![Dollar Art House Sells Out](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5840a3d0d2b8572ed5ad171d/1480684432154/newbanner.jpg)
These are hard times. These were hard times before the ascendancy of Donald Trump; before the fascist human dust of the United States became emboldened; before the incoming administration started planning a series of social policy arsons. Times are even harder now. To pay for these hard times the Dollar Art House is selling out; or rather we are selling artwork and putting on some first rate poetry and musical performances. From 5pm to 11pm on Friday, December 9, the “Dollar Art House Sells Out” will feature music and performances by Poet X, IndyBlack, Sunni Hutton and Jesa D’Or, along with artwork by Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl.
![Poem for Fidel Castro (Song of Protest)](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/583aeddd15d5db6612fd48de/1480338743440/34523a5160f037b3f014aefe7f20f16c.jpg)
“To defend our beloved Cuba.” The closing line of this poem from the great Chilean communist and surrealist writer Pablo Neruda rather sums up how working and oppressed people – in Latin America and around the world – are feeling in the wake of Fidel Castro's death. There is a lot to say about Castro the man, but it is far less important than the Cuban Revolution he helped lead, build and maintain for more than fifty years against the outside pressures of American empire.
![The Resistible Rise of Donald Trump: Two Performances](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5831a79cbebafb6e0f592375/1480114761306/8c1048fa67e6c3aec09dd5e589ecd786.jpg)
Poor Mike Pence. Greeted with a friendly gaggle of actors who both recognize him and are willing to express well-meaning concern over the havoc he may wreak as vice president. Pity too Donald Trump, who now feels blindsided by the realization that the theater isn't somewhere he and his cohort can retreat from the consequences of their actions.
Trump's reaction is what ultimately makes the action of the Hamilton cast a Good Thing. The man spent fifteen months using his own bully pulpit in a far less kindly way.
![Flawed Silence: Five Poems](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5806ae3046c3c450db6eba00/1479820648120/static1.squarespace.jpg)
Written she lapsed my eyelids curse
Never subjugated to her thoughts worse
Dreaming of twinkled themes her subconscious works
Works night and day because her lips she tamed
Her words released could leave bodies slain
Quiet in spite of riveting details
Still her mouth only inhales
Their thoughts she thunk perhaps prematurely
![Trump, Art, Music + Revenge](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5828c1645016e1a4d869030e/1479820122967/5817bbd1170000c3045badf6.jpg)
President. Donald. Trump. These are three words that never had any reality outside of a grotesque comic. Until now. The man who has bragged of sexual assault, threatened to “build a wall” and refused to denounce an endorsement from a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is President of the United States.
Hate crimes and proto-fascist incidents are spreading across the country. A right-wing terrorist outfit in Texas is threatening to arrest and torture “diversity professors.”
![These People Live Here: Conceptualism and the New Documentary Poetics](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/58166026e58c627afcf1abc6/1478261650884/poetics.jpg)
In 2015 it became clear that Viktor Shklovsky’s imperative to “make the stone stony” is a much simpler task than “making the corpse corpsely.” I am thinking of the use of autopsy transcript as poem, Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriation of the shooting death of Michael Brown. [1] While this particular text was said to be uniquely parasitical and vampiric, likely as much for its arrogance as its form, it should be understood as the logical product of an aberration in American documentary poetics that has recently adopted the brand name “Conceptualism.” Goldsmith’s personal framing of Conceptualism holds that all that must be written has been written and must merely be re-packaged
![The Comedy is Over](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5814e6d12994ca5361c8ed7b/1477765809986/41.jpg)
“Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But doctor... I am Pagliacci.’ Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains." – Rorschach, Watchmen
It’s easy to say that it’s because of Halloween. But why this Halloween? Why not last year or the year before? Will 2016 (already an ignominious year) be remembered as the year that sent in the clowns?
![West Aleppo](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/580b8689e4fcb5d3621bd8f6/1477309968716/west+aleppo.jpg)
This group of paintings has a non-linear connection to events in Syria. I started using this particular form – oil on large wood panels – when Syria was still a relatively tranquil country. None of the iconography I arrived at through shifting oil and pigment presaged, referenced or interpreted any of the digital images that have found their way to comfortably horrified audiences in the West. Yet after five years of following the Syrian nightmare from afar, I cannot help but see Syrian tropes in all of these paintings...
![Dylan as Poet](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/5803b92bf7e0ab48cf3c7243/1476701823485/91A2mjfVBhL.jpg)
Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His name had been occasionally mentioned as a possible nominee in the past decade or so, but he was seen as unlikely to win for two reasons. The obvious one is that as a singer-songwriter rather than a published novelist, playwright or poet, his work has stood outside mainstream notions of what constitutes “literature” for most of Western establishment opinion, although the Nobel did, long ago, honor Winston Churchill for his works of history.
The second reason this was unlikely is that Dylan is American, and therefore, as we know from a gaffe years ago from a ranking member of the Swedish Academy, a provincial...
![Dario Fo: Ideas That Outrage](http://web.archive.org./web/20161202233503/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5459984ae4b08b58f1c8df7f/55cf4bfce4b000da57b8a1cc/58022a572e69cf2489ace6b7/1476549173502/111022996_Dario_Fo_doing_monologue-large_trans%2B%2BxAHgvSpW8b5g6-J_2-NZhiCJUFm8ElNY_C5nFV93ld8.jpg)
Dario Fo, who died this past week, was a great playwright of the years of unrest and rebellion in the 1960s and ’70s. His plays such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! were hilariously cutting critiques of life under capitalism as it went into crisis. His style of theatre was like a Brecht play performed by the Marx Brothers in the age of TV. They even became long running hits in London’s West End.
Brian Mulligan, a teacher, writer and performer who was part of the “alternative comedy” scene of the 1980-90s, said...