SpokenWord Paris

Photo: Romina

Photo: Roy

In Part One:

Nicolas took a voyage dans le temps and came back to tell us about the future. Pour (poor?) Didier, la folie interne est en nous, comme la poèsie. Jen could see it on the little clocks you twist yourself into. Tom brought popcorn. And porch burglary. Charlie scarily predicted that in 2012 that which was will no longer have been. Romina took something apart. I had breakfast with Ulysees. John warned us that time is running out. No sense in writing what others already know.

Photo: Jonathan

In Part Two:

Roy had an hour of splendour. Sebastian found knowledge of his inner self. Chris and me took in the assassination of Ceaser, in his play about time travel tourism. By now it was late, so late that for Didier, l’aube s’eveille. Nicolas got into 5 centuries in a stocking with a clockwork lemon. Jessica, I should warn you, tears books apart to get inside them. Anna sang “a kind of song.” But for Alberto, memories are skidding bulls… and a coffee cup, put down in Tangiers.

One more SpokenWord before summer hits us like a heatwave: Monday 28th June, theme: Skin/la peau

Cheers all,
David

Every bo-bo comes back to his own rebel’s yell
C’est la revolution at Culture Rapide!
It’s The Spoken Word Revolution (as Antonia shouts) and it’s the Slam Poetry World Cup in Bobigny, we have guests from all over the world: The Canadian Slam Champion: Ian Keteku, From Holland: Ellen Deckwitz, From Singapour: Marc Nair, From Madagascar: Taghan, From Germany: Philip Scharri, From Finland: Ilkka Markkula, in the good company of Mona Jean, Komi and Theodora. And Betty, Jessica, Didier. Troy, Lynn, Arian, Ben. And Jason’s singing his last “Spoken Word Blues”.

Ian Keteku

Charlie becomes Gil Scott-Heron remixing
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

You will not be able to stay home.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on drugs and
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

Ellen

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Ford
In four parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Vladimir Putin
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by Sarkosy, Barak Obama
Gordon Brown followed by representatives of the United Nations.
The revolution will not be televised.

Theodora

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Academy Awards and will not star Nicole Kidman and
Bruce Willis or Harry Potter and sexy vampires.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of body odor.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner
because the revolution will not be televised.

Tagham

The revolution WILL put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will be live.
The revolution will be live.

Mona Jean

Anna’s revolutionary himn seems made up on the spot, at the moment, in your face
And it is:

Maybe it’s time for a Revolution
I’m getting sick of this constitution

Maybe it’s time to answer the telephone
I think it’s time to go to elephone
To go to hell-e-phone

Maybe it’s getting a little bit cold now
Sometimes we all feel a little bit old now
Maybe it’s time for a revolution
I think we all know the solution.

Komi

I leave you with Nicolas’s
The freak and geek manifesto.
Just scroll down the blog.
Cheers,
Alberto

by Nicolas

This text is totally free. You are free to do absolutely anything you can imagine with it. Translate, modify, cut, perform, sell, print, publish, claim as yours… Don’t give me any credit for it. Just make it evolve. It NEEDS to mutate and to travel. Please change something, and incitate people to do so. There will be multiple versions, none will be wrong. It will live for the ones who don’t.

Here is the version performed in Spoken Word, June 7th.

The freak and geek manifesto

PART I

For the ones who sit at home in front of their computer while their friends are outside being someone they are not.
The ones who were last picked in sport until they found the way to skip it.
The ones who watch ugly, cold, disgusting things on the internet but still need a hug because they just want to be loved.
The ones who pray, even if it does nothing.
The ones who pray, because it does something.
The ones who don’t like “woman on top” because there’s a woman involved.
The good guys who never get the girl.
The bad boys who don’t get her either.
The ones who don’t have the chance to feel the heat of a body when they’re getting asleep.
The quiet one, who is the sweetest, funniest, cutest girl but who never gets a second glance.
The ones who got their 18th birthday wished by their mother and automatic emails from amazon and ebay.
The ones who reply “Thank you, you too” when the waiter tells “Bon appétit”
The ones who got their high fives ignored.
The ones who inherited a body unable to give birth, and whose genitals are an artifact of the past.
The ones who act like texting when friends go to the bathroom.
The ones who open a chatbox when you’re online but never type anything.
The ones whose life is a parade of missed chances and social misfires, hiding behind a mask of happiness.
The crippled baby animal with no chance of contributing to the gene pool.

For the losers of the galaxy, the freaks and the geeks
For all the ones living in an evolutionary dead end.

PART 2

Breeders ! Giant SUV, mortgage and dog !
Breeders ! Wedding photo album, frames on the bookshelf !
Breeders ! Endless production of happy and undomesticated humans, immature midgets !
Breeders ! Children picture as profile picture !
Breeders ! Bronchiolitis !
Breeders ! Nanny, stroller, nursery places !
Breeders ! Self reproducing sources of flesh and meat for humanity since the beginning of times !
Breeders ! Prom queen and team captain in the hatchery from the day the stick hit the fan !
Breeders ! Surrendering at the game of life, hoping their offspring will do better.

PART 3

Revolution !
This is a call for all the losers of yesterday, jesters, monsters, deviants, outcasts exiled from the cities ages ago, banished from the everlasting kingdoms of life. Come back for revenge through our voice. We hacked your way out of the evolutionary litter you were put too much time ago.

Freaks and geeks connected their dirty intelligences and melted into the hivemind, endlessly flashing silicon and twirling electrons, interconnecting a series of tubes to spread this verse :

O Endless September, O Ides of March
Let the foul witches wake from the dead
Burning the world with their cursing word
Dancing on the grave of the Old Darwin

The name of the game is no longer the survival of the fittest.
The insane mens in insano corpore, I call the insane, the fools, the freaks, the creeps, the weirds and the geeks to build, produce and share art, instillate ideas into the innocent flesh beings while their breeders are too busy working and providing food and shelter and consomming what we produce.

I can hear the moan of the ones ejected since the days of yore
and the howl of the self dismissed winners of the Darwin awards.

They’re with us in twisted poetry
They’re with us in awkward moments
They’re with us when we sabotage our mating chances
They’re with us in freakiness and geekiness

Let them speak through our voice,
Spread their tainted vision through our presence
For the previously excluded from the gene pool deserve a revenge.

Les derniers SpokenWords avant le pause d’été:

So,/Alors,

SpokenWord numbers are falling as they do every year at this time. We’ve never had so many people come as this 09-10 season, we’ve never gone weekly, we’ve never had the numbers, the poets, the singers, and all who’ve come and made it what it’s been.
Also lately SpokenWord feels like it’s run out of steam to me and Alberto.
It feels like it’s time to have a break and rejuvenate.

So at the end of June we will shut down SpokenWord for the summer and return in September.

We have 2 final SpokenWords in June:
14th June (Time travel/voyager dans le temps)
28th June (Skin/la peau)
(No SpokenWord 21st June because of the fête de la musique)

And, if you want it, we’ll do one Grand Summer SpokenWord JULY 26th.
So tell us you want it! Or we won’t!

Alors,
Il y a déjà beaucoup moins de public, moins de poètes, et le nombre va baisser plus en juillet et août. Donc, après un grand succès cette année, on va faire un pause de SpokenWord pour les mois de juillet et août. On recommençera en septembre.
Si vous nous dites que vous le voulez, on organisera un SpokenWord mi-été pour lundi le 26 juillet.
Donc, dites nous!

Les dernieres SpokenWords de juin sera
14 juin (voyager dans le temps)
28 juin (le peau)
(Pas de SpokenWord le 21 juin, à cause de la fête de la musique)

Cheers,
David

We played doctors and nurses all night long.
I keep finding weird toys and instruments in my pants.

Betty

Marjorie Kanter – At The Doctors

I don’t
Know what
Happened

But it’s
Not my
Body.

It’s a bilingual soireè of love, memories, and sensuality.

Helena Humphrey – Footnote

French:
The language of love,
Mon amour.

English:
The language of lust,
Baby.

But

“Je t’aime”
They shout on the streets.

“I love you”
Once and under the sheets.

Rather the rare I love you from my English man’s lips,
Than the je t’aime that throbs from French mens’ loins.

Who usually writes through a gynaecological eye,
dropped the speculum.

Troy Yorke – “Abandoned Reflection”

Take away this busted mirror
Take away the shards of me
Pull from me the spokes of reason
I want to lay in waste
Weeping for those who spoke too soon
And crushed their heads when the windows closed.

Anarchy at Culture Rapide: UkulHelen of Troy

And someone is leaving Paris:

I am not not good at goodbyes
I am worse at hellos,
making sloppy first impressions
like my first day of graduate school,
when I got wasted
(not on purpose,
it was not my fault)
it started as one drink,
to calm my nerves
as I sang along to the
“Sound of Music” soundtrack,
the confidence song,

I have confidence in sunshine, etc.

But it quickly turned into six drinks,
and me, at the orientation party,
telling the chair of my department
that his tie
was hot.

I retreated to my Californian apartment,
lonely and young,
the opposite of how I feel in Paris-

in particular when Alberto,
on his first visit to my house
came armed with a briefcase,
and opened it to reveal
two eggplants
like twins.
He said
“Megan, you gonna have the olive oil?”
I said,
“Yes, Alberto, I gonna have the olive oil”
and I felt home.

Megan Fernandes

Huge Hug.
See you soon.
Anywhere on this globe.

Next Episode:
31 May
Theme: Maps… les cartes géographiques

Photos: Joa, sur les traces de Kerouac:

Leemore writes you from your other life:

Maira D’Arcy with a 30 second poem in dance form:

Jonathan in the throes of Dada poetry:

Valerie with a macaronic poem – a poem with other languages in it; she sidled along a cul-de-sac till the name came back; an expert in blowing up trains.

Other folks doing stuff included: Nicolas and his Magic Gloves, qui a fait disparaitre le Tour Eiffel. James, who missed mass on a Sunday. Charlie, who found a box full of zeroes. Lynne’s the politics of weather, endless rain rushing to Hell. Antonia – who rattles the brain while they put one breath after another and go off to war. English as she is spoke, with Marie & Nicolas. What is it you want you? You hear the birds gurgling? Chris’s play on love and unrequited slug. Suzanne: fromage feels so sad in the mouth, and smells like feet. Tom: Pound cake and other mysteries. Megan and Jonathan spiking drinks with illicit pills. Jason, easing his heartburn with a centrifuge… and many more esp old favourites.

Next Monday is Doctors, hosted by Alberto.

Hosted by Alberto:

Featuring Natasha from Russia, you know, the country around Moscow:

Bringing a touch of elegance to SpokenWord, Claire Trev and Paul:

And Robert, lost in a sunflower sutra of California supermarkets with Allen Ginsberg:

Magic night with Lady Calmus, Charlie, Claire Trev, Rosalia, John, Natacha, Noriko, Bruce, Jean-Philippe amongst the others. I’ve tried to post a video in which a professional magician named Troy starts elocuting “Are you dead now?”, but in vain, the upload failed. Maybe it’s too heavy, maybe too hot and not allowed on TV. I’m sorry, the only way too see the tough stuff passing here, is on Monday night, live, at Culture Rapide. I leave you with some magic lines by Antonia Klimenko from “Out of Thin Air” and then I disappear:

(….)

O Universe!
Above my stereo, my computer and my cell,
You are my favorite wonder
with your mirrored-stairways leading to untold dimensions,
with your zillion galaxies flashing-
eyes opening and closing like painkillers.
While I am turning blue and tricks in the dark,
You are performing Miracles!

Why, after all these centuries
am I not yet able to reveal myself
unto myself? What other kind of magic
do you have up my sleeve?
What other mysteries must remain hidden
in order that they not lose their powers.

See you on Monday,
searching for what is lost in translation.

Alberto.

Antonia: “how to love openly is an Art. I do it best in my head, without you. Arms waving like banners in the land of used dreams.”

Julien le barman with a barman’s blues:

Louise & Arthur:

Psycho or poet..?

Noriko, in Japanese & English, “Open real”:

Notes from the (poetry) underground:
Tristan poked a whole through paper-doll people. Angel sang for the Bolivian soldier. Tom dreamt a Guacamole crocodile. Michele got himself a Sun tattoo. Troy’s words were all about glory holes and cruelty to cats. Stale cakes and bitter ale. Claire has the living wallpaper. Shadows of a Saracen. There was sexual tension in the library, undulating with boredom. And those cool blue sheets. Charlie was used up, washed up, cast off, put out, all gone, worn out, over. An algorithm of an air molecule. Noriko wondered how many hours awake I might be. Nicolas regretted his Brazilian bracelet qui se castre ses envies. Rosalia had a Brooklyn story. On the island of Manhatten everyone is an object of utility. I read Joan Brady’s Two Women from her new book The Space Between. Alberto threw a tiny teabag from the 14th floor. Jessica asks “Are you afraid I’ll take you back to where I left you long ago?”

Next Monday’s theme: Magic