2×2: New Randy & Bob Holman w/ Vito RicciFriday – May 2nd, 20088:00 pm poetry, 9:00 pm showtickets $15

Reservations 212.334.33472×2 brings together two poet/musician duos in a night of New Poetry, Old School styleNew Randy is poet Holly Anderson (“density and loneliness of the City” (NYTimes)) and musician Lisa B. Burns (“my personal favorite”(Lenny Kaye)).Bob Holman, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, is “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen). Vito Ricci is “Downtown Musician Laureate #1” (World Magazine).New Randy: Q. What happens when a blue-eyed writer and a dark-haired singer conjure Sappho drinking vodkas in a neighborhood bar? A. They start writing about The Nature of Longing and the Longing for Nature. “If you’re young and taking love too seriously, if you’re old and giving up on it, if you’re a guy who can’t figure out women, if you’re a woman who’s not sure how strange you are, you could probably learn something from New Randy. Sure, it’s home-made… all the good stuff is.” –Jennifer Kelly, Splendid Magazine.Bob Holman w/ Vito Ricci perform from their new CD “The Awesome Whatever” (Bowery Records): Bob Holman, an originator of the Spoken Word and Slam Poetry scenes, shows how it’s done in nine tracks (plus an Easter Egg encore), produced and with music by his long-time collaborator in rhyme, master musician of Maspeth Vito Ricci. With the zipzap influence of the Hipperama of the Classics, Lord Buckley, and the on-kilter space shots of Captain Beefheart, Holman glides cross genres, boundaries and streams of consciousness like a your own personal tour guide on the road to Nirvana. “Nice work, Bob.” –Lou Reed– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –The Awesome Whatever!First CD in 9 Years from the “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen Magazine)(when the scene is Poetry!)Holman’s last CD, “In With the Out Crowd” was produced by needle-drop wizard Hal Willner and released by the ahead-of-its-time, lamented Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman founded in the mid 90s with music vet Bill Adler and legendary poet Sekou Sundiata. THE AWESOME WHATEVER is the first release of Bowery Records, part of the amazing goings-on at the Bowery Poetry Club where Holman is proprietor.The all-live, one-session, no overdub THE AWESOME WHATEVER is a milestone in Spoken Word. Holman’s most recent book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, 2006), a gorgeous, oversize collaboration with Chuck Close, adds a new graphic dimension to his poems so they stand up and dance with Close’s lush daguerreotypes. Likewise, in TAW, Holman expands the vocabulary of spoken word by actually improvising lyrics, adding gestural sounds as oral tradition placeholders, and making poetry journeys exploring genres from Reggae to Lounge to Flamenco.“Vito called me up one day and said he’d found a terrific studio, that’s how it all started,” says the Czar of the Spoken Word (Daily News). “Spin Studio on Astoria, how rootsy can you get? And Nic K as engineer — the guy was cracking up in my ear as I was improvising, the greatest solo audience a poet could ever have.”“A studio is a tool for creating poetry,” Holman continues. “Just as a comfy, inspiring writing space and a great pen and paper, or a keyboard that’s weighted and clacks appropriately are conducive to getting the words down on paper, so a studio where you can really hear yourself pushes the poem out in a relaxed, adventuresome way.”You can count Bob’s admirers on both hands, feet, and various other body parts: he and jazz violinist Billy Bang have an ongoing band, Bang Holman; he performs often with David “Pere Ubu” Thomas in his opera Mirror Man (recording available on Thirsty Ear); and in 2006 was in the original cast of Spalding Gray’s “Stories Left to Tell.” Lou Reed’s in Bob’s camp (“Bob is my kind of poet”), Ani Di Franco gives him “an A+!” and Russell Banks relates, “”Holman’s funky urban chants call back good memories of Beat collaborations between poetry and music. He’s keeping that tradition alive and well.”The opening cut, “She Never Phoned Me Back,” has the craziest history. Bob was performing at the University of California, San Diego, in a series curated by the great jazz poet Quincy Troupe. “We always try to get Bob on the radio, “ says Troupe, “because he speaks poetry. This day the host challenged Bob to put his theories into practice by improvising a poem right on the air! Bob suggested that the engineer throw down some beats, and they had a caller call in the title: “She Never Phoned Me Back” The result was totally outta sight, and was completely off the dome!” “I had several poems spread out in front of me,” remembers Holman, “”How Kora Was Born” for my griot, the Gambian poet/musician Papa Susso and “Ornettes” for Ornette Coleman – I was spending time with Ornette then. So I mixed, matched, hitched and hatched and the beats were infections. It just happened.” Indeed.The remainder of the tracks were all recorded at Spin Studios on April 12, 2007.The next track is the CD’s Break Out Hit: “Love Lake.” Written for Bob’s wife, the artist Elizabeth Murray, who died in August, this poem answered Vito’s challenge: “Bob, if you can write anything, why not write a hit song?” “Love Lake,” the result, begins with one of poetry’s great couplets: “You never thought it could happen to you/ I never thought the same thing too.” In the live TAW version, Holman takes on the glottal crunch of a carny pitchman gradually evolving into a heart-rending plea for transcendent universal love. The tune is chock full of what Holman calls “oralities”: those little spoken catch phrases between verses, the “uh-huhs” and “so far away I couldn’t hear it myself” commentaries of which James Brown was the master, and for poets in the oral tradition, serve both as fillers while the next verse is being concocted, and as the true improvisational interchanges with the audience that make a poem an event. Too much theory? Give a listen, and see if you don’t gently float downriver to the unity of the species which is “Love Lake.”The next cut, “The Meaning of Meaning,” is a totally deconstructed poem/song. It begins with Bob requesting Vito to do the Other Poem, which of course turns out to be the song they are doing right now! Confusing, you betcha, totally appropriately too: “What’s the meaning of meaning/What’s the purpose of purpose/ What’s the use – Can I use it/It feels so good to refuse it!” wails Holman. One critic called Bob and Vito’s version at the annual St Mark’s Poetry Project New Years Day Marathon, “Best of Show,” adding – “it was like hearing the individual beaten down by the implacable forces of history.”The next poem, “January,” is an ode to a “chilly-willy of a month,” a “month that seems like a year,” that keeps losing its place, falling in love, and forgetting it’s a poem. “Pasta Mon,” a hilarious paean to a Yuppie’s inability to break into reggae, “Pasta Mon starrin on hiz own tv show/Yesterday’s menu’s already obsolete-o/ Gonna show you how to roll a pasta-filled burrito.” Things get darker by the end:A nickel for a can & a nickel for a bottleA trickle down sound from the nickel that bought youAmerica the Beautiful in quarantineA cardboard mattress and a c
ardboard dreamBarbecue trashcans linin the HudsonDogs are howlin as you throw the spuds onPasta Mon’s recipes gettin kinda smellyRat ratatouille & vermin vermicelliThree poems with music follow – a praise poem “For Paul and Everybody Else” written for Paul Gulielmetti, the activist tenant lawyer who died last year, segues through a long musical ramble to “Night of the Living Dead,” addressed to two of Bob’s friends, Spalding Gray, the writer/monologist, and Pedro Pietri, the dada Nuyorican poet/playwright. Though they never knew each other, they meet in the poem, as they did in death – Gray’s body washing ashore after his wintertime suicide leap from the Staten Island Ferry just days after Pietri died on March 2 or 2, 2003 (he was on a plane at midnight between time zones when he passed, which is a point in the poem) from stomach cancer. Another praise poem for Pedro, “On the Street Named Pedro Pietri,” follows, a poem that was read in celebration on the day that East Third between B & C was declared “Reverend Pedro Pietri Way.” In 1989, Holman helped reopen the Nuyorican Poets Café on this block, and the Poetry Slams he ran 1989-96, the first in the City, were landmarks in the renaissance of poetry.“sweat&sexandpolitics,” one of Bob and Vito’s original raps from their touring show “Panic*DJ! The Plain White Rapper,” is recapitulated in a stripped-down very 07 version. The final cut is a long spoken word piece, “Picasso in Barcelona,” an ekphrastic (work of art inspired by another work of art) suite of poems based on Picasso’s teenage work as when he lived in Catalonia:In 1900 the futureOpened up its armsI invented the carAnd RembrandtTake off your clothesI will make a book coverAnd put a photo of me on the backTo make sure it sellsEvery morning I wake upGive myself a big kissAnd paint a masterpieceThen I have a coffeeThus ends THE AWESOME WHATEVER. If you want to hear the encore (secret track), well, the CD is enclosed! On the CD, the listener is dared to “See if you can tell which of Bob’s filigrees are straight off the dome.” For Bob, working in collaboration with Vito and Nic, gave him the support to take it all the way out – to launch his improvisational poetic skills to create a new kind of poem, which is in fact, the original way poems were written, I mean spoken! It’s Awesome! Whatever.