after my conversation with her, i thought about my writing process. lately, i write for school or for speaking engagements, still indulging in writing poetry & essays for pleasure. my daughter said this kind of writing didn't count as the therapeutic journaling she wants for me because it is all written for an audience. I suppose she never realized that the things I write for myself don't get shown to other people usually, because it has already reached its intended audience - the page.
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| writer in the bathtub - photo by teresa tsai |
However, writing had already become a "job" by the time I was 15 or 16. Working for the school paper meant selling ads, typing and editing other people's work and negotiating topics with administrators and advisors. Senior year I was managing editor, but I spent weekends in the city seeing bands, art house movies and drinking coffee at midnight to hear other poets wail. Going to college, I immediately joined the paper as a copyeditor. My 2nd or 3rd article was edited in a way that gave it bias and I stopped writing for them. The public backlash of having an article misinterpreted with your byline on it as author was a powerful lesson.
I started carrying a notebook around in jr. high, even a spiral in my back pocket would do the trick. To this day, it is incredibly rare for me not to have ink and paper around. Even with the advent of the online cloud and devices, there are still times I really need the smell of ink on good paper.
In the last 20 years, I have made a deliberate move to writing online. Yahoo had Briefcase which was an early cloud server. This allowed me to store writing samples online or the first time. The typewriter got left behind and storing new work became print-outs of cloud based poetry and essays. I told myself that writing online instead of in my books would make me a more disciplined writer, since I could resume that hour a day writing structure I missed. With online writing, my employer wouldn't ask what my book was and it would be harder to lose. Stealing time from my workday during lunch, I would write poetry & letters to out of state friends. I still went to coffee houses; bookstore readings and writing workshops just to keep growing and meeting like-minded others.
Around then, I started a postcard mail art exchange with Aaron Barker before the millennium. He was a great accomplice for testing the limitations of the USPS because (like me) he was both writer and visual artist. Post office had no problem with massive stapling, oddball shapes/thickness/materials. However AKBarker won the game the day his graphic sexual images out graphic'd the last ones i tried to send through the mail & the post office put his in a plastic wrap where only the address showed through for the sake of decency (lol).
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| (The
text on this handmade postcard from me to Aaron is an Iman quote) "The way I was raised and lived my life in Africa, I was never told I was beau- tiful. Never. If anything, I thought of myself as aver- age. The boys looked at my cousins and the girls in our family more than me. In my heart I was vulnerable and had low self-esteem about my own beauty, but not about who I was as a person." |
PERFORMANCE ART and SPOKEN WORD
So the focus on journaling grew like tentacle vines into many different shapes. I had a toddler at home. I got/gave cool postcards in the mail & hopefully brought a smile to the mail carrier's face. My boyfriend at the time, Matthew curated art events like I did and made electronic music in our house. My dear friend Frank Topp was always down for spontaneous music making. Hours were spent at each other's house making beats & rhyming over them. Our friend Brian Roberts was a drummer and there is a rare old recording of my early poetry with just him doing percussion. Back then recordings were done on DAT tapes or 4 track recorders that had to be converted onto a cassette or cd. Music and art was a huge part of our everyday lives.
Being a writer kept me employed in office work that helped me feed my kid and was a lynchpin to getting my foot into several job interviews. After work, I wanted to create music. Lots of girls wanted to sing for music producers, but I was a poet who came with her own material. Most of the producers I worked with over the years were friends or introduced to me by a friend. Before my daughter was school aged, I did a lot of live performances. I performed with a Quartet a few times at Reid Robinsons' old Johnny Rocket Coffee Shop (the first internet cafe in dallas) that included an upright bass, kit drummer and synth guy who did all the keys and sound engineering stuff.
I would sing over dj sets around town, reading poetry over their beats & improvising rhymes at times to match the mood of the music. Lots of my friends played music and it was nice to be invited to join them live on the mic. A friend invited me to Hot Springs, Arkansas for a weekend and there at Maxine's Puzzle Bar I had a very new experience.
We were having a drink at the bar and the band was setting up gear for their performance. There were probably only 20 people in the entire place. Someone on stage said, "does someone want to talk on this mic so I can do soundcheck?" I laughed and jumped on board. I read one of my poems from memory and probably sang an old jazz number by Sarah Vaughn. I bounced offstage, back to my seat at the bar and an older lady came up to me. She hands me a twenty and I said "what is this?"
She said, "This is my bar and I pay my talent." Then she pretty much walked off after I thanked her. I was astonished. In a lifetime of writing, that was the first time I was paid to perform. In church, in coffee houses, in nightclubs, in print - none of the proceeds had ever landed in my hand. It was just something I did as a natural extension of my writing process for fun and creative exercise. Writing has always been like breathing for me, something almost involuntary.
Things seemed to evolve soon after. Reid asked me to play a few gigs with one of his bands that usually included percussionist Domingo Leija and avante-garde visual artist & didgeridoo player Thor Johnson. If there was any income, Reid was very fair about it and I loved the artsy scene we usually played for.
Frank got us a weekly residency at a nightclub club called Eclipse Sol next door to the old Arcadia theatre. It was our 2 resident djs, Frank and my high school friend Matt Norman along with a wildcard dj that rotated every week. I sang over all of them and it was a great way to make music on monday and share my poetry. It also led me to meet some really interesting musicians and producers, however we were not paid anything but free drinks. Free drinks on a school night is not the best idea btw. So I learned about taking pre-performance naps and cutting myself off after a few drinks, just so I could function the next day at work.
During all this time, I still scribbled. I kept a journal in my car for red lights. I did "automatic writing" in the dark at concerts & movies that were especially inspiring (transcribing that stuff later is a beast lol). I played surrealist writing games with friends. I cut up my own words and glued them back together. Frank used my recorded laugh on a track he did for Fair Park records called "Celestial Park." It was just a sample and I am not credited on the record, but I was super giddy to be recorded on vinyl and literally hopped
around for a week.
So when I started making electronic music with others, it was a relief to most producers that I didn't mind being edited. Having effects put on your voice or having your poetry cut to pieces can be hard for some people, but as long as my content kept the same meaning I didn't mind and found it fun.
After a year at Eclipse Sol, I told Frank I needed a change. I started worrying about legacy stuff for my kid. What if I got hit by a car? How would she know why I had spent the time on the things I believed in? What would remain? What tangible thing could she hold in her hand? Having a residency on a Monday was taking its toll on me with a day job and a kid at home I'd rather be with. Our night was pretty popular and I had my first legit stalker who tried to follow me out to my car or just showed up waiting for me there. Dude kept showing up to the other events I threw as well, asking for autographs and eventually getting difficult enough that I had him thrown out of a couple of places for being too pushy/scary.
I got into the habit during that period of introducing myself to the bouncer or security guard at any place I was supposed to play at the beginning to ask for an escort to my car after I did my thing. The guard would smirk if they hadn't seen me perform before. Post-performance after the energy exchange with the audience, the guards understood why i needed a friendly walk to my car afterwards. That part was manageable, but the balancing a day job with night gigs was getting to be too much though.
More importantly, my desire to create more concrete work became undeniable.
WORDS & RECORDINGS (aka LYRICS)
I had a stack of journals in a box moving everytime I did. I had taken the trouble to type out poems or print out lyrics so I could hold them in my hand like a security blanket. What good would a residency be to my daughter when she was old enough to understand why mommy wasn't home monday nights?
Again I realized everything boiled down to time management. We humans only have so many hours in a day. I decided if I could sacrifice 8 hours a month (2+ hours each monday). then what if I redirected that same amount of time in a more focused way? So I pulled out my calendar. I blocked off 4 hours on one saturday each month for MUSIC. I blocked off another 4 hours two weeks later that month for ART. so if nothing else, I could progress my art and music a little bit at a time each month and keep momentum. It worked remarkably well.
The writing was happening every day anyways in bits and pieces and sometimes long luxurious writing sessions in my pajamas. But focusing the time, gave me permission to hide out and work every other saturday on something that fed my soul. The day job fed my body, the moonlighting fed my soul.
On the year anniversary we announced I was giving up Eclipse Sol. A year later, I had my first release on vinyl.
Patchen Preston was introduced to me by wonderful Frank. He is an amazingly talented but reluctant producer and sound engineer. My original poem "Unnaturalism" is about the beat poet Neal Cassady. Frank asked me to record it as lyrics in Patchen's closet in Deep Ellum, which may have been barricaded with a mattress as added sound proofing. Years later I met Patchen's dad, the photographer & filmmaker Jon Preston at a party and I mentioned I had made a song with his son. He replied "The one about Neal Cassady? its in my car right now! I love that one." I knew I liked him immediately, because he knew the song was about Cassady by hearing it; plus he knew who Cassady was at all. Frank made a great video for this track on vimeo that includes images of fire and flight.
http://vimeo.com/8098295
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/unaturalism
Around 2000 I met Sean Anderson, who used my voice and lyrics on two different releases of his. His stuff was more progressive tech house then. He was really open minded about the subject matter I read about. Our first release "Solid Foundations" was on Chicago based Guidance Records and I was featured on the track "Dim." The original poem was about dream assassins, mythical kabbalist monks who could travel into people's subconscious while they slept. The song version was edited by the producer to be more romantic. The new creation turned out lovely and was well received.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/dim-grey-gdr-126
Mike Constantino had played music at quite a few events I had curated over the years. One day Adam Pickrell took me to the studiospace Mike shared on Ross Avenue downtown with Paul Paredes and Arnold Velasco. Knowing Mike from before, we were glad to see each other and scheduled a few recording sessions that lead to the release. Orly Angelo did much of the production on the first album "Getting in It", really calm and joyful. Orly has a great ear for music and very natural flow. Really enjoyed working with him. Like I could play a few keys on the keyboard to let them understand the melody I was feeling after I heard their first drafts of the track and he would just instantly get it & incorporate it. Great collaborator. They were very understanding of my single mommy status and let me bring my daughter with me. She was always super well behaved and would happily color and watch movies while we worked. I'd bring her a little bag with quiet activities to work with in the side office.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/getting-in-it-ross-street
In 2003, Patchen came by one of my dinner parties and he brought me a gift. He had remixed the original track we'd done and created something wholly different and pretty amazing. Instead of focusing on the driver in my poem, this edit focused on the bus Cassady drove in the book "electric kool-aid acid test" and did it in an progressive techy trippy electo way.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/further-field-trip-mix
Paul and Orly were frequently collaborating. Paul scheduled a few sessions with me as well, after I wrapped up with Orly and Mike's e.p. project "Getting In It". Scott Pace and Paul had a project called "Honest Cars" and I believe this was the first track we did together.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/cars
Sean's Guidance Record and Orly's Fair Park Record releases were the same year around 2003ish. "Getting In It" got a favorable review in the print music magazine "XLR8R." Both vinyl records were commercially released internationally although only a limited number were issued. I got an ASCAP membership, an advance from the record companies and in the contracts legally retain a percentage of the lyrical copyrights on all my commercial releases.
"Aqua A-go-go" was the 2nd track I did with Sean Anderson was a collaboration with JD Northrup (who now works at Pixar, but still releases music in SF). This poem was about rain and is a favorite of a few househeads in the UK. This track was released on vinyl by Fair Park.https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/aqua-a-go-go-fpr-022
Several of us went to Winter Music Conference (WMC) in Miami to perform. They would pay my hotel room if I could just get down there. I played three gigs while in town. I was supposed to play a fourth with Paul at Opium Gardens but his time was cut and so was I lol. I got to sing great live sets with Sean Anderson on the patio at Kent Hotel, and another with Frank Topp who was living there at the time.
I borrowed a vehicle and split the driving duty and gas cost with my my sweet girlfriends Sacha, Heather Smurfette and evil soon to be x-boyfriend. Kim Collins was my sound engineer that week and heart guru, she pretty much saved my ass with her amazing gear skills.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/balance
But even on the air mattress in the back of the suv on the way driving back to texas from miami, i was scribbling away writing new stuff in my journal.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/surveillance-vocal-trip-hop
However, throughout this I had financially difficulties. My parents were never rich. I had to be resourceful for my kid's sake. Corporate work paid well and had the insurance benefits I needed, but they would usually figure out I was not one of them and it was downhill from there. I never mentioned my art and music endeavors at the dayjob. Muggles are not impressed and it just opens the door for them to assume all sorts of things. "So you are one of those creative types, eh!? Now I'm on to you, missy! I saw that made-for-tv-movie about the artist/writer/musician. Escandalo!" I just kept hoping I would find a job that could accept that I was a hard worker that went above and beyond to get things done well and not be so upset that I had creative interests outside of work.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/houdini-electric-slipknot-mix
Paul had bigger plans. He wanted to do an l.p. and go for a full album. Originally he wanted me and scottie (redeye) to collaborate on lyrics or to release something with both of us doing vocals on different tracks. That didn't work out. Scottie had a very full plate and we just couldn't come together on our schedules. So, I was asked to write lyrics for a concept album to go along the lines of "glamour and damage." I wrote 12 fictional poems along that theme. Paul wanted the vocal delivery to be aggressive and forceful for his electrohouse tracks. I listened to a lot of Iggy Pop and La Tigre during the period we were recording. Scottie asked to keep the title "glamour and damage" for a project he was working on with someone out of state (said he was having it tattooed on to his neck).https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/firecracker
So I relented and changed our l.p. project title to "smash and glam." several years later, paul asked me to revisit the tracks and reworked a lot of my lyrics with an editor named Adam Ulevitch who shares writing credits on everything he changed. Negotiating content with an editor is an interesting exercise to say the least. Knowing what parts are worth fighting over and being able to appreciate improvements that you didn't make. Its an emotional see-saw of egos and preferences, but that is how art manifests sometimes.
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/heartbreaker-nyc-mix
WORDS as ART
So in addition to writing leading to music, it also led to art. I often incorporate my writing into my artwork as was also done by dada and fluxus artists. There is a series of 12 collages based on the poems written for Paul's "Smash & Glam" project. This series of artwork was shown at the Austin Museum of Art in ____ at their annual 5x7 invitational art exhibit and auction. Its interesting because you see the cut-ups style editing. I made art out of the written poems I had with me in the recording booths that got written on and edited from the original to turn it into "lyrics." These edits were sometimes necessitated to fit the song structure and beats. Sometimes they were topical edits negotiated between me and the producer. Often they were edits I discovered had occured when the producer was reworking the track (parts just end up cut and its part of the process). I had been edited in school as a writer, but getting your personal poetry edited into a more musical format by someone who is not a poet can be heart-wrenching. It can also be beautiful when it creates a new composition you had never thought of. The true power of collaboration requires sacrifice of both parties egos on some level.
I continued hosting independent curatorial projects called D.Verz events from 1998-2003. During periods of day job unemployment they were held monthly. I began hosting 12 hour music and art events on summer and winter solstice which continued sporadically after D.verz was set aside. I hosted my first event before my daughter was born in 1994 at a art house movie theater on Samuell at Grand Ave called the Major Theatre. The owners let me pick double features from their black and white reels and showed them at midnight if I agreed to promote them. I made xerox flyers and stapled them up around town. I was going to raves thrown by a group called Kind Family who was looking for a new venue. I told Clint I had a venue they could pursue on the condition that I never be asked to pay to get in and got a plus one guest.
It was a mistake to have more people in that space than the occupancy allowed. There is a special "silver" chemical applied to movie screens that is destroyed when touched (science). Dancers put sweaty hands on screens ruining their use for viewing purposes and it is a deep regret to me as a film lover who still has a collection of 8mm celluloid. I was young and didn't know any better at the time. I asked the owner each week at the rave to come give me a 5 minute warning before he would screen one of my favorite Douglas Fairbanks Jr. silent films from 1916 about the hedonistic "Detective Coke Ennyday" (definitely not a role model). It was during a viewing of this comedy short that my neighbor Reid Manderville (RIP) introduced me (his girl best friend) to his guy best friend, the other partner in Kind Family (Mike, my exhusband and father of my daughter). Mike wouldn't have anything to do with me at first because he was seven years older than me, but I pursued him and we organized some amazing events together bringing in Steve Lawler, Derrick Carter and Afrika Bambaataa to name a few. We also created a smart, beautiful, love child together. He and I had similar birthmarks on our opposing thighs, the shapes fit together like jigsaw pieces.
I kept journaling and writing, but did not sing while I was with my husband for some reason. I didn't pick up a mic again till I was at a party in the studio of Kenny Withrow, guitarist for grammy winning Edie Brickell's old band. Matthew P. was singing and I brought him a martini from my porta-bar. He handed me the mic and I suddenly remembered, "ooooooh yeah I can sing."
https://soundcloud.com/hepkatmama/wait-for-it
I remember that lesson because I know now if I don't have a song in my heart, it probably means I have changing to do.
Writing and art often intertwine in my life. I began managing the Plush Gallery downtown, after bringing a D.verz Event to the space. Randall Garrett let us host weekly poetry open mics that I co-hosted with Shawn Richburg aka Mustafa al-Laylah. We read poetry, had musical interludes and played surrealist writing games like exquisite corpse. It was wonderful to give new writers a platform to share in public for the first time and wonderful to meet established writers as well.
Years later, I was part of an art noise collective of performance artists called Binary Sound Machine who played at several galleries around town like the MAC, Texas Theatre and the very first Aurora Art Festival at Old City Park. I got to play clarinet in public for the first time since high school band and read poems over the music.
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Binary Sound Machine at first Aurora Event at Old City Park as part of the Cedars Open Studios Tour, photographed by Israel Denis |
Val Curry (gearhead and knob twiddler) was a great creative friend who invited me to play with him, Mary Benedicto (keys, video synth), Robert David Reedy (flutes & percussion), Sam England (guitar and accordion) and several other rotating artist sound performance guests like Randall and Jeff Parrott. Binary Sound Machine was known for improvisational music and abstract video projection that often included a box of children's musical toys and percussion instruments that were passed out to the audience members so that they could interact and make the moment happen. It was a deliberate destruction of the 4th wall, well except the time we played in Houston and there was a literal wall between us and the audience (see below) lol.
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| Binary Sound Machine at Box13 in Houston photo by Sam England |
I still try to read at Mad Swirl (now at The Overpass Nightclub in xpo park or found online) and Poets on X+ (now at Lucky Dog Books) as often as I can. Both are uncensored but still moderated and full of wonderfully talented poets and storytellers both young and old, all bringing their experiences and methods to share. Sometimes with the right group of poets you get the energy of a pentecostal revival, only without the religion. I'm pretty happy with this crew of laid back, like-minded, hyperverbal writers and friends. No one there says "you talk too much," instead they hoot and holler like they are feeling it.
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| cosmic kismet trigger effect at ant colony gallery photo by scott wayne mcdaniel |
I write for myself primarily. There are film treatments, including a long form improvisations short that we filmed over a 3 day period with 3 cameras (super 8 and vhs-c). called 24/7-11 it follows a group of people in a van all the way around beltline stopping only at 7-11's and parks. ideally the film should be projected simultaneously on 3 projectors and shown in one room as an immersive environment. There is a lot of work to do digitizing this project for modern formats.
my body of work also includes researched essays, critical art reviews, and cookbook editing projects. I write unapologetically and often, without reason or need for excuse. I choose my topics because I love them. Sometimes those topics are super personal and other times I feel like someone out there could get a happy connection if I shared it with them. How often have I read something mind-blowing by an author where it changed my pov for the better?
William Blake, William Gibson, William Faulkner,
Anais Nin, Jim Morrison, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde,
Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, carl sagan,
Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey, Castaneda, Don Miguel Ruiz,
kafka, hunter s. thompson, tom robbins, vonnegut, gaiman,
omar khayyam, kahlil gibran, lao tzu
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| visual art by suza kanon "for the love of faulkner" in the private collection of Christos and Lori Polemenakos |
I have a love affair with physical media, both collecting and creating. As a kid i collected rare first editions. I got a 100 year old 4 volume set of kipling at a flea market which included jungle book and I was hooked. I bought my grandmother's 8mm projector and celluloid reels at age 12. mom brought home a typewriter when her office made the change to computers when i was in junior high and the writing just flowed from then. I had always been a scribbler in notebooks. Getting in trouble for making my script too fancy in 1st grade. Noticing I could copy anyone's handwriting in 4th grade led to an interest in calligraphy. Writing has always been second nature, something soothing. Writing happens for me every day in some form or another and I try to make the very most of each opportunity. Whether it is writing a note to my brother and arguing on the internet. Often those argument are cut and pasted into drafts for later essays in my blog to give me enough time to research and source what I have to say. Every so often I am invited to be the feature poet at an event or asked to record for music projects, it is delightful creative exercise. Even as i write essays for school, I tend to choose topics I have been researching and wanting to spend time to write out anyways.
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| suza at chinati in marfa. unaltered photo with no filter, taken by docent in 2005. |
