PhillySound: new poetry

Andrew Lundwall's Scantily Clad Press has just published Jenn's new e-chap, entitled Maps & Legends: Here's a taste:

There is a dark path through the dark
woods & it leads to a dark
house lit only by a fireplace
& there lives the crone. Go inside & she will
offer you her secrets.
She will tell you
three things & the third thing is: the owls
are not what they seem. The second thing
is: dragons don't dance & they don't smoke
cigars. The first thing is: when you are dead,
you may have all the ponies you want.

Read the whole book here!

- Frank Sherlock

After almost a year of collective punishment that prevented Gaza's citizens access to work, food, fuel and medicine, Israel's recent offensive in the Palestinian territory has given at least one industry a big boost.

Check it out.


- Frank Sherlock

Ish Klein's AMAZING first book is NOW AVAILABLE! Click HERE for details!






(posted by CAConrad)

HBO had exclusive rights to film the events of Obama's inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial, and, LO AND BEHOLD, filmed everything EXCEPT the remarks and prayer by openly gay Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson: NO video and NO audio was recorded by HBO!!

LUCKILY someone in the crowd filmed Robinson's remarks and sent them to Amy Goodman, who aired the entire footage on DEMOCRACY NOW, using the tag, "...Robinson Silenced on HBO...."

Obama's inaugural committee apologized, stating that they had INTENDED for Robinson's remarks and prayer to be filmed with the rest of the events, and that they "regretted the error." Hmmm, error?

Click HERE to read the transcript from DEMOCRACY NOW, and/or view the footage.

Click HERE to COMPLAIN to HBO and DEMAND ANSWERS! Was is it the cameraman's doing? Was this a decision from HBO headquarters? WHO made this decision? WHO said, "LET'S NOT FILM THIS QUEER, BUT EVERYONE ELSE INSTEAD!" Because SOMEONE said it!

It IS clear however (at least it seems clear) that Obama's people DID MEAN for the Bishop's remarks and prayer to be filmed and aired on HBO.
CAConrad

PoemTalk that I did with Kristen Gallagher, Jessica Lowenthal and Al Filreis on Kathleen Fraser's poem "The Cars" is HERE. The prose poem itself is also included at this link.






I'll be reading at the SAM BARROW & FRIENDS event Monday, should be LOTS OF FUN AND HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE, details HERE. It will be my first reading from my book JUST ARRIVED FROM THE PRINTER, THE BOOK OF FRANK.

CAConrad

44's great-great-great grandfather braved the journey to Ellis Island from Moneygall, Ireland back in 1850. Today the small village in County Offaly has a school, a post office, a church, five shops, a police station and two pubs.

A celebratory tune has spread across Ireland claiming that the White House now is green. Hear & see "There's No one as Irish as Barack Obama" by the Corrigan Brothers.


- Frank Sherlock

Today (January 15) is the official release date of OVER HERE, from Factory School's Heretical Texts Series.

From the FS catalog:

OVER HERE is a collection of works written for farewell parties in the era of endings. These poems are culled from notebooks kept during imaginary road trips across the late empire, serving as toasts to new futures. Come inside for a strange celebration, and watch for sparks.

It's now available from SPD Books. Check it out here.

Thanks,

Frank

Moles Not Molar & Nexus RADIO present

RADIO MOLES - Transmissions: Signal to Noise Ratio
1650 AM on the radio dial!

This Sunday, January 18th 2009
2pm -5pm (live performances will begin promptly at 2:30 pm)

at NEXUS GALLERY
located in the Crane Arts Building
1400 N. American St.

A full afternoon program of radio plays, poems, sound art,
speeches, songs, sonic experiments, acoustic beating, sawhorse-
lassoing, shortwave irdials, and more.

Including Live Performances by:

JANET NEIGH, JAMIE TOWNSEND, GREGORY LAYNOR, KIM GEK LIN SHORT,
TIMOTHY LEONIDO, and PATRICK LUCY.

And Transmissional Works By:
AMAR RAVVA, AMINA CAIN, AMANDA DAVIDSON, BEN HOLTZMAN, JASON
CANDLER, BENEATH THE LAKE, JUDITH JORDAN, MIRANDA MELLIS,
CHRIS NAGLER, KATE BROWN, KATE DOLLENMAYER, JOSHUA GOLDMAN,
JON RUTZMOSER, TRISTAN DAHN, THE NOTHING FACTORY, HEIDI
CUNNINGHAM, NICHOLAS OTT, & MISSOULA OBLONGATA.

For more info on Nexus Radio and a full schedule of events, go
to www.nexusphiladelphia.org

For more info on Moles Not Molar, go to www.molesnotmolar.com

-- posted by R Eckes

...than to celebrate the latest achievements of our incredible friends!

The AMAZING new batch of Factory School books:


Over Here, by Frank Sherlock (104 pages)

RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY, by kathryn l. pringle (80 pages)

Slosh Models, by Brett Evans (88 pages)

Hegemonic Love Potion, by Jules Boykoff (104 pages)

Censory Impulse, by Erica Kaufman (94 pages)

Pub Date: Jan 15, 2009

All books $15 paperback, $30 hardcover -- available Jan 15, 2009 through Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org).

VOLUME DISCOUNT: Get a complete paperback set of HT Vol. 4 for $50 (33.3% discount). Order direct from Factory School using PayPal. To order by check, please contact the editors. Factory School's discounted price includes shipping to the continental USA. Individuals only.

For more on the HT series, visit FACTORY SCHOOL

For general info, please write to editors at bmarsh@factoryschool.org


On the birthday of Gladys and Vernon Presley's surviving twin son Elvis, middle name Aaron after his brother Aaron who died at birth. 8 of January, 8 to signify Saturn, ruling over Capricorn, now in the Sun ascending, over Graceland, Philadelphia, over the world. MUCH LOVE,
CAConrad

"When I first heard Elvis' voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss...Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail." --Bob Dylan

This Wednesday, Jan. 7th at 7pm
at Brickbat Books, 709 S. 4th St:

Mickey Hess
Tao Lin
Chad Willenborg

- posted by R. Eckes

Dear Melissa Etheridge, it seemed like good news that you had met with Pastor Rick Warren to confront him on his homophobic disinformation campaign. It makes sense that many thoughtful, open-minded people are thinking that your meeting with Warren made for a good, productive meeting of the minds. Many of these same people worked VERY HARD to get Mr. Obama elected, so the idea of him CHOOSING an openly homophobic anti-Semite like Warren to give "the blessing" at his inauguration to set the spiritual tone of his presidency is a very difficult thing to wrap our minds around. Our feeling of betrayal is appropriate.

To be honest Melissa I have no idea how much experience you have with Fundamentalist Christians, but they're called FUNDAMENTALIST for a reason. When you say you are interested in peace I don't doubt you for a minute. But when you say we should volunteer to be more visible it's nothing but weird to me. Your direct quote is, "Maybe if they get to know us, they won't fear us." But we queers don't grow on trees on a faraway island. Fundamentalist Christians deal with us all the time because we live in their towns. They gave birth to us, we are in their families, and we don't need to visit because we're already there. They know us and we know them, quite well.

From my own experience and understanding with Fundamentalist Christian relatives, there are some who will not allow me to use their towels or toilets because I'm queer. You wouldn't be allowed to either, no matter how many CDs you've sold. Never mind gay marriage, you can't take a shit! And these are people who LOVED me dearly when I was a boy. I FELT their love, and remember it well. And I also remember how painful it was to let them know I was queer, having grown up hearing their sadistic vitriol. My options were to hide or come out. Hiding is an option only for the true masochist, and I am not one. A relative said to me, "You were such a handsome boy, we had such hope for you." In an instant I became someone who was now ugly and without hope.

If I die tomorrow some members of my family will say, "We know where he's headed!" These are extremely unreasonable and uncompromising people, and their bible backs them up one hundred percent. I've read these passages, I've had them read to me. Queers are an abomination, period. We can serve all the soup in the world to all the homeless of the world but we're still going to Hell. The bible says so, period. And Rick Warren can say Jews and queers are going to Hell as gently as he can, but he still says it, and in doing so he makes Jews and queers subhuman animals not worthy of God's love. We are refuse, and THAT is the very kind of philosophy which encouraged Aaron McKinney to torture and murder Matthew Shepard. THAT is the very philosophy which permitted Roland Button to run over Erika Keels four times with his car, and the very philosophy that made her so invisible and inhuman that Philadelphia police wrote her death down as an accident, which remains classified an accident to this day. Despite the medical examiner's report, despite witnesses, despite petitions and marching and demonstrating on behalf of this 20-year old African American transwoman, her murderer has never stood trial, see this: http://www.petitiononline.com/ErikaK/

My boyfriend Earth was murdered in Tennessee. His twin brother who still lives in Philadelphia told me his hands were tied behind his back, he was dowsed with gasoline and set on fire. Over and over I asked, "HOW could they do this!!!!? HOW could they do this!!!!?" But we all know how, we know exactly how. Whoever murdered him was able to find the necessary apathy from a legacy of hate, a legacy of PERMISSION, handed down from church to church, quoting verse to sanction and spur their actions.

In Adolf Hitler's Germany the clergy who used the pulpit to spread hatred of Jews and Homosexuals were doing so to ease the troubled conscience, to act as a link to the voice of God to ORDAIN The Holocaust. Ask yourself how guilty are these men who used their positions of respect and their aura of holiness to push their trusting congregations to commit such atrocities?

Rick Warren is the author of one of the best-selling hardcover books in publishing history. And this is a country where he should be allowed to express himself freely, but so should we be allowed to counter it, to let the voice of reason break through. Millions of people trust and absorb Warren's message that Jews will burn in Hell, and that queers are not FIT to be treated the same as decent heterosexual Christians. Melissa why do you ask US to volunteer in his church? Why not ask these Fundamentalist Christians to volunteer at gay community centers and the queer suicide hotlines? Instead of asking US to show how worthy we are, how about they be asked to prove their worthiness for a change? It is WRONG to grovel up to them for acceptance, for these are the people who pushed US away in the first place, remember? The compromises they demand of us are too expensive and would eat us alive.

We need to be LOUD and be LOUD NOW, not to get through to the people who have shunned us and discarded us, but for the young queer people growing up in these repressive, dangerous families. We need to prevent yet more suicides. And it would be nice to prevent gay bashing and murders, but that's a whole long battle which involves centuries of permission to undo. Did you see the movie Borat? The people being interviewed in the film were not actors. There's a man at a rodeo scene who says without hesitation into the camera that "we're working on" being able to hang queers here like they do in Borat's country. The man openly admires hanging queers elsewhere in the world. Some days THE ONLY THING keeping these bloodthirsty people in check in America is their fear of prison and the electric chair, and some days that's all we queers have between our lives and the grave.

In "Homosexuality and Marxism," the great American poet Jack Spicer wrote:

       Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is a fight against the
capitalist bosses who do not want us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.
       Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love could ruin the
universe if we let it.

Thank you Jack, for that! This ruin to me is transformative, is the Phoenix, and feels nothing less than essential for love to DEMAND its increase. Melissa please don't ask us to prove that we're good people, because if we have to prove it, then how good are the people asking us to prove it? And frankly I'm VERY GLAD that Barak Obama won and not John McCain and Sarah Palin, but at the same time Obama is LUCKY I didn't know he would CHOOSE Rick Warren's blessing BEFORE election day. You'll see me at the inauguration, I'll be the one with the sign that says, "YOU'RE LUCKY I CAN'T TAKE MY VOTE BACK!"

For all those who have suffered and continue to suffer, we must remember Dr. Martin Luther King's words, "The time is always right to do what is right."

Most sincerely,
poet CAConrad

By Nikita Stewart

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

A group of atheists, led by a California man known for challenging the use of the words "under God" in recitals of the Pledge of Allegiance at public schools, filed a lawsuit yesterday to bar prayer and references to God at the swearing-in of President-elect Barack Obama.

Michael A. Newdow, 17 other individuals and 10 groups representing atheists sued Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., several officials in charge of inaugural festivities, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery and megachurch pastor Rick Warren. They filed the complaint in U.S. District Court.

Newdow failed in similar lawsuits to remove prayer from President Bush's swearing-in ceremonies in 2001 and 2005.

Roberts will administer the oath of office to Obama at the Jan. 20 ceremony. Warren and Lowery are scheduled to deliver the invocation and benediction, respectively.

Newdow and others also argue that the phrase "so help me God," used consistently in inaugural oaths since the swearing-in of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, should be stricken, saying it is not part of the oath as specified in the Constitution.

Bob Ritter, staff attorney for the American Humanist Association and counsel for the suit, said in an interview that the group could win "as long as the judges uphold the Constitution."

"We think the law is on our side," he said.

Ritter said the lawsuit targets the oath, the invocation and the benediction.

According to the lawsuit, the opening and ending prayers "are completely exclusionary, showing absolute disrespect to Plaintiffs and others of similar religious views, who explicitly reject the purely religious claims that will be endorsed, i.e., (a) there exists a God, and (b) the United States government should pay homage to that God."

full article here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/30/AR2008123002858_pf.html

//jenn mcc