Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in 6th grade, I knew the wood, the wheels, and the art were going to be a part of my world. Like Alex Steinweiss and the album cover, skateboard graphics created the look of skateboarding. There were years where the… Continue reading Paradigms Crossed: Building and Burning Bridges in Skateboarding’s Disposable History
“A few decades ago, it became permissible for families to emigrate from the unincorporated areas of ‘reality’ into the science fictional zones,” reads the manual in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2010), and lately it’s been feeling more and more like we’re slipping into an adjacently possible dimension.… Continue reading Alfred Jarry: Live Wrong
With 30 Rock coming to an abbreviated end in its seventh season, I’ve been watching and re-watching past seasons. A friend of mine once complained to me about movies and shows about making movies and shows, and I understand his frustration, but the media-making premise is solid. It has a lengthy history going all the… Continue reading In Medias Res: Shows About Shows
Maybe it’s apt that I don’t remember, but I somehow came across Tom Phillips‘ “treated Victorian novel,” A Humument (Tetrad Press, 1970), nearly a decade ago at San Diego State University. Phillips took William Mallock’s A Human Document (Cassell Publishing, 1892) and obscured words on every page, leaving a few here and there to tell… Continue reading Revealing Poetry: The Art of Erasure
Though the concept album has a history dating back to the 1940s, prog rock acts like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Rush are probably the first bands to come to mind. Just doing an album-length story connotes prog leanings, recall The Mars Volta‘s De-Loused in the Comatorium (GSL, 2003) and Francis the Mute (GSL, 2005). Metal… Continue reading Concept-Oriented Discography: Literary Post-Metal
