Skip to main content

SW Shootout 07


Once again, no pictures from the actual event.

Boy, I wish my body would allow me to sleep past 8 AM. Cause two days of staying up till 4 AM, is really taking its toll.

Spiritually, I'm feeling re-charged, reinvigorated that what we do is important and matters.

Thursday night, after doing the draw I knew that the Four Corners, Austin, Dallas, and Denver bout was going to be crushing. Teams had traveled from a long ways and here's a bout where 3 teams would be sitting down that all legitimately belonged on the finals stage.

The weather was perfect, after a rain that afternoon the evening cooled down into the 80's and the teams stepped up to the microphones on the patio. About 150 people sat nervously drinking beers. A couple of dozen sat outside on the mall, listening in from behind the poet's back and hanging off the patio rail at the other venue (which hadn't started yet). Tony Jackson steps up and does this killer piece (that at the risk of not mischaracterizing it, was awesome). My memory now is short on specifics and long on impressions. Likewise, I didn't catch very many poems, bouncing back from venue to venue, checking in with hosts, bout managers, merch people, bartenders, etc.

Denver did my favorite group piece of the weekend. Ken upfront with the rest of the team behind him. It was a group prayer where they all prayed to God. And by the end it becomes a cachophony these one sentence mutters of the all the destructive and dangerous things we pray for. Stunningly brilliant.

Denver advances, joining the LoboSlam, ABQ 07, and SlamNuba at finals. After a protest and a compromise, we added San Antonio to the mix and had half our show the next day. The other half consisted of having the teams send one poet from their team to compete in an indy slot with the exception of Amarillo and Colorado Springs who (being the two lowest scoring teams) gave us two sacrifices instead of an indy slot.

No matter how hard we try, we can't seem to create a show that is less than 3 hours. The Kimo was about half full (holding 650) meant we had about 325 (not as much as I wanted, but a good house). The Kimo is a beautiful space.

We tried. Danny Strack from Austin took the Indy crown and the team slam came down as follows: LoboSlam, SlamNuba, Team Denver, and Team ABQ. I hosted the indy competition and after drinking a RockStar Energy drink was funny, witty, engaging, but efficient. Bob Whoopiecat and Jazz hosted the team finals and knew when to get out of the way of the poetry. A good solid tournament crew.

Now, off to start a word file with what to do for the 2009 SW Shootout. Dallas has it next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

  The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ).  While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande.  And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque.  From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon.  That green ribbon is the Bosque .  I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it.  It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...
3 comments
Read more

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque-the Autumnal Equinox edition

Overview:   In June, around the Summer Solstice, my wife, my dog, and I set out to hike the Albuquerque Bosque from end to end over two days .  It was well over a hundred degrees and after starting later than expected we didn't make it as far the first day as we hoped.  But we did make it. Now, three months later, around the Autumnal Equinox, we set out to do it again.  Our route was slightly different and, with the weather being a lot more pleasant, broke the day into a thirteen mile day and a five mile day:  eighteen total miles from Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge to the Alameda Bridge right on the border between Albuquerque and Corrales. The things we wanted to do differently this time were pretty straightforward:  1) don't get lost at the south terminus and get into the bosque sooner, and 2) walk even more on the westside.  So, the route was a follows:  we'd walk on the east side from Valle de Oro to the Rio Bravo Bridge, cro...
3 comments
Read more

Generating Poetry the John Cage Way

In it's simplest form, the Haiku is explained as a 3 line poem with the first line being 5 syllables, the second line being 7 syllables, and the third line being 5 syllables, or, even simpler, a 17 syllable poem. There is lots of discussion about whether just having the right amount of syllables makes it a haiku, and I'm not going to come down on whether what is going to follow is really creating haiku or not because I'm not trying to create intentional haiku. No, I'm trying to create random haiku but limiting it to 3 words. There are approximately 9,500 (5) syllable words, and 850 (7) syllable words in the English Language.  Knowing that, it is possible to create 76,712,500,000 unique haiku. If you want to see how this works click the below link. 3 Word Haikus From there, I can open the spreadsheet and make it editable.  On the top of column B (the blacked out column) I have my formula for randomizing.  From there I can sort the data and it will popula...
1 comment
Read more