Open City #13
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Erica Baum is an artist living in New York. She is represented by D’Amelio Terras.

Stuart David was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1969. He has published two novels, Nalda Said and The Peacock Manifesto, both released by I.M.P. Fiction in London. He is also the singer and songwriter with the band Looper, and was formerly a member of Belle & Sebastian. For more information, visit www.impbooks.com.

Lori Ellison writes, "I showed these drawings to a musician/songwriter friend who was in the East Village in the early sixties when acid folk (The Fugs, Holy Modal Rounders) was coming into being. When I told him someone had said they looked like they were done on speed, he said he had done a few drawings with ballpoint pens on amphetamines. ‘You always end up going over the same areas,’ he said, showing me with his hand holding an imaginary pen, ‘furiously, until you have a black (or blue) mass–and then you rip the paper.’"

Will Eno is a Guggenheim Fellow in playwriting. He is also a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Medway Writer’s Retreat. His play TRAGEDY: a tragedy appeared at The Gate Theatre in London in April. The same play will be produced by BBC Radio Four for broadcast in November. He learned writing from Gordon Lish.

Juliana Francis is a New York actress and playwright. Plays she’s written include Go Go Go, Box, Saint Latrice, and George and Evelyn. Her next acting gig is Richard Foreman’s upcoming play Maria del Bosco.

Sarah Gorham is the author of Don’t Go Back to Sleep (1989) and The Tension Zone (1996), which was chosen by Heather McHugh as the winner of the Four Way Books Award in Poetry. New work appears in The Paris Review, DoubleTake, Controlled Burn, Agni, and The Southern Review. Gorham is editor in chief and cofounder of Sarabande Books.

Luisa Kazanas lives and works in Brooklyn.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, a collection of stories published by Open City Books. "The Special Cases Lounge" is adapted from his novel, The Subject Steve, to be published by Broadway Books in September 2001. He lives in Queens.

Matt Marinovich lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He has been published in The Mississippi Review, Salon, The Quarterly, 5_Trope, and other magazines.

Richard Maxwell, a native of West Fargo, North Dakota, is a playwright who now lives in Brooklyn.

Honor Moore’s new collection of poems, Darling, will be published by Grove Press in September 2001. Her most recent book is The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter. She lives in New York.

Vince Passaro is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His story, "Cathedral Parkway," appeared in Open City #1. This piece is taken from his novel, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content, which will be published in January 2002 by Simon and Schuster.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of The Perfect Vehicle and Dark Horses and Black Beauties. She has recently moved to an old farm, and needs $50,000 to fix the barn.

Peter Pinchbeck (1931—2000), moved to New York City from England in 1960, where he joined the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. His early works included wooden sculptures that referenced the utopian Modernism of the Russian Constructivists. In the 1970s, he returned to painting, limiting himself to a formal vocabulary of rectangles floating on colored fields. In the 1980s, his work became increasingly gestural and expressive, an evolution that continued throughout his life. "In the 1990s his colors heated up and his shapes became more playful, eventually evolving into buoyant, barbell volumes that appeared, paradoxically, to be continuous with the light-filled space they inhabited," according to Roberta Smith, in The New York Times obituary.

Carl Hancock Rux is a former resident artist of both Mabou Mines and The Ebenezor Experimental Theater in Lulea, Sweden, and one of this year’s recipients of the NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence grant. He is developing two new plays: Smoke, Lilies and Jade, at The Joseph Papp Public Theater, and Talk, commissioned by The Foundry Theater, to be workshopped this summer at the Sundance Theater Lab.

Peter Nolan Smith is an underground punk legend of the 1970s East Village. He spent many years as a nightclub owner and doorman in New York, Paris, London, and Hamburg. More recently he has worked in the international diamond trade and the film industry. He is a constant traveler and has lived for long periods of time in Tibet and the Far East; he is currently based in Pattaya, Thailand. This is his first published work.

Terry Southern (1924-1995) is the author of novels (including Candy, and The Magic Christian), essays, and works of short fiction. He won the O. Henry Short Story Medal in 1963, and from 1964-1970, co-wrote the screenplays Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Barbarella, The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One, and End of the Road. Recently found audio recordings of Southern (in French from the 1950s) have been remixed by his son Nile Southern as part of the ALT-X online sound project "Network Voices" (www.altx.com/mp3). The long-awaited anthology, Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995, was recently published by Grove Press. Visit the Web site: www.terrysouthern.com.

Julianne Swartz is an artist who lives and works in New York. Her project, "Loci," appears courtesy of 123 Watts Gallery.

Bill Talen is the author/actor who inhabits the anticonsumerist televangelist called Reverend Billy. He is grateful to Tony Torn for his editorial presence in this sermon.

Toby Talbot’s books include A Book About My Mother, Early Disorder, The World of the Child, and several children’s books. For many years she was the cultural editor of El Diario de New York. She runs the Lincoln Plaza Cinema with her husband, and teaches Spanish literature and translation at New York University, and film documentary at The New School. The following piece is an excerpt from Gone, a novel.

Nick Tosches's collection of poetry, Chaldea, was followed last year by The Devil and Sonny Liston and The Nick Tosches Reader. His latest book, Where Dead Voices Gather, will be published this summer by Little, Brown, who will simultaneously publish a new edition of his earliest novel, Cut Numbers. His new novel, In the Hand of Dante, will be published next year. He lives in New York City.

Jack Walls is at work on a memoir from which "Hi-fi," in this issue, is culled. If you happen to see him when you’re out at night, you are in the right place.