DAY 25 – 10/11/10: With a day to ourselves in between shows/states, and our desire to see another movie in the theater too strong to ignore, we pick a random spot between New York and Providence in which to catch a flick or two. We settle on Stamford, Connecticut, a nice little town not very far from NYC, where we go and see David Fincher’s The Social Network, which we both enjoy immensely, and stick around for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which we both agree is utter horseshit. It is an interesting double-feature, with both films touching on similar themes involving money and power, but while Fincher’s film is perfectly structured and completely engrossing, Stone’s is bloated, boring, sentimental, and ultimately fairly preposterous, the final nail in the coffin of a filmmaker whose work we once admired. We spend the night sleeping in the van of the University of Connecticut – Stamford, or some such college, and narrowly avoid trouble with the campus security force the next morning when one of their guards asks us what we’re doing there. Ezra mumbles something vague about how we were just leaving and he lets us go without further incident. The timing was good; only fifteen minutes earlier, we were asleep in back of the van.
Ryk McIntire kicking off Got Poetry Live!
DAY 26 – 10/12/10:We arrive at Ryk McIntire’s house just in time to share a lovely dinner of pasta and homemade acorn bread with him and his wife, Melissa Guillet, and their three-year-old daughter, Autumn, who is probably the cutest kid on the East Coast, and plenty precocious as well (later, while we’re watching Hamlet 2 with Ryk, she comes into the room and looks at the DVD case; we ask her if she likes this movie and she says, “No. It’s not for little girls.” She also understands Alice’s iPod better than Ezra does). Shortly after dinner, we head out to the show, Got Poetry Live, an open mic with a very good following that Ryk hosts with the help of Tony Brown, who delivers a very well-written and impassioned piece about the “It Gets Better” movement that is among our favorites of the night. Ryk also delivers the goods, with a sweet but never sappy poem about Autumn that we both really like, and there is a special surprise appearance from none other than Mighty Mike McGee, who once called nearby Worcester, Massachusetts his home and has been all around the country and finally landed here. He does an excellent piece about celebrity culture, in which he expounds upon his many virtues that much more famous people will never equal, such as “Woody Harrelson will never have the disinterest in marijuana that I do” and “Taylor Swift wishes she could be as fat as me … Go ahead, girl, sing about it.” We then went on to do our feature, after being introduced by Ryk with our new “poet” names (Alice: “Killer Judo Word Launcher Supreme Love Truth Bringer” / Ezra: “Zero Tolerance In Your Face Ear Master Guru”) which was well-received enough to get us an invitation to stay in town another night to slam for a cash prize at a show that Ryk is helping Jay Chattelle start. After Got Poetry Live, we go to another, more late-night open mic at the Spot nightclub, where we each get to perform with a live band. Alice rocks the house, as she usually does with a live band, bringing out “The Hunt,” a piece she hasn’t yet done on this tour, and Ezra raps, as he usually does when he gets a live band to work with. This all goes over quite well, and the host invites us to come back anytime.
DAY 27 – 10/13/10: We decide to stay another night in Providence to check out the new slam Jay Chattelle is hosting in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which might be familiar to some of you as the hometown of Peter’s favorite beer on Family Guy. First, though, Ryk takes us on a brief tour of Providence, the highlight of which is the cemetery that houses H.P. Lovecraft’s tombstone, though his actual remains are in an undisclosed location due to previous grave-robbing attempts – Lovecraft fans are so ghoulish. Here’s Ezra brooding over the great one’s grave:
We arrive in Pawtucket that night after another delicious dinner with the McIntire family; unfortunately, there is not a big enough audience to actually hold a slam, but there are plenty of poets and a deejay, so we go ahead and have ourselves an intimate but lively open mic instead. Alice is particularly well-received and asked to close the show out with an encore performance after her first short set, and we make acquaintances with a number of very cool folks, who want us to come back sometime, perhaps on our next tour. This will turn out to be a frequent request throughout the rest of our days on the road. We spend the night at Ryk’s again, and then it’s off to Boston for the weekend, where we will be visiting Alice’s mom and former coworkers at the Natural Foods Trade Expo – East for a little rest, relaxation, and a lot of free samples.
DAYS 28-30 – 10/14/10-10/16/10: We arrive in Boston in the late afternoon and meet up with Alice’s mom at the convention center and hotel where the Trade Expo is going on. It is the first time Ezra has been to one of these things and he is somewhat overwhelmed: everywhere are people eager to share free food made by the companies they either own or are representing. This is only the beginning, so we walk around gathering free samples to eat immediately, planning to swing back through on Saturday when everyone is getting rid of their wares before flying back home – that’s when we’ll really load up on supplies for our rapidly dwindling food bin. Alice goes to a fancy dinner with folks she knows from her mom’s company, INFRA (Independent Natural Food Retailers Association) while Ezra stays in the luxurious hotel room and enjoys some time to himself. The next day we stumble upon an art crawl happening not far from the hotel and wander through one of the buildings, enjoying the gorgeous view from the artists’ studio lofts as well as samples of their work, which ranges from completely abstract to realistic representations and everything in between. That night, we put our van’s backseat bed to the test by piling in no less than six people in the back, including Ezra, Alice’s mom Corrine, and our good friend Nikki Duffney, who took Alice’s place at INFRA when she set off on this crazy adventure in the first place. We go out to a Thai restaurant in downtown Boston and back, and the bed holds up admirably.
Later, we go with Nikki to meet up with some Boston friends and, after getting slightly lost and then 86ed from the bar we had planned on going to because Ezra is wearing shorts (a bad idea not only because of the bar’s dress code, but also due to the near-freezing, rainy weather that night), we end up getting seriously shitfaced at a bar with the awesome name the Whiskey Priest. We outlast everyone in our party and end up dancing till bar close to the tunes spun by a very good house deejay and, since the bar is luckily not too far from the hotel and convention center, we stumble back together and get some rest. On Saturday, we load up our food bin with last-call free samples, then end up spending an impromptu final night at the hotel because Nikki is too ill to fly. She mostly recovers throughout the night, no thanks to the mostly awful The Lovely Bones on the hotel’s free HBO; the reviews were right, this is Peter Jackson’s worst movie yet, and this is the guy who made Bad Taste (at least that one admitted what it was right in the title). All in all, a good time in a very cool city.
DAY 31 – 10/17/10: Today we head out to Worcester (pronounced “Woosta,” or “Wista,” apparently) and arrive at the Nu Cafe for the Poets’ Asylum show, run by Slam legend Bill McMillan (who can be seen in the excellent 1998 documentary SlamNation), among others. We arrive a few hours early and get a bite to eat, relaxing a bit before the show starts. It is during this time that Ezra receives a call from Michael Mlekodaj informing him that Eyedea, one of the all-time greatest rappers from the Twin Cities who we last saw at the National Poetry Slam’s Hip-Hop Headquarters show in August, has died in his sleep due to a complication from his sleep apnea. We’re both a bit devastated; Ezra knew Eyedea since seventh grade and he performed at the CD release party for the Death Ray Scientific album, and Alice’s good friend Chelsea was seeing a lot of him over the last few months as well. It feels like a piece of home is gone. In our feature set that night, Ezra takes part of his time to cover Eyedea’s “How Much Do You Pay?” from the outstanding The Many Faces of Oliver Hart album, which we listen to a few times over the next couple of days. Afterwards, we talk with Walden and Kate, who Alice knows from her days at INFRA, and they make us feel very much at home, as do Bill and his friends at the show, including Alex Charalambides, who is the only one at the Poets’ Asylum show who knows Eyedea’s name when Ezra dedicates the set to him. Alex is the host of the Dirty Gerund show (if you didn’t know, a gerund is an active verb used as a noun; a dirty gerund would be the verb “fucking” in the sentence “Fucking is a good way to spend one’s time”), where we will be performing tomorrow night, and he joins us back at the home of Bill and Sou McMillan, where we hang out in the basement, talking and smoking late into the night.
DAY 32 – 10/18/10: We thoroughly enjoy staying with Bill and Sou, who is a fantasy writer and published Slam poet as well (her work can be found in the Spoken Word Revolution Redux book, along with Minnesota’s own Cynthia French), their son Liberty, who is a very smart and cool nine-year-old, and their four huge, furry cats. Liberty also has a pet rat, which surprisingly hasn’t become a problem with the cats. The McMillans prepare a delicious dinner and Sou even sends along a loaf of homemade bread with us, along with some of her short stories, and Bill gives us a copy of his new chapbook, as well as one for Karen G. when we get to Atlanta; we only have a book and CD each to share with them, but we are more than happy to do so. Their generosity was outstanding. Too soon, it’s time for us to leave, and we head out to Ralph’s Diner for the Dirty Gerund show, hosted by Alex and a hilarious and very enthusiastic fellow named Nick Davis. There is a live band, but unfortunately without a drummer, which makes it more difficult for Ezra to rap with them, but we pull together a solid feature set anyway, doing our best to live up to the dirty part of the show’s title. The Dirty Gerund open mic also features live painting by Ashley Tucker, who incorporates Alice into her on-the-spot painting (see the little naked chick in the singers throat?), which is completed throughout the show:
Did I mention the Dirty Gerund is full of all kinds of ruckus, including Snack Time? Snack Time is apparently a regular part of the show, in which Nick brings some sort of deliciousness each time for all to enjoy; we were lucky enough to partake in chocolate-frosted cinnamon rolls – sooooo good! Alex offers us a place to stay for the night, and Ezra is flashed with a titty before we leave, but we have to get on the road again, so we regretfully take our leave of the fine folks of Worcester and begin our long drive to Fayetteville, South Carolina, where we will be visiting Alice’s friends from Morris, Ashley and Gabe.
DAY 33 – 10/19/10: We have a pleasant drive out to Ashley and Gabe’s house in Fayetteville, SC, and are treated to a delicious Mexican food dinner. Ashley is studying to be a nurse and Gabe is in the military, so they’ll be prepared for the apocalypse when it comes. At dinner, there is talk of guilty pleasure movies, the ones that are so bad you love them, and Gabe mentions John Carpenter’s They Live, which Ezra defends as an actually good movie. Alice has never seen it so we watch it when we get back to their place. We all think it’s unfortunate that we’re only in town for one night and we didn’t really get to spend much time together, so we make plans to visit them again on the way back.
DAY 34 – 10/20/10: We arrive in Atlanta, Georgia and settle in at the home of Alice’s sister Amie and her husband Mbola, who is from Madagascar. They are awesome folks who know how to throw a party – their wedding was one of the best times ever – and they make us feel very much at home.
DAY 35 – 10/21/10: Amie and Mbola join us for our first show in Atlanta, which is at Cliterati, an “open no mic” series at a feminist/GLBT bookstore called Charys Books. The show is hosted by the always vivacious, affectionate and wonderful Karen Garrebrant, and there is a strong theme of school bullying throughout the night. Karen’s is our favorite of these, but there are many other strong works performed in the open mic, followed by a mini-feature by Tristan Silverman, who spits some hot fire, including a hilarious story about her all-girl’s summer camp when she and the other girls discovered their “joy-buttons.” This piece fits perfectly at a show called Cliterati, as does Alice’s feature set, which we close with guest appearances by Ezra on “Movie Geeks” and “Campaign.” A good time is had by all and we support the bookstore a bit by picking up a really cool book we didn’t know about before, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, a long illustrated essay by the greatest comic book writer ever, Alan Moore, about the history and suppression of erotic art.
DAY 36 – 10/22/10: On the advice of Karen G. the night before, we decide to hit up the open mic and featured performance by Tristan Silverman and Atlanta’s own Theresa Davis, who also performed at the Cliterati show. The show is at Agnes Scott College, an all-female school, and Alice makes a joke that Ezra couldn’t get away with in the open mic, saying, “If you weren’t a lesbian when you got here, you are now,” winning over the crowd and delivering a solid performance of “The Fountain.” Ezra follows her, introducing himself as a student at Agnes Scott and letting that sink in for some laughs before going into “Nostalgia,” an old poem he hasn’t yet done on the tour and that he performed at Nationals in 2006 in a bout against Karen G. and Theresa Davis, which is how he first met them. It feels like a good way to wrap up the open mic, and the shared feature that follows is top-notch, with Tristan and Theresa sharing the stage poetry-tag style, alternating pieces and bouncing off of each other’s energy and the audience, which is a large and lively crowd. Tristan does two of her best from the Cliterati mini-feature the previous night, as well as a short but excellent one about a dog humping a crucifix that was way more poignant and intelligent than that might sound. Theresa’s best, in our opinion, is a devastating account of witnessing and reporting a rape. It’s a heavy night all in all, and it inspires a short, dark poem from Ezra when we return to Amie and Mbola’s house.
DAY 37 – 10/23/10: Today we go with Amie and Mbola to check out a fall arts & crafts festival in Atlanta, which features a lot of really cool work by local folks, including jewelry made from real butterflies, buttons of famous actors and pop culture icons with vulgar captions added to them, and a series of movable dioramas depicting grisly and ghoulish subjects. There is also a band on stage when we get there made up of really young-looking kids, probably in sixth or seventh grade, tops, rocking out covers of Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana and others, along with a couple of originals; they end up maintaining a bigger and more enthusiastic crowd than the adult acts that come on later. It’s partly the novelty, of course, but we speculate that if they keep at it, those kids will be great by the time they’re our age.
DAY 38 – 10/24/10: This is a big day for poetry, with the Night Kite Revival in the afternoon and our feature at the Java Monkey open mic tonight. The Night Kite Revival is a collective comprised of legendary Slam poets Buddy Wakefield, Anis Mogjani and Derrick Brown, along with rotating secondary cast members that have in the past included folks like Mike McGee and, on this particular tour (which stopped in Geneseo, NY, shortly after we were there), the musical stylings of Timmy Straw and Emily Wells. Timmy Straw plays keyboards and sings with a beautifully sad voice; Emily Wells also sings like an angel and plays a mean violin, using loop pedals to layer both of her instruments, and she is currently working on a project with Dan the Automater, the genius producer behind classics like Deltron 3030, Handsome Boy Modeling School and Lovage. It’s a really good show, leaving us with wonderful, memorable lines like “Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past” (Buddy Wakefield) and “Booze is my tuition to clown college” (Derrick Brown).
Later, at the Java Monkey open mic, many of the performers mention the show, and it seems like we will share a lot of the same crowd, which is a large one, including Amie, Mbola and a few of Amie’s friends, and a whole bunch of other people who are apparently regulars here. The host is a guy named Kodac, who is a lot like a Southern-fried Tom Waits. He kicks of the show with a poem called “Regret” that reinforces the Tom Waits similarity and the open mic begins, a long list of performers that includes Karen G. once again and a guy known as Skinny Bully, who recites a very good poem about his experience doing social work. We lose some of the crowd when there is a break after the first half of the open mic, but there are still plenty of people left for our feature, which we split with Alice going first, followed by a few poems from Ezra and closing with “Movie Geeks.” The crowd is very appreciative, and after the rest of the open mic, we go with Karen, Kodac and Gabe, who we met at the Agnes Scott show, to a local bar called the Brick Shop Pub, where Kodac tells us tales of his friendship with Jimmy Carter’s son and we run into none other than Derrick Brown on the way out. It was a very good night for us and we are looking forward to our next stop in sunny Florida!
Day 40 – 10/26/10: We arrive at Infusion Tea with just enough time to eat dinner before the Soft Exposure open mic. Naomi Butterfield, the host of the open mic, treats us to a delicious dinner that tastes like it came straight from the Birchwood to Alice. When it’s time to start the open mic, things are looking a little grim. It’s not well attended tonight and the audience is quiet. Also, we’re up first so there’s no one to warm up the audience. Ezra starts it off and pushes his performance hard. Despite the quiet nature and older age of the audience, he doesn’t censor himself too much, which pays off because he’s got them laughing hard by the end of his set. Then he brings up Alice and she does 10 minutes of poetry that wins her the rapt attention of everyone in the restaurant. Afterwards, during the open mic period of the evening, a man even comes up to read an impromptu poem he wrote inspired by Alice’s performance. Damn, that makes her feel all warm and yummy.
Naomi Butterfield’s man Steve Tune agrees to put us up in his wonderful guest-house out back of his lovely Orlando home. It’s heavenly to have a place that feels like our own and Steve says we can stay as long as we like, so we decide to kick it in Orlando for a few days.
Day 41 – 10/27/10 : Sweet blissful nothing.
Day 42 – 10/28/10 : Today we head out to the Orlando Slam for Ezra to compete in their Dead Poets slam, in which you select one of your favorite dead poets to cover. The slam was at an old video store turned hipster hang-out, complete with a library, a bar, and a performance space. Guess that’s the only future for video stores with Netflix these days. The slam featured a number of great Orlando poets including Ronin (who covers an obscure French poet in highly entertaining broken French), Curtis X. Meyer, who ends up taking second place, and Tod Caviness (who will burn in hell for covering Mattie Stepnanek – look him up – in complete costume: wheelchair, blanket over his legs, and all). And then there was Ezra, who decided somewhat last-minute to do another tribute to Eyedea, covering “Step By Step” and “How Much Do You Pay?” from the Oliver Hart album. Despite the fact that only a handful of folks in the club recognized Eyedea’s lyrics and that Ezra takes suicide spot in the slam, Ezra dominates from the beginning and wins the Slam. When he accepts his prize, he mentions that Eyedea’s wake happened earlier that night back in Minnesota; this was the next best way to pay tribute, since we couldn’t be there. Everyone was moved Eyedea’s work, which just goes to show the man continues to reach people even now that he’s gone.
Day 43 – 10/29/10: Today we’re headed out to the Ripley Believe it or Not! Museum, our first excursion into the true tourist attractions of Orlando. Thanks to Curtis X. Meyer, whose father works for the Ripley Museums, we’ve got a free pass to all the Ripley Museums in the world for the rest of our lives, or at least until we lose his business card. The moment we step out of the car, we’re rewarded with this mythical sight:
A building on its back!
From the moment we walk in, the Ripley Museum has got us entranced. Ripley was an American cartoonist and anthropologist who traveled the world between 1920-1950 collecting artifacts, stories, and amazing facts. He worked all of his findings into a popular cartoon series called Ripley’s Believe it or Not! While we understand how some might find Ripley’s cartoons and massive collections ethnocentric and even exploitative, we enjoy the hell out of everything in there. Hopefully a museum such as this encourages people to get out there and see the world for themselves; it sure left Alice with chronically itchy feet. Some of our favorite things in the museum included the shrunken head and the video on how they’re made, the brain teasers,
the weight lifting frogs,
the Fuji Mermaid,
the Wolpertinger,
and last but not least this:
a tunnel made out of moving walls, filled with flashing black lights and techno music, with a bridge that you have to traverse from one end to the other. Being in the tunnel creates an insane sense of vertigo; it feels as if the floor is undulating below you, so convincingly that it actually throws you off-balance. It is almost impossible to traverse the bridge without holding on to the handrails. We spend at least five minutes in there trying out different things like taking giant steps that have Ezra almost falling on his face, and hanging over the edge of the bridge to feel like you’re flying upside down. Then we go to dinner at a Chinese buffet, and over an extremely excessive meal we realize we hadn’t walked through the tunnel with our eyes closed. So, we go back (thanks to Curtis, we get in free again) and this time we spend almost twenty minutes in the tunnel. And our scientific experiment concludes that when you close your eyes and walk through, you don’t feel a thing. Goddamn, optical illusions are almost as good as drugs. Almost.
Day 44 – 10/30/10: Steve’s mom, Barb, has invited us to have dinner with the family and friends tonight. We spend the day lazing around before dinner, both working on writing projects. Alice plows through the Henry and June edition of Anais Nin’s diary, which has got her daydreaming about going back to France, while Ezra prepares to begin the National Novel Writing Month challenge, in which he will attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. Dinner is served out on the patio with the lizards and perfect Orlando weather. We all drink lots of red wine and eat till our tummies are distended.
Day 45 – 10/31/10: Today is Halloween, but Steve, in his techy awesomeness, hooks us up with Netflix out in the guesthouse. So we stay in and watch Masters of Horror all night long. This is a great series if you haven’t seen it; we particularly recommend John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns and Takashi Miike’s Imprint.
DAY 46 – 11/1/10: NaNoWriMo begins, and we decide to check out downtown Orlando. We visit the History Museum, which we deviously sneak into without paying after Ezra wrestles some alligators outside:
The history museum is pretty cool, though we really only check out an exhibit of Florida’s “Highwaymen” painters, a group of self-taught artists that made a successful impact on the American art scene with their unique landscapes of authentic Floridian coastal beauty. Here’s an example:
After the History Museum, we drive to downtown Disney to check out that freakshow, which is kind of like a family-friendly Las Vegas, though when we arrive the first thing we see is a group of adults (college age) performing a song called “Born to Hand-Jive” for a group of adults (old). The weird thing is not only the strangeness of these overenthusiastic, Mickey Mouse Club-style “kids” performing for an audience that is seriously made up almost completely of other adults (we saw maybe two kids in the whole crowd), but also what a suggestive song they picked. “Hand-Jive,” which is apparently some sort of spastic dance involving weird hand gestures and a lot of jumping around, sounds almost exactly like “handjob,” which is another activity entirely (perhaps you’ve tried it). The crowning strangeness of it all was that none of the adults in the audience seemed to notice this at all; they just looked bored and touristy. So we wander around downtown Disney just trying to do all the free stuff we can, which is mainly just looking at stuff. The best of this is the most commercial art gallery ever; this thing is seriously a gift shop with the gallery right inside it, and everything is for sale, but the cool thing is that they’re exhibiting a lot of the “secret art” of Dr. Seuss, so we definitely enjoyed that. Tonight we reconnect with Curtis Meyer, who takes us to a Hip-Hop open mic at Austin’s Coffee and Film in Winter Park, FL, run by none other than Madd Illz, founder and CEO of GrindTimeNow, the world’s largest battle rap league. Ezra first met Madd Illz over a year ago when he came up to Minneapolis to start the Twin Cities division of GrindTime. You can see Ezra’s battles here:
Ezra GrindTime Battle 1
Ezra GrindTime Battle 2
The open mic has no host; emcees just stand in a line that stretches out the front door of the coffee shop it is held in and wait their turn to get on the mic. It is an all-freestyle open mic, and Madd Illz is easily the best, consistently killing lengthy, fast-paced and intricate extemporaneous verses that rival the best of Juice, Eyedea, or any other freestyle legend. Ezra observes that the world is wack when someone like Wacka Flocka Flame (2nd mention in this blog!) is more famous than Madd Illz. The rest of the open mic emcees are not half as good, until Ezra gets on and manages to do roughly that: half as good as Madd Illz. Seriously, check this dude out (note: this video was shot at Austin’s Coffee and Film, with the same deejay who spun the night we were there):
Day 47 – 11/2/10: We arrive at Casandra Tenenbaum’s place a few hours before the slam, which is at a restaurant in Delray Beach called Dada. There we’re greeted with big hugs from her roommates, and we find that a hug from a complete stranger is a beautiful thing when you’re far from home. On the way to the Slam, Casandra tells us about her plans to open a charter school with her roommates. They’re working on a program structure in which high school kids propose a project at the beginning of the year and then spend the whole year focusing on that project. Alice questions her about their plans for real sex education (none of that abstinence-only stuff) and healthy school lunches. She’s happy to find out that they’re even planning on a school garden and nutritionist.
Dada glows beneath low lighting and a creative atmosphere enhanced by Dali-esque paintings both in frames and painted right onto the wall. On top of that, the pay for featuring comes complete with a gourmet meal and mojitos with real sugar cane straws to chew. During dinner we meet Atlas, a street prophet who has devoted his life to spreading his art by performing in public areas, always wearing a mask and promoting a non-secular message of love and compassion. Alice is pretty taken with him (but in a way that doesn’t make Ezra jealous, because he also likes Atlas) and they spend a while talking about identity issues and following the path we desire, something that came up before for us in Chicago when conversing with Laura Yes Yes. You can check out some of his spoken word and rhetoric here:http://www.withinorwithout.com
Ezra takes over the feature set and Alice decides to slam in hopes of making off with the winnings; she does very well, going head-to-head and ultimately taking second place to Katie Wirsing, who won the National Poetry Slam in 2006 with the Denver team. Ezra gets lots of love for the feature set and manages to sell a few CDs, including one he sells for the price of a mojito to a couple who are out for their first time after having a baby.
Day 48 – 11/3/10: We wake up to an empty house and a note under the door from Casandra outlining her schedule for the day. At 11 am, she comes back home to take us down to the beach for breakfast and hula-hooping in the sand. Ezra even gets in the ocean, though he swears he hates water. Eventually, Alice conquers her fear of the bright blue jellyfish that line the shores and gets in as well to spend the afternoon diving in and out of the waves.
At night we head out to an open mic at the Funky Buddha Lounge before we hit the road back to Atlanta. The host perfectly introduces the night by telling us we’re about to witness a parade of broken dreams. Picture snowbird comedians and singer-songwriters for two hours. One hack even started a joke with “So, why do they call it the clap anyways? If the doctor called you up to tell you that you had it, do you think you’d start clapping?” Actually, that was the whole joke. Yep, we checked out early.
Day 49-51 – 11/4/10-11/6/10: We’re back in Atlanta for now. Alice starts work with INFRA again for the time being, which is nice because that means a paycheck, and decides to have Mbola cut off all her hair.
Ezra remains blissfully unemployed and continues to let his freak flag fly (and his hair grow).
Day 52 – 11/7/10: Tonight is our final show at the Asheville, NC, slam. Apparently, the slam is at a Masonic Temple. The fact that it’s a temple makes us question the less than pure content of our set for a second, but only a second, cuz screw it. They’re getting what they signed up for. We picked up this show thanks to Karen G. after the Art Amok show was cancelled due to venue changes. That seems to have been a common occurrence on our tour, slams and open mics seeming to have trouble holding down a consistent venue. We saw this in Chicago, Palatine, and Worcester as well. Guess the venues haven’t gotten the memo yet that poetry brings all the boys and girls to the yard.
The drive to Asheville takes us through the rolling hills of the Appalachians; it’s truly hillbilly country out here. We arrive in Asheville just before the show is supposed to start and head right to the Temple. We rush in, desperate for a bathroom, and run into two other poets and a grey-haired Mason, who also happens to be a part-time bellhop. The Mason calls down an old weight-and-pulley elevator for us and brings us up to the second floor to use the bathroom, which can be converted to a men’s room or a women’s room by simply sliding a plaque on the door. Before the show we explore the Temple, which is complete with a meeting hall with ornate chairs on opposite sides of the room, gavels, swords, metal batons, and black & white photos of previous Masons. The show is in the Temple’s theater, which was built for the theatrical version of their Irish rites, the ceremony for inducting Masons. We’re thrilled to find that the theater comes with 100-year-old sets; tonight’s resembles an Egyptian temple. Basically, we’ll be performing in front of King Tut’s Tomb.
The room quickly fills up with a familiar looking crowd of poets: neo-beats, neo-hipsters, neo-hippies, neo-gangstas and the like, and we’re off. Griffin Payne, the SlamMaster and host of the show, bounds on to stage with an energy that reminds us of Wonder Dave. Throughout the show he changes costumes and props. He even comes out with a bunny hat and bunny slippers at one point, which really makes us miss Dave. The show starts with a local jazz/rock band called Lyric and local feature Brooke Van Der Linde. Then the first half of the slam kicks off. Some memorable poets from the first round include Drewkowski, who does a poem about America getting fucked in the ass by Satan (who, he informs us, sports a giant cock wrapped in a Goldman-Sachs condom complete with a BP label, that when peeled back, lets out a load of crude oil all over her face) and Jeb Jackson, who told a parable about meeting women through lost-dog flyers that was equally brilliant and hilarious, though less political. Later, Ezra realized that “Drewkowski” is actually Andrew Procyk, a SlamMN team transplant he last saw years ago when he featured in Minneapolis.
We take the stage in between the first and second round of the slam for our final set of the tour. Alice does a handful of her favorites, feeling pretty different on stage with her new haircut, and then swears to put all of those poems to rest for a good long while. “Annabel Chong” gets a particularly good reception. It seems to Alice that a temple is just the right place for “Annabel” to be put to rest for now. Then Ezra wows with a few verses and gets folks laughing with “House.” We end the night with our group pieces, thoroughly defiling the shit out of that temple together. Afterwards, Alice gives away the rest of her books, not wanting to haul them around anymore and really needing to part with that work to start anew. She hands the books to anyone who comes up and talks to her and takes any money they offer up. In the end she gives out about fifteen book and gets around $70, which pretty much covers the cost of printing. Ezra also gives CDs out for whatever folks can afford, but doesn’t do quite as well, since he is still reluctant to give too many away for free – CD pressing is expensive y’all. Next time we tour, we might make a point to give out merch for whatever people offer. The way we see it, it’s about getting your voice heard, plus people are more likely to buy your stuff even if they don’t have ten bucks in cash.
When all is said and done, Asheville turns out to be the perfect last stop for our tour. The scenery is breath taking, the crowd is rambunctious, everyone here can’t stop talking about how much they love living here, and the venue is the best one yet. Thank you, Asheville, for giving us great closure.
Finally, after more than seven weeks, more than 4,500 miles, more than enough poetry, and too many generous, wonderful new acquaintances to count, let alone thank, we decide to modify our plans, because life is what happens while you’re making them. We had originally set out to tour for a couple months and ultimately end up in L.A., but due to its location, excellent public transit, and other factors, we decide to head back up to New York City and see how that goes. Wish us luck!
