An impossible comic by Ken Doll Koch.
You’re looking happily deranged, which, coincidentally, is exactly the feeling I’m living inside of righ nah, as ever. How’re you, though, really, ya little multigraph? Keeping them terrible teeth ’n’ claws well-sharpened, I hope? Some new things happening to/for/with your girl:
– I wrote my first piece for The Guardian recently, if you want to read me doing my serious voice about Kultural Koncerns.
– As of a week ago, I’m home from a two-leg flânerie to:
Me, me, and Jessica Hopper’s knee in our Seattle suite, as told to my Instagram.
A) Seattle, where I attended my first-ever EMP Pop Conference. I presented a paper about the way introversion/extroversion is expressed in Morrissey’s music (and inside/outside of me and other listeners) and appeared on a panel called Critical Karaoke, where I mumbled a weird half-poem I wrote about this Kendal Johansson cover of a Big Star song, feeling pandered-to in the series of yellowed rec rooms where I yawned through the dull romances of my teenage years, and the whooshing ocean.
Radio, my Transmission. Photo by Nick Kozel for City Pages.
B) Minneapolai, where I inhaled Westerbergian air, bought some INCREDIBLY salacious denim shorts in preparation for the looming, blooming SUMMERTIME, and did a little soft-shoe and a little boogaloo (for you) at an excellent Smiths night called Transmission. I’ve since become breathtakingly obsessed with its DJ’s radio show, which I aggressively recommend you check out on The Current, Minnesota’s lovely public station.
– I’m currently scarfing down Kenneth Koch’s visual poems (see all the way above), this teeth-licking, bouncy Italo disco track by Baby’s Gang, the collected Lingua Franca (if anyone can hook my brain up to some old issues, EMAIL A BITCH POSTHASTE), this De La Soul megamix by DJ Platurn, the occidental, wondrous, and hella grisly novel Lonesome Dove, and Arab Strap’s Philophobia, a handsome little cut of which you can hear in this video YouTube sound-o-gram.
– I spoke to the Huffington’s Proste about the tinctures and balms I smooth onto my face in order to feel a little bit less monstrous as a human being with other human beings’ eyes scuttling across her.
Overall: I’m okay. I’m cool. I’m blooming, and looming, and, above all else, happily deranged. I hope the same is true of your own personal soft-shoe-ing and boogaloo-ing, however it is you may be doing it at the moment.
Yours in sweaty fervor,
ARS
ARS 