Sexy Coyote’s performance was a true highlight of the night, and despite a/v issues the band played on, their lead singer/keytarist at one point championing through the seated crowd and giving everyone a chance to punch the keys.
Alternating between the voices of expert bricklayers, hurt children, frank parents, and an omniscient third-person narrator who, in italics, ties the collection together, Mortar pushes past discomfort:
No regrets, without all I would have never become the emotionally disturbed person who called herself Pantifesto’s Pornastic Phunhouse on MySpace where I was encouraged to do open-mics.
Sampsell is fully involved in Tony’s perspective, imagining how a two year old (the book goes until age five) will interpret what he sees, given limited experience with the world and its contents...
We’re all telling ourselves a story about ‘how’ this all is ‘going,’ with no real beginning or end—and doing a lot of work to filter our actions and the world forces we’re responding to through shifting/incomplete/inherited taxonomies of meaning and meaning making…
Nietzsche writes in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “For the world forever needs truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus, though Heraclitus does not need the world.”
I guess I would say the ambition is easy to maintain because it sustains itself on my fundamental enthusiasm to talk about movies or anything else in media that interests me.
The book belongs to the same lineage as Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” where the poet stands at the grave, eye buried, voice calling into Sheol. Like Ginsberg’s cawing cries and black-clouded Eye, Levi’s visions do not console; they demand presence.
...when I was first diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis at the age of 20, it really was a shock to the system. I’d been drawing and writing since childhood and art was always such a huge part of my identity.
