Day One
2 p.m. At home, typing, thinking of poetry!
Elvis is alive and well
I ate with him at Taco Bell.
Put acid in his Mountain Dew
Psychedelic booty scratch…..
The last off-kilter line kills me every time. My sister, Ali, who introduced this quatrain to me, wasn’t certain about its origins when I texted her about it an hour ago. “Either my friend Aaron wrote it or we wrote it collaboratively at a Waffle House over coffee and cigarettes because that’s what kids did in the late ’80s!” she texted back.
I don’t know how many young poets are hanging out in Waffle House these days, but I can tell you Indy isn’t a bad place to be a poet.
There are plenty of opportunities to find an audience for your work. At the monthly series like VOCAB at White Rabbit Cafe (if you’re over 21), you can hear Corey Ewing and Januarie York host poets, spoken-word artists, and aspiring rappers.
Kafe’ Kuumba, now in its 36th year, is also a place where aspiring poets and/or spoken-word artists can hone their craft. You can also check out the monthly open mic at the Chatterbox (again, if you are over 21), or the acoustic open mic at the Irving Theater, or the Nightjar Poetry Series, at Tube Factory artspace (which has an open mic after the featured performance).
If you’re an aspiring poet, you should go to an open mic! Do yourself a favor, though, and know what you’re going to read before you get up to the podium. Practice your delivery once or twice, don’t go over your allotted time and be respectful to your audience.
Day Two
2:30 p.m. I park at the Circle City Industrial Complex (CCIC), adjacent to Mass Ave.
One hundred years ago this massive building housed the Schwitzer Corporation, a hub of auto manufacturing. Currently it houses over 100 artists along with many businesses.
I’m here to meet up with Ken Avidor, who has a studio on the second floor.
Ken will show a film he made of me reading four poems from my forthcoming poetry collection “A Thing for Border Towns.” The venue will be his G’LUME Theater, which is just a small room with some chairs and a projector adjacent to his CCIC studio. (Yes, it’s a satirical reference to Newfields’ multimedia extravaganza.)
Ken’s in his studio working on some illustrations when I arrive. I give him fliers for the event. I made them with my panoramic photos from a road trip I took along the US-Mexico border in October 2023.
Ken is one of the illustrators for a bimonthly French periodical, “La Decroissance,” roughly translating to “Degrowth.” I could go on a bit trying to describe this publication through the lens of horseshoe theory, but just say it’s not the Paris Match magazine.
Ken has contributed his illustrations to Screw, Punk Magazine and Weirdo. Lately Ken’s been making films of episodes of Bicyclopolis, the title of the eponymous graphic novel which might be described as the journal of Dan, who bikes 70 years into the future using a human-powered time travel device called a “Velochonitron.”
7 p.m. I’m in the audience for “Frida … A Self-Portrait” written and performed by Brazilian actor Venessa Severo, at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. The woman being portrayed is the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, renowned for her surrealistic self-portraiture, much of which she painted during her marriage to Mexico’s greatest muralist Diego Rivera. (“Frida … A Self-Portrait” closed on April 7.)
Kahlo’s popularity, which has eclipsed that of her husband, might have something to do with the health challenges that she was forced to overcome. These include a childhood bout with polio and being impaled by an iron pipe during a trolley car accident in Mexico City when she was 18.
The most harrowing scenes are those in which you see Severo as Frida reacting to severe pain by injecting herself with the morphine and meperidine to which she was addicted.
After the performance, Devon Ginn, the IRT’s director of inclusion and community partnerships, asks questions to three Indy-based artists/art professionals onstage. These include artist Beatriz Vásquez, Indiana Historical Society curator Nicole Martinez-LeGrand, and Daniel Del Real, the curator for the Global Village Welcome Center.
One audience member asks about accusations that Kahlo appropriated culture from Mexican indigenous peoples to make her art.
Daniel Del Real’s response seems particularly astute:
“I’m probably not the right person to answer that question,” he says. “But I will share that I don’t believe she was appropriating. I think a lot of Mexicans are mestizo. We do have European (blood). I mean, look at me, I’m pretty pale. I’m pretty white. But I identify with my Mexican ethnicity.
“And I think that’s what Frida did in her lifetime. Now going back to whether curatorship should make that clear, I think, I think just letting people know that she was half-German, half-Mexican is enough. But she chose to embrace her indigenous side. I think that’s all we need to know. I think it’s a fair way of showcasing her heritage.”
Day Three
8 a.m. As I jog on the Monon Trail in Carmel, I pass the “Sail” sculpture, installed in 2019 by Indy-based Owens + Crawley. I get something out of it every time I look at it.
The structure of the 29-foot-tall sculpture is aluminum, supporting a mosaic of acrylic panels that evoke a sail from the outside. From the inside they make you think of stained glass in a place of worship. It offers a contemplative experience for anyone willing to ponder its dimensions and its meaning.
You wouldn’t know, just by looking at it, the stress and drama involved in its creation.
The upcoming film, “F*2020: Surviving the Pandemic,” directed by Paul Nethercott, documents the challenges that Quincy Owens and Luke Crawley, the sculpture’s creators, had during its fabrication. But its installation in Carmel, before the onset of COVID-19, presaged the even larger challenge the artists faced trying to keep their families together.
A few days ago, I went to see the rough cut of the film at Kan-Kan Cinema. Quincy is shown talking a lot during the COVID-19 lockdown, and you get hints of a storm brewing. Suffice to say, it wasn’t an easy time in the Owens household.
I told Paul, after a previous viewing, that the film needed a subtitle. I’m glad to see it has one. I’m not sure if I can take credit for that change, but I’m glad to see it. (Maybe he took my suggestion here because I made use of the F word in the title of my book “Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana: Poems and Short Prose.”)
It turned out that Ken Avidor, who was in the audience, was sketching Paul the whole time. I was the one to introduce the two.
Day Four
1:30 p.m. I check out an exhibition at the Herron School of Art & Design, “Give & Take”, which features participatory artworks by artists. “Blow Me” April Knauber is, I suppose, the most visceral of these. Her wood chair, a found object, had hundreds of wads of chewed bubble gum stuck to it.
There’s a free-of-charge bubble gum machine adjacent to the chair. You are encouraged to chew it and stick your wad on the chair. It’s a work of art that Beavis, Butthead and Marcel Duchamp might appreciate. (The “Give and Take” exhibition closed but you can read about it here.)
But the works that stick in my mind are those of Constance Scopelitis. In “Cookies,” you see a robed woman looking kinda sassy. The only color you see on her face, partly hidden by the robe, is the red gloss on her puckered lips. A whirlwind of cookies, emojis, and consumer products circles around her. This work is a lenticular photographic print, which the artist began as a pencil and paper illustration.
You see a much smaller image of “Cookies” in her wall-hanging AI-powered image generator titled “Coco Puff AI.” Your job as an observer is to type in a description of “Cookies” (and/or another work titled “Crackers in Bed”) as best you can into the textbox so the AI image generator can process it.
I type in a description of “Cookies” but my description is more morbid than it has to be: “A woman in a death shroud surrounded by a whirlwind of consumer products.” And this is what the interactive CoCoPop screen looks like after 10 seconds:
Maybe the point here is to have fun, and to test the limits of artificial intelligence. If you play along, you end up with what is clearly a slick AI-generated image, not a work of art. Which just might be the intent of the work, to show there’s still a place for the artist, considering the current state of AI. As for tomorrow, who knows?
AI is fraught territory these days for visual artists and writers. I know a little something about how fraught it is, having prompted Microsoft’s DALL-E image generator to reimagine a Carmel roundabout in the style of Dali before posting it to Facebook. I thought it was funny. DALL-E and DALI: GET IT?
Boy, was I wrong to assume that people would, like, have a sense of humor about this. I got a lot of negative feedback from Indy-area artists, who considered using AI-generated imagery a type of thievery and a more grievous crime than shooting your puppy’s brains out. But there were also those who saw nothing wrong with using AI image generation as a tool.
Ultimately this online debate inspired me to start writing an article on AI — rather than burying my head in the sand — and interview artists who use AI to further their creative endeavors.
6 p.m. I go to the Chatterbox monthly open mic hosted by Mat Davis, who read some of his haikus. I enjoy the relaxed, conversational format of this poetry series where everyone is expected to be respectful, but no one is required to give trigger warnings. I see a guy I haven’t seen for a while, John Clark, the founder of the literary zine pLopLop which has a storied history in Indianapolis.
John reads a found poem. “I’d written a poem on a piece of scrap paper but the list of best sellers on the other side seemed more interesting,” he tells me.
I read a poem that deals with the issue that Daniel Del Real addressed during the IRT community convo: cultural appropriation.“ A Thing for Border Towns” is the title poem of my forthcoming collection and will appear in Ken Avidor’s short film.
Day Five
I’m at the Circle City Industrial Complex. I had a good time at the showing of “A Thing For Border Towns” which runs for seven minutes and is on repeat throughout the night. Nothing makes me happier than when friends, fellow artists, pay a visit, and I have a few of those, and meet a lot of new people!
Day Six
12:17 p.m. I’m at the Global Village Welcome Center checking out the artwork in “The World Art Expo.”
The mixed-media painting “Sanguine” by Jonathan Angulo makes an impression on me, with its depiction of a woman with eyes gouged out, clutching a vase of daisies and a rifle in her hands.
While viewing this painting, I thought of the border town of Tecate, Mexico, where I spent a night last October. The town is stunningly beautiful, and the people I meet are beautiful, but it’s also a hub of cartel activity and murder without recourse.
6 p.m. I stop by Tube Factory artspace to see Michael Martone read his work at the launch party for Booth 19 — the literary magazine of Butler University’s MFA program.
Martone is the author of one of my favorite short stories, “Everybody Watching and the Time Passing Like That,” which was published in his first collection of stories, “Alive and Dead in Indiana.”
The story focuses on the high school years of the actor James Dean who grew up in Fairmount, Ind., and who died in 1955 at age 24. It’s written from the perspective of Dean’s high school drama teacher Adeline Mart Nall. Nall was still alive when Martone wrote the story, in the early 1980s, which meant he had to get her permission to publish. She let him do so, even though he mixed fiction with fact when putting words in her mouth.
Day Seven
8:10 a.m. Working on a poem for my forthcoming book, “A Thing for Border Towns: Poems and Prose,” set on the Gulf shore east of Brownsville, Texas, where I saw Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets on their pads in late October, 2023:
Here’s the poem, which kinda relates to some recent (not fake) news items about Elon Musk:
Boca Chica
Just as the SpaceX rocket lifts off the pad
a flock of egrets fly in tangential to
the shock wave, over the head of Henry
Ford (his ghost), heading to Mexico.
Ford wants to mass-reproduce himself
to populate Mars, and to dedicate
the whole planet to square dancing
and the production of model-Ts.
Think of it; a whole planet dedicated
to an industrialist in body and spirit!
He needs Elon Musk’s OK for this novel
idea, but the CEO is indisposed
at the moment, having just pushed a tweet
alleging Jewish hatred of white people.
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