September Gurls

Abby Heller-Burnham's birthday: September 18, 1980. A Virgo and a Monkey. Now, Abby's mid-Aughts musical heritage has been well-documented. Those who need to know, know: Abby played keyboards and sang for the all-girls rock band The Bad News Bats, led by Liz McDermott. The Bats were quite popular on the East Coast for a while, and Abs managed to move in rarified company. The scandal about Abby and music is this: though a dab hand at playing rock, Abs own peccadillo was that what she actually felt most musically attached to was show tunes. Les Mis, for example. I could embed something from Les Mis, but I have my reasons for refusing to do so. I did play Big Star endlessly for Abs in the early Aughts, but her response was never that enthusiastic. What Abs would have enthusiasm for is the very marked hinge from Big Star to painting, photography, and visual art in general. The legendary Mrs. Chilton might've shown Abby very much, as one suspects some of her professors at PAFA were shown by Mrs. Chilton. Alex stands there with his guitar and serenades Ms. Heller-Burnham. And makes no mockery at all, because the seamlessness in Big Star between music and images is something that distinguishes them in a positive light. The glossy, musical theater version of Manhattan being the musical world she was most attached to, I'm glad that Abs got drawn into the rock matrix willy-nilly to strut her stuff as a rock and roll animal. It takes all the masterpieces she produced in the mid-Aughts and transcendentalizes the idea that here's an artist who went the whole nine yards to cover all bases. 

I Am Yours

 

Did Mary Evelyn Harju have leave, if she were so inclined, to be a cynical person? In many ways, she did. Raised, as I was, as part of a generation exposed to the fangs of a media-pop culture juggernaut, with walls of flash-in-the-pan nonsense stuffed down our throats as though they would last, Mary stuck to her guns and painted what she wanted to paint. And she did like the cover of the Layla album, and it was one of our albums which we leaned on, night by night, in Logan Square and West Philly. But I want to make the case, very specifically, as I did in this Letters piece, that Mary was an earnest person. She tended to mean what she said, in an earnest way, and was untouched by the rigors of hardcore cynicism. This meant that our time together was always about the idealism of trying to give each other as much as we could, artist to artist, lover to lover. It was not for Mary Evelyn to be jealous of other artists, or to covet worldly status over anything else. The part of Mary that was sublime, was superbly levitational over ambitions which were not either interior, or had some hinge to interiority. Mary's brutishness, when it manifested, was scales-of-justice brutishness, meted out to those who had done or been evil in the world. And Mary did appreciate ironies, like any other intelligent, educated human being. But when it was us, Mary at her best could not have been more bleeding heart, nor could I. When her manipulative streak flashed, it was always just a gambit to keep control of her life, to not get too lost in a marriage to understand what she needed to do next. I forgave her, then and now. 

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.