Meghan Howland creates moody paintings with loose brush strokes, examining apparently stoned, depressed and brooding youths through a hazy lens. Her disillusioned characters appear delicate yet unaware or disparaging of their own beauty and their effect on the viewer. Their faces are often obscured or their eyes are clouded with drugs or closed, and there is often the hint of recent violence or self-harm as if they are avoiding a painful confrontation or in the midst of suiciding.
YDK Morimoe is an artist as enigmatic as his art. Also using the monikers of xhxix and Hi, this Japanese digital artist, born in 1985, has one of the most recognizable styles in contemporary art. His photorealistic portraits, mixed with painting effects and bold digital touches, are mostly always staging young men on drugs with sickly pale bodies and dazed eyes lost in surreal states of mental anguish and/or hallucination and/or physical injury.
p.s. Hey. So a regular reader of the blog named Jim Post wrote to me recently and asked if he could curate a show in my galerie. I said, ‘Please do’, of course, and today you can stroll/scroll through and peruse the very show he has curated, and I hope you will, and I hope you’ll share some comments re: the show with Jim, whom I am certain will be looking in. Thanks. Thank you very much, Jim! ** Scunnard, Hey hey, Jared! Ooh, you are ultra-correct in having thought, if you did, that I am both slapping myself upside my head that I’m not in London to see that show and feeling very grateful to you for thinking of me in its regard. I don’t know why you think he’s hot or why Yves Klein is not an in-person type, ha ha. But I am, yes, glad to know. You good? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. No, I think I understand, and, again, I don’t know ‘Detroit’. I will say that I think glibness can be one of those things that in the eye of the beholder. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Cool you’re into Martel’s work. I think her imminent new film has a lot more money and push behind it than her earlier films, so I think maybe it will get her long due recognition possibly? ‘I think you’re way too willing to give all extremely violent art a pass’: ‘All’? That’s quite presumptuous of you, no? To what are you referring exactly? Please identify some ‘extremely violent’ art works that you know I’m ‘far too willing’ to give ‘a pass’ and that you presumably believe should be condemned instead. Not having seen ‘Detroit, I have a theoretical problem with the idea that because her depiction of torture didn’t meet your standards of what’s acceptable given the subject matter that that means she didn’t ‘think about what [she was] doing when depicting it’. The idea that an artist who hasn’t taken into account the standards and politics and possible opinions of all viewers isn’t thinking through what she or did enough is a strange and unwieldy requirement to place on artists. You brought up ‘Frisk’: when that book was published it was condemned by quite a number of critics and people for not taking into account the possible homophobia of its readers and that it therefore posed a danger to both the status and lives of gay men. And in fact I have written disturbing sexual scenes in my works that I found complicatedly erotic, and, no, those scenes are not ‘torture porn’ as a result. Like I said yesterday, I object to the notion and term torture porn. I explained my reasoning, and I don’t think I need to elaborate further. I like the new Tyler the Creator album. I think it’s his best since the first one. Gaspar Noe is most definitely straight. I think ‘Love’ pretty much made that as clear as day. ** Nicholas, Hey. Ah, just fall for him, man. Life’s short. I just started Alistair’s novel and, no surprise, its fantastic, so, obviously, get it. Theoretically, I like the idea of a museum painted all black. It’s novel. Absinthe just gave me a splitting headache and nothing more. It was sad. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Oh, okay, about the movie. It’ll be a plane-r for. Thank you very much for the information about the Ordo Templi Orientis. That’s extremely interesting to know. Huh. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! My pleasure about the Martel post, of course. It’s totally possible and even recommended to be patient and realistic and excited and proud at the same time. That’s how I feel — or at least am trying to feel — about ‘Permanent Green Light’. The Palestine installation was kind of just goofy, to be honest with you. I’m still trying to fight off some laziness too. I figure it being August makes that okay-ish, but the fight continues. My day wasn’t much, actually. Mostly organized some things. The hours just kind of slipped by. Oh, well. Soon enough I’ll be longing for these nothing-ish days. And I will try to take advantage of Tuesday. How was yours? ** Jeff J, Hi. I’m new to Martel’s work, like I said, but ‘La Cienaga’ is my big favorite of her films so far. I didn’t get to indulge in the Bandcamp feast yesterday for no good reason, but I will today. Mark my word if marking it seems like an interesting thing to do. ** Jamie, Hello hello hello. Okay, I’ll quit making things worse by asking about the wifi thing and condemning whoever is the cause of your deprivation. I’m good enough. Yes, I put the Kiarostami Day back together yesterday, and it’ll launch here in the next two weeks. Thanks for suggesting that. Yeah, ‘wedding’ is just a weird form. How you’re supposed to react to it is too built-in and predetermined or something. Maybe happiness is something that shouldn’t be ritualized? Or, rather, the display of happiness? I don’t know. Today, not sure yet. Stuff I should do and even need to do re: work and projects that I will hopefully bring myself to attempt or do. Otherwise, not really sure. Strange lazy days these days over here. Was the hospital appointment okay/successful? Did the faceless corporation give good phone? Rock your today, yeah? Non-argurable love, Dennis. ** S., No, never seen ‘Aqua Teen’. TV and I have become pretty much estranged. Except for random French stuff. Good question about the realness why. Really happy with your life? Fuck yeah! Them’s the opposite of fighting words. Ghost stories book, yes! Get it, make it! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I really liked ‘La Cienaga’. I love your YnY’s future-related buzz. It infectiously tingly. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Cool, glad. I only know the publicized outline of ‘Detroit’s’ story, but it does seem like a lot to have taken on. But ambition is good. My dad always said we were related to, shit, some big famous guy or general or someone who fought at the Alamo. I can’t remember his name. I have a couple of other friends who are also obsessed with Patti Labelle sweet potato pie. Gonna check one out if I’m ever within its market. ** Okay. Please do enjoy Jim Post’s gift of an art show for you today. See you tomorrow.
______________ Daniel O’SullivanHC SVNT DRACONES ‘VELD is a new solo album of luminous pop incantations, electroacoustic music and shimmering drones from composer and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan. Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, O’Sullivan’s work is remarkable in the way it infuses familiar everyday experience with traces of the uncanny, the secret and the magickal. VELD distils these tangled realities into a wonderfully rich and complex record — one of O’Sullivan’s most immediate and moving pop albums to date, yet one that’s strikingly dense and allusive, alive with enticing sonic diversions, hypnotic mantras and eerie biomechanical rhythms. VELD was written and recorded between 2010 and 2016 while O’Sullivan was living on Tower Gardens Road, during the same phase that also nurtured other collaborative projects including Grumbling Fur (with Alexander Tucker) and Laniakea (with Zu’s Massimo Pupillo). This was also the space where O’Sullivan assembled and arranged Ulver’s 12th studio album ATGCLVLSSCAP and the last two Æthenor LP’s (O’Sullivan’s “automatic composition” group with Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) and Steve Noble).’— O Genesis Recordings
_____________ PhewCQ Tokyo ‘Like many British teens in the late 1970s, when Hiromi Moritani heard the Sex Pistols, she started her own punk band. But even by the standards of punk and post-punk, Japan’s Aunt Sally stood apart: dirge-y psychedelic rock, piano waltzes, spiky outbursts, a whistling take of “Heart and Soul.” And when Moritani struck off on her own in 1980 as Phew, she bushwhacked her own path. She had Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto produce her experimental first single. And for her debut album, she tapped a German dream team: producer Conny Plank and Can’s rhythm section of Holger Czuaky and Jaki Leibezeit, who cast a pulsing, harrowing sound. In the almost four decades since, she’s continued to carve out her own peculiar niche in rock, often working with legends who abet her vision, including Anton Fier, Otomo Yoshihide and members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten. … The furious “CQ Tokyo” returns her to her early punk roots, barking against a deliriously fast cha-cha beat, as if Yoko Ono snuck into Suicide’s practice space and stole one of Martin Rev’s rejiggered drum machines back in 1974. Menacing snarls of electronics roar alongside her increasingly fraught yells, the drums lurching faster and faster until they lash like a whip.’— Andy Beta
_____________ Zola JesusExhumed ‘Classic Zola Jesus is back. It’s clear from the first few seconds of her new song “Exhumed,” with its brisk orchestration, thickly blanketing bass, and ticking industrial beetle-scuttles. Nika Rosa Danilova’s last album Taiga tidied up the fierce immediacy of her early music into more polished textures, but there’s a more elemental and raw sense to “Exhumed,” the first taste of her sixth album Okovi. Danilova moved back to the Wisconsin forests where she grew up to record the project, and nature’s primal instincts are scattered all over it.’— The Fader
_____________ GravetempleDomino/Athatolhatatlan Felelmek ‘“The aim is to break boundaries and to find new horizons via the challenging of our own concepts of existence via the channels of musical trance. To me, it is like a contemporary way of Shamanism,” explains vocalist and black metal luminary Attila Csihar when asked about the motivation behind Impassable Fears, Gravetemple’s first release in eight years and the trio’s second proper full-length. But while most bands will funnel ideas of transcendental experiences and meditation into a discourse of zen-like, hallowed states of eudaemonia, drone-meister Stephen O’Malley, experimentalist Oren Ambarchi, and Csihar turn their gazes inwards, towards Lovecraftian horrors. Similar to what anthropologist Carlo Severi notes about the Kuna people, the basis of Gravetemple’s modern day shamanism becomes a vivid representation of human suffering exposed through a crushingly oppressive sonic language. They strive to make the anguish of human existence and the inevitable fear of death tangible, only to voyage beyond it.’— Antonio Poscic
_____________ chris†††ytp death ‘chris†††’s social justice whatever begins there, with a barrage of paratactic surges, lost cities of culture juxtaposed next to each other without any logical connectors. It doesn’t work in a linear or plot-driven way, but rather with a strong, vomitlike, and whirly centrifugal pull, yanking that which appears discrepant: the memes, the videos, the cartoon dialogues, the commercials, the vaporwave, the hullabaloo. The album acts as a repository for internet culture and as a portent of how the internet distracts us from mobilizing, stunned online in our minds, frozen from the outside world, yet there, never not unable to be political, but just simply and overwhelmingly inactive about it. Because, for many, the internet comes before the world around us, as real as the reality behind reality & interchangeable like-life.’— HYDROYOGA
____________ Robert Hood Pattern 8 ‘Paradygm Shift, the new album from Robert Hood, is a return to minimalism, but not as we might recognise it. The techno of 1994’s Minimal Nation, his career- and genre-defining album, drew strength from simple combinations of drums, chords and hi-hats. Sinewy sounds were held together with smears of bassline funk (“Ride,” “Station Rider E”) rubbery harmonics (“Rhythm Of Vision”) or dial-tuned acid (“Museum”). Paradygm Shift aspires to the “simple, repetitive programming,” as Hood puts it, of his mid-’90s music, but the base materials are larger. If you imagine Minimal Nation’s tracks as rooms in a house, as the Detroit-born, Alabama-based artist once did, then his latest album might resemble a monument of overwhelming scale. The changes on Paradygm Shift don’t seem radical, but they’re consequential. The loops—melodic leads, especially—are more prone to change. This is most apparent on the sliding organs of “Pneuma,” or the braided arps of “Pattern 8.” In these congested patterns, Paradygm Shift tends to lose sight of its focal points. Tracks like “Solid Thought” and “Pattern 8” are caked with accents, effects and counterpoints. The rhythms, carrying this extra weight, can seem as laboured as a run through mud.’— Resident Advisor
___________ Ka5shI Don’t Need It ‘Ka5sh grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a “super country” military town dominated by Fort Bragg. “I’m still the exact same as I was like younger, but now it’s cool,” they say. “It’s cool to be into bands and shit, and like cartoons, and just be weird and read. But back in [Fayetteville], no, that was not cool. You got called an Oreo.” The most exciting thing to do after dark was wander the aisles of the local Walmart, a cosmic injustice Ka5sh tried to correct by creating immersive performances for their early, Death Grips-inspired musical project, Weirdo. “I wanted to create an experience whenever you saw us live,” they say. “It was completely unappreciated, because I was in North Carolina, and no one got what we were doing. We would get kicked out of venues and stuff because we were just so wild and weird.” Weirdo never caught on, a disappointment Ka5sh understands in retrospect. “It wasn’t me,” they say. “It was just me trying to create a version of me that’s acceptable to everyone, and that’s digestible for rap.”’— bandcamp daily
_____________ Drew McDowallRecognition ‘Unnatural Channel is Drew McDowall’s follow up to his debut solo album Collapse released in 2015. Like Collapse, Unnatural Channel wallows in modular synths and abstract atmospheres but this time McDowall errs towards a more rhythmic sound melding elements of industrial and techno into his processed experimental work. In interviews Drew McDowall has spoken of his sleepless nights and I feel that may be the most obvious part of the Unnatural Channel referenced in the title. Unnatural Channel taps into the sense of disintegration first found on his debut but while it continues the themes Unnatural Channel evolves into a space distinct to Collapse. In relocating to New York Drew McDowall relinquished his place in the Coil line-up, a role that saw him contribute to Coil’s Equinox work and the acclaimed volumes of Musick To Play In The Dark, as well as the Coil related projects Black Light District and of course Time Machines, which resulted from Drew McDowall’s initial time-shifting experiments with tones and frequencies. It was a move made to secure his sanity but it seems his sleepless nights in New York have been productive musically finding himself within a conducive atmosphere of adventurous electronic musicians pushing industrial and electronic music into new and uncharted areas. Unnatural Channel does that too, taking Drew McDowall and his listeners into new territory, and especially within the mutated, morphed and processed rhythms he directs here.’— Compulsion Online
____________ Felicia AtkinsonVisnaga ‘On Hand in Hand, Felicia Atkinson is fascinated by information, in all its heterogeneity. It’s a fascination that has pervaded her recent work and, despite the range that colours this fascination, the information she brings into focus is primarily influenced by exemplary literature. On last year’s collaboration with Jefre-Cantu Ledesma, Comme Un Sel Narcisse, track names were curtailed to a single letter with the full tracklisting spelling out a quotation from Susan Sontag’s On Photography who was, in turn, quoting Charles Baudelaire. On A Readymade Ceremony the year before – the record that seems to have begun the cycle Atkinson is currently in – she blended textual offcuts from her own writings, those of Rene Char and Georges Bataille and various discoveries found in an Italian art magazine. In a way that is truly faithful to the meaning of the term, Atkinson’s work is a collage – a labyrinthine dislocation of source material drawn from what she sets out to read and what she happens to read, and one that seeks significance through contrast and serendipity.’— Tim Wilson, The Quietus
_____________ Richard DawsonOgre ‘Richard Dawson has said that he really believes in Peasant, his first new album since 2014’s breakout Nothing Important. And you should think so – given that, from its structure and instrumentation down to its most basic themes, it is a bold and almost complete break with the style that allowed him to cross over from the weirdo underground to his current position as the country’s best-loved exponent of avant-folk. Confessional tales of underage drinking sessions gone awry are replaced by a kaleidoscope of character pieces displaced to the pre-medieval Northern English kingdom of Bryneich, while the barebones sound palette of ribcage-busting vocal and spidery electric guitar seen on his previous opus have been replaced by a multi-layered, kitchen-sink ensemble aesthetic. Yet perhaps the most notable move Dawson has made in Peasant is the ambition of its central theme: how community can be reclaimed as a meaningful force in society.’— Danny Riley
______________ Yasunao ToneAI Deviation (live) ‘I have had an idea if I apply the neural network to create my sound work for long time. When I had a performance at Centre Pompidou with Peter Rehberg and other friends I tried to talk about the idea with a French guy from IRCAM. But, he couldn’t understand my idea, which by using neural network the sound I create would never have any repetitions. That was 2002 and I had to wait until 2015 when I had a grant from New York State Council on the Arts through Issue Project Room, then its director Lawrence Kumpf applied for my new work. The grant finally made possible for making my cherished idea, the neural network piece, reality. I had talked about the idea with Prof. Tony Myatt at Surrey University, UK and he developed the software for the piece with a team included Dr. Paul Modler. At the lab in the University a series of my performances of my MP3 Deviation were captured and used to train Kohonen Neural Networks to develop artificial intelligences that simulate my performances. Hence a birth of new piece AI Deviations.’— Yasunao Tone
_____________ CircleTerminal ‘A Swedish journalist recently declared Circle the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world after witnessing a particularly intense performance. Listening to Terminal, it’s difficult to find any reasonable grounds to disagree. To demonstrate their unfathomable ways, a few years ago they ‘leased’ the name Circle to an extreme Metal band whilst issuing an AOR-inspired record (not one of the more essential releases in the band’s catalogue which by now extends to a gazillion – well, 52 – releases) under the assumed name Falcon. The six-piece sport spandex and other vintage hard rock paraphernalia on stage whilst mightily wailing vocalist/keyboardist Mika Rättö (also familiar from psych-folk-rockers Kuusumun Profeetta) indulges his enthusiasm for the most ludicrous foot-on-monitor cock-rock poses imaginable. Much-acclaimed live sets push theatrics to an exhilaratingly baffling level where the performance might culminate in a mid-song intra-band arm wrestling match where the loser wounds up decapitated with a bass guitar.’— The Line of Best Fit
_____________ Puce Marylive at Tower Transmissions V ‘Compared to other extreme or underground musics, industrial music and noise have a much more distinct and literal relationship to art. Punk, techno, metal: these kinds of underground musics have evolved much more as folk musics with constraints that limit their freedoms as art while remaining within those genres. These constraints are immensely powerful, just as they have been in other, more traditional folk musics. Historical context, social and economic circumstance, have all aligned to create that musical vocabulary, and to abandon it is to abandon the large majority of what is powerful about playing that music in the first place. While there is a vernacular to specific noise or industrial musics – the most obvious maybe being the violent/sexual ‘extreme limits of the human condition’ of power electronics but obviously other tropes as well – this vernacular lies on a much more grey, intentionally crafted spectrum. It’s a continuum that has alway been shared with art, performance art, musical composition and experimental work that has, frankly, been the domain of the academy since the 60s or 70s.’— Puce Mary
_____________ White SunsA Year Without Summer ‘What guitarist/singer Barry, drummer Dana Matthiessen, and guitarist Rick Visser—who all chip in with electronics—establish is an ignominious sub-industrial alchemy. It’s a doomed space where doubt reigns, where it becomes difficult to separate instrumental components. White Suns’ initial embraces of scum rock and scuzz punk gave way, over time, to a heavier, more chaotic crunch, as the band moved from cassette imprints to labels (Load, ugEXPLODE, the Flesner) for its LP and CD releases. It’s the band’s earnestness—its self-reflexive sincerity—that’s remained steadfast throughout. Psychic Drift adds a fresh wrinkle to the catalog, limiting proceedings to just four extended meditations and swapping out guitars for tangles of synths, samples, and field recordings. The results feel overwhelmingly claustrophobic at moments and misleadingly thin at others; any time a song seems poised to peter out, a dark surge is almost inevitably en route. This vertiginous feeling fits the album’s loose lyrical theme: a modern societal apocalypse, nearly normalized. While Barry has shuttled between spoken word and screaming before, he leans harder on the former here—even as the surrounding sludge threatens to drown him out.’— Raymond Cummings
__________ Cornelius『いつか / どこか』 ‘Is Mellow Waves Fantasma-level good? Nope. Few albums are. But it is a welcome return nonetheless. All through the 1980s, Japan’s avant-garde took jazz fusion and proggy approaches to pop composition and redeemed those genre’s typically grandiloquent tendencies with a rare and winning restraint. Cornelius is a natural extension of this multi-disciplinary yet signature practice, and his densely thicketed shibuya-kei holds up neatly against the temporary contextualizations of trend. Fantasma, like The Avalanche’s Since I Left You three years later, married eclecticism and bliss-out propulsion in ambitious and indelible ways. Neither album has a misstep and both feature an endless series of delightful sound-trinkets nestled in a fetching, fortified advent calendar. The only downside is the massive sugar crash that can follow. But their judicious deployment of stirring emotion calls us back.’— WILLCOMA
____ LCCAj ‘Bastet is the Portuguese duo LCC’s 2nd album of dissonant electronic tang and pranging percussions rent in acres of stark negative space. In terms of rhythm and tone, we can detect a tighter, nuanced approach manifest in the marbled detail and gripping sensitivity of Bastet, which lives up to the enigma of its ancient Egyptian namesake – a goddess of music and female power who coerced humans to entertain her and keep her animalistic urges at bay. Constructed from recordings made at the esteemed EMS in Stockholm, the Inter Arts Centre of Malmö, and their own studio in Gijón, the results form an organismic interrelation of ideas that resonates with, say, the work of Pharmakon as much as Andy Stott at his brutal and stripped best.’ — Boomkat
_____________ EctopiaBermondsey Lagoon ‘Ectopia are Adam Christensen, Jack Brennan and Viki Steiri. Previous works have included sound-tracking Jack Smith’s experimental film Normal Love (1963) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). For the first release on the Wysing Polyphonic label three-piece Ectopia have created a suite of seven new works in which intricate cello and screeching and spoken word vocals are carried along on a wave of dark electronica, taking the listener on a journey into sad acid house, scratched DVDs, lipstick clogged with rolling tobacco and hangovers with absent lovers.’— Boomkat
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p.s. Hey. ** Mieze, Mieze! Hey, Mieze! I’m so glad that my blog got so lucky. Lots of love to you. ** H, Hi. Well, totally okay of course that you didn’t go the event. I wasn’t expecting that you would. My pleasure about the Bataille post. Have a great weekend. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, sir, yes. ‘Guilty’ is wonderful, I agree, yes. Another book about Warhol?! Jesus. I’ve heard of Richard Natale. Maybe he’s an FB friend or something. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I haven’t read all of your windfall of pieces yet, but the ones I’ve read so far have been enlightening. I think I read your ‘Detroit’ text on FB. I haven’t seen the film, and I doubt I will, but I’m generally always very suspicious of the ‘torture fetish’ accusation when it’s made towards books, films, and the like. Everybody, One last goodie from Steve Erickson before the week entirely ends. Here he is: ‘I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s DETROIT last night and was really pissed off by it. This exact same text was posted on Facebook, where some people here may have read it, but I also gave it a more permanent home on my blog.’ I think it’s pretty worth checking back with your old reviews re: that book possibility. You can always fiddle with them. Rights-wise, I know there was no problem whatsoever getting the rights to all the pieces I wrote for lots of different places re: ‘Smothered in Hugs’.** Dóra Grőber, Hi! I’m very glad the book intrigued you. Titles are really tough, but then a possible perfect one will just pop into one’s head magically. Well, if it matters, I would say borrowing a Burroughs quote as your title is not a problem whatsoever, but that’s spoken by someone whose first novel swiped the title of a whole Joy Division album. No, I haven’t heard anything about that event I Skyped/read for yet. It doesn’t seem that anyone I know bothered to go, or else they did and are being discrete or something. Everything else is good, no real complaints on my end. I hope the period between now and Monday is both peaceful and incredibly exciting for you. Was it? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I picked ‘Blue of Noon’ off the shelf the other day and reread some chunks, which inspired the post. It’s pretty fucking great. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Do you know why he didn’t actually start that secret society? I’m curious. ** Brendan, Brendan! B-man! Howdy, pal! I’m so happy that the post inspired that reverie. Man, how are you? What’s going on? Catch me up maybe? Bear hugs. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s better now. Excellent about the inspiring meeting with Donna. Yes, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to double down on your self-suggestion to write more. A Y’n’Y business model? Like Y’n’Y as a … company or … ? Fascinating. Good, you sound good, my friend. Have a lovely weekend. ** Nicholas, A big hello back to you, big N! Thanks for lending ‘God Jr.’ to your friend. Yeah, I mean, I’m happy to try to answer her questions if she wants. New places to live can be nicely altering or something once you get through the utter hell of physically relocating. Or that’s been my experience. Well, thank you for the kind words, man. The new Blondie is good? I’m always really wary of records by bands who start making records again after a long break when they’re in their relative dotage, but … I’ll peek. Erik Visser! Wow, I was thinking about him the other day and wondering what in the world he’s up to these days. How is he? If you communicate with him again, please give him very warm hugs and respect from me. ** MANCY, Hi! Yeah, it was a sad day when I fully realized what gelatin was made of. Very sad. The vegan ones are … okay, but they’re never imaginative. Or bouncy, squeezy enough. But oh well. Cool, a guest-post! Thank you so, so much! I’ll go find your email, and I’ll get back to you soon. Wow, thank you very, very much. Excellent Saturday and even better Sunday to you! ** Misanthrope, Hi. That’s not sad, that’s what it is. Only so many hours in the day and all of that. I liked candy corn as a kid. I used to sprinkle them on ice cream. Not now. Although I do want to try those Halloween-only candy corn Oreos just out of curiosity. One tiny bite. If I see Jedward fisting each other or something, I’ll IM you very fast. Your friend and I could be distantly related. My dad once told me that 80 or something percent of Americans named Cooper are related by blood, albeit very, very thin blood in most cases. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. I would say that gummi post did its number on you exactly as I had dreamt it would do to someone, anyone. I am a fan of Dieter Roth, yes indeed. I think I’m a fan generally. I like his overall practice and at least most of what his practice produced. Maybe I’ll do a galerie re: him or something. I haven’t done an Arte Povera post, no. I’m not generally much of a fan of those guys: Pistoletto, Kounellis, Merz, Boetti, et. al. Their work just doesn’t speak interestingly to me. I do, of course, like some of the artists who inspired that work or who are proto-Arte Povera like Manzoni and Fontana. Including Beuys in Arte Povera is really stretching it and fishing. I think Arte Povera has been defined such that the vast majority are Italian artists. Anyway, I can’t help you with AP ‘cos I’m not very into it at all. ** S., Hi. What does ‘being Catholic’ mean? I’ve heard people say that, and I know they’re not saying they’re Catholic believers or whatever. It’s about some quality or something that they call ‘Catholic’? Do hurt oranges hurt crocodiles, or is it a way to pet them safely? U2 a neat band? You mean their clothes and bathing habits? ** Right. I have a concert for you this weekend. I hope you will attend. Thank you. See you on Monday.
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