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 […]
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 […]
Birmingham, Alabama. Photo: Samm Bennett. All rights reserved. Roomful of Ghosts, the new release from Samm Bennett, is pure awesome, a sob and a chuckle and a whoop and a yowl, dredged up dripping from the mucky riverbottom of his bi-cultural bad self. (“Bi-cultural” because Bennett, an ubiquitous presence on the New York downtown music […]
A while ago, the technoculture writer David Pescovitz—whose mind was probably elsewhere at the time—rashly asked me for a reading list. He was curious to know what was on my nightstand. (He’ll rue the day he asked, before I’m done.) Typically, I have a half-dozen books I’m picking up and putting down, in my desultory way, reading a few pages here, skimming a chapter there. The presumption, at least subconsciously, is that this hodgepodge will form a sort of montage in my mind, inspiring intertextual conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities. (At least, that’s the theory…) Literary ADD meets Freudian free association.
Courtesy Propaganda Remix Project; all rights reserved.. What with pound-of-flesh gas prices; Bush’s tax incentive to stimulate SUV sales, unbelievably; an anti-terrorist driving school offering tips on high-impact ramming techniques and high-speed evasive maneuvers for dealing with death-racing terrorists (or just garden-variety road ragers); and the cheese monkeys’ recent eco-vigilantism against our gas-slurping behemoths, my […]