Monday, August 30, 2010

ATTENTION PLAYWRIGHTS: Co-Op Theatre East is taking Play Submissions

Playwrights Rob Florence and David Meth at January 2009's
COTE Tales Reading Series post-show discussion

ATTENTION NYC PLAYWRIGHTS: Co-Op Theatre East is now accepting one-act plays for its play reading series COTE Tales at Kaffe 1668 in Tribeca. Plays should be no longer than 20 pages, and speak to one of this season's themes:

1. Haunted Histories (10/24/10)
2. Ethical Conflicts (12/11/10)
3. Love across Borders (2/19/11)
4. Evolutions (4/13/11)

Plays should also fit COTE's mission statement: "Co-Op Theatre East believes in the power of art to foster a dialogue for social change. We provide an entertaining performance forum in which to ask evocative, challenging questions of artists and audiences on our way to creating collaborative answers."

The DEADLINE for "Haunted Histories" is September 3rd; plays for future readings will be accepted on a rolling basis. All readings will be held at Kaffe 1668, 275 Greenwich St., nr. Murray St. All chosen playwrights must be able to attend. Each submission must also include a synopsis, resume and the theme or which you're submitting in the subject line. Plays without a synopsis will not be read. Please e-mail all submissions to Casey Cleverly at
COTEsubmissions@gmail.com.

COTE's General Writing Submission Policy:

Co-Op Theatre East has an open submission policy and welcomes all playwrights to submit work. We accept all types of submissions including solo pieces, one-act plays, musicals and full length plays. All plays must coincide with Co-Op Theatre East's mission statement (see www.cooptheatreeast.org ) and include the following:

1) Synopsis
2) Ten Page Dialogue Sample
3) Playwrights Resume

COTE reads every submission and after reading the synopsis/sample may ask to see the entire script. Submissions may be e-mailed to Casey Cleverly at
COTEsubmissions@gmail.com.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Where The White Women At?

Oriental Stories, Spring 1931
(courtesy of Ted Swedenburg)

Dear Tea-Partiers,

While you are busy having your "Restoring Honor" Rally with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on the anniversary of the March on Washington I am going to jump on my magic carpet and have sex with your daughters.

All of them.

Hey Bristol! I'll catch up with you post-Dancing With the Stars, okay habibi? (I hear Bristol Palin is single again but I am going to wait until she dances off some of that baby weight.)

Sincerely,

Yusef al-Chesthair of Big-Cockistan

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Levantine Review Seeks Writers


The Levantine Review, founded in 2005, is an online monthly magazine dedicated to coverage of the arts and culture of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as its communities in diaspora. With up to 25,000 readers per month worldwide, and up to 10,000 local to Southern California, The Levantine Review is looking for talented new writers to contribute profiles, features, reviews and op-eds. Profiles consist of interviewing and portraying select authors, actors, filmmakers, composers et al—movers and shakers in the arts who happen to be connected to the MENA. Profiles will range 750-1200 words, features 750-1500 words, reviews of books, films and events 500-1200 words, and op-eds will range 500-1000 words.

Query first: editor@levantinecenter.org. Visit http://www.levantinecenter.org/levantine-review.

Levantine Review
Levantine Cultural Center
5998 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90035-2657
310.657.5511 vox
310.657.5522 fax
Email: editor@levantinecenter.org
Visit the website at http://www.levantinecenter.org/levantine-review

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum August 4-September 26th

New Museum (5th Floor)

August 4 — September 26, 2010
235 Bowery
New York, NY

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

BGP: Black Girl Project Premire Screening

My friend the awesome Bianca Laureano wrote to tell me about an upcoming screening of an important new documentary Black Girl Project this Friday August 27. She writes,

"My homegirl, activist, filmmaker, mami, radical teacher, and media maker Aiesha Turman will have her premiere screening of one of her first films through her production company SUPER HUSSY MEDIA for her organization called THE BLACK GIRL PROJECT.

The Black Girl Project (BGP) is now a non-profit organization of which I sit on the board. We have amazing events and activities planned to create our communities (world and universe) into engaging, supportive, and loving spaces for young black girls (and yes that includes Latinas as well as other/all ethnicities!). There will be a cocktail reception, film screening, and panel discussion with Aiesha and 4 participants in her film.

The film screening on Friday is at the Spike Lee Screening Room located at Long Island University 1 University Place Brooklyn, NY btw Flatbush and DeKalb (yes that is in Brooklyn). Tickets are on sale and are $20 (these are donations to the BGP) and will be on sale until Friday at NOON online http://bgpbk.eventbrite.com/ and are $25 at the door. You will get a dope film to see, drinks, dessert, and to see your girl in some 3 inch heels (honestly that alone is worth the $20, those of you who have seen me in my 3 inch heels know this is the TRUTH).

If you cannot attend but would like to support please consider making a donation. http://blackgirlproject.org/get-involved/

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

TONIGHT: NYC Book Launch "Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 "


Why Be Something That You're Not chronicles the first wave of Detroit Hardcore from its origins in the late 70s to its demise in the mid-80s. Through a combination of oral history and extensive imagery, the book proves that even though Southern California might have created the look and style of hardcore punk, it was the Detroit scene--along with a handful of other scenes across the country [cough *Philly* cough] that cultivated the music's grassroots aesthetic before most cultural hotspots around the globe even knew what the music was about.

The book includes interviews with members of THE FIX, VIOLENT APATHY, NEGATIVE APPROACH, NECROS, PAGANS, BORED YOUTH and L-SEVEN along with people who had a hand in the early hardcore scene like Ian MacKaye (MINOR THREAT), Tesco Vee, and Dave Stimson (Touch & Go Fanzine).

Monday, August 23, 2010

TONIGHT: The Sternberg Project


The Sternberg Project


August 23, 2010, 8pm

Sternberg Park

The Sternberg Project, a site-specific dance film by Zena Bibler of the Dance Film Lab, is a crowd-sourced, multi-media, videodance time capsule of July in Sternberg Park and its surrounding area composed of short videos made on anything from HD camcorders to cell phone cameras.

The final Moviehouse screening of the summer is a screening of The Sternberg Project as well as original work by Itziar Barrios called (Ballad of) Knowville and a live performance.

Shot in abandoned industrial locations in New York City, (Ballad of) Knowville attempts to explain our present world through the murder ballad aesthetic. This aesthetic is a sub-genre of the traditional ballad form (often an American version of an older European ballad), that relays details and often consequences of crimes of passion but with the elements of supernatural retribution removed. In this video piece, the murder ballad is an entry point into a world that conjures tension, intrigue, and mystery and where death is decorative, lyrical, and aestheticized. (Ballad of) Knowville teeters on the edge of a dream-state, repeatedly falling into dance-induced lyricism only to abruptly regain the stark reality of self-awareness.

Details:
Monday, August 23rd, 8pm
Sternberg Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Lorimer + Boerum Streets)
Event is FREE! (So bring your friends)

Zena Bibler is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and experimental filmmaker. Her latest projects include The Union Square Experiments, an expanding set of site-specific, geo-tagged, Google-Mapped, public dance performances with Katie Schetlick and Ashley Hannan and Little Dances Everywhere, a series of short, site-specific dance films that function like postcards from particular moments and situations.

Conceived and directed by Zena Bibler in collaboration with Katie Schetlick, Ashley Hannan, Faye Min Lim, Ashley Murray, Jacob Liberman, Malinda Crump, Rishauna Zumberg, Ariel Lembeck, Elaine Carberry, Zavé Martohardjono, Ullani Atkins, Sofia Feria, Jennifer Ruiz, Nico Demus, Peter Roushakes, Trevion Tillman, DJ Tillman, Zanaya Tillman, Davonaisha Tillman, Mia-Lee Betances, Kassandra Matos, Jacqueline Betances, Rian Rooney, Michelle Castañeda, Chris Tabron, Chris Henderson, Clay Franklin, Alice Cox, Gabriel Roldos, and Hannah Krafcik.

For more information visit http://www.brilliantp.com/moviehouse/

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Multi-media Installation, Painting, and New Album IX Are Featured in Luis Jacob's First U.S. Solo Exhibition at Art in General

Luis Jacob, Without Persons (2006) by David Frankovich

Luis Jacob: Without Persons

Art in General is pleased to present Without Persons, an exhibition of new and recent works by Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, curated by Andria Hickey. The exhibition includes video, painting, and a new work from the artist’s Album series that will be on view from September 16 – November 13, 2010. Receiving increasingly wider recognition, Jacob’s work was first exhibited at Art in General as part of the group exhibition Explosion LTTR: Practice More Failure, in 2004. More recently, Jacob’s work has been included in Documenta 12 and has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunstverein, Hamburg; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Over the past decade, Jacob’s diverse practice has addressed issues of social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Working in video, installation, sculpture and photography, as well as actions in the public sphere, Jacob’s work is often derived from research on a wide variety of subjects. In bringing together unlikely referents, Jacob invites a collision of meaning systems that destabilize our conventions of viewing and open up possibilities for participation and the creation of knowledge.

In the artist’s words, “what is essential for our experience of art—what is foundational—is the experience of non-intelligibility, a kind of dislocation. Aesthetic experience for us today is first of all an encounter with otherness, with strangeness: but an otherness that, crucially, is there demanding appropriation, intelligibility. What is so constructive about aesthetic experience is that it requires a creative act on the part of the viewer, an act of synthesis that is original through and through.”

The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Luis Jacob: Without Persons features a series of works that explore absence and authenticity in terms of pictorial representation, the legacy of modern art, and the self and others. These works call on the viewer to consider what may lie beneath the surface of the “empty picture,” and what new forms of real and unconscious knowledge may lay dormant in such minimal propositions.

The central installation, “Without Persons,” for which the exhibition is titled, is an immersive multimedia work that features two computer-generated voices, one male and one female, that talk about “being-in-the-city” and “being-with-others.” The adjacent images project an amorphous, plasma-like liquid, with abstract but seemingly bodily movement, as if animated by the artificial voices. As the liquid finds new forms in formlessness, the voices invite the viewer to consider the discord of the alien world without persons, and the coming to consciousness of an infant who knows no persons.

Jacob’s engagement with abstraction is also reflected in the exhibition through a series of paintings the artist made in response to an early suite of Mark Rothko paintings. Considering notions of authenticity and appropriation, Jacob reconstituted the original works using a staining technique on raw canvas for one series, and a vivid tie-dye technique, with two “eye holes” in the accompanying series of paintings.

Likewise, Jacob’s Album IX, newly created for this exhibition, intuitively reconstructs an uncanny narrative of recent art history. Album IX consists of dozens of images culled from a variety of books, magazines, and other publications. These images are montaged together in plastic-laminate panels, and hung sequentially in the gallery in the form of an “image bank”. Through processes of visual association, the images of Album IX compose a poetic narrative around various themes: reductivism in painting and the modernist tradition of creative rupture; base materialism and the aesthetic sublime; embodiment and the monochrome. Using imagery excised from published sources, Album IX becomes an invitation to construct associative narratives about artistic experience by means of the visual material that surrounds us in the expanded cultural environment. In the fall of 2010, Album IX will be published as an artist book by A Prior (Ghent, Belgium).

About the Artist

Luis Jacob’s work has been presented in numerous international group exhibitions including Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Animism, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp; Kunsthalle Bern (2010); Dance with Camera, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2009-2010); If We Can’t Get It Together, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2008); The Order of Things, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (2008); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007). His solo exhibitions include the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg of Mönchengladbach (2009), the Hamburg Kunstverein (2008); Platform Seoul, PKM Gallery, Seoul (2008); the Musée d’art de Joliette, Quebec (2008); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia (2007), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2005). In June 2010, Jacob presented the first of a three-part touring mid-career survey exhibition, Luis Jacob Tableaux: Pictures at an Exhibition, at the Darling Foundry in Montréal; the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto and to Vancouver. Jacob lives and works in Toronto.

Art in General
79 Walker Street
New York NY 10013
212 219 0473 tel
212 219 0511 fax
info@artingeneral.org