HEY, WAIT UP! CHANGE OF PLANS!

FALSE ALARM everyone--

Between Aesthletics in the afternoon and the show at Courtlandtland that we just found out about and the Fiddlesticks show and lecture, there was just too much at once for anyone to go to everything (which would be perfect); and additionally the weekend's outlook had turned sour for Megan to come up from Washington too. So we are POSTPONING THE LECTURE and the FINAL FIDDLESTICKS until NEXT SATURDAY at 8 PM.

Happily, this means that not only everyone else, but we of the Anti-Central NJPNA committee can hopefully attend Whiffle Hurling and the show. And perhaps Brad Chriss will be able to come up from Washington along with Megan and visit us as well; and if not we can all berate him via email and the blog! Huzzah!

SEE YOU NEXT WEEKEND!!!!!!

VIM VOM VIM!

FIDDLESTICKS #2 VIDEO TOUR!

As promised, here's the video tour of FIDLESTICKS #3, with poem machine by Charlotte Whalen, video installation by Alan Reed (which you hear playing in this documentation), and ink washes and surgery-curation by Tsubasa Berg.

C.o.N. & what this means for you.

! am hop!ng that Caraths!sm of Narcot!ca w!ll get the!r acts together so that they m!ght !gn!te a stellar event, bend!ng & stretch!ng sound & s!ght w!th focus/hocus & !ntent/untent. the corpse needs re-an!mated, needs a toe na!l cl!pp!ng, scotch guard!ng, !ng!ng!ng...

Are there any plans float!ng out there for what we m!ght do when we once aga!n face each other? !f not, how bout we start hammer!ng out the !deas on th!s forum?

!'m stat!ng r!ght here that ! want real!ty to r!p l!ke a sheet. the shepard shall be struck & the flock shall be scattered.

What say you, my heart!es? !s th!s what ye have sh!pped for? Aye, ! th!nk ye be brave.

plus, !'m try!ng to get a Rape Van performance sh!pped out !n t!me for the fest!val. Matt just won't stay !n the box.

the big drum in a room of 200 hundred makes you feel better about the 2 trillion

And so it starts! [as soon as I figure out how to post photos on this thing; SHOULDN'T take very long...]

And my tongue hurts. Fucking christ...

Either way, this couldn't have started without a nice ROMEO Y JULIETA, [CHURCHILL EN TUBO] from hit it big and caressing it around while apparently shredding my lungs. Apparently I was better than everyone else because of my Churchill.

DA! DA! DA!

Somewhere along the line I entered with Brad Chriss' 'Hermaphrodite' reading where he had just started Chapter [5] of blue spandex of two mates' copulation ['Copulation'] with lilac teeth? Sliding.

And then into John M. Bennett readings where things were fucking sweet. I haven't heard Brad read any Bennett before so it was interesting to see his configur/tranfor-mation. Its an interesting comparison to any of Olchar's performances since their (that of their performances') mode of existance have a harsh execution with different skins.

The stack of Bennett poems/mailings at once started a whirlpool even escaping the pool quite a bit until I got around to it... apparently translating it into this:

I remember one what told me: 'craemb'

After a few short minutes, this bastard offspring rolled around sort of unknowingly in its vile and bastard-like bowels all over the space and out the door (and up the steps, [into the elevator], down the hall, into a wooden rack, on the wall, onto a screw, back out the door, into the elevator, and up the steps, and behind the steps into the door, in reverse and eventually back into the room. When the wind cleared, you could smell the caramelized stench of a slick, roasted brut saloon. - Mmmmmmmm.

Within it, this happened (It happened.): cell phone coagulating feedback, slide whistle tails, [mike gravel], bennett, lung crackling shredding, cigars, fedoras, glass, tape, an exquisite corpse, pens, markers, people, sarah granett, tomorrow never dies, old ink, french, palindrome, a man who once drew naked in front of machines because he thought they were alive,


[a;rsogiajrja;laksjdf<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>]

Anyway, photos could do some of the approximating too.

LNYLNYLNY

Eric [?], ?, Steve D[?], William Salmon, Brad Chriss, ?

Brad Chriss

?, Naqeeb

Brad Chriss, Martha Clippenger, Eric, ?, O. Lindsann

Christa Lenz

Lindsann

Left: Sarah Granett

'Tsubasa Berg'

And... That's it for now since its 4:29am on a Sunday Night.

Good Morning and Good Night.

----

Don't forget Fiddle Sticks, this Saturday, March 8th with a 'Hector Clan meets Britney's Plastic Surgen' meets Silent Soiree meets Iuk Kide reading.

Video from the FIDDLESTICKS #1 Reading

Here are some highlights from the readings of Brad Chriss's and John M. Bennett's work at the kick-off for the first installment of the FIDDLESTICKS gallery:

Chriss introduces his set with commentary and a chapter from the Comte de Lautréamont's 'Chants de Maldoror' of 1869.

Introductory commentary and Chriss reads his poem 'A Divine Crackle'





Chriss reads his poem 'hermaphrodite.'





W. Fry reads Bennett's 'Jleeber'; O. Lindsann & B. Chriss rip J.M. Bennett; Fry & Chriss rorrim Bennett.





Lindsann and Fry tag-team Bennett





B. Chriss chortles JMB





The whole crowd gives Bennett a go in turns, culminating in T. Butković translating him into horn.





W. Fry stirs up Bennett's 'La M al'





Lindsann and a guest split duties on a Be Blank Consort piece.





W. Fry & T. Butković turn Bennett upside down and inside out





A little Noisemaker-tower of babel is constructed to Bennett as babbled by Fry and Lenny Corea (responsible for the wall drawing facing the door of the gallery).





Chriss and Butković shred Bennett with their lungs.





Lindsann throttles Cantar del Huff in the midst of inexcusable craziness that is ENTIRELY John Bennett's fault, we assure you.





Jamie Bruno (responsible for the forest strings amidst which this all takes place) phones Bennett in from a lavatory someplace, to the support of everyone else. Everyone else pulls their cell phones out too.





Megan Blafas and Warren Fry trap Bennett between a rock and a hard place.




We may post a few more over the next couple days, we're still going through the footage! And look out VERY soon for official information on the next FIDDLESTICKS evolution this coming Saturday as Tsubasa Berg, Charlotte Whalen, Angee Lennard, and Alan Reed move in to the L&F Gallery.

Olchar's Report on the Chriss/Bennett Reading

The FIDDLESTICKS exhibition, a three-month show at the Lost & Found Gallery leading up to the Anti-Festival in June, opened last Saturday with work by Bradley Chriss, Lenny Corea, and Jamie Bruno. Photos and a video of what they did with the space are posted below, Lenny's vaguely Cthuloid clusters of phalluses wrapping around the wall, merging into Brad's choratic and androgenous prima materia, with Jamie's string angling across the space, slicing off the corners, and wrapping itself around the appendages of Lenny's drawing.

At 8:00 the series kicked off with a reading by Chriss, followed by a reading by all of us of poems by John M. Bennett. Here's my own report of the event, hopefully other people who were there/involved will post their own too.

Brad's reading, formulated around the notion of the Hermaphrodite, moved back and forth between his thoughts on the hermaphrodite as a figure, and his poems in which he engages with it. He started out with a reading of the chapter on the hermaphrodite from Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror (Book II, Strophe 7), which certainly made my fucking day at the very least. As the chapter progressed, his rhythms and cadences began to subtly disrupt the text, they developed their own ebb and flow that worked independently of the grammar and sense of the passage. It's the first time I've heard someone other than myself voice this seminal text, and it was nice seeing this gesture of turning back to examine this tradition that he (and we all) are continuing, so that we can all take a measure of both how an Anti-Tradition has developed and changed, and also of the continual projects and concerns that we share with our counterparts 150 years ago... Brad then read two other poems on the hermaphrodite from his book-in-progress, hermaphrodite. These poems are quite a bit more constrained and refined than his earlier stuff (formally at least; in most other ways they're still pretty, mm, balls-out shall we say?) and his reading was more restrained as well, which (as a kind of microcosm of the progress of his set as a whole) made the final, a-semic strophe of the second poem that much more effective as it broke apart into rhythmic phonetics.

Which led us right into the Bennett reading.

We began with the (by now ritual) Distribution of the Noise-Makers. Warren, Brad, Tomislav Butković, and myself planned to take turns reading at random from a stack of Bennett poems to the accompaniment of everyone else--we had La M al, Sound Dirt, Cantar del Huff, Backwords (Quite a bit of Konstelanetz got read somewhere during the evening as well, an interesting added dimension of a joint endeavour on that book's model), and a thick sheaf of printouts of recent poems, especially from John's Globbolalia series. We would offer the opportunity to any of our guests to come up and give it a go themselves. As so often happens with New Jersey Post-Neo crowds, their energy was too restless to allow anything so straightforward to proceed. After several poems, Brad sent a stack of poems around the room, forcing everybody to step into John's linguistic world at least once. As the texts began to crisscross the room, there would sometimes be a couple going at once, sometimes read intentionally as simultaneous poems and sometimes nearly oblivious to each other; an impromptu assemblage grew out of the floor, and it took on the quality of a Brute Salon (the gatherings of collective automatism that have been going on intermittently in New Brunswick for the last couple of years), though the spine of Bennett's texts being read--sometimes as the centre of activity, sometimes on the periphery--provided a textual and (a-)linguistic continuity. Not what we had expected or planned, but it is nice to be surprised by your friends sometimes. Whenever new people showed up they were commanded to perform duets with us--Lenny, Andy Wolf, Megan Blafas when she arrived from Washington at the height of the thing. Jamie was unable to attend the event in person, so she called in to a speaker phone lent to us by the audience and belted out some Bennett poems from a bathroom stall someplace for about 15 minutes. (a side-note: as it happens, the set of Bennett poems performed by David Beris Edwards and I at the Anti-Festival in England a year and a half ago also took place in the toilet.) The phone sparked off some other ideas and Steve Dolnack started playing feedback produced by playing two cell phones off each other. At this point precise memories begin to fail me, perhaps other people can fill you in, but--eventually it all ended, apparently, everyone very kindly pitched in cleaning the place up, and a group of us went out and got pizza, then back home for further refreshments.

There will be some photos and video posted as soon as possible; we've got a pretty driving schedule here but we're getting everything up as quickly as possible.

This weekend--in fact later today--is BOSCH ON ICE, organised by Tom Russotti, which we'll get reports up on as well once we can do so; and the following weekend FIDDLESTICKS will undergo its first metamorphosis as Tsubasa Berg (New Brunswick), Alan Reed (Quebec), Charlotte Whalen (New Brunswick), and Angee Lennard (Chicago) move their stuff in; celebrated by (among other things) a Silent Soiree (this idea's been in the air for a long time) and a reading by myself (Olchar) of poems by the Ohio Post-Neo, Imogene Engine.

JOHN M. BENNETT READING Photos

Here are a few photos of the John M.Bennett reading at the Lost & Found Gallery, taken by Tsubasa Berg and other people as the camera was passed around. We'll get some video up presently as well, and a flickr account with more photos.

Brad Chriss reads from Lautréamont.


Chriss reads hermaphrodite.

Warren Fry reads John M. Bennett


Brad Chriss reads Bennett


Sarah Grannet gives Bennett a go


Olchar and a guest perform a Be Blank Consort piece.


Chriss Bemused by Bennett.


...and then this happened...


Jamie Bruno belts Bennett through a mobile phone.