DAVID CROSS AND AMBER TAMBLYN and warns, “I’m not afraid to do it again.” On Sunday, April 1, Tamblyn, Brown and Sia will collaborate with Mission Creek, Working Group Theatre and the Iowa Youth Writing Project to do workshops, culminating in a collaborative "Pro-am" performance that evening at the Englert. Tamblyn especially looks forward to Beau Sia's workshops, saying "he has the most fascinating and brutally honest things to say about performance-poetry, slam-poetry, the training that falls under that and the misguidance that can happen with a lot of youth.” It was becoming time to let everyone get on with their evenings, so I asked if there was anything else she wanted to mention. “I’m really interested in making out with Dora,” Tamblyn said of Iowa City poet Dora Malech, founding director of the IYWP. “Please tell her I’m going to pour two shots: one for me, and the other shot is just going to be my mouth, which she has to drink.” “Two shots . . .” I say aloud as I take notes. “Put it in writing, sir.” For Amber Tamblyn and David Cross, these seem like words to live by. Matt Steele is the publisher of Little Village.
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potential/possible drug-overdose/suicide, one of the many cases where you actually don't know if they just drugged themselves because of depression or if it was an accident. I asked (Manson) if he wanted to do this with me and he was like, in his words, ‘Fuck yeah, woman.’” Tamblyn tours regularly as a spoken-word performer. On Saturday, Mar. 31, She will be performing with Derrick Brown (Write Bloody Publishing) and renowned slam-poet Beau Sia, perhaps the two biggest rock stars in contemporary performance poetry. “(Derrick and I) did a couple of tours called Lazers of Sexcellance. They involved a lot of fun, drinking, interrupting our own poems to tell shitty anecdotes.” She explained that it is “not only about the poem and what’s on the page, but how do you turn the room into its own poem, itself?” “What sort of shape does that take?” I asked her, “How do you involve the audience?” “By asking how many of them tweet, then telling them to come up on stage and receive a spanking with their pants down. Or by making Derrick Brown stop in the middle of his poem and take off his shirt and rub his disgusting, hairy chest down with Lubriderm while we put R. Kelly on, and then go back into the poem.” She clarifies that she’s actually done that one before,
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actors who were really famous when they were young, but by their twenties or thirties, they died as unknowns.” She said the book deals with “the epidemic of drug and body abuse that happens in the industry, especially with women, and never gets talked about.” The first poem in the series, was about Brittany Murphy. It's called “About the Body,” and it can be found at poetryfoundation.org, along with a letter from Amber reflecting on Murphy. Tamblyn credits the poet Rachel McKibbens for encouraging her to develop the idea, but says it wasn't until a mutual friend invited her to Marilyn Manson's house that she really had a clear vision for it. “I didn't know a whole lot about him,” she told me, “but when I went to his house and saw his paintings, they blew me away.” She said Manson is “an honorary member of Dada." Later, online, I find all kinds of philosophical writing linking Manson to the Dadaists, and a hard-bound collection of his paintings called Genealogies of Pain (2010), which he co-authored with David Lynch. She described visiting Manson’s house, and the moment she forged this collaboration with her “emotional accomplice.” “One portrait looked exactly like one of the women I had written about—Donna Plato—a
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18 March 2012 | Little Village