Thursday, October 24, 2002

Contrasted with the CD that comes with the Short Fuse anthology, Arundo’s Triumph of the Damned and Edwin Torres’ Please present divergent alternatives.

Arundo consists of Actualist poet, G.P. Skratz and multi-instrumentalist Andy Dinsmoor. Skratz sent me Triumph to convince me that he was more than merely popping “up in print from time to time” as I had suggested in a “where are they now” discussion of Actualism. Given its 1999 production date and homegrown packaging features – photocopied cover, the CD’s title posted on a TDR CD-R disc via a mailing label – I’m not certain that I’m dissuaded of the “from time to time” periodicity. But there is more than print to Skratz alright. Triumph falls into the poems set to a musical accompaniment vein, akin perhaps to Dwayne Morgan’s use of bongos on the Short Fuse CD, or the work there of Bob Holman, never quite going so far into song as Michele Morgan’s jazz vocals. Dinsmoor ranges between guitar, recorder, sitar & tabla, with Skratz coming in on a couple of tracks on tamboura and two members of The Serfs, Ed Holmes & Bob Ernst, adding toy percussion, blues harp and a backup vocal on a couple of pieces. Save for one collaboration by Skratz with the late Darrell Gray and a translation from the poetry Hans Arp, the words – the back cover is careful not to call them either lyrics or text – are all Skratz.

It would be easy enough to dismiss Triumph – nothing here strives to be a breakthrough – but it is just too enjoyable for that. These pieces for the most part work quite well. Skratz’ droll wit rolls softly over the soft raga backgrounds offered by Dinsmoor. Only the final piece on the CD, the blues rock “Doorwayman,” comes across as more energetic than arranged. A couple of the pieces seem too similar lyrically – “Banana Ghazal’s” anomalous use of guitar & “Banjo’s” equally anomalous use of traditional Indian instruments don’t really paper over the redundant strategies of the poems – but as a whole, this is an excellent way to take in Skratz’ poetry, including his work as both collaborator & translator.

Please is an ambitious multimedia CD, one of three issued thus far by Faux Press (the others are Wanda Phipps’ Zither Mood & Peter Ganick’s tend. field). You put it into your PC, not your CD player. Once you go past the opening screen (with its own text, a much longer voiceover by Gina Bonati & title graphics), you arrive at an ideogram with links in each of its strokes. Depending on where you click, you will be led to one of five series of poems (“City,” “Boy,” “Remote,” Time,” and “Love”), a play in twelve parts (plus a prologue & epilogue) or section entitled “Media” that contains documentation of eight Torres performances plus his bio.

Each section of the CD, each set of poems, the play & “Media,” has an opening screen, a logo with its own set of links. Each set of poems as well as the media section also begins with a voiced over text read by Bonati. For the play, we get a little bit of music in a truncated marching band vein. Most though not all of the poems seem to have their own sound tracks, a few of which can be seen as readings of the text. If Alicia Sometimes’ music seemed to play against, rather than with, her own text on the Soft Fuse CD, Torres actively explores the entire range of push-pull juxtapositions between sound and written language. Often these are quite wonderful. Always, they’re playful & optimistic, qualities totally consistent with Torres’ poetry. As writing, Please is at a higher level, or perhaps at a high level with greater consistency, than any of the other CDs I’ve considered on the this. It’s a shame that there isn’t a collection gathered in a liner-note booklet – as a book’s worth of work, they’re more straightforward pieces than the typographic extravaganzas of his big Roof collection, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker: the texts work just fine on the screen even with the PC speakers shut down.

Like almost any web- or screen-centric work, Please invites bouncing around from link to link – while there is an order, the project seems set up to undermine it. One doesn’t so much read as browse, homo ludens in total evidence. Overall, though, it can be as engrossing as any front-to-back text imaginable. In fact, the one piece that doesn’t fully work on the CD is the play, precisely because it requires the participant to go sequentially.

There is an old rule of thumb with technology, one that I first learned watching Jackson Mac Low struggle with tape machines some 30 years ago: something always goes wrong. There are inevitably a few “gotchas” on the CD – the apostrophe often shows up as an umlauted capital O, there is at least one link that doesn’t go anywhere, opening a dialog box in vain search of a missing file on the CD. & the images are consistently too small throughout (a consequence of another of my rules of thumb: QuickTime sucks). But these are nits when taken in the context of the total project.

Overall Please pleases. It demonstrates the gazillion different ways Edwin Torres’ poetry (& mind) can move simultaneously, always interesting, always in the ballpark with something of value to add. He’s one of our great talents & we’re lucky to have every manifestation we can get of his work.