“Apo-o-o”
From the Otachikpokpo release
Fouled Discharges From The Fatted Head
By Peter Baker and Katie Rogers
Courtesy of The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump has railed against undocumented immigrants in recent days, branding many of them “murderers and thieves” who want to “infest our country.” Not long ago, he referred to them as “animals,” although he insisted he meant only those who join a violent gang.
The president’s unpresidential language has become the standard for some on his team. This week his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, made a mocking noise, “womp womp,” when a liberal strategist raised the case of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome separated from her parents at the border.
Arctic Monkeys’ Bowie-esque “Star Treatment”
Death By Streaming: Is Cult Cinema At An End?
by Judy Berman
Courtesy of The Baffler
The defining cult film of the Twenty-First Century is neither a mirror held up to nature or a hammer used to shape reality. The Room, released in 2003, is like a ninety-nine-minute episode of The Real World as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of no one. It is an incoherent broadside against evil women (or all women) and a backwards vindication of all-American male breadwinners who buy their girls roses and befriend at-risk teens. It’s a tragedy not just because it ends with a suicide, but also because sitting through it requires a robust Dionysian death drive. The Room is so bad that when you point out its idiocy, the idiocy of stating the obvious bounces back and sticks to you. [Read more…]
Old-Timey Brilliance From Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s Silvery “Fountains of Good Fortune”
Electro-Psychedelia From Dirty Art Club: “Queen Persephone”
on Soulspazm
Cash And Ass In Anderson .Paak’s “Bubblin”
From the new release, Bubblin
Directed by Calmatic
Childish Gambino Takes Aim In “This Is America”
on RCA
New Work From Young Fathers: “Wow”
Cultural Processes: A Quantum Approach
An Interview with Artist and Theorist Johanna Drucker
by Broc Rossell
Johanna Drucker’s newly published work, The General Theory of Social Relativity, addresses the fundamental question of how we are to understand the forces at work in the social world, and presents a radically innovative framework for thinking about social processes. A century ago theories of quantum physics and general relativity exposed the limits of Newton’s classical, mechanical, approach to explaining the forces at work in the physical world. But the social sciences, including critical aesthetics rooted in 19th century political theory, remain caught in a mechanistic paradigm. Drucker’s formulation offers a non-mechanistic approach to the understanding workings of the social world and the affective forces at work in non-linear politics and aesthetics.* Broc Rossell, publisher of The Elephants, spoke with author Johanna Drucker in Vancouver and Los Angeles last month regarding her new book with The Elephants, The General Theory of Social Relativity. [Read more…]
David Bowie’s Glorious “Sweet Thing / Candidate”
In tandem with Angelica Villa’s review of the wonderful Brooklyn Museum exhibition, David Bowie is, here is a dark suite to set a backroom mood. The exhibition is by no means dark, but Bowie had that lovely netherworld strain which, for those predisposed to the condition, felt viral and thereby one with all high occasions. Sonic theater at its most operatic and sublime:
Old-School And, Yes, Funky New Work From Parliament
“I’m Gon’ Make U Sick O’Me”
Feat. Scarface and Mudbone
Connan Mockasin’s “Forever Dolphin Love”
The Erol Alkan Rework
From the Reworks Volume 1 release
on Phantasy Sound
New Work From Marcus Marr: “Familiar Five”
Wajatta’s Infectious “Synchronize”
From their new release Casual High Technology
John Cameron Mitchell’s Timid How To Talk To Girls At Parties
In 2001, John Cameron Mitchell roared onto the film scene like a bat out of hell with Hedwig And The Angry Inch. Based on his daring Off-Broadway show, this outrageous rock musical was celebrated for its poignant tale of self-love and the dynamic spectacle of its sensational song numbers. Remarkably, Mitchell brought the experience of the live show into the movie theater, creating a sense of enchanting spontaneity that transformed the audiences who saw it. And that included me. [Read more…]
New Work From Young Fathers: “Fee Fi”
Roger Ballen & Die Antwoord’s “I Fink U Freeky”
Directed by Roger Ballen & NINJA
Roger Ballen’s Visceral & Phantasmagorical Outland
In her review of the Roger Ballen retrospective, “Ballenesque,” at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (through June 16, 2018), Shana Nys Dambrot tells us, “in the last three decades, Ballen’s instincts became more and more fantastical, his poetic and surrealist impulses gaining momentum and eventually taking over his storytelling impulse in the name of fiction and allegory.”
The exhibition is a must see, and to double down on its delightfully troubling aesthetic — and to get a truly visceral sense of Ballen’s taste for the fantasitical, the grossly poetic and the apocalyptically surreal — check out his 2015 short, Outland: