Friday, May 30, 2008

Braille Eyes

Dreamt I was evicted
from my house so
there would be no

more home for my
tears to dwell in but
in you I called

to you in some way
like one does in
dreams fact of tele

pathy but you were
already there that
is you are always

already here with me
who keeps an image
of the loved con

stantly before them
loves truly so there
will always be a place

to dwell hearts ears
seek braille eyes
what touch owes you.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Peace On A presents: Power & Performance


Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.
~ Judith Butler

Peace On A

presents

Power & Performance
featuring presentations by David Buuck, Julie Patton, and Chen Tamir

Sunday, June 8th 2008 6PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he organizes BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He is a contributing editor for Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I had disembarked at the Embarcadero, platforming myself into some semblance of public figuration. The bay area rapidly tranced it, from the resident base camps to the clamor and throng. Up and out into the punctuated street-sprawl, shadowed by the public directives. Heaved out then into the scablands, street-rocks popping against the undercarriage of the survival carts. Billboards tower as trees might shadow that. The turn lanes apropos of the new gold rush. Steetside is saddle leather, limbered for the pickets. 425,258 a day, fro and bending to it.
~ from Electricworks


Julie Patton extends her pulpoethic strategies into collaborative spaces via anyone willing to hand-dance—recent activities include stirring up an ArtScience mecca in Cleveland's inner city, "A Roon for Opal" art installation as part of the Olin Art Museum's (Lewiston, Maine) "Green Horizons" exhibition. "Using Blue to Get Black," an extended argument about the color blue forthcoming in Crayon Magazine. The rest is herstory.

riff off of
"Using Blue to Get Black"
(for my mo' there mudder)

blah blah blew light
be lack beat subject
leadible huge margins
lake back eerie bl accents
reeking scalp blue hung
er un
speak a bruised surf
faces mean blood ism
cl...oud braille lean
read
conscious pilots (heavenly friction)
hum blue staff
road read stratejeans
bic hus blind air
high hand le soluablu sex pack
14 ml tube b lousy pinkablue
sigh sing argue a pale smiles
be lie a blue lip fast
(as you write for days
vary a ble tongue brash
dis as stern pen onyx drink text
siccative blind
azurite for days
terre blue ish cast
boon flower b light
belie s can vast memory
ig blue not house a b...loa
ice, water, oil, wind
con vert sable skin c lash
crop then go after value
ire my bluest I
pearl pliant
goo out
b rain b light
tinktured, wheight bl+ u…
more than you can thank
heaven
flat to be tied re
touching orange
cut off your risk so
bleu to feel raw skies
scrump back ground
pain t hang
soul solvent
gesso so yes so blue
tellin’ me making do
with all that
blue


Chen Tamir is an independent writer and curator based in New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College. She is also a curator at Flux Factory in Queens. Her most recent curatorial efforts are on view in Toronto at the Barnicke Gallery with a show called "Stutter and Twitch": http://www.jmbgallery.ca/exhibitions.html

In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian and theorist Claire Bishop called Bourriaud up Relational Aesthetics’ cliquishness. She advocated instead for what I’m calling “Social Practice.” Social Practice is not reactionary to Relational Aesthetics: They run parallel. Their distinctions may sound benign, but it’s important to differentiate between artwork that reinforces a closed system, and one that challenges it. Although it’s really nice to hang out in galleries and feel cool, what we (and I mean a very broad “we”) need is art that takes us beyond that, or at least makes us question what that means. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable, forcing us to deal with issues we’d rather not face, or people we’d rather not associate with, but that discomfort is productive.
~ from “Social Practice”

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

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Peace On A presents Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos


Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge.
~ Leslie Scalapino

Peace On A

presents

Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Thursday, June 5th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place and Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady). Two collections of poems, Disaster Suites and Music for Porn, are forthcoming this year, and a little chap called "Imaginary Politics" will be out from TapRoot Editions this month. He's currently co-editing the writings of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which, "For a Realist Literature," can be found in the current issue of Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.


from MUSIC FOR PORN

Like yr body’s inner edge I feel things everywhere this pure circum
— schisms surround me but whatever happened in the car my
Social vacancy fills with random abductions stories extending

Lonely from the day’s bleak tone rows a landscape or whatever de
— scending points in space can’t see how we’ve been thrown
Out of the thing’s now blank interior it’s always a gamble trade

Being no event no self-evidence inside the dispersion affects
You boy how yr organs go on finding me here as one who might
Still feel a distance even when living in the other room strung

Out between their cries and the inner heat yr body leaves rim
— ming images lips limits what these circumcisions sing around
Me no more optical effects now pure pictures eyeing this — heaven.


Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY and currently lives in San Francisco. She has published a chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her first book, Armies of Compassion, will be published by Palm Press in 2009. She is at work on Earth Also is a Private Language, a book-length poem that takes place via the island of Evvia (Euboea): its geothermal springs and hydrotherapy traditions, ancient cults, and family stories that involve escape. In 2007 she guest-co-organized the Paros Symposium on Poetry and Translation in Greece. This spring she curated an event on poetics and healing, featuring psychologist Eric Greenleaf and poet/design/builder Robert Kocik, for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.


we have been made into
immovables domestic warp
the sacrum into acquisition
at the expense of the people the real people the principal
line that cuts us phoneme that articulates
my pursed fingering air as the instrumental
difference plays . the feeling
for people whose names we can barely
pronounce those names amnesty delivers
when I see human on a soup can
administer the homonym before
english can attack

from “Sacral Thought,” Armies of Compassion



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