Duende is “the heightened state of emotion that we often experience as shivers [run] up and down our skin when we are moved by a song or performance,” says Benjamin Moe. It’s a feeling he’s experienced from time to time, and it’s the centerpiece of the inaugural issue of Table Talk, a journal of ideas that aims to “talk about these things that we all feel but don’t really talk about — the inexpressible!”
The biannual publication — which launches tonight in an old red schoolhouse turned loft space in Bushwick — aims to be “a magazine that goes past the borders of academia, that publishes both well-known and unknown thinkers.” Moe, who attended Reed College and hatched the concept while summering in Greece, imagined something “that’s unorthodox. That doesn’t follow the rules of a normal publication.”
The first issue features contributors like American philosopher Alphonso Lingis; Chechen-born, Athens-based poet and boxer Jazra Khaleed; anthropologist Michael Taussig; and Spanish professor and In Search of Duende author Christopher Maurer (who also happens to be the father of Bedford+Bowery’s Daniel Maurer).
Some of those deep-thinking contributors will be on hand tonight for intellectual, creative and gastronomic nourishment at one of Bushwick’s most striking heritage buildings — a “beautiful old-school schoolhouse,” as Moe puts it, that he says is currently a hotbed for the underground techno scene.
There’ll be food and drink, an address by mercurial anthropologist Dejan Lukic, and a performance by New York rapper TARO.
If you can’t make it to 330 Ellery Street at 7 p.m., pick up a copy of the magazine in stores like Artbook @ MoMA PS1, McNally Jackson and Book Culture. The first issue is also now available online.