94 on 94

[94on94]

How is it that Hope Sandoval looks exactly she sounds? Was she willed into existence by 100 butterflies beating their wings 100 times into a summer wind? The wind, in turn, softly vibrating the strings of a guitar? The notes then re-materializing into a windswept enigma wrapped in a baby tee?

I just watched The Jesus and Mary Chain's Sometimes Always video for the first time, featuring the mysterious fairy woman with the sad eyes and the ghostly voice. Coincidentally, I had just read this article about teacup puppies. 

I mention this only because that led me to read this chapter from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It is called "Beautiful Objects Small", and tells us duh, we all like pretty, delicate creatures because of DNA, or something.

...In most languages, the objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets...it is the small we are inclined to be fond of.                       

Until this moment, I had neither known nor cared what the girl from Mazzy Star looked like, but suddenly, I found myself inclined to be rather fond of her.

The aforementioned songs are both lovely, and I had a fleeting crush on them both in my university days. It never went much beyond that though, and I wonder if it's time I cultivate a deeper interest. I'm about 3 videos in when I recall a conversation I had last week about something called ASMR. A "perceptual phenomenon" which causes some to enjoy barely audible sounds to the extent that they have turned a random whispering lady into a YouTube celebrity. It gives them brain tingles! :)

"I think I have the opposite thing," I had told my friend. "That's why I don't like the Eagles, Norah Jones or Bob Ross." This is my nonsensical trifecta of mellowness, and I stand by that. Why? Because they all give me fucking brain tingles. :( 

Mazzy Star are rather quiet. A lot of terrific things in this world are, but I am certainly not one of them. And so I I think that it's not just a confusion my loud self feels at the gentle sounds, but a kind of resentment at their apparent ease.

In Burke's essay, he makes a clear distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The separation was jarring at first, since it runs counter to my natural tendency to think that the former is actually most often achieved through the latter.

From Burke's same volume: "Of The Sublime".

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

Which I guess means that, for the most part, for me to truly acknowledge beauty, I kind of require it to kick me in the gut or the face or the heart or something. I am coming to understand that this standard is both unfair and exhausting. 

When I heard Hope, for the first time in so many years, lackadaisically deliver the line, "I gave you all I had/I gave you good and bad/I gave but you just threw it back", my first instinct was to call her a liar. 

My younger self saw an aspirational allure in such coolness, coveting her winsome poise. But at this moment in my life, I was having a bit of trouble with it. I was having trouble with how little trouble comes through in such delicate delivery.

And yes, I mulled it over far more than necessary, like so many overly fragrant drinks of the season. I thought about it while winter encroached, and my heartbeat slowed down and I officially crossed the threshold from early to early-mid thirties. And when I came out the other side...well, the quiet, the resigned, the peaceful, the muted- it resonated, for once.

Fade on, fair(y) lady.

[94on94]

In 1994, I found out that Billy Corgan “used to be a little boy”. It would take awhile for me to get beyond that, which makes sense because he still hasn’t gotten much beyond that twenty years later. Ooh, the years burn.

Though Today preceded this single, my Smashing Pumpkins awareness did not. While the sounds of Seattle hit me with a loud catharsis, Disarm’s symphonic melancholy was gentler- dare I say, a bit more sophisticated? It was also hard for me to understand just what he meant by that line, swaddled as I was in the innocence of which he spoke. Still, it was fun to sing.

It sounds just as gorgeous now; non-dirgey, un-grungey, yet somehow very much of its time, steeped as it was in 70’s child-of-divorce anger and disillusionment. The stylish black and white video transcends the years; soaring melodies lifting the band members above the sprawl of childhood rooftops. "The killer in me is the killer in you" wasn't anything I had the perspective to digest. Was this a Jeremy thing? Or was this the little boy inside talking? I try to listen to it now with new, mature ears, and I am satisfying chilled by the sentiment.

If I’m honest, it wasn’t until my early twenties that Siamese Dream made total sense to me (Mellon Collie was a project which took up a great deal of my time in the interim). Ten years after its release, I was smitten with how much better it seemed to stand the test of time over so many contemporaries. My dirty secret is that now, yet another decade along, I still think it’s perfect.

Yes, this in spite of all that would reveal itself in coming years; Billy’s predilection for the word “lover”, Billy’s ego, Billy’s personality, Billy’s pathological need to shit all over the romantic ideals that he himself implanted in my impressionable mind over the years. 

I am able to see past it all, because it was never about you with me, Billy. You really did have the songs, but you really gotta stop telling everyone about it all the time if you want us to remember.

[94on94]

I wanna talk to you about pink walls. When I was a child, pink walls were everything I wanted and nothing I could get my hands on. The pink in my mind’s eye was blinding; hot to the touch, incandescent, exotic. The pink I was given in real life was muted and milky and barely spoke in a whisper.

This was the battle between the ballet costume I requested for my recital (among a selection of 10 pastel shades, a lone fuchsia that looked like it had crashed down from Heaven or Mars) and the baby-blanket hue I was assigned. The betrayal of the electricity I was awaiting to saturate my walls, with the realization that that off-white base slapped on by the hired painters was actually the “pink” I had been promised. My mom has since apologized, but was probably in the right; as a child with extreme insomnia, the last thing I (and she) needed, was all that beautiful noise getting me going.

The 80’s were a terrific decade for pink, and they stoked my love something grand. The ’90s, not so much, and they got to work on draining the rose-colour from my glasses. Still, I was extremely grateful for the drabness of the Grunge aesthetic. In these, my family’s darkest financial days, I got to own the fact that I shopped at Goodwill and call it a choice. And facing an alien (hormonal) invasion of my body, I got to obscure my burgeoning femininity in draping flannel, baggy corduroys and giant band t-shirts and call it fashion.

I was never what you would call a tomboy, but my feelings on being female were certainly complicated. Just as I had yet to embrace or even accept most things about myself, I couldn't make peace with most of the seeming duties of my gender. In making so many alterna-hunks into my role models, it was easier to push back against shitty teenage magazines that told me I was fat and the make-up I wasn’t allowed to wear anyway, and decide that it was all just frivolous nonsense. I wouldn't be caught dead in this oppressive colour until my inner child went wild for a pink pair of heavily-discounted Levi's Silvertab corduroys at 16. There would be no turning back.

//

I re-discovered this video for Bull in the Heather pretty recently and ached for the mid-90's. These ladies rocked that shit with a cuteness, toughness and weirdness that today's kids might never know. They danced in their underwear and shred their guitars in leather skirts and lingerie as pink as the walls behind them. 20 years on, I feel energized and validated and in love, and sad for the girl who didn't even know that this paradigm of brash femininity even existed. Maybe I could have realized that Kate Moss and Alicia Silverstone weren't the only kinds of pretty one could aspire to, and felt a bit more comfortable in the things that I wasn't.

As for those damn walls, I finally got mine when I moved into my own (very shared) apartment (/room) when I was 22. My terrifically generous roommate indulged my childish wants and even did the painting. The particular shade was settled on as I absent-mindedly gestured to one from a stack of paint chits in her hand. I don't remember if I knew that mine was the final say.

"It's really pink. It's like bubblegum," I remember her telling me over the phone after the deed was done, with a touch of regret. Her tone was the sole indicator of the fact that this descriptor might be remotely undesirable.

I had a latent lingering that my tastes might be a little...off. Maybe even up until I watched the utterly fabulous The Punk Singer nearly a decade later. Listening to Kathleen talk about recording the Julie Ruin record alone in her PINK AF room, something clicked. Maybe pink could be punk?

I could have used a Kim Gordon featuring a Kathleen Hanna in 1994, but I'll be damned if they don't have my back in 2014.

[94on94]

Closer

I’m going to run with this dark thing for a minute. Further down the spiral, if you will. I spent the afternoon listening to Nine Inch Nails and struggled to write anything or do anything for at least 24 hours. 

Hurt is too perfect for these restless autumn days of disorder and discontent. It comforts me in the way that Nick Cave’s “People Ain’t No Good” does on days where the whole world is the worst. Like, who cares, we’re all gonna die, anyway, so just f*#k everyone. 

Which brings me to a song called Closer (get it?). I first became aware of this salacious gem back during the legendary (in my mind) 1994 MTV Music Video Awards ceremony. 

My previous experience with NIN mostly consisted of photos of Mr. Reznor and his keyboard, both caked in Woodstock ‘94 mud. I took a cue from the excited alternative masses that this was something of a cultural milestone. And I think I sort of got it, though I was still not so familiar with this thing they called Industrial Music. But how dangerous, how elemental, how sexy it all sounded. Closer’s heart thuds and hissing opening notes were like a slinking locomotive pulling the freight of sexual obsession into Shining Time Station (ie. my innocence).

Really, if I remember correctly, I don’t even think the actual words even registered with me. But the way he was saying them…

And those few seconds of sepia-tinged decay stayed with me. A heart literally pumping steam, a nipple-shaped mic silhouette, Trent suspended from the ceiling in leather. A Christ-posed monkey. What was happening?! Muchmusic didn’t let me watch it, just like my mom wouldn’t let me watch Pulp Fiction (I told you it was quite a year), and I demanded answers. I kind of waited for it during those late night “Too Hot For Much” bacchanals held by the nation’s music station every so often, but to no avail. Even though it scared me. Especially because it scared me.

By 1997, shock had worn off and novelty had settled in. I owned a copy of The Downward Spiral and think I got about half of it, but that sense of underworld mystery that hung over the rest still remained. Enough to make me consider buying a VHS compilation of NIN’s videos released that year and called Closure (but at 15 years old, $50 might as well have been $500). Closure, indeed.

I don’t think I ever got to see it until YouTube came along and turned me into my own goddamn VJ. Even in the context of adulthood it's still pretty shocking (maybe even more so in the context of 2014- if you will recall); pulsing with sex and danger and obsession and vermin and steampunks riding wings of meat. And undeniably hot, in that desperate way that damaged people are to other damaged people.

Trent is quoted as saying in The Work of Mark Romanek DVD that “the rarest of things occurred; where the song sounded better to me, seeing it with the video. And it’s my song." In the context of his current career highs of merging sound and vision, I find this observation immensely gratifying; prophetic, even. It's becoming rarer to witness an artist's successful creative evolution over 2 vastly different generations, while retaining such stylistic and thematic coherence. 

And it was beyond cool to see him mature and healthy-looking and dapper as shit, co-accept an Academy Award with Atticus Ross for Best Original Score a few years back. And to read about the ways he’s changed (“happily married with 2 kids and an Oscar winner”), as well as the ways he hasn’t (“as if I can be summed up as that now”). 

With two decades separating Trent's descent and his subsequent bouncing back, a lot of that pain can get lost in translation. Closer has become- has always been- to the chagrin of the man wrote it as a cry for help, a "lust anthem". Not that there’s much of a difference between the two. You gotta learn sometime, why not in 1994 (even if you were 12)?

[94on94]

The station formerly known as Muchmoremusic does this thing now where they will play an entire countdown show from a randomly chosen year. I made this happy discovery while cleaning up for Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ house and OMG, they blessed me with all the top 30 vids of October 7th, 1994 (and I was soo thankful).

It was back to the middle school dance for me, while I rocked out to “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” and tried to tune out not one, but two heartfelt Elton John ballads about lion relations. I was reminded of what an Alan Frew and an Assoholic were and for the first time wondered if this list was really real or unfairly influenced by Canadian and Disney- content laws. I turned up “I’ll Stand By You” until the windows shook and thanked Chrissie Hynde for existing as the raddest palate cleanser ever.

But soon, would be revealed #1. Now that would give me some 1994 meat to chew on. I felt exhilarated by the possibilities. So, what was the number one song on Muchmusic exactly 20 years ago?…

Yep, "Silver" by Moist. 

I remember finding this CD at a garage sale and thinking I’d scored something fierce (it was still burning up the charts, so duh, I sort of had). What I remembered less? The jarring darkness of it all. You know, in 2014, sometimes you miss the darkness on the radio. You miss it until David Usher is grimacing at you and digging his nails into someone’s statue-still shorn skull, while screaming biblical metaphors. You’re like, “Oh my! Why is he so upset? Why is he smoking indoors?”

On an unseasonably mild Sunday 20 Octobers down the line, it feels utterly bizarre to watch someone bare their demons in this manner. It feels even more bizarre to wade backwards through the last 20 years of cultural evolution (?) and encounter a 12 year old child who looks like me but is rather unfazed.

In 1994 I shrugged and I kind of didn’t buy it. Maybe I could sense that they formed their band at Queens University (true suffering must take root in Seattle, and only in Seattle), maybe it just felt like they were kind of trying too hard. Grown-up me can objectively say that the guitarist definitely was. Maybe it’s because there is nothing more mid-‘90’s than for a 12-year-old child to be so steeped in the collective cultural superiority complex of her time that she feels entitled to judge the cred (sad cred? drug cred?) of a group of grown-ass men. 

It’s worth noting that 2014’s current #1 happens to be a pastel nightmare (and I LIKE pastels, k?) of a crinolined dollhouse filled with confident and bouncy young people grooving to the beats of what I’m told is a a body positivity anthem. Good on them, of course, but this is one of those moments where I wonder if I’m happier in a world abounding with these “Facts of Life” kind of songs, sung by a girl whose December 1993 birth date is one goddamn week too early to really bring this stupid theme of mine full circle (thanks for nothing, kid)…Or if I miss, you know, the darkness. 

But I have been on this side of the new century for so long that I kind of have the urge to go yank Mr. Usher and that unreasonably hammy guitarist out of their dank dungeon-club and go for a walk in the sun and talk some of these things out. It can’t really be as bad as “Morphine baby’s final breath”, can it, David??! :(

And then I would ask him. “What does “we are silver” even mean?!”

When I was young I was like, “Riiight! we are less than gold but more than bronze”. But today, I was brushing my 32-year-old hair to the side and all those greys just triumphantly glistened…”we aarrrrre sillvahhhh!”. Hmm…

[94on94]

I've been thinking about 1994.

Because, as any good (quasi-) Gen X-er, my body is made up of roughly 55% nostalgia. 

I was 12 years old in 1994. A little blip between a very insular childhood and an adolescence which would look nothing like the big-haired, hoop-earringed and glamorous life that I had parsed together from various examples around me (the older girls from dance class and Muchmusic, natch). Yes, '80s pop culture had imprinted on me profoundly, but that would stay dormant for awhile. 

I was, as most 12 year olds are, a bit of a blank slate. Unlike(?) most 12 year olds, I was plagued by the unbearable lightness of my own being. Among the symbols of said blankness: an un-decorated room I shared with my sister in our new house, and an empty notebook given to me for my last birthday. I had been informed by my parents and teachers that I had a bit of a knack for writing, but I honestly had no idea what that meant. My inability to put anything in that notebook weighed on me.

If I had known what an idea was, I would have realized that I actually had a couple of them. But they had yet to be awoken or validated by any outside forces, so did I really? Being a child of the late 20th century, I would look to popular culture to fill in a good number of my cranial vacancies; for better or for worse, both consciously and subconsciously. You might say that 1994 took my mind at its most fecund point and-- you know what? Nevermind.

I was a child who longed for the freedom and wisdom that seemed to come with adulthood; a history that could be measured in years as vast and valid as twenty behind me. I remember what it felt like to look forward to looking back, as though it would somehow legitimize the space I was taking up on this dark globe.

And now I realize that I'm here. And it's just as I imagined! Fullness and regret, richness and poverty, rooms full of stuff. Teaching the kids about things that used to matter, getting the kids to teach me about slang. 

I am here to tell you that I have seen some retro lists in my time, and 1995 cannot hold a candle to the year that preceded it. I considered it, of course, because I soon realized that my plan of 94 blogs in the last 94 days of 2014 was not gonna happen, and the Internet loves easily digestible landmarks to help organize its memories.

I'm choosing to ignore this though, and power on like I have every right to: about the things I saw, the things I missed, and the things that changed me.

Because, as any good (sort-of) millennial, I am comprised of nearly 45% (metaphorical) selfies. 

Edited/updated in January 2015, to reflect my throwing off the shackles of deadlines. Which is what I might...(?) be doing in that photo?