Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA
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Posts tagged "phoenix"
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| Image: dustinphillips via flickr CC license |
Here in Phoenix, the predicted high temperature today is 115 degrees. On Sunday morning at The Sitting Frog Zen Center, we discovered that all the candles had melted in the heat.
The light rail (We built it, you bastards, as Jon Talton is fond of saying) which opened at the end of 2008, has been a success, and has proved the potential of an efficient public transport system - something that, however addicted you are to your car, is becoming increasingly necessary. But weather like this means that only the youngest and hardiest can get by without a car, unless their home and their destination are adjacent to a light rail stop. For public transport to be viable year-round, we need to spend as much on creating shade as on buying trains and buses.
Here’s me with Lee Harvey Oswald at Paul Wilson’s fantastic show at Willo North Gallery in Phoenix last Friday. I’ll post a review soon.
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| St. Ness Oil on canvas |
St. Ness depicts a Loch Ness Monster that is almost cartoonish, but not quite. While the monster is close to being cute, the detail of the water it inhabits is so convincing that the picture has the sinister, lonely beauty of the best of the American “creature feature” films of the 1940s and 1950s.
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| Among the Fortunate Oil on Canvas |
And why is he/she surrounded by birds? And why is the stick he/she carries carved in the shape of a bird?
Bledsoe is actually a realistic painter, in that the more his work is examined, the fewer clear answers or statements are to be found. This is the life we live, in which everything is in plain sight, and yet everything is hidden, and the meanings we find are only inventions. Richard Bledsoe brings news of real life.
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| Public Eye by Peter Bugg |
On display was work by the always-excellent Michele Bledsoe, Jeff Falk, Steve Gompf, and a fine graffiti artist named DOSE, whom I hadn’t heard of before but whose combining of images of Bob Dobbs and a Day of the Dead skeleton I found beautiful and unsettling.
The standout for me, though, was the work of Peter Bugg. His collection of dinner plates, onto which he had stuck widely-published photographs (taken by paparazzi) of female celebrities such as Britney Spears inadvertently (or perhaps not) showing their naked genitals, said something surprising about our culture of emotional voyeurism. Unsurprisingly, it was also the most polarizing work on display, with some people (including me) finding it compelling while others claimed it wasn’t art at all. (I didn’t know people still made that claim, but can now testify that they do.)
With a Warholian understanding of context, Bugg artlessly and artfully succeeds in making a point about celebrity culture (what Debord called The Society of the Spectacle and Chris Hedges calls The Empire of Illusion) - nonevents turned into bread and circuses. I had looked at these photographs before, but Bugg made me actually see them for the first time.
Steve Shadow Schwartz posted this review of the book on The Poisoned Pen website:
Barry Graham has written another strong and affecting novel. After last summer’s brilliant The Wrong Thing, he is back with a new book that is both short and immensely powerful. This is a love-hate hymn to Phoenix, Arizona and a truly intense story of love and forgiveness. Laura Ponto, an investigator for the public defender’s office in Phoenix is at the prison release of Frank Del Rio, a sexual predator and murderer. When she threatens him and subsequently assaults another person in the course of her work, she loses her job. This brings her into contact with David Regier, a reporter whom she loathes but somehow finds herself becoming involved with. As the story of their respective lives unfurl, to us and to each other, we learn what led them to the relationship they pursue.
The accretion of quotidian detail belies the constant tension that drives the characters and their search for acceptance of themselves and each other. We see the struggle that Frank goes through in trying to control his urges and the response of Laura, whose involvement in Frank’s life is spelled out in a stunning series of scenes. These red-hot words could only be written by Barry Graham as he is someone who has worked these stories and lived these nightmares.
Graham shows us how much can be put into a short novel; his take on Phoenix and all its problems serves as background to a story of breathtaking intensity. As both an ex-professional prize fighter and a Zen monk, his perspective on the moral dilemmas we all face is unique
That love and compassion is the answer seems to be a given. However it is the questions that often seem muddled and inchoate. This engrossing and heartbreaking novel is a must read.
Barry Graham will be at the Poisoned Pen on Tuesday, February 28th. He will discuss and sign his novel. He will also recite, from memory, passages from the book. This a unique talent and a rare treat.
Now Frank is being released on parole, and they both learn that their lives are still intertwined. Their story will end in a place even darker than it began. This shattering noir tale of suspense, sex, violence, love and death in the urban desert of Phoenix, Arizona, has been called “one of the great post-realist novels” by the French magazine Transfuge. It is Barry Graham’s most uncompromising novel to date, and Laura Ponto is his most unforgettable protagonist.
While I was put off by the (lack of) ethics of Stacey Champion, the Filmbar’s P.R. flack, who responded to criticism of the Filmbar without disclosing her professional interest (see the comments to this post, and this follow-up), I hoped my prediction would be wrong. I was never sure if Ms. Champion was showing shady ethics or just incompetence; those in the know told me a large part of the reason for the Filmbar’s hiring her was that she doesn’t charge as much as more professional spin doctors. Her comments on the second post suggest that she doesn’t understand the meaning of “professional interest.”
The Filmbar has, as I predicted, become primarily a venue for bands and D.J.s, a larger version of The Lost Leaf. Though it continues to show films, it seems to be focusing on films that are in the public domain - so the Filmbar can charge admission to see films it doesn’t have to pay for. I’m curious as to how many customers are paying to see films they could watch at home for free.
When the Filmbar’s original programmer, Steve Weiss, was laid off, its programming was done by Andrea Beesley-Brown, the “Midnite Movie Mamacita,” who had just opened The Royale, an independent grindhouse in Mesa. The Royale, which is closing tomorrow, had also been inclining toward old public domain films.
I predict that the Filmbar will close in the first quarter of the coming year, or else will continue as a music venue and will either stop showing films, or just show whatever it can get for free in order to justify the name of the place.
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| Ai |
When I got to L.A., Larry Fondation and I talked late into the night, as we usually (always) do. At one point, he showed me the Bloomsbury paperback of Of Darkness and Light, published more than 20 years ago. He had ordered a used copy soon after we met in 1997, because the book was then out of print and had never been published in the U.S. The copy he had was signed by me, in 1996, to the poet Ai, who I spent some time with back then. “Light in all your tomorrows,” I wrote to her. She had her last of those on March 20 last year.
Tomorrow, Larry and I will be reading (him), reciting from memory (me) and signing books at the Independent Book Fair.
At the Filmbar in downtown Phoenix starting at 9 this evening, Make My Baby (click here for my review of a recent show) will be playing… and one of its members, Lonna Kelley, will reunite with her old band, The Broken-Hearted Lovers, formerly known as The Reluctant Messiahs.
Admission is $5, with proceeds going to the legal fees of Kevin Pate, who’s also playing tonight.
