February 2006 Archives

tessellation, n.

1. the careful juxtaposition of shapes in a pattern; "a tessellation of hexagons"
2. the act of adorning with mosaic.


“A tom, sirs, a ginger tom and proud of it. Proud of his fine, white shirtfront that dazzles harmoniously against his orange and tangerine tessellations (oh! what a fiery suit of lights have I).”
--Angela Carter, Puss in Boots

As we stood there, watching the flames, I couldn’t help feeling the warmth of satisfaction. There was only a hint of bittersweet lurking in the shadows, represented by the knowledge that I couldn’t share the beauty of my revenge. It was a small price to pay. Giant rafters burned, brick walls crumbled in on years of work. Clouds glowed ruby and pumpkin as the rain sizzled in the inferno. For once the karmic scales had tipped my way. The great wheel in the sky, which had always turned a blind eye to my need, had finally landed on my number. In front of me was regular old combustion, handed down through countless generations. Inside of me was cold fusion.

On my street in the mid- sixties, about twenty-five houses with a choice of two designs curved around adjacent to a school yard; bordering a small creek that flooded in a big rain, bushes filled with black and straw berries, and the remnants of Illinois prairie. Besides being the perfect setting for a dusky game of Kick the Can, the houses on this small suburban street also provided the basements and garages for no less than four teenage rock bands.

Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson earned an MFA in poetry from University of Arizona and an MA in Film Studies from University College Dublin. He is the co-director, with Solan Jensen, of the forthcoming film Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape about the band Califone. Currently living in Colorado, he is completing a doctorate in literature and creative writing. His chapbook A Ghost as King of the Rabbits is available from New Michigan Press, and his book Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms is available from Pinball Publishing. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk, his second book, will be published in April 2006 by University of Iowa Press.

Pictures Inside the Mattress Before Your Brothers Are Dead

If you read Rick Rizzo's last article in sharkforum, you'll notice that Rick and I, offhandedly, began a verbal dialog on the music business at the shark's lair a couple of weeks ago. We decided that we'd both begin a series of stories on the music business to see if we could un-earth some clues into its, and more selfishly, my own future.

I was looking at photographs the other day and decided that the only description I could give to the image of a young woman who appeared in some of them was that she looked like a milkmaid. Now I grew up on a farm, and it can be accurately said that I once was a milkmaid, as one of my chores was milking the goats (my brothers milked the cows, although I did that more challenging task occasionally it wasn’t a daily chore). Unlike probably 99.9% of the American native-born population, I know what it is like to sit on a low stool, thighs spread and knees popped up at an angle while the feet are pulled underneath, close to the stool, to allow that certain necessary cantilever to the body in order to reach over and access the udder with the arms at the proper angle perpendicular to the body.

The Swamp: the Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise
by Michael Grunwald 450 pp. $27.00
Simon and Schuster

It is timely, in its way, this harrowingly academic study of the history of Florida and its battle with its extraordinary natural makeup. A most unlikely book, indeed, to catch this writer's fancy, as I am neither tree-hugger nor Southern History buff.

adventurer? Dick Proenneke

I was invited last spring to join what seemed to me to be an outrageously prestigious jury of architects, planners, graphic designers and architecture curators led by Pritzker Prize winning architect Thom Mayne (so why did they want me? was my first response) to award prizes in a project that the Chicago Architectural Club was realizing with the cooperation of Mayor Daley and the Cultural Commissioner. It involved soliciting ideas for the creative reuse of the City of Chicago’s many water tanks — a fascinating project aimed at raising awareness of this fast-disappearing aspect of the urban roofscape (check it out here). The jury convened in October, I think, but that’s not the point. The point is as part of looking at the over 180 entries, all of which were very, very interesting indeed, proposing wind generation, wi-fi hotspots, planters, purple martin houses, and so on, the word “graywater” kept cropping up.

internecine, adj.

1. Of or relating to struggle within a nation, organization, or group.
2. Mutually destructive; ruinous or fatal to both sides.
3. Characterized by bloodshed or carnage.


“What is it internecine that is locked,
By very fierceness into a quiescence
Within the rage? We shall not know till it burst
Out of corrosion into new florescence.”

--D.H. Lawrence, “Debacle”

I don’t know if the paint fumes are getting to you art world people, but I’m happy to be removed from the drama. As a veteran of the music biz, it’s all familiar; the decision makers with no spines or vision, the talent-less hacks, the system that rewards mediocrity. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Actually, I feel somewhat blessed. Sure, my band eleventh dream day saw all the ugliness that the music business had to offer, but we survived intact, we lived to tell.

From the superstar status, the voracious appetites for just about anything and everything, to the mad adulation of hordes of fans screaming our names, (ELVIS! HELP! SHARK!) all the way to starring in a string of bad movies, the similarities between The King and The Cadillac Of All That Has Come to Mean Fish, are all too striking. Who knew when Mr. Benchley first approached me about starring in this silly little beach thing of a film called of all things, 'Jaws,' that indeed, a star was being born.

Patty Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998) which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have recently been anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006) and Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions, 2006). She grew up in Detroit, earned a BS and MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Southern California.

"change of clothes? The very clothes of change!"

Here is the text of my CAA speech, for those interested who nevertheless cannot attend the annual conference in Boston next week.

Having grown up in LA I have a soft spot for cars. The right ride could take you through a variety of traumas, ranging from earthquake aftershocks to a stylist who just made your hair too blonde and too straight. For me, that ride had to be vintage. You can keep your GPS and fuel-injected blah blah, blah. I’ll take a 1965 Rambler over a 2006 anything. Form over function all the way down Interstate 405. That was my motto at least, until my most recent trip to LA.

The magnificent Michigan Central Station is slated for renovation as Detroit's new police HQ. In the meantime it looks like this:

"A perfect example of Urban Decay in America known as Detroit's abandoned train station. Also Known as Michigan Central Station. Michigan Central Station once was a thriving epicenter for the city of Detroit and the whole Midwest. Now the abandoned train station sits with most of it's windows broken.

The architecture of the building is beautiful and definitely deserves to be saved."

Check out the rest of the shots at seedetroit.com.

Sharkforum scores a front-page link at Lumpen.

xyster, n.

A surgical instrument for scraping bones.

"Winter’d under water. I am

Not fond of Liars. Armed

With a xyster to debone

The keister. . . "

--John Latta, “Kudos and Xyster”
From Verse

Like a good horse race the 2006 Oscars (honoring films, remember, released in 2005) is shaping up to be quite an interesting contest. The pre-emptive favorite for best puicture and best director, "Brokeback Mountain" (which I did not like and for which my negative opinion earned a number of accusations of homophobia) seems to have a certain momentum working against it.

He isn't doing too well so far at this year's Winter Olympics but, boy oh boy, does this Bode Miller guy know how to hold a crowd in the palm of his hand, or what?

imago, n.

The imago is the last stage of development of an insect, after the last ecdysis of an incomplete metamorphosis, or after emergence from pupation where the metamorphosis is complete. As this is the only stage which is sexually mature, and has functional wings in winged species, the imago is often referred to as the adult stage.

The Latin plural of imago is imagines, and this is the term generally used by entomologists - however imagos or imagoes are also acceptable spellings.

“Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
split open and the imago, the true adult,
slowly somersaulted out backwards”

--Galway Kinnell, “Why Regret?"

Chuck Stebelton works as Literary Program Manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center, a non-profit arts organization in Milwaukee, and co-curates the Myopic Poetry Series, a weekly series of readings and occasional talks at Myopic Books in Chicago. He is the author of Circulation Flowers available from Tougher Disguises Books and Precious, an Answer Tag chapbook. Newer work appears in recent issues of Antennae, Jubilat, LVNG, Verse, and Chain 12.

The Shells of Orange Corvettes

Chicago media get it right as well as wrong, c'mon. In this Full Press, a Sun-Times reporter, smiling between the lines, illuminates the bold treachery of the ghastly ABC-Disney LED sculpture on State Street, and at the Reader, Liz Armstrong works the number one to fashion a few more cheerily lubricious paragraphs.

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castellated, adj.

1. Furnished with turrets and battlements in the style of a castle.
2. Having a castle.

“Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion...what if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand?”
--Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mark, Perhaps it is in your best interests to defend the indefensible....

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Whoops! Now I'm going to risk anger with my friend, the notorious Shark! I have to admit that I regularly enjoy Victor Cassidy's art writing!

Boise Triumphs With Writer In Possession of Opposable Thumbs and an Actual Brain...



The Chicago Reader has not yet printed (though I believe they are going to-) my response to Victor Cassidy's hilariously inaccurate piece of attempted slander. This guy has got to go. I'd say feed him to the sharks, but I am a shark! Have a little compassion for the apex predator deluxe of the high seas! Considering this guy seems to have all of the raging intellect of your average hostess twinkie, and given that we denizens of Shark Alley here at the Farallons happen to possess discriminating palettes, anything with the brain of a toxic cupcake probably isn't going to be a big hit.

Oh, you crazy River North, when will you learn? All the kids have gone to bed before you've even baked the bread!

Pollock was a fake, or something

I was perusing the current Chicago Artists' Coalition (CAC) Artists' News - February and came across a mention of Sharkforum.org in their Art News section by Shag.

"hey, Swedish folks, take it easy on all the innovation stuff, allright?"

I've been a sucker for awards shows since I was a kid. I've actually cried listening to acceptance speeches. There is something undeniably touching about watching some artist -- regardless of true merit or true ability -- clamber onto a garish stage to thank every person he or she has ever known in return for an ovation and a cheap statuette.

Jason Bredle received degrees in English and Spanish from Indiana University and his MFA from the University of Michigan. His chapbook, A Twelve Step Guide, was winner of the 2004 Diagram/NMP Chapbook Contest and is available from New Michigan Press . Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in ACM, Columbia Poetry Review, and 42opus. He lives in Chicago, where he serves as Distinguished Poet in Residence at James Brown Elementary School.

Ray Pride and Sharkforum get nice mentions in Greencine.

Your ex-pat-Chicagoan, foreign correspondent for Sharkforum, will be giving a speech at the Annual Conference of the CAA (College Art Association, the US organization for art historians) in Boston, in February. Please come!