Ferro-Aqueous Quarries

Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, you impertinent idiots of youth?

Here’s the deal, Sparky: we want to show you the best new ideas in arts and ideas. Period.

Arts? And ideas? My good sir, you josh and jape. Aren’t those two species of dinosaur?

First, Josh is a good friend of ours. Don’t use his name in vain. Second, we don’t jape. We mimsy and canter and do the boogaloo stomp, but jape is a thing for monkeys. And we’re not infinitely typing randomly from the White House press room. So there. Nyaah.

Get – to – the – POINT…

It’s very simple. We live in stupid and crazy times.

Where are our flying cars? I WANT MY FLYING CAR! STOMP STOMP. Sorry, ‘scuse us, that was just our whiny little brat brother. He’ll come out of the den every so often after five hours playing “Doom” on two liters of Jolt Cola. We’ll try to keep him otherwise occupied, but every now and again he’ll burst into the living room and demand we play a game of kick-the-ball-into-my-head. I usually kick it once, very very hard, right at his nose, and he goes away for a while.

Okay. See, we just can’t stand the fact that we’re expected to act like grown-ups when the grown-ups are only acting like grown-ups but behaving like angry children who like to kick down sand-castles. We can’t get behind Bush –

TERRORIST!!! Raise the Threat Level to Infra-red! Red shift! Red shift! Sing Huey Lewis and the News with me: “We’re going back – in – ti-uh-ime!”

–and we certainly want the terrorists to go fuck themselves with a very large chainsaw. Twice. Lengthwise.

We’re doing that already. Except, um, we don’t know if they’re terrorists. But we’ll make ‘em terrorists, by God, if it’s the last thing we do!

You really took that “Gonna get medieval on their ass” thing literally, didn’t you? See, that’s the thing. These days, we’ve got a lot of techology. And we’ve got a lot of religion. And they’re not doing much, other than making us money, driving us crazy, and killing us. This is debatable, of course, but that’s the end result we see from our vantage point. Things seem to be improving just a little: they’re helping us connect with one another. But very few of the former are connecting us with anything other than a Britney Spears crotch-shot, and few of the latter are connecting us with anything other than shuysters, hucksters, egomaniacs, plutocrats, child abusers, and miserable bastards who dream of the Apocalypse like a kid dreams of an ice-cream cone. Rocky Road. With rainbow sprinkles.

We can’t believe in the Republicans, because they’ve lied the United States into global dishonor. We can’t reflexively believe in the Democrats, because they can’t seem to grow out of their poll-twitching phase. We can’t automatically believe in the wisdom of our elders, because they helped get us into this crap. We can’t believe the news, first – figuratively – because it’s like watching Munch’s The Scream on surround-sound while strapped into the Ludvico Technique chair, and second – literally – because everybody’s in somebody else’s pocket. And there’s a hole in each pocket, dear Liza, dear Liza. An erection grows through it. And you know the rest.

Anarchist. Nihilist. See, I told you you were a terrorist.

Okay, Sparky, I’m going to make this real easy for you. We believe in art.

What th’ heck is art, anyway? Bunch of no-good layabouts, these artists: manic-depressive chain-smoking dope fiends drowning in whiskey and sex. Art’s that grotesque blot on the wall, right? Piss Christ?

Thaaaat’s not art. That’s art’s covering shadow. Art creates, it doesn’t destroy.

Sez you!

That’s right. Sez us. We know this is a really big question, so we’ll be answering it all over The Boy Bedlam Review. But we think art is about dreaming the future and making sense of the past. And when we mean art, we mean anything creative that fuses form and function. We hate categories, but since the world is full of ‘em, we’ll give you some before we take ‘em away again: music, visual art, fashion, photography, fiction, non-fiction, prose poetry, lyric poetry, epic poetry, fiction, fiction essays, nonfiction essays, speculative essays, movies, film, internet stuff, video games, architecture, dance, analysis, criticism –

–Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on a sec. You sound like an octopus doing battle with an army of hyper-caffeinated spiders! But first things first. What do you mean by criticism? Isn’t that criticizing? Doesn’t that go against your first principle, that art creates, not destroys?

Sorry, misspoke. I meant interpretation. The word that we’ve used all this time, ‘criticism,’ has really screwed us up. We’ll talk more about that later. In The Boy Bedlam Review we’re not going to cover or carry anything that’s anything less than awesome, and we’re going to short-circuit our Schadenfreude button. We will take awesome things, and try and show you why they’re awesome. With as little academic gobbledygook as possible, but still with an awful lot of brains.

Oboy. Oboy. That sounds great! I write stuff too, you know. I’m a human being, really I am. I paint an’ I draw an’ I video an’ I make really deep poetry about my tortured lonely poet’s soul. Publish meeeeeeee!

Now you hold on a sec, Pokey. The one place we will use our critical minds, as ruthlessly as we can, will be in determining what goes in The Boy Bedlam Review. We believe, more fervently than you can imagine, the truth of Shakespeare’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven…

(And there are more things in Heaven and Earth, good Horatio, that are dreamt of in your philosophy.) This means that we want capacious and generous minds who also hear the music in things. We do not want contained, and in-volving, and solipsistic works that tell the poet back to himself. Rather, tell about us to OURselves.

Now you’re getting academic and theoretical. You said you weren’t going to do that. Stop that! What th’ heck do you mean?

Okay. We’ll tell you what we want.

First and foremost, we’ll read the first two sentences, or first two lines, of your written work. Always remember: your work is an advertisement for itself. Make us, compel us, to read further.

In terms of ocular art (static visual art, architecture, film, design, online design) we want work that is not only the expression of a unique consciousness, but also engages – not only with the history of that one art form, but also makes the mind leap to comparisons and analogies with the world, and/or other genres/media.

We especially like intelligent, clever, blog-sized pieces. We’ll take ‘em and nudge them up against other analogous ideas. Create some friction, some heat, and let them make a brand-new baby idea between them.

If it’s a longer piece of work, you’d best be making us think in a new way. We won’t accept good ideas if they’re packaged in an unreadable form.

So what sort of stuff do you like?

We’ll tell you. We’re definitely not telling you to do your stuff like them, and if it looks too much like them, we will laugh at you. But if you can catch the thread that links some of the folks below, you’ll know what we mean. And if you don’t know who these people are, Google is your friend. We guarantee you’ll learn something.

Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Jefferson, Michel Gondry, Rob Thomas, Joss Whedon, Stanley Cavell, Salman Rushdie, William Carlos Williams (especially his prose works and Paterson), Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Umberto Eco (especially his essays collected in How to Travel with a Salmon and Travels in Hyperreality), Greil Marcus, Mozart, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, William Gibson, Simon Schama, Richard Brautigan, Henry Miller, Delaunay, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, James Gleick, Roland Barthes, Ezra Pound as critic, William Burroughs, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke, Walt Whitman, Richard Feynman, John Coltrane, Jackson Pollock, Zadie Smith, Joseph Campbell, James Joyce, Vassily Kandinsky, Jeff Mills, Underworld (the electronica group), Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Shakespeare, Haruki Murakami, Oscar Wilde, Madonna, Hugh Kenner, P’ez (the Japanese hyperjazz band), W.B. Yeats, Shinichiro Watanabe (creator of “Cowboy Bebop”), John Donne, Ovid…

And others. We’re writing on the fly, not thinking of everything. Suggest something or someone. If we like it or them, we’ll add ‘em to the list. It’s all about flow, you know.

Holy frijoles, that’s one hell of a list! They’re all geniuses! Mommy, I’m scared.

Don’t be. Every one of these folks started somewhere. If you’re reading this, and you’re digging it, you’re probably just like them in spirit. And if you really listen to yourself and the world, we’ll hear you.

But we also believe, just as the poet, lover, and madman are all of one compact – so too are the artist, the editor, the curator, and the criti—oops, we mean interpreter—all of one compact. This means: unless you’re tremendously, ludicrously, blindingly talented: in other words, mo’ betta than us, it’s entirely possible we’ll critique and edit. Don’t take this the wrong way: we’re not out to dry your grape into a raisin. We want to press your grape into wine. So don’t whine. Work with us. You reserve final word on our edits. We reserve final word on whether we publish. We’re going to make you a star.

Specifically, in terms of essays and interpretation, we don’t want academic obscurity. If we like you, we want to make sure your work gets read and gets into the common discourse. We especially like stuff that interrelates various arts and elements in making a point. And we want that point to be about the now. To understand ourselves as humans again.

But... but… but… All this craziness. It makes my head go ‘splody.

That’s why we’ll also want some elements of pure simplicity. A haiku. A portrait. A poetic image of nature, or of the connection between architecture and nature. A calmly worded essay on a classic work of art. These will be the ballast in our balloon. They will reaffirm the goodness of our common humanity.

Who’s we? Who’s you? Who’s us?

We will be historians of culture, we will be scholars of the now, we will be the curators of the future arts. We require gentlemen and ladies of letters, we require vultures of culture who have shed their jargon and their snark, we require outsiders who view the world from a perpendicular angle, we require insiders who while flowing in the slipstream know their velocity, we require bruisers who can slam a sledgehammer at cant, we require prostheletizers of the unknown erotic, we require humorists who can slice our empire open like an eye, we require an apothecary who can salve our frenzies with fresh waters of simplicity, and we need enlightened capitalists that can teach us how to fish. We will be a heterodox association; we will be spokes wheeling into our common hub.

And you want to do what?

Save the world.

How’s that?

By bridging the division brought about by the addition of science into the old world of religion, by creating a nexus of positive art that explains and yet still celebrates our time here on this Earth. Publications such as The Third Culture and Seed Magazine attempt to do just this, but their entry-point and their ultimate goal remain focused on the art that is created from science and technology. The Boy Bedlam Review intends, instead, to concentrate on art that engages with our negotiation of both science/technology and religion/belief/the spiritual that allows us to understand ourselves as human beings in the 21st century. By constantly thinking about history and imagining what is lost to it. The Boy Bedlam Review will be, in its conception and execution, a fundamentally humanistic publication -- a work of art, created by the tangential connections between minute particularities.

Motherf-- Alrighty then. Say I work my butt off for you. Show me the money.

Ay, there’s the rub. We’re not investment bankers and we don’t come from money. We have small private grants from a couple of generous individuals that principally will allow the Editor to produce The Boy Bedlam Review for one year, and compensate the web designer. We do not swim in a vat of cash. But WE SOLEMNLY SWEAR THE FOLLOWING:

We believe great works merit payment. Why should anyone torture their soul for a pat on the back? We honestly and absolutely will work to give you something in exchange for your talent. At first, it might not be much. A five-dollar payment as a promissory note. A bottle of Jim Beam. But if we get good work published, we’ll attract attention. Attention gets sponsors. Sponsors bring money. We’re not assholes, we’re artists too. This FAQ is art,The Boy Bedlam Review is art, and while we’re not totally starving, we can’t just go forking out $100 here, $100 there. We will, at the outset, pay you what we can. “Trust us” is the most abused phrase in the entire lexicon these days, but we’re honest brokers. THIS IS OUR SOLEMN PLEDGE.

Where are you?

In the only place we could be: New York City, our home, for however long it and we remain ourselves.

Who are you?

This is us.