June 4 1pm: @SEA No. 15 "Ventriloquism"

The 15th episode of the PRB's live magazine moves on from last month's "soundtrack" to the the theme of thrown voice, own voice, inserted speech, strange animations, gastromancy, phony phones and pirated/parroted phonics.

Join writer/scholar Sarah Kessler (currently writing a book on ventriloquism), filmmaker and preservationist Ross Lipman (and his treasure trove of early ventriloquist cinema), poet/translator Eugene Ostashevsky (w/ DJs, pirates, and parrots in tow), and artist/writer Mady Schutzman (whose latest fiction features a ventriloquist dummy) for a Sunday afternoon of stagecraft, masquerade and dissembling! 

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Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American poet currently residing in Berlin. His most recent work, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, explores the communication challenges of pirate-parrot relationships. Released in the New York Review of Books Poets series, it draws on early modern travel narratives, hip-hop, and philosophy of language while pursuing the themes of emigration and untranslatability. His previous poetry book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, engages characters like MC Squared, the Begriffon, and Peepeesaurus to deal with snafus in natural and artificial languages. As translator, he is most known for his work on Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and other Russian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century avant-gardes.

Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, archivist, and essayist. His films have screened throughout the world and been collected by museums and institutions including the Academy Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Northeast Historic Film, the Oberhausen Kurzfilm Archive, Budapest's Balazs Bela Studios, and Munich's Sammlung Goetz. His most recent work, Notfilm, was named one of the 10 best films of the year by ARTFORUM, SLATE, and many others. Formerly Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, his many restorations include Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and works by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Shirley Clarke, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Loden, Robert Altman, and John Cassavetes. He was a 2008 recipient of Anthology Film Archives' Preservation Honors, and is a three-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics' Heritage Award. His writings on film history, technology, and aesthetics have been published in Artforum, Sight and Sound,and numerous academic books and journals.

Mady Schutzman is a writer and theatre artist.  She has published academic essays, performative texts, and creative non-fiction and is particularly proud of her Brechtian musical comedy about Rodney King and the  L.A. uprising.  She is currently writing a book for Routledge Press on the relationship between humor and ethics.  Mady is Faculty Emeritus at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

Sarah Kessler is a media and cultural studies scholar and television critic. She is working on a book, Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, that explores metaphorical and material deployments of ventriloquism in contemporary transatlantic popular culture. Her writing on art, film, and media has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Camera Obscura, In These Times, Triple Canopy, Sounding Out!, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among other venues. She writes a regular television column, "The Bingewatch," for Public Books. Kessler completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine in 2016 and currently teaches at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

 

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Doors open 12:30 pm
Event: 1pm-3pm

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Chinatown, Los Angeles

Always free of charge.