Posted on August 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Performance.
[I'm archiving some old weblog writing, and a few bits seem to fit here. This is from 7 november 2000]
Every couple of weeks, friends of mine from the Well meet at a bar called Revival. Monday nights there are poets performing upstairs. Though we never left the main bar area, performance poetry could not be escaped last night; we were treated to a special Ambient Lunatic show from a caved-face anger merchant who would be kicked out of your local Tourette's Society for inappropriate behavior.
I missed her opening salvo, in which she apparently overheard Betsy describing a Bush supporter in her office, and loudly asked why they didn't just throw her out the fiftieth floor window? I assume an uncomfortable silence followed.
When I arrived she was scribbling and grunting at the table behind us. I had put on some tunes on the jukebox. The Clash's "Lose This Skin" came on, and she was apparently quite taken with Ellen Foley's long growly vocal lines, and started chiming in with her own loud humming whine, not exactly on pitch but clearly attempting to follow what Foley was doing, or maybe drown it out as a toddler might. I couldn't see her, but I'm told she was also recording herself doing this.
Very well; I like Ellen Foley myself, and it's possible I express some of my enthusiasms in socially questionable ways. But when "Lose This Skin" ended and Blur's "Charmless Man" came on and her Foleyesque wail continued unabated - if anything, her keening got louder and more abrasive -- it began to be a little alarming.
In time she subsided to muttering, with occasional exclamations of a politically confrontational nature, most of them crude and childish enough to make even an east village politico squirm with embarrassment. They weren't especially coherent, though, till eight o'clock performance time neared; suddenly she declaimed in a carrying voice, "Goddess in a world of fucking assholes!"
While we were attempting to recover from this declaration, she added, muttering, "Should have seceded from the union in nineteen-fifty-fucking-five," and, "Morons with no political sense whatsoever," possible referring to us, possibly referring to her fellow poets, possibly referring to voices having a party in her head.
This was nearly the end of the show, but as it happened a couple of our party needed to use the bathrooms at the same time she did. Poor Michael was next in line and when the door opened she poetry-slammed him out of the way, explaining that she needed to fucking piss.
She emerged twenty minutes later.
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