Right now New York is calm, and this of course feels eerie. It’s a good time to catch the last weekend of Today’s Weather at Sit and Read in Williamsburg. Zero1 Magazine just ran my catalog essay for the exhibition.

The gallery recently posted an awesome time-lapse video of the artists at work and a free PDF version of the haunting little book that goes along with the show, which features Ian Campbell and David Muenzer’s “improved” vintage oil paintings and found Polaroids.

Know who’s now on Twitter? Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath, the BFG, and even Behemoth, the black cat from The Master and Margarita. It’s all a part of Reorbit, a “reanimation of historical and literary figures.”

The full list of characters is here. I happen to be tweeting as Eleazar Albin, the 18th-century natural history illustrator we recently contemplated graphically here at The Rumpus. There’s nothing uncouth about following dead people. Really.

In a special visual edition of the Generation Gap column, renowned Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak and I team up to bring you a tale on the very edge of natural history, a story about haunted 18th-century illustrator of bug and bird, Eleazar Albin. …more

Tonight is the final screening of Gabi on the Roof in July at the San Francisco Indiefest. If you’ve seen Tiny Furniture, you’ll appreciate that both movies feature hipster hamster’s that die unexpectedly. But Gabi‘s hamster could beat up Tiny‘s.

Made by young Brooklyn filmmaking couple Lawrence Michael Levine (director, character of “Sam,”) and Sophia Takal (producer, editor, character of “Gabi”), Gabi is a pastiche of wonder and honesty. Levine didn’t originally intend to be in the film at all, but shooting took so long on their limited budget that he eventually stepped in, playing the role of Sam, who’s naive little sister, Gabi, full of harmfully cute ideas about anarchy and art, comes to visit him in Brooklyn, on vacation from Oberlin. It’s a good thing he stepped in; their playful, whip-smart dynamic drives the film toward something awesome.

“Welcome to the only dating site that lists real people, sincerely posting their real data and picture. You’ll feel comfortable watching them. Just like in Facebook.”

To construct Lovely Faces, the third column in their phenomenal Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, which began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico borrowed info from one million Facebook profiles, then ran the pics through face-recognition software. Despite the Face to Facebook art project’s snobbishness about social realities, we must admit that Lovely Faces is endlessly amusing. Click around. Judge people’s characters. Maybe you’ll find yourself.

Why is the second person such a natural and addictive tense–perhaps the only honest one–when writing about drug abuse and a foggy recovery?

For years, you haven’t been able to stop asking this question. Reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, you are asking it again, vocally (a real dinner-party silencer), by mistake or with motivations hidden from even yourself.

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In yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I chat with artist Eric Drooker about animating Allen Ginsberg’s Howl for the film of the same name as the long poem, and his resulting new book, Howl: A Graphic Novel.

One thing that was edited out of my piece was this sentence: “Howl: A Graphic Novel reads like a panoramic urban altar, demanding something deeper than just the reader’s attention.” Maybe readers are afraid of sacrifice?

One thing that the critics keep forgetting to mention about the movie is that it offers a chance to experience the poem in more than full form, with certain sections repeated. The film would have been stronger clocking in at 60 instead of 90 minutes, and The New Yorker is right that the issues in the obscenity trial feel “woefully dated,” but James Franco gives a vibrant performance and the overall experience of the film is a heightened experience of the poem. In my book, that’s something to celebrate.

There are geeks, there are music geeks, and then there are the chordal crusaders, the modal moradeurs. In their own words, “powerambient” band Chord summons the feeling “of a single note being rendered into an unsolvable riddle–a harmonic Gordian knot that creates an almost pastoral feel of being blinded by the sun.”

At Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room on Sunday, Chord brings their singular sound to a phenomenal Important Records showcase, which includes everybody from folky Arborea to the microtonal Duane Pitre. Chord’s new album, Progression, comes out in November, and sees the stellar cast reaching an even deeper and darker sonic drama. It’s sure to turn heads.

The only literary event more cloying than a boring reading is a networking event without alcohol. The Faster Times, “a new type of newspaper for a new type of world,” is out to remedy this situation in the same way they’ve been smartly remedying sickened news models. Saturday night in New York, they’re hosting Drink with the Lit World’s Best Editors and Writers. I’ll be there reppin’ The Rumpus. The Paris Review will be there. So will Bookforum, n+1, and many others! Here’s the Facebook invite, in case you’re a part-time writer, part-time stalker. Drink. Talk. Pitch. Gawk.

About a year after the breakup, I started keeping a text message journal.

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In three different rooms on two coasts, artist Darren Almond is practicing visual alchemy.

One thing he does is take long exposures on full moons in ridiculously remote locations. Another thing he does is capture time itself. The still above comes from one of his two Sometimes Still projects currently showing at Matthew Marks in New York. Cunning and resonant, it’s the best video piece I’ve seen in months and months. It concerns a Japanese Buddhist monk practicing a ritual of endurance. It closes Saturday. Get out and see it!

Great Britain is making its own lists. And Great Britain is still publishing novels.

If you believe the rumors, the raging historical narratives are printed by hand, folded into folios, carried from London’s dust into the countryside in the talons of birds that never made it across the Atlantic, placed on a round table in the middle of Sherwood Forest, then torn open by the teeth of hunting dogs. Wine might be spilt, a little blood drawn, but nobody’s popping champagne. …more

“This show is an act of complete personal indulgence. When the good people at apexart approached me about curating something in their space, they made a huge mistake. After some polite back and forth, Steven Rand said to me directly, ‘We’d like you to do something that reflects your passion.’ I responded, ‘Well, football or what you call soccer is my passion. It’s my only religious commitment. The World Cup is coming up soon and I’d like to create a space where we could watch games together.’ Amazingly, they agreed.”

–Curator Simon Critchley on the origins of Men With Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup, a phenomenal group art exhibition (and space to watch live World Cup matches) that opens at apexart in New York tonight from 6-8pm. Here’s the full screening schedule; doors will open promptly at 10am for early matches!

I was on my way to Book Expo America on Tuesday when the C train, still in Brooklyn, experienced a preposterously long delay–even for the C train. At first we were told simply that a “situation” was being “investigated” at “another station.” …more

Rollo Press is continuing the slowest book swap in the world.

The often-thrilling little outfit has been playing around lately with Linus Bill, a photographer who has taken to silkscreening because, he tells Interview, “Until I made those silkscreens, I was never satisfied with how my work looked as prints….With the silkscreens, you really work with color. It’s dirty and there’s mistakes that sometimes look better than what you planned.” Diane Barcelowsky tells Nylon that “anything that makes you think and is full of emotion and passion is art.” So, passion that looks better than what you planned: that is the goal.

Foam is finally putting issues online; the new one, #22, is all about peeping, and includes and new work by Michael Wolf and Evan Baden, who’s new work is about teenage girls’ online fantasies. Kiki Smith’s Sojourn, at the Brooklyn Museum, uses material that “shines with a subtle sheen the color of soy milk.” For Artforum, Harmony Korine recalls “elderly peeping toms who lived down the street in what I assumed was a makeshift nursing home.”

Have you seen the “psychedelic” Picasso? What do you know about the Death of Death?

I was actually glad to hear “Animal” on the new 90210 last week. The second most luscious (“Sans Soleil” wins that prize) and first most catchy track on Miike Snow‘s self-titled 2009 debut, fit perfectly with the elevated high school moment. “I change shapes just to hide in this place,” they sing. “But I’m still, I’m still an animal.” …more

One unintended consequence of David Ross’s appearance on the Colbert Report last year has been the misunderstanding of intention. …more

Allen Ginsberg claimed that his reading voice was an imitation of the voice with which William Blake spoke to him in his visions and dreams.  Once you hear Ginsberg read, you are stuck in his dream forever.

Javier Marias, the prolific Spanish author who blends wit and private conspiracies in unparalleled ways, was on KCRW’s Bookworm yesterday. As one would expect from the lengths of the provocateur’s written sentences, the interview went on so long that they had to split it up into two shows; the second one airs in a week. New Directions used my quote from a SFBG review as a blurb for the newly released third volume of Marias’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. I say that he is “sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.” But I’ve never heard his voice. I’m about to. I’m kind of afraid.

The group exhibition Amor Fati (Love of Fate) opens at the Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oakland tonight.

Curator Lian Ladia has put together a potent mix of artists who aren’t afraid of politics and aren’t afraid of the subconscious. Highlighted by a “visual anthropological sculpture” by SFAI instructor and Bay Area gem Carlos Villa, the show includes work by Malaquias Montoya, Kwatro-Kantos, Faviana Rodriguez, and painterly duo MIJU, to whom I once wrote a letter as a review. Whether you love or hate your fate, this is a show to be reckoned with. The reception is from 6-8pm. The show runs through February 8th.

On the other coast, Brooklyn gallery Jack the Pelican sees the opening of A Space Exodus, a smart and irreverent show by Larissa Sansour featuring, among other things, “the first Palestinian on the moon.” The opening lasts from 7-9pm tonight, and the exhibition runs through February 7th. It’s fitting that Sansour’s show is opening while viewers have around 24 hours left to see the Wallace Berman show at Nicole Klagsburn in Chelsea. Exhibiting videos that took way too long to make, the two artists share an essential sense of humor, an aesthetic calm, a pained delight.

Larry Sultan is dead. The photographer behind Pictures from Home passed away from cancer on Sunday at the age of 63. The SF Chron, NY Times, and LA Times have similar obits. In 1990, Catherine Liu (yes, that Catherine Liu) talked to Sultan for BOMB about his home movies project; in the interview, Sultan says: “I want to measure how a life was lived against how a life was dreamed.” …more

The 2009 music release schedule is winding down, so people have started making their arbitrary top-whatever lists.

While such rankings might be more potent some years from now, when we see which albums are actually still in rotation (like tomorrow’s Leonids meteor shower, where “trails laid down by the [meteor's parent] comet in 1466 and 1533 are expected to be the chief contributors to whatever happens”), some late-season releases and tours guarantee that this presidentially revolutionary year will be known as the year of the resurrected voice. …more

Writer and artist Alasdair Gray is his own best nightmare. It took the modern Scottish bard twenty-five years to finish Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), his fat, strangely inspirational novel of urbanism gone awry. …more

At BushwickBK.com, Mimi Luse reports on a one-night-only multimedia Lil’ Wayne-related show, curated by Audrey Berman and Pete Deevakul. With Claude Léveque and Bruce Nauman squaring off at the Venice Biennale, Studio Von Birken’s Louis Vuitton-meets-Lil’-Wayne parody is as potent as a neon spliff.

It’s hard to look at some of Nauman’s work and not think about the fonts that haunt us, and it’s hard to think about that without visualizing the fabled Twin Peaks letterjobs. Now, writes LENSCRATCH, David Lynch is a “photographer,” too.

At Frieze.com, politics and kitsch at Akram Zaatari’s solo show.

In Cabinet, rhythmic role playing: “As far as­ we know, onl­y one man took him up on the proposal, an expat American card-carrying communist jazz trumpeter and polyrhythmic prodigy named Conlon Nancarrow.”

At what point does the viewer start seducing the artwork?

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I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.

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“And he came to interview me and suddenly I felt like he was trying to corner me. ‘Oh, what’s it like being a terrorist,’ and ‘You’re just doing it for shock value so people will buy your records.’

“And then he said, ‘When I was young…’ and I was like, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Oh, when I was young, before I formed my political opinion, I used to think John Lennon was cool.’

“And I was like, ‘So that means after you formed your political opinion, you didn’t think he was cool, because you thought they were all, like, wanky left-wing liberals. And that means you’re a right-wing conservative, so you’re going write me up as a terrorist.’”

- M.I.A. talks to Negar Azimi in Bidoun

Sometimes, in the work of German-Danish artist Christian Lemmerz, a “child’s christening is symbolised with a baptismal font in white marble with the inside shaped as a baby coffin….[A] wet grave filled with Kölner Wasser, to dampen the stench.”

In “Corpus Delicti” at the Copenhagen branch of Gallery Faurschou, the lifesource is in the details. The gallery has posted a slide show of the dark, luminous exhibition.

Established by artist David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell coordinates cultural responses to climate change. One dope thing they do is send groups of artists, musicians, educators, writers, and scientists into the arctic–not forever, just for a trip. Past expeditions have included Feist, Amy Balkin, Vikram Seth, Jarvis Cocker, and Gary Hume, creator of the Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, below. …more

Back in Santa Cruz, I marveled at Ukulele Dick and Oliver Brown, maestros of ukulele songsmithing and quirk. But sometimes a song is not just a song. Sometimes it’s an extended, operatic adventure, more like an urban folk ballad, played by San Francisco musician Annie Bacon. Bacon’s Folk Opera debuts tonight at the Noe Valley Music Series and then travels around the country. She composed it entirely on ukulele, with parts for upright bass, fiddle, trumpet, and multiple voices. The voices will take you to another world, one that just happens to be this world.

Shirin Neshat is consistently astonishing. In Art in America, Eleanor Heartney talks with Neshat about her ongoing project of lyrical short films, and now a feature, based on Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur‘s magical 1989 novel, Women Without Men. Cabinet presents “Deception as a Way of Knowing,” a conversation between D. Graham Burnett and Anthony Grafton: “Sometimes you are just reading along in an old book and wham, it’s like you sat on a cat!” At Art Basel, Paddy Johnson wonders if there will ever be an economy so poor that it “completely eradicates bad art.” Bidoun blogs the Venice Biennale. Tyler Green waxes on The NGA’s so-called America. People still collect the Beats. And LACMA on Fire would like you to know that there’s a big scary vase at the Getty.