- Karawane Performed by Trio Exvoco
- Karawane Performed by Anat Pick
- Karawane Performed by Marie Osmond
Taken from a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not segment on sound poetry from the mid-80s. According to producer Jed Rasula, “Marie Osmond became co-host with Jack Palance. In the format of the show, little topic clusters (like “weird language”) were introduced by one of the hosts. In this case, the frame was Cabaret Voltaire. Marie was required to read Hugo Ball’s sound poem “Karawane” and a few script lines. Much to everybody’s astonishment, when they started filming she abruptly looked away from the cue cards directly into the camera and recited, by memory, “Karawane.” It blew everybody away, and I think they only needed that one take. A year or so after it was broadcast, Greil Marcus approached me, wanting to use Marie Osmond’s rendition of Hugo Ball for a cd produced in England as sonic companion to his book Lipstick Traces; so I was delighted to be able to arrange that.”
And more, in context:
“”Now, all this may strike you as anecdotally evasive. But, truthfully, Imagining Language wouldn’t have happened without Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. “Imagining Language” was the name I used for one of my project file folders (to give you a sense of scale, at any given time I had about fifty such file folders going). In the context of commercial television, the topic was the longest of long shots. I tried in vain to interest the producers in a segment on Finnegans Wake, for instance. But they did bite on the phenomenon of Boontling, an argot local to Booneville in northern California (see Imagining Language p. 50). They also did a segment on Benjamin Franklin’s spelling reform proposals, unlikely as that seems. What really went over well, though, was sound poetry. In fact, Mel Stuart was so captivated by it that he went out to shoot the segments himself (normally, he dealt only with scenarios involving Jack Palace; all other footage was either stock or else produced as needed by hired “stringers”). These included George Quasha and Charles Stein, who didn’t perform that much in public but had developed a striking buccal symbiosis. After that was broadcast, Mel went to Toronto to film the Four Horsemen, the seasoned sound poetry quartet that included bp Nichol and Steve McCaffery. It was filmed on the roof of the loft Steve was living in at that point on the east side of the city next to the Don Mills Parkway. The one other byproduct of my “Imagining Language” file at Ripley’s came later, when Marie Osmond became co-host with Jack Palance. In the format of the show, little topic clusters (like “weird language”) were introduced by one of the hosts. In this case, the frame was Cabaret Voltaire. Marie was required to read Hugo Ball’s sound poem “Karawane” and a few script lines. Much to everybody’s astonishment, when they started filming she abruptly looked away from the cue cards directly into the camera and recited, by memory, “Karawane.” It blew everybody away, and I think they only needed that one take. A year or so after it was broadcast, Greil Marcus approached me, wanting to use Marie Osmond’s rendition of Hugo Ball for a cd produced in England as sonic companion to his book Lipstick Traces; so I was delighted to be able to arrange that.” — http://www.fascicle.com/issue02/imagininglanguage/rasula1.htm
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías