Kind Artists stretch out in group show at Mad Art

The Kind Artists opened a group show at Mad Art last night. I follow most of these artists pretty closely in social media, so sort of thought I knew where they all are. That's not a bad thing about social media, getting to share your friends' artistic process very casually.

So I knew Jay Alan Babcock has been doing repetitive, detailed drawings and paintings based on school Yearbook photos from a more socially conformist era. That didn't make his work any less exciting to see in person and to scale, since a couple of these paintings are just enormous. I found myself transported mentally to some offbeat public space, like a gym at a monied private school or a cafeteria at Google corporate, where someone had the sense to invest in one of these giant pieces and leave it standing there in front of people all the time.

I have seen Deb Douglas' work in person fairly recently (for an overcommitted parent like me) so knew what to expect from her, but enjoyed seeing a long line of these pleasing mixed-media pieces she is doing that mix archival images with her own drawings and then titled in ways that often introduce a conceptual component. I was personally gratified to see her showing again my favorite in this line of hers, "We have no quinces," which Deb did for the Poetry Scores invitational to Embirikos. That piece is the first sight when you enter the show, so I felt a part of this kindly community.

I also get out of the house to see Jeremy Rabus shows better than most, and he engages with his process fairly openly in social media, so I wasn't surprised by his part of the show either, but was again delighted to see it played out to scale. He had what must have been dozens of small, oddly shaped, brightly colored paintings arranged in a scattered way on half of Mad Art's long western wall. I thought of Guided By Voices and all of their endless, brilliant two-minute songs, all of them somehow different than the others -- and beautiful -- no matter how many you hear. Jeremy's little paintings were like that.

With Timothy Meehan, I was less sure what to expect. What I see from Tim's work at a glance on social media is all over the map, and I don't think I have seen a good grouping of his art in person before last night. I just loved his work in this group show. These blunt paintings had compositional elements from some of my favorite printmakers -- Melina Rodrigo kept coming to mind. His titles tried a variety of conceptual approaches to what seemed to my eye a very connected body of work with primitive, natural, earthen patterns and tones. If I had $400 to spend on art and a wall to hang something on, I was a Meehan buyer last night.

I didn't know what to expect from Amy Bautz either. I have known her for years and collaborated with her for the first time when we were both what I would now call "kids," but we haven't been as closely connected in recent years and, from what I have observed, she seems to change things up a lot as an artist. In this show she has intricate, eccentric drawings of natural forms, though when she happens to be drawing a natural form that hangs suspended from a plastic clip, the plastic clip gets the same electric, kooky, adoring attention from her.

The scale of Mad Art, I appreciated last night, is great for a small group show, because everyone really gets to stretch out. In their own ways, each of these artists stretched out in this ample space and aggressively demonstrated what they were up to. That's exciting of itself, but there is the added dimension that they are pointedly doing this as a group with a brand, as it were, that suggests kindred spirits who are kindly disposed. That suits me, and the St. Louis creative community, just fine.

They even went so far as to pose for a really handsome portrait, in matching suits and obviously made-up for the camera. They treat themselves as the early Beatles. And why not? Why should musicians be the only artists who get that unique kick that comes from being in a band?

*

Imaged, poached from Jay Alan Babcock's online photos, is I think one of the pieces in this show.

Lola talked me into seeing the new big show

I seized a rare night out recently to reconnect with some buddies from the burlesque scene. My friends Lola and Kyla, and their friends who became my friends, skyrocketed not long after we started hanging out and now there is just no keeping up with them (especially if you're a parent with a day job).

Hanging out with them on Cherokee Stree the other night, Lola gave an eloquent pitch for why my road dog John Parker and I needed to see the elevation of their act in the Naughti Gras 6 show, where they have been allowed to completely reconceive the Koken space for their sexy (and hilarious) theatrics.

I'll admit I'm the guy who was there in the early days but then didn't keep up as the showmanship developed and then exploded, and Lola was giving me the business about this, going so far as to jab me in the chest as she made her points and to address me by my first and my last names.

I was kind of being put on notice. I was expected to see the new big show!

Then she added a personal persuasive note by pointing out a key role in the new production for Dewy de Cimalle. "I know she's your favorite," Lola said.

So that was that. Talked me into it. Put aside some time. We're going to go see the new big show!

Speaking of Dewy de Cimalle, the above image of Dewy is by Carrie Meyer of Insomniac Studio. A beautiful canvas print of this naughty librarian portrait is available at St. Louis Curio Shoppe.

Tower Groove opens singles club with Old Lights / Demonlover

 

 

 

On Friday night I went to the inaugural release party for the new Tower Groove Records singles club. By paying up front for a year of once-monthly releases, you get twelve new vinyl 7" records, each a split single between two local bands, for a bargain basement $5 per record.

 

I'm taking the trouble to post this hoping I can drum up some subscriptions for these guys. You can do that over on the Tower Groove website. I operate my hobbies on a cash economy basis, so I had lunch at Mangia and handed Jason Hutto $60 in cold cash for my subscription. Tower Groove printed up some carbons, so I even walked with a receipt which I have kept as a sort of badge or ersatz membership card.

 

At the record release party on Friday at Off Broadway, they had my name at the table, sure enough, so I collected on my first Tower Groove 7". This one pairs Old Lights, a personal local favorite, with Demonlover, a feisty, unpredictable trio.

 

The Old Lights song, "Blocking out the Sun," was written by bassist and co-frontman Kit Hamon, who sings like a power pop angel. It's hook-laden rock & roll in the legacy of Revolver, with that tuneful two-electric-guitar sound that never gets old. Beth Bombara's keyboards add an additional melody line and tasteful punctuation. The song itself is of that enviable sort where every part of it would work as a hook ... and it has four or five parts, four or five legitimate hooks, with dynamic, surging changes between them. The closest equivalent from my era of the St. Louis scene (the late '80s, early '90s) would be The Lettuceheads led by Carl Pandolfi.

 

Demonlover's song, "MC5 U in My Dreams," reminds me of my favorite Butthole Surfers records, like Locust Abortion Technician or Cream Corn. It opens with this abrasive but catchy punk song that turns into a meandering noise improvisation. I don't mean noise like hideous loud, I mean noise like Sad Lewis or Eric Hall, where the character of the sounds is what is being played. I liked these guys enough to look them up and read on the KDHX blog where they fretted that the instruments they are writing on will be audible at a live gig. I can see why, listening to the noise part of this song -- chimes, keys, sousaphone, glockenspiel, and vocals sung as from a warbling victrola.

 

The live show on Friday was full of surprises. I had never seen Old Lights, though I have one LP, Every Night Begins the Same, and their contribution to the Tower Groove double record, "We Laid Down." I was interested to see that both of their Tower Groove songs thus far are written and fronted by Kit Hamon, because the other front man, David Beeman, has such absorbing frontman charisma. He was dressed like a grunge rocker, flannel and jeans, but had his jeans cuffed like a rockabilly dude and wore the indoors ski cap of the 21st century hipster. Then an instrumental break hits, and suddenly he's is pogoing and swishing his guitar around the stage like a Mod -- or like a man who is very secure in his masculinity. This guy is a true new hybrid of the rock band frontman. Best of all, he is unpretentious and likeable in doing so. "Come in," he said to the people standing half-way back on the dance floor. "Come in." And we came in closer to the stage.

 

Demonlover also has a peculiar and fascinating frontman in Andy, as he is credited on the 7", though I gather from Dana Smith his last name is Lashier. When Andy isn't plunking around and making noise, he is a left-handed bass player who sings in two mics, one of them wildly inflected and distorted. He is one of those guys who has a very personal relationship with his instrument and the process of performing -- he's so possessed, it's hard to take your eyes off him. He is also flat-out goofy. He sort of jogs in place in these battered black workboots when he is stuck there in front of one of his mics for any stretch of time. I only regret to report that Andy seemed to have forgotten his belt or prefers not to be thus restrained, and as the gig wore on he took on a new southside rocker variant of saggin', which is not the sort of unique frontmen hybrid we want to promote here at Confluence City. Andy is backed by Rage, as per the 7", who seemed to be the short-haired incarnation of JJ Hamon, who can do no wrong on any instrument, ever.

 

**

 

Image is of my new Old Lights / Demon lover 7" on the portable record player my buddy Jocko gave me. No excuses for not listening to vinyl when you can still buy these guys for $20, though Tower Groove records also come up digital download codes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

Crone's candidacy as media person of the year

I grew up in the St. Louis media writing for The Riverfront Times when Ray Hartmann owned the paper. That RFT always ran a media column that I thought did a good job of stirring up the proverbial and reminding us what we were talking about and how we were talking about it.

If St. Louis still had a good media column and it was handing out media persons of the year awards, Thomas Crone would merit an award for something. Crone had a Zelig-like ubiquity in 2012, he was everywhere doing everything, and it was some of his best stuff.

I won't pretend to have kept up with all of it, but there was a Second Set series on The Beacon where Crone got nostalgic in public, but he had so much to say and said it so well that his nostalgia was well worth sharing. He also seemed to be always blogging about good things for our mutual friend Stefene Russell who keeps the gate on the St. Louis Magazine arts blogs.

I thought he did his best work of all -- in 2012 and to date -- on his own project Half Order Fried Rice, a multimedia mockumentary project. Crone invented a series of fake lists where St. Louis placed, as the city always does place in real life on assorted national lists of cities with (for example) the best drinking water, most violent crime and worst racial segregation.

A Half Order Fried Rice episode comes with a brainiac prose piece by Crone, some seriously witty and insightful post-modern banter, that eventually introduces a piece of improvised sketch comedy. Like the rest of us amateur directors in St. Louis, Crone casts his friends as amateur actors, to uneven but frequently totally hilarious effect.

In Half Order Fried Rice, however, Crone developed a problem that is new for him (but painfully familiar to me). He had so much going on that it was difficult to figure out at a glance what was going on and who should take the time to experience it.

I volunteered production advice to him, as an old friend and creative partner. I thought he should keep the brilliant title "Half Order Fried Rice" for his production company, such that it is, and retitle this web series "St. Louis: City of Lists." I thought that series title would really draw in the sizable regional audience that would appreciate what he was doing.

Alas, as usually happens when I or anyone else volunteers unsolicited production advice to anyone else, Crone kept right on doing what he was doing the way he was doing it.

I acted in a couple of episodes of Half Order Fried Rice and especially enjoyed acting in and then watching the Mumblecore episode. I thought Crone got some pretty good improvised sketch comedy out of Kevin Arndt, Amy Broadway and me playing a Mumblecore moviemaking unit.






In what was a very good year for the Crone, he also gave me probably my single most satisfying experience as a working amateur artist in St. Louis in 2012: acting in this Half Order Fried Rice episode, on the same day the great improv actor George Malich went in for his second, and final, brain surgery, in a hospital about a mile from where we were shooting on the Hill.

**

Photo is of Crone as Capt. Buster Jangles in the Poetry Scores movie I directed, Go South for Animal Index (which will premiere June 16, 2013 in Istanbul). Yes, Crone was all over the media map as an actor as well.

Bootblogging #24: One by Fire Dog

I am really excited about this new song from St. Louis rock band Fire Dog, "Prelude," featuring The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra, which appears on the new Fire Dog record May These Changes that the band is releasing tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 6, with a 7:30 post-election show at Sheldon Concert Hall, 3648 Washington Ave.


"Prelude" by Fire Dog by Poetry Scores

I heard "Prelude" on a five-song sampler of the new record, leaked to me by a friend of the band. The other songs are totally different -- they have lyrics and vocals and are more standard local rock band song fare, though really good stuff in that vein. (Except for "M.A.N.," which is white rap and space soul, and not so good stuff in that vein.)

My link to the band is Rebecca S. Rivas, the supremely gifted staff reporter and video producer I was fortunate to recommend to my employer, The St. Louis American, for employment. Rivas, who is the spouse of Fire Dog frontman Mark Pagano, has produced a video to the song "Transformer" from the new record.



I appreciate Rivas for turning me onto the new Fire Dog record. It took a little courage for her to do so, since Fire Dog is one of the running jokes in our newsroom. I have been in some bands with stupid band names, so I aught to know, but I find it hard to take the band's name seriously. As a result, when I ask about her husband's band, I ask about Water Emu, Earth Sloth, Air Hyena, or Fire Aardvark, but never, God help me, Fire Dog.

I am sure much more about that there new record and that there record release show is to be had on that there Fire Dog website.

**

Image borrowed from Bring Fido.

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More in this seriesBootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos
Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter
Bootblogging #23: Three by the Heebie Jeebies

Eleanor Roosevelt reunion weekend Dec. 7-8

The 1990s St. Louis folk rock band Eleanor Roosevelt will have a reunion weekend and release a new record, Water Bread & Beer, with gigs on both sides of the river, December 7-8.

The record release party proper will be a house concert Friday, December 7 in Olivette with Fred Friction opening. The $10 admission includes a copy of the new CD Water Bread & Beer. Doors are at 7 p.m. and the music starts at 8 p.m.; bring your own drinks. Seating is limited. For reservations and directions, contact David Melson via email: melsond@gmail.com.

Then Eleanor Roosevelt performs 10 p.m. Saturday, December 8 at Jacobsmeyers, a musician-owned brewpub-to-be in Granite City, with the Heebie Jeebies and Dana Michael Anderson. This show is free. Jacobsmeyers Tavern (618-876-8219) is located at 2401 Edwards Street in Granite City, Illinois, within sight of the scenic working steel mills. Eleanor Roosevelt will start right at 10 p.m., Heebie Jeebies at 11 p.m. with Dana following at midnight and going as long as it feels good.

The band Eleanor Roosevelt evolved from Enormous Richard, which along with Uncle Tupelo, Chicken Truck and others pioneered St. Louis’ alternative country scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Enormous Richard toured the country with a manic, goofy stage show; when the band began to focus more on songwriting and less on stage antics, they changed band names to reflect that, keeping the “E.R.” acronym.

As Eleanor Roosevelt, the band had it widest national exposure on recordings, with songs on early volumes of Bloodshot Records’ Hellbent series and East Side Digital’s Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings. The band also relesed a 7”, Head in a Hummingbird’s Nest, on Faye Records and scored a feature film, Dan Mirvish’s Omaha: The Movie. “Head in a Hummingbird’s Nest” later appeared on Snow Globe Record’s compilation of lost bands from the ‘90s, Tiny Idols. The band recorded two albums of material in the 1990s before effectively disbanding, though they would not self-release them until the new century: Walker with his head down (recorded 1993, released 2007) and Crumbling in the rain (recorded 1995, released 2005).

Both Eleanor Roosevelt records Walker with his head down and Crumbling in the rain are available at the major digital download sites; as is Why It's Enormous Richard's Almanac, a reissue of the original E.R.'s debut 1990 tape. 

The band’s next evolutions would be from Eleanor Roosevelt to Three Fried Men and finally to Poetry Scores, a non-profit arts organization that translates poetry into other media and has bases of operation in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Istanbul and Hilo, Hawaii. The new Eleanor Roosevelt record, Water Bread & Beer, was recorded in many American states in the late 1990s while the musicians in the band were on the road recording poets and setting poetry to music, which resulted in the first Poetry Scores project, Crossing America by Leo Connellan (2003).

Water Bread & Beer does include several song settings of borrowed texts: a poem by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a Jewish children’s song to summon rain from Morocco, a Peruvian worker’s chant and a fragment from the Amos Tutuola novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But for most of the record, the band returned to its roots of working with the lyrics of front man Chris King, who sings about falling in love with a girl in a wheelchair, finding himself surrounded by “strangers and dangers,” walking the mean streets of James Brown Boulevard and nourishing himself with the traditional African cold remedy of pepper soup and local honey.

The band: Joe Esser (bass), Matt Fuller (drums, guitar, banjo), Chris King (vocals, guitar), David Melson (bass), John Minkoff (guitars) and Elijah “Lij” Shaw (banjo, fiddle, guitars), with guests including Geoffrey Seitz on fiddle and Pat Sansone (now of Wilco) on keyboards.

Eleanor Roosevelt blog: www.eleanor-roosevelt.blogspot.com. Or email brodog@hotmail.com.

A portrait of two dancers: Beatle Bob and Jay-Jay

Beatle Bob anointing Enormous Richard at our first reunion show at CBGB.

Last night I went to a local rock band reunion concert at Off Broadway, where the Heebie Jeebies played for the first time in 18 years and the Boorays for the third time since then. My band Enormous Richard came up at the same time as these bands, played many gigs together in the early days of Cicero's Basement, so this promised to be a nostalgia trip.

It really wasn't. I was never transportated back to better days gone by. I just got absorbed into the present moment of two truly great rock bands brilliantly executing inventive and tasteful arrangements of vivid, interesting material. They totally rocked!

They didn't even look bad doing it, as we middle-aged rockers tend to do, since the two front men are aging well. Kip Loui of the Heebie Jeebies looks ageless, sporting a goatee as if to prove he is old enough to whisker. Mark Stephens of the Boorays is a little older than most of us from that vintage of the scene, and looked a little older, cooler and wiser back then. Now he looks like a nicely cleaned up version of that exact guy, wearing newer used thrift store clothes -- still cooler and wiser than us, but now also, somehow, younger.

I know quite a bit about most of the people in these bands and did the inevitable memory lane tripping, but the music was actually better than I remembered it. The songs were better than I remembered and the execution was much better. Surprisingly for a reunion show, living in the present was more interesting than living in the past.

It helped that throughout both sets I was witness to something I must have seen before, but never when I fully grasped what I was seeing and what it meant: I saw Jay-Jay work the same local rock dance floor as Beatle Bob.

It's hard to summarize these characters without losing newcomers, but Beatle Bob was starting to emerge on the scene when our bands were doing gigs in the late '80s and early '90s. With his Beatles mop and suit, Bob did zippy dance moves right in front of the band and showered the anointed band with fanboy enthusiasm delivered by a professional. Bob built this schtick into a brand, now a national brand, they tell me.

Jay-Jay came up on local dance floors later, when Beatle Bob was already more famous than any of the local bands he anointed. Jay-Jay had no appreciable costume or signature haircut, much less schtick overall. That said, Jay-Jay could command a dance floor, call attention to himself with repetitive, mannered dance strokes, and radiate passionate fanboyism at the band like he and they were the only things in the room; on the Earth.

Jay-Jay was the amateur, Beatle Bob was the pro, but everyone understood that an understudy had emerged.

Me and Jay-Jay a few years ago when he bought my drawing, no doubt. of some local rocker.

Last night I got to stand for more than an hour and watch the two of them, Beatle Bob and Jay-Jay, work the same local room, the same dance floor, the same great local bands from their heyday.

Beatle Bob picked a corner early in the Heebie Jeebies set - right up against stage right, at Alex Mutrux's feet - and did his thing there. He came out of his dance groove briefly to introduce the Boorays, but then leapt right back into that stage right corner and stayed tucked tightly in the peculiar, slashing mannerisms of his dance. Bob's solipsism is more total than ever now. A man who did a repetitive dance has become a repetitive dance with a man inside there somewhere.

Jay-Jay, on the other hand, would saunter to the edge of the dance floor like an ordinary show-goer, get moved by the band, or not, get more into it, or not. The difference between Jay-Jay and the average show-goer is when he did get more into the band, he got a lot more into the band. Next thing you know, his passionate fanboy dancing is the biggest show in the room; on the Earth.

It was fun to compare their big shows.

Beatle Bob's signature dance goes dervish when it gets intense. It's a disjointed circling phenomenon that gets faster and a little wider in circumference, with more violent elbow pops and knee kicks. Jay-Jay goes vertical, straight up in the air toward the ceiling, with this human pogo stick quality that he innovated. The shortest man on any dance floor, Jay-Jay hits the heighest heights.

Jay-Jay also digs much deeper down into the raw guts of the human heart than we have ever seen Beatle Bob journey in the dance.

Last night there was one Heebie Jeebies transition, a thrilling jolt from familiar chorus to a new and unexpected melody, a suddenly bright bridge back to where we began, when Jay- Jay did the splits -- his short legs were split open as wide as he is ever going to get them -- then he plunged forward, face-first, and slapped the wooden dance floor with the palm of his hand for all he was worth.

That was rock & roll.

**

Sorry the pictures are of me and these dancers. It's all I have. Last night I did not want to be running around with a camera.

Bootblogging #23: Three by the Heebie Jeebies

I'm excited to see the Heebie Jeebies reunion at Off Broadway on Saturday night, tripled up with the Karate Bikini CD release party and The Boorays re-re-reunion.

The Off Broadway website is telling me doors open at 8 p.m., the music starts at 9 p.m., it only costs $5 if you are old enough to drink, and Kip Loui tells me half of the proceeds go to KDHX Community Media.

Kip and I go way back. I once had and dearly miss what I believe was the first Heebie Jeebies recording on cassette. I asked Kip if I could bootblog a few tracks from the past, and he posted them on Sound Cloud for just that purpose. Why don't you give a listen while I natter on about the old days, below?

Sorry Kip's face has to be so huge.







Come to think of it, there isn't much point to nattering on about the old days, is there? You have your own old days, which are more interesting to you than mine. Or, you are not yet old, in which case the chances are good you're not going to sit in rapt fascination reading yarns of yore on the blog of an aging local rocker.

But I always dug the Heebie Jeebies, the Boorays maybe even more, and Karate Bikini is the bee's knees as well. I plan to be attendance at this live musical performance.

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Image from Skreened.
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More in this series

Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce HeadsBootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos
Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter

Readings at The Royale: Bombs & Monsters; July 25

Poetry Scores' "Readings at The Royale" series returns 7-9 p.m. next Wednesday, July 25 at The Royale public house, 3132 South Kingshighway; Steven Fitzpatrick Smith, proprietor.

At no cost additional to drinks and eats, the public may experience, in this order:

Poets
Stefene Russell
Chris Chable
Chris Parr
Kristin Sharp
Uncle Bill Green

Songster
Ann Hirschfeld

Fictionist
Edward Scott Ibur

The occasion: Poetry Scores is reissuing the artbook/CD of our poetry score to Go South for Animal Index by Stefene Russell, copublished with The Firecracker Press.

Go South for Animal Index is a poem about bombs and monsters, and this is a themed reading: poems, songs and stories about bombs and monsters.

Everybody gets about 17 minutes of face time, starting pretty promptly at 7ish. Chris King will emcee, giving elliptical one-line intros and sneaking in about three of his own short bombs and monsters poems throughout the evening.

Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media. Though a live reading of poetry is a translation of poetry into voice, our mission compels to go the extra mile of media.

We are curators of Noah Kirby's sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound, which currently is installed in the back courtyard at The Royale. That's where we'll be performing. It is expected that one or more of the poets will translate a poem through the medium of Noah's sculpture.

The event is free and open to the public. Just come out back to the courtyard. The Go South for Animal Index reissue will be available for sale. Questions? brodog@hotmail.com

Poems published in Smithers (B.C.), Hackney (London) and Balmain (Australia)

I'm not a poet, but I play one on Twitter. At least I follow a lot of publications on Twitter and sometimes follow prompts to submit poems. Mostly, you miss. Sometimes, you hit. I just landed three poems in a row in three different exotic places.

My poem "What you get is what you see" is in the book The Enpipe Line: 70,00+ kilometres of poetry written in resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal published by Creekstone Press (Smithers BC Canada).

I'm enough of a Simpsons fan to really like the idea of being able to say I am "big in Smithers".

Actually, I am really little in Smithers, or at least in this book, with just one poem that runs 18 lines (haven't measured the metres) of our poetic pipeline. The 18 was deliberate -- the poem is written in the 7/11 form innovated by the St. Louis Quincy Troupe, which I tweaked a little. Troupe does lines alternating 7 and 11 syllables, and I added trying to do it in two stanzas with 7 and 11 (=18) lines.

The Enpipe Line was the brainchild of Christine Leclerc, a Vancouver-based author and activist, and she edited the book as part of an editorial collective that culled these 175 pages out of the 70,000+ kilometres of poetry they published online. I'd like to meet her one day and ask why they picked my poem, one of many I sent that were all added to the online pipeline. I'd guess because it's totally not about the tar sands or politics, and so provides a quirky interlude.

I also have the poem "Seekonk" in a issue #5 of nifty little inc. magazine published out of Hackney, London.

Issue #5 of inc. is also known as The Postcard Issue, and there's a brilliant concept behind that. The editors Anya Pearson and Will Coldwell asked for short poems, with the idea of laying them out as postcards with partner illustrators working to each poem. Each poem gets art the size of a postcard to run on the opposite of the page, and facing the poem is the address line used for credits and a postage stamp also made by the companion artist. The Postcard Issue of inc. is just one of the coolest literary artifacts I've seen.

My poem is not one of the better pieces, but I love the crude art that MSTR Gringo did to my crude little poem.

Seekonk, if you don't know, is a hard little town in Massachusetts on the Rhode Island line. I come from Granite City, Illinois, where the hard white people are called "hoosiers". I went to Boston University on a Navy ROTC scholarship which is how I learned about "Massholes". All this came back to me when visiting the Providence, Rhode Island area as a travel writer; hence the poem.

"Seekonk" also is cast in Troupe's 7/11 form, though it has 14 lines, like a sonnet, because I couldn't get the poem to work in 7, 11 or 18 lines. Forms are made to be tampered with.

And here just the other day I got in the mail the July-August 2012 of Quadrant, an Australian magazine of ideas published out of Balmain,a suburb of Sydney in New South Wales.

I gather its politics trends toward the quadrants on the right of the spectrum, but the literary editor, the great poet Les Murray, is a friend and correspondent. When I send him the next letter, I throw some poems in the envelope and some see print in Australia.

This time, Les took "Sorrow of God," a serious poem I am very proud of. Like everything I am doing these days, it's cast in Troupe's 7/11 form, though I count 10 and not 11 lines, which makes me wonder how hard I tried to find an 11th line for this thing.

"Casualties of the State" & my Elly very partial payback

Could you say no to this face? Not if you were me.

This face belongs to V. Elly Smith. Not long ago she asked me to act in two scenes in a movie she was shooting. I couldn't say no. So I played two scenes as a guy named "Chris King," the blowhard producer-talent on the podcast Kingmakers.

On Sunday evening, St. Louis will have the chance to see my two scenes and the rest of Casualties of the State, an FBI procedural set in Washington, D.C. but shot here. A work-in-progress cut of the movie screens 6:15 p.m. Sunday, July 8 at The Tivoli in the Loop. It's part of the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase produced by Cinema St. Louis.

I haven't seen the movie we will see on Sunday, but I did see an earlier cut, which is how I ended up getting the acting assignment. The filmmakers really pressed the preview audience for feedback, and responding to some of my criticisms led them to create a new part. They then had the good sense to put to work the guy who created the work, me, to play the part.

My connection to the project is Elly. Anyone who ever worked with Elly would double over backwards to help her out. I directed a feature movie shoot for Poetry Scores that dragged on for two years, and Elly was with us for that whole long haul. She is super resourceful, talented, tireless and utterly a joy to work with.

In the St. Louis indie movie scene, you know, mostly we don't pay each other. So when I say I owe Elly, I mean I owe Elly. Big time. This doesn't even begin to settle the debt.

**

Casualties of the State on imdb
Official trailer