Tony Renner painting Zak Marmelefsky playing banjo

We have here the painting "Zak Marmelefsky Playing Banjo in Tower Grove Park," by Tony Renner, as lifted from his artist blog.

It's the first image I've seen of a finished piece from the show "Crescendo" that Cindy Tower organized for Contemporary Art Musem St. Louis' Open Studios event on Saturday. She had tge concept of musicians playing together while painters painted them.

Poetry Scores provided some help going in - we mostly rounded up the musicians, while Cindy mostly rounded up the painters - and our board member John Eiler fed everyone and bought the first rounds of drinks.

Actually, Tony was one of the few painters that we rounded up, and this Zak character was one of the few musicians that Cindy rounded up.

I myself was mostly useless on the day of the event, owing to a 25-year high school reunion I celebrated the night before, with somewhat more enthusiasm than I had expected. I have been working triple overtime trying to get out of the country to attend a family funeral, and my mind and body must have needed a party more than I was aware.

I expect more images of work from the show to pop up. Laurent Torno III has made and posted a cool short video of the day's events, and one of the painters Carlie Trosclair has posted an album on Facebook, snapshots from the day.

It was Cindy's idea to do this as a benefit for Poetry Scores, and though I left her with all of the work on the day of the event, at the after-party (notice, after missing the work, I did make it to the afterparty) she was still talking like that was the deal.

So, sometime this winter we will round up all of these paintings and do a show and a silent auction, maybe with a more slightly structured musical presentation - that is, maybe the guy who was supposed to structure the music (me?) will show up this time.

Looking forward to it.

"Music without Words, pray for us" (instrumental, or not)

The Poetry Scores blog is intended for edification and amusement on some days, and on other days it's pretty much a gigbook: a place to make a note I'll need for reference later. This is a gigbook note, though I'll try to make it interesting for any regular readers who peaked in at evidence of an update.

What I need to gigbook is another phrase from Joyce's Ulysses, which we aim to score in snatches, that wants to be the title of an instrumental. Joyce certainly tee'd this one up for us, since the phrase is "Music without Words, pray for us".

The phrase appears in what David Hayman describes as "a litany of Bloom's adventures sung by the 'Daughters of Erin'":

Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.
Flower of Bath, pray for us.
Mentor of Menton, pray for us.
Canvasser of the Freeman, pray for us.
Charitable Mason, pray for us.
Wandering Soap, pray for us.
Sweets of Sin, pray for us.
Music without Words, pray for us.
Reprover of the citizen, pray for us.
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us.
Midwive Most Merciful, pray for us.
Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.

Come to think of it, as perverse as Joyce is in most instances, we should probably score that litany as a rock song. It would be quite Joycean to give the title "Music without Words, pray for us" to a song with words.

In that case, clearly, the solo - the music without words - would have to come right after the phrase "Music without Words, pray for us". And, indeed, doing the math, that is the eighth line, with four lines following - which is to say, exactly where the solo would fall, after the second verse and before the third.

You end up with a very classic in-built song structure:

* Four lines (verse)

* Four more lines (verse, ending on "Music without Words ...")

* Solo (the music without words)

* Four last lines - ending on enigmatic phrase that would be fun, really fun, to sing as an outro.

Like the millions of people before me who, for whatever reason, and in whatever ways, dove into Ulysses and began to play around, I often end up with the disquieting feeling that Joyce left a trail to lead me here, and I can hear his smart ass laughter at the business end of his ashplant!

Pray for us.

More in this series

"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"
"Sad music" (instrumental)
"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

*

Prayer tattoo by Enrique Patino.

"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"

Though I mostly was looking for passages of Ulysses to score as rock songs when I read James Joyce's big fat headache of a novel, I couldn't resist setting aside a few pieces that promised experimental spoken word material.

There's not as much challenge, not as much creativity, involved in providing music under the reading of a text - I much prefer the thrill of treating someone's else's text as a lyric sheet, with the puzzles of inventing a melody and sculpting a song structure - but this bit from the Nighttown section of Ulysses is just begging for some carnival barkeresque sonic treatment.

SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile) Ladies and gentleman, my educated greyhound. It was I broke in the brucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted thong. Block tackle and a strangling pully will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. (He glares) I possess the Indian sign. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. (With a bewitching smile) I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride of the ring.

I am thinking of something along the lines of the spoken word material in The Black Rider, by Tom Waits.

As unique and amazing as Tom Waits is, in St. Louis we really don't need him for our projects (not that we could get him), and that is because we have Fred Fricton here.

We have put Fred to use on everything we have ever done here at Poetry Scores. A search of this blog for his name provides this huge list of posts, most with performances embedded. Without question, though, the most fitting precedent for the kind of piece this wants to be is "Orthodoxy - Orthodoxy" from the poetry score to Blind Cat Black.

Free mp3

"Othodoxy - Orthodoxy"
By Fred Friction and Pops Farrar
From Blind Cat Black

Poetry by Ece Ayhan
Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

*

Carnival barker Pearl Jam gig poster by Ward Sutton, whose brother I knew in a former life.

*

More from this series

"Sad music" (instrumental)
"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

"Sad music" (instrumental)

So I baited myself to keep reading through James Joyce's Ulysses by flagging passages that I thought would be fun to score and sing.

Mostly, I was looking for rock song lyrics, parts of the novel to break up and treat as lyric sheets, but I also noted a couple of options for experimental spoken word numbers and instrumentals.

In essence, I was reproducing the array of techniques we use in Poetry Scores when setting a long poem to music. The parts that look fun to sing, we make into songs and sing. That always leaves behind parts of the poem that would be more fun to say, as well as haunting little fragments that want nothing more than to lend themselves as titles to instrumentals.

This passage of the Nighttown episode of the novel has a simple phrase I have set aside to title an instrumental.

(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

BLOOM: A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.

(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.)

I wanted to record a flavor of the passage, but the title of the Three Fried Men instrumental I'll write with Lij or Matt Fuller is really very brief and simple: "Sad Music".

Given the context - "Sad music. Church music." - it should be a little churchy. It should be a church music for the prayers of a young whore in a sapphire slip.

As an example of this technique, here is "The muddy music of the ink squid" from the poetry score to Blind Cat Black. The poem, and therefore the title of the song, is by Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat, and the composition and performance are by Matt Fuller, though we used the band name Three Fried Men for the performance credit.

*

The image is of "Sad Music on My Red Guitar" by Maria Pace-Wynters.

*

More in this series

"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

At long last I have now finished James Joyce's Ulysses, with mixed feelings, but I still have lots of marginal notes left at passages that should make good rock song lyrics. This is all prose in the novel - prose with latent lyricism.

"Monkey puzzle"

a monkey puzzle rocket burst
spluttering in darting crackles

zrads and zrads,
zrads, zrads

And Cissy and Tommy
ran out to see

and Edy after
with the pushcar and then

Gerty beyond the curve
of the rocks

Will she? Watch!
Watch! See!

Looked round
she smelt an onion

Darling, I saw your
I saw all.

This really wants to be a brief, frenetic, but melodic piece of psychedelic pop. I'm eagerly awaiting some new guitar ideas from my songwriting partner in Hollywood, Matt Fuller. It will be fun to sing "zrads" over and over again!

More in this series

"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

*

Monkey puzzle trees image from somebody's blog. I can see how that is a good shape for fireworks.

Cindy Tower & Poetry Scores present “Crescendo”

For Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ “Open Studios”
Saturday, July 25 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Southeast corner of Tower Grove Park

As part of The Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis’s “Open Studios” weekend, on Saturday, July 25 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Cindy Tower and Poetry Scores will present “Crescendo” in the southeast corner of Tower Grove Park, at the intersection of Grand and Arsenal Streets.

The live performance event will feature musicians improvising together while artists draw or paint them. There will be two separate sets, starting at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. respectively, with different sets of musicians and artists for each.

The intention is to record the music, and play it at a later date when the resulting artworks are exhibited and sold on silent auction.

This project aims to foster community and bring public attention to the wide range and diversity of talent in St. Louis.

Participants are as follows:

10 AM - 12:30 PM:

Musicians: Jason Braun, Mike Burgett, Heidi Dean, Ellen Gomez, John Marshall, Carl Pandolfi, Geoff Seitz.

Artists: Cindy Chafin, Kathy Cory, Mary Downey, Tim McAvin, Carmelita Nunez, Lucky Rashkis, Tony Renner, John Sarra, Daniel Shown, Barbara St. John, Zak Marmelefsky

1 PM – 4 PM

Musicians: Frank DiPiazza, Roy Gochenbach, Tom Hall, Mama Lisa, Stephen Lindsley, Tim McAvin, Baba Mike Nelson, Bradd Young.

Artists: Wesley Fordyce, Mary Beth Hassan, Cheri Hoffman, Claire Medol Hyman, Nick Hutchings, Goran Maric, Emily Moorhead, Carlie Trosclair, Cindy Tower, Andrea Vadner, Aaron Bos-Wahl.

Special Thanks to John Eiler and his family for use of their house across the street as a “green room” for participants!

Cindy Tower is an artist working in St. Louis, and Poetry Scores is a St. Louis-based non-profit arts organization that translates poetry into other media.

For more information, call Cindy Tower at 917-854-2179 or Chris King of Poetry Scores at 314-265-1435 or email Chris at brodog@hotmail.com.

*

Sketch by Cindy Tower.

The Chris Voelker variations

Tonight I was fortunate to work with this guy in the studio - Chris Voelker. Adam Long, who engineered the session at his home studio in Midtown St. Louis, took the picture with his laptop.

I had asked Chris to lend violin to two songs for our score to The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray. Here are rough mixes from the session.

mp3s

"Also, it's a space probe"
(Matt Fuller, Chris King, Les Murray)
Three Fried Men w/ Chris Voelher

"Breath of catching up"
(Chris King, Lij, Les Murray)
Three Fried Men w/ Chris Voelher

I'm really happy with our work. It was enlivened by some Rye IPA by Buffalo Brewing. Between takes we discussed the irrationality of the death penalty and the exquisite drug that is love.

"What kind of a present to give"

Another possible song lyric excerpted from the prose of Joyce's Ulysses.

"What kind of a present to give"

He was so kind and holy
and often and often
she thought and thought

she could work a ruched teacosy
with embroidered floral design
for him as a present
or a clock

but they had a clock
she noticed on the mantlepiece
white and gold with a canary bird
that came out of a little house
to tell the time the day

she went there
about the flowers
for the forty hours' adoration
because it was hard to know
what kind of a present to give

or perhaps an album
of illuminated views
of Dublin
or some place.

"He" here is Father Conroy and "she" is Gerty MacDowell. I adore this as an example of Joyce's gift - not used nearly often enough, for my taste - of getting under the skin and inside the imagination of ordinary and pleasant people thinking about ordinary and pleasant things.

I'm all for the tortured artist poet (Stephen) and the sensual singer (Molly) and can see the value in imagining the cuckolded advertising canvasser (Bloom), but I admire even more something like this: a skillful representation of how a church girl imagines making or buying a present for the priest.

Some guy named Bob Williams from Iowa has posted an interesting essay about this part of the novel.

*

More in this series

"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)

"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)

"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)

"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)

"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)

"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"

"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

*

View of illuminated Dublin (Engine Alley) from Desmond Kavanaugh's Flickr.

"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

This is one of those passages from Ulysses that makes me wish James Joyce had had the patience, or the relative lack of ambition, to write more realistic novels before he took to reinventing the form of the novel and then the structure of the English language itself.

This paragraph, broke up into lyrics, evokes to me very early 10,000 Maniacs. I think it wants to be a wistful retro folk rock song.

"Fires in the houses of poor people"

Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall
Father Conmee saw a turfbarge,
a towhorse with pendent head,
a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw
seated amidships, smoking and
staring at a branch of poplar above him.

It was idyllic:

and Father Conmee reflected
on the providence of the Creator
who had made turf to be in bogs
where men might dig it out and
bring it to town and hamlet to make
fires in the houses of poor people.

There will be a lot of options, when we get out guitars, for what to do with that interstitial phrase, "It was idyllic:"; and though we could be accused of overdoing the outro gambit, the temptation will be strong to repeat that last line I have chosen for the title a number of times, with the dynamic of an outro.

More in this series

"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

*

Picture of a turf fire from somebody's Flickr.

"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

And yet more fun recasting paragraphs of James Joyce's Ulysses as rock song lyrics.

"Christfox in leather trews"

Christfox in leather trews,
hiding, a runaway
in blighted treeforks
from hue and cry.

Knowing no vixen,
walking lonely in the chase.
Women he won to him,
tender people,

a whore of Babylon,
ladies of justices,
bully tapsters' wives.
Fox and geese.

And in New Place
a slack dishonoured body
that once was comely,
once as sweet,

as fresh as cinnamon,
now her leaves falling,
all, bare, frighted
of the narrow grave

and unforgiven.

Ulysses Annotated unpacks this sparkling enigmatic language, describing in detail how it "conjoins the careers of Shakespeare and George Fox" (1624-1691), a founder of the Quakers. It also points out echoes from an Irish folk song, "Fair Maiden's Beauty Will Soon Pass Away," which we will want to look at as we compose the song.

A lot of these lines from Ulysses look like Guided by Voices lyrics, but this one is puzzling and evocative in a different way. Especially with the first line, which cries out to be the song title, I think of the Vancouver band Frog Eyes.

*

Image of Shakespeare's home New Place from The Folger Shakespeare Library, which also has the manuscript of his title to this house.

More in this series

"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)

"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

"All future plunges to the past" (Joyce, Pandolfi)

This passage has now been scored by Carl Pandolfi! See below for mp3!

I am starting to think there is a major mistake in the historical record on Charles Manson's primary source. It has been widely reported that The Beatles' White Album (1968) was Manson's primary text, but I am starting to wonder if it wasn't a well thumbed copy of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) that gave Charlie his ideas.

In a previous paragraph from the novel I broke into lyrics, Joyce used the word "helterskelter," which as we know Manson adopted to name the race war he imagined was forthcoming. And here we have another Manson Family favorite lurking in Ulysses: "creepy-crawl". I'll break the paragraph into how I imagine singing it.

"All future plunges to the past"

Unsheathe your dagger definitions.
Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.
Streams of tendency and eons they worship.
God: noise in the street: peripatetic.
Space: what you damn well have to see.

Through spaces smaller than red globules
of man's blood they creepy-crawl
after Blake's buttocks into eternity
of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.

Hold to the now,
the here, through which
all future plunges to the past.

What a great phrase for a sung outro: "all future plunges to the past". A melody just shoots right out of that sequence of words, as if inherent in them. James Joyce can turn English into a tonal language.

I hear a song unfolding the lyrics as two sung verses, followed by the chorus. Then we would repeat the verse pattern twice instrumentally (guitar solo, or guitar and organ solos) and finish by singing the verse two or three times as an outro.

As for "creepy-crawl," no less an authority than Linda Kasabian defined it (under questioning by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in Manson's murder trial): "A creepy-crawling mission is where you creepy-crawl into people's houses and take things..."

Joyce just creepy-crawled into other people's books and took things. One source used here is spelled out on the Joyce Images site, where I creepy-crawled to take the buttocks illustration from Blake, who wrote:

"I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more" (Jerusalem, plate 77, "To the Christians").

*

mp3

For all my talk of how we would score this as Three Fried Men, Carl Pandolfi beat us to the punch!

"All future plunges to the past"
(Carl Pandolfi)
Carl Pandolfi

*

The complete "Songs from Ulysses" series

"The sailors playing all birds fly"
"And the sun shines for you today"
"Half the ships of the world"
"He rests"
"Less reprehensible"
"Example?"
"Restless. Solitary."
"I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea"
"Pretty pretty petticoats"
"Music without Words, pray for us"
"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"
"Sad music"
"Monkey puzzle"
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people"
"Christfox in leather trews"
"All future plunges to the past"
"She was humming"
"Silly billies:"
"Happy Happy"
"A sugarsticky girl"
"Everybody eating everyone else"
"Blood not mine"
"Sell your soul for that"
"Over the motley slush"
"My childhood bends"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!"