Nothing: a benefit for Tuli Kupferberg - St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, produced by Hal Willner
This isn't going to ramble, but meander as, in the decades since ending any critical assessments, it is no longer second nature to scribble furiously, processing events in real time, to bear witness, but more scattered and fragmented, unfortunately, resorting to sentiments recollected in tranquility, which is now.
That sentence was falling apart from the giddyup...and that's alright too. There's something anarchic about too much punctuation, like the way it breaks up a smooth thought into a bunch of jaggies, as if blowing up j-peg beyond its pixellation limit. Which is how memory works too--no seamless flashbacks, only flashes, and that which remains lights up a broad sketch with few recognizable details.
For instance, the opening loop of the March on Washington in 1967, when Allen Ginsburg and the Fugs were part of the attempt to levitate the Pentagon is just an audio excerpt of a huge watershed event, like one big wave in a tsunami. Still, it is worth repeating, as it did, an overture over and over, this insane, irrational act, and just what the times demanded. If didn't remind you that this night was coming from another world, you might as well have been home with reruns of American Idle.
The lights go down and the noise comes up and it is the celebrity jam session. Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, and a guy on beatpads or turntables (hard to tell amid the wash of f/x)--that's skronk, screech and squawk to say the least. The headliners come on first? And no songs? Depends. It could be anybody up there trying to rip the stirrups off your anvil and puncture your drum, but was them. They brought a celebrity cache to the mix--alright, yet it wasn't any of their sets (excerpt Zorn, who can always wail in a maelstrom, still pumping a knee under his sax the add extra wobble warble). What they delivered was the brain eraser, the preconception purger. Couldn't have been more than 15-20 minutes, but it burned about that long after as well.
Some may wonder why this free jazz is set among the crazy lyrico-rhetorists, and those probably have forgotten how much the scenes bled into each other back in those days before we split up to follow our labels. This is the part where the real memory play comes in--part personal reference, part social history. In the 1960s, you could have a band like the Mothers of Invention doing a two-year residency at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village and incorporate post-bop blurt, doo-wop and stuff approximating encounter therapy with an audience, without anybody worrying about appealing to a demographic. Which is exactly what comes on the stage here. Even as excellent an organizer as Hal can't overcome some last minute snags, and so the guy who intro's them and the next and a couple others is not Richard Belzer, who bowed out with the flu. The guy makes a mention that their may be a surprise visit via videophone from the man himself, but that's for later.
For now is The Fugs, in the band's longest line-up since the first days: Ed Sanders, Steve Taylor on guitar and vocals, Coby Batty on drums and vocals, and co-producer Scott Petito on bass and keyboards. Ed looks pretty good, all things considered, as does Taylor, a regular at St. Marks Poetry Marathon (see previous post), and Coby you'd swear was Iggy, from distance. They do one of Tuli's finest ballads "Morning Morning," and one of their famous poem-to-song adaptations, "When the Mode of the Music Changes." Which is not exactly a poem, per se, as much as an excerpt from Plato, referring to the observation that the entire order of the State is affected by such things and should be carefully monitored. When Fugs (the poet's band) became The Fugs (a rock band with a definite article added on by their record label) it was not only a transition from a downtown bunch of scruffy folkie malcontents into a (semi-) professional electric group it was at a time when people actually believed "rock" could change the world. (Let us allow this discussion to slide with the proviso that, perhaps, hip hop may prove to be a greater threat, if only for its overt anti-establishment appeal...masking a more conformist approach than envisioned in the blandest beatitudes of Pat Boone.)
The mention of St. Marks and the Poetry Project wasn't casual. That's where I'd seen Tuli the most over the previous decade, but not since 2003 or 2004, leading me to wonder if he'd been boycotting it for getting too bourgeois, or something. Now I know it was health. This is one of the main reasons for coming there; I'd given a couple bucks to S. Clay Wilson, Obama's campaign, Haitian relief and now it was time to pony up for someone who I knew, if only slightly, and admired, but quite a lot more. Small price to pay.
Now there might've been Elliott Sharp playing with Jeffrey Lewis in here, or something else. But about then Philip Glass was playing piano to the abstract films of Harry Smith, another Fugs contempo. He's the same guy who came out with the "Anthology of American Folk Music" back in the day, influencing generations with his choices. The movies are that etched-frame animation of colors and textures and stuttering and shaking shapes that signal a hand-made product. This is another Willner touch--add in an element that some may see as tangential to the subject, and others as key. And it you can employ a new sense as well, that doesn't hurt either.
Peter Stampfel comes up next with his daughter and someone else to do his new number off a new CD, telling of his own influence on another generation, "The Duke of the Beatniks". He and Steven Weber were in the original Fugs, 1965 edition, and shortly thereafter both formed the Holy Modal Rounders (with Sam Shepard on drums) though they remained in Fugs off and on for a few more years. It is lovable coots (for that is what he is) like Peter and Tuli that give you hope for your future, if you manage to make it past post-menopausal depression. This is not growing old gracefully, but screeching and howling--Tuli would snarl out anti-war rants then song parodies and Peter still jitters like an R. Crumb cartoon with a sugar rush.
More or less at some point around here John Kruth and his All Star Band slouched on. This rag-tag gaggle consists of John S. Hall and Dogbowl and some other guys that made me think of members of the Great Small Works puppet theater that has been throwing leftist/anarchist spaghetti dinners around town on scattered Tuesdays for the last 20 years. So, am I certain they did "CIA Man"? No, I am not. I heard it, and it could've been Lenny Kaye, but... It was the 'list poem'-sort-of workout of "The Ten Commandments" that I'm sure of, especially enjoyable for the ex-red-diaper-baby Hall getting around the text and under the mike to torque the tablets into heresies.
It was about this time, or earlier or later, when Peter Stampfel comes back with Tuli's pal the author Larry "Ratso" Sloman to do a bit of commercial theater. Ratso makes sure that the memorabilia table and t-shirt concessionaire are noted straight away, all proceeds going to Tuli, natch. And then to up the ante, gives it over to Peter to auction off a classic original poster of The Fugs from 1967 (maybe) with the faces of Tuli, Ed and, Peter notes, "my old rotten partner Steve" (although that may not be the exact term used, and only half in jest--lotta water under the bridge with those two). With the promise that they will get signatures from both Ed and Tuli, the awkward and comic bidding by Peter gets up to a $1,010...or not. (It was a little confused at the end as to who had the last bid and what it was.)
I met Tuli through a long-time buddy of his Lanny, who produced a show on Manhattan Neighbohood Network public access called "The Coco Crystal Show". When I was working at the "bump shop" (making photo repro line-screens for print) for Lanny, he got me and my friend Dean to work camera. Tuli and Lanny would often appear on the show as well. That's when he showed me what was in those FedEx envelopes he was always carrying around: these funny-looking line drawings. These were his early political cartoons that would appear in Downtown magazine, late '80s, as I recall. When I asked him why he wore shorts in late November he said it was something he picked up from the Long Range Desert Patrols of the British Army--helped to acclimatize him to the cold. I liked that he always seemed to have a good reason for behavior that would otherwise seem a little crazy. But this is beginning to sound too much like an obit. Back to the jams.
Now, whether or not she was exactly next, Shilpa Ray and her band (name escapes) came on to do "Supergirl", offering apologies in advance for only having learned the song that morning. In case you hadn't noticed the previous rave for this little lady, she was one of the showstoppers at the Sly Stone Tribute at Castle Clinton last year, and her throaty chuckle at some of the sexual attributes assigned to the heroine of the title managed to be both self-mocking and sexy. For that alone, she deserves a red S on her chest.
We'll add the other headliners here. Sonic Youth played the longest set, maybe 30 minutes, with one shredder at least by Thurston. The odd thing was the other guitar was not Lee but Kim. I have already said I was out of touch, but when did the line-up change? Maybe not--I saw them at the 4th of July show at Battery Park only two years ago and they were the same band I remember since Richard Edson left. Their place is secured as some of the last standard-bearers of what was the real downtown scene; the last of the experimentalists who made it big. This is why they're here; having made gigs with Sun Ra and other ancient luminaries, they've continually demonstrated their hearts are in the L.E.S. place. They may rock harder than any Fugs tune ever, yet the torch they carry is the same.
Ok. You can't call this the producer's moment, but yeah, Hal Willner comes on with Lenny Kaye, telling us that, instead of doing a live hook-up to the house (as Tuli had already gone to bed), and he couldn't find anyone else who'd do this and Tuli specifically requested it and so, another of his parody songs, a tribute backatcha to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: "A Septugenarian in Love".
Along about then, Jolie Holland did a song and I think she was pretty good. Then Gary Lucas--the guitarist of a 1000 ideas--one of his multi-layer, self-accompaniment, live-double-tracking time-flanging whammy-wah-wah numbers. And the All-Star Band did another turn, leading the audience in a good-old-fashioned sing-along to "River of Shit", before launching into my friend Ed's favorite parody number: "I've Been Working For The Landlord".
The final segment was given over to the Fugs. At the penultimate moment, Ed began to introduce a beautiful slow number to end the show, but gave in to peer (and crowd) pressure that wanted just one taste of the band that could, when necessary, knock it around the stage. So they searched through their sheets and came up with what Ed called "our psychedelic parody song". "Crystal Liason" did not disappoint at all, giving Taylor a chance to pull a few wails from the paisley ether, and--with no explanation I can fathom--Ed goes to the back of the stage and puts on this long, fire-engine red cloak and starts shimmying around like a dervish with disc problems...which detracts in no way from making you think something almost like: Oh, So this is what it was like! That he chooses to end according to his original plan, "Dover Beach" only underscores the loveliness of that tune.
But yeah, where would we be without a coda, huh? And it is a pre-recorded message from Tuli, thanking everyone for their support, wishing all a good night and "Enjoy yourself...It's later than you think..."
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
...the harmony in the dischord...
Subtitle: A minor key meditation on “Birth of the Uncool”
The above link leads to an online article by Brian Eno which is sort of a toss-off (in my opinion) but well worth your time, as was mine, in reading more of the comments/reactions to the piece. As one of the contributors made mention of the fact that another's post was somewhat excessive (longer than the original article), I had to agree, in principle, that one's response should not be greater than its inception. (With the exception of religio-politico nonsense which requires the marshalling of ideas and facts to counterpose the points of faith-based statements.)
So, with that in mind, I present the following as a response to the responses:
Outside of the unfortunate resemblance to the UnCola, this seems to have engendered a lot of very well- informed and well-spoken remarks. This is what I consider the best of the web -- random contributions from all points of view, pro and cons, that bring keen insight to a piece.
What I found is my usual amazement that, when all opinions are compared and resolved, they actually seem to form the same mechanism of a metaphor. Mind you, I understand that it is all in my mind, but, nonetheless, it seems to follow exactly the models of two major league philosophers, and one groundbreaking composer, of the last century. They are, not to make any further mystery about it, Derrida, McLuhan and Schoenberg. And, as we are talking about music, the latter’s application is particularly startling.
I would call it Schoenberg’s Ultimate Symphony, really. Why? This appears to be everything that stemmed from his liberation of tonality in 1909: the unstructuring of everything associated with Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the introduction of Chaos in the form of Atonality and 12-tone Serialism, were all auguries the arrival of the same messenger: The Internet.
When you stop to consider, as no few have here, what this development in human relations means (and it is nothing less than that; mere technological innovation? Puh-leeeze!) is that everything that can be digitalized can be made available to everyone at all times. Factor this with Zappa’s work ethic: “anything, at any time, for no reason”, more or less. Between jpgs, mp3s, and .wav/.mpg/.flv files, you can see or hear almost anything you want to, on a whim. We are talking magic here.
At the same time, this also eliminates Local Identity and the exclusiveness associated with discovering new, unheard sounds and scenes and events. The combination of Global and Local is used here as “Glocal” – a neologism which may or may not catch on, but is just as descriptive of the phenomena of something that is both nowhere and everywhere. (If Derrida was into using Marcuse, he’d’ve said “the negation of the negation” probably.) This simultaneity is straight out of McLuhan, even if his “Global Village” analogy, which has been often cited without proper interpretation, looks like it was made for just this purpose.
In this case, any segregation of interests or niches perceived are merely the result of our attempting to duplicate, in our minds/tastes/labeling modules (whatever) the same sort of discrete notation understood in terms of machine intelligence and design: things not applicable, or at least not previously available as standard variations of human thinking, such things as “identity”. If you follow, say, a couple of late 90’s trends that I recall, named “handbag” and “Baeleric” (both being some Euro-variant of late-stage Acid House, I believe) noted as different from one another by their BPM counts, you are not talking about “taste” as much as an ability to count, or take a pulse. These are less “lifestyle choices” (to use a popular socio-psychobabble phrase for what used to be “your thang” or “my bag” or that kind of earthy, pseudo-afro slang) than micro-preferences (just to nudge it further into the “processor-speak” of the day). The simple exercise of reversing the process, of taking these rivulets of data courses up the creek to their sources will eventually reach the gathering of waters where everything is “mainstream” now. (The prejorative terms, “overmixed” and “diluted” also fit the descript.)
This is where the concept of Atonality enters. When there is no tonal center, all things are equal: stress, pitch, timbre on each note can be increased or decreased without limit and without any relation to what had come before and what would come after. What structures remain exist under the same description as those of free-form improvisers: aleatory. At its core, all “must” then must be organized by the listener. This also is equally descriptive of social networking sites (the obvious development of earlier childhood “playdates” as well) and device-happy moderns, in that there is nothing in the original structure (which gets closer and closer to Derrida’s Deconstruction premise) which comes unselected, as part of the package. All options are up to the user. (How computerese!) Even the idea of “uncool” or “cool” itself. (All things ARE relative, but only when you’re Ego Prime.)
A side effect of this is, however, increased fragmentation and alienation among listeners, fans, users (whatever). The seeming contradiction here is: the more the sounds get driven into one indistinguishable mass of micro-preferences, the less need there is for like-minded groupings to create the old style “us vs. them” scenario. The only possible way to find or accumulate a gathering of people with these sort of specific turn-ons is via blogs or social networking sites. The concept of the new verb “friending” (and the associated conjugations: “I accepted a friend…” and “I friended” to the ultimate insult of “unfriending”—a/k/a: a “face-slap”) even shows how the distance of space requires a qualification (not “I made a new friend” or “I befriended” even, to “I lost a friend”) which comes from never actually being in the presence of that other. (Which is pure Derrida, again.) In other words, Facebook does not equal face-time.
These are the silences, the rests.
And what that leads to its maddest issue. What used to be a desire to distinguish one’s set from another’s by what is au courant is now more like what’s-plugged-into-the-current. It has been said here that fashion is what is repeated several years later, and that today’s VH1 oldie was last month’s big hit. Further, this was addressed by replacing the slag of “That was sooo last week” by “WHOA! Someone hasn’t been online since this afternoon…” This bespeaks a tempo racing beyond the capacity of human players, possibly even human ears.
That the time signature.
Finally, the comment “we are all cultural magpies” seems well-observed and pointed. We nest anywhere we can find a perch, owing no allegiance to anything but our nature, which is constantly shifting, regardless of the past, seeing as more little than a “fat tail” (to use Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” neologism) of experience in our comet-like trajectory. The ad copy that goes something like, “It isn’t important, where we’ve been, but only where we are going” re-enforces this attitude with a vengeance. This is how an example cited of a London DJ having nights of “dark ambient” sounds at some club or outlaw warehouse party can be so treasured. These exhibiters are our arbiters of “cool”, our curators of the gallery of sounds, and create the closest thing available to an “in crowd”.
And yes, under this title, it is possible for “uncool” to be “the new cool” even as the label “hipster” becomes unhip. Thus we arrive at the only unifying chant remaining to us: “ARE WE NOT HIP? WE ARE MET-A!”
And that’s the only key in this piece.
So just sit and listen to the harmony in the dischord.
The above link leads to an online article by Brian Eno which is sort of a toss-off (in my opinion) but well worth your time, as was mine, in reading more of the comments/reactions to the piece. As one of the contributors made mention of the fact that another's post was somewhat excessive (longer than the original article), I had to agree, in principle, that one's response should not be greater than its inception. (With the exception of religio-politico nonsense which requires the marshalling of ideas and facts to counterpose the points of faith-based statements.)
So, with that in mind, I present the following as a response to the responses:
Outside of the unfortunate resemblance to the UnCola, this seems to have engendered a lot of very well- informed and well-spoken remarks. This is what I consider the best of the web -- random contributions from all points of view, pro and cons, that bring keen insight to a piece.
What I found is my usual amazement that, when all opinions are compared and resolved, they actually seem to form the same mechanism of a metaphor. Mind you, I understand that it is all in my mind, but, nonetheless, it seems to follow exactly the models of two major league philosophers, and one groundbreaking composer, of the last century. They are, not to make any further mystery about it, Derrida, McLuhan and Schoenberg. And, as we are talking about music, the latter’s application is particularly startling.
I would call it Schoenberg’s Ultimate Symphony, really. Why? This appears to be everything that stemmed from his liberation of tonality in 1909: the unstructuring of everything associated with Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the introduction of Chaos in the form of Atonality and 12-tone Serialism, were all auguries the arrival of the same messenger: The Internet.
When you stop to consider, as no few have here, what this development in human relations means (and it is nothing less than that; mere technological innovation? Puh-leeeze!) is that everything that can be digitalized can be made available to everyone at all times. Factor this with Zappa’s work ethic: “anything, at any time, for no reason”, more or less. Between jpgs, mp3s, and .wav/.mpg/.flv files, you can see or hear almost anything you want to, on a whim. We are talking magic here.
At the same time, this also eliminates Local Identity and the exclusiveness associated with discovering new, unheard sounds and scenes and events. The combination of Global and Local is used here as “Glocal” – a neologism which may or may not catch on, but is just as descriptive of the phenomena of something that is both nowhere and everywhere. (If Derrida was into using Marcuse, he’d’ve said “the negation of the negation” probably.) This simultaneity is straight out of McLuhan, even if his “Global Village” analogy, which has been often cited without proper interpretation, looks like it was made for just this purpose.
In this case, any segregation of interests or niches perceived are merely the result of our attempting to duplicate, in our minds/tastes/labeling modules (whatever) the same sort of discrete notation understood in terms of machine intelligence and design: things not applicable, or at least not previously available as standard variations of human thinking, such things as “identity”. If you follow, say, a couple of late 90’s trends that I recall, named “handbag” and “Baeleric” (both being some Euro-variant of late-stage Acid House, I believe) noted as different from one another by their BPM counts, you are not talking about “taste” as much as an ability to count, or take a pulse. These are less “lifestyle choices” (to use a popular socio-psychobabble phrase for what used to be “your thang” or “my bag” or that kind of earthy, pseudo-afro slang) than micro-preferences (just to nudge it further into the “processor-speak” of the day). The simple exercise of reversing the process, of taking these rivulets of data courses up the creek to their sources will eventually reach the gathering of waters where everything is “mainstream” now. (The prejorative terms, “overmixed” and “diluted” also fit the descript.)
This is where the concept of Atonality enters. When there is no tonal center, all things are equal: stress, pitch, timbre on each note can be increased or decreased without limit and without any relation to what had come before and what would come after. What structures remain exist under the same description as those of free-form improvisers: aleatory. At its core, all “must” then must be organized by the listener. This also is equally descriptive of social networking sites (the obvious development of earlier childhood “playdates” as well) and device-happy moderns, in that there is nothing in the original structure (which gets closer and closer to Derrida’s Deconstruction premise) which comes unselected, as part of the package. All options are up to the user. (How computerese!) Even the idea of “uncool” or “cool” itself. (All things ARE relative, but only when you’re Ego Prime.)
A side effect of this is, however, increased fragmentation and alienation among listeners, fans, users (whatever). The seeming contradiction here is: the more the sounds get driven into one indistinguishable mass of micro-preferences, the less need there is for like-minded groupings to create the old style “us vs. them” scenario. The only possible way to find or accumulate a gathering of people with these sort of specific turn-ons is via blogs or social networking sites. The concept of the new verb “friending” (and the associated conjugations: “I accepted a friend…” and “I friended” to the ultimate insult of “unfriending”—a/k/a: a “face-slap”) even shows how the distance of space requires a qualification (not “I made a new friend” or “I befriended” even, to “I lost a friend”) which comes from never actually being in the presence of that other. (Which is pure Derrida, again.) In other words, Facebook does not equal face-time.
These are the silences, the rests.
And what that leads to its maddest issue. What used to be a desire to distinguish one’s set from another’s by what is au courant is now more like what’s-plugged-into-the-current. It has been said here that fashion is what is repeated several years later, and that today’s VH1 oldie was last month’s big hit. Further, this was addressed by replacing the slag of “That was sooo last week” by “WHOA! Someone hasn’t been online since this afternoon…” This bespeaks a tempo racing beyond the capacity of human players, possibly even human ears.
That the time signature.
Finally, the comment “we are all cultural magpies” seems well-observed and pointed. We nest anywhere we can find a perch, owing no allegiance to anything but our nature, which is constantly shifting, regardless of the past, seeing as more little than a “fat tail” (to use Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” neologism) of experience in our comet-like trajectory. The ad copy that goes something like, “It isn’t important, where we’ve been, but only where we are going” re-enforces this attitude with a vengeance. This is how an example cited of a London DJ having nights of “dark ambient” sounds at some club or outlaw warehouse party can be so treasured. These exhibiters are our arbiters of “cool”, our curators of the gallery of sounds, and create the closest thing available to an “in crowd”.
And yes, under this title, it is possible for “uncool” to be “the new cool” even as the label “hipster” becomes unhip. Thus we arrive at the only unifying chant remaining to us: “ARE WE NOT HIP? WE ARE MET-A!”
And that’s the only key in this piece.
So just sit and listen to the harmony in the dischord.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
All Is For Naughts
Or, "Catching up with the Zeros..."
Yes, it has been much ballyhoo'ed about as to the disunity in nomeclature with respect to the decade past. I will go with the above simply out of the way it reminds me of Jethro Clampett trying to count, but, as well, a short piece by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. found here
And so, as 2009 drew to a close, as is my wont I went to the St. Marks Poetry Project Marathon on New Year's Day. The major change this year was the dedication of the event to the passing of Jim Carroll. As there is a previous post here upon that gent, I will not wax prolix again.
The standard disclaimer still applies to all the Hash Marks.
This is not a review anymore than anyone can scribble anything on over 100 performances of various stages of abstraction and concrete references and still maintain some kind of appreciation for each and all. This is simply the list transcribed in the order of appearance with the raw notes of solid impressions and a few asides. If anyone happens to stumble across this and feels slighted, don't be. You were part of a day I always treasure if only for the fact that it gives us all a way of celebrating the passage of time without referring to the previous eve's false sense of overwhelming jollity and gay abandon, usually associated with Re-Marks like, "Whew! I shouldn't oughtta ___ like that!" (Fill in your debauch of choice.) Such it is that the Question Marks after some entries represent whether or not I heard right what was coming off the stage (acoustics, and the natural ambiguity of poets' word choice and/or their level of articulation). The Quotation Marks enclose possible titles or sharp details that sprang out of the mix.
And everything else is just...St. Marks.
1. David Shapiro -- "forget..."
2. Cliff Fyman – bad waiter
3. Phyllis Wat - platonic solids
4. Richard O’Russa
5. Marcella Durand,
6. Michael Lydon – the handsomest man in the world sings another warm and friendly well-nigh children's song
7. Michael Cirelli - re: muslim/or non-WASP wife endiring airplane security checks, “she doesn’t hide the bomb/she is the bomb”
8. Joe Elliot – advertisements for the new world (sorta zen slices form the image factory)
9. Pierre Joris
10. Joel Lewis
11. Dael Orlandersmith – on a personal encounter w/a famous celebrity on a cellphone walking across the middle of 6th avenue
12. Nicole Peyrafitte & Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
3PM
13. Brendan Lorber – advice for the be chic?
14. Tony Hoffman – Intertidal Zone?
15. CA Conrad
16. David Mills – “if it has a face/don’t eat it” and a list poem (lobotomy is? or a body is?)
17. Tracey McTeague– What Shelley began, Redd Foxx finished… ‘Look out, Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to you!’” [consort/wife of Lorber, is stone sex fox in leather and choker and heels, even w/baby]
18. Denizé Lauture,
19. Lisa Jarnot
20. Magdalena Zurawski – lesbian w/real vocab for sex (why is it that they seem to do the eros thang so much better than the porno thang?)
21. Tyler Burba – "last night I had a strange dream, sitting with a group of children and we were all singing this song about death..."
22. Gary Parrish – ex-vet: “two days to go/I might be standing here/for years”
23. Elinor Nauen
24. Mónica de la Torre – (on job applications, overhead? over-heard?) “My English is no…”
25. Steve Cannon – gal (protege?) reads poem ending "hope is where our heart lives" and he chords piano like a goofy Monk, to end on "No Small Matter"
26. Tim Griffin – (has apparently put on a similar marathon with the Serpentine Gallery in London) “What are the new topics?”
27. Will Morris – a/k/a Billy Cancel (options titles = “or” repeated w/innumerable funnies, such as "an ode to my father or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is or citigroup building 51st floor...")
28. Renato Rosaldo – Sam Spade and Effie Perrine discuss case in shooting script terminology
4PM
29. Church Of Betty – a song from Araby
30. Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan – “a poem is true if…” [sorta XYZ and Meyers, w/o rhythm]
31. Diana Hamilton – “describe…”
32. Eddie Hopely – a list of first names of the 15 largest company’s CEO’s (a large number of which are women)
33. Mina Pam Dick – “let us mourn Mona Lisa’s eyebrows…”
34. Susan Landers – poem based on the Chicago Manual of Style
35. Bob Rosenthal
36. Don Yorty (& nephew on 2nd guitar) do blues songs: “Goin’ Back to Work Again” w/line “Sisyphus did fine/pushin’ one rock at a time”, and “White Trash Baby”
37. John Godfrey
38. Rebecca Moore - "is now working part time at an upstate farm animal rescue shelter..." and still clocks in as downtown's own version of Tori Amos, or better
39. Donna Brook – driving instructions on Health Care (like "people who drive on the political left must learn important rules of the road...to reach your destination it is most important to do so without injury to self, passengers or vehicle...there will be wrong turns, false starts, and dead ends...but always keep your hands on the steering wheel")
40. Kim Lyons – from “Secret Sharer”?
5PM
41. Michael Brownstein – plastic bottle squeezing to demonstrate the enemy ("20% of these end up in landfills"), conscience on full blast, projects us into Soylent Green world…
42. Philip Glass – a new one! (that is, new to me...)
[who was the guy in the Nudie-type suit of cacti, teepees and campfires patches reading “WAGON MASTER” in sequins?]
43. Peter Bushyeager – thinks of the Stones’ “No Expectations” and speaks on the contrast between blogging and the countryside extremes
44. Robert Hershon [great presence in the room]
45. Greg Fuchs – “so excellent to sit in this room, quiet, and listen to one another”
46. Karen Weiser – “Suppose you surrender ‘til we hum about you”
[I want tech support on my life!]
47. Paolo Javier
48. Joanna Fuhrman – “I hid the 20th century in my Marcel Duchamp lunchbox” (w/a Rrose Selavy ref. too)
49. Yuko Otomo
50. Steve Dalachinsky – “I was shanghai’ed years ago/by my book” (ending w/”Thank god/He gave us God” almost orthodox jew in citation)
51. David Freeman
52. Tom Savage – for Merce Cunningham, and a Ned Rorem song to a Whitman text
53. Ari Banias (amazing baul out?) “Love takes its Sharpie and draws a mustache on everything” (& a disco ball moved by 2 guys on street: stunning image of the nightlife icon in the real world…)
6PM
54. Kristin Prevallet – OLD STYLE! w/bongos!
55. Judith Malina and Red Noir Ensemble – reading of classic Julian Beck rabble-rousing rhetoric, followed by semi-STOMP and group grope! (boy, they don't make them like this anymore...)
56. David Kirschenbaum – “Dorothy Hamill, Farah Fawcett, Shawn Cassidy” in song tribute to hair!
57. Sharon Mesmer – “A few things I’d like to see in the next year…” (She gets better every time I see her...)
7PM???
58. Jon S. Hall – a) Christmas trees rolling down the street like tumbleweeds” from accompaniest, then, b) “EVERYTHING’S CLOSED!” poem w/ultracute baby daughter
59. Avram Fefer – sax solo
60. Adeena Karasick
61. Eugene Ostashevsky – “The Parrot & The Pirate”, quotes Descarte, and olde saw about two frogs in buttermilk: one drowns and the other kicks up such a fuss it becomes yoghurt and makes an escape, then Gilligan’s Isle!
62. Toby Goodshank (from Moldy Peaches)
63. Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
64. Maggie Estep - new novel about pirates? ("She was tall for a girl, not ugly for her time, and someone had stolen her dog...")
65. Patricia Spears Jones
66. Dan Machlin & Serena Jost
67. Murat Nemat-Nejat – “The structure of Replicants”(?) and, “I’m a parakeet/twit-wit-twit-wit/Good Morning!” language lesson record thang that actually got the stoic crowd to do repeats!
68. Gillian McCain – comes up w/Lester to play tapes of Jim Carroll talking about the day Kennedy was shot finding him on toilet masturbating to pix of Streisand in bikini, and 2 more, then Lester gets audience to sing one chorus of Happy Birthday to her and gives her a Snuggie as present
69. Steve Earle – “Peace”
70. Maggie Dubris
71. Edwin Torres – “Grunt” (yup! All about scatological functions...)
72. Steven Taylor
73. Ed Friedman
74. Bill Kushner & Merle Lister [2nd year w/Chihuahua bit]
75. Janet Hamill – song paean to “Metropolitan Avenue”, in two parts
8PM
76. Foamola – just as much fun and chaos, but w/repeat of “I Like Heroin” song
77. Todd Colby – “Thanks for 2009 - it sucked!”
78. Tony Towle - toasts
79. Christine Elmo - dancer
80. John Giorno - dusts off one from 1993
81. Laura Elrick
82. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs [in Hawaiian and Cherokee]
83. Charles Bernstein – “Not for all the whiskey in heaven…”
84. Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater – extended enigmas with members in the audience chairs adding oddities, best of which is guy who keeps interrupting to hang either quotation marks or Nixon peace signs over the proceedings
[there is no expiration date on______]
[note: Jim Carroll memorial, Feb. 10]
85. Elliott Sharp
86. Penny Arcade – “I took it on myself…” for 2nd year
87. Lenny Kaye
88. Legs McNeil – from intro to his Ramones book
89. Anne Tardos – anti-war
90. Tonya Foster – (uses of the term ‘bitch’ and ‘b-ball’)
91. Miguel Gutierrez – dances along to, then sings/screams a Radiohead song, blonde wig goes flying in paroxysm
92. Lewis Warsh - imagines a conga line and sexual metaphors, long and complex
93. Eileen Myles
94. Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers – utilizes a white-trash ethnic soundscape of semi-comprehensible morphemes and syllables while she dances
95. Jonas Mekas – “KEEP ON SNOWING! …JUST LIKE RUSSIA IN 1812!”
96. Reuben Butchart – very nice song set to poetry of John Carroll, not Jim
97. Taylor Mead - (for a change, his portable Mingus tape works okay)
98. Patti Smith - beaming: "I actually feel pretty good about the year to come..."
99. Oliver Ray - real nice, long song
100. Anselm Berrigan
101. Yoshiko Chuma – starts w/music for a change, actual medley of Bernard Herrmann themes!
102. Callers – nice music set
103. Joan Larkin
104. Tracie Morris
105. Simon Pettet
106. John Kelly – terrific song
107. Peter Zummo Group (with Ernie Brooks and Bill Ruyle) – fascinating work taken from Newton’s book attempting to track a comet around the Earth to prove theory of gravity but feels like you're following with your astrolabe in hand and tripping through the solar system
109. Jim Neu – dedicated to Bill Rice and another guy…
111. Roy Nathanson and bassist – great jazz workout
Yes, it has been much ballyhoo'ed about as to the disunity in nomeclature with respect to the decade past. I will go with the above simply out of the way it reminds me of Jethro Clampett trying to count, but, as well, a short piece by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. found here
And so, as 2009 drew to a close, as is my wont I went to the St. Marks Poetry Project Marathon on New Year's Day. The major change this year was the dedication of the event to the passing of Jim Carroll. As there is a previous post here upon that gent, I will not wax prolix again.
The standard disclaimer still applies to all the Hash Marks.
This is not a review anymore than anyone can scribble anything on over 100 performances of various stages of abstraction and concrete references and still maintain some kind of appreciation for each and all. This is simply the list transcribed in the order of appearance with the raw notes of solid impressions and a few asides. If anyone happens to stumble across this and feels slighted, don't be. You were part of a day I always treasure if only for the fact that it gives us all a way of celebrating the passage of time without referring to the previous eve's false sense of overwhelming jollity and gay abandon, usually associated with Re-Marks like, "Whew! I shouldn't oughtta ___ like that!" (Fill in your debauch of choice.) Such it is that the Question Marks after some entries represent whether or not I heard right what was coming off the stage (acoustics, and the natural ambiguity of poets' word choice and/or their level of articulation). The Quotation Marks enclose possible titles or sharp details that sprang out of the mix.
And everything else is just...St. Marks.
1. David Shapiro -- "forget..."
2. Cliff Fyman – bad waiter
3. Phyllis Wat - platonic solids
4. Richard O’Russa
5. Marcella Durand,
6. Michael Lydon – the handsomest man in the world sings another warm and friendly well-nigh children's song
7. Michael Cirelli - re: muslim/or non-WASP wife endiring airplane security checks, “she doesn’t hide the bomb/she is the bomb”
8. Joe Elliot – advertisements for the new world (sorta zen slices form the image factory)
9. Pierre Joris
10. Joel Lewis
11. Dael Orlandersmith – on a personal encounter w/a famous celebrity on a cellphone walking across the middle of 6th avenue
12. Nicole Peyrafitte & Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
3PM
13. Brendan Lorber – advice for the be chic?
14. Tony Hoffman – Intertidal Zone?
15. CA Conrad
16. David Mills – “if it has a face/don’t eat it” and a list poem (lobotomy is? or a body is?)
17. Tracey McTeague– What Shelley began, Redd Foxx finished… ‘Look out, Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to you!’” [consort/wife of Lorber, is stone sex fox in leather and choker and heels, even w/baby]
18. Denizé Lauture,
19. Lisa Jarnot
20. Magdalena Zurawski – lesbian w/real vocab for sex (why is it that they seem to do the eros thang so much better than the porno thang?)
21. Tyler Burba – "last night I had a strange dream, sitting with a group of children and we were all singing this song about death..."
22. Gary Parrish – ex-vet: “two days to go/I might be standing here/for years”
23. Elinor Nauen
24. Mónica de la Torre – (on job applications, overhead? over-heard?) “My English is no…”
25. Steve Cannon – gal (protege?) reads poem ending "hope is where our heart lives" and he chords piano like a goofy Monk, to end on "No Small Matter"
26. Tim Griffin – (has apparently put on a similar marathon with the Serpentine Gallery in London) “What are the new topics?”
27. Will Morris – a/k/a Billy Cancel (options titles = “or” repeated w/innumerable funnies, such as "an ode to my father or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is or citigroup building 51st floor...")
28. Renato Rosaldo – Sam Spade and Effie Perrine discuss case in shooting script terminology
4PM
29. Church Of Betty – a song from Araby
30. Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan – “a poem is true if…” [sorta XYZ and Meyers, w/o rhythm]
31. Diana Hamilton – “describe…”
32. Eddie Hopely – a list of first names of the 15 largest company’s CEO’s (a large number of which are women)
33. Mina Pam Dick – “let us mourn Mona Lisa’s eyebrows…”
34. Susan Landers – poem based on the Chicago Manual of Style
35. Bob Rosenthal
36. Don Yorty (& nephew on 2nd guitar) do blues songs: “Goin’ Back to Work Again” w/line “Sisyphus did fine/pushin’ one rock at a time”, and “White Trash Baby”
37. John Godfrey
38. Rebecca Moore - "is now working part time at an upstate farm animal rescue shelter..." and still clocks in as downtown's own version of Tori Amos, or better
39. Donna Brook – driving instructions on Health Care (like "people who drive on the political left must learn important rules of the road...to reach your destination it is most important to do so without injury to self, passengers or vehicle...there will be wrong turns, false starts, and dead ends...but always keep your hands on the steering wheel")
40. Kim Lyons – from “Secret Sharer”?
5PM
41. Michael Brownstein – plastic bottle squeezing to demonstrate the enemy ("20% of these end up in landfills"), conscience on full blast, projects us into Soylent Green world…
42. Philip Glass – a new one! (that is, new to me...)
[who was the guy in the Nudie-type suit of cacti, teepees and campfires patches reading “WAGON MASTER” in sequins?]
43. Peter Bushyeager – thinks of the Stones’ “No Expectations” and speaks on the contrast between blogging and the countryside extremes
44. Robert Hershon [great presence in the room]
45. Greg Fuchs – “so excellent to sit in this room, quiet, and listen to one another”
46. Karen Weiser – “Suppose you surrender ‘til we hum about you”
[I want tech support on my life!]
47. Paolo Javier
48. Joanna Fuhrman – “I hid the 20th century in my Marcel Duchamp lunchbox” (w/a Rrose Selavy ref. too)
49. Yuko Otomo
50. Steve Dalachinsky – “I was shanghai’ed years ago/by my book” (ending w/”Thank god/He gave us God” almost orthodox jew in citation)
51. David Freeman
52. Tom Savage – for Merce Cunningham, and a Ned Rorem song to a Whitman text
53. Ari Banias (amazing baul out?) “Love takes its Sharpie and draws a mustache on everything” (& a disco ball moved by 2 guys on street: stunning image of the nightlife icon in the real world…)
6PM
54. Kristin Prevallet – OLD STYLE! w/bongos!
55. Judith Malina and Red Noir Ensemble – reading of classic Julian Beck rabble-rousing rhetoric, followed by semi-STOMP and group grope! (boy, they don't make them like this anymore...)
56. David Kirschenbaum – “Dorothy Hamill, Farah Fawcett, Shawn Cassidy” in song tribute to hair!
57. Sharon Mesmer – “A few things I’d like to see in the next year…” (She gets better every time I see her...)
7PM???
58. Jon S. Hall – a) Christmas trees rolling down the street like tumbleweeds” from accompaniest, then, b) “EVERYTHING’S CLOSED!” poem w/ultracute baby daughter
59. Avram Fefer – sax solo
60. Adeena Karasick
61. Eugene Ostashevsky – “The Parrot & The Pirate”, quotes Descarte, and olde saw about two frogs in buttermilk: one drowns and the other kicks up such a fuss it becomes yoghurt and makes an escape, then Gilligan’s Isle!
62. Toby Goodshank (from Moldy Peaches)
63. Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
64. Maggie Estep - new novel about pirates? ("She was tall for a girl, not ugly for her time, and someone had stolen her dog...")
65. Patricia Spears Jones
66. Dan Machlin & Serena Jost
67. Murat Nemat-Nejat – “The structure of Replicants”(?) and, “I’m a parakeet/twit-wit-twit-wit/Good Morning!” language lesson record thang that actually got the stoic crowd to do repeats!
68. Gillian McCain – comes up w/Lester to play tapes of Jim Carroll talking about the day Kennedy was shot finding him on toilet masturbating to pix of Streisand in bikini, and 2 more, then Lester gets audience to sing one chorus of Happy Birthday to her and gives her a Snuggie as present
69. Steve Earle – “Peace”
70. Maggie Dubris
71. Edwin Torres – “Grunt” (yup! All about scatological functions...)
72. Steven Taylor
73. Ed Friedman
74. Bill Kushner & Merle Lister [2nd year w/Chihuahua bit]
75. Janet Hamill – song paean to “Metropolitan Avenue”, in two parts
8PM
76. Foamola – just as much fun and chaos, but w/repeat of “I Like Heroin” song
77. Todd Colby – “Thanks for 2009 - it sucked!”
78. Tony Towle - toasts
79. Christine Elmo - dancer
80. John Giorno - dusts off one from 1993
81. Laura Elrick
82. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs [in Hawaiian and Cherokee]
83. Charles Bernstein – “Not for all the whiskey in heaven…”
84. Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater – extended enigmas with members in the audience chairs adding oddities, best of which is guy who keeps interrupting to hang either quotation marks or Nixon peace signs over the proceedings
[there is no expiration date on______]
[note: Jim Carroll memorial, Feb. 10]
85. Elliott Sharp
86. Penny Arcade – “I took it on myself…” for 2nd year
87. Lenny Kaye
88. Legs McNeil – from intro to his Ramones book
89. Anne Tardos – anti-war
90. Tonya Foster – (uses of the term ‘bitch’ and ‘b-ball’)
91. Miguel Gutierrez – dances along to, then sings/screams a Radiohead song, blonde wig goes flying in paroxysm
92. Lewis Warsh - imagines a conga line and sexual metaphors, long and complex
93. Eileen Myles
94. Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers – utilizes a white-trash ethnic soundscape of semi-comprehensible morphemes and syllables while she dances
95. Jonas Mekas – “KEEP ON SNOWING! …JUST LIKE RUSSIA IN 1812!”
96. Reuben Butchart – very nice song set to poetry of John Carroll, not Jim
97. Taylor Mead - (for a change, his portable Mingus tape works okay)
98. Patti Smith - beaming: "I actually feel pretty good about the year to come..."
99. Oliver Ray - real nice, long song
100. Anselm Berrigan
101. Yoshiko Chuma – starts w/music for a change, actual medley of Bernard Herrmann themes!
102. Callers – nice music set
103. Joan Larkin
104. Tracie Morris
105. Simon Pettet
106. John Kelly – terrific song
107. Peter Zummo Group (with Ernie Brooks and Bill Ruyle) – fascinating work taken from Newton’s book attempting to track a comet around the Earth to prove theory of gravity but feels like you're following with your astrolabe in hand and tripping through the solar system
109. Jim Neu – dedicated to Bill Rice and another guy…
111. Roy Nathanson and bassist – great jazz workout
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