clearly, I peaked at seven

"Well HELLO. Welcome. I’m so glad you could come. Are you prepared for our journey? First we must duck behind this thick sheet of spider silk that hangs at my back. Some say it is the veil that separates the living from the land of the dead. Others insist it is a curtain that hangs in the living room of the oppressors, my parents. Hush, there’s no need to be afraid. As you can see, I am super.

Here, take my hand.

What’s that you ask? These socks? These thick cotton athletic socks, the short kind, like a lesbian volleyball player might wear? Look more closely. More closely still. There. Yes, you see? The pink rim is the glue that ties this outfit together. And also, let’s be honest, these marvelous purple jellies make my feet sweat.

Dare you—DARE YOU—mock my hair? Well then, mock away, but know this: the last person who mocked my hair paid with her life. That is her blood you see smeared on my cheeks."

sm + spiral stairs

I am so incredibly grateful that I lived long enough to see Pavement rock as hard as they rightfully should.

The sad truth is that most reunion tours are little more than a depressing reminder of your own mortality. The band members stand up there like harbingers of your inevitable decline. They are bloated, less attractive versions of their former selves (your former self). Do they seem tired? They seem tired. Something you once loved has been reduced to a symbol of how, in the fullness of time, we all become kind of lame.

But Pavement, much to my delight and surprise, was exponentially better than the last time I saw them ten years ago. Granted, it’s impossible to say if their super-awesome show in the year 2010 is more indicative of my own oblivious embrace of mediocrity (a phenomenon my friend C calls “slouching towards Applebee’s”) or of Pavement’s late-blooming ability to rock out, but one of the benefits of aging is that such questions no longer matter.

It’s hard to explain exactly what Pavement means to me. Because, first of all, Stephen Malkmus’s whole purpose in life is to not mean a whole lot. You know how grammar nerds parse can parse gibberish sentences because they vaguely sound like English language? That is sort of like Pavement’s relationship to human feelings.

(Malkmus’s lyrics, at their best, sound like something Morrissey might pen after a stroke. I mean that in the best possible way. Like Morrissey, Malkmus is full of sass, cleverness, complexity, and calculated distance. The difference is that he shellacs the emotional core of his songs with nonsense instead of ego. He’s also a lot more laid back, but that’s just a product of geography.)

And yet, for all their resistance to meaning, Pavement has meant so very much to me. Westing (By Musket and Sextant), along with Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes, are the two albums that have most shaped my life. On the surface, I guess they’re an unlikely pair, but the more I think about it, the more similar they seem. Both taught me something about having a sense of humor under duress. Both cut through the crippling solipsism of teenage angst and revealed the possibility of belonging to a dissatisfied community.

Above all, every song on those albums was like a little love letter to being weird. As a very unhappy young lady growing up in a Tennessee cow town, those songs helped me dream of a life worth living. They gave me perspective. They helped me grow up.

It’s a little weird to love a band like that and find their live shows totally lackluster. They toured a lot when I was in college, and it was a major letdown every time I went to see them. You know your favorite band must really suck live if the highlight of their show is a Velvet Underground cover. Still, I went to see them often, because Pavement on a bad day is still more awesome than most things.

Fast-forward to the present day (well, last night), to their outdoor concert in downtown Chicago. First of all, Millennium Park is just a great place to see a band. Usually, at an outdoor venue, I stand around thinking things like is that actually a dead animal, or is that what pot smells like now? or are those short-shorts ironic, or is that an honest-to-pete sex pervert? But listening to Pavement at Millennium Park last night, I could have closed my eyes and sworn I was 16, night-driving with all my windows down and the radio all the way up.

Secondly, not having any new material meant there wasn’t some new nightmare reunion album they had to focus on. The band played a nice cross-section of their catalog with gusto, including fully three-fourths of Watery, Domestic. What a treat!

Finally, there was the band itself, who remain, for the most part, untouched by the ravages of time. They all look like they’ve been bathing in the blood of virgins except for poor old Scott Kannberg, who, on top of the indignity of being a poor man’s Lee Ranaldo, has aged into a poor man’s Stephin Merritt.

Spittin’ image

I think it took the advent of the Jicks for me to appreciate how everyone in Pavement has an important job. The almost unbearable cool of Stephen Malkmus is perfectly balanced by the unbridled enthusiasm of Bob Nastanovich, who is either awesomeness incarnate or a high-functioning autistic, depending on how you look at it. Watching Bob jump up and down for a solid hour, playing everyman “instruments” like the tambourine, the cowbell, and the glockenspiel, I liked pretending he was a Pavement superfan who got to join the band for one night. (He tuckered himself out so thoroughly that he had to sit through the last few songs.) And the pothead vibes you get from Mark Ibold are exactly the right answer to the misery radiating off of poor old Kannberg, who, to give him his due, is probably the one who keeps the band from sounding too frivolous.

(Mark Ibold, incidentally, is my top celebrity pick for who I’d want to hang out with if the world were ending. I drove to Winston-Salem to interview him when I was a manager at my college radio station, and I’m a little surprised the universe didn’t implode then and there due to me, the most nervous person on earth, trying to have a discussion with someone who couldn’t have given less of a flying bahooey in the nicest possible way. I love you, Mark Ibold! I hope you never cut your hair.)

Funny how Pavement is still teaching me lessons after all these years. They helped me come of age, and now they’re showing me it might be okay to get old. Or, at the very least, that even as it becomes more familiar, this world of ours still holds some nice surprises.

9.11: We all remember. Now let’s reflect.

I dream a lot of bad dreams. I think it’s because I drink so much Diet Coke. It’s not enough that the aspartame is giving me rat cancer; the caffeine is now attacking my subconscious.

I had a real doozie last night, a nightmare that was intensely weird and repetitive. Have you ever had one like that? I think most dreams have a real narrative, like a movie, but sometimes mine are like pressing rewind and watching the same scene over and over. Like someone’s showing me something.

This one was in two parts. Part one: I’m in a rapidly descending plane. It’s clear we’re about to crash. Then, just as the plane hit the ground, but before you could actually feel the impact, I was back in the air. Falling fast. Again. Again.

Part two: I’m running through a huge grassy field with a few other people. Planes are crashing around us. There are many different kinds—old-fashioned ones with propellers, huge passenger planes, and futuristic fighter jets. They arched up in the air before nose-diving to the ground, like someone had catapulted them over an invisible wall. I remember thinking, they’re using these planes like bombs.

Then I woke up, gave myself a little Keanu Reeves-style whoa, cracked a Diet Coke, and got on with my day.

It was only later, when I logged onto Facebook and saw all the 9.11-related status updates, that I realized today is September 11. Which, first of all, I freely acknowledge reflects poorly on me, because (a) yeah, I read Facebook before I read the news and (b) I’m a little out of touch with the whole space-time continuum. What can I tell you? My phone beeps at me whenever I’m supposed to do something.

But anyway, the gravitas of all the NEVER FORGET statements was somewhat undermined by their positions between, like, updates on Katie’s garage sale and what Amanda had for breakfast. Like, I’m sure the ghosts of the World Trade Center appreciate these heartfelt, if occasionally misspelled, status update memorials. No doubt people are sacrificing the animals of Farmville in tribute to the their memories. Above all, I’m sure they appreciate the strange icons people post, such as this dramatic popsicle-stick sculpture depicting that terrible day when the three(?!) towers fell:



So I just want to say: Relax, Facebook. I can assure you that no one who lived through that day is going to forget 9.11. It’s a muscle memory akin to a kick in the stomach. I think about 9.11 every time I’m in downtown Chicago, when I look up at the sky and worry that a plane is flying too low. I think about 9.11 every time I read about the misguided hatred of Muslims that is eating through our country like some sort of retarded cancer. Sometimes I think about it when I’m eating grilled cheese or doing laundry or digging through my bag for keys, because it’s just memorable like that.

It’s the kind of thing that haunts the dreams of someone as apathetic and snarky as me.

So maybe instead of trying so hard to remember, we should reflect. Reflect on the crimes that have been perpetuated in the names of the people who died that day. Reflect on what we can do to promote peace going forward. And, above all, reflect on the relationship between loving your country and loving the rest of this wide world.

:-(

If there’s one thing I find more distasteful than religion, it’s bigotry. I mean, both rank right up there with Pepsi, YouTube, and the entire catalog of The Eagles in terms of manmade atrocities. Global blight, stock your bunker, etc.

I know I’m far from alone in feeling surprised and appalled RE: the ever-devolving ground zero mosque situation. Every morning I scan the headlines and kill a thousand hobos in my thoughts.

I feel foolish that it’s taken me aback. I’m from the South, so I thought I was used to people scraping the soles of their shoes and calling it belief. My uncle uses the word nigger in e-mail forwards that he sends to his entire address book. I shake my fist at the computer every time I see it, but it’s sort of like objecting to death or taxes: there it is, no matter how bad you wish it were different.

Yet there is a difference, however superficial, between having dinner with my stupid bigot uncle and being at a party with an educated person who says there’s no such thing as racism in modern-day America. One has two heads and the other has two assholes, but in the final analysis they’re both scary freaks.

For me, this issue was thrown into relief a week or two ago during a friend’s birthday dinner, when a self-identified liberal member of our party held forth on her views on the controversial mosque.

“I don’t know if you know this about me,” she said, “but I worked at the World Trade Center.”

[Long pause for emphasis]

“So, you know, my feelings have been all over the place.”

Already, we had reached an impasse. A regular bigot is one thing, but a bigot who leverages a national tragedy as though it’s some sort of doctor’s excuse for her repulsive, cancerous hate? I’m not a fucking lawyer but I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of Latin-named logic mistake.

The conversation went downhill from there. This lady, a Jew, was talking about her Orthodox friend’s “menstruation tent” like it was totally normal, la-la-la, in one breath before denouncing all of Islam as backwards in the next.

I wanted to be like, hmm, sounds like your misogynist OCD nightmare god has an awful lot in common with the misogynist OCD nightmare god of your nemesis. Fetishizes virgins, gets mad when you eat stuff on certain days, prefers the devout dress like doofs, candlelight dinners, and walks on the beach, right? Now, if only you spent more time hating yourselves instead of each other, the world might be a better place.

But, you know, acquaintances. Bite your tongue and try not to gag on your $35 fish.

That dreadful experience helped me hone in on what has been perhaps the most upsetting aspect of this whole sick sorry affair, which has been the tone set by the people who should be fighting the good fight. Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama often couch their support of the mosque in terms of Constitutional rights, which frames the argument in a manner not unlike Newt Gingrich’s analogy of putting a “Nazi sign” next to DC’s Holocaust museum.

Yes, yes, they have the right. But here in America, historically, as surely even someone as limited as Newt Gingrich knows, “having the right” has approximately not-a-whole-lot to do with winning the battle of public opinion.

It hardly takes the cold stare of a heathen (i.e., me) to figure that Muslims didn’t fell the Twin Towers. And if you think for a minute the devil done blew them down, well, the devil’s also busy blowing up abortion clinics and singeing crosses and touching Catholic children where they shouldn’t be touched.

The NYT has filled its pages with reports on fears of Manhattan’s Muslims. It makes me wonder what a historian 100 years from now might make of it.

Most recently, we have General Petraeus’s reckless statement that those wannabe book-burning go-tards in Florida should hold off because the evil Muslims might murder American soldiers in the name of I-don’t-know-WTF, like, Middle Eastern Ray Bradbury?

Because, you know, the Taliban holds strict standards in terms of what news footage it uses for brainwashing purposes.

And even if what Gen. Petraeus said is true, which it almost certainly isn’t, what an irresponsible thing to say. Because (a) it perpetuates the conflation of Muslims and terrorists and (b) it makes that “pastor” and his “congregation” look like patriots if they back down. Which: no and no. NO!

The first rule is you don’t argue with crazy people. You can’t. It just makes them believe they have a side.