Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 4.
Read Bruce Licher's Remembrance of An Amazing Adventure In Calexico with the Late Chris Burden →
photograph by Bruce Licher
Chris Burden, who passed away a few days ago at his home in Topanga Canyon, California at the age of 69, was known for his performance art pieces that bordered on terrorism, like the time he took a pistol and fired several shots at a passenger airline taking off from LAX. In another piece, entitled Coals to Newcastle, which is a British idiom for doing something stupid or pointless, Burden sent a toy rubber-band model airplane with marijuana strapped to it over the border into Mexico. In the following eulogy of the late groundbreaking artist, Bruce Licher - a former student and founder of the LA post-punk band Savage Republic - describes his adventure in Calexico with Burden during the preparation and making of Coals to Newcastle. Read the whole story here.