Personal Jesus

Worth noting that Mary was, among other things, a Violator kind of girl. The songs on Violator hit so many funny-bones on Miss H that one wonders if Depeche Mode, to make the album, hung around Media taking notes. Mary was brought up in a Christian Right context. The tenets of Christianity could, thus, have hit or missed with her. Turns out, Miss H disliked the tenets but found Jesus himself irresistibly fascinating. Yet Mary was pleased just fine with developing her sensual life, too, as a painter and otherwise. Stir into the mix too many drugs, always, and understand how what develops is a Girl, Interrupted streak a mile wide. That's what Riot Grrrl is all about. For Mary to have succeeded in the house she grew up in, there would have to have been a secret hero there, and there was. Miss H, if you look closely, had no trouble finding good luck to bear her along. As to why Mary found both Jesus, and Depeche Mode, so fascinating: she liked the idea of being in touch with higher, cosmic powers. She was always looking for ways to dissolve into something larger than herself. All kinds of roads met freakishly in her. The complex chemistry of the whore/Madonna was in there; the devotee of Renaissance formalism; the good-time get-high party girl; and the daughter who was never quite the black sheep she dreaded being. She was, to say the least, combustible. As of the Aughts, we all were. And Mary always had a copy of Violator handy. Not, ultimately, a woman of the cross, but close. 

Lust For Life

 

Were the State College townie kids decadent? You could say that. At least about the Nineties. As of fall 1998, right before I left, I found myself snorting heroin in a trailer with a bunch of them, and learned what I learned. It's not that different than acting, and theater-craft: it's about living in the moment. You either have the gift of living in the moment fully, really, or you don't. The State College townie kids then were gifted that way. Which meant that a Trainspotting stripe did, in fact, festoon the enterprise of hanging out with them, getting to know them, and being a participant in a town called State College for real, rather than being there incidentally as a PSU student. Maria, Lisa, Emily all looked enough like Diane from Trainspotting that to see the film, which was huge then, was to chuckle. To Happy Valley extends the piece I just rewrote into a bunch of live-action vignettes, from a time-place continuum unscripted, unique. Not that the dark side of small town life (stagnation, boredom, aimlessness) wasn't in State College then, too. Of course it was. You get older, and realize: living in the moment, in any drama (or comedy) of your choice, has to be balanced with thinking about the future. Depending, of course, on whether you have any interest in doing a long haul routine. With these kids, I couldn't always tell. I do know that then, there, in that time-place continuum, the life-force energy in State College about having a good time was pretty potent stuff. Because of a lust for life (as the song goes) they all had. Regardless of what the future held for these kids, I've attempted to take these moments and make a future for them. That's the name of this game.  

Another Night

So this piece I've just redone about State College in the Nineties: to give the large scale overview I want to give of a specific place and time, it has to stay pretty general. Another Night, a miscellaneous, if huge, dance track from the mid-Nineties, brings a specific night I spent in State College to mind that's worth relating. It's the late January 20s of 1996. The beginning of spring semester. I've already met Jen Strawser and Gretchen Stump but have no idea what's going to happen yet with them. Snow is on the ground, after a big storm. Steve (Kurutz) and I heard there was a rave happening in East Halls. East Halls: State College's own Kentucky transplant. Not hip, not cultural. Sports geeks. Making it unusual that they would have, of all things, a rave. But it was Saturday night (I guess that makes it alright), so we trudged through a hundred yards of snow-pile and ice littered parking lot to check it out. Stoned, as was not unusual then. The rave, on an abandoned second floor of some random East Halls facility, was not that crowded. I seem to recall that Steve and I were supposed to call Jen and Gretchen at some point. It was at the East Halls rave I heard Another Night for the first time. In retrospect, if that was noteworthy, and not to disrespect Steve and Gretchen, it's because 1996, for me, was to be a florid year about florid nights: big ups, big plummets down, and no time at all spent in the middle. Nineties revolution. Except in relation to my literary apprenticeship-cum-vision quest, wherein I continued to churn out mostly garbage and wait for the Muse-ship of my dreams to sail in.  

Too Late For Goodbyes

Except that it's not too late for goodbyes, really. It could be an encumbrance at any moment, or a blessing but, great God almighty, it'll wake you up, to know you have a PAST. You've been through some shit, for real. What's gone is gone, what's done is done, except that it isn't. The philosopher's stone might also be the blarney stone at any instant. To be the Proustian dude who spins a cultural web around a fabled past, and to have the web ACTUALLY WORK, is an experience which can only mean that for you, the past can never die. Not too late for goodbyes, only the sense that Aughts Philadelphia is still, oddly enough, in its infancy, in swaddling clothes. A piece like the newly revised Trish preface, attempts to make the Aughts Philly mythology glisten, and begin a sustained assault against everything third-world, unreal, mold-consonant, abortively generic and individually un-gifted in American culture. You say goodbye, and I say hello. Hello to Mary, Abby, and the rest. Not that another bizarre HELLO in the Twenties is not this Julian Lennon tune showing up all over the place. Makes me think of Elkins Park when I was a kid. The Septa station, Station Pharmacy, Ashbourne Market. The abandoned bank, into Harrison Avenue, up a hill and down again into Mill Road. Innocence. Not to get Proustian again. Except to say that the crew from Aughts Philly are well-equipped to deal with a long life, and an eternal HELLO. And that what it means to have a real past in the world has to change every day, because the past itself is a thing that changes, too. If you feel like turning and facing the strange, come on over. 

Femme Fatale

Cards on the table: when things got icy in Center City Philly in 2009, and it became clear that the Center City cultural scene was not going to regain its wits anytime soon, a part of me fell apart. As of the early and mid-Aughts, I was simply too young to understand that the party in Philly would or could end that painfully. Stands to reason that Third/Sister Lovers became my anthem album for the second half of 2009. It is an album about pain. In this case, legendary pain, i.e. Steve Cropper shows up to lay down a guitar track, and they have to run a cable to him standing in the hallway. Cropper couldn't enter the studio, because Alex was being weird. The emergence of Dani at the Last Drop in 2009, as is documented in Flaming Red Hair, was also weird. It was the first icicle summer I ever spent at the Drop. Dani and I were weird together. I moved towards writing Apparition Poems, amidst a fractured, suddenly listless landscape. Abby Heller-Burnham at the time wouldn't talk about anything but wanting to die. Rough stuff. The Great Recession itself was almost over. We would all have to live in its aftermath. The encounter with Dani was my final Aughts encounter. No starlit idealism at all. Just a sense of being willing to junk things up to express what needs to be expressed. So there's Alex, again. And the ice in the music was palliative for me at the time, because I was living through something similar. Starlit idealism is still difficult to come by.  

The Narrow Way

I've fallen out of touch with what people are saying about the Teens these days. In the early-to-mid Teens, it was commonplace that the media refer to the 2007-2009 recession as "The Great Recession." The Occupy movement was massive, and has now managed to disappear completely. The Teens were recession-aftermath years. Slow, lugubrious, and about a society that had lost a huge chunk of population. In the early Teens, after my time at Temple was done, and my final academic appointment at U of Sciences, I struggled to find a balance. Times were lean and mean. I was suddenly out in the 'burbs, in Conshohocken, on a purgatorial wavelength about the Aughts. During the Teens, Pink Floyd were constant companions. The Narrow Way is one I leaned on, because I did feel that, if I was going to survive what I was going through, it would have to be The Narrow Way. Echoes was big, too. As was the idea that Abby Heller-Burnham, willy-nilly, would loom largely over the rest of my life. People can say what they want: the Aughts in Philadelphia were really not normal, at all. If a fire was going to be started around Aughts Philly, it would have to be me that did it. And I did. The Narrow Way. But it's a good one, as of '26, feeding on its own energy the right way, avoiding the right pitfalls, filling in the right spaces. The years living by the river were a congeries of all these issues. As is the sense that ultimately, whether a fire starts from narrow circumstances or not doesn't matter. Come on, baby, light it. And now we'll wait for the world to catch up. 

Beast of Burden

As has been established: play-lists at McGlinchey's in the mid-Aughts were dominated by two rock albums: Some Girls and London Calling. It's also been established that McGlinchey's is where the game started for myself and Hannah M. The revamped version of The Wilderness Sequence leaves no stone unturned (so to speak) about understanding that the whole underwater vibe for me then was about wandering in a wilderness space. I didn't really understand where I was going or how I got there. Hannah, from Santa Cruz, was used to a sense of vagueness about her life. Californian vagueness. The hard-edged sense of East Coast precision I was used to received a lesson in what underwater life is really like. The underwater sights I saw were ones I only sort-of ever regained my wits from having seen. Hannah's Ocean Queen persona could really only be revealed when, indeed, the curtains were drawn. Yet, when precision and punctiliousness are dropped at the door, the emotions eventually generated can be uneasy ones. The whole underwater ride had to be at least slightly uneasy. But I went through it, like anyone could go through anything, and lived to tell the tale. Even if it's still difficult for me to ascertain who was being who's Beast of Burden. After this many years, I suppose it doesn't matter. All we need to know is that the Ocean will be there forever.