KlubKine with Jacquesrates
KLUBKine May 21, 2026. Krazy soir. Jacquesrates turns 60. Johnny Smak gets zine published. & radically unclassifiable media essay ART FAG gets big screened. 7pm Free
Tom's Book Club
Join us to discuss The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs—the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with fictional motifs, and as he puts the question to realism, the four stories merge into one unfathomable requiem. (New Directions)
Generative Writing Workshop Led By Graft Union Reading Series
ECHIDNA is a generative workshop series led by Graft Union where we will feature two generative writing prompts.
We will provide materials and there will be time at the end to share our new creations!
For more information & details, head over to social-media platform Instagram: @graftunionreadingseries for more details.
Nadia's Proust reading group
We continue the Search for Lost Time with a discussion of the second half of the second volume.
Erica Schreiner: New Work
New Work brings Erica Schreiner home. An Oregon native, Erica now works from New York, where she has maintained a 20+ year practice in experimental VHS video and performance art. Performing before her camera, Erica creates allegorical, ethereal works that merge femininity, anarchistic themes, ritual and sensuality.
Saturday, April 25th, Erica presents work never before screened in Portland: a collection of new short films that carry her signature visual language of metamorphosis, vulnerability, and the female gaze.
Her work has exhibited at MoMA, Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and SHOWstudio, and in 2025 entered the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
This screening of short films will be followed by a Q+A with the artist.
DISPLACED: Luca Dipierro & Gabriel Urza
DISPLACED
A reading and talk with Luca Dipierro (author of Sewer and Stage) and Gabriel Urza (author of The Silver State)
What place does one write or make art from? In the case of Luca Dipierro and Gabriel Urza, it's a place where they don't fully belong, that they inhabit as strangers, each in their own particular way.
Gabriel Urza is the author of the novels Silver State (Algonquin Books, 2025) and All That Followed (Henry Holt & Co./MacMillan 2015), as well as the novellas The Last Supper (2021) and The White Death: An Illusion (2019), which was an Oregon Book Award finalist. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, Politico, Salon, Slate, and elsewhere. Urza is a professor of creative writing in the Portland State University Master of Fine Arts program. He is also a former public defender and a licensed attorney who practices criminal defense in Nevada. His story collection, An Incomplete History of the American West, will be published in August.
Luca Dipierro is an animator, writer and translator born in Italy and living in the USA. His cut-out animations, filmed in stop motion with marionettes made out of paper and old book cloth, have been called “a perfect balance between creepy and charming” (The Huffington Post), and "weirdly charming and unerringly unsettling" (The Quietus). His work has been shown in theaters, galleries, and film festivals worldwide. Dipierro is the author of the collections of short prose Biscotti neri (2011), Nei paesi infimi (2024), Sewer and Stage (2026), and numerous zines. Dipierro is also founder and publisher of the micro press Garganta Press. Other Tongues, an anthology of his writings and drawings from 1996 to 2026, will come out at the end of the year.
Donna Stonecipher, Jeanne Heuving, & Consuelo Wise
Join us for an evening of readings by Donna Stonecipher, Jeanne Heuving & Consuelo Wise
Donna Stonecipher is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia, which was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, and Transaction Histories, which was listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City. Her poems have been translated into seven languages. She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s trilogy études, cahier, and fleurs, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is being published by Seagull Books.
Poet and scholar, Jeanne Heuving has lived most of her life in Seattle, with forays into Palo Alto, New Haven and Cambridge. She is engaged by the tensions between prose and poetry and seeks to amplify these in her work. Indigo Angel (Black Square Editions, 2023), made up of three books—Mood Indigo, Brilliant Corners and Air Time—takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history. Heuving’s scholarly work includes Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry, co-edited with Tyrone Williams (Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019) and The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series, University of Alabama Press, 2016).
Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University. Her first book, b o y, was published in 2024.
exXCinema fFfF
Join us for an evening of intrepid, experiential, pre-proto-prae-diegentically filmic videoation with two pieces by film-maker & poet Lynne Sachs:
A Biography of Lilith (35 min.) In a lively mix of off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, the film updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist.
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (30 min.) Sachs uses visual and aural collage techniques to combine the theoretical issues of feminism with memories of discovering her body as a young girl. By looking at home movies and found footage, the filmmaker explores science and art's representation of women. (Film-makers Co-op)
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. (via the film-makers website)
Christopher Adams reads Lardo Bardo Installment 3
Christopher Adams reads Lardo Bardo installment 3 of 4,
with other performances of poetry, comics and internet things from:
Lily O'Donnell
Lucy Clifford
Lauren Isa Arri
Buddy
PSU MFA Alumni Reading
Readings from PSU MFA Creative Writing Alumni:
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
Eric Larsh
Joshua Pollock
Tom’s Book Club
A discussion of Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation.
Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts commingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.
Rachel Walther: Born To Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon
Rachel Walther will discuss and read from her new book, Born To Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, soon to be released from Headpress.
“Drawing on extensive archival research, film historian Rachel Walther delves into the film’s backstory, tracing how an unbelievable true crime tale of love, bank robbery, and LGBTQI+ activism became a box-office smash and catapulted a group of Brooklyn outsiders into the media spotlight…Walther’s deep dive interrogates the film’s place in the 1970s zeitgeist, set against a background of antiwar activism and the fight for gay and trans rights, and in doing so shows its continuing relevance today.”
non-performance for 4 tape recorders
Tape music composed and recycled live, unfolding and folding slowly over an hour and a half.
Come and go as you please.
Tom's Book Club Film Night: Saló, or the 120 days of Sadom (Pasolini, 1975)
In conjunction with our book club discussion of Olivia Laing's The Silver Room, we will be screening Pier Paolo Pasolini's notoriously difficult last film.
Quoth Criterion:
Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . It’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.
Nadia's Proust Reading Group
We meet to discuss Part I of Volume II of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. You are welcome to read any language or translation of the text.
ExCINEMA FfFf: The Films of Charles Henri Ford
The films of the American surrealist poet, magazine editor, photographer, and collage artist.
Poem Posters Probably filmed in 1966, with motif of an exhibition of Ford’s large-scale text-image collages, it is an invaluable historical document that shows Factory stars Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga cavorting with Beat legend William Burroughs, musician Ned Rorem, film critic Parker Tyler, literary enfant terribles Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, pop artists Jim Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, and many fabulous unknowns. The soundtrack mixes free jazz (by John Handy), ambient sound, the voices of gallery visitors, Charles Ford reading his own poetry, and a wry commentary by Al Hansen.
Johnny Minotaur (1971) A lyrical explosion of taboos: incest, intergenerational desire, pansexuality and autoeroticism through mythopoeic, sensual imagery, recitations of his diaries and a philosophical debate featuring an impressive narration by such artists as Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Warren Sonbert and Lynne Tillman.
An Evening of Minimal Electronics & Film
Performances by:
Purpureal Daystar (on tour from Switzerland)
Ceremonial Abyss ("west coast" tape music)
Varied Terrain (Dylan Howe & Emmet Martin) new record out on Moon Villan
Films by Hali Autumn (digitized super 8)
Kine Klub
KLUB KINE on March 17, 2026 at 7pm presents IN (by Jacquesrates). Filmed all over San Francisco in 1994, this 'never-seen' 16mm color/60min 'feature' (screened digitally) portrays a day & night & gig in the lives of Swiss Army Vagina (a band). IN is maximalist Underground...full of triggers, punk verite & sad thrills...it's one-of-no-kind(!)
Tom's Book Club: The Silver Book by Olivia Laing
We will discuss Olivia Laing's new novel that revolves around the world of Cinecittà, specifically on the sets of Fellini's Casanova and Pasolini's Salò, during the rise of Italy's Years of Lead.
From the Publisher:
[The novel] is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.
Reading: Christopher Adams/Lily O'Donnell/Quinn Gancedo/ Asher Geldman/Peri Heath
Christopher Adams will read from his new booklet Reality Emoji, with other performances by Lily O’Donnell, Quinn Gancedo, Asher Geldman, and Peri Heath.
Detour Film Series: Happy End (Oldrich Lipsky, 1967)
A Czech black comedy that tells the story of a life in reverse, from death (birth) to birth (death).
From Orbit:
The reverse chronology, with events playing out completely backwards, upends the narrative flow to become a playful, surreal, Dadaist experience unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.
A free zine with readings related to the film will be provided.
It is encouraged to show up early to save a good seat.
Heiken Gallery Art Opening: Tape Painting Artist Lot's Used Apostrophe
Tape Painting Artist Lot’s Used Apostrophe
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March 5- April 28
Opening March 5, 5-8PM
Painting, collage, music, and sculpture.
Spare Room Readings presents: Alice Notley Marathon Reading
We will read three books by Alice Notley
HOW SPRING COMES
OPERA (from The Speak Angel Series)
INCIDENTALS IN THE DAY WORLD (included in Early Works)
Come and go. Snacks and drinks. Free and easy.
This is an installment of Spare Room's annual marathon reading series.
Literary Shitterary
An evening of short films and writings, revolving around the printed word, by Rankin Renwick
Rankin Renwick's art making life is highly influenced by the printed word. After reading In The Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Mathieson, they took off hitchhiking to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to see what it was about with their own eyes. And, having read The Beats since 15 years old, they took off on another hitchhiking trip to San Francisco to check out what that was all about. Both of these trips originated in Chicago and were accompanied by their wolf dog, their friend’s Super 8 camera, and their journals, which later informed the voiceover of the completed films years later. They were a bookseller for ten years at various shops around the USA, their last bookseller stint being at Powell's, where they started the Small Press and Journals Section and had a small press reading series called The dew.claw. While working there, they were befriended by William Tanner Vollmann. Through a roundabout way, they ended up shooting footage of him in The Tenderloin, resulting in The Ugly Movie, a film that is mostly retired, it is so unbearably ugly. But Rankin will screen it tonight.
And read some poems and essays of their own scribbling.
Filament Reading Series
Filament Reading Series is a monthly reading event showcasing the poets & writers from Portland State University's MFA program in Creative Writing. At Word Virus Books, we will have six readers: Katie Johnson, Grace Lawrence, Rachel Blair, AG Dupont, Beth Pickard, & Luca Fontanetta followed by a brief open-mic with a sign-up sheet.
Film Screening: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Lovers on the Bridge)
Detour Film Series presents: The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1991)
Leos Carax’s delirious saga of l’amour fou burns with an intoxicating stylistic freedom as it traces the highs and lows of the passionate relationship that develops between a homeless artist (Juliette Binoche) who is losing her sight and a troubled, alcoholic street performer (Denis Lavant) living on Paris’s famed Pont-Neuf bridge. Capturing their romantic abandon with a giddy expressionist energy—especially in a wild dance sequence set against an explosion of fireworks— this whirlwind love story is an exhilarating journey through a relationship that confirmed Carax’s status as one of the leading lights of the post–New Wave French cinema.
(from Janus Films)