Artist makes the spoken word sting

By GINA VIVINETTO

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2000

TAMPA -- Spoken word is a curious genre of performance. It encompasses everything from stand-up commentary along the lines of comedian Lenny Bruce to avant-garde poetry recitation, caffeinated, off-the-cuff rants about society, and sometimes simply plain old reading from the printed page.

A spoken word event, in short, can be horribly painstaking. When well done, however, spoken word has real power. It can be gripping, incisive and illuminating.

Such was the case Friday night at the Orpheum club in Ybor City when spoken word artist Lydia Lunch dished out an hour's worth of material from The Devil's Racetrack, a collection of her writing to be published next year. Lunch, along with singer Henry Rollins, is a pioneer in spoken word. Both artists have roots in the punk rock movement -- Rollins in the seminal Black Flag and now Rollins Band -- and Lunch as singer for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks back in the 1970s.

For that reason, the two rebels are interested in similar issues: the evils of mainstream society and corporate America, the ravages of drug addiction, AIDS, racism and sexism.

But Lunch's performances have evolved in the 15 years she's been spitting out the contents of her mind. Now 41, she's honed a real craft for storytelling, as Friday night attested.

Lunch recited gritty pieces about life in New York, including a bittersweet poem about bedding a teenage Latino who, the same night, was stabbed to death on her street. The poem displayed Lunch's knack for making the personal political, expanding into a commentary on hate crimes in general and the rage that seems to be eating away at our country's young men.

Dressed head to toe in black, with tattoos peeking from beneath her clothes, Lunch was particularly adept at adopting various personas. She morphed her voice, using inflection and nuance. In a riveting piece about life in prison, Lunch narrated as a male inmate doing time for a sex crime that may have ended in a homicide.

Lunch's reading bordered on manipulation; she coaxed the audience through a dangerous series of emotions: pity as we heard of the prisoner's boredom, his inability to block out the banal sounds of television and cellmates, those "stupid men in love with their own voices."

He yearns for things he had taken for granted, "a warm breeze on the back of your neck, a fresh pack of cigarettes." He disdains the guards, "poster boys for the f------ Aryan brotherhood."

Later, the prisoner's rant grows angry, and the audience's pity turns to discomfort as he relives the crime for which he is incarcerated. To hear him angrily scream, now using profanity, furious with his victim for seducing him, comparing her to a ravenous dingo, is unsettling. Lunch had tricked us into empathy.

The piece, like her others, raised questions, provoked and made no attempt to settle it all neatly.

Author Jerry Stahl, the subject of the 1998 film Permanent Midnight, based on his novel, opened the show. Where Lunch focused on social commentary, Stahl, who once wrote for the television program Alf, went for laughs. Also clad in black and accented with tattoos, Stahl delighted the audience with bawdy pieces about a young teen caught sniffing women's undergarments by an elderly neighbor in the laundry room of his mother's condo. That piece is from Stahl's Perv: A Love Story.- To reach Gina Vivinetto e-mail gina@sptimes.com.