Live From City Lights: The City Lights Podcast

Guillermo Gómez-Peña celebrates the release of Conversations Across Borders

jeff — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:17:06 +0000

On Thursday, January 12, 2012, Guillermo Gómez-Peña stopped by City Lights Bookstore for an evening of performative pedagogy in celebration of his most recent publication Conversations Across Borders (Seagull Press). A long time City Lights author, Gómez-Peña was joined by City Lights Executive Director Elaine Katzenberger, as well as Canadian theorist and editor of Gomez-Peña’s recent book, Laura Levin.

For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

Conversations Across Borders was published by my padrino Richard Schechner and edited by Canadian theorist Laura Levin. It contains an anthology of very bold (and performative) conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with rebel curators, pioneering artists, cultural anthropologists, art historians, activist writers—in essence a wide variety of intelligent, engaged and fierce contemporary art practitioners and theorists. It also contains gorgeously provocative never before published photos. My Canadian sister Laura Levin and the amazing team of Seagull books made sure that the book functions both as an accessible (and activist) treatise on theory as well as a beautiful art/ifact.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto. She is the editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press) as well as a number of collections on performance, art and public space (in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Performance Research). She is Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. A director, dramaturg and performance deviser, she recently has collaborated on several transnational performance projects that investigate the intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies,

Elaine Katzenberger is the Executive Director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, an editor, and past friend and collaborator with Pocha Nostra.

Percival Everett reads at City Lights

jeff — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:21:58 +0000

On Tuesday, December 13, 2011, celebrated author Percival Everett stopped by the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to celebrate the release of a tryptych of new books from Graywolf Press: Assumption, Damned If I Do, and Erasure.

About Assumption: “Half zen koan, half Jim Thompson, and 100% Percival Everett, the twined mysteries of Assumption provide all the lively satisfactions of ‘genre’ fiction, while describing yet another arc in the trajectory of Everett’s brilliant and protean career.”—Christopher Sorrentino

About Damned If I Do: A cop, a cowboy, several fly fisherman, and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories.

About Erasure: Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback.

———-

Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of sixteen books, including Wounded, American Desert, Erasure, and Glyph. He lives in L.A. and British Columbia.

Victoria Nelson and Jack Werner Stauffacher celebrate the release of Bestiary of My Heart: Cautionary Tales

jeff — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:00:54 +0000

On Wednesday, December 14, 2011, Victoria Nelson joined Jack Werner Stauffacher as City Lights celebrated Jack’s 91st Birthday! on the occasion of the release of Bestiary Of My Heart: Cautionary Tales (InkerMen Press) by Victoria Nelson.

King Cobra. Draculess. Son of the Pope. Black leather cats. Panther-parrots. A wild child. An eighty-year-old woman eight months pregnant. A man and a woman. A woman and a woman. A woman and a dead man. Flash floods and earthquakes. Spirit animals and strange herbs. The pig that knew the trick. A man’s heart roasted on a spit. A red ruby. Stories drawn from dreams, anecdotes, and other unexpected sources over thirty years.

Tall tales, cataclysms, transformations.

‘Victoria Nelson must stop being a national secret. What a writer she is! And what a mind she is—brilliant, original, imaginative; her language dazzles. A splendid critic and storyteller, she is also an authority on the literature of the spectral and the surreal. In A Bestiary of My Heart, Nelson and Deborah Barrett achieve a mesmerizing fusion of tale and drawing reminiscent of the high art of Bruno Schulz.’ – Cynthia Ozick

‘Rather than a bestiary, Victoria Nelson could well call her book a treasure chest or jewel box. She gifts the reader with gems, crowns, amulets—poetry. Resplendence. Deep Satisfaction.’ – Maxine Hong Kingston

Victoria Nelson is the author of the award-winning The Secret Life of Puppets, and its companion volume, the forthcoming, Gothika. Her other works include a memoir, a study of creativity, and a previous collection of stories Wild California. She was the co-translator of Letters, Drawings, and Essays of Bruno Schultz and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jack Werner Stauffacher is an master printer, typeface designer, and fine book publisher. He has taught at the Carnegie Mellon University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the founder of Greenwood Press and examples of his work can be found in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Wendell Potter reads from Deadly Spin

jeff — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:51:01 +0000

Here’s a newly released recording from the archive: Wendell Potter discussing Deadly Spin at City Lights Bookstore!

Wendell Potter, former Vice President of Communications at CIGNA, made national headlines in 2009 when he testified before a Senate panel, disclosing how profit-driven insurance companies engage in practices forcing millions of Americans into under-insured or uninsured status.

Since then he has worked tirelessly as an outspoken critic of corporate PR and the distortion and fear manufactured by the wealthy health insurance industry. It is a PR juggernaut that is bankrolled by millions of dollars, rivaling lobbying budgets and underwriting many “non-partisan” and “grassroots” organizations. His book, Deadly Spin, is not just an expose of health insurers but a stark warning that corporate spin is distorting our democracy.

—

Wendell is currently a senior analyst at the The Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan nonprofit that produces original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern; the senior fellow on health care for the Center for Media and Democracy, an independent, non-partisan public interest organization; and speaks out on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. He also serves as a consumer liaison representative for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

In widely covered testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee in June of 2009, Wendell disclosed how insurance companies, as part of their efforts to boost profits, have engaged in practices that have resulted in millions of Americans being forced into the ranks of the uninsured. Wendell also described how the insurance industry has developed and implemented strategic communications plans, based on deceptive public relations, advertising and lobbying efforts, to defeat reform initiatives.

Since then Wendell has testified before two House committees, briefed several members of Congress and their staffs, appeared with members of Congress at several press conferences, spoken at more than 100 public forums, and has been the subject of numerous articles in the U.S. and foreign media.

William E. Jones reads from Halstead Plays Himself

jeff — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:00:54 +0000

On Thursday, December 8, 2011 at City Lights Bookstore, William E. Jones read from Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotexte Books).

Fred Halsted‘s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy.

Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989.

In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted–to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time–and what it looked like when it collapsed.

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.

Stephen Elliott reads “Verne’s Wife” from Charles Bukowski’s Absence of the Hero

jeff — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:20:56 +0000

Listen to Stephen Elliott reading “Verne’s Wife” a classic short story by Charles Bukowski, collected in Absence of the Hero.

Absence of the Hero contains much of Charles Bukowski’s earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze, and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls “Playing and Being the Poet.” Among the book’s highlights are tales of his infamous public readings (“The Big Dope Reading,” “I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls”); a review of his own first book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of getting lost in the Utah woods (“Bukowski Takes a Trip”). Yet the book also showcases the other Bukowski—an astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own “Manifesto” to his account of poetry in Los Angeles (“A Foreword to These Poets”) to idiosyncratic evaluations of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior.

Our second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Hero is a major addition to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to the wide range of his work.
“He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It’s a full house—read ‘em and weep.”
—Tom Waits

“This second volume of Bukowski’s uncollected stories and essays offers all that Bukowski is known for—wry obscenity, smutty wisdom, seeming ramblings whose hidden smarts catch you unaware—but in addition there are moments here in which he takes off the mask and strips away the bravado to show himself at his most vulnerable and human. A must for Bukowski aficionados.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and The Open Curtain

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diarieswhich has been described as “genius” by both the San Francisco Chronicleand Vanity Fair. The Adderall Diaries was the best book of the year in Time Out New York, a best of 2009 in Kirkus Reviews, and one of 50 notable books in the San Francisco Chronicle.

His novel, Happy Baby, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award as well as a best book of the year in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice.

Elliott’s writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is the editor of The Rumpus.

Nelson George Reading from The Plot Against Hip Hop

jeff — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:00:03 +0000

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Nelson George stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read and discuss his new novel, The Plot Against Hip Hop (Akashic Books).

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard/security expert D Hunter, suspects there’s much more to his death. An old cassette tape, the theft of a manuscript Robinson was working on, and some veiled threats suggest there are larger forces at work.

D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hard core fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, as the Illuminati, FBI agents, and West Coast gangstas roam the hard streets D Hunter walks down.

D Hunter is a tough black clad product of crime-ridden Brownsville, Brooklyn, a man whose family has been devastated by violence and who has dedicated himself to protecting people in an age of insecurity. Hunter has his own secrets, his own vulnerabilities, which he fights to overcome as he becomes a reluctant private eye. After reading The Plot Against Hip Hop, you’ll never hear the music the same way.

Nelson George is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture and is the author of several award-winning books on the subject, including Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues; he also coauthored (with Simmons) Russell Simmons’s autobiography Life and Def. He directed Queen Latifah in the HBO film Life Support, and is an executive producer of VH1′s long-running Hip Hop Honors broadcast.

What has been said about Nelson George’s work:

“One of our coolest cultural critics has written a mystery page-turner about the underbelly of hip hop, and it’s woven with signature whip-smart insights into music. Nelson George’s smooth security-guard-turned-detective, a.k.a. D, scours a demimonde as glamorous as Chandler’s Los Angeles. This plot has more twists and turns than a pole dancer, and D definitely needs an encore–he’s destined to become a classic.”
–Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club

“There are few people who can put the past seventy years of urban reality into the perspective of the most recent hip minute like Nelson George. The Plot Against Hip Hop is no exception. Nelson George braids actual facts and fictional characters flawlessly into a time-tunneled walk along various developments in this now-megabusiness called hip hop. For those that say they love hip hop as well as the total legacy it evolved from, it bodes well for them to keep this very close to their head, heart, and attention.”
–Chuck D, Public Enemy

“Nelson George is one of my greatest influences as a writer… He inspired me in many ways, and he continues to inspire with The Plot Against Hip Hop.”
–Talib Kweli

“The most accomplished black music critic of his generation.”
–Washington Post Book World

“Perhaps one of the seven greatest books ever written. It has the realness of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the warmth of The Color Purple, and the page count of Tuesdays with Morrie. It’s a must read.”
–Chris Rock, on City Kid

“Reads like a hip-hop answer to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.”
–New York Times, on One Woman Short

Kenneth Patchen Centennial Celebration

jeff — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:41:48 +0000

Jonathan Clark, Bart Schneider, and friends stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 to celebrate the release of Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection (Kelly’s Cove Press).

“I am ambitious in a larger sense.” wrote Kenneth Patchen to Thomas Wolfe in 1937. The young writer went on to justify his claims, producing over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose, along with painting-poems, silkscreen prints, drawings, and other graphic works. Patchen, one of the 20th century’s leading experimentalists, gained widespread attention and notoriety through such books as The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941). His readings of poetry and jazz were a phenomenon in the 1950s. Almost 40 years after his death, Patchen’s works continue to intrigue and inspire lovers of modern literature worldwide.

Patchen, born in 1911 in the Ohio steel-mill town of Niles, lived and wrote mainly on the East Coast until 1950, when he and his wife, Miriam, moved to San Francisco. Living in North Beach, he created his well-known “painted books” and performed poetry-jazz in the City’s avante-garde clubs. A crippling back injury restricted his activities in the late 1950′s; the Patchens moved to Palo Alto, where he continued to write and paint until his death at age 61.

Printer and photographer Jonathan Clark, editor of this centenary selection, befriended Kenneth and Miriam Patchen as a teenager in the 1960′s. He helped establish the Patchen archive at the UC Santa Cruz library and eventually served as executor of the Patchen estate.

Clark selected poems, drawings, ad paintings spanning the author’s career for this collection. Verses well-known and obscure appear, along with drawings and painting-poems, some reproduced for the first time in color. This Kelly Cove Press edition is a worthy celebration of one of the most intriguing figures of American modernism.

Daniel Pinchbeck reads from Notes from the Edge Times

jeff — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:00:06 +0000

Visionary author Daniel Pinchbeck helps us understand that we don’t need to wait for the dawning of the next age to radically change our perspectives. No stranger to City Lights Books, he stopped by on November 8, 2010 to read from Notes from the Edge Times, a collection of recent columns, articles, and essays that amount to an extraordinary mosaic view of the hopes, nightmares, and signs of breakthrough that mark our present era.

Pinchbeck examines the current economic collapse (an event he had foreseen by many months), radical political and ecological alternatives, the uses of psychedelics for spiritual insight, the revival of the sexual revolution, unexplained phenomena such as crop circles and the Norway spiral, the imminent (and often-misunderstood) question of 2012, and what it means to be an artist in a time of radical change. Pinchbeck’s virtuosity as a social critic, on full display in these pieces, is his ability to illuminate real and serious questions within unconventional topics that most literary intellects are unwilling to touch, from secret weapons systems to extrasensory abilities to the intelligence of plant life.

In Notes from the Edge Times, Pinchbeck does more than critique present- day questions and conflicts; he provides fresh ideas for living more consciously now, and for constructing our own more enlightened futures, even as the world around us faces profound environmental, social, and spiritual challenges.

Dennis Cooper and Dodie Bellamy celebrate the release of their new books, The Marbled Swarm and the buddhist

jeff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:01:37 +0000

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Dennis Cooper & Dodie Bellamy joined us at City Lights to celebrate the release of their new books, The Marbled Swarm and the buddhist.

The long-anticipated new novel from literary icon Dennis Cooper is a moody and foreboding tale of a son’s unwitting devotion to a possibly insane father. The Marbled Swarm (Harper Perennial) tells the story of a son raised by a charmingly psychopathic father and taught a private language only the two of them know. With its Parisian and French countryside setting; its trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine that obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender; and its completely original, lilting voice; The Marbled Swarm may read as a departure from Cooper’s earlier work – a new beginning, of sorts. But once again – with secret passages, events that may or may not have happened, and a father-son relationship strangely heavy with sexual tension – readers will find themselves enveloped in a world only Dennis Cooper could create.

What is personal, what is public? In our electronic age, can anybody tell the difference? While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. In her experiment in writing through states of extremis, she explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and her confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. the buddhist (Allone Editions) becomes a celebration of marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. This volume contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line. Like Duras’ The Lover, Bellamy’s writing glorifies the abject and the discarded; it is a passionate evocation of a love lost and a raw depth plumbed.

Dennis Cooper – called a “disquieting genius” by Vanity Fair – is the acclaimed author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France’s Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God, Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and Smothered in Hugs. His plays “Jerk” and “Them” are performed widely across Europe and the United States.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Dodie is the author of Feminine Hijinx, Broken English, The Letters of Mina Harker, and Pink Steam.