For immediate
release
Contact: Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com
CANAL CLUB is proud to host MESS
(Media Ecology Soul Salon) at 2025 Pacific Ave, Venice CA
90291, 310-823-3878, free admission on third Tuesdays at 8pm. The
public is invited to these engaging interviews by Gerry Fialka with the
following modern thinkers who'll address the metaphysics of their
callings and the nitty-gritty of their crafts.
May 20. RIP RENSE is the author of two novels, "The
Oaks," and "The Last Byline," a book of non-fiction, "Less Than
Satisfying Encounters With Humanity," and writes an award-winning
weekly column at Riprense.com. A longtime journalist, Rense has written
about music for most major U.S. newspapers, and magazines including
Mix, Spin, Performing Songwriter. He wrote extensive liner notes for
Frank Zappa's "The Yellow Shark" and "The Lost Episodes" (at Zappa's
request), the Grateful Dead's "Shakedown Street," as well as concert
program notes for Tom Waits. Rense also executive produced two albums
for the great American a cappella group, The Persuasions.
June 17. VAN DYKE PARKS is an American composer,
arranger, producer, musician, singer, and actor. His work spans six
decades, and he has worked with luminaries from Grace Kelly to the
Beach Boys, and recently, U2 to Fiona Apple & Sheryl Crow. From
child actor to film composer, producer, and ethnomusicologist, Parks
has created a distinct musical legacy and influence through his own
albums, and through his work for other artists and behind the scenes in
the music industry.
July 15. GEORGE HERMS. Among all the artists with a
beat sensibility who began working in the post war period, George Herms
has proved the most durable. His witty, resonant assemblages, produced
over a 45 year period, have enriched and furthered the Duchampian
tradition of found-object art in America. From the start the clarity,
humor and generosity in his work set him apart from his peers,
symbolized by the fact that he signs his work "L" "O" "V" "E".
Aug 19. PETER FRANK is Senior Curator at the
Riverside Art Museum, art critic for Angeleno magazine and the L. A.
Weekly, and past editor of Visions art quarterly. He was born in 1950
in New York, where he served as art critic for The Village Voice and
The SoHo Weekly News, and moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Frank publishes
and curates extensively around the world; he is known in particular for
his work on Fluxus and intermedia and for his "neo-modernist manifesto."
Oct 21. REBECCA CAMPBELL is an articulate young
LA artist. Her new paintings will be exhibited early next year at LA
Louver. After a strict Mormon upbringing in Salt Lake City, she studied
at UCLA. Her beautiful and haunting narrative work fuses abstraction
and representation. They are created with wide gestural strokes, but
remain attentive to detail.
Nov 18. LADY LORD BUCKLEY: the humorous and
articulate daughter of Lord Buckley, Laurie has many tales and
adventures of the Buckley family and their magical history. "I was born
a princess into a Royal Court that existed only amongst those who
agreed it was so." Lord Buckley was the immaculate hip comedian and
jazz shaman of the beat generation whose amazing material still lives
today. Lady B is also a strong advocate for free speech and appears
regularly on "Comedy Nation.com and the Free Speech Show.com" as well
as the daily co-host on the World Internet Radio Network's "Speak Your
Mind" with Gary Cambell (wirnonline.com) M-F, 9-10am. "The only thing
the truth lacks in this world is a sponsor," she says,"if Microsoft
wanted to cure poverty, it would be over tomorrow."Lord Buckley was the
most sensational comic of our time" - Frank Sinatra. "The fuel to my
success" - Bob Dylan.
Dec 16. JANET FITCH. In addition to her
critically acclaimed new novel Paint It Black, set in 1980 punk-rock
LA, and the nationally bestselling White Oleander, Fitch’s
short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies such
as Los Angeles Noir, Black Clock and A Room of One’s Own. This
LA native briefly attended film school in the director’s
program at USC, and worked at various times as a typesetter,
proofreader, graphic artist, freelance journalist, managing editor of
American Film magazine, and editor of The Mancos Times Tribune, a
weekly newspaper in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. She
currently teaches fiction writing in USC’s Master of
Professional Writing program and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
She lives in Los Angeles.
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GERRY FIALKA, film curator, writer, lecturer, and paramedia ecologist
has conducted interactive workshops at UCLA, MIT, San Francisco's Yerba
Buena Art Center, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Culver City High School,
and more. His public interview series MESS has included 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, John
Sinclair, Grace Lee Boggs, and Phil Proctor, among many others.
Fialka's interviews have been published in books by Mike Kelley and
Sylvere Lotringer. His William Pope.L interview is published in
the magazine ARTILLERY Jan'08 issue. Fialka's MESS retrieves the
original 1970 MESS (McLuhan Emergency Strategy Seminar) with McLuhan,
Buckminster Fuller, and Ted Carpenter (They Become What They Behold)
among others, all of whom stressed that breakdowns can be
breakthroughs. Visit: www.venicewake.org for Fialka bio and image: http://www.laughtears.com/
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MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon), produced by Gerry
Fialka since 1997, is based on Marshall McLuhan's insight: "If you
don't study the effects of technology, you become its slave." And by
"technology" McLuhan was referring to anything humans invent, from
language to computers, from philosophy to books, from toothpicks to
bulldozers. In dialogues with modern thinkers, MESS provides a forum
for probing both the form and the content of media, and for
comprehensively surveying its services and disservices, avoiding bias
or point of view. MESS is percept-plunder for the recent future.
In his book "I, Fellini," Federico Fellini wrote, "I don't mind
speaking autobiographically because I reveal less of myself talking
about my real life than I do if I talk about the layer underneath, the
one of my fantasies, dreams and imagination." MESS peers into the
portals of discovering this layer. MESS seeks what lies beyond this
layer.
Participants -- including writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and
activists -- are the early radar systems and rear-view mirrors
detecting how major transformations in technology affect us. As we live
in a MESS-age, this interactive series shakes people out of their
regular agendas and reality tunnels. MESS promotes mapmakers who search
for new lands and new data. MESS seeks meticulous understanding of
everything we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, passionately needling
the somnambulists and proving that learning can and must be fun. As
McLuhan asked, "How are you to argue with people who insist on sticking
their heads in the invisible teeth of technology, calling the whole
thing freedom?" "Technologies are not mere exterior ads," said Walter
Ong, "but also interior transformations of consciousness." And, in his
book Immediatism, Hakim Bey observed, "Simply to meet face-to-face is
already an action against the forces that oppress us by isolation, by
loneliness, by the trance of media."
"If it works, it's obsolete." -- McLuhan.
"Another fine MESS." -- Random Lengths News.
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"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 Proctor of the "Firesign Theatre"
"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
"Gerry Fialka is willing to enter in new discussions even if they go
against his current views. Fialka's multilayered 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." - Keith Jeffries, Ascalon Films
"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
"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. [Fialka] creates forums
that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one
multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of MARSHALL
McLUHAN: COSMIC MEDIA.
"When I participated in Fialka's MESS, he created a unique
through-space kind of meditation. This collective free high fires up
the ability/consciousness of not judging. It makes a gap between saying
and meaning leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Really amazing
event." - Marc Herbst, editor-Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.
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"The confusion is not my invention...It is all around us and our only
chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our
eyes and see the mess." -Samuel Beckett.