Please welcome to the world … Max Restaino Coyote (Amphetamine Sulphate)

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.

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—-“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.)

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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

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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

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SONGS

Cannibal Holocaust (Main Theme) – Riz Ortolani

Hammer Smashed Face – Cannibal Corpse

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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.