A Rondel for HiLo Heroes (2015)
By:
January 2, 2016
As HiLobrow embarks on its 8th year of publishing, here’s the 7th annual “Rondel for HiLo Heroes” (ABAB/CDDC/EFFEF), which celebrates 13 of the high-, low-, and nobrow icons about whom HILOBROW’s contributors wrote during the preceding year.
B
erenice Abbott saw the beauty of the urban quotidian;
E
rnst Haeckel‘s zoologica prefigured psychedelic comics;
H
elena Blavatsky rescued Koot Hoomi from oblivion;
E
llen Swallow Richards radicalized Home Economics.
R
obert Anton Wilson defied ideology with mindfucks and gassing;
M
oebius tangled us in an infinite loop of his imagination;
E
dward Bellamy wrote a socialist sci-fi provocation;
N
ella Larsen fictionalized — and practiced — passing.
A
nita Loos made gold-digging sound OK;
U
b Iwerks made an art form out of balderdash;
T
etsumi Kudo sculpted free-floating eyeballs and feet of ash;
I
an Curtis eschewed conventional emotional display;
Carmen Mondragón was erased from Art History’s memory cache.
We published 110+ HiLo Hero items this year! HiLobrow thanks Mark Kingwell, Jacob Mikanowski, Barbara Bogaev, Suzanne Fischer, Erik Davis, Anthony Miller, Brian Berger, Devin McKinney, Lynn Peril, Joe Alterio, Gary Panter, Devin again, and William Nericcio — who (respectively) wrote the thirteen HiLo Hero items to which the rondel links. We’re grateful to everyone else who wrote HiLo Hero items in 2015, too: Tor Aarestad, Josh Glenn, Tom Nealon, Franklin Bruno, Rob Wringham, Jerrold Freitag, Adam McGovern, Tucker Cummings, Mike Fleisch, Marilyn Snell, Karinne Keithley Syers, and Amanda French.
NB: This will be our final Rondel. Why? Because — after over 1,400 installments, since 2009 — this winter we’re wrapping up HILO HEROES series. We’re extremely grateful to the series’ many contributors!