Lounge Act

Lounge Act

May 2017
Read Excerpt

Lounge Act

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"Our Roland Barthes ... remastered, cleared for the pressure zone of American mythologies."
— Avital Ronell

Details

Poet, critic, and artist Wayne Koestenbaum performs piano miniatures (Scriabin, Chopin, Fauré, Milhaud, and Poulenc) while incanting spontaneous Sprechstimme-style soliloquies. Koestenbaum improvises words that stream in correspondence with the score’s musical phrases.

This LP is a live performance recorded on Friday October 16, 2015, at REDCAT gallery as part of the “Hotel Theory” exhibition curated by Sohrab Mohebbi in collaboration with Ruth Estévez.

Lounge Act is the second release in the new UDPR series, in a limited edition of 300 copies.

Lounge Act is produced in collaboration with REDCAT.

UDPR is a vinyl record series for the sound of poetry, curated by Michael Barron for Ugly Duckling Presse.

Author

Praise

Set against a pink, black, and gold net.... Koestenbaum took to the piano to perform short pieces by some of his favorite composers, including Scriabin, Chopin, Fauré, Milhaud, and Poulenc, while sing-talking improvisational monologues that obtained the look and feel of both poetry and stand-up comedy. Koestenbaum struck a delicate sonic balance between aural poignancy and the midnight sound of a cat in heat, breaking once between two sets to read a gorgeous, fragmentary poem.
— Andrew Durbin, Artforum
Did you hear? Poet, critic, painter, and now memoirist and piano virtuoso Wayne Koestenbaum lost seven pounds dreaming out loud to his own rendition of Scriabin's piano miniatures. He really did it! Google it.
— Jack Bankowsky, Artforum
Perverse, idiosyncratic, brilliant, curious, astonished, inspired..... The witty and vulnerable openness of these poems would be enough to make them appealing. But then there is a refreshingly casual (that is, not ostentatious) polymathic erudition that informs them--covering film, philosophy, literature, visual arts, and more--that makes them all the more compelling.
— Thomas March, LAMBDA Literary Review

Excerpt

Chopin, Mazurka, opus 33, number 1
(“I tied my tubes tonight”)

I went to CVS tonight
before this performance
I tied my tubes at CVS

CVS has a rabbi
He’ll tie your tubes

I don’t want to be a deadbeat Dad
I don’t want to perpetuate this line

so I went to CVS
and I said “Mr. Rabbi
will you scissor these strings that tie me
to the hinge of melancholy on that aforementioned plinth–
the strings of interrelation?”

and now my tubes are tied
I’m a clean man
I tied my tubes at CVS for free

next, I’ll get a bris
I want to lose this useless flap of skin

Details

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Publication Date: May 1, 2017
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