Re: Poem Recommendation

> Dale Houstman wrote:
> msifg wrote:
> 
>> 
>> "Dale Houstman" <dmh7> wrote in message
>> news:[email protected]...
>> msifg wrote:
>> 
>> "FarStar" <ecowboy> wrote in message
>> news:[email protected]...
>> He's got to be the creepiest singer I've heard, maybe moreso the
>> leonard
>> cohen.  Don't you think the doors are creepy, like charlie manson
>> creepy, I do
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Jim was a natural prankster.
>> He was a rock&roll gangster.
>> He better be creepy.
>> Otherwise, he's not being honest.
>> 
>> He certainly could be embarrassing: I've seen live footage of him, and
>> he's not so much "creepy" as "drunk" - he might be considered "creepy" in
>> the way lonely Uncle Ginsock was creepy at the family reunions, but
>> that's
>> about as far as that goes.
>> 
>> "embarrassing" applies to jim in many ways.
>> he obviously had a garden variety of personality
>> defects coupled with a soaring IQ of 140.
>> that combination, mixed with drugs and booze
>> made him, sort of, obnoxious.  his behavior
>> on more than one occasion, got him in all kinds
>> of trouble with the law. (lewdness, public drunkenness,
>> public disruption, inciting riots, vandalism,
>> and other pranks were his forte.)
>> 
> 
> 
> I don't mind that he got in trouble with the law - it was almost
> expected in those times. But to get in trouble over such a small
> contribution is perhaps less than inspiring. He was sort of a rock and
> roll Hugh Hefner when it came to "sexual politics" and it is easy for me
> to imagine that if he had lived longer, he would have ended up as a fat
> man in a leather suit selling P*RN on cable. The real problem with him
> is that his "pretensions" were so dramatically overbearing, and he had
> very little sense of humor about himself and his work. The human race
> has had a lot of "prophets" and he is far from the most interesting, and
> his combination of sex, drugs, liquor, half-baked mysticism and a
> generally adolescent grip on life doesn't age well. It didn't age well
> even when he was alive; he slowly became either an irrelevancy or a joke
> to many music listeners of the time, and - from what I saw - his core
> fan base ended up being disenfranchised misanthropes with a predilection
> for self-pity, a taste for beer, and the merest understanding of what
> poetry was. That said, there are some good songs in there, and their
> dramatic/theatrical sound has proven to be influential. But they are not
> the best examples of themselves...
> 
>> 
>> "creepy" would be from the perspective of his
>> painfully normal parents and people like them.
>> (nixon's silent majority.)
>> 
> 
> 
> We ALL had "painfully normal parents" - the hippie generation's source
> was mainly in the white suburban communities of America. Jim just made
> just a trifle more snot-nosed about the fact his parents weren't raving
> shamans.
> 
> 
>> jim's long hair, wild stare and "obnoxious" behavior
>> contributed to the disowning of his parents.
>> (i'm sure those calls to home went quite well.)
>> his dad was an admiral in the navy.
>> can you imagine the tension btwn those two?
>> 
> 
> 
> This is pretty common though: my (step)father was in the army, and I
> lived most of my youth on army bases. Long hair? That is hardly a
> cultural landmark for Jim: even bald people had long hair in the 60s.
> And we were masters of the obnoxious.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I like Henry Rollins for today's
>> "Jim" like personality.
>> 
>> They do have some similarities: Henry is also a pretentious who has pipe
>> dreams about being a writer, but is really just a dumb block of wood with
>> some paper and a pencil.
>> 
>> maybe so.  but, henry's still young.
>> and, since he puts so much work into it,
>> he could still produce something brilliant.
>> 
> 
> 
> He ain't THAT young, and poetry and rock and roll are usually best
> produced in one's greenest youth. I've seen Rollins on a number of
> occasions, as a musical performer, as an author, and as a "man of
> ideas". He is not impressive in any of those arenas. I think he is
> dumber than Morrison by a good two or three foosball parlors, and has
> generated for himself a personality (pushy muscular loudmouth who looks
> like he should join the Marines) that frankly is depressing.
> 
> 
>> of course, he ain't no morrisson.
>> however, very few in the pop spotlight
>> can claim that title, if any.
>> 
> 
> 
> A totally subjective thought and insupportable. I think there are PLENTY
> of musicians/composers/performers who are better than Morrison.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> However, Jim crept through
>> the cracks of the vestal industry.
>> 
>> They don't allow any "crazies" through the
>> doors anymore.  Too bad.  That's where
>> true art lies.
>> 
>> Oh, there's still some loonies lurking about out there: the fact is, the
>> vast majority of pop musicians in ANY era are essentially "normal" and
>> merely professional rather than "crazy".
>> 
>> i disagree with ANY era.
>> the sixties came with more "open cracks."
>> 
> 
> 
> One only has to look at - for instance - the lives and personalities of
> blues and jazz musicians to realize that art has always attracted
> fringe personalities, drug users, drinkers, sexual maniacs, killers, and
> so on. There have been a lot of discussions/essays/books about the
> connection between mental instability and creativity, and it is scarcely
> worth another debate here. Much of what passed for "crazy" in the 60s
> was the result of a cult of public display. Of course, one CAN find
> signs of supposed psychological problems everywhere, with the occasional
> outright schizophrenic (Brian Wilson, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett) but
> much of the rest are really just bits of typical egomania, neurosis,
> narcissism, alcoholism, sex addiction. I see more actual crazies
> everyday at my job. It can be said that too much fame and too much money
> exacerbate these tics, but they're not uncommon.
> 
> dmh



Well put, basically. 


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