More Madonna, Less Jesus

More Two Nice Girls

Sorry, if you’re not into them, but I’m not done with Two Nice Girls. I kept watching more of their videos last night. Here’s Money, performed by the original line-up with Laurie Freelove.

The recorded version sounds so much better, especially Gretchen’s lead guitar. But I just love this performance’s simple innocence.

Gretchen writes :

We actually rode a relatively folky wave, all my punk aspirations aside. We just really loved melody and harmony and wanted to sound pretty while saying radical things. I don’t think that just telling the truth about your life should be viewed as radical, but unfortunately it often is. Why shouldn’t we be out as lesbians? What did we have to lose? We weren’t really in the music business to get rich. We wanted to create anthems for people to come out to. We wanted to put on shows where hot, single babes could hook up. We wanted to provide an unmistakably queer soundtrack for them to fall in love to. We wanted to show men what lesbians were up to. We wanted to paint a picture of a world that was bigger and brighter than the one we were living in. We wanted to say that the emperor had no clothes. We wanted to give everyone a glimpse of our record collections. We wanted to make everyone have a good time with the lesbians, which was perhaps something you’d never experienced before. Those were our dreams of being mainstream. We just wanted to be in the middle of the mix, and not in the margins.

Public Poetry

People rarely write nasty reviews about poets and their poetry. But when I read one in N+1, about the poet who delivered the inaugural poem on January 20th, and about the the other inaugural poems, I got excited. A poem and a poet that someone cares enough about to criticize? Maybe poetry does matter.

I remember thinking that Maya Angelu’s poem at Clinton’s inaugural would bring poetry back into every-day life again too. It didn’t. Why am I always thinking that? Better that I just keep with my story that my job as a manager has been a better venue for my skills as a poet than any darkened coffeeshop.

It’s better because Rudolph Delson, the author of the N+1 essay is right. The poem at Obama’s inauguration proved that Elizabeth Alexander is a master of American singsong, and writing a poem worth of the occasion and audience was beyond her.

She seemed to me a master of the American poetic singsong.

By this I mean the elocutionary convention of delivering verse with preciousness and with rapture, so that the audience can hear how profoundly the poet loves the English language, how badly the poet wants to give the English language a deep tongue-kiss. In the singsong, speech occurs at an even volume, no syllable spoken much more loudly or softly than any other; in the singsong, the only way to emphasize a word is to say it slowly, or to pause after it. The singsong ignores both the syntactic beat of vernacular English and the rhythm of syllabically metered lines, giving every poem the cadence of an automobile engine that (precious thing!) can’t quite turn over. If a poem introduces no startling vocabulary, summons no puzzling imagery, and contemplates no troubling thoughts—in other words, if a poem is prosaic enough that the audience needs no time to take it in—then the singsong sounds like self-satisfaction.

And then he writes a hilariously sarcastic review of her website, and then digs into her “puzzling indifference to mathematics and natural science.” He admits, however, that while writing a poem for Obama may be beyond her, it has been beyond everyone who tried it.

The New York Times published a transcript of the poem Alexander ended up writing. . It’s not the usual word-salad of a modern poem, undiscernible and silly. I can follow each sentence as a coherent thought, but the construction of them does not rise to poetry. And together they are a jumble of ideas, each one not developed enough to leave me with a new or resonating connection with her, or other people, which is what I look for in poetry I like.

What Love is Like

Linked to xkcd’s site is a list of his favorite comics. That’s how I discovered this gem, a collaborative effort of a talented photographer and writer. Here’s one I liked today. They are all wonderful. I love the internet.

Current San Lorenzo River

We’re having a very nice storm this afternoon, so I thought I’d go out and take a look at the river. I like to do this during storms, not because I’m afraid that it will flood (it might, but I’m not afraid of that) but because sometimes interesting stuff is floating down it. All kinds of things come down that river. This one morning several years ago, on my way to work, I saw an elephant. I literally could not believe my eyes, but there was an elephant floating in the river. I could clearly see the trunk, head, and ear. It was several hundred yards up stream, so I ran closer to it as it came toward me. As it came closer and closer I thought it looked more an more like an elephant, but it could not, COULD NOT be an elephant, a baby elephant, in the San Lorenzo river. Finally, it floated past me, and I saw that it was a giant stuffed toy elephant, indeed.

No elephants today.