Frankenstein vs. the World

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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“Ben Masterton-Smith visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben’s diploma project, part of which proposed a farcical realization of a 7-mile rainbow reportedly seen on the occasion of Kim Jong-il’s birth.

“In many ways, this spatial realization of the state’s own ridiculous mythology serves as a sadly necessary—because totally delirious—over-compensation for the otherwise monumentally vacuous cityscapes of North Korean urbanism, as if the grotesque political spectacle of a pink rainbow soaring seven miles over the city might retroactively justify that city’s empty stagecraft.”

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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.

“No one lives in the present except amnesiacs”
– Lynn Tillman

Tags: lynn tillman.