Rust Belt Bindery of Moorehead, MN has just produced a limited edition, illustrated chapbook of DSM 14 contributor Blake Kimzey’s story “Up and Away,” a story from the same series as his excellent “A Family Among Us.”

The story is accompanied by three original paintings, all inspired by the story. It is a first edition of 75 and is being bound at Rust Belt. Each copy is an original work of art, meticulously hand-bound, and costs $14 (including shipping).

I’ve had Derek McCormack’s The Show that Smells lurking on my shelves for years. It’s a selection from Dennis Cooper’s “Little House on the Bowery” series. I can’t heavily recommend it, but it’s interesting.

The dubious deal with this text is it presents itself as a vampire movie, and there are too many characters and too many tricks.

There’s great energy to the prose, some great tongue-in-cheek gaffes and some interesting experimentation with representative symbols.

It’s extremely minimal. The whole thing takes place in a mirror maze. In an area the size of (what felt like) a two-car garage.

Here’s how it opens:

Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers in a Mirror Maze.

Whenever a character is introduced into this book/movie/play thing, they appear thusly. There are some interesting uses of this technique, as when a vampire in bat form emerges:

V.

Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers.

V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers and a bat and me in a Mirror Maze. The bat becomes Schiaperelli. Her blouse is batwinged. Becoming!

But at 108 pages, with a word count probably shy of 17,000, there seemed to be a lot of such entrances. I didn’t count them, but there were at least twenty. And while the first instance of it was quite humorous, it became a thing to glaze over.

Actually, I glazed over quite a bit of this. It makes me feel bad. I’d go back, try again. There were probably too many characters. Too many super-minor people, completely undeveloped. That’s an MFA type word, right there. I feel like an ass typing it, but it’s really all you can say.

The book is told in the first person (?). I didn’t really understand who the narrator was until he raped a guy very late in the book.

The villain here is a woman vampire named Schiaparelli who make perfume, clothes and takes the soul of Carrie Rodgers in exchange for saving Jimmie Rodgers who has Tiberculosis and who is also a carnival singer—hillbilly music.

These are sequins:

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

These are crystals:

*******************************************

These are bats:

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Here’s a joke from the book:

What do you call a pervert vampire in makeup? Mascary!

The design on this book is remarkable. The premise is interesting. The prose is energetic and, for a spell, engaging, but for so slim a book it felt I had to labor through.

I don’t know much about Akashic or the project they had with Dennis Cooper. I’ve only read one Cooper book. Closer.Well. I think I started it, couldn’t get through. Made it ten or so pages in.

Maybe I’ll let that be tomorrow’s book.

This one – The Show that Smells (a reference to what carnies call animal shows) — felt too quirky, too bent on textural innovation.

At what point does innovation become laziness? I mean, this book is a Vampire Movie. That’s the claim. It’s got a cast of characters in the pre-pages. There’s a director names — Tod Browning. Browning, of course, died in 1962. I don’t know, maybe he was too dead to do a real solid job on this one. Like, maybe his death made it hard to give direction. Maybe, because he’s dead, he had a hard time knowing when to yell action, when to yell cut. This book came out in 2007. Most likely it came together in 2006. Forty four years of death could definitely dismantle one’s mechanics with celluloid storytelling.

Also, the last film Browning did was Miracles for Sale, in 1939. That was nearly 70 years before this feature, and on that gem, he had the pleasure of working with Robert Young and Florence Rice.

If you read the cast of characters he had for this outing, you begin to sympathize:

Jimmie Rodgers – Himself

Carrie Rodgers – Joan Crawford

The Reporter – Derek McCormack

The Carter Family – Themselves

Coco Chanel – Herself

Renfield – Lon Chaney

The Vogue Vampire – ?

That’s tough right there. Not only did he have the author portraying a character from his own script (can you imagine the arguments that ensued in terms of vision?), but the majority of his cast was representing themselves, and only masters such as John Malkovich can pull of that kind of artistry, and theses folks (Jimmie Rodgers specifically) are not John Malkovich. Sure, there’s Joan Crawford, but she had a good thirty years of dead on her too, and hadn’t made a public appearance since Mommie Dearest, so she had a lot riding on her for this one.

All that aside, I will be interested in seeing what McCormack cooks up next. There’s a lot of good things going for him. He’s got good presence.

(more…)

Matthew Vollmer’s essay “epitaph 45″ appears in Issue 15 of the magazine. Matthew sat down to answer a handful of questions about the essay and the meaning of orangutans pissing in their own mouths.

Who died?

On one level, a version of myself. On another level, nobody. Yet. The epitaph could be read as one penned for the future occasion of my passing. But that sounds pretentious. Which is why I wrote these in third person. I needed distance. I needed not to say “I” or “my.”

(more…)

Glenn Blake’s Return Fire is set, like his first collection, Drowned Moon, along the rivers and bayous of east Texas, where families, legends, memories, and entire neighborhoods sink into the subsiding land and rising waters of natural and man-made disasters. “Who in his right mind would’ve settled here?” Bobby Dean thinks.

(more…)

Did you read this NYT piece when it came out last month? I’m surprised I’m still thinking about it these weeks later.

It’s a year-end retrospective on how bad big-label rock was in 2011, and it’s just awful. Not because it’s wrong — of course it’s too bad that Sublime with Rome is filling the airwaves with Sublime-lite filler, and of course it would likely be difficult to listen to the new Nickelback album from start to finish. But who with a vested interest in music in 2012 would have the bad sense to check in with Nickelback to see how they’re getting along?

The author cites “bands well past their sell-by date” like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Limp Bizkit, R.E.M., and Sum 41, as further evidence of the decline, forgetting that expired bands have been with us forever, and we have been ignoring them for just as long.

As Dan from Brussels puts it, “This year gave us terrific records from Wilco, the Decemberists, Radiohead, Adele, Bon Iver, M83, Cee-Lo, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z & Kanye among many, many others — and you’re sitting here bemoaning the fact that Nickelback and friends are making boring music? Please.”

“Yes, the center is rotting,” Elizabeth from Illinois says. “But the fringes are increasingly important in the world of rock music. In a world of globalization, the internet, and the arguable decline of major labels, is it wise to dismiss alternative and indie music as the fringe? In my eyes, ‘fringe’ artists ARE the new center.” Should Elizabeth really have to say this as if the year is 1999?

One of the easiest things a struggling newspaper (every newspaper) can do is hire good critics who are paying close attention to culture. Not radio culture — actual culture. They will do it for cheap or for free, just for the cred. The Times is better than this.