Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Science of Things Familiar

The Science of Things Familiar

Damm, Johnny
Desilva-Johnson, Lynne
Desilva-Johnson, Lynne

Paperback

General ArtGeneral Graphic NovelsGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $34.00

ISBN10: 1946031038
ISBN13: 9781946031037
Publisher: Operating System
Published: Feb 14 2017
Pages: 210
Weight: 1.09
Height: 0.57 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English

Johnny Damm's Science of Things Familiar diagrams the ways we move toward and away from one another, exploring relationship through the failures and disjuncts that reveal it. In annotated illustrations taken out of their original context, in comics stripped of their narrative content, and in cinematic essays whose parts are sutured where they've been spliced, these pieces take apart the familiar to see what makes it tick. Troubling our assumptions about the workings of nonfiction, they reveal themselves as highly constructed, interweaving the personal and historical just as the book's rat-a-tat refrain rings out both drumbeat and gunfire. If we catch ourselves dancing, we've missed the point. Witty and serious, critical and compassionate, Damm invents a new visual poetics in which what we see and hear do not sync up. This is his way of waking us up with a BLAM! and WHOOSH! to the history of appropriation and conquest underlying America's popular forms. Nothing here is familiar, even as we recognize parts of the whole. - Amaranth BorsukJohnny Damm's 'Science of Things Familiar' mashes up Classics Illustrated, vintage diagrams, and film director bios to create an unlikely fusion that is a oblique yet often poignant autobiography as well as an essay on the way that we transform culture as much as it transforms us.- Matt Madden, author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style'Science of Things Familiar' captures freeze-frames from the history of comic books, crime films, and blues music, all from the middle of the darkest century. Johnny Damm accents the pulpish poetics in both the visual poetry and the phonic milieu, experienced by the masses in each cheap genre made on the fly for everyone. -Christian BökHerman Melville performing jumping jacks. An experimental Brazilian filmmaker making British propaganda films. A legendary delta bluesman who prefers to play the pop hits of the day. In Science of Things Familiar, Johnny Damm sifts through cultural detritus to disturb the sleeping past.In an uncategorizable mix of image and text, Science of Things Familiar scavenges from 50's pulp comics, 19th century scientific diagrams, film noir shooting scripts, and more. Damm introduces the reader to an American landscape of bastard blendings, where the familiar swiftly gives way to the uncanny.

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