Word X Word Festival: Phrase I

                                                                                              [ALL PHOTOS BY OGDEN GIGLI]

"Words are under assault and we're here to defend them!" declared Ben Knox Miller, one-third of the Rhode Island-based band The Low Anthem, to a standing-room-only crowd at Barrington Stage Company Stage II in Pittsfield, Mass., last night.

Such might be considered the thesis statement of the first annual annual Word X Word Festival, a week-long celebration of vocabulary and the art form it's able to create--spoken, sung, written, and otherwise performed--which runs through Saturday, August 22.

The group's second engagement in town--following a gig last March at Mission Bar + Tapas, just around the corner on North Street; Mission, Inc., founder Jim Benson hatched Word X Word--offered a challenge: to assemble its "wordiest possible set," Miller explained. "There were very few songs we had to eliminate."

The Low Anthem's aural delight--earnest, sometimes heart-tugging follk ballads infused with an old-time atmosphere and punctuated by crooning, whispering, and the occacional chorus of shouts--was a fitting start to Word X Word. The band peppered its inventive playing with the kind of cultural observations that turn on intellectuals: "We've become a culture of superlatives. We've lost tact for the in-between feelings."

So true. According to Gen Y, everything either sucks or is awesome. Right? "Good," said Miller, in shameless reference to Bob Dylan, "has lost its meaning."

These musings cushioned a game of musical chairs: Miller switched between his post at a vintage pump organ and on a stool set beside an acoustic guitar and red electric Fender, a harmonica rigged around his neck and a French horn an arm's length away; bandmates Jocie Adams and Jeff Prystowsky floated between violin-bow-on-metal-glockenspiel-bell-hybrid, clarinet, and those guitars, and a giant bass and a little white drumset, respectively. (The trio squeeze twenty-seven instruments onto their breakout album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, after all--recorded over ten days spent in an isolated summer cabin on Block Island...in January.)

Taylor Mali, four-time National Poetry Slam champion, threw out some similar sentiments on the demise of language a couple of hours before that, when he took to the stage with his unique brand of vivid storytelling. It's poetry at the core, and perhaps why many in the audience didn't expect Mali's rapid-fire routine: pure comedy crafted of words carefully, artfully stacked. Quelle surprise! my mind seemed to gasp in between reflexive guffaws. We learn that falling in love really IS is like owning a dog; four (!) things he loves about his wife, Marie-Elizabeth (who later came onstage for bilingual duet); and that as a teacher, he's on a quest to change the world, one eighth grader at a time. Hearing violins? Watch "What Teachers Make" in action.                                                                                        

Sandwiched between the two was David Dondero (Double-D, he dubs himself, in his soft-spoken, self-deprecating manner)--crowned alongside Dylan, Waits, and Springsteen as one of the Best Living Songwriters by NPR. A sort of genius that so subtly seems to shrink away from the limelight while exploring dark themes like suicide and war, which somehow aren't that dark when infused with Dondero's dash of wit and serious sentence-stringing. (His first song was an ode to an anti-inflammatory arthritis drug whose letters earn an impressive score in Scrabble.)

The lyrical feast continues this week (August 17-22) with spoken word slams, readings, and discussion at the Lichtensten Center for the Arts; The Ten Hour Play, a weeklong live playwriting workshop culminating in a Saturday performance at the Zeitgeist Gallery (organizer Carrie Saldo will post regular updates on the website for those who miss a night but still want to participate); and, of course, lots of live music from top local, regional, and national songbirds at Mission Bar + Tapas. Check the full schedule here.

This morning I pasted the freebie sticker distributed to the audience courtesy Taylor Mali onto my office door--fitting for an editor's office, right? I'm a product of the Clueless era, however, so breaking the habit in speech is, like, an ongoing battle...

 [ALL PHOTOS BY OGDEN GIGLI]