Continuing with the toner thread, I recently found the blatantly semi-local (mere excuse for a JFA ref) Jason Willis Flyer Collection (’81-’06) while searching out resources for giving visual direction to one of our designers on a Nemo project. I actually remember receiving multi-generational copies of these used as stationary for scrawled notes folded into zines during the early eighties. 

Bryan Ramond Turcotte has a wider sourced compilation in his book, Fucked Up and Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement, the predecessor to Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything and the source of this post’s title.

It seems obvious to mention Bryan Coley, Lydia Lunch and Thurston Moore’s No Wave — a chronicle of the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. No Wave was recently released with an exhibition at KS Art and a Teenage Jesus and The Jerks show at Knitting Factory NYC. Thanks to Rich for the tip on this one.

more: TJ+tJ show (sb_t) / No Wave (prefix,vid)

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I’ve been spending a lot of time gathering new findings of intentionally unintended, random beauty from the school of experimental field recording lately. As a result, Xeni Jardin’s interview with David Byrne regarding his project, “Playing the Building” for BBTV naturally caught my attention when it wound through some friend’s sites over the past week.

Watch: Playing the Building (stills via the header)

Alhough the audio acoustics of Byrne’s Building are intentionally engineered and by definition more installation-based than field recording, the resultant environmental susceptibility certainly blurs the line between the two. Beautifully.

Straight jacked from Roy Christopher’s site, June 10th, 2008:

My favorite Talking Head, David Byrne, turns an entire old building in New York City into a giant sound machine in an installation called “Playing the Building.” Xeni Jardin takes a tour.

Under David’s manipulation, New York’s hundred-year-old Battery Maritime Building becomes a giant sound sculpture. He explains:

“Devices [have been] attached to the building’s structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate, and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”

Read the full post at Roy’s site, soon to include the 2008 edition of his reknown, Summer Reading List.

via: Dave Allen / Roy Christopher / Xeni Jardin / David Byrne / Boing Boing

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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)

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“Dan’s work bears the hallmark of his intelligence…”
—Liz Siegel, The Art Institute of Chicago

Artist, photographer and old friend Dan Estabrook, who’s show I recently posted about, has been included in Anthropy Arts, The Photographers Series. A new DVD series that provides the first comprehensive study of today’s most influential photographers.

That’s perfectly fitting description of Dan and his decades-long exploration of vision and technique which began around the time of our late-night Harvard darkroom stints, when he would sneak me in between skate and zine-making sessions.

From Anthropy Arts:

Working exclusively in 19th century processes, Dan Estabrook produces intimate, yet compelling photographs that illustrate the beauty of long forgotten methods.
- - -
Dan Estabrook discovered photography through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboard culture of the 1980’s. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he worked with Christopher James, from whom he learned alternative photographic processes as well as ways to combine his disparate artistic interests.

It’s great to see another document serving up the recogntion Desta deserves. 

Dan’s skate zine Contort is also traveling with the show, There Is Xerox on the Insides of Your Eyelids.

The Photographers Series: Dan Estabrook (trailer)

via: Anthropy Arts / Pathetica / Desta: Flickr

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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)

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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)

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by Sister Corita Kent

via: hi+low / design observer / i love this world / weekend america

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Here’s a re-up of David Lynch’s Ghost of Love from the Inland Empire soundtrack and a older post, with props for the curious folks that let me know that the previous link was dead. Communication is always welcome and appreciated. Well, almost always, I suppose (although some spam is ridiculous enough to actually enjoy). Said exceptions aside, notification of the need for re-ups are never filed under that category, so thanks again.

And a funny thing happened on the way to this re-up…

While in the process of digging for a new header/gallery link image, I was reminded of a scene in Inland Empire that reminded me of one from another film. The film, Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren had such an impact on me as a young film student (preparing to drop out of art school to work at a skateboarding magazine) that I named my daughter after the woman who made it.

I wonder if Lynch intended the shot as an homage? It wouldn’t surprise me at all considering Deren was as much of a risk-taking, visual-narrative driven, abstract filmmaker as Lynch. She hasn’t been referred to as the High Priestess of Experimental Cinema for nothing. Plus, Meshes of the Afternoon deals with transitive states of consciousness shot in a nearly seamless linear flow, leaving a more obscure line for the viewer to strain their mind in their attempt to follow. Classic Lynch, classical Deren…

Although I’ve got a more focused post about Deren in the works, in the spirit of serendipity, homage and the Silver Jews’ Open Field nod I’m about to post about, I thought I’d upload the scenes from both for your own comparison, edification and amusement.

Screens via the image above, Ghost of Love re-up below.

David Lynch: Ghost of Love (9.2mb, mp3.zip, MF)

Previous, link-laden s|b posts:
strange what love does
strange what love does (redux)

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Rad Fangorian guerilla art from The Decapitator, a UK-based street artist/culture-jammer known for graphically severing the heads displayed on major advertising media and reducing them to bloody, bony stumps.

His latest efforts include a foray into newsprint, having hijacked the London Paper’s back page Motorola ad and distributing it both by hand and via the distributor’s supply. The event was even documented for prosperity, here.

Originally found on either cpluv or ffffound, it’s seems the East London Decapitator’s work has been getting around.

From Wired:

The mutation of art into other forms of art is always fascinating — even if the recipients aren’t always willing, as was in the case with New York-based graffiti defacer, known as the Splasher. Splasher became infamous this summer for tossing paint onto the work of well-known street artists like Shepard Fairy and Momo, citing controversial claims that their work was gentrified, banal and irreparably appropriated and commodified.

the decapitator: flickr
via cpluv / ffffound / notcot / wired

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Graphic Design on the Radio was a series of one-hour radio shows broadcast in the summer of 2007 on Resonance FM. The programmes featured interviews with leading graphic designers who talked about their work and played music that inspired or influenced them.

Presented by Adrian Shaugnessy, those interviewed included:

Jonathan Barnbrook / Neville Brody / Malcolm Garrett / Michael C Place / Fred Deakin / Vaughn Oliver / Rick Poynor / Angus Hyland

Tune in.

via: cpluv™(build) / Resonance FM / Build / Studio Tonne

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