Edmund Zimmerman and Rick Prelinger: Manifesto on the Virtues of Preexisting Material March 26, 2007

Edmund Zimmerman is the Director and writer in residence at the La Romita School of Art in Umbria, Italy. He majored in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, studying with Michael Palmer, Tom Mandel, Kathleen Frazer, and Mark Linenthal during the nascent Language Poetry movement. He worked as a lyricist, vocalist, and musician in the early, Dadaist days of the California punk rock scene before moving to RomeItaly, where he spent a year touring as an actor with the Opera Theater of Rome in Verdi’s La Traviata. His interests have always revolved around the creative arts…in ten years in Rome he worked as a performer, producer, musician, curator, and promoter and founded the ongoing multi-ethnic concert series “Roma Incontra il Mondo” for the city of Rome. Zimmerman has written political and cultural essays for the International Herald Tribune, South Asia Citizen's Wire, the SF Bay Guardian, American Politics Journal, Bad Subjects, and many others, and was co-founder and political editor of Tongue Magazine.

He writes filmic sketches that delve surgically close to the human heart. “Some of my poems are stab wounds that follow the knife from the darkest corners of intention to the twisting, rusty blade.” His readings have been described as romantic theater. His book, “A Color for Bloodless”, will be released in English and Italian in Italy by Casa Editrice Thyrus
in June.

Rick Prelinger (http://www.prelinger.com), an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation. His feature-length film "Panorama Ephemera," depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library (http://www.prelingerlibrary.org), an appropriation-friendly research library in San Francisco.

Official Website: http://www.moesbooks.com/moes/monday.htm