Paul Chan: National Philistine

This will be a quick one. Check this out:

http://www.nationalphilistine.com

This is a project by Paul Chan, an awesome video/ multi-media artist whose work was perhaps the only exciting discovery I made at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (I also liked the Wrong Gallery installation). Anyway, on this site, you can access fonts, audiobooks and videos that Paul Chan has made. It's a really great site, what an amazing artist. The piece of his that I saw at the Whitney was a black and white projection onto the floor (which reminded me of those lamps that kids have with rotating shades and shapes cut out of the lamp shade, so that shadows in the spapes of animals are projected onto the walls. In the Chan piece, silouettes of things from the street-- bicycles, telephone poles-- are floating into the air, toward the sky and then all of a sudden bodies fall, both up and down. I immediately thought of Sept 11, of course, but it was so much more thoughtful and beautiful than any other artistic production I've seen that came out of Sept 11. My other favorite Sep 11-related thing is the Sleater-Kinney song "Far Away", off the album One Beat. Very good stuff.