Going Up in Milan

I've ridden a lot of escalators in my time, and I've seen a lot of stickers, but I confess that this never occured to me.



By Kama, based in Milan, Italy. More from Kama here.

Time Travel

More high weirdness at the Northwest Film Forum. Urban Archaeologist (and author of the wondrous zine Dreamwhip) Bill Brown and film maker Sabine Gruffat have teamed up to present a multi-media concoction of video performance, spoken word, scratchy records, and 35mm slides at a few select locations around the country. According to the entertaining but almost indecipherable press release, Gruffat will navigate by the red, green and blue stars of electronic constellations while Brown will pilot the machine toward the irretrievable past and the inaccessible future. Together the audience drops out of the temporal flux and travels through the sensory drone of the digital and analog hyperspace. I think it sounds like fun?

One night only, at the NWFF on Tuesday, Aug 18 at 8 PM.

Wojnarowicz

Today is the birthday of painter, writer, photographer, film maker and performance artist David Wojnarowicz. Had he lived, he would be just 55 years old. Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1954 and spent his youth in agony that his homosexuality and his dysfunctional family did not square with the ideals of the 50's. His parents divorced when he was 2; he and his two sisters lived with their mother until their father kidnapped them.

Sexually precocious, Wojnarowicz was 9 when he turned his first trick in Central Park. Encouraged by his mother to draw and paint -- he earned lunch money by sketching the carnal fantasies of his friends -- he entered the High School of Music and Arts but dropped out at 16 and became a thief and a prostitute. After hitchhiking many times across the U.S. and living for several months in San Francisco and Paris, he settled in New York's East Village in 1978.

Wojnarowicz created artwork that boils with rage against the political and religious powers that branded him a pariah. Many of Wojnarowicz' works incorporate experiences drawn from his personal history and from stories he heard from the people he met in bus stations and truck stops while hitchhiking. By the late 1970's he had created and collected an extensive catalog of images, writings and objects that capture the personal voices of individuals stigmatized by society and form a forceful rebuke to mainstream history.

In the late 1980's, Wojnarowicz was diagnosed with AIDS, and his art became more sharply political than ever. He was entangled in highly public debates about medical research and funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists. He challenged the nature of public arts funding at the National Endowment for the Arts, and won a lawsuit against the American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi, an anti-pornography political action group that Wojnarowicz accused of misrepresenting his art and damaging his reputation.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 37. Over his brief life, he wrote five books, including the memoir "Close to the Knives," which remains one of the most important documents on living with AIDS during the onset of the epidemic, and created art that is now in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

"The ancients believed that light came from within the eyes and you cast this light upon things in the world wherever you turned. I remember wondering if the world disappeared or was cast into darkness when you closed your eyes, or, even further, if you died, did the world die also."

Riot in the Streets

It's a great moment to be making street art in Seattle. For as long as I've been around, Seattle has lagged FAR behind most other American cities in the creation and preservation of worthwhile graffiti and public murals. Never mind graffiti meccas like New York and San Francisco - much smaller cities like Portland and Pittsburgh have long had wonderfully well developed street art scenes that put ours to shame.

Finally, a critical mass of Seattle area artists have been stepping up their games and creating gorgeous and poignant street art on the walls, overpasses, signs and dumpsters of our metropolis. Take a ride this weekend past the SoDo free wall, the Georgetown Graffiti Wall, or the Tubs Memorial Project to see some of what's been taking place in the spraypaint fueled laboratories around the 206.

Or, pay a visit to either of two significant exhibits that are opening this Friday, both of which prominently feature local street artists. Up in Greenwood, the BHerd Gallery opens "Urban Decay," which features new work from local writers Asher, Tim Kapler, Akimbo and (ahem) Gurldogg. In Belltown, the Seattle City Hostel project opens for public viewing with new work from Parskid, PGee, Skeleton and Key, and lots more.

Graffiti is the tattoos that brings color to the skin of a city. It's about time that a city as culturally alive as ours finally has some ink worth showing.

Thanks to Slightly North for the photo of the Georgetown graffiti wall!

So Many Pages, So Much Money

All of the wealthy art and literature types among my readers will be happy to note that the Manhattan Rare Book Company has attained a first edition of Foirades/Fizzles, created by Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns in 1976, and signed by both of them.

Johns spoke about the project in a 1977 interview with Edmund White:

I met Beckett through the exwife of an art critic. She wanted me to do illustrations to Waiting for Godot, but I said I’d like to work with Beckett on something new. She didn’t seem to understand and kept sending me other published texts. Then, when I was in Paris with Merce Cunningham and his dance company [in 1973], I met Beckett. I told him I wanted to illustrate something new. He looked horrified. ‘A new work?’ He asked me. ‘You mean you want me to write another book?’

I said, ‘Don’t you have some unpublished fragments, just some words or phrases? At that time I was thinking I’d use his words inside the image, phrases included within the picture. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have something like that but they’re in French.’ I told him I don’t read French. He agreed to translate them into English. Only later did I learn what an arduous process translation is for Beckett—he makes something altogether new when he translates. Finally he sent me two or three beautifully polished pieces; they were finished works and not fragments at all. Then I coaxed another one out of him. In the end he sent me five pieces. I decided to print both the French and the English in order to make the book longer and so that people who know both languages could compare the texts. I did etchings of the numerals and derived the other images from two patterns I’ve been working with in the last few years—a wall of flagstones and slanted lines on the diagonal, a sort of cross-hatching.

When I showed the etchings to Beckett he held them very close to his face and scrutinized them for ages, scanning up and down (his eyesight is very bad). I was terrified he’d hate what I had done. I said, ‘Sam, I’ll be happy to explain--.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s perfectly clear,’ and he made approving noises. Then I showed him the endpapers. He said he hoped that I would place the cross-hatching design at the front of the book and the flagstones at the back. I asked him why. He said, ‘Here you try all these different directions but no matter which way you turn you always come up against a stone wall.’

Just $30,000 if you act fast. Significantly cheaper versions of the landmark book can be found here.

Seattle Savants

Here's another idea that's been a long time coming. Seattle has been on the forefront of alternative comics creation since Fantagraphics opened their offices here some 20 years ago. Through good times and bad, Fantagraphics has remained committed to nurturing and promoting Seattle comics talent, regularly both publishing and employing local cartoonists. To celebrate their lengthy paternal relationship with Seattle comics culture, the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is opening "Comics Savants: A Survey of Seattle Alternative Cartoonists" this Saturday, August 8.

This exhibition features original artwork and published material from some of the most accomplished artists making comics today - people like Peter Bagge, Charles Burns, and Jim Woodring; some remarkable up-and-coming cartoonists like Ellen Forney, Eroyn Franklin and Megan Kelso; and a bunch of current and former Fantagraphics Books staffers like Jim Blanchard, Roberta Gregory, and Patrick Moriarity.

Many of the artists will be at the opening reception on Saturday, from 6:00 to 9:00, to say hi and sign books and artwork. Think creatively. Buy locally.

Stay the Night

After sitting vacant for who knows how long, the historic Lorraine Hotel in the heart of Belltown is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Owner/developer Lee Kindell is remaking the long dilapidated 30-room hotel into a traveler's hostel, with each room decorated by a different Seattle street artist. The painting project is being curated by Jen Vertz of Upper Playground Seattle. I had a chance to visit the project recently, and saw all manner of gorgeous work being done by such Seattle artists as Joey Nix, Weirdo, Soule, PG, EGO, and many many others. The common areas, bathrooms, kitchens and entrance ways are also getting a grand makeover. Even in its current embryonic state, the Seattle City Hostel is beautiful to behold.

More about the Hostel project here. More images from the work in progress here.

From Hiroshima to Hope

From Hiroshima to Hope is an annual event honoring the victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all victims of war violence. This year the ceremony takes place on the 64th anniversary of the initial bombings, Thursday August 6th, from 6:00-9:30 pm, just south of the Bathhouse Theater on the northwest shore of Green Lake.

People begin gathering at 6:00 for lantern calligraphy and folding of Peace Cranes, at 7:30 a program of musical performances and speeches begins, and the candle-lit lanterns are floated across Greenlake at dusk. This is a beautiful event, both inspiring and solemn, that very much encourages the participation of children.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest

Ernest Pignon-Ernest is a French artist in his late 60's whose entire career has been devoted to the creation of powerfully political street art. Ernest, who is based in Paris, has traveled the world since the 1940's getting up on public walls with careful, beautiful charcoal drawings, etchings and silkscreen prints, always without official permission.

Pignon-Ernest is famously disdainful of mounting shows in galleries or museums, and instead sees himself as creating a whole new kind of art object. "I choose a real place,' he said in a 2003 interview, "and slip an image into its interior. I believe that the insertion of my image into the real world gives that reality the characteristic of an image." Pignon-Ernest was trained as a classical draftsman, and his first foray into public art was provoked by the horrors of the atomic bombings in Japan. He pasted images of the victims in cities throughout France. Since then, he has reacted to large and small acts of oppression by creating street art in England, Italy, Japan, Algiers, the U.S., Israel and South Africa.

Most recently, Ernest's work was seen on the streets of Gaza, where he posted life-size images of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died last August. Many more images at his official site here.

Dead Baby Downhill

You're too late - registration for the 13th Annual Dead Baby Downhill race is now CLOSED. This legendary event, staged each year by the organized core of the impressively chaotic Dead Baby Bike Club, races straight downhill as much as geographically possible and concludes with the "The Greatest Party Known to Humankind." This year, the race starts at the Comet Tavern on Friday, August 7 and ends at an undisclosed, but guaranteed festive, spot in Georgetown. If you didn't register you can't win any prizes, but you can still come party with the best and baddest team of bike-building nutcases west of the Mississippi.

George Russell

Jazz musician and composer George Russell died two days ago, on July 27th. Russell was a hugely influential (and criminally under appreciated) musician whose inventive approach to jazz composition and theory influenced everyone from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Sun Ra.

Though he had played drums professionally since the 1930's, Russell's career as a composer began in 1941 while he spent 6 months in a hospital recovering from tuberculosis and learning the fundamentals of harmony. The first piece of music he sold - "New World," bought by Benny Carter - was written and sold from his hospital bed. On recovering, Russell joined Carter's Band as a drummer, but was replaced by Max Roach, at which point he forever gave up drumming for writing and arranging. Russell moved to New York where wrote music for the likes of Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, and Charlie Parker. Among many other gorgeous pieces of music, he wrote the seminal "Cubano Be/Cubano Bop" for Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra, often credited as being the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz.

Throughout the 1950's and 60's he arranged music for bandleaders like Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw, composed pieces according to his "Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization," and formed "The Jazz Workshop" sextet which recorded Russell's compositions under his direction and toured throughout the U.S. and Europe. Fed up with the lack of recognition he received in the U.S., Russell moved to Europe in 1964 and returned in 1969 to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music where he remained until retiring 2004. In 1990, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, and he was honored in 2007 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as one of 33 "living jazz legends."

Asked in 1958 if jazz had a future, Russell said "If America has a future, jazz has a future. The two are inseparable."

The ever brilliant music blog Silent Springs pays tribute to Russell by linking to torrents of some of his best known recordings, right here. For those of you more interested in sharing Russell's music legally, this clip of Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Jimmy Cleveland, Gene Quill and Ed Thigpen playing the George Russell composition "Stratusphunk" courtesy of youtube.

Dumpster Diving

This has received plenty of coverage, but with the weather the way it is, I think it's an idea well worth promoting. David Belt, a real estate developer in New York, along with a group of handy friends, has been turning run-of-the-mill dumpsters into urban swimming pools. The first was at a junk yard on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the company they formed, Macro Sea, has now taken on the challenge of bringing dumpster pools, and other recycled objects d'art, to underused strip malls around the country. The idea, said Belt, was not to create an exclusive party destination but to experiment with underused space and materials, repurposing them with urban renewal in mind. A great idea, worth stealing. More photos and building details here.

Ice Handler

My God it's hot out there. Here's a poem for right now from Carl Sandburg.


Ice Handler

I KNOW an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with
      pearl buttons the size of a dollar,
And he lugs a hundred-pound hunk into a saloon ice-
      box, helps himself to cold ham and rye bread,
Tells the bartender it's hotter than yesterday and will be
      hotter yet to-morrow, by Jesus,
And is on his way with his head in the air and a hard
      pair of fists.
He spends a dollar or so every Saturday night on a two
      hundred pound woman who washes dishes in the
      Hotel Morrison.
He remembers when the union was organized he broke
      the noses of two scabs and loosened the nuts so the
      wheels came off six different wagons one morning,
      and he came around and watched the ice melt in the
      street.
All he was sorry for was one of the scabs bit him on the
      knuckles of the right hand so they bled when he
      came around to the saloon to tell the boys about it.

Gurldogg up at BHerd

Your humble Gurldogg is beyond flattered to be included in an upcoming street art group show. I was invited in by the righteous stencil artist and ceramicist Soule, and I've been working hard to earn my keep. It ain't easy when the other artists in the show include the bafflingly brilliant Paper Monster out of New York, Italian street artist Klevra, local hero Specs One, and a bunch more besides. You can see some of my work in progress here but I sure hope you'll come up to the north end of Seattle to see the real deal. The show "Urban Decay" runs for just 2 weeks, from August 14th to August 28, at bherd studios 8537 Greenwood Ave. N. I'll remind you again before the opening.

Tough Stuff from the Buff

People who haven't spent time in Buffalo, New York probably don't know about the Queen City's potent media arts community with a long tradition of creating unusual works that blur the lines between video art, personal documentary and media activism.

Straight out of Buffalo, filmmakers Marc Moscato and David Gracon are currently on a bike tour of the Northwest, carrying a collection of short films and videos by Buffalo artists. "Tough Stuff from the Buff" is a collection of 16 short films being shown in a dozen theaters, all ages venues and non-traditional spaces throughout the Pacific Northwest. Having already stopped in Anacortes, Bellingham and Vancouver, BC, they are now headed South, from Port Townsend down to Portland, and will be in Seattle for one night, july 28th, at the Caffe Vita on Capitol Hill. Full tour dates here. The tour website is being regularly updated, with photos, video and stories from the road.

The "Tough Stuff" collection purposefully presents a diverse sampling of Buffalo artists, from accomplished media makers to first timers, who reflect the city's rustbelt charm and demonstrate how ballsy one has to be to find a unique voice in a town suffering from the advanced stages of capitalism.

Hart Crane

Today is the 110th birthday of poet Hart Crane, born July 21 1899. Crane was born a poet, famously writing poems from his early childhood in Garrettsville, Ohio, despite constant demands from his father that he study business in order to take over the family's candy factory. At seventeen he published his first poem about the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Crane moved to New York City in his late teens, passionately determined to make a living from poetry, and formed uneasy friendships with such literary figures of the time as Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Eugene O'Neill and E. E. Cummings, although his heavy drinking absorbed most of his social time.

In 1930, Crane published his only major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, which used the sights, sounds and abundant symbols of New York to present a powerfully spiritual vision of America. In an essay written in 1925, Crane wrote "I am concerned with the future of America, but not because I think that America has any so-called par value as a state or as a group of people.... It is only because I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere. And in this process I like to feel myself as a potential factor; certainly I must speak in its terms and what discoveries I may make are situated in its experience."

Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-three, by jumping from the deck of a steamship.

The Mango Tree

           Let them return, saying you blush again for the great
Great-gandmother. It's all like Christmas.
           When you sprouted Paradise a discard of chewing-gum
took place. Up jug to musical, hanging jug just gay spiders
yoked you first, -silking of shadows good underdrawers for
owls.
       First-plucked before and since the Flood, old hypno-
tisms wrench the golden boughs. Leaves spatter dawn from
emerals cloud-sprockets. Fat final prophets with lean ban-
dits crouch: and dusk is close
                              under your noon,
                              you Sun-heap, whose
ripe apple-lanterns gush history, recondite lightnings, irised.
                              O mister Señor
                              missus Miss
                              Mademoiselle
                              with baskets
                                                                  Maggy. come on

Hedges

More than books, Chris Hedges writes polemics.

Hedges began his career reporting on the conflict in El Salvador, spent seven years as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and was later part of the New York Times investigative team of that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism.

In 2003, just two weeks after president Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, Hedges famously delivered a commencement address at Rockford College saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, his microphone was cut, and two young men rushed the stage to try to prevent him from speaking. His then employer, The New York Times, criticized his statements, issued him a written reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality," and demanded that Hedges cease speaking about the Iraq war. In response Hedges left The Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

Since then, Hedges has published one scathing book after another, beginning in 2002 with the bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning which describes the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime, followed by Losing Moses on the Freeway, about lives which had been consumed by religious extremism, American Fascists in which Hedges argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Europe at the beginning of the last century, and Collateral Damage, written with Iraqi journalist Laila Al-Arian, which is based on hundreds of interviews with combat veterans and reveals the terrifying reality of daily civilian life in Iraq at the hands of U.S. troops.

Hedges speaks at Town Hall in Seattle on Wednesday July 22, promoting his latest book, Empire of Illusion, and to speak about his belief that America is retreating from the reality-based world into one of false certainty and squalid celebrity pseudo-events. Tickets are just $5 at Brown Paper Tickets or available at the door beginning at 6:30 pm.

20 x 200 x 206

Jen Bekman will be in Seattle on Friday, giving a talk at the Seattle Art Museum at 7 PM. Bekman founded the terrific website 20X200, which offers prints in limited editions of 200 for $20 each. The boundary breaking site presents new prints twice a week, and offers a regular reminder that art need not be expensive to be valuable.

Bekman is in town in her role as the curator of "Photo-Op," the 14th annual photographic competition exhibition at Photographic Center Northwest. The show, which also opens on Friday, features 5 photos from each of 2 dozen photographers (such as Katie Baum, whose photo Untitled 5 is shown here) and offers 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes of $1000, $500 and $250.

Somehow Bekman also finds time to write a blog, Personism, which offers exquisite pairings of images and poems. Check it out. Tickets for the talk are $4 for SAM and PCNW members and $6 for the general public, available at the door on the night of the lecture.

Review of Books (short works)

Having a new baby around isn't particularly conducive to reading thick novels or delving into lengthy essays. Baby Nico adds to my life in untold ways, but long lazy days of reading simply ain't one of them.

These days, I'm reading almost exclusively short works - stories, magazine articles, poems and essays - that can be digested in a single setting. I have a half-dozen such books stashed around the house in various places. I haven't finished a single one of the books on this list, but whenever a spare moment arises, I jump in fresh.

The 16 stories in Michael Faber's collection Vanilla Bright Like Eminem move at a rapid speed as they open small and invariably shocking windows into the lives of their misfit characters, something like a Scottish version of the stories of Flannery O'Connor. Faber's command of the form is as prodigious as his imagination. Stories transform on a dime from fantastic to terrifying, and yet most of the characters come across as ordinary people who are poorly equipped to deal with their harrowing circumstances. Some of the stories are quite successful - For example, “A Hole With Two Ends” is a tale of two business people who have a sudden extraordinarily violent encounter in the Scottish Highlands - and some are less so, but as a whole the collection is compelling and powerful.

I'm a fan of Luc Sante, the cultural critic, historian, and prose craftsman who wrote Low Life, the exceedingly brilliant history of underclass New York City. His book of essays, Kill All Your Darlings, published in 2007, covers a wide range of topics - everything from the etymology of the word "dope" to the birth of the blues to a character analysis of Bob Dylan - but he still comes most alive when writing about New York. The wonderfully rich essays include reflections on the Lower East Side in the 1970's, a first hand account of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots, and — ever a connoisseur of con men — a pair of meditations on two quintessentially New York monsters: John Gotti and Rudolph Giuliani.

Anyone interested in the current state of publishing owes it to themselves to read McSweeney's Quarterly Concern on a regular basis. Despite the regular sound bites about the "death of publishing," the good people at McSweeney's prove over and over again that there are still a million new and creative ways to publish new and creative writing. As a case in point, I'm currently making my way through issue number 31 in which the editors asked a number of excellent contemporary writers (including Douglas Coupland, Joy Williams, Shelley Jackson and Will Sheff) to create new stories in genres long thought dead (including the Biji, the Nivola, the Graustarkian Romance, and the Socratic Dialogue.) Some experiments are more successful than others, but the entire magazine is entertaining, provocative, and beautifully presented. As always.

Roberto Bolaño's collection Nazi Literature in the Americas takes a huge cue from Borges by inventing a sort of encyclopedia of fictional right wing authors. However, very much unlike Borges, Bolaño's writers live in the real world rather than in the rarefied library. They have adventures, get arrested, meet historical figures, develop insane theories of politics, entertain rabid delusions, and occasionally even meet with terrific success. This is simultaneously a darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, and a savage look at a persistent thread in American culture.

Anne Grgich

It was a sad day for Seattle when Outsider Art superstar Anne Grgich packed her bags last May and moved south to Portland. Grgich had been based in Seattle for many years, creating paintings, prints and her magnificent illuminated books for shows and galleries around the world. In 2008 and 2009 alone she had one-woman exhibitions in Nashville, Vancouver, Vienna, Port Au Prince and London, and she curated the traveling show Internal Guidance Systems, soon to open in New Orleans, which represents the very vanguard of contemporary visionary art. Sadly, recent sales of her work couldn't quite maintain a home and studio in Seattle, so she headed for our more hospitable sister city over the border.

Anne is prominently featured in the second edition Outsider Art Sourcebook, published in June by Raw Vision Press, and her first-ever Australian solo show runs from October through January at the Sydney College of the Arts.