The Avant Guards 6

Reeling from a crushing defeat at the hands of the Selfies, the Avant-Guards must rediscover their team spirit and remember what makes them love the game. It doesn’t help that a member of their team is horribly smitten with a Selfie player.

As a transfer student to the Georgia O’Keeffe College for Arts and Subtle Dramatics, former sports star Charlie is struggling to find her classes, her dorm, and her place amongst a student body full of artists who seem to know exactly where they’re going. When the school’s barely-a-basketball-team unexpectedly attempts to recruit her, Charlie’s adamant that she’s left that life behind...until she’s won over by the charming team captain, Liv, and the ragtag crew she’s managed to assemble. And while Charlie may have left the cut-throat world of competitive basketball in the dust, sinking these hoops may be exactly what she needs to find the person she truly wants to be. From Carly Usdin, the writer behind the hit series Heavy Vinyl, and artist Noah Hayes (Wet Hot American Summer) comes an ensemble comedy series that understands that it’s the person you are off the court that matters most. Collects The Avant-Guards issues #1-4.

The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

The convergence of rock music, counterculture politics and avant-garde aesthetics in the late 1960s underscored the careers of the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground. This book examines these artists’ relationships to the historical avant-garde (Artaud, Brecht, Dada) and neo–avant-garde (Warhol, Pop Art, minimalism), considering their work in light of debates about modernism versus postmodernism. The author analyzes the performers’ use of dissonance and noise within popular music, the role of social commentary and controversial topics in songs, and the experiments with concert and studio performance. Albums discussed include Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Freak Out!, We’re Only in It for the Money, The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light/White Heat, as well as John Lennon’s collaborations with Yoko Ono, the Zappa-produced Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, and Nico’s The Marble Index.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

The Avant-Guards have been on a roll, but when they hit the end of their winning-streak, will these new friendships survive? As The Avant-Guards struggle to move forward, they’ll soon learn just what it means to truly be a team - on the court and, most importantly, off the court. The critically-acclaimed team of writer Carly Usdin (Heavy Vinyl) and artist Noah Hayes (Wet Hot American Summer) deliver the next chapter of the series where every shot counts when you take them with your friends. Collects issues #5-8.

This collection brings together a selection of original, research-led essays on more than a dozen avant-garde British writers of the 1960s, revealing this to be a crucial - and crucially overlooked - period of British literary history.

The author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.