Bart Plantenga
Bart Plantenga is a writer who has been called "the world's expert on yodeling and the "Alan Lomax of not just the yodeling world but yodeling worldwide." He is also a pirate radio station disc jockey known for his radio show on Radio Patapoe, "Wreck this Mess." Plantenga has written several books about yodeling including "Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World," released in 2004 by Routledge, and "Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica", released in 2013 by the University of Wisconsin Press. He has also released the  album "The Rough Guide to Yodel" and wrote the entry on yodeling in "Music Around the World: A Global Encyclopedia". Along with Ron Kolm, Mike Golden, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, he was a co-founder of the Unbearables, a literary group in New York City, which held an annual event reading erotic poetry aloud on the Brooklyn Bridge, and stormed the offices of The New Yorker "to protest the quality of the magazine’s poetry." Plantenga maintains two YouTube channels, "Yodel in HiFi Top 50+", and a channel for his radio show, "Wreck Dub Wire Yodel", and has written  for The Brooklyn Rail. His novel Beer Mystic has been called an "experiential experiment" and a "'global pub crawl' across various Web sites" and is excerpted in the critical anthology "Up Is Up, But So Is Down New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992". Plantenga is a native of Amsterdam. He spent a year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as a student in the early 1970s before transferring to the University of Michigan for his degree. He lives in Amsterdam with his partner Nina Ascoly and their daughter Paloma.