notes from Dallas

I can never sleep in hotel rooms — not on these in and out nights. It usually takes me a couple of days to adjust to a new room when I’m there by myself, and that’s in addition to my usual insomnia…

so you get to listen to me ramble. Or read my ramblings, more to the point.

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Every time I fly into Dallas, I find myself singing Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas” in my head, humming it at odd moments while I’m in town, etc. “Did you ever see Dallas/From a DC-9 at night…Dallas from a DC-9 is a beautiful sight.”

Strangely enough, Dallas is one of the few cities I’ve been to that I don’t think is all that beautiful from the air at night.

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Listening to iTunes on shuffle on the plane, I heard two different versions of Thelonious Monk’s “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues Are” back to back. Both are recordings from a night at the Jazz Workshop, one each from the two sets they played that night. The takes are different enough that it didn’t become monotonous (not that Monk ever becomes monotonous to me — I jump back and forth between Monk and Ornette Coleman as my favorite jazz artists). That’s one of the reasons I love jazz so much — the freedom that artists feel to reinterpret their work. It’s encouraging and frustrating to me as a performing poet — I wish more of us felt that it is important to not “freeze” performances.

I heard a poet at the Lizard Lounge last night use the word “love” in a poem and he pronounced it exactly the way Buddy Wakefield always says the word “love” when he hits it at the climax of “Convenience Stores.” I really, really want to hear people be original in performance. When I start to see myself “freezing” a rendition of one of my poems, it drives me batshit crazy, and I try to retire the poem for a while or actively look for a new way to perform it.

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And while we’re on the subject of the Lizard Lounge…I had a great time there last night. I just wish it wasn’t such a long drive home and that it was an earlier night in general; I could get into being there far more often.

Iyeoka Okwaowo was AMAZING. Performing with the Jeff Robinson Trio, she sang as much as she did poetry and seamlessly blended the two. Best feature I’ve seen in ages, and I’m a fan of hers anyway.

I did “DIY” with the Trio during the open, and I had a fun time trying to take a poem whose performance is pretty “frozen” after all these years and work it differently to make the piece work with music. I have to thank Faro for that — our collaboration is really opening me up to new ways of looking at my work.

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This afternoon before going to the airport, I got into a hot and heavy argument with one of my neighbors who took me to task for parking in front of his house and hindering the plowing of our street. Granted, he parks across the street, they didn’t plow last night, and I wasn’t even directly in front of his house, but it didn’t stop him from taking me to task for not having respect for people who’ve lived on the street for 35 years.

On another day, I would have ignored him or mumbled something apologetic, but the stress I’ve been feeling lately just popped and I ended up trading high decibel F-bombs with a 70 year old man over a parking spot. Not my finest moment.

He’s one of the guys who puts crates out to save his spot. It’s not illegal in Worcester like it is in Boston. It ought to be.

Again, I wasn’t in his spot. He had his car in his usual spot. I’m not sure what set him off.

Ah, winter in New England…

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If anyone local or otherwise is looking to go to the show in Cambridge on April 12 with Adam Stone, Iyeoka, Duende (that of course is Faro and me), and Marc Smith, I’ve got tickets to sell — come see me.

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And now, I think I shall try to sleep. In Dallas, which from a DC-9 is a beautiful sight.