Thursday 12 April, 7pm – 10pm
The Next Objectivists
The NEXT OBJECTIVISTS is the world’s only 100% autonomous poetry workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We teach ourselves about formal, thematic, spiritual & political modes of poetic resistance. We try to take the “con” out of conceptual poetry. We read together & write together. The Next Objectivists invite you to participate Thursday April 12 7pm at Mess Hall in Rogers Park for the first workshop of our Spring series on decomplexing. We’re leaving the reception. Taking a breather from satiric public punditry and tactical safety gaming. We’re thinking now thats probably partly how the horses got their masks. We’ll start with a reworking of some manuals, following NATOs instructions exactly to see how that feels. Then we’ll look through some old ode forms and then trail CA Conrad along the black thread leading from our wrists to a carrot (http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/). All details will be either real or made up, we hope you can make it. We’ll look at research/realism and giving/taking direction through both directive poems and actual manuals, documents that are written by committee from the start. Starting with this administrative document http://www.scribd.com/manuals%26manuals/d/33288968-NATO-Training-Group-Handbook-2004 and this “battlebook” http://www.scribd.com/doc/74289321/NATO-Handook-on-the-Medical-NBC We will talk about the manual/handbook as a form and carry on the project of editing and rewriting handbooks. We’ll hone the technique we used on wikileaks. Other nato declassified docs are possibilities as well, there are quite a few published on scribd if anyone wants to look. “…in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless and anonymous crowd or ‘mass’ but, rather, a new level of being — what Deleuze, following Eisenstein, calls the Dividual — in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualism of all kinds. So it is that the properly utopian features of Brecht’s collective work, and of collective or collaborative work of all kinds, are occulted and repudiated; yet this is one of the most exciting features of this work in general, and one of the unique sources of the excitement it has in store for us — the promise and the example of a utopian cooperation, down to the very details of those literary sentences which our tradition has attempted to reserve as the last refuges of true creation and the individual genius. It is a lesson whose Brechtian pleasures will surely return in future generations, however unfashionable it may feel to contemporaries in the current age of the market.” Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method… Send an e-mail to nextobjectivists@gmail.com to be added to our e-mail list or visit www.nextobjectivists@blogspot.com for more details and view some of our publications. Join us! You’re probably already a next objectivist.
Friday 13 April, 7pm – 9pm
Film Screening: Berkeley In The Sixties
Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) is an award-winning documentary film by Mark Kitchell. It’s portrait of the “turbulent decade” when the Bay Area was at the center of the countercultural vortex, features all the usual suspects: Mario Savio, Todd Gitlin, Joan Baez, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Gov. Ronald Reagan and the Grateful Dead. The documentary highlights the origins of the Free Speech Movement and the development of the counterculture of the 1960s in Berkeley, California.
Saturday 14 April, 1pm – 5pm
3 Crises: G8/Nato workgroup
Please join us as the Three Crises Seminar moves from study to praxis & becomes a Three Crises NATO/G8 Action Team!! Between February and May, we will discuss ideas for how to develop experimental, collective and situated actions that respond to the presence of NATO in Chicago (May 15-May 22, 2012). As we finalize our current project, we meet every Saturday.
Sun, April 15, 7:15pm – 9:00pm
Our City Within the State: The State Within Our City
Tonight’s theme is FOLLOW THE MARKET – Globalization, free trade and Chicago. What is globalization? What makes the “world market” different today than 100 years ago? 1,000 years ago? Where does Chicago sit in relation to the Globalized Market of today? What is the relation of Globalization to the G8, the G20 and NATO? How does NATO differ from something like NAFTA and the IMF? What are the differences between these institutions today? 7:15: Dinnerluck; 7:30 – 9:00: Discussion.