BOMB Podcast
By BOMB Magazine
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Podcast Description
Interviews readings and other outspokenness from BOMB Magazine.
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Fiction for Driving: Borders by Margaret Zamos-Monteith | -- | 9/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Fiction For Driving: My Life with Cars | Listen to Erica Hunt reading her story “My Life with Cars” in the twelfth installment of BOMB’s literary podcast series. This story was originally published in BOMB 116. | 6/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitPhoned-In #15: Dan Boehl | In this new installment of Phoned-In, Dan Boehl reads from his new book Kings of the F**king Sea and talks to Luke Degnan about his collaboration with Jonathan Marshall, censorship, and Spiderman 3. | 6/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Phone Call at the Edge of the Parking Lot | -- | 5/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Some of What I’m About to Tell You Is True | -- | 5/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jim Shepard at Greenlight Bookstore | Listen to Jim Shepard read from his book of short stories, You Think That’s Bad, at Greenlight Books this past April. | 5/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jane Benson | audio | 5/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitBOMBlog Reading at The Half King | On a frigid Monday night in January, BOMBlog hosted a reading at Half King, the legendary bar and restaurant in Chelsea. Listen to a podcast of the event, featuring Luke Degnan, Ben Mirov, Dorothea Lasky, and Justin Taylor. | 4/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Al Burian | Al Burian | 4/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Fiction for Driving: The Color of Night | BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America Series The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell Read by Madison Smartt Bell Running Time: 25:44 In the eleventh installment of BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Madison Smartt Bell reads an excerpt from his novel The Color of Night.[podcast]http://bombsite.powweb.com/Podcasts/FFD-SmarttBell-MP3.mp3[/podcast] | 3/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Blake Butler #2 | Ben Greenman Andrew Weatherhead Melissa Broder Gigantic Blake Butler BB2 | 3/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Blake Butler #1 | Cal Morgan | 3/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jonathan Franzen @ Bookcourt | -- | 2/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Justin Spring at the NYPL | Justin Spring spoke with Honor Moore at the New York Public Library on September 29th, 2010. BOMB was there. | 10/26/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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BOMB All-Stars Literary Reading at Greenlight Books | On Wednesday, October 6, at 7:30pm BOMB contributors Barbara Browning, Christian Hawkey, and Kim Rosenfield convened at Greenlight Books, our friendly neighborhood indy bookstore, right around the corner from BOMB’s HQ, for an series of readings. Pictures and audio for those who missed, or those who wish to re-live, are posted here. Created with flickr slideshow from softsea. | 10/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gary Shteyngart at BookCourt | Better late than never! Listen to Gary Shteyngart read from his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, at BookCourt this past July. A short Q & A follows the (hilarious) reading. Shteyngart’s novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003),and Absurdistan (2006),. His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times. | 10/8/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Heather Christle | In episode #014 of Phoned-In, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside!. ALSO a Q&A with Luke Degnan, she discusses the forest, a generation’s obsession with animals, and authenticity. Listen to Heather Christle read below: Luke Degnan: What’s your relationship to the idea of a farm? Heather Christle: I never lived on a real one. People have been asking me that so it’s good that you say the idea of a farm. When I was little, one of my favorite toys to play with was this bag of little miniature farm houses and animals. Some were plastic. Some were wood. They were all out of proportion to each other. They were great. I loved arranging them and playing with them. It’s definitely related to the imagination for me. I have fantasies, like a lot of people around my age do, of moving into the country or even living in the city and having some chickens and things, but it’s not something I’ve been able to manage. So even the more real versions of a farm are kind of a fantasy for me. I love the idea of a farm. I really do. Especially since they’re so full of animals, and animals really get my imagination going. LD: I asked this same question to Zachary Schomburg, but I thought I’d ask you as well. Why is our generation obsessed with animals and critters? HC: It’s a good question right? It’s not just in poetry. It’s in music, it’s in art, it’s everywhere. Someone, when I was on tour, had just seen Zach read and had no idea that we had anything to do with each other. He started talking to me about Zach and about animals and our generation. I think he had a theory that we have a desire to get back into narrative and a kind of imaginary coherence to the world. That there was a naivete to what we’re doing. Which I think is perhaps the case to some extent. Perhaps it’s a form of resistance to the machines that we see all the time. If our field of vision is populated with so many machines, perhaps it helps to populate our minds with more animals just to balance things out a little bit. There’s a general interest in the woods too and woodland animals. I think that a lot of that energy can be traced back to fairy tales and that kind of thing. They feel like really basic images and ideas to work with, which is helpful because then you can make the poem be about the arrangement of images and the logic of how they’re arranged. We don’t get too distracted by the animal or by the trees because they’re so basic. I’m not really thinking of real trees or real animals. They’re these kind of basic forms that are just there to be manipulated or to manipulate me. That happens too. LD: It seems like our generation is obsessed with critters and the forest in a way that’s not so obvious to the people doing it. HC: That happens all the time, not just with animals. You think that you have a great idea that’s really authentic to yourself and then you find out that Vice has already written an article about it or something. It’s a tricky thing too because I’ve become more and more aware of those tendencies in my own work to the point where I’m trying to back away from them a little bit and do some other things. It can become awfully predictable too. You participate in these patterns sometimes without realizing it. It’s good, probably, to become aware if it becomes a tic or something. There’s one poem in The Difficult Farm that I read called “Acorn Duly Crushed”, and I totally didn’t realize when I wrote it that there are all these Dear ___ poems out there. It had been brought up to me by someone who suggested that I maybe change that. I felt like I couldn’t change that poem. I couldn’t take away all of those dears. They seemed pretty significant to how it was all working. I hope that it broke the pattern enough as it wasn’t a particularly loving address to the forest. It is at some points friendly, but it’s also kind of insulting. The [...] | 10/8/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Sam Amidon | On a summer night last July BOMBlog contributor Richard Goldstein came across something out of the ordinary in a Chelsea gallery, among Bill Beckley’s photographs was experimental folk musician Sam Amidon. Intrigued, Goldstein picked Amidon’s brain about free-jazz, the history of American folk music, and the skills you can pick up on a beach in Nova Scotia. Photo by James Walton. Last July, it wasn’t just art that was on view at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, but a small gathering for a concert by Sam Amidon on the occasion of his latest release I See the Sign. Hosting a concert, the gallery seemed suddenly more ’80s—not because of Bill Beckley’s photographs—and certainly not because of the banjo and fiddle playing Amidon. It was a matter of energy and spirit that marked that time-before-Chelsea where art and music crossed paths in and sometimes more often outside gallery walls—the piers, clubs, and beach. Amidon found his way to Shafrazi via the West Fourth subway station. He had been playing banjo on the platform hustling some money to catch a film. A man approached him with two dollars and asked for some banjo lessons. Amidon went to the man’s house where work by LeWitt, Acconci, and Judd dotted the walls. The two were in for more than they expected and pleasantly surprised by each others’ talents. For Amidon, it turned out the man was Bill Beckley, a photographer who had been making story-art in the 1970s and now large quasi-abstract photos; and for Beckley, it turned out the subway player was an accomplished musician and story teller in his own right. In time, Beckley introduced Amidon to Tony Shafrazi as he had done with Keith Haring. At the gallery that night, Beckley’s photographs set the stage for the musician. Reflected on a frame’s glass, Amidon’s silhouette played against the blood and lollipop reds of a large Beckley photograph. Softly, Sam Amidon started playing his fiddle then began sawing at it with his bow. It let out a torqued call like his voice and those shape noted ones from 1700s New England and the Northern Revivalists that influence him. He spun the song back to melody and proceeded to take the audience on a rustic journey well beyond Chelsea. Listen to a live recording from the show here: Richard Goldstein: You come from a pretty musical family. What was that like growing up? Sam Amidon: The great thing about it was just being in the world of music. Many of my adult friends and my parents’ friends were musicians, so that was the most important thing for me. It’s not so much that I performed, though I did perform as a young child, the most important element was being in an environment of tunes. I played fiddle mostly growing up, but I don’t have any claim to authenticity for folk songs—I didn’t grow up singing and playing the banjo, but I discovered a lot of these old folk songs the way a lot of more indie people did. When the Harry Smith anthology was reissued and the Dock Boggs CDs started showing up at a CD store downtown I had a frame of reference. My parents played that style of banjo, so I could learn that from them. RG: Is that the point that triggered a looking back to folk music? SA: No, it took a little longer. At this point, I was still in high school and was thinking more that what I really wanted to do was go to New York and play free jazz. I came to New York to get away from folk music because I felt that I’d done what I could with it…that sounds horrible, I felt like I wanted something different. RG: You mention Sonny Rollins as a major influence. Were you playing sax or something? SA: No, violin. I do talk about Sonny Rollins a lot because I’m a total jazz nerd, and I listen to jazz all the time. I especially love a set of his recordings called Live in London 1965. He was quite scared of the recording machine and these recordings were made when he didn’t know he was being [...] | 10/6/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Telephone #1 | This special episode of Phoned-In features poems from issue #1 of the journal Telephone. Listen to twelve poets read their translations of a poem by Uljana Wolf and to read an interview with editors Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault. Luke Degnan: What is Telephone and how did it start? Sharmila Cohen & Paul Legault: Telephone is a biannual experimental poetry translation journal. There’s a spiel we’ve been sending around that describes it all, but basically it mimics the children’s game where you whisper one phrase from person to person, changing it along the way. We start with a handful of poems from a foreign poet and then solicit other poets and translators (often regardless of their knowledge of the source language) to “translate” them however they see fit. The two of us started working together after a very productive brunch. At the time, Paul had just finished his English-to-English translations of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson; Sharmi had been studying German and was translating a lot of contemporary work. That common interest turned into Telephone. Actually, our brunch-mate Nick Sumida came up with name for the journal, and we took it from there. It’s worth pointing out that another poetry journal called Telephone predates us, published by Maureen Owen, with the help of poets like Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman, among others. We didn’t know that at the time, but it’s nice to feel that we’re operating in a tradition of small New York presses with an interest in experimental poetics. Brooklyn seems like the ideal place for us right now. In just the past year, journals like Maggy and SUPERMACHINE have been launched out of the scene here, and there’s a lot of cross-pollination going on. LD: Can explain the idea behind Telephone #1? How did you wind up choosing Uljana Wolf? SC & PL: The first issue of Telephone seemed to come together on its own. Sharmi had been reading a lot of contemporary German poetry and approached Uljana Wolf to discuss a translation project. Soon after, Telephone was born, and it was the perfect venue to present Wolf’s work. Her book, Falsche Freunde (kookbooks, 2009), and more specifically, the “dichtionary” section where the poems in Telephone come from, is obsessed with false cognates and celebrate the “untranslatable.” Once the source text was confirmed, we set out to collect a group of poet/translators from a variety of backgrounds. Some of the contributors knew no German at all, others had a great deal of experience translating German poetry, some had never translated before. Within the realm of poetry, the rules of translation are extremely flexible. People have done everything ranging from Chapman’s Homer to Zukofsky’s homophonic reworking of Catullus, and yet all of these various modes fall under the same umbrella. With Telephone, we wanted to have a place to put these ideas in direct conversation with each other. LD: What are your plans for future issues? SC & PL: The plan is to feature a different language in each issue. For Issue #2, we’re going to collaborate with Michelle Levy at the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, a nonprofit gallery based in Midtown Manhattan. She approached us with the idea of doing a translation-based exhibition that combines poetry with visual art and new media. The featured poet is to be Augusto de Campos, a founding father of the Concrete Poetry movement in Brazil. We’re very excited to be working with him because he pioneered so many of the ideas that we are investigating with Telephone and the future exhibition. At the moment, there’s a lot of discussion about planning an events series and expanding into a full-on press—Telephone Books. We recently caught wind that all of Uljana’s DICHtionary poems are being translated by Susan Bernofsky, one of our contributors, and is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse as a chapbook. It’s very exciting for us to see more of Uljana’s work [...] | 9/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An excerpt from Three Delays by Charlie Smith | BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America Three Delays by Charlie Smith Read by Charlie Smith Recorded at the studios of Art on Air International Radio Running Time: 38:48 In the ninth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Charlie Smith reads an excerpt from his novel Three Delays, published by Harper Perennial. Read an interview with Charlie Smith by John Reed here or pick up a copy of Issue 115, on newsstands September 15th. Click here to subscribe to our feed and download this podcast. Check back with BOMBsite.com with each new issue to listen to audio versions of these stories. | 9/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jim Behrle | I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way. This twelfth episode of Phoned-In features a reading by poet Jim Behrle. Click through to listen to the podcast and to read a Q&A in which he and Luke Degnan discuss The Boston Poet Tea Party, satire, Snooki and being punched in the face. Simon Slater - DUDE DESCENDING A NUTCASE (2010), Acrylic paint. Listen to the podcast below: Luke Degnan: How did the Boston Poet Tea Party poetry marathon go? Jim Behrle: It was pretty cool. It’s a lot of work, but then when you see the pieces come together, it’s kinda great. You invite like 120 poets, but it ends up that 20 of them can’t make it to Boston. It’s still pretty amazing. They can be really transformative events. That’s what’s so interesting about them. Aaron Kiely ran one in ‘95 or ‘96, the first one. It was in Cambridge. I was like “holy s**t.” I met at least 25-30 poets who I still know today and whose work I think is great. For a long time, when I was a kid, when I was in college, I thought, I’m a poet and I want to be a poet, but I was like, how come I don’t like poetry? How come I don’t like what my teachers are teaching me? Louise Glück is that all there is? She’s nice, but is there anything else? For me that was a huge event, that first one, and then ever since it’s been an opportunity to meet people who I wouldn’t have a chance to hear or see read ever. LD: Anybody this year that you hadn’t heard before? JB: I met Elizabeth Marie Young. She did a bit on the radio with me, and I thought she was terrific. There was another Fence guy, Jibade Khalil Huffman, who I thought was terrific. Also I met Geof Huth. He does a lot of word poems and stuff, where it’s like a symbol…I’d never met him before. I had only seen his work on Ron Silliman’s site. It was a pretty intense thing to see him read. He was jumping around, throwing poems against the wall. He was speaking in tongues for a while. I thought that was pretty cool. LD: You’re from Boston. You’re a big Red Sox fan. Why did you leave Boston and go to the home of the Yankees? JB: I grew up north of Boston and I lived in Boston and Cambridge for a long time. Even walking around is great. You’re near Harvard, near Harvard Square, near Inman Square. You think this is just an unbelievable, beautiful place. If you get the right weather and you’re walking around in the sun, you think what an amazing city to be able to come to. It’s real different than Brooklyn. I think Brooklyn and Manhattan is beautiful, but there’s something about Boston that seems like a city that’s built on poetry or made for poets somehow. I’m a huge Red Sox fan. I actually moved the day after the Red Sox won the World Series. I had been working in Brooklyn at a bookstore part time, shuttling back and forth. The last day I lived in Boston was the night the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. I remember walking though Kenmore Square hugging crying old men. The riot police were out. I walked all the way from Boston to my house in Medford up Mass Ave. People were just honking their horns and going crazy. This was pretty much the moment I was waiting for for a long time. I had always wondered what it would be like to live in New York, to be a New York poet. The bookstore I had been working out was closing. I had run out of bookstores to work at in Boston. They called me The Jim Reaper. I think I worked in 12 or 13 bookstores and 11 of them are closed now. I just kinda ran out of ideas. Brendan Lorber let me sleep on a hammock in his basement, I fell in love with a married woman, and I was here in New York trying to do it. LD: What would you like to achieve as a poet or perhaps as a poet who has ideas on how things should be? JB: I’ve always wanted to write poems. I try to write them better and better, but they have descended into humor and parody a little bit. LD: What I mean is, you do seem to have an agenda. You have definite [...] | 8/31/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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David Mitchell at BookCourt | Listen to David Mitchell read from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, at BookCourt on July 16th, 2010. David Mitchell is the author of five novels, most notably number9dream and Cloud Atlas, which were both listed for the Booker Prize. A short Q & A follows the reading. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcast here. | 8/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Mairéad Byrne | Why am I here–in this house–in this world–which also holds a man screaming as other men saw at his neck with an inadequate knife? In episode 11 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Mairéad Byrne reads from her book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven. Leigh Van Duzer, LIFT, 2010. Listen here: Luke Degnan:How has teaching at an art school informed your poetry? Mairéad Byrne: It’s a slow process. I was attracted to the job at RISD because I wanted very much to teach at an art school. When I was a young journalist, longing for poetry, the paintings on the walls of the studios of my friends, and the conversations we had in those studios, and watching them work, the visibility and practicality of it, made art real for me and gave me confidence. I am indebted to Michael Cullen in particular, who was just consummately hospitable towards me inevery way. In my twenties, I also worked in theatre, where many arts meet. I later ran an art center for a while. When I decided to emigrate and pursue an MA, and then a PhD, of course I found writing—and literature—separated from the other arts. A historicity entered into it; a vivacity was gone. RISD seemed a way to join things up again. But it is an institution like many others and the place for writing as an art form is still undetermined here, structurally. However, I have got to work with amazing students, and I have amazing colleagues, all of whom, in their multiple talents and generosity, reinforce my native understanding of writing as material, performative, and hospitable to collaboration with the other arts. As a teacher, I’ve been able to design and teach courses in Visual Poetry, Sound Poetry, Writing as Art + Design, even the Irish Comic Tradition (in which I carved out a place for myself of course). Teaching allows one to foreshadow, as well as draw from, practice. It’s a wonderful way of life. Sometimes I long for a life of action but I don’t know how suited I would be to it. LD: There’s a section of The Best of (What’s Left Of) Heaven titled “Interviews.” What is it about interviews that interests you in a poetic sense? MB: Probably the thing that interests me most is the gap, the silence, between question and answer. In these interviews, I generally write both question and answer so it’s really just play-acting. Sometimes I leave the questions out. I’m drawing casually on techniques I used as a journalist but, because I’m inventing rather than representing characters, I’m just having fun. Also, I’m fundamentally interested in tone and intonation and that plays into almost everything I do. LD: In an interview with the Poetry Foundation you said, “These days I am much more inclined to compose in HTML, or Photoshop.” Can you talk about this process a bit? MB: When I did that interview with Sina Queyras, I was participating in a project, Lingua Ignota, by Samantha Gorman, Danny Cannizzaro, and Edrex Fontanilla, which involved translating an invented language. Because the markings seemed iconic, I made some of my contributions in Photoshop. It’s kind of ironic: Samantha Gorman—whose work I knew best—was graduating from the Brown University MFA program in Literary Hypermedia, but she worked intensively with manuscript culture, especially the Book of Kells; and Lingua Ignota seemed runic. There are strong connections and tensions between early and current writing technologies in terms of visuality. That’s exciting, as I am obsessed with color. Every poet with a blog or website probably has something to say about this. You can feel you’re working for Google so saving Word files or hard copies might be your insurance, or shares. At the same time, Google can feel like a colleague or companion (one who colonizes your brain). I’ve always been interested in the technologies of writing. I remember, in a very early workshop (with Eavan [...] | 8/11/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Beryl Korot at the Aldrich Museum | Head over to BOMBsite to read this article in its entirety and watch some of Korot’s video work. The following recording is an excerpt from an artist talk between Shimon Attie and Beryl Korot held at the Aldrich Museum on June 27, 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening. Click here to subscribe to our feed and download this podcast. | 8/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Podcast: Jessica Hagedorn & Nelson George | Picture via This BOMB Podcast features a reading curated by novelist James Hannaham presenting Nelson George and Jessica Hagedorn. It was recorded live at the historic Montauk Club on June 23, 2010, as part of their new reading series No Book Jackets Required. Nelson George reads from his memoir City Kid and Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson; Jessica Hagedorn reads from her new novel Toxicology, forthcoming from Viking in 2011. A short Q & A with the authors follows. | 7/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Play wit de Churen | (photo via) -This Saturday 7/24, MoMA PS1′s Greater New York presents Warm Up, featuring JD Samson, MEN, Kalup Linzy and the Sweet, Sample, and LeftOva, and DJ /rupture, as well as some surprise guests! -If you haven’t yet, check out Ben Steinbauer’s film Winnebago Man, screening at Landmark Sunshine through August 9th. The film profiles YouTube phenomenon Jack Rebney, and by our count is not to be missed. -Allow us to present Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros from The Bowery Presents at Webster Hall @ 7:30 PM this Thursday 7/22. Buy tix in advance and save $3! That’s all we’ve got this week, unfortunately, but it should keep you busy ’til the next BOMB Alert. And, now that you’ve got a little free time, check out yesterday’s BOMB Radio cast, direct from us to you, care of Newtown Radio! …then, subscribe! | 7/19/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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BOMBASHTIC | -The official lineup for BOMB’s Summer Bash has been announced! Moreover, it’s been tweeted! The bash will be bashing at GlassLands and will feature LA BIG VIC, Noveller, Title TK, Gunn/Truscinski, and cheap art to buy from music-lovin’ artist Steve Keene. Come out, dig the music, buy a painting–let’s be real, your Pulp Fiction poster has seen better days–and most importantly, hang out with BOMB! -Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls and Rangda, respectively, plays at Zebulon every Monday @ 9 PM. Catch an interview he did with Harmony Korine in 2008. -We’re all in New York, but we bet it’s at least a few degrees cooler in London Town, where Alejandro Cesarco‘s solo project Present Memory just opened at the Tate Modern on July 9. If you’re lucky enough to be in the neighborhood, do go and see! -Earlier today, American Splendor cartoonist Harvey Pekar passed away. Read an interview from 2003 with American Splendor (the film) writer/director team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. BOMB Radio Ep. 5 BOMB’s Lena Valencia interviews performance and net artist Lindsay Howard (aka Look I’m Lucid) live in the Newtown studio. Featuring music by The Alan Parsons Project, Psychic TV, and more! Listen below: …and subscribe! **BOMB ALERT LATE EDITION** This Friday 7/16 check out 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests (2009) from Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham, screened at the Guggenheim at 1, 2, 3, and 4 PM. | 7/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Shane Jones | It was with reluctance that Shane Jones initially submitted his novel, Light Boxes, to Adam Robinson, Founding Editor of the small press Publishing Genius, who accepted his submission with equal reluctance. Now, after being optioned (and subsequently turned down) by Spike Jonze, Light Boxes has been re-released by Penguin. Featuring a recording of him reading from the novel at McNally Jackson in Manhattan. Listen to a recording of Shane Jones reading an excerpt from Light Boxes on June 24th at McNally Jackson in Manhattan: I like to think I have my ear to the street, that if there’s an up-and-coming writer with a style that runs against the grain, I’ll know about him/her before that style is being either castigated or revered by my “mainstream publishing” colleagues. This is impossible, of course. There are a lot of talented writers out there that I will never come across, and a lot of small, independent publishers putting them in print, but the volume is massive, and one can only read so much. So as much as I’d like to say I’d read about Shane’s wonderful book on some obscure website and fell in love with it that way, the truth is that I only discovered it when Spike Jonze picked up the film option and Variety reported it. (Penguin has a lot of books on its backlist, many of which have been optioned, and it’s my job to keep tabs on them. I also happen to love film, so it works out well.) This was a few months before Spike’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are came out, but the hype had already begun. So I ordered a copy online and then emailed Adam, inquiring about the tie-in edition rights, should the movie ever get made. Adam told me that the rights were Shane’s, but I wasn’t convinced, and didn’t want him getting left out of the equation entirely—after all, it was his commitment to the book that put everything in motion to begin with. He persisted, and then the next told me that Shane had since gotten an agent, and that he (the agent) would be in touch. He was, that same day I believe, and he managed to send me an electronic version of the book in advance of my physical copy, which was still in the mail. I loved it, of course, as I’m a sucker for anything that pulls off that rare perfect balance of tenderness and violence, especially if it’s contained in a fable-like story about men in strange masks and trench coats who start a revolution. ¡Viva el vuelo! —Tom Roberge Shane Jones: I’ll be honest—I hated the Publishing Genius website so much that I didn’t send Light Boxes to you right away. Adam Robinson: That’s cool. I was just so proud of myself for learning how to code HTML that I forgot it wasn’t 1995 anymore. SJ: Yeah, but then everyone else rejected the manuscript and I felt like I had no other choice. What was your first reaction when I emailed you about the book? AR: My first reaction was, honestly, that I don’t like the name “Shane.” SJ: Shane is kind of a scumbag name. I imagine a Shane as really weak looking, missing teeth, and a mullet. So it’s understandable that you had that reaction. AR: My second reaction was that I didn’t understand what the “game of prediction” was, so I stopped reading it. Then one night I read a bunch and I thought it was okay, but a little too saccharine for my tastes. Also, a little too loose. But it was the right length, and you were wicked famous, so I was torn. Eventually I decided what the heck, I’ll just reject the book and get it off my plate. I really did want to publish a woman because that was important for where PG was at the time. SJ: It’s kind of funny that I didn’t like your press that much and you didn’t like the manuscript right away. I think after you sent that email about wanting to publish a female writer, and me writing back about how I didn’t punch people, things kind of took off from there. Or maybe they relaxed a little. AR: Yeah. I always appreciated the quickness and informality of [...] | 7/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Joyce Kim and Carlos Roque’s Mostly Shadows at Art in General | PREVIOUS / NEXT Joyce Kim, TRACES VI, acrylic on canvas, leather, and framed printed text on paper, 2010. Katharina Stenbeck performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS. Katharina Stenbeck performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS. Carlos Roque performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS. Carlos Roque performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS. Following is a recording accompanied by a series of stills from video documentation of the June 11th opening of Mostly Shadows at Art in General. If there is an edge to painting, has anyone ever jumped off? Klein jumped, or so staged it. He is the point of departure for Joyce Kim’s most recent body of work. It’s no accident she has made the move from gray, ever present in her Le Samourai paintings, to blue in respect to Klein’s International Blue. Her versions of his blue are faded by time—blues bordering on sun-bleached lavender, cornflower, and robin’s egg. In this way, she recognizes a painting’s past ideals transformed through time and her current exhibition at Art in General is aptly titled Mostly Shadows. Her June 11th opening at Art in General featured a new installation of painting, text, and suede by Kim with readings of the artist’s text by actress Katharina Stenbeck followed by musician Carlos Roque on guitar. Seeing the wires of the amps strewn across the floor before the performance brought a sense of anticipation, and seeing the wires in the context of the painting brought the sense of being on the brink of the jump where Kim’s work is perched. To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 7/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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PIXELBOMB hits Northside! | BOMB’s very own Lena Valencia and music blogger PIXELHORSE (a.k.a Elise Oh) give you an instant-messaged tour of this year’s Northside Festival put on by L Magazine, complete with pictures and video. It’s easy. It’s virtual. And much, much less sweaty. While there is no lack of outdoor, festival-like shows all over the City in the summer, L Magazine’s Northside Fest is the closest Brooklyn comes to an actual music festival in the traditional sense of the word. Spanning over 20 venues in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick area, the fest this year featured 300 bands, most of them “unknowns.” Rather than curating all those bands themselves, the L reached out to bloggers, labels, and PR firms to create their own showcases which kept the lineups fresh and eclectic. The problem: the bands were SO fresh and eclectic that there was no way I could navigate the lineup myself. I needed an expert. I needed a music blogger. So I called up my old friend PIXELHORSE (a.k.a Elise.) Elise and I met to watch the playoffs (go Lakers!) at Habitat, where she came armed with a long list of bands annotated with little hearts and x’s—I was dealing with a professional. Together we decided to steer away from the hyped shows and stick to the lesser known bands (sorry, Thao and Mirah!), and, in lieu of the Traditional Review, to stick to AIM banter, videos, and photos, which is mostly the extent of my attention span on the internet anyway. Come Thursday, we bustled over to L Mag HQ to pick up our press passes and swag bags, chugged some free Heinekens, and decided to jet over to Warsaw for “housegaze” duo Hundreds in the Hands who were opening for Au Revoir Simone. Hundreds in the Hands at Warsaw, 6/24/10. Photo by Lena Valencia. Lena: Ok so: Hundred in the Hands. Elise: oh boy. Lena: I mean, I get it, but I’ve heard it before. Also, would they exist if she wasn’t pretty? Questionable. Elise: Jenny Lewis Jr., you mean? Lena: I was thinking more Lykke Li but not as interesting. Elise: If she were uggos, they def wouldn’t be opening for Au Revoir Simone. Lena: True dat. I liked Warsaw though! That disco ball was amazing… Elise: But the scene was 90% eurotrash taking photos of themselves outside smoking and making sexy faces. I couldn’t stand that place. The disco ball was the best thing about Warsaw, just like the singer’s hair was the best thing about the band. Followed somewhat closely by her voice. Lena: I am over drum machines. We saw some interesting drummers this weekend, and they are so much more fun to watch than people twisting dials around. Elise: yeah Hundreds in the Hands were BRINGIN’ the drum machine noise, hard. I think I like a combo of synths/drum machines with good instrumentation. There are some exceptions, like AnCo and other bands that are all synths and s**t, but for the most part I think a balance works best. Our next stop was Union Pool, aka the easiest bar to sneak PBRs into, where we were just in time for Austin transplants YellowFever. YellowFever at NorthSide Fest from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo. Elise: Good duo. Another amazing drummer. Lena: I usually find indie-folky female vocalists overly whimsical but she had some bite. Elise: Yeah I feel the same way. She is so stone-faced. There was nothing cutesy or too approachable about her, but she was still sarcastic and funny. Lena: Also the way she manipulated her voice was f*****g with the voice recorder. Elise: Oh? How? Lena: She’d hit a high note and the levels would go crazy Elise: She was using a slide guitar. I have a feeling this is the song you are talking about. She would slide the guitar as she hit the same note vocally. I was about to bring up that song because it was my favorite part of that show. maybe even of the whole weekend. Lena: Yes. That’s what i was talking about. Elise: It was rad. i love a slide guitar. and YellowFever’s aesthetic is folky and eclectic enough to pull it off. Their equipment is [...] | 7/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ben Mirov | Who was chasing me through the brush? He’s staring at neon graffiti and doesn’t look away. He looks like a rich kid on acid. He turns into a duffle bag. The man I have sex with is me. I don’t dream about you. I find your feelings’ cloud. In episode 10 of Phoned In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Ben Mirov reads from his book Ghost Machine. Click through for a Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss boredom, depression, Lego poetry, and Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Aaron Mette, INVOCATION TO SGT BLAZEKIRK OF THE NORTHERN SKY, 2009. Carving on Blackened Foamcore, 20 x 30 inches. Luke Degnan: The poem, Ghost Node from Ghost Machine is published in Elimae, but it is labeled as fiction. I’m guessing you submitted it as fiction. Ben Mirov: I can’t remember what I submitted it as. I’m pretty sure I just sent it to them. I remember once that got put up I was kind of surprised that it had been put under fiction. I don’t think it was what I intended, but it also didn’t bother me. I like the fact that Coop Renner, the editor of Elimae, decided that it was fiction. LD: I was wondering if you could talk about your relationship with fiction in relation to your poetry. There is a narrative in this book. BM: Absolutely. That was something that came out over time as I was revising the poems. The unit the poems were built out of was the sentence. So right away they had this relationship to fiction that was sort of incidental. When I was writing the raw material for the poems, they were just pages and pages of sentences. I would just sit down and write to pass time or work out difficult emotions that I was having at that point in my life. I would sit down and write, I hate to say it, as a form of therapy. I would write as a form of coping with my life and reality at that time. I found that the sentence was a convenient unit to work with. I wasn’t really thinking about line breaks or poetry at that time. I was thinking about filling pages or passing time. I was just writing to get from the beginning to the end of the sentence. Over time as I started to revise, I had put everything away for a while, I moved from San Francisco to New York. When I felt that I had the impetus to revise those poems, I started taking the sentences and collaging them together or taking large chunks of sentences that went together and manipulating them into poems. There is an element of fiction in those poems. I wanted that to come out as I was revising more and more. I didn’t want the book, Ghost Machine, to be just a book of poems. I wanted it to be a hybrid, perhaps something people haven’t seen as much. LD: It kind of reminds me of Murakami‘s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There’s definitely a woman who has left, and you’re going through these mundane tasks, but instead of making pasta and cleaning you’re drinking and jerking off. BM: It’s funny that you bring up that book. Ghost Machine was basically written in 2007, most of it was. At that time my good friend Brian, one of my oldest friends, who I mentioned in the machine poem, from that line “the next step is to think like Brian,” he had been telling me to read Murakami a lot before that point. I had never really wanted to. Then I went through a horrible break up with my girlfriend, and I decided for whatever reason to pick up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle simultaneously while I was writing these poems. Throughout my life I’ve had this relationship to literature where certain books will choose me at certain times in my life, and it will be completely appropriate, and it almost won’t be my decision. My experience with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was very much like that. I felt like that book was written about me. I felt that Murakami had written that book so it could come into my hands at that moment in time, and it was for nobody else and for no other purpose which is totally selfish and self centered, but it was an [...] | 7/6/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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PODCAST: Farai Chideya with Nora Chipaumire & Thomas Mapfumo | Author and journalist Farai Chideya speaks with Nora Chipaumire and Thomas Mapfumo about the commentary they are making on Zimbabwe today and their collaboration on lions will roar…. Farai Chideya has combined media, technology, and social justice during her 20-year career as an award-winning author and journalist. From 2006 to early 2009, she hosted NPR’s News and Notes, a daily national program about African-American and African diaspora issues. She and the teams she has worked with have won awards including a National Education Reporting Award, a North Star News Prize, and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association for coverage of AIDS. She has written three nonfiction books: Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters; The Color of Our Future; and Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans. Her novel Kiss the Sky (Atria Books) was released in hardcover May 2009 and paperback in May 2010. | 6/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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PODCAST: Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger | Montana Wojczuk interviews Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington about their film, RESTREPO, winner of the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. RESTREPO documents Junger and Hetherington’s experience as journalists in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, at the American military outpost of the same name, deep in Taliban-controlled territory. RESTREPO film directors Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington (right) at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan. In this podcast, Montana Wojczuk interviewed Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington about their film, RESTREPO, which won the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and premieres this month in New York and L.A. As embedded journalists in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, Junger and Hetherington wanted to create a film that was as narrative as a war movie, with actual footage of war, expressing the anxiety, violence, and boredom of being part of a small unit of American soldiers fighting in what U.S News & World Report has dubbed, “the most dangerous place in the world.” RESTREPO is named for the outpost these soldiers created, high in the mountains of Afghanistan. Named after a member of their team who had died in action, RESTREPO became the “tip of the spear” for the American war in Afghanistan, thrust far into Taliban-controlled territory. Sebastian Junger has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1996. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the bestselling author of the “The Perfect Storm” and “A Death in Belmont.” His latest book, “War,” documents his time in the Korengal valley. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington, author of “Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold” has reported on conflict for over ten years. He was awarded the 2008 World Press Photo prize for his work in Afghanistan and is a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair. Of “Long Story” Hetherington has said “I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer. This is about narrative.” In RESTREPO Hetherington and Junger have used a light touch in creating a narrative out of documentary material. The result is a film that, while it tells a story, allows us the breathing room to make our own meaning out of the images on screen, and in our reactions may say more about the audience than about the filmmakers themselves. RESTREPO has angered some for not taking a political position, and it is indeed uncomfortable not to be able to retreat to the safety of polemic, but perhaps we can take a page from these journalists’ willingness to enter contested territory unarmed. To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 6/28/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE MORE FREE | Photo by Carol Rosegg, courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown. Originally in BOMB 52, Summer 1995 –This Monday 6/28 (today, for those of you following along at home) at 7 PM, 92nd Street Y will host a preview of Love Ranch. The film is directed by Taylor Hackford and stars the inimitable Helen Mirren. This screening is the latest installment of 92Y’s popular “Reel Pieces” lecture series. Tickets are $35 (and worth it). –Author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and First Proofers Ed Park and Nelly Reifler will be reading this Wednesday 6/30 in the Bryant Park Word for Word series. This week’s event features contributors to UnderWaterNewYork.com, a website dedicated to “stories, art and music inspired by the underwater objects and phenomena that surround New York City.” Take a long lunch–the event reading runs 12:30-1:45. –Also at 92Y this week, artist Paul Chan of BOMB 92 talks to Artforum editor Tim Griffin at 92nd Street Y this Thursday 7/1 about his latest project in collaboration with Creative Time, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. –Christian Marclay stands in two spotlights this week, having just opened a solo show on the 24th at Paula Cooper Gallery (through 7/30) and now with a piece titled “Festival” opening at the Whitney Museum Thursday 7/1. Now hear this! Artist Robert Greene, phoned-in poet Zachary Schomburg, and fiction writer Danielle Dutton feature prominently (exclusively) in last week’s BOMB Radio broadcast on Newtown Radio: …and/or/then subscribe to the BOMBcast feed here to stay up-to-date on all (free) multimedia goodies from BOMB Magazine. | 6/28/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Josiah McElheny at 192 Books | Listen to a podcast of Josiah McElheny reading from his recently published monograph A Prism on June 8th, 2010 at 192 Books in Manhattan. From Rizolli: McElheny is a unique figure among artists of his generation: his primary medium is glass. Over the last 15 years he has created an extraordinary body of work exploring the relationship between art, history, and narrative. Known for his room-size installations of glass sculptures, the artist’s work is as rich visually as it is conceptually. With contributions by some of the most important writers and scholars today(including curator and writer Louise Neri, art critic Dave Hickey, curator Helen Molesworth, and cosmologist David Weinberg) this is the most comprehensive consideration of the artist’s work to date. A complete listing of events at 192 Books can be found here. Read McElheny’s 2005 interview with Arturo Hererra on BOMBsite. To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 6/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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PODCAST: Marilyn Minter | 100 Food Porn, 1989. Television commercial, 3 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. Most commercials I don’t mind missing, but when Marilyn Minter screened several of her “Food Porn” commercials from 20 years ago at a Strand artist’s talk I was sorry I had missed them until now. The shots were pulpy, the music sinister and dancey—think Ryuichi Sakamoto meet’s Madonna’s Erotica—communicating Minter’s process so strongly. The videos were played on late night TV commerical slots purchased by the artist in 1990. You would have seen them on breaks from Letterman or Arsenio mixed in with commercials for M&Ms or frozen dinners. Subversive was and still is Minter’s plat du jour. The lecture happened May 25th at the Strand bookstore on the occassion of the re-released and expanded edition of Gregory R. Miller’s monograph of Minter’s work, out this July. Since the ’90s, Minter has been included in the 2006 Whitney Biennal, worked on projects with M.A.C cosemetics, and her “Green Pink Caviar” video was featured in Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet Tour. Listen to a BOMB exclusive podcast of the Strand lecture below: To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 6/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An excerpt from S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton | Danielle Dutton © Katrin Lepler. BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America Series S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton Read by Danielle Dutton Recorded in the home studio of Hand-Made Records Running Time: 14:54 In the eighth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Dannielle Dutton reads an excerpt from her novel S P R A W L, published by Siglio Press, which appeared in the Summer Issue #112 of BOMB’s literary supplement, First Proof. Click here to subscribe to our feed and download this podcast. Check back with BOMBsite.com with each new issue to listen to audio versions of these stories. | 6/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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How to Escape From a Leper Colony By Tiphanie Yanique | The crucible of the Caribbean islands, where Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews coexist, is the primary setting of Tiphanie Yanique’s triumphant debut collection. With a nimble touch, Yanique explores the fragile yet crucial connections between the US and the islands and the nuances of race, culture, class, and religion. Out of these materials, Yanique creates a kaleidoscopic spectacle. Love is the common theme that runs throughout the collection: a love with missed connections and heartbreak, a dangerous kind of love that momentarily raises Yanique’s characters out of the death-of-the-heart trance in which they live and then, with cruel indifference, drops them back into it. As the elliptical stories open up suddenly, and different narrative threads and characters are introduced, the canvas widens and mushrooms. The haunting title story and the erotically charged “Street Man” especially stand out. In the gem of the collection, “The International Shop of the Coffins,” we are introduced at first to Father Simon and Jean Monroe, a.k.a. Anexus Corban, the owner of the shop. He sells children’s coffins shaped as sneakers, others as lollipops: “the candy part painted in blue and green and yellow swirls, the stick—where the child’s legs would go—painted an authentic bone white.” The two old men, one black, one white, meet every afternoon to drink coffee and watch the sunset from Corban’s shop; both have been broken up by love. One day two schoolgirls, Leslie and Gita, enter the shop. With breathtaking sleight of hand, Yanique picks up the thread of Gita’s life. She is such a luminous character, her story so heartrending, that I longed to read a whole novel about her. That’s the kind of talent Tiphanie Yanique is: her first collection of stories leaves the reader craving more. —Jaime Manrique is completing Cervantes Street, a new novel. Listen here to Tiphanie Yanique’s live reading of How to Escape From a Leper Colony and the following Q & A at Brownstone Books in Brooklyn, NY on April 29th, 2010. To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 6/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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AIR RAID: BOMB ON RADIO | This Sunday (6/13) BOMB will be on Newtown Radio from 11 AM – 12 PM — just in time for you to drag yourself out of bed and start streaming online. If you’re just not a mid-day person, subscribe to BOMB’s RSS feed and you can podcast the broadcast at a more pleasant hour. Listen to last week’s (Xeno & Oaklander, CAConrad, and Sam Lipsyte) here: Sunday, 11ish Sunday’s show will feature BOMBstars including performer Cynthia Hopkins, writer Joshua Furst, poet K. Silem Mohammad, and musician Steve Gunn. Get in gear and don’t miss this! | 6/10/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Podcast: April Yvette Thompson & Lynn Nottage | This BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS’ at the final event in their LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. Listen to Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and April Yvette Thompson discussing the many shared themes in their work, as well as their paths to becoming successful playwrights. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. This event was recorded live at the BRICstudio at 57 Rockwell place in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 18th. To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here. | 6/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Public Record: Crimes and Documents in 19th-Century Pittsburgh | Justin Hopper’s Pittsburgh-based Public Record is a series of sound poems created from 19th-century crime reports which will be delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works. Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.” In the 19th-century, before modern sewage systems snaked beneath city streets, garbage was filtered into deep, open pits. Night-soil men would climb into the pits, carry up buckets of human waste, and transport it to farms for use as manure. On June 5, 1872, the Pittsburgh Daily Gazette reported the alleged murder of 55-year-old Andrew Kurtzbaner, a night-soil man at the St. Nicholas Hotel, formerly at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue. According to the report, Kurtzbaner was pushed into the pit while cleaning it. “The guy drowned in feces collected from what must have been a flophouse,” says Justin Hopper, who spends his days reading newspaper accounts of Pittsburgh crimes committed 150 years ago, and then writes “documentary poetry” by directly sampling language from the crime reports, and re-structuring it into verse: A gentleman who was in the vicinity and saw the excitement, ran to the place, stripped off his clothing, and was lowered by ropes into the vault. Speedy as the work of rescue had been, it was not speedy enough, and the man was quite dead when brought out As artist-in-residence at Old/New Media — a program supported by a technology start-up, DeepLocal, and an independent publisher, Encyclopedia Destructica — Hopper designed Public Record, an immersive, multifaceted collaboration: His poems will be converted into audio pieces by a sound artist and delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works. Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.” Public Record began a couple of years ago, envisioned as choreographed re-enactments of the murders. But a year later, Hopper — a long-time arts reporter — discovered Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, a book-length documentary poem culled in part from court testimonies of the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners. “It’s rooted in actual square footage of land,” he says. “[Nowak] takes something as prosaic as court testimony, and finds the poetic value in it. I realized that this is what Public Record was meant to be.” Hopper searches microfilm for crimes that occurred on streets identifiable on both a map of 1872 and a current map, within a several-block range. He looks for at least one name — a perpetrator, victim or bystander — as well as discrepancies in language or reporting. People described as “decrepit, homeless, and alcoholic” speaking in language that’s practically Shakespearean, for example, or a report of a stabbing that includes the lyrical admission of a man nicknamed “Bruiser” Lynch (“I stepped toward the bed and a man raised up -/ I saw he wasn’t her husband, raised the knife and let it drive”) alongside his sister’s fragmented, [...] | 6/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Matthew Coolidge interviewed by Deborah Gans | In this BOMBLive! podcast, Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, is interviewed by architect Deborah Gans of Deborah Gans Studio. Part of the BOMBLive! series In the Open: Art and Architecture in Public Spaces, sponsored by Cary-Brown Epstein, Steven Epstein, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Teaser video below: BOMBlive: Deborah Gans and Matthew Coolidge from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo. Complete audio here: To have this automatically downloaded to your iTunes, subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here. For more slideshows from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, head over to BOMBsite. | 5/28/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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PODCAST: Cynthia Hopkins and Craig Lucas | Listen to the Podcast of this post-show discussion at Soho Rep. between playwright Craig Lucas and musician-performer Cynthia Hopkins. Truth: A Tragedy runs through 5/30/10. Also on display is a Cabinet of Curiosities assembled from the memoirs, artifacts and various media belonging to Hopkins’ father. More details and info here. Cynthia Hopkins in The Truth: A Tragedy. Photo by Paula Court. Cynthia Hopkins (genitor of the band Gloria Deluxe, the Accidental Trilogy, and a multitude of other notable artistic ventures and triumphs), latest work grew out of her love/hate relationship with Greek Tragedies and the writing she was doing while moving her ailing father into assisted living six years ago. The result is a document unflinchingly genuine and true, if filtered through a highly personal narrative. Through song, dance, and text Hopkin’s conjures Parkinson’s disease, a hoarder’s nest, notions of suppressed homosexuality and a classroom full of ten-year-olds chanting jump to a man on a ledge, with the get-up of a clown and the feet of a Fred Astair. Uncomfortable, hilarious and, tragic, maybe, heroic, definitely, Truth: A Tragedy has you squirming even as you laugh, laughing even as you squirm and softening every time Ms. Hopkins sings. Look for an interview of Cynthia Hopkins by Annie-B Parson in the upcoming issue of BOMB out June 15th. | 5/25/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Podcast: Somi and Hugh Masekela | The latest BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS features Ugandan-Rwandan-American jazz vocalist and composer Somi and music giant Hugh Masekela discussing heir shared musical influences and the connections between jazz and Africa. This event was recorded live at the Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 11th, as part of 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. Visit www.651ARTS.org for more information. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts. | 5/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Mark Leidner | You’re panicking / because you can’t remember the meaning / of nonchalant, but I’m massaging / your neck, whispering, / It’s what you are. This ninth episode of Phoned-In, our poetry-reading-by-phone podcast, features a reading by Mark Leidner. Scroll down to listen and read a short Q&A in which he and Luke Degnan discuss Twitter, robot voices, and pitchforking steaming piles of irony. Emilie Selden, FENCED IN (2008). Digital Print. Luke Degnan: In your bio, you say you live and tweet in Western Massachusetts. I’ve followed your Twitter feed for a while. Do you consider Tweets a part of your craft? What draws you to Twitter as a poet? Mark Leidner: I love many things about it. One way to think about it is practice. It makes me practice attention to sentences. I will often think of jokes that I’ll want to share or absurd things, and I love the challenge, as quickly as possible, to change the joke or the idea or the concept into an efficient, little sentence that’ll carry it. I also love how it’s made me think more aphoristically. One feature of an aphorism would be the cinematic way a sentence unfolds. So you get a subject and a verb, and you don’t know where the object is gonna be until you hit the object, and sometimes what the object will be will make you reinterpret what the subject and the verb were. So I like thinking about the narrative of cognition that happens when you read a sentence that’s guided by the grammar. Tweeting has made me pay more attention to that because often the rhythm or the grammar or the alliteration, all those features that make a really good sentence great, for some reason they are foregrounded when all you have is just one sentence as opposed to elaborating on an idea. LD: What drew you to making videos of your poems? ML: It was initially an editing process for revision. It helped me revise poems for a page. One of the things I strive for is a conversational seamlessness for most of my poems, not all. I often experimented with text to voice software where you select some text, put it in a window and a robot will read back to you the text. That helps me hear it in a monotone, an uninterested party, articulating those words, so that I can more effectively hear when I’m trying to, you know, be so clever or be too lyrical or too something that disrupts the dream of the poem. I’ll often will try to revise in order to make a poem as smart as possible, and in trying to make it smarter and better and deeper, it loses its believability as a convincing human articulation. The movies that I made were made with this software called Xtranormal in which you type in text, and a robot is animated and reads back to you the poem. So I just did it initially to hear my own work in another way that was not just me reading it. When I’m reading it, I don’t have enough distance from it. So then when I started doing that I thought, well this might actually be cool, so I started putting more effort in the actual movie part of it, putting sound behind it, trying to tweak the grammar of the text that I give the robot so that it will repeat back even more naturally to create something that seems like it’s sort of alive on the screen. The short answer is I started to edit my own poems for the page, and it became its own form that I really like and enjoy and have learned a lot from just from playing with that form. LD: In the HTML Giant comments section you wrote, sometimes there is too much irony all piled up in the barn, and you have to pitchfork another steaming pile of irony on top of it all, and you have to pitchfork another, and another, and another when the world is s**t-streaked with irony that is when beauty will emerge love is irony purists sure hate farce but pushing against things is the only possible way to live Can you comment on this? ML: I believe that, I think. It’s really interesting to think about how a public forum, like a comment stream, can…it makes [...] | 5/21/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Podcast: Ronald K. Brown and Sonia Sanchez at 651 Arts | The latest BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS is a conversation between award-winning choreographer, dancer and community leader Ronald K. Brown and legendary poet and activist. This event was recorded live at The James and Martha Duffy Performance Space at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 4th, as part of 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. Visit www.651ARTS.org for more information. | 5/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CAConrad | In episode 8 of Phoned In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, CAConrad reads from The Book of Frank and The City Real & Imagined. Click through for an Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss Philadelphia, (Soma)tic Poetry, and why it’s necessary to ignore advice from older poets. Zoe Strauss - Detail I-95 (Merry Christmas House) Courtesy of the artist. Luke Degnan: How has living in Philadelphia shaped your poetry? CAConrad: It shaped it completely. You filter everything through your life. I’ve been here since 1986. That’s well over half my life. To be specific: the streets, the sounds. I feel like home here is a hundred things before it’s my actual apartment. I just really feel at home here. I love the libraries and the poets. There’s so many wonderful poets here who spur me into action constantly. I really feel like I learned to investigate the world here. That’s what the (Soma)tics are all about. Ultimately, I want my (Soma)tic poetry and poetics to help us realize at least two things. That everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new thinking and imaginative output and that the most necessary ingredient to bringing the sustainable, humane changes we need and want for our world requires creativity in all lives, every single day. It’s a pretty drastic world. I keep meeting people who say, Well, isn’t it a luxury to write poetry? I think the complete opposite. Art is extremely important right now because we need to be creative. We need to hit our creative core and open it up in order to figure out how to make these changes. We really, definitely need to make changes. We’re on a sinking ship. LD: In your (Soma)tic Writing Exercise, Radiant Elvis MRI, you describe an exercise to prepare oneself for an MRI. You propose examining a certain place, and you wrote, “The space I chose is a street in Philadelphia, a place I know more than any other place on our planet.” Where is this place, and will you describe it? CAC: It’s 22nd and Chestnut Street. It’s an intersection in Philadelphia. I had a very magical experience right near there. There’s a museum right near there called the Mutter Museum. I was in the herb garden, and I was reading this document supposedly by a Rosicrucian, that’s very much like this exercise, only it goes a little further. That exercise was to manipulate people and things in an environment. This was to be able to be in that environment when you’re not anywhere near there. That street corner comes up in dreams sometimes when I’m not in Philly, when I’m out doing a reading or whatever in another city. What’s on the corner? One of my favorite architects in Philadelphia history, Frank Furness, he designed the Unitarian Church which is there. There’s a pharmacy on the corner. There’s so many minute details. The thing is about this corner is since I started the process of absorbing the contents, it’s sort of become addictive. The idea is that you choose something in your life, a place that you frequent, that each time you approach this place, prepare yourself to stop, look very closely at it, close your eyes, imagine what you saw, and then open your eyes to see what you missed, and each time you’re going to keep incorporating all of these missing pieces until you have the entire contents of the space whether it’s a room or a place outside. You can actually go there, project yourself in that place, which is what the MRI somatic exercise is about. The MRI machine works with the water molecules of our bodies to have them face one direction by way of magnetic charge. It’s at that point that you really start to visit that place when you’re inside the MRI machine. Once you find yourself in that place you begin to float, you start to be in that place in a way that you haven’t been before. Then you come out and take notes, and you write your poem. LD: What advice would you give to a young poet? CAC: My friend [...] | 5/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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James Shea | In episode 7 of Phoned-In, BOMB’s poetry reading by phone podcast, James Shea reads from his book, Star in the Eye. Click through for an brief Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss Japanese poetry and the passage of time. Rebecca Sargent, FADED WATERSLIDE, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. Luke Degnan: Your book was published in 2008. Has the passage of time made you view these poems differently? James Shea: The poems are getting further and further away from me so that they seem to be almost like someone else’s poems. I like that because it helps me to move on to the next poem and the next manuscript. They’re kind of like old friends. I know that they’re going to be there for me. I know where to find them if I need them. LD: Do you consider these poems autobiographical? For example, did you kiss your girlfriend on the mouth after she vomited? Do you feel distanced from them in so far as your life is now different? JS: I definitely think of my poems as bound up with my life, but in a kind of tangential way. For example, some of the poems in the book I wrote when I was living in Japan, and that was a few years ago. I suppose the distance feels more chronological than psychological. I believe my poems are about as autobiographical as my dreams, in the sense that some elements are vividly true, but many other details are not quite real. Your question reminds me of when I asked a friend of mine if he had ever spent a night in jail. He said, “No, but I feel like I have.” That’s how I feel about some of the lines in my poems—I’ve never flown all the way to Rome only to be dumped at the airport, but I feel like I have. LD: You just mentioned living in Japan. Can you talk about your relationship to Japanese poetry? How has Japanese poetry influenced your work? JS: I feel like it’s influenced me in all kinds of ways, some of which I’m not sure I can explain very well. When I first started reading Japanese poetry, primarily haiku, I had been reading a lot of French surrealism, and I found something in the way haiku poets used juxtaposition that I felt had a kinship with the French surrealists. That was something I keyed into very early on and would come back to over the years as I started to study Japanese and then live in Japan and then translate. Recently I’ve been more interested in classical Chinese poetry. In both cases, I’m interested in the ways in which the speaker feels kind of absent or at least not present in the way we are accustomed to seeing the speaker in Western poetry. I like that. LD: How has the Japanese language itself influenced you? JS: That influence is much clearer to me. That’s because over the years as I’ve studied Japanese. I became more and more estranged from English and from my own poems in some ways. There was a period when I was revising my work in Japan and after Japan where I felt like I was seeing my poems from a new perspective. I had spent so much time in this other language, even dreaming in this other language, to the point where English seemed kind of new to me. James Shea is the author of Star in the Eye, selected for the 2008 Fence Modern Poets Series. His poems have appeared in various journals, includingAmerican Letters and Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, and Verse. He has taught at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, and as a poet-in-residence in the Chicago public schools. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago. To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here. | 4/26/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Zachary Schomburg | In episode 6 of Phoned-In, BOMB’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Luke Degnan talks to Portland, OR poet Zachary Schomburg about our generation’s obsession with animals and how poetry lends itself to collaboration. Also, Zach reads some poems. YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW (2009). Elizabeth Hoy. Luke Degnan: You seem to have an obsession with the forest and trees. Can you explain why or where this comes from? Zachary Schomburg: It’s not as if I spend more time than other people in the forest. My forests aren’t real forests I suppose. They’re kind of these dark, dream forests. When I picture them, they’re made of the trees you see in Tim Burton movies. They’re twisty and unreal. I like to spend time in forests. I like to go hiking and that sort of thing. It feels very different when I write a poem. It’s not the same kind of nature. When I write these narrative poems, often times when they exist in poems, they feel like dreams to me. In fact some of them very much are dreams. In a lot of my dreams I’m being chased, and for whatever reason if I’m not being chased through a building or some childhood home or something like that, I’m often being chased through these kinds of forests. Wherever the place is, it’s kind of confusing. It’s easy to get lost in it. It’s easy to hide in it. It’s very dense. A forest is the perfect setting for these sorts of chase scenes, in my daydreams and these dreams that I consciously make up and in my actual dreams as well. LD: Why do you think our generation is obsessed with critters? Wolves, birds, bears, LOLcats, panda bears, animals in general… ZS: I have a lot of those. You’re right, I’m certainly not the only one. For me, they’re a way of putting characters into my poems and still give my protagonist the ability to be lonely and isolated. It’s really important that even in the poems that I’m writing, my protagonist, the I, is the only human or the only person we can identify with in each of the poems. A lot of times they’re about loneliness and searching. In order to have these other characters they almost have to be animals, and if they’re not animals at least some kind of inanimate object that becomes a character in a poem. Animals, to me, are very…I’m interested in them I suppose. Especially bears and owls and jaguars and certain kinds of insects and wolves. I don’t know why, but I think that a lot of the critters I just named are critters that are associated with the night. I’m constantly writing poems at night. I can’t write a poem while the sun is up. I guess these are the creatures I think of when I’m writing. These animals that our generation mentions are kind of like representations of these actual animals. I don’t think they’re real. For example, I don’t think people are interested in real owls, but they might name their band The Owls. It’s this fascination with myth or mythic creatures. The creatures themselves aren’t necessarily mythic, but there is a strange other reality where the animals exist in. Almost like they’re fantastic animals in some way. I think it might be a result of these children’s books that we used to read. There’s this turn in literature that has happened in the last few years where we try to capture the tone and even the narrative style and sometimes even the exact narratives of very simple children’s books. I wonder if it’s this new return to try to recapture innocence, recapture our childhood, in the same way that we would recapture a children’s book as if we want to live in the world of the children’s book that we read when we were six years old. LD: You’re involved in many different collaborative pursuits. You recently performed with a band, you’ve worked as and with an illustrator, and you’ve worked on Team Sad and two other upcoming chapbooks. What draws you to collaboration? ZS: Poetry is about connection. It’s about communicating something that’s kind of [...] | 4/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 49 Episodes |
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