The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
In recognition of Sen. Arlen Specter (D) — who switched to the Republican party in 1965 and then back to the Democratic party last year — losing his bid for reelection on Tuesday we give you the beautiful art of Zak Smith:
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90% of my street work has been made in Athens/Greece. The political and social situation there is pretty loose and that gives room for anomie of all sorts. It is not necessary to get a permission to paint in the public domain.
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Anthony Lister’s paintings are hard to describe–mostly because they’re so easy to describe. You could say Lister is a graffiti-artist who does paintings of comic book characters and other pop-culture icons in spray-paint, but that doesn’t explain why they look fantastic.
Shot on the sets of pornographic films, Dennis McGrath’s photographs are eerie, funny, down-to-earth, poignant, and gorgeous all at the same time.
Sometimes, in the Industry, you see things that you really wish you hadn’t. If it’s a certain kind of very independent girl, she’ll shrug it off, like “Hey, it didn’t turn out that well—but I have no regrets, and it’s good for business.” But it can be hard to watch someone you know being sincerely degraded—dressed up so she’ll look half her age, ganged up on and treated like a whore, and edited so she’ll intentionally sound like an idiot—even if you know she made a lot of money off it.
“…Beauty is often considered suspect based on the lingering premise that it is radically conservative and reactionary, and that the strategies of visual appeal used by the mass media can be seen as one of the ways that authentic experience is transformed into mediated experience and false consciousness.”
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Zak Smith: There’s a lot of “stoner” art being made these days–like some half-assed faux-naive drawing of a yeti riding a bicycle into a bee’s butt or something. Your work isn’t like that–yet it does seem to have something to do with the kind of doom/stoner metal being put out by like Sleep or Electric Wizard or Monster Magnet back when they were good–can you talk about this stoner aesthetic or mood? About paranoia? About hallucination, paranoia, altered perceptions of time–anything like that?
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M. John Harrison is doomed.
Here is what is going to happen to him: in ten or twelve years, after the Hollywood development people have clawed past the Dunes and Narnias and Spider-Men and have begun to see the bottom of the complexly-constructed-fictional-realities-that-can-be-plausibly-turned-into-mammoth-SFX-epics barrel, Harrison’s work will be discovered and turned into films.
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