Is it possible that artists and musicians will become the next big special interest group in American health care reform? Not by a long shot, but it’s nice to know that there are some benevolent organizations out there that a) actually give a damn about the astronomical number of uninsured artists in this country and b) can do something to take the edge off of rising medical costs. Artist Access, a New York health care initiative based out of the Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in North Brooklyn, offers starving artists and undernourished arts support workers access to quality care on a sliding-fee scale, with doctor’s visits ranging from $15 to $60, and prescription medication, from $2 to $22.
But it gets even curious-er. For creatives who can’t even shell out a few dollars towards their next routine check-up, Artist’s Access allows participants to pay in kind, earning “40 credits worth of healthcare services” (according to the program’s brochure) for every hour of performance or artistic activity they contribute to the life of the hospital. That’s forty dollars towards medical care, and, if you add it all up, probably a lot more cost-effective than gigging in most New York bars. Or priceless, if you dig the community service element.
Call 877.244.5600 for more information.
To find out if similar opportunities exist in your area, check out Fractured Atlas, the people behind the nationwide Artists Affordable Healthcare initiative.
Kevin Hooyman shares pages from his new book, Love To Live. Here’s the second excerpt from the first chapter, ‘Social Grace’. Now listen very carefully…
LOF/T Load of Fun Theatre
120 W. North Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201
Tickets: $5 (tix can be purchased at the door)
Doors Open: 8pm, Performances: 9pm
ALTERED STATES, Curated by Jamillah James for Frontier Projects
Live Performances by Lexie Mountain Boys, Soft Circle (ex-Black Dice/Lightning Bolt), Blues Control (Siltbreeze Records, Brooklyn), Ra Khuit Noor, and New Jedi Order.
Altered States examines the history of collective action, originating in the 1960s with communalism (made families in hippie and freak subcultures), and avant-garde performance, where elements were borrowed from traditional rituals and ceremonial spectacle. This rubric for performance and artistic practice champions a freedom from creative, economic, and social constraints, and de-emphasizes the singular, commodifiable art object as the end-all of cultural production.
The exhibition considers a renewed interest in the aesthetics and performativity of mysticism. Through idiosyncratic performance, borrowed iconography, and the creation of “invested” objects and spaces, the artists in Altered States re-contextualize alterity, or “otherness”, as a psychedelic state of being, and explore the secular, the sacred, and the creative space in between. Continue reading →
APRIL 4 — DOROTHEA DIX
Advocate of humane treatment for so-called “mentally ill.”
APRIL 4 festivals:
* Ancient Rome: FESTIVAL OF THE MAGNA MATER OF PHRYGIA, a reliquary embodied in a small meteorite. An ecstatic procession with the magna mater in a chariot drawn by lions, castrated priests leaping and dancing and gashing themselves to a din of flutes, cymbals and drums.
ON THIS DATE
1802 — Mental health reformer, activist Dorothea Dix born, Hampden, Maine.
1900 — Prince of Wales, in Belgium, escapes anarchist assassination attempt.
1914 — French writer Marguerite Duras born, near Saigon, French Indochina.
1915 — Blues guitarist Muddy Waters born, Issaquena County, Mississippi.
“Cosmic Love” is a collaborative art show featuring a group of artists with a similar vision: We dream of Love in all dimensions, tangible and non, and of the cosmic magic of love, and its powers in the cosmos. We are here to spread this message that Love is Cosmic and Love is Everywhere!
Cosmic Love artists include: James Weigel “owl eyes”, Nora Keyes, Kime Buzzeli, Mindy Le Brock, Tracy Conti, Miss KK, Annakim Violette, Alia Penner, Valentine, Joanna Burke, Veronica Ibarra
Two big events on the East Coast this weekend. In Baltimore, its the Transmodern Festival all weekend long with a gaggle of some of the best tweaker-performers around (Dan Deacon maybe the best-known of them). Here’s a nice chat with the festival’s organizers from the Baltimore City Paper.
In Brooklyn on Saturday night, there’s the Launch Party for WFMU’s FreeMusicArchive.org , a site that will soon be eating many of your evenings in solitude by providing you with tons of free and totally legal downloads by great musicians who you really want to listen to. Before that happens, you can get out and among other people one last time and hear live music by Sightings, Pink Skull, John Dwyer’s new band, Excepter and DJ Brian Turner. Here are deets.
We will expect to see smiling, drunken photos of you at one of these events on Flickr Monday morning.
APRIL 3 — TERENCE MCKENNA
Sacred substance psychonaut, shamanarchist.
APRIL 3 holidays and festivals:
* Ancient Egyptian FESTIVAL OF MIN.
* ETERNAL RICTUS DAY.
* Iran: SIZDAH-BEDAR: It is unlucky to stay indoors.
ON THIS DATE
1783 — Writer Washington Irving born, New York City.
1860 — Pony Express service begins.
1882 — Quintessential Western outlaw Jesse James shot by Robert Ford.
1924 — American actor, social dropout Marlon Brando born, Lincoln, Nebraska.
1950 — Radical educator, historian Carter G. Woodson born, Washington, DC.
1950 — Radical composer Kurt Weill dies, New York City.
1972 — Showboat politico Adam Clayton Powell dies, Harlem, New York City.
2000 — Entheogen psychonaut & futurist shaman Terence McKenna dies, Hawaii.
I’ve been making different kinds of chess pie for most of my life; it’s like pecan pie without the pecans in it. I think vinegar pie is similar, and transparent pie is similar. It’s just slightly different proportions of the different ingredients and consistencies, otherwise it’s the same thing: the magic of sugar mixed with butter mixed with eggs thrown in a piecrust.
Will Oldham’s Double Chocolate Chess Pie
1/2 c. Butter 2 oz. Chocolate, unsweetened 1 c. Sugar 3 Eggs, lightly beaten 1/4 c. Crème de Cacao liqueur 2 tbs. All-purpose flour 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract 1/8 tbsp. Salt 1 Pie shell Vanilla ice cream or sweetened whipped cream (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a saucepan over low heat, melt butter and chocolate. Remove from heat. Blend in sugar, eggs, liqueur, flour, salt and vanilla extract into melted butter and chocolate. Beat until smooth. Pour into the pie shell. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until set. Cool on a wire rack for at least 30 minutes.
There’s a place in Louisville called Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen that makes a really insane chocolate chess pie, and that might be where I first had it, ‘cause it opened when I was a teenager. [In Louisville] there’s also Derby Pie, which is pecan pie with bourbon and chocolate chips in it, but that’s not a full-on chocolate experience. In Birmingham, Alabama there used to be a place by the airport called BJ’s on the Runway and they made the best pies ever. They had a chocolate meringue pie, and the chocolate was… it was like a black hole. You got sucked into the whole thing and you didn’t come out until the pie was gone. It was six or seven inches high, with this meringue. Amazing pie. I think that that was when I realized what the possibilities were in a chocolate pie.
[I make chess pie] probably three times a year, ‘cause sometimes it’s easier to go to Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen to get a slice. I’ll make it for a recording session and we’ll just eat it over the course of the session. You get the rewards all along the way. It helps the music stay psyched. This
is nice, though, because it has this Crème de Cacao, and that’s a very good liqueur. I like it. I can have a scoop of vanilla ice cream with whiskey poured over it. It’s good. In Italy they call it an “Apogato”, which means drowned man, and you can have it with your choice of liquor. Sometimes sweet potato pie with a little bit of bourbon or rum cooked into it can be really delicious.
Chess pie and sweet potato pie are two things widely available in varying recipes all across Louisville. It’s a very exciting place for pie. There’s a bakery in Louisville called Plehn’s Bakery that makes a caramel ice cream, and the caramel ice cream from there mixed with the chocolate chess pie from Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen is… it’s beyond description. When you take a bite of it, it’s like… how you know… it helps you recognize how omnipotent and indescribable God is. Because this food, you know, goes beyond, and obviously God, you know, God would go beyond anything a Pope could tell you, or an imam could say about, or rabbis, you know? They can pretend that they can tell you about God, but it’s way fucking beyond their comprehension, no matter how many books they read or how much they whip their back or do whatever they do. It’s the same thing with the pies when you realize that the way things work is way beyond anything you could comprehend. We can put [the ingredients] together, but we can’t explain why, when you put them together, why they do what they do.
We’re hosting an art exhibit tonight at Floating World with David Mack, to celebrate the release of his latest book, Kabuki : The Alchemy. In the following interview we discuss themes from his Kabuki series and his plans to adapt Philip K Dick to comics.
WHO: David Mack
WHAT: Art exhibit, slide show discussion, Q&A with the artist
WHEN: Thursday, April 2nd, 6-10pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave #101
JASON LEIVIAN: Kabuki: The Alchemy talks about a new beginning. Everything that came before (Volumes 1-6) was childhood. Maybe one way of putting it, when I was younger there was a developmental stage where I immersed myself in books and ideas that I was interested in. But then at some point there was a breakthrough and things got crazy. It’s like it all became real and my life became some science fiction novel. When I was younger I read things in books, but now my life is these things. What was metaphor, now seems like platonic truth, even realer than this reality, which seems like maya by comparison. Let’s talk about the spiritual journey of David Mack as it’s expressed through your art. In Kabuki you see the work as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can you discuss that a bit?
DAVID MACK: I think I understand what you are describing. What you focus on has a tendency to change you, affect you. When you are passionate about something and active in working on it, it can seem like you hit a point when your real life seems to operate on dream-logic: You think it and then it materializes.
Creating on a regular basis is a great practice for that. It clues you in, trains you, to realize how malleable the material world is – that you can have an immediate effect on it based on your thoughts and actions. When you write or draw everyday, you start with a blank, and then you make something- an idea suddenly exists in the three dimensional material world. Just by writing it down, drawing it, you take this thing that only existed in your head, and then suddenly it exists in three dimensional physical reality. Practicing that everyday, starts to reveal to you that things work that way. You experience that transition everyday and it becomes larger than the page or the work you are doing. It has a ripple effect in people that experience your work and their response to it.
Suddenly you realize you have not just created one story, or one work, or a body of work, but you’ve created your own career, and your own life, as your self-portrait, and your contexts for your life, and your work has become your passport to a variety of worlds. And there is a point when the dream you were dreaming, and then dared to enact in reality, has become completely real and you live it everyday. And other people can even share it with you.
That is a great lesson to learn. Because once you learn it, you can go about living it very consciously. As consciously as you would craft your work on the page, you realize you are crafting it off the page as well.
Arthur Magazine 