The way in which we define language can limit or broaden our interactions with the world and others in it. As this brief video begins to explore, interlocutors take many forms, not all of which correspond to our “usual” understanding of sounds or gestures as referring to particular symbols. I am hesitant to aestheticize a fellow human’s seemingly peculiar form of thought, but isn’t this an argument for poetry, in its...

A friend of mine who’ll remain unnamed often tells a Waits story (most likely apocryphal, as if there were any other kind of Waits story)  worth re-telling: This friend, see, is coming off a bender in LA–uncertain, for instance, of how he’d arrived in LA in the first place.  He is certain only that someone has forced a roll of cheap toilet paper down his throat during a blackout and he wants to remain stuck shirtless...

Why review now and not wait until I’m finished?  Two reasons: I’m no good at lying, and this will assure completion. You’re probably reading something that’s wasting your time and these books could solve that. The Instructions is a big ambitious beguiling book.  Adam Levin is genius material (and, yes, I know the dangers and futility of such a moniker, but still…).  He constructs a thousand plus pages of...

I don't know if all tattooists (I refuse to call them all artists; some are, while others are merely practitioners) are liberal with their privacy settings on Facebook, but I would guess many are; whether or not they are likely to be satanists, as mine turns out to be, is another matter.

The shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize was announced earlier this week. The list boasts two first book publications and four independent...

The enigmatic Bill Knott is at it again.  OK, I already regret the tone of that first sentence; its suggests a ruse, which is probably the last thing (or at least somewhere down on the list?) poet and artist Bill Knott has in mind with his recent online activities.  Since the abandonment of his cult-inducing poetry blog (don’t think he’ll like that characterization either), he’s begun selling his artwork online.  For...

The most stimulating films I’ve watched this summer have been documentaries (not necessarily new, but new to me). Here are the top three in order of overall impact (And, yes, I did like Exit Through the Gift Shop, but it inevitably missed the gut check for me): 1. Marwencol. Changed the way I think about art in ways that continue to surprise me. The basic premise, without giving away too much: Mark “Hogancamp,”...

We all know of Dali’s bloated ego; He fancied himself quite the Renaissance Man. In this clip from “What’s My Line?” – Dali gives the panel a good run-around trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that he does. …oh, and just in case you didn’t already...

Need some help here. I’ve been listening with continuing fascination and awe, frankly, to the album Spark of Being, the soundtrack, performed by Dave Douglas and Keystone, to Bill Morrison’s cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. DJ Olive’s textures and Gene Lake’s nervy drumming, in particular, create a a sonic approximation of what The Creature may have felt stumbling into its body.  First, does anyone out there...

Last night I saw Amy Grant sing. Also Johnny Rivers and Vince Gill and a 22-year old blues guitarist named Jessica Munn. All of them came as a surprise to me, who had gone to The Station Inn, truth be known to hear Dawn Sears, who wasn’t there. Thus is life born of chance operations, like John Cage says–communicates itself among the accidents of chance. Before I was born, my mother decided to name me Nora. She must have said it...