Sherry Chandler

A different kind of birdsong?

From Heraclitean Fire, who says:

The set-up in the video isn’t exactly the same as the one in the gallery, but it gives you the idea: a flock of zebra finches in a room with electric guitars and up-turned cymbals, who ‘play’ the instruments by hopping around and perching on them. They are free-flying in the gallery, and you can walk on paths between the instruments.

It’s an immediately appealing idea and quite memorable, so it will probably be something of a hit, at least by the standards of contemporary art installations. To be honest, though, I thought it was less striking in reality than it was in neatly-edited little close-ups on YouTube. It was more like being in a slightly odd aviary than in some kind of extraordinary art-place. People did seem to be enjoying it, though. I slightly wonder how much of that was just the pleasure of being in among all these very tame little birds, but perhaps I’m just projecting my own reactions.

I’ll have to admit to zebra finch envy. They are lovely little birds. But like Harry, I wonder if they wouldn’t be happier left alone. And can they hear all that racket?

27 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London

New Year’s Eve Stuff

The key to literary success? Be a man — or write like one by Julianna Baggott in the Washington Post.

But when I invented the pen name N.E. Bode for “The Anybodies,” a trilogy for younger readers, I had to choose to be a man or a woman. The old indoctrination kicked in. I picked man. The trilogy did well, shortlisted in a People magazine summer pick, alongside Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. I was finally one of the boys.

Via WILLA

Amy King has already visited this subject in Why Weren’t Any Women Invited To Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?. She has a link to WILLA’s counter list. It’s a WIKI, so you can add your own favorites.

Also in Salon.

I’ve discovered a couple of blogs by Kentucky writers — or at least by writers in Kentucky. One is Emma Bolden’s A Century of Nerve. Emma is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at my alma mater, Georgetown College. She is also poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.

The other is the Brannon Book Blog, a site set up by Jimmy Brannon as a forum devoted to promotion of book authors from Bourbon, Nicholas, and Harrison Counties and neighboring areas of north central Kentucky. I have a vested interest in pointing you toward this blog, being as how I’m one of the authors featured. Jimmy is a man of many parts whose memoir of his son, I Love You, My Goose, is due out in 2010. Patrick Brannon died of cancer at 13 after a heroic struggle.

Jimmy, as befits the editor of the local paper (The Bourbon County Citizen), also has a news blog, and while I don’t often agree with his politics, I did find points of agreement in this item: Government leaders looking to reduce budgets should take a close look at the costs of incarceration of prisoners:

Unfortunately one of the biggest obstacles to reform is the problem of the labeling of an idea as ‘liberal’ which basically in today’s parlance means that which is opposed by all conservatives, or a ‘conservative’ idea which means one which is opposed by all liberals.

Normally such things as prison reform, rehabilitation, and any form of early release from incarceration is thought to be a part of a ‘liberal’ agenda. But from my perspective it is the conservatives that should be leading the fight to reduce the cost of imprisonment to the taxpayers.

Yesterday, Fresh Air aired parts its 1986 interview with South African Activist Poet Dennis Brutus, who died on December 26.

As a young man, Brutus helped to found the South African Sports Association to protest against segregation in athletics. He was arrested for attending a sports meeting in 1963. While on bail, he fled the country to try to persuade the Olympic executive committee to suspend South Africa from the Games until apartheid ceased.

By the end of the year, Brutus was captured and jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. Though the South African government had banned the printing of his work, Brutus’s poetry made its way outside the border, starting with his first collection, Sirens, Knuckles, and Boots.

In 1964, South Africa was expelled from the Olympic Games and Brutus was forced to leave the country shortly after. He emigrated to the US in 1971 and became a professor, teaching literature and African studies at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh.

The stories he told of his imprisonment and his treatment at the hands of white authority made my flesh creep. His story also gives a deeper meaning to the incident portrayed in the new Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman film Invictus.

And for your enjoyment, an item sent to me by my favorite visual artist, Donna Rhae Marder: An optical illusion the size of a town

Christmas at Keeneland

Preparations are under way here at our house for the Christmas at Keeneland Arts Fair over in Lexington next Saturday and Sunday.

Eighty-one artists will be there offering crafts from baskets to wood.

A great place to do your Christmas shopping.

The unfinished turned ornament shown here is made with tree of heaven (bowl) and ash (finial). The carved spoon below is cherry.

Look for TR at booth # 21. Visit his web page to see more of his work.

Look also for Toni Menk at booth #3. Toni is not only a great designer of glass beadwork but also a fine poet and a fellow member of the Green River Writers.

If you miss Christmas at Keeneland, TR will also have several pieces in the Third Annual Gallery & Gifts Holiday Market at the Scott County Arts & Cultural Center. The Gallery is located in the old jailer’s house, 117 North Water Street, Georgetown, Kentucky. The show opens on November 1 and will run through December 19. Gallery hours are 12 N to 4 pm, Tuesday through Saturdays, Sundays 1 to 4 pm.

And you can always purchase his work at the Kentucky Artisan Center or Appalachian Fireside Gallery.

Festival Del Dia De Los Muertos

A reminder to local folk that today the Living Arts and Science Center (362 North Martin Luther King Boulevard, Lexington) holds their Festival Del Dia De Los Muertos from 5 – 9 pm. They will have hands-on craft activities for the young folk, with traditional music, dance, and food for the whole family. The celebration will culminate in a candlelight parade to the Old Episcopal Burying Ground at the corner of Third Street and Elm Tree Lane for a viewing of an installation of altars.

You can also take a look at the Recordamos exhibit of calaveras that will hang in the Gloria Singletary Gallery until November 14. Above you see a photo of the mixed media piece my son, Tom C. Williams, and I contributed to the show. I wrote the poem, he did the drawing.

Thirteen other local and regional artists have made contributions and the students of Sayre School have contributed an impressive collection of suitcase altars in mixed media.

Christine Kuhn has assembled a huge altar of found objects, including a motorcycle that was drawing much attention from the boys when we dropped by last week.

Other notable pieces take the idea of recordamos into the political. Robert Morgan’s assemblage “The Perfect Host,” a skeleton made of all manner of found objects — keys, plastic tags, and other things less easily recognizable — commemorates those who have died of AIDS, and a digital mixed-media wall hanging by Bruce Frank of Georgetown called “No Plants, No Planet.”

I have found the staff at the Living Arts and Science Center wonderfully friendly and helpful and you’ll find some lovely notecards and other items suitable for Christmas giving in their giftshop.

The Day of the Dead Festival is supported, in part, by: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Donor Advised Fund of the Bluegrass Community Foundation.

I read this poem at the link: Relics

Neuroesthetics?

Who knew?

From Tim Parks at the NY Review of Books Blog, a report on Neuroesthetics: When Art and the Brain Collide, a workshop conference at IULM University Milan, wherein Semir Zeki was the star speaker:

What Zeki was trying to demonstrate was the brain’s response to ambiguity, a major element in most aesthetic experience. He showed slides of the Rubin vase, the Kanizsa cube and triangle, and Isia Leviant’s “Enigma.” In the case of the vase and the cube, the brain could only see only one of the two alternatives at a time, but it could never shake off the other and would keep switching back and forth, without resolving the issue, a characteristic that Salvador Dali had exploited in his “paranoiac critical” paintings. He went on to show slides of which parts of the brain were activated when responding to such stimuli.

“If you tell me,” responded Ron Chrisley, “which circuits of a computer are active when its chess program moves knight to queen’s bishop three, you haven’t told me much, have you?”

It was that kind of conference.

. . .

What was most disturbing was the rather crude notion of “aesthetic experience” that the scientists seemed to entertain. The word “beauty” was used as if we knew what it meant.

. . .

When I remarked in the closing discussion that none of the speaker’s experiments had tackled the word, the poem, the novel, or more generally the aesthetic of narrative, a voice behind me cried out, “Thank God!”

__________

Maurice Manning says he can’t talk about metaphor without using metaphor. Maybe we can’t define beauty without just showing the world something beautiful.

Today, we might begin with Temptations of Solitude, an ekphrastic collaboration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Dave Bonta.

Dave explains the collaboration here.

The British press

The BBC gives us the winner of the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009, a photo of a leaping Iberian wolf:

Jose Luis Rodriguez captured the imaginations of the judges with a picture that he had planned for years, and even sketched out on a piece of paper.

“I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting – or predation – but without blood,” he told BBC News. “I didn’t want a cruel image.”

With a great deal of patience and careful observation of the wolves’ movements, he succeeded in taking the award-winning photograph

Me, I sort of like the winner of the Urban and Garden Wildlife category (scroll down), which involves a red fox and a calico cat in the Russian snow. After that popular photo that showed a cat treeing a bear, I suppose a fox is nothing but the photo has great colors and action.

All the category winners are worth a look.

the Guardian gives us the short list for the T.S. Eliot prize, 10 poets “who have dreamed and who have dared.”

He highlighted Sharon Olds’s One Secret Thing, which moves from meditations on war photographs to an exploration of ageing, as a collection that had moved the award-winning American poet to the next level. “She’s well known as a highly confessional writer, who writes very personally and intimately about her family situation,” he said. “But she seems to have pushed even further in this book.”

I found both of these links at The Poetry Hut Blog, a blog I suggest you look at often.

Recordamos

My son, Tom C. Williams, and I collaborated on a mixed media piece for this Recordamos exhibit, which opened yesterday.