Category: Magazines

Robert Pollard
EAT II
2005, Rockathon Records

In 2023, anytime someone tells me that Artificial Intelligence will take over the arts and replace human creations with digital patchworks, I stop listening to that person.

There are a few drops of truth in it, probably. I’ll give them that.

A popular song birthed entirely from an algorithm isn’t far-fetched these days. The awkward clickbait articles that I get suckered into reading online never seem to come from human beings. Life is in a weird place now, for sure. This is not the same world that my Generation X ass grew up in.

But if someone sincerely believes that HAL 9000 will be the new Mozart, I think that they just hate people. That’s the only explanation I have for why it makes sense to anyone that human connections through music and writing will simply fade from fashion. We will no longer care about what others are feeling, thinking, and seeing. We won’t be hooked when someone who shares our experiences makes something great out of it.

Instead we’ll be satisfied with artistic blow-up dolls.

I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at least for oddballs like you and me. Us deep-diggers. Us crazies who get into EAT.

That’s what I think about in 2023 as I go over this second issue of Robert Pollard’s long-running art magazine. Its X-Acto knife cuts and its occasional visible Scotch tape, and even its poems, have human fingerprints all over them. Today, it feels like a resistance outpost against the cyber-dystopia.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #96: EAT II”

Robert Pollard
Eat
2003, Rockathon Records

I’m curious to know when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist. If you’ve looked at nearly any record he’s ever put out, you’ve seen his work (the TVT albums are among the few exceptions) and you’ve seen it evolve.

The earliest Guided by Voices LPs have collage elements. Found clippings are a part of albums such as Devil Between My Toes and Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, but the compositions are primitive and the images tend to come off as truly random. They look like old punk rock show flyers. That’s a part of their charm, but as GBV got more famous, Pollard stepped up his art game.

By Bee Thousand he was playing with empty space, ultra-bright colors, and asymmetry. Throw in the lyric sheet on which each song is attached to a simple and memorable piece of imagery and the result is iconic and it doesn’t age almost thirty years later. If the rough, lo-fi music bothers someone, the artwork alone might persuade them to give it another chance. It both offsets and deepens the mystery.

Nine years later in 2003, Pollard launched an art magazine dedicated solely to his own work. He called it Eat and, as of this writing, there are seventeen issues of it, with more to come.

Collage art dominates most of them. Lots of poetry shows up in the early volumes. The presentation would get fancier over time (the latest issues of Eat are basically softcover books; they’re heavy with a thick spine). A few later installments come packaged with a 7″ record. Then there’s the oddball issue that’s all short, wry prose pieces by Pollard, telling stories from his past.

Eat is a full-color, psychedelic happening. It’s a place for the REAL deep-diggers. And it starts here.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #87: EAT”