Animal Shelter Issue 2: Art, Sex, Literature
Semiotext(e) is pleased to announce Issue 2 of its occasional intellectual journal Animal Shelter, edited by Hedi El Kholti. Fleeting, ephemeral, nondigital, and nonhierarchical, Animal Shelter is, as Alex Gartenfeld wrote in Interview, “a loose collection of texts, sequenced like a mixtape”—focused yet eclectic. Gathered around a long conversation with philosopher Paul Virilio on “The Littoral as Final Frontier,” conducted on the first day of the “flash crack” collapse of the European markets, issue 2 features fiction, artwork, poetry, conversations, and essays which orbit desublimation, digression, negative monument, catastrophe, shadows, horror, sexiness …
Animal Shelter 1 (2008) summoned the underground-press sex culture of the 1970s as an intellectual conduit. Issue 2 evokes the suspended atmosphere of a world drifting in limbo; analysis laced with an undertow of oblivion. In this issue:
Moyra Davey on writer’s block, Walter Benjamin, and Jane Bowles.
Bruce Hainley channels Paloma Picasso to jot some notes on Margie Schnibbe and the “explicit.”
Bifo on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes’s Wide Shut, and the relation between irony and cynicism an.
An interview with Paul Virilio on seascape, inertia, and the Zynthia cyclone .
Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer on George Porcari’s ambient photography .
Shlomo Sand and Sylvère Lotringer on contemporary Israel, myth, and the invention of Zionism.
Alistair McCartney on early ’90s bohemia in Hyde Park, Perth, Australia.
Dodie Bellamy on queer subculture and the “Goldilocks syndrome.”
Veronica Gonzalez‘s short story on friendship, loss, and Los Angeles .
Rachel Kushner‘s short story that takes up pubescence, motorcycles, and Flaubert’s lewd correspondence from the Nile.
A rare short story by Eileen Myles on Winston Leyland’s legendary 70s tabloid, Gay Sunshine.
Other contributors include: Robert Dewhurst, Ben Ehrenreich, Matt Fishbeck, Paul Gellman, Slava Mogutin, Jed Ochmanek, John Pluecker, Michael Rashkow, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sarah Wang, and others.
” . . . At the Liberation . . . I discovered a coast that had been off limits during the entire war. For a child, the discovery of that seascape was an extraordinary moment, the end of the world, the finisterre; the discovery of freedom as well as an endless, negative horizon where there is nothing but the horizon, nothing but fluid dynamics.”
—Paul Virilio
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BOOK RELEASE PARTY AND SCREENING
Friday, December 16, 2011
7:00 pm until 10:00pm
HUMAN RESOURCES: 410 Cottage Home St. Los Angeles, CA 90012
Please join Semiotext(e) for a release party to celebrate the release of William Jones’ HALSTED PLAYS HIMSELF.
Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989.
In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted–to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time–and what it looked like when it collapsed.
The screening of Fred Halsted’s LA PLAYS ITSELF will start promptly at 7 pm. after a short introduction by the author.
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Semiotext(e) DVD Release Party: Gilles Deleuze From A to Z
Sunday, December 11, 2011
6:30pm until 9:30pm
THE MOUNTAIN BAR: 473 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Please join Semiotext(e) for a release party to celebrate our first DVD: Gilles Deleuze From A to Z.
The event starts at 6:30 pm.
A short screening and introduction by Sylvère Lotringer will begin
promptly at 7 pm.
— Pierre André Boutang: Gilles Deleuze / Claire Parnet: From A to Z: “O as in Opera” (1988)
20minutes (Translated by Charles J. Stivale).
— Carmelo Bene: Hermitage (1968)
20minutes
A performance by Memories (Brian Getnick, Corey Fogel, Claire Cronin) will follow at 8:30 pm.
Stay for Kate Wolf’s birthday party after the event.
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TWO UTOPIE EVENTS IN NEW YORK
When is Utopia? A Panel Discussion
Monday, October 3, 2011 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Columbia University Morningside Campus Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
For roughly a decade, beginning in 1967, the Utopie group offered a militant alternative to professional urban planning and sociology journals, formulating a critique of the technocratic and administrative rule over a disabled and alienated urban society, while also projecting an ephemeral urban poetics. Utopie: Texts and Projects 1967-1978 anthologizes and translates material from group’s magazines, pamphlets, posters, exhibitions, and articles. The work provides a window onto the group’s intellectual concerns, but also onto the tumultuous period in which a number of architects, urbanists, and sociologists worked in close collaboration.
Panelists:
• Hubert Tonka, Editor of Utopie, Publisher and Author
• Isabelle Auricoste, Editor of Utopie, Landscape Architect, Professor, École d’architecture de Bordeaux
• Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, NYU Institute of Fine Art
• Jean-Louis Violeau, Sociologist and researcher at the École d’architecture de Paris-Malaquais (co-editor of Utopie: Texts and Projects)
• Craig Buckley, Adjunct Assistant Professor, GSAPP, Columbia (co-editor of Utopie: Texts and Projects)
Event co-sponsored with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Cabaret Series 03: Utopie
Tuesday, October 4 · 6:30pm – 9:30pm
As part of Storefront Cabaret’s Series, we will present Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967-1978, a book edited by Craig Buckley and Jean-Louis Violeau. The book reprints material from the group of architects, sociologists, and urbanists known as Utopie. The launch includes a one night only exhibition, featuring the magazines, pamphlets, posters, and other traces of the group’s activities. Performers will include Isabelle Auricoste, Craig Buckley, Jean-Louis Cohen, Cristina Goberna, Meredith TenHoor, Hubert Tonka, and Jean-Louis Violeau.
Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare Street
New York, NY 10012
Tel. 212.431.5795
info@storefrontnews.org
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SEMIOTEXTE is looking for testimonies of people who attended the SCHIZO-CULTURE Conference organized at Columbia University in 1975 for an upcoming book.
It will include the texts of all the lectures and panels and a detail account of the events.
Please send your contact info to: Hedi El Kholti: hedi@semiotexte.com
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Pierre Guyotat & Abdellah Taïa at the PEN Festival in New York<
French novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat, author of Coma (Semiotexte 2009), and Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa, author of Salvation Army (Semiotexte 2009), will participate in the Seventh Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York. The festival will take place on April 25 through May 1.
Pierre Guyotat will speak on The Public Intellectual panel on April 25 at The Standard, New York from 5:30-7pm. Other panel participants are: Manual de Lope, Peter Godwin, Linda Polman, and Hervé Le Tellier; moderated by Michael Silverblatt. Tickets are $15/$10 for PEN members and students with a valid ID, available by calling (866) 811-4111 and at ovationtix.com.
A Conversation with Pierre Guyotat on Tuesday, April 26 at Columbia University, Buell Hall, 2nd Floor (Maison Française Conference Room) from 4–6pm. Conversation in French. Gary Indiana will read from his introduction to Coma.
Abdellah Taïa will speak at the Revolutionaries in the Arab World panel on Wednesday, April 27 at the 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20/$15 for PEN members and students with a valid ID by calling (866) 811-4111 and at ovationtix.com.
In Conversation: Pierre Guyotat and Edmund White on Thursday, April 28 at La Maison Française from 7-8:30 pm. Tickets are $15/$10 at the door for PEN members, free for students with a valid New York ID. To reserve a seat, call La Maison Française at (212) 998-8750 or email maison.francaise@nyu.edu.
Pierre Guyotat will participate in a Cocktail Hour Reading on Friday, April 29 at the Bowery Poetry Club from 5-6:30pm with David Bezmozgis, Rahul Bhattacharya, Tomas Espedal, Shin Kyung-Sook, and Irvine Welsh. Tickets are $10/$5 for PEN members and students with a valid ID, available by calling (866) 811-4111 and at ovationtix.com.
Abdellah Taïa will read at the Enclave Reading Series on Saturday, April 30 at Cake Shop from 4–6pm. 152 Ludlow St, NY.
In Conversation: Abdellah Taïa and Dale Peck on Sunday, May 1 at The Cooper Union, Fredrick P. Rose Auditorium at 1pm. This event is free and open to the public. No reservations required.
Pierre Guyotat in San Francisco and Los Angeles
City Lights in conjunction with Semiotext(e) and the Cultural Services office of the Consulate General of France in San Francisco present a Reading with Pierre Guyotat from his novel Coma, on Monday, May 2 at 7 pm at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco.
Pierre Guyotat at the University of California, Berkeley on Tuesday, May 3. Please check the website for updates on specific location and time. http://french.berkeley.edu/news/news_main.php.
Please join us for an evening Reading in the Garden with Pierre Guyotat, introduced by Sylvère Lotringer on Friday, May 6 at 7:30pm at the MAK Center in Los Angeles. Guyotat will read from Coma. MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, 90069. This event is free with a suggested donation of $7/$6 for students and seniors.
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