Open mic last night
The gods love poetry. Well, Writers' Block, anyway. After some slouchy afternoon showers yesterday, the sky cleared and Kafe Kerouac was abuzz with people. Then, a little while after we ended a long show, the skies opened up and dropped an ocean on the city.
We got started at our typical 8:15 and ran open mic until about 9:45. THEN we started the slam. We had a whopping olpen mic list, and it was a fine batch of poetry. John Troyer went off in style. We'll miss him. New people every week, new poets every week, and some great retention here. We keep running out of chairs and adding to the email list, which is all magnificent. The heckling wasn't out of control last night, and so the show ran really smooth.
Was at the Chief Rocka show Sunday in Cleveland with a hadndful of WB poets. The ride up was the stuff that harrasment suits are made of. Suffice it to say, cavemen can be romantic. Apparently, I am the Darwin of sex.
Anyhow, the Cleveland set (which featured Jessica Care Moore) is DJed by their SlamMaster, Tom Noy (who I really dig because he chooses cool, eclectic stuff like I do, but with a tighter R&B edge), and it really made me nostalgic for music at the WB again. I'm going to carve some space out next week for DJing to come back, maybe in that hallway. It'll be like a DJ booth and won't eat up valuable seating space. This means I'll need to bring my PA back out again. Ugh. It's worth it. When we played records on the old floor model stereo, it was always cool, and it gave me an oportunity to to go through my vinyl each week. Now? I'll just bring the iPod mixer and maybe a turntable (for stuff right out of the stacks they sell in the store) and go to town. This gives me reason to dig through my music, but in a different way. Nice! I'll get in the lab this weekend and see what the best arrangement is.
The exercises I've been posting are part of team training, to answer a couple of questions I've received about them. I give the team a month or so of straight writing to see if they can come up with anything new that's a potential contender for their sideboard. This year I amplified that experience by posting exercises daily. I opted to share all of those publicly, thinking people might get a kick out of them. That aspect of their training ends June 30th, though. After that it's all performance tightening. To me, if you slam with 100% of the same poems you did a year ago (or two years ago or three years ago), you're weak.
We got started at our typical 8:15 and ran open mic until about 9:45. THEN we started the slam. We had a whopping olpen mic list, and it was a fine batch of poetry. John Troyer went off in style. We'll miss him. New people every week, new poets every week, and some great retention here. We keep running out of chairs and adding to the email list, which is all magnificent. The heckling wasn't out of control last night, and so the show ran really smooth.
Was at the Chief Rocka show Sunday in Cleveland with a hadndful of WB poets. The ride up was the stuff that harrasment suits are made of. Suffice it to say, cavemen can be romantic. Apparently, I am the Darwin of sex.
Anyhow, the Cleveland set (which featured Jessica Care Moore) is DJed by their SlamMaster, Tom Noy (who I really dig because he chooses cool, eclectic stuff like I do, but with a tighter R&B edge), and it really made me nostalgic for music at the WB again. I'm going to carve some space out next week for DJing to come back, maybe in that hallway. It'll be like a DJ booth and won't eat up valuable seating space. This means I'll need to bring my PA back out again. Ugh. It's worth it. When we played records on the old floor model stereo, it was always cool, and it gave me an oportunity to to go through my vinyl each week. Now? I'll just bring the iPod mixer and maybe a turntable (for stuff right out of the stacks they sell in the store) and go to town. This gives me reason to dig through my music, but in a different way. Nice! I'll get in the lab this weekend and see what the best arrangement is.
The exercises I've been posting are part of team training, to answer a couple of questions I've received about them. I give the team a month or so of straight writing to see if they can come up with anything new that's a potential contender for their sideboard. This year I amplified that experience by posting exercises daily. I opted to share all of those publicly, thinking people might get a kick out of them. That aspect of their training ends June 30th, though. After that it's all performance tightening. To me, if you slam with 100% of the same poems you did a year ago (or two years ago or three years ago), you're weak.