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collage for # 6 by s b smith

ONE MORE GRAFFITO

Pity anyone
Who has to shit in nasty
Filthy Cleveland cockroach dead air
Evil shadow bars yellow dog cell
Meaty graffiti Uncle Sam junkie
Punk funk old mushroom clouded
Soupbone cough coffee
Cold monkey ass sand-
Which is the way it is
City jail where
Taking my eyes off
The contemptible
Unkept floor
I leave the future
Occupant of my cell
One more graffito
May your dirty dreams
Keep you sane

- Daniel Thompson


ArtCrimes Publishing History 1986-2006

513 ArtCrimes Contributors

Reading any issue of ArtCrimes has been an adventure. When you plunge into the currents of the aptly named Duck and Cover, best take your fine-art discernment out of your wallet and keep it clenched firmly in your teeth. It's almost like Deliverance. Unkempt poets, painters and less-definable types snipe at unwary readers from pinnacles and deep canyons of quality and subject matter. But in fact, almost all have been visible in the city's galleries and performance venues or on the printed page for a decade or more. Included are notable visual artists like Melissa Craig (also a former ArtCrimes editor), and revered CSU prof Ken Nevadomi, George Kocar and Dexter Davis (even Utter finds a small place). American Splendor artist Gary Dumm contributes a two-page spread, Harvey Pekar himself actually draws a stick-figure rendition of a downtown incident, and many of the area's best poets claim a page or two. Maj Ragain, Daniel Gray-Kontar, Chris Franke, Michael Salinger, Amy Sparks, Ben Gulyas, John Byrum, John Stickney, Ray McNiece, Jim Lang, Peter Leon and many others add extraordinary works, often sandwiched between vapid, puerile — crap.

But so what? Truly wonderful talents mainly known to Ohio audiences like Marvin Smith, Terry Durst and Marsha Sweet are represented, as are veterans of the larger art world — painter and former Cleveland Institute of Art instructor Catherine Redmond, for instance, writing a poem from her New York digs. They share space with local legends like Robert Richie, cartooning here under the name of Dick Head. The book opens with one of Scott Radke's haunted hybrid soft sculptures, part goblin/part sea serpent, sporting a bird's nest and an egg in its midriff, and continues with all sorts of hybrid surprises, including a 1990 poem/letter written to Ben Gulyas by Charles Bukowski. Painter/sculptor/chanteuse Brenda Stumpf shows up with a mysterious charcoal sketch, and many others wear several hats as they scramble to live for art and the city at the same time: There are artist/gallerists like Joan Deveney and Bridget Ginley or bookstore owner Suzanne Degaetano. And there are ghosts. Daniel Thompson, for one, and of course Smith's beloved Mother Dwarf Smith. Even d.a. levy, patron saint of all Cleveland's beat/hippie lit, is represented.

In short, Duck and Cover is a big, fat, mass wedding of retro-beat, neo-dada and genuine curbside rust-belt art, found or made by artists who don't give a damn about the New York radar, let alone the perceptions of more local hierarchies. If there is a cutting edge to ArtCrimes, that heedless idiosyncrasy is the source of its sharpness. This is an irreverent, incorrect chorus of voices, each answerable only to its own disheveled muse, driven to create not by any institution, market or public expectation, but by the dictates of stubborn inner need.

Or as Bukowski remarks here on page 138: "They stuck something in me and it said WRITER and there I've been. Like a wooden leg or a windshield wiper."

- Doug Utter, for the Cleveland Free Times

ArtCrimes was open to material from any artist or poet. It had a policy of total freedom of expression. It published material that couldn't get published anywhere else.

The final issue was #21. ArtCrimes no longer accepts submissions, but check Green Panda Press, Deep Cleveland, or The City Poetry zine. A "Best of ArtCrimes" anthology might be published in the future. Past ArtCrimes issues are available with Deep Cleveland.

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