IT DID SMASH ME

I Will Smash You flyer3 copyI went to the New York screening of Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro‘s film I WILL SMASH YOU (caps are obligatory) and I can now confidently say that you will want to see it also.

The premise is this: Michael sent out a call last year for people who wanted to smash something that carried a meaning or burden they wanted to rid themselves of. The people came to Michael’s house in Baltimore where he had a smorgasbord of smashing implements laid out on a table in his backyard. Michael interviewed them a little about why they were destroying what they were destroying and then they dismantled the object using an ax, sledgehammer, crowbar, chunk of concrete, etc.
By now I think everyone has seen the trailer featuring our man, Adam Robinson, in which he metaphysically destroys the hymn, It Is Well With My Soul. (If you haven’t, please, for the love of no God, click here.) This was one of my favorite parts of the movie because there are a number of Hymns I would like to destroy also, but I was also surprised and delighted by how much of an impact that the other performances and stories had. Michael and Luca did a phenomenal job in selecting the right quotes and facial expressions and gestures to reveal something really intimate about each person.

Not one but two computer monitors are savagely axed; a teenager mutilates a blood-filled pinata of her teacher’s head; a be-scarfed man destroys ‘procrastination‘; and a woman in high heels and a velvet dress destroys a car she believes is cursed, axing every window and even ripping out the steering wheel.

I hear that Ken Baumann is putting together a screening in LA, and the good folks of Detroit and Toronto will also soon get a chance to see it. Contact Michael or Luca to arrange a screening in your town. You need to be smashed.

Web Hype / 10 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 2:30 pm

Visceral Imaginings: Sombre

Watched this film by Philippe Grandrieux earlier this week (after seeing him highlighted on Dennis Cooper’s blog), and still haven’t been able to shake this opening montage from my head.

Has gotten me thinking even further about the collaging of extremely visceral on extreme levels (the children) to the more intuitively visceral, on a calmer level (the car), a quiet/loud compiling that has been well put to use in the music land but perhaps less so in text.

It seems to me that Burroughs was able to pull some of this off in his cut up methods, but I’m also wondering what other textual artists could be pointed at or explored in such a way? Seems like the leaping times are much more drawn out on the page most often, when they do not necessarily have to be? To what effect?

Here also music and sound have as much if not more prowess on the experience as do the images themselves, the motion. How can music and noise be added to a paragraph, a page? What texts might replicate such a feeling?

Anyhow, Sombre surely has some of the best shot work I’ve seen in a while, even if it is another serial killer film.

Random / 28 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 2:19 pm
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3 a.m. starts new press.

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article about the split between what is called academic and what is called avant garde.

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GIANT Excerpt: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#5)

Suicides of the ’90s,

                                        you don’t need me to tell you we needed you and you were not nothing to us. Mimicking into stupor was a better guess at how to play ourselves–even I was on TV so I shouldn’t have to recount that either. We tried to say heathen but our mouths ended up spouting a music better suited to driving through a star-tarted desert. Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years, but we do we call this shit? Might makes maybe, to put it mildly. Branches of science we haven’t invented or gotten around to suppressing would alter the hideous tides, keep us from killing what keeps us alive. The whole world, to the extent that we can name such an invention, we have sliced open–I never did make it to physics class but with luck it’s not too late, the last so slow to leave so leave on all the light.

All this week, HTMLGiant posted poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Day #4 is here.

Excerpts & Web Hype / Comments Off on GIANT Excerpt: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#5)
September 25th, 2009 / 11:52 am

Push Ups for Poetry

A Special Poets House Fundraiser

from Black Ocean founder: Janaka Stucky

push up pro

What is Push Ups For Poetry?
Push Ups for Poetry is a fundraising project I began on Monday, August 10th 2009. I decided to set a goal for myself: in one month’s time be able to complete 100 push ups without taking a break. This is not a herculean task by any stretch of the imagination, but it is also something decidedly difficult for most of us who aren’t in solid athletic shape. On my first trial run, I was able to complete 40 push ups in a single set. I will train for the next four weeks, and plan on completing a single set of 100 push ups by the end of that time. All the money raised will then be donated to Poets House, in New York City.
Web Hype / 6 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 11:10 am

The Insertion of Money Where the Mouth Is

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TriQuarterly is moving online and/or ceasing publication depending on who you ask. It is a real shame to see such a fine publication being forced into this transition. I’ve noticed a lot of garment rending, lament and outcry, but how many of us subscribe? Every time a small press or magazine announces it’s going to close or is on the verge of closing, the Internet immediately begins frothing about the loss to arts and letters but as someone who works behind the scenes and knows how few of us actually subscribe to literary magazines, I have to wonder about the hypocrisy of it all. People say they can’t subscribe to every journal or that they can’t afford to subscribe or they don’t believe in acquiring things or a wide range of other excuses but still,  people really appreciate the work  We appreciate your appreciation but we like and need your money more. What magazines are you subscribing to these days? Do we have a right to express our outrage about the “state of publishing” if we’re part of the problem?

Behind the Scenes / 243 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 10:42 am

Glimmer Train’s Best Start

logo01.jpgThe more creative editors get, the less writers have to. I’ve noticed a lot of send this type of thing in submission guidelines, which can be effective when applied as a formal constraint, but it seems, with the exponential increase of content everywhere, that we (as writers and editors) grow less and less concerned with writing than we are with creative publishing. Editors, who may be themselves writers, are more and more conceptually proactive, and no longer just “edit” in a subtractive sense, but impose an editorial narrative on the aggregate of work they publish. This can be, and is often exciting, but sometimes just, um.

Of their “Best Start” fiction category: “[…] is different from our others in that the piece should be an engaging and coherent narrative, but it does not need to be a complete story […]”

And you thought flash fiction was the easiest way to write, now you don’t even need to finish a story. They then go on to say, “All pieces should be original fiction and not have appeared in a print publication.” If the piece is unfinished, how the hell would it have appeared elsewhere? Then they say, “No fiction for children, please.”

READ MORE >

Mean / 29 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 12:14 am

Your words compete with this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uad17d5hR5s

Random / 36 Comments
September 24th, 2009 / 7:47 pm
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David Cronenberg is remaking The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg.

Also, the Disney-helmed adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank-written by David Mamet–isn’t turning out as planned.

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