Indianapolis Diaries (uncut “My Culture Journal” from April 2024)

What Microsoft’s Dall-E thinks of Carmel roundabouts!

Original “My Culture Journal” article published in Mirror Indy

April 1

Considering today’s April Fool’s Day and the first day of National Poetry Month, and I’ve got in my head this quatrain that sorta hits both marks, with its origins in Indianapolis.

Elvis is alive and well
I ate with him at Taco Bell.
Put acid in his Mountain Dew
Psychedelic booty scratch…..

It’s that last off-kilter line that kills me every time I think about it.  But my sister Ali, who introduced it to me, wasn’t certain about its origins when I texted her about it an hour ago. “Either my friend Aaron wrote it or we write it collaboratively at a Waffle House over coffee and cigarettes because that’s what kids did in the late ‘80s!” she texted back. 

In keeping with the start of National Poetry Month, I’m hard at work on a manuscript titled A Thing for Border Towns: Poems and Prose, much of which originates with a road trip I took from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas in October, 2023. Unlike most of the poems that appear in my book, Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana, most of these poems are set in the American West, or in Mexican border towns. 

On April 5, I’ll be in Indy, and I’ll be on film reading some of my new work. That is, I’ll be at Circle City Industrial Complex (CCIC), actually, where artist and illustrator Ken Avidor will show a film he made of me reading four poems from this new collection. He will show them in his “G’LUME Theater. (Yes, the satirical reference to Newfields’ The LUME is intentional.) Ken is the illustrator for a bimonthly French periodical titled  La Decroissance, roughly translating to “Degrowth.” One of the issues it promotes in its pages is eco-sustainability  Lately Ken’s been making films of episodes of Bicyclopolis, the title of the eponymous graphic novel which might be described as the journal of Dan, a young time traveler who bikes 70 years into the future using a human-powered time travel device called a “Velochonitron.”  

I’m glad that Ken, who has contributed his illustrations, over the course of his career, to such publications as Screw, Punk Magazine and Weirdo, has given me a chance to exhibit my work. We met at an Urban Sketchers Indy meetup. I wrote a story on Ken and others in his group during their March 2023 meetup, when they brought their sketch-pads and pencils to Central Library to draw their surroundings.

My participation as an artist (of sorts) at CCIC is something of a role reversal. I’ve been writing about art for a while now in Indianapolis, publishing mostly in NUVO. But I’ve been writing poetry for a much longer time. I’m old enough to recall an Indie literary magazine, based in Indy, called pLopLop, edited by John Clark, the heyday of which was in the early 90s. The magazine succeeded in publishing drawings by Kurt Vonnegut, poetry by Charles Bukowski, Hal Sirowitz, Lyn Lifshin, and Wanda Coleman among others. It also published many Indy-based writers such as Kit Andis and yours truly. Most importantly, I think, it featured founder John Clark’s doodles and sketches, which gave pLopLop the look of an art project as much as a literary zine. These were, really, the pre-internet days, and I have a certain nostalgia for a time when I found it easier to focus on words typed on a page. The literary zine also caused something of a poetry reading scene to emerge, one that I’ll always associate with the red brick apartment complexes where some of the readings took place. 

That scene is gone now, but there are still poets in Indianapolis. I can attest to the fact that Indy isn’t a bad place to be a poet.

For adults there are plenty of opportunities to hone your craft. At the monthly series like VOCAB at White Rabbit Cafe where you can regularly hear Corey Ewing and Januarie York mix engaging performance with poetic insight. Kafe’ Kuumba, now in its 36th year, is also a place where aspiring poets and/or spoken word artists can hone their craft. You can also check out the monthly open mic at the Chatterbox. Or you can read your work in the open mic at the Nightjar Poetry Series at Tube Factory artspace.  Etheridge Knight Inc. and Brick Street Poetry, and the Writers Center of Indiana are organizations that sponsor literary events, readings, contests, and opportunities to publish.

The opening of four independent bookstores in the city in 2023 certainly hasn’t decreased the number of poetry readings, and opportunities for local poets to read their work.  Dream Palace Books & Coffee periodically organizes readings for local poets.  

Consider that Indianapolis is the home of  Alyssa Gaines, named the sixth Youth National Poet Laureate in 2022. She was the inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Indianapolis, a program sponsored by the Indy-based VOICES Corp, in 2019. A look on their website shows that their support of poetry programs is ongoing. On April 13  VOICES sponsored a “Five Senses” workshop with spoken word poet Januarie York, focusing on descriptive language to build a poem. 

If you’re an aspiring poet, you can find an audience to connect with. Do yourself a favor though and know what you’re going to read before you get up to the podium, practice your delivery once or twice, don’t go over your allotted time, and be respectful to your audience.

April 2   

2 p.m.

Dropped some flyers for my First Friday  A Thing for Border Towns film showing and meet-and-greet with Ken, who wants his G’LUME theater to be a free speech zone.  We started talking about various artists who have had their museum shows canceled for various reasons. One that comes to mind as I write this is Palestinian-American artist Samia Halaby, whose one-woman show had been slated for the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. This show was canceled late last year with the only explanation being a two sentence explanation, citing security concerns.  Her show, ironically, was titled “Salima Halaby, Uncancelled.” The artist, who both received her MFA from, and taught at, IUB, had apparently sent some pro-Palestinian media posts. Whether or not this was the real reason for the show’s cancellation, we’ll never know, as the univ But the cancellation fever cuts both ways. In a recent article for the Times of Israel,  local rabbis Dennis and Sandy Sasso write,  “Exhibitions of Jewish artists are boycotted and a Jewish museum is criticized for having paintings of Israeli hostages on its walls.”

6:30 p.m.

I saw “Frida … A Self-Portrait” which was written and performed by Brazilian actor Venessa Severo, and directed by Joanie Schultz, at the Indiana Repertory Theatre.  The woman being portrayed is Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter renowned for her surrealistic self-portraiture, most of which she accomplished during her marriage to Mexico’s greatest muralist Diego Rivera. 

Rivera was far from being Mexico’s greatest husband, having affairs with Kahlo’s sister and numerous other women (prompting her to have affairs of her own.) 

Kahlo’s phenomenal and enduring popularity, which has eclipsed that of her husband, might also have something to do with her health challenges. These include a childhood bout with polio overcome and her being impaled by an iron pipe during a trolley car accident in Mexico City when she was 18.  

The play is set on the last day of her life, July 13, 1954, in her childhood bedroom at Casa Azul in Mexico City.

Severo’s performance is enhanced by the use of a clothesline from which a bed hangs down and she’s able to slip into. There are also, hanging on that line, various costumes including suits resembling those that her father and her husband wore.  At one point you see Severo slips into the guise of her father, mustache and all, speaking with a German accent. At another point you see her succumbing to the caresses of the philandering Diego Rivera. It is a powerful and affecting scene even though you can see it’s just her with a hand through Diego’s suit. 

Some of the most harrowing scenes in the performance are those in which you see Severo as Frida reacting to severe pain by screaming and injecting herself with the morphine and meperidine, she eventually became addicted to.

More than once Severo breaks the fourth wall—that is, speaking to you in her own voice rather than that of Frida -- first to tell you that she is Brazilian, not Mexican, and next to tell you what she calls “the missing element between me and Frida” that she has had her own history of physical challenges resulting from a birth defect that rendered her left hand atypical.  She relates the harrowing story of how, when she was four years old, her family traveled to see a doctor who recommended a surgery that would have replaced her missing fingers with toes but fortunately her parents let her have the final say in the matter.. A question immediately popped in her head: “How was I going to dance without my toes?” 

She gave her answer to the doctor by kicking him repeatedly.  “We were on the plane home within the hour,” she said. 

After this performance, there was a “community conversation” onstage where Devon Ginn, the IRT’s director of inclusion and community partnerships. asked questions about the performance to Indy-based  artists/art professionals including  Beatriz Vásquez, known for her papel picado (cut paper) artwork taking inspiration from native Mexican art traditions. Also in the conversation were Indiana Historical Society curator Nicole Martinez-LeGrand, and Curator for the Global Village Welcome Center Daniel Del Real. During this discussion, an audience member asked about accusations that have been made that Kahlo appropriated culture from various Mexican indigenous cultures. 

Left to Right: Daniel Del Real, Nicole Martinez-LeGrand, Beatriz Vásquez, and Devon Ginn Photo by Dan Grossman 

I thought Daniel Del Real’s response to this question was astute.  

 “I'm probably not the right person to answer that question,” he said. “But I will share that I don't believe she was appropriating. I think a lot of Mexicans are mestizo. We do have European [blood]. I mean, look at me, I'm pretty pale. I'm pretty white. But I identify with my Mexican ethnicity. And I think that's what Frida did in her lifetime. Now going back to whether curatorship should make that clear, I think, I think just letting people know that she was half German, half Mexican is enough. But she chose to embrace her indigenous side. And I think that's all we need to know. I think it's a fair way of showcasing her heritage.”

April 3 

Went running on the Monon Trail on the Monon Trail in Carmel in the early morning.  Passed the “Sail” sculpture, installed in 2019 and I get something more out of it everytime I look at it. 

Until “Sail,” much of what the city of Carmel had to offer in the way of sculpture were the backward-looking bronze sculptures by J. Seward Johnson, of various citizens going about their daily business: a man reading a newspaper on a bench, a woman carrying a bag of groceries, a man teaching his daughter how to ride a bicycle.

But “Sail” is different.

The support structure of the 29-ft high sculpture is aluminum, supporting a mosaic of acrylic panels that evoke a sail from the outside. From the inside they might make you think of stained glass in a place of worship.  It offers a contemplative experience for anyone willing to take the time and ponder its dimensions.

The two Indy-based creators, Quincy Owens and Luke Crawley are both portrayed in a film under development titled F*2020: Surviving the Pandemic, directed by Paul Nethercott, which begins in the period that the two artists are developing their projection 2019, and the time after that during the COVID-19 when everything is shut down.  (Yes, the F* in the title, as you probably guessed, means FUCK.)

On March 26, I went to a showing of the rough cut of the film at Kan-Kan Cinema, a film where, during the shutdown, you see a lot of Quincy Owens talking about how things are going during the pandemic. Suffice to say it wasn’t an easy time in the Owens household.It was even more crowded in that household because of the addition of Greek artist Cristos Koutsouras who was stranded in the US at the time, due to the shutdown of flights from US to Europe. 

After a previous screening in 2022, where I only saw a small portion of the film, I told Paul personally that the film needed a subtitle, and now it has one. I’m not sure if I can take credit for that change, but I’m glad to see it.  (My argument is, having used the F word a lot in my own writing is that you should feel free to use it, but you need to provide context.

Paul took questions after the showing to which Ken Avidor showed up.  I can take credit for introducing the two, thank you very much.

That is, Paul called him after I had suggested his GLUME theater at CCIC might possibly be an alternate venue for the film in case there was overflow. It turned out there wasn’t a need for this, but it inspired a visit from Paul to Ken’s studio. As they’re both filmmakers, around the same age, they hit it off.  I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they wind up, in a few years time, working on a project together.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role of grants, literary agents and such in the promotion of a career in the literary arts, because I’ve done so much on my own with my Roundabouts book, which I self-published on LULU, doing all the copy-editing and design on my own. But networking is also very important. 

April 4

Herron Gallery 

I went to an exhibition at the Herron School of Art & Design, titled Give & Take, which featured “participatory artworks” by local, national, and international artists. The most visceral of these, in my book, was “Blow Me” by April Knauber. Her simple wood chair, a found object, had hundreds of wads of chewed bubble gum stuck to it.  There was even a free-of-charge bubble gum machine adjacent for your chewing and you were free to stick your wad of gum on the chair. 

But the pieces in the exhibition that stuck in my mind after the exhibition were the works of Constance Scopelitis. Her works start from pencil and paper drawings. From these she makes lenticular photographics which, by covering them with plastic sheets, give her work the illusion of actual three-dimensionality. One of those was “Cookies” where you see a robed woman; in gray scale drawing; the only color you see on her face, partly hidden by the robe, is the gloss on her lips in a pucker.  A whirlwind of various cookies, emojis, consumer products circles around her.  

A small image of “Cookies” is depicted in her wall-hanging artificial intelligence-powered image generator titled “Coco Puff AI.”  Your job as a participatory observer is to type in a description of “Cookies” or “Crackers in Bed” (another lenticular photograph on display) as best you can 

“Use the textbox below to describe the image you selected above Hit the process button to have CocoPop AI process your results.   

I chose “Cookies” and typed in the description, “A woman in a deathshroud surrounded by a whirlwind of consumer products.” And this is what it showed me.

It was intriguing for me to see this engagement with AI. I happen to know a little something about how controversial it is, having prompted Microsoft’s DALL-E image generator to reimagine a Carmel roundabout in the style of Dali  and used that image on a Facebook post to promote my A Thing For BorderTowns film event at the Circle City Industrial Complex, saying “Why see Dali at Newfield’s LUME, when you can see my event for free.” The tie-in, I admit, didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I was entranced with the image DALL-E had come up with, a very surrealist roundabout bearing the face of Dali. Considering that DALL-E was named after Dalí, that the AI program was named after the artist, so there were multiple levels of meaning in my Facebook post that I was sure ALL of my Facebook friends, or at least some of them, would love

Boy was I wrong.  I got immediate, strongly negative feedback from Indy-area artists, who considered using AI generated imagery a type of thievery. Long and short of it, I took the offending image down, because I didn’t want the controversy to distract from my upcoming event, but I left the discussion up because it was an interesting one. Some of the comments struck me as a bit unhinged or ridiculous, but CCIC artist Joy Hernandez brought up a legitimate point, I felt. She cited the fact that AI image generators train, or use, the work of living artists without those artists being compensated or rewarded. While the only artist my particular DALL-E image ripped off was Salvador Dali himself, who is DEAD, I can see why artists are concerned about this But not everyone was in agreement; some artists saw AI as a tool to create your art, like Adobe Illustrator. Despite feeling for a moment or two that I was being social-media-shamed for no good reason, like my social media identity was being turned into the equivalent of a Wanted poster, I felt in the end that I did the right thing by letting the discussion expand and grow.  Ultimately this debate inspired me to start writing an article on AI, and interview artists who use AI to further their creative endeavors. So to all you who watched this social media kerfuffle grow, please note that I didn’t ever apologize for using an AI image and I don’t intend to, thank you very much, as I think they can be useful.