Thursday

January 30, 2008

Apparently, Beckett & Kafka wrote nothing but page 75s.

Tuesday

January 28, 2008

Samantha Giles' A Force to Separate considers each person listed by officials as homicide victims in Oakland in 2006 in the order of the discovery of their death. The total number of homicide victims for that year was 148, the highest total in more than a decade.

Deep Oakland is pleased to announce that a selection of this ambitious work is now available for view here.

____
Deep Oakland
www.deepoakland.org

Affiliated with neither the tourism nor better business bureaus, Deep Oakland seeks to create a compendium of inter-linked images, text and sound that represent the complications and vitality of Oakland’s current moment.

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January 28, 2008

Young-Ha Kim, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, trans. Chi-Young Kim (Harcourt, 2007). 119 pages.

A random find I picked up for 99¢ at Goodwill.

An anonymous narrator breaks humanity down to types: those who are ready to suicide and those who aren't. He is more concerned with the first who to him are potential clients in a more nihilistic than Kevorkianesque way. Kim's prose shifts back and forth from 2 brothers C & K, the lover they shared before her suicide, and C's subsequent almost lover, depicting the banality & failure of each's existence. With references to Jim Jarmusch, Maria Callas, Gustav Klimt, Leonard Cohen and Tristan Tzara among others, this read has a hipster flavor that seems to be begging for a John Lurie soundtrack. Idleness, distance, perfunctory sex. . . this has all the hallmarks of an indie hit. It's a well-crafted, albeit bleak, read. I'm looking forward to his other novels coming out in English.

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Friday

January 24, 2008

All I can say, East Bay poet folk, is I hope that you caught Logan Ryan Smith at Pegasus. Because if you didn't, then there was no excuse for missing Kevin Killian in a West Oakland apartment tonight.
Kevin reading his letter to the editors of Apex of M that he sent them but they didn't publish should be mandatory reading for anyone considering editing a journal, agreeing to be a contributing editor to a journal, or--much more condemningly--on the advisory board of a journal. Or for that matter participating in any human endeavor. Scrutiny I think was the moral of the story and acting on it, rather than going with an easy, comfortable complacency. . . the piece possibly had anti-capitalistic implications that I think I might have missed (I'd need to read it in print).
In light of Prosody Castle's new bent, Killian read personal (neo-confessional?) material, focusing on HIV/AIDS and how it affected him and his friends in the 80s til now. Well crafted, heart-felt (is that a dirty word for a self-professed avant?) & moving.
I was glad I caught this.

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Thursday

January 23, 2008

As a Michigander (yeah, that's what they call us), my favorite shibboleth is knowing that the place name Mackinac (as in Mackinac Island) rhymes with jaw. I don't know of any other word that ends in C that rhymes with jaw.
For fashion design folk, the Mackinaw Coat comes from this etymology; although, they used to be plaid before the military heisted the design.
Us Michiganders, historically, have dug us some plaid. The idea of a double-breasted wool coat isn't bad either; although, that part of the design might have been borrowed.

Wednesday

January 23, 2008

from Dillon:

Please join us for the first reading in our 2008 series with a too-rare East Bay appearance by SF's Kevin Killian.

We're so happy to have Kevin launch our 2008 series of readings talks and actions around the current state of the HIV/AIDS crisis. A poet, novelist, critic and playwright, Kevin Killian's books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, Arctic Summer and Argento Series. With Dodie Bellamy he edits the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period[ical] in San Francisco. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), Men on Men (ed. Geo. Stambolian), Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper) and Wrestling with the Angel (ed. Brian Bouldrey). With Lew Ellingham, Killian is writing a biography of the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-65). He has written many essays and articles on Spicer's work and co-edited Spicer's posthumous books The Train of Thought and The Tower of Babel (both 1994). He and Leslie Scalapino have written a play, Stone Marmalade, on the Orpheus/Eurydice legend, to be published by Singing Horse Books.

Thursday, 1/24/08
Reading starts at 7pm
$5 suggested donation
Gallery of Urban Art Reading House
1007 41st St., #442 (Green City Lofts)- punch 11926 at the gate and come upstairs

January 23, 2008

FRIDAY JANUARY 25, 7:30pm at CCA

1980s POETS THEATER REVIVIFIED: THREE PLAYS REXAMINED, REANIMATED, & RESTAGED

“Particle Arms” by Alan Bernheimer (excerpts)
“Third Man” by Carla Harryman (excerpts)
“Creative Floors” by Kit Robinson

$10.

Sunday

January 19, 2008

Poet's Theater at CCA last night:

CA Conrad's "The Obituary Show" was worth the $10 to get in. The creepiest peanut butter sandwich ever. "A bucket of fuck" as a positive.

Buuck's intro simultaneously raising and lowering the bar, as a way of saying welcome to the performance people.

Kevin Killian's Michael Stipe T-shirt strip act.

Erika Staiti (as in mighty Staiti, the program tells us) in plumes.

Clive working the walk-on extra action in the corner.

Buuck advising to "cover the nip" from the wings to a piece that promised nippage. Thank you David Brazil.

Mary Diaz as a lushed out Yoda. Was that really a beertini? I thought those were figments of Mr. Westbrook's imagination.

Hannah Weiner, as directed by Suzanne Stein, shows a use for semifore that the Boy Scouts never covered.

And that sandwich. . . with the hand. . . the creepy creepy very wrong and creepy hand. . .

I hope they slap it up on youtube or ubu soon.

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Friday

January 17, 2008

When I was working at the Georgia State Univ. Law Library, I worked until closing, which meant that I took my lunches after dark. I would walk down the street to the last place open and get a few dolma, then I would sit in Woodruff Park with the homeless who were settling in for the night. From my bench, I could always see the Equitable building lit up brighter than the rest, cascading down on the least fortunate in Atlanta.

It's never left me.

Saturday

January 12, 2008

Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman, Nanking (2007).

I caught this documentary at the Shattuck yesterday afternoon. Picking up & reinforcing Iris Chang's work, the film frames the work through foreign first hand accounts of Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, taking the written part of the dialogue (as opposed to interviews with massacre survivors) from the letters, journals, and other texts by Western foreigners who satyed in Nanjing to set up a "safety zone" prior to Japanese invasion. When some of the silent film footage shot by Rev. John Magee was shown, many of the older Chinese in the audience started crying. In the West, the Rape of Nanjing is a historical event, but for many Chinese this is still an open wound that the Japanese government continues to fester by not admitting what happened and by allowing text books into their schools that say the massacre never happened, whitewashing over a mountain of evidence carefully assembled by Iris Chang and by the Chinese Government. Hopefully, this film (by virtue of being a film) will reach a wider audience and help initiate another round of discussions around the Nanjing Massacre.

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January 12, 2008

Sun 1/13 8:00 PM
1510 8th St Performance Space [1510 8th Street Oakland]

Corey Fogel / Kanoko Nishi / Willie Winant Trio
Yasi Perera solo
Jen Baker / Liz Albee duo

Friday

January 10, 2008

Thu 1/10 8:00 PM $6-10 sliding scale Luggage Store New Music Series
[1007 Market St. @ 6th Street SF]

8:15 pm: Matt Davignon - drum machine
8:45 pm: Kristin Miltner - computer/MAX
9:30 pm: Agnes Szelag - electronics/projections

Wednesday

January 8, 2007

Simulpoem, a collaborative text edited by Dillon Westbrook and featuring the work of Chad Lietz, Chris Stroffolino, Dillon Westbrook, David Harrison Horton, J. D. Mitchell-Lumsden, Loretta Clodfelter and Lara Durback is now up at Deep Oakland.

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Tuesday

January 7, 2008














Helena Keefe, "Talking to Neighbors: Jim in West Oakland"(2007).

A telephone-based social sculpture. Call 510.451.1489 to listen or visit 7th Street near West Oakland BART to see the installation.

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Friday

January 4, 2008

Dale Jensen, Purgatorial (Malthus, 2004). 48 pages. $9.

I picked this up at the Lakeview branch of the Oakland Public Library. I'm not quite sure what Jack Foley means when he says in his blurb that "Jensen's poems are able to tell us things about ourselves we would never have suspected," but there are some good moments in the book: my favorite being the end poem "Remember the Maine" (48). I also liked these lines from "This Vision":
on some level a structure i've learned
in thirty years of writing poetry
it isn't easy giving you this half lie
all you do is open your head and use your skill
and people think you're honest (p. 2, ll. 8-12)
The read, however, is encumbered by flat office verse:
your computer cord ducks
and your phone
makes choking sounds ("Your Cubicle's Lunch," p.6)
I think this is a self-published venture (Jensen edited a magazine called Malthus). The magic page count of 48 makes it technically a full-length, although I wish he would have done some tough editing and boiled this down to a more solid chap.

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