Well, anyway I like the West side I mean I put my time in on the Lower Lower East Side Im never gonna... I like I mean I like where the synagogue is I like where that area is great then I lived in the East Village and that was terrible. That was insane. So tell what are you guys whats happening what are you guys are oh. Well, I I did a lot of tests and I tried to get off of, uh, being self-conscious about it. I mean at first it was a little awkward and I did it like several days of tests and yeah, you know, I was like watching what I was saying and at this point its like Im just letting it yeah. I just started Monday Ill just do it for a full week, um, but I did lots lots of test for a while just so I could get used it to. Just figured Id catch a week of language and see, you know, start to work with it a little bit. So, no this is me normally, this is really this is me. Three years. Im just gonna get a cup of coffee. Dont you want some milk? You want some sugar or anything? OK. So what so what hap happened finally it was like just too too stiff and too weird? Too conventional? Right. Im gonna... You were the best. Borrow one. Yeah sure, hes famous. I like his work, yeah I think hes really cool. Oh really, where was it in the synagogue? Really, what did he do? God, why didnt I know about this? Yeah yeah yeah like Grand Central and right. Why did I not know it was happening there its so cool. Was it was it good? No you of course its like there still is its still an active congregation, isnt it? Oh, its right Mr. Markowitz used to tell me right it was downstairs, oh, thats so cool. Um, OK so I was gonna ask did you turn it off during... Yeah yeah. I would say so I guess no really really I would say that theres times. Yoko. Yeah, its the new, uh, she put out a new album called Rising and then a bunch of people did remixes of it and this is the Thurston Moore remix yeah. Its nice, isnt it? Is it annoying you? Um, um, when are you guys looking to do this and are you looking to have several pieces going at once or do you plan to give the space to one artist for a certain time? Yeah, well, I guess my life is really sound its interesting because I was trained as a visual artist and, uh, theres a big article about what Ive done in the in the in this new Art In America the written word and its about three artists that have worked with, uh, with text and its trying to, uh, establish, uh, books and writing as serious artwork and not just some side product of an artists production. So, this is from here on in you can actu you should maybe pick this up at some point or I can xerox it for you and then, yeah, and this about some of the things that Ive done. And they were Ive moved from more sort of concrete objects to less and less, you know, um, sort of more ephemeral and sort of sheer sound pieces based on sound. I was trained as a sculptor and, uh, I went to RISD and I used to make sculptures of books and, um, all sorts of objects and then, I was carving language onto book, these wooden books and they were really beautiful but I became much more interested in language than in the actual form of the book itself. Um, so I stopped making sculptures and began working more directly with the language itself and came up with several of the these gallery pieces over the years that were just text, um. Yeah of course I have that on my refrigerator. I love that. Everybody loves it. And it this all these are based on sound I can get into that in a minute. Um, and more and more after this was 94 I rejected even making things, uh, physical hence this is like where I work and its all computer and, um, and I worked and I worked on this book and actually this this whole article is about my book which I just finished and is going to be published this summer, which Im really excited about by by The Figures its a small press, uh, experimental writing press. Um, along the way, um, my work since 1990 has all been based on language and the way language sounds. Um, and I began to work with rhymes very simple rhymes and um, I did a, um, book here with a collaboration with a vocalist named Joan La Barbara who was is the primary vocal interpreter of John Cages work. It was an honor to work with her and, uh, it comes with a CD of Joans stuff, and uh, it was released on Lovely Music actually. Do you know Lovely Music? Theyre a theyre a good downtown, uh, New Music label so this CD was released individually on Lovely Music. And I wrote the poems and theyre very simple rhyming poems and Joan did vocal interpretations I can actually play some of them for you. Yeah well these were all drawings originally and yeah I laid this whole thing out on the computer it goes through all these different changes and they were a suite of 80 drawings and Joan I just handed the test the raw text I said do with them what you may. So this is tracked there are 79 poems even though its called 73 poems and its got 79 tracks on it so you can actually plug in track 26 and turn to page 26 theyre very faintly printed down here the page numbers and you can actually listen to her vocal interpretation of this. Um, sure sure theyre fun. And actually I have the whole project on the web now which is really neat. I put the entire thing up with sound bites and everything so its its its view able from everywhere. Uh, OK. Yeah if you have the yeah if you have the sound if yeah yeah I mean if you have speakers anybody can get it sure. And thats its all converging because I mean thats also what Im doing. I design web sites for a living and I work for, um, many presses and I do I do literary sites on the web and so this whole kind of interest in poetry and Im a DJ at WFMU so this whole kind of interest in poetry sound literature computers its all... Bill Arning. I dont know I dont know him. It sounds it sounds interesting. OK, so heres like this poem. And there are two its for two voices the kind of darker text and the light text and if you can just hold that and, you know, what would it sound like, you know? It was like one, you know, theyre all like like really teeny whats the next lets see. Its all her, yeah. So you hear that that background track is what we just sort of just heard and now shes putting something new laid over. What happens is that the the darker letters move to the next one and they become gray and a new set of letters is laid over a new set of sounds so the ew two. Oh no, its completely sound based. As a matter of fact this whole book I I this whole we can just move to the quickly jumping to that project its like my whole idea is like what if language was was was selected by sound before meaning and what is, you know, what does that do to language? And then Ive worked in many languages. Ive done poems in Ive done big poems in books in Polish, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish I was just in a museum in Caracas and. Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. Were you in Caracas. Yeah yeah exactly yeah. Yeah exactly. What were you it was a horrible place isnt it Caracas? Mean. Yeah its just its wild. Um, I was brought down there, um, and what I did was what I often do I was in Poland I did a similar project in a museum Ill Ill place myself Ill sit, um, in a museum and Ill collect sounds. Ill just collect Ill have a big stack of paper out and Ill have people come by and Ill have somebody translate something for me to say that Im collecting sounds that end in say the word in the words that end in the sound of ah. And I dont care what comes before it just as long as the last thing is ah. You know, cause its kind of like rhymes, you know, ha ja la na. Is it? Yeah yeah I just sit there and oh, its terrific, I have people coming up to me and laying things on me and Im always banging things into the computer and somebodys always sitting with me helping me put it in. I I actually have some pictures and I probably have a this actually quickly if you want to just quickly look at this. This describes the process more I I wrote it. Its more articulate than I am right now. Yeah, Ive got this whole numbering system going too. Actually here is, uh, here is a bunch of things from from Poland actually just read that and Ill show you the pictures. Oh oh dont just read the introduction. No no. I dont understand a word of it but thats... I did a similar piece in Venezuela right right very similar I mean I have a printout of it I never made it into a book. Um, but it was really great because I mean it was all about it was just all about, um, the possibilities of of of, uh, universal communication, you know, it all sums it all there. But it was fun, this is this is yeah my hair was really long but this is this is like me hanging out at the computer and people just just coming by. Um, no, so many let me get some more process pictures theres more drunken pictures. Poland was nothing but drinking it was really a lot of fun. And Allen Ginsberg came over and theres me and Alan Ginsberg. Um, this this was in ninety 93, yeah, late 93. Heres a reading we all did together me and Allen Ginsberg and a bunch of the different poets, um. Well anyway I just anyway these are mostly pictures of friends. Bill was there actually, Bill Arning was in there with me. And so I just sat I would just sit here and people would come by and I would enter these in. So I did that in Caracas and I did this big piece in Spanish, that was interesting. And then, the other interesting weird connection we have here is that is that I was selected as the poster boy for this show at the Jewish Museum. Did you see that the museum or? The matzohs on it yeah yeah yeah. So then this is then this is all over this piece has been reproduced all over town and this was some visual work that I just done done and showed and it was all about me, Bob Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, and Allen Ginsberg. So it was really funny that this ends up right up these are these are little postcards and theyve got big posters it was in the Times and it was really insane because it was a little side project I did. So, I mean there was this, and then Raphael and this article makes the connection, uh huh, Raphael makes a connection between my explicit use of Jewish Jewish images and the fact that Ive drifted to text and and and and text-based and kind of a taboo against images and and he brings that up in the article something you guys can have those I mean theyre... So so theres like all these funny crossovers yeah. Theres like all these really weird crossovers going happening now, um. Ive done that too, um. Ive also over the course of the years done several pieces based on single works, eh?, on single books only using the text in the books extracting texts from magazine articles. Sometimes Ill Ill write a work in another language and Ill only use the source from, say, a magazine article. Like I did this piece as kind of a warm up for Venezuela I did a piece in Spanish and I had a Venezuelan newspaper it was like the breakup of Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford. So I sort of, you know, of course I couldnt I dont speak Spanish I dont understand it but I was working with the language formally and only worked from that source so it thats another way of working. Um, and and thats thats not a problem. Um, its interesting you should you know its all too weird, you know, this all getting this is all getting really too strange Ive been the next series of poems Im doing are are one of the projects Im working on are based on the visual structures of the Talmud. Which is... yeah yeah yeah, which is great and also the and a lot of the Jewish graphics from that are in this book are really beautiful yeah this is an amazing book. Its all like Jewish visual poetry which is just just right up my alley kind of thing that Im. Its really its like from the seventies. Jerome Rothenberg put it put together and, um, actually I think it still is in print. And theres all sort of heres another. I love that as a matter of fact yeah. The Wallace Berman stuff is also interesting but look at these two arent they just incredible? You know its funny that the micrography I was like thinking what would I do with all this language that Im collecting like right now Im working right now of course as we speak and I was thinking I do would do some kind of micrographic piece with it, like how much language do we generate each week which is probably just like Ill find out like a stack I mean Ive got tapes and tapes and tapes already from this week and then what if I like reduced it down to like like the teeniest point size or something like that and con con and I fit it. I was in India and I saw, um, like the Bhagavad Gita like written on grains of rice and that kind of thing, you know, all that kind of. So theres like all this kind of, its interesting so Ive Ive been on the Internet Ive found I found a whole explanation of what what actually what this all means and I well, no, what the vi what the the the visual structure of the Talmud is I mean what what these things mean. This is the main commentary and this is commentary on this commentary and these are like assorted commentaries on everything else. You know, so its I I read the Life of Johnson and its a great book because its been annotated by so many people that theres. Boswells Life of Johnson that theres theres this but but then his wife annotated it and then another person later on annotated it and later on all the annotations appear so it became something really similar to the Talmudic structure. Yeah, lets see. Yeah this is the original guys commentary the original rabbis commentary glosses and these are other commentaries. This is the secondary it was called Tosafot or something and this is the second this is the primary this is the secondary and then all these are glosses and other like odd comments about other odd comments about, you know, I just saw it and thought it was so beautiful, you know, and each one is really different. Each one takes a different structure, you know, visually again its like theyre amazing. And I dont know anybody thats done any work with this structure in terms of visual poetry. Look at this one, isnt that beautiful? You know, again, you know, its not real interesting, you know, to me. I dont know. I have no idea. I know nothing about it. Yeah, I saw it at a at a book at a street fair and and. So yeah so, you know, its inter its very. I thought maybe I could, you know, Id start to flow some text around just just just for fun to see what would happen, you know, Im not sure but its its really interesting its very funny that you called its its, you know, I was telling my wife shes a video artist and, you know, I was telling her that you guys had called and, uh, you know, its just so funny because... Theres a Yiddish word for everything but theres kind of like all this its all this stuff is kind of in my head and in the air so when so when Eldridge St. Synagogue called it was like so this is just like something else, you know, something along these lines and so, you know, actually Im not a practicing Jew I mean Im much more drawn to Eastern practices. I mean I practice uh, Vedanta, which is a brand of Hinduism, I mean, thats my religious practice, but I mean in in terms of, you know, everything else Im totally Jewish, right? I mean its just like you know my whole culture is Jewish. I grew up in Long Island, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was given a secular Jewish education which is something called Kinder Shul, which is a Workmans Circle leftist, uh, thing so I was also sent to, um, kind of a leftist I mean, summer camp, Camp Walt Whitman which was like leftist and non-competitive again Workmans Circle, again my parent are really into Workmans Circle stuff. So my whole background was was yeah, was more like that culturally. You know my father works in the schmata business on 7th Avenue. Hes no major radical but its all this kind of stuff and I also grew up meditating and my parents were New Age and sort of EST people in the early seventies. So our whole family grew up meditating and I had this whole leftist Jewish thing going at the same time and, which is which is what I am today. Im a practicing practicing Eastern religion but my whole shtick is leftist and, uh, and and Jewish so. So, at any rate to get more specific about these projects, um, yeah Id like to work with I I would actually welcome the idea of working with with, uh, something within very tight much tighter parameters, um, because look, its all language to me. And whether, you know, the way Ive been working allows me to work with things not only that I like but also things that I might not like as well. Because my rationale is language is sound then it can include, you know, sort of things that either are not interesting or even if I permit it and, well, Id like to permit it to to let in things that I actually find offensive that are not mine. Well, um, its yeah thats not my thats not what Im doing. Thats not my I mean there are a lot of people that do that really well, uh, but I dont work with. I dont do that. Um, my, you know, my focus for the last probably 9 years has been exclusively language and the sound of language. Ive become really attuned to that. Um, so that sometimes so yeah, no Im not Im not a real sort of sound, you know, sound. I mean I appreciate other peoples work and certainly on my radio show I play. Well I mean I mean John Cage is the god, right? And and Im a Cage devotee and I got to know Cage, um, through working with Joan La Barbara as well. So, um, I like, yeah, I like all electronic composers, experimental composers people that like Pauline Oliveros, uh, all New Music I mean Ive just got like a load a load a load of this stuff. Bob Ashley, but then hes language based which what I really love about his language. Meredith Monk I adore. I think shes terrific, yeah. So, I mean I think there are. No no whatever she does is good. I I have yet to hear a bad Meredith Monk piece. I play a lot of that on the show.
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