FANZINE

‘and so his noise was ours too for those times’ – On Ronald Tavel (1936 – 2009)

04.24.09

So the story goes that Andy Warhol needed a narrator’s voice when he made the move from silent pictures to "talkies." And Ronald Tavel had just the voice, i.e. the serpent in the garden he sought after. But Tavel turned out to be an artist far greater than Andy originally bargained for. He built his name with Warhol sure, as his narrator and screenwriter, but Tavel’s own projects of poetry, fiction, and especially the theatrical arts are in a class all their own, as he took his audience from the tame waters of the "absurd" out into the utter "ridiculous." Jennifer Krasinski gives Tavel, who died earlier this month, a proper sendoff.  Illustrations by Danny Jock.