“This print is the first in a series that Becky Stark and I are making together. We write slogans and turn them into prints and videos. This is the first print and is designed in collaboration with Jacob Ciocci.
Jacob is a founding member of the art collective Paper Rad and plays in the band Extreme Animals. Becky is the lead singer/songwriter of the folk pop band Lavender Diamond. We’ve been longtime collaborators and friends. We live across the country from one another and write these slogans via text message. It’s fun to get a random positive message, and our intent is for people who come across these posters to get the same feeling of unexpected joy.
Our work together is about giving off healing vibrations generated by humor and beauty. We hope it makes you smile.
Young Lions revolves around a cast of listless, urban youth who look for meaning in art, religion, and each other. Recently awarded the highly coveted Xeric grant, it is the debut graphic novella from blogger/zinester Blaise Larmee.
Scheduled for publication on April 1, 2010, Blaise thought of a unique promotion for fans interested in reading his new book. Make a Yoko Ono zine and he will mail you 1x pre-order package (1x Young Lions + 1x untitled experimental zine).
Mail a copy to:
Blaise Larmee
3720 SE 28th Pl. #19
Portland, OR
97202
Here’s a nice follow-on from the Raoul Vaneigem interview, posted earlier this week: British author/poet/journalist Iain Sinclair on what he’s discovered through the years from “motiveless walking” in London. From the Telegraph:
In London, from the first, I walked. As a film student, newly arrived in the early Sixties, I copied the poet John Clare on his feverish escape from Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping Forest, when he navigated by lying down to sleep with his head to the north. Skull as compass: all the secret fluids and internal memory-oceans aligned by force of desire. Clare returned, as he thought, to Mary, his first love, his muse; to his heart-place, Helpston, beyond Peterborough, on the edge of the dark fens. My drag was cinema, Bergman seasons in Hampstead, Howard Hawks in Stockwell. Or art: the astonishing Francis Bacon gathering at the old Tate, at Millbank, former prison and panopticon. Bacon’s melting apes were robed like cardinals. Naked men, stitched from photographs, wrestled in glass cages.
Motiveless walking processed the unanchored images that infiltrated dreams of the shadow-belt on either side of the Northern Line. I lodged in West Norwood, a house on a hill, like the one I had left behind in Wales. I wandered through mysterious suburbs to the rooms above the butcher’s shop in Electric Avenue, Brixton, where the school was based. Street markets, I discovered, were a significant part of the substance of this place. Walking was a means of editing a city of free-floating fragments. I composed, privately, epic poems conflating the gilded Byzantium of W.B. Yeats with the slap and strut of Mickey Spillane’s California. London was an impossible relativity of historical periods and superimposed topographies.
After Dublin, where I enjoyed four years of apprentice exile, I came to Hackney: perched, settled, stayed. The modestly impoverished zone had the virtue of being unknown, even to itself. Submerging into a novel territory, as a casual labourer, I found both time and means to pursue my obsession with alignments, reforgotten writers, lost rivers, Hawksmoor churches, crime clusters. Street signs and spray-can slogans were a code to be broken. I had no idea, back then, that rogue Parisian intellectuals had already branded these strategies and given them a provocative title: psychogeography.
30 years later, assembling a collection of essays on London, which I called Lights Out for the Territory (after Mark Twain), I realised that, unconsciously, I had been operating, all along, as a disenfranchised psychogeographer. I stalked a defining urban narrative by sleepwalking through downriver reaches, sniffing after faded traces of Thomas De Quincey – and challenging the post-architectural infill of Docklands, the empty hubris of the Millennium Dome, with ritual expeditions that doubled as curses. Compulsive digressions disavowed the bullet-point banalities of developers and promoters. I wrote about pit bulls and satellite dishes. I attended the funeral of that mythical east London gangster Ronnie Kray: the godfather of the ghosted memoir, of mendacious boasts disguised as confessions. The pulp model for self-serving political autobiographies. I looked down on the glittering Thames from Lord Archer’s penthouse. London was revealed as a city of hidden connections and weird coincidences.
I had stumbled on a model for future projects: the walk as a narrative, as a moving film made from static images. This was a method of preparing the writer for an act of occult possession: in the way that William Blake was captured by the spirit of John Milton in the form of a star striking his heel. Considerations of the present Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley would begin by employing the Lights Out for the Territory template…
Jack Rose passed away suddenly at home in Philadelphia on December 5, 2009. He was widely regarded as the most profound exponent of acoustic guitar playing of his generation. Jack grew to be loved and admired by a great many people through his live performances, electric personality, [serious] cooking skills and a general mastery in the art of friendship. This concert is a release party for his new album Luck In The Valley and an occasion to celebrate and remember the good Dr. Ragtime. The artists performing were all dear friends of Jack’s and admired by him musically.
Saturday, February 13, 2010 – 7:00 PM
Latvian Society of Philadelphia – 531 N. 7th Street
Performers:
D. Charles Speer & The Helix
Thurston Moore | Paul Flaherty | Chris Corsano
Michael Chapman
Pelt
The Black Twig Pickers
Glenn Jones
Byron Coley
Meg Baird | Chris Forsyth
Megajam Booze Band
DJ Ian Nagoski
Video clips curated by Tara Young
The last year has been rough, but we’ll try to face the new dawn more regularly. See how it goes, and we’ll deal with some older stuff amidst the newer stuff. Can’t be helped. Thanks.
1. I guess it’s beyond the point of convincing anyone that some of the best music/sounds is happening on small cassette labels, but once in a while something gets slapped in the tape deck that just utterly, completely nails you to the underpinnings of heavens dripping maw. Such an experience is to be had by anyone lucky enough to grab hold of if only goodnight, the first cassette on the Wagtail label by Eastern Massachusetts improv/noise/strange-string shaman-femme Ashley Paul. Ms. Paul has been on the hot tongues of local noise lovers for a few years now and has gotten some recognition through her collaborations with the amazing Rel Records imprint. This cassette is really, really stirring and odd and affecting with high-frequency vox (which may or may not be ACTUAL vocals, but the mystic air conjured by reed-tongue) that call to mind early Connie Berg (Mars) interacting with bowed percussion and dislocated guitar sex. Cool as it gets. Get it.
2. Recent times appear to have been busy for Ed Sanders (above), one of the heroes of this century and the last. Amidst rumblings of a vast archival reissue series of material recorded by Ed’s band the Fugs, there is also a new Fugs album due sometime soon, and a slew of printed material already in hand. Poems for New Orleans (North Atlantic Books) came out in ’08, but only recently came to our attention. The book is full of Sanders’ beautiful verse, inspired by a trip to the city, which lead to intense reading about its history, and imaginings of chance encounters that might have been. Thus, the book’s a mix of investigative poetry (a school of thought Sanders founded), pure conjecture, and his own special lyricism. Great stuff, tying together near-ancient history with the catastrophes of Katrina and much else. Here’s a brief sample of the poem, “Echoes of Heraclitus”:
A helicopter flew me away
I wound up in Utah
where I am waiting for Jesus
or anybody
to help me home.
Also new to us is America, A History in Verse: The 20th Century Volumes 1-5 (Blake Route Press). The first three volumes of this massive, detailed ride through the American consciousness were published by Black Sparrow Books, but following the retirement of the legendary publisher, John Martin, there was no one around to actualize the words. Thus, the full set is available as pdf files on CD. And hideous as this format feels (we spend way too much time on screen already), the work is fantastic. Here’s a short piece from Volume 5:
The Oklahoma City Bombing
April 19
Timothy McVeigh
looked like someone who could have been a NASCAR driver
or a retired quarterback
Close cut hair
White eyes of blue a Gulf War vet
and bursting from a sliver of the small town ethos
that allowed grumbling gun nuts
& gummint-haters
to exist without much hassle
It would be delightful if someone would turn these last two volumes into actual books as well, but for now, this will have to do. Ed was also the main subject of a recent show hosted by an amazing gallery/printing shop in Brooklyn called The Arm. They hosted a brief show of his many glyph-based artworks from the last half a century, and while the show has ceased to exist, The Arm’s Dan Morris is working on a portfolio reprinting several of Ed’s most eye-commandeering efforts. There are also a few loose sheets of this work available. And they are guaranteed to make yr brain very hot.
Anyway, we await finding a copy of Ed’s new poetry collection from Coffee House Press, and the soon-due Fugs CD as well. ‘Til then—keep grope alive.
3. One dude who has been on the UK underground noise cassette scene as long as Ashtray Navigations’ Phil Todd is Joincey. Haven’t really heard to much from Joincey in a while but he has this new thing now called My Carapace Is Leaking and the first thing we’ve heard by “them” is a split cassette with Swiss-Swedish double bass improvisor Nina De Heney on the Rayon Records label from Lyon, France. Joincey, or My Carapace Is Leaking, also employs bass action, though unlike De Heney’s more raw, organic scrape and touch (which is ruling), it is more of a skin-melting lather. And it is completely great. A wonderful split by these two, and anyone who has followed Joincey through the years with Wagstaff, Inca Eyeball, Coits, Stuckometer, and his amazing Face Like A Smacked Arse label will desperately want this.
4. Another great set of releases has appeared from Mondo Macabro, who seem to have a truly insane grasp of international exploitation films. The third volume of their Bollywood Horror series pairs two films from the Ramsay Brothers studio, Mahakaa and Tahkana, which combine tons of bad vibes, dance numbers and surreal juxtapositions of elements – I mean, who knew Nightmare on Elm Street was lacking a gay Michael Jackson character? Not us. But now we do.
We also understand, from seeing Akio Jissoji’s Marquis De Sade’s Prosperities of Vice, that it would have been a bad idea to create a criminal theater based on the works of De Sade in Japan during the 1920s. As to whether it’d be a good idea now, we can only guess. But watching how the bad idea actually was is a great visual treat. Weird to think this same director did the Ultra Man movies!
5. Great Dividing, the Australian label that kicked in the front door of our o-brain with the posthumous 3 Toed Sloth LP (which for better and/or worse is as close as we can get to contempo Feedtime action as it features almighty Feedtime drum-jesus, Tom), has issued a cassette comp, A Range of Greatdividing, which has some primo Sloth as well as other Oz dementia like the top-notch Shoptoprockers. Primal, guitar scrawl with dirty-hair free-chug moves that proves Oz still the sexiest dirtbarge ‘neath the meridian.
We are collecting stories of how people got into the band/shows they saw/memories/testimonials etc.
It would be awesome if you wanted to contribute. It doesn’t have to be fancy or well-worded, we’d just like you to leave a record of your experience and get an idea of what Bikini Kill means to you. Maybe it’s your reaction to a song we wrote, something weird that happened at one of our shows, a personal anecdote or just WHATEVER. Send yr story to bkillarchive@gmail.com and we will post it or just leave a comment somewhere on the site. You can also send us images to post.
Please help us spread the word. To document the history (or herstory) of the band it is necessary to include an oral history from “the fans”. We say fans for lack of a better word–a more expansive term would be inclusive of friends, peers, comrades, co-conspirators and imply participation rather than an audience separate from the band–which is what we hope to achieve with this interactive approach.
Also, if you have video/film footage of the band, please contact us, Thanks!
Arthur Magazine 