Lost in Prayer

This is one of my favorite things. I found it on the inside cover of a telephone book in a cheap motel just outside Memphis. The telephone book was lying in the night table, resting on top of the Bible like a hand covering a fluttering heart.

For some reason it says everything to me about Elvis. I don't think Elvis will ever go away because the contradictions of his character, his painfully obvious faults, his intense sincerity, and his dangerous faith in his own destiny can not be resolved to fit the bill of a conveniently tragic hero. The story of his life is resonant, and it's become part of what our culture is about. That's what the "Elvis is alive" part says to me.

It'd be cliched to go on about all that, though his story is fascinating. (I'm half way through Peter Guralnick's two volume biography of Elvis, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Recommended.)

So there's Elvis, head bowed, lost in prayer.

This piece is now part of a private collection in Menlo Park, California.

You could totally see her nipples

Veruca Salt with Juliette Lewis and the Licks seemed like an odd bill. And it was. Juliette tries to look like Iggy Pop, but she actually copped her moves from Hedwig (who copped them from Iggy.) Strange that she constantly reminded me of a fictional character, but then again, Iggy Pop will soon be a fictional character. (Seriously, there's an Iggy Pop biopic with Elijah Wood set to star. What terrible casting.)

Her voice was pretty decent, and her contortions were professional, but the songs were noticably lacking. The best/worst moment came during the set closer, Search and Destroy, yes, an Iggy cover. On the one hand it was the only really good song that they played, on the other, possibly sensing that the rock gods had not been appeased with this performance, J decided to send us home with a memory so iconic that we couldn't help to look back on this show as a great moment in rock.

She dropped the mic with a big amplified thud and launched her ninety-eight pound frame onto the masses, for some fairly wild crowd surfing (explicity banned at the metro--read the sign.) Then she's dropped back on stage just in time to haul up the mic and finish out the song, lookin more than a little disheveled.

A pretty surreal experience, it played out exactly as it would have in a movie--it was the rock show scene in a high school comedy starring you, not only because of the stilted recreation of a cliched rock experience, but also because it was that one girl from Natural Born Killers.

A little later i got a little out of hand dancing to Jimmy Eat World's The Middle and i think i might have bumped into a waitress or something. I tried to be nice about it and apologize, but there were like four people giving me the stink eye. And i wasn't even dancing that hard. So much for having fun at the Metro.

Oh yeah, Veruca Salt played too. I hear that they used to be better.

Kill the DJ

This article makes me glad that i didn't happen to wander into hipster Williamsburg this past weekend that i spent in New York. To be fair, i'm sure that there are also great places and people in that neighborhood as well.

I found that article through this weblog posting, which points out that one of the people (a-holes) quoted in the article happens to be half of the indie rock sister duo Cocorosie (who were recently lambasted by Jessica Hopper for dropping the n-bomb in a song.)

These articles are pretty good, though the hand wringing over postmodernity in the second is a little over wrought, so i shouldn't say too much. I definitely agree that the fear of embracing overt political ideology has really hamstrung the ability of some otherwise lefty people to see the problem of racism (and the ways in which it interacts with class, gender, and other oppressions) in clear terms.

Someone recently told a friend of mine that it irritates him when he sees white people in his predominantly black New York neighborhood. Both of the people involed in this conversation live in predominantly black neighborhoods, both are white. Obviously this comment was intended to be ironic (to some degree) and also to reflect on the racial awareness of the speaker. But this statement marks a retreat into irony in the face of a seemingly insoluble problem (in this case, marginalization of black people by gentrification,) rather than a real (a political) confrontation of that problem.

This is the reason that concerned, aware people shouldn't be allowed to turn from radical politics; they must be made to confront them as perhaps the only real way to change the fundamental terms on which society is (mis)organized.