Ill be performing a new movietelling piece at this year's AAWW Literary Festival. Click here for more deets. Hope to see you there!

Saturday, November 14
4pm
Powerhouse Arena in D.U.M.B.O.
37 Main Street, Brooklyn

MOVIETELLING

“Benshi” is the Japanese word for a live narrator, more literally “interpreter,” who read along with silent movies. Today, Movietelling features poets reviving this vintage practice by reading new works alongside muted film footage. Join Walter Lew, who coined this phrase, Ye Mimi, Paolo Javier, and Alexandra Chang for a live performance of this genre-bending art.

In anticipation of the Movietelling event Ill be participating in on the 14th at Powerhouse Books, here's a brilliant distinction offered by Jeremy Thompson between the two practices that are influenced/inspired by Pyonsa and Benshi. And while Neo Benshiists left and right will lay claim to the latter's influence, in practice, their performances come off as nothing more than Neo-Orientalist parody, a contemporary "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" for a homogenously white and hetero avant garde audience.  

Props to Walter Lew, who coined the term "movietelling", and continues to educate a diverse generation of younger poets (myself included) about/in the art.

Check out this terrific new reading series hosted by Tim Peterson. Simply awesome.

On Saturday and Sunday October 17 - 18 2009 from 1-6 pm, Brooklyn artist ERNEST CONCEPCION and Queens poet PAOLO JAVIER will be participating in the Annual Gowanus Artist Studio Tour. They will be showing work from obb a.k.a. the original brown boy, a collaborative multimedia poetry comic begun in 2006 that imagines an octopus and a catfish moving through New York City at the turn of the new millennium. It draws from the tradition of poetry comic collaborations and art of Clark Coolidge and Philip Guston, Joe Brainard and Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, bp Nichol, Raymond Pettibone, and the Filipino Invasion of artists who worked for Marvel and D.C. in the 70s and 80s. (Trans) Nationalism, race, ethnic fundamentalism, and love are among obb’s thematic intersections/collisions. As well, obb foregrounds the presence of the poetic in comic books, and experiments with this potential via a fragmented text built on/with/from/through illustration, cut-up, collage, video, and painting.

Goldfish Kisses, a fifty five-page chapbook excerpt from obb, appeared as a limited edition published by Sona Books in 2007. Here are a few links to view selections from the collaboration online:

http://www.2ndavepoetry.com/2ndAve_2/ecpj00v2.html
http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/concepcionjavier.html

ERNEST CONCEPCION was born in Manila, Philippines where he received his BFA then moved to the US in 2002. It was in the lonely town of Englewood, New Jersey where he began The Line Wars, a series of black and white drawings depicting opposing forces engaged in ridiculous battle based on the entertainments of childhood and adolescence. He has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, d.u.m.b.o. arts center, Asian American Arts Centre, The Contemporary Museum in Hawaii, Exit Art and numerous galleries in the Philippines among others. Concepcion has participated in the LMCC/Workspace 120 Broadway Artist Residency, the Bronx Museum of Art Artists-in-the-Marketplace (AIM) program, the Artists Alliance Inc. Rotating Studio Program and the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency. Eventually he broke away from the formulaic style of the drawings and explored different approaches to conflict creating an entirely new body of work. His solo show at the Kentler International Drawing Space last year showed this new process. He had his second solo show in June this year at the NY Studio Gallery and now currently on view at Saint Joseph’s College in Brooklyn. Concepcion currently taught kids at the Brooklyn Children's Museum on how to draw and think. He wears eyeglasses, loves to drink and plays PC games like a freak. Yes, PC games.

PAOLO JAVIER is the author of Megton Gasgan Krakooom (Cy Gist Press, forthcoming), LMFAO (OMG!), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He is printed matter editor for Boog City, and edits/publishes 2nd Avenue Poetry, a small press devoted to innovative writing. A former Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence, he recently served as Visiting Associate Professor in Poetry at the University of Miami. He lives with his wife in Queens. Commenting on his first book, Leslie Scalapino wrote, "Paolo Javier makes words be beside images or beside spaces and equality and separation of space and image and word that's a 3-D sculpture wherein the courting lover always in bed and out in NYC flies up to his intended and appears to be Paolo Javier (translated as say Berrigan). By the end of the writing, that person is apparently someone over fifty with some other given life in place (whereas Paolo Javier is young, in his twenties), the someone over fifty not a character or 'voice' as ventriloquism but ventriloquism of space and words that undo and at once heighten the previous spaces new like pressing the lips to the page.”

For more information on the open studio tour please visit http://www.gowanusartists.com/ where you can download a pdf map for the entire 2 day event. It is from 1pm - 6pm on OCT 17 & OCT 18.

The studio is located at 94 9th street (between Smith & 2nd Avenue), 4th floor, Studio#4. For easiest access, take the F/G train to Smith/9th Street.

Thanks so much and hope to see you there!

Congrats to editor Tim Peterson for putting together another jaw-dropping issue of EOAGH. Three poems from my new chapbook Megton Gasgan Krakooom appear in the issue, alongside others by a panoply of talented folks. Check it out. 

Hope you can make it to the 13th annual A.G.A.S.T. on Saturday and Sunday, October 17-18, 2009 from 1-6 p.m. This is a free event open to the public, and Ill be showing some of my recent comics collaborations with Brooklyn artist Ernest Concepcion. More deets here.