Anal Magic Attempt 2 Yesterday I wrote a little spiel about Anal Magic but, dissatisfied with what I wrote, the entry is lost somewhere in the nether regions of my hard drive. Hurrah! Not being a radio aficionado, I don’t really know the precedents for Anal Magic. Kenny G(oldsmith) is not a shock-jock like Howard Stern, nor is he quite the comedian of Groucho Marx; his style is quite his own. Being a American who has been out of the States so long that I am really a foreigner, it’s refreshing to hear someone on the radio who has a real sense of humor and cruel irony. Kenny know that I loved his reading of a George Bush speech of the torture sounds of Tortura, but there is much more to the show than that. Anyone interested in Sound and the recording arts really ought to listen to ANAL MAGIC. Kenny does play sound poetry at times but he also links this in with new modes of audition. John Cage, of course, frequently features on the repertoire as does Erik Satie. Then there are all of the sound art practitioners themselves like Amikhanian, Hodell, etc. I’m sure he even played some of the music from the Cremaster as well. All of this is really, very very important because the significance of the change in auditory perception since Russolo and Satie is consistently ignored by most literatures. (I know that was a bad sentence but, hell, I’m on my lunch break). I obviously have a bias, I won’t conceal it. For me sound and audition is extremely important for bringing the body back into poetry.. or rather is the juncture at which words can leave themselves. Literary types tend to downplay audition as such because other critical approaches Mail; Jeremiad: word of the day.. Er. Critical approaches, such as Freudianism/ psychoanalysis etc. lend themselves to either justify meaning or even add meaning in the case of certain poets. Sound. What do you do with it? Charles Bernstein arrogantly, in my opinion, dismisses sound as meaningless in his Radio Radio interview! He makes a bunch of obnoxious sounds (ok here’s my jeremiad for the day) and says essentially that there’s nothing in it. Sound involves a context. Sound poetry is often closely related to music and highlights the musical aspects of language. I think Mr. Bernstein would agree to the extent that sound poetry does much the same thing to the musicality of language that language poetry does for the social use of language. Sound poetry has moved on for people like Jaap Blonk who create wonderful textures of this raw material itself, beyond the concern with language per se. But there is more. Sound is always implicated in our environment as is as much of the fabric of the social and cultural domain as language. Oops.. Would like to continue, but I’ma outtada time