Word: avant
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Medeski, Martin and Wood's music is not simply a new, avant garde construction of jazz. In a jazz world saturated with top notch players and willing experimentalists, MMW have managed to put themselves on the map by making music that is really more a dialogue between opposite elements like traditional jazz structure and wild experimentation. Though some criticize the band for often approaching the limits of meaning in their abstract wanderings, it is the incredible, seamless continuity between disparate elements that gives their music its real significance. Their real skill lies not simply in their abilty in weaving dense...
Throughout the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, these and many other poets flooded New York City to form the community that may rightly be called America's last avant-garde. Decidedly unconventional and anti-academic, they stapled together 8 1/2 inch by 11 copies of their own poems in dingy church basements, distributed them to a small group of subscribers or friends, or published in magazines with names like Lines or Fuck You: A Magazine for the Arts. It was cheap, efficient, bohemian and fun. But these once unknown writers have come a long way since then. Random House...
...iconic figure in New York underground, Adventures in Poetry was one of several dozen shoestring publishing ventures that burst onto the scene during the "Mimeo-revolution" of the 1960s. The revival of the press represents an effort both to rehabilitate the spirit of community that characterized the New York avant-garde while highlighting what Fagin thinks are the best minds of the present generation...
...very notion of "good" writing is a subjective one and a perennial problem for "avant-garde" writers who generally receive little outside approval of their work. Even Ashbery's ascent to the ranks of "academic poetry" was-and still is-something of a mystery to his underground contemporaries. "Ashbery was even then a hero to most of us," North explains. "However, the idea that he would ever be read beyond this small circle seemed an absolute impossibility. It's hard to remember that before 1976 when he won all sorts of awards [for "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror...
...such lousy TV. From D.C. to Dixie, it's the same vocabulary of ominous synthesizer music, phony-sounding testimonials, graphics worthy of public-access cable and canned punch lines ("Wrong for the court. Wrong for our kids"). It wasn't always so. The 1964 Daisy ad was practically avant-garde. Today, while Madison Avenue produces some of the most sophisticated programming on the air, most political ads remain stuck in the Stone Age. Nader looked like a philosopher king simply for doing a couple of funny parodies of MasterCard and Monster.com spots. Both appealed smartly to voter cynicism about...