Dividing the world into 2 camps

There are two types of people: those who unconsciously assume a position of reverence when Celine Dion sings "My Heart Will Go On," and those who find such a thought somewhat frightening. \nI don't know why I was reminded of this when I loaded Joni Mitchel's Court and Spark album into my portable CD player. I suppose the division of the world into easy camps overlooks the gray areas of maudlinness.\nI'd decidedly say I was of the latter camp listed above, never being a fan of artificial sweetener. Yet here's Joni, warbling some very maudlin-like tunes of woman in love, woman scorned, woman vaguely triumphant. \nAll my teenage angst got wrenched through endless repetitions of Joni Mitchel albums, an outsider (I thought) like myself. I learned about tricks that poetry could play from the lyrics, how words had a music all their own. I judged the lyricism of the world around me by the orchestrations on Hejira and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. I had daylight fantasies of hanging in a coffee shop with Joni, her best gay friend. We'd giggle over large mugs, talk about how men suck and smoke a lot. (Note to heterosexual men: This is why your women like us.) Talk the lowdown of the life behind the songs. \nEverything I learned about how people loved in the movies and on television was thrown out the window by For the Roses -- man, I felt that woman's pain! A good man is hard to find. "Coyote" would be the song I'd live by. \nThere are two types of people: those who venerate and those who objectify.\nThis division of the planet's population was suggested by the opposing anniversary celebrations of Roe vs. Wade. Bush and the Lifers, NOW and the Choosers -- need I tell who I think Joni likes? Any woman who can pose nude by the ocean (butt shot only, very tasteful) for her album art has got to think women are smart enough to run their own lives. \nBut if you listen to the albums of the last 10 years, you might detect another pulse that Joni and I have in common -- thoughts of the supreme importance of life, a wish for a different reverence of it. Not one that defines cellular mass as moral property, but celebrates within that dividing soup a mystical and truly unknowable impulse, a consciousness awaiting its own choices. Joni and I don't like to fuss. \nRight now, Joni is crooning "Raised on Robbery," a song in which she channels the spirit of an inept hooker in a Toronto bar -- this was my brother Matt's favorite song on the album. It's the perfect song for a retro drag queen, though that shouldn't reflect poorly on my brother's younger proclivities. Indeed he chose the song that expressed the duality of Joni best.\nA '70s sex kitten, Joni cut a legendary swatch through the California rock scene, but the longing you'll hear in her voice is usually beyond just catching the next lay. She seems to have felt as so many of the '70s folk did, that we would find in the pleasures of the body what was unfindable in the country at large. \nWe would find the meaning of freedom in freedom itself -- slightly licentious freedom without terrible recriminatory reflections from norms and mores. While we spread pieces of our own destruction, we also created the platforms for newer worlds, better in some ways. Would-be better worlds, I guess -- if they learned from our lessons. \nIf personal control seemed definitely lacking in the '70s, it simply took its cues from the world at large -- or maybe more to the point, stopped taking them. It was the decade of ugly blood and dissension -- a sarcastic generation angling for control from a tight-ass world. \nI hope George W. Bush listens to Joni Mitchel.\nThere are two types of people in the world: those who see choices as the imprint of soul and the truth of the individual, and those who see statements as sufficient substitute for choice. \nAnd I'd gladly put myself and Joni into the former category, but it's a questionable fit. On "Free Man in Paris," Joni is widely assumed to be singing of David Geffen, her crise de coeur back in 1974. The person she sings of has a contempt for the forms of his life, the artificiality of the publicly known. The choices of the artificial life -- do they reveal the soul? Is it only honesty that marks the value of a person? I think Joni and I are stymied by this question. \nOccasionally, the happiest people are truly those who know the least. Ronald Reagan, whose presidency brought the curtain down on the '70s with a Kristallnacht quality, was graciously unaware of arms being sold to Iran, money funneled to vicious guerrillas who did things we didn't think we supported as a nation. He never once recognized AIDS publicly. \nThe morals of one as the values of all -- Joni and I are, I believe, united against such an idea. On a more recent album, Joni stakes out the idea of the cynicism that is used to sell cynicism on "Sex Kills": "And the gas leaks/and the oil spills/And sex sells everything/Sex kills" -- and I'm her acolyte. Sex can kill. Your sex doesn't have to…\nThere are two kinds of people in the world: those who live in the present and those who believe there is a future worth having. What kind of person are you? According to Joni and me, it's your choice.