Très Abel

There aren’t many things I go to in Portland that don’t involve David Abel. Thanks to David, I saw one of India’s greatest dhrupad singers, Uday Bhawalkar, perform morning ragas, unmiked, in a tiny NW Portland gym. Through his work at Spare Room, David's been in back of most of the poetry readings I’ve been to here some way or another. Last week, besides reading with Charles Alexander, he starred and sang in The Theory of Love, a complex, involving multimedia ‘musical lecture’ with libretto created (by David) from a vast mix of source texts stretching from Sappho to Basho, Cheever to Cixous. Next afternoon, I caught David reading in The Screen Grammar Cinema & Poetry Experiment, a poetry and film event organized by David Gatten and Cat Tyc for the 2007 PDX Film Festival. (He read, among other pieces, parts of a sequence dedicated to experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton.)

Folks, it’s not over. Tonight’s the opening for BY ALL MEANS: ARTIST’S BOOKS AND OBJECTS, a show curated by (you guessed it) David Abel, in which seven Portland-area artists explore and interrogate the concept of ‘the book.’ 7 - 10 p.m., New American Art Union, 922 SE Ankeny Street.