Odyssey Works
Call for Participants!
For Odyssey Works: New York, a day-long, interdisciplinary performance.
The Event:
A day-long performance created for a single participant, based on the way that participant sees the world. If your application is chosen, we will create this for you alone, free of charge.
Part experimental theater, part artistic procession, and part psychological journey, Odyssey Works: New York will happen only once and will have as its protagonist a single participant for whom the artists and actors are supporting characters in a fully immersive performance.
In previous journeys, participants have found themselves in rowboats crossing the river Styx to the underworld, happened upon a tunnel echoing with recordings of their own thoughts, or been asked to conduct an orchestra of screams, laughs and tears. What will happen this time is a closely guarded secret.
Who You Are:
Participants must be over 18 and available to participate in a daylong performance starting in New York City on April 16-17, 2011. Participants must also be willing to open their lives to us in preparation through a series of questionnaires, conversations, and interviews.
Who We Are:
Odyssey Works is an interdisciplinary collaborative arts and performance group that explores the boundary between artist and audience. Directed by Abraham Burickson, Odyssey Works has been producing large-scale productions for small audiences since 2001. This is the group’s first East Coast production. Odyssey Works: New York is sponsored by grants from the Cornell Council on the Arts and the Risley College for the Creative and Performing Arts. For more information, and to see video of past participants, point your web browser to www.odysseyworks.org
The Catch:
There is no catch. Participation is completely free. If you are interested in having a performance created for you, please email applications@odysseyworks.org for an application. You may also simply download one from the www.odysseyworks.org by clicking on “APPLY”. Inquiries can also be sent to this address. Be sure to include your contact information.
Filed under: performance, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: abraham burickson, Cornell University, Experimental, Ithaca, odyssey works, performance, relational aesthetics, theater
Odyssey Works Website Now Up!
It’s at www.odysseyworks.org. Full functionality is not yet there, but it is a lot of fun to tool around already.
oh, and the Movable Feast video is here
and the Henry Video is here!
The videos for the Odyssey Works 2009 projects are coming soon!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My new chapbook is out on Codhill Press. The cover was designed by Lauren Kohne, a synaesthetic artist who sees letters as colors. She can read the cover as a poem. Can you? There’s only one way to find out. Get a copy at Amazon or (better, faster) Codhill Press.
Charlie, A Chapbook
Filed under: poetry | Leave a Comment
Tags: abraham burickson, chapbook, contemporary, design, lauren kohne, poetry, synaesthesia
Hey, this book is classified as fiction and non-fiction – what a thrill to be able to put it on two shelves, no? It is worth reading for that genre-bending feat as well. Of course, the shtick is just a shtick, as all fiction is filled with non- and all non- is filled with fiction.
Genre distractions aside, the book is a page-turner, even though it turned out that I had read two of the chapters before (one in the New Yorker, and one in Harpers). I was glad to get a chance to buzz through it all again, to ride a wave of connected narrative arcs, following a bumbling Jake Silverstein as he fails to make it as a magazine writer. Though he is nothing like Etgar Keret, I love this book for many of the same reasons I love a Keret book; it is light and has a loose tendency to touch on meaning, and just when you expect the plot to go somewhere, the protagonist gets in his car and admits failure, and just when you expect the plot to go nowhere, the protagonist happens upon a device that pushes it forward in unexpected ways. Continue reading ‘Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then it Did’
Filed under: reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: harpers, jake silverstein, marfa, nonfiction, texas
There are risky moments in the long life of a book lover, moments when, in a fit of nostalgia, he returns to some old favorite hoping to reencounter that early sense of discovery and awe, that un-jaded, youthful moment when a book was not just a gateway to a new set of ideas, but a model of what creativity was capable of, of the brilliant potential of the human mind when it toils long and hard and far past the thought patterns of everyday thought. Certain early books are safe to come back to – Siddhartha, Wallace Stevens’ Collected Works, Moby Dick. Others, one must be more cautious about; is it wise to reread Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude? Probably. What about Sartre, Camus? Tread carefully. Kerouak? Best stay away, leave that copy of On the Road next to The Outsiders and move on. Sometimes, in the course of such a sentimental search, one is tempted to read a previously unread book by a once-loved author like Kurt Vonnegut or Steven King. This is frequently a terrible idea. So it was with me as I read Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas. The book managed to not only bore and irritate me with its endless cleverness and disregard for plot, but to cast violently into doubt my memory of loving his other books.
Clearly, Robbins is a writer unlike any other. His renown, built on such books as Skinny Legs and All and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is well-deserved. It is hard to think of another writer who deals with the subjects he does, and one who does it so damn cleverly. The books are, in fact, an all-expenses paid cruise in the Persian Gulf of cleverness, and if you are really on board for that kind of trip it is a wonderful one. Nary a paragraph goes by without a quirky metaphor and a brain-twisting allusion. “The receptionist,” starts one of Robbins’ countless descriptions, “- she probably has a different title – is a fortyish matron who looks as if she might have spent a lot of time in a freezer locker. Her face is ashen , flat, and lopsided, like a stone-axed cut of caveman meat, a reptile steak for a prehistoric barbecue.” This character is completely inconsequential, but the inconsequential is the point of Robbins’ prose, and he continues: “Her eyes are spots of gristle, and her thin mouth is an ax wound in the fillet.” The character hardly exists for another paragraph and one is left wondering why so much time was wasted describing the woman. But this is clearly the recipe Robbins is using – toss together a mind blowing assemblage of odd and over-described personages and scenes, sprinkle a minimum of plot and a maximum of weird and quirky factoids and shake well, then see what comes out. The result is a compellingly unusual blurb. This is the story, written in the second-person, of a money-obsessed Phillipina on the eve of her financial ruin who finds herself faced with a litany of mind-altering events. Ostensibly hunting for her boyfriend’s runaway kleptomaniac monkey, our protagonist becomes entangled and slowly falls in love with a former investment banker named Larry Diamond, whose seduction of the protagonist threatens to unleash not only her libido but her atavistic memories of aliens and magical reptilian creatures. Along the way she encounters a wild cast of characters, from her psychic, overweight best friend Q-Jo, who also goes missing, to a Native American obsessed with a Van Gogh drawing he keeps beneath a bowling alley, to a mysterious Japanese doctor who coyly touts his cure for cancer on TV.
The cliché in theater is that if there is a gun on the table in the first act it must go off by the third. In this book the gun is the Japanese doctor’s cancer cure, and all 385 pages, the reader waits for it to go off. At the end it does go off, but we find that it is shooting blanks. There is nothing interesting about the resolution of this information, as there is little interesting or surprising about Q-Jo’s mysterious disappearance. For that matter, the monkey’s mysterious disappearance turns out to have little meaning as well. The only interesting show in the book is the protagonist’s slow character transformation and awakening. From the beginning we know that this will be the point, as her description is a caricature of a money-obsessed businessman (don’t be distracted by the fact that she’s a woman or a minority in this). The transformation, however, is patiently executed, and is the one shining light in the plot. Otherwise, the major part of our reading time is allotted to a tiresome and endless stoner lecture by Larry Diamond on the human race, amphibians from outer space, African tribesmen with a connection to the stars, and a general end-of-the-world hysteria. The lecture, in the same voice as the narration and thereby of Robbins, himself, we can assume, amounts to nothing. Like the supporting character in Ayn Rand’s awful opus, The Fountainhead, Larry Diamond turns out to be a mouthpiece for the author himself. But unlike the Fountainhead, Half-Asleep in Frog’s Pajamas, other than a general tweaker’s anti-establishment ranting, has nothing real to say.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: abraham burickson, books, fiction, novels, reviews, tom robbins
Red Hill Books is in Bernal Heights at 401 Cortland. The cross street is Bennington.
About the poets:
Abraham Burickson’s chapbook, Charlie, has just been released by Codhill Books. He is a poet, essayist, and conceptual artist. His work has appeared widely, in such publications as Blackbird, The Painted Bride Quarterly, Time Out Chicago, Southwestern American Literature, and the Best New Poets 2008 Anthology. He currently teaches writing at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA.
Miriam Bird Greenberg grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas and spent her childhood roaming the creeks and caved-in barns in muslin schoolteachers’ dresses left behind by ancestors a hundred years dead of diphtheria. She’s been awarded residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts, a waitership from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Stegner Fellowship. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, though she’s also taught EFL in Japan, hitchhiked solo from Montana to Vermont, and flown kites in Tiananmen Square. She lives in Oakland, California, where she’s practicing “settling down.”
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I was at a bookfair for independent and small presses and literary journals. A lot of the stuff was pretty interesting, and it warmed the heart to see such wonderful and highly unprofitable work being done. Aside from publishing a wide range of poetry and experimental prose, these publishers have been experimenting in interesting ways with the format of the book or the literary journal. Here are a couple of samples of what I took home:
For more info on these publishers, check out Salt Hill Journal (out of Syracuse),
and Fact-Simile.
Enjoy!- Abraham Burickson
Filed under: design, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: bookbinding, independent, poetry
It’s a little hard to explain. Take a look at the video and you will get a better idea of what it is that we do.
more about “Odyssey Works Intro Video.avi“, posted with vodpod
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
So I’m working with Culture Push’s ArtCraftTech think tank on trying to find different ways to think about money and healthcare. We’ll be having a couple of public events in December. It was a great chance for me to start thinking about the problem of money and why, despite its brilliant efficiency, it encourages overconsumption on the one hand and neglect of the finer human strivings on the other. To that end, I wrote this problem statement for the group to utilize in developing a new model of thought around such issues:
The Mortaliteconomy: A Problem Statement about Money and a Potential Solution
Money. It is a problem, this we know. Everybody you’ve ever met uses it as the primary means for transacting goods and services. It is a brilliant system, building on the earlier barter system by adding the capacity for trades to be made for value instead of specific goods. Because of Money, a bus driver need not give rides to rice farmers in order to get the rice he needs. Brilliant. But, at the same time, an enormous amount of the world’s suffering is a result of the strange behavior of Money. People who have a great deal of Money tend to get more. People who have very little have a hard time gaining more. Consumerism runs rampant. Poetry is forgotten and poets give up and become lawyers. Healthcare becomes unavailable to a great number of people, even though the people who provide that care wish it to be available. A woman walks into a building filled with the drugs and the equipment necessary to save her life, and staffed by people whose only goal is to save lives, and, because of the Money problem, she cannot access any of it. Why are you behaving so oddly, Money?
My friends, consider the following:
- The monetary system is remarkably efficient. Goods are able to travel thousands of miles to satisfy distant needs. The faster they travel and the cheaper they are, the happier Money is.
- This efficiency applies most immediately to basic needs: food, drink, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment
- and, primarily, Money itself.
- This efficiency is limited primarily and most consistently to these basic needs, though it has been known to stray.
- As systems of transportation and accounting become more efficient, and governments become less interested in interfering with Money’s evolution, Money becomes better at what it does best, and concurrently worse and what it does worst.
- Which is to attend to long-term needs and finer, more unquantifiable needs. This includes, for instance: Health; what is the value of health? How much does a life cost? Also, for instance: Poetry. Also, for instance: The Love of Family. Money tries to figure these out, admirably applying its supply-and-demand reasoning to these things, but, mostly, Money is non-plussed by these, and pecks away at the goods and services related to these, then returns to what it understands best.
- Given its indisposition to meet these finer, unquantifiable needs, once Money has transcended its capacity to satisfy the basic needs, it returns to those same needs again and again in more and more dangerous ways.
- Having already fulfilled the need for bread and water, Money turns its efficiency eye upon them again and produces Big Macs and Pepsi Cola; having fulfilled the need for clothing, Money turns to it again and produces Air Jordans and Gucci handbags; having fulfilled the need for shelter, Money returns to it again and makes it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, manically expending the majority of its energy on the goods and services it knows how to move most efficiently.
- In its mania it tries to satisfy the most immediate elements of the unquantifiables – the sense that they have been fulfilled in the short run. To this end, Money begets Advertising to associate these unquantifiable needs with their coarser cousins. A loving family is associated with the Family Pack and the Family Calling Plan. Commercials refer to cars as poetry. Yogurt and sugar cereals are the key to healthy living. As this happens, Money encourages the neglect of Poetry and Family and Health because Money cannot efficiently deal with these. Citizens become consumers. Hurricanes are measured in economic impact. The unquantifiables become loci of shame and are forced into the flickering fluorescent light of government patronage.
Continue reading ‘The Mortaliteconomy and the Solution to the Healthcare Crisis’
Filed under: Ideas, Money | 1 Comment
Tags: abraham burickson, art, economics, healthcare, Money, overconsumption, poetry, theory
In October of 2009 I was thinking about cities. What makes a city a city? Is it the density? The commerce? The cultural institutions? We all know a city when we come to one – what is that?
Perhaps it has something to do with desire. So one Sunday morning a few friends and I set out walking. We decided we would walk someplace new and take turns leading. The only guide was our desire. We ended up in private gardens and a flea market, a hippie commune, an antiques mall, a couple of art galleries, and a hilltop homeless enclave, among other places. Afterwards I wrote this essay – Cities of Desire (with apologies to Italo Calvino) – about what makes a city a city.
What you see here are the images from our walk along with field recordings of the sounds from the city. Overlaid on all this is the essay. The walkers were: Alejandra Orozco, Robert Hudon, Cynthia Rothschild, and me (Abraham Burickson). Enjoy.
Filed under: architecture, design, Ideas | Leave a Comment
Tags: abraham burickson, Architecture, brazil, city, poetry, san francisco, urbanism
Search
-
You are currently browsing the The Abode of Snow weblog archives.
