"The Cantilevered Behometh" by Stefene Russell

This is a working draft toward Stefene Russell's contribution to the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, The Cantilevered Behometh.

The title is chosen from The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, and the work responds to the poem. The piece will be hung in the show depending on where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears.

The Invitational/silent auction will be held at The Luminary Center for the Arts (located at 4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway, just across the street from Tower Grove Park) 6-10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, with an after-party following just down the block at The Royale.

I asked Stef how she made this and what she was thinking.

I scanned in pages from an old British Xmas catalog, Gamage's - it had that old-school Brit feeling that lurks in a lot of the corners of the poem. At first I was thinking those "archaic spirits" Les mentions were Aboriginal, since he writes about that a lot, but when I really got to thinking about Modernist architecture, it seemed like a direct reaction to that sort of dark, wooden, repressed Victorian thing, the sort of world that the Xmas catalog represented.

This could just be my wingnut theory, but seems to me the Industrial Revolution in Europe, when it squashed this whole old Celtic world of nature spirits & tribes but it soaked some of it up at the same time, or at least its shadow (e.g. Blake's "Satanic Mills"). & that those white boxes, and high-rises, were sort of an attempt to scrape off that creepy Victorian darkness that still had in it elements of the old, old world, or at least a very enraged & pushed-underground aspect of it (in Australia too, not just England - that Crown exerts a heavy influence).

Like building closer to heaven to get away from the cthonic, in a way. But there it is, flying around like a kite ... it shows up anyway. If that makes any sense! Anyway, it'll get printed & mounted & painted, but pretty subtly. I am excited about it.

I thought that improvised email had so many varied insights into Les' poem that I printed it out for him, along with this image, and will post it to him in Australila tomorrow, along with a long hand-written letter from me.

My band, Three Fried Men, set this part of the poem to music for the poetry score - we even used this phrase for the song title.

mp3

"The cantilevered behometh"
(Matt Fuller, Chris King, Les Murray)

Three Fried Men

Recorded by Lij at The Toy Boy

Mixed by Adam Long

Michael Behle's "Gazing through themselves"

This is Michael Behle's contribution to the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, Gazing through themselves (8" x 10" gouache and flashe on panel, 2009).

The title is chosen from The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, and the work responds to the poem. The piece will be hung in the show depending on where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears.

This means, given where there titles appear in the poem, Behle will be sandwiched between Amy VanDonsel and Heather Corley. Which is enviable any way you look at it.

The Invitational/silent auction will be held at The Luminary Center for the Arts (located at 4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway, just across the street from Tower Grove Park) 6-10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, with an after-party following just down the block at The Royale.

mp 3

This part of the poem was scored memorably by Robert Goetz.

The starving spirit is fed upon the heart

(Robert Goetz, Les Murray)
Robert Goetz

This is Track 13 on the CD we will release at the art opening - dead in the middle of the 25 tracks, in the heart of the score.

Poetry Scores 2009 Art Invitational and CD release

For The Sydney Highrise Variations
At The Luminary Center for the Arts (4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway)
6-10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13 (after-party following at The Royale)

On Friday, Nov. 13 Poetry Scores will celebrate the release of its fourth poetry score CD with an Art Invitational devoted to the same poem, The Sydney Highrise Variations by the Australian poet Les Murray.

The host venue, The Luminary Center for the Arts, is located at 4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway, just across the street from Tower Grove Park and just down the block from The Royale, which will host an after-party following the 6-10 p.m. release party and art opening. (See below for list of artists.)

The concept of a Poetry Scores Art Invitational is simple. Contributing artists make work that responds to the poem, and they title the work after a verbatim quote from the poem. The titles then dictate where in the show the pieces are placed, as the work is positioned according to where in the flow of the poem the language used for the title appears. In this way, in a sense, it is the poem itself that hangs the show.

The Sydney Highrise Variations Art Invitational also will be a silent auction, where the artists themselves set their opening bids (low). At the end of bidding, all sales are concluded the night of the show and proceeds are split evenly between the artist, the venue and Poetry Scores, a St. Louis-based arts organization that translates poetry into other media. (Cash, check or credit accepted for sales.)

The organization’s primary artistic form is one it innovated: the poetry score, a long poem set to music as one scores a film.

The Nov. 13 Art Invitational will also be a release party for the poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations, co-produced by Matt Fuller and Chris King, and featuring the music of Three Fried Men, Middle Sleep (post-progressive rock improvisers from early 1980’s Los Angeles), Robert Goetz and Frank Heyer.

Limited quantities of the organization’s three previous poetry scores, Go South for Animal Index, Blind Cat Black and Crossing America by Leo Connellan, also will be available for sale. While supplies last, all CD purchases come with a complimentary beverage from Schlafly Beer or O’Fallon Brewing.

Contributing artists for the Art Invitational, in the order their work will appear in the show, include Greg Edmondson, Andrew Torch, Michael Hoffman, John Minkoff, Tim McAvin, Jenna Bauer, Sue Hartman, Kim Humphries, Keith Buchholz, Amy Alton Bautz, Julie Malone, Michael Paradise, Lyndsey Scott, Brea McAnally, Hap Phillips, Nita Turnage, Sarah Colby, Jeremy Rabus, Grace Woodard, Dana Smith, Kim Richardson, Kevin Belford, Christopher Gustave, Amy VanDonsel, Michael Behle, Nancy Exarhu, Heather Corley, Melanie Persch, Thom Fletcher, Chris King, Stefene Russell, Carmelita Nunez, Jason Wallace Triefenbach, Gina Alvarez, Alexa Hoyer, Jon Cournoyer, Tim Meehan, Robin Street-Morris, Goran Maric, Colin Michael Shaw, Daniel Shown, Tony Renner and Eric Woods of Firecracker Press.

Other confirmed artists who have not yet provided the title from the poem they are using for their work include Alicia LaChance, Dianna Lucas, Justin Tolentino, Cindy Tower and Robert Van Dillen.

In an essay he composed on commission for the Poetry Scores CD liner notes, Les Murray’s biographer Peter F. Alexander writes, “The Sydney Highrise Variations is a set of five linked poems which Les Murray first published in 1980, and subsequently included in his volume The People’s Otherworld (1982). The entire sequence is a meditation about the complex culture of the modern world, and Australia’s place in it.”

Alexander – a professor of English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and author of Les Murray: A Life in Progress (Oxford University Press) – concludes his essay: “The whole poem sequence derives its tension from this ambiguous response to the modern world. Murray ultimately is both excited and repelled by modernity, even as he feels himself ‘vibrant with modernity’s strange anger’. His is an older and a newer vision, both seeing modernism’s history and anticipating what will replace it.”

For more information about Poetry Scores or this event, contact creative director Chris King at 314-265-1435 or brodog [@] hotmail.com.

Poetry Scores is an arts organization based in St. Louis, Missouri (U.S.A.) devoted to translating poetry into other media. It has been featured on BBC Radio 3, NPR and in most local media. Poetry Scores is a Missouri non-profit organization. Its Board of Directors includes: Dianna Lucas (president), Serra Bording-Jones (treasurer), Stefene Russell (secretary), John Eiler, Matt Fernandes, Chris King, Stephen Lindsley, Charlois Lumpkins and K. Curtis Lyle.

Poetry Scores acknowledges the continuing support of Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts, KDHX Community Media, Schlafly Beer, O’Fallon Brewing, host venues past and present (The Luminary, Hoffman LaChance, Mad Art), and all contributing artists.

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Sydney highrise image from somebody's Flickr.

Workbook for "Peajacket era" & "Repeat their lines"

Blog as workbook here.

These are arrangements for two of the guitar parts for songs we will be recording from scratch in Nashville this weekend. I'll pair them with, here, the parts of the poem we will be singing onto them (or overdubbing with Les' reading).

"Repeat their lines repeat their lines"

Ingots of sheer

affluence poles

bomb-drawing grid

of columnar profit

tunnels in the sky

high window printouts

repeat their lines

repeat their lines
credit conductors

repeat their lines

bar graphs on blue

glass tubes of boom

in concrete wicker

each trade Polaris

government Agena

fine print insurrected

tall things on a tray

repeat their lines

repeat their lines

[This has line breaks and repetitions that reflect what I will sing, not what Les wrote. He repeats the lines, but not as much as I will when I sing it.]

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"The peajacket era"

All around them is the old order: brewery brick terrace hospital
horrible workplace;

the scale of the tramway era,
the peajacket era, the age of the cliff-repeating woolstores.

South and west lie the treeless suburbs, a mulch of faded flags,

north and partly east, the built-in paradise forest.

[Again, adding extra line breaks to reflect the pacing of the reading we will use.]

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Picture of some feller named Thomas Q. Peiffer in a peajacket from a picture gallery of the Peiffer family.

Drafts of cover art for "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Here you have the core Poetry Scores production team at an earlier moment on this journey, waiting for food outside a crab shack in Maine ca. 1995. Traces of that lunch seem to have survived on the frame of this Polaroid.

We were Hoobellatoo, then, and working on what would become our first poetry score, Crossing America by Leo Connellan, a great poet of Maine.

This weekend we will convene in Nashville, with John Minkoff and Dave Melson, to finish our fourth poetry scores, The Sydney Highrise Variations, by a great poet of Australia, Les Murray.

Our production credit has shifted over the years, from Lij and Chris King (Crossing America), to just me (Blind Cat Black), to Matt and me (Go South for Animal Index and Sydney Highrise Variations), though Lij does most of the actual studio engineering (with lots of help from Adam Long).

This year's cover art is very much a trilogy group effort. Matt is doing the design, based on two of Lij's college architectural studies. It was my idea, when I saw the drawings hanging on the studio wall in Nashville, which makes me creative director - my actual title in Poetry Scores.

Every so often, the job matches up with its description.

Here are rough draft's of Matt's cover designs - the links open pdfs.

Rough draft of front cover

Rough draft of back cover

Dana Smith's "Freud's cobwebbed poem"

This is an already outdated work-in-progress for Dana Smith's painting "Freud's cobwebbed poem".

The odd phrase in the title is drawn from the Australian poet Les Murray's great poem of modernity and cities, The Sydney Highrise Variations. I am told Freud figures here for the phallic nature of skyscrapers.

Dana's painting, soon to be finished and already very different from this image, will appear in the Poetry Scores Art Invitational to Les' poem. It will be held 6-10 p.m. (something like that) Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts (follow that link for directions &c.).

All the work in the show will respond to Les' poem and be titled after verbatim language from the poem. It will all be on sale on silent auction.

We also will release a poetry score CD at the event - the whole poem set to music as one scores a film. Here is the part of the score that incorporates the language Dana chose for his title.

mp3

"Hot air money driers"
(Matt Fuller, Chris King, Les Murray)
Three Fried Men
w/ Carl Pandolfi & Christopher Y. Voelker

Nine final mixes from "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Adam Long and I worked all day and night yesterday on final mixes for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations.

mp3s

"On its vaulting drum"
Three Fried Men

“Also, it’s a space probe”
Three Fried Men
with Christopher Y. Voelker

“The new city standing on its haze”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Vanished from the central upsurge”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Employment and neckties and ruling themes”
Middle Sleep
with Thom Fletcher and Stefene Russell

"In ambiguous battle at length"
Another Umbrella
with Les Murray

“Worldwide breath of catching up”
Three Fried Men

“Skill and the shadow”
Middle Sleep
with Les Murray

“Six hundred glittering and genteel towns”
Middle Sleep
with Chris King and Heidi Dean

A highlight from the session.

"The new city standing on its haze" is built from a crudely recorded guitar tap, of Lij picking out a chord progression in Nashville who knows how many years ago, onto some primitive tape recorder. I dubbed Les Murray's reading onto it - a reading recorded in Long Island City - in the spare bedroom of Matt Fuller's sister in Hollywood.

So this crude recording had music from Nashville, dubbed in Los Angeles with an Australian reading in New York. That still, somehow, wasn't enough. It wanted some city sounds. So Adam positioned one (high-performance) mic out the back door and another out a window.

It rained steadily, so we get more water than city, but that's okay, for a watery poem about a harbour city; in this stretch of the poem, Les yammers about the "ship-chained harbour" and "flooded valley".

Worked for me.

Five final mixes for "The Sydney Highrise Variations"

We have 25 songs to finish, mix and master between now and the Nov. 13 release party for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations. Yesterday Adam Long and I pulled the first five fish into the canoe.

mp3s

1. "Far above the tidal turnaround"

6. "They docked at apogee"

12. "In the land of veneers"

16. "The C19-20"

17. "The cantilevered behometh"

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We started with the band songs that are ready to mix, thinking they would require the most effort and take the most time, so the artist name for all of these is Three Fried Men.

Three Fried Men is Heidi Dean (vocals), Matt Fuller (guitars, drums, vocals), Chris King (vocals), Lij (guitars, drums, vocals, organ, whistles), Adam Long (percussion), David Melson (bass, guitar, vocals) and John Minkoff (guitar), though John isn't on any of these particular tracks.

"In the land of veneers" features Carl Pandolfi on organ. "The C19-20" features the poet himself, Les Murray, on vocals, and the rock producer Roger Moutenot on drums.

All the words are by Les Murray from his poem, of course (that being the idea of a poetry score). The melodies are mine, worked out to guitar parts by Matt Fuller for all of these but "Far above the tidal turnaround," which began its existence on a very old scratch guitar tape Lij gave me at least 15 years ago. I am a musical scavenger.

Basic tracks were recorded by Lij in Nashville at The Toy Box, assisted by Marc Primeau, though Carl recorded his own organ track at home and hand-delivered the session, and Adam recorded his percussion track on "Tidal turnaround" yesterday afternoon in the studio.

I think we'll list Matt Fuller and myself (Chris King) as co-producers again this year. We kind of worked out the songs and concept, mostly in Coldwater Canyon overlooking Los Angeles.

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Sketch by Lij from an old architectural school project. It hangs on his studio wall in Nashville. It will form the basis of the back CD cover.

Sydney Highrise Variations Art Invitational: a Preliminary Mockup

Michael Hoffman
'"the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround."

Tim McAvin
“Inked in by scaffolding and workers”

Thom Fletcher
"The city kept her flavour fire-ladder high"

Thom Fletcher
"To limit them to standing on economic grounds. With their twists of sculpture"

Chris King

“Dante”

Chris King

“Cromwell”

Thom Fletcher
"The worldwide breath of
Catching Up may serve to keep the mighty, slowing
machine aloft beyond our time".

Robin Street-Morris
"To be solar, I must be nuclear --"

Daniel Shown
"Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
gathered to be urban in plein air,
more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger."

Tony Renner
"more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger"

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These are ten of what finally will be more than seventy-five works of art (taking into account the various variations) that will be displayed at The Luminary Center for the Arts on Friday, Nov. 13, when Poetry Scores will host its 2009 Art Invitational.

Every piece in the show will respond to Les Murray's poem The Sydney Highrise Variations and be titled their using a verbatim quote from the poem. We will then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears - as I have done for these ten pieces.

Daniel's and Tony's pieces posted here are each one of numerous variations they are doing on their chosen theme.

I also feel compelled to add that, though half of these ten pieces are by the least accomplished contributors to the show (Thom Fletcher and myself, Chris King; neither of us artists, per se), nearly everyone in the show is a genuine, accomplished, and talented visual artists. Amateurs like Thom and me just are a little more excited by the gig and got started earlier!

Tony Renner vibrant with modernity's strange anger

Tony Renner is prodigiously productive as an artist and has a fancy for variations. I was hoping he would produce a set of variations for our Art Invitational to The Sydney Highrise Variations by the great Australian poet Les Murray, and he did not disappoint.

This is "Variation #18" from a set of 18 that all bear the title "more complex in their levels than their heights/and vibrant with modernity's strange anger".

Like all of the pieces being made for the show, its title is drawn from the poem. We then display the work according to where in the flow of the poem the title appears. These lines Tony has chosen conclude the poem. There is something of a traffic jam at the end, with many people falling for the last few lines, and I don't blame them; they are really evocative lines.

Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
gathered to be urban in plein air,
more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger

Colin Michael Shaw, Eric Woods and Daniel Shown also are making art with titles drawn from this language, and Daniel's also is a set of variations. I love this stuff.

The Invitational is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts, which is a really amazing space across from Tower Grove Park and just down Kinshighway from The Royale.

All work will be for sale on silent auction, with proceeds split three ways between the artist, the venue and Poetry Scores, a Missouri nonprofit that translates poetry into other media. Afterparty at The Royale.