Flowers & Cream is a small press / independent POETRY publishing imprint founded by Sonic Youth songwriter Thurston Moore. The press aims to feature work of young, emerging poets steeped in contemporary poetic practice and investigation/illumination.
Living betwixt Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City, Thurston Moore has been involved with editing the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal since early 2000. His own verse has been published in various anthologies and by a number of imprints since Water Row Press first presented Alabama Wildman, a collection of scattered writings from the 1970s and 80s. He has been on faculty at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.
Moore will be joined by Elaine Kahn as the assistant poetry editor and business facilitator of Flowers & Cream Press. Elaine is a poet and songwriter with work published by Glass Eye Books, Big Baby Books, Ecstatic Peace Library, as well as being featured widely in various journals. She has worked as an intern for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA and as the Poetry Buyer for City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently resides in Northampton, MA.
Flowers & Cream recognizes the diversity of resonance in the contemporary poetry scene, a community charmed with reference to earlier schools, waves, gestures, pronouncements, and inks all with eyes both forward and askance.
The Littoral Series is made possible by support from The Casement Fund, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Come celebrate the spirit of literary independence with The Old American Can Factory indie presses. The event will feature Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, Habitus, One Story, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Enjoy drinks, refreshments, and music.
Readers include: Ross Benjamin, from Archipelago; Lonely Christopher, from Akashic; Irina Reyn, from Habitus; and John Surowiecki, from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Join free103point9, PAJ Publications, Issue Project Room, and Electronic Music Foundation in celebrating the publication of Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves by Galen Joseph-Hunter with Penny Duff, and Maria Papadomanolaki (PAJ Publications. In association with free103point9.) This event will feature performances from Todd Merrell, Kabir Carter, Terry Nauheim, Lázaro Valiente, Joel Chadabe, and others.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this ground-breaking look at a new art genre, Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves brings together a genealogy of 150 artists and artworks—and more than 250 images—from 1921 to the present that encompasses performance, video, radio theatre, sound art, media installation, networked art, and acoustic ecology. Here is a fascinating account of the ingenuity and creativity of artists who have made new discoveries in broadcast, public works, performance composition, sound, and text, stretching the boundaries of both transmitter and receiver. At a time when public access struggles with corporate control of the airwaves, artists have combined activism and communications technologies to represent alternative worlds on the electromagnetic spectrum. Click here to order Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Todd Merrell’s work illustrates a fascination with the imperceptible environment of electromagnetic radiation that shortwave radio and processing can capture, and transform into an immersive, musical environment. http://www.www.toddmerrell.com/
Kabir Carter’s work moves between performance and installation, and focuses on the physical and emotional effects of architecture and acoustics in private and public spaces. http://www.kabircarter.com/
Terry Nauheim explores sound and visual relationships through digital media, drawing, and installation. http://www.terrynauheim.com/
Lázaro Valiente is sound artist Mauricio Pastrana, his work is comprised of sounds and silence originating in the daily improvisations of life. http://lazarovaliente.org/
Joel Chadabe composer, author, is an internationally recognized pioneer in the development of interactive music systems. http://www.chadabe.com
ABOUT THE FREE103POINT9
free103point9 is a New York State-based nonprofit arts organization establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists and works informed by an intentional use of space — often the airwaves. free103point9’s major programs include the Transmission Art Archive, an in-progress resource featuring artists, works, and exhibitions and events that define the genre and place it in a historical context; WGXC 90.7-FM: Hands-on Radio, a creative community FM radio station serving Greene and Columbia counties; and the facilitation of a NYSCA Regrant program. http://www.free103point9.org
ABOUT PAJ PUBLICATIONS
Founded in 1976, PAJ Publications has become one of the U.S.’s most important and valuable publishers of drama, criticism, performance texts and documents, including contemporary American writers and works in translation. Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves is the latest volume in PAJ Publications’ Art + Performance series which features individual titles on Yvonne Rainer, Bruce Nauman, Meredith Monk, Gary Hill, and other artists. For subscription information for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, please visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/paj .
ABOUT ELECTRONIC MUSIC FOUNDATION
The mission of Electronic Music Foundation (EMF) is to explore the creative and cultural potential in the convergence of music, sound, technology, and science, and share what is learned through contact and interactions with a large and growing public. http://www.emf.org
Author Jarett Kobek is the son of a Turkish immigrant and a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. In the summer of 1999, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta defended a master’s thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East, and called for a return to the “Islamic-Oriental city.” Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek’s novel ATTA offers a psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism?
Gavin Everall works at Book Works, on marketing and editing. Past projects include Make Everything New, A Project on Communism, and the Semina series with Stewart Home. Prior to working for Book Works, he worked at Verso.
Books will be available at the event, sold by Mobile Libris.
ISSUE’s Theoretical series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund.
Frolic Architecture is the third and newest collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Thiefth (2005), both of which appeared in the Records of the Year lists in The Wire. Writing in Artforum, Bennett Simpson described Souls of the Labadie Tract as “a confrontation with history, community, language, and sound that is truly harrowing.” Where the previous works began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems’ embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe’s celebrated collage poems.
ISSUE’s Littoral series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
In Syncopated Verse and the Art of Paradox, renowned poet Tyehimba Jess will explore the contrapuntal poem and how poetic form can reflect aspects of Euclidian space, history and geometry.
The Tracie Morris Band features: Tracie Morris (voice/poetry) Val Jeanty (electronic drums) and Marvin Sewell (guitar). Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet, performer and scholar and works as a sound artist, writer, bandleader and actor. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and the New Museum.
ISSUE’s Littoral series presents Jacues Demierre and Vincent Barras this month. The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. Barras & Demierre have previously published Voicing Through Saussure, a film by Véronique Goël.
Talk, verbal stuff, is taken as a primary component, drawn from materials found in the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on various ancient and modern languages (the so called “Indo-European” languages). The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. The body is where this vocal investigation takes place, digging in the primitive sound matter of language
France has always been the home to innovative writing, and the new wave of French writers is as shockingly unconventional as the Surrealists or New Novelists were in their day. Dalkey Archive’sReview of Contemporary Fiction has just published an issue dedicated to the French publishing house at the crest of this wave: Editions P.O.L.
A roundtable discussion of the new French writing will include John O’Brien (founder of Dalkey Archive Press), and Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens (founder of Editions P.O.L), as well as writers Mark Polizzotti and Brian Evenson and Brooklyn Academy of Music Humanities Manager Violaine Huisman.
Mark Polizzotti’s books include the collaborative novel S. (1991), Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (FSG, 1995), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (British Film Institute, 2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. The translator of over thirty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz, he has been an editor at Random House, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, David R. Godine, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York’s top books of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.
John O’Brien is the founder and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction at the Unviersity of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive has published over 60 French titles, and many of these are POL authors.
Photo by Daniel Mordzinski
Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens was born in 1944. After law school, he began working at Christian Bourgois as a trainee where he subsequently became a reader. He was hired in 1970 by Flammarion, and in 1972 he created the “Textes” imprint, in which he published such notable figures as Bernard Noël, Marc Cholodenko, and René Belletto. In 1978 at Hachette, he created the “Hachette-P.O.L” imprint, which became a full department in 1979. There, he published Emmanuel Hocquard, Georges Perec (who won the Prix Medicis in 1978 for “Life A User’s Manual”), Danièle Sallenave (who won the Prix Renaudot 1980 for “The Doors of Gubbio”), Leslie Kaplan’s first book, and one hundred other titles. In 1983, with the support of Flammarion, he created Éditions P.O.L, which he has directed since then and where he has published more than a thousand books over 28 years. Today P.O.L is part of the Gallimard Group and publishes approximately 50 books per year, chiefly novels and poetry.
Violaine Huisman is Humanities Manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Before assuming this position she worked as an editor and rights director with Seven Stories Press and as a literary agent with Sterling Lord Literistic. She represented POL’s list in the US for several years, helping publish Marguerite Duras, Jean Rolin, and Dumitru Tsepeneag, among others. She has served as an English language interpreter for French writers and artists, and her translations from the French have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times Magazine. She currently moderates monthly discussions with contemporary French authors for “Write about Now” a series co-presented by Bookforum and the Villa Gillet at the French Institute Alliance Francaise.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Two Films by Warren Sonbert
With readings by Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman
Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art, is crashing with friends in November and December, organizing a series of events at like-minded spaces across the city while it relocates to its new home. For more information on these shows, please see their calendar.
The Cup and the Lip, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1986, 20 mins Friendly Witness, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1989, 32 mins
Though Warren Sonbert has frequently been described as a maker of diary films, the label fails to capture the emotional and formal intricacies at play in his work. In less than twenty films made from 1966 to the mid-90s—his career caught short by his death from AIDS at age 47—Sonbert’s primary method was indeed the creation of dense montages from 16mm shot in the course of daily life. The same images and ideas were often reused in different permutations for new films and, through this process, footage of his friends and colleagues attains an iconic status that transcends its documentary valence, becoming vibrant evocations of Sirkian melodrama. “I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments,” Sonbert said of his own work, “with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn.” The rich use of color and delicately punctuated editing also point to the influence of his mentor, Gregory Markopoulos, and Sonbert’s love of Hitchcock, Kenneth Anger, and opera.
The Cup and the Lip and Friendly Witness both date from the late 1980s, when Sonbert was refining and deepening his use of montage. Amy Taubin noted that The Cup and the Lip “is so dense it’s impossible to apprehend it at a single viewing,” calling it “Sonbert’s darkest work.” Precisely composed of 645 individual shots over 22 minutes, set to girl-group songs and the overture to Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s 18th-century opera Iphigeneia in Aulis, Friendly Witness was Sonbert’s return to sound after two decades of purely silent films. Tonight’s event pairs Sonbert with readings by three poets—Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman—a testament to the fact that, though long-admired as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, he always worked in conversation with other forms, literary and otherwise.
Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. In the 1990s, he co-founded and directed the Poetics Program at the State University of New York Buffalo. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound.
Corrine Fitzpatrick is a Brooklyn-based poet, and former Program Coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is the author of two chapbooks – On Melody Dispatch and Zamboangueña, and her poetry appears in numerous print and online journals. She recently completed the MFA program at Bard College.
Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Recent books include Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001), an experimental novel dedicated to the memory of Warren Sonbert. Forthcoming books include The Wide Road, an erotic picaresque written in collaboration with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna). She is co-contributor to The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975-1980. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch will read from their collaborative book Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). It combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around New York City with a pair of roving dialogues.
Holy Spirits is a Brooklyn-based band with classical guitar melodies, harmonies, handclaps, chants, ambient keyboards, and vibrant percussion. They have been working with Nathaniel Whitcomb, a motion collage artist, to make a series of videos for their recent EP “The Afternoon’s Blood.” Tonight they’ll do a live performance with Whitcomb as he manipulates his motion collage on a screen.
The last several years have been witness to an increasing number of exhibitions, books, and archival audio releases representing New York art, music, and underground cinema from the years that hinge the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, the traveling retrospective Dan Graham: Beyond, Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980, Marc Masters’ No Wave, Tim Lawrence’s Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and the DVD release of Ericka Beckman’s 135 Grand Street New York 1979 all speak to a growing interest in historicizing this period of multidisciplinary ferment.
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
“Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983” is a three-day event organized by art historian Branden W. Joseph and musician David Grubbs to take place at ISSUE Project Room. Its purpose is to examine the intersections as well as the failed encounters of art, music, and cinema in downtown Manhattan from 1978-1983. In addition to an evening of panel discussions (Thursday, Nov. 4) among some of the most notable figures to emerge from the art, music, and film scenes of the time, the event will include a rare screening of James Nares’s no wave epic, Rome ’78 (Wednesday, Nov. 3) and conclude with a concert performance headlined by the first New York appearance in years by the fearless, crucial downtown band, Ut (Friday, Nov. 5).
Rome ’78 (1978, 90 minutes, dir. James Nares)
Starring Patti Astor, James Chance, Bradley Field, David McDermott, Eric Mitchell, Lance Loud, John Lurie, Lydia Lunch, Anya Phillips, and Pat Place, among others.
British-born artist James Nares has lived and worked in New York for more than three decades. He is known both as a painter and as a filmmaker, and his films were the subject of a 2008 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Jim Jarmusch described Nares’s films as “luminous jewels scattered in the dirt—as varied and striking as his paintings, his photographs, and his train of thought.” As a painter, Nares uses his mastery of the balance between spontaneity and control to create a single elegant stroke that pulsates with energy, relating to Franz Kline as well as to the cartoon brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein. As a musician, Nares played with the Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens.
Harry Mathews is the author of various novels, poems, short fiction,and essays from New York (1930). He settled in Europe in 1952, and since then has lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. In 1978, he returned to the United States to teach for several years at Bennington College, Columbia University, and the New School University. Now married to the French writer Marie Chaix, he divides his time between Paris and Key West. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the “ New York School of poets”, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Oulipo Compendium (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
The Brooklyn Rail turns ten this year and that is certainly cause for celebration. Please join Rail Fiction/Intranslation editor Donald Breckenridge as he hosts an epic night of readings from some of the most innovative authors and translators brightening the literary landscape.
“As a self-taught writer and ardent reader of formally experimental fiction, my goal over the last decade has been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven publishing industry.”–Donald Breckenridge
Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments,including her groundbreaking work of hyper-fiction, Patchwork Girl. She is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and the novel Half Life. Her work as appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.
Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, KambyBolongo Mean River, and the forthcoming Asunder. His work has appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, and Nerve.
Lewis Warsh is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently, Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005, and the novel, A Place in the Sun. He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University.
Johannah Rodgers is the author of Sentences, a collection of short stories,essays, and drawings and the chapbook, Necessary Fictions. Her stories, essays,and reviews have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts, Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and literature courses at CUNY, where she is an assistant professor in English.
Dawn Raffel‘s short story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, was just released. She is also the author of Carrying the Body and In the Year of Long Division. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Art & Letters and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.
Joshua Cohen is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Eugene Marten is the author of In The Blind, Waste, and Firework. He lives in New York City.
John Reed is the author of five novels: A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance,The Whole, All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare, and Tales of Woe. He is the Books Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.
Fran Gordon, founder of the National Art Club’s PAGE reading series, also directs FDU’s MFA in Writing reading series. Her novel, Paisley Girl, was a finalist for QPB’s New Voices Award. She teaches in The New School Writing Program, and for The Pan African Literary Festival.
Yasmine Alwan is the author of Elsewhere and co-editor of Tantalum, a magazine for new prose.
Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s finest writers. In 2006, he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award,he was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005, and the recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 2003. He is the author of eight books of fiction and essays, including The Enamoured Knight, his elebrated book on the character of Don Quixote and its eponymous novel. He lives in upstate New York.
Sarah French has had her fiction works published Bomb, The New Review of Literature,and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently working on a novel.
Susan Bernofsky is the translator of four books by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The 2006 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, she has also received awards and fellowships from the NEH, NEA, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently writing two books: a biography of Robert Walser, and a novel set in her hometown, New Orleans.
Translator Alyson Waters teaches literary translation and contemporary French language literature at Yale University. In the past few years, she has won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant, a PEN translation grant, and a “bourse de sejour aux traducteurs estrangers.” She lives in Prospect Heights with her husband and daughter.
Donald Nicholson-Smith‘s translations include works by Guy Debord, Jean Piaget,Jean-Patrick Manchette, Paco Ignacio Taibo, J.B. Pontalis & Jean Laplanche, Thierry Jonquet, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. His most recent translation is of Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine, as sent from the trenches of Champagne in 1915. Born in Manchester, England, Nicholson-Smith is a longtime denizen of Brooklyn.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein, the novels 6/2/95 and You Are Here. His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Come celebrate the launch of the new book Introduction to Civil War by Tiqqun It will be an evening of fire and words hosted by translators Alexander Galloway and Jason Smith.
“Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global bio-political fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of this listless implosion.” –Tiqqun
Jared Hohl reads from his recently completed manuscript The Invaders’ Retreat, a novel set in the modern dystopias of Iowa, Ireland, and Corsica, where crop dusters, terrorists, substance abusers, and an elderly purveyor of psychedelics are bound together by exclusion and the chemistries that dictate their livelihoods. Featuring a theatrical interlude written by Charlotte Courtois and Keith Custer, the novel’s young protagonists.
Jared Hohl received his MFA from The New School where he was the recipient of the National Arts Club scholarship for fiction writing. His short stories have appeared in Washington Square, Agriculture Reader, Torpedo Magazine, and the anthology The Apocalypse Reader.
Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the novel Half Life, hypertexts includingPatchwork Girl, and several children’s books, including the recent Mimi’s Dada Catifesto. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals including McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The Believer, and Cabinet Magazine. In 2004 she launched her project SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2,095 volunteers. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she is the co-founder with artist Christine Hill of the Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, a work in progress.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
ISSUE Project Room celebrates The Brooklyn Heights Association‘s 100th Anniversary with an event that will program channel the psychedelic spirit of poet, journalist, humanist and Brooklynite, Walt Whitman, set against the stunning waterfront backdrop on the Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park on July 1st at 5 pm until midnight.
Musicians and bands including the Wingdale Community Singers, Christy and Emily, Prince Rama, and otherswill perform original work along with new pieces set to a marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass,” recited by some of the nation’s most intriguing poets.
The outdoor concert, closing with a late night program of acoustic music after 10 pm, is part of Celebrating a Century, an exciting year-long series of events highlighting Brooklyn Heights history, famous residents, and the BHA’s past & future.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series began in 2006. It is a monthly event curated by Tony Antoniadis, pairing writers with musicians, sound artists, and video artists. Named after IPR’s former location on the edge of the Gowanus Canal, Littoral is an attempt to cross-pollinate poetry and fiction with image and sound, and to bring New York City’s innovative (but often separated) creative communities together.
Ariana Reines will read from The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks 2006) and Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar 2007) and the translator of My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, for Mal-O-Mar, and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig, for Semiotext(e). TELEPHONE, her first play, was produced by The Foundry Theatre and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, February 2009. The production won two Obies. TELEPHONE will be published in Fall 2009 in PLAY: A Journal of Plays.
The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal
The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is the portrait of a true humanist who made a career out of compassion. Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”
This volume includes lengthy dialogues from 1979–1981 with Réal conducted by journalist and author Jean-Luc Hennig, in which she eloquently discusses the theoretical implications of sex-positive whoring and relates her experiences both inside and outside the profession: from her lengthy love affair with the “Berber” to such “psychological” and “special” clients as the “moldy rhinoceros.” The “Little Black Book” that rounds out this book is drawn from the logs in which Réal kept track of her many clients, from “Pedro, hilarious fat Spaniard, devoted, simple, honest, fat peasant face, 70F” to “Pierre 8 (from Basel), blue eyes, fifties, slightly balding, cultivated, sweet-violent … licks my finger after I remove it from his anus … 100–400F.” It is a journal that not only chronicles Réal’s working life, but offers a clinically direct, investigative sociological analysis of the sexual subcultures of her time.
Laurel Nakadate will screen a number of short videos.
Laurel Nakadate is a photographer, video artist and filmmaker.She was born in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa.She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, The Yerba Buena, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia.In 2009, her first feature film, STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors/ New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature film, THE WOLF KNIFE, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. Nakadate’s work is in many public and private collections including the Yale University Art Gallery, The Saatchi Collection and the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City.
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.
Thinking Out Loud: Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen
Everybody likes a good fight. Earlier this year, in the pages of Artforum, Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen publicly disagreed on how to think about the sonic arts. Cox advocates a sonic naturalism “which short-circuits the aesthetics of representation and mediation and instead affirms an aesthetics of force, flux, and resonance.” Kim-Cohen, argues that “it is the worldly, rather than the earthly, that presents the possibility of meaning – sound derives its meaning from context, from intertextuality, from the play of difference in its conceptual and material strata.”
Oftentimes, the only thing you get out of a good fight is a bloody nose. Hoping for more, Cox and Kim-Cohen will sidestep the ad hominem upper cuts that sometimes pass for critical debate in the art world, exchanging their ideas of the sonic and trying genuinely to think out loud. Each will come armed with examples: audio, video, image, and text. These might include works by John Cage, Robert Morris, Francisco López, Christina Kubisch, Vito Acconci, and the work that started the debate: Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion. Theorists are likely to be dragged into this as well: Friedrich Kittler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Manuel de Landa, et al.
No champion will be declared, no belt will be awarded. The hoped-for outcome is a few new ideas, a more thorough understanding, maybe even one or two “ah-has.” By thinking out loud about the sonic, Cox and Kim-Cohen believe they can accomplish more in tandem than either could in isolation. It’ll be a friendly fight: Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Seth Kim-Cohen
Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist and theorist. His work has been presented at venues spanning the cultural spectrum, including: CBGBs, Tate Modern, PS 122, ZKM, Issue Project Room, Peer Gallery. His recent book, In The Blink of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, (Continuum 2009), argues for a wide-ranging sonic conceptualism and against sound-in-itselfism. Kim-Cohen has written for Artforum, The Chicago Reader, Art Review, Pitchfork, and Pop-Stock. He received his PhD from the London Consortium and has taught at Yale University and Pratt Institute. Seth Kim-Cohen is Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
More at www.kim-cohen.com
Christoph Cox
Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, teaches and writes on contemporary European philosophy and contemporary art and music. He is also on the faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, and a member of the CCS Graduate Committee. Cox is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999) and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004). The recipient of a 2009 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine and regularly writes for Artforum, The Wire, and other magazines. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen in New York City, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and G Fine Art Gallery in Washington D.C. Cox has written catalog essays for exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, the South London Gallery, Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Seattle Center, and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. He is currently at work on a philosophical and historical book about sound art and experimental music.
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.
The evening will feature:
1. Short Film, by Elisa Da Prato explaining the players, Dan Lloyd’s theory and the experiment. (approx 10min)
2. Dan Lloyd’s presentation of Jeff Sable’s brain activity converted into musical score.
3. The Lickets live arrangement of Lloyd’s Jeff Sable Brain Score and a short piece inspired by the stimulus Jeff viewed in the F-MRI Scan while generating the data.
4. Panel Discussion/Response comprised of Dan Lloyd, Zoran Josipovic, Doug Johnson (composer/theorist/music/therapist), The Lickets (Mitch Greer & Rachel Smith), Jeff Sable (the subject). Moderated by Elisa Da Prato.
DAN LLOYD is the Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Neuroscience program at Trinity College, Connecticut. For several years, he has been pursuing the connections between music and mind, a project at the intersection of art and science. Using art to explore complexity is at the heart of several past and ongoing projects as well. He is the author of Radiant Cool: a novel theory of consciousness. (Cambridge:MIT Press, 2004), a book joining noir fiction with a theory of consciousness, and Simple Minds (MIT Press, 1989). His current projects include Ghosts in the Machine (Rowan and Littlefield, forthcoming), a philosophical drama about minds, brains, and computers, and Subjective Time (MIT Press, forthcoming), an anthology on the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of experienced temporality. He is the editor of the journal Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.
ZORAN JOSIPOVIC, PhD, is a Research Associate and an Adjunct Professor in the Psychology Department and Center for Neural Science, New York University. His research focuses on the effects of meditation and other contemplative techniques on the brain, and on what these effects can tell us about the nature of consciousness. Zoran is a long-term practitioner of meditation in the nondual traditions of Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Advaita Vedanta. He has also worked as a psychotherapist and a bodyworker and has taught meditation at Esalen Institute for many years.
DOUGLAS BRUCE JOHNSON is a composer and music therapist, currently based in Hartford, CT. Performances of his compositions have been heard on three continents, and recorded on Zimbel (USA) and on BITMusik (Germany). Dedicated to live musicking, Johnson’s music celebrates the emotional connectedness that, together, performers and listeners can explore in music. His work in music therapy brings this interactive, celebratory approach to music into a variety of supportive and restorative healing contexts. From 1988 to 2009, Johnson was a member of the music faculty at Trinity College, Hartford
“THE LICKETS deploy a mini-orchestra of acoustic instruments—cello, flute, acoustic guitar, organ, sitar, harmonium, hand percussion, et al.—to call into being undulating vistas of luminous mantras and soundscapes. The Lickets’ raga-like settings suggest a strong Indian influence, and traces of visionary ‘60s jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane, the time-transcending drones of La Monte Young and his Theatre of Eternal Music, and ‘60s psychedelic rock surface too as parts of the trio’s trippy mix.” – Textura
ELISA DA PRATO is a writer, director and editor currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She worked for documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner on several films featuring artists such as The Who, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. As of late, Da Prato is developing a film aiming to narratively explore the intersection of philosophy, neuro-science, and music theory. Elisa is a regular video contributor to indexmagazine.com and theblackharbor.com. She studied motion picture production at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA.
Littoral series is made possible, in part, by the Casement Fund together with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
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.
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 Burnsis 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.
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.
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).
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: 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.
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
The reviews are still rolling in, but by all account Gaudeamus Muziekweek was a huge success. Check out some of the photos after the jump, and let us know which ones are your favorites. Without the support of you (our audience) we wouldn’t have been able to hold such a successful first weekend in our new home – but what really makes this all happen is the ongoing commitment of our members. We’ve added new benefits to our membership program for 2012, including the Jonathan Kane’s February Live at ISSUE Project Room CD and invitations to private events with artists in our community. So become a member today!
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
more . . .
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...
more . . .
Come celebrate the spirit of literary independence with The Old American Can Factory indie presses. The event will feature Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, Habitus, One Story, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Enjoy drinks, refreshments, and music.
ISSUE’s Littoral series presents Jacues Demierre and Vincent Barras this month. The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. Barras & Demierre have previously published Voicing Through Saussure, a film by Véronique Goël.
Mark Polizzotti’s books include the collaborative novel S. (1991), Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (FSG, 1995), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (British Film Institute, 2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. The translator of over thirty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz, he has been an editor at Random House, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, David R. Godine, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York’s top books of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.
John O’Brien is the founder and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction at the Unviersity of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive has published over 60 French titles, and many of these are POL authors.
Violaine Huisman is Humanities Manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Before assuming this position she worked as an editor and rights director with Seven Stories Press and as a literary agent with Sterling Lord Literistic. She represented POL’s list in the US for several years, helping publish Marguerite Duras, Jean Rolin, and Dumitru Tsepeneag, among others. She has served as an English language interpreter for French writers and artists, and her translations from the French have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times Magazine. She currently moderates monthly discussions with contemporary French authors for “Write about Now” a series co-presented by Bookforum and the Villa Gillet at the French Institute Alliance Francaise.
and essays from New York (1930). He settled in Europe in 1952, and since then has lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. In 1978, he returned to the United States to teach for several years at Bennington College, Columbia University, and the New School University. Now married to the French writer Marie Chaix, he divides his time between Paris and Key West. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the “ New York School of poets”, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Oulipo Compendium (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the novel Half Life, hypertexts includingPatchwork Girl, and several children’s books, including the recent Mimi’s Dada Catifesto. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals including McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The Believer, and Cabinet Magazine. In 2004 she launched her project SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2,095 volunteers. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she is the co-founder with artist Christine Hill of the Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, a work in progress.
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...