Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto and teaches writing at New York University and City College. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first collection, Forms of Gone, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her poems and articles have appeared in ACM, The Nation, How2, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, 100 Poets Against the War, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. She holds degrees in visual arts from Columbia and Concordia Universities and in writing from City College.
Because
"In spectacle, narrative may play a part, conflict may be an appendage, but spectacle’s heart is transformation, and its food is poetry."
It’s late… around four AM and I can’t sleep. The pug is snoring like a frickin’ lawn mower while the cat yowls in the other room, sitting shiva for my sweetheart who’s gone to LA for the week. So what does one do at a time like this?
Gad/Page/Madonna, 12"x24", 2005
Nancy Princenthal's Art in America article on the crisis in art criticism is a must-read!
There is a current crisis not only in art itself --- and the curating of art --- but in art criticism as well. New York Times book editor Barry Gewen reflected upon the theme last month in his long, elucidating essay, "State of the Art."
chiffonier, n.
A narrow high chest of drawers or bureau, often with a mirror attached.
“One day I found that the drawer at the bottom of the chiffonier, replete with mothballs, was filled with shawls, white, green, lilac. Stacked amid a great smell of camphor--it was like a shop; I didn’t have the nerve to ask her what she planned to do with them. ”
--Julio Cortazar, “House Taken Over”
From House Taken Over
Ray Bianchi is a native of suburban Chicago, the child of Italian immigrants, educated at the University of Iowa. Ray lived and worked for most of the 1990s in Bolivia and Brazil, first as a volunteer in a men's prison and later in international publishing. His work has appeared in Tin Lustre Mobile, Moria, Poesia Y Cultura, and Afterwords. Ray is the author of Circular Descent which is available from Blaze VOX Press. He is the author of two blogs chicagopostmodernpoetry and collagepoetchicago.
“Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli.”
caparison, n.
1. An ornamental covering for a horse or for its saddle or harness; trappings.
2. Richly ornamented clothing; finery.
tr.v. caparisoned, caparisoning, caparisons
1. To outfit (a horse) with an ornamental covering.
2. To dress (another) in rich clothing.
To the alcove of your tears
to your silken foot there the might of weapons far away
to my Spanish jennet
caparisoned with nerines with black stars with freesias.
--Valentine Penrose, “Beloved to love you,” trans. Mary Ann Caws
From Surrealist Love Poems
"Trash," according to Sabine Folie, chief curator at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, "has become a transcendental necessity." Folie, about whom I know nothing other than her absolutely perfect name, is writing in the catalogue of "'Dear Painter, Paint me...,'" an exhibition that recently toured Europe and included work by John Currin, the fly speck of a painter who has been stuck in many a New Yorker's eye since his mid-career retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum in November.
(Brandl and Leonard Bullock continue their debate about contemporary painting, as seen four shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.)
Lanterns
Next week, photographs from Park City, Utah, home of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Here are images from the 2005 edition.
Marilyn Krysl has published seven books of poetry and three of stories, as well as poems in The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic. She has received two NEA fellowships and the Lawrence Foundation Prize for fiction. She is former Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has taught ESL in the People’s Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, and volunteered at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. She just returned from Sri Lanka for the 6th time, where she volunteered for an NGO that works in Tsunami relief and peace-making among the three ethnic groups on the island. Her book Warscape with Lovers received the 1996 CSU Poetry Center Prize.
4 Ghazals for the Turn of the Century
Mohammed Ali, king of the trash talkers once said, “I’m so mean I make medicine sick.” Anyone on the end of Ali’s taunts; ask Joe Frazier, really had no choice but to laugh it off, or let it frustrate you to the point of distraction. In sports news this week, trash talk has popped up as a hot topic as the Chicago Bears have prepared to play the Panthers.
gardenfresh features Milwaukee artist Kathryn Martin who will have an installation.
6-10 pm, through February 17th - 840 W. Washington 2nd floor
Gallery 40000 presents "Versus, Photography & Sculpture", "A Group Exhibition featuring 12 artists exploring the interstices that exists between these two mediums."
7-10pm - 1001 N Winchester
Ath-bhliain fe mhaise dhuit!!!!
i.e. HAPPY NEW YEARS (IN GAELIC)
NOW I AM GOING TO WORK ON,,,,SHPREKKIN' DE GUD ENGLISH!!!!
Below is my last weekend's schedule which started off the New Years off in sunny Tarpon Springs Florida, after shoveling snow here in the freezing hills of Putnam Valley, NY.
It was a wonderful concert, from Mozart and Bach to Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. I hadn't been to Tarpon Springs since the winter of 1936-37 when I went to the first grade in Passagrille Florida, so seventy years later, it was nice to make a comeback!!!
Living in New York City I sometimes feel like I’ve lost touch with what author Greil Marcus called that “Old Weird America.” I’m thousands of miles from Wall Drug. Haven’t seen a Jackalope in well over a decade. Snipes can’t handle TV sets and boom boxes.
It's true.
All words are lies. Especially things called "text." So this time I'll shut up and just show my painting.
somnophilia, n.
Also called sleeping princess syndrome, is a paraphilia in which sexual arousal and/or orgasm are stimulated by intruding on and awakening a sleeping stranger with erotic caresses. Somnophilia may also refer to having sex with a sleeping partner.
From Wikipedia
(Brandl and Leonard Bullock continue their debate about contemporary painting, as seen in a quartet of shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.)
hybristophilia, n.
A paraphilia involving sexual arousal by people who have committed crimes; in particular cruel, or outrageous crimes. Some view them with dismay.
I wondered what you were all doing here! -Just stay away from me with your sick zoophilia- we sharks are not a bunch of perverts like you humans-
Most of the time when a human encounters a great white shark, it's hunting something;
1) Needle Anus
2) The Witches of Breastwick
3) Not Dead Enough
4) Motor Home Massacre
5) Weenie Roast Massacre
6) Sugar and Shit
7) Slaughterhouse of the Rising Sun
8) Skankobite
9) Boy Eats Girl
10) Satan's House of Yoga
11) The Gingerdead Man
12) G-String Vampire
13) The Cactus that Looked Just Like a Man
Robert Archambeau was born in the USA but grew up in Canada. He studied literature at the University of Manitoba and the University of Notre Dame and has taught at Notre Dame and Lund University (Sweden). He currently teaches at Lake Forest. He has also edited two books, Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias and Vectors: New Poetics. His book Home and Variations is available from Salt Modern Poets.
"Imitations and Collage: from the Poems of Blas De Otero"
Oh, come off it you big apes. I’ve seen a lot of best of lists for 2005 movies and I have to say I’m a little shocked to see King Kong on many of them. Unless you only saw ten movies this year I can’t imagine this three hour chest thump taking the place of smaller, better films like Phil Morrison’s “Junebug” or Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man”.
The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent
so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.
- Joseph Campbell
According to a Passamaquoddy Indian named George I met at a rest stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike last week, the word totem means, “that to which a person or thing belongs.”
Not since chocolate and peanut butter collided to make the Reese’s Cup has a flavor combo been so highly anticipated as the Tortoise/ Bonny Prince Billy recording, The Brave and the Bold.
Hey- you got singer on my instrumental band.
Perhaps the best rock book in 10 years (even though the Motley Crue book is still funnier), “Our Band Could be Your Life” IS my life. Published in 2001 and then quickly out in paperback, “Our Band…” tells the story of the second punk rock revolution and how it was subsequently won (by Nirvana in 1991). The tale is told in thirteen chapters using the device of the biographer, one band per chapter.
Once upon a time my neighbor and I were walking up our front condo stairwell when passing a painting that we both have walked passed a hundred times he stopped, looked at the painting and said, “Is this good?”
At once maddening and gloriously free and honorous of a mythical Hollywood past which may or may not have roots in reality, Peter Jackson's virtuoso remake of the 1933 classic "King Kong" offers everything for a movie lover to love (and everything for a curmudgeon to hate). Call me amiss, but I must cop to having never seen any of Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films. Cast-of-Thousands spectaculars have always been distasteful to me. With "King Kong," it seems, Jackson has found a way to keep his megalithic special effects machine working full time whilst paying close attention to a simple plot line (albeit one written for him almost 80 years ago). The resultant film is everything one would expect from a $207 million budget.
Although I am a big Jack Black fan, I refuse to see the new remake of King Kong. I made this decision a few weeks ago after I first saw a poster for the movie with a close-up of Kong’s face. The ape looked an awful lot like my pug Louie. They both share the same loveable but domineering nature and pushed in nose.
Brandl and Bullock in Europe This entry: “Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 3. (Mark Staff Brandl and Leonard Bullock continue their debate about contemporary painting, as seen in an ever more numerous group of shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.)
bimaculate, adj
Having, or marked with, two spots.
"Utter like a public-address system,
like a bimaculated duck, with windup gears."
From "Whale Poem" by Sean Singer
I don’t know what it is about It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve seen the damn thing over a dozen times and yet every Christmas when they haul it out of the attic, with the cherished ornaments, shimmering tinsel and fake snow, I can’t look away. Each year I tell myself I’m just gonna watch a couple of scenes: Uncle Billy, drunk with a crow on his shoulder, frantically searching for the wad of cash he rolled up into a newspaper and absentmindedly handed to that slimy bastard Mr. Potter. Or maybe Violet whoring around the seedy, neon-lit streets of Pottersville. That should do it. But this year I wound up watching the whole damn thing again. Maybe it’s because back in the fifties my mom looked a like an ethnic Donna Reed and this is the first Christmas that she’s gone.
Any self-respecting fan of American music should know who Townes Van Zandt was, and if you don't, chances are you will soon.
A field of dandelions in bloom; I’m always suckered in by the brilliant yellows and greens; a salad of color. As Dorothy drifted to sleep on her opiate bed, I want to dive in with apiarian bliss and absorb the rays of the sun. An illusion evidently, because time will undo the beauty- all I’ll be left with is an army of defoliated stems. A ghost town of weeds; no floral Eden. As hope springs eternal, so does the inevitable fall.
Oops, too late. This morning's Chicago Tribune ran a duplicate of yesterday's Tempo section page 8. The strange thing was, Tuesday's "Su Doku" puzzle featured the solution to "Tuesday's Puzzle."
Talk about puzzled - I hadn't yet had my requisite pot of coffee to jump-start my brain.
1. To blow or breathe into or on.
2. To treat medically by blowing a powder, gas, or vapor into a bodily cavity.
"I kissed you like a shipwreck,
like one who insufflates the word."
From "Fons" by Pura López-Colomé, translated by Forrest Gander
flavorpill
The Chicago Reader (Adobe PDF file)
Haberarts Art Criticism Website
One of my favorite writers on art is not a professional critic, nor art historian, nor artist, nor curator --- he's not even getting paid for it! His name is John Haber.
The allegedly 21-year-old, certainly talented singer-songwriter Nellie McKay ('mi-KAI') has two strikes against her in one month. First, a few new tunes go to waste in the awful movie Rumor Has It, and, reports the NY Times, she's the latest musician to be told by the suits that she doesn't suit their biz plans.
tympanic, adj.
1. Relating to or resembling a drum.
2. also tympanal. Anatomy. Of or relating to the middle ear or eardrum.
"The tympanic thought
worth less than a walnut."
From "A Fickle Sonance" from Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton
A friend of mine once asked me what the biggest difference between Buddy Guy and Jimi Hendrix was.
My answer: "A plane ticket."
Originally posted December 15, 2005 -- I attended a panel discussion the other day, "Local Engagement: Museum Curators Speak" which featured four "younger" curators (although they weren't all young, and some had been in their posts for a number of years) as part of the ongoing "Artists At Work" series sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs under Barbara Koenen's capable supervision. (Check out their excellent website, here,)
Brandl and Bullock in Europe
This entry: “Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 2.
(Mark Staff Brandl and Leonard Bullock continue their debate about contemporary painting, as seen in a brace of shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.)
1)Strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust.
2)In theology, concupiscence refers to one's desire, either for good or evil.
(Concupiscence is from Late Latin concupiscentia. The adjective form is concupiscent. A related word is Cupid, the ancient Roman god of love.)
"Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds."
From "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens
Joshua Clover is the author of The Matrix (2005) and Madonna anno domini (1997). He is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis, and contributes to the Village Voice and The New York Times. His book The Totality for Kids will be released in April by The University of California Press.
Rauschenberg's Combines/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/December 30, 2005
Robert Rauschenberg's Combines are just that - combinations of materials and objects that forty-five years ago were not the stuff that large-scale art was made of. He includes bits of weather-worn signs that once graced shop fronts, old tires, cans, stuffed animals (most famously the goat in Monogram (1955-59) and a bald eagle in Canyon (1959). These materials challenged art audiences still trying to grasp Jackson Pollack’s aggressively enigmatic paint splashed canvases, to further question their concept of art and even more importantly, beauty. Other artists before Rauschenberg had created collages out of unlikely materials, including Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell’s elegant boxes. But by bringing collage to such a large scale, Rauschenberg’s intent and process of combining color and texture feels all the more arbitrary and perfect.
