Tuesday, Janurary 26th, 2010

Desde Antique Children estamos encantados en publicar dos cuentos ‘La Mejor Atracción’ y ‘Los Focos’ por el autor prestigioso mexicano, Guillermo Samperio. Samperio ha escrito más de veinticinco libros de cuento, novela, poesía y ensayo. Ha publicado en diversas revistas de México y el extranjero y ha sido traducido en múltiples idiomas. Samperio ha aparecido en antologías a lado de Asturias, Benedetti, Bioy Casares, Borges, Cabrera Infante, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce y Nabokov, entre otros. Sus más recientes libros son Cuentos reunidos, Alfaguara, México, 2007; La Guerra oculta, cuentos, Lectorum, México, 2008. Samperio acaba de publicar su libro de cuentos La Gioconda in bicicletta que será presentado en la embajada de México en Italia.

[translation]

Antique Children is delighted to publish two short stories ‘La mejor atracción’, and ‘Los Focos’ - by the highly acclaimed Mexican author, Guillermo Samperio. Samperio has written more than twenty five books that include novels, short stories, poetry and essays. He has been published in various magazines both in Mexico and abroad and has been translated into many languages. Samperio has appeared in a number of anthologies alongside Asturias, Benedetti, Bioy Casares, Borges, Cabrera Infante, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce and Nabokov, amongst others. His most recent books, Cuentos reunidos and La Guerra oculta, were published in Mexico in 2007 and 2008 consecutively. Samperio has just published his book of short stories, La Gioconda in bicicletta which will be launched in the Mexican Embassy in Italy this year.

~Hero Mackenzie

Tuesday, Janurary 19th, 2010

Many of us carry a fascination for those things which slitter shadows and poke us awake on our more fitful nights.  Inzekkt’s work taps into this mental territory without leveraging the grotesque or hyper violence so popular today.  His method is more subtle, delving instead into an otherworldly, fairytale place filled with insect-like creatures of his own creation. 

Click Here to view Inzekkt’s gallery.

~Ty Gorton

Tuesday, Janurary 12th, 2010

Las voces polimorfas de la literatura hispánica; un juego de narrativas, una circulación de identidades, una mezcla deslumbrante de mitos y fragmentos montados y transportados, de España a Sudamérica, del individuo rebelde a la muchedumbre transformó, del niño Travieso al adulto alegre y del pasado colonial al presente democrático...En reconocimiento y la celebración de la riqueza y la diversidad de la literatura hispánica, Antique Children está abierta a estas nuevas voces! Estamos encantados de publicar un cuento del escritor premiado de Argentina, Asher Benatar y el arte del aclamado Horacio Bustos. Sus obras serán las primeras de muchos escritores y artistas, nuevos y establecidos, que aparecerán aquí. Con el espíritu de la comunicación, circulación, y liberación imaginativa panamericana y transatlántica, estamos buscando a más contribuidores del mundo de habla hispana. Artistas! Por favor envíennos sus cuentos y poemas, sus fotografías y sus películas, sus pensamientos, sus sueños, su imaginación Traviesa porque debemos liberarnos de las restricciones de la vida cotidiana.

Como Bolaño dijo:

“La verdadera imaginación es aquella que dinamita, elucida, inyecta microbios esmeraldas
en otras imaginaciones. En poesía y en lo que sea, la entrada en material tiene que ser ya
la entrada en aventura. Crear herramientas para la subversión cotidiana.”
Roberto Bolaño

[translation]

The polymorphous voices of Hispanic literature; a play of narratives, a circulation of selves, a glittering assemblage of myths and fragments reassembled and transported, from Spain to South America, from the defiant individual to the crowd transformed, from the mischievous the child to the adult delighted and from the colonial past to the democratic present... in recognition and celebration of the richness and diversity of Hispanic literature, antique children is open to these new voices. We are delighted to have published a story by the prize winning Argentine novelist, playwright and artist, Asher Benatar and the highly acclaimed Argentine art of Horacio Bustos. Their works will be the first of many writers and artists, both new and established, set to appear here. In the spirit of Pan-American and trans-Atlantic communication, circulation and imaginative liberation, we are looking for more contributors from the Spanish speaking world. Please send us your stories and poems, photographs and films, your thoughts, your dreams, your wicked imagination because we must liberate ourselves from the constraints of the quotidian...  

~Hero Mackenzie

*****

Tuesday, December 15 , 2009

Human beings have an uncanny ability to assume their version of reality is fairly similar to each individual they come across.  Despite a constant stream of evidence that suggests our own perception--whether of events past, the current moment, or the possible future—can and does vary greatly from those around us, most of us manage to move through days as though the people we interact with are perceiving things in much the same way we are.  Our subconscious instantly layers our own awareness over the lives of others, even when we know little to nothing about them.  In this way, each of us are able to feel we have a relatively firm grip on “reality”.  In William Bradley’s essay, ‘What The Survey Doesn’t Say’, this little Jedi mind trick of perception is displayed powerfully.

“I thought it was just the booze making me maudlin that night, but it apparently wasn’t, as I find myself thinking of that old woman from time to time even now. She’s gone and lost forever, I assume, yet she’s still there, on the screen, laughing at Richard Dawson’s smarmy attempts at humor, gazing at that ridiculously-large bow tie that must have been fashionable then. And it seems kind of sad to me to think that this woman’s immortality depends upon a cynical generation’s desire for retro-kitsch.”  -William Bradley

~Ty Gorton

Monday, December 7, 2009

In a world such as this, it becomes an easy thing to desire absolute definitions for the causation of hardships facing much of the seven billion people inhabiting Earth.  It is, however, the direct result of absolutism that has delivered us here, into a place of empty judgments, floating amidst a sea of art spun from the infantile idea of good vs. evil, black vs. white, etc.  In his essay, ‘The Consequence of Habit’, David Chaim Smith explores the diversity of Eden’s serpent, not as the religious symbol of humankind’s evil, but as the possibility for intuitive morality not interested in control but true behavioral enlightenment.

“The Gnostic understanding of the serpent is a direct challenge to the insanity of moral absolutism. Religious law posits that right and wrong are a closed book. There is no creative choice when morality is frozen solid. It is up to human beings to assert that morality does not need any set form other than kindness and awareness. It can be based on fluid adaptation to every unique circumstance, each in it’s particularities.” – David Chaim Smith

As artists, it is our charge to break down the barriers of absolutism and let the light of creative possibility fall freely across our darkest corners, especially in regards to morality. Read the entire essay along with meticulously beautiful companion artwork (also by David Chaim Smith).

~Ty Gorton

~Jim Lopez

Monday, November 30, 2009

Today’s robber barons have trained us well in the art of insipid grandeur.  We are hoop trained to believe that waking up feels like an obstacle, walking a maneuver, breathing an utter mystery.  Few are the actions we can take that don’t feel rehearsed, another form being filled out for stamp’s approval or decline.  As we stretch and pull the corners of our paychecks to house our funneled whimsy, the grass grows long and rich beyond the life trounced footprints of economic gain.  And what of all this unkempt grass, waist high stuff that glides beneath overturned palms like the hem of possibility?  What of it?  Amidst a thousand yards of open field they have us marching single file along a lukewarm center.  An endless row of fake penguins mistaking an idea as instinct, a theology as the only means of survival.

What are we then?  Elephants on one leg, monkey pirouettes, tigers clawing vapor, a circus act tricked into fearing the air outside the striped dome.  But there is air out here, air for the taking, whole columns of it stacked to sky and multiplying.  If our lungs can work, then so might limbs, fingers, minds, our infant intellects…so might the whole damn mess of human possibility.

Exiting the dome is Antique Children’s trip.  We long to pull back those heavy canvas edges and reveal the next fascination, the first glimpse of a tree beyond the veil, a decision seen without the distortion of mesh breaking it into distractions.  The circus mapped us for a time, charming at first, exhilarating perhaps, until the safety net stopped catching dreamers, until performances revealed their torture induced mechanisms.

Our feet are ready for thicker growth.  Our tongues want to speak with different words, or, if the same words, at least filtered through the kaleidoscope of a new idea.  We have bodies made for pushing through brush into raw discovery, like land starved sailors dipping down into a valley that doesn’t know their kind.  It is our nature to become complacent with the known and use it’s rougher edges to pry open the next mystery.

Let us fringe freaks abandon the ringmaster’s dome once and for all and pitch roofless tents on different soil.

~Ty Gorton

© Stephan Maich

~Jim Lopez

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The lines and cracks in the palm of one hand often recounts an argued past, recognizes an often misunderstood, anamorphically perceived present, and divines a, more-often-than-not, misinterpreted future, lacking awe.  It is fair enough that these disgruntled aspects, weighted in the palm of time-and-memory, are necessary for grounding the location of our ossuaries and strengthening the elasticity of our skin. 

In the other hand of observation, what is recounted in the past is often placidly sublime, what is recognized in the present is often beautiful, and what is divined for the future is marveled in wonder. 

The individual primordial memory, the first essence of one’s thought--whether terrifying or gifted with grace--is the beginning of one’s unraveling to self, where memories of the past and plans for the future merge their polarity into the present center.  It is in this merging of the circular cross-roads of time-and-memory that the Antique Child finds his or her self, with eyes turned inside out, embracing the ever wandering “I”, which seeks to allude itself in the further widening of the past and the future. 

The Antique Child is not greatly offended by vice nor by propriety, but finds the human in both, while mischievously adorning his or her child in the noble constitution of a benevolent mind, playing hopscotch in the squares of stasis and anti-stasis, while resisting the indifferent sophistication passed off as cultured maturity.

~Jim Lopez

Amidst this tumble of words and art, over time, an answer may present itself not unlike a stone washed up to shore, pleasing and smooth for the finder’s palm. Not that we intend on posing a question; the only answers worth discovering are those we aren’t looking for, the kind of answers that peer around corners we are hesitant to approach. Fiction, philosophy, illustration, photography, poetry, etc.…those ancient youths among us will weave a tapestry whose pattern will not soon present itself. For a time, a certain chaos will boil here in our famished cauldron, where bits and pieces will roll against each other until finally a flavor emerges, an aroma not recognized but namable. I am here only to stir occasionally, to ensure the quality of ingredients, but never to guide the concoction toward a desired end. It is the flow of nutrients along riverbeds of awareness that commands my attention, an awareness that widening the banks is no longer useful, only a deepening of currents. Content for content’s sake cannot achieve this, which is where you come in. Let us dig deeper, not wider, canals for contemplation’s journey toward a wanting ocean. Let us dig and loose antique soil known of yet forgotten so it might mix with our lesser notions and rage.

~Ty Gorton