Mashinka Firunts | News

Spectacularizing Scholarship: A Performance

2009-11-06T06:36:00.001-08:00

Today at 12:30, I will be performing a presentation entitled Spectacularizing Scholarship: A Performance at the Praxis of Feminist Pedagogy Conference at CUNY Graduate Center. In which I will elude fixity by way of Foxtrot and Lindbergh Hop away from stabilized meaning.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Writes to Dead Necrophiliac Poet Fyodor Sologub...

2009-10-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Jeremy is reading his work this Friday, October 30th, at the Outpost (1014 Fulton Street) in Brooklyn at 7PM with Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Duckling Presse and Sommer Browning of the Asthma Chronicles.

He will be reading selections from "Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Writes to Dead Necrophiliac Poet Fyodr Sologub [pictured left] On the Occasion of Halloween and Upon the Recommendation of Mikhail Gorbachev."

PS122 "Conversations with Culture: Cont. Performance & God"

2009-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

An event I'm participating in orchestrating at PS122 is taking place tonight at the 11th Street Bar at 7pm. Details below and at PS122.ORG.

FREE and open to the public

"Contemporary Performance and God"
Tuesday, October 20 7pm
11th Street Bar (between Avenues A & B)

Email artsdevelopment@ps122.org to RSVP

Performance Space 122 is pleased to announce the premiere of a new program titled "Conversations with Culture," a series of public panel discussions engaging non-performing arts community members in a dialogue about the art, politics, and life that happens on our stages. These discussions endeavor to reinsert performance into the cultural, economic, and environmental debates coursing through contemporary society, from which it has recently largely been excluded.

On October 20th, PS122 will inaugurate this series with the panel discussion "Contemporary Performance and God," presented in advance of Morgan Thorson's run of Heaven, a new ensemble work exploring emotional and physical manifestations of ecstatic perfection, gleaning forms and concepts from religious practices as strategies for creating the same state through dance. The discussion aims to trigger wider cross-community debates about the role and ramifications of contemporary performance as critique of, complement to, and replacement for other religious practices.
October 20th Participants include:

JAY WEGMAN Director of the Abrons Art Center and and former Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine www.henrystreet.org/arts

MORGAN THORSON choreographer: HEAVEN premiering at Performance Space 122 on October 25: http://www.ps122.org/performances/heaven.html

JOHN MERZ Diocese of New York Episcopal Chaplain to NYU http://www.ecnyc.net/

MICHAEL DE DORA JR. Executive Director, Center for Inquiry - New York City http://www.centerforinquiry.net/

Mister Thompson at EOAGH Issue 5 Launch

2009-10-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

Mister Thompson to read Vlad Putin to-night at EOAGH issue 5 launch at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn. The event information is as follows:

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn

8:00 Amy King
8:15 Jeremy James (Foxtrot) Thompson
8:30 Mark Lamoureux
8:45 Christie Ann Reynolds

9:00 Eric Lindley
9:15 Bill Marsh
9:30 Adeena Karasick
9:45 Matthew Rotando

EXTRA! V ORGANZA

2009-09-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

EXTRA! V ORGANZA: A Literary Spectacular Starring Jeremy James Foxtrot Thompson and Mashinka Foxtrot Firunts

This Friday, September 11, Jeremy and I will be presenting a collaborative performative poetics piece we’ve authored entitled EXTRA! V ORGANZA as part of the Boog City Festival’s Poets’ Theater program. Other poets presenting include Charles Bernstein and Charles Borkhuis.

EXTRA! V ORGANZA description: They are inked up. They are hot off the press. Spinning good yarns. Penciling a National Angle. News Items: His Woman Girl of the Fridays Years (1940) (1942) closes the press box; some curtains. Gets in the wired room; word-ringers, face reporters, and gossipmongers gum up the works. The Rumor Mill, an RSS feed, Perez Hilton, and teeny Tweets are seen slurping Manhattan at the Savoy Saturday. This weak head lines: Wild Parties in Pictureland. Weekend Orgies of the Stars of the Silver Sheet! Singed Startlet Warns of Winding Celluloid Road to Ruin! 80 stab and jab beached bodies, the best and worth less of 1990, the Forbes Celebrity 100-2009. There’s something very important on the teletype, six or seven items back. The Obits read: Bolshevist sweetheart dead, a relation, you knew her.

Poets’ Theater Information:
Friday, September 11th, 9PM
Sidewalk Cafe, 94 Avenue A (at East 6th Street)
F/V to 2nd Avenue, L to 1st Avenue
Free With Two Drink Minimum

For the Poets’ Theater program and further details, click here.

Jeremy Presents AGITPROP! at the Center for Book Arts

2009-06-10T14:40:00.001-07:00

On Friday, June 12th from 6-9pm, Jeremy will convert the Center for Book Arts into the Recessionary New York Department of Agitation & Propaganda. Fresh-pressed komsomolski uniforms will not be compulsory.

From the Center for Book Arts website:
Book Arts Lounge AGITPROP! | Friday, June 12th , 6-9 pm

For three hours we will convert The Center for Book Arts We will print a selection of handbills and small posters relevant to the economic situation affecting all of us, discussing whom the message is for, what purpose these prints might serve and the various ways in which they can be dispersed. $10 suggested donation/ $5 members.

Jeremy James Thompson alias Vladimir Putin Reads To-Night

2009-05-21T11:32:00.001-07:00

Mister Jeremy James Thompson will be reading selections from his Vladimir Putin piece, to the delight of Soviet expatriates citywide. The details are as follows:

"READING

Organized by Super Machine | http://supermachinepoetry.blogspot.com/

FEATURING

** Jeremy James Thompson - carved from sand castles, part human / part hunan, a jew in the rough, i don't know if he's jewish, reading from his newly formed Putin fantasia, as here: http://autotypist.blogspot.com/ | ** Ishmael Klein - a new scrutiny for hootenannies, with glued on adjustable method dial, outfitting her hands with animal hands, as here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ishkleinfilms | ** James Copeland - still further abbreviation of his trousers, with business as busyness and a dedication to the organization of faxes, as nowhere.

To-NIGHT | Thursday May 21 | 8pm

OUTPOST LOUNGE
1014 Fulton Ave between Grand and Classon. | C train to Franklin. G to Clinton-Washington."

Dances of Vice: Secrets du Boudoir

2009-05-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

This evening, I will be modeling the hats of Hey Sailor! Millinery at Dances of Vice: Secrets du Boudoir. The details are below:

"EVENT: Dances of Vice 'Les Secrets du Boudoir' | TIME & DATE: May 16, 2009 - 7PM to 11PM (show starts 8:00) | LOCATION: The Montauk Club - 25 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn | ADMIT: $21 (Adv) - $25 (DOS) - LIMITED QTY

Find yourself dancing the night away with winking beauties clad only in flirtatious vintage dishabille and abandon yourself to vice at Les Secrets du Boudoir, featuring the saucy fun of tap-dancing sensations The MINSKY SISTERS, a tantalizing peek into the boudoir of the enchanting AUTUMN WARD, classic burlesque by lovely RITA MENWEEP of The Peach Tartes, and the hot two-stepping music of GRANDPA MUSSELMAN and His Syncopators.

Also, prepare yourself for a Salacious Spectacle of Magnificent Millinery Creations in an exclusive coquettish hat and fashion show by HEY SAILOR! Hats from San Francisco!"

Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art

2009-05-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I co-delivered a collaborative presentation of archival research at a Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art on the subject of European architectural modernism, Alfred Barr's museum-as-a-torpedo-moving-through-time (pictured above), and geometrical vs. n(E)on geometrical strains of abstract art.

Correspondence from Katherine Dreier (of the Société Anonyme) to Alfred H. Barr, dated February 7, 1937, regarding the installation design of exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, & Surrealism:

"It seemed as if you had deliberately hung the pictures to give the emphases to the abnormal. It was most painful...people left your exhibition feeling wuzzy!”

My Cocktail Hat's Off to Vaginal Davis

2009-05-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Ms. Vaginal Davis, queer sensationalist extraordinaire and topic of my most recent paper on spectacularism, has recently been named the recipient of the 2009 Performance Space 122 Ethyl Eichelberger Award, bestowed upon "an artist who exemplifies Ethyl's larger-than-life style and generosity of spirit; who embodies Ethyl's multi-talented artistic virtuosity, bridging worlds and inspiring those around them." The award will facilitate the staging of a spectacular by the artist at P.S. 122 in the spring. New York City lies in wait of her neo-cabaret confetti.

The Posthuman Dada Guide

2009-04-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

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:

2009-04-08T05:15:00.001-07:00

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

Jeremy to Read at St. Marks To-Morrow

2009-03-22T12:26:00.001-07:00

As part of the Poetry Project Reading Series curated by Kyle Schlesinger, Jeremy will be reading along with Karen Ranall tomorrow, MARCH 23rd, at 8 PM.

"You might say that both poets exercise implementing & synthesizing the textual visual, (textu(r)al). I hope you will come see/hear [them] read.

See Below for more information:

Karen Randall is an artist who works in the media of words, digital collage (both sound and visual), oil painting, and letterpress printing/artist’s books. She is the daughter of an astrophysicist & grew up playing with primitive computers, a very cool chemistry set from the 50s, building short wave radios and a telescope, while also painting & writing poetry. She has taught hands-on science in the Chicago public schools, literary studies in western MA, and letterpress printing at the Center for the Book in NY and at Naropa. She developed four-color printing process as a means of combining the fluidity of contemporary digital imagery with the luminous qualities of ink layered on Japanese papers. Her work has been collected by numerous colleges, institutions and private collectors including the Library of Congress. Images of her work can be seen on line at www.propolispress.com.

Jeremy James Thompson is an instructor at New York’s Center for Book Arts as well as a curator for their New Voices reading series. His work focuses on the process of collaboration, the reinvention of propaganda, and the defining of a practical avant-garde. Through his own Auto Types Press, he has produced collaborative prints with poets including, Edwin Torres, Joan Retallack, David Lehman and Charles Bernstein. His texts and typographic works are published in collections and journals including Cricket Online Review, Pinstripe Fedora, The Houston Literary Review, The Bucky Monkey, Lamination Colony, WORK, and Viz. Inter-Arts, a Trans-Genre Anthology. He blogs about movietelling, typography and poetics at autotypist.blogspot.com.

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Cathedral is Located in the East Village at:
131 E. 10th St., New York, NY
(through the gate and around the back)"

For A Practical Avant-Garde

2009-03-03T16:49:00.000-08:00

"Minimalism and postminimalism agreed on one thing: eliminate pictures. Painting took to a pure territory, while the new art forms expanded the realm of art to every conceivable issue and strategy. The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career. This generated what is perhaps this century's biggest art movement: careerism."

Dushko Petrovich, For a Practical Avant-Garde, n+1

Club Wit's End Cocktail

2009-02-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Club Wit's End, the signature cocktail for this evening's opening of Club Wit's End was designed by Jeremy. Should you venture to Marion's to-night, the cocktail will be available throughout the evening.

Carnival Tumblers' Backdrops

2009-02-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

"Rimbaud is there with his well-known tirade: 'I used to love idiotic paintings, overdoor pictures, stage decors, carnival tumblers' backdrops, signboards, popular prints, old-fashioned literature, pornographic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers' day, fairy tales, tiny books for tiny tots, old operas, silly refrains, naive rhythms.' So much the worse for those who do not confess to a taste like that; so much the worse for those who turn their backs on the fantastic..."

-Albert Valentin on Eugene Atget, 1928

Holiday, 1938.

2009-02-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

Of all the rhinestones collected by the wardrobe departments of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and Warner Bros. throughout all the Golden Age of Hollywood, Holiday is surely the most dazzling. Its storyline is allegedly culled from the life of Gertrude Sangford Legendre, "a former debutante who left high society to become a big-game hunter and later spied for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II."

Jeremy to Read at Portable Boog Reader 3 Launch

2009-02-10T22:43:00.000-08:00

Jeremy has a piece in the recently released Portable Boog Reader, available for download here. In commemoration of its launch, there will be a reading this Thursday at the Sidewalk Cafe. Details are below.

Boog City Presents: Portable Boog Reader 3 Launch & Urban Folk Relaunch | Thursday, Feb. 12, 7:30 p.m. | Sidewalk Café, 94 Ave. A (at E. 6th St.) New York | $5 suggested donation with a two-drink minimum | With readings from Portable Boog Reader 3 Contributers: Shafer Hall, Adeena Karasick, Jeff Laughlin, Amy Lawless, Geoffrey Olsen, Jeremy James Thompson

Musical performances by urban folk acts Justin Remer, Joe Crow Ryan, Brian Speaker | Hosted and curated by Urban Folk editor Jonathan Berger and Boog City editor and publisher David Kirschenbaum | For further information: 212-842-BOOG (2664), editor@boogcity.com | PBR3 (BC53) features the work of 72 New York City poets. The online pdf is available at: welcometoboogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc53.pbr3.pdf.

"Boog City is a New York City-based small press now in its 18th year and East Village community newspaper of the same name. It has also published 35 volumes of poetry and various magazines, featuring work by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, and theme issues on baseball, women’s writing, and Louisville, Ky. It hosts and curates two regular performance series—d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press, where each month a non-NYC small press and its writers and a musical act of their choosing is hosted at Chelsea’s ACA Galleries; and Classic Albums Live, where up to 13 local musical acts perform a classic album live at venues including The Bowery Poetry Club, Cake Shop, CBGB’s, and The Knitting Factory. Past albums have included Elvis Costello, My Aim is True; Nirvana, Nevermind; and Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville."

Hanging Structure With Stripes

2009-02-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

Sol LeWitt, Hanging Structure With Stripes, 1963

Tease N' Tell: A Seminar on the Body Politics of Burlesque

2009-01-30T14:53:00.001-08:00

I'm tickled pink to see exemplars of burlesque taken up as an object of academic inquiry. Scholarly investigations of performance are so overwhelmingly confined to the sort that occurs within the legitimizing walls of the white cube/black box that it's a marvel to see them venturing out into the smoke-filled nightclub parlor and back alley burlesque house.

From the website: "From the seedy Blue Angel Cabaret to the CWTV’s Gossip Girl, in the past decade burlesque has infiltrated the mainstream yet manages to remain a transgressive art form. While it flirts with popularity burlesque at its best does not compromise its subversive origins, erotic themes, and defiant ideals. It naturally lends itself to promoting queer philosophy and values without necessarily calling attention to its inherent queerness.

Contemporary burlesque, often known as neo burlesque, borrows from various genres including dance, drag, performance art, theatre, and, of course, traditional burlesque. It is a hybrid art form that mixes traditions, flaunts rules and standardizations in order to remain provocatively entertaining.

The seminars will invite some of the leading neo burlesque performers in New York to perform as well as provide the theoretical and historical context for their work. The seminar participants will have the opportunity to read about, observe, and engage with this unique form of performance art that advances the artistic expression by constantly challenging the political and cultural authorities.

THE CENTER for LESBIAN & GAY STUDIES (CLAGS)- Seminars in the City | Wednesday 2/4 | 6-8 PM | Room 410 | The LGBT Center | 208 West 13th Street / New York, NY 10011 | Seminar Facilitator: Jasmina Sinanovic. Presenter: Dr. Lukki, performer, producer and educator, New York University and the New York School of Burlesque."

Village Voice

2009-01-18T16:37:00.000-08:00

Dances of Vice: Visions of Weimar was featured in a slideshow on the Village Voice website, including the above photograph of Jeremy and I. The slideshow in its entirety is available for viewing here.

Jeremy James Thompson in "Out Of Sorts" | studio.miko

2009-01-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

News Bulletin Aught Nine No. 2:

Jeremy James Thompson to exhibit typographical marvels in "Out of Sorts," a one-night exhibition of letterpress prints. The information is as follows:

"Out of Sorts: A survey of contemporary letterpress printers connecting typography, image, and language.

Monday January 19th 7-10pm
studio.miko
50 Dobbin st.
Brooklyn NY, 11222

Featured Artists:
Bryan Baker
Amelia Grohman/Tae Won Yu
André Lee
Nancy Loeber
Amber McMillan
Sarah Nicholls
Alisa Ochoa
Ben Owen
Jeremy James Thompson
Corinna Zeltsman

This event is part of the January Series at studio.miko."

Dances of Vice: Visions of Weimar

2009-01-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

Photograph above: Dances of Vice: Visions of Weimar on January 10, performing a miniature Charleston onstage with razzle-dazzling Jen Minsky of The Minsky Sisters during a number by cabaret sensation Isengart, musical accompaniment by the marvelous Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators. Below: Lindbergh hopping with Jeremy James Foxtrot Thompson.

All photographs copyright Don Spiro, save for the last one by A. Fischer.