BUT, what better way to signal my return than a clip of the first all female supergroup evahr: Wild Flag.

I.  Must.  See.  “Racehorse”.  Live.

This one night [my neighbors] invited me to come to dinner with them.  And so, like I do with everyone I despise, I went out with them.

Now this was before I had discovered Ativan, so the only remedy I had for social anxiety was drinking beverages such as Hennessy and amaretto sours; in this case a White Russian was also involved.  Plus a bottle of wine.  I basically opted to behave as if it were my final callback for Flavor of Love.  So cut to me, shitfaced.

Now here’s the thing: Most people slowly sober up.  They gradually regain consciousness and awareness.  Not me.  I violently snap into sobriety–usually in the middle of some shameful and/or unhygienic act.  So, this particular night, I go from ordering a delicious salad to having the guy’s cock in my mouth and the girl’s mouth on my cooter.  I am smack in the middle of a threesome.  To answer the implied question, no, I don’t know if it was consensual.  We can’t even get into that minor point right now, because a stranger’s cock is in my mouth.

…

I had never been in a threesome before, and I found it very complicated.  There is a lot to juggle in a threesome: penis, balls, her vagina, her boobs, your boobs, your vagina, shame, avoiding genital warts…

…

So the next thing that happens is he unceremoniously removes his penis from mouth–I would have liked to have had some say in the matter–and repositions himself to start having sex with his girlfriend from behind.  Now she’s eating me out and he’s doing her from behind so her face is jamming into my cooter.  Like, I’m getting fucked by her face.  It feels, like, fine.  I mean, it’s a face.  She is sort of mousy, so I don’t fee much.  It’s not like she’s Adrien Brody.  Having sex with Adrien Brody’s face would be a different story.

I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I just do what every guy I’ve ever blown in the back of a car does.  I place my hand on her head and do the “steering wheel” (how guys put their hands on the back of our heads and sort of tilt their heads and watch).  I’m just trying not to make eye contact.

They both abruptly get up at the same time and thrust their respective genitals into my face.  He puts his cock in my face, and she puts her vagina in my face.  Which, by the way, is not shaved.  Full bush.  I’d always been a defender of the full bush in support of feminism, but that was before I had to put my finger in one.  Ladies: Clean it up.  If you’re going to date-rape your neighbor, the least you can do is trim the box.  Don’t be tacky.

So the girl takes my hand and guides me.  Apparently she wants me to finger her and jerk him off.  Simultaneously.

Just as a side note: There is no music during this ordeal.  In times like these you learn not take music for granted.  Can a girl get some Now That’s What I call Music, Volume 17 or something?  But here there is nothing to drown out the sounds of regret.

I try to find a rhythm of jerking him off and fingering her at the same time.  It’s basically an updated version of the head-pat/belly-rub.  And I’ve never fingered a girl, so I’m sort of aimlessly stabbing her uterus.  It is so warm in there.  I’m weirded out by it, so I behave like a Fear Factor contestant, wincing and grunting.  Then they start making out above my head, so they close in on me and I have even less room to do my thing.  And now my arms are getting tired, and hand jobs are already difficult because I never know what angle works.  Like, for hand jobs I usually just use my vagina.  So my arm muscles are burning.

But I’m not a quitter.  My parents did not raise me to give up.  So I work harder.  Some crazy adrenaline kicks in, and in my mind I hear, Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!  I just start milking like crazy and I hear him mumble something but I can’t be stopped and then he ejaculates.  Not on my face, but basically– it hits my shoulder and is in my hand.

I’m thinking, Nailed it.  I just went from guest star to recurring, right?  Wrong.  The girl flips out.  She starts yelling at him.  She’s pissed that he just did his thing.  So she’s screaming because I guess there is a rule between couples that you have to, like, finish with each other, not with the random neighbor.  So they’re literally naked fighting.  She starts crying and I’m holding cum in my had, which I promptly wipe on the couch.  Then she starts yelling at me.  She calls me a whore.  I was like, “Me?  A whore? Yeah, for sure.”  That’s fair.  It’s sort of hard to defend your honor when you’re holding jizz in your hand.

…

Something I learned from this experience: Threesomes suck because you have to live with the fact that you gave two people herpes.  And that two people don’t call you back the next day.

– Written by Whitney Cummings, excerpted from “Whore Next Door”, from “Worst Laid Plans”.

I am sitting here on my disheveled bed, my dog oddly resting against/on top of of my left leg, killing time by reading “Letters to a Young Poet”, a translated compilation of letters from Rainer Maria Rilke.  My writing instructor recommended the book to me a few weeks ago and it has been collecting dust at the foot of my bed since then.

Any attempts to describe the sense of excitement and comfort I felt as I read over his letters would be inartful and inaccurate.  I simply lack the skill and verbal facilities to it justice.  But I sit here, at 12:48am on the verge of laughter and tears, feeling as though an old friend sat beside me, listened quietly to my questions, my fears, my insecurities, and offered the following words of advice:

“You ask whether your verses are good.  You ask me.  You have asked others before.  You send them to magazines.  You compare them with other poems and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts.  Now…I beg you to give up all that.  You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now.  Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.  There is only one single way.  Go into yourself.  Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.  This above all–ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?  Dive into yourself for a deep answer.  And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet the earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”  — Letter #1

“Turn your attention thither.  Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away. — And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life.  A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.  In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other….  I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”  — Letter #1

“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.  To let each impression and germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity.  That alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating….  Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.”  — Letter #3

“If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and you can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.  You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.  perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it–but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing…. Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with the sweet sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.  For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you.  And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your grown, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.  Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different;  love in them life in an unfamiliar form and be considerate of aging people, who fear that being-alone in which you trust.” — Letter #4

Good stuff.  Thanks, Rainer.  Oh, and he gave the young poet a book, which makes my whole drunken Jen Knapp incident a bit less embarrassing.

I was the good kid.  I never argued with my father.  I did my chores.  I cooked dinner for my family.  I arrived at practice early to set up the nets.  I smiled and laughed easily.  I was smart enough to be accepted by the nerds but not threaten the jocks.  I was able to navigate my adolescence so that if you were to ask my high school classmates about me now you would get either a “Who?” or a “Oh yeah.  She was nice!”  Believe me.  This was success.

But I knew who I was.  And I was well aware of the echoing chasm between everyone else’s perception and my reality.  And so, with the giddyness of a four-year old kid on Christmas morning, I went off to college knowing that, at a minimum, I was free to start over.

As it turns out, my dorm, Mirkwood (yes, the dorms at Irvine are named after Lord of the Rings, which was nerdy in 1995, cool in 2004, and now just pathetic) had a really large Christian contingent.  Don’t get me wrong, we still had our fair share of porn running on the community television set in the living room at all times and a lot of pot, beer, and loud sex at all hours of the night.  As “the real me” wasn’t all that into the porn, pot, and beer, I just happen to fall into the Christian kids.  We had good clean fun and they didn’t seem like the Bible thumpers that I imagined.  They listened to the same music I listened to (well, almost) and they seemed…happy.

All I wanted was to be happy.

UC Irvine is a commuter school.  Upwards of 80% of the students are from Southern California.  A regular Friday afternoon saw student after student slinging their laundry over their shoulders as they headed to their cars and braved the traffic to get home for the weekend.  My dorm was no different.  While housing 60 people during the week, on weekends the numbers dwindled to closer to 20.  The campus on the whole was a ghost town.

I can’t remember the first time I went to church.  I can only assume that one of my dormmates invited me and I didn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday morning.  Why not?  I was raised in a fairly agnostic household.  We never talked about God or religion.  To the extent that religion was a part of my life it was simply cultural.  When I asked my parents why I was lighting incense and bowing before a tall, deep red altar that had fruit, fried rice, and pictures of my grandmother resting atop a red table runner, they told me I was honoring my ancestors.  I should feel free to tell my ancestors whatever I wanted.  So I did.  I never knew my grandfather so I always prayed to my grandmother.  And my prayers always began like this:

“Um.  Hey Grandma.  Um.  I don’t know if you can hear me, but….”

It always felt awkward.  I don’t think I ever really believed she could hear me.  But there was a comfort in it, I suppose.

I would continue to go to church every week with my friends.  It was pure fellowship at first.  The people were nice, they weren’t saying crazy things, and there were little life lessons you could take away from the sermons if you chose to take the God part out of it.  “Be kind.” “Be selfless.” “Think of others.”  Shit, sure.  I can get on board with this.

After the first few months I drove myself to the local Barnes & Noble and bought a Bible.  I was curious.  I had never read the text and I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about.  I very distinctly remember sitting in the aisles flipping through each brand, translation, application, whatever.  “How the hell am I supposed to know which Bible to get?”  Eventually I settled on the NIV New Student Bible.  “Uh, well.  I’m a student.  So I guess this will work.”

Literally.  That was my rationale.

I would read that bible from front to back as though it was “On Liberty” (I was a Poli Sci major).  I highlighted it.  I went over it.  I put question marks in the margins.  As I became more engrossed in my study I started going to college fellowship meetings with my dormmates.  A “college fellowship” is just a fancy spiritual way of saying “church club meeting.”  What kept me coming back to the fellowship meetings each week was the music.  I loved it.  I loved singing along in unison with other people.  I loved watching the worship leaders sing with such passion.  I loved seeing people be moved.  It moved me.  My curiosity grew.

In the Spring of 1996 the Christian groups and local churches organized an “Outreach Week”.  It was week wherein the groups would put together community events on campus in an attempt to evangelize and spread the Gospel.  Most of the time these events involved giving out free food to college students, which as we know, will pretty much (1) draw college students regardless of the event and (2) make college students do anything.  I often wonder how many devout Christians gave up their soul in exchange for a cold soggy slice of vegetarian pizza.

The week culminated in a “Praise Night,” which was a night open to the university community to come, sing worship songs, listen to a message, and watch some skits.  I remember running late to that night.  I don’t remember why.  My friends were already seated by the time I got there so I snuck in to the back of the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall (oh, irony) and sat in the back row.  I had missed the worship and the message but I was just in time for the skit.  The skit had no dialogue but it was scored to wordless music.  As it started I was immediately bored.  My cynical self kept thinking “Really?  They think shit like this is effective?  Do they take us for idiots?”

But as the skit unfolded I stiffened and sat up in rapt attention.  There were five storylines.  Each involved a person doing something (seriously, I don’t remember what exactly they did) that constituted something “sinful” that left them “broken”.  I use “airquotes” because these terms have a more loaded meaning in Christian parlance than in the secular.  But they were all doing shitty stuff and Jesus would calmly walk up to them and try and convince them not to.  But they all ignored him in different ways.  By the end of the skit each one of the five had literally nailed Jesus to the cross.  Two in the feet, two in each hand, and one put the crown of thorns on his head.  After Jesus died they all realized what they had done and they felt immense shame.  But then Jesus, after being resurrected, came back down.  And he went to those five people in an attempt to show himself to them and show them he still loved them.  They literally pushed him away, but he persisted until finally each one of them crumpled into his arms.

I left before the sketch ended.  I literally ran.

I walked quickly back to my dorm room.  I cried the whole way home.  I chastised myself.  I didn’t know what was going on but I knew that I felt like either screaming into the heavens, punching a wall, or crumpling down into the grass in the fetal position.  I got back to my dorm room I grabbed my Bible and ran down to my car.  It was the only place I new I could be alone.  It was 10pm.

I would sit in my car for 8 hours.

I remember so many thoughts and emotions running through me for those 8 hours.  I knew that I hated myself.  The depths of my self-loathing would only lead to a tragic end.  I knew that.  I had known that for years.  I felt inadequate.  Not a good enough daughter, not a good enough sister, not a good enough anything.  I had known that for years, too.  I felt unloved.  This was no one’s fault but my own.  I had no reason to feel this way.  I came from a loving family and I had a sister who looked up to me.  None of that changed the way I felt.

But worst of all, I felt like I deserved to feel the way I felt.  I deserved to feel hated, inadequate, and unloved.  Over the course of 18 years I had come to convince myself that this was my lot.  I had lived with these feelings for so long.  I had dealt with them.  I had managed them.  But on that night, that warm Spring night, I felt overwhelmed by them.

And so I cried.  I sat in the faded tan leather seat of my 1987 white Acura Legend, and I cried.  Hard.  I violently punched and kicked my dashboard and steering as though convinced that I could physically bust myself out of this hell.  By the dim light of my cockpit light I flipped through my Bible.  I read the highlighted passages that gave me hope and comfort.  And I read the penciled gray bracketed verses that I questioned.

Only stupid people believe in God, I told myself.  You have to be dumb to believe this shit.  Because it makes no sense.  God loved us so much he sent his one and only Son down to earth to die for our sins?  And the dude was resurrected?  Please.  I’m no moron.  I’m an intelligent, rational, practical person.  Unless this supernatural story could be explained to me in irrefutable scientific terms, I wasn’t buying it.

But I wanted it to be true.  I yearned for it to be true.  I needed so badly to feel unconditional love and acceptance because it was a feeling I had never known.

Eight hours later, I was tired.  I was physically and emotionally exhausted.  I wanted so badly to make sense of things.  I tried so hard to believe but my mind simply refused to go there.  My heart and my head, in constant struggle for years, were at an impasse.

So I turned on my stereo to play a mixed tape a friend had given me.  And as the sun began to peek out over the eucalyptus trees that lined the parking lot, I heard this:

“Trust in the Lord with all of your heart
Lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your life straight
Don’t worry about tomorrow, He’s got it under control
Just trust in the Lord with all your heart and he will carry you through.
Lord, sometimes it gets so tough to keep my eyes on you when things are going rough.
Then I turn my eyes up to the sky and I hear your voice and it says to me…”

And so I did.  I sat in my car alone, I put my head against my steering wheel, and I cried a quiet prayer, accepting Christ.

I didn’t tell anyone for weeks.  To me, my experience and my Christian life was between me and God.  I didn’t become a Christian because of other Christians.  I didn’t become a Christian because I thought I would be perceived as a better person or for some sort of pat on the back.  This was my thing, it was private, and in order to adequately explain it to anyone would require me to divulge some of my deepest, darkest thoughts to my friends and family.  I wasn’t ready to do that.

But I felt changed.  I felt a newfound sense of calmness.  Of security.  Friends and family, who had not known I had become a Christian, noticed.  I was less angry.  I carried with me a sense of peace that had not been noticeable before.  But even with all that, I still struggled with how I felt about myself.  And I struggled intellectually and emotionally with how God felt about me.  But I never felt comfortable talking to anyone about it.  “Everyone else is so happy all the time.  Why drag them down?” I thought.

One day I was at my favorite Christian bookstore in Lake Forest browsing the music aisle.  I had come in search of Christian music that wasn’t just faith based but also, well, good.  Because let’s face it, 99% of Christian music is just bad music.  I had two favorite Christian bands at the time: Jars of Clay (of “Flood” fame) and Sixpence None The Richer (who would later be known for that damn “Kiss Me” song from “She’s All That”).  I had just started to become involved with the worship team at my fellowship so I was learning how to play acoustic guitar.  That’s when I saw this:

Huh.  A chick who’s not all dolled up to look “churchy” with a guitar strap.  Interesting.  I walked over to pick up the CD (hey!  Remember CDs???) and turned onto the back.  There, next to the track listing, was the picture of the head of Taylor acoustic guitar.  I.  Love.  Taylor.  Guitars.  So wait, it was a non-churchy chick playing a Taylor?  Here’s my $15, too-nice-to-be-normal Church Lady.  Sold.

To this day I can’t talk about that album without getting emotional or tearing up.  It changed everything.  Finally.  Finally I heard someone sing and say the words that were in my heart and my head that I could never articulate.  Finally I felt like there was a kindred spirit out there who saw God the same way I did.  Finally, I didn’t feel like something was wrong with me because I had dark thoughts.  Finally, I had someone to…talk to.

Have I labored all for nothing. Trying to make it on my own.
Fear to reach out to the hand of one who understands me, say I’d rather be here all alone.
It’s all my fault I sit and wallow in seclusion. As if I had no hope at all, I guess truth becomes you I have seen it all in motion Pride comes before the fall.
Can I offer up this simple prayer. Pray it finds a simple ear. A scratch in your infinite time.
Not withstanding my fallings not withstanding my crime!

I am wanting, needing, guilty and greedy
Unrighteous, unholy; undo me. Undo me!

But it was one song.  One song that tore into my heart and articulated exactly what I wanted to say but didn’t have the words.  It is a song that I sing to this day despite the fact that I haven’t gone to church in 10 years.  It was a song about Mary Magdalene:

From glass alabaster she poured out the depths of her soul.
O foot of Christ would you wait if her harlotries known?
Falls a tear to darken the dirt.
Of humblest offerings to forgive the hurt.
She is strong enough to stand in your love, I can hear her say…

I am weak.
I am poor.
I’m broken.
But Lord I’m yours.
Hold me now

Let he without sin cast the first stone if you will.
To say that my bride isn’t worth half the blood that I’ve spilled.
Point your finger and laugh if you choose to say my beloved is borrowed and used
She is strong enough to stand in my love, I can hear her say…

That song saved me.  Whenever I doubted my faith.  Whenever I was angry.  Whenever I felt unworthy of even taking a breath, I sang this song.  I sang it as loudly as I could, my voice soaring to the heavens as though throwing up a rope for someone to save me from the dark cavernous holes I repeatedly dug for myself.

Jen’s songs helped me explore my own thoughts and brought me to a fuller understanding of God’s love for me.  That he could love me, little old broken me who had fucked up more than anyone would ever know.  That he loved me unconditionally both in spite of and because of my brokenness.  It was a soul-shattering revelation that I still live with today.

Coincidentally, right as I had stopped going to church for reasons that aren’t particularly relevant here, Jen disappeared.  No one knew where she was.  Deep down I knew why.  No one could sing these songs about brokenness and grace so honestly and so truly unless she herself were going through something.  I had a hunch she was gay.  It was the missing piece of her story that would make everything make sense to me.

For the last seven years I still wondered what she was doing.  Not because I missed her music or because I wondered if she would ever come back to it, but because I just wanted to know that she was ok.  Through her music (I had never met her) I had come to see her as my friend and I just wanted to make sure my friend was ok.  I grew into the habit of Googling her name every few months for clues but nothing came up.

And then a few months ago, my Googling finally got a hit.  She was back.  She was putting out a new album.  And when I read that at 4am on a random weeknight, I literally let out a shriek.  As I perused her new website I noticed that the tone had changed.  There were no references in her bio about her faith.  “Dude.  Totally gay,” I thought.  You don’t come back to rebuild a music career and ignore your devout and loyal fan base.  People in the secular community don’t understand how huge Jen Knapp was.  She sold more albums than some of my favorite bands, like Arcade Fire or Sleater-Kinney.  Grammy nominations, Dove Awards (the Christian music Grammys, if you will), Gold albums, and sell-out crowds.  Jen wasn’t courting this crowd anymore.

Of course the announcement came.  And my reaction was one of simple relief.  I watched her Larry King interview and thought “Good for you.”  She came out in the way I would expect: fearlessly, honestly, and humbly.  In a way, I was simply proud of my friend, Jen Knapp, for continuing to live her life with integrity.

A few weeks ago I got a chance to see Jen at a small bar in San Francisco.  As the overtly Christian opening acts played, I literally started sweating like a whore in church.  Because it felt like church.  It was the whitest concert crowd I’ve experienced in San Francisco.  They all clapped along to the opening acts as though there were singing gospel songs.  Some even raised their hands to the sky as though it were a worship session.  I of course reacted by drinking fairly heavily.  Everyone rebels in their own way.

By the time Jen took the stage I was standing against the bar, being plied by free beer and liquor after befriending the bartender.  The grin that formed on my face as my diminutive idol took the stage with nothing but her sunburst Taylor guitar was embarrassing and possibly a bit creepy.  When she sang her new songs of freedom I bopped my head and beamed.  I just felt so proud of her.  And when she sang her older faith-based songs I sang.  I sang loudly.  I was just so happy.  So happy that I inadvertently bought her a drink.  Long story.

But I was so happy.  And drunk.  But mostly happy.  I think.

After her set she came out and chatted up the 20 or so stragglers that hung out to talk to her.  I wasn’t part of that crowd.  Because that’s not what you do with your friend.  You don’t stand there and talk to them with a bunch of strangers.  It felt awkward.  Prior to the show I had written her a card, having been reminded by another idol, Carrie Brownstein, how much those cards can mean to the artist and how much they can mean to the fan.  The card was simple.  In my own self-deprecating way, I simply told her “Thank you.”  As I stood outside in the cold waiting for her to come outside, I realized I had my Miranda July book, which I was still reading and loving.  I pulled the book out and slipped the card inside.

When she finally came out and I walked (or ran, I don’t remember) up to her, thanked her for the show, and told her I had a card a book I wanted to give to her.  She unzipped her guitar case and told me to slip it in.  I did, thanked her again, told her to have a good time in Portland (where they were headed), shook her hand, and walked away.  In my head I berated myself.

“Why the hell did you give her a book?  That’s so weird.  What in the world compelled you to do that?”

“I don’t know.  Because that’s what friends do.”

Jen Knapp saved my life.  I can’t overstate it.  She really did.  Through her songs and her example she taught me what God’s grace truly means.  What it means to have the courage to accept it.  What it means to have the courage to forgive yourself and to love yourself.  And most importantly, she was one in a long line of idols who taught me that above all else, live honestly.  Live with integrity.  Live without apology.

Here’s a video of Jen from what I guess to be around 1999.  I hadn’t seen this video before tonight. While she had a much rougher life than I ever had, you can see that we share a lot of the same issues of self-worth, self-doubt, and never feeling “enough”:

Here’s Jen with one of the songs I quoted above:

Here’s one of her new songs.  I’ve been listening to this a lot.

I was reminded of this Hemingway quote last night as I had a moment of panic listening to other students in my class read their work out loud:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

If Drunk Ernie tells me it’s ok to used simple language, I’m going to keep using simple language.

If you actually take the time to read the Gladwell piece, which you should because it’s really inspiring and somewhat comforting, I’m sure you will pick up on certain themes that you’d think really resonated with me.  They did, but that’s not the point of this post.

My immediate reaction to that article was to lean back and reflect on my “patrons”.  The people in my life who have made personal sacrifices to allow me to pursue whateverthefuck it is that I’m pursuing.  Whether it be sacrifices of money, time, or an emotional or psychological tax of just being around me in my current dazed state, I am, despite my prickly and aloof state of nature, eminently lucky and thankful.

I was filled with warm fuzzies.  Though, upon further reflection, that might have been more the grilled cheese talking.

Lying in bed, drinking beer, and listening to Patsy Cline.  I am always struck by how effortless affect in her voice.  She is the white Ella Fitzgerald to me.  Patsy could sing the phone book and I would be reduced to tears.

This song always breaks my heart.  The way she sings “I’ve got these little thinks…” is gut-wrenching.

After the lovely bus ride to Potrero Hill I nervously stuttered into my first poetry class.  This was basically me spending $80 to reaffirm that I hated poetry.  To the extent that was my goal, it was a total failure.  But more on that another time.

After the class, feeling energized by my new-found tolerance of poetry,  I hopped back on the bus and headed to Green Apple Books, a famous independent bookstore in the Inner Richmond district of San Francisco.  Green Apple, nestled in an area that can best be described as “this is where all the real Chinese people live, eat, and shop”, is a fantastic bookstore that is built for hours of perusing.  I can get lost in the floor to ceiling shelves, slowly making my way over the creaky floor boards, through the nooks and crannies of the store, hoping that a title, author, or subject will trigger my “oh yeah, I wanted to read that!” impulses.  I went down to Green Apple with the intent of picking up two books: A Lorrie Moore book and Kay Ryan’s new book of poems.  Kay Ryan is a Bay Area native and the current Poet Laureate.  We read a few of her poems in class.  They weren’t horrible.

Of course, I made the mistake of stopping at the ATM at lunch.  This was one of those generic standalone ATMs that charge you idiotic fees to get your money.  It also displays your account balance despite the fact that you explicitly told it not to.  Well low and behold, the US Government had found my account number and decided to give back my hard earned money.  Either that or I am unwittingly part of an elaborate Nigerian embezzling scheme involving an Ethiopian prince named Mr. Jackson.  Either way, I wasn’t going to ask questions.

Buoyed by my temporary sense of wealth, I ended up with…hold on…let me count it up…13 books, 2 literary journals, 2 magazines, 2 greeting cards, and a pack of 15 postcards illustrated by Nikki McClure. Most of the books were used, so I was feeling good about that, at least.  Here were the highlights:

• The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Kay Ryan
• Self-Help, Lorrie Moore
• Hello Kitty Must Die, Angela Choi
• The Figured Wheel, Robert Pinski
• Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass
• Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon
• American Woman, Susan Choi
• Cream City Review, Volume 33, Issue 2
• The SPIN 25th Anniversary Issue
• Poets & Writers, May/June 2010
• No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

After the book raid, wherein I had to shoot some eye daggers at a middle-aged man who loudly told his daughter “We can just get it at Borders”, I wandered back towards my bus stop and decided to stop into Pho Clement, a mediocre pho restaurant nestled between a hipster joint and a Chinese hair salon.  My Timbuk2 back was literally overflowing with books.  I didn’t want to waste a plastic bag (I know, I know, I’m a hippie) so I tried cramming everything into my messenger bag.  I was able to stuff them all in except for three, which I carried.  As I dumped my bag onto the familiar red vinyl chairs at Pho Clement to a loud “THUD” that seemed to startle all the patrons, I set the remaining three books onto the matching red table.  Against the deep red background, the bright yellow jacket cover of Miranda July’s book stood out.  After placing my order with the overly friendly waiter, I settled in and started reading.

Unlike with music, I’m not particularly evangelical about books.  Sure, I’ll tell people if a book is good or worth reading, but I don’t get overly excited about them.  It’s not that I don’t read good books.  I do.  I read books that I enjoy quite a bit.  (AH CRAP!  I just realized I forgot to get Seth Stevenson’s “Grounded”.  Blurgh!)  But it’s rare that I love a book so much that I blabber on about it.

So with that caveat, let me say this: Pick up Miranda July’s book, “No One Belongs Here More Than You.” I’m familiar with Miranda July through her involvement with the Portland artists’ community.  Her name gets bandied about quite a bit by my favorite bands and visual artists.  She recorded an album for Kill Rock Stars, is best friends from high school (in Berkeley) with Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre, she directed a Sleater-Kinney video, etc.  Anyway, if you follow the Portland scene at all then you’ll recognize her name.  I had heard that she had put out a book of short stories, but I guess I buried that piece of information in the back of my head.  It wasn’t until I was wandering the aisles of Green Apple and saw that bold yellow cover that I remembered.

I’m not saying that it’s Gatsby or Infinite Jest.  It’s very simple prose.  She’s not trying to show you how many big words she knows, or hit you over the head with repetitive, flowery imagery just because she can.  You’ll finish it pretty quickly.  But her stories and her style had me sputtering with laughter in the restaurant and on the bus.  And seriously, books never make me actually laugh out loud.  It is simple, it’s clipped, and it’s slightly conversational.  Not unlike my writing style, I suppose.  But her writing has a fantastic absurdist quality to it that really pulled me in and then broke my heart.

Here’s an excerpt from “Majesty”, a short story about her dream of meeting Prince William:

I typed “royal family” into a dream-interpretation web-site, but they didn’t have that in their database, so then I typed “butt” and hit “interpret,” and this came back: To see your buttocks in your dream represents your instincts and urges.  It also said: To dream that your buttocks are misshapen suggests undeveloped or wounded aspects of your psyche.  But my butt was shaped all right, so that let me know my psyche was devloped, and the first part told me to trust my insticts, to trust my butt, the butt that trusted him.

That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.  I have a long skirt like the one he lifted, and I wore it with a new sexual feeling.  I swayed in to work; I glided around the staff kitchen.  My sister calls these skirts “dirndls.”  She means this in a derogatory way.  In the afternoon she came by my office at QuakeKare to use the Xerox machine.  She seemed almost surprised to see me there, as if we had bumped into each other at Kinko’s.  QuakeKare’s mandate is to teach preparedness and support quake victims around the world.  My sister likes to joke that she’s practically a quake victim, because her house is such a mess.

What do you call that exactly, a dirndl? she said.

It’s a skirt.  You know it’s a skirt.

But doesn’t it seem strange that the well-tailored, flattering piece of clothing that I’m wearing is also called  skirt?  Shouldn’t there be a distinction?

Not everyone thinks shorter is more arousing.

Arousing?  Did you just say “arousing”?  Were we talking about arousal?  Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that word.  Say it again.

What?  Arousing.

Don’t say it! It’s too much, it’s like you said “fuck” or something.

Well, I didn’t.

Do.  Do you think you might never fuck again?  When you said Carl left you, that was the first thing that came into my mind: She will never fuck again.

Why are you like this?

What? Should I be all buttoned up, like you?  Hush-hush?  Is that healthier?

I’m not that buttoned up.

Well, I would love to go out on that limb with you, but I’m going to need some evidence of unbuttonedness.

I have a lover!

But I did not say this, I did not say I am loved, I am a person worth loving, I am not dirty anyhere, ask Prince William.  that night I made a list of ways to meet him in reality:

Go to his school to give a lecture on earthquake safety.

Go to the bars near his school and wait for him.

They are not mutually exclusive; they were both reasonable ways to get to know someone.  People meet in bars every day, and they often have sex with people they meet in bars.  My sister does this all the time, or she did when she was in college.  Afterward she would call and tell me every detail of her night, not because we are close — we are not.  It is because there is something wrong with her.  I would almost call what she does sexual abuse, but she’s my younger sister, so there must be another word for it.  She’s over the top.  That’s all I can say about her.  If the top is here, where I am, she’s over it, hover over me, naked.

That’s little bit of a taste.

I read a lot of books where, even while I’m reading it all I can think is “Dude.  You’re only reading this book because you think you’re supposed to or so you can tell people you read it.  You’re really not enjoying yourself.”  *cough*Kindly Ones*cough*  Not once did I think that with Miranda July’s book.  I’m about halfway through — I started a couple of hours ago but was interrupted by my pho slurping (not a good “reading while eating” food) and a cramped bus ride home.  The stories are short, they are alternately amusing and heartbreaking, and you never really know where she’s going.  But this has been a really entertaining read so far, which is really all I ask for in a book.

Also, check out her website for the book.  It’s adorable.

The class started with our instructor asking us to read the following quote from Katherine Anne Porter:

“I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don’t know where it came from, and I do not know why — or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had — stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work that I have done.”

I stared silently at these words as the class droned on, their voices dissolving into white noise that I easily ignored. I know this quote is supposed to have a profound effect on me. It is supposed to trigger something in my writer’s soul. “Aha! A kindred spirit,” I should say.

It didn’t.

Because I don’t feel that way about my writing. At least, I don’t think I do. When I read that quote I immediately thought, “Well, replace “my writing” with “music” and that’s dead on. But writing? Writing, interestingly, is not necessarily something I enjoy. I don’t revel in wordsmithing or crafting stories. I don’t carry a journal and a pen with me everywhere I go in hopes of crafting the next great short story. I don’t ride an emotional high when I complete something I’m satisfied with. In fact, I find writing to be a chore.

I write because I feel compelled to do so. I write because, to put it simply, I can’t not.

Riding the bus home tonight, music of course blaring into my ears, this stark contrast between my feeling and connection with music and writing perplexed me. In class, as we sat in deeply tufted couches amidst the police sirens and ever-present smell of chai to deconstruct the intent, meaning, and greatness of a particular piece of writing, I couldn’t help but think “But this is what I do with music.”

I can hear a song and let it wash over me, marinate in it, live in it. I can spend hours deconstructing the meaning of that song, both lyrically from the writer’s perspective, lyrically from my perspective, the intention behind the song structure, melody, or riffs. I hear things that other people don’t. I know this because when I try to explain it to others they stare back blankly. When I hear a great song I can’t help but tell anyone who will listen about it. It is a gift and a curse. A great song becomes a part of me. It changes me. It can destroy me and move me in a way no piece of writing ever has.

But here I am. I’ve quit my job to pursue my writing. I’m considering going to school for it. I’ve shelled out $350 and am risking life and limb every week in order to learn more about it. I am consciously forcing myself to write more.

Why?

Like I said, I can’t not.

So this is where I come down on it: Music is my best friend. It has never failed me. It has always been there for me. I could “talk” to music for hours and I always walk away feeling better about myself, about life, about the world in general. Music is nothing but good times. But if you were to take music away from me, I could go on. I might not enjoy life the way I did with it in my life, but I would be ok.

Writing is love. Something that I am drawn to despite my own protestations. Something that I try to love on my own terms but fail. Writing commands me. I didn’t choose it, it chose me. And if you were to take writing away from me, to be honest, I’m not sure I would be ok. I quit my job because I did not like the person I had become and I did not like where I was headed. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that my job did not give me the space and the personal resources to address my compulsion to write. I know that I was headed down a very negative path and something had to give. Money and prestige or my sanity? I choose sanity. And Chaka Khan.

“But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had — stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work that I have done.”

I hope that over time I am able to internalize this, acknowledge it as a truism and wear it as a badge of honor. But for now I am pleased and somewhat proud of myself that instead of letting the writing rule my life, I am taking active measures to learn how to control this compulsion. Because at the end of the day, I know that writing and I will be together forever. We might as well start learning how to live with each other.

Loved this.  From Sub Pop’s packaging of the Dum Dum Girls’ limited edition 7″ singles for Record Store Day:

At long last…We at Sub Pop Records have finally devised an expensive, fragile, heavy and clumsy way of packaging and shipping mp3s.  The popular, invisible, tasteless, odorless music files are offered here on a piece of paper tucked safely within a handsomely printed cardboard sleeve (sometimes 7″, sometimes 12″, rarely 10″), and accompanied by an easily damaged plastic disc that, when push comes to shove, could, with the proper, expensive and temperamental equipment also produce this same music.  We believe this to provide a superior, conspicuous listening/ownership experience and hope to sell them to you in great quantities.  Enjoy!

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Record Store Day.  My independent record store of choice is Amoeba Records in San Francisco.  I love Amoeba because, unlike the small record shops made famous by High Fidelity, you can be completely anonymous.  The store is so huge and the selection so vast that you don’t feel self-conscious being the only person without a penis, piercing, or tattoo rummaging through the punk section.  The staff isn’t so “gear head” about music as to judge your purchases (e.g., today I bought The Pixies, 2 Jacksons LPs, a John Steinbeck reading on LP, ABBA “Supertrouper”, and Heart “Dreamboat Annie”).  I can lose myself in Amoeba for hours, and today I did.  I lined up at 10am (they didn’t open until 10:30) and was pretty much in the store, give or take 2 hours, until 4pm.

This was not necessarily a good thing.

Amoeba, much like Target, kills your pocketbook the longer you stay there.  I had a specific list of albums that were released specifically for RSD (and therefore in limited print) I was gunning for.  I memorized that list, made my way around the store and pretty much got what I wanted.  I checked out around at around 11:30am, $220 poorer.  “Meh.  Support your local record store” I told myself, and I left to sit down and grab some coffee.

But Amoeba would call me back with Charlotte Gainsbourg signing and Jonsi performing in the afternoon.  I headed back to the store and, in need of something to do to kill time, wandered through the aisles.  Well, four hours later I had met Charlotte Gainsbourg, bobbed my head to Jonsi, and handed over another $180 to Amoeba.  WTF?  How did that happen?  Shit like this only happens at Target.

Oh well.  But I was happy with my haul.  Here were the highlights:

• “The Snake and Johnny Bear” ready by John Steinbeck
• “Hits Are For Squares”, Sonic Youth
• “Super Trouper”, ABBA
• The Flaming Lips, Henry Rollins, and Peaches covering “Dark Side of the Moon”
• “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, The Byrds (original 70′s pressing)
• “Live at Kelvin Hall”, The Kinks
• “The Purple Tapes”, The Pixies
• “Dreamboat Annie”, Heart (picture disc)
• “The Jacksons: Live”, The Jacksons
• “Dirty Things” 7″ single, Telekinesis
• “Flume/Come Talk To Me” 7″ single, Peter Gabriel and Bon Iver
• “The Book of Love/Not One of Us” 7″ single, Peter Gabriel and Stephin Merritt
• The Thermals/The Cribs, 7″ split
• John Lennon Singles Bag (3 45s with “Mother”, “Imagine, and “Watching The Wheels, only 7000 printed for RSD)

Anywho, I’m stoked not just for my swag but also for the opportunity to support not just independent music stores, but also independent music.  I’m not sure if people really understand how rough it is for indie labels and the bands that sign to them.  It’s not as glamorous as people think.  Not everyone can (or wants to) sign with a major label that has the resources to make life pretty sweet.  And the smaller “true” indies, like Kill Rock Stars (Bikini Kill, Elliott Smith, Quasi) or Jagjaguwar (Bon Iver, Okkervil River, Lightning Dust) don’t make a shit load of money.  But they live music and they sign amazing acts and give them the creative freedom to do what they want.  There’s a lot to be said about that.  There are a lot of acts that made the jump from indie to major labels and it hasn’t always been that successful.

I’m looking at you, Modest Mouse.

So support your local record stores and support indie music labels.  Of course mp3s are way fucking easier.  I buy most of my music through iTunes and Amazon, too.  But whenever something really hits me and I want to get the CD or LP I usually go and order it straight from the label.  I guess it’s my way of saying thanks and making sure the money gets back to them.

“take a deep breath and do whatever you must to survive and find something to be that you can love.”

Iggy Pop wrote those words in his response to a fan letter.  I read the letter a few days ago over at Monitor Mix and these words, along with his salutation (“all my love to a really beautiful girl. that’s you laurence. iggy pop”) have stayed with me all week.  They’re beautiful, sweet, and make me love Iggy even more (an artist, mind you, that scared the living shit out of me when I was a kid).

More so though, I keep imagining what it must have been like to get those handwritten words from an idol when you were an awkward adolescent who felt all alone, awkward, misunderstood, an outsider.  You shoot this letter off to a music idol who, presumably, you feel is a kindred spirit, someone you can confide in, who might understand what you’re going through.

And you get those sweet and encouraging words back.  Something like that can be life-changing and, depending on where you are emotionally, life-saving.  Four days later I’m still moved by it.

Really sweet, Iggy.

As I disembarked from my regular train this morning at the Montgomery station, I saw this ad for the new Palm Pre.  I normally ignore ads but this one struck me because it seemed to run counter to another mantra, upon which, as a dutiful child of the 80′s, I had been raised:

So Ferris told me that life moves quickly and if I don’t slow down, I’ll miss it.  Palm is telling me that they have a machine that allows me to keep up with the speed of life so that I don’t miss anything.  OMG!  You mean I don’t have to miss that awesome tweet from my friend telling me she’s late for work?  Where do I sign up?!?  I mean really, Palm.  Do you think people are that dumb?  You’re trying to trade on Ferris’ name yet your product is the anti-Ferris.

I’m not one for schedules.  I don’t like my days packed with things to do.  In fact, I hate to-do lists.  To the extent that I have any social life whatsoever it typically involves, at the most, one “event” in a day.  I have no tolerance for running from thing to thing, feeling rushed or otherwise stressed out that I am running late for something.  I don’t wear a watch, I rarely ever know what time or day it is, and keeping a calendar is a complete waste of time for me.  I just really hate being told that I have to be some “where” at some “time” to do some “thing.”

But obviously I’m a functioning adult, trained in the social norms and mores of the world.  I know I can’t take my “you can’t tell me what to do” ethos to it’s logical extreme, though believe me, I try.  So I keep a to-do list.  I check my phone for the time and date.  And I very reluctantly keep a calendar that I very rarely ever check.  You know, because you need to do these things in order to have a roof over your head, remain gainfully employed, and have friends.

As I think I’ve made clear in previous posts, I love song lyrics.  Song lyrics speak to me in the way that great prose speaks to readers and seminal philosophy texts speak to philosophers.  As such, I downloaded an app for my iPhone, PowerLyrics, which allows you to look up the song lyrics to any song currently playing on your phone.  It’s a great app, though not perfect by any means (sometimes the lyrics are wrong and it’s not great for obscure music).  One of my favorite things to do on weekends is to get some coffee, take Chase to Dolores Park, cop a squat, and just watch the lyrics scroll by as I listen to my tunes.  It’s meditative to me and often times, it’s like having a conversation with an old friend.  At least that’s how I feel an hour later when I get up to leave.

For the past week, I have been taking the F train home from my job in the Financial District.  By way of background, the most direct and quick way for me to get to and from work is the J Church train, which picks me up a half block from my house, runs underground and only has six stops.  It takes less than 20 minutes.  But on Monday, for some reason, I thought “well, I’m not in a hurry to get home, the sun is still out, and I’d like to just sit and listen to my iPod for a bit.”  So I’ve been taking the F, which is horribly unreliable (you can wait upwards of 45 minutes between trains), stops at Every. Single. Block., takes 30 minutes to ride, and then requires me to walk another five blocks to get home.  On average, it triples the length of my commute.

But I don’t care.  Because the F gives me more time with my music and, since it runs above ground, I can access PowerLyrics and just sink into the words of a lot of my favorite songs.  It makes a difference for me to both hear the songs and read the words.  I absorb so much more as a reader than a listener.

The past few days I actually didn’t end up accessing PowerLyrics.  I stood patiently in the chill evening wind on the little island in the middle of Market Street and Montgomery for 30 minutes, just people watching.  Men in questionably coordinated suits (really, I can’t think that GQ rubberstamped the blue blazer/olive slacks look) trying to hail cabs, women who could easily double for Banana Republic mannequins rushing to the underground stations with their purses, laptop bags, and small Kiehls/Banana Republic/Anthropologie paper bags that earlier this morning housed either their lunch or their heels, and the weary East Bay commuters, who slowly walked their way to their public transportation of choice, mentally buckling in for the additional hour and a half commute home.

Upon boarding the antique F trains, many of which have been beautifully restored, I took my seat, cranked my music, and stared out the window with an odd expression of bliss on my face.  I am the odd man out.  Everyone else on the train looks either lost (lots of tourists take the F to get to Union Square or the theater), weary, or just flat out annoyed at how slow the train is moving.  Not me.  I’m loving it.  I could live on this train.  “Take your time!”  I scream in my head.  I’m all good right here.

I love watching the City pass by as the train slowly makes its way down Market Street.  You get the hurried rush of workers lining the streets in the Financial District, annoyed drivers trying desperately to fight their way through traffic to get onto the Bay Bridge (thank God we’re not a honking town), the confused yet excited tourists walking at a glacial pace in Union Square, gawking at every damn window, the grimy Tenderloin, where things that I am totally unfamiliar with and have only seen on The Wire are happening all around, and then the fantabulous Castro, where the boys are just getting ready to do it up.  That’s where the F ends and that’s where I hop off, happily strolling to my house amid the faint smell of pot, bears walking their tiny dogs, and neighborhood locals circling the block, head on swivel, attempting to secure a parking spot.

These have been the best hours of my days.

Today, however, I had to work a bit late.  Not because my job was particularly onerous.  As it happens, it only took me seven days of work, wherein I’m kind of supposed to be in by 9am, to get back to my regular sleeping pattern of falling asleep between 3-4am and waking up at 10:30am.  In other words, I was late to work so I had to stay late to log my hours.  And, since I was up late, I was quite tired by the end of it all.  Walking back to the train I considered just taking the J home.  I was tired, I wanted to see my dog, lie down, and catch up on all the internet related stuff I missed all day.

Thankfully, something stopped me.  The F was calling my name.  So again, I waited in the cold for twenty minutes (keeping myself warm by dancing to “Turn It On” and even doing the handclaps — no really) and finally boarded the green and yellow car that finally pulled up.  I didn’t have the energy to marvel at the nuttiness of my city.  So I plopped down in a distractingly warm seat (seriously, dude who sat there before me, you should get your temperature checked), fired up my go-to playlist and settled in for the ride home.

The first song that came on was “Burn, Don’t Freeze” by…wait for it…Sleater-Kinney.  A perfectly fine song, but never one that I remember as a favorite.  As I sat and listened to the familiar guitar intro, I realized that I actually don’t know the words to this song.  And despite turning up the volume and straining to listen in, I couldn’t make out the words in any meaningful way.  Sometimes this doesn’t bother me.  I can listen to a song and not have a full understanding of the lyrics.  It doesn’t necessarily bother me.  But something about this song was bothering me.  Well, “bothering” is probably not the right word.  But in that moment I was drawn to it.

“Burn, Don’t Freeze” is written in a style that Sleater-Kinney perfected: It is literally two songs at once.  Carrie and Corin sang on top of each other with melody and counter-melody, each with different words.  That in and of itself wasn’t enough to compel me to crack the song.  But two elements stood out: (1) I always want to know what Carrie’s singing because I think she has a way with words and wit and (2) Carrie and Corin’s vocal affects were flipped.  Normally Carrie has a very disaffected and unemotive way of singing and Corin, even when she belts it, has a sweetness or emotion to her voice.  But even though I didn’t know what they were singing about, on this song, Carrie sounded like she was purposefully singing rather sweetly and Corin sounded, well, pissed or bitter about something.  Hence my curiosity peaked.  As their disparate vocal styles, melodies, and lyrics intertwined I realized that purely listening wasn’t going to help me solve this song.

Frustrated, I fired up PowerLyrics.  As I read the lyrics, a slow grin crept across my face.  Remember, Carrie and Corin are singing simultaneously.  You can listen to the album version here.

Carrie: I’d set your heart on fire, but arson is no way to make a love burn brighter.  Always thought that the devil was the only one who knew the ins and the outs of the ways of love.  So I sold off my heart to see how this would end.  Now I can’t move an inch for fear it will begin.
Corin: When you saw me on that first day, said I’d blossom under your care.  Wrap me up tight inside your wing.  Is it safe now, is it safe to breathe?

Carrie: You come in between me and the darkness.  Please don’t you ever leave.
Corin: I force my eyes open and now who has changed?  You look different, so different today.

Corin: Holding your eyes in the hardest stare.  Running around like you wanted me there.  Looking at me like I’m the hottest in town, then turning your back when you’re moving around.
Carrie: Backwards, forwards going out of my mind, spinning way off time.
Corin: I ain’t gonna listen to you no more. Breaking outta this place throwing open the door. Use me up just to fan the flame.  But you’ll be sorry as I’m walking away.
Carrie: Fire to water, baby’s putting me out.

Carrie: You’re the truest light I’ve known.  But someday I’ll learn I don’t need your fuel to burn.  Always thought that hell was the only place hot enough to melt our hearts into a locked embrace.  There’s something so safe about a lack of air.  It’s the only way to make sure that you’ll always be there.
Corin: I’m the one who decides who I am.  I’m the one who will shed this old skin.  I force my eyes open, and now who has changed?  I feel different, so different today.

Carrie: We’re buried underground.  That’s where these hearts are found. Devil spins this world around.  Only Love can save us now.  Do you want to go underground?  Lay buried underground?
Corin: I’m gone!  I’m gone!  I’m gone!  I’m gone!
Corin: Don’t you wanna
Carrie: Did you really change your mind?
Corin: Ain’t you gonna?
Corin: Was this fire way too bright?
Corin: Don’t you wanna?
Carrie: Could this be your only crime?
Corin: Ain’t you gonna?
Carrie: Did you really change your mind?

 

I listened to this song on repeat at least 6 times, scrolling through the lyrics on each.  I would listen to Carrie’s part all the way through.  Then I would focus on Corin’s.  Then Carrie’s.  Then Corin’s.  Then try and process both together.  It was so much fun and it turned, what was otherwise a minor SK cut, to one of my favorite SK songs.  Because I had only caught bits and pieces of the lyrics on my prior listenings, I had no idea this was a love on the rocks/break-up song.  I had no idea how poetic Carrie’s lyrics were.  She sounds so desperate and needy (“You’re the truest light I’ve known.  But someday I’ll learn I don’t need your fuel to burn.  Always thought that hell was the only place hot enough to melt our hearts into a locked embrace.  There’s something so safe about a lack of air.  It’s the only way to make sure that you’ll always be there.”) and Corin’s so fucking bitter (“Looking at me like I’m the hottest in town, then turning your back when you’re moving around.”).  It’s so awesome.  I was feeling the high I get after discovering a new band or song that I never knew existed.  I literally skipped home, I was so excited.

I never would have experienced this had I just lazily taken the J home.  But thankfully, I broke my usual patterns and habits and my penchant for meandering about by myself, wanting to feel the pulse and rhythms of the City, not feeling wedded to a timetable or what was “sensible” created this moment for me.  I’m really grateful for that.

With the developments in technology there’s so much pressure to compress as much as possible into our waking hours.  And while that might work for some people it doesn’t work for everyone.  I am constantly amazed at how heeding that not-so-small voice in my head that screams “HOLY SHIT! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!  WHAT’S THE RUSH???” often leads to those moments where I feel most alive and at peace with my life and with myself.  Getting caught in the race, I’m definitely guilty of  thinking that to do = doing something = living life.  Thus I must “do” as much as possible.  Otherwise, what evidence is there that I was here?  But sometimes, not doing anything, relaxing, and letting life take you wherever it goes *is* living.

Fuck Palm.  Ferris had it right the whole time.

PS — Dear dude who laughed at me when I did my little handclap dance.  I’m glad that me, my iPhone, and Sleater-Kinney were able to bring a smile to your face.

Wait, what?  Elvis Costello with Jenny Lewis *and* Zooey Deschanel?  Indie essposion.

A pre-Janet Sleater-Kinney, which means a pre-breakup Carrie and Corin.  Carrie puts her head on Corin’s shoulder.  In the middle of a song.  A punk song.  Oddly adorable especially because Corin doesn’t even react.  If someone tried to do that to me while I was playing I’d probably bonk them in the eye with my shoulder.  Cuz I’m warm and cuddly like that.

The New Pornographers are one of my favorite bands and they have a new album coming out in a few months.  I had never seen this 2003 Letterman performance of my favorite song.  I’ve always thought one of the biggest coups in indie rock was A.C. Newman (the lead singer and band leader) convincing Neko Case to join the band.

PS — A.C., you are way cuter now that you’re tubby and bearded.

Another one of my favorite Canadian bands, Broken Social Scene, also has a record coming out soon.  BSS are a collective/Supergroup made up of up to 17 people at a time.  Seeing them live at Lollapallooza was seriously a life-changing moment.  And this is the song “Anthems (For A Seventeen Year Old Girl)” that left me mesmerized, pulled me in, and made me a BSS fan forever.  I’ve been chasing the high from that concert ever since.  This performance, with Emily Haines (Metric), Amy Milian (Stars), and Feist is fantastic.

I bought The Stills first album “Logic Will Break Your Heart” solely based on the title.  I knew nothing about the band except that they were from Canada.  But the album title hit me like a ton of bricks.  As it turned out, that album would be on constant rotation on my iPod and in my car for most of 2004 and 2005.  They’ve had some lineup changes since then and they kind of suck now.  But that first album, along with this song “Still In Love Song” are still very close to my heart.

Jennifer Knapp.  I will probably do a separate post on Jen Knapp, who has returned after a 5+ year hiatus wherein she disappeared to Australia to work in a pawn shop to get away from making music.  She’s returned, will put out a new album in a few months, and it looks like she got a tattoo.  For a good two years of college, the only music I listened to was Jen Knapp, Jars of Clay, Caedmon’s Call, and Deliriou5, all Christian artists with amazing musicality.

But Jen in particular was, like, my voice.  She was able to channel everything that I had ever felt, wanted to feel, thought, or wanted to say about my faith.  I bought a Taylor because of her.  I started songwriting and singing in earnest because of her.  In the same way that Kathleen Hanna totally influenced me as I was going through my adolescence and learning what it meant to be a woman in the world, Jen Knapp served the same role during my formative years as a Christian.  She was a huge inspiration and still is.  I’m so happy she’s back making music and I hope that she’s doing so without the Christian banner.

Speaking of Jars of Clay.  I blame them for my default strum pattern, which is basically the strum pattern from “Flood”.  But I do thank them for introducing me to alternate tunings and creative capo work.  And to this day I can recite the prayer at 3:40-5:00.  I spent a lot of time listening to this song in dark when I was in college.

I’ve only recently come to discover Kleenex/Liliput, a Swiss post-punk XX band from the late 70′s and early 80′s.  My favorite label, Kill Rock Stars, just re-released their albums and I’m loving it.  An all-female post-punk band that sings in both German and English, toured with The Slits, The Raincoats, and Gang of Four, and was sued by Kimberly-Clark for using the name Kleenex?  What’s not to love?

And that was my YouTube adventure for the night.

I.  Love.  YouTube.

If you follow me on Reader, you may have noticed (and expressed some level of annoyance) at the amount of Alex Chilton articles I’ve been sharing or tweeting about.  As I sit to write this post, I regret having shared so many articles that expressed, ever so elegantly, exactly what I want to say now.  But even though I knew I wanted to write my own thoughts on Alex Chilton, I just couldn’t help myself.  I was on the road and unable to write a piece myself, but I felt compelled to do my part to make sure that anyone who would listen to my inane ramblings knew not only of Alex Chilton, but why music fans all around the world were mourning.

It was a mission that was validated by the four six-word tweets that I received from strangers and non-strangers throughout the week: “Who the fuck is Alex Chilton?”

Well allow me to retort.  Or not really.

At this point you can google Alex Chilton and get the answer.  You can read a number of eloquent tributes (my favorites are Carrie Brownstein’s and Paul Westerberg’s) that so exactly encompass Alex Chilton’s impact and what he meant to the music community.

So that’s been done.  The point of this post, and the reason why 15 minutes after unlocking my front door after a two-week vacation I opened up my laptop to start typing, is to simply memorialize who the fuck Alex Chilton was to me.

Back in the pre-Napster days, finding music wasn’t as easy as opening a web browser, popping in a search term, and clicking “play now”.  Growing up in the Bay Area suburbs without cool older siblings to guide my way or access to a college rock station (that damn Mt. Diablo successfully blocked any radio signals coming from the punk underground in Berkeley), I pretty much relied on happenstance and MTV’s 120 Minutes for my musical discoveries.  In the case of Alex Chilton, it would be the former.

The odd thing is that I knew Alex Chilton before I “knew” Alex Chilton.  I discovered The Replacements in 1993.  After falling in love with their seminal “Let It Be” and kinda in like with “Tim”, I finally scrounged up enough money to get a used copy of their much maligned “Pleased To Meet Me”.  Of course, being the contrarian that I am, I loved that album, primarily for two tracks: “Never Mind” and “Alex Chilton”.

The dumb thing is that I had no idea Alex Chilton was an actual person.  I just thought it was a cool sounding name that Westerberg threw in there because it had the syntax that he needed.  So there I was, at 15, cranking “Alex Chilton” in my room dancing around like an idiot.  I.  Loved.  That.  Song.  LOVED IT.  The energy and the lyrics completely captured my love for music at the time.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

God.  Every time that part of the song comes on, “I’m in love.  What’s that song?  I’m in love with that song.”  I rock out with the goofiest grin on my face.  It’s just so anthemic and over the years I would, to myself, replace “Alex Chilton” with my artist du jour.  Jenny Lewis, U2, Oasis, John Lennon, Win Butler, Corin Tucker, etc.  They’ve all received the Alex Chilton treatment.  Come on.  Do me a favor.  Crank it up and walk around your room while you’re listening.  If you’re not dancing around and doing the handclaps by the end I simply ask that you check your pulse and try again.

Ok.  Stop waxing.  Keep telling.

I wouldn’t learn who Alex Chilton was until I went off to college.  I bought the Empire Records soundtrack (crap movie, great soundtrack) and fell in love with Evan Dando’s “The Ballad of El Goodo”.  I listened to it on loop when my roommate was in class, cranking it up, lying in bed with my legs up against the wall, trying to stay cool (we didn’t have A/C in the dorms).  One day I was flipping through the CD booklet and noticed that Dando didn’t actually write El Goodo.  Some dude named A. Chilton did.

Lightbulb.

By then the interwebs were in full force and I learned that Alex Chilton was the lead singer of Big Star, a band that people believed should have been up there with The Beatles, he was from Memphis, and he was, in fact, the “Alex Chilton” I had danced to.  I ran across the street to The Wherehouse (remember those?) and found Big Star’s most popular album, “#1 Record/Radio Star” and the rest is history.  The jangly guitar, the dischordant solos, the beautiful lyrics.  Big Star just pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go.

Thirteen.  One of the most beautiful love songs ever written and famously covered by Elliot Smith.  “Would you be an outlaw for my love?”  Uh, duh.  I love Elliot’s version, but Alex’s shaky voice in the original always makes me tear up.

I’m In Love With A Girl.  I would literally listen to this song as I drove around Irvine, equal parts imagining and hoping that a boy would someday sing this simple and sweet song to me.  Hasn’t happened yet, but I still imagine and hope as fervently now as I did 15 years ago.

As I would learn a few years ago while randomly Wikipediaing bands in my iTunes library (yes, I do this to pass time), Alex Chilton was a true artist who refused to bow down to commercial influence or mainstream taste.  He was sorely disappointed that no one was interested in Big Star’s music but he continued to make music on his own terms and basically said “If you like it, great.  If you don’t, fuck you.”  As I find myself gravitating more and more towards that ethos I can see why well-respected artists and musicians put him on a pedestal.  He lived it, he breathed it, he was awesome.

So that’s who Alex Chilton was to me.  A guy who made me laugh, sing, dance, swoon, and think, and who thankfully influenced so many of my favorite bands and artists.  He was revered in the music community and you can almost see musicians walking around with black armbands these days, “September Gurls” ringing from their headphones.

As for me, my “black armband” is listening to “Alex Chilton” on loop.  Because, as usual, Westerberg nailed it:

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

…

Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice.

…

I never travel far, without a little Big Star

…

If he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon?
If he died in Memphis, then that’d be cool, babe.

Alex Chilton, RIP.

So in my quest to start buying music in physical form as opposed to “digital rights” form, I’ve been hitting a few used record shops in San Francisco, namely the all famous Amoeba Music in the Haight and Rasputin’s in Union Square.  I used to go to the East Bay counterparts in Berkeley and Concord when I was in high school.  No doubt Amoeba had a far superior selection and was well-organized, but Rasputin had some fantastic deals (lots of $1 albums) and because is not organized well you could find some great hidden records if you took the time to hunt.

Which I did.

I probably should have actually flipped through my vinyl collection before hitting up Amoeba to refresh my memory as to what I already owned.  I didn’t and thus I now own two copies of Laura Nyro’s “Gonna Take A Miracle”, which is a great soul album that I love, obviously.

But I’ve been having a blast flipping through albums, aisle after aisle, for hours on end (I think I must have been in Amoeba for over four hours).  One of the more difficult tasks has been determining what albums I love vs. albums I want to buy.  And one piece of this criteria is whether or not that vinyl comes with a lyric sheet or lyrics printed on the back.

When I was a kid there was nothing better than getting a CD home, ripping it open, popping it into my CD player, and lying on my stomach on the floor and reading the lyrics along with each song on repeat.  To this day I can recite entire songs and albums from memory.  But with the advent of digital music I don’t do that anymore and I really can’t say that I can recall too many lyrics for any song I’ve bought over the past 10 years.

Of course most people will roll their eyes and tell me “Courtney, it’s called the internet.  Use it.”  Yes, obviously we can all find lyrics on the internet now and that’s how I normally do it.  In fact, I have two apps on my iPhone solely dedicated to displaying  the lyrics of any song playing on my iPod.

But, as I learned yesterday, the internet can be wrong.  No, really!  Stay with me!

One of my favorite Sleater-Kinney songs (I know, I know, I’ll stop talking about them eventually) is “Get Up”.  And for the longest time I thought Corin sang the following line: “Is there Splenda?  I am not ashamed.”  That was a really really weird line in the context of Sleater-Kinney, a band famous for singing about the negative female image issues.  “Corin’s singing about her love for Splenda?  Weird.”  Then again, I also thought it was kind of a cheeky line so I just went with it.

Then yesterday I bought “All Hands On The Bad One” on vinyl and looked at the lyric sheet as I was sipping at a coffee shop next to Amoeba called Rock’n Java.  There it was in black and white: “Is there splendor?  I’m not ashamed.”

Well, shit.  That makes a whole lot more sense.

I had a similar Facebook discussion with a friend of mine who thought that in “Skinny Love”, Bon Iver sings,

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be embarrassed
I told you to be kind

I on the other hand thought he sang, in the third line, “I told you to be balanced.”  Well I bought “For Emma, Forever Ago” yesterday and can confidently report that I’m right.

In addition to correcting my understanding of certain song lyrics, I was also reminded that sometimes lyrics don’t strike you until you see them in print.  One of the CDs I bought yesterday was a used copy of The Go-Betweens’ “Bellavista Terrace: The Best of The Go-Betweens”.  The Go-Betweens are a great 80s cult band from Australia who never made it big despite the fact that they sound a bit like The Smiths (especially with Robert Forrster sings) and write devastatingly beautiful lyrics.  I discovered them a few years ago after one of their members passed away and I’ve been re-listening to their albums(which I own digitally) a lot lately.

Flipping through the CD booklet I was completely floored, for what felt like the first time, by the beauty of their lyrics:

“And what will I miss?  Her cruelty, her unfaithfulness, her fun, her love, her kiss.” — “Part Company”

“‘When a woman learns to walk she’s not dependent anymore.’  A line from her letter; May 24″ — “Bye Bye Pride”

“When the rain hit the roof with the sound of a finished kiss, like when a lip lifts from a lip.” — “The Wrong Road”

I had read these lyrics before on the internet, but something about seeing them on paper made them resonate even more.  Perhaps because it made them feel more personal.  These were words that were written down by these men, and not just digitally cataloged by strangers on the web.  I was so moved by these lyrics I kept pulling the album out as I was out with friends at bars and restaurants last night, waxing poetic about the lyrics and reading them aloud to anyone who would listen.  It was like I was high.

I’m such a nerd.  And not a particularly good dinner companion when I get in these obsessive moods.

But anyway.  Yay for lyric sheets and CD booklets.  They *do* serve more than just a practical purpose and they’re not a waste of trees.  They can completely transform how you experience a song or an album.

Oh, and while I’m at it, can I just throw in another plug for buying albums for album artwork?  Again, going back to S-K, I had previously only owned most of their albums in digital form.  For “The Hot Rock”, the cover of the album just looks like the band standing on a sidewalk hailing a cab.  Uh, ok.  I don’t really get it but sure.  Now, looking at the album, Carrie actually has a huge diamond ring on her finger that is sparkling rather brightly.  The back of the album is black and has nothing more than a huge diamond in the middle.  It’s only when I saw the album artwork that I remembered that Robert Redford had a diamond-heist movie called “The Hot Rock”.  Take all this along with the lyrics of the title track (which uses a diamond heist as a metaphor for a crap relationship) and it opens up a whole new understanding of the song, the artwork, and the album’s themes.  It’s a shame that artists do put a lot of effort and care into album artwork to further their artistic thematic vision and nowadays we completely ignore it because digital music often doesn’t give you the complete picture.

Anyway, I’m loving this music hunt.  I feel like a kid again.

Despite the fact that I can go on hour long diatribes on how technology has changed music for the worse, the fact is I love the fact that thanks to Napster and iTunes, the democratization of music has lead to me discovering more bands in the past 10 years than I would have been able to otherwise. There is no mainstream/underground anymore.  As such, finding those obscure bands is remarkably easy.  Despite my cynical skepticism, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But, with the advent of mp3s, I don’t buy CDs or vinyl anymore.  In fact, for any album or song that I bought after 1999, I do not have the CD or vinyl.  Ok, that’s not true.  I have a few vinyls, namely Rilo Kiley, Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Radiohead, Postal Service, and Bon Iver.  But I haven’t bought a CD in years.

This bothers me.

I miss the collector aspect of finding music.  I miss the hunt.  And most of all, given my propensities towards collection, I miss having something tangible in my hands.  I miss that feeling of struggling with the stupid plastic wrap on a CD, peeling off the secondary security sticker on top, and pouring through liner notes.  I have to think that a lot of artists are pissed about this as well.  I could go on forever about my disdain of the new “singles” culture of music production, but the bottom line is that artists used to put a lot of effort and care into the production of their albums.  Liner notes mattered.  I can’t tell you how many little nuggets I’ve gleaned about artists from reading their thank yous.  Even little facts, such as their label, song sequencing, album artwork, are all dismissed these days.

So, I am embarking on a project wherein I am going to attempt to identify those albums that I actually want to own on CD or vinyl.  If I was still at my job I would just make this list haphazardly, spend an evening putting each album in to my Amazon shopping cart, and it would be done.  But that’s not an option anymore.  So I’m going to put together a list and slowly work through it as my resources allow.  I think this will be fun.

I apply the same methodology to my Kindle books.  I buy most of my books on Kindle these days.  But if I find the book particularly interesting so that I want it on my bookshelf then I will buy the physical book.  But quick reads that I found interesting but don’t think I’ll revisit or want to lend to friends I ignore.

So that’s the metric I’ll apply to music.  Albums that I love, that I would be sad if I didn’t have, and that I might want to lend to friends.

To that end, I’d like to enlist your help.  What are some albums that you’d want to own in physical form?  I suppose this isn’t all that different from a “Desert Island” list.  But I do think it’s an interesting question to ask.  We are so inundated with music these days that it can become difficult to differentiate between what is necessary and what is just…nice.

I mean, I’m pretty sure I’d want The Replacements “Let It Be” on a desert island.  Can’t say the same about Coldplay, despite the fact that my iTunes tells me that I listen to far more Coldplay than ‘Mats.

Thoughts?  I’ll post up a list soon.

When I look back on memorable life moments they are often comprised of my little acts of rebellion.  And really, when I say “little”, I mean little.  Despite my attempts to to actually be a rebellious kid, which I honestly do believe is my nature, I’m just too “good” of a kid to actually rebel in a meaningful or real way.  That said, rebellion is part of my nature.

Somehow, this idea crystalized as I went to the fridge tonight to grab a beer.

For those who have been around me with frequency over the last year, you know that my beer of choice is Pacifico.  As I grabbed my Stanford bottle opener (which sadly has run out of batteries and no longer plays “All Right Now”) I wondered how this happened.

This requires a bit of backstory.

I never had an intentional sip of alcohol until I was 22 years old.  That’s right, I was one of those squares who just never drank as a kid, and even when I did begin to drink (during the summer of my first year of law school) it was because I didn’t want to seem weird at the social functions thrown by the firm with which I interned.  And I use the term “intentional”, well, intentionally, because the only lick of alcohol I had before I was 22 was because my kid sister “accidentally” gave me a frozen daquiri from the freezer one night after I was hot and thirsty after Tae Kwon Do practice when I was 16.

Thanks, Kimmi.

Even though I drank during that 1L summer, I still didn’t actually drink.  When I returned to law school for my second year I was still straightedge.  My friends would go to parties and bars and I would sip my coke and call it a night.  It helped that for the most part, my law school friends were just as square as I was, so alcohol wasn’t central to our bonding experience.

It wasn’t until after graduation, when I started my Big Firm job, that my drinking went from a “please let me not seem like a weirdo” to “huh, I actually quite enjoy this stuff” phase.  I haven’t looked back.

At first I was kind of scared of beer.  I didn’t love the taste, it was so filling, and it seemed kind of lame to order a beer when everyone else was ordering X and tonics.  So I went through a phase wherein I only drank gin and tonics.  Then I moved to vodka tonics.  Then I went to margaritas, which, well, let’s just say tequila and I are no longer on speaking terms.

Then came the fateful day where my firm sponsored an event where we went on a tour and tasting at San Francisco’ Anchor Steam Brewery.  Anchor, as it’s referred to in SF, is a bit of an institution.  It was local, it was good, it was on tap all over the city, and it became my drink of choice for over two years.  It was hoppy, dense, and it made me feel like a real San Franciscan.  That sounds so lame to actually type out.

Ok.  I’m meandering.  So let me cut this short.  Ish.

I would bounce around for the next few years from liquor, beer, and wine.  Wine became a prominent fixture, as most of friends loved to going to wine bars and fancy dinners.  Just as things were starting to become intolerable at my firm, my friends and I began to frequent, often three times a week or more, a nearby wine bar in the financial district.  I have so many positive memories of these “happy” hours, but I specifically remember one day realizing that I kind of hated wine.

Ok, hate is a strong word.

But I didn’t enjoy it, at least not enough to shell out $15-20 for a glass, particularly when, let’s face it, I wasn’t just drinking one glass.  So one day, when we went to the wine bar, I perused their very limited beer menu, which included Belgian beers, local brews, and the aforementioned Anchor, and picked the cheapest one on the menu: Pacifico.

And that was that.

It is so embarrassing to admit now but I took so much pleasure out of going to that wine bar, sitting with a table full of lawyers whose combined income easily exceeded $1 million, drinking a $3 beer.  I would order it every time, leading to the kind waitresses to have a cold one popped open and on my table by the time I had taken off my jacket and scarf.

It’s a funny phenomenon, really.  As I made more money and worked my way up the ranks at my job I increasingly and intentionally engaged in little private rebellions that, while they seemed like endearing quirks, meant so much to me.  By the 5th year at my job I had gone from wearing business formal/casual 5 days a week to coming to work in jeans and Converse.  I never wore my hair up as a first and second year, but years later there would be weeks where I wore my hair in a messy ponytail every day. My boss would rattle on about how messy my office was and I would simply make it messier.  I would look at my shiny BMW, which I shamefully admit I bought primarily for status reasons, with immense shame.  “Look at the fucking sellout” I’d think to myself.  And so I would do stupid little things to prove to myself that I wasn’t one of THEM (then again, I intentionally drove my car down to Coachella just to fuck with all the hipsters — rebel was the name of the game).

Which is so dumb.  Sometimes you’re too busy rebelling (or being preoccupied with rebelling) to actually just be who you are.  I don’t actually dislike wine.  I just think I do in my head because of everything it represents to me based on my upbringing: white, rich, elitist, bourgeois.  I mean, that’s just an idiotic thing but as I stayed at my job it became real to me.  And so I drink my cheap-ass beer (usually either Pacifico or Bud Light).

A friend made a comment the other day that made me smile quietly to myself: “It’s really nice to finally see you get to be yourself.”  I’m not going to lie, it’s really nice to finally be myself.  Even if that means I’m a BMW driving, blue haired Asian chick who wears army jackets and drinks cheap beer.

Last night, the new documentary about one of my favorite bands, The Magnetic Fields, debuted at San Francisco’s Noise Pop festival at Mezzanine.  This was the first screening of the movie and I was lucky enough to score a couple of tickets to the sold-out show.  And much to my surprise and delight, Stephin Merritt, the mind and “heart” behind The Magnetic Fields was actually there!

But before I get ahead of myself, a bit about The Magnetic Fields and Stephin Merritt.  Stephin is an amazingly prolific songwriter and revered among indie music fans.  His songs have been covered by everyone from Peter Gabriel to Arcade Fire.  He’s also a renowned curmudgeon, often described as “prickly” and “irascible”.  You can Google him and read all the superlatives but I’ll take this moment to attempt to articulate my reasons for reverence and bewilderment.  What makes Stephin writes beautiful songs and stories in a way that recasts concepts of love, loss, relationships, and story in ways you’ve never heard them previously articulated.  Cliches that we cynical post-modern assholes simply dismiss and scoff at, Stephin transforms into songs and stories slathered in sarcasm.  He’s as cynical as they come.  He looks at life and rolls his eyes.  But this process makes everything sound new and revolutionary.  Anyone who knows me knows my love of “Book of Love”, a track from TMF’s sprawling three-CD concept album, “69 Love Songs”.  The album is, in fact, comprised of 69 love songs.

I love “Book of Love”.  Any boy who gave me that song would be my husband (or, at a minimum, my baby daddy) in a heartbeat.  I love what it says about love.

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing but

I love it when you read to me and
You can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb but

I love it when you sing to me and
You can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know but

I love it when you give me things and
You ought to give me wedding rings

It is a beautiful song, particularly when sung by Stephin’s disaffected baritone voice.  But the genius of the song is that Stephin is being completely sarcastic.  He has said that he wrote Book of Love as a joke.  It mocks what people are like when they’re in love.  He was recently told that the song was played at a fan’s wedding and he scoffed.  Obviously, this makes me love the song that much more.

So yes, the guy writes beautiful songs.  But what makes Stephin different for me is that he believes that you shouldn’t write songs or be creative when you’re in the emotion or feeling you are trying to evoke.  That is, if you’re in love, the last thing you should be doing is writing a love song.  Similarly, if you’re writing a story song, you shouldn’t be writing about something you’ve experienced or are experiencing.  I have never heard him elaborate on this point.  I was hoping that the documentary would get into his creative process but it didn’t touch on this particular issue.

I can only assume the following:  The idea must be that if you write while you are in that empassioned state, you cannot possibly capture the full range of emotion or possibility in the song.  You’re hamstringed to what you’re feeling.  Because of that, how can you possibily articulate something new or express something that is not cliche?  You can’t.  So why bother? You’re too tied to the “truth” of how you feel or what you’re experiencing.

This is mindblowing to me.  Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to break out of my “I can only write what I know!” mentality and force myself to write from a more objective place (thus the lack of posting here).  It’s really hard.  I am not hardwired this way.  I feel compelled to write what I see and what I feel at the moment.  The problem with this, and why I am entertaining these notions of more detached writing, is that in order for the reader or listener to connect with what I write, they have to care about *my* point of view.  Why the fuck should a complete and total stranger care what Courtney is experiencing?  In a way, you have to care about me in order to care about what I have to say.

That’s not an inherently problematic thing.  The strongest emotional connections I have with pieces of writing or songs almost always stem from my “relationship” with the author, writer, or singer.  If I know where the writer is coming from, their backstory, it creates this emotional connection that doesn’t exist otherwise.  Here’s an embarrassing and tremendously lazy example:  I hear “Simple Kind of Life” by No Doubt and I can cry fairly easily because I know, based on interviews and reading, what was going on with Gwen Stefani when she wrote that song.  “Knowing” her in this way allows me to create what feels like a very real emotional connection with her and thus, the song, despite the fact that it’s not a particularly amazing piece of work.  Compare that to, say, reading The Great Gatsby.  A beautifully written piece of art that, while I can intellectually recognize its genius, carries no emotional resonance whatsoever.

Like I said, that was an idiotically simple and lazy comparison.  Music is a more inherently moving form of art for me personally, so sorry, Scotty F.

Which brings me back to Stephin.  Here’s a guy who writes songs that move me on a frighteningly regular basis.  “Papa Was A Rodeo” is just a fantastic song with glints of country melancholy.  Yet he’s a complete mystery.  No one knows much about it.  In fact, one of the only things we do know is that the songs aren’t autobiographical.  They are not glimpses into his soul.  He doesn’t emote when he sings.  In fact, he looks completely bored.  Is it his mystique that draws me in, searching for little hints as to what he’s feeling in that song?  I’ve thought about that and the answer is affirmatively, no.  I’m not so arrogant as to think that I can find something that Stephin inadvertently let slip through the cracks.  I have too much respect for him for that.

But this conundrum was the driving force for wanting to see “Strange Powers”.  I was hoping for some insight into his creative process and his personality.  While the movie touched on both, it left me wanting more.  I WANT TO KNOW MORE, STEPHIN!  Which of course is exactly how he wants it.

That said, “Strange Powers” does exactly what any Magnetic Fields fan would want (loved the filmmakers’ acknowledgment that San Francisco is the heart of the Magnetic Fields’ fanbase):  It will convert non-fans into fans and make fans into superfans.  It is a documentary, 10 years in the making, that tells the story of the band, showing live footage, and really putting the music and the band front and center.  And that’s not to say there is no insight into the band.  The filmmakers’ focus on the relationship between Stephin and his best friend/collaborator/bandmate Claudia Gonson is really beautiful.  If you’ve ever been a fag-hag or friends with a prickly creative (ahem), there’s so much you can identify with.

Leaving Mezzanine I felt jazzed and inspired.  I’m sure Stephin would roll his eyes and tell me to calm the fuck down.

More TMF goodness:

“All The Little Words”

“I Don’t Believe In The Sun”

“Nun’s Litany”

I want to be a Playboy’s bunny
I’d do whatever they asked me to
I’d meet people with lots of money
And they would love me like I loved you

I want to be a topless waitress
I want my mother to shed one tear
I’d throw away this old, sedate dress
Slip into something a tad more sheer

I want to be an artist’s model
An odalisque au naturel
I should be good at spin the bottle
While I’ve still got something left to sell

I want to be a cobra dancer
With little Willie between my thighs
I may not find a cure for cancer
But I’ll meet plenty of single guys

I want to be a brothel worker
I’ve always been treated like one
If I could be a back-street lurker
I’d make more money and have more fun

I want to be a dominatrix
Which isn’t like me, but I can dream
Learn S&M and all those gay tricks
And men will pay me to make them scream

I want to be a porno starlet
For that I’ll wait ’til Mama’s dead
I’ll see my name in lights of scarlet
And get to spend every day in bed.

I want to be a tattooed lady
Dedicated as I am to art
Characters bold, complex and shady
Will write my memoirs across my heart.

“Book of Love” sung to…a puppet.

Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can’t say about NBC.  To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over 20 years.  Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we’re going to go our separate ways.  But this company has been my home for most of my adult life.  I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible.

Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I’ve had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we’ll find a way to make it fun.

And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational.

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

See the video here.