yours, mine, truth

Extreme, III Sides to Every Story

The "subtitle" to this one is "Yours, Mine, & the Truth."

I love that.

I love this album.

Also, the idea is fitting, given the conversation we have had about Houyhnhnms & the DFW piece & the idea of "truth" in general.

I may prefer Pornograffiti on certain days, but this one hits me in the head as well as the heart.

[SIDENOTE: any Guitar Hero players still around? The band's "Play With Me" was 1 of those "hardest-songs-ever," up there w/ Buckethead's  "Jordan"  & Dragonforce's "Through the Fire & Flames."]

"Yours" is the rockin' side, w/ "Politicalamity" continuing the band's creation-of-words motif; "Peacemaker Die" includes an excerpt of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, & "Cupid's Dead" just flat-out rocks.

"Mine," the mellower, ballad-y side, has 1 of the the funniest love songs ever written, "Tragic Comic."

& "The Truth" is a progressive tour-de-force, a 3-part, 20+ minute epic. It's called "Everything Under the Sun," & the parts are "Rise n Shine," " Am I Ever Gonna Change"  & "Who Cares?"

A fantastic, highly underrated near-masterpiece by a great band that never got a real foothold because of

(a) the length of their hair,
(b) the advent of "grunge," &
(c) their one big, huge monster hit, "More Than Words," which made people think they were Simon & Garfunkel & not a funky metal band.

Also, Nuno Bettencourt is a genius.

Yeah, I said it.

Later you'll hear more of his stuff, but if you're interested now, check out Mourning Widows (my favorite of his bands), Dramagods (bog melodic rock), Satellite Party (w/ Perry Farrell), & Population 1.

& how may I  connect this w/ you young'uns?

How about this: he toured as Rihanna's guitarist this year.

A lot of metalheads were quite angry.

I thought it was way, way cool.

Juniors:
You struggled to listen as my speakers struggled to give the amazingly quiet rendition of Eliot reading his own work.

I got a few words for you:

"O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag"

(& yes, that's how he spells it.)

If you didn't know it, you heard stuff from Hamlet, Greek mythology, the Upanishads, the Fisher King, selected plays, poems, stories, & myths.

It's all a heap of broken images.

& that's why it rules.

Sophomores:
An in-class open-book quiz on the stuff we had previously read aloud in class.

Many of you did quite well . . . & a few of you continue not to try.

We then looked at scene 2, in which things get downright conflict-heavy.

Creon's gonna kill Antigone.

Now Ismene wants to die fro the crime she did not commit.

(Wait--what!?!?!)

Antigone says, bring it on, big boy.

Will he kill his son's fiancee?

Will Antigone find a loophole in the law?

Will the sentry return?

Tune in tomorrow, same Greek time, same Greek channel.

(Also, bring your unit 4 definitions.)

&

be cool