The Posthuman Dada Guide

On May 4th, Andrei Codrescu read from The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess at the Solas Bar in New York City. The text is described as "an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world", based around a 1916 chess match between Lenin and Dada founder Tristan Tzara. Rather than offering up a run-of-the-mill reading, Mister Codrescu engaged attendees in a participatory question-and-answer session wherein he, armed with the manuscript, took on the role of Dada Oracle, responding to audience inquiries via randomly chosen excerpts from the text. The result was a raucous reenactment and reenvisioning of the "total pandemonium" of the Cabaret Voltaire (Mister Codrescu appeared sans Hugo Ball's blue and white striped cardboard tophat).

Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines

Jeremy and I just returned from Chicago, where I presented at the Northwestern University interdisciplinary graduate conference, Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines .

The images above are stills from the visual component of my performative presentation Mesdames et Messieurs, Meine Damen und Herren, Ladies and Gentlemen: Neo-Cabaret Performance and the Performative Subject, in which I sensationalize:

• Spectacularism: literally defined as the spectacular or other than that which is normative. Also, a strategy for envisioning new possibilities for subjectivity


• Vaginal Davis: a de-centered subject of many sequined hats


• Bricktops at the Parlour Club: A Futurist Evening, Dada Cabaret, Bakhtinian Carnival, and Bauhausian Festival-for-the-21st-Century


• The Banana Shimmy

The conference was a veritable variety show of death-defying feats of scholarly daring. Highlights from the roster:

• Dr. Sue Ellen Case presented a keynote address entitled Assignations, Drives, Collisions, and Stops: A Thinking Woman's Guide to Intersections in which she investigated the de-centered scholarly text and the scholar-as-flaneur




• Northwestern PhD candidate Barnaby King's presentation, Clowning at the Crossroads of Culture, in which he engages in an utterly extraordinary triple-tiered performance of a performative text on the circus performer, changes into the costume of a clown - red nose and all - and provides musical accompaniment on calliope.




• Lisa Peschel's Pleasure as Evidence: Scripts from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Performance, which commences with a live performance of a comedic operetta delivered by the scholar and two accompanying vocal talents

Step Right Up | PCA Conference

I will be delivering a presentation at the PCA/ACA National Conference in New Orleans this Friday. The image above is of a handbill I created to accompany the paper, entitled Step Right Up! Toward a Reformulation of the White Cube.

On the occasion of an excursion to the Vieux Carré: Elvis Presley croons New Orleans and King Creole, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe lays her burdens down By the Riverside.

The Autotypograph Presents:

Jeremy recently applied a new coat of mascara to the Autotypograph in a redesign winking directly at Vorticist typography.