From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V6 #202 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Friday, October 19 2001 Volume 06 : Number 202 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: concert reviews ["Carlos Verrastro" ] Re: BFP in the beginning ["Carlos Verrastro" ] italian tori dates [strange little woj ] tori and rape [Dracovixen@aol.com] LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert ["Alexis Rodriguez-Carlson" ] Re: [Exit 75] LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert [MichelleBelle40@aol.com] Re: Tori and Rape [Erin Martin ] Re: [Exit 75] LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert [MichelleBelle40@aol.com] Re: ["Aileen Sharkie" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 04:52:42 -0300 From: "Carlos Verrastro" Subject: Re: concert reviews Here it is something that I downloaded from THE DENT and That RICHARD had Said about the rape issue. I hope Richard does not mind me posting it again. From: Richard Handal Subject: Re: a VERY confused Toriphile To: precious-things@smoe.org (Precious Things mailing list) Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 02:25:57 -0500 (EST) Stacie said: > ok... in the Cornflake Girl book it says that she was raped at > gun-point and everyone is saying that she wasn't... I AM SOOOO > CONFUSED!!! please help. > love, > Stacie Love back to you, Stacie. :-) This is clearly one of the most important topics that gets discussed in Toriville--both in Online Toriville and in real life. For years now, people have been writing me privately and asking such questions as, "I was in an AOL chat room the other day and somebody said that Tori was not really raped," and "I was looking at such-and-such web site and it says that Tori wasn't really raped," and asking me if I had any definitive explanation about that. I am now going to attempt to stick a fork in this ancient turkey once and for all. (Until the new batch of subscribers to this list. What can one do about that?) Tori has said in multiple interviews that she was raped. It isn't only something she wrote as a lyric for a song--she has said in the first person that she was raped. So, we can't dismiss this as being something written by her for a song. And just so we are all on the same page with what Tori said about the details of the incident in question, I am going to quote from the only interview she ever gave with specifics about it, which was an interview she did with Joe Jackson of the Irish music magazine Hot Press, with the publication date of February 23, 1994. The full interview is on Jason Watts' Fairy Tales site, and elsewhere on the 'net. (Also check The Dent and Toriphoria.) [http://stuff.to/tori/tales/index.html] The Hurt Inside [...] "I'll never talk about it at this level again but let me ask you. Why have I survived that kind of night, when other women didn't", she says. "How am I alive to tell you this tale when he was ready to slice me up? In the song I say it was 'Me and a Gun' but it wasn't a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn't needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter". "And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralysed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violation through sex". "I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability". Okay. So, the song Me and a Gun is not strictly a narrative of a real incident, but it was *inspired* by an incident. A horrible, frightening incident. I understand that the *average* rape lasts four hours. Let that sink in for a minute and I'll move on. Back around August 1997, soon after getting yet another private inquiry about all this, I came to be pretty upset about the way some people have been spreading vague "information" about it, and some who have been spreading totally wrong stories about it. I started to do a little research in preparation for a major posting on it. Work at my job soon thereafter became quite heavy, and I put the project on the back burner. To speak about anything intelligently, one must have a common understanding of the terms used, otherwise discussion is meaningless and confusing. If discussion of whether Tori was really raped is relevant to this list then coming to an understanding of what that actually means can be no less relevant. [If the owners of this list disagree that I should have sent in this post, then I hope they unsubscribe me, because I won't want to be here anymore. Period.] To me, the obvious thing to do when trying to define a word is to look it up in multiple dictionaries. Legal meanings of words are not what we typically use in relation to other topics, and I can't see making it any different when discussing rape. If someone was shot in the head by someone else and he died, and the perpetrator is not convicted for one reason or another--maybe the charge was reduced to manslaughter or he was determined to be too insane to stand trial--we do not give a second thought to calling the act which put the victim's life to an end a murder. We do not define words by their legalistic meanings, we define them in more general terms. And I believe that is as it should be. We are not all lawyers, judge, jury, etc. We are not typically trying to make legalistic determinations when engaging in conversation. Thus, to seek a definition of rape, I did not crack open books on criminal codes. And at any rate, criminal codes vary from one tiny jurisdiction to the other. I do not know the exact location of Tori's assault, nor do I think that it is relevant in the slightest whether or not it meets any legal criteria for rape before it can, in lay terms, be categorized as rape. I think folks have become hung up on the legal definition. With that in mind, I will share with you what I found in dictionaries. ALL of the dictionaries I checked confirmed what Mike[why] posted recently. Here's a citation from the Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language [Unabridged], second edition, 1966: rape, n. [from rap, to seize, to snatch, the meaning being influenced by L. rapere, raptum, to seize.] the act of snatching or carrying off by force. something taken or seized and carried away by force. the crime of having forced sexual intercourse with a woman or girl forcibly and without her consent. If the act is committed when the woman is stupified by drugs or liquors, deceived as to the nature of the act, or overcome by duress or threats, or if she is below the age of consent, it is rape. the plundering or violent destruction (of a city, etc.), as in warfare. rape v.t.; raped, pt., pp.; raping, ppr. to seize and carry off by force. to affect with rapture; to transport. [Archaic.] to ravish; to commit rape on (a woman or girl); to violate. to plunder or destroy (a city, etc.), as in warfare. I'll ignore the botanical and other irrelevant definitions. And so it is the case with ALL the dictionaries I checked. I checked at least four or five of them. One of the ones I checked was the mother of all English Language dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). I'll leave out the archaic and obsolete definitions this time, and only copy the current, relevant definitions, leaving out the derivation: 2. The act of carrying away a person, esp. a woman, by force. 3. Violation or ravishing of a woman. And for the verb definition: 3. To ravish, commit rape on. And while we're in the OED: ravish 1. The action of taking or carrying away by force; plundering; violation, etc. Many of you will be familiar with the play The Fantasticks, which has a scene and musical number called Rape Ballet. A father has paid an old actor, accompanied by other actors playing American Indians, to abduct his daughter and take her on a long trip (I won't go into the plot reasons for this), and at the start of this number the old actor shrieks "Indians ready? Indians rrrrape!" There is no sexual intercourse involved in this scene. The Fantasticks is the longest-running play in history, as well as the most often performed. (There's no required set and can be performed with a minimal band so it's cheap to put on.) Many people know this play. Nonetheless, when Robert Goulet starred in a road company of it three or four years ago, the Rape Ballet was changed to The Abduction. Granted--most people would typically think of the forced sexual intercourse meaning of the word rape, and in this day and age, protests to a song about a rape, even if it meant abduction, must have seemed a likely possibility to the producers of that recent road company of The Fantasticks. But that meaning of the word is *not* obsolete, *not* archaic, and indeed, its *very* *existence* is rooted in meaning abduction. I submit that if anyone ever asks *you* whether or not Tori Amos was "really" raped, you can look them directly in the eye and tell them, "Yes. Tori was raped." And if you show them the interview from Hot Press with the details and they protest, you have my permission to wonder aloud why they are getting so hung up on the word itself once they were shown the details of the incident. I could go on much more about all this, but my point has been made. This whole thing *really* gets me upset. Please feel free to distribute this widely. I don't want more people writing me privately and asking me about this ever again. This, above all other topics related to Tori, deserves to live in the bright light of sunshine. Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Aileen Sharkie" To: Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 10:35 PM Subject: concert reviews > > Has anyone else noticed that in EVERY review of a concert in which Tori sang > Me and A Gun, it was described as "a song about her real life rape", or > something to that effect? It's starting to get on my nerves, considering > she WASN'T raped. Don't journalists have to check their facts before > writing up a story? :-P > just complainin' though > aileen ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 04:50:58 -0300 From: "Carlos Verrastro" Subject: Re: BFP in the beginning hi AJ & EWFS: Here it is the RS review of BFP. Rating ** The tension between secular desires and spiritual devotion has fueled rock & roll frenzy since Day One, so to speak, when the fundamen-talist-reared Jerry Lee Lewis took the highway to hell on "Great Balls of Fire" and the gospel-trained Little Richard began testifying in ecstatic boogie-woogie whoops. At various times in their lives, Jerry Lee and Little Richard have renounced and denounced rock & roll as "the devil's music." At other times the musical spirit has caused them to rise up out of their seats and throw themselves into their pianos with the unrepentant passion of possessed souls. Anyone who has seen Tori Amos live knows that she, too, can writhe on the piano bench like a demon in heat. The daughter of a Methodist minister and a recovering Los Angeles big-haired heavy-metal singer herself, Amos knows what it's like to be stuck between hard rock and holy rolling. But as 1994's mischievous hit single "God" showed, she's more interested in questioning the powers that determine the notions of sin than in castigating herself for guilty pleasures. "God" was just the opening salvo in the war on religion that Amos wages full-scale on Boys for Pele, her third solo album. This time around she's criticizing not just her own Christian heritage but most of the world's major religions. On various tracks she aims at Mohammed, Lucifer, Jupiter and a voodoo priest. The attack on deities is actually just part of Amos' larger struggle, which she has been detailing in oft-intimate terms since 1992's Little Earthquakes: the struggle against the patriarchy in general, with her own father symbolizing the fatherocracy. To borrow from the sort of mushy-headed New Age feministspeak that is Amos' stock in trade, she's on a mission to reclaim her - and our - inner goddess. "I need a big loan from the girl zone," she sings on "Caught a Lite Sneeze." Pele is a Hawaiian volcano goddess; the album's title could be interpreted as either (1) an appreciation of men willing to worship the female spirit or (2) a call for human sacrifice. Although it's a bit hard to muddle through the enigmatic artifice and fanciful metaphors that Amos wraps around her songs like so much obscuring gauze, the answer's a playful (2). And who could blame her? As Little Earthquakes' a cappella "Me and a Gun" described in harrowing detail, Amos was raped several years ago, and she has been trying to recover her sexual health - already damaged by her strict up-bringing - ever since. Many songs on the new album are about relationships with unappreciative men, culminating in the scary but lovely codependent ballad "Putting the Damage On." In a demonstration of her bid for independence, Amos produced the 18 songs herself, her relationship with her previous producer and boyfriend, Eric Rosse, having ended. Boys for Pele begins gently enough and indeed never works itself into a lather, which is one of Amos' failings; she doesn't seem to know how to rage. The first few cuts find the former child prodigy at her Bvsendorfer piano and a harpsichord singing atmospheric Kate Bushstyle compositions called "Horses" and "Blood Roses." While Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard pounded their demons out in big barrelhouse chords, the classically trained Amos painstakingly draws hers out note by tinkling note in dreamy songs that are part show tune, part church music. There's a twisted current running "under the pink," as she titled her last album, but as she trills away in a soprano voice that's 40 percent breath, it's hard to get past the fact that Amos has thanked "the faeries" on all her albums. Fantasies are the refuge - and sometimes the revenge - of the powerless, who escape in daydreams what they can't escape in reality. Amos gives ethereality substance when she declares, "Nothing's gonna stop me from floating," on "Father Lucifer." Still, as the bass and guitar kick fitfully into the song, you get the feeling that what she would really like to do is bust out. She comes close on "Professional Widow," with its "God"-like churning rhythm and provocative refrain of "star fucker, just like my daddy." But as usual, the lyric's meaning is oblique and unclear; Amos goes for the shock and giggle without going for the throat. She does a good PJ Harvey imitation on "Widow," indicating that she's absorbing some strong influences. I suggest she immerse herself in Babes in Toyland. Amos clearly is talented, and the harpsichord brings out the medieval in her; at times, Boys for Pele sounds like Hildegard von Bingen meets Elton John. But there's a fine line between precocious and precious, and even when she's "fucking the piano," as one observer put it, Amos has always seemed very conscious of her charms. Left to her own production, Amos takes chances with her songwriting, relying less on endlessly repeated choruses, and experimenting with strings, New Orleans brass and gospel choirs. But at 18 tracks, the album's way too self-indulgent. Amos draws out every line with pretentious portent, but supposedly mystical lyrics like "And if I lose my Cracker Jacks at the/Tidal wave I got a place/In the Pope's rubber robe" are ultimately mystifying and, well, bad. On the final track, after admitting her attraction to a damaging man, Amos, at least, admires a woman who takes a stand as she identifies with a friend who has killed a guy. But that, too, is just a fantasy of someone else's life, a far-off "Twinkle." (RS 727) EVELYN MCDONNELL ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 22:18:24 -0400 From: strange little woj Subject: italian tori dates a second italian show has been added on december 16th at teatro tenda in conegliano veneto, italy. additionally, the previously known show on december 17th in milano is actually at teatro orfeo, not teatro nazionale as previously mentioned. this information comes from . as far as we know, tickets for these shows are not yet on sale. woj ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 10:41:57 EDT From: Dracovixen@aol.com Subject: tori and rape She was held against her will while some psycho threatened to cut her up with a knife if she didn't sing for him. Rape is also defined as someone who is taken against their will, not only as forceful sexual intercourse. There was still the matter of a predator needing control, and she a victim who didn't know if she was going to live or die, or get maimed, or be forced into a sexual act. That takes a psychological toll, just as forceful penetration does. Did she ever actually say she was never penetrated? I was never quite clear on this, but then again, I don't consider it my business to ask. Since she was taken against her wil, she was raped, that's all. Black Dove << Subject: LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert Hi. Does anyone have two extra tickets to the Nov. 15 LA show? I don't care where they are, I would just love to see Tori again. I didn't think I was going to get to go to this concert because I was supposed to be leaving LA at 10 pm on the 15th, but because of all the airline madness my flights have been rescheduled to the 16th, so I can go if I can get tickets... Happy to pay all service and shipping charges, of course.... Thank you so much, Ali ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 14:25:48 -0700 From: "Tony Fernandes" Subject: Tori and Rape Dracovixen@aol.com wrote: "Rape is also defined as someone who is taken against their will, not only as forceful sexual intercourse." I'm not going to argue with anyone about the particulars of Tori's ordeal with the crazed fan she gave a ride to after a concert. I've heard her say during interviews that she was raped, and I assume she literally meant it. This, taken with her involvement with RAINN would further my belief that she was raped. If someone is taken against their will, it's called kidnapping or unlawful imprisonment, NOT rape. Rape is unconsentual sexual penetration (with an object or a body part). Is it any less traumatic for someone to be kidnapped and tortured/abused than someone who is raped? Not necessarily. However, the person who is kidnapped and forced to sing a song at knifepoint was not raped...unless they were raped. I would even say that someone who is almost raped, whether it was unsuccessfully attempted or the assailant purposely sexually toremented the victum without penetrating them, has a right to say they were raped...and it should be dealt with in the same way in all respects, especially concerning the victim's emotional recovery. I really don't want everyone trying to pick apart what I've said, I just wanted to define the word "rape" and state my opinion on the matter. I hope this clarifies a few things. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 17:58:06 EDT From: MichelleBelle40@aol.com Subject: Re: [Exit 75] LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert i also am in search of ONE ticket for this show!! Please email me if you have any or know of any! Thank you! Love Michelle MichelleBelle40@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 17:31:15 -0400 From: Erin Martin Subject: Re: Tori and Rape One thing that hasn't been addressed here is something else the original post-er might have meant about "Me and a Gun" not being about her "real-life rape." Whether or not you qualify Tori's experiences as rape, the exact scenario she experienced is somewhat different than that she describes in the song. So while she experienced an attack, whether or not you call it rape, you know that the song isn't "about" her exact experiences, per se, so much as it is the feeling of those experiences, as put into another scenario. Make sense? Erin ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:00:13 EDT From: MichelleBelle40@aol.com Subject: Re: [Exit 75] LA tix for the Nov. 15th concert i also am in search of ONE ticket for this show!! Please email me if you have any or know of any! Thank you! Love Michelle MichelleBelle40@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 23:56:46 From: "Aileen Sharkie" Subject: Re: Okay first off, to all the people who emailed me EXTREMELY pissed off, I'm sorry if I offended you somehow. I wasn't saying that what Tori Amos went through wasn't tramatic, serious etc. What I was TRYING to say was that Me and a Gun isn't exactly the same as what happened to her in real life. She wasn't raped (and by rape I mean penetration, because TO ME, that's what rape is) at gunpoint. Sure, the experience was probably just as terrifying, but for a journalist to say that the song is ABOUT "her real life rape" is, to me, incorrect. The emotion might be the same, but the technicalities are not. So sorry if I offended you, but i wasn't trying to be rude. Aileen ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V6 #202 *************************************