Talk

It was recently discovered that some advertising listed the incorrect start times. The correct timing is as follows: Doors at 7pm | Start at 7:30pm. Sorry for the inconvenience and we look forward to seeing you there!

Dirty Looks' Bradford Nordeen will lead a visual lecture of images and clips from Cookie Mueller's always fervent and sometimes-fleeting roles in the films of John Waters, through No Wave New York classics and in 1980s art videos. With a like flair for the anecdotal and in the collage spirit of Chloé Griffin's Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Nordeen will present stolen moments and larger scenes from her diverse body of work in "the blessed profession."
 
Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name as an actress in John Waters' films, including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and then as an art critic for Details magazine and a columnist for the East Village Eye. She was also a writer of hilarious and shockingly wise stories, the ‘cure for a bad party,’ and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. Her writings, especially the collection of autobiographical stories Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Semiotext(e), 1990) have inspired and amazed many and gathered a kind of cult following.
 
Cookie lived an independent and wild life, going from Provincetown, where she kept a circle of romantic crack-pots and poets around her, to New York City where she collaborated with No Wave and avant-garde filmmakers such as Amos Poe, Eric Michell and Michel Auder, published her writing, and became a star of the nightlife and art scene. Cookie also lit up the stage at the Performing Garage alongside other NYC luminaries such as Taylor Mead, John Heys, Gary Indiana and Sharon Niesp.
 
Although she died from AIDS in 1989, Cookie has become a counter-culture icon, adored by those who have discovered her work.
 

 4/24: Mark Lomanno: “Modulating Bodies and Intimate Incorporations: Trauma, Improvisation, and Belonging.”

Examining practices of breathing, listening, and improvisation as modes of radical kinship in critical times, Lomanno asks us – What scales can a musician run if they’re running out of breath? Running for their life? Drawing on Abbey Lincoln’s music and a vast array of Black Feminist writings in music, literature, and sound, Lomanno leads a guided listening of Black American pianists Mulgrew Miller and Bud Powell, as he asks us – when listening to music, what have we missed by listening only to the notes themselves? What else will we hear if we listen for the musicians’—and all our—bodies? Suggesting that these jazz pianists have shared essential insight for manifesting the “Wholly Earth” Lincoln imagines, Lomanno makes a case for Black sound practices as incubators of more sustainable communities.

This event will culminate with a collective improvisation by Indexical's Artist in Residence, Kumi Maxson.

Akwasi Papa Abrefah discusses the spontaneity in the development of steelpan in Trinidad and Tobago -- a process that illuminates the extensive histories of resistance and radical joy tied to the instrument's origins, as these creatives clashed with the policing of pan communities and US militarization. Akwasi will also discuss his work in building a community for the music at Stanford University.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. gives a lecture on the theoretical work behind his Friday night (4/21) techno set.

Anthony R. Green and Gabriel Solis: A Conversation

The music we often call Jazz is a remarkable creation. Exceptionally dense and rich, its journey from a local way of playing popular songs to a genre with global reach was almost instant. The feedback loop between local and global networks has continued to define the music to the present. Jazz scholarship has struggled to make sense of this dynamic. A persistent thread of mostly white jazz studies has particularly taken Jazz’s global breadth as a reason to perform a kind of erasure of its deep relationship to Black aesthetics, and more specifically to African American arts communities. This talk offers a polemic, against erasure, but also a historiography, aiming to see the music’s global life not as something in a paradoxical relationship to the particularity of musical blackness, but rather as in a congruent relationship with it.

Carolyn Jean Martin and Aaron Samuel Mulenga present artistic work and scholarship on articulations of Blackness in the Western visual field.

Join us for an artist talk and Q&A with artist Paul Walde, facilitated by Landscape & Life curator Gabriel Saloman Mindel.

The Landscape Thinking Group is comprised of UCSC Visual Studies PhD Candidates whose work interrogates landscape as it relates to race, politics and power in regions around the globe. For this event, the Landscape Thinking Group will be facilitating a “Bioregional Quiz” and discussion. Participants will meet at Indexical and then migrate to an outdoor location. Wear clothing appropriate for gathering outside.