’Blind Cat Black’ screens outdoors July 1

'Blind Cat Black' screens outdoors July 1 at Tap Room

Amateur surrealist zombie silent film shows with 'Song of the Dead'

A (slightly) new cut of amateur director Chris King's surrealist zombie silent film "Blind Cat Black" will screen outdoors at the Schlafly Tap Room (2100 Locust St., in Downtown St. Louis) at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, July 1 as part of a Missouri Zombie Double Feature that also includes "Song of the Dead" (2005) by Chip Gubera from Columbia.

The double bill will be shown outdoors, like a drive-in movie, in the parking lot south of the Tap Room, purveyor of delicious local Schlafly beers. The event is a co-production of Schlafly, Cinema St. Louis and Frontyard Features, and the price is right: It's free.

"I strongly support things that are free and movie screenings where you can drink good beer," said amateur director Chris King, who made the 58-minute "Blind Cat Black" in 2007 with a huge, volunteer, local cast and crew.

The local cast burgeoned to include something of a who's who of the St. louis underground arts scene. Hip-hop butch/diva Toyy Davis plays the lead part of The Absent Minded Tightrope Walker. Artist Jason Wallace Triefenbach plays the co-lead part of The Flower Shop Boy. Arts organizer Don Erickson plays The Dirty Man. Two real actors with legitimate acting credits, Stefene Russell (Aunt Sadness) and Ray Brewer (King of the Zombies), have significant parts. Club owner (The Royale) and man about town Steve Fitzpatrick Smith has a smaller part, as do major poet K. Curtis Lyle, pop producer Bradd Young, avante garde musician Tory Z. Starbuck, rapper Brooke HollaDay, rapper/rocker L.A., writer Thom Fletcher, actor Suzanne Roussin, jazz musician Christopher Y. Voelker, banker Neal Alster, urban conservation activist Michael R. Allen and some 50 people in zombie makeup and attire.

"As my friends in the local gospel scene like to say, I am 'blessed' with a very wide range of interesting and talented friends," King said. "Unbelievably, I think they are all still my friends, even after going through this exhausting ordeal with me - though Toyy is in between cell phones and braid-weaving gigs and she hasn't checked her MySpace page in half a year, so I don't even know if she knows about the July 1 screening."

King added that none of us his gospel friends were included in the making of the film.

"The movie is based entirely upon a very disturbing modern Turkish poem that is all about the secret street life of Istanbul, with lots of guns, rats, drugs, corpses, curses, tattoos, prostitution, gender-bending, violence, racial epithets, and sex," King said. "You will find some of all of that stuff in the movie. The South Grand scene is hard to faze, but you will still hear some chatter down there about the zombie orgy scene we filmed on the floor of CBGB on Super Bowl Sunday 2007. There is some, shall we say, 'objectionable content' in this movie. My friend Jamilah Nasheed, a conscious Muslim state rep, walked out on the premiere, not even half way through. I expect somebody will walk out on us on July 1 – well, since we are screening outside at The Tap Room, I guess they would have to walk in. Or away, into the night."

The film (shot on digital video, but called a "film," at least in King's own praise releases) premiered at the Tivoli Theatre in July 2007 as part of the 2007 St. Louis Filmmaker's Showcase.

"In the Filmmaker's Showcase, they slotted us on the 'Experimental' program, which made sense to me," King said. "Everything about 'Blind Cat Black' was an experiment. I had never made a movie before. My star, Toyy, had never really acted before, at least not in front of camera. And I would go so far as to say that a film had never been made in quite the same way as we made this one."

"Blind Cat Black" began its unusual life as Bakissiz Bir Kedi Kara, a book-length prose poem, written in Turkish by Ece Ayhan and published in Turkey in 1965. In 1997, it was translated into English, titled "Blind Cat Black," and published by Murat Nemet-Nejat, a Turkish Jew who lives in Hoboken and sells Oriental rugs for a living in New York City. King met the translator in Brooklyn, on a field recording journey with the mobile arts collective Hoobellatoo, just as the translation was coming off the press; and he reviewed it in The Nation magazine.

Almost a decade later, in 2006, Hoobellatoo had evolved into the St. Louis-based arts group Poetry Scores (named after its core form, a long poem scored as one would score a film); and King produced a poetry score to "Blind Cat Black." Drawn from Hoobellatoo original recordings accumulated over the previous decade, the score featured All Ireland piper Michael Cooney, Australian poet laureate Les Murray, King's own band Three Fried Men, and a number of names to conjure with in St. Louis, including songster Pops Farrar, raconteur Fred Friction and National steel guitarist Tom Hall. Poetry Scores released the CD at Mad Art Gallery in Fall 2006, accompanied by an invitational of artists from around the country responding to the poem in traditional media.

"By that time, we had been calling these weird little things we were making 'poetry scores' for so long, that I began to wonder why we had never made a film to one of the scores," King said. "Especially since I love silent movies, and that's bascially what would need to be done: to write and film a silent movie, and then edit it to the existing poetry score. So that's pretty much what we did."

The "we" in this connection makes for a long list. King began with local avante garde filmmaker Chizmo as the "visualizer" and local video veteran Aaron AuBuchon signed up as the eventual editor. But he quckly wore out Chizmo and grabbed AuBuchon and several other guys to help him finish shooting it. Then, in the editing process, he wore out AuBuchon and had to call in his old friend, the artist Kevin Belford, to help him finish editing it. He also wore out a makeup artist (party producer Leata Land), a zombie wrangler (nurse Dale Ashauer), a bartender (composer Eric Hall), and a patron who ran the Zombie Green Room (behavioral health exec John Eiler).

"The reputation of directors is of these manic, maniacal, absolutely impossible narcissists who act like the world exists solely to complete their film," King said. "Having now done this once – on no budget whatsoever, and with a demanding full-time day job – I can see where the reputation comes from."

Also screening at the Tap Room on Tuesday, July 1 as part of the Missouri Zombie Double Feature is "Song of the Dead" by Chip Gubera (2005), in which terrorists infect a spray intended to protect Americans against the dangerous 1,000-year Mosquito Awakening, bringing the dead back to life.

For more information, contact King at brodog@hotmail.com or 314-265-1435. Or Cinema St. Louis at 314-289-4150 or www.cinemastlouis.org. Or Frontyard Features at 314-664-4330 or http://fyfstl.com/.

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52nd City has got game

Good 'Sporty'
52nd City has got game

By Chris King

The most entertaining piece, for me, in "Sporty," the latest publication by 52nd City, is a two-liner included in the end-note thumbnail contributor bios:

"Thom Fletcher is a pneumatic fitting salesman from Ferguson, Missouri. He once won $120 in Detroit betting on a horse named 'Party Bus.'"

I adore the quirky, dry modesty and the suggestion of a life and mind – what was he doing in Detroit? why did "Party Bus" engage him? – that won't be revealed to us completely; that will be left, mostly, to our imaginations. This is the difficult art of the fragment, the miniature, the epigram, the short story, even; and, printed on expensive, glossy paper by a startup St. Louis arts group (that is not likely to be included in the regional arts tax district within our lifetime), 52nd City has to content itself with things that don't take up too much space.

As with its previous publications (which include one CD, the sublime "Sounds"), 52nd City defines a theme with the title of "Sporty." The pneumatic fitting salesman from Ferguson remembers his winning wager on Party Bus with its fetching name when writing his bio because his submission, "A Rose is a Rose, Of Course Of Course," concerns the sport of horseracing – more specifically, the names of horses that have won The Belmont Stakes. Presumably art director Caroline Huth (who, we are told, has moved up 50 cities to Chicago) is responsible for the illustration of these horse names fanned out around the image of a rose, interlineated with the names of the American Rose Society's 2006 National Rose Show winners, with silhouettes of horses circling the perimeter of the rose. You can't tell the roses from the racehorses by name alone, and that's the point, though it seems exceedingly crude and unFletcherian to look for a point in his peculiar, pleasant sport.

Andrea Day also is up to horses, or cows, or bulls – some animal involved in the leathery and dusty sporting life of cowboys, for her submission is a beautifully lit and shaded photograph of five cowboys (four white hats and one black) caught from behind, peering into a corral. Other than a small glut of baseball meditations, each of which also isn't really about baseball at all – "Second Case," Aaron Belz in his funnyman mode, writing about clichés and the strutting cliché that is Barry Bonds; "Fastball," Greg Ott on refinements and their discontents; "St. Louie Louie," K. Curtis Lyle on our town and its juiciest African-American dynasty, the Troupes; and "Sporting Pain," Brett Underwood on the art of the hangover and the illusion of resolutions – the editors seem to have made an effort to include as many sports as possible and repeat none.

K.E. Luther, in the nimblest writing in the slim volume, tracks her fascination with NASCAR. Emily Shea Fisher, in another personal favorite, remembers games we play in the street (and performs the impossible feat of getting a completely fresh laugh out of the poorest sport of our day, K-Fed). Franklin Jennings, rumored to be a 52nd City regular wearing the fake moustache and rubber nose of a nom de plume, snags a wincer from the archives: "Anthropology Displays," native peoples on display as primitive athletic curiosities in St. Louis in 1904, throwing rocks, fighting in the mud and, yes, chucking spears. Dana Smith paints skateboarders (and really makes me wish a Pulitzer would give these guys enough money, occasionally, to print in color). Stefene Russell takes a swing at lady's golf outfits, I think; I seldom understand her poems, though I always "get" them (I think). I can't help you, however, with Jessica Baran's "The Narrative of Nagel Messenger of Acme, IN.," of which I am certain of nothing except that it starts with a skating rink. Richard Newman, from the hoops-centric state of Indiana himself, plays a game of "Horse" while talking shit with a playmate. Yours truly writes about getting chased by a bully out of sex and drugs and into soccer and safety. (It's fiction; I dislike soccer and play it very poorly.)

As with the other 52nd City productions, I find myself sitting with "Sporty" and flipping through it at odd times, rereading and savoring passages and images, proud of its editors Andrea Avery, Thomas Crone and Stefene Russell and happy with this puzzling city where we all have washed up, together. I've no choice but to close with the inevitable groaner: "Sporty" is a winner.

**

See www.52ndcity.com on how to order and where to buy "Sporty" and the other 52nd City releases. Collect them all!

**

IN THE SLIDESHOW

Sporty portrait of the critic as a young, not fat, not balding rocker playing Whiffleball on the road between Enormous Richard gigs, ca. 1993

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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF LEO SZILARD

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF LEO SZILARD

Leo Szilard was a small, overweight, Hungarian, Jewish, atomic scientist. He was the first person to recognize that nuclear fission could lead to an atomic bomb. Seeing a nuclear future, he exploited a personal connection with Albert Einstein to get Einstein to sign a letter that Szilard composed and send it to President Roosevelt, which initiated the Manhattan Project. You could say he was largely responsible for the U.S. developing the atomic bomb before Nazi Germany and, with that development, for the shape of the 20th century.

Incidentally, after Hitler was defeated Szilard argued against the use of the bomb against Japan and, later, against the arms race with the USSR. He also thought up the idea for the Washington-Moscow hotline.

He also penned his own version of the Ten Commandments, in German. He was never happy with the attempts to translate the commandments into English. After his death in 1964, Jacob Bronowski wrote them down in English as a remembrance for some of Szilard's friends. Bronowski's translation and the original German version of Szilard were published in s book of recollections about him, "Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts."

They are words to live by.

TEN COMMANDMENTS

by Leo Szilard

1. Recognize the relationships between things and the laws which govern men's actions, so that you know what you are doing.

2. Direct your deeds to a worthy goal, but do not ask if they will achieve the goal; let them be models and examples rather than means to an end.

3. Speak to all others as you do to yourself, without regard to the effect you make, so that you do not expel them from your world and in your isolation lose sight of the meaning of life and the perfection of the creation.

4. Do not destroy what you cannot create.

5. Touch no dish unless you are hungry. (A pun that could read -
Do not turn to the court of law unless you are hungry).

6. Do not desire what you cannot have.

7. Do not lie without need.

8. Honor children. Listen to their words with reverence and speak to them with endless love.

9. Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not prevent you from being what you have become.

10. Lead your life with a gentle hand and be ready to depart whenever you are called.

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‘Blind Cat Black’ director on KDHX

'Blind Cat Black' director on KDHX Monday 7:30 p.m.

"The surprise was that we also turned up people who wanted to act in the movie, and both DMari DiGiovanni and Charlois Lumpkin, who we met through the KDHX class, ended up with considerable (decayed) face time as zombies."

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The Mona Bob unveiled for Tom Danforth

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Look at me! A published co-translator from the Italian!

I don't know if it's the final frontier, but I certainly never thought I'd go there – at any rate, here I am, now a published co-translator from the Italian.

The forthcoming issue The TriQuarterly (No. 127) is devoted wholly to Contemporary Italian Poetry in the original with facing translations, and 16 pages of this handsome 248-page book (which retails for $11.95 at a well-stocked bookstore near you) is dedicated to Roberto Gigliucci's "Poemetto facile degli alberghi" and its facing English translation by Leonard Barkan and (a'hem) Chris King, entitled "Easy poem about hotels."

Not to give it all away to that rare soul who actually acts upon this notice, tracks down TriQuarterly 127 and buys the tome, but the title of Roberto's poem is heavily ironic, in that it names a narrative poem about his visit to the sites of notorious suicides in Roman hotels. Yes, this would be quintessential feel-good summer reading, from me to you, with a whole lot of help from Roberto Gigliucci and Leonard Barkan, not to forget the good, learned people at The Triquarterly, published at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Who am I? How did I got here? God knows, not by mastering the Italian tongue, of which I know precisely enough to order successfully off a Pasta House Co. menu.

It was Leonard Barkan – then, a distinguished academic at New York University and now an even more distinguished academic at Princeton University, and throughout these fancy academic changes my very dear friend and intellectual mentor – who suggested the project. Leonard knew Roberto from his days in Rome. He thought it would be fun to do a translation project together, while we were grinding out the editing of one of his many fascinating and decorated books of comparative literature, which I have had the pleasure of editing for some years now. Roberto was game.

So, Leonard would turn the Italian poem into more or less literal English, then I would both simplify it (typically, moving from Latinate to Anglo Saxon root words) and supe it up, give it spin and spice. Then Leonard would peg my version down a little closer to the Italian in spirit and significance. Then I would twist his version again and supe it back up. After a few turns back and forth of the literary screw of this sort, we would arrive at a poem in English that we both liked and that Leonard could live with as a relatively faithful rendering of Roberto's Italian. Roberto himself knows about as much English as I know Italian and left us completely alone with his every blessing.

Since I am holding out that some of you actually will go track down TriQuarterly 127 and install this handsome book on your shelves at home, I will append – not "Easy poems about hotels," the published evidence of our work together – but another of the poems by Roberto that Leonard and I co-translated in this way. There are even more where these come from. Perhaps a slim volume of them will appear one day. As an example of our work together, Leonard gave to me as the literal translation of the title of the collection: "Songs of Inert Love," which I suped up and simplified into "Songs of Love Gone Nowhere." Here is one:

A LITTLE SONG ABOUT THE SUN ON THE WALL

By Roberto Gigliucci
Translated by Chris King and Leonard Barkan

A wall with the sun
or a boy on a deserted beach,
an empty hotel
or a sweaty priest
under a sunset tree.
Or me, with arrogance for metaphors,
all my chandeliers
of fruit and crystallized light,
transfixed fountains and statues,
green tits in triumph
with ruby-colored berry nipples,
the sun in a summer ice cream cone, 
such a tedium of stuff and sofas
and pianos at the bottom of the sea.
I am overdressed,
I sweat and tremble, I burn and I am of ice
like other miracles that are going out of style,
I am leaping, down toward on high,
an ascending collapse of snows
and refractions, lacerated stars, explosive
diamonds and base make-up made up of sand-blasted planets.

I would like to stop, to pause in my flying,
to undress in the windy heat,
arrogant metaphors, get out of here
peacefully in a naked shade of oak.
Everything is really simpler still:
moving around the house, drifting
through the city, coming home
to eat, ghosting around the house –
to go out, to cruise around, to go shopping,
to forget your own language in your mouth,
to forget the brain beating in your own skull,
to eclipse midday in the mind,
to make sun dark, no, more a fresh
penumbra – to be naked in public
or alone in a pyramid of light
in a forest or a summer garden,
to be calm, naked, splendorous, spectral, dull.
No, even simpler:  I
want to dance with you, that's it,
just dance with you
(and that seems like no big deal?) –
in my empty room, no lamp lit,
I want to dance with you.  Because
I am in love with you.

That's about it:  I awoke
one hot winter morning in Rome
and had nothing else to say,
I didn't know how to say anything,
just over and over
that I am in love with you.
Rather than speak
I prefer to go naked,
sing or cry and mumble
the words of others (my friend, it's all you,
I pardon you, please pardon me),
or else fall down on the floor
like a tower of ice in water, myself
seized by spasms of hysteria and howling,
you slap me around, or I slap you around,
tears in our eyes and feet frozen with love,
awed that death doesn't collect me then
desperate, death do not come for this man
naked, your veins so swollen.

I could wander miserable and frizzy
soaked wet in the morning searching
out a theme worth poetry
along the winter river,
sun and bird glow
down streets of theatre,
the world which in mourning triumphs
(the wretched world, which delights you).
I could do all that.  But what's the point?
There's no subject better than your blood:
All your sweet body's blood,
hot steaming streams of you, clamorous
traffic jams in your body, confident
blood shining under your skin at night
at midnight, three in the morning, even at dawn when I
dream that your blood has turned to sand.

You know the bar in the Tuscolana, number one ninety-eight,
they sell tobacco;
that's where you buy your mild cigarettes,
the ones the state monopoly sells,
go ahead, buy them for me too,
there's a moon as gross as my soul tonight,
it's very late,
I can't sleep and I want to smoke
and then I want to think,
to think of you, your hat with the crooked visor,
blue as a night of high spirits when it's time to cry
and ask each other questions, the kind
that really matter. 

Last night at the station
of the metro, wind blew
black like a dug-out full of piss,
orphanage, wind from a tunnel
subterranean and humid, I saw
two legs slightly
bowed and I asked myself:
what can I expect from those legs,
some good, or only trouble?
Is it worth it to suffer
such vertigos of joy?
Wouldn't it be better to purge
each thing of its contrary?
No?  How the hell would I know?
What do you want from me anyway?
Metaphors or memories?

More info on TriQuarterly, but not yet about No. 127 as of this morning, at http://www.triquarterly.org.

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Because Turkish poetry is good for you and helps you to live

On Living
By Nazim Hikmet

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.


III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...



Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

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Barack Obama and The Man Who Carved Canes

Barack Obama and The Man Who Carves Canes

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File under God, as in there is One, or some

I think we all write letters and emails in our head that we never send. Mine this morning, on the drive to work, was addressed to three friends in the South. I wrote to them in my head, but never sent, "If you ever get tired of your town, remember there is a busy guy in St. Louis who misses it." The towns I was missing were Athens, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama. Mostly, I missed my friends there, and dreamt on Highway 40 of seeing them with traveling poets in the fall.

This evening my four-year-old daughter and I went to an art opening, of sorts, at the Missouri Botanical Garden. The show was of stone outdoor sculptures from Zimbabwe. It was a private VIP reception before the public opening, and I was "very important" because I edit a newspaper that had previewed the show.

Another very important person was a black muslim state representative, who is new to the Legislature. Our paper, being a black paper, watches her every move. We have a love and hate relationship, but tonight it was all love, because she had her niece with her. My daughter and her niece played in the Garden, as the adults talked state politics, all in a supernaturally beautiful setting, surrounded by sculptures that had been labored over and prayed over.

The event itself had been prayed over. After the expected official remarks, a man and a woman from Zimbabwe consecrated the opening with a traditional Shona prayer and song. It was nice, effective, and fitting, and I participated to the best of my ability. Then I drank delicious, cheap red wine and strolled in the dark with a gutsy black muslim state legislator as our children crawled all over the sculptures from Zimbabwe.

I came home to a box on the kitchen table. It was addressed to me by one of the friends from the South I have been missing, Richard Selman of Birmingham, Alabama. I opened the box. In it was the instrument I had been missing at the opening ceremonies at the Garden, the mbira, the Zimbabwean thumb piano. Richard had made it from an oil can. He is a white guy from Alabama who more or less taught himself to make these instruments by looking at examples of them, and then went over to Zimbabwe and studied with the master craftsmen, so many of them now dead.

Richard's note, stuffed in the box with the mbira, acknowledged field recordings he had made and then entrusted to me without obtaining the permission to release them. He admitted he had important and overdue work to do in obtaining those permissions. He remembered a golden listening session in the producer Adam Long's apartment, when we listened to these old recordings from Zimbabwe. (On a dead format; to get his dead format deck fixed for the session, Adam had traded back to Nelly a very old Nelly master that Adam and only Adam possessed, after all these years -- a master worth many thousands of dollars.)

I looked at that oil can mbira and Richard's letter. I thought of Zimbabwe. I thought of the South. I thought of old friends. I thought of coincidences, of confluences. I thought of God, or of gods, and proof that there is One, or some.

In Slideshow at myspace.com/skuntrymuseum

Gas can mbira, by Richard Selman (two views)

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Legendary Irish piper records in St. Louis

Legendary Irish piper records in St. Louis

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