The Miracle Whipped Trickster: Eminem coming May 19

The Miracle Whipped Trickster: Eminem coming May 19

I’m sorry that Bobby won’t be with me to usher in the new Eminem CD next Tuesday. We had so much fun cranking King Mathers’ tongue-twisting lexicon while vacuuming or making pancakes (among other things.)

I hadn’t really given Marshall a fair chance until then- I was just never dude enough to swallow the pejorative bitter brew. But then fate brought me an even hotter mess than me, with biceps and abs I’ll never ever forget, and suddenly the white hip hop look was fever pitch in my mind, as  Bobby bopped through the house drumming Em’s beat with two wooden spoons against his knees.

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I saw what I’d been missing, and dissing. Eminem made my manic periods look like Snow White’s long slumber- and he was comedic, pure genius. The stories were intricate, detailed, fuelled by the most satisfying and sometimes shocking rhymes, clicking into place like puzzle pieces, a Rubik’s cube. He rhymes sounds and syllables and similars and words he makes up as he goes along. He’s quick on his feet, that’s for sure. The man has a way with words.

This was circa Curtain Call, and I refused to believe the curtain had been called. I didn’t think he would stay behind the scenes, though he said he was through. As much painful energy as centre stage might take, I knew he’d heal from grief, madness, rehab, whatever and the rhymes would start spinning right round baby. As an artist, one of the world’s most brilliant, he’d be driven to work again, and not just in production. The scars of stardom, childhood, poverty, riches, white trashiness, divorcing Kim twice- shit, it’s a lot… the kid worked his ass off through it all. Then it was white heat rocket into superstardom. The greatest rapper in the world, period. That’s what everyone was saying. How do climb out of that? Where do you go from there?

Even while tragedy is tearing apart the average family with none of the pressures of Detroit and superstardom, people are whispering about Eminem’s recent opening up about his drug addictions. Okay, let me get this straight- people are SURPRISED?  You didn’t figure this out for yourself before? There’s no way a man could talk that fast unless his mind raced a thousand times faster than yours or mine. And that would drive you crazy. And crazy people take drugs. And so do normal people. And people who lose their closest beloveds to suicides and murders and drugs take drugs.  And crazy people who also happen to be rock star and genius and white trash and rapper, a rapper who sings about drugs on a regular basis- what, none of this gave it away?

“I was born with a tick in my brain, yeah fucked in the head- is he nuts? No, he’s insane.” It won’t get any more clear than this- but I’m afraid Em’s audience is even dumber than he already thinks.

Well, Bobby didn’t make it, and that is a hole in my heart that will never heal over. But Eminem did make it, and I’ve got my tacky-ass faux-diamond big backward E around my neck, in case anybody was unsure I’m a fan, but also just to decorate a memory of a tragic but stunning love. Not everyone can make it through this life alive, but Bobby got me hooked on Eminem and I’m ready to shake my booty in his memory to the badass beats as soon as they hit the airwaves.

Now everyone knows Eminem couldn’t get famous until he spewed out on purpose the shadiest shit he could think of, which says way more about his audience than it did about him. He called that alter ego Slim Shady, the persona of an insane white man who was bad, mad and dangerous to know, to quote Lord Byron’s lover.

So what’s with Nick Cannon getting his panties in a bunch because Marshall raps about Mariah? I know, I know, it’s not all that nice to call someone a whore, it isn’t. But in rap’s theatre of the absurd, is Eminem supposed to be the only player who doesn’t use foul language about bitches and hos? Every celeb who has ever made the tabloids is fair game in these rap attacks. Now, if Nick had just said “Yo, pipe down on my woman,” fine.

But he wrote this:

“A mediocre (at best) Eminem record that sounds like it was written in 2001,” Cannon blogged. “At first, I thought it was old material that had been dug up from when dude ‘fantasized’ about having a pretend fling with Mariah. … But all of a sudden I hear my name in the verse! My first reaction was like, ‘This is his new shit? Wow, that’s too bad.’

Okay, thing is Nick, I didn’t even know you were a rapper until this hit my Perez-radar. So thanks to Em for putting you on the map for me.  I thought you were Mariah’s boy toy, and wondered why a rich babe like her couldn’t choose someone hotter.

Then I looked you up on Wikipedia and found out you had a #46 hit. And you sang something about being a new cat on the block, being bigger then Elvis. I listened to two numbers on iTunes and thought it must be 1982- no, I’m serious…and what’s this Nickleodeon business? The Pops don’t like me number was kind of cute, I confess, but nowhere near the mastery of tongue twisting rhyme, or the depth and breadth of mister white bread emmie.

It’s fine to stand up for your wife- but it’s just not entirely wise for a not so big shot producer to talk down about the work of a serious big shot rapper/singer/songwriter/producer. You know, the cunning linguist who has won more than 100 prestigious awards for his music, including an Oscar.

Anyhow, while I was on Limewire I thought I’d see if I could get lucky and find the verboten Mariah number. It was just my luck that the net was leaky at that moment and soon I was blasting one of Eminem’s nastiest and best vernacular jungle gyms. On top of the witty explosion of rhymes matched perfectly to the beat, the backdrop to this mad rap is bagpipes, and some kind of Mirwais-y production noise that moves your feet against your will.  This number’s a mind-bending bundle of tumbling rhyme, maybe one of his best…sorry, “illest.”

I don’t know about the rest of the album, but Bagpipes is a long way from Nick L. Odeon’s kiddie-cinema-popcorn heap.

“Locked in Mariah’s wine cellar… all I had for lunch… was red wine more red wine and Captain Crunch… red wine for breakfast and for brunch… ms. hello kitty satin bedspread with satin funk… You can be a permanent fixture …in my lyrical mixture…I’m the miracle-whipped trickster…”

Oh, dear, and then darling Nikki  started babbling on about how dissing the Butterfly Effect was racist, ‘cause Mariah is the same racial mixture as our President Barack Obama, you see.  It’s just…arrogant….to pull the racism card for the little skinny white boy from Detroit who braved the mean streets with nothing but his quicksilver wit and then won the respect of the biggest and best black men in rap and hip hop music because, in their words, not mine, he is the best there.

Sexist, no doubt about it, but not racist. Shit, how about: what a clever, awesome song, but my wife’s not a whore. Even Elton John is man enough to take a diss but not me, so can you rewrite that totally-ill-Grammy-written –all-over-it number without my wife’s number?

I had wondered if the climate toward the new album would mix near-religious devotion with snide and fickle snickering about the washed up addict man, with no regard for the man behind the mask’s private pain and right to recluse. Because people are quick to fickleness, screaming sell-out even if their shopping bags are stuffed with chart toppers.

But now I predict something different entirely: what will happen next is Bagpipes from Baghdad will go onto  become one of Eminem’s most massive hits, pervading the airwaves until kingdom come,  in no small part to Mariah’s jealous two-“hit” wonder.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Botero’s Beautiful Horses: a few notes on Jan Conn’s new collection of poetry

Jan Conn, poet, biologist.

It is Jan’s biography, I believe, that makes her work completely different from anyone else’s, that gives layers to her words that we can unravel. She writes with the vivid imagery of Latin America fuels Isabel Allende’s genius, yet the fact that she is a scientist drives all of the mysteries within her words. These mysteries meld ancestral spirits into the cells and veins and wings of vines and birds and dust. Conn is a nouveau alchemist of sorts, knowing transformation is indeed the stuff of cellular biology, the very thing that will save ecology if we can. As a scientist, she spends her time chasing mosquitoes, and it is this attention to the smallest of things that brings ours to the big ones. Conn does sweat the small stuff, for it is the very stuff of life.

And if life is made up of atoms and of cells and molecules, literature is made of up of alphabets and words, funny black marks on a page or stone tablet that magically record the way we see the sky, the way we feel anger, the way we make love or go mad. Conn takes us to “the fable of pink, the agony of yellow.” We visit rooms “crammed with blue statuettes of the dead.” We are transported to a world with guavas and saffron and copper-winged chameleons and antelopes and alligator skulls.

“The Henry Moore bronze/resembles a reclining chacmool/ on whose chest fresh hearts were laid.”

The ancient mythology of the Americas, all fury and magic and hotheaded passion and sacrifice, and she brings these potions and powders and temples and mermaids and warriors and virgins and volcanoes into the unruffled cool of Canada. It is strange and sublime to hear a scientist tell us with conviction that the gods are alive.

Jan Conn
Botero’s Beautiful Horses
Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and of Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World). Both are available through amazon, or through her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

U2’s No Line on the Horizon

I’m tired of this art school music these past few years. Nothing against the hipsters but I want some music with blood and guts again. I’ve hummed along at The Social to all these bland generic bands with men in guyliner and skinny jeans. I’ve thumbs-upped the new new waves’ creativity though sometimes I longed for a simple melody instead.

Of course, all great music is built on the music of the past, so the tragically hep who never check out Bach or Loretta Lynn or Bob Seger oughtta be shot. But there’s a time for this new electro-gloom; there’s also a supershiny glow I get from the more buoyant fare on the airwaves. Hell, I’ve really been enjoying the Britney Circus, and I count a total of one in my circle who thought Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind was really rather sweet and inventive.

But I’m sick of all this emptiness, too, this cutesy opera to madness chic. Or to the endless malaise of being born filthy rich. I’m looking for more than a melody, even as I insist on one. I’m looking for meat, for an album that has some weight in my hands. I want poetry, though, not nonsense syllables layered in sync with synth, words that make me feel something spiritual. There will be more time for more disco more pop more more more bubbles in life but right now I need music with real claws, not Lee press-on nails.

I suppose all of this is why I’m so excited about the new U2. I’d never quite relegated them to shark jumpers, and doubtless there were many fans of their last years. But I admit I can’t name their last four albums and don’t own any of them. I have a few songs on iTunes.

But this year is different. No Line on the Horizon is moody, both dark and glorious, with occasional waves of beauty and ecstasy flooding you. There are stories here embedded right into the very notes of the music, into the flawless ultrasleek production of the sound.

Thing is, I think, back when Bono was a young idealist, an offbeat imp, seesawing under spiritual crisis and the cursed caul that turns a man into a poet, we were all drawn into his seductive intensity. Then I kind of lost his beat ‘cause he was too mature, too stable, too smarmy. He had my respect, of course. But all this time I’ve been a hot mess and he’s been changing the world, and I just couldn’t sit still through it all.

There’s more than a glimmer here again, within the soaring melodies and swooping vocals, of faith with torment, a stirring of raw lust just just just underneath, there’s the feeling I should be reading Wilde and Sartre both, at a café watching sad and crazy people go by.

With U2’s newest inspiration, they rock, they roll, they belt out soul, and it’s slick and. thick and rich and never gooey. But there’s a rawness and desolation that’s been missing from their gracious goodwill these past years. It’s the kind of  album that goes well with wine, and lots of it.

Yes, yes, give me wine, I’m tired of measuring wine these days, give me one two three four glasses, five, no eight, give me pale Mozart tapestries on beautiful Laura, give me guitar beside Trout Lake, or better yet, the Mississippi where vampires played with an old mojo man on saxophone. Oh, give me the days when I made love behind dumpsters and pierced my lips and nose, oh, give me neural plasticity, give me back the kind of girl who could drive a stick shift through the desert.

I’m tired of measuring dollars, carbs, of doing everything in my power to be more my age. Oh give me those sunny mojito days laying in the bruising sun atop the boat with Al and the girls, give me endless sunrise serotonin, oh, bring me back from the dead into danger, let me fall in love or feel sick with lust and fear. What has become of me, in early on a Saturday night, drinking tea and watching my cat eat ham?

This new album gives me optimism that the best is yet to come and the stretch ahead is paved with subtle pleasures if not wild ones. It’s sort of a relief, to be honest. But it also feels like a funeral, a tribute album for just how well-adjusted I’ve become. It’s exhausting, careening heedlessly into middle of the road.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Incandescent Transcendence

Incandescent Transcendence

I hope you will all forgive the hopelessly flawed and erratic schedule of my columns. When I tell you that my infrequent and distracted postings are due to cataclysmic creativity, I trust you will understand. I must follow the muse elsewhere when she calls. This absolute inspiration surging through me, plus the busy reality of writing six various columns, has lately meant less attention to this one.

It has also meant some deep happiness, a rare treat. Happiness usually shows up for me in fleeting, elusive snippets, bright shiny fireworks that snap, crackle, and pop, gone by morning.

It also visits by knocking frequently on tiny and profound windows- black current in a favourite teapot, the man with the long eyelashes and gorgeous rippling biceps at the gym, a special poem in my email from Tara, the sliver of moon cutting through the navy expanse of spring dark.

But when I’m in the zone, really in the zone, for long and productive stretches, where brainstorming and output and focus share centre stage, I’m deeply, truly happy. It’s the most profound happiness I know.

In this period of my life I have been trying to transform the compulsion I have for over stimulation, as an exercise in coping with anxiety. I’m reaching for the kind of confidence I need to produce my truest work instead of giving all of my time and heart to other people’s projects, or to jobs I hate.

I’m reaching for peace, and for space, and I’m praying for time alone and time to heal from battle scars and the courage to think positively. I’m weeding out, breathing slower, letting go, moving on. And I’m making every effort to fill the hours with my art and not get lost in my unpredictable impulses and their consequences.

I’m fencing up my heart to say no more strays, not now, even though Timothy Findley once wrote, the “lost are so beautiful” and when you grow up in a labyrinth of madness, you see the beauty in Suzanne’s seaweed, too. But sometimes you get strangled in it, you drown. I’m practicing boundaries, I’ve promised to triple guess my heart, to look both ways before I cross the street.

It’s all about freeing up space. Mental and spiritual space. Space is scary. There’s too much of yourself in space, not enough noise, not enough distraction. The claustrophobia is deafening. Just you and your grief. You and the truth. You have to face what you don’t want to face, make peace with things you cannot change, come to terms with the dead because you yourself are not dead.

It’s about freeing up time. Taking the extraneous, unnecessary things away, so that a new gift of time and space emerges. Letting fall away the ones who didn’t really understand or love, the ones in whom you invested too much for nothing, and stop chasing after them, and stop giving time to the hurt that ripped you up, because you’re toughening up because you’re finally calling spades spades- (whenever you can see them and you’re not particularly deluded.)

Those parts always spent in upheaval and upset, in exhaustive depletion, too sensitive, too abandoned, too isolated, too surrounded- now they are free space for the people and things who have bolstered me, taught me, cushioned my falls, saw me, knew me- held me, not held me hostage. And more time for even more of my work. Less time chasing pavement? Not filling time with filler.

And here in all of this empty space, space that is lonely and unfamiliar, you know no one can rescue you after all, and you’ve been wrong to think it every time. But here you are. Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone.

And I have left that space wide open for the Muse and reading and creating voraciously, both written and visual work. I get sketchy now if I don’t get enough hours out of the day to put down the words I have in my head. I am calm and focused and resolved. I’m researching and writing all the time about fascinating people, finding out how other intense, disturbed, and serious artists function(ed). My novel is rapidly taking form, work I’m proud of so far and hope you will see one day and agree. I’m learning so much about wildly disparate topics- spices, the dudes who wrote the Bible, intersexuality, and the hard-drinking and serious writing life of Carson McCullers. And I’ve found fresh inspirations for painting, realized that my painting and writing are really interwoven, interdependent, fuelled one by the other.

Last year I was so supremely depressed I wondered how I could go on, and no doubt I will feel that way again, maybe tomorrow.

But today I can’t imagine how I could have been so pathetically sentimental, crying over spilled milk.

Happiness is not about the presence of an emotion or a distraction from hurt, and nor is it the absence of sorrow. It’s about investing all of your energy into renewable resources, if you can. Working hard at whatever you’re doing, and doing your best at it. About making time for silence and for art. It’s about letting nothing stand in the way of your calling. Nothing. That means not stopping even if it doesn’t work out financially. It might never. You do it because you can think of nothing else. You tap into flow, into the most alive parts of the universe and you don’t ever run empty.

You don’t run empty because you are no longer giving to distractions, the past, or to toxic people, the space and time that you are now giving to the muse. You have invited her to live with you, to sleep with you, to be with you forever. You have invited her in to stay, not just to come and go whenever you’re not busy.

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can find her books at www.amazon.com.