“But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all a room is.”
—Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight

Rooms, boxes, issues. First one, then another, slowly, then suddenly, they accumulate. zingmagazine issue 21, girl in tears, Beat poet on the back. And that poet, Ginsburg, isn’t happy. He is rather bothered to fulfill another monotonous request for a needy client, bookseller, fan. He asks, almost demands, refuge. A place to hide from the “wolves.” Another signature, another book, another room, another curated section. All done.

There’s a new TV product for sale called the “Tater Mitts.” Basically, they are rubber gloves that allow you to rub the skin off a potato in eight seconds flat. No waste from peeling with a knife, no accidental cutting, doesn’t remove any nutritious vitamins, and you can get a special French fry slicer, too. You can make a potato salad, you can julienne, you can apply a whole mélange of abilities to your starch products. Bring on the bushels. “Another” is not just enough, when you have Tater Mitts at your disposal. The truth is out.

And the social system? Well, invigorated, I would say, rather than undermined. And the business of zingmagazine, not the dull drab affair of a room, but the delicious tumble of the curatorial format we created—the curatorial crossing. Notwithstanding its appropriation from other magazines. “Four walls, a door, a window or two, a chair.” Rooms are all the same? Alfred Hitchcock said, “Style is self-plagiarism.” Let the plagiarism begin.

Devon Dikeou
editor/publisher

AARON HATCH
Aaron Hatch is a 20-year-old student at Fordham University, a former zingmagazine intern, and hopelessly grateful for this opportunity. The years have taught him that a picture is indeed worth 1000 words and that making things look cool is something worth doing; this is the source of his desire to be creative above all else. Aaron stays sane in his scholarly pursuits solely through doodling extensively in his notebooks. Consequently, he would like to think that given more time and accordingly, more doodling, he can get better at this art thing.

JONAS MEKAS/JAMES FUENTES
“The Untitled Warhol Project, Andy Warhol’s Memorial Service”
April 1, 1987, Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral

In 1961, Andy Warhol went to see underground films at the Charles Theater; run by Jonas Mekas, on Avenue B and 12th Street. When it closed in 1962, he continued to go to screenings at Jonas Mekas’s Filmmakers Cooperative on Park Avenue South. Later, Andy brought films in for Jonas to screen, such as the Andy Warhol Serial—the original Kiss films, starring Naomi Levine. Warhol’s first film, Sleep, premiered on January 17, 1964. It was a benefit screening for the Filmmakers’ Cooperative at the Gramercy Arts Theater—the theater the Cooperative used at the time for their screenings. Only nine people attended–two of whom left during the first hour. The Filmmakers’ Cooperative emerged from a meeting Jonas Mekas held in 1960 called “THE FIRST MEETING OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA GROUP.”

Mekas is known for his diaristic and poetic approach to cinema. The contents of this audio cassette were recorded by Mekas with a hand-held tape recorder at Andy Warhol’s Memorial Service.

ARON NAMENWIRTH
Aron Namenwirth is an artist who, with his partner Nancy Horowitz, co-directs artMovingProjects. They live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with their daughter, Jane.

JOSEPH F LOVETT/MARY BARONE
Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids from the 70s were the beginnings of his career as a photographer. When I interviewed him for my film GAY Sex in the 70s, we looked over the Polaroids that I watched him take 30 years ago. I was struck by how they captured the sensuality of the era. I was so happy to be able to use them in the film and to show a selection of them in zing.

Joseph F Lovett, Director of GAY Sex in the 70s
www.gaysexinthe70s.com, www.tombianchi.com

BERTIE MARSHALL
That famous line of Christopher Isherwood’s from his novel, Goodbye to Berlin, “I am a camera, recording, not thinking,” has resounded in my brain for 30 years, and now I quote it as explanation for the following pages. “Composition as explanation,” as Gertrude Stein once wrote. The photo of me at 15 years old, in Chelsea, London, is by my friend, the photographer, Six. I’m wearing a black parachute top by Vivienne Westwood and what you can’t see are the 6-inch-heel black stiletto court shoes. After many months of suffering at the gnarled hands of agents(sic), and publishers(sickie sic) over the rejection of my book, Berlin Bromley, a publisher (with balls), Saf Publishing, eventually did take it, an now the book is out. In the waiting room of those months, I decided to have some ‘fun’ with it—scribbles in a word playground. I mentioned to Devon, on a recent trip to NYC, my motto is now and forevermore, “Carry on regardless.” Although at present I live in dreary East London, these pages are a big kiss to my favorite city in the world—NEW YORK!!

Bertie Marshall
Easter Monday, 2006

JANINE GORDON
“Stunts (Jumps, Wheelies, and Burners)” circumvents the notions of risk-taking and thrill-seeking in contemporary sub-cultures of today. Depicted in the photographs is a sublime sense of serenity capturing a silent moment within the dangerous and frenetic chaos. On occasion, the smoke emitted from the burning tires covers the span of the photograph, leaving the activity barely visible.

MARGARET LEE
Margaret Lee lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and likes words on big rocks, epigrams, aphorisms, and objets d’art. She is also interested in the aging process, passages of time, and believes that everything is possible.

DENNIS SCHOLL
Thank you first and foremost to Kimberly, and also to Katherine and Linda and the rest of the Artpace crew for all the help. The work done at the Residency Program shows that amazing things happen when you least expect them in places you might not have thought of. In the case of Artpace, over and over and over again—Linda, keep on doin’ it!

Dennis Scholl is a collector and budding curator living in Miami Beach and Aspen.

GRACE KIM
One Saturday evening this March 2006, Grace Kim came upon the Explorer’s Club annual gala at the Waldorf Astoria. These are her impressions.

LEE STOETZEL
Lee Stoetzel is an artist/curator living in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He has been the co-curator of the West Collection for 12 years in Oaks, Pennsylvania. His series of “McMansions” is a reaction to the recent suburban sprawl coming into this rural area. He constructed his “McMansions” models using McDonald’s food. He used Chicken McNuggets as the texture for the fake stone facades, Filet-O-Fish as stucco siding, burger beef as dirt surrounding the homes, drink lids as window panes, and wrappers as shingles. Lee photographed the actual homes, located within a three-mile radius of his house, last spring while they were under construction. They are precisely represented. The Lionville, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s is located three miles west of Lee’s house and the Phoenixville McDonald’s three miles east. Lee spent $768.00, between the two McDonald’s, on building supplies for the project.

CHRIS JOHANSON
I was very excited to be asked to be a part of zingmagazine. I really enjoy nonfiction writing when people share personal experiences. I also love my friends. Without them, I’m sure my life would be a lot less interesting. That’s why I started doing these art shoes where I go to places with my friends. Also that’s why I’m writing about them and myself here. Life stories and lives intersect all the time. In my ramblings and interviews in this piece, I take you on a personal life journey. You get to learn about people and see how it is that we intersected and also learn (through the sharing of some of my personal stories) how it is that I got to know these people and share time with them, and why I am interested in them. As Jack Hanley once said, “You have to be interested to find things interesting.” And this is truly an interesting planet to live on.

DANIEL KOHL
These images are a by-product of my day job. By day, I am the Project Director for the Denver Art Museum’s new building designed by Daniel Libeskind. On the sly, I scan the construction site for intriguing and transient visual moments. These moments are transient primarily because they quickly get slopped over with drywall, paint, and plaster! While the completed building becomes the final statement or product, these fleeting images of a work in progress evoke the building yet to be.

DEARRAINDROP
Dearraindrop is an artists’ group currently living and working in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where we have known each other now for 10 years plus. These photos are images of our studio/headquarters in southern Virginia, “with us against reality or reality against us” in Oslo, Norway, and “Magic Brain” in Padua, Italy.

JUAN GOMEZ
I am interested in the human figure as a structure. I want the people in the paintings to convey an essence in visual form. I thought of them as symbols, as when you go to see a dance performance. The expression is in their poses. More than relying on color or atmosphere, I put it all in the figures. They communicate a state of mind or a mood through their bodies.

CRAIG REMBER
As I have been primarily a painter throughout my career, photography has served me most often as a tool. The use of the camera in the art-making process serves as a jumping off point for the paintings, but at ties I deem that a photograph is successful alone and need not be turned into a painting. The conventional approach to photography usually involves “real” physical representation—the freezing of a memory in time. With my photographs, I attempt to achieve the essence of an experience, not the literal representation thereof. The photographs are records of memory in a non-linear fashion, the subconscious moments between specific events. Unimportant events become the visual foreground, instead of the background—a closer look at what is typically ignored—and disembodied memories and experiences become more than the sum of their parts.

ALLISON HAWKINS
I live in Brooklyn, but my heart lies in a Midwestern field some 20 to 30 years ago. I make my drawings in Brooklyn too, recently received my MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and work for the Joan Mitchell Foundation. I am represented by the Proposition Gallery.

ANNA KNOEBEL
Read over as a group, one finds that each story in this section, in its own way, is about children and growing up. Considering I chose them one by one, thinking only of what struck me as honest and vivid language, the theme came as a pleasant surprise.

OMAR LOPEZ-CHAHOUD
“Artists’ Self Portraits as Porn Stars,” curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud: a project completed in conjunction with an exhibition at the Circus of Books in Los Angeles.

JAMES MANN
James Mann is a cinematographer based in Los Angeles, California. Born and raised on the outskirts of New York City (New Jersey), James grew up fascinated by, and photographically attracted to, industrial decay. This passion followed him and blossomed while attending college along the banks of the Mississippi River and again in his travels across the country to Los Angeles. This series of photographs was taken while on location and living inside a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is James’ first series of portraiture. To view more of James’ work, visit cameraexperiment.com

SARI CAREL
Sari Carel is an artist living in New York City.

MONTE BEAUCHAMP/PAUL ELLEDGE
Monte Beauchamp (founder, editor, art director, and designer of BLAB! magazine): The only restrictions Paul and I placed on ourselves for this curatorial was that we take artwork from the inside of BLAB! and photograph outside of it. Paul Elledge is a Chicago-based photographer and filmmaker whose award-winning work has appeared throughout the world. His book of photographs chronicling the people of Vesale, Italy, Luna Bella Luna, was published in 1997. It was mid-January when Paul’s schedule finally cleared, so the very next day we hopped in his van and drove around Chicago, randomly snapping the photographs contained herein.

JEFFREY HARGRAVE
I grew up in the South. On a daily basis, I dealt with racism in my community and on television. Images in cartoons that depicted Sambo and Mammy characters have influenced my visual language. The work presented deals with issues of race, religion, and sexuality.

CHETAN MANGAT/GRACE KIM
Chetan Mangat and Grace Kim can be seen at chetanmangat.com and grace-kim.com.

TOM SACHS
Tom Sachs lives and works in New York City. He still uses cassettes. Please send your old cassettes to him: 245 Centre Street, New York, New York 10013

MIKE DONOVAN/CHRIS JOHANSON
Lives in a rehabbed garage in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Amanda, and their cat, Fern, who wakes them in the morning by touching their lips very lightly with a paw that they suspect is a physical and emotional powersource. He named his band Sic Alps at the end of a beautiful autumn week in Chicago, Illinois, spent listening to MP3s with Andreas Busche. “Folding Cassettes” is his response to all the boredom and hassle the recording industry coughs up everyday.