The Bushwick Review Presents: Thee Keepers ov Love
Well, this should be a good time…
Several contributors to The Bushwick Review and their friends will be reading work at this event tomorrow. Many more Bushwick Review contributors will also be in attendance. Details on the flyer and the facebook event invite. Come check it out if you live in the area!
Please support my friend and Bushwick Review contributor Taleen Kalenderian’s project Lightness & Darkness. It’s a multidisciplinary print project in the form of a printed book which features poetry, prose, essays, photography, illustration, music and film. Here’s the Kickstarter campaign! Taleen is a creative force of nature and she deserves your support. She is also the captain of the excellent DUM DUM Zine.
The Bushwick Review got a mention in a guide to New York on BlackBook Mag. It is mentioned within the context of being sold at Desert Island Comics, which is one of the best places around. A truly great shop run by nice people, it is an honor to have The Bushwick Review on its shelves. Go there if you like comics or book or illustration or design or inspiring visual stimuli. Just go.
Michele Rosenthal’s prints at BUST Holiday Craftacular
Michele Rosenthal’s comics are in all three issues of The Bushwick Review. If The Bushwick Review had such a thing as “core members”, she would be one of the core members, and hopefully her well-crafted work will be in every future issue. I am amazed at how well Michele can convey a complex facial emotion with a few simple lines. She’s also the type of friend you value if you’re a person obsessed with making things. She has a very admirable work ethic and takes her friends’ creative projects seriously and with enthusiasm. Just two of her many excellent qualities.
Michele will be selling her prints and other items at the Bust Magazine Holiday Craftacular and Food Fair on Sunday, December 11th. See one of them in the picture above. The address is 78 Mercer Street (between Broome and Spring), and the event runs from 11am to 7pm. I would like to live in the world of Michele’s colorful prints.
If you don’t live in New York, you can still buy her prints at her etsy store: dialmformichele.etsy.com
Mikel Bisbee-Durlam contributed an imagined story based on a found photo for The Bushwick Review #3. Mikel is a true artist who explores all different forms - writing, installation, performance, video, and music.
You can currently see his paintings at Cafe Orwell in Bushwick (247 Varet St, Brooklyn NY). They are wonderfully large in scale and ambition.
If you don’t live in the New York area, his work can also be seen on the ol’ internets at mikelbisbeedurlam.com.
Did you know The Bushwick Review #3 is out now? You can find out all about it on the current issue page. Since this blog is dedicated to focusing on contributors’ creative endeavors beyond The Bushwick Review, I am instead going to write about that. Here’s three contributors and what they made in issue #3 and what they make everywhere else.
Alexander Beninato wrote the short story that opens this issue. When I started reading it, I thought it was going to be a nice domestic story about a young couple living an unhappy relationship of quiet desperation, but then it went somewhere obsessive and weird and awesome, and I’ll say no more. When Alex is not writing short stories, he’s in a band called The Aviation Orange and they have a new EP out called East of Here. Also, here is a sweet music video they shot a while back for their song “Radio”.
Alla Ilyasova wrote the one-act play that closes The Bushwick Review #3, a play I have had the honor of seeing performed. She also wrote a play about the moon that I saw a first reading of this past weekend. I will be interested to see any of her future work as a playwright, because she does not follow conventions that other young playwrights or screenwriters sometimes get trapped in, the tendency to imitate dialogue or scene structure that you’ve seen in many other plays or TV or whatever. She wants to take risks in her writing and she’s not playing easy.
Tim Vienckowski’s contribution to The Bushwick Review #3 is about Bill Motherfucking Murray. Here is Tim’s porfolio site timtimtimtim.com (tim and timtim and timtimtim were already taken). He’s an amazing designer who proves that design can be both functional/informative, but also fun, artsy, and incredibly COLORFUL. Speaking of colorful, he also took the beautiful photograph that is this issue’s cover.
The Bushwick Review has a West Coast soulmate and it’s DUM DUM Zine, captained by Taleen Kalenderian out in Los Angeles. DUMDUM Zine is a spankin’ new zine featuring hybrid forms of fiction, journalism, art, design, and any sort of transmedia story you can think of. It’s also a collective of people all over the country who collaborate on generating new forms of content. It exists in public only: as broadsides pasted on your city walls, at dumdumzine.com, and can also be purchased at Skylight Books in L.A. and Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago. DUM DUM accepts rolling submissions and publishes them on the web, and is printed quarterly according to themes emerging from the content received in response to calls and prompts.
Taleen Kalenderian contributed some beautiful large format photographs to The Bushwick Review #3 (more on TBR #3 later). She’s a creative force of nature, who, in addition to DUM DUM Zine, made a zine about being Armenian called Talzine, and is a freelance writer and photographer for The Onion A.V. Club, Filter Magazine, and SPIN, among other publications. Taleen’s also been known to write music, host creative dinner parties, and create other things that can’t or don’t need to be hyperlinked, because they aren’t means to an end, they are simply her understanding the need to make things everyday.
Zachary Feldman has contributed his witty haikus to all three issues of The Bushwick Review. In The Bushwick Review #2, he wrote sidesplitting haiku reviews of popular Bushwick restaurants. It was a subject near and dear to his heart and stomach, because Zach is a man who knows restaurants and knows food. He writes a late night dining column for Serious Eats, and recently I was lucky enough to go with him on his first journey to Foodswings, a vegan fast food place where I eat on a frighteningly regular basis. Here’s his great review. We ate the amazing wings that are pictured below. If you ever want to go to Foodswings with me and eat these wings, just ask, I will be there. Always.
All this week I’ve been saying in my head, Is it the weekend yet? Is it the weekend yet? Well, I say that every week actually, while I’m at the office, but more than usual this week, because this weekend is one of my favorites of the year. It’s Bushwick Open Studios.
I’ll be traveling around with a merry band of art appreciators, wandering around the beautiful neighborhood of Bushwick and visiting as many of the studios and sites as I can. Here’s a couple things I know I’ll be checking out: Bushwick Open Pages: an indie publishing fair, can’t wait to meet other local writers and publishers. Also The 4th Annual Bushwhack Series at The Bushwick Starr, a performance festival that will feature new work from Paul Rome, a contributor to The Bushwick Review #2.
And finally, as this BushwickBKcom review of The Bushwick Review says, a sneak peek of The Bushwick Review #3 will be available at some of the Bushwick Open Studios venues, before it is available to the masses in July. Thanks to Paul Cox and BushwickBK for the review, and to everyone who alerted me to it or reposted it on facebook and other channels. Exciting.
