Published by Antigravity Magazine and founded by Ceasar Meadows, past anthologies have featured local comic artists and illustrators like Jeff Pastorek and Happy Burbeck as well as out-of-town artists Josh Neufeld (author/illustrator of A.D. New Orleans and bestselling graphic nonfiction piece The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media) and Josh Simmons, 2009 Ignatz Award Nominee for Outstanding Artist.

Artists featured in the current issue, including frequent Room 220 contributor Clark Allen, will be on hand to rub shoulders with friends and fans. Uptown’s favorite bar, Ms. Mae’s, will provide the keg. The event is free and open to the public.

HAFU: The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan by Megumi Nishikura & Laura Perez Takagi

The film follows the lives of five “hafus”–the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese–as they explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafus Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.  The film explores race, diversity, multiculturalism, nationality, and identity within the mixed-race community of Japan. And through this exploration, it seeks to answer the following questions: What does it mean to be hafu?; What does it mean to be Japanese?; and ultimately, What does all of this mean for Japan?  (2013, 90 minutes)  Japanese and English subtitles.  Admission is Free.  LIMITED SEATING.

After the screening there will be a Skype Q&A with Hafu Producer/Director MEGUMI NISHIKURA, followed by a conversation with the New Orleans Hapa community about the collaborative effort to create a Hapa Photo Scroll.  For more information about the Hapa Schroll contact poetryprocess@gmail.com.

For more information contact mail@charitablefilmnetwork.org, and please visit and www.hafufilm.com.

HOSTED by the Japan Society of New Orleans, Press Street’s Antenna Gallery and Charitable Film Network, in conjunction with the 3rd Annual New Orleans Loving Festival - a multiracial community celebration and film festival that challenges racial discrimination through outreach and education. Look Here for additional Loving Festival events.

New Orleans, Louisiana is the murder capital of the United States. For the last decade, statistics have shown murder rates four to six times higher than the national average. Eighty percent of the victims are black males, mostly in their teenage years. SHELL SHOCKED starts at the surface of New Orleans’ teen murder epidemic and delves into the hearts and minds of those whose lives are most deeply impacted—the youth who live in fear of violence, the parents who grieve a wound that will never fully heal, and the mentors and officials who have dedicated their lives to touching, and perhaps saving, one life at a time.  (2012, 60 minutes)  There will be a short discussion with filmmaker JOHN RICHIE following the screening.  Seating is limited.

For more information contact scrubbrush@scrubbrushproductions, and please visit shellshockeddoc.com.

This year’s festival kicks off with a book launch for its anthology Saints and Sinners 2013: New Fiction from the Festival, proceeds from which benefit both the festival and the NO/AIDS Task Force.

The weekend continues with master classes taught by headliners Justin Torres and Dorothy Allison. Torres’ first novel, We the Animals, debuted to acclaim from the New York Times and many other publications. Read an interview with him at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Allison is the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, and Cavedweller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been called “The Roseanne of Literature.” Other speakers include Elana Dykewomon, Felice Picano, Bernard Cooper, Ellen Hart, and Andrew Holleran.

The festival also aims to provide its visitors with perspective and opportunities that extend into the business side of the writing life. Editors from the LGTB literary world will be available to hear pitches and answer questions about how best to prepare short fiction for anthology submission. Guests can also mingle freely with authors and speakers at the Fest’s “Glitter with the Literari” party.

Other fun things to do include the Saints and Sinners walking tour, New Orleans’ first LGTB literary tour, and the New Orleans leg of the Stories and Queer reading series. Festival events will take place at Faubourg Marigny Art and Books, Gallery Orange, the Herman-Grimma House, and Hotel Monteleone.

See more coverage of the festival at Lambda Literary.

Read OPP English “Part I: The Instigator” and “Part II: When I left, my mind was buzzing.”

By Ari Braverman

“All right! Who’s feeling read-y?”

This is how Nik De Dominic asks for volunteers.

A voice issues from the middle of three students seated in a conference-style arrangement of tables in a windowless classroom inside Orleans Parish Prison: “Me.”

The man clears his throat before reading the first line of Matthias Svalina’s “Creation Myth”: In the beginning, everyone wanted to fight to the death.

We’re all silent as he continues, poring over a handout, including Anne McKinley, grants supervisor at OPP and the prison-side coordinator of De Dominic’s program. The poem ends and De Dominic indulges the room’s resonant silence. All three students are still staring at the poem when he asks them to unpack the text.

“Genesis,” says one student, who will only give his name as D.

Behind D and the other two students, the room is full of bookshelves that are mostly empty. De Dominic’s personal donations fill two rows, and behind where I sit there are a number of volumes for the prison’s high school reading program, but that’s it. Someone has placed a new globe near the door.  Three plastic cabinets dominate the room’s rear wall, each secured with a padlock. It’s unclear whether or not they, too, are empty.

Apart from these and the guard seated in front of them, the white and orange sweat suits, plastic sandals, and shackles, it’s tempting to forget this isn’t a standard poetry class. The students arrive on time, 3 p.m. every Thursday, and stay engaged for the whole two-hour period. Each man has the same easy bearing in this space, the confidence that comes from aptitude and experience. They’ve all been in the class since the beginning of the semester in September, and everyone says he’s learned something.

D says he never watches the clock in the hope that class time is running down—a departure from his experience as an undergraduate. On the contrary, he says he hopes for an extra twenty minutes every week: “I don’t know if it’s the jail environment, the way it offsets class—you have to take that into consideration,” he says, “but I just get caught up. You’re learning something, doing something constructive, positive. You’re learning something about yourself maybe, expressing yourself through writing, and you want to keep going.”

De Dominic guides us through the packet without interruption. There’s none of the side conversation or daydreaming that happens in most classrooms. Everyone at the table takes a turn reading a poem out loud. Each begins with the phrase “In the beginning.”

Jason Romero volunteers to read a piece about a woman who tapes, glues, and paperclips complementary objects together—tears to faces, smiles to happy people, leaves to trees—but isn’t happy with the outcome.

“That woman’s confused, man,” he says after finishing. His classmates and teacher murmur in agreement. Black block letters on his sweatshirt spell out “OPP,” another reminder we’re not at Xavier, Loyola, Tulane, UNO, Dillard, or Delgado. He says the paperclip poem reminds him of the world.

D reads a poem in which the world begins with an old man telling stories to mimeograph machines he thinks are children, and the packet concludes with “Destruction Myth,” the last piece in the eponymous collection. De Dominic prefaces it by asking the students why Svalina might have chosen the name he did, given there’s only one “Destruction Myth” and the rest of the book’s 44 poems are all called “Creation Myth.”

Different timbres fill the classroom as the students read from final piece round-robin. The language is choppy and spare, the images visceral and concrete, yet mysterious. When it’s finished, De Dominic appeals to his students as writers, not just readers, and asks them about how the thing works, what it’s doing and why, and what language they’d love to borrow. It’s easy to see why these men feel so comfortable with De Dominic—he comes to them as a teacher, but never crosses the line between instruction and condescension. He’s encouraging but never saccharine, friendly but not too familiar.

“He’s saying that, in the end, one thing that’s normally with another thing would be without it, which makes you realize what they would be [alone]. What would the salt be without the sea?” Romero muses.

Then De Dominic says it’s time to wax philosophical. “Is creation possible without destroying?” he asks.

D counters the question with one of his own: “The intention is to show us that there’s violence in birth and life?”

“Maybe.”

Unphased by the oblique reply, D continues:“[I’m thinking of] the different ways things are created—anything from an omelet to birth to the mountains. At some point in the process there’s some kind of destruction or violence. I guess you could call [creation] a violent act.”

Romero riffs off this comment and suggests: “I guess we have to break one thing down to make another thing. Like an omelet. If you want use onions, you have to break them down a little bit to make the whole omelet.” This begins a discussion of the necessity of pain when it comes to mastering tricks on a skateboard.

Later, Romero tells me he didn’t participate much in the beginning of the semester: “When I first got to class, I was really shy and nervous. I don’t think I’m dumb or anything, but everyone was so smart!” He laughs. “I was just quiet, just listening. Now I’m doing it all.” He wears a black beanie and has a plastic rosary around his neck, and looks very young. He and D are from the same tier in OPP. I ask if they hang out when they’re not in class and they both laugh.

“We don’t like each other,” D says, pointing at Romero across the table. “We try to kill each other.” He pantomimes a snarl.

Romero grins: “I can’t stand him.”

It turns out that, at least on that particular tier, these students are some of the program’s best ambassadors. Romero shares what he’s learned with a younger friend, who in turn has contacted McKinley, the OPP coordinator, about joining the class next semester.

“We’ve been advertising,” D tells her, and she thanks him with a mix of sweetness and sarcasm and feigned exasperation. She seems more a housemother than authority figure.

Bryan Baker, the third student, spends his time on a different tier. Except for his initial participation and reading out loud when it’s his turn, he remains quiet in spite of his palpable engagement with the text. He appears older than D and Romero and has a powerful build that amplifies his taciturn presence. But his sternness belies a romantic heart. When asked why he signed up for the class, he answers: “I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to write to females.” He pauses. “I’m just being honest.”

Everyone at the table—teacher and student alike—concludes his reason is completely valid.

“That’s why I started writing poetry,” De Dominic offers.

However, as class ends, Baker also describes how important it felt to participate in something like this. He says wanted to do something that would elevate him. “I look forward to coming here every Thursday to get an experience to bring back [to the tier]. We’re around a lot of negative shit all day, so it’s good to get out the door for a little while and learn something. [This class] really works for me.”

Romero echoes the sentiment: “I feel like I’m bettering myself by coming to this class, sitting here, paying attention, working on my writing. Writing and literature is something you can use throughout your whole life, not just in one certain career.” He illustrates his point with a discussion of injury. What happens if someone who’s been taught a physical trade loses a hand or a leg, or becomes paralyzed? “The trade is now useless,” he says, “but if you are strong intellectually, it’s something you always have with you.”

“A class like this,” D says, “can help you communicate between cultures, ages, races, sexes, to better understand where people are coming from and to better express yourself to a broad range of people. There’s a wider range, a bigger net. You can modify [what you’ve learned] to fit certain career requirements.”

To steer the focus back towards Svalina’s poetry, De Dominic gives the class five minutes to make their own creation or destruction myths. He reminds everyone about the brevity of Svalina’s phrasing, as well as the poet’s pop culture references that ground the writing and create a sense of familiarity for his readers. Everybody, including De Dominic, gets right to work, and the room is silent. The guard at the back of the room peruses the screen of her smart phone.  D squints at his paper for a long time, tapping his pen against his bottom lip. The five minutes become seven, then ten. Baker and Romero write quickly, and the latter is still editing his work after De Dominic calls time.

“Where do we begin? I want to hear these.” De Dominic leans back in his plastic chair, laces his fingers behind his head.

D’s effort has rendered something short and opaque but full of possibility: “In the beginning there was time. / Just waiting for it all to start. / Again, in the beginning time was waiting / and it waited till the very end.”

Baker has come up with some of the most resonant lines of the day, including “The sun will come up but never go down / … / Fires will last forever.” He retreats into silence as soon as he finishes reading.

Romero’s piece is the longest of the three. He describes childhood totems: a tricycle and nightlights, coloring books and tantrums. He regards the page with a gentle expression as De Dominic compliments the work.

Then, keeping with seminar format, De Dominic reads his own, a piece about New Orleans that begins with Justin Bieber and Madonna and ends with the collapse of social media.

“That’s got legs, that’s got legs, and that’s got legs, too,” De Dominic says, pointing at D and Baker and Romero in succession. “Go back to them and write them out. What you’re doing now is pretty.”

On that note, class ends. De Dominic has to be across town by 5 p.m. to teach at Delgado’s campus on the West Bank, and the three inmates are due their allotted daily “outside time.” De Dominic says an easy goodbye and disappears through the door. The students line up. The cuffs on their ankles, cumbersome plastic flip-flops, and thick white socks keep their strides very short. The guard opens the door and ushers them through it. I’m next, and McKinley brings up the rear.

We exit into a dark concrete cellblock and take the stairs very slowly until we reach a landing. Instead of a window or guardrail, an iron grate separates us from a three-story fall onto Tulane Avenue, and the air from the outside world presses on our faces.

McKinley looks at her watch. “Starting now,” she says. “Three minutes.” Everyone takes a position looking out. “We used to do it for five,” she tells me, “but some people just couldn’t help hollering at some people.”

Romero laces his fingers into the metal latticework, sets his forehead in the space between his hands. D and Baker just look. The traffic sounds very far away. Tulane Tower rises in a plank of sunlight across the street.

“All right, guys,” McKinley says. “Time to go.”

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY by Robert Klane
Set during a single night at a disco, there are some nine distinctive, character-driven plots going on, including one featuring Donna Summer as an up-and-coming singer trying to get the club DJ to play her record. (1978, 89 minutes)

Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced by the contemporary moment that shapes the author’s daily life. And like many novels, The Flamethrowers is an amalgam of the author’s personal interests strung together by her character’s movements—in this case, the downtown New York art scene in the late 1970s and the Movement of ’77, a leftist revolt that rocked Italy that year. Kushner’s work as an art critic—she’s written for Artforum for more than a decade—helped spawn her interest in the former, and as she researched the latter after learning about the Autonomists and other components of the Movement of ’77, the texts of that era came alive as the Occupy and other movements culled them for instruction and inspiration for their own political actions.

The thread that connects these two elements—New York art and Italian revolt—in The Flamethrowers is Reno, a recent art school graduate from Nevada who moves to New York to cut her teeth as an artist and adult. She wends her way into the world she desires and becomes involved with Sandro Valera, a prominent minimalist who’s also the estranged scion of an Italian motorcycle baron—which is fortuitous, considering Reno’s transfixion with both art and motorcycle racing. The plot unfurls from here, with wild forays that entwine the narrator and others that transport the reader further back in time, to the genesis of the Valera empire, and into the depths of the imaginations of characters Reno encounters, who hold forth with indeterminably fantastical stories and revolutionary theories.

Rachel Kushner is also the author of Telex From Cuba, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She will present The Flamethrowers at a Happy Hour Salon hosted by Room 220 that will also feature readings by Nathaniel Rich and Zachary Lazar from 6 – 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). As usual, complimentary libations will be on hand, though we strongly suggest donations. Copies of The Flamethrowers and titles by Rich and Lazar will be on sale courtesy of Maple Street Book Shop. This event is free and open to the public.

Room 220: You wrote a piece for the Paris Review in which you mentioned writing about mass demonstrations in The Flamethrowers while Occupy Wall Street was on the news. While you were writing about riots, they were erupting in London and Greece. In depicting the political elements of the book, how much was your eye turned toward the present and what was going on?

Rachel Kushner: The way I conceive of the novel—my experience of writing one—is of living in a world that is constantly being shaped and filtered by the book I am writing. My eye is always turned toward the present, because the present, the whole extended plane of life, is arranging itself to be lifted up and transported into fiction. I thought a great deal about these past events in the 70s. I had encountered the Autonomist movement through my husband, who writes about French and Italian philosophy and political theory in the 20th century, and through him I met some Italians who knew a great deal about this milieu. I thought it would be a pretty thrilling context for a novel.

As I was writing the book, Autonomia and the Movement of 77 started to seem like something of a cultural zeitgeist. A lot of people were interested in Italy, and that’s partly because of Occupy and other movements that were going on. Even people in the Arab movements were looking to Italy, and people in the anti-austerity movements across Europe. It’s a really interesting time that hasn’t completely been studied and declared defunct in the way that May ’68 has. The Italian 1970s may have more interesting and relevant links to the contemporary era, given that the autonomist actions extended beyond the factory into the cities and were a set of refusals that no longer cohered with the factory and a traditionally Marxist class composition. Beyond the complicated issue of Autonomia, there were these rather simple coherences between what I wrote and what was going on in real life. As I wrote about the blackout in 1977, looting was erupting in London. As I wrote about people being tear-gassed in the streets of Rome that same year, people were being tear-gassed in Oakland. As I wrote about an anarchist street gang engaged in full-on combat with police, I watched live feeds from Greece of these kids fighting the cops in insanely asymmetrical battles, launching molotovs with lacrosse sticks.

Autonomists

I knew a lot of people involved in Occupy—many who are younger than I am, people in their early 20s for whom Occupy will probably have been the essential historical event of their time. My friends in Occupy are and were all interested in Autonomia, and they were reading the same texts I was reading. I did a reading from the novel-in-progress in L.A. and everyone thought that what I was reading was about them, when it was actually about this historical group of anarchists in New York City from ’67 – ’71 who were called the Motherfuckers. People know about that group, but my friends sort of thought I was writing a text that was related to them or inspired by them, and in a way they were correct.

Rm220: Factory workers play a potent role in the political landscape of your novel, as they have in real political movements throughout recent history. In terms of writing as part of a contemporary conversation, how did you view that specific element, especially considering the decline of organized labor in the United States?

RK: The 70s in Italy is a pretty complicated milieu, but it’s something like this: A lot of the theoretical components of Autonomia were born in the factories of the highly industrialized north of Italy—there’s the Pirelli factory where the Red Brigades famously got their start, and there’s these motorcycle factories, and of course there’s Fiat. But none of it, as I understand it, was about “organized labor” in a traditional sense—though I should say I’m no expert on autonomist and workerist history. I think some of the theories about why the Hot Autumn of 1969 at the Fiat factories was so intense and so many workers participated in the strikes is that many of the workers come from the south of Italy, which does not have the culture of work that you find in the north. This difference between the south and the north manifested itself in this total disregard on the part of the workers for their labor bosses when these strikes start to happen. They were primarily strikes that were not organized by union leaders, and instead something more like wildcat strikes. The movement partly happened because workers rejected their unions and the communist party altogether. They organized themselves, which is the origin of the term autonomia.

The component of Autonomia that was Rome-based was much more of a sub-proletarian, lumpen population of people who were not productive, and they certainly didn’t do factory work because it’s not an industrialized part of Italy. That’s a really complicated component of things: How did this mass revolt and mass illegality across multiple sectors of people occur if there’s no factory as a site of principle antagonism? People would try to explain it to me: “Well, people in Rome, they are not interested in work, they wanted to have a different kind of life. It’s a total rejection of bourgeois values.” There was simply a refusal to work, and I think that relates to what people are feeling now. Those in Occupy were not making a specific set of demands. They weren’t asking for health benefits and better minimum wages as barristas or whatever. It was, and I hope remains, a kind of rejection and a refusal, rather than a demand for a specific and better-negotiated position in the service economy—which is to say, the economy. I love that moment in The Wild One when someone asks Marlon Brando what he’s rebelling against and he says, “What do you got?”

“Splitting” by Gordon Matta-Clark

Rm220: And how did you come upon the New York art world of the late 1970s as a context in which to set part of the book?

RK: I’m familiar with that era partly from having written about contemporary art—a significant time and an influential time still for contemporary art—and partly from my childhood, and having been exposed, early, to some of it. That period also coincides with the death of the industrial age in the United States. It seems like an interesting coincidence—or not a coincidence—that the artists in SoHo were moving into these former manufacturing warehouses, and even using the detritus of manufacturing itself to make their work. As I was beginning to write The Flamethrowers, there was a retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney. Later, mid-way through the book, there was a retrospective of the Pictures Generation at the Met. A Jack Goldstein show is opening like next week in New York City, and I just saw it at the Orange County Museum. The 1970s is still an informing era for contemporary artists, who continue to be drawn to it, and to feel a need to contend with the figures and ideas and the discourse of that era. All of this made the era feel worth writing about.

Rm220: The book is filled with people talking over each other, or at least talking not so much to communicate but to simply talk. You have all these monologues—Ronnie’s story at the end, Stanley Kastle’s monolog, which is literally to no one. They’re excellent stories, but their quality doesn’t change their motivation. Relate this to your writing practice. How much of your writing practice is to communicate, to take part in the conversation, and how much is simply to monologue?

RK: I’m not sure there is a clear and clean distinction between “to communicate” and to “monologue.” The person who speaks in a long breathless jag probably feels he is communicating something important or he would not bother. I think a lot of people want to talk more than they want to listen. Meaning some component of their speech is always about the speech itself and their need to perform it and to hear their own voice and to dominate by talking, more than it is about making contact with a listener. But there is some level at which neither monologue nor communication are what matter to the novel, the rules of it, because the author is always communicating to the reader. Nothing is by accident or impulse—it’s all there, ultimately, by some kind of design. The author, ideally, is not a bloviator at the dinner table, but registering the phenomenon of such to have fun or be comic or make some other kind of point, for instance, to introduce textures into the narrative that the narrator can’t, since she is one voice, unmodulated.

For me, this resembles life—sometimes there are these people who are frankly bored when anyone else in the room is talking but them. And I like the sort of self-declared experts that can say a lot more about themselves than they think they’re saying when they want to tell you every detail about a subject of which they have the impression they are an expert—and sometimes they are an expert, but they tell you about their ego’s needs as they inform you.

Reno, the narrator, can’t entirely surf the more sophisticated discourses of the people around her and so she is often more quiet and withdrawn, which lent more space for other people to talk. I was also interested formally in the challenge of letting dialogue take over for very long stretches, letting someone who isn’t the narrator talk for thirty pages. The narrator is there, but she’s simply recording what he’s saying as a listener in the room. While I was working on this book I re-read The Savage Detectives by Bolaño. I love the way he lets people tell stories within stories. He’s obviously not the first person to do that. Conrad does, uses framing mechanisms. I was interested in developing my own manner of doing that.

Rm220: You mentioned Savage Detectives, but I thought several times of 2666 while reading this book—your narrator is perpetually on the outskirts of these things that are going on, which is the same for most of the narrators in 2666. And in 2666, as well, there are lots stories told by characters that go on for pages that, seemingly, have nothing to do with the plot.

RK: I read 2666 when I was just getting the engine of my novel running. For me, that novel and Savage Detectives have somehow become one massive tapestry. I think they are interrelated in a way that Bolaño’s other books are not. His other books relate in certain surface ways or in structural ways, but those two novels seem to be circling around the same questions—of the nature of evil, for instance—one in a more playful way and the other in a more dark and vast but insidious way. I think I’m equally influenced by both of those books. I certainly studied them—as many other writers have—and I’m flattered you thought of 2666.

My Mom thinks my work has really improved too is the second round of a show that illustrates the interesting connections between childhood and adulthood in art. Some artists’ work will just naturally show this connection and some work was made out of a desire to rework a childhood piece.

CUTTING LOOSE by Susan Todd & Andrew Young
New Orleans is a city where reality often takes a back seat to fantasy – where a stripper can become a Queen and a poor black man, a regal Indian chief. In this film we become intimate with a diverse handful of New Orleanians – rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, sheltered and streetwise – for whom Mardi Gras is the ultimate fantasy. Through spontaneous verite scenes, we experience the passionate ordeal these people go through to cut loose during Mardi Gras. Generously spiced with music and humor, Cutting Loose is a veritable gumbo pot of unforgettable characters on an outrageous journey of transformation during this uniquely American ritual.  (1996, 90 minutes)

For more information contact jolly8994@gmail.com, and please visit www.nolasynchronicity.com, and www.archipelagofilms.com.

TCHOUPITOULAS by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross
A documentary that follows three brothers as they discover the scenes of late-night New Orleans. (2012, 80 minutes)

For more information contact jolly8994@gmail.com, and please visit www.nolasynchronicity.com, and www.rossbros.net/tchoupitoulas.