Dream of the Unified Media

A Quantification of the Day Before, the Day After, and New Year's Eve

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

Number of Theme Parks visited: 3
Total theme park hours clocked: 31.5
Total different number of rides ridden: 21
Total number of actual rides: 33

Oldest ride ridden: technically, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, which debuted on July 18, 1955 as the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride.

Most ridden ride: Apocalypse, Six Flags (6 rides)
Most rides in one day: Apocalypse, Six Flags (5 rides on one day)
Longest wait in line: X2 (90 minutes on day 1), Six Flags
Longest ride: It's a Small World Holiday, Disneyland

Best ride scenery & design: Tower of Terror, Disney's California Adventure
Best surprisingly good ride: StarTours, Disneyland
Most interesting attraction: Innoventions, Disneyland
Best ride new to us: Apocalypse
Best overall roller coaster: X2

Biggest shock: Superman, Six Flags--we didn't realize it was running backwards until we got on and it started moving!

Worst rollercoaster: Riddler's Revenge, Six Flags
Biggest disappointment: Green Lantern, Six Flags
Most NC-17: Goliath, Six Flags; it moves so fast the wind almost took my t-shirt off
Scariest/not on purpose: Colossus (1978), which feels like it's falling apart
Most childish ride: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Best food: French Market, Disneyland
Worst food: Katy's Kettle, Six Flags
Best treat: Funnel cake, Six Flags

Number of people recognized: 1 (I saw someone from my gym in Tucson)
Number of celebrity sightings 1 (tentative--maybe Bill Paxton)

2011 Favorite Albums / 1. Florence + The Machine, Ceremonials

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

Florence + The Machine Ceremonials

Music Math: Kate Bush + Peter Gabriel + Annie Lennox + David Bowie

Best Tracks: "Only If for a Night," "Shake It Out," "What the Water Gave Me," "Breaking Down," "No Light, No Light," "All This and Heaven Too"

Representative Lyrics: "Regrets collect like old friends / here to relieve your darkest moments / I can see no way, I can see no way / And all of the ghouls come out to play"

Notes: Florence + The Machine have done something really significant with this album: they have distilled down the last 30 years of British pop music into a single cohesive disc. The songs have the operatic intensity of Kate Bush, the R&B/soul influence of Annie Lennox, the outerspaceness of David Bowie, and the accessible experimentation of Peter Gabriel, among many other audible influences. The lyrics, of course, are a bit on the maudlin/obtuse end ("What the Water Gave Me" is ostensibly from the perspective of Virginia Woolf just prior to her suicide), but the music is pure anthem. From the opening track's cascade of tinkling piano and harp, the songs build and build, layering instruments, vocals, and harmonies until they erupt into joyous, defiant, or mournful choruses.

Beau’s Critique: "This album makes me want to commit suicide."

2011 Favorite Albums / 2. Foster the People, Torches

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

Foster the People, Torches

Music Math: David Bowie + A-ha

Best Tracks: "Helena Beat," "Pumped Up Kicks," "Call It What You Want," "Houdini"

Representative Lyrics: "All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / you better run, better run / outrun my gun / All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / you better run, better run / faster than my bullet"

Notes: You've probably only heard the one song radio played constantly, but the rest of this album is worth a listen. The songs have diverse sounds and arrangements, pulling in just about every instrument and the kitchen sink, mixing up rock beats with dance beats with R&B beats. Each song is an infectious pop miracle, so be prepared to hum them obsessively if you dare to listen. Bonus points to including a really long sample from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at the start of "Warrant."

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 3. Oh Land, Oh Land

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

Oh Land, Oh Land

Music Math: (Björk - dadaism) + (Olivia Newton John - 1970s)

Best Tracks: "Perfection," "Break the Chain," "Sun of a Gun," "Lean," "Wolf & I," "White Nights"

Representative Lyrics: "He said, 'Sorry but you'll never gonna dance again' / But my feet just keep me moving / trying to break the chain"

Notes: The year's best art-pop album, Oh Land's debut owes a clear debt to the trail blazed by her Scandinavian foremother Björk but doesn't stray far from the sunny harmonies and major chords of traditional pop music. What buoys it all is her elfin voice, both reed-thin and velvety at the same time.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 4. Adele, 21

2011-12-27T07:00:00.001-05:00

Adele, 21

Music Math: ((Amy Winehouse + Duffy) - drama - disappointment) + heartache

Best Tracks: "Rolling in the Deep," "Rumour Has It," "Turning Tables," "Someone Like You"

Representative Lyrics: "Bless your soul you got your head in the clouds / she made a fool out of you and she's bringing you down"

Notes: It's easy to see why this album tops most of the end of the year lists--it's bold, fearless, honest, and most of all perfectly written and sung. The songs on 21 capture what Marianne Moore said about art: that it is most universal when it is most subjective. By pouring her own experience into this album, Adele creating something everyone can identify with--and her voice, so beautiful, carries the rest.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 5. Panic! At the Disco, Vices & Virtues

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

Panic! At the Disco, Vices & Virtues

Music Math: (Panic at the Disco - pretension) + !

Best Tracks: "Hurricane," "Memories," "Trade Mistakes," "Ready to Go," "Always," "The Calendar"

Representative Lyrics: "It was always you falling for me / now there's always time calling for me / I'm a light blinking at the end of the road / blink back to let me know"

Notes: After losing half its members (including the primary songwriter & lyricist) a few years ago, I wasn't sure Panic would be able to recover. But they not only put out a good album, they put out an album better than their others. This collection captures the electro-rock spirit of the first half of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out while incorporating more straightforward pop into their arrangements. We saw them live this year and, though Brandon Urie was sick and almost lost his voice during the performance, they were still amazeballs.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 6. Robyn, Body Talk

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

Robyn, Body Talk

Music Math: 1990s Robyn + 20 years

Best Tracks: "Dancing On My Own," "Indestructible," "Hang with Me," "Call Your Girlfriend," "Get Myself Together"

Representative Lyrics: "My momma called me last night; she said when nothing else fits, pick up the pieces and move on / I see the flashing red lights, just can't make sense of the bits / it's like my mind is gone"

Notes: A friend of mine encouraged me to pick this up and the end of last year and it became a year-long favorite. Although it doesn't seem like it should be difficult to make good dance music, it's actually pretty rare to find classy dance music, which is basically what this is. There's a maturity and depth to the lyrics rarely found in this genre, but also a playfulness and willingness to experiment and push boundaries, cross genres, and take risks.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 7. Eliza Doolittle, Eliza Doolittle

2011-12-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

Eliza Doolittle, Eliza Doolittle

Music Math: (Adele - melancholy) + Katy Perry

Best Tracks: "Moneybox," "Rollerblades," "Skinny Genes," "Back to Front," "Pack Up"

Representative Lyrics: "Singing with a broken string, tell me what you really mean / Do you know what you want? / While beating up on yesterday, I was on my rollerblades / rolling on, moving on."

Notes: Itty bitty cutie Eliza Doolittle has an accent so thick she can't sing through it (based on her name, guess which kind?). She's also known for rarely wearing pants in favor of very short skirts, which makes her like an automatic favorite of mine. These songs are light, hummable, funny, and cutely anachronistic, blending old arrangements (horns, strings, big band sounds, etc) with contemporary lyrics in the vein of Amy Winehouse, but to much different effect.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 8. Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes

Music Math: Björk circa Debut + 1950s doowop + Igmar Bergman films

Best Tracks: "Youth Knows No Pain," "I Follow Rivers," "Get Some," "Sadness Is a Blessing," "I Know Places," "Jerome"

Representative Lyrics: "Like a shotgun / needs an outcome / I'm your prostitute / you gon' get some"

Notes: This is one of the craziest sounding albums I've heard in along time. Li cribs from 1950s pop standards like "Unchained Melody" and groups like The Shirelles, then tosses them in a blender with tribal drums, tinkling bells, and buzzing synths, coming out of it with something that sounds intensely unique and immediately Scandinavian at the same time. Also noteworthy was her live iTunes session EP, which features stripped down versions of many of these songs--most of which lose the echoey backing vocals and allows you to hear her, just her.

Beau’s Critique: "This album makes me want to commit suicide."

2011 Favorite Albums / 9. James Morrison, The Awakening

2011-12-22T07:00:00.001-05:00

James Morrison, The Awakening

Music Math: ((Michael McDonald/Bryan Adams) - cheese) + Adele

Best Tracks: "In My Dreams," "Up," "Slave to the Music," "One Life"

Representative Lyrics: "But I can't help but shuffle my feet / Movin' like a zombie, chasing the beat / She lures me in, oh sweet surrender / Locks me down like a repeat offender"

Notes: This album snuck up on me, courtesy of free listening on Spotify, where it became my background-working music for a long time. Then it became driving music. Then I found myself humming it and singing it. If you could imagine a male, slightly more funk version of Adele, that's really what you'd find here--oh, and with a bit of Bryan Adams's raspy voice mixed in.

Beau’s Critique:

2011 Favorite Albums / 10. Marina & the Diamonds, The Family Jewels

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

Marina & the Diamonds, The Family Jewels

Music Math: (Florence of Florence and the Machine + The Count from Sesame Street) + Bananarama

Best Tracks: "Shampain," "Are You Satisfied?," "Oh No," "Numb"

Representative Lyrics: "If you are not very careful / Your possessions will possess you / TV told me how to feel / Now real life has no appeal"

Notes: Although it came out a few years ago, Marina found her way into my life this summer and she never left me. While her lyrics frequently border on the inane, the music is fun and sort of silly and absurd as well, so it all evens out. I listen to this all the time.

Beau’s Critique: "Love her. She's the new solo Gwen Stefani for me."

2011 Favorite Albums / 11. Mumford & Sons, Sigh No More

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

Mumford & Sons, Sigh No More

Music Math: Peter Gabriel + the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou?

Best Tracks: "The Cave," "Little Lion Man," "Winter Winds"

Representative Lyrics: "I will hold on hope / and I will let you choke / on the noose around your neck"

Notes: I love this quirky little album of homages to bluegrass music. Plucky banjos, slappy basses, and strummy guitars dominate along with beautiful harmonies in the vocals.

Beau’s Critique: "I don't like this and he's ugly. I feel like I'm in Ireland or something."

2011 Favorite Albums / 12. Fitz & the Tantrums, PIckin' Up the Pieces

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Fitz & the Tantrums, Pickin' Up the Pieces
Music Math: (Amy Winehouse - problems) x church organ

Best Tracks: "Breakin' the Chains of Love," "MoneyGrabber," "L.O.V.," "News 4 U"

Representative Lyrics: “It's 6 a.m. spitting gray / Don't know why I let you treat me this way / I keep holding on to your middle finger / But now I know I gotta pull the trigger"

Notes: Aside from having possibly the greatest band name ever, Fitz & the Tantrums do classic soul straight up/no chaser. Backed by traditional arrangements and prominently featuring a church organ in most of the songs, FATT do very little to adjust the anachronism of their sound and their content (unlike Winehouse, who modernized her lyrics). These songs focus on the bread and butter of soul--heartbreak--and look at it from several different angles. Bonus: download their cover of The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," one of the best songs of the year.

Beau’s Critique: “It reminds me of like a guy Amy Winehouse. I like it, but it's not really my thing."

2011 Favorite Albums / 13. Patrick Stump, Soul Punk

2011-12-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

Patrick Stump, Soul Punk
Music Math: (Fall Out Boy – everyone except Patrick Stump) x Prince

Best Tracks: “This City,” “Spotlight (New Regrets), Run Dry (X Heart X Fingers),” “Everybody Wants Somebody”

Representative Lyrics: “Step 1: Drink / Step 2: Make mistakes / Step 3: Pretend you don’t remember / Step 4: Drink a little more / Step 5: I need to run dry”

Notes: Many of you know I was devasted when my favorite emo band for 14-year-old girls broke up a bit ago, but my wounds have been healed by this release, which gives amazing vocalist Stump the ideal platform for his frenetic and funky brand of pop-rock. His voice is fully unleashed and is the star of the show, trumped (maybe) only by the note that Stump himself played every instrument on the album. Crazeballs! I saw him live this year and he is, truly, one of the most amazing live singers I’ve ever heard.

Beau’s Critique: “I love his voice, but this album is kind of lame.”

2011 Favorite Albums / 14. The Civil Wars, Barton Hollow

2011-12-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Civil Wars, Barton Hollow
Music Math: (Peter Paul & Mary – Peter) + Ulysses S. Grant / Hell on Wheels

Best Tracks: “20 Years,” “I’ve Got this Friend,” “Barton Hollow”

Representative Lyrics: “I’m a dead man walking here / That’s the least of all my fears / Walk beneath the water”

Notes: Charmingly anachronistic duo The Civil Wars blend country, folk rolk, and bluegrass sounds with their perfect cross-gender harmonies. Both singers have beautiful solo voices, which we hear from time to time, but their real strength is their dueling melodies on tracks like “Barton Hollow,” which evokes the era of the actual Civil War more vividly than many elements of the war itself.

Beau’s Critique: “This album makes me want to commit suicide.”

2011 Favorite Albums / 15. Peter Bjorn and John, Gimme Some

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Peter Bjorn and John, Gimme Some
Music Math: (The Hives – Green Day) + The Cars + Wakko from Animaniacs

Best Tracks: “Dig a Little Deeper,” “Second Chance” (awesome video above)

Representative Lyrics: “When you flew out of the nest / you made a mistake / flew all the way back”

Notes: In their effort to be constantly different than they used to be, Peter Bjorn and John released this fun little disc of anachronistic pop songs that feel like they could have appeared in just about any decade previous. The energy on the album is consistently high and the album doesn’t stray far from exquisitely crafted pop hooks, backbeats, and lyrics that are alternately vacant and pithy.

Beau’s Critique: “I kind of like that song now.”

Ed Madden on his new book Prodigal: Variations

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up in rural Arkansas, I remember being taught the story of Abraham and Isaac in Sunday school. The whole story is a real soap opera—the patriarch gets the servant pregnant, then his postmenopausal wife, who demands the servant and her kid be kicked out. There’s sex, jealousy, rejection and exile (and that odd subplot about strange men dropping in on their way to the big city, where they nearly get raped before the whole city goes up in flames.) But the central drama is a story about a father and son, a trip up the mountain where Abraham is going to kill his son Isaac because God told him to. Test of faith and all that. Over and over we were taught this story as an exemplum of great faith.

But it’s really pretty creepy, pretty horrifying. Your dad loves his god so much he’s willing to kill you. The poem that opens my second book of poetry, Prodigal: Variations (Lethe Press 2011), takes that story as its impulse, but reimagines it from the point of view of someone like Isaac. (“Sacrifice” also appeared in Best New Poets 2007.)

Sacrifice

When my father bound me, I submitted,

closed my eyes to the lifted knife in his fist.
Even now, the cords still hold my wrists,

rough ropes of love. My chest is bare,
my heart lies open. He loves his god more

than me. I open my eyes, watch my father
raise his fist against a bright and bitter

sky, no angel there to stay his hand.

In many ways, the book is a book about men—not just fathers and sons, but brothers,
friends, lovers. And for me it’s also a book about the stories I grew up with, especially stories from the Bible. In particular, the story of the prodigal son, with its promise of reconciliation, haunts the book. But if the book is haunted by what could have been, it finds its consolations in the here and now, in the rituals and relationships that sustain us.

One poem near the end is both tragic and hilarious. A friend of mine told me that his
mother, who has Alzheimer’s, has forgotten that she’d disowned him years ago for being
gay, and now the woman who rejected him is thrilled to see him.

Solace

Lily, Jack’s yellow lab, leans across the futon to look
at me, the casita’s latest visitor, new neighbor for the week,

then she sighs—the way that dogs resign themselves to something new—
thumps that thick semaphore of tail, and stretches, a back paw

against my leg as she sleeps—the way I fall asleep best,
my foot just touching Bert’s leg beneath the sheets. Meanwhile, the rest

of the world shudders on: sunlight spattering the shady lawn,
sirens pulsing on a nearby street, a cement rabbit pausing

at the back fence. If I speak of solace now, I don’t
mean comfort. At lunch today, Robert said his mother doesn’t

remember that she’d disowned him—the disease weeds the last few years
away. When he visits, she is almost loving, which she never

really was, he says. It’s not her, he says, or maybe it is.

This was a difficult book for me in some ways, grounded as it was in my alienation from
my own father and family and home. Ironically, when the book was launched in April at the Columbia Museum of Art, I was in the midst of a three-month stint at home, helping with my father’s hospice care. It was a big affair, a joint book launch with fellow poet and friend Ray McManus, and bluegrass gospel from a band called, of all things, Total Denial.

I know I retell stories obsessively. No version is the last one. Now the book is haunted by three months of something I could never have imagined, haunted by the possibility of all the book denies—-as in the title poem:

A man watches the road.
He will see me coming.

Even a great way off, he will see me coming.

The Curse of the Anthologist

2011-12-14T18:25:00.003-05:00

It's difficult to do anything in the world these days without a) someone complaining, b) someone else rushing to the defense of the maligned, and c) twenty or thirty unrelated parties commenting on why all the dramz is relevant/irrelevant/fascinating/ridiculous.

File this under c).

I've been looking through the Vendler/Dove disagreement with some surprise. But this won't be a blog post that questions Dove's editorial decisions or one that approves of/disqualifies Vendler's response. My personal take on the anthology and the review of it don't really matter; after all, who am I? I thought you'd agree.

But what I am invested in is the value system that created this conflict. It's situations like these, I think, that make the work of the anthologist a thorny venture. I think back to the days when Legitimate Dangers was first released--2006--and I recall many of the same arguments made. This isn't to say the arguments, such as issues relating to representation of diversity of race, gender, and other marginalized identities, are not essential ones; I'm just saying, "People, we're still having the same conversations." And that's a problem.

The anthologist carries the unnatural burden (it has been so proven) of satisfying everyone. This is a task Sisyphusian in scope. In fact, the only person the anthologist is sure to satisfy is him or herself--but even now, with Dove's situation, we see that, too, is not necessarily the case.

Vendler's perspective on the issue connects to a larger community of writer and critique who believe less is more. Fewer poets in the canon means closer scrutiny merited by only the absolute best poets of our time. This is an excellent perspective to adopt. If only we could establish, once and for all, the objective criteria of what is "the best."

Dove's perspective (if I may intuit it from her response) is that there are more poets whose work bears inclusion. I don't believe Dove sought to speak on behalf of The Canon. But in adopting the work of the anthologist, she is perceived (by some or all) to have done so.

Partly, I think this is because her anthology's title stakes a claim as an important evaluation of the work of the last century. These are big shoes to fill in a world where there are long standing assumptions about who those poets are.

My lingering question is: "Why do we bother to publish new anthologies if they will only include the usual suspects, whose work has been anthologized previously in other books?"

If that was the only goal of the anthology, we could all congratulate Norton on a job well done and leave it at that.

But many of us writing now, I believe, see value in adding to--not replacing, not supplanting, not necessarily criticizing--the established anthology gang. Vendler, in her review, allowed that some readers, especially young ones (!), might feel electrified by some of the work Dove included that isn't commonly found in other anthologies. But Vendler didn't believe this was a criterion that permitted the exclusion (purposeful or not) of the poets she (and others like her) expected to see.

It's that expectation that troubles me, and that has troubled me in all of the responses I've read to this particular anthology. And to every anthology ever produced. Especially when the expectation is voiced as "I expected to see X poet instead of someone like Y poet." If you felt this way, I'd hazard it's because you've seen X poet in other anthologies with a scope like Dove's.

But I'd also hazard you hadn't seen Dove's anthology before.

I believe it is the job of the anthologist to show us something new. Those poets who are regularly anthologized? Their work is taking care of itself. It will endure. The people who want it (expect it) can find it in any number of places. But the work on the brink of extinction--those poets not commonly anthologized, those poets Dove, as anthologist, feels need a second look--those are the pieces I'm most interested in.

I may not like them. I may not believe they are really worthy of inclusion in an anthology that, by its title, suggests it is a comprehensive look at a century of writing.

But I will value the opportunity to have made that decision for myself, rather than to have experienced, yet again, the same book with a slightly different title, a different editor, and some new cover art.

And if I disagree with Dove's choices, or another editor's choices, I won't disparage her or suggest she failed in her endeavor. I am, after all, but one person (see above: who am I?).

I will close the book, place it on a shelf, and wait for the next editor's unique perspective on poetry, to see what can be found there.

2011 Favorite Albums!!

2011-12-13T19:42:00.002-05:00

This year, instead of ganging up my favorite albums post into one loooong post, I'm going to unroll it one day at a time.

I winnowed the list down to just 15 albums (which was tough), so starting on 12/16, there'll be a daily post featuring one of the albums and my take on it.

Andrew Demcak on his new book Night Chant

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

My newest poetry collection, Night Chant (Lethe Press 2011), began with the leftover poems that didn’t fit in with the tone of my first collection, Catching Tigers in Red Weather (Three Candles Press, 2007). Around 2009, I became interested in the idea of “hidden,” which logically leads to the idea of “discovery.” I was still experimenting with poetic voice and narrative in my work, (e.g. who is the speaker, to whom is the poem addressed, etc.) and playing around with burying poetic forms within line breaks. The poems in Night Chant all have very formal metrical structures and/or rhyme schemes, but the forms are embedded in the line breaks to conceal them. Once the true line is discovered, the reader can see that these poems are in the tradition of French syllabic verse. For example, here is the poem “Announcement” with its “true” lines revealed:

A baby’s pink squeal for the tit, its hunger*
insolvent, obstinate country. Or
the snarl of sated fox, the expunger,
after its banquet of rabbit femur.
Mountains open upon their dependents
a volcanic outrage. Magma aglow
like the mind’s light, orange-red, resplendent.
Over lifeless men, the screech of sea birds,
the fins of mermaids the drowning have heard.

*my sloppy division of syllables (count 11, the next line 9 = 20 for the two lines.)

The end rhymes are more noticeable this way and the ten-syllable lines become apparent. So began Night Chant.

One of the memorable poem sections of Night Chant (besides all the raw sex poems) is what I’ve been calling the “Dead Baby” section. These poems came as a reaction to the state of Florida announcing that it was illegal now for LGBTQI2-S couples to adopt children there. My kneejerk response was “If we can’t have our own children, then neither can they,” and I began to imagine all the social permutations and complications of birth.

I wanted to include my two longest poems, both e-chapbooks, Pink Narcissus (GOSS 183/Casa Menendez Press, 2009) and 672 Hours (Gold Wake Press, 2008) here, the former from what is considered the first gay art film, and the latter about my 28-day stay in a drug and alcohol rehab. Both of these poems for me relate to the “hidden” in the gay experience.

And because this whole book was shaping up to be a literary catharsis for me, I decided to base the title on the nine-day, Navajo healing ceremony, the Night Chant. The title worked perfectly: it meant “the hidden expression.”

Bad Films/Charles Jensen/THE SWEETEST THING

2011-11-30T07:00:00.001-05:00

You know the plot: a heartless love 'em and leave 'em player toys with the affections of the opposite sex until WHAM! along comes the one who may turn out to be THE ONE. Undaunted, the player and player's best friend hop in the car to pick up THE ONE at a wedding...only to discover THE ONE is marrying someone else! The wedding derails at the last minute and then...our main characters reconnect, finally falling in love.

What you don't expect: the player is Cameron Diaz. THE ONE is Thomas Jane.

The Sweetest Thing turns tired romantic comedy tropes on their head by changing up the genders and letting women run the show. Diaz's Christina has left a sea of shattered men in her wake, all of whom suffer from anger management issues, impotence, insanity, or some combination thereof. Her best friend Courtney, of a similar mold, supports her friends "manizing" and does a bit of her own, all for--GASP!--HER OWN ENJOYMENT! Third friend (and frequent third wheel) Jane (Selma Blair), recently dumped by her man, sets off on a calorie-free sexcapade with a cute (but insanely stupid) man whose "features" have her reaching for the Advil the next day.

If these characters had penises, I'd hazard to say they'd be the staple of any ridonkulous male sex comedy. But because they are women doin' it for themselves, the film tanked. Diaz's love interest, Peter (it's slang for penis!), is a fussy, wallowy dude who becomes incensed when Christina rips him a new one for blowing off hot friend Jane at the club. He knocks her down a peg. Christina shrugs it off...but is she attracted to him? Yes. Probably because he's the only guy in the club who isn't dripping off her at any given moment. The story of our lives: we want who doesn't want us.

While The Sweetest Thing is bold in premise, it doesn't quite nail the dismount. If non-narrativity is your thing, this film is for you. Diaz and the girls interrupt the film with a costume change-filled "movie montage" while shopping for wedding outfits (and lamenting the sagging of her breasts with marked candor in the process), a spontaneous music/dance number called "You're Too Big to Fit in Here" that summarizes the three's perspective on consoling men about the size of their Johnsons, and a sex fantasy that features Christina receiving constant oral sex while eating giant ice cream sundaes with the calories removed. Add to this a road trip, a wedding brawl, a piercing-related fellatio emergency, an encounter with nervous bride Parker Posey, the most embarrassing visit to the dry cleaners EVER, and a glory hole, and you've got The Sweetest Thing.

While for most moviegoers, the disconnectedness (or what negative reviewers smarmily call its "bits," also slang for penis, btw) for me is its strength. Diaz, Applegate, and Blair are fearless in the film, often taking gags to the point of danger, disgust, or both--but never losing their wicked lack of apology for doing so (unlike most other female-driven comedies like Bridesmaids, which got gross, but allowed you to hate/pity the characters while watching so you didn't have to imagine spending a life with them).

While the film does ultimately return our women to "ladylike" status by the end (all our happily coupled and on a sex-free diet until "the time is right"), it pulls no punches along the way. One of the greatest moments is when Applegate lambasts Diaz for "naming the puppy" (Peter) after he chastizes her. Another woman in the restroom can't stop staring at Applegate's boobs. "They're fake," she says flatly, then offers, "Go ahead, touch them." The woman, then three other women, all begin evaluating the realness of Applegate's implants. As the bathroom door swings open, two men fall over themselves when they see this, their fantasy in real life. "That's why chicks always go to the bathroom together!" one says as they camp out for a better view. Of course, the reality is a lot less sexy.

Or the bit where Applegate and Diaz, clad only in their "laundry day panties" after a urinal soaks them both with water and Diaz gets poked in the eye at the aforementioned glory hole, drive to the wedding. Diaz drops something on the floor of the car and, as she reaches over to grab it from under Applegate's feet (who is driving), a hyper-masculine biker passes by and looks in, almost falling off his bike. Applegate plays up the appearance, flicking her tongue through her spread fingers, egging him on, while Diaz pats around on the floor none the wiser. All is fun and games until the biker, so caught up in their tryst, doesn't see his lane end...and dumps the bike on the ground. In the background, you see him stand up and shake his fist at them angrily as they drive off. Again--masculine misinterpretation of female sexuality is the punchline. Oddly, (straight) men seemed not to find this funny!

2002's The Sweetest Thing didn't get a lot of notice when it was released. In fact, I don't even really remember it coming out in theaters. A quick sweep of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes brings up these ringing endorsements:

"Female characters should be allowed to engage in raunchy humor on the big screen; they already do on the small one with Sex and the City. But unlike that HBO series, The Sweetest Thing has no guts." Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune

"If a date suggests the two of you should go and see this film dump them." Harry Guerin, RTE Interactive

"A movie in which laughter and self-exploitation merge into jolly soft-porn 'empowerment.'" Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"If you laugh at this badly made recycled trash dump...it may be because you are amused at seeing women doing the same revolting stuff men do, and being forced to suffer the very same consequences." Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

You'll note all these reviewers are, sadly, men. And possibly humorless pricks.

Even as it wickedly deconstructs heterosexual gender norms and sex roles, The Sweetest Thing never loses its sense of whimsy and fantasy, as evidence by my parting gift: "You're Too Big to Fit in Here." If not obvious, this clip is rated R.

Bad Films/Collin Kelley/THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN

2011-11-25T11:12:00.005-05:00

The Legend of Billie Jean was a flop in the summer of 1985. It was critically savaged and only earned around $3 million (peanuts!) at the box office before being sent to cable purgatory. Even the soundtrack, designed to draw in the MTV generation, tanked. Pat Benatar, who sang the killer theme song, “Invincible,” has disowned the movie.

The movie wasn’t in theaters long enough for me to see it on the big screen, but in the summer of 1986 I saw it for the first time in a hotel room in Savannah. And, oddly, every time I went on vacation with my family, the movie was playing. We would turn on the TV in our cheap hotel room and there was Helen Slater as the eponymous heroine fighting for white trash truth, justice, and the American way.

My father – who never paid attention to such things – remarked that it was “weird” that The Legend of Billie Jean seemed to be following us. From Mississippi to Virginia and beyond, Billie Jean Davy was working her “fair is fair” mojo into our very souls.

Watching TLoBJ today, it’s easy to see how this flop became a cult favorite on cable. With its impoverished Corpus Christi trailer park denizens, bullying, misogyny, attempted rape, child abuse, subversion of authority, and thematic link to Joan of Arc, TLoBJ wasn’t a happy ‘80s teen lark. It was anti-Brat Pack; darker than anything John Hughes would ever attempt although it’s cut from the same misunderstood youth cloth.

The story is pretty simple: Binx (played by Christian Slater in his first major role) has his beloved motor scooter stolen and trashed by the town bullies, lead by Hubie Pyatt. Binx and Billie Jean go to the police, but Detective Ringwald (a classy Peter Coyote) dismisses their story as just kids being kids.

Billie Jean decides to confront Hubie’s sleazy father, who runs a souvenir shop on the beach, and demands $608 to pay to fix the scooter. Instead, Mr. Pyatt says he’ll pay for the scooter in $50 increments every time Billie Jean has sex with him (“pay as you go, earn as you learn”) and when she refuses, he tries to rape her. Binx winds up shooting Mr. Pyatt in the arm, and the “Billie Jean Gang” (friends Putter and Ophelia are along for the ride to spice up their lives) are soon outlaws. They become instant celebrities and top the most wanted list as the media spins their exploits wildly.

A film geek, Lloyd, hides the gang at his house and shows Billie Jean the classic Otto Preminger film Saint Joan starring Jean Seberg. Billie Jean is mesmerized by the story and watches wide-eyed as Joan is burned at the stake for heresy.

When Billie Jean shears off her long flowing hair and dons the skin-tight jumpsuit, she transforms herself into a modern day Joan. Lloyd films her demands for the $608 and sends the videotape to every news channel in Texas, thus making Billie Jean a legend.

When Billie Jean & Co. arrive for a fateful meeting on the beach, where Detective Ringwald has promised that a restored Scooter will be waiting along with an apology from Mr. Pyatt, they find a phalanx of media, a whipped up crowd of supporters, and sharpshooters.

That’s a whole lotta lotta for what was billed as a “teen movie.” What makes the film more resonant now is how it pre-figured the media siege and spin long before the age of the Internet, 24 news cycle, and merchandising (Billie Jean’s likeness is emblazoned on everything from t-shirts to Frisbees). TLoBJ was also unafraid to present its good guys as anti-heroes. Billie Jean and Co. were no saints – they wound up having to steal, elude police, and Binx even threatens Detective Ringwald with a realistic toy gun.

The climatic scene at the beach, where the crowd equally wants to see Billie Jean triumph and to be gunned down, is over-the-top but also chilling. Along with the allusions to Saint Joan and Bonnie and Clyde, there’s also a bit of Patty Hearst thrown in for good measure as Billie Jean becomes an “urban guerilla” forced to rebel to survive. Like Hearst, Billie Jean makes the “mistake” of living instead of dying.

In the end, a giant effigy of Billie Jean erected on the beach by Mr. Pyatt is set aflame, harkening back to Joan’s fiery demise. TLoBJ has moments of silliness, Helen Slater has a propensity to under-emote when a scene needs a bit more, but this movie definitely deserved to be a hit.

Sadly, every time I was feeling persecuted by my parents for not being able to stay out late, get out of chores, or borrow money, the “fair is fair” line never worked. My dad said when I got my face on a Frisbee to let him know and we’d negotiate. Bummer.

Collin Kelley is an award-winning poet and novelist. His latest book, the mystery Remain In Light, is out now in eBook format and will be available in print in January. www.collinkelley.com

Bad Films/Andrew Demcak/AMUSING MUSES: XANADU VS. THE LADY IN THE WATER, WITH SPECIAL BONUS PARABLE: GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

2011-11-21T07:00:00.002-05:00

This is going to seem goofy as all hell that I even think about these things, but believe it or not, Olivia Newton John’s frothy roller-disco movie, Xanadu (41% Rotten Tomatoes rating) and the dreadful M. Night Shyamalan’s “Adult Fairytale” The Lady in the Water (24% Rotten Tomatoes rating) are basically the same film, and I love them both, God help me! Both films feature a Muse who returns to earth to inspire a young artist/author to create a great work: In Xanadu, that great work is to build a pleasure palace (read: tacky 80’s roller rink) and in The Lady in the Water, to inspire Vick Ran (played by the ego-bloated M. Night Shyamalan himself) to write The Cookbook, which will inspire a future president to change the world for the better. Both films also feature a group of sisters (The Pleiades, or Muses) who assist the lead character on his journey, a common folktale motif.

Anyone familiar with my writing will know that I incorporate many different mythologies into it. I have always been fascinated by myth and legend and continue to be. I am a sucker for a good fairytale! But one must know how to present one’s story CORRECTLY, m’kay? Tipping one’s hat means doing one’s homework. What I love about Xanadu is the fact that it is based in the Greek myth of the Nine Muses (plus the title is taken from Coleridge’s poem, "Kubla Khan," POETRY BONUS: 25 points to Xanadu). Although Olivia Newton John’s character is called Kira, and not her real name, Terpsichore (Muse of Dance), probably has more to do with the average American’s ability to pronounce words than the mistake of the novice scriptwriter.

Even Shyamalan’s film has all the elements and motifs of world mythology. It was clear to me from the very first minutes of the film that Shyamalan, like me, was enamored by fairytales. The Lady in the Water employs these common folk tale elements: an explanation of world origin (we came from the sea), human strengths are glorified (kindness, generosity, bravery, team work, healing abilities, etc.), the help of guardians/mentors/guides must be sought (The mermaid, aptly named “Story,” after she inspires Vick Ran, can only return to her oceanic world with assistance of The Healer, The Interpreter, The Vessel, The Guardian, and The Guild members) monsters (the wolf-like Skrunt, the ape-like Tarturic, and the great eagle, Eatlon), a quest or impossible task (which is the plot of the film, for “Story” to inspire the writing of The Cookbook and return then to the sea), and a struggle between light and dark, good and evil (ahh, Hollywood, where would you be without that one?)
Both films also revolve around Freudian and Jungian mythological archetypes, even perhaps, Feminist archetypes (but I won’t go into that here, dear me, no. That is a doctoral thesis in itself! Try pulling apart L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books if you really want to know about Jungian archetypes.)

BONUS PARABLE: Guillermo Del Toro’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (61% Rotten Tomatoes rating). Guillermo Del Toro knows his fairytales – that is clear from the Hellboy films. But what I loved about his remake of the 1973 ABC made-for-TV movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is he moves the plot into the literary world of mythology by having his young female lead character, Sally, step into a “Fairy Ring,” a ring of mushrooms left behind where fairies dance, in the beginning of the movie.

Anyone who reads a lot of folklore knows what a Fairy Ring is to a mortal: a dangerous place to enter. Humans can be trapped forever in the fairy ring or lose an eye, or suffer another punishment from the fairies for trespassing (SPOILER ALERT: the punishment in the movie involves someone’s teeth being pulled out and eaten by the fairies, and then the hapless human dragged kicking down a grated shoot into an filthy ash pit where he is turned into a fairy himself. Ouch!) In the movie theater, I almost cried out, “Don’t step into that Fairy Ring!” It wouldn’t have been the first time I did something like that, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering partner (17 years we’ve been together), Peter. But I knew that this invasion into the fairy realm would have its consequences for the young girl character, Sally. In fact, it sets up the plot for the rest of the film. Del Toro’s use of this simple folklore element raises his movie from common horror, to universal myth. And, I, for one, am glad he’s such a smarty-pants.

Andrew Demcak is an award-winning author & poet. His new book of poetry, Night Chant, is was published by Lethe Press in 2012. Check out his other work here: http://www.andrewdemcak.com & here: http://www.the andrewdemcak23.com He is listening to Wire's awesome new album Red Barked Tree right now.

LOCUSPOINT: Maine, August 31, 2011

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of her region, editor Dawn Potter wrote, "Maine is an enormous state, and also a lonely one. Our largest city, Portland, is a blip on the cities-of-the-world map, last metropolitan outpost of the Northeast Corridor, an urbane seaside burg that is liable, among airport baggage handlers, to be confused with Oregon. Yet Portland lies in far southern Maine. Above it looms the bulk of our craggy, thin-soiled, brief-summered land mass, jutting awkwardly toward the seas of Greenland, toiling into the Canadian wilderness—few people and fewer roads and as cold as a rat’s ass for eight months of the year."

In the weeks since her edition went live, Dawn noted, "The Maine edition hasn't been out for very long yet, but already I've received many responses from other Maine readers and writers. Most seem to be excited about the edition, but I've also heard a few of them express reservations about the 'darkness' of my curated poems. This interests me, not only because I feel that the poems are far more ambiguously moody than the word 'darkness' implies but also because the image of an ideal Maine is so powerful, even in the minds of long-time Mainers. For writers, it can be hard, very hard, to balance deep love for a place with a simultaneous need to admit its flaws and travesties. But then again, isn't that struggle exactly what we face with all of our long-time loves?"

She selected this poem by Leonore Hildebrandt, "Field Notes," for this retrospective:

Field Notes

Wind soured with silage: on the hill
north of town, a farmer keeps Black Angus cows.
Wooden barn tilts on the right of the road,
New England farm house sprawls to the left—
and the black calves have a clear view
of green meadows, the hills, and the town’s distant glint
from the small pen
where they live in brown-black morass,
where they feed on limp roughage, patiently,
their ears poised for answers.

Sun! The meadow is dressed in light and moisture.
Old apple trees, three or four below the barn,
still hold on to yellow, shrunken fruit.
A Family Farm, the sign says.
Perhaps it is a matter of scope. Or voracity.
So that the middleman who wages price tags
and contracts can squeeze them
into the bite-sized lot.
The middleman never sleeps nearby.

The grass has been mowed, hauled off,
packed and sealed under plastic.
Now it rains in the hills,
black calves crowding at the rack.
Movement is habitual:
how to lie down on a muddy slope.

LOCUSPOINT: New York City, April 30, 2011

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of the Big Apple, editor Sean Singer wrote, "To a first-time visitor to New York, our city is enormous, complicated, overwhelming, and palpitating with light and noise. Poetry is a contemplative and solitary activity, yet it thrives in New York City. In a place of 8 million people (only one and half million of whom live in Manhattan) there is a big population of poetry readers and an even bigger population of poetry writers. What New York has over many other places that gives an advantage to poets is its freedom of the mind, by which I mean a person is confronted with the world every second of the day here; you are forced to make decisions about who you are in relation to language, as each block often contains its own tiny world: a Korean deli, a Malian mosque, a Gujarati sandwich shop."

Sean selected this poem called "VA Hospital" by Herbert Englehardt for this retrospective:

VA Hospital

Patience she says
As she shows fingernails so long
She must punch her computer keys
With a rubber-tipped pen

Patience she says
Wagging her green lacquered fingers
As she continues rapid-fire talk
With her son on her cell phone

Interrupting herself
She announces patience
No appointments for three weeks
The doctors are very busy

Join the quiet vacant-eyed
Patient veterans of America’s wars
Men run over by our own trucks
Ignored by overworked aides

Men in wheelchairs
Some without arms or legs or eyes
Heroes cowards
Ordinary soldiers

Waiting
Patient
While she chatters

LOCUSPOINT: Atlanta, August 31, 2009

2011-10-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

Atlanta inspired editor Jim Elledge to muse, "Place is never simply itself. Place is always something additional, something we bring to it: the way a trumpeter brings breath to the horn or a harpist’s fingers bring vibration to the strings. Air and movement. Song."

Here's a poem from that edition by Collin Kelley called "Controlled Burn":

Controlled Burn

It’s as if the apartment is on fire,
smoke clinging low to the ground,
a filthy sweet fog rolling in from
the southwest to dirty up the city.

In the barbecue restaurant, all tang
and wood scented, every eye
is fixed on the news, necks craned,
as anchors with serious voices
express concern, but no answers,
then cut to war in the Middle East
while tongues go back to licking ribs.

Later, it will be explained as a series
of human errors, 3,000 acres burning,
misunderstanding of wind patterns,
and inevitable oversight panels,
so someone can take the blame.

Driving home, sun filters through
the haze, sets every skyscraper on fire,
a preamble to coming night, and the air
smells like past and premonition.

LOCUSPOINT: Olympia, January 31, 2009

2011-10-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of her newly adopted city, editor Sarah Vap wrote, "I can’t talk about Olympia without talking about all this landscape, these outlying little towns. I can’t talk about Olympia without talking about these two completely different worlds-- very metro and very rural.

Olympia itself is pretty. On a clear day, you can see Mount Rainier. It’s got a port on Puget Sound. It has an artesian well where people gather, like in days of yore, to fill their jugs. It’s pretty liberal, it’s got a lot of students, it has a vibrant farmers market and a great little downtown. Olympia is the home of Evergreen State College, one of the most environmentally and educationally progressive public colleges in the country. It is the home of St. Martin’s University, and of several community colleges. It has a couple good independent bookstores. It has the capitol buildings and on the edges, the big box stores.

Olympia is in the rainforest. It has the rain.

And it has, undoubtedly, a million other things I haven’t yet discovered."

Here's a poem from that edition by Todd Fredson called "We Huddle Against the Wind":

We Huddle Against the Wind

My mother holds up a canopy, a leaded sheet,
to deflect that sunlight
leaping from threshold to threshold.

The backside of each ripple bulges
like Savonarola’s
monastic white cell,
its corners bending at the limit
of candlelight. For a second, I am sympathetic—

lust is a sequence of parentheses
with no words between them. Because with white
comes red.

Greedy bloom, kept humble by self-cruelty.

The gray moves us in
and the salmon flash against it like barrels of mica.

LOCUSPOINT: New Haven, March 31, 2009

2011-10-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of her city, editor Suzanne Frischkorn wrote, "That poetry would bring me to New Haven and how often poetry would provide cause to return was a surprise. A number of poets stop in New Haven for readings and conferences. Some I catch up with over dinner or brunch, and some we entertain in our – now habitable – home. The city also provides fertile ground for new friendships."

For this retrospective, Suzanne chose Margot Schilpp's poem "Manipulating Time":

Manipulating Time

So the sun’s apogee and the shiny windows
meet: ants die, carpets fade. If you look
closely, the glass is etched with fingerprints.
Everything is. Well, not everything:
the heart is slick, the brain, a mushy pod
that resists touch. There’s nothing like lucid dreaming
or a trip to the zoo. Once, in another town years ago,
we cheated at Rock, Paper, Scissors, before the charts
showed more elements to add—RPS 25—yes, rocks,
but also knives and guns, swords, mace, the higher
pitch of violence. It was before e-Bay, before all souls
walked around with ear-pods in little worlds
of their own making. You could greet someone
and they might speak. My attic is full of things
I’m saving for my daughters: their grandma’s
silver coffee service, a handmade silk stole, 50s furniture
they may not even like. I take back the years
by holding them in limbo: there you are, 1964,
a reindeer jumper with a jingle-bell nose. Hi, 1969,
and your Scottish doll with her eyes glued shut. I see you,
1976, hiding in my brother’s garish high school
graduation program. The things we kept
could all be trash by the side of the road, a kind of spell
against progress. Abracadabra. Turn yourself
into something useful again. At Chicago’s LifeGem
you can have yourself turned into a “memorial diamond”
to leave to those you love. They won’t be
in the Greenbrier bunker, which would have been full
of Senators had the story not been exposed
in the Washington Post. Where Congress will go now
is a mystery, and joins the list of many other mysteries:
why hypnosis sometimes look so real, how long
things will keep in the fridge, why the fashion
of leggings persists, and why the psycho bells across the street
ring on no schedule, but at random, in fits, a grand,
sonorous garland of bells and, combined with the hum
of lawn mowers biting back suburbia
to manageable wilderness, there’s just enough green
to allow us to believe we connect in some way
with the earth we use up, the land where antelopes
and bison, chipmunks, squirrels, turkey buzzards,
the laughable flamingo, the dog with popcorn-scented pads,
all exist in harmony and create a kind of music
that we sometimes hear, but don’t understand.
Skip forward. Step back. Straddle the best of that time
and this. All the noises we make and hear don’t cancel
the truest message hiding in our cells: you may have found
a lot of fancy ways to get there, but you’re still going to die.

LOCUSPOINT: Washington, October 31, 2008

2011-10-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

Of our nation's capital, Sandra Beasley wrote, "The poet as nurse; the poet as waiter; the poet as bureaucrat (consider the dowdy roots of the “Poet Laureate” title, which was originally “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”). The Washington poet is a working poet. The writers I know struggle and juggle artistic calling with the demands of parenting, lawyering, Department of Whatever-ing, bartending, and teaching. A friend often taxis from his work on the Hill to catch a Folger reading, knowing he’ll have to taxi straight back again as Congress marches steadily on towards midnight. On a good day, our insistence on making time for poetry demonstrates fierce, inspiring devotion. On a bad day we are an exhausted lot, cursing the delays of the Red Line and straggling in just as the reading ends."

For the anniversary, Sandra adds, "When I think about the DC edition, one of the things that I'm proud of is that we showcased two poets--Derrick Weston Brown, Maureen Thorson--with poems that then went on to appear in each poet's first full-length collection (Wisdom Teeth from Busboys & Poets, and Applies to Oranges from Ugly Duckling Presse). Only two years out, I'd feel a little strange about trying to reflect on what has changed in this town, especially as someone who has gotten to spend so little time in it as of late."

Sandra chose Derrick Weston Brown's poem "Remembering Bonita Applebum" for this retrospective.

Remembering Bonita Applebum

Bonita Applebum is a
onyx colored
Milky Way sprinkled
infinity loop of
a goddess's laugh.

Bonita Applebum be
the pentatonic scale
squeezed into form fitting
denim overalls.

Bonita Applebum be
Coltrane's “Naima” at 88 bpms
riding an Ali Shaheed Muhummad break beat
bare back.

Bonita Applebum be your daddy's
woman before your mama came into the picture.

Bonita Applebum still leaves thugs
breathless, their eyes leaking water
from nostalgia.

Bonita Applebum's eyes shiny like
new vinyl, fresh like a Rudy Huxtable
perm.

Bonita Applebum be your
first first. First back porch
summer sunset French kiss,
first pack of Nag champa incense,
first hip hop sample that makes you
seek out its source.

Bonita Applebum is
1989, baby dreads,
salt fish, ginger beer,
sweet iced tea, cassava,
kola champagne,
mud cloth, head wraps,

ashy knees, shea butter,
library cards, bottled water,
and rickety first time ancestor
shrines.

Bonita Applebum be black folk
in Birkenstocks and that’s okay.

Bonita Applebum's
bookshelf is bigger than yours.

What you gonna do about it?

Bonita Applebum is a worn
copy of Erotic Noir.

Bonita Applebum is light skinned
girl crushes on Lisa Bonet, Jasmine Guy,
Pebbles, and Tisha Campbell from House Party.

Bonita Applebum is dark skinned girl crushes on
Sheryl Lee Ralph, Eddie Murphy's first wife
from Coming to America, and Karyn White.

Bonita Applebum still knows the
lyrics to every song on Eric B and Rakim's
Paid In Full album.

Bonita Applebum be your
first on purpose poke on the
dance floor.

Bonita Applebum be
the reason you got a Sankofa tattoo
on your left shoulder blade.

Bonita Applebum is
the rasp of Q-tips voice
that puts goose bumps on
your girl's neck even now.

Bonita Applebum
ain't 38-24-37 no more.

Bonita Applebum is
33 with a mortgage
and two degrees under her belt.

Your mama still asks about
Bonita
Bonita
Bonita?

Bonita Applebum is your
Son’s second grade teacher,
Guidance counselor, tutor.

Bonita Applebum drives a
Toyota Forerunner hybrid model
with mud cloth seat covers.

Bonita Applebum is still slamming
like a hip hop song.

LOCUSPOINT: Phoenix, August 31, 2008

2011-10-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of the Valley of the Sun, I wrote, "Phoenix is an awkward commingling of the ancient and the new. Its name pays tribute to the way it was developed, built over (and using) a centuries-old canal system developed by the Hohokam people, who either vanished or abandoned their settlement there. But a sense of history like this isn't pervasive. Since 2000 its population has increased by 24%, making it now the fifth largest city in the United States and the largest state capital. The city's "historical neighborhoods" typically date back to the 1940s and 1950s, but Phoenix isn't a city of short memory; it was (and is) built by transplants and transients."

This edition of LOCUSPOINT was published on the cusp of the international recession that has affected the lives in every city LOCUSPOINT has published. But perhaps no city itself has been more deeply affected than Phoenix. A recent U. S. Census report showed that 227,696 homes in Phoenix currently sit empty--a vacancy equivalent to the population of Tucson, Arizona's next largest city.

It may come as no surprise that of the Phoenix LOCUSPOINTers, four of us left the area since 2008. Those who remain continue their dedication to the poetry community, however.

Here's one of my favorite poems from this edition: "November" by Meghan Brinson.

November

We sit in a room
and wait to discuss our results.

It is hard to understand
what has happened.

I look at the calendar
on the wall, the only thing
without a uterus on it.

It says November.
Simple. In big western block print.

Above all the squares
of dates
a colored photo of a chestnut horse
running in a green field,

his head turned back
towards me over his shoulder.

I see the bottom of his hooves,
his bent knees as his legs

move his body

further out of frame.

LOCUSPOINT: Madison, May 31, 2008

2011-10-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

Of the Wisconsin capital, Brent Goodman wrote, "Madison’s poetry scene cannot be contained. With 5 or more readings a week scheduled at various bookstores, to a strong community of resident post-MFA day-job poets, to the amazing national talent the university’s creative writing fellowships attract every year alongside the local award-winning slam team, this “Berkeley of the Midwest” remains an irresistibly-fun town in which to write, collaborate, and grow roots."

In the ensuring years, Madison has (unfortunately) become a symbol of America's troubled relationship between labor and leaders, an odd situation for a town loving called "an island of liberalism surrounded by reality."

I grew up 45 minutes away from Madison, but know surprisingly little of it first-hand. I lived along an invisible border that separates Wisconsin into two cultural camps: the Madison side and the Milwaukee side.

For this retrospective, Brent selected a poem by Nick Lantz called "History of Fire." Since appearing in LOCUSPOINT, Nick has gone on to publish his first and second books.

History of Fire

All things, oh priests, are on fire.
The earthquake on your birthday—

car alarms calling each other
like love-sick dogs, the forgotten

air-raid siren on the YMCA yowling
its one, sore note. The decks

of the freeway snap together,
the burning cars trapped. You watch

the rescue workers disappear
into the smoking gaps. Sometimes

they return with a survivor;
sometimes they do not. Begin

with the molecule, its carbons
shoulder to shoulder in the cold

quantum space. Begin 400 million
years ago, the Devonian air blushed

with oxygen, the first lightning-sparked
peat bogs smoldering on the shore.

Begin with this: fuel, oxygen, and heat,
this triangle, this tent of sticks you build

in the dirt. Begin with the room
where they waited until fire wormed

down through the rafters, draped
like a robe across them, until foreign

words clogged their mouths. Parthians
and Elamites, Arabs and the Greeks,

all understood, but someone
in the crowd jeered: they are full of wine.

The tongue is burning, oh priests,
its words unhinge their atoms.

From the hotel roof, in Istanbul,
you see it: a tire dump burning

on the other side of the Bosporus,
its base brighter than any city lights.

A waiter brings plates of olives
for your family. You hold your plate,

a cool O against your palm.
The moon is rust. The moon is gone.

Kallinikos the alchemist invented
liquid fire, a fluid that ignited

whenever it touched water,
and the Byzantines used it

to burn down the Muslim fleet
surrounding Constantinople.

The recipe for this fire is lost—
petroleum or calcium phosphide cooked

from lime, charcoal, and bones?
You have walked the covered

bazaar, its air rough with tea;
at the newly arrived American

burger chain, you ate your fill.
You stood inside the Blue Mosque,

your mother and aunt covering
their nude arms with burlap shawls

taken from a heap by the door,
while high on a pole, a loudspeaker

warbled out the call to prayer. The eye,
oh priests, is on fire. Everything

it sees is only flame or fuel.
All day, the Santa Ana winds

goad the fire. Neighbors stand
in the cul-de-sac and stare

at the orange ribbon draped
across the hills. You watch

whole groves of eucalyptus
sprout red wings, the trunks

screaming as they split in half.
The fire department hands out

sooty pamphlets that warn fires
persist in root systems for days,

and for a week you watch
the backyard maple, waiting

for it to give birth to a hot, angry child.
Fire burns a forest, a home,

a river. Cresting over the hills
at night you see the refinery,

caked in fluorescent light,
its stacks fingering the sky

with purple flames. You know
how close you’ve come to disaster:

the trio of gulls that disappeared
into the jet engine, a plume

of smoke and blood pouring out
the other side, the guttural heave

of the cabin as the plane
banked hard. Safe on the tarmac,

you looked back and saw
the fuselage feathered with carbon.

Colorado, Arizona, Oregon—
the summer every forest burned,

your brother took a job watching
trees from a stand, a lifeguard

without water. The fires at night,
he said, started like planets,

orange sparks low on the horizon.
After your parents’ divorce,

in your father’s cramped efficiency,
you opened the oven and flames

filled the small kitchen, crisped
the flesh on your arm and cheek.

All the way to the hospital,
your father chanted an apology.

Agni’s parents were two sticks—
rubbed together, they gave birth

to him and then burned to death.
You grow to understand this.

Agni grows up; he has two faces
and seven tongues. You understand

this too. Though it terrifies you,
you even understand when India

builds the Agni Missile, capable
of striking targets deep in China.

You grow to understand credible
deterrence, every other euphemism

of violence and mistrust, all
the Patriots and Peacekeepers

in the world. Nothing lasts,
oh priests; it turns to smoke

as we speak. Some fires are only
slower than others: a trash fire

catches a vein of coal that spreads
its own dark roots under the town.

The gases buckle the streets,
fill up basements, kill small dogs.

Some people learn to live with it;
most do not. The fire burns

for forty years, until the town
is all but deserted, until only a few

caved-in buildings still lean against
their naked I-beams, until the highway,

like a river, changes its course
to avoid the town. Backpacking

with your father in Arizona
you stop for lunch halfway up

the mountain, where a sign
memorializes a boy scout troop

that froze to death on this spot.
You can’t imagine dying that way,

not here, where the dusty lizards
pant on the rocks. You imagined

a desert of scrub brush and cacti,
but when you reach the peak

you see whole forests burning.
Your father tells you that fire

isn’t a thing—like a book or a building
or a child—but rather a process

of things, the road a thing walks
to become another, new thing.

Begin with accident or intent, a spark
or a hand. Begin with priests

smoldering in their temples.
Begin with the gods punishing

or rewarding us. Begin with this:
You wake up on a train

inside a tunnel of smoke.
You remember those plane flights

through clouds, miles above
earth, without bearing or reference,

the re-circulated air thin as a dream
about leaving. You’ve passed

the lumber yards, their damp stacks
of logs raw under the sun, the grunting

machine that rearranges them
with its hydraulic claw. You know

that fuel is fuel. Changing the trees
to houses won’t save them.

You stand and walk the length
of the train like a drunk, your legs

unsure. It’s barely dawn
and the other passengers mumble

half-words in languages you almost
understand. For hours, the train

glides through the smoke, and this
makes it easy to forget where you are,

where you’ve been, and where you’re going.

LOCUSPOINT: Lawrence, October 31, 2007

2011-10-14T07:00:00.000-04:00

Of his city, editor Joseph Harrington warned, "If anyone discovers a “Lawrence School,” hold onto your wallet. It’s seriously eclectic & still too small to have cliques; hell, these people all drink together. Lawrence, a college town, wears Town and Gown as a reversible suit."

To commemorate the anniversary, Joseph selected a poem from his edition to revisit. "I'd have to choose a poem by Kenneth Irby, whose 75th birthday will be celebrated with a symposium here in Lawrence on November. 5. This poem was originally published in LOCUSPOINT and appears in the "previously uncollected" section of Ken's collected work, The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006 (North Atlantic, 2009).

[on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 200th birthday, 6 Mar 2006]

so one tree will send out branch to join another and be saved
so the rock wall and its climber
elusive records, books
in what other dimensions inter-live
and returning maybe or not staying
and only in the mind keeping
and the memory itself going
flake flaking flaky from the start itself
no way to throw another after to find
and in the far distance in the interstice
another orb coming
or maybe here its cloud

LOCUSPOINT: Dallas, July 31, 2007

2011-10-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

Shin Yu Pai, the editor of LOCUSPOINT: Dallas, was kind enough to share this update with us on her city and her poets:

"Though I left Dallas in 2007, I return to the city a few times a year to visit friends and family. Under Karen X’s leadership as Programming Director, WordSpace has blossomed into a vibrant programming series produced in collaboration with Dallas institutions like the Kessler Theatre and the Tyler Arts District. Poet and curator Roberto Tejada moved to North Texas from Austin to pioneer the new art history PHD program at SMU. And Micah Robbins operates Interbirth Books and distributes Sous Les Paves out of Dallas.

Some general updates on authors featured in the Dallas portfolio:

Lisa Huffaker received the 2008 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review, which published her poem “The Maze.”

Renee Rossi’s chapbook Still Life won the 2009 Gertrude Chapbook Competition for Poetry. Finishing Line Press published Third Worlds in 2011.

Gjeke Marinaj published Sung Across the Shoulder: Heroic Poetry of Illyria, a collection of Albanian oral folk-poetry in 2011. Marinaj traveled to inns and coffee-houses deep in the Albanian mountains to record the poets reciting their verse. Marinaj also photographed the speakers and the venues of their performances. He has also translated Frederick Turner’s books The Undiscovered Country: Sonnets of a Wayfarer and Out of Plato's Cave into Albanian. He was awarded the 2008 Pjeter Abnori prize for literature by the International Cultural Center, part of the Albanian Ministry of Culture—an award given annually to an Albanian or international author in recognition of their ongoing contribution to national and world literature."

Shin Yu selected this poem from her edition, "My muse is a dead fuse" by Karen X, to commemorate our anniversary:

My muse is a dead fuse

Cars sit squatting on the pavement, peeing oil.
The pills of holy bushes spill over.
Walk the plank to play with the sun, drink a coke and drive
my car with your thoughts behind the wheel.
Hedges dear spear the brick wall.
Sky’s thumbprint sits calcified in the field.
The new Mental Leather Chew is editing his latest
videotape blockbuster.
The virtuoso’s dream is the improvisationalist’s nightmare.
You can’t control the river, the ocean.
You can’t control your muse.

LOCUSPOINT: Vancouver, May 30, 2007

2011-10-10T18:54:00.002-04:00

Of her city, editor Jen Currin wrote, "You can’t buy a carton of soy milk at your local grocery without bumping into a poet. This city has spoken word poets, closet-poets who gaze at the mountains, Wreck Beach poets who scream their lines on the sand nakedly, tending bar poets, poets who bicycle anonymously through the rain, poets who write screenplays or paint houses, coffee shop poets guzzling Canadianos, reading-poems-on-city-buses poets, and up-and-coming poets who haven’t yet left grade school...In my five years in this city, I’ve met a lot of poets. And one thing I’ve noticed about these Vancouver poets, whatever their school or clique, is that they value community. Nearly every poet I’ve met is in some kind of writer’s group—whether it is a workshopping, reading, writing, or sharing-new-work group."

Jen's edition of LOCUSPOINT was unique because she was invited to edit work only from a poetry collective, Vertigo West, of which she is a member. This is the only edition of LOCUSPOINT to take this specific focus, although it seems to predict in some ways the two writing communities included by Brent Calderwood in his exploration of San Francisco.

Here's a poem from that edition, "That Morning" by Helen Kuk:

That Morning

That morning, the suicide over the bridge
across from last year’s murder. My street blockaded,
jammed with voices. Sleepy, we crossed
a few streets over.

Or last night, the mouse
I thought was plum, was slug.
So much worse to know of bones. I didn’t feel
the skeleton or skull, the crack or squeal.
Surely killing is not this easy.
Simply, I stepped in the way of death
while I was greedy for you.

You scraped it up with a shovel,
buried it in gravel. Said,
“You sure took care of that, dear.”

Later than that and earlier,
first thing awake. Touch me
as if I were bird small. Only intend
to taste. What to find?
Meantime, I’ll feel for you.

LOCUSPOINT: Chicago, December 31, 2006

2011-10-08T07:00:00.000-04:00

This edition featured poets from diverse backgrounds and even wilder aesthetic camps meeting together under the—dare I write it?—big tent of LOCUSPOINT. Chicago's been a good poetry city since Carl Sandburg wrote about the city with the big shoulders. It continues to be a thriving mecca for writers today and is home to at least two wonderful journals—Court Green and Columbia Poetry Review.

Here's a poem from that edition by Paul Martinez Pompa called "How to Be Invisible":

How to Be Invisible

Don’t be so damn obvious
she says after shoving a T-bone

down his pants. Express lane
12 items or less & his belly’s numb

& pink from the blood through
the saran. The boy’s scared. Of both

mom & the lady in a smock
who flings buy-one-get-one

non-perishables across the scanner.
He imagines an entire police

squadron waiting outside, ready
to pounce. As they exit, a fist

forms in his pocket tight enough
to squeeze the breath from someone.

From Julie Dill, editor of LOCUSPOINT: St Louis

2011-10-07T11:30:00.001-04:00

"Stefene Russel's "Equinox" is still one of my favorite poems of all time.

St. Louis is getting pretty beat up lately with the economy making everyone miserable and violent and losing our favorite anarchist artist/businessman to a bulldozer accident.

And yet, Stefene and I just read with three other people in the sculpture park, perched on installation pieces commissioned for the sole purpose of serving as platforms for our poems. And most of the things I've always found amazing about St. Louis are still as great today as they were five years ago.

Things are always looking up if you know where to look."

Here's "Equinox" by Stefene Russel:

Equinox

This is the part where I drive through Dutchtown in the springtime,
trying to lose a chunk of coal in the sock of my heart.

I looked for a blue marble Pieta,
and found a church called The Melvin that used to be a theater.

I was looking for an Indian mound with a diamond at its center.
I found a gleam that fell from a Mississippian’s eye,
lying on the road, a lost black sequin.

I looked for a hat trick to blind me with fist fighting stars.
I found a demolition man and his pile of yellow bricks.

I looked for Our Lady of Jupiter, embroidered with purple scars,
and found a toy ballerina in a grease-trap jail.

Factory that manufactures springtime, please pick me
to be the next U-turn or figure eight or just glaze me senseless.

Give me a cherub to keep in my glovebox and the choice
between chlorophyll and ozone.
I can't stop driving, looking for the spot to dig
up the spring of thirteen going on fourteen,

standing on the edge of the river, coughing car fires out of my voice,

searching my wallet for a number
for some smart he or she to gunpowder me into a permanent magnolia.

LOCUSPOINT: Seattle, 30 September 2006

2011-10-05T07:00:00.001-04:00

Of her city, editor Rebecca Loudon wrote, "Seattle is a city known for its rain, its lush green beltways, its flourishing theater and music communities, its suicides, and its serial killers. The Pacific Northwest poetic tradition includes Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Sherman Alexie, Sam Hamill, Tess Gallagher, and Carolyn Kizer. When people think of the present Seattle poetry scene, they might think of the most visible type of Northwest poems; watery pastels, heron, the soft, the political, the easy landscapes, the ever present crow."

Here's a poem from that edition by Susan E. Butler called "Egypt Texas Ohio":

Egypt Texas Ohio

Where were you when it happened
when it happened
where were you and after
when November stayed November
did you go stare at the screen
watch Cleopatra sail away
are we too late if we decide to live
did you know the answer
say the words out loud
no Mark Antony don’t go!
did you know what would happen
when it happened
did you read hear see
hill tomb flame
when the crazy man ran out
his bloodied wife
sagged in the doorway
when he lifted his white shirt
screamed here is my heart
when the chained dog lunged and cried for help
you stood silent
bookbag clutched against your chest
like a shield

LOCUSPOINT: Saint Louis, 30 Sept 2006

2011-10-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

"If you look really hard, you can probably find some of these fine St. Louis poets any given Saturday night in the downstairs used book section at Left Bank Books, in the upstairs art gallery at Subterranean Books, or in someone's basement with a case of Schlafly and half a dozen friends who hate poetry, but they're none of them plotting their escapes any time soon."

Editor Julie Dill

Here's a poem by Richard Newman called Heartland Haiku":

Heartland Haiku

In 1970, when then-president Richard Nixon returned from China, he brought back home more than just a press secretary recovering from appendicitis . . . the youth culture of the day absorbed Eastern Philosophy faster than McDonald’s cheeseburgers. . . .
—from the internet site heartlandhealing.com

spring

Cadillac cuts through
satin wheat field, JUST DIVORCED
soaped on back windshield.

summer

Black roofs lick the sun
like an orange sucker. Hurry—
mow, motherfucker!

fall

Dirty magazines
curl under dead leaves, hot pink
pages burning red.

winter

Sandwich wrappers—whoosh!—
whip across the parking lot,
bloom in the bare bush.

LOCUSPOINT retrospective: celebrating 5 years

2011-10-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

Over the next few weeks, I'll be reposting selections and notes from past editors of LOCUSPOINT's editions to celebrate our five years of publishing.

First, we go back to the beginning. LOCUSPOINT launched on September 30, 2006 with three cities. The first one we're reviewing (because it's first in the alphabet) is Boston, originally edited by Christopher Hennessy.

Here's a poem from that edition, Wendy Mnookin's "Blue."

Blue

There were buildings,
and rooms in those buildings,
and in the beginning
it seemed the rooms were perfect
to contain us.

And then you fell
and cracked a rib.
I said, It doesn’t hurt.
I looked at your face and said,
It doesn’t hurt much.
Blame adhered like a bandage,
calming me.

It was never just the two of us.
There’s sky behind the buildings
and smoke and flames
and people who jump
from those buildings,
some of them holding hands.

Some days I try to live
knowing, really knowing,
the worst can happen.

I should have touched your rib
gently, the way I am going to imagine
God touched Adam’s rib
to make a partner.

If I can imagine God.
If I can imagine gently.

LOCUSPOINT: San Francisco is here

2011-09-30T11:27:00.003-04:00

Happily, today is LOCUSPOINT's fifth birthday, and we have one more reason to celebrate--

Brent Calderwood's San Francisco is live on LOCUSPOINT today.

Of the city, Brent writes, "The dot-com boom and bust of the past few decades have made the Bay Area a very expensive place to live—-rarely a good thing for poets and other marginalized communities. Nevertheless, it remains a sanctuary for free-thinkers." Check out his editor's letter to learn more about this lively and unique city.

Brent selected work by four San Francisco poets and included selections from not one, but two writers communities within the city, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and GuyWriters.

The poets featured are:

Dan Bellm
Michael Hernandez Castillo
Catharine Clark-Sayles
Christian Gullette
Brenda Hillman
Linda Jaffe
Cole Krawitz
Rose Lobel
Jeanne Lupton
Randall Mann
Michael Montlack
James J. Siegel
Kevin Simmonds
Brian Teare

and a piece from Brent himself.

Thanks to all the poets who participated, and to Brent for his excellent work pulling this edition together!

Read and enjoy.

Thanks!! And Calling Movie Lovers for the Next Blog Salon...

2011-08-12T07:00:00.001-04:00

Thank you so much to our blog salon writers for sharing their thoughts of their favorite "sequential listening" albums!

The blog had 2,700 unique visits and 3,358 page loads during the period of the salon.

Please help me thank our wonderful writers again:

Collin Kelley
Lee Houck
George Scarlett
Tyler Gobble
Shavawn Berry
Matthew Hittinger
Julie E. Bloemeke
Bill Beverly
David Dombrosky
Kelly Cockerham
Jory Mickelson
Andrew Demcak
Jessica Burnquist
Michelle J. Martinez
Pamela Murray Winters
Sean Singer
Ruby Classen

It was such a great success, let's do it again:

There's no shortage of awful films in the world, right?

So, why can't we help loving them?

The next blog salon will run in November. The topic:

A Colossally Bad Film I Love

The films in question should be universally reviled either by critics OR by the general public (or both!). The cultier the better. But even shlocky, standard Hollywood fare is welcome too--whatever you love (and know you shouldn't).

The form of the essays is still open to your interpretation: memoir, critical writing, narrative or non-narrative, it all works here.

Start thinking and send me your posts (with a bio and photo) by October 20, 2011!

xoxo,
Charlie

Epilogue: Ruby Classen on the Refound Joy of the Vinyl Record

2011-08-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

Oh, Vinyl – Where are thou gone?

I admit it--I’m a closet vinyl lover! Not the kinky kind--we’re not talking zip up suits and strange masks--I mean honest-to-goodness 33 1/3 vinyl record albums. I grew up in the 70s and my parents had the classic record player console complete with mini bar. I would spend my days playing Weebles while listening to a Sesame Street soundtrack album or this nursery song two-record album set complete with large Bugs Bunny-esque character and his band of merry children. In the evenings, my parents would alternate between Dad’s country tunes (“donuts make my brown eyes blue”) and Mom’s Spanish albums (“El Sauz y la palma se mesen con calma”). I remember when I knew all the words before I even knew what they meant. The order of the songs played on those scratchy albums mattered the world to levels of anticipation and memory games.

Now – 30 some odd years later:

I bought a record player again, three years ago, before my son was born. Tried to find an appropriate place for it 'cause who knew record players could take up SO much room? We’ve gotten spoiled with CDs and MP3 players--heck, even a cassette player was NEVER this big. So it sat, under the console table, under the front room window. Until Saturday.

Vinyl albums have always taken me back to a special happy place. The mood was right. I set up the record player in the front room while my son played happily in a play tent with his Hot Wheels cars and Buzz Lightyear action figures. I dusted off the lid, wired up the speakers, cleared away cobwebs, and delicately took the cover off the record needle. Then I ran upstairs to where I knew half my collection sits in an old copy box relegated to the corner of the room under not one but two Boppy pillows and the box for my netbook. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I unearthed some favorites, focusing on “kid-friendly”: Motley Crue (not yet), Pat Benatar (soon), Tina Turner (SO NOT YET), The Muppet Movie Soundtrack (maybe), The Carpenters (do I want him to fall asleep yet?)--and then the motherload: my Monkees albums, all four of them (More of the Monkees, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., The Monkees Greatest Hits and Then & Now The Best of the Monkees).

Rushing downstairs, careful not to drop the precious cargo, I couldn’t wait to fire up the albums that made me laugh, sing, and dance when I was younger AND older.

As I set the needle on the first record, my son quieted down in his play tent. Then he peeked his head out. Then he stepped out and proceeded to dance his way around the room. He jumped and shook tiny fists into the air. He chased me, I chased him--I held him in my arms while I danced around the room, spinning him now and then just to hear him giggle. “Mary, Mary” is still a great groove and I can’t help but click over to Run DMC’s version featuring Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith fame. “Your Auntie Grizelda” with its quirky nonsensical odd mouth sounds by Peter Tork, never fails to make me laugh and apparently, in recreating them as best I could, made my son laugh as well. “Star Collector” has now earned a new name (“The Hello Song”) and is over requested by the 2 year old. And on and on: we danced, jumped on the couch, kicked a ball around (yes, inside the house), and eventually settled down over the final strains of “Kicks.” A four album morning playdate--and it couldn’t have been better, if it tried.

Ruby Classen (very-soon-to-be Harper) grew up in sunny Southern California with her inspiring, single mom and her younger brother. She now lives in Columbus, Ohio with her adorable and charismatic almost 3 year old son and their OLD little Pekingese dog. She anxiously awaits the arrival of her musician fiance from SoCal later this month. A dancer at heart, music has always moved her. She dances to the beat of his drum...happily ever after.

Charles Jensen on Tori Amos's Scarlet's Walk

2011-08-08T07:00:00.000-04:00

This story begins and ends with heavy petting.

The author opted to start this way because recent studies show a majority of Americans enjoy thinking about heavy petting as much as they enjoy heavy petting itself. While the petting was indeed heavy in the first instance, the petting that begins this author’s story, it was also urgent—the urgent heavy petting of two people about to fall in love with each other, who haven’t fallen in love yet, but who want desperately to be in love with each other soon.

The author will slowly introduce the fact that these heavy petters are, in fact, both men. America is warming up to concepts of hot man-on-man action, if the legislature of the state of New York is any kind of litmus test. If you a sensitive reader, it is too late to caution you. The author apologizes if you’ve been scandalized by this revelation. Perhaps you were already imagining heavy petting featuring a particular person of the opposite sex. If that’s the case, the author will allow you to supplant one of the men in question with a person of your choice. But he also wants to encourage you to consider giving this heavy petting a chance on its own, to be assured, silently to yourself as you read, that two men can fall desperately in love with each other as you (perhaps) once did with someone else.

This takes place in a small living room in our solar system, on planet Earth, in the United States, in the state of Arizona, the city of Tempe, which rests just outside Phoenix. Yes, the lights are off. Yes, there are candles, and yes, they are scented. A stereo bleats is sad love-lorn notes through grizzled speakers carefully placed to maximize the surround of sound. The stereo clicks, changing CDs (for this was in the time of the CD).

The next CD plays: Tori Amos begins “Amber Waves” with “Well, he lit you up / like amber waves in his movie show.”

Meta moment: the amber light of the candles flickering as if through celluloid.

The two men, the author and his future love, kiss passionately on an unfolded futon in this light.

Their skin, when it appears in flashes from beneath their clothing, has an amber glow. In each other’s eyes they see the tiny lights of the candles reflected there like far-off stars. These men think to themselves they want to sail to these galaxies and be among those stars.

As the album continues, it leads the men through a journey. Scarlet’s Walk is ostensibly one woman’s journey across America.

On the cover art: Tori Amos stands paused on a country road—is it Oklahoma?—half-turned from the camera. One foot toward the sun. One foot pointing away. A light breeze threads its fingers through her hair.

In the next song, “A Sorta Fairytale,” the singer is on a California freeway, a state these two men will visit by car several times over the next three years. They cannot imagine these trips now. That one of them will end up on a hotel bed in San Francisco crying to the point of breathlessness cannot be known right now. That one of them will almost die in a one-car rollover accident cannot be known right now. “I didn’t know we could break a silver lining.”

The album moves forward: the up tempo “Wednesday” dissolves into the pensive “Strange,” haunted by vibraphones, and then “Carbon” with its icy drizzle of piano notes gathering into rhythmic waves of acoustic guitar and drums. “Carbon made only wants to be unmade” the way two men desperate to love each other want to be unmade, to be taken apart and studied, to be put back together. This is a way of loving. The author underlines this point.

“Wampum Prayer” appears. The a capella chanting may startle one or both of the men, coming suddenly after the first movement of the album. This is a turning point in the collection. “Don’t Make Me Come to Vegas,” Tori sings. In a few weeks, one of these men will visit Vegas without the other. He will think at the time it will be a chance for him to explore some other pastures, but all he does is miss the other, has a horrible time with his bitchy friends, calls often. The one in Vegas buys a mug for the other with London Bridge on it, a sight they visit along the way. It has the man’s name on it. The recipient keeps it for 9 years, 5 years longer than these two men kept each other.

“Sweet Sangria” arrives in its tightest dress and dancing shoes. It may or may not have brought along its pole. The men, in their petting, are negotiating a clothing reduction program, but it isn’t going well. One man wants to feel his skin on the other man’s skin. The other knows this is a slippery slope, that shedding a shirt leads to shedding pants, and shedding pants—well, the author is certain the reader won’t need a diagram.

“If the rain has to separate from itself / does it say / ‘Pick out your cloud’?” she sings in “Your Cloud.” The men, at an undetermined point in the future, will pool their belongings into a home. Framed pictures will appear on those walls, furniture arrives, and a domestic calm settles around them like a net through which they will see but feel they cannot move. Ultimately this net, initially what holds them together, they believe, will hold them back. From what, the author cannot say. They will separate. They will pick out their clouds. Their belongings, by this point, have lost their identities as “his” or “his.” The dog, just a puppy, they opt to share, but this arrangement doesn’t last long. The author had already named this dog Arden.

This was in the long, uncomfortable wake of September 11, so when “I Can’t See New York” fills the room, both men feel a great sadness weigh on them.

Folksy “Mrs. Jesus” leads into “Taxi Ride,” written for Kevin Aucoyn. “Just another dead fag to you / just another light missing on a long taxi line.” The line, its meaning, resonates. It is in this room one man will receive an anonymous voicemail in which a male caller threatens to rape the man in this story for being gay. But this night, months before that, is a night in which they feel safe together, unknown by the outside world. They are fully themselves.

The last four songs are another movement. The men leave behind the sadness of the last few songs. They have their lives to live. In this night, they are concerned with only each other, with the way this feels. The music fills the room like a liquid. Like a liquid, their lives will take the shape of the years they will share together. It always finds its own level. Things are good until they are no longer good. In ten years, they will not know each other anymore.

These last songs: wistful, knowing. The lush strings of “Gold Dust” enter: “Sights and sounds / pull me back down / another year.” At the end of things, the author knows he has loved and been loved. But things change. The past is not changed—the past stays back where it is and lets us go.

“How did it go so fast / you’ll say as we are looking back / and then we’ll understand / we held gold dust / in our hands.”

The author promised to end with heavy petting and will stay true to his word. This album, played so many nights while that futon warmed beneath the author and his soon-and-former love, became a tour the author attended at a venue down the street. He goes in, he listens to this performance, his first and only experience seeing her play live, playing many of the songs that have become inextricably linked to the telling of this story. He sits in his third balcony seat and looks down at her. He is thinking of his love when he hears these songs.

Somewhere in that auditorium is the man the author is going to marry.

Somewhere in that auditorium, listening to these same songs, loving this same album, is a man he will meet years down the road, whom he will meet at the worst possible time and under the worst possible circumstances. Someone the author will almost let pass by like a taxi he decides he does not need. Someone who will fall asleep during his first viewing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Someone the author will realize is the man he has been looking for and, dear reader, unlike many movies, our author has this realization just before it is too late, before this good man has passed him by and left him alone with his record collection and his big empty bed and his dog, who has grown and grown and become a lady.

Somewhere in that auditorium, the author’s future is listening.

When they kiss, no music plays. The music is always there between them.

Sean Singer on The Beatles' Revolver

2011-08-06T07:00:00.001-04:00

Many albums are important to me: the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, Glenn Gould’s 1981 Goldberg Variations, Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, John Coltrane’s Sun Ship, Horace Tapscott’s The Dark Tree, Elgar’s Cello Concerto played by Jacqueline du Pré, and Janet Baker singing Mahler lieder, for example.

But, Revolver was vital to me longer, and for better reasons than my own tastes. When I was in high school, I played it incessantly. It showed me that there was something imaginative and explosive outside the cultural desert (at least at that time) known as South Florida. It allowed me to escape the suffocating and traumatic aspects of my childhood.

Many of The Beatles’ most popular songs are on Revolver-—“Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Good Day Sunshine,” but my favorite is the last, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” an early experimental song written by John Lennon with sitar, tape loops, speeded-up guitar, and a modal form. “Tomorrow Never Knows” was an anodyne to all sorts of chaos, pain, and limitation; it let me give myself permission to be “creative,” and that may be a good meaning of the word “psychedelic.” It expanded my consciousness.

On the other hand, “Doctor Robert” is a lousy song, but “Taxman” is an awful song with an awful message. It implies that some of the richest people in the world, The Beatles, should not have to pay taxes, which are the core of social welfare and an egalitarian society. This shows that even something great can be two-fifths terrible.

Revolver is to the sixties what Radiohead’s OK Computer was to the nineties. I don’t know if Revolver is as good as any of the ones I list above, but for my own life, it was purposeful at a time when things were difficult.

Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also published two chapbooks, Passport and Keep Right On Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water, both with Beard of Bees Press and is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is writing his dissertation in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark.

Pamela Murray Winters on Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights

2011-08-04T07:00:00.005-04:00

In 1987, I was hired by a major scientific journal publisher as a trainee copy editor, not because I knew a damn thing about science, but because I knew that “syphilis” had just the one “l.”

Really, I can’t imagine what else they saw in me. I was 26, a library school dropout, somewhat brainy but utterly directionless. I had no office skills, I hated computers, and I had to borrow a suit for the interview. I was so self-conscious and fragile that a few years earlier, when called upon to give a poetry reading, I’d burst into tears at the podium and run from the room.

At this new job, I soon fell in with the lunchtime card-playing group, a clutch of fellow nerds who’d gotten about halfway through grad school, in French or botany or psychology, before some epiphany or happy accident led them to drop out, train up, and spend their days reading far too much about the interior landscapes of swine. On my second or third day, I made a joke that involved Tinker Bell and Simone de Beauvoir—-and got laughs. I’d found my people.

One was a fellow I’ll call Grey. Ten years older than me, he was in that enviable cohort with stories about sit-ins and hitchhikers and, especially, freeform radio. Mired among the artistically unadventurous in my formative years, the 1970s, I loved music, but like many people past college age, I was losing my ability to connect with new (or new-to-me) music. I subscribed to Rolling Stone, but not much grabbed me; I needed to be led.

Grey soon became, in effect, the older-brother-with-a-great-record-collection I’d never had. He’d lend me tapes, sometimes of single artists—-Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz, for example—but more often mixtapes.

One day, Grey asked if I’d heard the Tom Waits classic “Step Right Up.” I hadn’t, so he lent me a mixtape that included it. (I don’t know where he got these tapes, whether they came from friends or whether he made them for his own amusement. He didn’t make them for me.) “Step Right Up” was genius, kickass, with wordplay the likes of which I hadn’t heard since my mercifully ended suicidal-undergrad-poet days...but I was more curious about two other selections.

I’d read about Richard and Linda Thompson in one of those many Rolling Stone countdowns of superlative albums. The list contained the expected Springsteen and Beatles and Jimi, but up near the top were these Thompsons, whoever they were. The gulf between their critical acclaim and their album sales—-orders of magnitude lower than those of anyone else on the list—-intrigued my contrary nature. I don’t know why I didn’t chase after them right then; instead, the glowing review and fascinating story of Shoot Out the Lights slipped under the mental file cabinets.

Grey’s tape shook it out again. It had two songs from Shoot Out the Lights: “Don’t Renege on Our Love” and “Just the Motion.” I couldn’t believe they were by the same artists. The latter was a shimmering, melancholy song that might have been about resting, or drowning, sung by a woman whose voice was glass--clear and plainspokenly powerful. The former—-yeah, it had me at “Renege”—-began with this freaky drumbeat I couldn’t quite count out, little sparks of spiky guitar, and then this voice, this man’s voice, that sounded dark and foreign and unpretty and…edgy. (It was nearly 20 years later when Richard Thompson, at work on the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, offered an aesthetic statement that nailed what’s best about his work: “If you rub the edges off music, you really take away the music itself. The music is in the edges.”)

I loved “Just the Motion” from the start, but I can’t even quite say I liked “Renege”; I was merely possessed by it. The sound of Richard’s baritone pleading “Ah, noooo” wrapped around and through me, a dusky, spectral hand reshaping some unformed clay into a fully realized figure.

I became a woman with a mission. Very soon, I had found one of Richard’s solo albums, Daring Adventures, in the cutout bin at Tower, but Shoot Out the Lights was difficult to get in those pre-Internet days. My husband, after some intrepid research, went to a store nearly an hour away to buy the LP as a Christmas gift. By January, he regretted this gift, as I’d begun playing it daily. At least.

I gazed at the lyrics on the inner sleeve, which were printed in appealing puzzlelike patterns as fetchingly enigmatic as the cover, a swirl of amber light in which Linda’s portrait dangled over a sitting, slumped, shade-faced Richard like a judgment both deadly and desired. I studied the liner notes. Once too shy to sing even in front of my husband, I let my voice travel the harmonies, first clandestinely, later—-years later—-with abandon.

I guess you’d call the music “folk-rock”; to me, it had no genre. The critics, who, along with the Thompsons’ “cult following” (may I send you our newsletter?), are the ones who claim to know best, will tell you that the songs—-all conceived by Richard, with Linda’s input on “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed”—-blend rockabilly and Middle Eastern and Celtic styles, among others. I heard sounds both bone-familiar and plain odd.

What mattered, what matters, so deeply to me in this music? Was it my Scottish ancestry, my hillbilly heritage? Was it some musical madeleine from 1967: my father singing “My Wild Irish Rose” as he made a bologna sandwich? Was it my familiarity with watching the dark? Or did I, in my unsettled twenties, just need a good musical kick upside the head?

“Don’t Renege on Our Love” kicks off side 1, its title setting a challenge that the lyrical content of the ensuing album verifies that someone is doomed to fail. It’s followed by the brooding “Walking on a Wire,” with Linda on lead vocals. (What a voice—-a voice that Linda was then in the process of losing to dysphonia; at the time I first heard her, she’d been retired from music for a couple of years, presumably never to return.) Then on to “A Man in Need,” in which Richard embodies a man deserting his family with an inevitability that’s downright jaunty. (I don’t know at what point I learned, or remembered from that old Rolling Stone piece, that this record came at the end of Richard and Linda’s own marriage. I’ve never seen it as beautiful art imitating ugly life; I trust the power of an artist’s imagination.)

“Just the Motion” ends side one; flip the disc, and the title track smacks that placid sonic ocean with the force of a mortar. Shoot Out the Lights is very “sided”; one is supposed to feel that electric explosion halfway through.

I should mention here that, in early listenings, I didn’t really notice the guitar all that much. (Our old pals the critics will tell you that’s what you’re supposed to admire about Richard Thompson.) I enjoyed the rubber-bandy bend and sting of the solos in “Shoot Out the Lights,” and especially the market stall’s worth of instruments, headed by that guitar, in the engaging coda of “Back Street Slide.” But I was in it for something else, something tonal, most of which was carried in Richard Thompson’s turns of verbal phrase and in his voice.

Each song—-and there are only eight—-is a world, carrying its own atmosphere, gravity, terrain. “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” is especially distinctive, with its sinister lyrics (“Lying in a pool of herself with a twisted neck”) and its billowing curtains of sorrow in the instrumental passages. Was it, or was it not, written about Richard’s bandmate in the groundbreaking Britfolk band Fairport Convention, the late Sandy Denny? Grey guessed it was, but then again, Grey had told me not to bother to buy Shoot Out the Lights, as his tape contained the only two tracks worth hearing. How could he not have been swept up by “Wall of Death,” the anthemic closer, with its fairground imagery, its brave harmonies, and its hard-to-parse lyric “This is the nearest to being alive”?

We were moving in the spring of 1988, and every day, my husband would come home to increasingly disorderly scenes, half-painted walls, possessions disappearing into more and more boxes, while in the background Linda’s long-lost voice wailed “Too many steps to take, too many spells to break...This grindstone’s wearing me, your claws are tearing me…” It got so bad that he had to ask me whether I was trying to tell him something. (Life was not imitating art; we’re about to celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary.)

Finding my editing job, my friends there, and the music of the Thompsons both centered me and set me flying. I learned to drive. I took up black coffee and dark beer. I joined the Internet in 1993 to be part of a “Richard Thompson discussion list,” which is worthy of a lengthy essay of its own. At a folk concert, I saw a flyer for a magazine called Dirty Linen, which was named for a Fairport Convention song and covered the sorts of music I was finding I liked. I volunteered to write music reviews for the magazine. Ultimately, I parlayed these reviews into paid freelance work.

I began attending Richard’s concerts all over the world, a great adventure for someone whose family seldom traveled beyond the Beltway. (I’m currently holding tickets for shows in Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania and a weeklong music cruise in the Caribbean.) When Linda came out of retirement to tour, I got to hear her a few times; back in 1988, I’d thought I’d missed that chance.

As a Thompson fan, I learned about Scottish polka, surreptitious concert recording, morris dance, Sufism, vocal disorders, proper English tea (milk in first!), the moral complexity of marital discord, and the worth of standing in line for three or four hours or more, with my tribe, to gain a spot half-sprawled over the stage monitor at the foot of the 9:30 Club stage.

I left my editing job in 1997 to devote my time to writing. I spent several years on what was to be the first biography of Sandy Denny. Richard Thompson (a very, very good sport) wrote my foreword. The project fell apart rather dramatically, as did I, almost simultaneously. I pulled myself together and kept writing reviews for a few more years but ultimately realized that the work was neither my bliss nor my meal ticket. So I took my writing back in the direction of poetry, and I took my need for gainful employment back to the same job I had in 1987, in the same place, with many of the same people.

Grey’s still here. He’s tried to hook me on Leonard Cohen. Brilliant dude, but there will never be another Richard Thompson for me. That “Ah, noooo” is in my blood. I don’t know how it got there; I feel like it was always there, like some virus or other occult phenomenon, waiting for a chance encounter to wake it up.

Pamela Murray Winters grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, and now lives in nearby Silver Spring, walking distance from a soon-to-be-opened music venue and a noted poetry series, right in the happy middle. Her poetry has been published or will soon be published in Gargoyle, Gettysburg Review, Delaware Poetry Review, Fledgling Rag, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Anatomy & Etymology, JMWW, Calvert Review, and Takoma Park Writers 1981. She is at work on a book of poems about the transaction between performer and audience. She sometimes posts daily poems at oncedailyasdirected.blogspot.com.

Michelle J. Martinez on Tom Waits's Rain Dogs

2011-08-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

Twenty-one years ago, I lived in an old polished wooden house that carried a light scent of mildew in its core. It wore the sanded down and lacquered over footprints of hundreds of students, young bewildered energetic folks like me, hungry for freedom, control, booze, and sex, stepping out in to the unknown to try on a future self. At 17 and a half years old, I was the youngest in the house. I occupied the smallest room in that house on Dunn Street. A tiny perfect square, drab, with no closet, only a metal rack clinging to the thick wall like the kind in motels or boarding houses. There was one electric outlet in the room, and no phone jack. It was like stepping back in time. 1990 wasn’t all laptops and iPads like now and most people had remote control cable tv and VCRs, but something pure and sad about that room comforted me with its secrets. The window had no screen and opened over the back rooms of the house, so often I climbed out there to smoke and brood and soak in the quiet that takes over a college town in summer, leaving it all green grass and thunderstorms. All summer long I listened to Rain Dogs by Tom Waits. Somewhat steampunk and vaguely cookie monster, his vivid images and discordant harmonies spoke to the juxtaposition of the life I knew, and the dirty guitar through the album, strummed by Marc Ribot, just tickled me.

We sail tonight for Singapore, take your blankets from the floor, wash your mouth out by the door, the whole town’s made of iron ore, every witness turns to steam, they all become Italian dreams, fill your pockets up with earth, get yourself a dollars worth, away boys, heave away. The captain is a one armed dwarf, he’s throwing dice along the wharf. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. So take this ring. “Singapore”

Most nights I slept in my boyfriend’s bed. He had the only bedroom downstairs, and the only one with its own bathroom. He was the reason I had transferred to that college at 17 and a half and was paying for it myself, one class at a time, working weekdays for an eccentric old artist who was trying to squeeze 30 years of art and hoarding from a three story Victorian house into a two bedroom Craftsman. While I spent afternoons sorting and packing collections of ironing boards, antique salt shakers, and other obscure tchotchkes with the artist’s self-portrait painted gravely on their surfaces, listening to her political rants and tales of sadness, my boyfriend spent his days elusive and aloof. Under his white blond curls and sun golden skin, there was a dark edge. I would sneak into the forest with him, small shovels and collapsible water cubes in our internal frame backpacks, hydroponically grown clones of skunky high-test pot plants carefully packed in old coffee cans and lunch coolers. Deep into the humid Green County, Indiana forest we trekked and planted each one, hoping to harvest and cure in time for the student party surge at Homecoming in the fall.

Uncle Bill will never leave a will and his tumor is a big as an egg, he has a mistress and she is Puerto Rican, and I hear she has a wooden leg. Uncle Phil can’t live without his pills, he has emphysema and he’s almost blind. And we must find out where the money is, get it now before he loses his mind. “Cemetery Polka”

Some nights we slept on the front porch of the polished wood house to listen to the thunder and rain. When my boyfriend was gone on some overnight trip I was not invited to, I tossed and turned on the thin futon in my drab little room, and would flick on the little desk lamp perched on an overturned plastic crate stamped STOLEN FROM IGA and write until the pink dawn. Although I was only 17 and a half and taking one college course, I had already worked at homeless shelters and food banks in Minneapolis, Boston, New Orleans, and Indianapolis as well as had been exposed to the culture of the Midway of the state fair circuit and farm work in South. My memories were peopled with strange and rough characters, speaking in various languages and accents, smelling of stale smoke and drink. In fact, my own family had its fair share of these kinds of characters too. There was something about that room and the album Rain Dogs by Tom Waits that helped to pull these stories out of me. He spoke of a world I understood, a multi-cultural landscape of poverty and booze. I sat cross-legged under the window on the faded linoleum floor, pen pressed in hand and spilled prose into a lavender satin journal, the only thing left of my ‘little girl’ room back home.

Well it’s 9th and Hennepin. All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes. And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky, like a tarp thrown all over this, and the broken umbrella like dead birds, and the steam comes out of the grill like the whole damn town’s about to blow. And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos and everyone’s behaving like dogs, and the horses are coming down Violin Road and Dutch is dead on his feet. And all the rooms, they smell like diesel and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there. And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway, and I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat. No one brings anything small into a bar around here. “9th and Hennepin”

Because he was 21 years old, my summer golden boyfriend went to the bars a lot. When a band I knew was playing, they let me carry in gear through the back of the club with a warning not to drink. I could see the show, but had to respect the favor. I knew I could drink later. I would often hide in the middle of the crowd and close my eyes and dance. If I danced with closed eyes I wouldn’t have to see my boyfriend dance too close to the other girls, feeling them pressed next him, rolling his hand down their curves, unbothered by whether I had gotten into the club or not. Most nights that he went out, I stayed in and scribbled into my journal or the tiny spiral notebook I kept in my pocket, Tom Waits and his colorful cast of characters and discordant harmony keeping me company.

Sane, sane, they’re all insane. Fireman’s blind, the conductor’s lame. A Cincinnati jacket and a sad luck dame, hanging out the window with a bottleful of rain. Clap hands. Clap hands. Clap hands. Clap hands. Said roll, roll the thunder and the roll, son ‘bitch’s never coming back here no more, the moon in the window and the bird on the pole, we can always find a million in a shovel load of coal. “Clap Hands”

While the boyfriend had gone out a few days on a trip to see some Dead Shows in the east, I had had a couple VCR movie night with a few friends. We watched Down By Law and Stranger than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch captured the black and white doldrums that existed in the eighties behind the AquaNet and neon colors. Tom Waits and John Lurie personified much of the angst I felt and craved. This fed my need to hear Rain Dogs more. The guitar in some tracks tore through my core. Tore out any fear I had, pulled some of my anger to the surface, made me aware of my name. I scribbled with fury onto small paper as Marc Ribot’s strings awakened something in me I knew of the lives in the songs, more than I had ever been willing to admit to anyone.

Well you play that Tarantella, all the hounds will start to roar, and the boys all go to hell, then the Cubans hit the floor. And they drive along the pipeline, they tango ‘til they’re sore. They take apart their nightmares and they leave them by the door. Let me fall out the window with confetti in my hair, deal out jacks or better on a blanket by the stairs. I tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past, so send me off to bed forever more. “Tango ‘Til They’re Sore”

One of the nights that I sat alone with the Rain Dogs on Waits’ cassette tape, I composed a short story called “Jazz, My Love?”. It became my first published story and earned a much-needed $250. The friend who had convinced me to submit the story excitedly delivered the news while also scolding me for not being easy to find. Summer golden boyfriend had replaced me with an anthropology major and I was hiding out on Smith Street, subleasing a shotgun apartment without a phone while its usual tenant was finding adventure somewhere in Central America. Ten years later, when I showed the tattered copy of the story to my present partner, a weathered musician from New York, and told him the story of it while we were in the early lustful interview portion of a relationship, he informed me that he played drums and percussion with Marc Ribot and John Lurie, and worked on the music for the Jarmusch films that had influenced me a decade earlier. For the first time in a very long while, I felt like I was home.

Inside a broken clock, splashing the wine with all the rain dogs. Taxi we’d rather walk, huddle in a doorway with the rain dogs. For I am a Rain Dog too! Oh how we danced and we swallowed the nights for it was all ripe for dreaming. Oh how we danced away all of the lights, we’ve always been out of our minds. The rum pours strong and thin, beat out the dustman with a Rain Dog. Aboard a shipwreck train, give my umbrella to a Rain Dog. For I am a Rain Dog too! “Rain Dogs”

Michelle J. Martinez and her weathered musician partner live in Tempe, AZ with their two kids and small dog. They all pound on drums and keyboards and yell their heads off in discordant harmonies.

Jessica Burnquist on The Sundays' Reading Writing & Arithmetic

2011-07-31T07:00:00.003-04:00

Do You Feel the Words Too?

My love affair with The Sundays is not deep, but it is lasting. I admit that I don’t know the names of the band members. I admit that I wouldn’t recognize them on the street, and here’s the clincher—I admit that I don’t know every word to any given song on their album, Reading Writing &Arithmetic. I would recognize every song though—because I listened to that album repeatedly for an entire year. I listened beyond the lyrics and made up the words I couldn’t understand.

The beginning of 1990 was marked by the death of a dear friend. Crystal Donaldson succumbed to cancer the year she should have been beginning her second semester at St. John’s University. Due to cancer, she never attended the first semester either. She did make a trip from Tempe to Tucson to visit me for a weekend. The last time I saw her, she was dancing to the Meat Puppets without the wig she’d purchased post chemo. Punk boys noticed her. Probably everyone noticed her. We spoke about her dreams of becoming a writer, we spoke about sex, and as always, we spoke about music. She smoked a cigarette and said, What’s the worst that could happen, I’ll get cancer?

On the last night of our visit, I pointedly asked her how she was doing. She said she was tired of getting transfusions. I felt her leaving, but couldn’t articulate it. The day my mother called to tell me that Crystal died, I stopped listening to music. There was no song left un-haunted by her. Bands that we cherished were absolutely off limits. If R.E.M. snuck into a soundtrack of a film, or The Smiths were heard through a dorm room window, I became immobilized.

Several months after her death, I heard Here’s Where the Story Ends. I don’t remember buying the album. I just know it became background music that didn’t cause grief—somehow it propelled me forward. This was the year of astronomy before math ruined it; star gazing, and discussions of the mysteries of the universe. (For example, how is it that a nineteen-year-old should die of cancer?) This was the year of outright rebellion with adults in my life. Whether it was informing my father that I did not want to be a lawyer, or telling an algebra teacher to fuck off, I was asserting myself in ways my friend surely would have if she’d been alive. The Sundays’ lyrics ran round my head in snippets that made sense:

The words came stumbling out my mouth, and I went tumbling out…

And I’ve been wondering lately, just whose gonna save me?

I could have been wrong but I don’t think I was…

I’d like to be in history.

The album seemed deeply feminine, and woven with rhythms that swelled beyond language. Quite frankly, I couldn’t make sense of all the lyrics. I blame that on strong English accents and impatience on my part to really learn them. I was more interested in feeling them. Reading Writing & Arithmetic welcomed a sensory experience. I could sing parts of a greater whole, and fill in any indistinguishable sections with my newfound narrative. This was the year of my first poetry class, and I was becoming aware of lyrics that belonged to me. I’m certain that had I spent more time learning the words, I would not have heard my inner voice as clearly. The voice that gave approval of me pursuing Crystal’s writing dreams. The voice that screamed yes when I met the man I would marry. The voice that names stars without understanding their science.

Jess Burnquist grew up in Arizona. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals including Oranges & Sardines, 42 Opus, Locuspoint, and Syntax. She teaches high school English and Creative Writing in San Tan Valley, and is a teaching artist for Arizona State University’s Young Writer’s Program. She resides in the East Valley of the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan area with her husband, son and daughter.

Andrew Demcak on Eyeless in Gaza's Photographs As Memories

2011-07-29T12:19:00.001-04:00

I know what you’re thinking: Who? Eyeless in Gaza? Isn’t that an obscure Aldous Huxley novel? Yes, it is an obscure Huxley novel, but also one of the most underrated synth-pop duos to emerge from England in 1981. I first heard Eyeless in Gaza from my friend Diane, who was my pen pal I met through an ad she took out the LA punk ‘zine, Flipside, in 1986. I was an undergrad at CSU Long Beach, taking poetry classes, dying my hair neon fuchsia, wearing all black from head down to my pointy-toed boots. Diane made me a mix cassette tape of Eyeless in Gaza and I absolutely wore it out. What struck me most when I first heard Eyeless in Gaza was the voice of Martyn Bates, the lead singer. He used his vocal chords like an instrument: howling, shrieking, mumbling, singing, whispering. I had never heard anyone use his voice with such a range of complex sounds. And his lyrics were poetry. Eyeless In Gaza had albums with titles like: Red Rust September, Drumming the Beating Heart, and Kodak Ghosts Run Amok. What a vocabulary they used! Eyeless in Gaza was the music of a voice finding itself. And how much that appealed to me! I was still finding my own voice as well: a thread, a connection, a realization.

I remember driving up to Aaron’s Records in Hollywood to locate Eyeless in Gaza’s first album, Photographs as Memories. I parked somewhere off of Melrose Blvd on a bungalow-lined side street. On my walk over to Aaron’s, I found a crumpled wad of money ($21.00, to be exact) on the sidewalk. Oh, lucky day! Import records were so expensive! I was thrilled to locate their album in the import bin and I made my purchase. I rushed home down the Harbor Fwy. I was eighteen, and still living with my parents, but in a separate part of the house with its own bathroom, washer and dryer, and its own entrance (a Dutch door painted bright blue that opened on top and bottom.) It was my own, rent-free, mini bachelor-pad! I couldn’t wait to put the vinyl on my turntable and try out another new toy I had recently purchased: my first vibrator. (If you want to know more about that particular adventure read my novel, If There’s a Heaven Above.)

Immediately my favorite cut from Photographs as Memories was “Speech Rapid Fire,” with its pulsing synth tones and bass drone:

Speech rapid fire, profusion of words.

While you talk liquid fire, spoken, inferred.

Will bent on venom, run rotten with pride.

Yr verbose and yr swollen, broken inside.

License your malice with hidden endeavor,

silence emphatic, boxing clever.

Profile of damage eaten by spite,

yr occasioned to remonstrate, willful insight.

Indignant aptitude, labored and coy,

you are vehement discretion, aimed to annoy.

OK, so that doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, but as Robert Bly pointed out: Words need to travel through the brain to reach the heart, but music goes directly inside. This track did it for me. The simple melody, the repetition of language in the lyrics, the driving beat.

As a young gay man during the initial AIDS crisis of the 1980’s, it seemed very important to me at that time to harden myself. It was such a difficult period to be young and gay. Eyeless in Gaza were the kind of artsy, edgy Brit music that I needed. It was definitely not to everyone’s taste. I wore it like a badge, a symbol of my difference. I was not going to be another generic gay boy caught up in the Madonna club scene who got infected with HIV. I rejected the main stream of 80’s gay culture entirely. I had to.

When I listen to Photographs as Memories (on CD) now, I know that Eyeless in Gaza, to me, represented my new freedom, my new isolation. The majesty and terror of that moment crystalized.

Andrew Demcak is an award-winning author & poet. His new book of poetry, Night Chant, is forth-coming from Lethe Press in 2012. Check out his other work here: http://www.andrewdemcak.com & here: http://www.the andrewdemcak23.com He is listening to Wire's awesome new album Red Barked Tree right now.

Jory Mickelson on The Cure's Disintegration

2011-07-27T07:00:00.002-04:00

Coming Out & Coming Apart

Plainsong

I can feel the heavy wash of synthesizers vibrating their way out from the scratchy foam headphones of my walkman, even though I haven’t played this album on cassette in over a decade.

Seventh grade, the album out for a year. These over-the-top synthesizers are the beginnings of my teenage angst. Don’t you know I am ratting my hair in rural America?

Pictures of You

Synthesizers give way to the ready and repeated strumming of guitars. The first song was all drowning, but this, this is swimming, kicking my legs, driving me upward.

I am on a school bus and the left side of my face presses into the textured green vinyl seat. The glass rattles in its square metal frames as the bus lurches down a gravel road.

I have stared at this landscape my entire life. It never changes. These mountains and trees and the river are fixed and certain. Geography as a kind of constellation.

Closedown

I am rising close enough to the surface to see how light ripples and distorts.

Not on the bus, but lying on my bed staring up at the ceiling at the poster of Robert Smith’s enormous orange lips. I don’t even know where I could find lipstick in that shade.

I let the music pool underneath me, raise me up, until I am floating just underneath those enormous lips. They consume my field of vision. Why can’t I stop thinking about another man’s lips?

Lovesong

The reedy synthesized flutes and violins. The first clear, undistorted strings of an electric guitar. Is this hopeful or just the memory of feeling hopeful?

This song has played on the radio for twenty years and will still be playing on some soft rock station twenty years from now. In the car, when it comes on the radio, passengers catch me singing along.

Last Dance

Back through the exotic curtain of heavy synth. This song was a placeholder, a resting spot between two others that I my friends and I sing along to.

Only years later do I realize that the lyrics are about recollection. Not nostalgia, but a kind of distorted foreknowledge in retrospect. How to be in the moment again. Even twenty years later. But in that moment with the knowledge that it is twenty years later.

How I lie on that bed thinking I was the only fourteen year old who would ever want to kiss another man, unable to know how many men I would press my lips to.

Lullaby

This is the other song that my friends and I sing along to. My stringy bangs are so long and they resemble a spider’s legs. It was a contest. Who could grow theirs the longest? We all want “skater bangs” even though not one of us owns a skateboard.

Alone in my bed at night, I dream about hands touching me, taking me somewhere that I want to go but have no name for. A drowning hunger.

Fascination Street

If the last track tucked me in at night, this one pushed me out of the house to wander my small town in the dark. I walked miles, looking into the light cast from others’ windows. Each house a solitary stage on which another’s drama played out.

I knew everyone in the town where I grew up, but in the dark, from a distance, all lit up, their lives became fascinating.

Prayers for Rain

The restless build of the song mimicked my own. Too young to drive, too far from a city, and parents who monitored my every move, I paced. I threw myself down on the couch and my bed to try to break apart the monotony of my body. I got back up and paced. I swam in the slow circle of my own adolescence.

In some car, in some city far from here, someone was up to something better. The empty eye of the television gave me glimpses with its long blue stare.

The Same Deep Water as You

Drunken guitars echo slowly through the track, delicious as the moment before a first kiss with someone new. The lyrics spoke to me before I learned how to speak about desire.

To tell another person. To hear another say, “I’m just like you.” The words hover, twist upon the lips, always about to be spoken. Breaking the surface, into the air and light terrifies.

Disintegration

How could I miss all the kissing in this album? Sure, The Cure released “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” in 1987, but all the real lip action took place two years later in Disintegration.

My freshman year, during a round of “Stump ‘Em,” (a team based charade challenge) I correctly guessed the title of this album when one of my teammates made a confetti-like motion with his hands. We were accused of cheating. No, I loved the album that much.

Homesick

Robert Smith couldn’t stay up-tempo forever. The slow slide of boozy guitars and stumbling piano accompanies his slurring voice. Having hovered just below the surface, the resolve to rise above wavers and comes apart.

I want to say this song makes me homesick, but it’s a lie. I never want to go back to the suffocating wave of rural, sixteen-year-old existence.

In an attempt to break the lung crushing weight of my life, I tell my best friend that I might be bisexual the same night I taught her how to smoke. A full moon in July. Smoking on the same field where I used to play Little League, in the same park where I learned how to swim, my life in the shadow of those unmovable peaks.

Untitled

The song opens with an accordion or at least the synthesizer’s approximation of an accordion. Robert Smith’s voice is gentle, but sure. He tells us, “never quite said what I wanted to say to you. Never quite managed the words to explain to you…”

I managed to come out to a few people at the age of sixteen, but I waited another three years for that kiss.

I too wonder what I have managed to say as the cassette clicks off.

Jory M. Mickelson’s work has appeared in Free Verse, Oranges & Sardines, Knockout, New Mexico Poetry Review and other print and online journals. He is the winner of the 2011 Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Idaho. He’s the nonfiction editor of the literary journal 5x5 (www.5x5litmag.org) and blogs about writing and queer life at Literary Magpie (www.jorymickelson.blogspot.com).

Kelly Cockerham on Taylor Swift's Fearless

2011-07-25T07:00:00.001-04:00

Me and Taylor, 17 Again

I’m not going to lie about it: I love Taylor Swift. I sing the hell out of Taylor Swift. I sing like nobody’s watching. I sing Taylor until I’m hoarse and croaking. I sing Taylor like only an angst-y teenager can because when Taylor starts to sing, her fake southern accent kicks-starts a voice I silenced half a lifetime ago. Little Kel, as I like to call her, living in a small town called Tobaccoville, NC, who wanted nothing more than to get the hell out. She wanted to be someone else, to create another life, and somehow she always believed she could. I look back on that girl now and I don’t know how she did it because when she finally returned to me a few years ago, everything she felt then sent me crawling to the bathroom floor, to the basement in the middle of the night to curl up with my knees to my chest, crying. Most of the time what she gave me was this unspeakable pain, but sometimes I could hear her voice, angry, telling me to buck up, get a grip, hold it together—the way she always did, they way she needed me to. As an adult I felt I was failing her, my inability to finally hear her secrets and hold them steady in my hands.

Enter my daughter and her first Taylor Swift CD, Fearless. The first song I ever heard of Taylor’s was “Fifteen” and I could feel that girl in me rush up in joy, in hope, in recognition of all I didn’t know at fifteen, all that I did, and all I wanted and never had. Most people would probably say that I was popular back then, that I fit in, but Little Kel was living such a lie that know one knew her—she wasn’t popular, she didn’t fit—because she didn’t exist. The girl who walked those hallways was a ghost, a projection as thin as air that smiled and laughed. Sometimes she even managed to flirt but that girl inside couldn’t take any relationship further because people were scary, boys were scary, and no one could know her secrets.

Taylor wasn’t there to dream along with me about Romeo and Juliet, which I read obsessively, the notion of someone loving someone else enough to die without them seeming unreal to me. Impossible. Because no one loved me that way, and it wasn’t just about the boys sitting next to me in class who thought I was cute but seemed somehow intimidated to ask me out. I was convinced they knew how needy I was and were running for safety. Maybe they were. Maybe I was as unapproachable as I felt, as far away from everyone as I imagined. But it was more than their distance, it was the feeling of being invisible everywhere, or trying to be invisible, because being noticed was a danger in itself. Taylor wasn’t scared though; Taylor was waiting for Romeo, singing “Love Story,” her white dress probably already on order, begging him please don’t go. Take me somewhere we can be alone. Sneaking out, escaping. Taylor, when I was 16, I begged someone please don’t go and he went. We didn’t make it out of that mess you described. I was heartbroken, convinced he’d figured out how unworthy I was, this boy who’d held my hand and brought me Snickers bars. Who worried about me and sat by my bed in another country because I was afraid of the dark. I got away once and then I had to come back, and the bubble burst, the pumpkin smashed, but not Taylor. Romeo came back in the end. Little Kel loves a happy ending.

Little Kel lived in her head, so much so that often she arrived at school and didn’t remember driving there. She’d been somewhere else all those miles, and usually she was living in a Taylor Swift song, though neither of us could know that then. Taylor wasn’t quite ready yet to sing to my seventeen year old self. She wasn’t there singing to Stephen or Drew, but when I hear Taylor sing “White Horse,” I go back to my girl, the way she sometimes lost hope, the time I heard her say, “I’m not capable of loving anyone,” because she had pulled herself so far back and given up on people. When Little Kel lost hope she was right there with Taylor singing,

Stupid girl, I should’ve known, I should’ve known

that I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairy tale

I’m not the one you’ll sweep off her feet

lead her up the stairwell

this ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town

I was dreamer before you and you let me down

now it’s too late for you and your white horse

to come around

But ah Taylor, there’s always hope in your world, isn’t there? At the end of that same song, we get :

I’m not your princess, this ain’t a fairytale

I’m gonna find someone someday

who might actually treat me well

This is a big world, that was a small town

there in my rearview mirror disappearing now

Now it’s too late for you and your white horse

to catch me now. Try and catch me now

Little Kel hears that and hears my twenty-something self, saying to her, Hell yes. Try to catch me now. She’s a rebellious one. She’s the teenager Little Kel never got to be.

Sometimes when I listen to Taylor, it’s just me there. I hear “You’re Not Sorry,” and I don’t remember some boy who made me cry, I think of my father. I think about trying to get his attention and trying not to. I think about giving up trying and how things might have been if I could have done it sooner.

You had me crying for you, honey,

and it never would have gone away

You used to shine so bright

but I watched all of it fade….

All this time I was wasting

hoping you would come around

I’ve been giving away chances

and all you do is let me down

You don’t have to call anymore

I won’t pick up the phone

this is the last straw,

don’t want to hurt anymore

and you can tell you me that you’re sorry

but I don’t believe you like I did before

You’re not sorry…

There’s healing in Taylor. There’s power in giving up after giving in for so long, and for Little Kel and I that is magic.

You may not know this, but little Taylor grew up on a Christmas tree farm. Imagine the sparkles! The twinkling lights! There’s a song called “The Best Day” towards the end of the album and this song can break me down in its familiarity. There’s the pumpkin patch, the tractor rides. She’s a few states north but living in my rural world, but this song is more than that. It’s all about her mom, about their relationship which is heartbreakingly close. “I don’t know if you knew, but I’m taking the chance to say, that I had the best day with you today,” sings Taylor, and I think of my mother, far away in miles and spirit, the fact that I haven’t spoken to her in years. I think of all we’ve missed out on together and what we’ve never had. Then I think of my grandmother, more mother to me than anyone else, and how desperately I miss her every day. How orphaned I feel in this world without both she and my grandfather because my best days were with them. Even in the grief of those things, I have hope when I hear that song that my daughter might one day listen to it and think of her best days with me. I’m grateful for the tears because the grief I feel for my grandparents is so big that often I struggle to keep it in check, but when I listen to that song, I have a few minutes to let it go, to rest my arms and to cry without trying to blink the tears back. It’s a welcome break. When I need that release of grief, I listen, I let it out, I let it go and I can come back into myself, my day, with my shoulders relaxed, sad but not bubbling over the brim.

And let’s face it: Taylor is happy. Have you listened to her? That girl is normal and happy. She loves her parents, girls weren’t nice to her (because teenage girls suck and generally aren’t nice to each other), and boys liked her sometimes, and sometimes, like me, she sat next to them wishing they’d just see her, notice how much she wants them to really look at her, but overall there’s joy in every word. Even in the saddest songs there’s so much joy in the act of singing that something lifts up. My seventeen year old self listens to Taylor and lives again through her. She goes back to the familiar terrain of her head and she dreams. This is what it could have been like if she’d had another dad, another mom, been born in another place, if she could have been what everyone wanted or if she could have been herself. What if she could have spoken all the secrets? What if she had lived a different life? What might have changed? I would have taken Taylor’s teenage heartbreaks, the boys who were immature, indifferent; the bitchy girls; the mom who took her shopping after a bad day at school. I want Taylor’s teenage years and my 17 year old self sings it out with every song: the sassy, the sappy, the sweet. Taylor! I get it! I want it! Give it back to me!

It started with Fearless, I listened all the way through, over and over again, Little Kel going up and down, up and down like adolescence and hormones, riding that wave of past until it dropped me back to now. It’s a lovely ride. It’s not the Indigo Girls’ debut album that Little Kel listened to obsessively when I really was 17, feeling every blow of “Blood and Fire.” This is windows down, no-speed-limit back roads. This is the smell of memory mixing with tobacco in bloom, and a girl who can take me back through the safety of years with a few scrapes but not the need to bleed for it. I bump through this album and all that comes with it, and at the end, I’m still grown up, and Little Kel is a kid again.

I’m 37 years old, I like to call myself a poet, and I love Taylor Swift. I sat and cried during the 3-night Taylor Swift biography special. I cried for her hurt feelings, and I cried because she worked so hard to get what she wanted, and I cried because she got it. My little 17 year old fed every tear because she got it too. Because she never wanted to grow up, she never wanted hips and breasts, she never wanted the attention they brought or the looks those hips carried through the house in fear, and because everything in her was saying hurry, hurry, hurry and grow up—run! I cried because we both made it and because I can look at my seventeen year old self and hear her secrets, and stand up under the weight of them. She can just be 17 now, dreaming, not escaping, with Taylor, and I can be there with her.

I keep pressing play, set my Taylor play list to repeat for hours. I listen to Taylor in the car even when my daughter isn’t there. When she is, we sing together, we belt it out, Lucy singing like her heart’s been broken a thousand times and she knows, Taylor, she knows how stupid boys can be, how thoughtless, even at 7. There’s me in the front seat, skipping ahead to Speak Now’s “Never Grow Up”, saying, “This one’s for you, Lu,” and my sweet girl saying back, “Thanks Mom, but you know I have to, right? My body just likes to grow.” I wish my body had liked to grow, I wish my body could have grown in safety, free of fear and revulsion. Taylor sings for me and my teenage self, and we sing back to her in joy that she grew up clean, dancing around in her sparkly dress, smiling, and that she sings to my little girl now, that Lu can grow up in a house of Taylor Swift heartaches on her CD player without the secret songs of my teenager, lying on the bathroom floor. We sing back to her because Little Kel always held it together, always; and when we listen to Taylor, she smiles and sings like a kid, and she lets it go.

Kelly Cockerham is a poet and mother living in Maryland. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, she spent some long years in Tobaccoville, NC, before moving to FL and attending the University of South Florida. Her heart still lives in Tampa, cruising down Bayshore Blvd. with her girls, walking Pass-a-Grille Beach in St. Pete, and loving everything about finding her home, and family, in a new world. This is her first public declaration of love for Taylor Swift. She has been published in Ourobouros Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and The Leveler. Her work is forthcoming in Palooka, Tryst and Soundzine.

David Dombrosky on Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel

2011-07-23T07:00:00.003-04:00

Throughout the past 20 years of my life, I have held a special place in my heart for Tori Amos. In addition to being an insanely talented musician with a distinctive voice, she has a wonderful tendency to reinvent her sound with each successive album. Correspondingly, I find that I usually need to spend a few weeks listening to her discs from start to finish before determining how I feel about it.

This is my process with her work now and was my process with her music back in 1998 when she released her fourth solo album From the Choirgirl Hotel. At that time in my life, I was a wee bit busy holding down three jobs in the York-Lancaster area of Pennsylvania; so I didn't have a chance to really listen to the disc until late summer. I had decided to pack up my life and move to Atlanta, Georgia in order to find work in arts administration. So I loaded up my car and drove off into the summer sun with a deliciously dark album to cool me on my journey.

She's addicted to nicotine patches... From the first line of the first song, I was hooked. I have always been enamored with Tori Amos' ability to write clever, powerful songs with enough mystery to leave you trying to unveil their secrets. I'm a lyrics slut. It's true. I put out for intriguing, funny and heartbreaking lyrics. For me, From the Choirgirl Hotel is a lyrical orgy. I think the Tori-est way for me to talk about this disc's power and relevance is to explore it all lyrically. Don't worry. I'll be gentle.

She's convinced she could hold back a glacier / But she couldn't keep Baby alive / Doubting that there's a woman in there somewhere / Here, here here... – “Spark”

1998 gave us two albums exploring both sides of the birth coin. Madonna's Ray of Light reveled in the joyous event of giving birth, while Amos' From the Choirgirl Hotel delved into the psychological terrain of a woman wrestling with the ramifications of miscarrying a child. While Madge was running around getting all Kabbalah on us, Tori was digging through some serious wreckage:

...then the baby came / before I found / the magic how / to keep her happy /
I never was the fantasy / of what you want / wanted me to be /
Don't judge me so harsh little girl / so you got a playboy mommy... – “Playboy Mommy”

At that particular time in my life, I shrugged off the trappings of adolescence and college to begin my rebirth as a single guppie (aka gay urban professional) in the big city.

Brother lover bougainvillea / My vine twists around your need – “Cruel”

Like many young people starting off on life without the safety net of family or school, my first year in Atlanta was wrought with need – money, community, professional respect, love, desire, a sense of identity, etc. When Amos talks about the album, she often mentions how she envisions the songs as this group of people living their lives in a fictional hotel. As this disc held a dominant presence in the soundtrack to “urban queer” rite of passage, each track felt like a different aspect of me at that point in time.

Many of these aspects would make an appearance within a single night on the town. I would start by getting into my club “drag” - prep, leather, glam-rock – whatever I thought would bring me the most attention.

She's your Cocaine / She's got you shaving your legs / you can suck anything /  but you know you wanna be me / put on your makeup boy / you're your favorite stranger / and we all like to watch / So shimmy once and do it again – “She's Your Cocaine”

Then I would hit the bars and clubs to dance, tease the animals, and perhaps make a connection. If I headed to The Eagle, then the DJ would always spin the remix to Tori's “Raspberry Swirl” to get me in the mood.

I am not your senorita / I am not from your tribe / if you want inside her / well, /
boy you better make her raspberry swirl – “Raspberry Swirl”

Often, I would make a connection, although I usually ended up realizing that it was a forced connection rather than a real one.

Met him in a Hotel / Met him in a Hotel / you say he's the biggest thing / there'll be this year /
I guess that what I'm seeking / I guess that what I'm seeking / isn't here – “Hotel”

On rare occasions, legitimate connections were made...and lost two weeks later. I couldn't help it. I was a young Aries. Of course, I would always build the loss up to be more than it was. Drama queen.

Had a Northern lad / well not exactly had / he moved like the sunset / god who painted that – “Northern Lad”

During this metamorphic stage in my life, I discovered that I was HIV+. Invulnerability is a beautiful thing, until you realize that it doesn't exist. So it was now my turn to delve into the wreckage. For many months, I railed against the gods and acted as if Fate had snipped my thread.

I know we're dying / and there's no sign of a parachute / we scream in cathedrals /
why can't it be beautiful / why does there / gotta be a sacrifice – “Iieee”

But in the end, humor and friendship brought me through to the other side of the looking glass.

Stickers licked on lunch boxes / worshipping David Cassidy /
yeah I mooned him once on Donna's box / she's still in recovery – “Jackie's Strength”

If you had told me when I first bought From the Choirgirl Hotel that this album was going to be the soundtrack for arguably the most pivotal year in my life. I would have either sat down to study it like a survival handbook or requested to swap it out for some fluffier fare like Ray of Light.

I suppose it's a good thing that life isn't that prescient. We cloak ourselves in the music we need when we realize that we need it.

David Dombrosky is a nonprofit consultant, arts manager, technophile, and pop culturalist desperately awaiting the next episodes of True Blood and So You Think You Can Dance at his home in Pittsburgh, PA.

Bill Beverly on Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere

2011-07-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

Neil Young’s second record, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, was never a big hit. No hit singles; it never cracked the top thirty. My reverence for it stems from my belief that when I was young, it was my father’s favorite record. About this I may be right or not. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere resided in a group of vinyl 12-inch records leaning in the bottom shelf of the home-built bookcases in the living room. Our tomcat used them as a scratching post; each jacket had its shredded corner. Among these records, tattered by claws and by use, I always took Everybody Knows to be king. Even against The Band and Abbey Road and I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, it sounded like king.

“Cinnamon Girl” opens Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. You know it – a handclap and a galvanized stomp and a riff and a boyish longing. Like Van Morrison’s “Wild Night,” it’s a kinetic, anticipatory pop song. It is about being swept up; it sweeps you up. It is strange, short, three verses, no chorus, and the bridge comes at the end: “Ma, send me money now, I’m gonna make it somehow, I need another chance / You see your baby loves to dance.” Clumsy, confused, ecstatic. Presently the song ends, but is followed by an ominous web of knifing notes, a harbinger.

The muse in “Cinnamon Girl” is the first of the songs of mythic women who frame the record. The other two, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Young wrote in the throes of a 103-degree fever, legend has it. In each, Young rides the barroom crunch of the band Crazy Horse. These have been described as jam songs – an injustice, for often this term means fussy, annoying, virtuosic. These are not. They are fastidiously rhythmic, tense, uncluttered; here is where was born Young’s reputation as the one-note soloist (apocryphal; all the solos feature at least two notes). There’s a great ambivalence here; over Young’s cracked falsetto (“Down by the river / I shot my baby”) arches a trellis of lilting ooh la la la las. Those ooh la la la las seemed forbidden, delicious, to me as a youngster; how could a song about murdering a lover bathe itself in such pleasure?

Closing Side One, it lasts nine minutes; “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which ends Side Two, runs ten and a half. It opens with a hushed, hollow guitar meditation that echoes “Running Dry,” the dirge that precedes it. Then, like a bomb, Young’s electric guitar goes off – towering, cobwebbed, one of the great power chords in our language. “Hello, cowgirl in the sand / Is this place at your command?” he begins; these awkward, shimmering lines show up in Denis Johnson’s classic story “Emergency,” about a charismatic stoner with the ability to make everything come out right (“I save lives,” he explains). Like “Cinnamon Girl,” the song has three verses, each about forty seconds long. The rest is the click of a rhythm guitar and Young in the other speaker, sawing, stuttering, screaming, holding off the puzzles of romance with the sure light of the amp.

Back then, before the CD came to town, sequential listening meant you’d renewed your vows. I mean, you played a side, and when it ended, you got up; you crossed the room to the turntable; your roommate grumbled Dude, put on some Seger; in this caesura, you either put on some Seger or you flipped the record. You had that choice. The eight or ten or fourteen songs – gabba gabba hey – didn’t all play in a row. You didn’t have a remote, a two-year contract on your phone. Tom Petty, like Young a maker of musical aphorisms, cracked on the passing of this custom midway through his 1989 record Full Moon Fever, where he reminds CD listeners that “those listening on cassettes or records will have to stand up or sit down and turn over the record or tape” and thanks them for their patience.

These dual side-closers are the best enticements I know to keep going. And I asked my father, midway through this writing, if I was right. Was it, as I had remembered, his favorite? He looked dubious. “You know,” I said, and rattled off the songs. He nodded. “Well, that’s a pretty good record,” he said at last.

Bill Beverly lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife and daughter. His book On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America is available from University Press of Mississippi. He's @BillBeverly on Twitter. He teaches at Trinity College in Washington, DC.

Julie E. Bloemeke on Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits Volume 1

2011-07-19T07:00:00.001-04:00

Neil Diamond: Beyond Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

Yes, I know. Neil Diamond of Pulp Fiction, The Jazz Singer. Neil Diamond of “Red, Red Wine” before UB40 UB40-ed it. Neil Diamond of the groaner “Turn on Your Heartlight.” Neil Diamond of leather jacket and motorcycles and--dun dun dun-- “Sweet Caroline.” But in the turbulence of being 14, the way I saw Neil Diamond was a kind of salvation, a voice that made me question words and their layers of meaning, that taught me something about empowerment, surprise and re-thinking the expected.

Neal Diamond’s Greatest Hits Volume 1, on cassette (more on that in a minute) was one of the first music purchases I made in my early teen years. (And, Greatest Hits it had to be given that I was paying with an allowance, and therefore could not buy all of Neil’s repertoire.) By then, I had listened to him for as long as I could remember, playing his records on our living room turntable. But always I was competing with the open space to hear him, turning up the volume over the phone ringing, the cats chasing, my younger brother buzzing through.

When Christmas 1986 arrived, everything changed. I unwrapped my first Walkman, not realizing then how my experience of listening to music would forever alter. I would no longer compete for sound space; I would no longer pick up and drop the needle over this song and that. Instead, listening would become about the trajectory of the album, the journey of following an emotion from one song to the next. And, with headphones, with a cassette, I realized I could drown out the voices in the front seat, the television in the other room. I could take my music on a walk, into my bed. I could take Neil with me wherever I went: his lyrics, his voice, his guitar.

This way of experiencing music allowed a new intimacy, spurred in me a curiosity that made me want to know more, listen deeper, decipher. I now had the power to pause and rewind just enough to re-hear a word or phrase, finally able to attempt to make out some of Diamond’s lyrics. Was he singing Soolaimon? (Which, I later learned, can mean “hello,” “goodbye” “welcome” and “peace be with you.”) And who were those people that he named in “Done too Soon,” Henri is that—Rousseau?—and Sholom Aleichem?

I began to realize that all along, I had not just loved his voice, the strum of his guitar, the way he sing/shouts to the audience. Now I realized that I had fallen for the words he chose too. I turned his lyrics over, seeing layers of meanings, discovering them in multiple ways. They raised questions, spoke to a part of me that I was too young to yet define myself.

It was heady, empowering, and to me felt defiant, bold.

Every time I heard “Shiloh” I was more intrigued. After years of assuming the song was about a girlfriend—“young girl with fire, something said she understood. I wanted to fly. She made me feel like I could”—I began to listen closer. Who was this “only friend you can find, there in your mind?’ Was this an alternate version of himself? A future self? A pretend friend from childhood? A future lover? God? Was it all of them? Was this possible?

And, in the experience of listening to one song after the next, I began to realize that there was a play in the ordering of the songs too. “Shiloh” was between the preaching revival language of “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” and “Holly Holy,” a song with psalm-like cadence, parable references and biblical language: song of songs, the reference to seeds, a lame man that walks. The songs together were a trinity, another connection to the spiritual, something that spoke to me and made me want to listen to them in a row, again and again, and to question even further: What was the story of all of this? What was this saying about faith, messages, spiritual journey?

Other tracks grabbed me with this same sense of curiosity. I wanted to learn all of the biographical references in “Done Too Soon.” I wanted to know what it meant, what it felt like, from “Stones,” to “ache for love and get good stones.” (Of course, I later learned all too well.) Over the years, I realized I had learned the story behind most of the names from “Done to Soon”—from Bogart to Mozart to A.E. Poe (Tricky, Neil). But as I went back to look at the lyrics I realized that there were a few that I did not know. For example, in my teenage years I had always assumed that Gunga Din was a person, as most of the references in the song are. In writing this I discovered that it’s actually the title of a Kipling poem. (Apparently I need to revisit Kipling.) But there it was, waiting even now, a years-long secret from Diamond, a poem--literally in itself--set to be discovered in a list of names. And, as a poet myself, I cannot help but think it a kind of gift, a soolaimon, from Neil.

And while Neil’s music spoke to me in this way of poetry, he also got to me, still gets to me, in a very primal emotional way as well. There was something compelling, comforting, freeing and subversive about him that I could not get enough of. His voice, heavy with longing, suggestion, wistfulness, power, and sentimentia—Liam Rector’s term for the dementia of sentiment—took me back to places in my freer, simpler childhood self, took me to places where I was trying to discover who I was and who I would become. When I heard “Song Sung Blue” I was again six, spinning in an avocado shag-carpeted living room, when I heard “I am…I said” I was walking, outside, in the dark of winter, shouting the lyrics to the air after a teenage fight with my parents. No one may have heard but the trees, or, yes, Neil, the chair, but for then, it was enough.

Of course I knew, even at 14, that loving Neil Diamond was not a popular choice. It still isn’t. But carrying his cassettes in my backpack, in my purse, meant I had to admit him, share him, reveal him. While most of my friends were turning to U2, A-ha, Run DMC, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cutting Crew, Motley Crue, Led Zeppelin, the Bangles and Corey Hart, I was humming the lyrics of “Soolaimon” and wondering about this God who inspires a woman to “dance for the sun.”

Neil was my way of cleaving away from others and into who I was. He was unusual, and as a 14-year-old girl listening to songs that had been released before I was born, so was I. By admitting my affection for Neil, I was also beginning to grow into my own identity, to admit that I wholeheartedly embraced listening to him, despite the strange looks and comments. When I felt powerless, alone, confused, there was “Holly Holy” to reassure me. When I began to fall in love with poetry, ever deeper into words, there was “Play Me”: “Words that rang in me, rhyme that sprang from me…and what was right/became me.” And somehow, in his lyrics, his gravelly voice, I felt understood, transcended from an age of turbulence and drama. And in that, part of Neil, his words, became me.

I was a girl who loved Neil Diamond. I am a woman that still does. And I think I may be hoping that perhaps there is another reading of him out there, beyond the heartlight, the jazz singer, that red, read?, wine.

Soolaimon, Neil Diamond.

Soolaimon indeed.

Julie E. Bloemeke is a poet and mother of two young children. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pebble Lake Review, Ouroboros Review, and Mason’s Road as well as the anthologies: Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word, Obama-Mentum, The List Anthology and The Southern Poetry Anthology of Georgia Poets. She was a finalist in the 2001 Arts & Letters poetry competition and was awarded first place in the Spring 2010 Atlanta Writer’s Club poetry contest. She graduated with her MFA in poetry from Bennington and is currently working on her first manuscript. So far, there are no poems about Neil Diamond. So far.

Matthew Hittinger on P.J. Harvey's Is This Desire?

2011-07-17T07:00:00.002-04:00

AND THERE WAS TROUBLE TAKING PLACE

Ah, 1998. A big year for me. Half-way through college. Getting serious about writing poetry. I had just experienced a year of coming into an adult consciousness and skin to which I still feel connected. It was the year of first deaths, both my grandmothers dead on the same day, one year apart. It was the year of first love with another boy. It was the year that brought us the spiritual Madonna on her Ray of Light album. But I’m not going to write about my diva here, how the lyrics of “Mer-Girl” still haunt me (and where you’ll find Madonna at her most poetic, the standard to which I hold her, which leads to chronic frustration when she opts for the clichéd lyrics of so many of her tunes). No, I’m going to write about a different album that came out that year, one that imposed itself on my creative, poetic mind more than any other during those years: PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire?

I lived off campus by this point, in my own apartment, across from one of the lone independent music stores in town called Play It Again. All the CDs were shelved in these wooden hand-made units that were just tall enough to slip a jewel case in, and where you could spend hours browsing imports and rare EPs and maxi-singles. It’s where I went on Tuesdays to get my latest album releases.

Is This Desire? came out that Autumn, I remember that clearly, the crisp air, the leaves turning. If Madonna was my spring-summer record of 1998, PJ was my autumn-winter record, and not just because the track “My Beautiful Leah” has that prolonged listing of the Autumn months: “I swear you would remember / Black hair, brown eyes / Late September...October...November...December...” And every year I have to listen to it when the leaves start turning, when that first hint of chill enters the air, when our layers return and the darkness comes early. It’s a ritual, like reading H.D.’s Trilogy every year on Christmas Eve.

What draws me to this album: the poetic lyrics, the heavy bass, the raw vocals. The women featured in so many of the tracks have an empowered sorrow that’s intoxicating: from the opening lyrics “My first name Angelene / prettiest mess you've ever seen” (“Angelene”) to the dual Catherines: “Catherine de Barra / you've murdered my thinking” (“Catherine”) and Saint Catherine of the Wheel:

Catherine liked high places
High up on the hills
A place for making noises
Noises like the whales
Here she built a chapel with
Her image on the wall
A place where she could rest and
A place where she could wash
and listen to the wind blow

She dreamt of children's voices
And torture on the wheel... (“The Wind”)

To the missing beautiful Leah, “Did you see her walking? /Did she come around here, Sir?” and “Even as I held her / She went out looking for someone / looking for someone” (“My Beautiful Leah”) to these lyrics from “A Perfect Day Elise”:

He got lucky got lucky one time
Hitting with the gin in room 509
She turned her back on him, facing the frame
Said “Listen, Joe, don't you come here again.”

White sun scattered all over the sea
He could think of nothing but her name, 'Elise'
God is the sweat running down his back
The water soaked her blonde hair black

All these women seem to be illumined “under electric light” and it's that industrial glow that makes them beautiful. Like in “Joy” where we shift from the first person of “Angelene” to the third person of “Joy was her name / A life un-wed / Thirty years old / Never danced a step” and in “No Girl So Sweet” shouting “How much more can you take from me? / I'd like to take you inside my head / I'd like to take you inside of me.”

At times I felt the album was describing my inner state: “My hair longer than it's ever been” (“The Sky Lit Up”) as I had grown out my hair to my shoulders in an act of defiance over the short hairdos I found on gay men, and as I entered into my college obsession with Goddess culture and the ritual of Venus renewing herself yearly, that image of Botticelli's Goddess on the seashell propelling my need for longer tresses.

My favorite track to this day is “The Garden” with its cymbal-ticking beginning and heavy bass. In all these songs about women, the song stands out as it has two men at its center. I see it as a revision, no Adam and Eve present as you would expect with such a song title, but a revised story trafficking in Biblical myth while extending it someplace else. It starts with a “he” that I couldn't help but picture as me “walking in the garden” of the newly found sexuality open to me, “walking in the night” in the confusion of being alone with that, joined “by another with his lips” that first lover, who says:

'Won't you come and be my lover?'
'Let me give you a little kiss?'
and he came, knelt down before him
and fell upon his knees
said, 'I will give you gold and mountains
if you stay a while with me...”

Who are these men? Adam and Satan? Two angels? Lucifer tempting Christ? The kneeling down before him still gives me that sexual charge. And the song described how I felt losing that first love, “and he walked a little farther, and he found he was alone.” “There was trouble / taking place” pretty much summed up my psyche that year, coming to terms with death, with love, with love for another man and coming to terms with my sexuality, with love lost. I was “looking at my song-bird,” “looking at his wings” trying to find the words in my own poems to describe this new me, looking at these new wings and not knowing how to fly.

The lyrics are probably her most literary, the vocals her known raw bleats coupled with a new haunting whisper and despair-filled melodic tone. On many of the tracks you have a vocal singing and then a vocal chanting the same lyrics, sometimes in sync, oftentimes layering over each other, sometimes one preceding the other (as in “The Wind”). The sound has at times an industrial vibe, like machines caught in a synchronous loop, coupled with a heavy bleeding bass like in “Joy” or an electronic undercurrent like in “No Girl So Sweet”, and at times propelled by a simple instrument, like the piano in “The River” or the strumming guitar of “Angelene.”

The album art work and sleeve featured both her printed and handwritten lyrics (none of her other albums at the time did) and her hand-written notes about the instrumentation and chords for the songs. There's a tantalizing list of songs recorded, in “Like” columns to decide what goes on the album, treating us to the titles of many of the record's B-sides, like “The Bay” and “Rebecca” and “Nina in Sorrow.” I was so obsessed, I even re-wrote the lyrics to “Angelene” as an assignment for my creative writing class changing the title to “Magdalene” imagining that famous Mary of the Bible as I imagine PJ would (the song “The River” makes me think of Mary and Joseph, thanks to PJ posing next to a huge mural of them, Mary on donkey, in the album artwork), with lines like “It lays open like a road” changed to “Legs open like a road” and something about a crown of thorns piercing her thighs through her robes...

Is This Desire? It’s an album I turn to when I need a taste of the sublime, that terrible beauty found in the harsh reality of a woman wronged, of obsessive devotion , of a woman disappeared. It's an album that reminds me of those months where I was constructing my identity, rejecting stereotypes about being gay that didn't fit with my understanding of my self or who I wanted to be. It's an album that helped teach me how to inhabit another skin in a dramatic monologue, how to use an image. It's an album that helped teach me how to be a poet.

Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Platos de Sal, Narcissus Resists, and Pear Slip, winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award. You can follow his blog and read more of his work here.

Shavawn Berry on Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2011-07-15T07:00:00.000-04:00

Released October 5, 1973

I was thirteen-years-old when Yellow Brick Road was released.

I remember heading out to get it. Heart palpitations. Sweaty palms. I had it bad in those days. I couldn’t wait to hear it. My cousin and I talked about it for days, mapping out each movement after school on the day of its release, in order to get to the store before it “sold out,” which we were certain it would do. Exactly five weeks’ prior I’d seen Elton John in concert for the first time. I saved my babysitting money (50 cents an hour doesn’t add up to much) for weeks to afford it. Price: $7.99 + tax.

As I walked into the record store, all I could think about was grabbing the album, getting back to the city bus stop, and popping it onto my stereo the moment I got home. I saw it, displayed in several long rows on the wall. Elton. My breath caught in my throat. The cover showed a drawing of EJ stepping into a “portal” on a wall, wearing pink platforms, a lilac bomber jacket with his name on the back, and white pants. In the center of the cover, a pale purple bird crossed a lemon-washed sky. A tiny wind-up piano sat on the scuffed up street at the base of the sign. Across the top of the cover it simply said, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

Grabbing the first one I could reach, I headed to the front counter, handed the cashier $9.00 in crumpled one dollar bills and waited for my change. He bagged the album – the double album – in a brown paper bag, carefully folding the top shut. Hurry up. I ran all the way to the bus stop two blocks away on Magnolia, making it just before the next bus came. As soon as I dropped the 10 cent bus fare in the box and sat down in the back seat, I broke the seal on the cellophane wrapping, and scoured its cover and liner notes, then turned my attention to the words of the songs. One after another, I read the lyrics, running my finger under the titles: "Love Lies Bleeding," "Candle in the Wind," "Bennie and the Jets," "Dirty Little Girl," "Harmony…"

Arriving home half an hour later, I went straight to my room, shut my door, opened my stereo, took disc one out of its white protective cover, put it on the spindle and hit play. The album dropped to the turn table, and the first eerie chords of "Funeral for a Friend" started. The opening (which I’d heard just once on the radio a few days before) was a long piano solo that gradually got faster and faster and faster until it hit a crescendo of synthesizer chords which eventually lead into the distinctive opening of "Love Lies Bleeding" and the first sound of Elton’s vocals. I sat in my room, knees tucked under my chin, listening intently, fingers absently tracing the album’s back cover. First side one, then two, three, and finally four.

By the second song, tears filled my eyes. As I heard the luminous "Candle in the Wind" for the first time, I wondered whether anything better would ever be written about Marilyn Monroe. "Candle in the Wind" perfectly captured a school-boy crush on an iconic movie star, whose fame literally devoured her. “Goodbye Norma Jean, from the young man in the 22nd row, who saw you as something more than sexual, more than just our Marilyn Monroe…” I wiped my face on my sleeve. At the time of its release, Monroe had only been gone for ten years.

The signature chord progression that opened "Bennie" felt infectious, joyful. A smile spread across my face. I wanted “electric boots, a mohair suit,” just like her. And as Elton stammered “B-b-b-b-b-b-Bennie and Jets,” the music danced, embracing me. By the end of side two ("I’ve Seen That Movie Too") I was completely smitten. I skipped dinner, opting instead for a diet of side three, followed by the frothy dessert of side four. When the album finally wound down, ending with the plaintive vocal in "Harmony," I was convinced that Elton John was a rock god. I sat, writing his name in pen, on my thigh. I felt a rush of pure love, amazement, joy.

I’m sure my cousin and I exchanged gushing letters to each other that very night with our own heightened o-mi-god-i-love-it sort of reviews.

Ironically, when I revisit the songs on GYBR now, I realize there is a certain “kind” of woman being chronicled. In "Bennie and the Jets," she’s “weird and wonderful,” but mostly she’s “a dirty little girl,” a whore, a lesbian, a broken starlet, or a biker’s sister, with “a handful of grease in her hair.” Taupin’s lyrics also shadow imaginary gangsters ("The Ballad of Danny Bailey") and legendary cowboys ("Roy Rogers"). Later, they troll in the aisle of tawdry sex or the promise of it ("Jamaica Jerk Off"; "All the Young Girls Love Alice"; "Dirty Little Girl"; "Social Disease"). There are fightin’ words ("Saturday Night’s Alright for Fightin’") tucked in-between the solitary beauty of "This Song Has No Title," "Grey Seal," and "Harmony." Even so, I love these songs. I love the dark lives that live in them. These songs became the soundtrack to my life. What I adored about the songs on Yellow Brick Road is the stories they tell about the sometimes numinous, sometimes lurid carnival the world can be. My home life fell apart during the 70s. My parents’ implosion as a couple and their subsequent divorce was ugly, acrimonious. All I had during those years was the promise that once a year I’d see Elton on tour, and there’d be a new album every six months to drown out my often pervasive sadness. Somehow, Elton’s woven into the thread and warp of what makes me, me. His music is like the marrow in my bones. “Tell me, Grey Seal, how does it feel to be so wise? To see through eyes that only see what’s real?”

Almost forty years later, the songs (and the arrangements) stand up. They sound as good to me now as they did in eighth grade. Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics for all 17 songs on the album (with the exception of "Grey Seal") in two and a half weeks; Elton John wrote the music in three days, mostly at the Chateau in France where all the recording took place. Even to me, the absolute connoisseur of all things Elton, that is astonishing. The record –brilliantly crafted and produced by E’s longtime producer, Gus Dudgeon – seems strangely magical. It has an other-worldly quality that art that is “channeled” has. I often wonder where the inspiration came from.

As I did with all my Elton albums, I wore Yellow Brick Road out. The album I bought that fateful October day in 1973 did eventually end up on the Goodwill pile. However, I still have it on both tape and CD. It’s a record that I never get tired of. Even if I don’t listen to it for a year or two, when I return to it, I know every word, every turn, every chord. At the time of its release, a snarky reviewer in Rolling Stone gave the album an “unfavorable” review. Thirty years later, that same magazine ranked Yellow Brick Road number 91 on its list of the 500 greatest albums ever made. It rated even higher in 2009 on Britain’s Channel 4 list: #59 in the top 100 albums ever made. It is, in fact, Elton’s best selling studio album of all time, selling over 31 million copies.

I’ve been a quintessential Elton fan for four decades. I’ve seen him in concert on two different continents (North America, Europe), in three different countries (the U.S., Canada, England), and in seven different cities (Seattle, Vancouver, London, New York, East Rutherford (NJ), Las Vegas, and Phoenix). All told: 17 times. I met him backstage at Drury Lane Theatre in London’s West End, on my 19th birthday, where he gave me a kiss on the mouth and autographed a page of my diary. He dedicated a song to me at the end of his stint in London that week, singing “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word” to, “Shavawn. She’s from America and she’s been here for several nights,” while I wept in the front row.

In lots of ways, Yellow Brick Road, was the record that cemented my relationship with Elton John’s music. I got hooked in 1972 on Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player. I fell head over heels in ’71 when I heard "Tiny Dancer" for the first time on my brother’s copy of Madman Across the Water (another favorite), but Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was the album that catapulted me into what later became nearly twenty years working as a musician and songwriter first in Seattle and then in New York City. My love for what I considered “a good song lyric” shaped the songwriter/writer/ poet I became. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road changed my life. Truly, it changed my life.

Shavawn M. Berry received her Master of Professional Writing degree (MPW) in 1998 from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she specialized in Creative Nonfiction and Memoir. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Westview - A Journal of Western Oklahoma, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Concho River Review, North Atlantic Review, Synapse, Living Buddhism, The World Tribune, addictionsolutions.com, Blue Mountain Arts/SPS, and Poetry Seattle, to name just a few. She has been teaching writing at full time at Arizona State University since 2004. Ms. Berry was one of just four recipients of the Pedagogical Best Practices Writing Programs Teaching Award at ASU in both 2008 and 2009.

Tyler Gobble on State Champion's Stale Champagne

2011-07-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

I get sucked into the shuffle moment as well, craving that jam that makes my legs pump the fastest on my bike. But Charles is right, there’s something special too, that feeling that’ll never leave me, where I pop a record on and I just can’t turn it off. There are a few of these albums in my arsenal, most of which are on vinyl, which might be another essay in itself, but I think no matter the medium, one stands out above the rest: Stale Champagne by State Champion.

It's always shining on Kentucky when you're sad
But I ain't mad about the weather
I just ain't trying to feel much better about my past

These true rock n’ rollers came into my life when they played a show at my local record store a couple springs back. When I bought this album, it was nothing like I’d heard before. Five-minute songs wailing like what happens when kids get their Midwest and South intertwined, complete with quirky, wandering lyrics, and plenty of straight-up jamming. It’s got this indescribable catchiness that makes this essay hard to write while listening to the album.

I remember jumping from trees to shrubs
Pissing off all the flowers and bugs
We weren't winning but we sure could pretend to be

To me, this thing is like a fresh pie you just can’t eat one piece of. Though in no apparent way a “concept” album by general definitions, this album blends together as a whole in a way that rattles me every time. As a whole, it builds to top-notch rockin’ then sooths itself with a ballad. Even within individual songs, the band rollercoasters through loud and fast, slow and soft, or some mix of those. And the lyrics, oh the lyrics trail out of the lead singer’s mouth with a brilliant sincerity that hooks me again and again.

Thanks for the praying mama
I'm not sure how that stuff works but it's the thought that counts
Thanks for just saying mama that you like me around

Just check out a song like “Keeping Time,” the second song on the album, as the example of what I’m talking about. It speaks with a fearless, both musically and lyrically, that is both humbling and engaging. The thing that makes these songs pull me along is the pure catchiness of the tunes. Sincerely, I can’t think of another album that just seems to grab the human spirit and say FOLLOW ME. And follow I do.

And when I called I called to tell you
That your favorite of the athletes had died
He offed his family and left nothing
But an orchid on the nightstand alive

Basically, these songs radiate the kind of energy and care that work for me. I come from a Midwestern mom and a Southern dad and I have found myself pulled between these two temperaments my whole life. I guess also the lyrics, as a writer and as a human being in general, strike me as particularly moving and inspired. So when I start this album, I just can’t stop because woah-oh-woah it feels so right.

Tyler Gobble is lead editor of Stoked Journal, which is currently taking submissions for their second issue. Find more of his projects, writing, and ramblings at his blog.

George Scarlett on The Beatles

2011-07-09T07:00:00.001-04:00

The album that means the most to me, and the one I most enjoy hearing sequentially, is The Beatles. Double album, all-white cover, early pressings individually numbered. Its authors were big for awhile, but not built for the long haul. Drugs and dissonant temperaments. Happens.

The whys and wherefores of my choice follow. Eventually.

Every music lover has something to lament about the recent paradigm quakes: Record stores are endangered. For a long time they served as community centers for tastemakers and fanboys and girls.

Tastes are splintered. Rarely is there widespread excitement about an artist or a burgeoning popular music form. (I'm certain I need not mention that 'American Idol' does not count.)

Sensual pleasures are lost. Holding a new LP, slitting open and savoring the new album smell, gazing at art on the cover and session notes on the rear (or inside): gone. Piracy decimates the landscape. Few artists can make a living from their recordings. Who knows what potentially great albums will not be made due to the bleak economic realities?

The album form is nearly extinct, reduced to individual tracks and random play. To these and others on the list, I'll add my own:

I miss 1960s-style Top 40 radio.

I was born in the year Rock & Roll truly arrived, 1955. My early years (only child, rural upbringing, tiny grade school) served to keep me in the dark about most popular culture, although I loved the music my mom and Aunt Martha liked (classics, show tunes, folk, jazz). In the fall of 1968, though, I started high school in the nearby large town. Every day I rode the bus for an hour each way. That bus, to my eternal gratitude, was equipped with a radio and speakers throughout, blaring The Big 610 KFRC, the San Francisco Top 40 powerhouse.

A switch in me was flipped. (As I like to remember it, when I embarked on my first school day, the song playing on that radio was "Magic Bus." This may be apocryphal; while it makes for a great anecdote, I cannot verify it. But that song was on the charts at the time, and in heavy rotation. So why not?) I became an avid listener and 45s collector.

Recollections of formative times come prepackaged with their own sets of rose-colored specs. 1968-9 was my first golden age of music appreciation, and the one about which I have the fondest memories. So, admittedly, I have very little objectivity when discussing the era.

However, I do hold one opinion from which I will not budge: in radio history, for round-the-clock musical variety and eclecticism, late-60s Top 40 was second only to early-70s free-form FM. For instance, in that fall of '68 I might have heard Jimi Hendrix, Jeannie C. Riley, The Supremes, The Beatles, Tom Jones, and The Everly Brothers back-to-back.

That is how music was listened to in the 50s and 60s: grab a stack of 45s, load up the changer, and let's get this sock hop started. Back then, in the singles era, it was all about random play.

The album era changed all that, of course. Creative palettes became broader as artists' concepts moved beyond the three-minute form. I've long held that albums became important for a couple of other reasons, too: the lack of alternative playback methods, and pot.

In the 70s and well into the 80s, the only way to randomize one's listening was to make mix-tapes. Otherwise, it was a bit of a nosebleed to custom-craft one's own playlist on the spot. The standard was: drop the needle on side one, hit the beanbag, fire up the bong, and let Grand Funk Railroad have its way with us for twenty minutes. The bummer was getting up the gumption to flip to side two.

The point is, album squencing became crucial because the listener generally had no other choice in song running order. A new listening paradigm took root, and it flourished for a quarter century.

The CD allowed listeners to mess with a disc's track sequence. Multi-disc changers enabled cross-genre mixing. CD jukeboxes with their multi-hundred capacities practically demanded random play. Cultivation for change had already taken place well before the mp3 era began. The singles era had returned.

It is my belief that the individual song is the natural order. That was the standard when I was growing up, and it will be when I am shrinking. If I beat the actuarials and tenaciously clutch my small bag of marbles, I will likely live to a point where I have the perspective to see that the album era was, in fact, an anomaly.

Oh, yes, The Beatles. It stands as the last album I listened to all the way through. This would have been on a day in September of 2009, when the remastered editions of The Beatles' catalog were released. I situated a chair between a pair of good speakers and allotted myself a block of time to really *listen* to that album, with all its genius and flaws and redolence and crucial tracking order.

It was the first pop album I ever bought, you see. On November 25, 1968, a couple of schoolmates brought a freshly-purchased copy of The White Album into my Spanish class. The teacher, a Miss Suzanne Read, was of optimal Beatles-loving age, so for her the release of their first proper album since Sgt. Pepper constituted an event. So, after about twenty minutes of the usual "¿Dónde está la biblioteca, Pedro?" Miss Read shut it down, placed side one on the classroom turntable, and let 'er rip. We sat and listened the whole way through. At the end of our 50 minutes, she turned it over to side four. As we filed out of the classroom, I turned to see her dancing alone to "Revolution 1." I was heavily influenced. At the end of the school day, I walked across the street to K-Mart and bought a copy of my own.

At the time, the only record player in our house capable of playing an LP was the console in the living room. It was an ancient thing with a checkered service history. The amplifier was blown; no doubt one of its tubes needed replacement. So, when I got home, I put the first record on the changer, started it up, and then leaned in real low to get my ear as close to the stylus as I could. And I listened.

Fast-forward more than two generations. I now have in my digital library well over 55,000 tracks, and am adding to it at the rate of about 250 a month. About 98% of this bounty is comprised of full-length albums. This allows for seemingly infinite possibility, not least of which being that I can listen to any of those albums all the way through, track-by-track, in their original running order, if I choose.

If I choose. See, this is a key point here. Listeners nowadays have an almost intimidating menu of options before them. And one of those is to listen to albums as their authors intended them to be heard. For anyone who wants it so, the album era can still flourish.

I go a different way. Ever since those early days with Top 40, I have been seeking to recreate that genre-hopping, "I wonder what's next?" experience. I randomize my entire library daily, keeping everything active and maybe only a song away. This, in fact, is a major contributor to my optimistic nature: every day holds the prospect of a unique musical journey, with my imaginary disc jockey at the helm.

And yet, even still, I venerate The Beatles as a work of art. There are crucial associated memories. It is impossible for me not to be subjective about the album's contents.

But there is something else, another factor in my holding it aloft: the thing is scattershot. There are four lead singers. Genres include (and are not limited to) country, ska, metal, and avant-garde. The dynamics range from whisper to scream. The White Album is all over the map.

Random, in fact.

I am George Scarlett. In a prior life I worked for Tower Records for 24 years, in stores and at the corporate office. For the last several of those, I was the Chief Merchant, in charge of all product procurement and merchandising for the chain. I am now retired, although I do operate a small CD-to-mp3 music conversion service. I also blog as Veronica Fever for the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis.

I live in Davis, California with my wife Christine and our two Corgis, Morty and Luke.

Lee Houck on Ani Difranco's Dilate

2011-07-07T07:00:00.002-04:00

Every morning for the last nine days on my subway commute, I've been listening to Ani Difranco's 1996 record Dilate, which is her most devastating, most lonely (and still best-selling) album. I can do this because I’m a crazy, rabid, overdoing-it kind of fan. I have 24GB of Ani’s music on my laptop. (Most of it is bootleg recordings, from every year since 1990. Email me if you want something rare; I have it. Really.) I have seen her in concert 37 times.

First, a little background.

In 1994, I had a friend who decided she was a lesbian. Because of this temporary shift in her sexuality–-she’s dated men exclusively after that phase, and is now heterosexual married–-she started buying Out Magazine. In the back pages of that summer issue of Out, there was a small square ad for the then-new Ani record Out of Range. We’d never heard her music before, but she looked, from the picture at least--nose ring, shaved head, defiant--like she was one of us. Or at least who we imagined ourselves to be. We listened to that album a thousand times, driving oursevles around Chattanooga, our rollerblades in the trunk, drinking strawberry malts from the drive-thru near Suck Creek. The cassette tape (cassette tape!) would turn over, playing one side after another, and we’d listen again and again to the same songs we’d heard not an hour before. In the song “Overlap,” an acoustic ditty laid right in the middle of the record, Ani sings “I build each one of my days out of hope, and I give that hope your name.” We built our summer out of hope, too, we had built our friendship out of it. We soared through 1995 in love with each other and the world.

Then, without warning, came Dilate.

It was devastating. First was the cover art: sour green and sun-bleached letters, black platform shoes, long blue braids, and Ani curled in a ball, her face hidden, like a captive creature, as if she’s rocking herself back and forth for comfort. I put the disc--we’d upgraded now to a portable CD player--in and turned up the volume. It opens like this: a warbly electric riff, bent and shakey from...haze? from waking up too early? from something else? Then, Ani’s voice:

think i'm going for a walk now
i feel a little unsteady
don't want nobody to follow me
'cept maybe you
i could make you happy, y' know
if you weren't already
i could do a lot of things
and i do

What came after that, the chorus of “Untouchable Face,” was like someone driving a hammer into my chest:

so fuck you
and your untouchable face
and fuck you
for existing in the first place
who am i
that i should be vying for your touch
who am i
bet you can't even tell me that much

But it was also like this: You know in The Matrix when Neo learns to fly, and he explodes off the ground into the stratosphere? It felt like that, too. Someone had articulated the pain of love and loss in such a way that my insides, my soul, my teenage self had never felt reflected before. (See, I had fallen in love with a friend of mine who was straight--or, at least, identified that way in public, despite our sexually ambiguous relationship, and not really in the usual teenage boy way; by the way, he’s married now--and so I had felt all those things that Ani was talking about.) Ani was writing about how your sense of self gets warped by your feelings for another person. The way you pray for that person to swoop in and make you feel all these things, and then you resent them for making you feel anything at all. Fuck you and your untouchable face.

The album passes through all levels of grief, longing, intimacy, vengeance, scorn--it is the most tortured, beautiful, sad, striving music she had ever made, and maybe still has ever made. But you can’t get to the sunlight at the end unless you pass through the layers that came before it. And the record is so full of pull quotes that you could practically paste every word here and it wouldn’t add up to what you want it all to say.

A sampling:

when i say you sucked my brain out
the english translation
is i am in love with you
and it is no fun

oh now that, now that there's a problem
you call me up to confide
and you go on for over an hour
about each one that took you for a ride
and i guess that you dialed my number
because you thought for sure that i'd agree
i said baby, you know i still love you
but how dare you complain to me

like how could you do nothing
and say, i'm doing my best
how could you take almost everything
and then come back for the rest
how could you beg me to stay
reach out your hands and plead
and then pack up your eyes and run away
as soon as i agreed

i put a cup out on the window sill
to catch the water as it fell
now i got a glass half full of rain
to measure the time between
when you said you'd come

and when you actually come
and i wonder what of this
will have meaning for you
when you've left it all behind
i guess i'll even wonder
if you meant it

at the time

Then, finally, emerging at the end of the record with “Joyful Girl”--the scratchy sound of the guitar pick against the strings, that mysterious thing musicians call warmth--and those soaring voices, ghostlike, nebulous, but true.

everything i do is judged
and they mostly get it wrong
but oh well
'cuz the bathroom mirror has not budged

i do it for the joy it brings
because i'm a joyful girl
because the world owes me nothing
and we owe each other the world
i do it because it's the least i can do
i do it because i learned it from you
and i do it just because i want to
because i want to

The self is still present here, re-built, re-imagined, sustained, redeemed. Even after all that. And what more can we ask for? What else do we want from a great record, from music, from any work of art, but to be redeemed?

Lee Houck was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His debut novel, Yield, was the winner of Project QueerLit 2008, and was published by Kensington Books in September 2010. His writing appears in numerous anthologies published in the U.S. and Australia, and in two arty chapbooks: Collection (essays, 2006) and Warnings (poems, 2009). He is currently at work on a new novel, and blogs at www.grammarpiano.com.

Collin Kelley on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love

2011-07-05T07:00:00.002-04:00

I've gotten some great essays back from people about albums they love to listen to straight through, and I'll start posting them throughout the week.

If you want to participate, there's still time! Send your essay to me.

First up:

Hounds of Love – Kate Bush
By Collin Kelley

I succumbed to the digital age of music more than a decade ago. In the late 90s, I reveled in the illegal glory of Napster and Limewire, filling endless numbers of blank CDs with favorite songs and albums. I’ve since moved on to legal downloading thanks to iTunes, but I still have a soft spot for vinyl records and CDs. If it’s an artist I truly love and support, I will buy the physical record – sometimes in multiple formats. Kate Bush is one of those artists.

I discovered Kate in 1981 after I snuck into the living room one Friday night to watch the old Night Flight show, a precursor to MTV and one of the few places you could actually see music videos. Kate was already a cult favorite in the US, but was a star of Lady Gaga-type proportions in her native UK and across Europe. Thirty years later, that cult status remains. Kate’s literary and cinematic pop has never caught on in America, which is both a shame and a blessing.

When Kate somersaulted across my television screen, causing the vertical hold to roll along with her, in the video for “Wuthering Heights,” I was hooked. Her music has become as much an inspiration to me as any poet or writer. Kate’s 1985 album Hounds of Love is not only my favorite of her albums, but my favorite album by any artist. Ever.

The first single from Hounds of Love was the urgent and stirring “Running Up That Hill,” and I bought the vinyl single and nearly drove my parents up the wall playing it on the stereo. The photo of Kate holding an archer’s bow with the lyrics written across her arms and back is still one of the most arresting images in music. The lyrics still have the power to thrill and chill:

You don't want to hurt me,
But see how deep the bullet lies.
Unaware, I'm tearing you asunder.
There is thunder in our hearts.
Is there so much hate for the ones who love?
Tell me we both matter don't we?

When I finally got my hand on the album, I listened to it from start to finish. Over and over and over. Hounds of Love is not an album you can snatch a few songs from, but must be listened to as a whole for it to reveal its motivation and majesty.

On the vinyl version – and you really should listen to it on vinyl for the warm, rich sound – the album is divided into two halves: Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave. The Hounds side contains “Running Up That Hill” and a clutch of Kate’s well-known songs – “Cloudbusting,” “The Big Sky” and the title track.

But it’s The Ninth Wave conceptual song cycle, where Kate takes on the voice of a person hovering between life and death after an accident at sea, that cements her reputation not only as a musician, but a storyteller. Discordant voices rise and fall and helicopters buzz as the nightmare of being trapped under ice gives way to hallucinations and, eventually, leaving the body to hover over Earth with the satellites. The gem is “Watching You Without Me,” where the drowning woman’s spirit goes home to see her husband/lover one last time:

You watch the clock
move the slow hand
I should have been home
hours ago, but I’m not here…

The vocal track moves backwards and forwards, devolves into nonsense as her soul prepares to move onward. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful.

When I sit down to write, Hounds of Love invariably finds its way onto my stereo. For me, it’s a ritual: removing the record from the sleeve, putting it on the turntable and setting the needle onto the vinyl followed by the satisfying moment of crackle and hiss before the opening synth line of “Running Up That Hill” fades in. Hounds of Love is still the only album that transports me to a different place every time I listen to it. That’s the power of timeless lyrics and music.

Collin Kelley is the author of the novels Conquering Venus and the forthcoming Remain in Light. His poetry collections include Better to Travel, After the Poison, and Slow to Burn, which is being reissued in August by Seven Kitchens Press.

Maria J. Jensen Memorial Scholarship

2011-06-30T10:27:00.003-04:00

Our family is proud to announce the creation of the Maria J. Jensen Memorial Scholarship at Waukesha County Technical College. The scholarship honors Maria’s enthusiasm for learning, her dedication to success, and her wish to inspire other women to improve themselves through education, no matter what stage of life they are in.

Women over the age of 35 who have financial need and a GPA of 2.0 will be eligible to receive $250 per semester in direct financial support.

Maria enjoyed her time at WCTC so much. She decided to return to school in her 50s to study accounting because she always loved mathematics and handling our family’s finances and investing. During her time at WCTC, she formed strong relationships with her teachers and mentors and forged friendships with students in her classes, even those many years younger than her. She carried a 4.0 GPA in her classes and was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa, an achievement we know made her proud for the rest of her life. We have vivid memories of her nights of studying at the dining room table, poring over her notes and textbooks in preparation for her class meetings.

We are grateful to WCTC for the impact it had on Maria’s life and her self-esteem and hope that through this scholarship, we are able to inspire more women to succeed both in education and in the fulfillment of their goals. Thank you for helping us honor her memory and her passion.

To support the scholarship through an online donation, visit this page. Scroll down to “Named Scholarship” and click “Donate.” A new window or tab for PayPal will open. Enter the amount you’d like to give and click “Update Total.” You may be asked to log into PayPal at this point. Once you’ve made it to the “Review Your Donation” page, click on the link that says “Add special instructions to the seller.” Enter “Maria J. Jensen Memorial Fund” in the box that appears and click ahead to complete your transaction.

If you’d prefer to send a check, you can make it payable to “Maria J. Jensen Memorial Fund—WCTC Foundation” and send it to WCTC Foundation, Room C-213, 800 Main St, Pewaukee, WI 53072.

The Long Goodbye

2011-06-24T21:15:00.004-04:00

Four years ago, I sat in a small doctor's office in North Phoenix and listened as my mother's pulmonologist explained to my mother why she was coming down with a persistent cold every few weeks. "Unfortunately, it is cancer," she said. Although she was not a cancer specialist, she estimated my mother was at stage 3B or 4, but that an oncologist would be able to make that determination following additional tests.

She was 63 years old. Earlier that week, during a week of otherwise good health, she'd completed her normal 10-mile bike ride and attended fitness classes at her community's recreation center. This woman had advanced cancer? It seemed unreasonable.

Over the next several weeks, she wavered through treatment plans, including none, holistic, and traditional, finally deciding to go chemo and radiation first. The chemo treatments--demanding 8-hour affairs that required she lay in a recliner covered in blankets while various chemicals dripped into her body through an IV--initially took a huge toll on her. This was the only time I remember her balking at her predicament. "The cure is worse than the disease," she said, her body riddled with stabbing pains.

Fortunately, the treatments began to be less and less difficult, and eventually, she recovered and went back to exercising after just a few days. Throughout her years fighting back, she made fitness her top priority, eating well and doing plenty of aerobics with her core group of "fitness buddies." She golfed, she spent time with her friends, she laughed often. She loved being alive.

She made astounding progress. Initially, her tumors shrank a staggering amount. Doctors, who initially gave her 6 to 9 months, were cautiously optimistic as they moved her to a care plan that would help her maintain her level of health while preventing a backslide. The first pill regimen she was on was great--but gave her bloody noses, mouth sores, and difficulty swallowing. She took it in stride but eventually managed to get into a cancer drug trial.

The drug trial was really effective...but again, had strange side effects. She reluctantly stopped the trial and waited for a new one to open up for her. In the meantime, she was again suffering from a nagging recurring cold...that morphed into pneumonia...that caused a fluid build up in her lungs...that caused her lung to collapse. She went to the emergency room and spent several days in intensive care getting help. This was three and a half years into her fight. A doctor looked over her chart and said, "Maria, I think you only have 6 to 9 months to live." She'd heard it so much by then it didn't even register.

But in the hospital, the drugs they gave her to fight the pneumonia ended up giving her an infection called C-Def, which attacks the intestines and, left untreated, is fatal. A large number of patients who contract this do not survive. But at this point, it was clear my mom was not a typical patient. She took on the treatment program, which caused bouts of debilitating nausea while she suffered from constant digestive problems, and eventually, several weeks later, came out the other side and was cleared by her doctors.

But the pneumonia et al had taken its toll on her body and health. She was done almost 40 pounds from her normal weight and she'd gone several months without cancer treatment. We all knew in the meantime her tumors were growing but we were hopeful she'd get accepted into another drug trial this year. And then, she was. On Tuesday of this week, we took her--weak, but resolved to give it a try--for one more chemo treatment to see if she could tolerate another course of treatment.

It went excellent--she had almost no side effects from the chemo. We think, though, that sometime Wednesday she suffered a mild stroke. For the last 24 hours, she was a little confused about when and where she was, had difficulty speaking clearly, lost the ability to walk and feed herself, and then faded into exhaustion.

By this point, my mother had outlived 95% of the patients who receive the same diagnosis.

We had every hope that her symptoms, which we initially chalked up to sleep deprivation and the chemo, would abate and she would bounce back as she always did. Throughout everything, I expected her to recover. Not just to recover, but to thrive. She was that tough. She meant business! By Thursday afternoon, we began to fear the worst and gathered around her in the living room, holding her hand, talking with her, comforting her.

Even as she receded, the core parts of her were still there. If she burped, she politely excused herself. When I complimented her and said, "You're going great, Mom," she smiled and said, "Thank you." And, as she always had my entire life, she raised a hand to her forehead to comb her bangs away with her fingers.

Her mind bounced around for a few hours. Her eyes would glaze over but then become suddenly alert. "I love you guys," she said, her voice slurred by upbeat. "Is this my wedding day?" she asked later, confused. "Your glasses are really in right now," she told me kindly. After some quiet time passed, she told us, "I'm 12 years old," and then "people lie to me a lot--grown up people." (It was when she was 12 her family emigrated from Belgium, initially telling her they were merely taking a vacation.) She moved back further and further until we couldn't reach her anymore, and then we were fortunate enough to get her to Hospice of the Valley, where the staff worked with us to keep her comfortable and provided us with a lot of emotional support.

This morning, my dad called and woke me to say the nurses felt the end was near. I made it to her bedside, where my dad, brother, and I called our immediate family so they could speak to her before she passed. The ending came so quickly. It was too late and too soon. We wanted more time. We wanted more health. We wanted to know she was safe.

We sat in the room with her for a long time afterward. After a while a low flying plane, its engines sighing loudly, broke that silence.

You can read about my mom's experience in her own words by reading her blog.

Thank you to everyone who sent their wishes and thought of us today--we are grateful for your love and support.

Call for posts

2011-06-22T10:51:00.000-04:00

A few nights ago at dinner, a few of us sat around the table talking about music--what was playing over the restaurant-bar's hip stereo, the changes in the way music reaches us (blogs and downloads versus radio and retail), and our favorite albums. We each talked a bit about an album or two that has been significant in our lives, albums we tend to experience only through "sequential listening"--moving track by track, in order, from start to finish, loving every song. We also lamented the shift away from this kind of music consumption via single-track downloads and shuffling. We wondered, do people still love albums?

Can you send me some thoughts on an album you love, one you have to listen to from start to finish? It can be from any era, any style of music, and your writing on it can be essayish, memoirish, lyric--whatever you want. The only stipulation I'm going to lay down is that I'd like it to be prose. No length min/max.

I hope to get a good chunk of responses by June 30. Drop me an email (charles.jensen at gmail dotcom) with your "essay," a little bio, especially one that promotes a project you or your organization is working on (with links), and a photo if you want.

Please feel free to forward this on to anyone you think might want to participate.

McQueen for a Day

2011-06-20T10:44:00.004-04:00

When I was in New York last week, I was happy to be able to make some time to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Savage Beauty exhibit, which explored the work of Alexander McQueen. The retrospective has been so popular that I was encouraged to arrive at the museum before opening in order to get in line.

I got there about an hour early (I am not a subway master yet and wanted to be on the safe side) and enjoyed my morning on the steps (a la Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen). As promised, a line began to form. It grew and grew and grew until it stretched down the steps and along the sidewalk, prompting museum staff to establish a second line--which, instead of stemming the line, caused the waiting throng of people to seemingly double.

The exhibit itself was fascinating. While it draws from just a snippet of McQueen's work, it seeks to explore the overarching themes and concerns of his designs. It moves essentially chronologically to give visitors a sense of the change in his work over time. For this reason, beginning with selections from his thesis collection, which featured exquisitely tailored pieces on rolling dress forms, situates the viewer in what might become his most conventional take on fashion.

The museum's website for the show features some really wonderful photograph excerpts as well as the corresponding audio tour bits. You can also watch narrated video's of McQueen's shows to get an idea of how he turned the objective viewing of his work into a highly charged, dramatic experience for the audience.

The critics and even McQueen himself, in the quotations and commentary provided, return again and again to the importance of McQueen's training as a Savile Row tailor. McQueen found the most inspiring part of his design work took place on the model as he fit her into the clothes. Fit was everything, and it's clear throughout the collection that the impeccable marriage of clothing and model are at the heart of his accomplishment.

Although Project Runway has legitimized the purpose of the designer-as-tailor, it still feels like McQueen was of a different breed. In the show, he claims to work by hand, often himself, on the garments because he enjoys it, not because it's some kind of statement on fashion. I think this love is present in the work.

The focus on craft is such a good reminder to me as a poet. Craft isn't sexy because at its most accomplished, it becomes invisible. We strive to keep our seams from showing, to keep our reader from stepping out of the movement of the poem (at least on a first read) and down into the nuts and bolts of its language and structure. If language is our thread, the structure of our poems--as diverse among as the words we choose--are our signature stitches.

Split This Rock

2011-06-13T13:54:00.001-04:00

Split This Rock is currently inviting proposals for panel and round table discussions, workshops, and themed group readings for our third national poetry festival, scheduled for March 22-25, 2012, in Washington, DC. The festival will consider the relationship of poets and poetry to power and to the challenges to power. In addition the festival will celebrate the legacy of the late poet-activist June Jordan, as 2012 marks the tenth anniversary of her death.

What You Missed at the Lamdba Awards

2011-05-28T09:54:00.004-04:00

Both [Terrence] McNally and Albee spoke of what it means to be a gay author. In accepting his award, Albee said, “I’m not a gay writer. I’m a writer who happens to be gay … I’ve written a number of plays with gay characters in them, but I have never written a play that could be considered a ‘gay play’ because I consider that a lessening of the creative act, to limit oneself to one’s own sexual practices as subject matter for one’s work.”

In the less then 48 hours elapsed since these words were spoken, I've already noticed a growing flurry of response to Albee's commentary on his life, which by extension feels like a commentary on the Lambda Literary Foundation, and further by an extension a commentary on writing and identity--our associations, allegiances, and, ultimately, our communities.

I received in my inbox a letter from a colleague who bemoaned Albee's stance, feeling in many ways slighted by this attitude. On the one hand, Albee's comment seems unnecessarily sharp, more a criticism of others than a statement of self. The statement, while brief, is bloated with connotation and assumption; that is what I think provoke confused and angry responses to his words.

On the one hand, Albee is prioritizing his own identities, putting his creative identity ahead of his sexual identity. Albee seems to imply his goal is to transcend self in his writing--that being gay is no more important to him than being straight might be to another playwright. I don't think anyone assumes that heterosexuals write more "legitimately" or more "honestly" about other heterosexual people or experiences. Or do they?

At its core, Albee's position takes up an ongoing tension in the community of gay writers and writers who happen to be gay. Writers in the first camp don't feel like homosexuality "happened" to them; instead, they may feel as if their sexuality provides a lens through which they view the totality of their lived experience. Writers in the second camp may not deny the lens is there, but might say the lens doesn't limit or dictate what they look at through it. There may be a misperception that "gay writers" use only their own "gay experience" as subject matter, but this is untrue. Some writers who self-identify as gay writers may use their own experience, but I would hazard to say this ratio is probably equal to the number of heterosexual writers who use their own life as subject fodder. We don't discount these straight writers, but we also don't consider them brave or trailblazing, either. In either case, disparaging the choice probably doesn't help.

The deep tension here, though, seems to be the break between gays who are fundamentally assimilationist and gays who are separatist. A gay writer is more likely to consider him or herself as separate from the dominant literary community--specifically from both heterosexual writing and heterosexual culture. A writer like Albee seems more assimilationist in approach, gaining--and then perhaps being scorned for gaining--wider appreciation for work that is generally more inclusive of different kinds of people. Almost in every case, a writer who takes Albee's position has a greater chance of success in the literary world, partly because his or her stories will have a wider audience and partly because segments of that wider audience don't want to encounter gay people in the work they read.

Futhermore, Albee is also ascribing to the word "gay" a simple idea--that being gay is a behavior, not an identity. Part of the gay rights movement has been dedicated to reserving the notion that what separates gays and straights is what happens under the covers (although, trust me, it's different). But amplifying gay behavior into a gay identity is a fallacy. Our world is full of otherwise heterosexual people who, either temporarily or on an ongoing basis, love having same-sex sex partners. It doesn't affect their overall identity to do so. This is because being gay is really something else. If it weren't, I would spontaneously revert to being a heterosexual whenever I'm not having sex--which, honestly, is most of the time. If I were to consider the only gay thing in my life to be the sex I was having, obviously "gay identity" overall would take on a much smaller part of my overall identity. This may be the case for Albee. For those who perceive their gay identity as having wider repercussions, for touching on most or all aspects of their life, a perspective like Albee's feels reductionist and oversimplified.

And this is perhaps the concerning implication of Albee's statement: is he, by virtue of this attitude, contributing to the "recloseting" of homosexuality? By not taking a stake in being a gay writer, Albee, from some vantage points, is able to "pass." In the entire history of oppression, those who pass are met with resistance and disdain from both the people like them who cannot or choose not to pass and those for whom they seek to pass. Writers like Albee ultimately end up alone, outside of the dominant community and unwelcome in their marginalized community. Aspiring to pass can be read as a desire not to be seen as gay, which is fundamentally the same as desiring not to be gay in the first place. Aspiring to pass, then, can be perceived as a rejection of this marginalized identity, a yearning to be accepted by the majority as "one of them," undifferentiated--equal.

Are gay writers responding to this aspect of Albee's speech? Yes. Is this implication troubling? Hells yes. Because of our current complicated moment, when gays and lesbians had their marriage rights revoked in California, when our rights are debated in front of us in coffeeshops and on news programs, it is very troubling. In fact, more than that, it almost seems antiquated. But perhaps this is because of our current moment, when LGBT writers who are invested in the furthering of our rights are the ones holding the microphones. It is unlikely that Albee's words will turn back the clock (or, as a gay writer might say, "turn back time"). It's interesting that Albee was introduced by McNally, who wrote one of the most incendiary gay plays ever (Corpus Christi), which was so controversial McNally received death threats after it premiered. There, in a nutshell, were two very unique approaches to work in American theater.

Gay literature/literature by gay people still has a lot of issues to work out in this area. I know this debate--are you a gay writer or writer who is gay?--is one that has come and gone a few times on blogs and elsewhere, but sincerely, these ideas bear repeating. I will never forget a moment in a workshop with C. D. Wright during my MFA program. One of my classmates, who was raised in South Carolina, asked C. D. Wright about how people try to classify her as a "Southern writer" and whether or not that label was helpful. Wright very plainly said when people want to classify you, "don't sign up." Don't sign up. Don't sign up. I keep repeating it to myself. It seems like she's saying don't classify yourself, but I don't think that's it.

I think she's saying, "Don't let other people determine who you are."

And, fundamentally, that's the debate here. Albee doesn't want to sign up. There are those in our community who are desperate to place him in our community, and maybe that impulse is even part of what prompted him to receive this award right now. And it's Albee's option not to sign up.

I think Albee's done nothing wrong in making this statement. It is his own prerogative to define himself, just as those with an opposing viewpoint want the same luxury, to define their creative identity as being inextricable from their queer identity. For every Michael Cunningham, there's a Bret Easton Ellis. The argument on both sides is flawed: both camps want to limit the kind of definitions that can take place, but by doing so, they negate their own right to self-define. What we need to do is give each other permission to self-define, even when those definitions don't jibe with our perception of the greater issues at stake. Albee's stance won't single-handedly roll back LGBT visibility or progress.

Imagine if we never knew Albee was gay. We wouldn't have experienced any sense of loss. But what might have been in bad taste was saying this while accepting a prestigious award from an organization that fosters and promotes writing by LGBT artists.

But even then, no one wins a Lammy for being a good queer, right?

The Lost Poets

2011-04-17T09:42:00.002-04:00

For the past few months, I've been thinking again and again about something Mark Doty posted on Facebook related to the connection between poetry and the idea of (or the term itself) "the academy."

I was initially irritated by Mark's implication that poetry existed only within colleges and universities these days, as from my perspective, this is not the case. Then I went back and, in an effort to refresh my own ideas, reread his Facebook note and found myself not in disagreement with him as his actual writing was much more measured and fair than my initial reading of it. The text follows:

I'd like to encourage everyone concerned to just drop that tired descriptor, "academic." It no longer means anything. Here are some reasons: 1) Much of the reading, thinking about, and appreciation of poetry in our moment takes place within the context of a university or college setting. 2) Since poets are the ones teaching poetry, the curriculum reflects a great variety of preferences; there's no one sort of poetry favored. 3) If you've ever taken a workshop, taught one, been engaged by a book of poems by someone who makes their living as a teacher, been to a summer writers' conference, or been to a reading sponsored by a college or university, you're "in" the academy, too. 4) The idea of "the academy" is a myth; a great variety of educational institutions in the U.S. support the reading and writing of poetry, in one way or another, and these schools do not collude, conspire or even agree. 5) It's hard to imagine what would have become of American poetry without university support, given the character of the second half of the 20th century here. Like a lot of people, I found the art because of a Poetry Center sponsored by a school (in my case, the University of Arizona). It was a place that furthered the education of my spirit, and -- I don't exaggerate -- probably saved my life.

But regardless of my personal experience, it seems pretty clear to me that "academic" now means zero, nada, zilch! Let's bury the term.

I've been trying to negotiate these ideas both through my own experience and through my perception of the poetry community as a whole (if it can be so examined). My conclusion is difficult to come by; I feel a tremendous sense of conflict about the notions as stated, what they represent on a larger cultural scale, and how I and others can fit into the current perceived situation.

I recognize many of my peers and colleagues earn their living and health insurance through teaching in some way. It's true that even I, in the last few years, have worked in this way, either directly in a workshop room or indirectly by coordinating workshops for others. But I don't know if my personal experience in this area--literary nonprofit organizations--fits with Mark's assertion. While yes, we were teaching people how to write (at best) or simply engaging their interest in writing (at least), we were perceived by our audience as non-academic, as not the academy. I would say this is true of our national organizations like The Loft, Grub Street, Centrum, The Attic, and Lighthouse Writers, all of whom exist very purposefully outside of the more concrete identity of the "academy" and tend to draw audience to them for precisely this reason.

Does the teaching of how to write poetry alone make something an "academy"? If so, we should let the rest of the traditional academy know as in my own experience, the creative writers were reviled, devalued, or simply ignored by the more "serious" academics who toiled there. I pose this as a serious question.

I was introduced to how to write poetry in 8th grade, by a poet who provided a weeklong residency to my school. I also had a teacher in high school who very intentionally fed me the criticism, readings, and support necessary to continue writing. Are these, too, academies, even if their content fell far outside the normal realm of lesson plans and curriculum standards? Almost all of my poetry instruction in high school occurred in after-school meetings or independent studies. And true, in college, I participated more traditionally in the workshop model of instruction, and true, I pursued an MFA in the academy. All of these were necessary steps for me. But not for all.

Over the last few years, I have encountered and had the pleasure to work with some amazingly talented poets who live entirely outside the academy. I've come to understand this is more common than many people think, particularly those who spend the majority of their lives and careers within the academy.

These "outsider" poets generally have no idea that poetry is so entrenched in higher education. They perceive poetry as open to everyone, not as a cloistered and privileged pursuit. They have less awareness of the inner machinations of what some folks call "pobiz" and are generally the happier for it. They may or may not have heard of AWP if they've attended it. They read many poets, focusing, perhaps, on what their friends in their poetry circles are reading, what has been nominated for national awards, or what their booksellers or librarians recommend.

I think this community of poets is growing not more larger, but more visible. We can account for the growth in MFA programs as one factor contributing to the ever-larger crowds at AWP, but I think, too, that the Internet has afforded outsider poets new opportunity to become tourists in the other world of poetry. And I believe they are enriched in their visits--they encounter new journals they may otherwise have little or no access to in the real world, they meet new colleagues, they hear their favorite poets give readings.

I respect Mark's perspective and don't wish to imply his statements are wrong. I will say my experience suggests the divide between "the public" and "the academy" is generally only perceived by those within the academy. Those who are outside are fortunate for they generally have no idea they are outside of something.

In my thinking, poetry is something many Americans do respect, appreciate, and value. It's just not the way most contemporary poets would prefer they value it. We (and I include myself here) would rather our fellow citizens read our books, attend our events, engage in dialogue. We want citizens to come to us--to find our location, which, as Mark wrote, is very often within the walled garden of the academy.

But poetry in America, I think, is less about location and more about occasion. You can lead an American to poetry, but you can't make her or him read. Americans want to read poetry not where they want, but when they want.

Poetry is our natural impulse for processing sadness, grief, and loss; for celebrating momentous happiness like births and marriages; for ushering in a new era when a President takes office; for communicating the tremendous value a single person has or had in our lives.

The most widely read form of poetry in America? The greeting card.

Poets all over America who read this just cringed. I'm not overly thrilled about it myself, but I also think that's my own arrogance creeping in. Who are we to determine what poetry is "valuable"? That's a dangerous path to tread as it invites us to make all sorts of exclusions--some random, others purposeful. It is precisely that impulse to exclude that has helped us construct a falsely white male canon of literature.

A tremendous number of people also write poetry. If you want to determine how many, simply let the person sitting next to you on an airplane know that you write poetry. If you make them feel comfortable enough, you can bet they'll regale you with some of their own verse. Of course, these poets are "untrained," so they're probably not worth listening to--which might be an attitude you'd find inside the academy, where training is the necessary credential for access. Outside the academy, nobody cares. Those people aren't writing for audiences and adulation; they're writing for themselves, maybe their families, maybe some friends. And that is awesome.

The people will select their own value. We live in the era of self-aggregation, where everyone gets to curate their own content to their own liking. I'm not saying poetry should take over the greeting card industry, although I would enjoy sending cards so much more if we did; but I am saying that we need to remember that poetry matters to a great many people, in ways that extend far beyond our own books, our own classes, and our own presses. We don't get to choose the way it matters to them, or even when. They will find us when they need us. In the meantime, we keep writing, we keep recording, we keep remembering.

Regarding Recognition

2011-03-19T12:14:00.003-04:00

This year's Lambda Literary Award finalists in gay poetry are

darkacre, by Greg Hewett (Coffee House Press)
Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, by James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Pleasure, by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press)
The Salt Ecstasies: Poems, by James L. White (Graywolf Press)
then, we were still living, by Michael Klein (GenPop Books)

There were 33 submissions for this award. Of the 33, 7 were either collected, selected, or otherwise edited volumes of work by one or more poets. And to my knowledge, only 1 of the submissions was a republication of an existing volume of work.

The critique I offer here is not of the Lambda Literary Foundation, the judges who selected these volumes, or of the writers I am going to discuss. Instead, I want to critique a practice in the literary community of awarding significant prizes, money, and recognition to volumes of work that I feel are somewhat counterproductive to recognize.

Of the 52 years the National Book Award has been given, it has recognized a Collected, Selected, Selected and New, or Complete poems of a single author 23 times, or slightly less than half of the time.

Of the 91 Pulitzer Prizes awarded for poetry, a volume of this type has received the award only 22 times (or 24% of awards).

Of the 35 National Book Critics Circle Awards, a volume of this type has received the award only twice, or 5% of the time.

Although it has often seemed to me on an anecdotal level that awards are more often granted to republications (in whatever form) of previously published work, this is really only the case when it comes to the National Book Award, which is almost dominated by this type of publication.

On one level, it seems unfair and a bit unethical to pit "the best" or "all" of an author's body of work, when published as a single volume, against a new volume of perhaps more varied work by another writer. But then this gets down to what I feel are my core values relating to awards: that they should support the best contemporary work rather than the best career, and these are not often the same thing.

The poets who tend to win with their omnibus or selected collections tend to be canonized writers; that is to say, they are white men and women (but, historically men) who write in a specific mode, often the dominant mode of their era. It's clearly not a stretch to see that work that interrogates the dominant mode or in other ways works against it is rarely recognized, even when it may be of higher quality.

Awards of this nature, by virtue of their naming and their scope, purport to recognize "the best" book published in a given year. By extension, "the best" book becomes, for many, an essential read. It becomes, over time, a cultural touchstone for our historical moment, our experience, our sensibilities, particularly when this award purports to speak for the body of artists and readers as a whole.

From the three examinations above, it's clear that the various organizations seem to have different philosophies about what work to recognize. Are we to assume by these numbers that the National Book Award is, in intent and act, recognizing significant careers, while the National Book Critics Circle Award is more effective at recognizing individual works of merit? It would seem to be the case, and perhaps the balance these organizations bring to the "big 3" is meaningful for that reason.

I'm disappointed that James White's The Salt Ecstasies is a finalist for the Lambda award this year. But not because the work does not have merit; in fact, this book was especially important to me when I first encountered it and I am absolutely thrilled it has reappeared as part of Mark Doty's Re/View Series through Graywolf Press. However, the book was originally published in 1982 and, while it includes some supplemental writings (diary entries and an introduction from Doty), it is relatively unchanged from its original publication.

This book's status as a finalist, more importantly, has supplanted another poet's opportunity for recognition. Of the 33 submissions for the award, there were numerous other worthy volumes deserving of a place in the finalist circle. Poets whose careers would be enriched by this recognition. Poets who, over time, are likely to become more widely known and appreciated poets of our time.

It may be of interest to note that, to my eye, in no other Lambda Literary Award category this year has another republished or collected/selected/complete volume of an author's work has been recognized as a finalist. Only in poetry.

I'm interested in knowing other perspectives on this--what are some arguments in favor of recognizing republished work for these awards? Please share.

Arden's career path

2011-03-05T09:30:00.006-05:00

Last night, Beau and I decided Arden and Kitty needed to start contributing to our family on an economic level. Ultimately, we decided they might have a lively career in the entertainment industry. We've made a plan to pitch the following shows to all the major broadcast networks as well as Bravo:

Milk-Bones
Arden plays a doggedly determined FBI special agent teamed with unlikely partner named Kitty, whose cerebral approach to the world and overly literal thinking often causes friction and comedy between the two. In the pilot episode, Arden takes Kitty out into the field to investigate the discovery of a cache of rawhide bones at a local kennel. Kitty hides under a chair and swipes at Arden as she attempts to question suspects, then seduces the kennel owner by rubbing up against his leg and meowing.

Keeping up with the Barkdashians
Arden and Kitty star in this reality series that follows their efforts to build and open a high-end boutique called Dish, which sells custom-made food and water bowls to celebrity pets. In the first episode, Arden and Kitty cannot agree which of them is prettier or smarter. In the second episode, their store opens and they continue to bicker about which of them is prettier or smarter. Paris Hilton's chihuahua makes a cameo.

Flea
Arden and Kitty star in this musical take on shelter life. In the first episode, they find themselves taken in by a pet shelter where, after hours, the cast of ragtag, misfit dogs and cats sing and dance about their inner desires for love, acceptance, and flea and tick control. They are thwarted by Animal Services, who continually blocks their attempts to escape. Kitty will move you with her powerful rendition of Mariah Carey's "Without You," while Arden's note-for-note remake of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" will make you sign up to adopt her.

Big Litter
Arden plays Barb, a sister wife living an interbreed polygamist lifestyle in suburban Salt Lake City with her husband, played by an unknown St Bernard. Arden struggles to balance the demands of her husband, sister wives, and children, all while trying to avoid the ire and wrath of a fundamentalist polygamist compound leader, played by Kitty. In the season finale, Kitty sends an army of calicos to poop, puke, and urinate all over Arden's entry into the annual flowerbed competition.

Grey's Veterinary
Kitty plays first-year intern Meowedith Grey, a whiny, sullen, and emotionally distant surgical student at Seattle Grace Hospital. She is joined by a litter of other newbies, including the beautiful "Sniffy" Stevens, played by Arden. Throughout the first season, they respond to medical emergencies ranging from the comical (one dog gets his nose stuck in another dog's butt at a dog park) to the urgent (Kitty has a near-drowning experience after losing her balance on the rim of the bathtub). Benji, in a triumphant return to the screen, stars as the Chief of surgery.

An event.

2011-02-27T11:16:00.003-05:00

The day I received word I'd been awarded a sum of money for poems about loving men--in fact, a particular man--a friend of mine and I were publicly humiliated by two teenage boys for being gay.

I've been writing about this incident since it happened, recording my intellectual and emotional responses, pulling the event apart; letting it hurt me, pushing it away; being a subject to it and a master of it.

Even now, writing this blog post, my first instinct is to minimize--minimize the event itself; minimize my anger, frustration, embarrassment, and shame; minimize the significance of when and where it happened; minimize its overall importance to this community and to my friends and to me.

In fact, more than minimize, my first response is to apologize for responding. To apologize for having been hurt and embarrassed and shamed by it, which, by extension, may be an apology for being gay in the first place.

That I am starting out this writing with these hazards and explanations is, too, a kind of apology.

Dear America: you hurt me, but it's not your fault.

Dear America: you have fucked up your kids and now they are fucking me up.

Dear America: you remind me I am less.

* * * *

I can hardly bring myself to recount what happened.

To do so is not an act of empowerment. It feels more like a confession--which, again, implies that I am the guilty one, that I am the one who transgressed, that I am the one in the wrong, who broke the law, who should be punished. I do not want your sympathy, reader. I might not even want your compassion.

You should know they were recording our reaction to them on a camera phone.

This might be the ultimate crime. Not that this happened, but their harassment of us was a performance--we were made to perform for their delight, their mockery--something they could share with friends and the world via YouTube.

While we sat there eating our Chipotle.

* * * *

We had committed the crime of losing our self-consciousness.

We had been lulled into the suggestion of safety, that we were in a safe place, that our identities were no one's concern. That we were undetected. Flying under the dominant radar.

We were wrong.

* * *

More minimization: their actions were so stupid, childish. We shouldn't have cared. If we were not gay--and maybe this is my fear in sharing the story--we would have laughed. But we are gay, and we did not laugh.

My first instinct--a new one--was to rise out of my chair and beat the ever loving shit out of them.

I own that response. Look, this is my whole life we're talking about, of being literally and figuratively pushed around for seeming gay--not even being gay, just seeming gay. For something that is, essentially, only the business of someone I am actively loving. Which excludes about 307,999,999,999 people in the world.

Their joke was what you'd expect from high schoolers--something about when spring training starts, and did we know that pitchers and catchers need to show up three weeks early?

* * * *

Our first instinct, when they approached us, asking a question, was to help them.

* * * *

Our shamed reactions, captured on camera.

* * * *

That moment--the one where your personal difference is handed to you like an object, like an albatross you have to wear around your neck.

I have not healed from shame. It hurts less as I get older, doesn't debilitate me quite as much, but it continues to exist.

It waits to be called upon, then too eagerly reappears.

* * * *

This is my home people, my city. This is where I live my life.

It is not more theirs than mine. This country is not more theirs than mine.

* * * *

I wanted to kick the shit out of them. They left. My friend and I sat, speechless.

What is the right recourse in this situation? Someone please tell me because I would like to know.

I sat there, my appetite dead. Half-eaten lunch, nausea. The two boys walked by the plate glass window where we sat. I started him down. I did, I gave him the look, the one that says, "Fight me."

He stared back. Then was joined by 8 friends.

I looked away.

* * * *

Before they left, they all watched the video. I watched them watch it. I watched the 8 of them stand there, laughing.

One of them looked back at me, pointed at me, made a gesture like a batter hitting a baseball, almost fell over laughing.

Please explain what is the proper way to respond to this.

Scarred for Life

2011-02-17T09:08:00.005-05:00

Tuesday afternoon, feeling a little run down from a rushed morning and facing down a stack of student assignments to grade, I decided to make another cup of coffee in my French press. I've done this every morning for about five years: measuring 4 scoops of Starbucks Breakfast Blend, ground coarsely for just this purpose; filling the Pyrex measuring cup with just a skosh more than 2 Cups of filtered water; heating the water for 8 minutes until it boils; and then pouring it into the French press to steep for 4 minutes before I press the plunger, forcing the grounds to the bottom of the press and allowing me to pour off the fresh, toasty coffee.

I had just poured the boiling water into the open press. The smell rose up, rich and chocolaty and smoky, and I remember picking up the press itself--to move it? I can't remember why. It was in my hand for about 1 second when something happened--this I can't remember either, I flinched or stumbled or something. In any case, a soupy mix of wet coffee grounds and boiling water splashed onto my bare forearm.

Then I screamed.

I immediately put my arm under a roaring tap, and, for once, I was grateful for its numbingly-cold output. My arm lit up with pain from wrist to elbow, but the water's impact seemed only to numb my hand and fingers, which were beginning to ache with pain from the cold water in only half a minute. My arm, on the other hand, did not change temperature at all, still radiating the heat of the boiling water.

According to Web MD, scalds from hot liquids are the most common form of burn injury, and more than half of these injuries occur in adults between the ages of 18-64. Senior citizens are the most prone to scalds of any age group, and children under five are also at high risk.

A first-degree burn is so named because it only affects the first layer of the skin, or the epidermis. A second-degree burn, often recognizable by blistering, penetrates deeper into the skin to the dermis.

A few weeks prior to Tuesday, I'd suffered an earlier burn. Oddly, it was in almost the exact same area--my right forearm--but much smaller, more focused. I'd spent that afternoon making Martha Stewart's chicken soup recipe, which called for straining out the solids (chicken bones, sliced aromatics, and herbs) to reserve the broth liquid. As I carefully turned my stockpot over a strainer in the sink, the edge of the pot made contact with my arm just above where the oven mitt ended. The touch was brief, like a familiar kind of kiss, and left a small lip-shaped mark that, within a day, had raised a few small blisters.

That burn, healed except for an enduring red mark, vanished beneath the new burn, the Godzilla burn.

With my right hand numb except for its painful numb-ache and my arm no better, I took drastic action to cool the skin: I iced my arm for about five minutes. When I realized it wasn't helping, I went to WebMD for help. The first thing I read: do not ice burn injuries.

The site recommended wetting a cloth with cold water and placing it over the burn, which is what I did next. While the dampness felt like it was helping, the pain was simply increasing too quickly for this to have any real impact. A few minutes later, I peeked under the cloth and saw a reddened area about five or six inches long with small welts raising randomly across it, like a three-dimensional relief map of a mountain range, if the mountains could visibly grow taller.

The pain--like the soreness that comes after falling asleep in the sun, a deep, searing, radiating warmth with knifish jabs up and down my arm--soon became very intense and I felt myself swooning a bit. WebMD explains that burn pain can be some of the most intense and unpredictable kinds of pain because its patterns of expression change frequently and rapidly.

I told Beau, who was patiently waiting by, that I thought I needed someone to look at it.

This would be not a huge deal for most people, but most people have health insurance and I don't.

I don't have health insurance because I left my full-time job and took up several more flexible part-time jobs, none of which extend the benefit of insurance to their contractors. When I applied for coverage from Aetna soon after my old insurance lapsed, their response was that they could not cover me.

Me, who does not smoke, who drinks on rare occasion, who exercises for 1 hour five days each week, who cooks low-fat food high in fresh vegetables.

The rationale for no coverage? It went something like this: "Because you have recently been under the care of a doctor, Aetna is unable to extend coverage to you." I had seen a therapist for about a year to help me manage job-related stress and anxiety (without medication, he'd hoped), and, more recently, I had seen a chiropractor to help me recover from a weightlifting injury to my back. Both terms of care had ended a few weeks prior to my application for insurance, but apparently, those two experiences made me high-risk, too high-risk to cover.

Beau took me and my burn to the clinic at Target, which was pretty much the next best thing. As a show of defiance, I brought along the coffee, the perpetrator of my injury, and drank it in the waiting room. At least I got somebody in a lab coat to examine it, take my blood pressure (179 over 60) and temperature, smear some cream on it, and wrap it up for me. And they were nice about it, too.

Back at home, we ate a quick meal and I crawled into bed to watch some old episodes of Bones and fall asleep. The first episode: Brennan and Bones are called to a dessicated body in the woods with an internal temperature of 117 degrees--a body that, apparently, had been cooked.

The next morning I woke up, greeted by a blister two inches in diameter on my arm, rounded and raised like the "Easy" button from Staples. Surrounding it: an erratically shaped area of mauve skin, reminiscent of a birth mark. I applied the ointment to the burn and, awkwardly wrapped the area with some gauze using only my left hand and several stubborn pairs of right-handed scissors. I would be teaching all day--first consulting with an individual student I've worked with for several months, then changing lives through exciting composition instruction, and finally extolling the virtues of effective business writing throughout the evening hours.

Four hours into the day, as I set my messenger back on a chair in my composition classroom, I felt a sudden cool dampness on my arm. My blister had opened. Gross. I spent the entire class period seated at a table while my students peer reviewed each other's work, trying to move as little as possible while I marked insightful comments on their work.

I showed Beau the sad, half-deflated blister when I got home. "That's going to scar," he said, maybe not meaning to say it out loud. But I knew he was right: I was going to spend a good 15-20 years with a slowly fading scar of some kind camping out on my right forearm, a place visible beyond the edges of short-sleeved shirts, of rolled-up sleeve collars.

I have one other scar, which, this summer, will celebrate its 16th anniversary of being part of my body. When I was 18, I was at a party at a friend's house just around the time we graduated, maybe a week or so after. It was late, pitch black at her house on the outskirts of town, and pouring rain. I ran out to my car to grab something, throwing an overcoat on over my t-shirt and shorts. On the quick jog back, I found myself suddenly face-first in a huge puddle of water on the patio, a thin pain racing up and down my shin. I walked inside to gasps and a sudden flock of people putting their arms over my shoulders, leading me to the bathroom. When they started to clean the wound, I saw it: a six-inch gash across my shinbone, flaked with white spots where the bone was showing through.

Embarrassed, and maybe more foolish than I'd like to admit, I didn't opt to take a 50-minute car ride to the nearest hospital. Instead, I went home, bandaged it up, and woke up the next day with a long, thick scab over the wound, a scab that took about six weeks to fall off. It left my friend behind--the scar, violet and mauve and pink, covering almost half of my shin.

Over the years, the scar has steadily shrunk in size. Today, barely visible under the hair on my leg, it's lucky if it's even three inches long.

The burn above my ankle, caused by a motorcycle tailpipe, has also faded now, almost 21 years after its birth. The tip of the graphite pencil ground into my left shin also fogged over with new skin, or perhaps finally broken down by my body, after the guy in front of my Civics class stabbed me for jiggling his chair during the lecture. The place where, in fourth grade, a classmate pressed her long thumbnail into my hand has also vanished, so long ago I can't even remember what it looked like now--just a thin line, really, until it thinned itself away into nothing. The small dots above my eyebrow and bellybutton also vanished or vanishing now, as are the memories of the things I used to wear there.

Who knows how my arm will fare? By the next morning, the blister had redeveloped, returning to its Wednesday morning glory without any indication it had momentarily faltered at all.

These scars, all stories.

How to Survive in DC: An AWP Guide

2011-01-30T20:46:00.003-05:00

I've compiled the following tips for my writer-tourist friends arriving in DC this week. I hope they help!

1. Escalators
STAND on the right.
WALK on the left.
LAY DOWN UNDER THE FEET OF DCers if you violate this rule.

2. Visiting a Starbucks
Our Starbucks are not like normal Starbucks. Please keep in mind the following guidelines.

a. There may or may not be a line. If you can discern a line, get in it. You must "box out" like in basketball to prevent skipping from people who are busier and--frankly--more important than you.

b. You may be familiar with Starbucks's friendly baristas who are happy to help you, customize your beverage, etc. We don't have any of those. We have embittered, surly folk whose job it is to actively prevent you from getting anything you may have ever wanted in your entire life.

c. Since the baristas will not call out your drink (or fail to do so correctly), someone may "mistakenly" take it. Please understand, in DC, there are no mistakes.

d. If someone takes your drink, pay it forward. Steal someone else's. DC: trickle-down economics works!

3. Weather
Our weather is unpredictable, but one thing you can be sure of is that it will be unbearable. Be sure to pack the following:

Sweaters
Umbrellas (2--1 will fail due to high winds and/or be stolen)
A swimming suit or board shorts
A parka
A light cardigan/tank top set
A warm hat
Sunscreen
Crocs (just kidding--are you even reading this?)

4. Socializing with the locals
You can identify most DC residents easily, as they begin conversations this way:

"Hello! I am [DC Resident's name]."
"Hi, nice to meet you."
"Yes, it is. What do you do?"

Recommendation: do not reveal you work in the arts, are an artist, enjoy art, or advocate for arts funding. Instead, say, "I am a lobbyist." This will make most people vanish into thin air.

5. Riding on Metro

Here's a tip from a nearby DC insider: "Avoid the Red Line like an STI." The Red Line routinely experiences delays, single-tracking, and other debacles, rendering it nearly useless. Fortunately, this year's AWP is located: on the Red Line.

Purchase a dollar-value farecard rather than a multi-day farecard (which come with all sorts of pointless time restrictions). You can roll the dollar value over onto new cards, should you need to reload, and you can also precisely calculate your roundtrip fares using the fareboard at the card machine.

Make sure you insert your farecard into the turnstile so that the arrow points toward the machine. It will pop out the top. Pull it out and the gate will open, allowing you to pass through.

6. Having a drink or two

Recommended frequently: multiple times throughout the day.

Happy Hour is the dominant drinking mode for DCers, and you'll find generous and festive happy hours throughout the city.

7. The Smithsonian

Worth seeing: First Ladies' dresses, Portrait Gallery, Hirschorn. Skip: the rest.

DO NOT GO INTO THE NATIONAL AQUARIUM unless you are interested in paying $20 for the equivalent of looking at fish tanks in your neighbor's living room.

8. Eating

As much as people in DC love to drink, they also love to eat. There are a ton of great restaurants around, no matter what kind of food you're looking for. If I were you, here's what I would cry about having missed:

Ben's Chili Bowl (U Street)
Matchbox (Gallery Place/Chinatown)

That is all.

Enjoy your visit.
Jaleo (Penn Quarter)