The ISB playing “The Half-Remembered Question” and “Painting Box” on a TV show with Julie Felix, 1968:

“Retying the Knot”: a 30-minute 1997 BBC Scotland doc on the ISB, featuring three band members, Joe Boyd, Marianne Faithful, Woodstock footage, vintage and ’97 reunion perf footage, more, here in 3 parts:

Saturday, January 27, 2007 8:00 PM

Arthur Magazine and Drag City Present
Trinie Dalton and Steve Krakow at Quimby’s!

Join us at Quimby’s as Arthur Magazine presents an evening of reading and discussion with Trinie Dalton and Steve Krakow.

For this event Trinie Dalton will read from her new novel, which isn’t finished yet, about a witch and several of her monster friends. She’s in Illinois as a visiting writer at University Illinois Urbana Champaign, to celebrate the release of the new issue of their lit mag, Ninth Letter. Steve Krakow will be on hand to talk with Trinie Dalton about zines and other subcultural things.

Steve Krakow lives in Chicago and is the editor of Galactic Zoo Dossier and front man for Plastic Crimewave Sound. He is an organizer for the annual Million Tongues Festival at the Empty Bottle.

Trinie Dalton lives in Los Angeles. Her short story collection, WIDE EYED (Akashic) received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. She also co-edited DEAR NEW GIRL OR WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS (McSweeney’s), an art/illustration book based on her archive of confiscated notes acquired while she taught high school. She writes about music for Arthur and the LA Weekly, writes film reviews for Amazon, and also writes catalogue essays for artists. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Bomb, Nerve, Purple, The Believer, and Ping Pong (Henry Miller Library’s Journal). She has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches Fiction at USC.

What Glue Do You Use?
Curated by Yves Brochard

Dianne Bellino, Brian Belott, Erik Bluhm (artwork pictured above), Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Sebastien Bruggeman, Richard Fauguet, Christian Holstad, Aleksandra Mir, Javier Piñon, Kirstine Roepstorff, Amy Sarkisian, Leonor Scherrer, Frieda Schumann, Josh Smith, Robert Suermondt, Marnie Weber.

January 11 – February 10, 2007

From the press release:

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Cameron (1922-1995), curated by Michael Duncan, George Herms, and Nicole Klagsbrun. The exhibition runs from January 12 until February 10, 2007. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 12, from 6-8 pm.

This survey is the first solo gallery exhibition of artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel). A maverick follower of the esoteric mysticism of Aleister Crowley and his philosophical group, the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis), Cameron was also an accomplished painter and draftsman and mentor to younger artists and poets such as Wallace Berman, George Herms and David Meltzer. While enlisted in the Navy, she was assigned the tasks of drawing maps and working in a photographic unit, which led to attendance at art classes after being discharged. In Los Angeles, she became the wife and spiritual avatar of scientist and mystical thinker Jack Parsons (1914-1952), one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an influential leader of the OTO.

In the early 1950s, Cameron met the fellow LA artist and jazz enthusiast Wallace Berman who was fascinated by her artwork, poetry, and mystical aura. In 1955 Berman used his photograph of Cameron as the cover of his literary and artistic journal Semina 1 and included in the issue a drawing she had made the previous year. The drawing became renowned when the police cited it as “lewd” and shut down Berman’s 1957 exhibition at Ferus Gallery. After this experience, Cameron, like Berman, refused to show her art in commercial galleries. She remained, however, a crucial figure in the Berman circle. Cameron’s romantic aesthetic and commanding persona prompted filmmaker Curtis Harrington to commemorate her output as a visual artist in The Wormwood Star (1955), a lyrical short film recording the art and atmosphere of her candlelit studio. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger cast her in a leading role opposite Anais Nin in his film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1956).

Despite the grim fatality of much of her writings, Cameron’s artworks portray a fanciful, even wistful lyricism. In the early 1960s she corresponded with Joseph Campbell, citing her interest in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as well as in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and Isak Dinesin. Consumed by myth and the idea of protean growth, Cameron depicted the process of metamorphosis and transformation in hundreds of line drawings where ominous figures and landscapes emerge from uniformly striated, passionately articulated ink marks. Other gouache drawings and paintings depict mythic figures of her own creation engaged in ritualistic, symbolic acts.

Cameron’s sensitive drawings and paintings delineate a magical realm of metamorphosis and protean transformation. Featuring symbolic creatures in imaginary landscapes, her delicately articulated artworks rival those by fellow surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. They also seem fascinatingly prescient of fantastical works by contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Amy Cutler, Karen Kilimnick, and Hernan Bas.

In 1989 Cameron co-edited with O.T.O. leader Hymenaeus Beta an edition of the occult writings of Parsons. Also that year, Cameron’s artworks were surveyed in an exhibition, titled The Pearl of Reprisal, at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery curated by Edward Leffingwell. Cameron died of cancer in Pasadena in 1995. A selection of her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965 and in the 2005-2007 traveling exhibition Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

–Michael Duncan

(Tip courtesy Kristine McKenna)

NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS {We will be able to meet with prospective students in L.A. after February 1st, and prospective students in New York from January 11th – 27th.}

The topic/title for this second schoolhouse season is ‘Planet of the Humans’. What is our relationship to our environment? How can we as artists, designers, performers and writers respond to it more fully? How do we reconcile ever growing human need & consumption with ever more limited natural resources? Is there enough for everyone to thrive and not just survive? What do future generations of humans have in store? Are we afraid to ask those questions? Do we still dream about the future? Or have we collectively buried our heads in the sands of nostalgic reverie, craving the retro, historic, authentic, warm fuzzy security of a rosy optimistic past that never even existed? Why are even the best of us aiming for that which is sustaining? Why not remediating or ameliorating? Must even the most well intentioned contemporary human creation always have simultaneous degradation of everything around it as an unintended by-product? How will this story play itself out? Will we turn our behavior around in time to prevent our mass extinction? Will we remain but in a weakened position, a shadow of our former dominating species? What does a world with a submissive human look like? Or will we disappear entirely? What does a world after humans look like? Is that worth wondering? Do we truly understand our place on the planet only after we have imagined our absence? What should we do next? More questions coming…. All of the teachers for spring 2007 season in some way deal with these issues in their practice.

Spring 2007 Schoolhouse teachers:

{the list of teachers for the 2007 will be updated throughout the winter}

Amy Franceschini ~ Futurefarmers ~ Free Soil ~ {designer – artist}
Fritz Haeg ~ Gardenlab ~ Fritz Haeg Studio ~
Maria Lepowsky {anthropologist}
Yoshua Okon ~ La Panaderia ~ {artist – founder La Panederia – UCSD faculty}
Jenny Price {writer}
Heather Rogers {writer}
Ashwani Vasishth {ecological planner}
Claude Willey & Deena Capparelli ~ Moisture ~
Andrea Zittel ~ High Desert Test Sites ~ {artist}
dance, movement & yoga instructors:
Qusai Kathawala ~ {media designer / yogi}
Carol McDowell {movement artist}
Hana van der Kolk {choreographer/movement teacher}
Flora Wiegmann ~ Champion Fine Art ~ {dancer/choreographer/curator}