Performing

I've been trying to do more memorixing of my stuff for the Kymeras: this is from the last show, at the Laurier Royal Oak, down in the basement at our steampunk-themed Fireborn show. It's dark, and kinda grainy, but I still like the poem. And it's been interesting learning to put the paper down and work without it.

 

More adventures in radio

Well, well, well. I thought things couldn't get any more hairy than having your interviewee not show up unexpectedly, right? Yeah. The World of Radio decided to be madcap at me again.

So I got to the studio today with a 25-minute interview/conversation between me and a couple of other poets/critics/scenesters about spoken word (it was a nice chunk of audio, and the first bit of a two-parter) to play, but I was going to do a live intro and outro for it. So, I got in early to make sure I knew where the audio player on Computer One was, cued up a little Buckwheat Zydeco as an intro tune, got the headphones settled, and started making some notes and noodling around waiting for Third World Players to end so I could start my show.

Now, I was a little edgy because of the whole Gatineau climbing conflict thing. Actually, I was really pissed and reminding myself that Literary Landscapes is not the place to go ranting about the policies of the National Capital Commission. That, plus a little too much coffee over the workday and the usual jitters I get before showtime had me all sort of bouncing around. But I'd managed to calm myself down so I could remind myself that everything was going to go just fine.

Then, at about 6:27 or 6:28, I noticed a flashing, bright, strobe light in the studio. The light that usually goes off when the phone rings. But I picked up the studio phone and there was nothing. And there was a buzzer going off somewhere - not so loud that it was going to show up on air, I thought, but there was a buzzer, and the phone doesn't usually have a sound. Then I checked out the light, and noticed that it said "FIRE" around it in block letters.

Well, crap. If I wasn't at the board to intro and cue up my interview, we were going to have dead air. But there was a fire alarm. I set the Buckwheat Zydeco tune to play automatically after Third World Players spooled to a stop, and picked up my bag and headed out into the hall. I had about 6 or 7 minutes leeway before there was dead silence on the radio.

There were two young guys doing a show in the closed circuit recording studio, and they came out as I did. "What's going on?" they said, and I said, "I dunno, but I've got to be on air in like 7 minutes, I don't know if I can leave."

"Yeah, we've got someone calling in for an interview in 5," they said. "But if it's a fire, we've got to go, right?"

"Training did not cover this," I said, and they agreed that no one had ever told us what you were supposed to do if you have to evacuate the building. So we headed out down the emergency exit to see if we could find out what was going on. The stairwell smelled like pot, so we assumed that it was just someone smoking in the stairwell, but then we got outside and there were people all hanging around. I propped the emergency exit open with my bookbag and we tried to decide what to do. I knew the minutes were ticking down in there. Finally we all three decided just to go back in.

"For journalism!" I said, and they said that we could at least be each other's ears and eyes - we'd go back to our shows but if anything got weird we'd let each other know. So we ran around the back of the building and back up the five flights of stairs - past all the university centre staff waiting outside - and I went back to the On Air studio with about 30 seconds of music to spare, caught some of my breath, faded out the music, flipped on the mike, and started my intro (although my heart was still racing and I was still a little out of breath.) Then I ran the interview.

After a minute or so I went back out to the hall and some guy who was passing told me it was a "glitch" and that the fire alarms had been going off for no reason for a week. So, when the two guys from Studio B came back to the On Air studio to tell me they'd heard someone saying they had to leave I told them I'd heard it was a false alarm, and I stayed around for the end of the interview, did the outro, cued up some music, and by then the annoying buzzer had stopped sounding, and the folks from Carribbean Rhythms were there to take over for me.

Kind of funny though, that the absolute dread of dead air trumped _everything_. I was WAY more worried about a half hour of silence than I was about any purported fire.

Irony

Spotted this at the bottom of an article on USA Today's website:

 

The Recipe workshops every Wednesday this month!
Just a reminder that The Recipe hold spoken word workshops at Umi Cafe every Wednesday this month! 7:00 -8:30 at Umi Cafe, east end of Chinatown. For details check out Umi's website!

CR Avery, Nathanael Larochette, Musk Ox, Night Watch... and it's only Sunday morning!

It's been a pretty busy weekend so far. In part I suppose I can blame the newly warmed-up weather that means not only can I bike downtown, but I sorta want to.

Friday night I got to see CR Avery at the NAC Fourth Stage. The first time I ever saw CR Avery he was featuring at Capital Slam, and I knew then that I had never heard anything like this guy before. Or, actually, that's not quite true, I had, but not in that combination. He's like a bizarre, perfectly balanced alloy of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. Oh, and he beatboxes like a god, occasionally through a harmonica into the mike. It has to be heard to be believed. This show also featured a backup group with three violins, a cello, and an electric guitar, and if he's fun onstage by himself, you really have to see him with a band. (This, in fact, is where the Nick Cave similarities surfaced for me - the way he moved onstage around and through the other musicians and the mike.) They were good, too - two violins tended to take the solo lines and had marvellously different voices - one raw fiddle, the other full-throated Gypsy.

Watch this video of CR doing his poem "The Birdcage" in Arizona. I just found it, and it's mesmerizing. He did that one Friday night too.  

I think what I really love about him is the originality. I've never heard anyone else do this before. His poems/lyrics are surreal and gripping. And I wish I knew, in poems like 'The Birdcage' or the one about the cat, how and when he decides to throw in that explosive beatbox. What's going on in his head, what's the process? It's startling and unintuitive: it's not like he uses it as a 'hook' or refrain, or even in the places you would expect. And it's just about perfect where it is. 

Anyway, this show was just off the hook. I haven't been as transported in a long time. And as an extra bonus, there was an opening set with pieces from Nathanael Larochette, Marcus Jameel, Festrell & Danielle Gregoire, PrufRock, Kevin Matthews and John Akpata. 

 

And then, there was Saturday night. I wish I had been able to make it to the Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament lauch, but somehow that didn't happen. I did, however, get to the Mercury Lounge for a show that Nathanael Larochette referred to, when I talked to him about it on Friday, as "the night I forget to take my schizophrenia drugs and just turn into three people." 

I know Nathanael as a spoken word poet. He hosts Capital Slam, which is where I met him back when he first started slamming (and I was sitting at the sidelines keeping score or time or something.) This show was billed as "One Man, Three Sets" - a set of poetry, followed by a set with Nathanael's neo-folk/classical group Musk Ox, followed by a set with his heavy metal band, The Night Watch.

I've heard Musk Ox before on the radio (they get some play on CBC) but I had only heard the general rumours that Nathanael was a heavy metal musician as well. And admittedly, the usual reaction to that is, "Nathanael? Really? But he's so... quiet." But then, sometimes the biggest metalheads don't really look like metalheads, right?

Musk Ox was Nathanael on classical guitar with a violin and a cello played by a guy in a metal shirt who (to be honest) looked like he had to be about eighteen. I'm never all that good at describing music, but their stuff was minor-keyed, trans-cultural sort of stuff. Nathanael kept using the phrase "epic journey" and I suppose that does fit. Rafael, the cello player, in particular blew me away. And there is something about an instrumental band where you can hear the players inhaling together before phrases. It was meditative, soundscapey stuff. Beautiful. Completely mellow, relaxed me enough that I was no longer as grumpy and shy as I had been going in (I had found a chair in the corner in the dark and, to be honest, avoided the eyes of people I recognized: I wasn't feeling much like being out, but had really wanted to see this particular show. By the time Musk Ox was done with me, I was feeling much, much better. 

And then Night Watch came out. In this group Nathanael plays electric guitar: there's also a drummer, who was absolutely hilarious to watch, and a guy who looked like he might be a third grade teacher, but who completely wailed on the electric violin. "Metal" is such a wide-ranging term that I didn't really know what to expect out of this group. But I was really impressed. They're tight, which is really important in any band, but which, given the speed you sometimes have to play, is pretty much crucial for a good metal band. And they're fun, and smart. They play with rhythms and time signatures, they mess around with quoting beats and lines from other styles of music. They had a song that threw in bossa nova beats, they had the requisite medieval song (ah, medieval metal!), they opened with a tune from the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. The violinist improvises all of his solos on the spot - wow - and was versatile and fun. And the drummer was - delicate where he needed to be, jazzy almost, and clowned around with a set of windchimes and with the silences as much as he blistered it on the fast chunks. 

Plus, their last piece completely blew off the roof. Complex, epic, trading between quiet and loud, with chunks of machine-gunning speed and delicate beautiful lines in empty spaces. It was awesome. 

I do hope Nathanael does another one of these: part of what I enjoyed about it was getting to watch his versatility, but it was also fun to think that maybe someone had come for the metal and been surprised by the poetry, and vice versa. He said something about wanting to blow the stereotypes off poetry, folk, and metal, which I think he managed to do - all in one show. 

So, it's been a pretty good weekend so far! And a friend's got a spare ticket to a comedy show tonight, so I might actually go for the weekend trifecta. We'll see! 

Job Posting: CKCU Needs Camp Counsellors!
We are looking for two Camp Counsellors for the 2010 March Break Camp

Salary: $350 per week CKCU Radio
Job Position: Radio Camp Counsellor

Hours: 8:30am to 4:30pm
 
CKCU is hiring a Radio Camp Counsellor to help run our popular Radio Camp for kids ages 9-12. This camp contains a maximum of 10 children split into two groups. As a camp counsellor you will be responsible for the supervision and training of one group. Some of the camp activities include:
 
- How to write, record and edit a radio advertisement
- How to write, record and edit a review of their favourite CD, Movie, Book or Video Game, etc…
- How to use a professional broadcast mixing board
- How to record voice
- How to mix music together like a real radio DJ
- How to speak like a real radio DJ
 
The Children will also record a radio play, edit their voices, and add music and sound effects. At the end of the week they will do a live 2 hour radio show and show off what they have done at camp all week.
 
Job Description:
 
As a radio camp counsellor you will be responsible for:
 
Conducting camp workshops
Training children in the recording editing and mixing of audio
Teaching children to operate mixing boards, microphones and headphones.
Assist children in preparing scripts
Assist in planning a 2-hour live radio show that includes the week’s pre-recorded content
Supervise children during a portion of the lunch break
 
Qualifications:
 
Experience working with or supervising children
A lively and energetic personality
Knowledge of audio recording and digital editing
Ability to assist children with creative writing
 
Applications should be received by March 5 2010. Please direct applications to:
 
Matthew Crosier
Room 517
University Center
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA K1S 5B6
 
Phone: 613-520-2600x1625
E-mail: manager@ckcufm.com

Heavy Rooms

I'm still processing the Dusty Owl show from Sunday afternoon. John Akpata got up on the stage during the open mike and commented on what a 'heavy room' it was - with the National Slam Champions featuring (and are they ever a force to be reckoned with: their team set in particular was mesmerizing), a whole lot of representation from 3 Dreads and a Bald Head in the audience, and people like PrufRock and Hodan Ibrahim hanging out in the audience, it really was a seriously heady collection of passionate, powerful, creative talent all in one place. I was reminded of one Writers Festival event a couple of years ago, where Marcus McCann blogged later, speculating that if a bomb had been dropped on the room, poetry in Ottawa would have been set back decades - it was like that for spoken word and hip hop in Swizzles on Sunday.

John himself is going to be opening for Linton Kwesi Johnson this March in St. Andrews, Scotland: when he told us that yesterday I admit to going a little fangirl. I've loved LKJ since about 1991 or '92, when my brother introduced me to his work. And how cool is it that Canadian spoken word is so hot right now?

Literary Landscapes tonight!

Yessiree, it's that time again... I'll be hosting Literary Landscapes tonight at 6:30 pm. Going on live, with Jacqueline Lawrence, who I don't get to see half as much as I would like to. She's working away on many things, I hear, and she'll be teaming up with The Recipe (otherwise known as the Canadian National Slam Champions) and musician Rita Carter at the Dusty Owl this weekend, in a fundraiser for the Black Youth Conference.

Confession time - I haven't gone on totally live before. AND the station has a brand new computer interface. And this is CKCU. Techies? We don't need no stinking techies! Whee!

Good thing is, I think Jacqueline has some radio experience, so I'll lean on her. Will you be listening? www.ckcufm.com or 93.1...

Yeah, the sonnet can still bring it, right?

This just popped up randomly in my inbox (I never know where people found my email address: ah well.) It's in Toronto, but I am kind of amused that someone's dusted off the sonnet and thrown it into the slam ring. I wish someone would do something like that here. 

Hmm... maybe I'll bring that up at the next Dusty Owl meeting...

Poetry highs

I never really pegged myself as a performing poet. I admit, I think I do pay attention to the sounds of my poems and I try to focus on reading them well, but if there's an open mike I'm happy to sit back and listen, I shrug and say, "I didn't bring my stuff," or I just don't feel quite right about jumping up and claiming time that could as easily be filled with some other poet. It's the second-stringer, beta-wolf, supporting-cast side of me, I suppose.

So I was really surprised at how exhilarating it was to be a featured reader. I read at Voices of Venus last night, to a packed room at Umi Cafe, and it was fun. I wasn't even all that nervous, really. And having a whole half hour to stretch out and inhabit my work was great. I've done great shows with the Kymeras before - the Acadian set we did for the last Windborn was a highlight - but there's something qualitatively different about being the only featured artist. I found I really got comfortable up there when I had all that time and a sense of an arc to the material I was reading.

A lot of the reason for my comfort, I think, was the crowd. Voices of Venus is a really relaxed, fun space - props to Faye, the host, for creating that - and I think it is true that you can feel when a room full of people has 'clicked' somehow, when the audience is with you. It was a great feeling. I was surprised to discover that I had some funny poems - and had to remind myself to stop and wait for the laughs I hadn't been expecting - and was even more surprised by the occasional silent moment before people clapped, with a couple of of 'mm' sounds in the room. Oooh, fun. 

The open mic was also great beforehand - first-timers and veteran readers alike got up and read or told stories. I admit to being a bit nervous about having to follow some of the poets that got up. But the huge variety of work that came out during the open mike dispelled that. There was such a number of different voices that I felt just fine about stepping up and saying, Okay, this is my voice. I don't slam, and haven't done open mike at Capital Slam (though I've been asked to) for that reason: my stuff just isn't slam stage material. But then nothing about this open mike was restricted to any one style. 

And I was so buzzed afterwards! The coordinator, Allison, and I were standing around in the emptied-out cafe afterwards and she just kept bouncing up and down: which was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was on a complete high.

So while I never pegged myself as a performance sort of poet - I would so totally do that again!