Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Episode 21: Grab-Bag! All Right, Jazz Poem, and To Own a Car in San Francisco

 


Three pieces -

  • "All Right" (song)
  • Jazz Poem (read live at Pianofight, San Francisco)
  • To Own a Car in San Francisco (archive recording I dug up from 1999)

About that jazz poem. I believe I heard myself say in the interstitial patter that I'd include the text of the jazz poem in the podcast blog. Why, that would be right here.

The version of the text in the podcast is lightly abridged. But here is the full "Jazz Poem" as it appears in my book Pieces, Items, and Sundry Shorts.

A Jazz Poem

 

I'd like to read you my poem

            about

                                    miles

                        davis.

 

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

 

transgressive semiotic on stoned gold chuckwagon

            ridin' that

                        five-and-dime express

half six dozen of a birdbath catharsis griddle.

 

boooooo-aaaaaaah!

 

i met her in the

                                    rain

rain like plastic bucket of enthusiasm fish

            plastic: not a metal pail

rain

            like

drippy

fruitmeal

say i met her in the rain

on the

                        jazz

            train

 

jazz reverie cool & quotidian on nasal early afternoon midnight

            of

ghost-hour stanchion thoroughbred greenskeeper mongoose

 

                                                            jazz

                        jazz

            jazz

                                    jazz                                          jazz

                        jazz                  jazz

jazz                  jazz                                                                              jazz

            jazz

                                    jazz                              jazz

 

jazz like coleman and coletrain and ella and monk

herbie and billie and dizzy and duke

– personally, sonny rollins is not to my taste –

but jazz, like parker and bird and mingus and miles

                                                miles

                        miles

miles of jazz run ripchord down landscape of kosher corn beef and hash

            served in rusty beercan

                                    of

            a denuded middleclass dream

of fixed-rate mortgage diner-food

Armored Personnel Carrier pretty puppy

with

                        side

            of

jazz

like stilton wallflower emulsion junto pony nematode homology felcher dipilatory ape-chime

                        punchdrunk flywheel graft

9-&-three-eighths-type jazz

jazz in angry underwear

            like houseguest on electrified rug.


part

                        two:

the education

                                                of

            miles

davis

 

Miles Davis was born on May 25, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, soon moving to East St. Louis where he

            flew the fly                              as high as went by

                                    binged the bang to                   fling the fang

                        ran in the sand to live free of the man

and it was JAZZ, jazz like international turpentine gestalt

like cary grant and rosalind russell stranded in the Shan Plateau Range of western Myanmar

with nothing but a quarter ream of ledger paper and a masonjar of pickled duckbills

jazz

like miniskirt tirade of vegetable government

undue TOEFL exam in salad of jackrabbit wonderment

tornado pillbox of post-secondary nasal drip

soybean guttersnipe of preponderant dwarf

 

herein lay the education

                        of miles davis

 

 

Part Three: A Puzzling Numerological Interlude

 

1          the taste of licking a stamp, when there is no stamp

2          primrose blossom yields open to spring

3          rice bran breakfast cereal

4          the number four

5          is two plus three: therefore, primrose and bran

6          primrose times bran

7          primrose times bran, plus that stamp that isn't there

 


Part Four: precisely

                        sixteen                                                random

                                    words

 

Serrated masonic throwpillow necrotic stromboli encryption lug skedoodle venison proximate vegas ant-gargle shrimp if scrum bamboozle ass-turnip

 

 

Part Four-A: some conclusions

 

in the beginning, miles davis

                                                            then. jazz poetry.

in the end: an octopus

 

it always ends

                                    with

            an octopus

,

 

she

said

                                    on

            that

                                                                                    jazzzz

trainnnnn



***

And with that we prematurely conclude our podcast season. 24 episodes were planned, 21 were pushed out; and among the three episodes in limbo, the series finale (a rock opera named Psychonaut) went back on ice in November 2016 - where it had already been since 2001. But the unfinished projects will all be back someday for their revenge

So, till next time!

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Episode 19: Dog Dad


Kevin Spacey was turned into the household cat this past summer, in a film that was apparently terrible. For me, I think the notion of "Dog Dad" was rolling around in my head long before. In my notebooks you might see the concept pegged as, "Family romp a la Freaky Friday pursued to remorselessly dismal conclusion." Because those are the sorts of things one would find in my notebooks.





So this time around the idea was not to be original, and to play on familiar templates. I could even add that Dog Dad is a "spiritual ancestor" (as narrowly distinguished from self-repetition!) of a story I wrote around 15 years ago called "That Goddamned Dog!". It formed part of my book Platitudes for a Life in Hell, and I eventually made it into this little video.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Episode 18: Grab-Bag! Magus & Quanz #2, Reunion, and Bachelor Party


A little cluster of t
hree pieces this week, as we return from being dark for 'round and about a month.



Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Episode 17: "Bracing for the Joy" Preview



Bracing for the Joy performed in the San Francisco Fringe Festival, September 2016.




Saturday, August 27, 2016

Episode 16: Inside the Music



Here's a quick, silly one that would go well with weekend coffee or the like. The story follows from a pressing question: why do society's arguably freest people - rock stars with protective staffs, endless latitude, and millions of dollars - always blow it in the same way? Why can't one of them get really into exotic fish or ham radio, instead of cocaine? (We know it's possible: consider the lonely example of Brian May, who spends his free days on astrophysics and the defense of hedgehogs.)


Friday, August 19, 2016