BEHIND THE SCENES with Pejk Malinovski
Passing Stranger was a long time in the making, we hear. What was your original inspiration for the project
I became interested in the New York School poets on a trip to New York in 1997. I met John Ashbery on this trip and subsequently translated his poetry and that of his friends Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara, into Danish. I was drawn to the exuberance, colloquialism and edginess of these poets, their deep knowledge of and complete disregard for tradition, their indifference to conventional ideas of high and low culture. This breath of fresh air blew all the way across the Atlantic
Later I started reading a whole group of poets who were inspired by these writers - Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman. I moved to New York, and found myself in the East Village, where many of those poets still live and give readings. As I got to know more about the neighborhood and some of the poets, the idea of the audio tour slowly took form
Curtis Fox, a great radio producer and mentor was working with the Poetry Foundation at the time. We brought the idea to them and they liked it, and so provided funding to develop the project and build the website
You're a published poet yourself - did you approach it more from a poet's or producer's sensibility? Is there a difference between the two
Good question. I think I approached it with both sensibilities, but I do think there is a difference. I interviewed Ashbery about his poetry once and in his reluctance to "explain" anything he quoted the painter Barnett Newman who said "Birds don't make good ornithologists". I think my outsider status (resident alien) made it easier for me to wear the ornithologist cap, but in general I'm also very reluctant to analyze or in any way reduce poetry. I hope I managed to just provide anecdotes and background information about the poets and the neighborhood and leave the poems to speak for themselves. Also, my own poetry is quite different from much of the poetry in the tour - it's more conceptual. I use Google searches and appropriation in my work, which is less common among the poets featured in the tour
You've built a website that offers a simulation of the Passing Stranger walking tour. Talk about how and why you added the interactive dimension, and how this enhances the experience beyond just listening
I wasn't actually super ambitious with the website at the get-go. I just imagined a clickable map with some kind of pop-up audio player. But I also happened to be friends with the amazing folks behind Zeega, Jesse Shapins, James Burns and Kara Oehler, and once they got onboard things got a little more interesting. I forget who came up with the idea of the "video stills", but I think that's what really makes the online version worthwhile. Should I explain this? (Ed: Yes, please! ) For most of the stops there is a video, which usually shows the house where the poet lived, or something that the poet wrote about. A simple video, shot on a tripod, with random people walking through the frame. The idea is that someone in Australia who's visiting the site, will get a feeling of walking the streets, that same feeling of randomness, that anything can happen
When I shot those videos I tried to really film nothing in particular, which turned out to be hard. Put up a video camera in the east village, hit record and you're bound to film something in particular. Anselm Berrigan told me he recognized one of his old neighbors in the video from 101 St. Marks. You can see her if you let the video run for about 4 minutes, she's a pretty colorful character
But all in all the website activity is kept pretty minimal, the focus being on the listening experience
Besides the obvious, what's experientially different about following the tour online, and actually walking it
I guess the difference is that while walking the tour in the neighborhood, anything really can happen. Like Hettie Jones could walk out of her building, just as you hear her reading a poem about her kitchen sink. Or you might make eye contact with a passing stranger as you listen to the Whitman line "Passing stranger, you do not know how longingly I look upon you...
You worked with a lot of "famous" people to make this project. Can you share a memorable or surprising moment or two
I think one of the highlights was recording the script with Jim Jarmusch. He studied poetry with Kenneth Koch at Colombia in the 70's and he knows many of the poets featured in the tour, so he was my dream narrator. Having him in the studio saying "You gotta direct me, I don't know what I'm doing" was kind of a surreal moment. I was nervous about whether he'd be able to actually pull it off, reading a 49-page script cold. But he was amazing, and kept repeating lines over and over until he felt it was right - he was a total perfectionist. We took one smoking break during the almost 4-hour session, in which entertained me and Curtis with anecdotes of shooting guns with William Burroughs. He does an impeccable Burroughs imitation
Now that you've dug into interactive documentary media, are you tempted to bring some of these extra dimensions to subsequent radio stories, or does 'just audio' still suffice
I'm always very inspired by documentary films. Working on my latest project, Poetry, Texas I shot about 12 hours of video footage, which I still hope to make some kind of film out of. A big inspiration for that was watching Sherman's March , one of my favorite documentaries, by Ross McElwe
I'm also very excited about all the possibilities of location-based audio experiences. The smartphone revolution enables us to bring the listener to where the stories actually take place. Narrative becoming a path through a landscape, geography becoming your editor. On a professional level there are great opportunities for independent radio producers to work with museums, local cultural organizations, historical societies.