Fallen Angel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981
Music by David Chamberlain, Jr., poetry by Anna Chamberlain, and the lyric ‘all we ever wanted to say was chased erased and then blown away’ is from the Janelle Monae song, Many Moons. Hit play above, this is a spoken word piece.
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
apocolypstick commandments drafted across afro futures….hahaha….i love that line oh my…wicked cool back beat…ok, i need a transcript of the words…i loved the media but let me read along to catch all your words are slinging…nice cadence and creative wording anna
Shamanic archandroid Mayweather
bares her psychedelic soul
apocalypstick commandments
drafted across an afrofuturist ether
jazz cipher in an improvisational universe
technological seven wonders
she consults the oracle, stochastic AI
Basquiat echoes through millennia
replaying holographic blacksploitation flicks
space age neologistic laden mythology
birthing neo-expressionist street art
intellectual primitivist painted quasars
cybernetic countdown commences
to our ‘play with no rehearsal’
imagined through her superflat, robotic eye
meta-postmodern bestiary contained
within a haunted chamber pulsar
we get down to her beat
light years away from lovesick lyrics
our time-travelling Monae,
our mediator sings for freedom
radiant liminal being she promises
when ‘other’ becomes an absolute subject
she’ll take me home, she’ll take me home
until then this salt and slave history
becomes interstellar synergistic appropriation
a closed signaling loop, a lost transmission:
‘all we ever wanted to say was chased
erased and then blown away’
triple-dig this one, Anna, really love the performance art recitation & the electronic boss beat behind it–thanks for sharing the actual lyrics, like Brian I like to read as I listen. With some of the spoken word I have performed, I always struggled with dramatic pausing, working over & against the improvised jazz or blues; selfishly, I felt better when we did call & response–i’d perform a line or two or stanza, the the musician would answer in music. Thanks for your boldness, dear lady.
Basquiat… very cool… i love his work.. his story is a tragical one though… love where his painting took you anna… and thankful that you added the lyric..made it easier to really grab the words…very cool
Thank you for adding the words – although I am a very auditive person, there is so much density (and long words) in this poem that I needed to read along.
Basquiat on LSD, very Andy Warhol feel to this…
I so enjoyed the sound of you voice in this. and the pause in the music seemed quite perfect. it was a but hypnotic…had to listen to it twice….
I’m glad Brian asked for a transcription, but also glad I didn’t see it until after hearing the piece.
So cool — love your reading… robotic eyes…quasar and pulsar… you talk a physicist language.
🙂
Wonderful. I read as I listened also. Great combination.
Very creative – kidnapped and transported – salt slave to an entity named Mayweather – Basquiat rerunning blacksloitation films. What a cast of images, jazzed to great music and sung by you. I JUST LOVED IT. Wish we could share this LIVE. What a cool thing that would be. You do rock, our Anna!
Beautifully performed, Anna. Choosing a Basquiat as an inspirations is so appropriate. An intense interpretation of his work and casting it into the jazz arena is brilliant. So much tragedy that he manisfested, eh?
Wow! Just wow Anna. This is great in the words and the reading.
I was living in New York when Basquiat was Samo which was in some ways the purest and most playful incarnation–you have such a way with words, Anna–I confess it is too hard for me. My brain is not doing that well and it is hard for me to follow the specifics in a line by line way –this makes it difficult as I tend to be rather a literal reader–all that said, you have a wonderful way of putting together sounds and concepts and beat–thanks. k.