Welcome to (Year 2: Month 8: Volume 1), 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…
If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, now is the perfect time to start! Only $5 a month or $55 a year! That gets you two issues a month plus access to the entire back catalog.
ICYMI: The second mixtape is now available for free!!
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…
Mosie Romney (b. 1994, New York) lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens, New York.
Will Alexander Reads from DIVINE BLUE LIGHT, a Finalist for the 2022 BIG OTHER Book Award for Poetry
Carlos Motta is a Colombian-born, New York-based artist.
Reading is only one aspect of consumption, but a fundamental one. In a society that is increasingly written, organized by the power of modifying things and of reforming structures on the basis of scriptural models (whether scientific, economic, or political), transformed little by little into combined “texts” (be they administrative, urban, industrial, etc.), the binominal set production–consumption can often be replaced by its general equivalent and indicator, the binominal set writing–reading. The power established by the will to rewrite history (a will that is by turns reformist, scientific, revolutionary, or pedagogical) on the basis of scriptural operations that are at first carried out in a circumscribed field, has as its corollary a major division between reading and writing.
— from “Reading as Poaching” by Michel de Certeau
Andy Meerow is an American Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1980.
On August 29th, 1970 Miles Davis and his band played to 600,000 people at the The Isle Of Wight Festival. When asked the title of his one track set, Miles said "Call It Anything"
Alexandra Noel was born in 1989 in Columbus, Ohio.
“The work of D’Ette Nogle is characterized by a strong autobiographical streak, in which activities such as vacations, documentation of her grandparent’s mobile vacation home, and wrenching, intimate conversations become transformed and integrated into art.”
First, we leap ahead to measure the scope and transformations of this protean form—into airports, for example, which have now, all the new ones, also become shopping malls; into museums; finally into the city itself. The older city centre—blighted by suburbs and the new supermarkets, and then the malls themselves—now, with postmodernity and gentrification, catches up: not only by housing huge new malls within itself, but by becoming a virtual mall in its own right.
— from “FUTURE CITY” by Fredric Jameson, via New Left Review
Christopher Aque. American, born in Chicago lives and works in New York.
Sofia Defino Leiby is a German artist who was born in 1989.
Return of 13 Hedgehogs [MxBx Singles 2000–2009] (2015) - Melt-Banana
Suzie Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and translator.
The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, bright as butterflies, fat, with short round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.
— “Ponies” by Kij Johnson, via TOR
“Artist Kayode Ojo's sculptural installations transform aspirational clothing and furniture into uncanny scenes.”
Megan Plunkett (b. 1985 in Pasadena, CA, US) lives and works in Los Angeles
Jesse Stecklow (b. 1993, Cambridge, MA) received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.
There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath—if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.
— “SPAR” by KIJ JOHNSON, via Clarkesworld
Hanna Stiegeler. German, born in Konstanz lives and works in Berlin.
He'd taken this music as far as it could surely go, so Davis did what he always tried to do next, which was to take it one step further. On The Corner, released in 1972, was vilified at the time, and has had the balance reset far too heavily since in reappraisals that hail it as a masterpiece. The record has easily as much wrong as right with it, and in many ways it represents the sound of almost two decades of careful and craftsmanlike refinement of ideas, sounds and style being driven at a steady pace and with care and deliberation into a solidly built brick wall. After the final sessions for the album were finished, in early June 1972, studio recordings seemed to take a back seat to live work for Davis.
— “Miles Davis Live In 1975: Agharta Versus Pangaea” by Angus Batey, via The Quietus
Constantin Thun. Italian, Swiss, born in Milan lives and works in Berlin.
#DROWNINGNOTDROWNING to find me, plausible and aspiring in a relevant dress and full of promise. oh internet, oh tumblr, at twenty your sunniest meme is a church i enter, mouth full of feigning: i will be well. to find me so, industrious and suffering. sweet bean or sesame, darkest soy, an oyster sauce i squeeze from me. my pores are little sepulchres: my face is thick with foreign bodies. my face is foreign bodies. you don’t know. except you do. i do not know about anything, weary and sleek at three a.m. what is it to be so heavy with lustre that you can’t even?
— from three Poems by Fran Lock, via White Review
“Whether working with objects, photography, or drawing, Joe Zorrilla incorporates the philosophy of the bricoleur into the entirety of his practice.”
Elaine Cameron-Weir is a contemporary visual artist known for her sculptures and installations. She currently lives and works in New York City.
OTYKEN - LEGEND (Official Music Video)
“Born in 1992 in Chicago, IL, to Puerto Rican and African American parents—Gerald Lovell, uses his artistic practice as a means to self-discovery, and self-articulation.”
Florence Adooni - Yinne (Live)
“Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer.”
"Junkspace" – Rem Koolhaas & the End of Architecture — AB+C 18
Ángeles Agrela (b. 1966, Úbeda, Spain) has resided in Naples, La Habana, and Berlin, and currently lives and works in Granada.
The critical tide is turning, once again. The professional critics—and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones—are fed up with moralizing, and they are willing to speak about it in public. From Lauren Oyler’s observation that “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism” to Parul Sehgal’s exhortation against the ubiquitous “trauma plot” that “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and … insists upon its moral authority” to Garth Greenwell’s lament about a literary culture that “is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime”—the critical vanguard has made its judgment clear. For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
— from “On the Aesthetic Turn” by Anastasia Berg, via The Point
Hew Donald Joseph Locke is a British sculptor and contemporary visual artist based in Brixton, London.
On the screen in front of me, a yellow puddle floats weirdly above a mostly barren landscape, casting a shadow on the beige ground. To judge by the size of the humanoid figures scurrying around it, the puddle has the dimensions of a smallish backyard swimming pool. But then again, I can’t really be sure if the creatures are comparable to average human adults; beyond their general form and bipedal gait, they don’t resemble any humans I know. With somewhat enlarged heads and animalistic faces, they tend to flock close to one another. Some of them run excitedly toward some activity off to the side of the visible space. Others just stand in place for a while. Occasionally, a group will kneel around an object, as if worshipfully. It’s hard to understand what they are doing or why.
— from “HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL?” by Shane Denson, via Outland
Judith Linhares is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings.