Megalopolitan Diary, or A Dash Shaw catchup kit (for you and for me):

I reviewed Dash Shaw's great graphic novel Bodyworld on Sunday—here is some stray Shavian stuff!

I. A link to his IFC series The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century. (The storyboards, and other stories, including one of particular interest to "Dizzyheads," are collected in last year's book of the same title.)

(Via Eric Reynolds)

II. Poster for screening of Stanley Milgram's shocking Obedience:

(Via L.G. Thos.)

III. Douglas Wolk reviews Bodyworld (NYT)—an important point about the layout!:

The first sign that “BodyWorld” doesn’t play by the rules is that the book’s spine is at its top. The overall motion of Shaw’s story becomes a downward scroll rather than a rightward stroll. The climax of that slow 380-page dive is a remarkable sequence toward the end — seven pages devoted to a single gigantic panel that pulls the reader’s perspective downward across the architectural landscape of a future megalopolis, after which the movement of the story bounces back up into the stars. This is a disorienting, distracting funhouse of a book: there are long hallucinatory passages, near-abstract images, drawings overlaid on one another until they’re nearly incomprehensible.

IV. I might have posted this before—trailer to The Ruined Cast:

"The Ruined Cast" / Dash Shaw - demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.

Ouroboros-Fortified Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 15, 2009

I. New York magazine gives the nod to Light Industry proprietors (and, most importantly, Dzyds) Ed and L.G. Thos. — as does Artforum! This pic is from Artforum (that's Thomas and Ed on the left...other dudes are Michael Azerrad and Jeff Krulik):

{{{Heyyy—they'll take it!}}}

II. Defunct parks! Pantoums are from Malaysia!
(Via L.G. Thos.)

III. The Atlantic this month should be retitled "THE DIZZIES"??? Hua has the cover story, "The End of White America?"—two quotes for today:

A) “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby."

B) Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

And Dzyd Ta-Nehisi writes on Michelle Obama:

There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America’s racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you’re looking for common ground, then it’s true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we’re talking about the right one.

III. Have you read enough about Gordon Lish & co. yet? Dzyd Carla weighs in on (former Lish student) Christine Schutt.

IV. Only hyperconnect?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. —Scientific American

V. Hare-o-boros!



And, um....another one.
(Via Erasing)

Son of Table-Talk of P.G. for November 3, 2008

I. New Believer is out—the Art Issue! Hooray!

Lawrence Weschler on/with Robert Irwin and David Hockney; Mark Swartz on ; Sheila Heti interviewing Frank Stella; Morgan Meis on the art of the clubhouse; Joshua Cohen on a fake Caravaggio; Michael Marcinkowski on Cavemen (!!!?!?!?!?!?!); epic Hillary Chute interview with Lynda Barry; Jonathan Taylor on the third Twin Tower...in Tulsa; much, much more!







II. The NYT goes to the Bowery for the return of the Homeless Museum:

He said Albert pointed to a pumpkin that was keeping a stack of letters from blowing away and told him, “Twenty-seven years ago I could have drawn this perfectly.”

(Read all of Samantha Topol's Believer piece on the HoMu, from Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007 issue here.)

III. A Flickr set of spirit photography (via L.G. Thos.)

IV. Dizzies Name of the Year™: Ninth place N.Y. marathon women's finalist Dire Tune.

V. Dizzies Lede of the Day (trademark pending):

It’s like being named the outstanding British soldier of 1776.
The trade publication American Banker unveiled its Banker of the Year award last week: It went to Kenneth D. Lewis, chief of Bank of America.
—Stephanie Clifford, NYT

Crime A User's Manual

From Linksmeister General Thomas—this is playing on Monday at Film Forum:

SÉRIE NOIRE

(1979, Alain Corneau) Slang-slinging salesman Patrick Dewaere murders the aunt of his girlfriend (Jean-Louis’s doomed daughter, Marie Trintignant) to settle those pesky debts, but then itchily open-palmed Bernard Blier seems to know all too much about it. Adapted from Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman by experimental novelist Georges Perec in a conversational style that mingles verlan (back slang), newly-liberated profanity, bits of English, and elements of almost too-classy French. Approx. 110 min.

Jim Thompson + Georges Perec?!

Bruce Conner, RIP

Linksmeister General Thomas sends us two short films—Bruce Conner's Devo video (for "Mongoloid")—



—and Roger Beebe's recent BC tribute, featuring Toni Basil (as she appeared in Breakaway).

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More Dischiana:

The NYT obit, with a wide range of quotes (Norman Rush, Dana Gioia...): "He wrote a series of poems on grammar, for which he was a stickler, including one on auxiliary verbs."

Other Ed's appreciation on the New York site: "[Philip K.] Dick suggested [to the F.B.I.] that [Disch's novel Camp Concentration] contained coded information 'to be read by the right people here and there.' "

William Gibson: "On Wings Of Song, as I've said elsewhere, and more than once, is one of the great neglected masterpieces of late 20th-century science fiction."

I always liked this Disch blurb of the work of Harry Mathews (anyone know the original source?): "I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing—John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon—but none so strong as this, none that bear so clearly and deliciously the tang of spring."

And more links here.

Son of Table-Talk of P.G. for June 12, 2008

Beantown and environs: I'll be reading tonight at Newtonville Books, 7 p.m.!

(Thanks to all who came out last night for the Happy Ending reading!)

Next week: West Coast!
Week after that: BROOKLYN!
More info: here.

* * *

L.G. Thomas directs us to the University of Delaware's Library of Literary Forgery, featuring, among others, Frederick Prokosch and George Psalmanazar:

Born in the South of France, sometime between 1679 and 1684, Psalmanazar never revealed his birth name and allegedly adopted his pseudonym from the Old Testament figure Shalmaneser, King of Assyria. He traveled to Germany, took on the persona of an uncivilized Japanese--who spoke fluent Latin--and joined a regiment in the service of the Dutch. Psalmanazar recounted colorful stories of his past life to his fellow soldiers and when his regiment was posted to Sluys, in the Southwest region of the Netherlands, Psalmanazar came to the attention of the Rev. Alexander Innes, who served as chaplain to a Scottish regiment. Intrigued by Psalmanazar's wild claims, Innes soon discovered Psalmanazar's fraud--purportedly by asking him to translate a passage from Cicero into Japanese. Once he discovered the fraud, however, Innes became Psalamanazar's confederate, seeing in him a means to better his own fortune....

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Line of the week: "My new house is an unintentional Gordon Matta-Clark project." —Selfdivider

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 8, 2008

I. Two duos:

A) Richard Brautigan and Jack Spicer (to whom RB dedicated Trout Fishing in America)
B) Rethinking Edmund Wilson on H.P. Lovecraft

II. Dzyd Thomas doesn't like the reviewerish phrase "achingly beautiful":

It's like, really? Achingly? Did you quiver? It's right up there with "intensely personal."

To which I'll add: "brutally honest"!

III. Dzyd/Pretty Standard cross-promotional contest! Here's how to play:

A) Take a favorite group's name.
B) "Translate" it to the late 19th century or the Stone Age.

Thus "TV on the Radio" becomes "Phonograph on the Wireless"!

IV. Dzyd Jordan on Rudy Burckhardt, at the Poetry Foundation site. Favorite bit:

Pictures might be worth a thousand words, but Burckhardt’s photographs are happy with just 14 lines. Each has the characteristic turn—the change of direction and perspective somewhere around line 8 or 9—that transforms a short rhymed poem into a sonnet. In one, a parking lot breaks off at a trash-covered hill leading down to dirt and railroad tracks scattered with tires. In another, a stooped crone, wearing a hat with a giant bow, is carrying a parcel in the crook of her arm; she looks out at the viewer from in front of a billboard featuring the enormous face of a young woman, eyes cast upward. His nudes, too, show wit—one shows a woman reclining face down, a bunch of bananas on her back.

(Also check out the great, evocative photos.)

Dizzies Press Release: 'Transitional Objects' and 'Regarding Jeff's People'

Dizzyheads Ed and Thomas will be smarting things up beginning today:


MEDIUM COOL
ART IN GENERAL'S 10th ANNUAL VIDEO MARATHON
January 10-12, 2008
Sixth Floor Galleries
Art in General
79 Walker Street
New York NY 10013
tel. 212 219 0473
www.artingeneral.org
info@artingeneral.org

Thursday January 10, 6.30-8.00pm
Regarding Jeff's People, lecture by Ed Halter
This lecture by writer and curator Ed Halter takes its starting point from the work of Washington, DC-based Jeff Krulik, maker of the legendary video Heavy Metal Parking Lot. In his talk, Halter addresses the utopian hopes and mundane realities of public access television, the question of fandom and subjectivity, underground VHS bootlegging as proto-file-sharing, criticism of art and comedy, and the challenge of defining the term "artist", and in particular, "video artist".

As always, The Dizzies has the "insider scoop": Ed reveals, "I think it may be the first talk ever to quote both the writings of John Dewey and some dude who was a roadie for Redd Kross..."

***

ONGOING IN THE GALLERIES
Thursday January 10, 6.00- 9.00, - Friday & Saturday, January 11 & 12, 12.00- 6.00pm
Transitional Objects, curated by Thomas Beard

The screening Transitional Objects looks back on the past decade of electronic art as a way of thinking about a medium that has remained in flux—politically, aesthetically, and technologically—since its inception. Whether the subject is dime store psychics or the return of the repressed, new loves or old regimes, all works raise the question: where is video going? Artists include Bobby Abate, William E. Jones, Eileen Maxson, Jennifer Montgomery, Michael Robinson, Phil Solomon, and Jennet Thomas.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, September 25—how is it the last week of September?!

Friend Leland sends in this new bit of one-word poetry, "Lion-eating poet in the stone den," to give "Buffalo buffalo..." a run for its money...New Psychic Envelopes activity—no, not the mega-single "Berlin Wall," but a double cover of Team Knucklehead and some unknown band out of Liverpool!...Finally saw Once, and I concur with Atkinson and the Termites—loved this movie! Termite Matt points out that a version of "Falling Slowly" that stars Glen Hansard (of the Frames) and Marketa Irglova played on The Tonight Show "doesn't have the same heat, the same exhilarating release of energy as the version in Once." The song gets embedded in your head—I was humming it as I walked home—and I think part of the reason is the very canny way it's presented in the film: We watch and listen as Hansard teaches the song to Irglova (they are nameless in the movie), at the back of the music store where she sometimes goes to practice piano; he sings out the parts for her before he starts playing the song proper, and this makes our encounter with the song as fresh as hers (as theirs, really, since this is the first time they've played it together)—we're learning it at the same time...Once opens on Hansard playing Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun"; here's footage of him singing VM's "Astral Weeks"...Dizzyhead L. muses on post-apocalyptic lit—and film—and TV—and music...Dizzyhead Thomas has a blog..."Things I Learned in 2002," a short prose piece by Dizzyhead/Psychic E. chanteuse Sarah is the basis for this terrific short film...She looks Asian!...I have a Dizzyhead meme/contest in the works...STAY TUNED...

Bourne free

Quote of the day—of the year?—from Dizzyhead Thomas:

"Did you think 'And it will take me anywhere' seemed too hackneyed? I am obsessed to accelerate and simplify every phrase I set down."

—Marianne Moore, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

These days I am obsessed not only with filtering out cliché ("filtering out cliché"—that's not bad, not cliché!) but also splitting apart any too-cosy adverb-verb or adverb-adjective combos. Where does it end? What is the point?

* * *

Dizzyhead Benno's reviewing films over at L Magazine—check out his take on The Bourne Ultimatum. This line cracked me up: "Not to get all André Bazin on [director Paul Grengrass's] ass, but since when is editing a film to within an inch of its life considered the summit of mimesis?"

(Which reminds me, the headline for this fascinating piece on the Robert Ludlum thriller-writing franchise should have been "Bourne Again"!)

* * *

Molls asks: "What global not-for-profit will I find petty fault with tomorrow? Come back and see!"

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UPDATE: Dizzyhead Alex on "Poetry in Motion."