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.

Jonathon Lethem “Disappointment Artist”

Originally published in the Portland Mercury, May 2005.

At age 13, during the summer his mother was dying of cancer, Jonathan Lethem watched Star Wars 21 times. Later, he dropped out of college and hitchhiked to California to become an envelope-licker for the Philip K. Dick appreciation society. In his essay collection, Disappointment Artist, Lethem foregrounds items like Cassavetes, Marvel Comics, and John Wayne’s The Searchers and then illuminates them with both a studied critique and his personal experiences with them.

Lethem doesn’t depict his pop-cultural obsessive tendencies kindly, such as smoking a joint alone before a campus film society screening wearing his black-rimmed glasses to intentionally appear “nerdishly remote and intense.” The creative icons he worships, Kafka, Kubrick and Eno, are those who aren’t afraid to make their audience uncomfortable. With descriptions of self-imposed isolation through media, Disappointment Artist can provoke a similar uneasiness.

These essays seem like the research on which Lethem built his ambitious and best-selling novel Fortress of Solitude. Those wondering how autobiographical Lethem’s fiction is and curious about his writing process will find their answers here, but these essays also stand on their own and represent an unusual approach; call it “confessional cultural criticism.”