Frankenstein vs. the World

An excellent review of Marie Buck’s AMAZING WEAPONS, written by Brandon Brown, appeared in Jacket2 yesterday.

For Buck’s book to achieve its maximal effect we’d have to be living in the most debased time in history and “luckily,” we are! It’s a time in which “terror strikes / in the home of my dead sisters.” It’s a time in which all previous systems of transcendent relief have gone Darth Vader at best . . . The lyric speaker of Amazing Weapons manifests agency’s inversion by the stoic, hyper-bored way in which her body becomes the object of consumption by others . . . Like any great paratactic writing, the [book's] side-by-side propositions point to the breach between them. Buck exults in those breaches, inside of which are the real broadcasts from amazed life, from life enduring regimented mazeness. And part of the reality of that life, the everydayness of that life, is the articulation of “minor” desires and needs at the same time as major demonstrations by capital’s army attempt to crush formations towards autonomy, “I anticipate complete and utter destruction / And I want a maxi pad and I need a maxi pad.”

Read the rest here: “The Architecture and Ambience of the Maze.”

A few copies of AMAZING WEAPONS are still available!

Tags: brandon brown, marie buck.

Just in time for the Christmas season, the third release from Scary Topiary press: FLUSHING MEADOWS by Todd Colby. $10, ppd. Details here.

Tags: todd colby.

“You cannot understand what Alan Greenspan calls ‘irrational exuberance’ if you don’t reflect on the simple fact that millions of cognitive workers took tons of cocaine, amphetamines, and Prozac during the decade of the ’90s.” — Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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My life is complete now that two of my poems are appearing in my favorite magazine, Hedi El Kholti’s Animal Shelter. Issue 2 also features fiction, artwork, conversations, & essays by: Dodie Bellamy, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Moyra Davey, Ben Ehrenreich, Matt Fishbeck, Veronica Gonzalez, Bruce Hainley, Chris Kraus, Rachel Kushner, Sylvere Lotringer, Alistair McCartney, Slava Mogutin, Eileen Myles, Jed Ochmanek, George Porcari, Michael Rashkow, Shlomo Sand, Margie Schnibbe, Sarah Wang, and others.

Started in 2008, Animal Shelter 1 summoned the underground press sex culture of the 1970s as an intellectual conduit. The new issue evokes the suspended atmosphere of a world drifting in limbo; analysis laced with an undertow of oblivion. Desublimation, digression, negative monument, catastrophe, shadows, horror and sexiness, Gay Sunshine, blue line . . .

” . . . At the Liberation . . . I discovered a coast that had been off limits during the entire war. For a child, the discovery of that seascape was an extraordinary moment, the end off the world, the finisterre; the discovery of freedom as well as an endless, negative horizon where there is nothing but the horizon, nothing but fluid dynamics.” — Paul Virilio, The Littoral as Final Frontier

The issue is available from Ooga Booga, where there’ll be a release party this Wednesday.

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Announcing the tremendous release of the second title from Scary Topiary press: Amazing Weapons by Marie Buck. Silkscreened covers and hand-stitched binding. Cover art by Anne Muntges of Super Giant printers. Edition of 123. $10.

“I anticipate complete and utter destruction”; “I charge an overdraft fee to each person I meet.”

Sneak-preview poem & Paypal link: here.

Tags: marie buck, scary topiary press.

Adam Davis and Kate Schaefer have really lifted the bar with their furtive artists’ zine, Division Leap. These images are from issue #2, which came out around this time last year and includes a poem I wrote on New Year’s Day 2007, tucked in alongside the much more esteemed company of Thurston Moore, Ray DiPalma, Stephen Lapthisophon, Jim Clinefelter, Sue Tintinger, Clea Davis, Jinn Bronwen Lee, and Schaefer and Davis themselves. The runs are limited to 50 or 100 numbered copies, each one assembled by hand & grangerized into used-book curiosities. Issue #3, based on the wonderful notion of “a portable exhibition,” is recently out: go here.

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My meditation on Dorothea Lasky’s work (”review” has never felt right for the piece), composed for ON: Contemporary Practice while I was living in the wildflower-filled high desert of Nevada a couple summers ago, has just gone online at Jacket2. Lasky remains a luminous source of inspiration for me, and I’m happy the piece now has another life in this form.

Tags: dorothea lasky.

Tags: bernadette mayer, mimeo, poetry project newsletter.

The fifth issue of Kyle Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham’s fantastic MIMEO MIMEO is out this week, & available over at Small Press Distribution. I am particularly excited to see James Sullivan’s essay on Ed Budowski’s long-lost The Gallery Upstairs Press. Other features include a special by Paul Blackburn, interviews with Lyn Hejinian and Larry Fagin, an essay on Alice Notley’s Chicago, etc. etc. A formidable & spirited bunch.

Tags: Ed Budowski, james sullivan, jed birmingham, kyle schlesinger, mimeo mimeo.

Maxi Kim has written a fantastic review of Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs over at HTMLGIANT. Maxi’s double-review (which also favorably discusses Sara Marcus’s history of Riot Grrrl, Girls to the Front) contains an incisive argument about the way that the “belligerent” (love this term) origins of local art spaces and music scenes are often nullified in histories via a lazy veneer of academification:

the problem with many texts on the history of punk music is the degree to which certain authors tend to overestimate the influence and importance of theory, both on the development of punk and its relation to other para-utopian currents. Academic texts like Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) and Dave W.’s The End of Music (1978) have a tendency to highlight and play up the avant-garde connections that bands like The Sex Pistols had to situationist theory, while simultaneously downplaying or totally ignoring the belligerent and non-intellectual origins of punk . . . Given Kraus’ affinity for Dick Hebdige and Sylvere Lotringer, it would’ve been easy to excuse Kraus had she overlooked Janet Kim’s work in favor of a more theoretical approach to LA’s subculture. Luckily for us, Kraus sticks to the facts even when those facts seem to contradict the explicit aims of Tiny Creatures . . . [T]he degree of intellectual honesty with which [Kraus writes] about [her] subject matters from a warts-and-all position is instructive . . . Throughout Where Art Belongs [Kraus] generously assumes that the reader understands that while the cultural projects [she is] writing about situated themselves in opposition to America’s celebrity culture and consumer capitalism, they also emerged out of consumer societies based on such modes of ideology and thus do not entirely escape the logic of celebrity.

Tags: chris kraus, maxi kim.