My Life in Flux--And Vice Versa

Performance pieces like The Son of Man Trio , Cellar Song and The Last French-fried Potato --an improvised litany celebrating the end of the world--are woven into the fabric of this long, amorphous memoir by a key figure in the Fluxus movement, a stepchild of Dada. Williams, a painter, printmaker and poet, shuttles backward and forward from the early 1960s to the present, recounting festivals, happenings and Fluxus antics in Europe and Japan. His free-associative reminiscences in this scrapbook of provocations, infantile machinations and fitful inspirations are intercut with photographs, manifestos, concrete poems, posters, word games, drawings, musical scores and performance texts. He recounts the birth of Fluxus performance pieces like Spaghetti Sandwich and Pink Earplug , and discusses his on-and-off relationship with George Maciunas, the prime mover of Fluxus. A typical musical exercise goes like this: ``Sing meaningfully in a language made up on the spot.'' A little of this stuff goes a long way. (July)