Post Pacino Spectacular! June 24th Brooklyn

The Post Pacino Spectacular is a festival that will take place on Saturday, June 24th. The Spectacular is a circus of sorts based around diversity and fostering communication between different communities, including musicians and bands of multiple genres, painters, poets, theater, dancers, and mostly mad fun, the first Post-Pacino Spectacular will include: Reflectiostack, So L'il,I Feel Tractor, Ifwhen Seaman & Queerfunkel, Sleeping Kings of Iona & Katherine Betty Jones will be displaying her paintings. Poets Dustin Williamson and Frank Sherlock will be reading. Additionally, limited edition Goodbye Better compilations and zines will be released in accordance with each performance. Pete’s Candy Store is located at
709 Lorimer St.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For more info on them please visit: http://www.petescandystore.com/ Gratzi mucho. Love,Goodbye Better

TOOL: a Magazine

The Sixth Issue of TOOL:a Magazine features Joyelle McSweeney, Brenda Iijima, Susan Schultz, Mark Lamoureux and myself. Included here are the first few installments of the PECO Poems.

Letter to New Orleans for New Year's Eve

This poem appeared in Tuesday's Philadelphia Inquirer Commentary

Refinery Deal Pays Off
(Letter to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve)


There are the dead & those who talk to the dead
         through song    The parade is almost here &

this is an American mirror    Squint hard
    to see the Ninth Ward see Two Street    America

Cities are mothers that never stop raising
                   as long as the rhythms continue

And I will raise them up    And I will raise them up
And I will ra-ai-se them up on the last day

         Bayou Eagle feathers sewn into headdresses
keep the five-fifths citizen beat & burning

crude in the purified cold will be a dance called
         the dirty phoenix    This is American music

    A new year is coming with us    a dedication
Rebirth is playing our song    Don’t let them steal you

We come to party we come to remember
       We come to party & will not let you die

Frank Sherlock & CAConrad: The B. Franklin Basement Tapes

Nexus Foundation for Today's Art (137 N. 2nd St.) is featuring our audio installation, entitled The B. Franklin Basement Tapes. The collaborative piece is part of the gallery's Benjamin Franklin: American Idol exhibit to commemorate Franklin's 300th birthday. The show runs through January 2006, & will offer website access to many of the works via podcast. The opening reception is December 2, 5-9pm. We welcome you to stop by & listen. You may see our street team on your way to Nexus, handing out fliers & hyping the project, thus participating in the show beyond the gallery walls. Hope to see you there.

Frank Sherlock & CAConrad: The B. Franklin Basement Tapes
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Be cupid to world government. - “Pops” Lonnie Lynn

The B. Franklin Basement Tapes is a lo-fi response to the institutionalization of the Franklin myth. On the occasion of the 300th birthday of this visionary rebel & sexy nerd, much will be made of Franklin the statesman, the writer, the founder of services, and of course- the inventor. Rather than exalting the larger-than-life creator alongside his voluminous discoveries, we choose to take it back to the beginning. We channel Benjamin Franklin, DIY Idea Man. Mythology has a life of its own, establishing vertical relationships and hierarchical systems. But before mythology, there was/is the seed. Since we've yet to discover the Franklin Sun Recordings or Ben's Woodstock Years, The Basement Tapes document the kinds of beginnings that propelled Franklin to rock star status. Before the marble busts and the institutes, there were moments- as basic & genius as re-imaginations of the present.

The project can alternately be known as The Be Franklin Basement Tapes. In the spirit of the democratic thinker, these dream liberator exercise tapes can be worked out in basements all over the world. The poems are instructions to coronate our private parts. Make new musical instruments. Develop new ways of communicating subversions. Be a douser of flames. Make up lies & stoke revolts. This kind of urban planning & good-natured treason requires no degrees, and no academic pedigree. Franklin stopped schooling at age eleven and started studying margins, where all things are visible/possible. The Basement Tapes are not an homage to The Great Genius, but a recognition of the G-E-N-I-U-S that is not born & does not die. Today is your birthday. Be Franklin.

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To Baltimore!

Saturday December 17 i.e. Reading Series presents
CAConrad, Tina Darragh & Frank Sherlock
Red Emma's 800 St. Paul Street, Baltimore 7pm