WORMS

If you don’t know what WORMS is, you’re about to. WORMS is an interactive literatary magazine in 3D. WORMS is The Champagne of Beers of Literary Readings. Do I have to spell it out for you? Ok. It’s spelled W.O.R.M.S.

Anyway, the next installment of WORMS is next Wednesday. It will feature the words, faces and voices of Erin Gleeson, Jesse Heffler, Ashlie Kauffman, Robert Schreur.

That’s WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16 at The Bell Foundry (1539 N Calvert) in Baltimore. Admission is free, but you’ll want to have some $ on hand to buy independent publications, concessions and the like. Oh yeah. Wear a nice coat.

Tonight, the flamingos will be flying with Baltimore’s best “Death in Hampden” poetry, along with bands Midway Fair, Baltimore String Felons, and Vib!

Come out to Frazier’s on the Ave at 7:00p.m. for A Flamboyance of Flamingos. Hear a flock of poets and three stellar bands, all while supporting the city’s Health Care for the Homeless. At $5 at the door, we’re an evening of gloriously kitschy entertainment!

Wear your best Boh, Utz, Hon, or flamingo impression and rock the joint with your awesomeness. Participate in our flamingo-calling contest–don’t know what a flamingo sounds like? Neither do we! Make one up, toss back a shot, and have at it, hon.

I was also absent from Speak Your Piece last night, but I hear they made up a game. The exercise is to write a poem with the title “Death in Hampden” and the first line “I want to be impaled on a pink flamingo.” Here goes…

“I want to be impaled on a pink flamingo…”
Narrator: In a strange city, a grid of streets named for trees
without trees,
streets lined with cars, bars and wannabe rockstars,
A wildman dares to make a bold fashion statement:
“If I see one more bullshit tattoo, I swear to god I’ll kill you all!”
Narrator: this summer. The streets are lined with cars, bars and wannabe rockstars…
Pop legend “Plastic Centaur” stars in an epic film…
and the alleys run with beer and blood…
this summer…
Whoosh…
“Get away from that jukebox!”
sounds of explosions…
gratuitous breasts, beehive hairdos, more breasts, sex, inexplicable running…
this summer…
Death.. in Hampden…
Coming soon, to a theater near you

A friend and fellow resident of the CopyCat Building has released her first album, under the name Talitha’s Dream. The title of the album is The Album That Will Never Be even though, finally, it is!

Download the entire album, The Album That Will Never Be.

Here’s a sample song from the album. There’s More.
Download the entire album, The Album That Will Never Be.

There is an art exhibition in Baltimore that spans two museums.

At the Contemporary Museum, the show is Dawoud Bey: Class Pictures, a collection of color photo portraits. Dawoud Bey took “The Class Pictures” of students in public and private high school students in cities across the country. They’re real portraits though, with personality. These are not the cheesy backdrop photos we all lined up to have taken in high school. The portraits depict students from all over the country, and from many walks of life. In sum, these portraits of individuals offer a portrait of their world.

At the Walters Museum, the other part of the show is called Portraits Re/Examined. This show was curated, in part, by high school students. They worked with artist Dawoud Bey to select portraits from the Walters collection to show alongside 10 of Bey’s similarly evocative portraits. The students were asked to address the question of race and class in portraiture. Some striking comparisons have developed between the older historic drawings, paintings, and portrait miniatures from the Walters’ collection and the contemporary photographs of ordinary people.

The student-curators also will create auxiliary components for the exhibition, including a blog, Facebook page, podcast series, and cell phone audio tour.

Both exhibitions run from December 13, 2008 until February 16, 2009.

For months now, all the talk in my neighborhood has been about the Round Robin Tour. Something like a dozen Baltimore bands have been on tour together. What’s special about it is the format of the show. The show starts, and one band plays one song. Immediately after that, another band plays another song, and so on until all the bands have played a song. Then, they do it again, and again. It’s great! For anyone who gets sick of listening to sound checks between each and every band, this is a dream come true. It’s a wonderful idea, and Baltimore is very proud to have these bands draw huge crowds nationwide – no kidding, huge crowds! The show’s almost over, but there’s one performance left, and you can download the compilation from the tour!

Tonight, the Round Robin tour celebrated its homecoming at Sonar, here in Baltimore, by kicking off a two-night series of round robin performances. The first night was called “eyes night” and it featured nearly as much performance art as music. Many of the acts were accompanied by video projections, and the overall vibe was mellower. Tomorrow, feet night, will be more raucous.

Baltimore Round Robin 2008.

Another interesting thing about this tour is that the tour bus they used is powered by vegetable oil.

This whole thing was concocted by the same talented crew who brought an event called Whartscape as an answer to Baltimore’s Artscape. The group’s called Wham City.

Here’s a rundown of the many and diverse performances to be seen and heard in the Round Robin Tour.

The Baker Artists Awards celebrate Baltimore’s artists on the Web with an ongoing exhibition of its diverse artistic practice, and the Mary Sawyer Baker Prize will establish Baltimore’s reputation as a creatively rich and vital place to live with a civic commitment to value its individual artists.

Please take a minute to visit my work on the Baker Artist Awards web site. As a Baltimore artist, I am eligible to win the significant Mary Sawyers Baker Prize or maybe bragging rights as Baltimore’s Choice. Either way, please follow the link and vote for me… and, if you live in Baltimore, you could also Nominate your own work! Now go sign-up and vote to help me get my work out there!

Visit my nomination at http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nomination/view/dylan-kinnett

And all that you’ve held sacred, falls down and does not mend
Just remember that death is not the end
Not the end, not the end
Just remember that death is not the end
— Bob Dylan

Tonight was a mournful night for the arts community of Baltimore, even though the mourning was mostly in jest. A “wake” was held for Baltimore’s defunct arts magazine, Link: A Critical Arts Journal in Baltimore and the World (1996-2006). For ten years or so, Link was a preeminent authority on the subject of – you guessed it – arts in Baltimore and the World. Link published art criticism and commentary, with timely themes including net.art, at a time when the world wide web was still something of a novelty to most people; and “outsider art” or “visionary” art, at the birth of Baltimore’s Visionary Art Museum. Notable contributors to the publication included Yoko Ono, in the final issue.

Flyer for the wake held in memory of Link, a now-defunct arts publication.

Link’s wake began with a doleful litany, followed by eulogy, and was punctuated by drinking, as all good wakes should be. Highlights of the evening’s black comedy featured performance art by the Performance Thanatology Research Society, which included a woman who mummified herself and then sang “when you wish upon a star”. Other “mourners” crashed the eulogy by wailing and moaning and sobbing, while carrying black umbrellas and flowers. This wake was held at the 14Karat Cabaret, a hotbed of avant-garde activity in Baltimore, which was also the venue that hosted Link’s initial release party, ten years ago.

Out of respect for the deceased, presumably, no mention was made of the cause of death. A cautionary sermon, therefore, was conspicuously absent.

[audio:http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/national/local-national-786997.mp3]
Local NPR radio show “The Signal” gave a less tongue-in-cheek eulogy.

Link is gone, may it rest in peace, but the spirit behind the publication lives on. Tonight the torch was passed to a new publication in Baltimore, Locus Art Magazine. Locus has already published a fifth issue, and was named the 2008 best art magazine by Baltimore Magazine. (That fifth issue contains an interview with my former neighbor, Dina Kelberman. Shout-out to Dina.)

Baltimore’s art scene is in good hands, with the support of all the venues and programs that have sprouted up since the days of Link’s inception. Locus makes a fine contribution to that support for the visual arts.

Now, about that literary scene…

I’ve put together a new graphic literary journal in Baltimore, called “Infinity’s Kitchen.” To celebrate the publication of the inaugural issue, there will be an opening held at the Metro Gallery on Feb. 22 at 7 p.m.

Here is a run-down of the performances that will be at the release party.

Here it is folks, the video from episode 5 of the Ed Schrader Show. Here I am performing my spoken word routine. Enjoy.

[audio:lizz-king.mp3|autostart=no]

Baltimore’s City paper awarded the title of Best Singer/Songwriter to Lizz King. Lizz is my friend, longtime neighbor and a fellow West Virginian. Congrats, Lizz. Here’s what the City Paper had to say about her.

Wham City might be best known for giddy, hyperactive noisemakers such as Dan Deacon and the Santa Dads. But the collective’s best-kept secret, Lizz King, defies her crew’s prevailing aesthetic with bluesy vamps wherein she wraps her throaty voice around a single instrument

Cheers Lizz, defying a prevailing aesthetic like that.

Like I said before, I’ll be performing on the Ed Schrader Show on September 13th, at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore.

The Lineup

The Ed Schrader show always features a variety of shenanigans and this show should be no exception.

Honnie Wells & The Hundred Quart will perform music that has been described as “making Tom Waits look like a sissy”, with a bluesy raspy sound.

The more obscure Teeth Mountain will also perform.

The manager of Baltimore infamous night spot, The Talking Head, will make an appearance, presumably to discuss the reopening of the aforementioned night spot.

Baltimore’s self-styled vigilante super-hero, Blue Leader is sure to bring some gut-busting laughs to the whole affair. Check out his “Do The Math Comics” for even more laughs.

I’ll be performing spoken word, as well.

On Thursday, September 13^th at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery, I’ll be featured on the Ed Schrader Show. I’m really excited about the opportunity to perform some of my new spoken word material, in front of a live, televised audience. What should I perform?

I auditioned with the latest version of my perpetually-in-progress piece entitled “The Outside Talker“. With such short notice, I’m not sure I can come up with the entire garb I’d need to really pull it off. “The Outside Talker” is an imitation of a carnival barker, or sideshow announcer. I’d need a top hat, at the very least. I might decide to perform something else, instead.

I’ll need to practice, maybe memorize (yeah, right). Whatever happens, you’ll just have to see the show for yourself. If you’re not in the neighborhood, don’t worry, the whole show is usually syndicated online via YouTube, etc..

Since it’s a late show, there are sure to be plenty of gags and jokes, and perhaps some room for the kind of quick promotional suggestions that guests usually make on that type of show (I’ve got two, as it happens).

Again, I’m still not totally set on what to perform. Any requests?

Red Emma’s hosts Wred Fright and Crzy Carl Robinson, authors from the Underground Literary Alliance, this evening along with special guest Sean Stewart of Baltimore’s own Thoughtworm zine, reading from their recent publications. Fright is the author of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, a great comedic novel that tells the hilarious story of a garage rock band in a college town. Robinson’s novel, Fat on the Vine, called a “masterpiece” by at least one critic (and possibly more) details the protagonist’s breakdown after a breakup. If you haven’t checked out Stewart’s Thoughtworm … you should. Check it out tonight at Red Emma’s. 7PM, free, at Red Emma’s.

Not long ago, Wham City exploded onto the front page of the Baltimore City Paper, branding it the WHAM City Paper. The cover story was titled Crazy Diamonds: Wham City Doesn’t Want To Take Over The World–But It Just Might Anyway. Read the article for a slice of life in my neighborhood. Suffice it to say that Wham City is a collective of creative types, whose work ranges from music to philosophy.

That’s not enough! Also in the neighborhood, the new Metro Gallery opened this month, and hosted Wham City’s favorite talk show: The Ed Schrader Show. Recorded live before a captive audience, the show vaguely resembles the late-night talk-and-variety shows, the kind you see on TV, but this one is broadcast on the internet, occasionally. Unlike the watered down crap on the networks, Ed Schrader’s shenanigans include occasional profanity and startling interview questions like “Would you rather see me destroy the human race, or ruin myself?”. Anything goes, at the Ed Schrader show. Cheap beer, too. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

Episode 4 featured the Charm City Roller Girls, Baltimore’s all girl roller derby league. They boast of their ranking of 18^th in the nation!

Next up was an interview with Simeon Walunas from “Shut Up, I’m on the Radio“. As its name suggests, “Shut up…” is a radio show in Baltimore, on the Loyola College AM Radio station. The show features music from Baltimore that you probably can’t hear anywhere else. The radio show is available online, but only via a stream that you must tune into at the proper time (every Monday, 9 to 11pm, which happens to conflict with the Baltimore Poetry Slam). I would much rather the show had a podcast, but oh well.

Finally, in true late-show fashion, we got to see a musical performance by WZT Hearts.

Episode 4 of the Ed Schrader Show isn’t available for your online viewing pleasure just yet, but check with Wham City TV for an update. Meanwhile, previous episodes are available. Here’s a promo, so you know what you’re in for.

Welcome to Baltimore, “Charm City”: A Charm Bracelet of Half-Baked Delicacies

or

Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Collapse of the Avant Garde into Waves of Ecstasy

There’s an epigraph:

A motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition setting forth a theme. [Greek, epigraph, to write on] – American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

“Hey, Rock, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” – Bullwinkle J. Moose

The GI Bill Considered as the Indian Removal Act

What brings us to Baltimore? We can thank a forward-looking piece of legislation at the end of a war, the GI Bill, as the material impetus for moving this art of writing into the university. Our university affiliation, the professionalization of our activity, the tribal organization of our guild, the expected enaction of academic ritual as expressed by conventions. Viola: Baltimore. The story of the literary artist and art and the now sixty year integration with an institution founded in the Middle Ages would be an interesting story if I had time or if that was the task. Instead, consider this: This culture has been successful at impounding its artists in a kind of reservation. The university provides an inoculation frame, a context in order to order, to control, to make sense. This gathering? Have we rabbited from our reservations? Have we escaped the context of this definition? Baltimore is a port city. This convention may be considered as our island of quarantine.

The Avant Garde Taken Literally as Expressed in Xenophon’s Anabasis or The March Up Country, The Rouse translation

From Book Four: They reached the mountain on the fifth day. When the first men reached the summit and caught sight of the sea there was loud shouting. Xenophon and the rear guard, hearing this, thought that more enemies were attacking in front…But when the shouts grew louder and nearer, as each group came up it went pelting along to the shouting men in front, and the shouting was louder and louder as the crowds increased. Xenophon thought it must be something very important; he mounted his horse and galloped to bring help forward. As he rode he heard the soldiers shouting “Sea!” “Sea!” and passing the word along in waves.

Derrida Consumed by Crabs

1966. Derrida arrives in Baltimore, twenty-nine city blocks north of where we are now, to deliver, for the first time on these shores, the obituary of the author. At the very moment the construction of authorship in America is evolving from the romantic individual genius to the romantic individual genius with tenure. Later, Derrida is taken to a crab house on Belair Road where he is instructed in the procedure for disassembling the steamed Maryland blue crab. He is a quick study. He becomes proficient at removing the carapace, the feathery lungs and mustard some consider a delicacy, adept at cracking the claws with knife and wooden mallet, extracting the lump meat from the compartments of cartilage. The flesh of the crab is like soap. The act of consuming consumes him.

Why Do We Eat Human Flesh?

Some of us eat human flesh and drink human blood. Weekly. We do so in the context of the Christian faith, in the setting of the church. Art, too, is framed deviance. If the Avant Garde is regarded as a transgressive movement can it transgress the frame that makes it art? Is that, in fact, the only transgression left to transgress? The Catechism of the Catholic Church in America was written in Baltimore, Maryland, the Roman Catholic reservation. A catechism is a book that gives a brief summary of basic principles in question and answer form. Is there a brief summary of basic principles, a catechism, for the Avant Garde? Can art ask questions that have answers? Can it exist outside the picket fencing of its own inquisition? Must art be art? Must flesh transubstantiate in order to be consumed?

The Women’s Industrial Exchange

on Charles Street dates from the 19th century when it was founded to provide women a means to market the fruits of their domestic labor. There one can still purchase handicrafts – clothing, ceramics, paper ephemera, decoupage, lace and linens, millinery, jewelry, quilts, and souvenirs – as well as consumables – baked goods, preserves, candies, and herbs and spices. There is a tea room too. The Women’s Industrial Exchange excites me! The building is a kind of portal. Until his recent retirement, it even had its own doorman. A portal that, indeed, leads back to the past, but more importantly, a portal where the products of anonymous artists appear spontaneously to then be consumed by the visitor. True, the art that materializes on Charles Street is not of the genres we would here today recognize as the art of the Avant Garde. But its delivery system is for me current. Art that appears. Art that is found. Devoid of signature. My favorites are pieces of utility that have been transformed into the useless or the useless made into the useful – bread dough baked and glazed with silicon then affixed with googly eyes and magnets – the utilitarian on the verge of metamorphosing into art. Finding a Duchamp in Baltimore but without the baggage of “Duchamp,” a museum nowhere near, readymades without the anointment of Art. The Women’s Industrial Exchange takes us back to this future.

The Row House of Gertrude Stein Is For Sale

The Row House of Gertrude Stein Is For Sale

The Row House of Gertrude Stein Is For Sale

Once when looking for an apartment in Baltimore, I found an ad in the classified section of The Sun offering for sale a row house in the Druid Hill neighborhood once owned and occupied by Gertrude Stein. This caught my attention. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the notice was the authorial intent that by informing the reader that the row house was once owned and occupied by Gertrude Stein this would, in fact, be a selling point as persuasive as the parquet floors and the mahogany bannister, the leaded windows and the renovated kitchen. I had a chance, once, to purchase the house where, it was advertised by the seller, Raymond Carver wrote the short story “Cathedral.” Or was it the house where what happens in the short story “Cathedral” happened? Either way, the space was promoted as valuable, that these actions, the writing about something or the something that was written about, now dust, no not even dust but something simply over and gone, had, in the end, coin. Had added value in the calculation of real real estate. How curious this preceived desire to inhabit the habitation of a name, to possess the apostrophe of another’s possession. “Gertrude Stein” as brand is known how? She wrote all those words, all those books of words, ordered all those words and all those books in order to construct a phrase or two that would stick, that stuck, that infected the reader, that reordered his or her own row house of DNA, own chemical charm bracelet of memory. “A rose is a rose is a rose” is a kind of row house block. See the optical illusion of the foreshortened front porches as you look down the street! The repetition of the marble stoops. The repetition of the painted screen doors. “There is no there there” was the epigraph of my thesis written in Baltimore, Maryland, in an apartment on Charles Street, before I saw the ad in The Sun offering for sale the row house once owned and occupied by Gertrude Stein had even been written, had even been thought to be written. Gertrude Stein wrote “There is no there there” it is said, about Oakland, California. I alluded to “There is no there there” to associate it with Fort Wayne, Indiana. I am reading this to an audience, in a hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. I have no idea where or in what house Gertrude Stein wrote “There is no there there,” but I suspect that it was as true there as well, as meaninful or not there too, that there there was no there there.

The Western Most Eastern City; the Southern Most Northern City; the Eastern Most Western City; the Northern Most Southern City

Baltimore. When I was thinking of moving here to go to graduate school I talked to George Starbuck, who wanted me to move to Boston instead. He said: “You don’t want to go to Baltimore. It is the world’s largest small town.” Perhaps this art thing is not about transgression but in the situating of itself and one’s art, of one’s art between the spaces, on the lines. Not so much the breaking of boundaries, but the inscription of elaborate Venn Diagrams on the culture. The waves of overlap instead of the tide rising. Not the context of no context, but the context of context alone.

Martone Consumed by Crabs

The summer before Harbor Place opened, Martone wondered down to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore in the hope of capturing what coolness there was in the city. Looking into the water, Martone discovered an infestation of the harbor by crabs, doublers in fact, crabs in the act of mating. The salinity of the bay was such as to allow the crustaceans rare access to this most often sweet inlet of the massive estuary. The Latin name for the Blue Crab translates thus: Beautiful Swimmer: Delicious. There were millions of them, doubled, making millions more. The articulation of their graceful motion through the water. The architecture of their passion. The narrative of their cheap horror movie choreography. It is envy he felt, envy that the anonymous phenomenon of Baltimore, in its display, had again been more imaginative than he, a trained professional.

Xenophon, in Retreat with His Army through the Present Day Turkey, Races to the Front, Fearing the Worst

But they had made it out alive. There it was. The way back home to Greece. The men in the vanguard were shouting. “Sea! Sea!” which in Greek is pronounced ” Thalasa! Thalasa!” Onomatopoeia. The sound of the waves of the sea crashing over Xenophon as he, the leader of this disastrous exposition and the historian of the same, charged to the front. “Sea!” “Sea!” In English, a homophone. Going forward in retreat. To be swamped by human language, to be consumed by it, its ecstatic reaction to the steady static of the world.

The Constellation Is Not the Constellation; The Constitution Is Not the Constitution: Frigates Considered as Vehicles Embodying Change

The USS Constellation displayed in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor currently undergoing renovation is not one of the six original frigates of the US Navy. What you see is the remnant of a later ship of the same named built to fight slave trading in the 1850′s, an interesting story, but one suppressed in favor of the fiction of origin for commercial touristic reasons. The USS Constitution in Boston is the oldest commissioned warship in the world. The oldest commissioned warship, except that through renovation none of the original ship survives. The 18th century ship you observe has been completely consumed by its own maintaining. It is timeful and timeless. It is hard to regard these ships as works of art, these floating fabrications of stories. We try to make sense of them as we eat our crab cake sandwiches. We consider their wood sides transformed, we recall, to iron sides by means of a poem, a poem that saved the ship from scrap. We regard the complication of their riggings while we savor our crab cakes, crab cakes not made of crab but pollack dyed and flavored to be crab.

The Aesthetic of the Half-Baked: The Maryland Beaten Biscuit

I apologize for this bracelet of of false starts, postcards all caption with little message save this: “Wish you were here.” And here you are. I am both a producer and consumer of art and the art I produce mostly consumes other art. The metaphor the Avant Garde maintains is that there is a difference between production and consumption, the performer and the audience, me and you. I am here to tell you that these distinctions are not distinct for me. There is not the world and the art of the world. Artifice is all and its arrangement the lookout of us all in both of those roles. I offer these half-baked ideas, not even ideas. Notes, then. Notes of notes. Half-baked notions on the notion of notion. I am here suggesting the aesthetic of the TV dinner, the pre-cooked and flash-frozen, the heat and serve, the shake and bake, the poppin’ fresh, the just add water, the just add meat, the process of the processed, the condensed and reconstituted, the pre-packaged, the some assembly acquired. I am the maker of parts made of the wholes. The recipe for the Maryland Beaten Biscuit, a kind of hard tack, an Eastern Shore delicacy is this: Flour, salt, butter, and milk to make a stiff dough. Mix and beat for thirty minutes – preferably on a tree stump – until all the air is removed and the dough blisters. One hot typically swampy humid summer in Baltimore, I had a hankering for some beaten biscuits. One place to get them here in town is the Women’s Industrial Exchange. I ask the woman behind the counter for some beaten biscuits who then told me they didn’t have any. “Hon,” she said, “it’s too hot to beat.”

Note: This text was written by Michael Martone and published with the Creative Commons License.

My bike-courier roomies are planning a bike race. The interesting thing, to me, about this bike race is that it is a “choose your own adventure” race. Racers will arrive at predetermined checkpoints, where they will discover a new chapter in the story of their adventure through baltimore. The object of the game is to stay alive!

Of course, the reason this is all so interesting to me, in addition to the fun factor, is my interest in non-linear narrative. Journaling this event might be an interesting challenge.

Check out the Shock Trauma Bike Race Event Page if you’d like to participate. Stay tuned for more details…

On Friday the Thirteenth, tucked away in an off-beat bar, there was a fashion show called “Fashion Monsters”. A good time was had by all.

I got up on stage last night to do a spoken word performance, and I think the crowd liked it! Normally, when I do something between musical acts, the audience is thin. People go to the bathroom or the bar between bands, and they expect anything they hear coming from the microphone to be a mike check, or silly stuff about how the band’s CDs are for sale.

I went up after Lizz King, Vox Populi, and before the N.U.R.B.S., and I was armed to the teeth. I’ve spent the better part of the last week digging through a pile of everything I’ve ever written.
My recent move to Baltimore has given me an opportunity to have everything I own in one place, for the first time in almost ten years. With all my notebooks and boxes of papers together again, I could spread them out on my floor, and sort them. Honestly, I threw most of those papers away. Many of them were redundant copies, obsolete drafts, notes, etc. Many more of those papers were bad teenage poems.

My best friend Luke called me last night to say that he’d been reading over an old issue of Apocalypse Playground. He was laughing, right at me, when he called. He has a point, though. In retrospect, a lot of that stuff is laughably bad. What was it we liked about that stuff again?

I managed to find a fair number of surprises in that pile of paper, though. I took them to the stage last night, and aired them out.

I’m going to the beach this Thanksgiving, but while I’m gone No Categories will faithfully publish a collection of poems that I have rewritten and salvaged from that enormous pile of paper.

What should I do with the bad ones?

Inspired in no small part by my friends’ performance at The True Vine, and encouraged by the time I’ve spent this week, digging through piles of my old poems, and finding some gems, I’ve decided to give another poetry reading. The last reading was a sucess, but it has been a while. I’m out of shape. I’ve been thinking of doing some “covers”, which should fit right in, considering that the next likely venue for such a performance is Saturday’s jam session at the other end of the Copycat Complex.

These are three songs whose lyrics I would like to perform as spoken word:

Re-humanise Yourself

Words by Sting

He goes out at night with his big boots on
None of his friends know right from wrong
The kick a boy to death ’cause he don’t belong
You’ve got to humanise yourself

A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself

I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Billy’s joined the National Front
He always was a little runt
He’s got his hand in the air with the other cunts
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself
Re-humanise yourself

I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanise yourself

A policeman put on his uniform
He’d like to have a gun just to keep him warm
Because violence here is a social norm
You’ve got to humanise yourself

Re-humanise yourself…

Darkness

Words and music by Stewart Copeland

I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark
I could be replaced by any bright spark
But darkness makes me fumble
For a key
To a door
That’s wide open

Instead of worrying about my clothes
I could be someone that nobody knows
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws till I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

Invisible Sun

Words and music by Sting

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

It’s dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with me head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

And they’re only going to change this place
By killing everybody in the human race
They would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

Last Friday, with friends and neighbors, I attended a wonderful gathering at the True Vine record shop in Baltimore. In the back room, there was space enough to pack all of three bands and us for an evening of good music, good company, and laughter.

First on the line-up was Gemmel, a performance I was unfortunately unable to photograph, but a masterful show nonetheless. The guitar work was inflected, emotional, and very nimbly played.

Next, came Santadads: two guys, neighbors of mine, dressed as a bear and a tiger. The name of their mike-check tune seemed to be “We’re going to kill you!“, which was what they chanted. They ended their set with a very operatic rendition of the YMCA song. There wasn’t a dry eye or an un-split belly in the place.

Last, but not least came the new kid on the block, Lizz King. She’s a native of my hometown, Shepherdstown West Virginia, and played the show to announce the release of her first recording, entitled “All Songs Go To Heaven”.

For your listening pleasure, you loyal readers of No Categories, I have procured copies of the three songs on that recording. Please enjoy the songs: “Bigger, Better, Stronger, Faster” a song about a ridiculous work ethic. Next up, we have “Proletariat Delinquent” (whose title is difficult to spell), a delightful and somewhat eerie song. Lastly, there’s a song called “When the Curtain Rises“, which is a sultry song about disappointing things.

A good time was had by all, of course.

The rest of the pictures I took are posted in the photo album.

I’ve moved to Baltimore, Maryland. I have volumes to say on the subject, and on other subjects, since my recent period of writing inactivity. These will have to wait, though. I need to see about getting electricity and money first.