Wednesday, December 29, 7pm

Tearist Record Release Performance



To celebrate the release of Tearist's self-titled new album, Family is pleased to host a special performance entitled, Canceled

FREE

"For the duration of the new record Tearist will play a copy of the record and by means of violent manipulation effectively destroy it. The simultaneous playing and destroying of the record is crucial to the commercial release. The destroying of the record while playing and hearing the record will evoke a contradiction, the same contradiction that exists in the life/death scenario: to create is to destroy, to live is to die, all death comes from life, and all destruction comes from creation. Finally the actions we perform will work to immortalize the record in it's limited edition and evoke the sense of danger and loss involved in the creative (destructive) act. Simultaneous to creation a loss occurs which reminds the artist/creator of his/her own mortality. The loss, in this case, is the release of the record. We give this to everyone. We lose that which we have created. With this act we cancel this edition." - Tearist

Sunday, December 19, 7pm



On Sunday we're launching the re-issue of Amra's California book. Sarah Manguso will be reading too - here's a review of her book The Two Kinds of Decay in STOP SMILING
Sunday, December 13, 7pm



Book Reading and Release for:

Ten Walks/Two Talks
by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch



Cotner and Fitch will be reading

+ Maggie Nelson will also be reading new work

Ten Walks/Two Talks combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan with a pair of roving dialogues—one of which takes place during a late-night "philosophical" ramble through Central Park. Mapping 21st-century New York, Cotner and Fitch update the meandering and meditative form of Basho's travel diaries to construct a descriptive/dialogic fugue.

"Perhaps it was in the 5th century--I know this for a fact--that a certain government official in China chose to drop out of public life and devote himself to music and poetry, drunkenness and pure conversation. Soon he had a group of friends who had also left their "lives" and this group became poster children for the ideal life in Asia for a very long time. Even today. When Jon and Andy walk around Manhattan talking about things I feel like they are a moving page from that very fine idea in which small talk is large and nothing is more interesting or full or more entrancing than allowing the city to model for you--and walking among it too, becoming it." -Eileen Myles

"Like the propositions of Brainard, Schuyler, or Wittgenstein, Andy Fitch's declarations of ambulatory fact--of "mere" observation--are barbed with genius: clever, defamiliarizing, cushioned by a hum of meditative stillness. His sweetly Oulipian sentences give back to the ordinary its modicum of glow. And when he starts talking with the profound Jon Cotner, a latter-day Plato, we remember that philosophical inquiries have every right to take root in daily curiosities and drolleries, like the "smell of hip-cream," or the metonymic relation of "my first oral sex experience" to the "mace flavor" of a cup of tea. Neurasthenia never had finer spokesmen." -Wayne Koestenbaum

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch recently completed the collaboration called Conversations over Stolen Food. Fitch’s Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. Ten Walks/Two Talks is their latest book.

Maggie Nelson’s books include The Art of Cruelty, and Bluets. Recent books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. Nelson is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, and contributes to Artforum, Bookforum, and Cabinet.
Thursday, Dec 9, 7:30pm


KING by Sarah Soquel Morhaim
Photobook Release Party

Performances by Drawlings and Hiking

Come celebrate the release of KING, a book of black & white photos by Sarah Soquel Morhaim, published by Kaugummi. With performances by Drawlings and Hiking

KING follows the narrative of a journey, with sequences of exotic scenery mixed with the familiar, windows of cars and buses, the faces of animals and people, nature and the suburbs, and home. Morhaim's images are understated yet striking, suffused with an emotional quality that is distinctly her own.

Drawlings is the musical project of visual artist Abby Portner. Hiking is a new LA-based band.

sarahsoquel.com

kaugummi.fr

abbyportner.blogspot.com