The Dehumanizing Effects of Sam Pink’s Person
Jamie Gadette12.15.10
The narrator of Sam Pink’s novel Person has sex with his neighbor, shoots himself in the face with a pellet gun and agrees to kill his roommate’s father, but primarily the book is composed of elaborate fantasies, none of which come to pass. Perhaps anticipating this criticism, Pink has commented, "people will say nothing happens in the book but that’s impossible, you silly motherfucker!" Jamie Gadette, who has quaffed deeply of the waters of eccentric literature in her previous reviews for the Fanzine, retorts that it’s fine to create a text chock full of anti-social psychosis, but please don’t bore your readers.
For Tyler Perry Who Has Made the Movie When the Stage Play Is Enuf
Desiree Burch11.11.10
Ntzoake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf was first produced in 1975 in a bay area bar and has since appeared off-broadway, on broadway, PBS and innumerable iterations on college campus — in a way that to my mind recalls the viral popularity of something like Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Comedian and performer Desiree Burch takes a look at Tyler Perry’s aesthetic and what it means for the film adaptation. She finds much to praise in the ensemble cast but, in addition to all the other colors of the rainbow hears the melodramatic speechifying of a tiny man dressed in gold.
Site: OurGoods.org
Ben Bush11.10.10
Feel like trading your skills at canvas stretching for web design? Wanna swap your grant-writing chops for a letter-pressed edition of your short…
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Ben Fama11.08.10
Belatedly but, as always, with the purest of hearts Fanzine offers poet Ben Fama’s thoughtful take on Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Despite or due to its incorporation of Wittgenstein and Goethe, Nelson described this meditation on the color blue in a grant application as "heathen, hedonistic and horny." Nelson, who has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, examined the death of her aunt in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder and Bluets is not without its darkness.
Secret Historian: Samuel Steward
Kevin Killian11.02.10
In Kevin Killian’s review of Justin Spring’s Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, Killian recounts his own close encounters with Steward, who lived in the Bay Area in the ’80s, and his divergent viewpoints with a man whom he found, while not entirely fascinating, intriguing, not only for his sexual prowess and Stud File, but for Steward’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, his life as a tattoo artist in seedy postwar Chicago, his artistic endeavors, and multiple identities during an age of homosexual persecution. It was a transitional time for Killian as well, and his initial apprehensiveness toward Steward as subject matter gives way to real understanding.
Book: The Death of Bunny Munroe – Nick Cave
Michael Louie11.01.10
Bunny Munroe, a serious cocksman of the real incorrigible sort, is set on a tail spin with reality and fate after the suicide of his wife, who killed…
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu: The Haunted House Meets The Holy Mountain
Grace Krilanovich10.27.10
Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel, has been intensely praised by Shelley Jackson, Steve Erickson, Blake Butler, Brian Evenson and, um, Gawker. Set in a meth-ravaged section of the 1990s Pacific northwest, it includes junkie vampires, drug-induced ESP and a missing foster sister. By all reports it is awesome. Here, as a Halloween mood-setter, Krilanovich reviews the 1977 Japanese psychedelic horror film House, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, an experimental filmmaker who had previously directed a Charles Bronson commercial for "Mandom" cologne. The film has just been lushly re-released by Criterion Collection.
Press: Awkward Birkensnake
Ben Bush10.21.10
Novelist Brian Conn and Fanzine contributor Joanna Ruocco edit the fiction journal Birkensnake. While issue two was bound in a weird, plasticky…
Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, an excerpt from the 33 1/3 series
Richard Henderson10.19.10
It’s hard to summarise the surreal variety of Van Dyke Parks’ career. He worked as a child actor in a film starring Grace Kelly, arranged the song "Bare Necessities" for Disney’s Jungle Book and perhaps most famously co-wrote and arranged The Beach Boys’ long-shelved, ambitious concept album SMiLE. Along the way, he has collaborated with innumerable musicians, including The Byrds, Frank Black, Joanna Newsom, Laurie Anderson and Bob Dylan. He has also appeared in an episode of Twin Peaks and Robert Altman’s film version of Popeye. His own albums have often tackled unusual, quintessentially American themes, such as Brer Rabbit and Japanese-U.S. relations. It seems likely that wittingly or unwittingly you have encountered Parks somewhere. Richard Henderson delved into his Parks’ first solo album Song Cycle for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.
Jackass 3D in a 4D World
Jimmy Chen10.14.10
Jimmy Chen asks whether it re-contextualizes the question "Does life imitate art?" to rephrase it as "Do teenagers imitate TV?" It seems impossible to believe in the power of art to change lives without also conceding that art can change lives, not only for the better, but also for the worse. Using this lens, Chen examines the live-acton genital mutilaton of Jackass 3D.
