NaPoWriMo Poem Seven: The Peculiar Beauty of Meat

The city burns. The engines race
without much hope. Our skin, soot-speckled,
dusted with the ash of others, shows where
it shows as molten as a furnace.

The cloth is offered to the bull,
the thinnest blade withdrawn from the hide.
The muscle makes a sucking noise and then
what was beneath begins to trickle forth.
The razor blade is slicing up the eye.

The neon lights the smoking woman's body.
Each inhalation reignites the tiny sun
decaying to a point between her fingers.
The gangs of men who roar outside the window
take on its hue as veins in temples throb,
boozy blood cells rushing
to the head and other parts.

The creature at the cross' foot is screaming,
like the Pope, like the monochrome mother,
like la carne maccelata,
like a Krakatoa sunset,
like what flows in a Whitechapel gutter,
like the girl who pounds the keys,
like the blood I'll never bleed,
like the police cars burning through the long hot summer

NaPoWriMo Poem Two: Way Down

I recognise the artist and the name
but not together. I know this song sung
by someone else - a song with this name anyway.
Maybe I'm the afterglow
'cause I'm in a band, y'know...

A minute of music sung under my breath
in moments of boredom or nerves,
lyrics changed according to desire.
Gonna meet a great big star,
gonna drive her great big car...

The temptation of surrender
to the natural way of things,
a pleasant self-forsaking
as the gospel choir sings
gonna have it all here
on the way down...

Fear and Loathing in Camden and Covent Garden: a Savage Tale of Minibar Booze, Audience Combat, and Grim Temperature Fatigue in the Deep Bowels of London

Well, the mini-tour is over, and I can report that it went brilliantly! The first night at RAW Poetry in King's Cross was a good if unremarkable gig. The second London gig at the Poetry Cafe was much better, enlivened not just by the presence of Helen from Bird of Paradox but by a much bigger, better, more poetry-focused crowd - for my money, RAW suffered from the bar having a clear divide between people there for the poetry night and the normal bar regulars, so there was a sense of having to fight the room quite a bit during the gig. I managed this, largely because 'Eggshells', the second poem in my set, is a pretty heavy piece which essentially bludgeons the audience into submission. But even I was frustrated in my attempts to end the set on a high with 'The secrets, almost silent, that we sang', precisely because there was still too much cordite in the air from the previous piece. I went off to respectable applause (even from some of the disgruntled regulars), but with the knowledge that there was more I could have done.

Later, back at the hotel room, over a bag of Minstrels from the Tesco Express and an overpriced bottle of Stella from the minibar, I dissected this. I had been reading Stephen Fry's new memoir on the Kindle earlier that day, and fry reports a meeting he and Hugh Laurie had with his agent during which they were asked who they most admired, so he would have a sense of how to model their careers. This seemed like a useful gedankenexperiment from the artistic point-of-view though, not having an agent, I was forced to put the question to myself. The obvious answer, tragic though it is, is that I have always, as an artist, wanted to be like Tori Amos. I cannot help this. At gigs and events where I talk to cooler, savvier types, I mention Cohen, Dylan, Bowie etc, but the fact is that what I really, in my heart of hearts, want to be is a kooky little elf-maiden who sings songs about pain and voodoo and faeries and being in the wrong band with a tear in your hand. Tori was the first contemporary musician and songwriter who really marked me, who spoke to me (prior to hearing Under the Pink I was the sort of horrible little prig for whom it was classical music all the way, I'm ashamed to say), I was hers before I was anyone else's, and hers I shall remain. Despite my occassional brutal immersion in the soundworlds of Diamanda Galas or Nick Cave, deep down I have always been and will proudly remain an ear with feet, and so it seemed to me that it was time to think about how Tori would have played the gig I'd just done.

I thought about Little Earthquakes. Said album contains some of Tori's most heartbreaking numbers, but it would be unlistenable without the leavening influence of more humourous ditties like 'Leather' and 'The Happy Phantom'. I leafed through my folders. Did I have something that might fit that bill? As it happened, I did: a poem called 'A Short Course in Suicide Writing' that, while staying in a dark area, deals with its subject matter with levity and wit, and would fulfil the task of what ritual magicians call 'banishing with laughter', in that it would lighten the mood after 'Eggshells' and leave people feeling better.

Well, I tried this at Covent Garden and - even though I didn't finish 'Suicide' due to Poetry Unplugged's rigorous 'five minutes max' set rule - I went down a storm. Many people came up to me afterwards asking when I would next read in London, including the fantastic and clearly insane genius Kevin Reinhardt of Vintage Poison, and one woman who told me in very cross tones that the fact I didn't actually live in London was no excuse, and that if that was the only thing stopping me I had better jolly well sort that out. Helen and I were even stalked on our way to the Tube by another performer that night who expressed similar sentiments. All of these enquiries I dealt with using the wit, grace and aplomb which are typical of me, i.e. I mainly repeated the words 'er', 'um' and 'well', giggled, looked down at the floor, said 'thank you' and 'oh, now' and tried as hard as possible to divert the conversation back onto the subject of their work and how much I liked it. Still, even I, in my diffident way, could see that I had, to use a particularly modern, urban form of litotes, not sucked.

I was not alone in falling foul of the five-minute rule, incidentally. Another fine poet whose work was cut off just as it was getting interesting was the wonderful Sabrina Gilbert, who finished her set with a poem about sex which was, ahem, prematurely concluded, and who cannily turned this to her advantage by informing the audience that they could hear the end of it on one of the two CDs she had brought with her, 'The Family Album' ('As in,' she informed the gasping audience, 'music for makin' families...'). I of course bought the other CD she had brought with her, because (a) *koff* I have no wish to be thought of as prurient *koff* and, (b) I had been tremendously impressed with a poem Sabrina had read about Darfur, and she told me that the other CD had more of her political stuff on it. Her work really is amazing, and she reads it with the level of professionalism you often find in American, hip-hop-influenced poets, and which I wish to Godess more poets from other backgrounds would employ. You really should go and check her out, she's awesome.

(I would also recommend that, if you are in London, you attend an event at the Poetry Cafe, which is a fine venue, but with this proviso: the basement in the cafe, where the events are held, gets very hot very quickly, and after about two or three hours any event there turns into a grim endurance trial for the audience and, I imagine, the performer. I was lucky enough to go on during the first half, but as audience alone for the second I have to admit that I often found I couldn't applaud as much as I wanted to, purely due to fatigue from the overpowering heat. Helen avers, and I agree with her, that a key focus of the Poetry Society's fundraising in future should be getting some decent air-conditioning installed in the basement. I realise this may be a difficult one to get past a lot of poets, many of whom are very right-on when it comes to environmental issues: but I predict once they are told it may mean louder applause towards the end of the night, they'll fall into line. The whores.)

And so, after bidding goodbye to Helen at Gloucester Road tube station, grabbing a six-pack of Heineken from the Tesco Express for roughly what it would cost me to have a single bottle from the mini-bar, ordering some room-service nachos and sitting down to watch The Best of Rudetube (perfect post-gig entertainment: a programme entirely composed of silly clips off the internet, demanding absolutely nothing of the attention span) on the telly, I congratulated myself on a successful assault on the Capital. Tomorrow I would play Hebden Bridge, a tiny little town in the North of England. What could possibly go wrong?

Happy New Year, readers!

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish everyone who follows this blog my commiserations on the shitstorm 2009 turned out to be, and my naieve hopes that 2010 will be a better and more prosperous year for you, me, and all the people and causes we care for. I know I'll be working to make it that way: hopefully I'll land a few more good punches in the next 12 months.

I did want to do a long 'review of the year style' post, but, y'know, feck it, who has the time? But as a gift for readers, have a gander at this link to a youtube video of Tori Amos covering Bonnie Tyler (and not in the way some of you imagine, you filthy, filthy bastards). And if you consider that an inadequate recompense for a year's worth of faithful service, I beg leave to remind you not to fuck with the Ears with Feet.

Seriously, though: I love you all, and thanks a billion bundles for putting up with my witterings. Now, piss off and enjoy whatever you're doing, and I'll be back to rant at you some more in 2010.

Don't fuck with the Ears With Feet

Professional wrestler and candidate for coolest man on Earth Mick Foley has an interesting pre-match preparation routine:

'Oddly though, the most intense images occur to me when I listen to the Tori Amos song ‘Winter’. It’s a truly beautiful track, but I listen to it before matches to help me visualise the violence I’m about to wreak.'

Mick Foley is responsible for the most extreme 'Hell in a Cell' match ever, and once lost two-thirds of an ear in the ring ropes during a match against Big Van Vader in Munich.

Suddenly, the juxtaposition of 'Hey, Jupiter' and 'threatening someone with violence' in this post doesn't seem quite so surprising.

Weird that it's 'Winter', though. Me, if I had to prepare for a steel cage death match, I'd listen to the live version of 'The Waitress' from To Venus and Back...

Safe behind the curve: that Tori Amos review at last...

On some level, I've never forgiven Tori Amos for getting married. Not because she didn't marry me, you understand (well, okay, maybe slightly...), but because I was afraid that domestic bliss might interfere with her creativity - 'happiness writes white' and all that. I might have taken the album that came immediately after that marriage, From the Choirgirl Hotel, as proof that I was wrong, if I didn't know that many of the songs on that record were occassioned by the trauma of Tori's miscarriage. But the album that followed 'Choirgirl', To Venus and Back , was a much weaker proposition than any of her previous works. There were good tracks on there - '1,000 Oceans', 'Concertina', 'Glory of the 80s'; but there was an awful lot of filler, too. The experiments in using electronic production that added so much emotional content to Choirgirl degenerated, on Venus, into noodling gimmickry. Tellingly, the record company packaged it with a disc of Tori's fantastic live performances - the best reason to buy the package, and a tacit admission that without it the record would be of little interest even for completists.

There followed the time-honoured artistic holding action of releasing a covers album, though admittedly the album in question, Strange Little Girls , was brilliant. Tori's version of 'Raining Blood', for example, is much scarier than Slayer's original, the flashes of beautiful colour added by Tori's voice performing something of the same function as the touches of painterly brilliance in Francis Bacon's works - accentuating the horror by contrast. But a doubt remained in my mind: was this it? Was it covers from now on? Would the last original Tori Album be the mediocre disc they'd had to package with a concert?

And then September the 11th happened.

Actually, I'm messing with chronology here somewhat - I only heard Strange Little Girls after the attack, indeed it was one of the three albums I took with me on my trip to London the week after, a strange and memorable time to be in that city - flags at half-mast, an air of paranoia, every random event charged with significance like a novel by Burroughs or Iain Sinclair. On the last day of my stay they pulled a torso from the Thames just opposite Tate Modern - if I'd booked a later train I'd have been on the scene to see them do it. Nothing to do with me officer, we're Reform Houngans in my voudoun temple. But I digress...

Tori's response to what Stockhausen rather overexcitedly called 'the biggest work of art there's ever been' (over-excitedly, but not wrongly: the purpose of the attacks looks, at this distance, more like an overblown piece in the immature, shock-happy idiom of the Viennese Actionists than any meaningful act of warfare - and we should note that Stockhausen pointedly didn't say it was the best work of art, just 'the biggest') was to make the excellent Scarlet's Walk . I can't think of an unnecessary track on that album. It's the sound, musically and lyrically, of Tori grappling with a host of big issues: terrorism, religious fundamentalism, colonialism, her Native American heritage, racism, homophobia, sexuality, US history and politics - and, far from being overwhelmed, coming out decisively on top. The lyrics are masterpieces of compression, fitting multi-layered references and big concepts into tightly-packed lines, and musically it has the clear, plangent emotion of a work like Choirgirl or Little Earthquakes. Here was that rock journalist cliche, the 'return to form', for real.

And then she went and blew it again, with The Beekeeper . Described by Entertainment Weekly as 'the Tori Amos album for those normally freaked out by Tori Amos', which I suppose at least makes it useful for profiling purposes , The Beekeeper sounded, on paper, like an interesting proposition: a melding of the ideas in Buxton's The Shamanic Way of the Bee with an excavation of the suppressed feminine currents in Christianity, as represented by the figure of Mary Magdalene , it would be a kind of companion piece to Scarlet's Walk, exploring the Christian side of Tori's heritage. As so often, however, the engagement with the religion of the oppressor failed to result in good writing, not least because it coincided with the emergence of another, more populist take on the Magdalene myth: Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. A good rule for artists is to move on when the recondite becomes the mundane. When the masses take over what was terra incognita, the Invisible College decamps.

Sometimes into seemingly more quotidian areas. Tori's next record was American Doll Posse , a more conventionally politicised record which criticised the policies of the Bush administration while deep-mining Tori's history for a range of disparate sexual personae to adopt in writing. It was also more of a conventional rock album than her previous work - some tracks were even out-and-out pop - but look beneath the conventional structure and darker notions are to be found.

So, Tori's record so far, in this writer's opinion, is seven wins (every album up to and including Choirgirl, plus Girls, Scarlet and Posse), and one loss (Beekeeper) with Venus edging through as a draw on account of having a few good tracks and that live disc to salvage it. So, what to make of her new offering, Abnormally Attracted to Sin ?

Well, it isn't The Beekeeper, thankfully. I don't hate it. But then I don't have much of a strong positive reaction to it either. It's a competent album: sonically there are some interesting experiments in terms of production, and it has a sort of intriguing overall tone that reminds me, weirdly, of spy movies or Batman Returns , but the record as a whole seems to lack the sense of urgency of a Choirgirl or Boys for Pele, it's as if the need to make a record has dictated the project, not the need to say anything specific.

Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few good tracks:'Strong Black Vine', 'Police Me' and 'Starling' stand out, on this first couple of listens, as the kind of beautiful yet disturbing fare we've come to expect from Tori, 'That Guy' is a beautiful song in the political vein of Posse (or at least that's how this guy interprets its reference to a guy who 'swears he will walk' and 'carries a chip the size of New York'), and 'Not Dying Today' is a jaunty little number which rocks along at a fair-old clip and also presents the obligatory shout-out to Neil Gaiman . But overall it falls into the Venus category, and doesn't have a live disc to redeem it. That said, I can't quite bring myself to chalk it up as a loss, but I can't in all conscience put it in the company of records like Choirgirl or Scarlet's Walk. So: seven wins, one loss, two draws. Not a bad record, all things considered. But I still think it might have been better if she hadn't settled down...