Last night, we saw the publishers -- two twenty-something boys from Ann Arbor (Davy & Peter Rothbart) -- of Found Magazine. How to best sum it up? Pack together the endearing, heartbreaking, puzzling, mysterious, half-innocent, half-naughty, and near-forgotten memories of your confused adolescence and put it in book form. That's Found.
We listened to them read their best found notes, short stories, songs composed of found note lyrics (including a bad ass rendition of a found BOOTY TAPE track). I thought for a second I was going to die from the soft, sentimental croon of the singer-songwriter brother (didn't the guitar just a little too much remind you of church ... or dave matthews?) but, it was too sweet to reject. After all, we're so innocent when we pick up notes off the ground, hoping to find tiny peepholes into people's secret lives. Like spies or bystanders, but totally cool, right? Half-inside and half-outside; it's irresistably fun.
3 comments:
this is the kind of thing i like about Mike Mills, and about "Harriet the Spy".
i'm ready to leave school. it's becoming so clear to me that academia is an inbred corporation; the way it's financed reminds me of the way pharmaceutical companies are financed.
gah! everything i really need to "acquire" (in terms of "book knowledge"..), i think i got my full share of by the end of high school!
students being the financial equivalent of patients? i can totally feel you on the university as corporation thing (sucking the life blood out of students for years through loans). i can also agree with you that there's just a lot of insular intellectual mutual masturbation within the departments (including or particularly the ever vague social sciences, and the aggressive 'hard' sciences). for some reason, i didn't feel it was as serious in architecture -- though ego-stoking theory-generation is still prevalent -- because there is a lot of very practical and human-based problem-solving.
i definitely love the space that uni provides for debate, sparking of new ideas, creativity, and passing on valuable knowledge -- if only it had more balance between praxis and theory. and if only those were the clear goals.
(i was also thinking about the millions that one of our biology-related departments received from a monsanto-like biotech corporation several years ago. i think prof ignacio chapela protested it and was denied tenure at that time).
i don't think i have enough book knowledge (i guess design theory and urban theory is evolving in real time, so it's something i have to keep reading about to keep up with) ... but yeah -- you can't overload on it or it screws with your psyche!
yikes!- and yum- "mutual masturbation within the departments"... yumm.
when i say "pharmaceutical company", i think more about how the university regards itself as a factory that churns "knowledge", "po'duces" ideas, etc... and how it treats the funding process.
pharmaceutical companies seem to rationalize the high prices for their drug-products by saying, "we need mon-ayy for Research & Development! otherwise, how are we going to cure you of your god-forsaken AIDS and ovarian cancers, people???" they rationalize the gouging by hitting us "consumers" right back in the face, boomerang-style, with our own.. gah... "DEMAND" for cures (and "cures", to these corporations, seem to arrive only in the form of their drugs.)
gah! my stupid, rambling, mind-blowing analogy continues: our (students') tuition payments seem to contribute to some abstract Research & Development on the part of these worker-bees of professors we have..
bam! done typing. think I'll copy this to my own journal, jean. :p
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