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!
