LITERATURE

THE SMART DUMB CAT WRITES TOP CAT POETRY

an appreciation of James Gendron's Sexual Boat (Sex Boats)

By Zoe Brezsny

Go to the Amazon and buy!

“Where are you tonight, my personal party?” asks author James Gendron in his first full-length book, Sexual Boat (Sex Boats). It’s the poetry book of our generation, if only our generation liked poetry and reading. It’s devastating and comic, each poem a reminder that everyone else is as twisted and lonely as you. It’s also more than that, making paradoxical associations that most of us never think of: the afterlife with alcoholism or angel sweat with the odor of corpses. Gendron enters a consequence-free zone where language can be dumb and all the better for it. Transcendence rises out of the most banal moments and in the best of poetry makes it sing.

LITERATURE

THE RADICAL MUNDANE

a review of Dodie Bellamy's Cunt Ups

By Zoe Brezsny

Here We Are Yet Again

It’s what we’ve always wanted: a little book we can carry around in a pocket, shockfull of sexual secrets that disorient and excite. The cover of Cunt Ups depicts a demure mouse staring into darkness. It’s only after reading the first page that you realize that it’s on the edge of night and it’s hungry, scared and waiting to be fucked. And that’s just the mouse.Teasing us further, author Dodie Bellamy’s back cover photo has the comforting glow of a conservative, suburban housewife. True to the confusion of sex itself, Bellamy’s Cunt Ups oozes with bodily fluids, grotesque fetishes (crucifixes anyone?), psychosis, and -- you guessed it -- an irresistible mundanity. Her hands might be dishwater clean, but her mind is dishwater dirty.

MUSIC

WHY WE MUST SEARCH FOR REAL, BRUTAL ART

a consideration of the Swans' The Seer

By Zoe Brezsny

Grrrrrrrrr!

Lead singer Michael Gira is in a loincloth and bellows into a microphone as if he’s trying to perform a self-exorcism. As he’s ripping the demons out, the noise is so deafening that audience members are passing out and spontaneously defecating on themselves. You are in the world of the Swans. The Seer, the longest album the Swans have ever made, clocks in at a chippy two hours and sweeps through every sound this crazed group has ever tried to produce. The no-wave terror of their early albums, the melodic post-punk chapter and the gothic folk of their early 2000s' incarnation are all present and accounted for and more. Whatever the style The Seer is all raw sound, religious chants and phoenix rising from the ashes pop gigantism. As a Youtube commentator wrote about “The Avatar,” one of the tracks on The Seer: “Seeing Swans live leaves the body broken but the mind uplifted. It's a truly punishing experience, and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. The body is dead, but the mind alive."

LITERATURE AND INTERVIEW

A SUBTLE REVOLUTION

an interview with Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Interview and introduction by Zoe Brezsny

We never really know when a piece of art will change the landscape of what’s possible. If you asked me a month ago whether a sentimental, postmodern novel would open up new ground in American fiction, I would’ve laughed, especially when you added that it starts off with a dying American actress escaping to a small Italian fishing village. Nonetheless, that’s what Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins does and in none of the clichéd and predictable moves that we’ve come to associate with artistic revolutions. There are no taboos broken here, no values assaulted, no screaming out at the injustices of the world, but a much more assured and gentle mind at work. One of the shocking aspects of Beautiful Ruins is just how adult it is.

ART

THE CURSE OF THE COCKTAILS

a review of Nick DeMarco, PplSft and drinking art at Important Projects

By Zoe Brezsny

©Important Projects

I’ve been to many art openings, but this was the first time I’ve had to drive to the suburbs and walk past a tricycle and plastic children’s toys to get to the gallery. I was going to Important Projects, an artist cooperative run by Jason Benson, Joel Dean, and Sean Buckelew out of a house in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. I ambled down a leafy tree-lined street until all of a sudden: I was there. Two men who looked like boys sipped cocktails on the porch, their hair identically parted and slicked back, their clothes in the style of Mexican bullfighters.