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21 yet?
I went to Warehouse 21 on a whim just to see what the heck it was about after work last night. I remembered that our school boy band One If By Land was playing there along with some others.
Behind the hoard of teens in scrappy vintage clothing, with wild haircuts, lots of gently clinking metal, sucking on cigarettes like teats amongst dying attempts at garden decorations was Trevor, lead singer of One If By Land, sitting in a chain by the main door looking spaced and satiated as he does when no one's talking to him or has his attention.
---You missed the other good bands, what you mean you?, well- yeah, that’s ok 'I heard you suck', Ha! Last set's inside, you didn't have to pay?, Usually, but now you won't be disappointed.
They're name was SNMNMNM- guys that play tuba, trumpet, accordion, trombone, guitar, and drums.
Sort of like Moxy Fruvous meets They Might Be Giants meets Supergrass when they were still a garage band.
To my surprise, one of the awesome bus boys from the cowgirl books shows there. This one was his. It was certainly fun to listen to, but like most things when I’m restless- I know it’s good and enjoyable but I don’t enjoy it as much as I know I should be otherwise of times.
It's wonderful Santa Fe has something for teens that involves art and a place to socialize, and that a mixed crowd shows up for it. Wish we had had something like that in Dallas. It was just as i remember high school- people not really knowing one another or knowing how to, most just stood around trying to look cool, some gossiped. Some really had fun and boogied down. The band did rock.
Me, i just got some odd looks and double takes.
Joe Ray, Paramount spoken work guy and booker, suggested i go to the poetry workshops hosts does down there.
The thing lately has been though- either my pride in being distinct or this sense i've gotten that spoken word genre and collaborative isn't exactly what i want to head to in my work. Spoken word and reading it really is a performance, an acting up, a jamming more like when i played music. If anything I just want to experiment with it and use it to warm up a room when i'm reading.
But then- who the fuck books poets that aren't reading to the crowd? And i do feel obliged in certain ways, which is a constraint.
I saw Derek Walcott read Wednesday. It was a READING not a performance. Everyone in the house was listening, all the white haired white folk and I. I closed my eyes, didn't need to strain to see him his words were so beautiful.
After intermission was an interview. In it he illuminated the benefit to society to educated young poets, the fostering of creativity and the 'teaching', why he thought the reading of poetry would die out the way it was headed, it's current inaccessibility and obscurity, the prevalence of 'moi' in poetry, how maybe there should only be a few good readers and how there only are, why poets are shunned from the stage, the usefulness of American English colloquialisms and their play in modern poetry- especially the difference and importance between epics and lyrics.
How do you decide what to do when you don't know what you can do?
last modified Nov 23, 2002 at 10:53
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