Using the View-Master as her medium, Portland-based artist Vladimir weaves intriguing “28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches.” She crafts each scene using teeny toys, objects, and random paraphernalia.  When set to music and narration, a Vladmaster performance has more potential for magic than any movie theater. Instead of staring at a screen, audience members click through the story as one, each using their very own View-Master.

Vladimir is not currently touring, but you can experience the whimsy at home. Visit her website for information on how to buy reels of her Franz Kafka parables and other thoughtful tales.

(Thanks, NUVO.) 

Source: Vladmaster.

Images courtesy of  Vladimir .

Right now I’m killing the third person. With this very blog post, I am contributing to the sneaky, first-person narrative trend that currently runs our written world (and by reading this, so are you). According to Nathaniel G. Moore in Broken Pencil, we’ve all been too busy talking about ourselves to notice the third person slipping beneath the pages of time.

Moore investigates the opinions of several literary aces and provides a multi-faceted look at why we're  so obsessed with “I” these days. Here are a few of their thoughts:

Writers don’t seem to want the excess baggage of a big, baggy, third person story or novel. The standard compulsions of the third person author seem outdated, less cheeky and immediate, than the prattle of a typical first person present narrator. —Spencer Gordon

Lately I have been seduced by the first-person siren song, because for some reason this point of view lets me write meaner people, which is exciting since I usually go for characters on the nicer end of the spectrum. —Jessica Westhead

When people write about what they know, they install themselves in the story with devastating first person results. It comes down to laziness. Pure and utter laziness. —Gradey Alexander

Source: Broken Pencil 

Image by My Buffo, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Black people in the United States are in dire need of a more versatile narrative, Charles Johnson argues in the American Scholar. “No matter which angle we use to view black people in America today, we find them to be a complex and multifaceted people who defy easy categorization. We challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails… to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity,” he writes.

In challenging the 21^st-century usefulness of a “narrative of pervasive victimization,” Johnson calls for “new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present.”

Perhaps Johnson should pick up a copy of Shawn Taylor’s new book Big Black Penis: Misadventures in Race and Masculinity. The provocatively titled book seems to have been born from the very same vein of frustration, of a need to break through and tell new (or rarely told) stories. Rachel Swan describes the book’s genesis in the East Bay Express:

[Taylor] was mad. Mad at wiggas; mad at BET and MTV; mad that he grew up in poverty; mad at his father for disappearing; mad at the proliferation of "the N-word" and terms like “bling-bling”—especially when they gained currency in suburban communities; mad at CNN's Black in America (which, he said, imposed a kind of false unifying narrative that was supposed to stand in for the African-American experience); mad at movies like The Best Man (which, he said, made it seem as though adultery had to be the main theme in all black relationships); mad that men "can't just hug, we have to pound the shit out of each other's backs. . . . Pretty soon, Big Black Penis was more than just a provocative title; it was a move to bring authenticity into the discourse around black male sexuality.

There are over two million men and women trapped within the booming U.S. prison system, and their personal stories rarely make front-page news. To bring prisoners’ lives to the free world, the Texas Observer has published two long narratives from prisoners in the Texas prison system. The biweekly magazine introduces the essays, cautioning “under the circumstances, we can’t vouch for the purity, veracity, or motivation of their voices. But we do believe there is value in letting different voices to be heard.”

Andrew Papke is serving two back-to-back twenty year sentences for killing a young couple while driving drunk. “Death by lethal injection is but a circle come full,” he writes. “Lady Justice is not blind. She has 20/20 vision. Her actions shriek, ‘How you live is how you die,’ assuring us that all ends are born of their means.”

Papke reminds us how shakily thin the line is between being a prisoner and a free person. “There is only a small degree of separation between any of us,” he writes. He asks readers to imagine making the small decisions that would land us in death row:

These seemingly insignificant decisions, the small mistakes that compromise us, can veer out of control quicker than we can react. Suddenly we are blindsided by something happening, and though before we would have said, “Oh, I could never end up like that,” it doesn’t turn out that way. Once the hooks are set in our souls, things we could never have imagined doing can explode into acts that require a price to be paid.

Sid Hawk Byrd kidnapped, robbed, and sexually assaulted a woman in 1980—and then was placed in segregation eight years ago after an escape attempt. He writes about the banality of life and the struggle to stay sane living in a cell so small he can take only three steps from one end to the other. He has no television, no recreation, no release at all. He has few joys, one of them being the prison’s population of feral cats.

I have raised a kitten named Sox for two years. He lives in my cell, but comes and goes as well. They have made me put him out, but he comes back. He is potty-trained. He thinks he is human, I believe, and he is a smart cat. But he lives in a cruel world where danger, even for cats, is real. A guard not long ago stomped on and killed a friendly cat named Limo. He was a tiger-striped, gray-and-white fellow that loved to play and would jump up into any prisoner’s cell if the tray flap was open. He was too trusting, and this guard kicked him to death. 

—Brendan Mackie