the tishman Review

The Tishman Review has just published one of my teenage photographs.

http://tishmanreview.com/

Notebook Drawing April 2016

oddball

Latest notebook drawing by me at oddball magazine
https://oddballmagazine.com/2016/04/27/poem-by-scarlett-pedersen-2/

Compressed

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts-Matter Press is publishing a 12 week series of some of my postcards. Here is the first one.

http://matterpress.com/journal/2016/04/27/postcards-1/

 

 

 

Notebook drawing April 2016

Madeleine Sherwood 1922 – 2016

I Don't do Passover

              I don't do passover, or indeed any other Jewish holidays. I can remember a few passive passovers of my youth, nothing special and not very festive. I wasn't even bar mitzvahed   and for years I kept it a deep dark secret, too ashamed to admit it. Finally as a young adult I came out to my oldest childhood friend who of course knew this all along since we had studied for that day together with an old Rabbi who lived in our Brooklyn neighborhood and by the time i told him he had converted to Catholicism and could care less .
                 On holidays including Thanksgiving instead of going to the synagogue or having a  family Thanksgiving dinner me and my mother would drive into the city specifically with Times Sq on our radar and minds to take in some movies and dinner. Dinner was usually at our favorite place Hector’s  that great Formica covered cafeteria where the water fountains gave out with seltzer instead of just water. The place was located right under the Camel’s smoking man sign and the old Hotel Claridge where a second or  third cousin had his dental practice.
                     In our red and white 1957 gorgeous Pontiac we would go driving down to 4^th ave passing through downtown Brooklyn and the beautiful  Brooklyn Paramount on our way to cross that great bridge and then along the Bowery till we reached Times Sq. and all those movie theatres. What to see was our hard choice of the day. On that particular Thanksgiving  of 1958 We decided on “Party Girl” at the Loew’s State probably because it was a crime drama and the ticket prices at the State were low, children 50 cents at all times. The film starred an aging Robert Taylor who was no longer pretty and pretty much on the way out, and Cyd Charisse who also didn’t do much for either of us. Doris Day she wasn’t. Of course we had no idea who the director Nicholas Ray was, and the film’s cult following was quite a few years away.
               We didn’t care for it, and our movie viewing was not satiated, so on that cool November evening we made a dash across the street to the Victoria to see “I Want To Live.” We thought about seeing “Separate Tables” at the Astor, the large beautiful billboard with portraits of the stars pulled us in and both Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth two favorites of both of ours were in it, but it looked dry and we wanted wet.
                          The last showing of “I Want To Live” was just starting and we no doubt got stares because I was probably the only 10 year old in the audience. The film seared my young brain and everything else that could possibly be seared.  My mother favored tough and independent actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Susan Hayward who by all accounts was giving the performance of the year and her career as Barbara Graham who was allegedly part of a burglar murder spree in the early 50’s and was found guilty of murder and  put to death in the California gas chamber. Not exactly the kind of film a mother would take her 10 year old son to see, but my mom was advanced in her movie and mothering ways and always said if she wanted to see a movie then I could see it also.
                       We had just seen Vertigo in the Spring and loved it, and I had also seen “Night of The Hunter”  and “Sweet Smell Of Success” both of which shook me up,  haunting and staying with me for my entire youth. But nothing prepared me for what was screening across the shabby Victoria’s screen.  Hayward was brash and brassy, a troubled soul who had tried to kill herself in the early 50’s and was always strikingly good-looking, a Brooklyn born babe who sometimes gave over the top performances and we both loved her. I had never seen a film like “I Want To Live.” It was almost a documentary, grimy and gray with lurid touches throughout and with a Jazz soundtrack pounding in our ears.   It gave us pins and needles. Even at 10 I could recognize a downer and this film was one big down trip. It depressed me, and even at that young age I knew all about being depressed. This kind of film acting is dead and gone and would probably be laughed at or ignored today, and on my most recent viewing of the film a few weeks ago I could see why.  Hayward’s performance at times is so high pitched I’m surprised that the dogs of my hood didn’t coming bounding, barking  and pounding at my door. And then there was her suit, earrings and open toe heels that she wears in the final part of the film on her way to be gassed that no doubt caused me to be sexually attracted to women who wore open toe shoes from that day on. 
                However the film and Hayward are still compelling and pulled me in all over again. The texture and images of the film are like broken glass on a wet floor and the last half hour or so of the film is gut retching and somber and contains the best acting that Hayward does in the movie and no doubt was a big reason why she won the Oscar that year.  When the film was over, the lights came up and the audience was silent including me and my mom as we made our way out of the cigarette smoke filled theatre into the cool neon lit air of the Sq. and made our way back to Brooklyn on that Thanksgiving night so many years ago. 

Tallying Up

 The broadside I did with the poet Amy Young has been posted on this blog. Link is below for the article.

 
http://artnewengland.com/blogs/counterforce-in-the-world-broadsided-press-responds-to-the-flint-mi-water-crisis/

Notebook drawing April 2016

Boston Accent Lit

Boston Accent Lit has just posted 2 of my drawings

http://www.bostonaccentlit.com/haber

Doris Roberts 1925-2016

The great Doris Roberts has passed. She was much more than just the Raymond show.

my latest sculpture

Botanical 3. 2016. 
8 ½” x  10 ½” x 3” Mixed

art and movies.

For those of us not familiar or not very familiar with the artist Raoul De Keyser's paintings there is a superb show of his up now at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of 22 canvases some very small and compact these are sincere abstract works that impressed me with their colors and shapes and recall and bring to mind landscapes in the mist. Born in Belgium in 1930 and dead in 2012 it appears to me that he had a brilliant and rich life as an artist. Not all the paintings are great, but most are wonderful and seductive. One of the best shows I've seen so far this year.

Also great and wonderful is the show of photographs by the recently deceased master Malick Sidibe now on view at the Jack Shainman gallery. Although not as memorable as some of his previous shows there are still some terrific images of impact here including many photos of clothed female figures photographed from behind. I especially like his portraits with those beautiful decorative borders, unfortunately there are very few of those here, as are his photos of dancers whooping it up in their Saturday night finery.

And while I’m here I should mention "Neon Bull" Gabriel Mascaro’s strong and beautiful new film set among the workers and caretakers of bulls in Brazil’s far-flung rodeos called vaquejadas. The film focuses on a group of workers who travel from place to place with the rodeo including the very handsome and sexy Iremar played with great conviction by Juliano Cazarrého who cleans the bulls and in his spare time designs and makes costumes and clothes that one of his female co-workers wears in her side show like semi strip dance act, you have to get a load of her in one get up in which she wears a horses head and hoofs. Iremar’s one big dream is to be able to save up enough money to buy a professional sewing machine one day. There is also a female child, the daughter of the stripper-co worker in the mix who is brash and wise in her ways who adds a big dash of confusion to their lives. Iremar who drips sexuality is a deep and complex man, macho and bullish but also sensitive and creative. Everything here is raw, worn and run down, you can almost smell the dung that these workers are constantly shoveling and the smell of sex is also strong and in our faces and quite explicit including a gorgeous dimly lit scene of the male workers washing themselves in the nude with buckets of water that is like a painting come to life and an outrageous and very explicit scene in an textile factory late one night between Iremar and a very pregnant security guard. This was a strange and disconcerting film for me, like being trapped in some distant unknown land without a passport and a way to get out but difficult not to fall into its spell no matter how rough and ugly it is. And do I have to even mention that this is not a film for everyone. One of the best films of the year so far.

Malick Sidibe 1935-2016

One of our great photographers has passed

anne jackson 1925-2016

notebook drawing april 2016

if and only if

finally got an image of the magazine If and Only If that used a teenage drawing of me to go along with this poem. The magazine is about eating disorders and body image. Interesting.

notebook drawing April 2016