by Tom Tenney on July 30, 2010
This is the final piece for my Radio Narratives class, a ten minute audio art/umentary entitled “Off the Grid,” which profiles (to use the term loosely), three of my favorite art stars: Don Eng, John King, and Walter Gambin. Special thanks to Reverend Jen for providing some miraculous VO which pulled everything together for me in my hour of need. As always, I recommend listening with a good set of headphones. Comments and criticism are encouraged.
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Tagged as:
art stars,
performance,
radio
by Tom Tenney on July 18, 2010
This is the third of four radio pieces I’ll be posting this summer. The directive for this one was to create a piece that fit into the theme “Home” as presented on the CD put out by the Deep Wireless Festival. I chose to document my trip back to Boston, earlier this summer, for my high school reunion at the Cambridge School of Weston. I had recorded several hours of the reunion, not knowing if I would use it for anything, so it was a challenge to create something out of this stuff that I had recorded without idea or direction. I’m fairly pleased with the result, although I think parts of the narration are problematic and could use some additional editing.
As always, please listen with a good set of headphones if possible.
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Tagged as:
radio,
sound art
by Tom Tenney on July 8, 2010
This is my second production project for my Radio Narratives class. The assignment was to create a piece following the Snap Judgement guidelines, with one of the following titles/themes: Great Expectations, The Wizard of Oz, or Busted. I chose the first, and wrote a script about my romance with a young German actress back in 1986, based on my journal entries and her letters. Thanks to Noel Dinneen and Emilie Blythe McDonald for providing voices for the young me and the young Heidi.
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Tagged as:
radio,
storytelling
by Tom Tenney on June 29, 2010
So, this is my first foray into sound art, apart from audio I’ve designed for live performance pieces. It’s the first production project for my ‘Radio Narratives’ class at The New School, a three-minute sonic collage created almost entirely from appropriated materials, mostly soundtracks from military training and educational films, and follows the guidelines for the Third Coast Festival Short Docs Challenge. I’ve included a brief statement of intent below, but my suggestion is to listen to the piece before reading, if you choose to read it at all.
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Statement of Intent:
The piece was actually inspired by a Brecht quote about “an inescapable profusion and confusion in the tower of Babel.” I thought that “I didn’t know that” would be a good starting point for an exploration of state-controlled “truths” with the title phrase representing the public’s naive willingness to accept what we now recognize as mistruth and propaganda. I wanted the tension between time periods to emphasize how relativistic these messages are, depending on when we hear them – hopefully the mixing of periods emphasized the relationship between contemporary and dated material.
I originally titled the piece ” I Didn’t Know That: A Triptych” because I tried to create three distinct sections. The first is the monologue of media controlled messages, the second is a dialogue between the messages. The third section actually begins with Brecht himself reading a poem in his native German entitled “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”, which, in translation, begins:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
Layered on top of this is the voice of McLuhan discussing his idea of “resonance” – nonlinear, nonlogical comprehension of sounds and images. These are the 2 voice of “authenticity” that are eventually buried by the familiar voices introduced in the first two parts, which are layered over them to create a cacophony that is (hopefully) a sum greater than its parts. Anyway, I removed the subtitle since it didn’t strictly fit within the Third Coast guidelines and I’m sort of glad I did, as I felt it opened the piece up to a greater breadth of interpretation.
Tagged as:
collage,
mashups,
radio,
Remix
by Tom Tenney on June 7, 2010
Moby - photo by Maurice Narcis
With the RE/Mixed Media Festival a week behind me and the ‘official’ post-mortem with the band a week ahead – I need to start recording the experience. Maybe it’s just snips of memory, conversations, thoughts or feelings that floated through. A lot ‘happened,’ but this festival was something that came together between the cracks – that became a living being with breath and movement and thought – when we weren’t looking… while we were occupied ‘doing’ everything that needed to be done. It’s the baby that started growing after a night that started with a feeling – one of love, we hope – who needs your attention every day before it comes into the light, but who you do not ‘know’ until that day it’s born. [continue reading this post...]
Tagged as:
copyright,
festival,
film,
performance,
Remix,
Video
by Tom Tenney on June 4, 2010
Just recovered an old cassette tape of my high school band from about 1982 (I was 17), The Ethnic Slurs, most famous for playing the basement of my mom’s place outside Boston. Here we do a cover of the Voidoids’ classic, Love Comes in Spurts, with David Olem on crazy vocals, David Barker on guitar, Aaron Garrett on sax and ‘dropping things,’ and me on bass and snarky anti-hippy commentary. Hey, we were punks. :-)
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Tagged as:
Music
by Tom Tenney on May 20, 2010
NOTE: Written for ‘American Independent Cinema’ class at The New School; May 5, 2010.
The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of Independent Cinema
“As in the other arts in America today – painting, poetry, sculpture, theater, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years – our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one.”
Cassavetes
The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after their first meeting in 1961, is telling. In the late 50’s and early 60’s, independent and experimental filmmakers, frustrated with the predictable commercial formulae of Hollywood cinema, began aligning themselves and what they were doing with the art and performance world, where they saw exciting changes taking place. The original intent of this essay was to attempt to answer the question: How does what was happening in independent and experimental film in the late 50’s and 60’s compare to what was happening in art and performance at the same time? What were the common influences and how did they influence each other? As I dug into the research, it became obvious that trying to create clean lineages and clearly drawn cause-and-effect statements would be impossible. Attempting to define cultural influences is like trying to bottle smoke – there are simply too many artists and too many elements contributing to the cultural zeitgeist to confidently make such black and white statements. The alternative seemed to be the much easier task of making broad generalizations like the late 50’s and 60’s were “when the American avant-garde began to define itself, in opposition to European modernism and to post-war American society,” (“Ages” 10) or that the cultural influences had to do with the ascendance of youth culture, largely due to the popularity of rock n’ roll.
Instead of relying on such generalizations, I decided instead to hone my research to focus on three representative independent filmmakers of the time – John Cassavetes, Bruce Conner, and Andy Warhol – and examine how trends in art and performance influenced their works in particular. In this way we can hope to extrapolate a larger view by looking at a small cross-section consisting of three artists who, while working in very different ways from each other, all contributed to the changes that took place in American Independent Cinema. [continue reading this post...]
Tagged as:
Andy Warhol,
Art,
Bruce Conner,
film,
Fluxus,
John Cassavetes,
performance
