Can't get to Heaven with a three chord song

I like the way they dance with the microphone, swinging their hips and heads.

I like the way they tell bad jokes ("Why don't Lions play cards in the jungle? 'Cause there are too many cheetahs.")

I like the way their eyes roll back in their heads and the way it makes them look wild, not wild like punk kids, but wild like that old Wyatt poem, like a deer as it is dying.

I like the way their lyrics look horr-i-ble typed out on the page, but look sublime in my head.

I like the way they can make me feel almost anything, from euphoria to anger, but it's feeling, and that's enough somedays. I like feeling things I would have no cause to feel. (Is this true? Is this dangerous? But I never lie.) Why should I be angry, or indignant? What a parlor trick is this! I am their marionette.

I like feeling like she winked, just at me.

I like feeling the winter, despite what I say, it was all pale blue and dry and I like feeling it.

I had forgotten all of these things, but I remembered quite quickly.

All I want to do is sit around and gush about this concert. I guess it was all the more spectacular because, until they showed up on stage, I had felt like a piece of cork. Dried out, exhausted (I was yawning through the opening act, I felt so rude, but I was tired), like a big pile of nothing. I was The Nothing. I was unmoveable, and the show proved me wrong, or changed that. It was good, and it was good for me. I don't even like all of their songs (some off the new album are uninspired marches) and I didn't much care for the crowd, but it was what I needed all the same.

Sometimes I feel things such that it almost makes me faint. Sandra Cisneros was one time, Sleater Kinney the latest. Oh, dehydration had nothin' to do with this. And I never lie.

Corin whispered "Oh give me pretty song" into her mic. Oh give me pretty songs, Oh give me warbling songbirds. Carrie looks like a great blue heron, Corin a yellow-throated warbler. Janet just looks like a woman.

2002-10-20, Things I like about Sleater Kinney

before / after

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