Daniel A. Rabuzzi's Blog

City Dreaming

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun (1928)

The lobster emerges just long enough from the bottom of the bay to converse with the canary.  
"City lights," says Canary.
"Drinking their reflection," says Lobster.
Daytime work precludes more frequent posting-- and will continue to do so this fall.  You can catch glimpses of the lobster and the canary on Twitter:  @DanielRabuzzi



Elias Sime, The Computer Cemetery - or Addis Ababa as Motherboard (c. 2005?)

In the meantime, slivered recommendations, best of what I read this past year (alas! no time to comment further) in no particular order:   V. E. Schwab,  A Darker Shade of Magic;   Sofia Samatar,   A Stranger in Olondria;  Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice; Jeff VanderMeer, The Southern Reach trilogy;  Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling; Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor;  Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black; Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse;  Helen Marshall, Hair Side, Flesh Side; Daniel O'Malley, The Rook;  Nathaniel Mackey, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate;  Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti;  Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place;  Andrew Nicoll, The Good Mayor; Paul Cornell, London Falling.  



 Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, "Lower East Side, NYC, Street Scene" (c. 2014)

And a handful of favorite short stories, some old, some new, that have intoned their magic over me this year:  Steven Erikson's "Goats of Glory" (from the Strahan & Anders anthology, Swords & Dark Magic );  Ellen Kushner & Caroline Stevermer's "The Vital Importance of the Superficial" in Datlow & Windling's Queen Victoria's Book of Spells ); and Yoon Ha Lee's "Iseul's Lexicon" from her Conservation of Shadows.



Aleksandr Brodsky & Ilya Utkin, "The Paper Architects," from their Projects (1980-1990)


Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Dragon by Da Vinci

Study of Cats and Other Animals c. 1513

Look carefully, there among the cats.
Da Vinci thought hard about dragons--he pondered most of all the proper placement of their wings.  With his superior knowledge of anatomy and physics, he made sure dragon-wings were positioned in the place of arms, rather than appended helicopter-style to the shoulder blades (he drew winged dragons elsewhere; I cannot find the image at the moment).
I require such scientific exactitude in my creatures of fantasy.  
Except when they are bumble bees.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Kianja Strobert at The Studio Museum Harlem

Kianja StrobertUntitled, 2011  (Mixed media on paper; 30 × 22 in.;Collection of Zach Feuer)

Kianja Strobert evokes the deep energy, the stop/look/listen to your beating heart, the stillness of the Now.  Immerse yourself in her work, currently exhibited at The Studio Museum Harlem.  

Her own vocabulary, her own identity, with nods to Diebenkorn, Alston, Twombly, Thomas, Frankenthaler, Mitchell.

I especially love the title of her exhibition:  Of This Day In Time.

Brings me into what I call "Drop-Time."   I have summoned the Drop-Time in earlier Lobster & Canary entries:  Drop-Time,"the moment that is frozen in motion, simultaneously gliding and flying while having been lived once, in a specific blink or gasp, months or years or decades ago."


[As always, all images copyrighted to the artist and/or her legal representatives, and/or the photographer; images used here solely for non-commercial purposes of commentary].Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Lock-tight doors and paint-over windows

© Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Pencil, plywood, color pencil, oil paint, wax crayon and Scotch Tape
Most mornings-- in the deep pre-dawn-- I drift through landscapes of my mind's devising, listening to my own voice filtered through rock and cloud, reciting poetry in an obscure tongue.
Today, so early it might almost have been last night, I wandered through long corridors, hallways bathed in sepia tones and wisps of palest ruby.  Cryptic scribbles covered the walls-- I kept trying to read what was written, walked on unenlightened.  
Doors everywhere along the roofed avenue, none open, taunting me with their resistance to my efforts.  Windows too, all inked over-- I could hear winds and bird-calls beyond, but the panes remained opaque.
So hard to convey...this Twombly comes closest.
[As always, all images copyrighted to the artist or his/her legal representative, used here solely for non-commercial purposes of commentary].



Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Ominous Radiance

Sometimes words wrack me with their power-- I could fall down and drown in them.

This week I collided with Melville's poem "The Berg; A Dream" and have re-read it multiple times, giddy with it, while fearing its danger.

Above all, this ominous radiance:

"Along the spurs of ridges pale,Not any slenderest shaft and frail,A prism over glass-green gorges lone,Toppled; or lace of traceries fine,Nor pendant drops in grot or mineWere jarred, when the stunned ship went down."Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Sinister Beauty

Virgil speaks much of bees ("little Romans" he calls them, for their diligence and loyalty) but says nothing at all about wasps-- which is a shame because their biography is at least as illustrious, and frankly more dramatic.  I might write a treatise on bees but I would stage a drama about the wasp.

As summer slides into fall, tribes of husky bees flirt sedulously with the goldenrod and the dwindling vetch and yarrow, with the first surge of aster, in the strips and interstices along the East River. Buttery-banded bees, some almost milky, others orange-lacquered, displaying the hive's livery with brilliant abdominal intarsia.

Now, over the bee-swarms, in looping caracoles sails the wasp: onyx and cobalt blur.  An emissary from the distant blue, from across the wide water I think.  Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide To Getting Lost, speaks of "the blue of distance," the "color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not."  The wasp is a piece of that deep-blue distance bringing itself to me, self-embodied emotional longing made visible, a needle-slice of the far Faerie horizon detaching itself and flying right to my doorstep.

The wasp is a member of either the Chalybion or the Chlorion genus, a marauder whose daintily trailing legs and slender form belie the venom within.  They hunt crickets, grasshoppers and katydids, paralyzing them in underground burrows as hosts for their larvae.  (Annie Dillard's reflections in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on the parasitical nature of wasps haunt me:  "What if you were an inventor and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent?  These things are not well enough known.").   Faerie is no paradise.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Never cease to pursue magic-- it resides in the most mundane places

Late summer yields to early autumn here in New York City.  Before the leaves fall, while the haze still obscures our towers and wreathes our colonnades, as the sun slants in sharply to pick out hues and textures the summer preferred to hide beneath brick-sweat and enervating glare, we strolled this afternoon in the East Village and on the Lower East Side.  Some glimpses of what we found...




 Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Lobster & Canary On Summer Hiatus-- But Visit Us At MOUSE

Harald Sohlberg, Flower Meadow In The North (1905)
We're going to take a break for the summer, after five unbroken years (322 posts) of musings and observations.  Just to gather our thoughts, let the flowers grow, the fruits ripen... 

Giovanna Garzoni, Still Life With A Bowl Of Citrons (1640)
We hugely value you-- our readers-- and thank you for reading, and for the many notes and comments you send.  We will resume right after American Labor Day this September.  In the meantime, we invite you to follow our other blog, at MOUSE . 
[As always, all images displayed here are copyrighted to the artists and/or their legal representatives, or are within the public domain.  Used here exclusively for non-commercial purposes.]  Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Long Island City Open Arts-- Taking Wing

[Poster by Luba Lukova , copyrighted to Ms.Lukova; displayed here solely for non-commercial purposes of commentary.]

In the kaleidoscopic world(s) of the visual arts in New York City, the community of artists in Long Island City is rising.  (My wife and artistic collaborator, the woodcarver Deborah Mills, has her studio in LIC's Diego Salazar Building-- so I acknowledge my lack of objectivity on the subject!).   Long home to many artists (and housing museums such as MoMA PS 1 and The Noguchi Museum -- and, until it was painted over late last year, the graffiti edifice 5 Pointz), LIC has recently seen even more creatives arriving as rents continue to rise in Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn-- not to mention in Manhattan.

Symptomatic of LIC's growing stature as an arts center was the fourth annual open studios event last week.  While helping Deborah at her wonderfully crowded carving demonstrations, I took a quick tour of what colleagues had to offer, especially in the Juvenal Reis building across the street.  A few highlights from among many, more evidence of LIC's increasing prominence in the arts (as always, copyright held by the artist and/or his/her legal representatives; displayed here solely for non-commercial purposes):

 

Kathy Ferguson, "Gravity Goes Awry"




Atto Kim



Robert Badia  



Suzanne Pemberton  "Sagaponack"



Maria Liebana "Speedy"



Eric Rue  "Interface I"



Kinuko Imai Hoffman  "Buff"Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Tegene Kunbi: Making Colors Speak

[image error]

Contemporary art and design flooded NYC this week, with Frieze and a dozen-odd smaller art fairs now rivaling the Armory Show week in March.  The lobster and the canary visited two of the fairs-- PULSE and the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) --and have this to report.

PULSE and NADA were each gems of thoughtful curation, possessing a warmth and intimacy that invited genuine interaction with the works, the gallerists and the artists.  Booth after booth called us in with playful (but not precious or cartoonish) pieces, work that demanded attention without being shrill or bombastic, wielding instead a quiet authority.  If one can speak of a sensibility common to a hundred artists working in a wide variety of media and styles it would be a striving to highlight the physicality of the work-- perhaps a response to the digital and the virtual.  The artists at these fairs emphasized the gesture with kneaded impasto, splotches, drips, bold painterly approaches.  They highlighted the textures of their materials, crumpling, dimpling and pebbling their surfaces, streaking india ink on canvas, embedding bb pellets in resin, braiding and taping, using nails, bits of glass, wood, ripped paper within the painting.

PULSE and NADA feature smaller, younger galleries who in turn discover new talent.  I encountered several artists for the first time whose work I look forward to following for years to come (*), but the "whoa! stop-me-in-my-tracks" moment was seeing from a distance the luminous color-field paintings by Tegene Kunbi in the Margaret Thatcher Projects booth at PULSE.  Call it the instantaneous seduction of artwork, the hunger to throw oneself into the art-- I cast fair decorum aside and nearly jogged into the Thatcher booth to see Kunbi's paintings. 
All images here copyrighted to Tegene Kunbi and/or his legal representatives-- displayed here solely for non-commercial purposes of commentary, no copyright infringement intended.  

The images here do not convey the richness of Kunbi's color schemes, how the colors jump into the eye, how he sets one block in conversation with another and with the viewer.  Kunbi layers and articulates, and unabashedly shows us the artist's hand with his brushwork.  He evokes worlds--he is an alchemist like Klee, Rothko, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler.  Kunbi had me thinking of Kandinsky on the spirituality of art.  Kunbi reminds us how powerful painting can be in the hands of a confident practitioner.  And, in an age wedded to irony and pusillanimous when it comes to any talk of artistic verities, Kunbi unironically presents us with Beauty-- surely still one of the main points of Art.

(*)  Check out Lisi Raskin,  Graham Collins, Retna, James Hoff, Rachel Foullon, Benjamin Horns,

Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.