Check out this opendiary: Wr1tt3n

http://www.opendiary.com/entrylist.asp?authorcode=D712966
Hollie writes some great material on this site. For you creative writers out there, her words are worth taking a read.

The Best Book Review EVER!

This is truely the best book review ever. I bow to its greatness.

www.micmell.com/inspiration/49/greatest-book-review-ever/

Crimes in the Wyoming Valley: An Evening of Spoken Word / Jazz Improvisation

*This information is from my good friend Gil Helmick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZm2g79wiRw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl3mW6YlJMk&feature=related

Featuring snowmonks Gil Helmick and Jesse Lynch plus Ron Stabinsky.

Saturday, May 30, 2009
8:00 P.M.
All Ages
Free Will Donation
St. Stephen's Episcopal Church
35 S. Franklin St.
Wilkes-Barre, PA

Jesse and Gil return to the Wyoming Valley following years on separate paths that lead to many destinations from California to Nova Scotia to intersect in Portland, Maine in 2008. Jesse Lynch was raised in Kingston.

Gil Helmick operated a business in Wilkes Barre for twenty years before pursuing his passions of poetry and fiction

snowmonks is a New York City based poetry- jazz-classical fusion ensemble. Through the magical synergy of spontaneous musical interaction and vivid poetry, snowmonks conjures fresh sonic landscapes, which breathe, evolve, and erupt with masterful ingenuity and mindful abandon. With self-assured momentum and fine articulation, each line of poetry injects new breath into consciousness. snowmonks swims with a current of supreme adventure and sublime lyricism, and dares to do so with one foot rooted in black humor. The music is unequivocally in the moment, patient in its contrapuntal unfolding, and historically and stylistically informed. From longer compositions such as "The Marriage of the Future to the Moment" to the sudden burst of "Proletariat Zen Prayer," snowmonks illuminates the audience with line-by-line, note-by-note epiphanies.

snowmonks evolved from a random idea shared by pianist Jesse Lynch and poet Gil Helmick. In November of 2008, Jesse and Gil spent an afternoon improvising at Jesse's piano. They haven't looked back. Seven months later, Old Port Records offered a recording contract.

Poet Gil Helmick graduated with Honors and Distinction from the California State University in Sonoma, California, in 1976. He avoided graduate school, choosing instead to travel throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Central America, as well as through parts of Europe and Asia. His experiences during this time ranged from nights in Park Avenue hotels to stays at Brazilian truck stops, and from the intimacies of the high South American jungles to drinking wine with derelicts on the cold winter sidewalks of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. During the early 1980's, Gil's work was published in small California anthologies, and he performed over 40 public readings. In March of 1985, he flew to Paraguay and Brazil to write fiction, completing two novels: The Accomplice, and Wounded Angels. He recently completed a collection of poetry titled, Wounded by Zen. His poem, "The Evolution of Apocalypse," was used as text for a jazz opera, performed at the Brooklyn Lyceum, Brooklyn, NY, in September of 2008.

Pianist Jesse Lynch began playing piano at age 3, and went on to earn his B.M. in Piano Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His teachers have included: Ron Stabinksy, Tom Hrynkiw, Bob Durso, Robert Shannon, Dan Wall, Marc Steiner, Antonio Pompa-Baldi, Ivan Davis, Rosendo Santos and Andrea Bogusko. His styles encompass jazz, classical, popular arrangements, original rock, spontaneous solo composition and ensemble improvisation. As a solo performer, Jesse has served as full-time pianist at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, CA, and has been a guest artist at the White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, ME. Jesse regularly travels to California for seasonal jazz duo performances with Christer Norden. As an accompanist, he has worked in a wide variety of genres, for a diverse collection of instrumentalists and vocalists. He is also a sought-after piano teacher, vocal coach, music director for area theatres, and a church organist. A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he currently resides in Portland, Maine, where he regularly performs and records with local artists, and frequently attends sessions at a Vipassana Meditation Center in Western Massachusetts.

Ron received his first musical lessons at the age of five from Michael Hoysock, his grandfather. Currently, he is stimulated by the process of improvising music in solo and small ensemble situations, while continuing to be inspired by studying and performing music of various past traditions. He has studied the art of improvisation with Bill Dixon and Joel Futterman. Sessions with Jack Wright and the many manifestations of Jack's generous spirit in the world of improvised music have also provided much impetus for recent growth in Ron's own work.

Since January 2007, he has been producing an ongoing series of music performances, often focused on improvisation, in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He received Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts Project Grants in 2007 and 2008 for this series. Recent performances of written repertoire include the Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue with the Wyoming Seminary/Performing Arts Institute Civic Symphony Orchestra (Kingston, PA) and the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas with violinist Sophie Till.

Ron is a piano student of Edna Golandsky and Ilya Itin. He is the 2008 recipient of the F. Lammot Belin Arts Scholarship.

On snowmonks' "Crimes Against Inhumanity"

"Snowmonks is not just another garden variety, beatnik mangue' jazz-meets-poetry project. This is a REALLY good band: tight, visionary and confidently energetic. Gil Helmick is a REALLY good poet with a seriously great ear for the musical settings of which he is an integral part, not just a pseudo-hipsteristic vehicle for perfunctory accompanists.

Helmick's voice, minimally modulated, plays against the "controlled" and intuitive improvisations of the band's primary soloists, Jesse Lynch on piano and the amazing Mark Tipton on trumpet. With an uncanny sense of timing and subtle nuances of pitch, snowmonks make "Crimes Against Inhumanity" the hippest representation of this artistic cross pollination that I've heard since the last, alas, Steve Swallow/ Bob Creeley sessions. A real gem!"

Paul Lichter Dimensions in Jazz

"Gil Helmick's poetry is powerful and his delivery deceptively
quiet. The snowmonk music swings underneath Helmick's words."

-- Michael Simmons Huffington Post

"I have been artistically enlightened by snowmonks. They have blurred the lines between art forms and expanded my conceptions of music, improvisation, poetry, literature, and collaboration. Working with this fine ensemble of musicians and soulful people has been a wild and invigorating journey; and I have learned more than I have lent. The parts I contributed were exhilarating. I thought that perhaps I discovered snowmonks, but in fact, their art is so timeless I can't take the credit.

Let the world discover snowmonks - and the many dimensions contained therein - and be dazzled. These musical and artistic pioneers aren't taking prisoners. They fuse poetry, wherein every line leaves you daydreaming; and music, whose every phrase spins into a haunting symphony... well, should that be a crime?"

Taylor Mesple
Musician
Songwriter
Twenty year performer and producer featured on 150 CDs

"You could read poetry. But would you hear the rhythmic tap of percussive syllables, or the dissonance of conflicting observations, or the meandering of thoughts looking for satori? The poetry of snowmonks emits its truth in the tightly interwoven utterances of voice and instruments. The combination of word and note make "crimes against inhumanity" a unique art form that must have one element to complete the other.

Recorded in an obscure Maine mill town in the summer of 2008, "crimes against inhumanity" is the first release by the eclectic ensemble of musicians and solo poet. Although the recording was masterfully mixed by Inner Circle Productions and released on Old Port Records, each of the eight tracks truly found its own life with jazz improvisation.

Each member of the ensemble provides an incredibly deep well of talent and impulse for self expression. Months of experimentation and rehearsals finally brought them together in a highly professional and cohesive production.

There's the poet, Gil Helmick, who times his reading with the patience and simpatico of a jazz musician in no hurry to take the stage from his fellow artists. He waits, comes in when the beat calls, then fades out for the music to amplify his meaning, then adds his own understated punctuation. In "proletariat zen prayer" from his 2007 "wounded by zen" collection, Helmick plays into the tension created by the music before deftly delivering the last line "again." With that one word, after a long interplay of sounds, the poem crystallizes. Helmick graduated from California State University in Sonoma in 1976. At times he has explored the North and South American continents. At times, he has explored the dusty rooms of his grandparents' house in Belgium. And as all poets do, he has explored his own world view while challenging or reinforcing yours.

In contrast to the wryly weathered Helmick, pianist Jesse Lynch brings a fresh innocence that translates the entire world into an adventure or lab experiment. He earned his degree in piano performance from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but he began his love affair with the keyboard at age 3. Lynch intuitively assumes Helmick's experiences into this own musical language colored by his training in the classics, jazz, and improvisation.

Lynch frequently finds his way to Vipaassana Medication Center in rural Massachusetts where cellist Wayne Smith makes his home. Smith has played with the likes of The Spin Doctors, The Moody Blues, and the New Jersey Philharmonic. Sometimes Smith's discordant strings meet Helmick's baritone reading pitch to create a mood of humorous melancholy like that found in "the marriage of the future to the moment" and "as subtle as possible."

When it comes to mood, Mark Tipton is the master. Frantic paranoia, despondent acceptance, and heightened anticipation come through Tipton's horn in various muted and blaring degrees. Tipton also earned his degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and currently teaches trumpet and coaches jazz bands in Maine. He studied at the Henry Mancini Institute at UCLA where he jammed with jazz royalty Bobby McFerrin, Quincy Jones, and Doc Severinsen.

Tipton's jazz credits, along with Lynch's and Smith's classical backgrounds, make snowmonks not just another throwback to the Beat era when anything could be music providing a backdrop to anything that could be poetry. Snowmonks are a tight group that collectively expresses itself with the inseparable blend of voice as instrument and of notes as meaning. They are meant to be heard."
Emily Tuttle - Journalist

"An exquisite melding of skilled musical improvisation and spoken word, *crimes against inhumanity* explores political, personal and humorous themes. Gil Helmick's clear, calm voice is deftly supported by an array of grooves, melodic excursions, rhythmic fantasies, squeals and moans that meld together in a most engaging and provocative fusion."

John Smedley Professor of physics,
musical acoustics and jazz guitar

"It is an exceptional work. The sophistication of the music is tremendously appealing. I'm a classically trained musician and deeply interested in the ebb and flow of 20th century art music. It is amazing to hear how comfortably this work sits with written works that verge on improvisation like Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. I'd also draw parallels with Walton's Façade, but that's mostly tightly controlled, bumptious silliness and your work is decidedly not that.

To think that snowmonks pulled this off so cleanly, so passionately and, in a studio without an audience, is great testimony to the maturity of your collective artistic selves and the sensitivity you have to each other's contributions to the whole."

John-Michael Albert singer, composer, poet

"Gil Helmick and his surrealist-derived poems...reside in a natural humanism, and are advanced by a manic dark humor...Helmick's lines have the classic signature of original work in this vein...Much of his work has the insistence of syllogistic premise in geo-logical layers that astound and amuse at every turn. Some can be harsh and fraught with psychological overtones. .Their intent exaggerates the persona and renders it more disquieting, certainly a prime surrealist objective. Complacency is the true enemy of awareness. That the structure of logical postulation could be employed for the purposes of illogic resonates with quantum ignificance...Borrowing from the radical prosody of the East, Helmick also adapts the haiku form to his surrealist purposes. They become barbed skewers on the grill of the imagination...The good news is that Gil Helmick...marks his re-emergence into the word-spattered fray. This time Gil has enlisted a trusty group of musical improvisers to accompany his adventurous strides into the surreality of the 21st Century. The age of Digital Surrealism has arrived."

-Pat Nolan, review of Wounded by Zen

Why I love NEPA installment #1

Why I love NEPA: Bat Shit Crazy People!

Like Stanley Carter who decided to make himself at home in Plains, PA: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28409695/

Keith Gilman: Father's Day

Louis Kline might be out of the Philadelphia Police force, but he’s not out of the P.I. business. In “Father’s Day,” the first novel competition winner from St. Martin’s Press and Private Eye Writers of America, author Keith Gilman takes us through the dark journey of a former cop.

Lou’s taken up residence and solace in the Pocono Mountains after his friend and fellow officer, Sam Blackwell, allegedly committed suicide and his own mother had been brutally assaulted and killed in her row home in West Philadelphia. These story kick-starters force Lou to return to the City of Brotherly Love to confront his past and track down Blackwell’s missing daughter.

“They both had daughters, and they both put the uniform on everyday knowing it could be their last. If one of them ‘bit the dust,’ Sam would say, the other one would keep the girls safe. They’d made a promise to each other, like the oath they’d taken to the City of Philadelphia, and if nothing else, Lou was as good as his word.” And to Lou’s surprise, as the story unfolds, he discovers that the missing 20-something Carol Ann is not an innocent and scared girl.

Lou finds that Carol Ann is actually a troubled runaway who has not only hopped in bed with drugs but also with a bad boy boyfriend and an even tougher crowd. Even more, Lou’s former love interest, Carol Ann’s mother, Sarah, has a new husband, Vince Trafficante. That crook Vince, who owns a sleazy massage parlor where the missing girl last worked, may just be the clue as to where Carol Ann is located.

While Gilman lays out the story of Carol Ann, he doesn’t let the reader forget about Lou’s own daughter, Maggie, who defies her mother in order to live with Lou. Throughout the novel, Maggie is the device through which Gilman exposes Lou’s strength and vulnerability, which gives credence to the emotions behind his deepest fears. Gilman writes, “Talking to his daughter was like doing a puzzle where the pieces kept changing shape. The best he could hope for was to complete the borders.”

Gilman completes those borders in a stunning ending. Lou realizes the connection between himself and Blackwell’s daughter, femme fatale, Carol Ann, while she is sitting at the end of a shotgun barrel. Gilman writes of Lou’s situation, “The words had poured out of him, words that had been locked inside for a long time, words he’d never spoken before, to anyone. […] He heard his own voice coming out in wrenching gasps, his eyes riveted on the gun. In his fear, he somehow conjured an image of his own daughter, one step from the grave, and never having heard these words from her father’s mouth.”

But is Lou’s self honesty enough to save Carol Ann? Is it enough to console Sarah Blackwell, who has some of her own closet skeletons? Is it enough to change Lou’s life forever? Find out by reading about Gilman’s Philadelphia. Be on the lookout for Lou Kline in the future. Gilman’s hardboiled narration, driving dialog, and plot structure is definitely worth a crack at the big screen.

*First Published in the Weekender