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 ...
RABBLE by Christopher Michno
Artillery Magazine Jan-Feb 2013
Volume 7, Issue 3, Page 56
"Each 1,500-word essay in Rabble resembles a religious pamphlet, or a political tract, matching Stallings' essay-as-manifesto ethos. ... Two other Rabble essays exist: artist Steve Roden's Zen-like reply to Odilon Redon's painting of the Buddha, and writer Derek Beaulieu's dance with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Beaulieu's essay, 'All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy,' offers the greatest complexity and whets our appetite for more."
PARROT 15 Kept Women
by Kate Durbin Now Out from Insert Blanc Press
There are many intimate paths that wind their way around this expensive Eden, with many nooks for hidden rendezvous. The wide lawns are spacious enough for vast tents suitable for hosting parties such as a Midsummer Nights Dream lingerie gala. There are several sloping hills, idyllic for topless slip n’ sliding in the summer or sledding over a gleaming expanse of imported snow in the winter. A marble panel is visible just inside the video monitored main gate, presenting a depiction of Aurora, Roman goddess of the sunrise, guiding a group of young Eves into the southern Californian dawn.
...
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!
Fright Catalog by Joseph Mosconi is now available for Pre-Sale at $25 (at a discount anticipating the official release). Fright Catalog is a 100 page, full color, large format magazine scheduled for release in Fall 2012 from Insert Blanc Press.
the buddha’s hand forms the vitarka mudra, suggesting deep contemplation and indicative of a sage. although it is commonly formed with the right, the buddha forms this mudra with his left hand.
the buddha’s right hand grasps a walking stick.
on an 8th century statue from thailand, the buddha forms the vitarka mudra with two hands, looking strangely reminiscent of a 1909 photograph of mondrian, his theatrical hands pointing up and down like david bowie on the cover of heroes.
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.
PARROT 13 Tramps Everywhere
by Amina Cain Now Out from Insert Blanc Press
EXT. Morning. Strong sun. Short and long shots of a swamp. A closeup of a frog. It sits on the bank then jumps into the water, making circles on the surface. The camera stays, looking at the swamp.
VOICEOVER: I walked into the day.
...
PARROT 14 Fur Birds
by Michelle Detorie Now Out from Insert Blanc Press
I am 15. Female. Human (I think).
We lived in a burrow and ate grass. I licked my paw, tasting only the slightest remnants of ash. In one corner we piled sugar cubes – white and cold and sweet, and perfectly square. “Like a little igloo wall,” my sister cooed, twitching her tail.
...
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!
Poetry Is Dead, I Killed It. Insert Blanc Press insertblancpress.net Movie by Nick Flavin, Ben Rodkin, & Mathew Timmons. Sound recorded by Sonia Parada. Featuring Vanessa Place & Ben White. Also appearing: Amanda Ackerman, Mashinka Firunts, Danny Snelson, Joy Decena, Teresa Carmody, Harold Abramowitz, Jackqueline Frost, Kim Calder, Andrea Quaid, Suzanne Adelman, Christopher Russell, Greg Curtis, & Stephen Van Dyck.
