NLW (6): Dimension x7y Giga Heart Maggot
Today’s Natalie Lyalin Week bon bon is a guest post from Erin McNellis, who wrote this terrific review of Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat for NOÖ Journal [11]. Animals abound!
You studied ecology in seventh grade, memorizing the biomes for your science test: the chaparral, the rainforest, the tundra. You learned about the delicate balance of life, you imagined yourself into each exotic environment from your cold, smooth desk under the fluorescent lights—but you never imagined any place quite like Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat.
music is good and so is saturday
Another of Theo Jansen's marvelous Strandbeests, via Dennis Cooper's The Weaklings
Here’s an interview with Titus Andronicus about their album, The Monitor, which I’ve been enjoying the hell out of lately. Question: am I the only person who thinks that first question about the lyric fusing allusions to Springsteen and Billy Bragg in “A More Perfect Union” also contains a third reference that they don’t mention? The line they quote is “I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a new New Jersey”, which is the Bragg paraphrase (“I’m not looking for a new England”), but the next line is “Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to die”, which obviously is Springsteen at the beginning, but did anyone else hear “born to die” and think CHOKING VICTIM? Seems like something these guys would have on their radar. Anyway. If you like the idea of something that sounds like Bright Eyes but with its ball intact, or some version of the Hold Steady that is just as passionate but never has quite as much fun, this is maybe your new jam.
Here’s a playlist by fantasy/sci-fi legend Michael Moorcock at Paper Cuts. This made me really happy to read–his thoughts on the Dead (at the top) and Dylan (at the bottom) pretty much describe my own feelings to a T. The rest is good too.
Sometimes I wonder why I still bother to go to Pitchfork. Then I remember. It’s because sometimes I learn stuff like this.
From the Archives of WTF (not held at UT Austin): The year is 1996, and Snoop Dogg is reviewing The Aristocats for Entertainment Weekly. (via Angela Petrella‘s facebook.)
And Boing Boing offers up Son House’s “Death Letter” as their Greatest Song of All Time of the Day.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCNbacVt5w&
Gaga/Beyonce
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY&feature=player_embedded
Uh, this is kind of amazing. Pretty lame New York mag write-up here.
5 Glits of Drajjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
1.) A really cool excuse:
“Saying she was working on a sequel to ‘Wolf Hall,’ Mantel was not at the NBCC event.”
Yeh, I can’t attend the awards. I am writing the sequel to the book you are awarding. While you drink shrimp and eat gin, I am writing. Excuse me. Pop!
2.) What’s Andy Warhol doing in rural Colombia?
I don’t know. A tomato can full of cocaine? Who gives a fuck. Blar me.
3.) Did you know Lucy Corin is in the Great Outdoors issue of Hobart? How issue is this killer? Buy, fondle, crunk, read.
4.) I stopped reading a novel today with 9 pages left. The end. Ever done that?
5.) Sometimes Lit Mags use ugly fonts and it makes me sad. Sweet like forehead tattoos I want my words. I see my piece (oh how very important) and think, “Fuck, that looks like a lawyer or a dead fish or a lawyer with a dead fish.” Or I am trying to read other words and the font keeps pushing like a hydrogen cloud, human-given; a laboratory vision of near incompetence the moment it was thought, a hollow blar of a font just waiting for the smelly feet, waiting for the nasal drip from New York to come telling me in his fray, hopelessly hollow yet somehow charming, yellow, open-air way meant for stopping my brain from uploading beauty. But I digress. So.
WHAT IS THE BEST FONT?
Uncategorized / 38 Comments
March 12th, 2010 / 7:07 pm
March 12th, 2010 / 7:07 pm
Excel at art
"Vimeo Waiting," Microsoft Excel, 2010
In 1963 Josef Albers published a book on color theory, and since then color — “pure” color, the mathematical hue — has been the rage in abstract painting and design. In the old (c. ’70 – ’80s) days, painters spent months covering a canvas monochrome, blending, blending away the brush marks. The human hand was a horrible thing, corrupted with subjectively. An MFA in Painting student today is still prone to sit hours in front of their canvas, lamenting over which color to juxtapose another color with, and while I respect that solemn responsibility, I prefer the quick MS excel fix, take Vimeo’s default ‘no signal’ screen.
Matthew Simmons—
Still loving Isaiah Toothtaker: “The Cormac McCarthy meets Biz Markie on the marquee…” Watch Rare Form and download it for free here. Partnered on this one with Awkward from Bristol.
A Little More Hannah: A remembrance by a former student, plus a BH essay you may never have seen before
In December 2005, my friend Adam got obsessed with Jenny Lewis and bought every magazine at the Borders with her face on the cover, which was a LOT of them. Among the plenitude of mostly miserable and intellect-proof “music magazines,” which I soon found myself flipping through in mild amusement/dismay, one thing caught my eye: an essay on Beckett and Christianity by Barry Hannah in a magazine called Paste, which I had never heard of before. I was so enraptured with this essay that I made it my business to track their books editor down, and indeed my gmail records reflect that by 01/05/06 I was bugging Charles McNair, author of the novel Land O’ Goshen and editor of the Paste books page, for attention and work. Charles has been a good friend and occasional employer of mine ever since, and it all stems from our shared love of Barry Hannah. As it turns out, Charles studied with Hannah at the MFA program in Tuscaloosa, back when–but let me not tell his story for him. He has a very fine remembrance of his old teacher up at the Paste site, which you should go read. And also, Paste has gone ahead and made available Hannah’s essay, “The Maddening Protagonist.”
I’ve studied the mystic poet William Blake a good long while. Blake’s prophetic books—driven by a man who saw angels in trees and advocated naked free love—I can’t read except as inspired lunacy, which would also hold true for other denominational texts discounted by every theological archaeologist without rabid wolves running around his head. But where do you stop the discounting? We’re only cursing the darkness from the position of our own predilections when it comes to religion and, even more difficult, faith.
For simple truthful laymen, the Holy Bible is inconsistent to an almost sickening degree, and we mainly just let it pass. Faulkner once commented about one of his male characters who, “like most men, never thought about God one way or another.” Through the ages there seems a redundancy of the outright mad clutching Bibles to their chests and spouting scripture incoherently as they proceed from one asylum to the next.
Blake Butler—
Zack Wentz’s new web journal, New Dead Families, styles itself as “a cross between H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, and Gordon Lish’s the Quarterly, and/or Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds and Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions.” New text by Stephen Graham Jones, Carol Novack, Colette Phair, myself, and several other wilds.
Blake Butler—
The Top 13 lists Top 13 novels about drugs, including our pal Tony O’Neill. I’ll personally take The Wild Boys over Junky any day. What else are they missing?