john-christopher-writing

[john-christopher-writing]

Essay on ‘Final Destination’ up (incl. small ode to Devon Sawa & Sean William Scott’s chin) at soanyway.org:

“It isn’t pleasure, I don’t think, that drives audiences to the cinema if what they’re there to see are any of the Final Destination movies. Because it seems very clear to me that these movies are not, as they claim to be, about escaping death, but about being dead, and the perils of coming to life.” Read more here

[john-christopher-writing]

A very short piece on the formally aggressive & inspired art of the young Mark Morrisroe, published in Arc Magazine: The Dirty Issue, a publication my class and I worked very hard on:

ALLEGEDLY, he stalked John Waters and submitted a giant, flowery swastika for a school assignment. He cut pictures from porn magazines, placed them in empty candy boxes and left the rest to weather and chance. He tortured his cat just to film the bloody debacle. She handed in a photo of Joan Crawford’s face for homework, and she was asked not to return? Though their lives quickly diverged — she later went to Harvard, thank you very much — what Mark and Lynelle White’s relationship lacked in length it more than made up for in volume, arrogant volume, the kind only two sixteen-year-olds bored out of their minds can make. At school they started DIRT, a punk-fanzine that survived for several issues. Seeking gossip, the first issue reads: “Have you ever wanted to use a fake name? Tell lies?” If it didn’t carry the whiff of a running joke, this might have been the zine’s ethos: if you believe it, so will we. You were encouraged to “slander your friends!” and to send anything that might be found lying on the floor. One transgression the zine delights in is incongruous proximity: the profane, Frankensteinian intimacy of cut-and-paste contact, placing names of friends, enemies, nobodies next to Andy Warhol, Sophia Loren, Cher. (Cher receives particularly crude attention in the pages of DIRT, and even her cat is crowned “Pet of the issue.”) DIRT’s DIY-aesthetic is its reality and its brilliance: literally anyone could have done this.

In one issue, contributor Cindy LaViande (who later renames herself Judy: “It’s judy from now on”) writes that rock music “doesn’t mean a thing if there are no good looking guys in the band.” A cut-out of Bowie accompanies the piece. In another issue, we learn “who smokes what”: James Dean, lurking in Heaven’s alley, smokes “Camels (unfiltered)” while Blondie, um, “smokes opium.” DIRT’s tag-line reads “Eat it while it’s hot!” But what is it hot with, exactly? Agitation, desire, boredom: surely, these things burn. But DIRT’s heat is borrowed, its flames of notoriety on loan: this is fever by association. Like Richard Hawkins’ collages, its reach is knowingly excessive, obsessive, even, but ecstatically so. Permission to obsess is so rarely granted. Is it ever? Now I’m telling lies. And who needs permission anyway? What else is DIRT saying when they claim that, after a man was set on fire by Gene Simmons of Kiss — at a Kiss concert — he said he still likes Kiss? In permission’s absence, bonfires. Burn.

[john-christopher-writing]

THE FAMILY, a short story published by Fallow Media:

They wanted her to die, the other people in the house. Her family. And they were not subtle about it. Theirs was not a heritage of silence or awkward dinners, but of visible rage, and open, exposed delight. They asked her to die all the time. They asked her to die when they called her down to breakfast. They suggested she die while she brushed her teeth in the morning. They marveled at her friends for finding new and innovative ways to die. (It was true: scrolling on her phone, Raven was confronted with the revolting glamour of the arranged corpse. Claire in her summer frock, lying dead in her boyfriend’s arms; Tara, slim thing, hanging from a hawthorn tree. They were so tacky. She liked them all and left heart-eyes emojis in the comments.) (Read more)

[john-christopher-writing]

A short essay on Rico Nasty & her fearless artistry published by Soanyway:

Her aesthetic choices change with the same speed and vehemence as her voice, which is delightful I think, indicative as it is of someone unafraid to experiment until she finds the style that fits (“See you tryin way too hard to fit in / We goin shopping loser get in,” she sings on ‘Loser’). Her attitude to genre is ecstatic and crazed, and when I saw the Nightmare on Elm St and Poltergeist references in the video for ‘iPhone’ (track of the year?), I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. Dazed called her “emo-adjacent”, a neat formulation for an artist who values the power of a subculture while staying aloof enough not to be pigeonholed within it. (Read More)

[john-christopher-writing]

A short story, RESPAWN, based on true events and published by The Stinging Fly:

A sudden blow; a piercing metallic cry. The monster fell, and out of his open chest there soared a beautiful mechanical heart. I watched it spin in the crisp winter air one adamantine afternoon. It had the noble, puffed-chest deportment of a gallant rider in rattling armour. Hammers could rain down on it, I thought, and it would sing. I called it mine. (Read more)

[john-christopher-writing]

For AnOther mag, a short essay on Raf Simon’s infamous show from the 90′s, BLACK PALMS:

‘This Unhappy Mansion’ isn’t the title of a Raf Simons collection, but it could be, conversant as the Belgian fashion designer is with extravagant angst and sprawling disquiet, the rooms they flock to, the doors they slam. The phrase comes from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost just after Lucifer and his “horrid crew” of rebel angels are thrown out of heaven and condemned to suffer infinite sorrow “in the gloomy deep” which, I imagine, looks a lot like Simons’ Black Palms show. The ceiling soars and glitters, Alice by The Sisters of Mercy reverberates, spawns a dozen haunted echoes, and down the hall stalks Lucifer himself – or someone who looks a lot like him: a shaven-headed youth with flying buttress cheekbones, clad entirely in black, whose open shirt exposes a chest and stomach dappled black with – what else? – stars, marks you would expect to find on someone who has just crashed headlong through the cosmos. (Read more)