Volume 79 of the influential international art journal "Parkett" features Jon Kessler, Marilyn Minter and Albert Oehlen. In the tinkered gadgetry of Kessler's retro sci-fi installations, we peek through surveillance cameras to see our own image among his analog programs crammed with detritus of all kinds. Kessler's vista of (d)evolved cyberstuff is in a manic state of accumulation, as this data-diving artist masters the ecology of pure information. Within Marilyn Minter's fetishistic, flawless pictures, we find a painter obsessed with the clear articulation of magnified sweat beads and pore-smeared glitter. In each successive lip-smacking painting, Minter sets out to perfect beauty's disguise, affirming both her pleasure in fashion imagery, and an appreciation of its vulgar mishaps--say, a drag queen's eyelashes clumped together with too much mascara. According to essayist John Kelsey, Albert Oehlen's collage-paintings "seem almost bored of their own shock-value." And yet this artist, one of the most significant German painters of the past 20 years, can make boredom look like a rigorous, if not delirious experiment. Also featured: Spencer Finch, Gelitin and Mark Wallinger, as well as essayists Paul Bonaventura, Mark Godfrey, Glenn O'Brien, Katy Siegel, Andrea Scott and Pamela Lee, to name a few.

Holy Snappin' Trilogy Synopsis-Book 1 Call me J. Contemporary historical events and pop-cultural reminders abound and mingle with the lives of this 'seemingly' typical Boomer family in this first book of the family chronicle trilogy as it delves in deeply, helping the reader fall in love with each character of the Magyar family. Father Max is a first generation Hungarian Canadian. Mother Lily a fierce and loving spirit. The five children are as unique and varied as a box of crayons with protagonist, Annalee introduced in the Prologue as she spends mysterious moments in a Gypsy tent-her life laid out before this cloistered teen. The imagery and sometimes minute detail pull the reader in, engaging them from the beginning 'til the last breathless words on the last page of this fat read of Book 1, Call me J. Often, pre-publish readers point out they were, themselves, brought back and firmly planted again in THEIR lives in those dozens of moments in time the authour highlights and peppers throughout the novel. Remembering when. Example--what DID happen in the average household after the J.F.K. assassination? How DID parents react? Initially, in chapter one and into chapter two, the manuscript reads like an idyllic and charming sitcom of the "happy-days' of a 7 member gentleman farmer's family. Reality sets in in chapter three, "Nice guys finish last' when a graphically described tragic, dramatic happening lands on too many laps, bringing to bear how close-knit if not close proximity clans circle their wagons when the chips are down. Annalee begins to journal in earnest here and speaks her mind in spades. Chapter four, 'Lily's in the Valley', will have readers thinking.."OMG I cannot IMAGINE I couldn't COPE if that happened to OUR family " Chapter 5 brings unwanted new beginnings, leading the reader to a place where they cannot WAIT for book 2. Spanning and including over 50 years, this funny, forthright, down-to-earth but melodramatic chronicle begins in the early stages in protagonist Annalee's family's lives, with the infamous Hurricane Hazel of 1954 as it swept through HER place in life, taking young child Annie right on through to her stormy mid-thirties in Book 1, Call me J where Annie has found her Prince in shining amour, birthed three children; two who, with the aid of father Robert, are in hot pursuit of eventual NHL fame. Within the trilogy, the author takes a naive high school dropout country gal on unexpected journeys so varied as to be pooh-poohed as unlikely in one lifetime. Annie, born different from her sibs with a soul set on flight-mode more often than not, still happily approaches a decided future settled in a small manufacturing town in southwestern Ontario, Canada. She ventures, instead, to a life of magical adventure. Or misadventure. Reader's choice. This honest, memoir-style trilogy will have you saying NO WAY again and again as you follow Annie through a lifespan that brings her and hers many more ups and downs than you would expect in a typical dramatic narrative. This manuscript brings itin multiples. Put twenty people in a room; all will have had something immense touch their lives. It could be murder, interference and the potential horrors of stranger danger, disfigurement, addictions, violent domestic breakdowns and other tragedies. Or windfalls, exotic locales, puppies on Christmas morning, found loves and tight family circles. Annie Bell and her clan can claim ownership to all 20 of those biggies. Or 30.Or more. All this you will find within the pages of this saga as you lose yourself in Annalee's story. Settings: Central and Eastern Canada, Sarasota, Florida and beyond

How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. In October 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht was arrested at the Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, accused of being the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and mastermind of a dark net drug marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht was an ardent libertarian who believed Silk Road-described by the New York Times as "the largest, most sophisticated criminal enterprise the internet has ever seen"-was battling the forces of big government. He was convicted two years later of money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics and sentenced to life in prison. Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of "disruptive" technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists-Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms-who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.