The Lichen + Screen Ink + MLGI

The Hyphae Series - Screen Ink. from the lichen on Vimeo.

Tugboat Represent!

Rapha Lincoln

Beautifully shot, though I find it somewhat clichéd & anachronistic to use a leader flare effect on what is clearly video. Read the Rapha journal here.

Kill County

Three From Ringo (Kill County) at Lincoln Exposed 2009 from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

Three songs from Kill County's set, part of the Lincoln Exposed fest at Duffy's Tavern, 2-12-2009.

For eventual music video creation, I taped this set of Ringo's. Beautiful.

The Tam

Brent & I enjoyed the warm evening air to bike to the Tam O'Shanter. Brent enjoyed the shag carpet on the wall.


This is our new slogan.


Might make a good name for our BRAN team.


We biked through the fancy new arches along the Antelope Valley corridor.

O (Street) is for Obama

Great turnout on O Street tonight for an election eve rally.








O (Street) is for Obama from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.


As often, more on flickr.

Triggertown!

What good folks.

Triangle Forest, Make-Up Break-Up, & DJ Spence

Thursday, 8 PM, Spindle Basement, Dance Party

Lincolnites try to make 13-hour song

From the Lincoln Journal-Star:

By MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star
Monday, Jun 02, 2008 - 12:19:24 am CDT


They’re running a little late, so Mathias Svalina starts to strum a guitar and sing to no one, because they need to get this song started if they’re going to make it 13 hours.

The movie “Top Gun” plays on mute on a nearby TV-VCR combo.

“It’s better we do this on time rather than correctly,” Svalina says. “Although, I’m not sure what correctly would be.”

Anders Peterson (left), 27; Ande Reinkordt, 28; and Elisabeth Reinkordt, 25, play a ventilation duct, an electric guitar and a keyboard during a 13-hour improvisational song on Sunday at Box Awesome, 815 O St. (Micah Mertes)

There’s no textbook example of performing a single, uninterrupted, improvisational 13-hour-long song with no structure, no rules, no purpose. All that matters is the duration. It will take a fluctuating set of musicians — and some who aren’t musicians — to make it through the half-day-long set.

If you’re looking for a rational, you’re out of luck. It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s just supposed to last 13 hours.

Starting at noon on Sunday, a group of Lincolnites came together to tackle the senseless endeavor in the basement of Box Awesome, 815 O St. Their plan was to make it to 1 a.m. Monday, employing every conceivable sound-making instrument or device.

Guitars, computer keyboards, mandolins, voices, typewriters, balloons, mic distortion, ventilation duct, a Pat Robertson tape played in slow motion. The results are dissonant, bizarre, but not without moments of unexpected beauty.

“Well, it comes to being that everything is an instrument,” says Ande Reinkordt, the founder of local band Man’s Last Great Invention and a participant in one-song Sunday. “Everything makes some sort of sound.

There’s a visual component as well.

A drawing of Kiefer Sutherland’s vampire of “The Lost Boys” takes the stage at one point. Architect and Lincolnite Marti Gottsch sings through a big lion mask. Movies of the ’80s — “Top Gun,” “War Games,” “Willow,” “Ghost” — play on the TV.

And Elisabeth Reinkordt, Ande’s wife, has set up an old projector, which is playing 18-mm film reels of black and white documentaries about monkeys and child psychology. Elisabeth found the reels while Dumpster diving outside a local high school.

The 13-hour-long song offers a strange accompaniment to both the ’80s movies and the educational documentaries, which play simultaneously.

The volleyball scene in “Top Gun” carries new weight during the sonic distortion. And the electric-guitar-keyboard-ventilation-duct ensemble provides a rousing backdrop to the final dogfight.

“We saved Maverick,” Ande says, after the scene ends.

People come and go, doing what they can to contribute to the experimental opus.

But at the two-hour mark, the performers start to realize that, wow, they’ve still got 11 hours left. No one says so, but there’s palpable doubt on a few faces.

Can they make it?

Only those still there at the end know for sure.

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.

Nice Things

Dinner

Jim Stevens

Mathias Svalina & Zachary Schomburg

The Omaha Reader published a nice article by Avishay Artsy (of NET Radio News) on Zach, Mathias, the Clean Part reading series, Octopus Books, and contemporary poetry in general.

The Clean Part: This Saturday, October 27th, 7pm,

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery: Ana Bozicevic-Bowling, Julia Cohen & Ken Rumble

Theme: Fox Masks

Poetry Out Loud
Reading series brings in some of the nation’s best

by Avishay Artsy


Sometimes it takes free peanuts and pie to get people to listen to contemporary poetry.
When Mathias Svalina and Zachary Schomburg began directing The Clean Part Reading Series in 2005, audiences at Lincoln’s Tugboat Gallery cracked open peanuts and tossed shells on the floor. Raffle tickets were handed out for a pie, which sat in its box atop the lectern until just before the final reading. Then a lucky winner, usually a hapless undergraduate required to attend, would have his or her photo taken with the two beaming organizers.

“We don’t have pies anymore. It’s actually regressed,” Svalina said, laughing. “It used to be a lot cooler, apparently.”

Readings are now held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Featured poets are still taken out for post-reading pizza and beer. The two believe it’s a way to foster kinship between poetry enthusiasts in Lincoln and up-and-coming poets across the country.

The series quickly developed a positive reputation. Despite having no money to reimburse visiting poets, “literally, within two months, people were emailing us to see if they could travel here to read,” Svalina said.

The dozen Clean Part readings have attracted small, intimate crowds. Svalina and Schomburg acknowledge modern poetry’s limited appeal.

“It’s for 50 people. It’s not for the world. And that’s OK,” Svalina said. While poets might sell a handful of books at the readings, he said, “every single copy of that is going to be read more deeply, and better, than any copy of a Michael Crichton book is ever going to be read.”

Svalina and Schomburg are completing doctoral studies in creative writing at UNL, and teach undergraduate classes. The two publish Octopus Magazine, an online journal of poetry reviews and essays. They run the small press Octopus Books.

The set of 8 chapbooks from Octopus is, I hear, in very limited supply at this point.

Schomburg, 30, began the online magazine in 2003 with a friend, notable poet Tony Tost. After moving to Lincoln in the fall of 2005, Schomburg recognized Svalina’s name from the magazine’s rejection list, “because it was an interesting name. It was a name that I would have wanted on the page, because it looked good.” He asked Svalina, 32, to become co-editor.

“We had the same ideas about poetry, what poetry could do,” Schomburg explained. The book imprint and reading series soon followed.

This has been a year of firsts for them. Schomburg’s debut collection, The Man Suit, was published in April by Black Ocean Press. The cast of talking animals and dead presidents earned Schomburg an appraisal as “one of the sincerest surrealists around” from Publishers Weekly. Svalina’s first chapbook, Why I am White, was released in August by Kitchen Press. His second publication, Creation Myths, came out this month after winning New Michigan Press’s annual chapbook competition.

Seriously, there's no reason not to own these.

Both poets create highly imaginative alternate realities, in which action defies logic; and truth, as we understand it, is turned on its head. In Creation Myths, Svalina toys with the world’s genesis, imagining a pen that drew the world into existence, or a boy cutting the world out of colored paper. Other explanations involve hovercrafts, explosions, paper clips and a mummy.

Mythology figures into Schomburg’s poems, in which Abraham Lincoln shoots himself in the head and William McKinley plays piano while falling from the sky.

“I think that history is a lot more fun than the actual one that just happened,” Schomburg said, “so why not play with that?”

When Svalina writes “In the beginning people had cornfields rather than sex parts,” and when Schomburg writes, “At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung,” both writers show that the perceived is more important than the actual.
“[William] Blake said, ‘the imagination is real.’ Blake’s right. What we imagine is true,” Svalina said.

In The Man Suit, Schomburg writes, “Let’s bring everything that’s inside, outside.”
Poets share a sometimes-obsessive need to communicate, and by offering poetry enthusiasts a venue for cutting-edge writing, the two hope to translate what Schomburg calls the “indefinable chaos” of the world into something that can be understood.

Yes, No Coast Films is currently pimping poetry like there's nothing else that matters. And while there are plenty of other things that matter, it's a fine time to be in such close proximity to such talented and networked contemporary poets. Respek.