11/24 @ 8:00pm - Littoral Series: Robert Lopez + XXX Macarena (Tony Conrad, Jutta Koether, John Miller)

Robert Lopez

XXX Macarena

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.

Robert Lopez

Robert Lopez (born 1971) is an American writer. He is the author of Part of the World, a novel, (Calamari Press, 2007). His new novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, was published by Dzanc Books in September, 2009. His fiction has appeared in dozens of journals, including; Bomb, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, etc. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

For Littoral, Lopez will be reading from Kamby Bolongo Mean River, his hypnotic second novel, which tells the story of a young man who finds himself confined and under observation, the subject of seemingly pointless tests. His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stick figures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home. Darkly hilarious with a crushing emotional impact, Kamby Bolongo Mean River is a brilliant study of familial bonds and trauma, isolation and captivity, hope and hopelessness.

XXX Macarena

XXX Macarena bring back the alien drones to ISSUE Project Room just in time for Thanksgiving.  The group 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.

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.