I’m a little late with all this news, but Spring always seems to derail me. So, most of these tidbits are coming after the fact.
In March, I wrote about my experience performing at the Whitney Bienniale on Hyperallergic, a NYC-based art blog.
On April 2, Gartal co-hosted a reading with the Armenian Poetry Project at the Bowery Poetry Club, which included the Zephyr Poets from L.A. (Tina Demerdjian, Armine Iknadossian, Shahe Mankerian and Alene Terzian), Lola Koundakjian, Amir Parsa, Alan Semerdjian and me. It was super! Texts and recordings from the event, including one of my poems, can be found at the Armenian Poetry Project website.
My band Guitar Boy played at the Wondercabinet at Occidental College on April 24. Here is a nice photo. And a link to Guitar Boy’s My Space page.
And some info on the Wondercabinet, a mind-boggling, curiosity-inspiring, day-long event exploring modern convergences of art and science:
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On Saturday, April 24, Occidental College will return to the days before science and the arts separated into mutually exclusive domains as writer, critic and intellectual impresario Lawrence Weschler brings his day-long “Wonder Cabinet” to Eagle Rock.
“Intellectually, one of the things I’ve long been interested in is the notion of returning to a time when the sciences were at the heart of the humanities, when there was a marvelous, polymorphous, promiscuous interaction between scientists, artists, wizards and inventors,” says Weschler, a long-time New Yorker staff writer and author of the Pulitzer-nominated Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders who today is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. “The division between arts and sciences is only 300 years old at most. Before that, people like Michelangelo and Leonardo were as much scientists as artists. There was no distinction between the different interests they were pursuing.”
“In fact, with the rise of the Internet and social media we may be returning to an era in which scientists and artists, historians and digital innovators have all kinds of things to say to each other,” he says. “The Wonder Cabinet aims to facilitate that conversation. But it’s also simply a celebration of all things cool.”
Featuring the art films of Jessica Yu, Ed Ruscha, the Center for Land Use Interpretation Boris Hars-Tschachotin; Photographer Lena Herzog; Famed historian, magus, and sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay; David Wilson, the MacArthur-winning founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology; Oscar-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch; Cal Tech physicist Ken Libbrecht; Michigan artist Matt Shlian; New York artist Lauren Redniss; Identical twin artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes
Other news: I’m preparing to travel to Yerevan, Armenia, during the month of July to offer a creative writing workshop to women and participate in the WOW Collective’s annual intervention.
I’m gearing up to offer another community writing workshop in Queens, October-December 2010, more details coming soon…
Till Summer…