This Friday: Noal, Teal, Anthony, Tugboat, Son Ambulance, MLGI, probably more

Lots of good things to do this Friday night.

At Chatterbox:




Teal & Nolan are two of my favorite local artists. Here's an old painting of Nolan's, called "Samson and the Sabine Children." It's i think from 06.

All the images that I have of Teal's work are in my head.


The Tugboat/Artists Studios complex above Gomez will have its second First Friday night. The show at Tugboat is going to be Gary Rattigan: Things Go Wrong Quite Often

I think that show is all abstract paintings, apparently. This may or may not be one of them:


The complex includes a lot of studios & shops, which will all have open studios or events as well. Anthony Hawley has a studio there & will be showing a new set of work. Here's a message from him:

Please join us this Friday, May 2, from 6-10pm
"Transmissions: New Paintings and Works on Paper"
part of the First Friday Gallery Walk and Open Studios at the newly renovated 1416 O st. (also 116 14th st) 2nd floor.
Entrances to second floor on O St. next to Bodega's and on 14th st next to Jake Smoke's shop (elevator entrance near Duffy's).
Please look for us in studio #3

Here is one of Anthony's pieces from a series of minimalist text-image works on paper. It's called "Passing Beneath These Coordinates Everyone is a Pile of Glass," which is also what the tiny line of text says:


So go to the Tug-plex & then head down to Chatterbox. Do it. Do it.

Charlotte Park, Departure




No one on the corner has swag like us
Hit me on my burner prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas
--M.I.A.





Charlotte Park, Zachary



Y'wanna join in a chorus
Of the Amerasian blues?
--Joe Strummer






From J. Downey

Once upon a time there was a platypus. He goed into the lake & there was a crocodile named Sarah. Sarah was very nice. He first met Sarah when he was a baby. They met at the pond. Sarah is brown & green. Sarah’s favorite food is crocodile stew, made out of crocodile toenails.

The platypus & sarah play on the playground. They played on the swings. They were laughing & screaming & having fun. Then they went to the platypus’ home.

There was a long, grey crocodile. He was dirty. He had big, rotten teeth. His name is Tommy & he wants to eat Sarah & the Platypus. They got in a pink canoe & rode to Sarah’s house. It is orange & blue with squiggly doors. This house is in the water. Then they played.

The End.







Once upon a time there was a lion named Scott.

ROAR, said Scott. I want something to eat. Scott was very, very hungry. His tummy was empty. He was roaring all over the house. He said I probably want some porkchops. Then he went to the fridge. He was shocked when he opened the door. There was only his favorite hotdogs with black & white lines on them. Scott was very upset. Either ways he ate one.

burrrp, Scott said. Then he went outside to play. He saw his friend Waddles, the platypus, at the pond. He walked over to the pond. Waddles said hi. And then Scott said Wait a minute let me go get my floaty. He hurried off to the garage.

He came out with his floaty, his goggles, ice cream, lemonade, a chair & a sun visor. That was more than he needed. Tehn he went to the pond, he put his floaty in the water, he put his sun visor on, his sunglasses & then he said Oh No! I forgot to get my swim trunks & my suntan lotion. Then he went to the garage & got them, came back, put his suntan lotion & his swim trunks on & splashed in to the pond.

Waddles was very happy. He was happy that his friend was playing with him. Then they both ate ice cream & lemonade.

All of a sudden Waddles felt something in his mouth. His tooth was wiggly. Though platypuses don’t have teeth, he does. Then he bit into his ice cream. He said I feel like pulling out my tooth. Then he bit into the ice cream. He tasted something very bloody. Then he looked at his ice cream. He said My platypus tooth! But the bad side was it was a grown-up tooth.

The End

First Graders Podcasting about Ants

the goods, for real

This Saturday, Poets on Painters Reading at the Sheldon 7pm

The Clean Part Reading Series & The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
Present a poetry reading to celebrate
The Poets on Painters Exhibit

Featuring a reading by poets
Corina Copp
Paul Killebrew

And a discussion of the show by curator
Katie Geha

Saturday April 26th
7pm

Sheldon Memorial Gallery
12th & R Streets

This Saturday The Clean Part Reading Series and the Sheldon will be hosting a reading and discussion in conjunction with the opening of the Poets on Painters show at the Sheldon. Corina Copp and Paul Killebrew, two poets featured in the show, will be at the Sheldon to read from their work. Co-Curator Katie Geha will discuss her work with the show.

A visual and literary exhibition that pairs 20 contemporary poets with 20 contemporary paintings, Poets on Painters opens at the Sheldon on April 26. Each poet's response to a painting will be displayed alongside the artwork. A sampling of today's written and visual arts, Poets on Painters focuses on the intrinsic and fascinating connections between two of the oldest art forms as seen by some of their newest practitioners.

To view a slide show of the artworks, please click: Poets on Painters
Slide Show http://sheldonartmuseum.org/slideshows/index.html?pgi=11

Poets on Painters recalls 20th-century collaborations between Apollinaire and Duchamp, Stein and Picasso, and O'Hara and Rivers in its playful examination of how poetry and painting converge and diverge in the 21st century. The internationally recognized visual and literary artists included in the exhibition represent a vast array of styles and approaches, both traditional and experimental.

The project includes such notables as painters Mark Grotjahn, Sam Prekop, Laura Owens, Monique Prieto and Dana Schutz, and poets Jeff Clark, Joshua Marie Wilkinson Noah Eli Gordon and Sawako Nakayasu.

Organized by the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, the exhibition is curated by Katie Geha, former curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich, and Travis Nichols, a freelance writer based in Seattle.

Poets Bios:

Corina Copp hails from Lawrence, KS, Boulder, CO, and New Orleans, LA.
She is most recently the author of the e-book, Carpeted (Faux Press,
2004) and Play Air (Belladonna* Books, 2005). Her poems and reviews
have appeared or are forthcoming from Fence, The Germ, The Poetry
Project Newsletter, Pom2, and Magazine Cypress. She is the Monday
Night Reading Series Coordinator at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's
Church, and lives in Brooklyn.

You can read her work at:

http://www.fauxpress.com/e/copp/p1.htm
http://www.fencemag.com/v7n2/text/copp.html
http://germspot.blogspot.com/2005/09/corina-copp-p1.htm

Paul Killebrew has published work on Slope, La Petite Zine, and
McSweeneys. he is the author of Inspector Vs. Evader, published by
Ugly Duckling Presse.

You can read his work at:
http://www.lapetitezine.org/PaulKillebrew.htm
http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/v11/paul_killebrew.php

It's about time

There are hardcore bands named both Tristan Tzara & Adorno.

Manda Bala

I saw a pretty fantastic movie last night, Manda Bala. The narrative frame of the film is concerned with the story of one corrupt Brazilian politician & how this corruption has a trickle-down economic effect on the violence of the class struggle. It is an interesting story, one that I was not surprised by but definitely interested in. However the film itself is so much more than a story of the failure of one government.

The director Jason Kohn worked in Errol Morris' studio & the aesthetic & ideological fingerprints of Morris' style are all over this film. The interwoven through-lines of the film include frog farming, ear reconstruction surgery, the symbiotic kidnapping & anti-kidnapping industries, Jader Barbalho's corruption & the few governemnt agents who are attempting to combat this institutional corruption. All of this edited beautiful to a loudly mixed soundtrack of cool Brazilian beats. Oh, and the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous. Not only the weird scenes of frog-handling, but even the simple frames of people sitting next to interpreters telling their stories.


********


From an Interview with Errol Morris

BLVR: I once heard you say you were waging a war against cinema verite.

EM: A certain kind of war, if it's a war at all. Somebody recently asked me about documentary filmmaking becoming more popular, but when we speak about documentary, it's not clear we're talking about many things. We're talking about different styles, from verite to the collage films of Chris Marker and Dziga Vertov. Even verite, itself, is diverse. The fly on the wall idea with handheld camera, available light, which you can see everywhere from the films of Fred Wiseman to Cops, to all kinds of infotainment. A bestiary of documentaries: reality-based television, diary films, narrated slide shows with tilt-and-pan and an occasional zoom-in or zoom-out, interview based films and whatever it is that I do, which I think is its own kind of odd species of filmmaking. It's not one thing, it's many, many, many things. What I don't like about verite is this claim that somehow you're guaranteed truthfulness by virtue of style. That's my complaint. That somehow because a film has been made in a certain way — handheld camera, available light, fly on the wall — that somehow it becomes more truthful as a result. I respectfully disagree. My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in verite. Maybe more so. I don't believe that truth is handed over by stylistic choice. It's a pursuit.



********



One way that a lot of reviewers seem to have responded to Manda Bala is to read it as a metaphor for American corruption. They want the film to be a meditation on corruption that reflects the America that both is & could be. It's an interesting use of the film, but one that ignores the aesthetics, which are forefronted constantly through the clever editing & the visually rich cinematography. The film is importantly an attempt to find a way of understanding something as pervasive yet abstracted as corruption. The film weaves the quirky & the terrifying, it uses a macho cop who could have risen straight out of a lesson in stock characters & it uses hauntingly lit footage of a real surgery. Kohn interviews an actual kidnapper, torturer, murderer & lets his humanity onto the screen. All of these things are elements of the truth of the matter.

I don't think Morris was saying that documentaries can find a single version of the truth -- even Thin Blue Line doesn't do this, despite his "This I Believe" piece for NPR -- but rather that the art form allows the viewer to participate in the truth making via the ancillary rhetorics of other forms of films. Kohn's film seems almost to be in conversation with the pastiche-action style of Traffic, rather than the quirky meditations of Morris' Gates of Heaven. Ultimately this is a challenging & wonderfully fun movie. One that balances its cleverness with intelligence & balances its intelligence with the grotesque & balances the grotesque with the chillingly real. Worth watching. Worth discussing.

April Club Blog-Label

Ande is posting records at the April Club, including some MLGI recordings on which I play. Go there. Download them. Find your keys.

Selah Saterstrom's Visit

Selah read here Thursday night. A really amazing reading: funny (she made the first successful Nick Drake joke I've ever heard in one story), creepy, lyrically beautiful & challenging in the way she refuses to let the reader have a comfortably stable socio-political reading of a character. If I havent made it clear so far, I love her work & I think you need to read it. Even you, Herschel. Especially you, Colonel Mausenbrakender. And you too, Nate.

It's interesting to hear a writer like her read because I think of her work as so importantly textual. Her novels function partially by never letting forgetting the fact of their physical texts. More so in The Pink Institution, which has a structure relating to both the physical nature of a scrapbook & the disjunctive function of familial memory. In her Q&A Selah said she was working on a PhD in hermeneutics; this makes sense in relation to how she structures her books to work both through & beyond the fissures of reading & narrative-creation. I had a similar reaction when I recently had the chance to hear Sandra Miller read & talk a bit about her work & her background in dance made me think differently about the textual use of the page in her first book Oriflamme. I hadn't thought about the physical movement of the eye across the page in her work before then. It made me think about how all the poets & fiction writers who are trained to teach as comp teachers in their MFAs are necessarily affected by this mode of thinking about writing. So much talk about training writers to recognize the rhetorical positioning of the writer & audience must have an effect on those writers.

That cliche about write what you know is annoying for many reasons & true for many reasons, but I think people rarely use it in relation to the conceptual frameworks. It usually means write about the stuff you do, which is pretty boring. It also means don't make bullshit art, which is true. But we all have our own methods of parsing the daily events into something that makes us get out of bed the next day. And these modes of understand are more central to making art than the facts of events or the evocativeness of metaphors. An artist who doesn't attempt to create an epistemological framework is usually just trying to be cute.

Selah's work is so fascinating to me because each aspect of her story-telling & text-creation works in relation to each other one. Her complexity of structure in The Pink Institution forces a reader's presence in the story, thereby both creating a document of a family but also requiring the reader to situate themselves among the family stories. Her social landscape in the book is both one that she grew up in but also one that has a metaphorical function. I think the writers I love the most are those who are attempting to negotiate the tension between the conceptual & the visceral. Selah's books make me want to wash the viscera off my hands.

Busy Week

Take Care of Me, by Selah Saterstrom

TAKE CARE OF ME, SAVIOR to not wake them, to walk among them. I will put on the black wool mittens, Savior. To protect from habits, these dark, Christless days. To shuck our lot of corn, Lord. To rise early and never complain. To redeliver false baby, Savior. The nurse jammed me with a finger, Sweet Jesus, she wore a white latex glove. My name written in Psalms, to recite, Savior, to recite my name written in the Psalms. To pray on my knees for the eternal soul of her, my mother, Christ, my sucked, and I, absences of mother, Christ. To tell, Savior, of the cut cut incottoned stain. To red the paddle of flower, Lord, where labia agaped to center the bone, Lord. Shiny purse and funerals, Savior, to never complain of swollen issues, corn shuckings, and such. To will for it is best not to be, Savior, to not be sweetheart again. These are dark, Christless days, Savior, take care of me.



First printed in 3rd Bed, Volume 7: fall/winter

Thursday: Selah Saterstrom Reading at NWU

NWU Visiting Writers Series
presents a reading from
novelist Selah Saterstrom

Thursday, April 17th, 7pm
Callen Conference Center, Smith Curtis Building
NWU Campus

This Thursday NWU will be hosting novelist Selah Saterstrom for
the final installment of the Visiting Writers Series. Saterstrom is a
fascinating and intensely emotional writer – her work is edgy, yet
firmly in the Southern Gothic tradition. Her novels not only confront
the violence endemic in this literary tradition, their innovative
structures & style create a haunting and emotionally intense
experience.

Bio

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The
Pink Institution (both published by Coffee House Press). She
co-curates SLAB PROJECTS, an artist/writer-curator initiative
concerned with exploring the gaps between decay and reconstruction in
ruined or abandoned landscapes, and is also an editor at TRICKHOUSE
(http://www.trickhouse.org/), a forthcoming on-line curatorial
project. Her work appears in various places, most recently in Bombay
Gin, Thuggery & Grace, 14 Hills, and Tarpaulin Sky. She has been the
artist and writer-in-residence for various institutions and now
teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Denver,
The Naropa University Summer Writing Program, and Centrum Writing
Program.

If You Are in Lincoln You Really Must Go See Tatsuya Nakatani Tonight

This is part of the end of his mind-blowing solo set last night.







He's playing tonight at Jones Coffee
727 S. 11th st., Lincoln, NE
8-10pm, all ages, $5 suggested donation
with
Luke Polipnick (Guitar)
Chris Bates (Upright Bass)

If you don't go I'm going to ground you.

Tatsuya Nakatani

Tatsuya Nakatani, a cool improvisational percussionist, will be doing shows in town the next few days:

@ Box Awesome (formerly "the Chatterbox")
815 O st. , Lincoln, NE
7-9pm, $5, all ages
with Luke Polipnick (Guitar) & Chris Bates (Upright Bass)

Friday April 11 Lincoln, NE
--- Morning time ---
@ University of Nebraska, Lincoln
11:00-2:00
trio performance with Luke Polipnick and Chris Bates in UNL History of Jazz class

--- Evening concert ---
@ Jones Coffee
727 S. 11th st., Lincoln, NE
8-10pm, all ages, $5 suggested donation
with
Luke Polipnick (Guitar)
Chris Bates (Upright Bass)



Saturday April 12 Omaha NE
@ The Benson Grind: 6107 Maple, Omaha, NE
Suggested $5 donation, all ages
with Bryan Day (Electronics)& Luke Polipnick (Guitar)


BIOGRAPHY:
Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion) is originally from Osaka, Japan. In 2006 he performed in 80 cities in 7 countries and collaborated with 163 artists worldwide. In the past 10 years he has released nearly 50 recordings on CD.

He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. He utilizes drumset, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, organic music that defies category or genre. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.

In addition to live solo and ensemble performances he works as a sound designer for film and television. He also teaches Masterclasses and Workshops at the University level. He also heads H&H Production, an independent record label and recording studio based in Easton, Pennsylvania. He was selected as a performing artist for the Pennsylvania Performing Artist on Tour (PennPat) roster as well as a Bronx Arts Council Individual Artist grant.

The Hated

Am I a nerd for being really excited to finally find a copy of this?

Happy Birthday Pixel Zach

I love this guy.

3 Dreams & 2 Accidents

Erika Navarre's "Exquisite Moments" at Tugboat Gallery




Dream 1

I was half-awake listening to NPR Friday morning & they had a story of RFK's speech to a crowd just after the announcement that King had been murdered. In the dream the tears of the people around me fells as hard pieces of clear plastic. They bounced around the floor like ball bearings. The sound accumulated to sound almost like static above the speech.




Mike Hernandez-Stern's bike "Hidalgo"




Accident 1

I pulled into the Barnes & Noble parking lot Saturday just as a minivan was plowing through the windowed section to the cafe. At first my mind rejected what I'd seen. I kind of laughed to myself, thinking that it looked like a minivan had driven into the store. But as i stopped my car & looked I realized that this was just what had happened. Luckily no one was hurt. There were plenty of witnesses who saw it better than I had, so as the sirens could be heard I left.





Sherry Black's "Echo" at Tugboat Gallery




Dream 2

Friday night I dreamed that I was involved in some kind of strange installation poetry event. We were having readings in strange places, the bleachers to an olympic sized swimming pool while a practice was going on. An echoey stairwell. Zach & I were out on the street when a long line of inmates were being led into a Catholic church. For some reason, a huge crowd had gathered to watchin the inmates enter the church. Some of the inmates looked humble & frightened, some looked angry. One spit on Zach's shoe. Three small, wiry inmates were wearing hats of tanned leather. Zach was drinking a raspberry lambic beer; the bottle was hidden inside a coffee mug. I grabbed the bottle to take a sip, but he said no, there are cops everywhere. Something else happened then that I am not going to write about.




The String Demons





Accident 2

Saturday, maybe two hours after seeing the minivan drive into the bookstore I walked through the alley between my apartment & the Russ' grocery store. It smelled like dirty smoke. As I entered full view of the street I saw that a man was convulsing on a stretcher. Someone was moaning mournfully. A white guy was putting his oxford shirt back on, not sure why he would have taken it off. Two smashed cars were in the intersection. When i exited the store with some Romaine lettuce & some bread the man had been taken away in the ambulance. A crowd of people had gathered & they seemed to be looking at the spot where the man had been.




The Reinkordt-Polipnik Duo




Dream 3

Last night I dreamed that I was trying to teach a class of three students a literature course but I realized that we were inside a story & that we had nothing in our thoughts that hadn’t been written for us. Consequently it was difficult to understand literature. One of the students didn’t get it & argued with me. At one point in our argument I said that our experience was like in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern but because it hadn’t been written into the story he hadn’t read it & I realized that it had only been written into the story for me—perhaps as a character sketch. I ended up telling him that this was all part of my pedagogy. Then we were all inside a fairy tale & entered a candy house. A talking gingerbread man walked into the room. I said aloud to my students – now don’t eat him, remember the Levinas essay we read for class. The gingerbread man turned out to be a gingerbread boy & he ran to get his parents. We followed him (it didn’t occur to me that we’d broken into his house & that he might be scared) we followed him. The gingerbread dad emerged from a dark bedroom, I briefly considered what gingerbread person sex consisted of – then I was trying to explain to the gingerbread man that we were reading the story of his life, but he pointed toward a mirror & I saw that my students & I were all made of chocolate.









Tugboat & the studio complex opened on Friday. It's great to have a place be a focal point for artsy peeps in Lincoln again. I saw Anders' dad's country western band Friday. They were great. Mike is in town. He's great & his bike is great. I should have hung out with him more yesterday but I was feeling not-so-great so I watched The Conversation for the first time & it was great. Ande & Luke played music Friday night. They were great. My CV looks as great as it's going to after my final updating of it yesterday. Life lesson: don't wait 8 months to update CV. Life lesson 2: don't drive into big box bookstores.