When it comes to my most significant artistic endeavors, I haven't always operated alone. About a decade and a half ago, I was part of a collaborative project at Bill's Records on South Lamar (now Botham Jean Blvd.) with my longtime friend and occasional co-conspirator Alex Pogosov. The project was a reincarnation of an earlier open mic which ran from 2002-2006 at Bill's old location off Spring Valley in far north Dallas. The Lost Art Open Mic, as this later enterprise came to be known, began in May 2010 and ran until early June 2011, and has been chronicled on this site since some of its earliest days. Looking back at all the open mic nights we conducted, there are some that stand out as great successes, and others that I don't recall quite so fondly. Generally those not so fond remembrances are related to instances of low attendance or lackluster performances (or, in two cases, because I felt our event was hijacked). But there's one night in particular that I have largely avoided facing for a long time, one I've always been loath to revisit and hesitant to talk much about. And it isn't because no one showed up or because we had a uniquely terrible performer appear who tortured our ears with a blistering sonic assault. It's a night that became stigmatized in my memory due to the series of events that followed it and the impact they had on one of the primary contributors to our scene. And I'm finally going to talk about it here.
By September of 2010, the open mic had been going strong for over four months. Alex had settled on the "Lost Art" name by July, which helped us settle into a more focused direction compared to our initial "Open Mic at Bill's" placeholder moniker. Momentum was good, we were attracting a decently sized body of regular and semi-regular performers, and by the end of September, we were riding fairly high from successful features on the 5th and the 19th. Off-feature weeks could go either way, ranging from mediocre to very good, but we were trending mostly well overall. The 26th was shaping up to be a good night. The sign up sheet was looking good, boasting fifteen performers with an unusually high number of talented musicians and a couple of new names on the roster. Representing the regulars were Opalina and Carlos Salas, flamboyant singer/guitarist Harry McNabb, Lost Art co-founder Lilly Penhall, Dan Chandler, Joshua Martin, Joey Cloudy, and Paul Sexton. Jason Gully, my acquaintance of long standing and an exceptional guitar player, was present but not signed up to perform. Paul, host of his own, long-running open mic at Arlington's Mochalux Coffee House, brought a companion along with him.
Paul was a bit of a complicated character. His pedigree in the local spoken word scene was long, with notable gigs hosting or co-hosting recurring open mics at Zombies Coffee House, Barnes & Noble, Deep Ellum's Darkroom, publication via multiple print and online outets, and involvement with Suenos Sabrosos and the Oak Cliff Circle of Poets before partnering with Devorah Titunik for the Mochalux series. He had made appearances at the original open mic at Bill's old location at Spring Valley and Coit, and like me, he was also a supporter of Johnny Olson's monthly "Mad Swirl" open mics at the Absinthe Lounge. What I can say about him as a person is that he was a highly emotional wordsmith driven by passion and a sometimes misdirected intensity. Months earlier I had recorded a long, rambling "poetry play" that Paul delivered at his Mochalux open mic. The recipient upon whom all this wordplay was lavished was a woman named Sarah; unfortunately for them both, that relationship didn't survive the fiery fervor of the presentation. Paul was a good person, just one with some personal complications that were honestly characteristic of many denizens of the scene. The break with Sarah had been three months earlier; I wasn't aware he was seeing anyone else until he showed up at Lost Art with Alexcie Ewbanks.
I never got to know Lexy all that well. I'd never met her before and knew nothing about her, as she moved (or had moved) in circles I'd never been a part of. I'm not sure how well the Mochalux regulars, some of whom occasionally crossed paths with Lost Art, knew her, either. Paul's reach in the scene extended pretty far beyond the three open mics I was personally involved with or supporting. But new faces were always welcome and always encouraged to perform, since performers are the lifeblood of any open mic and you want to fit in as many new ones as possible. Lexy performed two numbers that night. The first one was an a cappella number called "Warning." The second, and the more important of the two for what would come next, was a simple guitar ballad she introduced as "Breathe."
Alexcie had a simple note picking style that was reminiscent of a performer I remembered from the first generation of open mic's at Bill's, a gal named Andrea. In those days there were no smartphones, camcorder recording gear was still beyond the means of most of us broke ass poets and photographers, and posting videos on a much younger internet was a magical, difficult to manage pipe dream. By the latter part of 2010, I was recording and preserving our open mic nights and featuring select video performances on this website. The recording setup was a jury-rigged one that spoke of very limited funds and great ingenuity in the use of what resources were available to us. The video was captured using a secondhand JVC miniDV format camcorder. As for the audio, we had gotten a working laptop and decent (if limited) audio recording software. We had the cables and extenders and splitters and adapters running across the floor from the stage into both the house amp and into my 1970's era reel-to-reel tape machine, a piece of vintage equipment that served as a rudimentary mixer and output device into the laptop where a digital recording was made. The tape was also run to create a simultaneous analog recording as a safeguard against a catastrophic laptop failure, and because tape handles potential clipping distortion better. That night, I used our "poor man's" setup to capture Alexcie's performance in full.
By this time, we were well underway with planning and production for the Live at Lost Art Open Mic promotional CD, and I was on the lookout for suitable performances to feature on it. Toward that end, I approached Lexy at the end of the night with a pitch for the project, and she agreed to be a part of it. I figured she'd come back on another night and I'd get something else recorded, possibly something better than what I'd gotten that night, and whatever ended up being the best performance would end up included on the finished compilation. How little I knew at the time...
Fast forward six days to Saturday, October 2nd. I drove out to Mochalux Coffee House in Arlington for Paul and Devorah's open mic, something I did on many a weekend, and rather than finding the bustling, thriving spoken word and singer-songwriter community I was accustomed to seeing, I instead found the place mostly empty and the atmosphere somber. Paul was nowhere to be found. Virtually none of the regulars were present. Instantly, I could tell something was wrong. Carol Hart came up to me and delivered the news: Alexcie had died, and Paul had been there. There would be no open mic that night. In the days to come, I would hear the particulars of the story. They had gone out onto the lake. Alexcie had drowned. It had happened in front of Paul. Paul hadn't been able to save her. It had taken three or four grown men to subdue him in his frenzy afterward. Paul was a wreck, and people were concerned about the state he was in. Mochalux was suspended temporarily. And those recordings I had made six days earlier had a completely different significance now: they were the last recordings made of Lexy performing her art. When I got home from Mochalux, I took the physical tape of the previous Sunday and archived it.
Paul was on a semi-suicide watch for weeks after Lexy's death, with various people from the scene taking turns to keep him grounded and prevent him from doing anything irrational. He returned to live performances too soon after the tragedy, struggling through pieces about the drowning incident and about his relationship with Lexy at Mad Swirl and anywhere else he chose to read. Eventually, he asked me if I was still planning to include Lexy on our promotional CD. I confirmed my plans had not changed, and assured him that Lexy she would still have a place on the final disc. She had signed off on the project, albeit provisionally, on the night her recordings were made, and I would be moving forward with one of them.
"Breathe," along with David Crandall's performance of "Cold As Hell" from the same night, was featured on Live at Lost Art Open Mic, released at Bill's on November 5, 2010. I remember Paul's reading at the microphone that night as one of the most intensely uncomfortable performances I've ever witnessed. As one might expect, he wasn't doing too well. It's very hard to watch someone who's barely hanging on nearly come apart in front of an audience. Alex's famously unflappable voice actually cracked afterward when he introduced the next performer, the only time in more than two decades our acquaintance that I've ever seen this happen. The open mic continued, and other than Paul's near breakdown, the night was a success. Videos from November 5th went up on the website shortly thereafter, as was my standard practice. But the videos and other recordings from September 26th remained largely unseen and unheard, still withheld from publication for weeks, and eventually months, after the event. The digital recordings remained on the computer, and the tape reel continued to sit on my media shelf.
Five months later, a group of us were shooting the breeze at the Metro Diner, a greasy spoon we often adjourned to following Lost Art, when Paul decided to ask me about the September recordings. I confirmed I still had them, and acknowledged the reason they hadn't gone up on the website: I needed to be sure he could handle the experience of seeing and hearing Lexy's performances again. I'd put up a YouTube video for "Breathe' for the benefit of the family, but had refrained from going any farther than that; all the other night's material had been deliberately suppressed out of a concern for Paul's mental health. Paul averred that he was ready for it. We had our monthly feature coming up, this time being the With These Words acoustic performance, which I advised him I needed to focus on first, but I agreed to finally edit and post the September material once that had passed.
And so it was that after the WTW material was mixed, edited, and published, I finally revisited the night of September 26th and gave it its due. The mixdown and mastering of the Lost Art CD had taken place in early November, and the experience of hearing Lexy's voice coming through my speakers during that process had felt coldly eerie. Now, six months later, the vibe at my workstation was decidedly melancholic as I prepared the rest of the night's content for publication online. Everything felt like it had a dark cloud hanging over it. When the material finally went up, we were a full 211 days out from the recording date, and I subsequently re-archived all the source materials and put them out of my mind.
Throughout all of this, life continued. Emmeline wrote a song about the tragedy called "Nothing Magic in the Water," which was performed and recorded at Lost Art in February of 2011. We had a very successful feature with Jonathan "Gno" White and another one with David Crandall early that same year. Dez Statum knocked it out of the park with her March feature, and the live guitar accompaniment provided for her by Chris Zimmerly was on point. Joey Cloudy, Josh Weir, and Maggie Smith did very well with their features in April and May. And in the meantime, Paul soldiered on at Mochalux, though that open mic was now chafing against content restrictions introduced by the coffee house's new owners. Lost Art came to an end on June 5, 2011, and its final night was a study in melancholy, with most artists' material speaking of journeys ahead, of moving on, and of things coming to an end. That night's material went up on the site as usual. I continued to support the spoken word scene for a while after the end of Lost Art before I eventually stepped away altogether.
Over the years, I've mostly avoided interacting with any of the content from the night Alexcie played Lost Art, though there have been instances. For the first few years after our CD release, I made it a personal ritual to sit down and listen to the disc all the way through on or near its anniversary, mostly to see if I thought the final product still held up. I had to go through the entire night's material again in January 2016 when I compiled the list of Lost Art recorded performances that's up on the site, although I only played each work just long enough to get the title. And I revisited "Breathe" and "Cold Day in Hell" one final time in January 2025 when I made re-edits for the vinyl version of the Lost Art CD. But beyond those, I've had little enthusiasm for re-engaging with anything from that night in 2010 until now, because I've decided it's time to embrace what the night actually was instead of trying to stow the whole experience away as something not comfortable enough to consider revisiting.
Bill's Records and Mochalux Coffee House are both gone now. Alex called me in September 2021 to inform me that Paul had died. Emmeline doesn't perform "Nothing Magic in the Water" anymore. The crew that once formed the nucleus of my open mic family has largely dispersed. As for the magnetic tape recording from September 26, 2010, I'm not sure if I actually still have it. Back in the day, I used to wipe and record over a night's performances as soon as they'd been transferred to a digital format. Tape reels were too pricey and too wanting of storage space to justify retaining everything on the format forever, and it made more sense to simply cycle between a few reels each week than to amass a large collection. There's a chance that at least some of Alexcie's night was never wiped, but I don't know this for certain. I'd have to throw several different tape reels onto my playback machine and listen to them to find out, and that's something I've never had an inclination to do given how tainted that particular night has always been in my mind. Maybe I'll do it one day. I know approximately where the recording would be if it still exists, but that's something to consider for another time. As far as I'm concerned, the recollection I'm posting today is enough.
