

Ryan Trecartin by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
“I liked thinking about the word occupy literally. To occupy something. To occupy a sensation or a history and then to be kicked out of it and be squatting near it and trying to reinvest in it.”

“I’m a believer in ‘the artist proposes and the universe disposes.’ On that meeting ground is where the important stuff happens for me, where a set of images, possibilities, dialogues with people both living and dead actually start forming.”

“With film, you have sound and you can construct this whole environment that allows for a certain feeling to exist for someone watching. There’s more of a burden on a painting to develop these kinds of feelings or experiences in one frame.”

“I want the people I collaborate with to understand that they can move a way from the realities they’ve been placed into, that they can create a reality.”

“The Internet is a predatory network that is, on one side, potentially a very coercive tool of totalitarian power and, on the other side, a tool that will increasingly be used to allocate rights and privileges through commercial means. Can we envision a different kind of network?”

“My imagination was shaped in a period of extreme rigidity in the social and political system. The apartheid system was about putting physical space between people. So an encounter with the other, with the neighbor or the stranger, has always seemed central to me.”

“A writer worried about reception is cooking a dead book. A writer’s job is to produce the best possible book in absolute freedom, so the category ‘acceptable’ does not play in the process at all.”

“I intended The Fugitives to be as close to a zero-research book as possible. I decided that if I couldn’t find something with Google in ten minutes, then I should forget it, or make it up.”

“Asymmetry is part of what makes us human, and it’s what makes our actions feel human. And we only know that because we can have a programmer make something play ‘perfectly,’ and it sounds terrible.”
From Dispatches from Moments of Calm by Alexander Kluge & Gerhard Richter
In 1946 the Russian astrophysicist Gamow, transported in a US Air Force plane from California to Canada, from there to Washington, and from there to Florida, on each occasion to deliver a lecture, saw WITH HIS OWN EYES—while waiting in a noisy café on New York’s Fifth Avenue during one of the few quiet moments he had to himself—the rotation of atoms and subatomic particles, their spin, the constant revolution of molecules and planets, the rapidly turning stars, galaxies and superclusters.
I like to think about what other people do when they’re alone. This is what I would really like to know about people, but I never know how to ask. Some people try never to be alone.
Around this time I became a frequent visitor to a sex-ad bulletin board. Real-life meetups were the focal point.
Time, equipped with smart device, travels border to border, language to language via Google Translate, emerges from German at end of journey.
You’re telling me: / chicanery, the moorhen, / the long triple happy fluid, / the orange response. / By golly that tastes good.
I am getting so used to this island it’s becoming like second nurture to me.
The tint hid you. Something about being in hell, and having no duties because of it.

What began as an art project with the overt purpose of confronting and confounding “straight” society ended up as something resembling a pro football game for people on psychedelics, and nearly as profitable.

The crisply constructed short stories for which David Means has become renowned are high and tight. His new—and first—novel, Hystopia, is something shaggier, departing, in its theoretical approach, from the New Yorker School of Fiction for the emerging field of narrative medicine, in which testimonies of trauma are inherently wooly and chaotic rather than refined and concise.

Questions, extractions … of authorship, origin, and connectivity. Kari Cwynar and Kendra Sullivan’s curation of Accompaniment, a group show at EFA Project Space, is meticulous and airtight—the curatorial statement (a chapbook in itself) is a feat of textual and didactic density that leaves no stone or song unparsed.

Welcome to Little Iran. We have not claimed a neighborhood in New York City, or even a street for that matter. Our community rears its head at shows.

Josef Kaplan’s latest book, Poem Without Suffering, is a long poem that begins in medias res then follows, in forensic detail, the trajectory of a bullet through the bodies of two children.

Although appropriately sized, the Little People—a civilization whose many dwellings once populated street gutters, building cracks, and window sills in Manhattan and other parts of the world—certainly would have refused to move into one of the micro-sized (though hardly micro-priced) apartments that are now springing up in New York City.
