Welcome to (Month 9: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 9: 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…
Enter the labyrinth of contemporary Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei:
A spectre is haunting pop culture — an adorable and friendly, but slightly messed-up creature that beckons us into a world of kindness and surrealism.
Welcome to sweetweird, the storytelling trend that's been quietly taking the universe by storm.
— from “The Sweetweird Manifesto” by Charlie Jane Anders, via Happy Dancing
Contemporary American artist Patrick Martinez
It is difficult to quite capture how weird this is. It’s as though a trans noise musician somehow scored a minor hit on the Billboard Alternative charts, provoked the personal ire of Kanye West, and then decisively won the subsequent beef. This sort of thing simply doesn’t happen to fat goth trans women who proclaim themselves to be filthcore queens.
— from “Kiss It And Make It All Infected: A Review of Manhunt” by Elizabeth Sandifer
Contemporary British artist Rachel Whiteread
The scalpel of the tongue. A drill. A pen. Equation in the eye. Commanding form demands a limit (What and how and when and where?)
— "TWO SONNETS FOR SUSANNE K. LANGER AND JOHN COLTRANE" by Eric T. Racher, Apocalypse Confidential
Contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão
Skin opens the body into ambivalence. Permeable and porous, it puts the self in relation with the world; yet this relation is also an exposure, a constant negotiation between the organism’s need to protect and sustain, and the forces and matters traversing it. ‘Do not touch’ is therefore an interdiction as commonplace as it is revealing, lest the tactile stimulation of such an elaborate organ prove too potent and challenge the very boundaries of the self.
— from “Porous Skins: Pandemic Posthumanism in Speculative Fiction” by Katharina Donn, via C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings
Contemporary American artist Stanley Whitney
She knows a plant has no wings She knows you get to be in the world if you have one A face, that is, a face that disappears in an aquarium or a cloud, or the microwave of someone too lazy to hang their clothes to dry,
— from “Ferdinand” by Megan Jeanne Gette, via New Sinews
Contemporary American artist Kristi Cavataro
Contemporary American artist Rick Lowe
Contrary to popular belief, reading Dictee is possible. Having since become a committed member of the cult, I wanted to write a simple introduction to this most impossible of tomes. The key is to not be intimidated by the book’s impenetrability but to notice instead how you can always feel its emotional urgency even when you don’t understand it, a cool heat glowing like plasma constructing a scar.
— from “The Stakes of Dictee: An introduction to a famously difficult work” by Ken Chen, via The Yale Review
Lita Cabellut is a Spanish multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands
BALENCIAGA: SUPERSTARS WALKING FOR THE COUTURE SHOW! (Sep 21, 2022, runway begins at 11:31)
Directed by Loic Prigent
Contemporary Chinese artist Zhuang Hong Yi
The Gucci Twinsburg Fashion Show (Streamed live on Sep 23, 2022, runway begins at 31:44)
With a fascination for asymmetrical reciprocity, Alessandro Michele revealed his latest collection for the House across two runways, each a reflection of the other. In his notes on the show, the Creative Director writes, “As if by magic, clothes duplicate. They seem to lose their status of singularity. The effect is alienating and ambiguous. Almost a rift in the idea of identity, and then, the revelation: the same clothes emanate different qualities on seemingly identical bodies. Fashion, after all, lives on serial multiplications that don’t hamper the most genuine expression of every possible individuality.”
Music direction by Alessandro Michele and Giovanni Attili
Music Composed by Gustave Rudman
Performed by Budapest Scoring Orchestra
Voiceover by Marianne Faithful
Contemporary Dutch artist Matthijs Scholten
Contemporary Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad
Horse Lords "Live" at Tusk Festival 2020
directed and edited by Corey Hughes cameras operated by Tyler Davis, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, and Corey Hughes audio recorded by Jared Paolini, mixed by Owen Gardner
Contemporary German artist Wolfgang Tillmans
we’re born but for how much longer? — a desperate pretence to an imaginary purpose — the begotten — it happens & keeps happening — it stops — it begins all over again — life as they know it — those haunted killer eyes — yes — eyes of the hunted — but are the rest as blind as they seem? — a pebble on a beach — shell=casing — spacejunk — careening through chemtrail vortex to oceanic poles of unreachability — Point Cthulhu — turning in a lifeless gyre
— from “Arachnid Selfportrait /1” by Louis Armand, via minor literature[s]
Contemporary German artist Markus Amm
Yes, we read words in an ordered order—one after the other, left to right, top to bottom (in English). But the lyrical writer cussedly resists. What if a fiction (a story) could be absorbed all at once like a painting? Or make the eye move along divergent paths? There are strategies. Brevity is one—a block of text on a single page. Collage another.
— from “Stories Where Nothing Happens in the Middle of Nowhere: A Reading List” by Michael Martone, via Lit Hub
Pacific Wave
Composed and performed by Odeya Nini
Filmed by Ian Byers - Gamber (2022)
Contemporary Belgian artist Luc Tuymans
There is a better future in the past. Imagine doing something every day for ten years and then stopping. I am a bad man, I am a bad poet, I am a complete asshole. I have lived my whole life as though I am about to score thirteen points in thirty-three seconds like an NBA all-star. I go fifty forty ninety, hole in one, touchdown, kick flip, first try.
— from “Mess You Up” by Richard Chiem, via Catapult
Contemporary Cambodian artist Anida Yoeu Ali
deep auricular brancnching of the middle meningeal artery, petrosal branching of the middle meningeal arry artery, pterella D'Angelo, Zeno of Elea, Teggrior alveolar branerior communicating artery & the
reching of the inferior superior alve<<Razor Blade Smileyface>> (or <<Bella senz'anima>> or <<Pure Vamp>>), <<Sudden Fury>> (or <<Furia gore>>), <<Pervirella>>, <<Fatal Framerate>> (or <<Fotogrammi
mortali>> or <<Suspiria 2K>>)
— from “THE WARBECK DECAPITATIONS” by John Trefry, via NEUTRAL SPACES
Contemporary American artist Charles Gaines
Contemporary American artist Sara VanDerBeek
My project is working through the following questions (and, also, in a way, Meister’s questions above): What is a sound’s container/containment? And what happens when I attempt to render it in language and in a body in narrative? With sound and with syntactic words there’s a question (or a problem?) of meaning, signification, even visualizability (to quote physicist Niels Bohr) – try to picture the meaning of the word now. What information do I (want from what I) hear? How much of language is echo and diffraction?
Concentric Macroscope (so far) is made from and of these. I’m trying to picture a language that’s all function but with no information. The narrative’s sentences are like the concentric circles of a vibration leading out then back in; the container: the speaker’s project and dialogue with herself; the system in formation, waiting for form, listening.
— from “Concentric Macroscope: a long fiction in progress” by Kelly Krumrie, via A Row of Trees
Contemporary Peruvian artist Marisabel Arias
TINARIWEN - LIVE Sweden 2012