‘Dead Joe’: Poetry slam with Nick Cave, 1992
Nick Cave reads the lyrics to “Dead Joe” and manages to keep a straight face.
Written by Richard Metzger | Discussion
Nick Cave reads the lyrics to “Dead Joe” and manages to keep a straight face.
Denice Frohman, Women of the World Poetry Slam 2013 champion, performing her powerful rant “Dear Straight People” at WOWPS in Minneapolis, MN.
This is a voice that should be heard. Denice Frohman will be touring in May and June and she’s got an album coming out then, too. Follow Denice Frohman on Twitter.
Via Joe.My.God.
British funnyman Robert Popper tweeted this clip a moment ago and watching it, I collapsed into a puddle of helpless laughter.
I’m not sure that’s exactly the response that the over-earnest performer, Mário Attab, wanted to stir in his audience, but at least I did feel something deeply, right? Right!
Here’s Mário’s take on Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which is even better, as if that’s even possible:
Follow Robert Popper on Twitter
So I’ve been trying to sum up how I feel about Occupy Wall Street and the media coverage (or non-coverage) of the demonstrations the last few days, when I found this clip and realised that one of the most brilliant poets of the last hundred years had already summed it up perfectly. Of course.
I was gonna say that the oldstream media has been over for me since 2000, when I saw some peaceful protests badly misreported on TV and in the papers. I wanted to mention how my obsession with this summer’s “Murdochgate” sprang from a desire to see the established news channels I detest so much crumble, to lose all respect with their audience through their refusal to cover a story with such huge significance. I’ve been struggling to express how we don’t need validation through a mainstream that has always ignored us or deliberately misrepresented us, that people shouldn’t worry too much, the message is getting out there loud and clear.
But fuck it. Gil Scott Heron beat me to the punch (hard) thirty years ago.
This incredible recording of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as a spoken monologue with no music and some ad libs) is from 1982. It was performed at the Black Wax Club in Washington DC, as part of a documentary film on Scott Heron called Black Wax. His voice is a thing of rich, easy-going beauty but his words are like dynamite. Yeah, the times and technology may have changed, but this is still so prescient and just so damn relevant it’s amazing.
Gil Scott Heron died only four short months ago, and it’s a real pity he can’t be around now to see the people of his home town out on their streets and taking direct action, how he can’t be there himself to rally the crowds with this incredible monologue and share his no doubt sharp-as-a-pin insights into politics and society. It’s true - sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. But we DO still have this recording, and I hope that everyone, including all the people involved with the protests in New York, gets to hear it.
Because the revolution will NOT be televised.
You see, a lot of time people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say
“aha the revolution is being televised”. Nah.
The results of the revolution are being televised.The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.
What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.
After the jump “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Black Wax monologue) transcribed, plus footage from the fantastic Gil Scott Heron “Black Wax” documentary/live film.
Alex Jones has really topped himself this time. And then a few moments later, he tops himself again. How fantastic that we live in a world where a guy who spouts crazy bullshit like this with a straight-face is seen on a major 24-hour news channel? (Guess which one?)
I love the modern world sometimes, don’t you?
Here, Alex Jones absolutely leaves David Icke in the dust as he spins a conspiracy theory of the how “the elite” smoke DMT to put them in touch with Terence McKenna’s “self-transforming machine elves” who want them to kill everyone Dalek-style. Apparently.
According to Jones, the alien beings have instructed that the Large Hadron Collider be built so that the inter-dimensional vortex could be opened, allowing them to gain access to our space-time continuum. (Well he doesn’t say that exactly, I’m interpolating just a little bit).
His rant is SO “Doctor Who,” isn’t it? Steven Moffat has got to steal it!
This shit is poetry. It’s hilarious Jabberwocky as well, but poetry nevertheless. So, so good. Savor it.
Jones says that he doesn’t “need” DMT, but speaking as someone who (quite literally) smoked DMT up to four times a day for a two month period in 1994 (I know, I know), I really think he should try some. Immediately if not sooner, if for no other reason to test out his own theory and report back to his listeners, right?
Truly this is one of the best Alex Jones rants yet (and that, as you know, is really saying something). The idea of the Bilderbergers sitting around hitting the DMT pipe and doing the bidding of “the elves” seems to scare Jones, but to me this seems like quite a good thing. But then again, I suppose that really depends on what side of the aliens you’re on, doesn’t it?
Which side are you on?
My college friend Alex Marshall surfaced this excellent montage (done apparently by a filmmaker named Azure Pepe Valencia) of Ginsberg’s classic 1956 poem to the country, the ideal, the situation. Hurrah for independence!
There may be a short film that’s quite as vivid, courageous and intense as poet Forough Farrokhzad’s Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black)—her 1962 portrait of a leper colony in the northwest of her native Iran—but I can’t think of it. Farrokhzad was a Tehran-born female poet born in 1935 to a career military officer and married off to the satiric writer Parviz Shapour at age 16. Farrokhzad divorced Shapour two years later and lost custody of her one-year-old child.
As much as it surfaces the sufferings of a rejected population, the 22-minute Khaneh… (excerpted below) clearly but subtly reflects Farrokhzad’s own attitude about autocratic Iranian society’s disapproval of her as a strong woman poet. The twenty-something scribe weaves her verse in voiceover throughout the footage, and her raw editing style moves agilely between long studies and quick cuts. The film would inspire the Iranian New Wave in cinema that flourished starting in the late’60s.
Farrokhzad would eventually adopt the child of two of the patients in the colony. Unfortunately, she died in a car-crash five years after the film was released, at the age of 32.
Watch: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black) by Forough Farrokhzad. 1962, 22 minutes B&W 35mm
Get: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House Is Black) [DVD]
