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The Post-Romantic Artist MD Interviews Paul Salamone  Paul Salamone is a Boulder, Colorado-based artist who works in words, pixels, colors, sounds, and continual experiments that inquire. His relevant biography will become apparent as the interview proceeds. He is the POLYSEMY Art Director. His website is paulsalamone.com Earlier in your career you were the editor of a Buffalo satire newspaper, The Beast. Why did you give it up? It's a tricky thing with satire, in that truth takes a back seat to provocation and comedy. As such, I found myself in the position of sacrificing both my own reputation and that of a number of friends in the Buffalo progressive community for the sake of what were essentially short-sighted gags. Unlike, say, The Onion, the fodder for our bits consisted of real people and real occurrences in the city of Buffalo, as well as national politics. And while I don't regret a single one of the issues we produced during my six-month tenure, needless to say I ended up losing a couple friends I wish I still had, and created some needless bad blood amongst the local alternative media. At a certain point it just got to be too much, the levels to which we'd stoop to be provocative every two weeks, and I had to call it quits and move on. But shit, it was fun while it lasted. You went on to found an influential e-zine called The Manifest, in 2003. Fill in the blank: for me as editor in chief, The Manifest E-Zine was _______. A giant pain in the ass. That, and one of the best career-building things I could have done. What was the driving force behind your decision to start the magazine and keep it going? Pride: I moved to Boulder to be part of an ezine being planned by some folks in the local arts community. When they bailed on the project, I took it over, and made it my own. What kept it going was all the positive feedback I got, along with the sheer fun of putting on live events with my contributors. Recently you had a high-profile dialogue with a Zen-trained facilitator, broadcast online. How has the dialogue altered your view of your artistry? Diane Musho Hamilton is a senior student of the Utah Zen abbot Genpo Merzel Roshi, as well as one of the most even-handed group facilitators I've ever met, and a good friend. Our dialogue was meant to address my unsustainable habits as an artist, using in large part her training in Genpo's Big Mind voice dialogue process. Basically, she would ask to speak to different aspects of my artistic persona, the idea being that, as these multiple intelligences are isolated and probed, new insights would emerge. What I took away from the dialogue were three things: Want to read more? Subscribe to POLYSEMY. Click here to preview more articles. ©2006 POLYSEMY. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. |