Blue Mountain Center

Conceptual artists Mike Silverstein and Kay Wood are taking on the parking ticket predators and their faux curb taxes in our new website parkinghorrors.com and having a lot of fun at their expense.

The Worldwide Parking Ticket Blight

Philadelphia — Pretty much everyone who reads a newspaper in this country knows that local governments have transformed needed parking regulations into cash cows for their own recession-depleted general funds. Most Americans however, don't know that this same predatory process — often in an even more pronounced form — is at work in countries around the world.

Britain is a prime example. After the government in 1991 allowed local councils to administer ticketing systems, often with the help of private contractors, the number of tickets issued soared 700 percent in the next six years. It has been increasing steadily there ever since. Stories such as parking wardens giving tickets to bus drivers stopped to pick up passengers, and to vans operated by the national blood service, have become a staple of English newspapers.

Madcap tales in this realm are turning up everywhere. In Tel Aviv, for example, if you haven't paid your ticket fines, you get a visit at your home in the evening from collectors. In Darwin, Australia, an elderly woman tied her dog to a fence by a parking bay while she shopped, and when she returned found a parking ticket tucked under its collar.

Parkinghorrors.com tracks this worldwide parking enforcement madness on a daily basis, with a special focus on the way it is playing out in this country. In addition, it runs regular features on the effect parking is having on local merchants, individual tales of woe from victimized motorists, and poignant and frequently hilarious cartoons by artist Kay Wood.

For more information, contact Kay Wood or her sidekick, Mike Silverstein, at info@parkinghorrors.com.

I'll have ten pictures on display at a group exhibition by Blue Earth Alliance photographers (http://www.blueearth.org) at the Mumm Ansel Adams Gallery in Napa, California

(http://mummnapa.com/visitmummnapa/galleryExihibitInformation)

Mumm Napa
8445 Silverado Trl
Napa, CA 94558-9435
(707) 967-7700

Dear Friends,

Please join us on Wednesday, July 16, 6-8 at Artists Space for a night of performances in conjunction with the exhibition Salad Days.

Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada marks my first public performance and continues my explorations of the transformed and grotesque body within historical moments of crisis. The multi-media piece moves between post-war Austria of the 1960's and our contemporary moment of war, offering a new way of looking at Rudolph Schwarzkogler's work, while reflecting on the impact of technologies on our present individual and collective bodies.

Considering that war can now be created and watched from a vast distance, Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada addresses a collapse of this distance and attempts a recovery of the bodies we have separated ourselves from. An audio component features the voice of Shahzada, a former Guantanamo detainee and tribal elder from Afghanistan known through the camp for his sad and beautiful singing voice.The songs are based on lines of poetry smuggled to him by fellow inmates.

Schwarzkogler, a member of the Vienna Actionists, began his career as a painter and went on to create largely private performances using himself, a model and a photographer. The results were simple, disturbing and austere photographic images of the body injured, healing and in the process of being handled and manipulated. Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada makes reference to the frame as a device that links painting to performance, image to the real and the past to present.

www.artistsspace.org

Curator:
Christopher Lew

Performers:
Rajkamal Kahlon
Jesse Lopez
Erin Shigaki
Elia Alba

Consulting/Art Direction:

Rajkamal Kahlon
www.wooloo.org/rajkamalkahlon

Jesse Lopez
www.jesselopez.com

Purple Gate Design, Erin Shigaki
www.purplegatedesign.com

Read, Write, Resist!

Split This Rock Poetry Festival (March 20-23) will bring poets and writers to Washington, D.C. on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, in the midst of the presidential election, for four days of collaboration, learning, andperformance. The festival will feature opportunities to build community and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change. Join us as we celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination.

Featured poets include: Chris August, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dennis Brutus, Princess of Controversy, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri, Lucille Clifton, Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade), Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Brian Gilmore, Sam Hamill, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Kuusisto, Semezhdin Mehmedinovic, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Alix Olson, Alicia Ostriker, Ishle Yi Park, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy, Pamela Uschuk, and Belle Waring.

The festival ends with a silent march to the White House, protesting war in Iraq, and poets will create a collaborative poem as part of our closing ceremony.

Our full schedule is now online. For a complete schedule of readings, workshops, and panel discussions go to: http://www.splitthisrock.org/schedule.html

Early registration discount ends March 15th. Sign up online today-- and help us get the word out.

Documentary film directed by María José Calderón about La Paya-style of Chilean singing.

Friday, October 26, 2007 ~ 8pm

La Pena
3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705 USA
More Info : http://www.lapena.org/event/586