2 titles reviewed in Iconoclast #97

A Cosmic Clown's Science Fiction Religion
Robert O'Neal

The Ginger Man runneth amongst us, splashing burning wit and satiric acid at our brains with much wordplay and jousting at religion and philosophy. In this brief poetry chapbook, we encounter someone well able to articulate our rage at the stupidity of 21st Century American life. Catch him if you can- and hope he returns for another round.

The San Antonio, Savannah, and Daytona Beach Poems
by Gerald Locklin

...'San Antonio' too has a picture of the poet: a photo on the back cover bathed in red. But the poems are more down-to-earth; how we deal with others (colleagues, lovers); our own habits and foibles. A little 'town and gown' here: academic conferences at expensive hotels (with poverty a few blocks away). Finally, Mr. Locklin recalls moments of his personal life and history.

Reviewed by Phil Wagner

Iconoclast
1675 Amazon Road
Mohegan Lake, NY 10547-1804

O'Neal reviewed in The 13th Warrior Review

from The 13th Warrior Review:

A Cosmic Clown's Science Fiction Religion
By Robert O'Neal (The Silver Wonder Press)

Why do middle class, middling, middle-of-the-road poets like Billy Collins get to be Poet Laureates while Robert O'Neal is all but unknown? Perhaps it's because, as the author himself says, "he'd rather be understood than accepted." Rebel to the core, O'Neal has the temerity to shake his fist at the existential dilemma and tell "the dictator" to go fuck himself. And no one does it with the same sardonic charm and masterful vocabulary -- he who ploughshares philosophical discourse into brain-piercing poetic bullets, an almost mystical defense against the duplicity of authority:

"I was there, tethered unaware,
the dictator's amniotic brainwash
percolating around me,
a cauled euteronaut traumatized
by the contradiction ushering him
from one darkness to a greater darkness..."

His anger and confusion resonates off the page and echoes the anger and confusion that many of us feel on our best days when we dare remove our heads from our hind parts and take a look around:

"God
is brushing slime on tapeworms.

Satan
has a name commensurate
with his monomaniacal ambitions.

They
feud over the span of years between placenta & crypt.

I'm
not sure which one continues to bless us
with Kalashnikov culture & pernicious viruses."

Or:

"Slipping
sliding,
Slobbering

out of a shaved vagina --

(The brow is always inaccessible!
Pelvic bones are the ignoble crowning
all of us receive in compensation.)

who
put us there

in the first place?

& why can't we refuse
to expose ourselves to uncompromising light?

& you wonder why
all newborns have clenched fists."

What else can be said about O'Neal's poetry? Whether one shares his world view or not, one must stand in awe of his ability to stroke the neurons and asshole at the same time. He certainly stands head and shoulders above many of the so-called poets out there slopping their ink to the white page. Certainly, he's worth the two bucks for this chapbook.

--reviewed by JCE

abe gibson/mayjabeen/brian klein at myopic jan 7th

A rare music performance coming up next monday. come out to myopic and check out the show. I'll be playing w/Brian Klein and Mayjabeen from Names.

Monday Jan 7th
7:30 pm
Myopic Bookstore
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave
Upstairs
Free Show

poem in the new Barbaric Yawp

my poem 'inching...' appears in the new issue of Barbaric Yawp (Volume 11, Number 3- September 2007)

you can get a copy for $4 at:

Bone World Publishing
John and Nancy Berbrich
3700 County Route 24
Russell, New York 13684

The Silver Wonder Press written about on Pitchfork website

I'm a bit slow to post news here but here's some pretty exciting stuff. The good folks over at Pitchfork did a really nice little article about Lee Ranaldo's "Hello From the American Desert" that we recently published. Here in the link to the article:

www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/47047-lee-ranaldo-pens-poetry-book
-based-on-e-mail-spam

We were also mentioned on the radio in Ontario recently when Lee did an interview in Guelph, and he also recently did a interview with Broken Pencil magazine about spam poetry that mentions the silver wonder-I'll post links to this stuff when it appears online....

Hello From The American Desert by Lee Ranaldo

It's been in the works since 1999 and has finally seen the light of day! I am so freakin happy to announce the publication of Lee Ranaldo's 'Hello From The American Desert'

This beautiful little chapbook features about 40 pages of poetry written between 2004-2007 which enlist spam received over the internet as a springboard for poetry.

The cover art and illustrations are from Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets and there is an introduction written by Todd Colby.

These are limited to an edition of 1000. There is also a lettered edition (a-z) of 26 copies signed by both Lee & Curt that will soon be available.

They are available now for purchase online at:

www.silver-wonder.com

new website up and running

zach hench put up a pretty beautiful website for me at:

www.silver-wonder.com

or

www.silverwonderpress.com

go check it out!!! All the cds and most of the chapbooks are available for sale online!!!

cruel november

folks I've spent most of this month very sick and have been unable to post here as much as i wanted to. some exciting things did go down and i managed to drag myself out of bed to do them...

november 9th the end of the world band joined p. michael grego & travis from ONO and played a set at plastic crimewave's four million tongues festival at the av-aerie.also on the bill:alela diane, heather leigh murray, outpost, alisdair roberts, and charlambides. someone told p. michael that we sounded like a riot!

november 20th the chicago guitar ensemble played at elastic. this time around it was:
me
alex wing
jesse thomas
cliff ingram
travis
brian klein
c.ezra lange
don ramon
bill mackay

brian labycz was gonna conduct this one but his gear wouldn't function so it ended up being a free for all!

labycz played in the opening set with his group-travelers and conquerors=labycz/zarzutzki/davis. aaron zarzutzki did some pretty incredible shit with a couple of cymbals and a no output turntable!

no new gigs scheduled for a bit. taking a little break to work on my meat puppets biography...

An Electric Prayer For Derek Bailey

Friends,

Tonight I get to make another one of my dreams become reality. When Derek Bailey passed away on X-mas day in 2005, I conceived a tribute to him called An Electric Prayer for Derek Bailey. It took almost 2 years to finally realize but tonight this show is happening.

I will be conducting a large improvisational ensemble that consists primarily of electric guitars, through written instructions and object cues, and have put together quite a talented group.

I hope to see ya tonight!

Friday October 26th
8 pm
South Union Arts
1352 South Union Avenue
Chicago Il
www.southunionarts.com

the group:

e gtars:
jesse thomas
bill mackay
dave bernabo
p. michael grego
travis
brian labycz
neil jendon
travers gauntt
don ramon

bass:
c.ezra lange
alex wing

horns/reeds:
jim ford
dean giavaras

drums:
charles rumback
ben billington

Lawrence Welsh Article in Tejano Tribune

Here is a link to a great article by Leslie Council......She talks with Lawrence Welsh about his new chapbook-Walking Backwards To Santa Fe.......

www.epcc.edu/ftp/Homes/elcon/092707f9.htm

love & death & teeth in the blood reviewed in Zen Baby #18

Another review of Todd Moore's bad mutha of a chapbook appears in the new issue of Zen Baby. You can get a copy for $2 from editor Christopher Robin at:

Zen Baby
PO Box 1611
Santa Cruz, CA 95061-1611

My review of Carducci's- Enter Naomi up at Smoke Signals Mag

This is my first published review so the excitement bubbles over here. Find out my thoughts about Joe Carducci's- Enter Naomi at:

www.smokesignalsmag.com

Todd Moore's Chapbook reviewed at Outsider Writers

Todd Moore's Love & Death & Teeth In The Blood was recently reviewed by Victor Schwartman on Outsider Writers. You can find it in the review section at:

www.outsiderwriters.org

Copies are still Available for $9 from
Pitchfork Poetry Press
P.O. Box 146399
Chicago Il 60614
Checks or M.O.'s payable to C.A. Gibson....

Abe Gibson/ Rotten Milk Duo Tonight!!!

i've got this going on at myopic bookstore tonight. it's supposed to be a duo with rotten milk but according to his recent myspace bulletin he's in missouri so if not i'll be bringing some solo e gtar action perhaps with a flying cymbal or two....

myopic bookstore- upstairs
1564 north milwaukee avenue
chicago illinois
7:30 pm
free show!!!

Lawrence Welsh reviewed in Saint Vitus

This is reprinted from www.saintvituspress.com:

CROWS AND RAVENS AND DREAMS: THE POETRY OF LAWRENCE WELSH
BY TODD MOORE

The bio note at the back of Lawrence Welsh's WALKING BACKWARDS TO SANTA FE informs the reader that he has already published five collections of poetry. Those readers who are currently familiar with Welsh's work know that his poetic base is the desert southwest and that he has already begun to mine much of the region from Los Angeles where he was born to El Paso where he is presently living and teaching.

Armed with those bare bone facts, one might assume that Lawrence Welsh is a poet strongly drawn to local color and the romantic Old West, but a close reading of his work only proves this assumption wrong. WALKING BACKWARDS TO SANTA FE is anything but a work of local color. And, while some of the poems tap into the rich tradition of the Old West, the thrust of these poems is toward something darker, something deeper.

The best poems in this collection ping pong between the personal and the hardscrabble life of mountain and desert. The elegy which opens the book, On The 15th Anniversary Of My Father's Death, is a homage to Welsh's origins, a kind of one off Kunitzian salute to a dead father. This is what you do as a good luck gesture so as not to disturb the old gods. This is what you do before entering the primal world of poetry and power.

This poem is a good introduction to what Lawrence Welsh is up to these days. The voice is clipped, elliptical, sometimes hermetic. The poem itself is a tip of the hat to Charles Olson obviously because of the open field way that the lines are displayed. And, of course, that influence extends through Olson to Robert Duncan. In fact, later on in the collection, in a poem entitled Elegy For John Wieners, Welsh refers to Olson and Duncan as well. This poem suggests the basic tension of the entire collection of the literary East with its lingering sense of High Modernism and Post Modernism and the ghost town deserterdness and near death darkness of the Old West.

an old timer says
keep your eyes open
study the shadows
el paso is all shadows...

from-The Elbo Room/Guadalupe

Welsh employs a clipped short line where the narrator is often felt to be hooded, almost invisible, and even when visible somehow withheld. The touch here is also of New York School and maybe just a hint of Language Poetry.

Welsh's voice and style also seem to be caught in that same tension of literary East versus the open hearted West. In the East the poet reveals nothing. He relies on allusion, he relies on aesthetic stance. In the West, the poet relies on the metaphor of the story itself and usually leaves out all the literary allusion. You can see the comparison very clearly in the poetry of Kell Robertson. Robertson tells stories laconically, elegiacally. Welsh suggests stories stoically and at an aesthetic distance.

Can such a tension survive as a recognizable style in a poet who live in El Paso, bordertown, gunfighter town, exile town, narco corrido town? It's a teasingly interesting question to consider. My take is he can, if he continues to maintain that tricky tension in both subject and style. However, my instincts somehow tell me that Welsh is a poet is search of a much larger subject. Maybe something all encompassing, a novel, a long poem, a sequence of shorter poems that somewhere in the future become a long poem, a metaphor is a long poem that somehow fuses Black Mountain, the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Charles Bukowski; Hart Crane first lost in the desert and then lost at sea, and the El Paso of Cormac McCarthy, Mariano Azuela, and John Welsey Hardin. These are all speculations, but poetry is haunted by all the best speculations. I Somehow have the feeling that Lawrence Welsh is searching for the secret metaphor that will define where he lives, where he writes, and where he dreams. A long poem that will define El Paso the same way that MAXIMUS defines Gloucester. And America. The grid for the poem and the myth for the dreams await him.

WALKING BACKWARDS TO SANTA FE is published by Pitchfork Poetry Press- www.pitchforkpoetryprojects.com and sells for six dollars

I Got Shows! Sunday & Monday!!

Friends and Neighbors,

I've got 2 shows this weekend. I've been hiding out in the apartment and haven't been doing a lot of hanging out with friends so I hope to see you at my shows. Both are free...

The first one is a doozy. Along with 124 other acts, The End of the World Band will be performing as part of the 2007 John Cage Musicircus at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Details:
Sunday October 7th Noon to Four p.m.
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
www.musicircus.chicagocomposers.org

we play at 2:15 pm on the first floor
at the Randolph Cafe East alcove 1e

Then on Monday night at 7:30 p.m. I'll be playing a duo with Rotten Milk at Myopic Books. This show is free and BYOB

Details:
Monday October 8th 7:30 p.m.
Myopic Bookstore
1564 North Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago
www.myopicbookstore.com

Daniel Carter in Chicago this weekend

it is my pleasure to let you know about 2 shows this weekend featuring NYC's Daniel Carter, in addition to being the James Joyce of the free jazz world he is also quite a musician. He belongs to the groups Test and Other Dimensions In Music. He has been performing for the last 30 years with folks like Alan Silva, Sun Ra Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Thurston Moore, Yo La Tengo, Antipop Consortium, and this weekend he'll collaborate with some of Chicago's young musicians.

Friday September 28th
9pm
Elastic Sound and Vision Gallery
2830 North Milwaukee Avenue
upstairs
$10 suggested donation- byob

Daniel Carter with The End of The World Band
Daniel Carter- reeds, horns
Abraham Gibson- Drums
Jesse Thomas- E Gtar

Giallorenzo/ Stein/ Daisy Trio
Paul Giallorenzo-Piano
Jason Stein- Bass Clarinet
Tim Daisy- Drums

Names
Mayjabeen- violin
Brian Klein- Electronics

www.elasticrevolution.com

Saturday September 29th
The Empty Bottle
1053 North Western Avenue
9pm
$15
Wire Magazine's- Adventures in Modern Music Festival

Daniel Carter- Reeds, Horns
Ben Vida- Gtar
Mike Reed- Drums

Headlining this evening will be photographers of their own poop- Deerhunter

www.theemptybottle.com

for Daniel info:

www.allaboutjazz.com/iviews/dcarter.htm

www.furious.com/perfect/danielcarter.htm

www.aumfidelity.com

daniel carter chapbook review from smoke signals mag

Daniel Carter's WORK IN PROCESS #1 is a sliver of a chapbook, 4 81/2 x 11 sheets stapled and folded, with text from pages 5 to 16. But it could easily take as long to read as a novel, dense as it is linguistically. In 12-point font with inchy margins, there are about a dozen sentences, several running more than a page in length.

If you can call them sentences. They're more like DNA, strings of ideas that have a logic made of associations. These associations paint the inner life of author Daniel Carter, a musician living and performing today in New York City and around the world.

Daniel Carter (b.1945) has a good Wikipedia article at last glance. He is also a philosopher and a very strange sort of activist. He is very active seeking out and working with young musicians and artists and creating connections between them.

Carter started his musical career singing doo-wop in parking lots and schoolyards. His middle-class background has left him with a tolerant attitude; his African-American heritage expresses itself through a Cornel West-esque eloquence spiced with popular colloquialisms; and his graduate studies and prodigious lifelong reading habit have put him into a world of the mind that he, himself constructed from elements found among the texts he has read.

Reading Daniel's work should be a collaborative process. I have created collages from snippets of his work. It can be used as a script for theatrical or video productions; processed as source code for constructions. I think DNA sequencers should sequence some of it out and see what happens.

Despite his laid-back attitude about self promotion, Carter's work is fairly widely published. The work in process chapbook is part of an ongoing series by Abe Gibson's Pitch/The Silver Wonder Press (also publishers of some good stuff by Matt Sheahan, Doug Draime, and Gibson himself) that will eventually result in a sort of urban jazz Finnegan's Wake.

You should read this book at random, paging through and letting your eyes land where they may. Then your eyes skid along like skaters on ice when they hit something like:

eternity stood trembling, her stability thoroughly undermined by a creeping terror
that now burst beyond fashion into permanent policy and into the cold business
of everything shattering.

It's prophet-type stuff, so it's especially going to resonate with readers who enjoyed the Nag Hammadi Library and Old Testament books like Isaiah and Ezekiel. It will also appeal to fans of James Joyce, and maybe to some people who wouldn't mind a slightly more accessible version of Joyce; it's still musical, weird, and fun but Carter stays primarily within the English language.

Review by C.B. Coble
www.smokesignalsmag.com

this is available for $3.00

the silver wonder global h.q.
po box 146399
chicago, il 60614
checks payable to c.a. gibson

guitarkestra III

today i had the pleasure of taking part in the sonic maelstrom that is the plastic crimewave vision celestial guitarkestra orchestrated by steve krakow. we were the group that opened up the hideout block party at noon.
it felt great to be out in the sun being a part of this pulsing, klanging mass of guitars (and basses, and a violin, and a great freakin drummer). although we were about 60 shy of the hoped for 100 it is always a joy to be a part of (or even near) a beautiful large sound like this....
another highlight of the day was finally seeing mucca pazza who were even better than i expected, a rare occasion indeed! as the kids say-"these guys are the shit!"
and speaking of shit-art brut who played a bit later were shit, pure shit.in fact half way through their set i went and took a shit. bryan ferry's body double just wasn't cutting it for me folks-but that's what exits are for...

review of dalachinsky/connors cd

from downtown music gallery newsletter:

STEVE DALACHINSKY & LOREN (MAZZACANE) CONNORS- Thin air (Ltd-CD-R) (Silver Wonder;USA)

featuring the voice and poetry of steve dalachinsky and the electric guitar of loren connors.this was recorded live at the knitting factory in 2000 and took quite a long time to finally get released. after a flurry of activity, with some fifty+ discs of mostly solos and duos, loren connors has been laying low for the past few years, playing the area set and recording infrequently. the great local poet, scenester, cantankerous character and good friend to all of us other downtown freaks, steve dalachinsky has grown more busy in the past few years, doing more readings than ever, going to paris a few times a year and having more discs out than he used to. this duo has played here at DMG on a couple of occasions through the years and i savor each set.

thin air captures an entire 63 minute set from the new knit when friends of ours still played there regularly. steve's poetry is honest and apt as he describes his and ours lives here in the ever changing downtown scene. loren's spooky guitar is often sparse and a great match for steve's words. i like the way steve repeats certain phrases so that it gives us some time to let the observations sink in. loren also works his special magic by selecting notes often one at times and bending those strings to add some pain/punctuation to the stream of observations that steve slowly dishes out. it's funny how steve's brooklyn accent and the tone of loren's lonely/haunting guitar remind me so much of this scene i've been a part of for so many years.an hour may seem like a long time to loan yourself to this disc, but i find it to be like listening to a short story about my life, our lives here on the lower east side-BLG
cd $14 (limited edition of 300 numbered

downtown music gallery
342 bowery
nyc 10012-2408
http://www.dtmgalley.com

or you can order it direct from us for $8+ postage...