Mark Nowak, Goth: Undead Subculture

Talking Leaves…Books and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center are pleased to welcome home Buffalo born poet and critic Mark Nowak for a reading and performance at Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Avenue, on Thursday, May 17, at 8 pm. Nowak will be reading from an essay published in the just-released book, Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press), entitled “To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant”: Music and Death in Zero City, 1982-1984. The evening will include a special performance by David Kane and Donald Kinsman, two thirds of the seminal Buffalo band Nullstadt, featured in the essay. Admission is $10, free to those who purchase a copy of the book at the event, or bring a copy purchased from Talking Leaves…Books.

This event is a must-see for forty-something fans of Nullstadt, aging denizens of the pre-Chippewa Strip Continental, Goths not yet born when Nullstadt was a local favorite at The Continental (let alone old enough to go there!), punks, post-punks, neo-punks, and anyone of any age interested in rock criticism, contemporary cultural anthropology, Marxism, organized labor, or the post-industrial history of Buffalo. As explained in Nowak’s essay in the new critical anthology of Goth culture—focusing on one band and one club in Buffalo in the early '80s—“Zero City” is both a literal translation of that band's name (null + stadt) and an epithet for post-industrial Buffalo.

A Buffalo native and Canisius College alumnus (BA, English, 1988) with a MFA from Bowling Green (1990), Mark Nowak is now an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Dept. of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis, where he has taught since 1999. His own book of poetry and essays, Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004), with an afterword by Amiri Baraka, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Nowak has received several major grants from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations. One of his specialties (of both practice and study) is labor writing, and he has written several plays on labor subjects such as the 2006 Sago, WV mine disaster (Sago, 2007), post-NAFTA closings of U.S. plants (Redundancy, 2005), Ronald Reagan's firing and replacement of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 (Capitalization, 2004), and Francine Michalek Drives Bread (the story of a Teamsters organizer, 2003). Both Redundancy and Capitalization have been produced by Buffalo's own Subversive Theatre Collective.