April 23, Noon: @SEA No.14 "Soundtrack"

@SEA No. 14, “Soundtrack”

• Thom Andersen, screening – Get Out of the Car (34 min) 
• David E James, film and talk, sound in the work of Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger 
• Susan Silton, talk and video 
• Jean-Luc Guionnet & Chelsea Rector, performance for saxophone and dancer of What is lasting in what lasts. / What lasts in what is lasting.

Doors open at noon, event is 12:30pm to 2:30pm.

Poetic Research Bureau, 951 Chung King Road, Chinatown

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Thom Andersen is an internationally renowned curator, filmmaker and scholar who has been creating experimental films for over 45 years. He attended Berkeley in the early 1960s and then returned to his hometown of Los Angeles to attend USC film school where he studied with Arthur Knight and eventually assisted on Knight's project THE HISTORY OF SEX IN CINEMA. While at USC Andersen met long-time friend and collaborator Morgan Fisher who assisted on Andersen's student film MELTING, a portrait of a sundae. He regularly attended local screening series including shows by the Trak Film Group and Movies 'Round Midnight and famously wrote about a controversial screening of Andy Warhol's SLEEP. After USC, Andersen attended UCLA and completed his experimental documentaries OLIVIA'S PLACE, EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, ZOOPRAXOGRAPHER and --- -------. During the 1970s his films screened at venues including Los Angeles' Theatre Vanguard and San Francisco's Pacific Film Archive. In 1976 he moved to Buffalo, New York and after briefly teaching became a programmer at Media Study Buffalo. He then moved to Columbus, Ohio where he taught for twelve years. In 1987 he returned to Los Angeles and began teaching at CalArts. In 2003 he attracted significant attention for his essayistic, feature length documentary LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF. The film won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival and was voted best documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice Critics' Poll. In 2010 he completed GET OUT OF THE CAR, a portrait of signs and abandoned spaces set to Los Angeles music.

David E. James has lived in Los Angeles since 1971. His recent books include THE MOST TYPICAL AVANT-GARDE: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, and the co-edited collections, OPTIC ANTICS: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs and ALTERNATIVE PROJECTIONS: Experimental Film In Los Angeles, 1945-1980.  His ROCK ‘N’ FILM: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year.

Susan Silton is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her practice meshes photography, video, installation, performance, sound, and language. Her work often is often installed in public spaces, such as with her contribution to HOW MANY BILLBOARDS? and A SUBLIME MADNESS IN THE SOUL, a rooftop opera to commemorate the recently deconstructed Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles. She also leads the all-female whistling group The Crowing Hens, a six woman whistle orchestra, which has recent performed at SITE Santa Fe and LAX Gallery, among other venues.

Jean-Luc Guionnet is a Parisian artist active in many fields (music, visual arts, cinema). He has mostly worked in electro-acoustics but also has a career in free improvisation, playing alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, church organ, and piano. He has collaborated with Éric La Casa, Éric Cordier, and André Almuro on tape music. His main free improv and jazz projects include Hubbub, Schams, Return of the New Thing, and the Joe Rosenberg Quintet.

Chelsea Rector is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary poet, actress and dancer. She recently appeared in Asher Hartman and Gawdafful National Theater’s production of THE SILVER, THE BLACK, AND THE WICKED DANCE, at LACMA’s Bing Theater.

Friday, April 14: Gabrielle Civil, Douglas Kearney & Anna Joy Springer

Join us as we celebrate the release of Gabrielle Civil's memoir Swallow the Fish.

SWALLOW THE FISH
with
Gabrielle Civil
Douglas Kearney
& Anna Joy Springer

Gabrielle Civil’s Swallow the Fish is a memoir in performance art that explores the medium from within its beating heart. Adding its voice to black feminist conversations, it combines essays, anecdotes, and meditations with original performance texts to confront audience, motivation, and fears. Both joy and panic appear in Civil’s world of performance, where neither walls nor city limits set the scope of the stage. Civil bares vulnerabilities and enthralls readers, asking essential questions and embodying dreams.

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over 40 original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Recent works include “…hewn and forged….” at the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival (2016); “_______ is the thing with feathers” at “Call & Response: Experiments in Joy” (2014); “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” (2014); and “Fugue (Da, Montréal),” at the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (2014). Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Obsidian, Asterix, Rain Taxi, and other publications. The aim of her work is to open up space.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), of which Amaud Jamaul Johnson writes: “Seriously, a marvel. I recommend entering Buck Studies at midnight, only after listening to Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet on repeat, skimming Pindar, Uncle Remus and the Bible, and eating at least two bowls of Count Chocula.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in the Santa Clarita Valley and teaches at CalArts.

ANNA JOY SPRINGER is a queer femme visual artist, performer, and cross-genre writer working with the sacred, perverse, hilarious and threatening. She is the author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an illustrated fabulist memoir with soundscape, and The Birdwisher, A Murder Mystery for Very Old Young Adults (Birds of Lace, 2009). Her other work appears in far-flung print and online publications (ex: The Writer’s Chronicle; Encyclopedia; Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature; Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy; Pank, and The Volta), as well as on several records (Lookout!; Alternative Tentacles). An Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, she teaches experimental writing, feminist literature & graphic texts. She’s played in punk and dyke punk bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, touring the U.S. and Europe in these bands and with Sister Spit, a raucous feminist literary performance group. She is the winner of an Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award (2010) and a recipient of UCSD Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award (2013).

Friday, March 25: Donato Mancini, Anahita Jamali Rad & Danielle LaFrance

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks, and visual art. His books and chapbooks include Same Diff (2017), Snowline (2015), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006), and Ligatures (2005). Notable exhibitions of Mancini’s visual artworks have included exhibitions through Artspeak, Western Front, Gallery Atsui, Malaspina Printmaker’s Society, and CSA.

Born in Iran and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territories, Anahita Jamali Rad’s work engages with materiality, love, class, violence, and displacement. Anahita Jamali Rad co-edited the critical materialist feminist journal About a Bicycle. Jamali Rad's latest book, for love and autonomy, is just out from Talon Books.

Danielle LaFrance is a poet, librarian, and independent scholar. She is the author of Species Branding (CUE, 2010) and the chapbook Pink Slip (SIC, 2013). Between 2012-2016 she organized the feminist materialist collective and journal series About a Bicycle. Her work deals with the ways “total war” and “Empire” infiltrate social relations as well as the intersections between language, revolutionary action, and self-abolition. And love. Since 1983 she has mostly resided on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, Úxwumixw, Stó:lo, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Friday, March 24: Ari Banias & Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

ARI BANIAS
& JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

Friday, March 24 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Ari Banias is the author of the book Anybody (Norton, 2016), and the chapbook What's Personal is Being Here With All of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). His poems have appeared in A Public Space, Boston Review, The Offing, Poetry, and as part of MOTHA's exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects. He lives & works in Berkeley, California. (www.aribanias.com)

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent collection of poems THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016.

Saturday, March 18: Marisa Crawford, Kate Durbin, Rose Quezada & Elizabeth Hall

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

MARISA CRAWFORD
KATE DURBIN
ROSE QUEZADA
& ELIZABETH HALL

Saturday, March 18 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections Reversible (2017) and The Haunted House (2010) from Switchback Books, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in publications including Hyperallergic, BUST, Bitch, The Hairpin, and Fanzine, and are forthcoming in Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books, 2017). Marisa is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the feminist literary/pop culture website Weird Sister. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles based writer and artist whose work deals with pop culture and digital media. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience, E! Entertainment, and the interactive poetry app ABRA. She was the 2015 Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence.

Rose Quezada is a native Los Angeles writer, reader, and translator. She’s managing editor of DUM DUM Zine and lover of all things mystical. Her work has been featured in DUM DUM Zine and Selfish Magazine.

Elizabeth Hall is a writer & musician based in LA. Her first book I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS is recently out from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Friday, March 17: Bodies in spaces forced to accommodate

Friday, March 17

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

*Bodies in spaces forced to accommodate:
Poetry of Resound, Recovery & Re-translation
feat.
Kimberly Alidio
Jen Hofer
Micah Tasaka
Sa Whitley
& Angela Peñaredondo

Join us as we celebrate Kimberly Alidio's Southern California tour for her book, after projects the resound (Black Radish). The evening features readings from after projects the resound by Kimberly Alidio. Special guests are Jen Hofer, Sa Whitley, Micah Tasaka and Angela Peñaredondo. Support your visiting and local poets and friendly feminists.

this reading will explore:
“How to write the migrations, distinctions, the threats to one’s humanity? – Hoa Nguyen (on Kimberly Alidio's, after projects the resound (Black Radish)

How to rearticulate survival as more as just survival but as a flourishing in spite of marginalized positionality, gender binaries, patriarchy and other systems of oppression?

How language and the retranslation of language in poetry can be a fulcrum to recovery, which lies at the intersection of identity and gender?

*The title of the event takes its name from Ayesha Siddiq's podcast, Pushing Hoops with Sticks, Vol. 2: You're Not Crazy and then from Kimberly Alidio's poem, "Bodies in spaces forced to accommodate," in after projects the resound

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Kimberly Alidio wrote after projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). She is the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Thought and a poetry fellow of Kundiman and VONA. She received fellowships from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and the University of Illinois’s Asian American Studies Program, as well as a doctorate in modern American history from the University of Michigan. A tenure-track dropout and high-school teacher, she hails from Baltimore and lives in East Austin, Texas.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, DIY/DIT book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the multilingual organizing collective Antena Los Ángeles, which does ongoing work to create bilingual and multilingual spaces for social justice struggle with the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, Defend Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and many other groups. Her writings and translations are available from numerous small presses, most recently belladonna, Kenning Editions, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Writ Large Press (forthcoming). She teaches at CalArts, Otis College, and Occidental College, and organizes with the decolonial pedagogical platform at land’s edge.

Micah Tasaka is a queer biracial poet from the Inland Empire exploring the intersections of identity, spirituality, gender, sexuality, and recovering from trauma. They received their undergraduate degree in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. They have performed throughout Southern California and have featured in Riverside, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Palm Springs. Their debut chapbook, Whales in the Watertank, was self-published in 2014. They write for The Blood Jet Writing Hour literary blog, and their published work can be found in In The Words Of Women 2016 International Anthology and Inlandia: A Literary Journey.

Sa Whitley is a black queer poet from Maryland who resides in Los Angeles, California. She has published work in Bozalta Journal and Toe Good Poetry. As a Cave Canem fellow, she is often nourished by the poetry of other Cave Canem poets across the country and across the world. Currently, she is a Gender Studies PhD Student at UCLA who studies black feminism and intersectional movements against subprime foreclosure in Baltimore. Her academic work has been supported by the Center for the Study of Women and the UC Consortium for Black Studies. She also enjoys fishing, dancing to funk music & Motown, and baking decent apple pies.

Angela Peñaredondo (host) is a Pilipinx/Pin@y poet, artist and educator born in Iloilo City, Philippines. She is the author of All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize) and the chapbook Maroon (Jamii Publishing). Angela’s work has appeared in Drunken Boat, AAWW’s The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Angela resides in Southern California, drifting between deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs. www.apenaredondo.com

Wednesday, March 15: Ariel Goldberg, Grace Dunham & Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

The LA launch of Ariel Goldberg's new book
The Estrangement Principle
with readings by Grace Dunham & Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

The Estrangement Principle is a book-length essay that explores landscapes surrounding the practice of categorizing "queer art."

In The Estrangement Principle Ariel Goldberg unravels the problematic label, “queer art” by consistently arguing for a wider range of associations with art made by queer identified people. Goldberg invokes the lives and works of writer Renee Gladman, and artists Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, among many others to bring the complexity of the communities and relationships behind art and literary histories into focus. This book-length essay mixes cultural criticism, close readings, and personal anecdotes, all the while developing a deftly wrought polemic. The Estrangement Principle is an exercise in contradiction with its ultimate goal being to resist the practice of movement naming.

Excerpt from The Estrangement Principle: "I began collecting the phrase ‘queer art’ in all its sweaty megaphone pronouncements. I felt pricked by ‘queer art,’ which I heard being uttered all around me in the titles of group shows, dance parties, anthologies, mission statements, press releases. I was also collecting palpable silences around events that could have used the word ‘queer,’ but didn’t. I had to get close to this description, like I get close to frames in museums, breathe on their glass and notice the dust. I wanted to get so close my vision would blur.”

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Grace Dunham is a writer and activist from New York City. They have written about prison abolition and trans resistance for The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and anthologies published by The New Museum, MIT Press, and ONE Archives, among others. Their first chapbook of poetry is available at thefool.us. Their current project, Support.FM, is a crowdfunding platform to help trans and gender nonconforming people in jail and detention raise money for bail and bond. They live in Los Angeles.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (1982, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, where he received an MFA in photography at UCLA. He resided in New York from 2000 – 2014, where he received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and participated in Artist-in-Residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Fire Island Artist Residency. Sepuya’s work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the International Center for Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum, among others. His work was recently featured in storefront: PUBLIC FICTION at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Callicoon Fine Arts and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York City. His solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery runs through April 1. He is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s grant for emerging Los Angeles artists. www.paulsepuya.com

Ariel Goldberg's publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books) and The Photographer (Roof Books). Goldberg is the Friday Night Coordinator at The Poetry Project. Their research and performance based work has been supported by the New York Public Library, Franklin Furnace Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Invisible Dog, Residencias Artísticas Intercambios and SOMA in Mexico City. They teach at Parsons, The New School and Pratt Institute.