PhillySound: new poetry

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is an intimate look at an unlikely team of young activists and old lefties who come together to battle the U.S. government following environmental activist Judi Bari's arrest on terrorism charges in 1990. Filmmaker Bernadine Mellis, the daughter of Bari’s attorney, Dennis Cunningham, documents her morally driven, very tired dad, while offering us access into the life of the extraordinary Judi Bari, and a piece of U.S. history that is increasingly resonant.

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is the first film to be executive produced by CHICKEN & EGG PICTURES. Founded in 2005 by Julia Parker Benello, Judith Helfand and Wendy Ettinger, it is a unique funding/Executive Producing venture dedicated to supporting emerging and veteran women filmmakers.

Screening and Q&A with filmmaker
Wednesday August 16, 7:00 pm
International House
3701 Chestnut Street
$10 general / $8 students

Visit Bernadine Mellis's website: RED BIRD FILMS

posted by CAConrad

listenlight
(posted by CAConrad)

at the Highwire Gallery, 1315 Cherry St. 4th Floor, 7 PM
to benefit Project H.O.M.E.



Visit the Website

Poetry: CA Conrad, Will Esposito, Adam Fieled, Frank Sherlock, Jessica Lee White

Fiction: Mike Land, Christian Tebordo

Movie: Ish Klein, Bob Judge

Photography: Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum

Installation: Steven & Billy Blaise Dufala

Music: Bad News Bats, Bitter Sweetheart, Drake, Eddy Walsh

Dear Friends---
Hope to see you there.

--Divya

On Saturday, july 29th, 8pm
the Chapterhouse Cafe and Gallery will host chapter and verse: 2
readings and open mic.
this session will feature:

>>canadian poet, sarah dowling

>>>>local fiction writer, mary hoeffel

>>>>>>new york poet, laura jaramillo

>>>>>>>>local poet and proprietor of Molly's Cafe and Bookstore, molly russakoff

an open mic will open for and follow the featured readings.
sign-ups will begin at 7pm at the Chapterhouse, 620 s. 9th s

www.the-stylus.blogspot.com

How does one map a city's voice? How does one map its secrets?


you start with a few boxes and the spirit of collaboration.


look out for the boxes in YOUR neighbourhood.

1A - Moore College (20th & Ben Franklin Parkway)
1B - Whole Foods (2001 Pennsylvania Ave)
1C - Free Library of Philadelphia (1901 Vine)
2A - 3rd St. Gallery on 2nd St. (58 N. 2nd St)
2B - Empty Lot (3rd and Arch)
2C - Chinatown (1011 Cherry)
3A - Cafe (Rittenhouse Square - TBD)
3B - The Forum (22nd and Market - SE corner of the intersection)
3C - 339 Gallery (339 S 21st St. - Currently on the SW Corner of the intersection)
4A - Lovash Indian Restaurant (between 2nd and 3rd on South)
4B - Pine and Camac (1300 Block of Pine)
4C - Dock and Walnut (Next to the Ritz 5)

www.confess2.us

-Div

from Etel Adnan's To Keep a Diary in a Time of War

To rise early, to hurry down to the driveway, to look for the paper, take it out from its yellow bag, read on the front-page WAR, to notice that WAR takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that’s it, to know that they dared, that they jumped the line, to read that Baghdad is being bombed, to envision a rain of fire, to hear the noise, to be heart-broken, to stare at the trees, to go up slowly while reading, to come back to the front-page, read WAR again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through the windows, to suffer from the day’s beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it’s useless to think, to pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, to take notice of people’s indifference towards each other.

To have lunch. To ask for some beer. To give one’s order. To drink, eat, and pay. To leave. To reach home. To find the key. To enter. To wait. To think about the war. To glance at the watch. To put on the news. To listen to the poison distilled by the military correspondents. To get a headache. To eat dry biscuits. To put the radio back on. To hear bombs falling on Baghdad. To listen to ambulances. To go out on the deck. To look at the lengthening shadows on the grass. To count a few dead flies on the pane. To go to the table and look at the mail. To feel discouraged. To drink some water. To not understand the wind. To wonder if the human race is not in chaos. To wish to blow up the planet. To admire those who are marching against the war.

To hear a war from far-away. For others; to bomb, eliminate a country, blow-up a civilization, destroy the living. To exit from one idea, to enter another. To go. To cross the Golden-Gate. To enter San Francisco. To stop at the light. To enjoy the luminosity of the green. To be on Market Street. To see too many policemen. To be told to keep going. To see young men being arrested at the end of the march. To measure tension in the air. To seek Valencia. To go all the way to Connecticut and park the car. To enter through the gate of CCAC. To sit in a room which is dark. To listen to a poet, then to another, speak about a time gone.

To stop at the gas-station and fill up the tank. To go uphill, peek at Mount Tamalpais. To take a rest, breathe, contemplate. To find a path and walk on wet grounds. To enjoy the enormous variety of the shades of green on the mountain. To raise one’s eyes to the sky and bring them back on the horizon. To compare the different greys of the sky. To try to speak to the clouds. To say yes, it’s impossible. To linger on the mystery of communication, to bemoan its absence. To say it’s okay, then not to believe oneself. To think of the morning news, to be horrified. To despise. To hate. To empty one’s head of overflowing e motions. To regret that evil exists. To blame oneself for the existence of evil. To want to forget about it and not be capable of doing so. To wrap oneself with death.

- posted by Frank Sherlock

If you're planning to come out to the ICA on WED night please try to get there by or at 7 pm, as the storytelling part of the evening will be first up. Nicole McEwan and I will both be telling stories.

Also, if you're coming, please go to this link below and simply print out the page about the program from the PhillyFunGuide and bring it to the ICA for half-off admission. Here is the link:

http://www.phillyfunguide.com/event.php?id=6034

--TD

From the CITY PAPER'S A-LIST

Tales From the 215: Stories, Slides and Serenades

Wed., July 19, 7pm. Free with museum admission ($3-$6). Institute of
Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.5911. www.icaphila.org.

It's true. Sometimes you forget to look around and enjoy the urban decay of the city you live in. Lucky for us Zoe Strauss has been documenting the forgotten and often crumbling beauty of Philadelphia for the past five years, while working hard on her 10-year "Philadelphia Public Art Project," which won her a place in the Whitney Biennial as well as exhibition space on the ICA's ramp. Strauss plans to show a piece of the project in the form of a slide show entitled "Philadelphia Freedom" at the fourth annual summer Whenever Wednesday at the ICA. Other Whenever Wednesday events follow Strauss' cue and seemingly aim to make you proud of living in the great and gritty Philly. Local art-worlder Shelley Spector regales you with tales of real-life adventures in a program called "Philadelphia Stories 1," while the Mummers make a live appearance in an animated opera called The Loathly Lady. (Annette Monnier)

"The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."--Dante

The Philadelphia poet Ashraf Osam is sending around the Save the Lebanese Civilians Petition. Please take the time to read the petition, and consider signing it.

Ashraf can be found on his blog ARCH MEMORY

All of Ashraf's family is in Lebanon, and as you can imagine, he writes to me, "I am literally sick with worry, anger, frustration and helplessness. And what angers me even more is the obliviousness of the general public and the skewed coverage of the media here. I don't watch US media anymore in times like these; it is deeply upsetting. It becomes such that death is justified by polls of the general detached public on CNN and the like! I wrote on my blog yesterday, 'When did the right to kill become a matter of polls?'"

We need to spread the word where our media fails us! The mainstream media, it's clear, is designed to fail us at this dark time in our history, to gently pressure our interest in celebrity babies, and other bullshit!

Thanks Ashraf for letting everyone know about the petiton and wishing the best outcome for you and your family!
In solidarity,
CAConrad

Tales from the 215: Stories, Slides and Serenades
Whenever Wednesday; 7pm · FREE with admission

"Philadelphia Freedom" celebrates summer in the city with an outdoor evening on the terrace of art, stories, slides and serenades at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The program includes:


Philadelphia Stories 1

Local raconteurs Shelley Spector (artist, gallerist, teacher and curator), Kenneth Finkel (WHYY's Executive Director of Arts and Culture Service), Nicole McEwan (writer), Art Casciato (Director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, University of Pennsylvania) and host Thomas Devaney (poet and Penn Senior Writing Fellow) will tell their own stories—stories of the underdog, the proud, the loyal, the real and gritty, as we celebrate the humor, heart, and the hard-core contradictions that make Philadelphia such a great and heartbreaking city. Our five storytellers will each have eight to ten minutes to tell their tales.


Philadelphia Freedom

Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss (b. 1970, Philadelphia) whose images are currently on view in ICA's Ramp in her first solo museum exhibition, presents her slideshow "Philadelphia Freedom." Strauss, a self-taught photographer, has been described as the chronicler of Philadelphia's mean streets and the town's own Robert Frank. For the past five years Strauss has been committed to a 10-year project she calls the Philadelphia Public Art Project (PAP), a photo archive that will document the people and neighborhoods of her native city creating photographs that find beauty in the forgotten and overlooked.


The Loathly Lady

Dr. Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania will present her pilot film of The Loathly Lady, the first animated opera, with score by Paul Richards, visuals by ICA-featured artist John Kindness, animation development by University of Pennsylvania's Joshua Mosley, and performances by early-music virtuosos.


STRUT!

>From the folks who brought you the Declaration of Independence—hailed as "the feel-good celebration of America we need"—STRUT! (runtime: 68 minutes) spotlights the world of the Philadelphia Mummers and their annual parade. Shot with no script and a point of view that shifts easily from moment to moment, the colorful, ebullient tale is told through revealing interviews, new and vintage newsreel footage, dazzling still photos, and glorious music. For more information visit the official movie site.

On view in the galleries through July 30:

• Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne
• Candida Höfer: Architecture of Absence
• Soft Sites
• Ramp Project: Zoe Strauss

Visit us online at www.icaphila.org

Institute of Contemporary Art · University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 · 215.898.5911

TD

Wow! Last night was an amazing event, and one which I had never imagined seeing take place in Philadelphia. I say that only because I've been to Black Mountain, and it feels like another world, and not until last night have I felt connected again to that feeling of the place, which is so foreign to my feeling of Philadelphia as place.

Michael Rumaker read from his new memoir BLACK MOUNTAIN DAYS at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, 709 Walnut Street. Before getting into the readings, I must say, PLEASE, YOU MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST GET YOURSELVES OVER TO THE GALLERY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! It's FILLED with Black Mountain artists' work, from Jonathan Williams, to Robert Motherwell and Elaine de Kooning. What an exciting show it is!

Rumaker is --dare I say?-- Lovely! He's one of those elderly gay men you don't find much in Philadelphia so much as you would in Asheville, or San Francisco. Sweet, not afraid of being EXACTLY who he is. He's queer in that effeminate way that's so rare these days, a fairy, a real live fairy, with fairy poems to top it off!

His stories about Black Mountain fed our eager attentions, the room PACKED with sweating, breathless, quiet people. He told us of the first time he met John Cage at Black Mountain, thinking maybe he was a hired farm hand because of his appearance, that is until he opened his mouth. Rumaker talked about spending hours and hours listening to and talking with John Cage, and said Cage was gentle in that way you always expect him to be. He also told us of experiencing Cage's "3.33" when it first was invented/discovered/what would you say?

Of Charles Olson he mentioned -- as Jonathan Williams has also mentioned -- would work in the fields doing farm work with the other poets, dancers, painters, chopping away at the kudzu vines that even back then covered and destroyed everything in sight. He talked about the serious and joyful business Olson made of teaching poems. In fact every time I hear about Black Mountain I get a tiny bit more of the sense of FREEDOM to create offered up. Not competitive, like most of these creative writing programs tend to be. No one LORDING over you with their unresolved psychological problems. Olson and the others who taught had a way of getting you to experience Life to learn poems. Rumaker talked about learning to dance in the fields with Olson, and it sounded like leaping, twirling, really taking the land the way a deer would in courtship.

One of my favorite stories Rumaker told us was how Buckminster Fuller was trying SO HARD to get his geodesic dome to work, TO STAND, but it kept collapsing. And THIS is the real genius of Black Mountain according to both Rumaker and Jonathan Williams, that it was a place where you were ENCOURAGED to DO WHATEVER YOU NEEDED TO DO and to fail, to fall flat on your face, and to then get back up. You had ABSOLUTE support! And Fuller kept having the damned thing collapse on him. THEN, on the day he finally figured out how to get it up, EVERYONE gave him a standing ovation in the cafeteria.

As much of a utopia it may sound, Black Mountain was also plagued with the KKK and other bigots coming onto the property threatening to burn the school down. Don't forget, this is before the civil rights movement. At the college everyone was equal, but as soon as you left the protection of the college set deep in the woods, every single toilet and drinking fountain was segregated. There was a sense of fear according to Rumaker, that was always in the air, but luckily nothing that had been threatened ever came to pass.

Along with the KKK was the FBI, because this was during the McCarthy era, and many of the folks teaching and learning at Black Mountain were being followed and watched carefully. In fact Rumaker said it's what he first heard about the place as a young man, that Black Mountain College was a hotbed of homosexuals and communists, and he said, "SOUNDS LIKE MY KIND OF PLACE!" What a wonderful old man! Big heart and talent!

Rumaker also read his poem about fairies, which was a beautiful looking book, unlike any book you've ever laid your eyes on, I assure you. Book artist Rutherford Witthus was the creator, a man who has recently moved to Philadelphia. Hope to see more of him, and hope to see more of his unique, beautiful books.

GET TO THE SHOW!
It really would be silly to miss this one!
CAConrad

In conjunction with the DREAMING IN BLACK AND WHITE show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art there is a film program. June 30th sounds like it was amazing, but missed it! SHIT! Those were films by Man Ray, Walker Evans, Joseph Cornell, and others.

BUT, July 14th is:
AVANT-GARDE CIRCLES
Total running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes

Hans Richter, Rhythmus 21, 1921 (4 minutes)

Marcel Duchamp, Anemic Cinema, 1924-26 (7 minutes)

Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1947 (1 hour, 20 minutes)

Hehehe! There's this footnote, "Please note: many of the films were made with handheld cameras and may cause discomfort for those sensitive to motion." Am I an idiot for thinking this is funny? Maybe so, I don't know why it's funny, but it is.

All shows begin at 7pm in the Van Pelt Auditorium and are free with Museum admission, although tickets are required. (Tickets to a free show? They're so anal over there! GEESH!)--CAConrad

Alameda
by Greg Fuchs


Don't even know where you are
Well not exactly
You are in the East Bay
Crisp clean American dream
During suburban existentialism
So perfectly depicted by Bob
Through automobiles & windows
Lawns, streets, cocktails,
& the punctum
Like the Hoover left in the frame
Or your aunt's pearls
I could tell by your paintings
That you would leave your wife
Well at least you married Whitney
And here comes the foreign car
Next to plastic
Garbage cans in the oughts.

-------

From Greg Fuchs's new chapbook Pieces of the Sky, put out by Dusie. When reading the title poem I can hear him reading it, here in Philadelphia, his poem for New Orleans. "The wind, the water / Washed my home, / My people away...."

This chap is literally the size of your palm, a tiny treasure!

Dirge, but brass band style, as he writes, "Come all ye / this is your orange / revolution / be in the streets" inspiring from the brink of tears. MMmmmm. I'd have to pinch you to make sure you were real if you said these poems didn't do it for you. Must I pinch you?

CAConrad

Okay, my mind is officially blown! Mary Kalyna and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art today where we saw the photography collection of Julien Levy, which you can see in the Berman and Stieglitz Gallery across from the museum shop.

Mary and I never left that gallery, which was not our goal, but we were unable to shake the rooms of stunning photography for the other things we wanted to go see.

Julien Levy married Mina Loy's daughter Joella Loy, so I was excited to know Mina Loy would appear.

And MAN OH MAN does she! There is a terrific George Platt Lynes photograph of her I had never seen before, sunlight seems to be coming FROM HER rather than surrounding her! Seriously, YOU look at that photograph and tell me if Loy isn't herself the Source of the Light!

But THEN, but THEN, there's the most astonishing Joseph Cornell BOX of Mina Loy under glass titled, "Imperious Jewelry of the Universe (Lunar Baedecker)" that you won't, can't, forget! Cornell used a Man Ray photograph of Loy to center the collage, it's truly sublime!

There's an eye-popping photograph of George Sand, taken by NADAR.

The photograph I MOST want to ENTER and be INSIDE for a little time though, is the extraordinary "Yosemite" by Alvin Langdon Coburn, taken in 1911. If you've ever been to Yosemite, this photograph, more than almost any other I've ever seen, really encapsulates both the desolation and involuntary meditation of the landscape. Thank you Teddy Roosevelt for keeping Yosemite EXACTLY AS IT IS in that Coburn photograph!

The real treat (unexpected joy!) though, is Frida Kahlo. I've never seen breasts quite so beautiful! There's a letter under glass that she typed in red ink to Levy. In it she tells of the police arresting her after her affair with Trotsky. Tells of her separation from Rivera, and tells of assholes everywhere telling her to not paint such sad paintings, to which she replies fuck off! The letter was written in June of 1940, and ends with her telling Levy to spit on every German he comes across.

Already looking forward to going back. We were there until it was time to be thrown out. There are so many truly astonishing moments in the gallery, just go, you'll see what I mean!

I haven't been this excited about a photography show since Tina Modotti, which by the way I saw in that very same gallery.

CAConrad

JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT THIS! So much going on!

Michael Rumaker is reading from his memoir, Black Mountain Days, and his selected poems, Pizza, at Bridgette Mayer Gallery at 709 Walnut on Sat. July 8th at 7 PM.

They also have a show up (as of July 5) of work by Black Mountain artists, called Greetings from Black Mountain College. This art show includes one of my FAVORITE Jonathan Williams photographs, "Beauty and the Beast," of Joel Oppenheimer and Francine du Plessix Gray.

SPREAD THE WORD!

See you there!
CAConrad