The new issue of Harlot , created by our friends in composition and rhetoric here at Ohio State, is now alive.

You should check it out, join the conversation, and tell people about it.

Caitlin & I have contributed a collaborative video project, for which you can read our artist's statement here:

From the editors:

"On the eve of the unveiling of our second issue, we’d like to ask for your help with exposing Harlot to new and curious audiences. Please encourage your friends, family, colleagues, and interested acquaintances to visit Harlot, check out our second issue (and your contribution, of course), and join the conversation. This issue’s Letter to the Editor mentions several new features we’ve added to the site and the Call for Submissions for our third issue will be front and center."

If you spin vinyl, I thought you might like to know that today is the day two of my favorite Miles Davis records have been reissued:

Bitches Brew

Sketches of Spain

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Full Text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

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"Storm" by Tim Minchin

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Matthew Brown was born in the UK and now lives in Canada:

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Grateful Dead: Barton Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, May 8, 1977

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"Summary of Dialectics"

by

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

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"Instructions on how to climb a staircase"
from Cronopios y famas
by Julio Cortazar

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Canadian artist Jaret Penner:

John Madera recently asked me to contribute a list of my top ten novellas for a compendium he was creating. This is what I sent him:

I always have a hard time determining what constitutes a novella. For this I decided to define it as a short book. So, here are ten short books I would highly recommend (in no particular order):

My Untimely Death, by Adam Peterson

The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector

Ray, by Barry Hannah

Light Boxes, by Shane Jones

Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein

Motorman, by David Ohle

The Bathroom, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan

The Ballad of the Sad Café, by Carson McCullers

EVER, by Blake Butler


The entire thing is now up at his spot, and includes the following:

"In his introduction to Different Seasons, Stephen King also called the novella “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.” In an effort to expand the dialogue, clarify, and even muddy the waters further regarding this renegade, this outlaw called the “novella,” I contacted over sixty writers and editors and asked them to list and comment on their favorite novellas. Below you’ll find J.R. Angelella’s heartbreakers, soul dissectors, and sentence pugilists, Nick Antosca’s border-crossing list, Ken Baumann’s fractured dioramas, Matt Bell’s beautiful strange selections, Crispin Best’s lots of things happening in little places lot, Daniel Borzutzky’s “only works translated into English” list, K. Kvashay-Boyle’s heartstruck aweswellings, Blake Butler’s expectedly unexpected, Tobias Carroll’s Moody mood piece, Jimmy Chen’s trinity, Jackie Corley’s knife’s edge list, Matt DeBenedictis’s five is alive list, Nicolle Elizabeth’s fire ants, Scott Esposito’s primarily Latin-American tour, Brian Evenson’s obsessive confessionals, Brandon Scott Gorrell’s favorite novella, Amelia Gray’s time machine, Jim Hanas’s trip West, John Haskell’s “random and scattershot” list, Jamie Iredell’s reverse-chronological personal survey, Jac Jemc’s soul-crushers and mindbenders, Shane Jones’s “lucky eight,” Sean Kilpatrick’s unhinged list, Lee Klein’s humans being human more or less list, Catherine Lacey’s meditation involving “the bottled embodiment of an economy at its most opulent,” Reb Livingston’s list to reread, Sean Lovelace’s screw-ups, Lorette C. Luzajic’s bridge and tumble crowd, Josh Maday’s unbearable heaviness of being list, Carole Maso’s fractured sprawl, Ben Myers’s mad bastards and quiet recluses, Ben Pester’s curatives, Cooper Renner’s perfections, Adam Robinson’s brainy bramble, Bradley Sands’s bizarro fiction-heavy list, Tim Russell’s grisly and sexy list, Christine Schutt’s one, Matthew Simmons’s pretty accretions and misdirections, Joe Stracci’s pillars, Justin Taylor’s eros erosions, William Walsh’s top twenty!, Kevin Wilson’s list that, if you took out the references, could be read as a recombinant short story, John Dermot Woods’s books that live inside him, and Leni Zumas’s weird and worried wonders. Paul Kincaid and Clayton Moore redress two genre gaps by offering, respectively, science fiction and mystery lists. And you’ll also find lists from Steve Almond, Timothy Gager, Molly Gaudry, Renee Gladman (her introductory paragraph is an incisive mini-primer of the contemporary novella), Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Michael Joyce, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Michael Martone, Kimberly King Parsons, Kathryn Regina, Peter Selgin, and David Shields."

German artist Katrin Schacke:

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Rethinking Academic Discourse:
A Poetic Approach to Intellectual Endeavor

Andrea Custodi
The George Washington University

Is there a rule in academia that says
you've got to fill up a page to sound smart?
if there is isn't
then why does everybody think they have to?
and if there is
then why does it seem that no one has thought to break it?

I am advocating a new approach to intellectual endeavor –
a poetic approach –
an approach that is
artistic
creative
yet grounded –
consciously performative
yet nonetheless sincere –
eminently playful
yet very much in the spirit of backgammon.

My starting point is the postmodern and deconstructive
challenge to intellectual tradition,
which I find powerful and compelling
but not effectively realized
in the works of the theorists who propone it.

...[continue reading here]

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Thanks to E.P.B.B for pointing this out:

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? (excerpt 1)

Directed by Robert Cauble

[you can view the entire film here]

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"The Seagulls Inside My Head"

essay on experimental fiction by

Daniel Green

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"The famously subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb has announced the completion of his long-awaited take on the Book of Genesis."

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"Claudia Heuermann's A Bookshelf On Top of the Sky gives us a rare peek into the working methods of one of the most notorious and reclusive composers on the scene today. Filmed over a ten year period, this documentary includes live footage of Masada, Naked City, Cobra, as well as improvisations, his classical work and rare interviews. A prize winner at European festivals, this film documents Heuermann's very personal, fifteen year odyssey with the music of John Zorn. At times frightening, at times hilarious, at times frighteningly hilarious."

[It's available on Netflix as a "watch it now" title]

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David Varno interviews Wells Tower

"Ben Marcus was incredibly helpful, a great inspiration. He had this thing where he’d caution us against "aboutness." You shouldn’t try to make your stories be "about" something, he would say."

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Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp "takes you on a journey through the art and ideas of the most influential artist of the 20th century. Animations and interactivity make ideas come alive with an immediacy that only multimedia can provide: you can spin the Bicycle Wheel, shake With Hidden Noise, and manipulate the elaborate allegorical automata of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

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That Morning Thing, an opera by Robert Ashley

"A live recording of the complete experimental opera, “That Morning Thing” by Robert Ashley, possibly from the Dec. 8, 1969 performance at Mills College. Composed in 1967 this was Ashley’s second foray into the realm of avant-garde musical theater, and is a work for five principal voices, eight dancers, women's chorus and tape."

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Thanks to Ken for sending this work my way!

Josh Poehlein's Modern History is a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos:

Maybe yesterday you couldn't find what you were looking for...here are three other unspeakably mesmerizing experimental albums & if they do not do the trick I am afraid I cannot help you:

Pierre Yves Macé
Passagenweg
(Brocoli, 2009)

Atlas Sound
Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
(Kranky, 2008)

Alvin Curran
Lost Marbles
(Tzadik, 2004)

You look like you need some amazing experimental music. Here are a few albums I've recently been grooving:

[hint: if you click on the words, you can download the albums for free]

Nicolas Collins
It Was A Dark And Stormy Night (Trace Elements, 1992)

John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Apple, 1968)

Morton Feldman
Crippled Symmetry (Col Legno, 1994)

Mike Patton
Adult Themes for Voice (1996, Tzadik)

Steve Lambert has created "Add-Art" -- which is a Firefox plug-in that replaces website advertising with art:

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"Theory and Play Of The Duende"

by

García Lorca

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Daniel Johnston - "I Had Lost My Mind"

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Portraits by Pascal Renoux:

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"Society of Control"

by

Gilles Deleuze

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Del The Funky Homosapien has made his newest album, The Funk Man, available for free here.

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Kevin Bauman currently resides in metropolitan Detroit. These photos are from his series 100 Abandoned Houses:

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"On Bricolage: Assembling Culture with Whatever Comes to Hand"

by

Anne-Marie Boisvert

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"loops of perception: sampling, memory, and the semantic web"

by

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky

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The Doors - The End (1967)

Demetrius Oliver lives and works in Houston, Texas:

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Wardell Milan earned an MFA from Yale:

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Titus Kaphar was born in Michigan and now lives in New York City:

British artist Cecily Brown:

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Feb. 4, 2009: Chelsea Art Museum
Pianist David Broome plays Charlie Wilmouth's TETHER for prepared piano

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On the Idea of Communism
Birbeck College, London
Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek…

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Photography by Marcio Simnch:

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New Issue of Lamination Colony, guest edited by Michael Kimball

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German artist Jörg Immendorff:

The Museum of Bad Album Covers:

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"Show Your Work!: A poet calls for a new kind of poetry criticism, and a new kind of critic"

by

Matthew Zapruder

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Habib Tengour on “Maghrebi Surrealism”

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Pere Ubu - "March of Greed"

Directed by The Brothers Quay

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Yellow Magic Orchestra - "Tang Poo"

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Something Awful presents Star Wars as Classic Art: