Old Links and New Links

Look what happens when I don't blog here in like forever. OLD LINKS. But well-worth reading.

Here's the New York Times on the world of steampunk.

Kim Chinquee has published a book of her short-short stories. Yes! Buy it! Here's a little something about her book, plus an interview, on the estimable Elegant Variation.

Chinquee's work has hitherto been known mostly to just that tiny group of obsessives who scour literary magazines like Quick Fiction and NOON. Naturally, I'm one of them. Way back in 2006 at Gambara, we published two of her pieces, largely because I sought her out and begged for a contribution.

Well, here's a new link: my article about The LAB and the 2008 Bay Area Poetry Marathon.

And also: conceivably the best photo of Violet Blue ever taken, an homage to Hunter S. Thompson. (Likely NSFW!) Though I have to admit, that sexy typewriter is a big part of it.

Mine's an Olympia, but that's another matter entirely.

Two Interviews

Sorry about the silence around here: I've been super-busy this past week covering the San Francisco International Film Festival for SF Metblogs. To prove it, let me link you to a couple of the pieces I've done.

1) Last week I did this interview with Kevin Kelly, the Senior Maverick of WIRED Magazine. We discussed the ideas in his State of Cinema Address.

Right now most people, when they think about filmmaking, they think about—well, in the world of text, there are Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Most of text is not that. Most of text is directions for opening something, or it’s fine print, or it’s “Made in China.” Most of the text in our lives is not prize-winning literature: it’s everything else.

Well, that’s where the world of cinema is. There is this pyramid, of which there is, at the top, 600 feature films; and then there is a gazillion other things. That bottom is getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster. I mean, it’s just expanding so fast that the proportion of the few feature films made to total video in the world is going to be similar to the proportion of prize-winning literature to total text in the world. So when we talk about filmmaking, most of the films made are not going to be feature films, they’re going to be other stuff.

YouTube is just the beginning. I literally mean that—it’s the beginning in the sense that we’ll have tools that help make it as easy to make film as it is right now to make a sentence.

2) Just today I did an interview with filmmaker Kevin Gordon, about his first film, Tellin' It Like It Is: The Work of Elouise Westbrook. We discuss the Bayview-Hunter's Point activist and her legacy, and we talk a little bit about his aims as a filmmaker:

When I met Mrs. Westbrook, I knew that I had no choice but to make the movie. She struck me immediately as an amazing person and an amazing subject, but it wasn’t until I was really into the research that I realized how significant she really was.

Four Things: Journals; Sedaris; Ferlinghetti; Lesbians

1) Okay, first up, my review on SF Metblog of the film 1000 Journals:

Take a hardbound journal — one of those sturdy 6×9″ sketchbooks from an art supply store — and write a little user’s manual on the inside covers: Take this journal and add something to it. When you’re done, give it away to somebody else. When it’s full, please send it home.

Then give the book away, and wish it a wonderful journey.

Back in the year 2000, “some guy” in San Francisco had this idea, and he carried it out. And then he repeated it 999 times over the course of a couple years, sometimes leaving the books in public places, at other times mailing them to people who had heard of the project and wanted to participate. What ultimately happened to the journals he sent out? Whose hands had they passed through? What contributions had they made to the pages?

2) David Sedaris is a non-smoker now!?!? It is true. And has been so for a while:

Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry.

In light of that, I find it kind of amusing that all my friends back in the day were Camel smokers. No joke!

3) Fifty years ago, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published A Coney Island of the Mind. It has just been released in an anniversary edition, and it is reviewed here by Barbara Berman:

The cover of the 50th anniversary edition replaces the famed light-strung black and white photo with a bright white background and large lettering colored to suggest the Summer of Love. Inside, the same type and minor, respectful design differences await collectors, newcomers or anyone seeking an inspired gift. The accompanying CD is an essential part of the package, given Ferlinghetti's lifelong dedication to poetry composed for performance.

I think Berman gets bonus points for referencing Littlefoot.

4) And finally, today's entry for the It's Not from the Onion!?! award. Three Greeks native to the island of Lesbos are suing a greek gay rights group, essentially over brand dilution. Best quote ever:

Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. "But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.

We have been Lesbians for thousands of years! ROFL

Two Reviews by Yours Truly

First, my review of Friday night's performance:

The Golem, set in a medieval Jewish ghetto, was produced in Germany in 1920 — the year the Nazi Party was founded. As you might expect from that context, the film was at times baffling, at times infuriating, but always compellingly weird and thought-provoking. And the original music by Black Francis was basically awesome.

Then, my review of The New Kings of Nonfiction, the anthology edited by Ira Glass.

Any of these stories is worth the price of the book, and you get fifteen of them. Whether it is Malcolm Gladwell working out how everybody meets the people they meet, or Chuck Klosterman following Val Kilmer around and writing down the nutty things he says, or Bill Buford getting caught in the midst of a berserk riot - which incidentally transforms his piece from a humorous fish-out-of-water travelogue into an unforgettable probe into the nature of mob violence, which he observes with awe and terror — no matter what is going on, it's always entertaining.

Earthquakes, Chabon, and Private Languages

1) First, a community service article on SF Metblog about putting together an earthquake preparedness kit. Please notice that it is by yours truly. (It's my first article on that site.) If you live in the Bay Area, and especially on the peninsula, having a preparedness kit is really, really important, so please check it out.

2) On a less serious note, Michael Chabon's new book of essays is quite good! Some would even say it was "cool." That's what E! Online says it is, anyway. (Link courtesy of Mark Sarvas.) I started reading it last week, and unfortunately had to set it aside to get through a much less diverting book, which I must review presently.

3) This article by Morgan Meis on The Smart Set was of great interest to me. Musing on the works in this year's Whitney Biennial, he considers the quandary of contemporary art criticism:

It's not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what's written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered, we would probably be shooting ourselves in droves.

It is, however, a good time to be an artist. The heroic days of hard drinking at the Cedar and a fistfight with Jackson Pollock are over. But on the positive side of the ledger you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there's someone out there fully prepared to take it seriously. Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don't.

The really key idea comes some way down the page, however. In discussing a certain artist's piece, he describes it and concludes, "It's just nice."

But it is very difficult to say what the work relates to or where it is coming from. Even a knowledge of art history antique and contemporary won't help you much. These days art isn't an insiders game so much as a contest in private languages. The artists are often working in their own heads and they don't feel much compulsion to translate.

This puts the critic and the curator in a hilarious position. Stripped of most of our authority, we fall back on tortured syntax and dubious vocabulary in order merely to say, in essence, that it is tough to talk about art these days.

I have discovered this for myself. For a long time I read books and studied art magazines in an effort to understand the context of contemporary works — essentially, I thought my problem was to figure out what was the controversy, what were the movements of today. What I've discovered is that there are no such movements, and no dominant controversy. Instead of aligning themselves with movements, artists have chosen to cultivate unique styles, or as Meis puts it, private languages.

The end result is that nothing, no amount of reading or study, can adequately prepare you to come to terms with a given work. What you must do instead is learn to respond to each piece, and each body of work, as you encounter it.

And I must point out that the situation in art today is exactly analogous to the situation in poetry. Meis's metaphor of "private language" is thus perhaps more apt than he intended.

Forward Momentum!

Regular programming will recommence shortly; but I have some good news to share first.

The biggest news: I've been offered a slot on SF Metblog, a well-known city blog. (I don't have an author page yet, but it's a go.) This will expand my potential readership by some fifty-fold, so I'm really excited about this opportunity. Some notable people have contributed to various Metblogs, including Violet Blue and Wil Wheaton (here's his author page on the LA Metblog). I never dreamed that I'd mention those two in same sentence, but there they are. Bloggers on the site have great latitude in terms of what they write about, so long as their posts are relevant to the city of San Francisco.

If nothing else, this blog will provide an excellent excuse for me to get out of the house and learn about what's going on in the city at first-hand.

Other good news: I've also gotten press credentials for the San Francisco International Film Festival, and so I will be posting reviews and coverage here, if not on the SF Metblog. If you happen to know anybody who'd be interested in these films, please link them to my coverage here. On Friday I'll be going to see The Golem, accompanied by Black Francis (of Pixies fame). A report on the performance will be filed shortly after its conclusion. Other ones I'll attend include the Erroll Morris film, the film about Hunter Thompson, and a number of lower-profile ones that have caught my attention. So stay tuned.

Comics (Mostly), Poetry (Partly), plus Edward Champion and Mark Sarvas

COMICS
First, something that I saved from last week. Here is the brief exchange of letters I mentioned between Douglas Wolk (of whom more presently) and David Hajdu in The New Republic, regarding the latter's book, The Ten-Cent Plague. The controversy that it recounts was a defining moment in the history of the medium: the brouhaha resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority, which cast a long shadow over the comics industry up through the late 80s. Read their restrictions, and you'll understand the main reason that superhero stories became so thoroughly married to the medium. The organization continues to operate today from the state of Irrelevance.

Also! The 2008 Eisner Awards just published their shortlist. The winners will be announced on July 25th at Comic Con. Most of the nominees are completely unknown to me, but I can personally vouch for the following:

• Mr. Wonderful by Dan Clowes (which I read as it came out in the New York Times);
  The Best American Comics 2007;
  
• MOME (I assume they're nominating all four issues of 2007?);
  
• Postcards: True Stories that Never Happened;
  
• The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (NB: This is already a rare book.);
  
• The totally unwieldly Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (which I was only able to inspect thanks to the display copy at Powell's Books);
  
• I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason (who currently has the NYT Comics slot);
  
• Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan;
  
• Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library #18;
  
• Comic Art #9 and The Comics Journal (which just changed format); and
  
• needless to say, Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk, which I intend to review in this space sometime in the next month.
  

POETRY
Today is "Poem in Your Pocket" day. Got a poem in yours? It's still not too late!

Mine was given to me. One of the things I found in my mail haul yesterday was a tiny envelope from Ninth Letter, stamped with the words DO NOT OPEN UNTIL APRIL 17 PIYP DAY. It turned out to contain an excerpt from Sara Pennington's "Primer: an abecedarian," first published in Ninth Letter vol. 4 no. 1.

And here is an excellent piece by Stephen Burt on John Ashberry, in the Times Literary Supplement.

CHAMPION V. SARVAS
Two entertaining book bloggers in conversation: Edward Champion interviews Mark Sarvas about his forthcoming novel for the 201st episode of the Bat Segundo Show (48 minutes).