alec michod

I interview psychedelic painter Fred Tomaselli in the January issue of The Believer.
THE PROCESS
IN WHICH AN ARTIST DISCUSSES MAKING A PARTICULAR WORK
FRED TOMASELLI, NIGHT MUSIC FOR RAPTORS

The world according to Fred Tomaselli is a dark, druggy, visually lurid place: a swirling dazzle of eye-popping data. Influenced equally by SoCal surfer culture and New York City trash-punk, [...]

Chris Holmes is a mad scientist of bustling beats, a necessary rock star in an age of diluted dilettantes, and one of the most brilliant and down-to-earth people I have ever met.
I met Chris at the University of Chicago, back when he was fronting a psychedelic grunge Chicago band called Sabalon Glitz, but I didn’t [...]

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at my apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. For some reason, I turned on the TV before leaving for work: I don’t know why, it wasn’t something I did regularly at the time. Images of North Tower burning were already on the air. After watching, dumbfounded, I [...]

My phenomenally talented mother, Susan Michod, has a new show of her Shroud paintings, which she started immediately after 9/11. She ended up painting them for the next four years. Haunting, filled with swirls of color and color’s absence, these paintings are among my favorite she’s done.
From the Artist Statement:
Shrouds. A shroud. Many shrouds. Paintings [...]

I was recently at home in Chicago and came across an email I received from the extraordinary encyclopedic novelist Richard Powers. I forget, exactly, but I think I emailed him cold out of the blue, to ask if he’d blurb my then-forthcoming first novel, The White City. I also wrote to Thomas Pynchon and Don [...]

I interviewed John Sayles for The Rumpus, and like his incredible new novel, A Moment in the Sun, the interview was long and brilliant, an expansive, breathtaking portrait of one of our most fearless and daring storytellers. The entire thing ran to over 15,000 words, although the final produced clocked in at around 3,000–if anyone [...]

When I was a younger writer caught up in the fever dream of what would be my first abandoned novel, I wrote in a state of panic and dread to David Foster Wallace, then stationed at Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois. Call this invasion an act of literary stalking, but this was before Infinite [...]

I recently had a one-sided conversation with a certain writer and self-professed celebrity of middling repute, a former writer of fiction. “What’re you working on these days?” he asked. I told him I was working on a new novel. “It’s all about nonfiction now, son,” he said, and then he rambled on and on about [...]

Ever since I read Umberto Eco’s propulsive doorstopper, Foucault’s Pendulum, I’ve been mildly obsessed with secret–well, secret anything: societies, conspiracies, books. When it comes to the latter, there’s really no other book quite as secretive as the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich is a handwritten book thought to be written in the early 15th century–in top-secret code. [...]

 
You’re trussed up like a turkey in a pan with just your head sticking out a dead donkey’s ass; and then the maggots eating away at you until you see the glory.
Donald Ray Pollock