rags of motel carpet waited to grow a brain
Mark Baumer09.26.11
The two most important questions upon waking are: Where am I? and, Where are my pants? Leon is going to have trouble answering either of these. New flash fiction from Mark Baumer.
Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism
Gean Moreno09.25.11
InfraNet Lab/Lateral Office is building a new architecture out of the carapaces of our dreams and failed cities. In volume 30 of the esteemed publication Pamphlet Architecture from Princeton Architectural Press, INL/LO suggests six "post-national" infrastructures from a proposed bridge across Bering Strait to Vatnsmyri Airport in Reykjavík. Gean Moreno considers the post-dreamtime landscape with a keen eye on the visually stunning and an ear for which playlist is called to muster.
Sam in a Slipshod Style
Laura Jane Faulds08.31.11
This is an ode to co-dependence. Let’s all be extremely self-conscious and revel in the knowledge that we are imperfect beings that not even Keith Richards can illuminate. And who is Keith Richards to you, anyway? And how can you be sad in the summertime when he shows up precisely not to give you love or validation? Let’s take a walk in the park. Let’s hold ourselves tight and sing, Baby, baby keep me happy.
Sponsored in Part IV: Unpredictable Addicts: Fun!
Malina Saval08.29.11
"If the Sopranos were Jewish, steeped in massive credit card debt, and lived in a dreary middle class Boston suburb where flabby white trash girls with high, hair-sprayed bangs walked around with their pants sliding down the crack of their tramp-stamped asses, that would give you a pretty decent idea of the kind of environment in which I was raised." In Malina Saval’s fourth installment of Sponsored in Part, the Saval family, in all of its extremities and generations, runs amok in a restaurant, practices avoidance, redefines what it means to be alright, seeks sponsorship in all the wrong places, bets the farm on eternity (death on the installment plan), and cashes in big time.
!Women Art Revolution! – Lynn Hershman Leeson
Bradford Nordeen08.07.11
Lynn Hershman Leeson is at war. Has been for years. Her lastest film !Women Art Revolution! (aka WAR) is a collection of video portraits, interviews with key feminist artists concerning their uphill scrum against an artworld overcooked with machismo, but with a ceiling that’s been cracking since the 70s onward thanks to the likes of Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneeman, the Gorilla Girls and so forth. Bradford Nordeen brings us through Leeson’s career up to her current "revisionist vie for historiography, a smart and sober demand for reparation."
The Smaller Part, or, on Invincibility: A Review of Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees
Laura Carter08.07.11
Laura Carter reads Heather Christle’s fragmented, fraught (and funny) poetry from The Trees The Trees through a Lacanian looking glass replete with languaged Mummys and "presages of the real and its vicissitudes," a curious vantage when you take into accont some of Christle’s characters have "gone to live at Space Camp permanently… while "we have to envy them eating freeze-dried ice cream every minute." Mirrors, mirrors, everywhere…But hey it works! We also get an intimate interview with the author here, bonzai!
“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.
An Exclusive Excerpt from “The Making of Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE: An Oral History” (circa 2021)
Scott Bradley07.25.11
Terrence Malick is a director known for his elusiveness to the big screen; he’s like a groundhog who only appears to see his shadow if he has a story beautiful enough to tell. Never mind if the story is about a couple on a killing spree, a soldier in the midst of battle, colonialists killing indigenous peoples––there’s always a silver lining of love, seen through an omnipresent eye that distills the good in any "bad" situation. In his latest film, The Tree of Life, he confronts his own bio, going further with the omnipresent––read God––lens, drawing on themes from The Bible’s Genesis story, yet replete with dinosaurs––creation in real time! And 10 years in the future we shall look back fondly on Malick’s juxtaposition of CGI, geology, and high family drama…yes. We <3 Terrence Malick.
Stories V! by Scott McClanahan
Amy Herschleb07.25.11
Fanzine has seen Scott McClanahan read. He has the charisma of a Flannery O’Connor character, a southern preacher in a dusty black suit bringing to his flock the gospel that James Joyce is dead, even if Scott’s more transparent prose might well from a tributary of the same spring, riverrun from his hometown West Virginia down here to Georgia (where Fanzine now resides). McClanahan is a story teller, and he has a wealth of oral yarns ready for an ear; thankfully they are also on the page. Amy Herschleb reviews his latest collection, Stories V! from Holler Presents.
SPONSORED IN PART III: AL-A-NOT
Malina Saval06.21.11
In Malina Saval’s third installment of her Sponsored In Part column, we start to see some Al-Anon fatigue as the breadth of her day-to-day responsibilities begin to pile up, and she still without a sponsor to help her along. There are some funnily awkward moments, some exasperation juggling her family life, her work, her sanity, and her husband who seems to be benefiting quite well from AA with seeming small recompense to the author.
