This Friday will be the last event at Mess Hall. Founded in 2003, Mess Hall has surfed on generosity for ten years, creating a particular kind of freedom, a quasi-liberated zone of experimentation where art, politics & playfulness come together & fall apart.

Join us for our final gathering in the space. We will say our farewells with a
parade, a key-tossing ceremony and a night-long party. The current key-holders
do not wish to leave the space alone. We will leave it as we found it:
together.

fight for your right

to party & party

for your right to fight

It has been a pleasure & honor to sustain this on-going experiment with all of
you. We will miss seeing you in this space, and hope to rediscover each other
in the context of new experiments with generosity-driven culture.

Gratefully yours

Mess Hall Keyholders

During this period we will continue to feature the “regularly-scheduled” programming. Please see below for upcoming regularly scheduled events. The special closing related events are on the calendar and compiled in the tab ‘Mess Hall is Closing: Final Months’

UPCOMING EVENTS

Tuesday, 12 March 6:30 – 8:30pm

Gift Circle

6:30 – 7:00pm Potluck – BYOB or dish or just come enjoy the bounty!

7:00 – 8:30pm Circle

What happens at a gift circle? We meet, mingle and eat. Then we form a circle and people go around and share what they need. All kinds of things have been asked for: bodywork, milkcrates, help healing a broken heart, garden help, someone to talk to about life goals, child care, etc. The need is spoken with no expectation of it being fulfilled. People in the circle respond if they feel it. Then people go around again and offer a gift, something they would like to share with no expectation of it being accepted. A wide range of things have been offered: a bag of pears, an Indian dinner delivered to your door, instruction on how to make the perfect pie crust, conversation in Arabic, French, Italian & Spanish, research help (from a librarian), help writing a simple will (from a lawyer), etc, etc. Afterwards, people check in with those who responded to the gifts/needs/wishes and schedule them! (Bring your calendars!) Some information on Gift Circles: “It Takes a Village” Fairfax Gift Circle – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxU_0Qdvp58

Occupy Rogers Park

Occupy meetings are currently held every Sunday. Please join us!

Visit https://www.facebook.com/occupyrogerspark for more info.

Tuesday,  8 January, 6:30– 8:30 pm

Gift Circle

What happens at a gift circle? We meet, mingle and eat. Then we form a circle and people go around and share what they need. All kinds of things have been asked for: bodywork, milkcrates, help healing a broken heart, garden help, someone to talk to about life goals, child care, etc. The need is spoken with no expectation of it being fulfilled. People in the circle respond if they feel it. Then people go around again and offer a gift, something they would like to share with no expectation of it being accepted. A wide range of things have been offered: a bag of pears, an Indian dinner delivered to your door, instruction on how to make the perfect pie crust, conversation in Arabic, French, Italian & Spanish, research help (from a librarian), help writing a simple will (from a lawyer), etc, etc. Afterwards, people check in with those who responded to the gifts/needs/wishes and schedule them! (Bring your calendars!) Some information on Gift Circles: “It Takes a Village” Fairfax Gift Circle – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxU_0Qdvp58

6:30 -7pm Potluck – BYOB or dish or just come enjoy the bounty!

7-8:30pm Circle

http://www.facebook.com/events/465410383505951/

Gift Circle

6:30 -7pm Potluck – BYOB or dish or just come enjoy the bounty!

7-8:30pm Circle What happens at a gift circle? We meet, mingle and eat. Then we form a circle and people go around and share what they need. All kinds of things have been asked for: bodywork, milkcrates, help healing a broken heart, garden help, someone to talk to about life goals, child care, etc. The need is spoken with no expectation of it being fulfilled. People in the circle respond if they feel it. Then people go around again and offer a gift, something they would like to share with no expectation of it being accepted. A wide range of things have been offered: a bag of pears, an Indian dinner delivered to your door, instruction on how to make the perfect pie crust, conversation in Arabic, French, Italian & Spanish, research help (from a librarian), help writing a simple will (from a lawyer), etc, etc. Afterwards, people check in with those who responded to the gifts/needs/wishes and schedule them! (Bring your calendars!) Some information on Gift Circles: “It Takes a Village” Fairfax Gift Circle – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxU_0Qdvp58

Thursday, December 6, 7pm – 10pm

Next Objectivists Poetry Workshop

The Next Objectivists is the world’s only 100% autonomous poetry & poetics workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We meet every other week in order to study writing of all kinds in relation to the New York School of Objectivist poets. All workshops are free & open to the public! We read and write together. Eat & drink together. Everyone is welcome. You may already be a Next Objectivist–come and find out.

Absinthe and Zygote Poetry Reading

Three pre-eminent poets will interweave their works into a single, remixed work. This experiment in language and performance will feature poets Elizabeth Robinson, Kimberly Lyon, and Nathan Hoks. As always, this event is free & open to the public.

Gift Circle

Who’s got a need?  A gift?  A desire to spend some time in community and eat?

Gift Circles at the Mess Hall are here again!

Circles will be held the first Tuesday of the month from November-April

Bring a dish to share, or simply enjoy the tasty decadence of our gathering Potluck at 6:30.

Circles begin at 7, close at 8:30, and we can stay and mingle and tend to our Beloved Mess Hall until 9.

Let’s stay warm this winter by circling up around the sunny energy of abundance flowing through our community!  Let’s honor ourselves and each other by taking the time to gather, ground, circle and share, and then let’s celebrate together as the ripples from our circle manifest in the world.

Thursday 8 November 7 – 10 pm

The Next Objectivists Poetry & Poetics Workshop

Tonight our topic will be the early work of EZRA POUND.

A little biographical data: Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. The family moved to a Philadelphian suburb soon after he was born. He studied comparative literature and Romance languages at Hamilton College (Ph.B. in 1905) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A. in 1906). After an unsatisfying teaching stint at Wabash College, he left for Venice in 1907 with intents of becoming a poet. His first collection, A LUME SPENTO, was published in 1908. In autumn of that year, he settled in London, where he stayed until 1922, moving to Paris and eventually Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. Working friendships with many modernist writers and artists: Yeats, H.D., Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Gaudier-Brzeska, and others.

A LUME SPENTO shows the strong influence of Provençal troubadours, Yeats, the pre-Raphaelites, and the English post-Symbolist Aestheticism of the “Nineties” (say, Swinburne). That is to say, a number of interventions had taken place by 1920 to make a poem like HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY work in the different way it does.

One was Imagisme, a loosely-joined school of writers whose principles, as Pound gives them in his 1918 memorial sketch “A Retrospect,” were:

(1) Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
(2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
(3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

(If you have the time, you can read “A Retrospect” here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237886.)

Another intervention was Pound’s coming into possession of the papers of Ernest Fenollosa, an American scholar of Japanese culture. In the late 19th century, Fenollosa had been studying Noh plays as well as Classical Chinese poetry under the tutelage of Japanese scholars in Tokyo. After his death in 1908, Fenollosa’s widow entrusted Pound with the notebooks containing the transcriptions and crib translations of these plays and poems, so that Pound might finish them. With Yeats, Pound brought out a version of the Noh plays, while largely on his own, with a little help from the British sinologist Arthur Waley, Pound produced CATHAY, mostly containing poems by 8th-century A.D. Chinese poet Li Po (in Japanese, called “Rihaku.”) Certain ideas that Pound encountered while working with Fenollosa’s papers influenced him greatly, for instance, Fenollosa’s idea that the pictographic or ideogrammatic character of Chinese writing made it an ideal medium for poetry. Linguists very rightly deny that the Chinese writing works this way, but the thought was attractive for Pound, who liked to remark that his sculptor friend Gaudier-Brzeska could guess the meaning of such characters as “horse” and “tree” at sight. Here was a language that provided truly “direct treatment of the ‘thing’”! Pound also found valuable a certain economy of expression in Chinese poetry.

And a last intervening factor was World War I, which left Pound cynical of European society, politics, and culture in ways that we might say were common to artist of his generation. Note that the poems of CATHAY, H.S.M., and the HOMAGE all, in different ways, war poems.

HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS is a loose translation of the Elegies of the Augustan-era Roman poet of the title. Pound felt that stuffy Classical philology had obscured a key trait of these poems as they were commonly understood: their ironizing attitude towards the pressure that Imperial Rome exerted upon its poets to write patriotic verse. The “liberties” that Pound took to bring this out, to bring back to life a Propertius whose experience in Rome Pound felt similar to that of English poets during the Great War, earned the HOMAGE vicious criticisms.

HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY was, in Pound’s words, his “farewell to London.” It falls in the tradition of Pound’s “society verse”: it makes certain criticisms and diagnoses of a range of types, certain event, and perhaps of Pound himself — or at least what Pound might have become had he stayed in London (this last feature Pound has hinted at in letters).

The Common’s Potato Patch

Next Objectivists Poetry & Poetics Workshop

Reading Zukofsky’s “A” while Listening to the Minutemen, part II The Next Objectivists is the world’s only 100% autonomous poetry & poetics workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We read together, write together & party together in order to better understand the possibilities of a radically objective approach to aesthetic experience. We take our name from second-generation modernist poets like Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff & Louis Zukofsky, but our sphere of study is much larger, encompassing a global range of potential encounters with poetic practices that resist the heteronormative alienation of colonial subjectivity. Sometimes we produce public performances, sometimes anonymous publications. Our workshops are free & open to the public. Everyone is invited. Beginners are always welcome & in our workshops we all strive for a beginner’s mind. Consider that you may already be a Next Objectivist; stop by our workshop & find out. Our schedule is flexible, fluxuating, determined by participating members & the exigencies of the moment. Send an e-mail to nextobjectivists@gmail.com to receive announcements of upcoming events and/or visit www.nextobjectivists.blogspot.com to find out more about on-going & upcoming projections.

Friday, 17 August, 6pm – 9pm

Dreaming Youngstown: Presentation + Potluck

Please join Natalya Pinchuk and Dana Sperry for a presentation of the project Dreaming Youngstown followed by a potluck.

Dreaming Youngstown-Open Library of Possibilities collects thoughts, visions and dreams for abandoned or blighted sites during group brainstorming workshops with the residents of Youngstown, Ohio.  Collected ideas represent the kinds of services, interactions, actions, events, situations, and physical structures residents want in their lives. The project emphasizes that solutions start with a lot of open-minded exploration and playful attitude on the part of residents living closest to these areas. Ideas from these meetings are posted online at www.dreamingyoungstown.com.  As an open source library, any idea within it may be reworked into a new idea, vision or project and put into action by anyone.

Youngstown is in the process of revitalizing itself after losing over half of its population in the late 70s. The project’s aim is not to develop a plan but rather to create a wide span of possibilities, so that when opportunities arise, there is more than one option on the table. Natalya and Dana will present the project, the ideas and inspiration behind it, as well as an honest assessment of how it is actually turning out. After the presentation, everyone is invited to share food and have a conversation.

Saturday, 18 August 12pm – 6pm

Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest

Join Mess Hall for a number of events during Saturday and Sunday of the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival. Rumors of a Free Store, a memorial for Chris Drew, public poetry writing by the Next Objectivists, & a chance to express your views on neighborhood finances.

Sunday, 19 August, 12pm – 6pm

Join Mess Hall for a number of events during Saturday and Sunday of the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival. Rumors of a Free Store, a memorial for Chris Drew, public poetry writing by the Next Objectivists, & a chance to express your views on neighborhood finances.

Also, join us Sunday afternoon/evening for

“We aren’t declaring war; we’re just revealing it.”

An extra-disciplinary anti-capitalist think tank. Specific times to be announced soon.

Follow that Shit Series: Taylor Ervin Exhibition, “Our Blood Thirsty Machines”

“Our Blood Thirsty Machines” uses images and text to explore the relationships of production, consumption and exploitation in the consumer electronics industry. The West’s insatiable desire for technology has spawned a global economy of exploration that fuels our hyper connected lives. This project steps back to examine the implications of these exploitative relationships that our technology driven culture has created. A regular schedule of open hours for viewing this exhibit appears on the Mess Hall calendar and in the announcements listed below.

Thursday, June 21, 3pm – 7pm

Our Blood Thirsty Machines open viewing hours.

Stop by, see the show, meet the artist!

Thursday, June 21, 7pm – 10pm

Next Objectivists Poetry & Poetics Workshop

Radical Banality part II: inside the outside in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

The Next Objectivists is the world’s only 100% autonomous poetry & poetics workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We read together, write together & party together in order to better understand the possibilities of a radically objective approach to aesthetic experience. Our workshops are free & open to the public. Beginners are always welcome & in our workshops we all strive for a beginner’s mind. Consider that you may already be a Next Objectivist; stop by our workshop & find out.

Saturday, June 23, 3pm – 7pm

Our Blood Thirsty Machines open viewing hours.

Sunday, June 24, 11am – 1pm

Art Patch Project

In memory of Chris Drew; explore the possibilities of continuing the tradition of radical silkscreening in Chicago.

Tuesday, June 26, 3pm – 7pm

Our Blood Thirsty Machines open viewing hours.

Thursday, June 28, 3pm – 7pm

Our Blood Thirsty Machines open viewing hours.