Portland Eclectic Art Comic Opening
A presentation, gallery exhibit, and book signing with Jesse Reklaw, Shannon Wheeler, Graham Annable, Joëlle Jones, Jamie Rich and Carolyn Main in conjunction with the Wordstock literary festival.
Thursday, Nov. 6th, 6-10pm, Fuzzy Glamour Art Gallery, 625 NW Everett St #111.
Damali Ayo spoke to “the realities of what it means to be an activist artist, a feminist anti-racism performance artist” on October 30th, opening the Bitch Magazine Feminism and Pop Culture Series at the Smith Memorial Ballroom. Ayo’s willingness to speak to her observations about race relations started at an early age, as she showed us in a insightful and highly engaging slideshow of her work, starting with the multicultural Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls she brought to her preschool as a child.
Her oeuvre includes panels of paint matched from the flesh tones of various parts of her own body and audio tapes of the paintmixers’ conversations with her, presented at the Seattle Center of Contemporary Art in 2003; name tags that read “Hi, My Race Is…” and were to be filled out as white, black or other at gallery openings (I believe she said the Mark Wolley gallery) through 2001-02; and perhaps most famously, her Rent-a-Negro website where you could allegedly hire a person of color for services such as tolerating your racist relative, now a book as well. Throughout her career, she has aimed to “create a cognitive dissonance in our collective unconsciousness.”
She also is retiring however—it’s not easy doing this sort of work. Some of the examples of hate mail she showed us were truly appalling, and she has suffered from chronic fatigue for years in addition to PTSD from a sexual assault she survived as a young woman. Still, I can’t help but think she’ll be missed.
Check out Back Fence’s theme this time around—it’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Getting Stuffed and Being Stuffed, and yours truly contributed a story about being addicted to mentally recording moments, sort of an extreme take on remembering important things in life, aka writer’s disease as one friend said to me. Though I think mostly the moments I notice are a sort of distraction from the depressing real stuff that might going on. I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy noticing the curtains.
Adrianne Young’s account of a acutely constipated kitten is also pretty amusing.
I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I’ve personally never seen Powell’s close down the Pearl room for a reading before. Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.
I came half an hour early and was lucky to get a spot on which to lean on the front of a bookshelf.
He was here to promote his new book Violence, but as he said he would early on, he talked about far more than the book, bringing in chicken jokes, dinner party conversations, late-Platonic notions of discourse and the inadequacies of hard-core porn to further his cultural critique of our particular historical moment.
What jumped out to me was this persistence of ideology. Zizek proposed that we are engrained with certain attitudes that seem ostensibly moral and high-minded, like all good doctrines should, but actually interfere with practical political solutions to the problem in question. The inability to discuss racism was one example he gave, how PC attitudes make it very difficult to address the latent racism which remains dysconsciously in our society.
I can only say that in my life as a schoolteacher, I have seen that to be true. No teacher would ever say they are prejudiced, right? Yet a lot of the more progressive critique of the education system, such as Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, point up subtle inequities which I have seen in real life, like a principal saying out loud that he had lower expectations for ESL students going to college, or an English teacher calling a counselor in front of an entire Honors English class to question a student’s placement because she had a strong accent.
And then there’s the larger systematic problems, such as why students of color are disproportionately represented in special education programs and underrepresented in honors programs, which has not only to do with the school system but with larger social problems that many communities struggle with and which affect a student’s level of literacy background and focus they bring with them to school every day.
These are all problems which could be solved, imo. The thing is, it would take a brutally honest societal conversation around the legacies of slavery and colonialism and what to do about them going forward.
The last time we saw a conversation like that was in the late 60’s.
I totally ripped off the title of this post from Allison Dubinsky’s email to me, but didn’t think I could do better. I don’t really know much about this event, other than Allison’s description:
The images have been described as “phantasmagoric,” “otherworldly,” and “eerie.” I guess I’d describe them simply as “extremely cool.”
However, I did check out Jim Kaznjian’s website, and his images are very Dali-esque, imo, and also in black and white by the way, which lends a rather more Escher-like quality to them.
I’m also curious to check out Pushdot Studios, now located right off 11th and SE Division—they focus on digital/computer-based art primarily, which sounds intriguing.
This is a manuscript I ran across tonight while digging through old papers from when I was maybe eighteen, the kind of thing you do when you’re packing and don’t want to take anything unused or unnecessary with you into your new life. I liked some of this though. I took a few pics to go with.
The man is dark-haired and round-faced with a square jaw, but I’m not sure. It’s always the same. Nameless, at least to me, with dark lids looking into me, stroking tenderly and lightly my hair. Sitting down below the house stilts, beside the river gully, we’re talking wild, but none of it remains to remember. Only his long eyelids and brown eyes, Russian brown it seemed to me now, eyes full of soft black like broken pencil lead. I’m scared now to think about it, but I don’t think I was scared at the time. This was my mother’s house, remember. I lived there, in those wood-paneled rooms.
One time I sat with a guy in the cab of his truck and he offered to let me steer if I wanted to but I should probably sit in his lap so as to make it easier, but I refused seeing as some natural restraint was telling me to be uncomfortable. This is not to say I didn’t stay up at nights thinking about maybe someday when I grew I might still know him and maybe we could marry seeing as I’d only be ten years younger. That wasn’t much, was it? Mama went out once with a guy nineteen years younger than her. He used to read her love poems by Kabir behind closed doors. I used to read the book, but couldn’t figure out what was so great about it.
I liked novels. Mom also used to buy Pepperidge Farm cookies for this guy. At least novels were stories, and stories you could get lost in. She was trying to fatten him because Scott was young and starving-ass skinny, and still lived with his mother, and washed his hair with detergent and was a haunting failure at being a composer. We didn’t really know if he was a good composer or not because it cost a lot of money to hire an orchestra.
And then there was an altercation between my mother and his brother regarding the money he apparently borrowed to pay our electrical bill, and he lied about having beaten his brother for her, and then one of her paintings got mysteriously slashed, and we always suspected one of them had snuck in and done it. He didn’t come around for a long time after that.
And then cold and cold and lonesome cold and gone and reminder now of trips spent chasing something I couldn’t figure out, and that which I long for is so shifting. Frozen-cold, hard pavement-cold, yes fuck-cold, the witch’s marrow that twines you in and makes you want to swallow. Oh, I’m so tired. Start at the beginning. Sometimes I think I spent my childhood in a darkened room. Through a white-sashed window through six separate panes, I can watch a broad, leafless tree. We live on the edge of a gully. A ravine, really. It’s a hundred bodies high, it’s very high, and the river runs through heavy with melted snow. Sometimes, the room opens and I can walk to the far shore of the river over footbridge, under dangling swooping telephone wires.
I don’t bring any food. It isn’t worth it. I know I’m going back. I know I’m deconstructing an essay of temperance, a lifetime obeying what I don’t understand. I think I’ve sensed that man floating in mother’s dreams, floating in mother’s dreams, spinning mid-air above her broad queen bed. I’m not sure whose man he is. I’ve suspected he really should be mine. His hands are dark and dark-haired and strong-nailed and I’ve wondered what it would be like for him to touch me with these fine long fingers.
My bed is thin. My sheets are flannel and itchy with balls from long use. My bedframe is square planes of pine. It was a bunkbed before they separated my sister’s bed from mine. No one else can really fit in this bed. It’s under the molded ceiling I dream of floating up to soft wings wrapping me, bearing me upwards.
I lie though when I say no one else can fit in my bed. I imagine him. I never fill in the face though. My man is tall, dark and faceless. And I will someday perfect me so that I can be perfectly desirable and there will be no question or anguish. I will have perfect clear skin and wear designer clothes and never say anything that’s wrong. I will have a thong bathing suit that fits snug over my toned hips. No one will be able to resist me, including him. I picture myself at night, outside of me, and watch what I look like breathing and wrapped in a twisted white blanket and hopefully looking so compelling and beautiful. I judge my beauties against my imperfections and decide I’ve got twenty years, surely I could master my faults. Surely I could remedy that stricken look in the mirror, and the habit of looking in the mirror all the time itself. Although then I wouldn’t know what people see when they look at me, whether the guy with the truck sees my blue eyes, my mouth which Mama always says is rosebud. You see, I need the mirror so I can check.
The only way I have any hope of knowing I’ve improved is by looking. Mama looks in the mirror this way too. I’ve seen her. Sometimes I try to imagine what I’ll look like with breasts, breasts like hers, with great cherry-gumdrop nipples and pale veined skin, breasts that seem to droop a little like fruit that’s just overripe. Breasts with stretch marks from doing all that hanging there. Real woman breasts. I can’t imagine how these tiny circles will ever grow.
It’s at night I most feel him spinning there. He lays down besides me in the bed. He does not slide between the covers and come to rest lengthwise next to me; he materializes there. He lays there and so gently runs his finger along my ribcage, sliding his nail along thin nighttime cotton, up the hipbone and down, down the slope to my stomach resting on its side, and he cups the tender mass of my female belly. The cold blue light fills the bathroom window. I lower myself into the sink, he slides his hands down my spine, my eyes are white, my teeth are blue and rotting with fungus, moss growing in the crack in our backs with abandon, he raises me, he lowers me, and all the while fingers are seeping round thighs, thigh bones, I can almost feel his vibrational warmth, I can almost make it real. I can feel the nape of his neck bristling, it’s one on one in one.
The mirror is cracked from side to side and beaded with dew, with steam from bathing, there’s a limelight from the mirror and I wait for the mist to clear so I can see myself. And all this time, we never leave my bed. All this time, the covers rest lightly against the frame and cold of winter, and I never leave my bed.
I interviewed Adam Arnold a couple years ago for a fashion column profile for PDX Magazine right before his color blindness collection and was struck by how complex his understanding of color perception was, of visual perception actually, and how informed his clothing was by these insights. Truly, wearable art. So I can’t wait to hear what story he has to tell now, and he’s only one of a great line-up. Must also mention that Jess Hecox, my darling friend and graphic designeress, had quite a bit to do with the poster…ain’t she grand?
A few weeks ago, I performed in Tiffany Lee Brown’s piece, Play Me, as part of JAW, the playwright festival down at Portland Center Stage (seen in pic to left). Part of what I believe she was playing with was this concept of public versus private space, the new ways we negotiate that in the advent of various technologies such as the cell phone and recording devices. Who hasn’t overhead somebody’s colostectomy account or bad date post mortem while on line for a coffee? And while I totally get that that’s bad manners, I’ve been guilty of that myself, which is why it was easy to play cell phone woman. I just loitered around in the lobby re-running recent phone calls I could remember having while folks streamed around me, completely ignoring my end of the conversation, as if I wasn’t having one, as if I was in a phone booth made of space.
Meanwhile, people trickled up to the balcony area, where Tiff was manning a “volunteer” station, wearing a volunteer badge, which was another take on anonymity actually—apparently Tiff was at an event one time, hanging out with some friends who were volunteering, and an event patron assumed she was a volunteer because she was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. If you look the part…interactions with service people do tend to have an impersonal flavor, even though the person in question may be an artist themselves. So anyway, Tiff was giving people instruction sheets for viewing the installation, and some people got the instruction to call my cell number, and I’d have a personal conversation with someone who had no idea who or where I was. The first thing everyone did was peer over the balcony at me. So I’d chat with them about how their Sunday was going, and why they were here at JAW or in Portland. Some folks were really open and willing, and some definitely had their guard up until they got used to the idea. An interesting cross-section of humanity, how open to the unfamiliar they were, to having a little intimate chat with a stranger.
There also was Eric Hausmann playing ambient music from within a bathroom, which was a hit. People kept peering around the doorframe to see where this out of place noise was coming from. His space had a sacred flavor to it, with all the brass Tibetan bowls and ringers, right there in the john next to the urinal and the tp.
There also were all these installations of cd or cassette recordings secreted around the place, which the audience would find via their maps on the instruction sheets. I contributed a couple stories, one about “hold me” based on my memories of Newport when my ex-husband proposed to me, and one about finding a noose in an abandoned factory while looking for wierd stuff to photograph in college. That was a creepy little locale, let me tell you. Some other contributors were Pecos B. and Frayn Masters—everyone did something intimate, but they were all different of course. Frayn’s was naturally hilarious. A cool thing was some were installed very publicly on lit podiums, and some were in hidey places like under a stairway or just in incongruous places like a drinking fountain. What’s public, what’s private, who’s intimate with us, who’s not—where do we draw these lines?
A few weeks ago, I drove out to interview the editor and publisher of Nestucca Spit Press for the New Oregon interview series I’m cooking up for the 2GQ web journal. I’d seen him read at an Oregon Literary Review reading at the Blackbird Wine Shop, which was a fun event, nice pours and a sweet space, and was struck by how he kept saying, “it don’t get any more Oregon than this.” And his knowledge of recent Oregon regionalism, of course.
So I drove out to the coast to find out more. I found him in an open-plan ranch house punctuated by skylights washing out a collection of Oregon-centric prints and memorabilia, planning the next great move in Nestucca Spit Press’ mission to preserve Oregon history. Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology will feature over 60 Oregon writers and 55 primary document excerpts, presenting a contemporary intersection of the literary and political in Oregon culture. Featured writers include Monica Drake, William and Kim Stafford, Matthew Stadler, Cheryl Strayed, to name just a few—and full disclosure, I also have a piece in the book. The title comes from that Ken Kesey quote about Oregon being a citadel of the spirit, a point of view I’d say is both captured and skewered by the book.
Matt was inspired by a small pamphlet published for Oregon’s centennial that had been put together by local contest, which incidentally featured a certain first place winner named William Stafford, but I think in my somewhat biased opinion that this version of a memorial anthology is going to live up to its title. It’s a true inventory of this moment in o
ur history. It’s gargantuan, it’s full of strong voices addressing crucial controversial issues affecting Oregon’s future, and it’s “no valentine”, as Matt said to me. Like a lot of Matt’s endeavors, it’s a bit of an outsider perspective: radically mixing the personal essay and original source material, not shying away from controversy, yet relentlessly pro-Oregon all the way through.
Check out the cool historical photograph, which is of Tom McCall signing the bicycle bill. He’s also known of course for being a preserver of local beaches and an advocate of the bottle bill. McCall helped to make Vortex happen, the country’s only state-sponsered outdoor rock festival, subject of Nestucca Spit Press’s first big book and a total 60’s hippie affair. Matt had tons of cool stuff actually. I only wish I’d photographed the viewmaster reels of Oregon’s World Fair, but they probably wouldn’t have come across on film too well anyway.
