Please welcome to the world … New Juche’s HEAT DEATH (Gallows Fruit)

 

Gallows Fruit is an independent small press based in Southeast Asia. We produce books and printed material in close consultation with our authors, and have a particular interest in place and topography. We value the unique voice and style of individual writers, the integrity of any single project, and our own independence and aesthetic vision over any market considerations.

No less than five percent of Gallows Fruit’s net profits will be donated annually to environmentally-orientated charities.

 

HEAT DEATH is a unique and irregular journal by New Juche that engages varied subject matter through a considered synthesis of text and visual material.

In each issue, readers can expect to find new photography and artwork by New Juche and a full dose of his prose, with its blend of the scholarly, symbolic, and self-eviscerating. Pricing will vary issue to issue, based on format, length and paper. Substantive high-quality content guaranteed.

ISSUE 1: ARTEFACT INSULAM
192 pp. Full colour, art paper, perfect bound, French flaps.

ARCHITECTURE; FAITE URBAINE; RUIN PORN; PHOTOGRAPHY; CHINESE BAROQUE; CONCRETE; PHUKET; PATONG; TIN; TOURISM; CORONAVIRUS; DAMAGE; REFUSE; ECOLOGY; PROSTITUTION; EMPTINESS; TROPICAL DECAY; NEW SECRET PATHS AND DANCING PLACES

In a room on the top floor I closed the door behind me and took a photo album into the dusty bathtub and lent back with my knees up in front of me and my head on a greasy pillow. Light filtered very pleasantly down through the green vines that laced the unglazed window and the fulsome trees outside. A second shaft of light fell through a space in the torn ceiling. My body felt very still, apart from my heart which I could feel beating and also hear, and it was the only sound in the room apart from birdsong.

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“We are very excited and privileged to launch Gallows Fruit with the first issue of New Juche’s Heat Death Journal. Thanks to the refined skills and generosity of Karolina Ursula Urbaniak its design is absolutely gorgeous and in perfect alignment with the author’s vision. Heat Death is a journal like no other: each issue is a focused, full length work of art in and of itself featuring a blend of New Juche’s images and his singular, lyrical prose. It’s like entering another world. Issue 1 is about ruin photography, Covid, ecology, and prostitution, among other things. We think it represents a new level of elegance and complexity in NJ’s work.

We’re hitting the ground running here at Gallows Fruit and we have no intention of stopping. In the pipeline are more issues of Heat Death, and a new book by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak about Lower Silesia. It’s an exquisitely stark visual diary of her journeys through the remains of the region’s industrial and political past. Last but certainly not least, we are very proud to be publishing New Juche’s brand new book Alehoof, his most sustained and beautifully wrought work to date. Thank you to all our friends and readers, and to the great and magnanimous Dennis Cooper!”

Rose Munro (GF Editor)

 

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Excerpt from HEAT DEATH 1

In the heat of another afternoon I visited an exquisite, privately owned beach down a steep and muddy trail that I had to be driven down in a dedicated four-wheel drive taxi service. I was obliged to buy a ticket to enter the beach which came with a small bottle of chilled drinking water. The bay was formed by giant tumbledown rocks either side. The sand was powder and the water was clear. There was a wealth of attractive wooden beach furniture, photogenic rope swings and the like, and a small good restaurant with very cold beer. I swam in the sea with my mask and admired the very wonderful and colourful theatre of marine life, and then lay on the beach watching the other two visitors taking photos of each other in the shallows.

Later on I watched the sun drown itself in the sea from a clifftop bar whose deserted balcony lounge gave an arcadian view of the resorts and settlements set in deepest green along the seacoast as I sipped a very expensive Heineken from an overly tall pilsner glass. Sitting on my own in such a place prevented me from relaxing and I left as soon as the sunset was complete. On the way back to my apartment I rode through the resorts and settlements I’d looked down over and found all of them to be completely desolate.

My varying experiences of emptiness on Phuket had led me to see that there was nothing neutral about the condition. Emptiness was inherently relational, I concluded, and was defined as much by what doesn’t fill or is expected to fill a space as by what is in fact there—it was altogether a condition perceived through comparison with other spaces. Emptiness necessarily invokes that which is perceived to be absent, and in this way may indicate particular focuses of anxiety, and social or economic miscarriage in an individual or collective sense. Here is a space, then, that I may slip inside. In the modern attitude towards prostitution also, the spectre of social, economic, individual and collective failure looms. Prostitutes are assumed to be ‘empty’, and that assumed emptiness evokes what is imagined must be missing: dignity, sexual and economic independence, social agency, legal status, moral purpose, and happiness. Perhaps mere ‘emptiness’ is not sufficient from this perspective, as romantic a term as it is, perhaps better to say ‘damage’, or even ‘laceration’.

Off the coast of the island are the sunk wrecks of two giant tin- dredging barges. Dredging is an assiduously devastating practice, and these hulks and others like them strafed and ripped holes in the coral reefs off Phuket’s coasts until the advent of plastic and tourism brought the tin industry here to an end. These wrecks may lack the romantic pathos of other shipwrecks but they do offer a kind of emptiness that makes them attractive in the failure they invoke, and they are covered in sea urchins and overrun by shoals of snapper, lion fish, scorpion fish, barracuda, and even moray eels of the honeycomb variety.

Before Phuket’s great switch to tourism and its subsequent ecological convalescence, the island was a very fine exemplar of the foul and leprous disfigurement that centuries of unimpeded extractive process inflict. TIN LAND, a smoking mess of craters and poisonous waterlogged pits full of arsenic, aluminium, dengue and malarial mosquito larvae and the ruins of industrial infrastructure. The mines, to which everything was sacrificed, were worked by mostly Hokkien and Cantonese single men escaping south from the poverty and oppression of their own country. Once an ore body was discovered the jungle was cleared and the ‘overburden’ was dug away to reveal the tin-bearing stratum. A dam was built to catch water for sluicing if need be, but during the long monsoon as much labour was required to pump rainwater out of the holes as was needed to mine them. This was done with enormous manual waterwheels, upon which scores of coolies would scuttle like rodents all day long. Every day coolies died from diseases and overwork. Many of the island’s ‘lagoon’ resorts are in fact built around bodies of water in old mining craters.

The urban settlements were typical frontier mining towns full of traders and tin buyers, smelters, tool and equipment suppliers and R&R for the armies of coolies in the form of arak, opium, gambling and prostitutes. Many brothels were run by Japanese women. They stocked mostly Chinese girls but also some Japanese and Siamese, and even Russians and Eastern Europeans to the outrage of the English press in Penang and Singapore. They were wild and lawless places administered by triads when they were administered at all. European business interests and Siamese authorities alike had to bring large security contingents and build fortified accommodation to stay more than a few days. Mid-century, aside from the enclaves of Chinese Baroque, Phuket Town itself was a hot, squalid and unsanitary place with open sewers, roads of mud, no reliable water supply, no means of dealing with waste and no drainage system. It reeked of rotting fish waste and was infested with crocodiles. Ships carrying tin and its payment in goods were subject to constant harassment by Straits pirates. Tin was used in China to make sculptures designed to be burned in religious rituals—when tin is beaten wafer thin it burns very brightly. In the west it was used to make bronze for gun metal, especially marine cannon. After Napoleon, and into the high imperial era, demand for tin reached its peak as it was used for just about everything that plastic is used for today, including all food packaging. Wealthy elite Chinese families emerged in Phuket Town, who insulated their society completely from the so-called ‘one-mat-one-pillow’ coolies. ‘The dragon marries the dragon, the hunchback marries the hunchback’. Some of these families endured the demise of tin and retain their high status to the present day.

(…)

As I picked my way back out to the beach with its open space and liberating depth of field, the sun was at that moment touching with its lip the most meaningful visual element in the distance stretching out before me: the impossibly immaculate flat line which represents the end of the restless sea and the start of the blemishing sky, the edge of the globe, a horizon so without flaw in its flatness that its betokening nature was implicit. The uneven foil of the waves and the clouds in their rough wide layers of movement betrayed it as a representation of a thing and not a thing-in-itself. How soothing to me then, that flat line appeared.

 

A sample of future Gallows Fruit projects

Borgo

 

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Images by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak

 

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Pillar

 

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The living house

 

 

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p.s. Hey. The blog gets to give you a great weekend by helping to welcome into the world not only a great new project by the very brilliant writer and artist New Juche but also the exciting new press that is delivering it, Gallows Fruit. Pretty momentous. Please give the shebang your complete local attention between now and Monday, and thank you all, and have the pleasure it richly portends, and my huge thanks to New Juche and to Gallows Press for the privilege. ** Dominik, Hi!!! All thanks to Oscar B if they’re out there somewhere. Soon we will rule the world, D! From our penthouses in Paris and Vienna and, heck, anywhere we want. Well, unless I suddenly become suicidal, Mario Wonder will have to wait on me and vice versa another week because this coming one is film-slammed. Ha ha, I may have already told you this, but when I lived in Amsterdam, I lived in an apartment formerly rented by some guy named Willem Gortmaker who had been arrested for murder and put in a mental institution. When I first saw it, the door was wide open, and the place was a huge mess, and there were knives stuck in the tables and things. Because of that, his apartment was very cheap and was the only place I could afford. Literally every day I lived there, I would receive an insane letter in the mail written by him in the mental institution to himself. And, on top of that, he still had the keys to his apartment, so I lived in constant fear that he was going to escape the mental institution and just walk in any minute. But it was cheap. Ha ha. Love making it extremely fashionable and popular for males to wear petticoats, G. ** Charalampos, Hi. Okay, I’ll try to find ‘La machine’. I think Lynch lies to prepare new things in total secrecy, so we’ll see. Thank you about ‘Closer’. There have been several proposals to publish a book that would be facsimile of all of the Little Caesar issues. The problem is that getting the rights to a lot of the works in the issues, as I had contributions from all kinds of very famous people, many of them now dead, like Warhol, Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten, Shaun Cassidy, Nico, porn stars, actors, and on and on, meaning the task of getting permission from those people or their estates would be a massive amount of work. So, at this point, I’m not sure if that’ll ever happen. But it would be great. Love from Paris and its mice. ** Jack Skelley, Billy Jack! How was the reading? How exciting! What did you read? My love back to Kim. Yes, I remember La Cabana very fondly. So cool that it has survived. I think I might have had my post-wedding reception — to Chris, at the Fox Venice, if you remember that — at La Cabana. Wow, you guys should and must so completely come to Paris! I promise you guys a blast of all blasts, not that having a blast here needs my help. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. ‘When Evil Lurks’, on it. That poster for ‘Terrified’ is kind of irresistible. Yes, in a little over a week, I think I might have room for some horror of the filmic variety. ** Tosh Berman, Amazing indeed. But I guess TV famously bought billions of books and things. Welcome home! I don’t even want to try to imagine your jet lag. Ouch. The world is a stress onslaught these days, that’s for sure. I know I’m a hopeless optimist, but I simply cannot believe that you-know-who could be reelected. That’s beyond my comprehension, and my comprehension is pretty good. But, yes, scary as fuck. Obviously, I am not the person to dissuade you from moving to Tokyo. Unless Paris was also a candidate. ** Steve Erickson, Totally agree with you. Well, actually, the young incarcerated writer was also a rapper, although not a very successful one. But there you go. As someone currently looking for odd sounds to implant in spots in our film, I hear you. Let me see if I can somehow find enough Vecchiali stuff for a post. I’ll give it a shot anyway. My weekend … Zac and I just found out yesterday that we have to have our film ready for a festival submission on Wednesday, earlier than we were originally told, so it’s going to be intense. I think we’ll have the final edit in a day. Then, about half of the Puce Mary tracks in the film right now are placeholders, so we have to lay in the final tracks, which she’ll have ready on Monday. And we have to make proper looking titles. Plus we have another deadline on Friday for a possible French post-production funding grant, and we have put in French subtitles for that. And other stuff. It’s going too be heavy weekend and week. Otherwise, Ariana Reines is reading here tonight, and I’m going to that. What was your weekend’s layout? ** Misanthrope, Hey there, Georgey Girl, wait, Boy. Another holiday? You Americans are spoiled rotten. Well, I guess if he looks like Elio, his being gay is not the hugest surprise. And if he does look like Elio, he certainly won’t have any problem pulling in dates. Teach him right, gay vet. ** Darbz 🤺, Is that a fencer? It is, isn’t it. Suave. I’ll start practicing my new ‘Darby’ pronunciation this weekend, promise. Short, spiky hair awesome! That’s just an excellent look. Rock it. No, I never spiked my hair. The only elaborate hair I ever had was when I got a very ill-advised shag haircut and put in pink and blue streaks very, very briefly in the Glam Rock days. I saw Davy Crash around a lot. I met him once. He was very drunk and threatened to beat me up. But he didn’t. No, he wasn’t particularly short. He was sort of medium height. Not as short as Danzig, no. Well, I was in the punk scene pretty thoroughly, so I guess I met a lot of punk stars or ‘stars’. Yes, I’ve been in mosh pits. I quickly realised it wasn’t worth it to be in them though. I was beaten up by stupid, drunk jock guys, but not by skinheads, no. Yeah, I published a zine called Little Caesar from 1977 – 1983. I’m pretty tall and sturdy so, yes, you can throw punches at me as long as you aim kindly. It’s morning here, night when you are. So happy both! ** Lilly, Hi Lilly. It’s great to meet you, and thank you a lot for entering this place. Wow, thank you so much for those amazing words about my stuff. I’m really touched and honored. Playwriting course: so you write plays or want to or … ? Are plays especially interesting to you? Do you write other things? Thank you about that ‘Guide’ chapter. Actually, I’m kind of really into structure. I think about the structures of my books really a lot. That chapter is based on something real. I wrote an article for Spin Magazine about some homeless punk kids in Hollywood. I hung out with them for a few weeks and wrote about it. When I working on ‘Guide’, I took that article and added fictional parts and changed things around a bit, but all of those boys were real people. And, yeah, I thought very carefully about where it was in the novel. I was trying to write parts that seemed like fiction but were real and other parts that seemed like non-fiction but were fiction. I was trying to play with the different effect that fiction has on a reader as opposed to journalism where you read it believing it’s a true story. If that makes sense. I can’t remember exactly what happens to the characters in ‘Guide’, but sadly the real David and Sniffles both died. Does that help? I can say more if you want. Yeah, I read ‘City of Night’, Rechy actually lived a block away from me. I like his writing. He and I didn’t get along so well as people. What can you do? Ha ha, yes, a boyfriend of mine fucked Gus Van Sant behind my back. I was friends with Gus, so that was kind of … oops. I haven’t liked Gus’s recent films very much, but I really like ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ and ‘Idaho’ and ‘Paranoid Park’ and others. Do you like his films? What other books or films do you especially like? It’s really nice talking with you. Please come back and hang out and stuff if you feel like it. It would be cool to get to know you. Take care. ** Okay. Feast on New Juche this weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.