Forrest Armstrong's Blog, page 10

RADCON!

I've been tired the past few days since we got back, but RadCon really was fun as hell and I wanna jot some notes about it. I went with Rose, Carlton, Jeremy, Kevin Shamel, Jeff, Cameron, Chrissy, and Angie to a huge hotel in a Washington town called Pasco… the drive there was beautiful, along the Columbia River most of the time and streaming through bright green mountains. I got that urge I get sometimes to live on a mountain, even one of those ones with the highway in sight. The town's...

Easy Sailing

Hey folks – I owe you an update from RadCon which I'll do tomorrow, 'cause there's definitely some crazy shit to talk about once my brain cools down. What I wanna do now is give you an album made by a very dear friend of mine. Dan Halpern has been my boy since we met back in Boston… we musta been like 14 at the time. We went on to spend all of high school in The Kymera Effect. That band did so friggin' much for everybody in it, it's crazy… when we started the youngest member was 12 and it...

Forrest in The Journal of Experimental Fiction #37

Eckhard Gerdes (co-editing this one with Jeff Burk) released a bizarro-themed issue of The Journal of Experimental Fiction and man, the contents are amazing. It's got work from Steve Aylett, Kevin Donihe, Cameron Pierce, Mykle Hansen, Gina Ranalli, myself, and a big handful of other writers making weird fiction in a more experimental way. It's also got a very pleasant review of Asphalt Flowerhead written by Eckhard himself. Here's a bit of it:

"When I was cutting my teeth on experimental...

hey you – DANCE

My buddy Jdubeats just sent me this video yesterday and it makes me so happy to watch that I have to show it to you. Let it make you move!

Dali's "Alice in Wonderland"

We spent the morning sitting around talking about surrealism and guys like Svankmajer, which led to thinking about Svankmajer's interpretation of Alice, which led to thinking about Dali's series of paintings interpreting the same things. The first time I was in Paris I went to a Dali museum, which changed my entire life. It was filled with sculptures of his works – the long-legged elephants, the girls with drawers coming out of them – and among the many paintings that were in there, almost...

Interview with James Chapman

James Chapman is a writer and publisher who runs one of the most exciting hubs of experimental literature today, Fugue State Press. He's released eight novels of his own so far, including Stet and Degenerescence (the book I reviewed yesterday), and many more if you include the other writers he's given a home with Fugue State: guys like Eckhard Gerdes, Prakash Kona, and Tim Miller. To me, James is the most inspiring example of how to ignore the hyper-commercial atmosphere we're surrounded by a...

Book Review: Degenerescence

DEGENERESCENCE by James Chapman (Fugue State Press, 2009)

Degenerescence is a creation myth the way only James Chapman could tell it. It starts in a world without stories, where WOE, (the central character, who begins the book disembodied until she speaks her form into existence) creates an island and everything in it by speaking the names of all things. In a world without stories, people only see objects for what is immediate and eternal about them, and nothing can be humiliated or damaged...

in mude

Vomitus Skink (aka Jase Daniels) just released his first full-length noise album, in mude. I'm a big fan of Jase's art and his sound is no different; it gets a lot of the same atmospheres, but as Jase described to me in interviews for a feature in Issue #3 of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, the difference between his art in images and his art in sound is "Time. Music is bound by duration, whereas an image you can observe for as long (or as briefly) as you want… I think my music creates a...

Perfect Union cover art

Just wanted to share this beauty with you…

 

 

Coming soon…

I'm Curious

Tell me about the best performances you ever saw. Any medium; whether it's some guy on the street juggling knives or some band selling out a stadium, or anything anywhere in between. I ask because performance is something obviously all of us in this scene are interested in, but we belong to the group of artists called "writers," who give "readings." There's only two readings – straight readings, in the traditional sense – I've ever seen that haven't gotten me bored – Eckhard Gerdes at the...