Category Archives: Performance

Performance Poetry Theater

“Escape by Balloon”

September 23, 2013 – 9:39 am

Monday, September 23, 2013

“Escape by Balloon”

The Burbage wasn’t the only theater group to make use of the Company Theater’s space on Robertson Boulevard. The most unusual play by a visiting troupe was called “Escape by Balloon,” which I have no program for. My guess is that it was the spring of 1972, when I was putting the finishing touches on editing the poetry section for the first issue of Bachy magazine. How long the play ran at the Company Theater I can’t be sure, but I doubt it was for more than a month. It was an ensemble-oriented effort, though, intriguing enough that I went to see it a second time. The “plot” line (what there was of it) clustered its images around a plan by some captured soliders in the War Between the States to escape from their prison by making use of a balloon. At some point about three-fourths of the way through the play, each character was asked what they would be willing to give up. The second time I saw the play, on the final night of its run, one of the members of the troupe said to the others, “I’m giving up this role,” and walked off-stage, but not before turning to the audience and inquiring, “Anyone want to take my place?” There was a pause. Whatever any character in the play had recited in any earlier performance of the play had obviously never been as radical as this gesture. No one in the audience responded to the gap in the performance for about 90 seconds. Then I stood up and walked onto the stage, a sudden stranger in the midst of an unforeseen escape. I had seen the play and so I knew where it was headed: from that point on, the character who left did not have any dialogue, but primarily moved in a slow dance towards an imagined culmination. I rode home on my motorcycle that night, certain that something beyond my control had guided me to the theater that night and would continue to accompany me, in all the guises and ruses that an artistic life requires of its celebrants.

 

 

 

 

 

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Performance Poetry Theater

Two Theater Companies in Los Angeles

September 22, 2013 – 7:19 am

September 22, 2013

TWO THEATER COMPANIES IN LOS ANGELES

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was more interested in theater than poetry. The most important theater company in the city back then was the Company Theater, located on Robertson Boulevard south of Olympic Boulevard. This troupe of actors and actresses understood better than anyone else in Los Angeles how to empower the “empty space” that Peter Brooks had proposed as the only sine qua non for theater. They also fit the prevalent pattern of being the senior segment of young people who were revising cultural expectations for avant-garde activity. Although the category of “baby boomers” gets more frequently cited in this period, the cultural reality of the 1960s and the first year or two of the 1970s was that young people born between 1940 and 1945 were the primary instigators of alternative artistic communities. One of leading actors in the Company Theater, for instance, was Gar Campbell, who was born in 1943 (11/9/43), just a few days after Sam Shepard (11/5/43).

It’s my understanding that Campbell went to the University of Southern California, where he met most of the people with whom he would go on to create the Company Theater, after which he founded and directed plays at the Pacific Resident Theater. The USC connection with the Company Theater goes past the undergraduate terms of its founding members. Laurel Ann Bogen may have been the first poet in Los Angeles to have seen the troupe, since she says they returned to campus to take part in an orientation week presentation in the fall of 1967. USC wanted to showcase the up-and-coming troupe as an example of the intrepidity of their recent graduates and Bogen’s life-long foray in poetry’s underground probably was kindled by the celebratory energy of Company Theater; Bogen herself became involved with the group in the second half of the 1970s, founding the Los Angeles Poets’ Theater at their venue as a way of trying to revive their depleted circumstances.

Although I attended and enjoyed the undulant sensuality of their early signature rite of passage, “The James Joyce Liquid Memorial Theater,” the play that hurled an image into my permanent definition of theater was “The Emergence.” Several characters who seemed to be jovial versions of the knight in Bergman’s “Seventh Seal” were off on a quest: suddenly the theater went dark. When the lights came up, we in the audience could barely see the actors stretched out on their backs on the floor of the stage, the backlit tips of their boots protruding past a long, slightly curved board that was as far downstage as possible. The heads of each character were tilted up off the stage floor; each character peered “down” at us, each of whom in the small theater (which perhaps held 90 people) had a profound sense that suddenly we were at the bottom of a deep well, and that what the actors were seeing were these odd characters peering back at them with awkward expectation of being recognized as exactly what we were: illuminated, puzzled beings, tussled into their story. Never before, and never quite to that extent since, have I felt as if the audience was so profoundly integrated into the mise-en-scene.

The Company Theater went on to produce a considerable number of plays, especially by Michael McClure, with whom later I would have the privilege of studying at Padua Hills. One of the twenty most startling performances I have ever seen in any theater was by Gar Campbell, whose enactment of the mania of “Spider Rabbit” at the Company Theater on Robertson Blvd. still reverberates in my mind. One of the other plays the Company staged at their original digs was Lance Larsen’s “The Hashish Club,” which was derived from Theophile Gautier’s “Le Club des Hachichins” (1846). I saw the play before it moved to New York and had a very brief run at the Bijoux Theater in January, 1975. Gar Campbell, Lance Larsen, Dennis Redfield, Jack Rowe and Michael Stefani comprised the cast. The one-sheet program for the production in Los Angeles prominently acknowledges Trish Soodik as the person whose idea of an adaptation was the original impetus. Soodik was a very fine and courageous actress who was brilliant in a production of McClure’s The Grabbing of the Fairy. Soodik died a couple years ago and you can still read the blog of her final months. Her first husband, novelist and scriptwriter Henry Bromell, also recently died. In addition to acting, Soodik was herself a playwright. I regret not having a chance to see her play, “The 60s,” at the Pacific Resident Theater on Venice Boulevard.

I can’t recall the specific reasons that the Company Theater found itself with an open enough schedule to sublet its venue, but a theater troupe that had started in Hermosa Beach in the late 1960s found refuge on Robertson Boulevard in the early seventies. The Burbage Theater Company, headed up by Sal Romeo, had run into conflicts with the local police in Hermosa Beach and given up its venue rather than endure harassment for putting on plays such as Rochelle Owens’s Futz. Finding another theater to work in was less than easy, and so it eventually borrowed the Company Theater’s space for a production of Paul Foster’s Tom Paine. The Burbage also staged Ionesco’s Exit the King for a brief run at the Company Theater. Theater company rarely thrive as houseguests, however, and fortunately the Century City Playhouse on Pico Boulevard became available for a lease. At that point I joined the Burbage as it slowly pulled together its first production in Rancho Park, The Devils.

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Music Performance Poetry

Darden Smith — “I Smell Smoke”

September 21, 2013 – 7:59 am

Saturday, September 21, 2013

DARDEN SMITH – “I Smell Smoke”

Not every songwriter can be Bob Dylan; not every musician a Michael Hedges. Bruce Springsteen once was asked who his favorite songwriters were, and he replied, “The one-hit wonders.” Sometimes, of course, a songwriter or performer has to wonder why even that one-hit proves dismayingly elusive. The late Jackie Lomax would seem to be a case in point.

Among contemporary songwriters, I’ve especially admired the dedication of Darden Smith, who is one of the vast contingent to have emerged out of the recent Southwest/Texas scenes. I’m not sure that Darden Smith has had a hit song at any point in the past thirty years, but he has a few songs that are worth listening to repeatedly. Mostly recently, I heard a recording of “I Smell Smoke”; it’s the kind of song that a young singer could add to his early repertoire and thereby make it clear to the audience where he sets the bar for his own compositions. It would, in fact, be a great song to play in a bar. It’s also a song where the lyrics could easily shift over to be sung by a woman.

I first heard Darden Smith play at a club on the Sunset Strip. I’m not sure if it was the Roxy. I had gotten tickets through my job at Radio & Records and all I was really anticipating was a night out listening to live music. I ended up writing a poem about the occasion.

SUNSET BOULEVARD

Two ridges

of soft blue light

gleam off an upright bass,

notching outthrust rims

of polished wood, an instrument

to stand behind, whose weight

assures the plucking’s command,

imperative of hip and hand.

He comes out first on the dim stage,

dips his fingers

in the rivulets and smears it on

the thick strings.

One hand rappels the bass’s neck,

playing notes Darden Smtih

can’t sing. He’s not a genius,

but devout and patient and shy

and proud. How could he forgive her —

“You’re not worth the sacrifices

I’ll have to make.” “Maybe not, but I’m

still asking you.” No, again.

The room was very quiet, as when mountains,

at twilight, amass their shadows

in layers of crushed rock, protruding crudity,

and chill. The splendor of fertility

relinquished. “I don’t blame her. It’s been harder

than she suspected. Not even I’ve endured.”

 

The next time I saw Darden Smith was at McCabe’s, in 1988, and then another time in the first half of the 1990s. His song, “Little Victories” was out by then, though I remember that his live version wasn’t as strong as the recording. At least that night. He’s still touring quite a bit, and I believe he’s on a tour in Great Britain right now. I have doubts that anyone in GB is reading this blog at this early stage in its promulgation, but if someone happens on it by chance, and learns that Darden Smith is nearby, then give a listen to this modest craftsman as a way of reminding oneself of the value of reiterated imagination. The break-through song is the one you’ll write today and think of as an ordinary effort.

 

 

 

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Books Performance Photography Poetry

“Who is She?” — Terry Braunstein’s show in Long Beach

August 17, 2013 – 11:51 am

Saturday, August 16, 2013

In the late 1970s, I worked at a bookstore at 11th Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It had been launched by three young fiction writers who were eager to join that decade’s lively independent book store scene in Los Angeles (and in this case, I mean the county and not the city). By the time I started working at the front counter and running the reading series, only one of the three fiction writers was still involved with the store, which served as the entry point to Los Angeles for one of its most prominent literary spokespersons, Michael Silverblatt. He had recently moved to Los Angeles and was living in an apartment, slightly north of Wilshire, several blocks west of the store, Michael didn’t drive, but he was in a perfect neighborhood to get around without a car. One afternoon, when business was slow, he happened to walk in and we began talking about poetry. I was putting together my first anthology, The Streets Inside, at the time and ended up inviting him to my apartment for a combination publication party/New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1978. It was there that he met Jim Krusoe, who became one of his enduring friends. Though Michael and I did not remain confident acquaintances, I am happy that he eventually found a niche where his specialized acuity continues to flourish.

Among the people I met at the store who turned into long-time friends was Dinah Berland, a photographer and critic who was beginning to write poetry. (The opposite move was being made by another visitor to the store, Peter Schjeldahl, who went on to write one of the classic poems about Los Angeles, “Pico Boulevard,” but would soon begin to focus on writing about art.) Dinah eventually introduced me to her best friend, Terry Braunstein, with whom she was an undergraduate roommate at the University of Michigan. I reviewed a show of Terry’s at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the late 1980s for the Long Beach Press-Telegram and have continued to admire how she retains her commitment to local activism even as she has exhibited her work on an international scale.

Terry sent out a notice the other day about her most recent project. The first weekend after Labor Day is traditionally a very busy occasion for visual artists, so I want to post her invitation well in advance so that any reader can plan her or his visits to various openings that weekend to include her event, “Who is She?” It will take place at a vacant lot in Long Beach at the corner of Anaheim & Walnut Streets. Terry’s installation/sculpture will be placed into dialogue with a choreographed piece by Cyrus Parker-Jeannette at both 5:45 and 7:45 p.m. The second performance will also feature projected animations by David Familian.

This event is part of a larger project called “A LOT,” in which vacant pieces of property in Long Beach are temporarily appropriated to present free arts experiences. It is sponsored in part by an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information on both Terry and Dinah, please go to their websites: terrybraunstein.com and Dinahberland.com.

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Music Performance Poetry

“A POSSIBILITY”: MUSIC AT THE SANTA MONICA CIVIC AUDITORIUM

August 8, 2013 – 10:27 am

“A POSSIBILITY”: MUSIC AT THE SANTA MONICA CIVIC AUDITORIUM

Thursday, August 8, 2013

News outlet reports that the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium would be shutting down its operations cited surprisingly few of the famous music groups and bands that performed at that venue. I was astonished, in fact, that so many substantial figures were left out of the Civic’s history, and began to wonder if the reporters actually had any knowledge (other than newly minted press releases from Santa Monica’s bureaucracy) of how many significant musicians had played there.

Before I had ever gone to a concert there, though, I had heard one of Harry Northup’s early poems, “Listening to Savoy Brown at the Santa Monica Civic.” Harry has graciously given me permission to include his poem, which is dedicated to Paul Blackburn, in this post.

if

if i if i

if i can       can get

can get       into       in-

to the rhy

rhy

rhy     the

rhythm of this

of this

of this

 

of this song

 

if i can get into the

rhythm of this song

if i can get

can get

can get

if i can get into the rhythm

if i can get into the rhythm of

this                 of this

of this song

if i can get into the rhythm of this song

there is

there is

a possibility.

 

aug 21, 1971

By the end of that decade, Patti Smith would be singing on the Civic stage the imperative to “seize the possibility.” The most underappreciated period of recent American poetry is the 1970s on the West Coast. The struggle to comprehend and subsequently seize the possibility of self-definition through small press production has only been partially documented in my book, HOLDOUTS, and a new generation of scholars needs to begin work on excavating the multiple layers awaiting their close reading. Along with the writing of his poet-spouse, Holly Prado (who is also an extraordinary poet). Harry Northup’s poetry needs to have a prominent space made for its vigorous, yet subtle audacity.

I asked Harry about other bands he heard at the Civic and he supplied me with the following list, in which he first praised in particular the music of Savoy Brown:

“I remember clearly how great the band was & in particular,
Kim Simmonds, the lead guitarist.  A great working class English blues band.

“I went to so many shows at the Civic from 1968 to 1973, including “Traffic,”
where I saw & talked with Jon Voight; Bob Marley, whose show was for some reason
transferred from the Shrine — it was like he was running in the sands of time;
The Allman Brothers; The Kinks; Steve Miller; Humble Pie with Steve Mariot —
what a beautiful voice; The Faces with Rod Stewart; Freddy King — the best blues
player — he looked like he had done time; & Van Morrison.  My first wife Rita &
I went, along with a bunch of surfers.” Harry added in a follow-up note that “Stevie Winwood of Traffic had the prettiest voice in rock and roll.”

The Civic was a venue that Harry and I both agree possessed great sight lines. There truly wasn’t a bad seat in the house. There were (and are) very few outlets of that peculiar capacity. Most venues are fairly small or huge stadium affairs. It’s not that easy (for performer or audience member) to find a stage that gives the both sides of the equation a chance to feel comfortable with its size and yet large enough to give a sense of occasion. The Civic did that.

I lived within a half-mile of the Civic for over 20 years. One advantage I had in attending concerts there was avoiding the hassle with parking. It was fairly easy to walk there or to find parking in one of the side-streets, that were blocked off enough from through traffic, so that only those who lived in Ocean Park would know about it.

Harry and I are hardly the only ones, however, who have affectionate memories of the Santa Monica Civic. Dennis Cooper’s diaries (at Special Collections at New York University) record his attendance at a concert by Iggy Pop and the Stooges at the Civic that Cooper regales as one of the highlights of his young life. When Bowie comes on stage as part of the encore, pandemonium (his word, if I recollect correctly) broke out. It wasn’t a riot, however, (or so it seems from Cooper’s description) so much as a moment when the carnivalesque took over, and there was (however briefly) an instance of collective liberation. The entire audience got a glimpse of what Northup had proposed: “a possibility.”

I want to close today’s post with the following list of 30 or so of the memorable concerts I’ve attended in California. Over a third of them were at the Santa Monica, McCabe’s Guitar Shop or Beyond Baroque. Obviously, there are dozens of musicians and composers whose work I never heard in a live setting, but wish I could have heard. I especially wish I could have seen some of the Motown groups. One treasures what fortune has provided. For instance, I only ended up attending the recording of Waits’s live concert because I walked into McCabe’s Guitar Shop and saw free tickets on the front counter. All I had to do was call a number and say I had picked up a ticket at McCabe’s, and I had a seat at a table less than 20 feet from Waits’s piano. I grabbed two “tickets” and called a new friend, Cher’rie Lawrence, and off we went.

 

Chrissy Hynde and the Pretenders – Santa Monica Civic (Her voice was even more full of timbre than on record.)

Minutemen – Beyond Baroque (as part of Jack Skelley’s Beyond Barbeque Series)

The Residents – Pasadena Concert circa 1984

Elvis Costello – First American Tour – Long Beach Arena; Los Angeles Sports Arena

(“Pump It Up” was his final song in these sets.)

X – The Whiskey A-Go-Go; with the Avengers – summer, 1978.

Among numerous other places I saw X were Club 88 and Santa Monica Civic (with Dave Alvin).

Exene Cervenka – The Alligator Lounge; May 30, 1995; The Prospector (Long Beach)

XTC – The Palladium (“Living through Another Cuba”)

David Bowie – The Forum – Summer, 1978; Anaheim Stadium (with the Go-Go’s)

Paul Simon – Santa Monica Civic – 1973/1974

Hollywood Bowl – Etta James & Solomon Burke (Summer, 2008)

B-52s and The Blasters — Los Angeles.

John Hiatt – Hollywood.

Solomon Burke and Etta James (Hollywood Bowl, 2008)

Tom Waits –  July 30, 1975

Rolling Stones – The Forum – June 11, 1972 (Stevie Wonder opened, and did not get as much applause as he deserved.)

Bill Evans (1929-1980) – San Francisco (with Harley Lond). This concert was in the late 1970s, and when I heard about his death not that much longer after hearing him live, I realized how fortunate I had been to have this one encounter.

Harry Partch – University of California, Los Angeles. Delusion of the Fury

Bob Dylan – Long Beach Civic Auditorium – 2008

(I once walked out on a Dylan concert. It was at a venue in Hollywood in 1978. I can’t recall what he was playing, but it was most certainly not songs from Blood on the Tracks nor his mid-1960s albums. He was listless and seemed merely to be going through the motions.)

Deborah Iyall and Romeo Void – Eureka, CA 1981

Stan Ridgeway and Wall of Voodoo – Santa Monica Civic, 1982

Rickie Lee Jones – Belly Up Tavern, Salerno Beach.

Beck – University of California, San Diego.

Bo Diddley – Redondo Beach club, summer, 1969

Wim Mertens – McCabe’s Guitar Shop (one of my favorite musical performances of all time).

Ray Manzarek  (with Michael C. Ford) – McCabe’s Guitar Shop

Chick Corea – Santa Monica Civic.

Talking Heads – Hollywood Bowl.

Patti Smith –the Roxy (her first show after Horses came out). Santa Monica Civic and Beyond Baroque.

Oingo Boingo – I’m quite sure I saw them live, but can’t remember where. (“Dead Man’s Party” is a classic.)

Suburban Lawns – Santa Monica Civic.

Bruce Springsteen – at least a half-dozen times. Santa Barbara, where he ended with an incredible version of “Jungleland”; Santa Monica Civic; Los Angeles Sports Arena; and the Coliseum.

Of course, there are also concerts I almost heard, but ended up having to leave before the music started. In particular, I was invited by a poet friend, who had an extra ticket, to see Neil Young at the Forum in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, this person was prone to substance abuse and became ill once we were at the Forum and I had to drive her home before the lights came down.

 

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Music Performance Poetry

Michael Hedges

July 30, 2013 – 1:17 pm

MICHAEL HEDGES (1953-1997)

TUESDAY, July 30, 2013

The longest single job I’ve held was as a typesetter at Radio & Records, from 1985 to 1995; every couple years the tedium of production work on a weekly newspaper would be reinvigorated by the brief appearance of a famous performer or songwriter. A few of the “stars” who dropped by included Tina Turner, Julian Lennon and Michael Jackson. Jackson was perhaps the biggest surprise in terms of his personal presence. As he made his way around the large production room with its paste-up tables and camera equipment, he seemed to acknowledge each of us without any sense of distraction or yearning to be elsewhere with someone else. In making eye contact as he shook my hand, he held as tight to the brevity of our greeting as anyone in his position could possibly manage. He seemed guileless in doing so. He had nothing to gain from extending himself even that much and he earned my respect for that as much as for his slithering choreography and the soothing turbulence of his music.

One week we all received an invitation to attend a performance by Michael Hedges at A&M studios.  I’m not sure what the occasion was, although it was obviously an event intended to be an industry gathering. No tickets were for sale nor was it advertised. Hedges performed his compositions with a passion and verve that I have rarely encountered in any artist in any medium. I would not trade this memory of hearing Hedges perform for being at any performance by any contemporary musician. At the time, I was working on the title portion of my long poem, “Barely Holding Distant Things Apart.” While Hedges was playing, the only words I could come up with to describe the effect of his music were “Tibetan / marching / band.” Afterwards, Cathay Gleeson (my first wife) and I went to a back room to talk with him. We were complete strangers, but he listened to our comments on his music as if we were friends from his days as a student at the Peabody Conservatory. My recollection is that Cathay spontaneously gave him a small crystal assemblage she was wearing.

He was in his mid-40s when he died as a result of an automobile accident in 1997. In the decade and a half since, I’ve thought continually not only of his music, but of the integrity he brought to its expression. I’ve always been dismayed at how few poets seem to know his work. Anyone who is reading this blog should immediately start using their computers to become familiar with the musical visions of Michael Hedges.

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Performance Poetry

Idyllwild Poetry Week

July 14, 2013 – 7:01 pm

IDYLLWILD POETRY WEEK

July 14, 2013

In the summer of 1999, Cecilia Woloch organized a week-long poetry conference at the Idyllwild Arts Academy. Over the course of the next nine summers, Woloch managed a rotating line-up of poets that could serve as an idiosyncratic model for that endangered species of literary projects, the anthology of contemporary poets. The following is not a complete list of those Woloch selected to give featured readings at Idyllwild, but it’s sufficiently comprehensive to provide an accurate survey of her curatorial sensibility:

Chris Abani

Ellen Bass

John Brandi

Christopher Buckley

Marilyn Chin

Lucille Clifton

Wanda Coleman

Billy Collins

Brendan Constantine

Richard Garcia

James Baker Hall

Eloise Klein Healy

Peter J. Harris

Terrance Hayes

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Galway Kinnell

Carolyn Kizer

Ted Kooser

Yusef Komunyakaa

Maxine Kumin

Suzanne Lummis

Tom Lux

Bill Mohr

Harryette Mullen

Carol Muske-Dukes

Marilyn Nelson

Naomi Shihab Nye

Sharon Olds

Holly Prado

Doren Robbins

Aleida Rodriguez

Maurya Simon

Gerald Stern

David St. John

Natasha Tretheway

Quincy Troupe

Ellen Bryant Voight

Charles Harper Webb

Cecilia Woloch

Robert Wrigley

Of these 40 poets, half are women; one-fourth of the total represent a range of poetics within African-American poetry that is difficult, if not impossible, to find embedded in current anthologies. On a number count alone, Woloch deserves considerable recognition for going far beyond an all too prevalent tokenism that still seems to operate within American poetry, especially within the academy.

Unfortunately, the Idyllwild poetry festival had to scale back its programming after the international economic debacle in 2008. A week of workshops and readings still takes place in July under the direction of Ed Skoog, who brought in Diane Wakoski and Richard Kenney as featured poets this year. David St. John was originally scheduled to lead a workshop, but had to drop out at the last moment and Kenney took his place.

As in past years, I am only able to attend the poetry programming in the evening because I teach a day-long class in fiction writing at Idyllwild’s summer arts camp. This past Friday, however, I managed to catch the final quarter-hour of a lecture by Diane Wakoski. The culminating trope of her talk involved the layers of secrets intermingling in a poem’s undulations. She emphasized that the crucial tension in a poet’s work involves the knowledge of a secret that must be addressed in the poem but cannot be revealed. As Wakoski cited examples of how this oscillation works out in poets such as Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, I thought of the way I explained poetry to young students in the San Gabriel Valley in the early 1980s: “A poem does not solve a mystery; it creates one.” I remember that at one school my comment was reported by the classroom’s teacher to the principal as a “dangerous” idea. I kid you not. On one hand, I was dismayed that what I was teaching grade school students about poetry could be categorized as insidious knowledge; on the other hand, I felt gratified that my work in various poet-in-the-schools programs was doing more than simply reinforcing the predictable habits of literacy.

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Books Performance Poetry

Coming Attractions: Bob Flanagan

June 27, 2013 – 10:28 pm

THURSDAY, June 27, 2013

One of the most overlooked anthologies of the past 40 years is Dennis Cooper’s Coming Attractions: An Anthology of American Poets in their Twenties, which was published by Cooper’s Little Caesar Press in 1980.  Perhaps my favorite poet in that collection is Bob Flanagan, who later became better known as a performance artist. His poetry, however, deserves to be remembered.

I drove down to Imperial Beach and back again today. Having a 92-year-old mother who is still living on her own but who resists having any assistance other than what her offspring can provide poses a challenge that I’m sure other baby boomers share. My posts will necessarily be brief on these days.

Having returned from my trip, I can think of no better way to close the day than bringing Bob Flanagan’s writing into this blog for the first of many times. His partner, Sheree Levin, made a crucial contribution to my anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” and I also look forward to my entries about her photographs of the poets in PLP.

 

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Music Performance Poetry

Take the Red Line: Poesia para la gente

June 26, 2013 – 12:21 pm

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Poesia para la gente

Except for Billy Burgos, I’ve never heard or read the work of any of the poets who will be taking part in “Poesia Para La Gente” this coming Sunday. I did hear Burgos read at Beyond Baroque a couple of years ago, though, and enjoyed it very much. He is definitely one of the “young” poets whose work has already significantly gone past the stage of “promise” and “potential” and begun contributing to the conversation about contemporary poetics.

The posting for “Poesia Para La Gente” has the subtitle, “Subway Edition,” which made me wonder if there is another edition or version of this project; indeed, a quick use of search engines brought up a poster for an event just last month, “Poetry under the Freeway,” which featured Iris De Anda, Rebecca Gonzales, Abel Salas, Matt Sedillo and Julio the Conga Poet at the Cypress Park Community Job Center. Jessica Ceballos appears to be the main organizer of these events.

It is heartening to see public transportation continuing to be used as a mobile venue for cultural work. One of the ways that poets have availed themselves of this platform is to have advertising-sized placards of poems on buses. I believe George Evans once set up such a program in San Francisco, and certainly New York has had these kinds of displays over the years. Smaller cities shouldn’t be overlooked as potential outlets, however. Santa Monica, for instance, in the late 1980s, sponsored a poetry-on-the-buses program. Some of the poets who were featured in a series of poetry placards on buses in 1988 included Stephen Rodefer, Eloise Klein Healy, Charles Bernstein, Ruben Martinez, Hugh Seidman, Sesshu Foster, Terry Wolverton, and me.

I suppose that one could argue that having posters of poems on a bus or a subway car is not necessary anymore. After all, can’t people just use their hand-held devices to dig up a poem to read? First of all, there is an assumption here about capital (the means by which these devices can be acquired and their functions made use of) and culture that seems a little too blithe. Internet access on a bus or subway car is not necessarily free, at least the last time I checked. I don’t know about other cities, but I remember a survey a few years ago noted that the riders of L.A.’s bus system were in the bottom five percent of the economic hierarchy. Furthermore, is there not something to be said for reading something on the “big screen” of a placard and experiencing a gaze at language that broadens one’s peripheral vision to include those who are riding the bus with you, perhaps a few of whom are also reading the poem at the same time. I hope that someone steps forward and helps Jessica Ceballos expand the reach of her events to include at least the temporary posting of the work being read at the events.

Here are the details for the “Subway Edition” of “Poesia Para La Gente”:

Poesia Para La Gente: Subway Edition

Poetry Reading

June 30, 2013

12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

A one-time event on a Sunday afternoon, to stimulate and encourage artistic expression throughout the Los Angeles area…via the metro lines. $5 for all day metro pass. Meeting at the RED LINE platform LA Union Station. FEATURING: Billy Burgos, Yago Cura, Sean Hill, Karineh Mahdessian, Ryan Nance, Conney Williams. Hosted by Jessica Ceballos. w/ OPEN MIC & musical accompaniment FOLLOW US LIVE – or hop on the nearest train by finding out where we’ll be – by using the hashtag -> #PPLG. We’ll be live tweeting/facebooking beginning at 11:30 AM #PPLG

 

LA Metro Rail System

Red Line Platform

800 N Alameda St

Los Angeles, CA

 

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Music Performance

THE THINGZ (Changed Upon a Garage Guitar)

June 22, 2013 – 10:46 pm

Saturday, June 22, 2013

THE THINGZ (Changed Upon a Garage Guitar)

The usual claim about popular music is that one is primarily interested in the bands that were on the play lists of one’s adolescence. While retaining an enormous affection for the glory days of Motown, I would prefer to devote what little time I can spare for contemporary pop music to younger musicians. In particular, I’m interested in those who are picking up the legacy of bands and songwriters between 1975 and 1995 who refused to let the corporate music business determine the future of guitar-oriented art. Part of that curiosity is simply sympathy for a similar goal in the small press world I was a part of back in those years. I remember Elvis Costello in the late 1970s saying that his goal was to destroy the record business. Of course, some of that was only the rambunctious bluster of self-promotion, but that attitude also reverberated with more sincerity than many people realized. Certainly, many of the most interesting bands that came out of that period were as little interested in getting signed by MCA as poets on the West Coast were in being aligned with Harper & Row.

If I have kept listening to popular music at all, it’s largely driven by the hope of hearing lingering strands of resistance to the ever-expanding commodification of culture. I’ll grant that my extremely fragmentary knowledge of current music is largely an intermittent act of overhearing at this point. There’s only so much time that one can give to all the many things that are worthy of our attention. Just as it’s now impossible for anyone to keep up with all of contemporary poetry, there’s no way that anyone can possibly keep track of pop music bands. That shouldn’t be used as an excuse for those whose blogs are primarily devoted to poetry to neglect commenting on the work being done in the field of popular music. One thing I’ll try to do in this blog is to give some minimal attention to popular music.

A few weeks ago, I walked over to the Prospector Bar at Seventh and Junipero in Long Beach at 11:00 p.m. to see one of my favorite “local” bands, THE THINGZ. I had listened to their second CD earlier this spring and wanted to find out how they sounded live.  Unfortunately, the band went on a bit later than the scheduled time, and I couldn’t stay for the whole set, which was a shame because the band was really kicking in as I headed home to get some sleep. I think Linda and I had an early dental appointment the next morning and I can no longer function on less than six hours sleep. My one reservation about the performance at The Prospector by the Thingz was that the drummer didn’t seem quite in synch in the opening numbers, but I was told the next time I saw the band members walking their dog that he had played sets for two other bands earlier in the day and was still trying to shift gears.

The Thingz is a three-member band, and one could think of them as a kind of stripped down version of X, with Billy Zoom being dropped from the line-up. The overall sound is an extremely melodic post-punk convergence of well articulated chord shifts with vocals traded back and forth with simmering dexterity. In a song such as “Secret Chamber,” for instance, I hear echoes of the B-52s as channeled through an impeccable garage band ethos. I’ll have more to say about this song later on. By chance, Linda and I saw them again the other day as they were walking home from a shopping trip and they mentioned they were playing this afternoon.

Today’s show was in a huge dirt lot near Sixth and Pine in Long Beach and this time they not only went on stage fairly close to the announced time, but the drummer was in fine form from the very first lick and the whole band seemed to glide effortlessly from song to song. The Thingz were kind enough to give me a copy of their set list, which included five songs from their new album, STEP RIGHT UP.

“She’s a Piranha”

“Human Pancake”

Mothballs & Bloodmeal

Old Arthur

Song for Sam

Your Misfortune

Lay Me Down

Bacon Slap

Thingz Theme

Secret Chamber

Clara Belle

Not Mean (Just Soured)

I enjoyed their show too much to spend time taking notes, but want to give special praise to “Bacon Slap” and “Clara Belle,” which was old-fashioned rocker of a number that made our rear ends twinkle with energy for a minute and a half of non-stop delight. Both songs served as a contrast to my favorite song of the afternoon, “Secret Chamber,” which featured guitar work by Michael that pushed far past the ordinary expectations one has for a pop music song. The song seemed longer live than on the new album, so the music in the instrumental portion at the end of the song may well have been improvised. If so, it coiled through a taproot that was close to being profound composition. Brief as it was, it sent a suction jolt of perfectly fermented antagonism through the resolution chambers of an inner dance that cannot be choreographed, but only passed through and released. Very well done.

If you want to download their latest effort, “Step Right Up” go to thethingz.bandcamp.com. You can get a code to download it with if you write the band itself at info@thethingz.com.

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