Welcome to (Month 8: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 8: Volume 1) 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…
When I listen to music (which is almost constantly—I’m listening to La Dispute’s “Stay Happy There” on repeat as I write this), I often find myself listening most intently to (and for) those sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional, out-of-control sounds and forces (glitches) that defiantly assert and call attention to themselves in contrast to the melodic and harmonic bedrock of the music: tape hiss, rhythmic unpredictability, weirdly bent or out-of-tune notes, dissonant clatter; bursts of pig-squealing, ear-splitting, headache-making feedback and distortion.... In other words, I find myself most interested in the noise, and noise is what I want to talk about in this essay.
— “ON NOISE AND NOISEMAKING” by Matt Hart, Jam Tarts Magazine
Contemporary Indonesian artist Heri Dono
Contemporary American artist Hernan Bas
One must be disinterested to see the beauty in art. Art must be disinterested in its own beauty to be art. It takes concentration and boredom to become disinterested enough to find the art-potential in what isn’t, at first blush, art.
— “Hide Fox and All After” by Lesley Jenike, via Waxwing
Contemporary American artist Betsy Enzensberger
In a cemetery for the nameless, gazing upon a slab placed just beyond the fence, silent, contemplating the end of the here and now, I suddenly feel like an apparition from a Lucian Blaga poem, stuck somewhere between the hand of the poet and the mind of the reader, between the reflective and the unreflective consciousness of what rests on the page. A voice, a being purified to transparency by the ravenous wind. A phantom, mobilized by flesh, and blood, and lust, a coincidentia oppositorum projection, punished and healed by the same thirst, amid gods and goddesses who kept on living even after the world stopped building them temples. Time resides by my side. Time, not as continuum nor as discontinuity, but time as that which underlies the continuous and the discontinuous.
— “Against the Skin” by Christina Tudor-Sideri, via Socrates on the Beach
Contemporary Indian artist Ravi Chaurasiya
Contemporary American artist Mary Ellen Bartley
Interdisciplinary fashion designer and artist Yimeng Yu is based in Beijing, China
I invent two people, a woman and a man. I call the woman Beth and the man Spencer. I don’t know anyone by these names. I find it easier to make up stories about people I don’t already know. I know three Melissas, and I don’t think I can make one up who has nothing to do with the other three. I need blank slates. Or I need to hide who these characters really are, to save embarrassment. Either way, names can’t correspond to real people or it won’t work.
— “THE GIRL ON THE BIKE” by Katharine Coldiron, via The Rumpus
Contemporary American artist D’Angelo Lovell Williams
And why must I represent myself? The bodies of objects are used and loved freely. Doesn’t the oil lamp stutter? Doesn’t the signal-light cataract with soot when I shirk the climb?
— "A Lighthouse Keeper Considers her Solitude" by Gabriella Fee, via Guest House
Sonic Youth - Drunken Butterfly (Official Music Video) (2022)
Contemporary American artist Clare Rojas
I stand in the darkness, waiting for a flood or tornado or hurricane, any natural disaster to shake me from this complacency, but the wind outside remains gentle, unconcerned if I smile or howl or wail. The electric hum never wavers.
— “Fluctuations” by Aram Mrjoian, via The Offing
Contemporary American artist Bryan Graf
Music videos directed by Hannah Sommer
Contemporary American artist Benjamin Degen
Contemporary Spanish artist Cristina BanBan
When asked by the Guardian to take a stance on feminism, Siri said, “I believe that all voices are created equal and worth equal respect.” That, with a thoughtlessness worthy of any robot, is a play on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous line. But it is probably an improvement over what Siri used to say, which the Guardian also printed, the dumb-blondish “I just don’t get this whole gender thing.” Also reported in 2019 (in an investigation labeled “exclusive”) was Apple’s directive, according to company documents dated the previous year, to rewrite the program’s lines so it would never, under any circumstance, utter the word “feminism”—“even when asked direct questions about the topic.”
— “A HUMAN WROTE THIS” by Jacqueline Feldman, via Statement of Record
Contemporary American artist Nikita Gale
Ouattara Watts Paintings at KARMA
James Kalm has been bumping in to the work of Ouattara Watts since some of his first presentations here in New York in the early 1990s. Although a native of the Ivory Coast, Ouattara studied in Paris for a decade, before moving to New York at the invitation of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1988, and has been painting here for the last twenty-five years. The artist creates large pictures that are a conglomeration of materials, techniques and references, that keep the viewer mystified, and the sensual observer satisfied. The canvases are fabricated from collaged fabrics, photos, patterns, the use of decorative boarders, and geometric figures with mysterious number sequences, to structure areas of distressed colors. As the title of one painting implies “Traveler of the Cosmos” Watts collects timeless ideas from all over the world, and depicts them briskly, as if the paintings are pages from his galactic travel log. This program was recorded May 5, 2022.
Contemporary American artist Kathy Butterly
Contemporary Taiwanese artist James Jean
For a while all that came out was answers. Then nothing.
— “I Am Still” by Jorie Graham, via The Yale Review
Contemporary Taiwanese artist Ya-chu Kang
The first time I saw the world end I was eight years old. It began peacefully enough. I sat in a well-padded chair in the dark with the rest of my second grade class, all of us tilted back, faces turned up to the white dome of the ceiling. We watched it shade into blue dusk, the stars and the planets coming out one by one. Soon we were under the clearest, blackest, brightest night sky any of us had seen, shining with an impossible number of stars. Over a shimmering electronic soundtrack, a disembodied male voice, like the voice of God, led us on a tour of ghostly nebulae and puzzling constellations. The comforting milky river arcing above our heads, the voice explained, was a small piece of our galaxy.
— “To Live in the Ending” by Alyssa Harad, via The Kenyon Review
Contemporary Tunisian artist Faycal Baghriche
5. How would you describe me? How would you describe yourself? How would you describe the country you’re from/living in? Where did you grow up? What was it like? Did you enjoy school? What were your parents like?
— “the passengers handbook” by Will Ashon, via 3AM Magazine
Regina Spektor: Tiny Desk Concert (August 2022)
Contemporary Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj
Contemporary American artist Kembra Pfahler
The opening music a carnivalesque mixture of the whimsical and macabre. Jaunty, eerie, pranksterish. Like a jester in a skull mask. Night, country road, a single car, only the tree trunks illuminated by headlights. Treetops lost in the night sky.
— “Eyes Without A Face” by James Pate, via PSYCHO HOLOSUITE [ZINE]
Contemporary American artist Mernet Larsen
Mountains are high and obnoxious. They’re made of very large stone, and they just stand there, imposing themselves. Mountains are incredibly self-absorbed and domineering. If you anger a mountain, it’ll launch an avalanche. In winter of snow, and in summer of mud and rubble.
— from About Mountains, Humans, and Especially Mountain Snails by Anaïs Meier, via Asymptote
Contemporary Indonesian artist Iabadiou Piko
Today I’m going to talk about the novelistic category of autofiction, a rather hazily defined genre—indeed, some ask, isn’t the blurring of author and narrator just another name for fiction? Not very interesting, I don’t think, so I’m going to test out some new work that tries to grasp what autofiction is. My talk is a narrative about where it comes from and why it might matter to us—if not always as art then at least as sociological evidence.
— “All Auto- All the Time: Artwork, Art Work, and the University” by Mitch R. Murray, via Murray’s website
Contemporary Libyan artist Ali Omar Ermes
Antígone (1992)
Directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniélle Huillet
Straub/Huillet’s film realises a series of twists and reversals through which the machinery of tragedy becomes rather decentred. Antigone is no longer entirely the awe-inspiring heroine in whom the play of destiny, juridical conflicts and the idea of resistance to tyranny, are incarnated. She is more the catalyst for a revolt that rumbles in the city against the objectionable war. But this revolt is difficult, since it also implies violence, and because it requires us to understand that this war is several wars at once: Creon’s war and the Elders’ war, the war for power and the war for bronze, and the war resulting from the ancient wars from which it is impossible to emerge, because might attracts might. What we still need to ask ourselves is whether we can serenely affirm that none of these wars is our own.
— “A War Film: Antigone by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub” by Benoît Turquety, via Senses of Cinema