November 26, 2007

from D Buuck:

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY & POST ON BLOGS ETC... THANKS! DB

As many of you know, poet Will Alexander is quite ill with cancer and isundergoing chemotherapy. He's spent his life largely off the poetry grid, taking on odd jobs, and has no financial support or, needless to say, health insurance.

Please join us on Dec 1 at 730 for a Bay Area benefit reading. Donations will be bundled and sent directly to Will. If you cannot make it but would like to contribute, please contact me for details.

Readers include:
Nate Mackey
Juliana Spahr
Taylor Brady
Lyn Hejinian
Andrew Joron
Tisa Bryant
Adam Cornford
D.S. Marriott
and more!

hosted by David Buuck and Small Press Traffic $10-up donations Saturday December 1, 7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall, at the California College of the Arts, 1111--8th Street, San Francisco

November 26, 2007

Cabaret of Hybrid Vigor
Thurs. Nov. 29, 8 pm. $6-10.
Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia, San Francisco.
Presented by The Poetry Center and kino21, from the pages of Viz. Inter-Arts: EVENT

Featuring Fluxus Events, Dada theater, poetry films, new Neo-Benshi, and more by Dore Bowen (Fluxus events), Maxine Chernoff/Paul Hoover (new Neo-Benshi), Norma Cole/Mac McGinnes (reprised Neo-Benshi), Robert Gluck/Dean Smith (poetry film), Leslie Scalapino/Konrad Steiner (poetry film), Roxi Power Hamilton (performance).

November 24, 2007

Hiraki Sawa, "Going Places Sitting Down" (2004). SMOCA.

There were other worthwhile pieces at SMOCA, albeit seemingly hodge-podge put next to each other.

Hiraki's piece was the room, projected on three large screens. 3 channels exploring the notion of travel in their own slowish pace, via rocking horse, camel, plane, etc. . . in surrealistic landscapes that forces the viewer to question not only the nature of travel but the reason that propels one to distant landscapes. Left long enough, the viewer could easily create a visual mythology.

November 23, 2007

My dad and I road tripped from Phoenix to Hemet, California to visit my aunt (his sister) and a cousin I hadn't seen in something like 18 years. Trying to pack as much of the family thing into this week, as I'm notoriously bad at this.

Sha flew in yesterday and immediately became my niece Sage's favorite.

Today is my last day. I think Sha and I are going to try to hit the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA, as it were).

Outside of the 5 blocks squared that is downtown Phoenix, it pretty much looks like a very long strip mall on all sides. Then there's the mountains and desert beyond.

November 16, 2007

Birth a little bit earlier than planned: Second-hand knowledge says that my nephew's name is Forest.

November 16, 2007

Sister gives birth on Sunday, the day I fly into Phoenix. The whole Horton contingent is amassing around her second child. At least a Thanksgiving baby won't get gypped out of toys like my sister (b. Dec 21st) did.

That said, the stack of ungraded papers--rhetorical analyses of the Communist Manifesto--needs to get considerably lower before I shove off.

I called my East Coast friends early on this morning (like 7 am Cali time) hoping that they might get back to me with appropriately timed distractions. When did all my EC friends get fucking day jobs?

The idea of straight hours worth of grading makes me shiver. Ethically, I can't justify making my own distractions (like this one) as I have distracted myself enough lately: y'know, with other projects whose deadlines are approaching or past.

Yep.

November 14, 2007

The centerfold from NBC's A Listener's Aid to Pilgrimage of Poetry: Ted Malone's Album of Poetic Shrines (NBC, 1939). When NBC had a regular poetry show on the radio airwaves, they published this guide to offer a little more info on the poets featured, including a brief one-page bio with anecdotes & an opposite full page photo of the poet's house or in Harriet Monroe's case, her living room.

November 14, 2007

Island Daughter Reading in San Francisco

Independent Press Spotlight
Sponsored by Intersection for the Arts

Tuesday, 20 November 2007
7:30 PM
$5 - $15

Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia (btwn 15/16 St.)
Mission District, San Francisco
415.626.2787
http://www.theintersection.org

Reading an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Chamoru writer, journalist and children's book author Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero joins fellow poets Truong Tran and Dustin Heron to feature this evening's publisher, Achiote Press.

Victoria will be reading from Embodiment of Thoughts and Dreams, a love story that takes place on Guam during the 1950s, and flashes back to the Japanese occupation of the island during World War II. The story explores love in the backdrop of tragedy, and the effects of war and colonization on a young Chamoru woman and her family.

Victoria is completing her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She also works as a media coordinator at the California Reinvestment Coalition in San Francisco, teaches a basic composition workshop to freshwomen at Mills College, and is actively involved in Guam's decolonization movement.

The excerpt from tonight's reading will be printed in the Fall edition of Achiote Seeds, a journal published by Achiote Press. http://www.achiotepress.com.

November 12, 2007

Prosody Castle 3.3- Urban Real(i)ty
Nov. 18th, 2pm. $5
start at The Gallery of Urban Art (1746 13th St @ Wood- near Mandela Pkwy/West Oakland BART)

Urban Real(i)ty: a guerilla installation and performance event, featuring:

Crude
Aimee Suzara
Kwan Booth
Lara Durback
Danny King
d scot miller
Ayodele NzingaAambr and K. Richards
Peter Spannagle
Erika Staiti
Chris Stroffolino
Shawn Taylor
Phill Weber
and more....

Prosody Castle hits the streets with a guerilla installation tour of out of the way Oakland. Original, word-based works appear in public places on or near the 18th- we take you to them before the city destroys them, giving you an early chance to see them evolve. The show will culminate in performances and viewings at the Gallery of Urban Art.

Please join us on a Sunday afternoon, get in our van and enjoy the tour.

November 12, 2007

Pandora is my new favorite timesuck. Michael and Dillon have been telling me about this for ages, but I've only recently sat down to play around with it. The Woodie Guthrie station I set up for some reason keeps trying to play Sonic Youth and Velvet Underground (even after I tell it not to), but otherwise the other stations I've set up have been pretty dead on.

November 10, 2007

Photos taken by my dad to remind me of Autumn in Michigan:

November 8, 2007

1. For all of the "musicality" discussion on the Buffalo List (for those not on this pedantic time suck be temporarily thankful), seeing Baraka and Mitchell on the same stage together, poet and musician, both elder statesmen of their craft at the top of their chops performancewise, showed how the two media can and often do work in tandem. Baraka skronked as much as, if not more than, Mitchell. There was a musical conversation.

2. Surreal or stupid conversation with Michael McClure and his friend in the john.

3. I have noted early on from watching videos of Baraka readings that his show-up-to-the-readings audience is mainly white & middle class. This show was no different. Crackerland. I still can't rectify this from his Black Arts days or his more recent (though now long-standing) Marxist stance.

He may well be the best attended American Marxist poet.

November 8, 2007

Withdrawn from my college's library and added to my expanding shelves (I give away 1/2 of my books routinely on principle):

William Griffith, Greek Gestures (John Day, 1929).

Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (Henry Holt, 1918).

Carl Rakosi, Selected Poems (New Directions, 1941). Issued as a staple-bound chapbook.

I will ammend this post later when I have more time (waiting on Dillon to go see Amiri Baraka & Roscoe Mitchell in SF). But will politely vent for now my outrage at a small library giving away anything of what amounts to maybe a shelf and a half of poetry; it seems ill-advised to discard books (even if seldom or completely unused) when the section as a whole is obviously utterly lacking.