Winter Spring Summer

Friday Random Ten, “woe is vista” edition

Friday, April 27th, 2007 | Music | 6 Comments

1. “Take on Me,” a-Ha
2. “Another Green World,” Brian Eno
3. “Glamorous Glue,” Morrissey
4. “Maquilladora,” Radiohead
5. “Angelica,” Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
6. “Boner Beats,” The Dead Milkmen
7. “Dub Driving,” Angelo Badalamenti
8. “Both Sides Now,” Joni Mitchell
9.  “The Postman,” The American Analog Set
10. “Toxygene - Las Vegas Mix,” The Orb
Bonus:  “I hope I get old before I die,” They Might Be Giants

Yay!:  1, 3, 6, 8, bonus
Blech!:  I don’t particularly hate anything on this list.
Seen live:  3, 6, 10, bonus
TMBG lyric of the week:  since they seem to be landing on this list at least once a week…
It’s a long long rope they’ll use to hang you soon I hope.
And I wonder why it hasn’t happened… why? why? why?

Windows needs your permission to perform this function:
brian
howard
jeff
lauren
marisa
rachel

oh vista… why won’t you let me download rhapsody, so that I might find new favorite songs among those that aren’t currently in my collection.  no, no, I’m not saying that i’m not grateful that you let me download iTunes… of course, yes, you’re right, that was very generous of you.  thank you vista.  thank you very very much.  no, please don’t get mad and take it away.

this is spam, right?

Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Whatnot | No Comments

okay — check out the last comment, the one from Raymon, posted today on this FRT from like… oh… i dunno…. two full months ago. i figure its some kind of spam, right? i don’t know what kind, since it doesn’t link to cheap viagra or a low-interest mortgage — it doesn’t even link to a personal blog. but i don’t know this guy.
or do i?

this reads like a yearbook entry from when I was in the 6th grade. and that’s particularly bemusing because i’m not really sure what the point is. but i guess that’s the way i feel about yearbooks too. either way, i’m considering stealing this tactic. not that i really have anything to spam about. but i could always use a few extra hits. and i mean, have any of us really outgrown the desire for the cheerful and pointless fake friendships cultivated in the pages of our grade-school annuals? I didn’t think so.

See you next year. TTFN. Stay Sweet. LYLAS.

Friday Random Ten, “last day of freedom” edition

Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Music | 7 Comments

1. “Workin’ on Leavin’ the Livin’,” Modest Mouse
2. “Four-Day Interval,” Tortoise
3. “Round Here (live version),” Counting Crows
4. “Hard to Tell,” Old Crow Medicine Show
5. “Beachball,” R.E.M.
6. “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” Ministry
7. “Alienation’s for the Rich,” They Might Be Giants
8. “No More ‘I Love You’s’,” Annie Lennox
9. “Hey DJ,” Quad City DJ’s
10. “Black Steel,” Tricky

Bonus: “Why Won’t You Tell Me What,” Josh Rouse

Yay!: 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, Bonus
Blech!: 6. Way better Jesus songs: “I Dream of Jesus” by the Dead Milkmen or “Jesus is a Friend of the Family” by the Roadside Graves.
Swooniest: Michael Stipe… I’ve spent the better part of the last few hours scouring the internet for the What’s the Frequency Kenneth video, or at least a good still of Stipey, in mid hip swivel wearing that little star t-shirt… this is the best I could come up with. Oh, swoon!
Best Lyrics:
I got a letter from the government the other day.
Opened it and read it, it said they were suckers.
They wanted me for the army, or whatever.
Picture me giving a damn. I say never.
~Tricky

Other friends of the family:
howard (no, we’re never gonna survive)
jeff (young boy done me bad, and I went and did you wrong)
ben (quiet, don’t tell anybody)
brian (oh has the world changed? or have i changed?)
lauren (i slowly wilt and die)
rachel (i’ve quit this a million times, can’t quite stay away)
kb (i wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for the journey now)
marisa (So why not stop trying to run and hide)

Friday Random Ten, “older and wiser” edition

Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Music | 1 Comment

So, Saturday was my birthday. (I’m now this many…oh wait, you can’t see how many fingers I’m holding up. I guess it remains a mystery). But that meant that my whole weekend, from Friday on, was befuddled. I did this FRT on Friday morning, but didn’t get the chance to post it (Would I lie?!?). Oh, and in case you’re new to this game. I just put my iTunes on random, with my whole music library queued up and jot down the first 10 titles the come through. No skipping or omitting.

Here they are:

1. “Dark Center of the Universe,” Modest Mouse
2. “Fishin’ 4 Religion,” Arrested Development
3. “Take me to the river,” Annie Lennox
4. “Super Magic 2000,” Chris Isaak
5. “Spent,” Filter
6. “Summer Days,” Bob Dylan
7. “You’ll Miss Me,” They Might Be Giants
8. “Life in the Factory,” Drive-By Truckers
9. “Kitten Intro,” They Might Be Giants
10. “The Precious Jewel,” Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny

Yay!: 1, 2, 7
Blech!: 5 – I totally zoned, I barely even heard this song playing.
Would have preferred: Something off of Decoration Day, by the Drive-By Truckers… the Southern Rock Opera albums just don’t do it for me.

So bring you’re good times and you’re laughter too:
howard(baby, instant soup doesn’t really grab me)
marisa (i tried so hard not to be the cryin’ kind)
ben (the mind that knows itself has a mind to serve the other)
brian (everyone’s happy when the wizard walks by)
lauren (minutes take so long to drift away)
jeff (i’ll tell everything i know)
rachel (if you’ve got love in your sights, watch out)

Let’s Talk About Plath, Baby

Monday, April 9th, 2007 | Books, Events, Poetry | 4 Comments

This Thursday, my wee poetry book group – The Bard’s Book Club – will be discussing poems from Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Each month, as I prepare for these discussions, I find myself asking not only what we should talk about, but why? What makes this poet worth looking at, as opposed to others. With Sylvia, this question struck me as particularly complex.

When I was in graduate school, a fellow poet asked if I would mind being interviewed for a critical paper addressing Sylvia Plath’s continuing influence on contemporary women poets. I immediately agreed—partly because my ego requires that I accept any and all opportunities to be quoted, and partly because, although I knew I felt a kinship with Plath, I wasn’t (I’m still not) exactly sure why. Although I’ve read both The Colossus and Ariel, Plath’s prose—namely The Bell Jar—was what stuck with me most. And not because I ever struggled with a similar mental instability, but because when I first read it (and here is my embarrassing confession of the day) I was so jealous of the “novel’s” writer heroine. (And I use “” because it is such a thinly veiled autobiography). She was winning prestigious awards, scoring prestigious internships, and just generally gaining in writerly prestige. Sure, she was descending into a mire of depression, but did I mention all the prestige?

› Continue reading

Friday Random Ten, “shameless plug” edition

Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Music | 8 Comments

1. Last Train to Trancentral, The KLF
2. Inside, Moby
3. Parachutes (Funeral Song), Mates of State
4. Don’t Think of Me, Dido
5. Come Back to Camden, Morrissey
6. Why Won’t You Talk About It, The Radio Dept.
7. About Me, They Might Be Giants
8. Complexity, The Roots
9. Piccadilly Palare, Morrissey
10. A Punch Up at a Wedding, Radiohead

Yay!: 3, 9
Blech!: 5… You are the Quarry was not the Moz’s finest, by far.
Seen Live: 3 (surprisingly the worst show I’ve ever been to), 7, 5/9
Swooniest: Morrissey, of course (second week in a row!) But let’s be clear, I’m talkin Bona Drag Moz, not You are the Quarry Moz… Sure, he’s still pretty swoony, in a lounge-singer, I’m-losing-my-balance-swinging-this-mic-cord-around sort of way.
Just because they’re not on the list doesn’t mean I won’t make a pitch:
The Roadside Graves, a most excellent alt-country band based outta our beloved neighbor state of refineries and big hair (what could be more alt than that?) released a new album this week, No One Will Ever Know Where You’ve Been (from Kill Buffalo Records). Seriously, the album is great. I was lucky enough to get a pre-release copy a while ago, and I love it. I’m gonna write a genuine review in a few days, when my new copy arrives, complete with liner notes and what not. But in the mean time, you can listen to their stuff here, here, and here. Do it. Go now. What are you waiting for?

Oh, hold on a sec… fellow speakers of this silly slang:
Andrea (apparently, it’s a mozzer kind of week in FRT land)
Ben (that’s my kinda Jesus)
Brian (where jellyfish go, to get away from mormons & drunk Eskimos)
Howard (I *heart* toad the sprocket, a lot)
Lauren (”there’s even a full rapsheet included”…oh, young Carlton…)
Marisa (don’t know many of the songs, but am intrigued by the titles)
Rachel (making her Random Friday debut)

Okay, go now.

Revisiting an old friend

Monday, April 2nd, 2007 | Books, Fiction | 2 Comments

If you haven’t read A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, you should. Period.

The first time I read this was almost 10 years ago at the urging of the Little Mister (long before he was the Little Mister), who had read it at the urging of his good friend and college roommate Uncle John.

The first sentence definitely gave me pause:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice–not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

It’s a rather daunting opener, especially for a recovering Catholic, religiously ambivalent college student, as I was at the time. The last thing I wanted was to be preached at by some peice of Christian propoganda masquerading as a regular ole novel. (I hadn’t yet read any John Irving, so for all I knew he was the Christians’ answer to L. Ron Hubbard.) Alas, I read on, and I’m so glad I did. I loved it. It immediately became my favorite book.

Last week, I decided to re-read it, to see if it still held up to my self-induced hype. I wasn’t really surprised to find that it did. › Continue reading

Geeks & Poets, Poets & Geeks

Sunday, April 1st, 2007 | Internet Prowess, Poetry | No Comments

Lookout blogosphere, there’s a new kid on the block. Or, more accurately, five old kids and one new kid, all milling around suscipiciously on a different street corner.

The Mad Poets Blog, an offshoot of the Mad Poets Society’s main web page, has been a while in the making. It includes a wicked-cool sidebar events calendar and regular contributions from po-bloggers Anna Evans, Rachel Bunting, Ashraf Osman, G. Emil Reutter, and yours truly. Eileen D’Angelo, the MPS Director and self-professed technophobe, will hopefully join us in the bloggery goodness once I convince her how easy WordPress actually is.

To say that I’m excited is an absolute understatement. You should totally check it out: There’ll be MPS news, ongoing poetry discussion, reviews, interviews, etc. etc. etc.

And as always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Little Mister, who saw the gobbledygook that was passing for code in the WP theme I was using and just decided to recreate the entire thing (in a matter of hours, by the way!) so that it would be easier for me to use/edit in the long run. And it is!

Sunday Geek Rant

Sunday, April 1st, 2007 | Internet Prowess, Whatnot | 2 Comments

There’s a reason why I still write my poems in a marble copybook, with a simple rolling ball pen, and only commit them to computer after several long-hand revisions. That reason: technology is goofy.

For all it’s bonuses, technology continues to befuddle me at the most unlikely turns. I spent this afternoon making simple sidebar banners to highlight my regular poetry events. You may or may not actually see those banners, and, if you do, they may or may not look the way I intended. Herein lies today’s befuddlement. You see, for some reason, the only way I can view changes made to my code is by clearing my cache, closing the browser altogether, then reopening. (Just refreshing, or clearing the cache & then refreshing won’t work). Then, maybe, the page I see will reflect my most recent updates. Sometimes, I have to restart the computer altogether.

Considering my html skills are rudimentary, at best, viewing my changes is particularly important… so I can be sure I inserted the links properly or set the alignment and margins correctly. This cache confusion has caused much cursing and fist flailing, as I’m accustomed to assuming that any problems are the result of user error (*me*) rather than an equipment glitch (stupid damned computer!!!!!). This afternoon, it got so frustrating I got the Little Mister involved. Even he was perplexed. Why, for instance, were the image paths in IE completely different than those in the code??? Regardless of how many times we cleared the cache and refreshed, it seemed that the little web elves that live inside my computer decided they preferred the old fouled code.

I *think* its okay now. I think. And hope. I can only go by what I see, and from what I see they’re fine. But if the banners are all icked up for you, please let me know. Or you could let me know if they look just fine too. A non-geek like me can use all the positive reinforcement I can get!