This week, do things that are fun.

From Thursday to Sunday BOMB’s going to be at The Armory Show! We’ll be repping at the BOMBooth so come check us, and it, out!

TUESDAY

The New York Public Library, the really swank one on 5th avenue with the lions, is hosting a discussion about black America. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who wrote ??Harlem is Nowhere??&#8212, and Simone Leigh, a video artist and sculptor and radical ruminator on feminism, colonialism, and other extremely important things, will be discussing the issues while BOMBlog contributor Claire Barliant moderates!

WEDNESDAY

MoMa is retrospecting Lucian Pintillie’s movies this week, and this Wednesday they’ll be screening his Niki and Flo. MoMa loves this guy and so does my dentist—I’ve got this molar coming in sideways that tickles my cheek—but his news about Pintillie was cheering.

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Damaged Goods on radical Godard-collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin’s remarkable California Trilogy.

“You can’t be a foreigner in a language other than your own,” intones the narrator of Routine Pleasures (1986). Framed as a statement, it is a simple line that will be questioned, in multiple ways, throughout the work of Jean-Pierre Gorin. After a brief but fertile period working with Jean-Luc Godard, creating formally challenging and politically dense moving image experiments under the name The Dziga Vertov Group, Gorin moved to Southern California, eventually joining the staff at the University of California San Diego. It was during this period that the “California Trilogy” was born: a set of films as experimental as his work with Godard, but broader and less dogmatic. Gorin approaches his subjects from a distance, but without relying of conventional forms of narrative documentary—the films read like pages from a journalist’s notebooks, filled with questions, concerns, and various approaches toward the material at hand.

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Nite Jewel discusses the range of influences behind her gauzy sound, including brainwashed evangelists and the cost of the metro.

Nite Jewel, AKA Ramona Gonzalez, released her first album, Good Evening, in 2008. On her upcoming One Second of Love—a collaboration with husband Cole M. Greif-Neill of psychedelic mainstays Ariel Pink and Haunted Graffiti—she creates a retro-inspired but futuristic sound that pulls a shimmering gauze over the world. The epitome of DIY from the get-go, much of the Nite Jewel discography has been recorded onto cassette and mixed in a way that highlights a woozy, romantic authenticity. By mining a wide range of genres, signifiers, and sounds, from freestyle to R&B and funk to chill-wave—all in the service of fantastic songs—Gonzalez sets herself apart from similar practitioners of lo-fi dream murk coming out of LA. She has spent time living both in LA and NYC, and the range of discernible influences in her music belies those experiences. Which must have been truly funky, given the results.

Her shiny new record, One Second of Love, drops March 6th on Secretly Canadian. We spoke about the album, her upcoming tour, and why New York musicians take themselves too seriously.

Alex Holmes So when did you first start making music?

Nite Jewel Like recording?

AH Well that too, but I mean when did you start messing with instruments, singing, mixing?

NJ I starting taking voice lessons when I was five, piano at six. I recorded songs on a tape recorder, like a handheld tape recorder at night shortly after. And I would write lyrics in my journal around then.

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Andrea Quaid and Vanessa Place on the simultaneity, reflection, and transformation of conceptualism.

Of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, conceptual artist Mary Kelly said, “I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject.” Poet and UbuWeb founding editor Kenneth Goldsmith said Vanessa Place’s work is “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.” Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout said, “Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry.” Bebrowed’s Blog said Vanessa Place is “the scariest poet on the planet.” Someone on Twitter said: “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”

Place is most certainly a literary and intellectual force whose work challenges what we mean by the word Poetry. Her two latest works, Statement of the Case and Argument (Blanc Press 2011), complete her trilogy, Tragodia. The conceptual writing project is one of radical mimesis as Place, an appellate criminal defense attorney who specializes in sex offense cases, presents her own legal documents as poetry and leaves the critique-complicity balance to teeter uncomfortably without settling on one or the other. Newly published by P-queue Editions, The Father & Childhood is a selection from a second serial work, Boycott Project, with the eagerly awaited complete work, Boycott Project, forthcoming this year from Ugly Duckling Presse. In this work, Place collects canonical feminist texts and replaces all feminine pronouns and gendered terms with their masculine counterpart to create a textual encounter leveled into masculine sameness. It’s all about men. As co-director of Les Figues Press and as editor, with Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Brown, and Teresa Carmody, Place collaborated on the recently completed anthology, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women. Place is also a regular contributor to X-tra Art Quarterly, and lectures and performs internationally.

Andrea Quaid This past September, you participated in a two-day symposium on your work at The Université de Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée organized around innovative analytical writing and “practice-based criticism,” or critical writing practices intimately connected to, yet different from, one’s creative writing practice. One aspect I find most striking about your poetic practice is your theoretical work, which moves deftly from aesthetics and philosophy to gender theory to cultural criticism. How do you experience the relationship between the two types of writing?

Vanessa Place They are the same thing, just different performances.

AQ At this symposium you presented “The Case for Conceptualism,” which argues that we are now in the conceptualist period as it defines itself against postmodernism. Is the conceptualist period, as postmodernism’s after, a description of our current historical period or (and always, and) conceptual writing’s aesthetic and cultural response to such compositional strategies of (to keep the list on p) parataxis, parody, pastiche, and polyvocality?

VP “Or” is always “and,” as you note. Hands find gloves, gloves, hands. In this sense, conceptualism is the correspondence between case and file. A case is many things, including a lawsuit, which is a case for and against, and a suitcase, which can contain anything that fits within a valise. A file can be used in old movies to escape from jail.

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Here is roaring selection of toothsome events for those who want to hunt with the big cats.

Friday

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s 1967: A People Kind of Place is featured at ICA Philadelphia. Her work is a convergence of sci-fi and identity exploration, and you should definitely take a minute to think through her use of a UFO-landing pad on the Canadian countryside.

Saturday

Itching for a second night of thrashing around to Rangda’s psychedelic jams? They’re giving back-to-back New York shows this weekend, and that second back is a performance at le poisson rouge. The decidedly more chill (chiller? chillier?) Loren Connors will open things up.

Sunday

As the buzz surrounding the opening of The Hunger Games film grows ever louder, Jewish writers Ben Marcus The Flame Alphabet and Joshua Cohen take a moment to address its apocalyptic topics. The two prominent authors will lead a discussion about how the the Holocaust informs their recent fiction.

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Artists Christopher Gideon and Elissa Goldstone live and work miles apart. Yet, they love the same game. The two sat down to discuss baseball and its role within the stadium of contemporary art.

At the risk of blaspheming, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I have always been generally mystified by baseball. Perhaps I have been too impatient with its pace or, more probably, too uncoordinated to actually play the game to really understand the value of it—to feel it in my very being. In middle school I was always that kid who selected the electronic bat, the one that, during whiffle-ball, would let out a satisfying crack mid-swing, despite the fact that nine times out of ten there would be no actual contact with the ball itself. That crack—the illusion of success, the physicality implied by the sound—always prompted a flutter in my stomach. Yet, I never delved any deeper in exploring what the flutter was all about, and never really connected with the cultural meaning of the sport. That is, until I attended my first baseball game. I was in Havana, Cuba. I was fifteen years old. The unique opportunity to witness a game that I had always understood via a strictly American lens, on the other side of the heavy veil of U.S.-Cuba embargo politic, was a siren song. The stadium was a veritable international summit; a diverse melting pot of nationalities and language, all in the same place, at the same time, to watch the same game. Initially doubtful about the purpose of my presence in the stadium, I quickly lost myself, whisked away by the energy of it all. The ritual of it. The signs and symbols, the hand gestures, the cheers, the distinctive smells. At one point, a fan got so worked up he rushed onto the field shirtless, screaming, seemingly having caught the spirit, driven by the love of the game. And there it was—that flutter again. I got it.

I wasn’t able to foster a deeper relationship to the game in the years that followed. That feeling, the flutter, it seemed to have dissipated. This is why, miles from any stadium, devoid of peanuts and Cracker Jack, I was startled by the return of the sensation, this time prompted by setting eyes on the respective works of artists Christopher Gideon and Elissa Goldstone. I encountered Goldstone’s work first, at Salomon Contemporary in the spring of 2011; Gideon’s I crossed paths with later that summer. Again—it clicked. And this time, the narrative behind the passion and value of the game was being related to me in my native tongue: contemporary art. Gideon and Goldstone’s translation of baseball-as-cultural-text is so adroitly precise that I, too, caught the spirit.

Goldstone is a New York native; Gideon hails from Detroit. The two have never met and encountered eachother’s work for the first time in this conversation about their unique relationships with America’s favorite pastime.

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Thom Donovan and Brandon Brown promise to dive deep into the realms of literary theory and leftist politics in their epistolary exchange. In this first of several dialogues, they share mutual adoration and opening provocations.

Hi Brandon,

These past few weeks I have been living with your books that came out this past fall: The Persians by Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya). It’s been a marvelous time, especially listening to your prosody in tandem with certain rap albums (Biggie, Wu Tang Clan, Jay Z), hearing the immense resonance with your own lyric. Persians and Catullus turn the heat up on quite a few recent conversations about “avant-garde” and “experimental” writing, while returning to some pretty f**king ancient sources. Likewise, the books have a pretty unorthodox outlook on the “task of the translator,” where translation issues not just from the faithful comparison of two (or more) languages (etymologically, philologically), but through bodily exigencies. The way the translator’s embodiment and their surrounding circumstances (social context, love interests, friendships, diet) shape any work of translation. How you have chosen to make procedures for translation out of your own, and others’, daily lives.

Would you care to talk briefly about how you see these books in a larger discourse? Both within the history of other translation practices, but particularly in terms of the point we have come to with a “post avant” poetics that is trying to grapple with larger political and social practices?

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Julia Guez on the pleasure and pain in Henri Cole’s book of poetry Touch.

In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud elaborates on “the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive.” To this end, he observes a child at play. When left alone, the child entertains himself with the invention of a game involving the forced disappearance and return of various toys (a wooden reel on a string, for example).

The game soon reveals itself to be a way for the child to enact and, in a way, master the distress of being left alone. Given the child’s strong attachment to his own mother, it seems strange that he would choose to re-enact the clearly unpleasant experience of being left alone with a game (requiring him to rehearse the loss and recovery, and re-activate the distress of the departure before re-activating any delight in the return).

Unpacking the significance of the fort-da game—so-called because these are the specific words the child will use to signify the disappearance and return of objects within his reach—Freud was able to postulate the existence of impulses, tendencies or compulsions that seem to operate independently of the pleasure principle.

After the discussion of children at play, Freud includes the following as a kind of addendum, “A reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable.”

There may be no better way to frame my analysis of Henri Cole’s newest collection, Touch. Cole is fearless in treating the loss of a mother. He is fearless in treating other losses, as well—the hens, for example, victims of capital punishment. At points, the only constraints seem to be formal.

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Bryn McConnell toys with color, line, expression, the canon—both on and off the canvas.

Bryn McConnell’s studio door is decorated with a clean grid of inspirations. One piece of construction paper reads, Everything is an experiment, while Art ‡ Democracy, Kunst ‡ Kultur, ART = Humpty Dumpty, ART = YUMMY YUMMY—the words of the German painter Jonathan Meese—mark a small poster. There are fashion ads and post-its, a magazine tear-out of the choreographer Trisha Brown, and just above the door’s handle a small white paper that says, go too far and get messy. On the right, a long, narrow white desk holds a diet coke can, an iPhone, a desk lamp, a bottle of Advil, clear glasses, a copy of John Richardson’s Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel, and the wings of an open magazine. Across the SoHo studio—which can’t be more than 300 square feet—two large canvases of brightly colored figures hang from a low ceiling and dominate the room like a pair of eyes.

Bryn McConnell just had her first solo exhibition at the Frontrunner Gallery in early February.

Titled Looked, the exhibition featured six paintings of iconic women, each of which McConnell made in the last two years. Linear brushstrokes dipped in vivid colors zigzag about in short rhythmic motions, just barely coming together to form the figures and faces that dominate the frame. Five out of six of these paintings were taken from her Re: self-reflection/refraction/reflexion series.

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Poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles discuss the past, Myles’s novel Inferno, and Modern Maturity.

There is that scene in the film Henry and June where Henry Miller reaches over to the radio blaring Hitler’s voice, and he snaps it off. He’s been having a beautiful moment with June, and they’re in love. Hitler’s not going away, and they can feel the presence of his very real, dark world-view closing in, but just the same they’re having their beautiful moment together inside the darkness. Eileen Myles is the living embodiment of this very kind of force that transmutes the aura of bondage into standing free, blatantly and beautifully free, from all the evil bastards of the world.

my need to say
that you can

That’s a quote from the brand new Myles poetry collection Snowflake/different streets from Wave Books. “[M]y need”—she says, and she’s not kidding—“to say / that you can.” Infectious, genius exuberance awaits! The poet Frank Sherlock recently showed me a list published in the International Business Times of the top five regrets people have on their deathbeds. Things like “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Eileen Myles is like a study in the emancipation of a life, for instance her reader’s life. Meaning YOU!

Her new poet’s novel Inferno (OR Books) is a map to the discovery of being a poet, like you can feel the discovery in process as if it’s actually happening to YOU as you read. This is a writer who watched dear friends die of AIDS the ’80s and ’90s while they were still young, and found the courage to understand: “I pick up a book and / another book and memory / and separation seem to / be all anyone writes / about.” YES, I said she “found the courage,” as though it’s possible to stand outside culture looking in with anything less than nerve, audacity, in other words, courage. “[M]y need to say / that you can” stand in the middle of chaos and create your own life. You can. You can one day realize as she writes, “Everybody / has one missing piece / and all the beauty’s / about it.” This interview is another gift she gives us. It was my pleasure to have this opportunity with one of the great writers of our time.

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