Yesterday’s Schlock Is Today’s Treasure in “The Camp Followers’ Guide!”
Books / Camp

Yesterday’s Schlock Is Today’s Treasure in “The Camp Followers’ Guide!”

Our new Bible (all photos by moi) Susan Sontag may have written the most renowned and widely considered definitive consideration of camp, but let’s be honest, Susie could not be camp if her public intellectual life depended on it. Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, or even, On Photography aren’t exactly laugh riots! … Continue reading

Fuck It All!: Thomas Kinkade Goes Dark and Other American Shitposts in Jordan Sullivan’s “Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking”
Books

Fuck It All!: Thomas Kinkade Goes Dark and Other American Shitposts in Jordan Sullivan’s “Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking”

I’ve recently been suffering from a fever. No, not that kind of fever. I’ve been struck with a Thomas Kinkade fever! Yes, the less-than-esteemed painter of shopping mall schlock (before the fall of malls) and the bane of snotty critics recoiling at the satiated bad tastebuds of Americans enamored with all those little queasily quaint … Continue reading

Never Can Say Goodbye: Eric Sneathen Conjures Gaétan Dugas (Aka ‘Patient Zero’) and Other Ghosts in “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
Books / Poetry

Never Can Say Goodbye: Eric Sneathen Conjures Gaétan Dugas (Aka ‘Patient Zero’) and Other Ghosts in “Don’t Leave Me This Way”

Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, published recently by Nightboat Books, is a ghost story. Ok, the book is not a ghost story in any traditional sense. There are no vengeful ghosts banging open closets or throwing silverware around after being summoned by a Ouija Board or, as in Danny and Michael Philippou’s film … Continue reading

American Schemers and Dreamers: Zany Tales from a Nation in Decline in Drew Buxton’s “So Much Heart”
Books

American Schemers and Dreamers: Zany Tales from a Nation in Decline in Drew Buxton’s “So Much Heart”

Americans are never happier than when they’re getting in on a scam. Or so said comedian Tim Dillon in a set I saw at The Stand in April (and as a former subprime mortgage hocker, he should know). If he’s right—and as much as I’ve rambled about con art as America’s foremost artistic discipline on … Continue reading

Fuck the Zipless Fuck! It’s All About Sexyless Sex in Jamie Stewart’s “Anything That Moves”
Books

Fuck the Zipless Fuck! It’s All About Sexyless Sex in Jamie Stewart’s “Anything That Moves”

I doubt I’ll look at a butter knife the same way ever again after reading Jamie Stewart’s Anything That Moves. That cool, silver, kind of fussy utensil will forever be etched in my brain as tossed unceremoniously into the bushes like Sally Draper’s Barbie doll after an indulgence in childhood anal fixation. Those rounded edges … Continue reading

What The Fuck Is With “Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York”?
Books

What The Fuck Is With “Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York”?

It’s cliché to point out that people in the United States now exist in completely different realities, typically broken down by political leanings. Just hop on any social media platform and you can bear witness. For one faction, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are eating babies and guzzling adrenochrome in the basement of a strip … Continue reading

If I Stay All Night and Talk: Conversation as Corrective in Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s “Faith, Hope and Carnage”
Books / Music

If I Stay All Night and Talk: Conversation as Corrective in Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s “Faith, Hope and Carnage”

Does an artist need to believe—or at the very least consider—the existence of God (or the divine, a higher power, or whatever it is you want to call it) in order to create transcendent work? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with ever since listening to an advanced copy of the audiobook for Nick Cave … Continue reading

What’s So Dangerous About Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer”?
America Is Doomed / Books

What’s So Dangerous About Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer”?

I’d like to begin with a fact. A simple yet shocking fact. It is this—a floodtide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of obscenity and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children! At least that’s what George Putnam said, finger-wagging in his Middle America-terrorizing introduction to the fear-mongering, … Continue reading

If He Felt He Had To Direct You, Then Direct You Into My Arms: More Items I Would Steal From “Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition”
Art / Books / Music

If He Felt He Had To Direct You, Then Direct You Into My Arms: More Items I Would Steal From “Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition”

In his Last Will and Testament made in 1987, on view in the sprawling exhibition Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, Nick Cave requested: “…money earned on records, both publishing and record sales, should be used to have and maintain a small but adequate room or rooms that will serve as the “Nick Cave … Continue reading

Man or Myth?: “Stranger Than Kindness” Is a Portrait of Nick Cave through His Many Obsessions and Influences
Art / Books / Music

Man or Myth?: “Stranger Than Kindness” Is a Portrait of Nick Cave through His Many Obsessions and Influences

In the nebulous period of 1983 and 1984 between the drug-fueled dissolution of the trash can-driving, six-inch-gold-blade-slicing, zoo-music-girl-lusting, junkyard royalty The Birthday Party and the official designation of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave played a smattering of clubs under a few different titles. There was Nick Cave and the Cavemen, which is … Continue reading