“The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.”

Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 – November 27, 1991) was an underground influencer of 20th century music, art and film. He grew up the Pacific Northwest, then left in the late ’40s to participate in the San Francisco Beat and Greenwich Village creative communities. Smith’s impact on American culture continues, and has accelerated since his death in 1991, with numerous books, music events, museum exhibits, albums and documentaries devoted to his work.

A Grammy winner for lifetime achievement, he was “famous everywhere underground,” in the words of Allen Ginsberg, who recalled: “He was given a moment to make a speech and said very briefly that he was happy to live long enough to see the American political culture affected and moved and shaped somewhat by American folk music, meaning the whole rock-n-roll, Bob Dylan, Beatnik, post-Beatnik youth culture.”

From the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2023 Harry Smith exhibition, “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith”

“Over the course of fifty years, Smith made renegade and innovative use of the changing recording and distribution technologies, from his voracious approach to record collecting to experiments with early tape-recording systems to groundbreaking manipulations of abstraction and collage in film. Smith was an innovator in collecting, organizing, and sequencing images and artifacts that structure the ways we understand and share culture and experiences today. He created a life and practice largely outside of institutions and capitalism, offering an eccentric model for engagement with a society today even further dominated by these systems.
“Vitally, Smith brought to light and wrestled with—sometimes imperfectly—facets of America’s rich histories, tracing and sharing underappreciated veins of culture often invisible to mainstream society. Very much outside of his time, Smith nonetheless created his own rich vein of American culture that says more about this country, its arts, and its diverse creative communities than nearly any other artist of his time.”

whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith
“The Artist and Mystic Who Collected the World” – New York Times August 14, 2023
Subscribe for updates about author/musician Bret Lunsford’s book and blog about Harry Smith’s Pacific Northwest childhood
artforum.com/print/197205/animating-the-absolute-harry-smith-36216

Lori Goldston is a cellist and composer from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist draws connections between far-flung ideas and explores timbral thresholds of her instrument, driven by a restless curiosity and informed by a long, widely varied history of collaborations with bands, ensembles large and small, composers, film makers and choreographers including Earth, Nirvana, the BBC Scottish Symphony, Mirah, Black Belt Eagle Scout, Helms Alee, Jim Fletcher, Christian Rizzo, Maya Dunietz, Jherek Bischoff, Jessika Kenney, Eyvind Kang, Ilan Volkov, David Byrne, Lonnie Holley, Stuart Dempster, Shelley Hirsch, Ghedalia Tezartes, Ellen Fullman, Lynn Shelton and many, many others.

Referred to by UK’s The Quietus as “a hugely important character in contemporary music history,” she performs in the US and abroad, and has released recordings on on Sub Rosa, Woodland Fauna, Marginal Frequency, Yo Yo, K Records, Second Editions, Sub Pop, Mississippi Records, Eiderdown, Substrata, Ed Banger, PIAPTK, SofaBurn, Broken Clover, and No Sun.

• Lori Goldston Bandcamp
• Lori Goldston in the Irish Examiner