Friday, February 22, 2008

L'Immortelle


My immortal
will you go

to hell with me
finally not be

substitutable
for anything

"you make me
weep, you made

me weak" my
heart is old and

not old the way
we stay so still

and seem to turn
away from this

world of light
the way that mo

tion makes us
a dwelling.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Peace On A presents: readings by PhillySound (Ad)*



Peace On A

presents

readings by PhillySound

featuring:
CAConrad
Mytili Jagannathan
Dorothea Lasky
Chris McCreary
Frank Sherlock
and Kevin Varrone

Saturday, March 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

curated by CAConrad and hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He can be found at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com


10 minutes into worry

needing us
a total attempt in vain some days

igniting a fashion for this blasted placement

my old thought of where we are going to bleed on the sofa
all around me this watered motion claps winter on the neck

we are not between trees between hairs
split mine in two so you can get it going
keep it soaring
~ CAConrad, from "going to 108"


Mytili Jagannathan lives in Philadelphia and currently works at the Asian Arts Initiative. She is the author of Acts, a chapbook from Habenicht Press, and her poems have appeared in EOAGH, Rattapallax, Combo, Interlope, Mirage#4/Period[ical], and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. She’s given many readings across Philadelphia, as well as in New York, D.C, and San Francisco. She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist grant from the Leeway Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.


Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first book, AWE, came out in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series along with the poet Michael Carr and is pursuing a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.


The Process of Explication

I.
Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.

II.
Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.

III.
Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
~Dorothea Lasky


Chris McCreary is the author of two books of poems, Dismembers and The Effacements. Current work can be found online at e.ratio and Tool. He co-edits ixnay press with Jenn McCreary.


Ultraviolence

Tiny Vikings break Jane Austen.

They play grab-
ass in class, crash their dad's Stratus

on the weekends. They
come together

in clusters to imagine our overthrow,
gossip about our bad

breath. They creep into our beds
as we sleep, gut us

w/ hunting knives, curl up to nap
wrapped in bloodied sheets.
~Chris McCreary, from "Fiend Folio"


Kevin Varrone is the author of g-point Almanac: id est (Instance Press, 2007) and g-point Almanac: Passyunk Lost (forthcoming, Ugling Duckling Presse, 2008). g-point Almanac (6.21-9.21) was published as a chapbook by ixnay press and Stenos for Indian Summer, a e-chapbook can be viewed at http://durationpress.com/bookstore/index.htm. Individual poems have recently appeared in Big Bridge #12(http://www.bigbridge.org/bigkvarrone.htm) and cross connect(http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/i24/g/contents.html). He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing at Temple University and The University of the Arts.

dear russell I woke this morning three am
ish my family all sleeping and I couldn’t
stop thinking of pollination and shrapnel
what a word o the transfer of energy
therein seems obvious enough. it’s too cold
still and walking through this sunken square
to where I sometimes wonder
if I might not break into blossom,
what would students think if I came to class
in blossom? I thought of swallows and providence
and bees how it’s all congealed in a drop of sunlight
and capistrano ain’t where it used to be even
continents drift when bart died I was moved
by all the people moved by him and not by blood
and the two black women who in a room full of
hospital administrators sang a gospel song
their acapella voices ached and near asphyxiated me
I had forbidden the use of soul in workshop
yet when they sang it is well it is well it is well
I knew it wasn’t, not with mine own,
which was bones in my pocket,
a spherical case, fragments
of a word that had metathesized
from coal.
~Kevin Varrone, from sortameditation


Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions and reading selections.


“till other voices wake
us or we drown”
~ George Oppen

*






















*thanks to Nathaniel Siegel & Dottie Lasky for pics!

Happening Now (Ad)


NEW YORK CITY
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, DOORS 7PM, PROGRAM 8PM

HAPPENING NOW AT THE FILM-MAKERS¹ COOP
BENEFIT SCREENING AT MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
66 East 4th Street (btw. 2nd Ave and the Bowery)
Subway: 6 to Astor Place; N, R, W to 8 St.; F, V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave; Tickets: $10-$25 sliding scale

Rally on behalf of the Film-Makers' Cooperative at a Benefit Screening and Silent Auction. The evening will feature a program curated by Caroline Koebel of historic and contemporary works recently inducted into the world-famous FMC collection with many of the artists in person. Partake in Two Boots Pizza, refreshments, and hand-screened FMC t-shirts. Auction items include books, i.e., Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Carolee Schneemann's Split Decision, and the dazzling Flaming Creature - Jack Smith and his Amazing Work and Times, - also: signed paintings and other unique pieces of art and expression like Ken Jacobs'first-of-it's-kind "Life Enhancer"!

PEGGY AHWESH
BEIRUT OUTTAKES (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
A startling digital resurrection of deteriorating 35mm trailers from the 1960s found in a ruined Lebanese movie theater. Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said. ­Ed Halter

PIP CHODOROV
FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) (2007, 16mm, sound, 12:00)
Having studied cognitive science and film semiotics, Pip Chodorov (b. 1965)recent films and drawings explore the terrain between the two fields. While aiming to confuse the parts of the brain responsible for the perception of motion (areas VI7 and VI8 of the optical cortex), Chodorov maximizes the potential hypnotic power of repetition and irregularity.

KEN JACOBS
CAPITALISM: SLAVERY (2006, DVD, silent, 3:00)
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.

BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC
DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE (2007, DVD, sound, 2:55)
Remembering the 90s, distracted; a single articulation, a way in.

LYNNE SACHS
THE SMALL ONES (2007, shot on16mm, DVD, sound, 3:00)
During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs¹ cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones‹small and large‹of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party.

CHIAKI WATANABE
1/3 (ONE OVER THREE) (2006, DVD, sound, 7:00)
1/3 is an audiovisual ensemble with lo-fi and minimalist aesthetics. The ensemble experiments with "one-bit" as an art expression. The emphasis is on using a single bit of information such as one-bit color, one-bit code and a one-bit note. In the title, "1" stands for one bit, "3" stands for the number of audio and visual inputs (one video from a laptop and two sound sources from custom-made electronics and electronic violin effects). 1/3 explores the essence of simplicity within the complexity with electro-psycho-physical perspectives. Sound by Tristan Perich(electronics), Sylvia Mincewicz (electronic violin)info: www.vusik.net

MIKE KUCHAR
TONE POEM (1982, 16mm, sound, 6:00)
The comfort of solitude leads to dreams.

FLAVIA SOUZA
CARNALEVARE (2003, DVD, sound, 5:20)
CARNALEVARE is an experimental film about the ecstasy of growth and decay.It is an attempt to reveal that ³the rawest materials in life are so pregnant with mystery and the capacity for change that disguising them is beside the point.² Carnalevare means ³take away the meat² and is related to the observence of Lent and the festival of Carnival. The parallel between this ritual and the cycle of birth and decay is in its powerful release and potential for material transformation. All the objects used in the set had been thrown away, by manipulating a few discarded materials and juxtaposing them meaningfully they could perhaps be transformed into something new. My inspiration for this small film was to investigate my own materiality,free of false trappings under the sure and unchangeable influences of time and nature.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
THE GLOWING WOMAN (2007, 16mm, sound, 4:00)
Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular. The colors created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

MARTHA COLBURN
MEET ME IN WICHITA (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
This work throws Osama Bin Laden into the fairytale Land of Oz. A combination of watercolors, collage and paint on glass animation, this film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality.

SARAH PUCILL
BACKCOMB (1995, 16mm, screened on DVD, sound, 6:00)
The Surrealists were fascinated by the idea that beneath the surface of everyday life there exist disruptive and uncontrollable forces. In Backcomb, Pucill inflects these themes with a feminist sensibility. In her film, the feminine, is neither personified nor idealised but remains symbolic - we never see the face of the woman with the black hair, nor do we hear her speak, but we come to see her as an almost elemental force. She suggests there is no escaping restrictive social definitions without some kind of violence, symbolic or otherwise. -- Chris Darke, London Production Fund

JUD YALKUT
KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967/2007, 16mm, sound, 24:00)
A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. The soundtrack is by the C.I.A. (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity). "The obsessive act of covering (destruction of boundaries-identities) gradually equivalent to the ritual of uncovering (Stripping away of ego); individual self, destroyed in mask/parody/clustering, is transcended. Mandalic (magic circle meditational form used to concentrate attention to a spiraling in/to a point through which new, expanded awareness is possible. The techniques of superimposition, a mere gimmick in most films, is an apt formal analogue for the dissolution of discreteness, for the meshing-merging of identities in the last orgiastic section of SELF-OBLITERATION -- we are confronted with an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent, undulating Meat-Cloud-Being." -- Paul Sharits.


SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23
Add to Calendar

The Weaklings launch (ad)


The Weaklings
Dennis Cooper reads from his new book of poetry The Weaklings
an edition of 300 numbered, signed and hard bound
from Fanzine Press
with art by Jarrod Anderson (displayed at the event)
Thursday March 13th.
6-9 pm. Reading at 7 pm.
Also music by Luke Rathborne

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Ab(b)aton

Where no one should step
The hell of the "mind's
own place" to ever be-
lieve in a world behind

The eyes while the eyes
Were open in the dark
Blood expanded as sight
Concentric to which

Love is never grasped
That is only an impulse
Of care or intent thought
Only of what I would

Do with you today the
Fact that I wasn't a vision
Of light drawn from its
Object to any particular

Purpose disturbs me I am
Hell nothing else with-
out you to hold your hand
Or see sound this place

Was a wreck with us where
Light must begin night
When black light resolved
My objective withdrawal

Little bells seized his
Ears animals taught him to
Hear the law like prophets
Beginning again to see.