Thursday April 1^st,  8pm

Calling all musicians, poets, artists, singers, songers, ranters, ravers, and lovers.

All performers welcome — open sign-up begins at 7:30pm

Grand opening night will be Thursday, April 1st, 2010 and will feature an extended set by folk musician Danny Schmidt, as well as open floor spots. Amazing refreshments — alcoholic, edible, and otherwise — will be available.

And Again! Every Other Thursday, 8pm

$5 door/ Performers FREE , Sign-up at 7:30pm

Completely Unplugged, Utterly Magical Music, Poetry, Story and Song & All Manner of Performance Artistry, since 1994

The Girl Eye Show

Opening Reception Saturday, April 3 at 7 pm with music and performance.

Photos Relating Females

Lauren Goldberg, Anne Marie Hansen, Beth Hommel, Cassie Olander

Prints by young urban female photographers evidence a spontaneous and intimate female gaze enveloping homo-sociality.  This is about both distance and closeness, intra-gender formal queerness and the receptive camera.

Bowery Books Poets

Sunday April 11^th, 5-7

Poetry Readings from 5-7 pm in Tribes Reading Room

Poets Fay Chiang, Cynthia Kraman and Janet Hamill.

April 17^th, 6-8 pm

Book Party

Shalom Naumen’s Selected Works

‘Unbearables’ Book Release Party and Reading

Saturday, April 24^th, 6-10 pm

$2 Admission

RA Araya presents…

6:00-8:00pm Readings by Carl Watson, Sparrow, Foamola

8:00-10:00pm OPEN Mic with Guitaris t& Songwriter Chris Barrera

A Night of Near Miss(il)es

Jazz Performance

April 30^th, 9pm

Will McEvoy-bass, Nathaniel Morgan-altosax, Cody Brown-drums, Owen Stewart Robinson- guitar.  

Donations to the space gracefully demanded.

Play, drink, discuss and hang. Look forward to it!!

The volume’s personal narrative tells of her family’s immigration from Southern China and Singapore to Chinatown; it encompasses the diasporic Chinese communities in Italy, Germany and throughout the world. The poems recount Chiang’s travels and, through her good ear, capture the voices of working women, interlacing the narrative with their stories. Among the finest poems are the deft portraiture of women, including “Mrs. Oltrani” and the two grandmother poems, “Orchard Street” and “Grandma.” The latter ends with the stunning close, “We continued our walk, admiring the peaches and apples hanging in other people’s gardens,” as good an image of envy and otherness in America as I’ve ever read.
Chiang mourns the deaths of her father and her brother’s Hodgkin’s disease, mental illness and suicide. In the poem for her brother Peter, “Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”—what a lovely title!— she writes, “past tomatoes /fallen off the vine / too soon,” that becomes a prefiguring of his premature “ripening.” Chiang recounts her own experience living with stage IV breast cancer, while in “David” she laments the state of the health care system and the condition of cultural silence by describing an HIV-positive client’s passing. What saves the narrative from utter grimness and despair is the poet’s remarkable understatement and acceptance of mortality. I’m reminded of essayist Richard Rodriguez’s comment that AIDS had somehow “Mexicanized” San Francisco in its confrontation with a generation’s death. Chiang has envisioned a future in which “You tell me, / Buddha said, / There is no heaven,” even imagining her own departure, saying, “No I could not bear this,” that is, the well-rehearsed rituals of yet another Chinese funeral and wake.
In “Midnight Blue Sky,” the poet contemplates her own suicide, but is drawn back by the awareness of change, the lightness of a Coney Island beach scene, the anti-nativist observation that “Each wave of newly arrived immigrants gracing these shores, the cold steel blue Atlantic, would settle and fiercely claim the city as its own.” In place of a politics of polarization, Chiang offers a poetics of inclusion, hence hope. In “Magic,” the poet observes the ways in which children, including her own daughter, reawaken adults to the loving details of the world, in “practicality and shrewdness.” The wonderful short lyrics, “Landscape” and “Home,” have the economy of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and a wistful ancestral longing.
The poet’s voice is conversational, accessible, deceptively simple and unadorned, modest, and sometimes raging, especially in the early poem, “Chinatown,” with its withering critique of the American culture’s homogenizing effect: “american tv sold mickey mouse and donald ducks / to little dick and janes and run spot run / in the suburbias of white picket fences / and automobiles.” But by and large, hers is a storyteller’s voice. Formally, Chiang favors a shorter line that isn’t often justified along the left margin but broken along the page, signifying movement. The collage of genres recalls Jean Toomer’s classic Cane, which also ignored or transcended questions of genre and convention.
The autobiographical narrative often circles and backtracks, so that “Journal Entry Jan. 1, 1975” describes her father’s death, while “Autumn Dusk,” which follows immediately afterwards, fictionalizes a conversation between father and daughter that remained unsaid during his lifetime. The latter poem gives itself over to the father’s elegiac voice: “in this light /in this autumn light / this September.”
There’s a satisfying wholeness to Fay Chiang’s 7 Continents 9 Lives, the arc of an active and conscious life. If I were to identify a single quality that marks the poet’s perspective, it would have to be full acceptance and inclusiveness: working class communities of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, those living with HIV, cancer or mental illness, the dispossessed, artists and creators as a force for social change. In the first section of “Images,” for example, the poet paints a carnivalesque scene on St. Marks Place in the Lower East Side in which she encounters an “old woman in raggedy coat and kerchief” who proceeds to tell her that she’s an artist-nun who sang “jesus light my fire in a lesbian bar.” The story is told without irony, grotesqueness or meanness, but with a common laughter; Chiang’s level, democratic gaze restores the homeless woman’s full humanity, and effects in the reader a “healing [that] has its own pace; / nothing to do with logic” (“Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”). If that isn’t the poet’s task, I don’t know what is.

I’ve known Fay Chiang since 1974 when she was executive director of Basement Workshop. At the time I was coordinator of Basement’s Writers Workshop.

The book is divided up into 47 sections or chapters, each with a title, and ranging in length from one page to roughly six.  It is a quick read and a fun read and it is a read you can always go back to as the undercurrents that Brautigan deals with offer a depth that lurks in the back of each chapter and the back of the reader’s mind so that there are always new connections to be made and new feelings to be felt.  The sections are split into different threads and themes with some recurring but with no over all coherent story, making it lyrical.  But this does not make it any less of a novel.  What engages the reader is, first, Brautigan’s prose style; smooth, light, with easily read and digestible sentences that move easily and naturally from one to the other.  Then there is the clash of themes where, here, drama does not build in the character’s lives, it is built in the reader himself as the different images and scenes, descriptions and events constantly push into and pull each other along.  And then there is the aspect of metafiction, fiction that reflects upon itself.  Brautigan takes it and puts in the first chapter and references the cover, as mentioned, a photo taken in front of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a park in San Francisco. 

The self referencing is important as it starts the function of building the book as an experience in the reader.  Good books make reading an experience so that the reader is not following a story but actually having emotional reactions to the work, is actually feeling and creating memories of feeling; so what Brautigan does by opening the book with a discussion of the cover is telling the reader that the event isn’t a story, or the book, but is actually the reader, as the reader must go back and observe the cover and now knows that the author who is now the narrator knows that he is writing a thing and he’s telling you he’s writing it so that like all good metafiction he points out that the thing is not the Thing but is a reflection of it and that the real Thing is life itself.  And then he goes on with the other themes, most particularly the degradation of America, as an optimistic description of the statue of Ben Franklin statue and the word WELCOME facing the four directions, are coupled with bums at a church across the street waiting for free sandwiches.  It is a scene of poverty and a clash with the manufactured image of America that moves throughout the book.  The image is then heightened by a Kafka quote that reads, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

This degradation through its many facets, the rise of technology, loss of value, loss of a connection with something more natural or organic, etc, runs the length of the book and is paralleled and contrasted with the other large thread that is of pastoral scenes of fishing.  Many of these scenes involve a family, moving around from campsites in America, illustrating the splendor of the country and the depth of its natural beauty while at the same time reinforcing the book with the metaphor for fishing, sustenance, a theme as old as Christ.  What is remarkable about the book is that although Brautigan has forgone classic structure he retained one of the oldest themes, that of life returning life to itself with the symbol of fish.  That this lost connection with nature can be retrieved through fishing.  Over the centuries this theme often involved a redemption, usually of land or character but always in the end of life.  Brautigan knows this but does not state it.  Instead he gives the reader events and description so that instead of being told what the problem is it is made implicit and instead of being told what to do about it the book, being set up as an event itself, activates the reader’s own sympathy or empathy or even urgency.  This is one of the key elements that made it such a hit in the ‘60’s.  It was a true cry, a sign, pointing directly at the clash of technology and nature and that nature was loosing—as Brautigan points out when addressing the camping craze in America that the Coleman lamp has become the beacon of these people and that it is “unholy”; and as he points to the rise of consumerism which is wonderfully illustrated in the section titled “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”  In this chapter the narrator finds out about a place that sells streams for trout fishing, that you can go there and build a stream, paying for it by the foot, stock it with fish and even surround it with trees and shrubs and wildlife to make a perfectly manufactured natural setting.  Brautigan’s light style makes these few pages seem almost cutesy as the narrator is picking out what he wants and discusses options as if buying a car with the salesman.  But those Brautigan undercurrents begin to creep up and the astute reader will begin to realize that it is a simple but poignant and strong commentary on, what was at the time, a rising consumerism that is now our everyday way of life.  Though we do not buy trout streams by the foot, almost everything else in our society, including our health and our bodies, has become commodities for profit. 

What stands out in the book, though, as truly astounding, is the relationship that “Trout Fishing in America” has with the reader, that it is a thing, not only the book itself, but in the book “Trout Fishing in America,” exists as an object to be explored, a personification, an event and even an entity unto itself.  Brautigan begins this creation of Trout Fishing in America as an entity right in the second chapter where the narrator wonders about when he first heard about Trout Fishing in America and there is a response after his brief musings by Trout Fishing in America itself.  This sets the stage for Trout Fishing in America not being simply an activity or even a pastoral state of mind to be reached in the tranquility of nature, but an actual entity, running around out there.  It moves, it talks, it does things.  It is at the same time a hotel and a bum named Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  It is all these things and more and Brautigan does not waste his or the reader’s time by trying to define it or explain it so that the reader may on his own grasp it.  This is where his having the book as a true experience comes into play, because it is the event of reading all of the chapters and sections against each other where Trout fishing in America is all of these different things and exists as different things, undefined and explained in their relationships that, in the end, the reader must put it all together into the actual experience, the way that any person who lives through an event puts the pieces together for a full understanding. 

It is not all completely out of bounds.  In the end Brautigan brings the pastoral family of campers to the city and the park in San Francisco with the Franklin statue that starts the book, pinching the whole thing off almost as it had begun.  Here, with their little girl, they come across Trout Fishing in America Shorty who, old and broke and nearing death beckons to the child who at first pays him attention then with a flippancy and frivolity runs away.  It is a scene of contrasts and foils, of warmth and desperation, of family and loneliness that is offered to the reader, so typical of this book and Brautigan, with no implicit meaning other than what the reader can get from it with his own senses.  

Over all the book is short and accessible, easy to read, and easy to read on many levels.  It is an exquisite example of post modernism and a triumph of literary themes and explorations that edge into the prophetic.  It is almost sad that this book is a cult classic, that its association with the 60’s and the counter culture movement has basically trumped its validity as solid work of fiction.  Hopefully, now, enough time has gone by and with the publication of this new edition by itself the up and coming generation of readers will see Trout Fishing in America for what it truly is.

Grand opening night will be Thursday, April 1st, 2010 and will feature an extended set by folk musician Danny Schmidt, as well as open floor spots. Amazing refreshments — alcoholic, edible, and otherwise — will be available.

Every Other Thursday, 8pm, A Gathering of the Tribes (Gallery)
285 E 3rd St, 2nd Floor (btw. Ave. C and Ave. D), New York City
$5 door/ Performers FREE (sign-up at 7:30pm)

Completely Unplugged, Utterly Magical
Music, Poetry, Story and Song & All Manner of Performance Artistry, since 1994

“Britain’s most intimate performance space” - The Times (London)
“One of five essential cultural interludes in Oxford” - Channel 5’s guide to Oxford’s Hidden Gems
“Oxford’s best-loved performance night” - BBC
“The atmosphere is magic” - Virtually Acoustic

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Lauren Goldberg         Anne Marie Hansen

Beth Hommel         Cassie Olander

Prints by young urban female photographers evidence a spontaneous and intimate female gaze enveloping homo-sociality. This is about both distance and closeness, intra-gender formal queerness and the receptive camera.

For more information contact Janet@Bruesselbach.com