March 2006 Archives

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....

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.

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.

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!

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.

Ursuala Sokolowska and Sharkforum got a nice blurb over at the Chicago Art District web site. Thanks!

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.

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.

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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."

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.

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........

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.

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

Ray Pride and Sharkforum get a nice push over at the Filmmaker Magazine web site. Here's a taste:

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.

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

“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
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.

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Over the past ten years or so, I've interviewed dozens of people about the movies they've made.

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

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.

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

(pl. wherries)
1. A light, swift rowboat built for one person and often used in racing.
2. A sailing barge used in East Anglia.

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Flora II (det.) detail

Warning signs have been posted along portions of Carpinteria beaches in response to a shark attack on two harbor seals last week.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

sepulture, n.

1. The act of interment; burial.
2. A sepulcher.

Art Green painting

Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism

Curated by Robert Cozzolino, it's at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1. The opening between the vocal cords at the upper part of the larynx.
2. The vocal apparatus of the larynx.

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