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Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
A film by Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf
7:00 p.m., Thursday, April 17, 2008
Fine Arts Theatre, 36 Biltmore Ave., Downtown Asheville
Admission: $7 BMCM+AC members + students with ID / $9 non-members
Filmmaker Henry Ferrini will be in town for the screening and will answer questions afterward.
"A beautifully composed homage to one of the few truly monumental American poets of our times." -- Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
“The best film about an American poet ever made.” -- Bill Corbett, The Boston Phoenix
"...an impressionistic, yet informative and moving document about the act of creation that neither shies away nor oversimplifies." -- Michael Kelleher, ArtVoice
Just in time for National Poetry Month in April, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, The Captain’s Bookshelf and Western Carolina University present a striking new film about Charles Olson, poet and charismatic leader of Black Mountain College during its final years, at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 17th. Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place wrestles with the six foot eight inch 275lb colossus of poetry through a visually and intellectually exciting mix of word and image. Filmmaker Henry Ferrini will be present at the April 17th screening at the Fine Arts Theatre to answer questions following the film.
Charles Olson saw Gloucester, Massachusetts as the perfect modern reflection of the ancient Greek city-state, a polis — 30,000 people shaped by their own geography and pulled by their own powerful sense of history. His poetry transformed the isolated fishing town into a microcosm of America energized by extraordinary confluences that connected it to all other places. For Olson, all time was likewise contemporaneous. By taking his readers back to the beginnings of history, he returned to the present with fresh understanding of how to create things anew. Polis Is This illuminates Olson’s life and work by exploring such connections and imaginative journeys. The film traces Olson’s process of self- discovery and makes it clear why Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and many other literary figures traveled to Gloucester to sit with the father of post-modernism — the man they called the “big fire source.”
Polis Is This combines interviews, archival footage, commentary and animation into a single voice full of insight and visual beauty. The film allows the audience access to the subject even as it captures the zeitgeist of a formative era in literary history. The 60-minute documentary features John Malkovich, as well as interviews with poets and scholars Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, Gerrit Lansing, John Sinclair, Pete Seeger, Chuck Stein, Anne Waldman, Charles Boer, Susan Thackrey, Amiri Baraka, Robin Blaser, Michael Rumaker, Jonathan Williams, Ammiel Alcalay, John Stilgoe, Vincent Ferrini and the poet’s son, Charles Peter Olson. An eclectic soundtrack puts together Boston’s grandfather of punk rock Willie “Loco” Alexander with Black Mountain College avant-garde composer Stephan Wolpe along with a little banjo picking from Pete Seeger. The film has screened to enthusiastic audiences in New York, Cambridge and San Francisco.
Director's Statement
All my life I’ve heard about Charles Olson. As a child around the holiday dinner table I’d listen to tales of a giant who walked the midnight streets of Gloucester, Massachusetts. In school, poets and writers asked if I was related to the Ferrini in The Maximus Poems.
"Back home in Gloucester, I’d crack the 600 plus page Maximus Poems to learn a little something about myself and my place in this place. I wondered why Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Stan Brakhage, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka made pilgrimage to Olson’s $29-a-month flat. What was it about this postman’s son, a Harvard trained historian, and the power of his imagination, that made a generation of poets and artists see him as 'the big fire source.'
"How and why America’s first fishing town became the portal to Olson’s world became a mystery to solve. The poet’s methodology, one that he borrowed from the Greeks, became my investigative technique as well. Istorin means to find out for oneself. It is the root of our word history and it became the route that I followed.
"In 1995, during the first Charles Olson Festival held in Gloucester, writer Ken Riaf and I put shoulder to oar and set out to find out what all the fuss was about. We talked to professors in the academy and people on the street. We searched in university archives and found Olson’s friends and family. In Polis Is This I’ve focused decades of filmmaking experience to address an even longer held question about our relationship to the place that contains us."
Henry Ferrini, Gloucester
January 25, 2007
Co-Sponsored by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, The Captain’s Bookshelf and the College of Fine and Performing Arts & Fine Art Museum, in collaboration with the Stage and Screen Motion Picture and Television Production program, Western Carolina University.
For more information contact Alice Sebrell at 828-350-8484.
Future of Tradition Productions, in association with Arts 2 People, presents Asheville's second annual Americana Burlesque and Sideshow Festival (ABSFest). In 2007, ABSFest awakened the spirit of the bawdy, bold and satirical arts with resounding success. Over 500 festival attendees were dazzled!
For 2008, ABSfest is back: bigger, bolder and bawdier. This event is most deliciously Asheville.
FESTIVAL EVENTS
Red Carpet Vaudeville Gala: the event kick-off party
What: ABSFest kicks off with the rolling vaudeville theatre Asheville adores, LAZOOM Watch for LaZoom as they spirit the glamorous stars around downtown, passing out goodies, selling tickets, and stunning the tourists. Follow the stars to the Fine Arts Theatre, as they walk the red carpet, brave the Paparazzi, and join the throng at the ABSfest Vaudeville Gala. The evening offers scintillating live performance AND the Southeast Premiere of 'Underbelly', a documentary about international burlesque and bellydance superstar, Princess Farhana that contains footage of ABSfest 2007.
When: Friday, June 27th 2008. Downtown 8-9 PM; Fine Arts Theatre doors @ 9:30 PM
Where: downtown, then to the Fine Arts Theatre, Biltmore Avenue
Cost: Red Carpet Vaudeville Gala: $12
ABSfest Spectacular Cabaret: the main event & showcase extravaganza! Sure to titillate!
What: a fresh display of nationally acclaimed burlesque performances, sideshow freakiness and vaudeville flair. Burlesque, hula wonders, pain management, glass walking, brisk bullwhips, Siamese twins and more a luscious cabaret ruckus after party. Headlining is Baltimore's award winning acrobatic burlesque super duo, Trixie Little & the Evil Hate Monkey, Syrens of the South, Panty Raid, Big Mama D, and much more. Emceed by Mab, Just Mab. Complete with mystics, vendors and more carnie appeal. After party with The Mezmer Society. Last year's show sold 500 tickets! The Not-to-Miss show of the year.
When: Saturday, June 28, 2008. Doors 7 PM; show 8 PM.
Where: The Orange Peel
Cost: $25 advance, $30 at the door
Workshops
What: Get your freak on! Workshops in: beginning burlesque, advanced burlesque, boylesque, hula hoop, bullwhip, stage makeup, costuming, creating an arts-based business, acrobatic balance, stagecraft, swashbuckling, fire performance, and more
When: Saturday & Sunday June 28 & 29 2008 from 10 AM – 5 PM
Where: French Broad Co-op Movement & Learning Center, 90 Biltmore Avenue; select workshops @ the Orange Peel, TBA
Cost: $20 per workshops; $90 for a day's worth (5)
All access festival passes available for $200 – includes admittance to everything !
Party Pass: both parties/shows: $35
Some tantalizingly promising clips:
Headliners Trixie Little & The Evil Hate Monkey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pGLRQpqFs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G3qsbv5Ths&feature=related
Whips Robert Dante & The Daring Tina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl31GTf-xhk&feature=related
Award winning Panty Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1UyXjBYUeQ
Juicy documentary Underbelly trailer
http://www.dikenga.com/films/underbelly/Trailer/default.asp
About Burlesque, Sideshow & Vaudeville
The satirical performance arts brought comedic entertainment and empowerment to the lower classes of American society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. A mockery of the higher and more socially conservative classes, the vitality of Vaudeville and Burlesque were slowly eclipsed by mid-century morality laws and the advent of modern media. Sideshow harkens back to less commercial carnival days, glorifying human oddity and strange feats of willpower.
The Vaudeville Revival is a huge international movement with festivals around the world, exploring women's empowerment, questioning mainstream paradigms of 'normal', and offering unforgettable, good old fashioned American entertainment to those bold enough to pass thru those striped curtains to the midway beyond...
A benefit art show and sale, Honoring the Earth Series, will be held at Blue Spiral 1 gallery in downtown Asheville, April 1 – May 11. The opening reception, featuring a multi-media presentation, will be held at 4:30 pm on Friday, April 4, at the Fine Arts Theatre on Biltmore Avenue next door to the gallery. The cost is $20 per person to benefit the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy (CMLC) and the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC). Reservations can be made by contacting CMLC at (828) 697-5777.
The project was designed to honor the memory of regionally recognized ceramic artist Clara "Kitty" Couch, and to raise money for land conservation in Western North Carolina. Couch was killed in an automobile accident in January 2004 while traveling overseas. Her four daughters inherited her final body of work entitled the Earth Series, large organic vessels inspired by natural forms.
After Couch’s death, her daughters worked with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy to put a post-mortem conservation easement on their mother’s beloved home in Burnsville, NC. “I have been dreaming for a few years about honoring my mother in this way, so it is truly a thrill to make it happen. Combining the show with protecting land in our precious mountains means so much to me,” said Couch’s daughter, environmental activist Katie Breckheimer.
Fifty friends and colleagues of the deceased artist have donated artwork for the show. “The response was overwhelming. My mother had a charismatic spirit that drew people into her good energy. Her friends didn’t hesitate to honor her in this way. Every art medium, from jewelry to photography, is represented in the show, and many of the artists are tying into the earth theme. The fact that the Blue Spiral 1 gallery is hosting the show during Earth Day month ties it all together,” Breckheimer said.
The opening reception for Honoring the Earth Series will include a life-of-the-artist presentation; a reading by Couch’s friend, teacher, and colleague Paulus Berensohn; and a short film by videographer and friend Jeff Goodman. Paulus Berensohn is author of Finding Your Way With Clay, a classic ceramic arts primer that inspired Couch’s career. Refreshments will be served.
WHAT: Wendy H. Outland of WHO KNOWS ART will offer specific
guidelines for creating or strengthening your portfolio (résumé,
artist statement, price list and images). Learn proper formatting,
what to include & exclude on your résumé, and how to prepare your
documents if you are an emerging artist. Also discover how to
write an effective statement, and get tips for submitting to
galleries, festivals and juried exhibitions.
The workshop will begin with a presentation which includes handouts,
followed by Q&A and critiques with artists that bring materials.
Artists at all levels are welcome.
WHEN: 9am-11am, Saturday, March 22, 2008
WHERE: Critics' Lounge (upstairs), Fine Arts Theatre,
36 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville NC
COST: $25 cash, check or card (PayPal). Seating is limited; call
828.686.5219 to register.
Please phone or email if you have any questions.
Wendy H. Outland (aka "WHO")
WHO KNOWS ART
Consultant for Visual Artists & Arts Organizations
Post Office Box 1382, Asheville, NC 28802
Phone: 828.686.5219 office or 828.231.5355 cell
Email: info@whoknowsart.biz
Website: www.whoknowsart.biz