FLIN VAN HEMMEN NIGHT!

FLIN (drums)/JON DELUCIA (soprano sax, sruti box)

+ MR. PATRICK OF TALKING STICK (storytelling and guzheng)

+ FLIN (drums)/TODD NEUFELD (guitar)/MYSTERY MAN (piano)

images by Richard Bergeron, text by Jonathan Vincent

Mein Trommel!!  Mein Trommel!!  EEEEEIIIINNNNNNN!!!!  I hear the small boy falling from the stairs.  I see his eyes gazing blindly into mine.  We finish making love in the window far above him.  Then you sit, wait, looking over your notes, grasp at your tie, slowly speak an imaginary list of your friends.  I turn away to find the sardines, the mackerels, the kippers, the clams, the mollusks, the bivalves, the winkles, the food of the ancients, the trilobites, the cans to peel back and suck.  You pack our flowers, placing each one in a small suit of armor.

    The boy has come to his senses.  He scrambles to the the entrance of a small cafe and glares inside, seeing darkly, yet inhaling the air as if his body could carry the entire room into his lungs, suspend it, and cough it out to clearly discern.

    Beyond a long thin blue countertop with a hinged sectioned left open, a small flock of bears in flower print dresses vaguely float about three tables.  They roll around their wide hips, waving their arms in conversation, and tilt their feet from side to side against the black floor.  One carries a large rotting pineapple on top of its head and blankly fingers its scales while laughing at some dry wit.  Another brings her paw to her teeth and yawns discreetly, faintly humming a familiar strain.

    The boy jumps into this one’s arms and claws at her skin.  Taken aback, she swallows him whole.

    The light on the huge stones far outside the city goes grey as the sun fades and now we can hear the cars beyond the trees and we know we still time have time to get to the train.  We go slowly down the boulders.      

small rabbits

deep in your gut

crying for a dying season  

another equinox of new aches 

and folk songs in stoic form 

with firm, dense distractions

and nothing else explodes 

a great sigh.     

It seems we have guests who sought the sight of seeing the things their souls were meant to see. our visionaries, literally v i s i o n a r i e s. Their ears reek of tunes, and vibrations, and sounds of all sorts of kinds. Look at them, just look at them : 

BED OF DADDLE/ ANDREW DRURY

Text by Jonathan Vincent, images by Richard Bergeron.

People keep eating!  Did the stream of gong mucilage slather onto the pot of fire in our face?  Why on earth does the food enter our lives the way we expected it to go into mouths?  They mince your words upon a carcass, scribbling names to identify and thereby make words like when you hear it, you stand inside of it, but it’s not you.  If you beat life into anything, then you’ve invented the world, but why?  The world was made, and you ate a portion of it with instruments attached to your sensation, but why get excited about it?   Despite what they say, I’ve found so many reasons to love you.  Every space within the mesh your skin makes me want to make myself clear to you.  Not like Tom Cruise, but expressed with every possibly tiny gurgle you’ve ever imagined and still in liquid form!  Take a long breath out, until you have emptied, and swallow, then take a bite.  You can sit in chairs now.  You have smelled your first pot of fire, and let’s talk about it!

BED OF DADDLE is…

Michael Evans (above)(drums, percussion)

Gordon Beeferman (above)(piano, synth, organ)

and ANDREW DRURY (solo percussion)…

Some more, or only one, a person.      

FIVE DOLLAR FERRARI/ YOLT

Text by Miriam Atkin, images by Richard Bergeron. 

Dual CD release party for two strange armies backed by the Prom Night record label collective.  This evening was organized by Brad Henkel, billionaire industrialist, conductors’ liberation activist, and innovator of steam-powered steam engine manufacture.  Five Dollar Ferrari and Yolt have been found guilty.

Five Dollar Ferrari (Brad Henkel, Dustin Carlson) makes machines to count the bubbles in your boiling blood.  Heavy duty trumpet bubbles and one missing guitar.

Yolt (Nathaniel Morgan, Dave Grollman,Weston Minissali) does its own exercises right between your thighses.  Up in your limns.  Riding the Tijuana rails. Fundamental downtown sound bringing you the holy motion.

and guests…

DERRICK RUNDGREN/WHY LIE?/KING MARY 

Text by Jonathan Vincent. Photos by our guest and beloved friend, Kacey Anisa, assisted by Chris Becker. Edited and Arranged by Richard Bergeron. See more of Kacey’s work at http://www.kaceyanisa.com/. 

Our beautiful guests : 

Wound down from Chicago, less fast than along the Atlantic, yet more knotted about the crowded cars that brought you for the first time to New York where you rose to fame, petals fallen ill about you.  You married your cousin, playing kissing games with punishment, and came to Papacookie for the crowd.  You wore your special striped gown, now the celebrity favorite on yahoo news.  You plucked the harp.  You saw dresses, sets and machines to play with, ukes, young tubas, mouth pops, nonsense.  And then you lost your head as you sat in a chair with your guitar in a lonely room on a country farm, godzilla and giant cupcakes on the grass outside, singing about turtles.  What a beautiful morning it was, and everyone and their grandmother cried with all of you rolling down the hill and far away.          

DERRICK RUNDGREN (eric unger from chicago)

(objects, slick photography for you)

KING MARY (from oklahoma, bailey stephenson and jerimy logan.  jerimy is doing some housekeeping inside the tent fort)

WHY LIE (aliza simons and dave ruder from new york city)

And…

more of our beloved humanoids: 

Papacookie Flight of the Fancypants: RIC ROYER’S DESPAIR/ALEXANDRA KALINOWSKY SINGS SCHUMANN/ENID ELLEN

Text by Miriam Atkin, photos by Richard Bergeron

This was great because the Belnord management had just issued to all of the doormen a shoot-on-sight mandate for Jonathan’s guests.  No joke! It was posted at the security booth that morning, with a minimalist-type artist rendering of someone who looked just like me—tall, black, with a perfectly round head, nice-broad shoulders and no hands—circled in red with a big slash cutting right though my middle!  I felt this picture stood for all us creative geniuses the world over: oppressed, shadowy, midnight men with inky outerspace where our bodies should be, aiming to answer the nothingness we find at the core of being by turning it into something. And we’re cool so long as there continues to be a whole lot of nothing, but then the powers-that-be are all smiling good naturedly at the avant-garde saying “isn’t that something?” and before we know it there isn’t anything left for us at all. 

But we made it.  Not one shot fired.  Our enchanted attendees were ether itself, wafting through the filigree of the Molten Gates of Something up to Our Heavenly Lord Cookie and in the end the gatekeepers had an uneventful evening.  Which brings us to the night’s theme: ghost bodies. 

 Ric’s oral transmission of the weeping willow’s rheumatism after which we all coughed and slouched in remembrance of when we used to believe that love had anything to do with the living. ( below ) 

Alexandra’s heartbreaking nod to both Clara Wieke (via Schumann) and the ghost of Theodor Uppman, our original Cookie, with Johannes Brahms in the background. (below)

Enid Ellen’s pale and sandy oceanic tones washing up on a misty morning alongside the mother’s body in a whale carcass; glowing angel in a fish. ( below )

More images of the sacred entities that were not harmed by the gate watchers.  We love our guests, friends, newcomers, and hosts. ( below )

HOUSEHOLD TALES / JASON AJEMIAN / JONATHAN WOOD VINCENT

Text by Jonathan Vincent, photos by Richard Bergeron

       This was the third, I think, of Sean Ali’s curated evenings.  He has brought so much beautiful music to Papacookie.  You could too!  Please ask about curating an event here.  Sean improvises, composes, and writes words.  His busy playing schedule places him in the center of the edge of the side of all things happening in the world of bowing tin cans, squeaking bass bridges, etc.  Though, as you will later see, he has an even larger scope of expertise than just this.

       The first act of the night was Jonathan Wood Vincent.  I’m Jonathan Wood Vincent and it would be odd for me to talk about my own performance, so I will.  I played wonderfully.  The warm songs that I brushed gently over the keys brought me to tears.  My effortless voice floated into the aural chasms of each audience member in equal measure, befriending the souls of each person without discrimination, loving their bodies and minds just as tenderly.  When I struck the  first note, the distant din of cars, trucks and buses faded from consciousness.  Perhaps they, too, stopped to listen.  The funny game I played while improvising a song based off of the audience’s suggestions was pure genius.  

        Next, Jason Ajemian played upright bass and sang.  Go see his website:http://jasonajemian.com/  Sean Ali’s intention for this evening was to present songs made by three people who are active in both improvisation and songwriting.  Though Ajemian is highly regarded for his work as an improvising bass player, videographer, and sound designer, he often plays arrangements of traditional songs on both bass and guitar.  On this occasion, he created an underbrush of intermingling strummed and bowed bass lines for his gently strained  tenor voice to peek through.  The sound smelled of a different place than the Upper West Side.  It rolled out like logs on a river or squirrels scrambling through the trees.

Jason Below: 

       Finally, in Household Tales, Sean Ali played agile bass lines and performed suave expressions beneath a band that calls themselves “a Rock N’ Roll band for the Postlapsarian Age”.  They write “songs about truck drivers on the open road, woodsmoke, digging your own grave, escaped lions, Philadelphia, baleful drunks, and pregnant women.”  Other than Sean, Household Tales are the brothers David Redbranch and Will Lea, who write the songs and play guitars, Amos Fisher on clarinet, foot bells, and backing vocals, Lathan Hardy on sax and inspiration, and Tim Shortle on drums.  To me they sound like two bands in one, depending on who is  singing.  David sings the heroic ballads and Will sings the crazed incantations.  They’re a band that I could imagine making songs at any odd hour in any place.  Imagine you’re at a steamy desert militia retreat, or a mountain top clown monastery, or a creepy underground bunker, you turn a corner and there they are, “one step closer to victory”.  Listen:  Here’s their website: http://www.myspace.com/householdtales/

- Jonathan Wood Vincent 

Household Tales Below :

And our esteemed audience :