Honeymoon in Beppu
PAINT YOUR TEETH is a live event celebrating experimental literature, music and dance. It's held in Tokyo every two months or so.
PAINT YOUR TEETH 5 Line-up
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-The Annubhava Orchestra
-oninko!
-Steve Finbow
-Melissa Mann
-Sarah MacLeod + Soddy
-Chikanari Shukuka
-the zen stance
-jim²achin[e]
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Sunday, November 22nd @ Gamuso in Asagaya
American Romances | Essays by Rebecca Brown
Publisher: City Lights
This collection of mordant, poignant and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry and incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be "American."
The impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers in order to be accepted into the community has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: There's a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to all of our seamy, lurid cultural voyeurism. Whose stories are ours to tell and whose are not? Despite the collection's mostly playful and entertaining tone, what's being discussed quite seriously are the ways in which America has tried and failed to craft and tell its own story. Fully embracing the theory of the literary Romance as a place where the probable opens up into the impossible, Brown lets her imagination run wild and envisions unlikely meetings and fantastical connections that span the course of America's cultural history: the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne intersect as representatives of west coast hedonism and east coast Puritanism; Gertrude Stein presides over a same-sex religious movement; John Wayne and Shane stand in for the author's father who may or may not have been JFK's wing man during the Cuban Missile Crisis; a mad Finnish-American painter turns Seattle's Hooverville into heaven; H.G. Wells' Invisible Man reveals his/her secret sex life.Praise for American Romances:
"Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown's essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock n' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder."
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
"If Rebecca Brown's talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric to a pop standard. An homage a menage to America, exposing what's laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt."
Van Dyke Parks, composer/arranger
"Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo between the wafers, to the Inquisition to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats."
Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar
Desperate for spiritual salvation and solitude, as well as a place to dry out, he secretly retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's rustic cabin in the Big Sur woods. But his plan is foiled by his own inner demons, and what ensues that summer becomes the basis for Kerouac's gritty, yet lyrically told, semi-autobiographical novel, Big Sur.
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti's cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. (...)
Thesis Project
An integrated branding campaign based around the illustrative reinterpretation of classic book covers directed toward junior-high-school students. You can check out more of the bits and pieces here. Done while at Kent State.
The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the “freedom” that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.
The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, “an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine.” And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.
The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapman’s photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene as it actually happened.
Poet. Lover of academy and porch.
