What about the Bible? And the Koran? It doesn’t matter. We have PERFECT LIVES”
– John Cage

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Over-the-hill lounge singer Raoul de Noget (Robert Ashley) and Buddy ("Blue" Gene Tyranny), The World's Greatest Piano Player and Boogie Woogie guru, are small-time entertainers on the small-town circuit. During an engagement at The Perfect Lives Lounge somewhere in Illinois, they become ambiguously enmeshed with Isolde (Jill Kroesen), the Sheriff's daughter, and Donnie (David Van Tieghem), The Captain of The Football Team, and their plan to commit a bank robbery of a highly conceptual nature. On the margins, they (and we) get to know the townspeople and the Midwestern landscape.

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A radical and singularly interdisciplinary work, Perfect Lives has been described by its composer and author Robert Ashley as many things, from "a comic opera about reincarnation" to "a song in the same way The Iliad is a song." It has been compared in print to Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Norman Lear's All in the Family. It's a key work in the history of American opera and the development of video art as a medium intended for broadcast to a mass audience, this seven-episode staging having been commissioned by the BBC to air on Channel 4. Ashley himself puts it most succinctly: "these are songs about the Corn Belt and some of the people in it... or on it." (Evan Pincus)

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dir. John Sanborn, 1984
United States, digital projection
175 min

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FRIDAY, 1/16
7:30 DOORS
8:00 SCREENING

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Whammy! is located in the REAR unit of 2514 Sunset Blvd, entrance access is via Rampart Blvd.