Friday 6th November: Readers Archive with Will Hodgkinson
Readers Archive continues it’s series asking writers, artists and musicians to allow access to their processes of reading and research. Invited contributors write a text which discusses their own routes of investigation. Further insight into these followed avenues is given through a list of texts, lyrics or otherwise, that the selector considers to have been key on that journey. All of these are collected and shown at Donlon Books. By uncovering the links made by others, be they linear or tangential, Readers Archive offers up a list of possible turning points for further reading and departure.
Will Hodgkinson is our second contributor in the series and will be in conversation on the 6th of November 2009 at Donlon Books, Cambridge Heath Road, E2, 7-9pm. Will is a writer, journalist and television presenter. His books chart his own journeying within music; learning to be a guitarist in Guitar Man (2006), writing and recording a pop song in Song Man (2007). His most recent book, The Ballad of Britain (2009), documents his travels around Britain making field recordings of folk music. Recording traditional ballads, changing and evolving in their repetition over hundreds of years and sung by singers such as The Waterson Family or Alex Neilson of The Trembling Bells, equally Hodgkinson seeks more contemporary expressions of folk familiar to us in Pete Molinari¹s Medway Blues or the Grime music that provides a backdrop to the writer’s everyday South London. His journalism includes a column in the Guardian as well as contributions to Vogue, Mojo and the Telegraph among others. Songbook, shown on Sky Arts is a series in which Hodgkinson interviews songwriters about their inspirations and the stories behind some of their most well known songs.
Also now accompanying Will Hodgkinson on guitar after the conversation on this coming Friday 6th November will be Michael Tyack of Circulus and Princes In The Tower. They will be playing songs in tribute to The Incredible String Band’s founding member, Clive Palmer and his later folk group, C.O.B.
For more information email me on editor@readersarchive.com or to view the previous contribution by Philip Hoare please go to the website, where all contributions in the series are archived.
www.ReadersArchive.com
www.DonlonBooks.com
Dark Events for Dark Evenings
X Marks the Bökship / Donlon Books
210 / Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, E2
77 Broadway Market, London Fields, E8
Thursday – Sunday 11 – 6pm
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Artist publishing and independent publishers
Fiona Banner and The Vanity Press
Seth Fluker
Seth Fluker is the current artist in resident at the bookshop. He has previously published a book on his work ‘Strange Days Indeed‘ which is available at Donlon Books. He has been shooting his latest project, the contents of a sink in the kitchen that he works at in London. He will be compiling these photographs and is looking to find a publisher for this new body of work.
Seth Fluker is a Canadian born (1982), London based self-taught photographer. In his early twenties, Seth became interested in photographing his surroundings while skateboarding throughout his hometown and cities abroad. Since then his work has been exhibited internationally and was recently published through TV Books in the Various Photographs Catalogue.
See more of Seth’s work at:
Launch of Dan Graham’s Rock/Music Writings and screening of Rock my Religion
Saturday 26th September, 6.30 – 9pm
210 Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
Rock/Music Writings is the first English language collection devoted entirely to Dan Graham’s writings on music.
Having initially appeared in small journals like Extensions, magazines such as Fusion of REALLIFE, or the artist’s catalogues the publication titled Rock/Music Writings covers Graham’s most prolific period of writing on music and its relation to popular and visual culture: the late 60s to the late 80s. Most of these essays are out of print or available here for the first time in anthologized form.
While Dan Graham is known widely for visual art, he began writing about Rock n Roll in the late 60s and remains an active writer on music and popular culture, both of which remain major tenants of his work. In the late 70s, Graham became very influential to the now infamous New York no wave scene through his friendships with Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, and Kim Gordon, to name but a few. Through this influence, Graham became a touchstone for many musicians, and he was responsible for helping form and inspire many bands of that era, among them the Theoretical Girls (which he original named “Girls That Do Theory”) and Sonic Youth.
Graham gave back to this community with his seminal video and essay Rock My Religion, as well as New Wave Rock and the Feminine, and Punk as Propaganda. Other works on punk rock included in the book are The End of Liberalism, McLaren’s Children, Untitled, and Artist as Producer.
Primary Information publishes artists books, artists writings, out-of-print publications, editions and web resources.
Rock/Music Writings is available for £12.95 and is distributed by D.A.P. It contains 13 essays and 29 B&W images.
Erotic Book Club: Macho Sluts
This month we are reading: Macho Sluts by Pat Califia
Thursday 24th September
8pm
When it was first published in 1988, Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts,a collection of S/M stories set in San FranciscoÂs dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishing. Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of woman-to-woman sex (and nobody has ever done it any better). If any book is responsible for the formation of the modern lesbian leather community, this one is it. Despite its graceful language, imaginative scenarios, and abundant humour, the lesbian press trashed Macho Sluts,and it became a focal point for the infamous legal battles between Canada Customs and Little Sister’s, the gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver. But readers loved it, and to this day Macho Slutsremains a vital and moving classic that still has the power to educate, radicalize, and expand our notions of the body’s potential to provide us with pleasure, pain, and love. This new edition, part of Arsenal’s Little Sister’s Classics series resurrecting classics of LGBT literature, includes a new foreword by the author, and an introduction by Wendy Chapkis, a Professor of Sociology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. There are also essays by Jim Deva, co-owner of Little Sister’s, and Joseph Arvay, chief counsel for the bookstore during its trial against Canada Customs.
http://www.theeroticbookclub.org/
Word Play at The Whitechapel
WORD PLAY
(A PLAY ON WORDS)
ACT 1
Thursday Sept. 10th
Doors open at 7 -10pm
FREE
SCENE 1
Whitechapel Gallery café/bar
R: Word Play is a night of adventure with words, what you can do with them, how you can break them and how you can put them back together again through interaction, performance and games.
Introduction to key characters
H: At the first Word Play event the audience will be asked to be the authors by constructing a play in one evening which will then be performed at the end of the night. This text will be the foundations for a series of reactionary events held at the Whitechapel Gallery which will explore translation, reinterpretation and review through performance, media, broadcasting and publication. DJing throughout the evening recorded readings mixed with phsycadelic sounds will be is Jody Porter, organiser of 14 Hour poetry events.
(aside)
this play is taking shape
the shape is black or white
the shape is a cube / turned on its side
the lines are the same
only (blacker) (longer) (reflective) (non linear) (more obscure) never odd or even
Thursday 19th November
P: Next in the series of Word Play events the artists collective Ante Press have been invited to curate a response to A Play of Words by challenging the tradition and format of review, to be held on November 19th.
77-82 Whitechapel High Street – http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit
Launch of Silk Handkerchiefs
Friday 18 September, 6pm–9pm (performance by Alex Brenchley at 8pm)
Donlon Books, 210 Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
Silk Handkerchiefs is the first in a trilogy of short comedy novels by writer and painter Paul Haworth.
Wank to Jeremy Kyle, postie wink, suicidal, hit on woman old enough to be my mother, like a lubricious satyr, nigh-on assaulted by a male admirer, lying in a pool of urine…shit like this, it never used to happen to me, I swear. Now it were the story of my life.
Narrator Alex ‘Abs’ Brenchley is unafraid to tell, show and give all. Alongside episodes about his youth at Westminster School, sexcapades in St James’s Park and Victoria Station, and life as one of the art world’s so-called Nutty Solitary Men, Silk Handkerchiefs weaves its story of one fateful day in the life of Alex Brenchley…a day of tragedy, violence and the promise of LOVE.
The character and story of Silk Handkerchiefs have been developed through radio shows, YouTube videos and short stories written by Haworth since 2003. A performance of Silk Handkerchiefs took place at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in July 2008, as part of The House of Viktor & Rolf. Alex Brenchley’s misadventures will be continued in two sequels.
The narration richly fuses Cockney, hip-hop slang and verbose Dickensian English. The book offers a delirious account of 21st-century anxiety at its most extreme and hysterical and captures the London of 2007 as if it was only yesterday.
Silk Handkerchiefs – hilarious, ridiculous, true!
Published September 2009
180 × 110 mm, 96 pages + cover, printed offset in black and red, sewn and glued
ISBN 978-94-90006-02-0
A Walk in the Park : Photographs by Michael Pitt
A Walk in the Park
A photographic essay of a year of walks in Victoria Park
Sunday 6th of September
Slideshow between 2pm – 6pm
Followed by drinks in Victoria Park
For a year Michael Pitt left his house on the border of the east end’s historic public park and documented his walks around the lake and paths in Victoria Park. Using his faithful old Olympus E300 camera he captured the light and shade and changing seasons throughout the course the a year.
Michael Pitt, was born in Shoreditch, and moved to Bethnal Green in 1977 to the be part of the housing Coop beside Victoria Park.
On Sunday afternoon he will be showing a slide show of an edited version from this collection of over 2,000 photographs.
This event is dedicated to his late friend Darlene Johnson
