Shivastan Press Woodstock Mountain Poetry Festival
“In the Spirit of Allen Ginsberg”
At the Woodstock Mothership – 6 Hillcrest Ave, Woodstock NY
info 845 679 8777

Saturday Oct 11 ~ 7 to 9pm:
Political Poetry of Change with
Janine Pommy Vega :: Andy Clausen
Peter Lamborn Wilson :: Eliot Katz
Vivian Demuth :: Diana Ayton-Shenker

9:30 to 11pm: Alternative Sexuality Poetry with
R. Dionysus Whiteurs
Followed by Open Mic

Sunday Oct 12 ~ 6 to 8pm:
Home Planet News Benefit with
Donald Lev + Special Guests & Open Mic

8 to 10pm: Buddhist Poetry Love-In
& Wildflowers Anthology Release Party with
George Quasha :: Shiv Mirabito
Ziska :: Loren Standlee + Special Guests
Shivastan Press Woodstock Mountain Poetry Festival

Event & Poet Info:
Political Poetry for Change, Sat Oct 11, 8pm: this event emphasizes (as Ginsberg proved) that poetry can change the world by raising awareness of political issues such as inequality, environmental issues, the current elections, etc, etc.

Janine Pommy Vega: Poet who teaches in local schools and in prisons and with migrant farmers in Upstate NY. Author of Tracking The Serpent & The Green Piano.
Andy Clausen: Ginsberg said “I would take my chance on a President Clausen…”
Author of 40th Century Man.

Peter Lamborn Wilson: Poet Provacatuer & an editor at Autonomedia, which publishes the magazine Semiotext(e). He is also a writer, teacher and New York radio personality, as well as a longtime student of the history of politics & religion. Author of Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam.

Eliot Katz: A major inheritor of Ginsberg’s political activism & author of When the Skyline Crumbles: Poems for the Bush Years (Cosmological Knot Press, 2007). He & Andy Clausen were coeditors of Poems for the Nation (Seven Stories Press, 2000), a collection of contemporary political poems compiled by Ginsberg. Katz is also cofounder and former coeditor of Long Shot literary magazine.

Vivian Demuth: Fire lookout poet who hosts an annual Poetry on the Peaks event in the Canadian Rockies. Author of the poetry collection, “Breathing Nose Mountain,” & the environmental novel, “Eyes of the Forest.”

Diana Ayton-Shenker: Poet who is author of numerous articles on human rights, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), sustainable development and culture. Her most recent book, A Global Agenda, analyzes contemporary issues facing the UN. Her book of poems is entitled Tumbalalaika.

Alternative Sexuality Poetry Reading, Sat Oct 11, 9:30pm: The rights & freedoms of those who are not in the mainstream will be discussed, debated & celebrated through the poetry of the sexual revolution exemplified by Ginsberg.

R. Dionysus Whiteurs: A New Paltz legend – “One of the most humorous & rhythmic poets around”
+ Open Mic.

Home Planet News Benefit, Sun Oct 12, 6pm:
For decades this important literary journal/magazine/newspaper/review has published the best poets in the Woodstock & NY area.

Donald Lev: Has published HPN with his late wife, poet Enid Dame (who was an expert in “Midrash” poetry) and continues to publish and read his poems around the Northeast.
+ Open Mic.

Buddhist Poetry Love-In & Wildflowers Anthology Release Party, Sun Oct 12, 8pm: this 9th annual edition of Woodstock’s only poetry magazine has a Buddhist theme featuring poems by some of America’s most accomplished poets such as Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, H.H. Karmapa and several local poets.

Printed on handmade paper in Nepal by Shivastan Press (Woodstock~Kathmandu) – which has published almost 50 different poetry chapbooks, anthologies & broadsides over the past 10 years.

George Quasha: His 15 books include poetry: Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands, Ainu Dreams [with Chie Hasegawa], Preverbs [forthcoming]; anthologies (America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry [with Ronald Gross], An Active Anthology [with Susan Quasha], The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [with Charles Stein]); and writing on art (Gary Hill: Language Willing; with Charles Stein: Tall Ships, HanD HearD/liminal objects, Viewer). Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He has taught at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Bard College, New School University (Graduate Anthropology Department), and Naropa University. With Susan Quasha he is founder/publisher of Barrytown/Station Hill Press.

Shiv Mirabito: Poet, Publisher & Editor of Shivastan Press (Woodstock & Kathmandu) & author of Transcendental Tyger.

Loren Standlee & Ziska: Poets who have hosted great lamas such as H. H. 16TH Karmapa, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche & Kunsang Dechen Lingpa at their Woodstock home.

“Please join us at Desert Island this Wednesday, October 8th from 7:00–9:00 PM for “Happy Accident,” a book signing, slide show and party with Dash Shaw, Ken Dahl, Jesse Reklaw, and Trevor Alixopulos. Don’t miss this chance to purchase a limited-edition Monster Face screenprint—a collaborative artwork by all four artists. The artists will be here to sign the prints and their recent graphic novels, and several will present slide-shows of their work.”

Happy Accident: Dash Shaw, Ken Dahl, Jesse Reklaw, and Trevor Alixopulos

Wednesday, October 8th, 7:00 – 9:00 PM

Desert Island
540 Metropolitan Ave, between Union and Lorimer
Brooklyn NY 11211
(718) 388-5087
http://www.desertislandbrooklyn.com

Dash Shaw, whose comics are known for their emphasis on emotional, lyrical logic and innovative design, was named one of the top ten artists to check out at the 2002 “Small Press Expo” when he was just 19 years old. He is the author of Love Eats Brains (Odd God Press; 2004), Goddess Head (Teenage Dinosaur Press; 2002-04), The Mother’s Mouth (Alternative Comics; 2006), and most recently The Bottomless Belly Button (Fantagraphics; 2008). His comic short stories have appeared in multiple anthologies, newspapers and magazines. In
addition, Shaw is a member of the weirdo pop band Love Eats Brains! and has co-written and acted in various short film projects.
www.dashshaw.com

Ken Dahl is the name Gabby Schulz uses to make it harder for his relatives to connect him to the comics he draws. Born in Honolulu, Ken has spent most of his adult life in a dreary transit about the continental United States. In May of 2007 he completed a one-year Fellowship at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and is now living in a truck in Vermont, figuring out how to continue to draw comics while avoiding inconveniences like paying rent or working a job. Ken is the author of Monsters (Secret Acres), which won the 2006 Ignatz Award for Best Minicomic.

Cartoonist Jesse Reklaw turns the dreams submitted by strangers into insightful, humorous, and clever four-panel comic strips in Slow Wave, which appears in alternative newsweeklies all over the country, and was nominated for a 2008 Ignatz award. The Night of Your Life, the
recently released collection of over five years of Slow Wave, is a testament to the ability of comics to illuminate the corridors of the imagination with wit, sincerity, and delight. www.slowwave.com

After completing the two lengthy, ambitious comics Dread and Mine Tonight earlier this year, Trevor Alixopulos released The Hot Breath of War (Sparkplug Comic Books), which filters the cartoonist’s romantic, restless nature and growing political consciousness through a style reminiscent of the magazine cartoon essay of decades past. www.alixopulos.com

Design For Obama. Download high-res posters or upload your own design.

Short Cuts by Adam Shatz
The London Review of Books

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.

The 60-minute film was first released in 2006 and shown during the mid-term elections on Fox News. Since then it has received top billing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness’ week on American campuses, at Christian-Zionist conferences and at events organised by Republican politicians in Florida. It has found a powerful backer in the real estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as ‘the world’s richest Jew’. The Endowment for Middle East Truth, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC which recently hosted a series of seminars named after Adelson and his wife, arranged distribution of ‘Obsession’, at a cost in the tens of millions.

The makers of the film, like their subjects, are soldiers of God. Almost everyone associated with it or with Clarion has worked for Aish HaTorah, an ‘education’ group with offices in East Jerusalem and strong links to the settler movement. Clarion was incorporated in Delaware to the New York offices of Aish HaTorah and Rabbi Shore was the director, as well as the founder of its media organisation, Honest Reporting, which campaigns against a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. It’s illegal in the US for nonprofit organisations, or for foreign nationals, to try to influence the outcome of an election.

The film’s chief claim is that 2008 is like 1938, only worse, since there are more Muslims than Germans and they’re more spread out geographically: ‘They’re not outside our borders, they are here.’ Violent raptures and spectacular carnage unfold in slick montages set to throbbing Middle Eastern music: Pakistanis deliriously burning the American flag, Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks, Hizbullah chanting ‘death to America’, clerics praising the ‘magnificent 19’ and the murder of unbelievers, children training to become suicide bombers, the planes crashing into the towers. These images are interspersed with footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler’s speeches. A chapter – narrated by Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer – is devoted to the Mufti’s collaboration with Hitler.

Scary Muslims are everywhere, and the umma stands more united than ever, driven by hatred of infidels and Jews and determined to conquer the West, a civilisation gone soft, weakened by self-doubt, political correctness bordering on treason, and, worst of all, a ‘culture of denial’. Gilbert spells it out:

In the 1930s, the danger of Nazism was there . . . but people thought, well, this is a German problem, it’s a limited problem . . . And I think the same is true today . . . They don’t see that Islamic fundamentalism is a global network and a global problem . . .because if you come to that conclusion – and I’m sure it’s the true conclusion – then you have to do something about it.

‘Obsession’ doesn’t say what we should do – except steer well clear of dialogue and negotiation.

Although there are interviews with the usual ‘terrorism experts’ – Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz et al – the film’s portrayal of the region is mostly left to native informants like Nonie Darwish (a leader of Arabs for Israel and the daughter of a slain fighter from Gaza), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-Christian author of They Must Be Stopped) and Walid Shoebat, a ‘former PLO terrorist’ who operates under a pseudonym – for security reasons, of course. Shoebat runs the Walid Shoebat Foundation, described on its website as an ‘organisation that cries out for the Justice of Israel and the Jewish people’. He’s made a career of recounting his journey from Islamic terror to Christian Zionism before audiences at Evangelical gatherings and the US Air Force Academy. It’s not clear, though, that he ever laid a hand on anyone. According to a relative, ‘the biggest act of terror he ever committed was to glue Palestinian flags on street posts.’ What is very clear is that, for the makers of ‘Obsession’, having once hated Jews gives you privileged access to the Muslim mind, and not only if you’re an ex-Muslim. Among the film’s authorities on radical Islam is a former leader of the Hitler Youth, Alfons Heck, who says that ‘what the Muslims do to their own children is even worse’ than the things the Nazis did to young Germans – as only a Nazi could know.

If you didn’t receive ‘Obsession’ with your paper, you can watch it on YouTube. It’s been posted by a former Muslim whose screen identity is ‘fuckmohammad’.

Adam Shatz is an editor at the London Review.