Ghosts of Joe Slovo

While I was away...

I've been sporadic lately as work has picked up and I've done other things with my time, like catch the end of the MLS season and try to keep current with the New Yorker (damn you good writing and the time it takes to get through you!).

So I'm going to take a page from cherylmaddalena's recent entries and just do a list of new and notes.

I'm Prince of the Geeks
You all will be indifferent to discover that I finished 135th out of about 35,000 in the official Major League Soccer Fantasy Soccer game. This gets me a prize. (I also finished 9th in my own division of about 270 people.) In the past 5 years I've been doing this I've gotten quite a stash of MLS junk: an All-Star poster, an extra-large MLS t-shirt that just says "MLS" on the front, a mini-soccer ball, a copy of FIFA '06 for my PC, and this year I'll be getting.... another mini-ball! Clearly I do this for the swag.

Spoken Word is Back in My Life
Found this thing in the neighborhood adjacent to mine to the northeast (Atwater Village) called Chi Chi's Word Parlor, which is a spoken word salon type-deal. They put 8 people on stage, two of whom to an improve writing exercise, and they read short 3-5 minutes stories on a theme picked out a month in advance. Anyone can submit and then a committee decides who gets on stage. They do it in a community theater that seats about 50. After the show they have wine, cheese, and dessert for everyone. Fun! Very low-key, very friendly, with quality writing. Reminds me a lot of the Berkeley Slam, except, you know, not a slam, it only lasts an hour and everyone is white hipsters. Which is about as close to a tribe as I'm going to get so I've started volunteering with them. I'm going to try to talk them into lengthening the show and doing a Slam once, just to see who the slam format can be married to what they are already doing.

My Cat Rules
My cat has taken to joining Tyche and I for dinner by sitting in one of the unoccupied seats and either surveying her domain with her head poking up just over the tabletop of engaging in an aggressive session of licking. I've decided that the cat day can be divided into the following activities: begging for food, racing around like crazy playing with stray cough drop wrappers, licking, staring out the window, sleeping, more licking, more sleeping, licking until its time to sleep, and begging for food. Yet each day seems so new and fresh to her. Clearly I need more cat perspective in my life.

Exercise Rules
So I've been riding my bike to work for over a year now, averaging probably 3 days a week if you add it all up. I've noticed something about bodies and exercise, something I found earthshattering, but not in the comet-smacks-the-earth-and-kills-all-the-dinosaurs kind of way, more in the earthworm and mole kind of way. Your body gets attuned to the activity. Case in point. I just took a two week lay-off from the bike because of soccer games to attend, late nights to work, travel to DC, and the fact that my bike dropped a crank, which makes it hard to pedal. So two days back in the saddle and I have much more energy and I need about 2 hours less sleep per night. Which is about where I was before I took my siesta. Which is fabulous, I have to say, and a bit surprising. I sure wasn't expecting the nearly instantaneous reset to where I had been.

Side note: As of last Friday morning I've now lost 20 pounds since the summer of 2005. The secret is: eat less and exercise more. Not quite. Eat right and exercise more. No white flour products, no starches (potatoes and white rice), fewer desserts, no processed food, no refined sugarm no soda, no juice. Lots of whole grains, foods rich in antioxidants, fruits, and vegetables.

On balance. Yes I eat dessert, but maybe twice a month. Yes I eat flour tortillas, but maybe 1-2 times a week. But the pasta is whole wheat, the rice is brown, the bread is multi-grain and so is the homemade granola, which is sweetened with honey. And I ride my bike 10 miles a day 3-5 times a week. And it took two years. And I'll probably gain 5 pounds between now and New Years.

Bay Area for Thanksgiving
Tyche and I are officially going to be in the Bay for the Thanksgiving weekend staying with bexrousse and hopefully seeing as many of you as we possibly can in that time. We are on a mission. Except for Tyche who will be in a library for the daylight hours. We have lots of feelers out, but nothing concrete yet, except the list of people we want to see. Maybe if we are lucky we'll get in town earlier enoug to catch the Berkeley slam on Wednesday night. Here's hopin'.

Kick ass and take names

ETA: I have rewritten the short paragraph on Amber T's performance, editing out excessive snark on the principle that I should write criticism in a way that I would like to read were it about my own work. Also I have gotten more info on how the American Heart Association benefited from the performance and have added that.



Last night Tyche and I made our way to the ends of West LA to the Brentwood Theater, an intimate 500 seater recently restored to its 1920's splendor. The Theater itself is actually on the campus of the west Los Angeles Dept. of Veterans Affairs campus and was originally used as a venue to entertain service members with movies, USO shows and their own productions. We were there because bucky_sinister had tipped me off in his own journal about a show that was happening.

Called The Drums Inside Your Chest, it was a benefit for the American Heart Association (though as a benefit it was unclear what they got out of it. At most the show brought in $7500 which seems like a paltry sum, especially when compared with what it must have cost to at least transport the performers to the show, if every thing else like fees, venue rental, production help, etc. was counted as an in-kind donation - even as an education event it was a bust since the AHA people got no stage time and the only way to get info was to go to their table, place far away from merchandise, etc. But I'm not quibbling about that, just noting, as a disinterested professional.  NEW INFO: Apparently the various sponsors of the show not only donated enough to compensate the poets, always a good thing, but also gave directly to the AHA. In fact the AHA got four times as much as the poets. But, in true keeping with the internal culture of mega-charities, they apparently didn't see this benefit as an opportunity to educate the public and so had to be BEGGED to show up with a table. I really don't understand how organizations that have as their primary function educating the public about their issue miss the point on these kinds of things.) and as such it could get away with the cheesy title the promotors saddled it with.

But that was the absolute worst part of the show, that title. Once the stage lights went up on the MC, the musician and magicial Rob Zabrecky who interspresed magic tricks and appropriately-pitched general weirdness between performers, the show hurtled through the best overal performance of poetry/spoken word that I've seen since well, maybe ever. I mean it is really hard to miss with a line-up that includes: Amber Tamblyn (yes, the actor), Beau Sia, Bucky Sinister, Mindy Nettifee, Derrick Brown, Buddy Wakefield and Jeffrey McDaniel. I suspect that such a show might have blown out the circuits of whoisthespirit's brain.

Amber T. started the whole thing off and she was my least favorite performer on a night when everyone on stage was worth the price of admission. Given her level of fame, I'm sure that she is the victim of increasingly low expectations from random people in the audience and her set very easily overcame those. Not only is her writing complex, her stagecraft is strong and she brought out her mother to accompany her on guitar. They worked together very well and, like all the performers who used music last night, the music integrated very well with the pieces, which is not something that always happens with spoken word pieces. I personally was not as taken with her content as I was with most of the other performers - I felt it was almost but not quite there, like the pieces were unfinished, a maze of interesting metaphor and simile and a few Big Ideas in the nooks and crannies, but no infrastructure to get them to connect. I'm not getting the more universal meanings of the work that I suspect she is consciously trying to get at. However, she was the driving force behind organizing the whole damn thing, so I'm feeling just a wee bit guilty for not liking her work as much when on the whole she gave me one of the best nights of poetry ever.

Beau Sia did a set of the kind of extremely accesible poetry for which he is well known. Mostly just rants disguised as poems he was funny and had great stage presence. He ended with a poem centered on the current hot buton issue of immigration that started out with a disclaimer in the voice of his mother which was the most complex and moving thing he did all night. The actual poem was, again, funny but went at the issue with all the subtley of a shotgun and the complexity of an amoeba. Not that this was, in the end, a bad thing. Certainly an issue like immigration is big enough to sustain all kinds of approaches to it and someone's got to answer the jeremiads of the wingnuts in kind. Beau did a great job.

Bucky Sinister, from who's journal I found out about the event, was two things last night. First a fabuolous counterpoint to the first two performers, bringing a backwoods hicksville, usa sensability mixed with equal parts punk rock and dive bar that contrasted with the styles of Amber and Beau. Second, a rough cut molassas-and-whiskey delivery that served to imbue his pieces with emotional timbre they demand. He did two of my favorites: Bruce Wayne and NASCAR (which I'm sure have different titles), both of which deal with populations that don't get much play in California poetry venues: rural working class white folks. The key thing about a great Bucky Sinister performance is that he subverts his image as a huge tattooed, blond-buzz cut, retired left tackle kind of guy with poems of surprising intimacy and poignance. This was exemplified perfectly in his other piece, which was an ode to a vanished donut shop in the Mission District in San Fran, but was really a meditation on loss and maturation.

Mindy Nettifee was great! She was new to me, but a wonderful discovery. She was very funny, but used the humor to smack you around with some Deeper Points. "Acceptance Speech" was the pinnacle of her performance. Structured as the kind of speech one might give upon receiving an award, it thanks people and things who have held her back or made her look bad. Two thirds of the way through you realize that this is actually a poem about coming to terms with losing a lover through heart-breaking betrayal. Extremely funny and clever throughout, this twist in the poem just makes the whole thing hit much harder, the way a great performance poem should. Open you up and then drive a knife through your consciousness. When she was done I wanted more.

After Mindy there was a short intermission complete with free drinks and not crap drinks either, but Vitamin Water and POM juice drinks. Delicious.

The last half of the show was even better than the first.

Derrick Brown did the best set of the night in a show that was packed with "best sets of the night". Over the years Derrick has been getting more and more sophisticated about melding music with spoken word. I remember him motoring through Berkeley once as feature at the slam there showing up with a device that allowed him to scratch using CD's instead of vinyl. That was a fun show, but last night's set was much more enveloping. He had a piece that dealt with LA's ubiquitous police helicopters and relationships that started with some audience participation. More than anyone I've seen he was able to meld his words with music that made them both more than they were before and yet not be "singing". The interesting thing is that I can't tell you much about the words themselves, even though they were top-notch. What I remember most from his set was where it took me emotionally. I felt engulfed in lazy waves and currents, surrounded by currents and eddies that pushed me into the energy and embrace of my seatmate and wife. It made me feel intimacy not with the performer, but with my wife and that's a rare gift.

Buddy Wakefield is my favorite poet. If there were one poet I would like to my writing to be favorable compared with, it would be him. Not only does he deal with difficult personal and politics issues and themes, he does it by weaving dense fabrics of words, breath, hesitations, syncopated delivery and smiles that amaze you with the word choice even as they insinuate the deeper meaning into your brain. He hits me on all levels and I really can't thank him enough for that. In fact, if plagarism is the sincerest form of flattery, then I've done that too, lifting the key part of my piece "Gospel and White Rocks" directly from a key transition in Buddy's "Convience Stores". Don't tell him, okay? I was most looking forward to his performance and I was not disappointed. One of the great things about Buddy is that he always looks so glad to be performing, so glad you are there to share this momemt with him, but that can mask the intensity and craft that he brings with him on stage. He out of all performers last night made the most of his body as a piece of the performance. He brought Emily Wells with him on stage for a couple of pieces and that just racheted up the impact a notch. When he finished with "Pretend" a great piece on belief and action complete with human beat box and Wells as human Theramin I was in another time zone. Which is why I go to spoke word show in the first place.

Jeff McDaniel is cited by most writers of in this small sub-scene, at least most male writers, as their original influence and I can see why. He's been doing something like this since the early 90's and his delivery is almost iconic. Laconic, clear, loud, but also almost a monotone, you can see his influence in timing, pacing, imagery and subject choice. His "167 Words" is a classic of modern spoken word. These days, though, he seems to be moving towards a more cerebral presentation and with less emphasis on performance. While still a great set, I didn't think, from an audience perspective that ending with him was the best choice. Buddy's emotion and intensity would have been much better suited to the final set, leaving the audience in a transcendent head-space. Jeff brought us back to our heads too soon and then left us there at the end. Still, I appreciated his work, but I think I would have put it either before or after Beau Sia (probably before to make Beau seem evern more energetic and aggressive than he actually was - at that point it would have been the perfect energy injection).

If this is to be the quality of performance and writing that Amber Tamblyn is serious about presenting regularly in her "The Best Contemporary American Poets Series", they you can bet that I am going to lie, cheat, or steal my way into tickets for every show. At $15 last night's show was a steal, like having your local connection surprise you with a "Buy One Get One Free" on an eighth of Maui Wowie. If you live in the LA area, be on the lookout for the next show and do yourself and favor and go.

Kick ass and take names.</lj></lj>