Thursday April 1^st,  8pm

Calling all musicians, poets, artists, singers, songers, ranters, ravers, and lovers.

All performers welcome — open sign-up begins at 7:30pm

Grand opening night will be Thursday, April 1st, 2010 and will feature an extended set by folk musician Danny Schmidt, as well as open floor spots. Amazing refreshments — alcoholic, edible, and otherwise — will be available.

And Again! Every Other Thursday, 8pm

$5 door/ Performers FREE , Sign-up at 7:30pm

Completely Unplugged, Utterly Magical Music, Poetry, Story and Song & All Manner of Performance Artistry, since 1994

The Girl Eye Show

Opening Reception Saturday, April 3 at 7 pm with music and performance.

Photos Relating Females

Lauren Goldberg, Anne Marie Hansen, Beth Hommel, Cassie Olander

Prints by young urban female photographers evidence a spontaneous and intimate female gaze enveloping homo-sociality.  This is about both distance and closeness, intra-gender formal queerness and the receptive camera.

Bowery Books Poets

Sunday April 11^th, 5-7

Poetry Readings from 5-7 pm in Tribes Reading Room

Poets Fay Chiang, Cynthia Kraman and Janet Hamill.

April 17^th, 6-8 pm

Book Party

Shalom Naumen’s Selected Works

‘Unbearables’ Book Release Party and Reading

Saturday, April 24^th, 6-10 pm

$2 Admission

RA Araya presents…

6:00-8:00pm Readings by Carl Watson, Sparrow, Foamola

8:00-10:00pm OPEN Mic with Guitaris t& Songwriter Chris Barrera

A Night of Near Miss(il)es

Jazz Performance

April 30^th, 9pm

Will McEvoy-bass, Nathaniel Morgan-altosax, Cody Brown-drums, Owen Stewart Robinson- guitar.  

Donations to the space gracefully demanded.

Play, drink, discuss and hang. Look forward to it!!

Looking at: Plate no. 4 “Homicide body of John Rogers W. 134th st., Christensen, October 21,1915, 88311 from EVIDENCE by Luc Sante

Im looking at
the properly dressed big black
hands of death
on the neat tile design
blood on footprints,
the shiny of shoes in corners
the stalwart jaw
of a witness.
Im looking at a century
inching into being
im looking at a photograph
of a black man
sixty five years after slavery-
lying on a floor dead-
hat dropped
like a felt
bomb-
round perfect boulder like it is
in 1915
everything
(nothing
had) happened yet-
give us time
thirty years
the hat
will drop on a little island
in a big city
give us time
and every river
is the seven of Hiroshima.
Im looking at the feet
pointed like poison
like the prince’s sword
to a picture
poured half full like
last nights red wine
the mother, Gertrude
on video tape
the ancient castle
of a drama
now a book report
for school.
The king got killed
in Memphis 1968
poison poured in his ear
by his brother.
Im looking at the square
corners
of a big mans jaw
gaped open the pointed
teeth of death ape-like
in the buck eyes
of permanent surprise
im looking at
the tiles turn to the
chain fence
the german shephard
of a dark afternoon
six million frozen
forever in
the dark nigger night
of the holocaust
blowing like the backhand
of god looking
at a photograph in
the comfortable overcoat
of an automobile moving
past the past
stuck in the rigor mortis
of one black mans body
in America with
his penis outside history
hanging in
the bad light
of magnolia
trees bent to the ground
with the sound
of hat
after velvet hat
crashing like tattoos
in time.

-Sapphire

An extremely long and image-dense New York art fair report by Janet Bruesselbach

Everything I shot from Wednesday to Sunday is here.

FIRST COURSE: The Armory Show

I registered as press in advance for this and showed up about ten minutes after the press conference to pick up my badge. I briefly glanced at Pier 92, where they only show dead artists, or at least which consists primarily of resale by historical, museum-level galleries. While there’s much more interest in the first market of Pier 94, the historical gap is small.
Example:

Juan Genoves, Transcurso, 2006 detail. From the press balcony this looked like a photograph but it’s really thick impasto.

As press, I have exchanged my attention and goodwill for privileged access, and operate as free publicity for the show. But as a cultural consumer advocate in the attention economy, I now consider anyone non-VIP who pays for access to be a Sucker. If you have a blog or anything I recommend you write yourself an assignment letter or just register on their site and get in free.

Maybe my research-fu is weak but I cannot find an image of how the pier is laid out. It’s basically a T. I started on the right arm of the T and methodically went down the rows. Because there are an odd number of rows on the staff of the T you can end up redundantly walking along it this way (and thereby seeing the featured Berlin part twice), so it’s best to do the arms by row and the pier over the water in a zig zag with a little overlap in the middle. It’s easy to get distracted by something on the other side and overwalk. With the white lights and walls everywhere, my eyes got much tireder than my feet. One thing I found I ended up doing was lingering in a corner staring at a piece I found completely uninteresting, just to rest.

I felt I was coming into this one with preferences different from ones I would have other years or even other days. Some of my arbitrary rules, and why:
1. Galleries that are basically retail shops for pop art stars (Hirst, for example) aren’t worth discussing.
2. I’m sick of contempt for the audience and easy cultural critique. True, just because the economy’s down doesn’t mean artists should make collector-friendly work, but conceptual laziness just means you have nothing intellectually complex to talk about. It looks like some idiot has scammed the gallery and that’s just business.
3. I’m paying particular attention to class issues as well as ethnic politics. While the Armory is aggressively post- and inter-national, it began as an American exodus for the European avante-garde. Without contemporaneity entrenched in the Obama Era we’re just looking at aesthetic balloons.
4. Things that are difficult to transport or install are interesting. Animatronics, performances, digital media.
5. But contrary to (4), things obviously marketed towards a particular part of the market - either museums or collectors - aren’t as interesting as those that really work just for the Armory. It’s like admiring mall displays. I’m looking for what is essentially intimate public art without the effects of public funding.
6. Every year I am less and less inclined to like something just because it resembles my own field, figurative painting. There’s a lot of figurative painting that’s done either photographically or non-representationally that is to be considered more as conceptual.
7. Things that would appeal to people with no art background and anything that disregards the whole modernist project hold a certain fascination, if only because I find myself so willing to dismiss them. This also goes for “bourgeouis” or “kitsch” work aimed at a theoretical market solely about interior decorating. Many critics overlook this work because it’s boring, and it does take up the bulk of the show, but it’s the sanctuary for the many many artists who just want to make beauty. Escapism is practical.
8. I like computers and science. And environmental issues. Grids, numbers, language: these are things I look at because they’re not something I can do well. HOWEVER. I am, if not a dogmatic technophile, at least an anti-Luddite, and will dismiss anything that’s simply critical of technology/modernity/”synthetic”.
9. Unless it’s something new by a favorite, I’m not looking at things I’ve seen before, either at Basel or at last year’s Armory. There are actually repeat pieces, which looks like it would be embarrassing or at least appears lazy. It could be argued that the galleries are standing behind their investments but it’s a waste of time to a spectator.
10. I am not looking at other art blogs and I am trying to see things other art blogs don’t before I read them.

Ultimately it’s just what caught my eye, which has an average sort of attention bandwidth, and VIKI’s camera.

What struck me in particular yesterday was the sort of economy simplified by postcolonialist Ngugi as the rich stealing from the rich. Or rather, most galleries are investments by rich people who consider themselves smart enough to try to find the few stupid rich people, or to catch the rich in moments of irrationality. Hence the free flow of champagne for handpicked VIPs. I can barely speculate on what percentage of art sales are gallery to gallery. At the super blue chip level there’s little to firmly connect particular artists to particular galleries besides geography, and even that’s irrelevent when the fairs, especially in an art hub like NYC, consist of the fattest international ambassadors.

Lets look at pretty pictures now.

Okay, Ian Davis does these awesome wide-angle landscapes full of identical figures, commentaries on industrial science, but I can’t find the new ones he had up and the picture didn’t come through. Look out for “hubris” and “skeptics”.

I ran into Jack Tilton, and had a look at Roberts & Tilton, his L.A. branch, which had some Kehinde Wiley (who may have stepped on me) and Titus Kaphar, who deconstructs canvases to comment on race history:

“Nip tuck” (or “Lillian Dandridge”?), 2009, Crumpled canvas oil painting.

Markus Schinwald, Carola, 2009. 22×18cm oil on canvas. 19th century style portraits of cyborgs are a good direction (and many were made in the 19th century already)

Also at Yvon Lambert was one of those “difficult to reproduce” near-conceptual museum pieces by Zilvinas Kempinas, Serpentine, consisting of magnetic tape blown in a corner by a fan.

This is interesting because apart from context it’s illustration or at least kind of gross pedophiliac erotic art. It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit. I apparently didn’t photo the attribution - if you know it, say it.

Muntean/Rosenblum: another of these paintings entrenched in photography, but there’s something about the children/escalator imagery and the discouragement of connection between photo and caption that has a poetic kick for me.

You know what? Because I’ve been just taking photos of labels (when they were there, because they weren’t always) to attribute, I may as well use those. Let’s try that.

It is a photo of a moon landing with the astronauts made black.
No, that method doesn’t really work.

The galleries that featured shows of individual artists seemed to be very proud of doing this - it was something they could afford to do, selflessly. It definitely paid off in attention to have an immersive, consistent space. A prime example is Adam McEwan’s “I Am Curious Yellow” installation at Nicole Klagsburn, which consisted of a series in only white and yellow, including blowups of Soviet German buttons, swastikas, and large prints of an article about an Olympic runner’s alleged gender fraud.

Peter Liversidge got a bright little room with two installations (”Come On In” of handpainted dice, and “little by little” neon) including the proposals for those installations.

The preponderance of high-hung neon was nicely deflated by a Japanese artist’s smashed neon sign near the ground.

I always like what Mizuma has, but if there’s a message to take from this show it’s that Orientalism doesn’t even work any more.

My bandwidth was shutting down in protest and I started favoring one-liners. I chatted with the Andrew Kreps assistant working under a painting consisting only of the words “tiny little microscopes” for a few minutes as a kind of high-stress palate cleanser. Kreps also featured a pro-choice piece by Andrea Bowers, consisting of a pre-Roe v. Wade letter from a shudderingly oppressed woman who had no idea where to get an abortion to a sympathetic (or maybe not) organization.

English mega-gallery White Cube featured this life-size bronze of a trans man by Marc Quinn.

What I find interesting about Benjamin Edwards (”Solo”, 2010 and already sold) is that 3-d is already, especially if done right, far beyond the glitchy emptiness he foregrounds.

Limning the differences between him and Justin Faunce is a quick exercise.

SCHNELL.

I love David Schnell very much.

I wonder if the title “world map of genreal hazards” is intentional. I rather like “genreal” better than “general” or “natural”. I don’t know who did the Scrooge McDuck but it’s excellently posed for this photo op.

South African galleries felt especially strong this year. This taxidermied farcegory had a live band playing incidental music that I saw VIPs covering their ears for.

I think that’s about all I can salvage. I don’t want to declare a judgment on the show overall, because it’s a lot of different galleries trying a lot of different tactics, and sometimes the good parts are just good and the bad parts are really interesting. I’ll do further posts on the many other venues that have sprouted up this week. There are qualitative comparisons to be made, and I’d rather not debate context or content.

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot Reid Seifer’s Forget perfume booth. They had spray, for forgetting. It didn’t work.

SECOND COURSE:Scope

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent.
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC, calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn’t be enough security personnel even with well-behaved, informed crowds.
That’s part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than meta-commentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn’t it taste great? David Stein’s absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE’s corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People’s Revolution, Kelly Cutron’s PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE’s VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Bad boy scout making noises.

THIRD COURSE: Verge

It’s young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace “emerging” and “overlooked” art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn’t have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather’s was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche’s Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

FOURTH COURSE: Pulse

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works. Tonight’s theme: Cybernetics.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here’s what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40×60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art’s snarky political cartoonist. He’ll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we’re really post-Oedipal, and I don’t think so). He’s been working incredibly hard this year, and I don’t know why he’s not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend’s dessert, #class - its strength is that it’s such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: “Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?”

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I’d already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting what I like to call dessert (see Part The Sixth).

Who did the hypervirtual photo that’s on the cover of Lethem’s Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that’s who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48″x60″ (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

DESSERT:

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don’t think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It’s ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic’s heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn’t work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we’d get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I’ve said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn’t teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to “social media expert”/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton’s husband and friends. Everyone’s kids were there. Powhida showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don’t think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I’m made nervous that everyone else there had day jobs, but better-paying ones than mine.

This shit is bananas. S-H-I-T.

Current Show: Language Paintings
Philip J. Hardy / Michael Gibson:
Closing Party January 27th 6:30 pm
Two one-room exhibitions of painters who engage with words without including them in the image. Hard uses an illustrative style that frustrates meaning, taking on the colloquial and making referentless parables. Gibson deconstructs visual semiotics, combining collage with observational painting.

Potluck Birthday Bash at Tribes for YUKO OTOMO’s 60th!
Saturday, January 16 3:00 pm
3 pm onward * bring food or drink * wear something red
Bring a creative offering
All Day Music & Poetry Readings

John Fudala Improvised Musical Theater Benefit for Tribes
Suggested $5 donation
Refreshments offered
Friday January 22, 7-10 p.m.
Performance 8-9 p.m.
Doris Lo, John Fudala, Lucas Klauss, Cody Raisig , Luke Meginsky, Ann Doherty-Hardbattle, Brian McCarthy , Anne Stesney, Angie Martin, and Special Guests
Musical accompaniment by Tyler Cash

Tribes Gallery and Will McEvoy presents

Night of Near Music Miss(il)es

Donations to the space gracefully demanded.
Play, Drink, discuss and hang. Look forward to it!!
BRING SOMEONE ALONG, we’re sure they’ll have a good time.

BassBassTrumpatar

Dustin Carlson says : “I am very excited to announce the debut of a new ensemble! - a double double bass quartet featuring Will McEvoy n’ Sean ‘lockjaw’ Ali- Bass, Brad Henkel trumpet, and myself on guitar. “We are but rhinoceroses being chased by dumptrucks.”

www.mysace.com/dustinjcarlson

Cal Folger Day – guitar and voice (bluesfolkgarde)

“Cal Folger Day was born and partly raised in our great nation’s capital city. Now, in garretts and barrooms, she strums, whacks, hoots and hollers for congregations of customers most nights of the week. She’ll release her first E.P. and tour the East Coast in March.”

www.myspace.com/calfolgerday

Jackie Skrzynski / Hila Sela
Blood and Love: The Ties That Bind
Exhibition from January 30th-February 27th
Opening reception January 30th 6-9pm.
Staged Reading February 20th 7-9pm
The artists sharing their hearts with us this month at Tribes commit a rare act of optimism. They describe love. Parent, child, husband, wife, son, daughter, friend. These relationships of blood and love create ties that can be stretched to the point of breaking, or redoubled to a strength that lasts generations. Each of these artists holds an ultimately hopeful view of love, but they skirt sentimental notions of archetypal relationships.

*These events were made possible by David Hammons, Salon 94, Capital One Bank* www.tribes.org*

the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchenin our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.

An Untouchable in New Delhi, India © photo by Susan L. Yung

“Plenty” in her short life is what she wrote, knowledgably. She was emerging as a public figure to become a spokesperson for life in Chinatown, which is the Chinese immigrant story as reflected like the Jews of Lower East. In 1977, inside a “slum” ghettoized neighborhood, Frances prepared her first manuscript that she had “written a secret book entitled “Crazy Melon”. She submitted to various funding sources for publications and routinely, had been rejected. It would be a social class problem where at that time, (is the norm) … to be reckoned as amateurish writings by elite writers like Kimiko Hahn, graduate of Columbia University, or Kenneth Roth. Nevertheless, by 1980, Frances began to receive a poetry grant from New York State Council on the Arts-Creative Artists Public Service (NYSCCA CAPS) in 1980-81; A New York Times Co Foundation scholarship (1986); and a NYSCA Writer-in-Residence fellowship (1987-1988). This gave her confidence to submit her second manuscript, “Green Apple” for “conventional poetry competitions” such as the publication Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy American Poets in NYC. Her brief poems, short vignettes and prose reflect her precise selection of words. Her sparse lines describes a single Asian woman’s (maybe feminist) subtle thoughts during the Ethnic (Black, Hispanic and Asian) Civil Rights movement of the 60s-80s. Her work is “not prophetic, but the creation of deeper silences in which to safeguard personal or community thought, feeling and relationships from the onslaught of real estate speculation, … exploitation by the garment industry, and the ideology of a nation at war against yet another Asian populace, the Vietnamese.” She never joined a union, a NGO organization or participated in Chinatown worker’s issues. Her sole participation had been in women’s writers groups of LES or whenever they had blossomed in the late 70s. Eventually, such women’s intellectual groups diminished in late 80s. Maybe, she lacked political motivations or to participate in any activities such as attending marches, rallies; demonstrations and other radical/revolutionary changes would stunt her career as educator.

In Frances Chung’s 40 years, she poetically, with a touch of sardonic humor, described the boundaries of NYC’s Chinatown from Canal St to the diverse culture of Lower East Side during the years of 1966-1990. She died in 1990. However, there is only one posthumously book that has been published by Wesleyan College and edited by Walter K. Lew, a poet and Korean-American scholar. He had total access of her two manuscripts to print this singular book entitled “Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple-the Poems of Frances Chung”. The book came out in 2000; 10 years after her tragic death and it took me twenty years later to find the book to peruse. By now, any trace of this poet’s qualitative experiences are forgotten and there are more writers of Asian American descent in NYC capable of writing about the same perpetual struggles as experienced in the 60s & 70s.

The paperback book has 144 pages of Frances’ poems, vignettes and prose writings with 30 pages of Walter K. Lew’s titles of “Commentary”, “About the Text” and “Appendix.” His intensive research and faithful chronology of her writings portrays the writer’s development from adolescent to a matured woman with speculative lovers as perceived by Walter K. Lew. He even directed her cover design that trivializes her manuscript into a small illustration. Frances’ intent is to utilize a Chinese wrapper’s design where she had scotch taped for her front manuscript, “Crazy Melon”. The wrapper enclosed dried sweet plums where Westerners are unfamiliar with its tart sweet taste and flavor. (Hard to explain.) I would prefer if the artwork had been blown-up full size to appreciate the candy wrapper’s artistry since it reflects the art of Asia. The cover’s design is important for marketing of the book’s contents especially if it is a foreign culture to an ignorant mainstream American culture.

Luckily, I had survived NYC’s various stereotypical labels and can enumerate or reflect the similar experiences as well as go beyond the melding compatibilities or incongruence of Eastern (mainland China) and Western cultures due to my various travels to third world nations. I seem to complete the cycle of growing up in a Chinatown and returning to the same ghetto/barrio problems that are also inherent throughout the world.

Frances and I were classmates in Junior High School and High School. I had moved into the Chinatown neighborhood at the age of 12 from 2 years in the Bronx and 10 years in Portland, Oregon, my birth state. NYC’s cultural shock had affected me grandly since my family in Portland, Oregon were the only Chinese living within a mile from another Chinese family. The NYC culture of finding Asian families of 7-10 people living in close vicinities crammed in three room apartments can be disorientating and especially in a classroom of 30 Chinese students who were highly smart with competitive grades. In addition, most of my classmates went to Chinese schools to learn reading and writing calligraphy as well as speak Cantonese from 3:30-5:30 at the Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott St. Thus their capacities to be studious, smart, intellectually observant, lacking leisure time to enjoy competitive sports, artistic activities, attending social functions and events such as rock concerts, dating, dance mixers, and other social activities to mold and meld into mainstream culture. Instead, they became the model minority for other ethnic groups in NYC. These were high achievers whose parents were employed in the laundries, restaurant businesses and garment factories. There were some students whose parent’s were from Chinatown’s small businesses that lined the streets of Chinatown retaining the village traditions of Mainland China. Rarely, were their parents in the professional professions such as MDs, PhDs, lawyers, professors, architects, engineers, corporations, etc. Thus, the environment and experiences that Frances Chung grew up motivated her to be a role model for her classmates. Being a straight “A” student enabled her to escape a future of poverty. She expresses her hopes, childhood traumas, “observations” of the local, residential eccentrics and/or “eccentric.” happenings She traveled as a tourist or “was it a jet-setter lifestyle”? Upon her return to Chinatown as her home base, Frances makes comparisons of her world wind travels and her life in provincial Chinatown, as cited in the following lines:

The echoes of the night trucks
bouncing off the cobblestones
on Canal Street play on the
silences in my bones. Playing
games with the red and green
light on the corner of Mott and
Canal, we find an excuse to run—
we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal. (page 4)

Her quick terse observations become humorously timeless. She purposely focused on her subjects depending on quick descriptions that embodies the brief moment, lingering the experience with unforgettable words different from her mother tongue. Her sensitive observations can, to a Westerner, be considered neurotic. She could be bipolar, a schizoid silently suffering the contradictions while developing a voice contrary to the Chinese traditions, as well as develop a vocabulary to emote feelings and subtly suggest a precocious mind.

…the young man stopping her in the street to say “Arigato” and then looking hurt when she explained she was not Japanese. And then the man whispered as she walked past on Mott Street “do you ever play with yourself? You and me … I could really sock it to you.”

Friends wrote from Europe wishing her a Happy Valentine’s Day. (p. 41)

…..blue mannequin eye. Some brides stood proudly without
heads, one-armed, even one naked bride with no nipples. (p. 34)

He will jump out of his hospital window. Before
you leave, he will ask you to bring toothpicks the next
time you come. (p.70)

the Mexican night
fresh smell of el campo
luciérnagas (p.118)

Her sharp wit encompasses the years of living in a confined, stifling community describing bitter hardships and taboo traditions that need broken as in:

There is a group of Chinese-American men who think of
themselves as Chinese warriors. They are beautiful
anachronisms. They study the martial arts, practice
calligraphy, consult the I Ching and go to sword flicks to
blow their minds. (p.61)

The reader can decipher double innuendos subtly expressed with select words as in

“…see her taking care of teacups in the
association. She seems imported.” (p.67)

These lines suggest the dormant domesticity of an immigrant woman. Frances abhors the servitude by highlighting the activity and ending in a simple statement. The word “association”, for a Chinese person, automatically indicates the family’s village name of colloquial China and their patriarchal history of migrating to America. It is the alternative social services provided in an insular community behind the gift shops, restaurants, & grocers familiar to tourists. However, due to the Exclusion Act of 1864 the sojourner men had to organize a methodology to legitimize a system of protection for their assimilations and survival in White dominating America. These family associations provided loans for small businesses, shelters for family arrivals, filed paper works for citizenships, provide translators, keep records of village members with same name sakes, locate separated family members, etc.

Often, Frances references the exotic teas, foods: Hispanic and Chinese as only some readers can experience due to their individual family upbringings. She reminisces her childhood of identifying peculiar actions as normal such as “banging on the kitchen table” and observing roaches scattering in seven directions which she states “I must reread “Metamorphosis”. She describes stealing a snail from a grocer’s stall and once in the apartment, “spraying drops of water from our fingers to see if it was home.” (p.28). These childhood memories are unusual little moments of joy for a ghetto child to ruminate.

Frances’ quick observant words express feelings that many Asian artists and writers lack. Most major AA writers only write about their ID crises whereby they are constantly dependent and too busy finding a role model to emulate. For example: for men it would be “Bruce Lee” and for women “Suzie Wong”. There are other occupations to be pre-occupying as filmmakers, photographers, writers, or musicians, poets etc. So in American history Asians will be portrayed or considered as some form of enemy as oppose to being just American. Maybe it is a rites of passage to call a Chink “Chink”, Japanese “Jap” and so on “whatever….” Thus we’ll be stuck as templates Bruce Lees and Suzy Wongs, the fundamental stereotypes for Americans to fall back on and thus stalemating the cultural definitions of Asian Americans. In the following poem, Frances indicates her rebellious attitude, minimizing the words:

We use newspaper for a
tablecloth. And when I
want to make my mother
sad I tell her that I’m
going to cook American
food when I get older. (p.52)

In the afterward section, Walter Lew did an intensive research of Frances short-lived life where many of her poems express the static turmoil of living/growing up in a ghetto and her desires to go beyond the boundaries of Chinatown as well as travel before settling into a sedate profession.

Frances had prepared two manuscripts for publications, “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple”. The latter has “a richer conception of the scope and achievement of Chung’s writing” as described by Lew. He footnoted and charted France’s chronological progress of writing each poem, prose etc. This can be quite obsessive and stringently limiting for further interpretations since we will never witness Frances’ full maturity through her writings. Her early form of expression and early writings of an Asian American woman is obliterated by other living women writers. Frances Chung’s sensitive works precedes the west coast notables Maxine Kingston Hong and Amy Tan. These two women write about the first generation Chinese coping with an unfamiliar culture in a new country while Frances reflects the struggles of living in a ghettoized neighborhood. Her subtle words slowly stings with angry. Unfortunately, she never expressed it through participatory demonstrations, joined any grassroots organizations, be a political activist or bona fide artist. She just became a teacher in the Lower East Side and slowly submitted her ms to various funding sources. It took awhile for recognition but by then it became too late. To know the source of her brain tumor … was it from too much overuse in being a straight A student or the adult stresses of being Asian in a Hispanic community or never understanding a loved one?

In her poems, Frances’ last lines as experienced in the ghetto, constantly stings the mind with ironies that reaches a certain level of timeless miseries. Often it can be stifling and her escape route would be

“…every cockroach that runs across
my mind
whispers that I haven’t seen Peking.” (p. 44)

Here are a few other extracted last lines:

“everything in life being guesswork
cooking without teaspoons
eternal windowshoppers
we women were sometimes like children (p.60)

Chinese New Year …….Banners
across Chinatown. So many dragons to
follow. Oranges to cut. Shrimp chips
flowering. (p. 24)

When I went to JHS 65 on Forsyth St, many of my friends were fascinated with Frances’ straight A grades and her competitiveness to outshine their intelligences. I seemed to only surpass her with my math and history grades. However, I felt her quiet complacent solitude disturbing as an introvert incapable to speak out or make complaints as I became rebellious to NYC’s education system and often spoke my mind to various teachers. Even when we were in Washington HS, an all girl’s school, Frances kept to herself and achieved all the straight A’s. After graduation, she managed to go to an elite school, Smith College with scholarships while I attended Hunter College. After college, I participated in a non-profit cultural organization, Basement Workshop to become an expressive artist. Via this organization, with other peer groups of identical begrudges, we were able to culminate in a Confucius Plaza demonstration as our civil rights movement.

However, Frances shied from such demonstrative activities and would submit her manuscripts to the Basement Workshop in the hopes of publication. The organization was too busy dealing with internal logistics of mobilizing volunteers into a collective consciousness and administering an arts space to prevent street gangs rather than finance a publication. At that time, she had finished her 2 years foray in the Peace Corps situated in Central and South America. In addition, she taught in LES as a trilingual teacher, Spanish, Chinese, & English. Poetry became her outlet of expression and she taught poetry at St. Mark’s Project and Henry St. Settlement. She was able to receive 3 poetry awards: NYSCA CAPS (1980-81), NY Times Co. Foundation scholarship (1986) and a NYSCA Writer-in Residence fellowship (1987-88). Besides South America, she traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Africa. Frances was slowly becoming acknowledged until she was overtaken by her brain tumor. Thus after her death does her poems become a significant testimony to a life style that is slowly disappearing due to encroaching gentrification of Chinatown after LES’s final gentrification.

I find myself falling into Frances’ affinities and identify closely with her struggles that it often becomes painful to reflect how our lives are parallel of self-destruction and resurrections. However, in the late 80s, Frances fell a victim of an institution’s negligence. Once diagnosed, she underwent surgery. While in a coma, Frances was injected with antibodies that the doctors had unknowingly been unaware of her allergies. During her unconsciousness, she died with the poison burning through her veins. I also had the same allergy reaction when recuperating from surgery and luckily; I was conscience to complain the burning sensation coursing through my veins. The doctors were able to counter the poisonous drug with the correct antibody.

As Frances relies on selected words to describe a lifestyle in Chinatown, I tend to record with a camera, stills and videos. Thus, I been able to also travel, record and compare similarities of foreignness and isolated observations on the hopes that social changes would be evitable, especially in the socio-economic improvements. However, little has evolved through such expressions in the arts to expedite these social changes. As Asians, we are still imbued with stereotypical labels due to mainstream resistances. Recently in the past year of 2008, there had been a rash of fires and evictions occurring in Chinatown. For example, in 2008, on a very cold winter night, prompted by a landlord’s complaints, the Department of Buildings evicted 50 Chinese men from their SRO rooms and relocated them up in the Bronx. These men were unable to read or speak English and were alienated in a Hispanic community. With the assistances of the young determined community activists of Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence (CAAAV) and the rallying efforts of Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), it took a year for the men to return to their familiar environment-Chinatown.

There are more Chinese bums
In the neighborhood now. No
one knows where they come from
but they appear with crazy
smiles and unshaven faces.
One of them looks like a poet. (p.19)

Did ALL these poems caused her brain to develop a tumor? Was it the wait and frustration of submitting her ms to publishing houses and the constant rejections? Or the wait until other Asian friends could print them in “another Asian” collective anthology every 10 years. She had been a member of Ordinary Women, Basement Workshop, St Marks Poetry Project, and Henry St Settlement. Like Iris Chang’s tragic suicide in 2004 (a well known published writer of Chinese American History who died at the age of 38. See my written article entitled: Iris Chang: A Deceased Role Model Minority). Both died in the same age range which can be suspiciously speculative. Frances’ goals were the same … to explain 20th century modern hardships in order to become an artistic entity as a writer & poet. In the 21st century, Chinatown is being gentrified where many prime properties are converted to skyscrapers leaving nothing to be preserved or become historic landmarks, to retrace and hide the miseries of the still inherent oppressions of an ethnic immigrant slum life.

Frances Chung subliminal speculative poems & prose writings describe the barrios/ghettoes like Jacob Riis’ photos of LES. She praises or glorifies no mentors, persons, or spiritual beings. The reader is introduced to a lifestyle that Luc Sante, writer of “Low Life”, might write if he was Asian. Frances might be described as the sweet, romantic Asian American “muckrakers” who unlike the anarchist, Emma Goldman, wrote about her present situation in the hopes of being published as a contemporary writer.

Like an American pioneer, Frances Chung’s writings are before her time. Her narrative voice preludes the writings of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Frances’ enduring words have historic significance as her voice transcends and echoes the 20th Century innocence of life in a slum/ghettoe/barrio during an era of restitution and reconstruction of an American eye sore called “oppression and racism” which leads us to our present situation of Age of Terrorism and Anarchism. As gentrification encroaches and eradicates areas of ol’ Chinatown starting from Park Row’s middle class neighborhood to Mott St’s small businesses, Frances words will haunt my generation while the next generation welds with the New Recession with unemployments, scapegoatings, glass ceilings, inflationary rent increases, lack of labor skills, lack of artists reflecting a minorities’ subculture.

RIP, Frances Chung

By Pamela L. Laskin

Mother pray

for freedom

from your body.

March

to the malignant beat

of your battled breath.

No suffragette,

you birthed

a baby

into oblivion

until she

was an adult

who realized

women’s rights

may mean

leaving your mentally ill mother

harnessed like a horse

in her institutional bed,

to rally

and rot.

Cease Fire

To a Friend

You’ve bombed

my occupied territory,

and no matter how much I tell myself

what choice did you have

my boundaries

still bleed,

all the civilians housed in my heart

are displaced;

this land

will never be the same.

Try dressing the amputations

that hang between us.

we are trees in the forest,

fallen,

unsilent and microbic,

pimpling earth.

weeds claw to choke

all our feet, dandelions

less flower than our daily

toils, unearthed worms

bang faces into compacted soil

trying to hide from the nits

chirping in our hair.

Life fly
A day beginning with sun and arching to noon
And then to night, a bloody kiss of other/
Rapid ascension, sudden drops, endless sailing smoothly,
Furtive hand across your thigh
The dark shadow of good-bye rushing into
Roller coaster reds and yellows of
Flight trembling, vibrato just beneath the skin of a cloud
Like death.
A memory in the gauze of a smile
Well rooted in brine well saturated in the stench of
Treachery.
Words pull us
further away from our meaning.
Both orbit first person, singular and plural/
then second person
Singular and then plural.
One and many, constant currents
Within my waters rapid in veins engorged and raging.
Facebook brings all the worlds together/
Nostalgic longings pollinating with present night-mare schemes.
Winter finds me wrapped in summer silks sweating the sex from my pores.
Lesbian woman born woman loving woman whatever the origin or ontology,
Genetic burden carried by innocents thrown with venom.

Life fly
A flight of fancy/
A kissing staircase of lie
Upon lie wavering in dusk/
And dawn/
A stone structure burned
Solid in the heat of noon bright sun/
To turn liquid again as light sinks into horizon.
And night rises like the force of your hand
In between my legs buried deep/
Rubbing my consciousness into ecstasy.
A door bolted iron rusting covered in fall leaves
The handle trips me as I run from you.
My cheek lands hard upon an edge,
The blood salty and warm on my tongue/
Dry cotton fields to the horizon’s palate
As your sharp breath enters my soul through nose, eye
and ear and skin and cunt/
Taut like canvass prepared, dreamt, conjugated in various tongues.
The body knows itself and wills its own existence,
merrily stoic of mind worries and worldly miseries and social injustice.
The body wants to be fed and loved and rested without names/
With food and love’s taste regardless of words/
Unalienable release shared rhythm rocks to rest against.

Fly life
A file of fermenting
Folds fielding conjurers of various camps/
Proclaiming creation in their names.
I know you as the one I touched and felt/
Firm and solid even as we turned to water
Fleeing ourselves onto the softest sheets I’d ever touched.
My web address when the climb gets too rough.

Towards a Post War Language

by Poonam Srivistava

The time has come        The people said

To talk of other things.         Not of kings and crowns

Of wealth and boundries                     But of life.

It is time to say this loudly                And In every tongue,

Damn the Damners who damn things up

Who hurt the flow so they can       Grow big bellies on the bloody bodies  Of Enemies, perhaps red, perhaps towelheads.

Its time to Damn the Damners who Damn things up.

Blow things up.              Decimate children, people and planet.

Time now to state

We take your language of war        We lay it down by the banks of the              River of Humanity.

We wash your dirty words of collataral damage,                  Of civilian, military, peace zone, strike zone, victory, defeat,

                 Troop, military base, international threat…

We wash your twisted construct of logic       The  ”We are Right and They are Wrong” The “Our way is worth the killing and the dying”          The “Our guns protect our peace protect our children                  Our way of life”

We wash all these lies              In the River of humanity                   And lift the Dams of War

Damnation now to the Damners.

While your war empoverishes us        While your saving graces and bailouts are          Reserved for the big powers of war

The people awaken and take back their voice.       Your words and constructs will be             Absorbed into earth’s rich soil

Broken down by carbon and phosphorous                 Reduced to primal sound.        Set free to swim and fly like fish and dove.

Bearing life’s pain and pleasure                      Without the extra carry on burden of war.

A new language will birth of the released sounds.

Will wander from the hearts and souls to   Bury deep within our one earth’s magma core.  The volcanic heat taking us to rich red rock formation       That freely stand for all life                      For all souls to echo voices against.

Damn the damners whose time is up

To cede to planetary peace        Now no more wage slavery             Debt chains holding us back from        Our true roles as creators all                   Pleasure and pain no longer linked to            Your war machine of invisible slavery.

Our world without war is born

Imagine it.     Visualize it.       It is so.                          Not by making things right.              Not by might over fright.            By the river of humanity                                      As it washes its ears clean of the lies.

Turns its ears over to the loved ones             Turns away from the fear and fearmongerers      That damn us and our homes.

No longer will we feed our truth as grist for the war machine.            Now we work and play for creation of beauty and art

And in the natural pains and pleasures of the cycle of birth and death     The 24 hours of the day      The biorhythm that connects us

We will damn the damners

And free the language of love.

The language of peace.

The langage of humanity post war.

Freedom from their corporate lust.

Freedom from the consumerist diet we have assumed.

Freedom from lies of us and them and words with no meanings like democracy and socialism.

Within the new construct we will build a new economy and a new world

Damn the damners they cannot damn us with our powerful tongues now,

We are in tune with the language of love.

© Poonam Srivastava

To put very simply
There must be a thousand ways
Out here in the ozone

Someone asked me once a long time ago
How one becomes a poet
So I inquired as to had he dreamed that night
To wake up and write it all down
Desperately
Then, soon, I told him
It wouldn’t be long
He’s be dreaming all the time
awake or asleep
Of his thousand ways to die

Do you drink until your belly becomes liquid?
While your muses toast you in adoration
Drafting your demise
Leading you to each of pennance
Over dark thorny paths by your hot sweaty hand
Like a curious child
To your thousand ways to survive

So, count on every jeweled finger
Every tarnished shred of daydreams
Becoming slow running nightmare reality
Give credit to every weary angel
Who lights these paths
With broken glass of your shattered mind
To your own very personal thousand ways to strive

But, when reality threatens to hit
Lucidity kicks in your teeth unexpectedly
Just be well aware and warned of your fate
That when that day comes
Finally bank on a thousand ways to deny, alright?

So, I’ll sit in a bar absently rubbing my dry frozen lips

On velveteen of a thoughtlessly scattered petal
Of a once very plump pink rose
If only to dream of a briefly safe garden
Remembering softness gritting my teeth
Confronted with my empty beer glass
Contemplating a thousand ways
Right now, right here, tonight

Music calls me home to you cold and tired
Laughing at this large ring
On my knobby scarred aching finger
Shining risky attention on all my old broken boned imperfections
When you’re on trial a few times over
Defending your life to its hilt
Sacrificing, endlessly footing the bill
You can’t help but dream each night
Of a thousand ways to thrive, alright?

That crisp scent of fresh money
Sharp and clean as a razor
Fast new cars, fancy tastes, exotic rituals
Accidents and miracles
Enough virgin rope to hang yourself by
On special occasions
Or, for specific escalations of monumental poetic potential
When you are distracted
By your own flow of blood
Glimpses of hot stolen heroes
Raising flames into your flying time
I’m sure you’ll find my love, at least
A thousand ways to live tonight

With the charisma and finness of a worldly diva, ingenue Alyssa Langworthy continued to stun spectators in the second round of Stockton’s All City Slam this past Friday. Awash with amazement, Judge Chrissy Davis said of Langworthy’s piece, “I feel as if I am listening to a grown woman’s thoughts!” Indeed, all of the judges were floored by Alyssa’s courageous delivery, clever turn of phrase as well as the humility of the poetess. Visitors to tonight and tomorrow’s final rounds can expect even more surprises from Ms. Langworthy.

My Man

Roses are red
And violets are blue,
But his two lips
Can steal mine away and damn day they’d like to
Full and think that smile that makes my tummy tumble
with each dimple that shows
creating crevasses in that cocoa colored skin that would even
make Hershey bars jealous
and I’m already envious
With those hoops he shoots
And the lines he spits always seem to overpower mine
More powerful and hardcore than I will ever be
he’s perfect in every way, yet the only thing perfect about him
are his flaws
making him human
because I’ve already found an immortal’s hand to put my life in
I need a man
One who wants me for me
Not what I have
Not that I have anything
And will love me and hip hug me
Tug my arm along his side going where life leads us
And I’m letting life lead me to him
And this time, maybe it won’t be the wrong one
But the right one
So I write one line each day about the time spent that day
cause maybe that’ll be the day
I’ll find a man stand before me in a crowd of boys
Still haven’t learned to mature and grow in their mind
Think they’re hard
But they haven’t even had it that hard
So how would they even know what hard is
And my man will be strong
Muscles of emotions
And rippling knowledge pectorals
Building bodies of opportunities taken
Connected by neck to a head of open mind leaking
Sad tears and mad tears
Through those stone cold eyes that seem to
Warm my body each time they lock with mine
I want a man who I can converse with
Tell each other of our firsts
And let each other see us at our worst
Hold each other tight and get us through to our bests
Letting fingers interlock
Spelling out our romance with just
Our knuckles
But not just in our knuckles
In the way he holds me tight
And I the way I whisper in his ear
In the way he calls me every day at 4 AM
Wakin’ my sleeping self up just
So I’ll be the first one he talks to that day
And in the way I can call him at 2 AM to say goodnight
And in the way I sit through a season’s worth of Kings games
When he knows I’m a Lakers fan
See this is how my man is
Or will be
When I find him
And you’ve heard anything you like
You can call me, text me 209 – 915 – 2189
Cause I am still lookin out there
For my man

Alyssa Langworthy has been a Stockton, California resident all her life. She started writing her poetry at the age of fifteen and is a sophomore at Cesar Chavez High School in Stockton. She enjoys every aspect of the arts and is currently awaiting her departure to college in two years. She spends her time between school work, her poetry, and acting.

Thank you to Tribes supporters who have made direct buys of the New Edge/Fly by Night Press publication Spic Chic. We are in the process of ordering a second print run of the book to utilize on the upcoming twenty five city book tour plus overseas presentations of material from: Spic Chic “The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican.”  

Spic Chic Written by: Luis Chaluisan aka El Extreme. Published by: Fly By Night Press - A subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC. ISBN 1930083173 (100 pages with color photos). For filmed performances of material from the book please visit  www.newedgecabaret.com

“I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” David Henderson, author, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child

In late 2008, Fly by Night Press (a subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC) opted to publish a compendium of  poetry, photos, artwork, comedic essays and short stories dating back to 1975 under the title of Spic Chic (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican), written by Luis Chaluisan (aka El Extreme). The term “Spic Chic” caused controversy in 1974 when it was used on the Bill Boggs mid-day talk show - then aired on Metromedia Channel 5 in NYC (now Fox Television). The offhand remark was offered by Latin NY magazine editors to describe the infusion of vivid colors by Latino clothes designers then making their mark on NY’s fashion world. The latter part of the promotional title (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican) is based on a humorous quip in 2005 from Nuyorican poet Papoleto Melendez that “El Extreme represents the torn page” from the canon of previously published Nuyorican writers who flourished in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Meanwhile, writer David Henderson (‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child) is a bit more serious stating, “I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” Both observations are welcomed by Bronx bred author Chaluisan - now residing in Brownsville, Brooklyn - who states, “I could have chased a traditional path in developing my work but I was having too much manic fun being off-beat and, besides, God had other plans for my creative life.” With the publication of “Narrative of a Hybrid” in the “Polemic” Anthology (1976, Straight Ahead Press – Amherst, Massachusetts) Luis Chaluisan joined the ranks of period Nuyorican writers that included Pedro Pietri (“Puerto Rican Obituary” 1973), Miguel Pinero (Short Eyes 1973) and Lefty Barretto (Nobody’s Hero 1976). Mentored by Black Panther cultural minister Ed Bullins and later by Young Lord Eddie Figueroa (founder of the “New Rican Village” on the Lower East Side of New York) Chaluisan was invited to join the NY Public Theater’s emerging playwright unit headed by Crispin Larengeira in the summer 0f 1977. A chance meeting with magazine editor-in-chief Soledad Santiago paved the way for Chaluisan to land a job at Latin NY magazine – the nation’s first successful long term English language monthly publication focusing on Latino (primarily Puerto Rican vis-a-vis Nuyorican) arts and culture. The nineteen year old Chaluisan rose up the ranks from reporter to music editor between 1977-79 under the tutelage of Latin NY publisher Izzy Sanabria which led to his being hired by WCBS network affiliate WFSB (Channel 3) in Hartford, Connecticut in June of 1979. For the next seventeen years he  worked as a TV investigative reporter, producer, writer and marketing executive for PBS (Bowling Green, Ohio), Telemundo (Tucson, Arizona/Yakima, Washington), WCBS Channel 2 (New York), and News 12 Long Island, along with stints at radio station WGB in Albany among other mainstream media outlets in the US. Upon leaving the news business in 1997 and resettling in Hartford, CT, Chaluisan (once again performing full time as “El Extreme”) began to disseminate work he had developed as a musical composer and poet/essayist with his own indie rock groups dating back to 1982 (Little Otis and The Upsetters, The Blankets of Doom, La Gran Orquesta El Extreme, Gang Bang Bang, and El Extreme’s Electric Cabaret.). The effort led to his inclusion in the National Slam Poetry movement as a State Slam Champion for CT. (1998/1999 in Austin, Texas and Chicago, Illinois.) His semi-final performance was captured on film by CBS’ Sixty Minutes and featured in the news magazine’s report on the tenth anniversary of the Slam movement. In 2000 he returned to NYC and set to work on organizing his written work and professional notes describing his media/educational experience which resulted in the off-Broadway play Spic Chic: S.panish P.eople I.n C.ontrol (initially a 2001 workshop at the Nuyorican Café in Manhattan with later runs at the Chelsea Playhouse and Spanish Repertory Theater). The performance at El Repertorio Espanol garnered the attention of producers for the 2004 Biennale Festival in Bonn, Germany where Spic Chic had its European premiere at the Bonn Opera House Theater. In the meantime, Chaluisan was approached by film director Henry Chalfant (“Style Wars”)  to contribute both content and interview source material to the award winning documentary “From Mambo to Hip Hop” which aired on PBS in 2006. In 2007, Chaluisan moved to Puerto Rico after the death of his father Federico Chaluisan to spend a year in mourning and soaking in the poetry/writer’s scene at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, PR. With the help of University students and Professor Linda Rodriguez, El Extreme re-emerged writing in both English and Spanish. The rest is, as the pundits say, “underground history.”