Blog #11

Rives: Performance poet, multimedia artist

Storyteller and poet Rives is the star of the new special "Ironic Iconic America." A regular on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, he's the co-host of the upcoming TEDActive simulcast event in Palm Springs. Offstage, Rives designs and writes pop-up books.

Watch the three performances by Rives and discuss which one you liked the best and why.  Hopefully you are making more of a distinction between language and the art of language, and as such, appreciate what modern writers are now doing with poetry and essays.

Respond to me by Friday, Nov. 4th.
Respond to two other classmates by Monday, Nov. 7th

1.) Slam Poem Link: "Mockingbirds"

http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_remixes_ted2006.html

2.) Slam Poem Link: "If I Controlled the Internet"

http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_controls_the_internet.html

3.) Definition Essay/Poem (?) Link: "4 in the Morning"

http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m.html

While viewing these videos is far more enjoyable than reading them, if for some reason you cannot access these videos on your computer or if you want to read the printed copy, then all three are posted below.


1.) Slam Poem:

"Mockingbirds" by Rives

Mockingbirds are badass.

They are. Mockingbirds -- that's Mimus polyglottos -- are the emcees of the animal kingdom.

They listen and mimic and remix what they like. They rock the mic outside my window every morning. I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring. I mean, if you can talk it, a mockingbird can squawk it. So check it, I'm going to catch mockingbirds. I'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails.

Yeah. And as I drive through a neighborhood, say, where people got-a-lotta, I'll take a mockingbird I caught in a neighborhood where folks ain't got nada and just let it go, you know. Up goes the bird, out come the words, "Juanito, Juanito, viente a comer mi hijo!" Oh, I'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound.

Cruising random city streets, rocking a drop-top Cadillac with a big backseat, packing like 13 brown paper Walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds, and I'll get everybody.

I'll get the nitwit on the network news saying, "We'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis." I'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is. I'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is. I'll get your postman making dinner plans. I'll get the last time you lied. I'll get, "Baby, just give me the frickin' TV guide." I'll get a lonely, little sentence with real error in it, "Yeah, I guess I could come inside, but only for a minute."

I'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning, "It's Raining, It's Pouring." I'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring. I'll get your ex-lover telling someone else, "Good morning." I'll get everyone's good mornings. I don't care how you make them. Aloha. Konichiwa. Shalom. Ah-Salam Alaikum. Everybody means everybody, means everybody here. And so maybe I'll build a gilded cage. I'll line the bottom with old notebook pages. Inside it, I will place a mockingbird for -- short explanation, hippie parents.

What does a violin have to do with technology? Where in the world is this world heading? On one end, gold bars -- on the other, an entire planet. We are 12 billion light years from the edge. That's a guess. Space is length and breadth continued indefinitely, but you cannot buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in America because countries are beginning to eat like us, live like us and die like us. You might want to avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing. There's about 10 million phage per job. It's a very strange world inside a nanotube. Women can talk, black men ski, white men build strong buildings, we build strong suns. The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes, and here we are, right in the middle.

It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn. When all the little mockingbirds fly away, they're going to sound like the last four days. I will get uptown gurus, downtown teachers, broke-ass artists and dealers, and Filipino preachers, leaf blowers, bartenders, boob-job doctors, hooligans, garbage men, your local Congressmen in the spotlight, guys in the overhead helicopters. Everybody gets heard. Everybody gets this one, honest mockingbird as a witness. And I'm on this. I'm on this until the whole thing spreads, with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing, "Hush, little baby, don't say a word, wait for the man with the mockingbird."

Yeah. And then come the news crews, and the man-in-the-street interviews, letters to the editor. Everybody asking, just who is responsible for this citywide, nationwide mockingbird cacophony and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey, California off to me, and they'll offer me a key to the city. A gold-plated, oversized key to the city and that is all I need, because if I get that, I can unlock the air. I'll listen for what's missing, and I'll put it there.

Thank you, TED.

2.) Slam Poem

“If I Controlled the Internet” by Rives

I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well-known actress tell a very well-known interviewer on television, "I'm really getting into the Internet lately. I just wish it were more organized." So -- (Laughter) if I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay, take the money, go to Amazon, buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to, call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language.

If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. Hang a left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good love, and you could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chatting with your pals.

Heck, if I ran the web, you could email dead people.

They would not email you back -- (Laughter) but you'd get an automated reply.

Their name in your inbox -- (Laughter) it's all you wanted anyway. And a message saying, "Hey, it's me. I miss you.

Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy." If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, "I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges." Now follow me, OK?

Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. One, two, three. That links with hotdiggitydog.com. That is my grandfather. They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me -- the guy who usually goes too far. So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis -- (Laughter) so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. I wouldn't need it. I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that -- pop -- I'd go wireless.

Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle/oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot shit, hot shot god.net? I guess it's just like life. It is not a question of if you can. It's, do ya? We can interfere with the interface. We can make "You've got Hallelujah" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. You don't say a prayer. You don't write a psalm. You don't chant an om. You send one blessed email to whoever you're thinking of at dah da la dat da dah da la dat dot com.

Thank you, TED.

3.) Definition Essay/Poem (?) (even I'm not sure what to call this)

“4 In the Morning” by Rives

This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times. The punch line? "On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador." This is a recent cover of New York Magazine. Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies. And this is a song medley I put together --

Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour.

A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from "The Godfather." Coppola's script describes these guys as "exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning."

A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits." After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered, the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians' paste. They worked until four o'clock

A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like in last April's New Yorker magazine, this short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out, "On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began." For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press -- across a lot of different media from a lot of big names. And it made me suspicious. I figured, surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world, really, aren't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it, right? Could it be there is something more going on here? Something deliberate, something secret, and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway? I say, this guy -- Alberto Giacometti, shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note. He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art. Its title -- "The Palace at Four in the Morning -- 1932. Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find. I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it. I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive. No, feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you've got them.

It works a little something like -- this is a recent Google search for four in the morning. Results vary, of course. This is pretty typical. The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, "It's Four in the Morning," three hits for Judi Dench's film, "Four in the Morning," one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Four in the Morning." But what, you may ask, do a Polish poet, a British Dame, a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking?

Well, let's start with Faron Young -- who was born, incidentally, in 1932.

In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth -- which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday.

But he didn't die on Dench's birthday. He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 -- which, incidentally, is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died.

Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this? She has the world's most absolutely watertight alibi. On that very day, December 10, 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning, Faron Young, was giving up the ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, Ms. Four in the Morning -- or one of them anyway -- Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm, Sweden, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. 100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself. Coincidence? No, it's creepy.

Coincidence to me has a much simpler magic. That's like me telling you, "Hey, you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born?" No, not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm, but that does not mean there's not something going on at the highest possible levels. In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see.

Video: We have a tennis court, a swimming pool, a screening room -- You mean if I want pork chops, even in the middle of the night, your guy'll fry them up?

Sure, that's what he's paid for. Now do you need towels, laundry, maids?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait -- let me see if I got this straight. It is Christmas Day, 4 a.m. There's a rumble in my stomach.

Homer, please.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me see if I got this straight, Matt.

When Homer Simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock, but the whole freaking calendar, he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the Baby Jesus. And no, I don't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things, but obviously, I know a coded message when I see one.

I said, I know a coded message when I see one. And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life" from the bookstore here at TED. Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want. Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt. And how far down into it you figure we'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket? Would you believe, about a dozen paragraphs? This is page 474 on your paperbacks, if you're following along: "Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address. My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it."

Sure you were, because you've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you. And then -- three paragraphs later we get this little beauty: "We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time. It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m." Well, how could it have? By his own writing, this man was either asleep, at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase. What happens to American presidents at 0400 on inauguration day? What happened to William Jefferson Clinton? We might not ever know. And I noticed, he's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions.

It could get awkward, right? I mean, after all, this whole business happened on his watch. But if he were here -- he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day, Bill Clinton began a journey -- a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades. In generations. The first since this man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election, way back in a simpler time, way back in 1932 -- the year Alberto Giacometti made "The Palace at Four in the Morning." The year, let's remember, that this voice, now departed, first came a-cryin' into this big old crazy world of ours.