Sunday, August 31, 2008

Connecticut artist Thomas Keeley:





*


New Surrealist magazine called Phosphor, from the Leeds Surrealist Group.

*


The Philosopher's Annual has selected the ten best philosophy articles published this year.

*


Polish artist Pawel Fabjanski:





*


Samuel Beckett in Legos: Endgame, Scene 1





*


North Carolina artist Thomas Scott Kuebler:

Kewpie and the Beast


Dr. Nighty Night


Friday, August 29, 2008

Thanks to one of my favorite websites, A Journey Round My Skull, for the heads up on Trevor Winkfield:

The Pond Concert with Blank Cards


The Student


Troubled Potatoes


*


Music video for Miho Hatori's "Barracuda"



*


Damien G. Walter examines Scott McCloud's Four Tribes of Art for The Guardian.

*


Noah Eli Gordon suggests some chapbooks at Rain Taxi.

*


Raymond Federman discusses Readability/Unreadability..."I do not write avant-garde."

*


Unbelievable, but true...If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats has cataloged the Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes on MP3!!!


*


Check out "The Astrobiology Rap," written & performed by Jonathan Chase, a post-graduate science communication researcher:



*


Collage artist Able Parris:





Thursday, August 28, 2008

French-Canadian artist Michel de Broin:

Entrelacement
(2001)


Black Whole Conference
(2006)


Superficial
(2004)


*

Beware of Cider Press Review!!! Read Stacy Lynn Brown's nightmarish experience with them.

*




Chinese artist Liu Bolin:


Cite Interdite 1


Camouflage 36


Unemployment 706


*

Two songs by Priscilla Ahn:


"Dream"



"Are We Different"




Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Nina Glaser got her BFA from Syracuse:

For Meaning or Other Such Quests Part I
(2005)


For Meaning or Other Such Quests Part II
(2005)


*


Jahsonic suggests: "Surrealism itself deserves a decentralized and regionalized historiography."


*


French artist Philippe Ramette:

Rational exploration of the undersea: the arrival
(2006)


Crisis of casualness
(2003)


Monday, August 25, 2008

This video of Tao Lin reading from his memoir, i went fishing with my family when i was five, makes me think of John Cage's 4'33". Both performances create an event by provoking an experience that moves beyond the basic elements of their construction:




Here is David Tudor performing Cage's 4'33":




*


Right now I'm working on an essay about David Lynch's Dune for an upcoming Lynch anthology that I'd like to be a part of, and I came across this article in which Alejandro Jodorowsky discusses his attempt to make Dune seven years earlier:

"[Salvador] Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the "wee", the other to receive the "excrement". Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the "wee" and the "excrement"."

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Money origami by Japanese artist Hasegawa Yosuke:







*

A few music videos for you:


Los Campesinos - You! Me! Dancing!





Venetian Snares - "Szamár Madár"





Architecture In Helsinki - Like it or Not




*

Sidney Pink
got his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art:

Us and You
2007


Unarmed and Unagitated
(2008)


There's A Reason
(2008)


*

Finally, be sure to check out Loopable:







Saturday, August 23, 2008

Finally watched Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. My initial reaction was strongly negative: when the end credits rolled I felt aggressively disappointed. I expected nothing less than sheer genius, since Schnabel won or was nominated for every directorial award imaginable, but all I got was a difficult film to stomach and a few instances of semi-interesting camera work. (If he wanted to make an extraordinary film, he should have kept the audience inside Bauby's p.o.v. for the entire film; the fact that he moves to the third person p.o.v. automatically makes this film mediocre.) After watching the extra features I decided to reconsider my position just slightly. I like Schnabel and I like his other films, so I figured I should cut him some slack. I suppose the film was ok, but I wouldn't watch it again and I wouldn't recommend it.

*

If you're into Philip K. Dick, here's the place for you.


*

Check out this article on the 35 Greatest Works of Reverse Graffiti.

*

FULCRUM #6 features previously unpublished and uncollected writing by Samuel Beckett and others, as well as articles by Marjorie Perloff and others, as well as poetry by Boris Vian (translated by Raymond Federman) and others.

*

We went to Half Priced Books last week and I picked up:










Thursday, August 21, 2008

New York artist Eddie Martinez:


It's Up To You & Me Brother


Resistance is Futile


Navigationing


*


Electronic Book Review has a sweet archive, which includes this interesting essay called The Avant-Garde and the Question of Literature by R. M. Berry.


*


California artist Serena Cole:


Death is Not the End


The Gilded Throne


Untitled


*


Two Music Videos directed by Canadian artist Andy Dixon:


Said The Whale - "This Winter I Retire"




Secret Mommy - "Kool Aid River"




Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Hayden's Ferry Review has just posted Caitlin's podcast interview...click here and look to the sidebar on the right to listen to her talk about her absolutely fabulous prose piece "Only This Torn Room Forever Sleeps."

*



My friend Tim has an interesting and provocative post about street art and politics.

*



While traveling this past week, Caitlin & I listened to Malcolm Gladwell read his book Blink. I highly recommend it.

*

Also, check out this amazing video from Multimedia Artist Takagi Masakatsu called "Girls":




Tuesday, August 19, 2008


Carrie Shipers's Rescue Conditions (Winner of the 2008 Slipstream Press Poetry Chapbook Contest) is now available.

*

Here is the Zhoushan Ensemble of Gongs & Drums performed by the Chinese Traditional Orchestra Zhejiang at the Culture and Congress Centre Lucene of Swiss in early 2006:




*

In an article for The Smart Set, Morgan Meis argues that "Criticism isn’t powerful anymore."

*

Here is a clip of Orson Welles reading the opening of Moby Dick:





*

Rosanna Greenstreet recently conducted a Q&A with Žižek for The Guardian. Here are a couple of my favorite of his answers:

Q: When were you happiest?
A: A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.

Q: What makes you depressed?
A: Seeing stupid people happy.

Q: What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
A: A mask of myself on my face, so people would think I am not myself but someone pretending to be me.

*

New York based photographer Amy Stein:







Wednesday, August 06, 2008

I'll be on hiatus until Tuesday the 19th.

Until then...

Check out the SPD blog.

Also, if you send SPD a poem, they'll send you a free book of your choosing!

New issue of Milk Magazine has some interesting stuff in it.

Here is work from artist Catherine Lacey:





Monday, August 04, 2008

Let's kick off today with a video of artist Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, explaining the influence of Marcel Duchamp on his work and career:




Next, how about a little Captain Beefheart? What about a live performance of "I'm Gonna Boogiarize You Baby":





Earlier, we were at the library, getting audio books for an upcoming trip, and I ran across a copy of The Shaggs album Philosophy of the World. Do you own this album? I snatched it up and when we got to the car I played it for Caitlin and watched her face closely to catch her response - hearing them for the first time usually incites reaction. If you've never heard them before, you need to check them out. I'd forgotten about them for years until this afternoon. If you own it think about pulling it out and dusting it off; it's well worth a re-listen. It's certainly avant-garde.

Anyway, Caitlin asked if there was a documentary about them, since their backstory is so interesting. I went looking around the internets and came up short. I did, however, find this animated video for their song called "My Pal Foot Foot." It's directed by D. Sticker:





To close out the music stuff, here's a music video for Can's "Oh Yeah":






In literary news:


Ubuweb has posted Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Apparently there aren't any copies of this film available on VHS or DVD anywhere in the world. Combine the rarity factor with this description and then try not to watch it:

"A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel's nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure."


Click here to watch it.

Also...

Blue Tea posted a group of fantastic collage artists you should check out.

Plus...

A few cool sites to explore:



Saturday, August 02, 2008

Oregonian artist Evan B. Harris:

garden grows piano keys


salt & sea piano keys