voice  310-306-7330    email  pfsuzy@aol.com bio  http://www.venicewake.org/About/About_Gerry.html press photo  http://www.laughtears.com/ GERRY FIALKA film curator, writer, lecturer, and paramedia ecologist has conducted interactive workshops from UCLA to MIT, from the Ann Arbor Film Festival to Culver City High School. Fialka gave two major lectures at The 2001 North America James Joyce Conference at UC Berkeley. His public interview series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Sessions), with the likes of Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, Abraham Polonsky, Mary Woronov, Paul Krassner, Ann Magnuson, Heather Woodbury, Norman Klein, Chris Kraus, P. Adams Sitney, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Kristine McKenna, Ann Magnuson, John Sinclair, Grace Lee Boggs, Firesign Theatre's Phil Proctor, Van Dyke Parks, Orson Bean among many others, began in 1997 and continues at different LA venues including Beyond Baroque and the Canal Club. Fialka's interviews have been published in books by Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. His William Pope.L interview was published in ARTILLERY magazine. Yerba Buena Art Center & San Francisco Cinematheque and the Mendicino Film Festival‚ hosted Fialka's Pixelvision: Electronic Art workshop and screening‚ in 2008. He'll present it in England at Lumen.org.uk in Sept, 2008. His MARSHALL McLUHAN-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club www.venicewake.org has explored media and literature at the Venice Public Library since 1995. His PXL THIS film festival www.indiespace.com/pxlthis has celebrated the PXL 2000 toy camera since 1991. Film Threat's Chris Gore deemed PXL THIS one of the ten best video festivals. Fialka's DOCUMENTAL series (now at the Unurban in Santa Monica myspace.com/sevendudleycinema) at Midnight Special, the oldest political bookstore in the world, ran for 8 years, and was praised as "L.A.'s pre-eminent documentary and experimental film showcase...the holy grail"-LA WEEKLY. In RES magazine, Holly Willis declared Gerry Fialka the "Los Angeles-based independent media hero." In the Independent Film & Video Monthly, Willis proclaimed Fialka an "exemplary devotee of cinema. Thanks to Fialka's penchant for the weird and wild, L.A. gets to see material we wouldn't otherwise." The LA TIMES calls Fialka "the multi-media Renaissance man." His 7 DUDLEY CINEMA series (www.81x.com/7dudley/cinema) continues the tradition of DOCUMENTAL at Sponto Gallery in Venice, where the beats used to read poetry (Venice West Cafe). Fialka has worked for Frank Zappa (for nearly ten years as an archivist), George Carlin (who once said directly to Fialka "I am goning to learn alot from you.") and Filmex. He has interviewed the likes of Amiri Baraka, Carla Bley, Horace Silver, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, George Clinton, Paul Plimley, Oscar Brown Jr, Ben Watson, Craig Baldwin, Grace Lee Boggs, Walter Bowart among others for AMASS magazine, LA Jazz Scene, Jazz News, Bird, Flipside, and PACIFICA's KPFK radio. "I am very impressed by Gerry Fialka's energy in bringing together groups of people to think about ideas. That is very much in the McLuhan spirit to create and foster interdisciplinary, living, educational projects in which people can talk about ideas. He creates forums that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of MARSHAL McLUHAN: COSMIC MEDIA. "Gerry Fialka's MESS series is a unique opportunity to meet special artists in a unique, intimate and revealing setting.  His intelligence and dedication to research leads to a stimulating and highly interactive interview that is both entertaining and amazingly enlightening." - Phil "Firesign Theatre" Proctor. "Gerry Fialka is very special, well prepared and ready to take risks - I learned about my self! My kind of interviewer." -Martin Perlich, author THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW. "I have participated in Gerry Fialka's interactive workshops at the Ann Arbor Film Festivals in 2006 and 2007. He is willing to enter in new discussions even if they go against his current views. Fialka's multi layered delivery of ideas encourages the search for new questions and new paradigms that extend beyond. He is well- informed, off-beat and articulate - one of the most fascinating people I've met at the AAFF." - Keith Jeffries, Ascalon Films "Fialka is a Zen master of media shuffling your mind with McLuhanisms, and stacking the deck with fresh insights into our culture." - David Selsky, Independent Film Programmer & author of 'Worlds of Silence' "What a great interview Fialka conducted with me. He made it so easy. There used to be people on TV who conducted interviews in depth, though few as good as Fialka." - Orson Bean "I showed my film Hippies From Hell at one of the most special venues in the world, 7 Dudley Cinema in Venice, CA. Curator Gerry Fialka is a wonderful host, able to create a joyful relaxing and concentrated atmosphere. During the Q&A he showed himself as a very eloquent critic asking deep and serious questions- always with humor, knowledge and full of energy." - Ine Poppe, Professor at the Willem de Kooning Art Academy, Amsterdam "Gerry Fialka is one of your grand 1970s collage sensibilities, conceptually leaping--like so many of the flickering Film Festival experiments that have nourished him for decades--from PXL to McLuhan to James Joyce to Duchamp.  As he laces it all together like a deerskin moccasin, you realize that most college students are deprived of witnessing this kind of associative thinking in action. Gerry Fialka's fast-paced workshops are an antidote for the corporatized classroom that only meets students' low expectations yet fails to go beyond. This guy goes, and takes them, beyond."- Michael R. Mosher, Assoc. Professor, Art/Communication Multimedia, Saginaw Valley State University "Gerry Fialka is a cinema treasure, a champion of the rarely-seen, forgotten or neglected films that illuminate our times; a man who has devoted much of his life to the exploration of art and philosophy and human behavior as shown in the movies.  For nearly four decades Gerry has introduced the startling works of unknown or rarely-seen filmmakers to audiences who enjoy the fascinating range of his questions and the surprising answers inspired by our urban impresario of the flicks, always a student of the art form he loves, from its depths to its heights." - William Richert, film director "Winter Kills". "Curator Gerry Fialka puts together events of films both experimental and socially conscious." - LA City Beat "LOS ANGELES: GERRY FIALKA. For a decade, scavenger-artist Gerry Fialka living and operating from a shed built of vinyl LPs, cassette-tapes and videos in a back lot in Venice, California has been leading a Finnegans Wake reading-group (venicewake.org) in a Los Angeles public library and mounting festivals of homemade PXL- 2000 movies (indiespace.com/pxlthis). He proposes a revolutionary, propertyless artistic communism in which the life works of Captain Beefheart, George Clinton and Rahsaan Roland Kirk cross-pollinate and merge with the whole mediated environment of late capitalism, where playtime unravels the knots of economic domination. Fialka politics of experience refuse conventional literacy and cultural value. He yearns to make real the tokenistic substitutions of and literature, a collective psychogeographical testing of limits as the masses turn against the blandishments of a reality defined by TV, and begin to interrogate their artificial surroundings: question time drew nighing and the map of the souls groupography rose in relief within their quarterings (FW, p. 476). In July, Fialka addressed the James Joyce 2001 Conference in Berkeley, drawing connections between Finnegans Wake and the oeuvres of Frank Zappa and Marshall McLuhan." - Ben Watson, Mute Magazine 9-01. "In his energetic, joyfully subversive "Culture Jamming" workshop, Gerry Fialka presents, potent examples of culture being hijacked‚ by alternative voices from those who would put a corporate stranglehold upon the 'conventional wisdom.'" - Ed Bradley, Film/Video curator - Flint Art Institute. "I am inspired and excited that Gerry Fialka, who holds an affinity for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, is researching and writing‚ a history of it. Having attended two of his 2008 AAFF workshops, I can testify he is intimate with experimental cinema and media philosophy, and is deeply dedicated to the exploration of new knowledge. " - Leslie Raymond, Professor of Art & New Media, University of Texas. Gerry Fialka curates 7 DUDLEY CINEMA, which plays a crucial role promoting counter-current moving image artists in a cozy community- oriented setting. Since November 2002, we have shown films free to the public with the filmmakers often present for discussion. We are an all volunteer group. Visit - www.81x.com/7dudley/cinema. Past screenings have included Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99, SOS & Sonic Outlaws, Watts Tower Film Festival, Critical Mass-Pedal Revolution, Lenny Bruce night, Uncensored Cartoons & much more. Our speakers have included Orson Welles' cameraman Gary Graver, culture jammer Craig Baldwin, director William Richert, political satirist Paul Krassner, archivist Stephen Parr, director Ted Bonnitt, experimental pioneer Chick Strand, producer Susan West (IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL), author Janine Marchessault, screenwriter/critic F.X. Feeney, experimental documentarian Philip Hoffman, Firesign Theater's Peter Bergman & Phil Proctor, poet Michael C. Ford, Ruben Guevara (Ruben & the Jets), Little Willie G. & Jimmy Espinoza of Thee Midniters, author Domenic Priore, jazz archivist Mark Cantor, Country Joe McDonald, Larry Taylor & Fito de la Parra of CANNED HEAT, producer Ken Kubernick, experimental filmmaker Alfonzo Alvarez, Lord Buckley's daughter Laurie, director Richard Elfman, comedian/ARISTOCRATS director Paul Provenza, Corman vet & author Beverly Gray, Pamela Des Barres, Victor Haydon (Mascara Snake of Captain Beefheart) film historian Michael Henry Wilson, experimental film pioneer Curtis Harrington and I AM CUBA cameraman Alexander Calzatti.  Happy TrailerHD Film Fest world premiered Oscar nominee TONTO WOMAN at 7 Dudley Cinema. Curator Gerry Fialka has been involved in: *The Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest experimental film festival in the world, *PXL THIS (www.indiespace.com/pxlthis), the annual Pixelvision (toy video camera) festival, established in 1991. Film Threat's Chris Gore deemed PXL THIS one of the ten best video festivals. *His DOCUMENTAL series (now at the Unurban in Santa Monica myspace.com/sevendudleycinema) at Midnight Special, the oldest political bookstore in the world, ran for 8 years, and was praised as "L.A.'s pre-eminent documentary and experimental film showcase...the holy grail" -LA Weekly. In RES magazine, Holly Willis declared Gerry Fialka the "Los Angeles-based independent media hero." In the INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO MONTHLY, Willis proclaimed Fialka an "exemplary devotee of cinema. Thanks to Fialka's penchant for the weird and wild, L.A. gets to see material we wouldn't otherwise." The LA TIMES calls Fialka "the multi-media Renaissance man." 7 DUDLEY CINEMA was featured on Warren Olney's NPR radio show, "Which Way L.A.?" on Santa Monica's KCRW. 7 DUDLEY CINEMA shows films at Sponto Art Gallery, which was the home of the infamous Venice West Cafe from 1955-66 where the Beats read their poetry. Join poets every 4th Tuesday at 7pm for open poetry and spoken word- free admission. Sponto Gallery has sponsored children's art shows, raised money for New Orleans' musicians and helped raise money for Venice Food Not Bombs, who feed the homeless. Jazz great Azar Lawrence played a free 2005 concert at Sponto Gallery. 7 DUDLEY CINEMA stresses dialogue on films, art, culture and politics. Gerry Fialka's other film series DOCUMENTAL has been praised by LA Magazine as "eye-opening with postscreening chats that cook." This tradition of examination continues at 7 DUDLEY CINEMA, DOCUMENTAL and at Fialka's MESS (Media Ecology Soul Sessions) public interview series. QUOTES : "I am part Communist and part Fascist with a healthy dose of Monarchism in my Marxism, but at bottom an Anarchist with a passion for order." - Wyndham Lewis circa 1929 "I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it." - Luis Bunuel "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." - Marcel Duchamp "The best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism." - William Faulkner "There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. There is only one of you in all time; therefore this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. The world will not have it. It will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, or how valuable it is, or how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, and to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction. A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others." - Martha Graham