Jul 16, 2025
seen from Israel
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seen from China
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seen from United States
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seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from China
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seen from United States
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seen from Germany
Hal Wilner (1956-2020) was a music producer who specialised in tribute albums to genres of music and particular performers/composers. These composers include Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Charles Mingus, Harold Arlen, Leonard Cohen, and lastly Marc Bolan. He produced and curated spoken word albums by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg among several others. Americans will know him for his choosing of the music for ‘Saturday Night Live’ for several decades from 1980 onwards, though none of his projects sounds stranger than the one album credited with his name ‘Whoops I am An Indian’, listen to it here.
This really got me.
2.19.17 Laurie Anderson on violin and keys, led a small group for a performance of musically illustrated poetry and spoken word at the penthouse of the Standard Hotel. Hal Wilner recited Gregory Corso and Laurie bookended the evening with pieces of her own. On the final piece she harmonized her voice down and improvised a riveting, haunting and eloquent story about the current administration.
RIP Hal Willner
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(the original US translation was mostly worse, obscuring all this, but it did change the last line to ‘because we like our hamburgers raw!’, which was almost a plus)
