===MESS archives===
For immediate release Contact: Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com
THE UNURBAN is proud to host MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) at 3301 Pico Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404, 310-315-0056, free admission, 7:30pm unless otherwise noted, Info: 310-306-7 330 myspace.com/sevendudleycinema The public is invited to these engaging interviews by Gerry Fialka with the follow ing modern thinkers who'll address the metaphysics of their callings and the nitty-gritty of their crafts.
MON, Apr 27. BOND WRIGHT (MA, CRT) IS A FOURTH GENERATION REICHIAN THERAPIST FROM DR. WILHELM REICH PRACTICING HERE AND IN HOLLAND FOR THE PAST 25 YEARS. SHE IS A FOUNDING MEMBER AND THEORETICIAN OF A RADICAL PSYCHIATRY - A PATIENT'S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. AS A TALK SHOW HOST FOR KPFK, SHE INTERVIEWED SOME OF THE GREATEST MINDS OF OUR TIME. SHE IS A POLITICAL ACTIVIST WO RKING HER ENTIRE LIFE TO PROMOTE HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ALL OUTGROUPS. SHE IS A POET, CONCERT VOCAL PERFORMER, SOCIAL CRITIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL SPIRITUALITY TEACHER. HAVING LOOKED DEEPLY INTO THE HUMAN PSYCHE, SHE HAS SEEN WHAT AND WHO IS THERE, AS WRITTEN IN HER MONOGRAPH ENTITLED "STORYTELLER-SOULHEALER."
MON, June 1. JOSHUA ELIAS is a traveler of the nonlinear highway, Elias has been a fixture in Los Angeles for 25 years. His focus is "outcreating the destroyers". An expert abstract oil painter spiritually driven, Elias works out of his Brewery art studio, releasing paint, poetry and vision. The Western world seems to be in a reckoning period. The Unknown "Getting Comfortable with Mystery" is an Art that Artists have long dealt with and many Artists are highly adept at cr eatively handling such adversity. Elias, a seasoned professional painter extraordinare, explores Ideas both practical and pragmatic, about making ones way through the muck, "creating your own Weather", defining your atmosphere and world in accordance with your Vision.
MON, June 22. LIONEL ROLFE - The intersection of the arts and politics has a rich history in LA, and there's no better person to ill uminate that history than author and journalist Lionel Rolfe. In his book Literary L.A., Rolfe reveals the history of L.A.'s forgotten literary scene. From Charles Bukowski to Robinson Jeffers, Aldous Huxley to Nathanael West, Rolfe describes the authors who made L.A. home and looks at the stories and struggles behind the c reation of a culture. Lionel Rolfe has written seven books, including "Literary L.A.," "Fat Man on the Left" and "The Uncommon Friendship of Willa Cather and Yaltah Menuhin." He is the product of the beat coffeehouses of Venice and Los Angeles in the late '50s, the civil rights movement and counter-culture politics of the '60s, and later was a s taff writer for the old Los Angeles Free Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, back when it was a good newspaper, as well as a regular contributor in the Sunday magazines of the Herald-Examiner and the L.A. Times.
MON, Aug 31. WILLIAM McNALLY, Born in Brooklyn, Bred in Berdoo. Venice activist & writer involved in blue-collar activism in Los Angele s, especially in Venice Town Council & Cityhood. He's conducted research for UCLA, written social commentary & historical features for the Los Angeles Times (who have described him as "poet,", "philosopher", "romantic" even a "closet thri ll-seeker"). He has published Venice historical calendars. Book Review called his 1976 book Venice of America: The American Dream Come True, "Flower Power Philosophy." He's also writing a biography about Venice founder, Abbot Kinney.
MON, Sept 28. S.A. GRIFFIN (interview at 8:30pm) is a father, husband, working actor and poet. He is the co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry which received the Firecracker Award as best poetry anthology. Once named best performance poet by The L.A. Weekly , he has toured the U.S. with The Lost Tribe, The Carma Bums and White Trash Apocalypse. The Lost Tribe on ce won The Gong Show with the lowest score in the show's history: 8. His most recent books are Numbskull Sutra (Rank Stranger Press, 2007) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2008). He recently published and edited CALL by francEyE under his Rose of Sharon imprint and published/edited Black Ace 8 for The Temple of Man. As an actor he received the Dramalogue Award for his work on stage and The Kari Award as best actor in commercials for Canada. He lives, loves and works in Los Angeles. Preshow live music at 7:30 - Dudley Saunders - Passionate experimental folk with the haunting imagery of Joni Mitchell and the vocal purity of Jeff Buckley.
MON, Oct 26. HANK ROSENFELD (at 7:30pm) writes for the LA Times, NPR, and any electrical outlet in the media storm. He was on staff at SPY Magazine. He wrote plays performed in NY, Mpls, Berlin and New Jersey. He wrote/produced radio shows from coast-to-coast and "from somewhere in the Mediterranean" on a pirate ship called "The Voice of Peace." He drove a San Francisco taxicab and a Good Humor ice cream truck, and was arrested for robbing the National Bank of Greece, but after a short beating in Athens was given a recipe for tzatziki and deported. He just published a book with/about his 94 year old writing partner Irving Brecher called THE WICKED W IT OF THE WEST. Brecher wrote screenplays at MGM in the 1930s & 40s, including two for the Marx Bros, "Meet Me In St. Louis (Judy Garland)," "Yolanda and the Thief, and "Shadow of The Thin Man." He wrote the first television sitcom "The Life of Riley" (1949 ), which was called then a "filmed comedy series." It won the first Emmy and starred Jackie Gleason. Irv directed Ernie Kovacs' last movie, "Sail a Crooked Ship" and wrote "Bye Bye Birdie" in 1963.
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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, Van Dyke Parks, Orson Bean, George Herms and Phil Proctor, among many others. Fialka's interviews have been published i n books by Mi ke 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 (McLuh an 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 and20image: https://www.laughtears.com/
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MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon), produced by Gerr y 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 w as referring to anything humans inve nt, 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 fant asies, dreams and imagination." MESS peers into the portals of discovering this layer. MESS seeks what lies beyond this layer.
Participant s -- including write rs, 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 every thing 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 th eir heads in the in visible 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 ama zingly 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. Fi alka's multilayered delivery of ideas encourages th e 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
"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, t hough few as good as Fialka. Tom Snyder was the last." - Orson Bean
"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'
"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 que stions- 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 y, 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.
"Fialka's MESS interview series is a fascinating evening with stimulating questions and approaches. I surely enjoyed the depth of the arena and a chance to pontificate on questions of the spirit in a relaxed scenario and free speech surrounding." - Lady Lord Buckley
"Gerry’s interview with me was like hypnotherapy without the snapping of the fingers to bring you back. I really felt good after that." - Lucky Otis, grandson of Johnny Otis and son of Shuggie Otis & the GTO’s Miss Mercy
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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.