Euphonia1 is a newsletter concerning experimental film, cinematic esoterica, contemporary art, horror and science fiction, and the 20th-century avant-garde. These dispatches will be at least bimonthly (twice a month), maybe weekly, but not daily. They will be looser in style than my usual published work. There will be typos, a lot of typos. As notionally conceived, these dispatches will include, in no particular order:
new texts by me, published elsewhere or exclusively here;
recent research related to artwork in progress;
photos, short videos, and visual art by me, sometimes by other people;
interviews with peers, idols, oddballs;
monthly highlights of some of the embarrassing quantities of film and art I imbibe every month;
and, yes, the occasional promotion of an exhibition or screening or Sasquatch-rare public manifestation.
I should mention that these dispatches will be free for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for reading.
John Menick
Euphonia was a 19th-century speaking machine created by the German astronomer and high-functioning hypochondriac, Joseph Faber. Faber worked for decades on the device, which was made up of a keyboard and organ attached to an artificial mouth, larynx, and throat. Euphonia could speak three languages (two more than me) and, in 1846, it performed at P.T. Barnum’s Egyptian Hall. Euphonia means “good sounding,“ though, by most earwitness accounts, it was a cursed and frightening device. You can read more about speaking machines in an essay I wrote for the Guggenheim Bilbao exhibition, Architecture Effects.
