Harry Smith

Harry Smith
Author: Andrew Perchuk
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892367350

Filmmaker, musicologist, painter, ethnographer, graphic designer, mystic, and collector of string figures and other patterns, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was among the most original creative forces in postwar American art and culture, yet his life and work remain poorly understood. Today he is remembered primarily for his Anthology of American Folk Music (1952)--an idiosyncratic collection of early recordings that educated and inspired a generation of musicians and roots music fans--and for a body of innovative abstract and nonnarrative films. Constituting a first attempt to locate Smith and his diverse endeavors within the history of avant-garde art production in twentieth-century America, the essays in this volume reach across Smith's artistic oeuvre. In addition to contributions by Paul Arthur, Robert Cantwell, Thomas Crow Stephen Fredman, Stephen Hinton, Greil Marcus, Annette Michelson, William Moritz, and P. Adams Sitney, the volume contains numerous illustrations of Smith's works and a selection of his letters and other primary sources.

Think of the Self Speaking

Think of the Self Speaking
Author: Harry Everett Smith
Publisher: Cityful Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Cultural Studies. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smiths long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smiths activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "Think of the Self Speaking is the next best thing to being with Harry himself -- perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.

The Order of Sounds

The Order of Sounds
Author: Francois J. Bonnet
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0993045871

This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse. Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities. Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

Paper Airplanes

Paper Airplanes
Author: John Klacsmann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780989531139

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions. Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany them.

Harry Smith

Harry Smith
Author: Paola Igliori
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-11-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1635901642

A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith. Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923–1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York. Five years after Smith’s death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith’s life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic polymaths. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.

Tales of Beatnik Glory

Tales of Beatnik Glory
Author: Ed Sanders
Publisher: Stonehill Publishers
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1975
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A sincere young poet seeks fame and fortune amid the coffee houses, sex orgies, political and social protests, and freakish characters of Greenwich Village during the late fifties and early sixties.

Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Heroes

Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Heroes
Author: Brian Lumley
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2007-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429913320

From the fertile mind of Brian Lumley: Weird heroes and weirder worlds! Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! Vampires. Elder Gods. Nightmares. Mysterious elixirs. Wines capable of transporting the drinker-literally-to another world. Fossils that dream of rending flesh between their teeth. These wonders, and many more, spring from the fertile imagination of Brian Lumley. Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! collects eight long tales of four of Lumley's most popular creations; Titus Crow, David Hero and his companion, Eldin the Wanderer; and the original Necroscope himself, Harry Keogh, who is featured in three completely new stories, one of them a short novel. The other stories in this collection have previously only been published in the United Kingdom. Titus Crow: Psychic detective, master magician, destroyer of the ancient Cthulian gods. In "Inception," we see the infant Titus at the moment his destiny falls upon him. In "Lord of the Worms," a simple secretarial job lands Crow on a sacrificial altar. And in "Name and Number," Henri Laurent de Marigny details a battle between Titus Crow and malevolent, occult winds that can rip living flesh from bone. David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer: once men of the waking world, now agents for King Kuranes of the Dreamlands. Sips of "The Weird Wines of Naxas Niss" send the pair on a tumultuous journey from a buxom beauty's bed to the depths of a wizard's dungeon. Then, seeking his missing friend, David Hero boards an ill-fated airship that is home to "The Stealer of Dreams." Harry Keogh, Necroscope: vampire killer without peer, capable of conversing with the dead. A sudden windfall brings Harry to Las Vegas, where he meets "Dead Eddy," a gambler who can't resist the temptation of one last big win-from beyond the grave! In "Dinosaur Dreams," Harry's interest in fossils leads him to uncover the truth behind the death of a young amateur paleontologist . . . and to discover that it's not just dead people he can call on in a crisis.... Harry's undying love for his mother leads him down a dangerous path in the brief "Resurrection." Four of Lumley's greatest heroes. Three of his most popular worlds. Tales to chill and to delight. Open the book and be swept away. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Partners

Partners
Author: Stephen Housewright
Publisher: Blank Forms Editions
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781953691040

The amazing life of Jerry Hunt, Texan avant-garde composer, occultist and artist, with appearances from Pauline Oliveros, Karen Finlay and others Jerry Hunt (1943-93) was among the most eccentric figures in the word of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early '90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances. Tracing Hunt's life across his home state's major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir-cum-biography by Stephen Housewright, Hunt's partner of 35 years, offers illuminating depictions of Hunt's important installations and performances across North America and Europe. Housewright narrates a lifetime spent together, beginning in high school as a closeted couple in East Texas and ending with Hunt's battle with cancer and his eventual suicide, the subject of one of his most harrowing works of video art. This highly readable narrative contains many private correspondences with, and thrilling anecdotes about, Hunt's friends, family and collaborators, including Joseph Celli, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Galbreth, Karen Finley, James and Mary Fulkerson, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Panhuysen, Annea Lockwood and the S.E.M. Ensemble. This publication accompanies reissues of seven albums from Hunt's record label, Irida.

Red Flower Vision

Red Flower Vision
Author: Paola Igliori
Publisher:
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781794249196

FULL COLOUR edition. (There is also black and white edition available, under the same title--different cover). Published by Wild Embers Press (2020). This esoteric memoir is compiled of narratives, photos, artwork, stories, interviews, and poetry. Excerpts from Paola Igliori previously published books "Stickman: John Trudell" , "Entrails, Heads & Tails", and "American Magus: Harry Smith" are included. "Red Flower Vision" is rich with encounters which landed Paola Igliori her into the lives of many creative and famous, kindred spirits, including Lakota activist and spoken word artist John Trudell (1946-2015), beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and esoteric genius Harry Smith. Trudell holds a space in Igliori's story of art and Life: an entire section of this book is dedicated to him: "Places of the Heart: Intimate Evocations". Paola's life story is a unique time and place revisited, revealing life as an Italian woman in infinite quest for healing, and Love. The book includes narratives from her time with John Trudell, interviews with Paola by Italian Journalist Manuela de Leonardis, her own interview of Allen Ginsberg and excerpts from her interview with John Trudell. Also included are photographs by Raymond Foye, Jeannette Montgomery Barron and Filippo Chia, with artwork by Harry Smith, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Louise Bourgeois. And many more.