The Inside Reader: Aaron Krach
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir MitchellAaron was another of my first time... now don't get me wrong, I was just starting this LiveJournal, posting reviews (more ramblings than reviews) and I compiled my then Top 50 Gay Novels list (it soon became 100 since there were too many good books out there). Half-life was in the Top 50, I don't remember exactly how I found it, probably in one of my browsing session on the net. Aaron wrote to me to say thank you for including the book and then he offered to send me a print copy. Wow, until then authors had always sent me ebooks, a real print book, signed... that was love at first sight and you will never forget your first time. So I'm more than happy to have Aaron as a guest today. More since we share a lot of "love": for Venice, for art, for photography (well he is an artist, I'm only a tourist).
Seven Perfect Books by Aaron Krach
Books change my life in small and large ways, almost every day. So I find myself wanting to share such transformative experiences with my friends. So I try and buy books as gifts. Except I am the guy who freezes in a store filled with thousands of options.
I need a list of perfect books. This is that list.
I carry around inside my head. Need a gift? Buy any one (or all) of the titles below. They’re each amazing and foolproof, new “classics” that everyone will learn from and love. They’re good enough to change a life.
(in alphabetical order)
1) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency By Nan Goldin. Yes, it’s a photography book. But you can get a handy paperback version that reads like the best fiction. I always liked Nan Goldin’s photographs, saturated color images of her friend and lovers and boyfriends and gay friends. Maybe I wanted to be her or at least be around her friends who seemed to smoke and drink and have sex all the time. This book strings them together in remarkable fashion, each leads into the next and tells a story of love and desire, heartbreak and death, only to start all over again with sex and creation. I remember exactly where I was when I found this book. Spain, 1994. Inside the library of the Reina Sofia, 19 years old, traveling alone. I found the book and began reading the introduction. When I finished a few pages later I was crying. Goldin writes about her sister’s suicide and explains the role such an event played in her becoming an artist. She didn’t want to lose (or forget) anything she loved ever again. Then the pictures unfold, full-bleed and gorgeous. Goldin has captured couples of every age loving. Sometimes painfully. Other times ecstatically. The result is a thin slice of life. It hurts. It feels amazing. And it’s only a book. Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Aperture (June 15, 2005)
Publisher Link: http://www.aperture.org/the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-paperback.html
ISBN-10: 0893813397
ISBN-13: 978-0893813390
Amazon: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Nan Goldin as her "tribe." Her work describes a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: "Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life."
2) Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. By page two, it was over. I fell in love and couldn’t stop. And I dare any reader not to fall in love with David Levithan’s novel. It’s an adorable, charming, heartwarming work of staggering genius. The writing is rhythmic and pop and Pop, like a perfectly crafted pop song. It’s a fantasy about growing up gay, a naturalistic book about being a teenager. He’s filled the story with Christians and drag queens and jealous lovers-to-be. Romance and adventure and… I’m not afraid to give this book as a gift to anyone. In fact it’s my go-to gift. I know it’s that good and impossible not to love. Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (May 10, 2005)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375832994
ISBN-10: 0375832998
ISBN-13: 978-0375832994
Amazon: Boy Meets Boy
This is the story of Paul, a sophomore at a high school like no other: The cheerleaders ride Harleys, the homecoming queen used to be a guy named Daryl (she now prefers Infinite Darlene and is also the star quarterback), and the gay-straight alliance was formed to help the straight kids learn how to dance. When Paul meets Noah, he thinks he’s found the one his heart is made for. Until he blows it. The school bookie says the odds are 12-to-1 against him getting Noah back, but Paul’s not giving up without playing his love really loud. His best friend Joni might be drifting away, his other best friend Tony might be dealing with ultra-religious parents, and his ex-boyfriend Kyle might not be going away anytime soon, but sometimes everything needs to fall apart before it can really fit together right. This is a happy-meaningful romantic comedy about finding love, losing love, and doing what it takes to get love back in a crazy-wonderful world.
( books from 3 to 7 )
About Aaron Krach: Aaron Krach is an American film critic, journalist, writer and artist currently living in New York City.
He was born in Ionia, Michigan on February 15, 1972. He grew up in Alhambra, California, and graduated from Alhambra High School. He attended the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, CA, graduating with a B.A. in Visual Arts in 1994. Aaron Krach moved to New York City in 1995. He now lives on Manhattan's lower east side.
Krach has written for Time Out New York, Out magazine, InStyle, , Oui, The independent film & video monthly, Indie Wire, HX, The Villager, a former editor of Empire Magazine, arts editor of Gay City News, and was a former editor of Empire in New York City, and was a senior editor at Cargo, which work was lengthily quoted in San Diego Union Tribune. He was an editor at BravoTV.com, and affiliated sites OUTzoneTV.com and BrilliantButCancelled.com. He is currently a features editor at House Beautiful, a Hearst publication.
Krach's debut novel Half-Life was published to critical acclaim by Alyson Books in 2004. The novel was nominated for a Violet Quill Award and was among the 2004 Lambda Literary Award finalists. Of Half-Life, Reed Business Information wrote "Gay readers will relish the attention lavished on love's growing pains and the smart dialogue between Adam and his high school buddy". His second book, 100 New York Mysteries, was published in 2006.
His work has been exhibited in Olympia, Washington, New York City, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2006, his solo exhibition titled "100 New York Mysteries" was presented at DCKT Contemporary in Chelsea, New York. In 2007, new photographs and sculpture have been exhibited at 3rd Ward in Greenpoint, Jack The Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, Gallery 312 Online in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Massachusetts's College of Liberal Arts. In 2009, "Longer Periods of Happiness," appeared at DCKT in Manhattan.
In October, 2009, he curated the exhibition, "Artists Who Use Text To Say Nice Things". Artists featured include: Alex Da Corte, Carl Ferrero, Dana Frankfort, Incidental, Chris Johanson, Cary Leibowitz, Gillian MacLeod, Mark Mahosky, Heath Nash, Kate O'Connor, Jack Pierson, Megan Plunkett, Franklin Preston, Trevor Reese, Alyce Santoro, Sighn, Mickey Smith, Charlie Welch, and Shawn Wolfe.
Of Krach's work in an art show in January 2009, Christopher Muther of Boston Globe wrote "Balancing the seriousness of Burtonwood and Holmes's political tees is the work of New York artist Aaron Krach, whose art plays with the familiar." (From Wikipedia)
Half-life by Aaron Krach Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Alyson Books (May 1, 2004)
Publisher Link: http://www.alyson.com/9781555838546.html
ISBN-10: 1555838545
ISBN-13: 978-1555838546
Amazon: Half-Life
During the last year of the 20th century, 18-year-old Adam Westman finds himself “on the verge of manhood,” as his best friend Dart likes to say. He lives in the exact center of center-less Los Angeles with his depressed father, Greg, and imaginative younger sister, Sandra. When Greg suddenly dies, more than everything changes and the relatively smooth orbits of family and friends are altered when Adam needs them most. In the middle of the drama, a man in uniform appears—and he is more than interested in Adam. This man, a policeman, is warm, witty and wise. He is 6 foot-something, dirty blond, and . . . well, he’s a California Boy trapped inside the body of a 38 year-old man. But how can Adam consider the possibility of a relationship when he is dealing with his father’s death, his friends’ (and his own) pre-pre-pre mid-life crises, his mother’s ambivalence, and his little sister’s need for him? Then again, how can he not?
Half-Life is about being—or at least feeling—young and old at the same time. About loving, or wanting to love, but knowing that life and love are both as exuberant and seductive yet two-dimensional and illusory as a billboard along any of Los Angeles’s endless freeways.
that, if you don't know latin, means: "Nobody is a prophet in [their] homeland". Or at least it's true if you don't have a friend like Ryan Field (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
that, if you don't know latin, means: "Nobody is a prophet in [their] homeland". Or at least it's true if you don't have a friend like Ryan Field (