This station depends on contributions from listeners.
WPS1 Art Radio is the Internet station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, featuring an MP3 stream of music, talk, and historical recordings and a free on-demand archive of over 1200 programs.
Once again, in the steamheat of August, Blagg & O'Brien, two outspoken pagans perpetuating the Word on broadband. There was praise for poet Thom Gunn going out in a meth-fuelled blaze of glory holes at 74, stern words from O'Brien favorite Wyndham lewis, fabulously modern work from 30's poet Kenneth Fearing, and a cautionary tale from R. Meltzer. Walt Whitman was invoked, he sounded good, and to close out our poetry-loving hosts reached even further back, to ancient Egypt, for a duet on Thunder Perfect Mind, an ancient text written by an unknown female hand.
Following the success of their reconstituted interviews on Show #16, Blagg and O'Brien repeated the format, inviting Andy Warhol to enlighten a rather earnest film student, and Alex Katz and Richard Prince to trade aphorisms and witticisms. There was also an homage to the Blue Heron on Pets Corner and a similar shout out to the late great C. Mueller on Cookie Corner. Organized religion was also mildly denigrated.
Hosts Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien impersonated a studio full of ethereal guests. They began by reconvening a 1959 era panel on modern art featuring Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Frank O'Hara and Elaine deKooning (from the magazine It Is), whose views on art and the art world seem highly pertinent 45 years later. Then gorgeous Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector interviewed Pablo Neruda, after which Jack Kerouac drunkenly replied to questions from Ted Berrigan and Aram Saroyan (op.cit. Paris Review, summer 1968 issue). All in all a very loquacious program.
Co-hosts Blagg & O'Brien turned their focus on a single tome for this broadcast, the classic compilation, "An Anthology of New York Poets" published by Vintage in 1970, and containing the cream of the New York School. Concentrating on the less well known stars of this poetic firmament, Click & Clack tossed the book back and forth and aired out random works by Frank Lima, Jim Brodey, Tom Clark, Dick Gallup, Kenward Elmslie and Lewis McAdams, all of whom held up very well 35 years on.
Our 13th outing featured sonnets from a diverse array of poets, spotlighting especially William Shakespeare andTed Berrigan. and including Petrarch, the earl of Surrey, Paul Violi and John Godfrey. To those sonneteers we missed, we'll do it again soon.
In their most unusual move yet, hosts Glenn O'Brien and Max Blagg gave center stage to Charles Bernstein - only their second studio guest in twelve episodes - and listened politely (even more unusual!) when he played several rare recordings - some even more obscure than their usual choices (George Oppen, the anti-Sandburg, for one) - which the charismatic Bernstein had brought from the University of Pennsylvania's massive poetry archive, PennSound. He is its director. Language poet Bernstein is also the author of 22 books, including With Strings and My Way: Speeches and Poems, (both University of Chicago Press). From a grainy recording of Robert Creeley in the early fifties, to a home made tape of an 80 year old Barbara Guest declaiming in her Berkeley living room, Bernstein's choices fit right in with the Bald Ego Online's motto - "If we like it, you'll hear it" - embracing and endorsing the infinite possibilities and wild diversity of language and words. Pip-pip!
Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien take this opportunity to introduce The Cookie Mueller Corner to their program, a recurring segment in which they will read some of the late writer's wonderful stories (Mueller died from AIDS in November, 1989.) This show includes Mueller's hilarious "A Winter in Provincetown, 1970," which appears in the 1985 anthology Wild History, edited by the artist and book collector Richard Prince. Once they're on a roll, the boys go on to present Max's "Gathering Bruises," novelist Denis Johnson's "Talking Richard Wilson Blues," Glenn's "To All the Boys I've Ever Loved," and more poetry by the under-recognized British poet, John Benjamin. They do not read any poems by Robert Benchley - a real rarity, as is this show in general.
Is poetry the proper response to world events? This may be the only place you'll ever find an answer! Certainly nowhere else on radio will you hear Ed Dorn's "Gunslinger" coupled with Russian poetry from Klebnikov and Ahkmatova (in English), while an impromptu screed about the budge deficit that gets a boost from a Philip Larkin poem about money. What conclusion can we reach from such variety? If you're asking Glenn O'Brien and Max Blagg, the answer must be a 1965 love poem to John Ashbery, from the English poet Lee Harwood. All bases covered. Of course.
Blagg and O'Brien ought to bottle their version of Christmas, as this dolefully cheerful selection of poetry - from Dylan Thomas and the Druids to Robert Graves to Blagg himself. But here, when God is the speaker O'Brien is the reader. And that's how it goes with the "Battle of the Trees" (you'll see).
Musical selection: "Falling at Your Feet" (written and performed by Bono and Daniel Lanois) from the Wim Wenders film "Million-Dollar Hotel", scripted by Bono.
Those click and clacking beat-manque poets Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien call up the still-lively spirits of favored bardic ghosts with correspondence from William Burroughs, Joe Orton, Pliny the Younger, Wyndham Lewis
and Philip Larkin to recipients who did not, unfortunately, include O'Brien and Blagg.
Here our two wacky poets read only the belles of several literary-heroic lettres, including a hair-raising account of the sudden resurfacing of heterosexual desire by William Burroughs; a droll and very gay tale by Joe Orton about W.H. Auden and the king of England; Wyndham Lewis's violent threats against a fellow artist, and a gripping account of the destruction of Pompeii by Pliny the Younger, a drama that was interrupted, perhaps not unfortunately, by the ringing of a cellphone neither host was able to locate. Forging ahead, they exhume an obscure epistle from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis, before signing off dazed and confused.
Somehow Tilda Swinton, Richard Aldington, Alex Katz and Anna Ahkmatova all seem perfect together when such subjects are taken up by such gentlemen as Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien, the Click and Clack of modern poesy.
How does Alex Katz choose his models? You are unlikely to find out by listening to this show, but you can't say that our Beatnik gurus Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien don't nearly die (laughing) while trying to find out. In fact, what they come up with is even better: poems by Ron Padgett from Katz's new exhibition catalog; "Requiem" by the late, great Anna Akhmatova, and an impromptu performance of "The Explanation" by that master of droll concision, Donald Barthelme. A program to gain perspective with.
The Click and Clack of art-radio poesy, Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien, take to their Klassical Korner for a thrilling play-by-play of Homer's current sales rank, spiking their repartee with a reading from Robert Graves' Iliad, plus a new Horace and a sudden but inspired New York School moment featuring the late Joe Ceravolo and seasonal poems by James Schuyler.
Rediscover Homer and Horace (newly translated by David Ferry) and their New York School heirs, James Schuyler and Ron Padgett , r.i.p., as hosts Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien continue to serve their large and highly subjective delectation of poets lost and found. Also in this edition: d.a. levy, Joe Ceravolo and Richard Brautigan.
For Bald Ego Magazine co-editors Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien, too much of the classics is not nearly enough for the radical present. Listen as they rend sweet and bitter soundings from Petronius, Henny Youngman, Mallarme and Beatnik Bob Kaufman, and do it as if they were kin.
Bald Ego magazine coeditor Max Blagg goes it alone, in the temporary absence of his "BOO" partner Glenn O'Brien. Blagg forged ahead to share some early influences on his own work - the "forgotten Beat," Brion Gysin, for one, whose 1959 appearance on the BBC provoked a major anti-Beat protest from horrified listeners. Dutch Schultz, for another, whose deathbed ravings, annotated by William Burroughs, you can hear Max read on this very show, along with a few Ted Berrigan poems and some wonderful, early and very short stories by Sam Shepard (from a 1973 book, Hawk Moon). And all in just one half-hour!
Poet-kibitzers Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien turn their fine journal of art and writing into the Car Talk of literature - amusing, romantic and morbidly funny, all at once. Here is the one place Ezra Pound can safely mingle with the likes of Ann Carson, Ronald Reagan and Linda St. John.
Poets Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien, co-founders of the art/literary journal Bald Ego share intimations of mortality while encouraging their guest, sexy-girl painter Duncan Hannah to revert to his closet persona as a short story writer. Max Blagg was born in England and has lived in NYC since 1971. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming collection of poems, What Love Sees in the Distance. Glenn, the author of Soapbox, a collection of essays, is also a poet, and comedian. He wrote the screenplay for, and appeared in, the film, Downtown 81 starring Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is also an avid golfer.
Poets and writers Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien host a radio version of the art/literary journal, Bald Ego. On this show, these two engaging raconteurs lament a recent Small Press Book Fair and read poems both dirty and sweet.
