“Contra Critique” is a series devoted to reporting non-critically on art and performance presentations that are not meant to be reviewed, such as works in process , readings or private viewings.

“Between the Lines” is a new reading/screening series at BAM. As part of the 25th Anniversary of the Next Wave Festival, BAM staffers Peter Conroy and Jake Perlin have teamed up with Brigid Hughes of A Public Space to put together emerging writers and filmmakers for this three-part series that includes some new film works commissioned by BAM.

Last night was the first installment of this adventurous series. It was definitely aimed at a younger crowd, and judging from the standing-room-only situation that occured in the BAMcafe, they showed up.

The evening was divided into two parts. The first half included readings by Wells Tower and John Wray, and a film and performance by Brent Green. After a fifteen minute intermission (how cute is that!), there was a reading by Meehan Crist and screenings of films by Mac Premo and Sabrina Geschwandtner.

Wells Tower read from a new work, Autumn Portrait. A first-person narrative introduces a man who becomes obsessed with a woman who lives in an apartment building across the street whom he believes to be a prostitute, although when he gives in to his urge to “know” her, it turns out she isn’t quite what he thinks. Tower is clearly trying to take a jab at the bored, middle-class male fantasy genre. Well, somebody had to do it.

Brent Green performs live music with his stop-motion anitmated shorts. He is self-taught, but the roughness of how his films look belies the skill with which he puts them together. You can see the scotch tape with which he afixes transparent overlays to background canvases. Hadocol Christmas retold the invention of Santa Clause through an expressionist fantasy of loneliness. And Carlin is an emotionally wrought work about an aunt who is dying slowly from diabetes. Greens music is earnest and bittersweetly moody. Normally he plays with a band, but last night, he played solo acoustic guitar, which seemed to make the textures of the video even more palpable.

John Wray read from his book Dear Violet, which is meant to be a collection of letters a young man in a mental asylum writes to his mother. They are semi-stream of conscious, occasionally sexually explicit, sometimes touching letters. Although, I always wonder if making a character insane is just a ploy writers use to allow themelves to write more freely than contemporary tastes will allow. While Wray read, a person stood next to him wearing a Clifford body costume. It certainly left people theorizing afterward, but any immediate connection was difficult to sense.

Meehan Crist read from her non-fiction work Everything After. The language, however, was decidedly poetic, blurring the line between fiction and non. The work swam through memories of her mother’s terrible ice skating accident and ruminations about the physics and metaphysics of consciousness.

Buildings is a stop-motion short by Mac Premo that shows everyday objects accumlating in variously choreographed ways to proportionally illustrate a tickertape of statistical facts about the city of Belfast that is being voiced over at a rather brisk pace. Premo manages to make this kind of study both narrative and hilarious. Who knew?

And Sabrina Geschwendtner screened Part 1 of A History of String. The opening shot shows a woman’s hands fashioning string out of the hair of a rabbit that is sitting in her lap. The piece goes on to follow traces of string that have been affixed through cityscapes. Then a digression into string figures of various cultures. Though it has a patchwork quality, this film manages to communicate information and make something as seemingly dull as string seem appropriately vital.