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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 12, 1977)
Surface and Syrqbol The Emerald’s weekly arts and entertainment supplement Thursday, May 12,1977 photo by W.D. Thornton NewMime Madness at Vida Barn The NewMime Circus wil pre sent a day of Old-Time Fiddle Music and NewMime Madness at the Vida Barn, on Saturday. The events will begin at 2 p.m. with a matinee performance of juggling, mime, fun and foolish ness for everyone. The Northern Broadcasters, an old-time fiddle band, will also perform through out the afternoon. The Vida Barn is located on the McKenzie High way at the East end of the Gate Creek Bridge in Vida. The evening performance will begin at 8 p.m. and is for adults only. Beer will be sold at the Barn from 7 p.m. The evening’s entertainment will consist of Elephant Calf by Bertolt Brecht and other selec tions from the NewMime Circus’ repertoire. Elephant Calf is an outrageous farce about justice, and more specifically, about the trial of an Elephant, by the Moon and a Banana Tree, for the mur der of its mother, who, strangely enough, is also present. The events transpire in a vaudeville atmosphere in a British Pub in 19th-Century India. The per formance is accompanied by an original music score, including a never-performed-before song by playwright Ira Rosenberg and New Mime Circus Artistic Director, Judith Barker. This engagement is part of Ihe NewMime Circus’ Spring Tour which is being jointly sponsored by a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. Tickets for the afternoon events are $1.50; for the evening show, they are $2.50; and combi nation tickets may be purchased for $3.50. Tickets may be pur chased at the Sun Shop, the Eugene Hotel, and at the McKen zie River Market in Vida. Horn blows for Whale festival By BOB WEBB Of the Emerald Jazz flautist Paul Horn will per form tonight at 8 p.m. in a concert to Save the Whales. His per formance, in the EMU Ballroom, will be the conclusion of “The Eugene Whale Festival,” which began Saturday. Paul Horn brings a unique style to his music because of an exten sive background in Transcenden tal Meditation. It is meditative, in trospective and at the same time inventive. He has combined a va riet of musical forms, such as jazz, classical and rock, and blended them to bring an airy gossamer quality to his perform ances. ‘There is no more jazz-rock or folk-rock,” he said in a press re lease, “only music. My music is sound meant for everyone’s ears.” Born in New York, Horn realized his love of music at an early age. After receiving a Bachelor’s degree from the Man hattan School of Music, Horn be came a “session" musician. Re cording dates with Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Ravi Shankar and Frank Sinatra followed and by 1960, Horn was ready to start his own band. While living in Los Angeles, Horn worked regularly with his group but still found time to join the NBC’s staff orchestra and continue with freelance studio re cording work. He also put out some dozen and a half abums on Ns own. A few years ago, how ever, Horn found his productivity waning in what he felt was the stagnating Los Angeles atmos phere and decided to move to British Columbia, where he pres ently resides. After leaving the States, Horn began a few new projects, inclu ding scoring films, soloing with the Victoria Symphony Orchestra (his performance, “Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts” won two Grammy awards), recording three abums for the Epic Label and a live double abum set for Vancouver’s Mushroom Label. Horns’ debut Epic Lp, Inside, was recorded entirely inside India’s Taj Mahal. His second Epic release, Inside II, features an attempt by Horn to establish a musical rapport with a group of killer whales (“...to communicate with whales through music. I admit it may sound strange, but it was very interesting”). The abum consists of duets with recorded killer whale sounds. Coinciding with his Inside II abum, Horn completed a film for Columbia Pictures, We Call Them Killers, showing this communica tion between the killer whales. Horn also completed an 18-week series of half-hour TV shows, “The Paul Horn Show,” featuring his newest ensemble and guest artists for Canada’s CTV network. His latest abum, due to be re leased next week on the Mush room label, was recorded en tirely inside the Great Pyramids of Egypt Widely respected in jazz cir cles, Paul Horn has been hon oured of late by Who’s Who in America, Men of Achievement and the Blue Book of England. He has also been a winner of jazz polls conducted by Downbeat and Playboy magazines. Tickets for the concert, co sponsored by the Cultural Forum and the Friends of the Whales are $2.50 for University students and $3.75 for the general public. They may be picked up in advance at the EMU Main Desk. John Ashbery writes poems. John Ashbery writes very good poems. "John Ashbery could very well be the greatest living American poet," according to Jim Sulli van, a graduate English student at the University. On Monday, May 16, John Ashbery is giving a free public reading at 8:00 p.m. in Gerlinger Lounge. For his most recent book of poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery won the National Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award His first book Some Trees, was published in the Vale Series of Younger Poets in 1956. Other awards for his literary accomplishments in clude Fulbright Scholarships, grants from the Ingram Me nil and Guggenheim Foundations, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1969. Critics ac claimed Ashbery’s book Three Poems “of the rare order of masterpieces.” Sullivan said, “There's that chance that Ashbery will be the greatest poet of the century." Of Ashbery, Harold Bloom wrote, “He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane. No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.” Ashbery is simultaneously outstanding and exas perating. He is one of the most experimental poets of his generation. ‘The Tennis Court Oath,” the poem bearing the same title as Ashbery’s second book, is almost an Poet Ashbery reads Monday By KEVIN RASMUSEN Of the Emerald impenetrable verbal conglomeration. Ashbery provides no clues for interpreting his poetic images. And yet it is this strange style, which Ashbery exe cutes with precision and authority, that draws readers to him. Though many images and meanings remain hid den, perhaps they are meant to remain so. Ashbery is thus capable of creating an almost dream-like quality. Music emerges in his poetry. "What I like about music,” Ashbery says, “is its ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of this argument remain un known quantities.” It's possible to feel and experience Ashbery before completely, if ever, understanding him. Raymond Roussel, a predecessor of Ashbery, once said his books were composed not out of experience but out of verbal games. Unlike Roussel, Ashbery is daily shaping Ns world into a poem. And yet, Ashbery con sistently refuses to frame his world with traditional themes or subjects. He says, “Most of my poems are about the experi ence of experience...and the particular experience is of lesser interest to me than the way it filters through to me. I believe this is the way in which it happens with most people, and I’m trying to record a kind of generalized transcript of what's really going on in our minds all day long.” Ashbery grew up on a farm in western New York State, and received his education at Deerfield Academy, Harvard University and Columbia Universtiy. For ten years he stayed in Paris writing art criticism for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. During that time, three books of his poems were published in the United States. Until 1972, Ashbery was Executive Editor of Art News. He also has written three plays, and is co-author with James Schyler of a novel, A Nest of Ninnies. Ashbery is presently a member of the creative writing faculty at Brooklyn College in New York City. On the page, Ashbery's poetry may often seem like “surrealist tom-foolery." But the music and meaning of his poetry promises to come alive at the reading on Monday night. Sullivan organized Ashbery’s appearance in conjunction with the Cultural Forum, the English de partment and the University Lectures Committee.
