I have a new friend, Angela Khan, who uses chat software. I am getting used to it. We banter about projects, poetry, and philosophy on these little pop-up boxes in the morning.
The other morning, she tells me also is chatting with Andrea Van Cleef.
This is my Northern Italian rocker buddy. I know social media makes it infinitely easier for anybody to be a catalyst, but as an O.C. (Original Catalyst), I still pride myself in connecting people up.
Khan is getting mobbed up in our project Poetry Scores, so I told her Andrea is the one musician who has scored me. I populated our chat box with a link to a demo of his song to my poem "I used to be precocious".
Then, I really got to thinking. Khan had just sent me some of her own poems. My first thought was that they would be fun to sing. So I told her I would post her poems and send the link to Andrea and see if he could come up with some songs.
The Quiet Room By Angela Khan
Murderous imaginings are suppressed in the light blue room
Confined shadows compress against the break room’s skin
slaloming through the silence, a slavish floor to broom
echoes race but time always wins
down the hallway donning a boyish grin
and stooping yet strong, the figure’s work never ends
sweeping accusations - life's blind custodian
begins to whistle woes unforgivable
in the coded key of Zen
Kind of reads like a Natalie Merchant lyric to me.
Bastille day is today
By Angela Khan
Bastille day is today
ever heard of this celebration?
You think you’re the King; I'm French; pay attention---
Behead thee King and drama Queen
I'm casting thy booty to the sea
your riches nil value and useless to me
Let us chisel this date into your dull memory
Rest your neck upon it's cold nape
Run through your lines just one more time before never
it is too late
to tip me
Learn from the stillness of the stone
and its silence
Even your darkest knights are lame
like your face we've saved from the
wages of slaves
Tails down You lose!
Heads off!
just proves
today is the day Bastille!
I'm melting the molds of victory waxes
paid for with your Icarus' taxes
Bastille!
Hone the blade
then bury the axes
Mark my face with Pheonix' ashes!
I'm writing you off with the ink from your spill
take a hard look what's come from this quill
thank you
thank you
thank you
Today we celebrate my Bastille!
Come to think of it, that also has a touch of early Natalie.
red on red By Angela Khan
Moving away from or coming towards depending on the wave length in colors and the speed at which I hover contemplating red I pull the covers over my head and the blackbirds aren't birds they were rats in a dream I once had when I was running over past events in my memory bare feet protected by angels didn't cut over bottles broken in an alley careless of the crime motion blurred visions of one time when I hadn't a dime or second to spend running through alleyways in my head it didn't matter much because my feet were tough and I owned no watch on the wrist to say late to the party to tell a story so great about love and loss of no blood and the police breaking rules to give me a lift and wishing me well in this here district why didn't I tell them? that My favorite Italian shoes were in that bag too. And what of the artwork that took a semester to do? Nevermind my faith in humankind and nevermind all of those things once called mine. Nevermind. Nevermind. Nevermind. Back to
contemplating red on red
And that one even has "Italian shoes"! Come on, Van Cleef, you can do something with that.
As the King/McAvin shoe hostage crisis enters its second week, I have taken to wearing my dress shoes to work. This situation is getting serious.
It all started on location in Cuba, Missouri, one week ago yesterday. It was our first day of shooting the new Poetry Scores movie, Go South for Animal Index. After a long day down at the creek, shooting our Coyote character (Kyla Webb) trading his moonshine to PFC Sack (Thom Fletcher) for hamburgers and to Badger (Roland Franks) for fresh fish, we moved up to the McPheeters' house.
I had picked out an upstairs porch to shoot the country dance scene. Our movie is based on a poem of the same name by Stefene Russell that is about the atomic bomb. My storyline centers on Lost Almost, as the soldiers called Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was invented and tested. The scientists lived a fairly active, if insular, social life when they weren't splitting the atom and weaponizing the resulting energy, and I wanted to reflect this fact with a mad scientist country dance.
Lost Almost was a secret military installation, and since we make silent movies, the best way to make this clear to the viewer is to have armed soldiers present at almost all times. So I asked for our soldier actors (Fletcher, Thomas Crone, Tim McAvin, John Parker) to make this shoot so they could surround the scientists and their wives while they danced.
We were just about to start shooting when I reviewed our soldiers' costumes. Everybody was looking pretty good. Then I looked down at McAvin's shoes. They were brown sneakers. When I asked the soldier actors to costume themselves, I specified black boots for their footwear. Brown sneakers absolutely would not do
Photo by V "Elly" Smith
My fussing about this costume blunder called attention to Tim's shoes. Since I was standing right in front of him, this also called attention to my shoes. Barbara Manzara, who is playing a scientist wife but also had been helpful all day with costumes, pointed out that my shoes - my beloved, lovely shoes - were black. At a glance, which is all the viewer would ever give the shoes of any of our soldiers, they would pass for boots. So Tim and I switched shoes.
Photo by V "Elly" Smith
It turns out we have almost exactly the same sized foot. The show went on, and I am quite certain no one who ever sees our movie will guess that one of the soldiers is wearing beloved, lovely black shoes that are not boots.
Directing a movie all day is a heady, exhausting experience. It takes you out of yourself. I stopped think about my feet or my shoes. By the time I started thinking about my feet or my shoes again, the shoot was over and Tim McAvin was gone from the location, he was absent from Cuba, he was on his way back to St. Louis wearing my beloved, lovely black shoes. I was stuck with the brown sneakers.
I am certain that Tim was able to walk off with, and in, my shoes because they fit so well. Tim and I carry our weight in a remarkably similar fashion. I have a long history of neck and back injuries and am unusually sensitive to how I bear my weight. I wouldn't last an hour in the shoes of a man who carried his weight in a way that felt wrong to me. I am sure my shoes felt right on Tim, because Tim's shoes felt pretty right on me.
They felt pretty right on me for a day or two, that is. Then, they started to feel wrong. The small differences in how we bear our weight and have imprinted our shoes began to become obvious to me. Tim's shoes began to bother me. My back began to ache. I don't really have any other comfortable, casual shoes. I was stuck with Tim's brown sneakers.
So I started to take my shoes - that is, Tim's shoes - off at work. The people who work with me began to object to this, and who could blame them. And so I, a week now into the McAvin/King shoe hostage crisis, I have started to wear my dress shoes to work.
I like my dress shoes. They are perfectly comfortable shoes. But they are not my beloved, lovely black shoes. Those shoes are in the custody of - in effect, being held hostage by - one Tim McAvin. And I want them back!
I have tried to get them back one time. One evening last week, This is where it starts to get suspicious. Oh, sure, Tim said. You can come and get your shoes. No problem. But you'll have to come and get them, he said. He didn't have a car that night. I took down his address. I drove toward his home in South County. As I drew near, to nail down directions to his door, I called Tim.
And, suddenly, there was no Tim on the phone. Suddenly, his phone was doing that thing when the person who has the cell phone plan tells the cell phone company his phone isn't going to be a working phone for awhile. Tim dodged me. Tim is dodging me. Tim is holding my shoes hostage! Tim, bring me back my beloved, lovely shoes!
I'll admit I'm not a hashtagger, and I'm old enough to remember vividly a social life before the internet, which leaves me a little cranky about meme-chasing as a means of communicating.
Come to think of it, I remember the meme-chasing equivalent before there was social media meme-chasing. It was the thing where people spoke solely in quotes from movie dialogue. That really sucked.
But interconnections can be fun when they are genuine. They can lead to fresh discoveries and new, instant intimacies.
So I followed a Twitter link from a guy I don't otherwise know named Scott Edward Anderson. Scott was riffing on a post by another guy I don't know named Jim Behrle, having sardonic fun with the genre of The Dead Bird Poem. Jim's post takes this trail back to a Facebook message sent to him, turning this dead bird poem thing into a bona fide, multi-platform meme without the breathy artifical perspiration of a #hashtag.
The post by Jim Behrle, which references one of his own dead poems about a dead bird, elicited from Scott Edward Anderson a dead poem of his own about a Dead Red Wing.
I dig talking to people through Twitter, so I told Scott his post and poem reminded me that I had written a poem about a dead bird brought back from the West by Meriwether Lewis, that subsequently was named for the captain explorer, Lewis's Woodpecker.
Scott said he hoped I'd share the poem. That was encouragement enough for me. Some document searching on the trusty old laptop, and this here dead poem has new wings:
*
LEWIS'S WOODPECKER By Chris King
I was happy to see you
dapper man in sooty black
jacket, reddish vest, with toe
nail issues, though, and a bit
grizzled, muzzy, matted about
the neck, tail feathers scruffy.
Woodpecker with a necklace, a Kamiah,
Idaho, exile, a holotype, neighbor
of the innards of asteroids, giraffe
scapula mixer of poisons.
Property of Harvard, now, from Charles
Wilson Peale and your namesake captain,
Meriwether, with Golden Pheasants Peale
asked of President Washington, tactless,
while they yet flapped. “I cannot say
that I shall be happy to have it in
my power to comply with your request,”
General George wrote Peale, “but expect it
will not be long before they will compose
a part of your museum, as they appear
to be drooping.” Meriwether Lewis
chased you like a northern flicker
through the Rocky Mountains, caught you
in the Bitterroots, spotted the glossy
tint of green in you in certain light,
thumbed the barb of your pink tongue,
author of song on the Upper Missouri,
marveled at how oddly artificially
painted in blood red and white your
breast and belly seem and the yellowed
browns of muscly iris in your purple eyes
only when you were in his canoe, composed.
*
As I recall, this was written in the presence of the actual specimen that had been brought back personally by Meriwether Lewis. I was a magazine travel editor for years and went to museums everywhere, so I can't remember where I saw it.
Oh yeah, I forgot. The internet knows everything. I asked Google and it sent me to the Library of Congress, which told me the specimen is birdhoused at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, which checks out; I must have done a dozen Boston stories.
That is the picture of the bird, above, from the LoC.
Lola van Ella and Sammich the Tramp will present “The Golden Age ... Live on Stage: A Silent Night in Black & White” at 9 p.m. Saturday, July 17 at Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave.
This unique – perhaps unprecedented – event will combine St. Louis burlesque at its sexiest with the art of the silent tramp (as perfected by Chaplin and Keaton, and revived by Sammich). It will combine live stage shows – burlesque, tramp – with silent film screened to live music by St. Louis’ own (and only) The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra and Kevin O'Connor.
This event springs from the stunning finale to the inaugural (2010) Show-Me Burlesque Festival. Lola van Ella and Sammich the Tramp stunned and then wowed audiences with a Lady & the Tramp stage show that opened with all the delicacy and mixed moods of Chaplin … but ended with Lola on a swing!
[See Hannah Radcliff’s artful video of their performance of Lady & The Tramp at the 2010 Show-Me Burlesque Festival: http://vimeo.com/12079789.] **
“The Golden Age ... Live on Stage” will feature an elaborated version of this piece, scored live by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. It also will feature the premiere of Kevin O'Connor’s original score to Buster Keaton's “One Week,” performed live by Kevin and The Rats and People as the film screens.
This homage to the arts of silent film and live music will be enlivened by burlesque performances from Lola van Ella, Foxy la Feelion, Gogo McGregor and Sturdy Gurlesque. Flappers! Burlesque! Comedy! Music! And more! All in the comfy confines – and pleasant acoustics – of Off Broadway.
Tickets are $15 and available at the door and at www.offbroadwaystl.com.
ST. LOUIS FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE
This special event coincides with the opening of the St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase, the definitive homage to local moviemakers produced by Cinema St. Louis. It runs July 17-22. For more information and schedules, please see www.cinemastlouis.org.
* Photo of Lola van Ella and Sammich the Tramp, by David McWhirter
** Please credit all photojournalists and videographers whenever posting their work, even for promotional or preview purposes.
I am trying to set up a reading series at The Firecracker Press where poets & authors read while we print a broadside of one of their poems. More details to come, but would you be interested in participating?
Uh, yeah!
I have poems I have written, as Firecracker would know; they printed my one chapbook, A heart I carved for a girl I knew. But I am much more passionate about my cotranslations, because it is far more interesting poetry than what I come up with on my own.
I have done cotranslations from the Italian of Roberto Giggliucci with my dear friend Leonard Barkan, a world-famous comparative literature scholar and art historian whose academic home is Princeton University, when he isn't parked in Rome or Berlin. The TriQuarterly published one of our translations of Roberto, "Easy poem about hotels"; the rest of our collection remains unpublished and uncollected.
I also have done cotranslations from the Turkish of Orhan Veli with my equally dear friend Defne Halman, a famous Turkish actor and the first VJ on Turkish television (the Martha Quinn of Istanbul). We have published some of our translations of the great Garip poet, here and there; but since we translated everything Orhan Veli ever wrote, there is plenty more to pick from.
So, today, I picked through it. I sent this batch of unpublished personal favorites to Firecracker. Let's see what they choose to print that broadside of. Saturday, August 21 is when I will be down at the print shop on Cherokee Street reading some of this stuff.
***
SELECTED POEMS BY ORHAN VELI
Translated from the Turkish
by Defne Halman and Chris King
**
HEADACHE
I
However beautiful the roads may be
However cool the night
The body tires
The headache never gets tired
II
Even if I go into my house now
I can go out a little later
Since these clothes and shoes belong to me
And the streets belong to no one
**
LOVELY DAYS
These lovely days destroyed me
On a day like this I quit my job
I got hooked on tobacco
On days like this
I fell in love on days like this
I forgot to take home bread and salt
On days like this
My obsession with writing poetry always recurred
Days like this destroyed me
**
I CAN’T EXPLAIN
(moro romantico)
If I cry
Will you hear
My voice
In lines of verse?
Can you touch my tears?
I never knew songs were so beautiful
And words so insufficient
Before falling into this trouble
There is a place, I know
Where it's possible to say everything
I come pretty close
I feel it
I can’t explain it
**
MY SHADOW
I'm sick and tired
Of dragging him around
For years, at the tips of my toes
Let's live in this world a little bit
Him by himself
Me by myself
**
HAVE I BEEN CAUGHT BY LOVE?
Was I also going to have thoughts like this?
Was I also going to be left sleepless?
Was I going to be silent like this?
Was I not even going to miss my favorite salad?
Is this the way I was going to be?
**
GUEST
Yesterday I was really bored
All the way into the night
Two packs of cigarettes
Didn’t do a thing
I tried to write
It didn’t grab me
I played the violin for the first time in my life
I roamed around
I watched people playing backgammon
I sang a song in a mode all my own
I caught a matchbox full of flies
Goddamn it, in the end
I picked myself up
And here I came
**
SPREAD OUT
She’s stretched out
Flopped there, all spread out
Her dress is hiked up a little
She’s lifted her arm
Her armpit appears
And with one hand she’s holding her breast
No evil in her, I know
None, none in me either, but ...
No way!
This is no way to lie down!
**
MY GOLD TOOTHED ONE
Come, my darling, come to me
Let me buy you silk stockings
Let me treat you to a cab
Let me take you to the music
Come
Come, my gold toothed one
My dark-eyed, wavy-haired one
My little slut
My one with the cork heels
My rock & roller, come
**
REMEMBRANCE
The knife gash on my forehead
Is because of you
My tobacco tin
Is a souvenir from you
Your telegram says
“Even if both of your hands are in blood, come”
How can I forget you?
My lady of the night
**
WITHIN
We have seas, full of sun
We have trees, full of leaves
Morning and night
We go
Go and come back
Between our seas and our trees
In poverty
**
SOME DAYS
Some days, I’ll just pick up and go
Amid the smell of nets fresh from the sea
I go from island to island
In the wake of the shearwaters
There are worlds, you can’t even imagine
Flowers bloom with a bang
Smoke blasts from the soil
Look, the seagulls, those seagulls
A different urgency in every one of their feathers
Some days, I'm up to my neck in the blue
Some days, I'm up to my neck in the sun
Some days, just loony
**
THE SLACKER
This is my gig
I paint the sky every morning
While all of you are asleep
You'll wake up and see that it's blue
The sea will tear sometimes
You won't know who sews it
I sew it
Sometimes I'll just goof off
That's also my job
I'll think of a head on my head
I'll think of a belly on my belly
I'll think of a foot on my foot
I don't know what the hell to do
**
FOR THIS COUNTRY
What didn’t we do for this country!
Some of us died
Some gave speeches
**
HEAR THIS OR ELSE
If you don’t hear the sound
Of nuts cracking open on branches
Just see what will become of you
If you don't hear the sound
Of the rain coming down
Just see what will happen
The ringing bell
The speaking person
If you don’t feel the smell
Of the seaweed
The lobster, the shrimp
The wind that blows from the sea ...
**
TOWARD FREEDOM
Before the day is born
You should set out
While the sea is pure white
The lust of holding the oars
The happiness of being useful
You'll set out
You'll set out with commotion of nets
Fish will welcome you
You'll be happy
As you shake the net
You'll hold the sea in your hands
Glittering scale by scale
When the souls of the seagulls
Are quiet on the graves of their rocks
Suddenly, all hell will break loose on the horizon
Mermaids? Birds? What do you think?
Maybe revels, parties, festivals, celebrations?
A bridal procession
Silver and gold thread for the bride's hair
Bridal veils, fanciful stuff?
Heeeeeey!
What are you waiting for?
Throw yourself into the sea!
Don't worry if you’ve left someone behind
Can't you see there is freedom everywhere?
Be a sail
Be a rudder
Be a fish
Be water
Go as far as you can go and keep going
**
THE MERMAID
What was it, had she just come out of the sea?
Her hair, her lips smelled like the sea until morning
The rising and subsiding
Of her chest was like the sea
She was poor, I know
But come on, you can't talk about poverty all the time
Directly into my ear, gently
Gently, she sang songs of love
What had she seen, what had she learned, who knows
Defne and I are supposed to publish our translations, Some Days Just Loony: The Collected Poems o Orhan Veli. We even have a nibble from a university press. But we are both lame at the business of publishing, and Defne is back in Istanbul and scarcely communicado. For now, you can download the text for free at that there link, so long as you don't publish it without permission.
I was in Washington, D.C. for the Friday night premiere of a play witten by a friend, sleeping on the friend's floor, and he had family coming to town for Saturday night; best I scatter.
The Irish rover in Baltimore suggested I meet him in Virginia. How would I get to Virginia? I wanted to know. "I'll get you sorted out," he said.
I thought something as simple as a ride from the city; but no.
The Irish rover, Pat Egan, was playing a festival that afternoon in Staunton. That night he was playing sessions and partying in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Between Staunton and the mountains was a college town, Charlottesville, Virginia, with a train stop. He put me on a one-way train.
"Get off the train, wander into town. Grab a beer. Watch the girls," was the Irish rover's advice. I did those things, and waited.
He appeared on cue, in a minivan driven by his exwife - still his flautist, on certain gigs - and her new boyfriend. No hard feelings there, Jeez.
I didn't know what to expect of the party in the mountains, was not given any clues about it - specifically was denied all detail by the Irish rover. But he had gone through some trouble, and indeed personal expense, to get me there; and that was encouraging.
For we had wandered together, in a simpler time. We had packed up with an African bush man drummer, a Merchant Marine songster, and a redheaded blues guitar orphan, and driven to a hippie commune in the Missouri Ozarks, where clothing was optional; where so many things were optional.
I am sorry that sounds like a tall tale, for it is strictly factual. Pat Egan and I were together with the Stone Age African drum, the melodies of the seaports of the wide open world, the American blues guitar, the rolling Irish music, and whatever is mine. It was not to be forgotten, that coming together; that confluence. We have not forgotten it. We are always looking for it, for something like it.
Far down a winding mountain road, we climbed out of the vehicle and into a clearing. A house that had been growing under a craftsman's hands bloomed to one side of the clearing; a barn for music he had built stood on the other. Between them, Bass beer was cold on tap, with a tequila bottle atop the cooler. And behind them both, a swimming pool, left in a natural state, with diverted creek water for pool water, and frogs in the pool singing lustily in the night.
The frog is my totem animal; pardon again, for what might be taken as pretention, but is only simply true. I was ecstatic to take in the deep peals of the frogs, singing for their sex. It was a church to me.
A dog wandered up, a bull dog. Simon was his name. I have known many dogs, many wonderful dogs, in many fantastic places. Simon immediately appeared to me as the perfect dog. As I shared this perception with people at the party, I encountered only quiet agreement with an obvious fact to which I was a clumsy latecomer.
Music was here, and there, and over yonder, and further down the trail, closer to the lake, where more frogs sang, and sang more loudly. I was a clumsy latecomer to all this magic in this clearing in the mountains.
Further down the trail were the youth, one young man strumming chords and singing a twenty-first century mountain lad's equivalent of gangsta rap power ballads, all "Fuck you," and "you," and "you," as his buddy nodded along, in the dark with the frogs.
Over yonder a tall rangy journalist, working on a heroic immigrant newspaper story about a Mexican man who swam the Rio Grande thirty years ago to come into this country and ended up in these mountains, stroked story songs on a guitar, carefully heeded by a bearded man from New Zealand.
There, in the music barn, fiddlers and guitarists clustered around the piano, where a bearded man - so many, many bearded men in these Virginia mountains - comp'd along on chords and runs as they all sang familiar songs, filigree'd by a dobro, played by another bearded man.
Here, inside the partly reconstucted house, where I wandered, were young people, gathered in a circle in the shadows, out of view of the party and unto themselves. We play in the dark and the inaccessible places, they seemed to say, in the way they were settled in. We like to play this way. We don't like for you to creep up on us while we play this play, while we play "The Cumberland Gap" and fight over whether it is a two-part song, or a three-part song.
A girl guitar player said, "Peter, you're the fiddler; you're supposed to be the jerk." So then Peter the fiddler roared, "THREE PARTS, DAMN IT!" and they all broke into a three-part "Cumberland Gap," damn it.
I had rambled through these mountains, a little to the west, years before, and sat with the family of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who did so much to capture these songs, and save them for us, waiting in the future. I wanted so much to romanticize these competent, talented, physically striking, and somewhat dangerous looking young people, crowded together in the dark, playing for no one.
Each time I stepped closer for a closer look, for a fuller sound, someone would look up from their instrument, squinting nervously through eyeglasses, as if I were an intruder, not a listener. I was an intruder; I was a listener.
And then they did the thing musicians have always done in the bands of my dreams, they switched instruments around; and in every new grouping, the music was a little more intense, as the person stuck playing a less familiar instrument compensated for absent technique with guts and emotion, and the spirit of the music was laid raw.
It was laid most raw when the girl banjo player ended up standing up and thumping the double bass like she was born to do it, like she would die doing it. At the end of that song, she spoke of thirst; and to keep the music from stopping, to keep her from stopping with the death throttle on the double bass, I offered to fetch her water.
She handed me a plastic cup, with a trace of wine in the bottom: "Just pour the water on the wine."
I went and fetched the water and poured the water on the wine and handed it to her, to help wth her thirst; then I wandered out the half-built house, out onto the patio outside. The patio looked down to the swimming pool frog pond. The frogs sang for their sex.
I thought of Nymah Kumah, the African bush man drummer who had taught the Irish rover and I so much. "Man stole music from the birds, anyway," Nymah told me once.
Man stole music from the frogs, anyway, I told the darkness.
The Irish rover strolled up. Then the flautist, Laura Byrne, who had been his wife. She said, "They cry out until they find their mates, then they quiet down. Then they start having sex. That's how it goes." She wandered back off into the night.
I marveled at the stray frog who continues to sing, after the others have found their mates. There always seems to be the one, in every round of mating. There goes one again. "He's fucking floating," the Irish rover said, pointing out the lonesome, musical frog on the float. "Look at your man over there: 'This is my chance!'"
I wondered if that was the origin of song: not the one who sings for sex, but the one who is nourished on the song, not the sex; the one who sings a song beyond sex.
The mysterious young mountain musicians had come out of the dark house now, out onto the patio, to smoke and talk. A pair gathered around the Irish rover. They knew each other, as old acquantainces, inklings of friends. They were not, to the Irish rover, the creatures of mystery, and a little danger, that they were to me; that I wanted them to be.
The girl banjo player who had played the double bass to death paired off with the more silent, cragged, handsome of the fiddlers. He looked much like the youngest son of the Merchant Marine songster I had known and played music with, when he was young and inarticulate, with swooping bangs and forbidding looks.
Someone called the cragged fiddler by name: "Chance." Of course. Of course, this cragged young mountain fiddler would have to be "Chance". He would have to be, in fact, "Chance McCoy," a name imported wholesale from American folklore.
Chance lost some of his clothes, and jumped into the swimming pool frog pond. "It's really warm," he said to his girl, whose name was and would have to be "Liz Mead" ("mead": an ancient form of honeyed wine). "Just jump right in."
Liz Mead lost some of her clothes and jumped right in. It was not really warm. It was really cold. Chance McCoy had set her up. She cursed him, then kissed him.
Then these two mysterious to me mountain people were out of the water and next to me by the swimming pool frog pond, wet and cold. Chance jumped up and wandered off into the night; Liz stayed put to shake dry her hair. I told Liz how much I had fancied her bass playing; how much she had brought the band alive with the double bass.
"But you can't really hitchhike with it," she said.
Peter, the fiddler obliged to be a jerk, approached and asked if Chance had any more tobacco. Liz searched for Chance's tobacco, found a stick of it, it slipped out of her hand and into the frog pond.
"It went away," Liz said.
I said, "You dropped it in the pond."
Liz said, "It jumped in the pond. It wasn't my tobacco."
And then Chance McCoy was back, with more beer. With more beer there would be more music, soon, there could be no doubt about that. I would intrude again; I would listen again.
I would think of the frogs and the birds, who gave us their music. I would think of the African bush man drummer; now dead. I would think of the Merchant Marine songster, Pops Farrar, now dead. I would think of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, long dead, and his mountain music, still alive, still alive and changing in these competent, unpredictable, dangerous hands.
In the morning, I would leave these mountains with a heart full of hope.
But for a moment that night, before the music came back, there was only beer, and frogs, and tobacco, and friends, and intruders. There were young mountain lovers, less wet, less cold, sitting together by the dark pond, and the frog songs.
"Can we just come back here tomorrow?" Liz Mead asked of Chance McCoy.
Chance McCoy shook his wet head and said, "Let's do that. Fuck whatever we have to do tomorrow!"
*
Photograph of Liz Mead, on another day, in another mountain clearing, from her MySpace page.
It turned out to be a naieve question. I asked the actor if she had found the language difficult.
She said, basically, the only difficult language is the language that is not written well; and the language in Richard Byrne's play Burn Your Bookes was written very, very well. It is a pleasure to speak language like that, she said.
She had just spoken a mouthful of that language. This actor, the bright-eyed Kimberly Gilbert, has the last major role to take the stage in the play. Not an hour before we were speaking, the curtain had come down on opening night of Taffety Punk Theatre's premiere production of the play.
Kimberly plays the stepdaughter of a famous alchemist. Yes, at one time, there were famous alchemists. Her character's stepfather was Edward Kelley, who got bottled up in a Bohemian court longer than his English family would have wished. This was during the European Renaissance, when alchemists were sort of weapons of mass destruction, or of potential mass wealth creation, base metals into the ever-elusive gold - secrets of state to be hoarded. Or eliminated.
Kimberly was a bright-eyed actor, with no one waiting for her on opening night. I was a guest of the playwright, the man of the hour, who didn't need me under his heels. I needed her, or someone for the company of the night, and I thought she needed me; but was a fool. She migrated to the cast party, and was a life of that party. And it was a lively party.
It was a pleasure to see Daniel Flint, who had commanded so much of the stage in the lead role of Edward Kelley, returned to himself, a contemporary man, an actor with an attitude and a winning way. He had on a grey porkpie hat, and sideburns had claimed swaths of his craggy face.
His date, his partner, was the woman who had sat beside me during the premiere performance, which I had found riveting. I was swollen with pride for Richard Byrne, the playwright, whom I have known for half my life, almost exactly. If a writer might dream, he might dream of fashioning a play from difficult materials, hocus pocus and wife-swapping from the 16th century alchemists in what is now Prague; and then catalyzing a rowdy crew of creative souls in a magnificent city like Washington, D.C. to manifest this fitful dream on the stage.
I was just as riveted by the neighbor of my neighbor in the audience. With Daniel's lady friend was her friend, Chelsey. Chelsey is tall as God and far more beautiful. We small-talked about Twitter, the only kind of talk that is possible about Twitter. I have since found her there, and now listen to her playlists; good stuff.
But, at the cast party, Chelsey was in the embrace of a tall bloke who had a minor role in the play, a nice man named Eric, who looked like a taller make of the motor force behind the Taffety Punks, Marcus Kyd. Marcus has the easy smile and charisma that even a straight man would have to describe as attractive, as cute. It was not difficult to see how he could get immensely creative people to go along with him in producing difficult plays for no money, for almost no money.
And his company's production of this difficult play was equal in every way to the occasion of the world premiere. The Taffety Punks' roots in the culture of D.C. punk was on display, with punk band posters more or less stapled onto the backs of minor alchemists, and the boots of Renaissance tricksters held fast by duct tape, as if they were frayed guitar cords.
*
That would be Richard Byrne, playwright; and Daniel Flint, star, at the cast party.
I was in Washington, D.C. Friday night for the opening of Taffety Punk Theatre's premiere production of Burn Your Bookes by my old friend Richard Byrne.
It is a challenging play, set in Bohemia during the flux of the European Renaissance. The title is, at a glance, misleading, because this is not a play about censorship. It is a play about alchemy - the art (con art, many would say) of transmuting less valuable metals into gold.
Alchemy was a hybrid pursuit, and Richard crafted a hybrid play out of it. He subtitles his play, in three acts, as a "tryptych," to signal its hybrid character. It tells three different stories, about the same cast of characters, with three different techniques, rather than plotting one storyline through three mutually modulated acts.
When I took my seat in the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop on Friday night, I had read acts one and two and seen a video of act two workshopped at the Kennedy Center in 2008. Though Richard had entrusted me with a PDF of the entire play, I purposefully held off on reading the third act, wanting to be surprised at the premiere; and indeed I was surprised, very pleasantly so.
Act one is, in essence, a domestic drama about relationships in and between the families of two English alchemists, Edward Kelley and John Dee, who both have turned up in the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Bohemia. There was a sort of free agency in alchemists at this time, with monarchs and emperors poaching from each other the alchemists that had the buzz of having a hot hand - the mystical ability of enriching the treasury without finding and mining for gold.
One problem with mystics, among many others, is that you can't contain their mysticism to the sphere of infuence that interests you. Kelley also has seen faeries in his glass (in essence, his crystal ball) that speak of wife swapping; and if there is one thing more volatile than two alchemists cooped up in a foreign court, it is two wife-swapping alchemists so cooped up. Richard mines some vivid, if at times confusing, dramatics out of this rich material.
Act two is another animal altogether. If act one resembles a superheated Jacobean domestic drama in form, the technique of act two is taken straight out of Samuel Beckett, with all his forlorn, infighting, often paralyzed duets. The act is almost entirely a dialogue between two stationary alchemists, imprisoned in adjacent cages for fraud and failure.
The fraud has grown accustomed to his fate. He knows he has cheated and was caught and is determined to make the most out of whatever life is left to him. His neighbor has failed, rather than faked, and like most failures in most media, he is certain that success almost had been his and certainly would be, if he could only be let out of his cage and back into the fire of active pursuit.
Their duality is an idiosyncratic variant of a classic opposition - and the playwright makes the most of it, alternating howlers with lines of sparking beauty and metaphysical truth.
I have digested act three less fully, since Friday was my first exposure to it and I have not found the time to return to the text since I got back home to St. Louis. After the entirely male domain of act two, it opens into the female world of Elizabeth Jane Weston, aka Westonia, a pioneering woman poet and the stepdaughter of the alchemist Kelley.
Really, act three is about the struggles of composition and the agonies of enduring someone else's editorial judgments, all finely tempered by gender politics which came as a major surprise to me. The alchemical themes and storylines of acts one and two are revisited and wrapped up, while the imagination is taken in an entirely new direction.
This new departure near the end that does not feel gratuitous nor irrelevant is a defining hallmark of successful longform writing. Just try to do it - I have tried - it is amazingly difficult to achieve.
I find I have said nothing about the production, directed by Marcus Kyd, but this is getting long, as it is; so I will return, later, to discuss the fun the Taffety Punks had with this difficult but rich play.
*
Image of Dee and Kelley raising a ghost is out there all over the web without attribution; hence none here.
Yesterday I posted the police report about Alderman Jeffrey Boyd (St. Louis Mayor Francis G. Slay's favorite black alderman) videotaping a constituent who was standing in the street in the middle of the night wearing nothing but his underwear.
This is the statement Boyd sent in response. Andre Williams, the other person described by police as a "bystander" videotaping this humiliating incident, also is an elected official. He is the 22nd Ward committeeman.
*
Alderman Jeffrey Boyd's story:
On the night of April 16, 2010, I was parked in front of 5891 Martin Luther King Dr at approximately11:35 pm with my friend Andre Williams. This location is 5 doors from my office and next door to Mr. Williams’s restaurant. A few minutes later we observed an individual in underwear and socks in the middle of the intersection, when seconds later a police car arrived.
We observed the officers attempting to communicate with the half clothed gentlemen when I decided to videotape the interactions of the police officers and the gentleman. I was curious as to how they would handle this situation.
While standing on the sidewalk, an officer requested that I turn off my video phone. I complied; however rethought his request and decided that maybe I should be videotaping the incident. I attempted to videotape again when the officer demanded that I put the phone back into my pocket. Again I complied; however I asked the officer if I was doing anything illegal. He stated that I was interfering because he was standing next to me and not involved in the incident.
This was puzzling. I continued to ask the question in what way was I interfering when another officer tackled me from behind and handcuffed me. I told him that I was the Alderman. The officer escorted me to the back seat of the police car where I sat for approximately 30 minutes. He was heard verbally saying “this is your F’ing alderman. This is what is representing you”.
I was never told why I was being handcuffed or read any Miranda Rights. I feel that any citizen has the right to video tape any incident that involves the police. The police have no authority to violate the rights of citizens.
*
I am trying to make sense of this incident for tomorrow's St. Louis American. I do know one thing. If (God forbid) I ever lose my senses, and I am found nearly naked in the street by an elected official, I hope he does more to help me than to videotape my shame out of "curiosity".
And if the police trying to help me tell this elected official to get out of the way, I would hope he would get out of the way and not attempt to flex his aldermanic muscles.
Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media, from its home base in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., but with friends and partners around the country and here and there all over the world. *** (Contact creative director Chris King, who maintains this blog, at brodog [@] hotmail.com.)
Posts
