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Here are some of the audio and paperback projects I've produced, relevant to the Twentieth Century, and edging into the Twenty-First.

The Little Red Radio Project

SOUND ART SOUND TEXT was a radio program on KCSB, the campus station of the University of California, Santa Barbara, running in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. In general, we expanded the usual DJ shtick to include readings and music from other times, other places. One major influence was the German experimentalists who at that time were raising radio to an artform. The hosts were Sasha Newborn and James Forman. (Programs delving into the 19th Century are listed in the right column, usually as simple audiofiles with no scripts available.)

IZAK STARFISHER was an experimental radio group: Fritz Folkerts, Erik Villesvik, and Sasha Newborn. We modeled ourselves after the Firesign Theatre group, one of whose members, David Ossman, was a Santa Barbara resident.




Second Life: The Summer of Love 1967 (video)

Izak Starfisher: Gunter Grass, Local Anesthetic (in 8 parts)

SoundArtSoundText: Al Drake (special issue)

SoundArtSoundText: Count Basie, Part One

SoundArtSoundText: Count Basie, Part Two

SoundArtSoundText: Robert Cole

SoundArtSoundText: Dreamscapes

SoundArtSoundText: Mitch Cohen interview

SoundArtSoundText: Farley Mowat

SoundArtSoundText: Ken Nordine

SoundArtSoundText: Charles Olson

SoundArtSoundText: Octavio Paz

SoundArtSoundText: Ezra Pound

SoundArtSoundText: Edith Sitwell

Bandanna Books

WALT WHITMAN marked a new beginning, a really new idea of America. He threw overboard all the ideas of poetry as it stood in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Rhyme—out the window. Thumpety-thump rhythm, iambs, dactyls, trochaic—out, out, out. Pastorals, Classical references, odes, didactic poems—banished. Stanzas—piffle. High-flown praise, lofty rhetoric, edifying verse—nah. What was left turned out to be quite significant, building on the uniquely American capacity called ingenuity, to make do, to think anew, to make a fresh break so as to discover—oneself, and one's own inhabited country. The Original Leaves of Grass had no poem titles, no author listed, but it sparked a sea change in literature.

EDGAR ALLAN POE was a restless mind, inventing genres that survive today: detective stories, poetry to a purpose, fascination with the morbid. Poe was a pioneer of psychological fiction. The First Detective: Three Stories by Edgar Allan Poe are the three stories he wrote featuring a dilettante detective, his bumbling sidekick, and by-the-book police official. Sound familiar? It's a formula used over and over again, most famously by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who himself declared that Poe was his source for the Sherlock Holmes stories.

GHALIB was the son of a mercenary chieftain in the years before the British East India Company created the Raj — in fact, he lived through the Sepoy Mutiny, and addressed Queen Victoria as a court poet might, to ask for her financial support. His witty and personally revealing poetry won him friends, and enemies. He wrote in Persian and Urdu; the Ghazals of Ghalib are translated from Urdu.

LEO TOLSTOY was a Count in Imperial Russia, but his mind was modern. Besides being a world-famous author of epic novels, Tolstoy was instrumental in saving a whole sect, the Doukhobors, from persecution by sending them to Canada. His writings after the novels investigated Christianity with a fresh, a novelist's master eye, resulting in The Little Gospel, a synoptic story woven from the three Biblical gospel stories that share most of the elements. However, Tolstoy understood that the editorial additions, the "crust" that had grown over the real story, included miracles, the fake genealogy (which was Joseph's ancestors, not Jesus'), the resurrection, all elements that had nothing to do with the message of Jesus. Digging through the layers of churchly hypocrisy, Tolstoy insisted upon non-violence as a central tenet of Jesus' teaching. Tolstoyan Christianity hearkened back to early pre-Nicean, even pre-Luke, practices: brotherly love, the Kingdom of God on earth. Gandhi took the message to heart, and turned it into a political movement that eventually won independence for India.




Bandanna Books • 1212 Punta Gorda St., #13 • Santa Barbara CA 93103
Copyright © 2010 Bandanna Books









PAPERBACK
Apology & Crito
Areopagitica
Leaves of Grass
Sappho: Poems
Dante & His Circle
Detective, Poe
Ghazals of Ghalib
Merchant of Venice
Gandhi on the Gita
Don't Panic: Guide to Term Papers
Myths & Legends of Mexico (Eng/Sp)