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….
The Fairy’s Hole: Vincent Fecteau’s Caveman Sculpture
Derek McCormack09.11.09
Author Derek McCormack takes us down the fairy’s hole, from the fairy grottoes of Georgian England on down through André’s beauty parlor on The Flintstones, to the modern, colorfully garish, ponderously beautiful, holey fake forms of Vincent Fecteau, now on view at Matthew Marks in New York City.
Back to School for the Bobbies: Brian Jones Revisited
Casey McKinney09.03.09
Back to School for the Bobies: Brian Jones Revisited
Riding the Hoboken Ferry
Pete Hausler09.03.09
When the world you live in is a world that’s constantly shifting (i.e. New York City) it’s good to have an anchoring voice that grounds you back in the ways that things once were before the hipsters started taking over and changing the landscape. Pete Hausler waxes a nostalgia of sorts, riding the Hoboken Ferry from the city back to the Mile Square City, home of The Feelies and Maxwell’s, remembers times when he was just a young’un picking up girls and feeling a little Kerouacian on his lunch break from work. Hausler meanders between Kerouac and Blaise Cendrars in the piece, melding his own writing style with theirs while conjuring up some terrific scenery of times past, and wraps it all into a seemingly innocuous and everyday break from his day job. Art by Danny Jock.
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
Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia
Olena Jennings08.23.09
Russia has seen its share of changes, rapidly over the last century and a half. And so has its literature, from the days of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, to the writers managing to document the Soviet era, to today’s pen wielders of supposed freedom and autonomy amidst ongoing conflicts in Chechnya and growing gangland capitalism. Editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker bring us a new survey of Russian literature for current times. Olena Jennings reviews.
