QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

Monday, March 15, 2010

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place, Tuesday, March 30th

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

presents

Clifford Chase

and

Liz Brown

curated by Nicholas Boggs

Tuesday, March 30th

at Dixon Place: 161A Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

CLIFFORD CHASE is the author of a novel, WINKIE (2006) and a memoir, THE HURRY-UP SONG (1995). He edited the anthology, QUEER 13: LESBIAN AND GAY WRITERS RECALL SEVENTH GRADE (1998), and his writing has appeared in publications ranging from McSWEENEY's to NEWSWEEK.COM.

LIZ BROWN's writing has appeared in BOOKFORUM, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, and other publications.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

presents

Sarah Schulman and Charles Rice-González

curated by Nicholas Boggs

Tuesday, February 23rd

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

Sarah Schulman is the author of 14 books, most recently the novel THE MERE FUTURE, the nonfiction book TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and the forthcoming THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: Witness to a Lost Imagination. She and Jim Hubbard co-direct the ACT UP Oral History Project www.actuporalhistory.org, which will show at White Columns gallery in September.

Charles Rice-González is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. His debut novel, Chulito, about a tough, young Latino man, coming out in the South Bronx will be published by Alyson Books in May 2010.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

QT: Hilton Als and Quince Mountain, Tuesday October 13th

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

present:

HILTON ALS

+

QUINCE MOUNTAIN

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

HILTON ALS is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He also writes for The New York Review of Books.

QUINCE MOUNTAIN, whose writing has been featured in Killing the Buddha and DoubleX, is currently working on a line of greeting cards for transgendered folks and their loved ones. Happy Manniversary!


Tuesday, July 14, 2009

QT Tonight! Mike Albo + Ryan Berg

(Unfortunately, Suzanne Snider, who was supposed to read tonight, can't make it. But fortunately, the utterly fantastic memoirist Ryan Berg will be joining Mike Albo for a stupendous reading! Don't miss it!)

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place
and the HOT! Festival
present:

MIKE ALBO
+
RYAN BERG

Tuesday, July 14

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington
doors at 7 / reading at 7:30

MIKE ALBO is a writer and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn. His second novel (written with his longtime friend Virginia Heffernan) is the cult humor classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. His performances of the character can be found on YouTube, like everything else in the world. His first novel, the critically acclaimed Hornito, came out in 2000. Albo is also known as The Critical Shopper columnist for the New York Times. He has performed numerous solo shows, including Spray, Please Everything Burst, and My Price Point, as well as with the comedy trio Unitard. He is also a founding member of the legendary downtown NYC naked glittery dance troupe The Dazzle Dancers.

RYAN BERG, a graduate of The New School, received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College in 2008. There, he was a Hertog and Nita Koblin Fellow. Ryan is the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is currently working on a memoir about the two years he spent as a caseworker for GLBT youth living in a group home in New York City. The first chapter of this book appeared in Ploughshares.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Tuesday, July 14: MIKE ALBO + SUZANNE SNIDER

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

and the HOT! Festival

present:

MIKE ALBO

+

SUZANNE SNIDER

Tuesday, July 14

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington
doors at 7 / reading at 7:30

MIKE ALBO is a writer and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn. His second novel (written with his longtime friend Virginia Heffernan) is the cult humor classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. His performances of the character can be found on YouTube, like everything else in the world. His first novel, the critically acclaimed Hornito, came out in 2000. Albo is also known as The Critical Shopper columnist for the New York Times. He has performed numerous solo shows, including Spray, Please Everything Burst, and My Price Point, as well as with the comedy trio Unitard. He is also a founding member of the legendary downtown NYC naked glittery dance troupe The Dazzle Dancers.

SUZANNE SNIDER’s writing appears in many issues of The Believer and as part of several artists’ catalogs—with the work of Danica Phelps, Clare Rojas, Aaron Wexler, and Eve Sussman. She podcasts for The Guardian, and has worked as an oral historian/interviewer for HBO Productions, the New York Academy of Medicine, Columbia University, and the Judd Foundation. She teaches in the Media/Film Department at the New School University and co-curates KGB’s Nonfiction Night. Her work has been supported through fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the UCross Foundation Center. She is currently completing a book about two rival communes on adjacent land.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Tisa Bryant and Silas Howard read, but you're not supposed to know that.

Many thanks to all who braved the bitter cold, the roping wind, the stacks of sawdust, the "There is no show tonight" sign on the door last week (I'd tell you which night it was, but then I'd have to shoot you). Our first night in the new Dixon Place paradoxically furnished a return to the old Lower East Side arts scene: underground, unpermissioned, embracing danger, shattering rules. Art on the edge! Risky words!

Tisa Bryant's warm readings from her wonderful work on films and Silas Howard's idealistic odes to Mr. Hollywood and the jilted love found there heated things right up. Here are the intros from the event.

But first, please don't forget to come to the FINAL QT READING OF 2008:

Tuesday, December 9
doors at 7 PM / reading at 7:30
TRIPLE BOOK PARTY!
Douglas A. Martin (Your Body Figured)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (So Many Ways to Sleep Badly)
Magdalena Zurawski (The Bruise)

I scarce can breathe, I am so excited. See you then!

The intro of Silas:

The first time I saw Silas Howard was in 1995, and I totaled a car on the way there. It was a big Buick Century, a station wagon my mother had driven to work for roughly a decade before consigning it to me for my senior year of high school. I was taking a poetry class at the Bethesda Writers Center that met on Monday nights, but when word came down that dyke punk troupe Tribe 8 was on tour and had a Monday night gig at the 9:30 Club, it seemed that the universe was asking me to choose between being a poet and being a punk. I chose punk, and ditched the class. So at 7:30 that Monday, while my suburbanite classmates chawed at their sestinas, my cinnamon-scented Buick wagon lost its brakes, skidded 180 degrees around on a slicked Seven Locks Road, and finally came to a halt an inch or two shy of a low stone wall that separated the road’s grassy shoulder from a steep, wooded ravine.

My whole body trembling with adrenaline and averted demise, I turned the car around, drove on to my friend’s house, and went with him to the show, where Silas, whom I’d never met, was playing guitar.

Given this history, was I a little nervous about having Silas read tonight? Yes. I told him: “No guitars.”

But really, I want to embrace these places Silas’s work leads us—pointing a different direction than the one we meant to go, hanging between road and ravine, contemplating walls and precipices, hearing our hearts march irregularly in our temples. In his video and film work as well as his prose, creatures shapeshift, kids fall into a hole and become kid-monster hybrids, phantom genitalia consort with the periodically expelled organs of the sea cucumber. These malleable bodies suggest malleable selves and an unsteady relation between self and embodiment, making for an art easily as liberatory, if perhaps not quite as cathartic, as the ritual castration that took place onstage at the 9:30 Club, the night in 1995 that I totaled my car.

and of Tisa:

At Dia:Beacon, I recently spent a long time hanging out with a set of Fred Sandback works. Each of these works consists of lengths of colored yarn stretched taut, defining shapes and thus marking out the planes of space within them, making that empty space seem tangible and charged. The most moving of these works, to me, is a set of yarns that extend vertically, floor to ceiling, while appearing actually to thread through floor and ceiling into the world beyond, engaging a space more expansive than the gallery, perhaps infinitely so.

I thought of this work while I was reading Tisa Bryant’s elegant and far-reaching book Unexplained Presence, which takes up European cinema, literature, and visual art in a series of linked prose pieces that defy easy categorization or facile reading. Zooming in on the African presences in these works, Bryant fills the screen with the perhaps blown-out result of that zooming. We wander through these narratives as if half-lost, traversing the inverse tale that blooms when a silenced or marginal element becomes the centering or constitutive one.

As often as not, forces and processes outside the enclosed space of a given work of art set it in motion: an active and resistant pair of viewers, a filmmaker Bryant shows us in the process of shaping light and sound, Zola writing to Manet about Olympia. As these forces penetrate the work itself, conversely the reach of the art, and the sphere of its relevance, extends out of frame as well, perhaps infinitely, drawing all of history into its spectral embrace.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

On last night's marvelous reading of Corrine Fitzpatrick and Andrea Lawlor

Thanks so much to the many people who came out last night, filling the room (and, afterward, the bar) with keen intelligence and conviviality. Intros below. But first, we interrupt this recap to bring you this breaking news story.

JUST ANNOUNCED! The remainder of the QT season--which will take place in Dixon Place's brand new swanky space on Chrystie Street--is as follows:

Wednesday, November 19:
SILAS HOWARD [By Hook or by Crook (and other films)]
+
TISA BRYANT [Unexplained Presence (Leon Works)]

Tuesday, December 9:
Triple book party!!! with
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN
[Your Body, Figured (Nightboat)]
+
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
[So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights)]
+
MAGDALENA "NO MIDDLE NAME OR INITIAL" ZURAWSKI
[The Bruise, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (FC2)]

Now, the intros:

ON ANDREA LAWLOR

Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “What gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future.” Andrea Lawlor’s smart and engrossing Pocket Myths series, which invites artists across disciplines to provide new takes on major themes and characters from Greek myth, has for the past several years been putting that assertion to the test, yielding work that has been beautiful, meaningful, engaging, humorous, and provocative.

Lawlor’s own stories set myths in societies more familiar (to me, at least) than ancient Greece: long-closed dyke bars in Park Slope, grad-student parties in small towns. Often her characters behave disconnectedly, as if compelled, driven along by the force of ancient plotlines, structures, fantasies, and drives, but dressed here in language that glistens with energy and intelligence and heart.

Lévi-Strauss also writes of myths as language that exists above the linguistic level, inoculated by its enduringness against the effects of any particular translation. But Lawlor’s language is highly relevant here: If her writing uses the myth as a kind of eternal engine, the myth in turn luxuriates in the enchanting chassis of her wicked humor, the sharp social commentary she laces through the myths’ retellings—in short, her impeccable craft. Lawlor’s stories propel me through them in a way that few works of fiction do: with an inexorable thrust.

ON CORRINE FITZPATRICK

There’s a rigorous aesthetics of subtraction at work in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s stripped-down poetics. This is most overtly visible in Zamboangueña, a chapbook that came out this year and consists of taut, sly stanzas culled verbatim from her grandmother’s storytelling, built as much from what Corrine leaves out as what she includes.

This principle also animates her recent poems, one of which begins with a sentence that, read quickly on the page, seems at first to say “in this world there are problems,” and then you realize, a bit late, that you’d read it wrong; it says not world but word. And herein lies one of the chief problematics—or, as it appears in the line, post-subtraction, “problems”—in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s poetry: that to travel from experience to poetry, from world to word, can seem a function of diminution, of winnowing. Her work explores the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral challenges this leaves us with.

The vehicle, the medium of this movement, is perception, a process whose conditional and unstable character plays a key role in these poems (“throw specifics into doubt”). A siren, which could be a sound or a woman or both, dopplers itself out of form; a changing angle of light alters a landscape, as does a simple bodily movement: “turn conducts my view.” What can be counted on?

These poems’ caution, and their considered and erudite skepticism, exists to challenge the same tendencies in ourselves, their readers. Too, the poems seek ways to challenge this outlook. “I speak to you,” one poem begins, courageously setting aside momentarily all the ways that assertion could be undone. Another poem’s title, “emptiness has something to shout,” evinces a similar determination to escape paralysis or muteness without relinquishing theoretical and critical rigor.

The urge to subtract, as gracefully rendered in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s thoughtful, critical poems, leads us to explore by what terms we might attempt, through all our changing perceptual and intellectual frames, to build.