Monthly Archives: March 2014

Poetic Research Bureau

Brian Blanchfield | Matias Viegener Reading, March 22 2014

Leave a comment

The Poetic Research Bureau presents…

BRIAN BLANCHFIELD & MATIAS VIEGENER

Saturday, March 22, 2014
Doors open 7pm
Reading at 7:30pm

Poetic Research Bureau @ 951CKR
951 Chung King Rd
Chinatown, Los Angeles

Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry–Not Even Then (University of California Press) and, newly, A Several World (Nightboat Books)–as well as a chapbook: The History of Ideas, 1973-2012 (Spork Press). He is at work on a collection of nonfiction, half cultural semiotics half dicey autobiography, forthcoming from Nightboat next year. He lives in Tucson.

Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who lives in LA and teaches at CalArts. His work has been seen at LACMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, ARCO Madrid, the Whitney, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Machine Project, MOCA Los Angeles, and internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Germany, and Austria. He is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit (2004-2013), the author of the new book, 2500 Random Things About Me Too, and the editor of the forthcoming I’m Very Into You, the correspondence of Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. In 2013 he received a Creative Capital award.

Book Launch

Kate Durbin & Melissa Broder | Skylight Books, March 27th

Leave a comment

Please come to a launch reading for Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone and Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment on March 27th at 7:30 at Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles. Sure to be the L.A. book launch event of the season!

I write a bit about Durbin’s new book in my essay Conceptual Writing: The L.A. Brand.

SCARECRONEwebFront

In Scarecrone, Melissa Broder deepens her self-aware and dark brand of poetry, which The Chicago Tribune says “risks the divine” and Flavorwire calls “unbelievable and overwhelming for its imaginative power alone.” Publishers Weekly says her work is “as funny and hip as it is disturbing.”

eentertainment_cover

The full-length version of Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment sparkles with the static of TV personalities, the privileged dramas of MTV’s The Hills and Bravo’s Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Kate Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian’s fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in a language of diamond-studded lavishness.

Continue reading Kate Durbin & Melissa Broder | Skylight Books, March 27th →

LACMA Event

Ryan Trecartin: 4 New Movies

Leave a comment

I’m posting this not only because I think Ryan Trecartin (who has lived in LA for a few years now) is great but also because all of his videos explore language in a way that should be of interest to poets and writers. Truly weird stuff, beautifully edited if always on the edge of total collapse.

Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and scholar (he was a professor of mine at the CUNY Graduate Center) wrote a great article about Trecartin for Artforum called Situation Hacker, a must read:

“Imagine slasher films without blood; porn without nudity; the Sistine Chapel without God; the New York Stock Exchange without capital. Pretend that Hieronymus Bosch’s intermeshed figures could text. Ryan Trecartin’s videos depict a vertiginous world I’m barely stable enough to describe. Watching them, I face the identity-flux of Internet existence: surfing-as-dwelling. Images evaporate, bleed, spill, metamorphose, and explode. Through frenetic pacing, rapid cuts, and destabilizing overlaps between representational planes (3-D turns into 2-D and then into 5-D), Trecartin violently repositions our chakras. Digitally virtuoso, his work excites me but also causes stomach cramps. I’m somatizing. But I’m also trying to concentrate.”

When: Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2014
Time: 7:30 pm
Where: Bing Theater at LACMA
Address: 5905 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90036

(get tickets)

Continue reading Ryan Trecartin: 4 New Movies →

UCLA Digital Humanities

Ursula Heise and John Christensen on Digital Environmental Humanities

Leave a comment

UCLA Professors Ursula Heise in the department of English and John Christensen of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability in the Department of History and editor of the journal Boom: A California Journal, gave presentations at the Digital Environmental Humanities workshop that took place Sept. 7-8th in Montreal.

 

UCLA Digital Humanities

UCLA Game Lab

Leave a comment

One of my favorite programs at UCLA is the UCLA Game Lab started by game theorist and designer Eddo Stern of UCLA’s Design and Media Art department. They do a fabulous yearly games festival at the Hammer Museum which is not to be missed.

UCLA Game Lab.

“We are an experimental research and development lab that fosters the production of computer games and game-related research. The lab supports exploration of these areas of focus: Game Aesthetics through experimentation in the look, sound, language and tactility of games; Game Context through development of games that involve the body, new interfaces, physical space and performance in new ways; and Game Genres through examination of the socio-historic-political discourse around games and the development of new game genres that challenge the presently accepted boundaries of what games are about.

The UCLA Game Lab differs from more traditional game development contexts through an emphasis on conceptual risk-taking and development of new modes of expression and form through gaming. The lab supports projects that will establish new paradigms for gaming that emphasize the self-reliance and personal expression of the gaming artist.

The UCLA Game Lab’s primary function is as a research and production space for collaborative teams to pursue focused work on gaming projects, while benefiting from the technological infrastructure and expertise provided by the lab staff and faculty. This type of incubation space creates a context of community, interdisciplinary exchange, privacy, focus and continuity that is vitally conducive toward the completion of ambitious game projects.”

Document

Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems

Leave a comment

The Los Angeles arts journal East of Borneo published this great article about Bertolt Brecht’s poetry written while he lived in LA during the 40s. Certainly worth a read if you’re interested in the poetic history of the city.

“Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s. Indeed, at no time, perhaps, was the city’s surreal admixture of improbable light and equally improbable darkness (sunshine and noir, in other words) more startling than during that very time, the thirties and forties, when hundreds, perhaps thousands of Weimar-era German-speaking exiles (Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Alfred Döblin, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Salka Viertel, among them) fled the killing fields of World War II Europe and found themselves in a city of angels nestled along the cerulean pool of the Pacific.”

1342641341_hangmen_also_die_300

Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters (East of Borneo).

Poetry Journal

Poetry Will Be Made By All

Leave a comment

The UCLA graduates have manuscripts in the free-for-download international poetry publication project Poetry Will Be Made By All. They are Laura V. Rivera (Apartment Complex), AJ Urquidi (The Patterned Fragment), Jake Eisenmann (Unforgeable Poems) and Stefan Karlsson (No Nothing).

Rivera_Cover_20142

“Poetry will be made by all! is an evolving exhibition that will publish and disperse one thousand new books of expanded writing and poetry over two months by authors from over fifty countries and spanning six continents. Poets-in-residence will work with visitors and a global network of writers from within an installation by Atelier Bow Wow. As part of the ongoing research project 89plus, this exhibition investigates the significance of poetry and poetic practices for the generation born in or after 1989.”

Library | Poetry Will Be Made By All.

Hammer Reading

Peter Gizzi | April 3 2014, 7:30pm

Leave a comment

Peter Gizzi is the author of Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from the Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This series of readings is organized and hosted by Stephen Yenser, poet and professor at UCLA and author of A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large and Blue Guide.

Links:
Peter Gizzi’s website
Interview with Peter Gizzi by Robert N. Casper

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE.

Parking is available under the museum for a flat fee of $3 after 6PM.

Poetry is supported, in part, by the UCLA Department of English and Friends of English.

All Hammer public programs are free and made possible by a major gift from the Dream Fund at UCLA.

Generous support is also provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, the Simms/Mann Family Foundation, The Brotman Foundation of California, Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, and all Hammer members.

UCLA Faculty Publication

Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary

Leave a comment

UCLA poet and professor Harryette Mullen, whose last full-length book of poems, Sleeping With the Dictionary, was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, has just released a new book of poems.

28362_web.ns.4.13.mullen.pica

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times picked it as a top book of the fall, and reviews of the book appear here, here and here. An excerpt appears here.

From the publisher’s website:

“Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, “What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?”

Mullen’s The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews appeared in 2012.

 

So-Cal Stage

Peiyi Wong: From Photographs: March 15-16

Leave a comment

FROM PHOTOGRAPHS: An installation/performance by Peiyi Wong at Automata Arts.

Peiyi Wong

A multi-media installation / performance that attempts to examine the many ways we have of looking, in hopes of uncovering the ideal way forward.

We will be presenting the latest research and findings of an anonymous amateur archeologist-explorer who remains inexplicably drawn to the ruins of Llano del Rio, a failed socialist utopian commune built on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Written, directed, and performed by Peiyi Wong

Continue reading Peiyi Wong: From Photographs: March 15-16 →