Max Restaino – Coyote
Limited edition, with 2 Art Cards

Are You Ready To Have Your Skull Scraped?
Introducing AS Horror

With cover design, illustrations and Art Cards by Steven Purtill (Human Rights, Small Talk at the Clinic etc.).

“Bodies are weird. I think that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to them. Watching them, that is. You could call it a curiosity but I get how it looks. My eyes are always drawn to skin and the way you can see the calcified pistons and joints bend and protrude, testing the limits of the soft nets protecting them. I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures’ wings trying to tear free.”

In my imagination I’ve killed myself a thousand times. Others, too. Max Restaino’s Coyote is a drawn out dissociative episode, a lucid nightmare of disemboweled animals, nosebleeds, vomit, tapeworms, soundtracked to System of a Down. Kids play video games, trespass into abandoned homes, chat in the school cafeteria, but the universe disintegrates slowly, leeches crawling underneath skin, every moment pierced by a knife. Coyote is raw, enveloping violence. — Danielle Chelosky

Buy COYOTE in the US
Buy COYOTE elsewhere

 

EXCERPTS

—-When the boy looked in the mirror, he no longer recognized himself. His reflection was a ghost with features obscuring one another. When he tried to read, the words floated around the page as if suspended in a pale haze, none of them resolving into comprehensible sentences, He wondered if before, when he felt things in a different way—a truer way—this would have scared him. It didn’t now, but trying to remember “scared” felt like grasping at a disintegrating dream.
—-Every day he drifted further away from himself, gradually moving back from the seat behind his eyes. Sometimes he’d pause in the middle, but not for long. The cloud he was becoming always continued to drift away.
—-His mother started taking long naps in the middle of the afternoon. The boy started taking walks around the neighborhood while she slept. On one of these walks, he saw a squirrel in the road. Dead, half-flattened, with its intestines smeared across the pavement. He thought of the way the crayons trailed across the paper, changing as they transferred themselves to the white plane. They became better that way. This squirrel is better than it was with its insides still inside it.
—-He watched it for days as cars drove over its decaying shred, continuously changing it from one beautiful thing to another.
—-He was behind his eyes again and could feel his heart pounding and heavy breathing that stoked a good heat in his belly. He wanted to take it home with him but knew that if he moved it, then it would become something else—something he’d make it, but he didn’t know if he could make beautiful things yet.

*

—-“Are you an artist?”
—-I can’t remember who asked me or when or why it mattered but it was something I thought about a lot in school.
—-If I said “Yes,” that would mean my life was only measurable in terms of my creative output, a direct corollary to the worth of my thoughts and actions as an individual.
—-It would be a weight shackled to my ankle.
—-I didn’t think I was. Artists were painters like van Gogh or Georgia O’Keeffe. Their work hung in museums. It was nice to look at.
—-Strokes of vivid beauty delicately brushed onto a clean surface.
—-When I was twenty years old I met Dylan. He taught me art could be ugly and beautiful at the same time.
—-Jeffrey Dahmer once said he didn’t think he was capable of creating anything but I don’t think he gave himself enough credit. I once read that some of Buster Keaton’s best stunts were achieved because he was so depressed he didn’t care if he failed and died. There’s probably something there. Creation inspired by violence. I don’t know. I’ll let a better writer figure that out.

 

WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THIS?
The COYOTE Mood Board

 

VAGUE THOUGHT

The part of New York that I live in is a melting pot of rural, urban, suburban, highway, preserved forest, and farmland. A lot of trees & wild animals. A lot of cars. A lot of roadkill. There’s a half-mile stretch of highway that is lined with wrought iron gate to defend the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery from traffic. Once, while driving by, I saw a deer impaled on the sharpened rim of the fence. It was alive, hooves kicking at the air, eyes black and wide and reflecting the streetlights. (The memory is in slow motion.)

*

Steven Purtill

 

QUOTES

“Help me/I’m disappearing.”
—-– Kayo Dot, “Calonyction Girl” from the album, Coyote

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.”
—-– Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“But inside my head, the most spectacular violence is happening. A boy’s exploding, caving in. It looks sort of fake since my only models are splatter films, but it’s unbelievably powerful.”
—-– Dennis Cooper, Frisk

“Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.”
—-– J.G. Ballard

*

Steven Purtill

 

A LIST OF ART

– The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
– Frisk by Dennis Cooper
– GUMMO, 1997, written & directed by Harmony Korine
– MURDER WEAPON, 1989, written by Ross A. Perron, directed by David DeCoteau
– CLEAN, SHAVEN, 1994, written & directed by Lodge Kerrigan
– BENNY’S VIDEO, 1992, written & directed by Michael Haneke
– Issues – Korn (1999, Immortal Records)
– Toxicity – System of a Down (2001, Columbia Records)
– S/T – Slipknot (1999, Roadrunner Records)
– Bonding by Maggie Siebert
– Negative Space by B.R. Yeager
– Hunchback ’88 by Christopher Norris
– My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf
– MANIAC, 1980, written by Joe Spinell, directed by William Lustig
– ERASERHEAD, 1977, written & directed by David Lynch

*

 

SONGS

Cannibal Holocaust (Main Theme) – Riz Ortolani

Hammer Smashed Face – Cannibal Corpse

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog takes great pleasure in helping to escort the very interesting writer Max Restaino’s first book into the world at large, courtesy of the always reliably exciting press Amphetamine Sulphate. And to host the bounty of pix and info up there by way of introduction. Please spend your local portion of this weekend investigating Max’s book and forking over for it if that makes sense, which I’m thinking it might? Thank you AS and Max for the privilege. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Cool. Wait, so ‘mirrors of the soul’ … right, okay, so they’re like what-do-they-call-them … one way mirrors, like in police stations? I think I’m overthinking this. But mirrors are better. Sorry for your similarly mysterious aches and probs. Yesterday was my least painful day so far, so I’m hoping I’m on my way out of this mess. I have an ambitious excursion to Versailles this afternoon to visit a friend, so that’ll be the test. I so like that ‘ß’ letter. French doesn’t have a letter as theatrical. Much less physically dullard English. Ah, well, I would go mad thanks to your love too, so we’re in the same love boat. Love switching places with hate and not telling anybody, G. ** Tosh Berman, Leg made a real improvement yesterday, so now I’m waiting to see if my stubborn it’ll-fix-itself theory was correct or whether it was a false alarm. Anyway, thank you. I haven’t read ‘V’ since I was in high school. Interesting. ‘Mason and Dixon’ is definitely in the running for my favorite Pynchon, although it’s an odd pick, I think. So I’m curious what you’ll make of it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, right, I’m surprised I didn’t come across those Richters in my search. How was the class? ** Mark, Hi, Mark! That John Soane link/stuff looks really interesting. I’m going to investigate this weekend, thank you. And nice that you were at one time a kind of baby Chris Burden. ‘Last Days’ has been turned into an opera?! Pray tell. Huh. That’s Zac’s fave Van Sant film. And it has the divine and so very underused Lukas Haas in it. LA’s hopping. I need to find out if Paris is too. ** Steve Erickson, Yes, Meredith’s David update is quite a relief. Everyone, For Artsfuse, Mr. Erickson reviewed Odie Henderon’s book about Blaxploitation, BLACK CAESARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS here. Plus, he has a lovely tip for us all. Take it away, Steve: ‘In case anyone wants an advance listen to the new Burial single, both sides have leaked on YouTube although it doesn’t come out till Feb. 9th. He’s revisiting his rave scene roots.’ Thanks, pal, fine weekend to you. ** Misanthrope, Okay, I think I can safely say that you are now the most phobic person I know. And that’s saying something because I have a certain friend whose phobias are so non-stop that I never thought he could be topped. Living on eggshells, bud. Mine’s just outer space and great heights. Oh, and a milder phobia of riding public buses by myself for some reason. Happily France’s schools are still producing brainy young people as a general rule. Justin Isis has never met a generalisation he didn’t adhere to, it seems like. Said with a certain degree of respect. Yuck, on the zapped thing, but, good, on the eventually toppling of it. It’s not too cold here, so I intend to spend some of my weekend outdoors even. ** Uday, Hooray! Except for the insomnia, although, wait, you’re turning it into a virtue, of course. You’re a marvel. I should do a post called Miroirs. That opens a lot of doors, and not just Ravel’s. Let me see. I trust your weekend is letting you ride it like a hoe. Am I correct? ** Darby 🐻, And hello to you! And such a comely rat, to boot. My week has been hampered by my unpleasant leg, but it is starting to ease back into regularity, I think. I hate seeing my reflection in mirrors so I tend to make beelines around them, so, no. Great on your book progress. Sometimes misery pays off. Oh, I like that hair you’re aiming at. Is that called a mullet? I think of mullets as, you know, what soccer fans do to their heads. Nice, I highly approve. I had a shag in the early 70s during glam. It was a brief, big mistake. My head is too large for a shag. Enjoy your friend and downtown too. I’m going to Versailles today, but probably not to the castle itself. Dubious is the best bear facial analysis by far. Yes, I see it! ** Justin, Howdy, Justin! Thank you, thank you. Sharing music or anything here is the opposite of gauche. All I do is share and share. I’ll give that obsessed over song a listen in a sec and see if it snags me too. Thank you. Everyone, Justin shares a song that he (pronoun guess only) is obsessed with. See if you get locked in too. It’s called ‘I got the fear’, and it’s on the great Merge label, and it’s here. Thanks a bunch! ** Filip, Hi, Filip! I love your poem. It’s so graceful and has such perfect economy and I’m smitten and impressed. And such a great, funny ending. Congratulations to you and, even more so, to us, the lucky discoverers of your gifts. I hope to read more of your stuff. Wow, awesome about your being the prince in ‘Into the Woods’. I think I know what cue-to-cue is. I’ve written the theater/dance works of this friend director/choreographer Gisele Vienne, who’s not so known in No. America but pretty weak known over here in Europe, for years so I’m in ‘the theater’ in that sense. Actually, an ex-bf of mine was one of the stars of the original, big flop production of Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along’. Some kind of symmetry there. Greatest luck with the production prep. Do you often perform in theater works or musicals in particular? Is performing a central love and focus for you? Thank you again for the really fantastic poem. Lots of respect from me. Have a most splendid weekend! ** Okay. You are fully aware of what your local weekend entails, so have at it, and I will see you back here on Monday.

_______________

Shirin Abedinirad Babel Tower, Iran, 2016
‘Her motorized Babel Tower stands tall within its surroundings, and can at times disappear into the natural landscape before catching a glint of the setting sun and reflecting it back to her viewers.’

 

____________________
Devorah Sperber Transporter: Kirk and Spock Beaming-In (2008)
2 beaded figures hanging in front of mirror panels installed in a corner to create the illusion of 6 figures beaming in, 100,000+ loose beads on mixed medium platform.

 

____________________
Simon Starling Venus Mirror (2012)
Venus mirror (05/06/2012, Hawaii & Tahiti inverted), 2012, invokes the perceptual, distorting and inverting effects of cameras obscura, speculum mirrors found in telescopes, magnifying glasses and photographic lenses. The mirror presents the 2012 transit as it was observed in June 2012 from Tahiti and Hawaii – sites visited by the artist and significant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observations.

 

_______________
Carsten Höller Sliding Doors (2003)
Sliding Doors consists of five electronic sliding doors with mirrored surfaces on both sides, through which a viewer can walk in an apparently endless passage. The doors are installed at evenly-spaced intervals in a corridor-like space and are connected to motion sensors that cause them to slide open when someone approaches and close shut when the person moves away. As a result, the movements of viewers alternately break and bind the visual limits of the space, which can be entered from either end of the corridor, increasing the likelihood of unexpected encounters as the doors open and close.

 

________________
John Baldessari Reverse/Repeat Series: Spoons, Peas, Jars, etc., 2001
‘A visual conundrum of criss-cross, back to front, left and right, condenses a sequence of actions in one single photogram that traces them all. The resulting symmetry and graceful patterns stand out from the ordinary of the depicted gestures and prevail over our expectations of cause and effect.’

 

____________________
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991)

 

_________________
Zhao Zhao Constellations, 2021-2022
Embroidery on silk

 

_________________
Christopher Madden Untitled, 2023
mirrors, fingers

 

____________________
Urs Fischer Various works (2013)

 

_____________________
Jeppe Hein Mirror Wall (2009)
A huge mirror is mounted onto a wall. When visitors enter the space the mirror starts moving subtly and wavelike. Visitors facing the mirror will be irritated by the vibrating reflection of themselves and their surrounding. This sensation causes not only a vague feeling of dizziness but also a latent distrust of one’s own eyes and spatial perception. As the mirror displays a different picture of the location, viewers question their position in the room.

 

_________________
Mario Klingemann Uncanny Mirror, 2018
‘Made by a neural network that has been trained to make faces from 68 given face marker coordinates. For this experiment the model has only been trained on the face of Françoise Hardy using material from 7 different music clips.’

 

_____________________
Tatiana Trouvé From here I disappear (2009)
From here I disappear is a tantalising series of plexiglass doors and mirrors that form a threshold we can only cross mentally, yet that opens a vista of multiple possibilities.

 

_______________
Eduard Locota Laocoon Mirror Sculpture with Augmented Reality, 2016
‘THE SCULPTURE IS NOT ONLY AN ARTWORK IN ITSELF, BUT ALSO SERVES A UTILITARIAN PURPOSE: AS A MIRROR. NOT ONLY CONNECTING THE VIEWER WITH THE INSIDE OF THE ARTWORK, BUT ALSO BEING ABLE TO CONTEMPLATE ITSELF, IN IT’S REFLECTION.’

 

___________________
John Miller Lost (2016)
The labyrinthine installation, aptly titled Lost, has been constructed in the Atrium Gallery at ICA Miami as part of a solo exhibition of Miller’s work. Covering approximately 74 square metres, the site-specific maze is built from acrylic mirrors mounted on wood frames. “With the mirrored labyrinth, Miller creates an environment that disorients by creating reflections of the self,” said Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator. Both the external walls and internal partitions are covered in mirrors, arranged to encompass the room’s structural columns and create a winding route.

 

___________________

 

________________
Lucas Samaras Corridor #2, 1970
50-foot-long walk-though hall of mirrors

 

_________________
Hank Willis Thomas Amelia falling, 2014
‘Hank Willis Thomas’s Amelia falling is derived from an archival photograph taken by photojournalist Spider Martin during the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama in 1965.’

 

_________________
Keith Arnatt Self-Burial with Mirror, 1969
‘A black-and-white photographic self-portrait in which his whole body, save his head, is buried. In it, the back of his head faces the camera, while a mirror placed opposite his visage reveals its reflection to the viewer.’

 

_____________________

 

_____________________
Alfredo Pirri Contemporary Steps (2011)
An official runs along a broken mirror art installation by Italian artist Alfredo Pirri as visitors tour contemporary art displayed at the war bunker, near the town of Konjic, just south of Sarajevo, Bosnia. The once secret bunker, built to shelter Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the communist leadership from a nuclear war, is some 280 metres underground.

 

____________________
Michelangelo Pistoletto Mirror Paintings (1962 – 1982)
‘Michelangelo Pistoletto began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself.’

 

__________________
Jim Hodges Folding (into a Greater World) (1998)
Folding (into a greater world) is a 6-by-8 foot surface covered in small, square chips of mirror that cast mottled light onto the gallery walls. Imperfectly aligned rows and columns keep these works in motion; a rigorous grid would make them too stiff and static. Such unpredictability stifles the handy shortcuts we normally use to make quick cognitive decisions—judgements made to register stimuli without getting bogged down in the process of really looking. In Hodges’ work, small tiles, chips and light bulbs fail to coalesce into holistic images so we are forced to study each individual component.

 

_______________
Random International Audience, 2008
‘Audience consists of a large crowd of head-size mirror objects. Each object moves its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention. When members of the audience enter the perimeter of the installation, the mirrors inquisitively follow someone that they find interesting. Having chosen their subject, they all synchronise and turn their heads towards them. Suddenly that person can see their reflection in all of the mirrors. They will watch this person until they become disinterested, then either seek out another subject or return to their private chatter. The suddenly synchronised collective behaviour of the objects is beyond the control of the viewer, as it is left entirely to their discretion to let go of their subject.’

 

__________________
Sylvie Fleury Razor Blades (2000)

 

________________
Mike Kelley Silver Ball (1994)
Aluminum foil, polyurethane foam, wood, chicken wire, speakers, four boom boxes, space blanket, three baskets, artificial fruit, and audio

 

__________________
Daniel Rozin Penguins Mirror (2015)
450 stuffed animals, motors, control electronics, xbox kinect motion sensor, mac-mini computer, custom software, tin bases, mirror

 

__________________
Oscar Muñoz Aliento (Breath) (1996–2002)
The work is made up of highly polished metal disks, the surface of which has been printed using a grease photosilkscreen process. Viewers have to breathe on the surface of the disks to reveal pictures of victims of political violence. Using photographs taken out of their original context, the work acts as a visual and political metaphor exploring the theme of disappearance.

 

___________________
Sam Durant Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock) (1998)
Two rectangular mirrors lie on the floor with mounds of dirt, large enough to conceal a body but in actuality covering speakers playing two different soundtracks simultaneously. Both are edited to stop and start in a stuttering manner: one of Wavy Gravy welcoming the audience to Woodstock, the other of Mick Jagger pleading with the Altamont crowd with phrases like, “Why are we fighting?” Recalling Smithson’s “non-sites” comprised of piles of earth taken from an exterior site and placed within geometric containers or right-angled mirror constructions in the gallery space along with other documentation of the site, Durant alters perceptions of these minimalist constructions. Through the use of scale and sound he transforms the raw materials into a statement about the disillusionment felt at the end of the 1960s.”

 

_____________
Olafur Eliasson Sometimes the river is the bridge, 2020
‘A basin of water is placed in the center of the darkened space, while the reflections of twelve lights illuminating the surface of the water create various shadows on the circular screen wall above. The ripples caused by the gentle stirrings of the water surface take on a variety of forms, inviting the viewer to partake in a state of deep contemplation that resonates with these water ripples.’

 

_____________
Mungo Thomson TIME, 2019
‘When you stand in front of one of the mirrors, you imagine myself on the cover of TIME? Not exactly. They are vanity but also vanitas. Yes, you are on the cover of TIME, but you are also going to die. The work is both fun and cruel. I was referencing novelty TIME mirrors from the 1970s. I like drawing from sources like that, such as wall calendars, because they are already art-adjacent, or surrogates for art. I scaled the novelty mirrors to my own height so they would be large enough to reflect the viewer and their context.’

 

_____________
Rafaël Rozendaal In Motion, 2011
‘The show consists of mirrors and projections crammed in a tiny space. I will rearrange the exhibition for one week, making it a different installation every day.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s a simple refreshing trick, but it works, yes. I too make an effort to refrain. Otherwise there’d be amusement park posts and GbV gigs here every week. Ah, a preventative act on love’s part. Very humane. I don’t know what pissed off my leg, no. It just started for no known reason. I’m getting the feeling that when you get older, weird body stuff starts happening, just like they say it does in the movies and so on. How disappointing. It is a pretty good name. The street I live on in Paris has a kind of good or at least very French name: Rue du Chevalier de Saint George. Not bad, right? Love covering or coating everything (except you) in your apartment with a mirrored surface for one hour and blocking your door so you can’t leave *sorry*, G. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. I have a chiropractor I can go see if need be, and need is beginning to seem like a be. Thank you for caring. It’s slightly improving, but very, very gradually. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ooh, I really like that title and I also really like that premise! Very nice, maestro. How did it deal with the class context? ** Jack Skelley, Jazzbo! Bootsy is the shit! Entwistle wrote a bunch of great Who songs: ‘Whiskey Man’, ‘Silas Stingy’, ‘My Wife’, ‘Fiddle About’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, … Lemmy, sure duh. Mike Watt = impeccable. I’ll get the Sasha Frere-Jones. One sentence-long chapters! Bristing, throbbing day to you, Bernard Edwards. ** Steve Erickson, I know they plan to, and I hope they will. Can’t imagine those books are money makers. Yes, I’ve never heard of Frieda Grabe. I probably have that Grove Press anthology, but it’s in LA, if so. I hope your tonight is generous with the REMs. ** Uday, Hi. As I was trying to imagine a bird perspective novel yesterday, the difficulties of pulling that off did spring to mind. But I’m going to give it a little more gestating time before I trash it. If you did write that story, you are a god, sir! I do reminder our Buddy Holly back-and-forth. How curious, him and LR. And why not? Funny about those least expected hung guys. You probably don’t know this weird character actor from the 50s/60s named Wally Cox. He was very famous when I was a kid. Kind of like a schlumpier, less cute, much nerdier Buddy Holly. Anyway, it turned out he was not only apparently huge hung but was the great secret love of Marlon Brando. If what I read is correct, Brando even had his ashes buried alongside Wally Cox’s. You never just never know. ** Charalampos, I fear you may have to do that, yes. You have some superb bookage coming your way, that’s for sure. Good vibes from my apartment, the editing room, and all locales in-between. ** Meredith Brody, Hi, Meredith! It’s so lovely to see you, And thank you so, so much for that very good news about David. He was a commenter here almost every day like clockwork for years, and then he just stopped coming suddenly, and it was when I knew he was in a rough patch after Bill’s death, and I’ve been quite worried about him, and what a relief to hear he’s well situated and okay. I too will do my best to see him when I get to LA next time, hopefully in the next couple of months. Thank you again. I hope everything is as splendid as possible with you. Love, me. ** Uday, Hi. I just checked, and you’re right, it’s ‘suspended’, whatever that means. I don’t have anything to do with that site, but I will contact the person who does it and let him know or find out what’s going on. Yikes. Thanks a lot for letting me know. You okay and better than? ** Justin, Hi. Yeah, I almost said ‘Idaho’, but I was afraid that would seem like too obvious a pick, but, yeah, that’s probably my fave too when it comes down to it. And thank you a lot about ‘TMS’! It’s so good to hear. That’s my favorite of my novels, if I have to pick. I love that it and ‘Period’ are special faves. You’re my dream reader. Cool, yeah, thanks. What’s the latest with you and yours? ** F, Hi, F. It’s very nice to meet you. I’ll happily read your poem as soon as I get out of the p.s., which will be, well, very soon since yours is the last comment. I look forward to it. And congratulations! And please come back, if you feel like it, and I’ll get my thoughts about your poem in order. Happy day! ** Right. Today the blog requests that you think about the mirror as a creative source using the examples piled up above as a starting point, I suppose. See you tomorrow.