This painting was, in my opinion, the best of the week as a topic. ("The Starry Night" is my favorite painting selected, but I liked this more as something to write off of.) And you are two of the most talented writers in this league, so I saved your battle for last. And I'm going to go whole-hog on the breakdown of this battle. I say all this before reading a word. So don't disappoint me.
Zenland: I read it once with your formatting, but found the formatting did nothing but make the second verse a chore to read. So for the reread, I pasted it into my Notepad document and found the second part less choppy as a result. You're too good to rely on formatting tricks. Anyway, this was an interesting take on the painting. I didn't expect to see the two men in the background turn into major players in a verse, but I liked that approach. Their upper-class status is obvious even from the little we can see of them.
Your writing invokes a lot of emotion. When reading, I picture a spastic voice, full of rises and falls and pitch changes and all sorts of other stuff. Some of your rhymes were just a little off, but it almost added to the feel of recklessness that pervaded the verse. What made this verse interesting was the double voice. The first stanza was more interesting because of the crazed feeling of it all.
Quote:
There they are, behind my back with diamonds set
In their necklaces was meshed with a hat and canes,
How are those bastards sane and I'm actin strange!?
Just cause they're decked out in nice clothes (I'd buy those)
And aftershave to lubricate when they masturbate,
I'm sure they do that although it's a rude and crude act
But that doesn't matter, Hey! You wanna blow those bastards away!?
Or walk up with a golf club and shatter his brains?
Come on!! Come out of your cavern Dave and plaster their face
On the sidewalk while we eat their eyeballs
And Laugh in their face!! Wouldn't that be great!?
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This part of the verse was the strongest. There was some crude imagery, but it fit. And I think that spastic voice really shined with the leap to not being sure if they masturbate. Asides can be tricky to pull off. The same is true of rhyming asides, but you used a few without losing the flow of the verse.
The rest of the stanza felt a bit redundant and a little less polished, even in its mania. Again, this is not an easy style to inhabit, and the lyricism and content seemed overpowered by the voice you were going for in the last six lines or so of the first stanza.
The bigger issues came to start the second verse. You sort of went back over the first verse's content with a new voice, and I suppose I would have preferred if you had simply written these two things together, in more of a call-and-response interplay. At this point, having read the first verse, I'm expecting the story to move. Instead we rehash. I liked the new voice, particularly in the third line, "Nonsense you bastard there is no such thing as mind over will."
The ending was interesting but way underdeveloped. We didn't get enough of a sense of Dave's backstory, so to quickly drop in that Dave, under Henry's influence, had murdered his wife without realizing it, was very abrupt. I liked the way you phrased the reveal, in Henry's grimy voice, but I thought the development as a whole was unnecessary.
The biggest issue with this verse is that you carved out two strong voices but didn't do anything with them. Though the action is implied at the end of the verse, the entirety of the written part of this verse is an internal monologue taking place while Dave stands at the pier. It's very difficult to tell a story without any physical actions and make it compelling, and you still could have succeeded with a bit more balance between the two parts. You wrote this very well, but the content didn't hold up.
NYCSPITZ: You went with the atmosphere piece, which is a pretty conservative approach, particularly to a topic such as this one that lent itself to storytelling. But you have a wonderful way with words, and your lyricism carried you here. This was smooth and slick and consistenty interesting with a few strong quotable sections.
The beginning felt like too much of a description of the painting. With all image-based topic weeks, it's important to keep in mind that your readers will be able to see the image. But I did love the idea of "a godless breeze," which was one of those turns of phrase that keeps your writing interesting and above most others. Aside: Didn't you use "illumine" in last week's verse?
Then you moved into discussing why the man in the painting was so upset, which obviously needed to be at the heart of any verse about this topic. And I liked the idea of the man pacing around and trying to cope with the real world, but I wish you had been more concrete about his concerns. The abstractions felt a little too distant, too out there. But they were beautifully written.
Quote:
Nasty Nicene ninja, extol immutable themes
gassy...and more ephemeral than Jupiter's sheen -
just contemplate worldly ignorance of the doofus regime.
opiate concocted death - a suitable tea
residue lines on CDs...snort a few to relieve.
Life's a chessmatch.
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That was my favorite section. What you did with sounds and wordplay there was very strong. The closing line also was strong. The only line that didn't work for me was, "You're the master and noob - excuse the belief." The phrases there didn't connect for me, and "noob" seemed a bit out of place.
Here's the issue: You're sort of evading the topic again, as was a big part of the problem last week. Now, the beginning of your verse was pretty directly about the painting. But by the midway point, you basically had stopped writing about the painting at all. This isn't a storytelling league, and topicals have won several battles here already. But this particularly painting definitely lent itself to a story or at least a more direct topical. Here, it seemed as though you skirted around the topic a bit.
Even with that said, I enjoyed reading your verse a lot. You're just a great writer. Zenland is, too, but I think he made structural mistakes that were impossible to overcome. I don't think this battle reflected either of your full abilities, though.
Vote: NYCSPITZ