Salon.com > Ross Simonini

Ben Marcus: Human beings are making a comeback

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Ben Marcus writes outside the limitations of language. He discovers the impossible combinations of words, the inabilities of certain phrases and inside those faults, he builds a world just beyond the reader's comprehension. When Marcus puts words together, they seem to cancel each other out, leaving behind something almost like meaning, but softer and less stubborn: language that can't be taken literally.

His debut, "The Age of Wire and String," reads like reference material -- a poetic manual, an encyclopedic list of objects, characters and concepts that Marcus simultaneously defines and undefines. His second book, "Notable American Women," is a collage of forms that includes correspondence, story segments, definitions, faux textbook passages, and chronologies, which collectively tell the story of a boy named Ben Marcus who lives in a community of "silentists" and endures pseudo-scientific experiments performed on him by his family.

James Franco: I’ve done the work

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Carter is my double. Whatever I’m thinking, Carter has thought about it too. He’s a great collaborator because we never argue; we just groove on each other’s ideas. We met at the end of 2007 and did a film in Paris called "Erased James Franco." I played James Franco. We did another project with mannequins and mustaches and motorcycles called Double Third Portrait. We wrote and created images for a children’s book called "Hellish." He helped me come up with the idea of acting on "General Hospital"; he helped come up with the idea for "Three’s Company" as a dramatic movie. We did another film together, "Maladies"; it’s about US, Catherine Keener plays him. In "Maladies," the two characters make a pact that if one of them dies the other will finish the dead person’s work. I would be honored to make such a pact with Carter because he understands me better than most. He has taught me most of what I know about art. Now we’re planning a book of poetry. -- James Franco

Trey Anastasio and the art of improvisation

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:01:00 +0000

In a time when jazz is barely a smudge on the cultural radar, the marriage of improvisation and popular music continues nowhere more apparent than with the Vermont rock band Phish. Other artists may be touring and improvising -- and they are -- but they don't sell out Madison Square Garden for three nights in a row and continue to host a series of annual, one-band festivals that draw upward of 70,000 people, all for the adventure of musical improvisation.

A highly divisive band, known best for its obsessive, vagabond following, Phish remains a baffling success in the music industry. Since it began, the group's musical style has continued to be a fluid spate of genres, most of which have very little in common with contemporary music, and some of which are laughably silly. A typical live show will include streaks of calypso, '70s hard rock, jazz fusion, salsa, labyrinthine prog-rock, old-timey music, new wave and barbershop quartet, and at any moment, one of these genres might be stretched out to 45 minutes of wordless improvisation. Unlike many equally successful rock bands, Phish is relatively ignored (or dismissed) by the media, and does little to engage with the publicity cycles that dictate the peaks and valleys of most bands' careers.