Ancestor, February 2024. Cardboard, feathers and found materials.
We live inside a culture whose overriding goal is to keep us distracted, afraid, addicted and constantly triggered and disconnected from our authentic selves.
Snakes, ladders and chaos Tim White August 2025. Acrylic paint, oil pastel and paint marker on industrial paper
Art is an antidote, a map guiding us to an authentic lived experiences and a life-affirming revolutionary principle.
IlluminousDancing with the SpiritsThe Garden
John Trudell, North American Indigenous activist, declared, ‘When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art’. In this context, of what therapist and medical doctor, Gabor Maté calls a ‘toxic culture’ the need for truth is critical and urgent.
FamiliarsLost child with beetle
The idea that art and poetry, and all the rich diverse forms of expression which connect us to each other can immunize us against the malignant virus of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy is deeply appealing. That this wisdom comes from the deep spring of Indigenous knowledge and resistance, and despite the ongoing depredations of colonialism, is compelling.
Autonomic
The broken bits of the world I collect and use: the scraps of paper, plastic and metal, the discarded and rejected materials are clues and tools helping me puzzle my way out of the colonial-capitalist labyrinth. They are medicines too, the materia of transmutation, which once distilled provide essential healing and deepened connection with the biosphere and all it nurtures.
Obscene icy pole
As African American feminist bell hooks writes, ‘The moment we choose to love we begin to move against oppression’. This process of resistance, of healing through love, is an essential part of overthrowing the dismal and diminished life the masters of misery want to force on us. And it is from this love, from the sources within our imagination and in solidarity with others we can assemble a ‘new world inside the shell of the old’.
Iron Hills of Adversity Prime Optimus Vs Panoptic Octopus
For me, the found and discarded objects and materials used in my art carry a promise and reminder of profound possibilities subsumed in everyday life beyond the superficial substitutions of a hollowed-out AI virtuality. That even everyday junk and detritus call out to be up-cycled and politicised demanding a place as emblems of a transformed future, and are always on hand as building blocks for a new world, is a source of joy and inspiration.
Mighty Fine Arts presents “Like Father, Like Daughter: Inherited Visions” featuring new work by Johnny Olson and Madelyn Olson. This show opens with a reception for the artists on Sept. 27 from 6-9 pm and will run till Oct. 26. It’s a family affair at MFA with a premiere exhibit by Mad Swirl spoken word master Johnny O and his exceptionally talented daughter Madelyn.
Both are figurative based artists who exaggerate and elaborate on the human condition. The characters they create derive from some overarching personal narrative but they manage to resonate on a mythic universal scale. Their approach is also filled with imaginative humor and playfulness with a touch of satire. The resultant effect is ebullient and energetic imagery imbued with creative fervor. Father and Daughter are cut from the same cloth and blessed with uncommon virtuosity.
Also on Opening Night Wordspace Artspeak presents a musical performance by Swirve! Chris Curiel fronts this avant garde collective of liberated musicians devoted to free thinking and improvisation. Their goal is to release your mind from convention and neurotic restraints with cosmic soundscapes. Come experience and get emancipated with Swirve!
Johnny Olson was born on a brisk November day in 1970 in Chicagoland. He found his feet & cut his teeth in the blue-collared working class neighborhoods of his hometown. In 1988 he was reborn in MCRD San Diego, where he found himself the new title of United States Marine. After surviving the Gulf War, he hung up his BDUs & turned in his rifle to instead grab his pen & brush where he rediscovered his passion for writing & painting. In 1998 he found himself in Dallas, where what was supposed to be a brief stint in the South turned into over two decades… & counting.
In 1999, Johnny, with a couple of other mad cohorts, started Mad Swirl. This ‘zine project has now evolved into a being all its’ own. After wearing too many hats, he now only wears a few at Mad Swirl: Chief Editor, Creative Director & Host at Mad Swirl’s monthly Open Mic night & Mad Swirl’s Quarterly podcast, “Inside the Eye.”
Johnny’s work first appeared in print in 1996 in the now defunct Lip Magazine. Since then, his words & images have found their way onto a few online and printed zines thru the years. To name a few: Mad Swirl: Issues I-VI, The Best of Mad Swirl : 2017-2024, Haggard & Halloo, 10k Poets, PAO Productions: The Open Mic Project.
My name is Madelyn Olson and i’m an artist (anyone else have a hard time claiming that title?), primarily creating in Procreate or on paper with ink & watercolor. i’ve been creating since i could hold a pencil in my tiny little hand. to me, artistic expression is one of the best things to exist. i hope to both create & admire it all till it hurts.when i’m not creating and admiring creation, i like to eat, hang out with my dog, laugh at silly things with my friends and frolic around outside in the sun.
The following writings and images are ideas about generating ghosts. These expectations highlight the link between the organic mind and a computer pretending to be a person.
Generative ghosts ripping through wall paper. Collage and oil Mitchell Pluto
Ghosts made by AI use language models to talk and understand us. Because of special features, they can remember, plan, and show other intricate behaviors that are typically associated with humans. Their capabilities extend beyond simply repeating old narratives. By mimicking a persona, they can alter things, suggesting patterns that affect thinking.
The Fellowcraft tracing board depicts the ladder of chemical memory. Collage Mitchell Pluto
Resembling jellyfish, neurons and astrocytes evoke images of creatures from the Cambrian period. The private “conversations” they seem to have make me feel self-conscious. In time, we will create pods that will contain our memories, drifting like space-cotton until they finally settle upon another flat surface.
Digital divination. Collage Mitchell Pluto
Digital divination involves making randomness sacred while also improving how humans decide. AI uses incomplete data to build future stories, mixing memory, invention, and calculation. The user will conclude that mathematical relationships govern the universe.
The search continues. Are we building a god, or reconnecting with one?
AI Lucid Dream simulation at the Pueblo. Collage Mitchell Pluto
Who wouldn’t want to be a dream tourist? At last we can vividly recall hypnagogic states. AI can give you sensory experiences to trigger lucid dreams, but only if you’re trained to acknowledge the notifications. Make certain to review the terms of service before agreeing to use the application that will re-define you as a product.
Daimon bots and AI agents from the future. Collage Mitchell Pluto
The daimon now refers to a guiding spirit that exists between calculations and problem-solving operations. These bots are here to help users with their digital fortune-telling. However, an hour will have about 4-5 minutes of commercials. Don’t worry, the ads are super short, only half a minute.
I am 62 years old and I live in Calabria, in the ancient Magna Graecia. I am harsh and solitary, wild, introverted, anarchic and autistically proud like my land, which is full of stormy seas, turquoise and crystalline seas, and rugged and desolate mountains, very colorful and rich in lakes and impenetrable woods. I have been painting, drawing, photographing, cutting, sewing, gluing professionally since 1995, since I decided that I wanted to breathe art every moment of my life.
I like to experiment with everything I have at hand,mixing incompatible, different materials in absurd ways. I like to scratch and dirty my photos. Sew them together and with my paintings. I like to sew my paintings endlessly.
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I never know what I’ll do, what of new or old I’m going to create. I don’t like to plan anything, I want things to happen as and when they have to happen, I don’t do anything at all…. I put on some music, maybe with a good glass of red wine…. I sit at my work table where I have all my colors, my beloved books, my photos, my colors….and the magic happens every time.
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After a while I start to draw dots, lines, knotted lines, I choose the colors….and so on….it’s wonderful what happens every time. It’s a continuous catharsis, a going inside myself, and always opening new doors to go deeper and deeper.
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To know, to discover and open parts of me that were sealed and that now by magic I was able to open and penetrate. Art has been my autistic way to be in the world, the only way I know and have to communicate my words, what I have in my mind and heart. It is the dance that I have chosen to dance in harmony with my breathing.
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It is my freedom, the freedom that is essential for me to live, to feel sincere and true. For the first 14 years of my ”professional” career I drew and painted only in black and white with rivers of ink and lots and lots of paper. I love black indian ink, and its thousand shades…..they are like the thousand shades of my soul, they are like the clouds that hide the faint glow of the moon….like the thousand thoughts that crowd the mind before it can choose the right word.
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I started drawing frantically and joyfully on many many zines and magazines from all over the world, I collaborated with noise, metal, industrial, techno music bands….did a lot of mail art…drew for everyone, everything. I have never stopped since then, obviously because I like it, because it is the job I have chosen, it is my life, the life I have chosen to live freely. I never stop looking for freedom in everything I do, it is essential to me. Art is freedom, dance, joy, pain, art is life.
The transition to color was an obvious, natural necessity, and collage too. Collage is an extraordinary bridge to and with infinite potential, it is a labyrinth, a puzzle that never ceases to amaze me. I love experimenting, measuring myself and having fun with everything that attracts my attention, it helps me grow artistically, to discover many new games.
My inspirations are many, many….. my beloved books, underground comics, fashion magazines, so much contemporary art, medieval and Renaissance art….Osho , Aurobindo and Mère, Sara Vaughan, Patty Waters, Evan Parker and Ornette Coleman, Can, Nicke Drake and Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell…. Diamanda Galas and Joel Peter Witkink…. many, much more… the laughter of my friends, the noises of the street, my beloved cats, the winter sea and mountain lakes.
…and of course the tarot cards….I have been studying, reading and painting tarot cards since I was a boy….I love them and I can’t stop studying them, contemplating them, collecting them. For the International Tarot Museum I have created 5 tarot decks and in these days I will start the sixth. I hope and want to continue to create and be free as I am today
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“Sol, el cuarto cielo” Acrílico sobre tela y madera. 50 x 50 cm 2023
Writing is an art, which requires a life and I don’t know how to write, I know how to paint, after 25 years, I don’t stop learning and growing. Words can probe the deepest reality, but it is not the only way, you can have few words and still have a profound impact on the nuances of reality, you can have songs in your mind, plastic and colors.
I have colors.
When I look at a painter I also see words. Meanings, ways of seeing the world and nature, that have been transferred, inherited from one artist to another. As if we all spoke the same language, a hidden one. Hidden it is, behind the colors that live in my mind.
I do not hide in the colors, from the unbearable reality. I want to think that I shape it, I want to think that it can be inhabited in other realities. I want to think that I win the fight, freedom from myself, freedom from reality. I want to be able to see a space, a small work of art and it reminds me of this, it speaks to me about the spirit, I want to inhabit dreams. Imagine the psyche of a great musician, composing songs in his mind, or a poet spinning beautiful phrases full of meaning. Evading the weight of the psychic constructions of the most common social dynamics. What a beautiful girl, that guy looked at me ugly, how badly that old man drives, how fat, how tall, DO RE MI FA SOL LA SI, isn’t it perhaps a transmutation.
I don’t know how to write, I can put these meaningful sentences, which I will regret later, not a poet. Nor from what I have painted, a constant growth, the practice of a static that comes from colors and forms. A way of meditating, a way of praying, perhaps that is why I am building altars today.
Disclaimer. This is a work of fiction, any resemblance to Actual persons or events is Purely coincidental.
I took Maryellen, a lady of leisure, to every expensive restaurant and high end bar, indulged her with gourmet food, fine wine and droll conversation. I spent a lot of $ on her, as a gentleman always pays for a lady. It was my intention to wear down her defenses and inhibitions, to spend a day and night with her, warming her up to strip naked in a luxurious hotel room with a heart shaped Jacuzzi.
Maryellen was a glamorous, statuesque beauty, with creamy platinum blonde shoulder length hair, pale pink lipstick and nail polish. She wore a demure antique white designer dress, shimmering nude nylon stockings, and strappy high heels. Her ample breasts, curvaceous shape and nice ass, were her most noticeable feminine assets.
Maryellen was the kept woman of a film producer who was her sugar daddy. She was useful as eye candy at public events, and made the producer look good. She lived rent free and got a generous allowance for other “services” too shadowy to mention.
Maryellen was a precocious sugar baby, adept at sucking the blood of men with deep pockets. I was also friendly with the film producer who owned two summer homes and drove a Jaguar and a Mercedes. I had business dealings with the film producer of an artistic nature. But having no loyalty to him, I jumped at the opportunity to get his girl if I was lucky.
By chance, I met up with Maryellen, while passing through the producer’s neighborhood, and it was then that she went on several surreptitious dinner dates with me. She welcomed time away from her master who was overbearing, controlling and played power games with money. Threatening to withhold funds from her when he didn’t feel sexually satisfied. But Maryellen was successful at twisting the producer’s arm to buy her a new high end designer purse, not some cheap fake discount.
A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole and pooped her out its butt into the Florida heat, designer handbag and all. A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole pooping her out its butt, soiling her designer clothes, making her sad. A giant alligator sex toy swallowed Maryellen whole, she found spiritual enlightenment in the alligator’s digestive tract, emerging naked from the reptiles’ butt, and in her nakedness, she was most comfortable in the Florida heat.
All erotic, exotic and grotesque epiphanies aside, after many expensive dinner and bar dates, I finally got Maryellen to spend a day and night with me in a luxurious hotel room with a heart shaped Jacuzzi. After she took off her demure designer dress, stockings and heels, I helped her out of her panties and unhooked her brassiere, then she lay naked on the bed and I rubbed eucalyptus oil on her body. Then we entered the Jacuzzi together, in the warm water she blissfully felt my stiff erect phallus entering the prime real estate between her legs.
“Reptile Fling” (C) 2023 by Richard Gessner
Richard Gessner’s work is published in Black Scat Review 24, Sulfur Surreal Jungle, Fiction International, Skidrow Penthouse, Seinundwerden, Another Chicago Magazine, Air Fish et al.
When I read Richard Gessner’s Voyeur Rising I imagined the story as an adult cartoon with liminal existential qualities. Voyeur Rising reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s use of an unreliable narrator who is found in most current social media video and reels. This collective trick usually deceives the viewer with a decoy. This is the place where Gessner’s work lurks, to induce the peripheral mind while feeding the predatory eye. Here we see the ultimate conflict and fantasy of the Freudian id haunting the masculine mind. A pleasure principle with an intrusive desire to poach voluptuous women without any commitment- but to squirt sperm, to clone more succulent women so they are everywhere. The fantasy has boundaries in Gessner’s character who is aware of his masculine delusion, that every women he find’s attractive isn’t a possession but an unfulfilled wish. All this takes place by the primordial ocean, a surface alive with waves.
-Mitchell Pluto
Strategically positioning his beach chair, pretending to be reading a daily newspaper, Joey Genauski, nonchalant, invisible, just by chance, settles in a tight rectangle of sand bordering the burgundy beach towels of two 19 year old college girls the age of his granddaughter.
The girls, an ash blonde, and a brunette with auburn highlights, have soft buttery skin, shapely, wide hipped—all curvaceous splendor—
Perfect brown bodies striped with pale tan lines sharply outlining pale pink asses and naturally large breasts jiggling slightly in the warm breeze of early summer.
The tan lines form a pale faded triangle V of panty line extending upwards. From butt crack to lower back, panty lines curving around thighs to below belly buttons—traces of cast of bikini no longer worn.
Gradations of pale pink skin merging to olive, cinnamon, golden brown, pale breasts encircled with D cup outlines of frilly brassieres. Burnt Sienna areoles and nipples a darker shade of brown than their overall tans.
Crisp yellow and gold designer bikinis, light summer dresses, brassieres. And panties are strewn across towels covered with tubes of sun screen, Purses, car keys, fruit, sandwiches cold drinks, a paperback of classic 19th century literature and a current glossy fashion magazine glistening in the sun.
Furtively, through dark sunglasses, Joey Genauski gazes longingly towards the girls’ spread open legs. Their Smoothly shaven vaginas, A reddish salmon pink, are soothed with cooling aloe vera. Blue and white beach umbrellas with a swordfish logo line the beach Landscape. Its a Saturday afternoon in early June, the weekend crowds work to Joey’s advantage, giving him an excuse to sit close to single women without being obvious about it. The crowds camouflaging his true intentions, allowing him to move frequently, unnoticed by the morally reproving beach patrol seeking to squelch his habit of constantly wandering the beach in quest of a perfect view.
Other voyeurs, Joey’s competition, watch the beach entrance from a distance, waiting for the arrival of young ladies, single or in groups. Approaching the ladies after they have gotten naked under their beach umbrellas.
Most women strip naked, but some keep their bikini bottoms on. Some wear Brazilian string bikinis, flesh toned thongs, almost nude, but not quite. Pale maidens wiggle out of floral print summer dresses, shorts, and candy striped one piece bathing suits.
Voluptuous brown girls peel off demure, white see-through-when-wet suits, revealing all to bulging male eyes, looking, gawking, looking away— Diaphanous mesh panties slide down svelte hips, falling to sand. Brightly colored, fancy brassieres pop off as delicate fingers reach behind unhooking clasps shining in the sun, catching the eye of a seagull flying in blue skies above.
Secret cameramen get up in the nooks and crannies of spread eagled women half asleep in the sun. Joey leaves the two girls, vanishing into thick masses of beach regulars, middle aged, tanned and leathery, marking their territory with windscreens, coolers and little plastic flags poked in the sand.
In Joey’s absence, competing beach voyeurs, some bold, well hung, smooth talkers, will succeed in engaging the ash blonde and brunette with auburn highlights in a lively conversation. Mastering bare body language a virile stud will advance to slow massage, rubbing baby oil of their perfect bodies glistening in the sun.
Slick voyeurs who remain at the top of the food chain will return to the beach, summer after summer, appearing like clockwork as in the legendary return of swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano—
Their pick up routines with the ladies will remain similar and predictable year after year, decade after decade. Enticing the girls with superficial big talk of financial conquest, fancy cookies and little airplane bottles of alcohol.
In the tidal pools of voyeur nursery school, untested new generations of voyeurs emerge like baby sea turtle hatchlings making a mad dash seaward—
climbing the slippery slope of a succulent female ass just over the horizon,
Joey Genauski wanders into a gaggle of girls taking it all off for the first time-
In the distance, randy couples frolic in the surf, avoiding the June Jellyfish in the waves, out at sea, fishing boats come in close to shore, catching a panoramic eyeful of skin.
“Voyeur Rising” (C) 2022 Richard Gessner
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing WhimsyAudible
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
Eric Capron is a self-taught artist. He discovers the arts of the circus and the world of the puppet.
Eric Capron. Artiste autodidacte au parcours singulier. Dès son plus jeune âge, la dyslexie le marginalise. Enfant solitaire, il quitte très tôt les bancs de l’école et l’univers familial. Commence une vie de saltimbanque, découvre les arts du cirque, le monde de la marionnette.
Artiste en perpétuelle mutation. Dorénavant un travail quotidien permanent de production d’œuvres en papier mâché : des corps mis en scène. Des corps non genrés, incolores, sans modèles, mais étonnamment présents à nos regards amis. Ils existent pour eux-mêmes, d’abord.
Les sculptures sensibles d’Eric Capron racontent l’âme humaine, la fragilité de nos destins. L’artiste revisite les mythes fondateurs, puisant ses références dans la mythologie, l’art sacré et profane, l’univers onirique, les grands textes de la littérature.
« J’ai le sentiment d’être l’instrument de quelque chose qui me dépasse, une sorte de miracle, une boite de Pandore qui s’est ouverte…» nous confie-t-il.
we are Martians. Aries. Martians from Mars. Let me explain, Mars was like Earth and now since we forgot our origin, we innately burn through every place we live. our soil is sand and glass..we made the moon a clock. Iron shares a special relationship with our blood, a period of sixty seconds. the hour hand is a blade that takes time to trim a heavy circle into a lighter circle. meanwhile, it’s getting late. who really invites Ahura Mazda into their thoughts? the all-knowing one, unless it’s really about an ark with wings or the other curve floating by boat? or is the lost manuscript of Eratosthenes?
Pseudepigrapha is a mercurial ghost, everyone has a ghost story they believe in. George Lutz, a land surveyor, used the positions of points, distances, and angles to channel a much better story than I could tell. Those shapes he conjured made beliefs appear real.
and that’s as real as Sherlock Holmes sending Watson to kill Houdini. and definitely as real as Aldrich Ames misdirecting a whole institution into remote viewing.. but you know, the target gets paranoid and loses when the Chessmaster is late to the game. you know that, right?
What happened to the red bone marrow of giants, you know, the ones who built the pyramids, survived the flood, and were from mars? They must have burned the big foot bones. indeed here comes elimination by illumination, psychological warfare, and the second coming. The Exorcist worked by controlling everyone in the movie theatre by managing what the eyes saw. The eye is a sense of self. yes, the spooks were real and so was the contact lens in the possessed girl’s eyes..Shakespeare was accurate about the world and so was Timothy Leary, whoever controls the eyeballs controls the brain.
Featured photo The haunted footprint at Göbeklitepe/Potbelly Hill by Mitchell Pluto
Mitchell Pluto 