CAPTURE EVERYDAY MOMENTS

The 2010 Whitney Biennial as seen through SemioSpectacles

Semiospectacle: A Literary Revue

Mashinka is curating the following show, in which I and several of my favorite performers and poets will be presenting:



TO RESERVE TICKETS, PLEASE VISIT: PS122.ORG.

This verbal varieté strategizes the explicitly semiotic spectacle in a multimedia showcase of live art representing an encounter between the academic lecture hall, the poet’s theater, and the vaudeville house. Its players cut across the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, pedagogy, cabaret, poetics, and performance in an investigation of linguistic mechanisms of spectacular identity formation. Linguistic illusionists expose the parlor trick of transparent speech, conjuring floating signifiers that levitate forty-four feet above the floor. Costumes sewn from three million majuscules burst at the semes. The auditorium oscillates between reading room and performatorium. The linguistic turn transmogrifies into a shimmy. Curated by Mashinka Firunts.

CO-SPONSORED BY: UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE. Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective focusing on new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. The Presse favors emerging, international, and forgotten writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses. Its publications employ a variety of handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

PERFORMANCES BY: Vaginal Davis | Lord Whimsy | Dr. Lucky | Jeremy J F Thompson | Paolo Javier | Daniel Scott Snelson | Shonni Enelow

STENO POOL: AN INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE Featuring:
Leesa Abahuni | Nicole Abahuni | Jen Zak | Matt Jones | Kristen Rhea van Liew | Fyodor Pavlov | Lawrence Gullo | Kyle Hittmeier | Lindsay Comstock

CODEXKAMMER: A FUNCTIONAL LENDING LIBRARY
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT BY: Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators
INTERTITULAR TAP BY: The Minsky Sisters
ONE-MINUTE CURATORIAL MICRO-LECTURES BY Mashinka Foxtrot Firunts

MARCH 22ND, FREE
Performance Space 122
150 First Avenue (at 9th Street)
Doors Open at 7:30, Staged Performance Commences at 8PM
Reception To Follow

SEMIOSPECTACLE WEBSITE
PERFORMANCE SPACE 122 RESERVATIONS PAGE
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

The Mystery Of Fraulein Festkleid and the Dance of the Seventeen Fabric Samples

Last night, at the Montauk Club in Brooklyn, my wife, Mashinka Firunts, performed a radio play:

"an aural-literary spectacle... a narrated bump-n-grind... a verbally articulated erotic dance... a suspenseful syllabic striptease." 

I had the pleasure of performing the role of the announcer, introducing the act by way of a pre-made recording played through an actual old radio, and then (in person) delivering the transitions between the acts and the intermission. 

It was a big success; the crowd packed in, hooting/ hollering... even catcalls (when in fact the only thing my wife removed was a single black glove). The story is this:  a woman, known as Fraulein Festkleid or Fraulein Franziska struts onto stage in sexy attire and everyone is ready for the usual show a woman on stage might give given certain kinds of music are playing & the stage is lit with certain kinds of lighting. The Fraulein begins to undress, and after a few things come off her body, shock hits the crowd, but not because of T&A. Rather, we see she's made of fabrics/ textiles, through & through, epidermal system & all. The delivery & descriptions make the work an impressive piece of formalism: the paragraphs, sentences, and words are undressed, sometimes exposing under-language: words seeming onomatopoetically dirty. 

I enjoyed the piece even before the performance, as I had rehearsed it with her, and played my part, but I hadn't expected it to not only satisfy the mob, but galvanize the remainder of the evening. 

Here's an excerpt:

Beneath the triple decker tulle dotted veil are two bakelite buttons with rhinestone accents in the place of eyes and pupils. Beneath her steel-boned satin charmeuse corsetry is a peplum torso with pintucked abdomen and a full bust of rose-tinted rayon with two asymetrically placed hatpins where areolas ought to have been. 

It is when the fashionable Fraulein Festkleid removes her pewter scalloped lace knickers that the remaining seated, conscious spectators’ bodies fall to the floor in a symphonic, stentorian boom. 

The Mystery of Fraulein Franziska and the Dance of the Seventeen Fabric Samples is so well-situated as a radio drama: the elements of the unseen, the fantastic, combined with live music, sound effects, and a vocally theatrical delivery manifest the seemingly immediate presence of protaganist, Feskleid. Mashinka has produced a script capable of reviving an otherwise sentimental and nostalgic medium/genre. I hope she continues in this mode, and I hope to get a recording (audio or video) of the performance to post at some point.

A photograph of Mashinka & I, taken on an old polaroid last night:

My Wife, the Academic

My wife, Mashinka Firunts, has been accepted to the Studio Arts MFA Program at Parsons: The New School for Design, the dual MFA/MS Program(s) at the Pratt Institute, and the MA program for Modern Art: Curatorial Studies at Columbia University. 

She's decided to enroll at Columbia University, a Graduate student at the age of 20.  

I'm happy and impressed. Someday, she'll be interviewing to teach at one particular university or another, and her curriculum vitae will be so impressive, that she'll be able to negotiate a job for me as well. 

Mashinka Firunts on Movietelling

Mashinka Firunts recently posted some insightful praise for the still somewhat recent shadoWord movietelling events I took part in. Being my wife, and loving all things related to me the most, the article is largely comprised of her account of my performance, and is preceded by several excellent observations and analogies pertaining to the visual spectacle and the evolving spectator into and throughout the 20th century.