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A
Taste of Slam
‘We
were a little nervous about reading here,” Cristin O’Keefe
Aptowicz told the crowd last Thursday (April 3) at the Frequency
North event in the College of Saint Rose’s Neil Hellman library.
“Usually our audiences are a little more drunk.”
This may have been a mite disingenuous coming from a poet
whose bio includes “extended residency in Australia” and a
“commission for the New York Chamber Dance ballet company,”
not to mention founding and hosting the three-time national
champion NYC-Urbana slam poetry team. Then again, it might
not. The CBGBs basement, where Urbana used to make its home
before it moved to the ever-swank (in a gritty poetry kind
of way) Bowery Poetry Club, is certainly no brightly-lit college
library.
Nonetheless, Aptowicz and her partner in life and poetry,
Shappy Seasholtz, are skilled writers and performers, and
they had no trouble captivating (and sending into hysterics)
the audience at the final installment of this season’s well-regarded
and “aggressively eclectic” Frequency North reading series.
Professor Dan Nester, who curates the series, was clearly
excited for the show as he bounced around seating people (the
audience overflowed to the balcony); he paused in his introduction
after listing Shappy’s award-winning book Little Book of
Ass, to grin and say “I love my job.”
Slam (competitive poetry in which random judges from the audience
give a poem a 1 to 10 score) tends to generate intense, clever
poems that get a quick rise from listeners, and it is perhaps
little wonder that the Saint Rose sound techs found themselves
having to continually turn their speakers down throughout
the evening.
Aptowicz opened with a piece about rejecting the corporate
job hunt to become a full-time writer. You could feel the
seniors in the room shift uncomfortably as she listed the
indignities of the job search process, culminating in “You
made me buy pantyhose.” But the room was happily in
on the joke when she launched into a literary-reference-packed
take down of a former scientist boyfriend who deemed “literature”
not important enough to bother with. “Go Plath yourself” may
be one of the most memorable lines, which she used as a segue
into a meditation on famous women poets who committed suicide.
Shappy opened with his trademark ode to nerd power, “I Am
That Nerd” (“I didn’t come here to chitchat, I came here to
role play.”), compared George Bush to the evil emperor in
Star Wars, and gave voice to the voiceless (zombies
that is). He also offered up “The Infinite Darkness,” which
everyone over the age of 17 who’s still writing bombastic,
navel-gazing “deep abyss of my soul” poems should be forced
to listen to on repeat.
It’s just a guess, but those students who were explaining
to a friend unenthusiastically, “Poetry reading. For class
credit,” as they entered the building probably ended up as
glad they went as I was.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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Photo:
Alicia Solsman
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Man
on the Spot
Last
Friday night (April 4), bioartist and U.S. government legal
target Steve Kurtz spoke in conjunction with a screening of
the film about his case, Strange Culture, at Christ
Church United Methodist in Troy. Of course, he couldn’t talk
about the specifics of the case at this event, sponsored RPI’s
BioArt Initiative and the still-homeless Sanctuary for Independent
Media. The film had to “do the talking.”
Art
Beat
SOMETHING
WICKED THIS WAY COMES If it’s a satirical performance-lecture
paired with a 3-D video installation, you know we’re talking
about an event at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This
week, EMPAC is hosting U.K. artists Liz Aggiss
and Billy Cowie. The video installations, which will
be up in RPI’s Greene Gallery from noon to 6 PM beginning
Tuesday (April 15) and ending April 19, are Men in the
Wall and In the Flesh. The former features four
men “in a sequence of poems, jokes, songs, flamenco—and naps,”
while the latter is a 3-D image of a dancer in action that,
we are told, seems pretty real when you slap on the 3-D glasses.
Aggiss’ performance piece, Hi Jinx, will be presented
Tuesday (April 15) at 8 PM in RPI’s Academy Hall. All events
are free. For more info, call 276-3921.
FILMS IN THE NORTH COUNTRY Thanks to digital HD equipment
(and a surround-stereo-sound system), the Charles R. Wood
Theater (207 Glen St., Glens Falls) has joined the ranks
of regional venues offering notable independent cinema where
it was, previously, mostly unavailable. In cooperation with
New York City’s Emerging Pictures, the Wood will begin
a spring cinema series tomorrow (Friday, April 11) at 7 PM
with Romulus My Father, an Australian-outback family
drama starring Eric Bana. Upcoming movies include Fired
(April 19), Sacco and Venzetti (April 20), Duchess
of Langeais (May 14), Paranoid Park (May 25), 4
Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (May 26) and The Witnesses
(May 28). All shows start at 7 PM, and admission to each is
$6. For more info, visit woodtheater.org.
ANOTHER LOCAL PREMIERE This is the time of year when the Hollywood
studios tend to release the, let us say, less compelling new
movies. The Spectrum 8 Theatres (290 Delaware Ave.,
Albany) have been breaking these seasonal doldrums with documentaries
like The Singing Revolution, and, starting Friday (April
11), Holly, an indie drama about child-sex trafficking
in Cambodia starring Ron Livingston (Office Space)
and Chris Penn (his last film). Screenwriter-producer Guy
Jacobson will be on hand for a Q & A after each Friday
screening. Check this week’s movie schedule for show times.
PUT ON A HAPPY FACE Troy Night Out, the organization
that runs the monthly shindig of revelry and art held the
last Friday evening of every month in downtown Troy, is running
a Vacant Storefront Artist Project. This is because,
of course, Troy has a number of vacant storefronts that could
use a bit of dressing up. They are looking for artists to
fill these spaces, which will “vary every month and are allocated
on a first-come, first-serve basis.” You can download the
application form at www.troynight out.org/forms.html.
—Shawn
Stone
sstone@metroland.net
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