Just got back from the Alchemy poetry reading for June and, well, it was definitely interesting. It’s usually all very polite and such, but that broke down at a couple of points. There was an argument at my table between an Israeli and someone who felt strongly against what Israel is doing, as most decent, sane people do. The Israeli thought he was paying a compliment, I’m sure, when he said “Your shirt looks just like an Israeli army shirt.” (It was green. It looked sort of like all military shirts everywhere.) It was not received as such.
There were two featured readers, which is a bit of overkill, but I guess you have to catch the visiting talent when they’re in Prague and I’d rather see two new performers than none, so there’s that.
I liked the first one, the girl. She had a love of cheap puns and alliteration. I don’t know that there was any earth shattering message, but she was quite entertaining to watch, put her heart into it, she did.
Then the guy came on and wandered through about a 15 minute preamble in which he talked about some of his other projects, he’s written a children’s book (it’s the new Harry Potter!), and about all the voice work he’s done, and how he’s really interested in Alchemy, like the real stuff, with us it’s just the name of a poetry reading but he’s all into the arcane writings and stuff, and he talked about how we all need to be happy and live in the moment and yadda yadda, and then before he started singing, he put up his YouTube video on the screen, him being soulful at the top of a cliff, soulfully walking through the grass, kneeling in an old church, and so on, and then when he finally began, he had background music coming out of his notebook or whatever. He actually had a nice voice and a couple of good songs, if he’d just cut the intro to about 30 seconds, left off all the tech shit and just done it unplugged, it would have worked fine.
He got a polite enough reception, so I thought maybe it was just me but then we went out to smoke a joint and everybody was out there bitching about how pretentious he was.
That was the last Alchemy for the summer, so maybe I need to focus on my next book.
June Alchemy
Filed under Blogs' Archive