Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Get Your Kicks

I love a site called LitKicks.com. “Literary Kicks.” All of the content is great, and a feature called “Action Poetry” is a wonderful outlet for obscure poets, part time poets, wannabe poets, and, my own mediocre offerings notwithstanding, some unpublished but highly talented poets.

First open litkicks.com; then go to the upper right and hit the “back,” as in Action Poetry is back! The next screen is always incomplete on my computer, I need to hit refresh to bring up the entire thing. I always have something in the current list, and if you want to go to a complete list of my postings you can click my name.

I am very happy to be amongst the regulars. We comment on each others poems, write poems in response, and engage in general logrolling. Some friendships are developed over time, e-mails are exchanged. It’s a very social experience, for me it is anyway.

So, if you want to read more of my scribblings, this is the place to do it until I can put together my mighty edifice of a super-blog.

10 comments:

Rory Cripps said...

Thanks Fred for the "kicks". I began writing songs at the age of eleven and, thanks to you, I now have of place to deposit some of those musty-old lyrics that I've been carrying around in my head throughout the past forty-three years. But I won't "rat" you out, HA!

Here's one (called "Sit Down Relax Friend")that I wrote when I was fifteen and recorded with my very good friend Petey Infantino in Linda O'Neil's basement (Linda's brother Floyd was the engineer). The song was, originally, a cross between an up-beat version of "People Get Ready" and "He's So Fine", with Alman Brothers-like harmony lead guitar parts. Back in the analogue day, in order to get harmony lead guitar, you either had to overdub or have two or three guitar players. Nowadays a guitarist can plug into a sixty-dollar Boss harmonizer and dial up all the "harmony" he wants. I recently revamped the song into a slower instrumental and spiritual version replete with hand-claps, organ, choir, sax, and strings via a "Sibelius" scoring program and ran it through a Sony "Sound Forge" production program. "Finale" appears to be the standard scoring program used throughout university music departments. I compared "Finale" with "Sibelius" and found Sibelius to be the better of the two. They're both very sophisticated scoring programs, but unless one knows how to write and arrange music for orchestra both of the programs are useless. Both programs provide some pretty good "stock" drum sounds but even at that, I had to write out the drum and percussson parts in order to avoid a "robotic" drum sound. In any event, there's no substitute for the "real thing" and in spite of the sophisticated nature of today's scoring programs, it's hard (as Al Jahn has said) to avoid that "elevator music" quality.

Sit down relax friend
Your troubles will soon end
Time shows right through you
And you know I feel for you
You think that you're peaceful
Well it's a big world here
Don't let 'em fool you
Your kindness can ruin you
Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . .
Rough day at the office
Drank a full pot of coffee
And the three hour lunch break
And the drinkin' I can't take
I wouldn't be you
For only a minute
No I just wouldn't care to
Get stuck what you're into
Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . . Ah . . .

Anonymous said...

Lol, man that was bad! Good thing you didn't quit your day job, Cripps.
Lennon-McCartney sure didn't lose any sleep over you, that's for damn sure-HA!

fred c said...

Now what did I tell you! Be nice! Ed, take a time out! Rory, count to ten!

Rory Cripps said...

Dear "Anonymous" (of Nov. 17 2008):
I agree--the lyrics are bad! But the music is actually quite good and many will attest to that. However I was only fifteen at the time when I wrote the lyrics. Now tell us your excuse for writing all that "humor" crap, at your advanced age, and hawking it over the internet. PLEASE BUY MY OH SO VERY FUNNY CAT AND DOGGY BOOKS--they're marked down to $6.95. . . You sound like Mr. Carvel. Talk about LOL, HA! I can't imagine that an obnoxious dork like you had even one friend in your entire life. It's a shame . . . you probably could have "re-invented" yourself if you started long ago, but it's obviously much too late for the "re-invention" now. I wish you all the best in your decrepitude and I mean that sincerely.

There, Fred: I counted to ten but it didn't work, HA!

Rory Cripps said...

Fred: I've been counting to ten all day long and it's still not working! Any suggestions? Please help! My need for "closure" is now so overwhelming that I'm certain that I won't be able to sleep tonight. The last time that I felt this way, I put a .40 cal. S&W JHP into the screen of the 13" Sony TV that I kept in my garage. It was a nice little TV and I was quite fond of it. But I got that obnoxious motherfucker, on the eleven o'clock news, right in his fucking head. The sacrifice of my 13" Sony TV was well worth it and I slept like a baby that night. But I'm the sanest person that you'll ever come in contact with, Fred, and I'd never do such an outlandish thing. I was merely dreaming and when I woke up the next morning everything was fine, the air was fresh and clean, and there was no trace of gun-powder residue on my face and hands, HA!

fred c said...

Ah! the Elvis solution to television madness! But it does leave a mess, and it's goodbye to a valuable household appliance.

I have to stop now, because I'm experiencing negative ideation about the intersection of guns and some of the people that I see on TV.

Anonymous said...

'Tis a sad little man who vents his frustrations on inanimate objects. I smile at the thought of you shaking your tiny fists in impotent rage! :)
He won. Get over it. Move on.

Rory Cripps said...

At ten feet, the bullet made a nice clean hole (about 1/2")in the screen. But the guts were FUBAR. Even a "whiz" (a double HA! there) of an engineer, by the name of STUNAD, couldn't put the pieces back together again, let alone restore the poor thing to its original inanimate state. Oh what a pity . . . all the inanimacy, in shambles, scattered upon the garage floor . . . plastic fragments embedded in walls.

What is it that you really want, "Anonymous"? What are your hopes and dreams? What are your true desires? Tell me. Arrangements can be made. Your fantasies can, easily, be turned into realities.

He won? Get over it? Move on? Jealousy? Tiny fists? Impotent rage? Those are not my thoughts, emotions, and attributes; they are yours. Stop your projection, Anonymous. Stop your lies. And take off your uniform before it's too late.

Anonymous said...

Calm down, dude... Just bustin' chops, College Point-style.
Would you deny me a little fun in the prime of my decrepitude? :)

fred c said...

Rory! If I lose you, that's about a ten percent drop in readership! Come back, Rory! Come back!

Anonymous doesn't mean it anyway. His doctor told him to take all of his negative ideation on (fill in the blank: his wife; his boss; his children; his body; his career) and direct it to some unsuspecting (almost) stranger on the internet. It's not personal: it's just misguided therapy.