DRIFT A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production Issue 2, Spring 2011

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From the Editors///

Dear Readers,

So much has happened in the time it took to put this issue of DRIFT Magazine together, both socially and personally. In fact, we got so caught up in the moments of everyday that we fell behind in the production of the magazine, the space we dedicated to celebrating and critically analyzing these very activities. But can we ever keep up? Can discourse stay apace with cultural events and producers?

Although it may seem an overly tidy and self-congratulatory move to turn our belated release into a revelation on the temporal lapse between discourse and production, it begs a better question about discourse itself as a mode of cultural production. About the generative relationship between activities and acts of idea-sharing, and about the slippage between these two seemingly discrete categories. What we mean to say is: DRIFT is as much a venue for analyzing the makers and means of cultural production as it is a site for enacting it. A marginal site, but a site, nonetheless.

Many of the essays, stories, and compositions within these pages tread similar water, situating various institutions in processes of cultural production. Be they musical canons, artistic sites, or classrooms, each of the authors investigates the specific qualities and roles of cultural institutions. They both challenge existing paradigms and posit new models. Thus, these authors are engaging in new kinds of artistic collaboration, new networks and economies of exchange, new forms of producing and sharing knowledge—not only envisioning a future, but also actively practicing the present.

Please enjoy the practice of reading this magazine.

Thank you.

Sean Collins & E. Maude Haak-Frendscho, Editors

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Table of Contents///

Napoleon in the Eye of a Needle: “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again” Rebecca Ahrens

Museum Eviction Paula Cobo

OCCUPY EVERYTHING [and/or EVACUATE] Cara Baldwin

Notes on the Joseph Beuys Project at Interlake Joseph Bryan

Dragging an Ox Through Water Brian Mumford Interviewed by E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

Western Shirts and The Creaking Chair Justin Sorensen

The Bushwick Bookclub: Takes on John Lincoln’s Shaking the Tree Sean Collins & Geoff Larson

Shaking the Tree Jon Lincoln

Contributors

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In 1987, California resident David Wilson bought the ground floor of a Culver City building to establish a business specializing in tile-flooring. While seemingly innocuous, this business venture housed the seedlings of a great uncovering. Buried under the floorboards and uncovered during renovation was a plan for “Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter” by Geoffrey Sonnabend. Wilson then proceeded to tack the fading diagram in the building’s storefront. Soon after his tiling company opened its doors, masses made pilgrimages to view the odd illustration. Some even donated their own objects of curiosity; with that, The Museum of Jurassic Technology was born.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s founding myth is in the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by alternative biographer, Lawrence Weschler. Rather, I should say that it is believed to be in the book—which incidentally, has been checked out of the library for the past week.

This curious museum is hidden in near obscurity in Culver City, known only to those in the art world seeking alternative exhibition practices. The museum is a hybrid: part natural history museum, part art museum, two parts cabinet of

Napoleon in the Eye of a Needle“No One May Ever Have the Same

Knowledge Again”

Rebecca Ahrens

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curiosity. At the center of it all, the space serves as an institution of institutional critique. Regardless of how passé the categorization of challenging the institution has become (museum professionals lean toward the term “new institutionalism” to describe the incorporation of critiques of the institution in to the institution), it is an appropriate framework here. The Museum of Jurassic Technology examines the relationship between objects of contemplation, many of which are facsimile of other non-visual materials, and discursive spaces.

My attachment to the Museum of Jurassic Technology is humanized, emotional because it has a realized presence—a narrative weaved together from anonymous letters to the astrologers of Mount Wilson, paintings and accompanied histories of Soviet dogs in space, microscopic sculptures of the French historical figure by “outside artist” Hagop Sandaldjian. The narrative of each exhibition rings clear in the over-abundance of context. Wall text, videos, and sound recordings fill the darkened corridors and illuminate the oddities on display. The foreignness, and often absurdity from outsider art to down-right absurd collections of objects, of the exhibitions and their contexts, reveal what is lurking in the dusty corners of every museum or site of cultural production.

For instance, there is a room within the maze of exhibits dedicated to the microminiatures of Sandaldjian. Along with several of his pieces is a detailed personal history. The representation of Napoleon seems to play with the scale of the small in real life and the mythological larger than life. Sanaldjian’s work and its exhibition shrinks such an imporartant historical figure and the narratives of history into the painstakingly tiny art of another individual.In a time when the author is believed dead and postproduction (appropriation) is the name of the game, such strong, non-traditional articulations exhume discursivity, implying both author and audience. The content of discourse, too, digs up forgotten tales and broader histories of knowledge. //

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Museum Eviction

Paula Cobo

Last year Museo Alejandro Otero, a Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art founded in the year 1990 in the city of Caracas served— among other cultural instututions—as shelter for thousands of victims of heavy floods in Venezuela. The Minister of Popular Power for the Culture, Farruco Sesto anounced that the museum would temporarily use all its facilities, including galleries, storerooms and offices, as improvised sleep/eat rooms for over 1.500 homeless. Museo Alejandro Otero, as a State owned institution, has proved its adherence to the Bolivarian revolution that began in Venezuela in 1998 under the leadership of Hugo Chavez.

Re-thinking the Museum´s role in the actual political and social process of the country2

Does the Bolivarian revolution think of the museum as an aesthetic apparatus for means of social/political representation (an aestheticization of politics), or on the contrary, as a politization of the aesthetical apparatus (museum)?

The Bolivarian museum will no longer be reductible to an artistic determination, but to a social regime mobilized by the state, explicating the capture of the revolutionary into the state-apparatus. The action peformed on December 2010 in Caracas, involving the emptying of the

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museum´s collection and the “introduction” of 1.500 homeless Venezuelans throughout the architectural space of Museo Alejandro Otero, is in fact a de-territorialization of the Museum´s content. This act forces a symbolical and physical desarticulation of the signification of the Museum as an aesthetic apparatus. As Deleuze puts it, a deterritorialization/reterritorialization implies thinking outside the dualistic fremework (out/in), and toward a propositional vector which underpins a possibility of change immanent to a given territory. This is the territory of the “cultural ediffice,” but moreover the condition of production of the place of Art.

In the process of the Bolivarian museum revolution, we are witnesses of a very interesting aspect. On the one hand, there´s an immanent political practice as the demarcation of the distinction between both public and private. In other words, there is an immanent political struggle over the distinction between both, and over who decides which spaces are public (and so, supposedly, political) and which spaces are private. Politics takes place fundamentally in the outside, as a process of struggle for the control of public space/policies/etc. In this particular case there is politicization through occupation of the social body into the public (museum). There is a symbolical and literal reversal of the real, the political in certain respects becomes representational as it occupies the space of the aesthetical. There is an immanent de-territorialization of the artist/artwork outside its representational container of the subjectivities of the modern (bourgeois) subject. The ruins of the museum are resignified as “social shelters,” not by any means of artistic determination of a particular artistic agent, but as part of a revolutionary cultural movement immanently captured by the State apparatus. In this way, the main cultural function of art institutions in relation to revolutionary politics in Venezuela today is to initiate the alliance of Real into the representational. The effects/ affects

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of the museum is an indicator of the current socio-political conditions of the country. This enactment of reversals presents us a very ominous mirroring with actual artistic production of so called political artworks circulating in the spectacular apparatus of aesthetic representation. On the other hand, the state occupation of the Museo Alejandro Otero as refugee shelter looks as “contemporary” as any poetico-political representational work of the social fabric.

The radical action of evicting the Museum places us in the middle of a battlefield of discursives regimes, articulating a two fold map: the Bolivarian revolution’s discursive regime in its state-captured re-territorialization of social conditions into the cultural space fighting, and the counter-notion of a Museum that we carry since the the French Revolution, which enabled for the first time in history free access to the former French royal art collections for people of all status three days each “décade” (the 10-day unit which had replaced the week in the French Republican Calendar).

The Bolivarian discursive regime is possible only through a negation of the Museum´s discoursive regime. So far, the Bolivarian wants to empty the basic principle of the Museum as such, which is primarily its exhibitional character.

This current and unfolding example present us the possibility of thinking outside and beyond the dualistic rhetorics presented to us. But most importantly, it unveils the notion of crisis. An institution on its phisical presence (architecture) becomes a body of the status quo, but finally it will be the affects who organize the time and space of its usage, and its this same body who will at one point or another claim—collectivelly—the space as political action, a break through the status quo, and a symptom of emergency.

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Is there a new possible way of generating thought and practices wich are immanently political in a unity of content and form? A power-affect-as-creational-agency capable of thinking its own unfolding, and by doing so, in its own uncertainty of the process, redefining its social meaning?

Is it that for re-thinking the museum in revolutionary terms (as creational agency), an Eventual universality will have to break with the past discursive regime in order to not just empty its content, but work on its form? Will we have to evacuate and not occupy? We assume beforehand that the old regime of discourse will be abolished, in order to create a new line of thought. If the form is the political, the problem that revolution has as Deleuze pointed out is:

(...) The real problem of revolution, a revolution without bureaucracy, would be the problem of new social relations, where singularities come into play, active minorities in nomad space without property or enclosure.

Shall we then abandon the museums?

If the re-thinking of the museum (the institution on its totallity) implies Revolution, which is the Event of total destruction and therefore a new creation, we assume beforehand that the old regime of discourse will be abolished, in order to create a new line of thought, consequently a new discursive regime. For re-thinking (in revolutionary terms), in an Event-based universality will have to break with the past discursive regime in order to not just empty its content, but work on its form. This means the possibility of a third discourse of its own far away from the dualism of positive/negative narrowly connected with Lacan´s Analytical Discourse as the dialectics between master-slave, teacher-student, etc. The possibility of thinking a third discourse as a whole new set of possibilities of/for thinking a new politics of the aesthetical dispositive will be no longer tied to the nation, to representation, or to the contract. Shall we then abandon the museums? The third option implyies total evacuation of the two previous oppositional discourses, and it welcomes a new subjectivitity that opens the existence of new languages/concepts/names. It is, in fact, not a re-thinking or re-working on the actual institutions, but creating new ones, ones that don’t have any name yet. //

1 All Photos from Farruco Sesto´s Blog : http://confarruco.blogspot.com/2010/12/desde-la-izquierda-lagrimas-de.html2 Motto from Museo Alejandro Otero. http://www.fmn.gob.ve/fmn_mao.htm

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OCCUPY EVERYTHING[and/or EVACUATE]

Cara Baldwin

I have made a rather radical decision today. I have decided to write with my hands. So what? It’s the tiniest gesture towards embodiment. My own. I understand I am to speak today on behalf of someones and somethings other than myself. This strange [and impossible] task is one I’ve set out to do every day for several years now. And while I don’t intend to turn my back on it—especially not now—I am first struck by the foreign impression of my own hand hitting paper.

To set out to write in this way is to see my own handwriting for the first in a very long time. It’s grown sloppy. I dreamt last night I was looking at my writing from years ago. How clearly cloying my penmanship was then. It expressed a sincere desire for legibility and understanding—even ‘approval.’

I’ve said that I am interested in exploring issues of intimacy and scale. It seems to me this has to do with a certain agency and trust; the Derridian qui ou quoi, the multitudes, the figure and the ground. It has to do with Sedgwick, Ettinger; the interpersonal and the many, many ways we become distanced from ourselves and one another.

I am writing outside and without pause or hesitation.

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This goes to the question, and what is at stake in the term ‘militant research.’ We have chosen this term, this phrase, to indicate a set of intentions and manner of working that operates in resistance. One that is not [for the moment] easily absorbed into the language of the institution as, say ‘research-based art practices’ or ‘activist art,’ might be. When it loses its force of resistance, we will abandon it—tactically [evacuate].

OCCUPY EVERYTHING [and/or EVACUATE]

We’ve said that Occupy Everything is an artist run platform dedicated to militant research, critical pedagogy and public practices that include mediatic intervention, feminism and the anti-enclosure movement.

It began at The Public School in Los Angeles in a class called “The UC Strikes and Beyond” and was inspired by the words and actions of occupiers everywhere.

It is an autonomously organized group that operates with both vertical and horizontal modes of distribution. It is porous and connected to an expanding [and/or contracting] constellation of projects that include The Public School, AAARG and The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. Respectively, these represent autonomous and variously ‘flat’ or ‘horizontal’ approaches to institutional frameworks that could be understood as the school, the library and the press.

This emphasis on information-sharing and militant research takes place in an openly declared ‘Information War’ that is, in fact, nothing less than a Class War.

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[I]

As I write this, I pause to consult with a social worker who directs me to public resources for food and shelter. I respond to an email from my friend and collaborator asking when I might come to stay with them. I overheard another friend last week explain my presence in her home by saying I was ‘between places.’ I reflected at length on these things, the cost of transportation and liminal spaces [neither here/ nor there].

The project of OE as it stands is configured around occupation and evacuation; embodiment and withdrawal. The militance of this investigation is not one of over-identification with institutional frames, but rather, a recognition of their violence. //

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Notes on the Joseph Beuys Project at Interlake

Joseph Bryan

The Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”

-Karl Marx

My earliest real awareness of the many radical potentials of early learning (by ‘early learning’ I mean learning that begins at birth) came to me after examining the work of the German conceptual artist Joseph Bueys.

I have always self-identified as an art-maker. I came to teaching as a means to supplement what I considered to be my true work, making art. I began my teaching career as a substitute teacher in a preschool classroom simply because the educational requirements to do so were much less rigorous than those of a ‘school-age’ teacher. I also felt I had more control over the amount of time I invested.

Bueys famously stated: “EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST.” I understand this declaration to be more about a social construction that includes all of humanity, our culture and ideas, and everything we make than a reference to traditional fine arts, say, making a painting. In much the same fashion

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that nature pushes life to expand in all directions, and is forced by physical laws into complex symmetries, human culture engages in the construction of elaborate conceptual compositions, always seeking a kind of balance. I believe this to be the ‘art’ to which Bueys was referring.

Also central to Bueys’ thought is the idea of PRAXIS, or the active practice of ‘doing’ one’s conceptual work rather than operating purely in the theoretical. Being an artist in the Bueysian sense includes living life with intentionality, wherever that might be; it is making engaged choices as we create our part of this huge physical, social and cultural construct. This act is creative, philosophical, political and practical. It is being conscious, even in a preschool classroom.

For many months I developed a project called “Peace Heroes” at Interlake Childcare and Learning Center in Seattle, Washington. Each week I would tell the children a simple story describing the life of a real historical figure, who, through non-violence, accomplished great change in his or her community. We would add that person’s image to an evolving collage-mural in the classroom and I would connect much of our activity to that person’s life. Peace Heroes included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Correta Scott King, The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet Tenzin Gyatso, Leymah Gbowee, The Most Reverend Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Ghandi, Josephine Baker, Chief Joseph the Younger, and many others. Lila, a five-year old girl in the group, described a Peace Hero as someone who “uses Love to make great changes happen. Sometimes people try to hurt them, but they usually win”.

Through the Peace Hero project I introduced the children and their families to Joseph Beuys. I added his picture to the mural and brought in a couple of books about his art for the children to see. I told them that he was an artist and educator, and I told them his highly mythological story.

Being an artist in the Bueysian sense includes living life with intentionality, wherever that

might be; it is making engaged choices as we create our part of

this huge physical, social and cultural construct. This act is

creative, philosophical, political and practical. It is being conscious,

even in a preschool classroom.

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In my classroom we often talked about mythology, calling them ‘special stories.’ I defined a myth as a story that may be true or untrue, that has been told and re-told many times, changing a little with each re-telling until it becomes everyone’s story. We talked about symbolic language, wherein a ‘symbol’ represents more than what it does or initially seems to be. This is in contrast to a tool, which is something that is what it does. We discussed many of the symbols that surround us daily, including the English language—written letters represent sounds, those sounds come together to form words, the words are assembled into sentences, and the sentences represent ideas. I chose my clothing to communicate a symbolic message and I spent a good part of the day communicating using various systems of symbols, including writing, props and pantomime. We also looked at prehistoric hieroglyphs and petroglyphs (picture-writing on rocks) and a photograph of the rapper Chuck D. The children interpreted his choice of clothing (all black) and his posture (fist in the air) to mean “Black Power.”

Then I showed them a piece from one of the books on Beuys. He had sculpted a crude rabbit in plasticine and placed it opposite a cast toy soldier half it’s size. The soldier was pointing a rifle at the rabbit and the piece was titled the Invincible. I asked them to interpret the piece. A lively conversation followed, and they agreed with one another that the Rabbit represented Love, and the Soldier represented Force. They agreed that because the Rabbit was so much bigger than the Soldier, the Rabbit must be the more powerful. I explained to the children the meaning of the word invincible—“invincible means no one can hurt you”—and then asked them if the Soldier was going to hurt the Rabbit. They agreed that the Soldier could not, and that the message was “Love is stronger than Force.” Because these were words I frequently repeated to the children, I was not satisfied that the idea was successfully communicated, that the children were not simply saying what I wanted to hear.

Then I showed them a famous photograph of an unarmed man stopping four Chinese tanks on their way to Tiananmen Square in 1989. I told them a simplified version of the events that occurred there, that the tanks were on their way to hurt many people, but that a man walking home with his groceries stood in the way of the tanks, and would not allow them to pass. I told them that it really happened. Then I asked them to tell me about this image and they agreed that it carried the same message as the Invincible, “Love is stronger than Force.” I was still unconvinced that the children truly understood what I was trying to communicate.

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The next day I came to school with my pockets full of small cast toy soldiers and a papier mâché rabbit very similar to the one Beuys sculpted. I asked the group to show me “Love is stronger than Force.” Predictably, they recreated the image from the book. Then I gave them all blocks of clay and sticks we had collected outside and asked them to show me, with their own symbols, the message “Love is stronger than Force.” Several children recreated the Beuys image, two children unexpectedly sculpted Chuck D, but five-year old Jacob sculpted a large volcano. On the volcano was perched a tree with a bird’s nest bearing three stone eggs. He told me the volcano was going to explode, destroying the tree. Before it did the eggs would hatch, and the baby birds would fly away. This was “Love is stronger than Force.” //

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Dragging an Ox Through Water

Brian Mumford Interviewed by E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

MHF: I recently saw you play a show up in Seattle at Cairo. It was really great, by the way. You bring together seemingly disjointed sounds and musical touchstones into songs that are surprisingly coherent. There is a folky earnestness and presence to your songs, but also a barrage

of mechanical/mechanically-altered sounds, too. They are very elastic, both in that they stretch a typical Western pop song structure to encompass noise and the incidence of a particular space, and in that they require listeners to hear along these multiple levels, as well. It results in

Brian Mumford is a Portland, OR based musician whose primary solo project is Dragging an Ox Through Water. His artistic credits also include Jackie-O Motherfucker, Grandfather Claws, Thicket, Sun Foot, and Jewelry Rash. After experiencing him playing on several occasions, I realized that his music was more than just impressively deconstructed beats and attractive textures, it is also sensuously engaged and conceptually attuned both to musical and broader cultural conditions. Although his music is valued by a wide audience of other musicians, discerning connoisseurs, and mere appreciators like me, it also arguably orbits several other practices. Mumford’s work is politically rigorous sound art, innovative chance-oriented musical composition, and the most attention-holding kind of pop. Furthermore, as our following interview reveals, he is both incredibly aware of his place in each of these realms, and extremely articulate about how and why he chooses to operate at this disciplinary intersection.

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really smart, yet catchy, jams. I was hoping you could sketch out a bit of your background in music, and some of your particular interests in the creation of songs. Where do you think your music fits into established genres/canons?

BM: Thanks for the kind words on the Cairo show. That place rules. [Have you been watching the AJE or Democracy Now coverage of the Egyptian revolution? (speaking of a different Cairo)… super inspiring… super fascinating. USA would really like CIA torture point-man Suleiman to take over power, but I’m betting the wildcat strikes will continue if they try to pull that shit.] My background in music: I’ll try to start with what’s specific to Dragging an Ox Through Water. It definitely ends up being an amalgamation of things, and I feel

that it at least usually manages to avoid seeming like a clumsy collage or a pastiche. When it comes together properly, it feels like a pretty accurate rendering of a kind of internal subconscious dialog and exploration of certain areas of externally experienced culture. That’s how it feels to me anyhow. And I get the impression, based on things that people have said to me about it, that it sort of works that way for other people as well. Country music was a pretty early influence on me, so using that as a stylistic reference point is both intentional and maybe a little inevitable. I like its weeping / yelping harmonies and the traditional virtuosic warbling of the singing. I also think it’s a very alienated style (having sort of emerged in the USA around the time that a lot of people were moving into cities and then

Brian Mumford. Photo courtesy of Aaron Caley.

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suburbs from more rural situations) in a lot of ways, and its sense of longing seems accurate and imaginative by turns. Folk and Pop music are also big influences on this project. Obviously, the stylistic quotation of Folk Music is different than the actual concept or practice of folk art or music, but both are important for this project. And I think that in the fucked-up, class-subconscious reality made possible by modern American advanced capitalism, the two actually have a lot of pretty hairy overlap. Noise has also become really important to me. Experimentally, it was for as long as I can remember. I was always hitting the same piano key at different velocities and listening to the changing harmonic overtones, barking in the reverberant atrium of a grocery store & listening to the decay (starting at age 2 I’m told), and later running inputs into outputs on consumer electronics. It’s found its way pretty naturally into most of the music I’ve made over the years in various ways, although my interest in it is always changing and taking on different and more explicit facets. Exploration of possibilities, welcoming of chance, participation with intention. I’m not really sure where my music fits into established genres & canons, but those I mentioned above are some of the areas I’ve sort of aimed at or ended up playing with. I also think that some of what goes on in this project is an exploration of the process of genre-fication and canonizations as symptoms or effects of social arrangements / structures / damage / health / etc. I mean that

my music exists in unlikely grey areas and wormholes between genres not necessarily for the purpose of stylistic charm, but for the purpose of exploring parallels and relating elements of genres to the process of culture-making or class. I am very clumsy at this still, and I’m trying to find ways of making it explicit without breaking it. I think alienation is absolutely central to our current moment. I think that a deeply internalized, and even glamorous, sense of alienation is an important system of control in the semi-consensual dream that is modern capitalist reality, and I am only beginning to understand that a big aspect of this performance I have been doing over and over again and constantly changing and rewriting, is a kind of theatrical performance of alienation and isolated-reflection which I think may be a darkly valued flower on the branch of many genres and movements within our culture. That kind of alienation can’t be merely acted out, though, as it is in a ton of totally commodified forms of “rebel culture;” it has to be commented on. I’m not sure I’ve been very successful at that yet, but I’m working on it, and I think there are certain elements of my recordings and performances that are starting to hint in the right direction. I should say, too, that there’s typically a frustrating lag between analysis and translation when it comes to ideas making their way in a recognizable fashion into the stuff I’m working on.

MHF: [Yeah, the ongoing events in Egypt are really surprising, and I still

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can’t believe how long they’ve been going, and how well-organized folks have been. It’s a kind of sustained revolt that had seemed off the table as a possibility. I’m astounded. Talk about challenging culture-making conventions!] I think that you’ve really well articulated this kind of red thread through various music genres. The kind of historicizing that describes these categories, and gives them canonical validity, have important economic consequences, in terms of attributing a bounded field and a marketable term to describe it. It’s a really alienating process, and Country and Folk and Pop all fall into this, and I think that Noise does, too. But you’re totally right, the actual practices they describe overlap with their quotations to a point where the

difference is not clear; musicians can’t help but be self-conscious of their music’s relationship to predecessors. So meaning-making is done on several levels, including this textual reading of historical situations. And this seems to be one of the spaces that you’ve opened up in your work for commentary on this condition; it’s not a fixed relationship, but a tenuous one that is always being re-negotiated. I see this happening particularly in your performances and with the electronics you use. The tools you implement during performances and recording are integral to your work. At the Cairo show, for instance, you had this incredibly evocative candlelight/sound translation device. The candle flicker, as temporal indicator of so

Brian Mumford. Doublescreen.

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many qualities of the space and other people’s interactions within it, arose in the music; present conditions were reflected in such a way that can never be exactly reproduced. But it’s not just a reductive description of the context in which the music was made, but also a kind of comment on the histories quoted. I should clarify, though, that I don’t mean to call your work derivative, either in it’s form or criticisms, but rather that it is a critically responsive form. It’s a really dynamic play with presence and absence. And I think this mechanism is at work in the echoes, loops, and delays you play, too. Do you agree with my assessment? What are your intentions? Can you describe these electronic tools and effects, and to what end you use them? I honestly don’t have much of a clue about effects and electronics. But I was really struck by an interaction you had with a kid after the show, when he gave you a nod of appreciation for using a specific gadget. It made me realize that these tools have histories, too. Playing with that seems like another layer, somewhat impenetrable to someone like me, for reading (and playing with / commenting on) your production.

BM: I do agree with your assessment for the most part, although there are a couple of details I’d like to clarify just a little bit.. The relationship I’m trying to describe, I think, actually works sort of inversely to [what you described]. The terms used to describe the work and the shape that the canons or

genres take can be effects of the economic circumstance which lead to their creation in the first place. The alienation I’m talking about is a precursor to the work. I think that a lot of work being made is highly informed by the sense of everything being reduced to commodity and of traditions being hollowed out of their non-commodity meaning... and I think that the terms and traditions and genres used to discuss that work are also consciously and subconsciously informed by that sense. I guess it’s obvious to say that there’s a way in which the qualities which come to be understood to constitute certain genres can have things to say (both consciously and symptomatically) about the experience a group of people are having. I just happen to think that a lot of what is being discussed is that sense of degraded experience and hollow echoing quotation marks. I think this comes as a result of a lot of continuous mass-rationalization which, given enough time, can only become cynical on many levels. So while I agree with you that the use of historicizing elements which bind work into marketable terms can be alienating, I think that the larger alienation is actually one which is much more pervasive and which happens at a different stage. I think you were kind of getting at some of that, too, but I just wanted to try to make it a little clearer as far as what kind of alienation I’m talking about. I like your description of the candle stuff. It really does drag the

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conditions of the present room into the recitation of the predetermined structures of the song. It’s nice because in a strange way nothing is automated. It would function differently if I were simply playing a recording through the warbling provided by the candle-light, and it would sound beautiful and be nice to watch, but having to work with the distortions immediately created weird feedback sensations. Networks of things all being affected by one another and compensating and trying to make the thing work out right and accepting and working with the things which don’t work out. It’s sort of a more overt and crudely technological expression of what any musician or group of musicians does in any circumstance, I suppose. I mean, fundamentally there is nothing unusual about it at all, but I do think that the form kind of draws my attention to interactions that I usually take for granted. I also don’t mind being called derivative. I know there must be a lot of different kinds of value to the concept of “originality,” and I know that I’ve been obsessed with it a lot in the last decade. But right now I feel pretty on the fence about it. I feel like it’s more important to be articulate (even in a subconscious way) or to make work that is mobilizing in some way, than it is to be original. I think that can take many forms, and maybe what people mean when they say “original” is that something has the property of illuminating what was already there in a way which makes it suddenly comprehensible, or in a way which breaks some other spell which was preventing you from accessing it.

I think of that more in terms of being free-associative, though, which I think is very important, because I do think that some damaging assumptions which are crucial to our civilization are very hypnotic, and you have to find ways of snapping out of them. The electronic tools I use for performance are more simple than they seem to appear. Some of them are home-made and I’ve kind of crudely tailored their design and function to my needs, so that can seem deceptively exotic. It’s mostly mixing and amplification stuff with a couple of different variations on delay effects, which I use sort of with the mixed intention of either unifying or scrambling the uh… “psychoacoustic space.” I used to frequently play with a couple of home-made oscillators, which responded to candle-light for drones, but recently I like to use just the candle for the delayed circuity you mentioned before. I definitely agree with you that tools have histories and sort of exist in quotations as well. I imagine it works like that within any discipline, and it ends up being sort of an insider ‘shop-talk’ kind of reference. But I definitely have pretty robust associations with certain familiar (preset) uses of effects, and I can get turned off by certain kinds of uses, but I also really love to hear people use some of them in really super stupidly overt ways. I feel like that kind of “mindless decoration” vibe can feel really viscerally abject in a way that I find relevant. I know it’s a personal fascination, but I think I like to hear things which feel either unnervingly over-familiar, unrecognizable, or which feel simple and direct. That’s how my mind deals

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with subculture-culture right now. [BTW since we last spoke. So many more uprisings! And the US labor movement being galvanized by the threats in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio! Really amazing times at the moment. I’m hoping particularly that the people in the Arab states who have had successful revolutions recently don’t allow themselves to be ruled by yet another elite merchant class (including the army in Egypt). I have the feeling that the United States may have some more class-oriented uprisings in its future...] MHF: [My folks both grew up on farms outside of Flint and I grew up mainly in Wisconsin, and my personal feelings about labor movements generally, and unions specifically, are really colored by these associations. That whole region has been in a post-industrial hurt for some time. Although I certainly agree that these current threats on unions would royally screw working people, I’m not convinced that the unions are in great position as viable alternatives. Unions in that region (and I’m sure elsewhere) have persistently assisted into their own demise by playing for the short hand while ignoring the long play. I hope, for the sake of working class people there, and those who will inevitably have their jobs threatened in the future, that they take this latest threat on in a more strategic fashion.] I was really struck by your statement: that kind of “mindless decoration” vibe can feel really viscerally abject in a way that I find relevant. Really strikes a chord, a fascination with the appalling as

perhaps the closest indicator of current conditions. [We’ve been maintaining a steady side talk about current events throughout the interview, and I think that they are really not so side-lined in the concepts we’re talking about, for instance, that you’re work is a reflection of your responses to “’culture’ right now.” I was wondering if we could incorporate our exchanges on cultural events, as they have progressed alongside our discussions, within the interview’s final text? We could delete all the “thank you”s and niceties, or really leave it all in there as a full transcript of discourse unfolding. When I went to your new project site, this idea totally got solidified for me as the most appropriate approach; music—yours or anyone elses—doesn’t happen in a vacuum, nor do our thoughts pertaining to it. What do you think?] Speaking of responding the culture right now, you’ve started a new project: MILITARY TOURISM / SONGS FROM THE COLONIES / REOCCUPATION / PREOCCUPATION. On your website (http://j.mp/ocproc), you give this description: “The United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries, where we have no declaration of war. This project seeks to gather covers by American musicians of songs that are associated by origin with each of these places. The songs should be selected geographically as specifically as possible, down to the city or area of the city where the base is located. If that’s not possible, songs can be

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more regionally general. Selected songs can be contemporary or traditional and can be interpreted as faithfully or loosely as a given cover-er deems appropriate; they must merely originate from or be associated with the region of the U.S. military installation.” In regard to our conversation about quotations, covers are the most self-conscious form of quotation. You seem to be working to clarify conditions of US military imperialism, having Americans re-produce a local song. Will you talk some more about your intentions for this project? And how you conceive its form? I toggle in my mind between images of a grotesque recital of sad ironies, and a celebratory re-affirmation of locational identity beyond the purview of US militarism. BM: Yes, totally, I am happy to come back to the “mindless decoration” bit. I was thinking the other day. I guess I think a lot about subculture as both an intentional discussion of alternative ideas for interactions between individuals and institutions and as a subconscious reaction to the health or toxicity of the environment. Dana and I were watching this Australian guy’s movie about permaculture, something about “food forests” I think, I’m sorry I can’t recall the title, and Dana knows more about this subject than I do. But she was saying that permaculture regards weeds as indicators of what is lacking or abundant in the soil. People who work this way with plants see certain types of weeds as indicators of what can be planted or added to the soil to change its

composition in a way which will make the system healthier and more productive. It feels like a stretch, but to me it’s analogous to an aspect of the way I think about subculture. I think it can be both a conscious engagement with alternatives and also a symptomatic glimpse of what is going on in the culture, what the form of the culture seems to be doing to its participants. I love the truth of the revelation contained in extremely harsh and degraded subculture for this reason. I also think that some things which come across as harsh and degraded are more multifaceted than they first appear and are actually rich explorations into alternatives which seem incomprehensible from the perspective of a present state of hypnosis. [I am totally down for including context with this interview. The beginning of our interview sort of weirdly coincided with such a potent period of political upheaval. Tunisia & Egypt, then Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya. We’re at war with Libya now (that’s 3 official wars and [at least] 3 shadow / drone strike / black ops wars). Union busting fight in the U.S. midwest. Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster. Aristide’s return to Haiti, etc etc etc etc. Maybe we can put them in sort of a timeline or something? I dunno, or maybe just some kind of summarizing paragraph? It’s weird because it’s all sort of related to the things we’ve been talking about, but it also necessarily eclipses whatever my thoughts may or may not be on these things and how art can or can’t be pertinent to these kinds of situations.]

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(With regard to the Occupation Preoccupation project, I do really want to talk about what my specific intentions are for participation in it, but I want to wait a while until it gains some collective momentum of its own. I will definitely say that I don’t personally really want it to be either necessarily celebratory or really at all ironic. I do agree that covers are particularly self-conscious, but that’s a part of what I’m interested in exploring with these songs. The supporting role of every American intentionally or unintentionally plays in projection of our Military force. This subject might be good for another time! For now I’m just trying to get word out and spur participation, which I understand is not necessarily the function of an interview, but

thought I’d mention it just the same!) I go back and forth a lot recently on approaches, and I guess I sort of carve out my own way as I go along, for better or for worse, even if I feel that I’m just in extremely experimental research sorts of territory. Sometimes I think that there is a real need for extremely specific intentional engagement which makes concrete statements on things or which draws intentional threads through territories which lead to awakenings. Then I also have been experiencing a lot of work which I feel preserves a space for a diversity of ideas and for alternate or even suppressed ideologies specifically because it resists explicitly narrative pathways and all the absorbed presuppositions which are

Brian Mumford playing with the group Sun Foot at Amnesia, San Francisco. March 3, 2011. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Novak.

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convincingly revealed in that form. I like writing and playing in ways which “feel good” but I guess there is a sense in which I feel that that intuitive way of working is very flexible and can be corrupted or colonized without proper tending. Because of that, I find it very important to have a lot of time to very intentionally engage in thoughtful exploration of political reality so that it can saturate the time I spend in free-association to make music. This rad quote from Suzanne Lacy articulates it: “I went into performance art for personal reasons, not political reasons, and I have learned, finally, to trust that the politics—just based on the way I look at life—will inform the work. The problem with many artists’ conceptions of “political art” is that they feel that somehow they are being called upon to use a different process in making their art, to start with rationality as opposed to intuition. It seems to me what’s important is to politicize yourself as a person and then learn to integrate those politics into everything you do.”- Suzanne Lacy in conversation with Lucy Lippard, Leaving Art: Writings On Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007. I do want subculture to come out of the woods of thinking of itself as a stepping stone to mainstream success. I want it not to become a mouthpiece for oppressive and horrible entities by selling its work (and delivering its audience) to corporate advertising. I also just want it to make relevant work which feels good, whether that’s cathartic or illuminating or even redemptive

or aptly ironic. And I think in order to do that properly, it has to engage with reality, and not merely find itself pleasantly manipulated by narratives handed down from the dominant destructive cultural forms. //

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Western Shirts and The Creaking Chair

Composed by Justin Sorensen

To begin, it is important to mention where I look for inspiration when composing music. Songs generally don’t find their way into my brain by chance. Usually, I am struck by the sight, smell, touch, or sound of a particular event that has occurred in my life. Once this event has taken place I am able to decide whether it is worthy or memorable enough to write about. My definition of memorable is loosely defined and grossly subjective.

Western Shirts and the Creaking Chair was written in the late winter of 2009. At the time, I was living in Brooklyn, and found myself struggling through a bleak, horrible winter filled with longing for some semblance of home. Plaid shirts had become exceedingly popular within hipster culture and I happened to be in the thick of it. Exiting the L train at my humble Morgan stop in the industrial confines of Bushwick led to a buffet of Ray Bans, tapered Levis and, of course, plaid western flannels. Yes, I am guilty of taking part in this fad as well, but after careful reflection found myself wanting this for other reasons. Let me rephrase, I came up with a possible explanation for this sudden resurgence in my style made popular by the grunge gods of the 90’s. To me, plaid shirts represent the West, cowboys, open fields, tall grasses, and images of family. Most of these images are the polar opposite of what I was seeing on a daily basis and perhaps that is why I was drawn to this fashion. It served as

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a balance in the unmistakable rat race of New York. The more I was absorbed by the city, the more I reacted through my appearance. I grew my hair long, had a big unkempt beard and wore plaid shirts. It was my release, it’s what kept me sane.

The last half of the title is an image of a creaking chair. The chair is the melody, and the melody is a lullaby. Lullabies are hummed in rocking chairs. This image is also from my childhood, in that my grandmother had a rocking chair so darn old it creaked more than it rocked.

As you will hear in the recording (online at www.driftmagazine.org), the song is melancholy in tone but finishes with sparkling moments of optimism and hope. The feeling of triumph ringing through, slowly uncovering bits and pieces of home, was promising and optimistic for me. I believe we all need this no matter where home is. Being reminded of comforting times with loved ones feels good, instills confidence, and brings hope.

As you can see and hear, this piece of music served as a vessel for me to pay homage to my family and home in addition to alleviating my nerves while living in a stressful environment. //

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The Bushwick Book Club: Takes on Jon Lincoln’s

Shaking the Tree

Sean Collins & Geoff Larson

The Bushwick Book Club, Seattle chapter, produced by Geoff Larson, is a loosely affiliated group of musicians who take a novel approach to the tired book club formula. Instead of gathering in someone’s kitchen/living room/garage and discussing plot points, character arcs, and underlying themes, the performers bring their musical analysis to a live audience. To call the performances “interpretive” of the subject material would not be completely accurate; they are sometimes reactive—even refutative—sometimes theme songs for under-appreciated characters, and they are sometimes merely soundtracks. The updated format of Bushwick has the feel of a nerdy nightclub revue—the liveliest of open-mics without the airing of diaries. After seeing a night of performances inspired by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the editors of DRIFT wanted to collaborate.

Bushwick primarily takes on classics, works that have already found a home in the cultural consciousness. To create something that fell between Bushwick’s approach and DRIFT’s, Larsen suggested that DRIFT supply an original story, something without the psychic fingerprints of generations of readers and critics. In return, Bushwick would enlist several musicians to take it on.

We chose a story by Jon Lincoln called Shaking the Tree. The story is something of a fable, and it is set in a very recognizable cultural landscape.

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The context is a cracked reflection of Western nations’ engagement with post-colonial Africa, wrought with 1980’s Pop sensibilities. The major players in the story: Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, and Bob Geldof, are familiar by reputation and by the record deals that earned them their status as cultural ambassadors. But in Lincoln’s story they are more; Gabriel, his suffering hero, is an archetype of potent and naïve self-deception, a goliath of Western pop credence. The real protagonist of the story, however, might be the system of bipolar microclimates of West Africa, beating him into resignation, conspiring—with the fickleness of consumer tastes—to fuel feverish dreams and tribal mutinies. Think Heart of Darkness meets The Big Chill. Imagine Marlow had plunged headlong down the Congo to learn what devilment lay behind Kurtz’ platinum-selling harmonies, and you are at a good jumping-off point for Lincoln’s story. Kurtz’ enigmatic dying utterance in Conrad’s tale, “The horror, the horror,” has been given it’s own drawer in the files of 20th century literary theorists. In Lincoln’s parallel universe it would be read: “The rhythms, the rhythms.”

The musicians who were asked to provide their interpretations of Shaking the Tree diverged from the respectful distance afforded to the canonical works they usually work with. Truthfully, the results are more reactive than interpretive. Rather than ruminate on the themes of the story, the musicians chose mainly to get lost in the details. From the significance of major characters’ real-life influence on them as musicians to the writing process itself, the Bushwick song responses expose as much about the reader/musicians and the general act of reading new works as they reveal about the story. Their responses provoked more questions: Without the guidance of previous critical response, what tools are available to readers? As the first audience to frame the story through their responses, (how) does their framing imprint it for the next generation of readers?

For whatever reason—its treatment of beloved pop icons, it’s rough handling of cultural bruises, or something else entirely—the musicians of Bushwick seem almost uniformly unsettled by the story as a whole. Their full reactions, from scathing to earnest, affronted, and mischievous, are audible on our website: www.driftmagazine.org //

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Contributors///

Rebecca Ahrens is originally from Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA with a BA in Art History. She is currently a graduate student at SFAI, and her academic interests are rooted in alternative exhibition practices that actualize theories of social engagement.

Cara Baldwin is a queerly operating artist/curator/theorist departing from the belief that art is a field without discipline or measure, turning her studio into a reading room/micro-publishing space that is open and creative, rather than hermetic and sealed. She is interested in revolutionary histories and systems of of exchange; Latin American and feminist contemporary art; Autonomy, Feminism, Marxism; Poetry and Performance. She is a founding member and co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest editorial collective whose activities include the print and online publication, Journal Press, a public lecture series, curatorial work, public art projects, and activist organization. Through her work in MOCA’s Curatorial Department, she contributed to the realization of several exhibitions of contemporary art with explicit political content. She is currently working on a book on critical pedagogy and militant research, and is a Ph.D candidate in Art History, Theory, and Practice at University of California, San Diego.

Joseph Bryan is an artist, educator, and father. He is also currently an administrator at Growing Seeds North, an early learning community serving young folks and their families in Portland, Oregon.

Paula Cobo (b. 1982) Santiago de Chile, is an artist working nomadly. Currently, she is pursuing a MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. She works in the relationship between text (poetry and philosophy) and objecthood, history and memory, with particular emphasis in the processes of dislocation produced on the Western hegemonic discourse of art and philosophy by its translation from a Latin American context. Her artwork consists in ephemeral installations often generated in relation with the space of exhibition. She works with personal and found objects, photographs, magazines and textiles, film and sound, unfolding a poetical arrangement that works as a visual essay (book). She was director and founder of an artist-run-space called Traschi

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Gallery in Santiago de Chile (2006-2008). In 2009 she was awarded by the Danish International Visual Arts Countil with the grant DIVA. Currently she is granted by the scholarship Becas Chile to study at SFAI.

Sean Collins is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. His writing has appeared in Lung, future/PRESENT, and Earl Grey is Dead. He and Maude developed the idea for DRIFT after a horoscope told him to quit his job.

E. Maude Haak-Frendscho is a writer, researcher, and curator who who recently recieved her MA in Urban Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her practice is concerned with the intersections of social space, subjectivity, and contemporary art. She is a curatorial intern at Southern Exposure, a non-profit contemporary art gallery and education center, and the co-editor of DRIFT.

Referred to within some (one) small Seattle social circles as “The Phenom”, Jon Ricky Lanman combines a penchant for punk rock edge, acoustic thump, and melody to create music that A) Puts you in a driving mood; or B) Awakens you to your ability to bob your head just like a chicken. Hear more at myspace.com/jonrickylanman Geoff Larson is the producer and director of The Bushwick Book Club, Seattle. He has spent the last 12 years working his way through all parts of the music business here in Seattle. He is an Upright Bass Player, a composer, song writer, sound engineer, and most recently named one of the curators of The Seattle Art Museum’s Remix events. www.thebushwickbookclubseattle.com

Jon Lincoln is a career dilettante from San Francisco, CA. An art school dropout with a philosophy degree, he lives in Berlin, where he’s currently working on a magical realist novel about Nicolas Cage.

MoZo is Seattle-based duo Moe Provencher and Aimee Zoe Tubbs. Their sound is full of drums, guitar, harmonica, and harmony vocals. They tour nationally and internationally, mostly on bicycles. You can find them at http://www.myspace.com/mozomusic. Born in Twin Falls, ID, Brian Mumford grew up moving between different areas of Oklahoma, Montana, and Colorado. His main musical project, Dragging an Ox through Water, marries the lyrical twang of country and folk to the broken textures of feedback, drones, tape hiss, and the howl of

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homemade oscillators. A strong value on the contrast between chance and intention makes both performances and recordings a constantly evolving process. He also plays in Jackie-O Motherfucker, Grandfather Claws, Thicket, Sun Foot, and Jewelry Rash.

Bridget Quigg is a Seattle-based songwriter, teacher and performer. She has played with several bands, including Skitterpup and The Unicorn Republic. Bridget recently wrote and produced two one-woman shows, “Losing My Grip” and “Almost Female: A Jockette’s Awesome Journey.” Bridget’s blog: http://bridgetquigg.wordpress.com Justin Sorensen uses the vibraphone to create soundscapes that suggest everyday occurrences in life. Soundtracks inspired by, where we are, where we go and what we do. I am creating music that has relevance to all inhabitants of the world I live. Most recently I have been involved with working on scoring music for dance and movies as well as my own performance pieces that deal mostly within the broad spectrum of ambient sound. www.justinsorensen.com, www.dasvibenbass.com

Shawnmarie Stanton has been a musician and singer for most of her life. In recent years, she has been creating original music for voice and harp as a meditation and exploration. Also an actor, Shawnmarie has been performing on various stages around Seattle and beyond for almost two decades.

Mike Votava is the songwriter and front man for the Seattle based band, We Wrote the Book on Connectors. He has coined the style of music known only as, “Mustache Rock.” He also runs his own songwriting service direct from the band’s website, www.wewrotethebookonconnectors.com. //

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Submit to DRIFT: DRIFT is a quarterly magazine with an open policy for submissions of original work. We are also seeking interviews, criticism, historical essays, proposals, and artist’s texts that respond to place or converse with the works of others. We encourage collaboration, cross-disciplinary engagements, and experimental forms.

All submissions must be accompanied by a brief bio (under 50 words). Please submit via email to: editor.drift@gmail.com, or email us for a mailing address. Otherwise, all submissions must be in .doc, .pdf, .mp3, or .jpg formats. Deadlines for each issue are the 1st of March, June, September and December.

Subscribe to DRIFT: Subscriptions and other purchase options are available. Single issues are between seven and nine bones, and an annual subscription is only twenty-five. Purchasing a subscription for a year gets you a free issue! Hot damn! But seriously, we really appreciate your investment in this project, which allows us to share the magazine as a labor of love. Please email Sean and Maude at: editor.drift@gmail.com to subscribe or, to use Paypal, go through our website. www.driftmagazine.org

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www.driftmagazine.org