Busy as hell, but thought I’d pass this along:
the new Zero Point Zero is up.
The Zero Point Zero Regular Column!
Very much more than Nothing!
Monthly Archives: January 2008
GotPoetry Tonight: Poetry + Music
Faro’s coming. I’ll bring a guitar and maybe more. Bring your own instruments, too. Songs are OK tonight, too.
Please come. The holidays are over and it’s time to come back out and play.
7:30, Reflections Cafe, corner of Governor and Wickenden, Providence, RI.
Been gone all day, so this is the post about the Provincetown gig.
drgeorge and I headed out to P-Town mid afternoon, made decent time, grabbed pizza before the gig. Met with our fellow poets back at the lovely little Provinetown Theater around 6:30 or so.
We each (there were six of us) did about ten minutes each, followed by the headliners, “The Bitter Poet” and “Howlin’ Vic.” More about them in a minute…the six of us were:
Terry Rozo, who read a well-written monologue about heroin addiction;
me
Skip (lj user=”drgeorge”> who did the “Artist’s Statement” from his book;
Jose Gouveia who read three excellent poems;
Chase, a 17 year old from Orleans who is someone to watch;
and a guy who walked in off the street and asked to read.
It was Bobby Miller.
Some of you may recognize that name from such places as “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry” and “Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe.” This guy was doing performance poetry before anyone had coined the name — frequently funny, often poignant, and always sharp work from the fastlane 70s punk and disco scenes in NYC. He’s been living a reclusive life in P-Town for the last seven years, working on a couple of books, and hasn’t been to a reading in a while. He’s still got it. It was a treat to hear it.
The headliners were hysterical. “The Bitter Poet” is a performance artist/actor who’s developed an act around a character called the Bitter Poet — a rock star-ish turn with funny poem-songs about relationships, many costume changes, and his own Les Paul providing back up music. Skip described it as Jack Black meets Steve Martin — good description. “Howlin’ Vic” is a burlesque performer who killed me with some great routines — highly recommend the striptease to “All Of Me” (think bloodstained lingerie and jumping rope with intestines) and the outstanding, deliberately bad routine to “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These.” I ’bout died. Not at all what I was expecting but a good time anyway.
They’re trying to establish this as a regular series – will be putting in a bid for a Duende headlining spot. I think this is a good thing.
It’s late and it’s been a long day. See you later — probably at Regie Gibson’s show at the Q tonight.
Fin
That’s the North Star, he tells himself
as he turns from the window. That’s
the way to go.
He’s wrong.
It’s Betelgeuse, but it doesn’t matter because
he’ll never get to share the thought,
and no one will get to correct him.
Then, there’s one final act
of tragedy:
it comes unexpectedly to him
that her hands
on his forehead feel false, as if
her compassion includes some measure
of contempt. He grasps at the hope
that he’s wrong,
but it eludes him
as she shuts his eyes.
This just in: gig tomorrow night
I’ll be performing — solo, not a Duende gig — as part of an evening of poetry out at the Provincetown Theater, along with two NYC poets named The Bitter Poet and Howlin’ Vic. Show starts at 7 PM.
This is a very last minute gig, so anyone who could possibly make it is enthusiastically encouraged to attend.
By the way — anybody know these guys?
Poem in Spindle
loudpoet‘s rolling launch of the excellent e-zine continues. Already one of my favorite e-zines, it explores various facets of life in NYC.
I’ve got two poems up in the joint: “First Letter Home” was in the soft launch back in December, and now “Light and Glass,” one of the very few poems I’ve written about 9/11, is up this week. I’m proud to have it there, a little humbled to be sure…
Worth checking out across the board, and bookmarking for future reading. This promises to be a Web highlight for hose (and others) seeking excellent work in all genres.
Plea
There are six billion people on the Earth.
Only seventeen of them
have ever seen a real UFO, only six have seen
a ghost, and only thirty-seven have seen
a yeti.
All of them keep quiet because
they have rationalized their experiences thus:
“it was lightning…”
“it was a trick of weak light…”
“it was my eyes making dumb sense of odd shadows on the underbrush…”
and so on. This is the way truth is made.
What they saw is a matter of fact, how they explain it
is a matter of faith. Sixty separate miracles
are filed sadly away as bad angles, old vision, and
unremarkable moments in unremarkable lives…
so how can you say
you are sure
you don’t love me?
Matters of Public Record
If you heard sirens this morning, that was probably me. I brought the old factory wheel from the back corner of the yard to the middle and doused it with gasoline, then lit it.
I ran inside to get the guitars and the books but someone saw it and before I could get them out to what I believed would be a pyre I heard the sirens so I stayed inside and called into 911 myself. Quick thinking.
I hurried back outside and picked up the gas can so I had an excuse for the smell on my hands. I told the firefighters it must have been a neighborhood prank. I don’t think they bought it, but I’m still home because no one can prove otherwise.
Right now, I’m out of cigarettes but feel a little nervous about going outside in case someone’s watching to see if I do try again. I’m waiting to see what the ravens say before I decide, but according to whatbird.com, there are very few ravens around here. It may be a long wait.
So I’d love it if someone would bring me some American Spirit cigarettes. I like mine blue, thanks.
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Everybody, relax, ok? It’s a poem.
Jester’s tonight/Gotpoetry Tuesday night
Small crowd, good performance.
Set list:
Maps (new piece)
Las Lloronas
Do You Know What It Means
Americanized
Thumbs Up (solo by Faro; check out his Myspace to hear it — http://www.myspace.com/downtheroadri )
Meditations on a Black Excursion
Mayans and Aztecs
Lesson: How To Be An Oppressor (new piece)
Where Do You Live?
OK merch sales; all in all a decent night.
No plans to record the new pieces just yet; if we do it’ll be likely be for the album AFTER the one we’re currently working on. We spent the afternoon working on sketches for that one, and looking at the possibility of adding some sampled and/or live beats to the production. Still undecided, and if we do, it likely won’t be on the whole album but used here and there.
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Tuesday night at Gotpoetry Live we’ve got a theme night — bring your own poems inspired by the theme of “Maps” and join the fun. 7:30, 8 Governor Street, Providence. 2.00 suggested donation. Love to see you.
Quick Plug
Come see Duende tonight at Jester’s in Westfield, and you’ll hear us premiere not one but two new pieces.
You can tell everyone you were there, and make them jealous.
That’ll be cool.
Ganked from Victor and Jeff
Go to this convenient compilation site right here http://longboredsurfer.com/charts.php and find the five years you were in high school. For each year, admit to the song that was your favorite at the time, then decide which one you now generally consider to be the best song on the list. Lastly, pick the year’s worst song, snarking optional.
This also appears in ocvictor‘s comments…
When it comes to the Top 100, I believe my high school years (1974-1977) may be the worst in history.
I left out 1973 deliberately, though I loved a lot of pop music before that (the summer of 1972 was my favorite year for pop music ever, and I found it too hard to choose favorites).
1974:
Fav — Stevie Wonder’s “Livin in the City” then and now. I remember discovering the long version (what we used to call the album version) late one night and falling in love with how much he changed his voice.
Worst Song:
“A Very Special Love Song,” Charlie Rich. You’ve come a long way from the rockabilly, O Silver Fox, and it’s all been down hill…
1975:
Fav then: “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” — Freddy Fender. Um, drugs, anyone? It was our senior class song two years later.
Fav now: “Third Rate Romance” — The Amazing Rhythm Aces. I still play this song on guitar now and then. Great, unsparing look at a one night stand.
Worst: Oh, so many candidates! I’ll go with John Denver’s “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” because he’s not around to argue. Donny and Marie’s “Morning Side Of the Mountain” is right up there too.
1976:
Fav then: “Dream On,” Aerosmith. Coming from southern Worcester County where Joe Perry was from, this was all about local boys making good. They actually played teen dances at the Lakeview Ballroom on Satruday afternoons when I was 11-12; I recall going to one once because my parents heard it was sponsored by the local Catholic Youth Organization and they figured it was OK. If they only knew…
Fav now:”Tear the Roof Off The Sucker,” Parliament. I hadn’t discovered Parliament back then because local rock radio didn’t play it at all.
Worst: Can anything beat John Travolta’s “Let Her In?”
1977
Fav then: “Walk This Way,” Aerosmith. See 1976 for details. (Point: by the fall of 1977, I’d fully discovered punk and didn’t think about the Top 100 for years after that. Also, this was high time for Bruce, the Jukes, and this was also the year I discovered the Dead and chased them around a bit; was also listening to all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t charting, so this is definitely a default choice.)
Fav now: “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson. Again, not getting much play on our local stations back then — what a great song. How much more would I have been into funk and related stuff if it had been available to us then?
Worst: I hated then and hate to this day “Stand Tall” by Burton Cummings, because I was a Guess Who fan and felt betrayed. (If “Nashville Sneakers” had charted, though, I might be putting that on the Fav list.)
Interesting. I’m struck by how much just focusing on the Top 100 limits my list — I was already listening to freeform radio by the time I was 14 so I knew and heard a LOT more music than just the chart hits — probably liked a lot of it a lot more than this stuff. Shit, I was a confirmed Robert Johnson fan by the time I was 15…
I got the laptop a much needed present last night — boosted the memory in anticipation of an eventual upgrade to Leopard. I still want to let more time go by before I do that, as I’m still checking out reviews of how it runs on G4s. I tend to be very conservative when it comes to op system upgrades — too many bad experiences back when I worked on Windows machines. I wasn’t having any dramatic trouble with it, but there were times when I was trying to do multi track recording stuff in Garageband and performance was slow — testing last night seemed to indicate that issue’s solved, and running multiple apps at the same time seems much smoother.
While installing the memory, I had the TV on and heard a commercial for “Futurama” that riffed on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Shortly after that, my brain exploded.
Fighting a head cold, but otherwise I’m OK. Not writing much here lately, due to work on poems for the new Duende album which I’ll be keeping under wraps for the foreseeable future.
Will be hitting the Asylum tonight for javabill‘s feature; tomorrow night, Duende plays a show out at Jester’s Cafe in Westfield. You should come to both of them.
Dark Matter 