Mashinka Firunts | News

Jeremy Presents AGITPROP! at the Center for Book Arts

2009-06-10T14:40:00.001-07:00

On Friday, June 12th from 6-9pm, Jeremy will convert the Center for Book Arts into the Recessionary New York Department of Agitation & Propaganda. Fresh-pressed komsomolski uniforms will not be compulsory.

From the Center for Book Arts website:
Book Arts Lounge AGITPROP! | Friday, June 12th , 6-9 pm

For three hours we will convert The Center for Book Arts We will print a selection of handbills and small posters relevant to the economic situation affecting all of us, discussing whom the message is for, what purpose these prints might serve and the various ways in which they can be dispersed. $10 suggested donation/ $5 members.

Photographs | Dances of Vice: Secrets du Boudoir

2009-05-23T14:19:00.001-07:00

Clockwise from the top left: Photographs no. 1 & 2 by Don Spiro | Photographs no. 3 & 4 by Voon Wai | Photograph no. 5 by Gabi Porter for Metromix.com.

Jeremy James Thompson alias Vladimir Putin Reads To-Night

2009-05-21T11:32:00.001-07:00

Mister Jeremy James Thompson will be reading selections from his Vladimir Putin piece, to the delight of Soviet expatriates citywide. The details are as follows:

"READING

Organized by Super Machine | http://supermachinepoetry.blogspot.com/

FEATURING

** Jeremy James Thompson - carved from sand castles, part human / part hunan, a jew in the rough, i don't know if he's jewish, reading from his newly formed Putin fantasia, as here: http://autotypist.blogspot.com/ | ** Ishmael Klein - a new scrutiny for hootenannies, with glued on adjustable method dial, outfitting her hands with animal hands, as here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ishkleinfilms | ** James Copeland - still further abbreviation of his trousers, with business as busyness and a dedication to the organization of faxes, as nowhere.

To-NIGHT | Thursday May 21 | 8pm

OUTPOST LOUNGE
1014 Fulton Ave between Grand and Classon. | C train to Franklin. G to Clinton-Washington."

Feature: aNYlife.Wordpress.Com

2009-05-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

Mister Thompson and I are currently the feature on the New York art, culture, and fashion blog aNYlife.com.

Dances of Vice: Secrets du Boudoir

2009-05-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

This evening, I will be modeling the hats of Hey Sailor! Millinery at Dances of Vice: Secrets du Boudoir. The details are below:

"EVENT: Dances of Vice 'Les Secrets du Boudoir' | TIME & DATE: May 16, 2009 - 7PM to 11PM (show starts 8:00) | LOCATION: The Montauk Club - 25 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn | ADMIT: $21 (Adv) - $25 (DOS) - LIMITED QTY

Find yourself dancing the night away with winking beauties clad only in flirtatious vintage dishabille and abandon yourself to vice at Les Secrets du Boudoir, featuring the saucy fun of tap-dancing sensations The MINSKY SISTERS, a tantalizing peek into the boudoir of the enchanting AUTUMN WARD, classic burlesque by lovely RITA MENWEEP of The Peach Tartes, and the hot two-stepping music of GRANDPA MUSSELMAN and His Syncopators.

Also, prepare yourself for a Salacious Spectacle of Magnificent Millinery Creations in an exclusive coquettish hat and fashion show by HEY SAILOR! Hats from San Francisco!"

Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art

2009-05-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I co-delivered a collaborative presentation of archival research at a Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art on the subject of European architectural modernism, Alfred Barr's museum-as-a-torpedo-moving-through-time (pictured above), and geometrical vs. n(E)on geometrical strains of abstract art.

Correspondence from Katherine Dreier (of the Société Anonyme) to Alfred H. Barr, dated February 7, 1937, regarding the installation design of exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, & Surrealism:

"It seemed as if you had deliberately hung the pictures to give the emphases to the abnormal. It was most painful...people left your exhibition feeling wuzzy!”

My Cocktail Hat's Off to Vaginal Davis

2009-05-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Ms. Vaginal Davis, queer sensationalist extraordinaire and topic of my most recent paper on spectacularism, has recently been named the recipient of the 2009 Performance Space 122 Ethyl Eichelberger Award, bestowed upon "an artist who exemplifies Ethyl's larger-than-life style and generosity of spirit; who embodies Ethyl's multi-talented artistic virtuosity, bridging worlds and inspiring those around them." The award will facilitate the staging of a spectacular by the artist at P.S. 122 in the spring. New York City lies in wait of her neo-cabaret confetti.

The Posthuman Dada Guide

2009-04-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

On May 4th, Andrei Codrescu read from The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess at the Solas Bar in New York City. The text is described as "an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world", based around a 1916 chess match between Lenin and Dada founder Tristan Tzara. Rather than offering up a run-of-the-mill reading, Mister Codrescu engaged attendees in a participatory question-and-answer session wherein he, armed with the manuscript, took on the role of Dada Oracle, responding to audience inquiries via randomly chosen excerpts from the text. The result was a raucous reenactment and reenvisioning of the "total pandemonium" of the Cabaret Voltaire (Mister Codrescu appeared sans Hugo Ball's blue and white striped cardboard tophat).

Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines

2009-04-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

Jeremy and I just returned from Chicago, where I presented at the Northwestern University interdisciplinary graduate conference, Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines .

The images above are stills from the visual component of my performative presentation Mesdames et Messieurs, Meine Damen und Herren, Ladies and Gentlemen: Neo-Cabaret Performance and the Performative Subject, in which I sensationalize:

Spectacularism: literally defined as the spectacular or other than that which is normative. Also, a strategy for envisioning new possibilities for subjectivity

Vaginal Davis: a de-centered subject of many sequined hats

Bricktops at the Parlour Club: A Futurist Evening, Dada Cabaret, Bakhtinian Carnival, and Bauhausian Festival-for-the-21st-Century

The Banana Shimmy

The conference was a veritable variety show of death-defying feats of scholarly daring. Highlights from the roster:

Dr. Sue Ellen Case presented a keynote address entitled Assignations, Drives, Collisions, and Stops: A Thinking Woman's Guide to Intersections in which she investigated the de-centered scholarly text and the scholar-as-flaneur

Northwestern PhD candidate Barnaby King's presentation, Clowning at the Crossroads of Culture, in which he engages in an utterly extraordinary triple-tiered performance of a performative text on the circus performer, changes into the costume of a clown - red nose and all - and provides musical accompaniment on calliope.

Lisa Peschel's Pleasure as Evidence: Scripts from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Performance, which commences with a live performance of a comedic operetta delivered by the scholar and two accompanying vocal talents

Step Right Up | PCA Conference

2009-04-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

I will be delivering a presentation at the PCA/ACA National Conference in New Orleans this Friday. The image above is of a handbill I created to accompany the paper, entitled Step Right Up! Toward a Reformulation of the White Cube.

On the occasion of an excursion to the Vieux Carré: Elvis Presley croons New Orleans and King Creole, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe lays her burdens down By the Riverside.

The Autotypograph Presents:

2009-04-08T05:15:00.001-07:00

Jeremy recently applied a new coat of mascara to the Autotypograph in a redesign winking directly at Vorticist typography.

Jeremy to Read at St. Marks To-Morrow

2009-03-22T12:26:00.001-07:00

As part of the Poetry Project Reading Series curated by Kyle Schlesinger, Jeremy will be reading along with Karen Ranall tomorrow, MARCH 23rd, at 8 PM.

"You might say that both poets exercise implementing & synthesizing the textual visual, (textu(r)al). I hope you will come see/hear [them] read.

See Below for more information:

Karen Randall is an artist who works in the media of words, digital collage (both sound and visual), oil painting, and letterpress printing/artist’s books. She is the daughter of an astrophysicist & grew up playing with primitive computers, a very cool chemistry set from the 50s, building short wave radios and a telescope, while also painting & writing poetry. She has taught hands-on science in the Chicago public schools, literary studies in western MA, and letterpress printing at the Center for the Book in NY and at Naropa. She developed four-color printing process as a means of combining the fluidity of contemporary digital imagery with the luminous qualities of ink layered on Japanese papers. Her work has been collected by numerous colleges, institutions and private collectors including the Library of Congress. Images of her work can be seen on line at www.propolispress.com.

Jeremy James Thompson is an instructor at New York’s Center for Book Arts as well as a curator for their New Voices reading series. His work focuses on the process of collaboration, the reinvention of propaganda, and the defining of a practical avant-garde. Through his own Auto Types Press, he has produced collaborative prints with poets including, Edwin Torres, Joan Retallack, David Lehman and Charles Bernstein. His texts and typographic works are published in collections and journals including Cricket Online Review, Pinstripe Fedora, The Houston Literary Review, The Bucky Monkey, Lamination Colony, WORK, and Viz. Inter-Arts, a Trans-Genre Anthology. He blogs about movietelling, typography and poetics at autotypist.blogspot.com.

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Cathedral is Located in the East Village at:
131 E. 10th St., New York, NY
(through the gate and around the back)"

Wantons Go in Bright Brocade

2009-03-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

Wit's End was a smashing success, the second installment is scheduled for March 28, 2009. Photographs 1-3 Steven Rosen, photographs 4-5 Flickr user Darlingdivastar.

Akhmatova's Winter Night of Diamantine Splendours

2009-03-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

March 2, 2009. A snow day was officially declared following the previous day's blizzard. Jeremy and I escorted a bouquet of black and white helium balloons through Manhattan, to the Neue Galerie coat check for hot spiced wine at Cafe Sabarsky, across Central Park (pictured above), to the Pegu Club for Kenta Goto's sensational Sleeping Monks (prepared with warm chamomile-infused scotch), and to Film Forum for the Breadlines & Champagne Series picture show. Me and My Gal (1932) was screening, in which Spencer Tracy entreats Joan Bennett, "Be a good fella and marry me."

For A Practical Avant-Garde

2009-03-03T16:49:00.000-08:00

"Minimalism and postminimalism agreed on one thing: eliminate pictures. Painting took to a pure territory, while the new art forms expanded the realm of art to every conceivable issue and strategy. The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career. This generated what is perhaps this century's biggest art movement: careerism."

Dushko Petrovich, For a Practical Avant-Garde, n+1

Club Wit's End Cocktail

2009-02-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Club Wit's End, the signature cocktail for this evening's opening of Club Wit's End was designed by Jeremy. Should you venture to Marion's to-night, the cocktail will be available throughout the evening.

Bulletin of Spectaculars No. 2

2009-02-24T13:21:00.000-08:00

WANTED: WILD BANDITS OF BURLESQUE (TONIGHT)

ANTI-MAG PRESENTS: GLAMPIRE DESIGN, AN EVENING OF MILLINERY DECADENCE

WIT'S END OPENING NIGHT

"Created by Diane Naegel and Don Spiro, Wit's End is a monthly celebration of the Jazz Age on the Bowery!
On the last Saturday of the month, come join us in a celebration of Jazz Age culture, drinks, and dance at Antik/Marion's on the Bowery! We like to think that an evening of enjoying fine cocktails, dancing the night away, and showing up in your finest is NOT a lost art in New York City...try our signature cocktail, the Wit's End, as well as a couple of old timey favorites (new featured drinks each month)!

THIS MONTH: Dance and drink the night away to the 20s/30s stylings of local favorites Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators! Special Guest vocalist: proprietress of Dances of Vice and our favorite vintage songbird, Shien Lee."

Carnival Tumblers' Backdrops

2009-02-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

"Rimbaud is there with his well-known tirade: 'I used to love idiotic paintings, overdoor pictures, stage decors, carnival tumblers' backdrops, signboards, popular prints, old-fashioned literature, pornographic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers' day, fairy tales, tiny books for tiny tots, old operas, silly refrains, naive rhythms.' So much the worse for those who do not confess to a taste like that; so much the worse for those who turn their backs on the fantastic..."

-Albert Valentin on Eugene Atget, 1928

Dances of Vice: Valentine Voodoo Rhythms

2009-02-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

Jeremy and I are attending Dances of Vice to-night after dinner at Tailor and the Valentine's Day cocktail tasting at Jeremy's bar, The Raines Law Room:

"EVENT: Dances of Vice: Valentine Voodoo Rhythms | TIME & DATE: February 14, 2009 - 7PM til 11PM | LOCATION: Don Hills - 511 Greenwich St. / Spring St (Manhattan) | ADMIT: $10 (with flyer) - $15 (without flyer)

This Valentines Day, take your sweetheart to Dances of Vice, where special guests RAGWATER REVUE direct from San Francisco are prepared to deliver "a lethal concoction of booze-fueled swamp lust" for this one-night exclusive east coast show with their signature medley of raunchy voodoo-alligator-carnival love songs! Ragwater Revue is Gooby, bass; Lady V, vocals; Kris Daniel, guitar.

This hot event also features devilish New Orleans voodoo jazz from the STUMBLEBUM BRASS BAND and sensational 1920s tap-dancing pair THE MINSKY SISTERS!"

Holiday, 1938.

2009-02-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

Of all the rhinestones collected by the wardrobe departments of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and Warner Bros. throughout all the Golden Age of Hollywood, Holiday is surely the most dazzling. Its storyline is allegedly culled from the life of Gertrude Sangford Legendre, "a former debutante who left high society to become a big-game hunter and later spied for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II."

Raines Law Room on Metromix

2009-02-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

Raines Law Room appears on the front page of today's online New York Metromix, illustrated by a photograph picturing Jeremy crafting a cocktail. A direct link to the article is here.

Jeremy to Read at Portable Boog Reader 3 Launch

2009-02-10T22:43:00.000-08:00

Jeremy has a piece in the recently released Portable Boog Reader, available for download here. In commemoration of its launch, there will be a reading this Thursday at the Sidewalk Cafe. Details are below.

Boog City Presents: Portable Boog Reader 3 Launch & Urban Folk Relaunch | Thursday, Feb. 12, 7:30 p.m. | Sidewalk Café, 94 Ave. A (at E. 6th St.) New York | $5 suggested donation with a two-drink minimum | With readings from Portable Boog Reader 3 Contributers: Shafer Hall, Adeena Karasick, Jeff Laughlin, Amy Lawless, Geoffrey Olsen, Jeremy James Thompson

Musical performances by urban folk acts Justin Remer, Joe Crow Ryan, Brian Speaker | Hosted and curated by Urban Folk editor Jonathan Berger and Boog City editor and publisher David Kirschenbaum | For further information: 212-842-BOOG (2664), editor@boogcity.com | PBR3 (BC53) features the work of 72 New York City poets. The online pdf is available at: welcometoboogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc53.pbr3.pdf.

"Boog City is a New York City-based small press now in its 18th year and East Village community newspaper of the same name. It has also published 35 volumes of poetry and various magazines, featuring work by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, and theme issues on baseball, women’s writing, and Louisville, Ky. It hosts and curates two regular performance series—d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press, where each month a non-NYC small press and its writers and a musical act of their choosing is hosted at Chelsea’s ACA Galleries; and Classic Albums Live, where up to 13 local musical acts perform a classic album live at venues including The Bowery Poetry Club, Cake Shop, CBGB’s, and The Knitting Factory. Past albums have included Elvis Costello, My Aim is True; Nirvana, Nevermind; and Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville."

Hanging Structure With Stripes

2009-02-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

Sol LeWitt, Hanging Structure With Stripes, 1963

Raines Law Room on Thrillist

2009-02-02T21:46:00.000-08:00

Raines Law Room - the spokeneasy theatre of mixological spectacles where Jeremy is currently on display as a bartender - is featured on the front page of today's Thrillist New York. Click here for a direct link to the article, wherein it is described as "a sultrily lit, tin-ceiling subterranean sleeve marked only by a small plaque and doorbell -- which, like a freckled Girl Scout hawking Do-Si-Dos, you must ring to be admitted."

Tease N' Tell: A Seminar on the Body Politics of Burlesque

2009-01-30T14:53:00.001-08:00

I'm tickled pink to see exemplars of burlesque taken up as an object of academic inquiry. Scholarly investigations of performance are so overwhelmingly confined to the sort that occurs within the legitimizing walls of the white cube/black box that it's a marvel to see them venturing out into the smoke-filled nightclub parlor and back alley burlesque house.

From the website: "From the seedy Blue Angel Cabaret to the CWTV’s Gossip Girl, in the past decade burlesque has infiltrated the mainstream yet manages to remain a transgressive art form. While it flirts with popularity burlesque at its best does not compromise its subversive origins, erotic themes, and defiant ideals. It naturally lends itself to promoting queer philosophy and values without necessarily calling attention to its inherent queerness.

Contemporary burlesque, often known as neo burlesque, borrows from various genres including dance, drag, performance art, theatre, and, of course, traditional burlesque. It is a hybrid art form that mixes traditions, flaunts rules and standardizations in order to remain provocatively entertaining.

The seminars will invite some of the leading neo burlesque performers in New York to perform as well as provide the theoretical and historical context for their work. The seminar participants will have the opportunity to read about, observe, and engage with this unique form of performance art that advances the artistic expression by constantly challenging the political and cultural authorities.

THE CENTER for LESBIAN & GAY STUDIES (CLAGS)- Seminars in the City | Wednesday 2/4 | 6-8 PM | Room 410 | The LGBT Center | 208 West 13th Street / New York, NY 10011 | Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic. Presenter: Dr. Lukki, performer, producer and educator, New York University and the New York School of Burlesque."