Fog Tropes: Ingram Marshall

I am very happy this morning. After several days of risking the swirling, foggy depths of memory, I stumbled upon a New Age artist I had been trying to remember. The CD (called Portraits) is long gone. But the beautiful, haunting sounds have stayed with me. Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes blew me away when I discovered it at Wherehouse Records or Flat, Black & Circular some time back in the late 80s while I was in college.

This live performance is amazing. I can’t help thinking back to conversations with Bonnie Dee and Brian about the French horn, and various trumpeters, when I worked at Curious Books in the late 90s/early 2000s.

You might also enjoy the gallery of The Sublime series, which seems connected.

Fog Tropes by Ingram Marshall. Performed September 22, 2012. John Marchiando and Mark Hyams, trumpets; Nate Ukens and Rachael Brown, French horns; Carson Kee...

The Sublime

A series of colorful, painterly, expressionistic paintings focused on depictions of space, space travel, portals, parallel universes, first contact and futurism.

A Screen-less Window

I wonder if anyone has serialized a novel on a blog. It’s an idea. Here’s a passage from my novel, Your Silent Face. The editing process is almost complete.

Sometimes I’d roll up on Nigel’s house when it was deathly still, but I’d find him in there, draped across his bed, reading Surrealist poetry or analyzing chess problems in the weak light filtering through his screen-less bedroom window. “Hey, man, what’s up?” he’d say, as if I had been downstairs making scrambled eggs. Other times I’d knock and let myself in and find myself confronted with all the usual signs of an East-sider’s evening—images from the TV flashing across the wall in the living room, a record playing on the stereo in his bedroom, a half-empty 40oz-er of Stroh’s beside the bed, and in his case, a piece of typing paper in a half-cocked typewriter—but it would be as if he’d been kidnapped by drug lords, or had spontaneously combusted.

People Enacting the Behaviors of Urban Animals

This is the only time I’ve ever really delved into a serious photo series. I used to shoot black and white film on a Minolta X-300, but that was for fun. The idea for this series came about after the housing bubble burst. People were desperate. I tried to call attention to this.

Enjoy the gallery. These prints are available in the Art for Sale section.

People Enacting the Behaviors of Urban Animals

art

Things Having to Do with Lilac

The days no longer really seem to have a beginning, middle and end. More like each day just feels like returning to interrupted, previously scheduled programming. I think any semblance of a regular schedule evaporated yesterday. Still can’t really be creative, but I did burn through Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise. Truly a masterpiece of contemporary American fiction. The dude called it. And he could see why something like this was coming. I guess you have to be able to see the warning signs in order to predict the future. Otherwise, it’s just a guess. So now I’ve turned to reading The Plague, by Albert Camus, for the third or fourth time. I’m really bummed that I can’t get my hands on the new translation by Robin Buss. I’ve heard good things about it. If only I had a can of lilac-colored spray paint, I could get to work on that painting in the studio.

Music by Lil Uzi Vert feat. Oh Wonder, "The Way Life Goes"

Poem

April Snow

The neighborhood is adorned with dog shit

dead leaves, ugly snow

what we want

what we get

It’s fifty-two

degrees I will walk my fear of death

up to the corner of Michigan & Clematis

& abandon it

like an unwanted pet

Like a hungry stray

it follows me home

It pains me

to stack the days

unread

books on a nightstand next to our bed

so we can refer to them

occasionally

while the sun parts

two clouds &

spits

—spring, 2006

Photo credit: Kierstyn Lamour

No Werewolves in My Back Yard

I am not a slam poet, or a spoken word poet, but I truly believe that all systems of poetry are generally meant to be heard. “Some Truths” straddles genres a bit, I guess: part page poem, a bit of spoken word. When I write page poem, I mean that the way the poem looks on the page was important in its construction.

I hope you enjoy it. It was originally published in an e-chap called Pure Pop which was put out by Revelator Press (many thanks to those folks forever). Coming to yoursilentface.com soon.

For now, some truths.

Get the Balance Ri-i-ght

I’ve been listening to a lot of music during the quarantine. It really helps me. Music has always helped. But I’m not a musician.

Today, Pete Martens and I are unveiling Get the Balance Ri-i-ght: A Post-Punk Playlist. It’s enormous! Over 600 songs! Over 46 hours of that Golden Age of post-punk music.

Enjoy! Share! Follow!

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80s New Wave, Art & the Selfies

Maybe you need a decent 80s New Wave playlist to listen to during these abnormal days. Pete Martens and I curated this one (Red Skies at Night) together. It’s a lot of fun to approach creating a Spotify playlist the same way you might approach curating a thematic group art exhibition. Pete, by the way, is a talented painter and printmaker.

The Selfie Series

A series of colorful, painterly, expressionistic paintings focused on positive depictions of young people from the Millennial generation.

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