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}

On John Coltrane and spirituality:

“Call it Universal Consciousness, Supreme Being, Nature, God. Call this force by any name you like, but it was there, and its presence was so powerfully felt by most people that it was almost palpable” – Alice Coltrane

Alice Coltrane, 69; performer, composer of jazz and New Age music; spiritual leader

By Jon Thurber, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 14, 2007

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.

Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in West Hills, according to an announcement from the family’s publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure.

Though known to many for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills. A guru of growing repute, she also served as the swami of the San Fernando Valley’s first Hindu temple, in Chatsworth.

For much of the last nearly 40 years, she was also the keeper of her husband’s musical legacy, managing his archive and estate. Her husband, one of the pivotal figures in the history of jazz, died of liver disease July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. Her last performances came in the fall, when she participated in an abbreviated tour that included stops in New York and San Francisco, playing with her saxophonist son, Ravi.

She was born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, into a family with deep musical roots. Anna, her mother, sang and played piano in the Baptist church choir. Alice’s half brother Ernie Farrow was a bassist who played professionally with groups led by saxophonist Yusef Lateef and vibes player Terry Gibbs.

Alice began her musical education at age 7, learning classical piano. Her early musical career included performances in church groups as well as in top-flight jazz ensembles led by Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

After studying jazz piano briefly in Paris, she moved to New York and joined Gibbs’ quartet.

“As fascinating — and influential — as her later music was, it tended to obscure the fact that she had started out as a solid, bebop-oriented pianist,” critic Don Heckman told The Times on Saturday. “I remember hearing, and jamming with, her in the early ’60s at photographer W. Eugene Smith’s loft in Manhattan. At that time she played with a brisk, rhythmic style immediately reminiscent of Bud Powell.

“Like a few other people who’d heard her either at the loft or during her early ’60s gigs with Terry Gibbs, I kept hoping she’d take at least one more foray into the bebop style she played so well,” he said.

She met her future husband in 1963 while playing an engagement with Gibbs’ group at Birdland in New York City.

“He saw something in her that was beautiful,” Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two, told The Times on Saturday. “They were both very shy in a way. It was beautiful to see them fall in love.”

Gibbs called her “the nicest person I ever worked with. She was a real lady.”

She left Gibbs’ band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s, replacing pianist McCoy Tyner. She developed a style noted for its power and freedom and played tour dates with Coltrane’s group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

She would say her husband’s musical impact was enormous.

“John showed me how to play fully,” she told interviewer Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin in comments published in “The Black Giants.”

“In other words, he’d teach me not to stay in one spot and play in one chord pattern. ‘Branch out, open up … play your instrument entirely.’ … John not only taught me how to explore, but to play thoroughly and completely.”

After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children. Musically, she continued to play within his creative vision, surrounding herself with such like-minded performers as saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson.

Early albums under her name, including “A Monastic Trio,” and “Ptah the El Daoud,” were greeted with critical praise for her compositions and playing. “Ptah the El Daoud” featured her sweeping harp flourishes, a sound not commonly heard in jazz recordings. Her last recording, “Translinear Light,” came in 2004. It was her first jazz album in 26 years.

Through the 1970s, she continued to explore Eastern religions, traveling to India to study with Swami Satchidananda, the founder of the Integral Yoga Institute.

Upon her return she started a store-front ashram in San Francisco but soon moved it to Woodland Hills in 1975. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1980s, the ashram is a 48-acre compound where devotees concentrate on prayer and meditation.

Known within her religious community by her Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane focused for much of the last 25 years on composing and recording devotional music such as Hindu chants, hymns and melodies for meditation. She also wrote books, including “Monumental Ethernal,” a kind of spiritual biography, and “Endless Wisdom,” which she once told a Times reporter contained hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.

In 2001 she helped found the John Coltrane Foundation to encourage jazz performances and award scholarships to young musicians.

In addition to Ravi, she is survived by another son, Oren, who plays guitar and alto sax; a daughter, Michelle, who is a singer; and five grandchildren. Her son John Coltrane Jr. died in an automobile accident in 1982.