Table talk

Wednesday August 27, 7:30 to 10pm, 2008

Fallen Fruit

“The fallen fruits and vegetables of August”

Come to a dinner made with (mostly) harvested and foraged fruit and vegetables plus a few market items from the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Usher in the (almost) fall season of Clockshop programming by sharing a fallen fruit meal together with us. Artist and cook David Thorne will be preparing the food that Fallen Fruit provides.

FALLEN FRUIT is a mapping and manifesto for free fruit. Every day there is food somewhere going to waste. We encourage you to find it, tend and harvest it. We believe fruit is a resource that should be commonly shared, like shells from the beach or mushrooms from the forest. Fallen Fruit has moved from mapping to planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. Our goal is to get people thinking about the life and vitality of our neighborhoods and to consider how we can change the dynamic of our cities and common values. Share with the world and the world will share with you. Barter, don't buy! Give things away! You have nothing to lose but your hunger!

Fallen Fruit is David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young

Reservations are required along with a donation of $30. Please send email to: rsvp@clockshop.org to reserve a spot and pay through Pay Pal or send a check for $30 made out to Clockshop at 2806 Clearwater Street, LA, CA 90039.

PAST EVENTS

Friday May 30th, 7:30-10pm

Rick Lowe and Marqueece Harris-Dawson in conversation

“Re-Built Environments”

Rick Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses in Houston and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Executive Director of Community Coalition in South Los Angeles, will discuss the possibilities for reimagining and rebuilding our urban environment. Drawing on each of their experiences, they will discuss how art and organizing individuals can alter lives and landscapes. Audience and participants will end the evening with food, drink and discussion.

BIOGRAPHIES

Rick Lowe is a Houston based artist/activist. In 1992, he founded Project Row Houses, an arts and cultural community located in a historically significant and culturally charged site in Houston. In 1997, Project Row Houses was awarded the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence. This project has served as a catalyst for realizing meaningful community and social development in its neighborhood.

Rick's work has been included in exhibitions and programs nationally and internationally. Rick was the year 2000 recipient of the American Institute of Architecture Keystone Award. He is currently working with Rem Koolhaas, architect of the new Seattle Public Library, as chief arts planner.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson has been a dedicated activist for more than twenty years. He completed his Bachelor?s degree at Morehouse College. Currently, he is the Executive Director of Community Coalition, a community-based organization in South Los Angeles. Marqueece is the second Executive Director of Community Coalition, following its founder, current California State Assembly Member, Karen Bass. The organization is best known for leading grassroots campaigns to close over 200 liquor stores and other nuisance businesses in South Los Angeles and winning the struggle to obtain College Prep courses for all LAUSD high school students.

For five years, Marqueece ran the Community Coalition youth project, South Central Youth Empowered thru Action, as Program Director. During that time, he led a campaign to expose the poor learning conditions at South Los Angeles High Schools. Student members of South Central Youth Empowered thru Action entered their schools, armed with disposable cameras and documented the conditions they were facing on a daily basis. They then trained to advocate for the badly needed repairs at their campuses, including leaking bathrooms and faulty lighting systems. As a result of Marqueece?s focused leadership and the students? tenacity, they won $153 million in repairs for their schools.

In addition to his work at Community Coalition, Marqueece has extensive experience in electoral politics and is a key participant in the Progressive Movement in Los Angeles. Marqueece was a delegate to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (2001, Durban, South Africa) and the World Festival of Students and Youth (1997, Havana, Cuba) and serves on a myriad of boards, committees and organization affiliations. Recently, Marqueece received a certificate in non profit management from Stanford?s Graduate School of Business.

Friday March 28th, 7:30-10pm

Green LA Director Jonathan Parfrey and writer Matias Viegner in conversation

“Two utopias”

Jonthan Parfrey, director of Green LA, and Matias Viegner, writer and founder of Fallen Fruit will discuss both the utopian and pragmatic sides to building a greener Los Angeles. They will debate the macro and micro issues of bringing a city and its citizens to the figurative table around global warming and public and private fruit. Audience and participants will end the evening with food, drink and discussion.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jonathan Parfrey is the director of GREEN LA, the region's leading environmental coalition. From 1994 to 2007, he was executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. He also currently serves as Vice-President of the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters and sits on the board of the statewide group, Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. In 2003, Mr. Parfrey was appointed to Governor Schwarzenegger's Environmental Policy Team, and was previously appointed to Governor Davis' select committee on radioactive waste disposal. He has published in the Los Angeles Times and other publications. In 1992, he received the Paul S. Delp Award for Outstanding Service, Peace and Social Justice. In 2002 he was awarded a Durfee Foundation Fellowship. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.

The GREEN LA coalition is composed of over sixty environmental and environmental justice organizations. A project of the Liberty Hill Foundation, GREEN LA is organized in a network of five workgroups tasked with improving the environment by addressing 1) public transportation, 2) energy generation, 3) Port of Los Angeles, 4) management of the urban ecosystem, and 5) the cumulative impacts of toxins on disenfranchised communities. GREEN LA also administers five projects; the most important involves drafting the public participation element of the City's global warming action plan. Read more about Green LA here.

Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who teaches in Critical Studies the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. He is a founder of Fallen Fruit, an art collaboration focusing on fruit, urban ecology and public space. He regularly writes on art for X-tra and his fiction appears in several anthologies and magazines including Cabinet, Black Clock and the Radical History Review. He's recently has co-edited two books, Séance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects, which emerge from an annual international experimental writing conferences he directs at REDCAT in Los Angeles. As literary executor for Kathy Acker, he has written and lectured extensively on her work, editing a volume of her letters for Chiasmus Press and currently completing an academic study of her work.

This event is FREE but donations are most welcome. There is limited space, please RSVP by emailing rsvp at clockshop.org.

Wednesday February 20, 7:30 pm

Matthew Stadler

“City of Wool”

Conversation with writer Matthew Stadler over dinner prepared by chefs Corina Weibel and David Thorne.

Dinner and discussion of “City of Wool”, a short story by Matthew Stadler. It is strongly recommended that all participants read “City of Wool” prior to sitting down to eat and converse.

"City of Wool" concerns a Sufi dervish who arrives in Astoria, Oregon in July of 1914 to set up a store, which he calls "City of Wool." Like most of Stadler's fiction, the setting and particulars of the story are all factual, but the central characters are made up. Astoria, the oldest US city west of the Rockies, was a very cosmopolitan place that mixed Sufi with Finn, Sikh, German, Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, and Dutch. It was an old port city with a booming economy, the future metropolis of the region. "City of Wool" depicts a reality that would not have been surprising to Astorians in 1914.

Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels, including Landscape: Memory, The Sex Offender, and Allan Stein. He lectures widely on the history of cities, principally the younger cities of the North American West Coast. Matthew is a past contributor to Frieze Magazine, Arcade, The New York Times, Art Forum, Domus, Dwell, and Volume, and co-founder of the small, independent publisher, Clear Cut Press. He got his B.A. in political theory at Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in fiction writing at Columbia University, and he studied epistemology in the philosophy program at the London School of Economics. Among many other prizes, he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, last year, a United States Artists Fellowship, for his fiction.

Corina Weibel is the chef at the new and well-reviewed Canele Restaurant in Atwater Village. David Thorne is an artist who also cooks on the line at Canele.

This event is a prix-fixe dinner ($40 per person). Please sumbit payment at the time of reservation, by check or credit card. Participants will receive a PDF file of "City of Wool" upon RSVPing.

Thursday February 21, 7:30-9:30 pm

a conversation with Matthew Stadler, novelist, and Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles City Council President and Representative of CD 13

“The in-between city”

Matthew and Eric will discuss the zwischenstadt, or, the in-between city, and the pleasures and problems an elected official and a novelist encounter when confronted with our contemporary urban condition. The term zwischenstadt, coined by German urban planner Thomas Sieverts in his book Cities Without Cities, was given to urban areas that no longer conform to the traditional notion of a city with a dense urban center and outlying suburbs.

Stadler writes, “I am trying to find better descriptions and better stories for the built environment I was born into. The old story of the concentric city (a dense center surrounded by rings of decreasing density, farms, and then wilderness) still causes considerable problems. It condemns us to live in a tragedy ? the dissolution of the city. It's a very expensive and discouraging story.”

BIOGRAPHIES

Eric Garcetti is Los Angeles City Council President and a second-term councilmember serving the 13th Council District. Garcetti has shown that a commitment to the street-level health of the community is a necessary first step in creating positive change. His unique combination of pothole politics and vision has won measurable results in the 13th District, showing how local solutions can show the way to make our city safer, create transportation solutions, and ease the city?s housing crisis. Prior to his election in 2001, Garcetti taught public policy, diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College and the University of Southern California. Garcetti studied urban planning and political science at Columbia University, where he received his B.A. and M.A. in International Relations. He studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. He is an avid photographer, jazz pianist and composer. He lives in Echo Park with his partner of twelve years, Amy Elaine Wakeland.

Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels, including Landscape: Memory, The Sex Offender, and Allan Stein. He lectures widely on the history of cities, principally the younger cities of the North American West Coast. Matthew is a past contributor to Frieze Magazine, Arcade, The New York Times, Art Forum, Domus, Dwell, and Volume, and co-founder of the small, independent publisher, Clear Cut Press. He got his B.A. in political theory at Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in fiction writing at Columbia University, and he studied epistemology in the philosophy program at the London School of Economics. Among many other prizes, he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, last year, a United States Artists Fellowship, for his fiction.

This event is FREE but donations are most welcome. There is limited space, please RSVP by emailing rsvp at clockshop.org.

Paul Greenberg

“Which bass is best?”

Wednesday December 19, 2007

Conversation with Paul Greenberg over a fish dinner prepared by chefs Corina Weibel and David Thorne

This event is FULL.

Over a fish dinner, Paul will answer the question, "Which Bass is Best?" He will cover issues surrounding the name "bass" -- how it is used by seafood marketers to cover over the way fishmongers substitute one declining wild species for another and then finally swap in farmed fish. He will also talk about issues surrounding aquaculture; how does one judge a good product? what are the real costs of aquaculture? why are their no organic standards for farmed fish in America?

Paul Greenberg is a writer living in New York City with extensive experience reporting on seafood and ocean issues. His opinion pieces, essays and articles on wild fisheries and aquaculture have been published in The New York Times Opinion Page, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Boston Globe Sunday Ideas Section, and The New England Fisherman. His 2005 New York Times Magazine article on Chilean Sea Bass received the International Association of Culinary Professionals' "Bert Greene Award" for excellence in food writing. The Penguin Press is due to publish Paul's book on eating sustainably from the sea.

A guest and commentator on public radio programs including All Things Considered and The Leonard Lopate Show, Paul's commitment to educating the public about fisheries conservation has taken him all over the world, including the Falkland and Shetland Islands, Siberia's Lake Baikal, Patagonia, Scandinavia, and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Corina Weibel is the chef at the new and well-reviewed Canele Restaurant in Atwater Village. David Thorne is an artist who also cooks on the line at Canele.