Making a Scene: A Conversation About Downtown New York City

More Info: Witching Hour

Description

2016 Mission Creek Festival participant Lisa Jane Persky, who shared her work as a photographer and journalist in the early ‘70s New York City scene, will join Richard Hell in a discussion moderated by Kembrew McLeod, author of ​The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Queens who Revolutionized Culture and Blondie’s Parallel Lines (33 ⅓ Series)​, which explored the tensions of NYC’s music scenes of punk, disco, pop, and mainstream rock. Sponsored by the University of Iowa Lecture Committee and the University of Iowa Department of Communication Studies.

About Richard Hell
Richard Hell is a writer and musician. His 1977 album Blank Generation, seminal to the creation of “punk,” was recently re-released in a two-disk “40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition.” His autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, was published in 2013. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Massive Pissed Love. He lives in New York and is at work on a new novel.

Photo credit: Rebecca Smeyne

About Lisa Jane Persky
Lisa Jane Persky’s work as a writer, photographer, and artist has appeared in Mojo, Vulture, The Iowa Review, BOMB, and The Pitchfork Review, among others. As an actress, her extensive credits in film and television include When Harry Met Sally, The Big Easy, The Cotton Club and The X-Files. A founder of both the New York Rocker and the Los Angeles Review of Books, she is the creator of the popular web anthology Chickens In Literature and is finishing a book about growing up bohemian in the years between the Beat and the Blank Generation. In 2016 Lisa premiered her early photographic narrative: X-Offenders: A Year in the Life of a Proto-Punk, 1976 at The Paul and Linda Douglas Gallery at The Englert Theatre in cooperation with Mission Creek Festival. The prints and accompanying ephemera from that show are now included in Special Collections & University Archives at UI.

About Kembrew McLeod
Kembrew McLeod is an award-winning author of several books whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon. His most recent book is The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the literary punks, renegade artists, DIY filmmakers, mad playwrights, and rock ’n’ roll glitter queens who revolutionized culture (Abrams, 2018), and in 2016 Bloomsbury published McLeod’s book on Blondie’s Parallel Lines in its 33 1/3 series. He has also produced three documentaries about popular music that have screened at many festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. Copyright Criminals debuted on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning Independent Lens series, and Freedom of Expression® was a companion to his book of the same name—which won the American Library Association’s Oboler book award for “best scholarship in the area of intellectual freedom.”