FANZINE

Knowing Me, Knowing You, Knowing Them: Fiction Across Borders

04.19.10

Are "discursive domination" and "representational violence" the colonial impulse in fiction or the very nature of literature itself? Is there an ethical way for writers to represent people who are racially, sexually, culturally different or should writers even be concerned with being ethical in the first place? In his review of Shameem Black’s Fiction Across Borders, Louis Chude-Sokei, author of The Last Darky, looks at how we look at fiction about the "other." Along the way he takes blandly utopian multiculturalism to task and examines how disdain and cross-cultural respect have come to seem interchangeable.

Accompanying images are courtesy of Berlin-based artist Paul Tyree-Francis.

Pottymouth

04.15.10

The oral aspect of sex can’t be overestimated and here Kevin Sampsell presents several case studies of the way we talk during the act. Sampsell is the author of the recent memoir A Common Pornography and proprietor of Future Tense Press. Art by Danny Jock.

Sex and Micro Prose: A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell and Man’s Companions by Joanna Ruocco

04.14.10

Kevin Sampsell, a longtime indie press stalwart with his Portland-based Future Tense Press, is also the author of A Common Pornography, a memoir about sex and family told largely in small segments. Joanna Ruocco’s writing has received praise from Brian Evenson, Robert Coover and Carole Maso. Her second book Man’s Companions is a collection of very short stories.  Trinie Dalton, no stranger to the world of short prose, reviews these two new works.

Tribute video for Robert Culp

04.13.10

This is a still image I took from the tribute video for Robert Culp’s memorial service this past weekend at the Egyptian…

Music: The Necks: The Boys

04.07.10

Okay (don’t ask why, well you can but) forgot what I’ve hastily said times before about no belief in genius – that it’s all just masked…

Bong Joon-ho’s Mother

04.07.10

Influenced by Hitchcock and David Lynch, Bong Joon-ho has made a series of films that blend horror, suspense and dark comedy to comment upon Korean society and human nature. In his latest, Mother, an older woman defends her developmentally disabled son when he is falsely accused of murder by a lazy and corrupt small town police force. Bong takes this seemingly feel-good premise and turns it into one of the most surprising and unsettling films in recent memory. His use of inventive cinematography often tricks the viewer’s eye, a fitting choice for a film that is in the end about our ability to deceive ourselves.

iPad anyone? I still like Kindle (for iPhone Mind You)

04.05.10

iPad anyone? I still like KIndle (for iPhone Mind You)

Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century

04.05.10

A plentiful supply of images, music and video are offered by the bandwidth you’re using right now and so contemporary art seems increasingly interested in offering something that the internet cannot: experimental settings in which face-to-face community can occur. If the marketplace, the church and the school have been traditional public gathering places, school is certainly the model that has been most readily adapted for art experiments. With an array of contributors, this collection presents rad examples of school-as-art-project as wells as challenges to the underlying assumptions of accredited art schools. While the collection’s purview is primarily community projects and MFAs, it seems worth noting that, with state budgets strapped across the country, public school arts education — like the perenially murdered Kenny of South Park — is once again on the chopping block.

Adios Los Mets, The Weather Sure Is Fair Up There in the Bronx

04.01.10

Pete Hausler weighs the ultimate question in sports fandom: how much is enough heartbreak? As a fan myself of a team of perennial disappointment, I’ve also asked that question many a time after season after season of underachieving, flashes of brilliance interspersed randomly between stretches of lazy, uninspired, inept, and seemingly uninterested play. When does a sports fan cut his/her losses? Alas, I find myself unable to make a statement-making move. It’s like sticking with a bad, abusive, and indifferent lover year after year—or in my case, 35 years (though I’ve only been around for 32 of them). Hausler on the other hand, invoking wise words from author Nick Hornby and an inspired friend, seems ready to cross that threshold into a new world unknown to most of us stubborn, beleaguered, and otherwise hopeless fans. Art by Danny Jock. -MKL