Late June. The last few years June seems to fly by as it always does, but it’s just time. June used to feel like the sweet spot of summer, full of nothing and everything to do, salt-crusted and slightly buzzed. Now it feels more like trying to rest and regain all the energy teaching requires. I wrote and read a lot, worked a bunch (a relief after working so little last summer, flirting always with running out of money), went to a few readings and shows. Didn’t make it to the beach, didn’t get out of town. It’s been OK.
One of the things I read was Anwen Crawford’s book about Hole’s Live Through This. I milked it for a couple months, somehow. Brought it once to a bar where my friend James works, and his eyes got huge and he was like, That’s my favorite album of all time I’d read that in half an hour. See but I can turn a half hour into a month and a half. I can read so slowly it’s really just staring at words.
So this album’s been on my mind, which means it’s crept back into my life. Good. This summer I’ve also reconnected with a friend from the Bay Area, Keala. Back then we swapped band members and probably secretly competed with each other. At one point we had practice spaces across the hall in the Tenderloin, and shared band members would cross the hall for back-to-back practices and Keala or I would sneak over to listen at the door. Really it was fandom more than jealousy. At least someone liked our bands!
Anyway, Keala’s band got started by learning and covering Hole songs, and Courtney Love was his musical and stylistic role model. You should have seen Keala in a torn slip, broken heels and smudged makeup, playing in a Castro storefront alcove until the cops came, then bargaining for one more song. Glorious.
After rereading Jessica Hopper’s truly marvelous oral history of Live Through This (first caught it in Spin, and now in her killer book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, which everyone who cares about music rather than just listens to it should read), I remembered this piece I wrote late last summer. I wrote it on assignment but went over (the minuscule) word count and didn’t want to edit it down, which I know is silly (esp. since I love counting words) but it got wrapped up in my feeling for the album, my own adoration of Courtney, and my feeling that (almost) everything was terrible last summer and this was just another little indignity. Also, as another friend points out, I’m a triple goat who can’t help bumping my horns on everything. Fuck it. So here it is, in all its latent g(l)ory.
The song with the eponymous lyric on Live Through This, “Asking for It” is the part for the whole, and Live Through This fills the room like a single song. Twenty-one years after its release, Hole’s second album is the age I was when it came out. Part of my mind is always on Live Through This, but every year or so I take the LP off the shelf and let it talk. Lately it’s moved closer to the stereo so it can find its own way to the speakers.
This July I participated in a Twitter-based collaborative improv narrative called All-Time High (#ATH15). Rob Wittig and Mark Marino invented what they call Netprov internet storytelling, and after taking part in previous iterations, Claire Donato and I suggested a theme: What if everyone ever went back to high school together in 2015? Rob suggested the name All-Time High, and the four of us set to work preparing the conceptual framework for the wormhole that ripped through summer for everyone who dove in.
It’s been an opportunity to revisit lost tapes and poke old wounds, and to figure out what you’d do then if you knew what you know now—if then was now and you could be yourself and whoever else you want to be. It’s totally bonkers, and has made a broke-ass summer that anchored us to Brooklyn less of a bummer. (As bratty as I feel complaining about my life in NYC, I can’t pretend the dog days of seasonal unemployment here are fun.)
Though I’d run three years from high school by 1994, Live Through This was among the first music I thought of when I started a playlist for All-Time High (including “Violet,” “Miss World” and “Rock Star”). Halfway through the Netprov, I created a character @hscarriewhite, setting the profile pic as the iconic pre-bloodsoaked, beautiful and doomed prom queen shot of Sissy Spacek in the first Carrie film adaptation. Every time I tweet in pop-cult drag, the mini screenshot grabs me by the feelings. Today I recognized its echo in the cover of Live Through This, that shot of not-Courtney as the girl with the most cake, before and after all that blood.
Live through this with me and I swear I will die for you the song of an earlier youth calls back—or is it forward? Nobody here but us ghosts.