Susan Danko

Made in Andrew Mockler's Master Class

Susan Danko

Made in Daniel Heyman's Woodblock Workshop

Margaret Reid Boyer

Margaret Reid Boyer, 08/13

Please Sex

We are the please sex

We say please when we are born and we say please just before we die

We say please when faced with others if faced with our desire

We say please to our children, we say please to our fathers

Please

Please

We wish to please

We please to love

We cheat to please

We lose to please

We lose if we please

We lose

We went out to please and came back alone

We dressed up and knelt down and hoed our single row

We are not pleased

We drank the hard stuff which seemed like pleasure afterwards

We had sex which seemed like pleasure in retrospect

We loved each other which seemed like pleasure

We pleased for others

We loved pleasure

We lay down with pleasure and woke up unrevealed

We gave birth with pleasure to our brothers' keeper

Someone was pleased

Someone will love us for our pleasure

Someone will please the boys and please the men

Someone will please the country and the school

Someone will

Beijing Charlie

Sometime you just want to crawl into a big black hole. That's what I thought I was doing when I said yes to an artist-residency in China. I didn't even know where China was. We were always told it was straight down in the ground, on the other side of the earth.

I am living in Appalachia. Taking care of a 93 year-old mother and a 98 year-old father. That tells you who I am. You know, we all become our parents. And even as old as they are...not to mention how old I am. They still love pushing my buttons.

It is love isn't it? Or that's what I call that big elephant that goes storming through my stomach when I try to explain what I'm doing with my life to them. And myself. I'm an artist. And no parent from Zanesville, Ohio wants that for their adult child.

I couldn't even explain it on my Chinese application. I do video. I do photography. I write. Act. Installations. Who the hell am I?

I did an installation called Public Hangings.

It was about how I'm saying, we all are artists. My show was about people hanging their cloths on clotheslines in public. Art has line...clotheslines. Color, texture, movement. It tells a story about what people wear and how they chose to hang their cloths. Everywhere you turn there is ephemeral abstract art. And one big conflict is we are all supposed to look away. Your clothes are full of conflict. And even if you hang only one sock on a clothesline, I say...you've got art.

My first photograph was of my grandmother's laundry. I was about five years old. So I've been passionately loosing this conflict for a long time. Trying to make sense of it. I don't know.

I'm shocked my arts confusion seems to be okay with this Chinese guy, Devin. He asked, "when can you come?" China. Oh, my god, China. I start emailing him questions.

Yet. He answers none of them. He gives answers to questions I don't even have. Who can explain the Chinese? I Google a story in the NYTIMES saying the area I'm headed for in Beijing is one of the hottest art districts in the world. But also impossible to give taxi drivers directions on how to get there. The streets and alley ways are so chaotic. And it is a half hour from the center of the city. A half hour ride on the New York City subway could put you in New Jersey, for crying out loud. Doesn't that sound inviting?

Here's the deal. I pay my own air fare. And they will pay for room and board and art supplies. Art supplies? I'm a photographer with a camera that requires batteries. I'm going to China to get free batteries?

I check the air fare. If I book early, I can get a discount. But what about my questions? Who are these people in China. Is this some sort of scam? Maybe I'll be sold in the white slave market. Actually that might be an adventure at my age.

Then I get this bizarre connection. Suddenly the far east is in my caucasian face. Let me take this slow because it gets tricky.

Turns out my only friend in Zanesville is Linda, an artist who used to run an arts organization in Columbus, Ohio. This Chinese guy, Devin. who isn't answering my questions. Isn't Chinese. He grew up in Cleveland and now lives in Beijing. In college he volunteered for Linda's Columbus arts organization, where I got this residency application. Linda says she sorta remembers Devin as being squirrelly. What kind of a person goes to China to meet a squirrelly man?

And these questions. Do I get them answered or book a cheaper flight? Questions? Cheap flight? Turns out I'm a cheap flight kinda guy.

I'm running out of time to study up on China, so I go to the library, but all I have time to read are these out-of-date books from the children's section. They talk about people starving, working in rice fields, mosquitoes and Mao Zetong sending people to re education camps.

So, this old white guy, packs his bags, made in China, climbs aboard a jet headed to Newark, New Jersey, for crying out loud, to get on a non stop flight with a cheap ticket taking him on a ride into a big black hole.

Beijing Charlie

WHIPPED OFF CENTER

 

Ooh. Auscultating the boiling sewage from the earth's blackened crust.

Goddamnit.

I said I love you.

And all I get back is some metadata

Cockamamie poem about how those certain crushing words

Stick like fetid glue in your moist-full-of-promise throat.

What about your tongue-torque tongue in my moist promising throat

Last night when I said I loved your sorry ass?

Faking feelings is way under rated

in your lovely little-too-honest

poems.

So full of antique gold gilded truth

they don't have space for real kindness. 

Dare I say real emotion or affection?

I repulse you,

you said as you climbed out of bed

Purposely? brushing your stiff stiffening digit

across my face, catching the moonlight in heat.

The love talk took away your freedom, your compulsion to be

Spontaneous

Like warm water flowing over the edges of wooden bowls.

No words, you said.

Well, you only get to make half the rules.

My bowels are fucking over flowing and it won't kill

You to swallow hard

the shallow demand

of making the white-hot lie

sounds of

 "I love you too."

Patricia Canelake

David Isaacson