But Also, Easter -

The Crucifixes

I'm very pleased with this book, pleased with it beyond reason. The design by R.V. Branham is simple and beautiful; the Democratica font reminds me of Uncial and Half Uncial lettering, mediaeval manuscripts.

That alone would be wondrous.

But the thing about it, I came to realize, is that it reminded me that when I was 13 one of our set texts was a kid's biography of Marie Curie. And remembering that, the feeling of reading it, I realized that that child and I hadn't admired Marie Curie, but Maria Sklodowska. I didn't imagine the lab, the nuclear industry, the Nobel prizes. The later part of the book had little hold on me. Only the search and the finding.

This book is the radium distilled from the pitchblende.

Douglas Spangle - 2016 winner, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award

There is a footnote in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which cites an unconsciously gender-based and class-based argument by Aldous Huxley to the effect that, because of more generally-available education and technological advance, there may be 4 men of literary talent now to every 1 of earlier times. Huxley’s corollary is that the demands of our vastly-expanded market must result in the production and consumption of a great deal of trash.

If we look at rock’n’roll we see that musical talent is widespread. Of course it is and always had been – where does the music in ethno-musicology come from if not from the ethnos? Where did folk music come from if not from the folk?

Folk tales. Border ballads. The blues.

Literary talent is similarly widespread, and that’s one of the things verbal art is now demonstrating and discovering to itself and the wider community. Speech and narrative clearly confer an evolutionary advantage. Narrative is central to humanity, and so is sputtering with rage, and so is singing.

Open mic is a forum / venue / performance / form which has proceeded quietly, and often just out of the range of vision of more formal and established literary forms and institutions.

That is its virtue, in many ways.

Being out of official sight means that literally anyone can apply, anyone can have their say and be heard. Because it is free and accessible, the concerns tend to be common human concerns – love, death, taxes… Like SF fandom it can be limited in scope by being invitational in nature – you can get fragmented groups and communities. But once the event or series is known the invitation is established, and the invitation remains open as long as the series lasts.

The Slam Poetry end of the spectrum can be quite formally innovative. The grass-roots, my first time in public end of the spectrum can often be perceptually innovative and emotionally subtle. Occasionally there is an astounding feat –

One night in late 2006, at the Broken Word open mic at the Alberta Street Pub, founded by Arlo Voorhees, a young woman read a long set of linked sestinas. They built and built and built, a Jacob’s ladder of exploration and explication from the nerve-ends of a relationship. It was the only piece I ever saw receive a standing ovation. It was a tour de force and a force of nature and ferocity.

Michael Shay organized a group of six active attendees – Douglas Spangle was one of the six – to edit the second published volume from those Broken Word readings. We all asked who that young woman was. None of the regulars knew her; none of their friends knew her; no one who listened to Talking Earth, on KBOO, knew her. We never found her. The poem's not in the book.

But we had heard it. We remember our mounting amazement as it built and crescendo’d – And then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, this amazing piece of art from, in, and of the community. Where it has always come from, where it has always been.

For those of us caught between I can’t go on and I must go on, open mic gives us the chance to draw from each other the spirit to go on.

And so we come to Oregon, Portland, and Douglas Spangle. Who has nurtured this form and forum of weekly readings for more than 30 years.

The Broken Word reading at the Alberta Street Pub (founded and emceed by Arlo Voorhees, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring readers such as Judith Fay Pullman and Jaqueline Freeman) followed the Meander reading (founded by Elizabeth Domike and Elizabeth Archers, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring the intricately-talented Andrew Macarthur, sadly no longer with us); and Meander followed the reading at Murray’s Pizza (emceed by Douglas Spangle), which followed the reading at A Shot in the Dark (sometimes emceed by Douglas Spangle), which in turn followed the long-running reading at Café Lena (emceed by Doulgas Spangle with Brian Christopher Hamilton), which succeeded the long-running reading at the Satyricon (emceed by Doulgas Spangle, and featuring such writers as Walt Curtis and Katherine Dunn).

That takes us back to 1983. 2007-1983.

From 2008-2013 Douglas curated Verse in Person at the northwest branch of Multnomah County Library. The Stone Soup reading at Marino’s, was founded by Curtis Whitecarroll, an alumnus of Broken Word, who Douglas had mentored. Stone Soup and its successors, Ink Noise, Word Warrior and Poets' Challenge have featured writers such as Dan Encarnacion, Coleman Stevenson, Brita Emeel, Brenda Taulbee, and JM Reed. The young & formidable poets are often transplants to the city from elsewhere, though not always, but because of Douglas Spangle’s work, they have a committed emcee, a gathering place, a continuing reading series, and an audience.

Nurturing open mic that is not all that Douglas has done – in addition to producing fine poetry of his own he was active in Portland Artquake / Write Out Loud, co-edited Rain City Review (which debuted many Pacific Northwest writers, from Sherman Alexie to Lidia Yuknavitch), has written for Anodyne and The Asian Reporter, produced the last Portland Poetry Fest (dedicated to Mary Barnard) and been a Visiting Poet at Benson High School. His activities in and on behalf of poetry in the Pacific Northwest are really too numerous to mention here.

With the 2016 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, the Oregon literary community recognizes the devoted nurturing of the weekly readings that has been the hallmark of Douglas Spangle's life: the constant, selfless, week-after-week-after week welcoming, nurturing presence, giving a venue and a voice to those who may go on to be well- and widely-known, to those who come and go in a single night, to any who write a name on a sign-in sheet.

And we at GobQ/Reprobate Books books add our heartfelt congratulations!

Outtakes

This is what I would normally have done with these three photos - eliminated any skewing because the camera wasn't quite straight, eliminated as much of the background clutter as possible (literally, on the stage, guitar cases and cables and the other things we subliminally edit ourselves, watching the speakers and following the conversation), making formal structures of lucky or accidental - or, occasionally, moments I can prepare for because there's a repeated pattern of movement.

I'm not a photographer in any accepted sense - no name badge, no enviably long lens for zooming past the clutter and architecture of the setting, and these factors are compounded by a certain lack of technique and, ultimately, limited talent. I can't move up to the stage or speakers without being rude. Sitting in the front row is about the best I can do.

What I can do, if we've snagged front row seats, is look at the stage and setting and listen to myself react to what has been assembled. Projections on the screen above, the lines of the room, the size of the figures on the chairs or standing at the podium in relation to the size of the room. The figures are often constrained by these lines, much as I feel and see people constrained by forces and events.

And so I rotate and crop, partly because off-kilter horizontals or verticals distract and annoy me so much I can't concentrate on the image itself, partly because the image will look sloppy otherwise, partly to draw attention to the heart of the image and the reason for producing it.

(Rotating and cropping are necessarily the same action with a defined (square or rectangular) format. But the difference between the darkroom - as far as I remember, it is so long since I've been in a darkroom - and digital photo editing is this: in the darkroom you could end up with a smaller image, and that would be OK. The proportions within the frame would remain the same. Or you could, in extra steps, enlarge and so alter them if you chose. In digital editing, with the kind of low-end editor I use for lack of time to use more complex software, after rotating/cropping, the remainder of the image floats and fills the area of the original. The edited image is an enlarged selection of the original.

And so these first three images in particular came to appear more...formal, monumental, than they had been in the taking.

And that gave me a lot to think about. Although these photos were taken at a staged event they are a subset of street photography. Which:
a) depends on intuition, experience, and luck
and
b) possibly because it is so serendipitous, so unlike studio photography, is often despised by the gatekeepers of "art"

But art it is. It is only the continued snobbery of studios and gatekeepers that says otherwise.* Photography began as street photography: the standards have been set by people like Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier, combat photographers from the American Civil War to Stalingrad to Tokyo, wildlife photographers, National Geographic photographers, photojournalists of all stripes (including their founder, Margaret Bourke-White)... And so I crop and rotate, hoping to make the image stand (up to the tradition, to the expectant gaze, against the expected view).

Suddenly confronted with formal, straitened images, I looked and compared, compared and looked, and decided in this instance to post the originals instead. They were truer to the good humour and relaxation of the moment. There's a laughter and liveliness to them that was worth showing.

The first reverts to this:

The second to this:

And the third to this:

Later that same day there was a panel with three speakers. One of them had to leave early so I couldn't get an individual photo of her. I didn't post any of the individual pix I did get because leaving someone out would have been... rude. However, I'm delighted with this example of purest luck.

There was a piano onstage. I might have mentioned it. Unmovable, ungetaroundable. By chance the woman sitting next to it was dressed in black, and if I squirmed around a bit in my seat I could make the two black masses merge. There were silver beads in the weave of the woman's stockings. I took several photos - and in this one she is looking up, her face is catching the light, her clothing merges into the cropped mass but distinctive shape of the piano. The frieze fragment's curve on the wall echoes the piano's, the black edge of the projection screen above her points down to the figure like a kind of large arrow, the woman's fingers indicate the tension of her focus and also echo the upward thrust of her face.

A good image by compositional principles, something snatched from the clutches of Time, something I did.**

==

* It is not photography in the studio sense, where the lighting is controlled and the composition likewise, and all elements indicate the photographer's understanding of the requirements of painting. (Which was the dominant earlier form of image-making, the standard to be no worse than - that's is the origin of studio snobbery: fear of being confused / dismissed with the lowly street.)

** When I bought my first SLR I had to think very carefully about what made me want to take pictures (I didn't have the money to spend on all those lovely accoutrements.) The answer was always: something I saw that made me want to keep it, hold it still against the flow and subtractions of Time. 

PETE Ensemble's R3

PETE Ensemble’s R3, directed by Gisela Cardenas, is a tour de force of costuming and condensation. The play runs and hour and forty-five minutes: the costumes are black, trim, tight-fitting, slightly adorned or stripped for the second role for each performer; the props are minimal, focused on shape, and also do double duty as the scene demands.

R3 is also a tour de force of dance. The choreography is a study in grand and subtle aggression, threat, incitement, calculated retreat and redoubled advance.

But the heart of R3, the reason to see it, is Jacob Coleman’s performance as Richard – an astonishingly kinetic and athletic presentation of twisted spine, dog-loping, monkey-gripping, chest-thrusting, bowing, cringing, curling, twisting – which instantly conveys the villainy at the heart of the plot.

This is PETE’s most accomplished piece to date. On this evidence, PETE is a company to be able, confidently, to expect great things from.