Pay No Attention

Remember to retter into your heart

This video totally cracked me up. 

http://tinyurl.com/287hyo

(Thanks, J, for forwarding it!)

Tyrone Cotton rocks, but some words are best left unspoken

A couple of days ago, I went to hear Tyrone Cotton sing and play guitar.  Those of you looking for some grouchiness can skip on another paragraph or so -- I promise it's coming.  But first I've got something genuinely nice to say, and you can't stop me. 

I really loved hearing Tyrone play the blues.  Tyrone (who is the friend of a friend of mine) was not the headliner of the evening, but his music was far and away my favorite part of the show -- I enjoyed it enough to buy his CD.  [Amazon carries the CD, if you're interested  (Tyrone Cotton) and you can also hear some of his music on his website ( http://www.tyronecotton.com/ ).]  Tyrone's music has a wonderfully unique sound, and he has a fabulous gravelly voice.  Although I do like the CD, I'm a little sad that it doesn't include a couple of great songs he sang that evening.  There was one in particular (which included the lyrics "woman, get your big ass leg off mine") that I'd really love to hear again.  I'll be on the lookout for his live performances and his future CDs.

The headliner of the evening was a poet, Frank Messina, and I gather from the audience reaction that I was pretty much alone in finding Frank irritating as hell.   Keep in mind that I'm a former English major and a total geek.  I like poetry (well, not all of it, of course, but I like some poetry and in general don't run screaming when poetry is mentioned). However, Frank was doing this "spoken word" thing.   He read (and acted out and, God help me, danced to) his poetry, while musicians jammed to it in the background.  One thing I learned that evening is that I detest the "spoken word" performance genre, and I'll be avoiding it in future. Thank the Lord, Frank let Tyrone have the floor on his own for a bit, or I might never have realized just how much I liked Tyrone.  Actually, I thought all of the musicians that night were talented to a greater or lesser degree ranging from good to really fine, but most of the time Frank did his level best to prevent me from noticing.   There was another poet there, by the way, Ron Whitehead, whom I liked a lot better than I liked Frank.  He had long hair and a crazy wild beard, and he read a great piece about how he learned the facts of life (it involved his father bringing him out to look at cows).

To be fair, I liked one or two of Frank's poems.  My favorite was one about an impromptu baseball game he and a friend (both die-hard Mets fans) had as kids with a couple of Yankees who lived on their street.  I thought the piece was delightful and amusing and authentic.  If only he could have stuck to that kind of thing (and not danced around so much), I would have liked him.  Unfortunately, most of Frank's other pieces got just a wee little bit too pretentious for me.  There was one in particular where I wanted to get up and smack him with a cast iron pan.  I don't know why cast iron.  Anyway, it's too bad you're not here in my living room, because I've been told that my mimicry of this piece is pretty damn funny.  However, I'll try to describe it.   

First you have to visualize Frank and his mannerisms.  He's your basic guy from New Jersey, and don't pretend you don't know what I mean, but with a pompous little goatee.  When he reads his stuff, he kind of chants it and adds some vocal excrescence -- for example, he doesn't just talk about "poetry," it's "p-p-p-p-p-p-p-poetry" -- and the whole time he's reciting, he dances around in a very white-guy-gets-down kind of way, eyes closed and head rolled back soulfully.  Have it visualized?  No, you can't possibly, but never mind.  Do your best.  The piece I hated most had him going on and on about how he didn't care about whether a woman was beautiful: he beseeched her to "Give [him] p-p-p-p-p-p-p-poetry."  He informed his theoretical date that he wanted "Whitman, with a side of Ginzberg" and a laundry list of other writers you probably read in your freshman year in college.  Than he and this singer chick chanted back and forth at each other salaciously for a while.  "Pleasure," she'd moan.  "Joy," he'd leer back.  They kept that up for a bit, alternating with a few more demands for p-p-p-p-p-p-p-poetry.   Meanwhile, the talented musicians on stage played manfully away in an attempt, by and large successful, to keep me from swinging cast iron pans at the stage.  But man, was I tempted. 

Well, like I said, I was in the minority.  The audience seemed to love him (although may I note for the record that it was his 40th birthday and half the audience apparently knew him).  One woman in particular kept squawking "Frankie!  Frankie!" like a demented parrot throughout the performance.  Anyway, Tyrone more than made up for it.