Quote from: bitewerksMTB on March 11, 2012, 07:46:15 PM
Quote from: HongKongGoolagong on March 11, 2012, 03:21:19 AM
Some kid slashed his wrists at that Paris SJ/CE/Sotos show the other week. Seen the picture, it was a deep cut.
Wow. They must have been awful!
A nuisance for the promoters and venue.
As the magazine it's published in (Hiroshima Yeah! from Glasgow) has no web presence and a small circulation, this seems a suitable place to drop a review I did:
Philip Best 'American Campgrounds' (Creation Books 2010)
So many circles. Like the ring of Mundy, Best and Dennison on the back inlay of Ramleh's
'Works III' compilation but here it's skinny-armed children whose rings are formed as
protection against the natural disasters, the animal predators, the possibly evil intent of
the readers of this morbid and peculiar photo-collage novel.
Children on almost every page but precious few to whet a pervert's appetites. These children
are vulnerable, tiny, helpless wretches. Best has stated that Shasta Groene, survivor of a
horrific kidnapping by serial killing paedophile Joseph Duncan, is the central figure of the
book. As well as Shasta, some of the other faces I recognised among the anonymous foundlings
are Susan Smith, Ulrike Meinhof with her children and Richey Edwards.
Leaving aside Bests's meanings - and Peter Sotos gets nowhere near discussing them in his
entertaining and bitchy introduction, focusing instead on himself as usual - there's some
aesthetic pleasure to be gained from the layout on the pages of the collages. The
arrangement of the shapes: trees facing childens limbs. Like planting a garden and deciding
to have a row of flowers here, just so.
So much of this material is taken from National Geographic magazine. In 2001 a Russian child
pornography ring was broken which used National Geographic videos of pandas to disguise
their product. Four years later, Joseph Duncan's obscure blog The Fifth Nail was befriended
by an enigmatic blogger fixated on Russian boys whose site was called The Panda Conspiracy.
Some true crime websites have claimed that Duncan used his laptop to upload the footage he
took of the Groene children at the campground later that year,the footage that caused such
upset at his trial. Best has stated that the book is shows "hope, redemption and exemplary
resistance to black, titanic forces". Shasta's resistance, certainly, but also that of
anyone who doesn't succumb to nihilism and atavistic urges and strives for empathy, however
hard it may sometimes be to locate. The final page juxtaposes what appears to be a
trendy-looking anorexic teenager's midriff with feeding tube attached against a desperate
street child in Latin America, huddled in the gutter in filthy clothes. It's hard not to
sense moral stones being cast here: 'American Campgrounds' is advertised as a jeremiad after
all.
It's the elements of scrying and sortilege which fascinate me the most in the composition.
There's a page featuring Frank Corder who set off on the night of September 11th 1994 in a
stolen Cessna and tried to crash it into the White House. Best seems to hint at a mirror
world, at hidden vistas of reality. At worst the book is incomprehensible, but at best it's
unheimliche.
Fan of his work in music will find plenty more of the very personal and esoteric mythology
used in various projects in this nice collector's item which has higher production standards
than most things published by Creation. The real Philip Best book in which he gets to show
off his unique way with words at length has yet to appear.
