news from kintespace.com ::: Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Steve Connell is a new-millennium troubadour in Urban Outfitters cargo pants. He’s the eighty-dollar Nike shirt of hip-hop romance poetry. Instead of wasting time with an old east-coast-west-coast feud about New York literary poetry versus Los-Angeles-Jim-Morrison stage performance, Steve embraces his acting training and serious music connections to produce spoken word like a filmmaker makes a film. When I auditioned his CD, The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights, I felt like I was watching a film instead of listening to the usual poetry recitals set to music. This is because Steve Connell’s work is saturated with rich imagery and witty stage drama—very suitable for an award-winning veteran of slam poetry and Def Poetry.

The vibe of this work shivers with a collective effort. It is representative of the North of Wilshire School of Los Angeles Poetry that includes such social luminaries as Saul Williams, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Gina Loring, Bridget Gray, Jerry Quickly and, of course, Tony-Award-winning Poetri.

The Intimate Nature of Knife Fightsis sensual poetry in a time of war. It takes an adult swim in the sea of anti-patriarchy north of the Isle of Lesbos without life guard training. This is something I tried in my twenties as a poet but eventually I stopped well short of the achievements of Steve Connell and “retreated” into my controversial African roots that people like Poetri avoid for whatever wisdom that governs him and people like Saul Williams suspect is anti-social madness. Let Steve adeptly represent what is recognizable under the current social circumstances. Malcolm-Jamal Warner just stared at me after my poetry reading. He just stared… Anyway, back to Steve: Feel his “knife fight.” Here in the kinté space we present six audio tracks. Listen to all of the tracks at rhapsody.com.

::: Bryan Wilhite: the art of kara walker

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/p_bwilhite4.html

This therapeutic poem “the art of kara walker” presented for my health and your—whatever—here in the kinté space is yet another wonderful way to systematically reduce the size of the kinté space audience. Just when we were enjoying over 30,000 page views a month (and this is a conservative number), Bryan had to go and do this…

Several years ago I met Kara Walkerin person at that glorified gift shop at the bottom of the petroleum company skyscraper here in Westwood, California. When you study the origins of this “museum” that is, the flesh man Armand Hammer, you should find some sexual politics going on that is somehow relevant to the sexuality hovering somewhere around Kara Walker. The key is that “we” need to forget about how a person gets the keys to the kingdom. Like the unwashed barbarians “we” are (like Norse barbarians in a palace of Byzantium) “we” need to be overwhelmed and preoccupied by the pomp and pageantry of intellectual bling bling. Unfortunately, when I met Kara Walker, I failed to do this and I had to write a poem about it.

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” and the genius grant awarded to Kara Walker and others like Stanley Nelson can be misinterpreted as a “great fortune” by televisionary W2 laborers like me—and, so here we are: a few, crass, country rubes looking for criminal acts. The pointed indictment that is “the art of kara walker” can clearly be seen as an artifact of the ignorant claiming that the innocent are guilty. However, I’m willing to take the risk and stake my social life on what’s written here. This sort of lunchroom politics have been with me since childhood so I’m seasoned. I’m primitive minded: I let the work of the artist speak to me because what is called “art” is, to my mind, just another form of communication. This poem summarizes my “limited” understanding of Kara Walker. It’s based on what I think she is saying to me. Either my misunderstanding of her is so profound that we should never meet and bridge so vast a gulf, or my understanding is horrifically exact and we should never meet again… Either way, she wins the award. “the art of kara walker” is a win, win.

::: rasx() on Media: Billboards and Postcards

::: ::: http://kintespace.com/rasx34.html

This documents the rasx() context, featuring four items for his critical eye: “Let There Be Q”, “Bridezilla,” ‘Ass-imilation’ and From Woodstock to iStock. These titles refer to commercial billboards and a postcard that got in his face and this time he decided to lean forward against the corporate push.

rasx()