Harlequin Knights

2008-06-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

For an Unoriginal Literature

2008-06-06T02:50:00.000-07:00

Nice Onion:

MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again

Re-Introducing...

2008-05-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Poetic Research Bureau

Sarbanes, Doller & Doller

2008-04-24T14:04:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends,

You are invited to the next installment of
THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH READING SERIES

SUNDAY, April 27, 2008 at 6:30 pm

With featured readers

Janet SARBANES
Ben DOLLER
Sandra DOLLER

The Smell is located at
247 S. Main Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
The entrance is through the back, by way of the alley, west of Main Street.

The doors will open at 6:30 pm. Five dollars at the door.

More about the featured readers:

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collection Army of One, (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions 2008), and is currently completing a novel entitled This Land: The Adventures of the President's Daughter. She teaches Narrative Writing and Theory in the CalArts MFA Writing Program, and Cultural Studies in the School of Critical Studies, where her scholarship focuses on the role of aesthetic practice in utopian and subcultural social formations. She has recently published criticism in the Journal of Utopian Studies, Popular Music and Society, Afterall, and the anthology Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Her fiction has appeared in Black Clock, Merge, Plum Ruby Review, Zyzzyva and the noulipan Analects.

Ben Doller (né Doyle)'s first book of poems, Radio, Radio, was selected by Susan Howe as winner of the 2000 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He co-edits the Kuhl House Books contemporary poetry series of the University of Iowa Press and has most recently taught in Idaho, Ohio, and California. Wherever he lives, he lives with his wife, Sandra Doller, (née Miller) and their boxador, Ronald Johnson.

Sandra Doller (née Miller) lives in San Diego with her new name, her man Ben Doller (né Doyle), and their pooch Ronald Johnson. Her first book, Oriflamme was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005, and her second collection Chora is forthcoming. Sandra Doller is the founder & editrice of a fancy magazine & press, the curiously named 1913, and she teaches at Cal State San Marcos.

The Poetic Research Bureau

2008-04-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

Last night we held a "soft" opening for the Poetic Research Bureau, a new bookstore/reading-space/lending-library/archive in Los Angeles dedicated to small press poetry chapbooks, books, journals and ephemera.

That's me at the desk. Harold Abramowitz took more pictures and posted them on Flickr.

Ara Shirinyan read from his new book Your Country Is Great (Futurepoem, 2008) and Dan Machlin & Jen Hofer read from a collaboration.

The Poetic Research Bureau is directed by Andrew Maxwell, Joseph Mosconi & Ara Shirinyan. It is the home of Make Now Press, Area Sneaks and the Germ. More information about our new space will be available very soon!

THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES

2008-03-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY, March 30, 2008 at 7pm

With featured readers

Daniel TIFFANY
Kelly LYDICK
Michael SMOLER

The Smell is located at
247 S. Main Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
The entrance is through the back, by way of the alley, west of Main Street.

The doors will open at 6:30 pm. Five dollars at the door.

More about the featured readers:

Daniel Tiffany's first book of poetry, Puppet Wardrobe, appeared in 2006 from Parlor Press. He has published translations of works by Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named one of the "Best Books of 2000" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His poetry, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Boston Review, Volt, The Germ, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and the Paris Review. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. His most recent poetry project, "The Dandelion Clock," was set to music by the composer Daniel Rothman and installed at the Interface New Music Festival in Berlin in 2007. He lives in Venice, California and teaches at the University of Southern California.

Kelly Lydick received her B.A. in Writing and Literature from Burlington College, in Burlington Vermont and her M.A. in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California. She is the author of Mastering the Dream (Second Story Books, 2007) and We Once Were, a chapbook published by Pure Carbon Publishing. Other work has appeared in Twittering Machine, Published in Moments and Burlington College Poetry Journal.

Michael Smoler (b. 1973, Chicago) is a collage artist and poet, living in Los Angeles. He is the author of five small press chapbooks, including in "envy in smoke" (The Healthy Unhealthy Press, NY, 2004), "A Quilt Film About the Death of Jack Spicer" a collaborative prose poem with Coryander Friend (The Healthy Unhealthy Press, NY, 2003), "worn broke" (A Ringing Press, Boulder, CO, 1999), "plot" (Third Ear Press, Boulder, CO, 1998), and "The Candy Was Good" (Third Ear Press, Boulder, CO, 1997). Smoler has studied and taught at Naropa University, in Boulder, CO, where he received a B.A. in Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (1998), and has also studied and taught at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Currently, Smoler is the director of HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS, an exhibitions and performance venue in LA¹s Chinatown, and is working on a manuscript of collected poems (1996-2008), tentatively titled "The Dead Muse."

THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES

2008-02-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2008

With featured readers

Jasper BERNES
Anthony MCCANN

The Smell is located at
247 S. Main Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
The entrance is through the back, by way of the alley, west of Main Street.

The doors will open at 6:30 pm. Five dollars at the door.

A bit more about the featured readers:

Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni) and a literary annotation of the human genome, Desequencer, forthcoming from TAXT. He grew up in Southern California and now lives in Albany, CA with Anna Shapiro and their son Noah. He is a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these two collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He has taught English as a Second Language in the former Czechoslovakia, South Korea and Nicaragua, as well as in New York City. Currently he lives in Los Angeles and teaches poetry at CalArts and ESL to immigrants. He is also the ceremonial and acting poet laureate of Machine Project, an art-performance-gallery
-instructional space in Echo Park.

2008-02-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

Me and my Angeleno friends Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Stan Apps, Ara Shirinyan, Jane Sprague and Mathew Timmons are all featured in The Physical Poets, Vol. 2 from Lil' Norton Press. Pick up a copy if you please.

Launch party for ISSUE ONE of AREA SNEAKS magazine

2008-02-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

From the swell mob, we diverge to the kindred topics of cracksmen, fences, public-house dancers, area-sneaks, designing young people who go out 'gonophing,' and other 'schools.'
—Charles Dickens

Saturday February 16, 2008
7 - 9pm
LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034
www.laxart.org

Featuring readings and performances by:
artist STEPHANIE TAYLOR
poet ANDREW MAXWELL
musician PETER KOLOVOS

The historical relationship between art and language has often occasioned lively and compelling work. AREA SNEAKS, a new print and online journal, seeks to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.

Gertrude Stein's Paris artist salon, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Tatlin's constructive collaboration, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci's editorial partnership, Augusto de Campos's concrete engagement with Brazilian modernism and Mike Kelley's interest in systems of literary knowledge have each provided potential models of positive exchange between artists and writers. AREA SNEAKS hopes to maintain this dialogue by creating a fellowship of discourse within an open community of contemporary artists and writers.

ISSUE ONE Contents

Essays by Stan Apps on “social art” and Daniel Tiffany on “infidel culture and the politics of nightlife”

Interviews with artists Stephanie Taylor (conducted by Kathryn Andrews and Michael Ned Holte) and Scoli Acosta (conducted by Joseph Mosconi and Rita Gonzalez)

Artist projects by Marie Jager, William E. Jones and Christopher Russell

Poetry by Sawako Nakayasu, Mark Wallace, Andrew Maxwell, Therese Bachand, K. Lorraine Graham and Ian Monk

The first appearance in English of Emmanuel Hocquard’s long prose poem “The Cape of Good Hope”

Visual poems by Ben & Sandra Doller

Stephanie Taylor received her M.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2000. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally and is represented by Galerie Christian Nagel, Germany and by Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles. Her book, "Chop Shop" was published by Les Figues Press in 2007.

Andrew Maxwell is a poet, linguist, translator, lexicographer and former bullfight promoter. From 1997-2004 he co-edited seven issues of the occasional poetry journal The Germ, directed the Poetic Research reading series out of Dawson's Bookstore in central LA, and was drummer for the experimental music ensembles The Curtains and Open City. He currently DJs the show “The Dream of Harry Lime” Wednesday nights on KXLU. His poems, essays and translations can be found in Fence, Jubilat, The Hat, Arsenal and Poésie.

Peter Kolovos is a free sound artist from Los Angeles, CA. Over the last decade he has developed an intensely personal sound vocabulary based on raw texture, volume, and duration. The result has been physical, abstract work that constantly shifts and evolves in real time. The mechanisms of impulse, memory, intent, restraint laid bear. He has performed throughout the United States both individually and as part of the group Open City. He has also released vinyl as well as CD recordings through his Thin Wrist imprint. His first solo LP will be released later this year by the Belgian Ultra Eczema label.

www.areasneaks.com

Editors: Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi

2008-01-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Language Lovers,

You are invited to the next installment of
THE SMELL LAST SUNDAY READING SERIES

SUNDAY, JANUARY 27, 2008

With featured readers

John SAKKIS
Mady SCHUTZMAN
Logan Ryan SMITH

The Smell is located at
247 S. Main Street
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
The entrance is through the back, by way of the alley, west of Main Street.

The doors will open at 6:30 pm. Five dollars at the door.

A bit more about the featured readers:

John Sakkis's recent chapbooks include Rude Girl (Duration Press), The Moveable Ones (Transmission Press) as well as the art book post bulletin (Taxt Press). A new chapbook, Gary Gygax, is forthcoming from Cy Gist Press. With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multi-media artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Chinese Notebook being the latest. Recent poetry, interviews, translations and reviews and have appeared in New American Writing, Aufgabe, Mirage #4/ Period(ical), Dusie, The Poker, Beyond Baroque, Hot Whiskey, Shampoo, The Bedside Guide To No Tell Motel, Bombay Gin, Shuffleboil, and Mipoesias. He curates the BOTH BOTH reading series in his apartment in the Lower Haight, SF and DJ's under the moniker ONLYMERK! having opened for Outkast, Heiroglyphics, Black Eyed Peas and the Living Legends among others.

Mady Schutzman is writer and theater artist. She has worked for over 25 years as free lance practitioner of the interactive theatre techniques of Brazilian director Augusto Boal, and co-edited two volumes of essays on his work with Routledge. In 2006, she wrote UPSET! -- a Boal-inspired, Brechtian comedy about the L.A. riots -- which was performed at REDCAT by 30 youth from the Plaza de la Raza youth program. She has published scholarly essays and creative non-fiction in several anthologies and journals including Black Clock, The Drama Review, Errant Bodies, Theatre Topics, and The Journal of Medical Humanities. Mady writes a lot about ambiguity and paradox, comedy, jokes, and trickery as forms of resistance, divination practices and performative tropes like ventriloquism, ritual, and hysteria. She is currently working on a film about the Socialist City a utopian collective started in the high desert 70 miles from L.A. in 1914. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts.

Logan Ryan Smith lives in San Francisco where he publishes Transmission Press chapbooks and the poetry mag, small town. He is author of 2 books of poetry, THE SINGERS (Dusie Press Books), and STUPID BIRDS, which he released under the Transmission Press imprint. His poetry has been published in New American Writing, Bombay Gin, Hot Whiskey Magazine, the tiny, string of small machines, Sorry for Snake, as well as numerous other mags, and also in the anthologies, Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and The Meat Book (Hot Whiskey Press).

2008-01-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

SPECIAL JANUARY BENEFIT FOR POET WILL ALEXANDER

Sunday, Jan 13 at 5pm L.A. Poet and artist Will Alexander has become seriously ill and has no health insurance. In order to help him defray the cost of treatment, a number of his poet friends will join him to read and honor him. Poets reading include Will Alexander, Wanda Coleman, Clayton Eshleman, Jen Hofer, Mathew Timmons and Harold Abramowitz, and Diane Ward

$10 donation (and we will 'pass the hat' for additional contributions. Skylight Books will donate 25% of all book sales made in the store from 4:00 to 8pm to the Benefit.) If you would like to contribute and are unable to attend, checks may be sent to Will's long-term partner and primary caregiver:
Sheila Scott-Wilkinson
400 South Lafayette Park Place, #307
Los Angeles, CA 90057

Movies: 2007 Top Ten

2008-01-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

In no particular order.

Inland Empire

I’m Not There

Eastern Promises

Syndromes and a Century

Colossal Youth

There Will Be Blood

No Country for Old Men

Killer of Sheep

Margot at the Wedding

Regular Lovers

2007-12-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Poetry Community,

Will Alexander, one of our most original and energetic lights, is ill with cancer.

http://www.greeninteger.com/pipbios_detail.cfm?PIPAuthorID=7

The last few months have seen Will in and out of County USC, and otherwise unable to maintain his teaching and reading schedule. Will was freelancing, so his resources to financially cope with this situation are exhausted.

We are collectively asking you to help fund Will's living expenses while he is in treatment and working on recovery. Sheila Scott-Wilkinson, Will's long-term partner, is acting as Will’s primary caregiver and financial manager. She and Will have opened a special joint checking account to receive these monies. Checks can be addressed to 'Sheila Scott-Wilkinson', and mailed to the following address:

Sheila Scott-Wilkinson

400 South Lafayette Park Place, #307

Los Angeles, CA 90057

Love and Peace,

Thérèse Bachand

Jen Hofer

Andrew Joron

Harryette Mullen

Diane Ward

2007-10-16T15:54:00.001-07:00

Please join us for a special backyard evening of poetry, food and conversation on Saturday, October 20, as we welcome poet and visual artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis, all the way from Athens, Greece.

Also reading will be local favorite Deborah Meadows.

Saturday, October 20
5pm

1305 Romulus Dr.
Glendale, CA
91205

Demosthenes Agrafiotis is an artist, poet, photographer, editor and sociologist based in Athens, Greece. Agrafiotis is the author of over 13 books of poetry, including a collaboration with Jerome Rothenberg, An Oracle for Delphi (Membrane Press, 1995). Between 1980 and 1990 he edited the Athens-based art & literary journal Clinamen, which featured translations of several influential American poets into Greek for the first time. His first book to appear in English, Chinese Notebook, is currently being translated by John and Angelos Sakkis.

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her works of poetry include: involutia (Shearsman Press, UK, 2007), The Draped Universe (Belladonna* Books, 2007), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004), and two chapbooks, Growing Still (Tinfish Press, 2005) and "The 60's and 70's: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick" (Tinfish Press, 2003). Her Electronic Poetry Center author page is located: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/meadows/

2007-09-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

Trailer for the documentary Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.

John Malkovich?

AREA SNEAKS

2007-09-04T19:18:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,

The journal I've been working on for, oh, the last year or so is almost ready to launch. It still needs to be printed, but you can get a sneak preview of the content on our website. And if you're feeling up to it you can pre-order a copy.

AREA SNEAKS

Eight Facts About Me

2007-07-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

I was tagged by Flickhead to list eight facts about myself. As good a reason as any to put up a new blog post!

1. I was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria. My parents ran a school for the children of British, Australian, and South African oil executives in a small town called Warri, which has since grown into a minor city. My mother was misdiagnosed with malaria when she became pregnant and when I was born my father planted a commemorative banana tree in our backyard. After an aborted trip through Italy (where we visited our relatives in the small comune of Frosinone) and France (where I came down with a rash) I arrived in California at less than one year of age. I have not been back to Nigeria since 1975.

2. According to family legend, my paternal great-grandfather Tony Mosconi was a member of the Chicago Mafia. The story goes like this: Tony, after killing a man in a gangland shooting, was spirited off to Bakersfield, California, where he was placed into hiding and given a job as a piano tuner. I’m not certain how much of this is true and how much is my father’s fancy imagination. I wonder if my great-grandpa had one of those gangster names, like Tony “Tune Out” Mosconi.

3. According to family fact, my maternal relatives were originally members of the Donner Party, though they separated from the main group and went around the Sierra Nevadas rather than over them, and thus avoided the cannibalistic misfortunes suffered by the rest of the settlers. The Campbells, as my grandmother’s family was known, settled in what is now known as the Silicon Valley and founded the city that still bears their name.

4. I played football in high school. And I was pretty good, too. I was a running back. I made All-State as a Sophomore on the varsity team, but I was injured my junior year (a back injury that is still a problem to this day, and a broken thumb), and by my senior year I was too interested in sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and beat poetry, too estranged from the meatheads on my team to enjoy myself, and too worried about getting seriously injured over something that in the big scheme of things was not that important. I still have nightmares in which I have to show up for late-summer conditioning and training.

5. In college, and for a few years after, I was in two rock bands. I was the lead singer in both bands. The first band was formed with former members of the hardcore emo band Portraits of Past. We called ourselves the Audience, and while we retained elements of hardcore in our sound, we were also influenced by Joy Division, the Birthday Party, Bauhaus, etc. This was the mid-90s. We put out one LP and CD. After I left the band, the remaining members changed the name to Vue and were signed to Sub Pop and eventually a major label in the wake of the success of the Strokes, where they were pretty much ignored and eventually dropped. The other band was called, variously, St. Joseph & the Abandoned Food, Joe Mosconi & the Substandard Cushion…we changed our name each show. We were sort of no-wave, with some Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu influences. Our drummer Chris Cohen went on to play in Deerhoof and Noel Harmonson our guitar player is currently in a band called Comets on Fire. Our other guitar player Andrew Maxwell was a poet and edited a journal called the Germ. We put out one 7”.

6. Related to that, I also ran a small independent record label for a year or so called The Aporia Label. I only put out three 7” records during that time: the St. Joseph & the Abandoned Food record; a record by a free-jazz group called Axaxax Asmlö; and a record by a noise rock band called the Lowdown. These were all bands in Santa Cruz during the late 90s, part of a brief music renaissance that we dubbed “no-brow”.

7. I self-published a poetry chapbook (then I would have called it a poetry zine, but it was essentially a chapbook) when I was 19 called Masters of the Craven. No you will never see a copy.

8. The longest movie I’ve ever seen is Ken Jacobs’ Star-Spangled to Death at nearly 7 hours. I have a chance to see Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-long Out 1 in the coming weeks, but it’s playing at a theater where the seats are incredibly uncomfortable.

I tag Stan, Matt, Mark, Lorraine, Franklin, Rodney, Erin and Suzanne.

2007-06-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

Tonight, join us to celebrate the release of Ara Shirinyan's first book Syria Is in the World out now on Palm Press.

At Betalevel, Chinatown, Los Angeles. 9-ish.

Tonight!

2007-05-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s Advocate and Gochis Galleries present:
THE RAINBOW GOBLINS
Curated by Darin Klein
May 31 – July 15, 2007
Opening Reception Thursday, May 31, 7-9 p.m. Free

LOS ANGELES, CA, MAY 31, 2007- Inspired by Count Ul de Rico’s children’s book The Rainbow Goblins, curator Darin Keith will be presenting a group exhibit of the same name at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s Advocate & Gochis Galleries from May 31 through July 15. The exhibit will kick off with an opening reception at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 31. Admission is free. The Galleries are open Monday-Friday, 6-10 p.m., and Saturdays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Klein, the Programs Coordinator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has assembled an array of works by more than 20 artists, each embodying aspects of a single color. Mounted in a dense, salon-style exhibition, this communal mosaic reads from afar as the spectrum of the rainbow, while closer inspection reveals each artist’s individuality.

“The rainbow can symbolize many different concepts—creative imagination, cultural diversity, God’s promise, fleeting insubstantiality,” says Klein. “In the gay community, it was adopted as a political emblem, only to become interpreted by some as a token of commercialized kitsch. This exhibit takes a new look at an old symbol.”

In Count de Rico’s 1978 book, cruel goblins seek to capture and exploit the rainbow, until a meadow of wildflowers uses its collective power to defeat the plot. Stirred by this modern fairytale, The Rainbow Goblins exhibit reimagines the rainbow as a celebration of the diversity and individuality of the artistic community and its power to call for and instigate change.

Participating artists include:
Adam J. Ansell, Erik Bluhm, BODEGA VENDETTA & PRVT DNCR, Nao Bustamante, Young Chung, Roy Colmer, Zackery Drucker, David Larsen, Matt Lipps, Jason Mecier, Lucas Michael, Billy Miller, Max Miller, Amir Nikravan, Coco Peru, Terri Phillips, Aaron Plant, Steven Reigns, robbinschilds & A.L. Steiner, Christopher Russell, Ami Tallman, Jo-ey Tang, Aiyana Udessen and Jim Winters.

Curator Klein’s artwork, independent curatorial projects and small press publications have been exhibited and distributed internationally.

Exhibition Dates: May 31–July 15, 2007
Opening Reception : Thursday, May 31, 7-9 p.m. Admission is free.
Gallery hours: Monday–Friday, 6-10 p.m., Saturdays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and by appointment
For information, call 323-860-7337.
Located in the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s Village at Ed Gould Plaza
1125 N. McCadden Place, Los Angeles 90038
(One block east of Highland, just north of Santa Monica Blvd.)
Free parking across from The Village

Radical

2007-05-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

The entire contents of the seminal 1970s video magazine Radical Software is now available online.

2007-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse…

- Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”

(photo credit: Johnny Kobra for the L.A. Times)

Appealing Biography

2007-04-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from my review of Aurie Ramirez's show at the Jack Hanley Gallery is up at the Fillip website.

This Weekend in Los Angeles

2007-04-25T18:41:00.000-07:00

Whew, there's much to choose from this weekend in the poetry and art realms!

1. FEMINAISSANCE Colloquium on Women, Experimental Writing and Feminism

ƒeminaissance is a colloquium on women, experimental writing and feminism, to be held on April 27th and 28th, 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). A related workshop and consciousness-raising event will take place on Sunday, April 29th at LACE, in Hollywood.

This event is organized by Christine Wertheim, Matias Viegener, and Teresa Carmody and is sponsored by the Writing Program at CalArts with a generous grant from the Annenberg Foundation. Feminaissance is presented in conjunction with MOCA’s show “WACK: Art and Feminist Revolution.” The colloquium puts writers from many genres in dialogue about issues concerning women writers today.

FRIDAY, April 27, 2007
MOCA, 250 S. Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012

7 pm Reception

8 pm Readings by Caroline Bergvall, Teresa Carmody, Meiling Cheng, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Tracie Morris, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, and Lidia Yuknavitch

SATURDAY, April 28, 2007
MOCA, 250 S. Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012

10:30 am-12:00 pm
Panel: “Feminine” Writings
Are there specifically “feminine” texts, topics and modes of writing? Or is the concept of “écriture féminine” more hindrance than help?
Panelists: Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Chris Kraus, and Lidia Yuknavitch

12:20—1:50 pm
Panel: Selves
Are women writers creating new forms of selfhood? If so, how does this manifest in the subject and/or perspective of the work and in the object, i.e., the formed text?
Panelists: Tracie Morris, Vanessa Place, and Christine Wertheim

LUNCH BREAK

3:15—4:45 pm
Panel: The Social
Can women writers effect the social imaginary in ways that positively change our psycho-sexual organization? Are they obliged to, or is this another version of mothering that restricts women?
Panelists: Dodie Bellamy, Bhanu Kapil, Yxta Maya Murray, Maggie Nelson

5:00—6:30 pm
Panel: Categories
What is gender today? Are the terms “gender” and feminism still useful in writing? Or are we in a post- or trans-gendered era, and to what intent social, representational, aesthetic, activist?
Panelists: Wanda Coleman, Susan McCabe, Eileen Myles, and Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young

DINNER BREAK

8:30 Readings by Dodie Bellamy, Wanda Coleman, Susan McCabe, Yxta Maya Murray, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place and Juliana Spahr

SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2007
LACE, 6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028

2-6 pm Potluck and consciousness-raising workshop on MOTHER: literary, real, symbolic and edible. Led by Bhanu Kapil, Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus.

2. Around Photography

Around Photography is a unique two-day conference organized by UCLA’s Department of Art that brings together a range of prominent artists, filmmakers, critics, and curators. A presentation by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean on Tuesday, April 24, and an evening of artist films in the Billy Wilder Theater on Thursday, April 26, run in conjunction with the conference.

FRIDAY 27 APRIL | Day I

7pm
Photography's Expanded Field
Moderated by Professor George Baker, UCLA Department of Art History and an Editor of the journal October, artists Barbara Probst, Nancy Davenport and curator Douglas Fogle will introduce the subject of photography's discourse with other media.

SATURDAY 28 APRIL | Day II

11am
The Archive Reconsidered
Moderated by Professor Eleanor Kaufman, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA artists Professor Catherine Opie, Department of Art, UCLA, Joel Sternfeld, and critic Jan Tumlir will address issues of taxonomy and politics as a means of investigating the photographic dimensions of what theorists have termed "an archival impulse" within contemporary art.

2pm
A New Luminism
Moderated by Professor James Welling, Department of Art, UCLA, art historian Professor Jonathan Crary, Department of Art History, Columbia University and artists Uta Barth and Anthony McCall will focus on issues of light, space and perception as a way of broadening conventional notions of the photographic.

LOCATION:
HAMMER Museum| Gallery 6
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024

3. The Smell Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series

Sunday, April 29

Reading to Celebrate a new mother anthology by Fence Books, with readers Wanda Coleman, Martha Ronk and Rae Armantrout

The Smell
247 S. Main, Los Angeles, CA 90012 [enter in back]
Between 2nd and 3rd Street
6:30 pm

2007-04-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold for becoming the first food writer ever to win a Pulitzer prize for criticism. Gold really is, as he might say himself, "godhead." Los Angeles would not be the same without him.

Doug Cummings at Filmjourney has some nice words for J-Gold as well.

Dialectical Fuss

2007-04-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

News and reports on the Dialectical Fuss, in which I heroically performed the role of Oliver Hall's radical love coach, are here and here.
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Also see reviews penned by Stan Apps at Jacket. Stan Apps apparently approves of Nada Gordon's Folly and Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson.
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It has become painfully clear, in debates about gun control and the 2nd Amendment, that libertarian gun nuts do not appreciate the illogic of their position. One hears over and over the defense that we need guns to protect ourselves against the encroaching authoritarianism of our government, that the right of the people to bear arms is the last defense against federal fascism. One thus invokes, in defense of the law, a fantasy scenario in which the government would surely perceive the arms-bearers as traitorous. "We must defend the law because we have the right to be outlaws." But the United States cannot produce Bolsheviks. Instead we conjure up Branch Davidians.