November 05, 2007

Some 52nd City Meta: King on "Stupid"

I was recently drawn into a long and confusing conversation, not all that unusual, but the core problem was sourcing. A few months back, I posted up a Chris King faux-release on the then-latest 52nd City. A contributor, Googling herself, found the piece and was miffed about my words. Which weren't my words, at all. They were Chris King's.

Anyway, here's another of the pot-stirring Chris King faux-releases:

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'Stupid'
Various artists
(52nd City)
$8, 36 pp.

Reviewed by Chris King


'Stupid' is really smart.

It’s the new publication by 52nd City. The editors organize each project by theme, this time 'stupid,' and surely regular readers of 52nd City who were aware of this theme on their editorial calendar expected wonderful things.

I did. I wasn’t disappointed. Yet, 'Stupid' surprised me.

There are stupid and funny things throughout the volume, as I had hoped. Piedmont Chris Johnson imagining an incompetent performance artist who can’t even manage to eat himself alive.

There are hints of sadness and even despair amidst the stupidity, as one would expect. Mike Steinberg discerning the Rilkean angels who sing background vocals on all artistic accomplishment, very much including Gary Coleman's pout.

There is incalculable shit, as one must crave. Aaron Belz breaking rules we didn't know we had agreed upon that govern a game we hadn't yet admitted we all play.

And there is one dangerous excursion into the philosophy that underpins the dualities that make a concept like 'stupid' possible. K. Curtis Lyle explaining the varieties of narcotic experience as both metaphors for psychic states and escape hatches from the burden of experiencing life at psychic depth.

But, actually, it's the visual art that caught me by surprise.

Sara Raischel has done childish justice to the shapes and moods of things we aren’t allowed to notice in clouds on the move, which art director Caroline Huth (presumably) superimposed over an image of clouds on the move.

This thing Caroline (presumably) did with the ending of Piedmont Chris Johnson's skit, you kind of have to see it and experience it in the context of narrative's warp and woof (woof), but it involves a plate, a pattern, shadows, a tea cup, a hammer (all caught in a photograph by Kerry Zimmerman), and the menace that you might mistakenly have thought was missing from the poem.

Wow, Andrea Day's photographs of what must be Curtis Lyle feeling his feet, because he has rooted his existential philosophy in feeling his feet.

And, then, Michael Allen's lead image for his ruined building ruminations, which does such a very fine job of letting blackness speaks for itself. It makes me think, inexplicably, of Mississippi Hill Country country picnics, and the covers of ambitious rock albums back when albums were bigger than cheeseburgers.

Speaking of cheeseburgers, Andrea Avery has a really stupid (smart) drawing of a Mustard King, which illustrates a really stupid (smart) Turkish poem about mustard that I had a tiny role in translating.

Here is what I did. I ordered drinks and sat down in Arlene's Grocery, in The Village, with this Turkish punk rock chick, who didn’t even begin to believe in herself. I believed in her, however, and that kept her turning the pages of Orhan Veli's poems and imagining the English words that the Turkish words wanted to be. I wrote down what she said. Sometimes, I flipped what she said on its head. Then she stole a lid from the tampon trash can. That was pretty stupid. She gave it to me. I moved it here from New York and have it hanging on a wall in my basement, which I call a museum. That's really stupid.

'Stupid,' however, is smart.


Posted by Thomas Crone at 08:59 PM | 52nd City Updates
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