Category: Uncategorized (Page 871 of 1119)

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“The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.
He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
His work is beautiful.” – Harold Pinter on Beckett

We all know Beckett’s work for stage and his novels. Few of us know his radio drama. Until recently, I didn’t even know he wrote any. But in 1955 the BBC, intrigued by the international attention being given to the Paris production of Waiting for Godot, invited the author to write a play for radio. Beckett was initially hesitant, but wrote to his friend the shipping heiress and political activist Nancy Cunard:-

“Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging of feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something.”

That ‘nice gruesome idea’ led to All That Fall—and four other plays specifically written for the radio medium between 1957 and 1962. There’s also a sixth – From an Abandoned Work, which I haven’t heard – and a French play, translated as The Old Tune, which comes bundled with the downloads below.

Neither Beckett’s work for stage or his novels, he’d be the first to agree, are exactly big on narrative and his radio drama is no different. Here’s a short synopsis of what does – or doesn’t – happen in those five plays:-

All that Fall: Maddy Rooney, seventy years old, “two hundred pounds of unhealty fat,” makes her laborious way to the Boghill railroad station to meet her blind husband, Dan, as a surprise for him on his birthday.

Embers: Henry sits on the strand, tormented by the sound of the sea. He talks to his drowned father, who doesn’t answer, and to his wife, Ada, who does. Throughout it all the sound of the sea weaves in and out, almost like a third character.

Words and Music: Words, called Bob and Music, called Joe are forced to collaborate by the club-wielding Croak. Under duress they produce two of the most exquisite lyric poems ever written by Samuel Beckett. The play is often understood as as being “about” the agonizing difficulties of the creative process itself.

Cascando: an Opener “opens” and “closes” two characters: Voice, who desperately promises “this time” to tell a story he can finish; and Music, who equally struggles to create a finished composition.

Rough for Radio I: the grumpy MacGillycuddy gets a female visitor then makes a phone-call, receives two in return, finally securing – or perhaps admitting – the information ‘tomorrow…noon’.

Rough for Radio II: an Animator assisted by a Stenographer and the whip wielding mute character, Dick, has the task of eliciting from Fox some unknown testimony of unknown significance. If it could but be achieved then “tomorrow, who knows, we may be free!”

Samuel Beckett’s radio plays available online:

All That Fall (1957)

Embers (1959)

Words and Music (1962)

Cascando (1963)

Listen to it on Ubuweb here

‘All that Fall’ and ‘Embers’ are probably the most accessible, unless you’re a total Beckett freak, but I really like Rough for Radio II and Cascando – not because I understand them in particular, but because they’re really beguiling in an aural sense. Maybe he’s not big on conventional narrative but Beckett uses structure to poetic effect like no-one else, both in his other works and his radio drama.

So what’s the deal with radio plays, I hear you ask? English-language-wise, both the US and UK have a rich history of radio drama, spanning the first ‘soaps’ on commercial radio in the US and Orson Welles’ seminal adaptation of HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds” (which used the medium so well, a nation was raised to the edge of panic). And by the mid-1940s, the BBC was producing over 400 radio plays each year. These days, radio drama has a minimal presence on terrestrial radio in the US, but the BBC’s commitment to this most idiosyncratic of media remains strong. In the UK, Radio 4’s daily ‘Afternoon Drama’ attracts an average audience of 500,000. That’s half a million. Five days a week. Fifty two weeks a year. And most of these are not adaptations of novels, short stories or stage plays: they are works written specifically for radio – that is, they take full advantage of the medium.

So again, what’s the deal with radio plays? For me, a good radio play is the next best thing to music, in that the content bypasses the eye and mainlines itself straight into your brain. Cos radio plays are all sound. So far, so obvious, right?

But what does ‘all sound’ actually mean? For the listener, compared with say watching TV drama or films, it means YOU get to create your own version of the characters and story in your own head because sound has to be, after smell, the most connotative of the senses.

What’s the first thing we become aware of, in the womb? Our mother’s heart. One could argue, therefore, that our ears are of primary way of engaging with our environment.

What differentiates homo sapiens from other animals? Speech – and how do we receive speech? Through our ears.

Sound is primal. Sound is personal and thus both subjective and infinitely ambiguous: the same sound will have as many connotations as it has listeners. Sound is intimate: the lover’s whisper, the bully’s hissed threat, the child’s cry, the dog’s howl. Yeah, I’m rambling a bit here, but that’s purely because of the very special and unique relationship each of us has with any given collection of sounds, which in turn renders the aural experience difficult to describe.

Okay, I’ll admit it: there’s something very unnatural feeling about sitting down and listening to radio drama as it is broadcast, whether it’s on an actual radio or via a website. There’s nothing to look at. You (well, I do) start to fidget after the first five minutes. Worse still, I close my eyes in the hope this will let me focus – and I fall asleep. We’re so visually oriented these days, we don’t know what to do with our eyes when we’re not using ‘em to take in information.

Listening is defo a skill. What I do – thanks my digital radio and its sd card – is record plays then transfer ’em over to my mp3 player and take ’em out with me. On walks. On train journeys. On the bus. With my eyes actively engaged in looking at nothing in particular, my ears are freed up to allow the drama to unfold somewhere deep in my brain. And if you’ve never listened to radio drama I urge you to take the plunge, cos at its best? There’s nothing like it.

Other Notable People Who You Might Not Know Have Written Radio Plays

Mr. Pinter : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slight_Ache

Mr. Orton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruffian_on_the_Stair

Mr. Behan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Behan#Plays

Mr. Minghella: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Minghella#Selected_plays

Mr. Adams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

Ms. Carter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Carter#Radio_plays

More recently, one of my fav radio plays is Matthew Broughton’s wonderfully eerie The Rain Maker. Due to copyright issues, you can’t download it, but I have an mp3of it, if anyone wants to send me a flash drive. Here’s a link to the writer talking about The Rain maker process:-

http://matthewbroughton.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/the-rain-maker/

Another amazing piece of writing for radio is Jack Thorne’s People Snogging in Public Places. Again, due to copyright issues, this isn’t available to listen to right now, but keep an eye on the radio schedules cos it may be repeated.

Finally, in true Becketian tradition, let me end where I began, with himself. There’s been a recent vogue for ‘staging’ his radio plays: here’s a trailer for one:-

Here’s a Mexican version of Embers, in Spanish:-

Here’s the original 1957 BBC recording of All That Fall – as a bonus, you get to stare at a particularly craggy Sam as you listen.

And here’s a photo from his little known ‘buff’ period.

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well, I’ve never thought of you as a Tarantino fan. I am a fan of most of his films, and I’ve also heard quite good things about this new one, so I’m very curious to see it for myself. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Ah, of course that’s the best news — that you’re writing something and into it! Keep the muse close. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yeah, it sounds hot in NYC from everything I hear. Sorry. We’re on the mellow side of hot right now. I hadn’t heard of that Rodney Evans film. Curious. Ha ha, when I saw ‘Hostel’ gay porn was the first thing that sprang to mind. ** Jeff J, Glad you dug it. Yeah, I’m mega-grateful for the currently tolerable heat. Just hoping it hangs out until summer bites the dust. I’ve had the Woosters and Reverdy in group round-up posts, but they haven’t been individually spotlit. I love Reverdy, so let me see what I can sort out, and doing a full-fledged post on the Woosters is a no brainer, now that you mention it. I’ll need to see how much evidence of their shows is online. I think I would want to concentrate on the early to mid-80s period. I’ll check. Good to hear about the new Zambreno and Rose Etter. I’m obviously looking forward to them. ‘Sentimental Education’ is so, so great, right? Yeah, the prose, wow. I’ll look for your email and write you back straight away. ** Misanthrope, I have a feeling I’ll like it. I can’t think of a Tarantino film I haven’t liked to one degree for another. Oh, I didn’t like ‘Death Proof’. But Kurt Russell was great in it. ** Corey Heiferman, Hey there, Corey. Yeah, those posters are sweethearts. Well, technically I’m not a Parisian, I’m just an extremely extended visitor. Fingers remain crossed about film school and that you’ll hear as pronto as possible. No, I’ve never personally been into Tarot. I’m not so very mystically inclined. I’ve had readings done for me. And I’ve even found a couple of them pretty eerie. Mm, hard to have a complex knee-jerk reaction to your film idea as I can’t really picture the place, but I do have a knee-jerk reaction to encourage you to give that idea every chance in the world. I do like Stefan Zweig, yes. I can’t remember if I’ve done a post about him. I’ll check. Enjoy the memoir, man. ** Okay. Today’s restored post is another one that comes quite a long time ago. It was made for this place d.l. Jax aka the writer/ performer/ director Jack Dickson who was one the blog’s most true blue, valuable and beloved community members way back when. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you so much from the future to Jack if you’re out there. See y’all tomorrow.

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Dear Dennis, let this post introduce you to Fran Herndon, the Beat-era California painter I’ve admired and loved for the past 20 years or more. This month and next a gallery in San Francisco, Altman Siegel, is running a retrospective exhibition of her work, so I want to urge San Franciscans and visitors to come on down and take a look at it. The show has been organized by the young Canadian curator Lee Plested, assisted by myself. Maybe some of your readers will take a look at this post here, and come and see for themselves, in person, the things I like most about this strange and disquieting work.

I became acquainted with Fran Herndon through my work on Jack Spicer, the poet whose biography Lew Ellingham and I worked on in the 80s and 90s. Eventually our book, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, appeared in 1998 (Wesleyan University Press). When I met Lew in the early 80s, I asked him, did Spicer really know about art? (He had founded, with five of his former students at the San Francisco Art Institute, an exhibition space they called the “6 Gallery,” but you know how sometimes you do things just to go along with a pushy crowd? Maybe, I thought, maybe Spicer was weak like I am in this one regard.) Lew advised me to look at Fran Herndon’s work and then make up my mind for she, Lew said, was the visual artist with whom he was closest.

When I met her I remember feeling that strange thrill that I had when introducing myself to the redoubtable Elaine Sturtevant, or when grabbing the hand of Marianne Faithfull as she stormed into “Why D’Ya Do It” onstage at the Fillmore. Each had been there (“there” in some ultimate, Platonic sense) at the beginning, and done something unique, bizarre, beautiful and misunderstood. Fran Herndon showed me into her place in the unfashionable Richmond district of San Francisco—on an avenue totally off my route!—and it would be hard to describe what an Angela Carter-esque experience this was, but in fairy tales one is often taken offguard because one is on wholly new territory, without most of the rules one lives by, unable to cling to familiar landmarks. I wasn’t there long, but I asked her to sign my copy of Everything as Expected, and she concurred. She had been asked about Jack Spicer, I expect, many times before, but I thought if I took the high road, and approached him through her own art work, I might come up with a different angle than all those other bozos. Thus began a long engagement.

Everything As Expected is a peculiar book, written by Fran’s then-husband, the late Jim Herndon in the early 1970s. James Herndon was once quite a famous author, a schoolteacher who has written up his experiences teaching in the inner city schools of the Bay Area and made a pair of amazing books about them, works of radical pedagogy that had enormous infuence in their day. The Way It Spozed to Be came out in 1968, and its successor, How to Survive in Your Native Land, in 1971. Remember the season of The Wire that focused on public school systems and its built-in wiring for failure? Total Jim Herndon knockoff. In Everything As Expected, Herndon wrote of the summer of 1962, when Fran Herndon had embarked on a complicated series of “sports collages” under the tutelary spirit of Jack Spicer (1925-1965). Fran worked from sports magazines, tearing out illustrations that caught her eye, and making a new picture each week by arranging the found elements and then treating them with watercolor, gouache, sculptural ornamentation, mounting them on masonite, cardboard, sometimes adding homemade frames. Herndon’s book reproduces almost all of the collages finished that spring, summer and fall, adding some wry, even caustic anecdotes in the Vonnegut manner. The text becomes an extended meditation on magic—the magic of bringing something to our world, from what Spicer called the “Invisible World.” Here in San Francisco it’s easy to feel magic all around one every day, but to find its source is a sometimes terrifying avon.

Years later, last October in fact, the curator and writer Scott Watson came to visit San Francisco from Vancouver, where he directs the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. Scott came to attend the opening of SFMOMA’s exhibition “New Work: R.H. Quaytman,” but we organized a trip to the Richmond so Scott could pay a studio visit on Fran Herndon. We brought a second curator with us Lee Plested, who had worked with Scott at UBC and with me at CCA, the art school in San Francisco where I sometimes teach. Scott asked Fran to show us not only her most recent work, but to take us back to the beginning, to her garage, where in a stable of flat files she had miraculously kept her large paintings from the earliest days of work. I hadn’t seen but the tiniest number of these pictures before, and Lee, whose first meeting with Fran this was, was as blown away as I. He hit on the idea of somehow organizing a show to exhibit this early work, and within a week or two after our visit announced to me that he and I were going to curate it together, and that he had secured the participation of the gallerist Claudia Altman Siegel, and the thing was practically was for the fall. Well, that was around the New Year, and now months and months later the show is up.

Fran has always maintained the respect of coterie of experimental poets; from Spicer, Blaser, Duncan, George Stanley and Jess in the early days, to the very young of today. In recent years the poet Avery Burns and his wife, Andrea Koehler, have organized several shows of Fran’s work at the North Beach gallery Canessa Park: beautiful shows, vivid, wildly ornate and personal. Altman Siegel is a very different sort of art space, clean, uncluttered, with a clientele of international artists, curators and collectors, what my dad would have admiringly called a “blue chip” gallery. At 82 or 83 this was a different sort of opening for Fran Herndon, but she was there, still somehow as young as she was the day I met her, very radiant and composed under this new, somewhat bewildering barrage of attention. (Dennis, even Christian Marclay poked his head in.) Here’s the essay I wrote for the catalogue of the present show, which closes at the end of October, please go in and take a look if you’re in town.

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p.s. Hey. My dear friend and literary comrade/hero, the late and very great writer Kevin Killian, guest-hosted several posts for my blog over the course of the years.  I will be restoring them for the obvious reason that the excellent and generous work he did for this place should be available to all. This, the first restoration, is his introduction and homage to the little known Beat era, San Francisco-based painter Fran Herndon. I hope you enjoy it. ** Shane Christmass, Hi. No, I haven’t seen that film. That conclusion you speak of is enough to get me hunting for it, of course, and the clip looks fun enough. Thank you. Nope, haven’t heard the Freddie Gibbs / Madlib album. I’m guessing you think I should? Assuming I’ve guessed right, I’ll check it out. And I have been following that news story, but only since finding that article you linked to. That gave it the extra spin my interests needed. Thanks again and overall, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed they are. Your sale is still on? Did you ever see Steve Erickson’s question as to whether people in other locations can purchase things through the post? Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein’s big house sale is still ongoing. And today he asks if anyone is interested in back issues of “Cahiers du Cinema”. Hit him up, if so. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yes, based on those photos, the failure of that particular park is vastly understandable. Yesterday was unspeakably brutal here. Jesus. Today the temperature is lower but the humidity is sky high, so it’s much better but no picnic. Enjoy your surrounding pleasantness. ** Bill, Hi. Well, the building that housed Planete Magique is now Gaite Lyrique, a prominent Paris venue for experimental music and multi-media art shows. Recently Tim Hecker, Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi, and Sunn0))) have played there, for example. There isn’t the slightest trace of the amusement park. It was gutted and reformed. But Gisele tells me that, during the transition when the place was a ruin and looked exactly like the photos, it was a hot spot for illegal raves. I haven’t been able to find any video evidence of them, sadly. The other park is just a giant empty swamp now. Yes, Spreepark. I was going to go visit its remains the last time I was in Berlin, but it was too much a trek given the time limits. Dude, it was 108 degrees yesterday! The hell it was is unimaginable even to me who barely lived through it. ** Steve Erickson, You’re going to be a beats maestro! Now that’s interesting. Link us up. Oh, man, it was really fucking brutal yesterday. The air was so hot and thick it was hard to breathe. It was still 106 degrees when I went to bed last night. I live across the street from an IKEA, and, when I briefly ventured out yesterday to buy cigarettes, I saw that, due to its air-conditioning, the police had commandeered the store, and they were directing old people and homeless people inside where there nurses and stretchers and things to treat people. Never seen anything like that before. Just crazy. I have followed Ka5sh a bit, and, like you, I haven’t found any of his recent stuff to be very interesting at all. Seems like he might have shot the exciting part of this wad in the initial burst. ** Right. Be with the wit and wisdom and knowledge-sharing of the much missed Kevin Killian today. See you tomorrow.