Well of course now I am in awe.

As far as Ed's famously mordant wit can be trusted, he denies the Clowns had
anything to do with jazz. But that's Ed. I saw the Kowalski Collective in
Hepburn Springs recently. He can do things on an emaciated shoestring,
that Mr Kuepper.

Sydney in the late seventies-early eighties was a fine place to be. Sydney
Uni less so, in some respects. I was coming at it from the other direction,
trying to reconcile what I was reading (for the first time) with what Gerry
Wilkes and Leonie Kramer were teaching. But an education is an education,
and had I never been forced to Spenser and Sidney, Baynton and the other
early Australians, the picture would have been incomplete.

The result? At 43 I have an enduring and difficult desire to read everything
I can get my hands on - still. Except Thomas Wolfe. I just can't get through
those doorstops, as hard as I try.

c

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 9:16 PM, Christopher C Jones <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Caleb, thanks and yes, I gave my collection of Laughing Clowns LPs to my
> youngest brother who passed them on to some young musos who nearly fell
> over backwards when they saw them, so I was told.
>
> Since it is no secret to be ashamed of; Louise, Tony Hobbs and myself
> shared a house when Tony and Louise were lovers and students in the jazz
> course at the Con and myself a student at an avant-garde art college in
> Balmain. We also shared an interest in avant-garde music, including
> jazz. I remember around this time that Tony made a recording with Jon
> Rose, who was then considered an avant-garde improvisational violinist.
> (I find myself wanting to hear some of these recordings as well.) I can
> also remember giving Louise some money left over from buying my first
> Nikon and other photographic gear so she could get a nice flute. These
> were days prior to the Laughing Clowns, BTW. Other peek moments I can
> remember are the Art Ensemble of Chicago playing live in Chippendale.
>
> Since these first days (half moon hallucinogenic daze) and years as a
> young art student when it still appeared possible that one can be an
> avant-garde artist, Postmodernism spread a dark and suffocating shadow
> of pure formalism and I found myself kicked out of art school for
> avant-garde activities outside of the limited choice of abstract
> expressionism or conceptual art, both of which demanded only a
> reactionary adherence to formal methods and to which my activities
> exceeded the limits imposed. I should have known better then to wear a
> badge proclaiming homosexual solidarity around a red butterfly I got
> when a member of Sydney University Gay Liberation where previously I was
> a student in electrical engineering and physics. An avant-garde art
> college just was not ready for this. However, when one is still young,
> you learn these things the hard way.
>
> It now appears that this dark suffocating lack of air called
> Postmodernism is fading quickly to not even a footnote in art history
> and us avant-garde students, previously censored by the laws of what
> postmodern art considered appropriate behaviour, can come out from the
> deep and hidden underground which nurtured our previous existence and so
> hence my interest in Louise's latest recordings and compositions which
> still in the review articles pass disguised as a cross musical genre
> montage, the last vestiges of post-modernist magazine review article
> hype yet to be fully destroyed beyond the last postmodern man standing
> in the name of avant-garde creation. Long live Archie Shepp. 'trane
> africa brass
>
> Also, I would be very interested to hear of any recorded performances
> available on CD of the New Zealand composer, Noel Sanders.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 18:45 +1100, Caleb Cluff wrote:
> > She was a member of the seminal band Laughing Clowns with Ed Kuepper.
>