publicity and critiques

I wrote this note of encouragement to a band from Wyoming living in one of the best towns in Wyoming...Tensleep. They are a good band but they got knocked by a Denver Post column about something they did that was "rude". I didn't know about that part. I guess I came in late.

On the subject of music critics and home grown heroes lies a tale:


(A note of caution: This longwinded recollection might be saved for one of those nights when sleep just won’t come. By the end of this, you’ll be glad to get horizontal.)

Mary-Averett Seelye was a performance artist who grew up in Washington DC. She was about 6’6” and thin enough to slide through an unopened door. (Remember the comic book guy, Plastic Man?) She had developed an art form that was unique: she recited poetry while moving like a dancer. Needless to say, she had to memorize all of the poetry. Beyond that fairly impressive feat, she also had to make her angular movements match, in some fashion, the mood she felt was created by the words of the poetry. Finally, she had to build a stage set to accompany this whole operation and dress accordingly. There were elaborate stage sets and costumes, but she tied the poetry together so that the whole thing didn’t have to get broken down for each new work. And the poetry was not for the faint of heart. She hit the books with a vengeance, tackling all of the poems you might have heard about and some that you had never heard or would likely ever hear about without someone putting a gun to your head in school. Let’s face it, trying to pierce the meaning of life ain’t dealing out chopped liver. Making a living out of that search…ah, that takes some thought.

I mean, take Edgar Allan Poe. That guy was weird. He got dressed all in black (John Cash?), wore a flat flamenco looking hat and used to sell his stuff on the street corner in Baltimore, hand published. These days, he might have been taken for a homeless man and beaten up and poured gasoline on and lit up like a candle. Or shot up a parking lot full of innocents. And the stuff he wrote was very strange…a raven? Come on, a raven is like an owl, with a sharp turned down beak, a real predator…not a crow. And can you imagine having a Raven sitting above your front doorstep saying, “Nevermore?” Yikes, that’s creepy.

But he got so famous they named the Baltimore football team from his poem. Pretty cool, but this takes a longer view of poets and their “audience.”

Back to the story:

Mary-Averett developed quite a following. In those days, she had a mailing list of 1200 people who would hear about what she was doing. The audience would number 300 sometimes and sometimes 100, but she always drew a crowd….a paying crowd.

She had a non-profit organization develop up around her called KINESIS, with a Board of Directors and a team of PR people who would get the word out about coming presentations. She was unique and that’s saying a lot in this world. You may not like poetry readings; you may feel that TS Eliot’s got nothing for you. For me, it’s an ordeal to get through his stuff without a crowbar, so I am not sure I “get” all of what he was about. Watching this lady recite his poetry while moving her angular frame through all kinds of contortions, over unusual stage sets…well, it was like watching a person do a modern dance in an imaginary cave, through all of these strange and wonderful words...like a slow motion St. Vitus dance, but controlled and refined and so intricately organized. Some observers got so amazed by what she did; they wrote Master’s theses on it for Graduate School. It’s hard to describe any better than this so you’ll have to trust me that it was remarkable.

Moving along to the critic part:

If you were heavily involved in poetry, you would be able to listen to her cadence, her reading, her general understanding and make a comment for the people who might be interested in stuff like that. On the other hand, if you were a person involved in expressive movement, or stage sets or “performance art”, you could take a shot at saying something interesting. Short of that, you would have to be pretty all around thoughtful to make much sense out of what she did. Getting an all around observer is not that easy. You can see why it might be hard to write something intelligent about a profound and thoughtful event, unlike anything in the creative world you had ever seen before.

One day a hapless critic from the Washington Post appeared at one of her “readings/interpretations/dance-outs/whatevers”. If this observer of cultural phenomena had been dumbstruck, he would have been a step ahead. Unfortunately for him, he wrote a tongue in cheek critique that got Mary-Averett a little wrapped around the axle. He was just the wrong guy in the wrong place and he said the wrong thing. So Mary-Averett memorized what he wrote and incorporated it into her next presentation. She blended it into her routine in a kind of curious way, just enough to let the guy know that she read it but also enough to let him understand a bit better what he had clearly missed about her art form. Assuming he was of average intelligence, he should have been embarrassed for the cheap shots he took. But what I am driving at, she didn’t let the guy dictate how she would operate in her own world. After all, the critic sometimes is a person who gets paid $75 to write an epitaph, or so he might hope. He might have gone home that night and likely watched Maverick re-runs like everyone else. Or maybe he came home and knocked down a fifth of cheap tequila and sucked his way through two packs of camels and beat his wife. Or maybe he beat someone else’s wife.

Now that I see how long this silly note has gotten, I am realizing I could have suggested having El Jefe write a song like Alice’s Restaurant which made fun of the police department who had charged poor Alice with littering, but I didn’t know Arlo or Alice.

Summing up:

Getting mentioned by a Denver critic may be a good thing. Getting panned by a Denver music critic is not terrible either…after all, what you all are doing is unique. Shoot, you live in Tensleep! That’s already unique. But beyond that, you are all surviving in a musical presentation, singing music for our times. And getting paid to do it! As they say in show biz, don’t let the bastards get you down.