What’s your theme, little girl?
If you had 10-15 would you play?
The great abstract expressionist.
Well, the film makes the poem seem more dated than it might otherwise, but an early pioneer of the “poetry video” format, which may soon be sweeping YouTube, but I still think Jean Luc Godard does it better, in part because he’s not really trying.
“Everytime I see a garbage can/ I think of her and that garbage man/ My woman left me for the garbage man.” Beautiful slow blues….
Remember when a lot of people felt taken or put-on when Steve Malkmus said the lyrics to a Pavement album were taken from, or based on, John Ashbery? Funny that none of these people seem to have much complaint about David Grubbs’ collaborations with poet Susan Howe. It’s the kind of collaboration that seems to me to perpetuate a conception of poetry as a ‘serious’ (elitist) form of art. I won’t say joyless or pretentious, but there’s still a disembodied sense (in the Biblical sense) of the word preceding the flesh that makes me feel that with ‘popularizers’ of poetry such as this, well, who needs obscurantists?
This album with his then pre-teen (I’m pretty sure) son on drums! After he won the lifetime achievement award, some ‘purist’ types in the poetry world took it as an affront that he was reduced to having to then give an award to Carrie Underword. Ugh, get me out of your petty attitude, poet-people, Ornette has a lot to teach you (and not just about music!). Luckily, two poets, David Baptiste Chirot and Joel Lewis, understood where Coleman was coming from, as one quoted Coleman saying that it would be no worse for artists to go to business school than art school….
So, who do you like better? Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg?
He was Robert Cray’s teacher, but don’t hold that against him.
Because sometimes you just have to….
Great songs, and the first time I heard a sample of what Chuck Prophet can do on the guitar.
