Through a literary prize, High Desert Journal aims to explore the realm described by poet Jarold Ramsey: "I believe in an ecology of story, memory and imagination as much as an ecology of land." As an organization focused on a specific place, we at High Desert Journal have discovered that a deep hunger of readers, writers, and artists exists for place-based arts and literature. We believe every place has an ecology of story, memory, and imagination that inspires us, connects us to one another and to a place. We want to offer the best of this "ecology" through the Obsidian Prize.
2012 Obsidian Prize for Nonfiction
Judged by William Kittredge
$1,000 prize and publication in the High Desert Journal
5,000 word max.
$15 entry fee
Deadline: February 12, 2012
Only unpublished work accepted
For writers working in or inspired by the West, Big Sky or big city. Send us your best work.
Submissions are only accepted via SubmishMash.
BLIND JUDGING. DO NOT PUT CONTACT INFORMATION ON MANUSCRIPT PLEASE.
Stadler Center for Poetry Bucknell Hall Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA 17837 570-577-1853 phone 570-577-1885 fax stadlercenter@bucknell.edu
In June 2012, the Stadler Center will conduct the twenty-seventh annual Seminar for Younger Poets. Held for three weeks in June, the Seminar provides an extended opportunity for undergraduate poets to write and to be guided by established poets. Staff and visiting poets conduct writing workshops and offer lecture/discussions, present readings of their own work, and are available for individual conferences. In the past, such poets as Linda Gregg, Terrance Hayes, Dana Levin, Mary Ruefle, Gerald Stern, David St. John, Arthur Sze, and Michael Waters have served as visiting poets. Numerous readings provide the participants with the opportunity to hear and be heard by their peers. Applicants compete for ten places in the Seminar, all of which come with fellowships. Fellowships include tuition, housing in campus apartments, and meals. Accepted students are responsible only for their travel to Bucknell and a modest library deposit. A limited number of travel scholarships are available on the basis of need. The 2012 staff will include Seminar Director G.C. Waldrep, Associate Director Deirdre O'Connor, and Stadler Fellows Jamaal May and Diana Park. Visiting poets Rick Barot and Brigit Pegeen Kelly will complete the lineup.
The 2012 Seminar will be held June 10 - July 1. The application deadline is January 31, 2012. For eligibility and application requirements, and to submit an application, please use the SCP Application Portal page, at right. For Frequently Asked Questions about the application process, click here.
Good Monday morning to you all, and a Happy New Year.
Back to work after a few days off.
So this is my very first post of 2012; a touching short film titled Hello Benjamin by Solomon Shadrach Turner - his senior project at Oberlin College - whose father (Benjamin) died in 1990, when Solomon was just a kid... a kid who so obviously loved and, as he says in the film, not just wanted to be like his father, but to be his father, though he never really got to know him well because he died young.
As TV networks continue to ignore audiences of color, the web has become a bastion for shows by writers, directors, and producers of color.
By now we’re all familiar with the success of the webseries The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but there are so many well-written and well-produced shows on the web. From black comic book style shows, to talk and travel series, the internet has been great to up and coming filmmakers.
But what should you be checking for in 2012? The list is long and varied, but here are my recommendations for great web shows to add to your que this year.
12 Steps to Recovery
I discovered Tony Clomax’s hilarious webseries 12 Steps to Recovery last year, but the show just keeps getting better and better. It follows Parrish Diaz as he tries to recover from a broken heart. It’s been called ‘Sex & the City meets Curb Your Enthusiam’ and it’s absolutely hilarious. Check out the first episode.
Human Resources The Series
Ever been involved in some uncomfortable (yet hilarious) office situations? Well you’ll love Human Resources the Series. From the mind of two black women–Kyra and Kozi Kyles–the show uses puppets to make light of many of the weird things that go on in the workplace. Genius!
Champion Road
Written, directed and produced by R.L. Scott and starring many familiar faces, Champion Road looks like it’ll be one of my new favorites this year. Billed as “an action drama… surrounding a middle class Black family with a positive message depicting images of strong Black Men,” this show fills a void of what’s currently lacking from network TV. Peep the pilot episode.
Eight-Six
We brought you the first episode of ‘Eight-Six‘ a few weeks ago and many of you wanted more. Well, the cast is back for a second drama-filled second episode and we’ll certainly be following this black soap-opera about the dark side of business as it unfolds. Catch up on episode one and watch episode two!
Got 2B Real
Do you love to laugh? Got 2B Real is a parody series about some of the divas we adore. The show creates hilarious mashups of celebs and the things we think they’re thinking (or probably should). Created by Twitter user Patti LaHelle, no diva is safe! Watching the first episode of season two and prepare to laugh!
On Book TV’s In Depth, author and journalist, Chris Hedges. The Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent spends three hours taking viewers’ calls, emails and tweets on topics such as terrorism, religion and politics.
The National Book Critics Circle Award nominee has a Masters degree in Divinity and is the author of nine books. His works include, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “Empire of Illusion,” and his latest release “The World As It Is.”
With the Occupy Wall Street manifestations taking up much of our social and political imaginations these days, we thought we’d highlight a few great films that bring context to the current uprising and related issues. Protesters are of course creating awareness about and resisting the global financial system and all its inequities and bad blood lineages. A broken economic system fuelled by greed and passed down to generations looking out for what their parents looked out for—themselves—is suddenly and finally the topic of the day, thanks to all the amazing activists occupying our financial districts and our attention.
Yet still many don’t fully understand what it’s all about, and since the devil is in the details, why not check out some documentary fare to round out the picture? Below is a list compiled from Cinema Politica and elsewhere of 10 docs that poke and prod at the capitalist economic system with creativity and criticism. This Halloween, while mainstream and corporate media remain content to focus on incidentals (protesters) at the cost of real systemic analysis (free market capitalism), why not peek behind the corporate mask and see what lurks beneath! Enjoy and please feel free to suggest more!
The American Ruling Class – An imaginative hybrid film (a dramatic documentary musical no less!) that follows the former editor of Harper’s magazine, Louis Lapham, as he encounters and provokes the haves of American society while giving due time to the have-nots and their rascally resistance tactics.
Let’s Make Money – As global bankers empty out resources in Africa and fill their own coffers in the West, this documentary from the director of We Feed the World, asks: How do so many work so hard for so little to make so few so rich?
Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis – Johan Norberg looks at the financial crisis and the causes of the meltdown, critiquing government policies for not stopping, but facilitating yet more financial collapses. Watch the whole film above.
Collapse - A stylistically rendered, pared down doc about controversial author Michael Ruppert, who in the film connects global unrest, energy markets, war, poverty and everything in between.
Inside Job – The director of this mainstream (distributed by Sony) but worth watching exposé, Charles H. Ferguson, describes the doc as being about “the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption.”
Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex Lies and Global Economics – An older but very solid National Film Board of Canada doc that engages with the amazing alternative economist Marilyn Waring, Who’s Counting is a refreshing departure from the scores of docs-on-economics that seem to forget women have a thing or two to say as well. You can watch the whole film above.
Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers – No education on the global economic system would be complete without a look at the ways in which corporations and governments keep a perpetual war machine whirring and spinning blood into profits.
The Yes Men Fix the World – By far the only film on the list deploying humour and satire in the service of dismantling the layers of lies and corruption that prop up corporate capitalism, the second Yes Men documentary is infinitely better than the first and, thankfully, self-distributed this time (the first instalment was carried by MGM, effectively killing many grassroots screening opportunities.
The Corporation – The grandparent of all the wee grandchildren above, The Corporation set the bar high when it came out a decade ago, but still stands the test of time. Is the corporation a psychopath? Watch this film and you be the judge.
At the recent Film Africa film festival in London, the new Ethiopian feature film “Atletu” (The Athlete) was screened to a sold-out audience. Directed by Rasselas Lakew and Davey Frankel, it is a portrayal of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian runner who won two Olympic marathons in a row, and broke the world record in Rome in 1960, running bare feet. Here’s the trailer:
The film follows a recent trend in feature filmmaking that weaves archival material with contemporary filmed footage, producing an interesting dialogue between the documentary imaginary and the fictional. The historical ‘real’, in these cases, don’t just provide a narrative framework, or set-dressing aesthetic. They produce a filmic grain that in turn invests in the contemporary footage a sense of historicism and character. I’m thinking of Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” where Sean Penn’s portrayal of the first openly gay congressman Harvey Milk is bolstered by the warmth and nostalgia of the 1970s archival footage that is intercut throughout, or Shane Meadows’s “This is England” (2006), where the opening credits show Margaret Thatcher in a tractor, or Princess Diana’s wedding, or a scared bobby beset by women at the Greenham Common protests. It’s an example of the use of archival footage to produce a setting that is spine-tinglingly nostalgic, so powerful in its evocation of a time past, that it transports you into it. The archival material is producing a social context, a milieu and an aesthetic that extends beyond the limits of staged scenes.
In the case of the Ethiopian film “The Athlete,” the restrained, somewhat sparse pace is made possible by its borrowing of footage from Kon Ichikawa’s momentous documentary “Tokyo Olympiad” (1965), which used 164 cameramen operating 1, 031 cameras to capture godlike athleticism interspersed with the true grit of physical determination and suffering. Here, below, follows the 9 minute marathon sequence from Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad:
If “The Athlete” is a marathon-paced film on the whole — slow, restrained and rhythmic (the film seems to have 4 ‘chapters’) — the use of archival material from Ichikawa’s film are the cinematic sprints in time and narrative; they capture a sense of history, of Bikila’s unending determination, and of a nations pride wrapped up in one thin, loping man.
Similarly, the images of Bikila running through a torch-lit Rome in 1960, the flourishing music disguising the (imagined) soft patter of his bare feet on the cobblestones is just as powerful.
Illuminated by the headlights of the motorbike filming him, or by the warm glow of the onlookers, Bikila seems to be running in a vacuum, running on an infinite stretch of moving road, with no particular destination.
After finishing the Tokyo marathon in 1964 Bikila famously said he could have run another 10 kilometres.
It is this unending determinism that “The Athlete” portrays; athleticism is not tied to a certain discipline, and there is no finish line, rather it is an infinite race with the self. When Bikila is injured in an accident, and tragically loses the use of his legs three years before his grand finale race at the Munich Olympics (in 1972), he continues to be an athlete, taking part in the Stoke Mandeville Archery tournament (near to where his rehabilitation hospital was located in Britain), and then in a cross-country sled race with the King of Norway.
But back to Kon Ichikawa’s documentary: Bikila’s godlike athleticism, his gentle, composed running style, perfectly symmetrical and ruthlessly resolute is celebrated by Ichikawa. As Bikila enters the Tokyo stadium for the final lap of his momentous marathon (watch the second embedded video, above, again), his loping body is caught delicately by a telephoto tracking shot. Slowed down, it exposes every sinew in Bikila’s long and graceful legs, every muscle dancing to the rhythm of his feet on the track. This sequence of the film is truly remarkable for its deft admiration of the athlete’s body, marvelling at the mechanics of its workings, revealing a photographic trope that revels in the capture of the exposed body (yet perhaps bears some uncomfortable link to colonial fascinations with the black body).
And yet, Ichikawa was not seeking the Man as God illusion that is shown in Reifenstahl’s “Olympia” (1936). The camera does not elevate the athlete. Rather, Ichikawa’s camera is close to the ground, zoomed in on the suffering, in the collapsed marathon runner, or in the beads of sweat dripping consistently from Bikila’s chin. The athlete, in the archival footage and in Lakew’s dramatisation of Bikila’s life, is beyond everything, movingly human.
With anticipation for D'Angelo's return to the stage next month in Europe at code red epidemic thirst level proportions, how would it feel to get your hands on a live recording of one of his shows from the Voodoo Tour? Silly question, I know. But way back in 2000, D'Angelo's set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands was bootlegged, and since that time it's been floating around on and offline. It's once again making the rounds with renewed interested in Mr. Archer thanks to this little European tour that he'll be embarking on soon. Needless to say, I can't wait to hear and see those live sessions, but until that time this download of this incredible concert is tiding me over just swell. Recorded on July 16, 2000 when D'Angelo took his Voodoo on the road with The Soultronics (featuring Questlove on drums and Anthony Hamilton on supporting vocals) backing him, this is a must-own for any D fan. Videos of this concert are also a must-watch to see the artist in fine form and all of the energy that he and the band exuded on stage. Listen to "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" below, hit the bounce to watch the complete concert, and bounce on over to Funk It for the free download for your own personal collections. I know that this was recorded over a decade ago, but I'm hoping, wishing, and praying that D'Angelo hasn't lost this fire. The game has truly been missing this.
D'Angelo: "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival
Props to Funk It for compiling this video footage and painstakingly syncing it up with the audio.
12/21 - Common performed in front of a sold out crowd at the House Of Blues on Sunset and brought out musical legend Stevie Wonder to share a special moment with him on stage.
Topic The topic is open. Any type of entry that meets the submission criteria below is eligible. Multiple entries welcome.
Submission Criteria • The contest is open to prose works. • Entries can be fiction, non-fiction or creative non-fiction. • Entries must be previously unpublished and not under consideration by any other publication. • Entries must be original and not a translation of a previously published work. • Maximum length: 2000 words. • IMPORTANT: No poetry, plays, reviews, and scholarly essays. No footnotes and endnotes. No pseudonyms.
• Submissions must be in Word or txt format. • No email or fax submissions.
Language • Submissions must be in English. • Submissions can be an English translation of the author's unpublished original work in another language.
Participants The contest is open to all writers, established and emerging, worldwide.
Entry Fee $20.00 per entry, non-refundable.
Deadline Postmarked on or before February 7, 2012.
Judging Blind judging.
Announcement of Results Winners will be contacted in Spring 2012, and their names will subsequently be posted on Accenti Online.
Prizes • Top prize: $1000.00 (CDN) and publication in Accenti. • Second Prize: $250.00 (CDN) and publication in Accenti. • Third Prize: $100.00 (CDN) and publication in Accenti.
How to Submit Each submission must be accompanied by a duly completed entry form and entry fee.
