People contort all kinds of ways to describe a really original writer, but Big Machine is an amazing piece of work. A true American Gothic ‘horror’ in the vein of Poe, or Melville or James — this book is authentically scary, compulsively strange, and hugely exciting on the sentence level. It’s also funny as hell. A riff about the Washerwoman cult, who rewrite the Bible in bizarre contemporary idiom, is worth the price of admission by itself.

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Sometimes pessimism is more encouraging than optimism, because more is true. I’m a huge fan of Straw Dogs, but the English counter-Humanist philosopher’s Heresies is just as bracing: ‘Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes’. Living in Los Angeles, where a brittle, self-obsessed ‘hopefulness’ is everywhere, I might need this writer (who certainly shouldn’t be confused with the Men Are From Mars guy) even more than you do. But you do, you do.

More timeless than current’. But I recently finished a long and complicated novel about Hollywood in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and am just now buckling down to write a short nonfiction book about this film, part of a series for Soft Skull Press. A little peremptorily written off as a mere ‘entertainment’, and also overshadowed by the in-fact-not-quite-as-good Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, this is a pretty dazzling effort: a coded Watergate-conspiracy narrative, a comment on the perils and pleasures of being fooled that’s also twice as much fun to watch as you remember. Which was pretty fun to begin with.

Whether or not you give a damn about baseball cards, you should read Josh Wilker’s captivating blog, Cardboard Gods. Using vintage Topps imagery — the stagey, shaggy and strange captures of forgotten ballplayers in the 70s — as a launching pad, Wilker takes off on flights about everything from memory to athleticism to middle-aged failure. The guy’s such a great writer it hardly matters. Post after post after post is a winner.

Lisa Jane Persky takes beautiful, beautiful, photographs. To be fair, she also took my book jacket photo, but that doesn’t make her work less amazing. She covers a ton of ground: visit her site to look at vintage, CBGB’s era Debbie Harry, but stay for everything else.

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The Disintegration Loops, a series of melty, mutated tape transfers, are pretty staggering [listen to Dip 1.3 below]. But William Basinski’s recent 92982, which seems to compress the murmur of all of Brooklyn, could even be better. ‘Ambient’ doesn’t nearly cover it: there’s a grandness, but never a grandiosity, of scale. It’s meditative without being lulling, mysterious without being merely vague. Amazing stuff.

The Thing. Not the John Carpenter movie, of course, but the subscription-only art object, curated by a different person each time. Jonathan Lethem’s Chaldron Optical System is the current one, an item of enigmatic and satisfying beauty. Who knows what will be next?
‘The Thing Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service. THE THING’s current year of subscriptions (issues 8-11) will begin with an issue by artist and writer Trevor Paglen, and will continue with visual artist Ryan Gander, and writer/radio personality Starlee Kine, and will end with Chris Johanson’. [photo by Lenny Gonzalez]