Hey, whoever you are you should go HERE...http://www.kenwardelmslie.com/interactive/nite_palais.html
This is on Kenward Elmslie's site and it's an interactive poetry show that has five featurettes...all are awesome...
1. "Girl Machine" features artwork by the great Joe Brainard (drawings of gurlie pin-ups in various states of deshabille, or doing peepshows for ya) while Kenward croons a great little weird song titled "Girl Machine" about the torments of sex. (oh yeah!) You can download it as an MP3...the lyrics are wack and so is Kenward's performance of it...it would fit in some John Waters movie perfectly...esp. if Waters created a character who was a Kenward Elmslie groupie...this could be played by like, oh say, Patty Hearst or Lindsay Lohan...or both! Grandma and granddaughter groupies!
2. "Nite Soil"...great altered postcard art (I think done by Kenward? I have one of these someone sent me) appears on the screen and you shuffle these individual cards around with your mouse, and strange phrases associated with each card seem to grumble against each other like subconscious traumas and gripes (hence the title probably). Talk of strange uncles and their discontents. Kenward's voice is scary here...sort of like a serial killer's...maybe that guy from the movie Saw....
3. "Beauty Secrets." An absolutely lovely vocal performance by Barbara Cook (who sounds a LOT like Streisand) interpreting Claibe Richardson's music. Showcases Elmslie's manifest gifts as a lyricist who can do mainstream as well as he can do wayoutthereotherstream. Artwork by Alex Katz.
4. "Sex in Suburbia." A little phrase sung a few times by Kenward: "No grabass on crabgrass THWACK!...sex in suburbia" as a teaser for Steven Taylor's music, with a few cartoony animations.
5. "Cyberspace." Six poems on a sort of windmill of chance you can spin as fast or as slow as you want. You select one vane, and the poem is recited for you by Kenward. These are pretty much regulation-length lyric poems, as opposed to the Nite Soil pieces which are more fragments, lending to the sense of psychic fragmentation in that feature. Art by Trevor Winkfield.
Once again, listening to these, I realized that probably no poet is as capable as Elmslie is of reminding us that language is an alien entity...he tends to erase syntax obsessively until (even though there is gleanable, if ambiguous, sense) you tend to feel the language would like to be done with us...that it is really Zaum underneath it all and ready to just become sound liberated from sense...he shows us language in the act of veering away from the human, like a Great dane you are walking on a leash that suddenly grows as big as a house and good luck holding on!
Check him out. Whether you like boobies or not.
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2 comments:
Hello, I had the pleasure of recording Kenward doing the Palais Bimbo Lounge show in 1985 at Beyond Baroque. If I could get Kenward's permission, I would love to share it with you all on my You Tube channel.
That would be most awesome, Ojaitimo. I would draw attention to it in a posting if he okayed it.
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