POETRY READING AND RECEPTION WITH JEWELLE GOMEZ,KEVIN SIMMONDS AND MARVIN K. WHITE GOOD VIBRATIONS ON POLK ST. 1610 POLK STREET THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23 6:30PM~FREE COPIES OF LA AIDS PROJECT’S MOST RECENT ANTHOLOGIES! For more information: www.goodvibes.com or clombard@goodvibes.com.
Good Vibrations, the San Francisco institution for all things sexual, presents Jewelle Gomez, Kevin Simmonds and Marvin K. White reading from the anthology To Be Left with the Body, a collection of poetry, essays and short stories about black bi/gay men and HIV/AIDS published by the Los Angeles AIDS Project, on Thursday, October 23 at 6:30pm at Good Vibrations 1620 Polk Street (at Sacramento Street) San Francisco, CA 94109 (415) 345-0400. For more information contact Camilla Lombard at clombard@goodvibes.com or at (415) 974-8985 ext.201 or Kevin Simmonds at simmondskevin@gmail.com.
A founding member of GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), Ms. Gomez is the double Lambda Award-winning writer of The Gilda Stories. Mr. Simmonds is a writer and musician whose works, including “Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country,” have been performed throughout the US, Japan, the UK and the Caribbean. Mr. White, author of last rights and Nothin’ Ugly Fly, is a poet and co-founder of B/GLAM (Black Gay Letters and Arts Movement).
Bronx Indie Artists Alma Micic, Urayoan Noel, Ranjit Sahu, and Peter Selgin at Barnes & Noble
Oct 21 / 7:00 pm / Readings & Music / Barnes & Noble at Bay Plaza
Readings and Music by Four Bronx Indie Artists presented by the BCA’s Bronx Writers’ Center and Barnes & Noble. Featured artists are jazz singer Alma Micic who will sing selections from her latest CD, The Hours; spoken word artist Urayoan Noel who will read selections from his CD of spoken word performances; Ranjit Sahu, poet and self-published author of A Year in Love and Drunk, will read selections of his work; and fiction writer Peter Selgin, author of By Cunning & Craft and Drowning Lessons.
Barnes & Noble at Bay Plaza is located at 290 Baychester Avenue in the Co-op City section of the Bronx. To find out what’s happening at Barnes & Noble at Bay Plaza, please call 718-862-3945 or visit www.barnesandnoble.com (click on “Stores and Events”). Events at Barnes & Noble locations may change. Please call 718-862-3945 to confirm events. Admission to this event is free and all are Welcome. For additional information, e-mail Lydia Clark or call 718-931-9500 x35. Click here for a printable flyer.
Small Press Traffic Reading Series Friday, October 24, 7:30 p.m. Timken Lecture Hall California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco www.sptraffic.org
Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He’s received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD Holy Kid, (Kill Rock Stars Records) is in the sound archives of The Whitney Museum for American Art. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax. His books include, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books) and I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said. His recent project is a collaboration with Spanic Attack (www.spanicattack.com) called NORICUA, a noh-boricua inspired non-movement gaining worldwide momentum, whose non-ideologies have been performed in the Bronx, Berlin, Loisaida and Puerto Rico.
Albert Flynn DeSilver has recently begun his tenure as Marin County’s very first poet laureate. He is the author, most recently of Letters to Early Street (La Alameda Press, 2007), and Walking Tooth & Cloud (French Connection Press, 2007). Andrei Codrescu has said about Letters to Early Street: “This is one of our poets and we stand behind him (or to his side) in any fight, physical or literary, he might be involved in. Except maybe the situation he describes thus: ‘A stuffed moose has just capsized in my bed.’†Albert has published more than one hundred poems in literary journals worldwide including Zyzzyva, New American Writing, Jubilat, Jacket (Australia), Poetry Kanto (Japan), Van Gogh’s Ear (France), Hanging Loose, Exquisite Corpse, and many others. Some of his letters in correspondence with the poet Paul Hoover will be featured in the new book Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008).
As we were leaving the Living Word Festival, I tell Barb that it feels like everything is happening in its proper order. Attending Paul Flores’ USF talk on the lineage of hip-hop, finding Nikki Giovanni’s interview on the connections between hip-hop and folk culture, and then having this festival go down right here in West Oakland’s own Lil Bobby Hutton Park (aka DeFermery Park).
Props to everyone at Youth Speaks for putting together a gathering that brought together so many of of the classic elements (MCing, DJing, and Graf) with the modern realities of urban survival (voter registration, grass roots lobbying, local sustainable produce, and affordable building materials) and all under the umbrella of arts awareness. The result was a general attitude of shared open knowledge, respect of individual experience, block party revelry, community outreach, and everyone looking out for their own personal good time.
One of the highlights was seeing Town Park in full effect with a wide array of skaters from every demo, age group, and ethnic makeup you could imagine. The only material requirement: bring your own board. The only non-participant requirement: Get your skate on or find a safe spot to watch.
From the distance I was viewing the skaters, I imagined that it didn’t matter how fancy or new your skateboard was, all that mattered is how hard you rode and your commitment to push yourself a little further to get to that next trick. More than anything, it reminded me of the real spirit of hip-hop’s origins, how you take what you got and turn it into an art form.
The tag line of the festival was red, black and GREEN in a nod to the Bay Area’s consistent commitment to diversity and environmentalism which was no big surprise but it was chill to find out that even the paint the graf artists were using were eco-friendly. Nice!
Sadly, we couldn’t stick around for the headliner of the festival, the mighty Mos Def, since we had already committed to attending the Korean Diaspora Reading at Eastwind with Lee Herrick and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, but we did get a chance to hear Los Rakas bring it with an infectious, carefree, and dynamic energy was well in line with the vibe of the festival. Their lyricals were on point with one MC acting as the sonorous sound canvas full of rolling Rs, booming echoes, and long drones as a frame for his partners crisp, staccato cadence. All the while paying homage to their roots in Panama, the Fruitvale, and sharing props with the woman providing their beats–DJ Leydis.
You better believe that we’re making plans for next year’s festival and doing our best to stick around for the whole day.
