Tuesday, January 23, 2007

At Hemphill

If you're looking at this at all, you probably already know that Colby Caldwell's show runs til February 24 at Hemphill on 14th St. and that audio files of me reading three poems can be downloaded at:
www.hemphillfinearts.com
You can put them on your iPod as you walk through the gallery--there are supposed to be a couple available at the gallery, too--though I do not suggest listening to them as you work out. They're not exactly upbeat.
"Amnesia: A Memoir" was originally written for a show called "Remembrance of Things Passed" at the Long Beach Museum, at the invitation of Lane Relyea. The reason I thought to make it available for Colby's show is that it's probably the first thing I wrote that went into the themes Colby and I have shared for some time, especially the unreliability of common accounts of memory.
"Songs" was written for a previous show of Colby's, and I guess the reason we both wanted it to be available was that this show is something of a retrospective for Colby.
"How to Survive Your Own Death" is a re-working of material from an old poem I was never that happy with.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Theater of the Absurd

Hollywood, Jan 4, 2007 -- Following the success of Jackass Number Two and Wildboyz, MTV announced plans for a film version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, featuring Chris Pontius and Steve-O as Vladimir and Estragon, with Johnny Knoxville as Lucky and Bam Margera as The Boy.
Estragon: Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.
(Vladimir reaches into shorts and pulls out six-foot-long python, waves it in Estragon's face. Estragon leaps back in terror, falls on ground, gathers up handfuls of red fire ants and force-feeds them to Vladimir. And so on.)