I recently received nearly a dozen smaller-sized books from Joel Williams. They are wonderfully colorful with titles like Red Skies, Serpentine, Anatomy, and Landscape. Many of the intriguing and playful drawings and collages suggest oneiric machines interacting with, and like, bodies on the sub-atomic level. Nudes features numerous spherical shapes arranged on various landscapes, which provokes a variety of complex and subtle emotions. Red Skies is probably my favorite book, with its glossy mixes of reds, orange and yellow backgrounds and perturbing constructions of surrational machinery, but all the books are a marvel. Williams has been in various exhibitions and collaborates with the Chicago Surrealists.
Patricide 3: Surrealism and the Uncanny. This 200 page journal-sized issue examines The Place of Memory, Documenting the Uncanny, Revolutionary Moments, and Uncanny Poetics. Contributors include Neil Coombs, Nicholas Royle, Mattias Forshage, Renay Kerkman, Brandon Freels, Stephanie Skura, J.K. Bogartte, Joe Pulver, and others. Editor Coomb's essay on Buttes-Chaumont, Kerkman's piece on the Ouisi Board, and Forshage's commentary on horror cinema are among the high points so far. There is also a section on surrealism in the Middle East. Documentary photos include Portland's own sidewalk teeth. Go to www.patricide.co.uk to order a copy.
The Oystercatcher. An occasional magazine from Denman Island, Canada with a blend of anarcho-surrealist, creative, critical and regional material. Issue 8 features a Mayday introduction, collages and poems, reviews and commentary on Tunisia, the Ishmaelites, Haymarket Scrapbook, Surrealism and queer desire, Vanishing Art, notes on Vancouver counter-cultural history, and more. There is a collage by the departed Don LaCoss that springs the levers of objective chance. Send a donation for a copy; Ron Sakolsky, A-4062 Wren Road, Denman Island BC, Canada, VOR 1TO
