Latest Performance

I'm a small-town poet in both written word and performance. I'm more influenced by rock and roll but I am also a lit-chick full of curiosity. My influences are far and wide and I can find writing inspiration in anything, from important matters to pure whimsy.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

WordSpring, Concert, Writing

Open mic went off fantastically. I'm hoping to get the performance videos up soon. Since April is National Poetry Month there were more poets reading. Almost half the performers on the sign up were poets.
The day after I had a nice chat with one of the other poets and let her know I'm organizing some poetry only shows for the summer. I'm waiting for approval on the proposed dates and then I'll have fliers prepared. This year should be easier since I've had one more year of experience and I'm more recognized in the art community now. With reputation and networking I'm hoping to create a poetry scene in the community. There's people who write, but keep it to themselves. I want them to come out and share their art.

Saturday I attended the concert at Bluseed. It was a fantastic evening. The show was great, and I stayed pretty late after the concert. Natalia Zuckerman is an awesome guitarist. I love her slide playing. Andy Friedman had some hilarious songs, and I learned he started out as a poet before he did music.

Tomorrow evening there will be a more professional show at North Country Community College. The Adirondack Center for Writing has invited poets Liza Jessie Peterson, Jon Sands, and Jeanann Verlee to perform. I'm really looking forward to the show. I'm still growing and learning as an artist so I like to see more experienced artists. It helps me see what I can do to define my art. Especially since growing up I never saw anything like this. If there were writers' retreats for students and professional poets reading up here when I was in high school I may have started my career earlier instead of the on/off writing I did. Better now than never, and hopefully my efforts will contribute to creating a literary art scene in my community. We have a huge visual art and music scene. There's concerts all the time. In the summer we have the monthly art walks. We even have a First Night celebration.
Theater does well here too, we have a LPCA (Lake Placid Center for the Arts) and Pendragon Theatre
I'm glad there's more professional artists of all forms of expression coming to the region. Hopefully I'll see many more. A great ending to National Poetry Month.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Penguins! And a Busy Week Ahead



These cute little guys are in the Central Park Zoo. I went there June of 2008. What transpired here got national attention and became part of the inspiration for a hilarious play I saw this past Sunday.

The local theater hosted a staged reading of Stephen Svoboda's "The Penguin Tango" to raise money for the local chapter of the Wildlife Conservation Society. I linked a review for the NYC production to give a better idea of what the play's all about. The event was hosted by WCS members and Svoboda. I found the play to be very cute and charming as we look into the fictional lives of penguins. After the play we went to the WCS offices for a talk back on the writing process, the events that inspired the play and acting. And we watched the Daily Show clip on gay penguins.

As an artist I like how artists outside the area are taking interest. Svoboda brought up two actors from the original NYC production, and had local actors from all over the Adirondacks work with these professionals. Svoboda is also involved in the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Artshttp://www.adksummertheatre.com/ as well as their Out in the Adirondacks event for members of the LGBTQ community as well as their friends, family, and supporters.

It's taken me a few days to post about this since I've been swamped with school work. That cold I had last week sidelined me for a bit, and the extra hours at my paying job this past weekend didn't help. I need to make sure the stress doesn't interfere any further with my motivation, I've been doing well so far. And if I get my work done I'll be able to enjoy some upcoming events.

Like open mic tomorrow. I don't think I'm going to be doing anything particularly theatrical this time unless I have a last-minute idea that could work. I have material ready to go and I got my flip cam in for filming. It should be a good night, hopefully this one won't start as tensely as the last one. Last month the list filled so fast and we had extra acts added in which made timing kind of tight.

This weekend is going to be a busy one event-wise. I'm actually a little torn on where to go. Saturday night there's three different arts events going on. Saturday afternoon I will be attending the NCCC Environmental Club's Junk to Funk fashion show. Where entrants make trash into fashion. In the evening there's four events in town. First one I heard about was High Peaks Opera Studio's Operetta and Broadway evening.
Also on Saturday Bluseed will be holding a concert featuring Natalia Zuckerman and Andy Friedman.
Pendragon Theatre is holding a reading of A.R. Gurney's play "Love Letters". This is a joint event with North Country Public Radio and the Adirondack Nonprofit Network.

I know I kind of crammed a lot into my latest entry. I'll be so busy this may be the only real time I have this week to post between school, work and the arts. My schedule should breathe a little easier this summer as I'll only have one class to worry about.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Stress

I haven't felt this scattered in a while. Doesn't help that I was fighting a cold all week, and have to work all weekend on top of that. I'm in the final stretch of the semester and am totally unfocused. When I do have the focus I'm getting interrupted. I just want this semester to finish so I can have my couple weeks break and then start the summer class.

Other than that things are well. Just got a Flip cam which I'll be using to record performances. Next week is open mic.

I have a few ideas to work on. Hoping I can get them out in just the right way to be thought provoking and entertaining.

Not much really to update on. Just gearing up for the summer. Planning when to hold my summer shows and set up a reading schedule to work on journal submissions. I should have an easier time now since I'm mixing my gratifications. I have my performance videos which get me out there, and I can work on submissions for journals for "official" credentials. Maybe my current presence on the net will help with the getting published part. Never know until I try.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Fracturing Fairy Tales

My layout is finally up! So far for outside networking there's just the link to my Twitter. Hopefully I'll get my other network links up during the week.

Doing last-minute touch-ups on my latest story for my fiction class. I like the story, but it still need something before I turn it in. I really need to send it in soon.

I've gotten my second cold in less than a month, lucky me! I went almost a year without getting sick and now there's something wrong with me all the time. I'm catching colds, messing up my ankle, etc.

As the title states, I've been thinking of fairy tales. Fairy tales have always fascinated me. At first it was the fantasy element of fairy tales, and as I grew older it was knowing how dark and gruesome many of them really were. I've had a tendency to fracture the occasional one for my own amusement. I wrote a series of poems a couple months back focusing on that. It involved people getting arrested, and plastic surgery.
I decided to do something different, and actually write a serious story based off a fairy tale. I got the idea from reading Chekhov's "The Lady With the Pet Dog" and then the version Joyce Carol Oates wrote. Oates took a classic Russian short story, gave it a setting familiar to American audiences and wrote it from the woman's perspective. I've been doing a similar treatment to The Little Mermaid. I want to write a modernized and mature story that further explores the mermaid's character. Of course I'm leaving in all the gruesome parts.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Pop's Not All Mindless Crap

I feel I should just make a post on just how awesome the new Gorillaz album is. I've always loved Gorillaz, I love the music, I love the concept. I like how the ultimate prefabricated band is at times more real than a lot of the so-called "real" things that are out there. You're invited to indulge in the fantasy of a cartoon band and take it as a believable fantasy. Behind it though there's a lot of fantastic artists working together to raise the bar with pop music and re-define it as something anyone could appreciate. Not just twelve year old girls. And far as I know the twelve year old girls who have discovered Gorillaz went on to liking more eclectic music and have stepped away from the bubblegum stuff "normal" society thinks they should listen to.

Dang I would have shared the video for Stylo but embedding was disabled. Bruce Willis looks like he's having a ton of fun.

I've also found that the latest album, Plastic Beach, is great mood music. Some of the songs have made for great mood music in my story writing. I've been having a difficult time focusing. I never really worked with redrafting until I took that story writing class. I don't know how many times I restarted my latest story before I wrote a draft I actually liked. Poems seem to come easier to me, I write bad ones every now and then, but it's rare I have to completely re draft from scratch. Most of the time editing individual lines and stanzas is enough to give a poem its full potential.

I've also been checking my YouTube stats lately. It seems out of all my poems the most viewed would be my poem slamming bullies. I'm glad people are liking it though, it was very intense for me to write. I spent an afternoon of blood, sweat and tears writing that piece up. Not to mention dredging up my own personal experiences with bullying. I hope those who have suffered through bullying take comfort in my words and those who have bullied see the error in their ways and change for the better. They may eventually become victims of schadenfreude like many of my unapologetic bullies.

Well here's hoping my focus returns so I can finish my school assignments and get these latest poems out of my mind and onto something more tangible. Open mic's a couple weeks away and I've had so many ideas incubating in my brain.

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