History/L&A

[katefans@chinet.chi.il.us (Chris n Vickie)]

Vickie here. Fun day in gaffaland...

Jonathan Whitcomb writes:

> to town by passing merchants.  Occasionally, some of the written 
> passages were so controversial that readers would burn the leaves in
> anger, leading to the modern term "flaming".  Many found that inhaling
> the smoke of the burning leaves caused a hallucanatory effect, and thus
> smoking leaves became more popular than reading them in some areas.

What a wonderful post!! I was rolling! Just wanted to thank you for it.
(btw, I've tried to e-mail you to "yes" on your offer, but keep getting
bounces. Is the offer still open?)

Meredith writes re "Love and Anger":

> A song is a personal thing.  What the artist says and what the song says
> to you are two completely different things- it's the difference between
> what the song is officially supposed to mean and what it means to you
> individually.

I liked your post very much. It's great to see that L&A means something
to someone else besides me.

> People tend to complain about Love and Anger's lack of direction.  True,
> not even KaTe knows what it's about, but in this case it works beautifully.
  ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^
Kate has said that over and over and I still don't truly believe it. She
just doesn't want to explain something so....um....confusing :-)
I think her statement about L&A should go on the same shelf as her
statement about TSW being her "most female album" and it's one of those
things where you either get it, or you don't. I get it, but I can't
explain it, so I have no problems with Kate not being able to either.

> The best songs for me are the ambiguous ones, because then you can develop
> your own ideas and associations about them.  (This goes along with the
> common bitch about videos, but I don't want to get into that, so I won't.
> :)  And even if you do someday find out what the song is "really" about,
> you still have the option of keeping your own interpretation- see my post
> about "Marlene on the Wall" from last week or so...

Oops, wrong list. You talked about "Marlene" in Ecto. You might want to
re-work that and post it here. I know what you mean though, and it's very
true that, if a person has their own interpretation of a song, finding out
the "true" meaning doesn't have to push aside the listener's original
ideas. The same can be said for videos, but it's harder to push aside
visual images and keep your original visualizations. I had my own mind
movies for Wuthering Heights, and now I can't even remember what they
were like. I've seen so many different versions of Kate doing the song
that my own version got lost over the years.

Vickie (one of Vickie'n'Chris)
katefans@chinet.chi.il.us