Art-Culture
Celebrating over two years of being open, the Converging Paths Sandusky Bay Meditation Center is located in room 405 of the Feick Building at 158 East Market Street in downtown Sandusky. According to the founders, the center honors all wisdom traditions and seeks to establish a better understanding of self and others through clearing the mind, lowering anxiety and deepening the meditation experience with the help of others. The Erie Wire visited the center on February 2 and interviewed Lou & Jan Young and Larry & Ann Smith about the center’s origins. While the center does not encourage any specific religion, it has hosted a series of Wisdom Talks. Alongside the regularly scheduled guided meditation, Tuesday night included a showing of Bill Moyers interview of Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience. For more information about the Converging Paths Meditation Center, click here.
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Artist: Scott Baker
song: National Anthem (Radiohead)
song: Shaved Head
song: Siberian Frostbite
song: (random audio clippings from concert at Clazel)
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(The Phantasmagoria video is extremely compressed, but we’ll upload the original file to YouTube sometime soon.)
Cabin Fever: The winter chill tightens its grip, fans let loose and dance!
Bowling Green, OH – As the snow settled on the sub-zero downtown on Saturday night, the maddening talents of regionally-acclaimed Phantasmagoria brought a crowd to the Clazel. Known for their innovative songs and inventive albums, their sets consist of high energy dance and rock compositions that make you want to move. Phantaz, as they are affectionately referred to by fans, were welcomed back to the scene for the first time in over a year by the sounds of Toledo’s grittiest progressive rock artists, The Argyle Everything. With a live set of jungle beats spun by WBGU-FM’s DJ What The Bleep? to segue the acts, the entire experience was made for another plane of existence – one where you can’t stop tapping your feet and bouncing your head to the rhythm until the last encore is satisfied!
Lure, Hook, and Snag
by Chris Green
Sunday mornings, there are men who take
young sons to the river and start
tying lures, casting, and drinking beer
before the sun rises. They strap life-
jackets on them after lunch and send
the boys scrambling upstream to float
back into their arms. They tell them,
“Further. Run up ’til you hit the bend.”
By then the sun has lowered over the trees,
and each boy squats alone for a moment
in the last patch of light. Dead fish drift
against the bank; unopened beer-cans float
silently past, caught in the current;
and somewhere inside, each boy feels a buckled
bridge that teenagers hurl themselves from.
Then the boy is by himself running
over the sharp stones. He will go far
enough this time, and though he can’t swim,
he will paddle to the middle, further even
than he was told to go. Further than
the week-end before when he saw him last.
Past the bend, he throws himself in, lies back,
until his feet no longer drag on stones.
He watches branches against the sky sail
over. He closes his eyes to feel the wake
of passing canoes and drifts toward what waits.
Chris Green lives in Huntington, West Virginia, where he teaches, writes about, and crusades for Appalachian literature and social justice at Marshall University. He was born and raised in Lexington, a city of some 300,000 in central Kentucky. He recalls, “When I was a high school senior, I asked the AP English teacher, ‘Why don’t we read anyone from Kentucky?’ She leaned over her podium and proclaimed, ‘There are no great writers from Kentucky.’ Thus, I began my quest to discover Kentucky and meet other writers.” He is co-editor of Coal: A Poetry Anthology, has most recently authored The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism, and is working on a history of Appalachian literature.
The book which is 104 pages long is available in soft cover ($15) and may be ordered directly from Bottom Dog Press (PO Box 425, Huron, Ohio 44839) at http://smithdocs.net, or at area and on-line bookstores. A series of readings and book signings is planned.
[Chris Green may be reached at: <greenc@marshall.edu>
Or Contact Larry Smith, editor of the press at: 419-433-5560, ext. 20784]
Artist Profile
Athena Pribanic, born in Sandusky, OH, is currently enrolled at the Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD), where she is working towards a bachelor degree in Fine Arts with a focus in Ceramic and Painting and a minor in Art Therapy.
Contact Information:
ampribanic@gmail.com
Digital Sketches
Click on Image to view Portfolio
Sketch Portfolio (Pencil & Charcoal)
Pottery Portfolio
Click on Image to view portfolio…
All pottery is priced between $20 and $50. Please email me under my contact information on Athena Pribanic’s Page to complete a purchase of my work.
Recipe for Summer Squash and Lake Erie Perch
-Larry Smith Get up just before dusk with the birds. Breathe the cool morning air. The day before, borrow your neighbor’s boat and a bucket of fresh minnows or shiners (Sorry, Vegans). Head out onto the foggy lake. Bring a lantern or flashlight to be visible; others may already be dropping lines. Better yet, bring your kids or a couple grandkids and let them get the taste of lake fishing. [No computer games; turn off all cell phones.] If possible, bring back a dozen good sized, yellow perch. Stop at the Farmer’s Market downtown. [They’re good people and won’t care how you look or smell.] Pick up 4 or 5 summer squash, a couple zucchini, maybe a green pepper or two, some onions. Get a dozen of fresh ears of area corn—nothing like it. Say Hi to Josh and Lauren at the CSA tent, they’re doing good work right here in Erie County, and always smiling and full of talk. Let your children browse the market tables, learn where their food really comes from. You’ll have to clean those fish. Tell your wife or partner you’ll cook dinner tonight. About an hour before supper or lunch, cut the squash and pepper and onions into ¼” slices. Get out your big steamer or a pasta cooker and fill with water to just below the strainer; layer the veggies up and lay the perch fillets across the top (It’ll cook.). Salt and pepper to taste. I spread some Rosemary across the top for the fishy smell. Bring the water to a boil, then cook on medium heat about 10 minutes. The perch should flake, the squash be soft but not mushy. Steam the corn a few minutes. Serve it with salt and butter, some tartar sauce for others. Bring on a big pitcher of iced tea, and listen as the kids tell stories of their day. Larry Smith is a professor emeritus at BGSU Firelands College and director of The Firelands Writing Center. A native of the Ohio River Valley, he now lives along the shores of Lake Erie. He is the author of eight books of poetry, four books of fiction,and two literary biographies. He and his wife Ann are two of the founders of the Converging Paths Meditation Center in Sandusky. See: Larry Smith’s Homepage.Listen to Larry Smith’s poetry being read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac.
Level, OH
Beyond the spit, water
which is not Ohio.
Turn Back.
Ohio might not
be any more
than twelve serious houses
& a bucket hanging
from a very beautiful pump.
You can see a lot from the car.
There are dusk animals
gliding by twos
in the stretch
of a serious winter.
There are two
murders each night
on the fringes of a very
beautiful park.
Christof Scheele teaches composition at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Hayden’s Ferry Review In 2003 he received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry.
Nice Ohio poem…in the midst of calm, there is the threat. I could feel and see it here
Reading about our local cultural events makes me value more our “local artists and writers” who speak of our sense of place but also for it. Here is a fine quote on this from the editors of Orion magazine.
” A literature grounded in the natural world . . . narratives that chronicle lives lived, as all are, in places—is as humbling as it is compelling . . . the writing itself earns a place in people’s hearts and, once there, can promote the idea that nature is what makes us human, that what we do to the environment, we do to ourselves. The more people relish this good literature, the more they come to understand the danger we are in ecologically speaking, the better the chances that humanity will rise to meet the challenges that lie ahead.”
–Editors of Orion magazine (March-April 2010)