Vice TV just finished up running a fascinating 6 part documentary, Haitian Nzambies, in which Hamilton Morris (of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia) travels to Port-Au-Prince in search of a Vodou solution rumored to create actual living zombies: people so close to death that they are deemed dead by physicians, but are actually alive. During his early research he is taken to a voodoo ceremony where a woman spazzes on a possessed chair and he is told that if he has sex on Thursday anytime for the rest of his life, he will be killed. That’s the beginning. Watch if you’re into corpses, ritual sacrifice, ember eating, black magick, and Vice-style seeking for an answer to the zombie powder quest.
The Understanding Campaign: Who Cares?
"Fhm" for Halloween as drawn by Tai Turner
This post is about the ad you’ve been seeing here lately.
And okay, full disclosure for the blog cops:
Recently, Justin Sirois and I and a couple other bros from way back lit up the Baltimore streets with a big plastic owl that Justin had kept buckled into his backseat for years. The owl was called BSO, as in, “Back Seat Owl.” We took the BSO to play pool at Club Phoenix. We took him dancing and everyone hooted when he did a backspin. We even bought him beers at H.L. Mencken’s old hangout, the Owl Bar. Then we took him to play football in the street where, sadly, the BSO perished.
Which is meant to confess two things: one, Justin is my friend. Two, my man knows party fowl. READ MORE >
My Halloween Tradition
is to listen to this song, every year since 1993.
This is from Bride’s third album. They are a Christian band from Kentucky.
2
Happy Holloween Kill Yr Idols
Who do you hate you used to love? For instance, I not into Tom Waits no more. Think he should have shanked Screamin’ Jay and moved the fuck on. Anyway. Tell about it.
How To Explain It To My Parents
How To Explain It To My Parents is a video series featuring conceptual artists explaining their work to their parents.
Here’s an episode with Martijn Hendriks, who did that rad version of Hitchcock’s The Birds where all the birds were erased, and more.
Other episodes are available here. [via Clusterflock]
{LMC}: A Brief Reflection on Czar Gutierrez’s Bombardier
You can read a PDF of Bombardier to better participate in the discussion. Go buy NY Tyrant. If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.
The New York Tyrant veers closer to a glossy magazine than most literary journals. The stories are punchy, slim, trim and — with an exception or two — quite small. This is a quibble when you like what you are reading and a relief when you do not. Czar Gutierrez did not just leave me wanting, I was left reeling, holding his strange text up to the stuff I usually like — the Cheever, the Amis, the Ellroy — baffled, going through it line by line, trying to understand why I liked it, and how the hell he managed to jerk me around so much I dug pressure prints into each page.
I am quite suspicious of translations. The ones that wash ashore in the U.S. are tend too often to be finger wagging nuggets of exoticism. The last I remember actually enjoying was Michel Houellebecq. And I should have hated this excerpt of Bombardier — it begins with a trickle of semen dribbling down some poor girl’s thigh, then the camera yanks around to see two planes cross in the sky; then he pulls away further, into pure telemetry and physics… I won’t spoil the rest. Gutierrez’s control is so splendid, his craft so clean and precise, you can ignore the fact that the man is a D.J., a poet, that his website shrieks techno at you as soon as you open it, and the implied quarrel with American military power and 21st Century capitalism (which, honestly, as a Colombian he has a right to quarrel with — we Americans do meddle a bit down there).
All successful magazine brands sell not just stories, but a platonic ideal of taste; a lifestyle, an aesthetic or the appearance of being informed. Literary journals are no different. Each time I pick one up I expect a throbbing, sizzling smorgasbord of discoveries — and for once, in the New York Tyrant, I think I found what I was looking for.
Don’t write all over the goddamn books please.
I hate blurbs on book covers, at least put that shit on the back if it’s all you can do you think you have to to sell your shit and maybe you’re right, I’m no good at selling it. A terrible telemarketer, I would probably make a mediocre regional fertilizer salesman, which is to say I would be shitty at selling shit. So you go on building bridges and stuff. I mean I get it. It’s silly but I’m better at burning them britches. What I like is to consume my brain food from a plain colored box, like an Oreo milkshake, or expensive yogurt the way Muslims frown on figure drawing in the mosque. I think that’s rad. Frown away Mohammad. Patterns are whatever. Pyramids are when. They are good to think on I think. I like to gaze at them and think on Gawd oh gawd the stars the trees. But my kind of cover is a naked Knopf hardbound from the 60s. Maybe I’m boring and probably it’s vain but I don’t want other people’s opine opinions influencing my internal dialogue, not until I’ve digested my lunch which is to say eaten the text the film the album the thing and pooped out an opinion of some kind, however odd it might look oblong and oblique, not until I’ve had time to play with it to prod it to scrape and slice it beneath the blade of my tongue. But I like first for a thing to be in space like a rock in the ground pulsing tight 600 million miles a fucking hour going this is True btw, and then to have it there in my mouth in my ears my eyes huge like a fresh batch of fungus, a bunch of firecrackers going off in my bulb my skull my head. My favorite thing said in French is J’ai mal à la tête. To think of it rolls off the tongue like butter on bread.
Obituary: n+1
Shit, guys. Apparently n+1 died this week, too. They wrote that thing about learning and college or whatever, right?
(Frankly, those guys were kind of douchey and we’d forgotten to check in on them. Dropped the ball. Yeah, so.)
I don’t know. Maybe send a card to Ben Kunkel’s step-uncle.
UPDATE:
I know I’m supposed to find out when they first published and all that, but seriously. Who gives a shit.