saturday december 30, 2006 - 11:49PM - Chicago, IL
Chicago, IL
Truth be told i wouldn't bring the new year in, in Chicago left to my own devices, but i'm here and it's all good.
i haven't blogged for a while and there are many things i've thought to blog about since ii last did and indeed, my thoughts on those things were coherent at the time i thought of them, but now... not so much. so this blog is the blog to try to get me back in the swing of tings. it will feature random understandings, proselytizations and sex. it will talk about ME a lot.
so MASQUERADE: poems of calypso and home is done (got done just before thanksgiving as a matter of fact) and now i understand why folks have to do previews before they put a show on. i've done ten shows and felt that i really hit my stride around show number 7. thing is, whenever i have a show, i spend the whole day preparing for it and "getting myself in the right frame of mind" and doing things like "centering myself". however, if you have a show everyday for say - six months, you can't center yrself all the time. somebody has to do the laundry and go shop for shoes and exotic cheeses at some point, so part of the learning about how to take this set of poems to theatre has been about how to live a whole normal life and be a professional at the same time day in and day out. let me tell you folks, you have to reserve a part of you for mid day cocktails and stil have the resources necessary to put on a kickass show at 7pm. it aint easy! still, it got done and apparently i'll be getting into the hip-hop theatre festival this coming summer- at least here in new york, if not in other cities too.
i like sex - a lot... i said in the subject that i'd talk about sex so i'm just delivering...
two days ago i'm waiting in KARMA (ist ave between 3rd and 4th streets) for milica. i'm having wine and smoking Gauloises (it is one of the few bars left in which you can smoke. there are hookahs and everything). i'm rapt in CLR James' "Beyond a Boundary" a book which i've read before but am now re-reading because i'm in the midst of so many poems about cricket that i want to reconnect to the game's and history's most formidable commentator on the politics of the sport, vis a vis being black in a colonial gentleman's game (more on this later). i look up and the bar is full. smoke is thick in the air and folks are chatting up a storm. i'm in the midst of reading and feeling that way one feels when you're really enjoying a bit of prose and feeling as you read like you're being filled up. as though epiphany is enveloping you just then, and i look up and there is one other black person sitting at the bar. he is also reading. he is rapt. we are the only two people reading i the bar - the two black men here in new york city. it feels positively paris left bank in a james baldwin chillin with nina simone sort of way. for some reason this gives me succor. on a christmas when james brown dies, gerald ford tries to steal the show and somehow the only teo people reading in a manhattan bar are two black men, i decided the world is being redeemed as we speak. milica comes in. she says in her perfectly aggressive serbian accent "what the FUCK is worng with christmas??!!" i couldn't agree more...
sex is really really good...
the book is selling well. 800 copies so far as a matter of fact and it hits stores officially next month. if you wanted to buy it on amazon and you got on it tomorrow - before jan 1 - you'd get it at significant discount. check it out "tarnish and masquerade". it's really strange, but now there are these poems before me and i'm not sure if they're going to represent growth when they appear, but i can't think about that when i'm writing i just have to write the poems and hope to hell i can get out of the way long enough to know what each poem wants. lynne asked patrick and i last night if - and let me see if i can recall the syntax of the question well enough - if we thought that the hyper self-awareness of the culture in which we now lived impacted the work we created in a way that was any different - for btter or worse - than in cultures before ours. in fact she said, "we are so much more 'therapied' than at any other point in history that it might be impossible to gauge whether ot not the art is coming from any place of innocence or naivete at all..." she went on to inquire whether or not that would hinder or help our work. after $200.00 worth of whiskey and beer we could not of course definitively answer that question but what we did come to - or maybe this was what i came to - was that the act of deciding to be a poet is i any age a demonstration of hyper self-awareness and that therefore that self-awareness can only be relative to the self-awareness of the society/age in which we live. it is impossible to figure out if we have or haven't undercut the "purity" the "honesty" of our direction, because the decision to arite is already one of self-awareness. we only hope that we can get out of our way enough to make honesty and truth bear upon craft enough (or vice versa depending on yr standpoint) to make the work, work.
so this one time i was having sex, right...
i now own a huge belt buckle with two six-shooters crossed, inlaid with rhinestones.
i am now 6-1 in drunken sprinting. buddy wakefield beat me when he was in new york, but i was wearing boots and i'da caught him if it was a full 100 meters. i'm kicking yr ass in seattle in a week and a half, Buddy - 100 meters after significant imbibage. it's on!
the dude in my local gym asked me if i travel so much because my job is as a professional soccer player. if i still look like i might be in some way shape or form capable of that, i'm not doing badly.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "100 years of solitude" is gangsta!!!!
C L R James is to West Indian socio-political thought and more importantly black west indians; what Cornell West is to socio-political thought here.
i promise i'll blog more. i'm going on the road from jan 7 to march 18. i'm a hoot when i'm in other folks' cities. ask anybody. there'll probably be photos. stay tuned.
i love Jesus but Christmas is whack!!
laters
Chicago, IL
Truth be told i wouldn't bring the new year in, in Chicago left to my own devices, but i'm here and it's all good.
i haven't blogged for a while and there are many things i've thought to blog about since ii last did and indeed, my thoughts on those things were coherent at the time i thought of them, but now... not so much. so this blog is the blog to try to get me back in the swing of tings. it will feature random understandings, proselytizations and sex. it will talk about ME a lot.
so MASQUERADE: poems of calypso and home is done (got done just before thanksgiving as a matter of fact) and now i understand why folks have to do previews before they put a show on. i've done ten shows and felt that i really hit my stride around show number 7. thing is, whenever i have a show, i spend the whole day preparing for it and "getting myself in the right frame of mind" and doing things like "centering myself". however, if you have a show everyday for say - six months, you can't center yrself all the time. somebody has to do the laundry and go shop for shoes and exotic cheeses at some point, so part of the learning about how to take this set of poems to theatre has been about how to live a whole normal life and be a professional at the same time day in and day out. let me tell you folks, you have to reserve a part of you for mid day cocktails and stil have the resources necessary to put on a kickass show at 7pm. it aint easy! still, it got done and apparently i'll be getting into the hip-hop theatre festival this coming summer- at least here in new york, if not in other cities too.
i like sex - a lot... i said in the subject that i'd talk about sex so i'm just delivering...
two days ago i'm waiting in KARMA (ist ave between 3rd and 4th streets) for milica. i'm having wine and smoking Gauloises (it is one of the few bars left in which you can smoke. there are hookahs and everything). i'm rapt in CLR James' "Beyond a Boundary" a book which i've read before but am now re-reading because i'm in the midst of so many poems about cricket that i want to reconnect to the game's and history's most formidable commentator on the politics of the sport, vis a vis being black in a colonial gentleman's game (more on this later). i look up and the bar is full. smoke is thick in the air and folks are chatting up a storm. i'm in the midst of reading and feeling that way one feels when you're really enjoying a bit of prose and feeling as you read like you're being filled up. as though epiphany is enveloping you just then, and i look up and there is one other black person sitting at the bar. he is also reading. he is rapt. we are the only two people reading i the bar - the two black men here in new york city. it feels positively paris left bank in a james baldwin chillin with nina simone sort of way. for some reason this gives me succor. on a christmas when james brown dies, gerald ford tries to steal the show and somehow the only teo people reading in a manhattan bar are two black men, i decided the world is being redeemed as we speak. milica comes in. she says in her perfectly aggressive serbian accent "what the FUCK is worng with christmas??!!" i couldn't agree more...
sex is really really good...
the book is selling well. 800 copies so far as a matter of fact and it hits stores officially next month. if you wanted to buy it on amazon and you got on it tomorrow - before jan 1 - you'd get it at significant discount. check it out "tarnish and masquerade". it's really strange, but now there are these poems before me and i'm not sure if they're going to represent growth when they appear, but i can't think about that when i'm writing i just have to write the poems and hope to hell i can get out of the way long enough to know what each poem wants. lynne asked patrick and i last night if - and let me see if i can recall the syntax of the question well enough - if we thought that the hyper self-awareness of the culture in which we now lived impacted the work we created in a way that was any different - for btter or worse - than in cultures before ours. in fact she said, "we are so much more 'therapied' than at any other point in history that it might be impossible to gauge whether ot not the art is coming from any place of innocence or naivete at all..." she went on to inquire whether or not that would hinder or help our work. after $200.00 worth of whiskey and beer we could not of course definitively answer that question but what we did come to - or maybe this was what i came to - was that the act of deciding to be a poet is i any age a demonstration of hyper self-awareness and that therefore that self-awareness can only be relative to the self-awareness of the society/age in which we live. it is impossible to figure out if we have or haven't undercut the "purity" the "honesty" of our direction, because the decision to arite is already one of self-awareness. we only hope that we can get out of our way enough to make honesty and truth bear upon craft enough (or vice versa depending on yr standpoint) to make the work, work.
so this one time i was having sex, right...
i now own a huge belt buckle with two six-shooters crossed, inlaid with rhinestones.
i am now 6-1 in drunken sprinting. buddy wakefield beat me when he was in new york, but i was wearing boots and i'da caught him if it was a full 100 meters. i'm kicking yr ass in seattle in a week and a half, Buddy - 100 meters after significant imbibage. it's on!
the dude in my local gym asked me if i travel so much because my job is as a professional soccer player. if i still look like i might be in some way shape or form capable of that, i'm not doing badly.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "100 years of solitude" is gangsta!!!!
C L R James is to West Indian socio-political thought and more importantly black west indians; what Cornell West is to socio-political thought here.
i promise i'll blog more. i'm going on the road from jan 7 to march 18. i'm a hoot when i'm in other folks' cities. ask anybody. there'll probably be photos. stay tuned.
i love Jesus but Christmas is whack!!
laters
1 Comments:
happy new years, sun.
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