speaking of books...

i must tip my hat to the amazing JT Kirkland of Thinking About Art
for seeing his One Word Project from an online experiment
all the way into a wonderful new book you can now order!
Thinking About Art: The One Word Project

after viewing a sample of their work, JT would give each artist one word that came to his mind, asking them to respond to that word and how it relates to their work. the book pairs each artist's response along with a reproduction of their work. i got a cheap thrill that my very own entry appears in the preview!
so do support some self-published artistic action,
at $20 it's quite a steal...

in other book news...i finished reading kornwolf the other day and this crazy little amish/werewolf/boxing story has really stuck with me. I do have a soft spot for dark tales with a touch of apocalyptic insanity. the werewolf in this book represented some kind of cultural/individual unrest that went on right beneath the societal surface... the kornwolf is a menace that is almost tolerated & encouraged until it spins out of control. the book ends with a primal gathering that i can only describe as a "teenage riot."

while researching my previous post that i discovered the author had committed suicide just after the book was published. i can't deny that this knowledge might have colored my feelings toward the book. i'm glad that i didn't know this until i was almost finished reading. it's too easy to project all of these suicidal notions onto the book and rob it of its merit as a separate entity from its creator. but i can't help feeling that it adds some authenticity to the dark neurosis of the book. here is a tribute to the author, tristan egolf.

if you can put down your book for a minute, i totally recommend
seeing Brick, a noir-ish detective drama set in the mean halls of high school. i was at first distracted but ultimately awed by the simplicity of the setting: bleak school walls, sparse parking lots, tacky basements and football fields were shot with such honesty they took on monumental stance. the space around the characters was an integral part of the drama.