this week in literature

CHARLES BUKOWSKI TRIBUTE 2011

charlesbukowski

SON OF A PONY READING SERIES
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia St. between West Fourth & Bleecker Sts.
Friday, January 7, $7 (includes free drink), 6:00 – 8:00
212-989-9319
www.corneliastreetcafe.com

If the massive New Year’s Day marathons at the Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club were a little too much for you to take all at once, the Cornelia Street Cafe is holding its third annual tribute to the rather iconoclastic, eclectic, and iconic Charles Bukowski, author of such books as FACTOTUM, BARFLY, POEMS WRITTEN BEFORE JUMPING OUT OF AN 8 STORY WINDOW, CONFESSIONS OF A MAN INSANE ENOUGH TO LIVE WITH BEASTS, and PLAY THE PIANO DRUNK LIKE A PERCUSSION INSTRUMENT UNTIL THE FINGERS BEGIN TO BLEED A BIT. Hosted by Kat Georges, the evening includes poetry readings and performances by Peter Carlaftes, Thomas Fucaloro, Angelo Verga, George Wallace, and Ryan Buynak, videos of Bukowski, prizes, book giveaways, and, appropriately, one free drink with admission. And if you want to read your own favorite piece by Bukowski or your own poem inspired by the writer, you can sign up to participate as well, but you need to get there before six.

CULTUREMART ’11

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya's FLOATING POINT WAVES is part of HERE's annual Culturemart festival

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 7-23, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

Culturemart, the annual festival of workshop productions by HERE’s resident artists, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year with another slate of diverse experimental shows incorporating theater, dance, film, music, and audience interaction. Things get under way January 7-8 with Laura Peterson’s GROUND, the second part of her Wooden trilogy, in which a dance quartet performs within living grass and trees. Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, artistic directors of the New York Butoh Festival, will present the immersive, multimedia FLOATING POINT WAVES. Betty Shamieh makes the murdered Arab from Albert Camus’s THE STRANGER the main character in the mysterious THE STRANGEST. A community of artists — as well as the audience — are all part of the interactive LUSH VALLEY, which seeks to reclaim the American dream. THE VENUS RIFF riffs on the Venus Hottentot. Democracy takes center stage in Aaron Landsman’s participatory CITY COUNCIL MEETING. Deborah Stein and Suli Holum investigate a woman who is her own twin in CHIMERA. Kamala Sankaram’s chamber opera MIRANDA mixes reality television with hip-hop and Hindustani classical music. And Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith uses puppetry to look at the sacred in EPYLLION, among other shows running through January 23, with all tickets a mere $15.

DARK MATTERS

THE ALTERNATIVE NEW YEAR’S DAY SPOKEN WORD AND PERFORMANCE EXTRAVAGANZA
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery between Houston & Bleecker Sts.
Saturday, January 1, free, 2:00 pm – 12 midnight
212-614-0505
www.bowerypoetry.com
www.spokenwordextravaganza.org

The Bowery Poetry Club is hosting its seventeenth annual New Year’s Day alternative poetry reading, featuring more than 150 performers, including Hobo Bob, Steve Cannon, Steve Dalachinsky, Kathi Georges, Bob Holman, Richard Kostelanetz, Eve Packer, Tom Savage, Jackie Sheeler, Phillip Sherrod, Sparrow, Angelo Verga, George Wallace, Bruce Weber, Jeffrey Wright, and Zork, and there will be an open mic as well if you’d like to add your own contribution. Although the event is free, attendees are encouraged to bring paperbacks for Books Through Bars, which supplies reading material to prisoners, and canned goods for Urban Pathways, which collects food and other services for the homeless. This year’s theme, Dark Matters, relates to how an “invisible glue holds the universe together” much like “the arts hold all us disparate individuals together. . . . When the city, the country and the world split into fighting fragments, music, poetry, and dance keep us intact.”

NEW YEAR’S DAY MARATHON READING 2011

Patti Smith will be among the hundreds of readers at the Poetry Project’s annual New Year’s Day marathon (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church
131 East 10th St. at Second Ave.
Saturday, January 1, $15-$20, 2:00
212-674-0910
www.poetryproject.org

The Poetry Project, which is dedicated to the past, present, and future of poetry, will hold its thirty-seventh annual New Year’s Day Marathon Reading on Saturday, featuring another outstanding lineup of participants from all over the entertainment spectrum. Among the hundreds of scheduled readers, who will begin at 2:00, are John Giorno, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, Suzanne Vega, Taylor Mead, Eric Bogosian, Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye, Vito Acconci, Anselm Berrigan, the Church of Betty, Jonas Mekas, Judith Malina, Citizen Reno, Bob Holman, Dael Orlandersmith, CAConrad, Elinor Nauen, Edwin Torres, Eileen Myles, Elliott Sharp, Maggie Dubris, Mike Doughty, Penny Arcade, Mónica de la Torre, Nick Hallett, and Wayne Koestenbaum. Admission is $20, and you can come and go as you please as long as there’s room.

UNDER THE RADAR 2011

GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN (YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD) will be at La Mama January 6-8 during the seventh annual Under the Radar festival (photo by David Baltzer)

The Public Theater (and other venues)
425 Lafayette St. between East Fourth St. & Astor Pl.
January 5-16, $15-$30
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com

The seventh annual Under the Radar: A Festival Tracking New Theater from Around the World features nineteen international productions, from the United States’ AMERIVILLE and LIVING IN EXILE to Belgium’s BONANZA, from Italy’s TOO LATE! ANTIGONE (CONTEST #2) to France’s VICE VERSA, from the UK’s THE INTERMINABLE SUICIDE OF GREGORY CHURCH to Slovenia/Latvia’s SHOW YOUR FACE! Several works investigate the nature of theater itself, including Vladimir Shcherban’s BEING HAROLD PINTER and Barry McGovern’s WATT BY SAMUEL BECKETT, while others feature such behind-the-scenes theater favorites as director JoAnne Akalaitis helming Nora York’s JUMP, about Sarah Bernhardt in Sardou’s TOSCA; Suzan-Lori Parks’s free WATCH ME WORK, in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright will literally work on her next project in the lobby of the Public Theater; and writer Taylor Mac’s THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA FOR MOTHER EARTH, a collaboration with the Talking Band that documents a cross-country antinuclear protest march. Other highlights include Reggie Watts’s multimedia collaboration with playwright Tommy Smith and journalist Brendan Kiley, DUTCH A/V; 2boys.tv’s PHOBOPHILIA, in which audiences will witness an interrogation in a secret location; and CORRESPONDENCES, a dance-theater piece in which Haitian/Malian Kettly Noël and South African Nelisiwe Xaba meet in person after having written to each other for a long time. While the Public Theater is home base for Under the Radar, there are also productions scheduled for HERE Arts Center, La MaMa, Dixon Place, the Abrons Arts Center, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and the Robert Moss Theater, in addition to several postshow discussions, a two-day symposium, festival lounges at the Chinatown Brasserie, and other special events.

JONATHAN LETHEM & JOHN HODGMAN: THEY LIVE

Jonathan Lethem and John Hodgman will discuss John Carpenter cult classic at IFC Center

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Tuesday, December 21, 8:00
www.ifccenter.com

John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi horror comedy, THEY LIVE, puts on sunglasses to reveal corporations’ and government’s subliminal control of the populace, then brings in wrestling star Rowdy Roddy Piper (HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN) as John Nada to try to save the day from a growing force of aliens. The cult classic, which also stars Keith David (THE THING), who gets into one of the great all-time movie fights with Piper, takes on social consciousness and public responsibility; “Homelessness and poverty aren’t just happening to one kind of person these days,” Carpenter (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, HALLOWEEN, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) said when the film was released. THEY LIVE is being screened December 21 at the IFC Center in conjunction with the publication of Jonathan Lethem’s (MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE) monograph on the film, DEEP FOCUS: THEY LIVE (Soft Skull, November 2010, $13.95). “THEY LIVE,” Lethem writes in the book, “lends itself to obsession. Howlingly blatant and obvious on many levels — some might ask, How many levels do you really think there are? — it grows marvelously slippery and paradoxical at its depths.” Lethem will be on hand to discuss the depths of the film with DAILY SHOW correspondent and fellow author John Hodgman (THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE) in what promises to be a rather unique event.

CLEMENT C. MOORE PARK

People gather every Christmas Eve in Clement C. Moore Park to read his holiday classic, “The Night Before Christmas” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sunday, December 19, Church of the Intercession, 550 West 155th St. at Broadway, free, 4:00
Friday, December 24, Clement C. Moore Park, West 22nd St. at Tenth Ave., free
www.nycgovparks.org
www.audubonparkperspectives.com

On Christmas Eve, 1822, Clement Clarke Moore wrote the holiday poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” for his wife and children, who lived on an estate called Chelsea in the neighborhood that later became the Chelsea of today. A native New Yorker, Moore (1779–1863) has two city parks named after him, the half-acre Clement C. Moore Park on Tenth Ave. & 22nd St. and the Clement Clarke Moore Homestead in Newtown, Queens. Every Christmas Eve, people gather at the Chelsea park to read Moore’s famous story, which is better known as “The Night Before Christmas,” right near where it was written. Although Moore is most closely associated with Christmas, he also compiled a Hebrew lexicon and was fluent in six languages. The Moore mansion itself was located at what is now a doctor’s office at 420 West 23rd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves. Moore is buried in Trinity Cemetery in Audubon Park, where, on Sunday, December 19, actor Malik Yoba will read Moore’s most famous poem in the Church of the Intercession, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the public reading, which will be followed by a lantern-lit procession and wreath-laying ceremony. “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”