Ghostmodern is a webzine created by Seattle-based writer, Mischa Downing. Founded earlier this year with the philosophy of keeping it “real, weird, and beautiful,” the zine functions on an open submissions policy looking for essays, poems, short films, and art that explore the darker side of humanity.

Mischa Downing – Pheelings: Spring 2014

Downing describes Ghostmodernism as the place where culture goes after it dies, an intellectual intuition as mysterious as death itself. It’s a place for a wide range of photos and essays, which in no particular order, tackle gender politics, queer history and explore newer ideas such as ARTivism.

Mischa Downing – Green,  How I Love You Green: Summer 2014

More: Website | Twitter

//////

For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Louise Bourgeois is one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time. In a career spanning seven decades, from the 1940s until her death in 2010, she produced some of contemporary art’s most enduring images, making sculptures, installations, writings and drawings which, in mining her own psyche, have entered the collective unconscious. There are currently two major exhibitions of Bourgeois’ work on display in Edinburgh.

Fruitmarket Gallery presents I Give Everything Away, an exhibition of work on paper with some of her most intimate work, both drawing and writing on display until 23 February. The exhibition begins with a labyrinthine presentation of Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings, a remarkable suite of 220 drawings and writings made between November 1994 and June 1995. Also in the exhibition are two suites of large-scale works on paper, When Did This Happen? from 2007, and I Give Everything Away, made right at the end of the artist’s life in 2010.

This exhibition complements a major ARTIST ROOMS exhibition of work by Bourgeois on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Louise Bourgeois, A Woman Without Secrets, 26 October 2013 – 18 May 2014. This exhibition highlights her late work, showing for the first time, an outstanding collection of works on loan to the national ARTIST ROOMS programme, including Poids (1993), Couple I (1996), Cell XIV (Portrait) (2000), Eyes (2001-2005), and two late masterpieces, the cycle of 16 monumental drawings A L’Infini (2008-2009) and the artist’s final vitrine, Untitled (2010). These works will be augmented by important loans from Tate, The Easton Foundation and private collections.

There are special events linked to both exhibitions – see Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art events here and Fruitmarket events here.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Liverpool Biennial is delighted to launch Stages, a new online journal. It presents new writing and thinking, and is a space for staging research generated from the Biennial’s year-round programme.

The first issue, Stages #0: The Banff Report is a portfolio of thinking that emerged from the Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency on the topic of ‘Dock(ing); or, New Economies of Exchange’ which took place in summer 2013. Lead by Joseph Grima, Suzanne Lacy, and Hakan Topal, alongside the Liverpool Biennial curatorial team, artists, activists, economists and historians took the residency theme as a starting point to collectively explore some of the social, political and cultural challenges we are facing.

Stages #0: The Banff Report includes texts and works by Brent Bellamy, Nadine Attewell, Morgan Charles, Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti, Ryan Ferko, Kate Hoffman and Ada S. Jaarsma, Logan Sisley, Fiona McDonald, Rafico Ruiz, Florian Sprenger, Michael Truscello, Xinran Yuan and Eva Castringius.

Morgan Charles discusses the artistic interventions on Silo no.5, Montreal’s largest industrial ruin. The idea that “oil as fundamental to the societies we have now” is explored in Imre Szeman’s article, How to Know About Oil. You can read Stages #0: The Banff Report in full online here.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

But what did he do before all this? Read on to find out all about where he started his career…

1 – My first job….well, I think my first job showed me that all jobs are really a collaboration. I was given a paper round for the local freebie thing on the estate where I lived in South Manchester, I was about 13 at the time, but there were about 200 of these things to take round, and I could only carry about 40 in my bag at once. So my poor old stepdad had to also take the night off and sit in his car at various points along the route, waiting to fill up my bag again. How full time posties manage their bag loads I’ve no idea – maybe they also have generous-hearted family members who are prepared to do such things? Anyway, I trundled around, headphones in my ears, walking at a leisurely pace and picking these papers up as I went. Don’t think I realised that this took a couple of hours every Thursday night out of the life of another man, I was very focused on myself at that age. As you are, I suppose. But his sacrifice never really occurred to me until years later. Surely the football must have been on the radio? Maybe he’d have preferred to have been in the pub? Or at home? Anyway. Every project is a joint effort I suppose.

2 – I graduated to collecting money for St Ann’s Hospice, a local hospice also on our estate, who used to run a £2 lottery every week, and folks signed up for this in the grim old days before the shiny National Lottery, which killed many others when it was born in 1994, I think? I remember writing an essay at school about how unjust it was that St Ann’s was going to struggle as I was going to a lot of houses where people had to break the news to me that they were switching…Still. At least I was able to carry all the money myself, and nobody had to wait on me at the bottom of every other road.

3 – I must be missing some things out here, but the next one that stands out to me was working picking Pomelos in Israel on a kibbutz in 1996/7. It turned out Israel wasn’t really for me, and I was uncomfortable with a lot of the things I learned out there about the Israel/Palestine conflict – so I’ve only been back once since, to be best man for my best friend. But the year I lived there did have a big impact on me, and I loved being at the kibbutz. I’m not really an early morning type, but I loved getting up at 6, shovelling down a big breakfast in the canteen and then taking the truck out into the desert to pick these fruit which to me looked like massive pears on the outside, massive oranges on the inside. The fact that I’d never heard of them before made it all seem very other-worldly. We could see the border from where we were working and I always wondered what was on the other side, how people outside the kibbutz viewed those inside, and I could never quite sign up to the idea. But there was a huge sense of camaraderie, I made great friends and loved picking those silly big fruit with the headphones in. (I’m seeing a pattern here. I like jobs where I can switch off and listen to music, daydreaming.) Also, though I’m not a Zionist and I didn’t fall in love with the country, much of the ethos of the kibbutz I picked up at 18 years old did stay with me, and I still enjoy working in communities. It’s just that now those are literary communities.

4 – There were a couple of other brief ones in between but my next main job was cleaning the rooms on the kibbutz, after the Pomelo season ended. Up until then there’d been a women-only policy for cleaning the rooms the (very small amount of) tourists to the kibbutz used, as the guy in charge thought that it was woman’s work – and that men couldn’t do it. This made me and a friend feel like gender warriors…which of course we weren’t, but it did make it easier to motivate ourselves to clean the toilets, mattresses, floors and all that. I don’t think we did a great job and I’ve been a little mop-shy since, but we did get the boss to admit fellas could do the job. Whether he switched his policy again as soon as we were on the plane back to the UK, I’m not sure…

5 – My first proper job in Glasgow, which I got in 1998, was at Curler’s on Byres Road. I started out on the bar and then got trained as a Team Leader, then loved it so much I almost went into the management training programme. As an undergrad I was doing 50/60 hours a week there – in those days it was a student pub, with cheesy discos and clubs on til 3am. Again, I liked being part of the team, counting the money up (with headphones in) and thought I’d like to own a pub of my own one day. But then I looked around and saw all the managers had no life, they were always always in the pub, and even when they finished they’d stay for a pint or two. I got lucky, as at Curler’s I met Alasdair Gray, who I later wrote a book about. So my 5th job was an important part of my first real career. Which became writing…

Find out more about Rodge on his website and follow him on Twitter.

//////////

We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

1. McDonalds Glasgow / Crew member
Sixth year at school and I took a weekend job at the first McDonalds store in Glasgow. Travelling from Paisley every Saturday to wear a bad uniform and punt burgers to shoppers. Made some good friends, had some good laughs and stuffed myself with burgers. This was at the height of the BSE crisis so the CJD should kick in some time soon.

2. Oddbins Glasgow / Sales Assistant
Now sadly in administration, this was the job that supported me through art school. Long hours spent in freezing shops selling Superbock and Glenloth Red by the caseload. Great staff discount mind and I learned a lot about wine. Old World is best. It just is.

3. Clydesdale Bank Central Records / Admin Assistant
Night shift, Clydebank, a warehouse crammed with row upon row of shelves. Filing direct debits as Radio Clyde pumped out of the Tannoy system. I lasted a week.

4. East Kilbride Arts Centre / Leisure Assistant
A great job! Working as a janitor in an arts centre. Good wages and free use of the facilities: dark room, editing suite, studio. A very productive time – making work and organising exhibitions. In a way it was too good. I stayed for three years. Beware the comfortable job.

5. Scottish Screen / Training and Education Assistant
My first real “industry job”. Providing support to the Training and Education Department. A great two years helping to organise industry training, scriptwriting courses and student film festivals. They were also kind enough to let me read all the scripts in the script library which got me started thinking about screenwriting.

//////////

We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

In some cases, their process is heavily influenced by academic approaches to theatre: Flatrate’s Rob Jones is a recent university graduate, and the formal experiments of Forced Entertainment are, again, a touch-stone. They can be found in The Arches or upstairs in The Tron, or even in the smaller spaces of The Citizens. Taking their queue from the companies of the 1990s like Cryptic, they are willing to explore new outlets for performance: Flatrate run a monthly open night.

This grouping lacks any formal affiliations, and the subject matter ranges from angular anecdotes through to child abuse: if there is any connection in the subjects, it is that they are often more unsavoury than standard theatre fare. What they do share is a retention of the script as a core, even if the idea of the writer, alone in a garret, pursuing a singular vision, has been replaced by a more collaborative vision.

Their contribution to the theatre calendar is a series of small scale productions, the occasional revival of a contemporary classic and a steady stream of new writing. It is unlikely that the names listed below would recognise any great affinity with one another.

Key Performers

Alan McKendrick. Most recently spotted in The Arches basement, sporting a natty hat and presenting a filmed monologue that exposed the latent violence behind rock music messianic environmental and synchronised swimming, McKendrick’s scripts are cerebral and knowing. Ready to mix it up with visual artists, he maintains an almost old-fashioned respect for the script, while winking at modern techniques and post-modern irony.

Flatrate. Their first plays literally happened in a flat, and so the name. Now presenting at The Tron, Flatrate’s Rob Jones suggests that he wants to merge musical and theatrical aesthetics in a new way, even envisioning the company as more of a record label than a traditional band of actors. Not shy of the odd neo-brutalism revival, they’ve moved on to original works, penned by Stephen Redman, and take their influence from internet porn and wandering conversations with confused critics.

Leann O’Kasi. Formerly director in residence at The Citizens, and now at The Tron, O’Kasi is a writer, actor and director who impressed with a revival of American card-sharp two hander Top Dog/UnderDog before writing and starring in the recent Dirty Paradise. A straight talking East Londoner, O’Kasi is at home with the explicitly political and the idiosyncratically personal.

Rhymes With Purple. Drumhead was the toughest of Mayfesto’s political pieces: an hour of torture and justification, it dropped plot for an intense presentation of hardcore interrogation. Unfortunately, they lost the video footage of the critic being waterboarded, disappointing most of the performance community. Nevertheless, RWP are as comfortable with comedy as vicious indictment of US double-speak, and have built up a following thanks to bi-annual runs at Edinburgh Fringe.

Drew Taylor. Another writer and perfomer, Taylor has roots in slam poetry, and is often seen ranting in rhyme. His alter-ego Markus Makevellian had a glittery season at this year’s Fringe: his involvement in Glasgay! has ranged from directing Tennessee Williams through to one man shows.

Martin O’Connor. Once upon a time, O’Connor turned out perfectly formed monologues, starting with masculine anxieties but branching out into the corrosive effects of celebrity culture and social alienation. Recently, he has expanded into multi-character examinations of Glasgow life, never loosing that ear for West Coast patter.