The latest round of bands gigging at Sacramento’s Fire Escape and Boardwalk may not live up to the lofty example of Blownload, Sexrat, or the Snot Cocks as far as hilariously bad band names, but June does offer some decent pickings. Enjoy:

Friday, June 11 @ The Fire Escape

“Summer Showdown 2″ (night 1)

Fallrise

Zuhg

Dogfood (that sounds about right)

Exhale

Saturday, June 12 @ The Fire Escape

“Summer Showdown 2″ (night 2)

Splitself

March into Paris

Allinaday

Flatline

(I’m hoping for a Fallrise-Splitself final round.  Maybe they’ll form a Voltron-like super band called Fallrisesplitself.  Also, a band called Coldcokt is playing at the ‘Scape on 6/25.)

Saturday, June 12 @ The Boardwalk

Conducting From the Grave

The Antioch Synopsis (sounds like a terrible Tom Clancy-esque thriller)

Journal

Aurelia

Beyond all Ends

Lifeforms

My Murderous Intentions

Karakas (because the city of Caracas, Venezuela sounds badass when misspelled!)

(By the way, how long did this show run?  Two days?  Could it still be going on?)

“I am in the third circle [of hell], filled with cold,

unending, heavy, and accursèd rain;

its measure and its kind are never changed.

Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow

come streaking down across the shadowed air;

the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.”

- Dante Alighieri, Inferno (Canto VI, verses 7-12; trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

A victory for the arts in Sacramento!  Sacramento’s own Blownload have made the AV Club’s list of 2009’s amazingly great/hilariously bad band names.  As I was reading the list, I was disappointed to see that there were apparently no Fire Escape-affiliated bands on the list – until I got to the end and discovered Blownload in the “Sex” category.  Still, it’s a disappointment that Killgasm and Sexrat aren’t included.  There’s always next year…

Here’s a poem I wrote on the way to work this morning.

Happiness is so happy.
Sadness is so sad.
Crappiness is so crappy.
Radness is so rad.

I don’t know exactly why, but I am a total sucker for almost any headline on the MSN front page that is phrased as a question. It could be the most mundane or uninteresting article ever written, but if it’s stated as like: “Who invented carbon paper?” I’m like: “OH SHIT WHO???” (answer: Cyrus Dakin, although similar earlier carbon papers were made independently by Wedgewood and Turri). Thus when I read a title that was like: “Who is Donald Trump suing for libel?” I of course clicked through. What followed was a story of pretty ordinary proportions involving Donald, the cracked-out Miss America, and Rosie O’Donnell. What’s interesting is not the story itself, which is typical star-drama, but rather Rosie’s particular reaction to it. As you may or may not know, she responded at least in part by writing a poem about Trump. It is still archived on her blog as of today, and you can read it here.

To be honest I find myself having trouble condemning the poem as a travesty simply because responding to legal challenges through verse is so bizarre that it’s hard not to find it endearing. Not only that, but I also really like how it’s written in the style of lyric translations you find online, with “to” replaced by “2,” “be” by “b,” and so on. And then at the end she writes, in a line apart from other stanzas to give it more emphasis: remember the seventies, which can only be a reference to Cornell West’s opus “70s song.”

The only real issue I have with the poem is that Rosie here is arguing in bad faith. She makes it clear through stanzas 8-10 that she is fundamentally opposed to beauty pageantry in general, and thus her pretension that she is only criticizing Trump’s recent actions in giving the wayward Miss America a second chance falls flat. Because she is unable to publicly badmouth beauty pageants as much as she’d like without upsetting her fanbase, she instead resorts to attacking the easy-to-hate Trump strawman. It is the job of artists to be brave in the face of adverse public opinion, and if Rosie believes in her misguided convictions so strongly, she should stand up for them.

In the end though, call the poem what you will. As for me, I’ll always feel a mix of gratitude and pity for the poem as it did bring me some yuks, some of which were with Rosie rather than directed at her, it also led me to far more embarrassing footage:

I think most people who know my predilections will recognize that I am already predisposed to hate pretty much any poem I accidentally get my hands on.  This goes probably double or triple for modern poetry where it seems like the only qualification for turning a shitty ramble into a “poem” is to give it some cool text layout.  Like “oh snap did you see how awesome it was when the second stanza was totally indented?”  It was with this perhaps curmodgeonly attitude that I accidentally read Wendell Berry’s “How to be a Poet (to remind myself)“, posted on the door of one of our secretaries.  I mean, whatever, the poem blows.  There’s no masterful insight here or even any real mastery of language, two things you might list as essentials for good poetry.  Okay, but that doesn’t really set this apart from the multitudes of shitty poetry already suffusing the medium.  Where this thing really goes off the rails is in the second stanza, where the poet writes:

Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly.  Live
a three dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.

I don’t think you could come up with more agrarian sanctimony if you tried.  What is it with artists who feel like any type of modern technology is some scar on the face of Gaia?  That somehow if you compose poetry on a computer screen (omg triple-whammy) then you’re somehow either a worse person, a worse artist, or both because of it.  Like it never occured to Berry that perhaps staying away from screens is actually harming his ability to live a three-dimensioned life, since he’s kind of eliminated at least one dimension right there.

I sometimes think about religions like the Amish or Luddites or whatever where you pick some arbitrary level of technological development and then criticize anything that comes after as somehow worse or evil.  Like maybe 5,000 years from now, when this era of history has become telescoped into a tiny nugget of development, there will be people who advocate living a simple 21st century lifestyle, uncluttered with the hustle, bustle, psychoses and neuroses of 71st century life.  I can see it now: Shun photonic wire.  Communicate subluminally.  Live an 8 dimensioned life;  stay away from holodecks.  Stay away from anything that terraforms the place it is in.