Nico Muhly's Drones on eMusic

I just made my debut at eMusic with a review of Nico Muhly's collected Drones EPs, embedded below. Read the review here.

NC Comicon Feature

I wrote a cover story for Indy Week about NC Comicon and Ultimate Comics. Very cool to see Duncan Fegredo art on the cover of the Indy! Read it here.

Introducing: The Lion's Face

The Lion's Face

LIGHT ON THE LION’S FACE is Tim Van Dyke's poetic interpretation of Baudrillard’s "Seduction," available for free at Argotist Ebooks. The Lion's Face is my album-length musical interpretation of Tim Van Dyke, completed in collaboration with the author over several months.



Lyrics and free downloads are available on Bandcamp.

Words & voice: Tim Van Dyke // Music: Brian Howe // Cover image: Grant Miller

Beat Making Lab

I took on what turned out to be a pretty involved and fascinating story about the UNC Beat Making Lab's exportation to the Congo and beyond--in Indy Week.

Lydia Davis article

Thanks to Lydia Davis visiting Duke this week, I got to unleash years of bottled-up thoughts on her epic Collected Stories: In the Indy.

One Thing I Like About the Beach

It temporarily dissolves our superficial differences. People with different political views, social habits, and lifestyles, who might simply scowl at each other on the street, come together to enjoy the day, to smile and make small talk. We discover ourselves to be the same kind of creatures who feel the same pleasure under the same sun, in the same sea. The beach is a place where we go to stare away from America—as one.

Copywriting

My small brochure for the NC Opera is out, following the completion of two much larger brochures for Duke Performances.

Tough Love: Parody & The Song of Hiawatha

The following is a transcript of a talk I gave last Tuesday, July 24, as a part of the Mixtape Reading Series at the Casbah in Durham. It is actually sort of two talks in one, a treatment of parody and a Longfellow recovery operation, merged together with a twist in the middle.

Tough Love: Parody & The Song of Hiawatha

by Brian Howe

"With both hands his face he covered."

I believe that in order to truly love something, you have to perceive and rejoice in what is ridiculous about it. This is also a good description of one of my favorite arts, the art of parody. To be sure, some parodies are simply catty and cruel, coming from disinterested or even hateful places—and these can be quite fun. I want to warm up with an occasional doggerel by Byron, which he seems to have written in an absolute fury over Peter Bell, a notoriously awful book that Wordsworth self-published even though his friends begged him not to. I should note that I’m using the term “parody” broadly here, to also encompass burlesque and drive-by attack poems such as this:

Mixtape reading: 7/24, The Casbah, 8 pm

Years ago, I ran a small salon-style reading series called Mixtape, where poets read work that was not their own. Now my friend Chris Vitiello, in conjunction with the Hinge Literary Center, has revived and renovated Mixtape at the Casbah in Duhram.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday, July 24) at 8 pm, I'm reading in it with poet Fred Moten, filmmaker sarah goetz, and photographer M.J. Sharp. I'll be giving a presentation about the love/hate nature of parody, using Longfellow as a lens. Details on the Hinge website can be found here.

The Lion's Face

Pauline Oliveros - Reverberations

Really can't overstate my admiration for Pauline Oliveros . . . though I did try.

I Went to a Fake Rave...

And all I got out of it was a pretty fun article.

Zammuto.

Zammuto!

Wax Wroth Reading Series #5: Chris Vitiello and Hassan Melehy

Chris Vitiello Book Release Reading (with Hassan Melehy)

On Tuesday, 27 March 2012, at 8 p.m. sharp, the Wax Wroth Reading Series returns to Carrboro’s Looking Glass Café, in a co-presentation with the Hinge Literary Center.

The featured reader is Durham’s CHRIS VITIELLO, arts writer and poet extraordinaire, whose new book Obedience (Ahsahta Press; 2012) can be read forward, backwards, or both ways at once. Regardless, it’s a tour de force of sustained scientific and linguistic interrogation.

Chapel Hill’s HASSAN MELEHY, a poet and literary critic who teaches French at UNC, opens the proceedings. Admission is free, though you can support the Café by purchasing a wide variety of beverages, from espresso to alcohol, and food.

2012 Independent Poetry Contest Reading

Tomorrow night at the Regulator in Durham, me, Chris Vitiello, Bridget Bell, and Laura Jaramillo help celebrate the winners of this year's Independent Weekly Poetry Contest. 7-9 pm.

New Poems in Esque Magazine

Got three poems from Wolf Intervals in the massive new "Revolution Issue" of Esque. Read those joints here. And read these John Colburn poems, which are really sick.

Busy Week at the Indy

I saw a Philip Glass opera, struggled through an historical novel by Lisa Alther, and attended a great Jeff Mangum show that would have literally killed me with joy a decade ago.

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics

I wrote an essay about Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song" for the Poetics of American Song Lyrics anthology (ed. Charlotte Pence), new from the University Press of Mississippi. More info here.

Arrange and Johnny Jewel

Two recent Pitchfork pieces I thought came out well: A review of Arrange, a young South Floridian whose music never ceases to bewitch me, and an interview with Johnny Jewel of Chromatics and Glass Candy, demystifying his phenomenal new record as Symmetry.