Perestroika

Stop moving.

What do we do now that the millennium isn't approaching anymore, but receding? It passed by the window an hour ago and the 1986 Toyota we're all riding in has about a thimbleful of gas left and its muffler is dragging on the ground. Even if we strained at our seatbelts enough to turn around and look back, all we'd see would be dim lights on the horizon. Ignes fatui. Millennial offal aflame. How can we stop moving when we have to go forwards to stay where we are?

The guitar weighed fifty pounds if it weighed an ounce. I called it Moby Dick. I played it on my bed, sans strap, sans amp, like the girls in All Over Me. But barre chords learned in 90-degree sexually confused summers do not stick in the brain so much as slide, amble and meander. Humidity is no good for steel strings or post-adolescent resolve.

Eventually, I had to give Moby Dick back to its original owner, a weed-addled, greasy-haired sub-punk named Robert who had made me cry years earlier in our high school cafeteria by insisting that Juliet died pregnant. "They did fuck," he had reasoned, pointing to the illustrated cover of his copy of the play and Little Lady J's suspicious paunch as evidence. "Either the chick is way fat or Romeo knocked her up."

I resented this. Romeo and Juliet did not fuck. People in bad TV movies fucked. Soccer Team Captain Ethan and Third Period English Jessica fucked--at parties, and (it was rumored) in the Math & Science wing stairwell next to the Coke machine. But what Romeo and Juliet did was too beautiful to have a name.

"She is not fat. It's just the way her dress is. That's what Renaissance fashion was like. And besides, you don't start showing when you've only been pregnant for, like, 48 hours."

"Whatever," said Robert, fellating a Twinkie. "Dude knocked her up."

Pogo Pazz & Jop

BEST MUSIC OF 2005

Albums
1. The Garter Belts, Drunk With Katie Couric
2. Shantalia, ABCexYZ (Remixes)
3. His Majesty's Knickers, Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria
4. Kizzmet, Dude Jacked My Shit
5. Mares Eat Oats, Rancid Sushi Bender
6. Nigel Fellowes, That Overhead Light Fixture is Terribly Bright (Import)
7. Rumpwax, Kissing Corpses
8. Mixmaster Liquify, Big Dick Stylee
9. The Pop Stars, International Blind Dateline
10. Marcel, Do Chomp Head, Thorax & Abdomen

Singles
1. Veronyca feat. DJ Cranapple 57 1/2, "My Booty My Business"
2. Beauty Pageant Contestants, "Lord Alfred Douglas"
3. Hans von Hans, "Ich hasse sie" (Import)
4. The Dishwasher Repairmen, "Schrodinger's Cat Looks Dead to Me"
5. The Rolls Royces, "(I Love It When You) Change My Oil"
6. Christian Science Breeding Room, "Bitch, Do My Taxes"
7. Tepid Breast Milk Rebellion, "Conventional Wisdom Suggests"
8. Fillet She Oh, "Kiss It Make It Better"
9. The Readymades, "Dada by Dawn"
10. Dancetyranny, Is It Just the Coke Or Does That Doorknob Have Eyes?

See y'alls next year!

Radicalism begins at home

Brokeback Mountain. I love it. I love that the leads cruise each other in the very first scene without even knowing they're doing it. I love that everybody in my theater gasped and yelled, "Oh shit!" in unision when Alma caught Ennis & Jack making out. I love that Ang Lee allows his characters to have complicated motivations and histories and desires that cannot be covered by the labels 'gay' and 'straight.' Yes, it is polite, yes, it leaves envelopes unpushed, but the encouraging fact remains that this mainstream film threatening to win several Academy awards features Heath Ledger greedily fucking Jake Gyllenhaal. As the Philly City Paper nailed it, "It's one thing to have circuit boys bang each other on the gay-fest circuit; quite another to have hot young stars cradle each other's faces at the multiplex."

Are Ennis & Jack gay, bi, or confused? The film doesn't know, and god bless it, it doesn't care. What it cares about is exploring modern American high masculinity and the toll it takes on men forced to obey its codes of emotional straightjacketing, stoicism and denial. Nobody has been able to deal intelligently with this in the last 10 years, except maybe Todd Haynes, and it needs attention now. If a couple of blow job scenes had to wind up on the cutting room floor in order for this movie to make it to screens and inspire even a handful of phobic football dudes to reexamine their asssumptions about what it means to be a man or a homo, then I say hot damn. Did we really need a gay Brown Bunny?

Snaps also to BB Mountain for the sweetest, saddest credits music of recent memory: Willie Nelson blithely queering the folkie standard "He Was A Friend of Mine" followed by her majesty Rufus Wainwright. All of us queer types in the Uptown were sitting there sniffling, "Totes, totes" through our tears.

My full film response, clarification & Foucauldian hoedown available here.

Season of the witch

Donovan is Richard Thompson on shrooms. He has the same posh UK elegance mediated by hippie populism, the same vast back catalogue of reggae-copping, psychedelic, folk-rockist sing-alongs, the same wait-how-old-is-this-guy-again unsettling sexual energy. He also, much like Dickie T., wields an intense Marc Bolan/Bryan Ferry/Frank N. Furter vocal steez, used to greatest effect last night at the Fitzgerald when he propositioned the audience, "Let us see if we can conjure...Aphrodite!" His banter was urgent and breathless, broken by frequent, presumably shroom-refueling trips to offstage right, after which he would return more spacey than ever to whisper questions like, "Why is it...that men...are born...with nipples?"

He trotted out "Hurdy Gurdy Man" first, bookending it with the inevitable "Mellow Yellow" encore. I ducked out during the second set to find sister usherette Ellen kneeling next to a man lying face-down on the carpet. He wasn't moving or talking and our house manager was calling 911, so I thought, "Well, that's it for him. What a way to go, right in the middle of 'Sunshine Superman.'" But then the dude twitched, stood up and lurched away, mumbling, "Mmokay, mmokay." Resurrection by Donovan!

Baa Baa Black Sheep is playing the Arise! holiday party tomorrow night. We have two new songs. Everything in the store is 10% off, so come buy a Nikki McClure calendar for yr uncle.

Eau d' internet dancing

Of all the things the internet has wrought, surely the most useful and democratizing has been the widespread availability of tiny quicktime videos of strangers and celebrities dancing like epileptic beavers. We at Dancing With Myself, of course, could not be more pleased with this phenomenon, wherein everyone from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to yr porn star neighbor shoots shaky digital footage of themselves dropping it all hot-like in their rec room kitchenette and then uploads it to their computer. The wealth of "My Humps" interpretations alone proves unequivocally that dance is alive and well in 21st century America, and grants a much deserved but long-denied legitimacy to the fine art of shimmying like a drunk-ass fool, in all its many forms and manifestations.

To those unsure where to begin their tour, I suggest my top three:

1. Assignment #25 of Learning to Love You More is the Fort Knox of internet dance footage. Sample at yr own risk, you may be blinded by the omnipresent sheen of bullion, dubloons, etc. Especially watchable are the videos by Elisa Harkins and Chelsey K. (Harkins gets Pogo points for filming hers in public, Chelsey for using a cake).

2. Melissa Auf der Maur's blog, in addition to Melissa's ace photography, has a holy grail clip of MAdM dancing in her socks to the Aries song from Harvey Sid Fisher's Astrology Songs album. Not. To be. Missed. Scroll down on the main page until you see "Aries, starting a new...dance!" on the lefthand sidebar. Windows Media works best for all you PC-types.

3. Whatevs else can be said about OkGo, their video for "A Million Ways" is four adult men doing a synchronized dance routine inclusive of the Marilyn Monroe faux-stripper move from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And that is kettle corn enough for me.

Psycho killer/ qu’est que c’est?

Holiday reading recs are here, fresh from the Pogo laboratory. Save wear and tear on yr DVD player and read it up instead.

Saint Morrissey
Title is supposed to be in ref to Genet bio, but also picks up on Halperin's Foucault rehab. Whatevs, queer hagiographies all 'round. Mark Simpson outdoes himself here, offering up prose so sharp and fast and furious you're in love with both him and Moz by page 2. Doing a straight chrono Smiths-to-solo cakewalk would be too easy for him, so he takes side-jaunts into 60s kitchen sink drama, glam, Britpop ("Blur was the Kinks for students and confused teenage girls from Epson who mistook Damon Albarn for someone sexy"), James Dean, Oscar Wilde, Margaret Thatcher and working class fetishism. Best of all, he recognizes that any project of unequivocally outing Morrissey would only deflate the legacy of ambiguity that makes him so queerly excellent in the first place. He doesn't pin the butterfly to the wall, he observes its flight.

[In 'Sheila Take a Bow'] the identity and gender of the narrator, as in so many of Morrissey's songs, is not so much unclear as transcended, providing both the male and female listener with multiple points of identification, which is the key to the subtle, fecund richness of so many of Morrissey's lyrics; even subject and object naughtily refuse to follow convention and switch positions frequently, sometimes playing top, sometimes bottom.

Crazy Marie
Danish poet, feminist firestorm and populist provocateuse Kirsten Thorup is also the author of this bestest short story EVER (um, the "Franny" half of Franny & Zooey excepted) about a disenfranchised laundromat employee who kills her boss. It's only available here for now, but really--parachute, snowshoe and/or spelunk into yr nearest academic library to get yr xerox on, because it is that amazing.

For the most part, nothing more happened other than that they would lie there for an hour or so warming each other. He was impotent and always asked politely if she wanted him to satisfy her with his hands. But she didn't always feel like it. Then he would turn over onto his back and look up at the ceiling. The room was narrow, with a high ceiling, and the walls were a nougat-brown. When the door was shut, it was like lying in a cardboard box.

Punk Planet
I could swear I only just bought #50, like, this morning. But somehow they're already up to #70 now. It's their return to muckracking. Yes! Rake that scene-exploiting muck, PP! Get back to yr roots! Also, Hit It Or Quit It #18 is still ready, willing and orderable, stuffed full of reviews incisive enough to make Greil Marcus throw in his critical hankie.

Horses in toto
Caryn Rose's song-by-song report of recent Horses 30th anniversary reenactment at BAM:

I know these songs. I know them. They know me. I could draw a timeline of my life and show you where they fit in, where I first heard them, when I first understood them, when they took special meaning, when they hurt so much to hear I had to push them away for a little while.

Blogging genius
Mairead Case does it again. I am beginning to feel the need to put this woman on a 24-hour Pulitzer watch.

you talk about how you are trapped inside your body, how you want to claw out and away and up. everything comes back to the cold, to ways to die quickly and ways to do it slow. she is sleeping with you again, but it is okay because her mother has credit cards and a rental car; they are going to court soon.

Deb's revenge re: elistist snoobs

Deborah, ma petite chere, je t'aime.

yr blog wouldn't let me post this...so elistist and snooby it was
towards me!

as your writing buddy/partner in crime -- i was told you would have a
new post up today! what the fuck? you've missed your deadline -- git her
done! YEEEEEEHAAAAAAWWWWWW!

yr cowgrl feminist transcendental conservationist friend. yeah, that one.

Cherub rock

From: lpogo [dancingvioletsnail@yahoo.com]
To: bcorgan [sullenmessiah@prophets.net]
Date: Dec 6, 2005 6:52 PM
Subject: christmastime (??)

hey billy, what's up? so you will never believe what happened today. i was down at the corner of snelling & university killing time before work, y'know, theorizing about stuff, thinking about art and religion and commerce, and the myriad ways in which they intersect & yadda yadda yadda, and then i decided to duck into payless to get warm (i know, i know, but it was all of 9 degrees outside, give me a break). i went in the store and was getting ready to scrutinize fringed mukluks and manolo blahnik knockoffs until i could feel my face again when what did i hear? none other than the dulcet tones of yr very own plaintive whine, floating over the PA!

well i'm telling you, you could have just about knocked me over with a feather! not only were they playing YOU in a PAYLESS but it was a song i had never heard before. and i was quite the pumpkins fan back in the day, as you'll remember. all those long metro rides we spent together, those tearful teenage nights you sang me to sleep--you were my dylan, for christ's sake. my springsteen, my flock of seagulls, my kajagoogoo! i thought i knew every exhalation and guitar fart you ever comitted to tape. yet there you were, dirging yr way through this track in the payless, and it sounded very adore-era, except for that the fact that you were singing,

Christmastime has come
There will be toys for everyone
'Cause Christmastime has come for you.

i have to say, love, it's a bit creepy. i mean, yr musical & vocal steez is not exactly suited for ringing in holiday cheer. for getting the chestnuts a-roastin' and the sugarplums a-dancin'. suicidal victorian consumptives drinking absinthe in the parlor, yes; jolly old saint nick, not so much. plus, what with the context of yr previous records and all, wherein children are only referenced as emblems of dreams forfeited and trusts abused, those lines about watching tykes play are downright jack the ripper. "secretly the gifts still hide/ the fun awaits for you inside"? maybe, if you're talking about the fun of crippling seasonal depression and social anxiety disorder.

props to you for getting on that record back in 1997, though; it's cool that all the proceeds went to support the special olympics. what was it called again...a very special christmas 3? too bad you didn't make it onto a very special christmas 2--that one had debbie gibson doing 'sleigh ride'!!! it's all good, though, 'cause yrs has mase (remember mase??) doing "santa baby" AND sting doing "i saw three ships"! snap! and i hope you don't have any retrospective guilt for getting played in paylesses or anything, because dude, worrying about selling out is SO 1994.

anyway, that's all for now. let me know how you're doing, and look for my holiday card in the mail!

with appels + oranjes,
yr pal,
lizzie pogo

p.s. do you know what is up with d'arcy? i worked this bizarre event at one of my jobs and one of the models reminded me of her. sigh.

Love me, hate me, read my CV

As thousands don't care, Camille Paglia returns to Salon after a book-writing hiatus, ostensibly to take down Madonna's new record and career trajectory to-date. But she's far less interested in interrogating Madge than she is in hand-jobbing her own relevance. "Look! Look!" she screams. "I am Provocative and Bitchy! I am Influential and Visionary! I produce Important Criticism!" Somewhere in the midst of all the sweaty self-promo she does observe that dance music is unjustly ignored by academic critics (OMG, Camille, you're so insightful! Richard Dyer and Jeremy Gilbert totally didn't point that out before you did!) and that Angelina Jolie has "a complex psychic life." Since when did a lame-ass filmography, dating Brad Pitt and a third-world kiddie adoption fetish qualify as a complex psychic life?

Also: Cintra Wilson name-drop not appreciated, except as a reminder of the good stuff I could be reading instead of this baffling, self-congratulatory, unoriginal non-essay.

Choice turdbits:

When I wrote in my polemical 1990 New York Times op-ed that "Madonna is the future of feminism," there were squawks of disbelief on all sides -- but that is exactly what came to pass over the next decade.

In a 1991 cover story on Madonna for London's Sunday Independent Review, I described disco as "a dark, grand Dionysian music with roots in African earth-cult" -- a defense that seemed bizarre because disco had yet to achieve academic legitimacy (which arrived in the '90s as more writers embraced popular gay history).

Giorgio Moroder's albums, which I listened to obsessively on headphones, were an enormous inspiration to me throughout the writing of "Sexual Personae" in the 1970s and '80s.

...we should probably be grateful for the Ritchies, our new Burtons with their baronial pretensions and nouveau riche excesses. (I have already tartly commented in the U.K. on Madonna's equine misadventure.)

Specially for Salon readers, I have gone through my vinyl collection to create a master list of my personal all-time favorite disco songs, leading up to the rise of Madonna. This is Madonna's artistic genealogy -- a vibrant tradition that deserves more attention and respect.

Nice try, Cam-Cam. The only "vibrant tradition" you're stumping is yr own.

Twee as folk

So Sanden and I are in a band called Baa Baa Black Sheep. Come to the show tomorrow night at the Belfry (8 pm!) and you can hear our wicked cover of Anarchy in the UK. I'll be the one in pigtails playing the xylophone.

Le Ballon Rouge

Tonite, from my living room to yr awed ears:

CINEMA REVOLUTION ANNIVERSARY PARTY
with (chordophonic geniuses & all-around mensches)
SPAGHETTI WESTERN STRING COMPANY
Varsity Theater, 21+ Doors 9:30, $8

Also, I so totes wasn't there. In the front row. Center. But I heard that their last show was hot like Pace picante sauce.

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.