ISSUE 21 | OCT 2012

RAW MATERIALS

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Tessa Cheek

Portable Words: A Chaotic Translation

LA TIERRA MAS AJENA - someone or other has been teaching you Spanish - the University of Buenos Aires - ‘otherworldly’ and even ‘la-la-land’ - « no, just the same girl in different places » - Flora knew what Alejandra could only imagine - that most abstract appendage - the trees place the leaves

Sam Feldman

Remix This Article

« I’m paying for this microphone » - the informal industry of internet content-mixers - a former Canadian Idol runner-up - the North Korean government’s « parody video » - an hour and a half of intense unscripted audiovisual raw material - the primary currency of both entertainment and politics

Avi Garelick

Beastly Flesh

« tying up and slaughter » - the most modern age - « just so I could smell their brisket » - « disengagement yields great fruit » - slaking a lust for beastly flesh - « He spilt blood! » - an interstitial mythic space - the secularization of meat - triumphant overcoming - « grow by the flesh of others »

Emily Winter

Making Things, Thinking Things

the striping patterns were decided by the length of the weaving session - each new day started with a different shade of gold - a ruptured understanding of the artist/technician relationship - time-motion study - practice, production, repetition - a playful discipline - a question of ego

Philip Engel

BWV 849

Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor - along with harmony, was considered impious - isolating the theme - the tolling of church bells - by truncation, then inversion, then diminution - the chiasmus hypothesis - sobriety (slow), pain (chromatic), and sadness (minor-key)

Jena Cutie

In Defense of Wheat

strangely Conceptual trees - figs, citron, wine-grapes - reasoning involving bread - a Lucifer match - unelaborated command - « Naked wheatbellied sin » - shaft, rod, stick in the mud, pin - woman's watery womb - not food, despite the name

Anna McConnell

excerpts from the decline of the wasp notebooks: the black notebook

the hippie god of The Here and the Now - evidence - could you PLEASE, PLEASE - EMMA FUCKING GOLDMAN - the Kombucha train-hopping gang – gonna provide me my own health care - little red mouths and spotty dregs of coffee

Casey Lange

A Finite Number of Things

flights of nostalgia – i have trouble with the word « miss » – I fidget. – as dead as the past, as dead as a fact – goodmorning-goodbye – be sly, trust to providence – « And now I can't even kiss you » – rosewater in everything