This Sunday: @SEA #7 "MAYDAY!" (w/ Horne, Jennings, Piazza, The Reader's Chorus)

The seventh edition of @SEA, the Poetic Research Bureau's monthly live magazine, falls auspiciously on May 1st, so naturally, we have accepted its mission, and name the occasion: MAYDAY!

Come join us this Sunday for a program wound about the thematic maypole of labor and emergency. Three film screenings on hidden work & hidden leisure from Adele Horne, Luciano Piazza and Humphrey Jennings. A talk on the monetization of attention from Luciano. And finally, a visit from The Reader's Chorus, who will evoke "El Lector" of the Lectores de Tabaqueres, the professional reader(s) who would entertain Cuban cigar workers in the earth pre-radio 20th c. The Chorus will perform a specially curated May Day selection of texts for our audience. Spring into action this weekend at 951 Chung King Rd!

@SEA #7: Mayday! @ Poetic Research Bureau
Sunday, May 1, 2016 – Doors open at 1pm

Adele Horne screens an excerpt from her feature "Maintenance"
Luciano Piazza screens recent work and gives talk on monetization of attention
Humphrey Jennings' short film "Spare Time" is shown
The Reader's Chorus channels "El Lector" and performs a special May 1 themed selection of texts

Participant bios:

ADELE HORNE makes documentary, essayistic, and experimental films. Her work has screened internationally at venues such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, Images Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Flaherty Seminar. Her film The Tailenders was broadcast nationally on P.O.V. and won the "Truer than Fiction" prize in Film Independent's Spirit Awards. She is a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts.

HUMPHREY JENNINGS (1907-1950) was an English documentary filmmaker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organisation. Jennings was described by film critic and director Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."

LUCIANO PIAZZA, a filmmaker and critic, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, creative writing at New York University and film at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He works in the intersection of audiovisuals and text. He is interested in the passivity and agency of spectatorship and the role of attention in societies of spectacle. He lives in Los Angeles, and is currently the Project Director of Ism, Ism, Ism, Experimental Cinema in Latin America, Los Angeles Filmforum's contribution for the Getty PST LA/LA.

THE READER'S CHORUS, organized by CalArts faculty Sara Roberts and L.A.-based artist Jordan Biren, consists of composers and musicians, visual artists and filmmakers, writers and poets. Initially brought together to perform Robert Lax and John Beer’s rarely performed Black White Oratorio, they are inspired by this hallucinogenic poem and the possibilities of sound in a group of speaking voices, and continue to explore texts meant for performative group reading.

Noah Warren, Margaret Ross & Max Ritvo, Saturday Night!

Please join the Poetic Research Bureau Saturday, April 16th at 7:30pm as we welcome poets Noah Warren, Margaret Ross & Max Ritvo.

Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass, winner of the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, Agni, The Missouri Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships from Yale University, the James Merrill House, and Stanford University, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He lives in Palo Alto.

Margaret Rossis the author of A Timeshare, selected by Timothy Donnelly for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize. Her poems and translations appear in A Public Sp ace, Boston Review, Fence, The New Republic and The New Yorker. Her honors include scholarships and fellowships form the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Fulbright Program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford, where she is currently a Stegner Fellow.

Max Ritvo was awarded a 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for his chapbook, AEONS. His poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. Ritvo’s eight poem sampler in Boston Review, introduced by Lucie Brock-Broido, was named as one of their top 20 poetry selections published in 2015. He is a poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and a teaching fellow at Columbia University. 

Sunday, April 10: @SEA #6: "MELODRAMA"

 The sixth edition of the PRB's monthly live magazine takes on the exaggerated contours and shirt-rending unrest of melodrama!

Behold the brave participants:

6 videos by wise and funny Mexico City filmmaker Ximena Cuevas (in person!)

LA's digital diva Kate Durbin takes on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (in person!)

A restaging of Ozu's Tokyo Story from filmmaker Matthew Lax (in person!)

A short video essay on vanity tables in Douglas Sirk movies by Mark Rappaport (video only)

A preview talk and audio-video take on Karen Carpenter and her reception in the Philippines by Karen Tongson, from her forthcoming piece in The Believer (in person!)


Sunday, April 10, 2016

As always, event is free. Refreshments served.

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Chinatown, LA, CA 90012

Doors open @ 1pm. Event at 1:30pm.
  

Ximena Cuevas is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and fiction, with the "impossibility" of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity and gender. It redefines the meaning of documentary. Her videos have been shown in festivals such The New York Film Festival, Sundance, Berlin, and Montreal, and she was the featured artist at "Video Viewpoints" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been an invited speaker at numerous events, including those sponsored by the Pacific Film Archives in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Guggenheim in New York, and in June of 2000 at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles based artist and writer whose work deals with pop culture and digital media. She is the author of E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and co-author of ABRA, a living text, which is both an animated trade paperback from 1913 press and an interactive app that received an NEA grant. Her recent performances include Hello Selfie, and The Supreme Gentleman, about the YouTube channel of Isle Vista shooter Eliot Roger.

Matthew Lax is a maker of video and installation work. Mining artifice and construction through a multi-disciplinary analysis of language systems, his work grapples with the creation of meaning and empathy through the intersection of melodrama, propaganda and advertising. Currently based in Los Angeles, he is currently finishing his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts through the School of Film/Video and the Center for Integrated Media. Lil’ Tokyo Story is a shot-for-shot remake of the climax of Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), exploring issues around language, translation and appropriation. 

Mark Rappaport is an American independent/underground film director who has been working sporadically since the early 1970s. A lifelong New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1964. Rappaport made the 1978 drama The Scenic Route. His last three features, all made in the 1990s were Rock Hudson's Home Movies, From the Journals of Jean Seberg, and The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender. The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk is a video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but nevertheless real vision of the roles that woman are forced to play in society? 

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). She is currently the series editor for Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press, and an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She has two books in progress: Normal Television: Critical Essays on Queer Spectatorship after the "New Normalcy," and Empty Orchestra: Karaoke in Our Time, which critiques prevailing paradigms of imitation in contemporary aesthetics and queer theory, while offering an account of karaoke technologies, techniques, and desires. Her work has appeared in Public Culture, Social Text, American Quarterly, GLQ, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction, as well as popular venues like The Believer, Public Books, Sounding Out!, Makeshift and Velvet Park. 

THE SKY ISN'T BLUE RELEASE: JANICE LEE, CHIWAN CHOI, SARA FINNERTY

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

A book release party for
THE SKY ISN'T BLUE by Janice Lee
with
Janice Lee
Chiwan Choi
and Sara Finnerty

~

Saturday, April 9 2016
7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
90012

~

JANICE LEE is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and The Sky Isn't Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She also has several chapbooks Red Trees, Fried Chicken Dinner (Parrot/Insert Press, September 2012), The Other Worlds (Eohippus Labs, June 2012), and The Transparent As Witness (Solar Luxuriance, 2013), a collaboration with Will Alexander. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is Editor of the #RECURRENT Novel Series, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor at Entropy, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design.

CHIWAN CHOI is the author of two collections of poetry, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press, 2010) and Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012). His two most recent projects are Ghostmaker, a book he wrote, presented, and destroyed in 2015, and The City is My Book, a novel to be written on a series of utility boxes in downtown LA in 2016. He is also currently working on a new collection of poetry to be published by CCM in 2017. Chiwan is also one of the founding partners of Writ Large Press, an indie publisher that uses the book to resist, disrupt, and transgress.

SARA FINNERTY has essays and stories in Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Longreads, Joyland, The Nervous Breakdown, Fanzine, The Weeklings, Dame, and others. She is the co-curator of The Griffith Park Storytelling Series and Sunday Editor at Entropy magazine. Sara is originally from Queens, NY and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Find her at www.sarafinnerty.com.