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A Kolya-n tapestry?

For those who lurked about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the early 2000s, Kolya, or Nicholas as many of us knew him, was a familiar face. He was a sans-papiers from Eastern Europe with a entrepreneurial flair that boggled the mind. He devised elaborate hustles to fleece department stores of money, recruiting many an empty-pocketed Shakespearean to abet him along the way. He resold cheap Chinese jewelry to tourists at a 1,000 per cent mark up. He painted henna tattoos on the legs, backs, and breasts of the young and foolish at the Les Halles park for 50 or 100 francs a pop, often using KMZ friends Tom Pancake or Ryan McGlynn as a sidekick. And, yes, suspicions were rife that perhaps he lifted a book or three from Shakespeare and sold them down the road.

Well, like most everybody from that time, Kolya moved on from Paris. He drifted to America where, once again living without papers, he lived for a long time by selling contraband punk rock T-shirts. Now, he has surfaced again with a Kickstarter project that seems to defy logic. Kolya, the man of the thousand scams, has discovered a love for tapestry.

From what we can tell, Kolya hopes to create a series of contemporary tapestries and donate them to modern art museums across the United States. “Coming to America, I was excited to explore native American tapestry as well as contemporary tapestry,” he writes. “[U]nfortunately I was also disappointed that such great tradition was somewhat shunned away by commercialization of the art scene.” Continue reading →

Onna Solomon has a new collection out with Press 34. Onna’s poetic reputation is prospering; she recently won the Chad Walsh poetry prize. And the concept underpinning Press 34 is compelling: it’s an art book project which produces 34 hand-crafted copies of each title produce.  Read away:

What It Takes

A man who lost his family
—two kids and a wife—
in a blameless accident.

He knows whatever there is
can’t imagine
how we sustain ourselves,

whatever there is must also be
surprised when we are
consumed by senselessness:

Continue reading →

Budweiser : Reminding you how much your weather sucks

Softened as I am by the idyllic weather in the south of France, it was a rude shock for me to experience what the Irish preposterously call ‘summer’.

During a visit to Dublin this June, there wasn’t a single day I could go outside without a sweater or jacket and my partner’s careful pedicure never saw daylight because sandals or open-toed shoes would have meant cold, cold misery. One especially frightful day, the high temperature was a mere 11°C (52°F). And let us not speak of the seemingly constant drizzle.

But beyond this personal suffering, the truly dispiriting part was the naïveté of the locals who appear to have no idea what a proper summer day should feel like. Case in point is what may be the saddest advertising campaign in business history: the American beer giant Budweiser is trying to give away free pints on ‘hot’ summer days. Under the rules of Budweiser’s Ice Cold Index promotion, people are entitled to a free pint of beer any day the temperature goes above 20 °C (68 °F). (People also get discount coupons between 16 °C and 19 °C.)  Think about that for a moment: the weather in Ireland is so gaspingly awful, Budweiser has set the threshold for a ‘hot’ summer’s day at a meagre 20 °C! In Marseille, a 20° C day in summer would be considered a frigid weather catastrophe!

Continue reading →