My friend Doug wrote this about my encounter with Lady Gaga:

When Celebrities Stop By
August 26th, 2010 11:41 am ET

The Fist: an arbitrary, unrelated photo
Photo: The author
Several weeks ago, a close friend of mine was unfortunate enough to be inside of a local bar when current pop superstar Lady Gaga made an ostentatious surprise appearance, dressed in stage persona attire and flanked by a security team. Predictably, this proved altogether too much for the mere mortal socialites and drunkards of this outer-Cambridge upper-level college region dive. They went all to pieces in disbelief that their lackluster lives should experience this brush with the divine. Frenzied pictures were taken, immediate Twitter updates and text messages updated the surrounding area, and soon a mind-less mob was formed, jockeying for front-row positioning, threatening to break into a savage melee.
At this point, the great Lady Gaga had no choice but to escape, leaving the lives (such as they are) of those arriving a moment too late forever ruined…
A freelance writer, this friend of mine who found herself in the middle of this momentary panic, emailed several local outlets offering to write a synopsis of the event. Though she had not spoken to Lady Gaga - hadn’t heard a word she had said, hadn’t had any real contact with her, only having witnessed her passing - each outlet immediately expressed a strong desire to publish her piece. My friend, of course, felt herself lucky to have encountered such a freak opportunity, but we were both rather disheartened by the event overall. Both of us have published works that have required a good deal of original research, contain what we believe to be unique insights, and works that are far more relevant to the daily lives of the average reader than any play-by-play of celebrity bar-hopping. But then, the metrics on such articles are unimpressive, and such articles are often hard to sell to any mainstream media outlet. I had experienced something similar when I wrote a piece about a Sarah Palin rally that I did not even attend. I had accidentally passed through a congregation of slack-jawed, beer-gutted “tea-baggers” and wrote a brief piece that states the obvious: Palin supporters are a grotesque lot. I was amazed by the number of hits (website views) this piece received. I supposed it was the key words “Sarah Palin” that had so inflated the numbers.
My friend and I speculated as to how well an article might do if it were to arbitrarily include celebrity names, like those of such superstars as Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise? Perhaps we could write purely speculative pieces regarding what might happen were Brad Pitt secretly sexually involved with Julia Roberts, while Tom Cruise tried to steal Brad Pitt away from her.
Helpfully, Forbes.com lists the most “powerful” celebrities in their Celebrity 100, for people as deficient in Pop Culture as myself. They are as follows:
Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce Knowles, James Cameron, Lady Gaga, Tiger Woods, Britney Spears, U2, Sandra Bullock, Johnny Depp, Madonna, Simon Cowell, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Kobe Bryant, Jay-Z, Black Eyed Peas, Bruce Springsteen, Angelina Jolie, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Jordan, Dr. Phil McGraw, Steven Spielberg, Ellen Degeneres, David Letterman, Tyler Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Pink, Lebron James, Roger Federer, Brad Pitt, Floyd Mayweather, Michael Bay, Donald Trump, Jay Leno, Coldplay, David Beckham, Jerry Seinfeld, AC/DC, Howard Stern, Jonas Brothers, Tom Hanks, George Lucas, Glenn Beck, Ryan Seacrest, Phil Mickelson, Ben Stiller, Jerry Bruckheimer, Cristiano Ronaldo, Alex Rodriguez, Robert Pattinson, Conan O’Brien, Shaquille O’Neal, James Patterson, Kenny Chesney, Manny Pacquiao, Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, George Clooney, Stephenie Meyer, Cameron Diaz, Serena Williams, Rascal Flatts, Charlie Sheen, Derek Jeter, Lance Armstrong, Kristen Stewart, Toby Keith, Sean (Diddy) Combs, Stephen King, Sarah Jessica Parker, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judge Judy Sheindlin, Robert Downey Jr, Lil Wayne, Reese Witherspoon, Keith Urban, Julia Roberts, Steve Carell, Meryl Streep, Akon, Maria Sharapova, Daniel Radcliffe, Venus Williams, Ray Romano, Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum, Drew Barrymore, Alec Baldwin, Kiefer Sutherland, Tina Fey, Kate Moss, Eva Longoria Parker, Jeff Dunham, George Lopez, Katherine Heigl, Danica Patrick, Kate Hudson, Chelsea Handler, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mariska Hargitay.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t recognize most of these names, thus the chance that I would recognize them in a bar any time soon lingers around nil.

Photos from NYC

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James Baldwin

is one of my favorite writers. NPR interviewed the editor that published a collection of James Baldwin's stories entitled The Cross of Redemption. NPR's website had one story in particular that I really enjoyed reading. I've posted it below:

Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare by James Baldwin

Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist ("this England" indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all — should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak — I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.

Again, in the way that some Jews bitterly and mistakenly resent Shylock, I was dubious about Othello (what did he see in Desdemona?) and bitter about Caliban. His great vast gallery of people, whose reality was as contradictory as it was unanswerable, unspeakably oppressed me. I was resenting, of course, the assault on my simplicity; and, in another way, I was a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare. But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.

Well, I was young and missed the point entirely, was unable to go behind the words and, as it were, the diction, to what the poet was saying. I still remember my shock when I finally heard these lines from the murder scene in Julius Caesar. The assassins are washing their hands in Caesar's blood. Cassius says:

Stoop then, and wash. — How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me before — I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath and beyond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and impersonal — and contemporary: that "lofty scene," in all its blood and necessary folly, its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a perspective which has never left my mind. Just so, indeed, is the heedless State over¬thrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve a desperate single- mindedness. And this single- mindedness, which we think of (why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and diminish a man — to distort and diminish us all, even, or perhaps especially, those whose needs and whose energy made the overthrow of the State inevitable, necessary, and just.

And the terrible thing about this play, for me — it is not necessarily my favorite play, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to speak, discovered — is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual ambition, self- conscious, deluded, idealistic, or corrupt, and the blind, mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob. "I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet...I am not Cinna the conspirator" — that cry rings in my ears. And the mob's response: "Tear him for his bad verses!" And yet — though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howl¬ing and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only receptacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones . . ."

Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world — once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is — some of the self- protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away. It is probably of some significance, though we cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehension of Shakespeare came when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French. The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, therefore, that I began to read the Bible again.)

My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.

In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to see — especially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French — is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations — which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people's survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.

Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me, since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among Negroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed.

My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.

That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.

Excerpted from The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Copyright 2010 by The Estate of James Baldwin. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved.

New Website!

More of a portfolio of my writing: www.melissapocek.com

Only in New York...

Snow Cone?

Lollapalooza 2010

The oppressive heat of the direct daylight, the submission – while wedged between sweaty fans – to becoming but part of a mass; both paradoxically manage to contribute to a liberating spirit of festival.

For the past six years, Grant Park in Chicago has served as the sacred Lollapalooza upon which pop idols are worshipped and lesser known are given opportunity to prove their mettle. For three solid days, bands such as Devo, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, The National, and The Dirty Projector, earned their places on the honor roll. But the highlights were the headliners, and Arcade Fire elicited surges of awe and were just spectacular.

Lollapalooza 8/7/10 12:33 AM

Chicago

I am in Chicago to check out the writing market and to cover Lollapalooza. Even though the publication I will be writing for has a rather large readership in New England, they are still working with no budget and in turn no money to get me into this event. I had to figure out a way to get the $271 three-day pass on my own. After many hours of head scratching, I came up with a plan, that I would get a free pass by volunteering. So I looked up the requirements online, filled out an application, and waited to hear back. The volunteer spots are highly sought after at this event, but luckily my eight page application was convincing enough and I got in.



The festival starts tomorrow so today I had some time to explore, I walked around Chicago's bohemian neighborhood Wicker Park. I window shopped at their boutiques that had everything from glittery framed pictures of Blagojevich to a clothing shop with clothes made from all-recycled material.

Ghost Monkeys...

give me nightmares.

They're actually golden snub nosed monkeys and they are endangered.

I am still exhausted from a 5.5 hour bike ride yesterday. I went from Somerville to Newton, Brookline, and JP to the North End. Total 45 miles. I think bike racing is something I want to do in the near future.
I added more pictures to my "summer" gallery on the right. Click on the picture of the flower to see more.