SOUND / MULTIMEDIA :: ROOM FOR STORMS
Exit Strata is pleased to invite you to the third installment of Birgit Rathsmann's multimedia art and sound piece, Room for Storms, to be held at the East River Bandshell on October 5th, at 7 pm. Following screening/installations in Chinatown and Mexico
FIELD NOTES :: NOW PLAYING ON NIGHTBUS RADIO :: 3 :: CHICAGO'S WITCHING HOUR
This episode of Nightbus Radio’s FIELD NOTES finds Jack Kennedy in Chicago, Illinois. If you haven't been introduced to guest blogger “Kennedy Karate,” yet, read the pre-quel intro to this Soundcloud Fellow‘s series HERE, and check out episode 2, Dreamcatching
ART :: Allison Malinsky and the Places of Memory :: RETORNO
Introduce yourself
FIELD NOTES :: Now Playing on Nomadic Nightbus Radio:: Jack "Kennedy Karate" Wants YOU
I’ve had one hell of a time in Nashville. I lost my virginity and my pride watching and listening to some insanely talented musicians playing on Broadway. My man on the scene, Christopher Walken, got an eye opening interview with
FIELD NOTES : Jacob Perkins :: From the Cannery, Part 6 : Return of a Fast Food Drifter
On top of the Olympic Range I am skating over snowfields and looking through something I'd only impair to describe as 'fabric' at night. Deep nostalgic chest throbs: the mushroom chocolates were a good choice. There was supposed to be
FIELD NOTES :: No Instructions for Assembly :: Kameelah Rasheed's Photographic Memory
While an Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock this summer, I continued to work on the series Memories: No Instructions for Assembly. This series which has morphed into six evolving iterations - I, II, III, IV, V, and VI is born from my family's experience with displacement and loss. There is limited photographic evidence that my family ever existed. Photographs were lost when we were unlawfully removed from our home in 1998. Some photographs were water-damaged or accidentally trashed before we packed seven lives and accompanying articles into a burgundy station wagon and made our home in a 450-square foot illegal attachment where my grandfather died, alone, nine years prior of stomach cancer. An attempt to conjure my family back into existence, in Memories: No Instructions for Assembly, I weave together orphaned photographs found at garage sales, photos stolen from the Facebook pages of estranged family members, magazine pages, water-damaged images salvaged during my family's 10-year bout with homelessness, and original photography to re-imagine a lost family history. Working in the tradition of the archaeologist and the archivist, I sample as well as reorganize existing materials into a series of images to produce a non-linear narrative that dances between vivid and vague memories. Editorial: LEVEL UP! Gratitude, Growth and Other Goings On in the Exit Strata-sphere
There is a poem I wrote in the early spring that describes the moment of meeting, and attraction, as... cellular intelligence, as when
my electrons got all jumpy-like
from first you walked in the room
recognized yours like an overdue reunion
refugees from the counties of each other
and I bring that up now because, metaphorically, our Exit Strata electrons have been getting all jumpy-like a hell of a lot recently.
Far beyond a one-to-one connection, this piece posits a theory of interpersonal co-evolution that I've been tossing around lately -- one that suggests that we instinctively recognize our creationary comrades: those who will make our world and life a better place, who will inspire us, challenge us, and help us evolve.
This electromagnetic impulse, lets say - the biological inclination to draw this person or these people into your self or your environment - becomes/grows into "love" with WORK: because even chemical reactions require catalysts, and require the appropriate conditions for full realization.
We come to love those people who bring this original impulse into being -- through the ultimately selfless act of commitment to another person or group of people. We appreciate and feel in our very bodies how awesome it is that these people stay with us, and give of themselves and their energy again and again.
So we're going to start out with a big hearty THANK YOU. Oh man.
We love you people.
We love our contributors, the people who come to our events, the people who write us email, the people who chat with us at our tables -- and we get all jumpy for you.
You know why? Because you make us believe in what we're doing, and you show us that YOU believe in what we're doing. You let us know that it supports and inspires you. That it is encouraging and enabling and growing your work and your connections and your community. And because altogether, we're feeling like we've, well, LEVELLED UP. To a new Strata.
Let's hear it for 2012! Did you know it's the United Nations' Year of Cooperatives? I think that "country of eachother" those lines channel an understanding of is, in fact, the collaborative, cooperative future we are building here together.
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 25 :: Ana Bozicevic on Marguerite Yourcenar
disclaimer, from Ana: "if you need a word about why I am featuring a novelist as a poetic influence; her work is poetic to the point of absurdity." et alors...
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I, YOUrcenar.
None of my friends seem to give a shit about Marguerite Yourcenar. Sure, someone’s father read her in the 80s—probably Memoirs of Hadrian—and there was an interview in the Paris Review with her just then—just at her death. Naming her as an influence has been taken at times (dans mon cas) as an affectation. {This is supposed to be personal, so I’m making it so. But what isn’t? There’s no person, so person’s everywhere.} So this is what I can tell you about Marguerite Yourcenar & “I” (“L’être que j’appelle moi”/the person I call myself, as she puts it):
That
- it was my father who introduced me to her. And started me toward owning most of her books.
- “I” passed her novella of incestuous love, Anna Soror, around my Croatian high school like the mind-porn that it sure was.
- “I” translated parts of her Fires, a reimagining of antique myths—especially the one about Sappho—and made an offering of them to a young woman. This was my idea of courtship; should’ve read Plato’s Lysis first.
- when “I” had a blog for four years, called Quoi? L’Eternité. it was named thus after Yourcenar’s memoirs, not Rimbaud. She also introduced me to Yukio Mishima.
That’s enough now. But from a current vantage, it’s incredibly ironic that Yourcenar’s writing should have served as a queer f-to-f offering – considering the fact that though she quite likely was queer, she was also very oblique about it – what I’ve heard called “old school.” Here’s a passage from that Paris Review interview cited here without value judgment – neither for Yourcenar nor her interviewer and his “deviance:”
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 21:: David King on Frederick Seidel
On Frederick Seidel
People often ask me what I’m reading, who I’m reading, who I like. My answer is always the same. I say nothing. I say nothing to protect them. I say nothing, like a hero. The problem I find is that the people who ask me what I’m reading, who I’m reading and who I like aren’t at rock bottom. They aren’t in dire need of an artistic overhaul. They aren’t where I was when I first experienced Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga. They’re just asking, often, to be polite, which is the worst kind of asking.
In August of 2009, everything was going wrong. The creative world in which I
was consumed was turning indie. Vegan. It was going soft, because to walk around with a hard-on in one’s head was impolite. The world around me was craving sterility. Political correctness of the mind and body was becoming impotent-making. I was growing sleepless with softness. I started to feel like the world was slowly denying my human right to tear. PC thought police had waged war inside my head with Nerf truncheons.
What I found in Ooga-Booga was a harsh reality of the mind. I found an
honest viciousness. I found humor in the utterly terrifying. I found terror in the utterly humorous. I found that I was terrified to find certain things funny. I found that my body would force a laugh to conceal a multitude of other emotions. But most importantly, I found that all of this could be done with poetry.
AWESOME CREATOR: PLAYWRIGHT :: Mark Snyder, Brooklyn NY
Mark Snyder, Ladies and Gentleman!
MARK SNYDER started writing plays in the eighth grade, casting himself in the juiciest parts. He now prefers giving real live actors that opportunity. His work has been performed at HERE, The Tank, the SF OOB [Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Play] Festival, the (sadly-defunct) Slipper Room, Pete's Candy Store, and throughout assorted speakeasies and bistros throughout downtown NYC. He can be found riding his bike and churning homemade ice cream at home in Brooklyn, and at: www.facebook.com/markbsnyder.
**Editor's Note: Mark has a terrific new play out, so he's been sneaky and given us our WWWWHW answers in regards to A DECENT STRETCH, showing at THE TANK NYC on 4/28-29. We are so excited about the play (and bringing a cadre of folks -- come with!) that we allowed it -- for now. Check back for more on Mark's creative process (the real WWWWHW) shortly! What we cannot leave out of this profile is that for our inaugural A.C., no one fits the bill more than Mark -- in addition to having a FT "job" (shiver) this man gets up every day before 5 am to write. The last play I saw of his was up at HERE... a month ago. And that's about the clip he keeps. CONSTANT rigor. He is a marvel and an inspiration! (And look at those abs!)