Obama '08 by Jonathan Horowitz

Congratulations...

...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.

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

Struggling, lately, with the issue of compromise.

For an Unoriginal Literature

Nice Onion:

MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again

Re-Introducing...

The Poetic Research Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau

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!

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

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

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

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

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

John Malkovich?

AREA SNEAKS

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

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

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

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

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