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Black Toad

My latest musical work for H.A. -

Bad Art 101, Prof. Elizabeth Alexander

Round two:

Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem "Praise Song..." was completely terrible. I'll take a chance on being redundant and try to describe this nightmare even further.

Not only was the poem's content trite ("We encounter each other in words...words to consider"), childish ("We walk into that which we cannot yet see."), uninspired ("Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.") and plain wrong ("All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din") but the delivery was stagnant as death and panderous to those who suckle from the dry teet of tenured 'art'. The delivery was out of place for any audience with a demand for nuance and aesthetic. I found the only connection between words and voice to be that they both fell harmoniously flat. The reading style perfectly represented dull academic lifelessness in performance where ideas are assumed to be more profound if they are delivered without force as a list of, unconnected, comma, delimited, words. And where professors masturbate over the illusion that they share a gift of improvisational syncopation with Miles Davis by randomly rearranging inflections. Do not pretend to be influenced by jazz if your shit is well-rehearsed. That qualifies for instant chump status and most certainly not a Pulitzer Prize.

And speaking of masturbation, I listened to the NPR interview with this artless woman just after it was announced that she would be allowed the chance to publicly humiliate herself. Asked if she was nervous she answered with an over-confident nervousness when stating that having nervousness would not help her to complete the piece. I believe it is precisely this dillusional confidence that leads to most bad art. Unfortunately it also allows such artists to increase their rank and popularity more rapidly than their more tentative, careful and far more interesting counterparts.

Inaugural review - In case you missed it

...though I doubt you could given the masturbatorial glee with which the "media" is covering this apparently ground-breaking civil rights event. OK, so the only way I could tune in at work was through NPR's sappy and constant interjections. So now I know where Obama's Dad is from and roughly what he might look like and that today Steve Inskeep will be changing his underwear one more time than usual. Just the news, please? Thanks.

This is the limp slop heap of a poem delivered during today's inaugural events. I had to read most of this at a later time because the delivery was such a deliberate drone of faux-Beatnick and contrived jazz that I was too angry to hang on past the second stanza. Keep in mind this woman (Elizabeth Alexander) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for similar barf parading as incite:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking
past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or
speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn
and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a
hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in
need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of
wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love
that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence
begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Ack! This is how I would describe the world if I desired all meaning to be replaced by style, and borrowed style, at best. But the delivery, I can't even begin to describe...YouTube that bitch.

In stark contrast was an awesome string/piano/clarinet piece written by John Williams. It seemed to borrow from several American folk tunes and was performed perfectly by Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and others. The sound quality of YouTube won't do it justice. You might just have to NPR that bitch.

The dreaded pastor Rick Warren's speech was better than expected simply for that fact that he noted that America is not a nation of people dictated by their religion. A statement that surely required high-tech gadgetry to bypass his normally bigotted core.

I thought Obama's speech was good. It was centrist which begs the question of its honesty - if his past resembles his presidency it should be some lefty shit! He did mention that the US is a country of "many faiths, Christian...yaddayadda...and Non-believers", which, while incorrectly describing atheism as a faith, is something you would have never heard admitted by McCain much lest his campaign witch. It was reasonable, recognizing terrorism as incompatible with democratic secularism. It recognized terrorists specifically as radical Muslim religious groups. That's a big shift for him, which seems that he's able to cope with reality even if his supporters often cannot. However, not even a hint at gay marriage. Lame!

Collide Magazine: A Place for Religious Hacks

http://www.collidemagazine.com/blog/index.php/470/stop-using-media-part-three

Herein you will find a ridiculous discussion between myself and some churchies. A half-witted article Part 3 in a multi-part series discussing overuse of media in churches (fair enough) by a hack editor, Scott McClellan (below-right), in a fledgling faith-based "entertainment" blog called "Collide Magazine". I was connected there when his article's reference to Trent Reznor was picked up by the "NIN Spotting" forum on NIN.com. I was making a post there because I was seemingly the first to discover what appeared to be a NIN logo in the most recent update to their photoblog (left). In the article he characterizes Reznor as an opportunistic businessman whose modus operandi is gathering your money. Evidence? None. Not that I would expect Collide readers to demand it.


You'll no doubt see that this guy's shamelessness knows no bounds. After refusing to engage any of my thoughts in a public discussion within the sparse comments section of his blog, he makes a post on Twitter asking his followers for "advice" and provided a link. The Twitter post describes me as angry and spewing "Hater-ade". Aside from the bad humor even that smile appears forced and cocky. Most of his friends jump in with the foolish idea that I'm somehow afraid to debate this guy through private email though public debate is obviously far more demanding of skill and fact. Two reasonable churchies ask me for my thoughts on the origin of morality. Upon my reply our pompous author chimes in to say that the discussion is off-topic and any further posts will be manually deleted by him. And to wrap it all up, he thinks the comments section is no place for comments:

If you have a blog or forum in which you’d like to host a discussion of your own or publish your own thoughts, I encourage you to do so. This space, however, doesn’t exist for that purpose.

I have replied asking what purpose a comment section exists for and I assumed that the post would be deleted (IT WAS, SEE BELOW) until I was followed up by a nice man named "Danny" who, though agreeing with my analysis of Mr. McClellan, laid out a huge winding sermon. A polite sermon meandering on concepts of morality and hypocrisy in the church, but a sermon nonetheless. Now I sit wondering if the author has the thickness to delete a sincere sermon from his religious blog at the price of keeping his silly promise, and his title of "Keeper of the Last Word".

UPDATE: He deleted them.
UPDATE AGAIN: He re-added them, minus mine.

My Hero Has Died

"'You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.

So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that's begun. Don't you think that's already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? 'Let's see... Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh...viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures, perhaps a human immuno-deficiency virus making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.'

Well, that's a poetic note, and it's a start, and I can dream can't I? Ya see, I don't worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snales. I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want, ya know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron...wooOOooh...wooOOooh...wooOOooh. It doesn't punish. It doesn't reward. It doesn't judge at all. It just is. And so are we, for a little while. Thanks for being here with me for a little while tonight."

~George Carlin (5/12/1937 - 6/22/2008)

Russian Circles on tour

I saw the kickoff show last night @ the Picador in Iowa City. You must see these guys.

http://www.myspace.com/russiancircles