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A reading & performance with the four recent ELEVATE residents: Steve Orth, MK Chavez, Suzanne Stein and Julian Francis Park.

JULIAN FRANCIS PARK has poems in Blind Field (forthcoming), Entropy, HOLD (forthcoming), Horny Poetry Review (forthcoming), and Writing w/o Walls, narrative excerpted in Queen Mob’s Tea House, reviews in Jacket2 and Tripwire, and a chapter, “On the Historical Conditions of Accumulation,” in Rosa Luxemburg: A Permanent Challenge for Political Economy. Julian does intake for Causa Justa/Just Cause’s Tenants’ Rights Clinic, and facilitates a free, weekly writing workshop with the Bay Area Public School at the Omni Commons. Julian also works on Omni’s newsletter, The Commoner. Tweets @jfpark3

SUZANNE STEIN’s publications include The Kim Game, TOUT VA BIEN, and Hole in Space. With Steve Benson, she is the author of Do Your Own Damn Laundry, which documents the 36 improvisational dialogues they performed together between 2011-2012. She is the founding editor of SFMOMA’s Open Space.

Oakland-based writer, MK CHAVEZ is the author of several chapbooks including Mothermorphosis (2016, Nomadic Press) a full-collection of her work, Dear Animal, was released in October 2016 by Nomadic Press. Chavez is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, curator of Uptown Friday Readings in Oakland, and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Chavez’s work has been published widely in print and online. Her poem The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself In The Ruins, was selected by Eileen Myles for the 2017 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Award.

STEVE ORTH is from Kansas City, MO and has lived in the Bay Area since 2000. With Lindsey Boldt, he began publishing small books, under the moniker Summer BF Press, which published many classics such as Typing Wild Speech by Dana Ward, The Truth About Ted by Bruce Boone, and many others. Steve also edited Where Eagles Dare Magazine and curated Hybrid Moments Reading Series. He was a founding member of the short lived, but memorable, La Commune Books & Café, a collectively owned bookstore in Oakland, CA. Steve is also a writer, and his latest, Cyborg Legs (OMG! Press, 2015) is a fable involving grocery stores.

B. BROWN/S. GRUFFAT on R. SMITHSON’s RAMP +
Welcome back Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, Durham NC-based teachers, writers, and legendary bringers-of-light! They’re all the way out here on the Coast to unveil their ambitious Amarillo Ramp, a 40-min. essay on the north Texas land-art piece by since-deceased Robert Smithson. Smithson died at the site of another large-scale earth-sculpting work, Spiral Jetty, crashing in a small plane while making photo documentation. Author of Professor Know It All’s Guide to DIY Film/Video, Mr. Brown demonstrates his fiercely independent attitude through two earlier masterworks—The Other Side, on the now center-stage US/Mexico border-zone, and his first 16mm outing, Roswell, which sees our eager seeker scouring the White Sands of New Mexico for Spaceboy and his interstellar craft. Come early for Russ Forster‘s streetwise busking.

Everything Everywhere All the Time feels like big data sugar cane imploding, twisting into an Ouroboros of infinite digital regress, containing within the empty centers of the streaming figure 8 some true black pulsating with a 50-60 hertz hum – near silence. The media scrum suddenly becomes meditative. Then the image. The image of an image. Riffing with the relentless antisocial spectacle. Improvising attention. Learning to love the mediocre. Everything not there now maybe there in the spirit of play – but images of what? America’s Funniest Home Videos’ hyena cruelty. Vitamin infused false caring. Mom practices knife throwing on the kids in the back
yard. Hookers caught on tape. Mad about you, baby. Rushing water. Dancing light thanks to Nam June Paik’s Wobbulator. All in all the heart beat seeking its highest resolution, something other, even everything in retrospect, where there is really nothing, only the mediation, live relationships performed. Everything Everywhere All the Time is the latest project by media performer and “visionary poet” 99 Hooker (Seattle Times). Found and generated audio visual content is mixed live to fashion a “riveting” improvisation
(The New Yorker). Pop stars, Medieval monastics, surveillance footage and one hot pink dream catcher. Everything Everywhere All the Time incorporates work by many contemporary artists including Donald O’Finn, Feedbuck Galore, Akio Mokuno, Thollem McDonas, Mango Johnstone, Jin Hi Kim and others.

99 Hooker founded the pioneering media collective rev.99 (2000) which has performed at The Hirshhorn, Bowery Ballroom and was for many years the “house media band” at Freddy’s Backroom in Brooklyn, NY. 99 began performing media in San Francisco in the 90s with Benton C. Bainbridge, Lord Knows Compost and others. His work with filmmaker Martha Colburn has screened at numerous venues including Museum of Art & Design, dozens of film fests and universities. 99 has created many music videos, documentaries and live performances including for Questlove with Bainbridge at One Step Beyond (Museum of Natural History). As a musician and poet 99 has performed often. His recordings appear on Megaphone, Tzadik, Radical House, Label Bleu (FR) and many others.

https://www.99hooker.com/current-shows