Music: The Antlers – Hospice
Casey McKinney10.01.09
Now in Atlanta, trying to use my Shazam app on the iPhone to tag every bomb hip hop drop heard while driving with knees. Prob is, most of the mixes…
The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Jeff T. Johnson10.01.09
During some of the long silences of Pynchon’s career, it must have seemed he had disappeared for good. With his latest, we doubt it, as the Pynchon cartel reemerges to take on/revisit the best threads of his past works – The Lot cries for more. Jeff T. Johnson reviews Inherent Vice.
The 2009 New York Film Festival
Benjamin Strong09.24.09
‘When the lineup was announced in August for the 47th New York Film Festival – which opens Friday September 25th at Lincoln Center – some cinephiles expressed concern that the choices were a little too safe, conservative, and predictable.’ Nevermind, there are formidable showings from oldies like Alain Resnais, youngins like Corneliu Porumboiu, and we look forward to the new oldies from Harmony Korine (can we put him there in the mid-oldies yet?) – review by clutch Fanzine fim contributor Benjamin Strong.
Levon!: Levon Helm, The Dirt’s Gone Electric
Brian Howe09.16.09
Brian Howe raises a glass to Levon Helm of The Band, a man Howe describes as "the only genuine Southerner in a band that mythologized the American South… He was part Paul Bunyon, part Atlas." A true Southerner indeed; Helm often found himself displaced from the land that raised him, and just as often distanced by the dichotomy of his version of the South from what the South had come to represent in his time. Howe fashions a brief, but fitting tribute.
Art: JESSE BRANSFORD: IV = 369 (Luna) & JULIET JACOBSON: Earnest Corpse
The Fanzine09.12.09
Art blossomed Saturday night up and down, EST. In New York with the Seven in One! Seven in One-Third!! opening of Karsten Krejcarek and others at…
Art: Vincent Fecteau at Matthew Marks
Casey McKinney09.12.09
This month on Fanzine author Derek McCormack writes about a show of Vincent Fecteau’s sculptures he saw at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008,…
Book: Awkward Press
Ben Bush09.12.09
Jeffrey Dinsmore’s novels begin as page-turning genre fiction satires but in their oddness and literary invention quickly veer into something else….
Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink
Matthew Derby08.31.09
Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 won last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award and received praise from Jonathon Lethem, Francine Prose and Time magazine. Although that 900-page epic was Bolaño’s final work before dying of liver failure, New Directions is publishing the first English translations of some of his earlier works. Matthew Derby brings his perspective to Bolaño’s noir-ish The Skating Rink
DJ/rupture: Mudd Up! WFMU
Ben Bush08.25.09
When I first heard DJ/rupture’s Minesweeper Suite with its brutal combination of club hip-hop, breakcore and obscure international gems, it opened a…
Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
Rob Tennant08.25.09
The question remains: Who is more ‘indie’ – the O.C.’s Seth Cohen or New York poet Frank O’Hara? In Slanted and Enchanted Kaya Oakes reframes the debate by creating a wide-ranging lineage of independent media and artists, defying the categorical limitations that have arisen around the term in recent years. Mike Watt, Kathleen Hanna, David Berman and cartoonist Daniel Clowes all make appearances. Rob Tennant asks the ramifications of this heritage for the current state of independent culture. -Ben Bush
