blowing up boulez

["K. Scott Handley" <thesubtlebody@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am a friend of Josh Ronsen's and apparently the
second-largest contributor thus far to the project,
which is too bad, since I only gave a few items. 
Ronsen is so incredibly far from being a Francophobe,
that he probably warrants Ashcroft supervision.  His
politics and aesthetics are hardly anti-French or even
for that matter anti-Boulez, though even if they were
anti-Boulez, what of it?  French aesthetics and French
artistic production can do better than that crusty
bureaucrat, anyway.  

FWIW, Mr. Ronsen has translated some quite valuable
interviews with Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram
from French.  Josh has a caustic sense of humor and
enjoys "play", something was always at work in dada,
something else that has always dedicated itself to the
deflation of pretentions that people in positions of
enormous privilege and power (like Boulez) almost
necessarily manifest.  Such playful American adoptions
of dada are a welcome dismissal of the kind of pomp
that the French intellectual establishment regularly
coddles.  Mr. Ronsen absurdist performances and
electroacoustic music are hardly reactionary and
hardly anti-intellectual: the danger is that these
Great Ossified Moderns (Stockhausen, Boulez, La Monte
Young), canonized in their own lifetimes, will be
inextricably identified with anything other than the
short cultural moment that birthed them.  God forbid
Boulez should remain solely emblematic of France
contributions to contemporary music.  

As for the crudity of the gesture: Keith Rowe once
told me that "a lot can be learned from crudeness". 
He was referring to what he had gained from working
with Pita.

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