Welcome to (Month 7: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 7: Volume 2) contains tons of contemporary art, music, fashion, literature, videos, and more stuff that resists categorization!
Don’t forget this newsletter will exceed most email limits, so you’ll need to click through to “view entire message” at the bottom of this email or click over to the website to enjoy the whole thing.
And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
Contemporary British artist Emma Talbot
i want to cut open my face and dig for diamonds.
the ghasty sights, driving through the streets, and so much more and more and less. this was a thanksgiving universe handshake, a verbal contract between the suns and the moons, hallowed light and gravity; a holiday without a host, or sacrament, a penitent, a two-way machine from the above.
— from “FACE” by ELIZABETH VICTORIA ALDRICH, via Selffuck
Presentation of the 51st Couture Collection
By Demna
Contemporary American artist Catalina Ouyang
Contemporary Canadian artist Laura Letinsky
One proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.
— from “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang, via Electric Literature
Charlie Kaufman | BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series (2017)
Contemporary South African artist Zanele Muholi
If we can leave behind the constant injunction of our gatekeepers and tastemakers to comply with aesthetics of the "straightforward," we can embrace intense meadows and ecstatic riddles. Jäderlund, Hopkins, Zurita, Lynch, Jefferson all offer a different route, an ecstatic, visionary route that says: poetry is a strange force that can take over your minds and bodies, transport you out of what you think you know and take you into a new kind of mysterious knowledge.
Write what you don't know.
— from "To Vibrebrate: In Defense of Strangeness" by Johannes Göransson, via The Poetry Foundation
Contemporary American artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya
I find myself sitting behind myself on the 63 bus, 30-odd years suddenly gone. We stop at the lights at the Grand Palais where the new Míro is on. To my left the Eiffel Tower and, in front of me, there I am, beside myself.
— from “all the mirrored selves we are” by Shelley Day, via 3AM Magazine
Contemporary Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto
Craig Green “Spring/Summer 2023” (full runway looks here)
amnesia of Newhall afternoons half-burned by eucalyptus and the Santa Anas amnesia of seminars in theory dogs snuffling at every leg under the table amnesia of interrogation amnesia of incommensurate cant amnesia of commandeering enough space to bring the sleeves in and collar the hem imagine but do not pretend
— from “Leaving La Lavandería” by Joe Milazzo, via OHM Magazine
Contemporary Dutch artist Hellen van Meene
I plant brains out back to help me think. I can’t say whose. In the mornings, I pour coffee over their folds and sprinkle the grounds as fertilizer.
— from “The Brains” by Ruby Rorty, via HEX
Contemporary American artist LJ Roberts
Thinking of choice and consent as the artifice of flows beyond us, instead of as an originary impulse jumping forth from our God-given breasts, is not new: French philosophers and schizoanalysts Deleuze and Guattari wondered why the citizens of a fascist arrangement kept saying yes to their own oppression. It's a sticky problem: why do we shoot ourselves in our feet? You would think that when presented with the options to choose one’s liberty over servitude, we would always go for the former. Time and time again, however, we say yes to the boot.
— from "The Hidden Curriculum of Consent" by BAYO AKOMOLAFE, via his website
Contemporary Mexican artist Astrid Terrazas
Sabrina Carpenter - because i liked a boy (Official Video) (2022)
Directed by Amber Park
Creative Director Sarah Carpenter
Those in power keep invoking “the normal” as in “when we get back to normal.” I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal. Of course, I understand the more benign meanings of normal; having dinner with friends, going to the movies, going back to work (not so benign). However, I have never used it with any confidence in the first place; now, I find it noxious. The repetition of “when things return to normal” as if that normal, was not in contention. Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was white supremacy normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. But, I and many other people hate that normal.
— from "On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying" by Dionne Brand, via Toronto Star
Contemporary American artist Rachel Perry
Contemporary American artist Mary Lum
Artplay, which is short for “art gameplay,” is a new fine art genre. It uses a range of game features for the sole aim of producing art. More precisely, what belongs in the fine art register is abstracted from a design-oriented game assembly and repurposed.
— from “A MANIFESTO FOR ARTPLAY” by Milan Marković, via Voidspace
Contemporary Chinese artist Guanyu Xu
IN 1895, JUST AS the century was closing out around him, Stéphane Mallarmé made his famous observation that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book.” It was a statement worthy of the times — fins de siècle, after all, typically inspire such oracular and millenarian reflections. This pronouncement, however, did not actually appear in a book but in a French periodical (La revue blanche), the very medium that Mallarmé believed would one day overtake literature — and by that he did not mean replace it. He believed rather that the speed and scale of the press would cannibalize books, absorbing them into a larger narrative schema.
— from “Into the Maelstrom” by Jared Marcel Pollen, via LARB
Contemporary American artist Hannah Levy
Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes outright plastic. Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes the other violin and Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes safe at home, chipped Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes.
— from "INEVITABLE HOLMES" by Oli Johns, via XRAY
Contemporary American artist Fred Tomaselli
Emily’s feet caught. She tried to get out of the bed. Her legs lost in the presence of large mass. The Retirement Home duvet was heavy. Hellishly heavy, mother would have said. Like hell was a weight, Emily thought, layered in night, whereas hell was her gravitational life.
— from “G Is the Acceleration of the Box” by SUSANNA CROSSMAN, va Reflex Fiction
Contemporary South African artist Nelson Makamo
I invent a tiny tube, a long and thin thing, so thin you almost can’t see it but a surgeon can see it, with their pupils needled under the bright lights of the operating room
— from “MODERN MIRACLE” by Abhainn Connolly, via HAD
Bella Poarch - Dolls (Official Music Video) (2022)
Director: Andrew Donoho
Just before the golden lion faced the forest once more, something caught my eye. A flower, peeking shyly through the snow. Curious and surprised, I moved away from the door in order to lean down and inspect it. It was a rose in the beginning of its bloom. A pink rose to be exact.
— from “Em” by Cassandra Bristow, via Quail Bell Magazine
Contemporary Chilean artist Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero
Contemporary Japanese artist Keiko Aikawa
Contemporary American artist Matt Lipps
you become your own poison the way you talk about everything in the garden
— from “Snake But” by Buck Downs, via Annulet Poetics Journal
Surrealist Women | Live Q&A with Abbi Jacobson and Anne Umland
(Museum of Modern Art, 2020)