The Missing Links
Nine films by and about John Cage. * John Cage‘s “Lecture on Nothing” (audio). * Cage against the machine! * The rehearsals for Glenn Branca‘s Symphony N °15. * Why do we hate modern classical music? * Paul Morley vs Alex Ross. * The 34th anniversary of the Sex Pistols on the Today programme. * […]
Maintenant #40: Sergej Timofejev
When we started the Orbita, poetry readings were actually kind of gatherings of sad drinkers with beards who were dressed in big polo-neck sweaters. After or even during every poetry reading people got drunk and depressed. We didn’t like it this way. We never had a manifesto or something like a new poetical ideology. We just grow up in the tusovka where poets, artists and musicians were mixed. And that was quite natural to us — to make efforts to bring poetry into collaboration with other forms of culture, to find for poetry an equal position amongst these forms. But we just pushed some boundaries further… if we are crossing boundaries we are getting new audiences which were not so “literature oriented” before, that’s for sure. When we were performing in the clubs some young people came after and said: “We are surprised, we never thought that modern poetry could be just about us and what we feel…”
In the 40th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Latvian poet Sergej Timofejev.
Five Poems
A man comes in, his suit is crumpled
And there are thin-rimmed glasses on his face.
He’s arguing with the emptiness, he’s crazy, he’s a wind.
The thin-rimmed glasses quiver.
His suit is crumpled, he argues quickly.
The man comes in and fills the room.
The man comes in, he’s been coming in for hours.
His suit is crumpled. He argues too quickly.
His glasses quiver, he’s an idiot, he argues.
He’s a wind, he’s crazy, he’s coming in.
By Sergej Timofejev.