SPINELESS BOOKS - Key Persons

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 [A richly humorous, satiric look at American life in the late 40s, a profound (and profoundly disturbing) commentary about the ability of the creative mind to transform the monstrous into breathtaking art, Lolita is above all this century's most passionate and most memorable lover story. ]

Terry Allen was born in 1943 in Wichita, Kansas and spent his childhood and high-school years in Lubbock, Texas, a town perched on the edge of the Texas Panhandle with a long history of producing eccentric musical figures who brewed up a volatile mixture of country, hard driving, rockabilly, swing, and the blues (Lubbock alumni include Buddy Holly and Joe Ely, the latter having appeared on Allen's Lubbock on Everything and collaborated with Allen on Chippy). His father, Sled Allen, played major league baseball (he was a catcher for the St. Louis Browns) while his mother, Pauline Roosevelt Piers Allen, was a professional jazz and barrel house piano player. After graduating from high school, Allen left Lubbock for California with his wife, actress and performance artist Jo Harvey Allen[4], where he received his BGA from Chovinard Art Institute. During the 1960s and 70s, Allen's creative energies spilled over into several different forms: sculpture and video (the two forms he probably remains best known for in the U.S., particularly for Youth in Asia, a body of visual and audio pieces dealing with the aftermath of America's war in Vietnam), drawings, environments, theater, installations, performance art, music, and numerous unclassifiable, mixed-media works. Occasionally returning home to Lubbock for extended periods of time, Allen also had an extended (and apparently unhappy) stint as a member of the Art Department at San Jose State University ( he had earlier turned down an offer to teach art at Berkeley). During the 1980s, Allen's work in the fine arts began attracting increasing attention, both in the U.S. and abroad, particularly Germany. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim fellowship for the visual arts (1986), and recorded a soundtrack album, Amerasia, for the film of the same name by German director Wolf-Eckhart Buhler. In addition to doing the soundtrack sets and costumes for Pedal Steel, a dance piece choreographed by Margaret Jenkins which premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 1985, for which he received the Isodora Duncan-Award and Bessie Smith Award. has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Documenta VIII (in Kassel, W. Germany). Allen returned to the SW in the early 90s, establishing a residence in Sante Fe where he currently lives. Juarez has had a long and complex gestation period, and has periodically gone through major transformations in different modes. It found its start in 1969 as a series of drawings and songs, the earliest of which came about in Allen's first Lubbock studio. But Juarez continued to expand, spilling over into a variety of forms, as it continues to do so to this day. The audio recording of Juarez was done in San Francisco and featured musicians who would become the core of Allen's "Panhandle Mystery Band" which would accompany Allen on most of his later studio albums. A screenplay based on Juarez followed in 1978, followed by a performance adaptation by Jo Harvey. By 1980, the piece had changed into "A Simple Story"-an installation piece of three units, incorporating aspects of song, image, word, space, and form. A recent incarnation is a stage script co-written by Allen and his friend, David Byrne, who used several Allen songs on the soundtrack to his first feature film, True Stories. Allen hopes to have this script eventually staged as a kind of "horse opera" at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music.