December 2006 Archives

The time to come to chennai is definately dec through jan - every night there is incredible music - you can't even go to the internet closet (not a cafe by any means) without seeing the most fantastic drumming on a small tv shoved into the corner of an already tiny space with 6 computer stalls...

The hardest working man in show biz has succombed to pneumonia. It's a dark day for music fans everywhere. Read the story here.

i have been practicing/learning new scales like never before - ya need a bit of discipline to last at carnatic boot camp but i'm doing pretty well with it - these guys are really amazing - they are coming to nyc and touring the states in february - more details later - gotta say its a little exhausting at times - yesterday i was supposed to go to a concert - laid down for a minute - short nap at 7 pm and woke up at 1 am then practiced till 4am fell asleep until 6am woke up...

Blood's backroad then a sudden red branch
breaking up inside a kaleidoscope.
A meadow of loose colored chips

rotating inside a shepherd's sunken
purse; the possession of its waiting between
sad mirrors in the endless
changing heat of a mother's forehead
like a stain.

Okay old habits die hard - Like being a total dufus! Perhaps a hipster dufus but dufus none the less - When Krishna told me about "the ruby" he wasn't talking about a rock - It was a metaphor for his sweetheart - And she is very pretty - The other smooth move of the day was when I went to a local "High Class A-1 Vegetaerian" Cafe and sat at a table with a couple of technical engineers who took pity on me - I was having some sort of veggie dosai - eating with my right hand of course when they started to order more food - all sorts of great stuff - electric red cauliflower that made me eyes pop out - but DON'T DRINK THAT WATER MAN! - I was having a rough time tearing me pancake when unbeknownst to me the left hand lept off my lap to hold the thing down while I tore away - A look of mild disgust was mirrored back to me suddenly - Whoops! "Okay that one is yours," they said. In return for their kindness I thought I'd invite them back to the hotel and give them a couple CD's but they instantly balked - Who knows - all American serial killers must look alike to these guys - They said they'd see me around the cafe sometime - So back to the hotel for more practice of Carnatic scales - Slowly learning the Kalyani raga -C-D-E-F#-G-A-B- C' - It's not the notes that get me its the slide or the "gurry" [not to be confused with curry!] And of course going up is different than coming down [As any acid head from long ago will tell you] BTW the coffee is amazing - heavy on the milk and sugar but damn good rocket fuel - Helps while trying to keep up with these fantastic Carnatic percussionists - I've never been one for "fusion" ala Chick Corea's Return to Forever and Stan Clark is really somethin' but these guys have it going on on a profound level - woven into the DNA - the science behind the soul is astounding - Or is it the other way'round?

Reading widely as I do, the other day I discovered the existence of the “heavy element community.” Now I had thought, being in contemporary art as I am, that I would have known or guessed at all the possible communities in the entire universe. The contemporary art community, naturally. The health-care community. The gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community (did I get them in the right order?) The fundamentalist Christian community. The NASCAR community. The American Girl community. The Civil War reenacter community. The koi enthusiast community. The Castle of Mad King Ludwig community. And on and on and on. I can imagine a tatting community without straining the slightest brain muscle (for those of you who’ve never heard of tatting, it is an obscure form of handwork). I can be certain there is preservation of spelunking songs community, in fact I think I have their spiral-bound songbook somewhere. And though I might not have thought of it without sitting myself down to be quiet for a moment or two, I can even envision a nematode community, especially as these non-segmented worms were a key plot feature in the Val Kimler epic “Red Planet Mars.” But a “heavy element community?!

It's like that old enigma about cops - What do Indian men with mustaches (which seem to be most of them) call other Indian men without mustaches? Woke up having no clue what time it was - Watching pop videos ala Sharks and Jets on steroids - Fosse gave birth to a demon he never dreamed of - The girl/boy ritual dance video is alive and thriving/throbbing in the Sub Continent - Some tabla players have moved in upstairs which really enhances my mandolin practice! I should probably stop by after a couple days and see if they wanna jam - Their beat science is in perfect synch with the spinning fan above my head which kinda makes it sound phased like a Leslie - Have to keep practicing to keep up with Ganesh and Krishna - two phenomenal speed demons hammering out the calculations of Sub Continent Soul...

Thermal updraft sucking things that soar
into the frozen vortex of thunderstorms.
faux angel, Mary Poppins Harpy.

God(s)! this place is intense - I've been getting up every morning at dawn to walk and photo the city streets - Haven't been shooting too many people - mostly temples, shrines, symbols painted on the ground with rice flour - then back to bed for a few more hours then over to Ganesh's where we do "calculations" 4 rounds of 5 four rounds of 4,3,2,1 - it's mechanical and hilarious.

so i'm here in ganesh's office - listening to subash instruct some poor american dude in the next room with an electronic beep machine - he must tighten up the calculations! - the streets here are nuts - really must watch everything you do - the traffic in every size, shape and form is coming at youfrom all directions - the sheets on the bed were gross - had them change them this morning -

Since we (Wesley and I with others) have been tossing philosophical terms around rather glibly, I think a slightly "teacherly" presentation is in order here, to make certain that we are all on the same page. Most artists and artworld denizens have little reason to deal with the terminology of aesthetics regularly, so probably have forgotten what a few key terms we love to bandy about actually concern. The two main ones that will pop up time and again, are ontology and epistemology.

Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), both collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His most recent book is The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2005). He edits the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule and is Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney’s. He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

After Schubert’s Sad Cycle of Songs
Fritz Wunderlich, Die schöne Müllerin

What happens to the suitor
who runs out of lullabies,

John Kruth is travelling in India making music, visiting with friends, and blogging. Following is the first of what will hopefully be many dispatches - ed

What an ordeal! The flight from JFK, scheduled at 7:15, didn't take off until 10 pm. But it was a good quick flight, We were then herded off the plane through security, then back on the plane again (without time to shop - how un-Heathrow!) for about 8 hours to Mumbai with the biggest fattest most fidgety kid sitting right in front of me. I saw some dumb Woody Allen mystery flick ain't never saw before. By the way Indian Airlines just pours you the biggest glass of Johnnie Walker Red they can and gives it to you free! Ah knockout drops! I couldn't finish the second one...

Tip of the Week: Ursula Sokolowska
by Michael Weinstein
Yet another conceptual photographer festooning the walls of Chicago galleries in defiance of the holiday spirit, Polish-born Ursula Sokolowska presents a grim reflection on her troubled childhood in color shots of mannequins representing herself placed in real-world environments that she associates with her past.

More: NewCity review

Ursula Sokolowska is a Chicago-based photographer who has created her images for some time with projections. I recall previous works she made with her younger brother as a model, but her new series at the Schneider Gallery delves into family relations more deeply--and creepily.

All of the color prints have blank-faced dolls and cloth mannequins that stand in for the artist, her mother and brother. Onto the blanks, she has projected faces found in old family photographs. The creations represent the artist, her mother and brother in restagings of difficult scenes recalled from Sokolowska's childhood.

More: Chicago Tribune review

At Attytood, Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch describes his "lone nut" theory of the assassination of the American newspaper. "The American newspaper is being assassinated by "a lone nut." And we're going to tell you the name of that lone nut: Craig Newmark of Craigslist... —a man whose altruistic vision of running a business to NOT maximize profits is now threatening the livel[i]hood of thousands of working men and women across this country, your neighbors who work at and publish your local newspaper, jobs that were once supported by the classified ads that have migrated to the most[ly] free (or low-cost) Craigslist.

As I mentioned in a Shark blog post quite a while ago, Nancy Princenthal's Art in America article on the crisis in art criticism is a must-read. Especially if you were one of the immense number of "hits" we had on our recent Shark-pack-altercations about critics, artists, art --- one of several perennial or at least revenant Sharkpack concerns. If you didn't catch that issue of the magazine, the article is now on-line (probably for a short while, since it is the complete text). Here's your chance to read it on your screen, and maybe even download it, print it out and read it in the bathtub, as I am wont to do with on-line articles.

Dana Goodyear is an editor at The New Yorker. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Slate, Open City, and The American Poetry Review. Her first collection of poems, Honey and Junk, was published by Norton in 2005. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

Over Your Dead Body

This wasn't what you had in mind
when you said, A house by the sea—

A man in the grocery store check-out line said to me, when I was buying the ten-pound bag of sugar I hadn’t been able to find the week before, “That’s the biggest bag of sugar I’ve ever seen.” Now if I was my friend Mary I might think the guy was coming on to me, but I don’t think that way, and if he had been coming on to me, why I must be sending out the most inexplicable signals of approachability as the fellow was haggard, mostly toothless, and the shade of yellow that indicates either liver disease or habitual cigarette smoking.

I was bewildered. This guy, who had to be at least in his sixties, had never seen a ten-pound bag of sugar! My epiphanies tend to be of the prosaic sort, and this was definitely one of them. I said, “I do a lot of baking.” It wasn’t an apology, but stern defiance. Yes, I am a contemporary woman, and I do a lot of baking. My pies are particularly renown, and I have one mild friend whose anger is leoninely fierce if I tell him of the pies I’ve baked, as he lives far away and can only remember their pleasures. Now if the fellow had been sixteen, I would have understood the comment (and certainly even my friend Mary wouldn’t have thought it was a pick-up line). For my aforementioned pie-loving friend is in his forties, and author of the statement “I thought green beans somehow grew ‘French cut,’” one of my earliest prosaic epiphanies about the difference between my rural upbringing and that of the majority of my peers, raised as they were in suburbia where green beans came either from Green Giant cans or Birds Eye frozen packages, not the truck garden. (For those of you in Rio Linda, as Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying, a truck garden is a large garden from which you sell as well as subsist.)

These are some quick shots of an installation at Schneider Gallery. Although, the gallery setting may not be as ideal of a location as a junkyard or a decrepit basement - it turned out alright.

My time is spent working 16 hour DAYS just trying to keep up with all I am doing. At 75, my schedule is MORE INSANE (but more gratifying) than ever!!! I am here in Denver until June 3rd, as 'Visiting Distinguished Professor" (the University of Denver's description of me, not mine).

I have already been assigned to 22 different events (!!!) as well as appearing in classes and seminars for the Sociology department, Creative Writing, French Studies, Anthropology, American Studies, Drama and Film, Jewish Studies, and of course the Music School.

WHOEVER'S LEAVING THEIR TRIB BEHIND AT THE COFFEE SHOP must, must stop. Please! Take it away, so I don't keep stumbling into poor Charlie Madigan's cubicle, where on Tuesday he tenders his musing about "the big, juicy meal" that is Barack Obama after "one fabulous speech." and how Obama would be Al Gore's ideal running mate, since "Gore has tree-hugging chops, and Democrats can't resist that." Here's more of Madigan's mad mulligatawny of condescension and conventional wizardom, representing all the valor and acuity of TribCo MegaCorp's op-ed faculty: "First, in presidential handicapping, the media know just about as much as the guy in the street." [But get paid more and talk to themselves more, apparently.] "If it were up to us, Howard Dean would have won the Democratic nomination...

Poets for Human Rights speak out against systemic injustice

Date: December 9th, 2006
Time: 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Location: Acme Art Works, 1741 North Western Ave, Chicago, IL

An Evening of Social Engagement
featuring the poetry of Robert Archambeau, Emily Calvo, Nina Corwin, Melissa Culbertson, Teneice Delgado, Richard Fammerée, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Chris Gallinari, Francesco Levato, Christina E. Lovin, Mikki Mendelsohn, Brent Mesick, Erika Mikkalo, Simone Muench, Charlie Newman, Kristy Odelius, Steven Schroeder, Susan Slaviero, Jennifer Vazquez, Rachel Webster, as well as others. (Painting courtesy of Gabert Farrar).

Visit Poets for Human Rights
or
For more information on the event visit Francesco Levato

Mark Pawlak was born and raised in Buffalo and has lived in the Boston area for most of the past 40 years. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Official Versions(2006). His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2006, New American Writing, and Exquisite Corpse, among others. He is editor of four anthologies, most recently, Present/Tense: Poets in the World, an anthology of contemporary American political poetry. He also co-edited Shooting the Rat: Outstanding Poems and Stories by High School Writers, drawn from Hanging Loose magazine, of which he has been an editor since 1980. Pawlak is Director of Academic Support Programs at UMass Boston, where he teaches mathematics.

Dos and Don’ts

Steal from one person and it's plagiarism. Steal from everybody and it's research.—Frank Sinatra as told to Tony Bennett

“Keep a strict eye