“The Last Book kindles creation-fires of a new kind; it marks the birth of the technological illuminated manuscript. With texts by Mary Gaitskill, drawings by Davina Semo, videos by Leslie Thornton, and sound by Greg Landau, this hybrid folio demands to be man-handled with care, to be rewound and fast-forwarded, to be read and touched. This jeweled and inlaid vellum reveals the book as fetish, book as master controlling and prescribing our movements, book as monster: it inaugurates a novel reading ritual–part riot, part cutting-arcane. The book at last dead? Long Live the Last Book!”
-Gabriela Jauregui, author of Controlled Decay

The Last Book: This Ain’t Your Grandson’s Kindle

On April 26, 2009 The Last Book was performed at the Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. For this project, the haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts produced an homage to “the book” in the age of the conquest of the Kindle. Steve Fagin wished to resuscitate the magnificence of the illuminated manuscript as the world turned toward darkness. Perhaps electronic technology could be used, not to leave the book on the dustbin of history, but to reconstitute a forgotten past where words and images danced in each other’s arms.

To this end the haudenschildGarage constructed a one of a kind book that included text, drawings, moving images and sounds. Its construction in the medieval, supersized tradition consisted of three illuminated folios each eighteen and a half inches high, thirteen inches wide and three inches deep.

To make this more than a dirge for the dead, a proper Joycian Wake, we incorporated into our project the live and kicking writing skills of Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls Fat and Thin), the macabre visual lyricism of Leslie Thornton (Peggy and Fred in Hell) and YouTube, the MySpace-with-a-twist drawings of Davina Semo, the retro-futurist music mix of Greg Landau, and as the piece de resistance, Shanghai’s notorious and ever so talented bad girl author Mian Mian as one of our readers with Monica Jovanovich-Kelley and the Kindle.  This bouillabaisse was concocted by Steve Fagin.

Other Last Book participants included Eloisa Haudenschild (producer and line producer), Monica Jovanovich-Kelley (stage manager), John DeMerritt (book binding), Joel Swanson (graphic design), Tad Linfesty (easel and book fabrication), Jim Nisbet (book fabrication), William Brent and Marco Llanos (electronics/technical coordination), Hsiufang Chen and Kate Wall (printing), Alastair Johnston, Teddy Cruz, and Alan Rosenblum (consultants), and Patricia Montoya (video assistant). The Last Book performance photography by Yvonne Venegas and video documentation by Merve Kayan.

The haudenschildGarage wishes to thank Kimberli Meyer, Director of the MAK Center.

On July 30, 2007 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK with author Jim Nisbet. Steve Fagin was the moderator. As part of his presentation, Nisbet read an excerpt from his novel Dark Companion (2006).

Following Nisbet’s talk, Gun Crazy, the 1949 film noir feature film starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a story about the crime-spree of a gun-toting husband and wife, was screened. Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female), the forerunner of director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), is considered by many to be the ultimate B-movie – with film noirish elements. Director Joseph H. Lewis’s cult picture was taken from a Saturday Evening Post story by novelist MacKinlay Kantor, and developed from a screenplay by Kantor and blacklisted Dalton Trumbo (credited as Millard Kaufman to hide the fact that he was one of the Hollywood Ten).

FUEL: Chinese

About Jim Nisbet

Jim Nisbet has published eight novels. Seven of them have been published in French as well as English, with an additional miscellany of translations into German, Japanese, Italian, and, forthcoming, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian. An eighth novel, Ulysses’ Dog, has been published in French only by Editions Payot et Rivages(Paris). A ninth novel, How I Got Work will be published by Rivages Noir in Spring, 2008.

Nisbet has also published five volumes of poetry: Poems for a Lady, Morpho (with Alastair Johnston), Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley, Small Apt (with photographs by Shelly Vogel), and Across the Tasman Sea. Two “audio narratives” — stories told via sound effects — have been issued under the title The Visitor. (You can listen to both if you step into the ARCHIVES.) And innumerable individual poems, essays, stories and excerpts have appeared in nearly as many newspapers, magazines and anthologies, including American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, The Bay Area Reporter, Big Bridge, Blind Date, The Bolinas Hearsay News, Bombay Gin, Caïn, Carbuncle, Cinizas, City Lights Journal, La Croix, Exquisite Corpse, Green Level Anthology, Gulliver, the photographer David Perry’s Hot Rod Pinups, La Licorne, Life of Crime, Measures of Poison, Mike and Dale’s Younger Poets, No Difference Here, The North Carolina Anvil, Pangolin Papers, Panta, Plots with Guns, Poetry Flash, Poetry USA, Polar, Public Illumination Magazine, The Punctual Actual Weekly, Rolling Stock, San Francisco Noir, Shuffle Boil, The Stone, Sumus, Temps Noir, Thus Spake the Corpse vols I & II, Vogue Hommes International, and WET — not to mention Crow, Raven, and The Turkey Buzzard Review. Nisbet has twice won the Pangolin Papers Annual Fiction Award, and thrice been nominated by that magazine for the Pushcart Prize in short fiction. His 2006 novel, Dark Companion currently contends with four other nominees short-listed for the 2007 Hammett Prize.

Aside from reading and performing his own work for nearly forty years, Nisbet has written and seen produced a modest handful of one-act plays and monologues and himself directed the original productions of most of these works. Furthermore, he has sunk but thrice to teaching “Creative Writing” at the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado. Over a period of ten years (late 70s – mid 80s), with David Schein and Berkeley’s Blake Street Hawkeyes, Nisbet co-produced six Actualist Conventions, marathon performance events presenting a different poet, performance artist, musical ensemble, theater group, dance troupe or film every 30 minutes for 12 – 48 hours.

Nisbet also owns and operates his own business, specializing in but not limited to the design and construction of its eponymous Electronics Furniture. Click here to visit his website for more information.

About Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

On July 30, 2007 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK with author Jim Nisbet. Steve Fagin was the moderator.

Following Nisbet’s talk, Gun Crazy, a 1949 film noir feature film starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a story about the crime-spree of a gun-toting husband and wife, was screened. Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female), the forerunner of director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), is considered by many to be the ultimate B-movie – with film noirish elements. Director Joseph H. Lewis’s cult picture was taken from a Saturday Evening Post story by novelist MacKinlay Kantor, and developed from a screenplay by Kantor and blacklisted Dalton Trumbo (credited as Millard Kaufman to hide the fact that he was one of the Hollywood Ten).

FUEL: Chinese

About Jim Nisbet

Jim Nisbet has published eight novels. Seven of them have been published in French as well as English, with an additional miscellany of translations into German, Japanese, Italian, and, forthcoming, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian. An eighth novel, Ulysses’ Dog, has been published in French only by Editions Payot et Rivages (Paris). A ninth novel, How I Got Work will be published by Rivages Noir in Spring, 2008.

Nisbet has also published five volumes of poetry: Poems for a Lady, Morpho (with Alastair Johnston), Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley, Small Apt (with photographs by Shelly Vogel), and Across the Tasman Sea. Two “audio narratives” — stories told via sound effects — have been issued under the title The Visitor. (You can listen to both if you step into the ARCHIVES.) And innumerable individual poems, essays, stories and excerpts have appeared in nearly as many newspapers, magazines and anthologies, including American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, The Bay Area Reporter, Big Bridge, Blind Date, The Bolinas Hearsay News, Bombay Gin, Caïn, Carbuncle, Cinizas, City Lights Journal, La Croix, Exquisite Corpse, Green Level Anthology, Gulliver, the photographer David Perry’s Hot Rod Pinups, La Licorne, Life of Crime, Measures of Poison, Mike and Dale’s Younger Poets, No Difference Here, The North Carolina Anvil, Pangolin Papers, Panta, Plots with Guns, Poetry Flash, Poetry USA, Polar, Public Illumination Magazine, The Punctual Actual Weekly, Rolling Stock, San Francisco Noir, Shuffle Boil, The Stone, Sumus, Temps Noir, Thus Spake the Corpse vols I & II, Vogue Hommes International, and WET — not to mention Crow, Raven, and The Turkey Buzzard Review. Nisbet has twice won the Pangolin Papers Annual Fiction Award, and thrice been nominated by that magazine for the Pushcart Prize in short fiction. His 2006 novel, Dark Companion currently contends with four other nominees short-listed for the 2007 Hammett Prize.

Aside from reading and performing his own work for nearly forty years, Nisbet has written and seen produced a modest handful of one-act plays and monologues and himself directed the original productions of most of these works. Furthermore, he has sunk but thrice to teaching “Creative Writing” at the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado. Over a period of ten years (late 70s – mid 80s), with David Schein and Berkeley’s Blake Street Hawkeyes, Nisbet co-produced six Actualist Conventions, marathon performance events presenting a different poet, performance artist, musical ensemble, theater group, dance troupe or film every 30 minutes for 12 – 48 hours.

Nisbet also owns and operates his own business, specializing in but not limited to the design and construction of its eponymous Electronics Furniture. Click here to visit his website for more information.

About Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.