Description

Literature will be taken dead or alive when F20 Grail 12 makes target practice of postal codes worldwide. This is a cri de guerre for a world lousy with disposable objects. It’s an escape from cultural anhedonia, a busy and beautiful computer terminal-bathed marquee joint, a backlit immanent domain, starry-eyed server off the chain, a keyboard-rocked, two-tone fever scream of miraged family ties, punch drunk crushes, mimetic Americana, hardhearted idealism, seduction by way of quipping, lethal IQ. Romance like a bridge too far. It shines, pops like a black balloon huffing neon, it says to the guileless and gutless pick your dignity up off the floor and cease now with that bootlicking fidelity to hegemony. Lay the stagnant corpse of literature at the feet of gatekeepers in hot pursuit of a promised land of surplus warmth, CPUs overheating, coolants overflowing. The slowest art form is now a rapidfire semiautomatic relic to be adored and cherished. A rousing anthem for precarious times. Install these glyphs as meditations as visual installations. Loath to be typecast as sentimental or crass this exuberance cannot be contained, this voice implores you to abolish your delusions. Before you’ve gone to die a thousand deaths in heaven, an earth angel is putting your city on the map, sardonically indifferent to market caps and ice caps and social mores. Tap the vein, feed the pulse, this is poetry and prose for a non verbal age. The conflict-averse look away— a page-turner that bleeds this war for the soul of art, plaintive civic grief waxing to deliver us from inflation. Thick skinned world weary impossible dignity. The uncanny valley stings with residual humanity, flash efflorescent stick of dynamite, black light afterglow— xoxo. Be dumbstruck or eat your heart out. Do you copy? Sing, spit bars, respect guns, what better time than now? This here is lifeblood drink from my dayglo cup. Antibodies for good times gone. You can’t even see this. You can’t look at or properly behold or visually process this shit, your pixels won’t render. For old world magic, new world blues, a white knight knuckling to paradise promises to be your final destination fatal attraction.

5.5×8.5″. 96 pages perfect-bound. Cover Art & Book Design by C.J. Christine. Contributing Design by Emma Hazen. Photography courtesy of the artist Jon Rafman. Includes 5×8″ glossy insert. 

Interview with C.J. Christine

Civil Liberties