GirlsNQueers First (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} girlsnqueers) wrote,@ 2006-02-23 13:37:00 |
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Lisa King Audio: Pass It On
I put up a simple page of MP3s I have of the late Lisa King winning an Amazon Super Slam at http://users.rcn.com/ngender/lisaking The first four of these tracks are actually on MySpace which you can go to directly at http://www.myspace.com/lisakingaudio. You can either stream or download the MP3s at MySpace. The first track will automatically start playing when the page loads, which is a little eerie. I know that those of you who knew Lisa and her work will be going to the site to listen, but I also urge those of you who have never heard Lisa's work to go too. The poems are a decade (or more) old, but they still hold up. The tracks also give you a good idea of what a vital, funny presence Lisa was on stage even when she wasn't performing poetry. Please tell your friends to go to the site and listen too. As I say in the accompanying note on both sites, Lisa really wanted her name and her work known.
There's a famous quote that likens a person's death to a library burning to the ground. That quote is particularly apt for writers. Lisa King's death makes me acutely aware of what a piss-poor job most of us do of preserving our work, especially those of us who have a backlog of unpublished work. We need to edit and organize it (either once every six months or once a year) and publish it independently, even in a very limited edition. I have been very bad about doing this, but now I'm really going to make an effort. Writer/performers should also make audio of some of their best performances. I know many of us have videos of ourselves performing, but because decent lighting and editing of video is tricky, listenable audio is a lot easier to make than watchable video. Don't record everything: a director whose name escapes me said that the age of Super 8 film had more interesting home movies than the video age because film was expensive and people used it only for the true highlights of their lives. He was right. So if you are doing a performance you think might be special, hire someone to plug audio equipment into the sound system to record it and to then edit out the extraneous bits. Hire someone whenever you have a good show coming up. Again, having just a few copies yourself is better than nobody in the world having any copies at all.
The original cassette off of which I took Lisa's poems was damaged so that part of one of Lisa's poems and three from other performers aren't on it anymore. I gave away a whole lot of these cassettes to audience members at a March 2000 Super Slam. If you have a cassette labeled The Amazon Super Slam 12/28/96 I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at this address. Thanks.
I put up a simple page of MP3s I have of the late Lisa King winning an Amazon Super Slam at http://users.rcn.com/ngender/lisaking The first four of these tracks are actually on MySpace which you can go to directly at http://www.myspace.com/lisakingaudio. You can either stream or download the MP3s at MySpace. The first track will automatically start playing when the page loads, which is a little eerie. I know that those of you who knew Lisa and her work will be going to the site to listen, but I also urge those of you who have never heard Lisa's work to go too. The poems are a decade (or more) old, but they still hold up. The tracks also give you a good idea of what a vital, funny presence Lisa was on stage even when she wasn't performing poetry. Please tell your friends to go to the site and listen too. As I say in the accompanying note on both sites, Lisa really wanted her name and her work known.
There's a famous quote that likens a person's death to a library burning to the ground. That quote is particularly apt for writers. Lisa King's death makes me acutely aware of what a piss-poor job most of us do of preserving our work, especially those of us who have a backlog of unpublished work. We need to edit and organize it (either once every six months or once a year) and publish it independently, even in a very limited edition. I have been very bad about doing this, but now I'm really going to make an effort. Writer/performers should also make audio of some of their best performances. I know many of us have videos of ourselves performing, but because decent lighting and editing of video is tricky, listenable audio is a lot easier to make than watchable video. Don't record everything: a director whose name escapes me said that the age of Super 8 film had more interesting home movies than the video age because film was expensive and people used it only for the true highlights of their lives. He was right. So if you are doing a performance you think might be special, hire someone to plug audio equipment into the sound system to record it and to then edit out the extraneous bits. Hire someone whenever you have a good show coming up. Again, having just a few copies yourself is better than nobody in the world having any copies at all.
The original cassette off of which I took Lisa's poems was damaged so that part of one of Lisa's poems and three from other performers aren't on it anymore. I gave away a whole lot of these cassettes to audience members at a March 2000 Super Slam. If you have a cassette labeled The Amazon Super Slam 12/28/96 I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at this address. Thanks.
