| Anyone can hear but few listen,
anyone can look but few really see & hardly anyone reads. It’s
an edge. Here’s a couple of things that have kept me sharp
in recent times.
I’ve been a longterm enthusiastic fan of
the American artist ROBERT WILLIAMS, since his days in the 60s San
Franciscan underground comix scene along with fellow blown minds
like Robert Crumb, S Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez & Gilbert
Shelton. From those early groundbreaking mutant minboggling line
drawings, Williams has switched to painting, creating a lowbrow
outsider style of post psychedelic art that fractures reality with
an iconaclistic visual cosmology that confuses the eye & confounds
the mind via an exuberant explosion of masterful colour & image.
The volumes ZOMBIE MYSTERY PAINTINGS, FROM A TORTURED
LIBIDO & VISUAL ADDICTION, the titles give you an idea of what
awaits, have chronicled his evolution as an artist with a remarkable
imagination & wit & as one of the great draughtsmen in contemporary
visual art. But aside from founding & publishing the essential
JUXTAPOZ Art & Culture Magazine ( I’ve raved about it
before, orderable from any newsagent ) & a collection of his
early comix & sketchbooks, MALICIOUS RESPLENDENCE & the
occasional group gallery guest spot, it’s been pretty quiet
for over a decade, with no new ROBERT WILLIAMS collections published.The
new volume, THROUGH PREHENSILE EYES breaks that drought with a resounding
thud!
Literally. The large format hardcover houses 250
heavy paper stock pages that weigh in at a hefty 4 pounds. It’s
a powerful statement, containing over 50 exuberant new works, all
beautifully reproduced & with Robert’s own entertaining
esoteric explanatory notes for each of them. One could say he’s
mellowed, there’s fewer naked women, hot rods & foodstuffs
but he’s embraced quantum physics & visual paradox, refined
his use of colour such that his visual thought balloons are given
even freer rein to manifest & mutate in hitherto unexplored
places. The creative energy on display here can barely be constrained
by the page & the bookcover. He’s wilder in a subtle way.
Less retro, more boho.
My nomination for novel of the year is the astounding
autobiographical EPILEPTIC by DAVID.B. It’s hard to describe
the pleasure that it is to read, in spite of the fact that it chronicles
the effects on the narrator & his family of his brother’s
extreme epilepsy, but what comes through is an incredibly human
emotional journey that the reader becomes emeshed in as the family
samples macrobiotics, spiritual healing, extreme psychology &
other new age groups in their quest for a cure or at least some
respite for their ailing member & the narrator’s remarkable
honesty & candor when telling of his struggle with his own conflicting
emotions. Originally published in France in 6 volumes this is the
first time that they’ve been translated & printed in one
360 page edition.
Oh & did I mention that it’s a graphic
novel? No, not a comic between hardcovers, but a genuine hybrid,
each of the dense intricate black & white panels resemble expressionist
European lithographs, symbiotically echoing, amplifying & exposing
the text as well as telling a story of their own. No cartoons here!
Many people may think that it’s a bit easy, that the pictures
make the story easier to absorb, particularly for lazy minds, but
here they enrich & often confront the reader’s experience,
it’s no easy ride, you have to stretch. The book design, paper
stock, printing quality & proportions are all perfectly balanced
& crafted, it’s a pleasure to hold. Don’t just take
my word for it, it’s also number one book for the year on
metacritic.com!
Since his dynamic debut in 1988 novelist GEORGE
PELECANOS has bought a unique voice to modern crime & urban
fiction writing, blending strong characters, hardbitten dialogue
& gritty storyline, all set on the mean streets of his hometown
of Washington, the city with the highest murder rate & largest
black population in modern America. His last 3 highly acclaimed
& recommended novels Hell To Pay, Right as Rain & Soul Circus
follow the trial by fire of black street cop Derek Strange in the
crime cauldron of the American capital & the diffifculty of
reconciling his own actions & emotions with the stress of the
job. HARD REVOLUTION, his latest in paperback actually precedes
those books & finds Strange as a rookie cop caught up in the
social unrest, racial tensions & riots that followed the assassination
of Martin Luther King in 1968. But it’s also about family,
neighbourhood, friendship & struggle, universal themes that
make his books more than whodunnits. A great entry point for those
who have not sampled Pelecanos before & for those familiar with
his work, his best.
Also about those most human of experiences &
emotions but set in Brooklyn during the 70s & 80s & only
cursorally connected with crime is JONATHON LETHEM’s “FORTRESS
OF SOLITUDE “. It’s an epic tale of 2 friends, one black,
one white, imbued in music, graffitti & comics & what would
happen if they gained superpowers & fucked it up. It’s
also about social change, art, love, pain & the whole damn thing.
Lethem’s skills at evoking atmosphere, time & place &
transporting the reader there are all on ready display here, the
final chapters in particular are incredibly moving, with the realization
that you really can’t go home again, that you & home have
both changed so much that you are strangers to each other. A beautiful
sadness.
Somewhat of a literary tour de force CLOUD ATLAS
by DAVID MITCHELL transcends history, time, geography, space &
style by tangentally linking 6 different stories with audacious
confidence & language. It’s a dazzling display, although
not perfect, the future/sci fi section is very tedious, but Mitchell’s
big perspective & attention to small detail combine to have
you excitedly devouring each new reality. It’s a series of
puzzles with no solution, a kaleidescope with no perspective, a
riddle with no rhyme.
And isn’t that what it’s all about?
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