June 26, 2007

Dreamt that Jose Canseco was my auto insurance agent.

June 26, 2007

Watchword Press is getting together with Instant City for a reading this coming Friday, June 29th (7:30PM) at Pegasus Books (2439 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley--two blocks from downtown Berkeley BART). Featured readers include: Benjamin Perez, Loren Rhoads, Matt Rohrer, and Jeremy Adam Smith.

June 26, 2007

Tonight

Please join Parthenon West Review in welcoming poets
Ales Debeljak and Rusty Morrison at Pegasus Books,
Berkeley, Tuesday June 26, 7:30PM.

A rare visit from Debeljak, a world-renowned Slovenian
poet. Ales Debeljak has published ten books of essays
and seven books of poems in his native Slovenian. His
books of poems in English translation include Anxious
Moments (White Pine, 1994), The City and the Child
(White Pine, 1999) and Dictionary of Silence (1999).
His non-fiction books include Twilight of the Idols:
Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (White Pine, 1994),
Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its
Historical Forms (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2004) and a comprehensive anthology The
Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in
Postcommunist WorldThe Imagination of Terra
Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine,
1997) which he edited. Debeljak teaches at the
Department of Cultural Studies at the University of
Ljubljana and directs Center for Religious and
Cultural Studies. Debeljak recently served as a
visiting scholar at Center for International and
Comparative Studies, Northwestern University in
Illinois. He and his American wife, Erica Johnson,
live in Ljubljana and have three children.


Rusty Morrison's manuscript the "true keeps calm
biding its story" won The Ahsahta Press Sawtooth
Poetry Prize, selected by Peter Gizzi, and will be
published by Ahsahta in January 2008. This manuscript
also won this year's Poetry Society of America's Alice
Fay DiCastagnola Award, selected by Susan Howe. Rusty
Morrison's first poetry collection, Whethering, won
the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary
Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She has
been a recipient of the Cecil Hemley (2006), and
Robert H. Winner (2003) Memorial Awards from The
Poetry Society of America. She has also been a
co-winner of the Five Fingers Review Poetry Contest
(2003). Her poems, essays, or reviews have appeared or
are forthcoming in Boston Review, Columbia, Chicago
Review, New American Writing, The Modern Review,
Pleiades, Parthenon West, Verse, VOLT, and elsewhere.
She is co-publisher of Omnidawn.

Tuesday June 26, 7:30 p.m.
Pegasus Books
2349 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone (510) 649-1320
Pegasus Downtown is at the corner of Shattuck and
Durant, three blocks from Downtown Berkeley Bart.
http://www.pegasusbookstore.com/index.html

June 17, 2007

Legacy of Torture at Parkway Theater today at 2 & 5 PM.

June 17, 2007

June 17, 2007

Walter Logue. hitmewithaflower. Gallery of Urban Art. Runs through July 13th.

Logue's work in this exhibition appropriates lyrics from the rock & roll cannon (yes, think "Stairway to Heaven"). While at times a little too literal in its cut & paste usage, the assumed shared (pop) history [would the gallery's Black West Oakland neighbors immediately conjure up Velvet Underground or even Trainspotting by simply seeing the words "Such A Perfect Day" affixed to shiny black rectangles?] had the effect of forcing me to hear ass-rock guitar licks that I hadn't thought about or listened to in years.

June 17, 2007

view from my new apartment

June 11, 2007

Please forward to interested parties:

Deep Oakland Website Launch
Monday June 11, 2007

Oakland, CA — Cities are more than the people, buildings and geographical areas that define them. They are a nexus of connections creating active, vital communities. The size and shape of these connections may be invisible, even to the residents of a given city. And the location where one thing in the city connects to another thing is often on the move. Points of connectivity may be small, short-lived, visible only on a one-block radius. Connections mutate. Yet the way a city ‘looks’ from the outside (media) can remain proportionally static with the actual generation and re-generation of communities over time, the transit and intersections of people, water, money, memory, ballots, animals, concrete, water, labor, food and information.

Affiliated with neither the tourism nor better business bureaus, Deep Oakland seeks to create a compendium of inter-linked images, text and sound that represent the complications and vitality of Oakland’s current moment.

This project is ongoing. As the website grows, we will continue to solicit and present archival and current materials from a diverse range of Oakland writers, artists, community leaders and organizations, materials that engage or investigate the city’s ecology, economics, politics, development, history and the arts.

Our hope is that Deep Oakland will both serve as a location for conversation to begin, and will extend conversations already in progress, to the point of critical mass where the interconnectivity of the activities of these disparate activists, artists and writers becomes visible and begins to positively impact the Oakland community and the world at large.

Featured work:
David Buuck’s “B.A.R.G.E Reports”
Haleh Hatami’s Layer 3, Port
Brian Teare’s “On Refuge”
MacArthur Blvd Portrait Project
Oakland Living History Program
Rebekah Werth’s Megafauna & Amazing Powers

Call for submissions:

If you have an idea for a project, content or a link that you would like to see included on the Deep Oakland website, please send us a query by email: deep.oakland@gmail.com.

We are particularly looking for:

• Work that is directly concerned with Oakland or, if a creative piece, is produced by a member or members of the Oakland community
• Work that adds to a better understanding of Oakland and its diverse communities
• Work that analyzes the social, political, economic, historic, ecological, and/or creative aspects of Oakland
• Work that records individual and group efforts to create change in Oakland communities
• Work that responds to materials already posted on the website
• Work that addresses neighborhoods or localities that are currently under-represented on the Deep Oakland website

Deep Oakland is a project of A'A' Arts (501c3), sponsored and supported by Mills College and the James Irvine Foundation.

June 11, 2007

Dreamt that I was looking at a studio apparment in Minnesota. I was planning to commute from Minneapolis to Oakland. The apartment turned out not to be a studio but rather a small room in a disfunctional family's house. They were looking for a lodger. It somehow had a Stepenwolf feel to it. The little boy was creepy and the stairs and doors creaked. I tried to be polite about it, but as they kept pressuring me to take it (they were desperate) I began yelling that it wasn't a studio and the commute would be ridiculous.

_____

I'm going to sign the papers with my new landlord in about an hour. It's a place near the lake.

June 8, 2007

Michigan and Trumbull will never be the same again. I second the idea of the CFL franchising southward.

June 3, 2007

Along with the car comes the fun of having to replace all the tools I someone divested myself of back when I divested myself of a car back in 2002. Seriously, I like the idea of tools around the house. I'm thinking of myriad ways to put them to good use that have zilch to do with auto maintenance, which I hope I won't need to do for some time.

June 1, 2007

Oakland effectively banned street shrines by fiat in 2004, and other cities like Boston are following suit.

The results in Oakland are more murals to memorialize the deceased, more youth wearing (often hand painted) memorial Tees, RIP tags up the Avenues and elsewhere, and a greater visibility of a community's mourning. It's not the community that police chiefs like to recognize, but the deceased were family members, school friends, block friends, church friends . . .

This dehumanization of grief and loss in larger city policies is abhorrent. How are these neighborhood shrines any different from the shrines on highways for folks killed in car wrecks? A matter of location? Assumed criminal activity? Do parents and friends grieve any less in the ghettos of Oakland and Boston than elsewhere?