GAS Featured Poet, Musician and Sound Engineer: JC Roden

 

RC Roden is a musician, poet and sound engineer.

BE:  You’re a bit of a mystery man to me. You suddenly seemed to appear on GAS with very good videos with music which you’ve created. You say your a sound engineer. Tell us about that. What does that entail?

JC: Sound engineers work in film, television and theatre. They record the sound, for example the individual instruments of a band, they mix it, they add effects and ensure a good

balance. Therefore you need a lot of technical knowledge and experience but - above all – a feeling for the music.

I started out in theatre, worked with musicians, went into film and finally back to theatre. Nowadays I produce my own music. I use software instruments, digital effects and a digital

audio work station, which also allows video insertion and editing. All this fits on a laptop. A lot has changed in this profession, but you still need the experience, the feeling - and much passion.

How I came to GAS is easy to tell.
I used to say “rather hell freezes over and becomes an ice rink before I go to Facebook”. But I was looking for an online platform for my videos and YouTube turned out to be too

unspecific. Then a musician friend of mine told me about the many art groups on Facebook. He specifically mentioned the GAS - group and I am happy he did. I have discovered many

wonderful artists from all over the world in this group and had the pleasure of working together with some of them. I appreciate that very much.

Killing Machine (Messiah) by RC Roden

BE:   When I first “met” you you were working in Germany but you live in Greece.  Do you travel to different countries for sound engineering jobs or just back and forth to Germany?

JC: As a young sound engineer, I traveled extensively on tour and had the pleasure of seeing many countries and meeting many interesting artists. For example, I was on the road with West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and did technical support for various bands and theater productions. To be honest, that would be too exhausting for me today. Working on tour means 10-12 hours work a day plus the traveling (and the parties). That's great if you're 25 or 30, but I'm 60 now and prefer a slightly healthier life - and the romantic dinners with my wife..

By the way, it's the other way around (unfortunately). I live and work in Berlin, but I travel to Greece whenever I find the time.

BE:  Do you work with anyone who will hire you as a sound engineer or do you have a special area where you work?  I remember you mentioned working with a puppet theatre?

Heimathafen (c) Frederic Schweizer

JC:  Oh yes, the puppet theatre in Berlin Neukölln, it's in my neighborhood. Very charming and lovingly furnished. They do children's theater, but also a lot for adults. I attended a "Faust" show a few weeks ago and met the owners. Very nice people. We chatted over a bottle of wine and got to the topic of Dylan Thomas (of course). Then we (I..) started fantasizing about how Under Milkwood could be staged as a puppet show, with music and a good sound design. To cut a long story short: I'm thinking about it...  By the way, on the same street as the puppet theater is another theater where I worked for over 10 years, the Heimathafen Neukölln. It is over 100 years old and heritage listed, also very charming and beautiful. Concerts, readings and theater performances take place here.  If you ever visit Berlin, check out both, they are worth it..

BE: I think you said you were also a poet.  Would you like to share one of your poems with us?

JC: I wouldn´t consider myself as a poet. I write a lot of texts, whether they can be described as “poetic” in any way is up to the reader. But I´m happy to share the lyrics of my new video

 with you guys, and you´ll find out for yourself...

Paradise Lost or: The End Of The Line by RC Roden

The valleys passed by in the blink of an eye, the mountains touched the moon
and one with the mountains, the moon and the stone on which he walked, the merchant looked up to the sky, but - he found no solace in it

The many summers he had seen on his way to the sea, the clouds rising and the winds rushing down, the voices that had circled, the gazes that had embraced him,
All this led him now to the end of the line
 
Carefully he examined the withering fields of memory whose fruits he hoped to find in the water, like the light of the sun that multiplied and dissolved there,

that spoke of memory as of a woman in labour with wide open eyes

and of her child as of a ghost

 

One day, before the next life or after the last love, he would think again of the mountains, of the roots of the earth and the misty candles of imagination

where seconds ago a heart had beaten in his breast,

where a single imagined syllable had unleashed a torrent of words inside him

and a single step had led to a half-empty, half-finished paradise.

And he, who dreamed the world in flames,

and kept a double-tongued fairy tale between his lips,

which asked and answered,

at the same time, with the same voice,

which once exposed, twice took a new shape,
He, who incessantly mocked the song of birds, the fear of the blind on the

pavements, and the tales of day and night, of brotherhood and freedom..

He - suddenly stood by the sea

and spread his arms

The merchant opened his eyes, he was standing in the middle of the city

He stared at the neon lights in which the moon was fading

He listened to the sound of the surf dying away in the din of traffic,

and for a last time a wave rose,

high as a mountain,

and smashed on the pavement of the street.

“If you're running out of time”, said the merchant, “buy as much of it as you can....”

He heard himself laughing and time

gave answer.

***

I originally wrote this text in German, in 1992. The war in former Yugoslavia began and I got more and more the impression that madness rules the world. That's why I started writing, maybe to get rid of it.

100 years ago, after the first world war, William Butler Yeats wrote the line "The darkness drops again" in one of his poems. Many wars were to follow. Today it´s the one in Ukraine, nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. I'm still writing, but the new lyrics are similar to the old ones. 

More than 30 years after the first words I wrote, madness still reigns and darkness drops again. Still, I have hope.  I may not believe in humanity, but I believe in the love and the

power of the individual human being. I can see it, everywhere and every day.

I see it in the eyes of the noisy children on the playground in front of my house and in the smiles of their mothers. I see it in the old couple from the house next door still walking down the street hand in hand after 50 years of marriage. I see it in my wife's empathy when she talks about her social work and in my best friend's passion when he talks about his art.

So, the Darkness may drop, but we we are prepared.

In my Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas, art by Belinda, video and music by RC Roden.

GAS Featured Poet, Artist and Musician: Joan Borland

Meet Joan Borland, if you haven't already.  She's a most unique and unusual talent who has learned to survive through art. When life gave her lemons she made a kaleidoscope! 

In Joan's own words:

As far back as I can remember I was scared and tuned myself out of an angry noisy family life distracting myself by making things.

In the trauma my 4 yr old self was going through I turned to objects instead of people. 

I searched for found objects that 'spoke' to me.

Rarely did anyone speak to me without anger in my family. 

I found a stone shaped like a nose I kept in my pocket I rubbed for comfort. 

I found a big, round 60's button I talked into as if it were a telephone.

I felt so scared and alone. 

I improvised to stay alive. 

I did not know what 'improvised' meant at 4 yrs of age.

I only knew of an awful feeling that stopped me breathing  normally would stop if I distracted myself enough. 

I didn't know these awful feelings were panic attacks. 

I did not know my mind was under attack from emotional neglect. 

I did not know at 4 yrs of age I was keeping my emotional and spiritual life alive by seeking communion with found objects.

 

I was never told I was loved. 

I did not know what love was.

My love showed itself by rescuing animals, birds in distress; I know I now was rescuing myself. 

I did not know these actions were love. 

At school an art teacher asked the class to paint self portraits. 

I painted myself as Mr Spock. 

I identified with Mr Spock as I had no self identity. 

I was punished for this and didn't paint figuratively again. 

I stopped painting anything 'til I was 30 yrs of age.

I lost a baby. 

The pain was too deep to write about so I turned to painting although I had never painted since school. 

I painted the spirit of my lost baby in the art I was beginning to create.

I'm sure me painting specifically spiritually brought a baby to me that did not die. 

When my son was born I stopped painting. 

My accidental spell of beckoning a child to me had worked and I didn't need to paint anymore. 

I didn't paint again until I painted a painting for my son's 18th birthday.

The English teacher I had at school wasn't like the art tracher. 

I was unruly and cheeky and he spoke to me instead of berating me in front of the whole class. 

He asked the class to write either a piece of prose or poetry about fog. 

I had been writing poetry as soon as I learned to write and thought  everybody wrote poetry. 

Poetry for me was easy so I wrote a poem for the writing exercise. 

When the English teacher came back to hand the class their marks for their writing about fog he said he had never given a nine and a half out of ten to any pupils writing and would the pupil who he had given that high mark to stay behind as he wanted to talk to them about their writing.

I was a noisy member of a group of girls the English teacher called 'The Bridge Club', and I was totally embarrassed that it was me the teacher had given the highest mark in the class to. 

I was 13 years of age and the poem I wrote about fog was called 'Smog Claustrophobia'.

I stayed behind and was anxious and perplexed. 

I didn't know what I had hidden in the poem the English teacher would understand. 

He asked me if I had copied the poem from somewhere. 

I replied with an indignant 'No!'

He asked me to bring in other poems for him to look at. 

I did this and he went about marking all the poems I had brought in for him with a nine and a half out of ten.

He told me I had a gift

He told me to keep writing. 

I would have kept writing anyway as writing is a part of me I need to function every day as much as an ear or a tooth.

I have becoming my writing which I rarely draft and is as natural to me as breathing. 

The same thing happened when I began to paint again. 

I've never written or painted with any idea of how things will turn out.

With writing I just start off with a word or line that has come to me and go from there. 

With painting I just make a mark and everything flows from there.

I can write songs, but I prefer to freestyle to let the words find me. 

I have never attempted to get any of my work published. 

I don't really know why this is. 

When I was a working artist exhibitions came to me; I did not chase them.

I've had to think about this as Belinda is going to put my work forward for publication. 

I had no family I could relate to. 

My family didn't try to relate to me. 

I was viewed as an outsider. 

I didn't know I was developing into an artist. 

My poetry, art, music, and songs are my family now. 

I cannot be separated from any of them. 

I did not draft this piece of writing either. 

The alchemy that turns feeling into poetry, art, and song elevates you from your insanity. 

The world sees me as mad, sad, bad; my art shows I am not of that world of judgement. 

I am my art and my world is art; the rest is gravy.

 

GAS Featured Poet and Musician: Suchoon Mo

 

Suchoon Mo, Korean Army veteran, lives in the semiarid part of Colorado.   He  came to the US under sponsorship of an US Army war veteran with Bronze Medal with Valor.   He pursued higher education and received his Ph.D. in psychology from University of Pennsylvania.  He is a professor emeritus of Colorado State University, Pueblo.    He is the author of a number of scholarly monographs and research articles dealing mostly with time perception and time perspective.    His poetry and music composition appear in Seattle Star, Fishfood Magazine, Kissing Dynamite,Jonah Magazine, Modern Literature, Ephemeral Elegy, North of Oxford, Scarlet Leaf Review, Literary Nest, Modern Literature, Modern Poets Magazine, Snake Skin, Dissident Editions, Aji Magazine.   And others.  Both in music and poetry, he tends go on opposite direction of modernism.    In fact, his first two poems in English were published along with a poem by William Carlos  Williams in "East and West" in India in 1959, a few years after he left Korea and arrived in the US as a war veteran.

 

Ballad Of War

 

an old requiem
is my serenade
I no longer sing

 

rusted machine guns
buried mines
they are mute

 

deep in the mountains
far in time since gone
beyond and beyond

 

memory does not age
it only fades away
to the place where I was once

In The Paradise

 

in the middle of the desert
there is a kingdom

 

in the middle of the kingdom
there is a casino

 

in the middle of the casino
there is a chapel

 

in the middle of the chapel
there is a casket

 

the casket is empty
you are in the paradise

 

Serenade

 

one gray autumn day
it was raining

 

there was a railroad station
long abandoned since

 

she stood there alone
wet and cold

 

the train left
I never saw her again

 

I am now old
and she was young

 

 

 

A Mantra

under a full moon
one solitary monk
recites a mantra
in a temple

under a full moon
one thousand frogs
recite a mantra
in a pond

 

 

 

Keep Going

leave the temple behind
leave the cemetery behind

keep going

a stranger in a strange land
you have come this far

keep going

find the place far away
where you died once

keep going

 

 

 

Two Shadows

two shadows
on the road
going somewhere
or elsewhere

side by side
close together

one is mine
the other one is yours
isn't it?

going somewhere
or elsewhere
or nowhere

 

 

Serenade No 3 - Suchoon Mo, 

Art: Mikahil Nesterov

GAS Featured Painter, Composer, Poet and Pianist: David Thomas Roberts

 

DavidThomasRoberts.com

Be:  Where were you raised and where do you live now?  I see a lot of “ragtime” videos and you post a lot of pictures of barns and country settings.  I was wondering how much your location might have colored your music and art?  How much do you feel your family has influenced your style of playing?

David:  I grew up in Jackson County, Mississippi, in the southeastern corner of the state, very near the Alabama state line. I count the village of Kreole as my hometown, though it was annexed by Moss Point in my teens, which I’ve always regretted. It was a world of savanna remnants and piney clusters, of our cousins’ little stores, of the Finn church and the forest just beyond, of the rude dreaminess of Bayou Cumbest, and the ongoing clamor of the paper mill, that destination of log trains clacking through the night. I was deeply affected by landscape and the nuances of place from very early in my memory. In addition to the pine thickets and buttercup savanna flourished much river swamp sporting the usual sensuous hardwoods, such as sweet bay magnolia, red bay and black gum. The Escatawpa River was nearby, and the mighty Pascagoula itself only a bit further. The mystery inherent in this heavy, ultra-green world became a central theme in my consciousness, and would remain a leering force in my work. I’ve carried the intrigue of structures pressed upon by the darkness of timber throughout my locale-obsessed life, reveling in its irreplaceable thrills from the Piney Woods of the Gulf South, to the Missouri Ozarks, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, just to mention the regions exerting the most intense hold upon me. 

I now live with my wife, Teresa, in Walnut Creek, California, in the east Bay Area, and have for some years.  We’ve known each other since our late teens, when we were attending the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Having been in and out of California for much of my adult life, I’ve developed a poetic relationship with much of this territory, too, especially far northern California and the subtly magical California Delta just east of here.  To say that I continue to prioritize a highly reflective, intimate relationship with place barely suggests how deeply influential this factor in my thought continues to be. It drives my longings and the lyricism of my sanity, and I daily dwell upon it as I endeavor to decide where an archive/museum devoted to my work should be created. 

"The Window" by David Thomas Roberts

Be:  Even with your unlimited and eclectic compositions such as “The Window” I hear a ragtime influence.  Are your compositions played exactly the same every time or do you add bits as you play, according to your mood or what you have in mind to express?  

Can others buy sheet music of your compositions or are you completely unique each time you play? 

David: Ragtime came into my life in early childhood, thanks to the late years of the first ragtime revival, which roughly lasted from 1949 to the early ‘60s. I lost contact with it, in effect, for some years, especially as I focused upon painting more than composing from age 9 to 14, after writing my first piece at age 8 (a waltz which I still play in concert!). It reentered my life as I was returning to composition much more intently, thanks to my discovery of the extraordinary music of Charles Ives, who utilized ragtime in his uniquely prescient, visionary, collage-like works. This was also the time when Joshua Rifkin’s first recording of Scott Joplin’s rags appeared on Nonesuch, a project that yanked me onto the path of becoming a ragtime composer and, in the view of many, the most significant one of the second half of the 20^th century and beyond. Ragtime-based composing is but one face of my NeoRomantic language, though perhaps the most revealing, and thoroughly explored one. For me, the piano rag became an affectionate vehicle of lyrical, confessional utterance, a precious vessel for my most vulnerable and trusting expression.  One can’t miss my roots in Romantic piano music in general, or my love of hymns, much popular music and various ethnic expression when hearing such ragtime-based works as “Camille,” “Waterloo Girls,” “Pinelands Memoir,” “Through the Bottomlands,” “Roberto Clemente,” “Nahyr” and dozens of others. The sheer melodic appeal of these pieces as well as their unabridged, yearning expressivity, has much to do with my being disproportionately associated with ragtime to this day, despite the increasing availability of other branches of my musical output. It was as the composer of *Roberto Clemente* in particular that I found at least a cultish, niche recognition while still in my twenties. 

Like most other classical/art music/serious music composers, I greatly value the specificity and precision of scores, and my ragtime-based and other Americana/PanAmericana compositions are no exception. That said, I’m acceptant of very slight embellishments and hints of variation in many works in restrained keeping with the recorded legacies of 19^th and early 20^th century virtuosi such as Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman and Vladimir de Pachmann, and what many of us like to think is the appropriate treatment of Midwestern rags as well, at least on the repeats of strains.

"Waterloo Girls" by David Thomas Roberts

A great many of my piano pieces are published, and are generally available via my website, DavidThomasRoberts.com

Be: Have you been to many countries on concert tours? I saw that you played in Japan.  Do you paint when you travel? Do you feel your music and painting are closely connected somehow, like different expressions of the same ideas?  They both strike me as energetic and “jazzy”.)

David: I’ve performed in Canada, Norway and Japan, but would love to concertize in many other countries, including England and Brazil. I’m friendly with a good many people in Brazil, and am an admirer and interpreter of Ernesto Nazareth. These days I would be gratified to appear far more often here in the States, too.

As for links between visual art and composition, yes, they are deeply intertwined in my psyche; indeed, I’ve often referred to them as facets of the same invention. I’ve been engaged in polymathic expression nearly my entire life, and have relished the interplay between poetry, music and visual art from early on. When asked in the fourth grade what I wanted “to be,” I answered in accordance with what I’d been becoming for a while---“A painter, poet and musician.” By my mid-teens, I was fashioning the essentials to be explored in all three media right up to the present. Even then, my sensibility was in keeping with Kandinsky’s maxim that the purpose of art is to present mystery in terms of mystery, as an encounter with my earlier poems and paintings is likely to suggest.

In the Little Belt Mountains

by David Thomas Roberts

In the Little Belt Mountains lacquered and steered like a lunar galleon

Where ice lore yanks its own banquet into trances

And timber guffaws its prissy way to dream-history

Roars a cosmic tide beyond reckoning

Booming autotelic tales unregistered everlasting

As if treatises and haughty manuals were nothing more than

Bruised brickbats powdered in Butte alleyways,

Sweeping the troposphere in sacred arrogance

Oblivious to sing-song patter and horsepussy foundations

Orating wintergreen fortresses into rocket-jangled archives

Oh!

In the montane bevy of ramrod visions

Lodgepole pine and polestar fed

This jack-o'lantern-hearted glacier-blaster primed for centaur nights

Spikes the prank of oceans in spirit-heat

Rearing to grin from vortex to beer joint like some ascendant pumping station

Thrashing in limitless green-eyed delirium

Tossing Neihart like a frosty infant Jupiter bound

And hugging it back to the spinning wheel of stoves and log spasms

Sure as upland paroxysms grind their stories

And clocks are hummed to testify to green glimmer of night

This the stocking yammer and winter-warmer ongoing

When a continent romances itself to planets

In the cartography of ultimates

In this the book of singing explosions

In the Little Belt Mountains.

Be:  I see a lot of sexual imagery in your poetry and a lot of your paintings.  Is that a conscious or intuitive thing?  (Sometimes it feels there’s something haunting there.)

David: You are so right! It’s surprising that this evident and provocative theme has never been mentioned in earlier interviews with me. It indeed speaks of a haunting that has been with me from earlier than my conscious memory can access, it seems. It was very upsetting to hear about the existence of sex when I was perhaps 9. When I told my mother about this, she uncomfortably confirmed the reality of the reproductive act, and said that she had tried to inform me when I was much younger but had desisted because I became nearly hysterical. Even into early adulthood, I never fully accepted it as a facet of this life that I was certain I could embrace. The tension between being galvanized by eroticism and burdened by disquiet, anguish and rage at its infusion in the world, remains a contorted presence in my consciousness and work.  

Be:  Are you still actively composing, painting and writing.  Have you ever had long periods where you didn’t feel creative? If so, how did you handle that?

David:  Oh, I’m always at work in one medium or another, and prefer to be in the thick of efforts in all media simultaneously. For me, writing, making visual art and composing are not optional actions, but obsessive drives, screamingly visceral needs and purposes.  My sense of rightness, fragile as it is anyway, would be crippled without fidelity to these drives that are the carriers of my very notion of selfhood.  

Be: I suspect you make your living through the arts.  Care to elaborate?

David: What income I’ve ever generated has resulted from my life as an artist. Composition commissions, sales of paintings and drawings, concerts, and sales of recordings and sheet music have provided my income. The only day job I ever had lasted about a week, but fulfilled its purpose---to fund my entering the state chess championship in Natchez in the summer of 1973. As it turned out, this was part of a crucial chain of events, as it led to my meeting a young man whom I would befriend at college three months later and who would soon introduce me to Teresa Jones, the indisputable love of my life. 

These days, the creation of my archive as the world grows increasingly insecure and, for me, inhospitable, is a relentless concern. I continue to hope for a decisive benefactor’s emergence, but accept that I might well be forced to disseminate and promote my work as never before to guarantee the creation of this citadel.  

David Thomas Roberts