Will Salas ‘slam’ for the arts?
Ben Ortiz … has cultivated San Antonio’s highly entertaining “Puro Slam”
performances through various venues for more than a year now … [and] the
audience has grown to the hundreds for recent performances. But Ortiz,
entertainment editor of the weekly Current, wants to make the Slam even
hotter.


Isn’t life entertaining? New York is consumed with righteous debate about a
cartoon painting daubed with elephant dung. The Gothic horror tale of
“Frankenstein,” as retold by City Council’s gothic activist Mario Salas, is
a cause célébre.
Surprised? Heck no.
This is, after all, the entertainment age. It’s also the age of
“information” overload, of short-little-attention-span, when even the
nightly news is recast as entertainment, snappy sound bites rule even high
politics, and sports are a slam-dunk.
Which leads us to the Slam.
In case you didn’t know it, San Antonio is home to an emerging art form
called the poetry slam – slams, as the most recent form of the venerable
poetry reading. High-energy, pop-culture “slams” bear roughly the same
relationship to traditional poetry readings as Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin
Mary” bears to the “Mona Lisa.”
You don’t have to be a poet to slam. You show up, you perform your “poem,”
and randomly selected judges rate you for entertainment value. It’s
entertainment.
Ben Ortiz, who has cultivated San Antonio’s highly entertaining “Puro Slam”
performances through various venues for more than a year now, says the
audience has grown to the hundreds for recent performances. But Ortiz,
entertainment editor of the weekly Current, wants to make the Slam even
hotter.
He’s invited Mario Salas to slam out a few bars of his “Frankenstein” at
the next slam, set for Tuesday at the El Toro Club on North St. Mary’s.
“San Antonio’s puro ¡SLAM! would be willing to contribute $1 and one bottle
of Shiner Bock toward the publication of ‘Frankenstein: The Dawning and the
Passing,’ so long as Councilman Mario Salas would be willing to read a
portion of the book at our spoken-word scrimmage against other local poets
who likewise are struggling artists in search of patrons,” Ortiz offered in
an e-mail to media folks.
To deepen the political implications of the proposed event, he’s throwing
open the Slam to members of the city’s Ethics Review Board, recently
slammed by Salas.
“Mr. Salas will not be able to shout anyone down, nor will he be able to
keep members from citing newspaper or other media reports, if they choose
to slam,” Ortiz says.
This could be a supreme political entertainment, raising the rough comedy
of City Council to an art, and garnering attention for yet another worthy
local art event.
Another hint: Since popular artist Robert Tatum, whose clever,
controversial cubist mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe created a flap in
’97, has supported the Slam with prizes in the past, perhaps he’d do a
special tribute to Ofili’s much-more-celebrated (and considerably more
offal) art as a prize.
Think national media coverage! Think putting S.A. on the map!
“We’re hoping Mr. Salas will seriously consider helping us lobby City
Council for funds to build the SLAMAMODOME spoken-wordatorium that could
conceivably host the National Poetry Slam, say, in the year 2005,” Ortiz
says.
Entertainment indeed.
By Susan Yerkes
Express-News columnist
San Antonio Express-News_S.A. Life section, 10/6/99

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