bart plantenga at Rockefeller Center with his family, 2008 [photo by Nina Ascoly]
Introduction.
bart plantenga is the author of many books of fiction including BEER MYSTIC [Autonomedia, 2026], SPERMATAGONIA: THE ISLE OF MAN [Autonomedia], and WIGGLING WISHBONE [Autonomedia], his memoirs PARIS SCRATCH and NY SIN PHONEY IN FACT FLAT MINOR [Sensitive Skin, 2016, 2017] and book of poems, LISTFULL: LIST POEMS OF NECESSARY ORDERLINESS [SPUYTEN DUYVIL, 2021].
If the world as we know it were to be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, and all that was left was a handful of survivors how would they build a Brave New World if all they found in the ruins was the complete works of bart plantenga, Dutch-born, American-educated experimental writer, poet, DJ and world authority on yodelling?
Good question. The answer is they would have to learn to speak a new language/to almost speak in tongues, handle language as if it were glowing isotopes and as Wittgenstein asserted that “the limits of language mean the limits of my world”.
Then we need to find a language that takes us beyond the limits of our world and into the stratosphere – with bart we find an extraterrestrial vehicle to take us there – speed and intoxication are the fuel of bart’s writing and his beautiful mania for experimentation.
Why are bart and his writing so important – well, he has given us some of the most unflinchingly experimental writing on either side of the Atlantic.
He moved to New York in 1978, bart, young and impressionable, fell in with the NY avant garde, eventually co-founding The Unbearable Beatniks of Lite, The Unbearable Bootlicks of Life [later simply The Unbearables] who set out to rock the literary establishment and bourgeoisie.. using the bars of the lower East side as Campaign Rooms.
If the anti-establishment of New York had a diabolical troublesome offspring then it was to be found in this band of rebels, the Unbearables.
In 1988, we find bart in Paris, DJing on anarchist station Radio Libertaire, writing BEER MYSTIC and Paris Scratch.
So, New York, Paris, New York and finally in 1996, he moved back to his hometown Amsterdam where he embarked on a whole batch of different projects, maintaining two YouTube channels including Yodel in HiFi Top 50+, and his Mixcloud channel where he continues his radio show. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife and daughter.
Bart and I hooked back up after a long absence to do this online duo of an interview In the spirit of Miles and Coltrane and Acid House Everly Brothers balling out Delphi….Rock on. Read on.
bart plantenga on the way to the Radio Libertaire studios, Paris, 1990 [photo by Wendy XXX]
Bart do you remember when we first met at the Tuli and Samara Kupferberg Exhibition at the Hok Gallery in Den Haag. I was chatting to the Gallery owner Alfred van de Helm.
“The introduction/conversation flowed and just as we got to swapping solos in walks Bart Plantenga..”The world authority on Yodelling ‘.!!!!!..New York DJ… underground author/ editor of dozens of magazine and many amazing novels/ writing experiments.
Yea, it was a fortuitous ad hoc summit filled with the kind of magic that only works when you feel the click, the enchantment of the human click for which there’s no explanation. But we’ve learned to ride it, tap into it as a signal of sorts. Glad to’ve met & in such a happenstance manner in the spirit of hippie times in post-hope times
Soon the conversation is rocking…like a cross between an exchange of ideas and a free association of stories…..three ‘ cool’ guys sharing a open Mic…
I’m at some of my happiest moments [there’ve been many] when the to&fro flows like a jazz improv like this meeting in Den Haag like you know the next line – some kind of precognition. & you feel like you’ve never been wittier, never gone deeper with words, with punchlines, delirious linkages, 6 degrees of separation whittled down to 3.
We talk about The Fugs and Bart says he once did a reading with Tuli and he’s got it on film…..wow…trump that!…We talk about Anarchy.. Revolution…Marx ..
Well, reading with people like Tuli was all chance, never pre-ordained. It was in NY with the Unbearables & fellow travellers, happy, & yet annoyed, to be called the most important NY lit movement since the Beats, to do shambolic readings, parodying, riffing off the whole idea of self-serious readings, mediocre combos of words etc. That we did in Paris & it must be my & that of my compatriots low tolerance for cliche & low-hanging fruit. An amiable chaos of some purpose – one feels
The brothers and the bearded one…The Three Stooges…..The crazy world of humour and revolution..😎✊
Yea, something about the dynamic of the 3. Balance, strong, harmony but also kinetics, christianity & all that, which we’d riff on – irony being a weapon/tool of some efficacy. Yes, used to watch the Three Stooges with Paloma when she was young. Still a laugh riot, laughing so hard altho yr not supposed to…
Fighting Daly’s Chicago cops and levitating the Pentagon…The FBI calling the Fugs ” the vilest thing the human mind could conceive”.(.. please please write about me one day 🙏)….
Indeed! What comes round goes back around & around until we are dizzy with the fact that in 50 years of protesting of contrarian texts, of erudition, or paradigm shifting, the rich & ruthless & authoritarian are more in the helm than ever. [That Abbie Hoffman film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, was really good but made clear how eerily prescient 1968 USA was]. But resistance means no rest til Brooklyn, no rest ever. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we should succumb to over-amped stress – it just means being forever engaged in the world altho learning only through age the art of detachment because if you don’t – & I felt we felt this that magical last day of the exhibit – they’ve got you with all the gaslights turned up so that they’ve got you consuming your way out of the anxiety society might super-impose over our consciousness.
Samara recounted stories about her Dad…the arms out the window of the school bus was marvellous ‘..Tuli travelled on Samara’s school bus to stop the kids putting their arms out of the windows which greatly embarrassed the young Samara.
Yes, Tuli & Ed Sanders & Groucho & Carlin & Pynchon & many other madcapped geniuses who promoted levity as a way to a deeper self, the cutting edge of serious art has to be serrated with humor. & as soon as proclaim something like this I must take the piss out of my own declaration, to not get trapped in the self-help wellness, guru charlatan podcaster realm preying upon our feebleness.
What a pleasure it was to spend time with Samara and host her show with Tuli…..The exhibition created such an environment that the mind could open and my thoughts could flow…creating a special place for like-minded people to be free and share…. I don’t know if you keep in touch with Samara bart, but she is holding a new Exhibition of her art
Very peripherally. We are friends on FB. She is keeping the spirit of Tuli alive as is Thelma Blitz among others.
In Portland Maine – her new home. I’d love to go but USA bit of a stretch at the moment.”
It’s a killer trip. Me & Nina go annually to Arizona to visit her aging mom. It’s basically 24 hrs all told. & now with DHS & goon squads with random enforcement of likely illegal laws…
Bart do you think you should be famous?
Long ago I dreamed of being rich and how thrilling it would be to personally donate my wealth to good causes & deserving artists. I don’t understand the new Dickensian billionaires & their joyless lives. Bill Gates’ ex shows how it should/could be done. If we just taxed these criminals properly we wouldn’t have to be grateful for the crumbs they’ve strewn under our noses.
As far as fame – Hmm. I’d settle for renowned or well-regarded… I think it would be nice to float on a certain amount of acclaim or recognition that would precede me like the renown would erase my shyness like a red carpet of presumption so that what has been reported can lay the groundwork. Like having a bar where they know your name, your drink of choice… But beyond not much…
If not famous better known and appreciated?
Appreciated would be fine. I have simple psychic needs. Just once in a while someone might say “O I know you’ or ‘O yea, I read that book, so yr the guy that…’ I am too shy, wish I was more Dali or Johnny Rotten or Gore Vidal extroverted – like the world’s your stage. But I now find myself attracted to the shy/reclusive style – absence as a kind of intriguing presence: Pynchon, Salinger, Burial, Banksy, B. Traven, Tricky – & how they overcame or owned that shyness to become befamed, despite their social limitations.
You have ticked all the right boxes as an artistic Innovator and a member of the vanguard of the international avant garde.
Maybe some boxes but never one that comfortably drew attention to me, my work without craving or begging for attention. Conventional wisdom in hindsight is pretty much this: get famous before you write your book. That seems to be the case when you look at all the celebs/musicians/artists who get a kind of open door to write their books with their fame as selling point for publication. But …
If you were an astronomer would you place yourself in the Universe?
A quiet planet next to whatever planet Sun Ra is from.
Some sort of renegade/ lone star /planet?
A quite inaccessible place, difficult to reach but well worth it for those who make the effort to visit…
Or a ‘black hole’ predatory for all that’s influential and can be sucked in, and used by Bart Plantenga and fellow’ pranksters ‘?
I know you love a bit of Ken Kesey.I see you more if a ‘ Demon Box’s than a ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest
Hmm. Funny you mention Kesey. I have honestly not read him or read about him or watched videos or much of anything until about 2 months ago when he came up in conversation of books I like or recommend & I thought Sometimes a Great Notion would be a book to recommend to Nina. I’m a slow reader & VERY particular about the books especially novels. I dislike most popular literary novels especially the ones stuck in universities [except maybe Kingsley Amis…] or kind of bourgeois novels .
How about this for a description of the non traditional American way of writing.
( The American small press seems to welcome this type of writing open armed)
I read my writing described thusly: “bart plantenga’s writing style is eclectic, experimental, and deeply rooted in unconventional approaches to storytelling and poetry. His work spans genres, including novels, essays, poetry, and nonfiction, often blending elements of surrealism, meta-narrative, and gritty realism. Nonconventional quickly dovetails into alienating or offputting or annoyingly gimmicky, which is stupid but feeds into the current notion of convenient & bite-size. It reminds me of an Alan Watts allusion: the point of music is not to arrive as quickly or efficiently at the end point like you might desire were you going grocery shopping. The point of music, art, some writing [not the formulaic] is the trip, the dialectic, the getting lost & finding your way but somehow with current impatient culture we want everything to stop early – on time. As if our bodies can absorb the lengthy before it occurs so we only have to experience the short version. like speeding through or flipping through a recording FF as you absorb the basic drift but miss all of the beauty. But I think many people are annoyed, have no time to feel beauty.
“Kesey explained why the collection of semi-autobiographical essays was titled Demon Box: “When Viking was bringing it out,” he said, “they were desperate for something to call it. I told them, ‘Don’t call it anything .’ It isn’t a novel; it isn’t an autobiography; it isn’t journalism; I think of it as a box in which all this stuff goes.”[2] To his publisher, Kesey started calling the book a “box novel,” a new form of literature. “If I were to think of it as a (traditional) novel, I would have joined it together and had a gradual progression of thematic movement and character change through it, but I didn’t want to do that.”[2] Kesey also explained he considered the idea of publishing the essays in pamphlet form, then putting the pamphlets in a box and selling the box.” Wikipedia.
Well, the original tales of the BEER MYSTIC were short anecdotes, haiku-ish fables, that could then be shuffled & put in any order desired. The will was there to allow happenstance to take over but ironically I wasn’t in enough control of whatever talent I didn’t even yet know I had so that notion of randomness deciding the fate of the narrative ended after the many excerpts appeared in LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR [NY/NJ radio station WFMU’s legendary program guide]. & so 25 rewritten versions of BEER MYSTIC & 2 aborted attempts at publishing it by 2 fledgling big-minded publishing houses, I realize that the story has had a quicksand-like influence on my writing. As I developed vocab & kinetic writing skills, the ms kept demanding my attention to update, improve, tweak, rewrite parts of it & so every year I’d have to grovel, become servile & do its bidding, a little like a sovereign with an insatiable appetite & an undefinable taste.
BTW: I just finished editing the BEER MYSTIC, July 9, 2025. In pursuit of its publication by Autonomedia I enlisted the talents of 3 friends & ex-Unbearables all of them familiar with me, my style & the BEER MYSTIC story. Old friend, Alfred Vitale, active Unbearable & editor of RANT, did the first round of proofing, which led to deep conversations about subjects that BEER MYSTIC dredged up as well as suggested adjustments which precipitated some rewrites with elements of happenstance, improv included. It meant a kind of interactive intrusion into the story & the story was much enhanced by the harmonics, the antics, the memories.
Ken sounds like a kindred spirit. You seem to enjoy subverting traditional form in regard to the marketable novel. A novelist like Kurt Vonnegut ( who I imagine you admire)can use the established novel presentation while at the same time taking plot into the stratosphere imagination wise.
There is a rambunctious contrarian aspect to my personality, a little like Mark E. Smith or John Lydon, impatient with convention, with people expecting to be ruled by the expectations they’ve learned to expect. But all this is mitigated by shyness & decorum… I have often not stuck to guidelines, to demands especially when they seemed to serve no purpose. In college I just took whatever courses interested me so never with a focus on a major or diploma. By the end, faced with inevitable bureaucracy I searched for a mentor who finally helped me create my own major.
But now submitting to lit mags or publishers I do exactly as is expected of me – double-spaced, 1-inch margins, Times Roman, headers, footers, 1500-word limit … But then, I’m not willing to die on the sword & want my work – me – to be liked at the same time. A little jealous of celebs who are geniuses in their own way who are able to twist the knife, take the piss & get away with it because of their status as admired celeb-writer – they can speak their minds & be seen as profound, while the lesser-known are judged as annoying or pretentious… Not being cruel but being truthful or truth-telling.
co-founders of the Unbearables Ron Kolm, Mike Golden (RIP), and bart plantenga [photo by passerby]
Is the avant garde nature or nurture.?
I don’t have a good sense any more of avant garde or free jazz or improv or experimental. All these [non]forms have become branded sounds or looks. Listen to improv music & notice how often it resembles all of the other improv music you have heard – little asymmetrical, arhythmic, unharmonic bleeps & toots. So, no longer improv, but instead, we have the expectation of what improv should be. The freedom of form, no guardrails has a daunting, intimidating aspect to it. Like poetry with its devil may care rep. But poetry, even freeform or unconventional styles are packed with presumption & so that is why at a poetry reading so much of it sounds of a pattern – the liberational aspects of 50s Beatnik style is now the cookie cutter blueprint expectation. It all sounds of conformity, that Beatnik, cadence because we have all absorbed the poets & their oratory & we all end up sounding like updated versions of Black Mountain or Beat or NY jazz poets – or whatever the equivalent is elsewhere.
So when you read new poetry it sounds old. Avant garde has the expectation of the unexpected which becomes ironically quite predictably edging toward outlandish or flaunting with a transgressive zeal, exploded typography that is also defined by social expectations that range from those 50s movies of Beatnik or 60s satirically portraying cliched versions of hippies/beatniks to the point where we become the brand & suddenly an artist is known for a certain kind or style of art that begins to be defined by cultural expectations of who you have projected yourself to be.
I mean do you just wake up one morning and think’ fuck it I’m gonna subvert the universe, trash tradition and the established world of the Arts?
No, but it’s an interesting point & can only work organically because otherwise you’re just trashing tradition in a non-trad-trad way. With the new conformity of today’s young – & old – we seek ways to fit in but simultaneously stand out. Like nonconformist conformity [the anarchy symbol spraypainted wherever, the fuck-you, the messy, noisy guitar solo, the ugly-is-beautiful painting… Meanwhile businessmen are limited to expressive colorful ties & socks, the rest remains the same. If you’re trashing established culture norms it better come from a deep place. Otherwise you’ll just come off as a Billy Idol or Kanye West of the literary world.
What was the turning point away from orthodoxy writing you were introduced to by a neighbour in Upstate NY with his basement collection. I’m talking Poe, Dickens, Hemingway.
Ah, yes, we discussed this in an earlier email… I had a neighbor in NJ who was a 6th grade teach. He & his wife, knowing my parents were poor & shoestringing the purchase of a suburban home – I did not have an end table in my bedroom; the alarm clock sat on a chair my parents had found, stripped & refinished – they invited me to their modest basement library of classic books & the World Book Encyclopedia. So ever few weeks I’d ring their doorbell, return the finished books & head to the basement choosing the next Robinson Crusoe, Poe, Dickens, Hemingway … & the next letter of the World Book Encyclopedia. I started & systematically read all the way through to vol. 20 – wxyz. I really traveled in the immersive worlds of RL Stevenson, Walter Scott, Dickens, under covers, using a flashlight under the sheets after lights-out …
I now realize from the World Book that, as a dyslexic, I’m aided by illustrations when reading. So, when I read, like a child, I don’t mind an illustration here & there – Breton’s Nadja is illustrated with a mix of thoroughly mundane & surreal photos. & since way back pretty much every story of mine now comes with an illo of my own design/choosing. I never hade the notion that young readers eventually could become writers. I thought there were readers & there were writers & somehow there were some unspoken law that separated them.
The idea that I could write words down to mean something was awakened by an English teacher who complimented an essay I wrote. I took his elective creative writing class & there learned the intimate relation between reading, discussing, writing. Upon reading that essay asked if there were any writers in the family – NO. Totally flabbergasted. Not even close, although my mother, a bit of a painter, wrote me some 3000 letters after I moved out of the house & before she passed on into the clouds of unrealized dreams.
This teacher, soft spoken, modern haircut, fat balthus knotted, floral tie, encouraged me, submitted that essay to a high school anthology of best essays & it was accepted. I gazed at the certificate, with its fake gold seal I thought must mean I was about to arrive … An essay on inalienable freedom as promoted by the let-your-freak-flag-fly hippie ethos was published in in our tri-county local newspaper. I published my first poems in the school lit mag, Blue Jeans [https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2021/02/bart-plantenga_16.html ].
In high school I straddled the world of poetic hippiedom, nerds & jock-athletes. As a champ long distance runner [cross country, mile & 2 mile], the first lit story I read that spoke to me was “Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner”. As a fast guy with many first places I won my exemption from petty bullying mostly pushing in the hallways, slamming me into the lockers or punched me in the arm really hard with a wind up & then an insane snicker.
Being a bit of a minor star runner in the region made others forget that I was just a nerd with taped up eyeglasses that my father would repair in his repair den using glue, heat & plastic. I was elected vice president of the student council; our Animal Party won over straighter parties. We made absurd promises that ridiculed the whole idea of students affecting school policy. I wrote the acceptance speech but let the president read it out of shyness.
I joined a “gang” of “deep” thinking guys; we were radicalized by hippies yippies … & if we were going to be drafted & sent to Vietnam, we were going to flee to Canada. My story “A Black, A Catholic, A Jew, A Hedonist, A Protestant & An Atheist” tells the story of those times & our group of alt-thinking dudes who travel 60 miles by VW bug to the big town to see the forbidden Last Tango In Paris & discussed our futures [published in Scarlet Leaf Review]. We eventually refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance & the Star-Spangled Banner, which were regular rituals [America is weird] … we were the same pair of unwashed jeans for months as a protest gesture of some sort involving bourgeois values or something. But I did not write my first attempt at a short story until after high school. Its mere completion mesmerized me for days on end, as I read-reread-re-re-read it. I remember: it was about a couple of teens who went around town leaving comments & slogans in the wet sidewalk cement …
Was there one book or more that sneaked into your subconscious and lit the fuse for your later incendiary prose experiments.Dada / Surrealism, Butor, Bataille, Artaud, Burroughs, Brion Gysin? Perhaps you voraciously swallowed the lot?
Well, living in the middle of a nowheresville, my influences were more modest/prosaic; I’d say Brautigan [Troutfishing, Confederate General, et al.], Vonnegut, Hemingway, Kerouac, Kesey, Salinger [have reread Catcher more than any other book] Whitman, Thoreau, Huxley, Marcuse, & Soul on Ice, Alan Watts & other hippie heroes of anti-materialist, pro-nature, anti-war & alternative lifestyles, altered states of consciousness.
I did not get to Rimbaud/Baudelaire, Pynchon, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky [took a course in just Dostoyevsky], Joyce [took a course in Joyce], until college. I remember taking extended breaks, reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in a meadow while working as a census taker. After college Diane DiPrima – the idea of polemical leftist hot head writing sensitively, or the amazingly influential heightened gossipy casually-intense poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ed Sanders Tales of Beatnik Glory, Sam Shepard, seeing his plays, the book Motel Chronicles …
Was the presentation of the words as important as the content?
Yes, cool books were often signified by cool covers, but also layout, writing style. I actually refused to purchase some editions of books if their covers were crap. I related to alternative publishers like New Directions – their covers seemed to match my disposition. So Patchen, Rexroth, Rimbaud Celine … Celine, although not pc, his work reverberated & immersed like no other – save Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gunter Grass Tin Drum or some of Faulkner. In any case classic beautiful covers with a slight edge of consternation to them.
I have designed most of my books. Had a hand in designing both yodel books, because the best cover art has to speak to or enhance the content in an organic provocative way & in-house graphics departments were usually run of the mill. The indie publishers like Autonomedia, Sensitive Skin, Spuyten Duyvil …
In college, influenced by campus film societies, you could see great films every day. Here I would go with gal schoolmates to see films 3 times a week. I fell under the influence of Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, et al. We’d discuss the film deep into the night & then began to realize I had a visual mind, maybe I could translate film images or real sightings into words, words that would produce visual images on the mind screens of others. I still dream of making a movie with someone with cinematographer skills.
I worked numerous on-campus jobs including street sweeper, campus mail delivery & nightshift work in the graduate library where for breaks a film-going gal of a certain attractiveness would come meet me for break. We’d go outside & roll around, wrestling on the lawn, discussing the films we’d seen recently.
& on into my film-going in NYC [Theatre 80, Film Forum, Bleecker Street Cinema, and the 8th Street Playhouse] where I witnessed early Wenders, Fassbinder, more Godard, et al. & on to Paris with its legendary arthouse cinemas where I spent many a dark summer afternoon. It is here, especially Godard & black& white Wenders, where I cribbed my later fictional style. A bio-hermeneutics is not necessary at this time.
As a vehicle for what you wanted to express. I think ‘vehicle’ is an appropriate metaphor because cars/travel figure a lot in your writing.
Yes, well while living in the Midwest I did some serious hitchhiking & Greyhound bus trips for a decade or so. Those graphic experiences & those as a cabdriver in Michigan continue to be close to the surface of infinitely available memory & thus are regularly mined still, as these themes of precarity, impermanence, impatience, yearning, movement without seeming purpose. As a kid my parents would go for rides, just ride around in the car – i get the feeling that much of automotive experience is nothing more than being kept awake by movement in this metal capsule or feeling some false sense of agency speeding down a highway. These experiences continue to inspire. Over time there was a certain fusion of words in lines & travel on roadways, but also contemplative night time wanderings …
So it could be said your stories are hurtling full pelt through the streets onto the highway out into the wide open spaces where they collide and run over the bemused reader minding his own business. You don’t exactly drive in the slow lane in your art.
You could say that & I might nick the notion, a Ballardian one, where the mere wordly description of hurtling down the streets could be regarded as dangerous. But the visceral impact of my words on others was a dream, a pipe dream, a dream I would, in turn, realize by writing this dream… Capisce? How to move words to move people – through agitation & illumination…
Beer Mystic, Wiggling Wishbone Stories of Pata- exual Speculation. Beer Mystic is an incredible full throttle Kaballistic road trip of a book, that is probably more inclined to give you hallucinations than psilocybin mushrooms – it’s a psychedelic boozy rollercoaster of atomic prose – it’s the meaning of life and the secrets of the universe all telescoped into one slim book alive with radioactive yeastic phosphorescent prose … I can’t recommend it enough.
Sounds unreasonably kind but I’ll take what I can get. & any kind words are welcome flattery that instantly become immutable truth. I might nick those words.
Is this your Tarantula? (Dylan) Naked Lunch (Burroughs) to Brooklyn (Herbert Selby Jr.)
I very much dug Dylan’s Tarantula at age 16 & find it superior to his award-winning Chronicles. I love much about Burroughs & i think his point of view sometimes infects my work, Last Exit probably shares some gritty aspects with BEER MYSTIC, although BM is quite a different breed from the above. These are all bottom of the stairs, first step-up influences. Not denigrating them, just that I’ve moved on, carrying cells of their bacteria along with me as sleeper cells or asymptomatic diseases. I can still appreciate some Dylan but gave up fandemonium obsession in 1980 after Slow Train, a bit similar for the others mentioned as well. They had their time that lined up with my building block needs in the moment. Same for Henry Miller – still interesting but less interested in reading. Kerouac & Salinger don’t fit in there because of their warm humanity & I can still reread some of their best. I guess some of these authors you just have to read at the right age. And I was a fan of all the above to differing degrees. Bukowski too… But I’ve moved on, appreciating their farewell pat on the back.
In a recent email to me, you mentioned your immigration status – coming from the Netherlands to the USA – how do you think that ‘ shaped ‘ you – if at all.
Well, it had a profound influence on who I became for better & some for worse. Despite being profiled as aliens & weird, with parents with strange accents, me & my brother had friends, although I won’t go into how my mom never quite fit in, missed her Amsterdam, but felt it not her place to complain. It is only as my parents approached their last years that I began thinking about writing about them. This is cruel & can never be adequately corrected. The alienness stuck, became a trope, began to define me as outsider or other thinking. Regrets – I’ve had some. So, it is with mixed feelings that I’ve begun to write about my family – did a WRECK THIS MESS themed programs on my father, mother, & brother – now all dead. what my parents underwent during WW2 – death, suffering, hunger, my father as a slave laborer etc. has interested me since my late teens. But they raised us in the US & they always remained a bit alienated from the entire blending-in thing no matter how much they desired – they all became citizens. Not me, I protested the American way, militarism, eventually nationalism & patriotism as plagues on the soul. Again, we embraced everything American at that time … until age 17 when I became awakened to the dark side of the USA with the Vietnam War, the genocide of the native population, eugenics, funding oppressive governments & dictators globally… i had a steep intense learning curve. & was fully radicalized by the last year of high school to the point of refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the National Anthem.
We moved when I was 6 from the outskirts of Amsterdam to the armpit of America, the heart of industrial New Jersey with a view not unlike the opening sequence for the Sopranos. Ironically to one of the ugliest parts of the US – New Jersey, armpit of America was the saying.
So I suspect having been the child of immigrants had some effect on your life and work.
Is that true? You write very movingly about your mother’s life in the Amsterdam Quarterly.
Do you think her experience has left an indelible mark on your life and creativity. A psychoanalyst might suggest that your pursuit of the avant garde was a form of escapism, how would you react to that theory?
It was a dive into & simultaneously a backing out of I guess. I sought out artists & writers & musicians who were other – Beefheart over Eagles, reinforcing my natural inclination toward contrarianism. There could be so many touchstones or artist names but simultaneously having witnessed events & shows by convention busters like the Fluxus group remain inspiring for making ephemeral “objects” that remained intangible or unpurchasable but commerce has a way of even commodifying anti-commodification so I’ve given up giving heart & soul to resistance since even resistance is cooptable as tee-shirt or empty chant – Dylan doing a Cadillac commercial, the use of Kerouac by Jeans mfr, a Clash song used as an ad jingle. I can no longer rail & resist the unstoppable forces of commerce & avarice. But you can still deconstruct, redirect, satirize, deface all of these gestures dominated by commerce. & that is why the Situationists continue to influence me – their critique was to not sacrifice the self for a movement, remain true to revolution in other ways.
The dérive is a favorite device / strategy – in critiquing or car-dominant urban paradigm. The situationist [like me in Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor but especially in Beer Mystic] has wandering strategies to reclaim dream for the dreamer, confiscated by the urban planner of logical artery grids, cement & taken back by those who set out to achieve a paradigm shift away from the car & toward the dream… Yes, since I began writing about my family I no longer feel it was too bourgeois or whatever for me to bother with. Now it is helping me to understand what it is like to be someone who has moved 43 times since birth – amazingly we’ve lived in the same place in Amsterdam for 16 yrs.
Are you interested in psychoanalysis? In the same way perhaps the Surrealists were?
Would it be fair to say that your early reading of Joyce, Beckett and Virginia Woolf etc and the ‘ stream of consciousness excited your imagination.
No, not much interest in psychoanalysis per se. Not discounting it, have read some of it, just not my way of analyzing. I was very into Joyce/Kerouac/Woolf stream of consciousness in college, thought that was my way in [or out of] lit. Stream of consciousness still speaks to me as a strategy to be called upon. I think Pynchon does this gloriously in his novels, most recently noticed in Vineland where long sentences so deliriously & deliclously set down the intricacies of sensory experience, critique, fascination & I could feel my pulse adjusting to the tempo of his prose rhythms.
Freud wrote on the imagination:“The realm of imagination was seen to be a “reservation” made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life.” Would you agree?
There is a seamless transition between these states, a bardo corridor, a magical liminal space that goes unnoticed as transactions are made that lead to poetry & fiction. But like Watts said you don’t need to know the name of every flower to appreciate them
Or was Freud a ‘coked- up’ perv who had a thing about his first cousin? I should imagine you are more a Wilhelm Reich/ R D Laing ‘ The Politics of Experience & the Bird of Paradise’ type of guy, rather than Jung or Freud.
Yes, went through a phase late high school, early college. I take all information, fold some of it seamlessly into my work but I am not about standing on the shoulders of commonly acknowledged greats.
Bart Plantenga Eternal DJ. I mean you were a DJ in Paris in 1987 for a while. Is that as cool as it sounds? Where ? ‘The Finnegan Wake’ Irish Pub? Seems to this day to be a hub of creative activity in Paris…
Well, this was a fertile period of vision development, of purpose, of pleasure, adventure, endless flirtation & lots of creation. Yes, well, I’ve always been an unusual outlier DJ having been near-impoverishment for much of my adult life & so all my creativity came from borrowing, stealing, reusing, making it up, seldom spending great sums on vinyl, making do since my first radio shows on legendary NY/NJ station WFMU where I’d sleep over, camped out on a cement basement to make sure I was on time for my 9 AM show…
In Paris, we made tapes of passing sounds, of weird moments, of records we did not own. It was all on the fly, impulse, chance, life lived on a Ouja Board projected on the topography of Paris. We overcame the oppression of mere survival, learned the shelf in the super with the most drinkable affordable wine.
Here I met Mark B. [found footage filmmaker, all around dreamer-creator] & Black Sifichi [photographer who became a well-known French DJ – he claims indebtedness to me for that] & Brad Lay, NY photog, comedian who had married a blond French woman as had I – so coincidence as a re-kindling of an age-old early-NY-days friendship.
In different configurations involving also graphic artist-polemicist Lori E., aspiring filmmaker Zuade K., several coked-up American ex-pat aspiring writers, a female Canadian photographer of distinct horniness & a playground we could claim for ourselves. So, radio on anarchist station Radio Libertaire, which led to many hilarious, unscripted uh-oh moments but also great wine-from-bottle studio conversations, broadcast interruptions, audio detournements etc. that spilled out into the street & the area around the Sacre Couer where Libertaire was, somewhat ironically, located in the shadow of. We did many scandalous, inspired, readings in Paris – always being denounced or praised or both afterwards.
This is a rich period, which is only somewhat touched upon in various radio essays & the haiku snapshots found in Paris Scratch. But this is where a REAL version of Beer Mystic as novel was cobbled out, rewritten, re-edited, walked around with, tested in readings, rewritten in a big house in the middle of nowhere southern France – the Languedoc region.
What kind of music were you playing? I have seen you mention ‘ hip hop’ in reviews- are you despite your/ our age eclectic enough to embrace a musical genre most people of a certain age find unlistenable, with lyrics ( if that’s the right term) that can be of the ‘ street ‘ but also some sort of macho – bling draped negative take on life/ gangsta relationship/ crime/ diversity…ghetto. Do you feel like mounting a spirited defence of Hip hop?
Listening to old programs/emissions, seeing old playlists, before I became obsessed with themes, I used to kitchen sink it. Lots of obscure, indie, small/non-label, alternative stuff – Butthole Surfers & beyond. ANY genre, style, movement was game. Every genre, many nationalities… My theory since my first show remains: 95% of all music sucks but that 5% of every genre [except maybe opera, which is probably 3%] is more than enough to keep us satisfied for a lifetime or more. There are certain genres I continue to gravitate toward like dub in all of its permutations especially all Adrian Sherwood & On-U sound, a lot of speculative/spiritual jazz [Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, Pharoah Sanders], no-wave post punk, under-regarded & disparaged easy listening [Astrud Gilberto], the best of non-new-age ambient but anything really – the best of country like Hank Williams is right up there with the best of all genres of music. Obscure & forgotten is the cocaine of the DJ, the moment of ecstasy is the segue where 2 songs blend & enhance one another. My segues can last several minutes so ecstasy can last… The best of hip-hop-rap is also among the best music has to offer. & it’s interesting that white folk/rockers are sometimes pegged as political but its actually black music that ends up being more enduringly political – from Marvin Gaye to Melvin van Peebles to Gil Scott Heron to Public Enemy to Killer Mike to Mingus, Max Roach, Nina Simone & Run the Jewels, etc. …
I go for the best, the under-appreciated & reject all the bling, fanfare, hype & posturing in all music. It is funny some years later to hear a song that I am totally unfamiliar with was the biggest hit of the summer of whatever year.
Punk/ Post Punk?Hip Hop.?Jazz.Give me/ us your top ten albums of all time Which albums can we bury you with Bart?
Don’t get me started. I’ve done many lists, a whole book of lists, & even some Wreck This Mess shows on favorite songs, artists. Most recently Wreck FaveFaves2 1271 [https://www.mixcloud.com/wreckthismess/wreck-favefaves2-1271/]… Any list would inevitably go beyond 10, & would include Burial, Adrian Sherwood [On-U], Coltrane, Miles, PiL [Wobble et al], the Orb, Hank Williams, Serge Gainsbourg & certainly The Fall – but that’s off the top of my disheveled-hair head. If you’re serious you’ll end up being sorry you asked… [I can send you my meticulously maintained playlists if you want to go down that rabbit hole.]
There is something of the anarchic socio/ political humour of Frank Zappa / Captain Beefheart / Sun Ra…Moondog/Fugs in your work in my opinion – Is that fair to say?
Yes, often play the Fugs, less often Sun Ra, Moondog & Beefheart but they are faves. I never got into Zappa, although I can appreciate him on some level, but his music after the early years & his later lyrics just seemed cringy as if trying too hard… His late 70s-80s albums just sucked. Still love Beefheart – amazing dadaist soul.
Or are you more Bebop /Punk/ Post Punk/ Hip Hop.
yes much post-punk nowave when musicians said to hell with conformist-doctrinaire punk & started pissing off small-minded purists by including disco – from PiL to Tom Tom Club. Also loved the intermingling of dub & punk from the Slits to Mark Stewart & the Maffia, & even a few Police songs – their only good songs are a few dub-reggae influenced numbers. Into a lot of electronica post Aphex Twin that combined rowdy noise, minimalism, beats, repetition & a sense of joyous dismantling of expectation.
Making a point – using pointed satire- but still being able to use humour. Is that important?
Yep, much of my fiction, even radiomaking & my graphics is tinged with humor or satire. Yes, give me Vonnegut, Pynchon, Catch-22, Gulliver, Huck Finn & hundreds more that escape me at this moment.
I watched an old interview with Francis Picabia recently, and he was specifically [discussing] whether Dada/ Surrealism were ‘ fun’ movements and not just serious iconic tectonic shifting plates in the Modernistic Art world – literature – film – music…Picabia said “ they weren’t into fun,a very serious bunch” ( I paraphrase)….I mean there must have been a few laughs along the way.- 1914 – 1936.
Definitely. Dada & much subversive art is driven my humor, satire. Even today some of our best popular social critics are comedians – Stewart Lee, Jon Stewart, John Oliver – just a few skimmed off the top… many more that could be listed. Look at the podcast world of serious issues, many are hosted by [ex]comedians. Dada + the Young Ones + Marx Brothers + Monty Python could keep me happy for a long time. Again I am failing to name less popular comics who are just as vital. Our Dada-agit-prop leanings certainly made our readings less standard & more fun-adventure.
Apparently not! My point is that having read quite a lot of your work, writing, listened to your audio projects, looked at your visual extravaganzas and typographical/ imagine you are funny – humour plays an essential part in your expression. I don’t think anyone could accuse you or your fellow collaborators of taking yourself too seriously. Is that fair comment??
That is at the core of it: seriously unserious, which is, of course, a coping mechanism for not being taken seriously in the first place. So if you out-humor them, the being ignored aspect stings less. We, as the Unbearables were inspired by the Fugs, Tuli & Ed as patron saints. But also the buffoonery of Orlovsky & other clowns. Serious but with a satirical side that reveals the absurdity of it all. We did many readings that had a self-depracating quality to it – not self-hating but recognizing the absurdity of self-seriousness… They sometimes edged over into the performative absurd where we’d take the piss out of each other, fellow Unbes lampooning, interrupting, chastising one another to the point of audience confusion – & probably some annoyance.
The Unbearables: “In 1985 Kolm, Bart Plantenga, Mike Golden, and Peter Lamborn Wilson founded the Unbearables, “a loose confederation of poets and writers who came of age in 1980s and 90s New York. Infamous for their high-minded aesthetics and low, barroom manners, the group has sought to torment literary powers-that-be throughout its more than two decades of existence.” The group was based on Wilson’s precepts (written under the nom de guerre Hakim Bey), as set forth in his seminal book, TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone). David Life, the owner of the Life Cafe, gave them berets and renamed them “The Unbearable Beatniks of Life.” Shortly after this, they did an event they called ‘The Crimes of the Beats,’ during which they dropped the word ‘Beatnik’ from their name, becoming simply ‘The Unbearables.’
I did an encyclopeidia style entry on the Unbearables for Andrei Codrescu’s wonderful Exquisite Corpse [ http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_8/foreign_desk/plantenga.htm ] that through satirical mythologizing manages to capture a strange essence of the Unbearable dynamic missing from most journalistic articles on us –there were quite a few & that they often got it wrong was fine, almost desired. Yes, we were a very loose confederation, some convivial hanging out, some plotting various scandals to reveal the hypocrisies of the scene, of slam poetry, spoken word, Perf poetry. Yes, great when it’s great but mostly kind of a catch-all for peeps not up to the demands of musicianship or stand up comedy or sustained writing of depth. Anyway, great events but also plenty of shambolic evenings, or depressing under-attended events. But all along our “fame,” limited as it was, carried its own secret detonation device. We noticed how the detrimental effects of the crumbs of renown or recognition thrown our way, led members to become competitive, bitchy, egotistical, the very characteristics we wanted to keep at bay, ignore. People began to bicker about reading order, payment & responsibility for the anthologies, etc. We began to reveal aspects of an organization no matter how much we tried to derail this. It’s almost an inevitability unless you see it all for what it is – a farce, a very limited opportunity. Some very influential characters & developed lasting friendships with a goodly number of the core crew. When the outreach bloated our membership to 50+ I no longer related & many of the writers or artists, although fine people maybe, did not do it for me & probably vice versa. We were even infiltrated by a mole who tried through obsequious fan interest in our group to provoke & gather info. It was very uncomfortable, many poo-pooed it as self-aggrandizing – the notion that we were important enough to destabilize. This led to internal strife, bickering – ironically…
Bart could you talk a bit about the ‘ Unbearables’ The New York scene at the time. Some of your antics are worth recounting.
Yes, well, the original wave was me & Mike Golden & Ron Kolm, whereafter on the fly we attracted multimedia documentarian Matty Jankowski, English poet Max Blagg, & Peter Lamborn Wilson [aka Hakim Bey] of T.A.Z. fame. We hung out at the anomalous Tin Pan Alley, a rundown outpost bar for exots, weirdos, artists in a chic but touristy part of town. It had an old-style all-are-welcome except bitos approach, the bartenders were tough beauties, the jukebox filled with Bertolt Brecht [actually singing] to the Butthole Surfers & plenty of other rousing oddities. The place was a joyful shambles with a gaping ceiling hole where conversation always veered to the odd & illuminating. We did a rousing reading there involving toy instruments & wild declamations & me reading portions of early BEER MYSTIC.
Storming the New Yorker offices- Did you wake anyone up?
Well, we did 2 “Free Verse” demos in front of & in the offices of the New Yorker, famous for foregrounding poetry in this day & age. But it has almost always leaned to the private swimming pool school of rarefied observations of privilege & established academic poets of a certain civility & so we felt it was time for a change, to open it up to living poetry written by poets who’ve lived a life – rowdy, scruffy, nonregulation poesie. They were annoyed but put up with us, feigned listening & ultimately only poet Sparrow hit paydirt, landing a poem between their thigh-pages. It got us lots of press & brought attention to the gap between official/acceptable/regulation poetry that checked all the boxes except of the profoundly lived experience.
It made us Unbearables realize that we were pretty much all from working class backgrounds, did not benefit from deep-pocketed well-connected culture liberals, no fast-tracking from Ivy League writing profs – we were the new Beats in the eyes of some, were even called that – which only hastened our implosion when we started wondering whether the hype was maybe real.
plantenga performing at Brooklyn Bridge Reading, September 1994 [photo by unknown]
Reciting erotic verse on the Brooklyn Bridge?
We had countless great event-readings [but probably more no-show, no bang disasters as well] but this is probably visually one of the best & most emblematic – simple but grandiose. 43 poets stretched along the length of the Bridge from the Manhattan side to the Brooklyn side, reading poetry aloud. I knew it would be hard for me to be heard so I decided on placard poetry, haiku-ish witticisms on cardboard, wearing a weird get-up of turtleneck stretched to cover mouth & nose so I looked like the Bazooka Joe befamed of the bubble gum wrappers… & I flashed my cards to the hundreds of commuters walking home across the Bridge. [cultural ref / photo: Opie was the Ron Howard character on the Andy Griffith Show, where he played the son of local sheriff Griffith.]
Was there something about the Yippie guerrilla action about some of your actions?
Yes, definitely! A bit of low-end political hijinks cuz so much of the scene was so trad & boring or narcissistic …
Throwing dollar bills down from the balconies at Wall St- running a pig for President)
Were the Fugs a big influence? ( Levitating the Pentagon) Punks? Situationists, Anarchists? But more with the literary establishment as your target than say the political establishment.
At some point we misbehaved, being impolite to just plain annoying stand-up perf poets with their self-flattering gibberish. After a few beers we thought it our duty to mock. But that was seldom. We actually did more of it directed at one another [as already briefly noted] – the ole back & forth, poignant witticisms meant to cut us all down to size but in a sardonic style… what was our point? Um, remaining unpredictable? I am guessing some of us just saw it all as a necessary evil that led to some feeling they were being associated with a whole scene that thrived on fabricated self-importance which got in the way of a good illuminating time had in the company of poets. A bit of Corso-Orlovsky wild-child-style antics I guess. Situationism was my preferred nectar & that of a few others as well… Some of the Unbearables later did some wandering readings that hinted at dérives…
It all reminds me of the fun and revolution at the Cabaret Voltaire. You created something new, but we’re still able to give a proud tradition of artistic rebellion an honorary nod.
We had no real homebase, wandered from venue to venue, felt at home in a few places. Our home base changed with the times & the absurd rent increases. Tin Pan Alley went under & we tried other holes like the vaunted Cedar Tavern or Max Fish but found a fair home for a time in the Life Cafe until that became too popular, crowded, touristy & we finally settled on a midtown Irish dive bar called the Shandon Star where there was an auto jukebox that if no one fed it coins would play random numbers, where the old sailor barkeep wiped down the tables with a sour musty cloth. Where the beer was piss but at least vaguely affordable & the food steam table buffet style presenting grey overcooked meats & just a few potatoes for us famished vegetarians. But here we had our liveliest conversations because we were left alone because the Shandon was bereft of style & thus almost always under populated & the barflies, stewed & blasted, were no bother & so we had our own joint for some 6 yrs or so until it went under only to return as a Burger King – & is now, capitalism eats even its own – a Wendy’s.
Ron Kolm is still alive. Other original members of the ‘ Unbearables’ are they still with us?
Was he a big influence, or were you already synthesized together sharing the same ideals?
Yes. Ron is very much alive. I’ve always touted his condensation / editing-weeding skills as someone who could edit Finnegan’s Wake down to a few interlocked haiku. A poet, short tale writer who was always hauling around 2 ratty shopping bags filled with lit goodies to hand out, zines, copies of friends’ chapbooks etc., always insisting we keep our readings short. 5 minutes & off.
Collaborators? Have there been loads?
Well we produced regular DIY assembling zines where people would make 50 or 100 copies of their page of scribbling or art, bring it to the bar where everyone would set out their piles of pages as people would move from table to table to assemble their own copies of the zine – most famously, The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side. I co-wrote short stories with Black Sifichi “Wet Dreams of the Pope” & “Contemplating Charles Bukowski’s First Kiss” and we performed them in Paris & for a special Dutch VRPO public radio broadcast. Both stories have led to trippingly-interesting lives with “Bukowski” being reprinted maybe half a dozen times. I collaborated with great artists Jonathon Rosen & Gary Panter, illustrating their artwork with my narratives, inverting the classic illustration to writing relation…
You can easily accommodate both forms of expression – both as a collaborator and as a solo artist. Do you wake up and think I’m going to switch or is an organic decision. Next I’m going to do so and so.
Any collab usually just happened out of some need or organic development like proximity in a bar where gossip overlapped – at readings Unbearables became instant cast members in mini-plays or entered their pages to be folded into the next assembling magazine. Now considering a collaboration with daughter Paloma Jet…
But I admire musicians & their facile ability to just duet, jam – writers don’t have that for the most part.
bart plantenga, Dj at Radio Libertaire, Paris, 1989 [photo by Foto Sifichi]
Bart you are indisputably the world’s leading expert on Yodelling. How did this come about?
Well, in a nutshell, & I DO mean a nutshell, the story is this: In 1996 me & Nina decided we were moving to the Netherlands & so for my last radio show at WFMU I put together a special show. As I looked over my playlists I noticed that in the evolving soundscapes I’d played lots of yodeling, without even consciously doing so. The tracks, especially Pygmy yodeling, fit into the expansive ambient tapestries I was then just starting to weave. I made a list & in the end the 2nd half of my goodbye show was all yodeling, 1.5 hours of it – from jazz to Pygmy to Swiss to cowboy to even a few ambient tracks like Deep Forest. This show somehow got the attention of a local NYC pop magazine that asked me to write an article on the subject, which I did. at 1500 words I thought I’d done a pretty OK job covering the subject. & that was that. But the yodels, in a version of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon [frequency illusion, where in my case yodels seemed to be appearing everywhere & so I started collecting lists & tracks. Someone suggested an academic journal which accepted my proposal to do a deep yodel dive & I produced my first true academic article at 11,000 words. I thought this seals the issue; I was done with yodeling. But, no, the yodels kept coming my way via friends, listeners, library & online searches & my hyper-awareness. I was going everywhere, global. A friend & Unbearable, suggested I try Routledge but I thought OK but I think they’re the largest publisher of academic books so no chance no way. But my proposal was scooped up & there went a good part of 3+ years of my life. YODEL-AY-Ee-OOoo received global glowing praise & attention everywhere – magazines, popular journals like Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Rolling Stone, TV, radio, BBC, NPR, foreign media, Al Jazeera! It was wild & went on for several years, leading to a Rough Guide to Yodel CD & many more appearances on the BBC, NPR & local stations. & now I thought I can put it all behind me & continue with the “serious” unpaid writing of serious fiction. But no, the week the book came out I was standing on a train platform, a woman recognized me & asked me if included this NY Italian cowboy radio celeb who yodeled on his popular radio program – Olivio Santoro. & I had to say no, so any completeness that had been ascribed my book was now false & so began a 7-year research-writing second volume – Yodel in HiFi & more interviews etc. [but decidedly LESS because it was a smaller publisher & I’ve done maybe 10 radio shows on the subject, was invited to lecture at prestigious places like The Library of Congress, Mediamatic [Amsterdam], The Bourse [Brussels], The Future of Folk Conference at the University of Wisconsin… I’ve since continued collection new tracks & performers & I will no doubt reach a crisis point where I’ll end up doing another article &/or radio program – my burden, my legacy.
Many would consider ‘yodelling’ the anti – hero of musical form. Either something the Swiss (I lived there once I know) or Austrians, Southern Germany might do on a mountain side.
It is an outsider, extreme vocalization, much reviled in pro & decent music circles. It is radical in its ability to upset folks & its ability to project. There are some very respected hi-culture opera divas who to spook the bourgeoisie would let out a few exuberant yodels. Yodelers are seriously marginalized even though as my 2 books & countless articles have shown, yodeling has often been used or vocalized by some of the greats in almost every genre from Beethoven to the Beatles to Sly Stone to jazz singers, hip hop, reggae, pop music, country – yodeling is done globally on all continents except Antarctica, in pretty much every country in every musical genre & yet, the paradigm go to is it is silly or ridiculous, loud, annoying … but, yea, so are wanker guitar solos or trombone solos or kazoos …
It does however feature on the Dutch group Focus’s one UK hit ‘ Hocus Pocus’ which I must admit as a teenager into hard rock I and many others found a bit weird…but not unpleasant. Could you say a bit about your interest in yodelling and how it came about. You are a bit young to remember ‘ yodelling Cowboys’ I suspect.
Don’t get me started – although you already have at your own peril. I will include some key articles expressing my advocacy for this disparaged vocalization. The yodel has a special allure, different from flamboyant vocals, in that it has much folklore clinging to it. Mythic reach, sexual connotations – there is an entire sub-genre of 70s German softcore porn that always includes yodeling at the moment of orgasm.
I did hear you once say you were moving on to ‘do wop’ another genre one might argue is a niche taste in music. It usually is backup I believe. Is that the New Direction?
Actually NO. Hey, even do-wop has some yodeling tracks… But my interest is now a bit on whistling, after a radio show on the subject of whistles in songs etc. & a fun article in PERFECT SOUND FOREVER. [provide?]
Question I usually end on – If I knocked on your door now what music would you be listening to, especially if you were writing?
Well, I listen to music all day long. Most of it is instrumental when writing. Words interrupt. I also keep [wild or prominent] percussion to a minimum. when I’m out walking, biking, erranding i am usually test-listening to a developing podcast [either Dig•Scape (politically oriented) or iMMERSE! (about immersion & aesthetics) produced for artist Charlie Morrow) or tracks for the next Wreck. I listen to my own shows on Mixcloud sometimes, or those of Black Sifichi, Audiometric or just ambient or cool jazz [Miles or minimal or dub].
I will tell you a story: Paloma was a home birth. Nina was in the bedroom & I was documenting contractions AND DJing. Everything irritated Nina, which I totally understood going through a childbirth. So we had decided that I would DJ the event… Long story short: I DJed even if it was a long childbirth process. The midwife thought it a nice idea. The 2 most memorable albums spun were The Gentle Side of John Coltrane & Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. So involved was I in the DJ task & that of keeping track of the contractions that when the birth happened I took photos but only later realized I’d forgotten to load the camera. The midwife was intrigued & after the birth asked for the names of these 2 albums and so the next day I went to visit her in her office to get an after the fact photo of Paloma with the midwife AND give her CDRs [hey, it was 2000] of the 2 albums…
In the end, I’m just winging it with every once in a while a friend or writer or street happening or a newspaper headline laying in the street, suggesting a new direction, a new metaphor, a new escape route.
plantenga and Black Sifichi, DJ-photographer, prepping for Paris reading, 1990 [photo by Audrey]
.
Malcolm Paul