From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V10 #45 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 Wednesday, March 2 2005 Volume 10 : Number 045 Today's Subjects: ----------------- NY Times review Piece by Piece [e m ] Re: San Francisco ["DragonGrl" ] Re: precious-things-digest V10 #44 [Dana ] Re: San Francisco [Beth Winegarner ] Re: precious-things-digest V10 #44 [e m ] DC Tickets? [Jeffrey Clark ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 20:58:42 -0800 (PST) From: e m Subject: NY Times review Piece by Piece this article discusses two of the best sellers. it really does not speak to well of tori. somewhat misses the point i think. but thought i'd share anyway. ellen http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27TBR.html? Inside the List By DWIGHT GARNER Published: February 27, 2005 UICED: If you want to sell an addiction memoir these days, the conventional wisdom holds, you'd better be prepared to lay out the lurid details -- the more gruesome the better. (James Frey's book, ''A Million Little Pieces,'' published in 2003, may be the one to beat for a while. It opens with the author missing four front teeth, wanted in three states and covered with ''a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.'') Koren Zailckas has cannily taken the opposite tack. Her new memoir, ''Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood,'' which enters the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 10, is so poised and elegiac that she comes off as the Norah Jones of her plastered generation. No crime sprees, strip club jobs or spooky detox centers here. ''Smashed'' goes down with a slow, genteel burn. Zailckas, who is 24 and grew up in one of Boston's middle-class suburbs, coolly explains how she began drinking at 14, had her stomach pumped a few years later, threw up a lot, lost her virginity while blacked out and finally got sober at 22. Not a pretty story, but not a Belushi-level meltdown, either. Zailckas's failure to flame out in a more spectacular fashion has bugged some critics. As Rebecca Traister put it recently in Salon: ''A reader could easily close the book and say, 'That was her big drunken girlhood? I got drunker than her! Where's my book deal?' '' Zailckas got her $150,000 book deal, I suspect, because she is often a terrific writer, and one who knows how to frighten parents. ''I haven't met a girl yet who hasn't been interested in drinking,'' she writes in her memoir. ''Every time I've seen a bottle emerge, girls have followed it the way children follow Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin: with small feet pattering, wooden shoes clattering, little hands clapping and little tongues chattering.'' BEWITCHED: Tori Amos, the flightily melodramatic singer-songwriter, doesn't admit to drinking anything much stronger than green tea in her new memoir, ''Tori Amos: Piece by Piece,'' written with the rock journalist Ann Powers. But the book, which makes its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 14, manages to feel whacked-out in plenty of other ways. Less an autobiography than a series of transcribed interviews, this memoir allows Amos to ramble on like Joseph Campbell channeling Glinda the Good Witch. (''When you start believing you are Aphrodite, or believing you are the Dark Prince, first of all, you have offended the Divine,'' she says in one typical passage.) Amos's fans, who have bought some 12 million of her albums, love her for this stuff. Everyone else may be scared straight, and lay off the green tea. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:31:49 -0800 From: "DragonGrl" Subject: Re: San Francisco On Tue, Mar 01, 2005, Christina Wong scribbled in purple crayon: > From: Christina Wong > Subject: Re WTF > > I Don't mean to beat a dead horse but I have not seen > anyone mention San Francisco. I am so upset because I > tired to get tickets during the pre-sale, which I > couldn't do because it was "sold out" in 2 min. > > then for the general sale, I tried to get tickets and > at 3 minutes after the tickets went on sale all i > could get was the farthest balcony in the 6th row. > Well, I figured that i just got bad seats so threw > them back in. ... Deletia... > I'm so fustrated and I want answers! Anyone else had > this experience with the SF show? The SF show ticket experience left quite the bitter taste in my mouth. I have a reasonably fast computer and a nice, quick internet connection. I was online, ready to go at 9:45 am Sunday. Reloaded the ticketmaster page until I could actually look for tickets, and never ONCE was offered the chance to purchase a ticket, not even a "bad" one. (Not that there is a bad seat at Davies Symphony Hall) I kept trying for a half an hour. And I was only attempting to get 1 ticket. Within a half an hour of the tickets going on sale, there were at least 20 tickets to the show up for grabs on ebay...some people were auctioning a pair of tickets for no less than $700. The whole thing makes me nauseaus. Davies Symphony Hall isn't a small place. It's not the San Jose Arena, but it's not The Fillmore either. Makes me wonder how many tickets were released for this show, in total. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I've never had this problem getting tickets before. I've always been able to at least snag a "bad seat". Feeling bitter, but hopeful about getting tickets for Tori's second go round, DragonGirl - -- - ----^-----^------(@ You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here, and whether or not it is clear to you, have no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. - -- Desiderata @)-----^-----^----- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 01:29:45 -0800 From: Dana Subject: Re: precious-things-digest V10 #44 > Nadyne wrote: > > There are other ways to get good tickets into the hands of fans. I > know I've waxed poetic about it before, but I have to say it again: > R.E.M. gets it right. For each and every concert, they get a block of > tickets that they sell through their fan club (which they run > themselves), and those tickets are always excellent. They've > threatened to move their show to another venue if the venue doesn't > give them good enough tickets. I haven't seen R.E.M. from anywhere > further back than the fourth row as a result of these tickets. To get > the fan club tickets, you have to be a member of the fan club, and you > can't just sign up the day before the tickets go on sale. It's still > possible for scalpers to get these tickets, because I could order the > tickets and then sell them to a scalper (or scalp them myself), but > it's a lot less likely than the standard TicketBastard on-sale. prince does the same thing... all of the rows closest to the stage are reserved for fan club only. and when he lets people on stage - which he does often - they are always fan club members. all that ever changes is how many rows are reserved, depending on how big the venue is... good system, imo dana ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 08:13:40 -0800 From: Beth Winegarner Subject: Re: San Francisco Christina, I got tickets for SF. They were indeed in one of the upper balconies, which often is just fine with me. (I'm very short and have trouble seeing when I'm standing on the floor, unless it's in the first few rows or the theater floor is well-angled). I managed to get a block of three tickets together just as the sale began on Sunday, which is lucky, because Violet, who was searching on her computer at home while we talked on the phone, tried the same thing and couldn't get any to come up. After I'd completed my purchase, I tried to go back and get two sets together, and then just one, to see if there were any left, and it appeared that all the tickets were gone. I haven't tried since then, so I'm not sure if any more opened up after the initial mad rush was over. I do have a feeling that it sold out within just a few minutes, though. Beth ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 12:35:12 -0800 (PST) From: e m Subject: Re: precious-things-digest V10 #44 - --- Dana wrote: > > > Nadyne wrote: > > > > There are other ways to get good tickets into the > hands of fans. I > > know I've waxed poetic about it before, but I have > to say it again: > > R.E.M. gets it right. For each and every concert, > they get a block of > > tickets that they sell through their fan club > (which they run > > themselves), and those tickets are always > excellent. They've > > threatened to move their show to another venue if > the venue doesn't > > give them good enough tickets. I haven't seen > R.E.M. from anywhere > > further back than the fourth row as a result of > these tickets. To get > > the fan club tickets, you have to be a member of > the fan club, and you > > can't just sign up the day before the tickets go > on sale. It's still > > possible for scalpers to get these tickets, > because I could order the > > tickets and then sell them to a scalper (or scalp > them myself), but > > it's a lot less likely than the standard > TicketBastard on-sale. > > prince does the same thing... all of the rows > closest to the stage are > reserved for fan club only. and when he lets people > on stage - which > he does often - they are always fan club members. > all that ever > changes is how many rows are reserved, depending on > how big the venue > is... good system, imo yeah, i think Phish used to have a similar mail order system. but it was very much a lottery. you weren't always able to get them through the band necessarily. i think this goes to show that there are A LOT of options out there in terms of preventing this fiasco of a ticket sale, and yet tori's team did Skata(shit). i just wonder why. was it too much money, or time issues or trouble to set something up for her fans? it just makes no sense. hopefully news of this will get to them and maybe they will take measures in the future to prevent this. - -ellen __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:36:11 -0500 From: Jeffrey Clark Subject: DC Tickets? Has anybody heard anything about the DC show? I've seen just about all the other shows mentioned on this list but. Do the tickets themselves assign the seats, or is it a general admission type of thing? Guess I'm gonna be calling the theater saturday at noon to try to get them. Hopefully they'll sell over the phone. ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V10 #45 *************************************