The UAG Gala This Saturday Night!

UAG 1st Annual Gala

UAG Special Event +

On Saturday, February 25th

From 6:00 to 10:00PM

UAG 1st ANNUAL GALA!
Back in the Black
(Black and White attire encouraged)
Feb 25th 2012
Normanside Country Club 150 Salisbury Rd. Delmar, NY 12054
6p-10p Champagne Preview 5p-6p

Tickets:
$100 ea Honorary Committee; Includes Champagne Preview and reserved seat at a table, name listing in program, Drink Ticket
$50 ea Champagne Preview
$35 ea, $60 for 2
$20 ea, Discount for artists who donate/display art

Food & Beverage: Grille One Six Five at Normanside Country Club has graciously donated the hors D’ oeuvres and displays, Cash Bar.

Entertainment Schedule:
5:00-6:00pm: Champagne preview with Classical Guitar Society of Upstate New York
6:00-6:45pm: Acoustic stylings of guitar picker Matt Durfee
6:45–8:00pm: DJ OFI, Poetry by Poets R.M. Engelhardt  & Dan Wilcox
8:00-9:45pm: C Ryder Cooley and Stompin’ Jug Ramblers
** Auctions Close (Approx 8:40 pm)
9:45–10:00pm: DJ OFI
MC: Corey Aldrich

Art: Artwork on display and for sale- Susan Hales, Dorthea Osborne, Mary Fronk, Thomasa D. Nielsen, Kimberly Schaller, Remsen St. Studios, Fulton Street Gallery, Photography Center of the Capital District, Existing Artists, Albany Poets

Auctions: Original Artwork, Gift Certificates for Local goods & Services. BUT IT NOW option will be available during Champagne Preview.
Donated Items (so far): Dorthea Osborne, William Hetzer, Kimberly Marks, Steven Rolf Kroeger, Thomasa D. Nielsen, Gary Masline, John Connors, Mary Fronk, Elizabeth Maloney, Kimberly Schaller, Ami Lahoff, Rebecca Schoonmaker, Nina Stanley, Bob Anderson, Perfect Blend & Make Me A Cake Next Door, Arts Center of the Capital Region, Lark Tattoo 278 Lark St., Fly Boutique, SPAC, CAP COM Federal Credit Union, Spectrum 8 Theatre, New World Bistro, The Downtube

50/50 Raffle.

Seeking Items for Silent Auction & Chinese Auction!

Seeking: original artwork, artists prints, gift certificates for goods & services, and more.

Donate your item, gain exposure at a great venue and help us keep community arts alive! The Upstate Artists Guild is a 501c3 organization. Participating donors may attend the Gala at the reduced $20 rate.

Interested in finding out more? Contact UAG member Rebecca Schoonmaker at rebecca.schoonmaker@uagmembers.org and send a description of your donation. Thank You!

Poets Speak Loud –

7th Annual Tom Nattell Tribute and Beret Toss

Albany Poets Celebrates Poet Tom Nattell

Albany Poets will celebrate the 7th anniversary of Poets Speak Loud at McGeary’s on Monday, January 30, 7:00 PM. The event will also commemorate Tom Nattell, local poet and community activist, who died the same day the poetry open mic began, January 31, 2005. Tom had been scheduled to be the first featured reader at the new series, but died of cancer that morning. The open mic was held that night and was a celebration of his life, work and performances.

Tom brought poetry and spoken word to Albany in a time when there were not 30-plus open mics and readings per month in the area like there is today. The QE2 mic was “the only game in town” and if you wanted to get up on stage and have people to hear your poetry, you made sure you were free on the last Monday’s of the month. Tom Nattell was the man who first announced many of the names you hear now taking the stage.  And some of those same local poets that were staples of that monthly event, like Mary Panza, Dan Wilcox, Don Levy, and R.M. Engelhardt, are now hosting their own open mics and readings, and continuing the traditions that Tom began over 20 years ago.

This very special event will begin with the annual “beret toss” at the Robert Burns statue in Washington Park in Tom’s memory at 6:00pm.

Poets Speak Loud, an open mic sponsored by Albany Poets, is held at McGeary’s in Albany on the last Monday of each month, hosted by Mary Panza. However, for the anniversary event the host will be Dan Wilcox, poet and host of the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center. Wilcox was a friend of Nattell’s and both were members of 3 Guys from Albany, a poetry performance group.

The event Monday will be a classic open mic, in the style of the monthly open mics run by Tom Nattell at the QE2 on the last Monday of each month in the 1980s and 1990s. While it is expected that some poets will read tribute poems to Nattell, or old favorites from past readings, poets are invited to read poems on any theme and share in the spirit of poetry.

Sign up for the open mic will begin at 7:00pm at McGeary’s with the event starting at 8:00pm.

The suggested donation for the event is $3.00; McGeary’s is located at 4 Clinton Square. in Albany, NY. For more information about Albany Poets visit the website: www.albanypoets.com. For more information about this event, or about Tom Nattell, contact Dan Wilcox at 518-482-0262 or email to dwlcx@earthlink.net

The Cynic & The Mystic

The Cynic and the Mystic

Within every meditator, says Peter J. Conradi, the cynic and the mystic battle.

The ancient Greeks invented cynicism—the word comes from the Greek for “dog”—and equated it with philosophers who lived a vagabond, natural life, devoid of luxury, pride or malice. Since then, cynicism has gone downhill. Oscar Wilde wittily quipped that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Today’s cynic disbelieves in the possibility of altruism or good faith. Only the lowest motives count.

Cynicism is the style of the age, found everywhere. It loves blackwashing, not whitewashing. Nothing is so quick to awaken our cynical disgust and spite as any hint of idealism or transcendence. One symptom is Christopher Hitchens’ The Missionary Position, his demythologising of Mother Teresa’s life-work, jacket-puffed as “hilariously mean.” His title implicitly compares Mother Teresa’s pilgrimage to straight sex, and Hitchens’ Teresa is a self-deceived, reactionary monster. Our taste for bad news is inexhaustible.

Cynicism lowers energy, saps courage, and is part of the degeneracy of the age. How can meditative faith itself stay unaffected? Cynicism, it might be said, is the enemy of the moral life. But the way to overcome an enemy is to explore our secret kinship with him, and try to understand his power from inside out.

The meditator can manifest as two contradictory people. One, an ordinary unregenerate impatient jaded materialist, sees humankind as a fortuitous and pointless blend of minerals and star-gases in a dead universe, and life as self-interested, without meaning. For him the spiritual path is pretentious, a kind of vanity. His favorite opening line is from Beckett’s Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” with its echo of Ecclesiastes (“Nothing new under the sun”); though he scorns all that is lyrical or elegiac. His favorite adverb is Martin Amis’ “unsurprisingly.” He fears his own disappearance, both in death and in meditation. He resembles the hero in Sartre’s novel Nausea, for whom the world exists in superabundant threat to his own sense of being. This stubborn hero is all too familiar, to the point sometimes of seeming almost to be part of me.

Yet this is not the whole story. An alternative persona has a child’s capacity to lose itself in a condition of extreme wakefulness, attentive to what it sees or hears or does, “engrossed in a world of play.” The perceptual field expands and shows a new world: the mystic finds the meaning of life within love.

There is no final victor in the war between these two embattled personae, and meditation is one site where they repeatedly encounter one another. After extended meditation the joyous mystic is ascendant; in periods of inactivity, by contrast, the depressed, anxious cynic wins. They speak different tongues. The world appears very different to each, with its own internally coherent logic. They seem zoologically distinct species, each addicted to his own cherished truths.

The mystic, however, does not see more than the cynic; he sees less. What is subtracted is what is self-involved. With that crucial subtraction, the world and all it contains becomes vivid and marvelous and moving. The cynic suffers less impersonally. He is anxious and depressive. It is remarked of some who are dying that they wonder at never before having felt so intensely alive. The meditator would like to feel aliveness without being obliged to await this final moment. The terror of a world without sacredness is the greatest terror. The meditator remembers that life itself is sacred; the cynic forgets this.

One recent November my partner and I were invited to Bhutan, last Tibetan Buddhist kingdom on earth. Normally you pay a large sum to go trekking; we were fortunately guests and so exempt from daily charge. We drove to the monastery of Ganté and negotiated use of a simple retreat cabin at 11,000 feet. overlooking mountains fluttering everywhere with prayer-flags, where we had altitude sickness and meditated for some days.

Himalayan night-skies are dazzling, for there is no light pollution anywhere. Vast, immensely brilliant star-populations turn slowly above. They induce awe, stop the mind, open the heart.

One such night I pondered some old needling questions: “How is there a world, something rather than nothing? What sense is to be found?”

A story I had heard when living in Poland for two years came back unbidden, touching some deep nerves.

When asked “Who are you?” a Warsaw friend’s housekeeper replied that she did not know. She knew only that her mother had been rounded up for deportation in Warsaw’s Umschlagplatz around 1943. By then it was understood that this meant a cattle-truck to the gas chambers of Treblinka, and most knew how soon and in what manner that journey would end. In the square, terrified, ill-nourished women from the ghetto passed their babies over their heads from one to another set of upraised hands towards a high wall enclosing them. They were thrown over to the far side, where pious Catholic Polish women caught, collected and raised them as gentiles.

This tale haunted me. This woman did not know who she was. She knew only that she was the child of two kinds of courage: that of a forever nameless mother who had let her go, and that of the foster-mother who cherished her.

Her story was scarcely universal. Yet it seemed to shed its own strange light: there are sources of blackness and selfishness; but courage, generosity and compassion are instinctive and real too.

That night I also recalled a farewell bonfire-party at the end of a monthlong group meditation retreat. An Irish friend recited Prospero from memory and was asked to repeat and repeat the whole speech by the others, who listened spellbound, as the sparks flew upward into the night-sky:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep…

A friend, a tough-looking postman, observed humorously of his fellow meditators, “I don’t know why I’m crying; I’ve hated them all for the whole month.”

I imagine the scorn of a cynical friend and want to say to him that the joy unlocked by meditation is not stupid or soft but tough and intelligent, even if short-lived. It fades and the beginner wants it back. If there is intelligence within cynicism, there is also soured romanticism. The cynic’s secret hope is that his is not the whole story; his secret fear that it is. His is not the whole story; though giving up cynicism is frightening: it protects from feeling.

I tried to explain all this later to my friend Iris Murdoch, the novelist, repeating, “You fall in love with everyone, even with the people that you hate,” and she laughed, and then thought carefully in her customary way, and watched as a dog watches, and replied gently and firmly: “That’s good.”

Peter J. Conradi is the author of Iris Murdoch: A Life (Norton, 2001). His newest book is Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me (Short Books), available in the U.S. this spring from Trafalgar Square Publishing

This is the complete version of the author’s piece as excerpted in the

July 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

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Tuxedomoon ~ A Mystic Death

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Get Your Copy Now …

Versus Lexikon: Poems By R.M. Engelhardt on Scribd

Poetry & Experimental Writing

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all the Iridescent magic up there your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to sleep.”

~ Johnny Truant

R.M. Engelhardt

R.M. Engelhardt Writer~Poet. Albany,NY
Albany, NY United States

Follow The Words .

www.rmengelhardt.com 

Albany, NY based poet, writer R.M. Engelhardt has published several books over the last decade including Nod~Logos~Alchemy~The Last Cigarette: The Collected Poems of R.M. Engelhardt & others. His current experimental book of poetry & prose is called “Versus-Lexikon” A poet & writer, Engelhardt through his ideas & visions has helped to create a large amount of the Upstate, Albany, NY spoken word~poetry scene and is the host of “SAINT POEM READING SERIES” an Open Forum-Mic For All Poets held every 3rd Monday of each month at The Upstate Artists Guild (UAG).His work has also been published by many journals on the net & in print including Retort, Verve, Industrial Nation, Sure! The Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Thunder Sandwich, Fashion For Collapse, 2nd Avenue, The Angry Poet, Danse Macabre, Full of Crow & many others.

Saint Poem ... Be Visionary

All men should possess a ‘visionary faculty’. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live too tensely, under too much strain, ‘getting and spending’. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man’s fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time ‘getting and spending’ to stay alive. …The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man’s own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the ‘sage’, who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never takes thought for the morrow.”

From The Outsider by Colin Wilson

(Source: rmengelhardt.com)

SAY SOMETHING NEW ALBANY

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On Monday, January 16th the Saint Poem Reading Series will be holding a special event for all those who have poems they would like to share concerning politics, wall street and the current state of the world and America!

7.30PM Sign Up, 8PM Start

http://rmengelhardt.tumblr.com/post/15724299502/occupy-the-word-poetry-at-the-uag-on-01-16-2012