Littoral: MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES
MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES
The idea for –MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES—originates in the work of neuro-philosopher Dan Lloyd, Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. Dr. Lloyd’s research focuses on taking patterns found in brain activity and converting them into musical score. These scores are not biofeedback or music cognition experiments, but rather extracting the ‘architecture of consciousness,’ as it occurs in the brain, and assigning its varying components musical tones. The result is musical scores meant to reflect brain activity itself. Through this, Lloyd found that recognizable musical structures emerge, and he thus formulated a theory that consciousness operates within a musical structure – or rather, that music is an expressive interpretation of how our brains work.
The “music” generated through Lloyd’s project seems oddly familiar, and is surprisingly harmonious and musical. Now, should this theory be proven, the philosophical implications are both joyous and endless. The idea that we are, in fact, music – or that music is, in fact, truly human: a reflection or interpretation of the human mind.
The event will serve as both an exhibition and an experiment. Elisa Da Prato, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who had initiated the event and is currently working on a film concerning this theme, will be pairing Dan Lloyd with different ensembles/musicians who will be assigned with the task of interpreting the scores that are the result of his studies. The event will be divided into three parts: a screening of a short film about Lloyd’s experiments that would spell out the context for the experiment; the staging of these scores as interpreted by the musicians; and a discussion concerning both the aesthetics and the musical validity of the aforementioned scores. The panel is shaping to include Lloyd, a neuroscientist, a music theorist, and the musicians assigned to the task.
Da Prato states that her goal is to create a discussion about the emotional and biological necessity of music itself. She wishes to assimilate Lloyd’s theory to the scientific/philosophical equivalent of Woody Allen’s joke concluding his film Annie Hall: “we need the eggs.” The idea being that, for some reason, we need to both express and experience people in musical form. Almost a scientific case for joy.
Littoral Series: New York Tyrant with Phillip Stearns
ISSUE’s Littoral Series began in 2006 and is a monthly event, curated by Tony Antoniadis, which pairs fresh and compelling writers with innovative contemporary musicians, sound, and video artists to deepen the artist and audience experience of the works.
The New York Tyrant is a tri-quarterly literary magazine based in Hell’s Kitchen, focusing on the immediacy of the short story. The pieces, coming from voices both new and seasoned, are concise, evocative, often humorous, and sometimes surreal. We believe in the power and urgency of the story and its ability to describe and illuminate the interior and exterior landscape. We believe in the power of narrative and its ability to make life more astonishingly alive. Joining ISSUE for Littoral will be Eric Hintze and Eugene Marten.
Erich Hintze lives with his wife, a dog, and a one-eyed cat in a rowhouse in Washington DC.
Eugene Marten lives in Harlem and tries to get one thing right. He is also the author of the novels In The Blind (Turtle Point), Waste (Ellipsis), and the forthcoming Firework (Tyrant Books).
Phillip Stearns (AKA Pixel Form) is a practitioner of sound and visual arts; music composer and performer; electronics sculptor and installation artist. He is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts music composition department where he studied with David Rosenboom, Hans W. Koch, Michael Pisaro, Mark Trayle, Sarah Roberts, Tom Leeser, and Andy Kopra. Central to his practice are the use of custom electronics, hand-craft, hardware hacking techniques, media technologies, procedural processes, organic and natural gardening, and seed saving. He views technology as a site for exploring contemporary society, cultural tendencies, and the horizons of violence, politics, information, noise, control, proximity, parity, subversion, corruption, interconnectedness and interrelatedness. Pursuing organic and natural agricultural practices and ecological design are a way of addressing the harmful impacts of the widespread proliferation of modern technologies and mediating the damages resulting from their wanton consumption and disposal. Characteristic of his work is judicial use of materials, restraint, simplicity, a careful balance between conceptual depth and playfulness. He has presented, performed, lectured, exhibited, led workshops, and screened works at various festivals, conferences, residencies, museums and institutions around the US and Northern Europe including the Experimental TV Center, NIME, Filmer La Musique, STEIM, Darmstadt, Torrance Art Museum, Machine Project, Telic, Optica film festival, ISIM conference, GLAMFA exhibition, Spark festival, Bent festival, Soundwalk, Chaos Communications Camp, Cal Arts, SFSU, UCSD, UC Davis, and Mills College.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is supported, in part, by The Casement Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
CANCELLED – Lucy Sexton: Sickness, A Night of Sick Stories
CANCELLED
apologies.
Sickness: A Night of Sick Stories Hosted by Lucy Sexton
Readings by:
- Joe Westmoreland writing about his adventures with HIV
- CD Clifford writing about babies, sex, and old people
- Nora Burns writing with an incredibly sick sense of humor
- Lori E. Seid writing about sick lesbians
- Brigid Murphy writing and singing about terminal lymphoma
LUCY SEXTON has worked in theatre and film in different capacities for more than 20 years. She developed and directed the Obie-Award winning off-Broadway show, Spalding Gray, Stories Left to Tell, working closely with Gray’s widow Kathleen Russo. Sexton produced Charles Atlas’ documentary The Legend of Leigh Bowery for the BBC and Arte. With Anne Iobst, she co-created the Bessie Award-winning dance-performance group DANCENOISE, which has performed extensively in New York and around the world since 1983. She regularly teaches workshops in performance and compostion, most recently at the Daghdha Dance Center in Limerick, Ireland. As a performer she has appeared in the work of Alien Comic, Charles Atlas, David Gordon, Jo Andres, Mimi Goese, Heidi Dorow, Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Jr, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Richard Move, Sarah Shulman, and Alain Buffard among others. Performing as The Factress, Sexton hosts a randomly occurring live talk show, The Lucy Show, with co-host Mike Iveson, aka Nurse Baby Asparagus. She is currently directing Tom Murrin’s one-man theater piece The Talking Show, and producing a new film by Charles Atlas on the musical group Antony and the Johnsons.
Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel Tramps Like Us, of which Kevin Killian wrote: “Joe Westmoreland writes better than we deserve, and his simple sentences are each one a little marvel of sophisticatio n and purity.” Westmoreland wrote a regular column for Pos Magazine and has contributed to many periodicals and to the anthologies including Discontents (New Queer Writers), Best American Gay Fiction of 1996, Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade, and Latin Lovers: True Stories of Latin Men In Love. He lives in New York City.
Nora Burns is a founding member of the comedy groups Unitard and the Nellie Olesons and has performed across the country in venues from PS122, LaMama, and Joe’s Pub in NYC to Highways, Cavern Club and HBO workspace in LA. She has also performed at the Aspen Comedy Festival, Just for Laughs in Montreal and We’re Funny That Way in Toronto. She has appeared in the films Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Broken Hearts Club and Boys Life 3 among others. Her television appearances include Logo’s Wisecrack comedy show and the Sandra Bernhart Experience.
Wingdale Community Singers
The uncanny fervency of Old Time music was the starting point for the Wingdale Community Singers. A copy of Black Hole Heaven, Hannah Marcus’s album on Bar/None Records, bestowed on novelist Rick Moody by Bar/None’s proprietor, Glenn Morrow, led Moody to Marcus and a long friendship followed. The two shared interest in old folk, blues, and bluegrass, and after a time the two attempted writing some songs in that idiom. The form was old, but the lyrics were contemporary and urban, reflecting that other New York City, the borough of Brooklyn, where both lived. With a brace of songs, Marcus and Moody solicited the aid and counsel of David Grubbs, a veteran of twenty years of punk and experimental music, and a former member of Squirrel Bait, Gastr del Sol, Bastro, The Red Krayola, and many other projects. Grubbs brought a modernist sensibility and a rich facility with country music (from his roots in Louisville) to the lineup. The three recorded their eponymously titled first album in 2004 and it was released the following year on Plain Recordings.
Because of Grubbs’s demanding schedule as a solo performer and as a full-time instructor in music at Brooklyn College, The Wingdales often solicited and found other partners for live performances, including Abe Streep, on violin and mandolin, and in the course of playing gigs in 2006, they enlisted Nina Katchadourian, who in the long Wingdale tradition of doing many other things, is well known as a visual and conceptual artist. She also curates at the Drawing Center in New York City. To the Wingdales, Katchadourian brought a lifetime of songwriting, and a rich alto voice, low enough to swap the tenor line with Moody on occasion, making The Wingdale Community Singers a genuine vehicle for three-part and even, on occasion, four-part harmonies.
In 2007, The Wingdale Community Singers, when schedules permitted, began recording their follow-up album at Seaside Recording Lounge in South Park Slope, home to a number of New Pornographer sessions recently, with Patrick McCarthy engineering. By fall of 2008, they’d mixed and mastered Spirit Duplicator, fifteen new songs (including one old gem by the Carter Family), four by Marcus, three by Moody, two by Katchadourian, and five by Marcus and Moody, exhibiting, as the title of the album would suggest, a continuity with the old folk and bluegrass forms that colored the first Wingdales release, but also moving in new directions, as in the dark rock and roll inflected opening track, “(I’m in the Mood) to Drive,” the gospel of “AWOL,” the baroque chamber pop of “Montreal,” “Let My Ship Pass By,” and “Aviary,” and traditional feel of the Carter Family’s “Death Is Only A Dream” and Moody’s “On the Carousel,” an a cappella update of the Sacred Harp songwriting style. The album augments the four core members of the band, who all play guitar, keyboards, and sing, with longtime Wingdale alumnus Abe Street (violin, mandolin), and other players from Booklyn, like Tianna Kennedy (cello), Gerald Menke (pedal steel, slide), Taylor Bergren-Chrisman (bass), Charles Burst (drums), and Nadje Noordhuis (trumpet).
The Wingdale Community Singers have tried, in their brief history, to make music that has the old community feel of folk music, and the reliability of these old styles, as well as the complexity and lyrical dynamism of contemporary modern music. On Spirit Duplicator, they both reveal a continuity with the music they love, as they also try to move the idiom a little further. It’s an album of deep feeling, great harmonies, and great songwriting, that could have been made almost anytime in the last fifty years by people sitting in a room playing together. And, in fact, much of it was made this way, a group of people well past the youth that drives much popular music, all of them with busy complicated lives, sitting in a room, playing and singing for the love of doing it.
POETRY TO THE INFINITIVE POWER(S)
Join us for an evening in celebration of ISSUE Project Room featuring dozens of literature’s finest poets followed by a bacchanalian celebration and performance by These Are Powers.
Proceeds will benefit ISSUE Project Room’s move to 110 Livingston.
At 7pm — The Way of the Word
Poetry Extravaganza curated by Bob Holman, Suzanne Fiol, and Kenneth Goldsmith
featuring the amazing poets:
Bob Holman
Ken Goldmith
Jonas Mekas
Anne Waldman
Judith Malina
Abiodoun Oyewole (of the Last Poets)
Hettie Jones
Jeff Wright
Esther K. Smith
Georgia Luna Faust
Michael Carter
Kathy Engel
Kimiko Hahn
Beau Sia
Holly Anderson
Max Blagg
Frank Lima
Betsey Andrews
Mike Topp
Steve Dalachinsky
Yuko Otumo
and the FLARF POETS:
Gary Sullivan
Sharon Mesmer
Drew Gardner
Katie Degentesh
Jordan Davis
Brandon Downing
Nada Gordon
At 9:00pm — These Are Powers Dance Party
Live performance by These Are Powers with debut screening of their new music video for “Candyman”, featuring the new single off of their forthcoming release with RVNG Intl. Filmed at ISSUE’s future home, the Beaux-Arts 110 Livingston, “Candyman” is a surrealist dinner party where every course served consists entirely of sugar and the guests overindulge in an alternately comedic and nightmarish story. Conceptualized by These Are Powers and director Joseph Krings, the video was produced by a team assembled by Knowmore resulting in a bizarre, fun and colorful video that makes a perfect companion piece to an already infectious song.
TAP’s live performance will feature live AV projections by SECRET PROJECT ROBOT and will be followed by DJ sets by Ryan Sawyer, and Matthew Radune and Jeremy Campbell. Opening the event, immediately after the way of the word, is the duo Lone Wolf and Cub (drummer Ryan Sawyer and trapeze artist Suzanne Rogalsky).
About the TAP Dance Party artists:
These Are Powers
These Are Powers take the familiar and channel it back from the future primitive. We are a language all our own. It is club beats played live, found sounds, pulses, blips, collage, oscillations, electronic watercolor, decay, regeneration and every vibration in between. Whatever it sounds like is not what you think. Look twice. These Are Powers hail from the dual ports of Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL.
We are Anna Barie (sings, electronics), Pat Noecker (prepared bass, sings), and Bill Salas (electroacoustic drums, sings). We create movement in freedom, infinity in possibility.
Secret Project Robot
http://www.secretprojectrobot.org/
Secret Project Robot: Art Experiment is a not for profit dedicated to the documentation and proliferation of contemporary art and current cultural trends in music, performance, dance, the party and social theory.
Lone Wolf and Cub
http://www.myspace.com/ryanlonewolfsawyer
Listen to Bob Holman perform his Spoken Word Poem “Walking Brooklyn Bridge” for the Urbana 10th Anniversary party at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC Oct 2007
MALOMAR NITE with ARIANA REINES, DAN HOY, HOLY SHIT and JON LEON
UNFORTUNATELY, Due to Circumstances beyond our control, Genesis P-Orridge, Morrison Edley and Bryin Dall will not be able to participate in tonight’s performance.
MAL-O-MAR NITE
HOLY SHIT
DAN HOY
JON LEON
ARIANA REINES
celebrating the RELEASE OF
GLORY HOLE / THE HOT TUB BY DAN HOY / JON LEON (MAL-O-MAR: 2009)
AND
MY HEART LAID BARE BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, TRANS. ARIANA REINES (MAL-O-MAR: 2009)
Holy Shit (www.veryholyshit.com) is artist and designer Matt Fishbeck in collaboration with a lot of different people (Ariel Pink, Christopher Owens of Girls, many many more). Their record, Stranded at Two Harbors, is out on UUAR.
Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is co-founder of the art and literary magazine SOFT TARGETS. His publications include Basic Instinct: Poems (Triple Canopy, 2008), and Outtakes (Lame House Press, 2007).
Jon Leon wrote the books Right Now the Music and the Life Rule, Tract, and Hit Wave. He makes videos in New York City.
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006) and Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), and the translator of The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal (Semiotexte: 2009). Her play, TELEPHONE, won two obies in 2009.
Angela Jaeger & Alan Licht with Pat Irwin, Cynthia Sley and Chris Brokaw
Angela Jaeger: KICKWANTS ONLY: excerpts from the punk diaries
Angela Jaeger is a New York-based singer and poet who has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians including PigBag, David Cunningham, Bush Tetras, The Drowning Craze, Billy McKenzie, Amy Rigby, Jim Sclavunos and Alan Licht. She has published with glass eye books, Green Panda press, Principal Hand and the Brooklyn Rail. Her punk diary project is based on her own teenage journals from the mid-late 70s East Village, a graphic text that has inspired readings with writer/ journalist Byron Coley.
Angela Jaeger
Alan Licht will read from An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn (Drag City Press, 2002), a “both sides now” extended meditation on the 80s, the 90s, New Wave, Grunge, Post-Rock, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Philip K. Dick, and the pets.com sock puppet. Some rock-geek described Licht’s tome thusly: “A thoughtful and entertaining look at how music and culture infect (“cross-pollinate?”) each other, Alan Licht’s An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn succeeds by being real.”
Alan Licht is a New York-based guitarist and writer. Author of Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media (Rizzoli, 2007), he has written for the WIRE, Sight & Sound, Modern Painters, Village Voice, and other publications. A composer and improvisor who has performed with everyone from Tom Verlaine to Michael Snow to Devendra Banhart to the late Rashied Ali, he is the co-founder, with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, of Text of Light, a group which combines free improvisation with screenings of experimental cinema.
Alan Licht
Pat Irwin & Cynthia Sley
Pat Irwin was a founding member of the ground-breaking instrumental band ”The Raybeats” as well as ”Eight Eyed Spy,” formed with Lydia Lunch and others from the New York “No Wave” scene of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Pat also played guitar and keyboards with ”The B-52’s” from 1989 through 2007. He has also composed the scores for numerous independent films (including My New Gun, But I’m A Cheerleader, Bam Bam & Celeste) and cartoons (including “Rocko’s Modern
Life,” “Pepper Ann,” and “Class Of 3000.”)
As lead vocalist of the ”Bush Tetras,” Cynthia Sley produced some of the most distinctive aspects of the Tetras sounds. Sley’s spoken/sung vocals in songs like
“Too Many Creeps” and “You Can’t Be Funky” created hypnotic trances offset by Pat Place’s guitar rhythms. “Too Many Creeps” was a mainstay of the infamous early Eighties New York “No Wave” club scene.
Together, Pat Irwin and Cynthia Sley have started to record and perform as Command V.
chris brokaw
CHRIS BROKAW was born and raised in and around new york city. after attending oberlin college, he moved to boston, massachusetts, where he continues to reside.
in 1990, he began recording and performing internationally with CODEINE, with whom he played drums and guitar on 2 records for SUB-POP. in 1992, he left that band to pursue songwriting, singing and guitar playing with COME, who recorded four albums for MATADOR and toured internationally over the course of 10 years.
since 2002, chris has recorded four solo albums: the instrumental “RED CITIES” (ATAVISTIC/KIMCHEE/12XU, 2002), the solo acoustic “WANDERING AS WATER”(NORMAL, 2004), the film score “I WAS BORN, BUT” (ATAVISTIC/12XU, 2004), and the rock/vocal “INCREDIBLE LOVE” (12XU/ROCK ACTION/ACUARELA, 2005).
he has performed on over 2 dozen other recordings, performing as a member of the following bands: THE WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY, THE NEW YEAR, PULLMAN, CONSONANT, and THE EMPTY HOUSE COOPERATIVE; as a guest on recordings by COBRA VERDE, MANTA RAY, ROSA CHANTSWELL, KARATE, and VIA TANIA; and as an accompanist to recordings and performances by STEVE WYNN, EVAN DANDO, THALIA ZEDEK, ALAN LICHT, TARA JANE O’NEIL, crime writer GEORGE PELECANOS, and RHYS CHATHAM.
CHRIS BROKAW was born and raised in and around new york city. after attending oberlin college, he moved to boston, massachusetts, where he continues to reside.
in 1990, he began recording and performing internationally with CODEINE, with whom he played drums and guitar on 2 records for SUB-POP. in 1992, he left that band to pursue songwriting, singing and guitar playing with COME, who recorded four albums for MATADOR and toured internationally over the course of 10 years.
since 2002, chris has recorded four solo albums: the instrumental “RED CITIES” (ATAVISTIC/KIMCHEE/12XU, 2002), the solo acoustic “WANDERING AS WATER”(NORMAL, 2004), the film score “I WAS BORN, BUT” (ATAVISTIC/12XU, 2004), and the rock/vocal “INCREDIBLE LOVE” (12XU/ROCK ACTION/ACUARELA, 2005).
he has performed on over 2 dozen other recordings, performing as a member of the following bands: THE WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY, THE NEW YEAR, PULLMAN, CONSONANT, and THE EMPTY HOUSE COOPERATIVE; as a guest on recordings by COBRA VERDE, MANTA RAY, ROSA CHANTSWELL, KARATE, and VIA TANIA; and as an accompanist to recordings and performances by STEVE WYNN, EVAN DANDO, THALIA ZEDEK, ALAN LICHT, TARA JANE O’NEIL, crime writer GEORGE PELECANOS, and RHYS CHATHAM.
Alex Waterman reads Robert Ashley
a conversation with Robert Ashely, scored using one of Ashley’s early graphic scores, in memoriam…Esteban Gomez (1963)
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008.
In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and will be shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe this fall.
Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.
The operatic works of Robert Ashley are distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language. Fanfare Magazine calls Ashley’s Perfect Lives“nothing less than the first American opera…”, and The Village Voice comments, “When the 21st Century glances back to see where the future of opera came from, Ashley, like Monteverdi before him, is going to look like a radical new beginning.” A prolific composer and writer, Ashley’s operas are “so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner’s Ring cycle or Stockhausen’s seven-eveningLicht cycle. In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else.” (The Los Angeles Times).
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1930 Robert Ashley was educated at the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music. At the University of Michigan, he worked at the Speech Research Laboratories (psycho-acoustics and cultural speech patterns), and was employed as a Research Assistant in Acoustics at the Architectural Research Laboratory.
During the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival, the annual festival of contemporary performing arts in Ann Arbor which, from 1961 to 1969, presented most of the decade’s pioneers of the performing arts. He directed the highly influential ONCE Group, a music-theater ensemble that toured the United States from 1964 to 1969. During these years Ashley developed and produced the first of his mixed-media operas, notably That Morning Thing and In Memoriam…Kit Carson, and he composed the sound tracks for films by George Manupelli.
In 1969, Ashley was appointed Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (Oakland, California), where he organized the first public-access music and media facility. From 1966 to 1976 he toured throughout the United States and Europe with the Sonic Arts Union, the composers’ collective that included David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. With the support of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Ashley produced and directed, Music with Roots in the Aether: video portraits of composers and their music, a 14 hour television opera/documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers, which premiered at the Festival d’Automne à Paris in 1976 and has since been shown worldwide in over 100 television broadcasts and closed-circuit installations.
The Kitchen (New York) commissioned Perfect Lives in 1980, an opera for television in seven half-hour episodes. The opera was co- produced with Great Britain’s arts network, Channel Four, in August 1983. First broadcast in Great Britain in April 1984, Perfect Lives has since been seen on television in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United States and has been shown at film and video festivals around the world. It is widely considered to be the pre-cursor of “music-television.”
Staged versions of the operas Perfect Lives, Atalanta (Acts of God), and the tetralogy, Now Eleanor’s Idea, have toured throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Ashley and his company have been presented at the Avignon Festival, the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Musica Strasbourg, the Almeida Festival (London), the Festival de Otono (Madrid), New Music America (New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia), the Inventionen Festival and the Hebbel Theater (Berlin), by the Gaudeamus Foundation (The Netherlands), the USIS Interlink Festival (Japan), the Next Wave Festival (New York) and Site Santa Fe.
The Florida Grand Opera, Miami-Dade Community College and the South Florida Composers Alliance commissioned an opera, based on the experiences of the Cuban “rafters”). Balseros, was premiered at the Colony Theater, Miami Beach, on May 16, 1997.
Other commissioned works include operas Now Eleanor’s Idea (1993) and Foreign Experiences (1994) for his own opera ensemble, with funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and Meet the Composer’s Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program; Van Cao’s Meditation (1992), for pianist Lois Svard; Outcome Inevitable (1991), for chamber ensemble, by Philadelphia’s renowned Relâche Ensemble; Superior Seven (1988), for flute with orchestra and chorus, by Barbara Held and the Bowery Ensemble; eL/Aficionado (1987), opera, by Mutable Music for Thomas Buckner; Atalanta (Acts of God) (1985), by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, for its anniversary celebration;Odalisque (1984), for orchestra, solo voice and chorus, by The Arch Ensemble, Musical Elements, Alea III, and The Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago; Music Word Fire (1981), for television, by Channel 13/WNET.
Ashley’s When Famous Last Words Fail You, for voice and orchestra was commissioned and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra on December 7, 1997. Your Money My Life Good-bye, a radio production for Bayerischer Rundfunk, in English and German, has been completed and will air in early 1999. Dust, an opera commissioned by the Kanagawa Arts Foundation, Yokohama, Japan, premiered on November 15, 1998.
Ashley has also provided music for the dance companies of Trisha Brown (Son of Gone Fishin’, 1983), Merce Cunningham (Problems in the Flying Saucer, 1988), Douglas Dunn (Ideas from The Church, 1978) and Steve Paxton (The Park and The Backyard, 1978.)
Robert Ashley is the subject of a film by Peter Greenaway, one of a series entitled Four American Composers, Transatlantic Films (London) and Mystic Fire Video (New York). Perfect Lives was published by Burning Books (San Francisco) with Archer Fields (New York), October 1991. Ashley’s recorded music and videotapes are available on Lovely Music, Ltd., Nonesuch/Elektra, New World Records, Mainstream, CBS Odyssey, O.O. Discs, Koch International and Einstein Records.
Byron Coley and Andy Schwartz with Loren Connors
ISSUE Project Room presents author and poet Byron Coley reading from an unpublished novel about record collectors called ”Dominos”… with musical accompaniment by the legendary Loren Connors, plus a reading by former editor of “New York Rocker” Andy Schwartz.
Littoral Series: Melvin Van Peebles + Nondor Nevai w/ Mick Barr
Melvin Van Peebles is unquestionably a renaissance man and his reputation as a living legend is indisputable. The incomparable Van Peebles has found success in every medium of the entertainment industry as a director, producer, writer, actor, composer and editor. From music (a three time Grammy nominee) to television (an Emmy-award winner) to Broadway (eleven Tony nominations) this trail blazer and trendsetter does everything his way. While he is best known as the “godfather of independent film and modern black cinema”, he also has the honor of being another first—the first African-American trader on the American Stock Exchange.
Melvin Van Peebles was born in Chicago. After graduating from college two years before most, Van Peebles joined the Air Force where he became the youngest member of the Strategic Air Command. Upon leaving the Air force he went to Mexico made his living as a painter for awhile and then it was on to Europe to do graduate study in Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam in Holland. Several years later Van Peebles moved to Paris, taught himself French and worked as a journalist for a French Newspaper. Adapting Chester Himes’ writings as an ongoing cartoon series for “Harikiri” the legendary French Magazine, ignited a fire and Van Peebles went on to write five French language novels. One of those novels became the basis of his first feature film, La Permission: A Story of a Three Day Pass which won him the Critics Choice Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. The rest as they say is history.
Unfortunately, sometimes the reality of people who are simply trying to maximize their personal potential is often complicated by prejudice, discrimination, intolerance and systemic destruction of the ego. In their struggle for liberation pioneers like Van Peebles, with their discontent and refusal to accept the status quo, create eruptions so significant that they become the bedrock upon which new opportunities are born. Looking over the life of Mr. Van Peebles we can now on truly fully assess the enormity of his actions on History. Van Peebles calculating merger of his roles as a businessman and artist not only assured his projects meet with success, but opened the door for many African American Artist. Best said by his son, Mario Van Peebels, and I quote: “My father crashed the gates, then along with Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis broke down Hollywood’s color barriers. They made it possible for all of us to come marching up the hill: Spike Lee, the Brothers Hudlin, John Singleton, Bill Duke and myself.” In 2004 Mario Van Peebles honored his father by making Baadasss the story of his father’s struggles through Hollywood. The movie won the Academy’s Spirit Award. Today the Hollywood machine counts African-Americans filmmakers among some of their most lucrative producers.
The evening will also inlcude music performance by Nondor Nevai w/ Mick Barr as part of ISSUE’s Littoral Series co-curated by Suzanne Fiol and Tony Antoniadis.
nondor –
Nondor Nevai (drums/throat) is, according to Thurston Moore, “… a satanic power metal freak of nature…crushing, hilarious and delivers the damaged goods…A lot of Beefheartian voiced ruminations on straight up boner-boy sex with a shot of art history thrown in. Fucking weird and fucking awesome.”
For their performance expect an athletic display of psychonautical rigor that approaches and occasionally surpasses what is physically possible on this instrumentation; antagonizing the nonidiomatic and the panidiomatic, it will push the limits of extreme metal.
Mick Barr is an American avant-garde metal guitarist. Notable for his relentless speed and agility on his instrument[1], he is most well known for being one half of the band Orthrelm, currently signed to Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings label.
Some of Barr’s other projects have included Crom-tech, and a duo with drummer Zach Hill from Hella, as well as appearances with Quix*o*tic, and The Flying Luttenbachers. He has also released albums under the names Ocrilim and Octis, consisting of his own guitar over a drum machine. On the difference between the two, he says “Ocrilim is Mick Barr overthinking. Octis is Mick Barr underthinking. These names mean nothing when a live show is concerned. Come see Ocrilim and you may be forced to watch Octis.”[2]
In 2008, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series began in 2006 and presents fresh and compelling writers of today working with innovative contemporary musicians to develop new ways of experiencing the works, in part by dissolving the boundaries between language, sonority and art.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Kenneth Goldsmith sings Roland Barthes with live String Quartet
A live String Quartet (Mari Kimura, Dana Lyn, violins; Jessica Pavone, viola; Egil Rostad, cello) will perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and improvisations in the style of Anton Webern while Kenneth Goldsmith sings text by Roland Barthes.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University for 2010. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Exact Change 20th Anniversary
With Joan La Barbara, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, Till by Turning, Alex Waterman, Barbara Epler, James Hoff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang responding to and reading the work of Joseph Cornell, Franz Kafka, Morton Feldman, Stefan Thermerson, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zurn and John Cage.
Exact Change publishes books of experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements.
The press was founded in 1989 by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, known outside publishing as musicians from the bands Damon & Naomi, and Galaxie 500.
Exact Change authors include Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Morton Feldman, Alice James, Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka, Lautréamont, Chris Marker, Gérard de Nerval, Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Roussel, Philippe Soupault, Gertrude Stein, Stefan Themerson, Denton Welch, and Unica Zürn.
Many Exact Change titles were originally published by larger houses, especially in the 1960s, but had more recently been left out of print; some were previously published in the U.K. but not in North America; others are new publications initiated by Exact Change. But in all cases these are books that we believe should be kept available always. We think of our list as a looking-glass version of the Penguin Classics or the Library of America, drawn from works that are equally important but have in general been neglected in the U.S.
Exact Change books are distributed to the trade by D.A.P., and direct via the website www.exactchange.com.
Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/soundartist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her “signature sounds”. Creating works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology, her awards in the U.S. and Europe include the 2008 Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center; 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition; DAAD Artist-in-Residency in Berlin and 7 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships: Music Composition, Opera/Music Theatre, Inter-Arts, Recording (2), Solo Recitalist and Visual Arts; ISCM International Jury Award; Akustische International Competition Award; Aaron Copland Fund for Music; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Collaboration Award of NY Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts and Media; Meet The Composer and ASCAP Awards. Numerous commissions for concert, theatre and radioworks, including: “in the dreamtime” and “Klangbild Köln” for WestDeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne; “Dragons on the Wall”, a music score commissioned by Mary Flagler Cary Trust and “Calligraphy II/Shadows” for voice and Chinese instruments, both for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company; choral work “to hear the wind roar” for Gregg Smith Singers, I Cantori and the Center for Contemporary Arts/Santa Fe,; “Events in the Elsewhere” from “The Misfortune of the Immortals”, funded by Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace; “Awakenings” for chamber ensemble, from the University of Iowa Center for New Music; “l’albero dalle foglie azzurre” (tree of blue leaves) for solo oboe and tape, commissioned by The Saint Louis Symphony, and “A Trail of Indeterminate Light” for cellist who sings. “73 Poems”, her collaborative work with text artist Kenneth Goldsmith, was included in “The American Century Part II: SoundWorks” at The Whitney Museum of American Art. “Messa di Voce”, an interactive media work, in collaboration with Jaap Blonk, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, premiered at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria on September 7, 2003 and was awarded Honorary Mention in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica. Live Music for Dance commissions include “Landscape over Zero” (2004-05 for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company), “Fleeting Thoughts” (2005-06 for Jane Comfort & Company), and “Desert Myths/Isle of Dunes”(premiered at NJPAC April 29, 2006 featuring Ne(x)tworks and Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company). “Atmos” for flute and sonic atmosphere, commissioned by Meet The Composer/NYSFM, premiered March 2008 at Symphony Space, performed by Margaret Lancaster; recording will be released on New World Records in 2009. In 2007-08, La Barbara received a NYSCA Music Composition award to compose a new spoken word opera, “An American Rendition”, in collaboration with choreographer/theater artist Jane Comfort, which premiered September 2008 at Duke Theatre, NYC. La Barbara is currently composing a new opera. Joan La Barbara will be responding to Joseph Cornell’s Dreams.
Guitarist Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors’ singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors’ three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O’Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Loren Connors will be responding to Franz Kafka’s Blue Octave Notebook.
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable whoʼs who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim OʼRourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Arto Lindsay, and Jandek. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. Licht has collaborated on film and video performances with Charles Atlas and Andrew Lampert. He has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review,
Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications. His book, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007. Alan Licht will be responding to Album Exact Change.
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008. In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and will be shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe this fall. Alex Waterman will be responding to Stephan Themerson’s Cardinal Polatuo.
Till by Turning is the collective effort of Amy Cimini, Erica Dicker, Emily ManzoSarah Biber, and Katherine Young. Working as performers, educators, improvisers, scholars, composers, and song-writers — Till by Turning performs new chamber music by established and emerging artists and develops creative educational programs. Til by Turning will be responding to Morton Feldman’s Give my Regards to Eighth Street.
Barbara Epler grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and she started working at New Directions in 1984, after graduating from college. She became the Editor-in-Chief in 1996, a Director in 2000, and in 2009 the Publisher. Still independent, New Directions was started in 1936 by James Laughlin, and was recently described by Richard Eder in The New York Times as “long struggling and long astonishing” (though she sometimes remembers that as “long suffering…”). Laughlin was the first in the USA to publish Nabokov, Borges, Lorca, Montale, Celine, Dylan Thomas, Neruda, Mishima, Tennessee Williams, Sartre and many other now classic world authors; he also built a poetry list around the then avant-garde poets Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Paz, Oppen, Olson, and Duncan, and continued with Creeley, Levertov, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, and Corso, who all embody an experimental tradition which is carried on these days by Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Forrest Gander, Kamau Brathwaite, and many others. Laughlin accepted Pound’s notion that truly new writing could take 20 years to catch on, which allows for a great deal of editorial latitude, and Epler focuses on finding new fiction, and New Directions has been lucky to be the first American publisher of new great writers like W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Laszlo Krasznahorkhai, Cesar Aira, and Victor Pelevin. She has also been a contributing editor for Grand Street magazine and a judge for the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the N.Y.U. Emerging Writers Award, and the PEN Translation Fund Awards. Barbara Epler will be reading from Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the m
ost exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. A book of critical essays, “Uncreative Writing,” is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Kenneth Goldsmith will be reading selections of John Cage’s Compositions in Retrospect.
James Hoff is an artist living in New York City. He is the co-founder and editor of Primary Information, a non-profit publisher devoted to printing artists’ books and multiples by artists both young and old. He was the co-editor of 0 To 9: The Complete Magazine 1967 – 1969 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the editor of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), winner of the William Carlos Williams Book of the Year Award. With Primary Information he has edited publications and multiples by John Cage, the Art Workers’ Coalition, DISBAND, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Seth Siegelaub, and Emmett Williams, among many others. He is the recent author of Topten (No Input Books) and co-author of Endless Nameless (No Input Books). Primary Information was formed in 2006 by Miriam Katzeff and James Hoff to foster intergenerational dialogue through the publication of artists’ books and writing by artists—emerging, mid-career, and established. Our period of focus is from the early sixties to the present, with an emphasis on the conceptual practice begun in the mid Sixties and the strategy of using publications as an extension of this practice. Primary Information has recently released a CD anthologizing the late 70s/early 80s feminist music and performance collective DISBAND. Upcoming publications include an anthology of Dan Graham’s writings on music, a facsimile edition of Avalanche Magazine, and source book/anthology of the feminist magazine Eau de Cologne. For more information, please see www.primaryinformation.org. James Hoff will be reading from Unica Zurn’s Dark Spring.
Angela Jaeger, Byron Coley + Gary Panter, Devin Flynn & Ross Goldstein
THE RIDICULOUS NO
A running quest for word slap ingénue, songstress/ poet Angela Jaeger joins forces with underground textsmith extraordinaire Byron Coley for an evening of sporadic talk – to no one, to each other, to you. A collection of psychedelic chants, words, sights and sounds will bounce between these 2 college buddies in what might otherwise be explained as unknown chemistry. See for yourselves.
After that, Brooklyn’s own Gary Panter and Devin Flynn (with Ross Goldstein “Sittin’ In”) will conjure up whiffs of the sweetly-scented musical gangaroo that is theirs alone. This evening’s performance will be in celebration of the newly released “Gary and Devin Go Outside” CD, and will draw from the rich tradition of world psychedelia, as well as blazing ragged pathways through jungles of freshly-scorched synapses. They may be collaborated upon as well. Hear for yourselves.
Angela Jaeger
Angela Jaeger is a New York-based singer and poet who has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians including PigBag, The Drowning Craze, Bush Tetras, Billy McKenzie, David Cunningham, Amy Rigby, Jim Sclavunos and Alan Licht. She has published with glass eye books, Green Panda press, the Brooklyn Rail and is currently working on an edition for Principal Hand. She gave a debut joint reading of her Punk Diary project with writer/journalist Byron Coley at Issue Project Room in 2007 and is currently shaping this material into a graphic text book form.
Byron Coley
Byron Coley lives in Massachusetts and has worked as a writer, archivist, editor & collector for over 30 years. His most recent book was a collaboration with Thurston Moore called “No Wave” (Abrams). In the works are “Pants Down, Earthlings!” (Gladtree), “The Moisture of Diapers” (L’Oie de Cravan) and others. He currently runs the Ecstatic Yod Collective and glass eye books, writes a few columns, authors liner notes aplenty, and contributes to various periodicals.
Gary Panter
Long one of his generation’s great visual artists, Gary Panter also has a long history as a musician. He began recording and issuing records on his own back in the ‘70s, but he is probaby best know for the “Tornader to the Tater” single, engineered & backed by the Residents, which came out in ‘81, and the Japanese LP, “Pray for Smurph,” which has recently been reissued in deluxe digital format. His sound is always woozy, but he can play a guitar just like stealing a bell. And considering his history – from Jimbo to Pee Wee’s Playhouse to Dal Tokyo to Pink Donkey and onward – well, what would you expect? His most recent book is the massive “Gary Panter” two-volume monograph issued by Picture Box. Amazing.
Devin Flynn
Devin Flynn is another guy whose visual presence is better known – for now – than his “footprint musicale.” A master of animated insanity, his most revered project may well have been the “Y’all So Stupid” series, which destroyed the line beyween surrealism and Asperger’s Syndrome with all thumbs blazing. What is less known is his deft-ass handling of all-known musical instruments, no matter how obscure. How deft? Deft enough to make Gary sound more like Paul McCartney than a walrus. Which is defter than hell.
Ross Goldstein
Ross Goldstein is the new “secret weapon,” whose presence explodes the duo-infinity of the Panter/Flynn Union into triangulated perfection. Based in upstate New York, Goldstein has evolved into that region’s answer to many questions posed (imperfectly, it seems) by Van Dyke Parks. His first LP, “Trail Songs” (Specific Recordings) is a puff & chug of special merit. His photograph remains classified.
Karen Finley
photo: timothy greenfield sanders
IMPULSE to SUCK
The performance of the apology and
The separation of sex and state
Karen Finley was in Albany, New York on March 10 in the Capital for a conference waiting to hear a speech from Governor Eliot Spitzer on Reproductive Health. Instead later that day, Spitzer performed an apology with his supportive, devastated wife standing next to him. Finley will speak about the performance of the apology, the erotic transference of the media’s fixation on Spitzer’s frown and the emotional starring role for his wife, Silda. Finley will perform her latest spoken word text which examines the confession, the apology, the imagining of the sexual encounter, the travel of the escort, the compulsion, the immigrant father’s plan for his son to succeed and the couples imagined therapy sessions. Looking at the psychodrama in the intimacy of our political leaders, Finley poses to see the agony of the son’s need for approval from the father and the ancient wrestling of the feminine archetypes of mother and whore.
Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo
Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo
GET THIS PICTURE HERE
Old friends Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo invite one and all to Issue Project Room for the world premiere of their new collaborative film:
JACKA SPADES (a.k.a. GET THIS PICTURE HERE)
2009, Super 8mm, 34 minutes, black and white, sound.
Steve Dalachinsky, with the aid of Yuko Otomo and cinematographer Andrew Lampert, is given the chance to direct his dream film. This is not that, but rather the result of what they shot that day presented in real time as they filmed it. In the end, this is always what the film was supposed to be; what Steve wanted is another story heard on the soundtrack of the images gathered within. Shot last February on the streets of Soho, and mostly edited in-camera, this movie is never shown the same way twice. It will change forms with each subsequent presentation. JACKA SPADES (a.k.a GET THIS PICTURE HERE) is the second installment in Lampert’s ongoing TABLES TURNED trilogy. In this series, the filmmaker (Lampert) hands over direction of the movie to his subjects. “I think I always wanted to be the actor, not the director.” – Steve Dalachinsky from the soundtrack.
Also expect to hear Dalachinsky and Otomo read selections from recent writings, a new and still untitled film performance from Lampert, additional audio surprises, a potential guest star and, of course, door prizes.
For more information: read again.
Bios:
ANDREW LAMPERT, film/video/performance, born St. Louis, lives in Brooklyn. Regularly concocts performances involving projectors, people and text; super 8 and 16mm portraits, home movies and found footage; videos of domestic matters and disjointed narratives; audio recordings on various subjects including those mentioned above and more; other stuff, too. Works have been seen/performed/exhibited here, there including Whitney Museum of American Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, British Film Institute, The Kitchen, The Getty Museum, Kill Your Timid Notion festival, New York Film Festival, Sculpture Center, The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, Cinema Project, Diapason, Issue Project Room and many other venues. He was Director of Programming for the New York Underground Film Festival for many years and is currently Archivist at Anthology Film Archives. Lately he has been reading early Lawrence Block books, listening to Ornette Coleman bootlegs and working on a forthcoming comedy record with musician/writer Alan Licht.
STEVE DALACHINSKY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946 right after the last BIG WAR and has managed to survive lots of little wars. He has been writing poetry since he was a child and though he has grown older he has never grown up. He has been listening to, inspired by and influenced by music most of his life along with visual art, primarily surrealism and abstract expressionism. His great love is LOVE though he has been called a big curmudgeon. He feels that his poetry is an act of spontaneity and tries rather than to simply describe the “thing”, the “other,” to transform it. What he likes to think of as a kind of descriptive transformation and commingling of everything he encounters both internally and externally. His work has appeared in journals on & off line including; Big Bridge, Milk, Unlikely Stories, Xpressed, Ratapallax, Evergreen Review, Long Shot, Alpha Beat Soup, Xtant, Blue Beat Jacket, N.Y. Arts Magazine, 88, Helix and Lost and Found Times to name a few and is included in numerous anthologies such as Beat Indeed, the Haiku Moment and most notably The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. His most recent chapbooks include Trial and Error in Paris (Loudmouth Collective 2003), Musicology (Editions Pioche, Paris 2005), , Lautreamont’s Laments (Furniture Press 2005), In Glorious Black and White (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), St. Lucie (King of Mice Press 2005), Are We Not MEN & Fake Book (2 books of collage – 8 Page Press 2005). Dream Book (Avantcular Press 2005), Totems (Unarmed Press 2008) and Christ Amongst the Fishes ( a book of collage Oilcan Press 2009). He has written many liner notes for such luminaries as Charles Gayle, Roy Campbell, Matthew Shipp, James “Blood” Ulmer, Anthony Braxton, Rob Brown, Sabir Mateen, Rashied Ali, Roscoe Mitchell, Hamid Drake, Mat Maneri, Assif Tshahar and Derek Bailey. His books include A Superintendent’s Eyes (Hozomeen Press 2000) and his PEN Award winning book The Final Nite (complete notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, Ugly Duckling Presse 2006) and Logos and Language, co-authored with pianist Matthew Shipp (RogueArt 2008 ). His latest book is Reaching into the Unknown, a collaboration with French photographer Jacques Bisceglia (RoguArt 2009). His CD’s include Incomplete Directions (Knitting Factory Records with many great musicians 1999), The End of the World with drummer Federico Ughi (577 Records 2002), Phenomena of Interference with pianist Matthew Shipp (Hopscotch Records 2005), Merci De Votre Visite with Didier Lassere and Sebastian Capazza (Amor Fati 2006), and Thin Air with Loren Mazzacane Connors (Silver Wonder Press, recorded 2001, released 2007). He has read his work throughout American including New Orleans , San Francisco and the N.Y. area in venues such as the Poetry Project and The Bowery Poetry. He has also read extensively Japan, Britian and Europe, including France (posesie bienniale, Paris, Musee d’Aquintane, Bordeaux, C.I.P.M., Marseilles, Maison d’Poesie,Nante) and various institutions throughout Japan and Germany. He has little formal education and has been called a Jazz- poet, a post-beat poet, a street poet etc. All of these he flatly denies. He’s also been called lots of other things, some of which he is and some of which he is NOT. Or as he likes to see it: HE SIMPLY IS… or as Monk once stated, ” I don’t know I just do IT.”
YUKO OTOMO is a visual artist & a bilingual poet (poetry & haiku) who is of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays & does translation. In visual art, she has been concentrating herself on the study of “pure abstraction” & has created a body of work covering over 3 decades. Her work has been shown in various gallery spaces; such as Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128, Knitting Factory & Vision Festival. As a poet/writer, she has read her work in venues such as St. Marks’s Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, Tonic, The Stone, Knitting Factory, NY Public Library, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nest, Pink Pony, Nuyorican Poet’s Café etc. She also has read in Germany, France & Japan. She has been published in many magazines & literary publications such as Recluse, 6×6, Long Shot, Appearances, The Unbearables Assemblage Magazine, Downtown Anthology, Senritsu & others. Her books include “ Garden: Selected Haiku” (Beehive Press), “Small Poems”, “The Hand of the Poet” (by Ugly Duckling Presse), “Cornell box Poems”, “Genesis”, “ Fragile” (by Sisyphus Press). She also has a huge volume of critical writing on art such as “On Artist & Studio”, “On Artuad: Writing & Drawing”, Henri Michaux: Untitled Passage”, “Vermeer & the Deft School”, “ Being as an academician versus being an intellectual”, “Victor Hugo” & etc
Glenn Branca + Neg-Fi + Paranoid Critical Revolution
GLENN BRANCA
“Lesson No. 3 (A Tribute to Steve Reich)”
commissioned by The Barbican Center London in 2006 for Steve Reich’s 70th birthday celebration.
The musicians for this performance are: Reg Bloor, Ryan Walsh, Evelyne Buhler and Glenn Branca on guitars and Libby Fab on drums.
Circa 1980: “Lesson No. 1″ was released, a friend of mine knew someone who knew Steve Reich. My friend told me that Steve had heard the record and commented about “Lesson No. 1″, he said: “Oh…..that sounds like Phil” but he also mentioned that he had liked the piece on the flip side, “Dissonance”. I was thrilled.
I should mention that I was a serious fan of Steve’s work having heard “Music for Mallet Instruments”, “4 Organs” and “Come Out” while I was living in Boston in the mid-70’s (I didn’t move to NYC until late ‘76). All of his pieces were incredibly important to me. At the time I was writing a lot of music for my theater group “The Bastard Theatre”, and both process and repetition among other things: Penderecki style clusters and thick beautiful Messiaen chords were all right in the groove with what I was thinking about.
This year when I was talking to Bryn Ormrod about doing something as part of the Reich festival I mentioned this story to him and suggested that maybe I should write a “Lesson” for Steve. There had been a Lesson No. 2 on my album The Ascension so I suggested it be called Lesson No. 3 (a tribute to Steve Reich). The piece, as it is now written, is probably as close as I will ever get to a classic 70’s Reichian Minimalism (except for maybe “The Temple Of Venus” from “The World Upside Down”), at least without doing a direct imitation of Steve himself, something I’m sure that he would cringe to hear.
NEG-FI
Brooklyn-based duo Neg-Fi debuted as a band in 2003 with a home-made cassette release for the annual DIY holiday art event La Superette. Incorporating drastically detuned guitars, bass, walkie-talkies and handmade devices, Neg-Fi creates short, minimalist compositions with maximum impact. Following the self-released LP Listen-OK in 2005, they have just pressed a new EP, a split release with Atlanta-based noise artist Eiliyas.
Both members have performed in Glenn Branca’s Symphony No.13 in New Jersey, Belgium, London, Rome, and St. Louis.
photo by Tony Cenicola
PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION
THE PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION have been playing the NYC club scene since 2006. Their self-released debut CD “Death of the Cool” came out in December 2007 just in time for the band to play ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES, “A Nightmare Before Christmas” in Minehead, England. PCR is currently mixing their second CD, “Euphobia” to be released by the fall. The band recently played at the South By Southwest Music Festival in March 2009. Their sound could be described as Post-Neo-No Wave Oddcore Punk.
In addition to PCR, Guitarist Reg Bloor has been playing with Glenn Branca (to whom she is married) since 2000. She played in Branca’s Symphony No. 12, Lesson No. 3, his rock band Branca/Bloor, in his trio, eventually becoming Concertmaster for his Symphony No. 13 for 100 Guitars. In the late 90’s she was a founding member of the Boston-based band TWITCHER, who released the self-produced CD “Leg of Lamb of God” in 1999 and appeared on the soundtrack for the Troma film “Terror Firmer”.
Prior to joining PCR, drummer Libby Fab studied electro-acoustic music and music composition at Trinity College Dublin, where she completed an M.Phil in Music and Media Technology. Libby became part of the Glenn Branca crew in 2006 as technical director, rehearsal drummer and assistant engineer for Symphony No. 13. She has worked on Branca’s shows in Montclair (New Jersey), Ghent, Dublin, London, Minehead, Rome, Seattle and St. Louis. She also performed in Branca’s Lesson No. 3 in London and Minehead.
http://www.theparanoidcriticalrevolution.com/
http://www.myspace.com/theparanoidcriticalrevolution
Grey Room with Ulrike Müller and Emma Hedditch, Petit Mal and XXX Macarena
GREY ROOM PRESENTS:
XXX Macarena started to form at 4:30 pm on June 3, 2006 when Karin Schneider invited Jutta Koether and John Miller to take part in her performance Sabotage at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Schneider had been included in group show called Grey Flags. She set smoke machines and instructed Koether and Miller to start playing when the entire space filled with smoke. Since then the two have performed at art venues such as NBK in Berlin, Forde Galerie in Geneva and Artists’ Space in New York. MFC-Michèle Didier & Les Presses du Réel have recently published the CD Selling Short, a recording their NBK performance. Last February Mike Kelley and Tony Conrad joined Koether and Miller for a performance at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. This will be their third performance with Conrad.
John Miller was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954 and currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He is currently an Associate Professor Barnard College’s Art History Department. While at RISD, he played bass in a band that included J.D. King who went on to form the proto-Sonic Youth band, the Coachmen. At CalArts, he played in Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s band, the Poetics. The Kunsthalle Zurich will have a retrospective of Miller’s work that will open August 29.
Petit Mal (Benedict Seymour & Melanie Gilligan)
Petit Mal are Melanie Gilligan and Benedict Seymour, an artist and writer respectively, who first started to publicly release music as part of the Antifamily collective in London. The duo have been described as practicing a kind of electro-pop fusion of Chris and Cosey and Alain Robbe-Grillet, with Gilligan’s icily melancholic vocals and Seymour’s synths and piano staking out an unironic reinvention of post-punk and electro sounds. Their single “Crisis in the Credit System” failed to penetrate the charts, but is, as far as they know, the only song to predict the current collapse of capitalism as we have unfortunately known it. (Dusted Magazine)
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, A Naked Woman Riding a Spiral Graphic of Some Kind, 2009
Emma Hedditch & Ulrike Müller with Nancy Brooks Brody, Zoe Leonard, and Megan Palaima
Emma Hedditch and Ulrike Müller will use the inventory list of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ expansive T-shirt collection as the material for a collaborative reading performance (names of participants to be announced).
To wear a T-shirt for others to read. To get the message, or ask for it’s meaning. A communication, to communicate with strangers. A signal, sent out, a call, with or without intention. To embrace the confessional. To make and be made by it. To embody and intend ones desires, politics, and alliances. Declarative. Encounters in your face, so many bodies, women, lesbians. A move towards tensions? An attraction and a question. An archive, a collection, a list. Dense absence. To reintroduce the body, our bodies, and feel both difference and affinity. To voice a relationship. How to talk about contentious feminist histories without leveling them into all-one, all-the-same? To talk about a movement, and be a movement. Be moved. What are you trying to tell me, what do I think you are trying to tell me?
Emma Hedditch
Emma Hedditch is an artist living in New York whilst participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent performances include When I Do This, Can You Feel Something? as part of If I Can’t Dance… Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, March 2009 and We Are The Signs And The Signal atWorking Documents, La Virreina, Barcelona November 2008.
Ulrike Müller
Ulrike Müller is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna, Austria. She has worked with the queer feminist collective LTTR, is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006) and currently serves as visiting faculty at VCFA (Vermont College of Fine Arts).
GREY ROOM
Grey Room brings together scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media, and politics to forge a cross-disciplinary discourse uniquely relevant to contemporary concerns.
Publishing some of the most interesting and original work within these disciplines, Grey Room has positioned itself at the forefront of the most current asthetic and critical debates. Featuring articles, translations, interviews, dossiers, and academic exchanges, Grey Room’s emphasis on aesthic practice and historical and theoretical discourse appeals to a wide range of readers, including architects, artists, scholars, students, and critics.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/grey
Charlotta Kotik (cancelled)
CHARLOTTA KOTIK
Charlotta Kotik, curator at the Brooklyn Museum since 1983, was born and raised in Brooklyn. She studied art history and archaeology on the undergraduate and graduate levels at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She has worked at the Jewish Museum, the National Gallery, Prague’s National Institute for Preservation and Reconstruction of Architectural Landmarks, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
During her tenure at the Brooklyn Museum, Kotik has organized site-specific installations of works by Martin Puryear, Jenny Holzer, and Joseph Kosuth in the institution’s Grand Lobby. She also curated Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993, the widely acclaimed special exhibition that toured internationally after its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
As of 2006, Kotik is the John and Barbara Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
John Jesurun
John Jesurun, a winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1996, is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost innovators of avant-garde theater, creating virtuoso works that overlap media and language in surprising and unpredictable ways. Each episode of CHANG IN A VOID MOON plays with various media forms, pop-cultural constructs and entertainment genres. Essentially a soap opera, the drama (comedy and mystery) of “Chang…” revolves around the exploits of a businessman by that name and his schemes to defraud the Peters clan, a wealthy family steeped in severe dysfunction. The construction of “Chang…” is as important as its text. It is converged by the influence of film, television and radio rather than by theatrical convention. Scenes begin and end abruptly, as if cut and spliced together. Camera effects are replicated: actors are frequently suspended on platforms in various configurations to suggest overhead shots, long shots, and shots from below. Stagings have included helicopter rescues, sailboat races, a floating saxophone, car crashes and chases.
Like all of Jesurun’s work, Chang is driven by word-play: puns, allusions, and non-sequiturs. Playful phrasing enhances the dialogue’s rhythmic quality, and speaking Jesurun’s dialogue, his characters create a nearly symphonic chorus. Throughout the play, rhythms are often interrupted then redeveloped. This style, distinctly Jesurun’s, has been viewed as a precurser of “sampling” which anticipated the technique’s casual and widespread use in all forms of pop music. Music is by Barbez, a New York art-rock ensemble. The New Yorker has written, “Barbez includes a brilliant theremin player who smokes cigarettes and a full –throated Russian singer who comes across like Joan of Arc with a sense of Humor. They cover everything from Bertolt Brecht to Black Sabbath, but the real attractions is their melodically haunting originals. With a folk-music sound located somewhere between turn-of-century Eastern Europe and modern America, it’s arty rock that moves between brooding and winking.”
Born in Battle Creek, MI in 1951, John Jesurun was originally trained as a sculptor at the Philadelphia College of Art and studied film at Yale before turning to playwriting in the early 1980’s. He was the Associate Producer of “The Dick Cavett Show.” for two years. He has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the NEA. In addition to La MaMa, his works have been presented in major venues and festivals both nationally and internationally. Jesurun’s work has long been distinguished by his use of film and video to destabilize the audience’s sense of reality. In 1986, his “Deep Sleep” had two 70-minute films projected on facing screens while the five actors were caught in between. The on-screen actors warned their live equivalents, “Do you see the machines? They’re the projectors. They are projecting you…You must get off that roll of film so that when the film runs out you’ll be safe.”
With “Chang…,” Jesurun has consistently worked with some of New York’s most exciting performers. Over the years his company has featured: Steve Buscemi, Ethyl Eichelberger, the performance artist John Kelly, Black-Eyed Susan. George Osterman, David Cale, Michael Tighe, Rebecca Moore, Frank Maya, Mimi Goese, and choreographer Neil Greenberg, among others. Many of these performers first came to prominence with their work in “Chang…,” and most of them continue to appear in new episodes. Jesurun received an Obie in 1986 for “Deep Sleep.” His other La MaMa works to-date are “Black Maria” (1987), “Red House” (1984), “Number Minus One” (1984), “Dog’s Eye View” (1984), “Iron Lung” (1992), “Point of Debarkation” (1993), “Slight Return” (1995) and a revival of his most famous work, “Shatterhand Massacree,” in 1992. His play “Philoktetes,” written for Ron Vawter, has been published in the Yale Theater Magazine. It will be presented by The Club at La MaMa this Spring, from March 4 to 21, 2004. Jesurun’s “Faust/How I Rose” will be presented at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in Fall, 2004.
LAWRENCE D. “BUTCH” MORRIS
LAWRENCE D. “BUTCH“ MORRIS
CONDUCTS
A CHORUS OF POETS AND STRING ENSEMBLE
AT ISSUE PROJECT ROOM
SHOWS AT 8PM & 9PM.
CHORUS OF POETS:
Yasha Bilan, Mark Gerring, Chavisa Woods
Nora McCarthy, Justin Carter
Alex Bilu, Helga Davis
David Devoe
STRING ENSEMBLE:
Nicole Federici, Jason kao Hwang – viola
Shawn McGloin, Jane Wang – bass
Skye Steele, Charlie Burnham – violin
Greg Heffernan, Alisa Horn – cello
WITH TEXT BY ALLAN GRAUBARD
Edwin Torres + Sean Meehan + Anne Tardos + Barry Weisblat + Margarida Garcia
I > < FEEL > < THE > < NEED > < FOR > < FEEDBACK
a n e v e n i n g o f s y n c o p a t e d s t a t i c
as sonic reference
as human interaction
as social exchange
featuring
Edwin Torres + Sean Meehan
&
Anne Tardos + Barry Weisblat + Margarida Garcia
&
together
Kate Valk & Andrew Schneider
Kate Valk began working with The Wooster Group in 1979 and since then has co-composed and performed in all of the Group’s productions. Valk has also worked on and been featured in all of The Wooster Group’s radio, film, and video projects. Valk founded and directs The Wooster Group’s in-school partnership with Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School and the Summer Institute, a performance intensive for public high school students conducted at The Performing Garage every summer. Valk received an OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence, a BESSIE Award for her performance in TO YOU, THE BIRDIE! (PHÈDRE) and a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Individual Artist Award. This year Ms. Valk has been chosen as a mentor for The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
Kate Valk has co-composed and performed in the following Wooster Group projects:
HAMLET – 2006
WHO’S YOUR DADA?! – 2006
HOUSE/LIGHTS (reprise) – 2005
POOR THEATER – 2004/5
Brace Up! – 2003
To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre) – 2002
North Atlantic (reprise) -2000
House/Lights – 1999
The Hairy Ape – 1995
Fish Story – 1994
The Emperor Jones – 1993
Brace Up! – 1991
North Atlantic – 1984
The Road to Immortality
Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony-1987
LSD (Just the High Points)-1984
Route 1 & 9-1981
Hula & For the Good Times (two dance pieces)-1981 & 1983
Miss Universal Happiness & Symphony of Rats-1985 & 1988
–written and directed for the company by Richard Foreman
Radio
The Peggy Carstairs Report-2002
Racine’s Phèdre-2000
The Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill-1998
–each radio piece was a BBC Radio 3 Broadcast of a Festival Radio Production
Film & Video
House/Lights DVD and DocumentarY-2003
The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill-2000
Wrong Guys-in progress
Rhyme ’Em to Death-1994
White Homeland Commando-1992
Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It-1986
Andrew Schneider is a multimedia designer and performer. He is the co-founder and Associate Artistic Director of the Chicago-based theatre company, bigpicturegroup. His performance work has been seen at P.S. 122, The Prelude Festival, The Conflux Festival, The Tank, and O’Reilly Media’s ETech. His multimedia work has been featured in Art Review, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TimeOut NY, Make, SIGGRAPH, DorkbotNYC, Sony Tech Wonder Labs, the Telfair Art Museum, and at the Center Pompidou in Paris. His Solar Bikini has been featured in galleries internationally. His latest projects include Experimental Devices for Performance (.com) and Acting Stranger (.com). Andrew Holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU. He is currently working with The Wooster Group and Fischerspooner. More at andrewjs.com.
Bob Holman + Anne Waldman w Peter Gordon + Kit Fitzgerald
Bob Holman is best known as a free-wheeling impresario of new poetry:
slams, hiphop, performance. But he’s also written eight books, most
recently A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with
Chuck Close published by Aperture, teaches at NYU and Columbia, and is
the Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. He’s made recent trips to
the Kolkata Book Fair, Banff Arts Centre, the Costa Rican
International Poetry Festival, and the Naropa Summer Writing Program.
His new project is a film documentary on the Poetry of Endangered
Languages, starting with his recent two month shoot in West Africa,
“On the Griot Trail,” and another on Ginsberg in India
watch
Anne Waldman
“She is the fastest, wittiest woman to run with the wolves in some time”- Ken Tucker,
The New York Times
Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife”. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity will be published by Penguin in 2009 and she will be on a reading tour in April. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book(Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. A book translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2009.
Waldman has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay.She has been active in the current election, along with countless young people and elders and artists. She took a vow at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 to devote her life to poetry and artistic “community”. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.
She has been a student of Buddhism since 1962, a feminist, and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry, appearing on stages from Berlin to Caracas , from Mumbai to Beijing. She has been instrumental in encouraging poetry projects world-wide and has helped organize programs in Vienna and Indonesia. She has also collaborated with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis and Pat Steir as well as dancer Douglas Dunn, filmmaker Ed Bowes, and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye. Her extensive historical literary, art and tape archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Some of her performances may be viewed on YouTube.
Some Responses to Anne Waldman’s Poetry:
“It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat an despair, Anne Waldman comments in Civil Disobediences: Poetic and Politics in Action. Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.”- Forrest Gander. The Harriet Blog, National Poetry Foundation, Chicago
“Here is a voice from the frontlines of poetry’s improvisational traditions”- Peter Gizzi
“She’s the fastest, wisest woman to run with the wolves in some time.” Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review
“From St Marks in the early sixties, to her stewardship of Naropa, to her worldwide travels, Anne Waldman has shown herself to be one of the key players on the U.S.A. poetry scene. Her energy, her total commitment to her art, and her cultural work are a wonder to behold. Wherever it happened, Anne was there.” - Marjorie Perloff
All 3 below from an essay by Ravi Shankar, in the Quarterly Conversation 2008:
“The apocryphal rumor that she started – started- the phenomenon of Poetry Slams when she and Ted Berrigan donned shiny trunks and boxing gloves to verbally pummel each other with uppercuts of verbs and roundhouses of metaphor.. Her prodigious proliferation: publishing a book of poems a year, not to mention translations, edited anthologies, sound recordings, cameo appearances in Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara, performances with Allen Ginsberg, Meredith Monk in the documentary Cooked Diamonds, fried Shoes, collaborations with artists Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, with musicians Steven Taylor and Steve Lacy, the co-founding with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired educational institution in America, two-time winner of the International championship Poetry Bout in Taos, New Mexico, recipient of many of the country’s major grants and literary awards, onwards…
***
“Waldman is a transpersonalist and Maximalist. [Her] choice of deity is Kali, Hindu goddess of time and ferocity, meat and skulls, remover of the advidya (the ignorance that makes us fear death), a creative and destructive force that wears a girdle of severed arms, a bracelet of cobras, corpse-earrings, and a mouth darkened with blood…Waldman is a Flame.”
“Anne Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis. Orality is crucial to her. She is a force of nature. Needed to be in order to hold her own in the male-dominated world of the Beats. And her work is an specially potent example of Helen Cixious’s idea of ecriture feminine, female writing that overcomes the limits of Western logocentrism and male patriarchy, or in Waldman’s own words, “body poetics and politics, right now.” Her erudito, which she wears like a mantle, is deeply eclectic and one feels that all of the turbulent waves of the late 2oth century have washed over her From Olson to Oulipo, from Sappho to Diane di Prima, from apperceptions of genocide to sexual empowerment that enclose menstruation. Waldman’s a sponge who has soaked up art and drips what she’s absorbed into splotches of color. She also leans Eastward, using Buddhist concepts and Sanskrit words in a way that doesn’t feel like dilettantism or mere shrubbery in her poems, but something meditated upon over a course of years, studied and given breath to breathe.”- Ravi Shankar, the Quarterly Conversation
Of IOVIS:
Iovis is a monumental improvisation, epic length, major work by a major poet, Anne Waldman” - Allen Ginsberg
“A marvelous mytho-poetic collage of self-and-other, male an female, in demonstration of a female universe (”open system”) packed with seed. The Goddess considers the role and power of Jove in detail, in cosmic gossip and multiple language. Anne Waldman’s vast poem is a net of language and spirit that opens out the possibilities of writing and our enactment of
Archetypes in one long breath” – Gary Snyder
“Waldman’s chapters are fuid and ever-changing-like life. Hers is a pedagogic poetic that teaches as much as it complicates, enlightens as much as it mystifies, is filled with stories and myths, personal reflections and homages. Because the poem moves through time, contained among clusters of practical information are also elegies for the deaths of loved ones, ritual practices, erotic wishes… Waldman is carrying on the 20th century epic tradition…” Poetry Project Newsletter
Of Vow to Poetry
“Waldman’s utopianism a good antidote to current militarism. Vow to Poetry is an enticement to vocalize, to make ideological interventions with language. Deluged as we are by agenda-hiding, mendacious rhetoric of profiteering, I is good time to read Waldman. She has spent a lifetime artfully hexing and arguing against violent territoriality. The utopian imagination is embodied in this stellar poet whose heart has an interstellar wingspan.” The Sunday (Boulder Daily) Camera, Boulder, Co.
Of Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble:
“Waldman accomplishes an open alliance between the bodhisattva path and her radical poetic and artistic determination. In this marvelous volume, Waldman makes a vow to poetry. [The poem] upholds the complexity of being human in the entire bubble-shaped world that it confronts..Waldman leaves her readers with a sense of provisional hope, conditioned by our participation in making the possible world possible.”-The Poetry Project Newsletter
PETER GORDON is a seminal figure in the New York music community. He first gained attention with his Love of Life Orchestra, which helped define the fusion of experimental composition with punk and jazz infused dance music. Gordon has worked some of the most influential artists and musicians of the past decades, including Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Foreman, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Stephen Petronio, The Talking Band and Chuck Berry. His work in film and television is featured on the soundtracks of “Desperate Housewives”, “Joe Versus the Volcano”, “Déjà Vu” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. His collaborations with video-artist Kit Fitzgerald at venues such as DTW, La Mama and BAM/Next Wave Festival have pioneered live video performance.
Gordon’s music has been released on the Lovely Music, CBS Masterworks, Warner Brothers and Newtone Record labels. Recent releases include: LCD Soundsystem James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s remix of LOLO’s “Beginning of the Heartbreak” on the critically acclaimed “Fabriclive 36″ mix album; Gordon’s opera collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, “The Society Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge”, on the “Crosstalk” anthology (Bridge Records); and the re-release of Gordon’s debut album “Star Jaws” (Lovely Music). Peter Gordon is currently working on a new retrospective LOLO album to be released in the fall by DFA Records. Gordon’s collaboration with Bob Holman, INDIA JOURNALS, will be appearing in the new issue of Rattapallax.
Kit Fitzgerald is a media artist and director working in video art, live performance, digital painting, and music video. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been presented in the Whitney Biennale, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave, the Hetmusiktheater (Amsterdam) and LaMama E.T.C. Ms. Fitzgerald has collaborated with composers Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Max Roach; poet Seiku Sundiata and choreographers Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, and Bebe Miller. Her hi-definition video, Painted Melodies, won 1st prize at the Electronic Cinema Festival in Montreaux. The Deadman, her film adaptation of Bataille’s Le Mort, won second prize at the Riccione Film & TV Festival. Ms. Fitzgerald has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the NHK Foundation of Japan. She is a graduate of the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women and Director of the Department of New Media and Digital Production at Concordia College, New York.
Rick Moody and Amy Denio
Acclaimed composer and musician Amy Denio and novelist/singer-songwriter Rick Moody trade spots reading and accompanying one another on a variety of experiments in text and music.
Seattle resident Amy Denio is a composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, audio engineer, and international collaborator. She started her own label, Spoot Music, in 1986. Her main instruments are voice, accordion, saxophones, clarinet, electric guitar, and bass, and she makes field recordings. She has collaborated with musicians and artists from East and West Europe, Japan, India, and throughout North America, and has 35 CD releases. She has played concerts in N. America, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and throughout Europe. She composes sound tracks for theater, film and dance, and works with choreographers such as Pat Graney, Li Chiao-Ping, and Victoria Marks. In 1997 she received a Bessie Award for her work with David Dorfman Dance. Her music has been performed at the Venice Biennale in Italy, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall in New York, and The Ethical Society in Philadelphia.
Rick Moody has published four novels (including THE ICE STORM and THE DIVINERS), three collections of stories, and a memoir, THE BLACK VEIL. His work has been translated in over twenty languages. He sings and records with The Wingdale Community Singers, whose second a
lbum, SPIRIT DUPLICATOR, will be released in June 2009
