Sober Sunday Reflections on...Things That No Longer Excite Me

One thing you notice, the older you get and the more time you spend surrounded by pop culture, is that a.) your favorites change (obviously) and b.) things you used to like--on a profound level--no longer excite you. Many times, old friends from high school, have asked me if I've seen such-and-such movie or heard such-and-such album by someone I used to like way back when I was a teenager. Examples include: Radiohead, Kevin Smith and Tim Burton. They ask because when I was a teenager, my friends and I used to really like these things. But, anymore, I have a hard time feeling anything but a lack of interest and that feeling you get when you become so over-familiar with something that it kind of stirs up sick feelings in your stomach.

It could be that, as a pop-culture glutton, I'm always on the hunt for new and exciting things--chasing that same feeling I got when I first saw Chasing Amy (how's that for a ham-fisted Kevin Smith-ian Kevin Smith reference?) or that first time I decided, after years of hearing about them and seeing sleepy-eyed pictures of Thom Yorke, to finally listen to Radiohead, even though, from said pictures, they looked about as inaccessible as David Foster Wallace is to a Larry the Cable Guy-junkie. 

Pictured: the original Infinite Jester

So when I hear friends bring up old favorites, it no longer activates the newfound-pleasure region of my brain. Instead, I feel something like an internal brain-groan: the name triggers the been-there-done-that filters of my brain and I'm no longer interested. Because, being the pop-culture whore that I am, I have to move on to the next thing, no matter how much I loved the first thing--no matter how many times Thom Yorke patiently lulled me to sleep, singing the same songs night after night, as my 16 year-old self vowed: "I'll never leave you, Thom. I'll never leave you. Nirvana? They didn't mean shit. Smashing Pumpkins? Puh-leaze. I only have lazy eyes for you, Thom."

And, for the most part, at least when I was sixteen, this was true: I thought at the time, that Radiohead was it: in my search for the saddest-of-the-sad bands--a journey that took me from Nirvana to Smashing Pumpkins and, finally, to Radiohead--I thought I'd found the penultimate sad-slash-angsty-slash-smart-slash-sexy band there ever was and ever would be. But then (it might have been a few years ago) I decided that I didn't want to be sad anymore--at least, not like Radiohead made me sad. So, in true pop-culture whore fashion, I packed up my dripping, sadness-pummeled and infected vagina ears and moved on to the next thing--which, as it turns out, because of my discovery that I no longer had to pay for physical copies of albums--I could instead "try" them--ended up being a lot of things.

Discovering music blogs opened up a hidden door--one I'd never seen before but had always been there (at least since I started caring about music). I imagine it would be (to extend the whore analogy) like a party-girl floozie, waking up from a party, peeling her jizzum-glued body from the couch, where she crashed after boning one of the same five dudes she's been boning for the past ten years (in all states of mind)—and, on her way to the bathroom, she notices a little door tucked into the wall of a dark hallway. She opens the door. Light punches her in the eyes. Yes, “punches” her. The light is that brilliant and blinding. When her eyes do adjust, there is a golden land of penises, all waiting to be used as she sees fit. She soon forgets the same five guys she’s been boning since high school, with the prospect of gorging all these penises and the reality of all these penises there, right in front of her, gleaming in her party-girl floozie eyes.

In the same way, faster Internet speeds and the discovery that I could download just about any album I wanted (ahh...those were the days) and some I didn't know I wanted because I didn't know they existed, was like the party floozie wandering into a vast land of golden penises. Sure, it's overwhelming, but how often do you get everything you ever wanted--while also knowing that, should you want anything in the future, you can have that too?

Ahh, the Internet....Who would have thought that one day it could all be mine?

The flipside to this, as I found out later, is that, with so much exposure to awesomeness, you start to get bored or less interested with the things you used to find awesome: things like the aforementioned high school obsessions--so that, while it is true: you're getting all this awesome stuff for free, you are paying for it by unconsciously taking down and replacing on the favorites-shelves in your mind, all the things you used to value.

If you would have told me in high school that there would come a day when I no longer cared about the new Kevin Smith movie or the new Radiohead album, I probably would have been like: "What? That's impossible. What else is there in this world-that-never-changes worth caring about but Radiohead and Kevin Smith?" Granted, this is incredibly naive, but, back then, the Internet wasn't what it is today (at least not for me or anyone I knew), so you had to dig your heels into something--you had to define yourself by one or two really awesome things vs. now where EVERYTHING is..."Mmm, whatever."

So, what's my point? What am I getting at--or trying unsuccessfully to get at in this long-winded rant of a pseudo-essay?

Exactly that: long-windedness.

See, I was at a neighbor's place this weekend. He has a TV and I don't. Actually, that's not true. I have a TV, but my neighbor has channels on his TV, so anytime I'm over, we spend a good deal of time watching TV--the way it was meant to be watched...on channels! One of the things we watched (or started to watch), was a Kevin Smith special--one of his I-don't-know-how-many Q&A specials, in which an audience member asks a question and Kevin Smith takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour to sort of answer that question.

My neighbor and I watched the first hour and a half, which, I kid you not, translated to one question 75% answered. The question was: "What was it like directing Bruce Willis?" Kevin Smith's response touched on everything from weed to Wayne Gretzky to sex with his wife to his entire filmography to...the fat-people convenience of being able to order groceries by phone. When he finally got to the question, his answer was essentially: "Bruce Willis is a dick. But I like him because he's Bruce Willis." 

"Well, actually, Bruce. See, I'm the director--You know what? Never mind. You da man, Bruce! 'Yippie-ki-yay!'"

Of course, since this isn't my place--it's my neighbor's--it feels wrong for me to say what we watch. So, I usually just let him pick what we watch and I sit there and watch it because--you have no idea what it's like, living in an Internet and TV culture and not having constant access to either of those things--any TV is good TV. You sort of become Charlie from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. One bar of chocolate a year seems absurd to your snooty English schoolteacher and your snooty classmates, but one bar of chocolate for you is a goddam treasure. Same for me and TV. I hate FoxNews, but when I'm over at my dad's, he always has it on, so I savor every minute of it--even if everything they say clashes with who I am and what I believe. I lap it up because it's TV.

So, anyway, my neighbor and I are watching this Kevin Smith special and just before Kevin Smith launches into his lengthy response to the audience member's Bruce Willis question, he prefaces his response with: "Sit down. This is a long story." To which, the audience responds with cheers of oh-you-Kevin-Smith affinity, while I'm thinking: “Goddammit, Kevin Smith. Why do you have to be so goddam Kevin Smith-y. I've changed since high school. Why haven't you?” But, like I said, because this isn't my TV, and because when it comes to TV, I am in such a situation now, not having TV, that the mere mention of a new TV show makes me salivate like a dirty Dickensian waif staring into a storefront bakery window. I sit there and take it all in, preparing myself for what I think will be a daunting undertaking: listening to someone I no longer care about talking about things I really don't care about (like Bruce Willis). What I found, though, about 15 minutes in, is that...I actually do still like Kevin Smith. And, at about 30 minutes in, I started to really like Kevin Smith again.

In the years since I stopped caring about his movies, I sort of developed a laundry list of things I couldn't stand about him and his movies: the way he writes, the way his characters use big words awkwardly to say little things clumsily, the whole Kevin Smith/New Jersey universe, Jason Mewes, etc. etc. But what I discovered while watching the special is that: these things were really just me making excuses for the snooty pop-culure asshole I've become. 

***

It's easy to dismiss anything you once liked, when you've seen or been exposed to so many other things. The best analogy is probably the ugly-person-who-can't-understand-why-pretty-people-cheat analogy: they don't understand it because, unlike pretty people, they aren't exposed to as many opportunities to cheat. Having been exposed (and continually exposed) to so much content on the Internet, I cheat all the time--even on the content I'm loosely attached to, so that, in effect, what I'm doing is fucking any glimmering shiny thing I see, with a vast sea of other glimmering shiny things twinkling in front of me. And things I've seen before lose their twinkle. My brain has been trained to pass them up, or overlook them, dismissing them as "been-there-done-that."

The problem could be that there's too much out there. I'll never get to it all, but it would take a stronger man than me, someone with a more rigid personality, to be able to walk past so many brilliant, shiny objects and pass them up, vowing instead to stick to the few things I know that I already like.

That being said, I do still like Kevin Smith. But, because of my present condition, I can no longer feel excited when I hear about his new movies or one of his new 3 hour specials. My time on earth is too short to get hung up on the brilliance of one man--or the brilliance of a few  proverbial men—especially when there are so many proverbial men making so many things. But, as a service to myself, and perhaps as a way to catalog all the things that used to figure so profoundly into who I was and how I defined myself, I've decided to make a list of things I no longer get excited about.

Without further adieu...

Kevin Smith

My first exposure to Kevin Smith was around 94/95-around the time Clerks came out on video. My babysitter at the time worked part-time, when she wasn't babysitting and delivering papers (which she often did simultaneously), at a local, independent video store--a place called Video Stop, similar in style to the video store the character Randel from Clerks worked at. Every week, she was allowed to preview the new movies that came to the store, which meant a lot of afternoons watching mostly shitty movies. One of the movies that came to the store was Clerks. I probably saw a lot of movies I shouldn't have at that age, thanks to my babysitter, including Airheads and Billy Madison, which, fucked up as they are, probably had a huge impact on my character today. But Clerks, for whatever reason, I was not allowed to watch.

There were two girls around my age who went to my babysitter's at the time. They were allowed to watch Clerks (because...having a vagina makes you more mature and able to handle a Kevin Smith movie?), but I was not. I remember, they waited until I left to watch it, which made me feel awful because, I'd seen the previews, and it looked so different from anything I'd seen--I was naturally intrigued. But, my babysitter, like all my babysitters and most of my female teachers, gave preferential treatment to girls, while I silently dealt with my first-world problem of not being able to watch a cool-looking movie with dirty words.

"I want to hear the "fuck" word in a movie--then I'll know it really exists."
 

Fast-forward to 8th grade and I am a weirdo. I feel alone in my weirdo-ness, but not in a sad, emo way. Just that: I can't find people with the same interests as me--no kids my age rushing home to watch Kids in the Hall re-runs on Comedy Central or the same five Tom Green episodes I've seen way too many times before on MTV. But that all changes when a new girl shows up named Rebecca.

Rebecca is tall and skinny and she is in my science class. She is attractive, but she wears Converse All-Stars and her arm is covered in bracelets. She listens to punk rock and uses the word "fuck" like an adult--that is, she doesn't use it gratuitously because she's 13 and she thinks it makes her cool. The way she says "fuck" ages her, because it comes out so naturally--like there are two definitions of the word, and they both essentially mean the same thing--but we, the rest of her mouth-breathing peers, haven't yet discovered the second usage. To hear her say it: we know that's the cool way we've been trying to use it for the past 3 years, ever since we took the leap and decided potty-words no longer merited an “uh-uh, I’m telling” threat.

Anyway: for all these reasons, and in spite of her attractiveness, she is detested by almost everyone. Nobody else listens to punk rock. Nobody else wears Converse shoes. She is her own thing (even if her "own thing" is kind of a cliche, which I don't realize because it's still new to me).

At this age, I am too afraid to be my own thing, because, even though I've grown up with these people, suddenly being different or exhibiting any hint of idiosyncratic behavior can spiral into a vicious, life-ending rumor chain--which, at this age, absolutely terrifies me. The last thing I want is to stick out. So, I buy all the clothes I'm supposed to (American Eagle, Abercrombie, Aeropostale) and I pretend to be super-big into the same shitty popular music (mostly rap records which I don't own because rap music is forbidden in my house). 

Rebecca, on the other hand, stands as a reminder of why I don't assert myself, because, while I can say in hindsight that she was way cooler than any middle-schooler has the right to be, at the time, she was constantly being harassed by the same assholes I aspired to be like: the rich kids who listened to shitty rap records. They give her all the usual labels: whore, skank, freak, etc. And it only gets worse when she shows up one Monday with a shaved head.

I ask her about the shaved head in science. She says its for an "acting gig'. I have no idea who this girl is, or where she comes from, so I can't say with any certainty if this is true or not. But I'm less concerned with the authenticity of her story as I am the balls she has to do something so (or, so it seemed back then) outrageous--something, it seemed, that could completely annihilate her already low social rank (which it did). I ask her about this. "I don't give a fuck what other people think," she says. I smile at her, because this is awesome and it's equally awesome to hear someone put into words how I wish I felt. We then go on to forge a friendship, discussing at length a lot of the pop-culture crap I can't talk about with other kids at school. One day, she mentions Kevin Smith. She says she likes independent movies (a term I've never heard before but one that snags me because she makes it sound so cool) and tells me about how, when Chasing Amy came out, she and some friends drove up north to see it--and when she says they drove up north, I imagine that they did just that, because Rebecca doesn't have any friends in our grade--all her friends are probably older and they have licenses and watch independent movies. I confess to her that I've never seen Chasing Amy and her eyes get wide: "Oh, it's great. You have to see it."

Later that week, I tag along with my mom when she goes to the library. I immediately head toward the video section and find Chasing Amy. I check it out and watch it that night. At this point, I still haven't seen Clerks, so this is my first Kevin Smith movie. I am immediately smitten. I've never seen characters like these: they smoke cigarettes but they're not dirty (like I believed all people were who smoked), they use big words and, even though they dress like teenagers, they do adult things. The movie is lost on me, but I still love it--I love it for all its foreignness, for all that I don't understand but hope to someday. I aspire to be these people because they look and act cool. 

 

Pictured: the Joe Camel of Pseudo Intellectuals

 

My dad comes downstairs and asks what I'm watching. "Oh, it's an independent movie," I say. "Chasing Amy. It's a Kevin Smith movie." My dad says he's never heard of it and I pretend that that makes me weird--in my own pathetic way, drawing the line in the sand that separates the much-cooler me from my uncool dad.

I never get the chance to talk about the movie with Rebecca because she moves away just before the school year ends, still leaving time to sign my yearbook. In it, she writes (and even more pathetic, I have this memorized): "Stay weird and stuff. Becca."

I could say something here about how Ben Affleck coming to terms with Joey Lauren Adams's lesbian character in Chasing Amy, in spite of all the Ben Af-flack he catches from friends, is like me deciding to become friends with Rebecca (who is rumored to be a lesbian, but probably isn't) in spite of all the Chris-flack I caught from my friends, but...that would be lame. And I already kind of said it by way of writing about how I wasn't going to say it, because I'm a self-conscious asshole. The point is: I have an obvious, nostalgia-bleeding soft-spot for Kevin Smith that originated with me really, really liking him and what I thought he stood for. But, now, I no longer feel that, because I realize there is a world outside of Kevin Smith. And, because the Kevin Smith who was making movies when I was in middle school is not the same Kevin Smith who directed Jersey Girl when I graduated high school or whatever he's doing now.

In spite of that, I did enjoy the previously mentioned Q&A special--but I still can't get excited, not in the same way, about Kevin Smith as I did when the world of cigarette-smoking pseudo-intellectuals was still new to me. 

Tim Burton

Like most children of the 90's, Tim Burton figures into my early life pretty prominently. My dad swears that when I was 6, I loved Edward Scissorhands, though all I can remember from watching it back then is how much it freaked me out--and not the stuff you think would freak a 6 year-old out, like…the titular character having scissors for hands. I was fine with that--it was the sunny, pastel color-scheme of the neighborhood, Johnny Depp's white face-paint, and, for whatever reason, Winona Ryder in old-lady make-up, doing a bad old-lady voice. For some reason, I found all these things really unsettling.

Flash-forward to high school, and these are the things I appreciate most about the movie. I like that every house is the same and that they are all painted-up in vomit-y pastels because I realize, hey, Tim Burton is trying to say something here: he's saying that all the people who live in this neighborhood are exactly the same and their queasy sameness is reflected in how their houses are all painted the same queasy colors--and it's Edward, who lives alone in his dark, abandoned mansion at the end of the street who is the freak. He is, for reasons he can't help, isolated from everyone in his community. He didn't ask to be created by a frighteningly fragile-looking Vincent Price; he just was--and this is where it got him: alone and shut off from everyone else. In high school, this is profound stuff--and, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm sure I thought I could relate to Edward on some level.

I eventually (still in high school) decide that I really like Tim Burton. I go back and watch all the movies I watched when I was a kid. This time: with a new set of Tim Burton-loving eyes. These movies speak to me now. I finally understand what Tim Burton is doing artistically--because, now, as a mature, thoughtful high schooler, things like art and how much everyone sucks suddenly interest me. 

I might have been quite the catch on the outside, but in high school this is what was going on internally.

I never turned into a full-fledged (or any level of fledged) goth, but my friend did give me a Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt, after we discussed how much we loved that movie. This same friend and I also discussed how awesome it would be if Tim Burton did something like...direct Alice in Wonderland. We even formed a band using this aesthetic--the dream prospect (then) of Tim Burton turning Alice in Wonderland into the most unsettling, claymation super-films of all time. All of our artwork at the time reflected this idea--this shared vision of Tim Burton doing a druggy-but-not-druggy version of what we considered one of the most imaginative, druggy-but-not-druggy stories of all time.

And then....

Tim Burton actually does these things. First, he directs his own version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (another one of the dream projects my friend and I use as aesthetic fodder for our band). And...it sucks. It sucks so bad, because it's not the film I'd envisioned. Instead of meticulous claymation, I get shitty CGI.

By the time he gets around to Alice in Wonderland, I've already disowned Tim Burton. I suddenly feel ashamed that I own a Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt (that's a lie--I've alway been pretty self-conscious of that t-shirt and projecting the image that I listen to shitty Hot Topic bands) and I never wear it out in public.

This may seem like unwarranted snootiness on my part, but these two movies (and all the other movies he's done since the glory days of 90's Tim Burton) hit me pretty hard. I was disappointed--nay, devastated, when I saw what could have been (I thought then) one of the finest movies in Tim Burton's catalog: the penultimate Tim Burton movie. I mean, it makes sense, right? That's why he did Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--because those movies are practically softballs when it comes to material for Tim Burton to direct. Or, so you would think. 

Something something something Carrot Top on a mescaline bender.

The fact is, like Kevin Smith, the Tim Burton who directed Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not the same Tim Burton who, back in the 90's, actually gave a shit about making movies imprinted with his own artistic brand. What should have been gimmes turned into gimmicks, and people, like myself, turned out in droves to see these movies, because we collectively all came to the same conclusion: Tim Burton doing these movies would be awesome. The math, however, didn't add up.

I remember once, being at the aforementioned babysitter's. One of the movies she brought home from the video store was Nightmare Before Christmas. Either at the end or before the movie there was a little featurette, in which, Burton and his team of Burton clay-mators discuss how long and meticulous the process of shooting the movie was. They explained that it took them something like a year to get the film done.

I remember finding this fascinating, because a year at that time seemed like forever. And, furthermore, I'd done clay sculptures at school, so I knew how much fun it was to play with clay--and the idea fascinated me that the movie was shot in stop-motion, one frame at a time. I tried experiments of my own: sculpting my kneaded eraser into Burton-esque heads and changing the facial expression for the imagined next shot.

I bring this anecdote up because I can't imagine any little kid today watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and feeling similarly inspired. "Wow, that CGI looks so bad. I can't wait to try it out myself!" My only hope is that, as my generation continues having kids, and those kids become old enough to understand movies, they are subjected to better stuff than what Tim Burton is making today--perhaps including some of the old childhood-scarring Tim Burton titles like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. 

Radiohead

This picture is so much better if you imagine the cameraman as a sleazy, pencil-moustached Wal-Mart portrait studio photographer dangling a set of keys by the camera.

Radiohead, O, Radiohead. Where to begin? You have nursed me through many a dark and trying period in my young adult life. Shall I compare thee to Prozac? I shall. For without you, I probably would have gotten out of my gloom and done something more constructive with my life. But instead I elected to stay home and listen to my first-world pain reflected in Thom’s Mickey Mouse-after-a-divorce falsetto and the bleep-bloop of the Brothers Greenwood.

Radiohead, for me, and a lot of my generation, were (maybe still are?) the penultimate sad-band. Eighties kids had REM and the Cure. We had Radiohead.

I first discovered Radiohead my sophomore year of high school. At the beginning of that year, I was deep into Nirvana—deeper than I’d been into any band before. I absolutely fell in love with Nirvana, because, also at this time, I’d developed critical thinking skills. An entire world opened up and I started to realize things—things which, ultimately bummed me out. I felt like teenage Buddha: once I started to really look and try to understand the world outside the safe harbor of my parents’ house, I realized that people suck and I am a “people” so I suck, too. So, in that sense I felt like most Hessian characters (Hesse’s characterization of Buddha included).

So, Nirvana naturally became a gateway band. I started with Nirvana—because they reflected my newfound sense of self-loathing and cynicism—but I was, rather unconsciously, still looking for something else—something beyond Nirvana, if you will. Something that not only made me think about things but also made me feel things on a profound level, because, for the first time in my life (probably), I realized that thinking and feeling and, specifically, feeling bad about thinking converged in this middle ground of pseudo-intellectual despair.

The next band I graduated to was Smashing Pumpkins, about which (whom?), more later. Billy Corgan wasn’t quite as gifted with words as Kurt Cobain, but what he lacked in succinctness, he more than made up for in introducing me to the world of dreamy gloom-rock.

Flash-forward to the spring of my sophomore year and I am absolutely caught up in this whirlwind of self-obsession and dreamy music. I’ve burnt through the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography and I’ve gone back and looked at all the bands Billy Corgan or Kurt Cobain have name-checked in interviews: Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Vaselines, Mudhoney, etc. This stuff is fine, but I’m in a record store one day with my hipster uncle. I see the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, on the back of which it lists the artists. I see a couple names I know: the Butthole Surfers, Garbage, yadda yadda. But I also notice the name Radiohead. At this point I’ve never heard a song by Radiohead, but I know from frequenting the local record shop and my trip to Boston that summer that they are a big band. I see an entire zine dedicated to them in a Boston record shop and I sub-consciously link them with the conversations I can’t follow on the Boston subway: Ivy League hipsters talking about things I know nothing about or, if I do, I wouldn’t know, since these blowhards are using words I’ve never heard before. In my mind, Radiohead is the band these super-cool, educated college kids listen to, though I have no proof of this—and just linking Harvard alums with Radiohead in my mind, makes me feel like they are probably too inaccessible for me. But, the next spring, I am in the record shop and my uncle says I can pick out one CD, as is his custom anytime I tag along with him on trips to record shops. I choose the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack because I have a gut-feeling that I really need to hear that Radiohead song, even if I don’t get it. It just feels right.

I take the CD home and that night, and when I’m lying in bed, three hours before I have to get up for school, because I’m so worked up and unable to sleep when I’m 16 and thinking about my bullshit 16 year-old problems, I decide to listen to it.

It sounds like something out of a bad rom-com (newly disenchanted white guy, gut-feeling in a record store), but I swear from the moment I heard that sneaky bass-line to Thom’s trapped-in-feedback vocals, I was in love. I had a feeling of finally finding what I’d been searching for: the apotheosis of my sad music quest, which began (naturally) with Nirvana and peaked with this one Radiohead song, “Talk Show Host,” which, to this day, after having listened to all their albums, plus: many of their B-sides, alternate takes, etc., is still my absolute favorite Radiohead song. 

"Hey there."

That being said….

In spite of how magical and romantic and borderline creepy my Radiohead-discovery story is, I am unable today to feel anything beyond lukewarm interest in any new Radiohead project. I’ve probably read about Thom’s Atoms For Peace side-project countless times and, in my head, I always tell myself that I will listen to it, putting it on my list of things to check out with the same ambivalence that a broken-down husband puts down on his list all the things his no-longer-the-woman-I-married wife tells him to do. “Take out the Garbage. Clean the gutters….” Because, at this point, checking out new Radiohead stuff feels more like an obligation than something I do because it’s novel.

It kind of bums me out, too, because, I used to think (confession time!) that Thom Yorke was the coolest motherfucker walking this earth. He’s British. He listens to obscure electronic and dance music. And he has one gimp-eye which makes him look like some kind of ratty hooligan from a British action film. On top of that: every goddam word he writes is perfect—and so not-British because he uses words four year-olds know to communicate ideas I’m not even sure I understand.

I can’t say for sure what happened, but I think it was around the time King of Limbs came out that I decided I no longer really cared about Radiohead as much I used to. Sure, I downloaded it the day it came out, but not so much because I felt like I really had to hear it. It was more like something I felt I had to do, because: “Duh, it’s Radiohead. And I like Radiohead, right?”

I hate to compare Radiohead to pizza, but I can’t think of a more appropriate analogy. The way I feel about Radiohead now is the way I feel about pizza. I like pizza. I know I like pizza. But do I still get excited about pizza, the way I did when I was 5 and pizza was still relatively new to me and somewhat of a novelty? No, not really. Same with Radiohead. They are what they are: a band I like, but they’re no longer the band I cherish in the same way I did in high school.

Also: I don’t know how much relevance this has to the article, but what the fuck happened with Radiohead? Back in high school, I think maybe five people at my school knew who they were. They were our little, go-to sad band. Now everyone knows about Radiohead. Not trying to sound like a hipster dick (because the notion that liking Radiohead or thinking they’re an underground band is kind of comical now), but when did they suddenly become everyone’s favorite band? I have a friend who is a music major. She listened exclusively to rap music and musicals in high school. Now, even she knows about Radiohead.

 I don’t know. Maybe they really are turning into REM, if they haven’t already.

Let’s hope they stop before we get another lame-by-any-standard catastrophe like “Everybody Hurts”. Dear Lord….

Life's Aquatic Pageant with Captain Michael Stipe-sou

Smashing Pumpkins

In addition to this post turning into the in-dire-need-of-self-editing brand of writing popularized by Stephen King, it’s also become somewhat revelatory, as I never realized until now just how much of my high school self was shaped by my experience at my previous babysitter’s. Along with Nightmare Before Christmas and Kevin Smith, it was also at my Tab-chugging, video-store worker babysitter’s house that I was first exposed to Smashing Pumpkins. Her son was a prototypical nineties kid: he had albums by all the alterna/grunge bands of the period and because he was in high school, I thought he was the coolest person alive.

On afternoons after school, he would let me hang out in his room, where we played SNES games and listened to music. One of the bands I really responded to (or maybe it was the only band whose name I could remember) was Smashing Pumpkins. At that time, the Pumpkins were all the rage with flannel-wearing, chili-bowl-haircut-ed high schoolers. They had just released Siamese Dream, which meant they were still relevant—and my babysitter’s son had this album and Gish.

I went to the library around this time and checked out both Siamese Dream and Gish on cassette, which I then had my mom make copies of on her dual-deck cassette recorder. I kept the tapes for a long time and only upgraded to CD copies in high school when I realized one day: Hey, I used to like Smashing Pumpkins. I think I’m going to like them again. 

 When I see this picture all I can think of is a baby defiantly shitting his pants.

And like them I did. I became obsessed with Smashing Pumpkins. Again, it was my sophomore year (a pretty pivotal year in my life and my development as a jaded, 90’s-holdover today). The Pumpkins provided the perfect soundtrack to my life then—from the dreamy, overly-distorted guitars to the dreamy, nonsensical lyrics. I was in a state of transition—from fun-loving teen to cynical-asshole adult—and, not being able to process this transformation, it helped that I could submerge myself into something as weird and esoteric as Billy Corgan’s post-acid-burnout lyrics and song structures.

I used to write the lyrics to “1979” in my notebooks. It’s cheesy, but because at this time I had difficulty expressing what was going on internally, it felt good to write anything—especially the lyrics to a song that resonated with me in some strange and mystical way. At 16, I became nostalgic—nostalgic for the 90’s—or what I imagined the 90’s to be, piecing together my own fuzzy memories from the glory days of grunge and what I saw in Smashing Pumpkins music videos, which, as it turns out, were released as a DVD anthology in tandem with my re-discovery of the Pumpkins.

Eventually, I got over my love of the Pumpkins, gradually shifting—as I pointed out earlier--my allegiance to Radiohead.

When the Pumpkins “re-formed” in whatever mid-2000’s-year-that-was and released a new album, I really got over the Pumpkins. I didn’t want to admit it to myself but the reunion didn’t excite me—and not just because it was only Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain who were re-uniting. I was just…over the Pumpkins. And, besides that, the new songs, as expertly crafted as they were, were still missing that very esoteric thing that attracted me to the Pumpkins.

I can’t think of a way to describe it, except to say that none of the songs had heart. They sounded mechanical and bland either because Billy Corgan over-thought the record—it being the first proper album under the Pumpkins’ name since 2000, so the pressure to impress was obviously on—or he put absolutely no thought into the songs. Either way, the album confirmed my worst fears: that the band I previously thought symbolized and epitomized “cool” now did nothing for me. And it wasn’t just the new stuff—even going back or thinking about going back and listening to Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie, no longer excited me. It just gave me that “burnt-out” feeling you get when you’ve explored something so much that there’s nothing left to explore. 

Wes Anderson

Before he was the Prince of Twee, Wes Anderson was an independent filmmaker who got lucky. Fresh off the quiet success of Bottle Rocket, Anderson made Rushmore.

I was 12 when Rushmore came out and, it seems strange now, but I remember the movie not only getting a wide release but also being promoted somewhat aggressively, which is especially weird when you consider what kind of movie it is. But the late 90’s were a different time. The movie market hadn’t been saturated yet with shakey-cam, CGI shit-fests or sixth-in-the-series dashed-off sequels and since Gen X set the standards for entertainment, directors and musicians who promoted quirk were all the rage. Well, maybe “not all the rage,” but they were certainly “in” at the time—and like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights or Alexander Payne’s Election, these movies were, if not celebrated, kind of the norm.

I alluded in a past post to kids in my grade quoting the “Showgirls” exchange from the Scream 2 trailer. Another line they quoted was the “Oh, are they?” line from the Rushmore trailer. Looking back now, it seems strange: kids living from the bumfuck-iest part of the Midwest, with pedestrian tastes in pop-culture, quoting lines from Wes Anderson movies--especially considering that Wes Anderson has gradually come to symbolize all that is twee, pre-inde culture. Not that his movies have ever been underground, but there’s always been a decided snootiness amongst Anderson-ites, who cling to him like he’s their little, underground thing. But, in 1997, when Rushmore came out, the trailer was everywhere—so everyone was familiar with it and the “Oh, are they?” line was the one line all my friends knew and quoted, alongside lines from definitely-not-Wes-Anderson movies like Half Baked.

Of my friends, I think I was the only one who actually saw Rushmore. I bought a pre-viewed VHS copy at Blockbuster—two things that don’t exist anymore. I remember really liking it—and liking it, not because it was a Wes Anderson (because I didn’t know enough to even care about auteur directors at this time), but because I thought it was a good movie.

Then, in high school, Wes Anderson released the Royal Tenenbaums and started to establish himself as a “voice” in cinema. By this time, I had started paying attention to directors—the first being Kubrick (isn’t Kubrick always the gateway to snootery?)—so I knew that the director of that-movie-I-really-liked-when-I-was-12, Rushmore, directed this movie, too.  I didn’t like it as much (and still don’t, no matter how hard Anderson obsessives try to convince me it’s his best), but I kept an eye on Wes Anderson, because, without the Internet, I didn’t have access to all the arthouse/auteur movies I have access to today—nor did I have access to information about other movies. I just watched TV and went to the library and Blockbuster and took note when things looked interesting. Back then, I had to actually sit through the credits to find out who was involved with a movie—painstakingly rewinding and re-rewinding if I missed the name I was looking for vs. now, in my life of luxury, where I can just log onto IMDB or Wikipedia and figure out what would have previously taken months or years of research and talking to people/exchanging pop-culture trivia.

Flash-forward to my freshman year of college. I am a Max Fischer-ian art student with a love of Holden Caulfield and a distaste for authority. I am directionless and full of ambition, which is a horrible though not-uncommon combination for naval-gazing kids that age. On some days, I skip class and go to the local, dollar movie theater (or wander around downtown, which is still new to me), deciding that figure-drawing floppy-dicked crackheads, hard-up for money and more than willing to pose for a bunch of artsy-fartsy art students, in class sounds less appealing than not figure-drawing floppy-dicked crackheads and doing whatever the hell I want instead.

One of the movies I see, for the second time, is Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic..., because, at this time, I decide that Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors—if not, my favorite. I become so obsessed with this movie—and Wes Anderson in general—that I buy sardines (Steve Zissou's favorite food) on my lunch break at work. I’m a cashier at a grocery store at this time, so I can buy anything in-store and I choose sardines just because I have such a freshman art-school student boner for Wes Anderson.

 Pictured: universal champion of disenchanted art school students everywhere

And then….

Flash-forward again (lot of flash-forwarding going on in this post) and I am at my neighbor’s house—the same house where I recently watched that Kevin Smith special. He’s just rented Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s latest release, and he asks if I want to watch it. I’ve already revealed to him that I like Wes Anderson, so, naturally, he assumes I’ll be interested in watching Wes Anderson’s newest movie, which I haven’t seen before. But…he is WRONG!

Again, I feel that internal-groan. I have no interest in revisiting my former art school boner for Anderson and I especially don’t want to watch his new movie, because…it just doesn’t interest me. But, TV is a luxury in my world, so I agree.

Same thing that happened with the Kevin Smith special happens with Moonrise Kingdom. Fifteen minutes in, I can’t take it: all the calculated “this is a movie/these are the characters/this is the house the characters live in” Anderson-isms irritate me. And then I start to wonder: am I irritated because this is “predictably Anderson-esque” or am I just being an asshole because, as an auteur director, Anderson has every right to revel in his own style and I should appreciate the movie for being a demonstration of an artist who is comfortable in his own voice? I decide on the latter and, subsequently, the movie becomes more enjoyable. It’s not my favorite—or anywhere close to my favorite Anderson movie—but I like it, in that moment, because it’s fun and, as over-exposed to Anderson’s style as I’ve become—either from Anderson himself or his piss-poor imitators (Submarine, anyone?)—it’s still an enjoyable movie. 

***

So, will I ever get excited about Wes Anderson—or any of the other stuff on this list—again? It’s hard to say. A lot of the things on this list I clung to because they were weird or different at a time when I didn’t know too many weird or different things—mostly because I didn’t have the Internet, so I didn’t have easy access to information about weird and different things.

There will always be a soft-spot in my heart for these things because they represent a time in my life when I discovered, through discovering these things, things about myself and who I wanted to be. They represent the exciting world that exists outside of convention—even if they’ve now (at least in my mind) become conventional.

I guess I feel like Stan from that episode of South Park when he turns 10 and everything suddenly seems “shitty.” And, like Stan, age has given me the same prognosis: I’ve become a “cynical asshole.” 

So:

FUCK IT!