All posts by Brian Stefans

Brian Kim Stefans' books of poetry include "Viva Miscegenation”: New Writing'' (MakeNow Books, 2013), Kluge: A Meditation and other works (Roof Books, 2007), What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Heretical Texts, 2006), Before Starting Over: Selected Interviews and Essays 1994-2005 (Salt Publishing, 2006) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003) which includes experimental essays on the role of algorithm in poetry and culture. He presently lives in Hollywood and is an assistant professor of poetry, new media and screenplay studies in the English department of UCLA.

Christine Wertheim and Patrick Ballard, Automata Arts | April 5-6 2014, 8 PM

Christine Wertheim will perform swOunds, hOwles and other infantile nO|ses from her new book mUtter- bAbel, published by Counterpath Press.

Patrick Ballard will perform Impressions; a rotating cast of pieces for solo performer with a microphone.

$18 General Admission
$15 Members/Students/Seniors
Seating is Limited; Advance Reservations Suggested.

To purchase tickets for the performance, click Here.

Christine

Christine Wertheim is author of mutter-bAbel (Countertpath Press) and +|’me’S-pace (Les Figues Press), editor of the anthology Feminaissance, and with Matias Viegener co-editor of Séance and The n/Oulipean Analects. She has performed her work widely, including at La Sorbonne, Birckbeck College London, University of Western Sydney, Machine Project, LA, Echo Park Film Center and the MJT. With her sister Margaret, she co-directs the Institute For Figuring, organizing events at the intersection of science, art and pedagogy. In 2011 the sisters received the Theo Westenberger Grant for Outstanding Female Artists from the Autry National Center. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

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Patrick Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist that works through object making, music, performance, writing, various comedic forms, and a motley crew of other assorted media. His performance and sculpture work has been shown at Machine Projects, Grand Central Art Center Santa Ana, and featured as a part of Pacific Standard Time’s Ball of Artists. He will be receiving an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts later this year.

at:
AUTOMATA
504 Chung King Court Los Angeles, CA 90012
automata-la@sbcglobal.net
www.automata-la.org

For Directions to AUTOMATA, click HERE.

Automata Arts.

Guy Bennett | April 2nd 2014, 7:30 PM

Otis Books is pleased to publish a collection of writing that spans the career of the late Italian poet Giovanna Sandri, including verbal and visual texts, poems and poetic essays.

Edited by Otis College Professor Guy Bennett, and introduced by Giulia Niccolai, only fragments found: selected poems, 1969–1998 includes translations by Bennett, Faust Pauluzzi and Giovanna Sandri.

Guy Bennett is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous translations, including most recently Self-Evident Poems and a translation of Mohammed Dib’s Tlemcen or Places of Writing. He is the publisher of Mindmade Books and co-editor of Otis Books/Seismicity Editions.

All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are free of charge, but seating is limited.
Ahmanson Hall Forum, Goldsmith Campus
9045 Lincoln Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. 90045

Ian Bogost at CalArts | April 1, 2014

Video game theorist/designer and “speculative realist” philosopher Ian Bogost will be speaking at CalArts’ Interventions Lecture Series. Wish I knew about this earlier! The series has already hosted Lisa Duggan, Renee Gladman, Lydia Davis, Bruce Robbins, giovanni singleton and Fred Moten this year. Ian is appearing as a “BONUS” world.

The Interventions lecture series is a year-long graduate course offered to first-year MA Aesthetics and Politics and MFA Creative Writing students. All lectures are free, open to the public and begin at 7 pm in Butler Building #4 on the CalArts campus except where otherwise noted.

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Among Bogost’s most recent publications is a book-length collaborative study of a single BASIC program that ran on the Commodore 64 titled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Co-authors included: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas , Mark Sample, Noah Vawter. For faces than your average selfie.

Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. In addition, Bogost is Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on political games and artgames.

Interventions Lecture Series | Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics.

Friends, Bitches, Countrymen: Contemporary Feminist Poetics Visions and Voices

This looks like a really great event that I just found out about this morning. I’ve been meaning to see most of these writers for a long time! The website states:

What are the relationships between feminism, poetry and power? In a reading and performance, five American poets will define, discuss, question, subvert, celebrate and explode their varied feminist poetics.

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Wednesday, March 26, 2014 : 7:00pm
The Ray Stark Family Theatre
School of Cinematic Arts 108
University Park Campus

Book signing to follow. Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP at the links below beginning Monday, March 3, at 9 a.m.

USC Students, Staff and Faculty: To RSVP, click here.
General Public: To RSVP, click here.

via Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Continue reading Friends, Bitches, Countrymen: Contemporary Feminist Poetics Visions and Voices

CAConrad and Laura V. Rivera | March 28, 7 PM

Please join us for a reading by poets CAConrad and Laura V. Rivera.

Friday, March 28
Doors open 7pm
Reading at 7:30pm

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

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CAConrad writes: “The son of white trash asphyxiation, my childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for my mother and helping her shoplift. I am the author of six books of poetry, and I am a 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, and I conduct workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.” Conrad’s titles include Ecodeviance, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and the Book of Frank.

Laura V. Rivera is a Los Angeles based writer and performer originally from Puerto Rico. She is the founding editor of online poetry journal, Circle. Her works include “You Will Close Your Eyes,” a live group hypnosis, and a chapbook of photographs and poetry documenting a transmigration (City of the Soul). Her new chapbook of poems, Apartment Complex, features work written during periods of experimental hermitism. She is a UCLA Creative Writing alumn and is approaching studies in clinical psychology and traditional psychoanalysis. She is interested in effecting altered states, making bad video, and amateurish brain surgery.

 

Poor Dog Group | Five Small Fires at the Bootleg Theater

Poor Dog Group is a group of CalArts graduates who formed five years ago to explore the outer bounds of theater in a way reminiscent, to me, of the Wooster Group in NYC. I’ve long been a fan of their work, among the most challenging I’ve seen in LA. This is their new show at the excellent Bootleg Theater near downtown.

March 6 – 29 | Thurs-Sat | 7:30pm

Press Release | Get Tickets

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Five Small Fires began as an investigation into ancient ritual, and the nature of satyr play within Greek theater. Set in a community center, revolutionaries of an abstract New Age movement stew over life’s meaning and purpose. A dark secret begins to reemerge, causing the members to seek aggressive liberation. While philosophical rhetoric builds upon itself, the members continue to seek emancipation from the troubles of contemporary life by conducting a series of lessons and tests, which they broadcast on-line. As these rituals collide in celebratory chaos, a higher community is formed through dance, initiation rites and radical apocalyptic anarchy.

Continue reading Poor Dog Group | Five Small Fires at the Bootleg Theater

Brian Blanchfield | Matias Viegener Reading, March 22 2014

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.

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

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.

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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.”

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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

Ryan Trecartin: 4 New Movies

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