Today I worked in the yard. Then tonite I went roller skating with T.T. with Paul. Afterwards we went the Gaylords for refreshments, ping-pong, etc.
When Paul took me home he told me I was real cute & a bunch of other stuff. I’m crazy I know but it just didn’t affect me. Here he carried on about how nice I was & everything it didn’t even please me where-as if Bob would have just told me (he wasn’t there) it was a nice day I’ed get goose-pimples down & up my spine. Early in the evening Nancy told me Joan Sterns had told her that her & “Bob” were going out tomorrow evening. Nancy also said he went to a beach party tonite. Well, that started it. All night I kept thinking about him. And when Paul was kissing me good-night, I was thinking about Bob & what he was doing then & of all the good-times we’ve had together & how guilty I felt about kissing Paul. Then when I got in the house I started thinking more & more about Bob. And then absent-mindedly I started singing “I Wonder Whose Kissing Him Now” & “You Made Me Love You” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” and now I realize another thing. When I used to come home from a date with Bob, I used to go straight to sleep. But with Paul, I have to wash & brush my teeth. I wonder if that means anything! Another thing, I’m beginning to appreciate the way Bob kissed me. It was much more smoother, softer, lighter, spine-tinglinger, etc. etc. When Paul kisses me, its blah, blaah & more blaah. On the whole it was a nice evening. Ritchie brock up with Zella. Hip-Hip-Hooray. I wonder why. I looked very nice in the new slacks I got yesterday. Got in at 12:50.
Editorial Note:
Oh, poor Lois. Just for kicks, try to envision Lois moping around her room singing “You Made Me Love You” and pretending she’s Doris Day, a la this amazingly Technicolor video:
This here is one of my all-time favorite artists: Otis Redding. No other performer is able to capture the gut-punching urgency of love like this man, in this song. His voice, oh his voice is thick with the consumption of love as he forces the soul of each word into the microphone. Beatific.
Aaaaaahhhhhh, Courtney Love–the train wreck we love to hate but secretly hope never fades from the limelight permanently. Let’s be honest: people like Courtney Love serve a vital purpose within our society as benchmarks for our self-esteem barometer. Loves the world over are a means to gauge how we’re doing on a personal level, a way to compare ourselves to the “rich and famous” and say, “At least I didn’t fall off a barstool and flash my southernmost private parts to the entire MTV audience, crew, and a music icon.” This is the same reason an old roommate of mine would watch the show 16 and Pregnant when she was depressed: no matter how bad her day was, at least she wasn’t sixteen…and pregnant.
I have a soft-spot for Ms. Love, forever the former Mrs. Cobain, because she was omnipresent during my formative listening years; this means I had no choice but to like her (the proverbial cop-out). Her hot-messness aside, she musically explores what it means to be a woman in the world and this feminist angle hasn’t been adequately explored because she often gets in her own way. Okay, she ALWAYS gets in her own way but hear me out on this tangent. Take, for example, the song “Doll Parts” from Hole’s album Live Through This, released in 1994, in which Love discusses society’s perception of women as playthings (dolls), how it forces women to regress into infantile desires (for cake) to get attention and the effect of this dynamic (turning women fake, making them ache). She’s pissed, and wants you to ache like she aches:
“I am doll eyes
Doll mouth, doll legs
I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, but I do too
I want to be the girl with the most cake
I love him so much it just turns to hate
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday, you will ache like I ache
Someday, you will ache like I ache
I am doll parts
Bad skin, doll heart
It stands for knife
For the rest of my life
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, but I do, too
I want to be the girl with the most cake
He only loves those things because he loves to see them break
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday, you will ache like I ache
Someday you will ache like I ache”
In 1998, Love released what I believe to be her second best album to Live Through This which is Celebrity Skin. On the title track of this album she refers to herself as a “walking study in demonology”–an admission that she is routinely vilified in the press, and rightfully so as her behavior is erratic and often violent. (For more enlightenment on this facet of Courtney, I recommend watching Kurt & Courtney from BBC documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield). However, she is singled-out as particularly heinous where the same type of behavior from her male counterparts are often begrudgingly accepted as part of the rock and roll effect. That makes Courtney Love a fascinating specimen in our search to understand the perception of women in our current culture, particularly because she is so self-aware and open if not tragically unwilling to clean up her act. But should she have to? That is the question.
Now, I am in no way (I repeat: I AM NOT) advocating Love as the pinnacle of feminist mystique, but I do commend her on the courage it takes to be Courtney Love in all her grotesque glory; she is nothing if not consistent. From Hole’s video for “Violet” (featured above) where you can clearly see Kurt’s influence and understand his fascination with her to the video for “Celebrity Skin” (seen below) which showcases her attempt to professionally rebirth herself as the movie star rocker chick, Courtney Love lives her life on a public stage and forces us to confront her and what she represents. Whatever your feelings are about this, you can explore them in the flesh when she plays The Independent here in San Francisco tonight. A truly a throwback Thursday if there ever was one.
Hold on, hold on, hold the phone: a song that references Theodor Adorno and Noam Chomsky?! I have been persuaded (couldn’t resist the pun) that this song by Faded Paper Figures delivers on every level: intelligent, thought provoking lyrics that forces we as listeners to examine our consumer culture and its effect on the human condition and our planet set to a repetitive tune which evokes the robotic. Genius. You need to buy and own this album. Wait…damn it.
“He won’t know Adorno
He’s an adult with an adcult
You can buy your way into his head
He was never better
Wearing sneakers and a sweater
Made by 12-year-olds sweating in Shenzhen
He says,
Let’s drive, drive, drive
Till we burn, burn, burn,
We can choke on it later on tonight
And we’ll fumble with the planet
Dry the river and then damn it
Just persuade me that everything’s all right.
This was his reality,
says the stupid love equality
And he’s never seen a car he didn’t like
On code like a reptilian
Pays Rapaille another billion
From your cortex to the page is just a hike.
So Let’s drive, drive, drive
Till we burn, burn, burn,
We can choke on it later tonight
And we’ll fumble with the planet
Dry the river, then we’ll damn it
Just persuade me that everything’s all right.
Because things…we’ve got to have our things.
We’re not persuaded by the Omnicom
We’re not persuaded we’re the only ones
We’re not persuaded by hegemony
We’re not persuaded we were ever free
Is that your conscience, or are you alone?
Is that Noam Chomsky on the telephone?”
Bob is starting to warm up a bit. I never noticed how nice looking he was before. *I’m going to give him 2 years. If by that time there’s no spark……. I’ll try to forget him.
Sometimes a current obsession comes from music released in times passed just southeast of the present yet that music is able to remain still north of your present person. For me, that obsession is David Gray’s 2000 album White Ladder. The true test of an album is its longevity, and longevity is beget from timelessness which comes from cyclical relevance. So the question becomes: Can I relate to the same song I first discovered as a teenager when I’m pushing the precipice of 30? In its moment, White Ladder was mainly defined by the radio hit “Babylon,” but it offers the listener so much more. “My Oh My”, “Nightblindness”, and the song featured here–“This Years Love”–are melancholy, contemplative and wax poetic with every turn. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy “Babylon”; it has its place in my listening routine. It is merely that I’m called more strongly by soft sadness wrought from things come hard, and that has been true since I was a raincloud loving teen taken with the Beat Generation but cursed to live in an inhospitable Southern California climate.
This connection to music, the way certain albums and songs are able to stay with me in a visceral way (a way that quickens a pulse, or soothes an ache), is what I’ve chosen to spend my adult years attempting to dissect and describe. Like here, now. But you know what? Sometimes you just like what you like, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. It speaks, therefore you listen.
Nostos Algos 