COURTESY WIKIMEDIA
In the latest issue of The Third Rail, the contemporary art quarterly published out of Minneapolis, Ubuweb founder, MoMA poet laureate, and all-around mischief maker Kenneth Goldsmith looks back on the 15 years he spent as a radio show host on New Jersey’s famed WFMU station. Lots of great stuff in here. Among the anecdotes he shares in “Forty-Six Thoughts on Radio”:
— “Each week, I had three hours to kill. That’s the way I saw it. How to fill up three hours?”
— “It is said that a baby’s cry is the most attention-getting sound in the human catalog of sounds. I once looped a piercing baby’s cry for an hour.”
— “When I ran out of ideas for a new show, I would just play one of my old shows in the public MP3 archive. Nobody ever knew the difference.”
And it gets better. The other 43 thoughts are available in this PDF right here, but it’s worth looking out for it in print since it’s a handsome publication. (It’s also free.)
Thanks to Minneapolis’s David Petersen Gallery for carrying it!