Writer, singer, composer and poet Rick Moody first gained widespread acclaim with his 1994 novel, The Ice Storm, a portrait of dysfunctional suburban life that plays out over the course of a long Thanksgiving weekend. In 1999, The New Yorker named Moody one of America’s most talented new writers, with a voice that constantly pushes the stylistic boundaries of modern literature. He has published five novels, three collections of short fiction and two nonfiction works. He also performs with the Wingdale Community Singers, an acoustic band that blends the sounds of old-time folk, gospel and bluegrass, with hints of rock and baroque chamber music to augment their arch, literary lyrics. Their most recent album is Night, Sleep, Death, released only on LP by Drag City. Moody will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Moody: Tim Davis happens to be one of the lyricists for a band I like a lot, Cuddle Magic, but he is better known as a photographer, a sort of magician of photo-transformations, and lately video transformations, in which seemingly inert cultural material is suddenly rendered strange, new, and in many cases deeply hilarious. Check his “Upstate New York Olympics” series, for example. Davis finds paradoxes and ironies everywhere around him, but he’s also alert to deep melancholy right next door over to the hilarity, and, as such, he seems unusually astute and complex to me. Also his photographs and videos grow on you, the way a good song is often better the more often you hear it. This is true of Cuddle Magic, too, the band he writers for, but for today I want to celebrate his visual, which is lucid, beautiful and odd, and well worth searching out.
Video after the jump.
