Salem Collo-Julin

ART WORK: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT ART, LABOR, AND ECONOMICS

PDFs –

http://www.artandwork.us/download/

WEBSITE (up & good but we’re still adding stuff) — http://www.artandwork.us/

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK

those who have committed to distribution or contributed to the project will get copies delivered to them soon. anyone else who can promise to give copies away and not just sit on them and furthermore give them to people who want to read them, email me! servers a t temporaryservices dot org

We closed down the old livejournal for Temporary Services and are now blogging about TS, Half Letter Press, and friends over by here.

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not-so-surprising keywords for August:

continually re-writing grocery lists

plastic black drugstore Filipino Grandpa sandals

Willie Nelson

big salads with almonds

victory laps

ten minutes of neatenin’ up every day

the Staple Singers

writing more than discussing

hugs not drugs (or smug lugs – pref. hugs from friends over 80 & under 2 y/o)

Cat Fancy

Tuvan singers

Edna St Vincent Millay

get on up and do it again, you can do it one more time:

Larry Levan:

Holy crap, you wouldn’t believe the arduous journey it took to bring you this newsletter. Please do me a favor and at least go read it, even if you can’t afford to buy anything right now. Jesus H, indeed.

dear russkie — we always fought & we always won. love always, salem

Let’s Re-Make’s new book is available for free as a PDF. As always, if you have the dough, you should spread it around to your friends, but if you need some coaxing, check out the entry from the group Section 8. Yet of course another thing I’ll have to ask B&B about next time we’re all chatting — is there a group in the outer norrebro that is actively reading my mind and took the Cats & Ghosts project into a better direction? Well, good. Translation – I’m not the only one influenced by Louis Wain. Awesome.

Some optional events:

Monday 6/8, evening, enter the forest of blistering light and love with bands, performers, and excess hugs at No Coast. Here’s the fantasm of PR from the inbox –

FINGERS
Monday, June 8th 2009
7:30pm
at No Coast – 1500 W 17th St.

always limp-wristed, never backhanded

ANXIOUS TO TAKE YOU TO THE BACK ROOM GAY VAUDEVILLE OF YESTERYEAR, A VISION OF CAVES AND PARADISES WE HAVE IMAGINED INTO REALITY. WE BRING YOU A NIGHT OF PERFORMANCES IN THE STRUGGLE AND THE SPLENDOR OF QUEERTRANSFEMINIST BODIES, A RAINBOW OF HALLUCINATED AHISTORICAL REENACTMENT. OUR FINGERS ACT DEFTLY, SLIGHT OF HAND AND SLIGHT OF WEIGHT, SHADOW GAMES, PALMISTRY AND CARPAL FEELINGS. WE PRESENT A WHOLE SORDID SMORGASBORD OF INTUITIVE MAGICAL PRACTICE:

Dewayne Slightweight’s The Kinship Structure of Ferns, a 30-minute psychedelic solo opera with projected drawings, is a hermit’s inquiry into the nature of kinship and it’s collective hope and despair.

Edie Fake rises up for The Count, vampiric gay tales from the crypt. A recounting of what his unearthly life has been below. An account of the ghost rivers that run beneath us. A 20-minute countdown of our times together until all the night candlelight is burnt. Tabulation. Reiteration. Reincarnation.

Silky Shoemaker’s Arranging the Object is a gladhanded play (with video) about the terrible weight of loving, knowing, and holding it in your arms,with inspiration drawn from late night radio, ecstatic camp, and Lily Tomlin(!)

Owen Brightman does double duty, traveling lightly with two short pieces. Sado-Magical stages bondage escapism and rope tricks the finesse into knotty suspense. If your right leg should cause you to stumble is an harlequinade of stilted vignettes and gentle balance.

Scott Tankersley delves deep in Hark the Haunted Hallways!, a 20-minute sonic excursion into the glorious, hungry catacombs of the (butt)hole.

Joined at the wrist to the musical accompaniment of Jail, Vanessa and Megan, together as Learned Helplessness, a band, twangy and morose, out of tune. Pancake makeup.

TO YOU, FROM THESE FINGERS, A GIFT:
DIVINE EXTRAVAGANCE, SCENIC OVERLOOKING, FARCE, FANTASY, FANCY FACADE, CABARETS OF DECADENCE, CABINETS OF CURIOSITY, PASTICHE, REVELRY, OASIS, MIRAGE.
METOPIA, YOUTOPIA, WETOPIA.
YOU ARE IN GOOD HANDS!

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then later Monday night go to Danny’s for Peace Party night to benefit the Unlympics!

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& Tuesday — if you are free in the afternoon, you must come to the south side and see the fabulous ART LAND! 3–5 pm, Tues 6/9/09. in Sherman Park, most likely by 52nd & Loomis. Look for the cardboard cannons shooting out free t-shirts for kids, the R/Z=made tower of power, Miss Adams’ 4-foot all-seeing eyes, and M’s magic crazy clown boat that will scare the bejeezus out of all of the Sherman Park geese (voted #2 on last year’s Libby Art Club Bully Map of the neighborhood)

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& as always if you’re on my side of town, you’re welcome to stop by and check out the extreme home makeover in progress! R/Z/M/L & J (but a ton of work from M, yay) all toiled and troubled, boiled & bubbled on my apt while I was away. Still a couple of things to organize, but boy, did they work wonders. Bawling ensued, of course, no potato chip casserole necessary.

yesterday we took a “break” and went to Gould’s Book Arcade, which actually has around 20,000 books but probably more. It looks just like the drawing on their homepage, and made me mourn the loss of several overwhelming, owned-by-grumpies, beautifully crazy used bookstores in Chicago. I bought way too many books but most of them are gifts for some of you people reading this so you’ll just have to wait and see!

Two days ago we went to a zine fair at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Sydney. Most of the booths were pretty good – picked up some disgusting horror comics (“These were banned by the Australian Post Office!” the woman behind the table smilingly said as though she was offering me cheese & crackers at the grocery store). Picked up a few things there too, more gifts.

Also got my hair cut by a lady who told me the following:

• “You are American. I can tell by your STRONG accent.” (sidebar — she had some sort of transylvania 6-500 thing going with her voice)
• “Why are you in Newtown (this was the neighborhood the shop was in — it’s one of those used to be but not so much now kind of ‘hoods)? There’s nothing but LESBIANS here.” (To which I replied, “Oh yeah, where?” and then she, without missing a beat, said, “They are EVERYWHERE.” and then looked quickly at the corner as though some sort of lesbian rat was going to scurry from the shadows.
• So then this guy comes in to get his hair cut and my haircutting lady and the other employee get all excited. Apparently, he is an actor on some local Sydney tv show. It’s as though he’s Linda Kohlmeyer or something, they are going nuts. and the haircutting lady says to me “Do you see a lot of CELEBRITIES in the states?” and I tell her my Oprah walking her dog story which is lame, because it’s basically, I was going into work late when I worked near Harpo and I say Oprah and a dog get into a limo and that’s that. And then my haircut got a little shorter than I expected because the TV guy started flirting with his hair cutting guy, and now, I have a boy haircut.

It’s actually not that short, I’m just going to have to Shane it up or something.

I feel that I need to annotate this to ’splain some pop culture refs -

KOHLMEYER:

The exhibition opened last night with some fanfare. I’ll post videos tomorrow, as I’m unable to hear anything but the bands playing below me at the space I’m staying at. A benefit for this radio station in Sydney, which will give you $50,000 Australian dollars if you convince that Virgin Airlines guy to give them $1 million Australian dollars. Sounds simple to me. In passing at the afterparty last night, this guy was talking about getting approached by a dude outside a bar who said “Hey man, do you have $5000 to spare?” Broke the ice, I guess, and the guy and the dude ended up hanging out together in the bar for the evening. This made me think of two things — first, what would the dude do if someone ever handed him $5000? Second, if you’re someone who has either my or Al Parker’s fantasy life, the story would have turned out much differently.

On Parker — I’m reading that biography, Clone, which was a Free Store pick up from this last round and something I thought might be helpful in case I was seated next to a long-winded conversationalist on the airplane over here. Never happened, so I finally got to start the book today while taking a much-needed cop a squat at a playground near the exhibition space. I was kind of nervous about reading the authorized biography of America’s first gay porn superstar near a playground, so I covered the cover with my hands flat as I read. I don’t think anyone, even the lady with the two Cavelier King Charles Spaniels with matching sweaters, noticed. (& on that — does this remind you of this? Me too.)

Big (but not that crazy) news. We got contacted by the artists of the original sculpture, we think. Someone with their email address filled out the response form. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s them – you can easily spoof an IP address or email on those things. I’m telling you this because when we upload this email to the website, as we do all responses that come in, well, you’ll be the definition of bemused. It ends in an insult, which created this conversation: “Do they say ‘wankers’ in America?” “Some people do, but we prefer jagoff.” Oh, the discourse of public art!

Speaking of crazy news -  like every day this week at some point Bloom has read a headline out loud while working on his computer and my reaction has been “What? Are you reading The Onion?” Mercury is out of retrograde soon, right? All I know is that I’ve read about former morning shock jocks volunteering to be waterboarded and then Balcer made Boing Boing and apparently koalas are rife with STDs, just like people riding out their sunset years in FLA. But turning home for solace, I’m reminded that it’s not the end of the world.

Rife with ideas from this exhibition and thinking a lot about the place of nostalgia and memory and personal history in gentrification. These questions came up a few times for me today while listening to talks from Brenda Croft and Jakob Jakobsen, fellow artists in “There Goes The Neighbourhood”.

Oh, & I’ve listened to this song 22 times in the last week or so:

Mostly working on the indoor part of the exhibition today. Had a really nice round of drinks (they call pitchers of beer “jugs” here and the Beavis & Butthead in me always snickers a little) & sharwarma/falafel rolls with K&Z (the organizers of this thing), A (the media guy & programmer), and JJ (who co-founded Copenhagen Free U) last night in Newtown, which is pretty much like Chgo’s Wicker Park. Used to be, but not really. You know? There’s a used book/record store there that B & I need to stop at — the owner found out in the late 60s that Aboriginal activists were shoplifting all of his black power-related literature from the states, so he started just giving it all away to them to support the cause. Awesome.

Holy crap, this just blew my mind. Actually the whole site is pretty great. Thanks for the point, MC

also, here’s some research:

& for a totally different project:

& here’s one of the responses from our Sydney project. I like that people have been spontaneously sharing space on the flyers for multiple responses rather than starting a new one. I guess that’s bound to happen when people are used to bringing their own bags to grocery stores? Seems to be the same principle at work.