Arrive at 7:45 sharp for misty jams from Jamaican Showers (Playdate).
Also on the bill are Mt. Olympus, Ex Humans and Family Fun.
Date & Time: Friday, February 13th – Doors at 7PM
Venue: GLASSLANDS (BROOKLYN)
Location: 289 Kent Avenue between South 1st & 2nd / Brooklyn, NY 11211
Price: $6
New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones has an excerpt from Arthur contributor Dave Tompkins’ long-awaited book about the vocoder up on his blog. Tompkins connects the dots between Cher, T-Pain, Holger Czukay, and the classic Cylons, sprinkling in ample quotes from Bell Technical Journal along the way. Go read “Unvoiced Hiss Energy” over at the New Yorker. And keep an eye out for Tompkins’ book, due out next spring on Stop Smiling Books/Melville House.
P.S. Tompkins’ infamous interview with Godzilla appeared back in Arthur #10, which is currently available in the Arthur Store.
Arthur Magazine online publisher and satellite UNIVERSAL MUTANT is looking for interns seeking experience on projects in interactive media, film and independent print publishing. Work with Arthurmag.com contributing editor Dan Chamberlin and Will Swofford to curate our “DAILY MAGPIE” blog column and the growing ARTHUR TV brand. Starts immediately – four days a week. Unpaid. Serious inquiries only – email editor@universalmutant.com
(Location: Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
FROM IAN NAGOSKI:
Philadelphian Will Schofield’s monumentally great A Journey Round My Skull blog (named for the first-person Hungarian account of early 20th century brain surgery) of “Unhealthy Book Fetishism” has long relished in the intensity of the gaze, a combination of fascination and repugnance which is almost psychedelic in its insistence.
His most recent posts have artfully combined lustfully sought-after images with utterly maniacal texts, so that the image here is given with with a longer section of this text called “The Process of Slow Digestion” by Mileton Barba.
“Dr. Spasmodeus Smugglington shrank back, his skin shriveled and every hair on his body bristled, his nerves contracted, his guts drew taut, when he saw the little red eyes, brilliant as rubies, and the shiny, bifurcated tongue, its movements accelerated by excitement, darting, zig-zagging wildly in a bold, vertiginous arc”
Dig through the archives and be jealous, amazed, confused and sickened in turns or simultaneously by Schofield’s research. But watch for whatever he does next.
Have you heard Skeletons‘ new album Money yet? If not, pick up the gatefold LP version and open it for a little surprise courtesy of apocalyptic soothsayer/painter Justin Craun. Then listen to it and allow your mind to spread and wander…over to Zebulon on February 12th… to see it in the flesh, like this, alongside their comrades in arms Zs.
Date & Time: Thursday, February 12th – 9PM
Venue: ZEBULON (BROOKLYN)
Location: 258 Wythe Avenue between N. 3rd and Metropolitan / Brooklyn, NY 11211
Price: Free
Maya Hayuk, creator of the “Mallard’s-head-and-reindeer-pummel on a rainbow dagger” ARTHUR t-shirt, is a dynamic and prolific painter, drawer, muralist, collaborator, and beacon of good vibes for the new century and beyond. Her new paintings have totally been blowing my mind. If you’re in New York, be sure to check out her opening at Cinders Gallery. Don’t let the fact that it’s on Friday the 13th freak you out – these paintings create a force field of positive energy that even Jason or Freddie couldn’t penetrate.
Date & Time: Opening Friday, February 13th 7-10PM. Closing March 15th.
Venue: CINDERS GALLERY (BROOKLYN)
Location: 103 Havemayer St. / Brooklyn, NY 11211
Price: Free
To see more of Maya’s work, visit http://www.mayahayuk.com
Q: When the elephant falls, do all the fleas die?
A: The fleas get fat for a while because the elephant is busy being dead. Then the fleas fall too, and the fleas on them rejoice, until they know better.
Proud Flesh is a 30-minute Western shot mainly in the Dakota badlands by Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando and starring their mothers. It’s a remarkable film, even if it hasn’t been seen much outside of Baltimore.
Until it’s more widely released, there is this trailer:
And last month, Baltimore’s Ehse Records released the entirety of the soundtrack as an LP in an edition of 300 copies.
It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.
(Disclosure: although this writer made small contributions to the film and soundtrack, my hand is neither in the till nor on the tiller.)
Ron Rege explains on his blog:
At the beginning of 2008 – I started to create a series of numbered 4×6” drawings, as an exercise – to start to flesh out ideas for a kind of “science fiction universe” that I’ve been slowly imagining over the last few years – the idea of a “Cartoon Utopia”. So many imagined futuristic “fantasy worlds” seem to be “dystopian” in nature –dark and pessimistic. I thought it would be nice to imagine a “futuristic” fantasy where humanity had progressed in a more positive way…
While spending time as “artist in residence” (thanks to D&Q!) in Montreal this past summer, I decided to create a series of much larger (18×24”) drawings as part of this “Cartoon Utopia” series. I had begun reading a biography of Manly P. Hall – founder of The Philosophical Research Society, and author of the classic Secret Teachings of All Ages. After finding a worn out paperback on Alchemy on the sidewalk in Montreal, I became totally hooked on looking more into ideas related to “Ancient Wisdom”.
These large drawings ended up containing & being inspired by quotes I had come across in books I had been reading. So, this second phase of the drawings shifted from describing aspects of my fictional “Cartoon Utopia” universe – to presenting drawings based on quotations that help me describe the building blocks of my ideas for this “fantasy world”. I think I’ll be working on this phase of the drawings for quite a while. The more things I read – the more curious I become – and I have ideas for many more drawings, both large and small.
The ideas, and history of Alchemy & Hermeticism have really opened up a new way for me to relate to a wide variety of philosophical, religious, and mystical traditions, as well as modern ideas in both science, and the “New Age” movement. Instead of being universally skeptical of everything, it’s helping me see similarities between all the different ways humans have invented to help describe this wonderful fascinating world we find ourselves in. By taking it all kind of lightly, and by creating “cartoon” artwork about all of these ideas – I feel like a bit of a trickster. It’s really fun.
I don’t want to offend anyone who relates to any of these ideas in a serious fashion, but I find by having fun with all of it – I hope to be able to present some really amazing ideas in a lighthearted way that doesn’t scare people away. In a way that draws them in with a spirit of fun and inspiration.
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