Southpaw Jones – The Pleasurecraft

January 27, 2009

Consider the possibility that you don’t know dick. You might think you do … rather intimately even. Some people might have mistaken you for a dick once or twice. In fact, you might have actually been one at some point or another. Even if you haven’t been a dick, there’s a small chance that your name is Dick. No shame there. Richard sounds a little pretentious anyway … especially if you’re French and put all the emphasis on the back end. If you’re not a dick, there is a (roughly) 50% chance you’re at least attached to one – not necessarily by marriage, but by arteries, erectile tissue, epidermis, and the like. Being attached to a dick doesn’t mean you have to write it love letters. In fact, writing love letters to your pecker is kind of dickish, really. That doesn’t mean you can’t possess some affinity toward it however. After all, if you have a dick, you know that your dick leads you around on some rather exciting escapades. Such adventures are bound to engender a sense of bonding. You might even feel a certain camaraderie with your little downstairs neighbor. After all, you seem to share so much in common. You have the same taste in women … or men. When he’s overworked, you both get really tired. Sometimes he’s awake when you’re asleep. Sometimes he’s asleep when you’re awake. Sometimes he might need a pill to stay peppy. Sometimes he’s so … out there … it’s downright embarrassing. On occasion your dick needs correcting. Like a wayward child, at times he needs to be pointed in the right direction. Some dicks need constant adjustment – not just the dicks on major league pitchers and gangsta rappers but also dicks on big-bellied rednecks in Bermuda shorts and overly curious toddlers. After all, you’re never too young to learn that even though your dick might not always live up to your expectations, he’s always an available and willing playmate. If you’re like most people attached to a dick, you probably feel like you know it pretty well. You’ve spent a questionable amount of quality time exploring its ins and outs. You might even feel like you’re something of an expert on the dick. Well, get over yourself. It turns out that nearly everyone is a specialist on the dick, whether they have one or not. Take FronteraFest’s Dick Monologues, for instance. You might think a show so named would be a veritable sausage fest. Not so. A full nine of the 11 members onstage lack a member themselves (unless, perhaps, there’s an incredible Crying Game plot twist). Can they make up for their dicklessness with oral acumen? Very likely. Members include writers Spike Gillespie, Sarah Bird, Diane Fleming, Robin Chotzinoff, Sarah Barnes, and Marrit Ingman, plus performers and bons vivants Laura Lane, Kristine Kovach, and Jaycee Wilemon. If you feel like you’re missing the meat, don’t worry. Dick Monologues throws you a couple of bones with songwriter Southpaw Jones and actor/performer Rudy Ramirez. How can hilarity not ensue?

THU., MARCH 23, 2006

Here’s a dirty, filthy, shameful little secret: Austin is lousy with poets – not the free-versing, in your face, theatrically emotive, gangsta-gesticulating slam poets. They’ve already outed themselves. They’re upfront about their embarrassing little literary obsession. No, more insidious and pervasive are the poets who attempt to deny the intrinsic dorkiness of their craft by disguising it as something cooler: music. They call themselves songwriters. It’s no wonder. Historically, poets don’t get much for their efforts except poverty and misery. You can bet your ass that America’s current Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, doesn’t have iced-out bling and a sick crib with a boom boom room like Big Boi from OutKast. More than likely he’s shivering in a mud hut on the windswept plains of Nebraska scrawling arthritic elegies to rusty, abandoned farm equipment, hoping his Pulitzer pays for a few more months of precious propane. That’s, as Sinatra sang, the “top of the heap” of the poetic world, and he probably can’t even afford Bono’s deli tray. It’s no surprise then that songwriters are notoriously cagey about owning up to being word geeks, but they are – word geeks in the worst way. While the rest of the literary world abandoned rhymed verse about a century ago, songwriters keep hammering it out ad nauseam. For a lot of songwriters, music is the lipstick on the pig of shamelessly bad poetry, but occasionally you find a songwriter who is a brilliant synthesis of musician and word geek, who within the strict framework of structured verse and musical meter manages to transcend both. Southpaw Jones is one of those songwriters, and he is celebrating his First Annual 29th Birthday tonight at the Cactus Cafe with Erin Condo, the Ginn Sisters, Spike Gillespie, Jon Greene, Matt the Electrician, Seela, Bill Passalaqua, and others. Poets? Songwriters? You decide.