Brandl and Leonard Bullock argue about contemporary painting, as seen in a brace of shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.
Songs are powerful medicine. They can punch you square in the heart. Put a whole different spin on your day. Good songs have a way of sneaking up on you, whether through an infectious groove that makes you dance spontaneously, or they can ambush you with insidious introspective lyrics and haunting melodies. You could be out, doing a little shopping when you walk into a store and suddenly get an ear full of Billie Holiday singing “In My Solitude” and instantly find yourself transported to the dark end of “Downer Avenue.”
Junebug
Directed by Phil Morrison
Sony Pictures Classics
A sensitive tale of family and art fails to live up to it's promise.
redivivus, adj.
Living again; brought back to life; revived; restored.
Usage note: Redivivus is used postpositively--that is, after the noun it modifies.
Here's yet more from Paul Belker's amazing collection, this time it's
After 107 years, get yer schnitzel somewhere else, the 17 West Adams Berghoff is closing February 28, AP reports. What's next, Marshall Field's? Oh... right.
apiary, n.
A place where bees and beehives are kept, especially a place where bees are raised for their honey.
Make A Rising: Semolina Pilchard's climbing up the Eiffel Tower once again, but this time the Walrus isn't Paul...
Okay, when was the last time you heard an album that combined elements and influences by the following: The Incredible String Band' Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, The Mothers of Invention's Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Beach Boys' Smiley Smile, Love's Forever Changes with sonic shards of Robert Wyatt, Eric Satie riding a bicycle with a flat tire and something that sounds like Harry Partch shaking up a can of spray paint then suddenly smashing Mr. Satie's bike to bits with a shovel which kinda creates music to a French movie I've never seen before.
Fur by John Rocco
(Published in Heaven Books 180 pp $25.00)
The debut novel by New Yorker John Rocco on Louisville's Published in Heaven imprint is a shocking, brash magical realist fable about addiction.
Addictions to dope, sex, violence, money, porn -- it makes no difference to Rocco, a man who seems to have never met a vice he didn't enjoy.
apotropaic, adj.
Intended to ward off evil.
Particular objects called apotropaic turn away demons and evil monsters, including vampires. They can be ranged into four general categories:
Ballin' the Jack: Friday, December, 23 2005
55 Bar on Christopher Street is one of my favorite joints in NYC. It's one of the only rooms left in the city with a genuine feel. The kind of you can't create. Its two nights before Christmas. Stockings and tinsel hang over the bar. Photos of jazz giants adorn the walls - Miles, Bird, Diz. Back tonight to hear Ballin' the Jack, Matt Darriau's balls to the wall early jazz septet featuring Frank London (his bandmate in the Klezmatics) and Anthony Coleman (one of the finest interpreters of Jelly Roll Morton's oeuvre) on the oldest Fender Rhodes I've ever seen.
My friend Paul Belker is a
fuck v., n.
v. tr.
1. To have sexual intercourse with.
2. To take advantage of, betray, or cheat; victimize.
3. Used in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal.
Rick Geary is an illustrator living in San Diego. Something about his work makes me chuckle. I've been a fan of line art for a long time - adept practitioners demonstrate a nice sense of economy. And yet, for such a low noise-to-signal ratio, good caricature works very much like language.
Here's an interesting quote from celebrated figurative painter Eric Fischl concerning the current gallery system (reprinted from "Hampton Jitney Magazine"): 
sensorium, n.
1) The part of the brain that receives and coordinates all the stimuli conveyed to various sensory centers.
2) The sensory system of the body.
geophagy, n.
Geophagy is a practice of eating earthy substances such as clay, often to augment a mineral-deficient diet.
From Here, Bullet published by Alice James Books. Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.
If you're behind on your gift giving like I always am, here's a nifty little site called Fantamos38000 that sells a wide variety of posters, including a large selection of Italian and Spanish horror-sleaze posters, as well as Hammer studio posters. Find it HERE.
bruxism, n.
Bruxism is grinding of the teeth. The verb is "to brux". The cause, or causes, of bruxism remains unclear. Some dentists believe it is due to a lack of symmetry in the teeth; others, that it reflects anxiety, digestive problems or a disturbed sleep pattern.
Some drugs are known to cause bruxism as a side-effect, e.g. MDMA and others of the amphetamine-based family.
From Wikipedia.org
"The Freecycle Network™ is made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Each local group is run by a local volunteer moderator (them's good people). Membership is free."
Since the new era that dawned on September 11th, rights have been in constant jeopardy. By now, most people dont even think of this as newsworthy.
Twenty One artists in one show makes for an overwhemlming experience. Wednesday, I visited the BSD gallery on lake street, for the group show titled “A Bloody Portent of Possible Erotic Chaos”.
Putting Their Names All Over the News
Banks' Sponsorship of Radio Newsrooms Raises Questions About Journalism Ethics
By Steven Levingston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 15, 2005; Page D05
"...Clear Channel Communications Inc. radio stations in Madison, Wis., and Milwaukee are turning back the clock.
Starting in January, the news on WIBA-AM in Madison will deliver its report from the Amcore Bank News Center. The station has sold naming rights to its newsroom to Amcore, a regional institution operating in southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois and Iowa. About two years ago, WISN-AM in Milwaukee introduced listeners to its newscast from the PyraMax Bank News Center.
iridectomy, n.
Surgical removal of part of the iris of the eye.
In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis performs a make-shift iridectomy on Michael Myers with a coat-hanger.
From Dictionary.com
A snappy little snapshot of local history, Genevieve Coleman's charming first feature, Monday Night at the Rock 'N Bowl chronicles about the punk rock bowlathon-drinkathon at the Diversey River Bowl in Chicago. It's out on DVD now, and we check in with first-time feature filmmaker Genevieve Coleman about its process and progress of a story told over the course of several months of Mondays around the turn-of-the-century with borrowed video cameras.
The Sun-Times' failed Red Streak tabloid, for young audiences that don't read newspapers, which folded after this AM's editions, offers a "personal note" about its "relationship" with its 36 or 37 readers:
"We need to talk. I don't know how to say this, except to just say it.... I know it's four days before Christmas and all, but there's no point in going through the motions anymore. This has been a long time coming, and we both know it. Don't worry. It's not you. It's me."
Opens December 25th.
"Swaggeringly nasty film which deserves an audience outside the horror fanbase."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry
(Simon and Schuster 179 pp. $25.00)
When Larry McMurtry turns to non-fiction he is as potentially great as any writer in America. When the topic is as near a dear to his heart as the history of How the West was Won, the results can be positively staggering. The author of "Lonesome Dove" and "Terms of Endearment" starts with an overly long introduction -- almost an apology, really, for the grimness of his approaching subject -- and then proceeds to painstakingly document and deconstruct each of the major Indian massacres of the late 1800's. The book refers to Custer's fall at Little Bighorn but has no chapter dedicated to it. It does deal in detail with massacres starting with the Sacramento River massacre and describes every mass killing leading up to and including Wounded Knee. The white man was overwhelmingly the aggressor and many of the body counts were low, but many settlers were indeed scalped and massacred barbarically themselves. McMurtry calls these incidents "perfect meatshops" quoting a long forgotten federal cavalryman; the metaphor of the butcher shop and the slaughterhous are omnipresent.
The study of the physical features of the moon.
The hand that explored my body cavities, hand of the selenographer, mapper of lost roads.
Paul Nudd is an artist whose pieces i have seen in person only a few times, yet his style and technique register so firmly in my mind that any time his work appears, I immediately know who it is.
Three new novels in my beloved crime fiction genre have appeared recently and are so good that ignoring them would seem itself to be a criminal offense for anyone interested in these sorts of books. The first (in order of recent publication) is the latest from the great, Emmy-nominated (for HBO's "The Wire") George Pelecanos, "Drama City."(295 pp. $24.95 Little Brown). Strictly speaking, it is not a crime novel but it is certainly hard-boiled.
Our foreign correspondent Mark Staff Brandl has made it known the waters are now sharky here in Chicago and, on artletter: I agree with Mark's comment that the sites are very different- but that is where our agreement ends.
We here at SHARKFORUM are working continually in our efforts to bring you only the finest, most qualified reporting of our local (and national/international) culture coverage: all of our editors have been thoroughly screened, subjected to rigorous background checks, and submitted to a personal interview with one of the co-founders of SHARKFORUM - David Roth, or, The Shark himself.....here is a recent photograph of Le Grand Requin du' Blanc interviewing a prospective member: why the cage? Do I look THAT famished?
A UK study shows Barbie's in for it: "The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers.
We think they're swell - go check 'em out.
On August 22nd, 2004, Scream, and Madonna by Edvard Munch, were torn off the walls of Oslo's Munch Museum.
Not literally, of course. (And not that there's anything wrong with that.) In today's Sun-Times Anders Smith Lindall offers up a steaming platter of home-town goodness: Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine. Ryan's burgeoning cottage industry designs and prints brilliant original pieces for cd covers and concert posters.
Turnhere is a new website compiling short videos about neighborhoods around the world. From the company's PR: Turnhere is "seeking professional and independent filmmakers, [which] it pays for their work and creativity, to participate in an ambitious initiative which is chronicling life in American neighborhoods across the country through 2-5 minute short films made specifically for the Internet." Their bold claim? "TurnHere is essentially making the largest documentary on American culture ever made. Films should be artful and high-concept, focusing on the people, culture, history, local businesses and political landscapes across America... The site is highly viral, as each film has [its] own unique URL which can be forwarded via email." Austin, Texas is the setting of the sample they suggest; the short from still-gentrifying Wicker Park is emblematic to the point of parody, such as this shot of a young woman in an AC/DC t-shirt, wearing oversized sunglasses and dog-ears, striding in front of a U-Haul trailer on a leafy side street.
Until I get better footing with this whole blog thing I'd like to start things off with a passage from Max Beckmann's essay entitled "On My Painting" written in 1938. Beckmann's words have been influential in how I see and work with paint. Here you go:
Local glossy STOP SMILING, "the magazine for high-minded lowlifes," pulls out the stops with an all-Chicago celebration (issue #24) on the stands soon: the cover models are Mayor Daley, Vince Vaughn and Hugh Hefner, collect one, collect them all. The good stuff inside starts with Q&As with local lumens like Lois Weisberg, Aleksandar Hemon, William Friedkin, Studs Terkel...
From Ladders in July published by BlazeVOX [books]
loose change
by William Allegrezza
I was only shot six times before I changed
my name to Gara and moved to Florida.
Well, Who is Henry Moore? Only one of the most important contributors to the world of abstract sculpture, silly!
Chris Ware's Chicago-steeped comix serial in the New York Times Magazine, Building Stories marked its fourteenth installment Sunday (all of which are downloadable in PDF form), but the artwork that leapt off Quimby's new arrival table at me Saturday night was his cover for a new translation of Voltaire's "Candide, or Optimism," described by its publisher as "a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with French flaps and rough front!
"There has been a shift in the functions of the various strata in the art work in recent decades. Something far stranger than a power realignment alone has been happening in the art world. Earlier, historical changes were relatively transparent transpositions of domination. Novel now is the seeming shift of interest, of focus --- almost of aesthetic object."
I was worried this would happen -where everyone would be overly self concious and sensitive about posting their photos, intimidated by me! - I know, and sympathize, sometimes I'm amazed myself!........just how good looking the GW shark actually is! Please! Try and keep in mind, this, is not a beauty contest!
My sticker says: Hi, I'm Mark. I've been asked by Wesley to be the "foreign correspondent" for his Blog/Site SHARKFORUM: Opinion With Teeth. I'm going to be writing for the SHARK about art, the artworld and related entities from the perspective of an outsider, yet one acquainted with Chicago. Writing from that interesting position termed "ex-pat" by the UK citizens I have met around the world; citizens who never really emigrated, but just never seem to make it "back home."
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
well, well; here we finally are, ensconced in cool grey green salt water unfettered- now; is there anything to eat in this place? SHARKFORUM I see as an aristocracy, a place where unique, inimitable, individuals can gather to discuss ideas, argue, hold forth and so on. Chomping is not only allowed, but encouraged: are we not APEX PREDATORS?
We here at SHARKFORUM are always in search of great web sites. Here are a few faves.
In a world loaded with snarky one-liners, perfunctory didacticisms and quixotic Post-Modernism, Martin Puryear is a breath of fresh air. Last Saturday the 64-year-old artist opened an exhibit of sculpture and drawings at Chicago's Donald Young Gallery, and this is a wonderful, if modest show.
What's in a name? A lot, sez us here at SHARKFORUM, so we'd encourage you to avoid the temptation to read in too much specific meaning.