For thirty years David Chapman has collected images of muscular women – cartoons, old travelling vaudeville troupe and circus ads, photographs of body builders. In contrast to the image of a typical woman (be it from years in which curves dominate the popular aesthetic or years in which long and lithe is the way to look) the rare images contained within David Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky’s book Venus With Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women may make you second guess your impressions of the strong woman.
“There is something profoundly upsetting about a proud, confident, unrepentantly muscular woman,” writes Chapman in the book’s introduction. “She risks being seen by her viewers as dangerous, alluring, odd, beautiful or, at worst, a sort of raree show. She is, in fact, a smorgasbord of mixed messages.”
In 2007 Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal launched Domestic Tension an interactive installation at a Chicago art gallery targeting key issues of morality and violence surrounding the Iraq war. For one month Bilal inhabited a prison cell-sized room with little but a desk, lamp, computer and a bed, all sitting in range of a paintball gun, rigged to fire via an online click by visitors to the exhibition website.
Small Canadian literary magazines are facing catastrophic budget cuts because of changes made to how magazines are subsidized. Last year the Harper Government created the Canadian Periodical Fund, a streamlined approach to funding Canada’s ever-struggling periodical industry. But in its new and improved form it seems funding is only available for the big commercial fish in Canada’s small magazine pond.
The Canadian Periodical Fund, which merged together the Publishing Assistance Program and Canadian Magazine Fund, provides subsidies only for magazines with a minimum circulation of 5,000, which is no small feat in Canada’s great and sparsely populated expanse.
Poetry can project reflections on our world and the complexity of the human condition in ways no other written format can; a direct line to the wanderings of the soul. Poetic verse can illuminate the mystical or spiritual sides to our existence often swept aside in our fast moving world. Words spelling out the beautiful impossibility of life on this green planet.
Disappear by Montreal poet Ian Ferrier — a composition with the band Pharmakon featuring Kris Mah on guitar and laptop, Doug Stein on drums, and in collaboration with media artist pk langshaw — is a beautiful portrait on the permanence and impermanence of life. An incredible mix of spoken-word performance poetry and contemporary dance, Disappear is a multidisciplinary feat of beauty from the heart of Montreal’s poetry scene. Disappear is a single on Pharmakon’s recently released album To Call Out in the Night.
Whether written or spoken, rhymed, rhythmic or free verse, the aesthetics of words are a mirror for how some of us attempt to influence and define the world where we live. Have poets shaped the political world ? Is the political world itself deeply poetical? The answer depends in part on what we include in our definition of poetry and who we consider to be poets. Can war propaganda or marketing campaigns be poetic?
Poetry may be ethically neutral in itself, but it nonetheless serves its masters. In the hands of the elite or the underprivileged, poetry is a form of power. Poetry – this exercise in contemplation, regardless of the form it takes – often forces kings and heroes to make poets of themselves, and occasionally turns poets into kings and heroes.
This is the second half of a two-part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco. We spent an hour with the award-winning writer and illustrator discussing his approach to comics and journalism, the relationship between comics and education, and how he copes with war and tragedy, among other fascinating topics. Click here to read part one before reading the rest of the conversation below.
Putting ink onto paper and words into mouths
Art Threat: I want to talk about process on a practical level. How long does it take you on average to complete one of those pages in your books? Where do you work? Do you show it to anyone else before you send it into the publisher?
Joe Sacco: I work at home. I kind of dedicated a room, a bedroom to work in. I mean, it’s nothing but desks and books and all that stuff. And it takes about two days to do a page.
That’s from beginning to end?
Beginning to end. And normally I’m working on two pages at a time, so in five days I’ll get two pages done. But you know sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. The thing about drawing, what I found over time, is I can pretty much accurately tell myself, I have this many pages to draw, it’s going to take this many weeks or months.
As a kid I developed a quiet obsession for Archie comics. No car trip, camping outing or family reunion was complete without my stack of thick dog-eared volumes, containing in their small borders the multiple-page narratives that now seem so dull.
This early development of bad taste thankfully morphed into membership in a book club and the subsequent devouring of several books per month during my junior high years. Aside from the odd Mad magazine perusal, I had abandoned my old companion the comic book, even misplaced my coveted collection that numbered in the hundreds. Boxes full of dusty Archies may still be languishing in solitude in some random attic somewhere in British Columbia.
It wasn’t until years later, in adulthood, that I discovered “graphic novels” — long form storytelling through comics. Blissfully unaware of the dork-factor, I sunk into tales of fantasy, sci-fi, and medieval adventures with gusto, borrowing books by the anxious mitt-full from my Star Wars-obsessed friend Cam.
TAKE ACTION: to The Walrus demanding an end to the greenwash, or call them at 1.866.236.0475. If you want to cancel your subscription, you can unsubscribe here.
“Divest from the Royal Bank of Canada, close your accounts, tell RBC to stop funding the tar sands project.” This was the advice filmmaker Shannon Walsh gave an audience in Toronto after a screening in 2009 of her documentary on the Alberta tar sands project, H2OIL.
Someone in the audience, noticeably moved by the film’s critical exploration of Alberta’s cash-cow and the planet’s eco-nightmare, had asked Walsh the dreaded question, “OK but what is something we can do right now?” Where many filmmakers would read out the laundry list of tepid actions like writing letters and signing petitions, Walsh gave everyone something concrete and tangible to focus on.
Whether the film has made an impact on RBC’s supportive connections to the tar sands is doubtful, but that might be more of a problem of visibility than apathy — Canadian films are notoriously underserved in the North-of-Hollywood distribution and exhibition matrix. Nevertheless, many had no idea that RBC was so intimately connected to what has been described as the largest and worst industrial project in human history.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Canada’s premiere (and therefore very visible) literary arts, politics, and culture magazine The Walrus.
What follows is an account of what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a group of young Christian Democratic party members on Monday. The verbatim excerpt below (in italics) is revealing.
In the interests of entertainment, I have recreated Merkel’s comments as a dialogue with a fictitious, pesky and well informed attendee at a fundraising event. Imagine the two of them meeting in a large room filled with well-dressed socialites, Chancellor Merkel moving slowly through the crowd with her handlers and encountering rather unintentionally this bespectacled and nebbish character — indeed, a party pooper — whom she tries to evade and does, eventually, successfully slip away from after a very brief exchange.
Chancellor Merkel:In Frankfurt am Main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background. We are a country which at the beginning of the 60s actually brought guest workers to Germany.
In this RSA Animate, radical social theorist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane? “Any sensible person right now would join an anti-Capitalist organization.” – The poignant words of Harvey on the unsustainable and inequitable nature of capitalism are brought to life by RSA‘s very cool animation. Enjoy and have a great weekend.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
Small Canadian literary magazines are facing catastrophic budget cuts because of changes made to how magazines are subsidized. Last year the Harper Government created the Canadian Periodical Fund, a streamlined approach to funding Canada’s ever-struggling periodical industry. But in its new and improved form it seems funding is only available for the big commercial fish in Canada’s small magazine pond.
