Word: verso
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Broke My Heart," an extended review of Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story collected in Wallace's Consider the Lobster.) And they have a funny mirrors-within-mirrors, mise-en-abyme effect: they pull back the smooth glossy surface of familiar images and show us the rough, grainy verso. Despite being outside the boundaries of anything remotely resembling literary quality, Moore's book delivers on both counts...
...shrink-wrap (an ironic touch given Ware's disdain for polybagged, untouchable collector's comics). The cover appears deconstructed. And it is, sort of. The dust jacket unfolds into a 29 x 21 3/4 inch, poster-size, full-color work about God, man and comic strips. The verso displays Gary Panter's giant mandala of cartoon and fine-art characters through the ages. Ingeniously, when wrapped around the book, the poster forms a pocket on the front and back in which sit - surprise! - two mini-comix by John Porcellino and Ron Rege Jr. In a single package, "McSweeney's" explodes...
...This is the theme of John Strausbaugh's smart new book, "Rock 'Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia" (Verso Press). Strausbaugh laments the decline of rock music from something that he says was "legitimately counter-cultural" to something that has simply become part of "the nostalgia industry." He cleverly calls the tours of the Who and the Stones and Madonna "civil war re-enactments of rock-and-roll." Indeed, rock-and-roll itself has become a kind of ironic relic, something the newer groups do in inverted commas...
...painting is things seen for their own sake, deriving their meaning from their being, not the other way around. The Ray, 1725-26, is perhaps his single most imitated work in modern times. Cezanne, Matisse and Soutine all did homage to it in copies. Anyone who has seen the verso, as it were, of a dead ray, or skate, the commonest of sights in a Paris fishmarket, knows that the underside of this fish bears a grisly resemblance to the human face. But that sort of double meaning, with its built-in pathos, would probably have struck the artist...