2008 Sep 22 - Sep 28

Tue Sep 23 - 5 p.m.
CMU: Giant Eagle Auditorium (Baker Hall A51)
School of Art Lecture Series: Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist who uses her sculptures to explore the tactics of bootlegging and counterfeiting as they apply to cultural and economic globalization issues. Her past work has included recreating various 1950s furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand out of rubbish in Beijing, China, and photographing models of Stonehenge made from cheap, imported, Asian food products.

Wed Sep 24 - 4:30 p.m.
CMU: Gregg Hall (Porter Hall 100)
University Lecture Series: Steven Greenhouse
Steven Greenhouse, a labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, will discuss his recent book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. His book analyzes the economic and business factors which have had a negative effect on the majority of the American workforce. Greenhouse will also touch on the role working-class voters will have in this fall’s election. Greenhouse has written for various newspapers in both the United States and Europe for the past 25 years, and has made appearances on CNN, BBC, PBS, National Public Radio, and MSNBC.

Wed Sep 24 - 4:30 p.m.
CMU: Breed Hall (Margaret Morrison 103)
Idealism/Realism/Modernism: Rethinking Literary History or How Modernism Emerged
Norwegian-born Toril Moi, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature, Romance Studies and English at Duke University, will discuss the emergence of modernism and its ties to literature, history, and the arts in general. Moi’s areas of research include feminist theory, women’s writing, and the intersection and influence which literature, philosophy, and aesthetics have on each other. She also has special interests in psychoanalytic theory and theater. Moi has written several books including Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, a bestseller originally published in 1985.

Thu Sept 25 - 4:30 p.m.
CMU: Adamson Wing (Baker Hall 136A)
University Lecture Series: Toward a More Peaceful World
Harriet Fulbright, president of the J. William & Harriet Fulbright Center, will address the growth and importance of international education as well as discuss programs that have helped promote international understanding as a means to achieve a more peaceful world. Her talk will highlight the efforts of the Fulbright Center, a non-profit group which promotes world peace and the use of nonviolent means and international collaboration as a way to resolve conflicts. The group’s efforts are designed to be a continuation of the work and dreams of Fulbright’s late husband, Senator J. William Fulbright.

Thu Sep 25 - 6:30 PM
Chatham University, Athletic and Fitness Center Gymnasium
The Nego Gato Afro-Brazilian Music and Dance Ensemble brings rhythms and dances of Salvador. It features live percussion and traditional instruments and a performance of Capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art that combines dance, gymnastics and acrobatics. Admission is free.

Fri Sep 27 - evening
Bloomfield Little Italy Festival

Fri Sep 27, 7 PM
CMU - McConomy Auditorium
Free showing of japanese anime' (in japanese)

Fri Sep 26, 9:30PM
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
THE FILMS OF DEAN SNIDER
Program length: about 1 hour
organized and presented by Douglas Katelus, who is on tour with this program
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Annex Studio (yellow carriage house behind the big yellow house), 6300 Fifth Ave.
FREE
THE FILMS OF DEAN SNIDER
More heard of than seen outside San Francisco, the films of Dean Snider (1949-1994) are formally playful and richly possessed of character. Ultra-short and often self-mocking, Snider’s abounding catalog is a bit confusing and almost always funny. Hard to compare with any other filmmaker, Snider’s subversive stance and sardonic sense of humor enlivened his varied, quixotic films and real-life antics. He once staged a coup in the projection booth of the San Francisco Cinematheque, forcing a show of local films on the audience. On another occasion, with fellow cinema-activist Steve Schmidt, Snider literally hijacked an entire Cinematheque audience by bus and delivered them to a screening at the No Nothing Cinema, a now-legendary film/performance venue that he co-founded. Snider was known to pay a dollar to viewers who attended his shows, and as a judge at the Ann Arbor Film Festival he gave each and every festival-rejected filmmaker $3 of his prize
money, igniting debate. Indisputably important and certainly overlooked, these films are nothing short of a revelation.
“During his relatively short lifespan, Snider produced literally hundreds of films. Beyond filmmaking, his gadfly outbursts and philosophical provocations helped spark controversy and stimulate conceptual filmic border-crossings…. Film theorist Janice Crystal-Lipzin said of Dean’s films, ‘Why, the titles are longer than the films!’ – no doubt referring to HEY!, a single frame of a bale of hay.” –V. Vale and Marian Wallace, RESEARCHPUBS.COM
Projected in video

Sat Sep 27
Meetup picnic
North Park - Willow Shelter
Meetup is an internet-based activities calendar in which people of common interest schedule and/or join activities. The pittsburgh area meetup organizations are coming together in this event. Alcoholic beverages allowed (but you must show proof of age). Willow shelter is located close to intersection of Babcock Blvd and Ingomar Rd/Wildwood Rd.

SatSep 28 - evening
Bloomfield Little Italy Festival

Sat Sep 27
Bluegrass festival in Greene County (Rices Landing, on the shores of the Monongahela River)
$15/person

Sun Sep 28
The Great Race - 10 km run
start in Squirrel Hill and end in downtown Pittsburgh
For a second run (and find a case of beer stashed in the woods), try the Hash House Harriers: Meet at 12:00. Chalk Talk will be at 12:30 sharp. Trail will start
from the soccer fields in Panther Hollow (near Big Jim's in the Run).

Sunday, September 28, 8PM
Garfield Artworks 4931 Penn Ave.
$5/$4 students
Jefferson Presents... September 2008 Program #94: BRAKHAGE/GIDAL
See an assortment of rarely seen films by avant garde legend Stan Brakhage and British structural filmmaker Peter Gidal. All projected in original 16mm.
Stan Brakhage:
Blue Moses (1962) 16mm, black and white, sound, 10.5 min
Meat enigma spoken in eternal language of director, con man, and magician. It's about the sham flesh that men create to dam the streaming of the truth from their muscles and senses... a molecule of revelation in the shape of a drama thrown off by the artist between ANTICIPATION and DOG STAR MAN. -- Michael McClure. A manifesto of film epistemology in the form of an actor n conflict with the camera eye. --Brussels catalogue. Brussels International Film Festival, 1964.
Tho't-Fal'n (1978) 16mm, color, silent, 14.25 min
This film describes a psychological state 'kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this Thought Fallen PROCESS as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed.
Aftermath (1981) 16mm, color, silent, 7.5 min
(after + math ((mowing, crop))) a second growth crop... this is my strongest attack on pop culture, the movies, T. V., etc. --what CAN be done with it? / the idealism of moving-visual-thought-process the very raw meat of brain, trying to absorb and transform the unthinkable': this, then, that 2nd harvest of healthier gain... retrieving patriotism, even, from blasphemous commerce. (Quote: Webster's 7th Coll.)
Peter Gidal:
Film Print (1974) 16mm, color, silent, 40 min
"The possibility of contemplation offered by photographs is recouped and even radically undercut in FILM PRINT by the continually moving picture... When meaning does seem to emerge (it) is immediately displaced by denial of the space... The suppression of meaning-production as a cinematic process is a structuring feature of the film... The repetitions, the radical refusal of semioticity (denial of the codes of dominant cinema but also the codicity of structural film itself) and the unfixed nature of the space articulated by the film, all serve to operate against the kind of closure associated with a defined and homogeneous film space." --Annette Kohn, "Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film"
Condition of Illusion (1975) 16mm, color, silent, 32.5 min
"What I want to stop is the error of making everything into narrative, a definition of narrative in such a way that it becomes unhelpful. Maybe you can have narrativization without narrative. CONDITION OF ILLUSION plays on the identifying or shifting from the terms of identifying of the relations between the spectator and the photographic image. There is a constantly slipping horizon of identification at the level of the photographic that's being moved through that film and ROOM FILM 1973. There is the problem of identifying the relation between the object and the reflection of the object, the problem of reading the photographic image. You've got this problem watching the film, during the viewing. In CONDITION OF ILLUSION you are in relation to the photographic image, but that relation is a constant slipping of the identifying relation which is the basis of the classic film... what is not achieved is the kind of stabilization of reproduction into the
terms of a representation...." --interview by Stephen Heath, Cambridge Tapes (March, 1977) & Wide Angle, Vol. 2 No. 3 (May, 1978).