Commentaries - November 2011

Henry Hills, 1985

David Moss and Yoshiko Chuma

Henry Hills’ Money (1985) is a fourteen minute collage film of split second shots of performances by and conversations with experimental musicians, poets, and dancers in public and intimate spaces of Manhattan.

The indiscriminate and energetic mix of music performances, poets reading from books, and dancing combined with performers’ conversations and the bustle of the streets enacts the mutual conditioning of cultural production with the structures of lived experience. The confluences of lived experience, peculiarly intense in urban areas, form the consciousness for producing music, poetry, and dance which in turn materially constitute culture’s institutions in the superstructure and the subjects produced out of them.

The split second shot technique lifts the performances and conversations from their source coherences into atomized gestures. The atomization emphasizes intrinsic qualities of shots, near stills analyzable by photography aesthetics while simultaneously gesturing toward their implied temporal sequences.

Chicago and Princeton Readings

Chicago Humanties Festival & The Poetry Foundation
Sunday, Nov. 13 at 1pm
Poetry Foundation, 61 Superior Street
(sold out)

Princeton University
"Attack of the Ambient Poems"
with Tan Lin
Tues. Nov. 22 at 4:30pm
McCosh 60, reception follows

Jerome Rothenberg @ 80: A Celebration

CUNY Center for the Humanities (New York)

Jerome Rothenberg, photo ©2008 Charles Bernstein

Friday, December 9
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
(diagonally across from the Empire State Building)
6pm (sharp) to about 9:30pm

Poet, translator, editor, anthologist, Jerome Rothenberg is joined by friends and collaborators for an exploration of his influential work. Papers on, and celebrations of,  Rothenberg’s work will be presented by  Susan Howe,  Homero Aridjis Carolee Schneemann, Ammiel Alcalay, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Waldman, Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers, Jeffrey Robinson, Pete Monaco, Charles Morrow, Anne Tardos,  George Economou, Rochelle Owens, Al Filreis, Monica de la Torre, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Nicole Peyrafitte, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn, Mark Weiss, George Quasha, Peter Cockelbergh, Ligorano-Reese, Danny Snelson,  Diane Rothenberg, Hiro Sato,  Ian Tyson, and others.

Sigmund Laufer Holocaust Series (1960-1964)

Susan Bee talk and ppt

Sigmund Laufer, First day of school, Berlin, Germany, 1926

The Brodsky Gallery at Kelly Writers House (at Penn) has an exhibit of the Holocaust etchings by Sigmund Laufer. This show will be up through December 2011. Susan Bee, his daughter, gave a talk about his work this past Thursday and Susan (with my intermittent help) presented a ppt on Laufer's life and work, which we are making available here. A fine discussion, led by Al Filreis's incisive comments, followed.

Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (MIT Press)

Ireme Gammel at launch, Naumann Gallery, NY, 11/4/11; photo by Ch. Bernstein

This is a long, awaited, much-needed collection of the exuberant and enthralling poetry of the great American Dada poet "Baroness" Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The book is a sumptuous collection of poems and images, as much art catalog and text collection. And Irene Gammel tells me there are still significant uncollected poems, which I hope can be brought together in a web archive.