"ou" as in ouch

Andrea Lambert

2012-02-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

wire & vaudeville (20 x 26) oil, mixed media 2000


scopophilia I (4 x 5) aol cartridge, collage 2002

scopophilia II (4 x 5) aol cartridge, collage 2002

...and me without (22 x 27) oil 2007

refuge (16 x 18) oil, text, mixed media 2008


Jet Set Desolate Future Fiction London, 2009


Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin / 750910-2155 valeveil 2009

G(u)ilt chapbook, 2011

Queerness, subculture, mental illness, and financialinstability are central themes in my work. Paintings and text both reflectthis. A sense of place locates eachpiece. San Francisco informs Jet Set Desolate (Future Fiction London),and North Hollywood informs Lorazepam andthe Valley of Skin / 730910-2155 (valeveil). My recent chapbook, G(u)ilt, plays off between San Francisco and Echo Park.

My writing draws from personal experience, however it is notsolely, excruciatingly personal. Not tosay that all my experiences are universal, some are more specific, but thatonce they are on the page they are open for other readers with similar identifications. The free clinic, student loan default,butch-femme desire: if you have taken the pill, you understand.

I feel like once the writing is out of me I am no longerbound to it; I don’t need to hold the experience so tightly.

This detachment, I think, has allowed me to confess in aseries of thinly veiled memoirs. Most recently is Scaffolding, a punk novella about the late nineties, which isseeking publication. I am currentworking on a lesbian love story set in Echo Park called Unpredictable Boots. I have been so thoroughly steeped in “writewhat you know” that it is very difficult for me to write what is not direct,visceral experience. Being desensitized to self-exposure, toself-incrimination, to embarrassment, is necessary armor for the work that I do.

This controlled disclosure is my narrative strategy.

The Ballad of Student Loan Default

Don’t give me your pity

As I hung up the phone

The student loan lady

Once again deferred

I twist the cap

I tip the bottle

I pour the pills

Ativan two mg

Smooth loose and dropping

Fast down my throat

Don’t cry for me Argentina

And by this I mean Encino

Echo Park and NorthHollywood

Don’t cry for me customerservice ladies

With your thin pity andsoft-serve smiles

Ooze through the phone andstain my cheek

It is dank, my cheek

It is stained

From the last grains of aMAC blush bought 2006

2010 now and I’m stilldabbling sad

For a lifestyle leftbehind

Like a bag on a downtowntrain.

No matter,

Your pity, it stains

My pills wash it out

How many more days

How many more calls

You call six times a day

The legal limit, you say,

In a tone better left for sugarcane.

But my pill box clicksshut

Each day shorter each day

I steal an extra Ativan

To ease the terror of yourcalls

Where I stare defaultbetween the eyes.

My eyes.

They have seen my creditsucked down

They have seen the banksrefusals

Bills paid over and overwhile the loan debt rises

And I can no longer pay

I have seen the look on awoman’s face

As she shits into a bag onthe sidewalk

And the look on a woman’sface

As the stretcher comesthat will take her away.

Away.

I cannot get away.

I have turned off myphone.

I have two Ativan left forthe month.

Soon the seizures willcome.

Teetering on the rooftopparty

I lean on a friend’sshoulder

Gesture with two fingers

The Citibank building looms

Ten stories higher

Dulled with Bud Light

I trace the letters withmy fingers

Say, “I’m not one to gopostal,
But they call me six times daily.

I owe them sixteen thou

So if I had a

Bullet,

I say if I had a

bullet

Their name

would

on it.”

Homo-centric tent at the West Hollywood Book Fair

andreaklambert.com

Coco Owen

2012-02-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

My work dramatizes the very gender-inflected struggle of claiming a voice. It speaks of that struggle with forked tongue, using irony, punning, allusion, ambiguity, and double entendre as strate-

gems

for opening up treasures in words beyond the manifest meanings that lie on the surface (because they lie on the surface).

I like to lean on the archeology of words, which exposes infraverbal, etymological residues that can be unearthed and put back into use. [Meddle English by Caroline Bergvall uses such verbal archeology.]

In a poetic line, words (like Trojan horses) yield unexpected resonances: what's concealed in the unconscious of each word whickers to the unconscious of the others. Like the Jungian I am, I enjoy amplifying those sotto voce conversations among words. Sometimes their talk sounds like Babel-babble, but it's always revealing.

When I use gender as a trope for the struggle between silence and utterance, it isn’t necessarily literal. But I always pose the question: do I have the right to write? And because I pose that question, what I'm also asking is: do I write right?

There! The phrase “right to write” drops something beautiful in my lap, because the issues of voice, permission, and proximity are right there in it. Can I claim my right to work English in a way that pleases me?

My skewed, homophonic version of Matthew 7:7 pleases me, because it both plays with and critiques the source text:

         Her Golden Rule

        Mask, and ye shall receive.
        Sequin, ye shall find;
        Knockout, the door will be
        Opened into you.

I love rendering [pun intended] the multiplicity of words, in words.

I love exploiting English’s inherent ambiguities and redundancies to celebrate them. Homonyms, puns, double entendres, overdetermined line breaks, and variant spellings build up the musical richness and intellectual complexity I want my poetry to bear and bare.

James Merrill called the Oxford English Dictionary “the unconscious of the language,” so that’s the word-bank I go to, to “make the unconscious conscious.” For writing poetry is (also) work of the psyche. Here's where my training in psychology and my writing dovetail.

Sometimes I play with language using verbal fission:

        Be e c om e to me no w;
        Be a ll u red, yo u
        Be au ti ful hone y
        Ma ch in e    of    be e in g.

                     (from “Final e”)

And sometimes I use verbal fusion:

        We thought our LemonDropMantle
        would never dissolve,
        but endure—EternalConundrum—

        on our tongues, SweetJesus!—
        like a BitterSweet pickle,
        HereAndHereafter.

                    (from “LifeLiqueur”)

Sometimes I try to bamboozle syntax by letting trickster words mean everything at once, like waving while drowning (c.f., Stevie Smith). I court ambiguity on purpose, preferring polysemy to simplicity (i.e., the simplistic).

I dislike “accessibility” even more. Porn is accessible.

I like the richness ambiguity affords, even if it can be dis-
orienting:

        Abandoned ship, disembark I you sovereign
        Cargo. Chaste-ravished I your utter Subject.

(from “Holy Child Sonnet,” see below)

I write the poems the way I do in part because, as Linda Kunhardt said recently in Poetry magazine, it entertains me to do so! But it is serious entertainment.

I like giving a poem a textual tic which hawks a thematic shtick. I really like it when I can get a poem to read two (even if conflicting) ways at the same time:

        Dear P|earls before s|wine.

                  (from “Be-hold, Be-head,” see below)

I like that dizzying kind of sense-making because, in truth, aren't we all polymorphically perverse, hemispherically bilateral multi-taskers? Why pretend, especially in poetry, that "condensery," that we’re not?

Here's a sampler of my previously published poems:

Bunny-Hole

She’s bedded down in the hollow
of her mother’s expectation.
She’s dug for her furring
curves a gaze-escape
that’s her retreat from
the family den of sex inequity.

There, under- ground, her Flopsy
self’s centered in her better nature’s
itchy need for separation from her warren kin.
Her little hole’s a burrower’s
Wonderland furnished with
a little desk & chair of knotty pine.

Holed-up, hermit-like—
this booby hutch her escape hatch—
her invaginate imagination takes
a pubis-eyed view from her earthen
nest of premature self-consciousness.
Her precocious interiority’s

like a tulip bulb, dirt-bulwarked;
a Netherlands in hiding
from predations of the hawked
model of femininity to which
she’s promised her tawny beauty marking
her as a fancier’s or furrier’s moving target.

She hankers in her bunker, nests.
She doffs her rabbit coat, & scribbles code
in her moleskin notebook as self-preservation gesture.
She’s turncoat to the topside’s
   topsy-turvy etiquette expected of game girls.
Haunted, she broods her hunted selves.

[in the Antioch Review]

              Holy Child Sonnet
                                        (after John Donne)

You-to-be, viceroy — unreason of —
My knocked-up open addiction to
Your battering breath, your sieged inhabitation
Of — my little emperor — port I am.

Beloved, host I you as self-possession:
Belaboring, be mine; as vise-like I you dis-
Entwine. Famished amnion love canals
Our truce: Caesarean-sacked — citadel —

I, usurped — delivered of — disgorge you,
Captive you plunder my body’s booty.
Divorce me unimprisoned birth me!
Deliver me from to your stranger thralldom!

Abandoned ship, disembark I you sovereign
Cargo. Chaste-ravished I your utter Subject.

[in 1913: A Journal of Forms]

Be-hold, Be-head

Be-jeweled weapon of execution.

A|head — Be-hold!

Haunted. Hunted.
Halal m|eat.
Dear P|earls before s|wine.
Butchery’s holy t|error.

Be-hold! Be-headed!
Hostage to broadcast media
Streaming, I couldn’t look a|way.
My accomplice e|yes rolled in my head.
Cut to, clear through,
Be-lovèds fell, be-reaped.

Then I, too, died —
Be-headed, in a patriot d|ream.
Caput mortuum.
Reamed in skull-duggery’s war-theatre.
I was stumped;
Blood be-dezined, a streamer.

But I n|ever suffered, saved by
The i|mage’s undreamt-of
Kindness. Which, inshallah, s|pared me,
S|till —
My soul f|led from my body,
Initiate — A sign to other headless
Horsemen of t|his apocalypse.

Uncapped caryatid,

Oracle, I finger war criminals,
While the martyred be-lie our state.
And in that state (Department of —) they lie.

S|hades, fouled and fooled,
The dead’s incensed consciousness floats,
Survivor-savor seeking mercy.
Dead-headed, b|looming, be-nighted,
They’d be-wreath peace.
N|one’s found. Yet

Be-hold, they stand at y|our door —
Angel-torsoed. Be-wingèd.
Tourniquetted. Torches.
Lady Liberties. Lazaruses,
Heads-in-hand — and knock.

Be-hold! Y|our political capital!
Y|our state banquet! Y|our ritual s|laughter!

For they’ve come back,
Body-baggèd-sattvas.
Suras, surely. Soldiers—
Not enemies | anemones.

[in Tidal Basin Review]

Jeremy Mikush

2010-09-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

Chakra Cabaret

Final Chakra Cabaret

JeremyNJustin Chakra Cabaret

You are currently witnessing my moving through his first Return of Saturn.

I recently came out…as an artist! And I remain a hybrid—an artist-scholar. While I create songs, cabarets, and performance art that is ritual magick, I muse over the beneficial possibilities of utilizing Platonism/“Neoplatonism,” Mystery Cults, Goddess worship and Contemporary Paganism, and traditions of mysticism into both my academic and artistic projects. What began as a long collaboration with his Los Angeles roommate, the drag Glamazon Alaska Thunderfuck (aka Justin Pretty, http://alaskathunderfuck.com), has become a rising dawn of the Artist’s and Teacher’s path.

I’m at the dissertation stage of my Ph.D. program at UCLA in Musicology. I won’t belabor my work there:

(http://www.musicology.ucla.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1231:jeremy-mikush-bio-&catid=8&Itemid=227)

In the past year, I have begun a journey into the esoteric, the mystical, the astrological, and the psychic. My art aims to transform my solitary journey into a group experience as much as the observer-listener will take the journey with me on mutually benevolent terms. In other words, you need not believe like me to let it affect you (though I am most certain and, to me, literally enchanting you!), but you should experiment with what/how/why the sounds and environment allow you to move somewhere beyond the physical plane of existence.

You’d think that engaged relations happen between a performer and those on the “other side,” whether an audience or whatever Higher Forms exist to us. But I don’t think many explicitly choose to these days. Many of our fellow citizens of the world are simply being entertained and engaging as little of themselves as possible. Thus, I do think of myself as a Revolutionary of the Heart and of the Spirit. On the other hand, we have been inundated with more or less convoluted ideas as a result of the Great Postmodern Age. Those of us who are amply educated (or over-educated, truly!) have been pumped full of theories and critiques: the deconstruction of materialism, material culture, and the worship/denigration of the technological; exoticism and postcolonial antidotes; and the deconstruction of identities that previous generations held as dogma—of sex and gender, of race and ethnicity, of class and socioeconomic status. But, in the end, what has it done outside of intellectual circles? I argue that it’s often masturbation of the mind. It leaves us with today’s struggles: Isolation and communities starving for—dare we say—Authenticity and Sincerity. We have become a society with harmful levels of Desperate Narcissism, Aimless Self-Entitlement, an Age of Irony and References fearful of origins and unwilling to rebuild the traditions we have reconstructed. Instead of having vanquished old monsters, they lie in ruins, asking to become relevant and meaningful. We must integrate our group shadows and demons.

What happened to Inspiration instead of Influence? What happened to communities that weather the barrage of novelty? Can traditions of various stripes morph and evolve positively for each generation? Can we deconstruct without becoming ethically responsible for reconstructing our self-created wreckage?

In this salon, music, poetry, invocations, and discussion will provide us one of the first opportunities I have witnessed in LA to confront and make revolutionary change in our bodies, minds, and spirits.

APRIL OAW: JASON TRIEFENBACH

2010-04-21T23:08:00.001-07:00

LUCAS MICHAEL

2010-03-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

MIXING IT UP
Three bodies of work that dealt with the idea of winning, climbing and success...

AN INSITENCE UPON FAMILIARITY, 2004

The series is part of a body of work additionally composed of two videos ("Björn Again", 2004 and "Venus", 2004), and a series of drawings ("The Myth of Sisyphus"). The series, while questioning ideals of power and masculinity in sports, addresses the idea of failure in the midst of a culture that values and rewards success above risk and experimentation –the idea of failure not as a negative, but as an option, as a possibility of renewal evolution, as a reward in and of itself. On a more personal level, the photographic and video components of the series becomes an exorcising exercise, in which I revisit my parents futile attempts to have me learn tennis during childhood. Mostly based on photographs of tennis champs from the 70's and 80's (the actual period of my tennis lessons), in this revisionist version of events, even though I appear to be triumphant, the viewer could actually (and rightfully) question: am I winning or losing? Gleeful or in pain? Soaring or falling?

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, 2003-2007
To climb or not to climb... Drawings of existing public stairs scattered around the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Isolated from their environment, taken out of context, and reconfigured and reorganized, these become drawings of relics, ruins, coming from/leading to nowhere, just floating in space.

Inspired by press photos of 70’s and 80’s tennis icons, Bjorn Again, 2003, prolongs and extends the fleeting moment of winning --an action of constant impermanence in itself. Via repetition and extreme close-up (not unlike a pornographic “money shot”), the viewer may question: is this a moment of triumph or defeat?

LUCAS MICHAEL

2010-03-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Shot directly and in one take from a TV monitor playing Liza Minelli singing "But the World Goes 'round" in the film New York, New York, LM², 2002, is a “drag upon drag” performance of empowerment where the drag queen becomes the voice (the “real”), and Liza becomes my impersonator, being forced to lipsynch to my voice. The song‘s meaning, an anthem of survival and optimism in the face of life’s/love’s obstacles, is thus usurped by this reversal of roles.

Liza, Liza, Liza!

Still from Still Life (Liza), 2005, a live-action reenactment of Warhol's double portrait of Liza Minnelli, affected by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borge's affinity for elliptical narratives and interpreted by the artist (me!). By subverting Warhol's painting technique, the photo-based silkscreen, in my version of events the final image (a painting) comes before the source (a Polaroid) that the original work actually derives from. By slowing down a one-minute sequence to fifteen full minutes (of Fame), Minelli is able to transcend that moment of the jarring photographic flash and become the glamorous, calm woman she appears to be in the painting --it could be assumed to be simply a video still image, until Minelli blinks her eyes. At around the eleventh minute, we hear loud noises and we see a flash in both screens, representing the moment in which Warhol snapped the Polaroid that the paintings would eventually be based on.

Home Alone (since 2003) Vol. 1, 2004, is an on-going work, composed of short vignettes (maximum 30 seconds each), prompted by my recollection of scenes from movies.

With time, my over-identification with the characters from these films have become part of my life-experience. Contrary to their source, my reenactments are low budget, low tech and they are produced by a crew of “one”.

Home Alone deals with identity and the division of the Self: No repeated action is ever identical to the source; the person one sees when looking in the mirror is always changing and is never true to what it reflects. Indeed, the Self has the potential to become Other; I am the victim and the perpetrator, the mother and the father, the daughter and the son, the lady and the tramp.

JASON TRIEFENBACH

2010-03-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

Partial, Assisted, Actual… (Golemic Traditional) 2010

wood construction in plastic pan on concrete base adorned with plastic tubing, medical paraphernalia, inverted turtle shell filled with the artist’s hair, electrical lights and cords, rope, tape, belts, leashes, mirrors, metal chain, live plants, US Marines recruitment brochures and brochure stand, photographs, ceramic masks, rubber mask, bumper stickers, postcard, earrings, owl statuette, glass, wire, metal clamps, votive candle, bamboo, leather blindfold, plastic bucket, water, ceramic turtle, vintage aspirin bottle filled with rusty nails, paint on cardboard, mold culture on cardboard, artificial flowers, preserved alligator, fragment of a license plate cover, bronze wedges, rubber cock, the right half of a pig’s skull, fountain mechanism.

Possession 2009

press photo. Dimensions variable.

Angels Point Intervention 2009

At sundown on Friday Nov 13^th, at the Angels Point Recreation Area in Elysian Park, I installed an addition to the public sculpture there. I also performed a series of short actions and vocal pieces for the small audience assembled. The sculpture and actions functioned as focal elements to gather people at that time and place, and the meeting of those in attendance should be considered part of the piece.

selections from “Come As You Are, Sadie Hawkins” 2009

Mixed media on large format photostat prints. Each panel approx 3’x4’

Social Arena 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 2009

Performance environment w/ paintings on foam insulation sheets, paintings on found signage, wooden crates, chocolate-flavored powdered dietary supplement in plastic containers, election pamphlets and balloting information, painted plaster sculpture, discarded bucket, topiary cutting, broken trophy (these last three from a cemetery at Normandie and Jefferson in Los Angeles) on area rug. Implied actions altering the arrangement.

INVITATION 2009

Installation with wooden pyramid, paint, video, found objects from Tijuana, Mexicali, and Los Angeles, various other materials. MexiCali Biennial 09/10

stills from Dream Warfare 3 2007

30 minute video narrative

No Mercy From the King of Christmas 2007

Live performance with accompanying sculptures. White Flag Projects, St. Louis

Hero, Compromised (Autobiographical Fiction/ Narrative Medley) 2006

Sculptural installation and four-channel video. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

JASON TRIEFENBACH (sampler video)

2010-03-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

Artist Statement 2010

A quality of Severity. What does this mean, for an artwork to be “severe”? Perhaps not only a matter of Subject, but the treatment of said Subject- the choices made in its handling.

Over-arching thematic concerns that continually inform and delineate my practice include an existential examination of Self in its processes, undertaken through a lens of anthro- and sociological topics:

- the nature of Time as biological function and social construct

- “Otherness” in gender and sexuality

-public space and casual vernaculars of signage and embellishment

These ideas, filtered through an appreciation of ritualism and spiritualist tendencies both historical (Egyptian theology; Navajo creation myths) and contemporary (Rosicrucian Park in San Jose CA; the music and back story of YAHOWA 13) emerge in works of INSTABILITY and HYBRIDITY. Through storytelling and the performative application of ceremonial and archetypal signifiers, I attempt to confront and inhabit Mystery, Cruelty, and the Uncanny.

This structuring of DURATION on SITE is achieved through theatricality, transgression, and the internalization of collage processes so that the resulting IMAGES, OBJECTS and ACTIONS come to function somewhat as marks on a map, and the primacy of individual works is subsumed into CONCEPTUAL CLUSTERS to be read in whole or in part- a system in continual growth and collapse.