Drag City US Vinyl & CDs

Notes: Until we have a feature film in which Bill Callahan's words are spoken by the true and deep characters who exist within the songs, the best format will be this lyric book - wait, no, the best format will always be the albums featuring the songs, since they are sung by Bill Callahan, the author and singer, in his own inimitable and completely individual fashion. I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it's a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy ink-wash images by the man himself.

The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan's gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure.

I Drive a Valence does this for the listener - makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan's songs on another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world.

Notes: Projectile is an artist's book by John Sparagana, Reto Geiser and David Grubbs. The book spirals outward from a single source image: a news photograph of chair-throwing at the conclusion of a cancelled rock concert in the early 1980s. Visual artist John Sparagana has long produced sliced and mixed collage works in which a source image is enlarged, copies of the image sliced vertically into 1/8" strips and then sequenced horizontally, followed by a second stage in which the stretched image is sliced horizontally and sequenced vertically. The resulting works stutter, shimmer, extrapolate, and radiate with all manner of dazzling visual effects. Projectile deepens this engagement, with Geiser drawing from multiple works by Sparagana and a work of short fiction by Grubbsia single 2,100-word sentence that wends its way through the entirety of the book.