Semantikon/Three Fools Press was founded in Southwest Ohio in 2003. My aspiration being, to develop an online community media co-operative highlighting Midwest artists while also working to help artists the transition from the brick-and-mortar art world to the networked world during a time when the digital divide was rapidly widening by not only publishing their work, but also offering free technology services, new media training and general consultative services to help artist make the transition. In the 6 years Semantikon/Three Fools Press was was actively publishing, we produced over 60 original features of visual art, literature, opinion and film as well as 9 original e-Books. In addition to our site features, we also hosted our own server-based web TV station (via the now defunct Miro Platform), radio station (Via Live 365), a blog (Hypergraphia) as well as collaborating to produce 8 community events to support and highlight our featured artists and our operations. In June of 2009, Semantikon/Three Fools Press published its last feature, in July of that year, we published out last blog post, a review of Magnolia Electric Co. concert in Austin. Although the reasons we stopped publishing are numerous and frankly, too amorphous to detail here, the initial goals of highlighting Midwest artists and helping them traverse the widest arc of the digital divide, was met with praise and considered by some to be, a precocious achievement considering we did in the time before "push button" publishing, smart phones and broadband. In my own terms, the success of semantikon, could be best summed up by the following exchange. Q: "What is semantikon is trying to do?" A: Create space where there is none."
In the Winter of 2019, after a series of meetings with former co-op members on what should happen to the website and archives, Semantikon/Three Fools Press moved to form a partnership with curator and archivist Kelly O'Donnel. Kelly's passionate work documenting the Southwest Ohio Arts community over the past 25 years, including many of the folks we worked with, made this an ideal partnership. At the time of this publication, during the height of COVID-19, the entire semantikon website and archives are being collated and organized into her larger archives, with plans to package her extraordinary work and see that archive be delivered to the Cincinnati Art Museum for future generations enjoy, and we hope draw inspiration from. To that end, we sent an invitation to all former Ohio-rooted features to write a retrospective essay on their experiences with semantikon, the arts community during the we were active, and their view on that time and the state of online publishing today. For our final feature, enjoy six retrospective essays by former features, collated in order of the feature. In addition, find a timely reiteration of the cut-up poem, "Quelle Horreur", by our first literary feature, the dearly missed Aralee Strange.
For those who were there from the beginning, we thank you. To those who read and learn about our work in some future time, we thank you for your careful consideration of our story and, and aspirations to speak for and about, our time.
Lance Oditt
Founder, Editor and Community Manager
Semantikon/Three Fools Press
October 5, 2020
Retrospective Essays
Mark Flanigan
Exiled from Main Street: Safe Harbor
Aralee Strange (1943-2013): Quelle Horreur
A postumous reiteration of cut-up poem "Quelle Horreur" from our 1st Literary Feature
Patrick Sebastian (now Pretemdas Kirtana)
The Thing About Dorothy
Nathan Singer
That Year (And After)
Joseph Winterhalter
Variations on the Avant Garde
Mick Parsons
A Moth Among Troubadors
Fritz Kappler
Looking Back...
Nick Barrows
In Retrospect...
Mark Flanigan
First regular feature and syndicated columnist Exile on Main Street (2000-2004) and Exiled from Main Street (2004-2009), Guest Editor (May 2006), e-Book: Minute Poems(2007)
Exiled from Main Street: Safe Harbor
I haven’t written anything for a while. Which is why having to sit down just now to write for semantikon conjures a familiar feeling.
After all, back in early 2003, after having abruptly resigned from my monthly literary column at X-Ray Cincinnati, I wasn’t writing much either, for the entire experience had left me flattened and unmoored.
X-Ray Cincinnati began in January 2001 as a sort of upstart attempting to challenge Cincinnati’s local alternative newspaper, CityBeat, the former positioning itself as something like an alternative to the alternative. I wrote the cover story for the first issue and had a monthly column titled Exiled on Main Street that appeared most months, one that detailed my Little Tramp-like exploits living downtown trying to make it as a writer as I toiled away as a suburban warehouseman.
But having been asked by the publisher to collate and edit a literary supplement for the magazine in February 2003, a task I threw my whole weight behind and saw through to a satisfactory and challenging degree in my estimation, said publisher and I bumped heads over the inclusion of the opening piece, an excerpt from the novel A Prayer for Dawn by Nathan Singer, titled “Welcome to Niggertown.” As a result, the two of us resorted to playing a game of chicken and, as is often the case when two stubborn people play chicken, there was no winner.
Short story shorter: The solution I proffered was either they publish the piece in question, or they published my resignation instead.
And as I said while signing off for the last time in X-Ray: I liked my little column. Finally, I had found a platform after so many years of writing diligently for an audience of one. That said, there were in fact other, ancillary reasons in mind while I ushered myself to the exit door.
For one, I wasn’t enjoying the constraints (or discipline, maybe) of my column’s smallish word count. As is still the case now, at the time I was most interested in writing stories that explored all necessary detours and therefore required a large canvas, which resulted in more than one occasion in me doing stories in serial form, an enterprise not particularly suited to a monthly magazine, especially one with a sometimes erratic publishing schedule.
To make matters worse, because the paper had increasingly become a collective in which its writers were expected to chip in on its production, I found myself jumping from writing a column, to being a Contributing Editor, to picking up the published magazines at the press, to dropping off copies at distribution sights, to attending meetings, to realizing that a certain month’s worth of magazines didn’t make it to the streets—this after spending much of my creative energy the prior month writing my column and often proofreading the magazine—to doing interviews and features and literary supplements and, finally, to writing a resignation, the whole venture initially pitched as a place where writers would be paid for their work, when in fact the opposite had proved true: I was paying to play, and how.
So, yeah, there I was in early 2003, after something that had started as a creative shot in my arm had turned instead into something resembling a bad habit, all my momentum and inspiration dissipated, left with the awareness that my column had been more than a series of individual pieces, had something of the arc of a novel even, but the necessary armature had broken abruptly, leaving my sculpture in an unfinished, unsatisfactory state, and I had no idea what to do about that fact.
Enter Lance Oditt and semantikon.
The smoke had barely cleared before the former came in and picked me off the mat. Lance and I had some history in collaborating creatively, seeing as we had produced Ominibscure, a literary magazine that published from April to September 1998, another creative enterprise that had ended abruptly, this one largely because of my own personal issues related to mental health and self-medication.
Ominibscure had been a print magazine, but not merely. It also had a web component that was ahead of its time. Hell, in 1998, I had no idea what the web even was. But Lance did.
Thus, when he began to speak about creating an online creative arts journal in early 2003 and asked me if I would consider continuing my Exiled series on it, I was interested, even though I couldn’t spell this new venture either. Thanks to my former publisher at X-Ray who had charitably gifted me a computer, I was no longer using my old Brother WP-3410, and so I had some idea at the time what an online community looked like.
Despite having reservations that an online community where people wore clothes could actually work, I signed on.
As I remember it, Lance initially asked me for some short stories to test the waters before I resumed my Exiled on Main Street series in earnest, the first of which was published in April of 2003 alongside a bevy of less-distinguished writers such as William Blake and Antonin Artaud whose works were made available via semantikon’s library of public domain works. The following month semantikon’s publishing arm, Three Fools Press, debuted with a print version of a mini essay of mine entitled Bukowski, which accompanied a performance event wherein I attempted to conjure the titular character’s spirit by performing his works live.
Afterwards, I spent the bulk of 2003 working on and sending short stories while semantikon diversified with offerings such as audio tracks from the late, great Aralee Strange and poetic works by the mysterious Marle Galveo. It wasn’t until November 2003, though, that I finally resumed my Exiled on Main Street series with a piece titled “Dear Cathy,” the longest Exiled piece to date and one that was miraculously unleashed to the world in one fell swoop.
I wasn’t sure what to attribute it to, but the response to this story was immediate and unequivocal: Never had so many readers reached out to me to say how much a story had affected them.
Reading said piece at the 3rd Annual Exiled Show, which semantikon also helped produce and which followed shortly after its publication, I felt that any momentum or mojo that may have been lost by my resignation at X-Ray had been regained, which in turn injected the prerequisite energy to continue my series in hopes of guiding it towards a more proper ending, an endeavor that was only further bulwarked by the site itself growing exponentially: the public domain library got fatter, the monthly literary feature was introduced, then a monthly visual artist, then films, then an RS feed to tell others about it all, then a radio station to soundtrack the party… and, through it all, something resembling a true community began to emerge.
By April of 2004, when it was clear that my decade-long stint in residence on Main Street should and would come to an end, I sat down to write the denouement to my series secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t just be me yelling into an empty well, and I only quit yelling after 6000 words, an ending of a story I began to tell in the pages of X-Ray Cincinnati, but had not the room to tell there. Thanks to semantikon my book, and my time on Main Street, had been brought home.
Which was more of a beginning than it was an end.
In September 2004, I had the honor of being semantikon’s literary feature, where I could exercise my somewhat dormant poetic faculties, while also that month Three Fools Press published in the stomach, an annual review that featured a selection of Exiled pieces alongside a smorgasbord of talented writers that had featured or submitted to the site. There was also a special edition with a cover designed by semantikon visual artist alum, Tim McMichael, a true ARTifact that sold out almost as quickly as it was available. Said book release corresponded at a show held in the courtyard of the Iris, my home on Main Street, on my last night in residence there.
The preceding surely must stand testament to the dynamism of semantikon when considering that it only references the first year of the site’s existence, partial as it is.
It was natural, then, once I found myself ensconced on Prospect Hill, only a stone’s throw from my beloved Main Street, that I should begin a new column. Thus, in December 2004, Exiled From Main Street debuted in its pages, a prelude of sorts that was celebrated with a fifth (and final) Exiled reading, once again sponsored by the good folks of semantikon.
After that, as the man said, it was on. By my hand and count:
35 new columns
4 short stories
12 archived columns
18 poems
1 broadside
1 song
3 live audio excerpts
1 guest editorship and
1 published poetry manuscript that found its way to
10,000 downloads, becoming the best-selling Mark Flanigan product of all-time, but only because, like all the other wares offered on the site, the price of admission was free.
Which reminds me of something Lance once said in the forward to in the stomach, something that strikes at the heart of the entire enterprise: “With every user that has taken the time to visit semantikon, a community space has been activated where the audience and artists re-define what can be had when you’re being offered something that is free, or worse, for spare change.”
Aside from getting this author out of the gutter and helping him find a sense of community to further shield him from the void, the site offered so much more on a professional level. Of greatest import was the credence and legitimacy it lent my work by dint of being surrounded by such an impressive array of unmistakable talent: Joseph Winterhalter, Jay Bolotin, Angela Marsh, Nick Barrows, Michael Crossley, Stacy Sims, Aaron Cowan, Mick Parsons, Kate Schmidt, to name just a few, were the flowers that transformed my foliage into a bouquet. Without the legitimacy and context each provided, my outstretched hands would have been holding mere shrubs.
What’s more, semantikon also provided an apparatus that functioned as a de facto website for someone like me who was lacking the wherewithal, expertise, or money to make a website, which was priceless. The ensuing online presence opened any number of publication and performance opportunities to me, and continued to long after it ceased publication in June 2009.
Even then semantikon did not go dark, but instead continued to function as a living online archive, where it remains accessible and resonant as of press time, not unlike many of the positive outcomes that resulted from my having signed on upon its inception. The ability of seeing my column through and keeping it together for the long haul afforded me the confidence to continue to look for other ways to network and grow my own community through the years, as well as answer the phone when who else but CityBeat called and asked me to write some Exile from Main Street columns for them.
But that’s another story for another time. Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t be here where I am—writing this now, from this vantage point—if not for my having experienced semantikon’s ideal, a safe harbor where there were few restrictions and even fewer rules, the only one I could tell being that it was imperative for it to operate outside the inherently flawed, commodity-driven model emerging elsewhere online.
That battle, of course, is all but lost now. But in addition to bearing witness to its trove of intrinsically worthwhile artistic self-expression, this semantikon archive should also forever prove that said battle was not waged without salvos from some sort of resistance. And it’s that very resistance that I am proud to have played a part in, however (im?)modest my part may have been.
Mark Flanigan
Cincinnati, OH
August 2020
Aralee Strange (1943-2013): Quelle Horreur
A postumous re-iteration of cut-up poem "Quelle Horreur" found in our first literary feature (October 2003) in honor of Aralee's life's work and early support of our fledgling community. Enjoy Aralee's 1st feature, listen to Aralee reading Dr. Pain's Main Street Remedy, enjoy Aralee's second feature. Purchase the excellent The Road Itself, Collected Works of Aralee Strange (Mark Flanigan, Editor). Listen to Aralee read Quelle Horreur on a postumous radio essay on WVXU about her work and life.

Patrick Sebastian (Pretemdas Kirtana)
Literary Feature November 2003, 2nd Columnist, Dorothy and the Snake Handlers
The Thing About Dorothy
In the summer of 1975 our family station wagon was on a seemingly endless stretch of Oklahoma highway that promised a campground eventually where we would set up and settle down but that promise seemed further somehow the further we drove and, of course, I had to pee. That is, I did just have to pee when I said so the first several times, now what I had to do was more akin to what happens when you release a can of shaken soda, so I tried not to move, while pressing my pelvis and tightening my belly and praying to “please God, don’t let me pee my pants in the car.” My dad, based on absolutely no other interaction with me my first nine years of my life, suggested again that we could “just pull over by the side of the road. For God’s sake, it’s alright! No one is going to see you” Now, I was even more unlikely to pee standing by the side of the road than I was to go play outside on a Sunday in my church clothes, but the pressure was on my bladder and my brain and I stifled tiny moans of restraint when my father raised the stakes,
“Well, young man, you pee your pants in this car and you’re gonna wish you had gone by the side of the road because you won’t be able to sit down for a week! Clear?”
So, okay, to recap: if I pee my pants I get the shit beat out of me. That’s great, total evacuation parenting.
“Jim,” my mom’s voice, scolding at first, then lifting, as she said,
“Jim, a house.”
And there it was and I believed even more in Bible Jesus, that could not only turn water into wine, but also, and personally more meaningful to me, He could also provide a decent place for a prissy little boy to pee.
We drive up the incline to the house.
I gingerly ease out of the car and head up the driveway, taking each step as though I might somehow slosh and spill. Approaching I see a woman who I think, despite her station and location, thinks she’s a movie star, oh not a real movie star; even she only thinks she’s Shelly Winters, but nevertheless, she’s stretched out, cornfed, on a lawn chair, wearing a bikini, holding a tin foil sort of visor and wearing dark sunglasses, both of which she lowers when I, dry-mouthed and bladder-full, nervously ask,
“Excuse me, ma’am, could I please use your bathroom, please?”
And she looks directly, coolly at me, like I was her husband’s divorce lawyer and not a little boy just too proper to go pee outside and she read the line as though she’d practiced it for my arrival, as though she’d been saving it for the first person to intrude on her sunbathing, she said,
“Now. Just WHO. Do you think you are?!”
My breath caught in my throat and I tried to swallow as I turned and moved as quickly as I dared back to the car, my face burning with inexplicable shame.
“Now. Just WHO. Do you think you are?”, she had asked, for some reason meaning to make me feel badly. It’s a damn good question. Don’t misunderstand, of course, she was an awful bitch, but the moment is clearly unforgettable, not only because of her bad B-movie actress impression but because it’s a good question.
Who Do you think you are?
Who do I think I am?
Who am I, as opposed to who I’ve been told I am?
When you tell your story, you frame your story. You reframe it simply in its telling without changing a thing. Even if the facts or circumstances in the story we share are unpleasant or painful, as is often the case in my own, even in simply telling the story we become a witness, rather than singularly a victim or actor.
The stories in “Growing Up Jimmy: Tales of Bible Belt Survival on the Yellow Brick Road” and the “Dorothy and Snakehandlers” series published on Semantikon are all filled with longing and challenging moments of discovering “just Who I think I am”, who I’ve been told I am, and what rises and remains. A few of those stories, such as, “Rollerball” and “True Confessions of a Music Nerd”, I’ve enjoyed dusting off, editing a bit, and doing readings of them with the pop music cues played that are already written into them for fundraisers as recently as 2013. Audiences seem to connect with the plight of the preteen character I was in these stories, the overt humor, and the soundtrack; music rises, the hope remains. Seventeen years after writing these pieces, I retain a fondness for them, not because I wouldn’t edit and tweak this and that, of course, I would, but because of a courage in them that was new for me then and surprises me now looking back at them. That’s true. It still surprises me that I could just tell a story in my own voice because I had no frame of reference for having a voice. Having a voice was a foreign concept for the five year-old I was who was so afraid to speak that I was presumed to be a mute or the ten or fifteen year old I was, legs trembling, fire red and switch-welted, crying, exhausted, pleading for the beating to stop. Being granted a voice, being heard, listened to had been almost solely the privilege of, well, someone else; someone assuredly heterosexual, someone with money, someone who might kick back with you at your favorite sports bar for a cold one, which is to say, not me.
I look back at these stories as foundational to finding my voice and Semantikon as the place and people who heard it, believed in it, and gave it a place of safety and freedom.
It was in 2003 that I self-published, “Growing Up Jimmy” and Semantikon invited me to join it’s diverse collective of writers and artists. The self-published chapbook of “tales of Bible belt survival on the Yellow Brick Road” sold modestly well with what I had at my disposal which was satisfying, but being published on Semantikon, not only put my work along side the work of talented writers, but would grant these stories and future ones, an exponentially larger, worldwide, in fact, potential audience, which was both a little frightening and very exciting. Feedback was largely positive and I have often, for just a moment, but a very important moment, connected with someone with words on a page, a story from the stage, or text on a screen read by…a cop, yeah, a cop, who then, knowingly shared with me about the abuse he had endured as a child and thanked me. He thanked me. Under what other circumstance would That happen? Let me help. None. The depth of shared humanity of such moments is undeniable. To have risked my voice and to find it was safe to do so was an adventure in growth made possible by Semantikon and it gave me the space and time to build a bit of confidence that would be necessary later when essays such as “Do That To Me One More Time” garnered as pushback and name calling for me, as gratitude.
Not everyone was pleased with my voice but still the stories rose and hope remained and the stories I told are the stories I know – whether about the childhood faith healing of my dog in “Answering The Call” or calling out the gay “community” for what I perceived as victim-blaming when my friend and local DJ was beaten to death in “Do That To Me One More Time”.
The practice of writing, for me, proves that I have been beaten but not beaten blind or deaf or out of my heart, or completely out of my mind. If there can be language and words and a story, then perhaps, I can manage a story that is manageable and imagine myself stronger than my struggle, bigger than my fear, and even if a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, we can, together, witness these transitions, these times, these moments and in our witnessing we, writer and reader, are mattered into belonging, and that alone, perhaps, makes the work and vulnerability of writing worth it.
The stories I know and tell help move me, and in very fine moments, move you as well, the reader, the listener, a little closer to not just who we think we are but who we really are and what we actually feel and really see, which is, I promise, no matter who you are, a kaleidoscopic witness of experience that defies Kansas dust bowl sepia tones. Because that’s the thing about Dorothy, isn’t it? For all of Dorothy’s outrageous adventures in the technicolor land of Oz, she longed to and eventually did return gladly to a world of desolate black and white, telling her Aunt Em, who you’ll remember left her to fend for herself when the cyclone hit, that “there’s no place like home”. Hmm, I don’t know. I think maybe if Dorothy had the Munchkin nuts of The Lollipop Kids she might have more likely exclaimed that there’s some place a helluva lot better than home, a place of friends, and wonder, and color, and choice, and empowerment, if not absolute safety. There’s a place better than home and that place is belonging.
Belonging is something Semantikon engendered organically through nurturing its writer’s authenticity, creativity, and growth, belonging us to ourselves, our voice, our story, and to the larger world through the power, weight, and breeze of often strenuously chosen words and fearfully shared stories that grow our shared humanity.
Pretemdas Kirtana (Patrick Sebastian)
pdk
Nathan Singer
Feature April 2004, Guest Editor November 2006
That Year (And Since)
2004 was a watershed year for me. Most of my six published novels are either set in, or double back on, that year. In Blackchurch Furnace (2018) I refer to it as “the dawn of the apocalypse.” 2004 was the year that my first two-act play Chasing the Wolf premiered, my first novel A Prayer for Dawn was published, the year that I got married. It was also the year that two of my heroes, Hunter S. Thompson and Dimebag Darrell were killed by bullets (the former self-inflicted, the latter from a psychotic fan on stage). It was the year that the incompetent war criminal, the very nadir of American electoral politics at the time, George Dubya Bush was oiled up and squirted back into the White House (it was a simpler age).
It was the year that my best friend died.
To call 2004 tumultuous would be an understatement, at the very least. To be sure, all these years later, I’m still processing it. All of it. And as I page through In the Stomach, the Semantikon review from 2003-2004, those tumultuous memories awaken in my mind like a small tornado. I’m reading pieces that I haven’t read in well over a decade, created by writers I admire very much, but haven’t considered in far too long: Bess Rose Miller, Krista Franklin, the late and much-beloved Aralee Strange, so many others. I feel like I’m looking through a photo album, but it’s all in words.
It took quite a while to make my peace with calling myself a writer of any sort. I always figured I’d be a professional musician, exclusively. I spent the 1990s and into the 21st century blowing out my eardrums on stage (when I wasn’t dodging billy-clubs in the street), and always saw that as my true path. But around the turn of the new millennium I started to get very interested in writing, and spoken word performance. Admittedly, I didn’t know much of anything about spoken word at the time. I’d never even seen a spoken word show the first time I got on-stage to perform my writing. But I thought that maybe, just possibly, the same energy and ferocity that we were able to bring to the stage playing in metal bands could be transferred to solo spoken word as well. What the Beat writers had done with jazz, and the slam poets had done with hip hop, maybe could be done with metal and punk too. Maybe? Why not? It turned out that this idea was not unique to me, as I soon found myself sharing the stage with other like-minded word-slingers like Nick Barrows, Luke Radkey, Michael Crossley, Patrick Sebastian, and Mark Flanigan, who shared my enthusiasm for using poetry and narrative to create an unholy ruckus. And, indeed, ruckus seemed to be forever on the dance card.
I have to admit that I was not thinking “long term” back then. I loved the immediacy of the spoken word stage, and as my first sputtering forays into publishing had lead to chaos and upheaval (ask Flanigan about that sometime), it seemed that the ephemeral rush of the stage, and the anything-goes approach we took to performance during that time, would be how my art lived. I could never be exclusively a playwright after all, or a poet, a performance writer, a composer/musician, or actor, or a short story writer, or novelist. Not exclusively. I can’t be a “post-modernist,” a “satirist,” an “absurdist,” or a “surrealist” . . . unless I can be all of them. I suppose I could have at least tried to buckle down and chose any one of these disciplines as my focus, but nah. A multi-disciplinary approach to the creative arts, and an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship have suited me the best. If I were going to publish my work, it would have to be with a publisher who shared that vision. Thankfully, I’ve been able to find a small handful of publishers over the years that do. Lance Oditt was the first.
The bottom-line is, I lacked the discipline for anything more focused (I still do). In my novels, my characters often break into rhyming jags and stylized thematic riffs, very much as I do in my solo spoken word performances. When I started writing A Prayer for Dawn my intention was to simply attempt to deal, satirically, with the notion of art and culture in a conservative climate, which morphed suddenly into the reality of a frightened, angry, shell-shocked, conservative climate (the events of September 11th 2001 happened when I was about two months into writing). What purpose, I wondered, does art serve, particularly in times of war? Surely we know that art can heal, but what about art that is not meant to heal? What responsibility does the artist have to his/her society? Is there a limit to what a society should tolerate from its artists, and what is that limit? These are some of the issues I attempted to address in this book, all with a bent toward the satirical, the absurd, and at times, the surreal. (Present day America feels very surreal to me. It did in the early 2000s as well.) I also attempted a rather risky experiment in the writing of the piece, and that was writing the fiction in “real time,” as real events occur. Essentially, that means that although I had a basic concept of the work and all of my characters set, their reality, and the environment of the story, was constantly in flux. It is terrifying writing in such immediacy, but it is exhilarating as well. I wrote straight through with no “filter” or second thoughts for six months, keeping the “writing” going 24/7, which meant that I wrote significant chunks of the book in front of live audiences. Some of those very pieces were first published in Semantikon (but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself).
Two writers that I most admire are William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut. The aspect of both of their writing that most appeals to me is their appreciation for relativity. The idea at work here is that nothing is intrinsically “good or evil,” “sacred or profane,” “moral or immoral,” except that with which we have collectively (and perhaps arbitrarily) decided is such. And to further that idea; imagination has no morality. An artist may very well be an extremely scrupulous and ethical individual, and I should hope that she is, but her imagination, if said artist is anything of an artist at all, has no morals. A moral imagination is a stifled imagination. The common thread throughout all of my work my fiction – my music, my poetry, my spoken word, and was central to my doctoral dissertation – is the concept of “prison.” Physical prisons, economic prisons, social, spiritual, sexual, emotional, etc. Like Jean Genet, some of my characters appear in actual, state operated prisons. But all of the characters are in prison in one form or another. And each character is given pretty much “equal time.” In that regard, I have borrowed elements of the short story, and playwriting as well, to further my narrative. Each character has a personal story to tell. Each character deals with his or her own individual prison. Even A Prayer for Dawn’s third-person omniscient narrator finds herself in a prison of sorts. The purpose of all art, perhaps, is for the artist to free herself from walls, bit by bit, stone by stone.
I can say all of that now, but like I said before; back then I wasn’t thinking long-term. Thankfully, Lance was. Sometime around 2002 or 2003 Lance convened a group of us at some bar somewhere (memories are foggy and awash in whiskey). He had a big idea he called “Semantikon,” a collective-run arts journal published by his Three Fools Press that would feature an entire gamut of multi-disciplinary artists. This would be a journal without confines, without boundaries or limitations, without boxes, curated by the artists themselves, misfits and talented weirdoes all.
“So wait,” I asked, “we can curate issues ourselves?”
“I WANT you to curate them,” Lance said.
“And we can feature artists that we want to?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Damn. Aiight!”
2004 was a long time ago, or at least it feels that way. But as I look through the Semantikon archives I can’t help but notice how vital all of this material still seems to be. No one’s work (except, perhaps, some of mine) feels particularly dated. Did I have any idea back then that we would ever be preparing to have this stuff archived? Saved for posterity to be enjoyed by future generations? Please. I couldn’t have even fathomed it. But I’ll bet that Lance did. As I said above, Lance always seemed to be thinking long-term. And for that, and for giving me the opportunity to first see my work in print, I shall always be grateful. This work is a time capsule, a document, a journal, but it still lives, it still breathes. It still hits me in the heart, and in the stomach.
Nathan Singer 2020
Joseph Winterhalter
2nd Visual Art Feature, MetaNyn Sequence, Literary Feature October 2005: 13833 Manifesto
Variations on the Avant Garde
A loaded proposition -- in concept, and as an evolutionary articulation
I first met Lance on an icy November evening in 1998.
Nearing 1207 Main St., he and Flanigan appeared through a frosted street side window as an intrepid - albeit wobbly – pair of novice figure skaters, insistent on choreographing the ice dance ‘routine’ they had doggedly set upon themselves this particular evening.
I was finishing up a happy hour bartending shift, and after some hailing through the weather and a negotiation with the sidewalk, the 2 of them made it inside for a pop. Introductions were made, a few formalities exchanged, brief conversation and - along with a few more Irish whiskeys - the 3 of us lit out up from the basin to Northside and the Comet...
“What does it matter to us what judgements may later be passed upon
our obscure personalities? If we have seen fit to record the political
differences that exist between the majority of the Commune and
ourselves, this is not in order to apportion blame to the former and
praise to the latter. It is simply to ensure that, should the Commune
be defeated, people will know that it was not what it has appeared to
be up to now.”
Gustave Lefrançais addressing constituents, 20 May, 1871
Around this time – maybe later, sometime in 1999 – I came across the following in an exhibition review, and it has remained an ear worm throughout the intervening years:
“…at the end of the day, the last luxury of the 20th Century is context.”
CONTEXT
At its core this was what Semantikon.com provided. Context. Early 21st Century context…
As a premise it was simple enough.
Embrace the ‘form’ of the storied precedents set forth in the bevy of printed editions of art minded ‘Literary Journals’ produced by loose, avant-garde collectives throughout history. The surrealists, Letterist International, Fluxus and the like – not to mention zine culture, in all of its glorious DIY manifestations – were touchstones. Semantikon.com was conceived to follow suit. Sort of…
A shout in the wilderness, for sure, but one that staked a claim for - and voiced the validity of - a motley, abstract community of (mostly) midwestern artists.
And while we’re at it - build SEMANTIKON.COM from the ground up -- on the Internet.
Throughout the 1990’s, the concept of the Lyotardian “Death of the Grand Narrative” firmly took hold.
An overarching sense that by maintaining a linear arc of the importance of work produced mainly in the major culture centers across the globe, a larger number of voices were being excluded.
The emergence of the ‘World Wide Web’ was poised to combat this – nearly anyone could ‘get up,’ pushing their work out to an audience heretofore practically unreachable. Now, regional ‘micro-narratives’ were not only on equal footing with NYC, LA, London and Paris, etc. – they were locations of innovation - and where the truly exciting work was taking place. We always already had to work -- harder.
There’s a joke about being a serious ‘Artist’ in a joint like Cincinnati–
“It’s a great place to get a body of work together -- to take somewhere else.”
Not anymore.
All at once, “Elsewhere” was at our fingertips - via a click of a mouse - WORLDWIDE.
A distillation of our working praxis – firmly rooted in the ‘here and now’ of the time - broadcast internationally. Aesthetic positions became concise articulations of the NOW, however entrenched. Veteran campaigns engaged through trials by fire: Bolotin, Strange, LaCharity, Flanigan; or nascent, tentative gestures - workshop volleys of the green and embryonic.
Still, all beholden to a firmness of conviction - and belief. And still again, on equal footing.
Semantikon.com was our ‘Mechanism for Context.’
As a website - format-wise - Semantikon.com exploited the templates laid out by its forebearers.
By pairing a featured Literary Artist with a featured Visual Artist, on a roughly monthly schedule, the site took on an aura of prescience, auto-magically becoming an interrogation of intertextuality. Resonance and disruptions bloomed and withered again, only to reemerge – mutated, viral and more subversive - through the cacophony of voices accumulating within its 1’s and 0’s.
Not a luxury, by any means, but rather an organically manifest situation of ‘CONTEXT.’
Personally, I was fortunate enough to be twice invited – maybe 2 and a half, three times – to have my work, both visual and literary, featured on Semantikon.com.
Granted – some forms translated better than others...
First one: 2004
I work primarily as a Painter, and I make big paintings.
Lance - or Lance and I - hit on the idea of having an online Semantikon.com feature for a series of recent paintings I had been working up. The online feature, along with a coinciding ‘physical’ exhibition, would run simultaneously, with one feeding off of the other. Logistically speaking, we had a task in front of us.
For the online situation, capturing via photography the scale and subtlety of the new paintings, and the presence of a new technique I’d developed - utilizing a ridiculous number of layers of scraped and buffed oil paint and wax – was, frankly, a pain in the ass…
Long story short. After a few trials - and accepting the compromise that even if the individual painting images opened in a new ‘window’ online, the reproductions were what they were – we cobbled together a handful of images, a couple of facsimile pages of ‘Notes’ and, in hindsight, a wandering non-sequitur ‘statement.’ I hung the show in situ at some ‘Modernist’ high end furniture store I’d been working with, made some posters, and the ‘META-NYM Sequence: 5 Paintings’ exhibition was realized. Glitches and all.
Did it work?
YES -- insofar as you’d be hard pressed to find at the time any precedent - or ‘model’ - of an artist taking on the uncertainty and ambition necessary to even begin to entertain this as an idea, let alone have it succeed as a viable, emerging exhibition platform. This project was, in fact, relatively uncharted territory.
As an experience, the reach was there: great crowds at the opening and after, with a steady stream of online and in person engagement. I met a few collectors – several of whom have become lifelong friends, and received an occasional email of interest from some far-off locale. It also – indirectly – took me to Paris…
Context? Absolutely. We MADE the context, and it worked.
Still – some forms translate better than others...
Next one: Part I
Back to 1999 -- briefly.
I work primarily as a Painter. Primarily.
Adjacent to the visual work, I will on occasion break into a mode of writing – haltingly and belabored, still -around whatever it is I’m thinking about ‘about’ painting. Set off during some existential ‘dark night of the soul,’ and accompanied by the incessant reading and re-reading of some semi-obscure - albeit in my mind essential – books, 1999 was overrun by these – what? – episodes of malaise? The paint was drying up…
Y2K, the entrenchment of the YBA’s in Britain; being just a little bit older and - seemingly - none the wiser, I was hounded by an indescript, generalized Fin de Siècle ennui. I dove in. Hard.
Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, particularly the essay ’Cartouches;’ Isou and Debord, over and over, with a soundtrack of Call Me Burroughs, Morphine and The Stooges; Burroughs’ Nova Express and the cut-ups, running in tandem with an unhealthy obsession focused on the premise of Aronofsky’s film Pi. These works were exposing a METHOD – they also happened to be seeing through me, in order to see me through.
At the time, my studio was a 3rd floor tenement walk-up on E. 13th Street, #8. I was 33 years old, and on the evening of 3 May, 1999 – at approximately 10:10pm – I sat down to write…
I stood up at 7:48am the next morning with an 8-page manuscript: 13833 Variants of Apathetic Brilliance.
“I am interested in the distribution of physical vehicles
in the form of editions because I am interested in
the dissemination of ideas.”
Joseph Beuys, December 1970
“…physical vehicles in the form of editions…”
Of course.
As a ‘physical vehicle’ the 13833 V.A.B. was 8 typewritten pages, collected in a 12” x 9” craft paper envelope. This original text evolved into a self-produced, xeroxed ‘edition.’ A multiple of 33 first generation iterations - copies made from the original text; with a couple of working copies, and 8 ‘Artist Proofs.’
As a manuscript, the content of 13833 V.A.B. lent itself to a number of possible interpretations.
Was it a straight, deadly serious artist manifesto? An ‘arch-conceptual’ Baldessarian parody – with tongue firmly planted in cheek? Concrete poetry, wrapped up in an end-of-the-century post-punk samizdat?
It was, in fact, all this and more.
More or less…
Procedurally, what the text laid out was a proposal for a series of 13,833 individual 11” x 7.5” pieces – artworks - on Arches 140# cold press paper. A number of possible drawings and paintings, material studies and biographical artifacts; miscellaneous notes, novelties - ephemeral odds and ends. 13,833 of them.
A visual documentation - and archive - of TIME…
Nota bene: In order to secure 13,833 11” x 7.5” pieces, it was calculated that I would need 1,730 22” x 30” sheets of Arches paper. That’s an awful lot of raw material, and it’s not – to this day – inexpensive.
And still again - some forms (of ideas) translate better than others…
Ideally, the concept behind producing an artwork as a ‘multiple’ is that the piece provides an affordable entry – while maintaining the form of a physical ‘artifact’ - for a broad segment of “the people” to get into an artist’s body of work; and for getting a little bit of cabbage into the artists pocket, while you’re at it.
(That’s beneficial when you set yourself up to need 1,730 sheets of fancy French ‘art’ paper…)
While mass produced – within the scope of the edition – multiples are a mechanism for a more extensive distribution system, in a manageable, self-contained and portable format; although, by the very nature of a multiples ‘limited’ production, the dissemination of the idea will always already be just that – limited.
Still - and essentially - when considered within the maverick lineage that engendered it, and the motivations of that lineage which it challenged, the 13833 Variants of Apathetic Brilliance as manuscript manifests - fundamentally – as a written record of a number of possible IDEAS.
And as such, the 13833 V.A.B. took on a life of its own, as much as a piece of writing
as it lives as -- something else, entirely.
A loaded proposition, again -- in concept, and as an evolutionary articulation.
Next one: Part II
Full disclosure: I have absolutely no recollection as to the how - and vaguely the when, sometime in 2005 – it came to be that Lance approached me to post up again as a ‘Feature’ on Semantikon.com.
Not for the paintings this time, though…
The 13833 V.A.B. had stuck its head out in a few instances between 1999 and 2005.
A couple of ‘straight’ readings, parts of which were integrated into a sound collage for a spoken word CD project Flanigan put together; the occasional inclusion in exhibition of some of the individual works on paper, though minimal in number, and somewhat out of context.
And then, there was a performance - which injected the 13833 straight into the soul of Greil Marcus’ Ranters and Crowd Pleasers - at the 5/3 Bank Theater at the Aronoff Center (of all places) for the
November 2002 Weston Art Gallery InterMedia series.
Slack translations into French and Chinese of the entire text - read by a couple of aspiring ‘actresses’ in short skirts, fishnets and high, high heels; megaphone declarations from a shabby old man with a tin whistle; then a sharp suit rattling off the Notes on the V.A.B.: a situationist ‘cut-up’ of conspiratorial, Burroughsian candor; ruminations and post-modern Beat elegance.
Just maybe, it was this iteration that catapulted the piece into the realm of ‘literature’ in Lance’s mind, and mine as well. Regardless, plans were made for compiling the October 2005 Semantikon.com
‘Literary Feature’ – Joseph Winterhalter: 13833 Variants of Apathetic Brilliance.
Finally – some forms translate better than others.
At this point Semantikon.com had been hummin’ along for a while, having smoothed out the majority of bumps and bruises it had gathered in its infancy. Lance - being the wizard – continued to tweak and refine the ‘look’ of the site and its interactive facets, as well as the platform overall. It was, after all, an evolving cyber-organism - and things were solid.
We set up a time to meet. I gathered up everything I had relating to the project, fortified myself for a couple of days in ‘LanceWorld,’ and set out for Columbus – dead set on establishing, once again…
For me – ‘analogue’ as the day is long, still – this one turned out to be a breeze…
A breeze -- Just like that rushof air that engulfs you preceding the heat from a concussive blast.
First step was bog standard, apparently. At least in Lance’s world.
As the manuscript was printed on standard issue 8.5” x 11” typing paper, all that was needed to do was to scan each page - and the cover of the outer envelope - into the machine. It was perfectly formatted.
Lance worked some of his wizardry and within minutes – or an hour or two, depending on who you talk to – there was a glowing page of thumbnails on his screen; an ordered, tight grid of 9 images: the craft paper envelope and the 8-page 13833 V.A.B. text. A few spells and conjuring’s later, a click on any image would open up into a new window - revealing a nearly full-size reproduction of the chosen text page. Perfect.
Next, we input a short statement regarding the genesis of the manuscript, messed around with the format a bit. Seamless operation - and done.
The ‘Notes…’ however, were where the ‘juice’ was -- or at least where we could squeeze out a mind-boggling context for them -- by indulging in and taking full advantage of the repository of information that was instantly available on the ‘Internet’ of those days. Necessary information…
On stage, the Notes on the V.A.B became a careening, dynamic clarion call.
Distorted, megaphoned ‘pirate radio’ transmissions wrestling with the static din of a repetitive and droning - yet clear, straight - recitation of the 13833 text, tuned as ‘temp-morts’ translations in French, Chinese and English. A tin whistle bleat in a darkened room…
On paper, the Notes on the V.A.B. was a dog-eared, typewritten and carbon copied sludge…
crossed out, margin filled and crossed out again – non-sequitur wanderings, again –
aspiring out-takes maybe fallen from a trash bin at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur; most likely E. 13th Street.
As a ‘shareable’ document - in other words - it needed some help.
We went to work. Cut some lines, clarified others; rewrote a section here and there, assembling a pseudo-respectable – albeit esoteric, still – version of the notes. Whittled down from the original 3 pages of rewrites to a manageable and webpage appropriate 9 or so paragraphs, Lance introduced – once again – a little more ‘magic’ -- HYPERLINKS.
THIS. WAS. IT.
While not a completely foreign concept to me, the latent potential in the utilization of hyperlinks to convey additional, Necessary Information – extant, yet concealed within a text - was nothing short of a revelation.
An overloaded filing mechanism – my internal, intertextual ‘soul of the machine’ -
could now, at the very least, be approximated. ‘A system of quotation and détournement – embellished and contradictory – in a long, discursive chain…’ come to blistering, anarchic life.
Via a document. On the internet.
Which emboldened ‘the dissemination of the idea.’
A line as casual as “is an accident” opened to the Library at nothingness.org. The term “situations” led to Bureau of Public Secrets and ‘Theses on the Paris Commune’ – which in turn made accessible any number of additional, essential texts available at bopsecrets.org. All told, we fit 9 hyperlinks (several of which are no longer live…perhaps ‘too dangerous’?) into 9 paragraphs. These portals offered 100’s - maybe 1000’s more - ancient andmodern trails to explore; fleshing out, quite simply –- ‘CONTEXT.’
Joseph Winterhalter: 13833 Variants of Apathetic Brilliance went live on Semantikon.com on Sunday,
2 October, 2005. One month and 8 days later I boarded a flight to Paris…
Paris:
90, rue Saint-Martin: 89 steps up a spiral-scratch, opening up to a what amounted to be not much more than a reconfigured rooftop…broom closet.
Still, an ancient, cobbled street below – ‘la rue Saint-Martin.’ Narrow, soot-marred and mysterious, alive with ‘le revenants’haunting – this time - an absence of barricades; though still again - an echo of their presence through centuries, scarring this ‘artery of resistance’ as contested territory.
That we ended up there – appropriate as it may be - isn’t really important. The How most certainly is…
The ‘META-NYM Sequence’ had, over its physical run, infiltrated a certain sort of consciousness.
The online Semantikon.com feature pushed the work even further afield throughout the year. I was able to get a little cash stashed away, proceeds from off-loading a few paintings and peripheral works related -and then not so much - to the exhibition, and was itching to “get outta Dodge.”
Not coincidently, I was turning 40 that November…and there was
no way in hell I was going to be in Cincinnati when that happened…
Finding a spot to crash was Priority 1.
I figured I could squeeze out sticking around for close to 18 days – if I played my cards right. This needed to be a lean, streamlined Recon mission; a steady, inexpensive base was crucial to making it work.
Research ensued, and hotels were out – even 0-star joints were too much for my ‘hard-scrabble’ budget.
Where to turn now? CraigsList.
Well before ‘Air BnB’ turned every sleaze-bag with a shithole into a wanna-be Conrad Hilton,
CraigsList was the place to look for Lo-Cal accommodations – anywhere in the world.
Community based - truly – as well as relatively transparent and HUMAN. You were still taking a chance,
but it just felt more ‘right’ - and real - than the other options on tap…
Narrowed down to a dozen or so spots, I fired off a bunch of emails in my best pidgin ‘Franglais,’ and then – nothing. Crickets. ZERO. I slowly began to accept that if this was going to happen, I may – perhaps – have to do this the ‘right’ way -- which is, sleeping on and under a pile of cardboard boxes in the Parc Vert-Galant on the Île de la Cité, or nearby, under the Pont Neuf… the oldest ‘new’ bridge in Paris. In November.
Tearing through a late season house painting gig – just a little more scratch to pad the coffers –
I was doing 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to knock it out, and I was fried.
Time was getting tight, and I nearly missed it. The email…
While cordial enough – French Cordial – a potential host had, still, a couple of questions.
La Maîtresse de maison, Linda, a French-Senegalese expat, had her vetting process honed as sharp as a piece of Damascus steel. Two questions, elegant and incisive: “Why, exactly, are you wanting to spend 3 weeks in Paris?” and “What, precisely, do you - as an American - intend to do to contribute to la culture française while you are here?”
I threw together a paragraph or two: painting/writing research - along with a few otherideas I wanted to investigate - and my impending turn of age; and then the ‘coup de tète’: the links to Semantikon.com. With META-NYM Sequence: 5 Paintings and 13833 Variants of Apathetic Brilliance added, I hit send.
That was all it took. Sealed it. A couple weeks later, I landed at DeGaulle. Hopped the Métro to Châtelet-Les Halles, and met Linda at Place Edmond Michelet. She handed over the keys - and a curiosity. Attached to the key ring was a small bauble, not more than an inch long. A cast aluminum jet, with ‘TNT’ embossed in bright red paint on each side. It was about 9:30am, Paris time. 11 November, 2005. Armistice Day.
An approximation of bohemian homelessness would have to wait – and, there was to be no surrender during this particular campaign…
90, rue Saint-Martin: 89 steps up a spiral-scratch - an ancient, cobbled street below…
The Map:
Passing through the front door to the street, two doors to the right was Centre Pompidou. Directly across, Place Edmond Michelet, and beyond that rue Quincampoix. Walk a bit further and you were back at Forum des Halles – a massive, subterranean shopping mall and transit hub - which replaced the teeming arcades and fresh food markets known since Émile Zola as ‘La Ventre de Paris’ -- the‘belly of Paris.’
Completely by chance – maybe - ‘basecamp’ was just about half a mile -
or 750 meters as the crow flies – from ‘Point Zéro des routes de France.’
The pin-drop, precise spot from which every single distance
in and from Paris is measured.
Dead center.
Bags dropped, we hit the streets… and for the following days, weeks (now a lifetime?) each second buzzed and pulsed with - clichésbe damned – an intrinsic physical and philosophical resonance -- Electricity.
Early on, the ‘Map’ was a necessary - though not ‘exactly’ an evil - crutch. A formality we needed to indulge if we were going to expedite hitting the hot-spots with the precision this operation called for, as there are certain things one must experience, firsthand. Besides, there was – still - a lot of work to do…
In no particular order – of importance or chronology – and, certainly, not an exhaustive itinerary:
Our immediate surroundings, the 4ème arrondissement, andthe Pompidou, which had opened a comprehensive DADA exhibition in early October; the Musée National Picasso, complete with a stenciled assessment on the limestone entrance: ‘N’Futur’; Place de Vosges, and on to the Left Bank.
Musée D’Orsay – then over Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor to le Louvre… the latter at which I nearly lost my head after standing stone-like and motionless for every bit of an hour or two, soaking in every inch of Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple – while the tourists rush by, reenacting that Bande à part bit…
Up to Montmartre – Sacré-Cœur and le Bateau-Lavoir; down the hill and east to Place de la Bastille. Back across the Seine to the catacombs – “C’est Ici L’Empire De La Mort.”
A Métro trip to visit the Eiffel Tower – jumping off the train at Trocadéro - providing a down-step garden jaunt past the husk of Musée du Cinéma – Henri Langlois. Another site considered ‘contested territory’ --then, an impulse: enact an impromptu bit of situationist street theater - a ‘performance piece’ – unscripted.
Which - unbeknownst to nearly every passerby - became a clandestine collaboration with Banksy.
“In no particular order – of importance or chronology –
and, certainly, not an exhaustive itinerary…”
This statement isn’t - completely - 100% true…
It did take us a few days to get our bearings – negotiating the Métro in particular. Still – map in hand - we mostly walked. With purpose. It became apparent that there was an internal logic working on us – intuitive, maybe – but it seemed to be more than just that. A sensibility dragging us along – ancient in origin. Then, I got it. The layout of Parisian arrondissements is a spiral; a series of roughly expanding circles, spooling out from ‘the center of the universe.’ We’d tapped the current, though hadn’t – just yet – begun to drift...
Still, a spark - “In Girum Imus Nocte…”
The Territory:
90, rue Saint-Martin: 89 steps down a spiral-scratch - to a narrow, soot-marred street below…
Passing through the front door to the street, two doors up and to the right was Centre Pompidou.
Beyond that and heading slightly northeast, staying to the right – 180, rue Saint-Martin, the second to last Parisian address of Guy Debord.
Early on we’d head out at dawn – backpacks loaded down: books, maps, provisions – deliberate, and with calculated, focused intent. Now, about a week in, we began to run merely on instinct - though I did carry with me an Allan Kaprow-like “flimsily jotted down set of root directions” in the bag, just in case.
…technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences…
…(a) behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects,
and thus, quite different from the classical notions of a journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons drop their relations, their work and leisure activities,
all their other motivations for movement and action,
and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view,
cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents,
fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by knowledge and calculations of their possibilities.
Guy Debord – Theory of the Dérive, 1956
Now, carrying only the essentials - water, some ‘ideas to disseminate’ – it was on.
17 November:
Gravitational draw, a psychic fax: Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Vestigial remains of ‘les enfants perdus?’
On and under rue du Four. 51, 47, 34 - 26? 24 - Vingt-deux? A ‘mythical’ hole in the wall – Chez Moineau - suspended in gelatin and silver by Van der Elsken; the dive bar to which all others aspire? No dice.
Now a cheap ‘clubwear’ storefront – all neon leggings and faux – something or other - ‘faux’ will suffice.
So, we’re off – again, and another not quite accidental - drift. Since - still again - there are certain things one must
experience, firsthand…
Café de Flore.
It was here that the world turned – briefly, and forever - after a few bottles of wine.
Beneath the critical eyes of ‘les fantômes de Sartre et de Beauvoir’ –
though thoroughly convinced of their full support – my companion on this odyssey and I agreed –
in no uncertain terms – that we would get married.
Little fanfare, other than a brief ‘potlatch’ –
et le mépris bohème et langoureux de nos voisins de table…
A tidy, Parisienne dose of “bohemian, languid disdain…” Sure, if that’s what you need to keep you going.
Not us. Not now -- ‘La beauté est dans la rue!’ Going deep, deeper into the 5emé - we found our way through the Panthéon on the way back up from rue Mouffetard and environs; and at 51, rue des Écoles, Cinéma Le Champo found us. On the screen this evening, at 22h -- Guy Debord’s ‘last’ film, from 1978: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni.
We turn, indeed – with ‘Just A Few More…’
21 November:
Rue de la Bûcherie – ‘Street of the Butchers.’
At number 37, just across the Seine from Notre Dame and ‘Kilometer Zéro’ -- Shakespeare and Company.
We had stumbled upon a ‘reading’ – “The Paris Review: Its Strange Past and Sublime Future.”
Hosted by the late Susannah Hunnewell, Paris editor of ‘The Paris Review,’ an avalanche of positions fell upon us. From Nelson Aldrich reading from a 1990 piece by George Plimpton to poet Jacques Jouet, a member of the Oulipo Group – and with everything in between - sensibilities hit overdrive. Now’s the time.
As the electricity in the room subsided post-performance, I approached a young woman – furtively occupied behind a teetering pike of books - who appeared, still, to be running the shop. On cue – with the attendant ‘je ne sais quoi’ - she introduced herself as Sylvia, as I fumbled into my bag and pulled out – everything.
Broadsides and chap-books, Flanigan’s VOLK/cspi spoken word CD; a few posters I’d made, a manuscript …
“Would you mind if I left a few of these around? Put some posters up?” An emphatic reply, followed by an animated – while brief – conversation. “Absolutely. Please do...”
Semantikon.com had bluntly - apropos of its name and with the heft of a meat cleaver – landed.
“Since its founding by George Whitman in 1951, Shakespeare and Company has been a meeting place
for Anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution. Endeavoring to carry on
the spirit of Sylvia Beach’s original ‘Shakespeare and Company’ shop, it quickly became
a center for expat literary life in Paris…Ginsberg, Burroughs; Anaïs Nin
and Henry Miller…
William Saroyan and James Baldwin were all early visitors to the shop. From the first day the
store opened, writers, artists, and intellectuals were invited to sleep among the shop’s
shelves and piles of books -- unknown, mostly, and early on in their careers…”
‘Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.’
– G. Whitman from “A Brief History…” – shakespeareandcompany.com
Another cascade to follow. Our conquest of Paris carried us on…
Rummaging the book stalls and small shops nearby the banks of the Seine, one score was otherworldly --
Volumes I, II and V -- Œuvres Complètes de Paul Verlaine 1953; Volume III of the Correspondance de Paul Verlaine, 1929, and a few others. Each one with their pages ‘un-cut,’ the collection was wrapped tight, tied together with heavy twine, and pulled from the attic of ‘ÉDITIONS MESSEIN – 19 Quai Saint-Michel – PARIS,’ by none other than Monsieur Messein’s granddaughter…
Drawn around a quick corner we landed on rue Gît-le-Cœur… at number 9, “the Beat Hotel.” Now a 4-star ‘boutique’ hotel - Madame Rachou long gone – the cobblestones retained, nonetheless, an intensity and oscillation worthy of a Gysin ‘Dream Machine.’ In homage, some would say, I managed to dislodge a small, loose piece of limestone from where the façade met the street -- and I carry it with me, to this day.
‘ONWARD!’ to an ‘Irish Pub’ on the next corner (sometimes you gotta play the chips as they fall…) Hustling inside, bonhomie… We found ourselves amongst a crew: a couple, ‘defense contractors’ from San Francisco; then a Swedish physicist; and, while separate at first, an interesting pair of young French girls – art students at the Sorbonne. Into the night, through liters of wine, the warmth from Calvados – and on, and on…
As there are – for one last time – certain things one must experience, firsthand. Like a Parisian sunrise…
I did make one more trip to Shakespeare and Company, in order to - you know – check things out…
One last, misty November afternoon, I dipped in a doorway, huddled up out of the wind. While I finished a hand-rolled Gauloises (it really is the best,)a slow, steady snow began to fall – the first since we arrived.
In an instant - wind picking up - a more rapid fall, now more ice than snow in the mix…
Out of nowhere a figure materialized.
Small, ahistoric in clothing – my ‘shabby old man with a tin whistle’ maybe? Another ‘fantôme d’une communauté’ come to push me along? As he was struggling to clasp the shutters and pull these giant, ancient tarps over the bins -- which held all
the books -- I jumped in to help.
Now – these were not the cheap, plastic waffle weave tarps we use today; these pieces were works of art. Massive oil-cloth sheets – watertight – and timeless.
While it took a ‘minute,’ we were able to get everything secured, as best as it could be.
My ‘coworker’ had, it seemed, a method. An experienced hand obviously born from years of repeating this particular maneuver, with a precision that demonstrated the utmost care.
Job done, and with an authentic, sincere ‘thank you’ -- he gestured to head inside the shop.
Shaking off the cold, a barrage of questions followed – precise questions - interspersed among several more issuances of ‘thanks.’ I answered best I could - flummoxed and disoriented to be honest - by the inquisitive line of interrogation thrown my way…
Slightly in a trance – though without hesitation –
I ‘auto-pilot’ pulled a last Semantikon handbill, CD, and card form my bag.
I caught a brief flash in his eye, then a shift in his visage, overcome by a knowing sense of – well - calm.
This calm – an openness - had a certain character to it, as if this man had, actually,
known my answers to his questions all along.
With a clutch of material in one hand, he extended his other to shake mine as he said
“Yes - Hello!! I took a look at all these the other day --
I’m George Whitman. Do you need a place to sleep for the night?”
27 November:
Our last night passed with one last dérive, each step reinforcing in the deepest sense that this was not the first time - nor certainly would it be the last – that these paths had bestowed upon those who partook in their guidance an essential truth. This ‘Truth’ - having been passed down since the 11th century – from ‘the Old Man of the Mountain’ to Burroughs, Gysin; through the splintered ‘Letterist Internationale’ to countless radicals and punks, was the lived experience of an ancient phrase. A contrarian - and oft misunderstood - declaration that stood for nothing less than absolute freedom: ‘Nothing is true; Everything is permitted.’
28 November:
4:30am - with little sleep - we jumped on an RER train at Châtelet-Les Halles, back to DeGaulle.
Our departure would not be an easy exercise in ‘letting-go.’
A line of close to 100 passengers clogged the way to security – presently unhostile, probably due to le café having not just yet fully mobilized their synapses. This calm turned on a dime, though, as Andie MacDowell - dragging her daughter behind her – figured it would be a fantastic idea to just stroll past the backlog. This was not a wise decision on her part. Between bouts and shouts of gorgeous French mépris - and trips back and forth to the counter – we made our gate with minutes to go. By now - with the flight overbooked - there was only room for one of us. A tough call – but, sometimes you gotta play the chips as they fall… With a crisp grip of 800 new-found euros in my pocket - and through the glass on her way to boarding - I bid my newly minted fiancé a fond ‘Au revoir!’ For a few hours more – at least - Paris wasn’t going to let me go…
Context. Semantikon.com covered more than just a few positions during its ‘classic’ period of activity.
As a website - format-wise - Semantikon.com exploited the templates laid out by its forebearers -- the storied precedents set forth in the bevy of printed editions of art minded ‘Literary Journals’ produced by loose, avant-garde collectives throughout history. By pairing a featured Literary Artist with a featured Visual Artist, on a roughly monthly schedule, this website took on an aura of prescience.
The idea was to not be limited, by any means…
In addition to the monthly features, Semantikon.com carried around in its corner a ‘ringer’ or two. Indulging in, and taking full advantage of the potential that information could manifest by being instantly available on the ‘Internet’ of those days was a loaded proposition. To cover all the bases, Lance had embedded the seeds of a ‘physical’ publishing arm, Three Fools Press; e-books and ‘broadside’ posters -- the work of various contributors, all downloadable, ready to print; a deep library; experiments in sound - occasionally; and a repository of avant-garde film and video. It was under this category that my final Semantikon contribution would find itself, filed under ‘Semantikon CELL LOGIC: Cinema Lost and Found.’
Third one, in full. 2007:
“No film is more difficult than its era.”
Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles,
qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film “La société du spectacle”
Simar Films, Paris, 1975
In 1975, two years after the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle had been released -- this brief statement, lodged neatly as a voice-over in Debord’s following film, must have sounded as yet another volley in his contentious ‘anti-career’ -- as easily dismissed as it is dismissive.
Now, in 2007 – 34 years after The Society of the Spectacle was first screened – I’m not quite sure of how the game of time has proven Guy Debord prophetic with regard to a film - or any eras - ‘Difficulty.’
When asked to write a brief introduction to Semantikon.com’s November ‘Cell-Logic: Cinema Lost and Found’ feature La société du spectacle, I started to feel like Louis Armstrong’s jibe about jazz “Brother, if you don’t get it, there ain’t no way I can explain it to you…”
I thought about staggering down the rue des Écoles in Paris on a chilly mid-November evening a couple years earlier, missing a screening of ‘Société…’ at the Cinéma le Champo - then ‘settling’ to settle in to absorb Debord’s In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni instead…
I wanted to remind myself that the spectacle is not a collection of images, but rather the social relations between people mediated by images. I had to remember that critical theory must still communicate itself in its own language, and for it to be an all-inclusive critique, it must be grounded in history.
I needed to remember to forget about living the negation of style, and to – still again - remember how to live a Style
of Negation.
After all –
“No film is more difficult than its era. For example, there are people who understand, and others who
do not understand, that when, according to a very old power strategy, the
French were presented with a new ministry called the Ministère de la Qualité de Vie,
it was quite simply, as Machiavelli put it, ‘to allow them to retain at least in name that which they had already lost’.”
“…already lost.”
Nope, considering “Once I was young…and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this…” -- and as I write this piece, which began straight; a ‘retrospective essay’ -- as Lance referred to it –- regarding my involvement with Semantikon.com --
now its tenor taking on a curious vibe -- [shift linguals // tangle word lines] --
as if something else, entirely, has overtaken its production --
for it is now the Summer of 2020 -– ‘COVID Time.’
And not just yet, for in revisiting these projects, activities, experiences – I’m struck mostly by how much we have retained, to this day - contrary to the ‘conclusion’ arrived at in 2007 – and not just in name only.
And still again - in light of thefinal two paragraphs wrapping up the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ piece above, with its prescience chillingly accurate – today, each day – as it is necessary for us to not only recall, but fight for, the promise - the importance - of what Semantikon.com put forth into this world, our world.
Which is - that undeniable, necessary foundation for - and of – CONTEXT.
CONTEXT
Which, by the very definition of the word, ultimately provides a justification for - everything –
ALLthe deadlines. Miscues and stutter steps; victories – large and small – fires and failures…
ALLthe ‘talking with nervous intelligence,’ the clarity,the absolute necessity to ‘just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out...’ -- each time, and for everyone.
The incessant ‘Literary Preambling’ – the experience - the essence of the story...in context:
The ‘Work’ --
Semantikon.com: A Community Based Arts Journal
This Community: Each one of us; including everyone that has crossed paths with it - Semantikon.com.
Each one: an initiates into ‘La Société du Semantikon’-- through the work.
Each one: integral to the ‘Essence of the Story’ -- through the work.
Still, this is not to say that there haven’t been forces utilizing a certain ‘negation of style’ at odds with these collective – and individual - pursuits. In fact, today’s world perhaps may still prove our works ‘prophetic’ with regard to any eras ‘difficulty.’ Against this formidable - yet fluid, slippery - adversary, these pursuits, their resonances and disruptions…withering again, only to reemerge – again – more mutated, even more subversive, have hardened their roots…
Since, of Course:
“Avant-gardes have only one sole moment;
and the best thing that can happen to them is, in the fullest sense of the term,
for them to have made their moment.”
Guy Debord – In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, 1978
So, as ‘we turn in a circle in the night, and are consumed by the fire.’ - Semantikon.com made its moment.
And, by having made its moment – one time - Semantikon.com goes on, making its moments, forever – by striking within an existing, shifting context:
What does it matter to us what judgements may still be passed upon
our obscure personalities? If we still see fit to record the political
differences that exist between the majority of the population and ourselves,
noting these differences now may be in order to apportion the necessary culpability
in the future to the former, and to acknowledge the latter for their foresight…
Which, as an evolutionary concept, as an ongoing enterprise -- embodies a loaded proposition. Still.
Then still - again – by actively pushing to give voice to its Initiates: the latest ones - each one – an integral participant in a timeless lineage, Semantikon.com has become more fortified, as its wells run deeper.
This storied ‘Cadre’: a motley, abstract assortment of ‘Artists’ – our actions firm, and steeped in history – will endure.
Semantikon.com endures.
With the work undertaken – in any form – it carries on.
The idea carries on…
In retrospect. In action. In archival form. In our hands. In this world -– and worlds to come.
We move – onward - doing nothing other than that which we have always already done –
which is, to ‘KEEP ON!’
As such: KEEP ON!
– with experience,
- with the work,
- with the soul of the machine,
- with an insistence of context…
- with ‘La Société du Semantikon.’
For:
“It is simply to ensure that, should the Commune be defeated,
people will know that it was not what it has appeared to be
up to now.”
Now.
And still again.
And always…
=====================
Joseph Winterhalter
Cincinnati, Ohio
June/July - 2020
Mick Parsons
January 2005 Feature, Expeditions Notes (2006) , Guest Editor (May 2009)
A Moth Among Troubadours
I first met Mark Flanigan at Kaldi's Coffee House on Main Street in OTR; this was before gentrification had fully set in, before the riots in '08. I'd managed, mostly out desperation and the willingness to be seriously underpaid, to land a gig writing for an upstart arts and culture rag, ArtSpike.
While I framed this as a success based purely on my talent to my 2nd ex-wife, the fact was that my willingness to be exploited probably played a much larger role. My portfolio was dated and I had no idea how to present myself. In other words, I was a rube. And, I probably still am. The fact that I was (and am) a rube accounts for the fact that when I met Mark with the intention of interviewing him for an article about something he was doing at the time (Forgive me, Mark, I can't remember what it was.) and I mostly did the talking. I mostly talked about me. You may not believe this, but that sort of thing wasn't – and isn't – common for me. I'm a lousy self-promoter and even at the not-so-tender age of 30, I wasn't quite comfortable with talking about myself as a writer. Yet that's what I did. At several points in the conversation, Mark even joked about the fact that I was supposed to be interviewing him, not the other way around.
But that was first conversation I'd had with another writer since getting out of graduate school. I was hungry for a creative community. Hungry for contact with other people who worked in words. My working life at the point was academic; I was still plying my tarnished by newishly-minted MA in the college teaching trade, playing a losing game based on broken rules – the 3 Card Monte Ponzi scheme you live as an “adjunct instructor.” I wanted to do well. Hell, I wanted to be “successful.” And I even looked for writers in the not-so-hallowed halls because that's where I found them before. It never did any good; I didn't know how to talk to them. I didn't know what journals they were reading (I still don't, though I could care less at this point) and I didn't know the trends and fashions of academic poet culture (because they do exist and editors do often fall back on them... or fall against them... but in either case, there's an assumption that the poet knows about such trends and fashions and is also either falling back on or falling against them.)
I don't remember the details of showing Mark my work. But he didn't hate my work when he did read it, though I do remember him making some comment about it being decidedly academic. At some point he said to me something like, “There's this guy you should meet.” And that's how I ended up meeting Lance Oditt.
***
To understand One-Legged Cow Press, you have to bear in mind that what little bit of tech savviness I have is hard won and looks impressive only by relative comparison to others who are unfortunate enough to be even less tech-savvy than me. I'm far more comfortable on typewriter than I am a computer keyboard; but in spite of that shortcoming, meeting Lance and seeing what he was doing with semantikon.com made me think about publishing. And it made me think about the fact that I was in Cincinnati, OH, a place with an incredibly complex artistic community that got the short end of the shit stick for no good reason at all. I was reading – and bumping up against – incredible writers that for one reason or another, fell out of the mainstream.
Let me backtrack a bit.
I don't exactly remember meeting Lance. I was probably drunk – not an uncommon state of existence for me back then. But I know what I'm like mostly at first meetings and, unlike when I talked Flanigan's ear off in Kaldi's I probably stammered and said very little when I first met Lance. Or, being drunk, I was overly talkative and mildly obnoxious in that way I used to think was glib and sociable. But when I showed Lance my writing, he didn't hate it. And in future conversations about my work and about the work of writing in general, we struck upon a theme that I've carried forward – that the separation between academic writers and non-academic writers – work that is sometimes called Outsider Art – is a false one. There's the work and there's writers. How they get to the page is far less important than what they do when they get there.
And there was another theme that Lance and I struck upon, after I talked to him about this idea of a regional small press... an outlet for writers from the Ohio River Valley (mostly) or with ties there, at any rate. Because publishing was still, in the early years of the millennium, pretty much a coastal or academically housed concern. The big publishers existed on the outer doughnut of the United States – New York or California. The “literary” publishers were all within the protected walls of academia. There were a few exceptions that held on – Stovepipe out of Georgetown, Kentucky, and Sarabande Books out of Louisville for example But the small press explosion in the 1990's hadn't gained much ground in the Ohio River Valley. And the wave had retreated almost as fast as it had happened.
It was a losing game. But I'd been teaching a dozen sections of college composition at four different area colleges and universities; I was starting to see the strings in the machination, saw the shadow of my professional future at that time. I needed to do something. And talking to Lance about community – which was always the goal for semantikon.com, to build a self-sustaining creative community, where there were no leaders, exactly. And no followers. He wanted to get the ball built and rolling – a process he was always... well... in the process of … and I saw clearly that the main issue with starting a small press – money and being able to print affordably – was easy to get around online.
I'd also recently read an article about this new technological marvel that was in the pipeline – ebooks. Microsoft and Amazon were both working on something called e-ink, which would be easier on the eyes than a back lit computer screen. I remember talking to my older brother – who is what he refers as a “technologist” – and he thought it was more than plausible. But it was a couple of years away still. And I didn't want to wait.
***
When Lance first decided to publish me on semantikon.com, I was over the moon. I didn't have much luck with the traditional publishing routes; being an academic myself at the time didn't seem to ingratiate me to editors, and while I could have published myself on One-Legged Cow, I didn't really want to. As I saw it, I was trying to build something bigger than me – a vehicle for other regional writers to get their work into the world. And when Lance wanted to publish segments this long poem I'd been working – “Expedition Notes” – in the January 2005 feature, I couldn't have been more pleased.
Here,
pollution rises to the top of the frozen river, impervious to the cold
dredging up with it
the bones of all our children, most beloved pets and evil memories, ex-wives,
cheating husbands, deadbeat fathers and drunken mothers.
We’ve learned not to notice.
Not anymore. Better to keep our heads down
lest he arctic wind snatches our souls from our nostrils.
A leading authority has suggested
the increasing number of winter deaths
is a direct result of exhaling at the wrong moment.
People have died
suffocating themselves
trying to keep it in.
Great mystic nihilists use pillows,
having learned to ignore the unconscious drive to survive,
holding the goose feather down on themselves.
Others have their mouths and noses surgically sealed—
but that’s mainly on the west coast
according to a special report on 20/20.
Sex and asphyxiation clubs are forming in high schools
all over the Great Midwest, while here,
in the Great Valley, senile riverbed farmers watch
while their proud sons’ daughters
wrap their legs around their heads
and crawl back up the birth canal.
-from “expedition notes: winter blockade”
(Full Version Online:http://www.semantikon.com/features/mickparsons2006.htm )
In one of his more exuberant moments, Lance told me “Expedition Notes” was my Wasteland. All I knew was that something I wrote found a home. And that was when I learned that every poem has a home. Every poem has an audience. Every single poem.
***
The idea for OLCP was to build it up and then, when the technocrats figured out e-ink, I could make the move. But I didn't just want to do a website. That didn't feel... tangible enough. So I used the PDF format. I wanted to pay the writers I published, even if it was only enough to buy a beer. When readers bought OLCP books, I sold them a lock code and emailed them a locked PDF. That also helped me build an email list, too, which was far more complicated to do then than it is now.
And we did ok. I published Mark and some other writers, some of whom have gone on to bigger publishing opportunities. I published a literary journal, Sticky Kitchen, which was archived at Ball State University in a collection dedicated to regional literary journals. I ran monthly readings at the Base Art Gallery – a coop art gallery on Main Street in OTR.
Lance eventually offered me the chance to be a feature editor on semantikon.com and I brought in what I felt were some solid writers. I was still straddling the false dichotomy – that space between academic writers and “Outsider Artists” – and my editorial picks reflected that. And when OLCP imploded after 3 years and I moved to Arizona chasing the only (short-lived) full-time teaching position I ever got, I found myself thinking about it as a watershed moment.
***
Something else was born then, too. This idea, one I'm still playing with and trying to bring into focus. This idea that there's an Ohio River Valley Literature that's distinct from Midwestern Literature and distinct from Appalachian Literature. A literature formed by the land made by the changing river channels, this Wild West before the western expansion, this land of myth, this land of the Seven Hills. A literature that's more about what happens when writers get words on the page instead of how they approached the precipice. I see the shape of it when I unfocus my eyes stare forward, in writers like Mark Flanigan, F. Keith Wahle – who was also published on semantikon.com at one point – as well as Aralee Strange, LaTasha Digs, Nathan Singer, and Ralph LaCharity. There are others. If you're lucky, you'll get to read them.
And as I think about what it all means now, I'm left with the lessons. Every poem has a reader. And some of the best writers to come out of America come out of the mud of this river and the land it's created. Publishing is a lot easier than it used to be, and maybe the small press/indie press boom, was only this bridge between the big boys having all the toys to being able to publish a book using your cell phone and a borrowed WiFi signal. But semantikon.com stands as a testament to something else: that once upon a time, someone dared to believe that regional writers deserve the stage as much as Billy Collins and Barbara Kingsolver. I can't think of a better legacy to be a part of as a former teacher, former publisher, and working poet.
Fritz Kappler
Visual Art feature, October 2006, Download e-Book:A Magic Day Coloring Book
Looking Back...
I look back on the Semantikon Project with a wry smile. At the time there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity to share work or dialogue about ideas in an informal way in the electronic medium. It didn't take a lot of persuading to say yes to the notion of contributing. I was particularly impressed with the swift turnaround between conversation and the publishing. Rather than wait weeks or months to see our thoughts in print, this took about as long to produce as it did to transcribe. At least that was my impression, I'm sure a lot of work went on behind the curtain. Of course it was flattering to be asked to participate and given the chance to expound on my particular genius. Now I realize that perhaps, in some of the interview portions, maybe speaking off the cuff isn't necessarily more accurate or thoughtful or truthful than a carefully considered and composed response might be. I cringe when I look back at the disconnect between some of what came out of my brush and what came out of my mouth. Oh well.
As I look back at the pieces included in the story, I am struck by the almost random selection and mediums I was experimenting with. What is this guy doing? I'd also forgotten that at least half of these, Oddog, Indica, and The Birthday Party series, among them, were unfinished at the time. In the case of Oddog, I developed an entire series from that piece. I don't typically document my work in progress so it's almost funny how some of these almost look like sketches to me now. Humbling. It will be interesting to look at what I'm doing today in fourteen years and see if there're similar developments...Let's just say I was in a period of transition at the time and probably still am.
I would say I'm most satisfied with the fact that Semantikon afforded the opportunity to electronically publish my Magic Day Coloring Book. A perfect meeting of art and the means of delivery.
I'm still thankful that I was able to participate in the Semantikon Project and that this piece really does capture a particular, if awkward, moment and place in the life of this artist.
Fritz Kappler
Nick Barrows
Literary Feature 2007, Audio Performance of "Radio", Broadside Poster for "Radio"
In Retrospect...
I am not sure where to start on this. First and foremost, it should go on record that I have a bad memory. A very bad memory. So it should go without saying that you truly cannot trust the narrator in this piece. I had/have eight pieces with two audio recordings of Radio and Pantomime Green as well as a beautiful broadside of Radio on Semantikon beginning in October 2007. I know I was living in Over-the-Rhine at the time, I know I was sending out a great deal of submissions (for me anyway), and I know I was burning at both ends. I had a 9-5 job but still managed to stay out way past when a person with a 9-5 should stay out to be ready to meet that job the next day. I was in the first year of a relationship that (knocks on wood) I’m still in today. Looking back, I still had the stings of a few bad encounters that made me the type of person that was almost unbearable to be around at times. I bring this up because one of the reasons I am where I am physically and creatively is because of that relationship. When I decided to print my own chapbook called Rockets on Bibles, she helped edit and was very supportive.
Three other relationships that were so very important during this time, and still are, were with Mark Flanigan, Jay Reynolds, and Jack Rininger. I had done a reading at VOLK, but I did not know Mark very well yet. I did find an email about trying to do a reading together (did I read at one of his Inktank open mics?) and I am sure it’s the reason I came to know of Semantikon. I lived with Jay in the 90’s and would guest spot with his amazing band 4 Track All-Stars. Jack, who I have known since high school, and I would jam together with me playing on a new instrument I picked up, the concertina. Why is all this vital to this story? Because with Mark, Jay, and Jack I would go on to write a very awesome book and form the best bands in the world: The book is called Versus and the bands are Eagle to Squirrel Variety Hour and Jack Burton Overdrive. Now are they really the best book or bands in the world? Not really. But to me they are because they are the most creative endeavors that I have ever been a part of. True expressions of myself collaborating without restriction. These guys are my brothers in every sense of the word. I am very proud of that. Connecting with Mark gets me connected to Semantikon; pieces in my chapbook become songs for Eagle to Squirrel. Crash, for example, becomes WERK. Crash was one of the pieces that would be on Semantikon. Connection.
So, 2007 in OTR was different than the hustle and bustle that it is now. It was in a downturn at that time. The activity of bars, coffeehouses, dance clubs, and galleries that seemed to be at full throttle in the late 90’s were at low hum by the mid to late 2000’s to say the least. No streetcar, no multimillion-dollar condos and apartments, no restaurant or bar at every corner, and certainly no high-rise grocery store. It was, at times, a gaggle of people coming out like it was some type of lost forbidden place where they might catch a donkey show or something. For me, I loved living in OTR on and off from 97-08 and would still, most likely, be there but the place was prime for “renovation.” Well, I wasn’t rich, and I can’t put a hammer to a nail to save my life. So, to other pastures I would eventually go and roam. Now this is where the memory thing becomes a problem – I don’t remember specific readings or a big run of poetry events. I think Inktank was doing some open mics and maybe another place or two like Publico but I never got to read there. I spent a lot more time in bars during that period than I should have. MPMF would really bring the area to life in Septembers so that would get me going and steered me in the direction of music. I do remember being hungry to do something. Something that would smash my poetry and music together. Something different, direct, and hopefully new.
I can only find a few emails from back then about being published in Semantikon. From the end of September to the second week of October I had a few direct messages with Lance. I remember it being one of the most beautiful sites I had seen at the time. It was focused and gave purpose and respect to the pieces on the site. It was also multimedia, so the idea to have a recording of my poems on the site really got me excited. I think I had a phone call as well with Lance, again not too sure but we must have because we got to the idea of several pieces, two audio recordings, and a broadsheet of the poem Radio. The broadsheet was brilliant, the 700 WLW tower and a transparent map of downtown Cincinnati with my words on top. Semantikon was trying to do more than just put artists on online. That would be one- or two-dimensional thinking and Semantikon is/was never just that. I feel they wanted to show you every side, angle, and curve of the artist. The different speeds, movements, and frequencies could be shown, seeing every aspect. A fuller picture indeed. It made me feel that I was a part of something unique and I liked it very much.
Most of my pieces that are on Semantikon ended up in my Rockets on Bibles chapbook. Looking back on those pieces, I see the birth of Eagle to Squirrel. I see the transition between a twenty-something spitting at the poetry and person that is trying to write poetry. It’s okay, there is some good stuff in there, just a lot of anger and lack of focus, but I am getting off track. I am not sure how to wrap this up or if this is something that helps anyone understand the time, but for me it represents a creative reemergence that has continued to this day. I was beginning to see how I could better my poetry with music and better my music with poetry. I didn’t have to separate them, I wanted that so much and that both loves of mine could be better for it. I am glad Semantikon was a part of that time with me. It felt like an online safe harbor giving a place for artists to be angry, sad, happy, silly, rude, wild, and to simply experiment. It is hard to find that now, especially online but that is another story. That’s all I have, and I hope it gives you a little insight into the time. I’ll just say that I think most of what you read is true, but who knows?
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