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[Here's a short essay I wrote for Keston Sutherland's poetry zine Quid. I still don't have ordering information for this issue but if you are interested in acquiring one please write to me. "Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France" is the first name on an anti-war email petition that I received about 30 times over the course of the week leading up to the writing of this article on 10/11/02.]
Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France – Can We Win?
(On Carol Mirakove's Poetry)
Some kind of argot –
not entirely given over to the track star at Mineola Prep model – these poems are worked – but nonetheless somewhere in the sprawl of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, jacked-in but running freely through the night that could be day – "muscle a language / monumental / & free" – trying to move forward – avoiding the snipers – scanning the roadside – refiguring the spectacle less as a saturating, unlocatable ethos but as an array of robotic effigies, the divisible choruses of ad agents, secret agent men, agent oranges, and agency debilitators choked up by the nefarious database and becoming Senators – I guess one might suggest she turns it [the language game, or Debord’s "game of war"] into a video game, L.A. freestyle, fusing Flash sprites from this herecleitian noize – but she’s hired the best animators (pals of David Choe), best screenwriters (that would be the poets she’s read and emulated, several including Rod Smith and Heather Fuller from DC days) and her software has pledged strict allegiance to grassroot copyleft principles – the "anxiety of influence" of choice for code writers once known as "hacks" –
[I plug allergens… into the engines… of Audiogalaxy Satelitte… and the repository... from which I stream… one frisson... undivided… with listservs… and Rasputina… for all…] – etc.
Our speech will occasionally be struck by a flying neutrino and the social glue of the lyric will turn into shards – "chewtoy colliding somewhere with dust" – we somehow get back into it, thanking the machinery [melancholy?] of the page, especially Nurse Ratchett’s syndicated tab key (keeping the runaway spaces in check) – high school disciplines including Projectivism (Olson, but I champion Morley) and performance poetry’s post-hip hop [?] "new fusion" [!] yawp, but also Pound’s clear imagistic coins and Bernstein’s sonic dada empurplement – to wrest control and even a momentary classical stasis from a datachick’s tendency to mallarmé one’s way across the white amidst the throes of chance which are really the underlying op sys gone sluriously bonkers –
The heartfelt themes mingle freely with the ironies – the "TV mantis / placing her neck on the guillotine" with the "fuck you I pray / for a big soundtrack" – the rape with the camp – [these are poems from 3 cities, as Carol has informed me in an email: DC, LA, and NY – so there’s something following her everywhere] – we call these… "metastases," in Wilkinson’s sense, the sites of pain that appear in different poems and draw our attention to the borders of the lyrical-corpus-as-somatic-graph as they are limned by acute punkts –
Fake punk bands, two of three eyes on the market, seem to want to say: anyone over 25 looks so old – but we are all over 80 and struggle with a deforming language of impressions, experience, and cultural obsolescence [their omniscence] – that nature’s legs lag behind the further we grow from the Modernist moment and self-creation is more individualized than ever, which is to say the older are farther from youth but closer to the old, sterling Futures shared by a mobilized communal imagination. Now [these are the conversations my friends and I have] there seems a dearth of major dreaming in the follow-up generations, one symptom of which is that they can’t find utopian moments when bringing it down a notch – "devoid of drapes / and bedspreads / the clock’s on pause / the window part of / the outside / eyes the surface / this / just beneath just / beneath " – that New York strategy ["habitus?" asks R. Toscano] of being the darkest, hippest thing on earth though writing about flowers, Sunday morning and loving Jimmy Schuyler – [z.b. I saw Richard Hell at two St. Mark's memorials this month, for Kenneth Koch and John Wieners, which isn’t surprising but might be chaos theory for some with doctoral dividends] – and conveyed through language uncluttered by mannerist elaborations [I’d like that to be the good new magic but I’m waiting for the overture to end… ] – American plain-song, of course, a clean slate for microtonal aesthletics…
[the other folks in my office aren’t talking to me because they see I am reading these poems –
I suppose I always am because they don’t talk to me even when I’m not holding 8.5 x 11 soon to be A4 sheets
– it’s too bad –
– I’d tell them of the mirakove worker and the minus signs that became an em-daschle in my Word autoformat mode…] –
Of course I’d like to mention William Carlos Williams, the poem as a single motion – in Mirakove’s case, perhaps a spill, or a butoh-like abandon in which the body is given over entirely to gravity (Min Tanaka, when asked about his jump: "I didn’t jump, I fell"), but with an electric animé splendor – so that at the finale of "extensity: to Mina Loy" there is that WCW trick of ending a poem with one little pocket of divergent activity ("this was / Icarus falling") quite often closing on a gerund or adverb: "tumbling / seductions / that would also be made / of glass & flower / vengefully." This "leaves them wanting more" but also continues the activity of the poem beyond it, deeper into the pit of the entropic flowerpot or contemplating the emotional and moral elements that have become LIVED because we have shared the wandering – like the camera drawing back at the end of a feature (for instance, Easy Rider, our Fonda-ness enflamed) – something still happening, it’s not strictly death, so why stop the camera now?
I write "an argot" above, meaning I guess those criminal or inner-city languages that surface like pearls in which neologisms and nicknames are pretty much the same thing – "sucktank / abducted weapon / at the stucco" – and reflect some sort of urban verbscape of "snipers," "vixens," – as I suggested earlier (drawing from the same poem "girl in dunes"), Mirakove is hardly a meditative poet in any conventional sense nor a language poet – there are constant and never indifferent negotiations between the will to self and the impositions of the world’s image banks – one can certainly not do without the other (and Carol, that's her name, has long been the snappiest, but also most giddily recombinatory, dresser on the NY scene) – Baudelaire loved artifice as did Oscar Wilde but New York vatics tend toward the newspaper realism of faded black jeans and poems of the catholic self, simply because Dada is everywhere and there is hardly need to dress up when everything’s on the verge of becoming a ready-made
(so you thought – not any longer – though the seventies will be back sooner than you’d like as this year’s budget crisis unfolds – piles of garbage and subway fare hikes, David Bowie kissed on the lips singing "I am a DJ," etc. etc. – probably not as interesting, but yet fodder of an urban apocalypsists imagination, more readymades – )
now that the dot com bust has also revealed to us how uninteresting our fashion sense has been [and how interesting the 20th century can be!] we’ll like that artifice spirit coming back, but with cybernetic tensegrity, grafted to the soft tissue between the bones, a "guttered ballerina," as nothing can be plain anymore – "the 'Nineties' tried your game / And died, there’s nothing in it" (Pound).
Words just sort of drop in in this non-linear lyric writing – no base tone, always ready to spring – Mirakove
it’s so possible to be indifferent, the first thing the fake punk bands do, elevating middle-class indirection to a cardboard socialite platform (an enervated Alex Katz), but there’s something to be said for a poem that won’t suffer indifference after having already rented it kühl loft space deep in its agitant's heart – "it doesn’t pay to not be complex, muting in an ear leaves chained an archived document to affront shellac, she is susceptible to faith" – and in another poem: "you were bored out of long whatevers," or "you distracted your distraction without careless closeness away from that beginning" – it’s hard to start where one is I suppose –
there is nothing natural about this "argot," I think she made it up.
[The following review was just published in the Boston Review.]
8
This is the beginning of a new
spiritual and ethical position. For a woman.
Based on the supposition of harmful intent—
that another, male or female, even without realizing it
might very well want to hurt me, cause my subjugation.
I don’t propose an equalitarian lovingkindness or compassion.
I propose, for women, always an instinctive wariness.
I propose, further, meditation in separate closets, without
instructions. That’s
the whole religion. It never has to be proposed again
in order to exist. It has no organization and no beliefs.
Written in Paris from 1995 to 1996, Disobedience is in method something of a synthesis of Notley’s last two books, both of which also pursued clearly defined conceptual projects. Like The Descent of Alette (1996), it derives many of its themes and much of its imagery from dreams and conjoins the description of a subterranean journey with a concerted effort against the day world of oppressively bureaucratic, often male, society. Structurally, Alette was distinctive for its use of quotation marks to break up the line into breath units, and each of its untitled sections—which otherwise looked like normal stanzas—added up, serially, to the whole of the poem. Disobedience is also a serial poem, but each of its irreverently, often histrionically, titled sections is a constellations of fragments, some of which resemble barbed fortune cookies—“Starving because there are ‘jobs’ in our consciousness”—and others which run as long as a page. Like Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), a suite of sixty-nine poems that chronicled significant events in the author’s life (including her marriage to Ted Berrigan, her changing attitudes towards writing, and her second marriage, after Berrigan’s death, to English poet Douglas Oliver), Disobedience is written freely from an “I” and with the forthright, even defiant, lyric subjectivity she feels has been subsumed under the projects of collagist poetics with which she herself—as a member of the “second generation New York School”—had once been deeply engaged. In Disobedience this “I” becomes a troubled site, sometimes represented as total absence (the soul is the “universe’s asshole,” she writes, and later, “I am exactly material and in fact non- / existent as a self, am everyone else”) and at other times as a singular, rebellious presence, as when she revisits Rimbaud’s famous “I is another” with a formulation that reflects the friction between the “exactness” of the refreshed identity that she is pursuing and the anonymous, troubled commonality she can’t do without: “What’s exact / is I, whose particulars may not be mine. / I is never another.”
[The page actually hasn't officially launched yet, so you can consider this a sneak preview. We expect to make the formal announcement in late January, when the college kids are returning to school.]
Pause Button
Kevin Davies
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, Comp., in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary Pause Button, first published in 1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
The Relative Minor
Deanna Ferguson
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public address, the scale tipping from the lexicons of theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration. Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a full-length book since this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty
Richard Foreman
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style are alive and flinching in Now That Communism is Dead.
What the President Will Say and Do!!
Madeline Gins
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing Mechanism of Meaning, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." What the President is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.
Vexed
Jessica Grim
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language" sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.
Adjunct: An Undigest
Peter Manson
Adjunctforms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist David Markson's Reader's Block. But Adjunct is far from an organized literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Vérité
Michael Scharf
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness" are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of Vérité takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
2197
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.
Sunset Debris
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.
Response
Juliana Spahr
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the permanence of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. Response, Spahr's first book (Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.
Little Books / Indians
Hannah Weiner
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined "other," and Little Books/Indians, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.
The Lesser Magoo
Mac Wellman
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist," in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's. Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences, eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los Angeles and the New York productions.
The Tapeworm Foundry
Darren Wershler-Henry
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, Nicholodeon, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. The Tapeworm Foundry is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
[I've been working for several months on a new series of .pdfs for the ubu.com site. The series is called /ubu ("slash ubu"), and includes the following titles in its first run:
Kevin Davies, Pause Button
Deanna Ferguson, The Relative Minor
Richard Foreman, Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!
Madeline Gins, What the President Will Say and Do!!
Jessica Grim, Vexed
Peter Manson, Adjunct: An Undigest
Michael Scharf, Vérité
Ron Sillman, 2197
Ron Sillman, Sunset Debris
Juliana Spahr, Response
Hannah Weiner, Little Books / Indians
Mac Wellman, The Lesser Magoo
Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry
Below is the general introduction to the series -- stop on by!]
Our hope, with the /ubu ("slash ubu") series is to complement and augment relatively "traditional" methods of publication by usurping one of the most common functions of independent presses -- bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public -- while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books.
What made this idea seem interesting now, as opposed to eight or so years ago when internet publishing began its colorful but checkered history (prematurely vaunted by poets as the sequel to the "mimeo revolution") is the realization that people are willing to read long, complex works of literature from the internet provided they can print them out.
By formatting these books with professional typesetting tools and publishing them as Adobe Acrobat files, not only is the amount of paper needed to print out a book lessened because web page items like menu bars and graphics are absent, but the letter-size (8.5 x 11) page is transformed into a visually pleasing "book" page, its seductive gutters, leading and tracking making Cinderellas out of the plain-Jane ream of photocopy paper.
Publishers of innovative poetries on the web have always had trouble formatting works in html (which, among other limitations, does not have tag for a tab), but the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat format is perfect for giving the designer all the features of advanced typesetting and graphic techniques that are stable and consistent across several computer platforms. A color printer lets you fully enjoy the cover pages of these files, most of them original designs by Goldsmith and including one of the artworks from the ubu archive.
And over the course of the many years these books will be online, they will no doubt be downloaded, printed out, and most importantly read by hundreds of readers who might not otherwise have access to poorly distributed, limited edition small press books. New works will enter circulation relatively quickly, and older works, after some hassling with a scanner and proofreading, will make their bids for being unjustifiably ignored classics.
All of the reprints in the /ubu series from books that were not already digitized (any title published before 1992 will be one of those) have been painstakingly reset, either after having been scanned and OCR’d, or being retyped into the computer. More recent titles are based on the files used to produce the original book, either for Word files or, in that rarest of instances, Quark files.
The original mandate for the series was to publish single-author titles of creative literature but as with any venture such as this there are stirrings that suggest new approaches in the future. For now, we encourage you to please steal our books -- you don't have to be bored Hollywood starlet or an Abbie Hoffman wannabe to walk out with bags full of priceless items here. Please check back regularly for new titles as they arrive, and thanks for stopping by.
I wish I had something, anything, to write today. I don't. An article on Alice Notley should be appearing on the Boston Review site soon, an interview with John Cayley on the Iowa Review website, and my bit on Carol Mirakove is coming out in Quid, which won't be online but is elsewhere on this site, in part (and in ebonics). That's about it.
Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon noodling around with Final Cut Pro, the software that I thought I'd have down by now when I bought my iMac early 2002.
I basically took some footage I had shot of my friend Boaz Barkan, the Israeli butoh dancer, and a guy named Zack -- an actor but also a butoh dancer, I had first seen him perform on the roof of P.S. 1 with Min Tanaka, one of the greats of the genre -- doing an improv in a mah-jong park in Chinatown.
Zack, who is a ghostly looking guy with long stringy hair and would have fit in nicely in The Crow, was wearing a tux for the show; Boaz didn't realize there would be costumes, so he ended up with the role of the female -- no problem, of course, Boaz often dances in wedding dresses, flouncy summer hats, etc., and in fact androgyny is a key element in a lot of butoh (b-dancers often look like something out of Genet's The Maids).
Anyway, to make a short story yet longer, I had shot this performance on my sister's Sony Digital 8 cam, a piece of shit (don't tell her I said that), but only because it is not true dv -- the footage actually looks all right, but it was even better when I stretched it out to run half its speed, tinted it a ghoulish green and blurred it up so it looked like I had a vaselined lens.
Boaz and Zack then looked like figures out of some horrible phlegmy dream, the red of Boaz's jacket managing periodically to break through the green tint [note: must learn color theory], and Zack himself some long spindly thing in his tux like an Edward Gorey cartoon.
The soundtrack, also stretched out -- and did I mention that the footage was all reversed -- was quite beautiful as well, though I relish the day when I will get my hands on some sound editing software and learn to noodle with that as well.
But enough of that.
I've read three or four interesting books in the past month (I've been considering posting the names and covers of all the books I've been reading lately, but have been too lazy to do so):
Citizens, by Simon Schama, a "chronicle" of the French Revolution that I highly recommend for its portraits of cultural phenomena (such as the little Bastille castles carved from real Batille stone that were the hot item at the time); Science is Fiction, an MIT book on the films of Jean Painleve, who was the first to make scientific studies of underwater creatures such as seahorses and who was much lauded by the surrealists, especially Battaille; Sarah, by JT Leroy, a Junky-era Burroughs-ish tale about a boy prostitute in West Virginia who works with his mother at a truck stop
[sorry, someone walked into my office. By the way, I'm coming down with something nasty and am feeling a bit feverish, hence the chatty triviality of this entry, a sign of delirium when it's not in perfect iambs.]
...at a truck stop...
...at a truck stop...
...at a...
...Burroughs...
...b-b-b-.,...m,...,
Oh, forget it. I recommend Sarah though -- read a friend's copy, it's only 150 pages and can be lapped up in about 6 hours. I'll tell you about the other books some other time.
Meanwhile, I highy recommend you look at the site of the Language Removal Society, a group that takes recorded speeches -- or the recorded speech, rather -- of celebrities and removes all of the words, leaving behind only the sounds of inhalations, gurgling, sighs, etc. Some of it's pretty sexy, I much recommend the Marilyn Monroe one:
I also just read (about an hour ago -- my "at al" bit above reminds me of the Hollow Men) Louis Menand's essay on T.S. Eliot and anti-semitism in LM's new book American Studies. Not quite Charles Bernstein's "Pounding Fascism," which I think is a great essay, but some subtle distinctions made therein and useful history of TSE's relationship to such people as Charles Maurras -- I think less of TSE after reading it, though not of the poetry.
Did you know that Ezra Pound was from Idaho? I did, but never realized how f-ckin west that is. So to call Robert Duncan the west coast's answer to Ezra Pound almost doesn't mean anything (did it ever?). He's the west coast's answer to Idaho, which is like saying Joel Lewis is New Jersey's answer to the poets of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery gallery.
When do I start making money?
[Kenny G at ubu.com has put up an .mp3 of Alan Licht and I performing last year at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. The direct link is here but it might change in the future. My intro is below.]
One day at work, not inspired by anything in particular, I decided to run Kenneth Goldsmith's "Soliloquy" -- a book whose text was composed of an uncompromising transcription from tape of everything Goldsmith had spoken for a week -- through Microsoft Word's "autosummarizer" program.
Since the autosummarizer basically preserves what, statistically, has been repeated most often, I discovered that a majority of what Goldsmith had said that week (and probably every week) was "Uh" and "yeah" with some fleshy words, like "Stockhausen" and "Cheryl," piggybacking on them past the autosummarizer's red pencil.
My text, which I called "Summary," seemed strangely resonant, and exposed to me the vulnerability of Goldsmith's somewhat strident, grandiose textual program -- which is to say, the risk of utter triviality, but also the way his private life can be helpless before the transformations of a text alogrithm (that he put the text online contributed to this).
I wanted to perform part of this text at my reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on May 1, 2002, but learned, after practice runs at home, that I probably would not be able to hold anyone's attention for the desired length (I wanted about 5 minutes of it).
I had seen and heard Alan perform in a variety of contexts over 2000-2001 -- one time as solo performer riffing off a guitar loop, once as a second guitarist for a reformed DNA (with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori) and at home on .mp3s of his two bands from the 90s, Love Child and Run On.
His range was incredible, he seemed capable of doing anything, and I saw a kindred spirit in the sense that he was interested in trying out several seemingly incompatible styles that would appeal to different cultural groups and sensibilities, at times appearing a feedback "naif" and others aprog-rock virtuoso (he's also a really good writer).
Anyway, after a test run in my apartment we decided to give it a shot -- I thought, in both the rehearsal and the live performance, there was the same initial movement of apparent disjunction -- very percussive and, in the voice, kind of nasal -- that melded into an "ambient" phase that just flowed.
I surprised the audience by putting "Summary" at the tail end of a sequence called "What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers" -- you hear the last poem of that sequence in this .mp3; there was also some funny audience response that doesn't quite come through on this recording.
I've finally put some pictures online of the mini digi fest.
Unfortunately, due to my ineptness with my still somewhat new digital camera, these pictures are mostly blurry. I must have changed a setting or something because I couldn't get the shutter speed faster, and hence there was a lot of camera shake recorded. And I didn't want to use the flash.
This is basically what I could cull from the mass.
www.arras.net/mini_digi_pics.htm
If for whatever reason you want to see more I can drop all of them into a directory and you can pick through them, though they have pretty abstract file names.
I also have video of the event which is hi-8 but at least it's from a mounted camera.
Thanks again all of you who were there and who participated!