Lara and Josef and their incredibly talented friends Jordan Dalton and Kate Brown put together this installation, Meat Out of the Eater for &NOW.

Kate and Jordan arranged wood and cloth and wires and seatbelts into a tunnel that was undoubtedly organic, as if it’d be sticky and wet if you stuck your hand in it.

Lara’s words suggested the same stickiness as she reinvented myth through Josef’s electro-popping, rpg-video-gaming lens. His music and video lulls, then amuses, but ultimately bares you to the work that holds it (the sculpture) and the work it holds (the words).

You can watch the the video and hear the sound online – which is amazing and worth your time. But, even better, would be to get this thing to visit your town. Just so you can touch it. Send Josef an email if you want to make that happen.

Click these shots for links to more info about the people in them.

Jason Chambers gave The Complete Collection of people, places & things a really thoughtful read and wrote about it over on the blog to which he contributes, Three Guys One Book. He writes “Here is this sleepy village, populated by tendancies and residents and laws worthy of a strange, pleasant dream. The inanimate shake with life. The episodes are farcical, but at the edge of every joke or wordplay is a hint of seriousness. Or perhaps it’s the reverse.”

3G1B is a fascinating read, especially if you’re a writer who has any concerns about the practical realities of that lifestyle. Between the four contributors (they added another “guy”), they’ve experienced just about every aspect of the writing/publishing continuum, from writing to publishing to selling, indie to major. And they speak about it candidly and specifically. A lot to learn at this site.

Conferences can be a real drag. But I suspect &NOW will be anything but, just from skimming the schedule. I’m about to get on a plane to Buffalo. First time to western New York State.

If you’re at the conference, come see my panel with Johannes Goransson, Tim Wood, and J.A. Tyler tomorrow around 2:00. We’re going to present our various image-text collaborations and then discuss how ruptures in our working systems have led to the works as we see them now. There’ll be pictures and drawing.

I’ll also be reading at the Action Books reading on Saturday morning with Johannes and Joyelle McSweeney and Lara Glenum. Hope to see some of you there.

I’m planning on taking a lot of pictures…

I have the privilege of reading with these two sublime writers tomorrow (Sunday), as part of Jessica Bozek‘s Small Animal Project Reading Series.

Please come out if you can. It’s at Outpost 186 in Cambridge, MA at 3:00 p.m.

(Kristen and I will read a comic we made together as well as our own work.)

This is the simplest piece of beauty I’ve looked upon in a while. Turn the lights off and the sound up and weep away.

Watch the trailer for Joe Young’s upcoming Easter Rabbit.

Dave Kushner has posted another killer ’86 Mets painting. This time capturing the tough-but-loose likenesses of Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry from their classic Sports Illustrated cover. (Around the time they both recorded rap singles.) The background says “Gangsta,” a very contemporary Mets reference. Maybe Dave is co-opting the term, taking it from Jerry Manuel’s failed bunch, and giving it back those few guys who actually won games for this franchise. I blogged about Kushner’s portrait of Keith Hernandez smoking a cigarette a few months ago, and I still think I’d pay more money for that one than this one. Either way, I’d love to have them both on the new studio walls.

Had the pleasure of reading this vowellessly titled book a couple times on the train this week. And had the pleasure of meeting Justin Sirois last weekend when we read together at the Baltimore Book Festival. I was really inspired by two things. ONE, the fact that he gave out handmade books to the whole audience who was good enough to brave the rain to watch us read (of course, I left mine in my hotel room), and, TWO, the voice that he is making available to American readers in his book MLKNG SCKLS and the longer, as yet unpublished, novel Falcons on the Floor. Justin also credits his work to Haneen Alshujairy, who he explained is a woman that he knows and regularly corresponds with who fled from Iraq to Egypt. Justin’s simple but properly indulgent words create stories that offer Alshujairy’s experiences to an audience (English-speaking Americans) who are usually prevented from seeing this side of Iraq (his book profiles two young men fleeing Fallujah). There is a lack of exoticism and a dull, familiar desperation that is rarely achieved by those portraying war and foreign lands.

A few moments in this book really stick with me. One is a haunting scene in which Salim, the book’s first person narrator, sets his laptop’s webcam to film to him taking a piss in the river at night, and he imagines an internet audience watching this moment, without explanation, on YouTube (or some other site). It’s an incredibly vulnerable moment for character and reader. Later, Justin writes an exceptional scene in which Salim “uncooks” a curry to show his girlfriend how much he loves her. Justin is good enough not to define this anomalous moment as a memory or a delusion or a dream – it is real to Salim and the reader. And as he goes through the painstaking process of “uncooking” we watch them flinch and cringe at the sound of a door knock, a far more threatening sound in their environment than the not-so-far-off screams of pain they’ve grown accustomed to.

MLKNG SCKLS sections are ancillary scenes to a larger novel, Falcons on the Floor, which Justin has written, and we can only hope will be made available to us soon.

Last weekend, Josh Korenblatt showed me these layered “paintings” he’s been doing on his iPhone with just his fingers. This convinced me a I needed an iPhone. Then my old phone died the next day and I went and got one. I downloaded Brushes, the app that Josh uses, and now I realize that it’s going to take a lot of practice to do anything close to what he does. Here are some thumbnails of his work:

The cool thing about sketching on your iPhone, Josh pointed out, is that nobody knows you’re sketching them, and they don’t get self-conscious like when your sketchbook and pen is in full view. They think you’re just checking your Facebook page for the third time that hour or IM’ing your buddy who “works” in marketing in midtown.

Anyway, if you have Facebook, check out these painting that Josh has created with his phone.