If Everyone Titles This Super Bowl Deja Vu Will That Make It So?
Michael Louie02.01.12
You know the drill, if you know football. We saw this game a few years ago right? Giants and Patriots. Manning and Brady. Giants underdogs again. Michael Louie and I (Casey here) saw round 1 after a wedding in Salt Lake City. Our motley crew of Brooklynites in black took over the basement of some Pats bar and lost our shit as Eli became sweet butter late in the game and David Tyree caught a pass with his helmet. It was a divine day, Mike remembers, and we hope to stick it to New England again (am putting an inverse double hex on this blurb, as it will be old news and not jinxable come Monday).
Prologue: This Fragile Fortress
Thomas McBee01.19.12
Thomas Page McBee is running––down a street in Oakland, down a stretch of history, down a thread like an ant in the description of a tesseract. In the prologue of his (as yet) unpublished memoir "about crime, family, and masculinity," This Fragile Fortress, McBee brings his hands together in a flash––a boyish Mrs. Who––and the ant passes from who Thomas was into who he is about to be. Oakland, California: 2010.
Year of the Quarterback
Adam Underhill01.06.12
‘Penn and Teller could have devoted an entire episode of Bullshit! to the "run the ball first" canard,’ as this season proved to be all about the QBs. From Tebowmania to the precision of Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees, Adam Underhill looks forward to the playoffs and the quarterbacks still in contention.
Top 10 Moving-Image Events of 2011
Bradford Nordeen12.29.11
From feature to porn to trailer to meme, Bradford Nordeen assembles his 10 favorite "moving-image events" of 2011.
Experience the Wait: Carsten Holler
Bradford Nordeen12.15.11
Here’s an idea: art is about access to an imagined experience. Half Seward Street slide and half Escaliers de Montmarte, Carsten Höller’s Untitled (Slide), 2011 is the centerpiece/centrifuge of his New Museum installation Experience, running from October 26 through January 15, 2012. Bradford Nordeen takes a trip through the funhouse of Höller’s making and sends back reports on the waiting front. Here’s the slide, here’s your ticket ro ride.
Stupid Ostrich Tricks, or Why Gary Bettman and the NHL Are on the Wrong Side of the Fighting Debate
Pete Hausler12.15.11
The death of Derek Boogaard earlier this year sparked a controversy in the hockey community: was it drugs and alcohol, or too many concussions suffered on the ice that led to Boogaard’s advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy and early passing? Pete Hausler lays down some knowledge on the importance of the Separation of Fighting and Hockey. As in: it’s possible. As in: what are you afraid of, Gary Bettman?
Four Poems
Mike Young11.30.11
The fingernails of Mike Young’s poetry scratch up layers of language & history coded in the flesh, and raise the welt of the recent past. Grit right down there in the cuticle. Four new prose poems from the editor of NOÖ Journal.
My shovel // Sparkles like words: Anthony McCann Dig and Dialogue
Andrew James Weatherhead11.10.11
Anthony McCann is pushing the folds of language back like he is walking through the Origin of the World and it is a woodland. "It’s almost as if I were saying these things / To someone––to you––or not even to you"––or to Andrew James Weatherhead as he delves into I Heart Your Fate, McCann’s latest from Wave Books. Let them show you this: these mineral veins of vivid word.
What Not Sleeping Starts To Make: Blake Butler’s Nothing
Ken Baumann10.15.11
The late great David Foster Wallace was once interviewed on European TV and said he can’t own a TV because that’s all he would be doing. Like in the pot scene from Infinite Jest in the first bit of that epic novel. He also said he writes in a difficult way to try and battle this tendancy in himself. Too easy is self defeating. Blake Butler, the author of Scorch Atlas, Ever and two books on Harper Perennial this year, the novel There is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, released this week, is an inheritor of Wallace. Everything Butler writes is difficult (a good thing), beautiful, dark, and oft funny. Friend and copublisher of the literary mag No Colony Ken Baumann recently interviewed Butler. It is no less challenging than Butler’s fiction, or non.
“I make (myself): envoi”: Nancy Spero’s Contemporary Poetics
David Berridge08.02.11
The exhibition Nancy Spero – initiated at the Centre Pompidou, Paris last fall and adapted for Serpentine Gallery, London this past spring – was the first major retrospective of Spero since the artist’s death in 2009. Wandering between the two, in a landscape populated by feminine bodies, hieroglyphics, and Antonin Artaud, David Berridge explores the dialogue that exists between Spero, artists of the past, poetics of the present, and artistic politics yet to be born.
