One of my favorite novelists, Jonathan Lethem, has made several song lyrics available for adaptation by musicians - free of charge. He’s also offering stories for film or stage adaptation for the price of one dollar. As he explains on his Web site:
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I’m a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.
I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay for Harper’s Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice reflect that belief.
It so happens that his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, is about a fictional indie band and includes lyric fragments. I need to get me a copy, but meanwhile I can listen to the songs based on the fragments, like “Monster Eyes.” (There are three versions by different musicians as of this writing.) Yay! Thank you Johnathan!
p.s. Oh my god, just to add to the chaotic possibilities, you can play more than one song simultaneously from the page! Crrrrazy!
Pretty soon my blog will be nothing but videos and will be so slow to load noone will bother. But I couldn’t pass this one up!
I used to dream about this kind of thing all the time when I was actively co-counseling (a special kind of peer counseling, see the Thought of the Day in the sidebar) and I’d wish I could go sit, literally, on misbehaving politicians and ruthlessly counsel them until they broke down and cried and worked through their childhood traumas so they could think clearly and start doing the right things. (Don’t worry, co-counseling is not about sitting on people and making them cry. That was my own warped fantasies!)
Here’s a video of Ojos del Brujo, as a follow-up to a post back in January. You can also read more about Ojos del Brujo here. It’s flamenco pop! Enjoy.
Ze Frank is leaving The Show for Hollywood and I am feeling quite melancholy. Ze has gotten my work day off to a smiling start for quite a while now and though I can’t blame him for moving on to something new, and hopefully just as Ze-ish, I will really, really miss him chatting with us, his “sports racers”, for a few zany minutes every morning.
If you’ve been a fan, do watch this segment which features some great songs that will only make sense if you already know about giant babies and earth sandwiches. Okay, they still don’t make sense, but they’ll be familiar.
Thank you for sharing your crazy, loveable self, Ze. Best of luck!
