Insert Blanc Press is proud to announce our new show, The People with Editor and Publisher Mathew Timmons and Insert Blanc Artist Ben White, is Now on iTunes!!! The People features the voices and ideas of The People that make up the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the west coast, and beyond on KCHUNG 1630AM every 3rd Sunday at 3pm. More & more The People simply choose, for whatever reason, Power to The People in the home of People Power on the Internet. A Radio Revolution offering comfort and cueing up Special Stuff. This is The Sound you love to listen to, The Power of The People to make atmospheric, psychedelic, and dance-oriented Conversation. Radio for The People featuring art, literature, talk, cultural criticism, visual culture, intelligent witticisms and so much more! The People is me, The People is you, The People is we, and You Can Too! … like a Broken Record magically repaired.
Keep up with The People & find out about upcoming shows & guests on The People's blog!
We've done four whole shows so far, 4! and we would really love it if you Subscribe to the iTunes podcast and rate the show (5 stars cause The People are grrreat!) or you can also listen to the shows at The People: The Archive or on SoundCloud, and also you can go to The People's Facebook Page [while you're at it check out the Insert Blanc Facebook page]. It's all very exciting stuff and we've had such great guests as Joseph Mosconi, Jay Erker, Katie Herzog, Andrew Choate, David Shook, Jason Kunke, Boris Dralyuk & Andrew Falkowski!
by Amarnath Ravva Saddle-Stitched chapbook 2 Color cover, Black & White interior Matte finish, Opaque cream, 70# text (104 gsm) Dimensions: 6.125" x 9.375" x 0.125", 16 Pages ISSN: 2169-3811-17
Outside, I walk towards the edge of the parking lot. All around me are cats and dogs, even some chickens. The asphalt is seething with the strays of paradise.
It's not a matter of beauty for them. They collect around their needs; they hover around the promise of food.
“The new journalism, Ravva-style, stimulates the nerve endings with its alternately lush and spare renditions of some spectacular settings, William Kentridge or Gauguin or Florine Stettheimer should be in charge of the art direction when the movie, or opera, appears, but in the meantime sit back and enjoy the calm cool stylings of one of America’s finest young writers.”
-Kevin Killian
...
The PARROT series was originally issued by Blanc Press (Los Angeles) from 2005-2010. Insert Blanc Press is reissuing facsimile editions of each title from the PARROT series and releasing a Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection at the end of the run.
Titles in the PARROT series: Harold Abramowitz’s A House on A Hill (A House on a Hill, Part One), Amanda Ackerman’s I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander’s On the Substance of Disorder, Brian Ang’s Pre-Symbolic, Stan Apps’ Politicized Pretty Picture, Amina Cain’s Tramps Everywhere, Teresa Carmody’s I Can Feel, Allison Carter’s All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Michelle Detorie’s Fur Birds, Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, K. Lorraine Graham’s My Little Neoliberal Pony, Jen Hofer’s The Missing Link, Maximus Kim’sBreak Bloom Burn, Janice Lee’s Fried Chicken Dinner, Joseph Mosconi’s But On Geometric, Vanessa Place’s Forcible Oral Copulation, Amarnath Ravva’s Airline Music, Stephanie Rioux’s My Beautiful Beds, Ara Shirinyan’s Erotic in Czech Republic, Michael Smoler’s Pieces of Water, Brian Kim Stefans’ Viva Miscegenation, Mathew Timmons’ Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, and Allyssa Wolf’s Loquela.
Covers of Parrot were originally designed by the amazing printmaker, Maggie White. You can find out more about her work at Gray Area, methinks you'll like what you see.
Read some press on the PARROT series, including a review of PARROT 5, a review of PARROT 1 and an interview with editor Mathew Timmons. And check out the various ways Insert Blanc Press offers to become a subscribing member and to support the press. Visit the Subscription page at Insert Press for more details!
Until I saw Adam Curtis’s 2002 documentary Century of the Self, I had never given much thought to the genesis of public relations. The field of public relations was invented, it turns out, by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. In the period after the first World War, when many were questioning the human drive to violence, Bernays understood the power of both wartime propaganda and Freud’s theories of the unconscious to manipulate public opinion.
Rabble, an imprint of Insert Blanc Press, is co-edited by Holly Myers and Mathew Timmons. Rabble prints single author issues of critical essays of about 1500 words on a subject of the author’s choosing. The subject will be an artwork (or series of artworks), but broadly defined: could be visual art, literature, music, architecture, film, design; could be contemporary or historical. The essay will be printed in pamphlet form, with room for a couple full color images, and distributed at a reasonable price.
Rabble seeks to be a venue through which to interrogate the nature of criticism, a laboratory for prodding at the boundaries of criticism as a form. The idea is to begin with a framework that reduces criticism down to its two fundamental components—the thing that's been made and the person who responds to the thing that's been made (i.e., the art work and the critic)—and invite each writer to take it from there. We’re not looking for the average book or exhibition review, but something that tests out a new direction, whatever that means to the individual author.
We have great confidence in the potential of Rabble to make a lasting contribution to the cultural discourse on the West Coast and beyond. It is our hope that, in charting a path between the two prevailing poles of the genre—the ever-narrowing shutters of print journalism on the one hand and the ponderous obscurity of the academy on the other—Rabble will go some way in restoring the sheer excitement of criticism.
We are excited to announce the Pre-Sale at a special price of A Slap in the Face: Four Russian Futurist Manifestos, the first of the Manifestoh! series curated by editor David Shook, and scheduled for official release in Summer 2013!
A SLAP IN THE FACE:
FOUR RUSSIAN FUTURIST MANIFESTOS
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Chapbook, 32 Pages Full Color
Dimensions: 6.25" x 8.5" x 0.25"
Containing:
A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE (1912)
the manifesto from A TRAP FOR JUDGES II (1913)
GO TO HELL! (1914)
A DROP OF TAR (1915)
“The emergence of the New poetries has affected the still-creeping old fogies of Russian little-ature like white-marbled Pushkin dancing the tango.”
The four manifestos collected in A SLAP IN THE FACE rattle with the verbal ingenuity and vitriolic verve of Russia’s most accomplished Futurist collective—known as Hylaea and, for a brief period, the Cubo-Futurists. Organized in 1910-11 by the Burlyuk brothers, the group featured the wildly talented poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the master of “transrational” (“zaum”) poetics, Aleksey Kruchenykh. The Hylaean program of total destruction and uncertain renewal offers an ominous parallel to the political turmoil of the Great War and the events of 1917. Dralyuk’s annotations provide information on Hylaea’s tumultuous history, its literary battles and short-lived alliances, and the biographies of its members.
“These four manifestos of Russian Futurism, charting key points in the rapid unfolding of the Russian avant-garde, provoke the appreciative bourgeoisie while declaring the liberation of the word, the phoneme, and even the grapheme! Dralyuk’s brisk, inventive translations convey the energy and rowdiness of the original.”—Eugene Ostashevsky
“Boris Dralyuk’s new translation brings these manifestos to life with fire, passion, clarity, humor, and the unmistakable flavor of inventiveness, of verbal fireworks. What a joy to see Mr. Mayakovsky in English, slapping the face of the adoring public, throwing Pushkin overboard—with the passion of all young artists, yes, but also with humorous abandon, brilliance, and delicacy of detail. Mayakovsky and Khlebnikhov were revolutionaries who believed in the ‘word as a creator of myth,’ who believed that the ‘richness of the poet’s vocabulary is his justification.’ Bringing their manifestos into English today is a very timely event, one thinks. This is an important new translation.”—Ilya Kaminsky
Boris Dralyuk holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, World Literature Today, Poetry International, Slavic and East European Journal, Russian History, and other journals. He is the translator of Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need (Calypso Editions, 2010), co-translator of Polina Barskova’s The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011), and author of the monograph Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012). He is also the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky(Penguin Classics, 2015). He received First Prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition, and, with Irina Mashinski, First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.
Insert Blanc Press Editor & Publisher Mathew Timmons WONDERs about things for WONDER all through the month of April, the cruelest month, National Poetry Month.
PARROT 16 Pieces of Water
by Michael Smoler Now Out from Insert Blanc Press
“promise in a minefield”
again
once more
for the last time, I swear
I’ve come to know
one day
I will
before long
never
again.
...
The PARROT series was originally issued by Blanc Press (Los Angeles) from 2005-2010. Insert Blanc Press is reissuing facsimile editions of each title from the PARROT series and releasing a Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection at the end of the run.
Titles in the PARROT series: Harold Abramowitz’s A House on A Hill (A House on a Hill, Part One), Amanda Ackerman’s I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander’s On the Substance of Disorder, Brian Ang’s Pre-Symbolic, Stan Apps’ Politicized Pretty Picture, Amina Cain’s Tramps Everywhere, Teresa Carmody’s I Can Feel, Allison Carter’s All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Michelle Detorie’s Fur Birds, Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, K. Lorraine Graham’s My Little Neoliberal Pony, Jen Hofer’s The Missing Link, Maximus Kim’sBreak Bloom Burn, Janice Lee’s Fried Chicken Dinner, Joseph Mosconi’s But On Geometric, Vanessa Place’s Forcible Oral Copulation, Amarnath Ravva’s Airline Music, Stephanie Rioux’s My Beautiful Beds, Ara Shirinyan’s Erotic in Czech Republic, Michael Smoler’s Pieces of Water, Brian Kim Stefans’ Viva Miscegenation, Mathew Timmons’ Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, and Allyssa Wolf’s Loquela.
Covers of Parrot were originally designed by the amazing printmaker, Maggie White. You can find out more about her work at Gray Area, methinks you'll like what you see.
Read some press on the PARROT series, including a review of PARROT 5, a review of PARROT 1 and an interview with editor Mathew Timmons. And check out the various ways Insert Blanc Press offers to become a subscribing member and to support the press. Visit the Subscription page at Insert Press for more details!
In 2006 I entered a raffle and won an iPod programmed by Thurston Moore filled with black metal songs. He called the mixtape "Old Hate." The songs were great but what was even more interesting was the spreadsheet that accompanied it with all the band names and song titles. I started keeping my own spreadsheet of song titles and began collaging select phrases with my own (and others') adolescent poetry, language culled from World of Warcraft and occult forums and chatrooms, sentences from H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and bits of art theory. I had been interested in slang and specialized vocabularies for some time...the language in my first book, Galvanized Iron on the Citizens' Band, was drawn from the somewhat eroticized slang of truckers and miltary personnel. I view Fright Catalog as a sequel of sorts to that book.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
There are no characters in Fright Catalog. But if there were a books on tape version (and it would have to be tape, not digital, so that the sound would wear out and get a bit warbly) I could imagine Sean Connery as narrator. He would be dressed in his Zardoz costume and sip single malt Scotch and interrupt every now and then to ask, "Is this thing on?" By the end of the book he would be so irritated that he would curse with words only Scots know and throw his headphones on the ground and stalk out of the recording session.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Wouldn't you love a monsterman to repair the dimensional cluster?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
2 years, 6 months and 3 days. Then it sat around on my hard drive for many years. Finally the design of the book took more than a year.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier, Barbara Kruger, Sister Corita Kent, Will Alexander, Colby Poster art, Euronymous, Mark E. Smith, Jenny Holzer, Allen Ruppersberg, H.P. Lovecraft, Lautréamont, Varg Vikernes, Hannah Weiner, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Halloween costume catalogs, Friz Quadrata, Graham Harman, children's literature, Azeroth & Draenor (& its shattered remnants, known as Outland...)
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I nearly always think about the physical form the book will take while I'm writing it (and sometimes even before I've written anything). In the case of Fright Catalog, the text and the form are inseparable. It's published in full color and every page has a different color combination of text and background. It's also published in the form of a semi-glossy magazine.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Fright Catalog was published by Insert Blanc Press.
Insert Blanc Press steps into The Future of Radio and Records and Books on Tape! Listen Up! Do you sometimes just wanna sit back and listen to literature? Do you enjoy elaborate descriptions of complex visual art over the airwaves? Do you believe the radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. This is an innovation, a suggestion that seems utopian and that I myself admit to be utopian.
Insert Blanc Press is proud to announce our new show, The People with Editor and Publisher Mathew Timmons and Insert Blanc Artist Ben White. The People features the voices and ideas of The People that make up the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the west coast, and beyond on KCHUNG 1630AM every 3rd Sunday at 3pm. More & more The People simply choose, for whatever reason, Power to The People in the home of People Power on the Internet. A Radio Revolution offering comfort and cueing up Special Stuff. This is The Sound you love to listen to, The Power of The People to make atmospheric, psychedelic, and dance-oriented Conversation. Radio for The People featuring art, literature, talk, cultural criticism, visual culture, intelligent witticisms and so much more! The People is me, The People is you, The People is we, and You Can Too! … like a Broken Record magically repaired.
Listen this Sunday March 17th at 3pm as our guest Joseph Mosconi reads from his new book Fright Catalogfrom Insert Blanc Press. We'll also be joined by artist and gallerist Jay Erker to talk about her work.
While Insert Blanc isn't pressing vinyl yet, keep your eyes open for vinyl on the horizon. Meanwhile, we'd like to wet your ears with a digital download album available both as single songs or as a full album. Christian Cummings' album Slavebation will keep you aching for more, more, more!
"Alternating between elegiac despondency, apocalyptic vision, didactic discourse, and guided deprogramming exercise (often in the space of a single lyric), Cummings convincingly positions himself as a nerdish prophet of doom. Christian Cummings is facing our crazy life head on, in all its bewildering entropy and Gordian knottiness, and in doing so has produced the first great protest album of the 21st century.” -Doug Harvey, Artillery Art Magazine
“Lest we've forgotten, Cummings is reminding us what Uncle Frank (Zappa) told us back in 66. Plastic people in a plastic society living on a diet of plastic. And as we know, when they burn and melt they all start to stink. Slavebation is right up my street.” -Sexton Ming
FRIGHT CATALOG by Joseph Mosconi is Here!
Saddle-Stitched magazine, full color
Uncoated, Matte finish, 70# text (100 gsm)
Dimensions: 9" x 12" x 0.25", 100 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9814623-8-7
Black metal, death metal, blackened death metal—not to mention: deathcore; thrash; the melodic and technical; grinds and dooms and drones; pagan or bestial; progressive or deconstructivist; Norwegian versus Swedish (early Stockholm or later Gothenburg?) versus various Vikings and Scandinavians; first, second, nth wave….. the infinitely divisible subgenres of heavy metal music as discerned by its fans exhibit a mania for discrimination and taxonomy that approaches the monadic. Secrets, in these scenes, threaten to become singularities. Such, of course, is the reductio of all subcultures. And "Poetry," for "Culture," has become the ultimate and necessary subculture of them all. Fright Catalog is thus in part a dissertation on the sublime terror of the poetry scene today — with all its partisan scholasticism and stupid undergrounds (as Paul Mann would say). But this catalogue is also attuned to the poetic possibilities of subcultural discourse, to the phonemic tensions and narrative frissons that arise when metal lyrics are mashed up with phrases taken variously from online gaming dialogues, occult forums, and the secret language of adolescence (by definition: misunderstood; mardy; uncommunicative and inscrutable). In the process, Joseph Mosconi forces the opaque argots and cants of isolated initiates to speak with indiscrete promiscuity. Here, accordingly, are the slogans of an infidel poetics (in every sense of Daniel Tiffany's resonant phrase).
—Craig Dworkin
Fright Catalog by Joseph Mosconi has arrived and will remain available for the Pre-Sale price of $20 until soon after we return from AWP. Fright Catalog is a 100 page, full color, large format magazine published by Insert Blanc Press.
The Signed & Numbered Limited Edition (1-40) also comes with a zine by Joseph Mosconi, Fright Analog, and is available at the Pre-Sale price of $35.
We've seen the proof copies and while we eagerly await the books going to print all you out there have an indeterminately short amount of time to get your copies at the Pre-Sale price of $45.00. The cover price for these new books in the Insert Blanc Monograph series will be $65.99. So Get Yours Now!
Fright Catalog by Joseph Mosconi is also coming very soon and is now available for Pre-Sale at $20. Fright Catalog is a 100 page, full color, large format magazine scheduled for release in early March from Insert Blanc Press.
The Signed & Numbered Limited Edition (1-40) also comes with a zine by Joseph Mosconi, Fright Analog, and is available for Pre-Sale at a price of $35
check out the front cover with printer's marks etc ...
