From the monthly archives:

August 2008

More from American Idyll

Besides Walt’s, the karaoke bar, American Idyll features many fine works.  Some, like the rebuilt Korean karaoke room and the motorcycle race game, won by the loudest screamer, would fit in at an amusement park.  Just clever, they at least add to the carnival feel. So does the installation.  The show’s better installed than any [...]

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Japan’s Cruel Joke: American Idyll

I usually avoid karaoke’s chorus of horrors, especially outside east Asia, where we’ve rashly moved it from the private room into the bar, on the stage, before the beer-pickled hordes.  I’ve only ever worried about getting beaten up in such a place, when my friend Alice Mudd takes the mic and curdles the air. However, [...]

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Ai Weiwei has a more nuanced take

Having been brutalized by the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies: (From Zhang’s Hero, rather birds’-nesty) First, I’m not surprised that Zhang Yimou, long past his rebellious youth, has turned out closer to Busby Berkeley than the Neorealists. Zhang’s films have always tended to spectacle, if just for starring Gong Li, despite naturalistic acting and [...]

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Notes for a Movie by Composting Worms

Found footage, mostly. Distressed, vinegared, bubbling and old, halfway between Decasia and Mothlight to the point of cliché Closed loop running through the projector, but not a short loop– it should flop and coil on the ground, sweeping up dust onto the lens as it goes, tripping people, digging root vegetables Keeping my own counsel, [...]

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Amy Youngs’ Worm Art

Not just sheet mulch, but other composts: worm castings. I feed table scraps to worms camped in a bin in the basement. After I’d had them for a few weeks, I noticed I could hear them moving, eating. For worms, they’re loud. Artist Amy Youngs noticed the same thing. She’s an installer of heady systems, [...]

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Shredded monitor won’t compost

Thoughts today, digging holes: three reasons newspaper comics yet reign over their digital brethren. The gravenness of the image Their utility for to deliver babies The superiority of their sheet-mulchability:

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Achewood afterparty

Is it over? For me, maybe. I selected Achewood for my Best of 2007 in The Comics Journal. I was particularly taken by Chris Onstad’s Faustian gift for dialogue. His characters speak in erudite and profane two-percenters all the time, with more verve than most people I’ve met. But the talk chokes out the plot. [...]

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Phil Chambliss, Arkansas Auteur

I want to see more of these films, videos really, that Phil Chambliss has made for years with his coworkers from the rock quarry. The easy one to find, “The Devil’s Helper,” appeared in the Oxford American‘s 2007 Southern movie issue.  And it is a Southern movie: two ex-cons, jealous that they can’t get hunting [...]

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Lazarus Project

I normally write on images, but Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel The Lazarus Project entwines enough with photography to belong here. It follows a Bosnian writer and a war photographer through Ukraine and Moldova, one researching a book, the other acting cool and telling stories. It’s complex and hilarious. Hemon knows my language better than I [...]

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(coda, 4)

So, would that I had more to contribute like the other three. God knows I tried, but putzing through Japan with rickety camera gear yielded neither video black or black leader. Just crows, on a seeming moonscape: At least the light was nice later, in the train station, where I found out, from a paper [...]

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Landscape of White Lovers (3)

On Gary Sullivan’s Elsewhere (Three related posts this week, M-W-F, coda Sunday) I don’t know what it is about Japan that inspires good art. Yes, it also inspires the awful, from that Sofia Coppola movie to geisha-with-cellphone photos. But even the worst works please the eye. So the good ones are that much better. One [...]

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