Audio

The Women of the Avant-Garde

October 19, 2009

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(UPLIFTING ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And welcome to another UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast 'Avant-Garde All the Time'. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith. And today, we begin the first of two podcasts that feature the women of UbuWeb. Why you may ask the women of UbuWeb? Because if you recall last time during the regional series, we got to France and in the entire history of French artists on UbuWeb there was only one woman. We'd like to show that, in fact, there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on the UbuWeb.
So let's get started. We'll begin with Kathy Acker.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC PLAYS)

KATHY ACKER:
I want to tell you about my childhood. Nothing will prevent me, neither close attention nor the desire to be exact, from writing and speaking words that sing.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is the lead off track from a CD that was produced by Hal Willner after her death in 2000.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)
The track is called 'President Bush' and the album is called 'Redoing Childhood'.

KATHY ACKER:
My childhood began with President Bush precisely. This childhood began on the day when Bush started carefully to write down the instructions which were to be carried out on the day of his funeral. He did this because he knew that people like him do not die.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
But it's from a series of spoken word and poetry pieces that Willner put together with music. Other artists in the series included William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Holman and Lenny Bruce

KATHY ACKER:
I the everlasting, everblasting president in all other names. According to my discretionary powers as president, declared that on the day of my death...

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The pieces from this CD are excerpted from Kathy Acker’s book ‘My Mother: Demonology'.

KATHY ACKER:
…declare that my head be cut off.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Background music ranges from chanting monks, to the San Francisco hardcore band Tribe 8.

KATHY ACKER:
Human bones will hang all around the dead one.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Willner originally recorded Acker's contribution in 1993. And the whole record focuses around the first President Bush, and a lot of the tracks deal with the war and the conservative times. But somehow, Acker ends up reading, not a joyous coming into the Clinton era, but she reads the Clinton era through the president that preceded him and there's a lot of anxiety in this record.

KATHY ACKER:
I want to describe the beginning of this world. This world of Bush, where for us, there is no language.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)

BETH ANDERSON:
I wish I were single again. I wish I were single (UNKNOWN)
(UNKNOWN). Wish I were single again. I wish I was single (UNKNOWN).

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a great piece by Beth Anderson. A sound poem based around the riff I wish I was single again...

BETH ANDERSON:
I wish I were single.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
...that she submits to anagrammatic operations and basically chants and sings anagrams of these six words.

BETH ANDERSON:
And single (UNKNOWN)
(UNKNOWN).

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Beth Anderson is from Kentucky, but then moved down to the Bay Area, and she's a very well known new music composer. She studied with John Cage, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley and Larry Austin at Mills College. But all the while she did these beautiful sound poetry pieces.

BETH ANDERSON:
Again, (UNKNOWN)
(UNKNOWN).
(TAPPING)

LAURIE ANDERSON:
Ethics is the aesthetics of the view.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
From 1977, a beautiful piece by Laurie Anderson. It's called 'Two Songs for Tape Bow Violin'.
(TAPPING CONTINUES)

LAURIE ANDERSON:
Ethics is the aesthetics of The View.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Ethics is the esthetics of the few-ture. F E W dash T U R E. And then in parentheses the word Lenin. and then song for Juanita from 1977.

LAURIE ANDERSON:
Last summer I spent a couple of weeks in a Buddhist monastery
No one is allowed to talk or to read or to write.
It was very quiet there.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This was released on a very small artist record label called Airwaves, and it features a Laurie Anderson tape invention that she used called the tape-bow. She created this in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape samples on the bow instead of horsehair. And she plays it with a magnetic tape head in the bridge.

LAURIE ANDERSON:
Juanita.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Unlike regular tape recorders that just roll through at a consistent speed, she could draw her arm back
(ELECTRONIC WARBLING)
and change the pitch and the intonation and the speed of the voice. So in a sense, she's playing the voice now.
(PIANO AND VARI-SPEED DIALOG PLAYS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The first piece is the 'Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-ture' is a very straight forward, sound poetry piece. But the second piece that's really part of these two songs, is a narrative story about a woman named Juanita.
(PIANO AND VARI-SPEED DIALOG CONTINUES)
And it's about a mishearing of her voice. She mishears the word for ego, Anita, in Sanskrit. So the tape-o becomes a way of mishearing and misunderstanding language.
(PIANO AND VARI-SPEED DIALOG CONTINUES)

CAROLINE BERGVALL:
"Along the journey of our life half way I found myself again in a dark wood" wherein the straight road no longer lay. Dale, 1996.

CAROLINE BERGVALL:
At the midpoint in the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood For the straight path had vanished. Creagh and Hollander, 1989.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a beautiful piece by Caroline Bergvall, the contemporary British poet, recorded in 2004. And it's simply called 'Via'. And what she did was she went to the British Library, and she found 55 translations of Dante's Inferno,

CAROLINE BERGVALL:
"Half way along the road we have to go, I found myself obscured in a great forest, Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way. Sisson, 1981.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And she just simply reads one version after another of the very famous first verse of that book. And it's just so beautiful how various translators have interpreted this sentence.

CAROLINE BERGVALL:
"HALFWAY on our life's journey, in a wood, From the right path I found myself astray. Parsons, 1893.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Bergvall's collation is in itself a sort of act of transcription. It's also an act of cataloging. And by doing very little, she forces the text to reveal themselves in ways that would be impossible through a more dry and academic or close reading of these texts. By doing nothing really, she's doing more.

CAROLINE BERGVALL:
"When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Mandelbaum, 1980.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC PLAYS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The unmistakable work of Meredith Monk, recorded in July of 1982 at the New Music Festival in Chicago. It's an excerpt from a piece of hers that was then brand new and titled 'Turtle Dreams'.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)
It's a collage style work that juxtaposes minimalist movement, strange dancing, and Meredith Monk vocal work.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)
And it juxtaposes all of this with a live turtle walking through various terrains. You see the turtle in the final film roaming through giant constructed sets, the moon's surface. You see the turtle walking down a city block. You see these odd scale shifts that make the turtles seem absolutely enormous.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)
And meanwhile, the performers are performing in the turtle's midst and closeups of the performers' hands and bodies appear in juxtaposition with this turtle, the universal symbol of the world.
(DISCORDANT MUSIC CONTINUES)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The next cut we're going to hear is a great piece from the post-punk no wave musician turned spoken word artist Lydia Lunch, recorded in 1984. It's called 'What It Is'.

LYDIA LUNCH:
Jesus Christ. What the hell was that? I dunno. It's horrible, isn't it? It's made me feel sick. It's disgusting. It is disgusting. Well then why don't you do something about it? Why don't you get it out here? Isn't there any way you can get rid of it? How can I touch it? Oh God.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Lydia Lunch emerges in the Lower East Side in the mid-70s and becomes the lead singer for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and emerges about this time in the mid 80s as a spoken word artist. Her influences are almost predictably, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr, Jean Genet.

LYDIA LUNCH:
Where do you want me to put it?

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And she embraces a different strain of feminism.

LYDIA LUNCH:
I don't know. I don't care. Just put it out the door or something. Just get rid of it.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
A great quote from her on Perfect Sound Forever. She says, "I'm pro-sex, pro-pornography, pro-NRA."

LYDIA LUNCH:
What are you waiting for?

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
"That divides me from a lot of so-called feminists who I've readily debated as well as other forms of censor. We need more equality across the board. I think feminism certainly is not an outdated idea. I consider myself a 'femi-nazi'...because in a lot of 'conspiracy of women' speeches, I'm making a sarcastic proposal.

LYDIA LUNCH:
I think I'm beginning to grow attached to it. It's... Once you get used to the smell, it's... Ugh.

PATTI SMITH:
The histories of the universe lie in the sleeping sex of a woman. Now, back in Egypt, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was written because they got these like women that were like, you know, that were before the time after 1852. So, like, they got these women and they put them in these, like, tomb shapes, like mummy shapes. Only they didn't mummyize them

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is Patti Smith, recorded at St Mark's Church in New York City on the annual New Year's Day marathons. This was from January 1st, 1975.

PATTI SMITH:
Yeah, first they'd knock 'em out with a sledgehammer.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The beautiful and long piece running almost 8 minutes called 'The Histories of the Universe'.

PATTI SMITH:
Maybe throw a little merc in, anything they could get in there.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This appeared finally on a John Giorno Poetry Systems record called 'Big Ego' in the late 70s.

PATTI SMITH:
And deeper in her pores and into her veins, and you know how, like, the filaments are inside a lightbulb when you turn it on?

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And it's a beautiful improvisation. Begins with a historical incident and then telescopes inward right to the heart of the writing process and it is girl crazy. It's a poem about a fantasy of being sexually fluid and yet she is pro feminist. She says, "Then, but girls, I mean, it's just an extra thing we got".

PATTI SMITH:
You know, you just keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it and keep doing it.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And what she says next is fantastic. because she starts to move into writing and she says...

PATTI SMITH:
And it's really great if you're next to a typewriter because, like, you start... First. The first one you're doin' and you can't quite write it yet, but you got the plot.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And then you take the, and you wait, and you only go so far, and… You mustn't pee your pants. Then, you keep going, you keep going, and then it's time to lie down on the couch and get out Troky and anybody else who might be around. And you open up to page 100 On Theolet Ledoux's 'Bitch' paperback! Then, you just keep, like, getting' your fingers goin' like graphite until it's like a paintbrush and it's making a scene...

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
About halfway through the piece, she breaks out into song and the place goes absolutely mad.

PATTI SMITH:
(SINGING) # In this big step I am taking

SONG:
# seven seizures for the true #

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It's a great moment for Patti Smith and it really catches Smith before she's become a rock star. But she's still a poet.

PATTI SMITH:
(SINGING) # Be free from all deception

SONG:
# Be safe from bodily harm
# Love without exception
# Be a saint in any form. #
Thank you.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

HELEN ADAM:
A very old poem of mine about a modern werewolf, but I dare say the same sort of ladies is still around. Apartment on Twin Peaks'. I rented my apartment with a Chronicle want ad.
(MOCK CACKLING)
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Recorded the same day as the Patti Smith piece at the same place. It must have been an amazing session. St Mark's Church, New York City, January 1st, 1975. This appears on a later Giorno Poetry Systems record. This is Helen Adam and 'Cheerless Junkie's Song'.

HELEN ADAM:
Ha ha ha. They little know. They wouldn't believe it if I told them so. Few realize what me luck behind to lift its slat above (UNKNOWN).

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
She's 64 years old at this point. She died in 1993 in New York City, and she worked in the ballad form, sort of supernatural ballads which tell of fatal romances and darkly sadistic sexual affairs, jealous lovers, vengeful demons.

HELEN ADAM:
New Year's Eve and the moon like a flame. From as far as Fresno, my girlfriends came. I knew my party simply could not miss though I served my husband as the principal dish.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And she made these incredible visual collages too. And she called these collage is the product of lethal women. she considered herself to be a lethal woman.

HELEN ADAM:
It was only the gnashing of our teeth of steel that gave any flavor to that tasteless meal...

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Kristin Prevallet that put together an anthology of her work recently says, As with other female artists of the 20th century, such as Claude Calhoun and Maya Deren, Helen Adam represents a gender that is neither male nor female. She theatricals as femininity to such an extreme that the designation woman no longer applies.

HELEN ADAM:
For the apartment his blood was spent, and now I have the apartment to rent and I rented it with a chronicle want ad. if his ghost goes with it, let the Chronicle take the consequences.
(MOCK CACKLING)
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS AND APPLAUDS)

DENISE LEVERTOV:
The disasters numb within us caught in the chest, rolling in the brain like pebbles. The feeling resembles lumps of raw dough weighing down a child's stomach on baking day.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And the sounds of a British born American poet Denise Levertov, who was born in 1923 and died in 1997. What we're listening to here is 'Life at War'. It was recorded for WNET TV in a show that they did called 'Poetry USA' in 1966.

DENISE LEVERTOV:
The same war continues. We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it, the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it, the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it...

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Both politics and war are major themes in Levertov's poetry. She felt it was part of a poet's calling to point out the injustice of the Vietnam War.

DENISE LEVERTOV:
...burned human flesh is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
She was like Allen Ginsberg all over the antiwar scene, participating in rallies, even reading some poetry at them. And there's a famous correspondence exchange between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov of about war. They both opposed war, but Levertov of course, was an activist and tried to write the sort of poetry that would support her activism. Duncan argued instead that such a use of poetry as activism became a kind of propaganda that participated within the discourse of war. He famously stated, "The poet's role is not to oppose evil but to imagine it."

DENISE LEVERTOV:
...nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

EILEEN MYLES:
‘Lorna and Vicki'. Inside the White House lives the President of the United States and the First Lady and lived with him. It makes me think about history. Amazing that anyone could would want to live in there, especially to live with the guy who lives in there to live with some children too.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Speaking of politics, this is a piece from 1980 by the Boston born, but New York identified poet Eileen Myles. It's called 'Lorna and Vicki'.

EILEEN MYLES:
I was riding down Fifth Avenue yesterday, and the jostling vehicle started getting me off and I started pressing my finger against the seam of my jeans between my legs. It got even better. But then I thought, "Oh, Eileen, let nature take its course."

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It's a poem like so many of Eileen's poems about everyday sexual experiences coming of age during the sexual revolutions of the 60s and 70s.

EILEEN MYLES:
Masturbation will always be my favourite form of sex. though if I was a tree, I just stand there in the breeze.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
She's become a New York institution. She arrived here in New York in 1974. Of course, she gave her first reading at CBGB's and the legends continue. She attended workshops at St Mark's Poetry project, she ended up running the place. She was an assistant to poet James Schuyler. She hung out with Allen Ginsberg at the NUYOrican Poets Cafe. And generally, as she puts it, she lived punkly on the streets as part of the poetry and queer art scene that animated Manhattan's East Village in the 1980s and into the 90s. In 1992, she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States, which, of course, very sadly, she didn't win. I would love to live in an America where Eileen Myles is the president.
(BRASS HORN LIKE MUSIC PLAYS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
You will never guess what instrument we're listening to.
It is balloons. All balloons. Judy Dunaway. This is called 'Surabaya' from 'Surabaya Johnny' from Kurt Weill's play 'Happy End', written in 1929.
(BRASS HORN LIKE MUSIC CONTINUES)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
She is an absolutely incredible performer. She's an improvisational, avant garde composer. She's a free improviser. She's a conceptual sound artist. She creates sound installations, and her only instrument are latex balloons. She blows them up. She pops them. What we're listening to here is she's using them as a reed instrument, stretching the rubber to get different sound. She's a master at the balloon.
(BRASS HORN LIKE MUSIC CONTINUES)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
One of her great things that she does is she takes a balloon, and she uses it as a percussive instrument by putting water on her hands and rubbing the balloon. She also builds crazy sampler keyboards so that she can capture the sounds of the balloon and build incredibly complex instrumentation. She has these enormous balloon orchestras. She has created, since 1990, over 30 works for balloons as sound conduits, and she has become famous as the balloon improviser Judy Dunaway. There's a huge feature of her work on UbuWeb.
(BRASS HORN LIKE MUSIC CONTINUES)
(UPLIFTING MUSIC PLAYS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And that wraps up part one of the two part podcast, the women of UbuWeb. All of these women and many more can be found at UbuWeb at ubu.com I'm Kenneth Goldsmith and this has been 'Avant-Garde All the Time' produced by the Poetry Foundation.
(UPLIFTING ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS)
(UPLIFTING ELECTRONIC MUSIC CONTINUES

Sound clips from Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Caroline Bergvall, Denise Levertov, Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, and many more.

More Episodes from Avant-Garde All the Time
Showing 1 to 16 of 16 Podcasts
  1. Tuesday, January 11, 2011

    Driven by Sound Tracks

  2. Tuesday, September 7, 2010

    The Sound of Silence

  3. Friday, July 23, 2010

    Almost Completely Understanding

  4. Wednesday, June 2, 2010

    Sounds of Fluxus

  5. Tuesday, March 23, 2010

    UbuWeb Interviews

  6. Tuesday, November 24, 2009

    The Women of the Avant-Garde (part 2)

  7. Wednesday, August 19, 2009

    Continental Drift

  8. Wednesday, July 22, 2009

    The Sounds of the UK

  9. Tuesday, April 28, 2009

    Resident Voices

  10. Tuesday, January 6, 2009

    Punk Versions of Monkey Chants

  11. Tuesday, October 21, 2008

    Protest Poetry With a Beat

  12. Friday, August 1, 2008

    Schwitters Happens

  13. Tuesday, May 27, 2008

    Best Decade Ever?

  14. Monday, February 18, 2008

    The First "Three-dimensional" Magazine?

  15. Friday, January 18, 2008

    The World of Outsiders

  16. Wednesday, December 5, 2007