Latest Entries • 06/23 5:50 a.m. • 06/18 2:24 p.m. • 06/17 12:41 p.m. • 06/16 3:53 p.m. • 06/16 1:45 p.m. • 06/15 3:05 p.m. • 06/15 6:16 a.m. Past Weeks 06/14-06/18 06/07-06/11 | 05/31-06/04 05/24-05/28 | 05/17-05/21 05/10-05/14 | 05/03-05/07 04/26-04/30 | 04/19-04/23 04/12-04/16 | 04/05-04/09 • More XL Blog Archives Meet the Bloggers • Michael Barnes • Kathy Blackwell • Michael Corcoran • Omar Gallaga • Chris Garcia • Joe Gross • Sarah Lindner

04/26/04-04/30/04

04/29/04, 11:50 a.m.

From: Sarah Lindner e-mail me

No laurels for this borough

Thanks, Queens, for ruining National Poetry Month.

Joseph "Run" Simmons from Run-DMC wanted to be the borough's poet laureate. Queens picked somebody else.

Possibly, it was because Run moved to Jersey last year (after living his whole life in Queens). But the whole thing really seems to be about whether rap is poetry.

Poetry means loving words; it's about twisting them, stretching them, bouncing them around and seeing what they can do. Watch MTV2's

"Hip Hop Dictionary" next week. Discuss.

Poetry's also about doing something so fresh with the language that it might not make literal sense, but you just get it. Like, "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard."

But really, it all comes back to what Emily Dickinson said: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry." You know what did that for me? This rhyme of Jay-Z's: "Who don't understand a broad with a mean shoe game/ who's up on Dot Dot Dot and Vera Wang."

Queens blew it. Poetry needs some publicity. Simmons could have pulled some new fans into our shrinking little flock.

And he just deserves it.

In better National Poetry Month news, I fell even more deeply in love with the San Jose Motel last month when I saw

this poem tacked up in the bathroom of my friends' room.

I knew it from a book called "Poetry 180," a collection compiled by national poet laureate Billy Collins.

Not only does the retro-cool cover totally match the San Jose (it's the second-prettiest poetry book on my shelf, right after "A Working Girl Can't Win" by Deborah Garrison), the poems inside are just as crisp and contemporary: Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver and Miller Williams (who's the father of one of my other favorite poets).

Check it out. There's not a sucker MC in the bunch.

-- back to top

04/28/04, 2:57 p.m.

From: Michael Corcoran e-mail me

Those Loretta reviews are just wrong

The respected critic R.J. Smith gave it five stars in Blender. The tougher-grading Entertainment Weekly gave it an A. Critics (including our own Joe Gross) have been falling all over themselves in praise of an album that I'd guess very few of them will ever listen to again. Do you think a couple months from now R.J. Smith is going to have a jones for "Van Lear Rose," the new Loretta Lynn album produced by Jack White, which will probably not appeal to fans of either? Aside from apparently using the same black hair dye, this duo goes together like tempeh burgers at Luby's, like the Super Mario Brothers and Sister Rose.

Unlike Rick Rubin's heroic rescue of Johnny Cash from Branson, where the producer stepped back and stroked his beard and let the essence of the Man In Black flow, the Man Named White is all over the "Van" like a reckless toddler. It sounds to me like he's using the 69-year-old country legend to get his hip card punched, especially on the embarrassing "Little Red Shoes," where "Loretty" rambles on about her "mumma" and "dadduh" and something about not having shoes while White throws on all this artsy beige noise.

The AARP should file a protest.

There's gotta be a law against making senior citizens sound ditsy and pretentious at the same time. The Von Bondies' singer may have inferred that White was simultaneously playing pinball while producing their previous album, but no one would make that mistake on this mess. White Stripes fans beware. Loretta Lynn fans beware. The critics are wrong and I am right. R.J. Smith's not going to refund your money.

I've long held the theory that there's no right or wrong opinion when it comes to critiquing music, but I've changed my thinking. Another recent review was so wrong I almost sent the writer a "Dude, were we at the same concert?" e-mail like the thousands I've received from Jimmy Buffett fans through the years. The Strokes show at the Austin Music Hall on March 23 was one of the worst concerts I've ever been to where nobody threw up onstage. The bass was so loud it could work the wrinkles out of your khakis and the singer, who usually says five words all night, was Mr. Chatterbox. Hey, I remember my first beer. Singers are never funny when they talk onstage, but it's even worse when they think they are.

OK, so I open up the paper a couple days later and the Strokes are being heralded in glowing terms. Not mentioning the way-too-loud bass is like doing an Ozomatli preview and not bringing up the SXSW arrests. And the guy who wrote it is one of the best young critics in Austin (one who gets much more national magazine work than me, but I'm not bitter.) Maybe I've got deep-seated problems with Jack White because I thought, you know, if I dropped about 30 elbees and took a few needles to the face and won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing corporal punishment in parochial schools, I might have a shot at his squeeze, Renée Zellweger. I don't know — maybe it's me.

Nah!

-- back to top

04/27/04, 2:01 p.m.

From: Joe Gross e-mail me

On the wire about quitting TV cold turkey

Last week, I said I was marking time until HBO's "The Wire" starts. Between the labyrinthine plotting, the Baltimore setting and the exceptional acting, I can't think of an ongoing show I enjoy more (peace to the Sopranos, which, while gaining a little bit of juice from the last couple of listless seasons, has never recaptured the bounce and vigor of its mind-blowing first season; peace also to all four relentless hours of "Prime Suspect 6," which not only reasserted its place as the most intense crime drama in TV history, but reminded everyone that, yes, there is still something ineffably sexy about 58-year-old Helen Mirren) (or maybe it's just that she's been naked in a bunch of movies over the years.)

Anyway, plans have changed.

The missus and I have decided to get rid of cable. In fact, I'm calling the company at lunch today.

It's not that we don't like it. Rest assured there's no sanctimony in this decision. It's just that cable begins to add up after a while. There's the digital box with the hard disk recorder and the movie packs and the HBO. It's begun to feel a bit decadent.

So we're going cold turkey. All the acronyms, kaput: MTV, MTV2, AMC, TCM, C-SPAN, VH1, my beloved VH1 Classic (sigh).

And we still will be slaves to the TV as a device, as a screen, as a vector. We have memberships to at least three Austin video stores, but even those have been subsumed by our subscription to (NetFlix)(www.netflix.com/), which might be the best deal in consumer entertainment at the moment.

There are the stacks of novels, books of political theory collections of classic comic strips and hundreds of records that are sitting around our house. And there's always that library down the street, within walking distance, that we really should be using.

So wish us luck.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm sure we'll end up at someone's house to watch "The Wire." I'm not made of wood.

-- back to top

04/26/04, 11:57 a.m.

From: Michael Barnes e-mail me

Can't blog now - 'Law & Order' is on

Everyone else blogs about television. Why shouldn't I?

(Especially since the usual Monday blogger, Chris Garcia, is marching through the Middle Kingdom even as we type.)

So here's a quickie look at my viewing habits.

The former fulcrum of my cable viewing was the nonfiction channels at the middle of the basic Time Warner Cable spectrum. You know, the news, weather, sports and documentary fare that could be relied upon for immediacy, slick presentation and hard facts.

The old broadcast networks at the bottom of the numerical queue were too stodgy, while the public access channels located higher up seemed devoid of integrity. (Placing PBS and Time Warner's respectable News 8 between these two regions did not fool anyone.) After public access, the networks geared for women and children were too unreliable, as were the music and Spanish-language channels at the end of the regular cable line.

So the serious viewing — meaning more than a microsecond on the scanner — started in the mid-40s with the Weather Channel and ended in the mid-50s, before the outdoor sports reports. Oases such as the History Channel and Discovery lived just outside the core Michael range.

No longer.

Comedy Central was the first to pull me up to the upper 50s with the essential "The Daily Show" and priceless nuggets such as "South Park" and "Chappelle's Show" (which my colleague Omar Gallaga correctly pegged as the best medicine for the sketch-comedy genre.) Central also continues to rival HBO and BET for the most irreverent stand-up comedy, topped recently by the airing of "Queens of Comedy."

Then came Bravo, with runaway hits such as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and the still-evolving hybrid show, "Significant Others," not to mention addictive reruns of "The West Wing." After that, there are the middling channels such as USA, TNT and A&E, which have offered around-the-clock reruns of television's best drama ever — "Law & Order."

Now, like any hard-core "L&O" fan, I despised "SVU" — we call it "SUV" at home — and "CI" when they premiered. The first was too sensational, the second too mannered. But in reruns, hey, they're superior to almost anything else on at the time I watch TV, usually after 10 p.m.

So now the remote control goes straight to 60 and zips up and down from there.

Where are HBO and Showtime, you ask. Well, darn if we haven't ever ponied up for the premium channels. Instead, we watch the best series and specials from these valuable sources later, when they are collected on DVD. Then we marathon it.

So, to home and Channel No. 60.

-- back to top