"Torn, Disassembled and Ostensibly Glamorous In The Cyber Age": An Evening With Juliana Huxtable

An artist, writer and, as DJ, a veritable steward of the New York nightlife scene, Juliana Huxtable will deliver a mix of performances and readings tomorrow night at Franklin Street Works through the signature personas of Internet-addicted cyborg, priestess, witch and trans girl.

At a time when such topics as LGBT recognition, sexual violence in the armed forces (click here for a related PA entry) and the creepy acquisition by a leading search engine of a series of leading military robot manufacturers pepper the news, her staple fascinations with human identity, physicality, technology and the cross-fertilization of such themes could not be more timely, and will be expressed with the help of friends from the fomenting Manhattan creative 

underground.

Anachronism (2013)

A contributor to the ongoing FSW exhibit, Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art, Juliana is a member of the House of Ladosha art collective and has written for, or been referenced in, Maker Magazine, ArtForum and Mousse. Click here for a recent interview. She has appeared at Envoy Enterprises, Artists Space, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other New York venues. The Juliana 1 video from her Vimeo channel has unrestrained observations on urban pretension, body objectification and gender expression in character-based video games. Get a feel for her punchy delivery in this hilarious segment from TMI:

You can contact and keep up with Juliana's activities on Facebook.

When:

Saturday, March 1, 2014

5:30-7:30 PM

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Phone/e-mail:

203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

Perspectives Molded by Pain: A Writer’s Journey

Speaking through a selection of visceral, poignant poetry and passages from a memoir-in-progress, lifelong Connecticut resident Cora Santaguida, this Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, will describe her experiences coping, adapting, accomplishing and just plain surviving through the legacy of formative psychological and emotional trauma over the last few decades.

Forced to retire early in 2003 from mentoring, job coaching and youth empowerment work in the public sector, Cora sustained tenacity in shining light on personal shadows both for her own benefit and that of many others enduring similar challenges in silence, accumulating experiences by turns moving, infuriating and generous-minded, all contributing to the profound interplay between self-expression and self-discovery on the road to recovery.

A cum laude graduate from The College Rochelle with a BA in English, Cora has run for public office twice in Stamford (where she serves as a Justice of the Peace). She continues to involve herself in political and social justice activities, mostly surrounding the 10 key values of the Green Party.

While repression might serve as a short-term self-defense mechanism against violent affronts to one’s potential, dignity or welfare, many suffer in modern society because of its own collective exercise of a repression that is more willful in its evasiveness than subconsciously protective.

Current proposals by the Pentagon to artificially excise horrific events from the memories of war veterans (theoretically eliminating PTSD), is the most recent of numerous efforts at manipulating consciousness (see here and here), symptomatic of a way of life so ill both in how it defines--and globally projects--itself, that it would sooner reshape the human condition from scratch before acknowledging the fundamentals of human sensitivity.

Whatever is repressed, suppressed or decompensated for, the following video to Five Finger Death Punch’s “Remember Everything” (whose lyrics inspired one of Cora’s tattoos)  argues with authority and anguish how that which is done to the mind and body is at least as important as the impact it has on what both do over the course of a lifetime: 

Tongiht's 'Missed Connections' Event At Franklin Street Works Rescheduled

Postponed until next week due to today's storm, New York artist Ingrid Burrington’s Valentine’s Day-themed talk Connection Over Missed Connections at Franklin Street Works will scrutinize romantic longing across various cities as mapped out through a leading Franklin Street Works online classifieds hub. “Analysis of Craigslist Missed Connections postings and communities,” notes Ingrid of her show Taxonomy of Missed Connections, “offers a glimpse into the loneliness and sexual tension that serve as the linchpin of any thriving metropolitan environment.”

Part of FSW’s Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art exhibition, Taxonomy of Missed Connections is also a component of Ingrid’s Center for Missed Connections project and its mission to encourage a collective embrace of loneliness, both poetic and banal, within public spaces.

Find out more about Ingrid at her website, lifewinning.com. A free exhibition, Neuromast is curated by Taliesen Gilkes-Bower and FSW Creative Director Terri C Smith and will be on view through March 9.

When:

NEW DATE--Thursday, February 20, 2014

6:30-8:00 PM

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

(Light snacks and a signature holiday drink to be served)

Phone/e-mail:

203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

The "Socially-Acceptable Insanity" Of Being In Love... With Someone Else's Idea Of It

Richard Duffee

In the first of two provocative area presentations this week in response to Valentine’s Day, Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name? will plumb the Crusades, church/state relations, Islamic poetry, women's rights and other topics when Richard Duffee shares his research and conclusions at Curly’s tomorrow night at 7:30 regarding the origins of the wildly impossible conception of romantic love, incorporated as part of modern industrial life.

A PoemAlley fixture, egalitarian analyst of social power and author (The Slow News of Need, available from the “Collections and Anthologies” section below), Richard elaborates: “The shocking thing about Western love poetry is that the tradition does not assume one needs to know anything about the recipient of one's affections in order for one's claims to love to be credible. It's difficult to realize how weird this is because it's a feature of the cultural landscape that's been around for 900 years.” 

Because the output of Medieval troubadours and trobairitz (female troubadours) reflected their own romantic conceptions, as opposed to actual people, this helped set the stage, along with numerous intertwined social influences, for the senhalic, or fill-in-the-blank, adaptability of, well, affected affections as purveyed by today’s “sentiment-industrial complex” of greeting cards, candy, door-stopper-grade bridal magazines and wedding planning consultancies.

As for Tinsletown’s generous contributions, Spike Jonze’s Her (Warner Bros./Annapurna Pictures, 2013) makes a strikingly insightful break from this cheapening fixation in its portrayal of an emotionally hollowed-out divorcee’s romance with a self-learning computer program, set against a day-after-tomorrow Los Angeles which is, appropriately, Hallmark Card-cozy, while stringent in its devotion to socially-received (as opposed to individual) relational expectations:

Ingrid Burrington

Also surveying the urban crossroads of devotion and the digital, New York artist Ingrid Burrington’s pre-Valentine’s Day talk Connection Over Missed Connections at Franklin Street Works will scrutinize romantic longing across various cities as mapped out through a leading Franklin Street Works online classifieds hub. “Analysis of Craigslist Missed Connections postings and communities,” notes Ingrid of her show Taxonomy of Missed Connections, “offers a glimpse into the loneliness and sexual tension that serve as the linchpin of any thriving metropolitan environment.”

Part of FSW’s Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art exhibition, Taxonomy of Missed Connections is also a component of Ingrid’s Center for Missed Connections project and its mission to encourage a collective embrace of loneliness, both poetic and banal, within public spaces.

Find out more about Ingrid at her website, lifewinning.com. A free exhibition, Neuromast is curated by Taliesen Gilkes-Bower and FSW Creative Director Terri C Smith and will be on view through March 9.

When:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

6:30-8:00 PM

Joaquin Phoenix in "Her"

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

(Light snacks and a signature holiday drink to be served)

Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

Autumn’s Firestorms And Hellfire Missiles Over Lethe

Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic guest this Monday night is Connecticut native Charlie Bondhus, last year’s Main Street Rag Poetry Award-winner for All the Heat We Could Carry, his latest collection, and finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Book Award.

A prolific contributor to many publications covering an impressively wide geographical and editorial swath (the Hawai'i Review, the Alabama Literary Review, not to mention CounterPunch, the online and print publication of social and political commentary), Charlie’s versatility of theme and construction is supported by a unifying attention to vibrant imagery and emotive detail.

Compare the intimate, yet broadly filial tone of the sample below with “Looking Back” , “Syria” and “Return Ghazal”, a trio of pieces from last November's Poets' Basement posting on CR, which invoke the same human dimension as "October", but applied to the financial/political connivance behind the pursuit of global hegemony by framing current scenarios of visceral and ethical razing within a mythological conscience:

October

Five months after coming home,

you stomp out to the yard

after I insist on helping you,

the rake’s tines scraping the driveway,

making a nails-on-chalkboard sound.

I watch from the window, hurt but admiring

the ease with which you roll

the season’s lovely casualties

into large and small heaps,

working until a sudden gust

turns the morning’s labor

into a firestorm,

red and yellow clumps breaking apart

and spreading themselves across the lawn.

You return in the evening

sweat-covered and dirty,

leaning on your rake,

bearing, by way of apology,

the last chrysanthemums of the season,

a dying man

rediscovering his beauty.

Charlie graduated from Saint Anselm College, received his MFA from Goddard College and his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. He teaches English and creative writing at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey. 

Previous collections include How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2007 Blue Light Press First Book Award, and two chapbooks, What We Have Learned to Love (winner of the Brickhouse Books’ 2008-2009 Stonewall Award) and Monsters and Victims (Gothic Press, 2010). Click here to enjoy this playful tribute (along with other videos), "Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman", performed in 2009 at Amherst Books.

And click here if you would like to correspond with Charlie and keep up with his activities on Facebook.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), now beginning at 7:00 p.m.

  

For more information:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248