About 21st Surprise
Richard Dunlap
Richard (Dick) Dunlap’s visual and sound works have appeared in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, Stockholm, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
He has participated in New Music America festivals in San Francisco and Hartford, as well as in the PULSE II exhibition at U.C.S.B and in the FLUXUS exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
His solo album, Ode to the Sistrum, was produced for his 1999 retrospective at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Museum.
He has been a jazz musician since the 1950s, and his performances include a dual piano concert with Mal Waldron. Some of the other musicians he has performed with include Joe Venuti, Gary Peacock, William O. (Bill) Smith and Dave Friesen.
Dick is presently part of the group Headless Household which has produced nine albums. Dick has also created music for film, video and dance.
Dick has received grants and awards from the University of California’s Creative Arts Fellowship; the Charles Bloom Foundation; W.M. Keck Foundation; and the Esperia Foundation. He has also been given a Tiffany Award in Painting and for music composition from the Santa Barbara Arts Fund.
Dick lives in Santa Barbara, California. His wife Arlene is also an accomplished pianist, composer and teacher.
Matthew Sperling
Matthew Sperling is a high school dropout who also dropped out of a city college, a state college, and an Ivy League school. He received his bachelor’s from N.Y.U., having completed the requirements for a double major in journalism and a sort of Great Books program. He also got credit for a 10-week, 10,000-mile driving trip across the United States, during which Matt read books like “On the Road” and kept a journal. He shot over 40 rolls of black and white and color film using a big Nikon camera.
He is the author of at least 14 books of poems, two novels, three books of essays, two one-act plays, a movie script (with his wife Liz) and numerous other essays, poems, fiction, non-fiction, and newspaper articles. Matt has written about 100 songs. He also takes photos, these days mostly with a Nikon the size of a James Bond cigarette lighter. He also has fun as a painter.
Matt has washed pots and pans, picked oranges, been employed by a factory making sprinkler parts, and worked with turkeys, mostly of the non-human variety. (These jobs were on the kibbutz where he lived after he dropped out of high school.)
On behalf of such issues as campaign finance reform, Matt ran for Congress in New York City. He made it onto the primary ballot, a major accomplishment in a state in the grip of arcane and exclusive ballot laws. His other political activities have included tenant organizing, working with and for the homeless and protesting against the building and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.
He has traveled extensively in North America and Europe. A native of California, he lived in New York City for over 20 years, with another 10 years in Toronto. Matt has studied Italian, French, Spanish, and Hebrew.
Matt has been an investor in stocks, bonds and real estate, and he is a big believer in educating yourself about investing.