Hilobrow Heroes: Sam Shepard

Breaking the blog hiatus to wish the great Sam Shepard a happy birthday at Hilobrow.

Not pulling the plug on the blog, yet

Hey, everyone, if there's anyone left who hasn't found this blog by googling either "1001 synopsis" or "Terry Gross Gene Simmons interview." I have not yet run out of things to say, and there are still a few episodes of The Acousmatic Theater Hour left to link, but I am totally swamped with projects (see below) and will be for the forseeable future. Also, in case you haven't noticed, the discourse has become so small, so fast, so shallow that our internet reading and writing has moved to Twitter and Facebook (in fact, if it wasn't such a hassle, I'd move this whole blog over to Tumblr, which seems like a better platform anyway).

So eventually I'll say something, and when I do I'll link to it on Twitter/FB, which seems the only way to ensure that people will actually read it. In the meantime, here's a great Kenneth Koch poem that describes my current state:

You Want a Social Life, With Friends -- by Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends --
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends --
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

James Parker: "Let Us Now Praise: The Cliché"

Great piece from James Parker in The Sunday Boston Globe.

R.I.P. Teddy Kennedy, Niels Bohr, Jim Carroll, Roc Raida, and Larry Gelbart

I hate doing these group eulogies, but death doesn't take a holiday when I have no time to blog. Rest in peace, fellas.

SO MANY IMPORTANT THINGS at The Conflux Festival

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

CONFLUX
The art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space. Produced by Glowlab in New York since 2003. And Karinne and I created a radio play/audio walking tour for it.

Read the instructions below. Download link is at the bottom of the page.

This is a walking tour of anywhere. How this worked was this way: we approached multiple associates from around the world (novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, academics, visual artists, the unclassifiable, and people who are not writers of any stripe) and asked them for psychogeographical travelogues. In return we got texts from as close as Midtown Manhattan or as distant as Jerusalem or Port au-Prince. In one case we even got a travelogue of someone's dreams. We also dropped in a few small pieces of found text by authors we do not know, and wrote things to stitch the piece together.

Is this an exercise in accidental psychogeography and pattern recognition, sort of like when you listen to "Dark Side of The Moon" while watching The Wizard of Oz? Or is it, as one friend put it, an exercise in "the vertiginous cosmopolitanism that psychogeography is designed to avoid?" We don't know. Also, you are smart and will be able to figure out what you think without us telling you.

Do this: download the linked file to your personal listening device. If you do not have an mp3 player, email Jason at jason (at) jasongrote.com and he will mail you a CD. Then, choose one of the five paths below and follow the walking tour. Have fun!

1) Once you have finished loading the audio onto your mp3 player, exit via the nearest door. Take a right. Follow the instructions on the audio.

2) Walk towards a place that you find dangerous for whatever reason. Get as close as you can to this place without risking your personal safety. Without crossing whatever your own boundaries are, follow the instructions on the audio.

3) Extinguish all of the lights wherever you are and lie down on the floor. In your imagination, follow the instructions on the audio.

4) Walk to a place you have never been but have always been curious about. Once there, follow the instructions on the audio.

5) Look at this graphic, either on a screen or printed on paper, while you listen to the audio. Enter the world of the picture and follow the instructions on the audio.

Download the audio tour

If you have any problems with the download, email jason [at] jasongrote.com

CREDITS:
Conceived, edited, produced, and directed by Karinne Keithley and Jason Grote, and performed by Jenny Seastone Stern. Written by Annie Nocenti, Amber Reed, Carlos Murillo, Drew Haxby, Elana Greenfield, Guy DeBord, Jason Grote, Jen Collins, Jennifer Dumpert, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Karinne Keithley, Leah Souffrant, Lorraine Martindale, Matthew Burgess, Mimi Lipson, Peggy Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, Susan L. Miller, and Walter Benjamin.

Montgomery Park, Or Opulence

OK, I lied -- I am going to make time see a small handful of can't-miss shows this fall. And this is one of them. If you haven't experienced my co-host's work, you owe it to yourself to go to this. It will be brilliant and weird. Info and tickets here.

Also, how awesome is it that it was supported by the NYC Department of Sanitation?

--



Announcing Montgomery Park, or Opulence

A new play by Karinne Keithley

An immersive, radiant, and paranormal psychic health experience. With songs.

SEPT. 18-20, 2009 at HERE Arts Center

Montgomery Park, Opulence charts the rise of terrible energy. Weaving together anachronistic storytelling with superabundant and ill-behaved sentences, in an environment of immersive video and sound, Montgomery Park embeds questions of mind in a spooky trespass between conscious minds and conscious buildings.

Written and directed by Karinne Keithley
Performed by David Brooks, Karinne Keithley, and Katy Pyle
Video appearance by Heidi Schreck
Choregraphy by Sara Smith
Sound and video by Karinne Keithley with additional video by Amber Reed
Lighting by Zack Brown
Stage managing and mind-reading by Lacy Post


Part of the Autumn Artist Lodge at
HERE Arts Center
145 6th Ave.
(Enter on Dominick, 1 Block South of Spring)

Performances are at 7PM Friday – Sunday, Sept. 18 – 20,
and at 2PM on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 19 – 20.


Tickets are $15 and can be purchased by visiting www.here.org or by calling 212-352-3101. Limited seating so sign up now.


Please come! And please forward the invite!

* *

"wonderfully uncategorizable" ; "Karinne Keithley’s affecting video. . . featured her singular, delicate voice and a gorgeous, miniature Neverland. . ."
- Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

"Keithley clearly follows a skewed muse. Where exactly she is going is unmapped. Following her is often captivating, sometimes bewildering, always unusual. When she knows the way, she realizes the possibility of enchantment."
- Chris Dohse, Dance Insider

"Her writing is vital and unnerving, a lesson in the varieties of awareness the human animal can achieve."
- Gregory Pardlo, real live poet


* * *

This production is being presented through HERE’s Autumn Artist Lodge, which provides artists with subsidized space and equipment, as well as technical and administrative support.

Montgomery Park was written, in part, during a residency at the MacDowell Colony.

This production has been put together with materials from Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.

Fall Roundup, or Why I Probably Won't Be Able To Make It To Your Show

Not that the blog world has been actively clamoring for my return (hasn't the "discourse," such as it is, all moved to Twitter by now anyway)? But I feel compelled to make one of my occasional public statements recounting all the stuff I have to do.

First, I'm starting another semester, which is as draining as it usually is, though considerably less so since I got a car. I'm also still doing the WFMU show every week (and will get back to linking each episode once I get a chance), and am doing a couple of radio-related events. First, on September 20, The Conflux Festival, a sort of mini-Burning Man in NYC (minus the drugs, nudity, huge installation pieces, the desert, and the burning effigy; in other words, not really like Burning Man at all). Karinne Keithley and I collaborated on a radio piece, So Many Important Things, a sort of surrealist, displaced audio tour. And October 22-24, I'll be "spinning" radio plays at The Ontological for Free 103.9's radio theater event. Next week I'll be having a closed reading of my Clubbed Thumb commission, Civilization (All You Can Eat). Then I'm starting a Sunday playwriting class at The National Theater Institute at The O'Neill, and at the end of the month I'll be heading out to Chicago for the Carlos Murillo-directed production of 1001 at DePaul. In the coming months I'll also be starting work on David Levine's HABIT, an installation that will be developed at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center and then go up at Toronto's Luminato Festival and Mass MoCA.

Also in the hopper: unfinished commissions from The Denver Center and ACT, and I'm finally getting serious about jumping ship for Hollywood, so I'm busting my hump on a spec script. And a few 2010 plans that I can't announce yet. So don't expect much outta me this fall, except perhaps for all the stuff I just rattled off.

The Bereaved

Just a quick note endorsing Partial Comfort's production of The Bereaved, by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by May Adrales. Anyone reading this blog probably knows who Tom is by now, but on the off-chance you don't, here's Hilton Als' typically astute profile of him in The New Yorker.

In the interests of full disclosure, Tom is a friend of mine, and I've been a supporter of his work for some years now -- but his work is extraordinarily difficult to pull off. He's had a number of local productions recently, with many different collaborators, and there's sometimes a tendency for directors to overdo it, to blunt the power of the text by winking at the audience, or pointing out that Bradshaw's characters behave "unrealistically," as if that isn't obvious from the plays themselves. While this play is definitely a comedy, and May has directed it as such, she wisely stays out of the way, directing the play as if it was straight up realism, which is by far the most effective style for Tom's work.

One of the most impressive things about the piece is that it seems to do the impossible. Last summer, while she and I were teaching at Hollins, Bonnie Metzgar shared an anti-Aristotelian Mac Wellman exercise: write a play about people who are happy... and then they get happier. Miraculously, for all of its grim humor, this play manages to pull off that difficult task, while still managing to be entertaining from beginning to end. So, if you've been curious about Tom's work, or have yet to see a version of it that you've liked, check this one out. It's a great time.

Hilobrow Heroes: Antonin Artaud

Happy birthday to one of my favorite madmen! Relive the days when theater was interesting here.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

WFMU Fest!!!

Holy shit this is going to be good. Faust was our Acousmatic Theater Hour theme song, before Karinne picked that Bernard Fevre song that makes it sound like we're going to be telling ghost stories.

---

WFMU, the premiere independent/freeform radio station, is producing and curating a three day festival at the Music Hall of Williamsburg from Thursday,
Friday and Saturday October 1-3.

66 North 6th Street, Brooklyn NY
http://www.musichallofwilliamsburg.com/ (advance tickets available)

WFMU FEST
Thursday Oct. 1, doors 8:00, showtime 9:00, $20
Faust, Cold Cave, Aluk Todolo

Friday, Oct. 2, doors 8:00, showtime 9:00, $15 ($12 advance)
Pissed Jeans, TV Ghost, VeeDee, Guinea Worms

Saturday, Oct. 3, doors 8:00, showtime 9:00, $20
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sightings, Drunkdriver, Talk Normal

These shows will not be broadcast over the air/net.

WFMU Fest comes on the heels of a busy year of live events the station was involved with in 2008 for its 50th Anniversary that included shows with Sonic Youth, the Feelies, the Ex, Getatchew Mekuria, Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Wire, Times New Viking. It also was involved with simulcasting some non-WFMU events including 2008's All Tomorrows Parties Festival (and will be broadcasting 2009's from September 11-13) in the Catskills, as well as a huge portion of the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain this past May. The station has also curated two 14-band events at Austin's SXSW festival in 2008 and 2009, and its Free Music Archive hosted a party in April with the OhSees, Excepter and others.

More on the lineup for WFMU Fest:
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1st:

FAUST
Formed 1969 in Hamburg, Germany and considered the inventors of "Kraut Rock", iconoclasts extraordinaire Faust are key figures in 20th Century music. In the early 70's, along with Can and Kraftwerk, they re-invented pop music as a specifically European art-form. In their own studio they were able to revolutionize the whole process of musical production; they improvised with industrial noise, generated bizarre hypnotic grooves, indulged in shockingly willful studio-based collages, and dabbled with every conceivable musical genre, sometimes simultaneously. The touring members of this 2009 US Faust tour are original members Jean-Herve Peron and Werner "Zappi" Diermaier, along with James Johnston (Gallon Drunk, Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) and visual/video artist, painter, and musician Geraldine Swayne.
http: //faust-pages.com/
http: //frontporchproductions.org/artist/faust

COLD CAVE
Centered around Philly's Wesley Eisold, Cold Cave has been garnering attention via numerous recordings and live events as purveyors of dark industrial synth-pop via elements of power electronics. Cold Cave is a brand new signing to Matador Records, and recently issued music on Hospital Productions, Dais, and Wesley's own Heartworm label.
http://www.myspace.com/coldcave

ALUK TODOLO
Heavy weirdness from French occult combo (featuring members of Gunslingers and black metallist Diamatragon) described by Aquarius Records as: "ominous krautrock rhythms over Einsturzende style industrial clatter, some lost seventies psych rock holy grail channeled through modern post rock. Dreamy and dark and mesmerizing. Hypnotic guitar lines and simple shuffling rhythms that build into clattery propulsive jams, all clanging angular riffs and dense tangled drumming."
http://www.myspace.com/aluktodolo

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2nd:

PISSED JEANS
Pennsylvania's punk overlords exhuding copious amounts of SST,
Flipper, Drunks With Guns, and generally damaged American hardcore/post-hardcore through their sweaty pores. Their third and latest album has just hit, "King of Jeans", on Sub Pop. One of the more destroying live rock combos of the modern day.
http://www.subpop.com/artists/pissed_jeans

TV GHOST

From In the Red who's just issued their debut album:

"Lafayette, Indiana, creepers TV Ghost-- a band who ushers in a vile and squalid new disposition to ugly art punk and carves out a black hole of pestilence that will delight its sufferers to no end. If one can swim through the murky grime long enough to let one's frazzled senses adjust, it's clear how effectively TV Ghost incorporates the licentious nuances of The Cramps' earliest scuzz, no wave's cacophony, and Suicide's terrifying throb alongside cavernous bellows from the depths of the third layer of hell."
http://www.myspace.com/televisionghost

VEE DEE
Chicago punkoid swagger with copious forays into psychedelic scuzz-fuzz realms, joyfully bad trips to canoodle with the brain receptors most welcoming to the Stooges, Mudhoney, Misfits, Electric Eels, Original Sins.
http://www.myspace.com/veedee

GUINEA WORMS
Victim of Time: "The Columbus Ohio, Guinea Worms have been kicking around the fuzz bucket for a whopping decade now under the reptilian wing of Will Foster, but you'd never tell from their catalog which you could probably count on 4 fingers--CDRs included. Recently releasing their Box of Records 7" single on Columbus Discount Records, the accolades are rightfully raining down, as their mix of slightly sluggish 60s-style slingers smash directly into more urgent sounds of post-punk, and will stick in your gut like a parasitic worm." http://www.myspace.com/guineaworms

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3rd:

TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS
Legends of New York's No Wave movement of the late 70's, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were formed by Lydia Lunch and James Chance in 1976, with Chance later departing. With Lunch on vox and vicious slide electric guitar, the band was short-lived but made an enormous impact in the NYC underground and its followers for years to come. Their music was dark, nihilistic and emitted in short, violent blasts of what Rolling Stone referred to as "utterly unendurable" music, while tastemaker critics like Lester Bangs held Lydia and company up as pure genius and a complete deconstruction of the safe cruise control punk and new wave had settled into. They were one of the four
cornerstone NYC bands to appear on Brian Eno's "No New York"
compilation, and Atavistic later compiled all the bands recordings onto one
CD release. Lydia returned to the stage with the Jerks last year (Thurston
Moore, Jim Sclavunos in tow), this time out Al Kizys is on bass with Sclavunos (Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tav Falco's Panther Burns) on drumkit.
http://nowave.pair.com/no_wave/teenage.html

SIGHTINGS
Over the last decade the Hoffman/Lockie/Morgan trio has become one of thee live bands to see in NYC, taking cues from everything from early Neubauten to Japanese blowout psychedelia to cave-dwelling dub and even minimal house, all contained within a traditional guitar/bass/drums format. Sightings channel it all via noisy, organic rock with weirdly structured songs developed through a keen and alien vocabulary that constant playing and recording has developed to today's state of the band. Five years ago people first started to talk about them reaching new peaks, but they've only kept adding fuel to the fire and are really are destroying more every show.
http://myspace.com/sightings

DRUNKDRIVER
Brooklyn's rulers of agitpunk. Collective Zine: "Drunkdriver, while not exactly ploughing themselves a new furrow (see also: Brainbombs, Drunks With Guns et al), garnered a similarly joyous reaction thanks to the sheer blown-out bluster and mic-swallowing outrage of these nine songs: a stupid, f****d up mess that reduces three-chord frenzy to overdriven clumps of terminal noise and hectoring, drool-chinned bedshitting and makes every song something you have to fight your way through rather than passively endure."
http://www.myspace.com/drunkdriverusa

TALK NORMAL
The Brooklyn duo of Andrya Ambro and Sarah Register propel mysterious globs of percussion/synthesizer weirdness; arrhythmic yet hypnotic, extreme but accessible, keeping a distinct balance of abstract futurism and No Wave/postpunk purity. Their new full length due October 27 on Rare Book Room Records.
http://www.myspace.com/talknormaltalknormal

Contacts: Brian Turner, bt@wfmu.org, 201-521-1416 x223

Passing Stones

I don't know why StSanders disabled embedding, but this is worth clicking through to YouTube. So, so funny.

From Ubu.com

Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing
Raphael Rubinstein
This paper originally appeared in March/April 1999 edition of the The American Poetry Review

Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I'm not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to artists' videos. For the texts of other recent poems I've lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?

Read the whole piece on Ubuweb.

Tom Scharpling Interview on Marvel.com

Great interview on comics with the very funny host of The Best Show on WFMU (as well as one half of the comedy duo Scharpling and Wurster, staff writer for Monk, and many other things). Click to read.

Weird Al Roundup

I can't figure out how to embed Jibjab videos (not that I've really tried), so you'll just have to click on over to Rolling Stone's website to learn about the next Weird Al joint, involving The White Stripes, Charles Nelson Reilly, and a whole lot of lifted-from-the-internet Chuck Norris jokes.

Self-Explanatory

Episode 43 of The Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU

A Merce Cunningham tribute: John Cage's Mesostic lecture. Plus, my proud return to the airwaves!

From David Graeber: Direct Action: An Ethnography

I am pleased to announce the

Direct Action: An Ethnography

a book which has been supposedly about to come
out for... well, for years and years now, ACTUALLY HAS!

It is as of yesterday officially available on the AK Press web-site:

http://www.akpress.org/2009/items/directactionakpress

for the utterly not unreasonable price of $25.95
(which at 592 pages is actually slightly under 4.4 cents
a page, a genuine value!) - an can be ordered,
individually or en masse, even as we speak today.

A volume which gives new meaning to the old adage
"this book should be read by anyone who cares
about the future of the world and is large enough
to throw at anyone who doesn't."

here's from the web page:

Direct Action: An Ethnography

David Graeber
Edition: pb
ISBN: 9781904859796
Publisher: AK Press
Release Date: 2009-08-10

ITEM OVERVIEW
In the best tradition of participant-observation,
anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first
detailed ethnographic study of the global justice
movement. Starting from the assumption that, when
dealing with possibilities of global
transformation and emerging political forms, a
disinterested, "objective" perspective is
impossible, he writes as both scholar and
activist. At the same time, his experiment in the
application of ethnographic methods to important
ongoing political events is a serious and unique
contribution to the field of anthropology, as
well as an inquiry into anthropology's political implications.

The case study at the center of Direct Action is
the organizing and events that led to the
dramatic protest against the Summit of the
Americas in Québec City in 2001. Written in a
clear, accessible style (with a minimum of
academic jargon), this study brings readers
behind the scenes of a movement that has changed
the terms of debate about world power relations.
From informal conversations in coffee shops to
large "spokescouncil" planning meetings and
teargas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a
vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he
addresses matters of deep interest to
anthropologists: meeting structure and process,
language, symbolism, representation, the specific
rituals of activist culture, and much more.

David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist
who teaches at the University of London. Active
in numerous direct-action political
organizations, he is the author of Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology; Towards an
Anthropological Theory of Value; and
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire.

----------------------

I've read it. It's actually not so bad.
David

From Radiohead's Thom Yorke

Harry Patch (In Memory Of)

'i am the only one that got through
the others died where ever they fell
it was an ambush
they came up from all sides
give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
i've seen devils coming up from the ground
i've seen hell upon this earth
the next will be chemical but they will never learn'

Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111.
I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4.
The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me.
It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death.
It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny.
I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor.

It would be very easy for our generation to forget the true horror of war, without the likes of Harry to remind us.
I hope we do not forget.

As Harry himself said
"Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims".

Recently the Today program played the song for the first time and now it is available to download from our website.

Please go to http://download.waste.uk.com to download the song

The proceeds of this song will go to the British Legion.

To peace and understanding.

Thom