by JULIA JESSEN

julia-jessen@uiowa.edu

The collaborators of *Ink Lit Mag* wants to separate their literary magazine from the pack of others in the genre found in Iowa City and on the University of Iowa campus.

In their reading at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., the students plan to expose their voices to the ears of the writing community as they read from the first issue.

“We want to be a teaching magazine,” said freshman Michael Collier, a co-editor-in-chief of *Ink Lit Mag*. “The members of Ink and the people who submit their writing to *Ink* sort of want it for the experience of submitting to a literary review and being part of the whole ordeal.”

Danny Khalastchi, the assistant director of the UI’s new undergraduate certificate in writing, said he first brought up the idea of a literary magazine to members of the Iowa Writers Living Learning Community at the beginning of the fall 2011 semester and discovered a student interest.

Funding for *Ink Lit Mag* came from a donation by the Magid family. The gift also created the Frank N. Magid Undergraduate Writing Center Fund in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Members of the group chose to make the magazine open only to freshmen and alumni of the Iowa Writers Living Learning Community.

The magazine will also include work and advice from an established writer in each issue. UI alumnus and poet Marvin Bell contributed a poem and did an interview for the first edition.

The editors of *Ink* said that this interaction with people at the beginning of their writing career sets the magazine apart from other literary magazines on campus.

“I think that our magazine is really helpful to people of all writing abilities and all writing backgrounds, and that’s what makes our magazine truly special,” said freshman co-editor-in-chief, Rachel Gosch.

The editors looked for pieces that had interesting messages or themes that might not have been explored in other literary magazines as they put together the first issue of *Ink Lit Mag*.

Some of the topics include stories of soldiers, pieces about time travel, and essays about new college experiences.

“I just think it’s a unique blend,” Gosch said. “We were looking for material that has something new to say.”

The magazine was started from the ground up without a blueprint for the production of a literary magazine. The widespread student participation created some challenges for the young writers.

“The energy was palpable — they tuned what could have been an adversity into something that made them all better writers and readers,” Khalastchi said. “They turned that challenge into something that made Ink what it is today.”

Creative director and co-editor-in-chief Sevy Perez said that there are numerous reasons to read *Ink Lit Mag*.

“If you enjoy reading, pick up *Ink*. If you like design, pick up *Ink*. If you like to smile or laugh, pick up *Ink*. If you want to be pleasantly surprised, pick up *Ink*,” he said. “You never know what you’re missing out on unless you pick up a copy of *Ink*. We’ve got a lot to share with the world.”

Click here to view an exclusive photo slideshow.

By Jenny Earl

Covered in blood with dark black circles around their eyes, zombies took over Iowa City Thursday.

John Hall, who founded the Red Shamrock Foundation in 2011, helped organize the 1st Annual Iowa City Charity Zombie Ball and Undead Masquerade to raise awareness for post-cancer patient needs, as well as to raise funds to support a survivorship clinic at the University of Iowa.

In March of 2009, Hall’s son Finn was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma. Finn struggled throughout his cancer treatment at the UI Hospitals and Clinics, which included rounds of chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation, two stem cell transplants, and immunotherapy. Since July 2010, though, Finn has been in remission.

Finn, and other survivors were the inspiration for the Red Shamrock Foundation.

According to the National Cancer Institute, the number of cancer survivors increased by about 20 percent from 2001 to 2007, the latest year for which data is available. In 2007, there were 11.7 million cancer survivors, a number that has quadrupled since the early 1970s.

Since the increase, hospitals around the United States are starting survivorship clinics to address the specific needs of post-cancer patients.

Hall said although the UI hospital cares for post-cancer patients, they have yet to create a survivorship clinic.
“I’ve spoken with a couple people and there’s ideas to create a survivorship clinic, but it’s nothing solid,” said Hall. “It’s just ideas right now.”

Willis Buckles, a student and soldier, came to the Ball with a gray face and a few bullet wounds — and an eager smile.

“I completely agree with cancer research and helping care with cancer and families that survive through it,” Buckles said.

Hall said the Zombie Ball is the first fund-raising event of many that the Shamrock Foundation hopes to have in the coming years to raise awareness for those, like his son, who have made it past a cancer diagnosis.

UI Dance Marathon partnered with the Red Shamrock Foundation for the event, grabbing a pint of blood and stage makeup, Dance Marathon members helped create zombies and contributed door prizes.

“We are such a young organization, we jumped at the chance to work with Dance Marathon, as they are a very strong and well known organization in the area,” said Hall. “I hope our partnership continues.”

Hall and his family spoke at UI Dance Marathon’s big event last year. The Hall family has been involved in Dance Marathon since their son’s diagnosis and said they’re still a part of it.

“The unique relationship these two philanthropic organizations have — with the Red Shamrock’s founder being a father of a Dance Marathon kiddo treated in the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital — is something really special and to be noted,”

said Michael Kinney, Dance Marathon executive director of PR/marketing director.

Colleen Eck, board of directors for the Red Shamrock Foundation and organizer of the event said it was spur of the moment, but it turned out to be great.

“When John said he wanted to create a foundation I said, ‘Count me in, I would love to be a part of this too,’ ” Eck said.

Daily Iowan: Where did you get the inspiration for this book, or the characters in the book?
Chuck Palahniuk: The very first incident — and it all came really tightly together — was when I was in New York doing promotions for the movie Choke, which is my fourth book. I was touring together with Sam Rockwell for a long period of time, and he was talking about making a movie about Jesse James with Brad Pitt. And he stopped speaking, and he became very self conscious. He said, “Listen to me, just listen to me go on. I just say ‘Blah, blah, blah, Brad Pitt. Blah, blah, blah, Brad Pitt.’ It sounds like I have some weird form of name-dropping Tourette’s Syndrome.” And that’s just such a really genuine, insightful moment, when I can say that even celebrities are afraid of being accused of name dropping.

But then it’s a bit more insidious, because it led them to self-censoring anything they said about their own lives, because most of their peers are also celebrities. They didn’t want to take about their lives for fear of being accused of name dropping. And so, I thought that was kind of heartbreaking.

That same weekend I was in a car with some publishing executives, and they were talking about Lillian Hellman. A lot of them had been asked as much younger people to do research into very specific aspects of travel in Europe. And, it was only when Hellman’s autobiography was published that they realized that they had been basically assigned to do the research that she used to write about her own life. And they had been roped into what now looked like a big fictionalized lie. They couldn’t really conflict it, because they didn’t want to be fired. They told me they were sort of unwilling accomplices in this big lie. And so they still are very resentful of that fact. And they also talked about a large number of celebrity biographies that are sitting in publishing houses, just waiting for certain living celebrities to die. In the same way that Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood sat for years, waiting for the execution of the two murderers. They just sit there and sit there, but as soon as their subject dies, someone just slaps another two page chapter on the book, and it’s in bookstores within a week of the death. It’s like little hyenas waiting for their subject to die. It’s so dismal, but appealing about that — books are just waiting for their subjects to die. The story is waiting to take over from the truth.

The fourth element — I’ll leave it at four — was when I was in Sundance with the people that made Choke, and they were getting a distributor for the movie. I couldn’t help but notice these incredible, beautifully-groomed movie stars, and they would appear in public for a promotion. They were completely unencumbered — they didn’t have a coat or a purse of anything. They would seemingly just wander freely through Park City, Utah, being photographed like animals wandering through the landscape. But walking about 10 or 12 steps behind them, there would be a kind of plain, overweight woman, who would be just completely burdened with all of the makeup cases, and the purses, and coats, and tote bags — everything that went into maintaining the beauty of this beautiful actor or actress. They were sort of pack-mules … They weren’t in the photographs, but whenever they were needed they would rush over and they would tuck in a stray hair or help apply a little more makeup. They’d check every detail. So I was sort of fascinated with these people, whose job it was to make this kind of perfection and beauty. That’s where I got the idea for Hazie, the protagonist in the book.

DI: Can you talk a bit about the references in the book? What went into the research for this book?
CP: A lot of the research didn’t go into the actual content of the book, it went into the structure of the book. And I’m always looking for nonfiction structure that I can use to tell made-up, really outlandish stories. So old gossip columns in the 1930s and 40s, like Walter Winchell’s column, Ed Hooper, things that just sort of evolved into tape-sets. I really needed to know how those worked, and I needed to know the conventions of them, so that I could replicate them in the basic structure of the book itself. So I was researching a lot of spoken language for all of the cinematic structure, as well as the convention of all of those syndicated gossip columns, so then I could replicate that structure, and use it to tell this fictional story.

It’s funny how all the research into the structure never really gets acknowledged, but the content was researching the story of female stars of that period — how they rose from obscurity, how they were typically taken and groomed by someone, how they went through a series of marriages — with each marriage serving a different specific purpose in a different phase of their life or career. But at the end of their lives, they would have this companion, this grooming person, who would basically care for them until they died. They would die in usually kind of dismal circumstances. Researching the lives of all these people like Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Ava Gardner — so I could create a kind of composite of all of them, that would resonate with the idea of all of them. Right now you can only imagine how many Liz Taylor biographies are sitting in publishers’ shelves, waiting for Liz Taylor to die. The numbers are probably staggering. Imagine all those different versions of you waiting to take over the moment that you die.

DI: What effect do you hope that the structure of the book, and the references within the book have on people?
CP: I never really try for a specific effect. If anything I just hope that people see aspects of our time that we kind of think of as just our time. The way that identities are imposed on people through the media, and that the nature of gossip, what we now think of as blogs — we think of as Brangelina and Bennifer — we tend to think of these phenomena as being really modern and of our time, but actually these things are ancient. My goal is to get people to recognize that all of these things are repetitions of historical patterns. They’re different patterns, and it’s upsetting if we see ourselves as part of that. It’s sort of a continuing, unending pattern of human behavior.

DI: Why did you decide to write the story in first person, from the perspective of Hazie Coogan?
CP: Well, number one, these sort of grooming-support people that I saw at Park City, Utah at Sundance — I found them so incredibly compelling. They’re like puppet masters. They seem to be servants, but they’re actually really kind of the masters of everything. It’s from the aspect of the philosopher Heidegger, who I’ve always found appealing. It’s the nature of power relationships — whether the king is really in power, or whether the people who provide food for the king are in power. There really is no clear hierarchy. But in a way each one holds power in their own way. It’s also *Sunset Boulevard*, the character we don’t see a lot of is Max, the butler. We see a lot of Nancy Olson, we see a lot of Norma Desmond, but we don’t delve into Max’s character. I’ve always wanted to see that story told from the perspective of the servant, of Max, who orchestrated so much of that. In a way Max is a survivor, the only one who could tell that story, because everyone else was destroyed by it.

DI: Going back to the nature of these power relationships and the balance of power, is that why you incorporated stage directions and told the story as if the speaker were directing it?
CP: Exactly. You know, you’ve got to have some form of that visually establishing of things, and physical direction of the perspective. For that purpose, it would be kind of organic of the story itself. It seems perfect, because in a way Hazie is the director, she is the one calling the shots.

DI8: In the book, there are a few references to art imitating life, or life imitating art. Do you consider Tell-All to be one of those?
CP: That’s a tough one, because in a way Tell-All is a hybrid, because it does draw from so many real things. But just the fact that they are real things — and combine so many real things — and I collect them, sort of makes them of the world. But I would say that it’s a hybrid, it is kind of a distillation of two things.

DI: You actually mention Iowa City in the book, as one of the places that Kathie Kenton is given a key to. Is there any specific reason behind that?
CP: Name-dropping! See how you read? We all do that. We read looking for a connection to our own lives. Do you remember the Huey Lewis and the News song, “The Heart of Rock and Roll” is still beating? It was this song from the ‘80s, and in the end there’s a fade out with this long series of shout-outs. Huey Lewis doing a shout-out “To Portland, Oregon,” “To Spokane, Washington,” “Cincinnati, Ohio!” It must be two or three minutes of continuous shout-outs, and people love that song. Chances were really good that your city or your town was mentioned in the song. And the people of Portland — where I lived at the time, they really love the fact the Huey Lewis was saying their city. So, that’s why Iowa City is in there. The more stuff I can cram in there, the more likely there would be something that resonates with everybody. It’s kind of a sweet thought.

DI: What commentary are you trying to make about either old-Hollywood, or the celebrity-worship culture that continues today?
CP: In a way, it kind of goes back to Heidegger. I’m always fascinated by ways in which people manipulate power — how they try to acquire power. One way is by name-dropping, like creating new associations that will sort of ignite them in someone else’s mind with some other thing that has a great deal of power. And so, in a way, the whole book is a kind of exploration of how power is gained from other people: how people manipulate each other, people manipulate each other in order to gain power. There’s one particular instance where the politicians are complimenting and providing awards to Katherine Kenton — but they’re only doing it to stand in the spotlight for a long period of time themselves. They’re only doing it because it makes them look really gracious, and part of the Katherine Kenton mystique is sort of hooking their wagon to her star. The book is about how everyone uses each other to try to increase their own power.

girl_talk.mp3

Of course, in the whole hip-hop world, it was something I was aware of, but also, with acts like John Oswald, Negative Land, or Kid 606, these are all acts I found out about in high school. I thought, oh wow there is this whole world where people are just manipulating pop music and pop culture and make something new and weird out of it. That was an idea that was always fascinating to me. So in 2000, when I got a computer, my first laptop in college, I’d seen a lot of people perform on laptops, so when I got my hands on a laptop, immediately I knew I wanted to play on it. I thought it’d be interesting to start a project based entirely on sampling other people’s songs. Kind of like Negative Land, except dealing with pop music rather than using rather than old records or things like that.

Would you talk a little bit about your process of creating these mashups? How do you get from having nothing there and a song with over 100 samples?
It’s a slow trial and error process for me. It’s something that never really begins or ends. It began like 10 years ago, and it won’t end until I stop. When I prepare for a live show, I have a template of material in front of me, and with the show, I trigger all the samples by hand and it’s all a loop-based software. But when I’m sitting around that week and preparing for the show, I might find little bits and pieces I want to use — ‘oh this combination of these vocals over this music over these beats, that sounds interesting, I wonder if I can work that into the show.’ So with the live template, I’ll make substitutions. I’ll take out something I’ve been playing a lot, or something I’m bored with, or something I don’t necessarily like that much, and try to put in something new. And based on audience response and how I feel about it, it will influence what I do with that clip.

So the live show is a big, living collage where each show I take something out or add something new, and it’s always growing. I’ll do that for two years, slowly working in new material into shows, saving the ideas, all of that, until I sit down to do an album. So by the time I sit down to do an album, it’s almost like I’ve had two years of practicing and I have all these ideas laid out and I know these three songs go really well together and they transition well into these five songs together. So by the time I sit down to do an album, it’s like I have 75 percent of the puzzle pieces and a really good idea of where it’s going to begin and end and it’s just a matter of assembling it, the small holes here and there.

That’s interesting because it sounds like almost a collaborative effort between the audience and yourself as a performer.
It’s funny, because the shows are definitely highly influential. And also, sometimes with the album, it’s a balance of having stuff that I know goes over well and having stuff that’s a big more experimental. Sometimes I’ll come up with something that I love or I’ll play it for my friends and they will all really like it. But, it just maybe doesn’t fit the context of the show that well but maybe it will fit the context of the album a little better. It’s definitely some give and take, and I feel like on the album I have more room to explore things that I think are musically interesting that aren’t necessarily just bangers that go over well during a live show. I feel more inclined to go more in-your-face or over-the-top during the show because people are partying and celebrating so you don’t really want down moments. Whereas on an album I don’t really feel weird about playing some one hit wonder from the early ‘70s that very few people probably actually know about.

When you’re making the album, do you have a bigger motive or argument than just making really fun and catchy pop music?
Yeah. I definitely think there’s some conceptual ideas at play. I don’t want to push any politics on people, but I think with any style of music that happens. You can listen to My Bloody Valentine and just hear nice pop songs, or you can listen to My Bloody Valentine and explore the textures and get to the more experimental elements. I feel like it’s like that with a lot of artists.

For me, I am kind of trying to push a little bit of an idea that all pop music should be valued, in some way. I try to get into things. I try to like music. When I find music I don’t like, I at least try to appreciate it. I believe all music has different intentions, and I think sometimes people forget that. You can’t evaluate Radiohead on the same level that you evaluate Kelly Clarkson on the same level that you evaluate Young Jeezy. But it doesn’t mean that they’re all not excellent at what they’re doing. Everyone has their own intention. Radiohead wants to be perceived as a brainy, artsy band, and they are. And Young Jeezy wants to be perceived as a popstar rapper who’s hard, and he is. They’re excelling at what they’re trying to do. So with my music I’m trying to break down all those barriers and throw them all together to almost challenge people in a way. To say, all of these things can fit together in the same world and guess what, it’s not embarrassing, it’s not weird, it’s not guilty pleasures, it’s just music.

I think that’s how I view music, and I think it’s implied. I meet people who hate all the source material, but like the music and that’s awesome for me. This is how I feel, but I’m not expecting anyone to be brainwashed into thinking about music in the exact same way that I do, but at the same time, it’s implied in what I’m doing. With any musician, they’re influences is implied deep down in the work.

And the whole idea of originality is why I love making these records where some people really just love them as original pieces of music, and for some people are on the fence — is this original, is this not, who owns this. I think that whole idea brings up a debate and that’s interesting to me. I don’t think there is an absolute answer. If you hate what I’m doing and think that I’m stealing from people, that’s fine, that’s your opinion, but at least I’m trying to push something out there that’s conceptually challenging to people.

Most of my favorite artists are bands that have challenged various aspects of music. People that make interesting pop music, but at the same time, causes debates and breaks down things in music, introduced different ideas in music, make people think about music in a totally different way than they thought before. So that’s definitely what I go for with music. I want to make something that’s a fun, party record but I also want to make something that’s challenging conceptually to people.

Well, I definitely think that’s the case. I’ve heard you cite ‘fair use’ as a reason you haven’t been challenged legally with music, but do you think that a reason artists haven’t come after you is because maybe they feel the same way as you? All music needs to be appreciated?
Yeah, I mean it’s definitely a potential thing. In an ideal world, that would be the case. People hear my records and they believe it’s transformative and they believe the music that I’m making is not negatively impacting their sales or their product or their whatever.

If you take a step back, you see that all music has influence. You can take any band and say, ‘oh, they have they guitar tone of the MC5 or the energy of Nirvana or a rhythm section that’s like Yes!,’ or whatever, you know what I mean? I think pull from everywhere. I don’t think there’s any real difference between playing a guitar, which is an instrument, to make your own instrument by playing someone else’s, manipulating the background and trying to make something new out of it. I think it’s very similar to taking a physical recording and manipulating it and changing it around to make something new out of it.

The world has changed heavily in the past 5-10 years, especially with this Youtube culture. I think a lot of musicians and artists can look out there and constantly see material that’s based on pre-existing media. Whether it’s home made videos on Youtube or remixes or taking CNN clips and autotuning them to make a joke out of them, there’s so much stuff on Youtube that’s based on taking something that exists already, and manipulating it and making something brilliant out of it. I think to a lot of people, that idea to take a pre-existing media being able to be manipulated to make something new is not foreign. We’re surrounded by it. Which is different that 10-15 years ago before the internet was as crazy as it is now. I think the idea of manipulating samples and remixing other people’s music was kind of a radical idea, and I don’t think that it’s necessarily like that anymore.

It seems like you’re taking this idea of manipulating music and applying it to the world, more than just the music world. Would you say that’s true?
Yeah, I think it relates to everything — heavily in sciences. But I’m not anti-copyright. I don’t think that people should be able to take something that someone else made, resell it and repackage it, and put their own name on it. But at the same time, I think in sciences, art, music, anything, there is definitely a stronghold where certain aspects of copyright has gotten out of control. I think it took awhile for it to become apparent, but I think in this internet culture we’re so used to sharing and borrowing and ideas flowing so quickly and emails and Youtubes and responses and people just collaborating on that level, I think it’s becoming apparent that certain aspects of copyright are holding things back.

I definitely think science is like that. People hold copyright on certain things and that makes it difficult for other people to build on this idea. Whereas if there was more of a fair use idea and if people could manipulate people’s ideas to try and make something new out of it, then I think things would move a lot quicker. But science is a business. People do do it for fun and because they’re interested, but it’s a business just like music is a business and just like all of that.

And in my mind, it’s even more so the business of music. A lot of people just do music for fun, that’s how I got started, but many people don’t just do science for fun. Many people do science because there is a paycheck involved. So when you’re working at this company as an engineer and you might have this idea or this angle on a certain idea but there’s copyright on it so you’ll have to work you way around it, there’s no point exploring it any further because there’s going to be a hierarchy of people above you saying that is forbidden, or that idea is already held down so we can’t move forward on that, and that’s it.

So I think it impacts all aspects of our lives. Anything that copyright has a part in.

Is that one of the reasons you went the route you did for releasing your Feed the Animals? The ‘pay whatever you want’ model?
In my mind, it was the most efficient way to do it, to be honest. It was the sort of thing where I feel that we should be able to sell these CDs the way that anyone sells their CDs. I don’t see anything wrong with selling CDs. I love going to Best Buy and buying CDs. I love that experience. I love looking through used CDs. That whole culture. I love it.

So when I put together the record I would take a step back and look at it and ask, ‘do I truly believe this is transformative? Do I truly believe I’m not negatively impacting anyone’s sales? This isn’t hurting anyone?’ And if the answer is yes, then I feel comfortable with it and I want to press it on CD and sell it the way everyone sells their CDs. I put work into this the same way that any musician puts work into it. But I think the pay what you want model was just something that, I am attached to the internet, just like most people. And when an album comes out, it jumps on the internet, and the majority of the people who are going to listen to that album get it through the internet and it’s available for free on file sharing networks and this and that. Which is cool, because that’s part of the reason I’ve had the success that I’ve had and the reason many of my musician friends have had the level of success they’ve had. Music being distrubuted, people hearing it, getting covered everywhere, you know it’s reason the shows are the size that they are, and it’s great. So, I wanted to embrace that rather than ignore it. So I just thought that I’ve always been pretty upfront about things with the people I push my music on, so I just wanted to say to the fans who buy the music or download the music, ‘we know you can get this for free and go ahead if you want to, but also, we’re selling it, so if you want to participate in that experience you go ahead and do that.’ It’s an upfront way to deal with it, as opposed to pressing a CD and turning my head and pretending that downloading things doesn’t exist. That’s why we did it.

Is there a new album coming soon?
Yeah. For the last album, I took three weeks off to start developing it and getting it going. So this year, starting in June, I’m taking three months off of shows, which I haven’t really done in the past few years, to start working on the next album. I have some ideas of where it’s going to go, and it’s impossible to predict how fast my work pace will be, you know. But, it could be done at the end of summer, I highly doubt that, but I’m going to take these three months to get the ball rolling. I’m guessing by the end of the year or early next year would be the goal. I have a lot of ideas and material and most of the show material is the new material.

Yeah, so I saw you last year in Des Moines, so will this show be different?
It’s always different. It’s difficult though, because every night could be a completely new show, or at least a year later could be a new show. It’s always tough to know who came out to what show, or how familiar the audience is, and there’s always a large chunk of the audience who wants to hear album material or remixes of album material. So I’m always trying to strike a balance between playing some stuff I played last time with a new take on it, or playing some stuff from the album, but yeah there’s a bulk of new material. I try to put that pressure on myself to mix things up because I’ll meet people who will say that it’s their sixth show this year, so I’ll think, wow I have to keep this moving and keep those people entertained.

Last question — thoughts on Iowa City?
I always remember Iowa City because in 2008, when I was on tour with Dan Deacon, we passed through on one of the final nights of the tour. We were all celebrating, and we went to someone’s apartment that night with a bunch of people we met and had a really rowdy day in general. The tour was winding down. So that’s always the picture I have of Iowa City — a house party we went to that completely sealed the deal on that tour, wrapped it up perfectly. That’s always what flashes through my mind.

Local rock band Birth Rites will play their last show before a semester-long hiatus tonight with Coyote Slingshot and Grand Tetons at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington. The show begins at 9 p.m. and admission is $3.

Birth Rites formed in Iowa City in 2007.

They got their start playing house and basement shows, drummer Gregory Markus said, but they played shows that were atypical of the type.

Keggers and huge house parties were where Birth Rites got its start, Markus said, not more intimate basement gigs. The UI junior described some of Birth Rites’ first audiences as “real bro-ey.”

“We’d play for people that didn’t want to hear us,” he said. Still, “we prefer playing in basements more than we prefer playing on stage.”

The band is going on hiatus because Markus will be studying abroad in Prague, Czech Republic, during the spring 2010 semester.

“I fell in love with it,” Markus said of Prague, after he took a class about the city, adding that the UI’s Czech department “helped propel [his] interest in the country.”

Markus said that his study plans are just one of many changes that Birth Rites has faced recently. Members Jack Hennessy and Jarrett Hothan moved back to Illinois after finishing their studies at the UI, so the band does not get together or play shows as often as they used to.

“This whole semester has been weird for us,” Markus said, adding that it has been refreshing for the band. “When you wait a month to play a show you’re show much more excited.”

The members of Birth Rites view the show not as a parting, but as a celebration of their time together and with other artists in Iowa City.

“Our friend and roommate for the past three years is playing one of his first solo acoustic shows,” Hennessy, Birth Rites’ singer and guitarist, said. He also said that Markus will play some of his own acoustic songs at the concert.

“We want to thank all of the people who have supported us,” Hennessy said.

The band plans to record an EP – a follow-up to their first album, *All Success Stories* – this winter before Markus heads to Europe.

Hennessy also said that Birth Rites may play the 2010 Mission Creek Festival with a different drummer, then will play a small tour over the summer when Markus returns.

“Strung Up From the Sky”

According to the restaurant Kuma’s Corner in Chicago, the “Pelican Burger” consists of a 10-ounce Kobe beef patty, with pan-seared scallops and lardons, in a garlic white wine sauce on top of a parmesan crisp, and it is served with white wine-garlic aioli.’

Oh, and the band recently came out with a new album, *What We All Come to Need*, which 32-year-old Pelican drummer Jerry Herweg said critics are calling the best in the group’s career.

Pelican will perform its instrumental-rock songs at the Picador, 330 E. Washington St., today alongside Black Cobra and Struck By Lightning. The late show will start at 10 p.m., and admission is $10 in advance.

The band’s latest album takes the energy of the 2007 release, *City of Echoes*, and combines it with the longer, winding progressive-rock influences of earlier albums to make for an epic listening experience.

“I don’t know if it was necessarily a conscious thing, like, ‘Oh, we need to make our songs longer,’ but I think it was the next step in writing,” Herweg said. “We’re always up for trying new things and seeing how they go over.”

Trying new things is a motto the band follows closely. One of the biggest surprises on the mostly instrumental album is the last track “Final Breath,” which features a vocal performance by Allen Epley of the Life and Times.

“We didn’t know what to expect because we put it in his hands, but we were stoked on the outcome,” Herweg said.

Herweg said that the members of Pelican never planned on being a strictly instrumental band when they started out playing in Chicago.

“We’ve always wanted to try to have a song with vocals,” he said. “We don’t have anything against singers, we just never found one.”

The drummer said he has played at the Picador about five or six times now, both with Pelican and his other band, Tusk. He said he doesn’t think anyone actually came to his first show at the Picador, which was then called Gabe’s.

“I’m pretty sure my singer Jodi spiked one of the floor wedges, and we ended up having to pay money to Gabe’s to pay for the gear he broke, rather than get any gas money for the show,” Herweg said.

Luckily, he said, his other experiences at the Picador with Pelican have been successful.

“Ever since [that first show], it has been smooth sailing.”

— by Eric Andersen

By Greta Hagen-Richardson
greta-hagen-richardson@uiowa.edu

Film archives keep locked behind their doors images and stories that cannot be preserved and maintained forever, even with the abundance of modern digital media.

Among these dying reels of film, New York City artist Bill Morrison discovered many of the images that later he featured in his films.

At 7 p.m. today, he will discuss and screen his work in 101 Becker Communication Studies Building as part of the Fall 2009 Proseminar in Cinema and Culture, Lost and Found: Archival Film. Admission is free.

Morrison is the savior of many old types of films. In the 1950s, nitrate film, composed of an unstable and inflammable chemical combination, became illegal and was replaced by other forms of 35-mm film. Many of the relic nitrate prints have been placed in facilities that are temperature-controlled and monitored. As time goes on, these films are subject to erosion, and they eventually decompose. One of his most well-known pieces, *Decasia*, is composed of snippets of black-and-white silent-era films in various stages of decay.

“[These films] were considered dead or sleeping soundly and, in a way, I woke them up to be shown to a new audience,” he said. “It is a type of regeneration and rebirth after a deep hush.”

Morrison began his career as a painter, originally in Chicago. After moving to New York City and working with animator Robert Breer, he moved his focus onto the moving image.

“Painting is something that you work on for a long time meditatively and slowly. And then it is something someone might spend a minute looking at unless it is considered important,” he said. “In film, you can control the audience environment. Breer talked about how film is like 24 paintings a second.”

With his work *The Film of Her*, Morrison constructed film as a collection of images melding into one another. Each of the separate images goes through a pattern of apparition, existence, and eventual dissolve on screen. This visual process seems to involve the idea that film is, in fact, alive.

Paula Amad, an associate professor of cinema and the instructor for the Proseminar who brought Morrison to the UI, believes Morrison expands our vision of living film with degrading film.

“The film is in the process of dying as he reassembles it and that says something about the organic, material dimensions of film itself,” she said. “It is a living entity. This explores and opens the broader aesthetic, poetic, and philosophical parameters of film.”

Something else that sets Morrison apart from his contemporaries is his ability to merge various artistic media. Many of his films are presented as multifaceted productions complete with live musicians. Amad said he is renowned for working with important composers.

“His films are made to be screened in a live context,” she said. “During the Proseminar, we will see them in a different context, but they still apply to theater, film, visual art, poetry and music. They have broad appeal.”

Among the films on tonight’s roster is Morrison’s personal favorite, “Light is Calling.” The original one-minute, 47-second archival footage was a gift. He extended the images four times in length, edited them, and set them to a score by Michael Gordon.

“It is absolutely gorgeous that the film had decayed in that way. I am still amazed by it,” Morrison said. “When a film has decayed that much, you can’t really unroll it anymore. [That project was] an effortless and graceful convergence.”

By Alexis Dorr
alexis-dorr@uiowa.edu

Imagine a sea of glistening masks, adorning the faces of mysterious dancers, all swaying to music provided by a masked DJ.

On the night before Halloween, this cinematic scene will invade the Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington, to raise funds for the historic Iowa City venue. Proceeds from the event will help fund Englert programs such as its Community Spotlight Series, Children’s Series, and more.

The Masquerade Ball fundraiser will begin at 8 p.m. Friday. A costume contest, live performances, and an auction featuring handmade jewelry from Hands Jewelers, 109 E. Washington, and vacations to locales across the United States will also contribute to the night’s festivities. Costumes are not mandatory for the Masquerade Ball, but they are highly recommended. Admission is $50.

The festive evening will commence with a dance party — participants are invited to get down onstage using all different types of dancing, from grinding to ballroom to theatrical pieces from guest performers. Organizers will also play selected pieces from The Phantom of the Opera to add to the masquerade theme.

“By having the party onstage, everything will look and feel like it’s part of a show,” said Nancy Mayfield, the Englert’s developmental director and volunteer coordinator. “Lighting, silver masks, strings of lights draped — it’s going to be very much an enchanting setting.”

The idea for the Masquerade Ball came from donors and Englert staff. The event took more than eight months to organize, but according to Mayfield, the majority of the work, including hanging decorations, securing performers, and mixing music, has occurred during the last two months.

Despite the extensive preparations, certain details of the show, like its participants, are still masked. Some Englert staff members have been kept in the dark as to the final product.

“It’s a surprise for us — we don’t get to see the decorations until the night of,” said Nicole Villanueva, the customer-service representative at the Englert box office.

Though the final result still lies in secret, Mayfield said she’s confident in the success of the evening.

“It will be an elegant evening for dancing and elegant wine,” she said.

By Hanna Rosman

Jewelry is meant to be more than merely an accessory; it is artwork. Throughout the decades, the concept and creation of jewelry has changed from being one-of-a-kind art to highly commercialized and mass-produced pieces.

M.C Ginsberg, 110 E. Washington St., seeks to remember the earlier concepts of jewelry as art by exhibiting vintage jewelry from the Art Decorative and Retrospective periods during regular business hours through Nov. 30.

“I am intrigued by the period,” said Mark Ginsberg, the president of M.C. Ginsberg. “The industrial modern period and post-World War I seemed to be not only a great period for fashion, for cars, but for jewelry,”

The Art Decorative period boasted jewelry that is angular and sleek in design, aimed for an elite crowd. The color palette used for the design included white metals such as platinum. Pieces on display at Ginsberg’s store, including a heart structured with metal and encrusted with blood-red jewels, demonstrate the period’s trend of geometrical symmetry.

A majority of people in that era could not afford such jewelry because it was custom-made. Those wealthy enough visited jewelry stores such as Tiffany’s or Harry Winston and sat face-to-face with designers to make something specific, Ginsberg said. The lustrous and sophisticated themes matched the tastes of the upper-class people who purchased the jewelry.

The Retrospective period in jewelry reflected the people by being bold and confident. The jewelry ultimately mirrored the rebirth of society to celebrate the ending of the repercussions of World War I, such as rationing and the American public’s nerves being strained and exhausted from violent conflict. The pieces used flowing design and bold sizes to show unrestraint and the desire to scream and be noticed, much like society.

The transition between the two periods was blunt, rather than being lost in shades of gray, Ginsberg said.

“[Art Deco] ended with a dot, dot, dot and [the Retrospective period] picked up with an exclamation point,” Ginsberg said.

The draw one has to a piece of jewelry is rooted in an emotional connection. An initial appeal may be a piece’s aesthetics or gleam, but it leads to a desire that it sparks within a viewer. In custom-made pieces, it is through the minute details made from a burnishing tool or the type of polish that magnetizes this attraction, Ginsberg said.

“There is something intimate, something sexy and sensual about” the subtleties of a piece, he said.

In mass-produced, commercialized pieces, these subtleties in detail can be missed. If a piece of jewelry is one-of-a-kind and handcrafted, it is a piece of fine art, said Ann Au, the owner of 2AU in West Des Moines.

“There is something dramatic and theatrical about a piece of art,” Ginsberg said. “If you are going to acquire them, acquire them for the right reason. If it doesn’t have an emotional connection, then it is all worthless.”

Otis Redding: The Best See & Hear
****1/2 out of *****

Otis Redding is a posthumous one-hit wonder, but his promise of soul remains forever imprinted in the genre’s music history. Otis Redding: The Best See & Hear is a CD/DVD set that celebrates the short four-year career the singer enjoyed before a tragic plane crash cut future access to Redding’s rich well of musical potential.

Inducted into the Rock ‘n‘ Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, he is honored for his commanding vocals and downright soul that often brought even himself to his knees. The master of soul is another instance of an artist ahead of his time. Despite his aptitude for singing and songwriting, Redding never saw a single of his recordings ascend higher than No. 21 on the pop top-40 Billboard charts.

Just three days before his death, on Dec. 10, 1967, Redding recorded “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” which proved to be his breakthrough hit and spent four weeks at No. 1 in early 1968. Watching the DVD of his live performances, it is both heartbreaking and moving to watch this soul man stir his audience into an awe-inspired stupor.

Although Redding was not a flashy performer with the moves of Michael Jackson to dazzle his fans, his conviction in his lyrics is nevertheless a spellbinding source of entertainment.
The Best See & Hear DVD is a perfect accompaniment to a CD full of classic tunes including, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” “Try A Little Tenderness,” and “Respect,” a song later transformed into Aretha Franklin’s soul anthem. The DVD puts a face to the familiar soul standards with a flavorful dose of live musical theatrics.

The first section of the DVD exhibits selections from the Stax/Volt Tour of 1967, which not only features Redding but also Booker T. & the MGs and the soul act Sam & Dave. The second section showcases Redding’s inspired performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 shortly preceding his untimely death.

Listening to and watching this CD/DVD set makes one wonder the stardom Redding could have reached. Still, the musical gifts Redding left behind indicate that this man was a force of love and vocal power that will continue to resonate for generations to come.

— by Caroline Berg