Writ Large Press

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onehumangallery — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:42:29 -0700

Great news in publishing. Hopefully the beginning of the end for DRM.

onehumangallery — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:18:36 -0700

Great news in publishing. Hopefully the beginning of the end for DRM.

Mike the Poet on KCET - Finding Poetry in LA

onehumangallery — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:25:01 -0700

Mike the Poet on KCET - Finding Poetry in LA:

Upcoming WLP author and Los Angeles treasure, Mike Sonksen (Mike the Poet), has been writing a twice-a-month column on KCET’s website.

His most recent post is this rundown of a few (of the many) great places to find and enjoy poetry in and around Los Angeles.

How to beat Amazon in the ebook game -- kill DRM

onehumangallery — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:32:47 -0700

How to beat Amazon in the ebook game -- kill DRM:

We haven’t put out an ebook version of any of our titles…yet. But we will be starting this year, with Abductions.

Our plan is to go with a epub and PDF route, so people can load it up on any reader (including their computers) to read the books. No DRM. Direct sales.

From the linked piece by Charlie Stross:

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it’s on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)

It doesn’t matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers’ Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon’s death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to “disrupt” them, and whose chief executive said recently “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation” (where “innovation” is code-speak for “opportunities for me to turn a profit”).

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don’t, they’re doomed.

However, we are going to experiment with the iBooks Author tool to see what it’s like to do a multimedia, pseudo-interactive ebook. That would mean DRM and Apple restrictions, but we want to experiment with that.

Join us for the official launch of ABDUCTIONS, the new poetry...

onehumangallery — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:24:55 -0700

Join us for the official launch of ABDUCTIONS, the new poetry collection from Chiwan Choi. His most personal work…told through an alien abductions mythology.

And the beautiful music of Holland Greco.

At the one and only The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

onehumangallery:

ABDUCTIONS - LAUNCH - SATURDAY 4/14/12 - 8PM

at The Last Bookstore - Downtown Los Angeles

reading and signing from my new poetry collection.

Music by Holland Greco

Chiwan Choi kicking off his ABDUCTIONS book tour in New York,...

onehumangallery — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:13:41 -0700

Chiwan Choi kicking off his ABDUCTIONS book tour in New York, March 2012. This is from Mike Geffner presents The Inspired Word at the 116 in the West Village.

An early review of Lying Chicken Man and the Muse

onehumangallery — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:27:00 -0700

Two days away from the book release and signing of the limited edition set The Siren and In the Painting Heraclitus Wrings His Hands Above the World and Appears to be Crying, the gorgeous poetry/art books by Melora Walters.

Saturday night is also the official opening of Melora’s solo show, Lying Chicken Man and the Muse. The paintings were hung this past ArtWalk in Downtown LA.

As happy as we are about the books, we are equally blown away by the show of her paintings.

And we are not the only ones impressed. Here is an early review from Matthew Wilder:

People think I’m kidding, or I’m being hyperbolic, when I say that Melora Walters is the Elia Kazan of this moment in painting. I think they are very similar figures: category killers in what they do, but ambassadors of a certain movement—in Melora’s case a return to a kind of full-throated expressionism that’s long past—that no longer holds cultural authority (though we do love the annual dividends it pays). And in both cases there is a mastery of form that buckles underneath a seismic swell of emotion—there is just too much feeling for a work of art to contain it. In movies we love this excess, probably because our feelings are usually so parched, but in painting this is considered not sufficiently thoughtful and a kind of indignity. Are people who look at paintings just dulled enough in the emotions they take in from the canvas that suddenly the inner life of Melora’s work will be made visible?

Actors often do things other than act and if we love them, or rather the skein of fantasies and daydreams they allowed us to project onto their faces and voices, we will put up with the jam band CD or the unfortunate slender collection of short stories because, in the end, it is one more keepsake of the moments of them we replay. I don’t know if Melora acted or picked up the brush first, but she is unique in my experience in her ability to fuse the two into one gesture. What you will see tonight are performative paintings, the act of acting and painting are made to coexist with each other. The concentration on gesture, immediacy, and above all desire acted out through a physical impulse is the same in both worlds—but again, on the canvas, that hailstorm of urgency, bodily urgency, feels more frightening and new.

The impetus for the series you will see here was (in part) the works of Heraclitus. The works of the pre-Socratic philosophers are all the rage right now, I think partly because their world, which begins in the space before Western Civ 101, resembles our own post-human-but-not-quite-dead period. There is a bit of apocalypse-played-backwards there. And so it is a very popular thing too that Heraclitus speaks of change and the instability of all things. We all try to render this panic-inducing news as a Zen koan as best we can. But what I find interesting about Heraclitus, and what lies beneath the two-and-a-half roomfuls of work you will see, is that in his later phase he became a wandering, misanthropic renegade, somewhere between a hobo and a beatnik, who roamed the earth and “ate bitter root.” He was clearly an inspiration for the greatest misanthrope in Western letters, Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, a jilted lover of humanity who retreats to a cave and exhilarates himself with bitter sermons.

Could the warm, genial, surely harmless person who conceived these works of art in some way be inspired by, or heaven forbid even be a bit of, Timon of Athens? It is certainly a Timonian age; and the difference between Room #1 and Room #2 is as if some spigot, some heart-shunt of compassion were turned on and off. The roomful of Hellenic masks is elegiac, noble, a work seemingly in mourning for itself; a whole civilization, a “way of life,” a species of emotion is alive in these ancient masks and now is almost crumbled into dust. Like a race of Asperger’s victims, are we able to read, genuinely read, the emotion on those might-as-well-be-cast-iron faces, now smudged into charcoal crumbles? Next door, there is this Chicken Man who is gleefully, zanily flayed alive. As if in a parody of a PETA spokesmodel weeping over the industrial vivisection behind the concrete doors of KFC, Melora dismembers, disfigures, and maybe reassembles, Frankensteinianly, a figure who is a Chicken Man, which, one suspects, might just mean just what it sounds like. There is no love lost in this room—or maybe there is nothing *but* love lost. In any case, the grand guignol pleasure in mutilating the canvas and mutilating the chickenshit are joined in unholy matrimony. Isn’t L.A. the world capital of gorehounds? Even the most visceral-minded might be satisfied by these acts of desecration.

Fusing these worlds—the elegy and the chainsaw massacre—well, maybe not fusing them—gluing them—like a child stepping in between parents to make them hold hands—is a series of sketches. I want to call them “brief sketches,” so slight are they; but they are slight in the lithe, elegant sense. They hark back to Matisse and the ease, the caressingness he could bring to a very few lines. The spareness in Matisse’s drawings, as in Melora’s, is experienced as a small, modest but electrifying touch. Who do you know, really, who speaks in as many diverse idioms as Melora, and in such an equally tender and all-commanding voice?

Don’t miss it.

Saturday, July 23, 2011. 6-10PM.

@ LAUNCH - 125 E. 6th St. (between Main & Los Angeles St., across the street from Cole’s), Los Angeles, CA 90013. 323-899-1363

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onehumangallery — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:28:31 -0700