Lady Lazarus

On the back of my Patti Smith early poetry coll. there is a blurb by Michael Stipe that says, "Anybody that breathes should eat this book." My feelings re: M. Stipe aside, I am going to p-phrase him now and holler 'cross the Interweb: anybody that breathes should eat this blog post. It is about memory and grief and the rabid alligator biting at yr ankles called wanting to be a writer. It is elegiac in the best and oldest sense, down to the solitary vocative O's. Like Catullus. Like something that really deserves to be called poetry -- deliberate, precise, economical, every word accounted for and a shiver on yr spine. It has the impact of Plath without her opacity, the same clipped one-syllable word-grenades and snakey rhythms:

all the way to new england, new england where we could cup mugs and mop eyes...

I mean, shit. This is just it. Why we should all be writing in the first place. To mourn, to recall, to dream, to live.

It ain't bragging if it's true

So I had this amazing dream. It was called the last four days of my life. I was back in Oberlin, and the town had tricked itself out even more fantasy camp than usj, streets snowy and silent and holiday lights bedecking the downtown corridor, my daily responsibilities limited to cooking and eating and storytelling and snuggling. On our way in on Weds. eve the roads were slick like whoa and we skidded off the highway into a ditch, Deb and I, but in an injury-free, laugh-about-it-hysterically-for-ten-minutes-afterwards way rather than a dead-in-a-midwestern-cornfield way. We also continued our tradition of getting blazingly lost in major Ohio cities and then somehow showing up on time at our destination anyway.

The Allen has a show up right now that is, in my opinion, gonzo bizonkers Snickers bar fantastic. Even better than Jim Dine splashing Diet Coke on his canvases. The entire gallery hummed with sound. When I went in there was a metronome ticking on an old upright piano with a computer screen inlaid at its heart, and on it you could watch digital video of the artist schlepping around her home kitchen, toddler on hip, getting things out of her refrigerator and putting them back again. Next to the piano was a sealed glass cabinet full of kids' shoes spray painted red, and on a little stumpy table nearby there rested fingernail clippings and baby teeth next to a display of about 30 brass alarm clocks. Most of the humming, though, was coming from a two-story treehouse installation. A staircase wound around the side and up to a thickly curtained room housing throw pillows and a birdhouse emitting chirps and whistles of alternately human and avian varieties.

When I came down out of the treehouse the metronome had stopped ticking. This was mad jarring, since I had spent the last 15 mins. subconsciously attuning my breaths & movements, as if on some deep-ass Wrinkle In Time tip, to its pulse, and with the beat gone my equilibrium was suddenly six flavors of shaken. So I was thinking, is this some kind of strategic fait accompli? Did the artist put the metronome on a timer to deliberately shake us up, to draw attention to the unreliability of time in the face of all attempts to record its passage? Or did the thing just happen to, like, break while I was there?

Regardless, I love me some 'stlation art.

Huh-huh-hiatus

I am spending Thanksgiving with my Deborah. While I am gone, read this--all of it. I'll be back pogoing in yr bedroom on Monday.

The covers issue II

Maureen Dowd is on Midmorning right now, so in order to stop listening to it and impotently yelling at the radio (FEMINISM IS NOT ALL ABOUT UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS HETEROSEXUAL DATING. STOP IMPLYING THAT IT IS) I'ma just write about the musics instead. Lots of new tunes passing through the Pogo office lately, including a comp. of post-punk 45s (Martha & the Muffins! Snap!) and the Army of Me remixes and covers record, which consists entirely of--wait for it--20 remixes and covers of "Army of Me" by Bjork. That's 69+ minutes of the same song, kittens. And you know what? It's totally effing Great. There's more representation of the industrial genre here than is perhaps, er, appreciated by yr average non-dustry listener, but otherwise it's a tasty chocolate box assortment of bossa nova, electro, country, acapella, accordion, Nintendo, and Klaus Nomi, who surely, surely deserves his own genre.

Other cuddly cocoa covers filtering in:

Peter Schilling -- Major Tom (Leaving Home)
Like Patti Smith's Gloria, not so much a cover as a structural overhaul. You can do a mean down-tempo skank move to it that the Bowie original just doesn't allow. Plus it has one of the most subtly moving, bittersweet choruses ever wrangled, in this or any galaxy. You're sniffling into yr sleeve before you've even finished mocking the synth lines. Dude, could this be any more 1983? (Sobs, wipes eyes). "This is my home/I'm coming home!"

Siouxsie & the Banshees -- Strange Fruit
Don't get me wrong, Through the Looking Gass is the shit, because yes, "Trust in Me" was originally sung by a cartoon snake. And the Sparks and Iggy Pop do-overs rock out. But covering "Strange Fruit" when you're a white British lady, albeit a sensitive and careful one, is inevitably going to bring up questions of ventriloquy and erasure. Does Siouxsie's performance elide or displace Billie Holiday, with whom the original is so associated as to be taken autobiographically, and whose vocal presence haunts the cover specifically because it is so absent? How is it different for Holiday to sing about "black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze" through the instrument of her own black body/voice than it is for Siouxsie to do it with her white one?

Still more queries than answers. Covers issue I available here.

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Fair

My theater job buddy Sanden (aka Thurston Massacre, former WOBC punk director and on-the-street radio interview producer extraordinaire) is obvs. the coolest kid in school. No, not the one who has all the hot tub parties you aren't invited to, the one who introduced you to the Mekons and DIY silkscreening during sophomore year. So why, MPR, don't you give the dude a job already? He's experienced, talented, volunteers aqui, and cleans up real nice-like in a bow tie and vest. We aren't plotting the downfall of yr theater during intermissions, just having good, clean whisper-debates about art & economics--I promise.

Crystal blue Naomi

Forget about rodents in blenders--the weirdest two minutes of video on the internet is officially Naomi Weisstein c. 1999 fielding queries for an axed VH1 doc about the "state" of women "in music." Naomi seems mired in some kind of late 90s/Lilith Fair empowerment-lite mainstream-o-vision (i.e., couldn't see past Sheryl Crow to, like, Chicks on Speed, Kristin Hersh) but offers about as much trenchant insight and analysis as you could expect from someone who is flat on her back and drinking out of a green plastic cup. Did VH1 agree to the interview on the condition that it could hang out in Naomi's rec room after dinner and eat Funnyuns? Is Naomi recovering from surgery/an illness? What is that butterfly thing on the wall?

This is still Naomi Weisstein, though, so when she starts slamming down lyrics from "Papa Don't Lay That Shit On Me" and sums up, "Just don't mess with me, 'cause I have a life, and I'm gonna live it," she commands respect, frog-voiced and supine as she is. She also wins the Metaphor of the Year Award for coming up with "gender church," "where the only thing you could do was frenzied worship of men--or suffering, abject devotion." Not surprising, really, since this is the lady who lays out my entire approach to feminism in three sentences:

"Except for their genitals, I don't know what immutable differences exist between men and women. Perhaps there are some other unchangeable differences; probably there are a number of irrelevant differences. But it is clear that until social expectations for men and women are equal, until we provide equal respect for both sexes, answers to this question will simply reflect our prejudices."

Right, totes. Next project: reclaiming mikvah.

Fassbinder is dead, Greta

It is all very High Art at the Pogo homestead right now, because there is water dripping from our bathroom ceiling and it's starting to look like the problem is upstairs. Except I have been upstairs, and there are no celebrity photographers snorting heroin, just some nice indie kids who bake cookies and play music. Shoot. How will I ever get ahead at my cutthroat New York art magazine job without Ally Sheedy to seduce?

These monsters are real

When you listen to Heavens to Betsy all the time, you forget. When yr perspective is firmly squared behind songs like "My Secret" and "The Ones," to say nothing of the first B-mobile and Bikini Kill records, you lose sight of how brave and fierce these women had to be in the first place to come forward with songs about sexual violence and abuse, to pound the musical landscape with such seismic force that it would crack and shift and divide. It wasn't just a conspiracy of silence they were up against--it was an entire musical tradition, premised upon the "immortal" boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl-and-sings-about-it narrative that both reifies notions of men as poet-singer-subjects and freezes women as lyrical objects. For someone to re-write that narrative, to say, YES, I am going to work in the rock idiom but it is going to be on my terms and in the service of my own rage and surivival and subjectivity as a woman--that is how you spell revolution.

Today it's easy to lose sight of how radical a strategy this is, to parody, inhabit and reclaim "(male) rock guises & tropes"* in order to cope with sexual abuse. The Free to Fight LP has been sitting on shelves for well nigh ten years. But there was never anything inevitable or easy about it, and there won't be, so long as musical traditions romanticizing assault conspire with male entitlement to produce a culture of violence against women. Because the formula is still there--displaced but lurking & thriving in subtler, superficially innocent (read: EMO) forms, a la Kind of Like Spitting's "We Are Both Writers," in which our wounded guy-protagonist sings,

All I really want to do is get back into you
No tension, no worries...
I can't control my instincts
Why can't I be happy just to call you a friend?...
I'm getting reacquainted with my lower self
Redhead teach me compassion from your fragrant continent...
I'm so sick of trying to fight my body and you at the same time
I am righteous in my anger!
All I have to give you is my lower self

It's not like the KoLS example isn't nuanced or complicated, since the Bridges Worth Burning LP also offers up "He Calls Me" in addition to "Writers" (my sister Jennie reads it as homosocial/erotic rather than as speaking from a girl's point of view, but theorize fer yrself). And Ben Barnett is obviously not a hulking, blatantly pervy misogynist like, say, Gene Simmons. But listen to the "Direction" H2B 7 inch and "Writers" back to back and see how innocuous the "I can't control my instincts" lyric sounds then. Plus, "fragrant continent"? What the Saidian hell??

*Phrasing is adapted from Gayle Wald.

Man sex can wait

File under "Becky Smith Rocks":

"so the center girl, blowing the bubble....is it just me or does she kind of have that secret look behind her eyes that's saying, "yeah...MAN sex can wait!"

http://www.sexcanwait.com/home.html

No time to do battle

Last week I quit one of my jobs. I cited "personal problems" to my boss, failing to mention that said problems arose from working in the corporate food service hellhole of which she is head manager. Adequate income be damned--I need to live my politics and I need to live them now. Like today, instead of contributing to the global solid waste crisis, culture of disposability and underpaid immigrant labor, I worked on getting this radical librarian gig a little further off the ground. So far it's been buckling and swaying at a cruising altitude of about 5 feet, and while I am proud to be flying at all, it'd still be nice to be able to clear, like, tree-level.

Lady, yr so self-reflexive!

"To find you here, all on your own, writing books like that--!"
Again, she looked almost proud. "Why shouldn't I?" she said.
I did not know. "It just don't seem right," I said. "A girl, like you--"
"Like me? There are no girls like me."

-Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

Fake it till you make it

As I try to rescue an essay from an old, broken computer (stone cold coma'ed it is, like a Days of Our Lives character, awaiting a new storyline) for editing overhaul and possible submission to EMP Pop Con 2006, I have been reading the big kids' bios from previous years and feeling more and more preschool all the time. Because this playground I am eyeing, it has a big sign over the monkeybars that says, "LEGITIMATE," and another one next to the sandbox that says "ESTABLISHED," and I hear that Bobby X-gau beats you up and takes yr lunch money if you try to go down the slide. I am worrying about this, and about definitions of legitimacy and success in cultural criticism, and the ways in which they intersect with gendered assumptions about virtuosity and skill. I am thinking about my lady Becky Smith, who would have EMP-Con panels and syndicated columns coming out of her ears right this second if the world were anything close to fair, until I come across the following sentence:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet.

What's this? An earnest effort from the first night of a YMCA adult education creative writing class? Why no, it's Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker last July! I'm not trying to step to A. Gopnik, dude is fine, and has done great stuff in the past, and can write. But does achieving this thing called Legitimacy mean you can throw eight commas into the salvos of yr essays in drunken lapses of stylistic sanity? That you can toss off sentence structures with all the pacing, rhythm and clarity of Christopher Walken reading early Gertrude Stein in a six-page column in one of the most elite publications in the world and have yr editor give you a big fat pass? Even if it doesn't, being Legitimate at least means you will get gigs, and that is rilly, rilly essential, because without gigs, you will never get a bio. And without a bio, you will never be Legitimate. Right. Did Joseph Heller make this shit up or what?

Lucky for me I already have my bio good and ready:

Lizzie Pogo (AKA DJ Polly Seamy) is arts editor of numerous publications, including New York Metro NYC, NYC New York Metro, the Manhattanist, the Dusseldorf Times-Picayune and the Ronne Ice Shelf Gazette. She is also a frequent contributor to Hoyden Wench, Fucked-Up, Toothache, Rockist Review, McSwooney's, and Bummerang, and founded the performance art journal Scrimshaw at the age of 5.

After receiving an Anna Nicole Smith Genius Award for her 2004 one-woman multi-media show Speculum!, Pogo accepted a fellowship at Urger University, where she now teaches music journalism, performance art theory, quantum mechanics and basket-weaving. In her spare time, Pogo DJs Thursday nights at Brooklyn's Club CosmoNaughty, runs a number of record labels, guest-curates art shows and organizes vocoder workshops. Her book Blow It Out Yr Ass: Subversion, Performance & Methodology is forthcoming from Plosive Press.

Indictments for all!

Is anyone else following the P-Fitz grand jury announcement countdown and having flashbacks to Watergate, or, um, watching All the President's Men? Libby sounds too much like Liddy. And when yr nickname is Scooter...it's like wearing a sign that says "Indict me now!"

Conjure ghost of Rimbaud here

When the lights went out we were talking about Violette Leduc. Or maybe she was teling me the story of how she bought the bookstore, how she had her eye on this other place and then discovered it was secretly thousands of dollars in debt, and its owner was nicking copies on the sly--a trade paper D.H. Lawrence here, a cloth Doctorow there. But we were standing in FICTION L on the second floor, the room glowed imperceptibly brighter for a second, and then it was totally dark except for the dim natural light creeping over from the windows that face the street. The owner lady said, "Oh no. Oh no!" and looked panicked, apologized and ran downstairs, leaving me holding La Batarde and suspiciously eyeing the pics of Anais Nin and James Joyce scotch taped to the shelves, which suddenly looked less than benign, staring at me in the dark like that.

Turns out owner lady (Kathy, my nascent BFF & hero not only for owning the single greatest, most ramshackle and delapidated independent bookstore on the planet, but also for knowing who Natalie Barney is) used to be heavy into the femme-based p-rock, and rattled off this crazy list of trailblazer ladyacts she saw at the Turf Club back in the day, something like Lene Lovich/Lydia Lunch/Nina Hagen/X/Blondie. Patti Smith came into the store last year, says Kathy, just to browse, and I can totes imagine her there, trolling the poetry section for Baudelaire while the lights flicker overhead and dusty shelves threaten to collapse. Seance-worthy would be an understatement. Meet me there on Halloween and we can have a chat with Anne Sexton.

N.B., Conde Nast

"I'd rather have no magazine to myself than have a magazine called 'Mixed Race Girls.'"

Zadie Smith on Fresh Air, adding that when White Teeth first came out, people sniveled that the only reason it got good reviews was that her pic was sent with the MS, and she's all purty-like. Says Zadie, "That would never happen to male writers, even pretty male writers, and there are a lot of them!"

Je suis une saboteuse feministe

At the restaurant of corporate death today (aka one of my jobs) I served a woman who was reading Fast Food Nation, and we got in a little convo about how amazing it was, and she said, "Yeah, I feel guilty reading this and eating here." So I rejoined, "Not as guilty as I feel about working here, believe me." She said it was okay, we all have to do what we have to do to get by; she had to work a similar job not too long ago.

Afterwards, though, I was like, shit, that's enough of that, let's get down to the sabotage at hand. So when my shift managers weren't looking, I grabbed some of the table numbers from the bin next to my register, ran downstairs and put them in my bag. We are doing a promotion for a new gnocchi dish, so several of the numbers say on them,

WE KNOW WHAT MEN WANT. GNOCCHI.

Classy, right? That pun on 'gnocchi' for 'nookie'? Thank you, corporate marketers, for simultaneously (hetero)sexualizing me and making women customers feel guilty & "unfeminine" if they happen to like this dish (it's advertised as meat & potatoes and "manly"). Not only do I not know what men want, I do not care, and my nookie is ladies-only.

I didn't get all of the "what men want" ones, but I plan to systematically eliminate them from the restaurant. I got four today--all the better for writing "white" "supremacist" "capitalist" "patriarchy" on in sharpie and taping them to the window.

Notes on fandom

Sound Unseen 2005 is over, and while I had to miss the 3-hour director's cut of The Brian Epstein Story (never getting over that one) I did get to see what happens when a couple of Czech filmmakers shoot about a day's worth of digital video of crazy Nick Cave fans, try to edit it into something resembling a documentary and then decide to give up halfway through: you get The Myth, which is actually kind of great in spite of itself, especially the part where Nicky C., smoking and looking tour-weary and distracted in the posh inner sanctum of a European venue, explains that he used to have idols, too--like Bob Dylan! Only, he hurries to inform us, he met Bob Dylan. In fact, Bob Dylan approached him.

Also awesometastic was Debbie Harry in TV Party demonstrating the evolution of the pogo by breaking out an actual pogo stick, then confessing sadly that nobody really does it anymore and it's been appropriated. And this was in 1980.

I think if we want "a fascinating sociological study of the cathartic and sometimes crazy milieu of rock semi-stardom" we're gonna have to wait for Passions Just Like Mine: Morrissey and Fan Culture, forthcoming from Kerri Koch, begatrix of the essential RG chronicle Don't Need You. Lady is totes brilliant. I hope she gets the doc on in the near future, b/c lately, my world is like a 24/7 inquiry into fandom, and I could use some guidance. Last week, some disgruntled ladyfans at the theater where I work (job #3!) flounced out of the main house doors after the Honeydogs show, and I caught one of them hissing, "How can people be so rude? It's the fucking Hondeydogs!" the same way you might expect to hear an art collector say, "It's a fucking Picasso!" But as far as I could tell, the Honeydogs are not a Picasso, just a crappy pop band, and they were not doing it for me, because when a band needs more than twelve people on stage at a time and is not ska, something is wrong.

Then, at my other job, we had an event for this insane celebrity quiltmaker man, and when I told a woman over the office phone about it she shrieked, "[Quiltmaker man] is coming here!? Tomorrow?!?!" and proceeded to say, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god" about 20 times while I tried to calm her down. So I was like, lady, it's no big deal, it's not like Patti Smith is coming or something. And then I realized, with a shudder and a grin--Celebrity quiltmaker man is her Patti Smith. And the Honeydogs are those women's Raincoats, or Bratmobile, or Mecca Normal. Because this fan thing is wildly relative, and it warps yr perspective once you get inside it.

The begged question for me still is, how does the fan-artist relationship square with feminism? How can we salvage the potentially revolutionary parts (women appreciating & encouraging each other & their art) from the parts that reinscribe hierarchies & boundaries (setlist/autograph hoarding, backstage/VIP areas)? No answer yet, just a question. In the meantime, anybody have a copy of Fanmail for research?

Housemate CD release show action tonite

SPAGHETTI WESTERN STRING CO. w/ the Pines
Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Ave S., Minneapolis
Doors 7:00 pm; $15/$10 student rush

Darlings of Mpls scene & band practices in my living room. City Pages says hells yeah. Star Tribune agrees.

Beachland blues

I am having ex-hometown venue withdrawal. Not for the new 9:30 after seeing 9:30 F Street, which was music docuriffic and made me admire & respect Ian Mackaye even more than before, which seemed impossible--no, for the Beachland Ballroom, my erstwhile pogoing grounds and site of many a 2nd wave riot grrrl rally/front row lady guitar hero swoon. I only just found out the pinball machine is free. To think, I could have been pinball wizarding it up gratis that whole time.

In all seriousness, this venue changed my life. It made me believe again in the power of live music, in the importance of breaking out of the bedroom listening circuit once in a while, of braving the smoke clouds and scenesters and drunk asses who yell, "Play Freebird!" for the chance to transplant that cloistered, personal transcendence into the middle of a crowd of other people, where you stand to gain so much more--something akin to collective spiritual catharsis. Because when the crowd isn't too wasted and the band isn't too tired and the jams are kicked the fuck out, stars align and you can look yr neighbor in the eye and know in yr gut of guts that we are all part of this same precious, psychopathic tribe called humanity.



The Beachland can swing this, I think, because it is so defiantly tiny. For reals, it's like my elementary school multi-purpose room reborn. Its stage, it is not the province of Rock Stars, it is the same creaky-floored, broken-curtained kids' hangout where my fourth grade English class performed Macbeth. Where I, as perhaps the campiest ten-year-old Lady Macbeth in the history of the world, got to sleepwalk, faint, and scream with great conviction from offstage left to indicate I was committing suicide by throwing myself off the castle wall. In that picture up there, if you replace the amp with a cauldron full of dry ice and the guitar with a cardboard tree, you have Act I, Scene I. So naturally, I am partial. Unsex me here and then some.

Zizek is my co-pilot

The new issue of Genders is out, and it's a doozy. While the Heavenly Creatures essay is disappointing (Are we ever going to get past Freud? Ever? I know that as misogynist Victorian coke addicts go he was totes the groundbreaking genius, but it's 2005. Could we at least do, like, Lacan?) Kathryn Kane's To Wong Foo exegesis is right on, wielding Zizekian social control theory like a sashimi knife to dice up racial and sexual minstrelsy. Especially awesome is her point that in order for a mainstream film like TWF to have drag queen characters and still be commercially viable (i.e., non-threatening, i.e., heterosexual) its narrative must necessarily elide those characters' sexual desires, reducing sexual preference to gender performance. Patrick Swayze in a dress is fine, so long as he doesn't start kissing any boys.

And speaking of kissing boys, Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capote just sounds like Sarah Vowell. So, um, there. Part of me is like, dammit, Hollywood, quit fucking around with my revolutionary queer misfit icons. I know it's terribly convenient for you to clean up all of their struggle and complexity and anger and ugliness by casting Salma Hayek or Nicole Kidman and being done with it, but isn't there a Farrelly bros. project you could be greenlighting somewhere? And another part thinks, hold up, if some lonely, geektastic queer kid in Wichita gets turned on to Capote, or Frida, or Woolf by renting a video from the Blockbuster next to the Dairy Queen and starts writing or painting or even comes out because of it, then maybe, maybe it is worth it.

Still, though--anybody touches Renee Vivien and I'ma lose it.

And I am totally a Kinks fan, too

Huh. Wow. I hereby forfeit all pretensions to musical knowledge.

Smile pretty, take take the money

Today at the sketchier of my two jobs, the restaurant one, some customers didn't like their food and sent it back for free replacements. My shift manager, already under potential dickwad surveillance by me, says under his breath, "God, that is so gay." Minutes later, said shift manager refuses to wear an apron because "it looks like a skirt," and a guy at a table I'm serving insults his friend for eating "like a girl." I steady myself, clutch my tray, and contemplate saying, "Listen, dudes, don't fuck with me. I'm a poststructuralist feminist. I read Judith Butler for fun. Any more of this shit and I'll rip yr balls out through yr nostrils."

Serves me right for not listening to Audre Lorde. Because this restaurant, it is definitely the master's house, and much as I thought I could destroy the system from the inside by queering and feministing and radicalizing shit up, I find myself passing over those tools and opting for the less confrontational, blunted, master's variety, i.e. not being "over-sensitive" and "giving the benefit of the doubt." And they get worse, the craptacular sexual politics of my workplace. In three weeks I have never seen a girl put on bus duty, and there has only been a dude up at the registers once. The cash ladies are all 17-24, cute, perky and carefully trained to smile and ask if you wouldn't like to add some steak to that for just $2.00. So I can't help feeling bummed and saddened and complicit in a centuries-old strategy of using young women's bodies and labor to grease the wheels of food service and capitalism in general, to comfort and congratulate and assure customers that buying more is always the answer. We're a couple of steps up from Renaissance tavern wenches, maybe...but only a couple.

It also reminds me of how some currents of (diluted?) 3rd wave feminism are too commodity fetishistic for comfort, particularly the ones that encourage us to buy our empowerment in the form of sex toys and coin purses rather than organize direct political action, mobilization and dissent. I've never been able to flaunt the Marxist/socialist steez before, just fierce alliance, because my survival feels imbricated with and enabled by capitalism in ways that are prickly like whoa to untangle. But maybe it wouldn't hurt to do a little review.

Pogo Digest

If the weekend's over and you're not up to integrating everything smoothly and you know it, clap yr hands (and just use bullet points!):

-No, I don't defend her conscience-blinkered, exhibitionistic, cash-mad L.A. fuck-up-ism; and no, I don't excuse her circa 1991 punching of K. Hanna, that was totes deplorable; but Courtney Love still interviews like a lab raccoon on meth that's been reading too much Lester Bangs, and dammit if there's anyone else out there being as gleefully, wittily confessional--even in the pages of SPIN, which continues to boast the journalistic standards of a kumquat. If you're gonna click the link, please, for yr own sake, scroll rilly, rilly fast over the picture, it's not pleasant.

-I have in some way handled (skimmed to read to re-read) ten of these books in the past three months. Creep. Tastic.

-Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka on the cover of Adulterers Anonymous. I love this. The way they're standing there, rocking the high contrast black & white--wary, conspiratorial, predatory--like a punked-out Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Exene's already got the early silents lace-up boots. Someobdy should have cast them in a low-budget 80s remake of Orphans of the Storm.

-Susan Sontag (Suzy Rosenblatt that was, RIP) gets her S&M on at the end of "Fascinating Fascism": "The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." I read this sentence in a crowded airport two months ago and started giggling uncontrollably. Now I can't stop thinking about it. Tag, pass it on.

At home she feels like a purist

(w/ thanks to Kim for Brit scene reportage)

My resolution not to watch the S-K Jumpers video more than once (worship music, not musician; crush out on guitar work, not C. Brownstein in a suit) has only resulted in me watching the new Ladytron videos over and over again in an effort to figure out what the hell is going on in them. Really--in Sugar, are Helen and Mira supposed to be getting married? In, like, a goth notary public's office of the future? And in Destroy Everything You Touch, are they chthonic snow mountain divinities, or did somebody just have some extra white cake makeup and some bonsai trees laying around that day?

They should probably turn me off, all of the faux-geisha mouths and ironed hairdos and nods to glossy fashion mags. And they do. But the Tron are so fantastically upfront about it--so outrageously, violently honest in their quest for artifice--that they skip past annoying, shimmy over problematic and wind up somewhere out near interesting, if only in a hey-look-at-that-piece-of-tinfoil-in-the-gutter sort of way. Plus, I'm still handicapped with residual loyalty due to the wonderfulness that was 604. A good-ass record, that was. And that was in 2001, decently pre-electro frenzy/Kraftwerk strip-mining bonanza (c.f. early Fischerspooner).

The eye candy angle aside, it's still up for grabs what the point of making music videos actually is. If a song does what it's supposed to, it should conjure up a synesthetic Skittles California Fruits buffet of images, tastes, moods and vistas all by itself, without the band ever having to hire a director, much less rent out a soundstage. Watching Jumpers, for example, feels totes redundant (opp. to study Carrie's fretwork excepted), because when I hear it, I already see a video inside my head. Chefs don't go around composing symphonies for you to listen to while you eat their food.

Only something like Kimya Dawson's Lullaby for the Taken video (Mercury to Ladytron's Pluto in the solar system of m-vid concept & design), not in spite of being quaint and beautiful and K Recs earnest, offers something like a defense of the vid imperative. When Kimya sings about her grandma dying, and her flickering video self attaches tiny wings to a granny doll at the same time, the sounds and images join forces on the same multi-media all-star team, and you notice things about the music you wouldn't have w/o the visuals, and vice versa. And then everybody wins.

FOUND

A longtime fan of FOUND magazine, I hereby offer up Exhibit A: a mix tape song list with detailed track notes folded inside a cassette case. Found by me, sans cassette, on the floor of the basement of my house (housemates deny ownership). Xeroxed b&w cover art features an androgynous face emerging from button-down shirt, with pieces of face cut out, S. Dali-style. Selected highlights, presented just fer y'alls free of charge, strictly sic.:

Tweed Penguin, Sampler #36 (Missy picks 'em!)
SIDE A
2. "The Wicked Sea" - MXYZ, Dec. 1990
"The best rock and roll song ever." -Jeremy
4. "Fuck." -The Smells, July 1990.
From the concept album, "Concept."
5. "Gunshot, " MXYZ - May 1990.
Andy complains/drums.
14. "No Room to Rhumba." -Joe, Fall 89.
From the brilliant album Cartalk.

SIDE B
7. "Here Comes Godot." -The Smells, July 90.
Widget Crue sessions. Formerly, "I Wanna Call Her But Her Last Name is Smith."
12. "Padded Steel Christmas." -Nat, Dec. 89.
Originally called "Stairway to Heaven," but lawsuit pending. I rip off Johnny Cash.
13. "Surfin' Vicar." -The Smells, Aug. 90.
The best song ever. Vol 36.
14. "Biker Larry." -The Smells
About a guy named Lawrence. Ted Nugent plays all solos!!

So many questions begged here...who were the Smells? What was the concept of "Concept"? Was "Surfin' Vicar" really demonstrably better than "The Wicked Sea"? Was Larry actually a biker, and how did he earn the admiration of Ted Nugent? Send any and all theories, queries, subpoenas and lawsuit updates to dancingvioletsnail@yahoo.com.