Article on 'The Sonosopher' in the College Times - Feb. 11th, 2008

Click on image to enlarge article. We're more than happy with this most recent coverage of the documentary by The College Times...

vaffanculo!

When I said this to Alex, he simply corrected my pronunciation.

I learned the useful word from a New Yorker profile of Beppe Grillo, a political comedian in Italy with a much-read blog. Grillo has been sponsoring V-Day protests against the convicted criminals in the Italian Parliament: Victory, Vendetta, and Vaffanculo.

Travis asked "When would it be appropriate to use 'vaffanculo'"?

Alex thundered, NEVER, it's never appropriate, that's the whole point!

alex once said

"being an artist is embarrassing"

kerouac, flanders and caldiero: THE ROAD

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Last night after the performance on larynx and sax at Ken Sanders Rare Books (Alex Caldiero scrolling down Kerouac's "On the Road" with John Flanders fueling the truck as it rolled), I sat on a stool at the Desert Edge next to Trent Harris and heard him say that without Alex, the city would be a wasteland.

I agreed, and added: I've always thought of you and Alex and Scott Carrier as the Holy Trinity.

That would make me the Holy Ghost, he claimed.

This morning, for several reasons, I'd like to revise my assessment.

1. This is no trinity, but a quartet: Ken Sanders is an obvious partner in crime.
2. None of the four is even remotely holy in a trinitarian sense. We'd have to move into a Ginsbergian universe for that epithet to hold true.
3. I can imagine Ken as God the Father and Alex as Sweet Jesus; but Trent as the Holy Ghost? Scott as the peripatetic apostle Paul?
4. Isn't it more fun to think of these four astride immense Percherons pounding across the west desert, headed for the City of the Saints?



Just testing, Alex said at the end of his poem about death, just testing. We all laughed, relieved that this member of the apocalyptic dream team was scheduled for later.

The straight line will take you only to death, Kerouac wrote, and Alex's reading circled around again and again to Kerouac on death, to Kerouac on jazz -- Neal and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long mad weekend. . . . And Shearing began to rock. . . . Folks yelled for him to "Go!" . . . "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" . . . Shearing rose from the piano dripping with sweat; these were his great days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Neal pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair" he said.

And my mind jerked to the last review I wrote for the Salt Lake Observer, the one in which I indicted Shearing for a lackluster performance at his 80th birthday bash in SLC -- after which "Jazz at the Hilton" pulled their advertising from the paper. Wish I had known Kerouac when I wrote it.

a nite of KEROUAC...

in colours

mlk uvu 1.15.08 +1

2003 Review of Joint Exhibition in Park City

Published in Catalyst Magazine March 2003

“Every Angel is Terrifying”

Frank McEntire and Alex Bigney, with Alex Caldiero, in a Stunning Kimball Exhibit

by Scott Abbott

In the first of the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke’s persona wonders who would hear him from the ranks of the angels if he were to scream. His thoughts turn immediately to the problematic nature of calling on a “more potent being,” “for every angel is terrifying.” By definition, divinity (or beauty in Rilke’s case), is horrific (a truth we suppress while singing sweet hymns in church or invoking god to save America). This month at the Kimball Art Center in Park City (February 16, 2003—March 24, 2003), two Utah artists, Alex Bigney and Frank McEntire, are exhibiting works under the title “What Cannot be Spoken”; and their works, like Rilke’s elegies, wonder about beauty and divine presence while holding them, warily, at arm’s length.

Consider first several of McEntire’s works, found and constructed objects with reference to LDS, Catholic, Hindu, and Buddhist iconography. Alongside the obvious religious devotion McEntire expresses in beautiful pieces like the hanging “Libation,” “Hidden Text,” and “Rice Offering,” a viewer begins to notice in other works that Jesus has been ripped off the cross and lain stiffly on an iron bed (“Rise Up”), he’s been lifted on his back and thrust frontally toward heaven (“Ascension”), he’s been plastered over and then skewered by a sharp rod while standing on an iron grate (“Lightnin’ Jesus”).

The most disturbing of McEntire’s works, perhaps, is “Chicken Feed,” a kind of steel trough set on the floor and filled with communion wafers, round, flat, cross-stamped hosts. As blasphemous, or as pointedly aimed at the blasphemy of venial religion as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” “Chicken Feed” feels like a knee in the groin of organized religion, or (and these multiple meanings abound in this show) it evokes biblical chicks under a wing and the “bread of life,” and our all-too-human frailty dependent on a succoring god. Much depends here on the eye of the beholder.

Still, and always, it’s a terrible god McEntire depicts, profound, comforting, vapid, and dangerous. An installation on the wall near “Chicken Feed” embodies all four aspects: “Visitation From the Divine Other” includes a tin belt-housing with a rectangular hole in the center from which light streams. Mounted above the housing is a white rabbit head, pink eyed and prettily veiled, a white wedding veil that descends over the housing. Looking through the veil, one sees a hand emanating from the wall holding a crucifix. McEntire talks about the divine (m)Other and the rabbit as a symbol of fertility. I see the pink-eyed rabbit head with its shroud as turning its secret into burlesque. Alternately, the guard and the veil protect the viewer against the horrific hand of GOD, so OTHER that it will burn your eyes out.

Like McEntire’s works, Alex Bigney’s seven new paintings, good-sized canvases that glow, numinously, from across the room, meticulously retract the secrets they reveal. These are humble paintings, reverent and devotional and ironic to the core. Beauty is the god invoked here, a terrible and traditional beauty not to be toyed with, but amenable to play and humor and infinite craftiness.

“Incognito” has a hand in the upper triangle with rays streaming around it. Between the hand and the rectangular painting below is a strip with the words

“NON DICE REIL LESE CRITA A BBOCE.”

The inscription in vulgar Latin, Bigney says, was scratched on the wall of a little basilica in the Roman catacombs. The words are broken, the letters spaced to make deciphering difficult. “Don’t say the secret out loud,” is the message. A black bowler hat tops a masked head in profile, revealing blue sky, white clouds, and single feathers within. Is this revelation the secret to the man’s identity? If so, what does it mean? Is it more of the disguise? A statement that we mean even when we hide meaning?

“Cappelleria,” hat store, repeats the profiled head with black hat, but this time the hat is opaque, revealing nothing but itself. Scratched faintly into the paint is the familiar vulgar Latin inscription. At the top of the painting a snake, a real snake, has been gessoed to the canvas. It appears now under layers of paint, visible as form but covered. The bright blue sky around the head is bumpy in places, covering remnants of an earlier version of the painting, announcing subtly that “ceci n’est pas un ciel.” Delicate little human/reptile figures recede and appear from a border surrounding the head.

Bigney paints a canvas, sands it down, paints again, sands it partially, leaving traces under the new paint. It’s an old technique, pentimento (I repent, I’m sorry, I take it back) a painterly palimpsest. What’s the effect of so much layering and disclosing? Hints of a deeper secret? A failed painting announcing itself? A continued reference to the process of painting itself?

Finally, this provocative exhibit I have scarcely hinted at includes twenty-six multimedia drawings: "Said Z," text by Utah poet Alex Caldiero, visual responses by Alex Bigney.

Said Z “I am Zephyr”

“you are Zero” said the Lord –

said Y “I am Youth”

“you are Yoked” said the Lord –

. . .

said D “I am Daybreak”

“you are Doom” said the Lord –

said C “I am Called”

“you are Canceled” said the Lord –

Bigney explores each of the letters visually, composing on paper silkscreened several times with light gesso, affixing letters cut from

Italian block-printed papers. Each drawing includes a border (of real quills sewn to the paper for “Q,” of dino stickers for “D,” of blue cosmos petals for “P”). It’s difficult to convey the craftsmanship evident in these playful and serious works, the meticulous care that went into sewing beads into the black silk around the letter “B” or gathering and wrapping and sewing the tufts of brown hair around the “H.” And it’s hard adequately to depict the playfulness, the willful verbal and visual humor of the compilation of images. These literate drawings ought to be seen, ought to hang in Salt Lake’s new library.

Alex Caldiero performed “said Z” for the audience at the opening reception, and added a poem that brought together Bigney’s obsession with the secrets of beauty and McEntire’s fascination with the secrets of the divine:

-- nonetheless he believes in god . . . the Lord does not respond – he believes in god all the more . . . what’s wrong with this man? How can he be so stupid? He does not know – he has no answer – he is a pure devotee . . . he is god’s stooge – he is god’s baboon. . . .

That would make McEntire, Bigney, and Caldiero the three stooges. It’s a brilliant show.

Alex Caldiero Performs Allen Ginsberg's 'Moloch'

"The Sonosopher" Documentary Project

The link below is a link to a post that I just made on my personal blog. The post is a general introduction/description to our documentary idea...check it out.

http://grabblogger.blogspot.com/2007/12/sonosopher-documentary-project.html

HOWL, 50th Anniversary

One of the most remarkable events I have ever witnessed. There's a good film of the event that might have some good scenes for the documentary.

Conversations Between a Mystic and a Rationalist