Joseph Mosconi - The Next Big Thing


The Next Big Thing

I was tagged by Kate Durbin.

What is the working title of the book?


 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

In 2006 I entered a raffle and won an iPod programmed by Thurston Moore filled with black metal songs. He called the mixtape "Old Hate." The songs were great but what was even more interesting was the spreadsheet that accompanied it with all the band names and song titles. I started keeping my own spreadsheet of song titles and began collaging select phrases with my own (and others') adolescent poetry, language culled from World of Warcraft and occult forums and chatrooms, sentences from H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and bits of art theory. I had been interested in slang and specialized vocabularies for some time...the language in my first book, Galvanized Iron on the Citizens' Band, was drawn from the somewhat eroticized slang of truckers and miltary personnel. I view Fright Catalog as a sequel of sorts to that book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

There are no characters in Fright Catalog. But if there were a books on tape version (and it would have to be tape, not digital, so that the sound would wear out and get a bit warbly) I could imagine Sean Connery as narrator. He would be dressed in his Zardoz costume and sip single malt Scotch and interrupt every now and then to ask, "Is this thing on?" By the end of the book he would be so irritated that he would curse with words only Scots know and throw his headphones on the ground and stalk out of the recording session.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Wouldn't you love a monsterman to repair the dimensional cluster?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

2 years, 6 months and 3 days. Then it sat around on my hard drive for many years. Finally the design of the book took more than a year. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier, Barbara Kruger, Sister Corita Kent, Will Alexander, Colby Poster art, Euronymous, Mark E. Smith, Jenny Holzer, Allen Ruppersberg, H.P. Lovecraft, Lautréamont, Varg Vikernes, Hannah Weiner, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Halloween costume catalogs, Friz Quadrata, Graham Harman, children's literature, Azeroth & Draenor (& its shattered remnants, known as Outland...)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I nearly always think about the physical form the book will take while I'm writing it (and sometimes even before I've written anything). In the case of Fright Catalog, the text and the form are inseparable. It's published in full color and every page has a different color combination of text and background. It's also published in the form of a semi-glossy magazine. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Fright Catalog was published by Insert Blanc Press.

Writers I am tagging.

Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Sophie Sills

 

Radio! Records! Books on Tape!


Insert Blanc Radio!

Insert Blanc Records!

Insert Blanc Books on Tape!

Insert Blanc Press steps into The Future of Radio and Records and Books on Tape! Listen Up! Do you sometimes just wanna sit back and listen to literature? Do you enjoy elaborate descriptions of complex visual art over the airwaves? Do you believe the radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. This is an innovation, a suggestion that seems utopian and that I myself admit to be utopian.

Insert Blanc Press is proud to announce our new show, The People with Editor and Publisher Mathew Timmons and Insert Blanc Artist Ben White. The People features the voices and ideas of The People that make up the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the west coast, and beyond on KCHUNG 1630AM every 3rd Sunday at 3pm. More & more The People simply choose, for whatever reason, Power to The People in the home of People Power on the Internet. A Radio Revolution offering comfort and cueing up Special Stuff. This is The Sound you love to listen to, The Power of The People to make atmospheric, psychedelic, and dance-oriented Conversation. Radio for The People featuring art, literature, talk, cultural criticism, visual culture, intelligent witticisms and so much more! The People is me, The People is you, The People is we, and You Can Too! … like a Broken Record magically repaired.



Listen this Sunday March 17th at 3pm as our guest Joseph Mosconi reads from his new book Fright Catalogfrom Insert Blanc Press. We'll also be joined by artist and gallerist Jay Erker to talk about her work.




by Christian Cummings
Full Album 55:07
13 tracks

While Insert Blanc isn't pressing vinyl yet, keep your eyes open for vinyl on the horizon. Meanwhile, we'd like to wet your ears with a digital download album available both as single songs or as a full album. Christian Cummings' album Slavebation will keep you aching for more, more, more!
 
"Alternating between elegiac despondency, apocalyptic vision, didactic discourse, and guided deprogramming exercise (often in the space of a single lyric), Cummings convincingly positions himself as a nerdish prophet of doom. Christian Cummings is facing our crazy life head on, in all its bewildering entropy and Gordian knottiness, and in doing so has produced the first great protest album of the 21st century.” -Doug Harvey, Artillery Art Magazine
 
“Lest we've forgotten, Cummings is reminding us what Uncle Frank (Zappa) told us back in 66. Plastic people in a plastic society living on a diet of plastic. And as we know, when they burn and melt they all start to stink. Slavebation is right up my street.” -Sexton Ming
 



Insert Blanc Press is also happy to announce our two new audiobooks, Stingray Clapping by Andrew Choate and Parrot 3 All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions by Allison Carter. Each book read in the artist's own voice, and while not actually a book on actual tape, we hope you'll enjoy an mp3 digital download.

 

FRIGHT CATALOG by Joseph Mosconi


 

FRIGHT CATALOG by Joseph Mosconi is Here!
Saddle-Stitched magazine, full color
Uncoated, Matte finish, 70# text (100 gsm)
Dimensions: 9" x 12" x 0.25", 100 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9814623-8-7


Black metal, death metal, blackened death metal—not to mention: deathcore; thrash; the melodic and technical; grinds and dooms and drones; pagan or bestial; progressive or deconstructivist; Norwegian versus Swedish (early Stockholm or later Gothenburg?) versus various Vikings and Scandinavians; first, second, nth wave….. the infinitely divisible subgenres of heavy metal music as discerned by its fans exhibit a mania for discrimination and taxonomy that approaches the monadic. Secrets, in these scenes, threaten to become singularities. Such, of course, is the reductio of all subcultures. And "Poetry," for "Culture," has become the ultimate and necessary subculture of them all.  Fright Catalog is thus in part a dissertation on the sublime terror of the poetry scene today — with all its partisan scholasticism and stupid undergrounds (as Paul Mann would say). But this catalogue is also attuned to the poetic possibilities of subcultural discourse, to the phonemic tensions and narrative frissons that arise when metal lyrics are mashed up with phrases taken variously from online gaming dialogues, occult forums, and the secret language of adolescence (by definition: misunderstood; mardy; uncommunicative and inscrutable). In the process, Joseph Mosconi forces the opaque argots and cants of isolated initiates to speak with indiscrete promiscuity. Here, accordingly, are the slogans of an infidel poetics (in every sense of Daniel Tiffany's resonant phrase).
—Craig Dworkin


Fright Catalog by Joseph Mosconi has arrived and will remain available for the Pre-Sale price of $20 until soon after we return from AWP. Fright Catalog is a 100 page, full color, large format magazine published by Insert Blanc Press. 

The Signed & Numbered Limited Edition (1-40) also comes with a zine by Joseph Mosconi, Fright Analog, and is available at the Pre-Sale price of $35.


Find us at AWP or get yours online today!