Joe Wall – Page 5 – Joe B Wall

Electro-Music Festival 2017

I’ll be performing a piece for spoken word and electronics on Sunday, 6 August 2017 at 2:30 PM as part of the 13th Annual Electro-Music Festival at the Irving Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana [directions]. The entire weekend is a long-form celebration of electronic, electro-acoustic, and experimental music that runs the alphabetic gamut from the abrasively new to the zestfully soothing, with a three-day bill jam-packed with amazing musicians I’ve had the pleasure to work with and otherwise revel in for several years now. I’m bringing my combination of left-field storytelling and digital atmospherics to the party, and I get to spend the rest of the time enjoying and educating myself in how it’s done.

All ages show – tickets at the door
Weekend pass $25, or by day: Friday $10, Saturday $15, Sunday $12

[Poster design by Jack Hertz]

QUEERING Sound 2017 // Spoken Word + Digital Media

I went acoustic for the first time ever for the 2017 Queering Sound spoken word show hosted by Sonic Circuits and Rhizome DC, performing a version of my story about a particularly awkward career move to the accompaniment of live banjo instead of my usual consort of digital instrumentation.

It was an interesting venture into more traditional storytelling for me and a big break from my usual obsessive need for control of every aspect of the sonic underpinning of my stories…and it went particularly well. Looking forward to more events of this type in the future, and am grateful to Sonic Circuits and Rhizome DC for hosting and inviting me to be a part of this show. If you’re unfamiliar with either of these organizations, I’d encourage you to check them out—good art comes from here!

The pay envelope.

The first purchase I ever made as a member of the working public was a cassette player.It was 1983, I was just about to turn fifteen, and I had a little brown envelope containing seventy-three dollars in cash that Carlo Petrucci handed me after my first week working at Pal Jack’s Pizza in Laurel. I was in Baltimore, visiting my grandmother, and we climbed into her turquoise Barracuda with sticky clear plastic seat covers embossed with little flowers that did absolutely nothing to stop those seat covers from clinging to your thighs like duct tape and headed up the street to Luskins.

Continue reading The pay envelope.

The Beastly Conveyance.

In 2010, I sold my Citroën. It’d taken me about eight years to come to grips with letting it ago, and if that says something about me, so be it. I’d put eighty thousand joyous, cantankerous miles on it, all up and down the eastern seaboard, from spending four hours stuck in a solid traffic jam on the Cross Bronx Expressway with the ARRET! light falsely warning me that the car was about to overheat to moments on Route 301 in South Carolina where I did the little mental arithmetic to translate kilometers to miles to confirm that I was indeed doing over a hundred on a lazy old trunk road. I’d lived out a French fever dream, but I went broke, the car developed a few faults beyond my means or technical ability to correct, and I fell into a premature middle age fugue state where I thought maybe, just maybe, I needed to grow up and stop living like a cantankerous continental eccentric.

I drove a practical four door economy sedan for eight years.

Continue reading The Beastly Conveyance.

Standing up at Stoop.

7 February 2017 – The Sex Show

Told a story as a part of the Stoop Storytelling Series – The Sex Show. The theme of the evening was sex, so I naturally shared a story of my own in which there was no sex at all, at least on my part, as I’m generally inclined to approach everything sideways, dealing reality a glancing blow.

I was honored to be invited to share the stage with nine amazing storytellers for an evening of lurid tales of the lascivious side of life, though my tale is less about actual sex and more about the tragic excesses of one’s early thirties, odd career choices, and the things you’ll do because of a crush.

You can listen to my story and the other wonderful tales from that night at The Stoop Storytelling Series – The Sex Show page, and you should do yourself a favor and subscribe to the Stoop’s fabulous and utterly free podcast via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. I can’t endorse Stoop enough—it’s just such a treasure for the Maryland region, and for storytelling wherever you are.

The bear in the woods.

A short-form story about summer camp and how it changes you, told live at the Electro-Music NY 2016 festival in Huguenot, New York, adapted from a story told off the cuff at the Stoop Storytelling series Second Stoop show on March 10, 2016, Summer Camp Stories.

My Fairy Godmothers [Still] Smoke Too Much

It’s less than two weeks to my first big show in a faraway city—I’m going to be telling stories in St. Louis, Missouri at the Kranzberg Arts Center, thanks to the HEARDing Cats Collective on Saturday, 10 October 2015, at 7:30PM.

The show page at Kranzberg Arts Center is Joe Belknap Wall at the Kranzberg Arts Center, and tickets are $12 for adults and $7 for students/artists.

The Kranzberg Arts Center is located at 501 N Grand Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63103.

[Warning: Show contains explicit content and adult concepts. Please note that Performer now comes with 82% more beard than pictured and will be wearing a nicer shirt.]

Out and about in 2015.

I performed on Friday, 11 September, 2015, as part of the Electro-Music 2015 Conference at YMCA Greenkill in Huguenot, NY. I’m gearing up for a revival of my award-winning spoken word piece, My Fairy Godmothers Smoke Too Much, and shared an abbreviated episode of lopsided stories of unlikely fairy godmothers, dancing with distant strangers, and otherwise trying to make sense out of the senseless eighties, accompanied by a freewheeling electronic score.

• I’ll be performing in Saint Louis, Missouri at 7:30 PM on Saturday 10 October 2015 at the Kranzberg Art Center [tickets $12 regular, $7 students/artists].

[thanks to Hong Waltzer for the fabulous photo]

Playing live, 2 May 2015 – Pyramid Atlantic

I’m playing at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, Maryland on 2 May 2015, in my Kantoendrato guise (my ambient alter ego). It’s a great bill, a fun, relaxing format, and everything starts at 8PM. $10 and well worth it.

[MORE INFO]

Having written

I hate having written.

Writers and their umpteen wannabees adore prattling on in endless repetition and lazy revisions of quotations, and one of the most head-scratching quips that makes the round is the oft-misquoted line from Frank Norris back in 1915 — “Don’t like to write, but like having written.”

Really? There are writers who don’t like to write, or, in the misattributed and otherwise mangled versions, actually “hate” to write? If one hates writing, why write? It all just reminds me of the panoply of tomes on how to be a writer that are almost nothing but long lists of methods of fending off writer’s block, disregarding the obvious fact that writer’s block means you have nothing to say, so do something else until you do.

I love the moment of writing. I love the anticipation of it, that fuzzy, sizzling sensation of stories boiling out of the back of one’s head, and I love the still space when I am with my writing instruments and a strong mug of tea with milk and earphones full of the kind of music that delivers me to that ecstatic plateau of elevated sensitivity that’s shared in the spiritual, the emotional, and the sexual, when all those channels to the unseen realms open like flaring nostrils in the cold and the fine hairs of the forearms rise and ruffle in electric waves.

I reach in, and it comes and comes and comes, the sound and the rhythm and the little bits of cantankerous play of meaning deconstructed into the chicken-scratching characters in constant mutation in the head and on the page, and it is easily one of the few moments when everything in the world is joyously and almost indescribably right.

It’s after writing that I lose interest, which is why my manuscripts fester in dark corners, because the tedium of marketing is the enemy of the celestial. I know it’s there, I know I need to engage in it if I’m ever going to make a career of writing and performing, and I know that I am very, very bad at it, but despite the urgency of practicality, I’d still rather just set the fires burning again, take the keys, and sear a new path through the world.