Category: Uncategorized

The problem was that, as a teenager, I believed I was devoid of emotion. In my journals from the last couple of years of high school, I would wonder what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t open up; why I could not express myself authentically; why I couldn’t let rip an ear-splitting scream of frustration.

What people saw without my realizing it was my face contorting into various expressions, and they heard my words conveying with an amazing clarity exactly what I thought and felt. And yet…I still believed there had to be a better way. Leave it to a perfectionist to try and figure out a more “efficient” way of expressing what he feels.

Which is why I could have cared less when I first heard the Cocteau Twins. It sounded so mushy…spangly…muted…airy…twee. The vocals trilled all over the place and the guitars seemed as if they were all mashed together with no room to make out the chords properly. It was just one more thing the goth kids were playing so they could sway and quasi-dance to it and then talk about how alternative they were, so far outside the mainstream.

Besides, I was already leaning more folk at this point–my ears seemingly wanting the more literal heartbreak conveyed by Natalie Merchant and Tracy Chapman. I didn’t have the patience to navigate through this aural Jell-O.

One night, however, as I sat huddled in my basement, again trying to articulate with ballpoint pen why it was I felt so inarticulate, Dave Kendall was on MTV’s “120 Minutes” blathering on and on in his annoying way about the Cocteau Twins, and just as I was about to turn it off, the soaring intro of “Iceblink Luck” ushered in this wave of musical warmth. I was (and remain) a sucker for a slightly left-of-center pop song,
and this was simply one of the most beautiful–the guitars crisp, the bass perfectly nimble, anchoring it all for Elizabeth Fraser’s no longer pixie-ish voice. It swooped low and settled in a beautiful mid-range.

To the goth devotees of the Twins, I would later learn, this song was betrayal. To me, it was like receiving the most beautiful invitation to a party. I put down my pen and closed the journal. I had almost no idea what she was saying. The only words that came through? “…that will burn this whole madhouse down.”

***

I was sitting on the hood of my stepfather’s truck in western Nebraska. The air was thick with heat and humidity, but a gusty, westerly wind was kicking up as a phalanx of thunderstorms marched down off the slopes of the Rockies, advancing across the rolling prairie.

I’d been driving for two days already, leaving Portland on a broiling August afternoon to head toward Vermont, where I would attend a college I’d never seen. I was driving the 3,000 miles alone. My mother was panicked; my stepfather, predictably, said little. He just looked at my mother and stated, “He’ll be fine.”

I’d desperately wanted to leave Portland. I wanted to leave two years of confusion, frustration, and exhaustion that mixed my coming-out, trying to finish school, and deal with my family. Even over the summer–when I thought I’d left most of this behind–I’d been obsessed with a boy who worked at a cafe near the movie theater where I worked. And in predictable Portland gay boy fashion, he’d expressed interest, played hard to get, apologized, and then did it all over again. I’d tormented myself enough in my journal, word after word running in circles that annoyed even me, detailing, outlining, explaining every little aspect of it all. You know, in case I wasn’t actually expressing myself clearly.

And when I’d finally hit the interstate, I realized those words were gone. I rolled down the truck windows into 100 degree heat and let “Heaven or Las Vegas” play as loudly as I could. There were words here, but they weren’t really words that conveyed accusations or questions; they were not hard facts. They were emotions, suggestions, hints at a new feeling that could replace the spirals of letters that had seemingly gotten me nowhere over the last four years. From the all-enveloping warmth of “Cherry-Coloured Funk”–which I insisted on listening to as the sun set behind me–to the mournful “Road, River, and Rail,” I found myself coming back to the cassette every other hour. And when, at night, I tried to write about all that I was seeing from the driver’s seat, the words seemed to shrink in number, their meaning becoming slight.

By the time I made it to western Nebraska two days later and saw, for the first time, the desolate beauty of a sea of tall grasses spreading across the visible landscape, my shoulders had begun to drop from my ears. I felt happily empty, in fact. I had no tears of self-pity. I had no words of recrimination. I had no words at all.

I’d pulled over, taking an obviously little-used exit off the interstate and followed the state highway south for a ways before pulling over on the side of the road.

Leaving the stereo on, I’d walked down the highway shoulder, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice mixing with the rising wind. Off in the distance, tendrils of rain reached the ground. Lightning flickered in the dark anvil-shaped cloud. I came back to the truck and leaned back against the windshield, my leg splayed down the hood. I strained to hear any words in the music of the album’s last and most musically obtuse song, “Frou Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires,” which began with distorted guitar in the background of a baroque piano line and erupted into a regal shower of non-words that seemed to express that everything was, as my stepfather would say, fine.

To my surprise, a cloud had grown out of the bottom of the thunderstorm out there on the prairie. A thin tornado. I wondered if I should leave, but it seemed far enough away. The sound of the wind in the grass seemed to carry away the last strains of the song coming from the stereo behind me. For the first time in what felt like years, I was–happily, contentedly–alone.

I don’t do a ton of freelance writing anymore, which is a shame, since I like to write. I just don’t usually enjoy the “freelance” part. But I do like the folks at Out magazine and their online incarnation, Popnography. And they graciously let me review the awesome Jennifer O’Connor’s latest CD, “Here With Me.” Short and sweet. Kind of like the album. Yay!

Check it out here.

More soon, including tales of the Hoosier State, Rum Runners bar, Fort Wayne, Bloomington, and an especially entertaining trip to the Chocolate Moose.

I started taking trapeze classes nearly three months ago, on the suggestion of my friend Rick Andreoli, who has become a dedicated aerialist and who had done a story in a local magazine on Cirque School L.A., which was started by Aloysia Gavre, a former aerialist with Cirque du Soleil.

I figured it might be fun, given my youth spent doing gymnastics and some time in dance classes in college. But I was, frankly, not prepared to become quasi-addicted to it. Make no mistake, this is a workout (Aloysia is also a Pilates instructor), and as I’ve learned more about flexibility, poise, strength, and aerial choreography, I find myself simply wanting to know more.

Most people I know are not surprised I like to hang upside-down from a bar, but I don’t think many know yet what it all looks like. Hence, Rick so nicely loaned his camera to a fellow classmate with the following results:

First off, we do not only learn tricks on trapeze. There’s also “the tissue”/”the fabric”–a mass of red silk that’ll burn you big time if you slide down it the wrong way. I’d never been able to climb anything, so this a learning curve for me:

First up, learning how to do a knee climb:

So, um, yeah… grabbing the fabric and pulling your legs up to straddle it as you flip into a pike position

Then hooking a leg onto the tissue to “lock” you into place.

The idea is that this leg locks you there so you can drop the other and then reach up to gain a hold on the next part of the tissue, drop your legs, and swing into another straddle and knee lock:

Easier said than done. I nearly fell off at one point:

But let’s not linger over that. Let’s talk about learning how to flip to standing and back to sitting on the trapeze. I only have pics from the low trapeze since Rick was in front of me in rotation, so he was climbing whenever I was on the high trapeze. No matter, you get the idea:

Start sitting:

Pull yourself up and over backward in a straight-leg pike (it’s all about the abs, my friends):

Find the trapeze with your toes (hopefully the bar is not swinging too much) and then slowly stand up straight after:

Once standing, then you get to lean forward, straight-armed and (ideally) slowly re-pike, turning forward, and ending up sitting on the bar again:

Of course, this being all about pushing yourself, I was told to try doing walkovers forward and backward instead of piking, which makes for prettier pictures, I think, but it’s much harder:

There will be more to come in the next few months, trust me. Once I learn how to connect a Mermaid to a Gazelle to a Gazelle Angel to an Arabesque, Chelsea, Iron Cross, and Russian Roll (not in that order), me and my newly acquired Capezio leggings will, along with others, be doing an exhibition here in L.A. Stay tuned.

As seen at the RNC from a fervent McCain supporter:

(Originally seen on Towle Road.)

THAT was Sarah Palin’s so-called “speech of lifetime”? A divisive, snotty, whiny diatribe that did nothing but set the stage to resurrect the ’90s “culture war” moniker?

What a load of crap. So apparently we come right back to where we started–with people who conflate church and state and just want a president who will do their bidding on social issues they’ve never even bothered to think about beyond what they’ve been told by others. God forbid we think about this country’s stand in the world and how the hell we are going to deal with it. No, by all means, let’s fixate instead on a woman who apparently can gut a fish while giving birth.

I do love that gender is being taken off the table a bit here, and that Palin just gets to be an asshole because she’s an asshole (and an asshole who apparently never took that whole Republican Party “Teach Abstinence” campaign to heart, but that’s OK because her family has enough money to deal with the situation, as well as enough money to deal with the medical demands that come with having a child with a disability, unlike, say, millions of others).

The Republican Party’s standing on social issues has never been more self-serving, full of double standards, and appalling. Palin was chosen precisely because she could “legitimize” these views. If you can put a pretty woman–who clearly dreams, still, of being on “Designing Women”–on a national stage and have her yell “YAY, GOD!” and “BOO, ABORTION!” then you motivate a group that did not want to vote for McCain previously. Pretty simple/standard PR and Marketing 101. Plus, when women tell other women what to do with their bodies, everyone gets confused and thus we distract from horrifying scenarios, such as Palin holding diplomatic talks with any leaders from the Middle East.

I just woke up with a sour taste in my throat. And I am angry. I am sick of both parties at this point, but the Republicans are simply repugnant. No vision. Nothing but continued hate and fear mongering and telling people of this country how they should live their lives to be considered “good.” (I have yet for anyone to explain to me, too, how Republicans who are “fiscal conservatives” are actually helping the country as a whole in the long term.) It’s patronizing, dumbed-down smoke and mirrors tactics that ultimately only divide the country into Us and Them. Only now it’s coming from an old man whose ego has outstripped his common sense and a VP candidate who’s essentially “Mean Mommy.” If this is how we’re supposed to “make history” (i.e., by not electing Obama) then I guess too many people in this country are simply OK with identifying with their captors.

In the neighborhood of Northeast Portland where I grew up, there were, by our schools’ standards at least, two kinds of kids. Looking back on it, I now realize it never really was about the fact that we were evenly split between black and white. Instead, it was just pronounced that these two groups were the Rockers and the Rappers.

It was the early ’80s in a working-class neighborhood of a small city that had little to offer the world beyond its proximity to the Columbia River and huge swaths of virgin timber. This paucity of options seemed to bleed into several aspects of our day-to-day lives as a result. Fathers in our neighborhood worked on trains, drove trucks, were day laboring carpenters and carpet cleaners. Mothers were mostly homemakers. The few that did work toiled at administrative jobs.

And although I knew that I didn’t (and really couldn’t) fit the mold of either a Rocker or a Rapper–least of all because I was a gymnast breakdancer–I also knew the value of hanging out and listening to what everyone else in my immediate neighborhood did…which meant heavy metal that ran the gamut from poppy (Motley Crue) to bombastically baroque (Iron Maiden).

For the kids on our block–spread between the ages of of about 9-19 across five or six different families–this music was omnipresent. The older boys might disagree, stoned in a neighbor’s basement, about the value of a Dio song versus Saxon, but for most of the rest of us, popularity was determined partially by radio play, but reinforced by our neighbors and peers.

The youngest of all of us, Amy, Leslie, and I would begin to dip our toes into the emerging rap of the era–from Slick Rick and The Sugarhill Gang to, later, Whodini, Salt N Pepa, and Eric B & Rakim–but for what seems to be a few years suspended in time, this metal and pop-metal was the main course on the menu.

The band that most successfully bridged the gap between the sometimes alienating heavy metal coming from England, and the more pop-oriented American descendants, Scorpions were hitting big in the summer of 1982. I was only 9 at the time, but I knew the words to “No One Like You” and could revel in the complex guitar solo that segued back into a killer riff, overlaid with Klaus Meine’s impassioned love-song vocals. It was a classic pop song plea dressed up in shiny, sharp edges. I knew a hit when I heard it.

And I wasn’t alone. “Blackout” simply was; it was my first taste of the “soundtrack to summer.” The very tone of the 10 songs to this day conjures crystalline memories of riding in cars to go to the river with kids from the neighborhood on a blazing hot day. Of watching my sister and her friends smoke cigarettes they bought at a local gas station. Of suspiciously eyeing the skinny white guys with long hair and wannabe muscle cars who were, or wanted to be, boyfriends of the girls in the neighborhood. Of clandestine gathering of the older teenagers in bedrooms and basements where they would gossip, smoke pot, or just lie around complaining about their parents.

I wasn’t yet privy to the full-blown adolescent fever that seemed to make the band and their albums even more relevant. I couldn’t go to the Scorpions concert that my sister and her friends so excitedly road tripped to. And even though Top 40 radio began to beckon to me, I found nothing short of comfort in the Scorpions, equating the band with a time period, only a few years away, when I would be going to high school, smoking my first cigarette, staying at past curfew–each gesture done with no regret and with a sense of freedom.

Listening now, I am surprised to feel, instantly, that same yearning and optimism in an album that is, in many ways, such a product of its time. The title track, “No One Like You,” and “Can’t Live Without You” are all anthemic, quasi-headbangers about loving girls and the music’s fans. And “Arizona,” long my favorite song, is really nothing more than a cheesy song about easy lays that could now be played during Spring Break at Lake Havasu.

But then there’s “China White,” a blatant plea about how the world seems to be dominated by evil in the form of drugs and that we need to change that by looking inside ourselves. If you didn’t listen closely to the lyrics–as we really didn’t, let’s be honest–you wouldn’t even hear Klaus flat-out sing “We need to fill our hearts with love.” You’d only enjoy the smothering guitar work of Rudolf Schenker, Michael Schenker, and Matthias Jabs.

2008 and 1982 mingle in my ears at this very moment, headphones on late at night, listening to “Blackout” on repeat. In the process of trying to capture the emotions and events of the time when this album gained its importance to me, I have only come to realize that the pure enjoyment of it–as cheesy as it sounds at points 26 years on–is its offering. I still feel, with these sounds in my head, that I could step out my front door and go over to Leslie’s house to watch TV until 5 am. I could ride my bike all day, not coming home until dark. I could follow my sister and her friends around as they try to ditch me at the college across the street. I could even lie on the front lawn, fervently daydreaming about all the stuff I am going to do when I am old enough. And summer is over.

Shouldn’t my 100th post be something more … meaty?

Maybe. It’s not like that many people are going to be offended by the lack of celebration I am exhibiting by typing about a computer program. In fact, those who know me well enough know that this makes perfect sense. After all, few things in this world bring me more happiness than hearing a computer/robot voice, whether in “The Simpsons” or a bad ’80s movie.

For a long time, I’d resisted Skype. I had a few friends in the past who really liked it and extolled its virtues, but I responded with a simple “Meh.” It was nothing personal. It’s just my inability to really understand technological advances, even though, once I do figure out the rudimentary way of using a device or program, I am SO into it.

So, a few months back when Lesley told me Chrissy–the ever-elusive Chrissy–was on Skype, I said, “Oh!” and then said, “Meh.” Following week:

Lesley: I am telling you, if you want to talk to Chrissy, Skype her.

Me: Oh, so it’s a verb now?

Still, I resisted, despite the fact that I missed Chrissy and did want to talk with her. Or “talk” with her.

When I finally was supposed to be working one day and decided I’d see what the hullabaloo was about, I saw this on the Web site:

This can’t be good, I thought.

But boredom and work avoidance have funny ways of making you do things, so I downloaded it and I didn’t even have to do anything. It was like a magical elf came and cleaned house and then left ME money. It opened up and immediately, there I was. And there Lesley was. And there Chrissy was. And the three of us online at the same time is something akin to hysterical chaos. Really, I fear for anyone who might try and read a transcript of the conversations.

It wasn’t even that chatting online was novel, or that I was reveling in suddenly communicating with Chrissy again. It was the simple rhythm of the text/speech between the three of us. Given that we are separated by many miles at the moment, Lesley is dealing with stressful family things, Chrissy is figuring out how to make designs for clients that don’t make her want to throw herself out a window, and I’m generally trying to figure out what my own job even is, these short frantic text balloon bursts online are suddenly an anchor. Granted, it feels like a linguistic Slip ‘N’ Slide, but I have never laughed so much at my stoic computer screen.

I try to keep it to a dull roar and not overdo it. Chrissy is good at simply saying “OK, gotta go, bye,” and then disappearing, while Lesley and I send bizarre emoticons back and forth to communicate the easy stuff while avoiding some of the really hard stuff for a little bit longer. Then I disappear, we all go quiet, and two hours later someone yells on-screen “IS ANYONE THERE!?” I stare at it, wondering if I should be philosophical, but instead chat while on the phone with someone telling me why “cream” and “tan” are not the same thing.

Me (on phone): Yes, I understand…

Chrissy on computer screen: Did you hear about the Canadian beheading?

Me (still on phone, coughing): Oh, sorry, excuse me…

Lesley: EEEEEEW

Chrissy: I love that they are doing psych tests on the guy who did it. You know, to see if he’s crazy.

Me: (guffawing)

Client: Are you OK?

Me: Yeah, oh, yeah. Sorry, just water down the wrong pipe.

After a particularly dizzying exchange of words today, I realized Chrissy needed some time to get where she is. Lesley will be gone for a while and need to come back to some peace and quiet. And I’ll still be wondering what the hell I’m doing. But it’s indeed great comfort when I can spend two minutes disparaging Mel Gibson, Peter Gabriel, and Canadian psychologists, all in one fell swoop. Where’s my copy of “That’s What Friends Are For?” anyway?

Ah, yes:

“True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper (1986)

Even at the age of 13, I was aware that hearing this song, at this moment, was almost absurd–nearly funny. Except for the fact that the sounds emanating from the radio in my room on this warm September afternoon had tears streaming down my face.

I was standing in my bedroom, aching to throw something through the window. My mother was in a car, devastated, driving away with a neighbor who lived across the street. She’d earlier answered a phone call and then slid past me and my friend Amy–who was watching me try to figure out my first algebra homework assignment on the living room floor–and left the house. Amy had excused herself immediately after, more aware than I that whatever that call was it could not be good.

It was only when my mother reappeared with the neighbor and I saw the dismal look on her face that I knew that the hospital had called. My father, who only weeks ago had come home for a couple of weeks, was now miles away literally and figuratively. I don’t recall exactly how my mother told me he was dead. I only remember the crush of her weight on me, copious hot tears coming from both of us and then the worst moment: when the news has been delivered and you pull away from each other and it feels like everything in the room–indeed, the entire world–is leaning in on you, pressing against your chest. You go into practical mode: “Now I must do this, and this, and then this.” There is no “after.” There is only now.

My mother needed to go with the neighbor to the hospital. I was told to go across the street and stay with other neighbors. But I said I’d go to Amy’s. It was all mechanical because none of it was real yet. It was simply something told to us that sounded so horrible and yet had not been proven.

And as my mother left, I wandered upstairs, not even sure why I had. And there in my bedroom I stood, bathed in afternoon sunlight, with the radio introducing “True Colors”and the gentle lead-in to the first lyrics: “You with the sad heart…” I stood there, unable to process that this was simply a single released by a record company that paid to have it on the radio. And the voice continued to sing, as if it was a promise: “If this world makes you crazy and you’ve taken all you can, then you call me up because you know I’ll be there.”

And in that moment, it was just for me. Before I had to walk up the street and watch Amy come out of her house to hug me–the first time in our young lives we’d ever done this. Before I had to go to school and watch as everyone took a step or two backward, awkwardly unsure of what to say to me, if they managed to say anything. Before I had to endure a memorial service that made me so angry because it did not represent my father as I’d known him. In those three minutes, before any motion had begun, I simply stood. And listened.

“Gazebo Tree” by Kristin Hersh (1998)

I’d grown to hate the phone because it only seemed like bad news came from the receiver. No one ever called me to tell me all the great things happening in the world. They called to tell me that someone’s sick; someone’s broken. Or, as I’d been dreading the last few weeks, that someone was dead.

My stepsister and I were not close. We were never confidants, and, when we did live in the same house, conversation was at a minimum. She’d gotten pregnant as a teenager and had a son while I finished college and moved to New York.

But New York had slowly been unraveling around me. I was in the midst of breaking up with a boyfriend and deciding whether I would leave the city. I was nearly 100 percent self-absorbed, so inwardly focused that when my mother had finally called to tell me that my stepsister was gravely ill, I didn’t, at first, have a reaction. And almost immediately I was intensely angry at myself for it–a real emotion at last.

But I also wasn’t really kept in the loop. My mother and stepfather were not only enveloped by her being so sick, they had no ability to communicate what it felt like. So when the phone rang and the news that she had passed actually hit my ears, my reaction was not to move. I couldn’t afford to fly home. My mother even told me not to, saying I should pay my respects when it wasn’t so awful and forced, remembering my dad’s memorial service.

For two weeks, as the dismal late winter refused to abate, I sat on the floor in my tiny bedroom in the Brooklyn apartment I shared with three other people and sequestered myself in writing a letter to my mom and stepdad, trying to express some bit of comfort for them. I didn’t sleep in-between trying to find the right way to say everything about my stepsister I’d never voiced–in fact, never considered. And my only companions were my cigarettes and this song–a mournful organ line running behind what sounds like an acoustic campfire song sung on a cold clear night in the high desert. “Bless my baby eyes/Don’t you know Jesus died/Spare me your moon shining/In my rainy gazebo tree.” It seemed like a prayer. Late at night, with my headphones on, staring at 7th Avenue and the garbage trucks, hoping that there was some solace in what I wanted to send home. I imagined a woman alone in a tree gazing up at the night sky, feeling utterly at peace, with no need for human companionship. I couldn’t write it down, as it wouldn’t make any sense, but it still hangs in front of my eyes every time I hear it.

“We Float” by PJ Harvey (2000)

This should be an elegy, I thought. But would Owen have liked it?

He’d only been dead a few months and I was still wanting his opinion on the music that had just been released. He might think this is too maudlin, I thought, and then ruefully laughed to myself, feeling even sadder in the windy heat of the Los Angeles fall.

Owen had housed me and my things on and off for months when I first moved here. He’d artfully arranged boxes of books in his living room to make them part of his furniture. He’d eagerly agreed to let me have my mail sent to his stifling Studio City apartment, and, when I did stay with him, he’d talk to me incessantly about music. Damn Geminis, I thought. So chatty. But even for keeping me up until the late night jabbering about 4AD releases, why Frazier Chorus was so underrated, and whether that new Massive Attack CD was really that good, there was pleasure to be found in the stream of words that seemed to never slow down.

His sudden death wasn’t from illness like so many of the others I had known. No, instead, it was wrong place, wrong time in Los Angeles. Botched robbery of an armored vehicle. Gunfire. And finding out that someone you knew had simply been making a run to the store while he did his laundry was suddenly, irrevocably gone.

And past the horribly hot memorial service and its cast of characters–some treasured, some totally random–we were simply left to wonder, “What now?”

And the music started coming.

CD release dates. I had no one to call up and say, in earnestness, “Oh my god, _____ is coming out in two weeks. I’m so excited.” And as the summer turned, oh so imperceptibly, into fall, I found this one of the hardest things to bear, as ridiculous as it seemed.

It wasn’t even that Owen was a huge PJ Harvey fan. And when her latest album was released two months after he had died I had no epiphanies about what he would have thought. But then there sat the six-minute album closer between me and forgetting. It was unexpectedly affecting, underscored by something dark, buoyed by something tender: “So will we die of shock?/Die without a trial?/Die on Good Friday/While holding each other tight?/This is kind of about you/This is kind of about me/We just kind of lost our way/We were looking to be free/But one day, we float/Take life as it comes.”

Maybe it is maudlin, I debated. I even imagined Owen’s fingers tapping out the drum beat while still screwing his face up at the lyrics. I would have had to look at him and say, “Just listen.” Only now it was up to me.

What the hell is that?

I am in The Record Exchange in Bennington, Vermont, in the fall of 1991, and the squall of an electric guitar has hit me in the head. It sounds like someone has taken a power drill to the guitar strings and begun literally beating the instrument to death. And yet the squall is beautiful. I see the image of of something bright explode in my head and I feel like I am sinking into molasses. It is instantaneous transport to somewhere else.

It only lasts for five seconds before I realize I am surrounded by other shoppers dressed warmly in wool coats and scarves on this dreary, late fall day. We are crammed into a tiny space that is the only retail establishment in this Recession-slammed town that reminds you there are actually two colleges here. It’s also the only connection I have at the moment to the music I used to find so easily back home.

I have moved here sight unseen. I only knew three things before I left Portland:

1. Vermont is bucolic.
2. Bennington College has given me a lot of financial aid.
3. I would be far, far away from Oregon.

That meant there were oh so many things I did not know, such as who the hell this band is I am hearing right now.

I amble up to the front counter and ask the guy behind the counter, “What is this?” He gives me a slight nod and hands me a jewel case with a shimmering image of a guitar bathed in what looks like a mixture of blood and strawberry Jell-O.

There is no break between power-drill-on-guitar and the subsequent muted jam of fuzziness mixed intricately with female vocals that seem unable to enunciate consonants. It is, I imagine, what it would be like if I had developed some rare disease in which musical ability combines with a slow deterioration of motor skills.

In other words, it is not Bennington, Vermont.

—

It isn’t that I mind this place so much. In fact, I feel like I am back in Oregon–only now I am surrounded by people who are much more knowledgeable about obscure, literate, and artistic tangents than I thought was possible. I feel a bit like an idiot.

“Yeah, My Bloody Valentine. They’re OK. I don’t really care for a lot of the album,” says Owen dismissively. He owns all the CDs I want. He’s much more opinionated about music than I am. I only know what moves me. I feel it in my gut. I don’t really care to know more. He can dissect the subtlest chord change and then look at you like you, too, should be able to hear it clearly.

I don’t, most of the time.

Sometimes I try to argue with him, but it’s like yelling at the wind. Mostly I try to change the subject. Stupidly, this time, I say, “I’ve never heard anything else like it.”

He flashes a smile, but it’s not an indulgent one. “Yeah, you seem like you’d like all that shoegazer stuff.”

—

I try to choreograph a dance to “To Here Knows When.” Alone in a dance studio at midnight with a borrowed CD player, I feel as disoriented as the song. This could work to my advantage, I think. Like every academic overachiever, I believe I can simply apply hard work to the task at hand and get the job done. But this is like getting hands on an eel. There’s a shimmering rhythm here. It drones and undualtes, guitars washing over each other in a way that feels like the music is playing backwards. But it remains just out of my grasp.

About two hours in, I realize that my enthusiasm, the euphoria the music instills in me, even my gymnastics background–none of it can help me. I am floundering on the hard wood floors like a fish out of water, gasping, not a graceful conduit for the music. I don’t fully understand the choreography I am trying to jot down on the notepad in the middle of this empty room. All I know is that it’s the middle of the night, it’s snowing outside, and in here I am getting nowhere.

—

The apotheosis of “Loveless” is its final song: “Soon.” It gives me chills every time I hear it. Its misleading drum beat morphs it into a dance song that is broken every 30 seconds by a towering wave of noise: Guitars. Swooping, echoing voices that run in and out of one’s ears. It is primal, celebratory, compulsive. I make my roommate crazy playing it. I make myself crazier by never being able to hear it loud enough.

There’s a party tonight and I want the entire crowd to hear it. I want to see all of them dance, happy that it’s near the end of the term. I want that revelatory catharsis that you can often only find when you’re moving to the music.

It’s long for a dance song, but the final 90 seconds of are a loop of drums and guitar riffs–the perfect ending for a drug- and alcohol-fueled evening. I’ve sheepishly made the mix tape, unsure if I will even be allowed to play it. But that’s how it works. You make it, you bring it, maybe someone will be willing to put it on.

I’ve spent the entire Saturday perfecting the running order of songs so that it ends with “Soon.” The rest of it is mostly shameless pop songs–nothing challenging, nothing that will alienate. In fact, it’s probably the most upbeat thing I’ve ever created. And that night, after drinking more than I need to, I approach the guy with the tape, telling him, “Hey! If you can, would you play this?!” He looks at me like he’ll consider it. To which I add, still yelling over the noise, “At least play the last song on Side B! It’s about 7 minutes!”

I go back to the dance floor. There’s the usual (“Sex Machine” by James Brown), the unexpected-even-to-me (“Join in the Chant” by Nitzer Ebb), the predictable but reliable (various Madonna), and then I hear the drum machine beginning of “Soon,” squeaking out a surprised gasp to make my way back to the dance floor.

Forty-five seconds in, the beat is buried with the guitar lines and vocals and there’s still a group of people on the floor bouncing, the wood springing under their feet.

And then the exodus starts.

Soon enough, only a handful of us remain. And despite the slight feeling of mortification, I am still swept up in the sound, sweaty, drink in hand in the air, spilling vodka on myself, cigarette in the other hand. I still have no idea what I’m doing here. But the bigger picture fades into five minutes of being blissed out. As I’ll tell Owen later, this is hardly shoe gazing.

“Self-Discography” is a series of essays on seminal albums and songs re-reviewed, recalled, and reimagined via the lens of my memory. It is said that smell is the sense most closely linked with memory. For me, it is sound.

I thought of snappier titles, but this one kind of says it all. I cannot believe that I have lived to actually see gay marriage legalized. Yes, I know, it has been in several other places already. But today, California, where I live, started allowing same-sex marriages. Since I am a resident here, I am seeing the effect–the media, people buzzing about couples who are getting married. I’ve even had an invite to one such wedding. It’s kept a smile on my face for most of the day.

Of all the arguments I love when it comes to this issue, it’s the one about “history” that makes me laugh. For example, plenty of bigots talk about how “throughout history” and “across continents,” marriage has always been between a man and a woman. Um, OK. Marriage was also about property, inheritance, land, and the complete subjugation of women to men. But let’s not get into the messy details. After all, we want our bodice-ripper “historical romance” novels to ring “true.”

I almost understand on some weird level those who disagree on religious terms–but only because I don’t think marriage should have anything to do with religion. If it was only a civil ceremony, then… But that’s a whole other story…

The best quote today came from an elected official–Republican Assemblyman Doug LaMalfa–who said he was disturbed that four people (i.e., four state supreme court justices) went against/overrode the will of the people in making this law. This rant could go on forever, but, really, let’s be honest: judges of that caliber do tend to be much more intelligent than the general populace (and therefore I’d rather have them making laws since they, um, STUDIED it and PRACTICED it for decades), and they didn’t achieve that position by putting daisies in rifles or wearing “No Nukes” shirts. Also, why is an elected official basically admitting by default that he’s glad he’s dumb, too? Oh, right, the need to look like an Everyman–a man of the people…who can then go against some of the same people who voted for him by telling them they have no legal right to be and love who they want.

So you see…we have achieved clarity.

After all, when you have the most sacred, holy vow of marriage bestowed upon you (as is your God-given right, apparently), then you can do things like this:

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NC couple accused of tying son to tree charged

By MARTHA WAGGONER, AP

A couple accused of killing their 13-year-old son by tying him to a tree for two nights for punishment appeared in a courtroom Monday to face charges of murder and felony child abuse.

Attorneys appeared Monday with Brice Brian McMillan, 41, and his wife Sandra Elizabeth McMillan, 36, of Macclesfield.

“It’s a sad case,” defense attorney Allen Powell, who represents Brice McMillan, said after the hearing. He declined any further comment, and the couple did not enter a plea.

The county sheriff’s office has said Brice McMillan told a deputy the teen was being disobedient and was forced to sleep outside last Tuesday while tied to a tree. The teen was released Wednesday morning, but again tied up that night for bad behavior.

Sheriff James Knight has said the boy was left tied to the tree until the following afternoon, when his stepmother found him unresponsive. Authorities believe the boy was bound to the tree with plastic ties and possibly other kinds of material.

Macclesfield is about 60 miles east of Raleigh.

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Then again, maybe marriage should only be for straight people. We’ve managed to “take back” words like “queer” and “fag”; can’t we come up with a pseudonym for “marriage”? I see why it shouldn’t be like that, trust me. And I most certainly see why people like Newt Gingrich and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, etc. etc. get a chance to try their hand at marriage AS MANY TIMES AS THEY WANT. They’re simply better than the rest of us.

Of course, this new right we have as gay Californians could disappear come November when all the right-wing nutballs and closet cases and conservatives who are afraid of anything not sold at Wal-Mart vote to ban same-sex marriage. To that, I say, when you know a party might go on for only so long, you make the most of the time you have.