Continue reading Escaping Sundance.
January 2006 Archives
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
Continue reading Simone Muench's Poem of the Week: "Because" by Yerra Sugarman.
"In spectacle, narrative may play a part, conflict may be an appendage, but spectacle’s heart is transformation, and its food is poetry."
Continue reading Spectacle: Notes for a Tasmanian Speech.
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?
Continue reading The Enigma of the 5th Beatle.
At best, self-revelation creates legends. We can’t get enough of Frida Kahlo. The Mexican born artist who died over 50 years ago is a bona fide pop icon. At worst, confessional art tells us more than we want to know about it’s subject and is both boring and embarrassing.
Gad/Page/Madonna, 12"x24", 2005
Gad/Page/Madonna, 12"x24", 2005
Continue reading Child Star Makes Good.
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."
Continue reading What's Wrong with Art Criticism?.
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
Continue reading chiffonier, n..
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
Continue reading caparison, n..
"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.
Continue reading What's Wrong With the Art World?.
(Brandl and Leonard Bullock continue their debate about contemporary painting, as seen four shows in Basel, Switzerland and nearby locales in Europe.)
Continue reading "Faster Painting, Move Move!"
Part 5: Brandl and Bullock in Europe.
Part 5: Brandl and Bullock in Europe.
Lanterns
Next week, photographs from Park City, Utah, home of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Here are images from the 2005 edition.
Continue reading Memories of Sundance 2005.
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.
Continue reading You So Ugly....
Two interesting openings:
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
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
Continue reading Friday Night Fever.
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!!!
Continue reading Letters From The Earth.
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.
Continue reading David Drew Longey – Blood From a Stone.
It's true.
All words are lies. Especially things called "text." So this time I'll shut up and just show my painting.
Continue reading Cover Painting: All Words are Lies.
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
Continue reading somnophilia, n..
(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.)
Continue reading Faster Painting! Move! Move!” Part 4. Brandl and Bullock 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.
Continue reading hybristophilia, n..
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-
Continue reading zoophiliacs.
Most of the time when a human encounters a great white shark, it's hunting something;
Continue reading Consider The Shark Attack......
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
Continue reading Thirteen Best Horror Film Titles of 2005 (in no particular order).
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”.
Continue reading On Film & Music: Too Much Monkey Business.
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.”
Continue reading American Totems.
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.
Continue reading Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match.
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.
Continue reading Your Book Could Be My Life.
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?”
Continue reading A Subjective Fable.
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.
Continue reading Until The Monkey Dies.
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.
Continue reading Until The Monkey Lives.
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
Continue reading bimaculate, adj..
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.
Continue reading Clarence in a Car Coat: My "Wonderful Life".
