Filed under: art, comedy, submissions | Tags: cultural criticism, independent ladies, new look, nuevo look, submissions
The Mildred Pierce Zine site has undergone some changes, and yr lookin’ at ‘em. We are getting into what my friend Nate M. would call “serious bloggin’, y’all.” As much as we want to stay committed to the paper product, we are also trying to get some internet lovin’, so we went out and got our virtual hair did for you writers out there who can only submit to a Cultural Crit magazine that looks like she pays her own bills… Am I right? Anyway, with a new look comes a new deadline for proposals: March 15th! Get those genius ideas in folks! We’re gearing up to roll out Issue No. 4, and you know you want a ride (of course MP pays her own car note!). The details of submission are below… (more…)
Filed under: comedy | Tags: comedy, film, gen-X, gender, ha-ha, humor, satire
Demetri Martin is unique in the history of stand-up comedy today. He’s like the antithesis of 80s comedian Sam Kinison — that overweight, repulsive, cokehead screamer. Sammy K was a man’s-man stand-up comedian; someone who conveyed with his rage and purple-faced delivery his unhappiness with the world and everyone in it. Ready to have his stomach split open and his guts splash out onto the stage, he made stand-up look like the hard, drug- and alcohol-driven job it truly is.
If Sam Kinison was some kind of 80s Thersites — the foul-mouthed, humanity-hating slave to society — then Demetri Martin is our modern-day Paris: a lover, not a hater, the shiny-eyed, self-effacing dude who plays his guitar softly, making jokes that zing but land softly in a nimbus cloud of post-hippie ethos. His first comedy special, in 2007, features a finale that was more fantasy than wit-cracking crescendo — the comedy coming from the tension created by breaking convention with what comedians do and don’t do. He plays out on his guitar a little tune while a forest setting shows the imaginary space in his mind, what he calls “the place where my jokes come from”: a place where elves romp along side jokes and his mother and grandmother appear.
Filed under: art, interview | Tags: $$, art, buffets, davis, ghandi, hunger, kafka, starvation diet, starving, twizzlers
Davis Schneiderman swoops in from above to scavenge more dead, dying, & live! writhing with desire! language while eagerly mocking us all. Davis was interviewed in MP#3 about collaborative fiction and his novel Abecedarium. Since then, here’s the news:
My novel, Drain, will be published in June 2010 by Northwestern University Press, with a fantastic afterword by Megan Milks. It’s about a near-future where Lake Michigan empties of water, and all sorts of crazy starving-artists stuff goes down. Why not pre-order a copy for your loved ones here? And I am trying to blog more often here.
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1) If/when (now or in the past) you have used the term “starving artist”** in relation to yourself, how literal are we talking in terms of actual starving? What would you count as part of the territory that comes with being a “starving artist” and what would you disallow?
Davis Schneiderman
I use this term when reading Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” which is sometimes translated as “The Fasting Artist” or “The Starving Artist” and fills itself with ennui and anonymity at the decline of public interest in the starving-artist spectacle. I read the story, conversely, after a feeding frenzy that consumes everything possible at the local all-you-can-eat/eat-all-you-can buffet establishments: Chinese and American. How much lo mein can i eat in one sitting? Can i make a steam-table parcel of reddish-pink Alaskan snow crab legs disappear by the time you finish a series of slow belches? Just you watch me, Kafka, just you watch.
2) What would you say is your general level of starving as a starving artist? By that, I mean, when you look around you, or think about starving artists in history, how would you place yourself in a kind of spectrum?
Filed under: art, interview | Tags: $$$, art, fiction, poverty, rage, starving, workshops, writing
Our series of Starving Artist Interviews (defiantly sans scare quotes!) continues with fiction writer, playwright, and longtime MP contributor Leeyanne Moore on the hard times and the life skillz she got out of em:
The marvelous Leeyanne Moore reads as part of MP's Issue 3 release party at the Bridge.
The starving-est time had to be when I took the big leap. After years of earning only minimum wage, I was working at an after-school program. I got no respect, not enough hours, and hated the alky boss with a passion that left me stinking with rage. I literally suffered from Rage-Sweat, each night peeling off my clothes to take a bath (our little attic appartment only had a bath stuck under the eaves) and my husband and I would notice how badly I stank from the stress.
So I quit and decided to start teaching creative writing workshops to children and teens. I kinda snuck in under the radar at this arts organization where I’d started taking writing workshops myself, and sent out fliers in the summer. The first day of the first week, no one came. I sat there alone at a table with paper and colored pens and felt pretty bad. But when I got home there were two messages on the answering machine and the second day of class I had three students. The fourth student showed up by walking into the room through the emergency exit. She had Asperger’s but was an awesome writer and I was on my way to never being employed by anyone else again.
I think that being a full time writer takes that same kind of business creativity that it takes to start a business. As someone once said: a lot of people are talented writers. The most successful writers are talented at managing their talent. For me, teaching those workshops became a set of life lessons in being entrepreneurial that have stayed with me. The most successful times I’ve had as a writer have had the same feel as that breathtaking plunge where I left behind the regular paycheck once and for all.
Filed under: art, interview | Tags: $$$, academy, art, ethics, genius, poverty, starving artist, writing
Sandra Newman is the author of the novels Cake and The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done; as well as the book How Not to Write a Novel (co-written with Howard Mittelmark); and has published short fictions in numerous venues, notably in Conjunctions (<–read “The Potato Messiah”). She was interviewed in MP#3 about Cake, bank robbery, and gender and experimental writing.
Here’s what she had to say about the writing life and $$ woes. (Interview conducted by Leeyanne Moore.)
illustration by john bylander
When you use the term “starving artist” in relation to yourself, how literal are we talking in terms of actual starving? What would you count as part of the territory that comes with being a “starving artist” and what would you disallow?
I haven’t ever been starving in the food sense; in my experience, in the Western world, the only way one could arrive at “starving” would be via ”utterly friendless.” And while my adventures in nearly starving have put a strain on my relationships sometimes (I don’t often borrow money, but I do stay on people’s couches for prolonged periods of time in my recurring dry spells), this has never gone into friendless territory. People with non-art jobs have all the food in the world, in my experience. In fact, you can pretty much make a three-course meal in the kitchen of a gainfully employed person without them ever knowing that the food is gone.
For me, most of being a starving artist in America is about taking risks that other people aren’t willing to take, sacrificing status, and often — the part no one ever talks about — making selfish decisions about other people’s welfare. Any starving artist with parents is at the very least making those parents miserable. In the vast majority of cases, s/he is also spending those parents’ money, which the parents perhaps had plans for and wished to spend themselves. Finally, any starving artist with children is going to feel like a criminal at certain points. There is no point pretending that the children would not have a better prospect in life if you worked for a reinsurance company and could afford to send them to private school. The children will be paying for your art career for the rest of their lives, in many cases. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you would have been a great success in your other, purely imaginary, business — no doubt you would just have become a starving, untalented claims adjuster. This point, however, tends not to impress anyone — people will generally relate to the artist as if she could have become a millionaire in any other field at all, at will.
Sandra's second novel
What’s been your most profound moment as a starving artist in terms of suffering? Has this shaped how you view your art or how you view the world & humanity?
For me, the worst part of being a starving artist is (as alluded to above) that one cannot afford to be ethical. This is a common feature of any poverty: Brecht writes a lot about this. In the modern world, this is usually a fairly harmless thing, amounting to a sin of omission generally. You can go a long time without confronting this, but eventually there will come a time when the choice is between doing the right thing and, for instance, getting your book finished. So you end up finishing the book, even though it means living off your partner for a few months, for instance, and you know the partner has no belief that your book will sell, and in fact, your partner thinks you should get a job in insurance, because this artist crap is going nowhere. Soon the partner is gone, sans a fair chunk of money, and the book is left behind as a monument to your warped priorities.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Greetings from Los Angeles! Its fun to be able to start a Mildred Pierce post that way–I will readily cop to the fact that some of my favorite blog writing is the quasi-informative luxury art and travel reportage. Who are these people, galavanting around the globe reporting on biennali, performas, documetas, trifectas and other made-up esperanto words for ‘luxurious art fair.’ Do these folks really get paid off blogging like that? Or is it more like, as Chance’s father says in So-Cal dirtmall art cinema masterpiece Kill the Moonlight,
“fake it til you make it.”
Well, the end of 2009 is making that fairly easy for Mildred Pierce. I just came out to LA from NYC, and I had promised my co-editor Megan Milks in Chicago that I would dash off an update before the New Year, so here we are. I have no art fair gossip to share, but I do bring the good tiding that Megan and I are getting serious about the Mildred Pierce web presence, and that 2010 will see improved communication between us and readers, as well as improved contact with our vast network of contributor spies, since none of our work stops were the pages of the magazine begin or end!
In case you missed the call for submissions (read it), this issue is themed comedy and the grotesque. It is not too late to send any communiques which might be essential to this forthcoming project. We love comics, criticism and interviews, whatever else comes to mind.
I’m personally contributing my own criticism as well as a few features on some favorite comedically grotesque artists. Of course, the measure of how comedic any gesture is vs. how grotesque and then again how pleasing, in its sum, is a contested standard. (more…)
Filed under: art, interview | Tags: art, comix, guillotine, poetry, profundity, sommer, starving artist
Originally published on our MySpace page, this is the second in an ongoing series of Starving Artist Interviews.
Sommer Browning, & pelvis
2) What would you say is your general level of starving as a starving artist? By that, I mean, when you look around you, or think about starving artists in history, how would you place yourself in a kind of spectrum?
I am so privileged it would be ridiculous if it weren’t so true. Sometimes I feel like the pate goose right before it’s slaughtered. I have a funnel attached to a pneumatic pump shoved down my esophagus and it’s feeding me heavy starches and poly-saturated vanity and flimsy images of human Being. So maybe I am an Overstuffed Artist, a great big gluttonous artist sack, about to burst open and spew Everybody Loves Raymond all over the place.
3) What’s been your most profound moment as a starving artist in terms of suffering? Has this shaped how you view your art or how you view the world & humanity?
I am due for another profound moment on Thursday, I have to schedule them in now that I live in New York. I used to have them quite often when I took a lot of LSD. They were great. Anyhow, my new thing is discipline. I’m going to explore it. I’ve fought against it my whole life, it just didn’t fit into my hedonism. But I think I was wrong about hedonism. Wrong about how I defined it. And I don’t think I like hedonism anyway, so eff it. I’ve been thinking about discipline and patience these days. Through control I might find happiness. That would be nice.
Filed under: art, interview | Tags: $$$, art, poverty, puppets, sean, starving artist, suffering, twin oaks
Sean Samoheyl is an AWESOME puppeteer and multimedia artist who lives and works in Twin Oaks, a worker-owned farm community in Louisa County, Virginia. Our friend Leeyanne Moore asked him a number of questions about what the term ’starving artist’ means to him, as a below-poverty-level (and somewhat outsider) artist. This is the first in a series of Starving Artists Interviews to be posted in the coming weeks.
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Sean Samoheyl, makin' art
1) When you use the term “starving artist” in relation to yourself, how literal are we talking in terms of actual starving? What would you count as part of the territory that comes with being a “starving artist” and what would you disallow?
I’ve gone hungry for art although usually forgetting to eat out of stress or whatever. But I’ve opted for sure for some crap burrito with nothing on it to save or just getting, say, soup and then bringing my own bread. Recently for a long train ride to an opening in Cleveland, I brought 4 sandwiches and homemade granola and 3 apples. The sandwiches got sort of old and were cheese and pb n j. All homemade bread and jam with our own fruit. But I was determined not to spend any money when I know it’s a gouge.
I can be frugal but then have very little sense when it comes to things like antiques and junk I don’t need. I’ve been poorer when I wasn’t making any art at all, I was just broke. I do try to disallow too many sweets. In Europe I tried to get by on sweets and once in Chicago, I tried to live on sugary cereal for like a week, and I would get sick every time. So it’s better to just fast and drink water, I think, than to try to eat sugar or a ton of cheese curls or, worse, trail mix or clif bars.
2) What would you say is your general level of starving as a starving artist? By that, I mean, when you look around you, or think about starving artists in history, how would you place yourself in a kind of spectrum?
I would call myself frugal or living voluntarily below the poverty line. And trying desperately to hide it. I hate how some hippies wear their poorness like a badge and just wear some outfit that looks so soiled a horse would avoid it and insist on going barefoot for some reason. But yeah, I’ve made items that a boutique might sell for $$ so I could have that “cool” edge “look” and just mend my own dang jeans and slap a cashmere sweater on top (donation) and eat at home before the opening to cover my embarrassing lumberjack appetite.
I’m way self conscious about being perceived as really poor which sort of comes from my upbringing which in some ways might have meant we were really poor which is funny. We never had ripped clothes. Which is funny to see rich people wearing dirty Diesel brand jeans.
Filed under: Uncategorized
From Robert Gluck’s interview with Dennis Cooper in BITING THE ERROR: WRITERS EXPLORE NARRATIVE (2005)…
Dennis Cooper says, in response to Robert Gluck’s question about the relation between comedy and violence/horror in his writing:
I divide the various things going on in the prose into individual systems and attend to each one so that it functions correctly on its own and also services and is serviced by its fellow systems. Comedy is one of the systems, and an important one, because comedy is such a talented tone, yet it has no gravity in and of itself, so it can be used to popularize other systems that are signaling more subjective, meaningful things. It can subvert the visceral effect of represented violence without decentering the actual punch. It can distract readers long enough to ease information into them that would be too confrontational for them to absorb otherwise. It can both deflect the reader’s attention away from the emotional meaning of a violent act and indicate that emotion by causing the reader to wonder why that deflection is occurring. It can signal the reader to relax, then betray his or her trust, thereby creating a particular kind of tension that can be really useful. If it’s used in a novel or section of a novel where authorial intent is as important as the fiction, comedy can function as superficial entertainment while at the same time indicating a shift or tweak in the fiction’s subconscious. Comedy can do a lot, and I try to use it very carefully. (249-50)
The full interview (worth reading) is available here, along with a ton of other provocative and mind-blowing essays on narrative.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Thanks to our friend Bonnie, we’ve got some copies of Mildred Pierce 3 in VANCOUVER. Go get em!
Tanglewood Books (South Granville neighborhood)
1553 West Broadway (Broadway @ Granville)
Vancouver, BC
Brigid’s Books (Kitsilano neighborhood)
2932 West Broadway (Broadway @ Bayswater)
Vancouver, BC
Also now at No Coast in Chicago:
1500 W 17th St
Chicago, IL 60608
