MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

And while we’re on music/pop culture deaths:

This may or may not be news to you, but Maggie Estep passed away last week.

I only found out myself a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen a whole lot of coverage on it (though I don’t live in the Great American Celebrity Circus Media Bubble, so it’s easy for me to miss stuff like this). But I thought I should say something – partly because I had her debut CD, and partly because in some ways, she represented the pinnacle of 90s GenX® AltCulture™.

I don’t mean that as a putdown of her personally. (The headline of this post isn’t meant as an insult either – it’s a riff on one of her more well-known pieces. See below.) Estep was a talented spoken-word performer who managed to be both alarming and funny. She also had great (if serendipitous) timing – when Alternative went mainstream on MTV and created the whole Generation-X industry, the poetry-slam scene was taken along for the ride, Spoken Word became a bankable genre, and suddenly Angry Hip Free Verse Poets were accessible in every mall in America.

And thanks largely to (1) being a good Spoken Word performer and (2) MTV, Estep became one of the faces of what we think of as GenX Pop Culture® – something so firmly rooted in the 90s that it feels (to me) as dated as Flower Power, Disco, Hair Metal and New Wave. And it’s a shame that she’s associated with that, because there was more to her than that.

That said, I admit I don’t listen to her CD anymore – mainly because the music sounds both generic and dated in a way that (say) Jim Carroll Band doesn’t. I prefer Estep either in print or with voice alone.

Like this:



No more Mr Nice Girl,

This is dF

When deciding how to tackle a cover song, one option – albeit rarely a popular one, and one fraught with risk – is the dramatic reading.

The most famous example, of course, is William Shatner, whose reading of Beatles songs pretty much defines the genre, for good or ill (though he’s made a good living at it). Peter Sellers did it too, albeit for laughs (which is an important distinction, because no one is really sure whether Shatner is being serious or not – possibly even Shatner doesn’t know).

It may be all in the delivery – after all, Beatles lyrics are meant to be sung, not spoken. But what about lyrics that arguably stand alone as poetry, which lends itself more to the spoken-word genre? What if you took, say, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and read it like a spoken-word piece?

Sebastian Cabot – TV’s Mr French – will demonstrate for you now.



The results speak for themselves, I think.

How does it feel,

This is dF

Re: This Writer’s Block Poetry Assignment:

I’m not a connoisseur of poetry by any stretch, but I did find myself spoiled for choice here. I was tempted to go for something by Bukowski or my favorite Poe poem (hint: it’s not “The Raven”), or possibly even a little Vogon poetry.

But I think I’ll go with something a little less obvious:

=======================================================

Let America be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

=======================================================

Sheer bloody poetry,

This is dF

And now, Fred Gwynne feels like saying a beatnik poem.



It says a lot about me that whenever I see a beatnik poetry reading in a Hollywood film, I think of the beatnik episode of The Munsters.

That cat is deep,

This is dF

ITEM: The Terrorists® have come up with a new way to terrorize Americans® – leave suspicious bags everywhere with nothing dangerous in them.


Put another way ... terrorists have figured out how to take the “If you see something, say something” campaign and make it work in their favor by planting stuff for people to report, then sitting back and watching the fun as we shut down everything in a panic to deal with it.

It’s sort of like jiu jitsu terrorism. Or practical-joke terrorism.

Which is better than trying to set off real bombs, of course. On the other hand, you do wonder if Cry Wolf Syndrome would set in if they did this enough times ... thus making it easier to plant suspicious items that could really hurt/kill people.

Insidious!

To be sure, I can’t say how accurate the FBI’s info on this tactic is. We’ve been told in the past that al Qaeda plans to use other common things you see every day – pregnant women, huge boobs, white people, etc – as terrorist weapons, none of which seem to have come to any fruition (depending on who you ask).

Either way, I’d say that at this rate, when it comes to terrorizing the public, the govt, the media and the public are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.

As Rick Moranis said:


PRODUCTION NOTE: Yes, THAT Rick Moranis.

Loose lips sink ships,

This is dF

Happy Mother’s Day from Queen, by the way.



DISCLAIMER: My mom and I get along fine, thanks. She likes Queen, too.

BONUS TRACK: The studio version of the song is here, if you'd like to see Queen when they were younger. 

Sheer bloody poetry,

This is dF

I only just saw this, and this may be of interest only to a few of you, but Jim Carroll died Friday.

So yr possibly going to be hearing a lot of this song – provided anyone even remembers who Carroll is, and if they do, it’s either for “People Who Died” or the fact that Leo DiCaprio once played him in the film version of Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries.

Which is a shame, because there was a lot more to Carroll than a novelty hit. That said, Carroll is probably an acquired taste, depending on whether you like yr poetry free-verse, drug-addled and depressing (albeit with a wry sense of humor at times), or whether you like poets fronting rock bands (see: Patti Smith Group).

I liked him. Of course my first exposure to him was “People Who Died”, but it wasn’t until 1990 when I heard a spoken word track called “Guitar Voodoo” from a compilation called Sound Bites From The Counter Culture, that I got a better idea of who he was. This was right around the time I was discovering Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. I looked Carroll up in the library and found his first poetry collection, Living At The Movies, and of course The Basketball Diaries. Grimly beautiful stuff. At the very least I’d recommend The Basketball Diaries to anyone (the film version, less so, though it was pretty good, but the experience really isn't the same).

I also used to have a copy of Praying Mantis, a CD of spoken-word pieces recorded at St Marks, which I used to sample for drops in my radio show all the time. Sadly, the best track – “To The National Endowment Of The Arts”, in which Carroll claims that Mapplethorpe’s last act before his death was to secretly place cameras in the bedrooms of board members to document their own hypocrisy in their moral objections to his work – isn’t available in shareable form on the Interweb. However, here he is rewriting Nietzsche.



Catholic boy,

This is dF

I get spams. Sometimes it’s good.

SYSTEM OF SEDUCING WOMAN Hi Any man including YOU in particular comes up with the following questions at some certain period in his life: How should I treat women? How can I get acquainted with and charm the lady I like? How can I make her feel the same way I do? How to make her fall in love with me and get her laid?

It’s that last line that makes it special.

Doing it all for you baby,

This is dF