In the Beginning, There Was Mail
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In the Beginning, There Was Mail
Art Books and Sub-Seismic Rumblings
The folio keyboard on my iPad is showing its age. I mention this because I spent some time the other night wrestling with it in order to bang out a screed about how I wasn’t going to be part of the algorithm. How I was going to fight the Man with the Man’s tools, and yada yada yada.
I bought a new keyboard for my iPad today because I still like the damn thing and I find it useful to have a functional keyboard now and again when I get a wild hair to make some words at the end of the day. And then I sat down to write the rest of that screed and . . . eh. Whatever.
I think social media is an illusion foisted on us by corporations who want our attention. It’s not enough to be consumers. We have to be doom-scrollers as well. Fuck all that. I’m going to make things, and I’m going to talk about the things I find along the way, because someone has to stand up and say, “Hey, I like that thing.” Otherwise, we’re all making art in a vacuum. And, don’t get me wrong, we should be making art. We should do it because it makes us happy, because it gives us that orgasmic joy of joys. But yeah, it’s nice when someone else notices.
And so, to kick of this thing—whatever this thing is, and well, it’s always some kind of thing with me, isn’t it?—let’s do mail call. Here are a few things that have crossed my desk recently.
The Etherington Brothers have a long running How to Draw like a Pro series on their blog, and it’s really cleverly presented in bite-sized chunks. Every once in a while, I get a wild hair about drawing and I try their how-tos for a few days, but my ducks always look like squashed frogs and I have trouble with ears. Anyway, whenever they do a Kickstarter for a bind up of this material, they include an add-on for their art book, which I’ve always wanted. This last time was no different, but instead of buying another drawing book I’ll never use, I went on eBay instead. And lo and behold! I actually found a copy of The Art of Stranski.
It looks like an exhibition catalog for a show they did back in 2018. Let’s crib the copy from the exhibit.
“The exhibition showcases what remains of the concept art, production stills and merchandising mock-ups that once accompanied the creation of a great but long-since lost animated feature. An aesthetic kaleidoscope of World War Two, cargo-cult, pop surrealism, jungle vines and hoodoo markings, all rendered in a deep four-colour process, and delivered in a style that bridges the gap betweenWill Eisner and Jamie Hewlett.”
Anyway, the book hits all my happy spots.
I also came home with a copy of Peter de Sève’s art book. It crossed my radar recently because of the included conversation with Bill Watterson, but having looked through the book now, I realize that I’ve been a fan of de Sève’s art for awhile. Among other things, he did the cover art for William Kotzwinkle’s The Bear Who Went Over the Mountain, which is a novel about a bear who finds a manuscript in a suitcase and who goes to New York and becomes a literary sensation. It is, as you can imagine, a bit of a Swiftian satire, but there’s a deep thread of whimsey that runs through it. Plus talking animals.
Eight Fires, the latest issue of The Dark Mountain Project arrived this week. When the project first launched, I found their mission statement to be an interesting idea: that art should look beyond the borders of civilization and explore art and creative expression in this natural environment. There was (and continues to be) an underlying acknowledgment of the world that we have made. We can’t stop climate change, but what does that world actually look like. What is our place in it?
I wandered off after a few years, naively thinking that these kids were a little too gloom and doom for me. And yet, here we are, and I’m back in the fold. I promise to read this issue. Really.
And speaking of those black Satanic mills, belching fumes and plumes into a darkening sky, Kevin Martin has put out a couple of EPs under his The Bug moniker. All together, these four EPs add up to an hour of lurching, snarling, gasping mechanical instrumentals. They were written to be dropped during a series of sessions Martin did in Berlin earlier this year, and they are definitely haunted by Techno Animal’s Re-Entry, a record Martin did a thousand years ago.
Re-Entry was the brainchild of Justin Broadrick and Martin. Released in 1995, it was a headbomb of a record, smashing dub and doom and looping seismic rhythms into a relentless bludgeoning that vibrated all of the bones out of your body. It was heavy and loud, and the shock waves from it created endless echoes of new genres.
Thirty years on, Martin’s Machine EPs are filled with slow, sub-sonic reverberations of those original seismic detonations. Each EP (I, II, III, and IV) take us deeper and darker, as Martin digs farther and farther into the sonic substrate.
We’re a few weeks past the release of The Cozy Cosmic, the anthology Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito and I put together, mashing up the Cozy Mystery vibe with the futility of Cosmic Horror. Publisher Brain has already moved that folder into the Archive, and I’m thinking about the books for 2024, both for Underland Press and of my own making. I’m going to take a page from Warren Ellis’s book and refer to projects with code names because, as I have learned, once you give a name to a thing, it can be hard to change it. (Artifice of Nature, anyone?)
PROJECT SPINE is curdling in my brain right now. I dumped 9000 words the other day because I finally admitted to myself that I was circling the drain. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. Time to pull the plug, let the basin empty, and come at this again.
PROJECT JAM is definitely Michael’s fault, and that’s all the context you get for now.
I realized I hadn’t seen all of The West Wing, and I managed to stack up all seven seasons for pocket change, and I’m working my way through them. Ostensibly, this is all texture and language buffering for PROJECT OSPREY. Notes to follow.
This is the template, I think, of what I’m calling The Creative Brief. I don’t find process very interesting to talk about, frankly, especially when you are in the thick of it. Moreover, feeding the Muse is an important part that gets overlooked, and if I’m going to spend any time on the Internet these days, it should serve that end. That’s how I’m going to fight this fight. One of the things I really miss is the discovery and sharing of interesting things, and I guess this is my tiny effort to bring that back.
-m