Poet Jen Hofer opened the doors (and backyard gates) of her Cypress Park home Sunday night for the second installment of her Moving Word poetry and film series, co-curated by filmmaker David Gatten and featuring the work of several local luminaries. This must be the largest crowd any up-and-coming (heck, even established) LA writer or filmmaker will ever see. Jen has an invitation list in the hundreds and, unlike most salons, this one welcomes gate-crashers. The notoriously hard-to-park neighborhood was jam-packed with film, poetry and art lovers from far-flung burgs like Valencia and Venice.

Filmmaker Rebecca Baron screened her early experimental short The Idea of North (1995). From the New York Film Festival website: In the guise of chronicling the final months of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as means of knowing the past and the paradoxic interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron's words “meaning is set adrift.”

Andrew Choate read some funny Flarf-esque poetry (though I don’t believe he used Google to create the work) and he also held up hand-made signs with two-word poems written on them. I remember one of them: Ladycat Cadylac.

Museum of Jurassic Technology founder David Wilson screened his structuralist-era masterpiece Dead Reckoning (didn’t catch the year – perhaps 1980?).

Susan Simpson screened a devastating new short, Boll Weevil Days (2005). Simpson, a puppeteer, created all the buildings and puppets in this short film. The plot dramatizes a nuclear or terrorist blast of some sort in Los Angeles, set to old-timey country music such as the Carter Family. If you're in Los Angeles this weekend, don't miss The Sunset Chronicles, Episode Three, a marionette/puppet show put on by The Little Fakers. Susan Simpson is a member of the group. And on the website I just linked to you can find a Quicktime short of the first Sunset Chronicles episode.

Maggie Nelson read from her book Jane: A Murder.

Amar Ravva performed a multimedia memoir (a video played behind him as he read) entitled American Canyon. You can read part of American Canyon online.

And finally, Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch screened a work-in-progress with live musical accompaniment by Devin McNulty about the last free-roaming buffalo herd in Utah.

I’ll try to post more frequently from here on out, I promise.