BOMB celebrated the launch of Issue #116 in style last month at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO. Check out all of the fantastic press, photos, and video highlights from the evening right here.

Thanks to everyone who attended BOMB’s Launch Party for our Summer Issue #116 at powerHouse Arena last month. It was a very cool night all around (by late July standards) down by the DUMBO waterfront. The joint was packed, and we overheard on Twitter that we drew the “absolutely best dressed crowd” (thanks, Courtney Maum). Guests sipped delicate glasses of white wine and handled perspiring bottles of beer, generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery and served by BOMB’s dedicated interns, while pondering readings by Nicholas Elliott, Simon Van Booy, and Sarah V. Schweig.

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Emerald Pellot speaks with playwright Mariah MacCarthy about the writer’s latest play: Ampersand: A Romeo and Juliet Story, part of FringeNYC.

Emerald Pellot The most obvious question is why Romeo and Juliet and why lesbians? They’re both intentional choices on your part, what meaning did you intend to convey with a lesbian couple and why Romeo and Juliet, over let’s say, Othello?

Mariah MacCarthy Hmm, interesting that you think this is the most obvious question! (Also, now you’ve got my brain cooking on a lesbian adaptation of Othello—that would be baller.) But I digress. The germ for this idea came about six years ago; in a directing class, we had to each pitch a “spin” on a particular Shakespeare play, and a friend of mine pitched a modern-day Romeo and Juliet with a girl as Romeo (changing the gender of the role, not just the actor). It stuck with me. Romeo and Juliet is all about who you’re “allowed” to love, which becomes much more poignant to me when it’s two women.

I write about sex, especially queer sex, a lot. An actor from Ampersand remarked the other day that a lot of my work is “about straight people not being straight.” If you want queer sex, at some point you’ve probably heard that you were a bad person for wanting the sex you want, which creates a dramatic conflict for you. Plus, girl-on-girl action onstage makes me happy, and writing what makes me happy is the only way I know how to work.

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Heather Christle and art by Clayton F. Merrell.

Heather Christle executes a sublime and shining lowliness. Fusing an arch jocularity to epiphanic neurosis, her poems take their panting repose within nexuses of concession and censure, volition and void, the aha and the blah-blah, laying forth drop-dead visions of the living’s gritty triumph of and over nothing, of and over our whatever, this weirdo here and now.

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BOMB’s Greatest Hits is a new archeological project that unearths the best of the BOMB archive from the past 30 years.

Roni Horn

In 1989 Mimi Thompson spoke with artist Roni Horn about objects, nature, and circumstance. Roni has received countless awards, fellowships and has been featured in the: Tate Modern, MoMa, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Venice Biennale.

Mimi Thompson How did you end up choosing Iceland as a place to go?

Roni Horn It’s a question that I’m always asked and I don’t have a real answer for it. I once looked Iceland up in the dictionary and it fell between ice hockey and ice skating. That’s pretty much as controlled a choice as I made. But having gone there, there evolved a relationship that I couldn’t separate myself from. Each time I’d go, there would be engendered the idea to go back and back and back. I guess the real reason is the relationship to yourself that is possible in a place like that. There’s nothing mediating it. There is nothing to obscure or make more complex a perception or a presence.

MT And yet it’s highly dramatic.

RH The drama comes from its youth. The landscape is unique in that the geology is very young. It’s like a labyrinth in the definitive sense. It’s big enough to get lost in, but small enough to find yourself. There is little erosion and, as a result, unexpected symmetries exist in unexpected places. America has everything Iceland has, but it’s ten thousand, twenty thousand, one hundred thousand years older, depending on where you look. Growing up in a very “old” landscape—New York City—it’s origins are secreted from the present. I mean that the geological aspect of the landscape in New York City can only be experienced theoretically at this point. In Iceland, you understand empirically exactly what this place is: its what and how. That accessibility effects the nature of one’s experience, the experience of the world. Any place you’re going to stand in, in any given moment, is a complement to the rest of the world, historically and empirically. What you can see in that moment, what you can touch in that moment, is confluent with everything else.

Read the full interview.

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98 Bowery

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

Who doesn’t like art from the ‘70’s and ‘80’s? And who doesn’t love PayPal? Gallery 98 brings them both together as an online gallery and store for the website 98Bowery.com. Right now the Gallery features rad art and ephemera created by the group Colab, and its associated art spaces: Fashion-Moda and ABC No-Rio Dinero.

The current inventory includes a number of Fashion Moda posters by Charlie and John Ahearn, Stefan Eins, Walter Robinson, and Marc Brasz, little graphic Barbara Kruger match books, photographs by Tom Warren, Harvey Wang and Jane Dickinson; along with plaster and ceramic art objects and silk screen prints. All the artwork ties into the out-of-print 1985 book, recently restored to life by 98Bowery.com, ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Gallery. This book gives the low-down on the “original” Lower East Side gallery of the 1980s, serving as a kind of survey for their past events, exhibitions, projects, and involved artists. Take your pick of the related art for sale at Gallery 98, but the inventory will continue to change, and will include photographs, art objects, and works on paper, from between the years of 1969 and 1989.

—AK

Read through for more Bomb Bits.

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Kate Bernheimer talks to Vanessa Veselka, the author of Zazen, about realness, Tinker Bell, and the acoustics of writing.

J. R. R. Tolkien coined a phrase for the happy endings of fairy tales, eucatastrophe. These happy endings do not, despite prejudices against them, actually deny the sorrow that always precedes them; they are, for Tolkien, as for so many among us, “poignant as grief.” I even used his definition of eucatastrophe as the epigraph to my most recent novel. Together, tragic endings and happy endings make a literary flip doll of epic proportions. Strangely, it is the happy ending that is maligned today as literature’s ugly stepsister. Still, the happy ending lives blissfully on in fairy tales of all shapes and sizes. Without spoiling the plot—as intricate and precise as any map of terror and wonder must be—the whole of Zazen embraces Tolkien’s idea of the happy ending. It is a big, bad fairy tale.

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The volume Imaginary Syllabi “includes writings which dream up, concoct and explore utopian, fabulist, fantasy syllabi for potential imagined and real classroom endeavors.” Editor Jane Sprague discusses feral sites, mongrel schools, and the all-too-real labor conditions of American education.

Zack Friedman The project seems to have two sides: it has a utopian aspect, in the sense that it seeks to not be constricted by limitations on the possible and instead pictures different ways of learning (or parodies the “rules”), but also is relatively pragmatic—many practicing teachers could implement ideas influenced by many of the syllabi in the volume. How do you reconcile these strands?

Jane Sprague I’m not sure I intend the book to “reconcile these strands”: I hope to expand them. Their contradictions. The limits certain sites of labor place on our version of “what’s possible.” What’s possible in the increasingly assessment-driven curricula endemic to higher ed.? (At least in the public sector.) How creative can you be in the composition classroom at college X where you work as contingent faculty, though no one really knows what you’re doing since no one checks. . . . And yet there you are, in the face of every ‘ism’ or ‘phobia’ you can imagine. You may want to push. You may want to provoke thinking about the war(s) and war culture, though this doesn’t sit well with Dean X, or any of the people who shudder at the idea of “hot-button” topics. So what about those of us, legion, duking it out in the trenches of what we must transmit (often called “SLOs” or “SCOs,” translation: Student Learning Outcomes; Standard Course Outlines), not to mention those of us, legion, who must teach texts pre-selected for us. And sometimes these texts have been authored by the department chair. . . . Still, in the face of all this, we forge ahead hoping to establish a space where we can work on what we hope our students might become: critical thinkers, strong writers, or at least writers who are keenly aware of the work they need to do, inquisitive readers, citizens galvanized to think beyond that which they already know. Or art makers who think outside reproducing the real and risk activism, re-thinking genre-ism, re-thinking thinking.

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BOMB Magazine is pleased to feature selections from ONandOnScreen’s summer issue. Each week BOMBlog will showcase poems and video pairings from the Summer 2011 issue of ONandOnScreen, an e-journal project matching poems and videos. This week’s pairing features poetry by Joseph Massey and a video entitled Traveling Sunspots.

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B.C. Edwards read The Great Frustration, Seth Fried’s inaugural collection of short fiction, and now he’s depressed that it’s over.

Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration is the kind of collection that makes you seethe just a little bit over how well it’s conceived, constructed, and written. There are almost no sour notes throughout the eleven stories, and there are plenty of moments of sheer brilliance. Taking small quotients from the greats across every field of prose, Fried is at once channeling Carver, Kafka, Saunders, and Barthelme, while never fully embracing any of them. As debut collections go, The Great Frustration is on par with some of the very best.

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Alyssa Kilzer speaks with Cole Rise, a photographer whose work achieves both surreal and cinematic qualities. They discuss his technique and process, travel, and his inspirations—including the challenging and maybe impossible question of why and how we are here and the size and existence of the universe.

Cole Rise’s photographs are both comfortingly familiar and hauntingly distant. He sets up emotional and mysterious scenes while focusing on the details and the larger forms in nature. As a result our world is portrayed as beautiful and strange. The permanent and ethereal beauty of nature is in the transformative sky, with its glaring sun, soft fog, bright constellations, or heavy clouds, in the volumes of the earth, the water and rocks, and, occasionally, in the frozen motion of an air born figure within these dream-like settings.

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