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.
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.
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.
My friend Todd Cobb, who just moved to New York leaving me without our rambly writing gabfests, was surprised I’d never read On Writing by Stephen King. I have to admit to having some anti-genre fiction prejudice (aside from my narrow but intense interest in mystery/noir), despite the fact that I know several people who publish/webdesign/write pretty cool sci-fi:—the silliness of taste, that we like one thing and not the other, what can I say? So, have actually never read any Stephen King before this book, shockingly, though I may have to remedy that.
The cool thing about this writing book is it’s mostly not a writing book in the typical sense. It’s not like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which begins by talking about aesthetic principles and the impossibility of aesthetic principles, that they “prove relative under pressure.” Which is no doubt true, that there are Things to Think About When Writing Fiction and Things To Watch Out For, that we’ll kill our intuition however if we get too rigid about following aesthetic absolutes which are so abstract as to be useless in practice. Of course, Gardner’s entire discussion is in itself pretty abstract—not to say that it isn’t insightful, but as Gardner himself said, that kind of abstraction is not always useful if what you want to do is simply tell a good story.
I am aware, mind you, that this post itself is somewhat abstract.
Which is where King’s book really shines, because it just takes us along for the ride with him in a very practical, humble manner. I wonder if this is in part because he writes genre fiction; he does say in the first section of the book—a short memoir of his life as a writer—that his HS principal found a copy of a self-published book (a proto-zine?) and asked him why he wrote this “junk” when he was so talented. Perhaps writing fiction that is meant for a general audience helps a person avoid some of this abstraction about technique?
Literary fiction tends to use a lot of fancy pants technique. At a Tin House lecture on defamiliarization by Anthony Doerr this last Wednesday, he talked about Victor Shlovsky’s theory about avoiding received language. Shlovsky encourages us to make “objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception” in order to keep described objects (people, things, events, what have you) from the automatization of perception. This happens to be a pet theory of mine, something I first heard about in an undergrad lit theory class and was corrupted by, that to find a more physical way of describing things makes the reader experience them more directly. It also relates pretty directly to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic theory, her idea that a way to subvert the abstraction of the symbolic aspect of language—the signified—is to work more on the level of the signifier, or the rhythm and melody of the words themselves. In a word, the language. Gertrude Stein can be read as working primarily on this level, as can James Joyce. I also think you can do this through figurative language. Kate Braverman is a great example of this. The problem, of course, is that there’s a limited audience for this kind of thing.
Doerr ended his lecture by saying that there’s a balance there that you have to make a choice about as a writer, how accessible you want to be, which I think is a way of saying that using less received language makes the language fresh, but you also have to consider how much you want the story to tick along. Sometimes you kill some darlings.
This also seems to be King’s opinion—tools basic to a writer are character and situation. And not plot, actually. He believes the spontaneity of creativity is incompatible with careful plotting. For him, the situation comes first, and then the characters. Like many novelists report, characters often take off in unexpected directions once he starts writing. “For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing…if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety.”
He also, however, says that vocabulary is the most commonly used tool of a writer. “The word is only a representation of the meaning; at best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.” Given that, use the most fitting word you can find. Wow, overtones of Shlovsky here? So I think we come back to the relativity of principles under pressure—sometimes you gotta stick to the story, and sometimes you gotta revel in language. Thank god. I do love to revel in language. And there’s only so many darlings I can bear to kill.
Ok, Back Fence PDX is really about the stories, but unfortunately, my camera was full early in the evening. I will say the storytellers rocked, though I only got to see the second half since I was part of the crew modeling swimwear at intermission. Will definitely come to the next one as a paying customer, which I believe will be next August, theme to be true colors, including a former gang member and one of those ladies who does your colors.
Check out the gaggle of beauties I got to strut around with last night at the premier of Back Fence, theme being summer love, pool time, sweaty stickiness, that kind of thing. For a more complete account of the evening, check out Matt Davis’ blog entry—I wonder if he was there because Allison Hallett was a storyteller and they both write for the Mercury? I don’t know, but was sorry I had to miss her story because we were all getting ready together the first half of the show. Which experience reminded me of getting ready for the prom or a wedding or any other girl-centric nail salon sort of environment, all trading make-up tips and bits of experience about life and love in no particular order. You might say we had our own storytelling series while putting in hot rollers.
On the porch of our “green room” house, the bevy surrounds Pamela Levenson of Popina Swimwear. At Tour de Crepes, Jessica Hecox and I make ze small talk. Bottom, primp time. Jess is applying gloss very gracefully I must say, while Kathryn, aka The Recovering Straight Girl blogger, gets some hair time with Sadie Byington of Eclipse the Salon.
Portland’s latest storytelling series, Back Fence PDX , kicks off this Thursday, June 19th with a theme that could only be described as hopeful: summer love. Storytellers include Alison Hallett of the Mercury. Intermission to showcase Pompina’s vintage swimwear, in which myself and a few other local girls will “model” the suits for you. Be there or be…you know the drill.
