RIOT Ink

NEW WEBSITE

riotink — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:34:21 +0000

We are going to try out blogspot. Less bells and whistles. So find us HERE.

FIRST RIOT INK MEETING DATE AND TIME!!!!!!!!

riotink — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:58:35 +0000

Come, come! Writers! Readers!Lovers of finely composed and messily arranged words! Come to RIOT Ink’s first meeting of the fall. Meet new people, make new friends, bring pieces you have been working on, bring books that you have read this summer and loved–tell us what you have been really enjoying about language lately.

DATE: Thursday, September 10, 2009
TIME: 5:30PM
PLACE: Cafe Medici (across from UT on Guadalupe Street), look upstairs for a sign that reads RIOT Ink

Back to School Update

riotink — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:06:14 +0000

Wow, school has already started again…

Wow.

Well, welcome back to school. Welcome back to Austin. Welcome back to a community of writers. A lot of things happened over the summer. For one, there is a significant line-up change for RIOT Ink. Ever since its birth in the fall of 2007, Paula Mendoza-Hanna has led RIOT Ink, and she has done a tremendously-amazing job. She brought writers together who probably never would have met otherwise and removed us from our cavernous bedrooms or indie-rock coffee shop hideouts. She has been a large help from making RIOT Ink what it is today and without her none of this really would be happening. Well, she graduated from UT this past spring and now is pursuing an MFA degree at the University of Michigan. But don’t worry folks! She isn’t gone for good, just for a couple years or so. I mean, come on, weather in Michigan has the potential to make people feel cold…and there might be snow.

In a similar fashion, other core RIOT Inkers have moved on and away to different states and schools and ways of living. Runjini now teaches kiddos in New Mexico under the program Teach for America and Miles is getting his PhD in History at Indiana University. And well, Zack has been gone for awhile, living it up in San Francisco. It is sad to see these people leave, and we wish them all of the best. Hopefully they will return, if not forever! then at least for a nice stay.

But with all of these departures, it is also time for fresh blood, for new writers and new ideas. Leadership for RIOT Ink has been passed to me and I look forward to taking on the role. I hope this fall semester and new year can be the best yet for the group. In the past we have done reading series, litzines, poetry postcards, collaborations, and other projects. I hope to continue with those traditions as well as adding new things based off the next generation of writers in the group. I am excited for the opportunity to work with new writers as well as the veterans from the past couple years. I want to continue the legacy of RIOT Ink as it has started.

With all of this transitioning, please bear with me. With school starting and all the other crazy end-of-summer-beginning-of-school stuff happening, it has been kind of hectic. But I promise to have RIOT Ink mostly-operational sometime this week. So don’t fret if you haven’t received an email! I will get to you. I just opened the mailbox today. I also will have a specific time and place for our first meeting soon.

If you are interested in joining or want more information, just send an email to:

because (dot) words (at) gmail (dot) com

For now, good luck with classes and the first week of school. I am already brewing my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and reading Dante’s Inferno.

Sincerely,

Ryan Bender-Murphy

Ars Notoria features JESSICA PIAZZA

riotink — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:57:56 +0000

You can read Jessica Piazza here, here and here.

Also, check out a clip of her reading last here:

This is going to be a stellar reading, so y’all be sure to make it out. Enjoy a cool drink in Austin Java’s patio and soak in the awesomeness that is Jessica Piazza. This time around, our good friend George Leake will be hosting the event.

Also, new issues of Maker III will be available at the reading. A LOT of great writers in this issue, so don’t miss out. Pick up a copy at the reading, and stay tuned for Maker IV, as well as a special RIOT reading featuring the contributors sometime late July.

Tagged: Ars Notoria, Austin Java, Bat City Review, Jessica Piazza, Poetry, RIOT Ink

MAKER III

riotink — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:51:52 +0000

Coming Soon.

.

Also, working on RIOT’s summer reading series.
Will likely be at Austin Java again, if they’ll let us.
Keep tuned. Summer’s here, yours truly is freshly graduated
and has time enough now to get ‘er started up again.

George Leake debuts COEUR at 12th Street Books

riotink — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:54:22 +0000

George Leake runs the production company Ars Notoria, as well as Pull Down Press. He has published several chapbooks including Blood and Chocolate, Tacit Notes, Nine Nocturnes, and The Hedgepig Agonistes. His latest offering is the lush, heady and thoroughly bewitching Coeur. He has produced many outstanding literary events and readings around town including such memorable events as WAR TRANCE at Hyde Park Theatre, featuring UT’s own giants, Douglass Parker and Tom Cable.

He will be reading from Coeur at

12th Street Books, Thursday February 26th, at 7pm.

An excerpt from Coeur:

down to the footpath-scuttling in the brush

scarlet tree bellowing-here is the track

where blossoms engorged assert and express

longing for joining, crush fallen whisper

utters we can’t, you won’t, what will they say

nothing from everything, what shall we reap

a glance, a word, a kiss, day unto night

grey beyond windows, a plain wooden chair

MAKER III : V O Y E U R

riotink — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:46:27 +0000

It may be literary blasphemy to hi-jack and invert (pervert?) the sentiment of Fitzgerald’s “privileged glimspses,” but when mulling over the theme for this next issue of Maker, those words and that first chapter of Gatsby are what immediately come to mind. I love, too, the line that tells of poor Nick Carraway’s unfortunate susceptibility to ”the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”

It’s not entirely fitting to invoke this chapter, I know. Nick never asked for nor wanted so much nakedness. And Voyeurism according to the DSM-IV would not count the thrill of observing an emotional disrobing. What I’m after is a much broader, and perhaps deeper, interpretation.

A voyeur, unlike Nick Carraway, is never privy to the intimacy she sees. The moments are stolen, not yeilded unbidden. What I hope to gather, from all friends and strangers alike, are stories and poetries of exquisitely uncomfortable moments of witness.

To inspire you–a few images–

Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'

Perhaps a poem about Ms. Lonelyhearts? She was one of my favourite parts about that movie. It was such a heartbreakingly intimate moment–when Jimmy Stewart sees her through his window having dinner alone and toasting her glass to a ghost.

: Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’. Another movie with a photographer, but…. um… very different.

Movie info from Amazon.com:

Michael Powell lays bare the cinema’s dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father’s work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock’s Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell’s film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell’s picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full color photography, documentary techniques, and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence, and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 rerelease, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative American audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. –Sean Axmaker

Marcel Duchamp’s Ètant Donnes:

….

Send your words to because.words@gmail.com

S P A C E M A N : D A D A : R O B O T

riotink — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:59:07 +0000

SPACEMAN:DADA:ROBOT

Hey folks, just wanted to let you know about an upcoming multimedia art show by the artistic collaborative Electronic Planet Ensemble. The group includes Sergio R. Samayoa, Chad Salvata, and David Jewell, an artist and poet RIOT Ink has had the pleasure of featuring at a couple of events.

We here at RIOT Ink know great work, so believe us when we tell you this is going to be a spectacular show.

So GO!

Be blown away!

And tell ‘em RIOT Ink sent ya!

ê ê ê ê ê

via email, David Jewell:

There will be a mail-art exhibit at the VORTEX THEATRE from JANUARY 9th to JANUARY 24th 2009. We will display all art received before the closing on Jan. 24th.

The THEME is Spaceman:Dada:Robot.
You can send something about one or all three of those words.

Mail art is the sending of original art, which you create, (i.e. a postcard, a poem, a collage, a drawing, anything) through the mail. We will display all mail received and also show it on the web. If it gets to us soon enough we may use it as part of the video for the show.

The show is a multimedia show: Music, Spoken Word, Big Video Screen, creating an environment of entertaining
sights and sounds. Stories and thoughts and music that has a beat and you can dance to.

It is fun based. Not serious based. It is serious.
But not boring. It is lively and enlivening and the text of the show contains actual astounding Facts About Space and Time.

So send us some art to this address:
Spaceman.Dada.Robot
8003-B Tisdale Dr.
Austin, TX 78757

The Performance will be at the Vortex.

Starting Friday January 9th at 8 p.m.

and every Thur. Friday, Saturday and Sunday after that until the 24th.

Vortex Theater is at 2307 Manor Rd. 78722

For more info. click here

mail art will be displayed at
http://www.sergioplanet.com

2009, jigga whaa?

riotink — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:09:14 +0000

Year of the Ox

It’s that time again, the New Year. And while most people are probably waking up just now, wearing the stench of cologne mixed with champagne mixed with their last bad decision for 2008, here at RIOT Ink headquarters we are diligently planning out what is in store for the new year. 2009 is going to be a biggie, even more impressive and spectacular than the previous one. Remember those warm-blooded and cheery summer readings (even the hurricane came to one!), well more of that is in store for the spring time. Details are being worked out, mainly the location and the frequency of the readings, but DO be on the lookout. Fall semester was crazy with grad applications, teacher assisting, and the overall winter doldrums. BUT ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, we shall begin this new year with a bang. How, might you ask?

Well, aside from a brand spankin’ new reading series to quench your poetry thirst, the RIOT Inkers will be putting together their THIRD Maker, the Voyeur edition, which will be edited by the lovely Ms. Paula Mendoza-Hanna. It will feature work from newcomers and veterans, ranging from short stories to poetry to explorations into the nature of beekeeping. This new Maker should come out late January or early February! Just think! VOYEUR, and no not like those Girls Gone Wild videos, sheesh, who do you think you are! Classy and sassy and maybe a bit trashy.

Oh wait! there is going to be a FOURTH Maker, too. The COLLABORATIONS edition of Maker. Yes, we are allowed this. Basically, we will release a Maker with the poetry collaborations written and performed over the summer. But that’s not all! We will also explain the prompts, method, and overall process for creating poetry with multiple people who, let’s not kid ourselves, write in completely different ways. I mean, rhyming couplets meets Godzilla — how does that work?!?!?!? IT DOES! And we will enlighten you. Because nothing is more fun than writing, unless you are writing with people you really really like. And well, don’t be upset if there are a couple pizza stains and mentions of the infamous P’Zone throughout this Maker. It is full of love and…well, that other stuff. (BURNT PIZZA anyone?)

And if a freaking reading series and new litzine issues combo wasn’t enough for you in 2009, then get ready for this! One of the newest members of RIOT Ink, Runjini Raman, will be releasing her first chapbook of poems through our high-tech publishing house (aka the Hanna House, aka the best place for nutella and peanut butter sandwiches). Runjini was found in the barren lands of university poetry workshops one day and we have loved her ever since. BACK OFF SAN FRANCISCO.

Okay. Lemme guess. YOU STILL WANT MORE. That’s fine. Because if those four BIG things weren’t enough. Then be ready for poetry to explode in your veins and your heart and when you are on the bus and when you are craving Japanese food and when you are waiting in line at Amy’s Ice Cream. Yes, poetry postcards might creep into your napkins or your bus seat or that book about marsupial mating patterns that you have to read for ecology class. Just saying, what goes better with animal sex than a poem by Sylvia Plath or Robert Frost or Anne Carson or Kenneth Koch (“tigers in my genitals”!).

What I am trying to say is that RIOT Ink is alive and kickin’ like a baby about to shoot out of the womb. So, to loyal fans, friends, and family members. Stay on board with us as we look toward the new year, for 2009 will beautiful like a freshmen entering college or a pack of gum just opened from the wrapper.

OKAY. Fine. Go back to reading your Christmas presents or cradling that bottle of Alka-Seltzer. It was a great year. Let’s have an ever better one.

-bender

Long Overdue Updates

riotink — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:54:52 +0000

Just a note to remind whoever might be dropping by that RIOT Ink is still alive and kicking, and will be recharging our batteries after Fall semester. There were many things we’d intended to do, but hadn’t the time for. That said we’re all itching to get back in it, and put on some shows and put out a few publications

A couple of projects to keep an eye out for:

- A RIOT Ink Yuletide reading. (Maybe we’ll even sing some carols? A poetry Santa? )

- A RIOT Ink Spring reading series

- The release of MAKER III : Voyeur.

- MAKER IV : Collaborations, A collection of RIOT Ink collaborations, complete with our prompts and methods

- The release of a new chapbook by fellow RIOT Ink’er, Runjini Raman

In the meantime, please enjoy this video clip of the incomporable Jill Alexander Essbaum: