dolls
SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH
art, music, politics, humor, lit, opinion, David Amram, Andrea Bauer, James Beckman, Mark Staff Brandl, Kim Christoff, Marilyn Cvitanic, Richard Dobson, Joel Dorn, John Haber, Paul K, Wesley Kimler, John Kruth, Jim Lasko, Norbert Marszalek, Simone Muench, Ray Pride, Rick Rizzo, David Roth, The Shark, Ursula Sokolowska, Nicholas Tremulis, Lynne Warren, Todd V. Wolfson
« February 2006 | | April 2006 »
March 31, 2006
TONIGHT at Metro in Chicago: The Return of Robert Pollard
This Friday, March 31 at Metro in Chicago:
ROBERT POLLARD
w/ THE HIGH STRUNG
Tickets: $19, 18 & over
Doors: 8pm / Show: 9pm
For those concerned with the health and relevancy of rock music over the last two decades, one of the guiding voices has been the great Rob Pollard with the various incarnations of his fine band Guided By Voices....
One of if not the favorite late night lair of The Shark's happen to be the balcony at Chicago's great rock club Metro. In all the time I have spent there listening to many bands none has approached nor equaled the high performance art meshed with four track garage rock ambience that was Guided By Voices. Make no mistake about it, Rob Pollard is the shit: completely brilliant, funny, complicated and fearless in his utterly compelling trajectory towards drunken debauchery and heathen like celebratory performance. He may very well be the finest frontman in rock music today. He is certainly the most intelligently prolific.
In recent times any number of rock stars have considered themselves poets, churning out reams of beautifully bound yet completely awful prose best forgotten -that is, if one found oneself unfortunate enough to have unwittingly stumbled upon this particular genre -but not so with Pollard, a lyricist of Dylanesque proportions and ambition -who's poetry.....lets just say he does not embarrass himself. Mr. Pollard is The Sharks kind of soldier; a terrific, apex artist in the midst of creating a large body of fine, uncompromisingly honest work of the highest level of conception and execution within the confines and perimeters of his metier.
The standard hipster take on Guided By Voices is that they were great early on -Vampire On Titus, Bee Thousand -and that the loss of Tobin Sprout dramatically altered the band. None of this is true: Guided By Voices was Pollard's band, reaching their peak in the later half of the last decade with a string of brilliant recordings beginning with Isolation Drills, continuing with purposeful meandering through Universal Cycles and Truths, Earthquake Glue, finally culminating in their last moment of recorded greatness with Half Smiles of the Decomposed.
I remember standing in Metro's balcony three years ago witnessing the performance of a band that would blow away The Who (Keith Moon notwithstanding), Robert Pollard staggering across the stage half in the bag -the rhythm guitarist Nate Farley polishing off a quart of Jack Daniels and finally at the concerts end being lead of the floor by security after heading off stage to pick a fight with an offending fan -all of which would be rendered moot if it had not been accompanied by one of the greatest rock shows any of us present that evening had ever been fortunate enough to see.......the shark having to go back to Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore West in 1969 to draw an adequate comparison. They were just that good. Unleashing anthem after anthem the crowd less audience than collaborator, becoming an equal part of the ensuing fray. It, was a happening.
Joe Shanahan gave the Chicago rock world a Christmas present a year and some months ago by bring to Metro for their last two performances ever Dec. 30, 31st 2004, Guided By Voices. If you were there for those last two performances nothing else need be said: two sets, roughly 60 songs each -with perhaps 7 or 8 repeated from one night to the next. The bar on stage, the great rhythm section, and the sturdy guitar heroics of Doug Gillard all serving as backdrop to the brilliance of Mr. Pollard.
Rob Pollard returns to Metro this friday night after a fourteen month hiatus, fronting a full band with (of course,) an army and array of new material all from his new release From A compound Eye. Door is at 8:00, opening is the High Strung, 18 and over.....not to be missed
March 30, 2006
It's Not Over Your Head if it's Meaningless: Thoughts On The Art of Choosing
When I was in art school a friend of mine offerred a rhetorical question that blew my mind. "Where does art happen? In the viewer, in the artist, in space?
I was dumbstruck by the question, not because it offered some profound insight, but rather because I'd never even considered it. It may be one of those questions that can't, or shouldn't be answered, but two recent shows offer some clues to an answer.
I've long maintained that Marcel Duchamp is the most over-analyzed and misunderstood artist in recent history. The genius of pieces like "Fountain" lies in the elegant clevage established between form and content. In many ways these "Readymades" are brilliant editorial cartoons, yet they derive no small part of their power in their ability to convey a sense of esthetic beauty which only bolsters the profound intellectual content they embody.
The subversive profundity of Duchamp's work should not lead observers to the false conclusion that he was somehow anti-art. I believe that he was really a sort of anti-esthete, at least as pretains to the tendency of esthetic doctrine to degenerate into a cloistered and stifling orthodoxy. When we consider his career we see an artist who was an avid proponent of the primacy of visceral beauty, and the fact that his work was so richly invested with humor and intellectual depth does nothing to betray such advocacy.
Yet Duchamp, like Pollock and Warhol, has been picked to pieces, disassembled and replicated in the worst manner imaginable. The result has been the most vapid and appalling form of pseudo-intellectual simulacrum. The art world is rife with examples of those who would seek to carry forth the innovations of Pollock, and yet in so many instances they offer absolutely nothing new to the dialogue, nor do they betray a convincing understanding of just what made his work so breathtakingly valuable. They're like musicians who know all the chords and none of the songs.
Last month I had the good fortune to stumble across "The Innocent Eye?" at Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. This show, which was a closely currated selection of amateur photographs from the 20th century, brought me back to that question of "where art happens," and I filed it away for further consideration.
In this case the value of the work is two-fold. First there's the esthetic experience of the amateur photographers, individuals who are obviously responding to esthetic stimuli, even if their powers of esthetic judgment are "naive." It's obvious that some of this work is meant to be editorial, some is meant to be artistic, and some is meant to simply provide a document of events.
And yet there are several pieces in this collection which are both technically and viscerally engaging, whether by intention or good fortune. I should demonstrate at this point a recognition of the fact that these are not art objects, and yet it seems such a slippery slope to offer such a pronouncement. How is one meant to establish the artistic veracity of an object without first defining just what art is? This fool has no intention of pursuing that fool's errand.
The point I'm trying to make here is that there's tremendous esthetic value in the curatorial aspect of this show. Nicholas Osborn, the man who has amassed this collection of "found" images, is clearly in posession of a learned eye, and his selection fo imagery creates a fascinating narrative of it's own.
The beauty of this show is that it doesn't try to be more than it is. As with many shows at Hammer, we're not faced with a didactic literary agenda. Rather, we see an enjoyable and appropriate emphasis placed on the art of choosing.
Central to the nature of art is the act of choosing, whether overtly and intuitively. It's beyond obvious to note that really great art demonstrates a conflation of many things - talent, instinct, proportion (seemingly the most rare and difficult to find nowadays), and volitional intent. So it's clear that the act of making good choices, whether they pertain to subject matter, medium or form, is a primary component in the creation of art.
Osborn's collection shows us precisely this, thereby illuminating just one facet of "where art happens." It may not be "art," but it's valuable and enjoyable nonetheless.
By contrast have a look at this tremendous review in Thursday's Chicago Tribune. I'm compelled to withhold comment on the specific piece in question until I've actually seen the exhibit, but Mr. Artner's terse analysis of the piece "Him" by Maurizio Cattelan is most certainly germane to this issue.
It seems that Mr. Cattalan, an artist who by Artner's analysis seems to have taken conceptual reductiveness a tad, er, far, doesn't even see his "work" until it's been finished and installed. This sort of detachment may have legitimate historical predicate - we're told that Giotto, for example, employed painters to work on his frescoes. Regardless, doesn't it seem just a little de-humanizing?
Art, like Soylent Green, is people. Or at least it ought to be. But such high-concept, low-involvement work is really more akin to manufacturing than creative expression, and it's just a little hard to conceive of an artist enjoying an esthetic experience with such little involvement in the process of creation. As Artner so correctly observes,
"...So all the terms in which the work has been discussed are not artistic but historical and sociological."
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm a firm believer in the naturally humanizing potential of art. There's a vicarious arc which travels from the creator (small "c"), through the inanimate object to the viewer. The wonder which often accompanies the viewing of truly brilliant artworks is often a result of the sense of connectedness which is created between artist and viewer - they are, in essence, joined in the process.
How can it be that something pure and essential is not lost when the act of inspired creation is eliminated from the process? It's all about choices.
Historia de la Musica Rock: pt. 4 - the Eighties
If New Year’s Eve 1979 was a night of punk rock glory, the morning after to start the Eighties was the start of a long hangover. After a couple months in Lexington putting off my future, I moved back to Chicago to get a job. Outside of graduating from college in 1930, I couldn’t think of a worse time to emerge into the market- unemployment and interest rates had the economy paralyzed- I spent the summer in Chicago before chasing the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend to Florida. I got a job mixing paint in Delray Beach for $9800/year and lived in a studio coach house. It was a nightmare. I can still remember the giant cockroaches scurrying as I blew out my woofers with the P.I.L. Metal Box. My girlfriend wanted to be an actress, and when I inadvertently got a role in The Miser which she was trying out for (and failed), it marked the beginning of the end.
Upon returning to Chicago I quickly got a job with A.C. Nielsen and received my first assignment in Elmira, New York. For the next six months I would have almost no contact with other people. I mostly worked alone and finished my work so fast that I usually only put in about thirty hours a week. I learned how to play guitar. Before I left Chicago I had traded my black Fender Precision bass for a sixties model Telecaster. I wanted to write songs. I had the Neil Young Zuma songbook with chord diagrams to learn from. To this day, I rarely play a real G major; I thought a G chord only used two strings. I started to write the kind of depressing songs that only a twenty-three year old reading Rimbaud and Genet could write. The music that I loved was post-punk British guitar slash- Echo and the Bunnymen, Gang of Four, The Mekons, and Joy Division. I moped. I also made my first drive into New York City. I left on a Saturday morning with the idea that I would see the city.
I came into the city driving through Harlem and found myself in a Times Square parking garage. I almost got hit by a cab crossing the street and dizzily found myself standing in front of Bond’s International. It was early afternoon. A guy approached and asked me if I wanted a ticket for the show inside. I thought it was a scam. The Clash had just finished a week’s worth of shows, The Clash on Broadway, and a matinee had been added on at the last minute. For five dollars I bought a ticket, and within my first hour on my first visit to NYC I was watching the greatest band in the world. I couldn’t make this up. Afterwards I got in my car and drove the four hours back home. I made many other solo trips to the city. I saw REM (they had the Radio Free Europe 45 out) open for Gang of Four at the Ritz, New Order at the Peppermint Lounge, and The Cure at the Ritz. I spent a ton of money on records that soothed my solitude. After a year I received my request for a transfer to Chicago and I returned with an expanding record collection, a cat called Pigeon, and the ability to sort of play guitar.
I really wanted to join a band so I answered some ads in the Reader. I didn’t even hear back from the two bands I auditioned for. I moved to Rogers Park on Lunt near the Heartland Café. I met my musical brother, Raoul V. Stober, a genius who shared my passion for music and possessed an instantly recognizable maniacal laugh. I worked, but I lived for music, went to any show at Tuts, listened to Cheri Pugh et al. on WNUR, and consumed one Strohs after another while listening to records. Raoul turned me on to MC5 and John Coltrane. There was an exciting new American indie movement starting. Bands like Mission of Burma, Pylon, the DBs, and Dream Syndicate were my favorites, and college radio and fanzines were fueling the fire. I met a drummer from Louisville named Janet; she moved to Chicago and worked at the Heartland Café where she met a girl named Shu.
In 1983, Eleventh Dream Day formed. In early 1984 we played our first show at the Jefferson Davis Inn in Lexington, Kentucky. By the time Doug McCombs replaced Shu on bass and Baird Figi joined as a second guitar player in 1985 we had recorded material that we wanted to turn into a record. Back then there were dozens of small indie labels around the country, some created by the bands themselves to release their records as well as friends’ records (Down There), but also labels like Twin Tone in Minneapolis and Rough Trade in London that were growing rapidly on the strength of their growing rosters. After sending out our demo tapes with no takers, my old college friend Keith offered to put a record out on his label, Amoeba Records. There wasn’t a whole lot to it back then. The main thing was to get yourself in a van; tour as much you could (we had to book our own tours) and get some distribution. Anybody could do it. There was a network of indie bands criss-crossing the country playing at clubs like Batteries Not Included, The West End, The Jockey Club, Tewligans, Seventh Street Entry, Uptown, Staches, Gabes, Middle East, Maxwells,and CBGBs. There was always a floor to sleep on. The camaraderie amongst the bands was the best part. Our pals were the Hollowmen from Des Moines, The Libertines from Cincinnati, Precious Wax Drippings and Friends of Betty in Chicago, and Yo La Tengo and Antietam from Hoboken. I had a job still, but I would do anything to play. We used to play Minneapolis on a Sunday night at the Uptown- load off the stage at midnight, hop in to the van and drive all night; I would shave and put a tie on at a rest stop and be ready to start my job at 7:00 a.m. We made Prairie School Freakout which started to get us some attention around the world due to fanzines (Bucketful of Brains and Unhinged in England- Howl in Germany- Forced Exposure/The Bob at home). The record came out on Amoeba again as well as New Rose Records in Paris. Radio support was there as well. WXRT’s Big Beat show and WNUR were playing it. We got to open some big shows at Metro- Long Ryders and Meat Puppets which got us some notice. Joe Shanahan also had Rock Against Depression night at Metro- usually 3 bands on a Wednesday night for five bucks. We played a bunch of those. You’d generally see the same faces, but there were a lot more every week.
The first sign of the whole thing unraveling was the death of several large distributors. Caroline, Jem, and Rough Trade were all having difficulties. Labels were getting shafted as invoices were going unpaid. It all began to snowball. SST and Homestead which ruled the indie world were having trouble. Some of the best groups began to (gulp) jump to the promised land- the majors. Husker Du and The Replacements were first. Did they get bigger? No. Careers? No. Neither band would surpass their indie greatness. In the summer of 1989 we started recording Beet with Gary Waliek of Big Dipper/Volcano Suns fame. We liked his production on MOTO’s Don’t Have to be a Dick About It. How’s that for indie values? We were happening. Just having fun, no pressure, rocking in the indie world. We were talking with Rough Trade; maybe a bigger deal. And then Atlantic came knocking.
Overall, the Eighties was an exciting time in music. Bands were taking all their influences from sixties garage to post punk and making original takes on it without some of the self consciousness that accompanied the new wave/punk scene. That’s not to say that possibly the most godawful crap ever reared its ugly hairdo in the Eighties in the form of ABC, Haircut One Hundred, and Flock of Beagles. Ugh. Bands like Great White created legions of Guitar Center noodlers that still plague us today. And possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the music industry- MTV
Next: The Nineties- major feeding frenzy/dead fish handshakes
Upon returning to Chicago I quickly got a job with A.C. Nielsen and received my first assignment in Elmira, New York. For the next six months I would have almost no contact with other people. I mostly worked alone and finished my work so fast that I usually only put in about thirty hours a week. I learned how to play guitar. Before I left Chicago I had traded my black Fender Precision bass for a sixties model Telecaster. I wanted to write songs. I had the Neil Young Zuma songbook with chord diagrams to learn from. To this day, I rarely play a real G major; I thought a G chord only used two strings. I started to write the kind of depressing songs that only a twenty-three year old reading Rimbaud and Genet could write. The music that I loved was post-punk British guitar slash- Echo and the Bunnymen, Gang of Four, The Mekons, and Joy Division. I moped. I also made my first drive into New York City. I left on a Saturday morning with the idea that I would see the city.
I came into the city driving through Harlem and found myself in a Times Square parking garage. I almost got hit by a cab crossing the street and dizzily found myself standing in front of Bond’s International. It was early afternoon. A guy approached and asked me if I wanted a ticket for the show inside. I thought it was a scam. The Clash had just finished a week’s worth of shows, The Clash on Broadway, and a matinee had been added on at the last minute. For five dollars I bought a ticket, and within my first hour on my first visit to NYC I was watching the greatest band in the world. I couldn’t make this up. Afterwards I got in my car and drove the four hours back home. I made many other solo trips to the city. I saw REM (they had the Radio Free Europe 45 out) open for Gang of Four at the Ritz, New Order at the Peppermint Lounge, and The Cure at the Ritz. I spent a ton of money on records that soothed my solitude. After a year I received my request for a transfer to Chicago and I returned with an expanding record collection, a cat called Pigeon, and the ability to sort of play guitar.
I really wanted to join a band so I answered some ads in the Reader. I didn’t even hear back from the two bands I auditioned for. I moved to Rogers Park on Lunt near the Heartland Café. I met my musical brother, Raoul V. Stober, a genius who shared my passion for music and possessed an instantly recognizable maniacal laugh. I worked, but I lived for music, went to any show at Tuts, listened to Cheri Pugh et al. on WNUR, and consumed one Strohs after another while listening to records. Raoul turned me on to MC5 and John Coltrane. There was an exciting new American indie movement starting. Bands like Mission of Burma, Pylon, the DBs, and Dream Syndicate were my favorites, and college radio and fanzines were fueling the fire. I met a drummer from Louisville named Janet; she moved to Chicago and worked at the Heartland Café where she met a girl named Shu.
In 1983, Eleventh Dream Day formed. In early 1984 we played our first show at the Jefferson Davis Inn in Lexington, Kentucky. By the time Doug McCombs replaced Shu on bass and Baird Figi joined as a second guitar player in 1985 we had recorded material that we wanted to turn into a record. Back then there were dozens of small indie labels around the country, some created by the bands themselves to release their records as well as friends’ records (Down There), but also labels like Twin Tone in Minneapolis and Rough Trade in London that were growing rapidly on the strength of their growing rosters. After sending out our demo tapes with no takers, my old college friend Keith offered to put a record out on his label, Amoeba Records. There wasn’t a whole lot to it back then. The main thing was to get yourself in a van; tour as much you could (we had to book our own tours) and get some distribution. Anybody could do it. There was a network of indie bands criss-crossing the country playing at clubs like Batteries Not Included, The West End, The Jockey Club, Tewligans, Seventh Street Entry, Uptown, Staches, Gabes, Middle East, Maxwells,and CBGBs. There was always a floor to sleep on. The camaraderie amongst the bands was the best part. Our pals were the Hollowmen from Des Moines, The Libertines from Cincinnati, Precious Wax Drippings and Friends of Betty in Chicago, and Yo La Tengo and Antietam from Hoboken. I had a job still, but I would do anything to play. We used to play Minneapolis on a Sunday night at the Uptown- load off the stage at midnight, hop in to the van and drive all night; I would shave and put a tie on at a rest stop and be ready to start my job at 7:00 a.m. We made Prairie School Freakout which started to get us some attention around the world due to fanzines (Bucketful of Brains and Unhinged in England- Howl in Germany- Forced Exposure/The Bob at home). The record came out on Amoeba again as well as New Rose Records in Paris. Radio support was there as well. WXRT’s Big Beat show and WNUR were playing it. We got to open some big shows at Metro- Long Ryders and Meat Puppets which got us some notice. Joe Shanahan also had Rock Against Depression night at Metro- usually 3 bands on a Wednesday night for five bucks. We played a bunch of those. You’d generally see the same faces, but there were a lot more every week.
The first sign of the whole thing unraveling was the death of several large distributors. Caroline, Jem, and Rough Trade were all having difficulties. Labels were getting shafted as invoices were going unpaid. It all began to snowball. SST and Homestead which ruled the indie world were having trouble. Some of the best groups began to (gulp) jump to the promised land- the majors. Husker Du and The Replacements were first. Did they get bigger? No. Careers? No. Neither band would surpass their indie greatness. In the summer of 1989 we started recording Beet with Gary Waliek of Big Dipper/Volcano Suns fame. We liked his production on MOTO’s Don’t Have to be a Dick About It. How’s that for indie values? We were happening. Just having fun, no pressure, rocking in the indie world. We were talking with Rough Trade; maybe a bigger deal. And then Atlantic came knocking.
Overall, the Eighties was an exciting time in music. Bands were taking all their influences from sixties garage to post punk and making original takes on it without some of the self consciousness that accompanied the new wave/punk scene. That’s not to say that possibly the most godawful crap ever reared its ugly hairdo in the Eighties in the form of ABC, Haircut One Hundred, and Flock of Beagles. Ugh. Bands like Great White created legions of Guitar Center noodlers that still plague us today. And possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the music industry- MTV
Next: The Nineties- major feeding frenzy/dead fish handshakes
Dialogue
The Dialogue paintings were inspired by comforting, therapeutic conversations with friends. Ideas and opinions were exchanged for hours at cafés, coffee houses and restaurants. I began documenting these events taking random photos with an inexpensive flash camera. While not every conversation grew into a heartfelt moment, my goal is for the viewer to experience the intimacy of the conversation and share in the dialogue.
(Part 1 of 5)
We Heart Gaper's Block
Sharkforum get's yet another nice plug from the good folk over at Gaper's Block:
Chicago Blog News~
EatChicago has redesigned. SharkForum is a group blog featuring some big shots from the Chicago arts and music scene, including Redmoon's Jim Lasko, New City's Ray Pride and Nicholas Tremulis. And holy crap! Sour Bob is back!
CAA Annual Conference Report for Sharkforum
Here's my thoroughly personal report from the conference in Boston. A bit looooong for a blog entry, but short considering all the activities at the conference.
Arriving
I arrived in Boston on Tuesday 21st February. I had to stay one night in the Hampton Inn, because I was arriving one day earlier than my roommate. A nice place, very friendly and helpful people --- but the heating was extremely erratic. It went from very hot to very cold, back and forth. I usually get a "weird plane air" and jet-lag feeling when I fly across the Atlantic or a similar distance or length of time. This, together with the fluctuating heat succeeded in giving me a head cold, which has continued until now, weeks later. Boston had almost no snow, unlike the mountains in Switzerland where I live, where I left behind snow about waste deep. However, strangely and abnormally, it was even colder than the Alps. Bitter cold.
Checking In
Early Wednesday morning, I checked into my "real" conference hotel, the Boston Back Bay Hilton. Beautiful, ritzy, expensive. Comfortable heating. Then I went to the CAA Conference, in the conference center adjacent to the Hotel as well as the Sheraton. Here is the check-in hall.
Meeting People
I started attending interesting sessions immediately. Made at least one in every time slot throughout the week (twice I left one to finish up in another). On the way to the first hotel, I shared a hotel shuttle bus with 5 young women, graduate students from Savannah College. All painters. Imagine that, those outrageous young people. They want to paint! At a university! Don't they know enough to do "media" work or cute events? Here they are: Erica Gajewski, Lisa G. Johnson, Edna Dapo, Nicky Buckingham and Sarah Sharp. Oops, I forgot, one is missing from the photo. I repeatedly came across Erica during the conference. They all seem knowledgeable and motivated, especially Erica. Let's all wish them the best as they enter into this preposterous, duplicitous village we call an artworld.
Young American Painters
At coffee I met several interesting "established artists" including Scott Betz, from Winston- Salem. He mixes linear, drawing ideas with installation.
First Session
The first session I went to was "The Altered Page." This was a "Studio Arts Session," so one of the few times I saw artists speak, rather than historians or curators. Very enjoyable. I'd like to add that I despise the term "studio art." It has been created by historians and critics for something that already has a name --- "art." The creation of art is called art. Everything else, even if interesting, even if I love it too, is something else. These "other" art-related activities have been referred to, until recently, as "secondary" or scholarly activities. Not meaning, thereby, less important, but "after the fact." Moreover, much art today is actually post-studio, created outside the studio, so "studio art" is simply a clumsy, unnecessary turn of phrase. One that I suspect is, once again, an attempt by non-artists in the artworld to usurp the role of the artist. Be proud of your own job and let us do ours!
Most exciting to me --- as will not surprise anyone who knows my work --- was the paper "Colossal Volumes: Cycloramas, Inhabitable Books, and Illuminated Rooms" by Amy Broderick of Florida Atlantic University. (Unfortunately, I can find no website for her.) Broderick has created remarkable, large-scale drawings which become installation-like. (Note: in German there is a wonderful adjective for this --- "installativ" ---, which we should borrow and anglicize. I will start doing it now.) She makes striking large-scale, installative drawings. She showed very little of her own work, however, presenting and discussing more famous artists' installations, which, together with her own approach, she sees as contemporary, yet, can be seen as enlarged illuminated manuscripts: Very intriguing. Entranced as I am with vernacular forms such as sign painting and comics on the one hand, and art history since the Renaissance on the other, this was a new insight to me. I had considered San Rocco and even the Sistine Chapel, but not illumination. Very perceptive Broderick --- and show more of your own works next time. I loved them!
Amy Broderick
Second Session
The second session I went to was "Gordon Matta-Clark and Architecture," chaired by Philip Ursprung, a fellow Swiss, of my Universität Zürich. A professor of Art History, Ursprung not only conceived a stimulating session theme, chose other participants well, but also added discerning words of his own to the panel.
Ursprung has written on a variety of contemporary artists and architects, including Herzog and de Meuron (architects about whom I too have written). (As an aside, Mr U has a fascinating surname --- it is German for "origin;" "Ur"= primeval, "Sprung"= leap, Mr Primeval-Leap, Origin of All Things.) Here he is.
Philip Ursprung
One of the speakers he chose for this session was the prominent and exciting artist Teresa Hubbard, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, and creates beautiful video installations (yeah --- me --- they're "media" artworks --- and I really like them!) with her partner Alexander Birchler. Hubbard, who is Irish, and Birchler, who is Swiss, have been shown all over the world, including in the Whitney and at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Hubbard was alone this time, making her presentation by twice playing a short film loop titled Single Wide Space. It features a seemingly emotionally distraught woman crashing her car through the wall of a cheap, pre-fab trailer-like home, climbing out, going outside to get in the car and doing it again. Simple to describe, but simply tragic and gorgeous. Hitchcock, Kafka, Hopper and Sherwood Anderson in one. Visual poetry.
Here's the team.
Hubbard/Birchler
The discussion after the presentations was equally edifying, good questions and Jane Crawford, the widow of Matta-Clark and the estate director, was in the audience. She gave some direct personal information and reflections.
The Convocation
The hall was packed. Hundreds of attendees. Mercy, though, was that some serious word-ifying. It went on for more than two hours, well beyond its planned length. Their were many awards to be given, and to some very impressive people and for some very noteworthy projects, but with reading each laudatory text in its entirety, and thank-yous and so on, .... The texts were well written, but were all in the program booklet we received, so perhaps they didn't need to be read aloud, or could have been shortened. All those around me were getting restless. I didn't mind it much as I was tired and enjoyed seeing the awardees' in the flesh. The award winners included Edward M. Kennedy (Lifetime Achievement on Behalf of the Arts, here is an example for why he was honored) and about 14 others.
Linda Nochlin won for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement for Writing on Art, something she clearly deserves. A remarkable historian who writes scholarly, yet readably, stylishly; who has an "eye" and confronts important issues. Nochlin thanked her (and my) editor Elizabeth C. Baker of Art in America for helping to make her work well-written. Truthfully, Nochlin is a fine author, but Betsy does demand high standards and improves many a text!
Elizabeth Murray won the artist version, and she greatly deserves that as well. And is, need I note, a painter and another ex-Chicagoan. We are everywhere.
Okwui Enwezor won an award as well. It was pleasing to finally see this much heralded curator in person. The first African to lead Documenta (no. 11; a great improvement over 10, even if he too was a bit "curatorially correct" and a bit light on painting). An amazing man. He thanked a couple of people for helping him to achieve what he has, in particular he singled out Chicago's own Susanne Ghez, referring to her as "indefatigable"!
Okwui Enwezor
Susanne Ghez
Finally, the Keynote Address speaker, for whom we were all waiting, was Arthur C. Danto.
Danto is one of the most significant philosophers in the world, the "one to beat" in fact. Fellow philosopher George Dickie, bouncing off the springboard offered in Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and other works, created the now-called "Danto-Dickie Institutional Theory of Art." Overly-simply stated, this is the theory that what makes something an artwork is that it is embedded (presented, accepted, shown, etc.) within the dominant institution, namely, the artworld. In a highly debased and fashionably expedient form, this dominates the artworld now and has done so for some time. Chiefly as it serves well (albeit in the main when misused) as an inherent justification for much mannerist Neo-Conceptual art. Although Danto's philosophy, particularly his thought-experiment of identical objects, is the principal anchor for this claim, he has himself seemingly had second thoughts about it, while still insisting on the End of Art due the collapse of art into philosophy. (Something I have argued is actually the End of Art History As We Have Known It, and not the End of Art, see my article here.)
He was an excellent speaker. Direct, clear and succinct. Fascinatingly, Danto emphasized another part of his ontological theory of art, that "works of art are embodied meanings." A claim often overlooked in the heat of argument surrounding attempts to subsume the Institutional Theory. Perhaps now is the time to delve deeper into this aspect of his thought. He also mentioned that poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein (a fan of painting) has claimed that Danto is "the philosopher of art most cited by critics." I suppose this ties him with Derrida, the theorist most cited by curators and professors. It was exciting to me to get to meet Danto personally after the speech, as I myself have often struggled with his work, in print or speeches, making me probably one of those artists who, like those critics to whom Raphael referred, quote Danto. I told Danto this and said I was sorry and would cite him less in the future. He laughed. I gave him one of my viewers, which contain images of my art. He enjoyed it and suggested he would also take pleasure in having a copy of this cartoon I did in an article where I cited and discussed him. I have to remember to send it to him. He is really a grand man and thinker, especially in light of the fact that his theory needs to surmounted and encompassed, not ignored, whatever my misgivings are concerning its unsought after effect.
Brillo Krazy cartoon, Brandl
Arthur C. Danto
Danto's ex-student and my favorite living philosopher David Carrier is successfully grappling with the Institutional theory, I believe.
David Carrier
The Gala Reception
As mentioned, due to the Convocation, we all got to the Museum of Fine Arts late, also having to find our own ways, catch cabs, etc. Nice museum. David Hockney Portraits show, John Singer Sargent murals, beautiful selections from the collection hung salon-style in the munchies area. Good hors d'oeuvres. I met one of my all time favorite ex-Chicagoan artists there --- as well as at several other times and places at the conference --- Buzz Spector. He is a brilliant book and installation artist, founder of Whitewalls, and the original "smart art" creator in the Windy City. Buzz is now the Head of the Art Department at Cornell University. Spector was a shining light as well as a benefactor of mine and of other Chicago artists who wanted to pursue more "intellectual" strains of art, back when that was "not the thing." Thanks for the inspiration Buzz!
Buzz Spector
Another Session
The next day, I went early to the session It's All About Process Not only is the title great, but so were the talks. The speakers all discussed the significance of process in artists' work, as a sort of theoretical physicality, or physical theorization, if you will.
In particular, I wanted to hear Janet Koplos. Koplos is another ex-Chicagoan, an art critic and important editor (senior editor at Art in America) and author who began at the New Art Examiner of all places. An intelligent, perceptive woman who can write damn well. She is the author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture and co-author of an up-coming comprehensive art history of crafts text. Her paper was entitled "The Meaning of Making in Contemporary Crafts." Truthfully, other than listening to and reading Koplos, I seldom think about crafts. Just my little personal blind spot, or perhaps the latent snobbery of a quasi-conceptualist? I couldn't help but relate her thoughts to a more general application of workmanship, as indeed did she herself, to include all art-making. Her views were very stirring. The end of her abstract describes the wider implications of her thoughts on crafts well. "Process is valued in itself, not merely as a means to an end, and its gratifications can be shared by an audience through the visual evidence of the object. ...[C]oncept, process and product are inherently wedded and of equal significance."
I am going to have to start condensing here, as I do get fired up and run on! So --- only a few notes on her thoughts, which I found intellectually thought-provoking, and stirring. Koplos mentioned at the onset "the pernicious effects of theory in criticism." Remember, this is coming from an intellectual and theory-oriented person, not some conservative philistine. She commented astutely that "all important experiences --- whether religious, aesthetic, cognitive or amorous --- are reduced by theory." She cited another author, whose name I did not catch, who said that "we can know more than we can tell." Koplos frequently used the word "workmanship," a term which bears resurrection, even with its somewhat passé inclusion of the word man. It has a colloquial ring to it and avoids the specifically "pottery" overtones of craft or the mechanistic clang of technique. Or maybe we need to think again about proficiency or skill. Koplos also mentioned that we need to "practice touch" --- the need for this is innate and doesn't go away. This touch is, or fosters, an important form of "attentiveness." "Working with the hands," as well as with the mind, "is symbolic protest" nowadays, she feels. Koplos also pointedly reminded everyone of the variety of inherently craft-like metaphors present in recent computer developments, not the least of which is the weaving together of the world-wide web. Finally, I was delighted to rediscover a word she frequently used, vernacular. This more properly describes many of the cultural elements which interest me than the word popular, often used today. Oh pugnacious yet cerebral plebeian antiacademician that I be, he says showily.
Very moving Janet! Look for her soon to be published text.
Janet Koplos
Meeting Interesting People
At this session, and then again several times later on, I met Ira Goldberg. He is the Executive Director of the legendary Art Students League in New York. Many important artists has studied there, even if or perhaps because it is not a degree-granting institution. In particular, a large number of the first comic artists honed their skills there. It is a unique learning (un-)institution. As it describes itself, "The League was and still is a cooperative society based on mutual help among all its members. There have never been any degrees or diplomas, no set curriculum; one must be there solely for the love and pursuit of art, the yearning for the exchange of artistic ideas and techniques. It is an institution founded by students for students, and these are the major reasons the school has continued to flourish."
Goldberg is an active artist as well as administrator --- and feels that "the time is right for a survey and debate on art education." My impression, if I may paraphrase him from memory, is that he feels most art education nowadays is a failure. Similar to the boring, anti-creative training in 1875 which the League was created to combat, much of what now passes for art education is the self-serving production of fashionable clones of a sect of art pundits. Correct me if I exaggerate, Ira! I must say, these are important, heretical considerations that strike to the heart of our current malaise. Worth considering. Perhaps one thing he means can be stated as the installation/graffiti artist Banksy has, "All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw."
Ira Goldberg
Shortly after first meeting Goldberg, and participating in a session discussion with him, I finally caught up with my erstwhile hotel-roommate, Raoul Deal, who also sometimes uses his full name of Raoul Greco Deal. Raoul and I were undergraduates in Painting together at the University of Illinois about 28 years ago. He then went off to live for many years in Mexico after having married classical violist Dinorah Marquez. They, with their daughter Gabriella, recently relocated to Milwaukee, where Deal does wonderful installations involving sculpture, painting, and community involvement. He has as much interest in "vernacular" culture as I do, his being generally more Hispanic, but not solely. Deal is one of the best artists I have ever seen or gotten to know, and I am not saying that lightly. With our time together there, and earlier this year when he and his family visited me and mine in Europe, Raoul and I dreamed up a two-person painting-installation exhibition, which we hope to travel. Look for in about two years! (While speaking of wives, mine is Cornelia Kunz, pronounced "Koo-ents" for you English speakers, who are wondering. She is Swiss, a Business Coach, Social Organization Developer, activist and more.)
Raoul Deal
Roaming about between sessions, I also met Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf. They are the creators of an important and compelling video titled The NEA Tapes. Censorship, government support of the arts and propaganda are important subjects and a battleground in an America where most of the so-called "liberal" media is now owned by right-wing backers of George W. Bush. The mass media serves as his propaganda machine and the radical right has its eye on extending their censorship and control beyond even that.
As the Metro Times Detroit has written about this video, "This hour-long offering ... gives a pretty thorough overview of the controversies surrounding the funding of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA)."
Next came MY Session. However, I will jump over that for the time being to comment on two other sessions I attended, wrapping up with my self-promotional self-description.
Two Sessions
I also attended a session with a very promising title: Art History as a Class Act, which unfortunately was not as invigorating as I had hoped. While the participants offered some fine insights, they were four white men, several with "upper class" accents, three with very dry deliveries, one who was enjoyable to listen to. In the hall outside the door, cleaning people (working class people of color) were loudly busy. Their noise lent a weirdly symbolic background to the talk, which even one speaker had to mention. Conference as a class act. Perhaps it was me, perhaps it was because it was a morning at the end of the week, but Raoul felt similarly remote from a discussion of a subject in which we are both interested. Here's a photo of him sketching installation thoughts on the program.
Raoul drawing.
Nevertheless, don't get me wrong. I insist that class is still The Big Hush-Hush in the art world. Not only art history, but the contemporary artworld is a class (-dominated) act. Chicagoans should be clearly aware of this, having always before their eyes the "governance" of the (private) School of the Art Institute of Chic (to quote an Artforum artwork from a few years ago). Anja Meulenbelt, a Dutch Feminist, wrote a book entitled The Layers of an Onion, whose title metaphor has bearing here. She points out that the problem of oppression in society is like three layers of an onion, ones we must peel away, somewhat painfully, one at a time --- making certain to tackle all three. These layers are sexism, racism and classism. I feel that (finally) the artworld is making a few inroads against sexism, but it has barely even begun to mention racism and actively quashes any mention of classism. The next time you are in a group show, ask where all the black and brown artists are. That ought to gather some quick silence around you! Even in the small numbers in which women artists appear, and the infinitesimally small number of artists of color who gain attention, they are overwhelmingly from the upper middle-class or higher, to say nothing of the whites. "Private school graduates who were incapable of doing anything else, so their parents bought them an art degree, where they learned to obey fashionable directives in order to craft a career," as a purposefully unnamed critic once described the situation to me. Let us continue to peel off the sexist layer (with a little more vigor even) and attack the other two immediately, even if we must do it surreptitiously.
Saturday afternoon Raoul and I went to an exceptionally stimulating session. Expatriate Games: The 19th-Century Artist Abroad. From the title alone you could guess it would interest us. Yet not only was the topic itself interesting, but all the speakers and the chairperson's presentations were compelling. Three I will discuss below. The chair was Erica E. Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The papers were:
Defining American, Defining Expatriate: The Puzzling National Identities of Sargent, Mora, and Henri, by M. Elizabeth Boone, Humboldt State University
The Filipino as Avant-Garde Artist, by Deborah A. Deacon, Arizona State University
Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African American Expatriate, by Sharon Pruitt, East Carolina University
Away from Home/at Home in Paris: Americans Reckon with la ville lumière, by Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University
and Edvard Munch's "Germanness" , by Jay A. Clarke, Art Institute of Chicago
The premise of the session, as written in the abstract, was that while the 19th century is often viewed as rather nationalistic in art history, "many painters of this period lived and worked abroad, negotiating foreign languages, art circles, and cultural practices to become successful in countries far from their native home." Furthermore, "this session address[ed] the two-sided engagements with Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and New York experienced by artists from an array of countries."
Sharon Pruitt's paper on Henry Ossawa Tanner offered many insights, based on information concerning his notable parents, facts new to me. This African- American painter definitely deserves far more attention, perhaps this is a beginning. His "internationalism" certainly bears more study. As Pruitt pointed out, did he find a certain level of acceptance, if perhaps as "exotic," as an artist in Paris and Rome that was unavailable to him at the time at home in the US, because he was black? I found Tanner's family life most intriguing. His father was a college-educated teacher and minister, an intellectual, Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923). He became a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bishop Tanner had seven children, the best known of whom is Henry O. Tanner, but his other children did well too. One daughter, Hallie Tanner Johnson, became a physician and established the Nurses' School and Hospital at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, for instance. Henry Tanner's mother, Sarah Miller Tanner was a former slave whose own mother had sent her north to Pittsburgh through the Underground Railroad. Sarah Tanner became a noted teacher. The painter Tanner, like the great jazzman Sidney Bechet and many other black artists, spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he painted some of the finest, large-scale Biblical paintings I have ever seen, until his death in 1937. I also learned from Pruitt that the painter's middle name, Ossawa, is in honor of the martyred white abolitionist John Brown, from the town where Brown first launched his anti-slavery campaign, Ossawatomie, Kansas. Pruitt sees much of the illustrious artist's personality reflected in those of his parent's, from what she has discovered in her research.
Sharon Pruitt
All the papers were riveting. I would like, though, to mention in particular two Chicagoans in this session: Hollis Clayson of Northwestern University and Jay A. Clarke, the associate curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Clarke's paper was a "deconstruction" in the best sense. She disassembled the (partially self-constructed) myth of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's "Germanness." Lucid, social, political, yet with sound, direct links to visual fact.
Hollis Clayson was a sparkling, humorous speaker with entertaining rhetorical talents as well as sound scholarship. She should perhaps consider giving public speaking classes to a whole roster of art historians and curators with whom I am acquainted. Her paper, "Away from Home/at Home in Paris" centered on a little-studied group of gaslight night scenes by a variety of American artists in Paris, all "mutilated voluntary aliens," who were "straddling the orbits of bohemianism and cosmopolitanism during a sometimes punishing period of accelerating French anti-Americanism in Paris" (symbolized for the French by the new Edisonian electric lights spreading everywhere). This was also a time in which many Americans began their slow swell of nationalism and disregard for "the rest of the world." I can most assuredly identify with these artists' positions, although the xenophobia and nationalistic, propaganda-swallowing seems nowadays to be more on the part of my "fellow" US citizens and their "freedom fries" than the other way round, as in the period Clayson discusses.
Here are the two erudite Chicago speakers
Jay A. Clarke, left, Hollis Clayson, right
Finally, Our Session
Our session was titled From the Page to the Wall: from Graphic Novels to Gallery Comics. We were lucky enough to be in Prime Time --- Friday afternoon from 2:30 to 5:00. Our chair was Christian P. J.-C. Hill of California State University at Fullerton.
Christian Hill
Christian is a professor of art but also a practicing fine and comic artist --- and an invigorating theoretician. He created the term "gallery comics" for work like his and mine. For Hill, a gallery comic (or art-space comic, or Kunsthalle Comic, Museum comic, et al.) is a challenging new form of art lying between book-based sequential comics and the spacial / wall situation of fine art. That is, a sequential, or quasi-sequential work which both can be read like a book and comfortably viewed as a gallery/museum work. I go into my own independently created related term of iconosequentiality in my paper. This is my neologism for the unique combination of forms of phenomenological perception in comics — and my art. Viewers frequently perceive both the entire page as an iconic unit, similar to a traditional painting, and simultaneously follow the flow of narrative or images from panel to panel, left to right, up to down. It is concurrently whole/part and openly linear (even multi-linear with the possibility one has to glance "backwards" and "forwards" if desired, while reading). My notion is thus perhaps a corollary of or an ideal compositional strategy for works of Hill's definition, which could be called a genre or new media form. (Note: Regardless of what is often maintained, new media does not just mean electronic devices. Performance was a decided non-technical new medium in the 70s; installation is probably the most important new medium discovery of Late Modernism and is not necessarily technological. Also, media is the plural of medium, which everyone seems to conveniently forget.) More about that all later.
Hill organized a group of curators, art historians and artists "to address the evolution and interactions" of such art "within the historical, theoretical, cultural, physical and economical dimensions of the gallery" (or Kunsthalle or museum, etc.).
The participants were: First Christian Hill himself, who offered some fine introductory explanations and ideas and a running show of gallery comic images from many artists;
Andrei Molotiu, of the University of Louisville, who spoke on Eternal Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Original Art as Aesthetic Object;
Joanna Roche, of California State University Fullerton , speaking on Art Histories of Gallery Comics: What Rake Told Maus;
Michelle Ollie, Managing Director of The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, who spoke impromptu on her spanking new college for studying comics;
and me, Mark Staff Brandl, of the Universität Zürich and a practicing artist, with my paper on my own work, titled Panels, Covers, and Viewers: My Mongrels of Painting, Installation, and Comics.
Andrei Molotiu is a unique scholar. An art historian and expert on Jean-Honore Fragonard, he is also a curator and a creator of abstract comics. He has a book on Fragonard coming soon from the world renowned Getty Institute.
Here he is as an art historian.
Andrei Molotiu
Here he is as an abstract comics artist.
I pointed out in my paper that "comics have always been allographic, as opposed to autographic, to use philosopher Nelson Goodman’s terminology. That is, the actual work of art is located in the published object, not a one-of-a-kind "original" as in painting." Nevertheless, Molotiu accurately pointed out in his discussion that the "original" art pages of comics offer wonderful opportunities for different an unique forms of appreciation on their own. Whereas in the past these drawings were tossed out or even destroyed by the companies after they had been photographed for printing, many collectors and scholars nowadays seek them out, buying them for often large sums. (I myself have a few framed and hung on my walls, such as my Gene Colan works and Al Williamson strip hung next to a Joseph Beuys multiple.) Talking a very enlightening phenomenological approach, Molotiu went step-by-step through the interaction a viewer has with such an original comic page, how one can appreciate not only the intended art values, but also additional discoveries such as the beautiful variety of thick and thin, tapering, brush ink work common to older cartoonists, the thickness of the ink on the board, the "palimpsest of marks that do not show up on the printed page: touches of pro-white and of [non-reproducing] blue pencil, ghostly pentimenti of erased penciling, marginal notations," fingerprints and so on. As he further stated, "these marks reveal the inescapable presence of the artwork and the comics-creating process itself." They are what Molotiu calls the "antilogocentric dimension." They shift the viewer's attention "from the utilitarian aspects of the art to those not so easily consumed by narrative." I must say that I stand happily corrected! I realized, as he spoke, that these are often the elements I have treasured most, and an important part of what lead me to my idea of installation-comics. Thanks Andrei! Molotiu discussed many other related points. Christian Hill says our papers will be printed in a scholarly journal. I certainly hope so, because I would like to have every one else's texts, such as Molotiu's. I was also impressed by his ideas on how to exhibit such works of comic art.
(Yet, Andrei, I won't give up on the historical facts as in our barroom historical discussion. Comics "qua comics" begin with Rodolphe Toepffer. There are logical limits to infinite historical regress and/or historical skepticism! --- or we have to argue it out again in the future. That would be fun!)
Joanna Roche of California State University is also an art historian, but one specializing in Modern and contemporary art. She admirably also states that she's "trying to expand my teaching of contemporary art beyond Europe and the US to many regions of the world where artists are at work: Asia, the Middle East, Latin America...." Roche made the best short definition of Hill's "gallery comics" notion: "A new form of art sharing the structural elements of the classic comic strip, book or graphic novel, but also using the possibilities of and belonging within the conceptual and physical spaces of the gallery, museum or the like." (If I am quoting her correctly from notes and memory.) Her images were wonderful, showing works that were primarily visual, perfect for viewing while walking about a space, and yet ones that demanded "reading" (in it's extended sense). One was a poetic and evocative series of panels of rain and umbrellas. I cannot find the artist's name or the title in my notes. Please write to me and tell me again Joanna! Another was a solo-word-balloon image from Christian Hill which was a tour de force of a gallery comic. I was flattered to see images of my own work turn up in her speech next to artists like Chris Ware, Christa Donner and Charles Burns. I will definitely re-study her paper when I get the CD of the session.
Michelle Ollie of The Center for Cartoon Studies gave a delightful spontaneous discussion of how one can instruct comic art. (She was a late addition to the session, as one planned member dropped out.) She discussed various aspects of curriculum and showed a handful of the shows they require of their students (who must utilize a variety of forms including short strips, books, exhibitions and more.) Even the graphics and drawings in their brochures are exciting (created by famous alternative comic artist Seth). The Center has regular visiting artists of high caliber. This April alone they will have Chris Ware, Seth, and Ivan Brunetti. These artists lecture and work closely with the students. And, have breakfast at the local greasy spoon, The Polka Dot, with students and visitors! There are not many institutions where one can study comics and comic creation, especially of a more "artsy" kind as well as traditional comics, with important creators. So watch this place. They are going to be very important.
And then there's me, Mark Staff Brandl. (Spoiler warning: here comes the self-serving artist part.) I had given my presentation at the Kunsthalle St.Gallen beforehand, in order to address the environment where I live (finally in my mother tongue English --- I usually have to speak in German). It went very well there, but I was amazed at how much smoother it went at the CAA. Perhaps because they are a more inherently intellectual community, or because the audience understood the socio-political implications of a mixed popular / fine art culture. (The audience was predominantly North American, but, from what I could see during the discussion afterwards, also included more than a few Europeans, some South Americans and a Japanese woman.)
Here I am right before the talk.
Brandl at podium
What did I talk about?
Speaking as a practicing "gallery comics" artist, I presented my own work, which is a "mongrel" combination of installation, painting and comics, and discussed it in relationship to the definition of comics (sequentiality, word and image, closure, iconosequentiality, etc.), the influence and confluence of comics and fine art, as well as viewers' relationship to the works from the perspectives of both "high" and "low" art.
Panels are installations wherein large paintings on canvas are surrounded by additional painting directly on the wall, creating huge, readable, sequential "pages" of (an often quite abstract) comic. The term panels refers to the small framed areas in comics, portable easel paintings (a term often used to denigrate painting as obsolete), and the segments of a fresco (one progenitor of comics).
The Covers works are paintings and installations employing the structure of comic-book covers: bold lettering, price, date, numbering, image etc. In them, I revel in the inspirational sources which comprised my initial calling to be an artist, including the billboard sign-painting and display-window decoration of my father, as well as superhero-comic artists. I do not simply appropriate, rather, I engage these forms as an inherited yet incomplete grammar, coaxing it to proclaim celebrations and critical thoughts. This is not fusion or cross-over, but a disjunctive dialogue of arbitration.
Viewers are hand-held slide-show viewers: clickable comics-in-a-toy. These "multiples" are often an integral part of my installations. Here, I use the term to refer to the perceivers, who have divulged varied, contradictory, yet exciting responses to such fine-art-cum-comics. Gallery comics mix various modes of viewing, as well as several art (sub-)cultures.
Finally, for me and similar artists, it was important to discuss how we have developed from comics into fine art, not the reverse, as was true of Pop Art pioneers. We are not slumming. This is my culture, , even if it is perhaps habitually insufficient . It is an inherited vocabulary and "scene of instruction", with strong socio-political dimensions. My work contains a celebration of the remarkable discoveries of comic art, used to enliven currently moribund und mannerist fine art --- thus additionally a critique. Contrarily, it is also a celebration of what the ambition of fine art in form and content can bring to comics ---- therefore a critique once again. A complex and challenging new arena of art.
The entire text notes for the speech are on-line at my website.
One wonderful surprise for me was the appearance of the talented writer and editor Tom Field at my session. While I have known him for a while via internet and a discussion list, I had never met him face to face. Tom has written and published in a plethora of forms, books, magazines, comics, etc. He and I are both adamant fans of the classic comic artist Gene Colan . Field in fact authored a book on Colan, which has just been released --- Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan . The Preface for the book was written by top novelist Glen David Gold, author of the delightful and complex Carter Beats the Devil. I was honored to write the afterward. In addition to the joy of getting to meet him, Tom brought me an un-inked (pencils only), unpublished page of Colan's originally for a Spector comic. It's fabulous and he is a great guy.
Tom Field
The discussion afterward was lively and people continued even beyond the allotted time, forcing the next session to have to push us out! Lots of spot on, well-informed questions and comments. Before we left, I gave out a batch of my viewers/catalogues. Hill certainly organized an notable session, one that will be of assistance to me in the future. I immediately received a slew of business cards and more than 10 offers to have shows, be a visiting artist, give lectures etc. Thank you to all those interested, but most of all Christian Hill for organizing it and inviting me, and my fellow speakers for animating the session.
If you haven't had enough by this point, are an art historian or are a fan of some kind, a CD recording of our session can be purchased for US$ 24.00 at Conference Media.
The conference was finally at an end. Unfortunately. It is always so thrilling to see so many people speaking so eagerly about their own art interests and hungrily devouring the thoughts of others. I suggest going to the CAA conference, for info and inspiration, as well as job searches. It is well worth it. There are a great variety of viewpoints presented, not just the "usual suspects," a plurality of "takes" on art and artworld events. Invigorating.
I left for the flight home. Here are the gates in the Boston airport.
gates
Here is a strangely symbolic sign over a restaurant in the airport. That's "pain" as in French for "bread." So many miles to Chicago, so many miles to Zurich. I need to decide. I'm heading home to Zurich; I'll come visit my ex-home another time.
sign
I can see the mountains.
As a close, I would particularly like to thank the CAA Travel fund, without which I couldn't have afforded the flight. And Pro Helvetia, without which I couldn't have afforded the time off, hotel and more. Pro Helvetia is a bit like a Swiss NEA. They have had a struggle recently, as you may well know, due to a controversy over an exhibition they helped fund wherein a famous Swiss artist insulted the major right-wing populist politician in Switzerland. As a result, the parliament decided to shoot a censorious "warning shot" over the head of the institution, cutting their funding by one million Swiss francs (about US$ 800,000). Whatever one thinks of that politician, that artist, or "scandal seeking" artists or "headline-seeking" politicians, this was juvenile. That's the censorship of the future, using pressure to promote a hoped-for self-censorship. Pro-Helvetia has not given in to this and should be applauded.
Thanks for wading through all of this! Yours truly, Mark
March 29, 2006
Sharksposure: Chicago Art District
Ursuala Sokolowska and Sharkforum got a nice blurb over at the Chicago Art District web site. Thanks!
~
Sharks X SouthWest: Part 1
Recently Sharkforum's own Nicholas Tremulis and The Shark drove down to Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest music festival. What follows is part one of an email correspondence recounting their adventures. All images by Todd V. Wolfson. - ed.
Nicholas Tremulis:
As anyone who has dined with the Shark in Chicago knows; he is accustomed to the finest nouvelle cuisine our city has to offer. Therefore, it was with some trepidation and/or fear of losing a limb that I introduced my aquatic friend to the banal yet botulism free playground that is The Cracker Barrel.
For those of you who haven't experienced the CB, it is a franchise of identical restaurants and fake general stores spread out across the interstates headed any which direction once you get out of any city. Even the washrooms are always in the same corner. They are modeled on another time that probably never existed, Like a Norman Rockwell painting or an orchestral arrangement of a Scott Joplin tune. Also, the word "Cracker" is probably the best description of what you find inside this dining establishment. One look around the room makes you wonder whether the original owner branded his first feedbag as a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke.
It's hard to think of anything more honky.
Le Shark:
Nouvelle Cuisine? Well, on occasion perhaps -Mbut more importantly, food that is what it claims to be -Cracker Barrel -isn't a cracker barrel, the country store ain't a country store, and the food isn't 'down home cookin' but rather, this wretched MacDonald-ized variant on what it claims to be. Actually the one safe bet on the menu is, the prepackaged crackers........ Rockwell? -not a chance -this dump has 'Kinkade' written all over it.
Nicholas Tremulis:The Shark perused the menu trying desperately to find something familiar. Something resembling prey from his own fine dining waters. He had the look of a man trying to figure out the exchange rate of dollars to drachmas in an Athens whore house. Finally, it was the word "steak" that seemed the most familiar. The idea of fish in the middle of Missouri seemed as incongruous as wearing a tutu at a Hell's Angels rally. He dug in, fearing this meal could be his last. But, just as it was easy to drive all day through a grey sky, it was also easy to gnaw through a grey meal.
Le Shark:
Desperate? The Shark was merely disgusted. If anyone reading this really wants to understand why we live in a country that goes to war with the wrong country, is the only industrial nation not on the Kyoto accord, as the Greenland ice shelf slips into the north Atlantic with New York poised to assume the mantle of the mid 21st century 'Venice' of America - as for places like Miami? New Orleans? -remember when.....( The Shark will be there swimming around, but probably none of you will be- ).... just go to a Cracker Barrel or an 'Olive Garden'...and peruse the ambiance..thank god the ice age is coming...and admit it Nick -you were completely thrilled with the opportunity to lunch at Olive Garden.......The Shark wants to know, how can you stand to eat that crap?
Nicholas Tremulis:
We arrived in Joplin around 10:30pm on a Thursday night; the half way point to Austin and the place we'd sleep for the evening. We tried for a late dinner at another interstate attempt at ethnicity,"The Olive Garden", but were turned away, as they had already closed. This brought me to another hurdle for the Shark. The dreaded "Steak And Shake!". This a place where the worst excuse for a hamburger you've ever had is referred to as a steak. Balls! Pure balls. Even I find this place to be a suicide mission. Here, the Shark drew the line, ordering only a small dinner salad.
Now it was time for bed. The Shark and I went to a nearby Wal-Mart and began loading up on any over the counter drug reading "may cause drowsiness" and hurried back to the hotel, eager to mix and match our synergistic sleep potion.
Le Shark:Anyone who knows anything about sharks knows we never actually sleep........can we just get to Austin already?
Nicholas Tremulis:
The next day we woke up, albeit a bit on the groggy side due to the "drowsy" cocktail, slammed about 20 shots of espresso between us and began the day's drive through Oklahoma and the other half of the United States; Texas. I've learned from numerous tours through Austin before our present odyssey not to get exited upon crossing the Texas state line. Your only half way there and the rest of the drive is uneventful to say the least, unless you happen to make the mistake of stopping at the truck stop in Waco. (whacko would be a better name for it)
Our hotel was 18 or so miles outside of the center of town, so we checked in, dropped off our gear and bee-lined it to Congress street and the Hotel room of my "brother from another mother", Alejandro Escovedo and his wife; the poet, Kim Christoff. The Shark, whose paintings reside on Escovedo's forthcoming album, had also brought a painting, as a present to the happy couple. He proceeded to rip the inferior hotel painting off the wall with his teeth, replacing it with his own superior work. Before he could adjust the lighting in the room to focus on its new found masterpiece. I suggested we take a stroll down the street to an art gallery to catch our friend Jon Langford at his book signing. Jon had finished performing and signing for the day and was ready to start draining the state of all the margaritas he could find. We convened for dinner at a great mexican restaurant with a table filled with other Chicagoans from the Bloodshot/Hideout gang. The food was quite a giant step up from the Soylent Green we'd been eating on the road. Saw my pal Charlie Sexton while we were eating there and laid an advance copy of my new album "Ultraviolet" on him. We said our goodbye's and headed for my home away from home in Austin: The Continental Club.
Now the fireworks begin! As it turned out, tonight's headliner was a super group from New Orleans I've been waiting to see for a long time called "Little Band Of Gold", headed by guitar hot shot C.C. Adcock. Tonight, however, was even more special. They were playing back-up band to a crackerjack line-up of New Orleans and Texas's finest R&B artists from the 60's. We saw Archie Bell (The Tighten-Up) doing his thing on stage. The amazing singer/drummer Warren Storm. (drummer on almost all of the Excello recording sessions, including all that Slim Harpo shit!) Then came an amazing singer from Houston, Texas that took our heads right off! The pyro-technic bomb the evening: Roy Head. Roy, like Wayne Cochran, was one of the "white James Brown's" of his age. Here was a man with a lot of flash and plenty in the dash! He blew through a train load of R&B be chestnuts, including his big hit: "Treat Me Right" whipping the microphone around with lightening speed and catching it with Bruce Lee precision. The Shark and I were mesmerized. After the set we said our hello's and went upstairs and found to our surprise an art gallery filled with original drawings of the famed dragster magazine cartoon character RATFINK. Could life be more beautiful? Sure it could, but this was pretty close.
Le Shark:Well Nicky poo you've pretty much summed it up - The Shark would add, I'm doing both the front and back covers of Alejandro's new cd -which I'm very happy about as Alejandro -and his amazing orchestra are one of the great bands on this melting planet at the moment. We should note that The ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO ORCHESTRA will be here in Chicago April 28th at Old Town School Of Folk Music -and back for a two night stay I believe in the near future after that - we will announce the dates here on Sharkforum.
I would also add, that no amount of superlatives could possibly describe the riveting unbelievably intense stage persona and performance of Mr. Roy Head.......we stood there in a crowd that included Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top fame and Ray Davies -all in utter and complete amazement of the greatness we were witnessing. What Nick may not be aware of, is that due to the cramped quarters of The Continental's stage, Mr. Head took to the floor to perform his finale -'The Snake' -which, consists of the 62 year old singer doing a backflip landing face down on the floor and then comes the slither.........The Shark was duly impressed.
Paul K Interviews Steve Gaghan
Replay: from time to time we bring back a piece which we feel warrants further attention. This is one such piece. -ed.
Stephen Gaghan, Oscar winner and Louisville, Kentucky native, is a man with more talent and more life experiences than most of the rest of us could ever hope to understand. Louisville has sent forth some fine artists (My Morning Jacket are burning up the pop charts as I write) but only one of them has won an Oscar. The single fact of his success as a storyteller (which is essentially what he is) is that his ability to write and to move people emotionally was forged in the crisis of his drug addiction. And his ability was not destroyed by that addiction. The specter of DOPE and dependency in general hangs heavily over his best works ("Traffic," "Syriana") and his best works are as good as anything American cinema has seen since the glory days of the Ashby-Hopper-Coppola-Altman-Scorsese 1970's. An ex-dope addict, he has suffered for his art in the righteous and classic sense. The Easy Riders and the Raging Bulls have a clear heir in Gaghan. And yet Gaghan himself is less ambitious than he is eager. Eager to write better screenplays, eager to make better films, but with seemingly no ambition to add his name to any sort of pantheon, especially when there is more work to do and more stories to tell.
Great artwork comes from pain, and Steve Gaghan is a great artist. A great director can tell any story and make it shine, just as a great singer can turn even the lamest song into a heartbreaking masterpiece. A great artist either creates new worlds cutting from whole cloth, or else he or she lives the story and then retains the ability to recount it. Gaghan, obviously, is in the latter category. These days mark a transitional time for Gaghan; the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one. With "Traffic" and the accrued cache of the TV work he'd done before, Steve got bumped up to the A-list. When they let him direct, he stumbled with Katie Holmes and "Abandon." His recent directorial effort, "Syriana" puts him securely back on the top tier and cements his status as one of the best director/writers currently operating. No more need to prove himself, Steve can, for the foreseeable future, film and write whatever he wants. It's daunting, but perhaps not for a humble fellow who has worked steadily and overcome a few serious obstacles in arriving.
Gaghan is plainspoken and earnest in his answers to a host of disparate questions that did not sport much of a connecting thread. What he has to say is self-explanatory and best left largely unedited (by me).
Q: As a writer, who are your favorite writers?
A: I like so many different writers in different forms but I tend to go work by work because people have good books and bad, good films and bad. Usually it's just people i've been thinking about lately. Novelists: Graham Greene, The Count - Leo Tolstoy, Checkhov -- particularly for his innovations in dramatic writing -- Wm Faulkner, Richard Yates, Nathaniel West, too many to mention, really.
Q: People working today?
A: I thought The Corrections was a major book. I think Richard Ford's Sportswriter and Independence Day are classics. In fact, I think if Ford knocks out the third in the trilogy and it's as good as the second they should give him the Nobel. Of film writers, that much maligned group, I think Eric Roth is really good. Scott Frank. Frank Pierson. Oddly I think it's harder to get into the hall of fame in screenwriting than in fiction writing. To my way of thinking you only have to write two great scripts. One great script and you're a great screenwriter, two and you're in the hall of fame. But almost no one has written two great scripts. Pierson and Roth probably have. Alvin Sargent. Maybe Robert Bolt. Maybe Dalton Trumbo. There are a lot of pros out in Hollywood and New York, people that can craft a good, shootable scene, who write clean, fast stuff, but they either have no souls or no ambition and really just get hooked on the money so fast it'll make your head spin. These are the people about whom Trumbo said, circa 1950, "they pay you a thousand bucks a week and pretty soon you think you need it." I think, hey, a thousand a week that ain't bad
Q: So as a director, who are your favorite directors?
A: All time hall of fame: Rosellini, Coppola, Clouzot, Godard, De Sica, Howard Hawks, Hal Ashby, Tarkovsky, particularly Andre Rublev which is a film you can watch over and over, understanding more each time. I love Z and Battle of Algiers. The 400 Blows is incomparable and perfect. More recently I loved "Sexy Beast," "Punch Drunk Love," Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"... Michael Mann is always doing something interesting and usually Fincher is, too, even if the films don't completely gel there's tons to learn from. I love the cinematographers Robert Elswit, Harris Savides, Ellen Kuras and Matty Libatique. This year I really loved "Junebug." The last line of that film, how it's delivered, where, the shooting, just slays me... as good as the last line of "Breathless."
Q: Ever been approached by HBO to work on the Wire or the Sopranos? Some of these shows including Showtime's Sleeper Cell seem to copy some of your moves.
A: Friends of mine, Robin Green and Mitch Burgess, who I met when writing for American Gothic, are the Sopranos producers under David Chase, and early on, when they only had a pilot, they reached out to me to see if I'd want to write on the show. I watched the pilot and the great genius Gaghan decided it sucked. I didn't buy the shrink, thought her performance blew, felt the ducks in the pool was derivative and mannered, all that kind of pseudo-critical theory bullshit you can pile onto something. Really, I'd decided I didn't want to write TV anymore and wasn't going to be tempted even by something good because no matter what, on the very best day ever on the Sopranos, you're still serving someone else's voice and that's not the business I want to be in, and isn't why I write.
Q: If oil is the west's biggest addiction, then what is the cure and how bad will the withdrawal be?
A: Imagine three hundred million starving, shivering monkeys huddled naked in their own piss and shit waiting for some democrat president to get the solar energy panels up on the roof of America. It's gonna hurt worse than kicking nicotine. It's gonna hurt. But we are a plucky, can-do lot here in the USA and I think we'll figure it out, not before we've done irreversible damage to the earth but, hey, that's not W's problem is it? Because he will have choked on a pretzel and gone to the great Skull and Bones frat party in the sky long before Kentucky becomes a desert. And truthfully it's hard for me to be too critical since although i'm trying to become "carbon neutral" I still have a '66 GTO which I do drive about once a month.
Q: Do you read a lot of new fiction to look for stories or will you be continuing to work up your own original scripts?
A: I usually find some book or underlying thing that has the seed of an idea, something that I'm interested in, that is a jumping off point from which to make up an entire world. I've needed this for some reason, a flag to plant in the sand with the studios, something to get me going... I'm trying to change that currently by writing something that is truly strange while also writing something loosely based on the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.
Q: Regarding the British "Traffik" miniseries, what was your method for adapting it? What were it's strong and weak points (as you perceived them) and is it easier to write an original script or an adaptation?
A: I was working on a satire on the war on drugs for over a year before I ever met (director Steven) Soderbergh and "Traffik." We had lunch and he pitched me the miniseries. But I was already writing the same thing, I said, at Fox 2000. I watched it once and realized that the problem I was having writing my film was because I had a single protagonist. And he had to virtually time travel around to cover all the turf I was trying to fit in: Columbia, Bolivia, Mexico, San Diego, Washington, Louisville (where it was originally set... moved to Ohio because Cincinnati has better looking inner city locations). So I watched the miniseries and knew I was stealing that approach. But I loved "King of the Hill," Soderbergh's film, and wanted to work with him so we threw in together. At that point I never watched the miniseries a second time. Truthfully, I admired the scope of it, but when push came to shove I found the plot mechanics largely forced and that it was very melodramatic. So i fought against this draft after draft. Ultimately I had some of those devices forced on me. They tidy up some loose ends in handy way. But the only story I care about is Benicio (Del Toro's) because that's the one we made up from whole cloth and the one that came out of my research in and on Mexico. I also like some of what (Michael) Douglas discovers in Washington which also came from my own observations of our little Nigeria on the Potomac. And much of Erika Christensen's drug use and adventures are my own use and adventures so it's kind of nice to have made use of all that wasted time. In terms of adapting i just don't look at the underlying stuff very much. There was a book under "Abandon," I think all they shared in common is that they take place in college. There is a book under "Syriana" (Robert Baer's "See No Evil") but less than one paragraph and none of the plot or stories come from it. There is a book under my next one but it is really just a point of departure. "Traffic's" strong points ultimately were showing that upper middle-class kids, our best and brightest, our hopes for the future, were fueling the misery of this international interdiction biz known as the War on Drugs. And Soderbergh's reintroduction of doc-style shooting to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. the idea that it's a health care issue rather than a police issue was and remains a valid point for somebody to be raising.
Q: Is there anything particular about Louisville and/or growing up here that informs your current work to a significant or noticeable degree?
A: I think coming from the south and having been a bit of a generalist, living many places, trying many careers, etc, gives me a bit of an advantage in that I have a peculiar perspective. A lot of talk in Hollywood centers on "the flyover," "the red state punters," "the middle" and it's extremely helpful to actually consider oneself a "red state punter." My parents still live on the middle of the block in the middle of the neighborhood in the middle of the city in the middle of the country and I have many friends in Louisville still. I'm trying to push the envelope of what is a "Hollywood film" but I'm doing it in a way that doesn't lose sight of the fact that I am the audience. I am the person I'm trying to reach. I know because I don't underestimate where I'm from, the people who are where I'm from. And I believe that a lot of other people do underestimate. They look out the window of their jets as they cross the country on their way to Europe and think... well, I don't know what they think, but if you look at the average film released in this country, they're not thinking very highly of the audience.
Q: Does moving within the higher hollywood echelons come easily to you or is it predatory and difficult and a pain in the ass? Does it help or hinder the creative process?
A: I just find that the higher up the ladder you scrabble the more people are focused on problem solving and the less ego driven it seems to be. The more talented and experienced the collaborator, be it a studio head or a huge star or producer, the more focused everyone is on solving things. Everyone can pretty quickly identify what's wrong but there's a whole class of people who just go to lunch and gossip and these are the people I like to avoid.
Q: Any ideas about your next project?
A: "Blink," a book by Malcolm Gladwell. WIth Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star.
Q: Any outside hobbies? Are you a big music fan, or sports, or politics or comic books or whatever?
A: I love music and movies and playing with my children and surfing and snowboarding. I can surf in my backyard and sometimes go out twice in the same day. This is the biggest drawback to Louisville - no break on the Ohio.
Q: Your political stance seems clear to me from the films but is there anything specific you'd like to state regarding the status quo? Since "Syriana" deals with the geopolitics of oil, I suppose it is fair to ask what you think about our presence in Iraq.
A: I stand with President Reagan's National Security Advisor, General Odom, who said he thinks it will be, "the single biggest strategic error in the history of the United States. It was a colossal fuckup. We're handing the country to Iran. There will be Civil War. We destroyed the place, murdered so many children. For what? So Exxon and BP could make record profits quarter after quarter. I also think they lied to get us into the war. I think that if the democrats take back congress there will be impeachment proceedings against the president.
Q: Is there anything at all good about drugs (in general) vis-a-vis the creative process?
A: No. Drugs and alcohol are a massive distraction. At first they're a crutch to have connection with strangers and friends but rapidly they become the end in themselves and you have less connection than you had before which in many cases is zero, so you end up in a hole. I would binge and then write to try to stave off depression. I never wrote one usable sentence drunk or high. it was like having two arms and one leg tied behind your back, hopping around shrieking "look at me" while you try to be filmmaker, husband, friend. What a joke.
Q: How involved are you in the casting process and what are your main criteria?
A: I make every casting decision, no exceptions. I don't want to see the strings, don't want to feel the person acting. They have to be capable of inhabiting it, of making it feel true, or it won't work for me.
Q: How important do you consider music to be in a film?
A: Music is beyond critical. "Casting" the composer is almost as important a decision as hiring the director of photography. I need someone who is collaborative and willing to take risks, to try and do something that isn't the thing that is the reason you hired them. I believe the score of "Syriana" is very, very good and Alexandre Desplat is, in my opinion, a brilliant guy (Desplat is up for an Oscar).
Q: What was it like to work with Friedkin on "Rules of Engagement"?
A: I love Billy. No two ways about it. He's a great guy and a great storyteller, and he made a perfect film, but it wasn't "Rules of Engagement."
Q: One last question. What do you say to the consistent voiced criticism that "Syriana" is too complex for the average viewer to follow, that it is downright confusing? Also, are you particularly drawn to complicated works of art, you know James Joyce or Pynchon or Tolstoy, something along those lines?
A: We shot over 200 different locations on four continents in 75 days, which is a lot. We also came in four million under budget. But now I'm so damn sick of all things "Syriana," I just want it to go away. So that's it. (..but) The film is not too complex. It's challenging but also works. It works even if you don't understand every last thing on the first viewing. This said, I probably cut too much out of it, some scenes with Bob and his wife, Bennett and his father, that really let the piece breathe, let the audience orient, that made it less "schematic," particularly in the second half. Who the hell knows. I don't think I'm drawn to complexity per se, but I know what I like is shit that feels real and truthful. One little moment of human truth can sustain me for a long, long time. And it comes in unlikely places. For instance, there is more of what I consider the true details of the messy human condition in the first half of "In Her Shoes" than in almost every "Oscar contender" added up. The relationship with the sisters, the ache of uncertainty, the small, random decisions that just happen, that aren't the product of great rational thought. This is what I'm drawn to. And any time you want to write about a system you'll find it easier to fragment the protagonist into multiple characters to cover more turf. And Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is my all-time favorite book. At least the first 750 pages.
In case the reader is curious about question #15 above, rest assured. I wondered myself. I even placed a bet with a movie-loving, "Syriana"-loving friend of mine. Which William Friedkin film did Stephen consider "perfect"? It had to be either "The French Connection" or "The Exorcist." I bet on "The Exorcist." I lost five dollars and -- given that "The French Connection" was one of the 1970s' original maps of addiction and public corruption --I should have known better.
The Pearl Fog
Open the door now./ Go roll up the collar of your coat/ To walk in the changing scarf of mist.
Tell your sins here to the pearl fog/ And know for once a deepening night/ Strange as the half-meanings/ Alurk in a wise woman's mousey eyes.
Yes, tell your sins/ And know how careless a pearl fog is/ Of the laws you have broken
wrote Carl Sandburg in a pome he called "Pearl Fog."
March 28, 2006
Spike Lee's "Inside Man" and the resurrection of Sidney Lumet
Inside Man
4 stars
An incipient Sidney Lumet revival continues to bubble up from the underbelly of the American film community. The resurgence of films about police corruption, along with the recent rereleases of "Network" and "Dog Day Afternoon" herald a renewed appreciation for the 1970's master's works. Like "16 Blocks," Spike Lee's "Inside Man" draws heavily from a Lumet piece; in this case it's "Dog Day Afternoon" with a significant twist.
Jodie Foster and Denzel Washington are the good guys, Clive Owen is a bank robber and writer-director Lee comes on as an African-American Hitchcock (or Lumet). Lee and Lumet (along with, perhaps, Jewison, Altman, Sayles and, recently Paul Haggis) are adept at treating racism as something which is a GIVEN; up-front, on-the-table, and often just as funny as it is evil. "Inside Man" is not one of Spike's overtly racial joints, so the preceding is a bit of a digression.
What "Inside Man" is is an intelligent heist film with plenty of suspense and atmosphere to burn. It offers a typically intense Denzel Washington performance, but, just as importantly, it returns Jodie Foster to a level of serious dramatic work she has not worked at in her last several outings. Owen is a star as well, with charisma to burn even though he spends a good deal of time with a canvas sack over his face. Owen has gone in 5 short years from an indie curiousity in "Croupier" to working with the likes of Mike Nichols and Spike Lee.
As a bank robber, Owen is something of a criminal genius but his character is also somewhat less than fully drawn. He is also getting some strategic assistance in this heist from the title character. These are, in the end, piddling concerns. When the title is finally explained at the tail of the film it is tribute to the genius of both the director and first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz that the ending is truly a surprise. "Inside Man" features two of the best plot twists in recent cinematic memory.
And before deciding on "Inside Man," let us take a moment to praise Spike Lee unreservedly for everything he's ever done in film. Lee has made any number of weak films but he's never, ever made a truly crappy one. Along the way, of course, he has made a handful of masterpieces and done so with a sense of joy one only finds in the very finest artists. Some claim "Do the Right Thing" to be his high point, a benchmark he will never surpass. Others claim that Lee's moves toward the mainstream in recent years have made him "less black." Nothing could be more false. Lee has made many films since "Do the Right Thing" which were better -- the underrated "Jungle Fever" comes to mind. Recently there have been "Bamboozled" and "25th Hour" both excellent films. Lee is that rare artist who continues to improve even as his work is assimilated (that's really the only word) into the mainstream. Denzel did a great job for Spike in "Malcolm X" but this performance here might even be better. In any case, "Inside Man" is one Spike Lee joint I'd be happy to smoke again and again and again. Word.
crenellated, adj.
1. Having battlements.
2. Indented; notched: a crenelated wall.
“before you unsnapped first
the crenellated shoulder wings
then the fumbling then the little
ankle wings and sent them back”
—Brenda Hillman, “Air for Mercury”
Read at Boston Review
March 27, 2006
There Are No Free Lunches Here At Sharkforum
The Shark himself along with fellow Sharkpack member Nick Tremulis recently swam down to Austin Texas for the South by Southwest Music Conference. Stay tuned for our two part coverage of that event along with a special feature detailing how The Shark saved the day when Mr. Tremulis was attacked with malice by an errant tornado bent on his destruction........ ~
Fire in the Belly - Act 5: The World as Viewed From The Water Tower
By the time May rolled around I had a large body of work together, and I was ready for attention. None developed. My trips to the AIC that summer involved, for the most part, staring at a small Van Gogh self portrait. I would drill into those eyes with everything I had. Nothing answered back, in a very deep voice. The painting was radiant. I was sullen.
But I was undeterred. I had seen Roger Murray sally forth in blissful ignorance, and look where it had gotten him! Surely I’d go farther. Hadn’t it been predicted?
“When you grow up,” folks would say, “you’re going to be an artist.”
My Mother would nod. “That’s right.”
They were cursing me, but they were right. I glided through all the high school art shows, drew cartoons in yearbooks and painted a portrait of my Grand Dad just before he died. It was the fall of my junior year of high school, and my Mom cried when she saw it. I almost did too. She was always the reason, she was the cause. While she unleashed withering criticism on anyone who dared disagree with her, she always approved of and supported me. And that approval meant everything in the world to me, because it was so rare to hear it from her. More than that, she had a sophisticated, if idiosyncratic esthetic. Everyone else in my family thought of me as a pathetic, indulged wierdo, but not Mom. No matter how outrageous my behavior, no matter how cruel, antisocial or thoughtless I could be, I was always covered by her umbrella of sanction. She was the one who bought me the sketchpads and pencils. She introduced me to all the Renaissance Masters, and she kept absolutely everything I ever touched. At school I was a pariah. At home I was a prince. An art school scholarship got me to Chicago, and I even had a painting on the cover of the School of The Art Institute catalog. I was poised for greatness.
It seemed at this time as though my slump would just be a blip on the screen. I had tugged on this little thread of found object sculpture, and now the thread was pulling on me. God help the man who has no muse.
Every failure in my personal life was excused by the fact that I was a great artist in waiting. I ran through jobs and girls. I even got kicked out of an apartment, but it never really mattered as long as I had this one thing in my life that was special.
I know I’ve made it sound like Roger and I never got along, but that’s not true. There were times, however few, when he could stop being a spaz long enough to enjoy meaningful interaction. Without question the best times we ever had together were up on the water tower.
The Belly’s greatest feature by far was the water tower on it’s roof. Standing guard atop the building’s southeast corner, standing like an extra from War of The Worlds, solid wood and wire cable. There are still hundreds of these old tanks in Chicago; they provided the water pressure for the old fire sprinkler systems. Most all of them have been empty for years, and one by one they get broken down and hauled away by wood dealers who sell the wood for a lot of money.
Our studio was in the southeast corner of the building, too, and there was a stairwell behind a bolted steel door situated in the corner. One day we decided to jimmy the bolt and have a look up top. The door wasn’t even locked. We’d spent 8 months in an unlocked work space. There were no lights in the stairwell, and we didn’t have a flashlight, so we groped our way up two flights of stairs. Furniture was strewn about, and we both tripped a few times, but we didn’t hear any rodents scurrying about, and we felt pretty safe. The darkness was worth it. Opening the roof door was like watching time lapse photography of a sunrise. The city of neighborhoods stretched out in every direction.
I think we were equally drawn to the tower, but how could anyone resist it’s allure? Neither of us spoke. We just walked right over to it and started climbing. The ladder was rusted but intact, and I don‘t think either of us looked down or stopped. The platform around the bottom of the tank was missing boards, but it was otherwise solid. We looked around, then sat down facing the river. It was a strange sensation to look down; the river was moving, and there was a lot of it. The result was to feel as though we were really above the water, as opposed to the small slope of shore beneath us.
We sat there for hours, and didn’t really say much. Roger pulled a joint out his pocket and we got high. The sun went down over the Kennedy and we watched it as the traffic eased. We just sat there and took it all in. The tower swayed a bit with the wind, but the effect was less noticeable when the sun went down. We didn’t go all the way up to the roof of the tank; that would have been overkill. But we were already a full 30 feet off the roof of the building, and easily 90 feet from the ground.
++++
Next week: Act 6: It’s All About The M-O-N-E-Y
<< Last week - Act 4: I Discover Urban Archeology
Joel Dorn's NYC: Volume 11
Poem of the Week: "To the Day" by Chris Glomski
Chris Glomski lived and worked for a year in Pisa, Italy before returning to Chicago. He is the author of a chapbook, IL LA, published by Noemi Press, and is at work on translations of various contemporary Italian poets. His poetry is variously informed by Mallarme and the great Italian masters he teaches, studies, and translates. Purchase Transparencies Lifted From Noon from Spuyten Duyvil Press.
To the Day
I would ask that you hold me—if not like spoon to
flame then because I am falling beneath the constant and alien
and fatal in faces. Hurry up good afternoon.
Know I am what you are looking for,
stowed in a hip-pocket as you straddle the nights
and I wish it were true—I do so much there.
Where satellites carve open a green sky, it is enough to look
to be patted down by all of it, and it’s all within me, though you have yet
to see. Suddenly I’m erupting and how quiet.
Grip me as you would blade, then cut away
our proper shapes: your talons, my severed finger—
then for you to perch there, carry me off.
March 26, 2006
Sharksposure: Filmmaker Magazine
Ray Pride and Sharkforum get a nice push over at the Filmmaker Magazine web site. Here's a taste:
More: Go here. ~
FILMMAKER BLOG
Saturday, March 25, 2006
MORE FILMS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND ARCHITECTURE
Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride posts all manner of thoughts and links regarding contemporary cinema. But over at Shark Forum, the Chicaco artists online group, he posts more personal stuff that might not make the general-interest cut of his other sites.
More: Go here. ~
March 25, 2006
TONIGHT at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC
Fiendish Thingy featuring Sharkforum's very own John Kruth, Dogbowl, Dave Dreiwitz of Ween and Andy Demos with special guest John S. Hall of King Missile fame.
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, NYC
Saturday, March 25, 8:00 pm
$10
~
March 24, 2006
you can't?
“There’s no YOU CAN’T in Vegas”, well at least that’s what the monorail ad says. So I decided to walk away from “the strip” towards a potential vegetarian / vegan friendly eatery. After receiving two signs that I should turn back, I realized “I Couldn’t”. The first sign was a strong smell of weed and the second a couple of methed out gentlemen. I didn’t feel the need to find out what my 3rd sign would be; if any. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I’d prefer to label it aware.
Beware of God
Beware of God
by Shalom Auslander
pub. by Simon and Schuster
195 pp., $13.00
A dozen odd short stories all focusing on metaphysical questions as to the existence of God might seem like a hard-sell for anyone besides a New York intellectual, and, indeed it is. That, of course, does not mean this is a weak book and it certainly is not.
Brooklynite Shalom Auslander has fearlessly addressed every major moral issue of the day with great intelligence and humor, but also with a sense of irony which suggests he may ultimately have no permanent moral stance.
That has nothing to do with the writing, which is uniformly excellent. Everyman characters with names like Leon Rothenberg and Moishe Cohen (random, synthesized examples of my own) appear and relentlessly challenge metaphorical Gods who either ignore them or else launch into 3-page bitch sessions of their own, explaining why He (God) has had more than his share of puny human beings pathetically praying and hoping that He will put some kind of end to their tiny troubles. It is an attitude not unlike that of the God in Ray Davies' Kinks classic, "Big Sky": ...Big Sky looks down on all the people who think they got problems ... Big Sky's too big to cry, Big Sky's too occupied...
Schlubs, schmucks and shlemiels -- those are Auslander's characters. One owns a dog which is evidently the Messiah. It's a humorous book, and a very cynical one, but one whose central viewpoint is hard to deny. Perhaps God has done His best to help us. Perhaps He regrets having created us (supposedly) in His image. Maybe he is tired of listening to our prayers and settling our unending disputes. Surely this is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of recent history.
Which is not to say that this is a great book impervious to criticism. Terribly compelling, and very laudable in that it doesn't shrink from major philosophical issues, "Beware of God" has its flaws. It is monochromatic; every story is brief and deals exclusively with the broken promises made between Man and God. Hitler, the Golem, Yankel Rosenberg and Charlie Brown show up, as does the actor John Saxon, Jerry Fallwell, Allah and the Three Stooges. I was surprised that Howard Cosell wasn't a character (then I would've been able to talk about boxing). Meyer Lansky gets no mention either. A pity. The metaphysics are somewhat simplistic and overly Judaic. It is possible to enjoy these pieces even if you're not Jewish (I did), but it is not necessarily easy to do so. The writer is brilliant and yet he clearly sees himself as one of the "chosen."
Perhaps, but, chosen for what? For success, for example, for leadership, for suffering?
The overwhemingly Jewishness of it all can become trying. I understand the themes of guilt and doubt. Personally, I am a self-hating Goy (a category I myself created). I am a Catholic of dubious loyalty. Still, the face-off with God is both time-honored and compelling. This book sheds some light and perhaps generates a slight bit of heat but it ultimately provides more laughs than answers.
March 22, 2006
paludal, adj.
Of or relating to a swamp; marshy.
After conversation...
Over the past ten years or so, I've interviewed dozens of people about the movies they've made.
I consistently blank on any memory of shaking hands in greeting. After each of the interviews, usually at a luxury hotel on Michigan Avenue or River North, I've grabbed the first bold image to clear my head from a half hour or hour of sustained conversation about art. This was after talking to Cameron Crowe about Elizabethtown and Kirsten Dunst's summer dresses.
After interviewing actor Patrick Wilson and screenwriter Brian Nelson about their brightly colored art-shocker Hard Candy.
After interviewing Scott McGehee and David Siegel about their light-fixated Bee Season.
After interviewing Marc Levin about his documentary Protocols of Zion.
After interviewing Richard Shepard about his gaudy Matador.
After interviewing Shane Black about his macho-bursting riff, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
After interviewing Wim Wenders about cities and landscapes for Don't Come Knocking.
On the way to interview Wim Wenders.
March 21, 2006
Tonight at Double Door in Chicago
Sharkforum's own Rick Rizzo performs with Steve Wynn at the Double Door. Here's a nice piece in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune about Rick and Steve, and their bands.
Doors 8:00 - Show 9:00 - $10.00
Double Door · 1572 N. Milwaukee · Chicago, IL · 773.489.3160
~ ~
March 20, 2006
Fire in the Belly - Act 4: I Discover Urban Archeology
I still remember the day that I really started working with found objects. I had collected them before, converting them to bookends and paperweights, but I had never really crawled inside their meaning or potential. I remember the day because it was April 15th, and I got off the O’Hare train at the Wicker Park station. The walk from the Damen, North, Milwaukee intersection to the studio at Cortland and Mendel is about a mile and a half, and it was a beautiful day. I’d gotten off work early in order to get my tax return in the mail at the Post Office downtown. In those days the downtown station was still housed in the hulking WPA era building which straddles Congress and the Eisenhower Expressway. I walked down Jackson to the subway and got on the O’Hare train. It probably would have been easier to take the Howard up to Armitage, but that train would have let me out in Lincoln Park, and I really don’t like it there.
So I went out of my way. As a result I stumbled upon a small trove of urban treasure in the form of an old three flat which had been gutted and stood open. Inside were industrial objects both large and small, representing processes both muscular and chemical. Dirty puddles covered most of the floor, but I just walked right in. Leaning against the wall was an old wooden dresser. The paint, which was the color of a hooker’s lipstick, was worn away on all sides, revealing the grain and providing an intriguing figure/ground composition. Before long I had collected together a mound of objects, not too close to the door, but close enough to get at easily.
I filled my arms and started walking. By the time I got to Ashland I was exhausted; I’d been exhilarated by a rush of ideas, and completely unrealistic about the distance I would have to carry these objects. I didn’t really have enough money for a cab, so I set my loot down and I rested. Within five minutes I was back on my feet and moving north on Ashland. I dumped my stash under the Kennedy overpass, and bolted up Cortland for The Belly. I grabbed an old shipping cart from the hallway and made for the elevator. By midnight I’d made the round trip, bringing back everything from the building on North Avenue.
What followed was an almost obsessive search for objects everywhere I went. I even borrowed a friend’s truck and drove up to the North Shore for their annual Haul Anything Away day. Sometimes, while scouring the streets of Chicago, I’d see other people walking in a manner I thought I’d invented, eyes to the ground, and I’d wonder if they were my competition. Most of them were homeless.
How could I have missed it? These objects were practically readymades, and Chicago is a veritable found object factory. Since that day in April I’ve become a savvy urban archaeologist. For example, all variety of under-carriage car and truck parts can be found at busy intersections and freeway ramps just after the snow melts away. And you can still find places where people just dump, like at Division and Halsted, across the street from Cabrini Green.
Each of these found objects has a physical beauty and cryptic history all it’s own. Sometimes I’ll stare at an object for hours on end, pondering it’s possible pasts. Roger was a little intrigued by these objects, and he was politely interested in the pieces which they produced. But I never got the impression that he really respected this direction much.
“I mean, really,” he said, “where do you go with this stuff?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He smiled at me and punched me on the shoulder. “Buddy, come on, lighten up! Ev’y little thing gonna be alright.”
I pursed my lips. Roger had changed over the winter. He was getting a fair amount of attention from dealers, as well as other artists. There were always people visiting the studio, and they were never there to look at my work. He had figured out that some of the classic rock he held so dear was acceptable amongst hipsters. Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin; it was cool to be old school, as long as you could back up your musical esthetic with something current. He blended in just fine, but how could he lose? He bought a copy of every cd I played for him, and never once found fault with even one of them. What’s that about? He was so busy jumping my train that he didn’t stop to think about how obvious this aping was. I was appalled, and felt violated. He glommed onto a music esthetic that had taken years to develop, and they had been tough years to be different. You try telling some linebacker in your senior class that you’re going to see a band called The New York Dolls. I earned it, not him. I stopped bringing in new music.
Melanie was marginally more supportive. She was a big fan of absurdism in general and Marcel Duchamp in particular. Her gallery represented people like Donald Lipski and Dennis Oppenheim, as well as artists like Martin Puryear and Robert Ryman. We saw these shows together, and we spent many hours gazing into Joseph Cornell boxes at the Art Institute.
For all her comprehension of the art historical soil my work was rooted in, for all her stylistic acumen, and her ability to connect the dots of influence, I never trusted her instincts, and never detected that she got the deep connect with my work. I saw how she got excited about Roger’s new pieces. She responded much differently to mine.
“Your styles are about different thinks.”
“Different thinks?”
“Yea,” she replied, “Roger’s work is more like music, or dancing. Your work is more like trig.”
“My work is like trigonometry.”
“His work lives in the Kingdom of The Soul, and your work exists in the Kingdom of The Intellect.”
“I get it,” I put a finger to my fore head, “you’re saying my work has no groove.”
She kissed me on the neck. “Don’t be shtoopid.”
I know now that she was right. I was so dug in to the conceptual qualities of found objects in particular, and Form in general, that I couldn’t see the value in any other way of thinking. Formalism can be freeing in it’s rigor, but it can get dogmatic, too. I ranted at both friends and neighbors that painting was dead. I held forth to all who would listen on the primacy of sculpture as an art form.
“It boils down to creating reality.” I’d insist. “Painting is reliant upon the canvas, a substraight of little or no relation to the meaning of the object, and as a result painting is dependent on something outside itself for it’s meaning. It’s derivative.”
Blah blah blah.
It all made sense, to me at least, but anyone who listened would just get pissed. “Go read Plato’s Republic.” I’d sneer. No one cared.
And that’s the funniest part of it - all that escetic crap didn’t mean anything real. These ideas made sense on their own, for one person, but they had nothing to do with the process of connecting to others. It was just too personal. That’s ironic, really, because my militancy was a result of an insistence on meaning, and a belief that significant meaning is the glue between people.
“Everything means something.” I’d say to Mel.
“Nothing means anything.” She’d volley. We’d go around and around on that one.
How do we measure meaning, anyway? Isn’t it about the fact that more than one person interprets things the same way? Agreement is a necessary ingredient, at least for starters.
Roger offered an answer, of course. He had a response whenever he felt one was needed.
“What is art, anyway, y’know man?”
“You’re looking at it.” I said.
“I mean, is art a lens, or is it a hammer? On the one hand it’s a mirror, but it’s also a scalpel. It’s weird.”
“That’s not the kind of meaning I’m talking about, Roger.”
“Are you sure, dude? Are you really sure?”
“Yes, dude, I’m really sure.”
See what I mean? I’m pretty tolerant - this guy was just too much.
++++
Next week: The World as Viewed From The Water Tower
<< Last week - Act 3: Roger Gets A Break
Poem of the Week: "Epitaph X" by Thomas Heise
Thomas Heise was born in northern Michigan, but raised in Southern Florida. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University, where he also taught as a Lecturer. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Ploughshares, Slope, Verse, Modern Fiction Studies, and in the BioCritique series. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he is writing a second book of poetry and finishing a study on twentieth-century urban American culture and literature. Horror Vacui is available from Sarabande Books.
Epitaph X
My birthright I have traded for a petal dress
and a summer eulogy. I have pawned my soul
for this opal ring, the color of a pale, taxidermied eye.
If I could carry calla lilies on my shoulder once more
like an umbrella in daylight, I would lean them
on the cemetery gate and sleep until the groundskeeper found me.
For some of us, beauty is carcinoma.
The saint’s stigmata is god’s rose, bestowed
for forgoing a human lover, who will, of course, die.
I died last year. My mother made her tears into crystal
earrings and clipped them to my ears. “Son, you will
pay for your sin,” my father spoke from his throne of glass.
Stars burn a sharp, white nacre until they evaporate.
The moon’s flamingo unfolds her iodine wings over the broken city.
My necropolis. My teeth are the fruit of your olive tree.
Medium Cool
March 17, 2006
My Mother's Face
This work is a reinterpretation of standard portraits that I have taken of my mother. The original countenance, despite being drastically affected by the image’s composition, continues to shine through as one of happiness and peace. This work is a meditation on the meaning behind that smile. Projections are thrown against a fleshy surface to give the illusion that only fragments of the face remain; the face is, in effect, torn apart and reassembled.
This work acts as a therapeutic exercise for my own emotional and personal issues with my mother. These photos seem to imply an emptiness expressing a sense of what the role or duties of being mother may have become for me.
In a broader sense, it is a view of the conflict between traditional family identities and structures deeply inherent in my Polish heritage and my own contemporary views.
March 16, 2006
wherry, n.
(pl. wherries)
1. A light, swift rowboat built for one person and often used in racing.
2. A sailing barge used in East Anglia.
“My love whose hips are wherries
Whose hips are chandeliers and feathers”
--Andre Breton, “Free Union,” trans. Mary Ann Caws
From Surrealist Love Poems
BIOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE paintings 2005-6
Flora II (det.) detail
Tennis Court (Aerial View) by Marilyn Cvitanic, 28" x 24" Oil, 2005
Michiguma by Marilyn Cvitanic, 28" x 24" Acrylic, 2006
Winneboujou by Marilyn Cvitanic, 28" x 24" Acrylic, 2006
Flora II by Marilyn Cvitanic 24" x 30" Acrylic, 2005
Louie's Mind (Interior View) by Marilyn Cvitanic 30" x 24" Watercolor, 2006
Even Morgan Fairchild (remember her? -you should, -her face hasn't moved in years-) Can Get The Flashbulbs Going at the Ivy, but it Takes A Real Star to Draw Paparazzi Into Shark Infested Waters...Please! No Autographs While I'm having Lunch
Warning signs have been posted along portions of Carpinteria beaches in response to a shark attack on two harbor seals last week.
Two harbor seals were killed by at least one Great White Shark on March 9, according to City of Carpinteria officials. The seals were killed in the Harbor Seal Sanctuary, an offshore location near the Casitas Pier, where seals give birth to their pups.
The seals were killed at separate times by the same shark, it is believed. According to Seal Watch volunteers, who monitor the rookery’s activities from the above bluff, the first attack was at approximately 10:55 a.m. The second attack occurred at 11:20 a.m. It is the first shark attack at the sanctuary witnessed by volunteers.
“A bunch of birds took off, making a noise. I turned and saw blood in the water and shark fin it,” said witness Vic Hypes, who moved to Carpinteria from Lake Tahoe six weeks ago. “I yelled ‘shark! shark!’”
(my public! its almost like I'm the 5th Beatle!)
Hypes estimated the shark to be 30 to 40 yards out, near the buoy. It was swimming around in a big pool of blood, which dissipated, and then another pool of blood appeared.
He rode his bike to City Hall and reported the incident to the sheriff’s department. By the time he returned to the seal watch observation point, the second attack had occurred.
Retired Department of Fish and Game biologist Bob Lea identified the predator as a 15-foot Great White shark. A zoologist from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History confirmed it. The identity was made through the bite marks on remains of one of the seals, which was recovered from the beach by city animal control officers.
In response to fears that the “success” of the Seal Watch is the reason for the shark attacks, and that more attacks are sure to follow, David Allen, a spokesperson for the all-volunteer Seal Watch reported that the local harbor seal population has remained approximately the same since the organization began.
He noted that although the number of pups born onshore has increased, the overall high counts of seals have not. At the Carpinteria rookery, the high count of harbor seals was 365 in 1994 on Oct. 1. Typically, over 200 adult seals have been observed since the 1980s.
Last Friday, warning signs were posted along portions of Carpinteria beaches advising of the possible presence of sharks in the water. The beach area between the Bluffs Park and Carpinteria State Park is closed annually from December through May for seal pup birthing season.
Seal Watch exists to protect a valuable natural and human resource—protecting the seals for their value both as a part of the natural world and for their value to people as a source of enjoyment and education. Human activities—not natural processes including predation—are the primary threat to the survival of the Carpinteria harbor seal rookery and haul out, Allen said.
March 15, 2006
Chicago: the city that smokes
March 14, 2006
Long May You Run / The Red Fiat Uno
Having been invited to join the sharkforum I find myself suddenly bereft of imagination. I might have hoped for a bigger story just coming out of the chute; something with more splash and impact. But it’s the little things that count, as Sergio says, and that sounds good enough. I’m happy the little red Uno has found a home with a friendly young man and dog.
In pre-internet days—when that F-100 was close-to-new— I started Poor Richard’s Newsletter. Postmarked Galveston, Texas, it was folded with stamp affixed, hand-addressed, stapled, and mailed to friends. It was about music, boats, drilling rigs; about work, beauty, boredom, and bragging about drinking too much. Poor Richard’s became Don Ricardo’s Life & Times in the early 1980’s in Nashville. Home was the Gulf Coast of Texas again for a few years. Home has been New Mexico, Chile, Michigan, with short stays elsewhere. Then home became Switzerland, an event nobody could have foretold.
Gouged out by the Rhine glacier some 15,000 years ago, Lake Constance is the largest inland body of water in Europe. Viewed on a map from the north, the German side, it looks like a crudely-drawn shark, or a cloud mirage, with its nose at Bregenz, Austria where the Rhine comes in at the eastern end. It reaches its widest point between Rorschach to the south and Friedrichshafen, from where the mighty zeppelin air ships once sailed. Narrowing towards the west the Bodanrück peninsula divides the tail at Konstanz, called Kreuzlingen on the Swiss side. Below one fork of the tail would be the Überlinger See; above, the Untersee narrows with hills coming down on either side: past Ermatingen, Mannenbach, Mammern, Eschenz on the Swiss side, and the peninsula Reichenau, then Gaiennofen, Hemenhofen, Wangen on the right bank. The lake becomes the Rhine again at the town of Stein am Rhein, which though it straddles the river is Swiss, belonging to Canton Schaffhausen. A one-lane wooden bridge crosses the river about eight kilometers down. Here on the north bank the road goes up the hill to the town of Gailingen, part of a German corrodor with Swiss territory on either side. On the south bank sits the ancient, still partly-walled town of Diessenhofen, where this wanderer came to rest. Five years now we’ve lived in a house atop the south wall, in an attic loft under massive wooden roof timbers. On a clear day we can see the Alps away in the distance.
Ten kilometers downstream the main body of Canton Schaffhausen pokes up into Germany like a mushroom. Below the town the river drops over the thundering Rhine Falls, the largest waterfall in Europe. Zürich and the airport at Kloten are forty-five minutes to the south; I can leave the house at six in the morning and eat dinner in Houston the same day. This is my beat, between Europe’s largest lake and waterfall. I have written a book about this country. Because no one else has, not in English that I know of. It concerns music, work, wine, language studies, fishing; my ongoing life as a performing songwriter, recording artist, husband, Texan in exile. I don’t work on boats or drilling rigs anymore, though I go there every day in my mind. I am beginning the third revision of this book; third or fourth, I disremember. The work goes forward, with grit, grunt, joy and some dissembling.
Richard Dobson
13 March 2006
* * * *
Not much time to ponder, I better make haste. Sergio flew in Wednesday night from London on Helvetica. We drove to pick him up in our almost-new Fiat. We had two days to hang out before we drove up to Baden-Baden to rehearse with Mätze, Richie, and Peter—the nucleus of Thomm Jutz’s old band— for the big show opening for Albert Lee at the Albisgüetli Country Festival in Zürich on the 15th. We’ve got more club dates coming up, but this one requires the full band with drums and keyboard, and guitarist Giampiero Colombo. If we don’t give Albert a run for his money, we’ll give the folks a good show.
I miss our little car, the red Fiat Uno, a sweet-running machine, grown a little tired of late, with an engine not much larger than a loaf of bread. Lots of famous musicians rode in that car from the days when Edith ran a concert series at the Trottentheater in Neuhausen—Peter Rowan, Rosie Flores, Katie Moffatt, Tom Pacheco, Dale Watson—they all wanted to ride in her little red car. I was the only one to lay a hand on her leg, an act fraught with consequence. Later it would become her Fluchtauto, her getaway car when she ran away to Texas.
Sophie, Thomas’s—her middle son’s—girlfriend drove it for a year. After Edith came back to reclaim it we drove it to Croatia and back—twice. We drove up to play in Mettmann, up in the north of Germany with Mark Wise who’s well over six feet, the three of us packed in with two acoustic guitars. We drove twice to France, to Leon, and down in the south the year we played the Crappone festival; to the far side of Austria hard by the Hungarian border; and south over all the major alpine passes, San Bernadino, Gotthard, Arlberg, Brenner. It’s not that a car has soul, but it begins to represent the accumulated memories of the times and places you’ve gone in it. A car is a piece of gear, really, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come to love it. You can feel that way about a boat, a guitar, a worn pair of boots. Great love and affection I had for a silver F-100 Ford pickup with close to a quarter-million miles before I let it go.
We watched the odometer roll over at 100,000 and still it kept chugging; uphill and down, dependable as it was unassuming. “We must think of getting another car one day,” she said.
“Oh, let’s keep it rolling awhile. There’s plenty of miles left in this baby, and it’s paid for long ago.” The kilometers ticked away with the days and the days into years. It would almost do 150 on a long straight-away. Other drivers were ever anxious to pass us, even when we were going over the speed limit. I had the feeling they found it annoying to be stuck behind us. But it was gradually losing compression, and power on the hills. Then one afternoon, deep in hinterland of Canton Thurgau it failed to start. I looked under the hood, checking for loose wires. Finding nothing wrong I tried again and it started. We took it straight to Herr Schwyter at the Steiggarage in Schaffhausen. Had it been using water? Well, as a matter of fact…. Aha… My Swiss German is better these days, but I still didn’t follow all the conversation. I heard Zylinderkopf and understood we needed a new cylinder head. Not a complicated job but it would cost us 700 Francs to repair. In time it would need a new clutch. A rigorous inspection coming up in August, there was no telling what else might need attention. Then he showed us the almost-new Punto, a dark silvery gray, 4-door. A patient man, Herr Schwyter had shown new cars to Edith before. She had always resisted, but this time she wavered. It was time to let the Uno go.
We went down and cleaned it up next morning. Swept the snow off the roof, polished the windows, ran the sweeper, emptied out the door pockets and under the dash, collecting parking receipts, shopping lists, pencils, maps, matchbooks. Looking good with clean lines, no wrecks, and paint slightly faded. A friend of Michael’s, Edith’s youngest son, had agreed to buy it from us for 350 Francs. I wondered if he would peel off the decals—the Texas flag, stickers from Luckenbach, Arizona, and British Colombia—likely revealing a darker red underneath.
Herr Schwyter gave us a pretty good deal on the Punto, a demonstration model with only 2700 kilometers, air bags, CD player, AC, bigger engine. This would be a help on the German Autobahn where you took the little Uno at your peril. It required steady nerves and concentration to venture out there, and you really had to watch out in the left lane with the big Mercedes and BMWs barreling down on you, flashing their high beams and looming in the rearview.
The doorbell rang in the late afternoon, after we’d gone in the Punto to buy floor mats and a new map of Switzerland. Edith chose expensive ones; on purpose even though money is tight. It was Michael at the door with his friend, a tall young man with long hair pinned back and a floppy cap. After shaking hands and some pleasantries we went downstairs together. I saw a dog in Michael’s car, parked just behind. The dog barked once and Michael let him out. Medium-sized, black with a white throat and bandana collar, it looked like a born Frisbee-catcher. The door to the Uno was open and at a word from his friend the dog jumped in, streaked once around the back, and returned to sit bolt upright in the shotgun seat, looking straight ahead and ready to go.
First New Zealand, and now, the Chicago Sun-Times Becomes Shark Friendly
Over the last week, the government of New Zealand has seen fit to put Me, -the Illustrious Great White Shark on its protected and endangered species list, at the same time here in Chicago, the Sun-Times has expanded from its already excellent theatre coverage, to now having the best shark friendly (as in the the articles layout and the the critic himself actually seem to have a pulse) sunday arts section in town.
Checkout this last Sunday's Show -Warhol Obsessed -an article by critic Kevin Nance having to do with the traveling exhibition Andy Warhol/Supernova Stars, Deaths, and Disasters now at the MCA. .
Jack Fish
Jack Fish by J. Milligan
pub. by Soho Press, 220 pp., $10.00
Another book about water in the midst of a trend which seems to be something to which all of us should probably pay attention.
Politically speaking, water will soon prove more vital than oil. Water shortages, lack of water, the need for water, all seem to loom large above the plotlines of a number of recent books. Jack Fish is a protagonist who actually comes from the water. He is a secret agent acting on behalf of the Elders of Atlantis, and he washes up on the beach at Coney Island, Brooklyn somewhat unclear as to what his exact mission is. He knows that he is supposed to find and kill a rogue agent named Victor Sargasso. Other than that, Jack cannot remember.
Nor can he easily breathe -- that being a skill only slowly and fitfully learned "up top." Nonetheless, Jack becomes an effective and fearless topside agent. He is like a James Bond with gills, a literary device of such simplicity and brilliance that one is surprised to be finding it for the first time. Eventually, Jack learns to breathe and to drink liquor and to dance and to navigate the 5 boroughs and to talk his way into a nightclub.
Jack's attempts at finding Sargasso allow the author to take his reader on a whirlwind (and decidedly satiric) tour through modern New York City. There are lesbian performance artists, punk rock nightclubs. freelance hitmen, dealers, stalkers, hookers and thieves. The Brooklyn topography is accurately rendered even as the plot spins off into unbelievability. The black humor saves a book that might otherwise be considered a mere curiousity. The great James Elroy calls this book "a wild ride" and who am I to contradict him? As a first effort, "Jackfish" indicates there may be great things ahead coming from J. Milligan.
Fire in the Belly - Act 3: Roger Gets A Break
It was mid March when I met Melanie. She was standing in front of me, waiting in line at Joe’s Fish House. She caught me looking at her, and she smiled as we made eye contact.
“Hi.” I said.
“Hi back.” She said.
There was a tense quiet. She paid for her coffee and turned around. She smiled again. I moved to the side, trying to be as non-threatening as possible. It was just another case of misreading the situation; I do that all the time. By the time I’d paid for my food she was bundled up and out the door. I followed her into the blustery night as she hugged herself and made a bee line for the front door of The Belly. Taking the stairs two at a time, I lost sight of her after the first flight. The stairwell was tall and reverberant, brick walls covered with closetsfull of paint coats, stairs steeper than normal and concrete. Roger and I were on the second floor, at the far end from the stairs and freight elevator. The hallway was narrow and high. The bathroom was utterly disgusting. The building itself was really big - a one acre footprint, with 15 foot ceilings and patchworks of drywall. We called it The Belly, but we should have called it The Hole.
As I approached the studio I heard music and voices. Both were vaguely familiar but unplaceable. When I opened the door I saw Melanie and Roger standing by my work bench. They looked surprised to see me.
We said our hellos for the second time and Roger introduced us. We discussed art, we discussed music, we discussed Joe’s, the fish joint next door.
“Do you eat there often?” She asked.
“Yea, I guess I do.” I said.
“It’s OK,” said Roger, “it won’t kill you unless you eat there more than once in your life.”
They laughed. I took off my coat and threw it on the couch. I tore open the plastic lined paper bag. Even with the plastic lining the bag was soaked through with oil.
“Hey,” I offered sardonically, “fish is brain food.”
They laughed, and that’s how I met Melanie. I thought she’d change my life, but it turned out I never really cared for her all that much. When she finally moved out it was my idea, I was just surprised that she agreed with me.
“Who’s this?” I asked her, smiling and shoving a thumb at the stereo.
She pointed to Roger.
“Five Style,” he smiled, “they’re a local act.”
“Oh yea?” I said. “It’s not too bad.”
As the conversation moved on it became clear that Melanie and Roger had only just met. He had taken his slides into a River North gallery, and Mel was working there as an intern. It’s always been hard for me to understand why someone would major in art history, but then again, everybody’s into something different. No surprise that she loved his work - everyone did. She paid passing respect to my end of the studio, but it was clear that she was there for Roger. I finished my dinner and set about making sawdust.
Roger ended up in a group show as a result, but that didn’t happen until July. By then Melanie and I had been seeing each other regularly, and we were just a couple months away from moving in together.
My funk began to melt away with the grey snow. I held on to enough of it to reinforce my cynicism, which angered Roger, and seemed to amuse Melanie.
“Cynicism,” professed Roger, “is truly the worst form of self-indulgence.”
“My cynic,” Melanie would grin, “He’s seen too much of the real world.”
I snorted at them both. What other antidote is there for naivete? I get so sick of these idealistic twits with their high school notions of creative fulfillment and purpose. The art world is just another marketplace, I say, and these precious little objects are nothing more than trophies for the rich.
Roger Murray never lost one drop of blood in the service of his muse. He never wept, not even a single tear. He was never confronted with the horror of losing track of your vision, because he never had one. He was a blind esthete, operating on instinct. There was nothing intellectual, conceptual or metaphorical in his work. That’s why his titles were so corny, and that’s why Melanie was so important to his development professionally. She’s the one who told him to leave each of them “Untitled,” and add a number. It was a deft move, and seemed to be the one missing element in the mix. These days Rog is a professional artist, with works at Art Expo and everything. Someone just told me that he’s featured in an upcoming issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine.
You’d think that all this would have filled me with anger, but I didn‘t, and don’t care. Why should I? He’s still an idiot. And I know the truth: Roger Murray is a poseur. I did get pissed off when Mel would defend him, or compare the two of us, but the anger never lasted. After all, I was the one who was giving it to her.
In truth that was all I was really after. It’s true that at first I had fantasies of us living out our days together, pillars of the Chicago art scene. She’d be a powerful dealer, or perhaps run the Art Institute, and I’d be the world famous artist, headed for the Venice Biennalle. But over time I came to lose respect for her esthetic sensibilities. How can you really have valid opinions on art if you’ve never been through the process? She never bled for art, either. She was an intern at an upscale trinket gallery, attempting to tell me what was what. Fuck that.
Next week: Act 4: I Discover Urban Archeology
<< Last week - Act 2: Working In The Belly
March 13, 2006
Historia de la Musica Rock pt.3 -The Seventies
My first concert experience ever was Frank Zappa with Captain Beefheart at the International Amphitheater in Chicago in 1975. Row Forty on the floor. The amphitheater was originally used for livestock shows. Our dog raced there once. I was ecstatic. Zappa was previewing the upcoming Apostrophe record (remember Yellow Snow?). Luckily, there was the Bongo Fury live record to document that tour because the sound was atrocious. I’m pretty sure that was Zappa on the stage. The guy next to me (I didn’t know him) passed out with his head on my shoulder. The air smelled funny.
Rock and roll got big. Really big. Stadium rock. My second concert was Chicago and The Beach Boys (with Terry Kath-yay and without Brian Wilson -nay) at Chicago Stadium. My third concert was The Who with Toots and the Maytals in Cincinnati. Get the picture? Big bands in big stadiums. I loved every second of it. C’mon, Keith Moon and lasers! But what did I know? I was an air guitarist with a rapidly expanding record collection. For the bands, money was flowing in; bands were throwing it out of hotel room windows, Cynthia Plastercaster was sculpting, and the drugs were plentiful. If it was difficult to see the band on stage, don’t worry, the band didn’t see you either. The audience was a big blur; we were the cash flow, we were dollar signs. Especially the boys. We trampled our way into the cow palaces, sometimes literally.
It wasn’t just stadium rock that began for me in 1975; by the end of the year I was introduced to the music that would change my life. In the fall, I went off to college in Lexington, Kentucky. I had no career goals, no vision. I was going to be a lawyer, but I quickly switched to psychiatry. How’s that for an about face? In my dorm, where I knew nary a soul, I somehow hooked up with the only person that hadn’t gone home to pick tobacco over the weekend. That fall my new friend Keith turned me on to the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison. He also had a new single, Gloria by the Patti Smith Group.
We listened to lots of FM radio. It was a novelty to listen to radio with no static and album cuts, not just a string of a-side hits. It didn’t take long for it to suck. For every Steely Dan song, you got four or five Baker Streets. I grew to hate sax solos. Bands started to put out lousy records ruined by coked-up producers. They were in love with the sheen of synthesized schlock, but payola still ruled the airwaves. Satin-jacketed record company hacks paved the way for airplay with lines of coke snorted from rolled up c-notes. Bands holed up in studios for months to make their supposed masterpieces. Rock became a bloated, disinterested beast. Some artists, like John Fogerty and Roger McGuinn were still victims of bad record deals; Fogerty refused to play his hits lest he put any more money in Saul Zaenz’s pocket.
I couldn’t get enough. My record collection was on its way to albatross proportions (I’ve had to move them close to ten times, often up three flights of stairs) When I was in college I spent hours in dusty bins; my mom would send me one hundred dollars a month so that I could eat on Sundays, but I would spend most of it on new and used records. Peanut butter and crackers became my Sunday staple. Ah, those used record stores. My favorite in Lexington was Bearswax which was responsible for my mediocre grade point average. The owner, Chris was a former dj who was basically making a living off old promos.
The seventies also had some great television for rock addicts. I used to set my alarm so that I’d wake up to watch Rock Concert at three in the morning. My favorite image from those days was Neil Young live doing Like a Hurricane. The song wouldn’t be released for another several years, but there he was, wind machine blowing him away, the black Les Paul, and the most ferocious magical guitar playing I’d ever seen. I’ll never forgive the city of Lexington for canceling a Neil Young tour because advance ticket sales were slow. The University also turned down a Springsteen show in 1976 because he wanted half the arena closed off with a curtain to keep it at 5,000 people. There was nothing to do in that town. If I wanted to have an intimate relationship with rock I would have to do it myself. I ordered a bass and an amp from the J.C. Penney catalogue for $180 dollars. I bought the Who Quadrophenia songbook and tried to learn bass by reading the notes. Have you ever listened to John Entwhistle’s bass on that record? I really tried.
And then, as D.Boon said, “Punk rock changed my life.” The Sex Pistols were coming to America and I was going to see them New Year’s Eve in Chicago. Of course, as we all know, that tour was canceled, but Elvis Costello appeared on SNL and blew everyone away. We drove up to Cincinnati to Bogarts to see him. That year we made that ride again and again to see The Ramones, The Dead Boys, and Devo. The cool thing was you could stand right in front of the stage. Heck, we could talk to Stiv Bators at the bar! Music was finally accessible. At the Patti Smith concert in Louisville she yelled for the fans to climb over the barriers and come right up to the stage. You could feel the air move out of guitar amps. Sweat would land on you. You felt like you were part of the concert.
By that time I had picked a few notes out of the Ox’s repertoire and found myself in a punk rock band, The Pods in 1978. We did almost all cover songs; Buzzcocks, Clash, Cheap Trick, Ramones, all the hits. I had kind of spiky hair and a skinny tie. For some reason Lexington bands were playing covers, Louisville bands like Tara Key’s Babylon Dance Band were playing originals. No matter. By 1979 we were ready for the stage. On New Year’s Eve, 1979 we booked ourselves at Halle Lou’s, a dive that let you sign up for a night, first come, first serve. You played for free. That night at the stroke of midnight, I played my first song in a real band on a real stage. The two dozen punks and a bunch of redneck regulars helped us welcome in a new decade. I’m not one to kiss and tell, but I got lucky that night with a girl I was previously unfamiliar with (ahem), a scenario that was highly foreign to me. It would never, ever, ever happen again, but I couldn’t help thinking as we left the club, sweat chilling on my face in the stiff winter wind, that I was going to like this. Rick Rizzo, the bass player, the musician; part of the world I loved.
Next: The Eighties- indies save us from a flock of fluff.
This is Chicago
Poem of the Week: "Century" by Joel Brouwer
Joel Brouwer's first book of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), won the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He has received fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, The Progressive, etc. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama. His book Centuries is available from Four Way Books.
Century
The art in the museum, exhausted and damp, demanded solitude. We're tired of crying your tears! We hereby decree the purifying change and henceforth reject the trash! Now scram! When curators offered to compromise by admitting only the blind, the art replied by suicide: each piece became a mirror. Beneath a bench we found a photograph of Eva Braun and Hitler locked in a deep wet kiss. She's nude, milk-blue against his black uniform. He has a riding crop in each hand. We shoved to see. Such a beautiful picture! It had to be: it was that or the mirrors.
From "Centuries" by Joel Brouwer. Copyright 2003 Joel Brouwer. By permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
March 12, 2006
So Much Better Than Bukowski
At the risk of having my hipster credentials revoked, I've got a confession to make: I'm not a fan of Charles Bukowski. In all fairness I'm compelled to admit that I've only read two works by him, Post Office and Women.
This isn't meant to be a wholesale dismissal of Bukowski's work. Rather, I think it's about time we acknowledged the writer who is arguably the master of this branch of the west coast "social realist" genre, namely John Fante. Don't take my word for it - just refer to Bukowski, who named Fante as his primary inspiration and the reason for his career as a writer.
Now comes word that none other than the brilliant Robert Towne has adapted Fante's "Ask The Dust" for the big screen. Mr. Towne's screenwriting credits are the stuff of legend: Chinatown (for which he won an Oscar), Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, The Last Detail, and the vastly under rated The Parallax View, to name just a few.
Towne has written and directed a screen-adaptation of Fante's tremendous "Ask The Dust," the hard-scrabble story of Depression-era Los Angeles. The main protagonist is Fante's go-to guy and everyman alter-ego Arturo Bandini, a first-generation Italian-American who falls in love with the beautiful Mexican Camilla.
As in many of Fante's works, the characters find themselves held in the untenable choice of love verses comfort. It's an economical work of genius which deserves a much larger audience.
It's hard to know how Colin Farrell and Selma Hayek will manage to sell Arturo and Camilla, but Towne has a history of balancing large social issues with personal dynamic. At the very least the film deserves a viewing.
For more on Fante, check out this great piece in Salon, or go here.
For more on the film adaptation of "Ask The Dust," go here.
March 10, 2006
Folio #2
sepulture, n.
sepulture, n.
1. The act of interment; burial.
2. A sepulcher.
“The figures figure what the lost soul means,
so long ago, in an acre of sepulture
insisting on the verb, not the noun.”
—John Berryman, “Dream Song 161”
March 08, 2006
It was raining Wednesday morning
The gentle sound of rain makes me think of glowing drops beading on windshields and the hoods of cars. I need the air. I imagine crisp, unnatural reflections from the lights of the city night.
Things aren't as crisp as I hoped. The sky reflects a ureic yellow. Strayed signs blur across the sidewalks on Damen, in search of a lost, blind dog.
Other fresh markings are almost as temporary.
But the marking...
...of territory...
...is...
...everywhere.
On a damp, not quite chilly morning
as the Tree gently wept.
What a wonderful exhibition! Bring it to Chicago.
Art Green painting
Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism
Curated by Robert Cozzolino, it's at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Some of the press about it:
"When it comes to aesthetic and creative movements, Chicago is often more closely connected with architecture and music than painting and sculpture. However, a new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition — curated by a native of Chicago — aims to give a new look at the Second City as a place that inspired and produced trailblazing visual art."
''There's a real need for rethinking 20th-century art to include the whole country,'' said curator Robert Cozzolino.
''One of the unique characteristics of Chicago is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo,'' he said. ''They insisted on following their own vision.''
Is that still true? Shouldn't it be? Hurray for Cozzolino. Get the show, Chicago!
Read about it and see images at:
here
here
here
or here
But What Will The Sharks Think?
"I am so proud to relay to you the recent announcement that Child magazine has rated us the country's best art museum for kids."
James Cuno
President and Eloise W. Martin, Director The Art Institute of Chicago
glottis, n.
1. The opening between the vocal cords at the upper part of the larynx.
2. The vocal apparatus of the larynx.
“Do you remember gliding on a gray tongue of concrete
toward the green glottis of the sea?
—Nina Cassian, “The Inclined Plane”
March 07, 2006
Poem of the Week: "Elegy for a Soldier" by Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker is the author of several books of poetry, including Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003); First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003); Squares and Courtyards (2000); Winter Numbers (1994), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994), which received the Poets' Prize; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Assumptions (1985); Taking Notice (1980); Going Back to the River (1990), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award; Separations (1976); and Presentation Piece (1974), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. She also translated Venus Khoury-Ghata's poetry. She lives in New York City and Paris.
Elegy for a Soldier
June Jordan, 1936-2002
I.
The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in a Second Avenue
diner. The lover was a Quaker,
a poet, an anti-war
activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.
Wet snow fell on the access
road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was
neither lover, slept uptown.
But the arteries, streetlights, headlines,
phonelines, feminine plural
links ran silver through the night city
as dawn and the yellow cab
passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for
that day's last or first coffee.
The city where I knew you was rich
in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc
debates, demos, parades and picnics.
There were walks I liked to take.
I was on good terms with two rivers.
You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words
lighting the page, good neighbor on your
homely street in Park Slope, whose
Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers,
dyke vegetarians, young
gifted everyone, claimed some changes
-at least a new food co-op.
In the laundromat, ordinary
women talked revolution.
We knew we wouldn't live forever
but it seemed as if we could.
The city where I knew you was yours
and mine by birthright: Harlem,
the Bronx. Separately we left it
and came separately back.
There's no afterlife for dialogue,
divergences we never
teased apart to weave back together.
Death slams down in the midst of
all your unfinished conversations.
Whom do I address when I
address you, larger than life as you
always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you,
ashes on the Pacific
tide, you least of all. I talk to my-
self to keep the line open.
The city where I knew you is gone.
Pink icing roses spelled out
PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake.
The bookshop's a sushi bar
now, and Passion is long out of print.
Would you know the changed street that
cab swerved down toward you through cold white mist?
We have a Republican
mayor. Threats keep citizens in line:
anthrax; suicide attacks.
A scar festers where towers once were;
dissent festers unexpressed.
You are dead of a woman's disease.
Who gets to choose what battle
takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends
mourn you, with no time to mourn.
II.
You, who stood alone in the tall bay window
of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning
with free-flying words, knew the power, terror
in words, in flying;
knew the high of solitude while the early
light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry
like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint
pen, yellow foolscap.
You, who stood alone in your courage, never
hesitant to underline the connections
(between rape, exclusion and occupation…)
and separations
were alone and were not alone when morning
blotted the last spark of you out, around you
voices you no longer had voice to answer,
eyes you were blind to.
All your loves were singular: you scorned labels.
Claimed black; woman, and for the rest eluded
limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out
self-definition.
Now your death, as if it were "yours": your house, your
dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers.
Death's not "yours," what's yours are a thousand poems
alive on paper,
in the present tense of a thousand students'
active gaze at printed pages and blank ones
which you gave permission to blacken into
outrage and passion.
You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra,
Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric,
were a black American, born in Harlem,
citizen soldier
If you had to die-and I don't admit it-
who dared "What if, each time they kill a black man /
we kill a cop?" couldn't you take down with you
a few prime villains
in the capitol, who are also mortal?
June, you should be living, the states are bleeding.
Leaden words like "Homeland" translate abandoned
dissident discourse.
Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes
still in progress now, as Jenin, Ramallah
dominate, then disappear from the headlines.
Palestine: your war.
"To each nation, its Jews," wrote Primo Levi.
"Palestinians are Jews to Israelis."
Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we
infer, despairing.
To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs,
Palestinians, immigrants, its women.
From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish,
Kavanagh, Sháhid
(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir,
cautioned, shift the accent, and he was "martyr"),
Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor,
and you, June Jordan.
Altman essay part I
A Meditation On The Enduring Importance of "Nashville"upon the Occasion of Robert Altman's Lifetime Achievment Oscar (part I)
My friend Tim Welch (one of the best American drummers of the last 20 years) makes the claim that Robert Altman's "Nashville" is the finest American movie ever made. I believe he is correct. When he first expressed this opinion I admit I considered it another blustery partial truth typical of a percussionist. "Better than "Citizen Kane?" I asked, better than "The Godfather" or "Bonnie and Clyde" or "North by Northwest" or "The Bride of Frankenstein"?
His succinct answer was: "Definitely."
Over the years I have come to decide that he is correct.
In 2000, before 9/11 made America once again aware of its fragility, a man named Jan Stuart wrote a thoroughgoing essay on "Nashville" in the form of a book called "The Nashville Chronicles," published by Simon and Schuster. Stuart was prescient in the same way Altman was. He sees in the film a veritable Rosetta Stone of information regarding the entertainment and political solar systems that light American society. If the term "American Film" requires, by definition, that the film be not only made in America but also somehow ABOUT America, then Stuart seemingly agrees with Tim. He seems, in his book, to consider "Nashville" certainly the most EXEMPLARY American film ever. And, again, he is correct.
The important points I make here are largely the result of Stuart's research and Welch's love. My own observations on this phenomenal film add a minimal insight that pales in comparison to that of those whose work I've digested.
Let us start with the film's relevance to events of today. Let us start with the cynicism and disillusion that coats our modern politics like an oil-soaked blanket. Let us start with Hal Phillip Walker -- which is where "Nashville" starts. The droning, non-sequitorial voiceover by the invented candidate was actually written by a semi-politically-connected Southerner named Thomas Hal Phillips. Altman was pals with him. His "speech" is the film's frame.
"We have some problems," his deceptively folksy voice intones. "I know something about money because I never had any until I was 27." It's not to difficult to tell that this Altman depiction of Middle America ("the Red States" in today's parlance) is meant to be satirical and comedic; only the dumbest of dumb Americans can fail to see that the film is essentially a joke, a parody. And yet the charicature is so savage that it is easy to see why the good citizens of Nashville were horrified by the final cut and why they felt insulted. The great Wim Wenders (who at one time was married to ) has said that "Nashville" is a film about noise. It's noisy, certainly, but "Nashville" is actually a film about democracy; dysfunctional, messy, democracy.
March 06, 2006
Good Riddance to Alt Country, Part I
There are indeed a few things to say on this topic. The only groups who deserve any credit at all in this area are Rank and File, The Long Ryders, Green On Red, the Silos, the True Believers, Uncle Tupelo, and my own group, the Weathermen. Everyone else, including Yo la Tengo and most especially the Whiskeytown-Will Oldham-Old 97s-etc.-generation were latecomers to the game.
Don't get me started on the pathetically mindless and reductive "roots-rock" of fools like the Blasters, Derailers, Mavericks, BR549s etc. All the folks who discovered Gram Parsons in 1992 can be safely counted out of that game. All pretenders to a throne that never even existed.
What is clear is that the punk generation eventually got tired of the reductive, two or three-chord ethic that produced its early successes. There are only so many times one can play "I Wanna be Your Dog" before its essential banality becomes obvious, even oppressive. Also, the musicians were aging, they were getting tired and they were having to play slower. The simple and obvious solution was to play quieter, slower songs. The DNA template was equally clear; it was a matter of splicing the Velvet Underground's genes onto the country-rock beast birthed by Parsons and the Byrds. It was a dicey target to select since the Eagles had already turned the beast into a cash cow, but the task was not impossible. Nevertheless, some got it right before the journalists figured it out; that's because the journalists did not get physically tired emulating Johnny Ramone until later. The musicians had already decided that it was time to slow things down. Thus the only great bands to emerge from this sad little genre are the ones who, like Wilco for example, became disgusted with alt-country's strictures and violently broke from them.
It is quite clear at this point that "alt.country," "insurgent country," "twang," "roots-rock," the stuff of which SXSW makes such thick hay -- whatever you choose to call it -- is as dead as a Howard Dean presidency. And good thing, too. It (the genre) encouraged the worst in liberal Yankees whose claim on the form was tenuous at the very best. The southerners who adopted alternative, punk-infused country (with the possible exception of the Drive by Truckers) were mostly rubes buying snake oil from carbetbaggers. Sticking to punk rock was equally reductive but at some one has to call a spade a spade. Punk rockers playing country music was more than could ultimately be swallowed. I don't like it when musicians try to become actors and I don't like it when actors try to become musicians. The alternative country movement found its ultimate failure in the release of records by Billy Bob Thornton and Russell Crowe, so-called "country" stars like Keith Urban and critics darlings like Bela Fleck and Gretchen Wilson and Big and Rich and Brooks and Dunn and the barely breathing corpse of Merle Haggard and the ossification of songwriting and the deification of Johnny Cash and the gradual discarding of Townes Van Zandt and the perversion and putrefaction of all things once reclaimed in the name of "the People," "the Folk," -- always maligned yet rarely ignored -- who contributed to make America good at at least one thing: Music.
Joel Dorn's NYC: Volume 10
Fire in the Belly - Act 2: Working In The Belly
So that’s that. We took over a sub lease on a 3,000 square foot warehouse space in The Belly. That’s right, the building had a name. Moving in was easy, because we had nothing. Two days after the October fire we signed the sub lease and drove over to Handy Andy to buy wood for our new benches. Roger picked me up at work. He was dressed like a lawyer. We collected two by fours and plywood, gathering up drywall screws along the way. Roger stopped in the tool paddock and picked up a cordless drill and a worm drive circular saw. He didn’t even look at the prices.
“I’ll pay for these.” He said, dropping them on the cart.
When we arrived at the new building we had a hard time finding a place to park. The dock was full, and the neighboring buildings were all covered with restricted parking signs. We sat there for five minutes before he turned to me. “What should we do?”
“We should go in there,” I said, pointing to a small fish shack next door, “and eat dinner.” Their parking lot was large and empty.
“What about our stuff?”
“We can eat in the car.”
After dinner we found a slot at the dock and I went inside to find the elevator. It was on the fourth floor, so it took a while to find the thing. The freight elevator was a large shambling box with overhead doors on two sides. Engraved with gang tags and vows of love, it smelled of oil and bearing grease. It made a loud clanking noise while in motion, and the woven metal grates which served for interior doors bounce up and down. It was lacking a roof by design, so you could see the workings of the cables reaching up four stories. The thing was magnificent. As it rumbled down I was filled with hope. The new space was big, and it offered possibility. So what if I had to share it with a frat boy? He’d be easy to manage. Otherwise I’d planned to simply ignore him, and I’d already gotten some practice at the hardware store that day.
“It’s way more relevant than science, y’know? Man can’t go on without it.” he paused and drew breath deeply. “I really don’t know how I could live in a world without art.”
I read labels in the checkout aisle. What a dork.
We loaded the material into the elevator.
“Do you think my car will be ok?”
“Yes,” I said, “your Cherokee will be fine.”
We went upstairs and we built work benches. We drank beer and smoked pot. There was no music. Around midnight the foundry lit up: a night pour. We would come to anticipate these rare pours, and it was hard to get any work done on those nights. We had the perfect industrial/urban view. The room’s longest wall was south facing, and four large windows provided a spectacular view. To the right stood the rusted iron mounds of the Cozzi scrap yard. Occasionally barges would moor there and fill up. Trucks of all sizes moved in and out all day long, depositing their loads of scrap metal. Finkel Foundries lies across the river, on the eastern side, covering the river on both sides of Cortland Avenue, and then moving east for about 5 blocks. Downtown Chicago is the backdrop for all this, the opposite end of the process which either begins or ends across the street from our studio.
It stayed warm into early November that fall, but our comfort was short lived. By December we were feeling the lack of a furnace. The truth is we had a furnace, what we were lacking was gas service. Neither of us could afford it, so we bundled up and brought in our space heaters from home.
It was cold. It was Chicago in December. What were we thinking? The cold made it hard to work. I tried to be romantic about it, remembering that Picasso and Braque had once shared a coat. It didn’t help. Was I Picasso or Braque in this relationship? The possibilities made me shiver. Meanwhile Roger soldiered on. I began to suspect that he was mocking me with his enthusiasm. And he was always there! I moved my bench to the other end of the room.
I found out in a hurry that he was loose with money. Before long we had a chop saw, another drill and a saber saw. Ryobi, Porter Cable, Milwaukee, only pro grade stuff. He let me know right away that I was free to use his tools as needed, and I didn’t waste any time in taking him up on his offer.
It’s not like I didn’t contribute; someone had to provide the hand tools, and we used my stereo for music. I always brought beer, and he seemed to rarely do that. Even when he did bring beer it was bad beer. Miller Lite, or Michelob. Yuppy beer. I was coiled for the night that he’d show up with wine coolers. Fortunately that sorry night never came.
So we negotiated a method, and for a while it worked pretty well. But there were times, and they weren’t few, when he would say something so stupid that I could barely contain myself.
“Y’know, man, life is really like a pendulum.” He was swinging a plumb bob just above the floor. “Your ability to tolerate pain,” he said as the bob reached one side, “determines the amount of joy you’re capable of experiencing.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s wild, man, y’know? It’s really really wild.”
“Uh, yeah.”
What a yutz. It was a while before I figured out that he wasn’t a lawyer after all. He was a corporate real estate sales guy. He had a license, but he didn’t have any buildings of his own. He spent his days cold calling small industrial businesses and getting hung up on. I would have quit that job in a day, but ol’ Roger just soldiered on. He seemed to soldier in all things.
We had to establish right away that I wasn’t about to tolerate bad music. He didn’t even seem to care.
“OK,” he said, “maybe you can turn me on to some new tunes.”
“Well,” I said, turning to the tape deck. “Check out Motorhead. They make some good ‘tunes’.”
I used that word every time I widened his world with something new. And it was all new to him! It was like he’d lived in a classic rock cocoon his whole life, believing every word they sold him. We fixed that in a hurry. I gave him everything. I gave him his muse. In return he took from me the one thing that made life worth living. In the end I managed to transfer this theft into my own personal liberation, but i still resent the need to do so. He took everything from me.
Even though he was there all the time, it became easier to avoid him. There were plenty of nights when I would barely speak to him, and I had a good reason to stay away once he started producing good art. The titles were awful - contrived, pseudo intellectual, lurid and emotional - and he would explain them as if he were being interviewed for ArtNews. But the pieces were too good, and even if I rarely said so, I couldn’t deny it to myself.
They were arresting, activating and fresh. His approach was completely intuitive, which was all the more annoying given his lack of any form of training. As his creative successes mounted, my frustration bloomed. Every time I set my tortured eyes upon one of these pieces my stomach would turn and sink. Every success of his translated into a personal failure for me.
I decided a project would be the thing to bust my needle out of it’s bad groove, so I took on a portrait commission. In exchange for $500 I’d paint a double portrait. It was a lay up. Having cranked through similar projects for pocket money in art school, I approached this painting with brassy confidence. Roger Murray would soon see where the talent resided in this studio. The painting was meant to be a surprise, so I had to work from a dim, out of focus Polaroid. There hadn’t been very much light in the room when the shot was taken. My patron asked me to correct the curve in his mother’s nose; she’d fallen recently, breaking it. I responded by smoking weed until I couldn’t see the break in her septum. It was a chemical septoplasty.
Even if I’d finished that piece, even if it had been the best painting to ever come out of me, even if it had been the fucking Madonna of The Rocks, it would have been a hollow victory. Roger was already my biggest fan.
“You could make some serious money,” he said, looking as though he may cry, “you really could.”
How can you say thanks to that? What did he know about me or my work? Nothing. Nothing at all. His highest praise came from watching me sketch and draw cartoons! Stupid, puny, unfunny little cartoons. His praise was worthless.
But as a sculptor he was a natural, that prick. I really think he mocked me with his optimism. I spent that winter frustrated and depressed. Reaching for the thread I’d lost, fantasizing about that fire, wondering what type of work I’d be turning out had the building not burned.
Next week: Act 3: Roger Gets A Break
<< Last week - Act 1: The Second Building Fire
March 04, 2006
The Devil’s Asshole
The other night a bunch of middle-aged musicians were sitting around drinking scotch and telling road (war) stories from their touring days. Here's mine:
We were lost and late for the sound check. There were four of us crammed into the van with all our equipment, driving around Virginia looking for the nightclub, when we pulled into a gas station to get directions. The woman at the cash register, a forty year old bottle blonde with Kool-Aid orange lipstick, insect green eyeliner and low-tar cigarette dangling from her lips clapped her hands together and said, “Okay, listen up boys ‘cause I’m only gonna tell you once! You pull outta here, hang a U-turn and take a right at the first traffic light. You go two more lights and take another right. You go down this hill and the road just keeps winding down and around and around. It’s like you’re goin’ through this tunnel and the trees have these long branches that hang down just like arms trying to grab you. But you just keep goin’ down and around and just when you think you’re lost, you’re not! You just pop out the Devil’s asshole and there you are!”
Two days later we’re finally expelled from Satan’s anus and landed with a thud on the Bowery, outside of CBGB’s in New York. It was my turn to stay with the van while the rest of the band went inside to check out the scene. The usual throng of punks, junkies, pimps and hookers were hanging around outside of the Palace Hotel, next door to the club. A moment later three cop cars pulled up and the boys in blue jumped out with their heaters drawn. I immediately got down on my knees and hid beneath the dashboard, only popping my head up occasionally to witness this little slice of life. Everyone on the street froze while the cops rushed up the stairs of the Palace, Kojak style. A minute later they came swaggering down the stairs, shoving their pistols back into their holsters, frustrated over a false alarm.
After sound-check I met my friend Gregg at an Indian restaurant on Sixth Street. We went into a tiny basement with a blue parrot painted on the door and ordered a small feast. The waiter fetched a tray of little dishes filled with lentils and onions and chutney while a sitarist with a bored expression on his face twanged the eternal Hindu blues. Gregg was in the midst of recounting his grind at the New York Times when suddenly a large rat darted up the heat pipe beside me and into a hole in the ceiling. I stood up and put on my coat while Gregg kept talking. Between mouthfuls of vindaloo, he looked up and asked where I was going. “Gregg, we gotta go. Right away. I’ll explain once we’re out of here,” I said. Just before we reached the door the manager grabbed my arm to ask what the problem was. I told him his restaurant had rats and if he wanted to cause a fuss over the bill I’d be sure to let everyone else in the joint in on the secret. “Oh yes the rats,” he said, with a smile, “they are an omen from Lord Ganesh. Thank you! Thank you very much!” he said, sounding delighted as he opened the door and whisked us out.
I walked with Gregg over to the Astor Place subway stop, through the urchins and tourists on St. Mark’s Place. He had to get back uptown. Since I had nothing better to do I headed back to CB’s to catch the opening act. Just as I’m crossing the street, a chartreuse Chevy Caprice with a rash of rust spots and a torn black vinyl roof came screeching up beside me. The man in the passenger seat was obviously not well. His complexion looked like someone forgot to put the mayonnaise back in the fridge. His eyes were all glazed over, like a fish gasping for breath on a deathbed of ice in a Chinatown market. The driver leaned across his friend’s limp body and screamed in panic, “Where’s the hospital? Where’s the nearest fuckin’ hospital, man?”
I stood motionless for a minute, recalling the faces of frogs and baby pigs I was once forced to dissect in tenth grade biology. “Your buddy doesn’t need a hospital,” I told him. “He’s dead! Take him to the morgue!” With that the driver stomped on the gas and peeled out.
When I finally got back to CB’s, the opening band, a group called Evil Twin was in full throttle. They featured a pair of gruesome dudes with heavy metal poodle hair-do’s playing matching double-neck guitars.
At last it was show time. The band had been a little edgy for the last few days. We’d been on the road for nearly three weeks as the opening act for a popular new wave art rock band on the comeback trail. At first I was pretty excited about the gig until we got to know them a little better. The lead singer who resembled my Uncle Alfred, a portly kosher butcher from Chicago, was a Jehovah’s Witness and the drummer (who never took a shower and always wore the same T-shirt that smelled like burnt cheese) was some sort of snotty Marxist. They were always arguing over everything, including us. They didn’t approve of our song lyrics and wanted us off the tour if we couldn’t find anything else to sing about other than sex, drugs and religion – which comprised our entire repertoire. It was the first night in weeks we didn’t have to put up with their crap. The band cut loose and played a wild and inspired set. After the last number, we stumbled off the stage in the dark while the crowd howled for more but before we could make our triumphant return, the soundman cranked up an old Iggy Pop record and robbed us of an encore.
With the show over, I made my way through the crowd and out the front door for a breath of fresh air. Hanging out with the creatures in the street, I momentarily felt relieved, certain that my baptism in the shit was over for the moment. Suddenly the boys in blue were back with their lights splashing and sirens screaming. Everyone froze as they jumped out of their cars and ran up the steps of the Palace Hotel again. But this time they were too late and a minute later an ambulance arrived. A pair of poker-faced attendants yanked the stretcher out of the back and pushed through the crowd. The cops came back down the stairs dragging a young guy, cursing in handcuffs, followed by the ambulance attendants carrying a body on their stretcher, covered from head to toe with a white sheet oozing big red splotches.
With that I marched back inside the club to get a drink and grab my gear, to beat a retreat. Just as I was lifting my amp some young goateed freelance hipster with pad and pen wanted to know if he could ask me a couple questions for his fanzine. “Sure,” I told him and set the amp back down. “What do ya want to know?”
“Why did you move to Milwaukee?”
Music Review: John Kruth and Peter Stampfel in NYC
(Sharkforum's own John Kruth has played with more famous and brilliant musicians than you can shake a stick at. Lately he's been working with Peter Stampfel. Following is a review of their show last week with John Hammond - ed.)
Somehow suppressing my inner old-fart, which was telling me "stay home---it's a school night" I went out to see Peter and John at MAKOR (which I still don't know how to pronounce).
The songs ranged from great to greater, setting my heart to dancing with laughter, and a couple of times nearly inspiring tears. They did a bunch of stuff I hadn't heard before, some of which
had the definite earmarks of Peter's kind of songwriting (suspicions of which were later confirmed). There were a couple of John's originals too--fantastic stuff. From the start, they had such sweet chemistry and complementarity going on---it was sort of the musical equivalent of peanut butter finding jelly.
Early in the set they played John's wonderfully goofy song about his checkers-playing cat, set to a kind of dark melody in a minor mode---a perfect background for funny lyrics.
Then came Peter's hilarious and biting song about being a white guy in a white man's world, full of rhymes like this one about white folks having more of everything--more guns, more toys of inherited wealth:
The condo & the yacht:
Daddy bought it
Junior got it
Another Peter original was "Sad Song" (or "Be Sad"? "So Sad"? my tiny handwriting on post-its had turned into smudgy near-indecipherability by the end of the set). It starts out with sentimentality about bygone things like cowboy movies, merry-go-rounds, and Studebakers, and such. Then suddenly we're hearing about homeless people, then Chernobyl, and woah, it's not funny anymore, but he done hooked us. A memory surfaced from somewhere years back: I think I recall a quote of Peter's, something to the effect that however non-mainstream/alternativey/hippie/beatnicky it might be, this wasn't protest music. But it seems Peter's songwriter soul was temporarily overtaken by the impulse to mourn the world's powerless underdoggies' suffering at the paws of the powerful overwolves.
John's song about a Croatian general took a similar trip:
starts out funny, then subtly but definitely steers its way into heartbreaking references to Serbs, death & destruction, loss of loved ones. The General is not fictional, it turns out. If there's a force for goodness in the universe and the law of karma means anything, the General will someday hear John's
ode to him. But alas, we all know that more likely life is mainly just random chaos from Random Canyon (get it, HMR fans? I hope you've read this far), and the General will probably be long-gone (like Long John?) before that ever happens.
There was some great picking, too. Peter had a new (to me) bluegrass-style resonator-backed banjo; John played the old-timey version. There was one dual-banjo, all banjo tune---I guess dancing banjos. It sounds like a setup for a joke, but IT WAS GREAT!!!! Peter did a neat chunka-chunka uke-ish kind of break in the middle of "It's Gonna Be A Great Day" that had the audience whooping with glee.
They closed with Dylan's "I Want You"---which I've never heard anybody cover, but I could picture old Zimmie himself hearing this and giving it a classic hyperbolic "yeah".
Well, I've never written a music review before ("Oh really? No kidding") but something tells me I've gone on too long already, so I'll just end here.
Oh yeah...I almost forgot: John Hammond was there too.
He closed for Peter and John.
Anina Karmen
aninalee@hotmail.com
March 03, 2006
Brandl and Bullock in Europe
This entry: “Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 7.
Brandl and Leonard Bullock CONCLUDE their debate about contemporary painting, as seen in four shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.
........
MSB: Leta Peer, a wonderful Swiss artist, was also included in the Kulturhaus Markgräflerhof exhibition, titled No Man/Woman into the Same River Steps Twice. An amusing title for a show, with its rather purposefully Germanicized syntax.
LB: Peer produces beautiful, small, representational works created through viscous glazing. Her themes are indebted to her childhood in the remote Engadine mountains of the “wild east” of Switzerland.
MSB: She also created a marvelous artist’s book not long ago, titled Borrowed Places, Christoph Merian Press. It concentrates on an installation-action wherein the artist hung very small paintings in the private spaces of acquaintances in New York City for a limited time. Peer documented the works in context, whether bedroom, living room, studio or other such locale. The book pairs these photos with short reactions by the people with whom the paintings were placed — situations which this Same River show resembled.
Leta Peer painting
LB: Other painters in the exhibition worth mentioning include Alice Stepanek, Steven Maslin, Lori Hersberger and Mathis Vass.
MSB: There are other shows of painting in this part of Europe, yet not in Basel, which are also of interest, showing that painting is indeed “on the move.” In particular, I enjoyed the exhibition of color-based geometric abstract works by Charles Boetschi in the Betriebszentrum at Weinfelden, Switzerland.
Boetschi’s paintings make clear reference to the minimalism of Donald Judd and to other geometric abstraction. Nonetheless, he denies and inverts several of their key premises. Boetschi utilizes quirky color and unstable geometric composition, playing our expectations of regularity against actual irregularity. His large canvases, which are often 2 x 2 square meters, are based on a grid formed of eight rectangular, horizontal subdivisions, termed "color units" by the artist. With these elements, though, he makes surprisingly dynamic, often visually “incorrect, ” unsettling compositions.
Charles Boetschi painting
Likewise, he focuses attention on the potency of eccentric color combinations. The choices of hue are unique and playful. In his paintings, strangely embarrassing yet exquisite "off-colors" are adjoined in a seemingly random fashion. The colors are usually so unique that personal and anecdotal associations accrue handily to them. The artist forswears both the utopian aspirations of hard-edged purist painting and the Dada-fathered theatricality of presence in Minimalism. Therein, Boetschi is able to regain something important with early geometric painters, yet scorned by Postmodernists — a striving after integrity.
"Rating" Paintbrushes
LB: And our rankings of the shows of painting we have discussed so far?
MSB: I give The Basel Kunstmuseum three and a half paintbrushes out of five, Î Î Î i
The Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the Kunsthalle, each three. Î Î Î
Boetschi receives five. Î Î Î Î Î
The Kulturhaus Markgräflerhof, an insider-trading four and a half. Î Î Î Î i
And you?
LB: The Basel Kunstmuseum has some wonderful stuff, but it’s clogged as usual and deserves little or no credit for the incoherence of that last room: thus three paintbrushes. Î Î Î
The Kunsthalle, definitely not Pakesch’s best, I give two and a half. Î Î i
Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2. Î Î
Kulturhaus Markgräflerhof, actually the least compromised, present company not withstanding, I find so close to four that I might as well say four. Î Î Î Î
MSB: Whatever the weaknesses and strengths of each exhibition we have mentioned, it seems that painting because of, yet also despite, a gathering wave of artworld rehabilitation is indeed on the move.
LB. And seems once again to be reliant on the quality of individual works and artists, rather than imposed curatorial constructions. A “traditional” strength worth reattending.
In addition to Brandl's solo blog entries, he and Bullock intend to post more such discussions in the future --- perhaps not such long, seven-part ones though. Furthermore, Brandl intends to post solo blogs by Bullock for him on the Sharkforum from time to time, whenever he writes them.
Contemporary Art Workshop
My painting studio is located in the Contemporary Art Workshop building.
Founded in 1949 in Chicago by John Kearney, Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and Ray Fink, the Contemporary Art Workshop is one of the oldest artist-run alternative spaces in the country. It houses 21 artist studios.
Also, with two interior exhibition spaces, the CAW hosts approximately fourteen individual and three group shows yearly. Many of the artists shown are recent graduates from world-renowned institutions.
It's definitely worth a visit to see some good, emerging to mid-career artists.
www.contemporaryartworkshop.org
Founded in 1949 in Chicago by John Kearney, Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and Ray Fink, the Contemporary Art Workshop is one of the oldest artist-run alternative spaces in the country. It houses 21 artist studios.
Also, with two interior exhibition spaces, the CAW hosts approximately fourteen individual and three group shows yearly. Many of the artists shown are recent graduates from world-renowned institutions.
It's definitely worth a visit to see some good, emerging to mid-career artists.
www.contemporaryartworkshop.org
Constructed Family (2006)
March 02, 2006
The Unseen and the Unseemly
An old saying goes like this:
"What you don't know can't hurt you."
Another favorite amongst artists and pseudo-intellectuals goes something like this:
"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."
Lately the news has me wondering.
When you run down the list of recent near-scandals it's almost hard to believe that anyone believes the PR issuing forth from the White House any longer. The problem isn't that the White House makes an effort to spin stories to their advantage - every administration in history has done that. The real problem is that this administration has elevated secrecy to a position of dominance which, I dare say, would make a loyal Kremlin aparatchik blush.
One is almost moved to boisterous laughter at the outrage expressed by the President's supporters in reaction the rancorous questioning of Scott McClellan after the Vice President's unfortunate hunting mishap. But what do they expect? When you insist on secrecy, you invite scrutiny and suspicion.
A quick rundown of past and recent events reads like a political police blotter: the shameful lack of awareness of the situation in New Orleans shortly after the landfall of hurricane Katrina, the opacity of the process surrounding the drafting of the country's energy "policy," the details surrounding the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the inexplicable time lapse involved in the releasing of the news that the Vice President had shot a hunting companion and friend (not to mention the fungibility of the account), the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the news that the NSA is spying on U.S. citizens, and that the President personally signed-off on this illegal action, and, most recently and perhaps most distrubing, the bizarre details surround the UAE "ports" deal.
President Bush insisted that he would veto any bill which quashed the sale to Dubai Ports World - before he had any familiarity with the details of the transaction. This statement elicited a rare public rebuke for GOP stalwart Trent Lott: "OK, Big Boy, I'll Just Vote To Override Your Veto."
Having played poker a few times I understand that secrecy almost always demonstrates an interest in covering detail. Thus we are left to ask "just what are they hiding?' The current administration's posture towards the rest of America (including the judiciary and legislative branches) can only be typified as paternalistic. But this isn't "Father Knows Best," and the First Lady isn't Jane Wyatt.
Now we find out the President and his Homeland Security chief were warned explicitely about the impending risk of levee failure before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Micheal Brown, a man who can generously be called the Don Knotts of the Federal disaster recovery effort, even warned President Bush and DHS head Michael Chertoff of a "catastrophe within a catastrophe" at the Superdome. Just days later the President was quoted as saying, in essence "no one knew the levees would fail." Please forgive us if we suspect that the President and his cohort enjoy a relationship with the truth something like that of Michael Jackson and his last wife.
Now that we see this for the bald-faced lie that it is, we're forced to wonder just what it is that those who support the President are thinking. How can an administration which has been busted repeatedly in outright lies claim any credibility at all? Even the most credulous amongst us are forced to wonder.
"Fool me once..."
The real shame for all of this lies at the feet of an impotent congressional body who has repeatedly allowed administration officials to testify to Congress without swearing an oath to tell the truth. Why in the world would the President of the United States, sworn to uphold the US constitution, refuse to swear under oath to tell the truth before a closed session of Congress?
The answer now seems painfully clear - this is not a case of mere oversight. No, it's much more horrifying than that. Whether by intention or effect, the White House has continually demonstrated contempt for the rule of law in this country and elsewhere, asserting that the actions of the Chief Executive, any actions, are legal because he says so. What else can you call this but Imperialism?
It seems hard to imagine the GOP carrying the Neo-Con water much longer. Congressional Republicans are increasingly pushing back against the White House, and the looming mid-term elections have got them about as settled as a "Christian Scientist with an appendicitis."
In the final analysis the GOP has got to be wondering what price they'll be forced to pay for this Faustian deal. If the President ends up getting impeached, it will be the result of actions taken by Congressional Republicans. The first law of politics is self-preservation.
Embrace Your Inner Historian
Now you can participate in the (re)writing of history. Chicago Living Arts has created Chicago Wiki Arts: A Collaborative Site for Writing on Chicago Culture.
A quick read of the music section demonstrated a painful ommission - no mention of Eleventh Dream Day. P-shaw! Someone alert the authorities!
Given that this, like Wikipedia, is a communal work-in-progress we're sure the gaping hole will be filled soon.
Viva le Web!
lancinating, adj.
Characterized by piercing or stabbing sensations; lancinating pain
“There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approach of winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezes it tight.”
--Angela Carter, The Erlking
March 01, 2006
Cabrini rose, mango, blue
Art Critic in Training: Detroit is a Mean Town
DETROIT (AP) — Apparently, one 12-year-old visitor to the Detroit Institute of Arts doesn't think much of abstract art.
The boy stuck a wad of gum to a $1.5 million painting called "The Bay" by Helen Frankenthaler, leaving a stain the size of a quarter, officials said.
The boy, who was not identified because of his age, was part of a school group that was visiting the museum last week when officials said he took a piece of gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the 1963 painting.
For more on this future art critic, go here.
Beware of God
by Paul K
by Paul K
paludal, adj.
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
After conversation...
by Ray Pride
by Ray Pride
Poem of the Week: "Epitaph X" by Thomas Heise
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
Medium Cool
by david roth
by david roth
My Mother's Face
by Ursula Sokolowska
by Ursula Sokolowska
wherry, n.
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
BIOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE paintings 2005-6
by Marilyn Cvitanic
by Marilyn Cvitanic
Chicago: the city that smokes
by Ray Pride
by Ray Pride
Long May You Run / The Red Fiat Uno
by Richard Dobson
by Richard Dobson
Jack Fish
by Paul K
by Paul K
Fire in the Belly - Act 3: Roger Gets A Break
by david roth
by david roth
Historia de la Musica Rock pt.3 -The Seventies
by Rick Rizzo
by Rick Rizzo
This is Chicago
by david roth
by david roth
Poem of the Week: "Century" by Joel Brouwer
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
So Much Better Than Bukowski
by david roth
by david roth
Folio #2
by Ursula Sokolowska
by Ursula Sokolowska
sepulture, n.
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
It was raining Wednesday morning
by Ray Pride
by Ray Pride
What a wonderful exhibition! Bring it to Chicago.
by Mark Staff Brandl
by Mark Staff Brandl
But What Will The Sharks Think?
by The Shark
by The Shark
glottis, n.
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
Poem of the Week: "Elegy for a Soldier" by Marilyn Hacker
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
Altman essay part I
by Paul K
by Paul K
Good Riddance to Alt Country, Part I
by Paul K
by Paul K
Joel Dorn's NYC: Volume 10
by Joel Dorn
by Joel Dorn
Fire in the Belly - Act 2: Working In The Belly
by david roth
by david roth
The Devil’s Asshole
by John Kruth
by John Kruth
Brandl and Bullock in Europe
This entry: “Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 7.
by Mark Staff Brandl
This entry: “Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 7.
by Mark Staff Brandl
Contemporary Art Workshop
by Norbert Marszalek
by Norbert Marszalek
Constructed Family (2006)
by Ursula Sokolowska
by Ursula Sokolowska
The Unseen and the Unseemly
by david roth
by david roth
lancinating, adj.
by Simone Muench
by Simone Muench
Cabrini rose, mango, blue
by Ray Pride
by Ray Pride
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