Welcome to (Month 10: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 10: Volume 2) contains tons of contemporary art, music, fashion, 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 German artist Julius von Bismarck
When his car began to rattle and smoke, Reiter managed to force his way across the lanes of traffic to pull up against the concrete wall. He waited there for someone to stop and help him, but no one did. Then he waited for a break in traffic so as to safely climb out. He almost had his door taken off when he finally did open it, and then there he was, standing with his back pressed to his car, as, horns blaring, cars roared past a mere handsbreadth away.
— from “THE RIDER” by BRIAN EVENSON, via Weird Horror
Contemporary British artist Sophie von Hellermann
Contemporary American artist Trenton Doyle Hancock
Finally, I want to briefly touch on the issue of aesthetic experience. That is, what’s it like to read non-protagonist-centered fiction? There can be no single definitive answer to this question given that this is a form that lends itself to many different styles and genres of literature (from straight-ahead realism to absurdist and speculative fiction with different kinds of narrative points-of-view and affective registers). Still, I can say there is a baseline experience that emerges from the realization that something very important—the protagonist!—is missing or just not present in the way we would usually expect. And, simultaneously, there’s the tenacious thought that through this absence something else has become available. The literary text becomes a truly uncertain terrain, and it is thrilling, for the reader, to witness how it will fill all that vacated space.
— “Beyond Protagonist-Centered Fiction” by Semyon Khokhlov, via Full Stop
Gregory J. Markopoulos - Twice a Man (1964)
Contemporary German artist Henning Strassburger
Anne Charlotte Robertson started keeping a diary when she was 11 and never stopped. By the time the artist died in 2012, she had amassed a collection of written, audio, food and film diaries that record almost 40 years of her life. These form part of her magnum opus, Five Year Diary, a multi-modal project whose main component is a 40-hour long diary film recorded on Super 8mm, chronicling Robertson’s life between 1981 and roughly 1998. Although it was only exhibited in this form a handful of times, Robertson envisioned marathon screenings of her always-expanding cinematic diary in a living room-style space: what she called “a home rec-room fall-out shelter”.
— “Describing The World Otherwise: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s ‘Five Year Diary’” by Anjo-Marí Gouws, via Another Gaze
Contemporary Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero
Contemporary German artist Peppi Bottrop
First, to overcome your initial rationalist hesitance, we must establish that all Things have a type of sentience—not sapience, but persistence. This work was done among others by Jane Bennett, whose “Thing Power” she places in an intellectual tradition that goes back to Spinoza, who said, “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives [conatur] to preserve in its own being.” Bennett translates conatus as “to strive,” explaining, “Conatus names a power present in every body: anything will be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it begins to exist.” Deleuze translates it as “the right of the existing mode” (Spinoza, 100); Zola Jesus released a 2011 album by the name. Bruno Latour uses the term “actancy,” a word I prefer to conatus because it’s in English, and because of its proximity to “agency,” which is the word I would most like to use for oil’s power, because of the double meaning of agent as either independent or a representative of an industry (insurance agent). However, the word “agency” has become so contested as to be functionally useless.
— “THE AUTONOMOUS CHEMICAL WEAPON: HOW SENTIENT OIL TOOK CONTROL OF OUR HISTORY – PART ONE” by Jed Bickman, via Apocalypse Confidential
Worlds (2021)
directed by Isaac Goes
Contemporary Australian artist Jenny Watson
The Poetry Center and Litmus Press join forces to celebrate the publication, with a collective reading of sections from this newly published book, as selected by Lyn Hejinian. Hearing is the long-awaited second book in a series of collaborations by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino organized around each of the five senses. Their first collaboration in the series, Sight, was published by Edge Books in 1999. Hejinian and Scalapino were nearing the completion of Hearing when Scalapino died in 2010. An all-star cast of participants read from Hearing: E. Tracy Grinnell, Michael Cross, Lindsay Choi, Simone White, Eric Falci, Eileen Myles, Renee Gladman, Myung Mi Kim, Judith Goldman, and Tom White, along with Lyn Hejinian. The readings are followed by a conversation between the readers and in response to questions from the audience.
Contemporary American artist Grace Weaver
Contemporary American artist Kathy Butterly
TEKE::TEKE - Dobugawa (Official Music Video)
Credits: Illustration and Animation by Maya Kuroki Editing by Serge Nakauchi Pelletier Music by TEKE::TEKE Lyrics by Maya Kuroki
Contemporary Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
This world is overripe, plumped with the past, but the letters are silent. I cannot get them back.
— “Pourrir” by Bex Hainsworth, via Trampset
Contemporary American artist Spencer Finch
Peer-to-Peer with Renee Gladman
Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Festival 2021
Contemporary Indian artist Gauri Gill
I sit, You sit, We sit. You’re talking, I’m listening. I can clearly see your lips moving
— "Momentarily Neither Here Nor There. Until We Are" by Laura Cooney, via RF ARCH HIVE
Contemporary French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière
Contemporary American artist Talia Chetrit
The BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY RT: 1:12:55'
Directed by Steven Torriano Berry
Twilight Zone/Outer Limits from a Black perspective
Sci-Fi Anthology Series.
1. "Deathly Realities" - A serial killer finds there is life after death and dire consequences to his worldly actions.
2. "The Coming of the Saturnites" Earth is visited by magnetic men from Saturn after the Saturn 5 Satellite causes a disruption to the planets population.
3. "Money'll Eat You Up!" Some people say that Money is the Root of all Evil...Sam Brickman knows that it is…he tries to tell the world, but the world won’t listen.
Contemporary German artist Björn Dahlem
I begin from a simple hunch: that the lyricism of Jean-Luc Godard’s films is one of the principal factors that draws us to them and incites us to figure them out. I speak, at least, personally: the first Godard film I saw, at the age of 15, was Bande à part (1964), and the métro scene in that movie, in which Anna Karina recites and sings a song, completely overwhelmed me. That scene forms the centrepiece of what I want to explore here.
— “Came So Far For Beauty: Godard’s Lyricism” by Adrian Martin, via his personal webpage
Contemporary Puerto Rican artist Dalton Gata
Toshio Matsumoto - Andy Warhol: Re-Reproduction (1974)
Contemporary German artist Andi Fischer
ZONE, Takashi Ito (1995)
Contemporary German artist Lothar Hempel
'Sleep Has Her House' Interview with Director Scott Barley
Interview conducted and edited by Caleb Carter
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it fall at all?" Berkeley's question has always pervaded the eerie corners of philosophy because both of its possible answers are equally as terrifying. The first, "Yes", means that the universe will keep unfurling without the consent of the human race, and will continue to do so forever. The alternative means that it won't, but it also implies that when you leave a room it blinks out of existence, and so does everyone within it, which is about as lonely as it gets. With 'Sleep Has Her House', Scott Barley introduces a third solution that potentially trumps the other two in existential spookiness: that a world exists once we turn our backs on it, it just is never the same one. Barley's bump-in-the-night epic is one for the purists: light, vibration, time and the stories we tell ourselves.
I was fortunate to speak to Scott over zoom about his influences, mystical states, the power of sound, and selling experimental cinema on the black market.
Contemporary German artist Lotte Maiwald
This is not a sestina, it’s a hologram. When I was eight, or about eight, my father took me to the darkened optics lab in the science tower basement, and showed me
— “Optics Lab” by Rachel Trousdale, via Psaltery & Lyre
Contemporary German artist Florian Slotawa
Contemporary Belgian artist Fabrice Samyn