Woodrat Podcast 5: Amplified Bards

A conversation with Houston-based poet Radames Ortiz and his audio collaborator, the composer Trills (Jonathan Jindra).

Topics include: How electronic music is composed; the arts scene in Houston; composing and improvising music to accompany poems; making the transition from ambient music to electronica that demands active listening; how Radames started writing poetry and why he chose not to get an MFA; turning a poetry reading into a multimedia experience and getting the audience involved; online reading, e-book readers and the supposed death of the text; the obligation of poets and writers to master multimedia tools; making and watching videopoetry.

Links:

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

Glyphs

beetle galleries 1

 

beetle galleries 2

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Be sure to check out the latest Festival of the Trees at treeblog.

Snow forest

snow on witch hazel

I set out this morning before the snow stopped, eager to take full advantage of the silence that settles over the land when a major winter storm falls on the weekend. This was the first I’d worn snowshoes in a couple of years, and I began with enthusiasm, despite the fact that I sank in nearly a foot with every step. Progress was slow. My own breath moved more quickly than I did, and I was soon almost out of it.

I’d almost forgotten what a deep, dry snow was like. From time to time my footsteps set off shockwaves, quiet little booms accompanied by a sudden settling of all the snow within a few yards’ radius. Sometimes this was enough to shake the snow loose from a nearby laurel bush, the waxy green leaves springing up and throwing off their white straitjackets. Before long my calves were aching, and my glasses kept steaming up and then freezing. I finally took them off and put them in my pocket, and did most of the rest of the hike half-blind: up to the top of the watershed, through the spruce grove and out to the Far Field, alone with the sound of my exertion.

Or nearly alone. The downy woodpeckers were out and about, and a pair of cardinals foraged in one thicket. On the ridgetop not far from its den tree I crossed a porcupine trail — an almost-tunnel through the snow — and wondered whether it had been going out or returning home. Twenty minutes later, on the lower trail back from the Far Field, I had my answer.

porcupine in a blizzard

This was shot hurriedly in dim light through a zoom lens, and then magnified further through digital zooming. But I really only took the picture to make sure of what I was looking at, especially with my glasses so fogged up. Had it not been for the location on a thin branch, I might’ve dismissed it as an unusually messy squirrel’s nest. It sat motionless with its head tucked against its belly as the snow sifted in through its forest of quills.

What this isn’t

Unknown web searchers, I’m sorry you were led astray and ended up here. This is not a site about Amish rubber boots, heavy rain penis, existentialist haircut, tweety only poems about love, how is a turtle and a groundhog alike, or (Lord knows) poems and classy behavior. This isn’t a site about sexsexsex, what colour is cat vomit, what does a groundhog penis look like, don’t eat whatever you say, tips for surviving the apocalypse, how to make me happy, shit creek banjo, wood rat midden photo, poem about not being a dick, poems about being rescued from climbing, explanatory poems on mitosis, or 20 gauge crow hunting. Most of all, this is not a site about the via negativa. I’m sorry. Better luck elsewhere.

The Banjo Project

My cousin Tony just passed on the link to this video, the trailer for a soon-to-be-released two-hour documentary called The Banjo Project: The Story of America’s Instrument.

If any musical instrument can be said to be quintessentially American, it is the banjo. Even in its construction, it tells a story of cultural exchange: the banjo is a drum with strings, a symbolic blending of African and European musical identities. Brought to the New World in the memories and traditions of enslaved Africans, repeatedly re-invented by African- and European-Americans, the banjo has shaped most American musical forms: the minstrel show (the dominant popular entertainment in the US in the 19th century), ragtime and early jazz, old-time folk and the folk revival, as well as blues, bluegrass, country, and new hybrids yet to be labeled.

I liked some of the quotes in the trailer, too. Here’s Pete Ross:

The banjo has always symbolized something other than just music in our culture. It’s completely saturated with cultural associations. It’s always an icon; it’s never just music. Every time you pick up a banjo, it’s gonna symbolize wild, rural, simple, and even clownish.

And Rhianna Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops says something I’d always thought:

Old-time music is, for me, the original integration. ‘Cause you had whites and blacks who in the normal space of things didn’t really interact all that much, but when it came to the music, it was like, they were there! It didn’t matter if you were a black banjo player or a white banjo player, it mattered if you were a good banjo player.

And finally, there’s this great quote from Mark Twain’s Early Tales and Sketches, Vol 2 (1864-65):

The piano may do for lovesick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles, and slate pencils. But give me the banjo… When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey… ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

(Damn. I think there’s more poetry in that quote than in any of my banjo poems so far! Twain was a master of the well-turned phrase, no doubt about it.)

Medicine Show (3)

This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series Banjo Poems

The banjo knows
what it’s like to be sky,
how high pressure produces
the clearest light.
I read about a woman
without a vaginal opening
who still conceived
& gave birth through a Caesarian.
This is more or less
how a banjo makes music,
isn’t it? They said
a jealous ex-lover had stabbed her
in the abdomen, permitting
his rival’s semen,
which she had taken orally,
to find & fertilize
her unsuspected egg.
Maybe this is
an urban legend but
it sounds like something
that ought to happen
in a world with banjos in it.
Who needs roots?
The medicine show barker
prescribes the same
white pill for everything,
a round
& chewable eraser.

Groundhog vs. groundhog

In honor of Imbolc and its buck-toothed seer, I uploaded a sharper copy of some footage I shot two years ago. Groundhogs are among the most solitary of marmots, and I think what we’re seeing here is a territorial dispute over some valuable real estate — the crawlspace under my house.

And as long as we’re watching videos, here’s another one I just uploaded, from the three-banjo jam session. There were other songs they performed more flawlessly, but this is the only one where the video is also half-decent (emphasis on “half”). And yes, it is entirely possible that they interrupted the sleep of the groundhog(s) below the floor.

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