On July 3rd, a plethora of artists gathered at the Satori Group‘s loft in downtown Seattle for a new collaborative event called whizARTbang! What is it? whizARTbang is a new collective of artists and supporters. It hopes to connect, collaborate, and support art in any way it can.

Each month, members host an intimate gathering featuring culinary art, visual art, live performances, and libations. The Melon was on hand for July’s gathering which featured a sampling of work from: Culinary arts, Painting, Stand-up, Dance, Video Art, Experimental Theater, and Sketch Comedy. Here’s our footage from the event which featured The Melon’s own Electric Elliot:

Artists included:

-Zoe Scofield
-Derek Shankland and Mike Klotz
-Stephen Ross
-Emmett Montgomery
-Jason Miller
-Juniper Shuey
-Boom! Theater
-Kevin Kantner (not to be confused with Kevin kantor)
-Counsel Langley
-Harlequin Hipsters
-Elliot Trotter

Here ye! Here ye! Announcing the biggest Poetry event to ever grace the City of Destiny. On Saturday, April 24th at 7pm, in celebration of National Poetry Month, 7 fantastic poets will take the stage at the Washington State History Museum to present poetry in a new light.

This event will take the art form to new heights as Tacoma poets enhance their timeless pieces using visual imagery, theater, dance, lighting and music. Mark your calendars for what is sure to be an historical event as the poetic torch is passed to the 2010 Urban Grace Soul of the City Tacoma Poet Laureate.

Included in this bunch are current Poet Laureate Antonio Edwards, and The Melon’s own Electric Elliot.

Tickets for the event are $7 a seat, but will be a slim price to pay for what is in store.

Today at 7pm, over 15 authors from the recently published collection of Tacoma poetry, In Tahoma’s Shadow, will be performing at King’s Books. Included in the bunch is Poet Laureate Antonio Edwards, former Poet Laureate Bill Kupinse, recently published Tammy Robacker and, The Melon’s own, Electric Elliot.

Join some of the greatest poets in Tacoma in one of Tacoma’s greatest venues.

Tacoma is Antonio Edwards city. After 25 years, he can’t think of living anywhere else and as Poet Laureate of Tacoma is determined to helping transform the City of Destiny into the bustling arts scene foreseen by prophecies.

The Melon sat down with Antonio to discuss his art, his message and his accomplishments as Poet Laureate. Listen for a presentation of his poem “Hilltopia” at the end of our interview.

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photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/maybelline/

Model Citizen

City bus banner

Gazing Hooters invitation through my windshield

A model citizen no doubt

Prepared to giggle and tickle my testicles

You gorilla vision to sugar scene

Relishing in tiled shower, I move to hold hair and

Sample vanilla silicon

But sight rolls in a different lane

I fondle steering wheel

O mind of merit!

Give passion to poster and pours to eyes

The better to embrace…

Gasp! You reach out past glass and dashboard

To feel, to caress, to delight

Hand nears my chest, abs, lower, lower please…

But no brushed touch erects

Instead fingers of raw and meddle

Desires to thrust cooled by air-conditioning and

The stink of fried poultry

I once walked under nocturnal eyes

Taking water and fries

I sat amongst great men doused in their Thursday’s best

We called upon you, asking for apple pie

And your teeth flashed like billboards

A gasoline flow

The cycle of statues runs deep into our animality and

Beyond comprehension

Inspiring heights and doubt

Shall statue be blamed for lust

Or lips that kiss it?

Patron desires sculpture

Sculpture grows from desire

Where does power lie

In a symbiotic paradox?

And so, as red turns green I hoot

“My dear lady

What is a golden owl, but a golden calf?

What is a poster, but a mirror?”

Copies of World War Me are still available. Contact etrotter(at)themelononline(dot)com if interested.

I present to you, in my humble opinion, the greatest poem about Tacoma ever written.

Paging dramatic sky, come in dramatic sky, come in

What is this place Great Cthulhu?

Which judged by its lowest lows

Embodies those who go by names not social device

My city the drug dealer, the homeless schizophrenic

My city the shitty landlord, the constant siren

My city the obstacle course, the affected college student

The polluted, crime-ridden, stereotyped, constantly under construction, meth capitol USA

Asshole of Seattle, my city the fucked up dead-end of a town

City, with all you possess

No wonder you weep without notice

And your people, ever cast in plastic grays and greens

Parade through drizzle, your quiet but constant drizzle

Reflecting a sunken past and a soaking present

That falls from hoods and drips down pink noses

Passing an exhaled smog

A smog of discontent, perhaps

But also a smog of resilience, of hope

Of positivity, of potential, of knowing that while this is not quite the top

It is far from the bottom

The rip of tape from skin strip after strip

Tacoma, the swamp of middle-American delusion

And so-called convenience

But its places to convene…

Places where trees still rule the earth

Where the sound crashes

Calling rain to moisture

Shells and shale to shore

Nearby the clank of trains and bicycles

Roams our city the terror

Squirming and scrapping its long claws

From rustic warehouse to graffitied coffee shop

Ancient Cthulhu, whose surroundings may origin or result from

As if with spare parts of the deep

Your mighty arms placed this town together

A dome here, a giant teapot there

Your materials seem wild but

Your plans are to rebuild

In the muck that grew you

Through some whim of fortune or mutation

Like spirits, our ancestors inspired and revived you

Inspired you to climb up from your slumber

Crack through toxic silted air and

Reclaim the oasis of our city’s destiny

No matter who or what declared it so

While our city, Tacoma

Like legends before and all things to come

Will one day sink back into its primordial creator

This place knows itself

Where it has been and where it’s going

It knows community comes from desire

That color strives from gates

That glass can only be born from fire

And this lost city, though fragile

Shall burn once more

Today is the day. Over 60 local restaurants are donating 25% of every meal/non-alcoholic beverage bill back to the Pierce Country AIDS Foundation.  So for today, make sure anywhere you’re buying food of coffee is part of Dine Out. This is a very important fundraiser for PCAF.  For a full list of restaurants check out this link.

Also in Tacoma, school board candidate Chris Van Vechten has his campaign kick off event at 6pm in the 6th Avenue Baptist Church. What’s unique is Chris is asking those who attend for donations of books for the non-profit organization Reading Tree.

Finally, the new Tacoma Poet Laureate will be announced to day at an event in the University of Puget Sound’s Rausch Auditorium. The event begins at 8pm and features a farewell to current Poet Laureate, Bill Kupinse, as well as readings by Bill and Professor Hans Ostrom.

Plenty of reasons to get out in Tacoma today. Get eating, get donating, get reading.

The University of Puget Sound just finished putting together a week long event called SymPOEsium, meant to honor Edgar Allen Poe on his 200th birthday. The festival wrapped Friday the 20th with an open-mic competition that brought in many parody pieces of Poe including one conceived by yours truly and master comic Rollie Williams.  Below you’ll find (poor) footage of the open-mic and the live Raven Rap, performed by Taylor Griffin and myself with music by Chaosthetic. When Rollie returns from English, we’re planning on shooting a music video of the rap.

Complete open-mic event:

The Melon’s current discussion topic gives me a chance to write about Wendell Berry, an author I’ve loved for a while. Berry is a prolific non-fiction, short story, novel, and poetry writer, so I’m never sure how to discuss his various themes, but since The Melon wants different perspectives on the family, I’ll discuss Berry’s views, most with which I agree.

Of all the structures in society, the nuclear family is the one to which Berry thinks people owe the most responsibility. By default, average American adults must interact with at least a handful of structures: the government, their workplace, their local community, and their family (to name a few). An individual’s responsibilities to these groups inevitably, at some point, come into conflict with each another. “Fidelity” is the story in which Berry most clearly describes his view on the family as the paramount structure in society. In this story, Danny’s father, an old man named Burley, is in the hospital, in a coma. The hospital staff says he may still be cured, but Danny knows that Burley is old and dying and would want to die on his own land near his family. So Danny steals Burley from the hospital, takes him home, is with him when he dies, then buries him. The state puts a detective on the case who wants to find evidence of the “kidnapping,” so he can prosecute the family for acting against the hospital’s wishes. But Burley’s family and a few of his close friends confront the detective, and their comments make him question the legitimacy of his investigation. These two examples show the two different perspectives:

“And you, [Detective Bode], are here now to tell us that a person who is sick and unconscious, or even a person who is conscious and well, is ultimately a property of the organizations and the state. Aren’t you?”

“It wasn’t authorized. He asked nobody’s permission. He told nobody. He signed no papers. It was a crime. You can’t let people just walk around an do what they want to like that. He didn’t even pay the bill.”

“Some of us think people belong to each other and to God.”

In that scene, Berry poses a dilemma: To whom does an individual ultimately belong? To the government or to the people who love him? The characters who speak for Berry argue the later, although Bode does have a point that a family shouldn’t be able to get away with just anything, just because they’re family.

And later:

“A fellow would need [the hospital’s] permission to get in. If he needs their permission to get out, he’s in jail. Would you grant a proprietary right, or even a guardianship, to a hospital that you would not grant to a man’s own son? I would oppose that, whatever the law said.”

“Well, anyway,” Detective Bode said, “all I know is that the law has been broken, and I am here to serve the law.”

“But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in its shade or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”

“Serve what?”

“Why, all the many things that are above it. Love.”

Every time I read this passage (I wish I could quote the whole thing), I have an aha moment. The law should not simply legislate indifferently, it should serve. The state deals indirectly, not directly, with eating and drinking and warming and clothing. The government, an abstract entity, should give deference to individuals. (More on that later.) This principle, as most principles, looks different in different situations, but I would rather the state be in allegiance to the family than the family be in allegiance to the state. (As a student of Russia, the Soviet structure comes to mind as a system in which the family had to make allegiance to the state their priority.)

Berry is not an anarchist; he is a tax-paying, voting citizen, active and vocal in his community and the nation, especially in matters of farming and food production (He’s had a large influence on the writer Michael Pollan). But he knows that the other societal structures exist only to serve the family, whereas many live, maybe unconsciously, that the family is secondary to their obligations to other groups in society.

Berry thinks government can hinder or break apart the family; he also thinks higher education can potentially have the same negative impact. When a young person leaves for college, she often breaks apart from her family and community, often never to return. Berry thinks colleges have become isolated centers of learning instead of entities which prepare locals to interact with their community, the initial impetus of many colleges.

In Berry’s novel, Hannah Coulter, an elderly Hannah laments that her two sons and a daughter are spread out across the country, and she attributes their location to her insistence that they pursue higher education. She then compares her and her husband’s attitude toward education to her neighbor family’s attitude:

Today marks Tacoma’s 133rd birthday.  Being the same  number of the City Center’s highway exit and a popular local blog, this birthday stands as a particularly special one.

What can be said of Tacoma in its 133rd year. Surely, this one is dramatically different from the first, and even the last.  In a year of constructions, art, chalk offs and politics, it’s clear that Tacoma is evolving for the better. The Melon is honored to be a part of that wonderful change, and proud to walk the (under construction) city streets.

Our friends over at Speak Your Soul have been working on a Tacoma Tribute poem which they’ve released today in honor of Tacoma.  Featuring portions from over 50 local poets (including yours truly), Zach Street has put together a remarkable and vivid piece capturing the romance of the city of destiny.  Be sure to check out the piece and spread the Tacoma love on this momentous birthday.

Happy birthday Tacoma!