Books In The Mail

I try to buy at least one or three new books every paycheck (even though I'll never catch up on my reading at that rate). Here are a few that have shown up over the last couple weeks. As to when they'll get read...who knows?

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Artist Profile: Scott Allen (Kansas City)

Scott Allen

An import from Oklahoma, artist Scott Allen now resides in Kansas City. If you had to label him, one would probably call him a contemporary impressionist. Aesthetically his work falls into the graffiti/painterly/street art realm, but his demeanor and concept are very much in line with the Impressionists. He is interested in showing the world what it right outside its front door. No need to search for fanciness, or super deep meanings; just breathe and take in each moment.

"Bitch"

Why are you an artist?

It sort of chose me I guess. My father is an architect. When I was young, he would bring home the old rolls of building plans. I would flip them over and make up my own stories. I never had coloring books growing up, I just had these huge, blank sheets of paper. My parents were very hands off and let me do whatever I wanted creatively. I still thank them for that approach to this day. Fast forward to now and I’m still doing it. I always have blank paper or my sketchbook with me….hoarding ideas, images etc. I have this thing in me that makes me draw and make stuff. If I don’t do it, I get real cranky and itchy. 

"Dorothy (Remixed)"

What is your inspiration?

It’s everywhere. During a concert I was working at in college, ?uestlove, the drummer for the Roots, said this to the crowd before he walked off stage at the end of the show. He was referencing music, but I think it applies to sources of inspiration and I wholeheartedly subscribe to it. He said “It’s all out there…you just gotta go get it." 

To get down to more specifics, I draw a lot from everyday life. It comes from constantly being aware and having a keen eye for something interesting to pop up. It could be some random graffiti on the side of a building, it could be watching someone who is a master at their craft do their thing, it could be a piece of music or something like the way a man looks at his wife. 

I am lucky to have a good group of friends and even better wife. The people I surround myself with are sources of inspiration. Even though all of them are not artists, designers, musicians or DJs they all offer something that I can use.

"Frida Kahlo"

Would you consider yourself a designer or artist or both?

Funny you should ask this…my day gig is as a designer. I have a BFA in Painting and now work as a Multimedia Designer. Design and art are very close cousins, but I do think they have some very distinct and important differences. I try to keep them as separate approaches.

To me art is about emotion and has a very introspective aspect to it. It’s the solitary artist doing what they do, removed from opinions and influences during the process of making art.

Design is about rules, clients and feedback. As a designer you are tasked with interpreting someone’s vision through your skill set. If you design something trying to anticipate what people will like, what will be considered a success and what will sell…you are doing your job.

Take the same approach to a painting and you end up with a flat piece that is just an exercise in technique.

"Pistolero"

What is your philosophy of Art ?

I try not to be “that guy” but sometimes I can be. Let me explain a bit further… I think there is a lot of stuff going on right now that gets tagged with the moniker of “Art” that really isn’t. The definition of art is elusive. That being said, I tend to take an old school, traditionalist stance on what is art. And in some ways my viewpoint is a tad contradictory. For example, a farmer who messes around with acrylics on found pieces of wood over a few beers in his basement may be unintentionally putting out incredible work. That is art.

Some hipster attempting to be clever by filling up construction tubes with mint chocolate ice cream and having it melt all over the floor during the gallery opening is not art in my mind. 

"RUN DMC"

What is the role of the artist in our society? 

I think the role of the artist is to act as a mirror sometimes and to remind us to slow down at others. I think the artist is there to highlight things that people may either pass by or tune out.

As digital and fast forward as society is becoming, hopefully the artists can be the ones to remind us to slow down, take a look and cherish those little “moments in time." 

"The Gentleman"

Where do you see yourself as an artist in 5 years?  What are your ultimate goals as an artist?

Hopefully I continue to grow and progress both as a person and as an artist. Even as I approach 40 I am still trying to "unlearn" some of lessons that are inherently part of going through Art School. A Professor who I have a great deal of respect for hit it on the head when he said "You'll spend the rest of your life unlearning everything you learned in school." Wow, how right he was.

 I want to put out stuff that moves people. Not necessarily in that rage against the world sense….more in a sense that when my stuff is on display, it causes people to stop and spend sometime with my piece. If it makes them laugh, cry or just reflect, I feel like that’s a measure of success. 

"Tom Waits"

What does art mean to you?

When it’s good, it’s amazing and really does have power. I think 10% of all art is amazing. It’s the finding that 10% that makes this ride we are on a fun one. I think sometimes art gets bogged down in the galleries, the politics and just plain trying too hard. It gets stuck in the world of “Does this match my couch." It gets stuck in the overly wordy artists statement about the deeper meaning of mint chocolate chip ice cream. It gets stuck in the world of “Well, where else have you shown your work?” It gets stuck in the limited time offer, call now to secure your limited edition print.

On the flip side, it has a purity and a grandness to it and will break free from all these limitations.

Art, at its core, is a beautiful element of human life that really, honestly does not have a good way to explain it. You’ll know it when you see it.

You can find the rest of Scott's work at the links below:

http://scottallen.storenvy.com

and

http://www.getoutofthere.com

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Book Art and Surgical Tools

Two sites I stumbled across today that have some really fascinating art-via-physical books. The first link is best visited as there are three artists spotlighted there. The second has more pictures than I wanted to post, simply because I didn't write the article, but I think the site is also worth exploring. Enjoy. 


http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-book-art-of-robert-the-cara-barer-and-jacqueline-rush-lee

And...

http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

"My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception," he says.

"The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge."

Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

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R.I.P. Barney Rosset - Grove Press Publisher, Literary Defender

 1922-2012

A champion of first amendment rights in regards to literature, Rosset became known as a fairly hated man due to his printing of books some believed to be morally irresponsible. Many of those books went on to become absolute classics in the canon of American literature.

A tiny list of just a few of the books he was responsible for putting out since 1951:

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (unedited)

Howl by Allen Ginsberg  (in the second issue of The Evergreen Review)

The Bolivian Diary by Che Guevara (excerpts also in The Evergreen Review)

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Recharging the Subconscious

I got out of the house this weekend...a lot. My friend Surya made an interesting comment while we were at the de Young museum. While I'm paraphrasing, the idea is his: "It's good to get out, experience, recharge the subconscious so that we can return to the writing with full minds."

Every experience we have wreaks some level of havoc on our brains. I saw some fascinating, thought-provoking pieces this weekend and I'm sure somewhere, sometime down the line, they will raise questions within me that need further exploring, that need explicating through one of the only mediums I know; writing. In the past, I had used writing as a weapon as opposed to an idea mover or problem-solver. These days, I make a very conscious effort to eliminate any of my own personal history from my work, but the subconscious is funny in the way it allows things to bubble up into our writing, even when we fight to keep it out.

Here are just a few of the many thought-provoking pieces we saw at the de Young.

Cornelia Parker - "Anti-Mass"

Stephen de Staebler - "Wall X Orange Scar"

Thomas Hart Benton - "Susanna and the Elders"

Chiura Obata - "Mother Earth"

Ralph Eugene Meatyard - "Untitled," "Untitled," "Untitled"

Claes Oldenburg - "Profile Airflow"

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The Art of the Library

I will only say this...I'm proud to be from a city that does such dope art work on the side of it's main library. The first picture (real) is from the Kansas City Library in downtown KC, MO.

Kansas City, Missouri

Abbey Library, St. Gallen, Switzerland

Atheneum Library, Boston

Cambridge Library Room, England

Candida Hoefer, Portugal

Chateau de Chantilly, Paris

Jose Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City

Reading Room, British Museum, London

Strahov Monastery, Prague

Trinity College, "The Long Room," Dublin

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Room, Yale

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Blogs You Should Be Reading

This is a little list of the blogs I check regularly. Some are political, others more literary, others are a kind of potpourri menagerie of whimsy. All are worth checking out on the regular.


1.) Conceptual Reception by my homegirl Karen. One of the potpourri menageries; writing, crafts, random fun stuff that makes you wish you had found out about it first. Karen is a fantastic poet and a truly entertaining broad in every sense of the word.


2.) Headers, Margins, and Footnotes by my good friend Surya Kalsi. He's been one of my two literary backbones since moving to the Bay area and one of the smartest cats I know. He's put up several non-fiction pieces about his most recent trip to Big Sur and I highly recommend taking half a day to read them all. His prose is solid and the photographs he attaches to the pieces are always of his own handiwork.


3.) HTML Giant is a site spearheaded by experimental author Blake Butler ("Scorch Atlas," "Ever," "There is No Year," and most recently, "Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia"). The site is more literary based with lengthy movie reviews, book reviews, and all things not found on bestseller lists. Spend a day sifting through the site and you're guaranteed to find something that twerks your fancy in just the right way. Off-beat as all hell, but a great read.


4.) Oddly-Even is another potpourri menagerie put together by my friend Giles, who I briefly knew back home in Kansas City, but who now lives here in San Francisco as well. Everything from music to books to current art to politics...the guy makes some interesting social commentary and is a whiz with the puns and humor.


5.) Oliver Belcher is an OLD friend of mine, back when I was growing up in Oklahoma City. He's one of the first people I remember calling a friend and we spent crazy amounts of weekends together before his family moved East. I recently reconnected with him on Facebook and found that he's finished his doctorate in Geography, among other academic notables. Primarily based in geo-political and social issues, his blog can be dense, but it's well worth the read if you're patient. A wicked smart guy with some very interesting opinions and writings.


6.) TED Talks are one of the best things to have ever happened to the internet. Academics, scientists, graffiti artists, writers, inventors, etc...all giving some of the most interesting talks based on projects that they've been working on or have studied in-depth. If you're not watching a TED talk a day, you're truly missing out on some fascinating parts of our world culture that don't get the hype they deserve from your everyday media sources.


7.) The Filthy Writer is put together by an old college friend named Blaine. His best friend from St. Louis, John, was one of my roommates and closest friends during my time at Truman State. Blaine's blog is another menagerie, full of writing, writing tips, and the occasional video game review.


8.) The Rumpus is an SF-based literary site that hypes up Bay area writers and writers in general. Once a month, they hold a reading at the Makeout Room in the Mission that is always PACKED early. I can't even begin to tell you how nice it is to live in a city where a few hundred people go to a bar for a reading and remain silent enough for everyone to hear the presenter on stage. Founder Stephen Elliot also sends out a daily email that covers his own thoughts on writing, movies, whatever crosses his mind at the time. I've gotten some really good advice from his daily emails and you will too if you sign up for the dailies via the website.


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Slumpin'

It's been over a month since graduation, two months since I turned in the final copy of my thesis, but it's been almost nine months since I've found myself in a workshop situation that required me to have pages done and give comments and critiques back to other writers. My own writing is suffering, my free reading is suffering, and I've got a backlog of fellow writers' works to get through so that I can give them an appropriate response in an effort to help them become better or see things that they would overlook from being too close to the writing.

It's a weird thing, this slump, and perhaps I should've expected it; I pushed myself pretty damn hard during the last two and a half years trying to get as much writing done as possible. The holidays don't make it easy either since I never get any work done when I spend time with either side of my family or friends back home. It seems silly to travel all that way to see them all (once, maybe twice a year) and then spend time sitting in front of a laptop trying to be productive. I think this was probably the first time I came home for any length of time and didn't bring my laptop. I knew nothing was going to happen in that regard.

And now it's 2012. I have a piece of paper that says I have been taught a few things that may or may not make me a writer worth reading. I have more free time to go out and see the city, but I also have student loans that are needing to be repaid; as much as I'd love to get out and see/do more, I'm now just as confined as I was before, but without the break in routine that class and post-class boozing afforded during the middle of the week. My brain is atrophying and in need of stimulation that will only help the writing in the long run. I've said it before in this blog: you can't be a shut-in forever. Sometimes you have to get out and do something out of your routine in order to unblock whatever it is that's keeping you from being productive. I just haven't found that perfect break yet.

A trusted friend and authorial compatriot recently asked me why I was working on a project that I was simply "toying with." I said I wanted to see if I could do it, a bit of a skills test, to push myself. He said I should work on what I'm passionate instead. He's not completely wrong. If there's no passion in what you're doing, people will know. They'll feel it when they experience the finished product. He's not completely right either, however. His comment threw me off my game for a week or so; I wrote nothing because I wanted to make sure I had the passion for what I was doing.

Then I remembered that I have some old flash fiction pieces that are perfectly bizarre and in need of updating. I went through all my files and found about 15 of them, all just to the left of strange and, in some cases, recurring themes that could make them a fun little short story collection. I wrote most of them back when my writing was less focused and my prose more poetic and flowery than grounded in any true substance. But the ideas are there and that's the interesting thing. These little two- and three-page fiction pieces have so much more bubbling under their surfaces that they may be what I need right now. More focus on smaller sections of work require less intensity than working on a full-on novel and I'll still be writing.

I'm still passionate about most pieces that I work on; some more than others, but the passion is there. Some stories just end up having different ways of concluding than we previously thought.

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Books On Deck / Up Next (Pt. V)

This list is so protean; constantly changing and evolving depending upon my mood and interests. I've got, no kidding, a stack of about 30 books I REALLY want to read, but a few have shuffled their way to the top. Some I've read before and loved (see: The Dark Tower series), others have been lauded by others that I've been wary to check out until recently (see: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series). Others, I'm in the process of reading now. For the most part, it's more mental candy than anything substantial (other than the Bolano, the Rulfo, and the DeLillo), but reading is reading. And you should always be doing more of it.

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