In One Year and Out the Other

On New Year's Eve, make a telephone call from one time zone to
another so that you are conducting a conversation between people
located in two years.

-- Ken Friedman

December 31, 1975



Dear Friends,

This score is your invitation to participate in a performance for the
New Year that friends and I have performed every year since 1975.

The first performance took place on New Year's Eve 1975-1976. It
started before midnight in Springfield, Ohio calling forward to Dick
Higgins, Christo, and Nam June Paik in New York. After midnight local
time, it ended with calls back to Tom Garver and Natasha Nicholson in
California. I have performed this work every year since then,
frequently calling Tom Garver, Peter Frank, Judy Hoffberg, Newton and
Helen Harrison, Abraham Friedman and the late Dick Higgins.

The arrival of new media gave rise to new modes of performance. On
New Year's of 1992-1993 I used telefax for the first time in
performing this work, sent telefax messages with the score to Christo
and Jeanne-Claude Christo, Peter Frank, Abraham and Shirley Friedman,
Dick Higgins, Hong Hee Kim-Cheon, Choong-Sup and Yeong Lim, Karen and
David Moss.

In recent years, email has extended the performance to network of
friends and colleagues. The ability to share and forward email
messages means that increasingly large numbers of people perform the
event each year using email.

Friends tell me that mobile telephone technology now enables new
enactments in which people at different New Year gatherings
simultaneously call to friends in many locations, receiving return
calls from different time zones shortly after.

In the Swedish country village where I live with my wife Ditte and
our dog Jacob, the annual New Year gathering is generally quiet. We
always cook a light supper of lobster and asparagus. In my
hermeneutical interpretation of the meal, the meat of lobster
represents the New Year emerging from the shell of the old, while the
asparagus signifies the green growth of spring.

This year, the menu will expand with an appetizer of cantaloupe and
thin slices of twice-baked ham glazed in egg mustard and bread
crumbs. We will follow this with avocado sprinkled with apple cider
vinegar.

Catharina Stenqvist and Eva Oesterberg will join us for dinner as
they often do. Jacob's grandson, Sixten, will come with them. (Jacob
and Sixten will not be sharing our lobster. Their menu will consist
of an appetizer of two cheeses, Skaane Prestost and Gruyere, followed
by a lightly grilled steak. It is New Year, after all, and my
postmodern rendition of the St. Francis role requires a dinner for
all creatures in the house.)

After dinner, we will stroll around the 800-year-old village church
and accompany Eva, Cattis, and Sixten homeward as village families
explode the annual fireworks display.

That will be my New Year's celebration. I hope your celebration will
be warm, cheerful, and satisfying. One thing is certain, or
reasonably certain, and that is the fact that a New Year is on the
way.

Here are my wishes for a wonderful 2004!

Ken Friedman