From 1997 to 1999 or thereabouts, I operated a Web magazine called pomegranates at the pomegranates.com domain, a domain which is no longer mine. I discontinued updates to pomegranates in 1999, acutely aware of the time that keeping a webzine going stole from my own creative work. During the few short years for which I worked on the site, Clinton was impeached, the 1979 Volker Schlondorff film The Tin Drum was subjected to a new round of censorship at an American public library in the midwest, and millennium hysteria was upon us. The events of September 11, 2001 had yet to occur.
These pages restore much of pomegranates webzine to the Web, in its original form and design with the exception of any accommodation necessary to fit it into the extended web of sites that now come under the umbrella of Grain is My Medium. Although the last "Home" page that I created for pomegranates included a note from me saying that the website would remain on the Web indefinitely, it began to feel odd to maintain the presence of a webzine that was no longer current and I eventually discontinued hosting services for pomegranates. Note that because not everything is restored, these pages may include references and hypertext links to material that is not accessible.
If I have restored art or articles that you contributed to the original magazine and you want me to suppress the content, please use the contact form to write me and I will do so. Because of the transient nature of the Web, I have not been able to contact everyone, though I have tried to be sensitive in restoring pomegranates to at least some postmortem existence on the Web. Whatever its flaws, pomegranates remains a quirky and arty webzine that did some good things.
Because the original presentation of pomegranates webzine is not entirely intact, the sidebar provides a key to the meanings of the individual "buttons" shown in the webzine's graphical navigation bar.
— Katherine Enos
July 2010
The fruit itself, or the seed of the pomegranate, as I used to be. The pomegranate always returns you to this page. (It would be too confusing to reinstate an original top-level page detailing posts of more than 10 years back.)
The rat. Not the year of the Rat, but the department of the Radical Art Terrorist (oh là là). The use of the word "terrorist" has come to be ill-advised since September 11, 2001; however, when pomegranates webzine was created back in 1997, I chose it because it made reference to a politically aware, even radical, artist and to art that was dangerous in intention and in meaning, though R.A.T. was the tongue-in-cheek name adopted by a group of artists in the 1960s. Think André Breton in 1928 when surrealism was revolution: Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. Think Situationism and Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life: People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth. The combination of creativity and politics is potent, even explosive, whether voiced by Marcel Duchamp: I don't believe in art. I believe in artists, or by punks like the Dead Kennedys in Chickenshit Conformist, a scathing judgment of an increasingly conformist music industry.
Kitsch. Everyday living. When I initially restored the site in summer of 2010, I posted mostly art and critical work and disabled this part of pomegranates. Based on writer request, however, I've now reactivated this section and posted a fair amount of the original writings. For now, you'll have to use the navigation bar on this page to get your kitsch until I update the navigation bar on the rest of the pages with this change.
Frame. Art. I would never have devoted myself to a website that didn't have it, particularly one lacking photography, Baudelaire's so-called "machine art" and, after writing, my first.
Critique. Being greatly fond of literary and cultural criticism, it was my hope to contribute to the creation of a Web-based repository of the same.
Prose. The proverbial fly on the wall. This department hosted words, sentences, paragraphs. What it is.