Music

Jackson Mac Low

“Jackson Mac Low’s marvels of verbal invention provoke nonstop streams of readerly imagination. In Bloomsday, anything can happen, and continues to.” -Charles Bernstein

Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago on September 12, 1922. He was a poet and composer, and a writer of performance pieces, essays, plays, and radio works. He was also a painter and multimedia performance artist, and often worked in collaboration with his wife, Anne Tardos. He is the author of twenty-six books, and his works have been published in many anthologies and periodicals as well as read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North America, Europe, and New Zealand.

For more info on Mac Low’s life and work see www.jacksonmaclow.com

Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones

World renown dancer / choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane were partners in art and life from 1971 to Zane’s death in the late 80’s, sharing a home, a dance company, and a celebrated creative process. Body Against Body traces their dramatic (and often controversial) careers as they intertwine and collide in a unique choreographic collaboration that has influenced much contemporary dance by merging cultures, races, and artistic styles. The book includes Zane’s haunting photos, Jones’ visceral poetry and prose, performance scripts and scenarios, a biographical essay (with performance catalog), dance photos of the company in action, and commentaries by dancers, critics, composers, musicians, visual artists, and a range of others. Among the artists who have contributed their creative visions to these collaborations are Bill Katz, Robert Longo, Peter Gordon, Keith Harring, and Max Roach.

OUT OF PRINT

Alfred A. Tomatis

This autobiography was originally published in French (1977). The Tomatis Method, which helps develop listening and communication skills, is used in 15 different countries. Tomatis addresses his experience with some of the most difficult therapeutic and educational problems (e.g., stuttering, autism, dyslexia, balance, motor control, and integration) and shows how they are affected and controlled by the ear. His account will be welcomed by speech therapists, performing artists, educators, and psychotherapists.

“What Tomatis has done with sound and hearing is virtually a Copernican revolution.” -Jean Houston, Ph.D., author of The Possible Human

“Tomatis’ work is the long awaited foundation for what may well be the most important research in sound, learning and health.” -Don Campbell, author of Introduction to the Musical Brain and Rhythms of Learning

“In the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Emanuel Swedenborg and Nicola Tesla, Tomatis is an irrepressible pioneer.” -Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy

Franz Kamin

EGZ Book of Frogs was originally written by “Uncle Franz” for the child (EGZ) that lives inside his adult friend Eve Rosenthal; and was illustrated by another friend, Kathy Bourbonais. This and several other little stories were later set to music for the mime and flute team of Jane Adler and Andrew Bolotowsky. The book is available either with or without a recording (7 inch LP) of these pieces. Also available from Station Hill Press: Franz Kamin’s book Ann Margret Loves You and 12 inch LP Behavioral Drift II/ Rugugmool.

If I Am A Musical Thinker is a statement of the aesthetic, social, and spiritual credo of the influential American composer and writer Benjamin Boretz. Boretz proposes that artistic expression answers primal human needs for experiencing identity through articulation in artistic media; and further, that theoretical reflection is — constructively or deconstructively.

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Andy Mister

Liner Notes is a semi-narrative prose poem, a meditation on alienation and pop culture. Beginning with the Beach Boy’s unfinished masterpiece “Smile”, Mister describes a world populated by ghosts. Adrift on a sea of drug use, boredom and popular entertainment, Mister traces his relationship to the obsessive collection of ephemera and the coterminous feelings of isolation and loss. Like an iPod on shuffle, lyrical descriptions of urban landscapes and memories of failed relationships mix with song lyrics and deadpan anecdotes of death, failure. In the end a life, like the book itself, is assembled from the detritus of pop culture. As he writes, “Each billboard is a monument to our ability to believe in anything, at least for a moment. Then it’s gone.” But belief’s shadow remains, amid the news of a world shot full of holes, which Liner Notes’ hauntings seem to delineate like the chalk figure at the center of every homicide scene we’ve ever imagined ourselves appearing within… “There’ll probably be some music there, lining your eyelids.”

I love the blunt care for real time, with all its gaps & noises & bends, Andy Mister takes in the searching, powerful scroll of paragraphs that make up Liner Notes. Working through the implied vision of an undecided note taker prone to stark assertions and excavating insights to perception, Mister puts songs at the heart of his relationship to language & digs away at the disappearances they reflect in their, and his, histories. “The world becomes boring when you brush away the detritus” says the same mind that listens to own its aloneness, & desires, evenly, “to dissolve each distance in distance”. —Anselm Berrigan

Andy Mister’s loving and disturbing “notes” create a complex harmony (sympathy) between public noise and private revelation. In the midst of Liner Notes we read: “Childhood is a song I can barely remember the words to. They only come back to me when I am thinking of something else.” that something else is at the heart of this compelling and magical book. Listen! —Peter Gizzi

Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” comes immediately to mind, but Liner Notes has more in common with David Markson’s late books or with Frank O’Hara’s “Hatred” than with any pop song. What’s most evident, though, is that Andy Mister cares for his readers by caring about his subject. He’s your friend, and he’s alive. —Graham Foust

I had forgotten with what feverishness I used to study the back jackets of my LPs. Was I seeking to understand my desire? The sadness of desolate beauty? The sensitive youth’s love affair with death? It’s all here—as breathless and disarmingly self-conscious as the sweetest parking-lot kiss. I love this book. —Jennifer Moxley

Huffington Post Review by Seth Abramson

Fanzine review and interview

Volta Pick by Eli Noah Gordon

Boston Review appearance of Liner Notes

Sink Review of Liner NotesFall 2013 

The power of music to effect significant changes in consciousness The power of music to effect significant changes in consciousness has long been known, but it was Helen L. Bonny’s pioneer work in the field of music therapy that first offered a specific method using guided imagery for altering our state of awareness. This updated and expanded edition offers step-by-step descriptions of twenty-five listening experiences designed to open new doors to creativity, insight, and self-understanding.

John Beaulieu

Richly illustrated with pictures, stories, and the author’s experience as composer and therapist, this book explores the history and practice of healing sound from ancient philosophies to the practical applications of therapy, religion, and art: mantra, toning, voice evaluation, tuning forks, and music listening. It also contains guidelines and exercises for teaching and an evaluation of music therapy today.

”…destined to become an invaluable resource for teachers, students and practitioners in all the healing arts. (He) guides his reader through all there is to know about sound healing—perfectly integrating didactic left-brain material with right-brain inner journeying.” – Elisabeth L. Macrae, MD

“(His) development of the body as sound is artfully done and is maintained by a well-supported and cohesive systems view. I especially appreciate his presentation of the practical aspects of sound energetics.” – James Z. Said, DC, ND

“Great! Finally a book on the important topic of healing with sound that comes from clinical experience—not facile esoteric speculation.” – David Gonzalez, Certified Music Therapist

Michael Ruby

The Star-Spangled Banner spans the 15-year arc from 9/11 to 11/9, concluding with a poem based on voices overheard the night of Trump’s election by poet Michael Ruby, a journalist who has covered U.S. politics for decades. Ruby began the book in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when he saw people freely using U.S. national symbols for their own political purposes. He decided to do the same thing for poetic purposes. Every poem in the book, which is dedicated to Jasper Johns and Jimi Hendrix, uses the 81 words of the national anthem and inserts words into the spaces between them. The poems have different vocabularies—sometimes surrealist like Ruby’s related book, American Songbook (2013), sometimes documentary and personal like his trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (2012). The Star-Spangled Banner is an artistic encounter with one of America’s leading national symbols, using the frame of Francis Scott Key’s War of 1812 lyrics in unexpected ways, and an unusual verbal and emotional portrait of the time from 9/11 to 11/9.

ADVANCE PRAISE for The Star-Spangled Banner

Michael Ruby’s The Star-Spangled Banner bravely demonstrates how history and politics infuse the quotidian. Throughout this innovative collection, Ruby disrupts the nation’s political discourse by reclaiming the words of our national anthem in ways neither Francis Scott Key nor any contemporary politician ever could have imagined. In this bold experiment in contemporary poetics, Ruby charts our country’s trajectory from 9/11 to the 2016 election: a true American tragedy and failure. By collaging both poetic and political lineages, Ruby redefines the possibilities of documentary poetry to take on the urgent difficulties of our times.
–Brenda Coultas

Michael Ruby has written a spangled and wild critique of American exceptionalism and made it into his own gleaming anthem for our moment, in this way reminding us that we can renovate our broken mythos into a song for oneself but with the knowledge that out of the one, many, many left behind, suffering abjections beyond anthem and national identity. Formally astute and rhythmically alive these sequences hold their nerve and deliver a gut punch.
—Peter Gizzi

Brooklyn of ample poetry was mine. (Props to Walt Whitman.) Looking west, wandering the waterfront below the Bridge, I’m often whacked by the legacy of my borough’s place in American poetry. Michael Ruby also looks west from Brooklyn as he riffs on America’s national anthem. Striating the text, like the design of the stripes on the banner itself, he inserts his own observations and literary/historical musings on America between the hymn’s words. Structurally, one is impelled to ask, are these sanctified words constraints like prison bars, or hand holds provided to climb ever higher on? One is confronted with an eternal American question: Why must freedom be the opposite of perfection?
–Loren Munk (aka James Kalm)

[following design] Michael Ruby e x p l o r e s P o e t r y.
—Richard Kostelanetz

Tenzin Wangyal

This book is a presentation of Dzogchen as taught in the Bon tradition. Dzogchen has began to be familiar to Westerners parincipally through the teachings of Nyingmapa school. In WONDERS OF THE NATURAL MIND, the author presents the Dzogchne teachings based on the Zhang Shung NyanGyud, the fundamental Bon text. The test gives an epitome of the main points of Dzogchen, its relation to the various systems of Bon teachings, and the authoer’s personal relfections on the practive of Dzogchen in the West.