festival ecstatique - day one
11.16
Yod Space, Florence
Festival Ecstatique was a three day literary and music festival curated by Byron Coley for Easthampton record label
Ecstatic Peace.
I attended a fraction of the festival's first evening.
When I got there, Berkeley poet Richard Krech was seated and reading from old work. In a bridge between old and new work, Krech mentioned that he had stopped writing (starting in the 70s?), but resumed in 2001 when the Taliban demolished the Buddha statues of Afghanistan's Bamian Valley.
Charles Potts' reading featured a fantastic piece on American history, "Geezers in Space: AKA the case for American Exceptionalism," included in the beautiful chapbook created for the event by
Bottle of Smoke Press' Bill Roberts. Here's the first stanza:
All Americans are exceptional, let them tell you.
It was an exceptionally wide path God cleared for them
Through the exceptionally beautiful American Wilderness
Over an exceptionally large number of dead Indians
Creating the exceptional doctrine of Manifest Destiny
Which manifests itself in their exceptional reluctance
To acknowledge the exceptional scale
Of the genocide that is the bedrock of their exceptionality.
Coley, Valerie Webber, and Thurston Moore then read a series of collectively written 'trash tanka' chronicling (and trashing) the discography of Joni Mitchell with many a poop joke.
A much anticipated reading by
Mike Watt followed. Watt had flown in from CA especially for the reading, and was flying out the next morning for a show in SF. He utilized jet lag for all its poetical worth and, reading at a hush and an exceptionally slow pace, painted various interior/exterior vistas with much color and
pedrospeak.
More on the Festival at
Baryonic Matter and its related
Flickr site