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Bart Plantenga

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a photo of myself

bart plantenga is a prolific author and active pirate radio station disc jockey who has been called "the world's expert on yodeling.He was born in Amsterdam, emigrated to the US, grew up in NJ, upstate NY, moved to Wisconsin, Michigan, hitchhiked across the USA ... and inevitably ended up in NYC where he co-founded the literary group, The Unbearables (originally the Unbearable Beatniks of Light) together with Ron Kolm, Mike Golden, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, for better or worse, sometimes called the most significant writing group since the Beats, at other times, the most ridiculous group of poseurs ever. They have produced a broad array of events: their famous Brooklyn Bridge Reading, The Dead Presidents Reading, The Madonna-Bukowski Birthday Reading, their Literary Seance, their protests of bland poetry in the New Yorker, their protests of "commodification of the Beats" at several prestigious Beat Seminars, and many more. Read more: Barely Bearably Unbearable: Chronicles of an Irreverent or Irrelevant Writers Group, Angry Old Man.

He also lived, wrote and produced radio in Paris for three+ years, eventually returning to Amsterdam, where he now lives with his partner and daughter. He has been a DJ – producing Wreck This Mess, in NYC (WFMU), Paris, and Amsterdam – since 1986. In 2015, he won the David Tudor Memorial Competition for his interpretation of John Cage’s 4’33” at the Faithful Festival in Berlin.


He has written a broad range of material from award-winning history articles to two pop musicology books, album liner notes, articles on refugees, artists, music, etc., literary novels including Beer Mystic, Ocean GroOve, Radio Activity Kills, the short story collection  Wiggling Wishbone & the novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man and the wander memoirs: Paris Scratch and NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor.

His books Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi plus the CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created the misunderstanding that he is one of the world’s foremost yodel experts. The New York Times Magazine featured Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo in its “Annual Year of Ideas.”

Some of his books have garnered unbelievable amounts of attention [BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, NY Times] while others have been astonishingly ignored. 

His non/fiction has appeared in, among others: The Guardian, The Times, American Heritage, Esquire, Vox Populi, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-art-of-documenting-the-undocumented/ Truthdig], Ambit (London), Exquisite Corpse, Evergreen Review, Mississippi Review, Fiction International,  Vokno (Prague),  Public Illumination Magazine (Italy), Frank (Paris), Brooklyn Rail, Actuel (Paris) … 

He has appeared in many anthologies including Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene (NYU Press), Semiotext(e) SF, Best American Erotica (Simon & Schuster) Waiting for a Train: Jimmie Rodgers’s America (Rounder), The Nation-KGB Nonfiction Reader (Nation Books), Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub (Schirmer), Bukowski Anthology (Silver Birch) and From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia).

He lives in Amsterdam with his partner Nina Ascoly and their daughter Paloma.

Selected works

References

Self as Shadow
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