Anne Lesley Selcer at 21 Grand

21 Grand and Killer Banshee Studios present:
The 9th Annual T-10 Video Festival
two nights celebrating short videos

An hour of videos under 10 minutes long each night, followed by a 30 minute feature on a local, accomplished and often under-recognized video artist.

This year's featured artists:
David Cox, Thursday July 16
Bulk Foodveyor, Friday July 17

The 9th Annual T-10 Video Festival examines the growing collision in the space prior occupied separately by cinemagraphic and video traditions. A popular forum in the East Bay for local artists working in video since 2000, T-10 began shortly after 21 Grand first opened its doors. As the cultural landscape has shifted so has T-10, redefining its purpose each year, while remaining focused on short form works.

Including experimental documentary, narrative shorts, animations and expanded media works, this year's entries mark a shift from the low-resolution immediacy that used to separate video from film. Hi-res digital cameras and low cost editing equipment have enabled more ways to produce independent work than ever before, and have collapsed film and video into the same media space. These tools allow independent artists to provide an important counterbalance to the dominance of mass production in the ecosystem of media experience. Some media works do not need to have an audience of millions; some belong to an audience measured by the size of a small room, that care passionately about seeing something different.

At a time when the means of production has never been more accessible, the ability to be heard or seen has has become increasingly hard. Recent closures, including the Parkway & Cerrito theaters, limit access to screenings of independent, experimental and locally produced work. YouTube offers vast amounts of work, but no context within which to view it. T-10 provides a forum that connects local audiences with local and national artists and producers, offering a survey of current practices in independent media production.

David Cox is an award-winning filmaker with a background in animation and videogames. He lives in the Bay Area and teaches at City College of San Francisco and DeVry University.

Experimental video artist, Bulk Foodveyor (Philip R. Bonner), creates media based theater using physical assemblage with a bizarre satirical humor. In 2008, Bulk Foodveyor was an Artist in Residence at the SFdump.

Plus videos on Thursday from: Anne Lesley Selcer, Ronnie Cramer, Desciple, Michael Trigilio, Anna Whitehead, Sarah Matik, Rebekah May, Raymond Yeh, Alfred Hernandez & Amy Green & Stephanie Sheriff and videos on Friday from: Rebecca Najdowski, Michael Goodier, Tricia Lawless Murray, Corrine Bot, Samara Halperin, Hilary Harp & Suzie Silver, Tony Coleman & Sean Levon Nash, Katie Krohn, Eve Edelson, Antero Alli, Magnetic Stripper, & Ian Winters

Veteran festival participants Killer Banshee return this year as co-organizers of T-10 with 21 Grand. Killer Banshee is a media arts and technology practice shared by Kriss De Jong and Eliot K Daughtry. Known for their live video performances, they have presented work locally and nationally in spaces ranging from ATA to the Bowery Poetry Club. As part of the Illuminated Corridor, they have presented in various public locations including the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Please check the websites for highlights, full artist list and schedule:
Killer Banshee Studios, Oakland, CA
http://killerbanshee.com/t-10/
t10@killerbanshee.com

21 Grand http://21grand.org
21grand@21grand.org 51044grand

Ray Hsu interviewed by rob mclennan

Ray Hsu is interviewed here by rob mclennan.

Ray is the first Canadian poet I met and the first I've wanted to translate into French.

Ray is the first poet I've ever read with.

New Issue of Action Yes is up!

Please visit the new issue of Action, Yes (www.actionyes.org).

"Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy": A special section devoted to the poetry and art of the scandalous cabarets performed by Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in Weimar Germany.

Abstract comics!(Including a preview of Andrei Molotiu's upcoming anthology from Fantagraphics Books.)

"Always/Only/A/Plenum": Tim Wood's essay on Robert Grenier and Grenier's response.

Translation of writers Agrafiotis (tr. by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis), Dragincescu, Froger (translated by françois luong), Lamat, Rubinstein, Sacré.

Per Bäckström's essay " "Crush the Assholetters Between the Teeth": Språkgrotesk in Henri Michaux and Gunnar Ekelöf."

"Dead Can Dance," Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle's ruminations on Decadence.

As well as poetry, visual poetry, collages and prose from Downing, Lundwall, Yankelevich, Schapira and others.

Esmail K'hoi's portrait of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Someone was googling Esmail K'hoi's poem "Pasdar Ahmadinejad," K'hoi's denunciation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and got here. My partial translation (with Mehregan Oskooi) can be found here. I can't find the full translation of it on my back up hard drive, but will post the full text when I do.

Undercover by Orbicule does not work

This post is for people who use a Mac. If you don't, skip this entry.

Some of you are familiar with the recent theft of my computer and the problems this has caused me and Anne in terms of getting work done. I already had one computer stolen from me 4 years ago and because of this experience, I took very deliberate steps to prevent this from happening again. So I got an external hard drive for backups (which I can only use on my work computer, sadly). And I got Orbicule's Undercover. You can see on the website what is supposedly capable of.

I pretty much followed every single step they suggested in order to prevent erasure of the hard drive: creation of a firmware password, setting up a guest account, etc.

It's now been three months since my computer disappeared and no activity has been reported yet. I've pretty much given up hope on ever retrieving my computer. And I now have to adapt my translation/writing practice to take into account that I don't have a computer anymore and that I can't afford to buy a new one, being poor and all.

So thanks Orbicule for your fake promises of retrieving my computer.

People, save yourself 50 dollars and don't buy Orbicule's Undercover.

Bruce Sterling's "Eighteen Challenges to Contemporary Literature"

At Wired.

Some parts recall the Action Books Manifesto:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

アラバマ物語 or translating titles

Anne Healy follows up on my post last year on cover design at Thomas Riggs & Co. blog with a comparison of different cover designs for Muriel Barbéry's L'élégance du hérisson. It is striking to see how uniform and unambiguous the translation of the title is. One exception perhaps is the Japanese title, 「優雅なハリネズミ」("yuugana harinezumi"), literally "The elegant hedgehog."

Similarly, To Kill A Mockingbird in Japanese is titled 「アラバマ物語」("Alabama monogatari") or "Tale/Story of Alabama").

More later perhaps on the politics of title translation. I am also remember how some foreign movie titles are changed tremendously when they are distributed in France. Well, at least American movies in the 80s. On the other hand, starting the 90s, those movies would simply keep their original titles (e.g., Last Action Hero or True Lies (yes, I had horrible taste as a twelve-year-old)).

Lunch with Gary

Gary and Anne


Hum ...

Washington Square Review

Just received the latest issue (Summer/Fall 2009) issue of Washington Square, featuring works by:
John Ashbery, Joshua Beckman, Aase Berg (translated, as usual, by Johannes Göransson), Katherine Bogden, Genevieve Burger-Weiser, Rof Dieter Brinkmann (tr. Mark Terrill), Mahmoud Darwish, Rémi Froger (tr. françois luong), Eleni Sikelianos, and others.

La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?

Mentioned in Abé Nornes Mark's essay on abusive subtitling ... Nevermind that the movie is dubbed. And that the English subtitling is anything but abusive.