This is just cool

via Arthurmag, via Jordan:

Here we are, about two weeks from the release of Al Columbia’s first book in almost a decade.  Pim & Francie is already receiving advance praise from folks like Spike Jonze…Al’s always working on something new and amazing, whether it’s music, filmmaking, comics, or in this case, painting.  Al showed me a photo of this new painting he was working on and I became immersed in the labyrinth of frayed facade and haunting beauty.

(click for full view)

May is surrealism month

Upon finishing The Physiognomy, I was suddenly filled with an unexpected and unshakeable need to re-read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.  I immediately called the Borders on Ponce and checked to see if they had it in stock, and then drove there while listening to this song (World’s End Girlfriend – Satan Veludo Children).  I arrived exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after I left—coincidentally where a lull appears in the song after an early crescendo—and walked inside to find my book.

After picking it up I decided to meander around, and I happened to stumble into a collection of Borges’ fiction, misfiled far away from its alphabetical port of call.  I’ve never read Borges but have always wanted to, and accidentally finding it amid thousands of other books seemed like way Borges was meant to be discovered.  So I purchased The Book of Imaginary Beings too.  It seems to me like they should make a pretty good couple, at least in theory.

Then I glanced at the magazines and picked up the latest issue of Hi-Fructose, where I flipped open to an article on the art of Thomas Doyle.  Doyle’s work felt like something out of a Kelly Link story or Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves:

See what I mean? It’s incredible stuff. Check out his site here (I’m linking it twice so you’ll actually go.)

Then I drove home through a sea of green lights, picking up where I left off in the song, and arrived home exactly four minutes and twenty seconds later, which is again, coincidentally, exactly the point at which the song ends.

Life is strange, sometimes, in its symmetry.