Welcome to (Year 2: Month 4: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
As always it’s absolutely bursting with contemporary art, fashion, music, literature, videos, and other uncategorizable materials…
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And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language
— from “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” by Adrienne Rich, via The Poetry Society
Nydia Blas “is an American photographer from the state of New York, whose works explore the identity of young Black women and girls. Her concern at the lack of Black women represented in the visual arts has led her to concentrate solely on making images of women of color.”
Robert Rauschenberg - Pop Art Pioneer Full BBC Documentary 2016
Armin Boehm “paints fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition.”
Three poetesses in white bras sit around a low round-table. With books in hand.
— from "Three Poetesses" by Carol Rumens, via The Guardian
Nicola Tyson “is a British painter who lives in New York. Her work consists of what she describes as "psycho-figuration", and is primarily concerned with issues of identity, gender and sexuality.”
Accuracy is an ideal limit. You see everything from the control room: the desert’s vastness, each measure I make, the clearness of the air, my walk through it, my nearness, the dunes’ array, drought and water. I reach for your arm but you pull it back. Behind glass you’re reaching I see it. Pull me. Let me look out from here one instant.
— from “No Measure” by Kelly Krumrie, via Harp & Alter
Micha Huigen is an illustrator from the Netherlands.
Walead Beshty “was born in London, United Kingdom in 1976 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.”
this whale is a toothed rack of couplets this whale is a real knuckle-coupler this whale is a hell of a central scaffold
— from KNOT A TRAIN by Paul Cunningham, via Grotto
Becky Beasley “(b. 1975, UK) is an award-winning visual artist, educator and advocate.”
“Berlin-based artist Matthias Bitzer combines drawing, painting and sculpture into an experiential space exploring history and identity.”
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor.
More than half of authors (54%) responding to a survey by The Bookseller on their experiences of publishing their debut book have said the process negatively affected their mental health. Though views were mixed, just 22% of the 108 respondents to the survey described a positive experience overall with their first publication.
— via The Bookseller
Simon Denny is a contemporary artist based in Berlin.
Berlin based artist Hagen Schönfeld:
Peter Weiss’s novella, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, begins in an outhouse – the narrator notes the ‘lava-like mound’ of excrement beneath him – and ends amidst copulating shadows. It is a plotless fiction in which the body’s functions exert grotesque forces on an inert world. We follow the nameless narrator through a series of enervated, dreamlike scenes set in a dreary rural boardinghouse.
— from “Alien Minutia” by Dustin Illingworth, via Sidecar
Lina Iris Viktor is a British-Liberian visual artist based in New York.
A number of our habits need altering or abandoning, I think, including excessive travel, excessive consumption, and so on: the idea that just because we can afford to, it is perfectly all right for us to buy a face cream manufactured halfway around the world and flown here. I read this morning an email from a friend paraphrasing something Arundhati Roy said or wrote to the effect that we can view the pandemic as a portal through which we can go either dragging the carcasses of our avarice and poisoned rivers along with us, or leaving all that behind and carrying very little.
— from an interview with Lydia Davis via The White Review
Dolores Cortes | Spring Summer 2023 | Full Fashion Show in High Definition.
Rashaad Newsome “is an American artist working at the intersection of technology, collage, sculpture, video, music, and performance. Newsome's work celebrates and abstracts Black and Queer contributions to the art canon, resulting in innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media.”
Be honest, now. What did you think you would find?
You have ventured all the way to this cellar, meaning you must have first braved the porch balustrade of milk teeth, skirting the welcome mat that parts down the center like a grin. Perhaps you chanced up to the second floor where the beds are heavy beneath the weight of fungal networks spun as fine as silk thread, or into the dining room set for two: plates flexing concave and convex like the thudding of ventricles, crystal glasses filled with a red gelled as thick as stone. Eventually you must have decided to continue your search below ground.
— from “Root Canticle” by Natasha King, via Nightmare Magazine
Contemporary American artist Caroline Turner
When someone in the narrative frame begins to tell a story, there’s a useful note [1>2] in the margin to indicate the corresponding shift in the story-layer. When a character within that story begins to tell a story, you’ll see a [2>3] and so on. For simple up- and downshifts, the notation is straightforward and utilitarian, but it becomes a godsend when Palol flexes the experimental potential of his system. For example, midway through the novel one finds this approximate sequence in the span of a few pages: Camila, a character in the frame narrative, expresses confusion about something she’s heard about a Silvia in the seventh-level narrative [7>1], so the narrator, Kolinski, waits for others to offer their conjectures and picks up where he left off [1>7]. But then Rogelio, the narrator of the third story-layer, runs out of champagne and disrupts the whole chain by going to bed [7>3], waiting until the next morning to resume his story about one Victoria [3>7], who is eager to describe a scene from her childhood [7>8] in which she spends a day with her grandfather, who tells her a story of three friends [8>9] who stumble upon a book called The Garden of the Seven Twilights.
— from “A Gargantuan Pulp Sphinx: On Miquel de Palol’s “The Garden of Seven Twilights” by Ben Hooyman, via LARB
Sol Calero “(b. 1982, Caracas) studied at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad de la Laguna in Tenerife.”
Germanier | Fall Winter 2022/2023 by Kevin Germanier | Full Fashion Show in High Definition.
Caterina De Nicola “is an artist born in Ortona (IT) in 1991, currently based in Zürich (CH).”
Valentino Garavani | Fall Winter 2022/2023 (Valentino Pink PP Collection) by Pierpaolo Piccioli | Full Fashion Show in High Definition.
Philip Ortelli is an artist working with video and sculpture:
Christian Dior | Cruise 2023 by Maria Grazia Chiuri | Full Fashion Show in High Definition.
Pavla Malinová “is one of the most prominent painters of the contemporary Czech art scene with an international recognition.”
chuala - performance in an empty white space
produced by chuala
directed by Chima Okerenkwo
editor Morten Hinrichsen
director of photography Nicklas Stinner
Contemporary artist Jasmin Halama