hooligan
08-15-2004, 11:56 PM
I don't know if any of you have heard of him, but I rediscovered him the other day and I wanted to share some of him.
An interview!
http://citypaper.net/articles/102298/20Q.shtml
Beau Sia
Interview by a.d.amorosi
http://citypaper.net/articles/102298/gifpics/Image_11.GIF
You've Come A Long Way Baby: The multi-talented Beau Sia
When Beau Sia was a teenager living in Oklahoma City, his main hobbies were water polo and girls. Then he discovered poetry and hip-hop. He moved to New York City, studied film at NYU, learned to breakdance, hooked up with Nuyorican Poets Cafe and started publishing the poetry zine Fuck Me. It wasn't long before he got a contract from Mouthy Almighty publishing and recording, befriended Allen Ginsberg and became known for his brutally honest, aggressive and humorous performances. At age 22, he's just released his first spoken word CD, Attack Attack Go! (Mouth Almighty/Mercury), and a book, a night without armor II: the revenge. The volume spoofs the poetry of singer-songwriter Jewel by appropriating her titles and retrofitting them with Sia's goofy, painful and sexed-up prose. If that weren't enough, he also appears in the new spoken word mockumentary Slam. When I called him at his Manhattan apartment, he was preparing beats for his first European tour.
When did you decide you were a writer rather than a funny guy with a good grasp on words?
I never did have a good grasp on words. My natural talent lies in drawing. But when I was 15, I wanted to win this girl's heart, so I just started writing. For some reason as an idiot-child I wanted to impress her. But I was bad. Really bad. But I still liked it. When the girl thing fell through I realized I could write about the things I had problems with. I wrote about morose things like cutting my throat open with a knife.
The last track on Attack ruminates on Allen Ginsberg. What did he mean to you?
He taught me some things about writing, but what he really taught me about was life. He warned me about the dangers of being exploited. He taught me how to be positive and genuine and connect everything universally. We just sat around and talked and ate a lot.
How did you get involved in making Slam? Is your character Jimmy Huang close to your own stage personae?
Me and Saul [Williams, the star of Slam] were in the performance poetry scene at the same time. We did Grand Slams at the [New York poetry hotspot] Nuyorican. Then he went to Brooklyn, I went to school and we got together to do NYU gigs. We hung at Fez, traveled to Portland for the [national poetry slams]. And he introduced me to Marc [Levin, the writer and director of Slam]. Saul's got a lot of people who hover around him, love what he does. Jimmy is a lot angrier than the Beau Sia stage personae. He's a lot more racist and bourgeois than Beau. But he's got the same loud, vocal level as me.
You seem to crave unison and partnership. You've joined teams for both swimming and slamming. Why is that important to you?
I do crave unison. I naturally want to write solely about my personal feelings and perceptions. I also want to write them so that everyone can understand them. I want people to know what I'm going through. Based on that, I guess I just want people to love me. I guess it comes from having a mentally rough childhood. I grew up with a very demanding family, which now I consider a blessing, but [during my childhood], it was very traumatic. A lot was expected of me -regardless of how I felt or what my needs were. I was overrun with having to be a better swimmer. I remember being really good at spelling bees, but really pressured to do so. That's translated to being more disciplined as a writer.
The record is heavily influenced by old-school hip-hop. How does a Chinese-American kid from Oklahoma get into rap?
I got turned onto rap very late in the eighth grade, to the crappiest stuff—Hammer, Kid 'n Play and Heavy D. When I was 19, I got into breakdancing. And then I got into old-school rap and breakbeats. The new stuff is just dumb, house party stuff. Then I got into the lyrics and connected with the whole "rap is poetry" thing. What I learned from Frank O'Hara and William Carlos Williams is different from what I learn from Kool Keith. I figured I should brush up on both. And that's why I needed those beats on the record. It just matched up to what I was doing.
What was your immediate reaction to the Jewel book when it came out in July?
My first reaction was to write my book in four hours [laughs]. I wasn't horrified . I knew where she was coming from, but it was like where I was coming from when I was 16—that stage of development. I'm not trying to knock her writing, but I've spent many hours a day writing for the last six years. Maybe she's been writing longer, but it doesn't seem so. It's hard for me to say whether someone's awful or not having come from such an awful state myself. She's just needs to forge her craft. She reads like a beginner, not a seasoned pro deserving of a big publishing deal. She should take advantage of it. She could perhaps open up the door for an interest in poetry. She could open the market.
[b]That's very generous of you.
That type of thinking's come from knowing Allen and Saul. I've been a jerk too long. My genuine feeling is if you've sold 300,000 poetry books, that's 300,000 more people into poetry. That's fantastic. My book sold 4,000 in its first run and we're pressing another 10,000. The upshot is that book chains want the book and I'll get a chance to publish my first five books.
And gives you the opportunity to achieve stardom and world domination through poetry.
I don't want world domination. I just want to pay for my sister's college tuition.
Slam opens on Oct. 23. For more information, see Cindy Fuchs' review in Critical Mass.
"Love" by Beau Sia
I think love is the most beautiful thing
in the world,
and I don't give a fuck,
because I have no original ideas.
I'm a pathetic man
whose goal is to read poetry
in order
to get women
to fall in love with him,
and you'd think I was reprimanding myself
and revealing my horrible dark side
by saying that,
but I was really saying
"women who hear this, fall in love with me, or else,"
because that's what it comes down to --
an ultimatum,
life or death,
and sure, maybe I'm being extreme,
but you walk around and tell me
that things aren't extreme,
jesus,
I've seen a man jack off to a gap window display,
so don't tell me that love isn't important.
and maybe you didn't get that series of lines,
that's OK,
most of them are subtext
designed to impress people
who know too much about art,
all you need to listen to is
the 12 percent
which contain words like "fuck,"
and "ass,"
and "ride my dongstick, you naughty schoolgirl."
because in a poem about love
we all need to know the relevant things,
because we're all looking for the complete definition of love,
if only we could open our encyclopedia brittanicas
and look up love and know,
but love isn't that easy.
they say cupid loved my so called life
and when the show was cancelled
cupid cried and cried and cried and
decided that he was going to fuck up
all of humanity,
and this is why china has a trouble with its birthrate
and arkansas rhymes with date rape
and iraq is iraq,
and the fat lipo-sucked out of california
could be
its own island.
but this isn't a poem about geography,
this is a poem about love,
the bane of my existence,
the reason why I hate valentine's day
and halloween,
which is about ghosts
and I think you know where I'm going here.
I'm going to the land of girlfriends of halloweens past,
and maybe I've only got three ghosts in this land,
but this doesn't mean that they don't bring their friends,
who are the ghosts of girls who have rejected me,
because girls rarely travel alone in this land
. lydia is from this land.
I used to kiss her
while listening to
the cure's "just like heaven,"
now I don't see her anymore,
so that song makes me sad,
why must we associate music with
our love lives?
I'm not trying to be profound here,
I'm just saying that music really takes me
back, way back,
and I can't explain the memory process involved in that,
because I am not a psychology major,
and maybe
my problem with picking up women
has to do with me always asking,
"what's your major?"
but that only makes me as cheesy
as 90 percent of guys
looking for women,
and 86 percent of them have women,
so what's the deal here?
maybe I shouldn't think of women in terms
of picking them up,
and maybe I should open up my sensitive side,
but really,
the sensitive side sucks.
I've been there.
you can only imagine the kinds of sweaters
they make you wear.
it's not fair,
love is not fair,
and war is not fair,
and I don't care what anyone has to say about
any of that,
I feel unloved,
I'm sorry I need people
to tell me I'm cool,
I'm just that way.
aren't you?
am I the only one?
I know that I can't be that
misunderstood.
but you don't want to
understand me!
you just want to hear the part
where I talk about my small dick again,
because the asian man will always be plagued
by this rumor
until he is brave enough to fling it out
and say,
"HA! WE ARE GIGANTIC!"
this is not the direction
I wanted to take
this poem.
honestly, I just want to be in the arms
of my true love, in a house, in a room,
in a wonderful, perfect world with our
two children,
a boy and a girl,
helga and lamar,
but maybe I shouldn't have said this,
woody allen taught us
that marriage is a death trap.
I'm almost as old as his girlfriend.
she could be the long lost sister
I've been looking for,
maybe my mother gave her away
when we lived in china,
wait, I never lived in china.
I think I've begun lying in this poem.
I was hoping to talk about love
for 3.4 minutes
and then
come to a conclusion,
somehow defining love
within the poem,
but
I don't have any answers
and I'm looking for help from anyone,
because love has got me fucked up
and dying,
because I feel retarded without anyone to hold me,
and maybe that's sentimental,
but what's wrong with sentimental?
I just need love --
to self: fuck you, I'm OK!
you see, I can't even decide what I need
much less understand what I'm saying.
you see, all I'm saying
is
someone love me.
-Beau Sia
first performed at Marymount Manhattan College, New York City, fall 1996
Here are some MP3s of his performances:
http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/sia/
Here is his site:
http://www.beausia.com/
An interview!
http://citypaper.net/articles/102298/20Q.shtml
Beau Sia
Interview by a.d.amorosi
http://citypaper.net/articles/102298/gifpics/Image_11.GIF
You've Come A Long Way Baby: The multi-talented Beau Sia
When Beau Sia was a teenager living in Oklahoma City, his main hobbies were water polo and girls. Then he discovered poetry and hip-hop. He moved to New York City, studied film at NYU, learned to breakdance, hooked up with Nuyorican Poets Cafe and started publishing the poetry zine Fuck Me. It wasn't long before he got a contract from Mouthy Almighty publishing and recording, befriended Allen Ginsberg and became known for his brutally honest, aggressive and humorous performances. At age 22, he's just released his first spoken word CD, Attack Attack Go! (Mouth Almighty/Mercury), and a book, a night without armor II: the revenge. The volume spoofs the poetry of singer-songwriter Jewel by appropriating her titles and retrofitting them with Sia's goofy, painful and sexed-up prose. If that weren't enough, he also appears in the new spoken word mockumentary Slam. When I called him at his Manhattan apartment, he was preparing beats for his first European tour.
When did you decide you were a writer rather than a funny guy with a good grasp on words?
I never did have a good grasp on words. My natural talent lies in drawing. But when I was 15, I wanted to win this girl's heart, so I just started writing. For some reason as an idiot-child I wanted to impress her. But I was bad. Really bad. But I still liked it. When the girl thing fell through I realized I could write about the things I had problems with. I wrote about morose things like cutting my throat open with a knife.
The last track on Attack ruminates on Allen Ginsberg. What did he mean to you?
He taught me some things about writing, but what he really taught me about was life. He warned me about the dangers of being exploited. He taught me how to be positive and genuine and connect everything universally. We just sat around and talked and ate a lot.
How did you get involved in making Slam? Is your character Jimmy Huang close to your own stage personae?
Me and Saul [Williams, the star of Slam] were in the performance poetry scene at the same time. We did Grand Slams at the [New York poetry hotspot] Nuyorican. Then he went to Brooklyn, I went to school and we got together to do NYU gigs. We hung at Fez, traveled to Portland for the [national poetry slams]. And he introduced me to Marc [Levin, the writer and director of Slam]. Saul's got a lot of people who hover around him, love what he does. Jimmy is a lot angrier than the Beau Sia stage personae. He's a lot more racist and bourgeois than Beau. But he's got the same loud, vocal level as me.
You seem to crave unison and partnership. You've joined teams for both swimming and slamming. Why is that important to you?
I do crave unison. I naturally want to write solely about my personal feelings and perceptions. I also want to write them so that everyone can understand them. I want people to know what I'm going through. Based on that, I guess I just want people to love me. I guess it comes from having a mentally rough childhood. I grew up with a very demanding family, which now I consider a blessing, but [during my childhood], it was very traumatic. A lot was expected of me -regardless of how I felt or what my needs were. I was overrun with having to be a better swimmer. I remember being really good at spelling bees, but really pressured to do so. That's translated to being more disciplined as a writer.
The record is heavily influenced by old-school hip-hop. How does a Chinese-American kid from Oklahoma get into rap?
I got turned onto rap very late in the eighth grade, to the crappiest stuff—Hammer, Kid 'n Play and Heavy D. When I was 19, I got into breakdancing. And then I got into old-school rap and breakbeats. The new stuff is just dumb, house party stuff. Then I got into the lyrics and connected with the whole "rap is poetry" thing. What I learned from Frank O'Hara and William Carlos Williams is different from what I learn from Kool Keith. I figured I should brush up on both. And that's why I needed those beats on the record. It just matched up to what I was doing.
What was your immediate reaction to the Jewel book when it came out in July?
My first reaction was to write my book in four hours [laughs]. I wasn't horrified . I knew where she was coming from, but it was like where I was coming from when I was 16—that stage of development. I'm not trying to knock her writing, but I've spent many hours a day writing for the last six years. Maybe she's been writing longer, but it doesn't seem so. It's hard for me to say whether someone's awful or not having come from such an awful state myself. She's just needs to forge her craft. She reads like a beginner, not a seasoned pro deserving of a big publishing deal. She should take advantage of it. She could perhaps open up the door for an interest in poetry. She could open the market.
[b]That's very generous of you.
That type of thinking's come from knowing Allen and Saul. I've been a jerk too long. My genuine feeling is if you've sold 300,000 poetry books, that's 300,000 more people into poetry. That's fantastic. My book sold 4,000 in its first run and we're pressing another 10,000. The upshot is that book chains want the book and I'll get a chance to publish my first five books.
And gives you the opportunity to achieve stardom and world domination through poetry.
I don't want world domination. I just want to pay for my sister's college tuition.
Slam opens on Oct. 23. For more information, see Cindy Fuchs' review in Critical Mass.
"Love" by Beau Sia
I think love is the most beautiful thing
in the world,
and I don't give a fuck,
because I have no original ideas.
I'm a pathetic man
whose goal is to read poetry
in order
to get women
to fall in love with him,
and you'd think I was reprimanding myself
and revealing my horrible dark side
by saying that,
but I was really saying
"women who hear this, fall in love with me, or else,"
because that's what it comes down to --
an ultimatum,
life or death,
and sure, maybe I'm being extreme,
but you walk around and tell me
that things aren't extreme,
jesus,
I've seen a man jack off to a gap window display,
so don't tell me that love isn't important.
and maybe you didn't get that series of lines,
that's OK,
most of them are subtext
designed to impress people
who know too much about art,
all you need to listen to is
the 12 percent
which contain words like "fuck,"
and "ass,"
and "ride my dongstick, you naughty schoolgirl."
because in a poem about love
we all need to know the relevant things,
because we're all looking for the complete definition of love,
if only we could open our encyclopedia brittanicas
and look up love and know,
but love isn't that easy.
they say cupid loved my so called life
and when the show was cancelled
cupid cried and cried and cried and
decided that he was going to fuck up
all of humanity,
and this is why china has a trouble with its birthrate
and arkansas rhymes with date rape
and iraq is iraq,
and the fat lipo-sucked out of california
could be
its own island.
but this isn't a poem about geography,
this is a poem about love,
the bane of my existence,
the reason why I hate valentine's day
and halloween,
which is about ghosts
and I think you know where I'm going here.
I'm going to the land of girlfriends of halloweens past,
and maybe I've only got three ghosts in this land,
but this doesn't mean that they don't bring their friends,
who are the ghosts of girls who have rejected me,
because girls rarely travel alone in this land
. lydia is from this land.
I used to kiss her
while listening to
the cure's "just like heaven,"
now I don't see her anymore,
so that song makes me sad,
why must we associate music with
our love lives?
I'm not trying to be profound here,
I'm just saying that music really takes me
back, way back,
and I can't explain the memory process involved in that,
because I am not a psychology major,
and maybe
my problem with picking up women
has to do with me always asking,
"what's your major?"
but that only makes me as cheesy
as 90 percent of guys
looking for women,
and 86 percent of them have women,
so what's the deal here?
maybe I shouldn't think of women in terms
of picking them up,
and maybe I should open up my sensitive side,
but really,
the sensitive side sucks.
I've been there.
you can only imagine the kinds of sweaters
they make you wear.
it's not fair,
love is not fair,
and war is not fair,
and I don't care what anyone has to say about
any of that,
I feel unloved,
I'm sorry I need people
to tell me I'm cool,
I'm just that way.
aren't you?
am I the only one?
I know that I can't be that
misunderstood.
but you don't want to
understand me!
you just want to hear the part
where I talk about my small dick again,
because the asian man will always be plagued
by this rumor
until he is brave enough to fling it out
and say,
"HA! WE ARE GIGANTIC!"
this is not the direction
I wanted to take
this poem.
honestly, I just want to be in the arms
of my true love, in a house, in a room,
in a wonderful, perfect world with our
two children,
a boy and a girl,
helga and lamar,
but maybe I shouldn't have said this,
woody allen taught us
that marriage is a death trap.
I'm almost as old as his girlfriend.
she could be the long lost sister
I've been looking for,
maybe my mother gave her away
when we lived in china,
wait, I never lived in china.
I think I've begun lying in this poem.
I was hoping to talk about love
for 3.4 minutes
and then
come to a conclusion,
somehow defining love
within the poem,
but
I don't have any answers
and I'm looking for help from anyone,
because love has got me fucked up
and dying,
because I feel retarded without anyone to hold me,
and maybe that's sentimental,
but what's wrong with sentimental?
I just need love --
to self: fuck you, I'm OK!
you see, I can't even decide what I need
much less understand what I'm saying.
you see, all I'm saying
is
someone love me.
-Beau Sia
first performed at Marymount Manhattan College, New York City, fall 1996
Here are some MP3s of his performances:
http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/sia/
Here is his site:
http://www.beausia.com/