If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)

 

When the bulk of the thesis portion of Equations appeared on PennSound in June 2023, to complete the antithesis/synthesis which was already there, I felt the book was mostly completed. Why it took me so long to get to Emma Pasternak, and the final major piece added to the book in July 2023 (the only major piece left off PennSound), I do not know. It could be because I always secretly felt slightly cheated that she slipped into and out of my Aughts life so quickly. The piece itself turned out well. That Emma, or Emily, could be so whirling dervish where carnality was concerned, I had no idea growing up. Not only was Emily obscure at CHS, despite stunning good looks (something like a female Daryl Hall), she was frowning, snappish, carping, critiquing, and loathe to praise anything. In retrospect, her real life was obviously happening somewhere else, including survival skills to do love-n-sex battles the right way. Thus, the mystery around Emily P. is a substantial one. Ted, of Chimes fame, had the hots for her too. Now, in this case, the Staple Singers tune has no causal connection to Emily P, or whatever happened between her and I. The Staple Singers are new to me, as of 2024, but what strikes me about "If You're Ready...", and the whole Stax groove-machine, is how easy, how natural it makes sensuality feel. Emily P. had spent her entire childhood and adolescence watching me, but when the time came, she took me off the shelf as lightly and easily as you please. Was Emily a Mavis fan? She should've been. All that lightness and ease is built into this Memphis groove, and thanks to Chris Stapleton on Sirius for turning me on to it. The Staple Singers, like Emily P, could've been easy to miss.  

O, Dana

 

Impossible to talk about my adventures in State College in the 90s, including the marriage to Jennifer, without mentioning Big Star. All the extra time in Gulph Mills in the summer of '96, as Oasis peaked and the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie plateau remained a lofty one, I also consolidated an obsession with Memphis and the 70s scene around Big Star. This began when my friend Steve Kurutz visited me in Pollock Halls, State College, in the summer of '95. I heard Third for the first time, and my musical world shifted on its axis. The entire State College indie rock scene, it turns out, was bonkers about Big Star. By the summer of '96, me being, and remaining, a mid-level player in the State College indie scene was in the pocket. The nimrods in Hollywood who created That 70s Show also certainly noticed. My birthday being February 7th and all that. And Jen's being March 22nd. In any case, by the time we made it to the Atherton Hilton (or maybe we'd stay at a Holiday Inn), the fractured landscape of my own brain was perma-dented in the music sector, by the collision with Alex. Who, as I later had leave to notice, was not the kind of guy to give a shit about such things. It didn't matter. The rock bottom of the ocean, where Jennifer and I were here, has much in common with the decay/decomposition aesthetic of Third, and "O, Dana." Even as the blonde, standing before us with the magic wand, is not Jennifer, it's... 

P.S. The video template here is, of course, Abby Heller-Burnham. If you think there's no Center City Philadelphia in Mid-Town Memphis, think again. Remember who showed at Alex's house... 

This Year's Model

 

And back-peddle back to the fall of '95. On college campuses around America as of the 90s, attempts were always made to hot-house things, in different formations and contexts. Throw the artist kids together, or the finance kids, or the science kids, and see what happens. PSU in State College was in at the deep-end with North Halls: a three-dormitory assemblage put together for artists, creative types, misfits, and queer kids to live in. I lived in North Halls for several years. As was later the case at 4325 in West Philadelphia, rock hipsterism was rampant. As of late August '95, through October and November, the hottest platter doing the rounds in North Halls was this, Elvis Costello's early jitterbug-n-squealing keys classic This Year's Model. North Halls had a so-so relationship to rationales. Sometimes, group dynamics happened for a reason, sometimes they did not. This time, as is explicated in Equations (#39), the appearance of a siren perfect for the place & time parameters was a call to arms. Everybody fell in love at the same time with Amanda, or Mandee, who I called Hope in Equations for her extremely extraordinary resemblance to rock chanteuse Hope Sandoval. She also looked like Justine Frischmann. Amanda was a heartbreaker and a Don Juana, who ripped to shreds, in punk-Gothic fashion, everyone she could get her hands on the right way. Yet, I would be lying not to concede that she did so in a memorable fashion, and that we all had fun in her game-matrix, even as we got mangled. For instance, I learned from her the rigors of Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast. When she pressed the Zorak-ian button on her wrist to incinerate me, at regular intervals and with the same ostensible sense that I was being uncool about whatever, it fed into all of us being who Declan McManus is on this platter: long-suffering victims. Even though the Equations piece explicates why watching from a distance could be more fun than getting up close and personal. That kind of fun for me was right around the corner in '96.

To Be Young

 

The poem Genius Loci, newly up on P.F.S. Post, presents an unlikely scenario— an entire houseful of scenester cadets ascending into space. Kind of like the way Rocky Horror ends. The house was a literal one in West Philadelphia: 4325 Baltimore Avenue. Worth knowing: Baltimore Avenue is the main thoroughfare or main drag of West Philly, with its rustically ornate houses, grassy backwards (unusual for the Center City environs), and politically extreme leftist sensibility. But not, as you will see, straight edge like D.C. Earthy, sensuous. Up close and personal, Philadelphia never does straight-edge the right way. Did Diana, from the poem, lure me to my death? Not really. We were all living fast, free, and easy at that time, and, as the piece points out, the genius loci, or animating spirit of the place (genius loci is transitive to the animating spirit of any given place), was all about totalized and adventurous indulgence. A little romp with Diana on the side wouldn't bother Mary H. too much. Especially because, the first half of 2002 had been warped and distended for us because Mary broke up with me several times to pursue someone else. Diana did not bring revenge to mind for me; just adventure and fun; but both the adventure and the fun had been earned, by a six month period of being sliced-and-diced by Mary's antics. And, oh yeah, the music. Lots of rock hipsterism at 4325, swimming around in the ambiguous (for rock) waters of the early Aughts, where and when everything and everyone was a Nick Drake or Big Star-level cult. So: we had Ryan Adams, here shown, The Rapture, Coldplay, Elliott Smith, The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, The White Stripes...all doing their respective version of Radio City and Bryter Layter. And an unconventional marriage, which invented its own rulebook, and which could and did withstand a little adultery here and there.

Don't Look Back In Anger

Rock history time. And I mean the version the version of rock history pertaining to, y'know, things that actually happened. Something I bet people in the UK don't know: Oasis did have one bright, shining moment in the United States in the 90s. It all happened in the fabled, vaunted summer of 1996, and it certainly wasn't Wonderwall. Rather, in the US, in the summer of '96, as Jennifer Strawser and I did our dance, in State College and elsewhere, and as Smashing Pumpkins and Mellon Collie made a rent in national consciousness, Don't Look Back in Anger defined the summer by dominating a bunch of economies. It was everywhere then. Back in Gulph Mills, not well, I nonetheless marveled at the idea that the Gallagher brothers had achieved at least some of their American aims. For a brief moment, everything in America did fall into line with that big, booming chorus, blasting through enough speakers that Jen and I did hear it at least once at Arts Fest. Also, with the sense the 90s palpitated with in the States, that everything and everyone was coalescing into a unified front, from Lollapalooza to littler versions like Outlaw Playwrights. It didn't happen twice, though: on both sides, before and after, Oasis fell through the cracks as another stalwart 90s act who were just around. Making the Oasis story in the United States a more complicated one than perhaps it at first appears. As is the story of that summer.   

Bitches Brew

 

More background: important, for Mary Evelyn Harju, and for those who might wish to know her, to understand her teenage years, in Media and at PennCrest. Mary, in those years, lived her life on the wild side of things, and chose to swing around a lifestyle that you might call pharmaceutically advantaged. This, I have documented in P.F.S. Post. By the time I got to her, Mary's swing-moves were as sophisticated as they could possibly be. Her ability to compartmentalize, in her life, was also jaw-dropping. Yet, there he stands, demanding attention, a mentor to her during her formative years, intermittent hubs guy, and another '76 to boot: John Ian Marshall. When I began with Mary in the early Aughts, he was in Center City, too. For the first five minutes I knew about him, I hated him. Quickly, however, I saw that he was another compartmentalization freak, and someone trying to manifest creativity in the world, and, from a distance, I did like John very much. See if you can spot him in Feel. But back to the Nineties. While I was in State College, and we all lived through Smashing Pumpkins boom-time, John and his posse, including Mary, migrated up to U Mass in Amherst, Ma. John organized trips. Ordained them. Some physical, some consciousness-based. And while the rooms swung around whatever the business of the moment was, Mr. Marshall often used Bitches Brew as a soundtrack. I followed suit, with Mary & Abby, in the early Aughts; and found that the parameters of our vision widened the right way. Even as I was later stunned to realize that my path had crossed once with John Ian Marshall's at a party in Elkins Park while I was still ensconced at CHS. As is karmic, it was just by chance that Mary wasn't with him. The universe, as I like to say, was planning some mischief for us. Peace. 

The Harder They Come

 

Ecstasy and shadows. This one is a slight tangent to what's included in Studio and Painter— the first night, in late 2001, Mary H. spent with me at 154 North 21st Street. Were we monsters of selfishness and vanity to be doing what we were doing? People who follow our story, know— someone innocent was being trampled underfoot. Melissa and Mary already intensely disliked each other. In retrospect, you don't tell a twenty-five year old kid, as I was then, who happens to be bursting at the seams with life-force energy, and channeling all the explosiveness of Center City Philly in the Aughts, to stay faithful when his true cosmic mate arrives. Mary H and I were meant for each other. That night at 154, we drank rum and water (grog, I believe it's called) from large mugs, smoked a few spliffs, and grooved to this, the Jimmy Cliff-dominated Harder They Come soundtrack. We were still only edging towards physical involvement; but the ice was beginning to melt. Euphoria, giddiness, a sense of attunement to higher realities— it was all there. As I marveled, as all Mary's more profound involvements did, at the wide gap between her restrained public persona and the born-to-be-wild riot grrl she was in private. It is still a source of disappointment to me, that I handled my personal life sloppily at the time; but, as the song goes, I had found my true will, and was myself attuned to the higher reality of how pieces in the universe belong. And our together insignia, which began then, was always the philosophy that a little Dionysian insanity, drunkenness and highness (highness emphasized for Mary H), never hurts, if you want to feel, in your body and soul, what it means to be fully alive.  

Starman

 

So: was Mary Evelyn Harju's studio at PAFA as much of an enchanted wonderland as I'm making it out to be? It was, for me. And she did wind up losing hold of it some time in 2002. While it lasted, it tuned into something about Mary I haven't investigated that much yet, even in Equations. As a stickler for visual appearances, let's have it duly noted that Mary was just as much of a glamor-puss as any other blonde bombshell. She didn't wear much make-up, but her appearance, on a day-to-day level, was still extremely important to her. More so, actually than was the case with Abby Heller-Burnham (or myself). That, ultimately, is what Mary would've seen in good old David Robert Jones, and why Ziggy Stardust was often displayed prominently in the studio. She liked glamour. Androgyny has never been my forte, conversely, but I was into Bowie on a songwriting level, and as rock theater. Bowie was big in Philly then. The Goths and the indie rockers all went for him. The association with space and the Otherness inhering was also big for us. Mary would've liked to experiment, and get dressed by Bowie himself, were he available then. And ZS qualifies as heavy-duty Zeitgeist shit for that time, that place. Bowie glamor could always translate as Mary glamor. Even as Miss H was patchy about rock, in general, and let a smattering of different kinds of music speak for her, without sticking to any one genre or cultural touchstone. 

What Goes On

Moving past Al Green: another constituent element of the early Free School experience, as documented both in Synchronized Chaos and Argotist Online Poetry: the giddiness, the euphoria, the high. I got a buzz then from being with Mary H. that was incredibly about ecstasy, a sense of time standing still at the most gracious possible angle. The waves we rode and swam in together were soporific. Flash fast-forward a bit for this one: by the end of '02, Mary and I were ensconced, night by night, doing Logan Square to West Philly and back. Abby could be with us at any moment. When it was the three of us at 154 (North 21st Street), I liked to play DJ for the ladies, often while we tripped. The third Velvet Underground album was a perennial favorite. Then back to PAFA, to understood how the earliest encounters with Miss H ranked, as highlights and talismans to hold for the rest of my life. The Velvets were around for those, too. And this tune takes us to exactly the right skyrocketing sensibility, to understand what it means to fall in love for real. This is how it felt, to be madly in love with Miss H: the mystery, the intermittent sense of division and reconnection, the sense of the sky, the ground, and all points in between as jounced alive, throbbing, active, set in motion. The two of us, as artists, were lucky to get there even once, let alone stay there. That we did remain in that charmed place for that long, after all these years and many eternities, could only have been luck, or a gift, complete and green, from the cosmos. 

Call Me

What with The Painter up at Synchronized Chaos, my mind drifts back to other details which surrounded the inauguration of my relationship with Miss H. It was a bumpy ride. Yet, the wild romanticism of '01 into '02 was, and remains, one of the peak experiences of my entire existence. It made me unhappy that it had to be at Melissa's expense. I'm not a cheater by nature. Yet, as the juggernaut that was to come built momentum in the fall of '01, and Mary and I began to get more special with each other, it wasn't just Aleister Crowley, aa the piece linked suggests, I was leaning on. Is the Al Green-Aleister Crowley chiasmus a vaunted one? Probably not. It had to work for me, though, then, because people who know popular music know, no one's more about adultery and transgression than Al Green. Al Green mythology, to be frank, is about the man being a womanizer.  So there I was, then, slipping into a role I wasn't comfortable with. But I did it. And the thrilling sense of intimacy in the Green tunes, like this one, was there between Mary and I at the beginning, whether in her studio at PAFA or anywhere else. Al Green also works well with Logan Square, especially at night, and West Philly. Both neighborhoods have their own sense of intimacy in-built, with nothing crass, ugly, or graceless about them. No skyscrapers, no monstrosities, no office buildings. In the end, I used Al Green to get my courage up, in a situation which wasn't optimum, but during a day I felt had to be seized. The opportunity with Miss H was one time only. That, or forever hold your peace. I'm glad the Green led me, and us, to victory. 

Writing to Reach You

The epic story of Jen and I, ensconced in the Atherton Hilton in State College in July '96, continues. It's been established that at that particular time, I wasn't what you would call a well man; I'd been messed with. For our Arts Fest stay, in some ways I was OK and could function, in some ways I could not. But a central imperative theme never stopped playing in my head that entire summer, and before and after. I wanted to write some one-acts and have them produced by the Outlaw Playwrights, a theater troupe who were hugely popular on campus at that time, and would consider work from anyone they liked. I started on a side-to-poetry theater apprenticeship in '95, and in '96 I was still on that road. In the end, I wound up having a handful of one-acts produced by the Outlaws, between '97 and '99. The tie-in from this Travis video, to what the center of Pennsylvania looks like, including the Strawsers in Liverpool, is interesting, too. The first Outlaw wave, as of '94 to '96, didn't like me much; the second let me do the damage I did.

Newsflash

 

Filling in some deets as regards what just went up on P.F.S. Post (Season in Hell: White Candle). I've established that Jen and I were staying at the Atherton Hilton in State College, where the piece takes place, to attend SC's yearly Arts Fest. One newsflash that hit the airwaves while we were ensconced there: the death of Jonathan Melvoin, who had been playing keyboards for (The) Smashing Pumpkins on their tour behind Mellon Collie. The Pumpkins were a dominant enough enterprise in '96 to make the newsflash a top tier one; the death had occurred during the tour, after (I believe) a New York show. This is all relevant to mention now because a central home truth of the 90s has gotten a little lost: don't let anyone tell you differently: (The) Smashing Pumpkins were the biggest American rock band of the 90s. In terms of power and influence, right there, right then, no one, including Kurt, could really touch them. Jen and I did our dance then, and here we are in 2024. But the dance of The Pumpkins in the 90s is worth mentioning, because (and here they are, in all their mightiness) this is the music that animated the trip for many of us. And it's as serious, musically, as rock music can get.