Author Archives: Christina

Poetry Reading: 6 Poets Read from their work

Poetry Reading (#2)


Biographies of the Poets

Shelley Seccombe (named for P. B. Shelley)
It gives me great pleasure to share this pursuit with other writers, including my brother and sister. I am grateful to Otis and the poets who share their Sunday evening readings with the Westbeth group. — Shelley Seccombe (named for P.B. Shelley)

John Silver
Grew up Cold Spring Harbor, L.I. Does covers, poems for Tamarind a coalition magazine. Hosted Tamarind Collation for 10 years. Moved to Westbeth,
Published in AND THEN, and other anthologies.
Hosted Westbeth readings. Curator of The Image and The Word Exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery. 2 Books of poetry (UNDERFIELD PRESS). Contributed covers and poems to White Rabbit and other anthological constructions. John Silver also paints.

Linda Marks
Linda Marks has been writing poetry in NYC for over 40 years and reading and publishing in small venues. She prides herself on writing accessible poetry.

Otis Kidwell Burger
I’m from an old New England family of abolitionist, preachers and some writers like Mary Otis Warren and Sydney Gay. Nature has always been important in my writing. I spent my childhood in the woods of Staten Island and later, many summers in the woods of New York and Connecticut.

Feldenkrais Class with certified Feldenkrais teacher

FELDENKRAIS 2017

$5.00 per class

Contact: Sandra Kingsbury westbethevents
@gmail.com

Sponsored by Westbeth Beautfication Committee

Doron Tadmor is a Feldenkrais Guild certified teacher

Class lasts 1 hour

The Feldenkrais Method consists of verbally directed movement sequences presented primarily to groups. A lesson generally lasts from thirty to sixty minutes. Each lesson is usually organized around a particular function.

Feldenkrais’Awareness Through Movement lessons, people engage in precisely structured movement explorations that involve thinking, sensing, moving, and imagining. Many are based on developmental movements and ordinary functional activities. Some are based on more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships. The lessons consist of comfortable, easy movements that gradually evolve into movements of greater range and complexity.

Feldenkrais’ lessons attempt to make one aware of his/her habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and to expand options for new ways of moving while increasing sensitivity and improving efficiency. There are hundreds of Awareness Through Movement lessons contained in the Feldenkrais Method that vary, for all levels of movement ability, from simple in structure and physical demand, to more difficult lessons.

A major goal of the Feldenkrais Method is to learn how one’s most basic functions are organized and improve. By experiencing the details of how one performs any action, the student has the opportunity to learn how to:

attend to his/her whole self
eliminate unnecessary energy expenditure
mobilize his/her intentions into actions
learn and improve

Westbeth in NY Times Magazine
Culture Issue April 2018
The Landmarks that Made New York
A Cultural Capital

Photo: Rob Stephenson

Westbeth Artists’ Housing
Westbeth, on Bethune Street, along the Hudson River, one of the first subsidized artists’ housing complexes in the United States, opened in 1970, providing cheap rent in 384 live-work spaces. Many of the residents that moved in decades ago are still there today. Credit Rob Stephenson

ONE OF THE realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why was that building torn down? Why did that bar close overnight? Whatever happened to the bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.

Place is as crucial to the architecture of memory as it is to dreaming, and like those New Yorkers who seem to disappear, spaces themselves carry their own memories here. Departed landmarks like CBGB or the Mudd Club are not so much addresses in downtown Manhattan as they are touchstones in the collective consciousness, occasionally reminding us of what was and of how much has changed — not least, ourselves. CBGB is where a 16-year-old Adam Horovitz — soon to be known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys — opened for punk legends Bad Brains in 1982; the Mudd Club is where, a few years earlier, Talking Heads, performing just days after the release of “Fear of Music,” coolly name-checked both spots in the iconic song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Moments like these still haunt the city — half recalled, half imagined — even now that the Mudd Club is a condo building where a unit sold recently for $3.6 million, or CBGB has been colonized by designer John Varvatos, plundering the cultural heritage of the very building he now occupies.

– Bill Hayes

Read rest of article HERE