In 2008, Oneida began the Thank Your Parents triptych with Preteen Weaponry. Since, the Brooklyn band—Kid Millions, Bobby Matador, Baby Hanoi Jane, Showtime and Barry London—has completed it with 2009’s Rated O and the new Absolute II (Jagjaguwar). The quintet is touring Europe in August and is also playing the Asbury Park, N.J.-based All Tomorrow’s Parties in October. In addition, Millions will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Millions: Let’s see if I can manage to talk about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay without resorting to cliché. She was five feet tall and had size three feet. She took on many lovers of both sexes throughout her life; not affairs, but public dalliances. She bought two adjacent farms at the top of a hill in Austerlitz, N.Y., and drank lots of gin and threw the bottles in the woods. (It was Prohibition; there was nowhere to dispose of them without drawing attention to herself.) But really, it’s the poetry that’s so tremendous, though her fame is remarkable if you compare it to today’s poets. Vincent (as she liked to be called) toured the country giving readings. There’s a map in her house at Steepletop of a tour she took; it’s crazy. She played a lot of the cities Oneida has. She wasn’t a fan of touring apparently. I have mixed feelings about it myself. Her Collected Poems was just re-published; it’s worth it, as is the biography Savage Beauty by Nancy Mitford.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NawJavK7Lu8
