Wednesday, June 18, 2008

big bear





Cheryl’s Gone Reading Series
June 19: DJ Renegade, Mel Nichols, Ryan Call, Tone Ghosting
8pm - free
Big Bear Cafe
1700 1st St NW, at 1st and R
Washington DC

Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade) was the 1998 and 1999 National Haiku Slam Champion. His poems have been published in Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Antioch Review, and the anthologies Meow: Spoken Word from the Black Cat, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapallooza, Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, Catch a Fire, and The Black Rooster Social Inn, which he also edited. In 1995, he received the Furious Flower “Emerging Poet Award” from James Madison University. He has performed on the Today Show, in a commercial for Legal Jeans, in the documentaries Voices Against Violence and SlamNation, on BET’s Teen Summit and By the Book, and in the feature film Slam.

Mel Nichols is the author of Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008), The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6 (Edge 2007), Day Poems (Edge 2005), and the forthcoming book Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon. Poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in New Ohio Review (/nor), Van Gogh’s Ear, Practice, and Abraham Lincoln. She lives in Washington, DC and curates the Ruthless Grip Series at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Sliver Spring, Maryland.

Ryan Call is a recent MFA graduate of George Mason University and the former fiction editor of Phoebe. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Avery, Hobart, Caketrain, NO COLONY, and Sonora Review.

A solo project of Jeff Bagato (aka DJ Panic), Tone Ghosting features a unique homemade instrument he invented himself: playing vinyl LPs with small hacksaw & electronic FX, magnifying, modifying, & energizing the small scrapes & squeaks to create a complex musical vocabulary. The patented “Tone Ghosting process” includes looping these sounds, reformulating them in frenetic live dubs, & adding freeform vocal madness. Tone Ghosting creates a unique sonic universe somewhere between the attack of power electronics & the complex mind-body games of electronica & non-idiomatic free improvisation.