LIT BY THE 'WICK: all bushwick, all the time

O'Death @ The New Party Club, April 2006

We arrived just in time for O' Death to play, who I was hoping to see. I had become familiar with their music via myspace, but this was the first show for me. They apparently play frequently throughout the city, and I'll now be sure to follow them.

The band exists in this communal paradox of charasmatic symbolism. Aside from mentioning their name a couple of times, they were comfortably indifferent to the crowd throught the set.

Popular Fiction and 9/11

Finally, the New Yorker has publised a short story. Sometime last fall there was a good one from T.C. Boyle, about Los Angeles car culture and high-speed organ tran- sportation, which coincided nicely with a concurrent car-chase expos� from Tad Friend. But since then it's been a reversion to Murakami (who

I do admire, but) or love affairs with old men and their maids, or other subjects equally mediocre.

But this week's story by Martin Amis, that funny and world-weary Brit, is the most hilarious treatment of September 11 I have seen in the past 4.5 years.

more + excerpts

Dialogue

William Powhida with Tam Tran

Before meeting William Powhida, I expected a night of endless laughs and jokes, and braced myself for a bombardment of the artist's many fictional personas, which he creates in his art as well as writes under. In NY Arts' November/ December issue 2004, James Kalm reviewed Powhida's work, titling his piece "The Bill of Wrongs: Will the Real William Powhida Please Stand Up".

Powhida, "Pressure."

Britney Spears, Art, Porn and the New Puritains

Since the 'wick's Art section is finally in development (check back for reviews, and more interviews to come), we thought we'd take the opportunity to give Lincoln and Dave over at Capla Kesting even more publicity than what they've already recieved, for the stunt they're about to pull with Daniel Edwards' new sculpture.

"A Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston" has caused an minor media storm, with heated debates at the blog level. We're not about to join; it's nice to sit back and laugh at how seriously people are taking this. Edwards once sculpted Ted Williams' decapitated head, soon after plans were announced to freeze the body. The world gets crazy ideas about varios iconic people, and these projects just amplify that. But the best quality may be the frigid pro-life movement's squrirmish acceptance of the 'monument;' or maybe it's the fact that the pro-choice side is upset.

I've been realizing over the past two years or so that we're living in a new kind of Puritanical period--one in which sex happens to be extremely prevalent, and sold above everything else; one in which internet porn is so accessible to minors that films for young people, such as Harold and Kumar or 40-year old Virgin, are including far more nudity and explicit references than what was found just ten years ago; but one in which all of this is held at arms length. It's a wink-wink, look-but-don't-touch kind of decade, and Britney Spears is perhaps the leading icon of this. Pro-choice people could think about what it really means that someone like Britney Spears--who really does come off like a porn star (or how we'd like to think a porn star comes across)--to have a kid. It means you can watch all the porn you want, little Joey and little Susan, but get married before you do anything about it.

-Dave

"A Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston" will be on display at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Williamsburg, through April 23rd.

e-zines

McSweeney's Inter[esting] Tendency

E-zines are really easy to take for granted. No special trips to the library or the good bookstore w/ comfortable seating are required to access them, and the content often changes so much that they're impossible to keep up with. Or they demand a paid subscription for their substantial content, only to cinch said substantial content once subscription fees are surrendered, in favor of gratuitous and really not so great erotica (Nerve, for example). Another issue occurs when the the e-zine exists as a wing of a substantial print publication (i.e. McSweeney's Internet Tendency)--

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MUSIC

Tom Waits: Troubadour of the Imagination

A discussion of Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, edited by Mac Montandon, and also of Waits and Bruce Springsteen.

Our Band Could Be Your Life is probably the only book of rock criticism/anthology that I've read. And that was three years ago; and because of the title. I thoroughly enjoyed it, however it was the first and the last. Unless you want to count Johnny Rotten's autobiography, which I read when it appeared in '99 or so. But due to my grown obsession with the records and persona of Tom Waits, and a gift certificate, I ended up with a copy of Innocent When You Dream...

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(anti?) TELEVISION

A note on post-Reality TV

"Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles"
-Dostoevysky.

First of all I should disclose that I don't watch much television. In fact I have a better memory of what was on 20 years ago (when I was five) than what is slated to air this week. But I do read a little bit.

Pre-Reality TV, as we know, was generally engineered as more or less a living dream of the ideal. Then came...

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