Cherokee Soundtrack

This April (and as usual these days), several streams come into confluence on Cherokee Street. How gratifying it will be to serve a small part in the confluence.

This past November, I went to check out this place on Cherokee Street called Stirrup Pants. It's a poetry chapbook shop (open for business on Saturdays), and a space for readings. My friend Maggie runs the place. There was a hint of stinging winter chill in the breeze that afternoon, but when I walked into Stirrup Pants I felt nothing but gentle and exuding warmth. I hung out with some great folks, most of whom are affiliated with or related to the Washington University creative writing MFA program. The conversation was relaxed, but not idle. Like a lot of the hanging out lately on Cherokee Street, this was hanging out with a purpose.

I started to attend the readings put on at Stirrup, and met some really great folk. One of the great folk I met is Heather. She runs a reading series called "Exploding Swan." I love that name. For the December edition of the series, Heather recruited my friend Jaffa and I to play some music. I composed a little 10-minute piece - minimalist type music for me on trombone and Jaffa on this reed keyboard and on xaphoon. We performed it at Heather's house for the reading. It seemed to have gone well.

Still another great folk I met through hanging out at Stirrup Pants is Eileen. She teaches at Wash U and works at their Kemper Art Museum. In December, the Kemper had this exhibit of chance art. Eileen put on a free chance aesthetics poetry workshop at the Kemper, complete with free lunch. I went primarily for the free lunch. (Wash U's loaded, so I knew that it would be a good lunch.) The lunch was, in fact, good. The workshop was, in fact, even better. I took away from the workshop two ideas that I have been contemplating ever since. The first idea comes from chance aesthetics' sublimation of the ego. Chance aesthetics often stand for the proposition that art can (and often should) be made not from within the artist's "soul" or even consciousness, but from the artist receiving the material outside herself or himself. The second idea comes from chance aesthetics' necessity for structure. There are always rules or protocols to follow in chance aesthetics. Often the method is the substance, and there must be a method else there will be no pleasing result or construction. Neither of these ideas are new or novel, but both of them are currently embedded in my brain as an approach to musical composition and performance. These ideas also coincidentally related well to the musical group in which I spend the large balance of my time.

I am in a musical group called the Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra. One of the big things that we do is compose scores and then perform them live to silent films such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu or Buster Keaton's Go West. Ideally, we want the audience not to realize that there is a live band playing to the film, or even for the audience to consciously register the music that we're playing. We're secondary to the film, and we compose our scores with that in mind. The idea is not necessarily to respond to the action on the screen, but to complement and support the visual narrative's present mood. Not only to be unseen, but also in a certain sense to be unheard. (Talk about sublimating a performing musician's ego!) There are also real rules and protocols to the music. It is entirely composed. There are very few improvisational moments. Each sound during a 90-minute film is planned. We think that this compositional approach brings about the most pleasing result for the audience.

The Archive is a new & used bookstore that just opened up on Cherokee Street. I attended their grand opening this winter, and found at least a dozen little gems that I hope are still there when I have some money. Like Stirrup Pants, The Archive is a really warm and inviting place full of warm and inviting folk. Authors are coming there from around the country to read and discuss their books. A lot of the authors have written books about localism. Like many businesses on Cherokee, the store also serves as a space for visual art and musical performance. (There's a really nice piano in there.) One of the people who owns and operates The Archive is Mike. Mike's also a film maker. Mike, too, is fascinated with and a big advocate of localism - in what and how we eat, in what and how we are entertained and express ourselves, etc., etc.. Mike's especially fascinated with the co-existence of and interaction between the urban environment and the natural environment. He believes that exploring this relationship between the urban and the natural is a key to creating vibrant and sustainable local urban community. He's kind of on a mission.

Mike made a short film called "Chicken and Waffles." The film documents the raising of three chickens, their slaughter, their preparation, their frying, and their consumption (with waffles) by people. The chickens were raised in the city, slaughtered by people in the city, prepared by people in the city, cooked by people in the city, and consumed (with waffles) by people in the city. It's kind of a how-to manual on localism. Mike filmed the big chicken and waffle cookout at Artica. Artica is this art and music gathering every year on the Mississippi River waterfront - one of those areas where the co-existence of and relationship between the urban and the natural are readily apparent.

This past Winter, Mike asked the R&P MPO to write and to record the musical score and soundtrack for "Chicken and Waffles." This is another big thing that we do, and we happily obliged. We usually record and perform music with very classical and folk influences. Mike asked us to do something with a more heavy rock influence. Again, we happily obliged. We're all former rock musicians, and Mike afforded us the opportunity to scratch a latent itch. The premiere of the finished product is at The Archive on April 6.

Also this past Winter, Heather asked me whether I would compose an R&P MPO piece for the Spring "Exploding Swan" reading series. A really great poet by the name of Zachary Schomburg is coming to town to read at Stirrup Pants. Zach has read to musical accompaniment several times before, and he really enjoys it. There's a group of musicians and poets here in St. Louis called Poetry Scores that records musical accompaniment to spoken word. It's an idea that really fascinates me and that I secretly always wanted to try ... spoken word as melody. Another happy obligation. Another latent itch scratched.

When Zach comes to town on April 14, he'll read selections from a 72-page epic poem he wrote called "Viking." It's about a young man who leaves Earth for Mars, then spends his middle age on Mars, then returns to Earth. When the man returns to Earth, he finds Earth now made of glass. The form remains the same, but the substance now is different ... translucent. I am composing the piece in a way that I hope complements and supports "Viking's" narrative arc. The piece uses just 5 tones: C,D,E,Ab,Bb (e.g. the "form" ... the "rules"). Whether the hero is on earth Earth, Mars, or glass Earth dictates the composed chordal colors derived from the 5 tones (e.g. the "substance" ... the "ego sublimation"). The musical accompaniments to earth Earth and glass Earth will have the same form, but a very different substance. The musical accompaniment for Mars will be similar to Earth's form and substance but just enough different, too.

So ... on Cherokee Street this April, a confluence of ideas, aesthetics, fascinations, missions, form and substance.

Here's hoping that the soundtrack will complement and support.

Movie Night featuring "Chicken and Waffles"
Tuesday, April 6
8 PM
The Archive
3213 Cherokee Street

R&P MPO Accompany Zachary Schomburg
w/ David Weinberg and Jaffa Aharonov
Part of the "Exploding Swan" Reading Series
Wednesday, April 14
8 PM
Stirrup Pants
2122 Cherokee Street

Stirrup Pants http://stirruppants.blogspot.com/

R&P MPO http://www.theratsandpeople.com/mpo.html

The Archive http://www.archivescribe.com/

Zachary Schomburg http://lovelyarc.blogspot.com/

Poetry Scores http://poetryscores.blogspot.com/

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

Quite nice.

For some odd reason, inspired me to read this.

Cool. There's a chapbook shop in my town.

My college friend Will Boast had his short story "Sidemen" featured in FiveChapters this week. FiveChapters is a neat site that publishes a full short story over the week days. (A full short story - that's kind of a strange phrase.)

My friend Amanda has this wonderful thing as the link on her gmail status. Perhaps Amanda is in love with A. Lincoln too.

Hell yeah.

RIP, DFW.

"At the age of 40 he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true.

This feeling only intensified with the introduction in later lessons of the characters known as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith". To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating into disjointed fragments of words."

"Pancake People":

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter," Page said in a speech a few years back. "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence." In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, "Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off." Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is "really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale."

Awed in Florida

My special lady friend in the St. Petersburg Times.

Tiny Tour in the Inqy

My special lady friend in this Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Poetry Roadie Weekend

Last weekend, I met up with my special lady friend, and I got to be her roadie/driver for a Midwestern leg of her book tour. Here's the route:


View Larger Map

Thursday night was the Observable Readings Series at the Schlafly Bottleworks in St. Louis. Good times, but that place always feels like a cross between a hotel convention room and a sarcophagus.

Friday night was THE WORD in Rock Island, Illinois, and Saturday afternoon was a workshop at the Midwest Writing Center in Davenport, Iowa. I love the Quad Cities. Always good to be near my old stomping grounds. Poet Ryan Collins (who also loves the Quad Cities) organized these two events and graciously hosted both Dottie and her roadie. The roadie enjoyed talking football with Ryan. Ryan also plays drums in an excellent Chicago band called Sharks.

Finally, Sunday night was Iowa City for the Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series at the Dey House, home of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Being a poetry roadie requires little in the hauling of equipment, so I got to walk about the building a bit. It was cool to be in a building where so many famous writers and poets once (and still) read, taught and worked. Dottie read with another excellent poet named Caryl Pagel. After the reading, we went to George's Bar. If you're ever in Iowa City, go there and get yourself a hamburger.

Damn good weekend.

If you care to witness a Tiny Tour of poetry, click here.

Harry Potter annoys me ...

... and I have zero justification for being annoyed. I've neither read the books, nor have I seen the movies. I'm a curmudgeon who ignorantly and reflexively dismisses the whole Harry Potter phenomenon as a passing and frivolous fad.

Still, far be it from me to bemoan J.K. Rowling's books as too "low-brow," or somehow actually bad for literature and its young (and old) readers. (From where does this idea come that literature must always be good for you, like brussels sprouts, or memorizing the multiplication table? This idea seems to inform a lot of both Harry Potter lovers and haters. Some Harry Potter lovers point to the books' popularity as tricking getting kids to read, thus turning them into super geniuses. Meanwhile, Harry Potter haters think the books are the work of a hack, and measure up poorly to "classic" children's/young adult literature. "The next generation of readers will have low standards, because they'll measure everything against Harry Potter books!" Why can't reading a book simply be a pleasure in itself?)

At any rate, the preceding was just a roundabout way to refer you to an excellent and moving essay by Michael Bérubé entitled Harry Potter and the Power of Narrative. I may just have to pick up the first Harry Potter book after all.