Negativland - Negativland
#266
June 1980
Negativland
Negativland
Genre: Experimental
2 out of 5
I took a sound design class at NYU. It was one of many that I did very poorly in. I had transferred from theater into film for no real apparent reason except that my friends were all film students and I had a really terrifying experience in Anne Bogart’s acting class in the Experimental Theater Wing.
I should have been in Strasberg. I was always more of a Method Actor.
But I talked myself in to ETW. Truth is, I basically convinced the auditors that I belonged there because I had been reading books on Richard Schechner and the Performing Garage and I have always been a compelling interviewee.
In all honesty, I should not have been allowed in to NYU. I had no business there. I should have gone to Syracuse, which was my second choice. They accepted me based on my audition of a Leonard Melfi piece, Halloween. Had I gone there, no doubt I would have gone through the entire program. Who knows what would have come of that. Maybe I would have stayed in theater, maybe abandon it. Maybe start a theater with some friends. I don’t know. But I didn’t. I went to NYU because it was more name brand and I was still a kid who wanted to “show those people” who I grew up with that I, too, could go to a name brand school.
I was an idiot.
ETW was a dangerous place for me. It was still in it’s nascent phase. I don’t think that they had fully developed their program and I know that Anne Bogart hadn’t completely finished her “Six Viewpoints” theory, which she ripped off from the late Mary Overlie and Wendell Beavers.
I had a meltdown. It was a psychological break. It was probably a long time coming.
I will talk about exactly what happened to knock me out of the theater program at a different time.
But i went into film. And I made some really shitty movies, where I tried to be David Lynch and convinced an actress to vomit up an unwanted baby. Yeah, that movie was bizarre.
They all were.
But, back to sound class.
I decided to record myself barking and turn it into an angry pack of dogs by overlapping various types.
I walked out of the studio in the middle of the night, very proud of myself.
When I played it for the class…they were not impressed.
It was terrible.
It’s the only moment I recall from that class.
I passed. But barely.
I never graduated from NYU.
Are you surprised?
Oh…this is an album of collaged sounds that, while better than my barking dogs, does nothing for me. I’m not really sure we should cover it. But I just wrote a memoir entry about college and I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna publish that.
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