Category: Event

Don‘t miss this dual release show featuring Chris Besinger, reading from The Usual Beast collected writings (Laughing Mouse Press) performing with Group Icky Rats from their work Group Icky Rats LP (Coat-Tail Records) with ONO.

Chris Besinger is vocalist for Minneapolis’s STNNNG. In addition to bringing copies of his new book, The Usual Beast (Laughing Mouse Press), a collection of STNNNG lyrics and other writings, with cover art by Tom Stack, Besinger will be performing with Group Icky Rats, his all-improvised rock band that is releasing its LP this month.

Group Icky Rats –Chris Besinger (STNNNG) on vocals, Jon Skuldt (White) on guitar and keyboard, and Bryan Reynolds on drums—forms, through its headlong charge into constant error, and force of will, new and gorgeous spectacular failure. That’s how it’s supposed to go when you make up all your rock songs on the spot. Wherever this vector directs the music, its components are 1) one poet dedicated, as are the finer ranters in the short history of rock—think Brewer from Saccharine Trust—to both massaging and upending the form through the formal and the informal, the situational, the “poetic” (Besinger); 2) another poet dedicated to –think Metal Machine Music—the piercing and to music-as-irritant (Skuldt); 3) and a shit-hot drummer who will crush you –think being destroyed— with total unadulterated punishing awesomeness (Reynolds). The new Group Icky Rats LP, out in an edition of 100 on Coat-Tail Records (home to releases by The Flying Luttenbachers, Xerobot, Melt-Banana, et al) will be available at the show and contains guitar from Mark Shippy (US Maple, Miracle Condition).

This event will also feature longtime Chicago way-out unit ONO, recently resurrected in what is now their nearly 30-year career, whose work –verifiable through early 80s releases and numerous performances archived on the internet— keeps re-setting the bar for total mind-bending performative fuckery.
For more info:

Group Icky Rats www.myspace.com/groupickyrats
ONO www.travistravis.com
Laughing Mouse Press www.laughingmouse.net

Funny, unique and fresh, Obamistan! Land without Racism helps the American public take responsibility for its development, rather than sit at home and hurl disappointment at their televisions, newspapers, and web sites, claiming that President Obama hasn’t lived up to his promises. As the first black president becomes the easy and favorite target for many conservatives and liberals alike. This book uses humor to create a shift in the reader’s perspective. It holds firm the idea that we have work to do as the citizens of our country- amongst ourselves. It shows us that we can make a real difference in support of change by embodying the change ourselves. “Change” is a call to action that does not sit only on the shoulders of our president- but on our capable shoulders too. This book holds the voting public to their word and asks them to put up or shut up.

“Funny, poignant and consistently absorbing.” Davy Rothbart, Founder of FOUND Magazine and contributor to This American Life.
For more info: http://welcometoobamistan.com

Kate Zambreno will read from her debut novella O Fallen Angel, published in April by Chiasmus Press, winner of their “Undoing the Novel” contest. The work is a triptych of modern America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, inspired by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, also a grotesque homage to Mrs. Dalloway. O Fallen Angel commits an act of anarchic literary sacrilege that calls to mind the rant and rage of an American Elfriede Jelinek, an exorcism of the culture wars and pop-cultural debris, a sneering indictment of deaf ears, blind eyes, and mute mouths. An editor at Nightboat Books, Zambreno keeps the literary blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister. An essay collection inspired by the blog will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2011.

Like Angela Carter’s fairy tales, Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel deftly exposes the psychic brutality that lies underneath the smooth glassy surface of parable. Set in Midwestern America in approximately 2006, Zambreno’s character/archetypes—a Mommy who names her golden retriever after Scott Peterson’s murdered wife Laci, a daughter who signs her suicide note with a smiley face and a doomed psychotic prophet—are all agents and victims of disinformation, but this doesn’t make their pain any less real. In Zambreno’s SUV-era America, unhappiness doesn’t exist because it can be broken down into treatable diagnostic codes. As she writes, “Maggie wants to be FREE but she also wants to be LOVED and these are polar instincts, which is why she is bipolar, which is a malady of mood.” A brilliant, hilarious debut.  -Chris Kraus, author of  I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia

Also joining the bill is John Beer, Jeremy Davies, Daniel Borzutsky, Megan Milks and AD Jameson.

For more info: http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.com/

Michael Bernstein is the author of the chapbooks cinderbook (Gold Wake Press, 2009), the rot to light (Gold Wake Press, 2010), 8s (Scantily Clad Press, forthcoming 2010), imaginary grace (Recycled Karma Press, 2010) from “a heap of swords and mirrors” (Bedouin Books, forthcoming 2010), the transit illuminate (mud luscious press, forthcoming 2010),  nanostars (greying ghost press, forthcoming 2010), and the Fire District (Differentia Press, forthcoming 2010) . His poems have appeared in magazines such as Puppy Flowers, milk, Moria, BlazeVOX, and New American Writing. He currently co-edits the online literary arts magazine Pinstripe Fedora. Michael lives and writes in Wisconsin.

Lewis Freedman writes poems. He (as of recently) lives in Madison. A chapbook, The Third Word (2009), was published by what to us(press) and another, Catfish Po’ Boys (2009), was published by MinutesBooks. He is co-editor of Agnes Fox Press.

Andy Gricevich lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he edits Cannot Exist magazine and, with Lewis Freedman. His poems have been published here and there, most recently in Pinstripe Fedora and We Are So Happy to Know Something. He has toured internationally as a performer of strange chamber music, theater and satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins and the Nonsense Company. He is uncomfortable writing this in the third person. Lately he’s been baking bread and finding the prevailing forms of irony in our poetic culture to be utterly inadequate in every possible way. The bread is getting better.

For more info:
www.cannotexist.blogspot.com
www.agnesfox.wordpress.com
www.pinstripefedora.com