I WENT TO AN ART PERFORMANCE AND THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE

The following pictures were taken sometime after January of two thousand thirteen.

It was still winter back then.





I was poppin' my Queens cherry. There was a panel discussion at the PSONE MoMa and my boy heard there was gonna be free drinks and it sounded interesting. The talk wasn't that interesting and the drinks weren't free but we still had a good time. This is us walking over there

as u can c we were excited 2 b alyv

This is the space within the PSONE MoMa, like a sci-fi movie or an animated television series about a wish granting dragon and its seven balls, where the event was held.

The DJ performed on top of a ten foot platform.      There was a projector behind the speakers. The drinks were served from a punch bowl. You could drink them outside of the dome, but you had to stay within the gravel.

and you know what they say about intellectual insight

AND YOU KNOW WHAT     THEY ARE   SAYING ABOUT YOU
       RIGHT
      NOW
.

I met Casey Li Brander once briefly at the bar on top of Home Sweet Home, the one down the hallway behind the white door, the conspicuous thing, I think some people like to call those sorts of things speakeasies, like take it easy, it's not a bar it's a mixology thing or something, it's gonna be pricey and the bartender will wear a vest instead of whatever the hell he wants, but I met her enough to fb and # her and then pm it and we don't talk anymore and this is her website (which may be defunct?)

dumb             cute      

        

But so she invited me to this thing not too far away from the PSONE MoMa thing and since it was ending anyways we decided to walk over there. It was at a private residency, presumably the artist's, who happens to be Casey Li Brander's friend. There were pbrs in a bucket and the audience stood on one side of a long room and faced this

for your reference those are twelve t shirts hanging against the wall.

the two canvasses facing each other up front have two people standing behind them with their arms sticking through

and some form of lighted platform in the center

so then the artist (CLB's friend) comes out though a door at the side and starts painting the t shirts on the wall with his hands

he went full out and started smearing the pain(t) onto his body/smearing the pain(t) onto the t shirts

then at some point he just straight up left the room

during his absence some people came into the room

They were wearing white jumpsuits and two of them wore masks. One of them laid down on the lighted platform while the masked whiteys removed the t shirts from the wall. They placed the t shirts on top of the platform and the man lying down and proceeded to dry them with those machines that do that to hair

the artist came back into the room while this was happening and put up twelve more t shirts against the wall and repeated the process

this time, before exiting the room, the artist decided to hump the two canvasses/people

There was plenty of applause when the show ended. I laid an empty can of pbr on the floor and headed in the direction of the door through which the artist came and went but through the outside hallway of the building. I walked into an apartment. The artist stood against the wall, looking at me and smiling. I approached him and his smile grew wider. He reached out a hand to me, and before I could speak he said thank you. I asked him where the bathroom was and his expression quickly changed, pointed towards a door and stomped off. The bathtub was filled with water the color of water in the cup that you used in elementary school when you would paint with water color, except imagine the cup being the size of a bathtub.

I'm not an art critic tbh

The Bleeding Edge: Thomas Pynchon: A Review: We get it

Ok, Pynchon. We get it. You kept busy in the early 2000's watching anime and playing video games with your grandsons. Also sitcoms, there are more Friends references than a novel should be allowed to have.

Maxine Tarnow, the detective/heroine of the story, acts as erratically as there are cringey puns in a Pynchon novel, and I’d accuse him of misogyny if his male characters didn't also act as idiotically. They're all one-dimensional and forgettable. The plot lacks the necessary build up and climax that a detective novel is supposed to have, resulting in an insignificant resolution at the end. A stranger to Pynchon's work could be upset over the non-conventional structure, but we all know that with him it’s always about the ride. And what a docile ride it is. The prose is flat. There is no tension. The words are not as carefully chosen and the digressions often lead to a dead-end.  The paranoia is still there, and how could it not when we're talking about 9/11 and the Internet?

The story is told in the present tense so there is minimal foreshadowing, and when 9/11 happens, at about 2/3 of the novel, in the immediacy of the now, there is no time for analyzing. We are caught right in the middle of all the confusion and the way to cope is to not overthink it. In a sense that’s what Bleeding Edge is all about, the digressions that go nowhere, sudden changes in voice and literary genre, ambiguity, irony, name-dropping, puns and silly names to entertain us, to distract us from the confusion, to take us somewhere else, like DeepArcher, the virtual reality simulation that by the end of the novel has expanded its real estate to include pre-9/11 architecture. The only moment Pynchon drops all artifices is during a heartfelt half-page eulogy to firefighters, and for that brief moment Pynchon is at his rarest with unequivocal honesty.


After David Foster Wallace and the new sincerity movement that brought to the forefront the likes of Tao Lin and Marie Calloway, pouring their hearts out into heavily auto-biographical fiction, writing in a style deliberately unadorned and non-ambiguous, Pynchon, with his  cryptic prose, represents, for better or worse, one of the last outposts of irony resistance. And on Bleeding Edge he is strongly standing his ground, like an old ethnic lady that for decades has been living in a rent-controlled unit on a now heavily gentrified neighborhood.

Upstream Vomit

"Have you seen Upstream Color?" 

No.

"I thought it was brilliant."

Really?  

"Well I dunno...

"

tks nytimes.com

Upstream Color is a terrible movie. It's a new hardcore mumblecore movie, directed by that guy who made Primer - a super low budget science fiction film about time travel. Was Primer a good movie? I remember a lot of people watched that movie and liked it. Naturally, lots of people watch stuff they enjoyed in college. So I watched Primer once on netflix stream back in 2007, but forgot soon after because it was an emotionless, boring experience about time travel. Meh. 

Flash forward to the internet in 2013 and BOOM guess who's back! Steve Carr a kara vermuth ?something, the Christopher Nolan of low budget sci-fi movies. A lot of people like using charts and graphs to explain why movies like Primer and Memento are really interesting and fun to deconstruct. Obviously, humans fabricate and manipulate data to justify any claim they make; the same is true for movie analysis. Take a look at my graph below for example: 

See graph 

But I digress. Upstream Color plays out exactly as it does in its very own trailer. Shane has crafted yet another emotionless, boring experience that plays out like a slow climax about some events that don't really matter. The entire movie is either a climatic note in a jerk-off song about robots, or nothing happening. 

Some of the movie-sucking highlights include: The acting, The dialogue "I want to marry you" the cinematography (why is every shot shallow DOF) the editing (ASL 2.4 seconds?) the boringness, the paleness, the nothingness. 

Movies like Memento and Primer are about boring stories that are edited in a way to convey a sense of importance and uniqueness. They're still boring stories about white people that don't really exist. If these movies teach us anything at all, it's that there are thousands of boring white people living life every day, contemplating what not to eat for dinner. Upstream Color is somehow more obnoxious than its predecessor, which is very sad because in this day and age it's pretty easy to make experimental cinema or video that doesn't abide to traditional narrative or structure etc. youtube/jason cozza.com

ugh, exactly

Unless you want to see a laughable example of indie art that wasn't produced by Lena Dunham, I cannot recommend that you watch UC. There are so many better things that you can do with 95 minutes of your life. I encourage you to do them. 

how many books did you read today?

Daniel Levin Becker Many Subtle Channels: in Praise of P


otential Literature review

  M  A  N  Y
            SUB  TLE


  C H   A NN E L S

         IN
             PRAISE
         OF



    P O T E N T I A L

   L I T E R A T U R E

What do you find odd about this? Ouvroir de littérature potentielle is a French institution. It is as French as they come. Poetry written in between subway stops, constrained writing in which the detective novel is written without the use of the letter e. The lipogram (as per wikipedia: writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z), etc

no rules, no limits, no conventions, no formats, no patronizing, no templates, no concessions: in one word, no constraints …   In our culture, nothing seems to be tolerated that limits the writer’s essential freedom, her spontaneity, his eagerness to make associations while writing. In literature, however, and probably in some other fields too, freedom conceived in terms of “no this and no that” is just a myth, and a harmful one. - 

jan baetens

Daniel Levin Becker is an Oulipian like Dan Brat. DLB became an Oulipian at age twenty-four, the same age DB became an Oulipian. DLB sought to write a book about the Oulipo, a French academic-like group or gathering which assigned itself in charge of literature experimentation by imposing limitations on writing. Unlike DB, DLB probably found an interest in Oulipian writing at an early age. The man has contributed to and worked for The Believer and Dusted Magazine among other publications. He plays music, he write music criticism, he reviews literature and translates books, he presumably speaks more languages than French and English, and he's an ivy leaguer. He went to France to catalog the Oulipo on a Fulbright. John Ashbery went to France on a Fulbright.

DLB runs us through a history of the Oulipo, describes the founding meetings between enthusiastic Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais using the Collège de 'Pataphysique as a jumping point. We learn about the illustrious members of the Oulipo, Italo Calvino and Marcel Duchamp among them, the various personalities and contributions of the group, the meetings they hold, the meals they eat and the wine that is served. The mission of the group is clear. They search for new writing techniques utilizing innovative constraint tools. DLB gives us some insight into the various attempts at potential literature, explaining Jacques Jouet's formulation and eventual execution (twice) of the metro poem, in which he rides through every stop of the Paris metro, thinking of a new line in between stops, and then writing down the line only when the train is stopped. As soon as it moves forward, the writing stops and the new line begins. George Perec's La Disparition (A void). Sounds pretty diff inted. Memebers of the Oulipo: Claude Berge, Italo Calvino, Bernard Cerquiglini, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Fournel, Jacques Jouet, François Le Lionnais, Hervé Le Tellier, Jean Lescure, Daniel Levin Becker, Harry Matthews, Ian Monk, Oskar Pastior, Georges Perec, Luc Etienne Périn, Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval, Pierre Rosentiehl, Jacques Roubaud, Albert-Marie Schmidt. Jeudis - Oulipo meetings. Sometimes open to the public. Special assemblies. Dinner. Wine. Jokes. Oulipian members constrain themselves in writing but not professions, including mathematicians, composers and etceteras. You derive creativity from constraints.

A very diff inted book.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

The Curfew by Jesse Ball: A Review

THE
CURFEW

by

JESSE

BALL

Excellent prose. Great commentary about the book format, how a narrator plucks the strings but doesn't truly disconnect from the central narrative. Perfect pacing. Unsettling.


;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A Review of The Milan Review of Ghosts

the
M
  I
   L
    A
     N
      R
       E
        V
         I
          E
           W
            of
             G
              H
               O
                S
                 T
                  S

The first thing I noticed about this book is the typos. Typoes? Typography. The first thing I noticed about this book is the authors. I recognize Tao Lin's name (Yuck! Coming out as a Tao Lin h8r jk I don't hate but this guy is the worst!). The first thing I noticed about this book is the cover art. The graphics (drawings) are done by Matt Furie. I love Matt Furie. I am not sure how to pronounce his name. I like to pronounce it the same way I do "fury." But he could be a furry. Or a brony. I found out about his artwork back in two-thousand and seven through 4chan. I am a big fan of his boy's club series. Reading the stories in this book you notice MFA caliber. There's a story about a pilot I recommend you check out.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of THERE AND BACK by Mark King

I can't tell what country Mark King's photographs are taken in. At first I'm thinking Vegas or New Orleans. But then maybe he's in the Caribbean. It reeks of professional photography bending the rules. Framing and light are powerful tools for a creative vision. King has two crucial characteristics of a good artist. He's talented at his craft. He has interesting subjects. His photographs don't seem to explore anything specific, but rather an open exploration of possibly implausible scenarios. A diff inted artist for sure.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of Techno Junkies by Sean Pryor

The idea behind techno junkies isn't original. A man feels a disassociation with the physical world and attempts to find happiness by merging into virtual reality (THE SINGULARITY). Sean Pryor illustrates a secluded man who feels pressured by his mother to embrace a world which he feels alienated from. The man falls in love with a cyber woman named Zerone and achieves a metaphysical love connection with her by splicing his soul (or w/e) into a network of wires plugged directly into his body. An ambiguous ending, but even more interesting is what comes after the ending. Some extra illustrations by Pryor. A Native American. An Astronaut blues singer. Fun with alligators. What I like to imagine is Pryor himself sitting on the toilet. Pants off. Shirt on.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of the young dissenter's handbook by Ryan Eggensperger & Dan Strauss

Apparently this comic book is inspired by one of those "X things you must do before you die" lists. Each page presents a different scenario in which a bald man is depicted going through the banality of life in the modern age. The character is moody, greedy, insecure, lonely, delusional, entitled, very funny. Some of the pages are more absurd than others, and the slight reference here and there to pop culture and social norms. Nothing better than a book with only one line per page.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

 A review of Wet. an erotic collection volume one

Papercut Press, based out of Brooklyn, NY claims to be a

small press based out of Brooklyn, ny.
We focus on underrepresented writers and strange works that are unlikely to be published.
We believe in beautiful, well-designed, printed books.

The book is well designed. It is printed. The writers may certainly be considered underrepresented. I don't recognize any of them. I don't know about the rest but I'll take their word for it. This is a print lit mag that borders on the diff inted. It opens with a missed connections posting (featured above) which plays with the format of erotic story-telling. There is a mix of comics, illustrations and photographs, more traditional short stories and poems, all of them sex-related. Most of them sexy. Think I'll keep my mouth shut on this one and just tell you to GO BUY IT! But I don't know where. I picked this one up at a bookstore in Bushwick. I don't know the name but I think it's on Flushing, near Wilson. Not one hundred percent sure though so...



;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of 3 Kims by Alexandria J Seekely

This short lil treat of a mag borders on the absurd. New Aesthetic. Tumblr sensibilities. A book of different internet "quotes" about the three succeeding Supreme Leaders of North Korea. Highly entertaining for the forty-five seconds it takes you to read through.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of Ornage by Tom Peyton

It is difficult to find Tom Peyton on the internet. In fact I got nothing. Orange blends photography, collage, poetry. New Aesthetic that the alt lit kids can get into. 




;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

A review of PEEK by Elizabeth Farrell

This is the best comic book/small zine I have ever discovered. Thirteen illustrations of school girl upskirts. Short. Sweet. Sexy. Thank you Elizabeth Farrell. So good I think even Nick Gazin featured it.


EXTRAS 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) EXTRAS

BONSAI by Alejandro Zambra

Recommended to me by the poet Gregory Solano. Poetic. Short. It's a movie.

TOILET BOWL: SOME NOTES ON WHY I WRITE by Kate Zambreno

I love Heroines. But you know that.

HAT TRICK by: Dr. Phil

Some kid on termbo sent me this back in two thousand nine. Hilarious.

SLIME DOG: YOU ARE MY FRIEND by Daniel Alexander aka SNACK PACK aka SNCKPCK

A tumblr alt lit type kid inspired by LIL B I'm assuming with an amazing PR machine.

geo journal

When did I meet Geo around Gainesville in summer of millennial ten? He said he'd eat a twenty dollar bill for twenty dollars. He accepted any challenge. I sat on a misplaced wooden drawer and he sat on the toilet eating the currency piece by piece.

  - -   -- ---- -   - - - - --- - --

get this

 - - - - --- - --- -   -- ---- -- -

Don't know his, but I was seventeen at the time.

24. of nights

over the unIDed sceen

getting ready for the bext nest thing

7. buying grits

So is this page the pre-journal to the journal, or is there another journal that this is a tribute to? Never been right about a conspiracy but times are changing, and you know they do and you lose some.

It's pretty clear to me today. Geo is a creative mind. He fell off his bike and went into a neurointensive care unit.

What are things in life you forget that you do not want to? And how can you.

First time you witness death

The second time you watch a man die. The first time you watch a woman die.

minor in possession

Early signs he would eventually eat a twenty dollar bill. I wonder what else he's ingested, and what he bought with that plasma money.
I wonder if I'll see him tonight.
I wonder about the last person he slept with. I wonder if I'llll..llll..ll meet someone he's slept with.

 As I type this I think of The Age of Sinatra and Motorman. Might recommend to him. As I type this I read his journal, feel tender sweetness of youth, sadness of growth, of forgetting and leaving and of growing up. I think of Umbanda. I think of pain as pleasure. You have to suffer to love.


There is nothing more painful than regret.

this is fucking touching me

What was Geo thinking here?

I've never been sure about the term bugaboo. A ghost is an apparition. A wraith is doomed to be pretentious forever. Let me give this away to you: They dig up his skill and find something inside of it. The protagonist dies a violent death. The love you have to find/give is manipulative. Once spent the summer lying in between kisses. She came down from Canada. I parked my dad's green truck on Collins Ave. I forgot to put change in. I didn't get a ticket. I almost crashed. We almost crashed. We almost loved. I wrote a poetic short-short flash in college, an experience I had with her in college, about how it felt to see her in line for sushi in college, how she looked like a college professor in her early twenties, didn't recognize her hair and didn't feel her vibe, how great she looked and how ugly I felt, so manny summer sessions on aim, waiting for years on end, to finally meat on the beach and let the time pass and turn to dislike each other. I wonder what Geo was thinking about.

not sure what happens here

the summer showers cuddle tenderly on my pink cheeks

i

∂˙∆©ƒ∆∂ß∑∆´åø˜å¨ç©¥¨˜ˆ∑¨Ï´ˆ¨†Ï´Î¨ƒ∫¨¥

bowler hat and moustache

charlie chaplin / hitler

..........
....

l,.
..... roedelius toujours arvop ärt spiegel im spiegel
llazy old lloot, our mother's ghost
roll oxytocin fantasy love
b-movie nowhere girl och whalesong tussle transparent c
                                                                             
                                                                             
                                                                             
                                                                             
                                                                             

                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                       

I like to kiss you on top of a skateboard
I love you as you hold a beer.
I want to kiss you on top of a skateboard as you hold a beer.
ijnja yurtis cumy bbegrl

What was Geo thinking of?