FANZINE

If You Give Enough Helper Monkeys Enough Typewriters: An Interview with Madras Press Publisher Sumanth Prabhaker

03.29.10

Sumanth Prabhaker’s Madras Press recently published a quartet of novellas by Aimee Bender, Trinie Dalton, Rebecca Lee and Prabhaker himself. The books are small, square, beautifully designed and include neither bar codes nor blurbs. The profits from each book are donated to a charity of the author’s choice. Part of what makes this interesting is the type of non-profits they select — the proceeds from Prabhaker’s book will be donated to a Helping Hands, a group that trains helper monkeys for the disabled. Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method, speaks with him about the ideal way to read a short story and fiction of odd lengths.

“GENTLEMEN, GENTLEMEN…” Brief Times With Robert Culp

03.26.10

I read this motto today in the LA Times: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there and we are in here." It’s a great toast by men of character and taste; the words attributed to actor Robert Culp and spoken by the likes of Hugh Hefner. Unfortunately I had to read this in the Times’ obituary for Robert, who died Wednesday after falling outside of his home. Robert was the father of a good friend of mine, a friend himself, and part of what I considered my surrogate West Coast family. I was always welcome in his house and his generosity and class were unmatched. It’s a sorrowful farewell to a man who was a great friend to many, though I remain thankful that chin had such powerful genetics.

Poetry: Amy McDaniel: Selected Adult Lessons

03.22.10

Saw Amy McDaniel read the other evening in East Atlanta – bit of fiction and some poetry from her new collection Selected Adult Lessons on Agnes Fox…

Reading: Dennis Cooper, James Greer, Mark Gluth, West Coasting

03.19.10

(Okay so the following has moved on up to Portland Thursday and Friday Seattle with Gluth and Greer doing two more readings)  Let’s raise one…

The Time of the Men with Guns: My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef

03.17.10

In December the Obama administration brought 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, attempting a surge strategy similar to Bush’s in Iraq, and, with the escalation of the war, the Taliban has found its way back into public debate. Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, where he was captured in 2002 and held in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility until 2005. Michael Busk reviews Zaeef’s recent autobiography, which brings up troubling questions about the conduct of the U.S. government but also what the appropriate response to theocratic despotism might be.

For further Afghanistan reading, check out William Vollmann’s out-of-print Afghanistan Picture Show, which recounts his time as a naive young buck fighting alongside the Mujahdeen against the Soviets. Also, recommended is Love and War in Afghanistan, a collection of oral histories that shows that region’s conflicts from many wildly different perspectives.

Josiah Wolf: Jet Lag (Anticon)

03.10.10

On the most recent WHY? album frontman Yoni Wolf sings, "I know saying all this in public oughta make me feel funny/but you gotta yell something out you’d never tell nobody." After five years as a backing multi-instrumentalist in his brother’s band, Josiah Wolf, a classically trained drummer capable of some incredible riffs, is speaking his mind in his first solo album. Through a multitude of overdubs, Josiah played all of instruments on this sonic exploration of the dissolution of his 11-year marriage. Chelsea Martin, author of Everything Was Fine Until Whatever, interviewed Wolf and finds much to praise in the album but wonders whether the anxiety over the novel being supplanted by the memoir has its parallel in music. 

Tastes Good Still? Oscars 2010

03.08.10

We are so bitchy we’ll never get any star interviews…oh well. As Ben Strong elucidates: "The Oscars exist for the sole purpose of Hollywood’s identity maintenance." But the Academy didn’t need Avatar to win to prove anything to itself. ‘Cause The Hurt Locker "more closely resembles Hollywood’s image of itself than do blue people." Alas, it ended with historic precedents. And George Clooney had a hockey haircut, ha….and Ben Strong gives Fanzine’s annual second take opinion on the event. (What we are hoping for in the future? I’m not sure…but I wouldn’t mind seeing Rob Lowe take another stab at some song and dance, cracked out Disney style. -CM)

From Party Animals to Gilt Queens to a New Hollywood Dame: Oscars 2010

03.08.10

Some changes in the Oscars over the years, and especially this year – 2010 sees 10 best picture noms as opposed to 5, a woman winning best director, and no gilded Miramax flick in the bunch, right? Except that “damned Helen Mirren” still got unwanted attention from co-host Steve Martin. Kevin Killian notes what has changed and looks back on a man who maybe got the Oscar show rolling in a new direction long ago, Allan Carr, who once ruled the Hollywood party scene and blew it all on a weird Snow White night. There’s a new book out about him by Robert Hofler called Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.

Music: Four Tet: There is Love in You

03.04.10

Ah Four Tet, king of the click, or pop click, clique, off the beaten blip of a tick…tock…dock? or sundry sampled warble, or what can I say? tough…

Kim Ji-woon’s Tale of Two Sisters

03.03.10

Alfred Hitchcock either popularized or created the term "MacGuffin" to describe any highly valued object that sets the plot in motion: the ticking bomb, top secret microfilm or the stolen necklace. Is it a stretch to say that in a romantic comedy, the completion of the romantic union is a type of MacGuffin? U.S. films often trot out romantic or sexual union as kind of plot device, while several Korean films I’ve seen seem to use the re-completion of the family unit as one of the central concerns. Director Bong Joon-ho’s excellent 2006 swamp monster film, The Host revolves around a family getting their daughter back after she’s been eaten by a giant mutant squid and dragged into the sewers. (Fittingly, Bong’s latest film which opens next month is titled Mother.) Kim Ji-woon’s particularly unpleasant depiction of "blended" family life, oddly helped Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Gets Some, to heal the wounds in her own.