From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V7 #158 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Friday, April 24 1998 Volume 07 : Number 158 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Robyn 2001: A No-Hit Oddity [Natalie Jacobs ] I know you all love TORI (and not my favorite, which is Spelling) [lj lin] Re: Flann [M R Godwin ] Re: (a wee bit of NMH content) [donald andrew snyder ] Anton Barbeau vs. Jarvis Cocker in San Fran... ["Janet M. Remley" <75143.] Re: I know you all love TORI [lj lindhurst ] Re: I know you all love TORI [MARKEEFE ] Re: Verve [james.dignan@stonebow.otago.ac.nz (James Dignan)] Kristin Hersh in Portland, last night [John Barrington Jones Subject: Robyn 2001: A No-Hit Oddity >Was the "both of them" referring maybe to both Hitchcocks (Robyn and Alfred) >rather than suggesting that he has a fanbase of two people? Let's hope so. I don't think it was. It sounds to me like a snigger at Robyn's lack of popularity. Feh! >PS Last night, I gave serious consideration to starting up a NMH mailing >list. Hmmm.... To talk about all two of their albums? :) I bought "On Avery Island" over the weekend and have not been especially impressed, except for "Song Against Sex," but I'm hoping it'll grow on me. >Your reference to "yer man" James Joyce makes me wonder whether you are >also aware of the great Flann O'Brien (aka Miles na cGopaleen, real name >Brian O'Nolan). "At Swim-Two-Birds" and "The Third Policeman" are not like >anything else I've ever read - surreal, ludic, funny. He died of drink in >1966, which must make him sort of a pre-post-modernist (or a >proto-post-modernist)? Flann O'Brien is god. 'Nuff said. (Quail, have you thought of including something about him in the Libyrinth?) "At Swim-Two-Birds" is my favorite, but I have to say that, as a writer, I find the thought of fictional characters taking revenge on their author to be a bit chilling... n., looking over her shoulder ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 10:26:56 -0400 From: lj lindhurst Subject: I know you all love TORI (and not my favorite, which is Spelling) TimesI copied this from the NY Times site!! uh, yeah...I am really good friends with them, and they said I could copy it! Really! I am having lunch with the NY Times this afternoon. They're a great bunch of guys. They all keep guns in their desks. - ----------------------------------- At Lunch With/By Jon Pareles Tori Amos: Disclosing Intimacies, Enjoying The Shock Value NEW YORK -- Tori Amos takes pains with her image. As she rehearsed for her appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman" a few weeks ago, she had her keyboard and piano moved to improve the camera angle, then pondered just how high her microphone should be tilted. After she raised it and noted the exact level for the stage crew, a bystander asked whether lifting her head improved her vocals. "It's never about the music," she said with a laugh. "It's about the chin!" Ms. Amos may be careful about her public face, but she isn't exactly inhibited. In her songs and her poses, control and abandon strike a fascinating, uneasy truce. For the cover of her album "Boys for Pele," Ms. Amos appeared mud-spattered and holding a gun and, in another photograph, nursing a piglet at her breast. The video clip for her new single, "Spark," shows her blindfolded, wrists tied behind her back, stumbling through an ominous countryside as she sings, "You say you don't want it again and again, but you don't really mean it." On the three albums she has released since 1992, each selling at least a million copies, Ms. Amos has sung about God and about being raped, about masochism and murder, about callousness and transcendence. And in conversation over a lunch of mussels, french fries and red wine at Le Bilboquet on the Upper East Side, she was merrily unguarded about everything except the identity of her longtime boyfriend. "The songs are really open," she said. "But there are things I'm really private about. People, I'm sure, will have a real chuckle about me saying that. Like, what is left?" Ms. Amos was in New York City for the final technical work on her new album, "From the Choirgirl Hotel," due for release on May 5. She is to return for a performance Thursday night at Irving Plaza here, previewing the songs with her new band; the concert sold out almost instantly. For lunch, she was dressed demurely, wearing a sweater over a dove-gray top and black pants. Around her neck was a small crucifix dotted with rubies, an odd accessory for a Methodist pastor's daughter who has bitterly rejected organized Christianity. "It's a rebellion against my rebellion," she said. "And it's really pretty, too. It's a great symbol, an ancient symbol. I love the blood. I love the passion." From the beginning, Ms. Amos's songs have been wayward and volatile, full of mood swings and musical leaps. They are held together by her meticulous, classical piano technique, while her voice swoops from innocence to jaded sultriness, from bemusement to bitterness. "I would change my clothes to be able to sing the songs on this album," she said. "Because you have to become the Sybil of songwriting. "I've really been interested in allowing myself to be taken over by the characters in the songs," she said by way of explanation. "You have to change to allow the presence of the entities of these songs to come. For any songwriter to say they do it on their own, well, they must have a very lonely life. I have a very busy life because these girls are coming in and out all the time, since I was a little girl. I'm never really alone." The songs are intimate, but Ms. Amos refuses to call them confessional. "I don't like that term, and I'll tell you why," she said. "When you confess, you're asking for absolution. And I'm not asking for anybody's approval." Ms. Amos, 34, started playing the piano when she was 2 1/2 "I wanted to be a ballerina," she said. "But my thighs are as big as rhinoceroses and I have no time in my feet. All my time is in my hands." She was accepted at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore at age 5 and was expelled six years later for improvising too much. As a teen-ager, she sang Gershwin songs, her father's favorites, at piano bars. She worked in Los Angeles with a rock band that had the unfortunate name Y Kant Tori Read, which released an album in 1988 before breaking up. After she moved to England in 1990, she began recording her own songs as she heard them: with her piano at the center, moving from hymns to classical filigree to bluesy vamps. Her first album, "Little Earthquakes," spoke to young women coming of age and torn between shame and desire. In a tangle of religion and sexuality, her songs' narrators were sometimes victimized, sometimes triumphant. "Every day I crucify myself," she sang in the album's first song. Loyal fans followed her increasingly free-associative songs on her next two albums, "Under the Pink" in 1994 and "Boys for Pele" in 1996. The Internet buzzes with interpretations of lines like "The weasel squeaks faster than a seven-day week"; Ms. Amos has such a widespread following in cyberspace that she is releasing one new song, "Merman," only as a computer download. Ms. Amos said her first album was like a diary; her second, like a painting, and her third like "a woman's journey across her own River Styx." Her fourth is like a hotel; the girls staying there are songs. "I saw the girls being like a singing group, because they're very independent, but they hang out together. They have their own solar systems, they have their own family trees, but I did see them having margaritas by the pool. Sometimes they let me sing with them." Many of Ms. Amos's lyrics on the new album remain oblique, amid recurring images of surrender, addiction, lost babies and womanly power. One key to the songs, she said, is that she had a miscarriage near Christmas in 1996. "I didn't write the record until that happened, and it was quite a shock. The songs were a huge part of me understanding my feelings," she said. "I had never appreciated life like that before." "The songs started to come," she said. "The music always comes in my darkest hour, and the music is always so giving. I have this picture of an endless well somewhere, I don't know where it is -- in the star systems out there. And the more that you're open to it the more that it keeps coming." Ms. Amos made her new album in Cornwall, England, 10 miles from the ocean. The studio is a converted barn; the neighbors are a chicken farm on one side, a sheep farm on the other. "The farmers are cool," Ms. Amos said. "Their attitude is, 'If you turn it up, let's just hope we get more milk."' In fact, she did turn up the sound. Some of her new songs surround her piano with aggressive rhythms and electronic noise. "The effects are part of the psyche of each girl," she said. "I looked at the engineers and I said, 'All those funny knobs over there, do they do stuff?' They said, 'They do more stuff than you can imagine.' So I said, 'Let's do stuff.' It's sonic geometry." Some of the new songs muse over loss and guilt and forgiveness; others flaunt an assertive sexuality. "There's a thread of my life running through the songs, but it's a tiny little thread," she said. "The songs never let me forget that. They let me know, as if they're saying, 'We live and breathe and exist, and you just happen to see us because of something that was happening in your life at the time.' They say, 'Tori, it's not just about you.' And humbly I say, 'Oh, thank you, you who is the song."' "You can be anybody or anything in a song," she said. "Nobody controls what your relationship is in a song or who you are in it. And nobody owns it. I'm a literary hooker. I will sit there and hang out with somebody just to see, OK, is there a reflection of them in me? Or are we adversaries? As a person, I don't like confronting people. I'll do anything to not confront a situation. But as a writer, I'll confront Mother Teresa if the songs are taking me there." One song, "She's Your Cocaine," puzzles over a man's attraction to a woman who will destroy him. "I've seen myself become quite angry because somebody that I love has been dragged through the streets emotionally," Ms. Amos said. "A vicious narcissist is hard for me to take. But a yummy narcissist, are you kidding? You're talking to one." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 15:45:34 +0100 (BST) From: M R Godwin Subject: Re: Flann On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, James Dignan wrote: [re Flann O'Brien] > great stuff, if somewhat confusing. ASTB, IIRC, deals with a novelist > writing a novel about a novelist whose characters come to life and take > over his life. At Swim-Two-Birds has at least one additional level. There is an autobiographical part about the student who is writing the book about the novelist whose characters come to life. Oh, and there's a pooka and a good fairy who argue a lot - there's a king who keeps getting mixed up with watercress - and some cowboys. I wonder who owns the film rights? - - Mike Godwin ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 12:02:02 -0500 (CDT) From: donald andrew snyder Subject: Re: (a wee bit of NMH content) On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Eb wrote: > PS Last night, I gave serious consideration to starting up a NMH mailing > list. Hmmm.... well if you did I would've known they were playing in Chicago Sat. in competition w/ the Apples in Stereo. NMH is at Lounge Axe and AiS are at House of Blues. Knowing that Jeff and Robert are buds, I would guess that there will be some form of gathering. So my question to those in the know: Would the joint effort take place at LA (my guess) or HoB (Susan - are AiS opening for Superdrag)? Any input (private e-mail is fine) is appreciated, though I'm already leaning twds the $7 NMH show. Thanks, Andy ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 13:09:19 -0700 From: Eb Subject: Re: I know you all love TORI >"I've really been interested in allowing myself to be taken over by the >characters in the songs," she said by way of explanation. "You have to >change to allow the presence of the entities of these songs to come. For >any songwriter to say they do it on their own, well, they must have a >very lonely life. I have a very busy life because these girls are coming >in and out all the time, since I was a little girl. I'm never really >alone." [clip] >Ms. Amos said her first album was like a diary; her second, like a >painting, and her third like "a woman's journey across her own River >Styx." Her fourth is like a hotel; the girls staying there are songs. > >"I saw the girls being like a singing group, because they're very >independent, but they hang out together. They have their own solar >systems, they have their own family trees, but I did see them having >margaritas by the pool. Sometimes they let me sing with them." [clip] >"The songs started to come," she said. "The music always comes in my >darkest hour, and the music is always so giving. I have this picture of >an endless well somewhere, I don't know where it is -- in the star >systems out there. And the more that you're open to it the more that it >keeps coming." [clip] >"There's a thread of my life running >through the songs, but it's a tiny little thread," she said. "The songs >never let me forget that. They let me know, as if they're saying, 'We >live and breathe and exist, and you just happen to see us because of >something that was happening in your life at the time.' They say, 'Tori, >it's not just about you.' And humbly I say, 'Oh, thank you, you who is >the song."' [clip] >"A vicious narcissist is hard for me to take. But a yummy >narcissist, are you kidding? You're talking to one." I just keep hearing that Howard Stern drop-in in my head, with that harsh voice barking "Shut UP! Shut UP! Shut UP!" over and over.... Groan, Eb ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 16:00:31 -0400 From: "Janet M. Remley" <75143.1676@compuserve.com> Subject: Anton Barbeau vs. Jarvis Cocker in San Fran... 8% RH content.(Yeah, right...) For all you Bay Area fegs who won't have gotten enough quirky-go-lucky up-with-people pop after two nights in a row of Robyn's head, the Anton Barbeau Drag Team 3 will be in town on Sunday, May 3rd at the Hotel Utah (4th & Bryant) doing an early (8pm) show for FREE ($0)! This is a good thing. Anton's band might be familiar to some of you already, as they have opened for Robyn a couple times. Rumor has it that Jarvis Cocker may show up. Now you know. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 18:45:12 -0400 From: lj lindhurst Subject: Re: I know you all love TORI >[clip] >>Ms. Amos said her first album was like a diary; her second, like a >>painting, and her third like "a woman's journey across her own River >>Styx." Her fourth is like a hotel; the girls staying there are songs. Yeah, this part completely nauseated me, as well as the part about her crucifixion being a "rebellion against my rebellion". Come on! lj ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 19:40:33 EDT From: MARKEEFE Subject: Re: I know you all love TORI In a message dated 98-04-23 18:57:46 EDT, you write: << Ms. Amos said her first album was like a diary; her second, like a >>painting, and her third like "a woman's journey across her own River >>Styx." Her fourth is like a hotel; the girls staying there are songs. Yeah, this part completely nauseated me >> And I think the "Crucify" EP was like an immense, yet ill-fated, cruise ship filled with passengers sailing from Europe to America. . . oh, no, wait. . . maybe it was just like a CD with some songs on it. I like Tori, but she can be kind of hippy-dippy sometimes. Maybe she wouldn't have to go to such great lengths to explain her music (via the press) if her lyrics weren't so deeply mired in obscurity -- I mean, if ya write good songs, they will speak for themselves. O, to have the lyrical clarity of "Little Earthquakes" and the musical complexity of "Boys for Pele" all woven into one album. I guess we'll have to wait a couple more weeks to find out what the new release will bring, but I'm a bit pessemistic. - ------Michael K. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 14:28:44 +1200 From: james.dignan@stonebow.otago.ac.nz (James Dignan) Subject: Re: Verve >isn't it an orchestral version of the stones "the last time," with words and >that tea kettle recorded over the top? that's what I heard... and it was the catchiest damn song of the year last year... once into your brain, never gone. At least it didn't sound like "The last time", unlike some 'original' songs..., James (still annoyed with Beck for 'Fucking with my head') ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 23:53:53 -0700 From: John Barrington Jones Subject: Kristin Hersh in Portland, last night Kristin played two nights here, tonight was the second. Just got home. I noticed alot of parallels twixt her and Robyn tonight. For one, the stage was decked out with a groovy little living room lamp sitting on a small table next to her. No cones, or fruit, but there were some plastic flowers in two vases also on the table. Her songs consist of alot of arpeggios, just like Robyn's. She did lots of between song banter, but it serves a purpose: she tells stories whilst changing tunings for the next song. Here were some stories, you tell me if they sound Robynesque: A 6 inch Santa Claus doll that walked around the room with a butcher knife in its back, and a room with a waterfall in it. And swedish commercials: naked pregnant women with abundant armpit hair selling everything under the sun. Her songs paint pictures, like Robyn's, but the pictures are made with emotionpaint. And the bottom line: The songs come from somewhere not here, not earthly. She is the real thing when she says the songs come to her. Tori's lines about the girls lining up for her (the songs) sounds bogus and crap in the face of these songs by Kristin. Jeme, I'm sorry I forgot to tell you that we were going to the gig. This would've been a great introduction to Kristin and Throwing Muses. Michael, I looked around for you, but didne see you. Hope you got to go, but if not, I'm sure she'll be back again sometime..... Goodnight all. Sorry for babbling, but I am moved. - -jbj ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 09:16:54 -0500 From: sdodge@midway.uchicago.edu (amadain) Subject: Re: Ice Castles... >In all honesty, when they make me king of the world, it >will be considered child neglect, endangerment, and >abuse for any kid to be in viewing distance of movies >like it. But what about parents like mine (and they are the majority) who think this is the only appropriate kid viewing? They'd be peeved. It seems that most people tend to regard children in this light that I don't understand- namely, not as adults-in-training with personhood of their own, but as this thing called "children", this sort of mythical thing with perfect innocence. In fact, when I was a kid my mother was really squicked that instead of these "after school movie of the week" things and sappy Bing Crosby as a priest who saves the poor church things, what I really actually enjoyed were "Twilight Zone" reruns and Edgar Allan Poe, because kids were - -supposed- to like the former, not the latter. >Susan Dodge has started to cringe every time I post, and >that movie bit about how I hated Ice Castles must have >pushed her over the top. Well, no, but I really didn't like being reminded of that damn thing all the same. Plus you put the song in my head (ewwwww!) which leads nicely into this next part. >insidious pop songs that get inside your head and won't >leave. They got hate mail for suggesting even the names >of the songs, which their audience was thrown into the >horrible echoes of the horrible ditties I'm not surprised. The last thing I need is to have Abba songs in my head. One of the reasons I like NPR generally is because I'm sure of not hearing that crap there. This is probably one reason people got so upset. The Chicago NPR affiliate has a segment they call "The Annoying Music Show", which is exactly what it says it is. It cracks me up. And everything they play is certifiably, one hundred percent, totally annoying. What I mean is, there's nothing that is say, annoying to some and not at all annoying to others (e.g., The Smiths), but at any rate has some credibility. Everything they play is on the order of "Golden Throats" (it is on this show that I first heard "The Young Puppetteer of San Jose" and "Honey", among other howlers). The surprising thing is that they've actually gotten complaint letters not from people who don't like the annoying songs in their heads but from people who claim that a lot of the music played -isn't- annoying, and resent the implied slam on their taste. Go figure. At any rate it is funny to hear the host read them on the air while Shatner's "Lucy In The Sky" plays in the background. I don't know if it is syndicated, but it OUGHT to be- ask your local affiliate :). Love on ya, Susan P.S. To Andy- yes, Apples in Stereo are opening for Superdrag, it's not a shared billing thing. P.P.S.- Fave song title of the week- the John Huss Moderate Combo "How Can You Say There's No God When Everything's So Bent?" ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V7 #158 *******************************