Spokenword Berlin Revue 2005

This evening I visited the final event of http://www.spokenwordberlin.net/.
The event was OK in general, nearly all people on the stage were good performers in the sense of pronounciation and keeping tension.
But to my sadness, around 10% of the content was about food (sic) and some 5% about brands and other 5% (as normal/as expected) copulation and sexual details, which seems to be the only knowledge that is common for nowadays people. And what I found interesting, too, was that a lot of people just laugh (in the sense of an “inspired” laughter) when they recognise sthg, independent of whether the idea behind was funny or not.
If find this interesting, because I found this kind of laughter in pseudo-educated circles where people who recognised an allusion to some knowledge trace also had this “knowing” smile/laughter.
And to be able to rhyme only (“Rita”) is not enough for me at least.
Think I liked Dalibor’s Rashomon-minus-1 (rather minus-2) “annotation” best, but also this other Berlin guy who got the “price” (one bottle “Rotkäppchen” sparkling vine and the honour, of course) together with the IMHO overrated Bas Böttcher in the first half, was good.
Anyway, the courage and the performative power is highly appreciable and though I did not have one “poetical moment” I went away with good impressions.
Generally I think, this community does not differ so much from the established/official cultural community, except of the money and the fact, that an ad hoc decision of the auditory decides about an author’s failure (and not the amount of books sold or a special jury): They establish themselves, they shake hands and are friendly to push up themselves. It’s as equal as the gamers clans are very close to the german “Verein”.
The biggest difference might be the rather sportive aspect – you get money and praise if you win a kind of match instead of getting prices because you’re a good self-marketer against jury members. Not such a very big difference. And the danger lies within the “quality” of the slam auditory – if they were completely dumb, a good (IMHO) author like e.g. Kling would not be heard because it needs time to get used to his language.