CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Amster is an artist, musician, and anthropologist. Formerly the guitarist for the band "Powaseed," he is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamilton College. Previous gigs include stints at The Tufts University Experimental College, U/Mass-Boston, and Wheaton College, as well as performances at the "Plough and Stars," "The Middle East," and the now-defunct "Club3." A long-time resident of the Boston area, he has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the former Soviet Union, Western and Eastern Europe and is currently in the process of editing a volume on the borders in Southeast Asia as well as writing an ethnography on sociocultural change among a small indigenous group of Sarawak (Malaysia) on the island of Borneo. He can be contacted at yaro@mediaone.net.

Ri Anderson lives and works in Boston. In 2000, she participated in the 2000 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; The I of the Beholder: Objectifying the Self, Studio Soto, Boston, MA; What’s the Big Idea?, Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, MA. She also participated in an artists' residency at the Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, MA, curated by Nick Capasso.

Her group exhibitions include shows at the Federal Reserve Gallery, Boston, MA; Perrin Gallery, Brookline, MA; Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA; Viridian Artists, New York, NY; Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA; The Copley Society, Boston, MA; and the Midtown Plaza Galleries, Atlanta, GA.

Awards and honorable mentions include the First Place Jean and Kahlil Gibran Award (Copley Society, 1995), Honorable Mention in the Ernst Haas Golden Light Awards (Maine Photographic Workshops, 1996), and Second Place in the Art of Love (Cambridge Art Association, 1997). In addition, her work is in the Permanent Collection of the DeCordova Museum. She can be contacted at ri_anderson@hotmail.com.

Peter DiIanni (PWD) is a conceiver and constructor with credits in oil painting, music composition and percussive performance, general contracting and fine carpentry, and co-credits with his wife, Leigh, in the production and (mis)instruction of a small portion of the ever-so-tenative human race, namely Jackson of 2 years, and Emma of 2 months. Generally, the human race element takes precedent, but with proper negotiations and some "costly" time (at this point in his life, there's no such thing as "free time"—it comes at some cost) he still manages to squeak out a batch of paintings every year.

His paintings tend to be vividly colored and packed with forms and people, often conveying mysterious, exciting and bizarre themes. Ivan Karp, founder and owner of the renowned O.K. Harris Gallery in Soho, New York describes his work as "spirited, mature, and convincing."

DiIanni is based in the Boston area and his paintings can be viewed anytime at www.peterdiianni.com. Contact him at paint14me@aol.com.

Matthew T. Grant is a Virgo. 6' 7'' tall. Plays guitar and sings. PhD in German studies. Dissertation: Critical Intellectuals and the New Media: Bernward Vesper, Ulrike Meinhof, the Frankfurt School and the Red Army Faction. Has been in the following bands: Spanking Machine, Maximum Leader, Jumbo, Observatory. Best remembered for having said: "I am made of God." Do not contact him. He will contact you.

David Halperin writes stories for adults and children. He can be reached at d_halperin@yahoo.com.

Wendy Halperin is an unknown photographer.

Mary Holmes is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is 91 years old and has been painting for over 80 years.

P.J. Pappas is a lunar-cycle organic writer and freelance farmer currently operating out of an '85 Dodge conversion van somwhere in the western deserts of the U.S.; working on a forty day-forty night confrontation with diabloical tectonic forces at work in the planet's underworld, and simultaneously attempting to negotiate a five-year contract with Righteousness, and an attendant 3-million dollar per year endorsement deal with DopeInk.chrome. His dispatches, Futuro Field Notes, specialize in gonzo reportage from the experiential outbacks of American, and Outernational, cultural no-fly zones, insanity and inanity testing and gunnery grounds, and covert-Ops beyond the Edge. Sound-recordings of Dubhop remixes of his bellettrizm are also forthcoming. His reachability varies but can be tested at pjpapp@hotmail.com.

Colin D. Pilney, the son of Harold and Sally Pilney, was born on November 7, 1964, in Virginia, Minnesota. It’s not usually hot out there in November, but the warm temperature on that day convinced his father that Satan himself was acting as midwife. While a student in Eveleth Junior High School in Eveleth, Minnesota, he declined enrollment in the National Honor Society, on principle. He narrowly lost the election for Senior Homecoming King, and continually irritated the High School guidance counselor, who refused to report his standardized test scores to scholarship committees. He was given extended detention for his lack of school spirit, but skipped it for violin lessons. He did not attend the Senior Prom, but took his mother to the opera, instead.

After graduating from Eveleth Senior High in 1982, he entered Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He had been accepted for admission after his Junior year of High School, but declined in order to spend another year in the woods drinking beer with bikers and hockey-players. While in college, he was frequently pegged as a potential serial killer. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1986 with majors in Classics and Geography, and a core concentration in Music (theory and violin performance). He was graduated magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His senior Classics thesis was entitled The Evolution of the Roman Triumph, and was written under the supervision of Dr. Jeremiah Reedy. His first experiences with gainful employment followed, when he delivered the St. Paul Pioneer Press, cooked pizzas, and pumped gas at the Ford Parkway Amoco. The gas station position was the best job he has had to date, and he probably should have kept it and stayed in Minnesota, with the normal people, playing the violin in the St. Paul Civic Symphony and the quartet, sailing, partridge hunting, avoiding women (except as friends), and watching the Vikings, the state’s professional football team.

He entered Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts in 1987, after some time driving around the country and living in a Chevy pick-up. His Master of Arts thesis in Classics, entitled The Fishes of Juvenal’s Fourth Satire, was written under the direction of Dr. Peter Reid. While attending Tufts, he worked at a gas station, the International Catacomb Society, managed an office for the U.S. Census Bureau, and became a bike messenger for a summer, before finally landing a position as a Sales Order Administrator for Cayman Systems, a computer networking firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his spare time, he worked as a security guard for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and catalogued ancient coins at the Sackler Museum. The security guard thing was almost as good as the gas station: while he missed the company of manly men and their jovial, drunken lbonhomie, the opportunities for getting hooked up with the unprincipled and morally lax female dropouts from America’s pampered north-eastern middle classes were practically limitless. He first saw his future child-bride in the Botticelli Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, although it took him two years to track her down and get some. He attributes his taste for the ghetto and its denizens to his association with her. Previously, he avoided contact with those people, except Indians, of course, because it’s necessary to drive through reservations to get anywhere out west, and who doesn’t enjoy the spectacle of a broken, humbled people and their rusty old trucks?

He began his doctoral studies at Fordham University in 1991, and worked under the mentorship of Dr. Harry B. Evans. While completing the requirements for his doctoral degree, he taught Elementary and Intermediate Greek and Latin, Advanced Latin, and Classical literature in translation at Fordham University’s Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses. Reading everything on the reading lists was a time-consuming miscalculation, as was his tangling with more locals than he could take down at one time. He also worked as an editor for the Database of Classical Bibliography, a position with intermittent remuneration. From 1993 to 2000 he was entombed in the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage (Poe Park, Bronx, New York), where he was the caretaker, cranky tour-guide, and good-will ambassador from the developed world. There he killed at least 97 rodents with poison, traps, cinder blocks, and a slingshot. He will be renting a room in Brooklyn, New York, and taking his child-bride to a part-time existence with a certain Database and Classics Consortium colleague/crazy person, her love child, and 20 partially busted African masks, while making a transition to a life of leisurely rustication and uxoriousness in what may be a new home in a picturesque horse country town, which has a military book dealer, West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes, and a German restaurant downtown. He does not remember much of anything from spring 1994 to summer 1999, and offers his apologies for whatever he might have said or done. He can be reached at cpilney@gc.cuny.edu.

As a child Addi Somekh always dreamed of becoming a reporter, but instead realized he had no choice but to be a balloon twister.

A.G. Vermouth is the editor of Zebrameat. He can be reached here.

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