Memoirs of a Suburban Shaman
December 24, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
what follows is an intermediary section of a larger project that links josef beuys to hipster-lost-boys shamanism that i’ve been thinking about
(*the craig smith character is very very loosely based on Maitreya Kali, whose album you can see below)
A sliver of Beuys’ spirit remained at large, having escaped the clutch of the shaman’s drum. That sliver has remained, observing without eyes or memory. A hungry ghost.
Truth be told it was that sliver Beuys’ wished to reclaim when he brought the coyote to the Motel 6 in 1963–twelve years before he would try again in public.
In April of 1963, Beuys brought with him a jar of reindeer piss, purchased on the Mongolian Steepe. The piss was collected from a reindeer, gone mad. Prior to pissing it had eaten a handful of mushrooms that grew wild. According to custom shamans drank the urine in to induce transcendental states. Occasionally, they sold it to foreigners.
Beuys gave the urine to the coyote. He ingested some himself.
He visited the coyote seven days a week for eight hours each day. Upon the shaman’s instruction, Beuys called to the part of himself that had been missing since the war. The part he lost when he crashed the plane–a piece of innocence he thought he could reclaim.
Through a series of incantantions, Bueys trapped the sliver of his spirit inside of the coyote. He found himself looking at himself, long lost.
Against expectation, the coyote retained the spirit. Refusing to bite Beuys and give his spirit a passage back to its source. Instead it became a wherecoyote. It broke free, sprung out the window, (because it was night it was a window–the light indoors reflected the indoors), the coyote escaped into the night and trotted off until it was forgotten, leaving Beuys to weep on a motel bed abandoned a second time.
(His second attempt to reclaim himself, tried again in 1974, under the auspices of art and “I heart America and America hearts me.”)
Years later the coyote bit a man and through the bite passed the spirit; the spirit did not want to die and the coyote was old and would die shortly. In this new body, the spirit lay quite still.
Like that fellow there:
Craig Smith left the city behind he left it he left it differently. He left the city because he tired of squares; he saw squares around him everywhere. He left the city by living in the city. He changed his name, that his mother would not recognize him. He forgot his name, that he could not be tricked.
He went to a man at the University, a man in a tweed coat. The man looked like a square but was not. The man in the tweed coat taught religion. He grew mushrooms in tupperwear boxes. The professor.
The professor sat his visitor on the chair in his office and they made a deal and they shook hands and the professor said he knew of other countries, countries no one had ever seen before, islands of gypsum dust and silence and possibility.
“It’s curious,” said the professor, “that such continents would have gone so long without ever having been discovered.”
“You’ll show me?” asked our friend.
The professor nodded. “You needn’t go far.”
Our friend: he wore dirty jeans. He had long hair. He had silver and turquoise jewelry on the fingers of his hands. He grew up with cowboys and Indians formed from plastic, he practiced their wildness, switching sides depending on the mood and who’s team he might prefer. He rode a yellow bus to school. He liked girls. He lived in fear of Russians and at school they had the children climb under desks during nuclear attack drills. He grew up in Pittsburgh when the city still hummed with steel, the river beds choked with barges carrying astronomically heavy loads; these he often studied growing up, marveling at their capacity to float. Craig moved to California when the city died.
As an adult, he had never before seen an image of earth from outerspace. He also wore cowboy boots and juju beads. He went to war protests wearing a poncho with a variety of buttons pinned to it.
Craig Smith went to the professor’s house. Because it was chilly out, he wore the poncho. They met by the professor’s garage door and the young man entered the professor’s house through the garage door and shook the professor’s hand; the professor wasn’t wearing a tweed coat anymore.
The professor wore moccassins and a corn meal sac for a shirt. He had war paint under his eyes. He did not say anything at all. He would not say anything. Only pressed the small of the young man’s back, bearing him through the darkness of a foreign room—labarynthian because it was unknown.
The young man lay down on a bed of blankets. He lay down as the professor sat down, and the professor crossed his legs. The professor sat in front of an altar—three cardboard boxes disguised by a tablecloth—five tea candles cast light on the alter. A large mirror behind the alter compounded the light by way of refraction. The room was otherwise dark.
The professor picked up a ball of sage. He lit the ball of sage with the candles and he poured the smoke on himself and blew the smoke over the young man’s body and sang an unecognizable song and then the professor picked a conch shell from the alter and blew sage smoke into the conch shell and sang a song again, a different song.
The professor put down the sage. He put it in an ashtray on the altar, then reached into the conch shell and pulled out the mushrooms and he placed the mushrooms in the young man’s mouth, “Chew these with your front teeth,” the professor said. “This is not food. Use your front teeth.”
The young man chewed. The taste was bitter and dry and he wished he had a bit of honey though he did not gag. When he finished chewing the professor put a mask over his eyes such that the young man could not tell whether his eyes were open or shut.
And then young man waited.
It began with a peculiar zinging sensation.
“Ahhh,” said the professor. “Las ninos. The little chimney sweeps.” It would be the last thing the young man remembered hearing for one hundred years: the duration through which the young man lay.
The zinging sensations persisted. Like electricity shot through the young man’s limbs, from the tips of his fingers the feeling travelled down along his spine, zinging, spitting electrons, little gasps of consciousness, sprung loose and shaking up his body, down to the base of his toes. Uncomfortable, disquieting. The young man was afraid.
Yet.
Too late too soon. He could not change his mind, could not go back to that faraway suburban drive outside the professor’s garage. The young man could only wait for this journey to pass through him and in the waiting he began to forget himself.
Sounds around him spun. He was in a boat on his back, a canoe in the jungle; he heard the crack of a parrot or a frog, he could not tell which; traveling down a river, passive, gazing up at foliage (imagined) when suddenly the vision would break entirely he would find himself self-concsious, bumping into a dream he’d had the night before but forgotten he wonders is it possible that he really had this dream, and yet surely for it has a substance; it occurs to him that there must exist a real space in his brain, physical compartments, rooms as in a house, where certain things are kept, like the dreams that one thinks they’ve forgotten where instead the dreams remain behind a closed door in one’s head. He knocks on the wall between himself and last night’s dream, playful, but this too is lost. He sees his brain like a doll’s house, a set with one side peeled back, his larger consciousness looking in, watching himself rap on the side of one wall at what he’d dreamt on the other side.
He experiences himself thinking in the present, a present self drawn from the sensation of a cumulative past—one in which the ‘I’ is persistent, continuous; similarly his present self exists with an imagined self projected into and through the future.
He is torn up again. He cannot follow a single thought. His body twitches with the uncomfortable spurs of electric goading that ride his body. He feels like he is falling down a tube. His body twitches involuntarily. Something goosing his insides.
Suddenly consumed with the sensations of his body he coughs, phlegm and spittle. He spits. He hears himself and the sound is ugly. He turns. He tosses. He sweats. He gasps. A monster choking inside of himself. It’s hard to breathe. I am dying, he thinks. This must mean that I am dying. The difference between breath and breathe, desert and dessert. He sees himself suddenly in a desert, walking beneath the sun, skin scorched, spluttering and mad with dehydration, pain.
He feels the professor next to him. He feels a hand on his forehead. The hand is cool and dry. He feels his skin draining the coolness. He splutters again. The professor’s hand pulls away and the young man cries out. He feels hands again, pulling down the covers, opening the buttons on his shirt; the young man helpless feels his bare chest exposed suddenly, he falls limp, cold, dead, certainly dead This is what it is at last at last at last.
Hands on his chest suddenly, over his heart he smells something—
“Craig,” the professor says gently. “Craig, I am about to put a balm on your chest. A powder. Chili and garlic and tobacco. I am opening your chest. Let the medecine ride through you.” The professor takes a bit of the powder, he rubs it in his hands, he rubs his hands very quickly together, he sounds not like the professor, but like a shaman, a psychic massoos and the young man’s heart has gone limp, “This is good,” the professor says, “as it should be. The death of the ego everyone must die.” The professor puts his hands on the young man’s heart and—
Craig Smith feels heat, at first soft and then stronger and stronger and more and more fierce, the young man gasps again he moans, yells, certainly alive certainly, the energy of the professor’s hands on his heart, the young man sees/feels his chest open, he feels his whole heart open up, spread wide, in two—almost painful—Craig gasps, wheezes, practically ecstatic—he feels the universe pouring into his chest, he feels himself connected. He would later describe it as something sexual. But it wasn’t quite like that at all.
And thereafter, the young man began to dream,
easily:
He rode a ship and on the ship he sat with his father on the rocking ship and his father gave him a small toy horse, a black one, and told the story of Bucephalus, and his father made him happy on the rocking ship where he happened to place cubes of sugar at the round window of a mouth
(visions are truncated–perplexed–repetitive–incomplete–out of order–happening at once)
When the ship struck an iceberg and the ship began to sink and the man felt himself a boy, for upon the death and drowning of his father he felt himself a boy, as one left alone, save for the horse—
—who drug dragged drug him to an island upon which he awoke with a spider on his face, a spider he could not see. He could not remember his name. The sand on the island was white. It was not gypsum it was still sand.
The boy lay on the beach on his back looking at the sky, every so often he tasted the sea for its tide pulled up and over and then off him like a perpetually moving blanket. He was not cold. Everything was very quiet.
He had surely died.
He never expected heaven to be like this: a lonely tropical island.
He stood up, unsteady. He wobbled. Like a colt learning to walk again.
He saw the black horse. It stomped its feet.
It stomped at the snake that tried to eat the sleeping boy.
Save for the horse, the boy was more or less alone on the island. Save for the rocks and the grass. And the boy learned to rub grass together very quickly. He learned to make fire from nothing. He fished using a stick and the pocket knife his father had left him. He explored the island. He found caves and crags. The boy went inside the caves, searching through the dark, using a torch he’d fashioned from hair stolen from the horse—collected from rocks and trees upon which the horse had rubbed himself. The boy took his torch into the darkest cave on the island and he climbed into the cave and he traveled for days through the darkness; there he found a room and under the dim light of his torch he saw ancient paintings. Paintings of horses, crude and elemental in the light.
He understood, somehow, Craig the young man understood these drawings. Completed by other young boys like himself. They were drawn along the pitch of a heros journey—the boy could see himself in the paintnigs left behind. They were never meant to be seen. The boy put his hand on one of the figures in the painting: a horse left in blood beside a handprint the size of his own. The boy closed his eyes with his hands on the horse and he saw into the past.
The boy who left the drawing there came here on a journey. He ate mushrooms grown in a tupperwear box and his teacher left him at the mouth of the cave and the boy traveled into the interior space of the cave and found his way, through a cloak of visions, to this very spot where the boy, apriori, drew the horse, before returning again to his teacher, a man.
Craig could remember, almost, if memory is like a sensory feeling of nearly grasping something palpable—Craig could almost remember hearing something about this on late tv. Was it? That cave paintings were created on shamanic visions, drawn in inaccessible places. Treacherous to achieve, possible only when one pierced reality with the second sight of lucid and psychadelic dreams.
He felt suddenly the intruder, suddenly not the boy at all, but another man in the same cave in the darkness, scaring the boy, stealing somethng from the boy, the boy looked at Craig with contempt the boy looked through Craig Smith and then Craig Smith lost his name and then he felt a sliver of an old man steal into his heart, caught in the cross fire of a prism, the man formerly known as Craig Smith swallowed Josef Beuys.
and woke up on a beach again.
and woke up on a ship again.
and saw the men grappling the black horse again. He felt nauseous. He vomited. He had an erection. He saw only darkness.
He saw, suddenly, a woman riding a horse off a diving board. She drove the horse through the air and into a very small glass of water. He turned away before they landed, but he heard the splash.
He looked at the sky which was smaller than the widness of the sky and he looked at the sky full of stars and realized that some stars could only be seen with his peripheral vision. He was confounded by the periphery of his vision.
He woke up, his hands wobbly to look at. He woke up and looked into the professor’s wobbly face.
“How are you?” asked the professor.
“I don’t know myself.”
“Here. Eat this fruit. And drink this water. And rest awhile.”
Following months: In order to better understand himself he had a spider tatooed on his face. He changed his name. He called himself Maitreya Kali. He was a new man a new man a new man a new man.
A man with a sliver of Beuys inside him, staring out his eyes.
What I read at Club DeVille
December 9, 2009
posted and written by Caroline Picard
I read this last Friday at a MAKE Magazine Event. Stephen Elliot has been going around the country touring his latest book, Adderall Diaries, and I had the good fortune to a participate. What follows is a much shorter version of a story I’ve been working on that tries to trace the current appeal of dream catchers and suburban-hipster shamanism back to, in this case, Joseph Beuys. I realize the link is as fictional as the characters described, but my hope is the link is fictionally resonate/telling.
Regarding The Death of One Barry Maguire, Who Drowned In The Woods On July 23rd, 2008
The dogs bore down on the dying stag and the dogs tore into it’s neck and snapped at one another when the old man called them off, (the old man called his horse Bucephalus), the old man called off the dogs and the boys laughed and the boys strung up the deer, the deer with a weak and fetid heart—it beat now, soft as an oyster—
Boys lined up before the stag and the old man took a photo of the boys before the stag. The shutter of the camera clapped. The camera blinked, catching the boys on paper.
The boys were tall and very skinny. They had no facial hair though the hair on their heads was wild; nappy, not dreaded. They wore faded fluorescent tye-dye t-shirts and sometimes medicine bags and sometimes fanny packs and often cut-off shorts cut off just above the knee. They wore keds or moccasins or slip-on shoes.
The stag lay in a heap at the foot of the clock. Its eyes rolled back and froze and the dogs snuffed its musty coat and the horse snuffed the stag and the boys bathed themselves in the fountain in the square. They shared a bar of soap. They lined up around the fountain. They washed their hands, they washed their necks, they washed their faces. They didn’t wear shirts. They smiled wide, white, ecstatic teeth.
The old man gave each boy a shot of liquor, (it was thick and brown and spicy, it smelled like pine soap; it tasted metallic like chocolate or blood), and together the boys sang more songs and their mothers polished their boots and the boys put on their boots and went to school with dark mouths having drunk the blood of a stag. At lunchtime they would march again over cobblestone streets, the blood of the stag still tasting their mouths,
as in the aftertaste of mercury.
On the weekend, the boys met in secret. They beat shamanic drums. They tied feathers in their hair, under the bunkhouse, wearing war paint,
they put tiger balm on their assholes.
On the weekend an artist went out into the woods. She called the boys into the woods and asked, “what do you think about free love do you believe?” She fucked many boys in the woods it was her art project.
One boy grew up.
This boy, a twentysomething, flew a bomber in The War and he crashed it in Siberia. After the crash they told him he wasn’t German at all
after all.
“Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favored neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in. My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.”
The other boys kept a mule and the they fed the mule wild grass and lay about, listening to the mule’s chomping sounds, (they named the mule Bufesalus). They grew hallucinogenic plants. They licked their leaves and performed plastic rituals during the camp fire drinking beer and beer and beer
the artist licked the plant and she felt the mule chomping at her body and she went to the mule that it might chomp on her body and she wrapped her legs around the mule and she took the mule inside of her and she hoped to have a baby with the mule.
The boys watched in secret beneath the bunkhouse with burning mentholated cigarettes and one told of his therapist who loved baseball and another told of his white home in the suburbs and the video games he played at night when he couldn’t sleep because he’d been afraid and the idea of the suburbs made a boy yawn until another boy yawned and a contagion of yawns spread over the boys at the thought of suburbia—
yard after yard with front walks in between the sidwalk is crisp and clean: green lawns punctuated by white grey walkways with the handprints of children, sometimes, dried in the cement. Each yard has a car and each yard has a house with bedrooms and a kitchen, a microwave, and in every house a jell-o cabinate full of countless kinds of jell-o. And the father goes to work and the mother wears or wants a diamond ring and knits her hands often over time’s advance.. And the children go to school on a yellow bus and when they grow up they gather in respective, carpeted, basements to watch TV and swallow brightly colored people selling brightly colored objects. They wait in the basements eating lotuses in white walls feeling very very comfortable it sometimes makes them climb the walls
—and they woke the next morning feeling empty and wan.
One boy, Barry Maguire, left the woods for the lake. He wanted to take pictures. He thought the surface of things could fill the emptiness.
When the pilot returned to the city, carrying the photo of the plane crash in his wallet. He wandered the ruins of his city, walking through smoldering streets between and through the husks of houses. What walls stood still were hot to touch and the stones trembled, as though in shock, gasping heat from the rain of a previous fire. Daily, people carried rubble from one part of his city to another. There was little to no color beyond what tattered corners of cloth and paper peered out between rocks. Sometimes he found a foot sticking out of the rubble. His city smelled like an oyster. A city with a broken skyline, it didn’t light up at night because all the lights had been shot out by sling shots shot by boys.
In his city he went to many dinner parties.
.
Meanwhile the boy Barry made a camera out of wood it was nice, sanded but not finished, its edges crisp and hard it looked like a sculpture of a camera not a perfectly-realistically shaped camera but a cartoon camera it could have been made of cardboard but it was made of plywood instead.
Barry asked another boy, “Francis, will you come with me? Will you come follow me and take pictures of me falling into the water?” And Francis said sure and they went the same afternoon and Barry was sat in his canoe three feet away with the wooden camera and Francis was sat in his canoe with the real camera.“REady?” Barry asked. as he stood up (before he capsized), pretending to take pictures with the fake camera and Francis took real pictures of Barry who started shifting his weight on the boat back and forth (he was a good swimmer Barry) and the boat waggled back and forth in the water and Francis took lots of pictures and then the boat started to capsize and Barry tried to do the same thing as before, to keep his hand with the wooden camera above water and Francis took pictures the whole time and Barry was in the air and Barry’s feet were in the water and Barry’s knees were in the water and Barry’s thighs in the water his torso in the water (he was smiling you can see in pictures) and Barry’s chest was in the water and his shoulders and his elbows and neck were in the water and his chin in the water his mouth (smile smile) his nose his eyes eyebrows forehead head head hair wrists hands and even the camera all in the water Barry was all gone Francis kept taking pictures as the water smoothed out glossy Francis thought about how you could pour a little bit of oil on the surface of the water and it would all smooth out just like it was just like a mirror as the oil stretched out Only.
Barry didn’t come back up again.
Francis waited a little longer (he stopped taking pictures). He waited what felt a long time when Finally, Francis jumped and swam down to see if Barry was Giggling under the roof of the capsized canoe. Joking.
He was not.
Francis swam back to his canoe. Careful to keep the camera dry. Francis sat in his little canoe for over four hours before they found him he didn’t want to leave the spot that Barry had drowned (even though both boats drifted farther and farther apart and farther and farther from the spot). They never found the body. The body vanished, absorbed by the lake—where face down it slept, between the city and the wood, dreaming of an an artist in a bathtub, an American woman who came to photograph white Angora rabbits.
Our Trip to the Northeast
November 4, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
Last Thursday the Green Lantern went off to the Northeast. We landed in Boston in order to do a reading at Whitehause Family Records in Jamaica Plain on Friday night.
Nate ended up playing acoustic in the beginning of the evening. I read a little something from the Gazette, Chris played a set, as did Luke and then Devin King read the response he’d written about the Gazette; the same one he read at the Whistler a few months ago. Some of the photos are kind of dark, but hopefully you’ll get a sense for the ambiance of the place. There seem to be a bunch of folks who live there; the house itself is large and leggy with numerous door to other rooms which, from the glimpses supplied, seem to boast their own largess. The people there were really nice, though we spent the most time with Kate and Brian. Otherwise, housemates appeared to enter the front door, come in the living room, spend some time watching out show, and then leave quietly–in what direction, I’ve no idea.
I really liked thinking about how the Northeastern architecture might influence alternative exhibit/art spaces–namely because they seem so undeniably domestic. Even the apartments I happened upon during my trip felt more like mini houses inside of larger houses. In any case. Whitehouse Family Records was decorated with years and years of detritus, art project and collective inspiration. There were Jimi Hendrix flags in the windows, paintings dedicated to the Beatles. There was a chandelier decorated with drift wood and horns and glass beads. An orchestral noise-machine composed of similar materials stood in the corner. We sat on a carpet in the living room, lights dimmed, and listened. It was great.
As all this was taking place, I was also installing a show in Providence, at AS220. That meant that every day, Devin and I drove out to Rhode Island to install the show, “Isolated Fictions.” “Isolated Fictions” is a group show featuring the work of Deb Sokolow, Jason Dunda and, in this manifestation, Rebecca Grady. As well, of course, as the Gazette. Neal Walsh was of great help–he had just opened up a small room in the AS22o’s project space; that room is to be dedicated to print projects. Thus it was a good match. In addition to helping us with the installation process, he also brought us to the Atheneum Member’s Library in Providence, where we got to see an original copy of the Gazette.
This library is awesome and feels totally haunted in that way that old places filled with old books and old wood feel haunted. The library was allegedly built in 1828, at the same time that the state built its first prison. The library was built with the intention to educated new immigrants who came to the region for work. It was believed that if the state provided the illusion of power (via education) the emerging lower/working class would not revolt. In the event that they did revolt, Rhode Island also built a prison.
Of additional note is the card catalogue: at a certain point in the 1900’s, a woman went through the library by hand, copying down library cards for all of the books, by hand. In that elegant, spidery script of our forefathers. Her index cards are still prevalent.
This is Providence at Night: On the Night of the Opening
The Main AS220 Space:
Our Show at the Project Space:
The newest, hottest thing in cliterature and literary erotica
October 26, 2009
OMNIA VANITAS
the newest hottest thing in cliterature and literary erotica is now available.
This edition’s theme: The Invisible Corset. Featuring works by Catherine Borders, Marissa Ayala, Meg Nafziger, Lily Robert-Foley, kristen cerda, Jane Agnes Quinn, Scott Hess, Chandra Smith, Rebecca Serle, Caroline Picard, Katherin Cox, Michael Sidman, SarahS, Circadies, Matthew Dexter, Brian Burton and Ryan Block. Compiled, edited and fabricated by Catherine Borders and Marissa Ayala.
Omnia Vanitas is available for purchase on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Corset-Omnia-Vanitas-Review/dp/B002T9TQ0K/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256374260&sr=8-8
Or visit the new, astoundingly beautiful website (designed by Isaiah Dufort): http://www.omniavanitasreview.com/
Omnia Vanitas is also accepting submissions for forthcoming editions.
Contact the Omnia Vanitas editing team at: Omnia.Vanitas.Review@gmail.com
The North Georgia Gazette Release: 09/01 & 09/03
August 24, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
Just because we don’t have a location doesn’t mean we’re giving up! (In fact we’re releasing a record number of books this fall. Seven. That’s right. We’re putting out seven super fantastic books and if you want to see what’s coming up, you can go here.) But more to the point:
The Green Lantern Press is proud to announce the release of THE NORTH GEORGIA GAZETTE at The Whistler on Tuesday September 1st 2009 at 8pm. And, on Thursday September 3rd at 6pm at 57th Street Books.
The Whistler: located at: 2421 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60647-2627 (773) 227-3530
Arctic Explorer John Huston will give a 30 minute presentation about his latest (unassisted) expedition through the North West Passage followed by readings from the Gazette by poet/transcriber Lily Robert-Foley and resident performer Basia Kapolka. After that, Devin King and Michael Thibault will collaborate on a reading/musical performance responding to the Gazette. “Home-made electrical musician” Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer and bassist/clarinet player Jason Stein will close the evening with an original music performance. This event is Free. Books will be available for purchase at a discount. (See prices/publication description below).
At 57th Street Books is located down in Hyde Park at: 1301 E 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637-1724 (773) 684-1300. On Thursday September 3rd at 6pm there will be a mellower evening where the audience is encouraged to ask any and all questions. Here again, Lily Robert-Foley will read alongside Caroline Picard with a Q&A to follow. This event is free.
The North Georgia Gazette is an original newspaper from 1821 published by a fleet of sailors trapped in the Arctic for eight months of darkness. In order to ward off scurvy, their Captain Parry insisted they put on plays for one another and keep a newspaper featuring only happy news. Re-released by The Green Lantern Press, our new edition features excerpts from the Captain’s Journal, the newspaper in its entire, an essay by contemporary Arctic explorer John Huston, end notes by transcriber/poet Lily Robert-Foley and original artwork by Daniel Anhorn, Jason Dunda, Rebecca Grady, and Deb Sokolow. This book was printed in an edition of 250 with original silk screen covers, a limited edition 7″ record by Nick Butcher and is available for $30. Advance copies for sale now. Books will be available at both venues for a discounted price of $25.
BIOS & Links:
http://www.forwardexpeditions.com/ (john huston)
http://www.katharinemulherin.com/dynamic/artist.asp?ArtistID=27&Count=0 (jason dunda)
http://danielanhorn.com/home.html (daniel anhorn)
http://debsokolow.com/home.html (deb sokolow)
http://www.rubaccaquon.com/ (rebecca grady)
http://www.programmablepress.com/jan08/nickbutcher.html (nick butcher)
Lily Robert-Foley writes plays, teaches piano and makes radical linguistic translation devices known as machines. Her work has and will have appeared in bathhouse, digital artifact, viviparous blenny and Omni a Vanitas. She is also the author of 12 Graphemachines, forthcoming as part of Xeroxial Edition’s Xerolage series.
Basia Kapolka is an actor, writer and director living in Chicago. Most recently she wrote and directed Jinx, a play based on the novel by Theophile Gautier at Act One Studios. She is also the Green Lantern’s resident actor.
A philologist with a heart of gold, Devin King writes about pop music for The Boston Phoenix, teaches poetry to young adults, and probably listens to too many showtunes and too much bubblegum pop. His serial-opera Dancing Young Men From HIgh Windows can be seen bouncing monthly from gallery to gallery in Chicago and his long poem, CLOPS, will be out from the Green Lantern Press in fall 2009.
Michael Thibault is a time-based artist, painter and curator. A solo show of his video work entitled Love’s Secret Domain will be shown in New York in the spring of 2010. Michael will debut his new, yet-to-be-named gallery space in Chicago’s Humbolt Park in the fall of 2009. He is also a member of the bands Silk Stalkings, Pleasure Principle, and The Paradise Spell.
THE GAZETTE IS GOING ON TOUR!
A travelling exhibition featuring a handful of artist included in the publication are scheduled to exhibit at AS220 in Providence Rhode Island, this Oct/Nov & at fluxSPACE in Philadephia this February. Additional information available.
Pursuing the Shaman: Joseph Beuys
August 22, 2009
posted & written by Caroline Picard
Right now I’m working on something about Joseph Beuys. You can see what you think….
1. The Boy.
The Nazi crashed his plane—he wasn’t really a Nazi he only fought for the Nazis—he was only German.
.
He’d been a Hitler Youth, he marched in shiny boots up down up down up down in unison with others, their boots clattered in unison against the cobblestone streets.
.
Mornings the boys woke early and gathered in the square. They gathered in the square and left in legions for the woods: dogs baying at their heels, the sound of a hunting horn, the morning mist a veil exuming from the ground. The boys went into the woods and under an old man’s command they found a stag (the dogs bayed) and they shot the stag (the dogs bayed) a shot rang out and then another (the dogs) wounded, the stag stood still (stalk) staring at the boys. The dogs bayed, pulling against the hands that held them, tethered as they were to taught leather straps. The dogs bayed and the boys laughed in muddy leather boots and the boys lined up as any firing squad.
.
Shots ran out a thunderclap and they broke the morning and they broke the stag and they let go the dogs who broke through the thicket. The dogs ran up to the stag, a feeble trembling body. Death was upon the stag and the dogs raced up and the dogs tore into its neck and the dogs bared their teeth and the dogs bit and snapped, strings of spit snapping off their lips, the dogs bore down on the dying stag until the old man called them off the old man on his horse called them off (the old man called his horse Bucephalus) the old man called off the dogs and the boys laughed and the boys strung up the deer, the deer with a weak and fetid dying heart—it beat now, soft as an oyster—and the boys carried the stag on a stick they felled from a nearby tree, fetlocks with leather chords and they trotted through the Black Forest singing the songs of their country, their cheeks flush with the morning, they laughed (they were quite proud) and gathred once more in the town square.
.
Boys lined up before the stag and the old man took their photo in front of the stag. The sound of the camera loud like the clap of a gun.
.
Morning still early, the boys gathered in the square once more. They lay the stag, its eyes rolled back, on the ground and the dogs snuffed its musty coat and the horse (it had a small head, the horse) snuffed the stag and the boys bathed themselves in the town square. They shared a bar of soap. They lined up at the fountain, they washed their hands, they washed their necks, they washed their faces, they didn’t wear shirts, they smiled wide white teeth, the boys were happy the boys were happy the boys were happy.
The old man gave each boy a shot of Jagermister and they sang more songs and their mothers polished their boots and the boys put on their boots and the boys went to school wearing their boots and the boys went to school with dark mouths having drunk the blood of a stag and they went to school and at lunchtime they would march again in unison over cobblestone streets in unison, the blood of the stag still tasting their mouths, as in the aftertaste of mercury.
.
One of the boys grew up to be a pilot first and then a shaman.
2. The Pilot.
The Nazi crashed his plane. He flew a plane. He flew a bomber. He flew a bomber in World War II and he crashed a plane in Siberia. After the crash they told him he wasn’t German at all
afterall.
.
He crashed a Nazi plane in Siberia and the Tartars found him. The plane was on fire. Smoke diffused the sky. The plane was on fire. Metal twisted and fetid, the machine groaned like a dying animal. The pilot was inside the dying animal. His heart beat inside the dying animal and his skin felt loose and wet and melted he tasted salt and the machine around him was very hot and death was upon him and he recalled the bay of a dog. The plane was on fire and the pilot lost consciousness.
.
His consciousness slipped out him like a shadow and strayed into the night to wander his consciousness wandered through Siberia disembodied. It staggered, absorbing the sound of a night sky, it trembled with comprehension beneath the music of the spheres, shaking like a survivor, it shook the thought of its hands, weak like a ghost it remembered old songs, it was absorbed by the night it shed its incidental traumas. It wanted to stay lost on the Siberian steepe but its thought ran into a Tartar beating a drum in a tent. His consciousness ran into the drum and the Tartar caught it and put it in a jar. The Tartar called the other Tartars and marvelled at the wisp of a spirit inside and the looked to the horizon and saw smoke on the horizon.
.
The plane was on fire and until the Tartars came the pilot burned inside his little machine abandoned by his consciousness. The Tartars came on horses. The Tartars came on camels stolen from Ghengis Khan.
.
The Tartars came on an elephant stolen from Alexander the Great. The Tartars came riding horses they stole from Marco Polo. They came to see the smoke. The came to save the body. They came to save the body. They wrested his body from the seething wreck—his skin smelled, the flesh round his eyes fat and ballooning, he had no hair, his hands mangled gloms, puss burst from his lips he could not speak his tongue burnt and badly swollen, tendons shone through parts of his skin, he lost his toes like matchsticks—they rescued the pilot. They lay him on a stretcher and carried him between two horses, the horses walked out of psynch and slow across the snow, breathing huffs of steam as they moved away from the wreck. The stars grew brighter as they moved farther from the sky. The body hung between a pair of horses above the ground.
.
They took him to a felt tent they took him to a cave. In the cave someone opened the jar. They lifted the jar to the pilot’s hole of a mouth and the pilot drew his consciousness back inside of a cave—the place where men make meaning. And a Tartar began to beat a drum.
.
They wrapped his body in fat and felt they wrapped his body (very badly burnt) with fat from the back of a pig they wrapped his body (the man was unconscious with pain and blistered) with the fat from a horse the fat from a cow they wrapped his body a tallow rod and the fat soothed the man and eased his pain and he was born again.
.
They went back to the wreck. The snow melted around it like a shadow. The earth underneath looked bruised. The smoke of the wreck was frozen and the man, no longer a Nazi, looked up with tears in his eyes. The tears froze as the smoke and he recalled the sound of the night the sound of the spheres the devastating beauty of transcendance when his conscousness wandered the steepe and mystery revealed itself like a woman like a wife.
.
“You are not German,” the Tartars told him. “You are one of us. Your heart beats with our drum.”
But the man, no longer a Nazi, no longer a pilot, did not join them and the Tartars took his picture before the plane he’d crashed (in the story the man made up) they took his picture with a camera fashioned from felt and fat (the man was never rescued by Tartars at all) they took his picture and the man used the picture as evidence that he’d been missing eight days.
3) The Artist.
The pilot said he crashed his plane. He lied. He is a liar. He crashed a plane and he said he was missing eight days. He needed to lie. He said the Tartars rescued him. He said he was reborn. He said he didn’t have to be a Nazi because the nomads fell in love with him. The nomads wrapped him in fat and felt and he transcended and they transcended and they shared with him the secrets of the universe because they said You Are A Good Man You Are A Good Man You Are A Good Man YouAreAGoodMan Good Man Good Man Good Man. The Nazi returned to the Western world an artist. He had a photograph of him standing in front of a plane with his arms folded (he only went missing a few hours). He said the photograph was taken by Tartars with a camera fashioned from felt and fat (it was taken by his co-pilot. Taken by a LOMO). He came back to the Western World and he called himself a shaman and he began to make myths because he believed they might provide a way to transcend the devastating history of the Western machine: the shot gun the airplane the watch the automobile the steam engine train the metal of pistons and machine oil and steely shiny arete.
.
When the man became an artist he carried the photo of the plane crash in his wallet and went to many dinner parties, they ate at tables in rooms with a wall missing, they ate like dolls in a dollhouse in a ruined city they ate potatoes and shame for supper and the artist told about the Tartars. Under the wet and dewey candlight he beat the table as though it were a drum and he talked about his wandering soul and he wove stories in and out of dinner such that his hosts believed they were eating bacon and pork cutlets and white asparagas, their guest made them happy their guest made them happy and the artist told how he was almost a Tartar and where steak tatar came from and about the healing properties of fat. He fashioned a camera from the tallow of a camera and the felt of a pussy cat’s tail he showed them his camera and he told about the transcendental properties of fat and felt and how these materials could heal any wounds.
Minutes (Reno)
August 7, 2009
posted by caroline picard
- There are tools from the fifth dimension. These tools, glass rods of various lengths, colors and sizes resemble small donuts, little larger than a Sakgewea. The more expensive tools resemble phalic prisms. These tools can be placed in various combinations on the chakras of the body. They are said to regulate the vibrations of the body into a fifth dimension frequency, thereby infusing the body with healing and consciousness. WHERE THE TOOLS CAME FROM: an alien who looked like a man from the fifth dimension entered a church outside of Reno. He was very tall and bald and he had very large hands. He wore a business suit. He had a five o’clock shadow. He carried a briefcase inside of which he carried his tools. The minister, a stout woman in a pastel pants’ suit (she was prone to seeing color fields), begged him to the side and at the end of the sermon. And after further inquiry it was decided that they would go into business together. They opened a factory. They hired illegal immigrants from the casino parking lot and showed the workers how to make the tools. They conducted sermons before and after work and at the end of church on Sundays, the alien/giant/joe shmoe offers demonstrations about the tools and how they work. MOST COMMON QUESTION: What happened to the fourth dimension?
- There is another church outside of Reno. Here another stout woman in another pastel pants suit conducts her sermons. The church is carpeted inside with drop ceilings and the windows are covered in yellow, see-through sheets of plastic. Inside, people sit on plastic folding chairs. At the end of the service, after the final hymn, the pastor disappears with three young children (the palbearers) into a back room. If you sit in the back, you will notice that one by one, people disappear into that room where they stay for up to half an hour. If you were to go inside, they would have you lie on a massage table covered in terri cloth towel. You would see the moon-faced children, sollemn, gazing down at you. You would remark upon the underside of their chins. The one above your head would hold your shoulders. The pastor would run a nail along side different parts of your body while chanting in a language you do not recognize. You would catch sight of blood out of the corner of your eye, though you would feel no pain. This would go on for several minutes and sometimes the pastor would break her chanting and pull the second child aside, to show you the bowl the child carried. “Look, this is your kidney,” she would say, lifting up an organ. “It was diseased do I took it out.” Afterwards the children would wash your body in warm water with more terricloth towels. They would leave you alone to dress yourself, you would re-enter the church, leave a donation and drive home.
Regarding Rabbit, Run
August 5, 2009
posted and written by Caroline Picard
Had I not read A Personal Matter so recently, I think I would have more patience for John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. It’s nicely written, I think, which is to say the writing is full of surprises. One of my favorite passages takes place with Rabbit, the protagonist, driving in the middle of the night (he has just abandoned his family), listening to the radio. A list ensues with songs heard, radio commercials and world news. I liked thinking about the flatness of that paragraph and how each participating noun was granted the same weight–whether a love-pop-song, an advert for bryl cream, or the unknown whereabouts of the dalai lama.
Nevertheless, it’s still about a dude running away from his family. Which is all well and good, except that I just read about those same troubles taking place in Japan and in larger extremes.
Perhaps because Updike also takes place in the post-fifties, pre-hippy era, (circa Dragnet?), where gender roles run rampant, I found the book hard to bear through. I could not tell how complicit Updike was, how sympathetic he was to his main character, who with Carver-esque baggage and social standing, continually returns to the sad hoorah of his better high school years. Of course, Updike pities the man, because of course it’s always sad when high school is boasted as the time of one’s life. Nevertheless, Updike wants Rabbit to be a symbol of the American man of his time. And maybe that’s fair, but it’s certainly out of date. While Updike doesn’t pull back from revealing the uglier parts of Rabbit’s character, he also affords this rhapsodic passages of sexual intercourse in which Rabbit finds some, albeit fleeting, redemption. Such passages appear as offerings from the author to the character in the book, where Updike appears to pity his protagonist and, through language, wants to sooth him.
Obviously I’m conflicted about it. Maybe that’s good. At the same time the Rabbit character just made a royal stink about his mistress not wearing a diaphram.
Minutes (Chicago)
August 5, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
- A very small man sat beside a very small boy at a bus stop. It was bright outside and both squinted against the sun; both ate breakfast also: an egg english muffin that looked to have been made at home. “It’s Ok,” the father said, looking down at his nine year-old. “We’re just small people.” Something about the way this was said. I’m not sure I understand it, for the boy seemed not to be listening, his eyes focused on the patch of cement in front of the bench, his mouth chewing the sandwich; he nevertheless sat up straighter and an almost imperceptable flush of pride stole across his fine features. He stopped chewing and gazed long at his own hands.
- A woman rested on another woman in the park. A third lay perpendicular as a witness. The first was chatty, her voice brassy, she punched through her words like one might kick through gravel. “I know I shouldn’t have told her about Pete, but really. I’m a tattle tale. I can’t keep that in.”
- At a table a young man spoke of endangered fruit. He said he wanted to save them. He was petitioning the city, he said, to start a farm in an abandoned lot. He asked you to sign the petition.
