A Meme for Suzanne Stein

...after her reading at St. Mark’s, 11/17/2008

1. What is communication?
2. What is the relationship shared between communication and art?
3. What is the relationship shared between your work and 70s “Live Art” (or performance-based art)? Participatory art? Tactical Media? Procedure-based art and writing? Land Art?
4. To what extent do you feel you are extending the problems of New York poets such as Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner? To what extent would you like to or feel you do complicate these practices?
5. Where does poetry currently stand in relation to visual art?
6. With the rise of “social networking” tools such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as life-simulators such as Second Life, how should or could we, as culture workers/artists/thinkers, reenvision communication and participation as problems for our work?
7. You have referred to both TAXT books and your reading performances as "site-specific". How do you understand the term "site-specific" in relation to your work?
8. What (if anything) do the terms “virtual” and “actual” mean to you? "Possibility"? "Potential"?
9. In what ways do you imagine any current artistic practices to be effectively social and/or political?
10. In what ways can participatory and extemporaneous performance practices be considered more ethical/emancipatory than object-based ones?
11. Why, in the past decade, do you think (re)enactment has become such a popular art form across the arts, but especially in visual art? Why not so much in poetry/conceptual writing (Kenneth Goldsmith's Day and Rob Fitterman's reenactments of the Grand Piano project aside)?

Poetry "After Katrina" in the Newsletter

In addition to some wonderful book reviews by Paul Foster Johnson, Carol Mirakove and others, the December/January 2008 issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter (available online in a PDF format) includes a double review I wrote for Brett Evans' and Frank Sherlock's *Ready-To-Eat Individual* (Lavendar Ink, 2008), and Rob Halpern's *Disaster Suites* (Palm Press, 2008). The review addresses poetry after Katrina, and contemporary "disaster lyric" more generally.

announcing ON 1

ON

Contemporary Practice 1

edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger

contents:
Taylor Brady, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, Jason Christie, Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Eli Drabman, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Edric Mesmer, Sawako Nakayasu, Tenney Nathanson, Richard Owens, Tim Peterson, Andrew Rippeon, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Dale Smith, Suzanne Stein, Ali Warren, Katie Yeats

on

Arakawa/Gins, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Michael Cross, Beverly Dahlen, Michael deBeyer, Mark Dickinson, kari edwards, DJ/Rupture, Thom Donovan, Belle Gironda, Brenda Iijima, CJ Martin, Emily McVarish, Yedda Morrison, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Patton, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward, Ali Warren

purport:
ON Contemporary Practice gathers writing about the practices or poetics of one’s contemporaries. While these writings may be highly anti-categorical or “hybrid,” they are ultimately for the cultivation and extension of critical discourse. If you would like to submit to ON please write the editors at oncontemporaries@gmail.com, or michaelthomascross at hotmail dot com, thom_donovan at yahoo dot com, and kyleschlesinger at gmail dot com. ON welcomes all unsolicited materials which pursue the below guidelines. For more about ON’s editorial positions, please see the first issue’s editorial, “For a Discourse”.

guidelines:
ON primarily publishes essays on contemporaries that investigate a poetics or practice. It does not publish reviews of individual poems, chapbooks, performances, etc. It also does not publish poems. ON’s editors will consider all submissions but will not provide extensive editorial feedback toward publication.

purchasing:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710-1409
Tel. (800) 869-7553
www.spdbooks.org

published by:
Cuneiform Press
214 N. Henry Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
www.cuneiformpress.com

Copies are available for $12.00. Free shipping in the US for all orders placed through the publisher. Send checks to Kyle Schlesinger at the address above, or paypal kyleschlesinger at gmail dot com.

Gore Memorial

-for Jane

I want to make a
memorial that is

not mythical to
bones and falling

bridges a gore
memorial a memorial

to gore and not
make reference to

any real thing
or place and pre

tend it is like
any other place

in time putting
history in the use

of mythology like
losing one's way

in a dark woods
that is ourselves

in that time with
out time when all

I wanted was to
make a gore memo

rial with you a
memorial to gore

and soldiers and
bones and bridges

real falling brid
ges because you are

here with me the
se facts are facts

and not mere ima
ges these images

won't be how they
wanted them shored.

David Levi Strauss' 15 Dispatches

Check out David Levi Strauss' blog entries on the presidential campaign at Aperture magazine, 15 Dispatches.

Peace Events presents Taylor Brady and Jennifer Scappettone (Ad)*

Peace Events & The Prosodic Body

present

Taylor Brady & Jennifer Scappettone

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

hosted by Thom Donovan & Robert Kocik at:

340 Morgan Avenue ("MEBLE" building)
E. Williamsburg (Graham Ave. L stop), Brooklyn
((PLEASE SEE DIRECTIONS BELOW))

about the readers:

Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco where he is active in the Nonsite Collective (www.nonsitecollective.org). His recent publications include *Yesterday's News*, *Occupational Treatment*, and *Snow Sensitive Skin*, written in collaboration with Rob Halpern.

from Occupational Treatment:

Perhaps I write to you in order to create delicious misunderstandings that will render me edible. I hope to settle your own digestion of my own erring analysis. Many of the campers are clothed in the gnawed remains of just such a meal. At one time they even produced its refreshments, but that was before the brewery started outsourcing beer. In the photos I've enclosed the effect is one of unfortunate fatigue. But you must remember that this nation is so young it has not yet discovered its youth. It only appears wreathed in tatters and strips of the outmoded or attenuated. Passing by way of sartorial falsehood, you must come to imagine the truth of a new collective body still barely veiled within it. Then distance comes and spills into its folds.


Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly, forthcoming shortly from Litmus Press, and of several chapbooks: Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e kollectiv, 2007, now available at www.dusie.org/BeautyIsTheNewAbsurdiD2.pdf); Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Ode oggettuale, a bilingual "poemetto" translated in conversation with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, Rome, 2008). She guest-edited Aufgabe 7, which features a section devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research. She is now at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, for Atelos, and is also writing a book on the amphibious city. She teaches at the University of Chicago.


EXIT 43

So here we are?

Exitable—architectural—girlish—hackquiescent.

Omoshirosoudeyone?

The chessboard has left and its dada with it.

What’s left is private.

About this—err—residence.

All mirrors noted. All windows. And all-breakable.

One ration under Bigus.

Still full of collector’s pieces.

Glass over glass. Dustiny, jurisdictionless.

Doug & Midge invite you off the page.

Into more issues than tissues.

Into La Salle. Into the Love Canal.

Scabie boomers:

Are you clean inside?

Here in the middle-of-center.

Death begins in the colon. Find out now!

Find 42 million pounds—

Moshi moshi. Supertrunk?

As one sterilizes her fen—

I wrote your copy inside the bubble

Find out why every second American is chronically ill.

& would now like to know what you are.

Two-way voice. In-only voice.

Lire desukeredomo!

Of Hooker Chemicals.

Out-only voice. Miroloyia

Littered with PCs. Rider B

Is Lyre, however, and yet—

Chorus!

Long-winged thrushes, or doves, making their way into

Engineering, termination, client service user training, where applicable,

Master Snare set in a thicket—

The rights and remedies for ST Service Service included in Table B…

So too these women, their heads hanging in a row….

………………………………………………………

They gasped with their feet for a very short while, not for long at all.

No use for civic grief: I Homer have hereby censored this account

& *anyway it was a long time ago.*

__________________________________

Directions to 340 Morgan Ave:
Take L to Graham Ave. Walk 4 blocks north on Metropolitan (past White Castle). Take a left on Morgan. Look out for a yellow awning that reads "MEBLE". You are there! Here is Mapquest, just in case:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Brooklyn&state=NY&address=340+Morgan+Ave

Peace Events (formerly 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.

Peace Events & The Prosodic Body
*photo courtesies Erica Kaufman, Dorothea Lasky, Jennifer Scappettone, and Stacy Szymaszek.

Crayon On Beauty Release Event (Ad)

New York University’s McGhee Division
Inside/Outside Series Celebrates

Crayon On Beauty

Edited by Andrew Levy and Roberto Harrison

WHEN Wednesday, October 29th, 6:30 – 9:00pm
WHERE The Torch Club @ New York University, 18 Waverly Place, New York, NY

Entertainment begins at 7:00pm (Open bar at 6:30; Food to follow the panel and performances)

Julie Patton in Performance
“part, smart, kkk-Palin mart, grow another heart...”

How do we live now? – Beauty, ethics, and the political body
An open Q&A panel with Chris Alexander, Thom Donovan, Kristen Gallagher, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Klobucar, Robert Kocik, Julie Patton, Tim Peterson, and Eleni Stecopoulos — Moderated by Andrew Levy & Ruth Danon

Prosodic Body/Phoneme Choir presentation
by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik with Valarie Samulski, Charlotte Gibbons and Jonathan Bastiani

Crayon 5 – On beauty – 26 essays on beauty, eleven new works of poetry, and 17 book
reviews (448 pages) – available for sale at the Torch Club (& spdbooks.org)

Contributors: Beverly Dahlen, Kristen Gallagher, Joe Amato, Chris Daniels, Cecilia Vicuña, Nicole Brossard, Rob Halpern, Julie Patton, Robert Kocik, Carolee Schneemann, Sawako Nakayasu, Kristin Prevallet, Brenda Iijima, Steve Benson, Laynie Browne, Diane Ward, Thom Donovan, Alan Davies, Lisa Robertson, Michal Lando, Peter O’Leary, P. Inman, Jonathan Skinner, Andrew Klobucar, Alan Prohm, Linh Dinh, Belle Gironda, Roberto Harrison, Andrew Levy, Corey Mead, Ruth Danon, David Pavelich, John Shoptaw, Laura Sims, Sally Van Doren, Dan Machlin, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Tom Hibbard, Stephen Vincent, Martine Bellen, Kass Fleisher, Chris Alexander, Matthias Regan, Pete Smith, Pat Reed, Judith Goldman

Sponsored by the Liberal Arts Program, McGhee Division, SCPS, NYU and the Office of the Dean, SCPS, New York University

For further information please contact Andrew Levy @ Andrewlev@msn.com | graphic design: allan@allanmargulies.com

Overhearing Altman (Deadpan)

The status of the voice in Robert Altman's 70s films (*Nashville* and *3 Women* in particular) frames us in a shower stall with a tiny ceiling like in the film *Being John Malkovich*. Our voices, doing the voices, overburden this frame, with stupid presence not refusing to be anything, to hear anything in a tone or a forward looking gesture of the hand. So spectacle whispers in our ears, convinces us we are everything. The status of the voice is a present that is everywhere, whose origin is nowhere--not even in Emerson or Jonathan Edwards or Anne Hutchinson for that matter. The body becomes a boom mic, an earpiece, a gun (always a gun). The body becomes this voice that is present everywhere in being nothing--Stevens' "sleeveless" fluttering, his "backward motions" of any actor's hands; Creeley's "The plan is the body. The plan is the body. The plan is the body..." like the mind talking to itself through the dark feedback loops of its interiority. I never really liked Robert Altman's films until recently with all their obvious ironies and satire and manufactured candidness (his signature tracking shot both surveillant and intimate), but out of all American filmmakers from the 70s he most anticipates Reagan as a problem of the mediated, imagized body. The body that is nothing but expression, the voice that is only voice--whether 'valley pop' or 'folksy'. The body that is only body--"wholly body" (again, Stevens)--only an image of the body. A body always anticipating being an image. That is American. Robert Altman, I don't want to be a body if the body has to first be an image of itself, rather than itself. I don't want to be contentless--discontented, literally. This year, this month, October 2008 before a presidential election, there is nothing but the image of the body and the voice under total scrutiny not for what it says but for how it says it. The only *sensible* rhetorical strategy (as Patrick Durgin commented last night) is an end game "ascesis" of word and gesture, expression versus what is said. These overheard performances of us.

Bardo

--for Robert

All these tears we wept
for real estate fakes
out the real we keep

our eyes on the inside
our upheavals to our
selves that's all

community was some
thing to do with a pile
of bricks and the shaping

of space something
like a marriage goes on
without members to

tell us we are all one
thank God there is
a park today with folk

in it picnicking and
playing basketball
thank goodness for

gratitude sometimes
a wall is only a wall
sometimes these doors

swing open more than
one way all we wanted
was to be inside that

building without being
inside it sometimes
we wanted to use it

without using it to
come back from the
dead without returning

buildings sometimes
move too fast for
our bodies to realize

this is all a preparation
for death so any one
will live dying into

a new purpose for
purpose or meaning
the way you interrupt

me with your body
challenges what I think
a body should do

so we are a discourse
about use didn't even
think a body could

be fucked *there* or
do *that* that is what
he means when

Nietzsche says
the strong must
be protected from

the weak each
body is a central fact
tracing the shape

of the law learning
to crawl since malice
must be demonstrated.

For AR, Again

Sound heard plainly in speech
And worlds created by sound

All the steps we take within them
Until they or we stop thinking

This is all you meant by here
Always making another version

Of our words since they are
Happenings across anyone's

Strings the way an ocean throws
The voice hears intervals in us

As though the first time thrown
Back to where we began

In prairies, husks, echos
Free because we are composed

In prairies, husks, echos
Discontinued continuously.

Magdalena Zurawski's The Bruise (Review*)

As Eileen Myles blurbs of Magdalena Zurawski’s *The Bruise*: “The real story of a female coming to age is not sex but coming to write.” Hence, the bruise of the book’s title: an otherworldly initiatory mark of both sexual difference (becoming woman, becoming gay), and the androgyny of becoming writer. Like a James or Blanchot, Zurawski tracks the loneliness of the writer’s imagination, becoming vigilant to it as it occurs in writing, leaving behind a record of the mind left to its own convoluted patterns and self-reflexive pleasures. The unnamed protagonist is dictated to by a door knob, but also by her own internal monologues and mental pictures. As she falls in love, her desire is kindled and nurtured by the need for someone else to acknowledge her bruise, and care for it. That she receives her bruise from a Rilkean angel while translating the "Duino Elegies" is telling since Rilke could have written in anticipation of Zurawski’s debut: "That is why this too must be the criterion for rejection or choice: whether you are willing to stand guard over someone else's solitude, and whether you are able to set this same person at the gate of your own depths, which he learns of only through what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness." Zurawski brings her reader to the heart of a solitude that all writers recognize, and guard with their lives. She also provides a crucial link between an emergent generation of “experimental” fiction writers and The New Narrative movement (writers such as Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, and Eileen Myles) which has only recently got some of the wider critical recognition and circulation that is its due.

*this review was originally intended for Time Out, New York, which has a 250 max. word count for their shorter reviews.

Dodie Bellamy on Amber and Bhanu's talk

I just noticed Dodie Bellamy posted an entry at her blog, Belladodie, on Amber Di Pietra and Bhanu Kapil's talk in San Francisco the Saturday before last, September 20th:

http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/2008/09/trauma.html

O Coevals (III)

I want you
in my mouth like
the sky needs
to rest

in our
eyes when we see
the sky for
what it is

interrupting this
labor the things
you wouldn't
build

to the sky again if
you had the choice
and you do
have the choice

or develop
useless as the
rise you get
out of me

when we touch
get around
to its sticky
reflections.

*

When we get around
to nothing

complicity calls
(this is the call)

no more rock anthems
just some rock

we can't stand on
some out of control

limbs no good for
anything anymore

no longer can we
control them

they speak words
and particles

of words we couldn't
have spoken before

project our
unsaved figures

without grace or shame.

*

The environment became us
it told us we had tender skin
that we had subtle organs

and were porous to almost
anything they said any reason
they hated us made us stronger

than we immediately seemed
with all these obstacles to the
true the world we have to make

because we can't help what we
are pain is not a mirror we
hold to the world distorting it

but it makes the world possibly
know itself as one subject
abandoned by their justice.

Flux Factory's Living Room (Ad)

Flux Factory presents: Living Room
in collaboration with
openhousenewyork

October 4 & 5, 2008

Flux Factory has invited ten artists to transform strangers’ homes into sites for interactive works. Domestic or historic locations throughout New York City will become arenas for exploring what it means to inhabit a space, to make it one’s own. In conjunction with openhousenewyork, “Living Room” locations range from private living rooms to historical sites throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Explore a wall of secrets, a room-cum-optical-device, and go rooftop camping, and other exciting projects!

“Living Room” is a continuation of Flux Factory’s interest in the urban experience, in New York history, and in the overlap between private and public space. As a live/work collective, we are fascinated by what it means to make a space one’s own. While satisfying our voyeur desires, this project is also an opportunity for the public to peek into private sites normally off limits.

Works will be on view throughout the 6th Annual OHNY Weekend on October 4 & 5, 2008 from 11:00 – 6:00 unless otherwise noted.

A free, 20 person shuttle will leave the Center for Architecture on Saturday and Sunday at 12pm to transport visitors to the sites.
Please email info@fluxfactory.org to RSVP for the bus tour.

openhousenewyork is a non-profit organization celebrating New York City’s architecture and design, culminating in America’s largest event of its kind, the annual OHNY Weekend.

Participating Artists: Emily Clark, Rodney Dickson, Kim Holleman, Prem Krishnamurthy, John Monteith, Jo Q. Nelson, Trong Gia Nguyen, Douglas Paulson, Tattfoo Tan, Lauren Wilcox

Curated by Chen Tamir

For more info and to view artist maps, go to: http://www.fluxfactory.org/living-room/

PROJECTS

Emily Clark
Teacher’s Lounge at P35M–Manhattan High School
317 W. 52nd Street between 9th and 10th Aves, Hell’s Kitchen
In the mind of every kid in school is a secret place sparking rumors and gossip. Clark has turned the abandoned teacher’s lounge at P35M into a functioning one, playing on the tropes of its assumed uses: relaxation, anger, frustration, gossip, lunchtime, union meetings, refrigerators, and (at one time) smoking.

Rodney Dickson
Romper Room
Public Toilets, 2nd floor of the Crane Street Studios, 46-23 Crane Street, LIC, Queens
Romper Room evokes a torture chamber, in which victims are held hostage, tortured, interrogated, and often brutally killed. This work alludes also to methods of interrogation currently used by the US government in the War on Terror. The title was taken from a popular children’s’ TV program in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, which terrorists adopted as a name for a room in which they tortured and executed victims during the worst days of conflict in Ireland.

Prem Krishnamurthy
Berlin/New York
772 Washington Ave, Apt #2, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
This projected slide installation concerns doppelganger cities, parallel interiors, and the unreliability of travel narrative.

John Monteith
Hide and Go Seek
The Arsenal, 830 Fifth Ave/ E 64th St, New York (Entrance on Central Park)
Sat – Sun, 2:45 pm
Participants will play “Hide and Go Seek” as a way of exploring the Arsenal and experimenting in new social settings. To participate, please RSVP to John Monteith at
john@johnmonteith.com

Jo Q. Nelson
Softbox
38-09 43rd Ave 3rd Floor, Sunnyside, Queens
Softbox is a completely malleable space where rooms are on wheels and entire environments can be changed around. The flexibility of this live/work warehouse space is due to its role as a testing ground for sculptural and interior architecture projects by Nelson and visiting artists. Focused on “hosting,” Softbox is both a laboratory and a social space where interactive programming takes place including screenings and performances. This will be its inaugural open house.

Trong Gia Nguyen
“The DUMBO Debates”
(formerly known as “A View to a Thrill”)
Barrack Obama and John McCain spend a weekend together on a secret roof deck Garden of Eden in DUMBO. They talk taboo politics, drink Bloody Marys, eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and leave all inhibitions behind.

Douglas Paulson
Urban Examination Initiative, Roofs Department
Locations TBA
Saturday night
This project is an open invitation to engage the city and OHNY from the outside. You are invited to join a group that will travel through sites by day, and camp on a rooftop by night. Participants are invited to join or leave at anytime. For more information and to RSVP to this urban adventure please RSVP to doug@douglaspaulson.com

Tattfoo Tan
Open Secret
393 17th Street #2A, Brooklyn
Open Secret is an intervention between the artist, Tattfoo Tan, a home owner, and the public. Open Secret investigates the junction between private and public by using invisible paint and black lights to reveal secrets in the privacy of a home.

Lauren Wilcox
An Instrument for Viewing the Contents of a Room
213 Montrose Apt 2 (2nd floor) Brooklyn, 11206 (Crossstreet Bushwick Ave.)
Sat 11 am - 6 pm, Sun 11 - 4pm
To paint perspective during the Renaissance artists used Alberti’s Grid, a device which projects a scene onto a flat screen. This installation is a version of that device, a box that captures a room’s elements, both actual and unseen, and translates them, inside, into objects both literal and abstract.

Kim Holleman
Trailer Park
Foley Square Sat and Sun: 10-8pm
This mobile living park, converted from a 14′ x 8′ x 7′ standard aluminum trailer, is an oasis surrounded by the bustling sights and sounds of the city.

Try! (Ad)

David Brazil and Sara Larsen are putting out their zine, Try!, EVERY two weeks(!!!).

With the exception of Stacy Szymaszek's Gam (the new issue of which is due on the streets soon!), I can think of no current magazine culture as vital and immediate for what is really going on in poetry. I am also a big fan of the aesthetic, which cuts and *tapes* in consistently intelligent ways, playing between image and text, typewritten and handwritten, reckless and refined, and which interposes the blogosphere in curious ways (see Suzanne Stein's piece in the latest Try!, which features excerpts from her blog LWC/LWK).

For copies or to submit your work to Try! try: trymagazine@gmail.com.

Free Market

They say you are free
And so we are free
Like a hole we made

In the sky or that
Weather of Septembers
We did not create

They say you are free
To do what you want
To be what you want

As free as a bird any
Other creature of ex-
change but you need

The law like that bird
Needs its wings is
Obedient to the wind

And you are not
A bargain unless
Entropy turns a billion

Lines your pockets
With a void which
Resembles us

Recrudescing bad
Effects while making
Shit up on those days

Liberal economists
Pray to some un
heard of collective.

A Conversation at 16 Beaver (Ad)

CONTENTS:

1. Introduction
2. Thematics
3. How to Participate

________________________________
1. Introduction

What: Conversation
When: Sunday, 12:00 - 5:00
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: All are welcome

This Sunday we would like to invite friends, colleagues, interested parties (i.e., you) to take part in a conversation. The conversation will be initiated by some opening questions and prepared statements. The event will be videotaped with the specific desire to produce a political document of our present moment and to open up our conversations to a wider public.

Rather than stream this event live (as we have with all other editions of Continental Drift), we are looking to edit a version that will be available for broadcast on alternative television networks and for download after the event.

It is open to anyone interested. We will briefly outline some themes below. You are invited, if you like, to select one of them and prepare questions or a brief statement (0-4 minutes).


________________________________
2. Marking The Turning Point or Holding the Baby?

Sudden changes in the social and political spheres have painted question marks all over the future. On the American streets the Democratic and Republican conventions just saw a new militarization of public space, with preemptive raids on the alternative media, intimidation of citizens exercising their rights to free speech and above all, mass arrests, in some cases with charges of "conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism" (according to Minnesota's homespun version of the Patriot Act).

What will come of this rising authoritarianism? In the corporate media sphere where such abuse is considered normal, the presidential campaign has lurched over into the worst kind of populism, with the Republicans posing as the unbridled candidates of war, ecological rape and yet more market "fundamentals" -- all in the pretense of challenging the "Washington insiders" of their own party, whose policies have created the crisis of the present. Is it possible the Americans could put total denial of reality into the White House again? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rage on, and the politicians seem to think they can win. Yet where the crisis is unfolding at the most extraordinary speed is in the transnational realm of finance, which for the last decade and more has set the parameters of neoliberalism for the entire world.

The magnitude of the credit crisis is staggering, as major banks in Britain and the USA fail and are nationalized, setting the stage for a long and deep recession that might extend as far as China. We are told by the economists that this is the biggest thing since 1929, but what does that mean? Not one of them has the answer. Anyway, this much is certain: neoliberalism as an ideology of purely economic governance is dead, good riddance! We're at a turning point, the past is retreating into history
and something new is struggling to be born. What a scene for a birthday! Come next January not only the new US president, but all of us will be left holding the baby.

This Sunday, the major themes that we have debated in the last three years of Continental Drift are back on the table, in the first person. The idea is not formal presentations, but conversation about the shape of our worlds to come. We want to speak in a time of crisis about new possibilities. Now it's your baby!

________________________________
3. How to participate.

This event is meant to take in the present and to offer up different positions or perspectives - both considering our Drift discussions in the past years and taking into account the questions you feel most important. We ask each of you to either prepare your own questions or a statement concerning this moment in time, something we have been thinking about and
need to ask to a collective of people. The questions or statements can use the following thematic framework outlined below or you can offer your own.

A. How would you assess the use, abuse, health, status of the concept of democracy today?

B. How do we understand the great political challenge(s) of our contemporary moment and what is the most interesting role that cultural practice can play in that context? or more generally, ... Where do you situate the role of cultural practice in political struggle today? Where do you locate the space of agency?

C. Is this current economic tumult truly a turning point in the model of neoliberal government and if so, how will this crisis be used? Many thinkers and artists have explored how crisis has been used as the primary mechanism through which power is consolidated, but it has historically also offered moments of opportunity for various political struggles. What might this point mean for us as cultural producers?

__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
phone: 212.480.2099

for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org

TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry

Powers of the False

If they say these
are facts then they
are facts

and if we don't
it doesn't
seem to matter

enough to anybody
at all it doesn't
seem to matter

who lives and who
dies as long
as they live

with these facts
as long
as we must live

with them the sky
is so much like
a grave

and they can't
seem to make us die
quickly enough

as though all that
"strength" were
was to pass for the true

and not do anything
to transform
the real...

Nietzsche wrote
the strong must be
protected from the weak

but I don't think
he meant this in
the way they mean it.

Ultra Red's Dont Rhine with Nonsite Collective (Ad, SF)*

Dont Rhine, of the audio activist collective Ultra-red, will lead a discussion around two texts his group has drafted, texts that come out of an emerging project to further develop their approach to art and activism across specific political investigations and self-organized pedagogy. (Both texts available at links below.)

Get Lost Travel Books
Monday September 22
1825 Market Street
(betwn Valencia and Guerrero)
San Francisco
7pm.

Ultra-red appears on the cover of the current issue of WIRE, which features a great article on the collective, a pdf of which will soon be available on this website.

Texts under discussion on 9/22:

1) "Some theses on militant sound investigation, or, listening for a change."

http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/some-theses-on-militant-sound-investigationor-listening-for-a-change/

2) "A Preliminary Outline of Paulo Friere's 'Thematic Investigation' as Cultural Action."

[see attached pdf: click on “1 attachment,” below.]

For more information on Ultra-red, see www.ultrared.org. The collective will be participating in Critical Resistance 10, Sept. 26-28 in Oakland (see “Events” at nonsitecollective.org)

*originally posted by Rob Halpern at Nonsite Collective's website

Lyra & Quinn's Petition Against Palin

Friends, compatriots, fellow-lamenters,

We are writing to you because of the fury and dread we have felt since the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Republican Party. We believe that this terrible decision has surpassed mere partisanship, and that it is a dangerous farce—on the part of a pandering and rudderless Presidential candidate—that has a real possibility of becoming fact.

Perhaps like us, as American women, you share the fear of what Ms. Palin and her professed beliefs and proven record could lead to for ourselves and for our present or future daughters. To date, she is against sex education, birth control, the pro-choice platform, environmental protection, alternative energy development, freedom of speech (as mayor she attempted to ban books and fired the librarian who refused), gun control, the separation of church and state, and polar bears. To say nothing of her complete lack of experience.

We want to clarify that we are not against Sarah Palin as a woman, a mother, or, for that matter, a parent of a pregnant teenager, but solely as a rash, incompetent, and all together devastating choice for Vice President. Ms. Palin's political views are in every way a slap in the face to the accomplishments that our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers so fiercely fought for, and that we've so demonstrably benefited from.

First and foremost, Ms. Palin does not represent us. She does not demonstrate or uphold our interests as American women. It is presumed that the inclusion of a woman on the Republican ticket could win over women voters. We want to disagree, publicly.

Therefore, we invite you to reply here with a short, succinct message about why you, as a woman living in this country, do not support this candidate as second-in-command for our nation.

Please include your name (last initial is fine), age, and place of residence.

We will post your responses on a blog called "Women Against Sarah Palin," which we intend to publicize as widely as possible. Please send us your reply at your earliest convenience—the greater the volume of responses we receive, the stronger our message will be.

Please email your responses to womensaynopalin@gmail.com. Thank you for your time and action.

VIVA!

Sincerely,

Quinn Latimer and Lyra Kilston
New York, NY
womensaynopalin@gmail.com
womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com