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

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keith Jarrett: The Koln Concert and What it says about Creativity

Life is about listening.   Sometimes what life is saying comes at you in in strange ways.   On Friday, I was reading this story on Salon.com and it mentioned that few jazz musicians have the same clout as they once did.  Of the few who still draw considerable audiences, it mentioned Keith Jarrett .   I don't know Keith Jarrett, but I've been trying to school myself on jazz for the better part of a year now.   Since I'm relatively new to this jazz thing, I want to make sure I'm really listening to what people think of as "great."   With that in mind, I bought a book:   The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings .   Under Keith Jarrett they mention the album,  The Koln Concert as his best album (part of any enthusiasts' "Core Collection").   So, when I saw the album while perusing Mecca Records in ABQ, I knew I had to buy it.   Life was talking. The Koln Concert  (So, go ahead and ...
2 comments
Read more

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi...
Post a Comment
Read more