The Weaklings

Great Days for Weaklings

xxxx001-1I read Dennis Cooper’s blog every day, and it’s always a pleasure, but I want to point out that there has been an especially good run this week, and so if you’re an only-occasional visitor over there, this is a good time to go check in. Let’s move backwards through time.

Today’s post is a collection of eleven YouTube clips of Stephen Malkmus singing–solo as well as with Pavement. It kicks off with an acoustic version of “Box Elder,” one of my all-time favorite Pavement songs, which I’ve only ever heard rendered in full fuzz.

Yesterday was a “back from the dead” post–originally posted 10/19/06 on an earlier incarnation of the blog that was hacked and destroyed. DC occasionally painstakingly re-produces one of those lost posts, and I can’t think of one I’m happier to see again than “Great Moments in Gay Porn #8: Klark, a mini-retrospective.

Career-wise, porn stars are to movie stars as dogs are to humans. That’s to say, their time in the spotlight may constitute a blip relative to their more respectable peers, but their lifespans as fan magnets can be no less storied and impressive. By that reckoning, Klark is something like the Paul Newman of Russian gay porn. In his ten or eleven year long run as a superstar, he has pretty much done it all without ever losing his Gary Cooper-esque stoicism (and consequent aura of dignity), his ever battle-ready attitude, his quasi-underraged everyboy bod, or his very Russian yet strangely nonspecific good looks. He may not get as many starring roles these days as he did when his competition was all but nonexistent, but he’s managed to outlast many of his famous predecessors by never quite stooping too low in his choice of roles to make a quick buck.

Irrespective of your particular level of interest in gay porn (my own is, let’s say, limited) Klark’s story is a compelling narrative, and I think the post is highly instructional in terms of how it approaches and handles certain challenges inherent in discussing an artist’s full body of work. Cheers to whoever it was put the special request in for this one.

Tuesday’s post was “Four Books I Read Recently and Loved: Urs Alleman, Eileen Myles, Reinard Seifert, Matthew Simmons.” In which DC enjoys and excerpts from (respectively) Babyfucker, The Importance of Being Iceland, How to Skin the Moon, and A Jello Horse. And Monday we learned about “Heavily plotted non-linear structures whose velocity lacks narrative drive“–aka, mazes.

Web Hype / 22 Comments
November 12th, 2009 / 6:36 pm

Keepin’ Up With Coop

What’s happening over at The Weaklings these days? Well, this week brought a bevy of guest-posts from some of Dennis’s Distinguished Locals.

Postitbreakup Presents…Auto-tune Day – A brief history of the use and abuse of the (in)famous pitch-perfection software.

Death Cab for Cutie raises awareness about Auto-tune Abuse at the 2009 Grammy Awards

At he '09 Grammy Awards, Death Cab for Cutie raises awareness about Auto-tune Abuse.

Bacteriaburger Presents…Nifty Day – A spotlight on the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive:

“Maintaining the Archive is done as a hobby: a volunteer, part-time effort. No one receives any compensation for or personal benefit from maintaining the Archive. Readers do not pay to access stories; authors do not pay to display stories; websites which host the Archive must make it accessible to all and do not pay for the content; stories are not obscured with banner advertising in and around them. The Archive does not own any of the stories and does not sell them or license them to others. All webhosting graciously is donated. Some readers help defray the incidental costs for which we are extremely grateful and hope that more readers will help in the future.”

And neither last nor least, Dennis himself presents “Recent works by some of the artists who also hang around here sometimes, Volume 6.” Some randomish highlights- a video of Derek McCormack & Kevin Killian reading,  a story and a poem by Alec Niedenthal (whose work, btw, we just accepted for Agriculture Reader #4), and several more images like the pasted-below from Kier Cooke Sandvik.

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Uncategorized / 6 Comments
August 3rd, 2009 / 10:14 am