Welcome to (Month 4: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 4: Volume 1) contains contemporary art from Poland, Germany, Kenya, America, England, Australia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Netherlands, New Zealand, Italy, and Pakistan — plus loads of contemporary literature: poetry/fiction/theory/interviews, new music, and videos of artworks, fashion shows, interviews, documentaries, 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 American artist Foad Satterfield
GRO presents: Artists' Exchange, "Humor, Passion and Painting", on March 16, 2022 with acclaimed Bay Area Painters M. Louise Stanley and Foad Satterfield.
Never Angeline Nørth
from Sea Witch: Vol. II
via Best American Experimental Writing
Miu Miu Fall/Winter 2022 Fashion Show
Creative Director: Miuccia Prada
Nathan found his mouth separated from him one day, and he did not know what to do. It was alive, his mouth, the one that’d been on his face for thirty-eight long years. Where it should be in its rightful place, below his nose and above his stubbled chin, now gone. He did not notice it at first. The loss wasn’t dramatic—no strange hand had come to rip it off, no excruciating pain or blood, or any other sign of something unusual. Everything was placid.
— from Meiko Ko’s “MAN WITH THE MISSING MOUTH,” via Anmly
Contemporary American artist Erin Eastabrooks
It’s been said that much of Lynch’s work is co-authored by his leading women — a sentiment he enthusiastically shares. In this regard, Inland Empire is particularly demanding. Dern plays at least three, possibly more distinct characters. With her extraordinary ability to channel both vulnerability and ferocity in equal measure (sometimes simultaneously), she has always been uniquely attuned to Lynch’s oneiric wavelength. Undercurrents of evil generate friction with his (often female) characters’ perceived innocence, until that innocence yields to something more honest. Here Dern will go from confusedly eyeing a ketchup stain on her husband’s shirt in one scene to recounting the grisly details of an attempted assault in the next. At points this tension becomes too great for words, and Dern contorts her remarkably elastic mouth into a taut rictus so striking that it seems to transcend the circumference of her face.
— from Cole Kronman’s “With Inland Empire, David Lynch Crafted a Nightmare on Home Video” via Hyperallergic
audiobooks - “LaLaLa It's The Good Life” (Official Video)
Directed by Rottingdean Bazaar and Annie Collinge
Contemporary Pakistani artist Sara Shakeel
Did you ever get in trouble for using her automatic garage door like a toy—hitting the button so it would retract up and then grabbing the metal lip at the bottom and letting it carry you up in the air, when you were still young and little enough for that to work? Have you ever looked at your own garage door and wondered how one could have ever had enough power to lift you floating up into the air while also at least a little bit wanting to try to again?
— from AMERICAN LAKE by Aaron Burch, via X-R-A-Y
Contemporary Italian artist Cinzia Ruggeri
Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory. Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't. Walk upstairs. Do not practice cannibalism. Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do anything to make it impossible. Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week.
— from “How to be Perfect” by Ron Padgett, via Poetry
Contemporary New Zealand artist Jodi Clark
You're that drawing of the cellphone on their cellphone riding on the cellphone as it speeds along, and you, you've got your sunglasses on, because you’re hiding from the real world, and it's bright in the glowing world you prefer, the one you keep in your pocket.
— from Bud Smith & Michael Seymore Blake’s “Rabbit Driving Cellphone,” via Paper Darts
Contemporary Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman
Experimental cinema involves the entire field of the passions. The so-called standard cinema standardizes the emotions, sensation, perception, and belief. In that cinema you don’t find anything except what you’ve known and felt already. Of course you can love this in the same way you love the same stories, read every evening, read by the same voice, your mother’s. Faced with this considerable restriction of sensible and emotional experience, experimental cinema re-opens the entire field of experience.
— from “Nicole Brenez on Experimental Cinema” via Girish Shambu’s blog
Peter Tscherkassky - Outer Space (2009)
Contemporary Hong Kong-based artist Johnson Tsang
Novels are a popular form, and are therefore susceptible to populism, and anything that smells vaguely of elitism is easily attacked. More still, it reflects an old antagonism that has always existed between philosophy and the dramatic arts, a conflict that dates back to antiquity. The culprit, we all know: Plato was famously contemptuous of the dramatic and poetic forms and excluded them from his ideal society, believing that they corrupted the soul. There was a practical reason for this. In ancient Athens, the functional role of the arts took their place under the guise of entertainment. Concepts that were structural to the society—birth, honor, nobility, law, justice, citizenship, fortune, fate, ignorance, knowledge, the Good, the True—were all hashed out in public for everyone to see. Plato wasn’t simply objecting to people wasting their time at the theater when they should be studying philosophy. He was arguing against what he saw as an inferior system for the delivery of ideas—ideas in pure form (eidos).
— from Jared Marcel Pollen’s “GIMMICKS & DIALECTICS: ON THE SO-CALLED NOVEL OF IDEAS,” via The Review of Uncontemporary Fiction
Contemporary Polish artist Jarek Puczel
Start out going east on Dream Drive toward Waking Up Stirred, Anxious, Excited.
In .73 years you’ll see trees on the side of the road that remind you of your 8-year-old body, swaying in the darkness of your bedroom, your bony arms wrapped around the neck of a freckled girl on your basketball team. The one everyone is always carrying on about—She’s smart and pretty and can make a three-pointer, your teammates fawn—conversations you never join, for fear of giving yourself away.
— Marisa Crane's "Directions from Birth to Gayhood" via Hobart
Contemporary German artist Birgit Brandis
Landmarks. Inchoate non-lieux digest former cities – Ballard’s immense, hungry ghosts. Where are we now?
The question effaced in extensive liminality. Swarm City: a mycogoth-arterial, like buttresses of some drive-through R’lyeh. Nomads inscribe luminous flows and eddies, implement distance optima over legacy time-code. Idems secrete data junk in thick sensations. Termite galaxies in the night. They pedestrianize like drunks at a fetish party. But there is no recollection of a destination. They broadcast fleet emoticons, ardent neuralese caresses; move on.
— from “Letters from the Ocean Terminus” by David Roden, via Dis Magazine
Contemporary Filipino artist Monica Delgado
Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Knowledge” (2019)
This lecture is built on the assumption that we are currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction, between and advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities. This convergence calls for a posthuman critical intervention in the form of intersecting critiques of western humanism on the one hand and of anthropocentrism on the other.
Contemporary Australian artist Belinda Fox
A trans body meets another trans body for coffee. In the span of drinking a twelve ounce Americano, one trans body is smudged out and rendered invisible by the other. Countless people wield the power to erase a trans body, but nothing wounds to the same extent as when it happens by the hands of another trans body. A trans body rents a place with a friend. The friend leans on the trans body sometimes as if they were spouses or two old trees bordering a field who fell into each other in a windstorm; hard to tell who is holding the other up.
— from “A Trans Body’s Path in Eight Folds” by Cooper Lee Bombardier, via Kenyon Review
Contemporary American Artist Erik Parra
Places can be haunted, we are told, but people must be haunted, too. If ghosts are souls turned vaporous and their homes confined spaces, then surely they can occupy a body? My mother always spoke of hauntings in her adulthood, before I or my sister came. Of a crushing feeling over her legs as she slept. Of sounds and voices that had no physical birth. She always believed her apartments to be haunted. She never considered that it was her bones, her blood that sabotaged her.
— from "Grandma Kim at Forty-Five: A Serigraph in Four Layers" by Chloe Seim, via Fractured Magazine
Balenciaga Clones
Spring 22 Collection
Video by Quentin Deronzier
Music by BFRND
Contemporary American artist Lisa Corinne
Meanwhile, we are inside, outside, behind, inside, outside, a dumpster piled high with a man and woman who are lovers/fish. They call themselves spiritual siblings, metaphysical conjoined twins, attached at the fin. Rainbow scales. We are snorting speed from a folded envelope crease, our rat named Wrench perched on our shoulders, cradled in our shirts. The dumpster people are growling about how things are different everywhere, how things have changed, not just in this Thick City, but all over this great big United States of Ours. They nod their heads inside, outside, behind our backs.
— from “Thick City” by Katie Jean Shinkle, via Fugue
Contemporary British artist Jesse Darling
The image degrades, decays like the sentence must under an eye. you say: static and/or pins. Lol maybe laser beams. I need glasses to go beyond the alphabet. You say vision: it reverberates into a painting.
— from an untitled poem by m. forajter, via The Journal Petra
Contemporary American artist Sarah Bowling
What I mean to say is that the sentence is a performance of existence and relationship to the world. “I think, therefore I am” presupposes an individualized view of a self that exists as a separate category from the world and implies that an “I” can exist individually and in separation from the rest of the world and the conditions that have allowed existence to even be a state of being in the first place. Grammar, rather than simply being a reflection of the conditions of the world, can also create predetermined conditions to live up to. I am not singular at all but the continuation and simultaneous existence of all my ancestors, predecessors, teachers, breath, spirit, sky, all of it everywhere and at once.
— from Janice Lee’s essay “On the Limits and Possibilities of the Sentence” via Catapult
Contemporary Australian artist Stephen Ormandy
one day i’ll ask an ancestor if they ever expected me to be the tree they planted.
— from “TWO POEMS” by p.e. garcia, via Barrelhouse
Wangechi Mutu: Between the Earth and the Sky | Art21 "Extended Play"
From her Nairobi studio, artist Wangechi Mutu considers her relationship with the natural world and the ways in which it has influenced her variegated artistic practice. A self-described "city girl with a nature brain," Mutu recounts her upbringing in Kenya, memories of playing in her family’s garden, and attending an all-girls Catholic school. These experiences instilled a profound respect for both nature and the feminine in Mutu, alongside a curiosity about the African history, heritage, and culture that was omitted from her studies. Today, Mutu’s monumental sculptures of hybrid female, animal, and plant forms assert "how incredibly important every single plant and animal and human is in keeping us all alive and afloat.
Contemporary Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade
The stretch of road bleeding across the border split into tentacles, empty and orphan mouthed through its corridors. Ahead of me, the city: a labyrinth of piping, the naked eye coming at it in a haze.
— from “LITTLE BLANKETS OF FIRE” by Penn Javdan, via HAD
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: A Concordance In Three Parts
Live Recordings 1990-2011
File Under: indie rock, noise rock, free improvisation, math rock, psychedelic, post rock
(via Internet Archive)
Contemporary American artist Laina Terpstra
They say willingness is what one needs to succeed. They say one needs to succeed.
— from “Patronage” by Solmaz Sharif, via The Yale Review
Dounia - “Avant-Garde”
produced by Donato
directed and edited by Dounia