Jun 4, 20080
xeroxeyelids.com
New, official site for all things related to the show, There is Xerox on the Insides of Your Eyelids. Updates, show calendar, galleries.. the works.
May 19, 20080
xeroxed eyelids (reprise+consume)
Needles + Pens have updated their site with new images from opening night of There is Xerox on the Insides of Your Eyelids. They’ve also made the show Catalog/Zine by Rich Jacobs available for $5 along with #13 of his ongoing exploration in toner, MOVE.
Speaking of Rich, I just received word that he’s hanging the next installation of the show in London. More to follow…
Opening photos / Catalog / Move #13
May 16, 20082
my cousin, my gastroenterologist (part 4)
Mark Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (part 4/4) (42.8MB, mp3.zip, MF)
via: i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
(mc,mg: pt.1/pt.2/pt.3)
May 15, 20081
david berman: idle hour
David Berman is a young Virginian poet with a sly, intense regard for the past. He comes on like a prankster, restocking the imperial orations of Wallace Stevens and the byzantine monologues of John Ashberry with the pop-cultural bric-a-brac of a new generation: ‘I am not a cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden’s mirror worlds.’ But his words have an easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history casts a shadow. A poem about the death of Lincoln ends, ‘The assassin was in mid-air / when the stagehands wheeled out clouds.’ —The New Yorker, Oct 4, 1999
David Berman’s Actual Air is one of the most coveted books on my shelf.
I originally picked it up because the cover design reminded me of Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (which coincidentally has some beautiful display errors going on at Google). It was the first collection of poems that deeply inspired and moved me since scouring Powells Books for every original printing of Richard Brautigan’s writings I could find and devour. I’ve bought dozens of copies of Actual Air for friends and family and plan to do so until one or the other runs out.
After posting about Open Field from the new Silver Jews release, Look Out Mountain, Look Out Sea, I dug through backups in search of the only two recordings of Berman reading I was aware of. I ended up finding them at The Corduroy Suit, along with a newfound recording from an Impossible Shapes show (Live at 2nd Story). Either this is it, or I’m not looking in the right place. If anyone out there is aware of more, please (please) let me know.
In the meantime, enjoy Idle Hour, an all too brief collection of readings by David Berman and another bundled repackaging following in the same vein as my previous two (here and here). This time with the jacket shot by Bobbi Fabian instead of my own.
David Berman: Idle Hour (3.4mb, mp3.zip, MF)
via: The Corduroy Suit (Actual Air/Biblio/Interviews) / Open City / Drag City / More Interviews: 01/02/03/04 / Silver Jews / Silver Jew trailer / Bobbi Fabian Photography
May 7, 20081
my cousin, my gastroenterologist (part 3)
Mark Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (part 3/4) (42.8MB, mp3.zip, MF)
via: i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
(mc,mg: pt.1 / pt.2)
May 5, 20081
my cousin, my gastroenterologist (part 2)
Mark Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (part 2/4) (42.8MB, mp3.zip, MF)
via: i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
(mc,mg: pt.1)
Apr 24, 20083
i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
I first read the name Mark Leyner while pouring through the pages of Mondo 2000(*), a short-lived and decidedly poignant introduction to the emerging cultural phenomena of networked computer systems, psychology, psychedelics and art. It was also my introduction to the personally life-altering thoughts of many personas of that era including Terence McKenna, Anne and Alexander Shulgin, Robert Anton Wilson and Jaron Lanier, just to name a few.
M2K was in publication during the early years of the internet era. During the transition from BBS to the web. A time when web browsers (Mosaic anyone?) were first able to display images inline, when the term cyberspace was not only used sans tongue-in-cheek, but heralded the clarion call for the social, cultural and human evolution that the internet seemed to promise. William Gibson’s science fiction made manifest, Terence McKenna’s visual ingression of linguistic intent and Timothy Leary’s final playground. Leyner’s book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist was published in the fertile hotbed of this era and into the literary epoch of cyberpunk, reflecting it’s hyperactive and hyperlinked hyperreality.
The World Wide Web of 1993 was a dangerous and beautiful place. Remeniscent of Gutenberg’s printing press in terms of it’s disruptive effectiveness as a tool of the cognescenti and commonfolk alike. The information flowing through it allowed and demanded the very freedom that echoed and fueled it’s democratizing intent.
Leyner’s work was as dystopian as that of his cyberpunk brethren, but it came with a twist; it was fucking hilarious. A bonfire in which no form of thinking (eschatological or otherwise) was left unscathed. Where the hedonistic, self-indulgent and ego-driven herd of star culture icons lived on to ridiculously preserved, medically plausable ends. Where the soup of the day was primordial soup, “ammonia and methane mixed with ocean water in the presence of lightning”.
Instead of everyman cyborgs with military weapondry on-board (ala Gibson, Jeter etc.) Leyner’s characters were mesomorphic cyborgs that whipped out 35 pound phalli made of corrosion resistant nickel-based alloy and a metal oxide membrane for absolute sub-micron pebnetration of petrochemical fluids. Where mono zygotic replicants could avoid transgressing the incest taboo via a miniature shotgun blast of gene fragments, altering their genetic matricies so that they would longer be mono zygotic replicants. Where secreted couples could meet in dreams and apocalyptic deformation bombs could disfigure everything within blast radius in the same chapter that referenced TV Guide digests of wonderfully absurd shows starring the likes of Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren.
My Cousin, My Gastoenterologist is classic Leyner, and I feel, his establishing tome. An amphetamine overdriven run-on thought train, slicing through a scatter shot pop culture landscape with the urgency of a pedal riveted to the floor.
Thinking now back on the time it was written, a time when I took M2K’s manifestos SO seriously, believing in the inherent evolutionary change agency of the web. Even then I couldn’t keep from laughing with Leyner, whose sci-fi scenarios seem far more relevant and in full fruition than Gibson’s hard-browed visions. Especially now that the web has primarily devolved into a vehicle for mass marketing, branding and porn.
Thanks to Leyner, I can laugh with the absurdity — welcoming every bent doctrine and obliterated principle as everything unfurls in the stark blue sheen of prime time, and still revel in the sub-experiential, subversive carrier tone that rings at the heart of it all.
Thanks finally to my good friend, Brian Knapp who picked up the cassette version of the audiobook at Powell’s in the 99 cent bin back in 1999, and the tech that has made it relatively easier to pass along.
I’ll be uploading each part over the course of the next few days.
Here’s the first:
Mark Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (part 1/4) (42.7MB, mp3.zip, MF)
related: Salon / Follow for Now / Links / Petition to Force Mark Leyner to Write Another Novel, (thanks Sampsell)
Feb 14, 20080
xeroxed eyelids (continued)
Update via Needles and Pens:
Feb. 13, 2008
The great hive of the internet is buzzing about over the Xerox on the Insides of Your Eyelids show, look onward: GSD’s blog over at Altamont, Roger Bridges’ Strange Beautiful, Bernie McGinn’s Of Skateboards + Copy Machines, Andy Jenkins’ Bend Press, and Epicly Trife
Dec 21, 20070
jenkins’ stAAAmmering 5’s
My good friend, Art Director for Girl Skateboards and founding member of The Art Dump (among many, many other hats) , Andy Jenkins has a shitload of reasonably priced 5×5″ paintings for sale from the Lab101 show, “stAAAmmering” he took part in earlier this year. I’ve got two on the way. Wish I’d had the chance to score some of these too.
Get ‘em before they’re gotten at Andy’s site, Bend Press.
Continue 
