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Magazine Forté Launch
Disclosure: Christine Rath, Forté’s Senior Editor, and many Forté contributors attended BC’s MFA program.
1. The scene: Recess Activities before the party started. That’s clumps of hair on the ground. 2. The women of Forte: Sarah Chacich (Editor), Christine Rath (Senior Editor), & Georgia Sagri (Editor-in-Chief), with the director of Recess Activities, Allison Weisberg.
Magazine Forté is an audio-only magazine “born out of the desire for deeper and more digressive explorations of subject matter and curiosity about the effects of routing such explorations through the medium of sound.” Last night, Recess Activities, a non profit art space,hosted a listening party for the fourth issue, “Post-Shamanism.”
Christine Rath, the senior editor, explained that Forté’s goal is to ACTIVATE YOUR BRAIN!!!!, because the experience of listening is a much different experience than that of reading. In listening to each of the recordings dozens of times, she could actually feel different parts activating, she said.
1. Amelia Saddington & Cara Beneditto, who are both “writers of collaborators.” 2. Jackson Moore, a composer, & Arthur Bravo, an anthropologist. Both are into music & space, just like astronauts, and came to last night’s event out of compulsion.
Showing currently was an installation by A.K. Burns and Katharine Hubbard that “intentionally conflate(d) the hair and art salon,” which meant that there was a lot of hair, and photos of hair, on the floor and walls. Georgia Sagri, the editor-in-chief, told me that every Forté event has been located in a different spot, including at a boutique clothing store in Soho and at the A.V.A. This location, with this particular exhibition, informed Forté’s content, Sagri said, because both highlight the body, gender politics, and feminism, which play off the theme of post-shamanism, a theme that is intended “excavate the complex relationship we cultivate with objects.”
Since this was a party, there was wine and sparking water to go with the audio and visual stimulus. Forté streamed in the background, and its sounds — which consisted of a lot more than just voices reading — created a unique atmosphere. The women who edit Forté want their magazine to be less formal, they said, something the listening party reflects. People came and went as they pleased, socializing over Forté sounds.
1. Donald, Brent, & Joey, who are all either friends with Forte contributor Scott Lawrence, or friends of friends. Forte friendships, once removed. 2. Kate Belski, fiction writer and Forté contributor Lauren Belski (No family resemblance going on with the Belskis here. None.), & artist Arlen Austin. Both of the Belskis are members of Krewe Analog.
Many of the contributors were in attendance. (The ghost of Aleister Crowley wasn’t one of the guests though — sorry fellow goths.) I talked to one attendee about his spirit animal, a rabbit, which, he said, disappointed him because he wanted something tougher. I also spoke with two men, who, after finding out that I was from San Diego, bashed the shit out of San Diego, L.A., Southern California, and then California as an entire state. Obviously they were just jealous of the gorgeous landscape, weather, and marijuana laws.
Anyway, Magazine Forté: Interesting publication, interesting party.
–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.
