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Summary (With Alan Licht)

This is audio from a performance of “Summary” that I did with guitarist Alan Licht at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. (The photo above is not from the event.) Listen to this audio file at ubu.com.

Introduction

One day at work, not inspired by anything in particular, I decided to run Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Soliloquy” — a book whose text was composed of an uncompromising transcription from tape of everything Goldsmith had spoken for a week — through Microsoft Word’s “autosummarizer” program.

Since the autosummarizer basically preserves what, statistically, has been repeated most often, I discovered that a majority of what Goldsmith had said that week (and probably every week) was “Uh” and “yeah” with some fleshy words, like “Stockhausen” and “Cheryl,” piggybacking on them past the autosummarizer’s red pencil.

My text, which I called “Summary,” seemed strangely resonant, and exposed to me the vulnerability of Goldsmith’s somewhat strident, grandiose textual program — which is to say, the risk of utter triviality, but also the way his private life can be helpless before the transformations of a text alogrithm (that he put the text online contributed to this).

I wanted to perform part of this text at my reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project on May 1, 2002, but learned, after practice runs at home, that I probably would not be able to hold anyone’s attention for the desired length (I wanted about 5 minutes of it).

I had seen and heard Alan perform in a variety of contexts over 2000-2001 — one time as solo performer riffing off a guitar loop, once as a second guitarist for a reformed DNA (with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori) and at home on .mp3s of his two bands from the 90s, Love Child and Run On.

His range was incredible, he seemed capable of doing anything, and I saw a kindred spirit in the sense that he was interested in trying out several seemingly incompatible styles that would appeal to different cultural groups and sensibilities, at times appearing a feedback “naif” and others a prog-rock virtuoso (he’s also a really good writer).

Anyway, after a test run in my apartment we decided to give it a shot — I thought, in both the rehearsal and the live performance, there was the same initial movement of apparent disjunction — very percussive and, in the voice, kind of nasal — that melded into an “ambient” phase that just flowed.

I surprised the audience by putting “Summary” at the tail end of a sequence called “What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers” — you hear the last poem of that sequence in this .mp3; there was also some funny audience response that doesn’t quite come through on this recording.