Sunday, May 31, 2009

revolutionary ear canal



"The Man Who Shouted Theresa"
directed by Zach Jones
based on the short story by Italo Calvino






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"I have a particular preference for what moves me, what compels me, what surprises me, what instructs and disturbs me, what expands my horizons of awareness as of sympathy."

Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan
by
Frank L. Cioffi




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"Part of the pure plain pleasure I derive from writing resides in my promise to myself not to take the same narratological bus twice. I can't imagine getting up each morning to compose similar sorts of stories or books or essays, day after day. Critics sometimes talk about me as a speculative-fiction or avant-pop author, but I consider myself less as a member of either of those literary clubs than I do simply as someone drawn to strange and surprising work that can take lots of different forms, but that in some way always resists the blandness of the literary mainstream--the fictive equivalent, say, of Britney Spears's music--while endeavoring to capture the complex and conflicted sense of what it means to be a human being several heartbeats into this still-new millennium."

The Landscape of Possibility: An Interview with Lance Olsen
by
Trevor Dodge




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"Where Babies Come From"
Text and audio by James Tate
Film by Zachary Schomburg






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"Hauntology is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida in his work Specters of Marx. In it, he invokes not just the ghost of Marx and the opening of The Communist Manifesto but also the ghost of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Two passages from Shakespeare’s play are particularly significant for Derrida: “Time is out of joint” and “To be or not to be”."





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"Things a Writer Must Avoid"
by Borges, Casares, and Ocampo

- Chaotic enumeration.

- Richness of vocabulary. Any word chosen as a synonym. Inversely, the mot juste. Any effort to be precise.

- Vivid descriptions. Physically rich worlds (as in Faulkner).

- Background, atmosphere, surroundings. Tropical heat, drunkenness, voices on the radio, words repeated as a refrain.


[more here, thanks to Elisa]



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The Puppet Show is a new artistic project by Winkler+Noah:









Friday, May 29, 2009

under the wine press of time



Lena Revenko was born in 1976 and raised in Minsk, Belarus:











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"Octavio Paz claims that poetry is an act of magical intervention that redeems us out of the constraints and delusions of linear time. For him, the poem does not stop time but “contradicts and disfigures it,” producing what Paz calls “anti-history.” “The poet,” he says, “is the geographer of heaven and hell.”


Female Grotesque and Female Pleasure: An Interview with Lara Glenum re her book of poems "Maximum Gaga"

by

Rauan Klassnik




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Melanie Bonajo was born in Heerlen, the Netherlands:











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New issue of Senses of Cinema




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"...because I'm a man, I understand men very well. But what a filmmaker—or maybe I can say an artist—really wants to do is express something that one doesn't understand. Since I'm a man, very naturally the most important subject for me to describe is women, because they are an enigma for me. So most of the time my protagonists are women. I don't really want my films to be categorized as women's films, because for me my films are about the most important enigma for me in my life, which is women. And I can stress that point not only because I'm a man and a male filmmaker but because Japan still today is predominantly a male society. Men are still the main characters. We've never had a woman prime minister. Women are oppressed, discriminated against, and rejected; they are outside the thinking of the society or the state. So the only way really to look objectively at that male-oriented society is to take the side of women, who are rejected outside that society."

"No Wasted Moments: The anti-cinema of Kiju Yoshida"
by
Chris Fujiwara




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"The critically acclaimed series from Isabella Rossellini is back with a new batch of very short films about the reproductive habits of marine animals. GREEN PORNO is scientifically accurate yet extremely entertaining."



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Sunn 0))) - Berlin, Volksbühne 2006



[part II; part III]


Thursday, May 28, 2009

become master of amorous genre








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Kathy Acker interviews William Burroughs



[parts 2-4]




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"Russian Formalist theory of the early 20th century made an important (and now familiar) distinction between plot and story. The story of anything is its strictly chronological unfolding, what happened in precisely the order in which it happened. The plot is the order in which those happenings are arranged artistically—the order in which they are offered for experience—liberated from their chronology, retimed, and given over to a different logic or logics. But there’s more to the plot than that."

"Positions of the Sun: Latitudes and Lucy Church Amiably"

by

Lyn Hejinian




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"3. A poem should be more than one thing. The more things a poem is at once, the better. A poem should be useful on as many different levels of scale as possible (individual level, pair level, group level, city level, world level. . . and down the other way, too, the level of organs, the level of electrical pulses)."

"Some Aesthetic Strictures"

by

Stan Apps




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"Can a writer’s letters—occasional and ephemeral as these tend to be—really qualify as great literature? In Beckett’s case, yes."

"Sam I Am"

by

Marjorie Perloff




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Japanese photographer Hiroshi Watanabe:







Wednesday, May 27, 2009

the quangle wangle sat



Swiss freelance architect and image creator Philipp Schaerer:














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Michael Haneke's austere pre-WWI punishment drama, The White Ribbon has won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The other winners are:

Special Lifetime Achievement Prize - Alain Resnais (who had the film Les Herbes Folles in competition)
Best Actor - Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds
Best Actress - Charlotte Gainsbourg for Antichrist
Director - Brillante Mendoza for Kinatay
Scenario (Best Screenplay) - Spring Fever (Lou Ye)
Jury Prize - tie, Thirst (Park Chan-Wook) / Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Camera d'Or - Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton)
Short Film - "Arena"
Grand Prix (second prize)- Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard)



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Feltidermy by Girl Savage:











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Jay Bennett (Wilco), RIP



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Barry Graham is doing a Free Book Giveaway



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"You are starting to understand or read the text how the text wants to be read or how you want to read the text in this moment. But meaning is being made, however it is being made. And the meaning is this: This sausage, in the hand? This drunken morning is blue?"

"Footnotes for What is Happening Somewhere"
by
JodiAnn Stevenson



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Jacob Rolfe is Skywhale:









Monday, May 25, 2009

we can help you



"when i wake up i am going to bury you in a parking lot"
by
Sasha Fletcher

Philthy Blog Presents: Sasha Fletcher from Philthy Blog on Vimeo.






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"If theory is not understood also as a practice, it will often make the mistake of confusing itself with knowledge, and will then cease to be theory."

"The Resistance to Theory"
by
Mike Johnduff




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"If Samuel Beckett was a recluse, as most of the world liked to think, then he was surely the most garrulous recluse ever."

"The Word-Stormer"
by
John Banville




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German photographer Karin Apollonia Müller:











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JS: Does food ever inspire you to write? Do you think there is any connection between being a writer and being an eater?

JSF: There are a lot of ways to think about that. First of all, literally what you eat affects how you write. If I drink coffee before I write I'm going to write very differently than if I drink beer, or eat a very heavy meal.

Jena Steinbach interviews Jonathan Safran Foer




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Dante's Inferno, the video game




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Q: Why don’t your stories have . . .

KL: Endings? Sorry about that. I like to think of the places where my stories stop as more of a jumping-off place. What happens next is probably interesting, but if I’ve written a successful story, you’ll go on thinking about what happened next and maybe you’ll come up with some interesting ideas on your own. Besides, endings are a bit too much like tails on people. Attractive, maybe, but usually not all that convincing.





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"It's a signature of youth to want to make a place for oneself by destroying the old guard. Perhaps, as Freud-tinted Harold Bloom has spent a career arguing, it is the anxiety of influence that impels poets to kill off, by "misreading," their artistic fathers in order to establish a place for themselves in the world."

"Reading Like a Graduate Student"
by
Rachel Toor




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New Directions has a blog.




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American artist Kevin Brannaman:









Sunday, May 24, 2009

off with your skin



Nicole Tran Ba Vang lives and works in Paris:











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A bakery in Thailand, in the province of Ratchaburi (100 km the west of Bangkok), creates these works of sweetbread in order to spread the Buddhist concept that one should never believe what one sees because what is seen is only an illusion:
















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Some art spaces to explore:








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Spanish artist Fernando Vicente:











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Ginou Choueiri is a Lebanese artist, based in Beirut, Lebanon:









Saturday, May 23, 2009

is this going to be your day of rest?



American artist Robert Peluce:








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"The sunglasses come off the high-queen of haute couture in this rare interview, in which the Vogue editor reveals why she always wears them and much more to Morley Safer in her first long-length interview for U.S. television."





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1997 BBC documentary: The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart





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"An Interview with Poet, Kathy Fagan"
by
Grace Curtis




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"To skin an animal, you start with a single cut somewhere around the throat and draw the knife downward in a thin, straight line to the nethers. It’s a lot like unzipping a fly. The thrush. The tomcat. The tusker. The beginning is always the same: a single cut."

from the Introduction of The Mounting of Desire
by
Dave Madden




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"Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world."

"Great Artists Steal"
by
Jerry Saltz




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"Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama "Antichrist" at the Cannes film festival."

"Lars von Trier film "Antichrist" shocks Cannes"
by
Mike Collett-White




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Check out Zornography: A website dedicated to publishing John Zorn's complete discography



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Koen Hauser
works and lives in Amsterdam: