Weird stuff inside holy places
If you live in a city, chances are you can walk into a gallery or museum and see something extremely weird on the floor. Pedestals are like easels, cloaked in antiquity — it’s not brilliant unless it’s on the floor. I used visit art galleries on Saturdays, a sorta tryst with culture as a full-time bureaucrat, shamefully bowing my head at the severe, stunningly attractive “receptionists” (dunno what to call them, those hot chicks sitting at the front) as I licked through the resume of whoever got his or her MFA. If there’s a tinge of resentment in my voice, I’m sorry, I’ve just put down too many Artforum essays completely confused about not what I just read, but why. If you need a “post-” to label it and a PhD to describe it, it don’t got that swing.
Get Down Moses
I. If you enjoy it when people come over and casually browse the spines of your bookshelf, you are a nerd.
II. When your literary journal is a wordpress/blogger subdomain using one of their templates, I imagine someone who felt they wanted to be an editor for 20 minutes, during which time they started said journal.
III. When your literary journal has per inch/pixel ‘wrap text’ margins (vs. defined paragraph width), despite how wide the browser is, such that a full paragraph reads as one single line the length of a child’s arm, I feel bad and don’t read the stories.
IV. When your blog’s color/font specs are antagonistically provocative (blaring colors, extremely small or large fonts) only crazy or bored people who think you’re charming will read your blog.
V. When your friend with the ’20 minute set-up’ blog template journal nominates you for a pushcart, it just means he/she put an envelope with some paper in it in the mail, sorta like sentimental recycling. You weren’t ‘realistically’ nominated.
VI. When you diss on someone more successful than you, you’re just being human. When diss on someone less successful than you, you’re just being a dick.
VII. When you dismiss people for either having or not having an MFA, for being or not being a particular gender or race, or for just liking a book, band, movie that you don’t like, you are being provincial.
VIII. When your third-person bio is longer than the flash fiction piece it’s accompanying, that’s fucking lame.
IX. If you are lucky enough to get ‘fan e-mail’ and you don’t respond (even if it’s just “thanks, I appreciate it”) because you are ‘busy,’ or in some sick way you think not responding to fans further legitimizes your fame, you are an asshole.
X. If you think I’m a dick, you should have a drink with my dad.
Literary Doppelgangers
Joey Greco
Brian Chase
I really like Cheaters, the show that catches people cheating on their lovers. Each segment climaxes in some parking lot or rank 2BR apt — the sadness of wanting to fuck something better, of escaping one’s unrewarding life. There’s something stupid yet profound about being cheated on, the lung popping sadness, the imperative rebirth that one must go through. I bet host Joey Greco was cheated on once; nothing can mask such humiliated endurance and tempered indignation. Cheating is like parking in the handicap spot, it’s just bad, even in a our pluralistic world. I bet a lot of ladies have cheated on their man with Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase [see also this]. Sex is about timing, being 3/4 the way there in 3/4 time (I tried 6/8 once and pulled a muscle). Rock n’ roll will always be sexy, even when there’s a psycho lady in the way.
Titular relaunch
Titular has been relaunched with a new design (great job, Gene) and is now accepting submissions again. (Published writers may want to relink updated direct-urls to their stories.) Krammer Abrahams and Reynard Seifert have graciously accepted my offer to edit. I’m stepping down, but will remain somewhere the background (a 3rd editor may be introduced). Please submit work — you now have fresh eyes to read. Follow titular.
Uncategorized / 26 Comments
December 15th, 2009 / 8:59 pm
December 15th, 2009 / 8:59 pm
Jimmy Chen—
If websites were books and if movies were video games and if you got 11:24 to spare cos you subtle like that.
4
A second opinion on time
Fred Lebain (via Designboom) takes pictures of scenes, then takes pictures of those scenes super-imposed on the same scene. The nod to Magritte’s “La Condition Humaine” (1933) goes without saying, but what really struck me was how similar the light was in both scenes, the shadows aligning perfectly with each other. We will assume Lebain took note of the exact time of day for both initial and ultimate scene, reminding me of Monet’s cathedral series, for which the painter kept tedious log entries tracking the seasons and times of days for each particular scene, as each painting took him a cycle of years to complete. In painting, the challenge is to preserve time, to box it in one moment.
The Unoriginal of Laurel
Uncategorized / 19 Comments
December 2nd, 2009 / 8:13 pm
December 2nd, 2009 / 8:13 pm
On Violence
Dostoyevski, Orwell, Žižek n’ crew have written far more compelling meditations on violence, but I figure I’d have a go at it (being an asian-canadian near-sighted pacifist and all), and this all in time for Thanksgiving.
To draw parallel’s between our Father’s pilgrimage and their genocide of Native Americans would be didactic and predictable. Any person, as I do, who enjoys the opulent grounds of American soil best not critique the ways in which such grounds were brought forth. War equals land, and we have landed. If the Native Americans had their way, we’d all be in England right now; I hear the gin is okay, but that Queen is a bitch. So, we won’t talk about war.
Slayer / Htmlgiant
I’ve always liked it when fans cut SLAYER into their bodies (nobody does this with country or jazz; satan rulz). I like htmlgiant a lot, but not enough to cut it into my body. Instead, I asked my wife (got married, fyi) to write HTMLGIANT with Sriracha hot sauce in her best “slayer font,” and in case you think I’m a wus, it totally burned. Satanic music jeopardized my relationship with my mom, as she forbid me to listen to it. Htmlgiant has at times jeopardized my relationship with my wife, as I’m always on it and sort of ignoring her. She’s all “can you heat up the peas?” and I’m like “comment shit-storm babe, really emo now.” So this is an open thank you to a) Slayer: for shredding, b) htmlgiant: for being a bunch of racist fags¹, c) my mom: for eventually letting me be satanic, and d) my wife: for heating up the god damn peas herself.
—————————-
1. Don’t start.
