The Fanzine: Linh Dinh, Slavoj Zizek, Interview with a Bouncer, Joanna Ruocco, Matt Bell, Blackface, Queer Children

One of the most popular articles at Fanzine of late has been Matt Bell’s micro-fiction Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo. The accompanying artwork by Joshua Hagler makes Bell’s unsettling world all the more vivid. Bell is an editor at the online literary journal The Collagist and the author of several novellas.

Another great fiction piece came from Joanna Ruocco who Derrida-ian second-guessing of oneself into a piece that has a kind of perfectly off-kilter comedic timing. Ruocco has received praise from Robert Coover and Carole Maso and has a collection of short stories out on Ellipsis Press.

Prof. Louis Chude-Sokei makes some interesting distinctions between the meaning of blackface when performed for a domestic audience and what it can mean in cultures outside the U.S. He touches on Turkey’s newscaster who performed in blackface after Obama’s visit, as well as America’s Next Top Model, Mexican cartoon characters and the popularity of blackface festivals in Africa.

Berlin-based curator Jesi Khadivi reviews Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy with vivid details on the brilliant theorist’s tendency to over-salivate.

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, reviews the latest from Vietnamese-American writer Linh Dinh. I’m a big fan of Dinh’s short stories and I’m eager for his novel Love Like Hate, which Seven Stories will publish in May.

Also, don’t miss Jennifer Blowdryer’s interview with bouncer Frankie Clinton about his experiences getting stabbed and the proper way to handle drunks, and Aaron Nielsen’s tackling of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Stockton’s book is intriguing in part due to its investigation of the oddities of the entire conception of childhood in western culture.

Tao Lin, Darius James, Brief Interviews, Werner Herzog, Arthur Russell,The Informant, Galit Eilat, Girls’ Guide to Rocking and getting 86′d

It’s been a busy month over at The Fanzine:

Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel, on Werner Herzog’s short documentaries.

Darius James, author of Negrophobia and That’s Blaxploitation! has written a pretty amazing, sad and hilarious piece on his childhood experience watching the film Revenge of the Zombies with an eye for race, identity and voodoo.

Jennifer Blowdryer interviews people about their experiences being kicked out of bars, apartments and restaurants in the the first installment of 86′d stories.

Thom Donovan’s profile on cellist and disco pioneer Arthur Russell and interview with Israeli experimental curator Gail Eilat about the Mobile Archive, an unusual traveling video art exhibit that specializes in war zones.

Daniel Hamilton reviews Chronic City, the latest from Jonathan Lethem and uncovers the latent critique of capitalism in Stephen Soderbergh’s recent films

Amy Meyerson closely reads both David Foster Wallace’s and John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and comes up with some engaging contrasts.

Also: new fiction from Joshua Cohen, who has an 800 page novel forthcoming from Dalkey Archive, and Mike Louie’s stellar review of Girls’ Guide to Rocking.

Finally, a write up and photos of Fanzine’s participation in Kaya Oakes’ independent media discussion panel at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

Jeff T. Johnson on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

There’s at least two surprising things about the new Pynchon novel: 1) it’s fairly short, 2) the cover looks like a Carl Hiasen mystery novel. Jeff Johnson, the former Kitchen Sink music editor and now a Brooklynite, shares his insights into this new work and compares the narrative structures of assorted Pynchon works in his review for The Fanzine.

We Can Only Expand the Boundaries When We’re Up Against the Ropes: Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brandon Scott Gorrell

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted, reviews the work of two very different young poets: one who writes in the voices of historical figures, including Amelia Earhart’s mechanic and boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, the other working in the genre of “Gmail Confessionalism.” Through these collections, Oakes traces the influence of parallel trends: the rapid expansion of MFA programs and the growth of digital publishing, showing us two very different points in the vast territory of contemporary American poetry.

Kaya Oakes, two Los Angeles independent record labels and I will be part of a panel discussion on independent media at Skylight Books, Sunday Sept. 27 5:00 pm. It would be great to see you there.

The Fanzine: Matthew Derby on Roberto Bolano

I’m a pretty huge advocate of Matthew Derby’s collection of short stories Super Flat Times and so I’m puffed up with pride to say that Derby’s review of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is now up on The Fanzine. Following the success of Bolano’s 2666, New Directions press is publishing the first English translations of some of Bolano’s work including this, his first novel. Derby is a former editor at McSweeney’s Believer and his review is as insightful and occasionally funny as one might expect. Fanzine will also be publishing an article from Derby on Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam diptych Full Metal Jacket, apparently a subject of his fixation.

The Fanzine: Slanted and Enchanted and New Fiction from a New Russia

I recently started working as  an assistant editor at the internet magazine The Fanzine. I has a great, very wide range of arts and culture coverage — where you can learn about the latest in experimental fiction as well as betting tips for the Kentucky Derby.

Two recent pieces I’d like to recommend:

Rob Tennant’s review of Kaya Oakes‘ Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture:

“The question remains: Who is more ‘indie’ – the O.C.’s Seth Cohen or New York poet Frank O’Hara? In Slanted and Enchanted Kaya Oakes reframes the debate by creating a wide-ranging lineage of independent media and artists, defying the categorical limitations that have arisen around the term in recent years. Mike Watt, Kathleen Hanna, David Berman and cartoonist Daniel Clowes all make appearances. Rob Tennant asks the ramifications of this heritage for the current state of independent culture.”

Also Olena Jennings’ review of Tin House Books’ Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. Jennnings shows how the shadows and literary tropes of the Soviet Union hangs over the Putin and Medvedev’s Russia. Also, Jennings brings insights into the translation process.

Busdriver Interview and Profile: “The Avatar of ‘Less Yeses, More No’s’ in the Era of ‘Yes, We Can”

A recent interview and profile of rapper Busdriver, written for TheFanzine.com.

“That’s the problem with underground hip-hop is that we don’t have street cred with niggas in the hood,” Busdriver expounded from the stage of Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre while muscularly wearing a mauve polo shirt. “College kids just download the shit, so it’s a small demographic we’re chasing after.” Opening for UK grime rapper Dizzee Rascal and Definitive Jux label head El-P at the end of a month long tour, Busdriver tore through his song lyrics at nearly double the already astonishing speed of his albums, pulsating around the stage, feigning anger and ecstasy, a mist of perspiration rising up into the stage lights while he freestyled about walking down Wilshire Blvd. in cowboy spurs. At one point he grabbed a life-sized cut-out of an eighties gold chain-wearing rapper and thrust the microphone into its face and––perhaps in an effort to catch his breath––demanded, “Now sing your part.”

Read the complete article here.

Doseone interview: “I may not be much else in this world but I guarantee you I am getting to rapper heaven.”

Published in The Believer, Oct. 2007.

Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the “persona/ego projection” as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon collective/record label, which fuses hip-hop to indie rock, ambient music, poetry, and experimental noise.

Although Drucker has recorded several solo albums, his primary efforts have been collaborative. With the trio cLOUDDEAD, he worked with Yoni Wolf (Why?) and producer David Madson (Odd Nosdam) to create a pair of critically acclaimed albums that pasted non-sequitur raps onto sleepwalking funk beats and archaic keyboards. His most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel (Jeffrey Logan) as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie-rockers the Notwist as 13 & God and with other musicians in their current project, Subtle.

Read the complete article in The Believer.

“Electronic Literature” N. Katherine Hayles

Published in The Fanzine, Aug. 2008.

With newspapers feeling the bite of advertisers’ migration to the internet and the music industry, for better or worse, in dire need of a new business model, the era of digital media seems to offer more fodder for fears than opportunities for innovation. Advances in electronic ink technology have brought resurgent interest to e-book devices, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, and so readers of literature might be wondering if a similar fate awaits their medium of choice. N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary profiles the work of writers who are diving into the new creative methods headfirst. In her forward, Hayles makes explicit her aim to create a canon of electronic literature and to introduce it both to lay readers and the university classroom. Additionally, Hayles’ book provides an overview of the critical discourse on the subject, arguing that this new kind of writing will require a different critical perspective than its print predecessors, advocating an examination not just of what appears on screen but the coding beneath.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.

Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD

Published in The Fanzine, Nov. 2007.

Every once in a great while when a band breaks up, it’s like a supergroup in reverse; each performer’s independent project is packed with an exactness of vision that seemed impossible in collaboration: as if Bob Dylan had always just been the guy who played rhythm guitar in the Traveling Willburys and then – Bam! – came out with Blonde on Blonde; a complete inversion of the rock archetype of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatle blandness.

Eccentric hip-hop trio, cLOUDDEAD, part of the Anticon collective, formed in Cincinnati in 1999 and relocated to Oakland together in 2001. Producer Odd Nosdam (David Madson) built murky soundscapes from archaic keyboards, flea market reel-to-reel tapes and a Roland SP-202 “Dr. Sample” while rappers Doseone (Adam Drucker) and Why? (Yoni Wolf) overlapped non-sequitur lyrics about paint-spattered eye-glasses, their neighborhoods and the universality of death. As self-described shut-ins who shared apartments in various permutations, on their albums they sound telepathically close: Why? and Doseone completing each others’ sentences while the production mirrors their hypnotic, sometimes morbid humor.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.