Like Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, they don't make offers like this anymore

Rorschach Sings!!! ("Watchmen" Parody) from Tame The Bear on Vimeo.

"Dreams are poems, not stories"

"In Dreams" from Blue Velvet

Anna Domino - "Land of My Dreams"

The End. The Beginning?

I went to see my old favorites The Smashing Pumpkins play at United Palace Theatre on Thursday night. I felt strangely apathetic in the days leading up to the show. I used to jittery and plan-obsessed for days before an SP show; it was a trial to focus on my real life. But mere hours before this show, I felt weirdly unexcited.

I generally try to get to a venue at the time listed on the ticket, even though it often leads to two hours of standing around in the dark, especially unpleasant now that I often go to concerts alone. But on Thursday I was enjoying a nice dinner with friends; I wanted to take my time. So we got to United Palace at 8:45, only to find out that the band had been playing since 8. I felt a little disappointed, but more guilty than anything else. Like I'd let down an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time.

The last time I saw the Smashing Pumpkins was at their supposed last concert on December 2, 2000, at the Metro. I was 16. I wore a white ballgown and a blonde wig - someone at one point claimed they had mistaken me for Courtney Love, which seems neither likely nor a compliment - and improbably tall shoes that cut off all circulation to my feet. At one point I asked a security guard to lift me out of the crowd because I thought I was going to faint; after I'd guzzled a few bottles of water, a kind cocktail waitress led me back to my space near the front of the small venue. Everyone hated me. Pumpkins fans, myself included, are a notoriously difficult bunch.

I wasn't expecting terribly much on Thursday night. I like the reformed SP album Zeitgeist okay. I've never developed a disdain for Billy Corgan's nasal snarl, even after years of listening to the music less and less. I still like the way he sounds. His voice was the least of my troubles on Thursday. I had missed most of the first half of the setlist, which was a shame, considering they played "Eye," my favorite weird SP b-side.

This Idolator post sums up what I did see pretty well:

Now, it’s bad enough to subject your audience to about 40 minutes of abrasive, deliberately off-putting music, but it’s even more uncool to come back for an encore that mocks them for not being 100% with you, and feeling disappointed for not hearing more of what they expected to hear from a show billed as a 20th anniversary concert. In conventional show biz logic, if you’re going to go that far, you should at least leave the audience with a crowd-pleaser. In Billy Corgan logic, you come out and perform one of the lesser songs from your best-selling album, and then finish off with a song that mixes disingenuous hippy-dippy “everyone is beautiful!” lyrics with improvised sarcastic rants that outright diss the city you’re playing in, mock the fans for paying to see your band, and tell your visibly disappointed audience that you’ll see them in hell. It was full-on douche-tastic passive-aggression.

(This is a quote from Matthew Perpetua's review.)

I just felt old. I don't mind, nor am I surprised, that Corgan is an ego-driven jerk. This is the man, after all, whose lamest noodlings I used to thrill to, whose music was the sole soundtrack to a different life I imagined for myself when I was twelve years old. Jesus, I still feel guilty for being late! Despite my determination to enjoy whatever the band trotted out, even one of the awful new songs ("G.L.O.W.", anyone?) I just found myself irritated by everything. Including Billy's outfit:

He spent most of the evening in a fringed skirt made out of what looked like white duct tape, white Nike dunks, and a white Zero shirt with some sort of Elizabethan collar. Forgive the terrible picture quality:



For the encore, he put on a different shirt:



Yeah, Billy, that was totally the item of clothing you needed to change.

I don't know. I guess this post doesn't include any big surprises. It's basically a poorly-written meditation on the reasons my friend Daniel doesn't read Postsecret anymore. I can't find the actual post he made on the subject, but his reasoning was something like "Well, when you can tell me a deep human truth that's not that life is hard and loss is sad, I'll be happy to read." You could probably say that about my blog tonight.

There's a silver lining, though. I came home and got all of my Pumpkins discography back on my computer. I had never uploaded most of it; I haven't listened to this music consistently for years. And it's wonderful. I'm especially enjoying Machina II, an album I never spent much time with when it came out in 2000. Listening to these songs again reminds me why I have loved this band so deeply.

Robert Lowell once wrote that the work of Sylvia Plath "makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing," That's about how I feel about Billy Corgan's music. It's demanding, too emotional, yet it always makes me feel like I'm twelve again, lying on my bed and hearing the songs for the first time.

This was my favorite picture of Billy Corgan when I was thirteen years old. Note the birthmark on his left arm and hand.

This morning on the train I was standing behind a fit Asian businessman. I couldn't see his face, but I could read what was playing on his iPod, which he held up to examine as he flipped through songs. He settled on Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People." Serendipitously, today Jezebel's Dodai covered Cintra Wilson's Times piece on the long life of Goth culture. All of this made me very happy.



I was never a proper goth, but I wanted to be. Starting in seventh grade I felt pangs of jealousy when I spotted one at the mall. Where did they get arm warmers and black lipstick? In eighth grade I started listening to Marilyn Manson (who I know is not the arbiter of goth, thanks) after seeing the video for "The Dope Show" on MuchMusic. My love of his music grew through lucky finds of Manson's earlier albums and EPs, and on April 20, 1999 my dad took my best friend and I to see Marilyn Manson at the Rosemont Horizon. He was supposed to be on tour with Hole, another favorite of mine, but Courtney Love had dropped off the tour and we saw Nashville Pussy instead, which was probably the only enjoyable part of the show for my father. When I got home, proudly clutching my brand-new size large shirt emblazoned with naked, sexless Manson, Columbine was all over the news.

After that I acquired a spiked leather color and a pair of close-fitting shiny black pants. They weren't vinyl, not yet; instead they were made of a sort of crunchy track-pant acrylic. The summer after that I discovered Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, as detailed below, and learned about what would always be thrown in my face as "real Goth": the Cure, black lace, orange lipstick, relentless mopiness. At this time I also became deeply involved with Jhonen Vasquez's comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its fandom, but that's another blog post for another tie. Suffice it to say I found myself deeply sympathetic with variously "gothy" things, including a host of comic books, endless vampire erotica, and a strong desire to be more depressed than I in fact was.

Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, I discovered online shopping and Hot Topic. By mid-September I was outfitted in skintight black vinyl cigarette pants that laced up with a suede string; various "corsets" that zipped or lightly laced up, in red brocade and pink vinyl; shoes that even I couldn't pretend didn't look like part of a Sexy Pilgrim Halloween costume; a miniskirt airbrushed with the image of bats flying out of a belltower, and very dark unappealing lipstick. I bleached my hair, then I dyed the tips purple, then I dyed it bright red. I owned a black velvet minidress that came to about the middle of my thighs with purple inserts behind black netting and bell sleeves.

At certain times older and more experienced alienated teenagers would look at me and inform me that I wasn't really goth - I was a kindergoth, a kinderwhore, some strange amalgam of raver and bored-looking suburbanite. Thank god the term "emo" didn't exist yet. My parents didn't really care; my mom even had some fun with the whole thing, going to Express with me and helping me suss out the most-Goth items on display.

From sixth grade on I owned a Sony Discman that gave me an entirely other life, one in which I was the protagonist of an incredibly cool movie scored to my favorite music. No matter how pathetic my tentative stabs towards romance were, no matter how harshly I fought with my parents over my relationship with my new boyfriend, no matter how hard I struggled in Math class, I could always escape to a world where "Rock Is Dead" was playing. "Set the Ray to Jerry" was on next, and both songs were just for me.





Marilyn Manson is an easy target. Neither his music nor his posturing could ever be called terribly original, and his hopefully-fauxmance with Evan Rachel Wood doesn't endear him to me, either. But I miss the days when he was on MTV, when he was present enough to offend people. It's not that popular culture has hardened to shock tactics like the ones Manson used; instead, some marketing genius over at Disney realized that if you grab the kids younger, when they don't like to be scared, they'll have brand loyalty to whatever dreck you pump out for them for the rest of their lives. It's part of the death of the record industry, too, I understand; right now the only people who can be counted on to buy albums are under 21 years old.



But there was a time in my life when nothing was more satisfying than the easy-to-swallow transgression that Manson served up. Everything about it was palatable to me at age fourteen: the queasy depiction of his escape from South Florida presented in his autobiography, the constant crowd roar effect he used in his songs, and his look.





I don't really care for the aesthetic any more, but when I was a Manson fan the way he looked made me feel thrillingly free. He was and is often awfully, brutally ugly, but with such style that it seemed okay. I was surrounded with images of what beautiful teenage girls were supposed to look like, and all of them were a far cry from anything I could or would be:





It was nice to have permission to be a little ugly and weird.

F.H.W.

A couple of months ago I had what I immediately termed a "middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout." I'm not sure why I started thinking about her. A friend of mine had mentioned seeing her at a party. He wanted to hit on her, but I guess she was there with her boyfriend.

Anyway, it was around two in the morning. I had brought my laptop into my bedroom, something I generally try to avoid doing, and found myself rereading Chris Heath's hilariously overwritten 1998 Rolling Stone cover story on Apple, "The Caged Bird Sings."



Here's a choice quote:

But in the busy, greedy, impatient '90s, we become whatever may be written about us in one or two perky paragraphs, and hers might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak. That is the great sucker punch of modern celebrity: It draws in the Fiona Apples of this world with that most wonderful of all promises -- to be understood -- and yet humans are still to invent a quicker, more-efficient method of being misunderstood by the greatest possible number of people than Becoming Famous in America. Fiona Apple has been discovering this for herself.

I first saw Fiona Apple on Saturday Night Live in late 1996. I used to glean a lot of important pop culture information from SNL; it was where I learned about another band I loved in middle school, Veruca Salt, and trying to follow the political jokes taught me as much about current affairs as, well, A Current Affair. Apple performed the song "Shadowboxer". I liked it so much that I asked for her album Tidal for my twelfth birthday a few days later.

In my memory that album will always be inextricably linked with a happy winter spent playing Mario 64, the only game I owned and part of my other birthday present, a Nintendo 64. For whatever reason the image of Mario diving into the aquatic worlds is especially linked to the opening song "Sleep to Dream." I listened to the album all the time, and I loved Fiona's controversial video, "Criminal."



It looks outdated now. Mark Romanek's slick surfaces and surveillance-camera feel are so common they're basically passe, and we're all familiar with Fiona's sad-hungry stare, the way her eyes sometimes turn red in the glare. But the whole thing transfixed me when I was twelve, even though I had to admit my mom had a point when she snorted derisively at the shot of Fiona squirting that, uh, dish soap out of the bottle at 4:03. Also, heroin chic (and maybe kiddie porn chic) aside, the video was and is sexy.

In 1996, the controversy over the video baffled me. Even though she was writhing on some faceless dude's knee, I reasoned, Fiona seemed to be in control of the situation; it's her song, after all, and the camera's on her. And while I don't really agree with my past reasoning now, I'm glad that I read the video that way. It didn't make me want to look tiny and sad in a closet. It was just a glimpse of a world that I could someday hope to enter and manipulate.

During my middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout I relearned a few facts about her that I missed as a sixth grader. Most importantly, I discovered that Apple dated David Blaine. For a long time.



...And in fact, according to the RS article, Blaine and Apple have matching tattoos that say "kin." And! According to this David Blaine messageboard, Blaine is the faceless man Apple oozes all over in "Criminal," which successfully oblitherates any lingering feelings about the video being sexy I still harbored. Of course, the Heath article also mentions that Apple had been up all night "drinking Surfers on Acid (some malignant combination of Malibu, Jaegermeister and pineapple juice) with Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson," so maybe there was already trouble in paradise in 1998.

I didn't think a lot about it at the time, but I was pretty lucky with the women who were famous when I was what they now call a "tween:" Madonna, Alanis Morrisette, Apple, even the Spice Girls were all better than the cocktail of titilation and stupidity now on offer to young girls. I went to Lilith Fair and saw Jewel and Sarah McLachlan.There were about eighteen months in the late nineties when the whole "women in rock" package got accidentally recycled into a celebration of real voices, and I was lucky to be twelve and thirteen years old.

The End and the Beginning

I was a diehard Smashing Pumpkins fan for about a seventh of my life, between the years 1998 and 2001. I got into the band after hearing a complete broadcast of the 1998 album Adore on Q101, "Chicago's Alternative," which I listened to religiously. My father got tickets to see the band perform on July 7, 1998, at what was then known as the New World Music Theater, in Tinley Park, Illinois. I loved the poetic impenetrability of Billy Corgan's lyrics, the soaring guitars, and, well, Billy Corgan: from the first time I saw the "Ava Adore" video on MTV, I was hooked on the bald songsmith's curious combination of vulnerability and theatricality. By the middle of eighth grade, I was madly in love: with his crooked teeth, with the birthmark that covered most of his left arm (as seen in seventh-grade me's favorite picture of him.) I wrote long poems to him in my journal. My greatest wish was to take a picture with Billy.

In my eighth grade yearbook, our answers to two questions were printed under our names beside our pictures: "If I could have one wish it would be..." and "In twenty years I will be..." My answers were "To be the inspiration for WPC's songs and JV's comics" and "Driving in a van with EG, listening to 1979." JV was Jhonen Vasquez, creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, EG was my best friend Erin, and WPC was none other than William Patrick Corgan.

My love for the band waned after I attended their epic five-hour breakup concert; I'd put so much emotional energy into my fandom, waiting outside the XRT building in the November cold and getting my wallet stolen at a Tower Records signing for which I had convinced my parents to let me miss school. I didn't get into Zwan. I liked Corgan's 2005 solo album TheFutureEmbrace but not the way he undercut its release by taking out a giant ad in the Chicago Tribune calling the Pumpkins back together. Of course the reformed Pumpkins were just Billy and stalwart drummer Jimmy Chamberlain. His endless confessional blogging seemed to have destroyed any possibility of pulling James Iha and D'Arcy back into the whirlpool.

I imagine I'll write much more extensively about the Smashing Pumpkins (and Adore, the critically reviled album that remains my favorite) in this space. But the main reason for this entry is the new Watchmen trailer:


That's Billy's reedy voice there, singing "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning," the B-side to "The End is the Beginning is the End," which was written for and featured on the Batman and Robin soundtrack:



I'm sure this was the meta trick of some soundtrack scrub out in Silverlake, but all I hope for is that we get another greenscreen video with Billy in a unitard, gesticulating wildly.

Something Brief About Radiohead

After my first boyfriend and I broke up, he got really into Radiohead. This was the April 2000, so he must have been listening to Kid A. It was the end of my freshman year of high school, and I had no experience with the band. Sometimes my ex and I would attempt to have amiable conversations outside the school while waiting for our parents to pick us up. He normally started off with some kind of backhanded compliment, such as "You're not dressed so slutty today."

And then he would start talking about Radiohead. Did I know, did I know, that Thom Yorke hated performing? That he performed with his back to the audience? Because all he cared about was the music? Did I know this?

No, of course not. I didn't listen to the band - although I did have a distinct memory of purchasing OK Computer in the seventh grade, hating it, and giving it to my mom - and I couldn't figure out what my ex was all worked up about. Later that year he wrote a bunch of poems with suspicously Radioheadesque titles: "Music (for the closing credits)," "IamnotwhoyouthinkIam," etc. And that was pretty much the last gulp of his engagement with popular culture before ascending into Grateful Dead cover band heaven, where he remains to this day.

Now, almost ten years later, Radiohead is a pretty undeniable cultural force. I went to see Radiohead in Milan on June 17. It was awesome. Thom Yorke did not, in fact, perform with his back to the audience. He danced like he was having a constant sexy seizure and stopped only to announce the football scores. And I wasn't dressed slutty, either.