natalie merchant

Kurt Vonnegut seems an unlikely collaborator with a jazz bassist from Melbourne -- but that is what happened in 2003 when the famous author allowed Australian musician and studio engineer Heselev to put music to his '73 reading of a section from his famous book Slaughterhouse Five. Heselev takes up the story about how, after graduating from...
> fromthevaults/3359/kurt-vonnegut-simon-heselev-tock-tick-1973-2003/

Perhaps because he is a poet and curator, Gregory O'Brien here approaches the life of the New Zealand-born artist Graham Percy with an eye for subtle (and sometimes strong) artistic connections more than strict chronology. And this is a fitting approach to an artist whose work slipped easily between many styles and practices, from...
> writingelsewhere/4022/a-micronaut-in-the-wide-world-the-imaginative-life-and-times-of-graham-percy-by-gregory-obrien/

While it seems to be going too far to suggest, as the reviewer of Radio NZ National did, that these "one-liners, poems, lyrics and tales" are "reminiscent of Cohen's mid-career poetry and writings" they are certainly more than merely diverting. The writer -- Ruth Carr of the band Minuit -- has some snappy aphorisms, odd...
> writingelsewhere/3991/i-felt-like-a-fight-alright-by-ruth-carr/

When the reclusive and friendless Henry Darger died at 81 in Chicago in 1973 (after a brief period in the same poorhouse in which his father had died) his story really began. Shortly before his death his neighbours discovered that Darger's apartment was full of the most remarkable, sustained artwork. Over the course of his later life -- in...
> film/3197/in-the-realms-of-the-unreal-the-mystery-of-henry-darger-a-documentary-by-jessica-yu-ovation-southbound-dvd/

You have to admire Kinky Friedman. With very little effort he manages to irritate just about everybody. He did in the early 70s when he fronted his country music band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, who parlayed broadly satirical political and country songs and willfully provocative anti-feminist rants such as Get Your Biscuits in the...
> absoluteelsewhere/3102/kinky-friedman-interviewed-1994-the-art-of-irritation/

This fascinating, self-funded double CD (available in a single disc "Selections" version) has preoccupied the former 10,000 Maniacs frontwoman for the past five years -- but if literate and literary music is your thing you'll conclude it was worth her efforts. After the birth of her daughter, Merchant -- as musical parents are wont...
> music/3001/natalie-merchant-leave-your-sleep-nonesuch/

At age 10, Nathalia Crane was an acclaimed poet and the subject of great controversy, not least for the sexual innuendo of The Janitor’s Boy in which she wrote of lustful feelings and how she would “dutifully shiver in bed”. “Her poems came to attention when she was published in American newspapers,“ says singer...
> absoluteelsewhere/3000/natalie-merchant-interviewed-2010-the-child-inside/