September 2007 Archives

Editors note: In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Jack Kerouac's seminal "On The Road" we asked his friend (and fellow Shark) David Amram to share with us his thoughts. What follows is most of an email he sent to Nick Tremulis. It is a testament to vitality, positivity and seemingly boundless creativity.

Jack [Kerouac] felt and acted and lived in that open warm and human way, knowing that an artist has nothing of lasting value to offer the world if they allow themselves to be turned into a mirror image of swinish selfish egotistical uncaring types who flatter them while abusing others..

Whenever we would see one of our friends do a little better than others and suddenly become abusive, i used to quote to Jack the killer line form the old Hebrew prayer from the Yiskor.... "Let not the oppressed becomed the oppressor"

Featuring Krista Franklin, Robyn Schiff, Philip Jenks, Joshua Corey
and special guest Murakami Sound Machine

B.Y.O.P. Bring Your Own People
When: Saturday, Sept. 29th, 2007
Time: Reading begins at 7:00PM
Cost: Free admission.
Location: Peter Jones Gallery, 1806 W. Cuyler, 2nd Floor, Chicago

To learn more about the writers, click continue

Click here for a fascinating collection of Vincent Van Gogh's Letters. There are some interesting nuggets in here, including this one on hullucinations:

... Again - speaking of my condition - I am so grateful for yet another thing. I've noticed that others, too, hear sounds and strange voices during their attacks, as I did, and that things seemed to change before their very...
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 22 May 1889

I stumbled across this gem at the ever-so-indespensible Museum of Online Museums.

From the New York Times:

BANGKOK, Monday, Sept. 24 — The largest street protests in two decades against Myanmar’s military rulers gained momentum Sunday as thousands of onlookers cheered huge columns of Buddhist monks and shouted support for the detained pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Winding for a sixth day through rainy streets, the protest swelled to 10,000 monks in the main city of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, according to witnesses and other accounts relayed from the closed country, including some clandestinely shot videos.

Link

Lisa Fishman is the author of The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta Press, 2007), Kabbaloom (Wyrd Press, 2006), Dear, Read (Ahsahta Press, 2002) and The Deep Heart's Core Is a Suitcase (New Issues Press, 1998). With Henry Morren, James Fishman-Morren, and Richard Meier, she lives in Chicago and on a farm in Orfordville, Wisconsin. She teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.

Argument

As the bony branches were black against the sky
and as the sky was violet nighttime blue

In 1811, near the end of his life, poet, ornithologist, naturalist and illustrator Alexander Wilson named this common North American warbler after observing it for the first time in the branches of a Mississippi magnolia tree. This bird, which breeds in spruce trees near the Canadian border of the United States and in Canada, is commonly called the Black and Yellow Warbler.

The second issue of the new arts journal MoonLit is out now, published by editors Lisa Janssen and Claire McMahon. Order from Drag City.

The cover art is by Neil Hagerty.

Featured poets (click continue)

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"OVERLAND PARK, Kansas (Reuters) - A Kansas military cemetery has run out of space after the burial of another casualty of the Iraq war, officials said on Thursday. "We are full," said Alison Kohler, spokeswoman for the Fort Riley U.S. Army post, home of the 1st Infantry Division. U.S. Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, both Kansas Republicans, on Thursday sent a letter to William Tuerk, the under secretary for memorial affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, urging for full funding for a new cemetery for Fort Riley. "While a new cemetery would not be completed in time to alleviate this situation immediately, it is vitally important," Roberts and Brownback, a Republican presidential candidate, said in their letter. "We truly owe our military members a debt of gratitude and the least we can do is provide them with an honorable burial ground," the senators wrote."

There's a great piece over at Smithsonian Magazine written by Joyce Johnson called "Remembering Jack Kerouac." Written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Kerouac's seminal work On The Road, it contains some real gems:

"Becoming beat had implied a kind of spiritual evolution. But "beatnik" stood for an identity almost anyone could assume (or take off) at will. It seemed to come down to finding a beret or a pair of black stockings and a bongo drum to bang on. Beatniks wanted "kicks"—sex, drugs and alcohol. They were more interested in hard partying than knowing themselves or knowing time. The two ideas, beat and beatnik—one substantive and life-expanding, the other superficial and hedonistic—helped shape the counterculture of the '60s and to this day are confused with each other, not only by Kerouac's detractors but even by some of his most ardent fans."

While I've always preferred Dharma Bums, there's no doubt that On the Road made a much larger impact. It remains relevant today.

Dysphemism - -the substitution of an offensive or disparaging term for an inoffensive one.

Recent Blog on Artopia about Editing: “Jack Kerouac, Pousette-Dart, and Me,” link

Recent Essay on “The Braid: A New Paradigm for Art” in the online journal theArtSection, Go to archive: Vol.1, No.3 (Aug.07), link.

Recent Podcast on PS1’s “Art Radio” Podcast site: link.

A taster:

In the summer of 2004 when I was teaching an introduction to contemporary art at the Anderson Ranch near Aspen, in Colorado, I came up with two ideas that I felt would help make sense of the confusion that prevails. Are we in a post-pluralist free-fall? Which direction is up? Who threw out the baby with the bath?

I was not convinced that art history and the art world were finished, yet the art world seemed at an impasse. Pluralism, long confused with anti-Leninist socialisms or, on an even deeper level, with polytheism, had been cast aside. Art was tied up in a knot, with no clear prerogatives and certainly without direction. But the term “direction” implies the dreaded Master Narrative that we have all tried to deconstruct, inadvertently letting it be replaced by…..the Market?

Perhaps it was not the end of art history, but the end of a certain restricted art history. Perhaps it was not the end of the art world, but the end of a certain kind of art world. I, of course, knew it was all rhetoric. Or as the Dadaists used to say, art is dead; long live art...........

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Inbox (Blazevox, 2006), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky, 2007; in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Collins, 2007; selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series) as well as The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, 2004), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, Boston Review, Jacket, and others. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.

from Novel Pictorial Noise

keep the theater in vantage point by metaphor
if something

for better

Kevin Nance delivers yet another terrific (rave) review describing The Shark as Chicago's leading painter/provocateur and spilling way too much ink on The Finger! (Didn't he see the invitation?... sheeeeesh!)

The Plush works are extensions of drawn forms influenced to a great extent by cartoon imagery. The large sculptures are crafted from various flat forms of shaped and fitted wood understructures, the proto-objects start as large cut-outs, then come to life when fabric and underlying padding is applied, suggesting a hyper-synthetic taxidermy.

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"War As We Saw It," a powerful and deeply skeptical Op-Ed about the Iraq occupation, written by seven soldiers in the field—Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Edward Sandmeier, Jeremy A. Murphy, Yance T. Gray and Omar Mora—was published in the August 19, 2007, New York Times. "In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act," the soldiers wrote. "Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, ”We need security, not free food. In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are—an army of occupation—and force our withdrawal." Yance Gray, 26, and Omar Mora, 28, were killed in action Monday. [The art is by Wesley Kimler.]

I don't have the time to go to my storage space and dig out my diary from 1979 so I'll have to write these notes relying on memory. Please forgive me if I've got the story a bit jumbled. I was in my last year at MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) when my teacher/friend the neon artist Cork Marcheschi was awarded the DAAD grant and given a studio and an apartment in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin, just about a hundred yards from the wall. He told me he could give me a place to stay if I'd fly over and help him out, photographing, cataloging and installing his work. So that January I took off for Berlin. It was a cold but wild winter. Working with Cork I met quite a few big leaguers in the art world including Ed Kienholz, who was a serious poker player. And I really dug the Turkish section of town, where I met some great musicians.

Jens Hoffmann is still right! He proposed this in his drawing (as seen above) last time around. Documenta needs to close, to get a non-consensus curator, and/or have an artist (non-consensus typus) curate it. Amen. How about a Sharkpackumenta?

Éireann Lorsung is the author of the debut book of poems, Music for Landing Planes By (Milkweed Editions, 2007). She received her MFA in writing and BA degrees in English and Japanese from the University of Minnesota. She studied printmaking and drawing at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, and taught high school in rural France.

Printmaking

Why don't you print the sky
at eight thirty? I saw your studio: it was filled
with things I didn't put there. Silk

On newstands/ at bookstores everywhere, Shelter Magazine features who else, but me! The Shark! Complete with full-bleed reproductions (of course!) and an article that coincidently, bites back!

pescetarian, n.

Pescetarians eat a vegetarian diet but also consume fish. Many pescetarians avoid red meat and poultry because they do not want to support factory farming or other inhumane methods of raising animals.

Cayetanno Ferrer makes photo installations that reveal what's hidden. It's an interesting conceit, and the work look pretty cool. It's always hard to tell if this sort of thing is durable enough to extend to a whole show, but the work on his web site looks great.

ThreeWalls
119 N. Peoria #2D
Chicago, IL 60607
312.432.3972

Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 2007, 6:00 - 9:00 PM

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Proteus Gowanus invites you to the opening reception for the yearlong interdisciplinary exhibit

“Play”

Friday, September 14, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

“You shall not bite, or not bite hard, your brother’s ear.”
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, (1944)

Paula Cisewski's first full-length collection of poems Upon Arrival was released in 2006 by Black Ocean, and her chapbook How Birds Work was published by Fuori Editions in 2002. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Swink, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Conduit, Black Warrior Review, Pilot, Forklift OH, and others. Poems from her new manuscript Ghost Fargo are forthcoming in Handsome and Coconut. She lives in the Twin Cities where she teaches writing and humanities courses and hosts the Imaginary Press Reading Series.

Piano Solo
          —i.m. Bobby Peterson

On the tables of the club romantic
flames flicker flick, certainly