This variety-show, mixed from rare vinyl and cassettes, highlights the strange and salvific sounds of American religion. Selections include bible-thumping hair metal; warbling New Age mantras; slide guitar from a demon exorcist; Mormon folk ballads; square-dancing Sufis; smooth R&B by a jailed cult leader; Jesus Freak psychedelia; ethereal tunes for UFOs; country crooning from televangelists; and more.

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America for The New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. In 2023, he was the recipient of the Wilbur Award for magazine-writing and prizes from the American Academy of Religion and the Los Angeles Press Club.

 

Listen Here:

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/3157

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Octogenarian and self-described “senior slut,” Garner’s lusty practice spans mail-order catalogs, classified ads, garments with cutouts, custom cars, tattoos (a red-and white bra, blue G-string crotch—pushed aside, ready for action—waistband stuffed with Monopoly money), and performances on the streets and on television. From the early aughts to the present, as Garner’s vision has waned, she has maintained a practice of producing a t-shirt a day, using iron-on letters to tinker with popular phrases in ways that reclaim their lusty potential and thumb her nose at assimilationist narratives.

Pippa Garner originally trained as a car designer, but was kicked out of the ArtCenter College of Design’s transportation design program in 1969 for presenting a car morphing into a human body. Undeterred by her expulsion, Garner conceived of her first major car work in 1973, Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevy with its exterior rotated 180 degrees so it appeared to face the wrong way as it drove. In a gesture at once daredevil stunt and conceptual probe, Garner scaled San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the work. In the mid-eighties, Garner began gender-hacking with hormones—a process that she considers a conceptual artwork—marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Much of her work has been in infiltrating mass media, from classified ads to the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

 

Listen to an old segment where Fiona Duncan (from the video above) brought Pippa Garner on MPR here: 

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/60

And recent conversation between Pippa Garner, Micaela Durand, and Sara O’Keeffe here:

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/3193

 

 

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Music and the occasional poem, for the slow and the groggy - 
 

MUD
 

Poets in order of reading:


David Lindsay
Christian Michael Filardo
Amanda Jasnowski Pascual
Aasir Cherot
Whitney Mallet
Wayne Koestenbaum
Seashell Coker
Lori-may Orillo


Composed by John Garcia.

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➚Awsome Tapes From Africa  collects and reissues some of the best music that might otherwise be lost to ears outside it's region of origin. Listen to this playthrough of a new release from Hailu Mergia, one of my favorites on ATFA here, and some chit chat with the man himself. Live from Pioneer Works' Press Play media fair:

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/3227

 

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Between 1964 and 1966, in the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Hélio Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems, entitled Secret Poetics, and reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his artistic practice. Despite his global fame as a founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretismo, his collaborations with major Brazilian artists and writers (Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ferreira Gullar, etc.), and his influence across a range of disciplines (including painting, film, installation, and participatory art), Oiticica’s “secret” poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This edition, which features the original texts in facsimile reproductions along with English translations and accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry to Oiticica’s thinking on participation, sensation, and memory. The first English-language translation of the “secret” poetry of Hélio Oiticica uncovers a crucial chapter in the development of one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists
 

This event features a presentation and reading by the book's editor and translator, Rebecca Kosick, followed by a conversation between Kosick and pioneering Oiticica scholar Irene Small. Listen to it on MPR here:
 

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/3250

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Cuckoo, cuckoo

What do you do?
In April, I open my bill
In May, I sing night and day
In June, I change my tune
In July, far, far I fly
In August, away

I must…
Cuckoo, cuckoo

 

 

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Bailey Scieszka brings us Whorology, the dramaturgical saga of Old Put.

In ➚episode one we meet Old Put, who works retail for the Detroit based company Enron Watches. By night, she creates a replica of the Playboy Mansion for her 12-inch fashion dolls. Old Put goes on a journey to meet the creator of Enron watches after faking her death to make her artwork (wicker sex dolls) more valuable.

In ➚episode two, "Blood on the Corn," Old Put is working as a butler at the Playboy Mansion West. Todd Popadopalis, worldwide watch mogul and creator of Enron Watches, has purchased the Playboy Mansion and spends his days building automatons with mechanical hearts. His latest monstrosity is a recreation of The Zodiac Killer. Guests begin to be picked off in a replica of The Shining maze that Todd had erected out of corn. It is up to Old Put to determine who is real and who is fake as she races against time to find the killer.

 

 

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