Giggage!

As you might surmise from the relative silence on this blog in recent times, I've been busy. June has been a hectic month, with lots of gigs and, more importantly, a lot of preparations for gigs as well, so most of my downtime has been spent chilling out recently. This entry is mainly just a round-up of the recent gigs for people following this blog who may not also follow on Twitter or Facebook.

The first major gig in June was the Jibba Jabba Showcase at the Leazes Fringe of Newcastle Green Festival, held at the Trent House. This was the first gig for which I was billed as AJ McKenna instead of my non-writing name (on the flyers at least), but initially it was a gig I wasn't keen to do on the day - not for any big reason, just because I was feeling really tired the day I had to do it. I forced myself to go though, and I'm glad I did because in the end I did an absolutely blistering set - no major surprises, just the usual stuff - Tension, Eggshells, A Short Course in Suicide Writing and On Looking Back into the Mosh Pit - but delivered in a really vigorous, exciting way that went down really well with the packed audience - many of them new attendees who'd came because of the Green Festy connection. I left on a massive high. The lesson here is that, unless you're really, really, seriously bad, you should always, always force yourself off your comfy sofa and out to gigs. It's worth it.

Later in the month came Take Ten at the Cumberland Arms, just this past Thursday. This was a really special gig for me because I performed two new poems - Other Peoples' Things, which I'd written for Monkfish Collective's 'Hand Me Down' extravaganza at Stockton Arc, and My Revolution Will Not Be Trivialised, which I wrote just recently. I was really pleased with the reception both these poems got, particularly the latter, which I was very nervous about reading - but again, I'm glad I did. The feedback was uniformly positive, and the room was pretty much blown away. My only criticism was that in the heat of the moment I altered my set after reading it to finish on Mosh Pit again - I had originally planned to finish on The Secrets, Almost Silent, that We Sang, which I think was a better thematic fit, but I was worried that more strident trans activist poetry might be laying it on a bit thick, so decided to go with something more universal. Probably a mistake, but to be frank after reading Revolution whatever else I read that night didn't make much difference.

But the main reason I've been busy was last night's gig at the launch of Spill Culture Club: a half-hour, curated group performance with other members of Apples & Snakes' Tyneside Scratch Club which featured two poems from me, one, Criminally Fragile, done reasonably straight (or as straight as possible given I was wearing what I now call my 'fuck with gender' outfit of white shirt, black tie, trousers and braces teamed with fabulous make-up [AJ McKenna is brought to you by 'Electric Plum' lipstick from Rimmel London - this concludes this brief word from our sponsor]), and then NSFW, done as what I suppose I ought to call a multimedia performance piece with guitarist Matt Harrison and dancer Angeline Lucas. This was a frankly awesome performance, and the reason I, a usually shy person not much given to the blowing of my own trumpet, french horn, or indeed euphonium, can get away with saying that is that Matt and Angeline did such a good job of bringing the piece to life for me, and for the audience who watched with rapt attention as Angeline literally writhed her way around the words, and around Matt's sumptuous, serpentine guitar riffs. An awesome spectacle, and one I feel privileged to have been part of.

So it's been a busy month! July will be a little quieter, with fewer gigs & rehearsals, as the local writing scene goes into its customary summer break. But I'm really pleased with the way these June gigs have gone; and, as all three gigs have been filmed, I hope to be able to provide followers with links to the performances so you can see them too as soon as I can!

Tour Report

Whew, what a week! I've been chilling out with my friend Michelle for the weekend after spending the earlier part of the week on yet another teeny-tiny tour of gigs around the North East and in London.

This time last week I was sitting round a low table on the fifth floor of Norham House in Newcastle, sharing some fantastic vegetarian soup with a group of people from Apples & Snakes North East and people from the local theatre community after the performance section of the inaugural Newcastle scratch club. At one in the morning some of us were still there, drinking wine and hanging out at the back of the building, looking onto the husk of the old Odeon cinema and discussing future plans. Scratch club was a good gig for me both professionally and personally, and I'll be going to the next one, and the next, and the next. I really think it'll help me develop my performance and take things to the next level. And there was great stuff at the gig from Amina Marix Evans, Jennie Pascoe, Poetry Jack and a whole load of other cool people.

Monday saw me visit the Lamplight Open Mic in Stanley. An excellent set from me at this gig was only marred by the fact that I had to leave before seeing the second half in order to get home to Washington at a decent time by bus. But what I did see included brilliant work by Jules Clare, Steve Urwin, Mark Speeding, Jaene Davies and many others. Another good gig.

If it was Tuesday it must have been Middlesbrough for a quick open mike spot at the Electric Kool-Aid Cabaret of the Spoken Word in Blu Basement. This was more of an opportunity to check out the venue and the gig, and it was impressive, to say the least. It was also good to catch a performance by WN Herbert, Andy Croft and Paul Summers, the last gig of their Three Men on the Metro tour, and Paul's last gig before he leaves for Australia. They were all great and you really should get their book.

I didn't sleep very much on Tuesday night, and then on Wednesday I needed to be up and about early for a train ride to London, where I planned to read at Jawdance, an Apples & Snakes open mike night at Rich Mix, a fantastic arts venue in Bethnal Green. This was one of the biggest stages I've ever been on and I was kind of intimidated by the size of the crowd and the slickness of the gig, which had a long list of guest spots, poetry films and even resident artists drawing everyone who performed in addition to the open mike stuff. However, the compere for the evening made a monumentally shit joke near the start of the night which relied on a whiff of dog-whistle transphobia for its punchline and I surfed through my performance on a wave of mutilation thereafter. It must have worked, I guess, because reaction to my short set was uniformly positive. Amazing how popular getting on stage, snarling and staring at the crowd like some kind of make-up-wearing old testament prophet will make you. Fortunately the night was saved by a great performance from the magnificent Anna Chen, who I urge you all to check out. She's great.

And to be honest the night needed saving, because I was going back to literally one of the worst hotels in London. The County Hotel, Bloomsbury. Look it up. Let's just say I figured it probably wasn't the hotel for me when I noticed reception was being manned by a German skinhead. Put it this way: when I got back to the hotel, Highlander was on and when I was watching the scenes in that horrific fucking bad-days-of-New-York flophouse that the Kurgan stays in I was thinking 'actually, that's not that bad. And to make matters worse, London under Boris Johnson seems to have became some kind of Mormon township where even hotel bars close at eleven pm and off-licences close even earlier. I had to go back to a room in the shittiest hotel in the world, and I didn't even have booze to make things better. If I hadn't had a decent chat with Helen G from Bird of Paradox at the gig, and seen Anna's set, I would have had one of the shittiest nights of my life despite the gig.

Fortunately morning came soon enough and I shambled, on maybe three hours' sleep, to King's Cross to get a train back to Newcastle - a city where it is a lot easier to get drinks after midnight than our nation's capital. Overall it was a good tour, and there are more gigs lined up - the rescheduled launch of At Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, on February 8th at Centurion, a spot at the Black Light Engine Room in Middlesbrough on Feb 25th, more Scratch Club fun...there's lots coming up. More soon.

Words and all that Jazz

Hello again, you wonderful flibertigibbets, you, and a great big special tacklehug of a hello to any of those lovely new readers I mentioned in yesterday's post. If you're still reading it means you weren't scared off by all that talk of privilege and how, shockingly, able-bodied white guys with penises they were born with and are happy with are not, pace the British tabloid press and Talksport radio, 'duh reel victums, innit?' and have actually got it pretty easy. Well done you! You've taken your first step into a larger world, as that smug patriarchal git Alec Guinness once said in a film he did only for the money.

[Personally I'm more of a fan of Samuel L Jackson's performance as Mace Windu myself; after all, he killed Boba Fett's dad! Though that fact brings with it the terrifying thought that while we know SLJ will do anything for money (Jumper is proof of that), Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett, and has a less-populated CV than Jackson's, may actually have thought that in episode two he was making art, poor love. But I digress.]

New and old readers of this blog alike may be interested to know that I will be reading (most definitely for art) at the inaugural Wordjazz event at Citizens House, Consett, tomorrow, along with Jenni Pascoe, Steve Urwin and Ira Lightman, among others. It promises to be an excellent night. Things kick off at 7:30pm. So, as always, if you're reading this and you're in the area, do come down, especially if you're new to Wrestling Emily - it really would be delightful to see you!

Anyway, that's almost all for now. However, in keeping with this blog's newfound devotion to the Big Society and my dogged desire to educate my followers, I would recommend new readers check out the wonderful film-length interview The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Diamanda Galas' fierce double-album Deifixiones: Will and Testament, and Osip Mandelstam's 'Stalin Epigram.' Class dismissed.

Is....*crackle* is...is this thing on?

Forgive my absence, darlings, but some kind of internet outage has left Stately Fish Manor without broadband for the past couple of days. To compound the problem, yesterday night my Blackberry died and for the past eighteen hours I have been forced to use the browser on my Kindle, which may be a great device for reading (and purchasing [and driving yourself deeper into penury each day by purchasing]) e-books, but which felt marginally worse for browsing Twitter and Gmail than it would have been were I to try and browse those same social networking sites by using the green screen PCs I first learned to use e-mail on at Northumbria Uni in 1996.The Kindle browser sucks, basically, and frankly I deserve counselling or medication or a massage for having had to suffer through using it. Jeff Bezos can lick my bits.

Anyway. The bitch is back. And the bitch will be reading at Newcastle's glamorous Centurion Bar on the 6th of December at the launch for By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, the new anthology of poems inspired by the writing of Elizabeth Smart which is being published by Red Squirrel Press. My poem 'The Smiling Animal at His Appointed Hour', which is about the murder of Andrea Waddell, will appear in the anthology. A small press poetry anthology isn't exactly the cenotaph, but I feel proud to have gotten a small acknowledgement of the injustice of Andrea's murder down for posterity, especially this close to the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It isn't much. It isn't enough. But it's something.

Fear and Loathing on the Calder and the Tees: from London to Middlesbrough via Hebden Bridge, in the company of drunken poets and a motley crue of lesbians

Reader, I am sorry. I am sordid. I am cheap. I am a tease. For I ended the last post with the tantalising phrase 'what could possibly go wrong?' suggesting, of course, that something terrible was on the point of occurring. A come-uppance, perhaps, for my smugness following my Covent Garden triumph. Alas, this was not to be. I may as well tell you that my Hebden Bridge gig, under the auspices of Write Out Loud, was as much of a success as my second London gig. Some jeopardy was involved, though, as, on arrival in Hebden Bridge, I found myself held hostage by a gang of notorious lesbians...

As a fan of Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir Fun Home, I had long coveted a copy of  The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, the only UK collection (to my imperfect knowledge) of her syndicated comic strip following, in that turgid soap-opera phrase, 'the lives and loves' of a group of lesbians, gay guys, guydykes, trans dykes, trans guys und so weiter in a city which may or may not be Minneapolis. And so, while in London, pootling about on my second day, I found myself in Foyles bookshop. I had mainly decided to go for a coffee in their excellent jazz cafe, but I was consumed with guilt over my purchase of a Kindle, which, many of my book trade friends had told me, was tantamount to me sticking a knife in their hearts. I resolved to show my commitment to the bound codex by purchasing some books at this cathedral of the UK book trade - and besides, the Kindle is not well-served for graphic novels, so a trip to that section of the bookshop seemed the best bet.

It was a toss-up between Dykes and the new, hardcover edition of the Morrison/Quitely Batman and Robin series, and I would probably have got both if Foyles' ridiculously well-stocked LGBTQ section hadn't had a copy of Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, but in the end I found hanging out with some lesbians more appealing than spending time with a guy in a leather batsuit. Almost too appealing, in fact, because, after making myself a cafetiere of the Taylor's of Harrogate coffee so thoughtfully provided by the landlady of the apartment I'd rented in Hebden Bridge, I found myself devouring page after page of Bechdel's strips, unable to tear myself away. There is a lot to be said for the one-page strip in graphic terms: it's incredibly moreish and, because of the built-in need for cliffhangers, the temptation to say 'I'll just read one more, and then go out' is almost impossible to resist.

Resist I did, however, and I did a fine job at Write Out Loud's regular gig at the Hole in the Wall. I did the tried-and-tested trio of 'Tension', 'Eggshells' and 'Suicide', and, during the second half - when everyone is invited back to perform another single poem - I did 'NSFW', a poem about sex and sado-masochism which caused a bit of a stir. It needn't be said that, of course, I'm the girl in the poem, but in fact it did need saying to one audience member who kept referring to it as the 'schoolgirl-strangling' poem while simultaneously saying how much she'd enjoyed it. Huh. Some people are always looking for an entirely different sense of transgression in your work than the kind that you're trying to convey, I guess.

Speaking of transgression, I drank a lot more than I'd intended to at the Hebden Bridge gig, and was very hungover when I departed for Leeds the next day. I knew that some Middlesbrough poets were planning a National Poetry Day event at the Writers' Block in their town, and was keen to go, but wasn't sure a ticket from Leeds to Middlesbrough would fit within the budget for my trip. As it happened it did, so I buggered off there and read at this excellent, free-form event organised by PA Morbid, was pleasantly surprised when the Crow King Andy Willoughby, who I knew from my Hydrogen Jukebox days, swung by, and generally had a nice old time there and at one of the local hostelries afterwards. Oddly, for an incredibly scary man, Andy has an ability to set you at your ease, and, even though I didn't know any of the other poets there (which made me feel impossibly old), I found myself talking to them like an old friend (I suppose I might grudgingly admit that two plastic cups of wine and three pints of Kronenbourg may have helped here...). Anyway, Andy and co saw me off onto a train from Middlesbrough to Newcastle, but not before entreating me to send poems for various magazines and presses, come back for other gigs etc etc. It was all quite wonderful, and sustained me very well during the bum-breaking 90-minute train ride back to Newcastle on a knackered old pacer that seemed hell-bent on stopping at every butt-fuck of a town between the Tees and the Tyne.

And so I got home, went to bed, and slept in until 1pm today. Sorry readers. I know it's not the end of Easy Rider, is it? Still, count yourself lucky it's not the neverending end of the Lord of the Rings films, or the end of the Sopranos, I mean what the hell was that, finishing up in mid-sent-

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?

KSM Exit 75, drinking, vagrancy, and visiting That London

Still alive. Still here. Just. Mum got ill again, and family drama led to me spending a rather fraught and self-pitying night at the Angel View Inn, Gateshead (nice place, lovely staff, great food, but given the circs a place I never want to go to again), then decamping, after a long day of literally bumming around Newcastle, back to Michelle's place. I'm getting kind of sick of all this to-ing and fro-ing, though, so today I did something I've been meaning to get around to for ages: I got a form from the local Housing Office, to register my interest in moving into what we used to call a council house before corporations like Gentoo got in on the act. Soon, perhaps, you will experience me blogging from the freezing cold of my own personal Bedsit Hell. Exciting!

It's not all Morrissey-esque misery, though. After my day of experimental homelessness in the Toon, I went to the long-awaited Borders reunion drinking session at Tilly's theatre bar. A fine night in a fine venue and, after we decamped to the equally fine Bodega, a great deal of fantastic conversation was had on topics as diverse as the foibles of customers, the most disgusting things found behind bookshelves, and my role, as head of the Psychology & Social Sciences section (incorporating Erotica & Sexuality) as the Pornographer of Gateshead. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...so that was a ray of sunshine in an otherwise depressing weekend.

Another ray of sunshine is my upcoming visit to That London to do some poetry gigs, which is happening next week. I'll be reading at RAW Poetry in King's Cross on Monday the 4th; Poetry Unplugged at Covent Garden's Poetry Cafe on Tuesday the 5th; then it's up to Hebden Bridge for Write Out Loud's own 'read-around' session on Wednesday the 6th, before finishing up in Middlesbrough for the Black Light Engine Room's National Poetry Day extravaganza. It's a tornado of troubadouring which I'm privately referring to as the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, largely due to the fact that I am having to do it on as close to no budget as possible (and the fact that I will sleep with  random members of the audience in return for a drink, obviously). And after which I will probably sleep right through for the remaining three days of my officially-sanctioned week's holiday...

'What goes up must come down, all that swims can also drown...'

And so to the Trent House, Newcastle, for my second appearance at Jibba Jabba, that bar's new spoken word night. Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a good venue, attracting a decent crowd and striking a nice balance between newcomers and regular performers. I'm not sure which of those categories I fall into at the moment: I wasn't sure if  I was going to perform last night - having planned to go just to discuss dropping some books off for a charity regular JJ attendee Amina Marix Evans works with - but planned a set anyway just in case.

In the event this turned out to be a good strategy as I wound up performing third in the set. I like performing fairly early (for one thing it gives you the chance to relax with a couple of post-performance beverages instead of spending the whole night sober, jittery, and waiting to go on) but I worry about going on first - I'm not the most cheerful of poets, and I worry that sending me on to plough through my tragic tales of gender-incongruity might kill off the room. Equally, the last spot is tough, because you need to provide the exclamation mark to the evening. Inadvertently I wound up doing just that last week at Cellar Door in Durham, and, given that I was in a rage after the cisfail that had been waved in our faces earlier in the evening, it was a weird kind of ending. So it was nice to nestle comfortably in among everyone else's performances, where I could do my thing without too much worry.

I was still kind of worried though. Not only was I doing 'Criminally Fragile' for the second time ever, I also decided to challenge myself by reading 'NSFW' a sort of sister poem to Fragile which is about...well, it's about sex, and desire, and particularly the experience of having desires that are kind of kinky. I figure if I'm going to start performing stuff about my gender identity more openly, I may as well come out and admit to being a bit of a pervy little bitch as well.

Or at least that's what I told myself. I was still bricking it when I got up. Why not junk the planned set? Just do some funny, silly stuff, set people at their ease, don't take risks. On the other hand I'd pretty much outed myself, gig-wise, a week ago, so...

Reader, I read the kinky sex poem. I did the set exactly as planned. And I wasn't shunned or stoned or anathemised by papal decree. In fact, the poems seemed to go over quite well. It still took a while to decompress after coming off-stage (those post-gig drinks came in very handy) and making it back from the gig through the stag-and-hen apocalypse that is Newcastle on a Saturday night was the usual exercise in pure fucking terror, but overall it turned out to be a good night. Particularly because - once I was over my nerves - there were fine sets from Jake Campbell, Jeff Potts, Radikal Queen and many other excellent local poets to enjoy, plus excellent material from co-hosts Karl Thompson and especially Jenni Pascoe, who actually performed and compered in spite of having a bad attack of labyrinthitis.

So Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a rather excellent night, even when I'm not airing my dirty lingerie in public. Do get along to the next event if you can. As to moi, it's looking like the next time I'm going to be getting my words out will be at the next of Steve Urwin's poetry slams at the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley, which won't be until the 21st of September. So in the meantime, fans of the pissed-off ranting which results from the usual blend of boredom and sheer teeth-grinding frustration with the kyriarchy which powers this  blog will, doubtless, have much to look forward to. As to what I have to look forward to...well, I'm wondering about that more and more. But that's another entry, for another day.

In Which I Get Back on the Horse

Not an actual horse, mind. Given the state of my nether regions recently any actual equestrian activity would be a one-way ticket to a world of insufferable pain. I'm being metaphorical, here. And what I'm being metaphorical about is the business of gigging.

I've decided to do more gigs. There. I've said it. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that my attitude to performance and praise is somewhat complex, to say the least, but, following the reception I got for reading a single poem at the Ink Festival, I've decided to start going out and actually performing a bit more on the scene. This Thursday, I'm joining the excellent Steve Urwin and Jenni Pascoe at  a Poetry Jam at the Waddington Street Centre in Durham. I think this is one of the first poetry gigs they've done at this venue, so the nature of the gig is somewhat unpredictable: it could be a really big audience or the more traditional three people and a daschund called Colin. Either way, the important thing is to get more performing time in. Regular gigging for the performance poet is like regular fighting for a boxer (though I don't think poetry necessarily has to be a competitive activity, which is one reason I generally don't do my best work in slams - well, that and all the testosterone flying about...): you can overdo it, true, but the only way to increase your chances of bringing your A-game on any particular night is to ensure you're doing it as much as possible on any other night you can.

To that end, I will also be attending Jibba Jabba on the tenth of July, which event, taking place as it does in the most excellent Trent House, will probably be somewhat livelier than the Durham gig...which, again, is good, because I need to get some practice in performing in different environments and for different types of audience.

Further gigs are being set up for later in the year, and I'll have more on those on this blog closer to the time. As always, do come if you can. Apparently I'm quite good, or that's what people are saying, anyway.

'Understand: there is no 'I'. Feel the Black Flame.'

(well okay, it was the White Flame in the Invisibles but work with me here, yeah?)

Short post today (and the crowd goes wild) because there is Stuff that Must Be Done. Yes. Well. Stuff I Fancy Doing, more like. Stuff That Isn't At All Necessary But I Quite Like, to be honest. Look, it's 'me' time, okay? It's been blue-arsed-fly central here all week and I'm meant to be on holiday. Yeeesh. You people, honestly....

But seriously though, I am taking a little time out from the ongoing Katrina Harte campaign to get some other stuff done, and one of the stuffs I'm getting done actually is a Thing That Must Be Done, in that it's the gig at Black Flame Books I keep going on about. This thing is happening sometime tomorrow afternoon, I think; I don't quite know the exact time yet, that's still being worked out. I'll be on the scene from 12:30pm onwards, which is when people are getting there to sort out the running order; and hey, the shop itself is open for business from 10am-5pm so, y'know, get down there anyway, support your local bookshop, that sort of thing.

I know what you're thinking. It's all very well, Adam, you telling us rough details about the gig, but what if we want to know exactly when it starts? Isn't there some kind of service whereby we could stay up-to-the-minute on things like this without checking this blog, perhaps a service whereby we can be updated on information about you through the medium of short messages? Fortunately, there is. I'll be out most of the next two days, but I will still be carrying the Infernal Device that lets me update my Twitter and even my Facebook page (sometimes, when Facebook feels like working), so you can stay in the loop that way, if you aren't following already.

And now I really am off. Yes, really. No, I will not hang around and do a little dance for you. No.

Back on the Horse

Tonight I start sorting out a set list and rehearsing for the gig at Black Flame Books in Heaton next Saturday. It's a tricky business. There are poems I've promised people I'll perform. But at the same time, I don't want this gig to just be me dragging out all my personal trauma. That does not make for a good gig. Even if there are people in the audience who share that trauma, and who need the catharsis of hearing someone acknowledge it, it can still bring the audience down. It brings those people down too, especially if you end on the trauma and don't offer hope. You can drag your audience through Hell if you want, and if you're good enough they'll come with you - but if you want them to come with you all the way, you have to show them a little piece of Heaven too. If you want to move people to tears, you have to be willing to make them laugh.

Or, to put it in a less highfalutin' way: a reading is kind of a conversation with the audience. If all you do is moan, they won't take much of an interest. And if you don't spice up your reading with something light from time to time, when you go for something, profound, you'll just fall flat.

Think about Bill Hicks. Bill Hicks did some of the most profound stuff imaginable in his stand-up: but he was able to get there because he could, and did, frequently make people laugh like hyenas. Hicks understood that a good set, like life itself, was a ride, and a ride goes up as well as down.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, despite having spent several years trying not to do some of the more crowd-pleasing poems in my repertoire, I'm now looking at ways to incorporate those into this set. The newer, more uncompromising stuff will still be there, but the older stuff will be making a return as well. Some of it. Not because I don't have anything serious to say, but because I do, and I don't want to dull it with constant repetition.

There's Always One...

First of all, check out the banner to the right of this entry. Thanks to Jamie Sport, who runs the mighty Daily Quail and who also works in social media for the British Red Cross, there is an even easier way to donate money to the relief effort in Haiti. So please do click the banner, and give what you can, if you haven't already (or even if you have already and are feeling extra generous).

Second of all - it was a dead cert that as soon as I'd sent off the manuscript I submitted to the Grievous Prize, a poem would show up that would have been perfect in that collection. At first I thought I'd only let her out on Twitter and Facebook, but it seemed unfair to let her languish unseen while all the other poems at least had some potential chance of being published, so here she is. So she's a straggler - not everyone's punctual.

Rainy Breaktime

Sat on the bench, sheared off from the others,
legs crossed, Tupperware lunchbox discarded
beside me, reading something they say
is too old for me; she is too old for me,

two years above, short hair, a nose that juts
out like a challenge, leaning her long body
all arms and reach, back
with a come-on-then cockiness,

asking me questions - what's that you're lookin' at?
Who wrote it? Funny name...What's it about?
and shy me is flattered to answer this girl
with her bad-boy looks, her eyes locked on mine,
drawing closer, hand sliding behind me

- and if the dinner lady hadn't came
I would have found out, painfully,
that hand was cocking a lighter.

* * *

It's a poem I've been trying to find a way into for a while, this one. At least since over a year ago, when I tried to write up an account of this incident (yes, it really happened, the me in the poem is me) in a dreadful attempt at memoir which, if it had ever existed on paper, would have been one of the pieces I'd asked my literary executor to burn but which, thankfully, now only exists as junk code in one or another of my memory sticks, if it hasn't been airlocked in a bulk delete already.

But it's an incident I was thinking of again, recently, after a conversation about bullying which I had on Facebook with Ira Lightman. It occurred to me in the course of the conversation that most of the bullying I had to deal with at school came from (cis) girls who, in my experience, can be a hell of a lot nastier than boys. Boys will punch you in the face, sure, but we tend to raise boys not to be particularly emotionally literate, so that's about all they can do (and the domestic violence statistics are an indicator that we ought to stop raising boys who can only express themselves with their fists, but that's another rant for another time, petit furets). Girls, however, are raised to be incredibly emotionally literate, which means they have a whole set of tools with which to hurt you far more deeply than the meatiest of knuckle sandwiches.

I don't think a boy would have formulated a strategy as subtle and twisted as the girl who did this. Find a mark who's obviously shy and socially-inept, talk to them, express an interest, make them feel flattered by all the attention, then, just when they're thinking hey, wow, she really likes me, set fire to their blazer. I'm pretty sure no major conflagration would have occurred, but I'd have jumped up shocked and made a fool of myself in front of everyone, which was probably what she was aiming for. And of course, what really hurt wasn't the fire and embarassment that didn't happen, but the sense of being used, of being toyed with and being so easily manipulated purely for someone else's sadistic amusement. Which meant the plan worked even when interrupted. Sick, undoubtedly. But you have to admire the technique.

Anyone wishing to admire my reading technique, scattershot as it often is, should be aware that I will be performing at a gig at Black Flame Books in Heaton on February 6th. Come along, if you're interested. But don't bring lighters.

Shatila Social Thoughts

'The problem,' Jonathan said to me as he dropped me off back at the house, 'is that you had them hanging on your every word and then you scuttled off. It was like you were disowning what you'd said.' And the thing is, people, he's right. About the latter part anyway. I would never be so ungallant as to presume that people had been hanging on my every word. Yes, there may have been silence, people may have been listening but, y'know, someone might have climbed up on stage behind me and started creating a balloon animal kama sutra. Correlation does not equal causation.

Jonathan was talking about my performance at the Shatila Social gig at the Cumberland Arms last night. I had pledged to write a poem especially for the event and to include anything people mentioned in the poem as long as they sponsored me to do so. In the end, only the redoubtable Kevin Cadwallender took me up on this offer, promising to contribute 'five shiny pounds' if I mentioned Torchwood in my poem.

Well, Kevin, you owe Peter Mortimer five pounds:

alt.torchwood.slash

Paging through the fanfic,
pansexual Mary-Sueing, superfluous
slash: Gwen/Tosh, Rhys/Ianto:
feeling smug,envisioning

gimlet-eyed women with too many cats,
and boxes full of knitting magazines
conjuring a warmth within
that hairy-knuckled male hands
will not bring: imagining
Jack’s lips, in plasma-screen
Hi-Definition, skin glowing
in the spaceship light,
pressed against the Doctor’s,
faces meshing, black glasses askew...

Huh. Losers. Perverts. Weirdoes.

Am I different? Am I worse?
I’ve lived an imagined life of decadence
in private, casting it with
friends and workmates, colleagues, exes,
people on the street. I’ve pictured
your fist in a black leather glove,
wrapped up in, ripping at, my hair;
I’ve flinched, half-smiling, at the thought
of your teeth snapping shut
on the soft parts of my skin:

what difference is there here but dramatis
personae, the decision not to dream
of sex by proxy? More honest, maybe,
more direct...

but I pass you in the corridor. We talk
and I feel awkward. The fanficcers –
they have that?

Maybe at conventions.


Obviously it's not really about Torchwood, of course. It's about adult situations, or at least the imagining thereof. In this it actually formed part of a weird triptych of poems about sex in the final part of the evening. Kate Fox started it by talking about unmentionable parts of the anatomy, her partner Alfie Craigs did a long and very satisfying extended metaphor comparing poetry-writing to having sex for the first time, and I wound up forming the unappetising filling in this weird improptu sex-poetry sandwich. Obviously it's an uncomfortable situation for an uncommonly pious child of the Almighty such as myself to be in, talking about, y'know, the filthiness and that, but that wasn't why I scarpered off the stage as soon as I was finished. I was in fact afraid.

I was afraid that people might applaud.

All performing artists fear applause on some level or other. We fear it being withheld, but we also fear it being given too liberally. There's nothing like a massive round of applause to politely tell someone - especially some shitty poet - that they've had their moment in the spotlight, and would you kindly get off stage. But for me, there's another thing I fear about applause. I'm afraid, you see, that if people are applauding, then -

maybe that means they like me.

I've never really got used to being liked. Being loved. Being wanted. If you want to completely throw me, if you want me to feel scared and shitty and to question my self-worth, don't get in my face and insult me, because I'll just insult you back. Instead, offer me a compliment.

Compliments fuck me up. The thought that someone out there, some other human being not related to me by blood, wedlock or longstanding friendship, might consider something I do to have been of worth, might actually feel something about my continued existence other than a strong inclination to want it over with as soon as possible, frightens the shit out of me. Don't know why. Maybe I won't ever know. But it does. And for me, that moment when you've stopped performing, when there's a chance that people might have liked you and, worse, might be about to let you know, is absolutely bloody terrifying.

All of which is no excuse, of course. Leaving before the audience have had a chance to say a proper goodbye, whether with bouquets or bricks, is just bloody rude, and I apologise wholeheartedly to anyone offended by my scuttling behaviour. Rest assured, it will not happen next time.

Shatila Social and the Great Sponsored Poem Experiment

Shatila Social
The Cumberland Arms
Ouseburn, Byker
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 1LD,
Monday July 13th
Doors at 7.30 starts at 8.00
Admission £5.00
(All proceeds to the Shatila Project)

Special Guests: Ray Laidlaw and Billy Mitchell of Lindisfarne
Blues singer Annie Orwin
Comedian Steve Drayton
Plus, Plus, Plus, Scott Tyrrell, Kate Fox, Simma, Nikki Hawkins, Yvonne Young, Adam Fish, Catherine Graham, Kevin Cadwallender, Annie Moir, Richard Makepiece, Kyla Clay Fox are just a few of the other wonderful performers who have agreed to help us raise money.

The writer Peter Mortimer spent two months working in the Shatila Refugee Camp in Beirut. Peter spent time working with the children of the camp school to create, and for them then to perform on camp, a 30 minute play, which incorporated music, dance and physical theatre. Peter is bringing 10 young actors, (and four of their teachers) to perform the play in the autumn on Tyneside. However, in order to do this, funds are needed to help pay for the travel and accommodation for the performers, and to organise the performance itself.

If you can come and pay the £5.00 entrance fee (which is, I know, rather expensive to watch ex-Lindisfarne personnel but you do have to remember I’ll be there too, so on those grounds it’s a bargain), then great, if not, I’d love it if you’d contribute some money by contributing to

THE GREAT SPONSORED POEM EXPERIMENT !
GREAT SPONSORED POEM EXPERIMENT, YOU SAY? WHAT, PRAY TELL, IS THAT?

It’s an innovative, forward-facing, innovative, audience-focused, innovative, interactive and innovative method I’ve devised of getting people to sponsor me to perform at the Shatila Social gig. Obviously, with such a packed bill, I can only do one poem, and I can’t go on too long, so that rules out sponsorship ideas like, say, 50p per poem or a pound for every minute spent performing or whatever. So what I’ve came up with is this: I will write a new poem especially for the event, and if you contribute some sponsorship money I will mention one thing of your choosing. It might be a specific word you want me to use, it might be someone’s name, it might be a number, a concept, whatever. It could be your favourite football team, a line from a song, or a convoluted and embarrassing double entendre. Literally anything you want, if you sponsor me and pay me the money to mention it for the gig, I will mention it in the new poem.

By now, you’re probably saying ‘gee, Adam, this sounds swell, but how can I sign up to be a part of this incredible experiment?’, or you will be if you’re an American 1950s schoolboy anyway. Well, Timmy, it’s simple – simply comment below with details of what you'd like me to mention and how much you're willing to pay for it...