Artforum. Summer 07.

"As evinced by Dave Eggers, the Flaming Lips, the Polyphonic Spree, and countless other acts, there's a great hunger for childlike wonder and optimism in America today, and its purveyors - embattled geeks as prophets of love - find themselves the focus of cultlike devotion. This is all very nice, and [Miranda] July is indeed as charmingly gawky in person as her stories and film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, would suggest." Andrew Hultkrans watches her read from her new collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You and get interviewed by David Byrne; he then listens to Becky Stark, spots Cindy Sherman and Michel Gondry and writes it all up in a diary entry for Artforum.

Scan the table of contents for the "Summer 2007" issue and it'll likely have the desired effect: You'll want to buy this issue since, for starters, James Quandt's pieces on 12:08 East of Bucharest and Hong Sang-soo are not online. As an appetizer, though, we do get Diedrich Diedrichsen on Scott Walker: 30 Century Man: "Walker's own take on his artistic persona is evident in his songs, with their homages to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Genet and their evocations of physical violence and primal distress, but his legend is one of involuntary periods of silence, of losing his first audience and never finding another, of the clash of avant-garde ambitions with the world of pop music, and of the soul of Xenakis trapped in a boy-group body. This legend was surely not willed, let alone deliberately constructed, by Walker himself - which makes it all the more powerful."

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2007 7:30 AM