Give Me a Frozen Sex on the Beach and a 75-Minute Poetry Show

How the 2004 National Poetry Slam Allowed Us to Bring Our Poems to People Who Just Might Need Them, and to People Who Definitely Don’t Want Them

You can get a sense of what a National Poetry Slam is going to be like even before the competition starts. If you arrive on Tuesday, the day before the first events, and you go to the host hotel, and you follow some of the poets around, you’re likely to happen upon that NPS’s particular zeitgeist, even though you might not be able to discern what it is until after the week is over, when you find yourself recuperating and contextualizing.

Sometimes baseball figures in. On the eve of the ’99 NPS in Chicago, for instance, a longtime poet who doubles as a Wrigley Field beer jockey reserved a block of tickets for poets along the first base line, and some of the organizers attended the game, looking far more relaxed and in control than any NPS organizer has a right to look the day the poets get to town. That NPS was arguably the best-run edition of the event in its history.

This year in St. Louis, there was also baseball – a game that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would later call the first game ever played in tropical rain forest conditions. Temperatures were in the high 80s, with humidity in the high 90s. If you looked out across the expanse of Busch Stadium, you could literally see the air coalesce and glisten and refuse to move. Even with the sticky conditions, it was a compelling game, with ample drama and a handful of home runs, including one to tie the game and send it into extra innings. But it took either superhuman stamina, or a contractual obligation to be there, to gut it out to the final out of the 12th inning.

The game provided a grim foreshadowing for the 2004 National Poetry Slam. What could be said of the baseball game could be said of the Nationals experience: From the outside, conditions looked right, but once inside, it was much more challenging to just get through it than anyone anticipated. Alcohol helped, but only for a while, as you realized that, ultimately, nothing could significantly change the conditions – the unpleasantness in the air was not just going to go away. Yet, if you stuck around and endured, you saw some art within the arena that reminded you why you loved the game.

Having been to nine National Poetry Slams in a ten-year span, I’ve seen some that have run smoothly, some that have been cursed with problems from the get-go, and I’ve even been a co-director of one myself.

As a competitor, I’ve read at a range of venues. At the most extreme poles, I’ve performed on a massive stage in a sleek, immaculate performing arts center in the heart of downtown Portland, with 1,000 people watching and documentary crews rolling tape – and I’ve read in a bagel shop in Middletown, Connecticut, under fluorescent lights, straining to be heard over a milk steamer.

This year, one veteran poet advanced the argument that, as the National Poetry Slam becomes bigger and involves more and more teams each year, we should only be doing this event in the three or four cities that have the infrastructure to best support it.

I see the wisdom in this, and yet, I would miss the opportunity to walk into a city I’ve never visited, with the mission of delivering a four-day poetry spectacular to them. There’s a certain beauty in the attitude that enables slam poets to enter strange venues in strange towns, size up the positives and negatives of the particular room he or she is reading in, and then attempt to own that room on the strength of content and performance.

The real mission of slam, one could argue, is not to make the librarian who goes to three open mike readings a week stand up and take notice of one’s poem, but to reach the blue-collar worker or white-collar professional with no notion of how poetry might speak to his or her condition. Slam’s mission, from the outset, was to show people with no idea that poetry could impact them just how profoundly it could speak to them. Rather than preach to the converted, slammers, in a sense, seek to convert.

So, in the spirit of fulfilling our mission, it made sense for us to try St. Louis. But the esoteric project of attempting to reach new audiences is compromised when those new audiences stay home.

The bulk of the NPS events were held in Laclede’s Landing, an enclave of bars and restaurants at the edge of downtown St. Louis, bordered by three of the city’s most recognizable landmarks – the Edward Jones Dome, the Gateway Arch, and the Mississippi River.

From a logistics standpoint, it was ideal – the city’s Metrolink commuter train ran from the airport directly to Laclede’s Landing, depositing poets a mere two blocks from the host hotel. In fact, the Arch/Laclede’s Landing stop emptied out onto 2nd Street, on which most of the NPS venues were located.

But from a poetry standpoint, it was what we’ll euphemistically label “challenging.” Even before we arrived, some poets wondered if the Fat Tuesday alluded to in the list of venues was part of the Fat Tuesday chain of frozen daiquiri bars – and indeed it was. That led to the inevitable question of whether we could really expect audience members to order a frozen Sex on the Beach and then settle in for a 75-minute poetry show.

Even more alarming was the report on Club Buca. Several weeks before Nationals, one savvy slammer found and circulated an October 2003 article, in the online version of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s student newspaper, The Current, detailing a female reporter’s night at Club Buca. The writer, painting a scene of sordid debauchery that would receive the Caligula Stamp of Approval, advised, “Leave coats, shyness and inactivity at the door of this club. You will be touched. You will be groped. You will not sit down. You will not be able to have intellectual conversations with other wallflowers.”

Clearly, that’s not a good sign.

Yet, because teams work hard all summer, and set their expectations high about what the National Poetry Slam will be and mean and do, we figure that people will turn out to see them, the best performance poets in North America, out of sheer curiosity and an inborn desire to be moved by a poem. We picture the bars and restaurants to be transformable by the sheer mass of poets who move, like a nomadic tribe, from city to city each year. We expect everyday people to be caught in the crest of the wave and dragged to our shores. We expect the opportunity to convert, and we expect conversion.

Not this year.

Though the slam community provided a mass of nearly 500 competitors, coaches and organizers traveling en masse to some of the larger events, they were spread out amongst seven venues on Wednesday or Thursday, and attendance from the general public for the first two nights was thin if not anemic. The team I coached, from San Antonio, found themselves in a bout with two perennial finalist teams, from Seattle and from New York’s Louder Arts collective – yet with barely enough people in attendance to scare up five judges.

The owner of the venue, a delightfully kitschy medieval-themed dinner theater called the Royal Dumpe, was conscripted to judge both Wednesday bouts. A slammaster from Southern Indiana was brought into the mix to judge out bout after 45 minutes of waiting for spectators who proved as elusive as Godot.

The St. Louis organizers managed to place small articles in the Post-Dispatch (one of the 30 largest daily newspapers in the country, by circulation numbers) and the city’s alt-weekly, the Riverfront Times. They also brokered a media partnership agreement with three local stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate, resulting in an alleged $100,000 worth of radio advertising promoting the event. They even managed to secure some local TV prior to the event, to let the people of St. Louis know that the poets were here.

Clearly, though, the efforts weren’t enough. One friend of mine from Chicago, knowing a bit about the St. Louis arts community, was puzzled at the absence of flyers, noting that flyers are particularly effective for getting audience out in St. Louis, and questioned the insistence of staging NPS at Laclede’s rather than the far more arts-friendly Delmar Loop.

Here, as best as I can gather, is a summation of how the relationship between clubs and organizers devolved over the course of the week:

1. Organizers promised clubs massive audiences who would come to see poetry and buy drinks.
2. Massive audiences did not materialize.
3. Poetry got in the way of the typical drinking/dancing/mating ritual behavior of the clubs’ regulars.
4. Clubs grew increasingly weary of poets and poetry.
5. Tempers flared.
6. Thursday night.

Thursday night was historic, featuring two unprecedented events in NPS history. At Fat Tuesday, where I was bout managing, and this year’s Spirit of the Slam Award winner Danny Solis was hosting, a member of the Miami entourage was kicked out of the club by bouncers for (initially) trying to shush patrons, and in the ensuing ugliness to follow, a member of the Miami team was kicked out of the venue before getting a chance to read.

The ensuing ugliness involved the initial ejectee trying to re-enter the club. Apparently, pushing was involved, and out of nowhere, poets and entourage members from inside the club rushed the front door – exploding past the poet from Salt Lake City halfway through a raw, emotional piece – and one of the bouncers announced, immediately upon the interruption, that the show was over and we were all kicked out of the club.

Tense moments followed, a St. Louis organizer who witnessed everything made calls to a district manager or some such, and we were able to continue the bout after a ten-minute caesura, albeit in an even more highly charged atmosphere than before. To their credit, the judges stayed with us, the audience (still mostly poets, with some club regulars in the back of the room) stayed with us, and much of the poetry in the bout was stellar.

Over at Club Buca, they were not so lucky. One of the judges left three poets into the bout, after giving nothing but 10s; the people staffing the bout decided to plug 10s into her spot the rest of the way. Three poets from the end of the bout, an overzealous DJ decided he had had enough of the poetry, and cranked up the dance music in the middle of a poem. Later, at the host hotel, after conferencing with the teams involved in that bout, the tournament officials decided – because the bout was run with four judges, and because it was not allowed to actually finish – to redo the entire bout the next afternoon.

What’s admirable here is the resilience of the poets involved, and their willingness to get back on the horse again the next day after surviving a fairly scathing performance experience barely 12 hours before.

But you would expect that of slam poets. Actors in a play have an unbreachable contract with their audience, based in decorum and the rules of theater. Audience members simply do not interrupt performers, and indeed are coaxed into appropriate responses, starting with the hushed anticipation as the house lights dim and Act One starts. Comics who are heckled are expected to fire back a scathing rejoinder at the heckler – in other words, they’re allowed the space and the mechanism to recuperate the order of their show. Musicians can simply turn up their amps and incorporate an air of disdain into their on-stage personae.

But poets competing in slams have no such protections. The audience at a slam, after all, is encouraged to respond to the poem when the mood strikes them. The audience at a slam isn’t necessarily willing to sit intently and discuss what they liked and didn’t like, as a theater crowd might, over a post-show glass of wine or cup of coffee. They let the performer know immediately, sometimes forcefully, sometimes obnoxiously.

The National Poetry Slam has its special rules of decorum that insulate the competitors from the worst brands of heckling. There are even specific guidelines in the rulebook, as well as a Code of Honour, to ensure that poets don’t heckle other poets. The event is predicated on the notion that these poets are the best that slam has to offer, culled from competitions in cities across North America, and thus have earned more of a right to the audience’s attention than at a typical neighborhood slam event.

But to a drunken patron of a dance club or daiquiri bar, the person in front of the mike is merely, at that moment, an annoying poet. The decorum afforded to most performers falls away, and in this climate, even the assumed sanctity of the competition is stripped away from the event, dropping the poet and audience member into the Petri dish of Marc Smith’s original experiment. The hypothesis being tested, in this trip to the lab, is that a poet, given a microphone and three minutes, can make someone with no personal attachment to poetry listen to a poem.

But for this to work, the venue has to be conducive to performance, and the audience has to have a sense that performance might break out in the room. At the Pageant, where team finals was held, and Mississippi Nights, where indie finals and a team semis were held, those in attendance understood performers might appear on the stage. Even the Royal Dumpe, in its Ren Fair-ocity, was adequately configured and acculturated for performance.

Clubs like Crazy Louie and the Drink, by contrast, were bars and dance clubs first, pulled into service as poetry venues by virtue of their proximity to the host hotel and the optimistic notion that promotional efforts would be enough to cancel out architecture and reputation. The very configurations of the rooms – large, vacuous spaces with comically narrow stages and few places to sit – were enough to signal disconnect between event and venue.

Slam was birthed in a pair of Chicago dive bars in what were then rough neighborhoods. The patrons were sometimes unruly and disruptive, but because the bars were established jazz clubs, and because slam came out of an avant-garde, performance art aesthetic, they were also attuned to sometimes difficult art.

The Laclede’s Landing set, by contrast, didn’t want anything difficult. They wanted to escape what they perceived to be the difficulty of their daily lives. You could see it in their faces, and in their demeanors: I want alcohol. I want to dance with abandon. I see my baseball team on the television above the bar, and I want to root for them. I want a temporary pair of arms around me. I want to feel appreciably attractive in this altered slur of hours. I want to change the channel on my life until I wake up the next morning.

As poets, we like to think this is where we’re most needed. Perhaps the most resonant moment of this year’s Slam Family meeting came from Team Urbana’s Rachel McKibbens, who asserted that the people of St. Louis missed out on what we had to offer because of the example we set with our work. To paraphrase, we model an outlet for self-expression, a cathartic release of emotions, which provides a healthy alternative to physically hurting others or ourselves.

To some poets, the call to poetry is that basic and that life affirming. To others, it’s a vehicle to potential success, to an appearance on Def Poetry, to a possible career as a performance poet – viable to only a select few, but much less improbable than it was even ten years ago.

Because there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 poets competing this year, it’s difficult for even the most dedicated audience member to hear more than a fraction of those. And while it’s likely that the bell curve of poet talent has remained fairly consistent over the years, the sheer size of the event makes it harder to recognize the patterns.

For the participants, the failure to attract appreciable audience to the preliminary bouts arguably placed more focus on poet as community member rather than poet as entertainer. This might be good, actually – allowing us to recognize the shared ideals in our mission while, at the same time, acknowledging the shades of difference in our writing and performance aesthetics.

Yet there’s a certain humility that can’t be helped when poets in competition are, for the most part, reading for each other. St. Louis showed that poets sometimes find themselves in arenas that will only reluctantly have them.

Some of us can adapt and make any room our own, be it an audience of three or an audience of 3,000. Stay in performance poetry for any length of time, and you will read to small and large audiences, to rooms devoid of energy and full of jagged energy, and to people who will love you simply because you are a poet. The St. Louis experience reminded me, no matter how any one show goes, the most important quality for a poet, particularly one in our particular arena, is perseverance. It’s crucial to keep writing, to keep reading, to keep performing, and to keep listening to others performing.

The sheer numbers of poets at this year’s Nationals shows how much work we’ve done since Marc Smith hatched his improbable concept for a poetry show in 1986. This year’s Nationals illustrates, perhaps more than any other, that the work has no end, and is sometimes incalculably hard.

In Praise of Animated Food

When it opened in April 1994, the San Antonio baseball park now known as Nelson Wolff Stadium was called “the Jewel of the Texas League,” and Mickey Holt, Public Relations Director for the San Antonio Missions, still likes to call it that. It’s a definite upgrade from the former home of the Missions, V. J. Keefe Memorial Stadium – an old, primarily wooden structure still in use by the St. Mary’s University Rattlers, which looks, sadly, on first impression, like sufficiently combustible kindling for a one-match fire. When compared to the newest parks in the league, including Round Rock’s immaculate Dell Diamond and the currently-under-construction Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi, Nelson Wolff Stadium looks as if it’s from another epoch, and even though it arrived two years after Camden Yards in Baltimore revolutionized our present-day conceptions of what a baseball stadium should be, it seems a relic from the days, not so long ago, when utility trumped charm.

Holt calls it a pitcher’s park, noting that there’s an almost-constant 15 mph wind blowing in from right-center field. They’re not looking to replace it anytime soon, as it is still clean and serviceable and relatively new, but when thinking about upgrades that are realistic and might inch them closer to Dell Diamond status, Holt notes that they’d really like to get a scoreboard with a video screen, to replace the Alamo-shaped one in right field. Holt also think they should be drawing more than the 4400 a game they average, not only because San Antonio is the eighth largest city in the nation and boasts a healthy number of sports fans, but because the Missions are downright good, having won Texas League championships in 2002 and 2003. Certainly, it doesn’t escape you, if you attend a game in the 2004 season, that they’re back-to-back champions – their marketing campaign is built around this phrase, appearing on the scoreboard, and on shirts, and on the jersey of their official mascot, an anthropomorphic jalapeño pepper with googly eyes named Ballapeño.

Riding out in the middle of the first inning on a motorized scooter, the Ballapeño indulges in the sort of fun, wacky mascot antics you’d expect of a mascot playing to 4400 a night who’ve come to watch Double A players with big league aspirations. He rides in the back of a truck around the perimeter of the field and shoots rolled-up T-shirts into the crowd as the truck loops its way past the infield seats. He dances on top of the dugout. He wanders into the crowd, pulls caps off children’s heads playfully, and slaps hands with adults who cannot resist the pull of a giant jalapeño pepper with googly eyes.

But at the end of the sixth inning, another, more mysterious mascot heads to second base, to the instant recognition and obvious delight of the crowd. This is the Missions’ unofficial mascot, who has been with the team since a local restaurant sponsored him to come out to V. J. Keefe back in 1988 for a series of promotional appearances. Two years ago, Newsweek named him the minor league mascot of the year (even though Ballapeño has been the official Missions mascot since Opening Day of the 2000 Season) and one look at him is all it really takes to understand why.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Henry the Puffy Taco.

The Puffy Taco very nearly defies conventional mascot wisdom. Typically, mascots are cartoonish depictions of people or animals or even objects, yet they wear distinctive human features like eyes and a mouth. It’s for the same reasons that babies and baby animals come into the world cute – to start the process of attachment, to allow the parents to want to care for it. Even the Corpus Christi Hooks, who will begin Texas League play in 2005, have started their marketing campaign by floating out a logo which appears to be a giant fishing hook with eyes and a mouth, and it wouldn’t at all be surprising if this gets committed to fabric and is set in motion to wander the stands next spring.

But the Puffy Taco doesn’t even try for recognizable facial features. It is, simply, resplendently, without pretense, a taco. More precisely, the costume is an open shell facing forward and standing on its end, with holes for the arms and legs to protrude from the shell. Because there’s no better way to describe this, vulva-like folds of lettuce and cheese protrude slightly from behind the open folds of the shell, all but enveloping the dark-red cylinder at the center of the taco, which is clearly where the actor’s head and torso fit, and which has to be meant to represent the meat at the center of the taco, although this would make the costume more of a hot-dog taco than a ground beef taco. “Henry the Puffy Taco” is stitched along the back of the taco shell at its bottom edge, for the four or five people in the audience on any given night who need clarification on who this is.

The Puffy Taco’s act is simple yet effective, and is a thirty-second case study in everything that is glorious yet low-rent about minor league baseball – that, indeed, is glorious precisely because it is so low-rent. The Puffy Taco starts at second base, and runs for home plate by way of third. A child is selected from the audience; it is his or her job to tackle the Puffy Taco before he reaches home. There’s a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote certainty to the act; it always concludes with the child tackling the Taco, and the show has evolved to incorporate an additional moment of triumph in which the child is allowed to clamber on top of the Taco and lift his or her hands skyward to make the “raise the roof” gesture. I think you can probably figure out what the crowd does in response.

Then, the Taco gets up and does a dance, and circulates through the stands for another half-inning or so, slapping hands and greeting the kids who flock around him, before giving the stage over to the Ballapeño for the rest of the evening.

The Taco’s act has evolved on its own over time. Initially, there was no tackling – as Holt explains, the first tackle was actually an accident born of some overzealous kid bumping into the Taco during a race. What was ordained from the beginning was that the kid was always supposed to win. Holt recalls that on the one occasion the Taco won the race, when the Taco’s act was still in its early stages of development, the crowd reacted with enough booing and general displeasure to assure that that wouldn’t ever be happening again. . Over time, the two concepts – kid always triumphs, kid triumphs by tackling the Taco before he reaches home plate – merged into what is now the standard nightly ritual.

As mascot theater goes, the Taco’s act is simple and slapstick and interactive and allows a child to emerge triumphant in a situation that is not quite man v. beast but is similar enough to evoke feelings of top-of-the-food-chain superiority and the resultant joy that comes with that. For San Antonians, there’s an additional level to why the victory over the Puffy Taco works as a gimmick, and that has a lot to do with the fact that people in San Antonio really like their food.

The current mayor of San Antonio, Ed Garza, who is still in his early thirties yet was reelected to a second term in 2003, has been moved by a series of Men’s Fitness polls perennially listing San Antonio as one of the fattest cities in the nation to push something called the Fit City Initiative. But there’s a larger, easier, more informal movement that Fit City is pushing against, which will probably emerge triumphant at the end of the day, and that’s the citywide drive to eat a lot of fattening food, often in public.

Every April, the city essentially shuts down for a 10-day conglomeration of festivals and parades called Fiesta. At the heart of the 100-plus Fiesta events are two major parades which draw as many as half a million spectators and are serviced by a staggering number of makeshift festival food stands. The Night in Old San Antonio event, which runs four days in the city’s La Villita and is another major Fiesta draw, allows its thousands upon thousands of annual attendees a chance to eat and drink with abandon. There’s music and dancing and street festival frivolity to be had here, but ask any attendee, and they’re more likely than not to tell you they are there for the variegated meats on a stick or the gorditas or the fresh handmade tortillas or the bratwurst or crepes or frog legs or potato skins or any number of the other foods on display.

The night before the first Krispy Kreme franchise opened in San Antonio, a line began forming outside its doors; by morning, 500 people had gathered, having camped out all night for access to the first hot, sticky, rings of fried dough to roll off the assembly lines and into their waiting mouths.

And every year in late January, right before the annual San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo, a loose coalition of organizers host a Friday morning Cowboy Breakfast. Even though it has moved from location to location in the last few years, the annual Cowboy Breakfast always draws in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 thousand, no matter what the conditions outside, to gather in the early morning hours for food that is, in a particularly important calling card to the people of San Antonio, free. The San Antonio Express-News article on the 2004 Cowboy Breakfast, with reporter Lisa Marie Gomez following in the well-worn path of previous reporters’ stories on the event, begins this way:
The drizzle, patchy fog and 49-degree weather at 5 a.m. Friday were quickly forgotten when the bands blared their tunes and hot coffee and food were served. The Cowboy Breakfast was in full swing at Crossroads of San Antonio mall two hours before the sun made its debut for the day, and traffic piled up as if it were the evening rush hour. Despite the morning darkness and the cool weather, families came out in droves. One family piled into a van, with children, cousins, and even grandparents. “We’re here for the free food,” Wicho Guerra said as he munched on a slice of white bread drowned in gravy. “I have no idea what I’m eating, but it’s good.”

So it is clear that the Fit City Initiative has a way to go. Tourism, after all, is one of the city’s largest industries, and food is at the backbone of San Antonio’s allure for locals and visitors alike.

The Puffy Taco mascot gets its name from a Tex-Mex innovation that has been adopted by a number of the city’s vast array of Mexican restaurants. Specifically, it was Jamie Lopez, the son of the Henry’s Puffy Tacos owner, who came up with the idea for the Puffy Taco mascot in 1988 as a way to further associate the puffy taco dish with his dad’s restaurant. Henry’s Puffy Tacos, a Westside restaurant which opened in 1978 and relocated to a former Luby’s cafeteria around the corner in 1996, naturally lays claim to its title dish despite having many other offerings on the menu.

The puffy taco is a crispy taco with a shell that puffs up in the deep-frying process, filled to bursting with meat, lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. A Citysearch review of Henry’s noted, “The shell of Henry’s signature dish is what newly fallen snow would feel like in your mouth – if it was fried.”

If you’re wise, and if you’re throwing caloric caution to the wind as you should be when you order the puffy taco, you’ll want to top it with sour cream and guacamole and salsa. Eating it is a messy affair, and is not so much a meal as it is a mainlining of fatty, spicy goodness. It’s a safe bet that Wicho Guerra and his clan have sprung for a dinner here at some point in their gastronomical journeys. And though they may not know exactly what they’re eating when they plunge into their puffy tacos, it’s safe to say they will determine it is, indeed, good.

But because Henry’s is far from the well-trafficked tourist haunts of the city, on a major arterial that cuts through a working-class, predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood, the Puffy Taco is a bit of a mystery to those tourists who find themselves taking in a Missions game at Nelson Wolff. A writer for minorleagueballparks.com, writing a review of the stadium in 1999, wrote, “I didn’t like the fact that the ‘Puffy Taco’ mascot was actually an advertisement for a fast-food chain,” and a scribe for ballparkreviews.com expressed disappointment that the Puffy Taco only makes his one appearance, despite “hearing much hype” about him.

Wesley Ratliff understands the tradition, though. At just 24 years old, Ratliff is the community outreach director for the Missions, which is an official way of saying that he is a professional mascot. He pulls double duty during each Missions home game, portraying both the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño, which is why they rarely appear in the same place at the same time.

Ratliff personifies the duality of San Antonio’s version of Generation Y perfectly – he sports a goatee and a tongue piercing that suggests a straight-from-MTV mainstream edginess, yet he’s unfailingly polite, responding to a number of questions from my interview with him with a demure and polite, “Yes, sir.”

Ratliff already has a long, impressive resume as a mascot. He started out as Eloc, the cougar mascot for Cole Junior/Senior High School, located on the Fort Sam Houston U.S. Army base, and best known as the alma mater of Shaquille O’Neal. Ratliff then moved on to serve as a mascot for the University of the Incarnate Word, one of San Antonio’s four-year Catholic universities, wearing one of the nation’s first inflatable costumes. He later moved on to professional mascothood at two of San Antonio’s prime theme parks, Sea World and Six Flags Fiesta Texas, and later realized a lifelong dream of performing at Walt Disney World, taking a whirlwind tour in which he was allowed to portray Tigger, Eeyore, Gepetto, Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and Miss Piggy over the course of several weeks.

His new lifelong dream, fed by his two full-time years and six part-time years with the Missions, is to make it into the big league mascot ranks; last year, he was in the running to take over as Raymond, the mascot for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which he describes somewhat perplexedly as “a sort of hairy troll thing.” He was one of two final candidates, and was ultimately the odd man out, but it’s clear that missing out on the chance to depict a hairy troll for one of MLB’s most moribund franchises might be a blessing in disguise. Ratliff graciously opines that it was an honor just to be in the running.

He’s also suffered for his art, having two surgeries on his knee for a torn meniscus – the first was the result of being tackled while portraying the Taco, the second came after a car accident aggravated the fragile ligament. The first actor playing the Puffy Taco also suffered a similar knee injury, leading one to believe that what a fifty-pound-child lacks in mass and force in tackling the Taco, he or she more than makes up for it in questionable technique, and is perhaps the prime occupational hazard for those with the calling to be a mascot.

Ratliff, despite the trick knee, is fortunate in that he is able to carve out a living as a professional mascot – a number of his colleagues on the Texas League circuit are actually salespeople within their respective organizations, moonlighting as the mascot in the sort of double-duty that isn’t at all surprising given the limited budgets of many minor-league teams.

And unlike a number of the other minor-league mascots toiling away in obscurity, Ratliff has at least enjoyed a fleeting yet memorable taste of the bigs. Last year, for fan appreciation day for the Missions’ parent organization, the Seattle Mariners, Ratliff was invited to Safeco Field where he performed as both the Ballapeño and Puffy Taco alongside the Moose, the Mariners’ lovable yet improbable mascot. The Moose, a land animal representing a team with a decidedly nautical theme, is the one enduring remnant from the team’s former owner Jeff Smulyan of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications – a chapter of Seattle baseball history that many Mariners fans would just as soon forget.

Ratliff recalls his reception as nothing short of rock star. As the Taco, he accompanied the Moose for a G-rated version of running the gauntlet – being doused with water by Mariners players in a ritualized procession across the field. He reports that the crowd responded instantly when he came out, and later, he signed autographs for a crowd of fans waiting as long as 45 minutes in line to meet him.

He also learned, on this trip, that he has it pretty good in the minor leagues. Mascots in the majors are bound by a longer list of rules than he’s bound by. The Colorado Rockies mascot, also on hand at Safeco for Fan Appreciation Day is bound to stricter rules than the Moose – or, for that matter, Ratliff himself. The Rockies’ mascot can’t be on the field after the ceremonial first pitch, and can’t be on the dugout ever. Ratliff, by contrast, pretty much has license to go whenever he wants wherever he wants, allowed to read the crowd and create his moments as he pleases.

For all the love the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño receive, San Antonio’s heart belongs to another mascot, basically because its heart belongs to another team.

Despite the century-plus history of minor league baseball in San Antonio, and despite having one of the most rabid high school football fan bases in football-obsessed Texas, San Antonio is a basketball town, and every other sport is thus relegated to being not-basketball. The Spurs have only been around since 1973, but because the team is the city’s highest-profile professional sports franchise, it enjoys a unique and revered position among San Antonians, and this extends to mascots, as none is more recognizable or more beloved than the Coyote.

Tim Derk, who debuted The Coyote in 1983, suffered a stroke this past March and has had to turn the job of playing the Coyote to understudies while he undergoes rehabilitation -- ending a 21-year run of donning a coyote mask with bulging bright green eyes and an easy-going, yet slightly maniacal, permanent grin.

The stroke not only sidelined Derk – it led him, his family, and the Spurs organization to do the unprecedented thing and reveal The Coyote’s identity to the public. For many, it was the first time they’d learned who Tim Derk was, and was also the first time they’d learned to separate Derk as someone distinct from The Coyote.

Derk’s condition was major news in San Antonio, dominating headlines and local newscasts for several days. The reaction showed that San Antonio, for all its aspirations to be a big city, is still a small town, in the good sense, at its core. Though we generally like our mascots anonymous in day-to-day life, and transformed into the lovable character when safely encased in the costume, there was no question of Derk’s family and the Spurs organization going public with the information. There was an overwhelming need to know, evinced by the media barrage and the remarkable groundswell of public support once Derk’s condition was made public, which easily overrode the typical willingness of a fan base to buy into the suspension of disbelief manifest in engaging with a mascot.

The Coyote has remained a fixture at Spurs games even while Derk continues rehab, and now, Derk’s legacy and years of service adds an additional layer of legend to The Coyote. It wouldn’t at all be surprising if his number (the cryptic “2!” – standing for “too excited”) is retired should Derk decide not to resume his role as The Coyote – though he’s not ruling out a return to the court, depending on how his physical therapy sessions go.

What the situation with The Coyote reveals, aside from the connection that fans have with a mascot, is the importance of the mascot in articulating the team’s identity, even beyond the role it might have had in years past. If you’re looking to point fingers as why it’s harder for teams to bank on the marketability of its star players, look no further than the era of free agency.

As a fan in his mid-30s, I might just be part of the last generation to know what it’s like to see a favorite player remain with a favorite team for the entirety of his career.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Ken Griffey, Jr. go from Seattle fan favorite to trade-me malcontent, and now, I’m more likely to remember his statistical disappearing act as an oft-injured Cincinnati Red than as part of the Mariners’ feel-good father-son duo that once hit back-to-back home runs in a game on (and this is so terribly fitting) Father’s Day.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Randy Johnson develop from wild-man anomaly to one of the most feared left-handed power pitchers in the history of the game – and then saw him help deliver a World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that entered the majors as an expansion team long after the Mariners. (Note: it is not lost on me that the Mariners are closing in on three full decades of futility.) In July 2004, the Diamondbacks publicly contemplated trading him, and Johnson hinted, not so subtly at all, that he’d like to become a Yankee. This was particularly cruel for Mariners fans who still remember his role in defeating the Yankees in a five-game divisional series in the ’95 playoffs, a series which was not only deliciously epic, but pretty much allowed Mariners fans to hate the Yankees with a blend of loathing and jealousy only surpassed by Red Sox fans.

And I have seen the worst free-agency jump of all, for Mariners fans or otherwise, in Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod was drafted by the Mariners, came up quickly through the team’s farm system, was a wide-eyed September call-up in uniform for the ’95 playoffs, became the team’s most crucial player during its high-water mark as an organization, and then left for a $252 million contract (from a division rival, no less) that could be characterized by any reasonable observer as either obscene or insane. After several years of insisting money was not the motivating factor, even though he toiled for the Texas Rangers through several moribund seasons, he was jettisoned to the only team that could take his monstrous contract – the hated Yankees.

For minor league fans, inconstancy in the roster is a heartbreak that comes with the territory. It’s no accident that the minor leagues are referred to as the farm system – players are nurtured and then harvested, the wheat is separated from the chaff, and the cycle repeats itself annually.

But for major league fans, the free agent market has brought on an inconstancy that they assumed (correctly, up until now) they were immune from. Which makes the mascot more than just a sideshow to fill time and amuse the kids between innings – the mascot has become, more than any individual player, the face of the franchise, the one personality guaranteed to return year after year. The most dedicated baseball fans, addicted to statistics and the hope that comes with spring training, have turned to rotisserie leagues to insure that they can be in control of players maintaining their allegiance to teams – even if those teams are mere constructs in infinite variations among thousands upon thousands of makeshift coalitions around the nation.

But, paradoxically, in the real world, the most enduring representative of what the team embodies is not a five-tool outfielder with a distinctive batting stance, or a pitcher with enough guile and raw talent to change the outcome of a game with his multi-million dollar arm, but a moose with a comically-large head, or an electric-blue marlin, or a non-descript green monster with a nose that vaguely resembles a trumpet. The pitcher and the outfielder might be dealt for prospects in the closing days of July, or might bolt to a contender at the first opportunity that MLB’s free agency rules afford them. The mascots, though, save for a conscious redirection of the team’s marketing people, are there to stay.

San Antonio is a city where people tend to settle in and grow old, and indeed, where multiple generations spend entire lifetimes. It’s a city where traditions are taken very seriously, where the two biggest institutional influences are the military and the Catholic Church. What this means, even with the rise of the Ballapeño, even with the rare convergence of animated jalapeño and animated taco in the same space, is that the Puffy Taco isn’t going anywhere. It’s perhaps no accident that Mickey Holt notes, “If we ever got rid of the Puffy Taco, we’d be crucified.

Yet, in talking to Wesley Ratliff, you get the sense that he will inevitably move on. He’s just entered his mid-20s and has already been a mascot for almost a decade. He’s come agonizingly close to toiling for Tampa Bay fans this year as a non-descript troll. He’s already had a glimpse of life as a big-league mascot, and he likes it. If anyone is cut out for the mascot’s life, Wesley is that person.

When Wesley moves on, the costumes will remain behind – a jalapeño with googly eyes, and a taco with no eyes – waiting to be worn by someone who remain, if all goes to plan, anonymous. Though a different person will embody the role, the bio info on the team’s official website will remain the same, in the jokey tone and cadence that is common to mascot bios at all levels of the game.

And it’s a safe bet that years from now, between the 6th and 7th inning of future Missions games, the Puffy Taco will take his place at second base, and a child currently not yet born will take his or her place alongside the Taco. They will run around the bases. The Taco will not make it to home plate, being tackled along the way. It will be someone else’s knees taking the torque, enduring another child’s zeal. And as the Taco lies on the ground, to the cheers of the crowd for another in a chain of consecutive nights, the Taco will know his place is secure. In a city where traditions rule all, and in which the Taco has become a quirky and enduring tradition, no one will let the Taco escape this mortal coil. Even today, between the 6th and 7th inning as the Taco makes his entrance, underneath the cheers, you can hear a handful of people quickly explaining to those who don’t yet know – the children, the visitors, the neophytes – the answer to the inevitable question, the variations on the theme of What the Hell Is That.

Beat Me in St. Louis: A Journey Through the Worst National Poetry Slam Ever, As Revealed In Livejournal Entries

Wednesday, August 4, 12:21 am
Journal Entry Title: St. Louis, Day Zero

So far, I have seen/felt/heard/experienced:

* 89 degree heat, plus 140 degree humidity, in Busch Stadium watching the Cardinals play in front of thousands of sweaty fans, pretty much all wearing red.

* Free Metro Link rides. I think you're supposed to pay, but we couldn't get the machine at the airport to take our money, and no one seems to be monitoring. So, okay, thanks for the free rides.

* Dinner at Show-Me's, which is the St. Louis version of Hooters. This sounds bad, but we actually had a good time, because Alvin Lau was with us ordering a drink so totally gay (with Malibu spiced rum, pineapple juice, and cranberry juice) that I had to dub it "the studded leather thong of drinks." We later got into a conversation with the waitress about the mixological content of a drink called the Red-Headed Slut. Apparently, this exists, and this led to a hilarious exchange which managed to embarrass both the Show-Me waitresses and Big Poppa E. Which is good.

* There's a freaky poet who's a perennial rep for Arkansas at the College Nationals named Russell, with multiple face piercings. He met a woman named Lacy in Oklahoma City, who can swallow her own tongue. She demonstrates, often, to whoever will ask. Mike's film crew got it on tape, and got her to sign the release pronto. You know, just typical weirdness at Nationals, but here's the kicker -- they HITCHHIKED to St. Louis from Oklahoma. People picked them up. In their cars.

So far, I've kept the Scrabble to poetry ratio to a fine balance. As in, lots of Scrabble, and no poetry yet. Skipped the smooth jazz open mike -- apparently a good move from all accounts.

More later.

Wednesday, August 4, 7:38 am
Journal Title Entry: Forgot the Best Anedcote of Nationals So Far

So, we're at the ballgame, and Adriana goes to the bathroom, where she runs into a woman who says, I kid you not, "Your skin is so amazing -- how did you get so tan?" When Adri replied that she's naturally that way, the woman responds ... "Wow ... you don't look black."

I predict la raza poetry is not going to do so well here this week.

Thursday, August 5, 3:21 am
St. Louis, Day One

Worst. Nationals. Ever.

That, and I miss my family.

Thursday, August 5, 8:19 am
Journal Title Entry: Furious Invective, Go!

So, I'm typing this from the Hampton Inn's business center, because my team took our room's computer chair across the hall last night, and are dead to the world, as I should be right now. My hangover is hideous and well-deserved, and I didn't really drink that much at all last night, which only leads me to conclude that I'm sick from what might be the worst Nationals ever. Worse than Connecticut. Worse than Seattle. Allow me to elaborate.

I hosted a bout and coached a bout last night. The bout I hosted started 45 minutes late because the sound guys failed to show up to assemble the microphones until 8:35, when I think they were supposed to be there at, oh, around seven. We had to use two volunteers as judges and beg three reluctant audience members (part of entourages) to judge as well. As it turns out, we were lucky in that we had people we could ask. I'm not sure if there was a single paying customer from the outside world in the venue when we started. We got the bout in at 65 minutes, which is lightning quick for 16 poets, and Deb Marsh thanked me by challenging our math and delaying us another ten minutes after the bout, when I was thinking, oh my God, our bout is the only one that's late, and I have to get to my team down the street, and oh my God, I hope they don't start without me. Turns out, of course, that my math was fucking perfect, and she wrote scores down wrong. I also had Logic from their team challenging the scores. Guess what? Your team got a 5? How do ya like my deductive reasoning now, Logic? *busts a kung fu move*

So, I get to my bout, and it's ... an intimate audience. As in, the teams. And the entourages. And about three poet-affiliated people. For a bout featuring two perennial finalist teams. It took 45 minutes for us to dredge up the judges we needed, including the owner of the club (who had to be deliriously happy with what was going on) and one of the Slammasters from Random, Indiana.

In all, here's a quick rundown of other highlights:

* After being told that venues would be 18 and over no-problem, the doorman at Fat Tuesday (and yes, indeed, it is part of the frozen daiquiri bar chain) wouldn't let Adri into coach Houston because she's 20, and after much begging, their 19-year-old poet was only let in to perform. The "stage" was actually an unlit patch of floor at the front of the club. Adri coached Houston to a 0.1 win sitting at the club's entryway next to the doorman.

* Jared Paul became NPS's first arrest because Providence decided it would be in good taste to help market NPS by doing their Abu Ghraib piece outside on a public street (site of opening ceremonies) at 2 pm, and his balls fell out of his loincloth (now there's a disturbing clause to type) and he got arrested for indecent exposure. Providence almost got kicked out of the tournament, but now, they're just on double secret probation. Gee, this isn't going to be make Jared Paul feel any more self-righteous or oppressed, will it?

* I asked Kevin McCameron, one of the organizers, "What is going on here? Where are all the people?" He just bewilderedly replied, "I don't know. I don't know."

* There was, to be fair, a tiny calendar mention in their entertainment section yesterday, and an article in their alt-weekly, tiny-but-grayboxed, written by a former slammer now living here. But it failed to get any audience out. I think maybe, if you count everyone who paid last night, in all the venues, you might have 50 paying people.

* Oh, and it's impossible to get to the late-night event unless you take a cab from the hotel ($10). Metro Link doesn't run that late, and it's not walking distance. Luckily, the LIVEJOURNAL READING tonight is at the hotel.

* Oh, and Austin got the 4 in their bout last night, so currently, our largely unrehearsed, just-glad-to-be-here team is above them in the rankings. 34 out of 69. Middle of the pack, third in our bout last night -- which, given our draw, is the best we could hope for.

I think I knew this was going to happen, and told people who refused to believe me, for two solid years. Though I feel like I can now do the I-told-you-so dance, I'd much rather do the hey-they-pulled-this-off dance.

Ugh.

Current Mood: Bad Nationals

Thursday, August 5, 5:19 pm
Journal Title Entry: The Bright Ray of Light

Nerd slam.

Oh. My. God.

I didn't even get to read (J. Bradley beat me in a livejournal trivia-off for a spot on the roster; how lame is that?), but Cristin's hosting was drop-dead funny, and there was community, and there was joy, and there was David Hendler against Paulie Lippman in an anagram-off, and then I had to leave early because I had to fix my computer through some weird place I found downtown at random. The U was falling off. It's better now.

Just waiting for the rest of the team members to get back to set strategy. My strategy tonight ... is for us to win. Brilliant, huh?

Friday, August 6, 1:46 am
Journal Title Entry: And Now, More on Travesty

First off, apologies to all expecting the Livejournal reading tonight -- postponed, not cancelled, we'll get it rescheduled as soon as everything blows over.

Believe me, many things are blowing right now.

My night went this way: team bout at Crazy Louie's, bar with a jaunty nautical theme, stage was small and looked more appropriate for puppets than poets. We took the 4, did some dice rolling in the second round which didn't work out, and by the end of the evening, all that was left was beating Corpus, after realizing that we probably couldn't get the 34 or so we needed in the final round.

I was ready to give PSI the benefit of the doubt though -- issues were getting addressed today from yesterday. Sound equipment was in the venues on times. More volunteers showed. Audience was still thin, but not anemic like yesterday's. It looked, early on, like the ship was getting righted.

Then, I bout managed at Fat Tuesday's on the Austin - Miami - Montclair - Norfolk - Salt Lake City bout, with Danny hosting. A Miami poet got kicked out by aggressive Fat Tuesday security staff at the start of the bout, there was some melee involving the poet (I think, still not sure) trying to rush the door three poems in. We had a ten-minute delay that started with the bouncers yelling that we were kicked out, and ended with us settling the place back down and letting poor Schuyler from Salt Lake (you know, the one we thought was dead last Slammasters) start over. We got our bout in. We even avoided a protest at the end, and the poet who raised the stink thought I needed a massage, and offered me a naked message. I am reasonably sure that she was just kidding, but I politely thanked her, and showed her my wedding ring to eliminate all doubt. Danny, predictably, God bless him, took the baton from me at that point. I hope it works out -- we worked our asses off to get that bout in as cleanly as we did.

But wait, it gets better.

For the first time in Nationals history (I believe), a bout didn't finish. Three poems from the end, in the middle of the leading team's third round poem, the DJ started spinning techno music, because the dance club wanted to honor its regular patrons (and thereby dis its out-of-town guests). There were rumors that the bout finished on the street, but indeed, it did not finish, and the result affects semis. Stay tuned, sports fans.

What's becoming markedly apparent in all this is that the relationships between the St. Louis organizers and club owners are not rock solid. I imagine there was a promise of a lot of money and excitement coming through these club's doors, which is not happening. The clubs are oriented toward drinking, and the poets are being regarded as a nuisance by the clubs and the hotel staff. As the mood gets uglier, I fear that the poets will act out at the hotel, and the hotel will start booting poets, and then we'll have a whole other layer of crisis on top of what we have now.

I don't imagine this will happen in Austin, since we'll have a much better core audience, much better relationships with the clubs, and much better relationships with the host hotels and the cities, but if we don't do something to cap teams at a managable number (and I think that's 64), PSI is in serious trouble. This can't continue this way -- something more grave than a bout not finishing will go down if we continue down this circus-y path.

I am utterly frightened at the prospect of a semis bout at Fat Tuesday. But, as Daniel Brewster told me tonight, with word about the fuckery of tonight going around (note: fuckery is my word), no other club is going to want to touch this.

On the bright spot, you can order a frozen Sex on the Beach at this club, if you so desire.

Beau Paul once proclaimed, "St. Louis is the only city that built a monument to getting the hell out of it."

I say: Westward Ho.

Current Mood: Horrified, Really

Friday, August 6, 5:31 pm
Journal Title Entry: It Just Keeps Getting Better and Better: The Group Piece Showcase

So, the group piece showcase at NPS this year was in something called the Art Lofts district on the edge of downtown, on something billed in our program as the Outdoor Mainstage. The Outdoor Mainstage turned out to be two microphones and a box in a courtyard off the sidewalk. To get us ready, we had to move the box (which only had room for two people to stand on) and get three mikes from the coffee place four blocks down the street, where the makeup bout from last night was held. (This is the bout that was shut down by Overzealous Techno DJ.)

But wait, it gets better.

So, a few poems into the group piece showcase, we hear sirens. And then fire engines and cops show up. Guess what? Hazardous materials situation. Hydrochloric acid spill about a block from where we're at. Apparently, we're fine -- as long as the wind doesn't shift. The reading continues, and it's going well -- the T.O.F.U. piece (Shane Koyczan/Mike McGee/CR Avery project) wrecks shop in particular. Helicopters appear. I notice that the local Fox station has sent a van over, which pulled right up to where we were doing the reading, so I quip to Mike, "Hey, we finally got the media out!" Sometimes, I crack me up.

In the meantime, the poets are swearing a-plenty, 'cause, you know, slam poets. About 2/3 of the way through, Daniel Brewster pulls me aside and says, "I don't know how to tell you this delicately," so I say, "Just tell me." Turns out a cop has told him to tell us to control the profanity, because there are parents picking up their kids. This mystifies me a bit, but I make an announcement to please be more PG. The poets, being a responsible lot, ignore the request.

Then, we figure out a few poems later what the hell he's talking about -- the courtyard is right next to, and I mean right next to, the Downtown Children's Center. We've had four hours of poems and rants and multiple f-bombs next to a daycare. Though Wicker Park had a piece near and dear to my heart, about the frustrations of growing up short, I missed part of it because a mustachioed, Tom of Finland cop who is probably not voting Kerry/Edwards in '04, dressed us down. "Those are little kids in there," he said emphatically. "Little kids." Mike said, non-plussed, "I heard you the first time," and again, I issued a request for PG mindfulness. Mike actually had to stop Andy and Kari from Vegas, up right after that second warning, blissfully unaware that their patently vulgar duet was not very PG. We ended with one other poem, despite Daniel's urging to have us pull the plug right then and there. Gee, that wouldn't have made things end on a sour note or anything.

Punchline: when we commented to Daniel on the lack of foresight evinced by putting an outdoor reading next to a daycare, his response was, "We weren't expecting the cops to show up. We didn't know there was going to be a chemical spill."

Really? I thought I'd seen "Chemical Spill Friday" in the NPS program.

By the way, more fuckery: there's a tie for 20th, so we're going to have a six-team bout tonight. Don't worry, fans of slam integrity: I'm already working on a play-in rule for a tie for the last semis slot for April.

Also, in other news, my committee's corporate sponsorship policy passed.

And: Livejournal reading will be 4-6 tomorrow. It'll be indoors, so you pottymouths can go to town.

Current mood: Hydrochloric Acid Exposure

Saturday, August 7, 10:13 am
Journal Title Entry: Firewood

Today's slam family meeting will possibly involve a sterling new issue on the table -- one of last night's indie finalists, Will Da Real One, only read one of the two preliminary nights. In fact, he was the poet who was kicked out of Fat Tuesday in the Thursday night debacle. The rumor is that a poet brought it up to one of the indie finals hosts before the bout, the host asked the poet, and the poet said, "Yeah, I spit on Thursday." So, I guess "Da Real One" is sort of a misnomer now. [Update: This rumor has since been refuted, but there still seems to be some kind of questions around communication of this information to the people who needed it. The bout officials didn't know that Will hadn't read Thursday until the third and final round of indie finals.]

Apparently, it was a data entering error from the tournament director that put him into the mix, and it was the departure from making sure every poet was represented once in a bout that allowed this to happen in the first place. As bout manager for that bout, I would have brought something up if I'd scanned the list for the indie finalists, but stuff was posted so late on Friday that I didn't get the chance to comb it -- I only checked to see that San Anto finished 45th in the nation. And I didn't really clue in to his presence on stage, because Hilary and Greg and I were having way too much fun, and, you know, vodka tonics.

Wow, it didn't take long for that innovation to bite PSI in the ass.

Hey, are those locusts I see in the sky?

Current Mood: Pre-Ritual Flaggelation

Saturday, August 7, 10:13 am
Journal Title Entry: Ow, My Life Hurts: Saturday Afternoon at Nationals

Just finished hosting the Little Reading That Could, aka the Livejournal/Blogger reading. Special thanks to all the participants: natawn84, hallawayjoe, karinotvery, fengi, poetryslam, loudgirl, auralfiend, dokuritsu, spentpenny, zadriana, jbradley, Bad Andy Neely, and neuraleyes for the use of his wireless laptop. I was thinking about doing an entry on the reading during the reading, but that would have been too dorky and too meta.

Slam family meeting was basically an evisceration of the St. Louis organizers, our corporate sponsorship committee election -- and with Jared Paul getting elected, this is a great opportunity for him to serve the community on an issue he clearly cares deeply about. I'll be watching his participation with interest.

The Miami indie finals situation went like this: tournament director explained and apologized, EC asked the committee to let them know if they see discrepancies, no one ever really demanded an explanation from Miami as to why they didn't say anything before Will actually got up on stage for indie finals. It can't be that they didn't realize he didn't read both Wednesday and Thursday. I know this for a fact. Also, later in the meeting, the person who initially got thrown out (starting the chain of events leading to Will getting thrown out) stood up to complain about how the bout officials handled it. Given that we nearly had a riot on our hands and diffused it, I find his perspective deeply unsatisfying.

But the focus of the meeting was on St. Louis. Michael and Kevin stayed to take the beating, Daniel wasn't there. Everything was covered, and I'm sure it had to be the worst couple of hours in Michael and Kevin's lives. It was horribly sad and excruciating.

Speaking of: only 45 tickets sold for the finals as of noon today. Let's just say I don't feel compelled to get there early to get good seats.

Current Mood: Sick of St. Louis

Sunday, August 8, 7:38 am
Journal Title Entry: Would Prefer a Transporter; A Plane Would Do

Nationals is over, except for the hotel checkout and the tearful goodbyes. I'm glad so many people managed to have a good time despite the monumental fuckups, but to me, that just underscores that this event is turning more and more into a navel-gazing, self-congratulatory, poetry summer camp. Poets should have an expectation that an audience will come to see them, but the overall package we're offering, with an increasing number of mediocre-at-best writers and performers not filtered out through a regionals system that would allow the hardest-working and most accomplished teams to be at a Nationals, gives little impetus to bring audience back night after night. And at the risk of sounding like Grumpy Old Man, I'm sick of poets not being able to edit out their profanity when they find themselves on an outdoor stage in front of restaurants at Opening Ceremonies or at an outdoor stage which has been placed right next to a daycare center. Slam, at its core, is supposed to be about adjusting your performance of a poem to your situation to best suit it and to best reach the audience.

Also, if I hear anyone say they are "spitting" a poem one more time, I will throw up.

The absolute best thing about last night's finals was Team Normal's piece during the showcase. Not only was it cleverly written, and brilliantly meta, but it was creative and utterly innovative. It showed that there are other options despite the standard tropes so many of the poets are relying on. Finals, overall, was better than last year's: the hosting was crisper, and the poetry covered a wider range of the palette (though things skewed heavily toward X is Good/X is Bad, as opposed to the barrage of I Am A Real Poet poems that bloated last year's finals).

Hollywood won, opening with Rives doing "Deaf Poetry Slam," then doing two skit-like group pieces (one opened with mikes used as guns, with two black poets enacting an armed robbery -- only they demanded that you give up your poetry rather than your wallets; the other was a conversation between Mr. White and Mr. Black about race relations and whatnot), and finishing with Javon the Golden Child (that's what he calls himself). Denver finished second, and I really like them as people, but of their three team pieces, one borrowed heavily from "Prayer," a 1998 poem written by Matthew John Conley, and their piece about suburbia (suburbia is bad) was a bizarro-world version of "Tube," the television-themed piece that Hilary, Wammo, Danny and I did in the Hindenburgian '96 Finals. It felt like "I Love the 90s" had suddenly crept in.

St. Louis claims we had 1200 total in the theater; I'm guessing it was more like 750, which means there were 300-400 paying customers in the audience. With the kickback they're getting from the hotel, they may actually break even, though I know they're raw about the registration money going to PSI rather than to the host city.

I talked to EC members about the Miami situation. The way they tell it, it was more of a comedy of errors where Will was shepherded along to indie finals an hour before it started, with Miami's slammaster assuming some concession had been made to Will for being thrown out of the Thursday night venue. They seem totally at ease with their decision, claiming it to be the tournament director's honest-to-goodness mistake, and since he's a nice, sweet guy that works hard, they might even be assuming that most of us will look the other way. Of course, if we hadn't adopted a system that now makes it optional rather than mandatory for a poet to perform each night, we wouldn't have even opened up to this possibility. Will there be improvements made to how we process information from the bouts, or will we continue to put four different people's scoresheets in a plastic tub and have a single person inputting the data in a hotel conference room at 1 in the morning?

It probably also helps that the 11th-place poet kept out of the competition, rather than being someone well-established in the community, is a first-year poet from Lexington who, at the slam family meeting, in a classy move destined for Slam Family Low Moment Annals, compared his not getting into finals to "child molestation." Um, no. That's not figurative language you're allowed to use. Of course, he got to read in the showcase, to make up for Friday's blunder.

Ultimately, I feel more like I have endured than enjoyed.

Current Mood: Utterly Defeated, Yet Willing to Buy a Souvenir Snowglobe, So Long As It's Ugly