If you check my Myspace soon, you’ll find a very rough mix of “Snakes On A Plane” that Faro and I recorded this afternoon. It hasn’t appeared yet and I expect to take it down when I get a better mix up — I’m still learning the Audacity software and this is the first multi-tracked stuff I’ve touched. I just wanted to get something up so those who haven’t heard Duende can get a sense of the dynamic.

Remember that we’ll be at Jester’s Cafe in Westfield tomorrow nite!

It seems to me that everything I want to say only fits into the gaps between the words I have at my disposal.

Poetry gets harder not because I don’t have things to write about, but because I don’t have the proper bricks to build the poems with.

Aging has made me acutely aware of how much I haven’t done yet. I feel like I’ve got so much more work in me and so little time to capture it as it should be captured.

I also feel like there’s no place for these poems to live once they’re born. I’ve married myself to a world of youth and immediacy and there’s no place for things that take more than a few minutes to truly comprehend.

Nothing feels right anymore. Working with Faro has made me uncomfortable in the best way: it’s made me discontent to rest on my laurels and repeat myself. I have so much new in me waiting to be born. Who’s going to listen to the new poet in me when all they want is the “elder statesman”?

Faro had a fairly serious car accident tonight before rehearsal, but it didn’t stop us from getting more work done. (He’s fine, if a little sore.)

We’re getting ready to lay down more tracks, and his acoustic playing on the classical guitar has added yet another dimension to the collaboration. I’ve got a bunch of tracks sitting here on CD for me to work with as I start stepping up to the next challenge: writing new material just for the duo, instead of just setting my existing poems to music.

Speaking of the duo: we’ve decided on a fairly ambitious name for the collaboration: “Duende.” Those of you familiar with flamenco music will recognize the term as the name given to the indescribable essence of the best flamenco — a poor attempt would be to say that the music contains a passion and intensity informed by the knowledge that death is present, urging you to do your best work as it may be the last work you do. A better way to say it is to say that you know it when you hear it. Its closest analogue in English might be to say that a piece of music has “soul.” Lorca wrote an entire book on it, which I highly recommend.

We toyed with calling ourselves “Cante Jondo,” or “deep song” — also a flamenco term for the most profound forms of the music. We thought that implied both the nature of the bass and my baritone voice as well as our ambitions for the group. However, we settled on “Duende” as being more all encompassing — and, in the spirit of the word, being something daunting to live up to.

So — we are “Duende.”

Right now, we’ve got the following pieces settled and lined up — there are more in progress.

With bass: “Getting Ahead,” the “Jim’s Fall” suite, “Snakes on a Plane”

With guitar: “I Need A Guitar Right Now (Or Something Like It),” “Where Do You Live?,” “Revisiting Roses and Violets,” and “Julie.”

I know a lot of the old-timers here will recognize those pieces. We hope to have a couple of them recorded soon and on Myspace.

I throw all this out there because we’ll be performing Monday night in Westfield, MA as one of the features at the Community Voices reading’s fifth anniversary party, at Jester’s Cafe. It’ll be our first performance under the name of “Duende” and the first one where we bring the guitar into the mix. We’ll be doing “Jim’s Fall” and one or two others, time permitting.

Please come. We’ll have the CD and chapbook of “Jim’s Fall” available for sale, of course; Faro will have his CD “Leap…and the net will appear,” and we hope to make it all worth your while. Also featuring will be Victoria Munoz and Bob Hoeppner, two outstanding poets worth making the trip for at any rate; and there’ll be the usual open mike, all hosted by the personable and talented Dave Keali’i.

Again — this is the most exciting work I’ve done in a while. I’m thrilled to be a part of this, and to work with such a talented musician.

Yay!

My own recording of my poem “Punk” followed by the Damned’s “Neat Neat Neat.” Yup.

Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” followed by Public Enemy’s “911 is a Joke.” Yup.

“Mineola Rag” by the East Texas Serenaders. (No follow up, I just love the song. It’s from the R. Crumb collection of ancient 78s by blues, country, and jazz players from the early 20th century.) Yup.

And my recording of “The Hole” followed by “Flashlight” by Parliament. Because you need a flashlight when you’re in a hole.

Yup.

NOTE: There are 5 recordings of me reading my poems on this laptop. I’ve heard two this morning. What’s up with that?

I got a 100 dollar Visa gift card from my folks for Xmas, and I’d been torn about what to do with it.

Today, I decided that what I really needed was a pair of good solid knockaround shoes — my old Timberlands are nearly falling apart and I have good dress shoes already for work, so off to the stores and malls I went.

After MUCH running around, I ended up at Newbury Comics (local CD/comics/all things trite and wonderful store) and bought a pair of Docs — first I’ve owned in years. Nice low cut 5 eyelet black pair. They feel great.

Because they were on sale, I was even able to splurge and buy a DVD of a recent Samuel L. Jackson movie about aviation and herpetology. (Hee hee.)

I also got some pirate/skull and crossbone stickers to ironically decorate the headstock of my electric guitar (because it’s plain black and I got tired of seeing no logo up there) and a considerate bumper sticker that explains what to do if you’re on a plane and there are snakes on it. Good to be prepared. (It’s going on Blondie’s case — Blondie being the big dreadnought.)

What? I don’t believe in being entirely practical with gift money…and God knows I proved it today.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a muthafuckin’ movie to watch.

because I feel better and don’t want to jinx it.

I’m ripping a bunch of CDs onto the laptop and it’s fun to think of the mixes that will happen when Sleater-Kinney, AC/DC, Breakestra, My Chemical Romance, and three discs of traditional and modern flamenco music are introduced into the shuffle pool.

Also adding some Sonic Youth, some Ornette Coleman, and some 70s soul to the mix…a little “Across 110th Street,” anyone?

Maybe some Roots, some Public Enemy, some Gang of Four, some fado, some Nick Cave?

The shuffle technology is cool shit — although I have to confess I still prefer a good freeform radio station like WFMU, which keeps the old anarchic spirit of the 60s-70s underground radio alive. I think good radio will always be my preferred medium for music. Surprise me, baby.

It’s not the one I originally planned to post — that one’s got an American Idol metaphor in it, and I’m gonna wait till next month for that one. This one had a more immediate inspiration.

The Zero Point Zero Regular Column!

Very much more than Nothing!

Please go, visit, comment. First one in a while and I need to get going again.

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight spending Xmas gift cards. I wandered into the music section and found myself in an amusing dilemma: I was standing in front of a rack of featured recordings and saw Ani DiFranco’s most recent album sitting next to the most recent album from My Chemical Romance.

My instinct was to pick up the Ani, as I’m pretty much current on my collection and like to stay that way; but something made me decide to switch up and grab the MCR album instead.

I couldn’t have told you who My Chemical Romance was if you’d held a gun to my head. I knew I’d heard the name, was all. Since I had free money I decided to just do something on a whim.

So let me just say that the decision to go for this album was a pretty damn good one. Completely different from my usual fare, and I like it a lot — will need to listen to this a couple of times before I decide what it is I like about it. It reminds me a little (not musically so much as emotionally) of when I first heard The Mars Volta — that same sense of being taken by something unexpected.

Shows the value of doing whimsical stuff sometimes.

No NYE festivities for this boy tonight — the cold/flu thing’s in full effect.

Have a grand fucking night and happy happy to all.

I just watched a video of Saddam being hanged — bad quality camera phone footage. I noticed that unlike the earliest reports had said, he was not hooded and certainly didn’t seem afraid so far as I could tell from the shitty resolution.

Did get a closeup of his face afterward. His neck broke at an odd angle and he was staring straight up, eyes open.

Why do I watch these things? Because I hate the sanitizing of brutal news and actions. I think one of the reasons that capital punishment remains popular here is because people are so insulated from the realities of death and execution in general.

Anyway, about that juxtaposition: I caught the video on a site with Google Ads. Directly above the video frame was one which read:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Browse through our wide selection and find exactly what you’re looking for!

I didn’t.

___________________________

Waiting for the Ambien to work before I sleep…

___________________________________

Famous Last Words at the New Year’s Eve Party

I should drive home but
I think I’ll wait a bit
until I’m sleepy —
I don’t want to miss anything.

___________________________________

Dear Mr. President Scott “Zod” Woods:

I think you should have a virtual press conference here on LJ so that all of the aspiring journalists and interested parties could hear your thoughts on the future of slam, PSI, and other things poetic.

You know — post a request for questions and then take what you get.

Naturally, I wouldn’t expect that this crowd would ask you any SERIOUS questions…in fact, I’m actively discouraging it right here and now for the record. Your snarkiness is what I’d like to hear, especially as it relates to things like the prop rule and the group piece rule and why slam isn’t a required activity in all public schools and what you plan to do about it, dammit.

This is, of course, just a request from an unworthy constituent and therefore meaningless unless I am living in Florida in an election year, at which point it becomes a mutable and tension fraught exercise in the nature of reality and the integrity of our democracy — but I digress.

Your most humble servant,
Tony “pain in the ass” B

head hurtin, runny nose, achy body feeling. In other words, I’m gonna be sick. My apologies for missing the party at Ralph’s — just couldn’t handle it.

In other news: I just saw “Boondock Saints” for the first time a couple of days ago and loved it, despite the many “Pulp Fiction” references (or perhaps because of them). Good flick, highly recommended.

I’ll have a new Zero Point Zero column up on the Gotpoetry site in the next couple days. Two words: American Idol. That’s all I’m gonna say.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled post-debauchery drunk browsing.