November 21, 2005

New Yipes! at 21 Grand (11/21)

Again with the good curating. Movies to start, movies in the middle, and movies to end and all somehow very very with the poetry angle. SF video artist Cathy Begien's short "Favorite Things" was comic, nauseating and very much about consuming (literally and figuratively). Darin Klein's reading (yes, the Yipes! thankfully still has straight up readers) began a little slow but worked up momentum to a finale of short prose pieces that had the kick of a mule. Norma Cole's intro was great for many reasons and her CDR Scout (Krupskaya 2005) should be on everyone's I-want-it list. The night was rounded out with another tremedous Begien offering, "Blackout." Any one of these elements would have been enough for a successful evening in and of itself; certainly Cole's screening would have been enough to get the bodies into the chairs. The fact that curators Cynthia Sailers and David Larsen continue to indulge us in such programmatic excesses really does make each installment an amazement.