Art Invitational to "Jack Ruby's America" Friday, Nov. 12 at Mad Art Gallery

Poetry Scores will host an Art Invitational to "Jack Ruby's America" by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell on Friday, Nov. 12 at Mad Art Gallery (2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard). Some 50 visual artists are making work in response to Clewell's poem. All work will be on sale on silent auction and will go home with buyers that night.

The silent art auction will start promptly at 7 p.m., and we will start to close bids at 9 p.m. The cash bar and delicious food catered by John Eiler should occupy us until 10 p.m. All proceeds from art sales will be divided evenly between artist, venue, and Poetry Scores - an arts organization devoted to translating poetry into other media.

The Friday, Nov. 12 Art Invitational also is the occasion for the release of our new poetry score to "Jack Ruby's America," featuring music by Yid Vicious (Madison, WI), Another Umbrella (San Pedro, CA), Kennebunkport Jazz Workshop (Nashville, TN), and Frank Heyer (St. Louis, MO).

The CD costs $10. There is no admission to the event. Opening bids start low at Poetry Scores art invitationals - often $50 or lower - and for work by some of our most beloved local artists. (See list, below.)

Each piece of art that responds to “Jack Ruby's America” will be named by the artist after a verbatim scrap of language from the poem. The work will be displayed and positioned around the gallery space, according to where in the poem the language chosen for the title of the artwork appears. So, in a sense, it is the poem itself that hangs the show.

We expect a mix of types of work you can hang on the wall - paintings, drawings, photographs, mixed media. Every year Eric Woods of Firecracker Press letter-presses bookmarks with a quote from the poem live at the event. Robert van Dillen makes a poem-inspired hat every year.

As a special treat this year, we will display and auction off the sexy outfit Becky Simmons made for Lola van Ella to wear (and take off) in her jazz burlesque of “Jack Ruby's America” performed earlier this year with the poet and the Dave Stone trio. We will auction off the outfit as worn by Lola (and not since laundered), all the way down to the gold star pasties!

For information, email Poetry Scores creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com. Poetry Scores is a 501(c)3 nonprofit Missouri corporation.

Confirmed for the Nov. 12 show:

Gena Brady Allen
Gina Alvarez
Andrea Avery
Jay Babcock
Michael Behle
Kevin Belford
Keith Buchholz
Ron Buechele
Deanna Chafin
Heather Corley
Thom Fletcher
Trent Harris
Paul Hartman
Sue Hartman
Emily Hemeyer
Michael Hoffman
Alexa Hoyer
Claire Medol Hyman
Angela Khan
Alicia La Chance
Robert Longyear
Dianna Lucas
Dawn Majors
Julie Malone
Tim McAvin
John Minkoff
Michael Paradise
Melanie Persch
Hap Phillips
Jeremy Rabus
Tony Renner
Kim Richardson
Martha Rose
Cindy Royal
Stefene Russell
Janiece Senn
Becky Simmons / Lola van Ella
Dana Smith
Robin Street-Morris
Andrew Torch
Nita Turnage
Robert Van Dillen
Amy VanDonsel
Eric Woods / Firecracker Press

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Watercolor of Jack Ruby by Kevin Belford, from the cover art to the Poetry Scores CD Jack Ruby's America, to be released at the Nov. 12 event.

Free semi-private screening of "Blind Cat Black" at the BW

There can't be all that many people of whom the following is true, but maybe it is you:

1. You want to see the Poetry Scores movie Blind Cat Black
2. You will be in or near St. Louis County this Thursday, Oct. 7
3. You will have an hour or so free that day starting at 11 a.m.

If this is you, then feel free to join Angela Khan and myself at the Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Ave., in Maplewood), more affectionately known as the BW or the B-Dub, at 11 a.m. We will screen the movie in the back room, I think it is called The Crown Room, where they do the Strange Brew screenings, sometime shortly after 11 a.m.

This screening is intended for cast and crew who have signed up to work on the second Poetry Scores movie, Go South for Animal Index. That is where Khan comes in.

In plugging prop needs over the last several months, I have resorted to social media, among other avenues of beggary; and, consistently, someone I had agreed was a Friend but whom I didn't quite know kept coming through for me: with a vintage iron, with a box of 1940s ladies hats, with the most perfect old-fashioned radio at absolutely the last minute before the first day of shooting. This was Khan.

The Khan radio

In the bantering that ensued from my repeatedly driving to her house, which kept shifting locations, she said she liked to act and even had experience acting in a silent movie. We make silent movies. Khan has ann interesting look, as the image up above amply testifies. I said I would try to find a role for her.

The tarty look above, in fact, would have worked just fine for Blind Cat Black. That movie follows our score to the poem of the same name by the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, which tells the tale of an Istanbul streetwalker. Had we known Khan three years ago when we made this picture, and had she looked like that then, then she would have looked perfect in the dark, dank streetlife of that movie.

Go South for Animal Index is an altogether different can of crickets. It's a fable about the invention and testing of the first atomic bomb, which actually happened in 1945 and explains the string of requests for ye olde props. Our casting needs for Go South are altogether different, but then Angela Khan is a changeling, this much I have gathered from a distance, from a box-strewn living room where I am being handed a box of hats or an ancient iron by a generous person.

It is my gut feeling she would look just fine as one of the People of the Peace, one of the people of the land living along a river when the bomb shop moves in and the mad scientists start to build kinky new weapons of death from the uranium being mined from the Earth by zombies.

We will see. And, maybe, we will see you Thursday at the B-Dub.

"And the oldest trees": a scene for Coyote and the soldier

These are storyboards for the movie Go South for Animal Index. We are making a silent movie to the poetry score we made to Stefene Russell's poem of that name.

This scene happens in Track 19 of the score, "And the oldest trees". Click for the mp3 of the song is if you want to listen to what the viewer will see during this scene.

In this scene a soldier, played by Thom Fletcher, seeks out a tramp in the woods, played by Kyla Webb, to trade the tramp some hamburgers for moonshine.

The soldier is station on Lost Almost (Los Alamos), where the atomic bomb is being invented and built. The tramp is just eking out his simple life in the woods.

Actually, I drew these storyboards (while on vacation in Paris) picturing the tramp in the woods by the India Mounds.We since settled on a location in Cuba, Missouri, that will put the tramp alongside a creek rather than a woodsy path.

This will change the physical dynamics of the change, but the basic idea of unlikely fellowship and shared animal appetites will carry over.

The part of the poem scored in the song we are shooting to here is: "And the oldest trees open their appetite in the light that does not fail". To me, this suggests some primal life principle, some ancient appetite that will survive.

It will survive all of our madness and evil and atomic bombs. This concept of the poem, and its American Indian basis, is why I wanted the tramp character. The tramp is Coyote, the ancient archetype of primal appetite and survival skills. (I also really wanted to work with Kyla!)

My writing on these frames is like direction to the actors, the words won't appear in the movie. We make silent movies to poetry scores we have produced based on long poems. The only language is in the poem as expressed in the score, as sung or spoken text.

Richard Derrick rocking out with d. boon and Mike Watt

Like a lot of overcommitted people these days, I am always dumping things to my personal email account as into a sort of electronic junkbox, as if some rainy day will come when I will sort through it all and put it to use.

Today is a rainy day.

Way back in June 2009, my coproducer and songwriting partner Matt Fuller sent me a video clip of The Minutemen performing live in the early 1980s. Nothing surprising, there - Matt and I have been making music together for twenty years and have kept the seminal San Pedro post-punkers squarely in our sights throughout our partnership.

There is, however, an inside personal bonus on this video clip - our new friend and collaborater Richard Derrick is playing drums on this gig, rather than Minutemen drummer George Hurley.

As I described in some of the liner notes to our Go South for Animal Index poetry score, Matt and I met Richard Derrick in San Pedro to do something of a windshield tour of Minutemen sites. Richard had been good friends and roommates with Minutemen frontman d. boon (who died in 1985) and had released a posthumous record of jams, d. boon & friends, that I reviewed for L.A. Weekly after Derrick Bostrom of The Meat Puppets gave me his advance copy.

To rock & rollers of a certain age, this may sound like name-dropping, but I don't care. We have been doing this stuff persistently for a long time and it has paid off, in terms of experiences and creations, which is why we do it.

After a pleasant visit with Richard Derrick, as an afterthought he dubbed some discs of his own music for us to keep. After listening to one disc in particular, Middle Sleep, I asked Richard if we could make use of some of the tracks on our poetry scores, and he said sure.

I now have more than 80 unreleased discs of Richard's music he made with an assortment of friends and bands over the years. This music has prominent places on three of the four poetry scores we have completed - Blind Cat Black, Go South for Animal Index and The Sydney Highrise Variations.

On November 12 at Mad Art Gallery we will release our fifth poetry score, Jack Ruby's America, and when looking for some noir rock to evoke the moods surrounding Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, I turned to none other than Richard Derrick and his (mostly one-man) band Another Umbrella.

So, anyway, I spend a bit of time at bars and parties, trying to talk over some music to explain to another rock musician what a poetry score is and how we now make our records "with this guy who was friends and roommates with d. boon and The Minutemen," and I suppose I am blogging this as a place to host this video clip of Richard rocking out with d. boon and Mike Watt back in the day as some reassurance that this is all real outside of our minds and memories.

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Richard tells me that the Minutemen songs he included on d. boon & friends are from the same gig as this video.

Lola van Ella, Candy Barr & functional Western wear

So Poetry Scores is producing a live show 8 p.m. Thursday Sept. 23 at The Foxhole at Atomic Cowboy. It involves a small burlesque component. We'll have the Dave Stone Trio improvising a score to Missouri Poet Laureate David Clewell's long poem "Jack Ruby's America," with the poet performing the poem. They will be joined for a brief stretch by Lola van Ella dancing a burlesque scene she is choreographing for the show.

"Jack Ruby's America" is Clewell's meditation on the Dallas burlesque club owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead on national television. Oswald, of course, had been arrested and accused of murdering President John F. Kennedy and a Dallas police officer.

Ruby ran a Dallas burlesque club called the Carousel. When I first approached Lola about choreographing and dancing a burlesque routine for the Carousel Club part of the poem, she immediately got enthused about Candy Barr, a dancer who worked at the Carousel, and said it would be fun to work up a tribute to her.

One thing I love about Lola is what a geek she is for artistic process. From the first days of our friendship and collaboration, we cleared the air that we could talk shop at any time and never feel constrained to just party or small-talk. So I am just thrilling on the following peek into her artistic process.

This is a message from Becky Simmons, who works with Lola on her costumes. She is writing to Lola about the Candy Barr costume for the Poetry Scores show, in reference to the above images:

Becky Simmons: I pulled these two pictures. So I can take a regular pair of panties and put fringe and whatnot on them to make them look like they do in the one picture, and either cover a bra or make a triangle-style top and match it to the bottoms, then make a panel skirt of some kind to go with it? And you could wear something else on the bottom so I could make the panties snap off, like your blue bow ones. And maybe if you had a little denim jacket or something over it you could just start with that, and make that the first thing you take off, then the panel skirt, then the bra, then the panties, and then the holster if you want. Or you could leave that on I guess, I don't know what she did. But I can get a little red piece of fabric so you can tie it around your neck, and it doesn't look like she wore a hat but maybe if you had a miniature one (kind of like a miniature top hat) that might be kind of cute?

I totally, totally, totally love this! I learned so much from it. Of course it stands to reason, but I had never considered that a burlesque costume has moving parts - it is as much a machine as it is a garment. Janet Jackson taught the world about "wardrobe malfunction," but I now know a burlesque artist and her costume-maker are all about wardrobe function.

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Dave Stone, Lola van Ella and David Clewell perform "Jack Ruby's America" at 8 p.m. Thursday Sept. 23 at The Foxhole at Atomic Cowboy, 4140 Manchester Ave. Admission is $7 at the door.

Poetry Scores is a Missouri non-profit arts organization based in St. Louis that translates poetry into other media. Email brodog@hotmail.com for information.

I. Revenge of the Volkswagen?

A long day of location scouting began with the consolidation of cars. We met at O'Connell's Pub. Laurent Torno III and I were chatting about the movie we are making when Dawn Majors arrived.

We were discussing the vintage car we need for the picture. A '50s Volkswagen I could borrow for free had been supplanted by a more appropriate $200 rental '40s American model. I was left alone in my own Volkswagen as Dawn and Laurent shuttled their cars into the surrounding neighborhood, where I would pick them up.

But, suddenly, my car wouldn't start. The key wouldn't turn in the ignition.

Jiggling the steering wheel, an old ignition trick, I managed to lock the steering wheel to the far right. I thought a push-start might free up the ignition and steering. Given where I was parked, and the hard right position of the locked steering wheel, I would not have much space, once the car pop-started - to break before crashing into the pub.

Bad in any event, this would be made worse by the fact that O'Connell's is the family pub of a Poetry Scores board member and actor in the film, John Parker. In fact, we were meeting there that morning because the family pub was hosting a shooting launch dinner for the cast and crew at the end of the day.

After I called Dawn and Laurent back to push my car toward the pub, and while I was considering how little space I would have to start the car yet not hit the pub, into that narrow zone between Volkswagen and O'Connell's slid a delivery truck.

Now there would be no way to get up enough velocity to pop-start the car before we pushed it into the delivery truck - or the delivery men unloading product on a hot July St. Louis Saturday morning.

The delivery men declined moving the truck until we solved our problems: They were on a tight delivery schedule.



Dawn and Laurent conferred. Managing battery power for their cameras is a constant concern for them. Perhaps for this reason, they suggested it might be a drained car key battery. So off they went with my car key to get me a car key battery.

Then I put my hands on my hips. I detected what seemed to be a car key in my pocket. It was a car key.

It was a car key, it fit right into my ignition, and indeed it started the car. How did I have my car key, of Dawn and Laurent had my car key? Obviously, Dawn and Laurent were on their way to the battery store with the car key to my wife's Volkswagen, not mine.

I called them back. After all due explanations, apologies and calls home, we were off to scout locations in my car. "Remember," I told Laurent, "my car - a Volkwagen - froze up on us right after we were talking about taking the vintage Volkswagen out of the movie. I consider that an omen ..."

To be continued.

The Trinity test, thunderstorms and our first day of shooting

July 16, 1945, the day scheduled for the first test of the atomic bomb at the base camp south of Los Alamos, was predicted to experience thunderstorms and indeed it stormed all night. There was every chance the Trinity test would be cancelled, but in the end there was a break in the weather - and then a crack in the universe when the split atom bomb successfully detonated, fusing the desert floor around it into green glass.

We scored Stefene Russell's poem about the bomb, Go South for Animal Index, and are now preparing to make a silent movie to the score. Stefene's poem ranges wide in scope, geography and timeline, from Congolese uranium miners to European pioneers in nucleaur chemistry to Nevada fallout victims of the bomb testing that continued in the U.S. long after the immolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is enough archival footage out there to make a "see it, say it" style movie that illustrates the lines in the poem line by line as they unscroll in the poetry score, but that approach is not for me. In writing a silent movie scenario for Poetry Scores, I like to take the core themes of the poem and come up with a parallel story that we can cast and shoot as a fable using local actors and St. Louis locations.

I decided to end our movie with the Trinity test, stopping before the real death and suffering - those torched Japanese cities and the Downwinders - with one of history's most dramatic moments: evidence of the weaponized split atom dawning over the American desert. And I thought we should start shooting on July 16 (2010), beginning to shoot our action on the same calendar date on which our action will end on screen.

Good idea. Except I was returning from two weeks in Paris on July 13. Despite a heroic effort in my absence by V "Elly" Smith to assemble some props needed for one of our storylines, I could only pull together one day of scenes for our opening weekend of shooting. On July 16, rather than starting to shoot, we were still slogging through location scouting, which we did as a group, with a little moonshine to pour into the Earth in two holy places where we will be doing some of our work.

Then Saturday, July 17: a full day of location scouting and roadside shooting, in lieu of locations, costumes and actors in place to shoot anything else. This was a bizarre day, tinged by the supernatural, which will get its own separate development on this blog.

That brings us to today, Sunday, July 18, when shooting with actors was to begin. We were to spend half of the afternoon in the woods, and half of the afternoon at a lake.

The characters for these scenes are Coyote, Badger and Wife of Badger. Coyote and Badger are primal culture heroes for the Navajo, and Stefene wove into her poem many of the cultural patterns of the Navajos who mined much of the uranium that, enriched, went into American bombs.

Our Coyote is a tramp, played by Kyla Webb - the eternal trickster living off his wits, and his whiskey still, in the woods. Our Badger is a tribal scamp, played by Roland Frank, styled after the palm wine drinkard of African folklore (and reality). In a storyline intended as comic relief, an earthy counterpoint to the nuclear experiments of Lost Almost, Badger steals fish from the tribe, sneaks into the woods, and trades it to the Coyote for gourds of moonshine.


Coyote is making his moonshine from corn mash. He also is stealing his corn from the tribe. Out at the lake this evening, we had plans to shoot Wife of Badger (played by Charlois Lumpkin) farming corn, Coyote stealing it and getting caught, Wife of Badger chasing Coyote, and Coyote escaping into the woods. I have in mind a mixture of tribal folklore and silent film comedy that could be unique - and should help break up the arduous task of getting silent drama out of nuclear physics.

But alas, the thunderstorms that did not squelch the Trinity test in 1945 have rained out our first day of live action shooting for our movie itoday. So I just ate some of Badger's prop fish, some tasty smoked mackarel roundscad, and wrote up this. Maybe I'll move onto the prop moonshine next ...