flame-letterhead.png

Features
Gallery
Magazine
Books
Events
About Tribes
CPF
Submissions
Contact
Store
Photos


  • Search

  • A Gathering of the Tribes

    A Gathering of the Tribes is an arts and cultural organization dedicated to excellence in the arts from a diverse perspective. Located on the Lower East Side of New York City, Tribes has been in existence since 1991.


  • A Gathering of the Tribes, 285 East 3rd St, 2nd Floor (between Avenues C and D)
    Phone: 212-674-3778
    Fax: 212-674-5776
    Email: Info@tribes.org


  • Tribes is a member of Chamber Music of America, Poets & Writers, Poets Society of America, St. Marks Poetry Project. We are Funded by NYC DCA, NYSCA & The Andy Warhol Foundation among others. All contributions are tax deductible.

  • Events Calendar

    SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
     1234
    567891011
    12131415161718
    19202122232425
    2627282930 

  • The 16th Annual Charlie Parker Festival

    Throughout the forties, Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz and immortalized the Lower East Side by capturing its combustive atmosphere and translating it into music. It is no wonder that every year the Lower East Side returns a little bit of the favor by celebrating Charlie Parker, his life and his legacy, as well as his deep rooted relationship with this neighborhood, through A Gathering of the Tribes' Charlie Parker Festival.
    This year, A Gathering of the Tribes is please to present the 16th Annual Charlie Parker Festival, entitled "BIRD LIVES," from August 2 - August 29. More information about this year's festival can be found here

Latest Reviews

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge […]


Just Kids, a Memoir by Patti Smith: “Because of Robert”

Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. […]


I Need That Record Store: Retail as Club Membership

by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at […]


Whitney Biennial 2010

By Vedan Anthony-North

With a name like “2010” you don’t really know what to expect when heading to the 2010 Whitney biennial. Unfortunately, you don’t really know what to think about the exhibit after leaving either. Though the theme of “2010” is justified by the curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari in the exhibit’s […]


THE LATEST FROM OILSPILLVILLE

By : Brian Boyles, New Orleans
It was getting a little too possible, you know? That we might make it, that whatever the forces leveled at our survival, they were internal, fixable, matters of fairness or racial understanding or budgeting. We could do that, couldn’t we? The Saints won, didn’t they? […]


Latest Poetry

In Church with Branded Knees

by Ayshia Stephenson
I don’t want him to tear my clothing off anymore. I don’t want him to crush my serenity
into this tiny spit of a paper ball, pit stuck in my throat, like it sits in a child who can not
say: please get it out. Branded knees need a buffer from a pebbled surface. Can […]


The Reunion: A Forecast by Suejin Suh

 
The Reunion: A Forecast                                                                           by Suejin Suh
 
 
Has it been more than three years?  Three or four years-ish since you cleverly sang,  
At the airport, we’ll cross paths walking, walking towards opposite ends/ like almostly- forgotten lovers who had seeming common sense.” (They lusted. Lusted incensed.)
 
Or was this an impromptu melody I made just […]


Latest Essays

UNPOP curatorial statement

by Janet Bruesselbach
“A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” –Adlai Stevenson
Unpop has a variety of playful reactions to both art as commodity and the political legacy of pop art. Art is a commodity so oversupplied that it may be the testing grounds for a post-scarcity economy. Its economy of […]


Off-Off-Broadway in Mumbai

by Howard Pflanzer
How can you produce a brand new controversial American play in Mumbai?  I thought India would be an excellent place to produce and direct my new play, The Terrorist, a timely commentary on the US government policy of detention of South Asians and Muslims and the initiation of […]


Latest Fiction

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge […]


Gone Fishing, Again

by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when […]


Latest Videos

A Starter Kit for Collectors: Exposition et vente au profit de TRIBES

A Starter Kit for Collectors: Exposition et vente au profit de A Gathering of the Tribes
Samedi 1er mai – Dimanche 16 mai 2010
Vernissage: Samedi 1er mai 14-18H
Réception pour les artistes : Samedi 1er mai, 19h-22H
Tribes Gallery
285 East 3rd Street, 2ème étage, NYC 10009
A Gathering of the Tribes est une association artistique et culturelle qui […]


A Starter Kit for Collectors: Art Exhibition and Sale A Benefit for A Gathering of the Tribes

A Gathering of the Tribes is an arts and cultural organization dedicated to excellence in the arts from a diverse perspective. Located on the Lower East Side of New York City, Tribes has been in existence since 1991.   tribes-poster-color.jpg
Saturday May 1st, 2:00 - 6:00 pm : Public preview
Saturday May 1st, 7:00 – 10:00 pm […]


Violation of Youth: Transcendence Through Destruction

      “Kids”

      Director: Larry Clark

      Screenplay: Harmony Korine , Larry Clark, Leo Fitzpatrick , Jim Lewis 

      With Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce and Chloë Sevigny 

 

      “Bully”

      Director: Larry Clark

      Screenplay: Zachary Long, Roger Pullis 

      With Brad Renfro, Rachel Miner, Nick Stahl and Bijou Phillips 

 

Violation of Youth: Transcendence Through Destruction in  Kids and  Bully review by Latif Zaman

 

 

Larry Clark’s Kids follows vacuous NYC teenagers Telly and Casper on a normal day, leisurely searching for drugs and sex. The stark, simple title, the day in the life structure, and realistic dialog of Kids gave it a documentary-like feel, many heralding it as an indictment of the kids of America. Clark’s film  Bully unfolds its tale of suburban teenage debauchery around the true-life murder of the sadistic bully Bobby Kent by a group six teenagers, including his best friend Marty Puccio. The extreme nature of the crime, and the victim, helps particularize these characters more than those in Kids, but also elucidates Clark’s perspective, namely his fascination with a certain kind of predatory instinct. In Kids and Bully the search for drugs and sex often come off as mere rote, fueled more by intertia than vigor or passion. The most dynamic character in Kids is Telly, the “virgin surgeon”, whose life is defined by the pursuit of his next virgin conquest. Bully portrays Bobby Kent as the only one among of his friends possessing any significant intelligence or ambition. However, a genuine pleasure in sadism centers his life. He repeatedly embraces Marty, his most fragrant victim, assuring him, “you’re my best friend.” Bobby needs his victims, whom he rapes, beats, and psychologically tortures, to escape the lethargy seeped ennui of their lives. The only powerful motivation Clark offers his protagonists in either film is the desire to conquer and violate.

 

Clark’s films generally follow a male perspective, females existing mainly as foils for the males. In fact most of the major female characters in both Kids and Bully are raped. In Kids, Casper, to emulate the sexual mastery of Telly, rapes the peacefully sleeping Jenny, in a long, explicitly jarring scene. The defilement of Casper primarily intrigues Clark, however, the camera focusing on Casper’s bewildered face the next morning as he asks “what happened?” Amidst all his drugs and debauchery, only the malicious violence of rape exiles Casper from innocence, from childhood. Looking back, Telly’s pursuit of virgins can be seen as a subliminal compulsion to destroy innocence that is made even more profound by the fact that he is HIV positive.

 

Planning the murder of Bobby Kent consumes the lives of the teenagers in Bully, all of them playing an integral part in the proceedings, and carrying it out in an almost ritualistic fashion. Just before the murder the kids even dance and rhythmically chant “we’re going to kill him,” and “dead.” All these youths live within the extended womb of their parents homes and financial support. They do not have the intelligence to escape to college or the drive to escape financially. Thus they are trapped in a perpetual adolescence. In one scene playing a video game, two of the teenagers perform a move called an “infantality” One explains “Its worse than death, because you keep living, but you’re a fucking baby.” Their hyper-sexualized and drug-filled world inundates them with so much stimulus that it no longer affects them. The first sexual experience, a first smoke or drink, become merely a blur instead of the traditional “coming of age” experience. Murder becomes the plateau of adulthood in Bully. The teenagers follow Bobby’s example and find the first stimulus in their uneventful and rather pathetic lives, in the urge to destroy him. Lust and rage, in and of themselves may be natural human emotions, but sadistic lust to harm transcends human law. Larry Clark doesn’t just degrade his protagonists, he makes them strive for degradation, and ultimately dehumanization through acts murder and rape. Clark’s films obsessively follow teenagers, and the only growth, the only escape from adolescence, he allows them in his microcosm are the basest of transgressions. Clark doesn’t concern himself with the consequences or victims of his protagonists actions, solely on the inclination to perpetrate them.


« El Chino
Contaminated Water »