Fiona Tan
Jeppe Hein
Poppy Jane Lee
Martin Creed
Jeanne Quinn
COOP HIMMELB(L)AU
Balloon Factory
Todd Robinson
Lee Boroson
Cheryl Pope
Dan Steinhilber
Bina Baitel
Object Design League
Tadao Cern
Tomas Saraceno
Omer Polak and Michal Evyater
Tim Hawkinson
Olivier Grossetête
Spencer Finch
Tom Hillewaere
Torafu Architects
David Colombini
Ahmet Ögüt
Nancy Davidson
Philippe Parreno
General Idea
Vincent Leroy
Me
Otto Piene
Masayoshi Matsumoto
Gordon Matta-Clark
Graham Lee
Lee Bul
Junya Ishigami
Jan Hakon Erichsen
Junya Ishigami
Aliaksei Zholner
Francesc Torres
Kris Martin
Sturtevant

 

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Fiona Tan Tilt, 2002
‘Tilt is a video by Fiona Tan of a toddler strapped into a harness suspended from a cluster of white helium-filled balloons in a room with wooden floorboards. The gurgling toddler floats gently into the air before descending to the ground, the little feet scrabbling for traction before gently ascending again.’

 

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Jeppe Hein Some see a Balloon, some see a Wish, 2021
Glass fiber reinforced plastic, chrome laquer (dark green, light blue), magnet, string

 

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Jeanne Quinn A Thousand Tiny Deaths (2009)
For A Thousand Tiny Deaths, Jeanne Quinn inflated approximately 50 balloons inside black vases and then suspended them from the ceiling. As the balloons slowly deflated, the vases dropped, crashing into pieces on a platform below.

 

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COOP HIMMELB(L)AU City Soccer, 1971
‘COOP HIMMELB(L)AU was founded by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, and Michael Holzer in Vienna, Austria, in 1968, and is active in architecture, urban planning, design, and art. In the project City Soccer in 1971, the practice released four giant inflatable footballs onto the streets of Vienna to bring a sense of creative liberation to the streets.’

 

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Poppy Jane Lee Bed Skewer, 2016
plastic rafts, air, metal poles

 

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Martin Creed Half the air in a given space (1998 – 2017)
A celebrated suite of pieces made with balloons, the monochromatic and formless sea of spheres offers visitors an opportunity to navigate the work from within—while also challenging them to consider that the location of art can be found somewhere between physical experience and sculptural construct.

 

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Balloon Factory Japan Premium Beef (2012)
Balloon Factory was invited by Sight Unseen to design a window installation for Japan Premium Beef as part of the NoHo Design District, a recurring gathering of off-site design events during the annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York each year. For Japan Premium Beef, a selection of uninflated balloons (shaped like sausages and different cuts of steak: porterhouse, flank, filet mignon, and T-bone) were displayed on butcher trays, framed by an installation of hanging sausage balloon links. This iteration carries a strong reference to the intricate fake food prevalent in restaurant windows in Japan. A limited edition run of 40 meat balloons were made available for sale at the BF web shop.

 

____________
Todd Robinson Oooh… (2014)
Colorful, squishy {yet solid?}, lazy-looking balloons made of hydrocal, polyester filler, and paint.

 

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Bina Baitel Inflatable Fountain, 2022
‘With Inflatable fountain, Bina Baitel merges the industrial universe of inflatable products with the architectural language of urban fountains. In between an industrial production and a traditional structure, a series of superimposed buoys define the shape of a monumental fountain.’

 

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Lee Boroson Uplift (2014)
Uplift comprises an array of inflatable fabric forms molded into stalactites to evoke the architecture of the underworld, providing room for contemplation in a dark, primordial chamber.

 

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Cheryl Pope Up Against (2010)
One of Cheryl Pope’s performances, Up against, involves the popping of water-filled balloons hanging from the ceiling with only her head. Upon witnessing the performance I realized that it is also an inner struggle that Cheryl is coming to terms with. She explains this as “clearing the air.”

 

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Dan Steinhilber Untitled (2005)
A manly action-painting made from knotted balloons. (As they deflate over days, this pseudo-Jackson Pollock goes limp.)

 

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Object Design League Balloon Factory (2012)
Balloons are familiar and loved objects, but few people realize that with some amateur kitchen chemistry techniques, the process for manufacturing them can be replicated on a small scale. Product designers Caroline Linder, Lisa Smith, Michael Savona, Thomas Moran, and Steven Haulenbeek—all members of design collective Object Design League—aimed to demystify and illustrate each step of this process with their Balloon Factory on-site at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from July 5th through 10th. Freshly-made balloons were available in limited numbers from the MCA Store for the duration of the event.

 

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Tadao Cern Black Balloons (2016)
Born out of Lithuanian architect-cum-artist Tadao Cern’s fixation to connect two balloons and spurred by his “childlike sense of discovery”, the experimentation produced such overwhelming results that he decided to evolve it into a more ambitious project. Using two different gasses, helium and sulfur hexafluoride—the former lighter than air, the other heavier—he managed to create a sculptural equilibrium where two balloons float in space connected with a metallic string in opposition to each other. This motif was then used to create considerably more elaborate configurations, some of which comprised of more than 400 balloons, meticulously arranged with great geometrical precision in rows or grids. Alternatively, they are displayed inside glass tanks where they float without any kind of support, a technique Cern devised especially for the project.

 

______________
Tomas Saraceno On Space Time Foam (2013)
Based on various kinds of knowledge, from quntum physics, art and different kinds of theories of the evolution of the universe, this is the largest inflatable installation EVER made.

 

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Omer Polak and Michal Evyater Blow Dough (2014)
Israeli designers Omer Polak and Michal Evyater1 have created an experimental food lab that gives diners the satisfaction of knowing where everything—right down to the aroma—comes from. Blow Dough lab is a peculiar combination of performance art and catering, during which visitors use custom-made, high performance baking tools to cook crispy bread balloons filled with herbal scents. Polak collaborated with Israeli baker and chef Erez Komorovsky, to “do something new with this chef who knows everything about dough,” Polak says. “It sounds very easy, but if you want to make the dough flexible, you have to really understand it.” Blow Dough works like this: Visitors take a small amount of pre-kneaded dough to individual baking tables, which are each rigged with an industrial blower (typically used by industrial designers for heating and bending plastic) and a small compartment for herbs and vegetables. The “baker” puts a slab of the dough over the herb container and the blower, which emits a blast of 1,000-degree heat. This does three things: bakes the dough, inflates the dough into a balloon of bread, and transfers the herb odors inside the bread, creating an aromatic air pocket. Then they bite into them. “It’s very weird,” Polak says, “because it’s crispy, but when you bite it, it’s nothing, just smells.”

 

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Tim Hawkinson Balloon Self-Portrait (1993)
latex, air

 

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Olivier Grossetête Pont de Singe (2012)
French artist Olivier Grossetête used three enormous helium balloons to float a rope bridge over a lake in Tatton Park, a historic estate in north-west England. Located in the park’s Japanese garden, the structure comprised a long rope bridge made of cedar wood held aloft by three helium-filled balloons. The ends of the bridge were left to trail in the water.

 

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Spencer Finch Sky (Over Coney Island, November 26th, 2004, 12:47pm. Southwest view over the Cyclone.) (2004)
Balloons, helium and string

 

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Tom Hillewaere Valse Sentimentale (2006)
As Massumi states: “There are uses of language that can bring that inadequation between language and experience to the fore in a way that can convey the ‘too much’ of the situation – its charge – in a way that actually fosters new experiences.” Belgian artist Tom Hillewaere exemplifies this unique attempt in his installation Valse Sentimentale. Set to the haunting sound of Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale, interpreted by Clara Rockmore on the Theremin, Hillewaere’s piece offers a white balloon attached to a simple black marker on a string. Surrounded by fans, the balloon oscillates lightly across a large white surface upon which the balloon traces simple lines as it traverses the space.

 

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Brad Adkins Untitled (pink balloon end) (2006)

 

________________
Torafu Architects Water Balloon Room (2014)
torafu architects have designed the ‘water balloon’, a luminaire that has the same visual properties as a single droplet of liquid. small air bubbles fill the glass bulb, resembling tiny particles of carbonation trapped inside. lit by an LED source hidden at its crown, the light that filters through reflects off both the small spheres accumulated inside and the asymmetrical tear shape.

 

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David Colombini Attachment (2014)
Attachment, a poetic machine connected to a website, allows you to send messages, images, or videos into the air through a biodegradable balloon. The basic idea was to take a stand against the current use of “smart” technologies by creating a poetic concept, using current technology that allows us to communicate differently and rediscover expectation, random and the unexpected. The site allows you, by entering your name and e-mail, to send a message and attach a picture, sound, or video. Once your content is validated, the machine prints the message and a code on an  sheet, slips it into a biopolymer cylinder attached to a balloon, which is released into the air. The balloon then travels haphazardly to a potential recipient.

 

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Ahmet Ögüt Castle of Vooruit (2015)
Ögüt takes the socialist history of Ghent as the starting point for The Castle of Vooruit. He concentrates on the Vooruit, the cooperative where the working-class people of Ghent assembled from the end of the nineteenth century until the early 1970s and which ran both a centre for festive occasions and a newspaper. Making reference to ‘Le Chateau des Pyrénées’ (1961) by the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, Ögüt is sending up a gigantic helium balloon in the shape of Magritte’s floating rock, launched near the Vooruit Arts Centre. He is replacing the mysterious castle on top with a replica of the Vooruit building.

 

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Nancy Davidson Cowgirl Dustup (2012)
‘Davidson is a sculptor and video artist known for making larger-than-life inflatable sculptures in an ongoing exploration of American icons and Feminist issues. Cowgirl Dustup offers a humorous, absurdist critique of the American cowgirl depicted in popular culture. With this massive inflatable sculpture, suspended in midair and measuring 21 x 16 x 16 feet, Davidson presents the iconic cowgirl as a spectacle to admire, a tall-tale fantasy of western legend.’

 

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Philippe Parreno Anywhen (2016)
French artist Philippe Parreno’s new work – Anywhen – is the latest large-scale commission in the museum’s Turbine Hall. He describes the work as an ever-changing experience “that plays with time and space”. A shoal of helium-filled fish float about the cavernous space to a surreal soundtrack from overhead speakers. Some of the sounds are piped in live from microphones outside Tate Modern – which raises the prospect of a busker on the South Bank being heard inside the hall.

 

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General Idea Magi© Bullet (1992)
Riffing on Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966), General Idea infiltrated this form, turning its inflatables into the shape of pills and branding them like pharmaceuticals with the group’s name and the work’s title. As balloons do, they gradually lose their helium and begin their slow descent to the ground. The life cycle of these objects is part of the work; as the balloons are displaced to the ground, visitors are encouraged to take one with them, participating in the dissemination of the work beyond the Museum’s walls.

 

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Vincent Leroy Boreal Halo, 2022
‘The massive inflatable ring rotates to the beat of a unique soundtrack, created by Jérôme Echenoz, adding an extra dimension to the experience. The audio background features sounds captured from all over the world, combined with infra-bass, and throbbing vibrations.’

 

________________
Me Ojisora (2014)
No doubt dozens of necks suddenly snapped in a group double-take as residents suddenly realized that’s no moon… it’s the enormous inflated head of one of their neighbors! Give credit to Japanese art trio Me (in collaboration with the Utsunomiya Museum of Art) for the uniquely unusual “Ojisora” project, an artistic effort spanning over two years from conception to realization. Its origin rests with one of the three artists, Haruka Kojin (above, right), who as a junior high school student dreamed of an old man’s grossly enlarged and disembodied head floating over town and country. Upon awakening from her dream, Kojin quickly sketched her recollection and then just as quickly forgot about it. Many years later, she came across her sketch and wondered… was there some way to recreate her dream in real life? After consulting with her two co-artists and with the support of the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Kojin took the first step towards realizing – and sharing on a mass scale – her odd dream from so many years before.

 

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Otto Piene The Proliferation of The Sun (1967)
‘The Proliferation of the Sun, originally conceived in 1967, is a 25-minute multimedia performance, using hundreds of painted slides, sound, and several projectors. Colorful shimmering shapes on hundreds of hand-painted glass slides are projected onto a massive balloon and huge multi-screen array, creating what Piene called a “poetic journey through space.” The visitor is immersed in projections that splay across various surfaces. Piene reminds the viewer of the magic of the projected image, which is even more beguiling when you can immerse yourself in it and become overwhelmed by the scale and light.

 

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Masayoshi Matsumoto various (2015 – 2016)
Japanese artist Masayoshi Matsumoto makes his amazingly detailed balloon animals with no glue or seals – then pops them when he’s done.

 

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Gordon Matta-Clark Sky Hook (Studies for a Balloon Building), 1978
‘In 1978, after his Building Cuts, Gordon Matta-Clark began working on Sky Hooks (Study for a Balloon Building). This project wanted to create a form of vital aerial space attached to buildings without involving the use of urban land and thus avoiding all real estate speculation.’

 

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Junya Ishigami balloon, 2007
‘Junya Ishigami’s “balloon” is a massive reflecting object that floats suspended in the atrium of the museum. Weighing just under a ton, the sculpture, built from light gauge steel trusses and reflective aluminum panels, is filled with an equilibrium of helium that allows it to hover precariously over visitors heads below, and is free from any connections to its surroundings.’

 

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Graham Lee Untitled, 2018
‘Mr. Lee gave up being an electrician after around eight years of doing magic and balloon modelling but it was later that he decided to take his work further. He said: “I was at a magic convention and on a table there was a one-balloon model of a hippo. I tried to figure out how he’d done it and it was then that I got the idea of going further with it so I went to some workshops and lectures and it went from there.’

 

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Lee Bul Willing To Be Vulnerable, 2015-2016
Metalised film, transparent film, blower fan, electronic wiring, 300 x 300 x 1700 cm

 

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Jan Hakon Erichsen Destruction Diary, 2018 –
‘The Norwegian artist is on a mission to destroy every balloon he encounters with an endless array of awkward Rube Goldberg-esque setups.’

 

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Aliaksei Zholner Действующий оргАн из бумаги, 2017
‘Paper engineer Aliaksei Zholner brings his crafty talents to the musical realm with this working paper organ. The tiny organ has 18 functional keys that create tones with the aid of corresponding reeds, and of course a pipe organ can’t function without a steady air flow, a problem Zholner solves with a large balloon.’

 

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Francesc Torres Inflatable Structure Containing Fog, 1969
‘In the mid-sixties, before his work turned towards installation and a critical reflection on power and the collective memory, Francesc Torres made a series of inflatable structures belong in this context. On one occasion, he submitted a bubble full of air that had turned slightly green to the effects of the waves. On another, he filled a large inflatable structure with fog.’

 

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Kris Martin T.Y.F.F.S.H., 2011
‘The art installment is an actual capsized hot air balloon. It is an interactive piece in which viewers can put booties over their shoes and explore the inside of the hot air balloon. Kris Martin created this installment in 2011 and it was intended to transport the viewer into a fantasy from which the viewer could draw their own conclusions on the meaning or possibilities provided by the piece.’

 

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Sturtevant Sex Dolls, 2012
’15 inflatable sex dolls, all but two of them male, with cartoonish printed chest hair and blank bulges between their legs.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** tomk, Hi, Tom! Me too: Zelda’s newest birth comes at my busiest time, urgh. Yes, I bookmarked the link to your piece on ergot. In fact, … Everyone, The amazing writer Thomas Kendall has a new fiction piece up at the ergot. site. Highly recommended. It’s called ‘A Clearing’, and it’s here. Awesome, the arc. I’ll go look for that in my email. Super exciting, thank you. Best of luck getting swiftly to the other side of the joblessness onset. Any interesting prospects or ideals therewith? ** A, Little AC here in Paris too, although I assume they’re preparing for the new world. Yes, I liked Boards of Canada, sure. I … don’t remember when I read ‘Paradoxia’, time wise. I have no qualms whatsoever using online cheats when playing games. I don’t give the slightest shit whether I can beat the bosses. I just want to skip them or get by them so I can keep wandering around. ** Jack Skelley, Jackerino. Squrls, wow. Mum’s the word. If you’re going to go that route, what about Bush Tetras? Steve Shelley’s their drummer now. Exciting shit, buddy. ** Dominik, My pleasure re: the book suggestions, of course. Love can never make things involving refined sugar healthy too often. I’ve been craving a Pop Tart the last couple of days, so maybe I’ll test out love’s powers. Any fun things coming up or having happened this weekend? Love making King Charles’s coronation the most shocking thing anyone in the world has ever seen in their entire lives, G. ** Misanthrope, Write things down. Keep a little calendar/planning chart. I do that. It, you know, helps. I think you’re right about Bernard. Eileen seems to be reading in every city in North America right now. As a workaholic of sorts, your procrastination almost sounds utopian. ** _Black_Acrylic, LKS’s new book is lovely. I don’t know that Sade book. Huh, Tempting. Especially as an audio experience for some reason. Enjoy, if that’s the word. ** Sypha, Wow, Front Line Assembly. I totally forgot about them. You’re on an industrial mission there. You make me want to go listen to à;GRUMH again and see what happens. I’m like the opposite, I originally only played PC games, but then I got a console and was so happy to find a way to do things away from my computer that I only rarely went back. Is the research on medieval history for a writing project? ** Darbs, Hi. I hope your weekend is good too. Well, I don’t know if mine’ll be good yet, so I just hope yours is good whatever mine ends up being. The LA punk scene was pretty small and tight, so you pretty much knew or at least bumped into everybody else regularly. How’s your roommate? I hope you see your best friend. The things you mention don’t seem weird or unnatural to me in the slightest, but I’m fairly weird myself, so … I played the first ‘Animal Crossing’, and I got so addicted to it — like I couldn’t stop playing it even after I finished the through-line — that I had to force myself to stop playing it, and I made a vow never to play an ‘Animal Crossing’ game again. But I’m tempted. Those artists sound interesting, obviously. Did you manage a blast or many blasts over your weekend, I hope, I hope? Love back from me! ** Steve Erickson, I know people here with VPN who claim it works perfectly, but mine doesn’t, at least when streaming is involved, that’s for sure. I don’t know La Tenee, and I just looked and couldn’t a single thing about them. Huh. ** Philip Hopbell, Hey, Philip. ‘The Counterfeiters’ was a huge book for me when I was still a young wanna be novelist. I can imagine his diaries are something, from what I know re: him. I just found out that Guyotat is buried in Paris, and in fact I have tentative plans to go find and visit his grave this weekend. ** alex, Hi, alex. Cool that the book suggestions mattered. I don’t know that Yellow Swans album, no. I’ll check it out. When I put on music while I’m writing, which I haven’t done in quite a while weirdly, I think I listen to the same realm of music that you do. I used to write to Autechre quite a bit for a while. Very inspiring. A sailboat, wow. That’s interesting. So then you’ll sail around in it? That’s a dumb question, I guess. I had a friend in LA with a sailboat, but I get seasick at the tiniest drop of the tiniest hat, so I only went out with him once and borderline vomited the whole time. Fun! ** Travis (fka Cal), Well, yeah, the hopping around. You do have to end up choosing one project as the #1 eventually. Are any of yours especially compelling-meets -doable? I obviously think finishing your novel sounds like a keeper of an idea, but of course I would. ** analrapist, Baseball’s rules are super complicated. They’re multilayered, which is why I’m drawn to it. It’s highly structured and kind of experimental too in a weird way. I’ll look for the SecretBase doc, thanks. Football aka soccer is massive here, of course. And I do like it. I’ve only been to one game live, I don’t know why. No one I know goes to games, although a lot of people I know watch the games onscreen in bars and cafes. Pretty sweet game, yeah. The French (at least) call football ‘the beautiful game’, and I get that. ** Okay. I decided to give you a weekend full of balloons for whatever reason. There you go. See you on Monday.

______________

‘This book made me feel better about life after a frustrating day at work trying to puzzle out some 1970s DIY electrical wiring. so I guess it’s like a little balm against complicated irritants. Among other things (with hat)

‘I said it about Lucy K Shaw’s last book and I’ll say it about this one, too: I think she is writing really clearly about what it’s like to live in these chaotic pandemic years. At least what it’s like for a wise, funny, tender, and thankful kind of person to live during these years. I haven’t been exactly inclined to seek out, you know like “covid writing” as this has all been playing out over 3 years, and I would hate to have anyone read this review and think that’s all this book contains, because it contains a lot of hilarious and heartwarming interrelated items (Aleksandr Petrovsky testimonies, hungover interviews, lots of good running scenes) but i think most people inclined to document have been documenting the pandemic to some degree or another.

‘I discovered Lucy K Shaw’s writing during a sort of uneven emotional period in my life, and reading something that can calm you down and walk with you is just about all you can ask from a book. It’s also always great to read something you think you might need at a given moment and then actually read it and still be able to say, “oh shit, I didn’t know I needed that.” So cheers to the gifts of this book. It has many.’ — Colin

 

Shabby Doll House
Podcast: Low Fi Lit – Lucy K Shaw W/ Hat!
Lucy K Shaw @ goodreads
Lucy K Shaw’s Favorite Books
Buy ‘Woman With Hat’

 

Lucy K Shaw Woman With Hat
Shabby Doll House

‘Intended to be read on public transport or, even better, in bed. A writing and publishing experiment. A low-key manifesto. WOMAN WITH HAT explores what we talk about once we’re reunited.

‘For people of all genders, with or without headwear.’ — SDH

‘As someone who has read all of Lucy K Shaw’s books, this one feels like the most Lucy K Shaw one yet. It feels like Lucy truly writing as Lucy, and not really caring what anyone else thinks beyond the people she wishes to connect with. That enthusiasm and freedom extends to the reader. There were so many conversations in here that made me want to have a conversation with myself about the same topic, or write about it. I also felt inspired to make work that was more free, exciting, closer to the heart of who I truly am, and it made question why I would chase what traditional publishing wants. That all sounds quite serious, so I should add this is a quite funny book as well. Many times throughout I found myself grinning to myself and loling. Yes, Woman with Hat, she is a book that can do it all. The serious, the moving, the ridiculous and funny. Like life, I suppose.’ — Kristen Felicetti

Excerpts

More

Lucy K Shaw reads from, “Woman With Hat”

SHABBY DOLL HOUSE (virtual) WORLD TOUR, THE MOVIE

 

 

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‘It’s difficult to talk with Martin Riker and not feel hopeful. Not so much about the world; both of us are likely too old to presume to know what might come of society, the planet, human beings. But talking with him, and reading his new book, “The Guest Lecture,” lit me up in thrilling ways about all the possibilities still alive — at least for books.

‘Then again, books and life, ideas and the concrete, the imaginative and the practical, are not opposites for Riker or for his protagonist, Abby. “There’s a William Carlos Williams quote,” says Riker, speaking from his home in St. Louis, where he teaches writing at Washington University. “Something to the effect of, ‘Only the imagination can save us’. … As a young man, I wanted to tattoo it on my arm. But I decided that it needs to mean something practical. It can’t mean something just idealistic.”

‘Riker has been walking that line for some time; few projects combine the imaginative and the practical as well as Dorothy, the micro-publishing house he runs with his wife, novelist Danielle Dutton. His first novel, “Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return,” had a narrator whose consciousness moved helplessly among bodies as he searched for his lost son — imagine an existentialist “Quantum Leap.” But it’s in “The Guest Lecture,” his second novel, that the dialectic between fantasy and figures, consciousness and bodies, takes its most affecting form.

‘Abby is an economist, because in college a boy made fun of her for not being practical. But she is also an academic, because her affinity for the practical went only so far. Also a wife and mother (practical or idealistic?), she’s recently been denied tenure. And she has been invited to an unnamed institution to give a lecture on John Maynard Keynes. “He embodies someone who has huge ideas,” says Riker. “Really strange ideas, and actually was incredibly doggedly focused on making them practical.”’ — Lynn Steger Strong

 

Martin Riker Site
A Young Academic Ponders Her Failures in an Insomniatic Haze
Cultivating the Arts of Life in “The Guest Lecture”
The Life of the Mind
Buy ‘The Guest Lecture’

 

Martin Riker The Guest Lecture
Grove Atlantic

‘In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.

‘Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.

‘With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.’ — Grove Atlantic

Excerpt
from LitHub

Evelyn is at a drum kit and I’m behind a marimba holding the mallets in a throat-choking grip that I know, from having seen actual marimba players, isn’t even close. She’s laying down a rhythm that feels rock-steady at first, like a rhymed couplet, like a stanza of Dr. Seuss, but that occasionally breaks time entirely, as if too much rhythm was accidentally poured into that one particular measure and a few beats of it spilled out on the ground. We’re playing. It feels loose. Chaotic, but in control. And we’re talking, too, not while we’re playing, but whenever we stop.

It’s men who write music history, she’s saying, and history is just whatever gets written, which is why history always misses so much of what’s going on.

*

Pamela Z sings and records her voice and loops and changes it in real time, recording her voice to immediately accompany herself still singing.

Ellen Fullman plays on strings that stretch across a room, strings so long that if you pluck them the sound is lower than the human ear can hear. She puts on sneakers and walks up and down, running her fingers along their length to make the strings resonate. Walking music. We saw her do it live. No doubt she’s out in the world doing it somewhere still.

Laurie Anderson’s computerized voice: funny and serious and perplexing and approachable and very ’80s sounding.

Charlotte Moorman playing cello in a bra made out of little TV sets.

Cathy Berberian.

Diamanda Galás.

Music as performance art.

In the arty “performance art” sense of performance art.

Obviously, music is a performance art.

John Cage’s essays and lectures were exciting to read, while his compositions were half the time hauntingly beautiful and the other half just sort of meh.
Björk I’d listened to in high school. Björk I already loved. Pauline Oliveros is probably the most famous twentieth-century avant-garde woman composer, though I personally preferred listening to that French woman whose name I’m not remembering, but whose music sounded, to me anyway, very similar, but a little bit better.

Evelyn explaining Oliveros’s concept of “deep listening,” which she was reading about at the time.

Me wondering out loud whether the reason Oliveros was more famous than the French composer I liked so much was because Oliveros coined this term, “deep listening,” and the most famous person in any situation is whoever coins a term.
Evelyn taking this question to mean that I wasn’t that interested in Oliveros or “deep listening,” which wasn’t at all what I was saying. Either she’d misread my whimsy, or else I’d struck a nerve. That happened sometimes. For all her generosity of spirit, she also had nerves, and I was occasionally surprised by what struck them.

Women in labs composing on tape reels.

Daphne Oram.

Laurie Spiegel.

Ambient, minimalist, electronic.

Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She wrote the theme to Doctor Who, as well as a lot of other electronic music just about as creepy sounding as the theme to Doctor Who.

Mary Jane Leach.

Annea Lockwood.

Once I get started, it all flows out.

Alice Coltrane, especially those recordings that are just bass and harp. The incredible variety of musical experiences that can be created with just a bass and a harp.

And Christina Kubisch, who composed a piece that sounds like what a cat hears when it dreams.

Susie Ibarra.

Evelyn’s hero Yoshimi P-We.

Harry Partch and his cloud bells, his giant marimbas like something out of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Meredith Monk and the idea that music and dance have always been spiritual. That music can make spirituality a contemporary experience in a way that religion often fails to.

How a friendship can persist, in memory, as little more than a list of musicians and titles, because a list of music is a record of experience, of the sound-experience of a place and time.

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Martin Riker – The Guest Lecture

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker w/ CJ Reads

 

 

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MM) This is your second book and your second book to incorporate dolls in a creative way. Your debut, Little Hollywood, entirely paper doll sketches and scripts to be performed, an incomparable format–like POLO–thoughtfully explores quite sad and profound situations. Do you think of dolls as somewhat central to your work? In a sense, all characters in a book are pliant like dolls, to be wrestled and massaged by the author into position, so I’m thinking on a meta-level it makes sense. Does it? How do dolls influence you? Could you elaborate for the uninitiated what POLO means?

JW) POLO stands for ‘Pants Off Legs Open’ – it’s a term from my childhood in rural Leicestershire. Polos are the name of a well-known breath-mint in the UK. So you could ask people if they wanted to have sex discreetly – “Do you want a polo?”. The combination of the highly sexualised suggestion, with the childlike slang-term or secret code, represents the experience of the children in the novella.

In regard to the use of dolls in both Little Hollywood and POLO – I never actually thought about it as a theme in my work until you asked. I guess on reflection, dolls are our first avatars. And both Little Hollywood and POLO look at ideas of identity and role playing. But yes, maybe something about control and compliance, too. Characters in a book, actors in a film, children in an adult setting – all have to comply and are all formed by something greater than themselves. The dolls are a vessel to be filled by their controller. There is a scene in which the protagonist takes his Barbie doll to the graveyard and talks about her hollow head getting possessed by the spirits of the dead. This is a metaphor for what the older boys are doing to the protagonist.

 

Jinnwoo @ Instagram
Jinnwoo @ Twitter
Interview w/ Jinnwoo
Jinnwoo @ goodreads
Buy ‘Polo’

 

Jinnwoo POLO
Expat Press

‘We’re all dolls that crack. Very rarely is a book so unabashed about obsession and growing pains. The boundaries of the prurient are dysregulated. Jinnwoo’s POLO is a stark, spartan narrative of extracorporeal longing, of alienation from the self. It taps into something intimate and molten that boils you alive. A courageous, droll confrontation of sexual adventure and abuse, unafraid of idiosyncrasy or obscenity. It is tender and punchy, featuring an unforgettable, commanding voice teeming with violent rage curling into wisdom. There are no easy categories, no premeditated salves, just reality in all its unforgiving clarity and ambivalence. An unbridled joy, a small book as silver bullet forged to penetrate and detonate. There is so much space to grow from these savage and sobering lines. Its wit and brevity belies a warm depth and astute x-ray of its subjects. POLO explores a codependent relationship like no other novella has, implicating you astride their twin-like interplay like a hard habit. Its impression is not easily shook off. Its meditation on deviance is profoundly once-in-a-lifetime.’ — Expat

Excerpts

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POLO trailer

You Should Be Feeling This Elliott

 

 

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‘Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is familiar to me. I grew up ten minutes from Walden Pond—we all called it Lake Walden. My family had gone swimming there even before I was born. Walden had a great dock that went way out into the water you could dive and cannonball off of and make a big mess. We were well aware of “the Cambridge people” with their funny hats trotting quietly on the trail on the right to where the hermit had been. There was nothing there now I was told. I went to college later in Boston and reading Walden was the occasion for me of beginning to swim in another pond. The guy who had lived in the woods was engaged in deep measurement. He described the pond as an eye that reflected everything there was. He told you how deep it was and he told in exacting terms what he ate and how much. His practice segued nicely with the world I was living in, a world of Catholicism (a.k.a. counting) and control. Thoreau liked Catholicism, well what he liked was Catholic churches and their intention of creating awe. What he didn’t like was God. He was a bit of a Buddhist: “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin,” he explained. He was a performance artist as well. Everyone knows Thoreau now, more than his teacher, Emerson and people love to chuckle knowingly that he went home for lunch and brought his laundry etc. He lived a mile away, so why not. And though Thoreau practiced what screams to me as a gay man’s plan to live deliberately and “alone” he was an entertaining and genial man, and many people stopped by, he and his little house were a bit of a local spectacle and David Henry became Henry David because he liked the sound and sometimes it was crickets and birds and sometimes it was humans talking in his hut, in the vicinity of the pond. And that train. The passenger train to Boston ran right by his hut so he witnessed the beginning of the Anthropocene firsthand. He refused to pay his taxes to support America’s war on Mexico and its commitment right before the Civil War to keeping the status quo of being a slaveholding nation. He had met with and knew John Brown before Harpers Ferry and he mourned his death by throwing his own life in a multitude of ways against the weightiness of that crime.

‘Around the time of the millennium I lived on Cape Cod in Provincetown, in my girlfriend’s house, and I was glad to be back in my native state after twenty years in New York. Provincetown was the part of uptight Massachusetts I could bear because of the art and the landscape and the queerness. I began to devour everything I could about this new place that was also old in my life. I read that Thoreau had taken this walk from Eastham which is roughly the elbow of the cape, to the wrist which is Truro, and finally to the fist or the hand which is Provincetown, the pointing finger, where I lived. I began assailing everyone I wrote for at the time which was mainly Art in America and the Voice to let me write a piece about this walk, but no dice. It was the corny kind of piece that Cape Cod magazines ran from time to time or the Times in their leisure section—it was something nice. Thoreau was not nice and I went ahead and did the walk anyhow.’ — Eileen Myles

 

Eileen Myles Site
For Poet Eileen Myles, the Best Writers Retreat Is the Laundromat
Eileen Myles on Discovering the Poetic Core of Everyday Life
Eileen Myles @ Instagram
Buy ‘a “Working Life”‘

 

Eileen Myles a ‘Working Life’
Grove Atlantic

‘The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.

‘a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.

‘With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.’ — Grove Atlantic

Excerpt

Put My House

Put my house
inside the
boat

Can we do
that

put my dog
inside
of your
dog

put these birds
inside of
yours

put my ocean

put your ocean
all over
my mountains

put my mountains
in there

put my dog
in yours

my dog walk
is safe
inside your
dog walk

let me
eat inside
you. Let

me eat
your food

let me eat
your house

put your house
inside my
dog

put your dog
on my
boat

naturalize

put my heart
in yours

put my mouth
on your
mouth

put my hair
in yours

let me breathe
inside you

let me smell

your guts

put your boat
in my eye

let me eat
your friends

put these hours
inside your
hours

eat this bird
cheep

eat my
dog’s
foot

eat that ocean

run to him
o’er the
o-o-cean

run to them
hear these
birds cheap

fly to me
eat my foot

put my house
inside yours
in your
mind think
me fly

this fly
me home
love me
now

forget your phone
eat my heart

run to him
o’er the o-o-cean

tweet tweet
tweet

dog growl

cluck

click

put my house

right in

there. Yeah

that’s me
lookin out

the window

look at

me

bark bark
bark

put your heart
inside

that bark

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Eileen Myles | a “Working Life”

An Evening with Eileen Myles (a “Working Life”) hosted by Heather Milne

 

 

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‘Basin begins with a drowning. Figure, the narrator, is rescued from the water by an unhinged paramilitary named Aslan. From near death, he is heaved back into the shattered and bleak world of Scott McCulloch’s debut novel. It is Figure’s subsequent journey along the coast—through villages, outposts, and barren steppe—that forms the story’s action. War forces him from one flooded settlement to another. The survivors he meets share what little they have: their food, their liquor, their opioids, their soiled mattresses, their bodies.

‘The war is based on the historical conflicts suffered by countries around the Black Sea basin but McCulloch avoids details that would explicitly situate the story. Little clues (in the flora and vernacular) could as easily place it in a far-future Australia, with the continent having been split by an inland sea. More important than the setting is the feeling of doom that pervades this world: a sense of futility that has most characters succumbing to narcotic lassitude or nihilistic euphoria, embracing destruction like vandals in a condemned building.

‘In the face of apocalypse, language fails us. We can bear witness to the event, but we cannot clothe it in poetry. At one point, Figure is ‘struck by how long it is since I’ve canalised thoughts into anything other than the act taking place, into what’s already happening.’ This failure of language is the Beckettian fascination at the heart of Basin (there’s a reference to Molloy’s stone-sucking scene at one point). Figure hears conversations in foreign tongues, unrecognised words, song lyrics he cannot understand. Soldiers and drug dealers rhapsodise to him half-intelligibly. War creates exiles whose shared language is horror.

‘Basin is an uncompromising vision of war and death. As such, brief flights of lyricality, glimmers of hope, have enormous significance. The book’s most jubilant scene is the birth of a donkey foal when, amidst the mucus and placenta, we see the young creature’s ‘black pupils emerge and shine.’ But moments like this one are fugitives too, and the poetry of Basin drowns in its darkness.’ — Bryant Apolonio

 

‘Basin’ @ goodreads
‘Letter from Tehran’
‘And now we are no longer slaves’: notes on Eden Eden Eden at fifty, by Scott McCulloch.
Audio: Scott McCulloch [Selectors Block] [29.04.2020]
Buy ‘Basin’

 

Scott McCulloch Basin: A Novel
Black Inc.

‘A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis.

‘Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn – a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.’ — Black Inc.

Excerpt

Rain. Faint ringing in the ears. Aslan takes a glug of fruit vodka, sticks his head out the window and spits the spirit onto the windshield and turns on the wipers. Jagged slopes of clay pass in the van window. Turnips are piled up in a vacant lot that looks as though it was excavated for no reason. Perhaps meant to be a block of apartments, or a car park, perhaps even a hole to inhume a thousand hasty pogroms. As I cross this state of conflict I am torn between poetry and reality. Such thoughts and ideations are reified in the terrain itself – it’s as if the land is condemned to destabilisation, to amnesia – all the more embellished when trawling through such a landscape with a wayward seer such as Aslan, moving forward with the pulse of sheer libido, the muscle of mindless sex, dementia.

We stop at a public fountain for water. A woman wearing a white skullcap bobbypinned to her thick black hair sits by the tap with soft drinks and watermelons in the cold trough. On a wooden table draped with a floral plastic covering, she cuts out pieces of the melon with a hunting knife and hands it to us. Aslan downs a few slices, then runs the wet rind up and down his tanned arms. I bite into the melon and watch a beetle crawl in the dirt; its brown casing turning green in the light.

The woman whistles to a younger man, presumably her son or relative, sitting in the shade of a gum tree. He wears a pair of runners with bits of metal glued to the tips of the toes. He motions over to a rusted sheet of metal by the hut, the scrap of an old car bonnet, and proceeds to tap-dance with his heels clicking and the tips of his shoes hitting the metal, tapping and scraping, in triplets and shuffles, clapping his hands to the rhythm of the shoes, inviting us to clap-along, and to the pulse of the tapping shoes and the claps he starts a yodel: a high shrill holler at first then shifting up and down, from castrato to a voice down within his bowels, back and forth, hitting the tin with gusto, oscillating between yelps and groans from deep inside his body electric. The fever of the dance meets the steam in the air. Aslan barely takes notice, squats by the tap and douses his handkerchief in the cold water and wipes his neck and scalp. The whole encounter seems to irritate him for some reason. Perhaps I’ve overstayed my welcome. How long have I been here for now?

We get back into the van. Aslan keeps driving, paying more attention to the cornfields and coastline outside rather than the road. Rambling, he huffs from one point to the next, half-struggling to spit the words out :

—– this terrain is a drawn-out fit, a seizure of nightmare and purchase. The tropics already make your head swell as is, and now the jungle has outgrown the city. I always thought it’d be the other way around. Downtown’s filled with them fags and pigs and I see the haunted spirits, I see the Ugly all around them

—– just a busker after some extra money, no?

I interject, but Aslan carries on, barely opening his mouth, appearing as a ventriloquist for an instant :

—– even the statues sweat in this silver hell. You can see their stone hearts oxidising on their lapels and down their trenchcoats. I used to own time here! The outside outside of time. Sexual offal held up in a net and dangling from the heavens and the grace of God insh’Allah the only way out is to die. Too late! I’m too late sticking around here pretending to already be born. Pretending to move in a room. Despite everything. My feet don’t fit my shoes. I had to use my heel flap to surgeon my cheeks. Old Cossack technique. My hollow absent cheeks … Good tidings good sir! See! See all absent faces. Absent faces in a market or park or in battle. Speaking the nothing beneath my heel. Except for the worms and larvae and eggs all energy-drinked up to the arse and outliving all of us. Good tidings! Static face absent of earthworm. Gold snatch in my cups. Give it to me. Give me snatch in a cup on a revolving table. Annexation. Cunts. Roulette! National Roulette! Global Roulette! O Straitjacket-suit jacket; sky-the-limit guarantee. O Booze, the only weapon to animate the mental State. This green and silver expanse. Annexed. Swollen fingers grappling for a pair of swaying hips in the Great Prostitution. How sincere these night cretins and hustlers – how real this slice of the human race – these merchants of the body purchase. See. Look! Look at them, that one buzzed to a 3, walking lopsided like an accordion on legs, ready to get stretched up and fingered. And there, that other one, pancake tits and a fucked-out head. If only I could wipe my debts with time in sex. I can smell it off the trees. Such a soft hair, such a lovely soft hair. Like a child’s. When I was a child my sister would cut my hair and put it in a beaver’s hole. I smell it off the trees on a coast of retarded white slaves dredging the sand for snatch. People are simply too stupid for freedom. It makes them sterile. They simply don’t want it. Same goes with you flashboy. You’re deaf. You’re not even here. I yanked you out of the sea and nursed and bathed and clothed you and still no consequence, no conviction. Holy Mother of God and Babha deliver us from Evil, insh’Allah. The System’s all fucked polluted. Fallout, people keep using the word fallout, as if this is all something new. The world we know is a product of hatred, but its extinction shall be the work of love…

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*

p.s. Hey. ** A, Hi. I’ll try the 1975, but I’m kind of more into noise these days. No, Courtney Love didn’t request me, I was assigned. In fact when I showed up in Seattle she told she’d read ‘Frisk’ to check me out, and she was really shocked by it. I don’t know Summer/Heat. Wait you mean the season. I thought that was a bad, ha ha. No, I hate summer and heat like the plague. I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest, sure. Paris didn’t used to get very hot in the summers, but thanks to climate change it roasts for a week or three every year now. ** Jack Skelley, Nice: rain. It’s raining here too, but that’s pretty de rigour. Yay and no surprise about Eileen’s greatness, and, hey, look up, .. coincidence. Oh, great, I’ll stalk my mailbox for ‘FoKA’. Slurp, etc. If there’s any radness in me, I’ll embrace it. Access yours too. ** analrapist, Hi. Yes, I like baseball. I haven’t followed it hardly at all since I moved over here, but yes. They don’t call it ‘the poet’s sport’ for nothing. Do you? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, I think that’s who I meant. I don’t know what Momomon looks like, oops. Oh, this was the banana chewing gum. I forgot it was sour too. I guess it doesn’t exist anymore since people are selling packs on eBay for $45. There does seem to be a few banana chewing gum types still around. Most of them seem to be imports from the Middle East. I’ll see if love can get me into the local electronics store today. Love pretending it’s ennui, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good, I’ll score it. The Surgeon. Thanks. Glad to hear he’s still chasing it. The ineffable. Thanks, Ben. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m alright, thank you. Cap and gown and the whole classic shebang, cool. Do you walk up onstage and get a rolled up certificate and all of that? Will you throw your cap up in the air? Do people actually do that? I haven’t seen ‘Zigeunerweisen’, but I just wrote it down and I will. I love Assayas’ ‘Irma Vep’. It’s the only film of his I really like. And, yes, amazing ending. And best ever use of Sonic Youth’s music in a film. Nice. I’ll max out my day. Did yours pay off? ** supermario, Hello, Mario. Say hi to Paper Mario for me if you’re not already him. ** Sypha, Honestly, the only Ladytron thing I love is ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’, so I’m probably not a good judge. I think either you or someone commenting on something you wrote on FB said something like ‘at least Skinny Puppy is better than Front 242’, and I agree with that. I think I love all the Zelda games, or like at least. My favorites are probably ‘Windwaker’ and ‘Ocarina’ maybe. ** Misanthrope, CDG still has smoking areas, but they’re only in the international terminals. And they, yeah, stink to high heaven. But hey. Actually LAX has a smoking area in their international terminal, strangely enough. If you come, and I’m here, and if it’s Roland Garros time, it’s a date! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. You can’t get Criterion Channel here unless you have VPN, and, even if you do, it streams so extremely slowly that it’s not worth it. Happy you got a paragraph down. Keep going, duh. Second (technically) new Surgeon LP prop. Okay, I’ll get it maybe even today. I’ll have an audio peek at Jessie Ware. You never know. ** Dom Lyne, Hi. That makes sense: the parallel with music making/mixing. I’m very, very happy with what we filmed. I think it even exceeded my expectations. Good questions about the evolution during editing. It’s so hard to tell until you’re in that trench. My guess is it’ll stay structured as we intended. It’s really just about which shots/angles we use and the scene lengths and things like that. But who knows. I feel very optimistic about it. I’ve never been a family guy, I guess obviously. I kind of removed myself emotionally from them when things were hellish when I was young, and I’ve never been sorry I did. Lovely remembrance of your friend. And delicious too in theory. Love back. ** politekid, Hi, O. It’s just my (lack of) luck that the new Zelda comes out just as I’m about to be swamped full time with editing the film, so I suspect I won’t get to it until it’s already old news. I hope the bookshop was giving away Virilio books for noble reasons. Okay, I would say that was a pretty swell day you had. Better than mine. I tried to write, couldn’t really. I had film related meetings and talks about the messy part (money) that were no fun but were productive at least. I did phoners with friends. I watched a documentary about Tiny Tim that was interesting informationally but nothing much as a film. I went to a store to buy the new issue of The Wire but they didn’t have it yet. Stuff like that. Just stuff, nothing with a crescendo. I’ve heard of Lankum, but I haven’t heard them. Pogues/ Swans hybrid? Weird. Maybe good weird. I’ll hunt. Big up! ** Travis (fka Cal), Hi. Too many creative projects at once doesn’t elicit a ton of sympathy, ha ha. More like congrats. Guitar skills upping. Nice, electric or acoustic? Enjoy Eileen. They’re always great. As is their new book (see: up above). Take care. ** anon01, I think what I always think when I read things like what you wrote, which is basically ‘huh’. ** Right. I managed to read five books I loved over the course of my recent ultra-busy month(s), and there they are for you to check out and consider. I hope you do. See you tomorrow.