Art Invitational to "Jack Ruby's America" Friday, Nov. 12 at Mad Art Gallery

Poetry Scores will host an Art Invitational to "Jack Ruby's America" by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell on Friday, Nov. 12 at Mad Art Gallery (2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard). Some 50 visual artists are making work in response to Clewell's poem. All work will be on sale on silent auction and will go home with buyers that night.

The silent art auction will start promptly at 7 p.m., and we will start to close bids at 9 p.m. The cash bar and delicious food catered by John Eiler should occupy us until 10 p.m. All proceeds from art sales will be divided evenly between artist, venue, and Poetry Scores - an arts organization devoted to translating poetry into other media.

The Friday, Nov. 12 Art Invitational also is the occasion for the release of our new poetry score to "Jack Ruby's America," featuring music by Yid Vicious (Madison, WI), Another Umbrella (San Pedro, CA), Kennebunkport Jazz Workshop (Nashville, TN), and Frank Heyer (St. Louis, MO).

The CD costs $10. There is no admission to the event. Opening bids start low at Poetry Scores art invitationals - often $50 or lower - and for work by some of our most beloved local artists. (See list, below.)

Each piece of art that responds to “Jack Ruby's America” will be named by the artist after a verbatim scrap of language from the poem. The work will be displayed and positioned around the gallery space, according to where in the poem the language chosen for the title of the artwork appears. So, in a sense, it is the poem itself that hangs the show.

We expect a mix of types of work you can hang on the wall - paintings, drawings, photographs, mixed media. Every year Eric Woods of Firecracker Press letter-presses bookmarks with a quote from the poem live at the event. Robert van Dillen makes a poem-inspired hat every year.

As a special treat this year, we will display and auction off the sexy outfit Becky Simmons made for Lola van Ella to wear (and take off) in her jazz burlesque of “Jack Ruby's America” performed earlier this year with the poet and the Dave Stone trio. We will auction off the outfit as worn by Lola (and not since laundered), all the way down to the gold star pasties!

For information, email Poetry Scores creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com. Poetry Scores is a 501(c)3 nonprofit Missouri corporation.

Confirmed for the Nov. 12 show:

Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Andrea Avery
Jay Babcock
Michael Behle
Kevin Belford
Keith Buchholz
Ron Buechele
Deanna Chafin
Heather Corley
Thom Fletcher
Trent Harris
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Emily Hemeyer
Michael Hoffman
Alexa Hoyer
Claire Medol Hyman
Angela Khan
Alicia La Chance
Robert Longyear
Dianna Lucas
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
John Minkoff
Michael Paradise
Melanie Persch
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Richardson
Martha Rose
Cindy Royal
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Becky Simmons / Lola van Ella
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Andrew Torch
Nita Turnage
Robert Van Dillen
Amy VanDonsel
Eric Woods / Firecracker Press

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Watercolor of Jack Ruby by Kevin Belford, from the cover art to the Poetry Scores CD Jack Ruby's America, to be released at the Nov. 12 event.

Free semi-private screening of "Blind Cat Black" at the BW

There can't be all that many people of whom the following is true, but maybe it is you:

1. You want to see the Poetry Scores movie Blind Cat Black
2. You will be in or near St. Louis County this Thursday, Oct. 7
3. You will have an hour or so free that day starting at 11 a.m.

If this is you, then feel free to join Angela Khan and myself at the Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Ave., in Maplewood), more affectionately known as the BW or the B-Dub, at 11 a.m. We will screen the movie in the back room, I think it is called The Crown Room, where they do the Strange Brew screenings, sometime shortly after 11 a.m.

This screening is intended for cast and crew who have signed up to work on the second Poetry Scores movie, Go South for Animal Index. That is where Khan comes in.

In plugging prop needs over the last several months, I have resorted to social media, among other avenues of beggary; and, consistently, someone I had agreed was a Friend but whom I didn't quite know kept coming through for me: with a vintage iron, with a box of 1940s ladies hats, with the most perfect old-fashioned radio at absolutely the last minute before the first day of shooting. This was Khan.

The Khan radio

In the bantering that ensued from my repeatedly driving to her house, which kept shifting locations, she said she liked to act and even had experience acting in a silent movie. We make silent movies. Khan has ann interesting look, as the image up above amply testifies. I said I would try to find a role for her.

The tarty look above, in fact, would have worked just fine for Blind Cat Black. That movie follows our score to the poem of the same name by the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, which tells the tale of an Istanbul streetwalker. Had we known Khan three years ago when we made this picture, and had she looked like that then, then she would have looked perfect in the dark, dank streetlife of that movie.

Go South for Animal Index is an altogether different can of crickets. It's a fable about the invention and testing of the first atomic bomb, which actually happened in 1945 and explains the string of requests for ye olde props. Our casting needs for Go South are altogether different, but then Angela Khan is a changeling, this much I have gathered from a distance, from a box-strewn living room where I am being handed a box of hats or an ancient iron by a generous person.

It is my gut feeling she would look just fine as one of the People of the Peace, one of the people of the land living along a river when the bomb shop moves in and the mad scientists start to build kinky new weapons of death from the uranium being mined from the Earth by zombies.

We will see. And, maybe, we will see you Thursday at the B-Dub.