Marwa Arsanios and Vartan Avakian are still young. They belong to a generation of artists who grew up during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and their unique experience with artistic research in Lebanon is revealing new narratives for a catastrophic historical episode. …more
“I used to always think of paintings as big large novels. And then all of these little drawings that I’ve been making, I think of them more as a bunch of poems equaling a chapbook or maybe a bunch of short stories…” …more
“The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the young, bright, creative people, leaving us with only the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
- Banksy …more
One unintended consequence of David Ross’s appearance on the Colbert Report last year has been the misunderstanding of intention. …more
Caris Reid, twenty-six, lives and paints in a high-ceilinged space in Greenwich Village, not far from Bob Dylan’s first New York apartment. She mixes her paints in dozens of glass candle votives spread across the floor. …more
When we were young, many of us built shoebox dioramas depicting scenes from a book, or an historical event. Artist Thomas Doyle did too, but whereas most of us abandoned those scene-setting projects when we were young, he still makes them. …more
Three wisps of a line in a frame can communicate the speed of a character’s movement, the melancholy of a leaf floating to the ground, or, as in many cases, the sweet release of flatulence. …more
“Even the things you love can take so much work that sometimes they bring you to the breaking point. So you might as well be in the most comfortable place possible to put yourself up against those tests, or else you’re making it harder for yourself. So it’s simultaneously finding the path of least resistance, but also knowing that you’re going into a storm.” …more
The last time I saw you, in 2000, we were in a hotel room in Pittsburgh; one of us was naked and there was a beautiful, heavily tattooed girl handcuffed to the sink… …more
“Spider-Man, but with tits.”
- Art Spiegelman
There is a 2:1 bald-spot-to-ponytail ratio in Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas. The man in front of me has a biblically voluminous beard and a t-shirt printed with Leonardo’s jumping-jack man. A red plastic tag pokes out from his shoulder like a solitary blood feather. I think he must have bought this t-shirt specially for this occasion, and I feel tender toward him. …more
At the end of his exhibit, I came across a guide called, “Damien Hirst’s Wallace Collection Trail,” containing short, chatty write-ups on twenty-six works in the permanent collection that have ‘ignited’ his imagination. For the next hour, with Hirst as my guide, I followed the trail. …more
Eddie Campbell is about to release a comic that will probably be world-renowned. It’s a compendium of his Alec books, titled Alec: The Years have Pants, which have long been recognized within a statistically insignificant community as some of the most inventive autobiographical comics ever authored. …more
Meet Able Brown: artist, New York City park ranger, body-surfing enthusiast and stand-up comedian. His drawings and paintings have been included in group shows at several galleries, including a show at the Fleisher/Ollman gallery curated by Will Oldham, aka Bonny Prince Billy. His illustrations also illuminate the disk jacket for Billy’s album “Summer in the Southeast.” But who cares about all that. The Rumpus loves him. …more
Molly Crabapple is an artist, model, entrepreneur, and one-woman pen-and-ink revolution. She’s probably best known as the founder of the worldwide burlesque life drawing phenomenon, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, which has opened branches in 80 cities since it launched in Brooklyn four years ago. …more
I like things to be accessible; it’s important for me to communicate to the non-art crowd as well as those more versed in art appreciation so I keep the entrance point as accessible as possible and leave it up to the viewer to see how far they want to take their understanding of the piece. …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
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. …more
There’s a story here, but it exists in illogical fragments, chaotic subtexts, and poverty economics cured in the meth-soaked algebra of need, greed and corruption. And eventually it all plays out in song. Folk songs, cowboy ballads and Narco-corridos. What you can’t see with your eyes you can feel in your heart. Hand me down my old guitar. …more
Viva Las Vegas’ saucy new memoir Magic Gardens is about stripping in Portland, Oregon during the 90’s when the “stripping as performance art” trend was taking hold and pro-porn feminism was a fledgling idea. …more
I recently read “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a sort of hybrid graphic-young adult novel by Brian Selznik that tells a fictionalized story revolving around Georges Méliès, the frenchman who was the first filmmaker to employ cinematic tricks in narrative. …more
“On the whole Young’s work deals with issues of corporate culture and the artist’s place in it, but the spaces they were cast in no longer seemed to exist culturally.” …more
The New York Times reports that memoirist and biographer James Lord died of a heart attack this week at the age of 86. And this moves me, because while there are The Last Book(s) I Loved, there are also those Books I Have Always Loved, among them A Giacometti Portrait, written by Lord in 1965. …more
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. It’s probably faster just to look at the pictures.
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.
21-year-old student Jesse Graves started putting up graffiti to promote environmental awareness nearly two years ago, and has never been harassed or arrested. Many of his pieces remain intact on walls around the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. …more
Gored by a banana on a barroom floor, a man lies supine as a nun slaps a midget, a down-and-out Santa drinks hard and a sullied beauty queen totes a severed head …more
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. …more
An HTMLGIANT/Rumpus Joint Publication …more
Illustrations by Elzbieta Gaudasinska for The Sun has Fallen into the Sack by Jerzy Bieniecki (Poland, 1975).
As you can see, the book was actually published in English translation — but only in Poland. …more
After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned!
I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine rack should carry at least a couple copies. At least the ones in San Francisco do. But even then it can be hard to find. …more
“It is the official art of authoritarian governments, aimed at extending state control through propaganda. Totalitarian kitsch exists to glorify the state, foster a personality cult surrounding the dictator and celebrate ceaseless and irrevocable social and economic progress through images of churning factories and happy, exultant workers.”
I have long pondered the boundless evil of all things kitsch but now thanks to this article (via Bookforum) I have new reasons to fear it.
Have you read The Rumpus Interview with Jake Gillespie yet? Once you do, click here to view more of his work.
This week, the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival is in full swing, catch Paul Madonna at Sketch Tuesday, assuage the pain of your own coyote-ugly experiences at Bawdy Storytelling’s Too Close For Comfort reading, and celebrate your favorite ephemera on international Obscura Day!
Monday 3/15: Head down to Viz Cinema tonight for a screening of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest as a part of the 2010 San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. The festival, which began last Thursday, runs through the end of the week and features films from Asian and Asian-American artists that span the globe. Tickets $12, 9pm at 1746 Post Street. …more
Julian Montague is an artist and graphic designer living in Buffalo. I have long followed Julian’s Daily Book Graphics series, and I am excited to present here his own designs for “books from an invented intellectual history concerned with the study of invertebrates and other animals as they relate to architecture and psychology.”
They are part of an exhibit which opens this week: …more
This week in New York Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman talk, Guernica has a reading, Joanna Newsom sings and plays harp, Marcel Dzama appears, talks and signs books, The Moth has a Story Slam, Christopher Walken loses a hand and Zoe Kazan gives him one, and Atlas Obscura presents an international celebration of curious and obscure things.
MONDAY 3/15: Elif Batuman and Keith Gessen in conversation. Batuman’s pieces—for n+1, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation. In The Possessed, her latest work of non-fiction, Batuman investigates a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, retraces Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus, and shows us why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying. McNally Jackson. 7:00pm. …more
The last installment of this series, which focused on the artists, writers and filmmakers in residence at the Chelsea Hotel, ends on a piece written by a man who has helped define New York’s nightlife and now designs some of the city’s most talked about venues. If you happen to meet him, you will probably have a conversation you won’t forget. And for some time after, you will think about him and the conversation, alternately.
Steve Lewis once lived in the Chelsea Hotel and has many stories of his times hanging out with this city’s most notable personalities, himself excluded, some of whom were featured earlier in the series. …more
Gerald Busby’s music for ‘3 Women’ is so perfect I don’t know how to talk about it. – Robert Altman
Several years ago, a friend recommended I rent Three Women, not because of my interest in Robert Altman, but because of the film’s unusual score. Finally finding the film, I was floored by the music. The eerie, lurching score, with its atonal shifts jettisoned with jaunty, marching romps & perplexing virtuosic flute exercises, was a confounding revelation. I heard echoes of Stravinsky, but certain movements played out like a psychedelic chamber pop mutation. To paraphrase Altman, I don’t even begin to know how to talk about it. …more
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold was published by Horse & Buggy Press in 1999, in an edition of just 1000 copies. The book primarily consists of Jeffery Beam’s poems (reworkings of bestiaries found in The Elizabethan Zoo) and Ippy Patterson’s illustrations. …more
Soon after finishing Dr. Strangelove in 1964, Stanley Kubrick became fascinated with alien life forms and decided that he wanted to make a sci-fi movie. Not knowing much about it, he needed a co-writer, or rather, a co-creator. He knew roughly what he wanted to do, but he needed scientific expertise. Someone suggested Arthur C. Clarke, but Kubrick had heard he was a recluse, and a crazy one at that. Nonetheless, he sent a telegram to Ceylon—where Clarke was writing at the time. …more
The South by Southwest Conferences and Festivals begin this Friday, 3/12, in Austin, Texas, and continue through 3/21. If you happen to be attending the festival, be sure to make it out to some of the presentations by Monofonus, the Austin-based multimedia organization, which has a full-schedule of film and video screenings, concerts and parties.
The schedule includes a screening of Lovers of Hate, a 2010 Sundance Film Festival Selection, which Monofonus helped produce. (Monofonus also provided the video installation for One Year Later: The Rumpus Anniversary Party).
Following SXSW, on 3/30, Monofonus will host the third installment of its Teleportal series, Teleportal 3: McSweeney’s, featuring Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, a Teleportal reading by Dean Young, video from Wholphin, and a special musical guest.
Check out the slideshow of Victorian photo-collage over at Slate…
Neil Philip, the man behind Adventures in the Print Trade, is a writer who also runs the print gallery Idbury Prints. His blog is a visual feast and an important art history resource.
…more
This week, it’s Monthly Rumpus time again, Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass takes over at the Landmark Lumiere, learn about the San Francisco Panorama at San Francisco State University, and maybe go see some clowns.
Monday 3/8: Come down to The Makeout Room for Sleeping With Friends, the love child of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s, featuring Jesse Nathan, Jami Attenberg (who you can see later this week at Modern Times), Mark Morford, Gerard Jones, Chicken John, Nato Green, and K. Flay. $10 cheap as always, or buy a $15 ticket and get a copy of Panorama (that’s a ticket to the baddest party in town and a copy of Panorama for a dollar less than the newsstand price, for all of you mathematicians out there.) 21+, 7pm @ 3225 22nd Street. …more
This week in New York Sam Lipsyte reads from The Ask, David Shields reads from Reality Hunger, the Magnetic Fields perform, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks reads, Lore Segal and Tao Lin engage in a panel discussion about the novella, Stephen Elliott holds a writing class, Philip Gourevitch, Francine Prose and Lewis Lapham explore natural and man-made calamities and Light Industry presents the films of Jon Moritsugu.
MONDAY: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog, will be in conversation at 92Y. Her new play, The Book of Grace, premiers at the Public Theater this March. 92Y. Lexington Ave. @92nd St. 8:00pm. …more
I’ve been regularly attending events and film screenings at Artists’ Television Access on Valencia Street in San Francisco for almost a year now.
I’ve gone as both volunteer and audience member, in the company of wily friends or in my own, often more obtuse company. …more
THE POET AND THE LADY OF THE CANYON
In 1967, two young Canadian songwriters met at songwriter’s workshop at the Newport Folk Festival, and had a romance. They were both about to become very famous, thanks to Judy Collins, who had introduced them and who would bring their songs to the Billboard Charts. Collins had released her cover of “Suzanne” the previous year, would release “Both Sides Now” the following year, and “Chelsea Morning” the year after that. …more
He was a restless person and this was the kind of rest restless people needed when they got restless.
Sometimes he’d sit in his room, watching movies in his underpants. Once, while he was sitting like this, a key turned in the door and then a couple walked in. “It’s OK, buddy, you can stay,” said the guy. “We’ll just sleep over here.” As the woman went to use the bathroom, the man sat down beside him and began to watch the movie too. He was alarmed but also a little pleased. He would enjoy telling this story. It was a good story. The movie he was watching was a Western called The Ox-Bow Incident and after he finally convinced the couple to leave, he went back to watching it. …more
With today’s opening of the Armory Show in New York, and with the various art fairs concurrently being presented such as the Whitney Biennial and Armory Arts Week, the city is paying homage in all its corners to persons who make art and make it well. In response, we’ll be paying particular attention to one location in the city that has for over a hundred years served as a center of artistic and bohemian activity—the Chelsea Hotel—and the various artists who took up residence there. …more
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