mudd up!

I’m trying to experience more visual art this year. If you’ve seen any outstanding shows currently up in NYC, please let us know… To break the ice:

tomorrow, Tuesday, School of Visual Art’s thesis show @ Visual Arts Gallery, 601 w. 26th, 15th floor. opening reception 6-8pm.

Two talented artists I’ve worked with will be showing, Rocío Rodríguez Salceda (whose painting graced Minesweeper Suite) and Tom Weinrich (whose painting ‘Noon’ will appear on the cover of Uproot)

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30 min. NYC radio rip over at Dutty Artz.

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road made a huge splash in 2007. If you found that novel moving, I strongly recommend Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (written 15 years earlier). I’ll try to find time to write about them together, in depth.

Rather tellingly, and in an entirely different context, after an extended meditation on “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” in Ecology of Fear [PDF link of David Harvey’s review], Mike Davis places Butler’s novel (”low-rise dystopia”) against the “strangely anachornistic and suprisingly unprescient” film Blade Runner as the far more accurate “extrapolative map of a future Los Angeles”, using the book as touchstone for the concluding chapters of his book. Davis’ reading of Parable of the Sower downplays the tenacious hope expressed in Octavia Butler’s vision but he, like me, is floored by the stark, vivid plausibility of Parable’s world.