Harlequin Knights

NEW! Los Angeles Literary Calendar

2011-07-07T15:55:00.001-07:00

Literary Happenings in LA & More

Paros, Little Red Leaves

2010-10-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

I edited a selection of poems from the Paros Translation Symposium for the new issue of Little Red Leaves.

WORD SEARCH Reviewed

2010-09-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

Steven Fama has reviewed my book, WORD SEARCH:

Puzzle Poem Pulchritude.

WORD SEARCH

2010-07-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

I have a new book out.

WORD SEARCH

published by OMG! Books

Limited edition, 100 copies with a commemorative pen (the only pen in existence with the words "motherfucker" and "Creeley" on it).

Get it here.

BUT ON GEOMETRIC

2010-06-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

PARROT 4 But On Geometric

by Joseph Mosconi $6.00

The PARROT series was originally issued by Blanc Press (Los Angeles) from 2005-2010. Insert Press is reissuing facsimile editions of each title from thePARROT series and releasing a Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection at the end of the run.

PARROT will print the work of Harold Abramowitz’s A House on a Hill (A House on a Hill, Part One), Amanda Ackerman’s I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander’s On the Substance of Disorder, Stan Apps’Politicized Pretty Picture, Amina Cain’s Tramps Everywhere, Teresa Carmody’s I Can Feel, Allison Carter’sAll Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Michelle Detorie’sFur Birds, Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, K. Lorraine Graham’s My Little Neoliberal Pony, Jen Hofer’s The Missing Link, Maximus Kim’s Break Bloom Burn, Janice Lee’s Fried Chicken Dinner, Bruna Mori and George Porcari’s May I take Your Order?, Joseph Mosconi’s But On Geometric, Vanessa Place’s Forcible Oral Copulation, Amarnath Ravva’s Airline Music, Stephanie Rioux’s My Beautiful Beds, Ara Shirinyan’s Erotic in Czech Republic, Michael Smoler’s Pieces of Water, Brian Kim Stefans’ Viva Miscegenation, Mathew Timmons’ Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, and Allyssa Wolf’s Loquela.

Individual issues of PARROT sell for $6.00. Subscribe to PARROT and receive all the individual titles from the PARROT series for $81.00 or pre-order the Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection, signed and numbered 1-50 for $100.00.

2010-04-21T18:18:00.001-07:00

AREA SNEAKS #2

2009-11-02T15:50:00.000-08:00

Announcing...

AREA SNEAKS #2

Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine.
- Charles Dickens

Area Sneaks is a Los Angeles-based journal edited by Joseph Mosconi & Rita Gonzalez that seeks to encourage dialogue between the worlds of visual art and poetry.

interviews with VISUAL ARTISTS

Edgar Arceneaux interviewed by Noellie Roussel

Analia Saban interviewed by Claire de Dobay Rifelj

POETRY by

Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Aaron Kunin

Doug Nufer

Franklin Bruno

Demosthenes Agrafiotis

Ara Shirinyan

Harold Abramowitz & Amanda Ackerman

Mathew Timmons

Will Alexander

Richard Kostelanetz

portfolios of VISUAL ARTISTS

Jody Zellen

Demosthenes Agrafiotis

a VISUAL POETRY symposium featuring

Robert Grenier

Johanna Drucker

Peter Ciccariello

Jessica Smith

William R. Howe

Derek Beaulieu

conducted by K. Lorraine Graham

ARTIST-POET collaborations

Kerry Tribe & Nick Moudry

Hillary Mushkin & Jen Hofer

$15

AVAILABLE ON-LINE via Paypal

email info@areasneaks.com for other arrangements

Upcoming Launch Events

Seattle: Friday, November 6, 7:30pm at Pilot Books, 219 Broadway E, Seattle, WA

Vancouver: Saturday, November 7, 8:00pm at Artspeak, 223 Carrall Street, V6B 2J2 Canada, Vancouver, BC...hosted by the Fillip Review

http://areasneaks.com/

Ackerman/Arrieta/Meadows/Mosconi

2009-05-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends,

It would be awesome if you could join us for an afternoon reading

on Sunday, May 24, 2009
at The Lounge at REDCAT

with

Amanda Ackerman
Marcia Arrieta
Deborah Meadows
&
Joseph Mosconi

FREE

Doors open at 2:00pm
Reading starts at 2:30pm

Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches. She is co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She is a member of UNFO (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS. Her chapbook The Seasons Cemented is forthcoming from Hex Presse, and her collaborative book Sin is to Celebration is forthcoming from House Press. Her work has also been published or is forthcoming in flim forum: A Sing Economy, String of Small Machines, The Physical Poets, WOMB, Moonlit, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Text, and Area Sneaks.

Marcia Arrieta’s work has appeared in Blueprint Review, A capella Zoo, Otoliths, So To Speak, 13th Moon, 88, The Bukowski Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Cold Mountain Review, Mipoesias, and others. Her Chapbook experimental was published by potes & poets press; and her manuscript the curve against the linear was chosen by Toadlily Press and published in their Quartet Series—An Uncommon Accord. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry journal, now in its 18th year.

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her most recent book of poetry is from Shearsman Press entitled Goodbye Tissues. Other 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/

Joseph Mosconi is a writer and linguist based in Los Angeles. He is co-editor of the art & poetry journal Area Sneaks and is co-director of the Poetic Research Bureau, a literary service in the public domain. His work has appeared in Try, Shampoo, Triple Canopy, The Physical Poets vol. 2, Primary Writing, the Fillip Review and other journals and magazines.

What I've Been Up To Lately, Pt. 1

2009-03-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Long time no post.

1. Lisa Robertson, Yedda Morrison & Sophie Robonson read at a downtown gallery called compactspace. The event was hosted by Les Figues Press and my outfit, the Poetic Research Bureau. We called this the "My Three Sons" reading. -son -son -son. Sophie read to us from Britannia via pre-recorded video; Yedda read from her fantastic new book Girl Scout Nation; and Lisa read from her new book Magenta Soul Whip. Afterwards we stumbled across the street to the recently redesigned Coles, who claim to be the originators of the french dip sandwich. For those of you who don't live in Los Angeles, there are two downtown restaurants that claim to be the originators of the french dip. The other one is Philippe's. I can't settle that dispute, but I can proclaim that, having eaten at both joints recently, Philippe's is much better in the sandwich department. What Cole's has going for it is that the atmosphere is more like a tavern and they have great beers on tap. Philippe's is like an old-school depression-era cafeteria, which has its charm.

2. For the celebration of Russian Futurism's 100th annivesary, Christian Bök & Steve McCaffery read some zaum & sound poems at the getty Center. I love noise, so seeing Christian read is always a treat. I continue to think that Christian's piece for Murray Schafer's experimental opera Princess of the Stars, in which Christian plays the Three Horned Enemy, is one of the best sound pieces I've ever heard.

3. Met up with Scoli Acosta and a few others for a wonderful spicy Korean crab stew at Ondal 2. The stew is cooked tableside by the waitresses; an incredible array of kimchee and panchan are laid out in front of you; and once you're almost done with the stew, the waitress comes by and cuts fresh pieces of pasta into the remaining juices and makes a mouth-watering pasta dish; then, just when you think you can't eat anymore, the waitress comes by again and makes a huge dish of delicious crab fried rice with what's left of the crab juice. At that point you really can't eat anymore.

Scoli and I are working on a children's book together, and it was great to see some of the drawings he's been making for it. The book is kind of an experimental children's book; it's about animals, and all the language uses the same syntax, such as: Oh! This sober mastodon indiscreetly awakened that dramatic hippopotamus. Or: Ugh! That dolorous husky remotely touched some watchful iguanodon. All the language was found and manipulated by yours truly. I think there will eventually be abaout 20 drawings. One of them is below.

Catching Up

2009-02-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

After a terrific reading by Kit Robinson & Diane Ward at the Poetic Research Bureau, we headed down to Chinatown where William E. Jones was holding a book release party for his latest project, Heliogabalus. In this, the third book in a trilogy of textual appropriations, Jones collaged various texts about the Roman emperor (who was somewhat of a gender bender, at least in myth: he supposedly married a man named Zoticus, wore excessive make-up and powder, and asked several physicians to equip him with female genitalia -- though most of this is likely apocryphal) with vintage ads and photographs from 70s-era magazines. The design, apparently, exactly mimics a magazine called After Dark.

Woids ‘n Aht: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing, a panel of visual artists who use text prominently in their work, was held the next day at MOCA. Mary Kelly, David Bunn and Charles Gaines each presented papers and examples from their work. I was especially interested to see this panel in light of a recent conversation over at K. Lorraine Graham’s blog about avant-garde writing and art and the pressure in each field to make overtly political work. Kelly and Gaines, especially, could be described as artists who foreground the political. Unfortunately they were the least compelling on this day. David Bunn, on the other hand, was a revelation.

Bunn, as I wrote below, acquired the archive of two million reference cards from the LA Public Library when the system went digital (a photograph of his studio looks like the giant archive where the Ark of the Covenant was stored at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark) -- he now creates art, poems and artist books with the language on the cards. In the image below, for instance, Bunn created a poem by looking up all the titles in the reference library that begin with the words "Why Does".

The issue of "poetry" as a problematic discourse in the field of art came up during Bunn's talk. According to Bunn, when he first contemplated creating poems in the late 80s/early 90s, he had to face the fact that he would be working in a field that had been totally discredited, maligned and ridiculed by the art world due to its perceived "subjective affect", senimentality and emotionalism. Poetry, he implied, did not engage in critical thinking, and Bunn was a conceptual artist for whom critical thinking was paramount -- how could he possibly write poetry? These sentiments were later echoed by Charles Gaines when he claimed that his total non-commitment to poetry stemmed from the idea that "You can't think and have feelings at the same time."

One hardly needs to point out that this is a sort of caricature of poetry -- of romantic effusion and Hallmark card horridness. I suppose the artists just weren't (aren't?) aware of the history of poetry -- that by the early 90s, (before then, even!) there were several strains of poetics that held the same sort of suspicions about subjective affect, emotionalism, sentimentality, lyricism, etc.

Later that night I ate some foie gras cotton candy. It was basically a big hunk of foie gras atop a lollipop stick, wrapped in sweet vanilla. You eat it in one bite. Sweet, salty, gamey. And surprisingly very tasty.

2009-01-29T14:24:00.000-08:00

Went to see the new show at the Luckman Gallery, Dance Witches Dance, a collaboration between Lara Schnitger and My Barbarian. Schnitger has been making fragile, somewhat anthropomorphic sculptures out of commonplace materials such as knitted and sewn textiles, fabrics and sticks for several years now. She calls her sculptures "characters," which she literalizes with titles such as Beijing Bitch, The Cougar and Suicide Woman.

For this show she teamed up with performance collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade) who provided a song & dance interpretation of her sculptures. The conceit was that the sculptures were witches, and that the members of My Barbarian were some sort of sorcerers who could bring the sculptures to life in order to make them dance to the songs being sung. Lara Schnitger danced in the background and occasionally took part in the rites being performed as My Barbarian sang their songs -- Schnitger looked exceedingly pleased that her sculptures were being metaphorically brought to life; it occurred to me that the next step should be to actually bring her sculptures to life via mechanical means -- I half expected them to actually move. There was also a video in the back room that they collaborated on -- it was supposedly filmed in the former Hollywood Hills home of Liberace, now owned by an art collector and apparent fan of Schnitger and My Barbarian. Overall a great collaboration -- I hope they do more together.

The next morning I woke up at dawn to join Ara Shirinyan, Brian Kim Stefans and a host of others for the Armenian specialty breakfast, khash. It's sort of an Armenian menudo, a hot boiling pot of garlicky goodness -- with stewed cow tongue, stomach, hoof and tendon. It's served with dried lavash bread crumbled into the soup, and lots of garnishes: pickles, radishes, fresh greens and cured meats. Also you drink vodka. Lots and lots of vodka -- and at 7 in the morning, it really gets your day off to a fresh start, let me tell you. The idea is you eat, get a little tipsy, then go back to sleep and wake up in the afternoon. It's supposed to be a good hangover cure. I love it. All the richness from the fat makes your lips stick together.

derive in the archive

2009-01-26T00:26:00.000-08:00

"The derive has to become a practice within the archive, allowing the discovery of the hidden ambiences within the Situationist stacks that escape the division of intellectual labor."

Coincidentally, I saw the conceptual artist David Bunn speak this afternoon. He was given the entire archive of cards from the old LA Library card catalog when they decided to go digital -- and now he creates poetry out of the language from the cards. For instance, in one of his poems he looks up all the titles in the catalog that begin with "after you" and arrives at:

After you, Columbus
after you, Magellan!
after you, Marco Polo
after you with a pistol.

This example is more procedural, but he has lately taken to creating poems with the card catalog in a more arbitrary fashion, dipping in and out and moving through the information randomly. He described his work as "derive" in the archive.

2009-01-19T16:51:00.001-08:00

I want to answer some questions that Mark Wallace and K. Lorraine Graham have thrown my way, but I'll save that for a later post.

Wednesday night I went out to Hollywood to see "that Swedish vampire movie," Let the Right One In. Kind of a moody, brilliant near-horror film. I say "near" because there really isn't that much blood, and when the gore does show up the effects are low budget, nearly embarrassingly so, to the extent that it comes off charming and oddly fitting for a film that takes place in the early 1980s. (Look for the CGI cat attack!) It's almost a horror version of Brewster McCloud. There are some strange gender dynamics going on in the film -- there is an implication that the vampire, a 12-year old girl, used to be a boy -- we see a quick shot of her nude body below the waist and see a scar running across her genitalia -- though not much more is revealed on this point. The loner little boy protagonist predictably vanquishes the bullies with the help of his vampire girlfriend -- but as typical as the story arc is, it is the pacing, mood, and snowy, nearly Black Metal atmosphere that make this film memorable.

Thursday night we logged on to Twitter to find out where, exactly, the Korean Taco Truck was going to be. You've heard the rumors, but nothing will prepare you for the experience. You will head down to the Miracle Mile, or Silver Lake, or Venice Beach and find a crowd of twenty-something foodies loitering on a corner, checking their iPhones. When the truck arrives you will wait in line for over half an hour, the smell of bbq short ribs wafting up the sidewalk. When you finally get to order you might be overwhelmed by the choices other than the short rib, spicy pork, and chicken tacos; should you get the Kogi Dog? The kimchee quesadilla? The korchata (Korean horchata)? It's all amazing, trust me. I too was once a skeptic.

Then we headed over to Michael Kohn gallery to see the Wallace Berman/Richard Prince show. The idea behind the show is that, supposedly, both artists have an overriding interest in female nudes. Seems rather arbitrary to me; one could easily say they both have an interest in Western iconography. I heard the original plan was to show Berman alongside Bruce Conner, but it fell through due to problems with the Conner estate. The two artists were exhibited in separate rooms, an odd curatorial decision. I'll have to wait to read the catalogue essay before I write more about this, but my initial reaction is that it would have been more interesting if the curators contrasted and looked critically at Berman & Prince's use of images of women; instead it seemed like a wanky celebration. The opening was packed with celebrities: Pamela Anderson, Anthony Kiedis, Brett Easton Ellis, Jason Biggs. At first I thought: what would Wallace Berman have thought of this scene? Then I remembered his close ties to 1960s Hollywood; Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson and the like. Oh Hollywood, you're so close...

2009-01-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

Some New Multiplicities: a conversation between Mark Wallace, K. Lorraine Graham & me.

2009-01-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

Sunday night saw Steven Soderbergh's Che. Better than any film biography deserves to be -- and better than I expected, given Soderbergh's past offerings (of his many films the only one I can stomach is The Limey). Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara is pretty perfect casting to my eye -- better, at least, than the too thin & pretty Gael Garcia Bernal in The Motorcycle Diaries. Soderbergh's Che is stipped of most typical biopic tropes -- no swelling music, no ironic dialogue, not even re-enactments of historical events, like the march into Havana -- instead, the action is very naturalistic, as though Soderbergh's been overdosing on Kalatozov and Bros. Maysles. Four hours long and released as two movies, which means I had to pay twice (not a very revolutionary marketing strategy I'd say). The first half follows Che up to the end of the Cuban Revolution, the second is one long guerrilla war in Bolivia, marred only by Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon cameos. Would've loved to have seen Terrence Malick's take.

Monday night met up with a group of folks at a Mexican restaurant in Los Feliz called Malo for artist Kerry Tribe's birthday. Kerry just finished a movie called H.M., "the true story of an amnesiac known as 'Patient H.M.' In 1953, at the age of 27, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy. The unintended result was that he could never form another lasting memory." So says the casting call. I was an extra. Look for the back of a doctor's head as he walks down a hospital corridor. That would be me. The real H.M., Henry Gustav Molaison, coincidentally died this past December. As the New York Times obit says, "each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time." Until it was the last time, I guess. Kerry has a collaboration with poet Nick Moudry in the next issue of Area Sneaks that incorporates some H.M. film and production stills. Extremely jealous that one of Kerry's birthday gifts was a copy of Fiona Banner's The Nam, "a compilation of total descriptions of well known Vietnam films Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon" all written out for 1000 pages as if it were one long movie. Also saw a preview of a Mungo Thomson multiple in which he remade several copies of Art Forum, the content of which is solely composed of advertisements that appeared in its pages during the 1970s.

Ate Malo's deliciously spicey chipotle & cream salsa as well as three hard-shell tacos: chipotle potato, ground beef & pickle, and lobster.

2009-01-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

Friday night met up with Ara Shirinyan, Andrew Maxwell, Aaron Kunin, Jacqueline Fauteux, Lilit Keshishyan and my wife Rita at Koko's Armenian, a restaurant run by Ara's genius chef of an uncle deep in the San Fernando Valley. Koko just sold the restaurant so this was to be our last meal there. I tried lamb brains for the first time...it sort of had the taste and texture of tofu or a dense cottage cheese. Not bad. Perhaps needed a bit more spice. The lamb tongue was delicious if a little too thickly sliced for me. The quail was perfect, as was the beef and luleh kabob. We finished off our feast with a large branzino grilled over an open flame. I asked Aaron about his upcoming essay in Action Yes concerning the "gurlesque." Supposedly it looks at the trope of the "princess" as political theology in the poetry of Catherine Wagner and Brenda Coultas. Elsewhere at the table, everyone was discussing the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In and admiring Andrew and Jacqueline's new boy, Felix.

Saturday Rita and I drove down to Orange County to check out the California Biennial at OCMA. This year it was guest-curated by Lauri Firstenberg of LAX Art. Highlights included Daniel Joseph Martinez's life-size animatronic self-portrait that goes into epileptic fits every hour on the hour, entitled Call Me Ishmael; Mark Hagen's paintings of what appear to be found, crumpled up notes that say things like, "TO PSYCHIC UNDERWORLD: STOP ASTRAL TRAVELING TO MOLESTIDECEIVE OTHERS (ANIMALS TOO). ANIMALS ARE NOT MADE OF HATE. CEASE & DESIST"; an installation by Marco Rios that consisted of an entire room in which the ceiling was brought down to precisely the artist's height (64 inches); Anna Sew Hoy's site-specific sculptural installation made partly out of denim sewn into the shape of worms or snakes; Rodney McMillian's painting/sculptural hybrids; and Amanda Ross-Ho's large-scale assemblages made out of lean-to dry-wall with patterned holes cut into them, collaged with seemingly random magazine cut-outs and other bizarre objects. (Below is a detail from her work).
Then we made our way out to the OC "anti-mall" (not much anti- about it; mostly just hipster shops like Urban Outfitters, hair salons and cafes -- but probably the coolest place in town from the perspective of an Orange County teenager) where the artist Shana Lutker was performing her interactive piece, Hear it Here. Shana had hired two actors who wore headphones connected to two mics set up in the audience. The actors stood up on a stage and repeated anything that any audience member spoke into the mics, so essentially the audience was supplying the dialogue for an ongoing "play." The actors, however, would only repeat everything in a dry, uninflected monologue, so when I sang the lyrics to "Herod's Song" from Jesus Christ Superstar into the mic, what came back to me was a sort of menacing monologue demanding that Jesus walk on water and mocking his inability to perform miracles, which was kind of weird given that we were in Orange County, a hotbed of evangelicalism. Other audience members recounted dreams, gave shout-outs to their loved ones, or tried to make the actors say more or less funny things.

After that we headed over to Little India in Artesia for some Andhra Pradesh-style Indian food at Tirupathi Bhimas. Incredibly delicious and spicy thali plates tempered by pappadum and chapati bread...washed down with mango lassi. Yum! Below the restaurant there is an Indian ice cream shop called Saffron Spot where we both ate saffron flavored ice cream. Near the entrance there were a bunch of free books published by the Society for Krishna Consciousness. Most were based on the teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. I picked one up called Chant and Be Happy: The Power of Mantra Meditation which consists mostly of interviews with George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono about the benefits of chanting Hare Krshna.

Drove back to Los Angeles and stopped by Chinatown in time to catch Kirsten Stoltmann's solo show at Cottage Home. Mostly incredibly colorful and densely layered collages that incorporate images of Lamborghinis and phrases like "MISUNDERSTOOD," "FAT MOM" or "LAVERNE IN THE BUTT SHIRLEY IN THE VAGINA." Some medium sized sculptures in the middle of the room looked like Oompa Loompa Land props from the 1970s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The gallery literature describes her work thus: "This new body of work employs over-used and abused tropes of swinger pornography, suburban craft, sports car masculinity, meditational sculptures and Tourette’s like poetics. In an attempt to exercise New Age sentiment through self-loathing and inspirational denigration, Stoltmann's efforts at reflection are always thwarted by her passive aggressive sincerity, humor, and self-depreciation."

Then made our way over to the Steve Turner Gallery where Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, aka The Speculative Archive, had a show with sculptor Jeff Ono. Julia and David presented a series of photographic dyptichs "of recent cases," according to the gallery literature, "in which people have been stopped, questioned, detained or arrested because they were photographing or found to be in possession of a picture. The pictures in question--the ones that remain invisible--are of sensitive sites in the USA; bridges, banks, tourist attractions, state capitals, and power plants. In this series the unseen image is paired with a publicly available image that has been found on the internet." Spent some time up in the gallery offices previewing work by Eamon Ore-Giron (who has a show coming up at the end of March) -- collaged, cut-out and manipulated LP covers that will be framed or hung on the wall.

THEN -- geez, we did a lot yesterday -- went to the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater where we saw Gustav Deutsch's essay film, Film Ist. In 12 parts and about 3 hours long, the film is mostly collaged found footage -- Austrian instructional and industrial films, silent movies, archival reels, Méliès clips -- that investigates, well, what film is: as such its parts have titles such as "Movement and Time," "Light and Darkness," "Magic," "Conquest," "A Mirror," etc. Affective and highly recommended.

This afternoon met with Gabriela Jauregui about some upcoming readings at the PRB, then went straight to San Gabriel for a big hot bowl of bun rieu oc (Vietnamese crab and shrimp paste rice vermicelli noodles with periwinkles).

Scoli Acosta & Zeek Sheck....

2008-12-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

perform in Paris at the Jeu De Paum Museum.

2008-11-06T15:00:00.001-08:00

After we watched the victory speech, we went here.

2008-10-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Obama '08 by Jonathan Horowitz

Congratulations...

2008-10-17T15:57:00.000-07:00

...to Scoli Acosta, who created the cover for (and has an interview in) the first issue of Area Sneaks.

Scoli won the £10,000 Champagne Perrier-Jouët Prize for Best Artist at the Zoo Art Fair.

2008-10-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

Over at Frieze Magazine's new blog, editor Jennifer Higgie has posted a video of Frank O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You," and accompanies it with a question: "Who, now, is writing poetry that knows about visual art in the way that Frank O’Hara did?"

I offered up as a first response some of the poets associated with UbuWeb, but I could have mentioned others. What's slightly irritating about her question is that it's posed as a lament on poetry's supposed ignorance of contemporary art; but strictly speaking, it reveals a lack of knowledge of contemporary poetic practice on the part of those who work in the field of contemporary art.

Brilliant

2008-09-20T00:31:00.001-07:00

2008-09-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

Struggling, lately, with the issue of compromise.

2008-09-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Steve Kurtz Waiting

2007-04-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Jim Fetterley made a video about Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble.

Steve Kurtz Waiting (2006) By Jim Fetterley and Angie Waller | Running Time 15:32

On May 11, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report his wife of 20 years was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house.

Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer.

The contradiction between the charges for possessing harmful substances and the county health commissioner assessing that no hazardous substances were found in the house leaves only the conclusion - that ideas, when misunderstood or disagreeable, are toxic.

Kurtz is one of the founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, a group whose beginnings in filmmaking over a decade ago have evolved into public performances and videos that educate the public about the politics of biotechnology. All of CAE's museum and public performances
are meant to not only inform the public about the ways their lives are affected by biotechnology, but also to dispel public paranoia that is generated by the media and a lack of understanding.

Steve became the victim of this paranoia, and through the extended powers of the US Patriot Act, he still awaits trial for mail fraud. If found guilty, could face up to twenty years.

"Steve Kurtz Waiting" by Jim Fetterley and Angie Waller is a video portrait of Steve Kurtz during a moment of indefinite anticipation as routine court litigations continue. Through a series casual interviews, Kurtz reveals an admirable calmness, spirited humor and a strong will to continue his role as a cultural producer after months of close surveillance, black vans, continued government scrutiny, and notably in addition to, the mourning of his close partner.

This video premiered in the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in a program called "Charged in the Name of Terror: Portraits by Contemporary Artists."

For more info on Steve Kurtz: www.caedefensefund.org
For more info on Critical Art Ensemble: www.critical-art.net
For more info on Angie Waller: www.couchprojects.com

Obama, Poet

2007-03-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Some sleuths dug up poetry written by Barack Obama when he was 19 and an undergraduate at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance,

Tumble in the

Rushing water,

Musty, wet pelts

Glistening in the blue.

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken

In, sprinkled with ashes,

Pop switches channels, takes another

Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

What to do with me, a green young man

Who fails to consider the

Flim and flam of the world, since

Things have been easy for me;

I stare hard at his face, a stare

That deflects off his brow;

I'm sure he's unaware of his

Dark, watery eyes, that

Glance in different directions,

And his slow, unwelcome twitches,

Fail to pass.

I listen, nod,

Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,

Beige T-shirt, yelling,

Yelling in his ears, that hang

With heavy lobes, but he's still telling

His joke, so I ask why

He's so unhappy, to which he replies...

But I don't care anymore, cause

He took too damn long, and from

Under my seat, I pull out the

Mirror I've been saving; I'm laughing,

Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face

To mine, as he grows small,

A spot in my brain, something

That may be squeezed out, like a

Watermelon seed between

Two fingers.

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

He wrote before his mother died,

Stands, shouts, and asks

For a hug, as I shink,* my

Arms barely reaching around

His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'cause

I see my face, framed within

Pop's black-framed glasses

And know he's laughing too.

2007-03-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start blogging again. It will be different this time.

2007-01-23T16:21:00.000-08:00

Awakening from my slumber to let everyone in Los Angeles know about the upcoming Alli Warren, Brandon Brown and Anna Joy Springer reading at the Smell this Sunday.

A Jerry Saltz article in the Voice about the current state of the art market reminded me of the debate Steve Evans initiated several years ago around the journals Fence and the Germ. "To say you won't participate in the market is like saying you refuse to breathe the air because it's polluted."

There's also this: "In the 1970s, conceptualist Joseph Kosuth said, 'The only people who care about art are artists.' That's changed." But today, are the only people who care about poetry poets?

Also, I suppose I should let you know about WAMPA.

2006-11-22T01:45:00.000-08:00

And oh yeah, peace to Robert Altman, 1925-2006.

2006-10-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

Franklin Bruno and Ange Mlinko are back to blogs. Welcome back!

Totally unrelated: here are a few of the best videos I've seen on YouTube this week.

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU ARE NUTS?

LITTLE SUPERSTAR

GOOD DAY, MR. KUBRICK

The Poetry Search Engine

2006-10-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

Using a new Google tool called Google Co-op, I created The Poetry Search Engine. Right now it has an index of just over 200 sites. Try it out and let me know how it works.

2006-10-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

I won't be writing a detailed summary of this year's Redcat experimental writing conference as I did last year (I decided to relax and simply watch and listen rather than take notes). But I may make a few comments and observations over the next few weeks. My experience is colored by my nerves. I moderated a panel this year, which I had never done before, and which was slightly disastrous (I had to apologize at one point for being nervous when my shaking body and quavering voice became too obvious...and in a q&a I referred to Anne Waldman's Fast Speaking Woman as Fast Talking Woman, which I immediately realized but didn't have a chance to correct -- dear Anne Waldman: I doubt you're reading this but I apologize for that). I guess I realized the hard way that I'm not cut out for panels or live conversation. I prefer the slow, unstressful and revisable thinking that occurs in writing to the quick-thinking, composed and smart repartee that the best conversation before an audience requires. My career as a cable news talking head lies in ruins.

2006-10-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

My partner Rita Gonzalez and I wrote the "liner notes" for Animal Charm's compilation DVD, just out on Other Cinema. Check it out.

Open Sores

The heft of video tape weighs on the world. Stacks and stacks of Betamax, VHS, and ¾” tape sit on aluminum shelves and hang low in bargain bins. A world of images screened only in conference rooms, rec-centers, waiting stalls and training halls has been ejected from life. Who are the brave architects that will construct a Library of Alexandria for our long-playing motivational minds?

The answer, it seems, is Animal Charm.

But don’t take our word for it. Read what cultural critic and UC Berkeley film professor Niyoma Wataporn has to say: “Hypertrophic, hypnagogic, and hyperreal—these are the qualities of our times and Animal Charm brings them to us in all their damning splendor. Jim Fetterley and Rich Bott never allow their audience to simply smile while watching their videos. One must double up in laughter or weep openly.”

The only smilers are the sad figures that populate the motivational videos and training tapes repurposed by Animal Charm into uncanny works of art. These funboys smile at jiggling, aerobicized bodies; they smile at leaping lemurs; they smile at outdated technology; they smile at success; and, most of all, they smile at creeping corporate horror.

This sense of corporate horror is most evident in videos such as "Street Shapes" and "Mark Roth", where open industrial spaces vie with enclosed cubicles to become ciphers for psychological and physical threat. Banal everyday objects take on a menacing, almost animal persistence. Parking curbs, utility shacks, file cabinets, escalators, parking lights…in these short videos, such objects are raised to the indignity of a person since, like a person, these objects have nefarious pasts. Which Enron executive’s car did this parking space once hold? Whose house was demolished to make way for this illustrious business park? Who or what is watching you? Or rather, what are you watching? A business meeting, or the movement of a pen, can be as frightening as any horror show.

In his book Capitalizing on Culture, Shane Gunster writes, “the ‘facticity,’ the apparent utility, of most commodities makes it difficult for people to understand how most objects – or more precisely, a system that satisfies needs by producing more and better commodities – might actually constitute a barrier to human self-development.” Animal Charm, befitting their identity as video terrorists, answers: “A professional pleaser…what’s that?” Gunster writes: “The endless production of material objects helps foster the illusion that bourgeois society is actually delivering on its promises. As they are fetishized, these objects are worshipped as the realization of a wish, rather than simply its image.” Animal Charm retorts: “Imagine a dolphin. Bet you wish you hadn’t.”

In today’s online world of YouTube and Google Video, where video sampling and mixing has become all too common (and somewhat tamed), where strategies of social critique quickly become marketing tools, Animal Charm have emerged as sentries to the gods. For now at least, Animal Charm have made the world safe for curating the commons and drinking deep the banal, sweet Jesus-juice of animal husbandry. As their alter-egos Struthers & Fields lament, “Thank god, at least, they’ve not yet found a way to kill the wind. They’ve not yet found a way to harm the sky…but they will…”

2006-09-12T02:21:00.000-07:00

Balm for a saccharine day:

...the mnemonic easily tips into the memorializing, that is to say, into a demand that the historical be monumentalized, and often today what is monumentalized is the traumatic....we seem to live in a culture fixed on horrific pasts, not in a culture desirous of transfigured futures. From my perspective its political effects are disastrous: we live under the repressive dread of antidemocratic blackmails ("9/11," "the war on terrorism," etc). - Hal Foster

2006-08-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

From an SF Bay Guardian article on the dispersed sound of the Dying Californian, whose members live in Los Angeles, Berkeley and San Francisco:

Dalton has lived in California most of his life, long enough — and far and wide enough — to know that "most people in Northern California have definite opinions about LA, and people in LA are just kind of oblivious." I tell him that a friend of mine once made this observation to me after a stereotypical Mission hipster threw attitude at him upon hearing he was moving back to LA. "That's why LA wins," Dalton agrees with a laugh. "It says, ‘What? You hate us!?’”

The DC also provide the soundtrack to many of Cathy Begien's videos.

2006-08-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

So long, Arthur.

2006-08-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

Stan Apps has a pretty decent overview of the experimental theatre event held last weekend at the Smell. And K. Lorraine Graham has some flickr pictures of her LA weekend, including the plays. The photo below is from Lorraine's series (Lorraine, I hope you don't mind I've pilfered it!). That's me in the French marquis outfit. Andrew Maxwell is Abe Lincoln. Rita Gonzalez is on the left, obscured by a sheet/curtain/sail.

2006-08-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

We’re having a timely conversation over at Stan Apps’ blog about violence, aesthetics, the Middle East conflict, and the new literary journal Soft Targets. I may have more to say about this later, but for now I’ll point you to Stan’s critique of the Soft Targets aesthetic, as well as the considered response from the editors of Soft Targets.

Vast Arcade Los Angeles

2006-07-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

(click on photo to enlarge)

“Dr. Eufencio Rojas!”...
“Presente”
“Liki Renteria!”...
“Ehh!”
“George Lopez”...
(Silence)
“El Pendejo!!”...
“Soy Yo!”
“Antonio Villaraigosa!"...
(Sound of locked jawbone cracking)
“Dr. Renato Frias!"...
(Low frequencies)

All are gathered here to pick up the parts and play with the remnants of Sr. Romo’s backhands.

First, let’s examine this document entitled, The Crystal Brilliance Manifesto. We have all studied The Art of Noises, have we not? Do you sense a rupture in the seams of 20th century art history now that we have come to a point where we can conjure the Futurists perfectly at home on Whittier Blvd?

Your Crystal Brilliance Manifesto loops los planes (which we remember were penned with blood, cactus, and semen) with the escritos of David Alfaro Siqueiros. His seemingly hazardous development was “an antinomic double objective: on one hand, encouraging the development of "new means" for literature and the visual arts through the incorporation of avant-garde principles; on the other, the promotion of truly independent perspectives based on the recovery of indigenous traditions.” (Mari Carmen Ramirez)

Romo, you penned, “Think of a mural dedicated to double vision, to sound, to the dead twin of the puff of smoke that you released from your lungs one night, to the long faded trails of movement left behind by your hands pushing into the concrete. Sounds should pass through your mind about now, wooshes and abstract noises and fractal like guffaws, hoots and car horns."

And then a crash defines the disso-stinct…and then we see the cinematic trails of Siqueiros project which somehow landed in Sergei Eisenstein’s erotic film bins.

Sr. Romo, think back to the Futurists’ dream of a mural dedicated to sound—think of Russolo’s praise of the-- “crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways…” (Russolo 85 Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2001: 74-77.)

-from Vast Arcade Los Angeles: An Introduction to the Project by way of an Interview Conducted by Rita Gonzalez at the Home of Arturo Romo, 8/20/05

Arturo Romo's Vast Arcade Los Angeles can currently be seen along with Kalup Linzy's All My Children at LAX Art in Los Angeles.

2006-07-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

This should go in the comments section of Silliman’s Blog, but he’s turned his comments off, so I’ll respond here.

In response to Sherwood Anderson’s 1918 poem “Song to New Song”, Ron writes:

Several things in this text stand out, above & beyond the obvious influence of Whitman. One is the fact that there is nothing personal here about the use of the first person singular. Is “I” here even a person? More accurately, it strikes me as a rhetorical position. Nor is there anything personal, even personified, about “you,” bird man of the furnaces. Rather, this is a kind of public, figurative language we hardly hear any more, save possibly in church. If it seems preposterous or stilted or dated, that is the index of just how far outside our expectations such language is today within the poem.

Ron is referring to Sherwood Anderson’s rhetorical, and presumably communal, use of I and you: “I greet thee, horse and terrible singer, half man, half bird, strong, winged one./I see you float in cold bleak winds,/Your wings burned by the fires of furnaces…”

My first thought was that this language is epic language, and that indeed one occasionally does find such language used in contemporary poetry, if only ironically . My second thought was of Juliana Spahr and her repeated address to “Beloveds” and her use of the rhetorical I in her book This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (Spahr was also ready-at-mind for Gabe Gudding). Finally, I recalled the very common use of infinitives that function rhetorically, figuratively, and publicly, and that are often composed as lists in much contemporary poetry. This sort of infinitival excessiveness is the syntactic soft spot into which the public I and rhetorical you have recently wiggled: “To labor night and day/To bear rain or wind/To eat badly and to sleep badly, etc., etc.” In Heretical Imperialism Pier Paolo Pasolini calls this the “inchoative infinitive”:

…. “inchoative,” that is, as description of repeated actions – always because of a normativity alluded to with the absolute certainty of being understood, of exciting sympathetic sentiments in other people who not only have had similar experiences but who don’t even have the possibility of thinking for themselves of different experiences….The infinitival category […] in any case implies a humble and, I would say, labor-union-like epic quality: and so it does not imply only a simple “reanimation” of the speech of a speaker as a statistically and above all socially individualized particular character, but of a typical speaker, a representative of a whole category of speakers, thus of a milieu, even a people….The sympathy of the author in reanimating his speech grammatically thus doesn’t go out to him, but to all those like him, to his world.

This Weekend in Los Angeles

2006-07-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

Poet's Theatre at the Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series
@The Smell

Plays

The Mummer's Play by Vanessa Place
starring Christine Wertheim, Matias Viegener, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, and Maude Place as Twing Twang

Bad Fuggums by Joseph Mosconi
starring Andrew Maxwell, Rita Gonzalez, and Joseph Mosconi

Rootbots by Matt Timmons
starring Steph Rioux, Stan Apps, and Matt Timmons

excerpts from Conduction in the Catacombs, by Will Alexander
starring Tova Cooper and Alison McDonell

Optimist Meets Pessimist by Stan Apps
starring Brook Haley and Jen Rust

What Do You Know of Ghosts? by K. Lorraine Graham
starring K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace

sections from Dark Carnival by Mark Wallace
starring K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace

Balm to Bilk by Rodrigo Toscano
starring K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace

Monkeys in the House by Harold Abramowitz
starring Steph Rioux, Stan Apps, and Matt Timmons

------------

Doors open at 6:30. $5 at the door to support artistes.

The Smell
247 S. Main Street
Los Angeles, CA

Please don't throw rotten vegetables. I've never written a play before.

Also:

The 3rd installment of Long Beach Notebook
Saturday, July 29, 8PM

Aaron Kunin
Jen Benka
&
Ara Shirinyan

Aaron Kunin is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005), a collection of small poems about shame. The Mandarin, a novel, is forthcoming in 2007. He lives in California and teaches negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Ara Shirinyan is writer and editor of Make Now Press in Los Angeles. He curates the Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series at the Smell in Los Angeles with Stan Apps and Teresa Carmody. His chapbook Handsome Fish Offices is due out later this year on INSERT PRESS.

Jen Benka's collection, A Box of Longing With Fifty Drawers, which is comprised of one poem for each of the 52 words in the Preamble, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2005. She is also the author of the Eisner-nominated indy comic book series, Manya. She is the recipient of grants and awards from Intermedia Arts, the Poetry/Film Workshop, Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Xeric Foundation. She works as the managing director of Poets & Writers, and on the side, organizes poetry events, which have included a 24-hour marathon reading of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson, a protest reading during the 2005 Republican National Convention, and currently, a 5-night festival celebrating women poets. She lives in New York City.

LONG BEACH NOTEBOOK is held at the home & office of Palm Press:
143 Ravenna Drive
Long Beach, CA 90803

2006-07-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

E-Mail Spam as a Masterpiece in the Making
When Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu looks at junk e-mails, he sees patterns - bits and bytes that can be manipulated into colorful plantlike images or stark architectural forms.

As a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, he and fellow student Tim Jaeger collected spam and used it to create live multimedia shows of sound, text, and animation - "like a VJ and DJ performance," Mr. Dragulescu says in a phone interview.
..............................................................................................

What? A visual correlate to the literary spam avant-garde?

2006-07-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

The Neo-Benshi craze finally found its way to Los Angeles.

Only here it's called Da Benshi in order to differentiate it from the Bay Area chapter. Like Berlin and Zurich DaDa?

Amar Ravva and Harold Abramowitz are curating the bi-monthly live film (or video) narration series at Beta-Level in Chinatown (Da Benshi Code is the official series name).

The Mask of Zardoz is its logo.

Saturday night was Episode 1: My Dog Benshi, featuring "Jury Duty" by Oliver Hall (A Few Good Men served as the source text; instead of being court-martialed, Jack Nicholson was brought to court for...); "Monster" by Jason Brown (Jason used a sampler and turntable to narrate a collage of silent monster films); and "Bubonic Phonics" by DJ Eng (found footage of a squirrel met a live human chorus shouting "Bu-bo-nic Plague!").

The highlight of the night, however, was "Goooaaalll!!!" by Stan Apps and Mathew Timmons. Stan was out of town, so his disembodied pre-recorded voice ineracted with Matt's live narration as they scoured the tubby universe of Spanish commercials and trash television.

Guess who they found there?

Jim Behrle, "the poet capitalist", "the fruit of the loom of romanticism".

Lucky for us, Stan and Matt have taken a video polaroid for posterity.

Watch Goooaaalll!!! by Stan Apps and Mathew Timmons on YouTube:
Part 1
Part 2

And check out Harold Abramowitz's chapbook Three Column Table out now on Insert Press (no website yet, but query Stan or Matt for copies).

2006-07-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah? This morning I received this:

"Well, are you pleased?"

He was glowing, positively radiant, grinning as good as the best of any literature. Looked clean. The antennas screwed up the effect though--they were overgrown instructor's level.

2006-07-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

So long, Syd.

2006-07-07T23:26:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Dying Californian, my old college housemates, play at Mr. T's Bowl. Saw perhaps the best men's room grafiti ever:

"Fuck this existentialist drama."
-Louis Ferdinand Celine

2006-07-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

Japanese improvisationalist Tetuzi Akiyama brought his guitars (acoustic, electric, mystic) to the experimental music series at the Schindler House last month for his first ever performance in Los Angeles. The night was cool, the crickets were chirping, and the occasional helicopter cruised by in the distance overhead as Akiyama strummed his acoustic, and then, after a short Campari break, boogied with his electric. I don’t own the vocabulary of a music critic, but I would guess that Akiyama’s acoustic noisy twangs & plucks are greatly influenced by Derek Bailey. The electric half of the show was conceptual: Akiyama essentially played a single classic rock riff for, oh, five to ten minutes, and then switched to another classic rock riff, which was also repeated for several minutes. It was very “dorm room”, but as my friend Jon said, the entire “rock” portion of the performance was put into relief by the more experimental acoustic half; many Derek Bailey style experimentalists can easily play “rock” but it’s not often that the rockers can play Derek Bailey.

2006-06-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. I complained about crass promotion and that's all I'm doing lately. Reading reports to come. But tonight there are two to choose from.

Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA, 7:30pm

TOM ORANGE, K. LORRAINE GRAHAM, MARK WALLACE, and CATHERINE DALY
Come celebrate the spirit of post moot, including but not limited to all forms of experimental poetic work that are both live and exist as objects. TOM ORANGE has co-curated the in your ear reading series at the District of Columbia Arts Center and edited the dcpoetry.com website and anthologies since Fall 2000 . CATHERINE DALY is author of DaDaDa, Locket, Secret Kitty, and To Delite and Instruct . MARK WALLACE is author of a number of books of poems, most recently Temporary Worker Rides A Subway . K. LORRAINE GRAHAM is author of two chapbooks, Dear (Blank) I Believe in Other Worlds (Phylum) and Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha

or

Incendiary Spirals, Words and Music at The Space at Fountain's End
3929 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles CA, 8pm

Will Alexander
Estrella del Valle
Jen Hofer
Anthony Seidman
Alan Semerdjian
Jane Sprague

The Smell Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series

2006-06-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

Featuring Aaron Kunin, Stacey
Levine, Matthew Stadler, and Stephen Ratcliffe.

The Smell, 247 S. Main Street, Los Angeles,

Sun, June 25, 6:30 pm, $5, (323) 304-2277.

Aaron Kunin writes poetry, criticism, and novels. Recent work has appeared in Boog City, No: A Journal of the Arts, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Poker, and elsewhere. His book, Folding Ruler Star, has been published by Fence Books, and his e-chapbook The Mauberly Series can be downloaded from ubu editions. His work is in a minimalist tradition of strictly limited vocabularies and word-counts, and yet simultaneously revisits the themes or structures of classic works by poets like Milton and Pound. Aaron teaches 17th century literature at Pomona College.

Stacey Levine is a Seattle-based author. Her books include My Horse and Other Stories and Dra--, a novel, both published by Sun & Moon Press; her novel Frances Johnson was recently published by Clear Cut Press. She has written for the American Book Review, Bookforum, Nest, The Seattle Times, The Stranger, and more frightening venues. Formerly a creative writing instructor, she is now working on a second collection of short fiction.

Matthew Stadler is a novelist (Allan Stein, The Sex Offender, Landscape: Memory) and a contributor to Artforum, The Organ, Dwell, The Oregonian, Frieze, Domus, and others. He was the literary editor of Nest magazine and is co-founder and editor of Clear Cut Press.

Stephen Ratcliffe's latest books of poetry are Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer, 2002). Recent poems have appeared in 1913, Chain, Denver Quarterly, P-QUEUE, New American Writing, LIT, Bombay Gin, Common Knowledge, War & Peace, Conjunctions and NO. Listening to Reading, a book of essays on sound/shape and meaning in experimental poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2000. He has recently completed a 1,000 page book of poems called HUMAN / NATURE (1,000 poems written in 1,000 consecutive days). He lives in Bolinas, California where he publishes Avenue B, and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

Smell Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series is sponsored by Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Make Now Press, and supported by Poets & Writers, Inc, through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.

2006-06-20T21:29:00.000-07:00

This is probably old news to the tech-savvy, but my favorite Daily Show Correspondent has a hilarious conceptual song/poem in which he reads 700 hobo names. It's called Hobo Names. It lasts an hour.

2006-06-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

May all my rejected essay proposals become blogposts....

Lisa Lapinski, a Los Angeles-based artist, exhibits a marked fascination with esoteric systems of thought and the limits of language in her installation and sculptural work. For her Art Center graduate exhibition “Armstrong Visions Solarian: Regina and Opium Have Dormitive Virtue” (2000) Lapinski investigated the artistic practices of philosophers who also happened to make diagrammatic drawings, such as Charles Sanders Pierce and Jacques Lacan. Lapinski’s monumental new sculpture Night Stand, which was exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, continues this investigation by limning the boundaries of religious systems of knowledge and the “ecstatic states” of the United Society of Believers, otherwise known as the Shakers. The Shakers’ rational systems of religious knowledge and irrational ecstatic states found their material corollaries in the sober earthiness of their furniture and the wild otherworldliness of their drawings. But what would happen, Lapinski wondered, if Shaker furniture were subject to the same ecstatic production techniques as the Shaker drawings? Night Stand is a testament to this idea, incorporating motifs from various disciplines (architecture, woodwork, painting) and religions (Christianity, Judaism, paganism) to create a critical work of art that masquerades as a devotional object. Night Stand incorporates Art-Deco sculpture, Jewish Stars of David, and impressionistic painting; it takes the form of a large piece of furniture, yet sections of the woodwork remain unfinished and none of the drawers function; if viewed from above, the sculpture’s shape resembles a swastika; if viewed from the side, its skeletal construction is revealed. How do such artifacts and symbols frustrate communication and rational systems of material production?

2006-06-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Google Shakespeare. Search the Bard's compleat works (minus the sonnets).

2006-06-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

To read Bay Poetics is to once again feel that strange combination of excitement, envy, and caution that may be the condition of the Los Angeles writer. Maybe it’s called ambivalence. Stephanie Young has put together a compelling Bay Area anthology. It’s filled with favorite writers and many new-to-me poets. Youngsters alongside codgers, ellipticists alongside narratologists, dogs alongside cats, et cetera, et cetera. And yet: I already know that the Bay Area has an amazing writer’s culture; it has some of the best reading series in the country, a storied history, Small Press Distribution is based there; from my perch down in Southern California, the Bay Area looks like poet’s paradise; of course it’s going to produce excellent anthologies. It seems so unproblematic. The Southland on the other hand….

Every year, usually around the time of the Festival of Books, the Los Angeles Times publishes an article that attempts to debunk the myth of Los Angeles as an unliterary city. I love myths. They index real-world phenomena. And those perennial articles are a load of crap. Los Angeles isn’t a literary city. Never has been. The Festival of Books is an industry affair, a front for the newspaper book review. We had Zizek at a Santa Monica bookstore and less than twenty people showed up. The guy introducing him didn’t even know how to pronounce his name. I remember going to some of the readings Andrew Maxwell used to put on at Dawson’s Books a few years ago; I was embarrassed at some of the turnouts (as I’m sure Andrew was as well…most of the readings were excellent, and some of the turnouts were great; but you know, how do you apologize to a poet when she's flown in from across the country and only two people show up?)

So Southern California is not really a literary place, but it does have a literary history, and there are a ton of poets here (a few months ago Catherine Daly made a list of Southern California poets on her blog – she has since taken it down – but it numbered over 650). And it’s not as if we don’t have a plethora of reading series and salons and festivals; there’s the Last Sunday of the Month reading series at the Smell, Jen Hofer’s Moving Word film and poetry series, Jane Sprague’s Long Beach Notebook, the High Energy Constructs series, Douglas Messerli’s Green Integer Salons, the yearly experimental writing conferences at the Redcat, the new Middle Monday of the month reading series at the Coffee Fix, Beyond Baroque, the LA Lit podcast…but somehow the Southern California poetry scene does not cohere in the way the Bay Area seems to (maybe the Bay Area just seems coherent from my point-of-view, but I doubt it). (And I see that Bay Poetics was originally meant to be an issue of Jack Kimball's The East Village, following up on the LA/NY issue; of which, the LA section, compared to both the online New York section and the print Bay Area section, is not nearly as expansive and seems somewhat narrow in its selection). Los Angeles is certainly not on the top of the list for traveling readers. “What? So-and-so New York poet is reading in San Francisco? Can’t we get her to come and read in LA?” Well…

Part of the problem may be that Southern Californian poets don’t seem to like publicity, and New York and San Francisco seem to have literary genes built into their DNA; Angelenos live in the shadow of Hollywood; publicity in that context just seems crass, insincere. “After all, we have no coherent literary scene. You have to drive 45 minutes across town just to go to a reading.” There also has never been a really great anthology for the area. (Green Integer recently put out a good anthology, but it was justly criticized for having an average age of 56). And many Los Angeles writers are vehemently anti-provincial; the very mention of a Los Angeles or Southern California anthology makes some shudder. “What would we call it,” said a friend, “Freeway Poetics?” Said another: “I just don’t believe in articulating a poetics based on location, especially this location.” But precisely because a Los Angeles/Southern California poetry anthology would be so problematic may be reason enough to attempt one. I don’t know, maybe not. But I’d like to hear what others think.

Back to Bay Poetics: I love the way it begins, with Brenda Hillman’s brief poem; I love the arrangement, what Stephanie Young calls “the ecology between writers…like overlapping circles with some points and clusters around the edge,” so that Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy are right next to each other, and likewise A Tonalists Laura Moriarty and Brent Cunningham (a fie on alphabetization!); and I love reading work by writers like Dan Fisher, whom I’ve long known but never seen in print.

And oh yeah: the Jack Spicer excerpt on the back of the book is a nice touch; it's a relief to turn the book over and see poetry instead of blurbs.

In Berlin & Prague, Back Soon...

2006-03-26T04:35:00.000-08:00

2006-03-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument

2006-03-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

Kevin Killian on last night Oscars.

"Mike hung up the phone and reported that in LA, everyone loves Crash, which apparently is set there, and everyone relates to its fractured, disjunct yet ultimately hopeful portrait of black-white race relations. It hits them where they live says he with a disgusted grimace, and where they live is two inches deep."

Not really. I think it's a loathsome, unforgiveable film. I haven't met a single Angeleno who liked Crash, though admittedly I'm not close to many Hollywood types, and the Hollywood types I do know wouldn't see a movie like this anyway. This morning the local NPR station was overwhelmed by folks calling in to Air Talk to complain about how the film is a misrepresentation of the city. Even the host couldn't fathom how anyone in the Academy could vote for this film. Live in Los Angeles awhile and you'll come to understand how poorly this film gets race relations (or much of anything else -- Thom Andersen would eat Crash alive) right.

2006-03-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

I've always wondered what Jordan Davis's Million Poems Show was like. Was it really a poetry talk show? Does it work? Now I know.

Also, Guy Maddin on David Lynch.

High Energy Constructs Reading

2006-03-02T20:52:00.000-08:00

HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS
presents

San Francisco Poets
Micah Ballard and Cedar Sigo

Friday March 3, 2006 at 8:30pm
$5

Followed by a reception featuring DJ LASR

HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS is pleased to present an evening of "the best minds" of a new generation of San Francisco poets, Micah Ballard and Cedar Sigo, who will read selections from their work. Books and other ephemera by the authors will be available for purchase.

Micah Ballard's poems have appeared in a variety of publications. His recent books include: Bettina Coffin (Red Ant Press), Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript (Snag Press), In the Kindness of Night (Blue Press), Emblematic (Old Gold), & Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Auguste Press). He is currently the director of the Humanities B.A. Program at New College of California & is working on a book of collaborations entitled Death Race V.S.O.P.

Cedar Sigo is the author of Goodnight Nurse (Angry Dog Press, 2001). His Selected Writings, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, was originally released in the spring of 2003, and a second edition was printed in 2005. His poems have appeared in The Poker, Yolanda Pipeline's Magazine, New York Nights, The Blind See Only This World:
Poems for John Wieners, 6x6 and Blue Book, among others. Forthcoming is a book of collaborations, Deathrace V.S.O.P. He has studied at the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and currently lives in San Francisco, where he is the editor of Old Gold\n Press.

HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS is a new Chinatown-based exhibition and performance venue dedicated to the presentation of work by emerging and established visual artists, performers, filmmakers, writers, thinkers, and others who engage or make difficult given notions of form and/or genre. Gallery hours: Thurs. – Sat. 11am – 6pm info@highenergyconstructs.com

High Energy Constructs
990 North Hill St. Suite180
Los Angeles, CA 90012
323.227.7920

The Smell Last Sunday Reading Series

2006-02-26T16:06:00.000-08:00

Hey Angelenos! Get thee to the Smell Reading Series tonight.

Come to the first reading of the year at THE SMELL,
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Reading will begin at 6:30 pm.

5 dollars at the door to support visiting poets.

247 S. Main Street,
Between 2nd and 3rd streets in Downtown, Los Angeles.

Readers will be:

Christine Wertheim
Elizabeth Treadwell
Jennifer Calkins
Stephanie Rioux

Christine Wertheim teaches on the MFA writing program at CalArts. Her recent poetic work has appeared in La Petite Zine, and Séance, (Make Now Press) with new work forthcoming in Five Fingers Review, and in New Messes and noulipo, (both from Make Now). A book of her poemes will be published in January 2007 by Les Figues Press. With Matias Viegener, she organizes an annual two-day conference on contemporary writing at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. “Séance,” in 2004, mixed the sexiest formalists and the most formal sex-writers. “noulipo,” in 2005, included members of the Oulipo, plus many of their English speaking heirs. The 2006 event will center on women’s writing.

Elizabeth Treadwell's fifth book, Cornstarch Figurine, will appear soon from Dusie Press of Switzerland. Her earlier works include Chantry (Chax Press) and LILYFOIL +3 (O Books). Rain Taxi says her work "seems at once medieval in its miniaturized exhuberance and modern in its casual entropies." She's director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in San Francisco and lives in Oakland with her husband and young daughter.

Jennifer Calkins is a poet, evolutionary biologist and the author of A Story of Witchery (Les Figues Press), a book-length narrative poem which poet Amy Gerstler calls "a strange, brave journey in which normalcy, deformity, violation and wholeness are radically realigned." Calkins' shorter work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including 4th Street, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Big Bridge, Ken*Again and Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior; her chapbook, Devil Card, was published by Beard of Bees Press. She lives in Seattle with her family, and works in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

Stephanie Rioux graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Writing in Spring 2005. Her writings have appeared in the literary journal nocturnes (re)view, are forthcoming in the journal Trepan, and are self-published on the internet at willowbutton.
Stephanie teaches English and writing to middle school kids in Diamond Bar, California, ghostwrites e-books for infoproductguy.com, and co-curates L.A. Lit with Mathew Timmons. Her main interests currently dwell in poetry, entomology, and embroidery.

Ariel Pink: For Kate I Wait

2006-02-24T22:04:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if this will work, but I'll give it a try. Below, a video mix-tape, courtesy of You-Tube. Some of them load slowly but you can press pause while they're loading and go to another one. Enjoy.

Deerhoof: Wrong Time Capsule

2006-02-24T22:03:00.000-08:00

Iggy Pop: The Passenger

2006-02-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

The Slits: Typical Girls

2006-02-24T22:00:00.000-08:00

Public Image, Lmtd: Chant

2006-02-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

Can: Paperhouse

2006-02-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

Joy Division: Shadowplay

2006-02-24T21:57:00.000-08:00

Prince & The Revolution: Purple Rain

2006-02-24T21:53:00.000-08:00

Captain Beefheart: I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby

2006-02-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

Sir Drone: A Film by Raymond Pettibon with Mike Kelley and Mike Watt

2006-02-24T21:48:00.000-08:00

The Smiths: Shoplifters of the World Unite

2006-02-24T21:47:00.001-08:00

The Rolling Stones: Honky Tonk Woman

2006-02-24T21:47:00.000-08:00

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: The Message

2006-02-24T21:45:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith: Because the Night

2006-02-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

The Who: A Quick One While He's Away

2006-02-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

Devo: That's Good

2006-02-24T21:35:00.000-08:00

2006-02-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

I’m struggling to keep up with the various blog posts and listserv commentaries on Flarf distributed throughout the internet; my brain fries each time I open the Lucipo listserv archive to find yet another five-page response to Dan Hoy’s Jacket essay. But I trudge on, mainly because I love literary fisticuffs, the discussion is generally intelligent and well-argued, and the humor is pitched a bit higher than Defamer. Lime Tree had a clarifying post several days ago, further enumerating the various ways in which the word “flarf” is used: “it belongs to the zeitgeist, which will do with it as it wills.” And today Silliman extends Gary Sullivan’s initial definition of Flarf by raising several questions about its perceived siblings (Kenneth Goldsmith, Alan Sondheim, Brian Kim Stephans, et al) though they are not really questions so much as already-apparent qualities: “systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry”; “the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling”; “appropriation of non-literary materials”; and “the role of acquaintance and friendship” in the creation of the work.

And so the genealogy of Flarf and its analogues continues to be (contentiously) mapped. Whether one wants to take that history class or not is a matter of opinion; people will place David Bromige and Jackson Mac Low into the family tree, or Kathy Acker and Tristan Tzara, or Alan Sondheim and the Baroness Freytag-Loringhoven, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t help us understand why this particular anti-aesthetic (and others like it) is rearing its self-proclaimed “awful” head now, among many different groups across various media, and why so many have such a strong reaction to it (and it is most often a reaction). But I think the Flarfists do themselves a disservice when they theorize their own work. Flarf doesn't need a defense because Flarf is indefensible. More troubling to me is the mention of Jeff Koons as a visual arts equivalent to Flarf. I see the connection, and I’ve thought of Koons (and Takashi Murakami and Gregory Crewdson and Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin) in relation to Flarf before too, but I don’t think it’s exactly right. While Koons is certainly corrosive, cute, and cloying, and though he does appropriate (not non-literary but) non-artistic materials and subjects to create his art, he strikes me as too much the individualist, uninterested in community, and not manic or offensive enough to be an appropriate analogue. Another blogger (I forget who it was, but it was in one of his posts at some point over the past year) compared Flarf to the Royal Art Lodge collective, which I think is equally mistaken. Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, and the other members of the Royal Art Lodge are just not deliberately awful enough. There’s a sentimentality and romantic earnestness to their work that is missing from Flarf (not to say that Flarf isn’t earnest or sentimental in its own way – but that difference is precisely something that should be explored further). And the Royal Art Lodge – well, they’re just not overwhelmingly corrosive or out-of-control. They’re sweet, but not sickly sweet, and not un-P.C.

Closer to Flarf is the work of the comics/art/video/performance collective Paper Rad. Visually, Paper Rad is truly nauseating. Seeing one of their gallery shows or performances is like eating too much Halloween candy after strolling down to the internet bar to down a hamburger milkshake. They make Jeff Koons look highbrow (which he is, in his way – that is, Koons has what people in grad school call, apparently with a straight face, a “critical apparatus”; I’ve found very little in the way of artists statements from the members of Paper Rad; in fact, expecting Paper Rad to have a statement of purpose would be to miss their point). Paper Rad generally uses day-glo and pastel colors, embarrassing and nostalgic but warped versions of cartoon characters from their 80s childhoods (Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage Patch and Garbage Pail Kids, My Little Pony, Gumby, Garfield, Bart Simpson, Teddy Ruxpin), outdated computer graphics and fonts, perverted narratives, and offensive, fucked-up photography; they mix it all up in a big witch’s cauldron and put it on the wall, or in a book, or on the computer screen. In their animated video, Gumby: Xmaz World View, Gumby takes his horse Pokey to get a hipster haircut for Christmas, but ends up hallucinating at the Farmers Market after getting high on spray paint while trying to graffiti the F-word on a wall. In I Heart Computers, a half-man/half-woman peacebird prays to its crystals after a notebook’s worth of teenage jargon flashes onscreen. Paper Rad also has somewhat of an engagement with poetry. There’s actually a poetry section in their new book, Paper Rad, B.J. And Da Dogs. One untitled poem reads:

WHATS harder than getting
a snowsuit on a drunk toddler?
What if the toddler was petting
a cat, and you thought the cat
was just part of the toddler

I’m on my 7th wife
What am I doing wrong,
hmmmmm
maybe its
the gong.
Or the bed bong

I;m going to be honest
how do you make refried beans,
is it just mashed potatoes?

What is a haiku?
Beginning to see the see-thru

When I think of candy
I think of being young
at a nudist beach, having the
power to ‘freeze’ time
and sample all the candy.

Is dancing like
crying?
I wouldn’t know
For I am the one
who dreams of
californication

This is not so extremely awful by itself, but in the context of the book, where page after page is crude n’ colorful – not to mention the page the poem is printed on, which is pink with some sort of old computer font, or in an art gallery, where the sensory experience is immersive and no speck of white space is left on the walls – the candy-coated awfulness is unbearable. (You can read more poems, handwritten even, and in this sense closer to LRSN's work, on their website). The aesthetics of Paper Rad and Flarf may be worth exploring since they seem on first glance so similar (use of computers/games, the aesthetic of awfulness, appropriation of “wrong” materials, and community interaction) – certainly they have quite distinct social histories, most likely even more divergent than Flarf and the “uncreative writing” of Kenny Goldsmith. Lately I’ve had a little devil whispering in one of my ears. He tells me to take the time to write an essay on these trends in the literary and visual arts. But I have an angel at the other ear. He’s singing that old Beatles song, “…whisper words of wisdom, let it be”. Or maybe it’s Bubble Puppy singing, “In the mist of sassafras, many things will come to pass”.

(More concerning Flarf and its discontents from Joyelle McSweeney)

2006-02-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm reading tonight at Beta-Level with a group called the Global Village Collective, details below.

Tonight @ Beta-Level, Chinatown, 8pm

Readings by Nico Vassilakis and Amarnath Ravva along with a group reading by the Global Village Collective of “Flag” by Ara Shirinyan from his book Waste the Land forthcoming from Factory School Press.

The Global Village Collective is Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Tova Cooper, Joseph Mosconi, Amarnath Ravva, and Stephanie Rioux.

Amarnath Ravva lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He recently finished his first manuscript, a work of non-fiction called American Canyon, that blends South Indian and Californian history, memoir, poetry, documentary, and compassion. When he is not writing or producing art, he teaches at Glendale Community College. Since 2001 he has served as an advisor for the journal nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts. He has published several poems in Interlope: a Journal of Asian American poetics, nocturnes, The Berkeley Poetry Review and has work forthcoming in the journal Trepan as well as the anthologies Risen from the East: the Poetry of the Non-Western World, and Writing the Lines of our Hands. To learn more about him or his work, visit videopoetics.org.

Nico Vassilakis lives in Seattle. He is a member of the Subtext Collective and co-founder of the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. Recently, his “concrete films” have been shown at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Encuentro Internacional de Poesía Visual, Sonora y Experimental (Argentina ) & ERRATA AND CONTRADICTION :: 2004 :: Dudley House (Harvard). More of his work can be found in Chain, Talisman, 3rd Bed, Ubu, Bird Dog & The Organ. His chapbook, Species Pieces after Perec, is forthcoming from g-o-n-g press. He is publisher of Sub Rosa Press.

2006-02-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

A bit of flarf google-sculpting: busy weekends are like codependents who seek out abusive relationships. And even worse, you're doing it to your fans! Ahhhhh…those filly weekends!

Friday night: managed to score tickets to a sold-out screening of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma Parts 1 & 2 at UCLA. A densely layered, poorly translated video, but a sweetly immersive experience. Pure chocolate to a Godard-fan. Several narrators speak at once (in French, in English, in French), words flash on the screen in irregular patterns, and every five minutes Godard proclaims “Histoires du Cinema!” in a nice, thick pompous voice. As a friend said, “at some point text becomes texture.” Sayeth film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Just as Finnegans Wake, the artwork to which Histoire(s) du cinéma seems most comparable, situates itself at some theoretical stage after the end of the English language as we know it, Godard's magnum opus similarly projects itself into the future in order to ask, 'What was cinema?'” Parts 3 & 4 screened Sunday. Alas, I didn’t make it.

Saturday afternoon: a visit to The Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. Wow. I’m surprised more Angelenos aren’t aware of this incredible community resource. Supposedly the largest archive of its kind in the United States, the library has hundreds and hundreds of flatfiles, shelves and file cabinets stuffed with historical pamphlets, newspapers, books, magazines, recordings, videos, ephemera and personal archives documenting the history of social struggles and movements in greater Los Angeles. Everything from the Charlotta A. Bass Collection (papers of the blacklisted editor and publisher of the oldest African American newspaper in LA and the first African American woman to run for Vice-President in the United States – on the Progressive Party ticket) to old IWW recruitment films from the 1930s to an audio recording of Huey P. Newton’s birthday party in 1969. Browse their website and consider donating or stopping by when you’re next in Angeltown.

Saturday night: a quick run by Kordansky Gallery in Chinatown to check out Nicolau Vergueiro’s second solo show, A Thousand Openings.

Nicolau Verguiero, A Thousand Openings

Later Saturday night: ran across town from Chinatown to Venice just in time to catch Jennifer Moxley and Aaron Kunin at Beyond Baroque. Kunin read poems from his book Folding Ruler Star in what sounded to me like a sinister voice, but a friend described it as the voice one might hear on an airport intercom (which is sinister in its own way). It was great to hear Kunin’s poems live, which actually strengthened them in my estimation. The voice in my head was much more timid. The work Moxley presented, in manuscript, was more narrative than I’d heard from her before (one piece was actually a memoir), but the new prose poems, which have lately turned up in journals here and there, may have been responsible for my Fourieran dreams later that night.

Later still Saturday night: out with friends to a dive bar in Atwater Village. Distracted by a girl playing darts. I couldn’t decide if she was a complete stranger or an old friend from college, and didn’t want to risk the embarrassment of saying, “Hey aren’t you…” and being mistaken. Meanwhile, over a few beers, Stan Apps explained how the Fed manages to make the wealthy even wealthier through a convoluted system of borrowing and lending.

Sunday afternoon: The Sunset Chronicles, Part III, in which wooden citizenry dreams of vegetable flight and abandoned movie palaces project the ghost life of marionettes. Or a really good puppet show.

2006-02-14T17:47:00.000-08:00

Market Poetics

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a predecessor to Mickey (once Mortimer, until Walt's wife requested a less pompous marque for their mouse) was traded by NBC/Universal to Disney/ESPN for sportscaster Al Michaels. “Yes, the prodigal rabbit has come home,” said John Canemaker, director of Animation Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I think it’s really kind of poetic in a way, how it all has come around.”

2006-02-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight, 7:30 PM @ Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA

Jennifer Moxley & Aaron Kunin

Native Californian JENNIFER MOXLEY is the author of Often Capital (Flood 2005), The Sense Record and other poems (Edge 2002; Salt 2003), Imagination Verses (Tender Buttons 1996; Salt 2003), and several chapbooks. Her poem “Behind the Orbits” was chosen by Robert Creeley for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2002. She is the poetry editor for The Baffler magazine and a contributing editor of The Poker magazine. Since 1999 she has lived in Maine, where she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Maine. AARON KUNIN is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005), a collection of small poems about shame. He recently moved to California, where he is an assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

2006-02-10T15:55:00.000-08:00

A tip from pas au-delà led me to The Power of Nightmares, a fascinating three-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that traces the twin histories of the neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists from mid-century to the present. Curtis argues that the neo-cons (following Leo Strauss) and the Islamists (following Sayyid Qutb) engage in the fantasy-manufacturing business:

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares.

They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits.

At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret organised evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful. (From the opening narration to The Power of Nightmares).

The tone is conspiratorial, though I’m damned if I can find a real conspiracy; it all seems true enough. The supposedly daring contention is that al Qaeda is not a coherent organization but rather an idea (meme?) adopted by isolated terrorist groups, and that the threat of terrorism is largely a fantasy. (A portion of the program, which was produced in 2004, points out that despite the constant threat of terrorist attacks in London, no terrorism has yet happened. The London Underground bombings of 2005 undercut this argument just a little, don’t you think?). The only real criticism I have is that the documentary seems to create a narrative out of isolated truths, leaving other important factors by the wayside (for instance, according to Wikipedia, MediaLens accused Curtis of leaving out the narrative of neo-con and Islamist economic self-interest, to which Curtis answered, “Both the neoconservatives and the Islamists have become powerful and influential and I chose to make a series of films that explained the roots of their ideas and how they were taken up, simplified and distorted. You want me to have made a different series [about] a perfectly good and very important subject - but different”).

One other point: Curtis seems to have been influenced quite a bit by the Bay Area underground filmmaker (and “media archaeologist”) Craig Baldwin. Both use found pop-cultural imagery and offbeat soundtracks; but Baldwin, at least in part, means to show how such imagery (old commercials, propaganda films, forgotten musicals and foreign films) serves an ideological master. By creating fake histories out of real historical detritus, Baldwin highlights the constructed nature of historical narrative. This is the basic theme in The Power of Nightmares too, but the footage Curtis uses doesn’t strengthen his argument; the old movies and commercials seem to be there just for the sake of throwing a fun and quirky bone to the viewer. That is, I don’t really see Baldwin's critical distance in the work of Adam Curtis. In The Power of Nightmares a funny and outdated old newsreel is just a funny and outdated old newsreel.

Watch The Power of Nightmares online:

Part I: Baby It's Cold Outside

Part II: The Phantom Victory

Part III: The Shadows in the Cave

2006-02-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-01-30T15:58:00.000-08:00

Nam June Paik, 1932-2006

Magnet TV, 1965

Some Nam June Paik links:

The Worlds of Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik Studios

The Nam June Paik Museum

2005-12-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

Hiatus hits (until the New Year).