Poetry Scores

Songs Confucius Sang: a demo

2011-12-31T17:45:00.000-08:00

Tools of the trade: poem, field deck, guitar.

We got started on a new poetry score during my recent visit to Los Angeles. Matt Fuller and I started scoring one of the books of ancient traditional Chinese odes; and Meghan Gohil recorded simple acoustic guitar and vocal sketches of eight of our new songs.

We are working from Ezra Pound's English translation of the 305 ancient odes. We are scoring odes 55-64, a book Pound called "Wind of Wei," more commonly known as "The Odes of Wei" and anthologized in the "Folk Songs" section of the canonical Chinese Classics.

According to legend, the ancient odes were anthologized and scored by Confucius. Though scholars no longer believe that Confucius single-handedly set these 305 odes to music and collected them in their present form, he did know the odes and sing them. He often is heard discussing them in The Analects, a collection of sayings attributed to Confucius and his circle. Confucius' only son, pestered by disciples for something The Master must have told his only son, said the only thing his father ever told him was, "Study the odes" -- know the old folk songs.

The musical settings that Confucius knew and sang (and may have composed, in part) have been lost to time. At any rate, we don't aim to reconstruct the songs as Confucius sang them five centuries before the birth of Christ. Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media, with a strong preference for cross-cultural modulations. Matt Fuller and I write music from a shared set of sources in American folk and rock music, so we'll present the old Chinese odes as American folk and rock songs.

Confucius himself played a stringed instrument described in English as a lute or zither (I like to think of it as a guitar) and stone chimes, something like a xylophone made of rock. Matt and I have started writing and recording on acoustic guitar, the contemporary American version of Confucius' ancient Chinese lute; and I feel compelled to add in overdubs some flourishes of xylophone (I have a good one made calabashes in Ghana) or even stone chimes, if we can get our mallets on a set.

"The Odes of Wei" is a cycle of ten songs, though our poetry score will have more songs than that. Several of the songs are long and varied enough to be treated as suites, with several component songs; of the songs Matt and I wrote this week, "Soup of mud" scores only a fragment of Ode 58, which will yield three of four separate songs in our score. Also, we always include instrumentals that are titled after phrases in the poem. Pound was an oddball who sometimes attached his own titles or epigraphs to the odes, and I'm inclined to use Pound's interpolated texts as titles of stand-alone instrumentals.

Pound's oddball status as a translator is a plus for us as songwriters. His frequently weird, densely impacted English workings of the songs Confucius sang just beg to be treated as fragmented rock lyrics -- the kind of songs Matt and I like to sing. Pound's Confucius could pass as a lyric sheet for Guided by Voices, Pavement, the Afghan Whigs or the earliest R.E.M. This stuff is fun to sing to guitar!

The UCLA scholar L. S. Dembo gave Pound some tough love in The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound (University of California Press, 1963). Dembo points out how Pound used false etymology for words in a source language he imperfectly understood and played around with slang and Americana in ways that damaged the tradition Confucius loved and respected with "whimsicality and bathos". We suspect that our folk rock workings of Pound's Confucius will drift even further from the ancient shore, but we hope as these old poems travel with us, they make new, unexpected friends.

Dembo wrote that Pound "destroyed a folk song ... in order to create a sophisticated Western lyric." What we are trying to do is now restore some of the demolished folk song, sung in the voice of another place and time.

mp3s

Songs Confucius Sang
Translated by Ezra Pound
Demo versions

"No room for doubt"
(Confucius*, Fuller, King, Pound**)

"Soup of mud"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"No bamboo long enough to reach you"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"Feeble"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"Sung far?"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"Forgetting-grass"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"Tangle-fox"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

"To last out all time"
(Confucius, Fuller, King, Pound)

Recorded by Meghan Gohil (Hollywood Recording Studio) in Los Angeles, California on December 29, 2011.

* Confucius: as noted, Confucius most likely wrote none of these songs, but since their authors are of unknown ancient Chinese origin, we take the liberty of crediting Confucius, a name that says "ancient Chinese" in the modern global village.

** Pound. Pound's English translations were published by Harvard University Press, which has (I assume) renewed its copyright; we'll need an agreement with the university press before making any commercial release of this material. In fact, I hope to enlist this great press as a colleague and partner in the project.

Our names in Turkish lights: Exdergi 4 (Contemporary Istanbul edition) is out!

2011-12-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

So, like we were saying, our sister citizens in Istanbul got us into Contemporary Istanbul 2011, inspired by Poetry Scores' announcement of its first sister city, the great Istanbul.

Our sister citizens publish the magazine Exdergi, and the new issue Exdergi 4 is now out.

It's published in Turkish, for the most part, as one would expect, but is beautifully designed and pleases the senses even if the mind doesn't penetrate the language.

As a benefit to people who worked on the first Poetry Scores movie Blind Cat Black, which screened at Contemporary Istanbul, this issue has our Turkish show poster, with two details from the poster. Open that PDF of Exdergi 4 and scroll down to pages 23 to 25.

I, for one, love to see this string of names of St. Louis actors in the Turkish lights:

Contemporary Istanbul coverage starts on Page 18 and includes some of Murat Nemet-Nejat's translations of Blind Cat Black into English that got this whole thing started.

Exdergi is edited by Ipek Tuna, with design by Ali Riza Esin; and we are very fortunate to be mobbed up with the creative people.

Poetry Scores and Exdergi do Contemporary Istanbul 2011

2011-11-30T21:14:00.000-08:00

So as we were saying, Poetry Scores started a new Sister City program and announced Istanbul as our inaugural Sister City.

Right away this helped to make good things happen, as our sister citizens in Istanbul with the magazine Exdergi launched furiously into the project of getting us accepted into Contemporary Istanbul 2011 as an Arts Initiative, and they succeeded.

Here is a little bit of evidenec.

The Contemporary Istanbul catalogue. We're on Page 122.

An artful blog post. The blog scrolls right, as well as down; scroll far right and you get a glimpse of how our space looked at Contemporary Istanbul.

An artful video. This is a time-lapse piece on Contemporary Istanbul getting set up and then going down in style, edited to "The marching band of his friend and of death" by Kennebunkport Jazz Workshop, from our poetry score to Ece Ayhan's Blind Cat Black, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat.

We got so excited we thought we'd rush so we could make a big announcement of another Sister City project between St. Louis-based Poetry Scores and Istanbul. We put that all together, involving a band in Istanbul scoring a Nobel laureate poet ... then decided not to rush and announce it at the festival.

So we'll wait a minute on that.

And Contemporary Istanbul, we hope to see you in 2012!

St. Louis arts organization formally states kinship to Istanbul

2011-11-16T20:14:00.000-08:00

Introducing: Poetry Scores’ Sister Cities Program

Starting from its roots in rock bands and a field recording collective, Poetry Scores always has been a people-to-people, artist-to-artist endeavor. From its infancy as an official arts organization that translates poetry into other media, Poetry Scores always has deliberately varied its focus, year by year, between American and International poets. And we always have been scavengers for collaboration, seeking and accepting help from any quarter in turning poetry into music, visual art, movies, beer, whatever.

Add all that together and one thing you might get is what we annouce now: The Poetry Scores Sister City Program. Starting in 2011, each year we will adopt a creative Sister City for Poetry Scores (and our beloved hub of St. Louis, Missouri). As we always have done with our choice of poets to score, we will alternate between International and American Sister Cities, starting this time with the Internationals, since in 2011 we happen to be scoring an international (Irish) poet.

And the Sister City that Poetry Scores adopts in 2011 is: Istanbul, Republic of Turkey.

The immediate occasion for this choice is Tunca Subasi of Istanbul accepting our invitation to show in the 2011 Poetry Scores Art Invitational. Tunca also is lending his penetrating artwork about the American atomic bomb project to the movie we are producing now, Go South for Animal Index, based on Stefene Russell’s poem about The Bomb. This marks our first collaboration with an international artist in an Art Invitational or a movie production.

But Tunca stands on the shoulders of giants when it comes to the creative relationship between Istanbul and Poetry Scores.

Poetry Scores has its earliest roots in the rock bands Enormous Richard, Eleanor Roosevelt and Three Fried Men. The songwriting core of these bands set to music the poetry of Orhan Veli – a great genius of Istanbul – as translated into English by a son of Istanbul, Murat Nemet-Nejat. We were guided in this work by Defne Halman, a Turkish/American actress now based in Istanbul.

The second poem we scored as Poetry Scores was Blind Cat Black, one of the greatest poems ever written (however allusively) about Istanbul – by Ece Ayhan and translated into English by Murat. Blind Cat Black was the first movie we made from one of our poetry scores. Then Ipek Tuna, Onur Karagoz and others brought our movie Blind Cat Black to Istanbul in 2010. Through this exchange, a creative dialogue, affection and friendship has started to evolve between the underground artistic community of Istanbul and our large collective of (mostly) St. Louis artists.

What does it mean to be a Poetry Scores Sister City? We expect what it means to evolve over time, but going into it, we accept a responsibility to reach out to artists and audiences in our Sister Cities as we go about our work. Just as we do spontaneously and pragmatically with St. Louis, we will look to these cities for our talent, our audiences, our ideas, our friends. It’s not a one-shot deal, either – once a Sister City, always a Sister City. The relationship is cumulative and ongoing. In the case of Istanbul, this amounts to a formal statement of an existing relationship; but there is value in formal statements.

For specific starters, in addition to Tunca joining our Art Invitational for Incantata and movie crew for Go South for Animal Index, Ipek has committed to chairing a committe to translate Go South for Animal Index into Turkish, and Poetry Scores has committed to use this translation to edit a subtitled Turkish edition of the completed movie.

Artists and audiences in our Sister City of Istanbul, we hope to hear from you; and you can expect to hear more from us – people to people, artist to artist, friend to friend.

Poetry Scores * www.poetryscores.blogspot.com * brodog@hotmail.com

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Photo from EUROsimA.

Poetry Scores Art Invitational FAQ

2011-11-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

I've been receiving some questions about this year's Poetry Scores Art Invitational, which is a good sign -- new people must be hearing about it. So here is an FAQ.

When does it start? How late will you be there?
The Art Invitational is an art auction. Doors and bidding in the silent auction open at 6 p.m. this Friday, November 11 at Mad Art Gallery. As bidding wars take shape, we will go live with the auction on the contested pieces. We expect to start moving to live auctions some time after 7 p.m. and have all art sold around 9 p.m. The party is likely to last until 10 p.m. or even later.

Where is this place?
Mad Art is located at 2727 So. 12th Street in Soulard. It's in a former police station, so look for the POLICE sign. Mad Art has extensive directions on its website. From downtown St. Louis, go south on Tucker/12th Street. Just under 44, Gravois darts off to the right and 12th Street continues to the left with a left turn. Go left and drive on 12th Street through Soulard towards the A-B brewery, and Mad Art is on your right just as you near the brewery. It's on the south edge of Soulard, east of 55.

Does it cost anything?
It's free to come in. There is a cash bar. (Contributing artists get two free drink tickets each.) If you bid on art and win, you'll need to be prepared to pay that night and take your art home with you. We accept cash, check and credit payments.

How does this thing work?
Poetry Scores has asked more than 50 artists to make art inspired by the same poem. The artists are required to title their piece after a quote from the poem. We then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. Poetry Scores is dedicated to translating poetry into other media -- in this case, visual media.

How does the whole bidding thing work?
It's easy. Next to each art work is a tag with the artist name and title of the piece. On a table near each piece will be a bid sheet, identified by artist name and title, that states the opening bid price for the piece. If you are the first bidder, just bid the opening price or anything above it. If there is a previous bid, then beat it. Add your phone number and email address to be safe, but don't go anywhere. Watch your bid sheets. As bidding wars get going, we will move to live auctions right in front of the piece that is moving to live auction. Be prepared to compete in the live auction until there is a sale. If there is no live auction, then all silent auctions will be concluded at 9 p.m. Be prepared to pay as soon as bidding on your piece is closed.

What if I have the high bid but I need to leave?
Make sure all of your contact information is on the bid sheet. Tell someone at the pay station you are leaving but want the piece(s) where you are high bidder and will settle up right away. If you really want the piece, tell the person at the pay station to appoint a proxy bidder for you and set a proxy bid ceiling (how high you are willing to do) in writing with the pay station.

Isn't original art expensive? Can I afford anything?

Original art is expensive, by many consumer standards, for good reasons. Because our Art Invitationals tend to attract other artists, we get a high-concept but typically low-income crowd. Therefore, each year we encourage our artists to set their opening bid low, in the $50 or $75 range. Many (but not all) artists go along with these ridiculously low opening bid prices, or even lower prices, though it's an auction, so the price can climb. All told, most people agree that our show is the art bargain of the year in St. Louis. We like it that way; we'd rather make less money and see all of the art go home with buyers than make a killing off a few sales at gallery prices.

Is this a benefit? For who? For what?
Proceeds from all sales are split evenly three ways: between the artist, the gallery and Poetry Scores. This limits how much we benefit, but it reflects our cooperative spirit. The portion that goes to Poetry Scores will be used to release our projects. We also translate poetry into music (i.e., poetry scores) and movies. At the moment, we need to reprint one poetry score CD that is sold out (Stefene Russell, Go South for Animal Index) and are producing a new movie (in fact, based on the same poem, Go South).

That sounds great, but I can't make it on Friday. Can I bid anyway?
Yes! We accept proxy bid ceilings. Here is how that works. You tell us how much you are willing to spend (set a proxy bid ceiling) and what you are looking for (particular artists, styles, colors, etc.). We will appoint a proxy bidder to manage your money conservatively, inching up on bids up to your bid ceiling. We then collect upon delivery of your new art if you win. Email Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com to establish a proxy bid ceiling.

This sounds great. I want to support it but have no use for original art. Can I donate? Is it tax-deductible?
Yes, and yes. Poetry Scores is a Missouri non-profit corporation with 501(c)3 federal tax status. All donations to the organization are tax-deductible. Contact creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.

My kid (nephew, niece) went to a SCOSAG workshop and has art in this show. That's what I want to see. Where is the kids' art?
This year, for the first time Poetry Scores partnered with the South City Open Studios and Gallery (SCOSAG) to involve children in the show. Seven children were signed up for a workship where they made drawings of things mentioned in the poem -- honey, salmon, nightmarish, bride, three frogs' karoake; you name it. Each of the seven child artists has at least one piece in the "big people's show" hung in the main space of the gallery. Like all of the art, their drawings are hung depending on where in the poem their titles appear. The rest of the children's art is hung according to the same principles inside the jail cell in the hallway between the front door and the main space.

Is the kids' art treated like the adults' art in terms of the auction?
Yes and no. The child's art in the main space will be auctioned off like the rest of the art in the show. Bid on your drawing and pay attention for when the auction goes live. The child's art in the jail cell costs $2 each. Just take the drawing you want and bring it to the pay station in the main space to pay.

Any other quesions? Email brodog@hotmail.com. Thanks!

Wrapping a fish, as in fish actor, with Herr Doctor Professor & the vintage car

2011-11-06T05:31:00.000-08:00

The first shoot yesterday, on a very long and ambitious day of shooting on our movie Go South for Animal Index, also was the last shoot for a workhorse -- or rather, workfish -- actor, who now has been on this job more than a year. Yesterday I began to call this goldfish, a stray resuce from the bait tank, "Leopold," after an orchestra conductor character played by Bugs Bunny in a Loony Tune. I enticed the man holding the fishbowl, Richard Edwin Skubish, who grew up with me in Granite City watching these cartoons, to whisper in excited awe, "Leopold ...!" every time the fish came out of the prop shop for a take.

Skoob, as his friends know him, plays the scientist who dies at Lost Almost, our fabled version of Los Alamos. I can't believe it's taken us this long for us to shoot this scientist entering Los Almost with his family, one of the first things viewers will scene in the completed movie, but we got it done yesterday morning at our prop shop.

Then it was a long haul from South City out to North County to shoot one of the last scenes in the movie: the widow of the dead scientist and their daughter driving into a sunset that becomes a nucleur sunset with the successful test of the nucleur bomb spreading behind their car. Our fearless crew of V. Elly Smith, Kraig Krueger, and Dan Cross walked up the road to get in position after I figured out the stretch of road where we should shoot.

Kraig ended up setting up further down hill for an amazing wide shot, but Dan got more of the roadside zoom.

Marty Luepker, who rented us this beautiful 1940s car for a song, drove up and down this hill for many takes. We were shooting at the spread of a generous friend who was out of town, yet allowed not one but two movie crews to shoot on his property yesterday. We have mutual friends in the other production and they sweetly and carefully coordinated with us so no one drove into one of our shots. No one ever did.

We still needed to shoot the widow and daughter, played by Stefene Russell and Claire Eiler, climbing into the car from the woods for that final drive-off, so we drove down a woodsy side road and shot that as well.

We have some footage of them walking together in some other wooded environments, but we shot them walking through these woods as well while they were there. The widow, by the way, is played by Stefene Russell, the poet who wrote the poem Go South for Animal Index and did voice-over work on the poetry score. Stefene was an indie film star as a younger woman. Claire is carrying an empty bird's nest. Her character's discovery of this empty nest is one of the turning points to her emerging from her grief over her dead father.

In the movie, these events happen at dusk becoming dark. Dan and Kraig were set up to shoot "day for night" where you filter your shot to look blue-ish, but Elly was not. So we peeled Elly off to get the bamboo/woods transition shots. I wanted someone from the military base and someone from the tribal people walking from Missouri-esque woods to bamboo and vice versa. Thom Fletcher's soldier character did this three ways: workmanlike, dead tired, and dead drunk.

Martin Sophia's tribal mystic character did the same, both in ceremonial garb and in his outfit as a menial comissary worker on the military base.

Martin is carrying an African doll he uses in one healing ceremony for the sick child in the tribe (sick, we are supposed to conclude, from uranium exposure). We shot that scene before the spider totem in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, with a background of bamboo lining a fence. We turned Atomic Cowboy's unique, bamboo-lined courtyard into a movie lot after my all-volunteer crew balked at driving all the way out to Cuba, Missouri every time we needed to shoot. That's what created the need to have some characters physically connect a bamboo landscape to what looks like Missouri woods. What puzzles me is that the man who sculpted that spider totem for Atomic Cowboy, Wesley Fordyce, is the same man who let us wander in and out of the bamboo and Missouri woods on his property.

Next, Elly and I took Thom and Martin to Atomic Cowboy to pick up a shot we needed at the quonset hut there, which stands in for our military comissary. When we were still shooting in Cuba, Thom's soldier dives into the woods to trade two hamburgers for moonshine distilled by a tramp in the woods, Coyote (played by Kyla Webb, aka Sammich The Tramp of Beggars Carnivale). My shooting script called for the soldier to pick up these burgers at the comissary from a tribal mystic working his menial day job on the base. Got it!

Our two movie units regrouped, with just about an hour of natural light left, down on the Mississippi riverfront, where Marty Luepker's parents live and garage their vintage vehicles. Stefene Russell can't drive a stick shift, so we needed a safe and secure place to shoot her "driving" while Marty pushed the car.

Not that Marty complained, he is a joy to work with, but after a point we decided we could just roll the car downhill to acheive the same effect.

The other thing we badly needed to shoot was in-car interaction between the widow and grieving daughter. In their storyline, they wander on wheels after being put out out of Lost Almost when the father/husband with the job in the physics lab died. We need to show a gradual, slow arc of coping with grief -- in two sets of costumes.

With the time and gear at hand, we mostly had to shoot these scenes with the car in one place and our production assistant Jocko Ferguson creating movements of light to suggest motion.

It was kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. At the very end of the day, as the sun dropped out of the sky, we had about twenty minutes to capture one of the emotional pivots for one of our one-hour-long movie's four storylines.

As you can see from this frame on Elly's camera, our cast and crew came through.

Very much looking forward to seeing Claire's face the size of a movie theater screen.

Playing the sad emotions was not too difficult at this point for our throroughly exhausted child actor, who pulled a 9 to 5 on a Saturday, acting all day long. Claire will not lack for options, but she certainly has the talent, temperament and stamina to be a professional actor if she wishes.

I also crammed in an evening interior scene, since we are running out of mild weather and none of our locations are heated. For Dan, Jocko, and me, it was back to the prop shop to shoot The Atomic Lady doing her thing in the Lost Almost office. Modeled after the historical Dorothy McKibben, The Atomic Lady is played by Amy Broadway. This character is basically Lost Almost's executive secretary.

In our movie, she types up secret passes under orders from Herr Doctor Professor, the boss of the nucleur lab and bomb shop, played by Paul Casey. Paul has not had a hair cut in more than a year, so getting this scene done last night also enabled us to wrap his character and send him, at last, to the barber.

Herr Doctor approves her work -- or not. When not, it's her task to torch the secret documents.

Dan framed some amazing scenes of flames licking at Amy's face and eating away at words from Stefene's poem typed on these pages. The very astute viewer, after repeated viewings, might notice The Atomic Lady burns papers with code words that appear on the secret passes from the two Lost Almost characters who die in the movie.

I saved the best for last. Out at Wesley's we also shot an important scene near the very end of the movie. Thom Fletcher's soldier, after a military career distinguished by drinking secret moonshine and grunt-crawling zombies into the path of test bomb blasts, goes AWOL. He melts into the woods, ditches his rifle and helmet, and digs up his old Vendor of Stuffed Animals hat and bindlestick.

And who should chance down his new route but the widow and grieving daughter, grieving less now after witnessing a successful tribal healing ceremony of the sick tribal child that they stumbled upon in the woods.

The movie opened with The Vendor of Stuffed Animals, before his induction into the military, trying and failing to sell his wares to zombie uranium miners. It ends with him successfully, finally, sealing a deal!

Then he watches them drive off into what soon becomes a nucleur sunset.

Barbara Harbach's composer's notes to "Incantata"

2011-10-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

Barbara Harbach speaking yesterday at the mini-conference on Paul Muldoon's "Incantata" and Its Sources.

Yesterday Irish Studies at the University of Missouri - St. Louis hosted the first academic conference on a Poetry Scores project, Paul Muldoon's "Incantata" and Its Sources, which Eamonn Wall organized around a lecture by Guinn Batten, a Washington University professor and Muldoon's first American publisher. Guinn said she would let us publish her provocative lecture here; yesterday I posted my brief presentation; and now I will share the basis of composer Barbara Harbach's remarks at the mini-conference, her program notes for the poetry score she has composed to Incantata, which premieres 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theatre in the Touhill Center at UMSL.

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Incantata: composer’s notesBy Barbara Harbach

I was drawn to the many feelings and emotions in the poem, the cry of heartbreak, enduring love, humor, pathos, giddiness, allusions to music, literature, art, liquor and food. The names of the four movements are taken from a phrase in the poem, as per Poetry Scores’ compositional model.

The first movement, Powers, is a play on Mary Farl Powers’ name, a woman’s powers, the power of nature, and the power of the world. The music begins with a thunderclap sforzando chord followed immediately by agitated murmurings in the cello and viola with two different melodies in the woodwinds, while the piano punctuates the musical fabric percussively. Soon the murmurings and the two melodies start to migrate among the instruments with key and meter changes. A new melody emerges in the winds imitated by the violin, while the piano releases some of the tension by arching arpeggios and scales. Tension returns with murmurings in the lower strings but now the piano joins again with arpeggios and scalar passages. The next section shifts the tensive murmurings to the winds while the horn and trumpet carry the melodies. The three melodies are developed musically and lead to a halt in the rhythmic motion. The bassoon begins a haunting and disjunct melody imitated by the cello. The winds and strings continue with the fugue melody until the eerie murmurings emerge in the flute and viola, ultimately with all the strings and winds playing different melodies. After the instruments drop out, another thunderclap chord leads into the coda with increasing tension, rhythmic motion and intensity ending with the final sforzando chord.

Nocturne opens with night sounds, strange and luminous twitters and chirps from the dark of night eerily portrayed by the woodwinds over open fifths in the strings. The reverie of the night becomes more complex when the piano begins its on melody, and eventually dominates the night sounds. As the piano melody ebbs away, the murmurings of the night again are tranquil. The nocturne theme, a gesture to the Irishman John Field, a composer of nocturnes, is introduced by the violin. The piano picks up the theme followed by a counter theme in the horn. Themes, counter themes, and the sounds of the night intermingle. As dawn approaches, the themes fall silent, and the murmurings of the night gently hush.

Relishing in Irish folk tunes, Composed of Odds and Ends opens with a jig-like rendition of "The Humors of Whiskey" with the melody in the violin, and grace notes with a drone in the accompaniment. A counter melody joins the jig in the upper woodwinds transplanting the grace notes and drone to the lower strings. The trumpet and horn, eager to enter the discussion, begin with the "Liverpool Hornpipe." The next section combines "The Humors of Whiskey" and its counter theme with a new theme in the flute. Next, the clarinet is insistent on playing its own tune, "Banshee," now accompanied by the "Liverpool Hornpipe". A more somber and poignant air opens with the viola, "For Ireland, I’d Not Tell her Name," of course generating its own counter melody. The woodwinds take up the tunes and barely finish before the horn and trumpet with the grace notes and drone accompaniment change the mood leading to 6/8 meter imposed over 4/4 meter with the ebullient themes and counter themes racing each other to the double bar.

Bitter-Sweet rails against the inevitable before acquiescing, while moments of tenderness lead to the eventual wholeness of spirit. The piano opens with edgy tension, as a scrap of a theme begins the ostinato in the bassoon. Other instruments chime in on the theme until the trumpet erupts with its on theme demanding and growing with intensity, culminating in crashing chords. The cello now begins a mournful, rising fugue theme, followed by the bassoon, violin, and clarinet utterings, until the piano enters with a sweet and delicate theme of remembrance. Woodwinds take up this lush theme, and before coming to a close, the piano softly begins to insert its bitter, edgy tension. A final fugue begins, combines with the piano melody until all instruments become agitated ending with the triumph of the spirit able to survive.

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Information on premiere of Incantata.

The madness and method of Poetry Scores (UMSL panel presentation)

2011-10-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

Irish poet and UMSL professor Eamon Wall, colorized by overhead projector.

Today Eamonn Wall, Irish poet and UMSL professor, hosted literary critic Guinn Batten (Washington University), composer Barbara Harbach (UMSL) and yours truly (Chris King) for a panel on Paul Muldoon's "Incantata," the text for Poetry Scores 2011 events. These were my remarks. More (much bigger news) from this panel to come!

I am very pleased Eamonn Wall organized this event this afternoon. I knew of Guinn Batten’s interest in Paul Muldoon through a student of hers who follows my work as a music producer, and I have been eager to hear her take on this fabulous poem, “Incantata.”

Eamonn suggested we do this event after Barbara Harbach and I invited him to perform “Incantata” when we premiere Barbara’s score of the poem on Sunday, October 30, here at UMSL. Eamonn, I’ll admit, was my second choice for reader, only because I first asked Muldoon himself. Paul Muldoon fully approves of what Poetry Scores is doing with his poem, and we already have recorded him reading “Incantata” (at a friend’s home studio here in St. Louis) for our eventual CD release of the poetry score. Unfortunately for us, Muldoon was not available for any of our live events surrounding “Incantata,” however, because he is on sabbatical in Ireland. So, in a roundabout way, we get to have this nice event here at UMSL today because Paul Muldoon got to go home.

I’ve really been looking forward to hearing Guinn Batten talk about “Incantata” and my friend Barbara Harbach talk about the original score to the poem that she composed on commission from Poetry Scores. I don’t have any insight or expertise to add on the subjects of Muldoon’s poem or Barbara’s new poetry score of it, but I did want to speak a bit about our humble St. Louis-based arts organization, Poetry Scores, that instigated all this exciting activity around what I consider to be the single greatest poem written in English by a poet who is alive today.

Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media. We named the organization around the musical form which we would like to think we innovated. A poetry score is a long poem set to music as one would score a film. We stumbled upon doing this work when we were a field recording collective, which really was just a rock & roll band that had acquired some recording equipment, lost its audience for the most part, but not lost our romance with the American road. So we stayed on the road, asking people if we could pay attention to them while they played music and told stories, rather than the other way around.

Doing this, we recorded Leo Connellan, a gritty poet from Maine with a lobsterman’s twang who was at the time the Poet Laureate of Connecticut. We recorded Leo reading his long poem “Crossing America” (a bicentenial poem first published in 1976), and when his reading timed out at 37 minutes – exactly half the length of a CD stretched to its limits – we decided to write and commission musical interludes to sequence between each of the poem’s sections. The poetry score was born.

Since Leo Connellan, we have scored the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat; the Salt Lake City/St. Louis poet Stefene Russell; the Australian poet Les Murray, a fellow Griffin Poetry Prize winner with Paul Muldoon (and, like Muldoon, a poet perenially rumored to be due a Nobel Prize); and just last year, we scored the New Jersey/St. Louis poet David Clewell, who was announced by First Lady Georganne Nixon as Missouri’s second Poet Laureate just after we started to score his long poem, Jack Ruby’s America.

I might add that I serve on Gerald Early’s board at the Center for the Humanities at my alma mater, Washington University, and the Center awarded Orhan Pamuk its Distinguished Humanist Medal soon before he won his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. I am more than a little superstitious, and like to think I’m a little lucky, so I was fully prepared for Les Murray to get the Nobel in 2009 when we were scoring his long poem The Sydney Highrise Variations, and almost expecting for Muldoon to get tagged for the Nobel this year while we were on our home stretch of the Incantata poetry score. But alas, David Clewell’s Missouri Poet Laureate gig is the only major accolade for which Poetry Scores can claim prescience.

There is more madness than method to what we do at Poetry Scores, but in terms of method, we do have a few rules. A poetry score can import no new language that is not in the poem. This rule came into play after Barbara Harbach finished her score to “Incantata” and sent me the titles of her four movements. At which time I realized I had not bothered to explain to Barbara our rules! Some of those proposed titles incorporated language that is not in Muldoon’s poem, and after I explained the rule Barbara and I had fun tossing alternate titles back and forth until she settled on title language that is found in “Incantata.”

Another rule is that we alternate scoring poems by U.S. poets with poems by international poets. We always have a number of projects in the pipeline, so we have options, from year to year. Last year we scored David Clewell, an American guy, so it was international for 2011. Paul Muldoon has lived in this country for many years and seems very much at home in Princeton, New Jersey, where we have mutual friends at the university. It occurred to me that I should ask the man if he minded being classified as an Irish poet, for purposes of satisfying our self-imposed “international poet” requirement for 2011. It fascinated me when Muldoon replied we could classify him either way – he really didn’t care if we chalked him up as an Irish or an American poet.

There is one other thing you should know about Poetry Scores, especially if you think you might want to work with us. We also had an early track record of getting in just before the bell, as in the bell that tolls. Both of the first two poets we scored, Leo Connellan and Ece Ayhan, actually died before we finished their score. Truly, this shook us up. A very morbid feeling of absolutely the worst sort of jinx vied with the more heroic sense that we came along just in time to capture these great poets and put their works to music just as they were leaving us.

More pragmatically, it forced us to release records for dead people. Though in 2011 we find ourselves happily producing a live event with Eamonn Wall standing in for a perfectly alive poet who happens to be across the Atlantic, back in 2003 when we released our first poetry score, Crossing America by the dead Leo Connellan, in the absence of the poet we staged an art show instead. This has now evolved into the Poetry Scores Art Invitational and art auction, which started as the way we release our CDs and has become a stand-alone event, one of St. Louis’ best art parties and art bargains of the year.

I would like to invite you all to the Poetry Scores Art Invitational to Incantata, which will be held Friday, November 11 at Mad Art Gallery in Soulard. More than 50 artists from St. Louis, Chicago, Denver, Boston, New York and Istanbul will present original art that responds to “Incantata” and is titled using a direct quote from the poem, then we hang the work depending on where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. It’s also an art auction, and how we intend to raise the money to release our poetry score to “Incantata,” featuring Paul Muldoon’s unforgettable reading of his poem enfolding Barbara Harbach’s adventurous and exquisite musical meditation on “Incantata.”

Since the mission of Poetry Scores is to translate poetry into other media, since we have these musical artfacts called poetry scores, and since we are a bunch of silent film mavens, perhaps inevitably we came around to the idea of making silent movies to our poetry scores. Currently, we are in production for our second feature movie, Go South for Animal Index, based on Stefene Russell’s poem about the making of the atomic bomb. Our first movie, Blind Cat Black, based on Ece Ayhan’s poem about a transgendered prostitute, premiered at the 2007 St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase and has gone on to play three Turkish cities, including the poet’s provincial hometown, where the showing of our movie – which also happens to be a zombie movie – was incorporated into a midnight visit to the poet’s grave on the eve of the anniversary of his death.

We very much hope you join us in the Lee Theatre at the Touhill Center for the Performing Arts at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 for the premiere of Barbara Harbach’s chamber piece Incantata and our poetry score, with Eamonn Wall standing in – ably, I am certain – for Paul Muldoon. When you do, I invite you to close your eyes and imagine the silent movie we will make to it one day. If you have any ideas for us, be sure you let me know.

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Thanks to UMSL and its various programs in Arts & Sciences for its partnership.

The Bridge to premiere of "Incantata" at UMSL (public transit party)

2011-10-24T06:21:00.000-07:00

Poetry Scores is privileged to partner with UMSL on our 2011 score, to Paul Muldoon's "Incantata". We will premiere the composer Barbara Harbach's poetry score to "Incantata" (a chamber piece for an ensemble of eight) at the Lee Theatre in the campus' great arts space the Touhill at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30.

To entice our mostly city friends and fans, Poetry Scores is hosting a public transit party from the city to UMSL for the premiere. We will meet at The Bridge downtown (1004 Locust) at noonish, be on Metro by 1:30 or 2 p.m. at the latest, and be in our seats in the Lee Theatre (inside the Touhill) by 3 p.m. for the concert.

The concert is free, so the only cost is transit and whatever you enjoy at The Bridge, an ambitious tap house with a well crafted menu. The concert lasts less than an hour, so we should be back at The Bridge for a nightcap by 5 pm and on our way home by 6 pm.

Amy VanDonsel and Chris King are your hosts, on behalf of the Poetry Scores Board of Directors.

All invited! Poetry! Music! Public transit! Beer! Fun people! Be there or be very badly missed by rowdy people having more fun than you!

Any questions? brodog@hotmail.com or (day of) 314-265-1435.

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The 3 p.m. concert sound good for an hour, but don't want to spend all day with us? Then meet us in the Lee Theatre (inside the Touhill) by 3 p.m. for the free concert.

And let us not forget the Poetry Scores Art Invitational (and art auction) to "Incantata" looming 6-9 pm Friday, Nov. 11 at Mad Art.

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Image from BridgeHunter.

Zombie bomb scenes with burning stuffed animals and ScareCrone

2011-10-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we finally shot the bomb testing scenes for our movie Go South for Animal Index, which is a fable of Los Alamos based on the poem of that name by Stefene Russell. For reasons that would be difficult to explain, the big day began by incinerating a stuffed Mr. Peanut via fireball on an empty keg of beer. Our generous host Wesley was pyro master.

Mr. Peanut bit the dust, so we had to go after him and torch him more individually, a sign of things to come.

None of us have ever torched a stuffed animal before, a strange action that bears a very strangely heavy weight in my shooting script. Mr. Peanut taught us they melt fast, so we'd have to be careful and shoot fast once a critter was on fire. And they end up looking like this.

So, we decorated our fake bomb with stuffed animals and our atomic scientists, led by Herr Doctor Teller (Paul Casey), did what they do.

What they do is direct underlings to tinker with hunks of industrial restaurant salvage we arrange to make look like at least a Surrealist zombie movie's equivalent of a bomb shop or, in this case, a bomb launch pop. In the first of the two bomb tests, a soldier (Tim McAvin) stands guard while Herr Doctor and two other workaday nuke docs (John Eiler, Neal Alster) direct a soldier-technician (Chuck Reinhardt) to fiddle with bomb pod gadgets.

There was an element of atomic scientist strip tease in this first bomb test scene, because I wanted John and Neal stripped shirtless and doing kind of a primitive male fire dance when a bomb goes off successfully.

When John heard this plan, he bought some wifebeater T-shirts for the shoot, and I took the hint. I did not ask my friends to dance shirtless in a zombie movie in our flabby middle age.

On stand-by in a little thicket next to the bomb test pod was a pile of zombies, waiting to be thrown at the bomb test when it was set to pop.

Herr Doctor gave that cue to another soldier (Thom Fletcher) who standing guard near the zombies. I directed Thom to roust the zombies by grunt-crawling through the thicket and pushing them out ahead of him. I didn't notice that he kept grunt-crawling across the field to the bomb until this action was in two takes and he was stuck doing it for half the day.

Zombie walking toward a bomb that is about to explode is an art form, and there are those who have mastered it. Eric Marlinghaus (far right) is such a natural his zombie colleagues had him demo a few of his moves between takes so they could admire them.

Then we blew shit up. As you can see, we made sure our zombie actors were far from harm, though we framed our camera shots so it looks like they were about to get immolated.

Scientists react a little bit.

"Okay, let's do that again with more reaction." I liked Tim's ad lib shot of his rifle into the air.

I was very pleased with the quality of the acting.

I can't remember why anymore, but early in the framing of this movie I saw zombies walking through a field of burning stuffed animals as the image we would shoot around the bomb tests to suggest The Bomb and its apocalyptic future.

The walking-through the fire would have required fire-proofing boots, once we saw how these things ignite, so instead we staged more private interactions of zombies with burning stuffed things. They tended to pull apart, as Alpy does here with her private dance doll -- a suitably creepy image for a movie about splitting the atom.

I had the idea of having the zombie actors pick out from the pile the stuffed animal they would have their private dance with. I'd like to think this brought out a little something extra in the actor. It is certain that something brought out a little something extra in Jocko Ferguson's private dance with his burning stuffed animal.

Remember, each zombie actor had an audience of pretty much everyone else on the shoot as they went through the death throes of what he came to call their zombie wubbies. Jocko really made a scene. It helped that his bear's head caught fire and burned for a weirdly long time without igniting anything else, with stuffed animal innards bubbling out of the bear's nose like toxic death snot. What can I say, my weird idea worked.

We planned a break between our two bomb shots to breathe some fresh air and let the first fire burn down, so I planned some interim scenes to shoot. There was zombie arts and crafts, for example. Stefene's poem incorporates a quote from the anti-nuke activist J. Truman that "A is for Adam, B is for Bomb, C is for Cancer, D is for Death". Matt Fuller and I scored that as a sing-songy nursery rhyme outro in the song from our poetry score "Atomic Cowboy Yodels". That's where we'll edit this scene.

Tim McAvin works on our scores as well as movies, and he sings that song with me on this score. I called him over to guard the A-B-C-D scene, but they had started filming without him and the scene looked good as a four-zombie tableaux. We did have Tim guard the next scene in what we called a "Captain Morgan" pose.

That scene was the application of Hitler moustaches to the stuffed animals before the bombs are tested on them.

Laurent Torno III and V. Elly Smith shot the whole day for me, a reunion of our original crew on a movie shoot that has dragged on more than a year and now involved about ten shooters.

We also needed to shoot a zombie trundle scene of stuffed animals, since we shot another zombie trundle scene of stuffed animals out in Cuba and needed to have it end somewhere. So we had those same zombies (Joyce Pillow and Jocko, with Lydia McGhee standing in for an actor we couldn't get back) trundle down zombie alley and dump the animals around a bomb set to blast.

We had to set up another match-back scene to something we had shot in Cuba: the suicide of Captain Buster-Jangle (Thomas Crone). After Buster-Jangle ate plutonium from a bomb and died, his corpse was put into a wheelbarrow, trundled, and dumped at the base of a bomb, nested in stuffed animals.

We needed to burn something that looked like Crone. So we had Crone donate the hat and shirt he had been wearing in this movie, and James and Cassi Blackwood spent some down time making a stuffed Thomas Crone -- a ScareCrone.

We knew from the way things were going up in flames that we would need to toss ScareCrone into the fire exactly when we were ready to shoot it burning. I tossed it in myself, and it flopped down upside-down like an upside-down crufixion. I had the wrong camera setting for this still shot on my camera, but trust me -- there was a wow factor and I expect one in the finished movie. It took forever to burn down and looked like a flaming torso the whole time. Laurent and Elly camped out on this mage for like ten minutes!

After we wrapped, Elly took a stuffed animal and roasted it to serve as a demented prop in a future movie shoot. Yes, throughout the day, there was a sick roasted stuffed animals on a stick thing going on. I love making conceptual zombie movies! And it's a great way to make ordinary people put up with poetry!

James Blackwood is inaugural Poetry Scores’ Writer In Residence

2011-10-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

Introducing: Poetry Scores’ Writer In Residence Program
James Blackwood is inaugural resident writer

Poetry Scores – a St. Louis-based arts organization that translates poetry into other media – invested $96 this year into renting a prop shop to store its accumulating mass of movie props. This prop shop, located in a very unique local garage, was soon developed into a movie set. Most recently, it has served as a set for the intake office of Lost Almost, our fabled version of Los Alamos in the movie we are making, Go South for Animal Index.

As an office intended to look timeless, or at least old-fashioned, it has a plain, old desk with a manual typewriter positioned on it. It has started to look like a quiet, secluded place where somebody could do some serious writing.

From this happy coincidence comes a new Poetry Scores program: the Writer In Residence Program.

Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media, so as such, we have no direct stake in the production of poetry or any other writing. However, if the pursuit of our mission, in terms of translating poetry into movies, results in this kind of special space for writing in this hectic world, we feel compelled to make it available for writing.

And so we announce the inaugural and 2011 Poetry Scores Writer In Residence: James Blackwood.

What does our Writer In Residence get? A key to the prop shop. A shelf to keep the work written there. A book shelf to keep books needed to write what needs to be written there. Privacy, within the constraints of movie shoots and prop movements and dressing sets.

What do we ask? We ask that our writer take advantage of the uniqueness of the space. A writer can have a laptop and the internet almost anywhere anymore, but in our prop shop there is nothing for writing but a manual typewriter*, paper, pens, and pencils. We ask that our writer use only these manual tools for writing. Also, in this age of portable documents and writing pods, a writer can work on almost any document at almost any time. We ask that our writer pick up and leave their work for this residence at the prop shop.

We will provide a shelf to store the manuscript or drafts or whatever the writer wants to call it. We just ask that what is written in the prop shop, stays in the prop shop. That is, until the writer is ready to publish or perform, in whatever medium, in which case we would expect to be thanked, of course. We agree to respect the writer’s privacy and not go rifling through his or her work, though it’s also acceptable if the writer bring or devise a way to keep the work in progress locked away within the shop.

“There is a great sense of honor in this assignment and I intend to live up to that or to do my damnest at the very least,” said James Blackwood, inaugural (2011) Poetry Scores Writer In Residence. “I've been most comfortable in an imagist format and I intend that to be the mechanical theme of my work: short concise poems and prose sketches.”

Blackwood is a Poetry Scores veteran, first showing up as a volunteer to work the door at the first event the organization staged in St. Louis, the art opening for Crossing America, the group’s first poetry score. Currently he is a board member, though there is no conflict in the board’s awarding him this position because it has no monetary value and comes with no stipend. It is worthless, unless the peace of mind and isolation to write is worth anything.

“In addition, I'd like to use the space as a host for conversations with other folks. Art needs them, especially off-topic conversations. It'd be great to have visual artists come and consider the work in progress and maybe sketch some responses or other things for me to take in,” Blackwood said.

“The ‘maker’ culture that's come to life over the last decade or so is fascinating to me, not least of all because of the inherent irony of its name. While its community is nominally based on building things, its core is understanding them and that most often starts with deconstruction. It's a logical descendant of the hacker spirit that has continued along the bleeding edge of technology. It plays. It breaks. It learns. It builds. And now it is reflecting back past the technology that incubated it, to all parts of our lives.”

The writer is reminded that Poetry Scores’ core mission is translating poetry into other media, and any use of the prop shop to further that mission takes priority over the writer’s use of the shop as a writing shed; but in practice, the shop sits empty and open for long hours, days, even weeks on end.

The Poetry Scores Writer in Residence position runs from the Poetry Scores Art Invitational (second Friday in November) to the next Poetry Scores Art Invitational. The Poetry Scores Board of Directors chooses the Writer in Residence and its decision is final; the application window is the month of October for any calendar year, though the board reserves the right to choose a writer who does not apply. The board’s choice is subject to veto from the prop shop landlady. The new Writer In Residence will be announced annually at the Poetry Scores Art Invitational.

For information, contact Poetry Scores creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.

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* The current Woodstock in the prop shop is on loan from Bill Sawalich and may or may not be the manual typewriter made available to the Writer in Residence.

Kim's quirky, material culture twist on Muldoon's "Incantata"

2011-10-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

Kim Humphries is a frequent contributor to the Poetry Scores Art Invitational, and we are delighted to have him back for the Incantata invitational (6-9 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11 at Mad Art). Kim's work often encodes a story worth the telling, so we asked him to do some telling about "Lucozade" (the image above is of the commercial artifact, not Kim's piece, which is in progess).

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Kim Humphries writes:

Initially Muldoon’s “Incantata”—a tribute to artist Mary Farl Powers—intimidated me. I saw it as a complex, roiling charge into an allusive and at times elusive roller coaster ride that included tunnels too dark in which to truly see, running at a speed that created blinding blurs where only the captured bits added up to anything truly tangible. Once I became comfortable with that—the experience that was the poem—with the words and sometimes gibberish that were painted with an intoxicated confidence leaving much to fill in, and imagine, or to not bother to imagine at all. It was then that I was able to begin mining the work for some way to contribute to the visual puzzle the “Poetry Scores” artists would be creating.

Not being one to reiterate or echo another’s work I looked for something to grab onto that would amplify and respect some small portion of the work—something that spoke to the nature of this beast. Frankly, I had to look up Lucozade. I rolled past it on the first couple of reads. Lucozade—it sounded primordial like a rare stone, like an element. To my surprise it is a sports drink from the UK. Blood and water are cited in the poem and this marvelous drink, like those, becomes an essential element of life. That was just the quirky twist I was looking for, something to have a bit of fun with as Muldoon seems to have had writing this quirky, colorful piece. As my work often speaks through bits of material culture this was a perfect match.

I procured a dozen bottles of Lucozade and am in the process of creating a well-engineered (the company is a Formula One racing sponsor, after all) presentation box for one bottle that will sit on a shelf at the appropriate location within the gallery. This piece will be part of the silent bid auction. The remaining eleven bottles will become a limited edition group identified by an artist’s label. They will be for sale in the gallery for immediate purchase at a reasonable price throughout the evening. 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the boxed and editioned Lucozade will benefit “Poetry Scores.”

The cross-disciplinary roots of “Poetry Scores” are truly impressive. This season’s panel discussion, live performance at the Touhill Performing Arts Center and the gallery exhibition / benefit cum Exquisite Corpse promises to be fantastic undertaking building on the multi-year—this is the 6th poetry score and invitational—history of this set of unique, fertile collaborations.

Kim Humphries
10/5/11

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Kim Humphries at Bruno David Gallery

"Not just a lament, but a dissent": Stephen Burt on "Incantata"

2011-10-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

I asked Paul Muldoon who he thought should write the liner notes for our score to his poem Incantata, and he suggested Stephen Burt of Harvard University. Steve -- a literary critic of the highest order -- was very kind to consent. With his permission, we post his essay in advance of the premiere of Barbara Harbach's commissioned score of the poem (3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theatre in the Touhill Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of UMSL).

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ON “INCANTATA”

By Stephen Burt
Harvard University

During the early 1980s Paul Muldoon kept up a tumultuous romance with the Irish artist Mary Farl Powers, known for her colorful and disturbing prints of curvy, biomorphic forms. Powers died in 1992 from cancer she refused to treat by conventional means. “Incantata” (1994) is his memorial to her; it is also his longest non-narrative poem. Acclaimed as raw, intimate, vulnerable, compared to his cannier, more guarded norm, “Incantata” nonetheless harbors the intricate patterns and puzzles his readers expect: those patterns make the poem not just a lament, but a dissent from Powers’ own fatalism, and from any larger moral claims about patterns that we might find in the world.

For all its complex details and allusions, the poem breaks neatly in two: the first 23 stanzas, each a complete sentence, follow anecdotes and memories from the years of their romance through to the months of her illness – almost, but not quite, a life story. The last 20 stanzas, though each one concludes with a period, belong grammatically to a single, overextended sentence beginning “That’s all.” The long catalog of things lost, of lines starting with “of,” modulates into the doubly negated comparisons (“from which we can no more deviate // than that … than that … than that”) among which the poem ends. The two parts suggest a division between life, with all its variety, and death, which unites everybody and everything. Where Powers insisted, with Beckett, on fatality, Muldoon insists as well on randomness, on the unpredictability that remains for us, in this world, as long as we live.

Muldoon’s rhymes are typically unpredictable: in the first stanza, “barrow” (a trench or grave, not a wheelbarrow) rhymes with “Herrera,” “Inca” with “pink,” and “nautilus” with the Irish hero-god Lugh. Muldoon takes his stanza (rhymed aabbcddc) from W. B. Yeats, who used it for his gravely ambivalent elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” and again in “A Prayer for My Daughter." (The Irish a leanbh means literally “my child.”) Yeats’s poem “All Things Can Tempt Me” pursues his dual compulsion to keep writing, and to cease “this accustomed toil,” “this craft of verse”: when young, as Muldoon and Powers were once young, the poet sought vivid inspiration, but “would be now, could I but have my wish, / Colder and deafer and dumber than a fish.”

This first in a bevy of quotations and allusions set Powers up in a national tradition, one that becomes international fast. Yeats gives place to Beckett, the expatriate who settled in France, whose art of repetition and reduction can seem both fatalist and materialist, reminding us that all atoms reach the same end. In such a cosmos geantrai and suantrai, “love songs” and “lullabies,” are similarly temporary consolations. “In everything there is an order,” but that order has little to recommend it: sexual adventure ends in a ditch, all life in one or another barrow, and Christian resurrection is at best as remote as the metamorphoses of insects. The Book of Kells and the “High Cross at Carndonagh,” representatives of old Irish piety, are at best overfamiliar, at worst tourist kitsch.

On the other hand, they have survived. Powers and her mother, working together on one of her last lithographs, enact at once the secular promise that art can survive, and the also secular promise of generational succession. Powers, however, died childless, so that she can survive only in memories or in her art, an art full of worms, of travesties (like Beckett’s immobilized characters) of the human speaking form. Perhaps all art is “a potato-mouth in a potato-face,” a vegetable form that says nothing of its own.

The talking potatoes, the marauding worms, the other reminders of violence and decay, from the Irish troubles to the “submerged” towns destroyed by the Quabbin reservoir, anticipate the claim that seems to govern the second half of the poem, the claim that death makes everybody alike, turns all nouns and all names to “quaquaqua” or “quoiquoiquoi,” “what what what” (with an overtone of “why why why?”). It is a claim that the fatalistic Powers, in her illness, appeared to accept (though she pursued her herbal remedies), and a claim that the energies of Muldoon’s cascading phrases defy. His first defiance falls flat: “art… builds from pain, from misery … a monument to the human heart / that shines like a golden dome.” Such architectural, impersonal survivals, associated with public works and with institutional religion (the Golden Dome of Constantinople, or Istanbul) seem brassy, insincere, impersonal, closer to late-1930s Auden than to the oddities that we expect from Muldoon.

And so the poem grows odd again. Muldoon restates Powers’s own materialism (“nothing over / and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover”), which he shares, and her fatalism (“nothing’s arbitrary”), which he does not share. He feints towards it nonetheless as he introduces his chain of repetitions, his epochal final sentence: “That’s all that’s left….” He will not come to a grammatical closure for 160 more lines.

The story of a life, which must come to an end, has turned into a list, which need not end at any particular point. This list sorts memories, and it seeks variety, in its use of the bodily senses (andouille, “the Cathedral at Rouen,” Calvados, Vivaldi) and also a variety of emotion, from “self-reproach” to sexual satiety. Its exuberance, “all composed of odds and ends,” seeks a centrifugal force, an unpredictable variety, to set against the centripetal pull of the syntax, and of the central fact, Powers’ death. “That daft urge to make amends / when it’s far too late” joins the catalog too, foreshadowing the final, more emotionally various, stanzas in which Powers’ father (the fiction writer J. F. Powers) visits her “sickroom,” where “of … of … of” gives way to “no more than ... than … than that,” where properties from the opening lines return.

Muldoon takes this chance to dissent again from Powers’ fatalistic cosmology, this time without making grandiose claims for art: “that’s all that’s left ... of the furrows from which we can no more deviate … than that we must live in a vale / of tears,” “than what we have is a done deal.” We all die – no divine “herbarium” can help that – but we are not destined to die at such and such time, nor in such and such way. Political violence, cancer and even floods (like the one that created the Quabbin) may all arise from some mix of natural law, blind chance and human endeavor, the same combination that generates the tangled wonders in the Book of Kells, in Powers’ potato-prints and lithographs, in Muldoon’s poem.

The bravura ending encompasses chiasmus after chiasmus: the cddc rhyme, the anagrammatic “row / of … worms,” the “ink-stained hands … hands stained with ink,” and the pairs of hands (Muldoon’s, Powers’, Powers’, Wahl’s) that span almost the entire poem, though now these hands can join “no more.” (The Irish language in the final line repeats, in Irish, the beautiful names of the ineffectual herbs.) The last stanza uses the same rhyming sounds as the first, reversed: aabbcddc becomes ddccbaab, “barrow” and “Herrera” (the initial a rhymes) mapped onto “row” and “arrah.” The same transformation occurs throughout the poem: the second-to-last stanza reuses rhymes from the second (“arm” and “worms” corresponding to “Hermes” and “herbarium") and so on; the middle stanza, to which the whole pattern must point, includes the Beckettian meaninglessness of "acacacac." (Several critics, such as Iain Twiddy, examine this pattern at length.)

If there is a hidden pattern built into our lives, it must be a pattern as absurd, playful, apparently arbitrary, and hard to detect as this skein of off-rhymes: a pattern that tells us only about itself. Muldoon remains sad, and he still wants to hold her hand: his poem has not brought in the doctrinal, nor the emotional, consolation of older and more famous elegies. Instead, that last line, with its heartbreaking counterfactual, tells us what Muldoon’s poem has accomplished. Into the welter, the quiddities, of all these memories, the poet has brought an appreciation, an ironic ornament, a colorful resistance to the monochrome of fate, an order not found in nature, but made by hands.

© 2011 Stephen Burt. Commissioned by Poetry Scores.

An interview with Barbara Harbach, composer of "Incantata"

2011-10-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

As previously reported, Poetry Scores will premiere Barbara Harbach’s poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theater, part of the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The concert, co-presented by Women in the Arts at UMSL, is free and open to the public, with plenty of free parking.

Poetry Scores spoke to Barbara Harbach about her score to Incantata.

How did you like working on this commission?

Barbara Harbach: It was a very fascinating ride, a good journey. At first I was very fascinated by the poem, “Incantata” by Paul Muldoon. I became very wrapped up in all the literary, musical, food and drink associations. It was just fun to read. I think that in a way it’s a eulogy to Mary Farl Powers, but on the other hand it’s a very strong love story, all these items rolled into one. I was inspired and wrote the four movements in order.

The 1st movement is titled “Powers,” a play on Mary Farl Powers’ name and a woman’s powers, the power of nature, the power of the world. The 2nd movement, “Nocturne,” is a reference to John Fields’ nocturnes, which are mentioned in the poem, and there is a little place where the piano part sounds like Fields. I was striving for beauty and nostalgic atmospherics and something a little eerie. Then the 3rd movement, “Composed of Odds and Ends,” was built from several Irish tunes. It’s a lot of fun. One source song is “The Humours of Whiskey” – you can’t get any better than that! It’s Irish and American altogether, with several quotes from fiddle tunes and a few gestures toward early Irish folk music. The last movement, “Bitter-sweet,” has a kind of sadness and resolution of acceptance with a few quotes from the other movements to round it out.

The poem is very allusive, mentioning a great many artists and works of art. Did you feel your composition needed to be similarly allusive?

Barbara Harbach: I felt no restraint in trying to stay within any framework the poem might suggest or his style of poetry. There are so many syllables per line; there is a very formal plan to the poem. I do realize there is some kind of global structure to the poem. If there is any kind of structure to my compositions, it’s my own forms. I use a loose rondo form, a lot of different melodies put together, fugues and canonic imitations.

Were you tempted to play with the poem's pop musical references, like Van Morrison and Dire Straits, “The Sultans of Swing”?

Barbara Harbach: I don’t know much about either one of them, so to superimpose on my composition their styles might sound forced or silly. It would be fine if another composer took another way around writing music for the poem – you might totally go that way.

As an artist you have done a lot of collaborations. Have you ever worked with poetry in this way before?

Barbara Harbach: No, I haven’t worked with poems or poetry in this way. There is a libretto to Booth! and my opera O Pioneers! written by Jonathan Yordy, a librettist now at Lewis University. I’ve set to music poetry by Emily Dickinson, 16th and 17th century English poets, and biblical works. So working with poetry is not new, but this endeavor using no words from the poem is new. This is the first time that I’ve put poetry completely into music – this is all instrumental music.

I had a ball doing it. It was a great deal of fun. There will be eight instruments and a conductor at the premiere. It’s going to sound like a chamber orchestra in there! It was a lot fun to do. I was really energized to go and write!

For more information on Poetry Scores, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call 314-265-1435. For more information on Barbara Harbach, visit http://www.barbaraharbach.com/. For directions to the Touhill, visit http://www.touhill.org/.

Ray Brewer's General ashes on Hitler's face

2011-10-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

Prop newspaper front of Hitler smudged by ash and scorched by stubbed-out cigarette smoked by the General (Ray Brewer) in his last scene in our movie, Go South for Animal Index, shot Sunday night on location at Atomic Cowboy (signed by Ray and me).

On Sunday we finished shooting Ray Brewer for the movie we are making. The movie is called Go South for Animal Index, a fable of Los Alamos, and Ray plays the General who runs the military side of Lost Almost, our fabled version of Los Alamos.

I wasn't really ready to wrap Ray on the movie, but he has a new acting opportunity and needs to shave the little moustache he grew for the General. We wrapped with Ray, in fact, before we got to the bomb shop and bomb test scenes, which is a shame, but not everything goes your way in the amateur movie business (and our shoot has dragged on more than a year).

Since our fabled version of the night watch before the first successful test of a nucleur bomb (and the Trinity test itself) will now be shot without the General, I needed to come up with an impactful way to wrap up his character's storyline.

I remembered a scene we shot with Ray and George Malich playing the Military Chaplain, when we had to rush wrap George before his sudden brain surgery. Wanting to tie their characters intimately, and mirror a funeral scene they play together early in the movie, we shot the Chaplain confessing the General. We played the scene like the General has to be there, it's his duty, but he doesn't think he has any sins he needs to confess -- he is trying to kill Hitler, who deserves to die; no apologies.

It ocurred to me to play that confession scene very late in the movie. I knew we'd wrap up George's Chaplain -- again, with him away from the Trinity test, since George would not be available to act in that scene -- with an alcoholic meltdown we had shot on our first day of shooting. The Chaplain hides from the final proof of the killing bomb in a bottle. That meltdown is set up, in part, by his failing to confess the General.

I liked the mirroring effect of having the General leave the confessional and, like the Chaplain, experience the completion of the bomb alone. The Chaplain turns to his secret bottle, and the General returns to his cigarette, which he has been trying to smoke all movie but been made to put out over and over -- you can't smoke in the nucleur physics lab, you can't smoke at the funeral, you can't smoke at the confessional.

At the Lost Almost cantina, he can smoke. He smokes and ashes his cigarette on Hitler's face, displayed on the cover of a newspaper displayed throughout the movie. After the successful bomb test -- which we dramatized, shooting on location at Atomic Cowboy, by flashing two bright lights on and off -- the General turns back to his cigarette and stamps it out on Hitler's face.

My childhood friend Richard Skubish, who plays the scientist who dies at Lost Almost (at whose funeral the General is not allowed to smoke), insisted that Ray and I should sign one of the false Hitler fronts for the newspaper we used in the three-take shot; so we did.

GEEKY POST-SCRIPT
There also is some inter-textual fun going on here for me. In our first movie, Blind Cat Black, Ray plays The King of the Zombies. Though he is paid to take out the hit on our hero/ine, The Absent-Minded Tightrope Walker (Toyy Davis), when the deal goes down and the zombies snuff him/her, The King of the Zombie is sitting alone at a bar (CBGB) drinking a goblet of blood. Much like the General having the solitary smoke at the bar when the scientists finally finish the deadly bomb.

Poetry Scores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’

2011-09-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

PoetryScores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’
Chamber orchestra will perform poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s elegy
Free concert Sunday, Oct. 30 at The Touhill
Lecture Oct. 27, Art Invitational Nov. 11

Poetry Scores will premiere Barbara Harbach’s poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30at the Lee Theater, part of the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus ofthe University of Missouri–St. Louis. The concert, co-presented by Women in theArts at UMSL, is free and open to the public, with plenty of free parking.

Harbach’s score to Incantata will beperformed by an eight-member chamber orchestra (Flute,Clarinet in Bb, Bassoon, French Horn, Trumpet in Bb, Piano, Violin, Viola andCello) conducted by James Richards. Sequenced around the four movementsof the chamber piece, Eamonn Wall will perform Muldoon’s poem, an elegy forMary Farl Powers and a celebration of the poet’s love and life shared with her.Chris King, creative director of Poetry Scores and producer of Incantata, will briefly introduce theperformance. The entire program will run less than an hour with nointermission.

PoetryScores is a St. Louis-based arts organization dedicated to translating poetryinto other media; Incantata is itssixth poetry score. Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Irelandnow based at Princeton University. Barbara Harbach is a St. Louis-basedcomposer and publisher of many works, concertizing musician and professor ofmusic at UMSL. Eamonn Wall is an Irish poet and professor of Irish literatureat UMSL.

Paul Muldoon’s poem “Incantata” was published in The Annals of Chile (1994). It is often cited as one of the bestpoems written in English by anyone who currently is alive. Muldoon is collaboratingon the poetry score, and his performance of the poem will appear on the PoetryScores CD once Harbach’s composition is recorded. A live performance of thepremiere will be recorded by Adam Long, the multiple Grammy-nominated soundengineer based in St. Louis.

“I was drawn to the many feelings and emotions in thepoem, the cry of heartbreak, enduring love, humor, pathos, giddiness, allusionsto music, literature, art, liquor and food,” Harbach said of her score.

The premiere of Harbach’s score will be prefaced a few days previously with alecture on “Paul Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’ and its Sources” by Guinn Batten, aprofessor of English at Washington University. Batten will speak 12:30-1:45p.m. Thursday, October 27 in Room 331 of the Social Sciences & BusinessBuilding at UMSL. The composer, Harbach, and producer, King, will join Battenfor a discussion. The lecture is free and open to the public, though a parkingpermit is required; call 314-516-7299 or visit umsl.edu/cis and click REGISTER.

Poetry Scores’ work with Incantata will conclude 6-9 p.m.Friday, November 11 with its 6^th annual Art Invitational at Mad ArtGallery, 2727 So. 12^th St. in Soulard. Some 50 visual artists aremaking new work in response to Incantata.As always at a Poetry Scores Art Invitational, all work is titled by the artistafter language taken directly from the poem, then the work is hung in the spaceaccording to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the titleappears. “In that sense, the poem itself hangs the show,” said King, who iscurating the invitational. All work will be for sale on silent and live auction(many payment forms accepted), with proceeds split evenly between artist,gallery, and Poetry Scores.

Formore information on Poetry Scores, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call 314-265-1435. For more information onBarbara Harbach, visit http://www.barbaraharbach.com/. For directions to the Touhill, visit http://www.touhill.org/. For directions toMad Art Gallery, visit www.madart.com.

"That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso"

2011-09-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

So Poetry Scores' 6th annual Art Invitational is coming up 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11, at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard. This year, some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Paul Muldoon’s poem Incantata.
Muldoon's poem is an elegy for a girlfriend who died of cancer. The beloved, Mary Farl Powers, was a visual artist, and from the evidence of the poem, she and her poet boyfriend carried on an exciting artist-lover dialogue and journey. Not only creative art (in all media), but also food, liquor, history, politics, geography -- they seemed to share everything, and Incantata appears bent on remembering it all.

I'm not a visual artist, but I play one at our Art Invitationals. As creative director of Poetry Scores and curator of our Art Invitationals, I tend to slip myself quietly onto the artist list to pad out our numbers (and because I can). I'm a doodler desperately hoping to be taken for a sketch artist or caricaturist. I like to draw people's faces. Since a Poetry Scores Art Invitational requires that work be titled using a quote from the poem, I look for names in the poem we are scoring and pick a face to draw.

In Incantata, I have a lot of names and faces to choose from, because this is a serious name-dropper of a poem. It's as if the poet were desperate to write down one more time any name either he or his beloved ever spoke aloud to the other. Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, Camille Pissaro, Andre Derrain, John Field, Enrico Caruso, Spinoza, Amelia Earhart, Airey Neave, Mountbatten, Joseph Beuy, Van Morrison, Rembrandt -- these names are all direct quotes from the poem, and therefore usable titles for a work submitted to the Invitational.

Tonight I ate an ice cream and attempted to enter Dunaway Books, in search of a book about Airey Neave, or perhaps Pissaro; but the place was closed. I feel like I am still looking for my subject, though the other night I took my first stab at a sketch of Enrico Caruso. In addition to being one of history's great voices, Caruso was a very theatrical and photogenic ham, so there are many evocative images of him to sketch from. As an inside joke, I sketched Caruso sketching -- a caricature of the opera star drawing a caricature.

There is talk of adding a children's art component to this year's Invitational. I'm working this out with new Poetry Scores board member and South City Studio & Open Gallery (SCOSAG) honcho Amy VanDonsel. I am typing this out now, in part, so I have a list of those dropped names to draw from later. I plan to find and print good images of all of these people, and have fun drawing faces with SCOSAG kids.

You know the jail cell in Mad Art, on your way into the main gallery space? We're thinking to hang the SCOSAG kids' art in the jail cell, along with mine, their mentor as a sketch artist, a'hem. We plan to put the kids through the same process as the other Invitational artists, in terms of putting their work up for auction and splitting proceeds three ways: artist, gallery and Poetry Scores.

Fun!

Poetry Scores’ 6th Annual Art Invitational Nov. 11 at Mad Art

2011-09-22T19:02:00.000-07:00

Poetry Scores’ 6th Annual Art Invitational

50 artists respond to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata Nov. 11 at Mad Art

From 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11, Poetry Scores will present its 6th annual Art Invitational at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard. This year, some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Paul Muldoon’s poem Incantata. As always at a Poetry Scores Art Invitational, all work is titled by the artist after language taken directly from the poem, then the work is hung in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. “In that sense, the poem itself hangs the show,” said Chris King, co-founder and creative director of Poetry Scores, who is curating the invitational.

All work will be on sale on silent and live auction, with bidding opening at 6 p.m. and sales starting to close at 8 p.m., with all art coming down off the walls and going home that night. Various payment options will be available. Proceeds from each sale will be split evenly three ways: artist, venue and Poetry Scores.

Poetry Scores is a St. Louis-based non-profit arts organization dedicated to translating poetry into other media, including music, visual art and digital cinema. The organization plans to use proceeds from the November 11 Art Invitational to fund a studio recording of the composer Barbara Harbach’s new poetry score to Incantata. A world premiere of her score, with eight of the area’s finest classical musicians, is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday October 30 at the Lee Theater in the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of UMSL. Both the October 30 premiere and the November 11 Art Invitational are free and open to the public.

Artists confirmed for the November 11 Art Invitational at Mad Art include:

Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Jenna Bauer
Michael Behle
Deanna Chafin
Grace Chung
Heather Corley
Gred Edmondson
Nancy Exarhu
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Alexa Hoyer
Claire Medol Hyman
Chris King
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
Meera Lee Patel
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Keek Richardson
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Daniel Shown
Derek Simmons
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Nita Turnage
Amy VanDonsel.

Incantata by Paul Muldoon and Barbara Harbach will be Poetry Scores’ sixth poetry score CD. The group previously has produced and released Jack Ruby’s America by Missouri Poet Laureate David Clewell (2010), The Sydney Highrise Variations by legendary Australian poet Les Murray (2009), Go South for Animal Index by Salt Lake City/St. Louis poet Stefene Russell (2008), Blind Cat Black by pioneering Turkish poet Ece Ayhan (2006) and Crossing America by Connecticut Poet Laureate Leo Connellan (2003). These records will be available for sale at the Lee Theater on October 30 and Mad Art Gallery on November 11.

Poetry Scores also has produced a feature movie to Blind Cat Black, which premiered at the 2007 St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase and went on to play three cities in Turkey with coverage on Turkish national television and in the national press. The first poetry score, Crossing America, was profiled on BBC Radio 3. Poetry Scores has received significant regional and national press coverage,

For more information on Poetry Scores or the Incantata events, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call314-265-1435. You may also follow Poetry Scores on Twitter (@poetryscores) and on Facebook.

My original Nation magazine review of "Blind Cat Black"

2011-09-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

I recently joined a social media group aggregrated around my friend Murat Nemet-Nejat, the Turkish poet and translator. There is some interest in this group to read my original 1997 Nation magazine review of the Ece Ayhan books that Murat translated in a single English-language edition, Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies. My review was instantly translated into Turkish and published in Istanbul as a piece of (in essence) bootlegged literary criticism. I know this because when I met the eminent Turkish scholar, translator and poet Talat S. Halman, he knew of me from this review, which he had read in Turkish. I almost fell off my bench at the Waterfront Ale House, near Professor Halman's Murray Hill home in New York City! If anyone has a clipping of the Turkish translation of this review, please let me know (brodog@hotmail.com) -- I'd love to have a copy for my files.

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Gay in Istanbul (as The Nation headlined my review)

By Chris King

Murat Nemet-Nejat is a Turkish-born Jew who has lived for years in New York City, where he sells Oriental rugs. A section of his first book, The Bridge, a narrative poem written in English, created quite a stir in Turkey when it was translated. When Nemet-Nejat went to Turkey for his honeymoon, he found that many poets wanted to meet him. One was Ece Ayhan, the author of some of the most bizarre, anti-narrative verse written in Turkish.

Ayhan expressed interest in translating The Bridge. “I told him I was surprised,” Nemet-Nejat remembers, “because our work is so different.” Ayhan replied, “It is like I am walking the street at night alone, and I came upon this house. There is a wonderful feast inside this house. I can’t enter the house. But I enjoy looking at it.” Ayhan wanted to work with another Turkish poet whose English was better, but that man was imprisoned at the time. The translation never came to pass. Years later, grieving for the death of his mother, Nemet-Nejat picked up two of Ayhan’s books, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, and cast them brilliantly into English.

This exchange partakes of the strange world of these poems. It is full of dramatic transitions: first publication, first translation, marriage, death. But the transitions lead mostly to fragment and incompletion, and the point of view changes as poet and translator change places. Someone, unnamed, is imprisoned for unstated reasons. Crushing sadness, the death of a mother, gives way to inexplicable creativity – the translation of experimental gay Turkish poetry. Ayhan is alone in the night, excluded from warmth and family, watching the play of color and motion.

The literature of the outsider has become quite an inside thing, but I don’t think we’ve heard anything like this voice. The uniqueness of these English sentences (A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxes are both prose poem sequences) emerges from the collaboration (silent, distant and protracted, as befits the texts) of two strangely formed poets. Ayhan wrote A Blind Cat Black as a provincial official and Orthodoxes as an Istanbul archivist. Those biographical teasers – given the baroque character of the verse, cast in street slang and rich in armpit smells, intimations of torture and truncated gay sex – conjure Kafka as a queer Turk. In Nemet-Nejat this outsider finds an apt shadow. As a Persian Jew growing up in Turkey, Nemet-Nejat was born in exile, speaking between languages.

Nemet-Nejat struggled for years translating Ayhan and went through hell getting this slim book into print. Even someone as charmed by the work as I am can see why. God knows what the Turkish looks like (the translator assures us that it has puzzled most readers); the English is a bizarre movement through invisible dogs, curses, convulsed emotions, corpses, stolen kites, rats in sewers, blind black cats with dead babies in their sacks, Pharaoh tattoos, “cum water” and the ghosts of jokes. Nothing obvious connects the riot of images and tide-turns of emotion. Confronted by such a book, in a busy world already brutal and confusing, one could easily be repelled.

Nemet-Najat says the best audience Ayhan found in Turkey was musicians and composers. That makes sense. Anyone who loves dissonance or fragmented melodies played sweetly outside the chord changes should love these poems: “He ran away on a steamboat, a jalopy but quick. Playing, unknowable, the muddy music of the ink squid.” Once you half-detach that part of your brain trying to figure out what is going on, you hear the most haunting music everywhere: “Madness put on a porkpie hat”; “My Aunt Sadness drinks alcohol in the attic, embroiders”; “hallucinations full of clowns run in ruins.” Once you hear the music, you see brilliant pictures: “They came drowned in the afternoon to the blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafes”; “I went to Jerusalem in that exile of the flower vendors and got settled in the town clock.” Is that a queer Turk Chagall?

This book has a way of lulling the reader into reverie, so that you complete the picture with your own colors, whistle the rest of the warped tune. When your rational brain reattaches, it’s like returning to a book you fell asleep reading and dreamed things into. It reminds me of Asian musicians who claim that they discovered the polyphonic music of the Western symphony centuries ago, but realized that monophonic music is more satisfying because it allows the soul of the listener to sing the harmonies. Nemet-Najat believes that Ayhan speaks obliquely because his subject touches the secret gay street life of Istanbul, which the official culture has silenced.

He also suggests that A Blind Cat Black is the disguised coming-out narrative of an Istanbul boy prostitute. That is one way to assemble the music and pictures. There are “untellable swords” and male queens, and certain shades of love and regret I have seen in gay men. With this reading, A Blind Cat Black becomes a study of a beautiful boy you probably wouldn’t like if you weren’t madly in love with him, living a horrible life he can’t articulate and is forbidden to describe openly, told in turn by himself, by a man who loves him, and by a heartbreaking third-person songbird: “An absent-minded tightrope walker comes. From the sea of late hours. Blows out a lamp. Lies down next to my weeping side, for the sake of the prophet. A blind woman downstairs. Family. She raves in a language I don’t know.”

A nastiness edges these poems, the voice of a devastated childhood viewed from a compromised adulthood: “They stole my kite in my madness, a violet, child-dead Sunday.” Just when this voice verges on whining, we find juxtaposed a calm, parental point of view: “My son is a queen. Has spread his wings.” Flashes of compassion shooting through the nastiness conjure the haunted image of parents watching home movies of a child who grew up only to commit suicide, an awful feeling made worse because the parental voice and the voice of the older male lover overlap. These ghoulish experiments with point of view are warmed by honest, old-fashioned sadness. At moments the poem becomes a half-told account of a conversation that drifted off and changed everything for the worse: “The adventure in a pass. Chasm. We don’t talk at all.” Or: “Not only the tides of the sea, even the explanations were useless.” The last lines of A Blind Cat Black deliver an unbearably bleak conclusion: “But no one should look for each other. Passing one inevitable sea.”

This is more than another journal of disintegration in a gay-baiting world. It is a virtuosic study of what you can do with lyricism denied, besides choke on it. Like brilliant musicians who crave simple emotion, yet love dissonance and the technical complexities of their instruments, Ayhan and Nemet-Nejat play endlessly on our heartstrings and bow—worry, even break them. A simple emotional line is dropped: “He likes his loneliness.” Simple images get sad twists: “The bend in a child’s heart.” Lyricism goes belly up and turns into self-satire: “Why the sea rises, no one knows. Oh the black shimmers of exile. I am a weeping half breed.” Then the poets blind us with complexity still drenched in emotion, like Imrat Khan in a furious raga: “The tryst in the labyrinth is slaked and duped by the divinations in sand. He was my age and a veiled queen. How the horses, how the chugboats rotted in that depth.”

This book stirs powerful memories of the sea. Its sometimes maddening, sometimes sorrowful sea changes of images left me thinking about knowing people for a long time and seeing them, over the years, from so many distances, through so much suffering, in so many different moods. I think it is the saddest book I have ever read.

– This review first appeared in The Nation magazine, July 7, 1997.

*

I went on to score Murat's translation of Blind Cat Black with the arts organization Poetry Scores, which then produced a silent movie to the score that I directed. This essay on this blog tells some, but not nearly all, of those stories.

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Image of Ece Ayhan from this wonderful fan site that also mentions our work.

Art Invitational for Paul Muldoon's "Incantata"

2011-09-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Scores Art Invitational for Paul Muldoon's Incantata will be held Friday, November 11 (that's 11/11/11) at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard.

At our Art Invitationals, we invite 50 or so local artists to make new work in response to the poem we are scoring. We require that they title the work after a verbatim quote from the poem. We then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the langauge used for the title appears.

In this way, the poem hangs the show. It works, year after year. Incantata will be our 6th annual invitational, with no duds to date.

This year, I bugged the artists early to work early and finish early so we can promote early. This partly is financial in motive. Our invitationals are silent art auctions, with proceeds split evenly three ways, between artist, venue and Poetry Scores. We're hoping to whet some appetites for this work and get some eager buyers in the door at Mad Art -- maybe even field some opening bids in advance.

Anyway, this is the early work we have in as of now -- in the order in which it will appear in the show.

"Paul Muldoon"

Dana Smith

"In everything there is an order"

Michael Behle

"A pupa in swaddling clothes"

Cindy Royal

“Its tidal wave of army-worms into which you all but disappeared”

Tim McAvin

"all-too-cumbersome device
of a potato-mouth in a potato-face
speak out, unencumbered,"

Claire Medol Hyman

"Or maybe a human caul"

Alexa Hoyer

"...as I watched the low swoop over the lawn today of a swallow..."

Jenna Bauer

"of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart"

Michael Hoffman

"You'd be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale of tears."

Janiece Senn

"The Shower of Rain"

Robin Street-Morris

Thus far confirmed for the invitational:

Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Jay Babcock
Jenna Bauer
Michael Behle
Kevin Belford
Deanna Chafin
Grace Chung
Heather Corley
Andrea Avery Durway
Greg Edmondson
Nancy Exarhu
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Michael Hoffman
Alexa Hoyer
Kim Humphries
Claire Medol Hyman
Chris King
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
John Minkoff
Michael Paradise
Meera Lee Patel
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Keek Richardson
Cindy Royal
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Daniel Shown
Derek Simmons
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Tunca Subasi
Nita Turnage
Robert Van Dillen
Amy VanDonsel
Eric Woods
More to come!

Before we get there, our score to Incantata will have been premiered. This year, we commissioned the great composer Barbara Harbach to do our work for us. Her score to Incantata will be premiered by musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theatre in the Touhill on the campus of UMSL. Be there!

How we came to shoot a zombie barber with a straight razor

2011-09-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we shot on location at our prop shop in South St. Louis. Our landlady, a supporter of the arts (and paramour of a Poetry Scores contributing artist) is letting us take over her garage as a movie lot.

V. Elly Smith clambered up on the garage for the aerial view. In this scene, the wall of the garage that faces Toni's backyard is transformed into the entrace to the office at Lost Almost, our imaginary Los Alamos, birthplace of the bomb. (Signage by Paul Casey, who also plays the lead Lost Almost scientist.)

We need to shoot a series of intake scenes, where civilians report for duty at the secret scientific military installation. Yesterday we shot the first of these scenes that will appear in the movie. A hapless tramp, the vendor of stuffed animals, has been drafted into the Army and is reporting to duty as a grunt soldier. The vendor is a recurring character in our movies played and (as I recall) invented by Thom Fletcher.

Playing the soldier already on post was Chuck Reinhardt, a musician friend of mine doing his first acting ever. We are making a silent movie about the making of the atomic bomb. In a silent movie, the best way to say "covert heavily guarded scientific military post" is to have a soldier with a gun in almost every scene. This gun is a prop on loan from Andy's Toys.

For most of these, his first-ever scenes, Chuck had nothing to do but stand sentinal and look forbidding and menacing. Doing simple things "naturally" is the essence of good acting, and it turns out Chuck actually is a great actor.

To show the coded secrecy of Lost Almost, we have to shoot a lot of scenes with the issuing, checking and burning of secret papers. On the vintage typewriter loaned to us for the movie shoot by Bill Sawalich, I typed out for the vendor of stuffed animals his draft letter. It read "a beast," a quote from the poem at the basis of our movie, Go South for Animal Index.

This is where having Elly on the roof made a big difference. In most exchanges, you want to get reactions from both sides of the exchange. Elly was the only person in the crew positioned to get the vendor's reactions.

Our options for getting that reaction were otherwise nonexistent. Looking out at the vendor from the sentinel's point of view, you see the backs of houses in a Midwestern city. Those images utterly shatter the illusion we are trying hard to create: the illusion of being in a timeless place, the land of parables and folktales. My approach in conceiving and executing storylines and movie shoots is drawn from world folklore.

Laurent Torno III, our direct of photography on this movie, was very crafty in finding a way to shoot this scene from an extreme side angle. If he went over and primped up those vines on the neighbor's trellis and worked with his focus on a really tight shot, there is nothing behind the vendor on his frame but greenery. That's the primitive look, borrowed from the classic silent films as well as world folklore, that our movies aim for.

This is not Thom saying he nailed the take -- he is modest about his abilities to the point of self-doubt -- though it sure looks that way, and he did nail the takes. Thom is one of my very favorite actors to work with for his talent and his temperament. He'll be back as the vendor of stuffed animals in the next two movies in the production timeline: The Sydney Highrise Variations (no better place for a guy selling stuff on a tall stick than a cityscape in a movie about modernity and vertical space!) and Crossing America (no better place for a wandering merchant than a road movie!).

Then we moved inside the prop shop, to shoot the new recruit's intake from inside the office. I had nothing but obsctales, literally and figuratively, for my crew in shooting this scene. We absolutely must not see the apartment building across the yard in any of our shots, and our prop shop is full of ... props. Worse, among those props I don't yet have the desk I need for the Lost Almost office and I couldn't get the actors playing the office roles on really short notice, so we had to shoot tight from their point of view with most of the room behind the camera, because the room is supposed to be full of office furniture and people.

Also, the fool director (me) had the good sense to pop a flash while shooting stills. Uh, that's a "CUT!" Mr. Scorcese. I couldn't take many stills, though, because my arms were otherwise needed in this scene. I put on the shirt won by General Graves (Ray Brewer) and played his body double. In our movie, those will be my arms extending out from the General's body to hand the new recruit his uniform, rifle, and coded paper with new orders ("he that is lost," another quote from Go South). I have started praying that we will later be able to match this shot back to the scenes we shoot in the properly outfitted and populated office, with Ray Brewer in the General's shirt, not me.

What's the hurry? Why shoot this scene now, and not later, when we have the props and actors we need? Because I wanted to shoot a scene with Thom's soldier character later that day, and he would need to be shaved for that other scene. So we needed to shoot him getting his shave!

Of course, an armed soldier stands sentinel over the new recruit's cut and shave. Armed soldiers are omnipresent in Lost Almost. We even have an armed soldier standing over the confession scene we shot with General Graves and the military chaplain (George Malich). We go in for the absurd and comic like that.

Plenty of absurdity in a new recruit being shaved by someone far hairier than he us, and a woman on top of that. Joyce Pillow came to us through Elly. She has all sorts of skills on movie projects, including the boring managerial ones, but in Go South for Animal Index she is a "debased cog" (yet anmother phrase from the poem); a nameless, faceless zombie. The zombies in this movie are conceptual zombies with no gore; the zombie is all in the acting -- they are method zombies. The zombie actors play the miners and millers who produce and trundle the uranium and plutonium needed for the atomic bomb effort. Looks like they also cut heads!

I'll let the zombie scholars tell me for sure, but I'm going to suggest Poetry Scores is breaking new terrain here by casting the first-ever zombie barber. And if you wonder, how do you act undead while shaving a total stranger with a straight razor? Very carefully! Not one nick was put in Thom Fletcher's face in the making of this movie.

Why a zombie barber? I probably would have cast a soldier in this scene, had I been able to get another soldier actor on such short notice. And that probably would have been less cool, so in the end, I am happy that Thomas Crone -- whose soldier character has done most of the other harrowing things in the movie -- was busy working on his own digital cinema project yesterday.

Why a zombie at all? The first movie we made, Blind Cat Black, incorporated zombies to match the surrealist technique of the poem we were working from (written by Ece Ayhan, translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat). I noticed an enormous difference in people's reaction to being told "we make silent movies based on long poems" (which make most people flee for their lives, for fear they'll be forced to watch one) compared to being told "we make silent zombie movies" -- which makes people buy a round of drinks and offer to act in our next movie!

The movie we are making now will be edited to our score of the poem Go South for Animal Index by Stefene Russell, a genius of Salt Lake City who lives and works in St. Louis. That is her pretty hair to the left of this frame. Stefene also acts in our movies and co-produces our projects as an integral part of Poetry Scores. In fact, we owe her producer connections for Thom Fletcher, the man in the zombie barber chair: he's her spouse!

Like so many greatly talented artists who gravitate to a lower-keyed city like St. Louis, Stefene is humble and working-class. The poet herself chipped in on this shoot as a production assistant, reflecting light onto the scene to improve the shot Dan Cross was getting.

Dan Cross is new to the Poetry Scores movie unit. He is an experienced moviemaker and instructor of cinematic arts. He has taught a course on zombie movies, and in fact came to us first as a zombie actor. Dan tells me he is enjoying the improvisatory freedom of our approach to making movies. We don't work from shotlists we prepare in advance. I tend to know the outcome I want from a scene, with a general sense of where in the score (that is, in the movie) it will fit, and then encourage the crew to get the shots that look good to them as we go.

The zombie barber scene, for example, was completely transformed by the existence of this ashpit right outside our prop shop (behind Elly there). I loved this little dump when I first saw it, but didn't remember it was there when I pulled together this shoot. I expected we'd be shooting the shave tight up against the old Army green wooden doors on our prop shop, but when we pulled up to the location the ashpit immediately presented itself as the perfect zombie hair salon.

Laurent was way into the zombie hair salon. He tells me he likes working on our movies because I keep coming up with cool, unexpected places to shoot. Laurent enjoys stretching out in a more artistic direction, compared to all the public television and commercial video he shoots to feed his family.

Our shoot yesterday drew a crowd of our prop shop's neighbors, like these twittering birds, who greatly entertained Stefene while she was pointing the reflector at the zombie salon. One neighbor -- oddly, no longer a neighbor, as he was moving that exact day, yesterday! -- really soaked it in from across the alley. Volunteer movie crews scavenge to stay alive, so I invited this guy over. Turns out he loves zombie movies, makes very realistic gore makeup, is a carpenter and electician who'd like to help build sets, and would love to play a zombie! See what I am saying about the zombie movie thing?

The zombie barber scene was improvised because we needed to shave the vendor of stuffed animals and transform him into Thom's soldier character, Pfc. Sack, for some scenes I planned to shoot later that afternoon in a thatch of woods. At the very end of the movie, as the scientists are readying for the first real nucleur bomb test, Pfc. Sack goes AWOL. He melts into the woods, lays down his rifle, digs up his old hat and bindlestick, and saunters off to go sell some stuffed animals (before presumably getting incinerated, along with his inventory, by the Trinity Test's nucleur blast).

As these things happen in the amateur moviemaking business, we were delayed by a flash thunderstorm (that we rode out in the sturdy prop shop) and never got to that second location. We never shot the shaved soldier scenes. So we rushed the vendor's intake/shave scenes with Thom for nothing!

**

Straight razor on loan from the actor, guitarist and barber Roy Gokenbach. Roy has an important role in the great ensemble cast directed by Daniel Bowers in A: Anonymous, the high-water mark in St. Louis indie cinama, never to be crested.

Vertical spaces in Collinsville with Tabitha for The Sydney Highrise Variations

2011-08-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

When you make feature-length movies on no budget, you take what you can get when you can get it. So when Tabitha Hassell, the niece of my old friend (and Poetry Scores' new production assistant) Jocko Ferguson offered to show me around Collinsville for possible movie locations, I said sure.

We mostly know where we are shooting everything for the movie we are making now, Go South for Animal Index. So I sized up Tabitha's Collinsville with an eye toward the movie we are shooting next, The Sydney Highrise Variations.

We'll shoot Sydney to our score of Les Murray's poem by that name. Les' poem is about modernity, vertical space, and the rise of modern cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Les' poem is saturated with the history and geography of one specific city, Sydney, Australia; but we make our movies in and around St. Louis and just have to make do with our local approximations of the exotic details in the poems we score and film.

In Tabitha's kitchen, straight away, I saw a quirky vertical closet that unfolds an ironing board. So I see an opportunity to shoot a domestic scene around an ironing board that exploits this vertical space.

(You'll see a lot of Tabitha in these shots. Laurent Torno III asked me always to position human beings in the frame when I'm shooting location shots.)

Tabitha also has a groovy vertical clock. Les' poem is in part about time -- about how the concept of the century is modern, so in a sense the 19th and 20th centuries were the first centuries -- so it wouldn't be hard to find a domestic scene to shoot in front of this guy.

Our first stop in town was a bar owned by a friend of Tabitha's. Given this was a big Hurricane Irene day, it was fitting to be in a bar named Hurricanes. It has a beautiful bar, though there is signage galore we'd have to dodge. The place never opens before 4 p.m. so we'd have tons of time to shoot there.

The courtyard at Hurricanes has a fantastic vertical to shoot as a backdrop: the Collinsville water tower, helpfully tilted so we can't read the town name.

Also a nice lone tree back there to shoot up into.

Collinsville has some trees, now. Look at this beauty.

Also, great roads for the tramps in our city highrise movie to ramble.

We rambled to Collinsville's most famous landmark, a giant catsup bottle.

There is an abandoned structure next to the bottle that is just dying to be some kind of hobo hideaway.

Where a hobo hideaway, must be railroad tracks.

Those tracks should sort of wander off forever.

Just opposite the hobo shed there also is what amounts, in a movie shoot, to a forested mountain.

Driving in Collinsville, you pass lots of these, which look cool but could get you killed shooting in them.

We made a stop at her friend Jason Jenson's house to see its tiki bar and golf green.

That could come in very handy when we come up with the scenes for the zombies in The Sydney Highrise Variations. In this movie, the zombies will be all of the new cosmopolitan urbanites who populate the new vertical city that sprouts up around the tramps of old town. We'll need some golfing new urbanite zombies. And zombies in tiki hot tubs.

Our final stop was a granary I have always loved.

Shot from a side road as we drove back to Tabitha's, by way of an ice cream shop, it looks rather like a castle.

It was a nice, productive ramble with Tabitha in her Jeep Rubicon -- a rugged 4WD monster she is willing to drive on locations with us. Welcome aboard, Tabitha! See you soon, Collinsville.

Moviemaker inspired by neighbor's fruits and vegetables

2011-08-22T05:35:00.000-07:00

Frustrated physicist's wife (Natalie Partenheimer) with soldier (Thomas Crone).

If I am ever asked again about my influences as a moviemaker, I think I'll say, "The fruits and vegetables of my neighbor".

Last month, my next-door neighbor Mark Shaw knocked on our door and asked if we wanted a watermelon. I said, "Sure," and he walked home and came back with this wonderful fat little melon.

When you are making a feature-length movie on no budget, everything is a potential prop. When the movie you are making is about the making of the first atomic bomb, then everything fat and round looks like a visual pun on Fat Man, the fat round atomic bomb prototype assembled at Los Alamos.

I told Mark we should use the watermelon in our movie. I said "our" and "we" because, on top of being a thoughtful and generous neighbor, Mark is a film school grad who works hard as a volunteer on the Poetry Scores movie unit.

And indeed, the next day we were hard at work on location inside the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, a city club with interesting visuals and spaces, which we're allowed to transform into a movie lot on Sunday mornings. I brought the watermelon to the shoot and stared at it until I could figure out a way to use it.

We had George Malich on the shoot that day, playing military chaplain. I decided to have the priest stroll into the physicists' open-air lounge to give them the surprise gift of a watermelon (which just happens to look like the bomb they will later build). The physicists are out, but they have left paperwork lying about. From these notes the priest begins to gather, with horror, what the physicists are doing behind their shroud of secrecy.

We also had Thomas Crone on that shoot. Crone plays one of the soldiers whose main role is to constantly reinforce the idea that this is a closely guarded and carefully controlled secret military base. Our soldiers do a lot of standing around with a gun or running someone off at gunpoint. In this scene, the soldier discovers the priest alone in the physicists' lounge and runs him off at gunpoint. Figuring no one would be the wiser, the soldier then saunters off with the watermelon.

So, now we had a watermelon that looks like the Fat Man bomb in the hands of a soldier. One of the places we have stationed the soldier is by a big drum of water. Los Alamos -- in our movie, it's an abstracted and imaginary place, Lost Almost -- was a place of scarcity, wartime rationing, and high elevations where it took water forever to boil. My shooting script calls for the physicists' wives to really struggle in the kitchen, as the women did in real life.

We already had shot a scene where Crone guards a big water drum from which a physicist's wife (Barbara Manzara) draws a bucket of water, more or less at gunpoint. I also had her character devour a plum on a bench beneath a tree, to show that she was famished, to remind us that simple pleasures persist even in desperate times, and to furnish an opportunity for a lonely and frustrated military wife to experience some of the sensuality that is absent from the barren bomb shop.

I like to make movies using repetitions with differences, the classic structure of folktales. So I could see right away what we should do with that watermelon. The soldier should stash his purloined watermelon by his post at the water drum and use it to entice a famished physicist's wife he likes the looks of to wander off to a bench beneath a shade tree, where he pursues other forbidden fruit with her but is rejected.

That was the scene we had scheduled for yesterday, with Natalie Partenheimer playing the famished physicist's wife Crone's soldier likes the looks of.

A few days before we were set to shoot, I walked over to Mark Shaw's house to return a different prop. His father teaches high school science and had loaned us a gigantic wall chart of the periodic table of the elements, which we had put to good use in the movie's theoretical physics scene. While I was in their house, Mark's mother offered me some cucumbers she had brought back from her reservation (she is Native American and grew up on a res in Wisconsin). Native American cucumbers? How could I say no?

Before I had crossed our yards to go back home, I knew I now had more movie props.

Yesterday, after Natalie and Crone had arrived on location at Atomic Cowboy, I talked them through my concept of the scene. It was pretty simple. Soldier stashes watermelon by his guard post at the water drum. Famished physicist's wife comes to draw water. Soldier likes the looks of her. While she is dipping her bucket, the soldier grabs the watermelon to surprise her. He offers to take her for a snack, and she readily agrees. They sit close together on a crowded bench. The soldier begins to slice off pieces of watermelon, and as they eat, it becomes clear this means a whole lot more to the soldier than it does to the physicist's wife. Depending on how they played that uneasiness and tension, we would figure out how to end the scene.

We got through the stage business at the water drum just fine, but once we started shooting the watermelon scene, Crone was not looking like a very aggressive lecher. V. Elly Smith was shooting the scene on three cameras, and I was monitoring one of the cameras trained on Natalie's face. When I could see that Crone might not make the moves to justify her looking offended and disgusted, I talked her through some other emotions -- like wanting more than she was getting from the soldier. She did just fine with that.

When we got to the point where we needed to figure out how to wrap up the scene, Elly and I conferred. I asked what she had to work with from the camera she was operating. She said she didn't have what I needed, if I needed the soldier looking like a lecher who was using the watermelon as a ruse for sex. Immediately, I realized that I had asked for a cliche -- the rapacious soldier, the self-defending damsel -- and now the natural instincts of my amateur actors (Crone's shyness, Natalie's attraction to Crone) had given me an opportunity to shoot a much better, much more surprising scene.

So I said forget everything else I had said. It was Natalie's lonely and frustrated physicist's wife who wanted more out of this than just a juicy watermelon. When she realizes that the soldier is all gun and knife but no action, when she realizes she isn't going to get anything out of this other than some watermelon, then she decided she wants all of the watermelon. So just as the soldier had done to the priest, she takes the watermelon and runs.

The soldier is then left alone with his rifle, his knife ... and a cucumber! I had stashed one of Mark's mom's Native American cucumbers in the soldier's rucksack with his knife. I told Crone he had it and he was free to use it as a phallic symbol when the rapacious/resistance deal went down. Now that the soldier was left alone, with no rapacious/resistance sdcene, the cucumber was put to a very different use. The soldier hacks it down and eats the cucumber, a symbol of both masturbation and self-mutilation.

V. Elly Smith shoots soldier (Thomas Crone) self-mutilating a cucumber.

So much better, so much more interesting, so much more approriate to the themes of our movie -- atomic bomb as the ultimate act of self-destruction -- than what I thought I wanted. And I owe it all to the fruits and vegetables of my neighbor, and the instincts of amateur actors.

The nexus of cancer, creativity and healing in "Go South"

2011-08-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Photo of Amy Camie by Julie Enstall

So, we are making a movie about the making of the atomic bomb. It's a silent movie we'll edit to the musical score we made to a poem. The poem, Go South for Animal Index, is written by Stefene Russell (who also performs on the score and acts in the movie). Stefene grew up a Downwinder from the Nevada nucleur test site and lost important childhood friends to wasting cancers, no doubt indebted to radiation exposure.

The Poetry Scores movie unit was confronted this summer with a cancer in our own cast. George Malich, who plays the military chaplain at the bomb base (Lost Almost, as the weary soldiers nicknamed Los Alamos), was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had to undergo emergency brain surgery.

Before his surgery (performed by world-leading experts at Barnes-Jewish Hospital), George not only worked in the grueling final shoots for our movie but also managed to write, cast, produce, and direct an improvised dramatic series about his new experiences, Life is Meant for Living.

A lot of us have been thinking a lot about George. Thomas Crone, who plays a soldier opposite George's military chaplain in our movie, wrote an insightful piece of reportage about George's creative process, his coping strategies and his instinct to heal others through his own creative experience. If anyone can kick the ass of brain cancer, after wringing deep meaning and art out of it, that would be George.

What George has been dealing with has made me think back to the people Stefene lost through wasting cancers as a girl growing up, piercing her with pain that produced the poem that now has inspired a musical score and a silent movie production. Creativity and cancer: that is kind of how this Go South thing got started.

Then I remembered what Amy Camie has been going through. Amy is a local harpist who records with Adam Long, the multiply Grammy-nominated sound recordist who mixes and masters our poetry scores. Years ago Adam handed us Amy as a possible collaborater, and we finally incorporated two harp pieces she recorded with Adam into Go South for Animal Index. Amy since has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Exactly as George would later do, she approached the experience of cancer as an artist and a healer.

That wasn't much of a stretch for Amy. For more than 15 years, she has played harp to inspire and rejuvenate the spirit of what she describes as "cancer, hospice and grief communities" (she's not one to use a lame word like "victim"). So when she was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in December 2010, she basically turned her healing music on herself.

In celebration of her final chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Amy's friends and family sponsored the gift of over 300 copies of her record The Magic Mirror to local cancer patients. This should inspire George's friends as he looks forward to the day he finishes his course of treatment!

The peculiar thing is, the nexus of cancer, creativity and healing is inscribed into our movie in ways that directly involve George Malich and Amy Camie. On one of our first days in production on Go South, George played this magnificent breakdown scene. It's the alcoholic military chaplain on the atomic bomb base melting down over all the massive, unprecedented death-dealing his ministry has supported.

George's performance will be edited to track 27 of our poetry score, the second to last piece and the second of the two Amy Camie harp tunes. On our poetry score, the song is titled "Tell me what is the power," a provisional retitling of Amy's original harp composition, which we augmented and deformed in Adam's studio.

We added Christopher Y. Voelker's soulful violin meditations and Tim McAvin singing like a songbird Stefene's poetry: Tell me: what is the power that will wash an entire generation? We then deformed this beautiful acoustic harp, violin, and vocal trio with weird atmospherics from Numbers Stations recordings that Stefene provided as a source sound, and Adam's short-wave radio play. It's a long, distorted, disturbing piece. It ends with twinkling sounds from Adam's radio signals that sound like hope.

The deformed harp piece is long enough, at 6:42, to tie together all of our storylines in the movie leading into the final track, the final scene of the movie, which ends with a bang. As Amy strums the harp, George's priest melts down, the atomic scientists struggle and finally get their fat man atomic bomb set to pop, the lonely scientist wives (finally let in on the secret of the secret project) gather in secret to watch the bomb test from a distance, the soldiers and tramps continue in their animal ways, and, on the margins of the base, under a tree by a river on a native reserve, a small tribal community finally succeeds in their fourth ceremonial attempt to heal a sick child.

This final suucessful healing ceremony -- a singing ceremony -- is observed (and awkwardly, from afar, joined) by a widow and her child. The poet Stefene plays the widow, who loses her scientist husband early in the movie. He dies from sudden fatal radiation exposure in the nucleur physics lab. The widow and girl are then evicted from the secret bomb base (George's priest gives them the kindly, but firm, heave-ho). They wander, dejected, throughout the movie in a vintage 1940s automobile, grieving and lost.

The widow and little girl grieving a death from radiation poisoning are in the end led by a tramp through the woods to a river, where they chance upon the tribe's singing ceremony. The sick little tribal girl (our silent movie will do its best to show) has been suffering from radiation poisoning herself. After all, their native reserve has been turned into a zombie uranium mine. You think that is far-fetched? Then read Stefene's essay about the sources of her poem!

mp3s

"And the mouth"
Amy Camie, Chris King, Adam Long, Christopher Voelker

"Tell me what is the power "
Amy Camie, Tim McAvin, Adam Long, Christopher Voelker

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See a slideshow of Julie Enstall's photographs of Amy Camie.

Zafer sent us some new translations of Ece Ayhan

2011-08-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Our Turkish wruter friend Zafer Yalçınpınar sent these texts. Click on them, and they get big enough to read. Here is what Zafer said about them:

I have just found some translations of Ece Ayhan poems... These are translated by Fatih Özgüven in early 80's.. They have published in a "literature translation press" which had called "Yazko"... We think that they are very interesting translations... Anyway, I share them with you... and you can share them anywhere/anyplatform you want...

A desultory web search turns up the following about the translator:

Fatih Özgüven teaches film theory and writes film and literary reviews for a number of periodicals and newspapers. His books include a novel, Esrarengiz Bay Kartaloğlu (Mysterious Mr. Kartaloğlu), a collection of essays, Yerüstünden Notlar (Notes from the Overground), and two books of short stories, Bir Şey Oldu (Something Happens) and Hiç Niyetim Yoktu (I Never Meant To). Özgüven is also a prolific translator, and has translated Borges, Nabokov, Henry James, Karen Blixen, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster, Jonathan Ames, Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf and Brett Easton Ellis. Özgüven lives in Istanbul.

Sounds good.

Why do we care? Because we set Ece Ayhan's poem Blind Cat Black to music as a poetry score, and then made a silent movie to that score. We worked from the translation by Murat Nemet-Nejat. I prefer Murat's work on this great poem to Fatih's; but, hey! What is good enough for Zafer is good enough for Poetry Scores!

You never know what is going to happen, George Malich

2011-08-07T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's now a moment I'll always remember, as long as I am able to remember.

It was a sweltering July day in St. Louis. We were set up in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, shooting scenes for our movie, Go South for Animal Index.

George Malich was half in costume as the Lost Almost military chaplain, and Martin Sophia was half in costume as the younger tribal mystic. We had shot really effective scenes with each of them that day, though not together. And now we were trying to figure out if we would get back up in the blazing heat and shoot a scene with the two of them together.

Shooting an ambitious movie with a volunteer cast and crew, there is a lot of running and gunning. I started out trying to shoot my shooting script, scene for scene; and now I just assemble the best cast I can on the short notice I have after confirming a crew is available, and then figure out what we can shoot that best approximates the script.

It's a conceptual silent movie, based on Stefene Russell's poem of the same name. It's a fable that will be edited to a poetry score, Stefene's poem set to music. So there is infinite leeway in working with, or around, my shooting script to construct a fable that evokes the themes of Stefene's poem. This is my way of saying my method is not slop!

Back to that sweltering courtyard at Atomic Cowbow. It was 100 degrees in the shade of the Quonset hut. We had been working for hours. We already had really successful footage in the can with both of the actors in question. If we went home now, everyone would be satisfied. No one was really dying to get back up, put on the other half of the costume, lug the cameras back into the murderous sun, and start shooting again.

But then again, we are crazy people, like everyone else in the St. Louis amateur movie scene. Everyone was kind of looking at me, the director, more or less willing to make another run at it if I asked them to set up for one more scene.

I thought about it. I wasn't sure what we would shoot. I was pretty sure we could come up with something. I asked the actors what they wanted to do.

Martin had just done an exhausting scene where he simulated a prayer ritual to heal a sick child.

It took a lot out of him. He also was justly proud for having nailed a challenging scene with very little direction. Martin was in no hurry to act again.

George also had done a challenging scene earlier that morning. The priest, intending simply to deliver a watermelon to the Lost Almost physicists, had chanced upon some of their paperwork and, for the first time, come to grasp the deadly business they were about: building a weapon of mass destruction.

In this dark mood, the priest was chased away from the physicist's picnic table by a soldier (Thomas Crone) at gunpoint. George, too, had nailed his scene and knew it.

And I knew it. But I also knew it was my job to push people beyond their normal senses of comfort and endurance. So, I said, "I'm looking at the two of you here at the same time and thinking we should just get up and do another scene."

Nobody jumped up to do the scene. It was hot -- heat index hot, people keeling over dead from the heat hot, cameras overheating hot.

Martin said, "I'm not going anywhere," meaning he could always be available for another shoot. "George, you're not going anywhere."

George did not jump right up to do another scene. But he did say, "You never know what is going to happen."

I thought about it for a second. George's availibility and commitment were unquestioned, and Martin had just made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere. More importantly, in my decision-making process, I wasn't exactly sure what scene between the priest and the mystic would work for the movie. I knew something would work, but I was as baked by the sun as anybody else on the set. My instincts as improvising fabulist moviemaker were not at their best.

I called it a wrap. We packed up and went home.

Sitting there at the time, I now know, George knew he had a brain tumor. He knew, in less than two weeks, he would endure open-skull brain surgery. He knew that there was no way to know how many more shoots he would have for this movie, or for any movie.

"You never know what is going to happen," he said.

As it turns out, George and our cast and crew canceled other plans to make everything happened so that all the scenes we absolutely needed for George's character got shot before he went into surgery on August 1. We got it done. And George was amazing.

But we didn't need that scene with the priest and the mystic, and so we didn't get it, and now we will never have it.

"You never know what is going to happen," said George, who knew what was going to happen.

Gravois location for zombie uranium mill

2011-07-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

Paul Casey as scientist in the uranium mine.
So we recently shot the big zombie uranium mine scene for our movie Go South for Animal Index. We are making a fable of the Los Alamos story, based on a poem by Stefene Russell. Given that it's a fable based on a poem, we are at liberty to be as representational as we wish, or not.

Our plan, at this point, is to mine something that looks like raw uranium (which we have done, mining sand) and then mill it into something that looks like yellowcake uranium, and then mill that into something that looks like plutonium.

These latter two processes in reality were vast technical enterprises that involved, among other things, creating a fission facility the size of an entire city in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We can always fall back on archival footage for that, and we may do so, but my first idea is to have our zombies play with food to create cornbread (yellowcake) and plum pulp (plutonium).

First, we need to have our zombies wheel the wheelbarrows of uranium (sand) they wheeled out of the mine to the location we will use for the mill. I have been looking for a location like this, which I just found on an alley behind Gravois.

The alley has a lot of other interesting textures to choose from.

I like this exterior.

There is a leafy green stretch, which is good, since we have our zombies walking past green at our Atomic Cowboy location.

Always good to have fences, since we need to suggest military encirclement.

Some kind of weird plutonium purple is poking out of this inage for no rational reason, other than to volunteer for the part.

This could suggest military workforce housing, if we want to imagine our mill that compressed upon domestic spaces.

This building has promise as an exterior for the scientists' housing.

I discovered this alley because it's behind the carpentry shop of Paul Casey, who is playing our lead scientist. We could have the zombies dump the mined uranium at the shop garage, if we can live with its hominess.

Shoot tight, and it gets less homy.

This barbed wire gate is probably a better dropoff point. We'd post a soldier, the general and Casey here.

Another look. If we use our prop shop to shoot the bomb shop, which looks likely, we have brick there. Making movies in St Louis, we need to get used to brick.

Another angle at the gate front. Casey has wheels we can use to move the Dumpster.

Wider shot. If we go for the gate front, we probably dont want the garage in the shot.

Casey is an old theater prop guy, and he has an actual mill we can use if we want to use a literal mill. That wasn't what I had in mind, but options are good.

Upstairs in his carpentry shop he has a small table with a great look for the zombie uranium mill table. There also is a larger table that doesn't look as cool.

Clean out this room and we can shoot the scene up here when the weather cools. This would be a lot easier than shooting at Mad Art, which was the previous plan. Casey said if we shoot at night there is a creepy light outside these windows.

A detail of the room. That red is so wrong it's right. Mostly, the scene would be shot in closeups of zombies and uranium (food), though.

Love these lights.

There is a desk for the pencil pusher zombie cataloguing product.

And a plutonium blue zombie lounger for the breakroom. Forgot to ask Casey if we can smoke up there! Our zombies must smoke!

"The Secret Jew" and the dreamer who installed the new windows in my house

2011-07-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

Detail of "The Secret Jew" by Chris Dingwell.

One of the men loading windows into our house was paused in the front room. He was reading the panel posted next to a painting. The painting was The Secret Jew by Chris Dingwell of Portland, Maine. The panel was the text of Murat Nemet-Nejat's translation of "The Secret Jew," a prose poem from Ece Ayhan's prose poetic sequence Blind Cat Black.

It's not everybody that enters our house who stops at the painting. It's not everyone who stops at that painting who reads the poem printed on the panel. I'd say it's not every guy working a window replacement job you'd expect to stop at the Turkish prose poem posted next to the florid painting of the Secret Jew, but half my artist friends in St. Louis work one menial job or another. I figured this guy was one of us.

I stepped up to him.

I explained that I co-founded an arts organization named Poetry Scores that translates poetry into other media. I told him we printed the poem he was reading for the Poetry Scores Art Invitational to Blind Cat Black, held in 2006 at Mad Art Gallery. I said the painter, my old friend Chris Dingwell, made this magnificent painting for that invitational as a response to the poem he was reading.

The guy was following me, but really he was just floored by Dingwell's painting.

Detail of "The Secret Jew" by Chris Dingwell.
I ran to the Poetry Scores inventory in my basement and got him a copy of the CD we produced of our poetry score to Blind Cat Black. I told him we had since gone on to make a silent movie to that score -- a silent zombie movie -- a silent conceptual zombie movie -- but there was no DVD of the movie so he'd have to catch a screening.

By now I had taken him to my garage to show him a pile of props for the zombie uranium miner scene we are shooting this weekend inside a sand mine in Crystal City, and suddenly I found myself in full-blown zombie recruitment mode.

The CD had to go out to his truck, I had to get my daughter to camp and myself to work, he had to help install the new windows in my house, but the zombie schmooze was on. Now he was telling the other guys on the crew and everyone was interested. I was talking up our zombie uranium miner shoot this Saturday and thinking I had new talent.

"You're working Saturday," the boss said to the dreamer who had gotten lost in the painting.

His boss then volunteered the information that they had installed the windows of the guy who invented the drive-in movie, Mr. Swank. He said the Swanks were from Ohio and ended up in Indianapolis, where they had the bright idea of stringing up a sheet in a town square, projecting home movies and seeing if people would pay to watch them.

They paid. Before Mr. Swank passed away (the boss was saying, as he handled my new windows), the old man owned five homes on Oahu. He needed five homes on Oahu because Mrs. Swank was ill, and as they traveled around the island to see friends, she needed to stop and rest often, so they bought their own resting homes along the way.

I explained that the one movie we had finished, Blind Cat Black, had been shown drive-in movie style at a tavern in downtown St. Louis. I said we had just lost an opportunity to show our movie projected on a sheet in town -- original Swank drive-in movie style -- due to the movie's disturbing adult content.

"For that movie, the big zombie scene was a zombie orgy," I said.

"Why didn't we replace your windows before you made that movie?" the boss asked, sadly.

The crew. The boss is inside the house, the dreamer is to the right.

Nucleur physics, watermelons, tribal mysticism and uranium miner zombies

2011-07-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

Eventful location shoot today for our movie, Go South for Animal Index, in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, which they throw open to us as a movie lot on Sunday mornings and afternoons. The crew was V "Elly" Smith on camera one and Murphy Mark Shaw on camera two.

Laurent Torno III, our director of photography, missed his first shoot (U2 tickets). Dawn Majors, who also is shooting the movie, has moved to Nashville to work as staff photographer for the Governor of Tennessee (though she has planned two weekends back in St. Louis, smitten as she is by the movie business).

Carla Doss worked hard today as production assistant. Carla helped out on our first movie, Blind Cat Black, too. Thanks to Carla, Mark was able to see the screen on Elly's camera to frame his shots in today's blinding light and heat.

Huge shooting day today. I have been getting very scared, because half-way through shooting a movie about the atomic bomb, we had no nucleur physics in the movie before today. Today, we introduced nucleur physics. I copied some pregnant passages and weird looking formulae and graphs from the Los Alamos Primer, the transcriptions of the introductory lectures that Los Alamos physicists received.

Eventually, we will shoot the physicists learning this material and arguing over it. Today we shot the Army chaplain (George Malich) coming across this disturbing material while attempting to deliver a watermelon to the physicists, who were not in their ouot-doors study. He gets angry at the thought of the destruction his congregants are preparing. He is interrupted by a soldier (Thomas Crone), who runs the chaplain out. Crone was a little late for the shoot, so we shot George's reaction to the sodlier before we had Crone there for him to react to. On this take, Carla tapped George on the shoulder with the soldier's rifle.

The watermelon was a valuable property today. We used it to motivate the chaplain coming upon the abandoned physics notes -- he was trying to deliver a melon to the brain trust -- and then we used it for comic effect, as the soldier tucks the melon under his arm and makes away with it after he rousts the holy man. Later, we will have the soldier use the watermelon in an attempt to make sweet time with one of our lonely scientist wives (Natalie Partenheimer).

That soldier/scientist wife scene will echo and comment upon another scene we shot today, when the other lonely scientist wife in the movie (Barbara Manzara) devours a plum she procured from the vendor of stuffen animals (a recurring character in our movies played by Thom Fletcher). I directed Barbara to find in that plum all the pleasure she was not getting in her marriage, and she took very good care of that plum. I, however, took no stills.

The funny thing is, the watermelon literally walked in my door only last night. In addition to shooting out movie, Mark Shaw is my neighbor. He dropped off the watermelon as a summer nicety. It was a short, fat melon, its shape and girth so like Fat Man, one of the bombs built at Los Alamos. I knew we had to use it.

After Crone showed up, we gave him sentinel duty. Los Alamos was a secret military base. In a silent movie, nothing says "secret military base" like a soldier with a gun in almost every scene, checking papers and directing traffic. And, in this case, simply watching some spent pieces of used zombie trash head back to the uranium mine.

The zombies today were played by Julie Malone and Aaron Garibaldi. The zombies in this movie are uranium miners and millers. This generic typing is right there in the poem we scored, and which we are now filming, where the poet writes, from the point of view of a Congolese uranium miner, "Why a corpse as me should be afraid?"

The plan is for all of our movies to have zombies. We came to the zombie genre honestly. Lead editor Aaron AuBuchon suggested zombies when I was casting around for a Surreal element to work into the movie Blind Cat Black to match the Surreal technique of Ece Ayhan's poem and Murat Nemet-Nejat's translation. It worked! It's a street hustler poem, and of course street hustlers are zombies.

It was then that I noticed you can get a LOT more different kinds of people to hear you out when you tell them you make silent zombie movies -- even silent conceptual zombie movies -- -- even silent conceptual zombie movies based on long poems you have set to music -- then if you tell people you make silent movies based on poetry. The zombies are here to stay.

Another huge advance today: we shot a healing ceremony. We have to shoot four. All four are attempts to heal a sick child. Although I live with the actors playing the sick child (Leyla Fern King) and her mother (Karley M. King), they have been hard to schedule. So I decided to play one ceremony where the child isn't there, but only emblems or simulacra of her: her likeness as a doll, a strand of her hair, one of her baby teeth. When we finally get Leyla and Karley to work, we will shoot them handing these items to the tribaly mystic, played by Martin Sophia. We owe Martin to the irrepressible Donny Blake, who is earning an Associate Producer credit on this picture.

Atomic Cowboy happens to have a spider totem in its courtyard. Los Alamos was in the desert, infested by spiders and snakes. We're making the most of that spider totem -- and the last embers of the courtyard campfire from the night before, which greets us every Sunday morning when we turn the tavern courtyard into a movie lot. There's always one good reason or another to have smoke in a shot.

In case you are wondering, we know it looks like there is a fence behind the bamboo. We are stuck with that fence, but we are using it: these are tribal people on a reservation.

The doll is from Ghana, where we have family. Martin is from Kenya. The tribal people in our movie are modeled after native peoples who mined uranium for the bomb effort, both in Africa (the Luba and Bantu) and in America (the Navajo and Utes). As we do with most things, we are coming up with our own collage of visual and narrative elements. We make our own fables or folktales. We are not trying to represent anyone's reality.

Ah, and here it is, the newest addition to the Poetry Scores family. Next Saturday we are shooting our big zombie uranium miner scenes, and I put out a call for wheelbarrows we could use (the poem talks of uranium miners who "bear wheelbarrows packed full of lightning"). My childhood friend Jocko Ferguson stepped up and gave us this rugged beauty, which I stencilled with "Debased Cogs," another phrase from the poem describing the miners.

The beauty is, this sucker fits right into my hatchback, and since you can pack it full, it doesn't really take up much space. Then, on location, it makes load on and out a one-trip process. How cool! Never leaving home without it again, at least not if I'm shooting a movie that day.

Post-Script
The hair and tooth for the healing ceremony were suggested by the poem, which has an obscure line about sewing up a stained pond "with a tooth and his longest hair". It occurred to me I still had one of Leyla's teeth from when she was a baby, and I could find her longest hair and trim it. These precious items were in a little juju bag that fell unobserved from my car while I was loading up after the shoot! Could not find them when I got home! Felt like I was bringing down a curse on my own kin by losing my daughter's baby tooth in a make-believe healing ceremony! A make-believe healilng ceremony with a character played by her at its center! So, after a long day of shooting, a long drive home, and a panicked search through all of our props, I got to turn right back around and drive right back to Atomic Cowboy. Where I found the juju bag! With the tooth.

Oriental and Indian (as in India) flavors for "O sadness over rage O rage over sadness"

2011-07-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

In 2012 we are scoring O Sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle. The text is a composite that Curtis and I arrived at together, working from a larger selection of his poems that deal with the American West. I asked to see his work in this vein when our movie unit decided we wanted to make a silent Western. In our way of doing things, that meant we needed to first find the right poem to score.

On our scores and our movies, Poetry Scores tries to use the ensemble approach of working with the same people we always work with. On our two previous scores, Jack Ruby's America by David Clewell (2010) and The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray (2009), we worked with the St. Louis multi-instrumentalist musician Frank Heyer. Given our ensemble approach, naturally we will try to work with him on O sadness over rage ...

Frank was brought to us by our friend and erstwhile board member Brett Lars Underwood, who booked him into the Tap Room. When I explained our approach to Frank, I emphasized how we are always looking for instrumental fragments or vignettes that we can sequence into our scores. He responded by mailing me two discs of music, one on a yellow CD and the other on a purple CD.

The yellow CD -- noir rock excursions on fretless guitar and keyboards -- is what I've been plumbing on our scores. The purple CD intrigued me, but since the tracks mostly have Indian and Oriental flavors, I found no use for it thus far. I can see how that could change, big time, with the score to O sadness over rage ...

Ultimately, we want to make an Indian and Cowboy picture, with an emphasis on the Indian. I appreciate that Indian as in Native American is distinct from Indian as in India; but we practice the arts of translation and collage, and I think Indian as in India could work well on this score. (I already intend to use Indian as in India dancers in the movie.) As for the more Oriental sounds, anthropologists figure American Indians as an Asiatic people, who migrated from Asia to the west coast of this continent on a now-submerged land bridge.

I think Frank's music on his purple disc is so promising for this score that I uploaded all 12 tracks to share with the poet (my co-producer) and anyone else who wants to listen along.

Music by Frank Heyer (mp3s)

Purple disc Track 1

This one sounds kind of Chinese to me.

Purple disc Track 2

More Indian, as in India.

Purple disc Track 3

Purple disc Track 4

This sounds very native Andean. I'd like to use this piece.

Purple disc Track 5

Less focussed to my ears; probably not a keeper for us.

Purple disc Track 6

Purple disc Track 7

Purple disc Track 8

Purple disc Track 9

Purple disc Track 10

Purple disc Track 11

Nice, plaintive electric guitar work here.

Purple disc Track 12

Back to that overtly Oriental opening flourish. A longer track at 5:06.

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

O Tonks over sadness O sadness over Tonks
The crow blows down the gap in the wind
Frontier fiddle concerto by Barbara Harbach for silent Western
Six Chirps Smith fiddle tunes for a silent Western score
"Alcohol and Used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett
From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score"
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

*

Bollywood Cowboy image from Catero's Flickr and belongs to him, not us.

O Tonks over sadness O sadness over Tonks

2011-07-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was picking through the Poetry Scores archive when I chanced upon some music by William Tonks. Tonks is a songster and musician in Athens, Georgia I befriended many years ago.

I brought his music up from the basement, I mean the archive, and I gave it a good, long, loving listen with my neighbor over a bottle of 2009 Puydeval.

I really was just trying to get my Tonks on, but I was surprised to find in the unreleased recordings he sent me a number of instrumental tracks with a certain flavor.

As a guy who scores poems as a hobby, I mean as a vocation, I am always on the prowl for unreleased instrumental music I can park inside a piece of poetry we are scoring. Especially when the music was written and recorded by a friend. It's like writing and recording a song with a friend, except my friend already has done most of the work.

The next creative musical project on the horizon for Poetry Scores is to come up with a score for the silent Western we want to make. For the first time, we are starting with the (very generic) concept for a movie: a silent Western. Given the way we work, from poem to score to movie, we had to find a poem.

We worked with the great K. Curtis Lyle to chisel a poem from his many unpublished Western texts, O Sadness over rage O rage over sadness. My neighbor and I opened the poem and read through it while listening to the Tonks instrumentals. We picked some instrumentals that sound promising for the score, and we assigned some tentative titles to them from the poem.

Here is what we came up with!

"Back to a pumpkin seed"
(William Tonks)

"The man who met the red deer is here"
(William Tonks)

"They lost the bone fire stove"
(William Tonks)

"Relentless sameness"
(William Tonks)

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

The crow blows down the gap in the wind
Frontier fiddle concerto by Barbara Harbach for silent Western
Six Chirps Smith fiddle tunes for a silent Western score
"Alcohol and Used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett
From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

Shooting a sex scene in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy on Pridefest day

2011-06-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

Today we pulled off a shoot for our movie Go South for Animal Index in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, which has just enough leafy fenceline to suggest a fence around a military base in a remote location. The scene I wanted to shoot was a soldier paying for and having sex with a whore who works the fenceline around the base.

John Parker is our soldier.

D'Mari Martinez played the whore.

We had trouble casting the whore role at the last minute, after a couple of actors backed out. In case we were shooting without the whore character, I lined up some other characters who could interact with our soldier along the fenceline. Martin Sophia is a recent recruit to play one of the tribal men who lives near the base.

Our crew for the shoot was Laurent Torno III, director of photography, and V "Elly" Smith.

John and Martin were the first actors on location, so we shot them walking along the fenceline and walking past one another.

The shooting script calls for lots of walking and passing shots to establish a complex, interconnected world of military base, bush, tribal encampment and uranium (zombie) mine. This approximates the actual world of Los Alamos, a secret military base built on a former Hopi mesa surrounded by tribal peoples and not far from uranium minds worked by Navajo.

I'm amused we are able to create some of this tricky illusion in the courtyard of a bar that has things like giant paintings of beers on the wall that can never enter any of our shots without ruining everything. Martin is from Kenya, by the way, and his costume is traditional; the drum was made by my brother in law, a traditional craftsman from Ghana.

The motivation of the soldier character is pretty clear -- he is out to get laid. The tribal man, on the other hand, is on his way to a healing ceremony. He is moving toward the spirit like the soldier is moving toward the flesh. The main action of the tribe in the movie is to conduct a series of healing ceremonies for a sick child.

The hat is a St. Louis original -- Robert Van Dillen made it for our Art Invitational to The Sydney Highrise Variations. The hat is actually a work of art titled "At apogee". I like it for this costume because it incorporates feathers. Our tribal people in the movie are a collage of native peoples who mined uranium for the atomic bomb project. This includes native Africans (though not Kenyans) and native Americans, all of whom worked feathers into their sacred headdresses.

Our shoot was complicated in an amusing way by the need to get a parade float out of the same courtyard where we were shooting. The Pridefest parade was today, and Atomic Cowboy had a gang of friends come by to take out the Grovefest float. Atomic Cowboy co-owner Jim Kellogg is in the rear in the red shirt. Jim has been a great ally of Poetry Scores.

Our shoot was minimally affected by them making their merry way onto the street and toward the parade. The other Atomic Cowboy co-owner Chip Schloss brings up the rear here.

I also called George Malich to come out and play his priest character. I wanted the priest to walk past the soldier, tribal guy and whore. This was in a way filler; in case I didn't cast the whore part at the zero hour, I would have found more things for the priest to do. Between actually having the whore character after all and a losing a bit of time to parade float logistics, I wasted George's time today. We never shot him. It's a shame, and I feel bad about it.

The very good news, however, is we did shoot the entire range of motion for a difficult scene, the soldier/prostitute trick scene. The actions opens with the whore preening.

We all felt D'Mari did a good job of establishing her character as a desirable sex object advertising her services.

Laurent's experience shooting fashion was a great assist in explaining to D'Mari how to act with her shoes. The bad news there is that we destroyed these nice shoes having her grind them in the gravel.

We were very limited in shot setup by a stage that the guys at Atomic Cowboy understandably did not want to move for the occasion. John walked into the frame from the other side of the stage, though we could not see the stage in any shot. Notice in the corner an idol where we would have shot the priest and tribal guy if we didn't have a whore actor for the day.

I didn't shoot a still of their simulated sex act, but here is Laurent showing them a take.

You can double-click on these images to enlarge them. John is having an interesting reaction to his scene here.

The Pridefest parade floaters returned while we were shooting the sex scene. Fortunately, Elly had some great long shots of the soldier and whore rutting by then. Here Laurent shoots tight with the parade truck behind him as D'Mari prepares to leave the soldier lying on the ground after he has satisfied himself.

The scene ends with the soldier lying on the ground having a smoke alone. John smoked himself sick. I liked the way the soldier looked dead lying there.

His helmet and gun made an interesting tableaux against a Buddhist sculpture in the Atomic Cowboy courtyard. Oppenheimer, who ran the physics side of the military bomb shop, was a student of Oriental religions, so this works as a deep inside joke for anyone who notices this rock is more than just a rock.

Pouring wax into the ears of stuffed donkeys with Salvador Dali

2011-06-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

When I was carrying on about a scene from our movie Blind Cat Black opening for Luis Bunuel at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, a card-carrying St. Louis Surrealist quietly objected.

My friend Andrew Torch pointed out that on one of the two films The Pulitzer was screening with the local silent shorts, Un Chien Andalou, Bunuel shares filmmaking credit with Salvador Dali.

I told Andy I had planned to come back, actually, and go into all of that. So I have come back to go into all of that.

In My Last Sigh, probably the best filmmaker's memoir I've read, Bunuel tells us about his collaboration with Dali on what has become the definitive Surrealist film.

When I arrived to spend a few days at Dali's house in Figueras, I told him about a dream I'd had in which a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor blade slicing through an eye. Dali immediately told me that he'd seen a hand crawling with ants in a dream he'd had the previous night.

"And what if we started right there and made a film?" he wondered aloud.

Bunuel and Dali each dreamt one of the two central images of the film, and it was Dali who suggested they turn the images into a film. Bunuel has a clear and rational account of their method in writing this wonderfully irrational film.

Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.

They ended up with a film scenario Bunuel knew no one in the industry would finance, so he put the touch on his dear mother. God knows good mothers are owed an immense debt for keeping their weird sons in business until the industry catches up with them.

Bunuel's account of shooting the film (over two weeks in 1928) speaks to the way I like to make movies: "The filming took two weeks; there were only five or six of us involved, most of the time no one quite knew what he was doing."

The number of people involved on set ranged from five to six because Dali was only intermittently involved in the shoot: "Dali arrived on the set a few days before the end," Bunuel writes, "and spent most of his time pouring wax into the ears of stuffed donkeys."

Typing up these quotes from an unglued paperback of My Last Sigh I read half to death on a trip to Africa, I am struck by something. Bunuel's never-to-be-forgotten image of the razor blade slicing the eye was his association from a different image that he actually had seen in his dream: "a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half."

Last night, The Pulitzer screened the Bunuel films (and one of three reels of local shorts) in its open-air courtyard, projected against a building. I liked that atmosphere very, very much. Especially last night, when the St. Louis sky overhead was rippled with clouds.

In the scene where the razor blade slices the eye, as usual, I looked away from the film. This time, I looked up into the clouds.

*

The film event, a coolaboration with Cinema St. Louis, was organized in connection to The Pulitzer's current show, Dreamscapes, which is a heart-breaker and brain-tickler and a half.

Poetry Scores opens for Luis Bunuel at The Pulitzer

2011-06-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Poetry Scores is opening for Luis Bunuel!

This Friday, June 24, a scene from our first movie Blind Cat Black (2007) will screen at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts before a Bunuel double feature: Un Chien Andalou (1928) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

Aaron AuBuchon, lead editor on Blind Cat Black, is in a bewildered state of ecstasy. A movie project he took on based on a pharoah he had tattooed on one of his biceps is now the opening act for two of his favorite films ever made.

Aaron edited the segment from our movie, "This monstrous traveler in hashish," that will screen Friday at the Pulitzer. It was selected by Cinema St. Louis as one of the locally made "short, silent films which include dream-related content" that will screen between 8 and 9 p.m. Friday, "projected in loops on surfaces outside at the Pulitzer".

It was a contest, actually. At 9 p.m. the winner (Brendan Leahy, for “The Tower”) will be awarded $500, then it's on to the masterworks of Bunuel.

I entered this scene from our movie as a short with "dream-related content" because it could work a stand-alone short (at 2:02) and Aaron did edit it as a dream. The contest form I filled out called for a "Description". I filled in: "Dream -- or zombie orgy?"

As a Poetry Scores movie, Blind Cat Black was written, shot and edited to a poetry score we already had produced to the Turkish poem of that name (presented in the elegant English translation by Murat Nemet-Nejat). We produce our scores as a sequence of stand-alone songs, and the music to "This monstrous traveler in hashish" was licensed from Latif Bolat.

Aaron took several hours of footage shot by the ever-alusive Chizmo on Super Bowl Sunday, 2006, at CBGB on South Grand and edited it into this piece all on his lonesome. My shooting script was simple, in its own way, and made no mention of a dream.

The script called for our protagonist, The Absent Minded Tightrope Walker (the hip-hop grinder Toyy Davis), to wake up on a pile of corpses. Her lover (the R&B star Bradd Young) finds her on the pile of corpses. They make love. As their lovemaking becomes more intense, the corpses gradually come alive in a zombie orgy.

I don't know why Aaron edited the scene to look like it could have been a dream. Maybe his pharoah tattoo knows. But I like what he did with my concept, and his decision made it possible for this scene to become one of 22 local movies that will open for two of his favorite-ever films on Friday night.

*

Dream Sequences: Film Night at the Pulitzer with Cinema St. Louis goes down (and around and around, at least the local short loop) 8 p.m. Friday, June 24 at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Blvd. Like dreams, it's free.

Atomic Cowboy as whore's fence, Army commissary, Los Alamos office

2011-06-20T19:08:00.000-07:00

I recently read Conquest of the Useless, the journals that Werner Herzog kept while making the film Fitzcarraldo. It's a great read about one of my favorite films. It made me want to watch Fitzcarraldo again. Watching the film again made me wonder why Herzog put his cast and crew through such hell to make this movie. He insisted they shoot in the Amazon. As a result, people crashed and burned in plane flights across the jungle, contracted malaria, and were impaled on the arrows of angry tribesmen. And in the end, most of the film could have been shot along any leafy river, if not in Herzog's backyard in L.A.

We started shooting our movie Go South for Animal Index in Cuba. That's Cuba, Missouri. Okay, it's not a distant malarial country with hostile pre-industrial natives. But it is a long drive for a volunteer cast and crew. The location there, a farm owned by friends of ours, is pretty rugged. It's a long drive up a rough road that requires four-wheel-drive, and there is a lot of real estate to cover on the farm between locations and home base, making it possible to lose an hour in simply relaying messages back and forth.

I love shooting there, but the director is always more invested in making a movie, better prepared to endure hardship and expense, than the cast and crew, even in a collective endeavor like Poetry Scores. I've felt compelled to find more convenient locations for as many shoots as I can. Reading Herzog's book about making Fitzacarraldo made me realize that less rugged and remote in location need not translate into less rugged and wild on screen.

So I was at Atomic Cowboy recently to produce a public event for a friend. Walking around the courtyard of this oh so conveniently situated venue, I realized I was looking at a leafy fenceline.

(When I shot these reference images my wife went along to add human scale, as requested by Laurent Torno III, our direct of photography.)

There are major storylines in our movie involving leafy fencelines. I have spent a lot of time in the wilds of Cuba looking for leafy fencelines. Here is one, I realized, that would probably work for the scene where the soldier wanders off the military base bomb factory, Lost Almost, and finds temporary comfort in the arms of a whore who lingers around the base. (My wife was not cast as the whore.)

There are tribal people living on the fringe of the base in our movie, just as there were at the historical Los Alamos. (My wife, in fact, plays a tribal person.) It's a little over the top, but Atomic Cowboy even has a tribal idol the soldier could wander past on his way to some action.

When I turned around from the fence at Atomic Cowboy, thiking about movie locations, I was looking at the outdoors bar at Atomic Cowboy. Given its mode of construction (Quonset hut), this could so easily be a military base comissary.

Our movie needs a military base commissary! Another soldier orders a hamburger there, which he then trades for moonshine with the tramp who lives in the woods.

The commissary has funky tile we'd need to mask, or accept in its spectacular weirdness -- all wrong for a military base, but maybe all right for a military base in a silent zombie movie based on a highly conceptual poem (by Stefene Russell).

This bike would have to come down, though it's arguably period.

Just today, when I was shooting these reference images, I noticed in the corner of the Quonset hut at Atomic Cowboy an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.

Our movie needs an old-fashioned wood-burning stove! At the actual Los Alamos, the base's executive secretary (aka the Atomic Lady) used the wood-burning stove in her office to burn secret documents, which was a daily occurrence at a place that, at the time, officially did not exist.

We are making a silent movie based on a long poem that should import no (or very little) language other than the poem into the movie. That means no intertitles to set the scene or move the narrative along. In a purely visual medium, burning by hand documents shown to be secret is a great way to suggest the secrecy of the environment, so I plan to rely a lot on this.

The stove will be behind the secretary's desk, which will be a focal point in the movie. During the intake scenes, the secretary is flanked the general who runs the military side of the base and the physicist who runs the nucleur bomb shot. The sightline away from the desk, shooting the recruits coming in, is not at all great. We'd want to line up soldiers back there, or some plywood painted grey, to mask the shot.

This is a crucial location in our movie, and I found a great candidate for it in St. Clair, Missouri, on property owned by Donny Blake and family. St. Clair is closer than Cuba, but not nearly as close as Atomic Cowboy on the near South Side.

I'll be tempted to try to make this interior work for the Los Alamos office. The exit of the intake office needs to lead to the exterior in St. Clair, which leads to a perfect walk down to the shed we are using as a bomb shop. The exit at Atomic Cowboy:

The exterior in St. Clair:

Lots more pictures of the St. Clair location for Lost Almost are over here. It is a fabulous location, though matching its exterior to the interior at Atomic Cowboy would require some work and luck. It helps that the Atomic Cowboy interior does not exit from this angle to a Quonset hut exterior!

Another problem. All three of these locations in the same tavern's courtyard -- whore's fence, commisary, and intake office -- would need to appear in the movie as three separate universes that are not this directly physically connected.

We can shoot tight on the fence and make this work for that scene. Though we'd need to shoot tight in between these two telephone poles, which can't appear. (None of the other junk would be in the courtyard for the shoot.)

Looking out from the commissary you see a similar leafy fence to what is in the soldier and whore shot.

I can live with that. It would be the same flora anyway, on the base and outside it. Also, we can stack up soldiers behin Pfc. Sack when he places his hamburger order.

Oh, and Buddha would have to go from the commissary, though he could pop back up in Opje's (Oppenheimer's) home, if we can borrow it for the day.

Some of this is supposed to happen, I would say, as fate looked down from the drink specials board as we left today.

I know, Atomic Cowboy, Manhattan Project -- it's not such a shocking coincidence. That's why we held our early meetings for the movie at Atomic Cowboy. Which is why it makes so damn much sense to shoot some of it here!

Mad Art's kitchen as zombie uranium mill

2011-05-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted the good news that we have found a location for the zombie uranium mine we need for our movie Go South for Animal Index, a fable of Los Alamos, of the building of the Bomb. We also now have a location for the zombie* uranium mill: the kitchen at our own Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis, host venue for the Annual Poetry Scores Art Invitational.

Milling raw uranium into fissionable material was, in reality, a massive industrial process that required the construction of a facility the size of an entire town in Tennessee. We are making a silent movie on no budget in the style of a fable, so we are taking matters into our own hands, or into the hands of our zombie uranium millers.

My concept is to take something granular that looks like it were chipped from a mine and then turn that into something that looks like cornbread (yellowcake uranium), which would then be turned into something that looks like plum pulp (because Richard Rhodes writes that the plutonium that went into the first nuclear bombs was about the size and color of a plum).

For this, I figured, we need a nice-sized kitchen that would accommodate four to eight zombie uranium millers. We will basically supply them with foodstuffs that could result in something that looks like cornbread and something that looks like plum pulp, and let them have something of an experimental zombie food fight.

We have now found that kitchen -- and in proprietor Ron Buchuele, we may even have another zombie uranium miller.

We can get a nice long shot from this angle, and only need to move the fan and the clock. Zombies tell no time and need no fan-blown breezes.

A longer shot. The stuff under the table needs to go, too.

We can shoot in from another angle as well. Trashcan comes out.

This angle nicely permits a glimpse into a jail cell (Mad Art is a renovated police station). I say we staff the uranium mill with some solidiers and have them hang out in the cell when they aren't watching the undead do their thing.

Let's take a look around the space. There are windows we'd need to mask from the outside so the changing light doesn't mess with our shoot.

We are stuck with the dry erase board, but can draw some nuclear physics on there, which will help tie the uranium mill to the bomb shop at Lost Almost (Los Alamos).

Logo on the vent needs to be masked with "debased cogs" logo. Our movie is based on a poem by the same name by Stefene Russell; "debased cogs" is her phrase for uranium workers.

Love the green paint, almost as much as the silver freezers.

Love the grimy working stoves.

"Vulcan" is so primal I say we leave the logo.

I talked Ron through my concept for the shoot, and he said for the granular thing the zombies bring in as if from the uranium mine, we should use couscous (rather than corn meal, my idea) because it will be easier to mold into shapes. So we got out some couscous. I like the way it looks. More granular than corn meal.

I see zombies playing with couscous in my mind's eye now. Now where do I get a whole bunch of cheap (or free) couscous?
*

* Zombie. Why zombies?

For the first poetry scores movie, Blind Cat Black, lead editor Aaron AuBuchon suggested we use zombies when I was looking for a visual element to evoke the Surrealist style of Ece Ayhan's poem (and Murat Nemet-Nejat's English translation). I liked the idea. When I put it into practice, I noticed a huge change. It used to be, when I told people I was making a silent movie, they quietly excused themselves. But when I started telling people I was making a silent zombie movie, they bought a round of beers and we talked for five hours. There was no turning back.

Also, the more I thought about the poems we had scored or were scoring, which would be the basis for our silent movies, I could easily imagine a set of zombie characters in every one. Let's face it. In every story ever told, there is a character or a set of characters that is the living dead, understood in one way or another. Though I have come to make a distinction -- we don't make silent zombie movies, we make silent movies with zombies. Zombies are just one of many elements we use, like poetry, music, the narrative structure and technique of the fable, and St. Louis.

Crystal City Underground as zombie uranium mine

2011-05-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

This year Poetry Scores is finishing a movie, Go South for Animal Index. Like all of our movies, it is a silent movie with zombies (as opposed to a silent zombie movie). Our zombies in this movie are uranium miners, millers, and couriers. That's because our movie is drawn from Stefene Russell's poem of the same name, which we already have set to music (we are now shooting and editing to that poetry score), and it's a poem about the Bomb.

We need to shoot uranium miners, millers, and couriers. So we need a uranium mine and mill, and some passages between mine and mill, and more passages between mill and bomb shop. We are starting to find what we need.

Dawn Majors, who is helping us to shoot the movie, took me out to Crystal City Underground, an old sand mine in Crystal City. This is pretty amazing, since we want our zombies to come out of the mine with something that looks like corn meal. They will be trundling it out in wheelbarrows. When it occurred to me that it would cost a lot of money to buy a wheelbarrow full of corn meal, I figured out we could fill up a wheelbarrow of sand then just dust that with corn meal. Well, our mine has plenty of sand.

Further, we need the illusion of mass production, though we only want to shoot a limited amount of action. So it would be perfect if our mine has visible evidence of completed work of the kind we need to simulate completing. Our mine has that, too.

It has a pile of sandbags. So we can shoot our zombies chipping away at the walls, and shake something that looks like corn meal coming off the walls. Then shoot the zombies bagging the corn meal, and putting the bags on this pile of sandbags. They will then fill wheelbarrows from the pile and trundle them out of the mine.

A wider shot of our zombie miner workspace. My photos are not great. There also are endless passageways in the mine to shoot the zombies trundling down, though my pictures don't really show them off. Did I mention the mine is wired for electricity and has plenty of lights? Our mine is wired for electricity and has plenty of lights.

Our mine also has a large underground lake, but it doesn't really fit this movie. Next time.

We need to get our zombies out of the mine. This is what one appraoch to the best exit looks like. Not bad. The other approach looks better, but my pictures look worse.

This is the exterior the zombies will emerge from. Probably we will need to shoot tighter so we don't see these trucks (see below).

There is some trashy looking stuff in the exterior we'd have to live with or laboriously move, like these bricks.

Also, a truck bed with a logo, which we would have to mask (perhaps with a "Debased Cogs"* logo; see above) or shoot around.

We would also need to mask the logo on this truck, which doesn't run anymore. I guess we'd also need to explain why the zombies don't drive trucks instead of trundle wheelbarrows. Come to think of it, we will need to shoot around the trucks.

We need the zombies to trundle away from the mine, toward the mill. This road will come in handy for that.

We also have a bridge to play with. Nice river below I should have shot. This is great, because we have rivers in other segments of the movie.

We also need a road lined with barbed wire for people driving in and out of the bomb shop, the military base, Lost Almost. Crystal City Underground has that.

I've been fantastizing about a long fence line like this where we can control traffic. Got it.

At the moment, the mine also tornado shelters which would make perfect zombie homes.

Or a perfect zombie village.
Pretty good day on the location scout, eh? And there's more! (To be continued.)
* "Debased Cogs": In a poetry score, we set to music every line in a poem; our movies are silents shot and edited to these scores. In Go South for Animal Index, Stefene Russell writes:

There are no alchemists, only opportunists
And beneath them the debased cogs
Who bear wheelbarrows, packed full of lightning.

The "debased cogs" in our movie are the grunt workers on the bomb project, the zombies.

Praying for Japan with Brad Gibson and Anonymous

2011-03-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

About two years ago, while in Seattle for a journalism conference, a friend of a friend took me out to a local gig, helping me look for someone to write songs with while I was in town. It was a fun night out with good local music, but produced no Seattle songwriting partner.

Until now.

I went to the pub that night in Seattle to see one band, but went home (as often happens) thinking about another. I was particularly taken with the drummer, Bradley Gibson. I dumped a bunch of Poetry Scores projects on this guy, knowing that somehow, someday, I would try to work with him.

Turns out it might be he who is working with me. The message came today.

I've got a new song that I'm really jazzed about. Not being a wordsmith, I thought I'd throw it your direction and see if something stuck with you. Let me know what you think!

http://bradgibson.com/news/entry/healing-for-japan/

Thanks,
Brad

I am a now or never guy. I listened to the song. It's really beautiful. Since it's a healing song for Japan, in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, I thought to score a traditional Japenese text with it.

Thanks to Twitter, which is also how Brad and I keep in touch, I recently read this great essay about protective children spirits in medieval Japan. I have been wanting to make some use of it, and here was my chance.

Rereading the essay, I found this passage about healing:

He (the prime minister) said, “While I was asleep, I was just dreaming that fearsome demons were inﬂicting all manner of tortures on me when a boy with his hair done in a bun on each side and carrying a wand came in the direction of the inner gate and drove the demons off with the wand, till they scattered and ran away. When I asked him who he was, he said, ‘A certain priest of the Gokuraku-ji, grieving over your illness, has been beside the inner gate ever since this morning, praying for you by zealously reciting the Ninnō Sutra, the scripture he has recited for many years. As a tutelary spirit watching over him, I have driven off these evil demons which were afﬂicting you.’ At that point I woke up, and afterwards felt quite well, just as if I had been wiped clean of an illness.”

It is taken from Uji shūi Monogatari, a 13th century collection of Japanese tales.

I thought that might work. I pared it down to a lyric, pulling out a line for refrain and title that seemed to match the feel and intent of the music.

"Praying for you"

The man said, “While I was asleep,
I was dreaming
that demons were inﬂicting
tortures on me

Then a boy with his hair
done in a bun
came carrying a wand
and drove the demons away.

When I asked the boy
who he was, he said,
"A holy man grieving
over your illness, has been

praying for you.

As a tutelary spirit watching
over this holy man,
I have driven off these demons
that were afﬂicting you.’

At that point I woke up,
and afterwards felt quite well,
as if I had been wiped clean,
wiped clean of an illness.”

The author is unknown, Anonymous, though the translator, Douglas E. Mills, gets a credit, if Brad uses these words. I'd be happy to take one, too, but the Poetry Scores concept hasn't exactly crept into our concepts of music publishing. We have a tradition of crediting the arrangers of other people's music, but not other people's words.

One of the things I love best about the Poetry Scores approach is you get to write songs with people from other cultures and centuries. Who knows what 13th century Japanese wordsmith will be working with Brad, if he tries to make these words work? As for Douglas Mills, it took some sleuthing, but I found a chronicle of Fifty Years of Japanese at Cambridge University. Douglas Mills' memoir starts at page 58.

*

Prayerful image from Gokuraku-ji (mentioned in the passage the lyric is taken from) from Lissette's Picasa album and belongs to her, not me.

In David Clewell's dream, Coleman Hawkins, in his new book, and my basement

2011-02-05T22:36:00.000-08:00

The new David Clewell book is out! It's called Taken Somehow by Surprise, is published by University of Wisconsin Press (which has done right by Clewell), and I will have a lot to say about it.

First of all, it's a fantastic book by a major poet. Clewell is the current poet laureate of Missouri, and in this state, that actually means something. The only other poet laureate of Missouri was Walter Bargen, another extremely important and accomplished poet.

And then, Clewell is one of ours, here at Poetry Scores. In 2010 we scored his great long poem Jack Ruby's America (CDs still available), our fifth completed poetry score. That poem appeared previously in a Garlic Press limited edition that was botched by bad glue, so Clewell takes another crack at publishing the Ruby piece in this new volume.

Jack Ruby's America concludes Taken Somehow by Surprise, and if you know what is coming in detail (as I do, having set the damn thing to music and curated an art invitational around it), you can see how Clewell, in fact, structured this entire sequence around the Ruby poem.

This really is a major wow of a book; and as I have said, I will have a lot to say about it in this space. For now, I wanted to share a sheaf from the manuscript collection of The Skuntry Museum (which looks a lot like my basement). This is not technically a manuscript, it really is a signed typescript (with a dedication to moi, aka "my local King"); but that's close enough for a rock & roll manuscript collection.

I bring this up now because the Clewell poem I have in autographed typescript, "In My Dream, Coleman Hawkins," appears early in Taken Somehow by Surprise. Double-click on the image above, and you should be able to read the poem. Now, Coleman Hawkins is one of the few artists I love more than I love David Clewell, though truth be told this is not one of my favorite poems in this collection, nor is it particularly representive of the collection. But it is a very good poem, it belongs in this book, and this autographed and dedicated typescript is a prized possession.

About that Walt Whitman Birthplace button, now that you have double-click on the image. I used it to affix the Clewell signed typescript to my Leo tie dangling from the rafters of The Skuntry Museum. What is a Leo tie? The first poem we scored was Crossing America by Leo Connellan (CDs still in print). Leo, sadly, died while we were scoring the poem. I went to the posthumous yard sale and cleaned the widow and his grieving daughter out of Leo's old ties. I then gave a tie to many of the people who worked on the score, and kept one for myself

This poem by Clewell is pinned to my Leo tie by the Walt Whitman Birthplace button. Why? Well, Clewell loves our score to Crossing America and has bought many copies of the CD for gifts to friends. Leo's poem includes a long, tortuted meditation on Whitman. Clewell, too, knows his Whitman and writes like he knows it. Stefene Russell, another poet we have scored (Go South for Animal Index), and a fellow holder of a Leo tie, tells me she knows someone who calls Clewell "Walt Whitman" owing to an alleged physical resemblance.

The Walt Whitman Birthplace, by the way, is located on Long Island. I have visited, and that is where I got the button. The destination is recommended. May the cities of Portland, Maine and New Brunswick, New Jersey, locate and preserve the birthplaces of Leo Connellan and David Clewell!

Poetry Scores in 2011: "Incantata" by Paul Muldoon

2011-01-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

Image by Mary Farl Powers.

In 2011 Poetry Scores is working with Incantata by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon. The American composer Barbara Harbach has accepted our commission to compose an original score to the poem, which will be premiered 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Touhill Center for the Performing Arts. The Art Invitational to Incantata will be held Friday, November 11 (11/11/11) at Mad Art Gallery. Here is the text of Muldoon's poem, followed by our recording of his reading it.

Incantata

By Paul Muldoon
In memory of Mary Farl Powers

I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow

colder and dumber than a fish by Francisco de Herrera,
as I X-Actoed from a spud the Inca
glyph for a mouth: thought of that first time I saw your pink
spotted torso, distant-near as a nautilus,
when you undid your portfolio, yes indeedy,
and held the print of what looked like a cankered potato
at arm’s length – your arms being longer, it seemed, than Lugh’s.

Even Lugh of the Long (sometimes the Silver) Arm
would have wanted some distance between himself and the army-worms
that so clouded the sky over St Cloud you’d have to seal
the doors and windows and steel
yourself against their nightmarish déjeuner sur l'herbe:
try as you might to run a foil
across their tracks, it was to no avail;
the army-worms shinnied down the stove-pipe on an army-worm rope.

I can hardly believe that, when we met, my idea of ‘R and R’
was to get smashed, almost every night, on sickly-sweet Demarara
rum and Coke: as well as leaving you a grass widow
(remember how Krapp looks up ‘viduity’?),
after eight or ten or twelve of those dark rums
it might be eight or ten or twelve o’clock before I’d land
back home in Landseer Street, deaf and blind
to the fact that not only was I all at sea, but in the doldrums.

Again and again you’d hold forth on your own version of Thomism,
your own Summa
Theologiae that in everything there is an order,
that the things of the world sing out in a great oratorio:
it was Thomism, though, tempered by La Nausée,
by His Nibs Sam Bethicket,
and by that Dublin thing, that an artist must walk down Baggott
Street wearing a hair-shirt under the shirt of Nessus.

‘D'éirigh me ar maidin,’ I sang, ‘a tharraingt chun aoinigh mhóir’:
our first night, you just had to let slip that your secret amour
for a friend of mine was such
that you’d ended up lying with him in a ditch
under a bit of whin, or gorse, or furze,
somewhere on the border of Leitrim, perhaps, or Roscommon:
‘gamine,’ I wanted to say, ‘kimono’;
even then it was clear I’d never be at the centre of your universe.

Nor should I have been, since you were there already, your own Ding
an sich, no less likely to take wing
than the Christ you drew for a Christmas card as a pupa
in swaddling clothes: and how resolutely you would pooh pooh
the idea I shared with Vladimir and Estragon,
with whom I’d been having a couple of jars,
that this image of the Christ-child swaddled and laid in the manger
could be traced directly to those army-worm dragoons.

I thought of the night Vladimir was explaining to all and sundry
the difference between geantrai and suantrai
and you remarked on how you used to have a crush
on Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, and Vladimir went to brush
the ash off his sleeve with a legerdemain
that meant only one thing – ‘Why does he put up with this crap?’ –
and you weighed in with ‘To live in a dustbin, eating scrap,
seemed to Nagg and Nell a most eminent domain.’

How little you were exercised by those tiresome literary intrigues,
how you urged me to have no more truck
than the Thane of Calder,
with a fourth estate that professes itself to be ‘égalitaire’
but wants only blood on the sand: yet, irony of ironies,
you were the one who, in the end,
got yourself up as a retiarius and, armed with net and trident,
marched from Mount Street to the Merrion Square arena.

In the end, you were the one who went forth to beard the lion,
you who took the DART line
every day from Jane’s flat in Dun Laoghaire, or Dalkey,
dreaming your dream that the subterranean Dodder and Tolka
might again be heard above the hoi polloi
for whom Irish ‘art’ means a High Cross at Carndonagh or Corofin
and The Book of Kells: not until the lion cried craven
would the poor Tolka and the poor Dodder again sing out for joy.

I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit, thin as a rake,
your hand moving in such a deliberate arc
as you ground a lithographic stone
that your hand and the stone blurred to one
and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl,
who took your failing, ink-stained hand
in her failing, ink-stained hand
and together you ground down that stone by sheer force of willl.

I remember you pooh poohing, as we sat there on the ‘Enterprise’,
my theory that if your name is Powers
you grow into it or, at least,
are less inclined to tremble before the likes of this bomb-blast
further up the track: I myself was shaking like a leaf
as we wondered whether the I.R.A. or the Red
Hand Commandos or even the Red
Bridages had brought us to a standstill worthy of Hamm and Clov.

Hamm and Clov; Nagg and Nell; Watt and Knott;
the fact is that we’d been at a standstill long before the night
things came to a head,
long before we’d sat for half the day in the sweltering heat
somewhere just south of Killnasaggart
and I let slip a name – her name – off my tongue
and you turned away (I see it now) the better to deliver the sting
in your own tail, to let slip your own little secret.

I thought of you again tonight, thin as a rake, as you bent
over the copper plate of ‘Emblements’,
its tidal wave of army-worms into which you all but disappeared:
I wanted to catch something of its spirit
and yours, to body out your disembodied vox
clamantis in deserto, to let this all-too-cumbersomen device
of a potato-mouth in a potato-face
speak out, unencumbered, from its long, low, mould-filled box.

I wanted it to speak to what seems always true of the truly great,
that you had a winningly inaccurate
sense of your own worth, that you would second-guess
yourself too readily by far, that you would rally to any cause
before your own, mine even,
though you detected in me a tendency to put
on too much artificiality, both as man and poet,
which is why you called me ‘Polyester’ or ‘Polyurethane’.

That last time in Dublin, I copied with a quill dipped in oak-gall
onto a sheet of vellum, or maybe a human caul,
a poem for The Great Book of Ireland: as I watched the low
swoop over the lawn today of a swallow
I thought of your animated talk of Camille Pissarro
and André Derain's The Turning Road, L'Estaque:
when I saw in that swallow’s nest a face in a mud-pack
from that muddy road I was filled again with a profound sorrow.

You must have known already, as we moved from the ‘Hurly Burly’
to McDaid’s or Riley’s,
that something was amiss: I think you even mentioned a homeopath
as you showed off the great new acid-bath
in the Graphic Studio, and again undid your portfolio
to lay out your latest works; I try to imagine the strain
you must have been under, pretending to be as right as rain
while hearing the bells of a church from some long-flooded valley.

From the Quabbin reservoir, maybe, where the banks and bakeries
of a dozen little submerged Pompeii reliquaries
still do a roaring trade: as clearly as I saw your death-mask
in that swallow’s nest, you must have heard the music
rise from the muddy ground between
your breasts as a nocturne, maybe, by John Field;
to think that you thought yourself so invulnerable, so inviolate,
that a little cancer could be beaten.

You must have known, as we walked through the ankle-deep clabber
with Katherine and Jean annd the long-winded Quintus Calaber,
that cancer had already made such a breach
that you would almost surely perish:
you must have thought, as we walked through the woods
along the edge of the Quabbin,
that rather than let some doctor cut you open
you’d rely on infusions of hardock, hemlock, all the idle weeds.

I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain,
of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart
that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed and leaden.

I wanted the mouth in this potato-cut
to be heard far beyond the leaden, rain-glazed roofs of Quito,
to be heard all the way from the southern hemisphere
to Clontarf or Clondalkin, to wherever your sweet-severe
spirit might still find a toe-hold
in this world: it struck me then how you would be aghast
at the thought of my thinking you were some kind of ghost
who might still roam the earth in search of an earthly delight.

Youd be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale
of tears like a jump-suited jump-jet whose vapour-trail
unravels a sky: for there’s nothing, you’d say, nothing over
and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover
reflected in the thousand lakes; it seems that Minne-
sota itself means ‘sky-tinted water’, that the sky is a great slab
of granite or iron ore that might at any moment slip
back into the work-out sky-quarry, into the worked-out sky-mines.

To use the word ‘might’ is to betray you once too often, to betray
your notion that nothing’s random, nothing arbitrary:
the gelignite weeps, the hands fly by on the alarm clock,
the ‘Enterprise’ goes clackety-clack
as they all must; even the car hijacked that morning in the Cross,
that was preordained, its owner spread on the bonnet
before being gagged and bound or bound
and gagged, that was fixed like the stars in the Southern Cross.

The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime
because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim:
I crouch with Belacqua
and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacac-
ademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the ‘quaquaqua’
of that potato-mouth; that mouth as prim
and proper as it’s full of self-opprobrium,
with its ‘quaquaqua’, with its ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq’.

That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso
from all that’s left of an opera-house somewhere in Matto Grosso,
all that’s left of the bogweed and horehound and cuckoo-pint,
of the eighteen soldiers dead at Warrenpoint,
of the Black Church clique and the Graphic Studio claque,
of the many moons of glasses on a tray,
of the brewer-carts drawn by moon-booted drays,
of those jump-suits worn under your bottle-green worsted cloak.

Of the great big dishes of chicken lo mein and beef chow mein,
of what’s mine is yours and what’s yours mine,
of the oxlips and cowslips
on the banks of the Liffey at Leixlip
where the salmon breaks through the either/or neither/nor nether
reaches despite the temple-veil
of itself being rent and the penny left out overnight on the rail
is a sheet of copper when the mail-train has passed over.

Of the bride carried over the threshold, hey, only to alight
on the limestone slab of another threshold,
of the swarm, the cast,
the colt, the spew of bees hanging like a bottle of Lucozade
from a branch the groom must sever,
of Emily Post’s ruling, in Etiquette,
on how best to deal with the butler being in chaoots
with the cook when they’re both in cahoots with the chauffeur.

Of that poplar-flanked stretch of road between Leiden
and The Hague, of the road between Rathmullen and Ramelton,
where we looked so long and hard
for some trace of Spinoza or Amelia Earhart,
both of them going down with their engines on fire:
of the stretch of road somewhere near Urney
where Orpheus was again overwhelmed by that urge to turn
back and lost not only Eurydice but his steel-strung lyre.

Of the sparrows and finches in their bell of suet,
of the bitter-sweet
bottle of Calvados we felt obliged to open
somewhere near Falaise, so as to toast our new-found copains,
of the priest of the parish
who came enquiring about our ‘status’, of the hedge-clippers
I somehow had to hand, of him running like the clappers
up Landseer Street, of my subsequent self-reproach.

Of the remnants of Airey Neave, of the remnants of Mountbatten,
of the famous andouilles, of the famous boudins
noirs et blancs, of the barrel-vault
of the Cathedral at Rouen, of the flashlight, fat and roll of felt
on each of their sledges, of the music
of Joseph Beuy’s pack of huskies, of that baldy little bugger
mushing them all the way from Berncastel through Bacarrat
to Belfast, his head stuck with honey and gold-leaf like a mosque.

Of Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, with its gut-wrenching viola,
of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, of Frankie Valli’s,
of Braque’s great painting The Shower of Rain,
of the fizzy, lemon or sherbet-green Ranus ranus
plonked down in Trinity like a little Naugahyde pouffe,
of eighteen soldiers dead in Oriel,
of the weakness for a little fol-de-rol-de-rolly
suggested by the gap between the front teeth of the Wife of Bath.

Of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of Seurat’s
piling of tesserae upon tesserae
to give us a monkey arching its back
and the smoke arching out from a smoke-stack,
of Sunday afternoons in the Botanic Gardens, going with the flow
of the burghers of Sandy Row and Donegal
Pass and Andersonstown and Rathcoole,
of the army Landrover flaunt-flouncing by with its heavy furbelow.

Of Marlborough Park, of Notting Hill, of the Fitzroy Avenue
immortalized by Van ‘His real name’s Ivan’
Morrison, ‘and him the dead spit
of Padraic Fiacc’, of John Hewitt, the famous expat,
in whose memory they offer every year six of their best milch cows,
of the Bard of Ballymacarrett,
of every ungodly poet in his or her godly garret,
of Medhbh and Michael and Frank and Ciaran and ‘wee’ John Qughes.

Of the Belfast school, so called, of the school of hard knocks,
of your fervent eschewal of stockings and socks
as you set out to hunt down your foes
as implacably as the tóraidheacht through the Fews
of Redmond O’Hanlon, of how that ‘d’ and that ‘c’ aspirate
in tóraidheacht make it sound like a last gasp in an oxygen-tent,
of your refusal to open a vent
but to breathe in spirit of salt, the mordant salt-spirit.

Of how mordantly hydrochloric acid must have scored and scarred,
of the claim that boiled skirrets
can cure the spitting of blood, of that dank
flat somewhere off Morehampton Road, of the unbelievable stink
of valerian or feverfew simmering over a low heat,
of your sitting there, pale and gaunt,
with that great prescriber of boiled skirrets, Dr John Arbuthnot,
your face in a bowl of feverfew, a towel over your head.

Of the great roll of paper like a bolt of cloth
running out again and again like a road at the edge of a cliff,
of how you called a Red Admiral a Red
Admirable, of how you were never in the red
on either the first or the last
of the month, of your habit of loosing the drawstring of your purse
and finding one scrunched-up, obstreperous
note and smoothing it out and holding it up, pristine and pellucid.

Of how you spent your whole life with your back to the wall,
of your generosity when all the while
you yourself lived from hand
to mouth, of Joseph Beuys’s pack of hounds
crying out from their felt and fat ‘Atone, atone, atone’,
of Watt remembering the ‘Krak! Krek! Krik!’
of those three frogs’ karaoke
like the still, sad, basso continuo of the great quotidian.

Of a ground bass of sadness, yes, but also a sennet of hautboys
as the fat and felt hounds of Beuys O’Beuys
bayed at the moon over a caravan
in Dunmore East, I'm pretty sure it was, or Dungarvan:
of my guest appearance in your self-portrait not as a hidalgo
from a long line
of hidalgos but a hound-dog, a leanbh,
a dog that skulks in the background, a dog that skulks and stalks.

Of that self-portrait, of the self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn,
of all that’s revelation, all that’s rune,
of all that’s composed, all composed of odds and ends,
of that daft urge to make amends
when it’s far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter
of false trails and reversed horseshoe tracks
and the aniseed we took it in turn to drag
across each other’s scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder.

Of your avoidance of canned goods, in the main,
on account of the exceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly high risk of ptomaine,
of corned beef in particular being full of crap,
of your delight, so, in eating a banana as ceremoniously as Krapp
but flinging the skin over your shoulder like a thrush
flinging off a shell from which it’s only just managed to disinter
a snail, like a stone-faced, twelfth-century
FitzKrapp eating his banana by the mellow, yellow light of a rush.

Of the ‘Yes, let’s go’ spoken by Monsieur Tarragon,
of the early-ripening jardonelle, the tumorous jardon, the jargon
of jays, the jars
of tomato relish and the jars
of Victoria plums, absolutely de rigeur for a passable plum baba,
of the drawers full of balls of twine and butcher’s string,
of Dire Straits playing ‘The Sultans of Swing’,
of the horse’s hock suddenly erupting in those boils and buboes.

Of the Greek figurine of a pig, of the pig on a terracotta frieze,
of the sow dropping dead from some mysterious virus,
of your predilection for gammon
served with a sauce of coriander or cumin,
of the slippery elm, or the hornbeam or witch-, or even wych-,
hazel that’s good for stopping a haemor-
rhage in mid-flow, of the merest of mere
hints of elderberry curing everything from sciatica to a stitch.

Of the decree condemnator, the decree absolvitor, the decree nisi,
of Aosdána, of an chraobh cnuais,
of the fields of buckwheat
taken over by garget, inkberry, scoke – all names for pokeweed –
of Mother Courage, of Arturo Ui,
of those Sunday mornings spent picking at sesame
noodles and all sorts and conditions of dim sum,
of tea and ham sandwiches in the Nesbitt Arms hotel in Ardara.

Of the day your father came to call, of your leaving your sick-room
in what can only have been a state of delirium,
of how you simply wouldn’t relent
from your vision of a blind
watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate
governs everything from the honey-rust of your father’s terrier’s
eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears
in the furrow, of the furrows from which we can no more deviate

than they can from themselves, no more than the map of Europe
can be redrawn, than that Hermes might make a harp from his harpe,
than that we must live in a vale
of tears on the banks of the Lagan or the Foyle,
than that what we have is a done deal,
than that the Irish Hermes,
Lugh, might have leafed through his vast herbarium
for the leaf that had it within it, Mary, to anoint and anneal,

than that Lugh of the Long Arm might have found in the midst of lus
na leac or lus na treatha or Frannc-lus,
in the midst of eyebright, or speedwell, or tansy, an antidote,
than that this Incantata
might have you look up from your plate of copper or zinc
on which you’ve etched the row upon row
of army-worms, than that you might reach out, arrah,
and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink.

*

mp3

"Incantata"
(Paul Muldoon)
Performed by Paul Muldoon

Produced by Chris King
Recorded by Roy Francis Kasten

*

If it's distracting to read Muldoon's long lines on this blog, download Incantata as a Word document.

Incantata is copyrighted by Paul Muldoon; all rights reserved. It appears in The Annals of Chile (1994), a wonderful collection that should be owned by anyone who adores this poem.

*

Image by Mary Farl Powers.

Translating poetry into hats with Robert Van Dillen

2011-01-21T20:48:00.000-08:00

This week, I finally delivered the last piece from our 2010 Art Invitational. The piece was "Fedora sensation" by Robert Van Dillen. Like all pieces submitted for our Art Invitationals, it is titled from language in the poem we were scoring -- in this case, Jack Ruby's America by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell. At one point in the poem, Clewell says that Ruby -- who killed Oswald, who had been charged with killing John F. Kennedy -- was a "Fedora sensation".

The buyer was Julie Malone, who was nice enough to pose for me in her new work of art. Yeah, Jules is quite the work of art herself. She also is a talented artist and contributed a powerful piece of her own work to the same show: "He shimmies".

"Fedora sensation" is fourth hat that Robert Van Dillen has submitted to a Poetry Scores Art Invitational. In 2009 we scored The Sydney Highrise Variations by the Australian poet Les Murray. Robert's piece for that show was titled "At apogee," a clever title for going way vertical, like with a feather.

I bought "At apogee". In fact, Robert expected me to buy it, because I had bought the two previous hats he had made for our Art Invitationals, and he claims this hat was made with me in mind.

Those two previous hats were "Her black hats. Trussed up with astral flowers" (from the invitational to Go South for Animal Index, by the American poet Stefene Russell) and "Madness put on a porkpie hat" (from the invitational to Blind Cat Black by the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat). You can see them here piled up under "At apogee".

"Her black hats. Trussed up with astral flowers" is the dark one on the bottom that looks trussed up with astral flowers. I'd give you a better look at it, but it is currently missing in action, having been incorporated into a sculputure I made for my daughter Leyla Fern that was disassembled and its parts misplaced. I did find a crummy picture of this sculpture, though.

"Madness put on a porkpie hat" also has been incorporated into a sculpture, an homage to the late Hunter Brumfield III that Leyla titled "The Clown". Here is a detail that shows off the hat.

In 2011, we are scoring Incantata by the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon. I read the poem a few times tonight, looking for phrases that would make good titles for hats. Robert has indulged me, thus far, in letting me give him a title from the poem as a sort of commission. Here is what I got so far, from Incantata:

"Hidalgo"
"Potato"
"Red Hand Commandos"
"Self-portraits by Rembrandt"
"Hermes"

I'll try to remember to come back and write something about why I think these would make great hats!

*

The Art Invitational for Incantata will be held November 11, 2011 -- 11/11/11 -- at Mad Art Gallery.

The crow blows down the gap in the wind

2011-01-15T07:33:00.000-08:00

The image is borrowed from the Flickr of Jay J. Wilkie and belongs to him, not us.

The first time I played in a rock band at a public space, there was Tim McAvin, grinning under a superb sombrero. Somehow or another he has been there ever since; my next attack of insomnia, I'll figure out a Tim McAvin discography in connection to the evolution of bands and projects that is Poetry Scores.

Here lately, I reached out to the creative and reliable people I could think of, asking for source recordings to score a poem by the great K. Curtis Lyle. Tim, as usual, came through for me. I was expecting a recording sitting around on the shelf, something unused or insufficiently used, that we could reposition and retitle. But Tim is one of these protean creations, the good stuff just pours out of him; what he craves is a good excuse to shut it off or make some productive use of it. Because like the typical protean character, he was not born to be the secretary or executive manager of his own creativity.

So, Tim banged something out for us that afternoon. "Here's a little Western whatnot. Done this afternoon. Mix rough, have all files," Tim scrawled, in the email message that transported the sound file. He cooked up "a little Western whatnot," because the score we are working on has as its final destination a silent Western movie. Poetry Scores starts with a long poem, in this instance a new sequence of pre-existing K. Curtis Lyle poems and fragments we agreed to provisionally retitle O sadness over rage O rage over sadness, the beautiful title of one of the constituent poems.

Curtis was my go-to guy for a poem to score with the end result being a silent Western. First of all, he is from the west, from Los Angeles, and he has a wide, Western, sweeping perspective on things. There are big skies and dangerous mountains in Curtis' perspective, and windswept deserts, where poisonous snakes and scorpions live and die. Curtis' blood, too, is a medley of the American West -- of Indian and African and surely European, of gun slinger and arrow whistler -- and Curtis has deeply lived many of the spiritual crises and catharses associated with the literature and experience of the West in lucid and brilliant poems I have been reading and turning over in my mouth for twenty years.

So here is Tim's "little Western whatnot". Not sure where it will fit into the score, or if it will fit. The poet and I are coproducing the poetry score; and since I like everything I am posting up and I am posting up way more than we can use in a one-hour movie, Curtis is in essence getting the first cut. But I have provisionally titled this scrap of music by Tim with a scrap of poetry by Curtis from near where I think this piece might fit in.

Sound Files

"The crow blows down the gap in the wind"
(Tim McAvin)
Tim McAvin

*

Tim McAvin now is the songwriter and frontman for the brilliant post-punk rock band Karate Bikini.

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

Frontier fiddle concerto by Barbara Harbach for silent Western
Six Chirps Smith fiddle tunes for a silent Western score
"Alcohol and Used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett
From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

*

The image is borrowed from the Flickr of Jay J. Wilkie and belongs to him, not us.

Frontier fiddle concerto by Barbara Harbach for silent Western

2011-01-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

The image is borrowed from the Flickr of Cindy Tomczyk; it belongs to her, not us.

Barbara Harbach graciously accepted the first real Poetry Scores commission, to score Paul Muldoon's great elegy Incantata (the premiere is scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 30 at the Touhill).

Barbara is a "real" composer, in the sense that her work is widely performed and recorded by symphony orchestras and chamber groups. But she also has the right sort of spirit for improvisational, eclectic, inclusive characters like Poetry Scores.

So I feel comfortable tossing her ideas as readily as I toss them to my post-progressive rock innovator buddies on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, my rock star penpal from Northern Italy, the folk fiddlers of Central Illinois, and our bread and butter, the survivors of the St. Louis music scene.

Barbara has now pitched in not once but twice in response to my latest call for source recordings. The poet and I are poring over source recordings for scoring O sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle. We intend to come up with something that will work well musically as a silent Western, since our thing is to go from long poem to musical score to silent movie, and we want to make a silent Western.

Barbara works fast as a whip, so since posting up her Freedom Suite for String Quintet I have had to spread it around a little before circling back to the violin concerto she sent me. Most recently I posted some Chirps Smith old-time fiddle tunes; what could only be called frontier fiddle tunes. With Chirps in mind and ear, then, Barbara's Frontier Fancies for Violin and Orchestra should fit right in.

mp3s

Frontier Fancies for Violin and Orchestra
By Barbara Harbach

I.
Fiddleflirt
II.

Twilight Dream
III.
Dancedevil

Recorded by Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra; Kirk Trevor, conductor.

*

The poet and I are coproducing the score, and I have been liking Curtis' picks from my postings. For example, to the Chirps Smith selection, Curtis responded, "I especially liked 'Illinois Cotillion'. It has a certain poignancy in the cadence that I like very much. I'm thinking a certain amount of very slow tunes in the piece."

This violin concerto certainly fits the bill for "a certain amount of very slow tunes". All three movements of the piece come in at just over eleven minutes. So we could even incorporate all of it and still have fifty minutes or so to play with; we are finding that an hour is a nice time to work with for a Poetry Scores silent movie.

I have already broken Barbara into the idea of fragmenting her previously recorded work, provisionally retitling it, and incorporating it, collage-style, into larger musical patterns; and as I have said, she gets it. This could be fun.

*

Barbara Harbach's liner notes to Frontier Fancies for Violin and Orchestra are brief but to the point:

"This exuberant violin concerto features spirited interaction between violin and orchestra. Fiddleflirt is a dual of speed and energy. Twilight Dream is an evocative aria and lush respite before the wild tarantella of Dancedevil."

*

Frontier Fancies for Violin and Orchestra is published and copyrighted by Barbara Harbach with VivacePress, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2010. It is recorded by Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra on Orchestra Music of Barbara Harbach – Symphony, Reverie & Rhapsody, Vol. 1, MSR Classics 1252, Newtown, CT, 2007

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

Six Chirps Smith fiddle tunes for a silent Western score
"Alcohol and Used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett
From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

*

The image is borrowed from the Flickr of Cindy Tomczyk; it belongs to her, not us.

Six Chirps Smith fiddle tunes for a silent Western score

2011-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

We're scoring the poem O sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle, mostly because our movie unit wants to make a silent Western; and in the back-asswards way we do things, we start with the score and then go back and make the movie.

With music that would sound good in a silent Western always in the back of my mind, I put my paws on Down in Little Egypt by the Illinois fiddler Chirps Smith (Vigortone, 2003), and an awful lot of it sounded like the right stuff.

This record was given to me by my friend Jim Nelson, who played guitar on it and produced it (along with Chirps and Jeff Miller). Jim was sure Chirps would be okay with my posting some tunes and trying to work them into the score; and indeed when I checked with Chirps he said if it was okay with Jim then it was okay with him.

mp3s

"Amish Town"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Fred Campeau, banjo

"Old Missouri"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Jim Nelson, guitar
Fred Campeau, banjo

"Lost Indian"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Dave Landreth, gut-string banjo

"Bowling Green"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Jim Nelson, guitar
Fred Campeau, banjo

"Illinois Cotillion"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Jim Nelson, guitar
Curtis Buckhannon, mandocello

"California Waltz"

Chirps Smith, fiddle
Jim Nelson, guitar
Fred Campeau, banjo

All tunes traditional, arranged by Chirps Smith and borrowed by him from various sources detailed in the liner notes to Down in Little Egypt.

All 26 tunes on this record are fantastic; any lover of fiddle music would want to have a copy of it. It is available from the CD Baby link I have provided or from Vigortone Records.

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

"Alcohol and Used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett
From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

"Alcohol and used Father Peyote" with Mike Burgett

2010-12-31T12:54:00.000-08:00

["Peyote Healing" by J. Myztico Campo , rights reserved by artist.]

We're scoring the poem O sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle, and we have been rummaging for music in the key of Black Indian Cowboy Silent Western -- however you want to multiply construe any of those concepts.

Now comes along one Mike Burgett multiply construing concepts, with two blips of music for our consideration. Hours more like it from Mike, as I well know.

audio files
"Alcohol and used Father Peyote" *
(Mike Burgett)
Mike Burgett

"Dream burned butter" *
(Mike Burgett)
Mike Burgett

* I have given these songs provisional new titles taken verbatim from Curtis' poem. That is one of the ways to score a line of poem in a poetry score, to bestow it as a title onto an instrumental. Who knows how, where or if these pieces will actually find their way into the completed piece.

text

O sadness over rage O rage over sadness
By K. Curtis Lyle

*

The image is "Peyote Healing" by J. Myztico Campo, an artist we should try to involve in this project.

*

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem
Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score
Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

From car jam to lost rock bands to Black Indian Cowboy poem

2010-12-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

Good old 2010, a year that is justly maligned by so many, was really good for me. One of the good things that happened was my car stereo CD player gave out again. At approximately the same time, my car stereo cassette player kicked back in again, and I was suddenly thrown back upon the resources of my cassette collection.

This got me back into the groove of my college rock band cassette collection, the early recordings of the campus bands at Wash. U. in the later 1980s that I looked up to (really, idolized). I expect for this getting back into the groove with my campus band idols experience to be Bootblogged in extensive detail once I come up with the right way to go from old cassette to new media with a rich sound.

For now I have snagged very rough digital transfers of a few instrumental nuggets. The "digital transfer" process was homely indeed. I blasted the cassette from either my car stereo in the car, or my jambox in the bathroom, and recorded the "room" sound with a handheld reporter's gizmo that converts readily to a mono WAV sound file.

I grabbed rough snapshots of these three tracks because I thought they might find a new home in our score to the poem O sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle. We have been asking after and looking for music in the key of Black Indian Cowboy Silent Western, multiply construed.

The only and one K. Curtis Lyle has been scoring his own poetry pretty much exactly as long as I have been alive on Earth, so by inviting him to coproduce the score I knew I was contending with a mature and strong point of view for how to do such things. I have my work cut out for me, but I'll enjoy trying to convince Curtis that some of the lost college rock bands of my youth has a home in his poetry.

mp3s

"I stopped and looked into your eyes" *
(Joe Z. Armin)
The Skinnies

"He walked all the way from Montana" *
(Benjamin Herzon)
Butt of Jokes

"Across phantom prairie" *
(Benjamin Herzon)
Butt of Jokes

* Just for fun, I have given these songs provisional new titles taken verbatim from Curtis' poem. That is one of the ways to score a line of poem in a score, to bestow it as a title onto an instrumental.

While I think these make apt titles, who knows how, where or if these pieces will actually find their way into the completed score. They are all also candidates for sung text, for attaching some words from the poem as a lyric to sing.

Interestingly, I am in touch with the principal musicians from The Skinnies and Butt of Jokes (they even overlap on one guy, my cowriter and coproducer Matt Fuller). There is the chance I could write melodies to any of these and then get the original songwriter to record the new vocal over his old track!

**

Drawing of the dashboard of my car by Leyla Fern King and me.

**

OTHERS IN THIS SERIES

Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score

Spaghetti Western music for O sadness over rage O rage over sadness

Paul Casey is all over the internet, including right here

2010-12-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

The actor in this fragment of a scene, Paul Casey, does not use email or social media or the internet or metal utensils - it's just hunt, with blunt objects, and then gather, with bare hand, for Casey.

So posting this video here on the blog where I can find it is pretty much the only foolproof way I know to make sure I can find it the next time I am at a public house with Casey and one of these 21st century characters with the internet on their phones who can dial it up for him.

This is footage we shot for our movie Go South for Animal Index. This is only some of the footage we shot from this scene, and only taken from one of the three cameras on the shoot. (Not sure whose, but Laurent Torno III, V "Elly" Smith, Dawn Majors and Murphy Mark Shaw all shot that day.)

Lead editor Aaron AuBuchon slapped the edit together over some music from the score, just to shut up people like me who have been clamoring to see some footage.

We are divided, intenally, over the wisdom of showing rough cuts of raw footage like this, but Casey has been buttonholing me at public houses saying there is video of him "all over the internet"; and I feel it is incumbent upon me to document said footage in such a way that Casey, himself, the Luddite, might see it.

A trail of sheet music & 'Good Whiskey Blues'

2010-12-28T19:13:00.000-08:00

The next show at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is Dreamscapes. I pointed this out to my friends and asked to see their work in whatever media that deals with dreams.

I figured I would hear back from my friend Andrew Torch - he is a card-carrying member of the International Surrealist Group that traces lineage back to Breton; he almost only paints from dreams - and sure enough, Andy posted this image to me.

"'Good Whiskey Blues' was based on a dream..." Andy wrote.

"[Expletive] great!" I responded. "Want to write about the dream too?"

"I generally let my artwork speak for me," Andy wrote back. "This was a series of dreams over about a one year period, the trail of sheet-music actually morphed several times in various dreams from a large fabric and paper Chinese dragon (where about 6 people hold it up with poles and zig-zag it through a parade) to sheet-music and then back to a dragon..."

He added: "the Chinese-dragon version of this painting is scheduled to get painted some time this year."

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Dreamscapes, organized by Francesca Herndon-Consagra, senior curator at the Pulitzer, opens with a public reception on Friday, February 11 from 5–9 p.m. and is open through August 13. The Pulitzer (3716 Washington Blvd.) is open and free to the public Wednesdays 12–5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Barbara Harbach string quintet for Black Indian Cowboy score

2010-12-27T18:53:00.000-08:00

Poetry Scores has embarked on a score to the poem O sadness over rage O rage over sadness by K. Curtis Lyle.

On this one, we started with the idea for a movie: we want to make a silent Western. So, we needed to find a poem that would yield a score that would yield an Indian and Cowboy picture, so I asked K. Curtis Lyle , our resident Black Indian Cowboy.

I put out a call for source recordings to consider for the score, and my buddy from northern Italy Andrea Van Cleef coughed up some new authentic Spaghetti Western guitar workouts.

Then I heard from the composer Barbara Harbach. Got to love a composer who responds as fast as the scruffy rockers of northern Italy!

Here is an mp3 of the first movement from my Freedom Suite for String Orchestra, "I. Harriet Scott – A Strong Woman". It has a mid-19th century sound that has folk-like melodies that might fit your cowboy theme. It will be recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in March. The other two movements might work also. No problem if it does not fit…

Barbara is unique.

I begged the other two movements from her as well, with permission to post them up. So here they are. These are Barbara's compositions on the computer software she uses; just imagine what the orchestral versions will sound like when we get to hear them!

mp3s

Freedom Suite for String Quintet
By Barbara Harbach

I. Harriet Scott – A Strong Woman

II. Eliza and Lizzie – Let My People Go!

III. Freedom

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LINER NOTES

Freedom Suite for String Quintet
By Barbara Harbach

Harbach wrote Freedom Suite for String Quintet in the summer of 2010, inspired by the life of Harriet Scott, her husband Dred Scott and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie. The premiere will be January 17, 2011 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis at 10 a.m.

"I. Harriet Scott – A Strong Woman" is inspired by Harriet’s memories as a child in Minnesota and St. Louis. She would have heard spirituals and dance music as an adult, and they, hopefully, would have reminded her of the good memories she had as a child and a young woman.

A brief introduction ushers in "The Good Lord is Comin’ for Me," a new spiritual based on the traditions of the 18th and 19th century American spirituals. Dance reels follow, in imitation of the Virginia Reels that were popular in the 19th century and in St. Louis. The poignant spiritual "Don’t You Weep When I’m Gone," composed by Harry (Henry) Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), has the melody in the cello that so wonderfully portrays the rich somberness of Burleigh’s melody. The dance tunes and "The Good Lord is Comin’ for Me" return and rush exuberantly toward the close.

When I’m gone, gone, when I’m gone, gone, gone, O mother; don’t you weep when I am gone. For I’m goin’ to heav’n above, Going to the God of Love, O mother, don’t you weep when I am gone. When I’m gone, gone, When I’m gone, gone, gone. O mother, don’t you weep when I am gone. O, mother meet me there, mother, meet me in de air, O mother don’t you weep when I am gone. When I’m gone, gone, When I’m gone, gone, gone. O Mother, don’t you weep when I am gone.

"II. Eliza and Lizzie – Let My People Go!"
The second movement is based on two spirituals – "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Go Down, Moses". The movement opens with seemingly random pitches in long notes, but is built on the circle-of-fifths utilizing the notes in the chromatic scale. The first section features "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" in G Minor with a triple canon among the two violins and viola. An interlude of the opening material then precedes a combination of the two melodies in F-sharp Minor although the melody "Go Down, Moses" predominates. The final section combines as well as alternates between the two melodies.

"III. Freedom" opens with a rising and ecstatic fanfare. A joyous four-voice fugue begins. Even amid the celebration of freedom is the ache of memories from the past – "Many Thousands Gone" – a new melody inspired by the words of the 19th century spiritual of the same name. The fugue melody is then combined with "Many Thousands Gone". With each return of the fanfare, excitement builds …but always touched by the memories of the many that have gone … until the feeling of freedom is wholly embraced.

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Freedom Suite for String Quintet is published and copyrighted by Barbara Harbach with Vivace Press, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2010.

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Picture is of Barbara Harbach in Romania.

Belly of the beast, mind of the first Missouri poet laureate

2010-12-24T14:36:00.000-08:00

Poetry Scores received this enchanting letter in the mail today, the actual physical mail, from one Walter Bargen.

December 22, 2010:

Dear Poetry Scores:

I just finished listening to David Clewell's Jack Ruby's America for the second time. It's a wonderful and moving work by both the poet and musicians. As I sat back in my chair to savor the experience, the idea came to mind that you might be interested in continuing the project, that is, of recording Missouri Poet Laureates (I'm the first one). I thought what work of mine might fit with the structure found on Jack Ruby's America CD, and the prose poem sequence, Belly of the Beast, in the book The Feast came to mind. The Feast won the William Rockhill Nelson Award in 2005 and Belly of the Beast won the Quarter After Eight Prize in 1996.

Belly of the Beast is a retelling of the Jonah and fish story in the Old Testament but this Jonah is a modern day character who is standing in a cashier's line at Wal-Mart with a plastic bag filled with water and fish or sitting at an office desk, all the while contemplating "where the ribs curve up into studded stars, sparkling with the remnants of the last backwash of cosmic debris, up the many rickety ladders, frayed ropes and tow-rope-thick varicose veins, along greasy precipitous ledges, that all led to his bone-roofed hermitage." I call the form of Belly of the Beast a povella (A word that I coined.), which is a series of prose poems that have a luminal narrative thrust that may focus on a character, an image, an experience, or something else. In this sequence, Jonah flounders upon Jessabelle, his future wife, on a North Miami nude beach when he is expelled from his fish. Jonah and Jessabelle are characters in six of the eight povellas found in The Feast.

If you're not familiar with the prose poem, it reads with all the rhythm and music of a versed poem. Charles Baudelaire describes the intention of the prose poem in the following way:

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose -- musical, but without (conventional) rhythm and rhyme, and supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the promptings of the unconscious?

I've enclosed a copy of The Feast and Belly of the Beast is the first povella. If greater length is needed, I think sections of other povellas that involve Jonah and Jesse could be added.

Sincerely,

Walter Bargen

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Thank you, Walter Bargen! We will certainly read Belly of the Beast and the rest of The Feast and let you know what we think!

The antique x-ray movie prop donation letters

2010-12-23T07:19:00.000-08:00

So it all started when an old rock & roll buddy, now in the medical field, offered us an antique x-ray machine as a prop for the silent movie we are making, Go South for Animal Index, which is a fable of Los Alamos, of the making of the first atomic bomb. The good doctor asked me what did I think.

I wrote back

I think I love you.YES!YES!YES!

The good doctor responded,

FANTASTIC!

can't wait for you guys to get the stuff. you will love it. i found some really old x-ray tubes...straight from a classic frankenstein b & w.
also, i can let you guys borrow a few old x-ray light boxes and a few old x-rays to lighten up in the background if you are interested.

very cool.

I agreed, very cool; and wondered what was the next movie. The good doctor had a plan.

so here is the deal...

we need to set up a time where you can come over here (with some help) and have some fun.
you will need a truck or decent sized trunk to fit stuff in.
so we don't die in the process, we need to find someone who is familiar with electricity, better yet radiology.

i will make a few calls regarding the dismantling of it, but i am pretty sure that it will only take disconnecting the fuse and chopping some wires.

I told the story of the donation in a blog post and sent a link to the doctor with a note.

The fricking ridiculous thing is, our zombie wrangler is a radiologist who lives on the East Side. He is copied.

We make silent movies with zombies. This requires a zombie wrangler. Ours happens to have a degree in radiology. I know, this is weird, because in this movie the zombies are uranium-poisoned uranium miners and millers. The zombie wrangler / radiologist played spoiler about the antique x-ray machine thing, though.

Well, I'm going to be a spoiler. Those exam tables weigh tonage. And everything else is just cabinets. Lotsa weight there. The face of the control panel would be very cool. Inside the cabinet, the generator usually looks like a telephone pole transformer kinda. The problem with all of this stuff is that it has cooling oil in parts of it that is likely full of PCBs,especially inside the exam head where the x-ray rotor is. So I'd be careful about dragging it around and where you put it. You might wind up with a Superfund site in the back of your pickup.

If this is a functioning machine, has he checked into donating to any schools?

I sent this to the good doctor, with a defeated note.

Maybe light bulb going off during lunar eclipse about tearing apart radiological devices is dangerous.

The good doctor was not convinced, however.

I agree about the table but there are other things that are only electrical but look cool that I am sure we can piece out. We will not be touching anything that has PCBs in it for sure. It is not worth getting poisoned for a silent film in my opinion. Great idea about the schools but no one wants to deal with the table even though it is functioning unit. It is a shame but I have tried for 2 years and the table is just too big and heavy. I almost had it shipped off to Africa, but that too fell through.

Still interested in the non PCB stuff?

I said something like ... I ... think ... so, now ... being a little spooked. This really was a light bulb about radiation that went off during the lunar eclipse.

The good doctor went out and got his own expert opinion from one of his previous radiology professors. Professor said:

I think the concern about the "box" (actually I think they are talking about the transformer) is due to the type of insulating oil found inside. If the unit is old, and I think a Westinghouse single phase fits that category, there is a real possibility that the oil is PCB (polychlorobiphenyl) which is toxic. If that's true then that same oil was probably also used in the tube head. I suppose you could have it tested although I don't know who does that kind of testing in this area.

There is no radioactivity to consider here. However, when you remove the federal terminal cables you might get some oil leakage. Thus the nature of that oil is important.

It may be that there was an elective "oil change" sometime in the past and the PCB oil was replaced by mineral oil. If that's the case then there is no toxic hazard.

As far as dismantling, I've always left that up to the professionals. If you choose to try, just be careful as some parts are quite heavy. I had a former classmate who tried to move his x-ray unit and ended up breaking his arm as the tubehead went flying when he removed the counterweights!

So we won't be poisoned, but we might snap off an arm. No, said the doctor.

i don't think we will break any arms since we will not be messing with anything heavy, we're just gonna strip the cool looking stuff.

let it roll.

Okay, let it roll.

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Image from One Letter Words.