In coordination with Factory School's recent publication of Charles Bernstein and Ben Yarmolinsky's Blind Witness: Three American Operas, we've launched a new PennSound page hosting complete recordings of all three operas, as well as videos from the Blind Witness book launch at Medicine Show, this past May.
Originally written and performed nearly two decades ago, these three vernacular operas — Blind Witness News (1990), The Subject (1991) and The Lenny Paschen Show (1992) — are perhaps even more pointed critiques of American society in the present: we are still a nation at war (at war with the same country, in fact), still a nation obsessed with the news, with celebrity, with our own inner workings. However, in these works, we discover a memento of simpler times, before our slipping headlong down a postmodern precipice, and through that trace we are capable of marking tremendous differences. The nightly newscast so wonderfully parodied in Blind Witness News (with its anonymized news team of Jill Johns, Jack James, Jane Jones and John Jacks) seems quaint in comparison to myriad channels of 24-hour news, yet the same hollow tropes remain. Likewise, Jenny Midnight's psychoanalysis has a human (if sometimes sinister) touch in the age of a faceless psycho-pharmaceutical industry. And, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, the Morton Downey Jr-esque Lenny Paschen exists to distract us from the fact that most contemporary television is equally outrageous, equally offensive, equally artificed.
Social commentary notwithstanding, the operas also provide immeasurable pleasures, starting with the uncanny juxtaposition between Yarmolinsky's lush classical melodies and accompaniments, and Bernstein's oft-hilarious libretti. Here, we see the poet's continued fascination with authentic speech (as delivered through television, advertisements, etc.) and common mythologies, seen in contemporaneous collections such as 1994's Dark City. In passages such as Lenny's abrasive monologue, Jack and Jane's opening fugue of news-speak, or John Jack's rendering of abstract sports arcana, we witness Bernstein's great joy in manipulating the conventions of everyday language and, can't help but enjoy it. At the same time, amidst this savage lampooning of a candy-colored culture, we also find sympathetic and world-weary characters — particularly Jenny Midnight — and this touch of empathy makes our experience that much richer.
PennSound's Ben Yarmolinsky author page also includes the composer's 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where he discusses his opera Anita, inspired by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings. Click on the title above for a truly unique listening experience.
We've recently added a new talk by the inimitable American poet and scholar, Robert Duncan — "The Adventure of Whitman's Line" was recorded by Bob Perelman in San Francisco on February 18, 1979. The lecture runs more than two hours long and is presented in three segments. This new recording nicely complements another recent addition, the 1983 lecture, "Another Look at Imagism," which came to us courtesy of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and also runs for two hours.
These latest recordings supplement an already-impressive group of Duncan lectures — covering topics as diverse as Shakespeare, H.D., Ezra Pound and physics — which are but a small portion of the overall contents of our Robert Duncan author page, launched this past February. Duncan's effortless (and tireless) genius is on full display here, with hours upon hours of readings from the Vancouver and Berkeley Poetry Conferences, the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, SUNY Buffalo and the University of British Columbia, among others. Click on the title above to start exploring this vast collection, which spans four decades — from the late-50s into the mid-80s.
