Jörg Piringer Comes to Schenectady to Play Vegetables and Talk

Jörg Piringer, Schenectady, New York (2 November 2010) Only a few days ago, Jörg Piringer, one of whose visual poems was featured in a visual poetry portfolio I edited for Poetry magazine a couple of years ago, and who is the developer of the iPhone app abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, dropped me a line to tell me that he was coming to Schenectady to give a performance at Proctor's Theatre with the famed Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna, Austria. Never has anyone in the past ever come to Schenectady and then contacted me so we can meet. (It is, to put it delicately, highly unlikely that anyone would ever have a reason to come to Schenectady, so rare that people I know who come here come only to see my family and me.)


Jörg Piringer and Geof Huth, Schenectady, New York (2 November 2010)
I invited Jörg to the house for dinner, Nancy made a great meal, and we spoke for hours about music, poetry, performance, the allure of language, countries we had visited, creating musical instruments out of vegetables, the Vegetable Orchestra's strange 2010 tour of the United States (consisting only of Schenectady and Indianapolis), and the metric system. Jörg was terribly jetlagged, and his body was telling him it was 3:30 in the morning when I drove him back to his hotel, but still we had a great time for six hours.

Jörg Piringer Explains Himself in Schenectady, New York from Geof Huth on Vimeo.

In ninety seconds, Jörg Piringer tells us who he is in the home of Geof Huth in Schenectady, New York, as Geof Huth asks him a couple of questions.
And before Jörg left, he was nice enough to explain himself, his work, and his interests in 90 seconds. Tomorrow, we will experience the Vegetable Orchestra, along with at least 500 others from New York's Capital District.