J’adore ca.
May 18, 2011
Gigantic Indoors
Has arrived!
Get your copy this weekend!
Gigantic Issue III Launch Party.
Friday, May 20th.
285 Kent on the Williamsburg Waterfront.
Doors at 8! We dance until the wee hours.
The new issue, Gigantic Indoors, features a collaborative poem co-written by David Berman (author of Actual Air, ex-founder of The Silver Jews) and Joe Wenderoth (author of Letters to Wendy’s); interviews with Gordon Lish and Lynne Tillman; new very short fiction by Joshua Cohen, Diane Williams, John Haskell, Kim Chinquee, and many others; art by Dan Estabrook, James J. Williams III, and Michael Crawford; and a specially-commissioned centerfold spread created by eteam.
May 18, 2011
The Flea
Write-up in the New York Times this week
about all this vintage we Brooklynites seem to be engaging in.
A photographer snapped this picture of
Jerome and I.
May 5, 2011
First Strike In The United States
Jerome. Wachusett Reservoir. April 30, 2011.
Shot this clip while sitting on the bank’s of one of MA’s largest public water reserves.
Reminded me of Joan Didion’s essay,
“Holy Water,”
from her collection
The White Album.
April 17, 2011
Melancholia
Lars Von Trier’s new masterpiece.
Due out in 2011.
“A beautiful movie about the end of the world.”
March 20, 2011
Thoughts on Crisis
I have used this break
to get caught up on some reading.
I picked up this first edition copy of Susan Sontag’s
Trip To Hanoi
from a vender on Bedford Ave some days previous.
The book was printed in 1968
by The Noonday Press.
I have been thinking a lot about a culture’s reaction
to disasters,
and how the press captures these reactions,
since the earthquake in Japan.
Sontag journals of the
Vietnamese’s reaction to the bombing during
The Vietnam War:
“We see only a handsome, evenly impoverished, clean Asian city; we see charming, dignified people living
amid bleak material scarcity and the most
rigorous demands on their energies and patience. The leveled towns and
villages in the countryside to which we drive on short trips already constitute a tableau from the past,
a thoroughly accepted environment
in which people go on functioning, working toward their victory, making their revolution.
I wasn’t prepared for all this calm.
Thinking about Vietnam in America,
it seems natural to dwell on destruction and suffering.
But not here.
In Vietnam, there is also a peaceful, fiercely industrious present with which a visitor must be connected; and I am not.
I want their victory.
But I don’t understand their revolution.”
Sontag goes on to note:
“Breton has distinguished two forms of the will
in authentic revolutionary struggle:
“revolutionary patience” and
“the cry.”
Much of the current news coverage of the earthquake
in Japan
has recently shifted to an understanding
of the country’s response to the devastation there.
I was reading an article titled,
“Reeling From Crises, Japan Approaches Familiar Crossroad,”
in The New York Times this morning
where one reporter predicted
that the
earthquake would “signal a new era”
in Japan’s history.
Having not traveled to Japan,
I feel ill-equipped to grasp
this statement in its totality.
And yet I feel compelled to understand it
and what it signifies for the people of Japan.
My thoughts are with them.
