SNEAK PEEK. ISSUE II. SO RAD. 2010.
C M BELL: an interview with the man, the myth, the legend...
Hi Martin. I miss you. After the long-anticipated release of the premier issue Issue I: Lonely are the Brave what do you think of the final product?
Very professional; the barcode, the ISBN, the amazing cover. Into it. You definitely deserve grants for the forthcoming issues. I'm a fan of Daniel Chavarria's Polaroid series; the poetry of Nicholas DeBoer; and the entire aesthetic of Mr. Christopher Schuman. The excerpt from Melissa Conser was equal parts disturbing and exciting.
With the release of the premier issue, there has been a lot of interest in your two pieces Lapse in Atlas & Rub Whiskers, Tear Cotton (p. 38 & 140), which are actually excerpts from a larger piece. Care to explain in better detail?
Affwri was a three year visual poem project that combined my affinities for the curvature of typeface and exploring limitlessness within the limits of language. When not seated in front of my computer, I wrote everywhere I could. Some of Affwri was written on the circular cardboard you get with frozen pizza; some in a $2 composition notebook while shoeless in the mountains; and a lot on the 40 minute bus ride to Denver. It was definitely a self-imposed rite of passage in the wake of the public school experience and at the heels of the university one; a meditation that allowed me to get from one elevation to the next.
The title of the upcoming fall/winter issue sleep prngrphr is taken from your second piece Rub Whiskers, Tear Cotton. The first time I read that piece, those two words violently stood out to me and have been on my mind ever since.
"sleep prngrphr." Take the phrase as you'd like: we've become so adept at creating filth that we can do it as we sleep; we're a nation of dirty dreamers; or maybe we're just disemvoweled.
You also make music under the name Young Dental. Your music appears in collaboration with Theodore Darst on the videosounds section of the Flaneur Foundry website. Explain whatvideosounds is all about.
I've been making computer-based music since the tender age of thirteen and Young Dental is my latest guise. Theodore Darst (http://vimeo.com/jcrs) is a brilliant filmmaker I met in Savannah, Georgia. We're like the Handsome Boy Modeling School of avant-garde short cinema.
You also host two other websites, Dermaptera and URL Historians. What’s the story with those?
URL Historians (http://urlhistorians.posterous.com/) is an Internet absurdity screenshot blog that I co-created with Isaac Linder. Getting its name from a painting "US Historians" by [I can't recall], submission to it is open to any reader who realizes the comedic potential of banner ads and Facebook comments.
Dermaptera (http://dermaptera.posterous.com/) was intended to be a "side blog" to URL, but soon eclipsed it in terms of popularity and effort. It's basically a recitation of the songs that get stuck in my head each day, hour by hour, linked to a sometimes obscure, but always brilliant Youtube video. I want this to be, not just a standalone blog, but a genre of blog, and thus welcome guest entries at any time.
So what is YOUR plan now?
Like many artists before me, my plan is emigration; eventual, but sure.
What do you think about the future of Flaneur Foundry as a biannual arts journal and small press?
Flaneur Foundry is a testament to much of what is good about small press: diverse, relatively inexpensive, and invigoratingly fresh. No matter how many blogs there are, people will always want the smell, the look, the touch of pure thought in their hands.
"Somebody's boring me. I think it's me."
an amazing array of other journals:
www.monkeypuzzleonline.com - Nate Jordon, monkey-in-chief, has created a quarterly literary journal based out of Boulder, Colorado. Monkey Puzzle Magazine publishes imaginative, thought provoking prose, poetry, hybrids, translations, artwork, and photography that exhibits intelligence and creativity, with a bit of socio-political awareness and humor. The most recent issue has even been nominated for a Colorado Book Award in the Anthology category.
http://theebeehive.com - A collaborative brain-child of editor-in-chief Christopher T. Schuman and public relations officer Bienenstock Thee Zeitschrift, Thee Beehive online literary journal is unlike any other, representing the best in literature and anti-literature, art and anti-art from some of the most promising up-and-coming writers. Schuman lived next door to me freshman year of college, and though neither of us remember most of that year, I am sure it was a good time.
http://urlhistorians.posterous.com/ - the URL Historians have created an open archive screenshot community to archive the vast WWW. Creator and future father of my children C. M. Bell said it best: "the Internet is the new great frontier, so it must be funny sometimes!"
http://farfallapress.blogspot.com/ - Farfalla Press/McMillan & Parrish is an independent small press surfacing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics co-founded by Gary Parrish, Colin McMillan and Tyler Burba.
www.zeroducats.com - A priceless as in no price not precious punk rock pocked calibrated print journal of fringe poetry and microscopic prose of the post savant.
www.thelinchpin.org - the linchpin collective is a group of artists, photographers, philosophers, writers, thinkers, and rebels. At the Linchpin, you can access articles about the arts and join in on discussions, access information on various projects and journals, network with other artists, join contests, and more.