Museum director or fascist dictator? This is a riot…

We need electricity.

The third issue of Electric Literature is out now. It includes work by Aimee Bender, Rick Moody, Patrick deWitt, Jenny Offill, and Matt Sumell. You can get a copy here.

We lost another one…

Equator Books on Abbot Kinney in Venice is closing as of midnight Sunday. This is very sad news. LA is losing another independent bookstore. Their web site reads:

To our friends, customers, family:

After 5 1/2 amazing years Equator needs to say goodbye.
We will be closing our doors on Abbot Kinney as of midnight Sunday.

We ask that you come by in the next day or two,
say hello, buy a book or record,
have a coffee, look at some great artwork,
and enjoy the space one last time.

It is important for us to come up with
some money, so we’d like to
sell as much as we can.

We really care about and love
all of you who supported us, were kind to us,
and understood us.

Thank you all so much, and we’ll see you soon.

xo,

philip and michael

making it happen

Just Kids

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1977.

Last night I went to see Patti Smith at Skylight Books here in LA. It was a bit of a mob scene. Fortunately, they had a live video of her reading next door in their art book shop because the main shop was packed.

I found her reminiscences about the old days in New York to be very moving. In fact, I had a few goose-bumpy kind of moments as I listened to her speak. Her no-nonsense passion for art and the creative spirit was really inspiring.

She read a passage from her book Just Kids about running into Robert Mapplethorpe in Tompkins Square Park just as she was trying to figure out how to escape from a bad date. He agreed to pretend to be her boyfriend, and the rest is history…She also read the story of how Allen Ginsberg bought her a sandwich because he thought she was a very pretty boy. She read about being so poor that she had to sleep in the bathroom at the bookstore where she worked and rummage around for spare change to buy peanut butter crackers. Hunger was definitely a recurring theme in the passages she read. She mentioned that when she and Robert didn’t have any money, they just didn’t eat. He could go longer without food than she could. She would get shaky and feel faint. When they did have money, her three specialties were lettuce soup, couscous with anchovies and spaghetti. Their rent was $80 per month. Someone asked her what she thinks of New York these days, and she calmly responded that the city should be for the people. And New York is not for the people now. It’s for the rich.

It was so strange how she met Robert Mapplethorpe. As a twenty year-old newly arrived in New York, she actually bumped into him twice before (once in Brooklyn and once in the bookstore where she worked) that night he saved her from the bad date. It seems like they were meant to find each other, right? I wish I could remember more…she was incredibly warm and down to earth and funny. She laughed at herself often. The whole night was incredibly inspiring. After she signed my book, and I was walking out of the store, I had to take a deep breath. The woman has an incredibly strong spirit. Just being in her presence restored my faith.

isn’t it romantic

Illustrated portrait of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This past week, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has been running a series on the Romantic poets: Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, etc. They’re all there! Those who actually subscribe to the paper get a nifty little pamphlet on each poet with their daily newspaper. For example, Germaine Greer wrote a piece on Lord Byron and Christopher Hitchens wrote a little ditty on Percy Bysshe Shelley. How cool is that?

Reading Hitchen’s column has rekindled my teenage crush on Shelley. He was such a rebel; I love the way he got kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet on atheism. If he had lived to a ripe old age (well, past thirty), would he have mellowed a bit? I guess we’ll never know. That’s the problem with the Romantics—they all died way too young.

Reggie Watts’ Binary Existence: Watch it. Love it.

Parnassus

It took me a few days to recover from Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.” The film is a wild ride, and a little surreal. Many of its twists and turns took me completely by surprise, and I felt like a little kid staring wide-eyed up at the screen. I was afraid to blink; I might have missed something.

In a nutshell, Dr. Parnassus and his completely unprofessional crew roam around in an ancient horse-drawn carriage that unfolds into a stage, performing whenever it strikes their fancy. Anyone who enters the mirror on stage enters the imagination of Dr. Parnassus who is, by the way, 1,000 years old. Oh, and he made a deal with the devil a few centuries earlier concerning his daughter’s soul. Got it?

I loved the culture clash that occurred when Parnassus & Co. would perform at a shopping center and all the ladies clutching their shopping bags would gawk at the dilapidated contraption. The contrast between the consumerism and efficiency of our hi-tech modern world and the messiness of human creativity was all over the film.  So many people, and not just women by the way, seek self-fulfillment through shopping and acquiring things; I wonder if this recession we’re in will put a dent in that mentality? Anyway, Gilliam’s film struck me as an ode to the messiness of a creative life, the way it might not seem logical or be easy, but incredible beauty and insight can come out of this great mess.

Did you know that Parnassus is a mountain in Greece? According to Greek mythology, it was home to Apollo, Dionysus and the Muses. Metaphorically and mythologically, Parnassus is known as the  home of music and poetry. In fact, Paris’ Montparnasse neighborhood got its name from the nickname “Mont Parnasse” because there were so many students reciting poetry on its streets back in the day.

Anyway, “Brazil” is one of my favorite movies ever, so I knew this would be a good one, and I was right. See it on the big screen if you can.

You can listen to an interview with Tom Waits, who plays the devil in the film, here.

If you have an extra $10,000 sitting around…

…and you want to spend it on a book, here’s your opportunity. Steidl has released a limited edition artist book of Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road with illustrations by Ed Ruscha. Here are the details:

Ed Ruscha’s personal affinity with Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road has been wonderfully resolved in this limited edition book. Ruscha has designed the book, illustrating Kerouac’s text with his own photographs.
The text is printed in Letterpress on 220g Hahnemühle paper and every one of the 55 photo-plates is blind embossed and tipped in by hand to create an exquisite and original edition of On the Road.

The book, published by Gagosian Gallery and Steidl, is signed and numbered by the artist in an edition of 350.

food for thought

According to Mary Eberstadt’s fascinating article “Is Food the New Sex?,” the puritanical kind of morality that was previously applied to sex is now applied to food.  Here’s her main idea in a nutshell: “The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not.”

You can read all about broccoli, pornography and Kant right here.