Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Susan Danko

Made in Daniel Heyman's Woodblock Workshop

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

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

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

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

Candy Shue

In the Land of Second Chances

Gillian came into the world a month early--insisting on being born in the wee morning hours of Halloween, instead of during Thanksgiving vacation, her official due date. Some of the nurses were already wandering around the hospital corridors in their costumes, so I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw Raggedy Anne and a tie-dyed Hippie passing by my room as I tried to ride out a wave of crowning contractions that doubled me over and had me gasping in a very un-Lamaze-like way.

She came out red-faced and fighting mad. Maybe there were ill winds--or ghosts and witches in the air. Whatever it was, Gillian chomped down so hard on the delivering doctor’s finger that he yelled, “Ow! She bit me!” in a loudly shocked voiced. How could a newborn gum a full-grown guy so hard?--she didn’t even have any teeth, for god’s sake! And what was the doctor doing with his finger in my daughter’s mouth, anyway?

My sister-in-law the Astrologer informed us that in addition to being a Halloween Witch, Gillian was also a Double Scorpio, a two-fold-whammy fire sign. And my parents, as proud Chinese grandparents, were ecstatic that Gillian was not only born in 2000, The Year of the Dragon, she was born in the Year of The Golden Dragon, a very auspicious and special event that only occurred once every 144 years. Apparently, we had hit a tri-fecta of cultural good omens.

Whatever the reason--the Greek stars or the Chinese ones--in her first hours on the planet, Gillian would stop breathing, turn blue, and be rushed into the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, where the doctors festooned her with electronics that monitored her heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels. Allie, coming in to meet the new family member, took one look at all the tubes and wires coming out of her younger sister’s head and hands and dubbed her “The Octopus Baby, “ which made the nurses laugh and laugh. At a whopping 5 pounds, 6 ounces, Gillian was full-term in their eyes; they had much preemie-er babies to worry about.

My mother had always said that bad luck came in threes, but she usually only brought this up after seeing that some old movie star had died, so I thought it only applied to celebrities. Gillian was colicky, sure, but who wouldn’t be after a bumpy beginning like that? Ok, so her cry was as piercing as a baby pterodactyl’s and it made my husband want to escape to the other side of the house, but that’s what earplugs were made for, right? Yes, she liked being up at 2am and asleep at 10am, which was highly inconvenient. And sometimes she scared the bejesus out of me at night when I would go into her room to find her sitting up in her crib, giving me her creepy Cabbage Patch Baby stare--all bald head and huge dark unblinking eyes. “Look,” my sister crowed, taking a ghastly picture of Gillian sitting ET-like amid a sofa full of hairless, cast-off dolls that even my nieces refused to play with anymore, “Gillian has found her people!”

Michael Geisser

BOTTLES

For twelve months, she hadn’t gone near or looked toward his study as she moved about the house. This night, she sat alone in the living room, facing what used to be his private refuge, eyes averted to a photo on the mantle, their vacation house in Maine, the place he had named ‘Utopia.’ She took a deep draw of her wine, turned her wedding ring around and around on her finger—she was thinner now. She turned her eyes to his study door, finished a second glass of wine, thought she heard him call her name.

She tapped on the door and entered his study; saw the wall covered with his books in riotous disorder, the window above his desk that looked over her faded garden, his collection of golf balls on a wall rack—one for each course that they had played together. She heard him unwrap a peppermint and pop it into his mouth to hide his tobacco breath from her, a ritual of his that she loved. She thought it was the sweetest of his many kind habits. “I hope you don’t mind my coming in,” she said, savoring the peppermint aroma.

She picked up a tiny, unopened bottle of hot pepper sauce on his desktop, careful not to move the three scallop shells that touched it. She was warmed that he still had this bottle, remembered when he took it from her meal tray when they were flying to Vera Cruz on their honeymoon, put it into his pocket without saying anything. She said, “You were always so good at keeping such little things . . . I wasn’t.” As she turned the bottle over in her hand, the brick-red liquid sloshing back and forth, she remembered how he had introduced her to the searing spices of Mexico and Thailand during the first years of their marriage, how she had accidently added a big scoop of super-hot Scotch Bonnet pepper powder to their stew one night, thinking it was mild cayenne pepper, how she had had to throw out the meal, pan and all. She remembered how she had expected him to yell at her. How he had laughed and kissed her. She thought, I would’ve yelled at him if he had done that.

She looked up at the walls around her. “I’m still surprised that you painted this room forest green; you are so partial to blue.” She placed the bottle of hot sauce down in the exact same spot—where the dust was missing—turned it to face the identical direction as before. The rap against the walnut desktop triggered a memory of how whenever she knew he was at his desk, she wanted to come in and kiss him, take in his scent when he hugged her . . . But she had always known better than to disturb him.

Her hand grazed a small, antique bottle, almost tipping it off his desk. “Oh my god,” she said as she saved the bottle. “Sorry.” She recognized the bottle; he had told her that it had once held the medicine of a quack. “When did you stick the blue jay’s tail feather into it?” she said.

“One night when you were calling out for me,” she heard him say.

She felt his hands settle on her hips from behind as she noticed the long, round bottle of black sand lying on its side on the windowsill. Oh, how sweet, she thought. He still has that bottle of sand from Maui. She remembered when they were making love under the palm trees by the ocean, and hid from a couple strolling by, the man saying to his date that the stars reflecting off the water looked ‘like herring running.’ How after they’d disappeared, he’d slid back on top of her, breathed into her ear, “Your herring is diving back into his house now.” How she said, “Welcome home, herring.” How they laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe.

The bottle rolled off the sill. She watched it fall for eons, saw her hands save it over and over, a thousand times over. She said, “Sorry,” each time. It struck the maple floor, shattered, shot black sand mixed with glass shards everywhere.