Along those lines, check out (if you don't know it already), illegal-art.org, a site dedicated to various multimedia collage projects, generally pretty political. It's where I downloaded the Grey Album a few years ago. Their videos are apparently down now, but they should be back up again. You may also enjoy detrius.net.

Found UBU Web, a cool site with tons of mp3s of various avant-garde poems, poets, and chaos. Dada, surrealism, Schwitters' Ursonate, and a million other things. Tons of miscellaneous Ashbery, including a great version of "The Wrong Kind of Insurrance," a lovely poem. And O'Hara reading "Having a Coke With You." CHECK IT OUT!

I suppose it's accessible mainly in the plot. Very straight-forward episodes trying to find who wrote the letter (the letter conceit could be the starting-off point for a Hollywood romantic comedy). There is even the coincidence of the boy looking for his father which seems like a very Hollywoodesque convenient plot turn though it of course doesn't turn out that way. Also the desperation-of-the-suburbs theme, though somewhat refreshing in BF because of the indecisiveness of it. And, Nate, you're right the sparse use of music is fairly a-typical here, as well as the very patient pacing. Of course even that seems as if Jarmusch is channeling the New Wave (if they were all actually dead.) Over all, I think it all works really well but is just more accessible. I almost wondered if this was a conscious choice to hit a larger audience, but from Nikki's parents' reaction it failed if it was. I think the relative tameness of it turned off many of Jarmusch's regular audience though. Still I liked it.

Joe posted this question re: Broken Flowers a while ago.

"And a discussion topic for the non-poets out there too. Have any of you seen Broken Flowers? What did you think? It's more conventional than Jarmusch’s work typically is. Is this good, bad, neutral? I know I tend to think accessibility generally hinders a movie, but it doesn’t really bother me here."

posted by Joseph @ 4:26 PM

We finally saw the movie last week. Funny thing: as accessible as this may be for Jarmusch, it still seems pretty far from fulfilling an audience's Hollywoodod-esque expectations. Nikki's parents saw the movie over the summer and called us immediately to tell us how much they hated it and almost walked out on it!

That gave us a natural predisposition toward liking the film -- but seriously, when we saw it we loved it. It manages to be awkward, sad and funny all at once. The most unconventionalal aspects, I felt, were its relatively low use of dramatic music and its non-closure. I loved both of these aspects -- in fact, I feel like they made the film a success. So I guess I wonder what was it that you saw as the more accessible elements (I realize you meant that in comparison to his other films--the only one of which I've seen is Dead Man Walking); and did anyone see these elements as a problem?

Found this today. A transcript of reading Dean gave last spring w/ a link to an audio version. I haven't quite gotten it to work yet. But here it is.

Elizabeth and I are heading to New York on Monday. It looks like nothing is going on with my job anytime soon, and Elizabeth will take architecture classes at Parsons until Tulane reopens.

Congrats on having the article accepted, Matt.