5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Melanie Gilligan (at Art21 blog)

"When I made Popular Unrest I suppose I opened up a Pandora’s Box by experimenting in creating non-individual subjects – i.e. I developed that film using acting workshops in which I asked the group of actors to work together to make up different aspects of a particular person or of an emotional state. I was trying to push for a breakdown of individual, separate characters and to see if I could depart from making the type of drama that is premised on this separation. I didn’t get all the way there by any means but I think I made some headway. But now with this new film the questions that arise from the premise are potentially more difficult to handle – e.g. what would feeling someone else’s feelings mean, and how do I as a filmmaker represent it? These questions are challenging but fascinating because thinking them through has implications beyond the construction of the film to broader inquiry pertaining to political solidarity and collectivity."
--Melanie Gilligan

David Brazil, Sara Larsen, and Robert Kocik at The Multifarious Array

The final event of the 2011/12 series is upon us...

All I want is to be in a band (at The Brooklyn Rail)

Thanks to Anselm Berrigan for printing (and posting) my long poem, "All I want is to be in a band," at The Brooklyn Rail this past month.

I just want to be in a band, man

And play anything ourselves out of here

Hear these tones like water stutters water

Like sunk ships suture the social or social

History was what we were immersed in

I hear your voice on the other side of disaster

What plays its way out of disaster

Just like it wanted to be, just like it wanted

To be in a band, convince us we are living

In a different future-past because the tones

The political economy of noise with its puncture

Of the present might wake/make a plinth

Through this struggle to be all-too-human

Come back from these feeling tones—

Assemblage, stutter, DJ function

Damn the Caesars: Crisis Inquiry (essay)

CRISIS INQUIRY
ed. Richard Owens

A SPECIAL VOLUME OF DAMN THE CAESARS
WITH ATTENTION TO THE WORK OF
ROB HALPERN & KESTON SUTHERLAND

POETRY & CRITICAL COMMENTS

Michael Cross • Andrew Rippeon • John Wilkinson • Luke Roberts • Laura Kilbride • Brenda Iijima • Marianne Morris • Edgar Garcia • David Rich • Nat Raha • Ryan Dobran • Josh Stanley • Reitha Pattison • Joe Luna • Emily Critchley • Robert Sheppard • Richard Owens

FEATURE: ROB HALPERN

Recent poetry, prose and lecture notes from Halpern | critical comments on Halpern by John Wilkinson, Thom Donovan, Kevin Killian, Brenda Iijima, Tyrone Williams, Samuel Vriezen, Kenneth Jacobs and Lee Spinks | bibliographic checklist of writing from and on Halpern.

FEATURE: KESTON SUTHERLAND

Recent poetry, email and essays from Sutherland | critical comments on Sutherland by Josh Stanley, Neil Pattison, Robin Purves and Laura Kilbride | annotated worksheet on Hot White Andy by Justin Katko | bibliographic checklist of writing from and on Sutherland.

REPRINT: SEAN BONNEY & FRANCES KRUK

The full text of Sean Bonney's Four Letters Four Comments (including responses from Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward and Lara Buckerton) and Frances Kruk's Down You Go, or, Négation de Bruit are reprinted here as they appeared through Punch Press in 2011.

For Terry

When the sky is falling

And your baby is walking reluctantly

Who won’t stop talking

Until the sky is right again

Tex Mex is on you

Why doesn’t this water look right

Our videos are a commons

Cows bring on a welcome lethargy

When a town becomes you

When you stop wishing

When you step back from the video

What’s the angle

What’s relational

The grass for real and the video of the grass

Do not a public make

Who is a commons at the movies, at the video

Sings a song like it could become common

Waste was only the beginning now where will they put it

Stuff it up their asses

Neither Democrat or Republican

Light beer won’t overtake you

New Wave done as Honky Tonk

Love for the student is a virtue

Let the video lose control again

Stop the waste water Machiavellian

Fuck the filtration of what should be good

Capture the sky, put a little here

Who think about process their life becomes a process 

Against control

Let the video lose control again

Say goodnight like a shout out to the world

Sleep is your megaphone

All that is good little one

This shift from alarm to infancy.