by Jerome du Bois
A pseudonym over at a blathering forum called livejournal has posted a couple of things about us, which garnered the usual comments, all of them also by pseudonyms. I must say, if these are our intellectual adversaries, we're in great shape.
The main guy I'm going to call tobaccoslave, since the cute little thumbnail that accompanies his post shows him sucking on a coffin nail like a tough guy. The cigarette smokes you, dude, not the other way around. (Since you ask, I'm almost five years tobacco-free. Thanks for reminding me, man.)
Tobaccoslave's second post is about "That's The Name of That Tune." He mistakes us for academics, which is just dumb. He thinks I'm stuck in some classical tarpit where poetry must rhyme just because I spin off some doggerel in the middle of my post. I could do that all day, man. I have to stop myself from rhyming too much; it would be silly, and I have serious points to make.
He wrote this post, I see, because I attack his "profession" as a live poet in my little doggerel. You want to talk about poetry slams? We went to one a couple of years ago, waaaay out in the East Valley. Jeff Falk (yes, your buddy, tobaccoslave, more on him below), Annie Lopez, and their crew were out there, and yes, there was at least one golden plastic putti on a stick on display.
There were other artworks on the walls and floor; and there was a bald-headed woman at the microphone yammering away, and here's the thing: nobody cared. Some listened, some talked to their companions, others wandered among the artworks, as we did, because the composition this person came up with was apparently as compelling as Muzak.
My point? Why do anything if you can't command the room? Does that happen at your gigs, buddy? No. Everybody knows. Everybody's already trained to be quiet and pay attention to the person at the microphone, and the next, and the next, and the next, no matter how self-indulgent, navel-gazing and stultifyingly boring the whole long evening is.
Don't come out of the dressing room until you know you can stop them in their tracks, turn their eyes and ears to you and you alone to wait with bated breath upon your very next words.
Until you can do that, you're a hack.
Which brings me to his first post, which apparently got copied, or which he posted, to a lot of other losers users at livejournal. (The person who admired "Enough With The Pink Already" was astute, though. A woman, I think, by the pseudonym. Naturally.) It's very short. He calls us the biggest hacks in Phoenix, and then he writes something which cracked us up:
They hate Jeff Falk, First Fridays, and Islam.
In that order, tobaccoslave? Are you fronting points for Ffej Klaf, as we playfully call him? We attacked the guy because he glorified Che Guevara, degraded Abraham Lincoln, and made light of 9/11 (the plane silhouettes). Otherwise, we think he's just a career public-money artist and lifelong narcissist and microphone hog.
We've made our position on First Fridays clear enough. And what's he bitching about? He and his crew will get their way, crooning like loons if they wanna, bouncing their voices off brick walls up and down Roosevelt Row.
As for Islam, see the sidebar. We'll be getting back to the subject of Islam in local schools (and worse danger: think Beslan here). One comment: one of the dingaling commenters pointed out in a nasty way that the Arabs gave us the Arabic numerals. True enough, but also remember the numerals predated Islam, making the commenter's point irrelevant; and remember also that the Arabs left out the most important numeral, which had to come from India: the zero.
Oh, I know shit, all right --but don't you dare call me an academic.
[Update: I hate getting the wrong kind of traffic. I wish the livejournal people would just go away. Three days of yadayadayada. The people who use and comment on livejournal squirt out little squibs of stupidity, less than a sentence long most of the time, like itty-bitty dogs marking their territory. As for the tobaccoslave, this is the squinkydoodle's reply so far:
Apparently, he's real uppity about people using psudeonyms when writing, yet still links to Instapundit, Lt. Smash, Michelle Malkin (last name actually Magalang), and others in his blogroll without irony.
I don't know Citizen Smash's real name. But the rest is just stupid --Glenn Reynolds, anyone? --and the Malkin reference is plain racist.
And this is what he chooses to talk about first. I can tell, this guy has got the chops, all right. Yawn city. And I still don't know or care to know his real name. What difference would it make now, anyway?
Posted by Jerome at August 22, 2005 08:20 AM | TrackBack