A few days ago I posted something about making a deck of Bush Cartel cards. Well, they’ve been made — Roger Ailes (not that Roger Ailes, obviously) has a link to one set, and here’s yet another.

(They say every rightist has her/his favorite leftist, and vice-versa. Some acquaintances of mine on the staff of the UPLB Perspective who later actually up and joined the New People’s Army were totally into Arnold Schwarzenegger, no matter how detestable his politics were. In any case, my current favorite evil attack dog of the right happens to be a four of diamonds.)

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It’s about time I wrote a little something about the sparkling joys of poet Eileen Tabios’s blog, WinePoetics. I imagine her drinking her wine, her entries spilling like tiny diamonds onto the keyboard, getting stuck between the “j” and “k” keys.

I met her a few months back at a reading, where she stumped me with a question on some offhand statement I made (I was introducing the writers) about how poets are needed to imagine the nation. I couldn’t really answer. Then I ran into her again buying Peet’s at SF State (god, this is starting to sound like some kind of mash note), just before she had a poetry reading. (I couldn’t go because I was teaching my research methods class at the same time.) Anyhow, she clearly had no idea who I was. =)

Her latest entry, “Song of the Torn Footnotes,” is characteristically lovely. “Your hands never memorized the circumference of her ankles.” And again: “As the moon rose, we never entered a room whose lights I cancelled from a sudden shyness.”

So, Eileen, if you’re reading this, consider it fan mail. Or better yet, consider it a toast.

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My dad, also named Benito Vergara (he’s D’Original Benito Vergara), wears many hats — I think he was befuddled, but secretly pleased, at being called a “rice guru” — but the last few years he’s been writing children’s science books. Children’s books! My dad!

Here’s a review of his latest, Waling-Waling: The Search for the Most Beautiful Orchid in the World.

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This week’s Friday Five:

1. What was the last TV show you watched?
Survivor, last night. I’ve said many times before that the show is my foremost absolute guilty pleasure, and I’ve always wondered whether or not I could incorporate in an anthropology class or something — you know, tourism, colonialism, cooperation, competition, plus issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. It’s all there.

2. What was the last thing you complained about?
I complain about everything.

3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?
Can’t remember. Probably Madeline.

4. What was the last thing you threw away?
A wrapper of a miniature Snickers bar.

5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?
WinePoetics.

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A letter from Tom Waits to The Nation, reacting to an article by John Densmore about using the Doors’ music in commercials (“I hope Sting has given those Shaman chiefs he hangs out with from the rainforest a ride in the back of that Jag he’s advertising, ’cause as beautiful as the burlwood interiors are, the car — named after an animal possibly facing extinction — is a gas guzzler.”)

Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs. It reduces them to the level of a jingle, a word that describes the sound of change in your pocket, which is what your songs become. Remember, when you sell your songs for commercials, you are selling your audience as well.

Although as someone on the Zorn list wrote, the irony is is that advertising may be just about one of the last places for creative music programming left, as radio has practically been given over to mega-corporations who play the same 25 songs over and over. (Classic rock really is the new muzak.)

At least in those Volkswagen commercials you could hear Charles Mingus, Stereolab, Nick Drake, Velocity Girl, and Psychic TV — when was the last time you heard them on radio, except if you were tuning in to an indie college radio station?

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