I just park the cars, ma’m
In my search for a suitable image to place at the head of next week’s A Public Space giveaway post (issues 2-6, so look out for that), I discovered this video at Urban Prankster, which documents a project in 1994 that several artists organized at Southwestern College in Chula Vista.
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red
Basically, they color-coded all the parking lots and had people park their cars according to some chart or something. It reminded me of Chris Cobb’s project in Adobe Books, but instead, like, with cars and lots of people and orange traffic vests and awkward interviews.
My favorite part of the video might be at 2:29, though some of the other things people say about the project are pretty funny. I can’t get the video to embed, so just click the link below.
Tomorrow is LitCrawl NYC (!!!!)
This is just a friendly reminder that tomorrow night is LitCrawl NYC, masterminded by Opium master-chef Todd Zuniga, and sponsored by Harper Perennial and LitQuake (the SFCA literary festival, gone bicoastal). The promotional bookmarks they gave me promise 40 authors giving 11 readings over the course of 2 hours, to be followed by 1 afterparty. Phase 1 begins at 7 Pm and is the East Village Phase. My top picks for this round are either Muumuu House at Botanica (readers are Zachary German, Brandon Scott Gorrell and Abigail Lloyd) or Harper Perennial’s “Silk Ties vs. Black Eyes” at the KGB, where my man Tony O’Neill will be teaming up with Simon van Booy for a nnight of “sartorial and pharmacological trivia.” Sure, why not? Phase 2 is the Lower East Side Phase, and begins at 8 PM. (The idea is you bolt from one thing to the next, bar-crawl style.) This time there’s a clear favorite choice. Is it Opium’s trademark OpiumLive show at Happy Ending? No. Is it the Gigantic magazine microeading at Home Sweet Home, featuring Ben Blum, Shane Jones, Tao Lin, and more? Almost…but no. I’m going to have to go ahead and nominate the New York Tyrant reading at Fontana’s, featuring Robert Lopez and…who is that other guy? Oh yeah! It’s me. Gian (aka Mr. Tyrant) tells me they’ve got it set up so Lopez and I will be on a balcony, reading down to/at/on the crowd, like a true tyrant addressing his loyal subjects, possibly while deciding how many of them to slaughter. Does fun get funner than this? Only at the afterparty, which is ALSO at Fontana’s, so if you come to the NyTy reading you get the double bonus of already being where the blow-out’s at. To see the full schedule, including complete list of readers and directions to all the bars, click here.
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May 15th, 2009 / 5:47 pm
May 15th, 2009 / 5:47 pm
Excerpt from “The Agonized Face” by Mary Gaitskill
On one of those long-ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money. READ MORE >
Houston Indie Book Festival: A Review by Kirby Johnson
I missed my chance to attend last weekend’s Houston Indie Book Festival because I was caught up in various Mother’s Day events; however, I was able to get in touch, through Signe Cluiss, with Kirby Johnson, cofounder/coeditor of NANO Fiction and one of the organizers of the festival. I asked her if she would write some of her thoughts about the day, and after the break I’ve posted what she kindly sent back.
15 Comments
May 15th, 2009 / 12:59 pm
May 15th, 2009 / 12:59 pm
Surrealism case studies: video game glitches
I’m fascinated with video game glitches, especially in POV games, given their inherent ‘narrative’ orientation. What makes video games so evocative is the pristine artifice and utilitarian rendering; and when transgressed by a coding glitch, is very unsettling. I find the inadvertent surrealism in the clips below uncanny, humorous, and ‘anti-brilliant.’ It begs the question: if accidents are where the really good ideas are — full of, strangely, more ‘natural’ logic — then what the hell is a writer supposed to do?
Case No. 1:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK9lS0rE0uY&feature=related
God damn it: ‘The Road’ trailer
I mean, I knew they were going to fuck it, but… really? This hard in the A?
Sigh. Next they’ll be making ‘Suttree’ into a romantic comedy starring Luke Wilson and featuring Verne Troyer as the watermelon.
Whoa!
Hey World, how’s it going? Oh? Great, I’m glad to hear it. Um . . . this is just a little thing, please don’t worry about it, uh . . . but, yeah, it’s spelled W-H-O-A. Everywhere I look lately it’s misspelled and I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s so awfully ugly with the “h” at the end.
No, no. This is more embarrassing for me than it is for you. No seriously, I’m the one who should be sorry. I just, well, I just thought if I was making such a silly blunder I would want someone to tell me. That’s right, World, “Whoa.”
Okay, cool. See you around.
Something Baffling, Something Bloom: In which I follow H.B.’s advice and start reading Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks
February 19, 1917.
Today read Hermann und Dorothea, passages from Richter’s Memoirs, looked at pictures by him, and finally read a scene from Hauptmann’s Griselda. For the brief span of the next hour am a different person. True, all prospects as misty as ever, but pictures in the mist now different. The man in heavy boots I have put on today for the first time (they were originally intended for military service) is a different person.
–The First Notebook
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May 14th, 2009 / 4:12 pm
May 14th, 2009 / 4:12 pm
The Rumpus on Shane Jones and Stanley Crawford
Justin Dobbs tipped us off that The Rumpus had published last week a nice review of Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. Jovanovic writes:
Jones makes use of ambiguity and possibility in the fabulist tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, but Light Boxes should not be considered a magic-realist novel. The sidereal reality of Thaddeus and The Solution is not simply one where magical elements are introduced into ordinary settings, like the man vomiting rabbits into flowerpots in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (though Thaddeus does vomit ice cubes)—in Jones’s novel there are few touchstones to the world as we know it. Light Boxes partakes in the traditions of folklore, archetypal myth, and oral history, a pedigree reflected in its images and descriptions. Clouds have legs and shoulders. They are shaped like a hand and can fall apart like wet paper.
Dobbs’ email reminds me that I need to read The Rumpus more, because likely I’ll find good stuff over there, such as this blog post by Deb Olin Unferth on Stanley Crawford’s The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.
If I had to make a small, partial statement here about book reviewing, I’d say this: I find that the most effective reviews (those that affect me most, I mean) tend to be the reviews that make me remember how much I enjoyed reading a certain book (for some reason, I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t yet read?). And I’m using ‘reviews’ here in the loosest sense. Jovanovic’s review and Unferth’s blog post both do this. I enjoy reading another’s telling of his or her experience of a book and I enjoy the connections that telling ignites in my head.
Is this a stupidly simple appreciation of book reviews? Probably.
Uncategorized / 15 Comments
May 14th, 2009 / 11:14 am
May 14th, 2009 / 11:14 am
Daily Moth #4
The new issue of The Daily Moth, the nifty two-page pdf journal that appears only via email and anything but daily, is now out. For our previous Moth coverage (including downloads of issues 1-3) click here. I tried to upload the new one for all of you, but apparently I can’t post files larger than 2mb, and the new issue is 2.4. So if you want it, you’ll need to get yourself added to the email list, which I think you can do by writing to thedailymoth at gee male dockom.
Uncategorized / 10 Comments
May 14th, 2009 / 9:51 am
May 14th, 2009 / 9:51 am