As the snaggletoothed folk singer Jewel proved so smashingly last year, poetry is a money-losing publishing proposition only when the poet in question is not an attractive twentysomething pop star. Putting this theory to the test this season is Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins of TLC (the reigning most-bestest pop group in America), whose Thoughts, a 160-page book of poems, essays, and family photographs, originally published in November of last year by Jewel's publisher, HarperCollins, hit the shelves of my local bookstore last week.

So which to recommend to your sensitive 14-year-old friend? Let's go to Amazon's perceptive customers for help.

Angelab00014@hotmail.com, one of 32 T-Boz fans who has posted a review, tells us, "She is a great writer. Her poems come right from her heart and thats cool. I read thoughts like 3 times already and I have only had it for a week. Its a great book. Has some color pictures thats cool too. Her poems actully mean something. It has color pics of her friends and her and her family. Its a great book."

Jewel partisan tennis3@home.com from Scottsdale, Arizona (one of 306 Jewel readers to post reviews) tells us, "Jewel's book is the best most inspiring book I have ever have the pleasure to read. I have read it more then a 1,000 times and I still read it every night. She writes so beautifully and has such a natural grace. She is a true angle."

An angle whom you can read nightly, or a great writer whom you can read three times a week -- the choice is yours.

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Oops! I got an e-mail from Seattle Weekly writer Michaelangelo Matos defending his assertion that CDs of the much-written-about Brazilian Tropicalia movement are hard to find -- a theory I lightly mocked in my last column.

"There's Brazilian pop aplenty at any decently-stocked record store," he wrote. "What I was specifically referring to was Tropicalia itself, which was a specific, two year (1967-8) art and cultural movement (it included music but was not limited to it). MPB [Brazilian pop music], by contrast, is the music that was made in its wake; a rough analogy might be early '90s breakbeat hardcore techno giving birth to drum 'n' bass.... And "avant-garde" [an assertion Culture Wars also poked at] comes into it due to the fact that Veloso, Gil, et. al. were as influenced, by their own admission, by concrete poets and serial composers as they were by Jobim or the Beatles."

Right he is. The late-'60s albums of Tropicalia guiding-spirit Tom Ze, as well as those by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa aren't available domestically; and it's hard to find Ze's minimal recorded output from that period even in Brazil (where, ironically, he's never enjoyed much popularity).

While I'm making corrections, I should also update the location of Brazilian Music Enterprises, an excellent online source of Brazilian music, which moved this month from Orcas Island to Long Island -- though due to the wonders of modern-day technology, its URL is unchanged (www.brazmus.com).

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Steve Brown is leaving his post at SAM as of March 15, after 10 years at the organization, where he currently serves as Associate Curator of Native American Art. According to SAM publicist Linda Williams, his resignation "was unexpected, but there's nothing negative about it. He's recently married, and he's got a lot of carving projects and teaching opportunities, and I think he just wanted to spend more time doing those personal things." His position will be filled after a national search.

Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com