Merthiolate

Rob Hardin

After failing to kill myself for the eighteenth time, I decided to be more positive. Why focus on failure? I thought. Why not appreciate the character added by damage to my once-perfect body? But despite the pep talk, I still couldn't examine myself without cringing. It was like being a vintage car fanatic and finding bullet-spray patterns on the hood of a cherry Stingray. I was twenty years old. I hadn't even been out of the warehouse. Now it seemed there were worse things than having flawless skin and a case of insomnia. Tattered eyelids, for example. Scalloped hollows in place of areolae.

Motor City is Not My Home

Emily XYZ

Motor city is not my home / but I love it just the same
Murder city, kill city ok but that’s just one way
to look at the place where so much comes from
and I know GM should have been allowed to fall but for all
the good men and women who would have gone down
with it, and their children / everyone here
has suffered enough already, the coasts have
no idea no idea what it’s like when whole towns are
laid off and shut down / New York money never
had to contend with this and New Yorkers only rate their own
poverty, their own suffering, and LA turns a blind eye to all

Lapis Lazuli

Kurt Wolf

Lapis Lazuli music exists in kind of a parallel universe where soundtrack composers dominate the later part of the 20th century musical landscape. A warped vision of what music from the era may have sounded like minus the utopian hippy hegemony of the late sixties and early seventies.

The following tracks were recorded at a rehearsal for the upcoming album, The Escape Goat.

A Fistful of Rupees

Christian X. Hunter

There is a train to Dharmavaram at 5:00 for fifty-seven rupees. That allows about fourteen minutes buy a platform ticket, retrieve my pack from left luggage, buy some food and find the train. With three bananas and two half-assed oranges cradled in my arm I head for the train. I am hyped-up and happy (not to mention full of pizza). The sheer exhilaration of knowing I won’t have to spend another hour in Bangalore, has me making Three Stooges wooh wooh sounds as I rush through the station looking for platform number two. When I reach the platform, three different conductors give me three conflicting opinions on where the third-class bogeys are. At the front of the train what looks like a third-class car is full. I never find the one in the middle. I get sent to the last coach and get in. The seats are wooden slats. It’s a little better than a cattle car. I put my bag down and sigh with relief as Bangalore City Railway Station falls away. I’m looking around for a seat when I notice a man and his wife staring up at me, faces contracted with unstrung dismay. “This is ladies’ car,” says someone’s hubby. The whole car comes alive like an invaded hen house. I go into the next coach, which looks like a second-class sleeper. I figure to let the ticket-wallah straighten it out. When I check my money belt for my ticket I notice on the back a quotation from Gandhi. “Tolerance for other FAITHS imparts to us a truer understanding of our own.”

That's Entertainment

B. Kold

Vion Sandor was cold. Everybody else on line was cold too, but they didn’t know what cold meant, not like Vion did. That’s what he would have told you if you gave him half a chance, going on and on about how he felt the cold worse than anyone else. That's what he would have meant to say, only it would have come out more like: “Motherfucker shit cold as a motherfuckin’ bitch, you know what I’m saying?” While he was saying it he’d give you a big smile like he was glad to see you but he’d be thinking fuck you.

Al Kresch

Banksy's Movie

Mark Netter

Even though he doesn't take a directing credit on it, there's no doubt that Exit Through the Gift Shop is Banksy's movie. Banksy is the English street artist who has stenciled, painted, graffitied or, if you like, vandalized urban walls all over the world. He garnered his biggest lift of fame by smuggling his own works into fine art museums and putting them up on wall with official-looking title cards, his works usually appearing to comment on the other more traditional, i.e. official artwork in the room. The best part is that, aside from his crew and a small number of insiders, nobody knows Banksy's true identity.

MM2

Rebecca Gaffney

Rebecca Gaffney is obsessed with out of phase strobelight, reflections, pulling ephemeral light/vid moments out of the air, weird underground bands, experimental everything, ghetto layers, transcendence, "happenings", epic collaborations aerial views and "new shit".

She's been recently concocting some new art methods including the musical genre of gauze rock, process cinema -a style of improvised filmmaking rooted in light, reflections, and microexpressions - and her new art-light-noise collective Enoch:A.L.N. (or Ewok: A.L.N.; the name changes occasionally:)).