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.

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.

Allison Crowe’s Tidings of Comfort and Joy and the Opposite, Too

Friday, November 30, 2008 Allison Crowe at Heliconian Hall

It’s too early to be sure, but I’ll go out on a limb to say Allison Crowe will go down in history as the brightest northern star in music. Yes, I realize we’ve got Joni Mitchell, Glen Gould, Leonard Cohen, and Sarah McLachlan. Hell, we’ve got Gordon Lightfoot. Then there’s bratty troublemaker Avril, who can be a bit embarrassing with her brand of small-town gutter punk- but on a good day sounds like Sinead O’Connor. But I think all of these will graciously relinquish their places to allow Allison to take her rightful seat on the throne as composer, writer, pianist, vocalist, and innovator extraordinaire.

Like I said, it’s too early to tell. Little sister Alley’s only 27, and just becoming a household name thanks to her stunning cover of Papa Leonard’s Hallelujah. She wasn’t trying to upstage K.D. Lang, whose lulling sultry country interpretation stunned us in 2004, but upstage her she did. Alley’s live number became something of a cult on YouTube, and for many fans and strangers alike, it’s the song they hum when they think of Allison Crowe.

Of course, history is seldom made out of a single single, no matter how astonishing, and the girl is a far cry from being a one hit wonder. Crowe’s future reign over Canadian pop divadom is simply the logical result of her prodigy. I picture her, not long from now, under spotlight behind a grand piano, on some massive music awards show, in a black Dior gown with Converse or combat boots. She’ll make a few of her peculiar trademark quips to let us share her nervousness, and we’ll begin to shift uneasily in our chairs, but in the next moment we’ll be shattered by impossible sounds. For Crowe formidably commands the piano to her will, sometimes battering it with all the fury of a hurricane, sometimes coaxing it with the lightest touch into sensual submission. There are few people in all of history who can play the piano as well as Allison Crowe.

For those of us who were nursed primarily by noises that beep and blip, there is something primal and unnerving about this music revelation. The piano might be in the way, ironically, of Crowe’s immediate success, because with her nervous, curvy beauty and big voice, the music industry would have her right now blasting the radio waves with something a little more Pink or Avril. But this dressed down diva’s extraordinary prowess and piercing vocal abilities are really just accompaniment for the accompaniment. And while she’s quirky and contemporary in her own way, the girl’s got an old soul that rightly insists on her own vision. To that end, she began Rubenesque Records and has an array or records already- records where her boss did not ask her to change a thing. While some might say you can’t be a pop songstress and an instrumental genius at the same time, in the same concert halls, to the same audience, Crowe begs to differ.

Sure, the cherry chapstick brand of buoyant bubbledom is infectious to be sure, but there’s plenty of that, it’s the definition of pop already. Allison’s going to merge a more serious kind of performance back into public consciousness, just as we all get tired of music that is made out of plug in popularity. And her intimidating intensity is rather addictive, and that’s why I rushed back to Toronto’s Heliconian Hall to see her Tidings tour, though I saw her perform already this year. The show was opened by lovely folk singer Stacey Burke, who set the ambiance for excellence.

Tidings, Crowe’s latest, is a different kind of Christmas album. Recorded by Larry Anschell (Pearl Jam, k-os, etc), it features a few old favourites like It Came Upon a Midnight Clear and O Holy Night, and Allison soared during these songs at the show. A real spine tingler was hearing Joni Mitchell’s River rediscovered.

It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

With this haunting Canadian hallmark, Crowe drew us inside, and then worked her hoodoo magic with rafter-raising, bone-rattling, nerve-shattering manic music. It was an almost pagan incantation to the gods of winter, the howling petitions of ancient circles for peace in chaos, bringing us from the vast and terrible freezing storms into the shelter of promise that Christmas’s very heart signifies.

Allison interrupted the shepherd’s watch by night to take us deep into the heart of darkness with her decidedly anti-festive Disease- all about the shallow end of the gene pool. Here is where you’ll glimpse some of Crowe’s deepest powers. Though her wide-ranging covers demonstrate beautifully that she can always outdo an original and remain quite humble and clueless that she’s doing so, her real talents go even deeper. Disease is a modern masterpiece, a full symphony or opera if you will within a few moments of music. Here she conjures hell, and shows her full mystery as a composer. (Wherever ‘words and music by Allison Crowe’ appear, you may be changed or damaged beyond repair, forever.) Here you descend into the pit of hell, quite literally. Crowe may have been burned at the stake for this dark spell in other times- her spell is more powerful than Dante’s Inferno, and before the literati come to hang me, too, I simply ask you to watch this frenzied fit of insanity before you say it isn’t so.

It’s powerful, dark magic like this that may make some critics tell her to tone it down and pray for bubblegum, but rest assured Crowe doesn’t leave you in hell, for her heart is full of hope and she has an undeniable sweetness: indeed, her emotions in motion span the full bipolar range from despair and disbelief, smoothing into calm and serene, then straight up into the heights of soaring ecstasy.

And while the slick and sickly ick and goo of the Christmas recordings by, say, Clay Aiken or Michael Buble are the real reasons people put a hole in their head over the Christmas holidays, Tidings might help you find your way back to whole.

Not everyone can bring down the divine, not everyone can be vast and mythological or bring the gifts of the gods into a winter’s night. But Allison Crowe channels the spirit each and every time.

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

Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor with Richard Jenkins

Despite my reputation for abject emotionalism, I seldom leave a cinema sobbing uncontrollably. But after Tom McCarthy’s very special film The Visitor, I could not stop crumpling my face into a dwindling roll of toilet paper. Nor could I stop myself from dropping into a pub for a few glasses of chardonnay to help numb the pain as I collected my thoughts.

The review I’d read in one of the Toronto weeklies hadn’t said much about the film. It gave it five stars, and said something like “a professor from Connecticut returns to an apartment he keeps in New York City and finds a couple living there.” Not much to go on, admittedly, but the reviewer said that telling anything else would give too much away.

I am indeed intrigued by being randomly led into films or books, and rather than head toward the surely fun new Angelina Jolie action flick, I took a gamble that this would be something special.

Walter Vale, a bored and lonely widower, is sleepwalking through a meaningless life. His only joy is the piano. His wife was a pianist, but he has no knack for the thing at all, and the film opens with him dismissing yet another piano teacher. By chance he is called to a dull economics conference to present a paper he co-authored. He protests to his superiors that he barely worked on the paper- he really just lent his name and a small contribution to a burgeoning researcher. His partner is ill, however, and he has no choice but to head to New York to make the presentation alone. He enters his seldom-used apartment, one he kept with his wife, only to find two illegal immigrants living there. They had rented it from a scam artist.

Richard Jenkins as Walter recalls all the forgotten subtleties of acting that are swept under today’s special effects and wild chemistry and big names and huge plot lines. Most of Walter’s depressed, curious, shy utterances are along the lines of ‘thank you’ and ‘I will.’ Somehow, these simple deliveries convey the wild transformation going on within him. At first, he is terrified to find the beautiful Senegalese woman in his bathtub, and her Syrian boyfriend throws him up against a wall. Soon, as the couple realizes they have been duped, and that they are indeed in Walter’s apartment, the trio is reduced to awkward pleasantries as the couple attempt to arrange lodging. Walter feels for their plight and goes out on a limb to invite them to stay for a few days.

This chance encounter with strangers from far reaches of the globe changes him forever. Forget the fast pace of New York cop shows, the glitz of big name art, commerce, or fashion: New York is made up of these diverse peoples, and their everyday struggles to land free from strife near Lady Liberty. Haaz Sleiman is Tarek, a handsome and funny Syrian who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone and play his drums. Danai Gurira is Zainab, an alien from Senegal who handcrafts jewelry and ekes out a living in the street markets. When Tarek and Walter discover their mutual love for music, Tarek insists on bringing the old professor to jazz clubs and outdoor drumming circles, and Walter surprises himself by learning how to play.

One day Tarek is arrested in the subway and taken to a detention centre, despite his protests that he is not a terrorist. He disappears into the immigration system, and Walter does everything he can to protest this injustice. He even takes Tarek’s mother to see Phantom of the Opera, a lifelong dream of hers, and she opens up about their life in and escape from Syria.

The fears, the hopes, the anguish, the built relationships, and the uncertainties that make up the life of people who are desperate not to fall through the cracks- here’s a film that effectively shows another side of the North American dream story. As I watched the film with my BFF who struggled to gain Canadian citizenship after leaving Peru, we both recalled the emotional hell of immigration, from two different perspectives.

I’m Canadian born, and grateful. We both thought of our Lebanese friend Sal who was heading to New York City to sign some official documents the morning of September 11. Needless to say his trip was cancelled that day, and his family waited many more years. Of course, the whole time, I was waiting with anxious terror for my husband to receive citizenship. He was a sailor from Serbia, one of the most war torn and volatile political situations in the world. I lived in constant terror that he would be deported and that I would never see him again. What happened instead was even worse, and that the contributing stresses led to addictions from which he was unable to escape. He died before his papers were processed. Now, like Walter, I’m alone.

And hence the reason for my teary-eyed exit from the cinema. Now there have been many films about the horrors of world politics, the dream of North American freedom, the epics of the immigration waves, the building of the Irish or Italian boroughs or the plight of refugees, the struggles and the victories and the defeats. But this quiet little film by Tom McCarthy, with its understated humour and its unflinching realism, is the one you will remember.

And what was the moral of this story without a happy ending? That you never, ever know who will touch you or how, you never know what you will lose, and like Walter with his new bongo, you never know what you will be given.

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

In Which to the Author’s Dismay, she has to concede that the girl rocks

Now this might be the weirdest thing I will ever say: I’m loving the new Ashlee Simpson album.

Who knew the spokeslady of the insipid generation would start channeling Avril, Gwen Stefani, Blondie lite, and a little Cyndi Lauper- possibly in time to redeem herself?

I hated even admitting such a thing, trust me. But Rolling Stone gave it the seal of approval and I thought, huh? Where am I?

So, yeah, checked it out. The lyrics are…horrible.. horribly unfortunate most of the time. But not all the time. It’s the type of awful that’s going to be embarrassing a few years from now when she’s putting out killer shit. And I think she will. Some of this already is.

I do so love a good pop ditty. I love silly boyfriend songs that thump and bump and jump about, stuff that takes you from the skipping rope days right through to the ol’ pine boat. But I’m heavily prejudiced by utter disdain for the Simpsons sisters. I’ve been embarrassed for them over the years, but at least Jessica’s got her beauty. The only thing interesting about Ashlee Simpson has been how her boyfriend made the word ‘guyliner’ part of group consciousness.

Though I cringe frequently at the lyrics, there’re other times when I’m genuinely thinking ‘clever.’ I would absolutely be up on the dance floor, and that’s getting rarer and rarer though I said it never would….

Some songs are getting better with repeated listening, always a real test in my mind. There’s a lot of fun to be had here, and I like to be silly and foolish a great deal of the time. Surely, Ash’s not the best voice in the industry, but not half bad, either. It’s the very first time I’ve ever seen the girl show a personality: tons of it! The Rolling Stone mentioned some ‘appealing honesty,’ and sure enough, a sprinkling of that and a good dose of genuine confidence really show her stepping up to the plate.

Most astonishing of all, there’s at least one track that I would call ‘brilliant.’ I couldn’t help but notice the title of Little Miss Obsessive right off the bat, given my blog name. Then I couldn’t help myself cranking it up loud, over and over. And I can’t wait to hear the long mixes at Fly, hands in the air, see you there!

Now how embarrassing is this? Go check it out.

Such a Nice Guy: The Outlaw, Larry Norman

Such a Nice Guy: The Outlaw, Larry Norman
4/8/1947 – 2/24/2008

“I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up,” Larry Norman said the day before his heart stopped. “I am ready to fly home.”

Larry was a natural storyteller, and he drew them from two sources only: real life, and the Bible. His songs are all vignettes of various characters and Larry’s observations about human spiritual nature. I veered a little far from the straight and narrow to always swallow his brand of Christianity. Then again, Larry was also banned from the conservative world. He was extremely free with the words ‘rock n roll’ in his songs, and he refused any of the saccharine polish in his music that characterized the burgeoning field of contemporary gospel music. He said it was never his intention to preach to the converted. He never apologized for rock’n’roll.

He was truly a radical because his integrity was never flashy. He actually tried, as best he could, to emulate Christ, not the trends of religion that change throughout history. No one could tell him to cut his hair or stop helping homeless people. On top of a spirit of real compassion, Larry was enormously creative, and had a distinctive voice that could convey a stunning range of emotions like no one else. His mild-manned, quiet fortitude gave way to a soaring falsetto. He was also an amazing poet with a real gift for the small story in every ordinary moment. Though he lived with heart problems since he was a young man, he demonstrated the peace that passeth understanding. When his fears about the future surfaced, when anxieties took hold, he examined himself from the inside out to find the source of life and to spread that peace to us. He also had a dry, understated sense of humour that I loved. His ministry was a blessing to many.

Larry’s peculiar quietness provided some sort of humble unity with his audience. He could rock the flock, but his unassuming nature was at odds with being a ‘rock star’. Larry managed to dodge extreme fame by refusing to abandon the Christ-centred songs to go into secular rock like his colleagues, including Dylan and Clapton. He performed with The Doors. But Larry preferred the Solid Rock to the glitterati of rock and roll, and that’s exactly what he called his independent recording label. Still, he was famous enough to find his name alongside Elvis Presley, his other idol, in the Gospel Hall of Fame. And the Simpsons used one of his song titles in a comic book: “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”

When I was still a little girl, I went to see Larry Norman in upper state New York. He prayed with me, walked with me, after the show, as if he had all the time in the world. I never forgot that, and later, at a show in St. Catharines, Ontario, he recognized me. I couldn’t believe it. I was fortunate enough to see three of his shows in my life. I wish I’d seen fifty.

from I Hope I See You in Heaven, Larry Norman

“Now I’m sitting in this garden in the middle of my days
And my memories drift and harden as the years they slip away,
And I’ve been looking in this mirror at the age around my eyes
Time is such an earnest laborer, precision is his neighbor.
Lay my body in the ground, but let my spirit touch the sky.”

Until we meet again, my friend.

Visit the writer, Lorette C. Luzajic, at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
You can order her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, through indigo or amazon online.

Hope for the Flowery (while listening to Elton John)

You know it’s a melancholy day if you’re listening to Elton John at five pm. It might even be the kind of night that I shut off all my phones and my Mac, the kind of night I stay inside and read Cooking Light in the granny chair. Hell, somehow I’ve acquired an afghan this winter…yeah.

Seriously, I’m really feeling the lull of Elton’s gorgeous schmaltz. Elton annoys me, overall, ever since he recycled Marilyn’s song and dedicated it, along with that England’s rose tripe, to poor Diana. Did not the Great Huntress and Hunted deserve her own exquisite lullaby? He ruined a moment, but hell, no one seemed to notice but me. I can’t doubt that the grief he was experiencing at the time made him crazy, but certainly you could have come up with something just for Diana? You’ve got to wonder why he forewent the chance to earn another zillion when my trashiest girlfriend, Anna Nicole Smith, tripped the light fantastic last year. And he mustn’t miss the Britney opportunity ahead!

I must forgive any of this cheese, for the madcap genius and originality of his better numbers. There’s something so old-school about the EJ experience. I must forgive the man for thinking he was locked in a closet- anyone who wears such outlandish, garish, exquisitely flaming clothes is definitely making a statement. Loud and clear, sister. And on top of all of that amazing gaiety, there are the odd moments of musical brilliance and those soaring, friendly, sad-tinged happy vocals. Certainly as an entertainer, El is absolutely, well, entertaining.

I’m not super versed in the man’s magic- I’m scared off fast by shit like Blessed and Can You Feel the Bile. It’s not cruel: if I’m a harsh judge, it’s only because of the moments when Elton gets it. Those moments are pure artistry. Creativity and originality at their apex, with a stellar set of pipes and a stunning engagement, intensity and depth. I’m talking about Rocket Man, Sacrifice, about Benny and the Jets, I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues, Sad Songs. Operatic, but easy going. So what’s going on when dude sells out to this kind of Lion King ballad pap? I don’t know, man, I don’t know.

The very gay bravado of his cinematic selections and collaborator Bernie Taupin’s thoughtful songwriting make sketches of kooky people we might even know. Elton’s blend of swishiness, sentiment, and madness is a very unique brand. He’s just the epitome of flaming, in the most grandiose and chummy ways possible.

And then he might make smarmy, poorly thought out barbs at Madonna, who made a world where he’s allowed out of the closet, but I guess that’s just him being the cranky old queen that he is now. He ain’t getting any younger. My bravado lies largely in my youth, also, as is the way for nearly every sentient being.

Still, for both of us I hope our best is yet to come. A fine moment like Nikita can be a nostalgic trigger for a finer moment, just as velvety, and darker. And pure, polished bubbles of tremendous joy and shininess like Don’t Go Breaking My Heart may be a glossy memory next to another frivolous morsel of sweet nothingness. Despite that my heart was broken by such predictable consumerist slickness as that Lion King debacle, in truth that was something of the comeback to respectability EJ had to have after a rattling career. Recall how many queens hid behind Glam Rock, as if no one could tell. The flamboyance we now revel in, the Gok Wans and Co Jos, all owes a debt of heritage to Elton John. All this ridiculous movie soundtrack balladry just proves that the wildest of us will mellow out in middle age. It’s true that the stress of being forced to admit he was bisexual in the mid-70s closed off the brightest chapter of his career, and from then on was a struggle. He even married a woman, an act I might call cowardly with my cavalier attitude of the Free to Be generation. But I can’t know what it’s like to be afraid your career will end because you are gay. Of course dude had cocaine and alcohol problems and an eating disorder. So did Elvis. Under the stress of fame, a girl needs a little something-something, and how easily that spins out of control as you become a spin-off in our disposable world.

It doesn’t matter if I feel ready to hurl when I hear songs like Tiny Dancer and Circle of Life. There are dozens of shining gems and hundreds of perfectly good rhinestones: I can leave the plastic on the shelf for someone else to coo over. I also have to respect the man because I know he tries to be flexible. He’s been brave enough to bridge the flaming arts with the testosterone riddled fury of gangsta in unusual creative endeavours like Ghetto Gospel. He bravely moved on from the hissy fit (so did Moby, still waiting for B y George to come around) and performed with Eminem in front of the world at the Grammies. This is what I love- to be surprised, to have the unexpected happen. Stan is one of the more unusual chunks of collaborative genius out there. This kind of spectacle is truly diversity. Rumour has it that he’ll be on Eminem’s next project, as well, and that his upcoming solo album might be hip hop. This is THEATRE , dahhhling.

It’s not just limited to the hot and tragic hip hop boys, either. There are more dazzling surprises: Kate Bush changed Rocket Man into a crisp, icy blade, it’s own ethereal world, clean and fantastical. Take three, Baby Stewie. I know the day that Stewie reads my poetry is the day I can say I did what I set out to do.

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