The aspiring artist seeking an inspiring avatar in the corpus of Terry Zwigoff has set themselves up, to put it mildly, for a fair bit of consternation. It’s not that, to invoke his Daniel Clowes adaptation Art School Confidential (2006), the “narcotic moment of creative bliss” is totally impossible—Crumb (1994), his documentary about the eponymous underground cartoonist, is littered with such moments rendered with the commonplace flick of a pen, even if bliss is comparatively rare—only Zwigoff’s cadre of enfants terribles, male pathetics, and fringe art-makers wryly observe how a collapsing capitalism and an ever-accelerating corporatism have come to define […]
by Frank Falisi on Apr 17, 2026
McKenzie Wark is out in Brooklyn, New York. We’re speaking via video chat in the days leading up to the FIDMarseille premiere of Life Story, her new collaboration with Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. Between questions, and while we wait for Jessica to join us, McKenzie moves around the world just out of frame. She speaks to her daughter, walks into and out of L-Train Vintage, crosses streets, occasionally exchanging greetings with passersby. It is a joy to edit the transcript of this interview later on—sentences are punctuated with “oh hi!”s, “how’ve you been?”s, little subtexts of intimacy smuggled into thoughts about […]
by Frank Falisi on Jul 8, 2024