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May 6th, 2008
daguerreotype, 5×4 inches
April 18th, 2008
one cichlid hovers like an alien mothership
hunting with the impression of sleep
another strolls leisurely to the dark
end of the tank, does a casual wave
with a pelvic fin toward a third fish
saying “good evening, I just may kill
you later on.”
I set up folding chairs to watch
the ecosystem is like a lock-in
slumber party for psycho-killers
I put a roller skating Barbie into the
glass prison– a referee
the audience turns off the light with a yawn,
curiosity delayed– we’ll see who is still alive
in the morning
April 1st, 2008
Artist Alex Podesta’s loses big rabbits in studio fire.
Posted by The Times-Picayune March 20, 2008
By Doug MacCash
Arts writer
It was a very strange sight. On Tuesday afternoon, 10 of artist Alex Podesta’s mannequin-like sculptural self-portraits lay on wooden pallets near the loading dock of the ArtEgg Studios — the old American Beauty warehouse on Broad Street. They were smoke-stained from the fire that had broken out in Podesta’s studio the night before, and wet from the sprinkler system and Fire Department hoses that had prevented the blaze from spreading to the other 49 studios in the 1892 structure. Read more.
Select Alex Podesta’s category on the left to view more of his work.
March 27th, 2008
gentrification
remember, way back in seventh grade, when you liked nirvana and started wearing flannel a whole four months before anyone else in your class? remember how mad you were when, four months after that, everyone liked nirvana and wore flannel? you hadn’t yet learned about the theory of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but you wondered why everything always had to get popular, why nothing could stay cool.
you see the new neighbors at the fancy new brewpub down the street, and instantly despise them. you hate their roadkill hairdos, fierce jewelry, coaster-sized sunglasses and distressed denim. you’ve seen the crate and barrel and pottery barn boxes they put out on their front porch, and you know that their denim is the only thing that’s distressed about them. you’re sure that two years ago they were wearing abercrombie and living in ardmore. two years ago, you were the first white person on the trolley in the morning and the last one off at night. so, it turned out that you were gentrification’s westward hoe. to be fair, though, you didn’t move out here with any manifest destiny in mind. at the time, your friends and family all thought it was manifest insanity.
the new neighbor girl blinks her black-lacquered eyelids and says, “maybe we don’t actually have to get an alarm. i’m just going to be really nice to everybody on the block, and then they’re not going to want to rob me.” you’d like to roll up your newspaper and swat her with it. you hear the guy talking about the “awesome, totally ghetto bar” that he’s just discovered. the more he talks, you realize that he’s talking about leroy’s showcase lounge. when you first moved to the neighborhood, you described leroy’s to your friends as “this 70’s blacksploitation bar, where samuel l. jackson could totally bust out of the bathroom firing an oozie.” the first time you walked into leroy’s, the needle scratched the record and the place went silent… not literally, of course, but if there were a needle, and a record, it would have. and now these isn’t philly, like, the new williamsburgh? posers are touristing about in your bar, acting like they were the first people to ever cross the threshold of the showcase lounge! who started this whole ghetto living is the new white belt trend anyway?
though, really, you’re a little happy that this new brewpub is here, that there’s somewhere that’s not leroy’s to go. you read one alt weekly article that cited the pub as an indication of the ’hood’s changing demographics. some of the local squatters protested out front for a couple days, but it kinda reminds you of college. the smooth, chrome-o-riffic surfaces disorient you at first. your eyes are used to faultlined sidewalks and nests of garbage, and all this silky metal and minimalist geometry confuses you. all these white people confuse you. you wonder if the old neighbors—that’s what you call them, but you mean the black neighbors—are at the brewpub. then you wonder if you would even recognize them, if you saw them somewhere other than on your street. sometimes you say how you doin’ to the old neighbors, and they say how you doin’ back. but even when you do, your eyes are focused forward, like you’re walking a tightrope.
two of your old neighbors saunter past the pub and take a gander inside. you see them shaking their heads and rubbing their jaws, and you overdub the “naw, man, i don’t think so.” you know that they’re probably going to roll on down to leroy’s, where (maybe because it’s actually a time-space portal to the 70s) smoking inside is still allowed. you wonder what would’ve happened if they had come in, what you would have possibly talked with them about—the plants that aren’t growing in your yards? the fact that the brewpub raised nearby house values by 20 percent? philly’s burgeoning murder rate? the new neighbors’ welcome mat, which says beware of cat and is covered with cute kitty paw prints?
you order another pale ale—hey at least the beer’s good. no longer leroy’s dubious lagers, which were always for some reason served with a straw, and not a normal straw either but one of those coffee-stirrer thingies. you wonder, who is my neighbor anyway?
March 20th, 2008
Control Panel . 2007 . Gouache on paper . 10 x 7 “
March 16th, 2008
I hated the flowers for living. I stared at them on Stephen’s nightstand. Dyed-blue orchids, bought on the cheap, $3 a bunch. The rest of the room was white and tan and cream and brown; the colors of empty walls and second-hand Ikea, of being broke and twenty-something and on your fourth apartment in three years. In the muted room, the flowers looked garish, slutty even.
I had given them to him on a whim two weeks earlier. Bodega orchids are the heart of New York City, the intersection of the exotic and the common, the expensive and the disposable. They are the one-night-stands of flowers. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. But Stephen kept them going.
He moved them from the windowsill to the table and back, to give them the right amount of sunlight every day. He added sugar to the water, and delicately plucked the sepals off as they turned yellow and curled up. The flowers lost some of their luster, but the leaves maintained a waxy green, like a Goddamn Crayola crayon. Read more >
March 15th, 2008
LUCAS TREE
KASPER TREE
JOANNA TREE
Artist’s Statement: This work emphasizes the relationship between us and the often overlooked element of our natural environment–trees. While we stumble through our everyday life, we often fail to see simple things such as trees. We take them for granted. Are they but trunks with branches and green leaves creeping out from beneath the earth as they stand in the path of our daily routines? Perhaps some of us manage to notice the aesthetic effects of trees. But we might not see the strong psychological and physical connections. People share the qualities of trees. Trees adopt human personalities.
-Barbara Kalina
March 12th, 2008
Charles stood leaning out of the window, though not looking down. Jane, across the alley, was leaning out of her window in a similar fashion. She had long, unwashed blonde hair and wore a summer dress that stopped just above her knees. Charles had on a filthy, white t-shirt and, because the water was off in the building, he hadn’t shaved in a week.
“It’s conceptual eating, really,” said Charles. “Very contemporary, although it was invented during the potato famine in Ireland. It requires an active imagination.”
“I have a spectacular imagination,” said Jane. She had eaten only dry pasta for three days and was imagining something sweet. Read more >
March 1st, 2008
It wasn’t until her senior year that my ghost starting working with horse imagery. A lot of short, quick shots. Horse tossing its head. Horse laying in a stall. She thought if she could inhabit the smell of a horse. How your hands will smell of horse long after. Horse laying in snow, snow gathering on its mane. She thought if she could feel the horse on her skin forever, she might loose the cold of the well in which she was born. An abandoned barn under mountains. Red barn in a snowy field, hills rolling. Like everything else, though, she never got it right. Horse on hind legs, slathered in foamy sweat, aware that it’s dying. Like everything else she touches, it turns to death. She makes art films out of death. Little girl in a white dress in a white field by a dying horse, shot from far away. She lies beside it, small hands stroking over the labored breath.
February 26th, 2008
I can show you born and play and fish
and wish I was still in touch
with all the other words I learned
that slip through the alphabet
I still hold in my hands, except for letters
q and x, who have somehow been shaken
from my grasp.
February 21st, 2008
See more of McBride’s work at www.siobhanmcbride.com.
February 20th, 2008
merely an artifact of the peculiar
for example, when one gets shot he yells out as if in pain. in fact, he does not feel any
Redness
The unfamiliar way things seem
to us the morning after blacking
out. A customary cringe
embraces a nauseous perception
of clouds. A May threatens
the flowers. How we purchase
expensive glass to protect
them indoors. Then talk, sing & shower
our petals with counterfeit suns.
A possible response would be that to keep from becoming bored
Two people will seesaw and one will drop suddenly to the ground, balking in existence. One will buy a house if the other will promise to haunt it. Bang-Bang.
Mumolo edits the excellent journal, Sorry for Snake. You can buy it by clicking here.
February 12th, 2008
4″ x 5″, daguerreotype
February 9th, 2008
In truth, I cared very little for the rat itself. Nor did I, when she first disappeared, feel very strongly for the girl who had left it to me. Our relationship was brief. I met her in June one year, and by August of that same year, she had disappeared. She didn’t leave much else to remember her by.
I don’t feel justified in saying that I missed her, at least when she was first gone. We were not on good terms at the end, if we even were at the beginning. But we spent a generous amount of time together. Had we, for instance, been imprisoned in the same cell we would have seen no more of each other. For the first week after we met we lay in bed together, sticking things in holes and pulling them out again. If we ate, I don’t remember. By the eighth day, the sheets were so laden with protein that I thought, in my half-conscious state, that I was lying on a corrugated roof. Over the next two months, I stared at her sometimes for hours without moving. Once she got so sick that she refused to put a tampon in and I had to do it for her. Read more >
February 3rd, 2008
 Visit the Musee Patamecanique online and schedule a visit to view the real deal in person with Curator Neil Salley.
February 1st, 2008
This is the first three installments of the serial story, “Shutdown,” by Jeff Crouch. Check this out and visit us again soon for the conclusion.
At the Emergency entrance, those who could walk on their own were permitted to leave, but there was no where to walk. A few fleabag motels were about a mile away, but there were no sidewalks—only oncoming cars, apartments, gas stations, beer stores, topless bars, and an abandoned lumberyard.
Who among the leaving would know where to go anyway? A car was required.
City buses had been commandeered to take those who could sit up and hold on to their IVs and bladder bags to a downtown recreation center. Mats had already been unrolled for their arrival, and these patients had been told to hold onto their sheets and pillows. Most did so nervously.
Two security guards watched over their medication.
A few ambulances were carrying the more chronic to nearby hospitals, and they had two or three gurneys a piece. The hospital visitors, let alone the patients, were noticeably upset. The hospital had shutdown. Read more >
January 29th, 2008
 learning to fly
24″ x 24″. 2007.
acrylic paint, spray paint and paint pen on wood.
Artist comments: An investigation of home
January 26th, 2008
You’ve tried writing to Lindsay–over and over, for weeks, months–and then to Maureen–as if you could tell the whole truth to her and expect her to bear you here at the shop, day in and day out.
Can you tell the whole truth at all, no matter who you’re writing to? Do you know it? That’s probably the real question–one of them, along with the ones Lindsay asked when she was cowering from you, stumbling away from your upraised arm like you held a knife in your fist: “What did you–? What kind of–?”
Those were real questions, too. Two unfinished questions, and then she turned and hurried away from you, all but running. The last of Lindsay.
The last of Lindsay.
*
“What did you–?” That one’s easy enough to finish for her: What did you do, Les? That one she left unfinished because she’d just been given the answer–one of the answers, anyway. You were answering it for her, holding your forearm up for her to see. Couldn’t be anything but bite marks.
The other one, though. What kind of–what? What kind of man are you? Father-in-law are you? Friend?
What kind of creep? Pervert? Monster?
Over and over you’ve tried to answer that one, give her and then Maureen the whole truth.
Try telling it to yourself, then. Read more >
January 18th, 2008
Light sensitive salts produce photographs. Nearly alchemy, these salts convert light energy into physical matter. Silver salts formed with bromine and iodine, enhanced with gold, generate images on a daguerreotype plate. Iron salts on paper yield deep blue cyanotypes. Intellectually, I understand these chemistries. I am a saltworker. I concoct the formulas in my studio; employ them to retell knowledge and experience. Yet every time, their results emerge wondrous. – Alyssa Salomon
Alyssa Salomon’s exhibition of new daguerreotypes & cyanotypes, Saltwork, is on display at Page Bond Gallery January 11 to February 2, 2008 & includes an artist talk February 2, 2008 at 11am at the gallery, 1625 West Main Street, Richmond VA.
Popular Ink will feature more Salomon’s work in The Indelible Kitchen soon!
January 16th, 2008
This Sunday, January 20th, from 1 pm to 5 pm, Chop Suey Books in Richmond, Virginia (1317 West Cary Street - the near-campus location) is presenting readings by Popular Ink authors Nathan Alling Long and Jorn Ake. This reading is part of an exciting ongoing series featuring our authors and contributors.
Long’s writing has managed to slip into journals such as Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, Story Quarterly, The Sun, and Tin House. Long contends that this is because he writes such short pieces. He is researching how to collapse the ribcage of words, to get them into even smaller spaces. From Long’s Popular Ink book The Dog and The Last Hot day of Summer:
An itinerant worker wonders whether the bus can continue to take him where he wants to go
“Why waste your money, Ray?” Billy said at the station. He’d gone with me to get my ticket. “Get there the same amount of time using your thumb.”
“We’ll see,” I said back. It was hot, early summer, and the station’s air wasn’t running yet. The doors were wide open, and I could hear each bus pull up, the hiss of brakes and doors opening and closing.
“Ray,” he said, “there’re places you can’t get to by the dog.”
Ake is a Popular Ink author and a contributing editor for The Indelible Kitchen, and is the author of All about the Blind Spot and Other Poems (Popular Ink) and Asleep in the Lightning Fields (Texas Review Press & winner of the X. J Kennedy Award). From All about the Blind Spot and Other Poems:
George was a small boy. He had only one friend. More than one friend would require a larger boy. Her name was Molly. She lived in a small house across the street. George lived in a large house with a big tree behind it. The largeness of the house made George feel unsettled. In Molly’s house George could put his hands in his pockets and lean against a wall. He could close his eyes and hum. A hum in a large house could go too far. A small crack could develop or a leak in the pipe beneath the sink. A large house could explode.
Lee Capps, a contributor to our Indelible Kitchen, will also be presenting his work. Mark your calendars and please join us on Sunday, January 20 in Richmond, Virginia at Chop Suey Books for this very special event!
January 8th, 2008
Part I
Israel’s Dwarf Hermit sees India’s god-bird Garuda in San Francisco.
Ab Ben Cohn’s very large, jet-lagged right pinna quivers.
“What’s this, Ab——you’ve taken on a new moniker? My favorite relative is now called ‘Israel’s Dwarf Hermit’?” Aunt Esther Stein says, blowing and spraying into his auditory canal. “I’ll have none of that, Ab. Won’t do at all! And what’s this——you’ve taken to talking to yourself? All the way here, I hear this. You prefer to converse with yourself, like your grandfather in years gone by. May he rest, and may it be in eternal peace!”
How like Mama! Ab thinks. The Steins’ greatest love——remolding the Cohns. Keeps the Steins in good fettle.
Over a foot taller than him, Esther Stein Weinberg straightens; short, bony fingers, armed with oversized jewelry, lightly ruffle her wispy, grey hair.
Her voice stirs with sand and gravel. “My last big project, darling Ab: to help you——”
Ab steps out of range, but curbs the urge to clear the moist invasion by stuffing his handspun cotton handkerchief into his ear.
“Sorry, darling,” she says. “——Help you break that hard shell.” Read more >
January 3rd, 2008
December 27th, 2007
December 20th, 2007
Zak. That’s his name. No c, no ary, just Zak. Streamlined, no extraneous vowels or consonants at all. Like a movie star. Or rock star. Someone famous. He owes it all to his father, about that he has no illusions. Montgomery “Roscoe” Wilbur hails from the Alabama capital with which he shares a name and had spent enough time studying human nature in general and the cannibalistic possibly Darwinian way in which Hollywood’s youth seem to devour every aspect of each other to at least bequeath his firstborn with a first name to rise above it all and by which might one day serve as the only syllable required. Zak. Plus, it sounds like a laser gun, which had a lot more to do with it than Roscoe ever let his recent bride in on. Read more >
December 14th, 2007
From left to right: John Murden, history teacher, web designer and sometimes artist; Clay Blancett, carpenter, writer, photographer, sometimes sculptor and Indelible Kitchen Contributing Artist; Randy Blythe, poet, writer and lead singer/metal star–Lamb of God.
The Popular Monkey shirt, illustrated by Chris Shrader, and the “technically i should not have been building a robot shirt” (comes with the limited edition book, Admissions, by Paula Champa) are still available in limited quantities. GET YOURS!
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