Tom Cassidy — Untitled

(Click to enlarge and focus.)

_____________________________

Tom Cassidy will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

"PAY ATTENTION" MN SUBCULTURE PHOTOGRAPHY by Adam DeGross (gallery/book release)

by Adam DeGross

Saturday, January 5, 2013

4:00pm until 1:55am

For half a decade, Adam DeGross has been documenting the underground DIY punk, hardcore, crust, black metal, and basically every other subversives subculture MN has to offer. This will be his first public showing, and along with having his first gallery, his highly anticipated photo book will be released the same day.

Adam DeGross is a 25-year-old, self taught photographer, who has documented almost every punk show in the past 5 years, and not just the live shows, but the lives of the people in
the punk communities. The photos take you into the underground and make you feel like you were there. His style of photography is raw, uncompromising, intense and grim, but also beautiful at the same time. His body of work speaks for itself, and he was recently honored by being added to the historical Andersen Archives at the University Of Minnesota.

This event will be hosted at BRICKMANIA, aka the Profane Existence Warehouse. It is a FREE, all- ages event, and attending the first night at Brickmania will ensure you have the first chance to purchase his book (limited, 1st edition copies) and also purchase his prints. After the event at Brickmania, a limited selection of prints will be on display at Caffetto in uptown for the month of January.

The gallery side will be DJ'd by PADDY OF DILLINGER 4. Who has said "Adam DeGross is the only photographer that matters."

BANDS PLAYING LATER IN THE NIGHT
False
Arms Aloft
Wild Child
Agitate
1 more tba

Sponsored by - Clashed Attitudes Radio, KFAI Root Of All Evil, Profane Existence Records

*BRICKMANIA LOCATION*
We are located in a repurposed industrial complex, known as the Thorp Building and CBC. Our address is:

Brickmania LLC
1620 Central Avenue NE, Suite 170
Minneapolis, MN 55413
612-545-5263

writing through "Dementia Blog" by Susan M. Schultz

by Jefferson Hansen


Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press) by Susan M. Schultz consists of a series of "prose poetic" remarks in each blog post. These remarks collage Schultz's coming to terms with her elderly mother's dementia with issues pertaining to teaching English, the Iraq War in 2006, family issues, and poetry criticism.


What follows are quotations from the book and my following remarks, drawn from my own experiences with three grandparents who died from complications related to Alzheimer's or dementia, In short, I will bounce my remarks off the main thread of the book, which deals with reflections on dementia.


(Quotes from book in italics.)

*     *     *

"Is there a spirit within dementia, if not a system of belief, then its flickerings, its necessary failures? Is its only belief paranoia, its only doubt a rooting for lost keys? Can spirit not, at its source, be this literal? A neighborhood for those who forget, leaving traces of their forgetting in what we remember?"

My grandfather was a master carpenter and house builder; although, ironically, he did it as a kind of "hobby." His real job was a factory worker.

His "spirit within dementia" was measuring, as a carpenter would measure. Toward the end of his life he wore three watches, checking and calibrating each every minute or so. I couldn't bear it.

Because he was my spirit.

As with many of us, I had a difficult childhood in many ways. In my mid-teens I worked for this man on his small acreage out in the country—upkeeping the house and barn he built, landscaping, gardening, and so on.

He became the solidity and confidence I so needed. 

& now I couldn't help him.

"My mother's life a loaded one, her words clues, symptoms to a foregone opening.The scholar translates death laments. But what do you call the lament that lacks death ... given she has escaped the institution?" (Liberties taken with recontextualizing Schultz's phrasing.)

My grandmother walked out of the hospital into a cold, clear, dry Wisconsin afternoon. An intravenous needle still stuck out from right below the inside of her elbow.

She stood staring into space, on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the hospital. None of us know how long she was there.

& neither did she.

"Incontinence (not yet). Anxiety (always). Loss of (you name it)."

My grandmother used to flush the toilet every 15 minutes. My grandfather, who still had typical faculties, tried to prevent it, but to no avail.

They lived in a very small town. My uncle told me that a city worker mentioned to him that an unusual amount of water was being consumed on my grandparents' street. He told him that it was his mother—my grandmother—flushing the toilet.

In her confusion.

"I write because I do not understand."

I based a character in a novel on my grandfather. It was clearly an admiring, though unflinching, portrait. I stared his dissolution from Alzheimer's straight in the face.

To come to terms.

To share with the world.

To bring narrative pulse and logic to this issue, to offer a way of knowing it in this essential fashion.

I think I alienated a number of members of my family. Apparently, they thought I violated privacy. Nobody has directly spoken to me about it.

Again, privacy.

They're of Scandinavian heritage.

"My mother forgets what distinguishes an instant from a decade, three days from 40 years. Her mother left three days ago."

My grandmother's round face seemed to grow elongated in her later years, as she held closely to my grandfather at all time, as if she were dizzy. Her face registered perpetual astonishment and perplexity—a world ever new is ever frightening, I suppose.

She remembered my grandfather's elbow.

"It bothers her sometimes she can't remember."

When my grandmother told me this, I confessed that sometimes I walk down the stairs and forget what I went into the basement for. I would stand for a while, shake my head, then finally retreat back up the stairs, empty-handed. We laughed. I tried to be a little uproarish. She was rueful.

"Her legs are white and thin, skin papery, covered with bruises and abrasions. On her shoulder more abrasions, her back bent forward, the spine crooked, as it has always been."

_____________________

Susan M. Schultz appears in AlteredScale.com 1. 

Susan M. Schultz is a poet, critic, and publisher who lives in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i on the island of O`ahu. She is author of a number of books of poetry, and she edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1995). She edits Tinfish Press and teaches at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa.

Dementia Blog at Small Press Distribution.

UNDETERRED

by Susan Lewis

By numbers, atrophy,

Time's slow leak.

This idea stirring

Like another birth,

Easy to ignore.

The puzzle of plain speaking,

Pain speaking:

What an animal needs,

Mother and mate,

Maid to order (in the midst of chaos).

Another energy sapped.

The tree of life fingering

The space between

Desire and acceptance.

The standard dose of accommodation,

The standard model of infliction.

Unexplained gratitude

In the event of interruption.

An amplitude of fear.

Fur stroked, stricken.

Pitiful cruelty lashing out

In remorse.

_____________________________

Susan Lewis is editing a gallery of textual poetry for AlteredScale.com 3. Her poetry will also appear in another gallery, edited by Mary Kasimor.


Susan Lewis is the author of  How to be Another (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming 2013), Commemorative Edition (White Knuckle Press, forthcoming 2013), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-Books, 2012), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press, 2008).  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in a great number of journals, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boog City, Cimarron Review, Eclipse, Fact/Simile, Monday Night, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse (online), and Verse Daily.  She is Editor of MadHat Press and Managing Editor of MadHat Annual and MadHat Lit. Her website is www.susanlewis.net.

Pyrrhic Victory Celebration

               by Vernon Frazer

the gestural charisma

of a vested intonation seeker 

events past choosing 

dilemma-measured template data

replacement winners

complexion warriors hang

a color-wheeling effigy montage

to mirror its best acclamation 

what festering continued

while battle surgeons failed to heal

a sneaking invitation divested 

_____________________

Vernon Frazer is a regular contributor to this blog. He appears in AlteredScale.com 1 & AlteredScale.com 2. He will also appear in the next issue, coming out in the spring.

delightful expenditure

by Jefferson Hansen

(Click to enlarge and isolate.)

Empire Visions by Dan Ryan

On the edge of change from

the every day

the place to which I’ve been

forever rushin

on my own on the Empire Builder

headin lickitysplit toward

the fabled myth

of

the American west

mad gray afternoons await me

raw, dank, bone marrow wind

Woke at dawn

somewhere east of Rugby

North Dakota covered in snow

imaginin ourselves to be

45 minutes behind schedule

complicitly caught in the illusional

drag of time

when in fact occupying

the great here

and

ever present now

2:45 PM  west of Glasgow

still behind schedule I’m sure

Montana actin like North Dakota

large isolated farms separated by

large isolated space

ring neck pheasant crossing a frozen stream

walkin on water like Zen Master Jesus

passin through another podunk town

name unknown to me

mountains of rusting and rusted

cars, trucks, farm machinery

loitering without permit or purpose

in snow-covered yards and fields

decomposing heaps of rotting metal

disappearing molecule by molecule like

the ’85 Toyota pickup

in the tidewater at Tokeland

all machinery predisposed to

the transitory existence

we bein no different

consisting of even less durable material

4:00 PM  sun goin down on yon horizon

not completely

not yet but movin in that direction

cattle likewise movin toward home in nose-to-ass lines

of varying membership

intuitive intuition

group mindlessness

driven by darkness and hunger

6:22 PM  passin through yet another nameless village

not important enough to bother stopping at

expectin now to arrive in Havre later than expected

by two hours and twenty one minutes

the smokers are desperate and will get their fix

in dark coldness

we’ve lost the light but not the snow

feelin sleepy but nappin not a good idea tho

I’ve had a long day and train ridin on my ass

is hard work

if I were a smoker or a toker I coulda

taken some breaks but

I’m not so I didn’t it not bein worth

stepping off for merely the breath of fresh air

and exercize

into frozen clouds of exhaustive toxity

10:52 PM  pullin out of Minot…why not?

the train bein fuled up

the smokers bein satisfied for now

can’t get to there without leavin here

be it time or place

and now upon happenstance bein

the very time and place for

some sleep action

I agree with myself that it’s time for

my sleepytime wine

under a full moon the train

like a multi-segmented caterpillar

creeps westward

where I’ll re-live in some ways what once was

the me of then havin no relationship to

the me of now

___________________________________

Dan Ryan is a regular contributor to this blog. He will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

After spending an extensive number of years attempting to save the world from itself while living in Olympia, Washington, I follwed my sweetie to Minnie's Apple Crisp in July, 2012.  Determined to approach life from a more obtuse angle, I am now a thoroughly committed Zen slacker, practicing guilt-free attachment to hanging out in coffee shops, reading all the wrong books, writing poetry, and enjoying other sensual pleasures with my partner. Dan Ryan will appear in AlteredScale.com 3, out in March.