Wondermentalist

If you weren’t there I want to tell you who was and what they were like. If you were there I want to remind you and tell you where you can hear more.

The evening kicked off with me chuntering on by way of warm up, and I admit I had no idea what I was on about or where I was going with any of it, until I remembered to infotain the audience with the backstory of Empath Man and perform a new scene where he is commissioned by the police chief to try and bust a cult. I’m going to blog Empath Man later and ask for feedback. God knows I need it.

Things picked up a bit here, I like to think, and then I introduced Jo Walton and Graham Macy, who are Nomad Shuffle. Nomad Shuffle haven’t been going long enough to have a web presence of any description – their Traydio presence will be their first output and upload – but if you type “Nomad Shuffle” into Google you get a link to a blog called The Inevitable Deterioration of A Good Person which I found diverting for a (short) while.

Next up, Beryl the Feral, most excellent slam winning performance poet, had just arrived back from Whitstable (where she’s been commissioned to make a new interventional poetry-based work for the Whitstable Biennale). Nevertheless she was composed and wonderful. Her set will be up on Traydio very soon, meanwhile sneak a preview here (click on “live recording”). Beryl the Feral has a self-published cd and two small paperback collections: ‘Poims And Other Stuff For Lovely People’ and ‘Got Poims?’ and it was gratifying afterwards to see a small cluster of persons gathered round her making poetic purchases.

[Which reminds me we must get a ‘merchandise’ table for the next wondermentalist cabaret. And someone to ‘mind’ it. Anyone interested please let me know…]

There followed cameo appearances from Stephen Park, Jackie Juno and Nathan Filer. These also went very well indeed.

Stephen Park is an artist as well as a comedian and poet. Visit his website, it’s great. Look at his drawings. Read interesting facts about him. They are, truly, interesting. What intrigued me after the show, when people said nice things (very nice things) about Stephen’s appearance, was that they referred to him as “the man who took things out his bag”, a reference not to his actual performance but to his introduction where I described the first time I saw him, in Exeter. I hope Stephen will not only return to do a longer set at the Wondermentalist Cabaret, but bring his bag, take things out of it, and talk about them with the candour, insight and quirky perspicacity (quirspicacity) that is his trademark.

Jackie Juno spoke to us in different voices. A multi-cultural event in her own right, she blurred the boundaries between nations and peoples till we didn’t know which way was east, west or Abergavenny. Later Jackie was to win the Dead Poets’ Slam on behalf of Kabir, but that’s another blog posting. Jackie is our headline act on January 25th. Come early and get a seat quite near her. You can also catch her online here.

Nathan Filer has been described as a “comic genius of insatiable libido and lyrical elasticity” and I would happily have introduced him as such, only he feels he’s outgrown that persona and anyway was intending to perform a more tender “I’m on my holidays and my girlfriend’s watching” poem, so I described him instead as a “troubled former comic genius with an all too easily satisfied libido and a quality of brittle lyricism, who occasionally shows a poignant glimpse of the talent that once was his.” At least I tried to. I stumbled so much over the intro I may as well not have bothered. Nathan made witty reference to my earlier attempt to sort the audience into dog/cat, optimist/pessimist, optimistic cat/pessimistic dog/pessimistic cat/optimistic dog type people. To be honest it reminded me of my We and My Shadow poem podcasted on Traydio last month, but Nathan wasn’t to know this. He then gave us an all-too-brief glimpse of his lyrical elasticity, but rest assured he’ll be back for an extended set in the New Year. He promised. His website by the way is called www.lyricalelastic.com - it was down for essential maintenance when I went for a look/listen, but meanwhile you can visit his myspace site. Did I mention Nathan is a prize-winning film-maker? No, there’s only so much you can take in one go isn’t there?

The first half ended with Classical Hindustani vocalist Pooja Angra a noted singer trained in classical music and a regular performer for the All India radio and Indian television network. Pooja’s presence at the inaugural Wondermentalist Cabaret was quite a coup for us and I was delighted with the rapturous reception she received. You can hear more of her here on YouTube, performing with tabla player Madan Rana. Pooja was a real hit and we very much hope she can be persuaded to return some time in the New Year.

The first half ended with me saying thank you to everyone and not setting a competition (as I’d originally intended) because we’d overrun by twenty minutes. As has this post. It was meant to be two hundred words, nine of them “marvellous” with four “splendid”s and a “magnificent”.

You might expect anything that caused you to have just one hour’s sleep, the night before your dawn flight abroad, to be irritating, unpleasant and upsetting. But you’d be wrong. The reason for my late, short yet thoroughly enjoyable, sleep-deprived night was the Wondermentalist Cabaret, the hugely original and massively entertaining brainchild of our poet-in-residence Matt Harvey.

Based around poetry (Matt’s most obvious specialite de la maison), the evening - the first, but certainly not the last, if the audience have anything to do with it - of fun and frivolity was also deep and meaningful, when and where necessary. Clearly, in the age of “witty banter”, popularised by the likes of Top Gear, Dave TV and “Have I Got
News for You?”, there’s a hunger for intelligent humour, and Matt’s hand-picked squad of entertainers left us as well-fed, actually stuffed, as a proper Christmas dinner. I was definitely struggling to find room for another wafer-thin giggle, let alone another belly-laugh.

“What was so good about it?” you might ask. So if you are (and anyone not wanting to know the result, should look away now), I’ll tell you. Matt’s secret weapon of mass de-construction, when it comes to a good night out, is his combination of modesty, charm and generosity. He’s modest and generous to share the stage with others with no fear of being bettered (though that’s hard to imagine, with his unique contribution to perfomance poetry). And he’s charming enough to get several great performers and a couple of hundred guests in the same room for an event no one has heard of, just a few days before Christmas when everyone is supposed to be too busy.

The added combination of Matt’s hosting, linking and sharing, with “locally-sourced” poets and comedians (in fact, all were both) with a “Dead Poets’ Slam” - scooped incidentally by a mercifully fresh and feminine-looking Kabir - was, as it turned out, the way to win the hearts of the Totnes crowd who laughed with, and it has to be said, at each other. This crowd, many standing for over two hours, was definitely high on the holistic hormone that Matt calls “Totnesterone”, which filled the air and opened their chakras to much seasonal merriment.

Take a look at the line-up (www.wondermentalist.com) to get an idea of Matt’s unassuming grasp of what it takes to re-invent the “variety” genre. And take on board the fact that it was almost a complete sell-out within minutes of the doors opening as most tickets were nabbed in advance. This, all thanks to Matt’s local popularity as well as his vision, skill and dedication to performance poetry and giving people something really good to marvel and laugh at. The Wondermentalist Cabaret is a clearly and quickly a winning formula for all poetry punters, gag-guzzlers and avid appreciators of novel and unpredictable live entertainment.

Well done Matt - in every way the original Wondermentalist.

The next Wondermentalist Cabaret will take place on Friday 25th January, again at it’s ‘home’ venue - The Seven Stars in Totnes. Get your ticket quick!

The podcast will follow - stay tuned at www.wndfl.com

The first ever Wondermentalist Cabaret was a big success. Everybody said so. It must be true…

In my last post I mentioned topical poems and how difficult it is to find a suitably topical topic. Probably my best-received topical poem was in the week the container ship MSC Napoli ran aground off the coast of Dorset and Branscombe Beach became a place of brazen scavenging.

Branscombe Police officers patrolled the beach to prevent unopened containers from being broken into and closed all roads leading into the village. They also handed out forms so people could report what they had taken to the Receiver of Wreck. (This must be done within 28 days, otherwise they are committing an offence.) Believe it or not this didn’t make much of a difference and most of the 50 BMW motorbikes among the containers were never recovered.

Branscombe Beach

Where looters and polluters coincide

Branscombe Beach

Where Beamer bikes are washed up by the tide

Saved from the sea’s spray

Shoved onto e-bay

More recently I was on Saturday live duty when the case of the unfortunately-named teddy bear was headline news. I felt it was incumbent on me to address the topic poetically, but to do so with tact and sensitivity. And brevity. My first thought was a list of famous bears, e.g.

Paddington, Pudsey, Winnie the Pooh

Tessie, Barney, Yogi, Boo Boo,

Lars, Fozzie, Sooty and Soo

Smokey, Rupert, Huggy, Baloo

even Aloysius

with hindsight

would do

and that would be enough, or maybe leave off the Aloysius bit and go to:

But the bear of the moment with unlooked-for fame

Is the bear over there, the bear with no name.

Not subtle, sensitive or tactful enough, so back to the drawing-board and a version of teddy bear’s picnic:

If you go down to the woods today

You’ll get a bit of a surprise

If you go down to the woods today

No need to go in disguise

 

For every bear that ever there was

Is gathered there this morning because

Today’s the day the Ursine Secular Society (soft section)

Stage a peaceful sit-down protest to express mounting dismay at the state of the grown-up world today…

(Thank you - now get out of our woods)

Still not sure. I phoned to run my thoughts by the producer said she’d prefer it if I didn’t cover the whole delicate teddy bear thing and I said Oh go one, and she said, I’d rather you didn’t, and I said, But I’d be embarrassed not to, and she said, I can live with you being embarrassed, Matt. And I thought, ah, yes, I may have lost perspective here…

So I looked at what else was in the news. The Labour party receiving donations from David Abrahams via a proxy donor was being presented as scandalous and sleazy. And irksome for the Prime Minister.

I remembered a stranger danger poster I’d seen – “A stranger is someone you don’t know. Most strangers are nice, but some are nasty and want to hurt children.” – and I wrote:

Donor Danger

Remember, members:

You can’t tell a real donor from a proxy donor

Just by looking at them.

If a strange donor approaches you

And you’re not sure if they’re a real donor

Or a proxy donor

Yell:

“I do not want your donation”

If they say:

“Well, it’s your loss”

Tell them:

“Rather that than make my Prime Minister cross”

And this would do, it would just have to do, then just before bedtime I saw a news flash that Evel Knievel had died. And I knew the best thing, under the circumstances, was to write a little encomium for him. Because he was very brave and extravagantly foolhardy – we loved him at my school, the boys did anyway. It felt like his was the kind of fame any of us could achieve if we were fearless, sequinned shameless enough.

 

Showman, frontman, stunning stuntman

In a tight white leather jumpsuit

 

He knew triumph and disaster

He knew bandages and plaster

 

Celebrated, sequinned, scarred

Evel flew, and landed, hard

 

So rev the revs, the engine roars

Knievel leaps, Knievel soars

 

Let’s leave him freeze-framed in the air

His name synonymous with Dare

 

They called him ‘Elvis on a motorbike’

Ladies and gentlemen, Evel has left the building