Semiotics of the Kitchen

Ladies! Forget Martha Stewart, Martha Rosler shows you how.

Andromeda / The World Works for Me

I have a little broadside out from the charming Crater press, run by Richard Parker and produced on a letterpress. And it has TWO colours! Here’s the blabber:

Head’s up! It’s the first Crater of 2010, and it’s a grand little broadside from Amy De’Ath: Andromeda / The World Works for Me. There’s a drawing by her too and it’s fantastic. £4 [£5 ROW]. Letterpressed &c. &c.

Praise for Amy:

“Amy De’Ath is the new fire for mortals. She peoples space. She plays tricks with the gods and with her readers. This is personal, and it’s hot shit.” — Marcus Slease

Last October Amy started a pretty neat blog, which can be found at http://www.amydeath.wordpress.com

Email me at richie_fire@hotmail.com if you want one. (+ a few copies of Harry Gilonis’s Acacia Feelings left too). Paypal / cheques please.

Also, why not subscribe? £50 (£55 ROW)’ll get you 10 copies or £50/5 worth of Craters, whichever takes longer. Other suggestions welcome.

ta-ta,

Richard

Poems in Fire Magazine

I have a poem in Jeremy Hilton’s FIRE magazine Issue 32 and will have some more in a few months’ time in Issue 33. It’s a weighty tome which, I hear, is produced on an electric typewriter and hand-bound. Single copies cost £5.00; a subscription for two issues costs £7.00; a subscription for three issues costs £9.00. If you want a copy email me at amy_de_ath@hotmail.com and I’ll forward your email to Jeremy.

Literary history, probably…

Keith Waldrop at the 2009 National Book Awards, Poetry from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Good song:

Another favourite of mine is called ‘Everything I Cannot See’, which is really brilliantly sad.

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Haiti Earthquake victims count on themselves

Read this article on Lenin’s Tomb … there are many more like it around on the internet:

Or, “We haven’t had any security issues at all”. (Via). Excuse me? I thought that violence was growing. I had been led to believe that “looting and gang-related activity” had taken over. Said gangs were, I was assured, “storming quake-ravaged storefronts and even ransacking coffins and piles of dead bodies in search of usable belongings”. (That fascination with corpses again). As it transpires, even in the text of these reports themselves, the major act of violence was by the Haitian national police opening fire on crowds of starving earthquake survivors, murdering one of their number, and leaving others tied up on the streets to be beaten to death by ‘vigilantes’ later.

The striking fact, patiently reported by observers on the ground, is that Haiti is not gripped by anarchy, ‘mob rule’, mass slaughter, or anything of the kind. There was probably no more violent crime in Haiti this weekend than there would be in any normal weekend, and probably less than in some American cities. Instead, while aid is obstructed, Haitians have cooperated to undertake rescue efforts and administer aid without the assistance of relief workers… (Read More)

Nic Green’s TRILOGY

Nic Green and co-performer Laura Bradshaw

Last night I went to the Battersea Arts Centre to see Nic Green’s Trilogy. The performance was a ‘runaway hit’ (as they say) at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it’s been all over the papers in London ‘cos it’s got naked women dancing in it!

…For ‘a celebratory venture into modern-day feminism’, I was really disappointed in the piece, but almost feel bad for saying so, because the women on stage (and most in the audience) were clearly enjoying themselves and feeling good about their bodies, which is never a bad thing. Nic Green and her crew should also be given credit for getting up there and giving their collective opinion in a lively and entertaining way. What troubled me is that while her production purports to be radical, it actually fails to acknowledge the work of a host of feminist thinkers, writers and activists who have been trying to move beyond so-called ’second-wave’ of the feminist movement (1960s-1980s). In fact, I am not sure that it forms any kind of meaningful dialogue with that second wave in the first place.

Part 1 of Trilogy begins by looking at women’s relationships with their bodies, and culminates in a brilliant dance in which 50 unprofessional female dancers fill the stage in unashamed nakedness, wriggling and jumping and generally having a great time. And it was great to watch their joy in the act. Part 2 focuses on archive footage from the famous 1971 Town Bloody Hall debate in New York about women’s lib. It was chaired by a misogynistic Norman Mailer, and featured Germaine Greer’s famous ‘Mozart’s sister’ speech, in which she asserted that ‘male art is sapping our vitality and breaking our hearts’. Throughout the footage, Trilogy performers danced on stage. At the end of part 2, one actor read out the names of every single female audience member (our names had been collected as we entered the theatre), and told them she loved them. Part 3 consisted largely of a slide presentation, including shocking images of a woman being stoned to death, rape statistics, and a nasty Dolce and Gabbana advert which apparently simulates a gang-rape scene. Female audience members were then invited down onto the stage to take their clothes off and sing Jerusalem (the Suffragettes’ anthem).

I’m not proposing that Green’s production ought to be intellectualised, but I think it’s a shame that work like this could be seen as radical. I think ‘Feminism’ is (again) reduced to soundbites here – Trilogy implies that by taking their clothes off in a manner that is not sexualised, women can ‘liberate’ themselves in a celebration of the female body and of womanhood in general.  The actors spoke of celebrating breasts and bums of all shapes and sizes, and denounced the shaven ‘barbie doll’ vagina. Of course there is a need to speak out against the ubiquitous pressures on women to look a certain way in this era of perfectibility. But – and this is my main problem with Trilogy – why must women be defined through ‘feminine’ physical features in the first place? Why, even if the cause is women’s lib, should we be signified by breasts and vaginas at all? Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was not the only text to argue that gender is performative, that the gender ‘woman’ (and ‘man’, for that matter) is not prexisting but contingent and moveable. The were no transgendered naked people in the dancing. Every dancer was ‘all woman’, celebrating her woman-parts. Men, apart from the markedly single male performer, were not permitted to get naked and dance. (Come to that, the audience were overwhelmingly white middle-class theatre-goers, the dancers overwhelmingly white twenty- and thirty-somethings – but that’s an issue I won’t expand on here).

A few times in the production, the actors/speakers called for a ‘feminism of multiplicity’; but what do they mean by that? If they mean that we are all entitled, and encouraged, to find our own version of feminism, then why are we obliged to join in with theirs? I mean, at the same time, they are asking us to get down on stage and get naked with them; if we don’t want to do that, we should all stand on stage and sing ‘Jerusalem’ in support of those women who have done. In other words, we are forced to conform to the template of the production – but surely this type of conformity is exactly what feminism should be opposing. They told me they loved me at the end of part 2; and whether or not I wanted their love, I wasn’t given the option to refuse it. Maybe I’m taking Trilogy too seriously, and some have said that its lack of analysis doesn’t matter. But the piece certainly takes itself seriously. Why, when we were shown a slide picture of a man at a feminist rally holding a placard reading, ‘IRON MY SHIRT BITCH’, were we not allowed to laugh? Nic Green and Laura Bradshaw looked on the audience straight-faced until the last (by that time, embarrassed) titter died away. Just to be clear, I should mention that I didn’t think the man himself was being funny – I thought the situation depicted in the slide was amusing, and I would say that the laughter in the room at that moment was a more effective and appropriate dismissal of his action than Green’s decision to take him seriously.

In the Guardian, theatre critic Lyn Gardner says, ‘It’s rather cheering to find a 24-year-old engaging with feminist history with such wit and complexity. I find myself constantly astonished at most young women’s lack of indignation about a world that seems to rate female achievement largely on a woman’s ability to chair board meetings while simultaneously taking pole-dancing classes and being a yummy mummy.’ (25th May 2009) While Nic Green’s production is joyous, optimistic and hardly a bad thing, it’s anything but complex, and – I would argue – not particularly witty either. From the start, the performers do this weird kind of overacting, smiley and using melodramatic tones, as if speaking as if to a bunch of reception class children. I initially guessed that this was going to be contrasted with something painfully and profoundly serious later on. That didn’t happen. I don’t know what to make of this piece, really, because neither do I know how to counteract the terrible way that women and their bodies, ‘perfect’ or ‘natural’, are today co-opted by capitalism. Think of the hypocrisy of the Dove ‘campaign’ advert, or The Body Shop slogan, ‘Love Your Body’ (by spending your money on our beauty products).  I just know that Trilogy, which runs along all-too-similar lines and is consumed at the theatre by a pleasant group of middle-Englanders, does not provide anything like a solution. If Lyn Gardner is astonished by young women’s lack of indignation about their situation in modern society, I think she should take a closer look (that is, a closer look than Nic Green’s) at what young women are really faced by, and give them more credit.

Number Station

Andy Spragg has an interesting new poetry project called Number Station. Click here to have a listen (& you need Winzip software or similar). So says Wikipedia: Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.

Eileen’s Website

Eileen Myles has a fantastic website (& fantastic-er poetry):

http://www.eileenmyles.com/

Joan

My brother, David Gibbons, has scanned some brilliant pictures of my Nan and Grandad and other family members. Thanks Dave, for scanning these photos in.

The one I like like most:

My Nan, Joan

Nan & Grandad's Wedding Day, 1945

Wedding

Love the colour!

Grandad, c.1946

Year of the Tiger

Through illness, existential angst (but of course!), stress and insomnia, 2009 wasn’t a great year for me in many ways, and it culminated in my nan, Joan Gibbons, dying on New Year’s Eve. She was a kind, gentle and shy lady who (as my mum said the morning nan died), spent her life waiting on other people. So to start 2010 I will raise a glass to her – Cinzano and lemonade was her favourite – and list a few of the good things I came across last year.

1. Early in the year James Green sent me a short film by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer:

2. I liked these podcasts from The Poetry Foundation:

Women of the Avant-Garde

Women of the Avant-Garde (Part 2)

3.  German DJ Anja Schneider was great also (here’s a link to her MySpace):

4. I found some poetry books which were really, really good. Here are three of ‘em:

Godzenie by (the fabulous and cool) Marcus Slease (Blazevox)

Zam Bonk Dip (Barque), and also poems from BOUNCE BEYOND (see onedit) and Above Shoes by Some Margin (Crater Press) by Jonty Tiplady

Poker by Tomaz Salamun (Ugly Duckling Presse) - I wish I'd read this earlier.