by Charles D'Ambrosio
(Clear Cut Press) $15; Deluxe Edition (including original gouache and handmade box) $350. Available at www.clearcutpress.com. Clear Cut Press' first book is a small, 32-page artist catalog of Michael Brophy's paintings with an accompanying essay by Charles D'Ambrosio. The book's production team spans the entire Pacific Northwest, from printing in Vancouver to editing in Astoria (by Matthew Stadler, who cofounded Clear Cut with publisher Richard Jensen).
To those of us from the Pacific Northwest, the main object of Michael Brophy's oil paintings, beautifully reproduced in this book, feels familiar and difficult: He depicts our land, human beings experiencing it, and the fusion between the two. This is a different problem in each painting, and not comfortable. "Most of Brophy's landscapes are obviously wrecked, but there's no nostalgia for the olden days, no melancholy.... [They] offer an artistic calm but no ethical or social way out," writes D'Ambrosio, whose essay is embedded in the middle of the small book.
I had never heard of this Portland painter, and according to Jensen, who brought the two together because he thought "it would be interesting to see what came of it," neither had Stranger contributor, essayist, and fiction writer Charles D'Ambrosio, who is currently based in Portland. His essay bypasses the usual art-critic conventions to contextualize a new artist in the greater contemporary art world; where concerned with a comparative discussion, D'Ambrosio points us to the Renaissance (saying, in many senses, Brophy commissions himself for oil landscape portraits). D'Ambrosio drives straight at the issues raised in his mind during his "reading" of the paintings; many of these are unavoidably about our relationship to art itself: "Looking at his paintings you don't get to pull out your wisdom or wistful regret or revisionist insights or any of the other consolations people apply as a patch to the broken world. You don't get to stand back, hoping for a better view."
To me, this book represents the act of inquiry and the difficulties that doing presents during the act of asking. It is a surveyed landscape and an inquiry into it without the burden of a clear-cut answer. Over and over, in each layer of its production, this pattern is repeated, most subtly and beautifully in its design. This artist catalog is a raw work of art, a complicated book that does not satisfy the impulse for art to have a purpose, to tell you what to think, or to feel familiar. MEGAN PURN
Revealing Jewel: An Intimate Portrait from Family and Friends
by Kenneth Calhoun, Cambria Jensen, Atz Lee Kilcher, and Jewel Kilcher
(Pocket Books) $15 Revealing Jewel promises an intimate portrait of the singer and it doesn't disappoint. Unless of course you associate sex or anything sex-related with the word "intimate," because the book conveniently skips over that portion of Jewel's life. What's left? Boring, pointless stories about a sweet American hick with English teeth who became what all American hicks with English teeth want to become: a pop singer. The book is a composite of several interviews with Jewel's friends and family, introductions to each chapter by Jewel's brother, some cameos by Jewel's boyfriend (rodeo persona Ty Murray--who also has a new book out called King of the Cowboys: The Autobiography of the World's Most Famous Rodeo Star), and obscure facts that only the most dedicated Jewel-heads would want to know.
As the story goes, Jewel came from nothing. She was, much like Jesus, born in a manger, or some barnlike structure. Her parents introduced her to music and she eventually became so good that she left home to do her own thing (again, much like when Jesus left home and began preaching at local temples). Eventually, Jewel hit it big as a pop singer, wrote a collection of very bad poetry, acted in a decent film, and currently has this book written about her by her devoted disciples. Long story short, the book is a shameless self-promotion put out by her money-hungry manager (who sometimes doubles as her mom). In the end, Revealing Jewel could barely hold my attention, not that it didn't try, but honestly, if I wanted to read a bunch of parables about how an amazing person touched so many lives, I'd pick up the Bible, or possibly The Clinton Wars. At least Jesus and Billy hung out with some hookers.
Honest to God, the most controversial thing mentioned about Jewel is that, after being tormented by a psychotic fan for about half an hour, Jewel politely asked the fan for some "space." Anyway, this brings me to my next and final point. Since Jewel is without flaw, a rational person has no choice but to declare her the second coming of Jesus Christ. That's right, I said it. So, for those interested, I will hold meetings in my basement on Saturday mornings. We can sing Jewel songs, read from the book of Jewel, and discuss possible Jewel sightings. Hope to see you there. WILL KOSTAS
Freud and the Non-European
by Edward W. Said
(Verso) $13 The book is small. It contains a lecture delivered by literary critic/public intellectual/Palestinian exile Edward Said. The lecture, which is titled "Freud and the Non-European," concerns the last book Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote, Moses and Monotheism. It's not a difficult lecture--the basic idea is this: Moses, who led the Jews out of Egypt, was not himself a Jew. He was Egyptian. And so the very person who invents Jewish national identity is not Jewish.
This contradiction, which was apparent to Freud (who was a secular Jew) and initially did not support the formation of an Israeli state, returns Said to familiar territory. What Said wants to show, as so many of his other books show, is that national identities are pure constructions--that there is nothing natural or organic about them. This, Said argues, is why "biblical archaeology" has been so important to Israel's foundation: Artifacts dug up from the earth prove that this is where Israelis belong. Of course, the very same earth that provides a "royal road to Jewish Israeli identity" also provides one for the Palestinians. But this contradiction, as with the Moses one, must be ignored or erased from view and memory.
I must admit that this book is not that interesting (in terms of new ideas and language), and these concepts about national identity and history are better worked out in his masterpiece Orientalism. I bothered to read the book (or booklet) because it offered, in miniature, all the themes and habits that I have enjoyed in Said's longer works: Said's strange (and some may argue unhealthy) worship of Joseph Conrad; his use of musical terms like "contrapuntal" (Said is a trained classical musician); and, of course, the repetition of his favorite poststructuralist concept, "the other." No other writer in the English language has gotten so much mileage out of "the other." CHARLES MUDEDE
((FREQUENCIES))
by Joshua Ortega
(Jodere Group) $24 Joshua Ortega's ((FREQUENCIES)) is a science fiction thriller, set in Seattle 50 years from now, that offers some provocative ideas about culture and politics in the new millennium. The future American society, as Ortega presents it, is John Ashcroft's wet dream. The War on Terror has escalated to outright totalitarian control. Everyone is implanted with a "biochip," which allows for continual surveillance and tracking. Even worse, the cops can read the state of your emotions; they can take you away for "freeking," or thinking and feeling outside the bounds of consensus reality. In opposition to all this, there is a ragtag underground alliance of ravers, gearheads, and ecologists--with some malicious hackers thrown in for good measure. The plot turns on an unlikely alliance between a blessed-out New Age girl and a cynical detective straight from the film noir archives. They end up working together under the aegis of a creepy, yet ultimately beneficent, Bill Gates figure, whose mastery of virtual technology has grown so great that he has lost interest in anything so crass as actual political power. Ortega gets into some serious culture jamming here--all the technologies and subcultures that populate his novel are recognizable today, but he recombines them in odd and unexpected ways. Everything is malleable. In ((FREQUENCIES)), even your core personality may turn out to be quite different from what you think it is. This results in new dangers, but also new possibilities of freedom. STEVEN SHAVIRO
