News/posts

Slothrop's, Tallinn, Estonia

20 January 2012

If you're in Tallinn, please stop by Slothrop's on Müürivahe 19.  You'll find a large selection of secondhand books in English - literature, history, art, politics, essays, criticism -- the works.  Slothrop's is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 18, Eastern European Time.  Soon we'll hopefully have a (carefully-curated) selection of...

Read more

NYC friends: Marathon reading of Gertrude Stein this weekend

20 January 2012
Triple Canopy is opening the new space at 155 Freeman in Greenpoint, and is celebrating in the most insane way possible - by scheduling a marathon public reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.  

I can't make it over, of course, but my own copy has been sitting unread for years on my shelf, as I tote it around from move to move .... so I will be starting it myself, in parallel,...
Read more

J. G. Ballard is dead.

20 January 2012
248129627_2c3b9c3971Id never say that J.G. Ballard was one of my favorite writers and I dont think you could get me to defend his prose style under any circumstances.  But his influence on art, literature and film (which have in turn influenced me) is incalculable.  Theres been a deluge of tributes, blog posts, and other articles since his passing last week and I dont really have anything to share myself...
Read more
Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. You know, we did eight shows in the first season and it was pretty time-consuming, but we were excited to come back for eight more in 2016. It's all archived here. The show took place at Mad House Helsinki's Ihana Baari, and was free to attend. No one is really sure why John hosted a talk show, but a lot of strange things have happened in the universe and this is ultimately pretty insignificant. We tried our best to entertain. Each week, John along with hype man Justin Tyler Tate, interviewed people about their creative process and tried to deliver a direct, communicative experience about art and performance. We've made videos available from all episodes of the show here for you to watch. We also will occasionally post audio podcasts when we get the time to go more in-depth with people, outside of the public show. The videos aren't always perfect and the audio even less so, but we hope you still enjoy them. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. But wait, there's more! The for-profit arm of Serious Introspection is called SI Services and we're up for anything, really! Now that we all live in different places, it's probably going to be quite an ordeal just to have three white guys host your kid's birthday party. But please believe me when I say that we would really, really love to do this. We are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. If you'd like to find out more about Serious Introspection, you can start by watching these episodes and seeing if it's your cup of tea. The hashtag #SeriousIntrospection contains the running stream of live tweets from our media specialist Ernest Truely (and anyone else who might contribute). We have a Facebook page which we use to post info about the upcoming shows and videos as they are released. We have made the show available as a podcast where people get Podcasts, generally iTunes or Stitcher. Try the Overcast app, it's really nice. So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already.