CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web. WHAT:“Solar Flare: Sun Ra’s album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note”: my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93. WHERE: HERE. CREDIT: “Boldly Go,” by Abdi Farah. (For more about this astonishing work, go […]
PHOTO: SRL MAYHEM. CREDIT/COPYRIGHT: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 […]
Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes “Love in the Time of Swine Flu,” my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City. Teaser: Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count […]
Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as “Jew Like Me,” “Zen Mind, Alkie Mind,” “Agnostic Front,” “I Was a Prepubescent Messiah,” “Banana […]
WHAT: “Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque,” a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD. Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein’s stunning […]
WHAT: “Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque,” a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD. Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein’s stunning […]
“I knew Sterling when he was an Aztec pimp”: the SF writer and Fine Young Ballardian Chris Nakashima-Brown, quoting William Gibson talking about Bruce Sterling. Neither of us could parse Gibson’s one-liner, but it had a certain corkscrew logic to it. Nakashima-Brown and I were in Mexico City last week, along with Sterling, Christopher Priest, […]
Recently, while ego-surfing GOODREADS, I stumbled across a review of my 1999 meditation on millennial America, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: “i re-read this book and enjoyed it as much the second time. its focus is really on some of the darker threads of the fin-de-millennium american culture. end of the century apocalyptic schizo kinda stuff. killer […]
All together now: “Warm leatherette/ Melts on your burning flesh/ You can see your reflection/ In the luminescent dash …” For the fervent Ballardians, especially the obsessive completists among them, who enjoyed last week’s post, I’ve archived PDFs of the various versions of my lengthy, in-depth interviews with JGB and director David Cronenberg, published in […]
J.G. Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. All rights reserved. My review of J.G. Ballard’s nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly. Read it here. “Nonfiction,” meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones’s Love and […]