Hello,
I've just listened to the George Macuinas audio clips. I think they're brilliant! I'm researching Fluxus at the moment for my PhD and I wondered if it'd be OK for me to put part of an interview on a CD and play it to a small research group I go to? There's a few of us that meet every so often to talk about our research, it'd be really nice to play a bit of an interview to the group as part of a talk I want to do, but I don't want to just take it if it's aginst copyright laws. I'd be very grateful if you could let me know if this would be fine or not. It was great to listen to them on the internet anyway.
Thanks for the site!
Sally Kawamura
Glasgow University Scotland UK
Sally,
It's really delightful to listen to George Maciunas in these audio clips, isn't it?
Please use in any way you want. You should know, however, that when you steal from me you are stealing twice! I have no legal or licensing claim to this content. This interview was recorded in 1977 at KRAB radio in Seattle, whom I assume, would have some legitimate ownership claims. KRAB became KSER radio in 1984 and KSER is still around but not sure if they have any ownership claims on this content or not. I have never sought permission to put this content on the internet, but assumed I would just try to claim educational use and if that didn't fly, then take it off if anyone with legitimate ownership rights pressed me to do so. This web page with the audio-interview clips has been up for five years and I have never been contacted by anyone claiming authority over this material. In fact, the page is infrequently visited, and has generated few if any email inquiries like yours. The most notable previous inquiry was one telephone call--out of the blue--from Billy Maciunas, George Maciunas's one and only wife, who was working on her PhD in English at the University of North Carolina or something like that when she called about four years ago. She was just curious who I was and why I was putting this on the internet (I don't think she had ever heard this interview herself), seemed to be happy that I was doing this (and certainly didn't invoke any estate privileges or rights to this material). I offered to send her a copy of the original audio tape, and then promptly lost her phone & address before I was able to do that.
Dick Higgins gave me the audio cassette of this interview. I don't know where he got it or who gave it to him. He seemed to think I would be interested in it (having never met Maciunas myself). He was right. I still listen to parts of it from time to time and always come away really liking George Maciunas and his attitude. Very mischievous.
The recordings available on the internet site <http://www.fluxus.org/FLUXLIST/maciunas/>, unfortunately, is not the best quality reproduction of the audio tape. This was my first attempt to do something like this (capture and digitize something on audio tape and convert it into streaming web media) and it shows. Maybe SOMEDAY I will go back and do a better job of reproducing this interview.
Now do me a favor. Please let me (and the participants of FLUXLIST) know a little about your dissertation research and Fluxus focus. Thanks.
Allen Bukoff
