jeez louise

so I went to an open mike in at stuart's in bellingham last night. karyna was featuring and elsner and I came along for the ride. damn, what a great little town. I'd love to live in bellingham. it was one of the best open mikes I've ever attended...way better than any I've been to in seattle. the readers were mostly really good. the ones who weren't good were bad in interesting ways. the two mandatory guys with acoustic guitars were...well, one of them was amazingly outstandingly fantastic. one of his pieces featured a blues riff stolen directly from a leo kottke tune, but he managed to play it correctly which is impressive in itself, and then he had made up different words for it, which he sang with a voice that sounded halfway between tracy chapman, that guy from blues traveller, and nectar. I realize that's three items. imagine three dimensions with each item on one plane and his voice equidistant from them in the center. anyway, the other guitar guy sucked but in an interesting way. he was a third of the way between syd barrett, jon auer from the posies, and an annoying skate rat. I kept hoping he would start screaming and smash his guitar but he just kept on plod plod plodding along. but he was still 10...ok 2...times better than the same bad guitarist would have been in seattle.

anyway, so we went out for burritos after the show with a few of the regulars and bellingham bob, the guy who runs the thing. it was we three seattlites, bob, bob's I-think-she-might-be-his-girlfriend-but-she-might-just-be-his-friend-who-hangs-out-with-him-a-lot, another young woman, and a guy who was the walking, talking embodiment of every conceivable stereotype of a neo-hippy, granola-eatin', counter-culture guy.

oh yeah, and a pretty cool older geezery kinda guy who was, I swear to god, the spit-n-image of Pete from Twin Peaks. I really wanted to ask him to say "there's a fish...in the percolator!"

so the stereotype guy seemed to think that he was really *freaky* and *shocking* and *edgy* because he's a vegan. what the fuck? I mean, I'm sorry but unless by "vegan" someone means "person from somewhere near the star Vega", I'm not going to be impressed with how weird and edgy they are. christ, I've been hanging out with vegans since this guy was in diapers. karyna *was* a vegan when she was in diapers.

I really had to restrain myself to keep from picking on him.
"no way! you used to own a van???"
"no way! you're in a band???"
"wow...you mean you were smoking pot to celebrate 4/20 yesterday? what's 4/20? what's pot? oh. isn't that illegal?"

crikey.

karyna was keeping pretty quiet except for a bit of quiet side conversation with Pete-from-Twin-Peaks guy. and elsner was the ghost at the end of the table: he didn't say a word to anyone until we were in the car later, and none of the bellinghammers spoke to him after hello.

soon they started harshing on poor robert frost. now, ok. he's not my favorite poet in the world. he's a bit dated, and a bit dry, and...well, he just doesn't really pop my toaster. but I like him a lot better than, say, whitman whom I frankly find bombastic and unintelligible most of the time. frost does have a clear, articulate style that rises the to the level of real lyric musicality from time to time, and has some really nice layers and symbolic structure. it's ok not to like him, but you gotta give him a least some minor props.

so they start kvetching about how it's no wonder that kids grow up hating poetry since all they are taught in schools is robert frost. (this came right after the astonishing, and equally ludicrous, assertion that historians spend so much time on kings and battles that they never bother looking at private lives of regular people, or family life, or games, sports, agriculture, work/labor, etc. it's as if the last half century's worth of historiography never happened in bellingham...and they haven't even gotten a telegram about it.)

so then the "another young woman" from above pipes up and says "yeah, the thing I really hate about him is the 'I...I'."

she got a couple blank looks and explained: "you know, 'I...I took the road less travelled'. he says 'I...I'. that's the worst."

everyone nodded in agreement.

(this was another thing about this discussion: they all hated frost, but the only criticism they had was of "the road less travelled". I asked "well, what about the tramps in mud time piece? or the mending wall, just to name two well-known examples. you don't think there's anything interesting or lyrical going on there?" they ignored the question.)

so this woman (who was, it turns out, a very young 19 or 20) just can't get over the "I...I". she keeps bringing it up throughout the conversation, like it's her only observation about frost so she wants to make sure everyone hears it. a lot.

so eventually the conversation takes a more positive note and the gang starts talking about what poets they actually like. it develops that everyone thinks cummings is pretty cool. I'm happy to have found something we can agree on, until Ms. "I...I" pipes up and says "yeah, I just *love* ee cummings".

and I can't resist.
it's too obvious.

so I say: "I dunno...he's ok and everything, but I just can't get over the whole 'e...e' thing. I mean, who does he think he is?"

elsner laughed until pepsi shot out of his nose.