Mess Museum

Torturing Sean McTiernan (of the podcasts Live at the Death Factory, Self-Pity, and All Units) by making him read hundreds of pages of fantasy fiction.

Podcast is back. LeTs PlaY a Game. We sift through 3,042 artworks by Finnish painter Kalervo Palsa and try to guess what he might have been like. Can we guess even a few biographical details? Who would draw like this?

Collection of his work here:

https://www.kansallisgalleria.fi/en/search?authors%5B%5D=Kalervo%20Palsa

A conversation with Alex Degen about his book Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters and comics in general. Throughout: a heavy emphasis on manga. My assignment for AD was to watch some episodes of Naoki Urasawa's Japanese-language documentary series Manben, which I love with every atom of my body.

Bert and Jo came over to talk about chess. I had an assignment just for Bert: to assess the logged tournament chess matches of Marcel Duchamp. In addition I forced the group to watch a tepid early-1990s thriller called Knight Moves, and then a better chess-centric movie called Uncovered.

Two artists guest-host with me: Travess Smalley and Sydney Shen. The idea was to talk about two short stories from the 1970s by French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud. We talked about YouTube and toilets for like 35 minutes first and sort of actually tied this into the stories. The way we did it is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

Examining literary personals ads of the 1970s, with Jo Livingstone and Annelise Ogaard.

The prehistory of this conversation begins in like 2013 when I worked at a used book warehouse and came upon a copy of Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, a collection of short fiction by Howard Waldrop. I've ended up with a few more of his books since then, all amazing. One longer story called "Fin de Cyclé" has stuck with me. We go into it on the podcast but it's Waldrop's attempt at a kind of art-historical fan fiction—maybe the most Mess Museum idea ever. I don't want to say too much about it, but I'm very excited for you to read it, and I bootlegged/typeset a PDF so you can! (Here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zqs38dhobytn3zj/HW-FDC.pdf)

The story itself concerns film, but we also talk a lot about movies on this one for some reason. And the kind of canon of classic Vines and YouTubes. Back at it again at Krispy Kreme.

Someone on Instagram asked where the old theme song went so I brought it back.

Food and drink—eating and drinking—in some examples from fiction and comics. Basically I found a collection of Kingsley Amis's short fiction in a pile of free stuff at work and thought it was really cool that he made up a subgenre of speculative fiction just about wine. He calls it SF-drink. Then I found out that he'd written the stories for a series of anthologies called The Compleat Imbiber, edited by this guy Cyril Ray, who was a prominent wine critic and a literal champagne socialist (Amis, on the other hand, was conservative grouch).

All that got me thinking about other stories that involve tasting things, with a special interest in how the sensory experience gets translated into words or pictures. This process often leads tasters and discerners to develop their own terms and habits, form a culture.

Sexist homebrewers provide a topic. A loot crate for sounding rods. The depressing Instagram afterlife of Playboy cartoons. An unforgettable centerfold. Peggy Guggenheim on sluts, rhinoplasty, and communism.

Don Bluth and Shanley. My neckbeard problem. Annelise joins, and having watched Bluth's The Secret of NIMH (1982), we bring the recording equipment onto the porch and use this beloved hack's imagination to conjure some unexpected associations.