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.
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.
Halal in the Family: A Muslim community gathers at the Islamic law-abiding butcher shop in Oakland.
Originally published in San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 2005
It’s easy to tell that Abdul Huruy, the Eritrean-born owner of Oakland Halal Market, likes to do the butchering himself. Just watch him as he lugs out one of the immense sides of lamb stored in the walk-in refrigerator and begins to casually slice the meat against a spinning electric saw blade, pausing only to indicate the best cuts. “Lamb rack,” he’ll say with pride, laying an open palm on the choice section of ribs.
Huruy’s family-run market – filled with long braids of garlic hanging from the ceiling and posters of Mecca photographed during the hajj, an annual time of pilgrimage – opened five years ago to serve the local Muslim community. Just a half block from a Sunni mosque, the Oakland Islamic Center, the market occupies a strip of Telegraph Avenue that’s home to a North African immigrant community as well as immigrants from elsewhere around the globe, many of whom are Muslim. “We have customers from Fiji, Guyana, Senegal, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen,” Huruy says, highlighting Islam’s ability to bring together people of different nationalities (“Different kinds because Islam is one,” as he puts it).
Read the complete article at the SF Bay Guardian.
“Agnes and Iris” regarding twin apartment managers
Originally published in The Shore Magazine, 2004 also recorded as a podcast for KQED’s Writers Block.
The tenants avoided Iris and Agnes, the identical twin managers of the West Park Apartments. They didn’t avoid them for the usual reasons. They didn’t avoid them because they were behind on rent or because they had painted the kitchen a very dark shade of green. Although of course some of them had done these things, too.
Instead they avoided Iris and Agnes because it was impossible to tell the two apart. There were rumors that Iris was taller or that Agnes had a mole on her neck. But these claims were never substantiated. The tenants lived in fear of calling one of their landladies by the wrong name. One of the twins became angry if she was called by the wrong name. Most people thought it was Iris who hated to be confused with her sister. But even if the name of the easily angered twin could be confirmed it wouldn’t do much to help. There was still no way to tell the sister with the temper from the one without. The man in 506 had once called Iris “Agnes” and she had erupted into a fury. When he moved out a month later, it was rumored that he had received only half of his deposit back.
Continued at The Shore.
Shorts and sandals: One intrepid adventurer explores San Francisco’s summer fashion taboos
Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 2005
FROM HIGH SCHOOL shop classes to construction sites, fashion critics wearing hard hats and steel-toed boots have long cast a disdainful eye on shorts and sandals. And sadly, San Francisco, in many ways an open-minded city, perpetuates that distaste. Wearing white after Labor Day seems as dashing as sporting an Armani suit when compared to wearing flip-flops in the foggy city. Not only do most San Franciscans choose not to wear shorts, but my experience has been that they patently disapprove of those who do: an aberration in the city’s live-and-let-live attitude.
To experience the city’s scorn firsthand, I put on my gold mesh shorts, manufactured from the same material as the liners of swimming trunks, and revealed my pale, hairy legs and knobby knees. I had carefully selected a pair of boxers that would look good through all the evenly spaced mesh holes in the fabric. My snaggletoothed toenails hung over the edge of my Baywatch-brand flip-flops, a toe-flossing pair decorated with an earth-tone, faux Indian motif. On my T-shirt in puffy-paint bas-relief was an image of a red deck chair on a strip of shoreline, with, beside it, an enormous nautilus shell that, disobeying all logical proportion, dwarfs the seagull flying above it. Could I be the flint to ignite the stored potential energy of charcoal gray power suits into the kinetic colors of summer-fun beachwear?
“Love and War in Afghanistan”
“Love and War in Afghanistan”
By Alex Klaits and Gulchin Gulmamadova-Klaits (Seven Stories)
“Even though I was Taliban, I think few people here in our village hold any grudges against me… Everyone understands that in order to have survived here over the last 25 years, it’s been necessary at times to do things that we can’t be proud of.” As a reluctant employee of the Taliban, the things Gulbuddin did include cutting off the hands of thieves, stoning adulterous women, and driving trucks over the bodies of the Uzbek opposition to create a shallow mass grave. At times Afghanistan resembles a Tom Waits song–every soul is tarnished but compassionate.
Read the complete article at the Portland Mercury.
The Albany Bowl celebrates a half century of Olympic proportions.
Originally published in San Francisco Bay Guardian June 2005
Its pastel and stucco exterior stitched with neon piping, the Albany Bowl beckons with its warmth and light. Stepping inside, one hears the thunder of colliding pins along 36 parallel lanes. The Bay Area is known for its polyphony of opinions, culture, and approaches to life, and its full spectrum can be seen at the Albany Bowl, from rockabilly to hip-hop, from UC students to 9-to-5-ers, from retirees to manic packs of toddlers.
Rising property values have made the large lot size necessary for bowling alleys a bit impractical, and establishments like College Bowl and Japantown Bowl have closed, their space divvied into smaller retail stores. Soon to be 56 years old, the Albany Bowl has stayed successful by accommodating a varied clientele and a steady flow of customers from 9 a.m. until 2 a.m., 364 days a year (the Bowl closes on Christmas Day).
And this alley has a flair all its own. In addition to the requisite burger and fries, the attached diner also prepares a selection of Thai food. Every time a shot is sunk at one of the red velvet-covered pool tables, it’s like the cue ball is attending a gala affair, trotting across the Academy Awards carpet. When I first stopped by, part-owner and general manager John Tierney was seated at one of the pool tables, using it as a desk while preparing a speech for an upcoming bowling tournament.
Read the complete article here.
Solex “The Laughing Stock of Indie Rock”
Originally published in Bitch magazine, Spring 2005
Solex is the alter ego of Dutch record store owner, Elizabeth Esselink, who pieces together loops and samples from the crappy, unsellable CDs in her store’s discount bins, to layer under her own clever, nearly English-proficient vocals. After three brilliant solo albums for Matador, Solex has gained a new label, a live band and a male vocalist. These additional musicians appear on every track on Laughing Stock, but not in the way one might expect. They comprise just one of the many fragments of source material Esselink cuts and pastes to make songs. The musicians’ presence gives the album a messier and livelier sound than its predecessors.
Souther Salazar, artist and stapler collector
Originally published in Kitchen Sink magazine.
Souther Salazar’s work exists at the intersection of zines, comic books, and the gallery world with a four-way “GO!” sign at every corner. Embracing teenagers swoop through the air on jet packs, vertebras jut out from the elongated neck of a Song of the South crow, a geometric-headed sasquatch nun reminisces about the best night of its life to a fox without forelimbs and the gleeful driver of a swerving 1950’s milk truck with the rear hatch open strews bottles along the road. In his frenetic genre-busting exhibits, paintings on rectangular slabs of wood function like panels from a comic book; thick layers of collaged cardboard give them the depth of bas-relief and characters from zines reappear as sculptures. “All my life it’s been everything mixed together. I think most kids are that way. They don’t think about what their medium is. If they have Play-Doh out, they work with that. If they have crayons out they work with that, and for me it’s sort of the same feeling. I want it to have that same level of excitement every time I sit down to make something.” (more…)
