Nathaniel Bartlett's soundscapes at Eyedrum, Atlanta

Nathaniel Bartlett at Eyedrum

Atlanta's Eyedrum gallery is an eclectic arts venture in a downtown warehouse space, supported for the past twelve years mostly by gallant contributors who believe that even in hard times art -- and artists -- need a place to create and perform. While its struggles to remain solvent are ongoing, Eyedrum continues to present unique opportunities for artists of all disciplines.

Monday, September 13 Eyedrum will present a performance and talk by composer Nathaniel Bartlett. Bartlett uses a five-octave marimba with a 3-D sound field, in which the audience is seated in the center of an eight-chambered array of speakers. The marimba sounds are manipulated by a dual-display computer monitor that replaces the music stand, and fed through Bartlett's own audio set-up.

From his website: "a three-dimensional soundfield can be projected into the audience space, totally immersing the listeners. In my music the positioning and movement of sounds in physical space, resulting in kinetic audio sculptures, is a central musical parameter. The three-dimensional soundfield is enriched by the use of high-definition audio (superior to CD-quality audio), which allows for a significant increase in sonic nuances."

More can be read about Bartlett's work and collaborations on his website, as well as online at Eyedrum.

Abebooks' weird book room

Those wild, wild folks over at Abebooks UK are tossing everything into their weird book room, including the kitchen sink: it's a total mind-melt of the unique and bizarre ... and they want your suggestions, too. Hurry on over and suggest something, won't you?

Currently featured: Hellbent for Cooking, The Heavy-Metal Cookbook, by Annick "Morbid Chef" Giroux.

"What hors d'oeuvres are appropriate to serve with face-melting guitar riffs? When touring in a van crammed with men in tight leather and denim in a cloud of hairspray, sweat and (various kinds of) smoke, can one safely think outside the box with a risotto or a cassoulet, or is it better to stick to more traditional comfort foods? Is there an alcohol-free hot beverage one can whip up to soothe the raspy vocal cords of someone who spends their days screaming and growling for money?

If you've ever asked yourself any of those questions, then Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook may be right up your alley. Full of recipes from everyone's favorite metal bands like Gwar, Obituary, Toxic Holocaust and more, these recipes are sure to totally wail. Warning: hair-nets not included."

Ginsberg's "Howl" goes from page to screen

"Howl" gets graphic

These days it is difficult to imagine the shock waves created in 1956 at the first publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Censorship issues, an obscenity trial, and an outright ban were hallmarks of the poem's public reception. Even more astounding is how different the world of poetry and personal expression would be today without the poem's scandalous history: eventually, the City Lights Pocket Poets series issue of Howl and Other Poems created a universe of free expression that now seems wholly natural but which required a long struggle testing America's concepts of freedom and its meaning for the individual rights of the artist.

The Allen Ginsberg Project posts that "Howl" is now receiving a graphic treatment by Eric Drooker, whose work will also figure in the fall's upcoming film version of Howl featuring James Franco and centering around the poem's obscenity trial.

From the Ginsberg Project website: "We're happy to see all the good press covering Eric Drooker's graphic novel for Howl. The New Yorker's The Book Bench gives it a positive sweet mention, there's a feature in Nowness, an interview in 7x7, and Comics Alliance have a full spread of images. Eric Drooker's posted his introduction from the book on his own site as well as some useful press info there. The book is a tie-in with the upcoming Howl film, one quarter of which is motion-animation of Drooker's work set to the poem. It only made sense to have a companion book that included stills."

It's worth mentioning, too, this weekend's HOWL! festival kicks off tonight in NY's Tompkins Square Park. There will be appearances by Anne Waldman, John Giorno and a host of others over the three-day event, which will continue with readings and other public gatherings through September.

Thomas Guinzburg (1926-2010)

Thomas Guinzburg, seated at right, with George Plimpton, William Pène du Bois and Donald Hall, in 1965. (Photo from The Paris Review)

One of the founding members of The Paris Review died on Wednesday at the age of 84.

Thomas Guinzburg helped create the magazine in Paris in 1953. The Paris Review became a journal of American writers unable to find acceptance at home; as Times writer Bruce Weber notes in today's obituary, William Styron, Jack Kerouac, Phillip Roth, V.S. Naipaul (and later, T. Coraghessan Boyle) were among many to be published and interviewed in its pages.

From Mr. Weber's article: "Mr. Guinzburg had a robust sense of humor and may be best known for engineering one of publishing’s most legendary stunts. On the occasion of Mr. Pynchon’s receiving the National Book Award, Mr. Guinzburg arranged for the comic actor Professor Irwin Corey to accept the award for the famously reclusive author. Mr. Corey’s speech, a lunatic and somewhat inspired ramble — he referred to Mr. Pynchon as Richard Python — was received with astonished guffaws, as he dealt mostly with American politics, though at one point he thanked Mr. Guinzburg, saying that he had “made it possible for you people to be here this evening to enjoy the Friction Citation.”

"The Warmth of Other Suns," and reviving a literary reputation at the Wren's Nest

The New York Times carries a glowing review of Isabel Wilkerson's new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great Sunbelt migration of blacks from, and back to, the South -- and her own journey from Chicago to Atlanta in 2001. The book took ten years to write and a committed editor through two publishers (which even the Times admits is a "glacial" pace in publishing).

David Oshinsky of The Times writes the resulting 622-page book is "a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch."

Wilkerson's approach to the story of the move back South of so many black families is inspired less by Studs Terkel than Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath figures as a writing model, focusing on the stories of three main characters around which larger ideas are woven. In a nod to the book's cinematic scope Wilkinson also name-checks the director Robert Altman as a reference point of interwoven characters and their stories.

Isabel Wilkerson (New York Times photo by Erik S. Lesser)

From today's Times article: "For a while during her research she would read a book a day. She went through a phase where she read about nothing but lynching and as a result, she said, was not very popular at dinner parties. She also became obsessed with the restrictions of the Jim Crow South, imagining the indignities her ancestors suffered. “There is no reference in the book to water fountains or restaurants,” she said. “None. It wasn’t necessary. It was important for me to talk about things you had never heard of.” The book describes instead the Birmingham law that prohibited blacks and whites from playing checkers together and the North Carolina courthouse where there were separate Bibles for blacks and whites to swear on."

Restoring more than a home at the Wren's Nest

Illustrating the complexity of the South's continuing literary traditions, over at the Wren's Nest blog there's a spirited, multi-part defense of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories by his great-great-great grandson, Lain Shakespeare.

Like many literary characters whose fame and popularity have slid into shadow over time and dispute, Uncle Remus remains a perplexing literary figure more unread and undiscussed than understood these days. Spike Lee's assessment of the fictional Remus as "the super-duper magical Negro" certainly makes Harris's creation the equivalent of Uncle Tom (which was based on the real-life Josiah Henson of Underground Railroad history) in Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist milestone Uncle Tom's Cabin. Here's Mr. Shakespeare's view, expressed in a series called Everything you know about Uncle Remus is wrong:

" ... scholars have branded Joel Chandler Harris as a 'nostalgic plantation romancer' who just so happened to pen nearly 200 folktales, the majority of them from a subversive African-American oral tradition. Explanations of this ideological chasm range from 'irony seems lost on Harris' to 'Harris probably did not understand this part of the story.'

While scholars have widely divergent opinions of Harris, it seems like his reputation as a 'plantation romancer' has been spun from one sentence fragment in the first Uncle Remus book’s introduction: '…a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe’s wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South.' For most contemporary readers, this has been enough to condemn Harris and his work."

Rehabilitating the reputation of the Uncle Remus stories for the 21st century is a tall order, resting more on matters of cultural anthropology than entertainment value. A white newspaperman from Atlanta writing black Civil War-era fables would be difficult to countenance today, but authenticity as a test of intrinsic value is a modern concept unknown in the 1890s.

It could be argued that, much like Harris's contemporary Mark Twain displayed in Huckleberry Finn, the Remus stories are best understood as fables for adults dressed in childhood innocence. Both stories are a knowing nod to difficult and thorny ideas. Whether or not, as Alice Walker claims, Harris "knew what he was doing" when he created "a creature to tell these stories," her opinion indicates a general idea Mr. Harris has a long road ahead of him toward a renewed literary acceptance, and Mr. Shakespeare his own difficult path ahead in reviving his great-great-great-grandfather's contemporary reputation.

David Maisel: the art of the forgotten

From poet C.A. Conrad comes this link to David Maisel's Library of Dust. Here's an article at boingboing about this extraordinary exhibit, which was mounted at San Francisco's Haines Gallery in 2008. A book featuring Maisel's photographs of copper cremation cannisters found at the abandoned Oregon State Hospital (filming site of Milos Foreman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is published by Chronicle Books; the Oregon State Hospital is currently slated for demolition. Conrad remarks, with the sweet irony that only all we the living can afford, "these people were so neglected, so hated for their conditions while living, but now people (can) flock from all over to see the urns of their remains."

From David Maisel's website: "Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans.

Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit.

The room housing these canisters is an attempt for order, categorization, and rationality to be imposed upon randomness, chaos, and the irrational. The canisters, however, insistently and continually change their form over time; they are chemical and alchemical sites of transformation, both organic and mineralogical, living and dead. The Library of Dust describes this labyrinth, and in doing so, gives form to the forgotten."

Maisel, quoted here from the article at boingboing: “There are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time ... but perhaps the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and what may happen to the souls that occupied our bodies. Matter, these canisters show, lives on when the body vanishes, even when it has been incinerated to ash by an institutional practice."

n+1 magazine shares a little film love

"Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno," d. Serge Bromberg and Ruxanda Medrea (2009)

The latest issue of n+1 comes with a brand-new online film supplement, N1FS 1. Editor A.S. Hamrah has high hopes there will be enough continuing interest in the IFC-funded project "to include interviews, excerpts from new film books, pieces on films and filmmakers that aren’t as contemporary, and more coverage of independent and gallery-based film-making, two things we’d really like to find new names for." The first group of articles is intriguing and entertaining, reminding readers there is (still) a universe of contemporary films and filmmakers beyond the googoolplex that is worth searching for.

Here are two brief excerpts from "Bad Influences, Bad Personalities," Hamrah's own round-up of new films, describing Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by graffiti artist Banksy, and Chase, by the charmingly named Liz Magic Laser. Chase is Laser's two-and-a-half hour film of Bertolt Brecht’s "Man Equals Man," a play first performed in Germany in 1926, set in a sequence of New York City bank ATM vestibules.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: What begins as an interesting documentary about how Banksy and other famous graffiti artists make their art soon turns into a semi-mockumentary that plays into people’s desire to believe the art world is too easily manipulated and therefore something they don’t have to pay attention to; that, in fact, they would be idiots to pay any attention to it at all. What they should pay attention to is Banksy, who doesn’t credit himself or anybody else as the director of this film, but who appears on-screen to speak to us from the shadows, if that’s really him, next to a monkey mask with ping pong balls for eyes.

Chase: Laser shot Chase on digital video in the ATM vestibules of banks in New York City. She worked without permission, gaining access like anyone else would, by swiping a bank card to open the door. In the film, her actors perform next to customers using the ATMs, among security guards and cleaning ladies. The actors declaim Brecht’s words while bystanders, a built-in audience, make withdrawals and deposits or wait around. Usually people ignore the actors, but some, roped in, play along for a moment before they leave. Whenever a new customer opens the door, a burst of unmixed sound from the outside world floods in, then the door closes and cuts it off again. One actor, Max Woertendyke, struts and works the crowd like he was born to act in foyers backed by a chorus of beeping machines. At one point, without breaking character, Woertendyke nonchalantly takes a Gummi Bear from a package a bystander is holding and eats it.

A scene from Pedro Costa's "In Vanda's Room" (2001)

There's a lot more to read in N1FS, starting with Elizabeth Gumport's thesis that good movies, or at least pleasurably bad movies, make the worthless ones even worse. (You may be able to get your money back after sitting through Kick-Ass, but you can never retrieve the time.) And then there's "Dicking Around," Christian Lorentzen's musings on the delayed-adulthood films of Judd Apatow: "It turns out that Funny People is the movie Apatow wanted to make all along. It takes as its subject the misery of success in Hollywood. Poor Adam Sandler basically plays Adam Sandler if Adam Sandler were a barely redeemable asshole with leukemia."

Of course, if you're interested in reading about the films of Pedro Costa -- the Criterion Collection recently packaged Costa’s massive Lisbon slum chronicle under the title Letters from Fontainhas -- there's this filmmaker's quote too, in an article by Jeanette Samryn and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon: “he told his audience that making a good film is like writing a love-letter in a bank. 'Few people are going to see this love letter in a bank, and still fewer are going to write a love letter in a bank. . . . Your work is to continue trying to write love letters, and not checks.' ”

For more love among the sprocket holes, check out the full article index at N1FS.

Oxford American tells the future: Optimism interrupted, and Max's Kansas City celebrates the past

Optimism, interrupted

The scrappy Oxford American magazine looks ahead with The Future Issue -- short stories, artwork, and columns devoted to life imagined in the year 2050. What's in the OA crystal ball? Connie May Fowler imagines a last-wish drive to an unpolluted seashore beyond even the reach of electronic memory-manipulation; Andrew Furman provides a rumination on the survival of the live oak; and the ever-curmudgeonly Jack Pendarvis reminds us, in the prospect of increasing lifespan, Larry King will be a spry 117 years young.

Yes, the future looks bleak -- a future of diminishing returns and short supplies, without the flying jet-cars we were all promised in the endlessly rolling-sheet metal future forge of the 1950s. Even worse, writes Michael Parker, the southern twang is about to disappear forever into the growing "I" of the gadget storm: "wither art thou in the age of the wide-webbed world, the iPhone and the iPad and for all I know the iIron, the satellite dishes toward the signal in backwaters where once only flower sought the heavens above? I miss you, you slurry-tongued tarpit; I miss your elongated vowels and garbled consonants."

Amid the gloom of the soothsayers and prognostics, the light at the end of the tunnel is provided by Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car -- still looking cool after all these years, even if its three-wheeled profile doomed it to extinction.

Read more here about the financial ups and downs of the Oxford American.

Max's Kansas City looks toward the past, fondly

Max's Kansas City, Mickey Ruskin's original hangout of New York's famous, infamous and not-so famous from 1965-1974, is about to receive a gallery reincarnation. For art and music fans of a certain age and inclination, Max's was a destination and a goal, sometimes both at once: a young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe eventually sat in the back room with Andy Warhol. “Robert was at ease,” Ms. Smith wrote, “because, at last, he was where he wanted to be. I can’t say I felt comfortable at all. The girls were pretty but brutal,” the New York Times Artsbeat blog printed on Sunday.

The installation at Loretta Howard Gallery is called "Artists at Max's Kansas City: Hetero-holics and some women too," and for good reason. As the New York Arts Beat site has it:

Hard drinking “heavy hitters”, in contrast to the clientele in the back room, gave off an aura of testosterone in the front room. The virtual hegemony of men there prompted the appellation “hetero-holics”. Women artists nevertheless were seen at Max’s, including Dorothea Rockburne, Lynda Benglis, and Alice Aycock. In this exhibition we attempt to recreate with curatorial accuracy the art that hung in Max’s and that artists traded with Mickey for bar tabs. Increasingly this art is seen to rank with the most extraordinary periods of history in centuries.

The Max's website also carries information on the new book of Max's photos and remembrances to be published September 15: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll (Abrams Image), in case your coffee-table is in need of some of that '70s downtown "exuberance and decadence."

A change at BellemeadeBooks, and a poem for Labor Day

A change at BellemeadeBooks

BellemeadeBooks is now a daily arts and media blog. Readers who are on the current email list will receive only the Sunday entries, which will continue to be sent weekly. Daily links to new posts here are being added to my own Facebook profile page.



A poem for Labor Day

Whiskey season
(M Bromberg)

Comes now September with its shorter days
and windows shuttered against the rain and damp;
where summer bees once droned the cold collects,
see to the wood in the garage, check oil for the lamps.

Against a whiskey season and the dark night conserve,
spare the sun, and bank pine for the fire.
Surrender the garden to the October chill,
and prepare all that the winter will require.

If you're lucky to have old friends, invite them in
to recite the old stories familiar in their telling.
When the bottle runs dry, and the night is dark,
find extra blankets and pillows for their bedding.

Gather your wits and smarts, learn a handy way with knots,
teach your dogs to fetch kindling from the yard.
You'll need supplies from the grocer, so pay up accounts,
patch any holes you find, and thank your lucky stars

the year is slowly turning to a close
and instructions such as this are all you need.
When you've done all you can on your own two feet,
rest, be thankful, and ask for many years like these.

(2010)

(photo of Moonbird courtesy of Ricky Friend)