Season 1 (2010/2011)

‘Leonardo’s Game of Chess’ (Dec. 2011, TRT 7 min)
‘Norwood Gets Back to His Me’ (Nov. 2011, TRT 9.5 min)
‘Anthony & Johnny’ (Oct. 2011, TRT 5.5 min)
‘Sarah’s First Day of High School’ (Jul. 2011, TRT 6.5 min)
‘Austin Changes his Name‘ (Jun. 2011, TRT 8.5 min)
‘Michael’s Roach Problem‘ (Apr. 2011, TRT 6.5 min)
‘Heather Gets Hit’ (Mar. 2011, TRT 5.5 min)
‘Harry Tells a Lie’ (Feb. 2011, TRT 4 min)
‘Felicity Is Ejected From Egypt‘ (Feb. 2011, TRT 5 min)
‘Davide’s Wet Dream’ (Nov. 2010, TRT 2 min)
‘Ralph & the Cat’ (Oct. 2010, TRT 2.75 min)
‘Patricia’s Nickel’ (Oct. 2010, TRT 2.5 min)

And now for something even more awesome: ‘Los Angeles: A Love Poem‘, by Dylan King (featuring a poem by Sandra Beasley)

Sources:
a. http://pic40.picturetrail.com/VOL272/8157143/15269508/231094190.jpg
b. http://www.flickr.com/photos/80643375@N00/356743212
c. http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HCcB7IDJQ6Q/0.jpg

Visual Editions, started in 2009 in London,  publishes books that are very aware of their materiality. As they put it “books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell”.

On Nov 15th they will publish their second book, Tree of Codes by acclaimed author Jonathan Safran Foer. This book was generated not from the singular vision of an author in his garrett, but rather from a shared fascination with die-cutting paper. From their site:

Our early conversations with Jonathan Safran Foer about Tree of Codes started when Jonathan said he was curious to explore and experiment with the die-cut technique. With that as our mutual starting point, we spent many months of emails and phone calls, exploring the idea of the pages’ physical relationship to one another and how this could somehow be developed to work with a meaningful narrative. This led to Jonathan deciding to use an existing piece of text and cut a new story out of it. Having considered working with various texts, Jonathan decided to cut into and out of what he calls his “favourite book”: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

Pre-order it here or check out their existing publications here.

“I knew she wasn’t English,
Because she spoke it far too well.
The grammar was goodly, the verbs as they should be,
And the slang was bang on the bell.

So as the language barrier clanged and banged,
I couldn’t hear – or see
England, London, and Bow
Crumble into the sea.”

You can watch him recite this on this BBC clip on Youtube.

They claim to be the original impetus for Burning Man, and they also started such important urban lore as the Urban Iditarod, the Salmon Swimming Upstream at Bay to Breakers, and, my personal favorite, Clowns on a Bus (where, as you might guess, they took over a bus, dressed as clowns).

The LA Chapter was overseen by none other than The Art of Bleeding’s Reverend Al Ridenour, and in true Reverend Al style, he took things to another level altogether. Eschewing the merry and boisterous vibe that SF cultivated, they embraced slightly more subversive, politicized, and dark happenings. Examples abound, but some of my favorites include the time they protested a G.I. Joe convention (which really pissed off the convention organizers), their ‘Nihilist Shopping Excursions’ where they looked for things that represented the worst of American society, the time they went for an Easter Egg hunt in a Nazi encampment in the Santa Monica mountains, or when Reverend Al served pages of a bible up in a fricasee. For human consumption, natch.

Rev. Al more or less shut down the LA chapter in 1999, but the society lives on elsewhere in the world, in glorious messiness.

http://www.cacophony.org/

‘I Love Alaska’ — by Dutch directors Sander Plug and Lernert Engelberts – is 13 short episodes chronicling the life of AOL user #71139 through her search queries, which were inadvertently released on the internet when AOL mistakenly published the private search history of 650,000 of its users. It’s really a fascinating watch (or rather, listen: It’s mostly VO).

Watch the episodes here.

Synopsis: I Love Alaska tells the true and heartbreaking search history of User #711391. As the the voice-over reads out the search queries entered into AOL’s search engine over a 3 month period, an image emerges of a somewhat obese religious woman from Houston, Texas, who is looking for a way to rejuvenate her sex life. In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction, and dreams of a new life in Alaska.