#closing on a note from michael stipe

[celebrityfanfictionblog]

The Governor of Minnesota

A Secret Rendezvous in Atlanta

Featuring Gov. Tim Walz and second gentleman Doug Emhoff

Less than 48 hours away from Election Day, the political atmosphere was electric. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff had come to metro Atlanta for one last political push. They hosted a rally at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Cobb County on a brisk Sunday afternoon, where the air was charged with the energy of imminent change. Jon Bon Jovi, R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, and the husband-wife duo The War and Treaty had performed, adding to the fervor. The visit was part of a flurry of political activity in Georgia, a key battleground state, before November 5th.

The rally ended with a mini-concert in the hotel ballroom, where Walz and Emhoff bonded over their shared love for rock music. There was a palpable "bro" energy, as Emhoff noted this was the first time he and Walz had held a full rally together. Both men, aged 60, reminisced about growing up in an America dominated by the popular culture of TV, films, and music.

Later, in the privacy of Doug's hotel room, away from the public eye, the tension of their campaign now morphing into something more primal. Doug's body ached with weeks of pent-up desire; his last intimate moment with Kamala felt like a distant memory. Tim's eyes had been on him throughout the campaign, especially today, and Doug could feel the weight of those looks. Now, with the door closed behind them, Doug's mind wandered to fantasies he hadn't dared explore publicly.

Walz, with his balding head, glasses perched on his nose, and his stocky build, seemed animated yet nervous. His quick delivery of words was now slower, more deliberate. "Let's both enjoy this," Tim said, his voice tinged with both excitement and the thrill of the forbidden.

He kneeled before Doug, who stood at 5'10" with an athletic build, thanks in part to his well-known yoga practice. His tattoos seemed to tell stories in the dim light - the "chai" on his bicep, a nod to his Jewish heritage; his children's names inked on the other, a testament to his paternal love; and the fraternity mark, a relic from his youth. Tim unbuckled Doug's belt, his hands shaking slightly with anticipation. As he pulled down Doug's pants, he was greeted by the sight of a hard, veiny cock, about 7 inches, with a pointed head that glistened with precum.

Tim's lips parted, his tongue tracing a path from the base of Doug's cock to its tip, savoring the saltiness of pre-cum. He took Doug into his mouth, his tongue swirling around, feeling every vein. Doug groaned, his hands gripping the arms of the chair, his body reacting to each stroke of Tim's tongue.

"Doug, do you want to fuck me?" Tim asked, his voice now husky with desire. Doug responded with a moan, nodding, his body already moving towards the bed.

Tim stood, undressing quickly, revealing his own arousal. His cock was 6.5 inches, not thick but with a pronounced head, throbbing with eagerness. Doug, perhaps spurred by the moment, grabbed Tim's cock, his strokes rough and eager, his own hand working his cock in tandem.

"Never thought about sucking a cock before," Doug murmured, his breath hot against Tim's skin before his lips enveloping the head, tongue exploring, tasting. The novelty of the act adding to the intensity, overwhelming them both. Tim's body shuddered, but he pulled away, not wanting to end it there. He positioned himself on all fours, his ass high, presented to Doug, every muscle tense with anticipation.

With a mix of saliva and pre-cum, Doug prepared himself, slicking his cock, then positioned himself at Tim's entrance.

With a growl, "Take my dick, Walz," he pushed in, the initial resistance giving way to warmth and tightness. Tim gasped, the pain sharp but quickly morphing into pleasure as Doug thrust deeper, each movement punctuated by the slap of skin against skin. As Doug found a rhythm, his hands gripping Tim's hips, his slaps on Tim's ass, the sound echoing in the room adding to the intensity.

"You like my dick?" Doug asked, his voice a mix of dominance and pleasure.

"Yes, fuck me. Make me yours," Tim panted, his voice breaking with each powerful thrust from Doug. Doug's hand found Tim's cock again, stroking it in rhythm with his thrusts, driving them both towards the edge.

The climax was explosive. Tim felt Doug's cock swell inside him, the pressure building until Doug's release came - hot, shooting deep with each spasm, filling him. Tim, overwhelmed, felt his own orgasm rip through him, his cum spurting out in thick ropes onto the bed below, his body convulsing with each wave of pleasure.

Doug's orgasm was a torrent, each pulse of cum felt by Tim, who pushed back, wanting to feel every drop. Their moans mingled, the intensity of their shared release echoing through the room. Doug's cum leaked from Tim, a warm trickle down his thighs as they both collapsed, breathless, the bed beneath them stained with the evidence of their passion. The reality of what they'd done hung between them, a secret shared in the shadows of their public lives.

"That was so surreal for me to experience that," Doug whispered, a mix of awe and guilt in his tone.

"There's more where that came from," Tim replied, a promise laced with the danger of their political lives.

This secret rendezvous in Atlanta, hidden from the world, was a moment of raw human connection amidst the chaos of politics.

[whenmemorydies]

90s alternative rock, masculinity and The Bear

This post by @bbythurs got me thinking about The Bear's soundtrack, specifically its use of 90s alternative rock. Some thoughts below.

Chris Storer and I are very close in age, and going by the soundtrack choices for The Bear, grew up listening to very similar music. I came to grunge a few years after its heyday but when I did, I quickly became obsessed with these (mostly) white boys singing frankly about things like domestic violence, sexual assault, drug use, and mental health issues, and who seemed to revel in challenging traditional masculinity. Their hair was often long but usually not overly styled (or washed for that matter), they sometimes wore dresses, lipstick and eyeliner on stage (but were decidedly unglam about it), and they scribbled "PRO CHOICE" on their bare arms during prime time television performances (shout out to Eddie Vedder).

Kurt Cobain on the cover of The Face, September 1993.

Michael Stipe, who often played with gender in R.E.M.'s live shows, had also recently come out as queer (his words were, an "equal opportunity lech") during the promotional cycle for REM's Monster (the album featuring Sydcarmy's infamous "Strange Currencies"). Alternative rock in the 90s was full of folks who were challenging convention, including the necessity of traditional masculinity.

The irony is that so many of the people who listened to grunge were white guys who had no problem with traditional masculinity. These were the same guys who head-banged and dove in mosh pits to these songs but went home and beat on their partners, or perpetrated sexual assault while singing the lyrics to these songs. No one can control who consumes your art, even if some artists did try to (see Kurt Cobain's liner notes from Nirvana's Insecticide):

In contrast, it seems like Chris Storer (thankfully) got the correct memo.

Ever since watching the first episode of The Bear, it was clear to me that this show has plenty to say about masculinity: how its performed and weaponised (2x06 Fishes is a master class in depicting this on film), how its subverted (think: Emmanuel and Pete but also Marcus and Chester), how those who don't conform to traditional masculine archetypes - in even the most innocuous way, like being artistic - can be isolated and picked off, including by those who might love them the most (see: Carmy's treatment by many in his family), and how those who do perform traditional masculinity to a T, can still be decimated in its wake (see: alpha-male Mikey).

Hearing tracks like Pearl Jam's "Animal" and "Come Back", REM's "Strange Currencies" and "Oh My Heart", Radiohead's "Let Down", and Nine Inch Nail's "The Day The World Went Away" used in The Bear is incredibly nostalgic for those of us who grew up with these artists. Their inclusion in the soundtrack is also incredibly intentional (like everything to do with this show). This is the music that Mikey was likely listening to growing up and that Carmy would have heard his brother playing. This is also undoubtedly the music that Storer grew up listening to as well.

I love that in a show about a man who is coming into his own after years of toxicity and abuse - much of which was targeted at Carmy because of how he performed (or didn't perform) masculinity - that reference is being paid to this genre. And if it was the case that this was the music Mikey was listening to and, perhaps even playing for Carmy when they were kids, that Carmy would be able to go back and re-listen to these artists now and know, that despite Mikey's demons and his own relationship with masculinity, that his brother always loved Carm, just as he was.

Author's note:

Also if there is a temporary (because it has to be fucking temporary, you hear me lol) Sydcarmy break up/parting of ways, I'm gonna need Storer and Calo to soundtrack it with Pearl Jam's "Black" (the MTV Unplugged performance). I'll need Eddie Vedder growling/screaming "WE BELONG TOGETHER" over a close up of Carmy's distraught face as Syd walks away. I'm going to need to hear,

I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/I know you will be a star/In somebody else's sky/But why, why, why can't it be/Can't it be mine?,

over the end credits please.

[starstruckbyacomet]

There Is No Safe Word (Part 10 of 10)

(Source) (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7) (Part 8) (Part 9) (Prewarning)

May 16, 2022: From a video message to Pavlovich. Photo: Courtesy of Scarlett Pavlovich. 

January 20, 2023: A text to Pavlovich after she filed a police report. Photo: Courtesy of Scarlett Pavlovich.

Editor’s note: This story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault & child abuse.

This past fall, Pavlovich began studying for a degree in English literature at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. As it happens, the university had awarded Gaiman an honorary degree in 2016. In December, Pavlovich approached the head of the university, Dame Sally Mapstone, to share her experience and ask the university to review the decision to honor Gaiman. Mapstone was sympathetic but indecisive; some on the board, she told Pavlovich, would likely want evidence of prosecution to rescind his degree. As far as the police report goes, the “matter has been closed,” a spokesperson says. Gaiman’s career, meanwhile, has been marginally affected. A few pending adaptations of his novels and comics have been put on hold or canceled. But the second season of The Sandman is set to premiere on Netflix this year, as is Anansi Boys on Amazon Prime. (Amazon did not return a request for comment.) He and Palmer are entering the fifth year of an ugly divorce and custody battle. Gaiman has “bled her dry” in the divorce proceedings, according to someone close to her. She’s moved back in with her parents in Massachusetts. (Gaiman’s representatives alleged that Palmer was a “major force” driving this story in light of their contentious divorce.)

Michael Stipe, former R.E.M. singer who is also a friend of Caroline Wallner, hosted Pavlovich, Stout, & Wallner at his house on Dec 31, 2024.

In December, Pavlovich flew to Atlanta to meet some of the other women who had made accusations against Gaiman. They had been unaware of one another’s existence until they’d heard the podcast. Since then, they had formed a WhatsApp group and grown close. “It’s been like meeting survivors of the same cult,” Stout tells me. “It’s impossible to understand unless you were there.” On New Year’s Eve, Pavlovich, Stout, and Wallner gathered around a bonfire at the Athens home of the musician Michael Stipe, an old friend of Wallner’s. Kendall joined them on FaceTime. With their dark hair and delicate features, they looked like they could be sisters. Around 11 p.m., they wrote down their intentions for the year and cast the scraps of paper into the fire. Pavlovich had written that she wanted to “release the yoke of victimhood” and “invite in self-acceptance.” The next morning, she woke before the others, made coffee, cleaned the kitchen, and sat on the porch in the winter sun. “Am I happy?” she wrote in her journal. “No.” But she also noted that she wasn’t alone. “There is no need to feel abandoned anymore.”

Back to: Part 9

[dustedmagazine]

R.E. Seraphin — Fool’s Mate (Take A Turn/Safe Suburban Home)

R.E. Seraphin said of his new album, Fool’s Mate, that “on the surface, they are love songs but there's a suggestion of something more ominous.” To set aside the ominous for a moment, you can get a lot out of the surface alone. It’s an immediate, intricate record that satisfies with or without a deep listen. Take, for instance, the streaming “Lips Like Sugar” grandeur on “Virtue Of Being Wrong,” the warbling bass and sunny trumpets on “Argument Stand,” or the shaggy, shimmering guitar solo on “Fall.” The band displays a sure-handed coherence and magnetism developed and then recorded live – with the exception of piano overdubs. The result is a set of dynamic, buoyant tracks that snap together a wide enough rock and roll tent to encompass Tom Petty, The Clean and a dash of Mark Lanegan Band, among others. Taken as a whole, Fool’s Mate is also reminiscent of Wilco’s Summerteeth, another bright, powerful album with lurid desperation creeping in from the edges.

Seraphin’s voice holds the center, bending lines into hooks. It’s a quality he shares with great power pop annunciators like Michael Stipe and Matthew Sweet, though, as a vocalist, he more so evokes the melodic hush of The Clientele’s Alasdair MacLean, Lloyd Cole’s breathy deadpan or, at times, the muted viciousness of The Jesus & Mary Chain’s Jim Reid. Like Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley, too, Seraphin wrings a great deal of energy and melancholic drama out of his stage whisper. In contrast to the mix of 2022’s more blown-out Swingshift EP, Seraphin’s voice is given a great deal of room on Fool’s Mate. For all the robust buzz of music around him, here Seraphin’s lightly-fuzzed words always stand out. And it’s in both what he says and how that we return to the ominous something underlying everything.

It’s put most succinctly on “Clock Without Hands” (not a Nancy Griffith cover): “The sun is big and bright but the clouds keep on rolling in” —  just one example of a preoccupation with a gathering storm. If that observation is a good working hypothesis for how the stories on Fool’s Mate are likely to unfold, then it’s the album’s more macabre lyrics that provide the most convincing evidence of how innocent tips into sinister. On the pleading “End Of The Start,” Seraphin twists and abrades familiar moments of pop song romance to grotesque and captivating effect. Rather than get lost in someone’s eyes, the narrator’s love has “a smile [they] really want to eat” and skin that isn’t just perfect, a la Cole, but “glistening” and, further, glistening with a “dew” they “wanna feel.” Consuming, somatic details like these, conveyed by Seraphin’s earnest, stricken delivery, leap up through the album’s gleaming surface to show the human weirdness wriggling underneath, and hint at trouble to come. The brief, sparkling “Bound,” an album highlight, works against type from another direction. Rather than strain against entrapment, the line “no matter what you do to me/I will not be bound” sounds, coming from Seraphin, arch, flirtatious even, a protest that is itself bound to submit, and happily, given the interplay between the song’s characters. Here, for once, the foreboding is stalked by the joyful.

The album closes with a cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Jump In The River.” It trades some of the ragged, gleeful openness of the original for a focus and a steady rhythm, driven by a melodic bassline, that foreground the lyrics and, in doing so, create a different kind of intensity. You get the same sense of abandon to a bad idea that O’Connor delivers but from, perhaps, a more calculating place. In Seraphin’s hands, it feels somehow more intimate. Less a fight you’re overhearing than a conversation, or relationship, you might want to get out of. Put another way, “on the surface, [it’s a love song] but there's a suggestion of something more ominous.” In discussing the conception of Fool’s Mate, Seraphin also noted that the “sense of corporeality [was] intended to unsettle the listener.” As a coda, “Jump In The River” completes that welcome intention and bolsters what came before — it’s not hard to imagine “like the times we did it so hard/there was blood on the wall” being a line of Seraphin’s own — and works just as well as an introduction as Fool’s Mate starts over, pulling you back in.

Alex Johnson

[heyitstesagain]

Meeting G Malkmus

30th December, 2017. Saturday, I received an anonymous like on this app, which I re- downloaded on my phone, that same night I did say hi, however didn’t hear back, so I went sleeping, after speaking to couple of those other gross people, oh and one of those bunch of peeps asked me if I’m on it to have some warmth during the winter, “warmth,” Seriously??, who talks like that, that man is a manager at a Chelsea Pizzaria, an Italian male, (eww, Italians who are into family and all, you know, guhh) who apparently was or still is in attempt to provide winter warmth to bunch of those desperate females in their 30s I guess, anywho, let’s not drag it along too much, let’s get back to focusing on G, let me refresh your memory who that is, it is that man who just liked me randomly thinking I’m a cutie, even though I revealed I’m 4’11″, and do not want children, men, huh?! And creatures that they like?!

So then the next morning, December 31, a sunny funny cozy Sunday, I was sleeping just fine and around 10.30 in the morning he said “Hey Tes, are ya originally from New York?! Hmm?! I wonder why would he ask me that?

I just said: Hi?! I evaluated these two possibilities or three, well I’m a non- white woman and from New York, so that’s usually the first question you’d get from out of towners and that’s to generate an answer to find out when did you actually immigrated to the United States? That was case one, then second was the fact, that some of those pictures that I’ve put up on that app was my recent visit to the Netherlands, he might have seen those and wanted to know if I live here or visiting, because men apparently can control their emotions based on the fact whether the female is a visitor or a locale?! Men, huh, in general?! In their entirety?!

Thirdly, which was apparently the reason he fell for me was if I indeed was born and raised in New York, because growing up at a suburban mid western town this kid has imagined himself of being born and raised in New York City?! Did he? You know how that goes with the indie/ alternative lovers, people that listened to the Velvet Underground growing up, would wanna troll Lou Reed, and at this point I’m pretty sure he legit tried to think about coming up with another soup container like Campbell like Warhol, since he’s by trade into mechanical or technical drawing?! Based on this third hypothesis: I’d say he wanted to know if I am indeed a New York breed, body and soul, full- fleshed, rigid walking and talking?! Or may be because he felt that I like him for being him? As he sensed that, or may be its familiar pain? Would I ever know? Or may be he felt that, I’m way too artistic for a non artist? And that’s his thing?  

And the exact idea of me, all of a sudden will start seeming too good be true?! As if: a non white, 30yo, NewYork woman from Queens would know Baumbach and religiously watch everything that Wes Anderson has ever done and also think of you legit resemble Mike Mills (creatively & in congruity) now that’s an anomaly?!

Well now getting back to how I responded to his asking if I’m from here, “originally?”

 “Yeah!” Short and simple, honestly I didn’t know he will write me back, came unexpected?! Why did he?!

Was that because he has devalued himself with time for the past 18 months, otherwise why would someone this talented, who makes these paintings⬇️⬇️

full of ethics and integrity and apparently intensely good-looking without even knowing have dared to write a low- life like this female, which is me, why?!

We will get back to that shortly, but then I thought, it’s Sunday morning, why did I have to go say “hi” in the first place on a Saturday night, that would generate a response kind of obvious and now I’ve to keep talking to him, so I prohibited myself from saying anything after that “yeah,” as in I’m originally from New York, for some reason later around the mid afternoon, I asked:

T: You?

G: I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana, came to New York to make films and paint, and not be bored, Indiana is boring!

T: Okay

G: What do you do?

T: I just work

G: No I mean like for fun? Movies, or bars, or sports, or weed, or whatever?

T: I watch a lot of movies, I get paranoid with weed, and I’m an awful drinker, I sleep for fun?! Being lazy is kind of fun?!

(Wasn’t really liking him as much, and was wondering why he kept talking? On a Sunday, December 31, when guys are busy making plans for the eve), however; he responded with something which piqued my interest a little further… which goes:

G: Lol, yeah I agree with that. I’ve watched 5 movies this weekend already (inside my head, I was like, omg, I do that by the time it’s Sunday, did I meet my soul mate? ) I don’t usually watch THIS (now he does that, text in all caps to emphasize the expression/ or moment) much, but it’s fucking cold out (like oh my god, does he think that it’s civilized, and not un- hip to stay home and watch movies and not talking to people and not do activities, i. e. gym, laundry, ice- fucking- skating, rock- climbing, upstate- hiking, might have really met my souls mate, a home-body? The rarest breed in men to find, I haven’t met one before)

T: Yep, so are you not doing anything tonight?

G: I’ve a big freelance job I’ve to do tonight, you?

T: I’m not doing anything, which I don’t usually majority of the time? What kind of freelancing?

G:Video editing, I also sometimes do writing and graphic design.

What kind of thing are you looking here on KosherAllegory (I mythicized the name of the app in here, “cliched” much?!)

T: I don’t know yet, what about ya? ( I might have come off standoff- ish and non- chalant, but was not on purpose, I promise, never honestly didn’t or still don’t believe in app, however, I met my soul mate in here, him?!)

G: Hopefully a girlfriend, but not forcing it, sometimes it’s just fun to meet new people (okay so he isn’t going anywhere with me, it’s just fun to meet new people, just passing time, chatting by?!!)

T: okay, has anything ever turned serious off of here?

G: yes, I had a serious thing with a girl I’ve met on here a few years ago, when that ended I eventually used it again and met some cool people but nothings gotten too serious. Are you new to KosherAllegory?

T: Well I have it on my phone, but honestly I never use it, not finding anyone worth chatting that’s all?!

G: Oh cool, well I feel lucky then, would it be easier to just text message?

T: yeah

He then left his number and I started texted him, should of just shut it right there, right then, but I didn’t and we kept talking for three weeks before meeting on January 18th, it was a Thursday, and was extremely cold out, we both felt that our souls just connected and physically we were like those two missing pieces of a Jigsaw puzzle?!

Ironically, both our mothers had left us at a time when they were not supposed to, at a point when we would struggle forever and keep looking for a shelter, and would keep looking for them and mess up our entirety to just find that soul thats never tired of being unsatisfied?! And also we both are or have been estranged from our fathers, it’s like we have found each other!!! He’s that ugly feet twin of mine?!

& then we lost each other again, I’m on this train on my way home, it’s March 23rd, 2018, another Friday, 6.54 PM, I’m on an F train, super uncertain that I’ll ever get to see G again?!

As I’m typing away, he’s just a week away from packing up his life of last 6/7 years that’s spent in here and moving back home, near Fort Wayne, Indiana?!!!

True, he never was around, but in a way he was, in my soul, around me, beneath me, above me, all over me and in my thoughts and in my existence, people say true longing always comes back, I’d never know now of how much of that’ll ever be true but I’ll rather just have to see it through… ???!!!

Until the end of this universe?! Haha, joke?! That even a bad one, but you’ll laugh at it, only ya (paraphrased from “here,”<PAVEMENT>my only fav song from your indie man)

Caution & Trigger Warning:

I’ve exclusively used materials and pictures without permission, might get sued for violating privacy and also violation of someone’s copyright of 2017!

[thesibfiles]

Courtney going on tour right after?

Theres a misconception that after Kurts death, Courtney went straight on tour right away. This is false. The album was already set to release a few days after and they couldnt change that on such a short notice. Promotion for the album was cancelled and she pushed back the tour 4 months.

“Live Through This was supposed to provide Love an opportunity to step out from her famous husband’s shadow. “It’s annoying now, and it’s been annoying for nine years, Love said in a 1999 Jane Magazine interview of always being connected to Cobain. Released four days after Cobain’s body was found, the album’s promotion was put on hold. Rather than retreat from the public eye, Love openly mourned and helped fans of Cobain and Nirvana make sense of the singer’s death. She sat with grieving teenagers gathered outside the couple’s Seattle home and recorded a reading of parts of his suicide note that was played at the singer’s memorial that gathered near the Space Needle. In the days following his death, Love showed a very raw and emotional side and admitted that, like many fans, she didn’t have all the answers. 

It was, and still is, impossible for people to discuss Live Through This without noting the irony of the album’s title. Love has said the name was not a prediction at all, but instead a reflection of all she had endured in the months leading up to its release, including a very public custody fight with the Los Angeles Department of Family Services over daughter Frances Bean. Rumors suggested that Cobain had written much of Live Through This (it’s Miss World, not Mister, just FYI). “I’d be proud as hell to say that he wrote something on it, but I wouldn’t let him. It was too Yoko for me. It’s like, ‘No fucking way, man! I’ve got a good band, I don’t fucking need your help,’” was Love’s response to critics in Spin’s oral history of Live Through This. Love and Cobain often shared notebooks and lyrics with each other, and while there is talk of Cobain’s influence on Love’s work, or the writing of all of it, less is mentioned in the press of her impact on his lyrics and music. Rather than sucking all the life out of Nirvana or threatening the success of the band, like many assumed she would do, she inspired Cobain. Fun fact: In Utero, Nirvana’s last album, was named after a line from one of Love’s poems.

Sadly, songwriting rumors would be replaced by other rumors. Women are often vilified and condemned for the deaths of their male partners. Love, like all women, was supposed to save her partner from death and addiction. Fans of Cobain projected all their anger and resentment over the loss of the Nirvana front man onto Love, and soon she was blamed for not only his addiction but also his death. There are even two movies devoted to the theory that Courtney killed Kurt: the awful Soaked in Bleach (2015) and the equally awful Kurt & Courtney (1998). If you think we’ve come a long way, baby, sadly we haven’t. 

One year after Anthony Bourdain’s death, Asia Argento is still being blamed, and in September 2018, Ariana Grande had to take a break from social media after fans blamed her for the death of her ex Mac Miller. A few months later, she would be blamed for new beau Pete Davidson’s mental health and addiction issues. It’s amazing she finds the time to write hit songs what with all the dude destruction she has going on. When women are not being blamed for the deaths of the men in their lives, they are being attacked for not grieving properly. “She wasn’t crying. She’s got $30 million coming to her. Do you blame her for being so cool?” a hospital staffer said of Yoko Ono following John Lennon’s murder in 1980. 

About four months after Cobain’s death, Love went on tour to promote her new album. Some questioned and judged why she would go on tour so soon, but Love has said it was a necessity. She had a young daughter to support. She needed to work. She also, sadly, still needed to prove herself. “I would like to think that I’m not getting the sympathy vote, and the only way to do that is to prove that what I’ve got is real,” Love told Rolling Stone in 1994.

Twenty-five years later, Cobain’s death still hangs over Live Through This. In the days leading up to the anniversary of Cobain’s death, former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur wrote an open letter to music magazine Kerrang saying she “would not stand for Kurt’s death overshadowing the life and work of the women he left behind this year.”

“We were extremely well designed for each other,” Love has said of her relationship with Cobain. In a letter reprinted in Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, she calls him “my everything. the top half on my fraction.” The two had similar upbringings, both came from broken homes and spent childhoods shuttling between relatives and friends. They both grew up longing for love and acceptance. When we tell the story of Kurt and Courtney we talk about drugs and destruction, but we don’t talk enough about love.

The two also shared an intense drive and ambition. “I didn’t want to marry a rock star, I wanted to be one,” Love said in a 1992 Sassy interview. Evidence of her drive can be found in the many notes and to-do lists she kept, some of which are collected in Dirty Blonde. There are reminders to send her acting résumé to agencies, to write three to four new songs a week, to “achieve L.A. visibility.” A scene in the documentary Kurt & Courtney features an ex of Love’s reading from one of her to-do lists, which has “become friends with Michael Stipe” as the number one task to complete (not only did Love do this, but he is her daughter’s godfather). This ambition is not surprising from a woman who, when she was younger, mailed a tape of herself singing to Neil Sedaka in hopes of getting signed. Love knew what she wanted at an early age, and what she wanted was fame.

She was certainly living by the “do not hurt yourself, destroy yourself, mangle yourself to get the football captain. Be the football captain!” motto she championed in the 1995 documentary Not Bad for a Girl. Ambition is often a dirty word when it is used to describe women and Love is no exception. She has been repeatedly described as calculating and controlling when she should be rewarded for her blond ambition and viewed as an inspiration. Critics and the press often call her a gold digger who only married Cobain for fame and money. They fail to mention that when the two met Pretty on the Inside was actually selling more copies than Bleach, Nirvana’s debut album. Even post-Kurt, Love’s intentions were always under scrutiny. On the Today Show to do press for The People vs. Larry Flynt, Love refused to talk about her past drug use, despite the host’s repeated questions, saying the topic was not an appropriate fit for the show’s demographic. She was right, but it didn’t stop a writer from describing the move as “calculating” in a 1998 Spin piece.

Cobain was ambitious too; he was just much slyer and more secretive about it. He was known to call his manager and complain when MTV didn’t play Nirvana’s videos enough, and he would correct journalists who misquoted the band’s sales figures in interviews. While success is typically celebrated and rewarded for men and it certainly was for Cobain, he also had to be mindful of the slacker generation that loved Nirvana and greeted success — and especially mainstream success —

While female celebrities like Love are criticized for their rebellion, male celebrities, like Cobain for example, are celebrated and mythologized for it. Cobain and Love both struggled with addiction, but it is Love who is repeatedly vilified for her drug use. “She was vilified for being a mess, for being a drug addict, for not being a great parent — in other words, all of the things we expect in a male rock star,” said Bust magazine in a piece in the magazine’s 20th anniversary issue, which featured Love on the cover.

We make jokes about the drug antics of male celebrities from Keith Richards to Charlie Sheen, idolizing their debauchery and depravity. The new Netflix/Lifetime movie by Jack Daniels, The Dirt, about Mötley Crüe, takes the band’s excesses to almost comic levels. Check out crazy tourmate Ozzy Osbourne snorting a line of ants by a hotel pool! Such zany antics! I would love to see Lindsay Lohan try to get away with that. We never allow women to live down their arrests and their addictions, but we repeatedly allow men to have a redemption arc. Robert Downey Jr. was in and out of jail and on and off drugs for much of the mid to late ’90s, but we rarely, if ever, talk about his past.

When Love isn’t being attacked for her addiction issues, she is being judged for her parenting. Love’s first unflattering press was “Strange Love,” the much publicized 1992 Vanity Fair profile by Lynn Hirschberg. While the piece talks at length about Love’s drug use and constantly questions her parenting ability, it doesn’t paint Cobain in the same light. “It is appalling to think that she would be taking drugs when she knew she was pregnant,” says one close friend in the piece. Hirschberg relies on many unnamed sources and focuses often on the tabloid-like aspects of Love’s life and addictions. “Courtney has a long history with drugs. She loves Percodans (‘They make me vacuum’), and has dabbled with heroin off and on since she was eighteen, once even snorting it in Room 101 of the Chelsea Hotel, where Nancy Spungen died,” she writes. “Reportedly, Kurt didn’t do much more than drink until he met Courtney.” (Even when it is reported by Kurt and Krist that Kurt tried heroin in 1989, way before Courtney, It was also known that he smoked weed and used caugh syrup to get high in 1989 and 1990.)

This double standard was common in coverage of the couple. In Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the 2015 documentary by Brett Morgen, Love asks her husband, “Why does everyone think you’re the good one and I’m the bad one?” Later in the film we see a scene of Frances Bean’s first haircut. The child sits on Cobain’s lap while Love searches for a comb and scissors. The camera shows Cobain nodding off, and while he maintains that he is just tired, it’s clear he’s not. The scene is painful to watch, especially because those around Cobain carry on like nothing in wrong, giving the feeling this is just like any other day in the Love-Cobain household. The scene is a reminder of how the press treated Cobain’s addiction when he was alive. They just carried on like nothing was wrong, instead directing all their judgement at Love.

[1962dude420-blog]

Today we remember the passing of Warren Zevon who Died: September 7, 2003, Los Angeles, California

Warren William Zevon was an American rock singer-songwriter and musician. Zevon's most famous compositions include "Werewolves of London", "Lawyers, Guns and Money", and "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", all of which are featured on his third album, Excitable Boy (1978), whose title track is also well-known. He also wrote major hits that were recorded by other artists, including "Poor Poor Pitiful Me", "Accidentally Like a Martyr", "Mohammed's Radio", "Carmelita", and "Hasten Down the Wind". Along with his own work, he recorded or performed occasional covers, including Allen Toussaint's "A Certain Girl", Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan", Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life Again", and Prince's "Raspberry Beret".

Zevon's early music industry successes were found as a session musician, jingle composer, songwriter, touring musician, musical coordinator & bandleader. Despite all this, Zevon struggled to break through in his solo career, until his music was performed by Linda Ronstadt, beginning in 1976 with her album Hasten Down the Wind. This launched a cult following that lasted for 25 years, with Zevon making occasional returns to album and single charts until his death from cancer in 2003. He briefly found a new audience in the 1980s by teaming up with members of R.E.M. in the blues rock outfit Hindu Love Gods.

Known for his dry wit and acerbic lyrics, he was a guest numerous times on Late Night with David Letterman and the Late Show with David Letterman.

In 1978, Zevon released Excitable Boy (produced by Jackson Browne and guitarist Waddy Wachtel) to critical acclaim and popular success. The title tune is about a juvenile sociopath's murderous prom night and referred to "Little Susie", the heroine of the song "Wake Up Little Susie" made famous by his former employers the Everly Brothers. Other songs such as "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns and Money" used deadpan humor to wed geopolitical subtexts to hard-boiled narratives. Tracks from this album received heavy FM airplay, and the single release "Werewolves of London", which featured Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, was a relatively lighthearted work featuring Zevon's signature macabre outlook that reached No. 21 on the charts.

Critic Dave Marsh, in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979), called Zevon "one of the toughest rockers ever to come out of Southern California". Rolling Stone record reviews editor Paul Nelson called the album "one of the most significant releases of the 1970s" and placed Zevon alongside Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen as the four most important new artists to emerge in the decade. On May 11, 1980, Zevon and Willie Nile appeared on the King Biscuit Flower Hour.

In 1983, the recently divorced Zevon became engaged to Philadelphia disc jockey Anita Gevinson and moved to the East Coast. After The Envoy was poorly received by critics, Asylum Records ended their business relationship with Zevon, which Zevon discovered only when he read about it in the "Random Notes" column of Rolling Stone. Following these career setbacks, he relapsed into drug and alcohol abuse. In 1984, he voluntarily checked himself into a rehab clinic in Minnesota. His relationship with Gevinson ended shortly thereafter. Zevon retreated from the music business for several years, except for playing live solo shows; during this time he finally overcame severe alcohol and drug addictions.

During this period, Zevon collaborated with Bill Berry, Peter Buck and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), along with backup vocalist Bryan Cook to form a minor project called Hindu Love Gods. The group released the non-charting single "Narrator" for IRS Records in 1984, then went into abeyance for several years.

Berry, Buck and Mills served as the core of Zevon's next studio band when he re-emerged in 1987 by signing with Virgin Records and recording the album Sentimental Hygiene. The release, hailed as his best since Excitable Boy, featured a thicker rock sound and taut, often humorous songs like "Detox Mansion", "Bad Karma" (which featured R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe on backup vocals), and "Reconsider Me". Included were contributions from Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Flea, Brian Setzer, and George Clinton, as well as Berry, Buck, and Mills. Also on hand were Zevon's longtime collaborators Jorge Calderón and Waddy Wachtel.

In interviews, Zevon described a lifelong phobia of doctors and said he seldom consulted one. He had started working out, and he looked physically fit. Shortly before playing at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 2002, he started feeling dizzy and developed a chronic cough. After a period of suffering with pain and shortness of breath, Zevon was encouraged by his dentist to see a physician; he was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, a cancer (usually caused by exposure to asbestos) that affects the pleura, a thin membrane around the lungs and chest lining. Zevon was deeply shaken by the news and began drinking again after 17 years of sobriety.

Although Zevon never revealed where he may have been exposed to asbestos, his son, Jordan, suggests that it came from Zevon's childhood, playing in the attic of his father's carpet store in Arizona. Refusing treatments he believed might incapacitate him, Zevon instead began recording his final album, The Wind, which includes performances by close friends including Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, Timothy B. Schmit, Joe Walsh, David Lindley, Billy Bob Thornton, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty, and Dwight Yoakam. At the request of the music television channel VH1, documentarian Nick Read was given access to the sessions and made the television film Inside Out: Warren Zevon.

Friend Jackson Browne reunited with Zevon for his final album On October 30, 2002, Zevon was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman as the only guest for the entire hour. The band played "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" as his introduction. Zevon performed several songs and spoke at length about his illness. Zevon had been a frequent guest and occasional substitute bandleader on Letterman's television shows since Late Night was first broadcast in 1982. He noted, "I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." It was during this broadcast that, when asked by Letterman if he knew something more about life and death now, he first offered his oft-quoted insight on dying: "Enjoy every sandwich." He also thanked Letterman for his years of support, calling him "the best friend my music's ever had". For his final song of the evening, and his final public performance, Zevon performed "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" at Letterman's request. In the green room after the show, Zevon presented Letterman with the guitar that he always used on the show, with a single request: "Here, I want you to have this, take good care of it." The day after Zevon's death, Letterman paid tribute to him by replaying his performance of "Mutineer" from his last appearance. The Late Show band played Zevon's songs throughout the night.

Zevon stated previously that his illness was expected to be terminal within months after diagnosis in late 2002. However, he lived to see the birth of twin grandsons in June 2003 and the release of The Wind on August 26, 2003. Owing in part to the first VH1 broadcasts of Nick Read's documentary Warren Zevon: Keep Me in Your Heart, the album reached number 12 on the U.S. charts, Zevon's highest placement since Excitable Boy. When his diagnosis became public, Zevon wryly told the media that he just hoped to live long enough to see the next James Bond movie (Die Another Day), a goal he accomplished.

Zevon died of mesothelioma on September 7, 2003, aged 56, at his home in Los Angeles. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles.

[queerchoicesblog]

Dear Italian Writer, Your comment on Michael Stipe's song got stuck in my head all day ("they’re a doleful, heartwarming hymn to hope and love"). I've just remembered an Italian song (not from the 60s, so let me rectify my past remark - I enjoy Italian music overall, lol) that conveys the same message, and, of course, I had to come back here: A Mano a Mano (Rino Gaetano's version is my favorite one). Oh, the song is pure poetry, I think, and it speaks for itself: /1

See, Carioca Nonny? You found an Italian song I didn't know of! I mean, Rino Gaetano is quite an icon here but I have never heard that one shockingly. Thanks!

The lyrics translation is something like:

Take my hand and come closer

A flower might grow in our garden

It will never freeze in the wintry chill

A flower might grow from this love I feel for you

Rino Gaetano is actually linked to a lockdown memory that somehow got stuck in my head. A happy-ish memory of that time.

It was springtime, a very weird lonely spring. We were on strict lockdown, the streets were empty and we were scared, sad, upset by our world completely turn asunder. The only reminder of the passage of a time that seemed like frozen out of the blue was the sun. Ironically, for once we had such a gorgeous spring that felt almost like an insult: how does the sun dare shining so bright when we are all trapped inside, mourning the ones we lost?

Now I like to think it was a reminder of life from nature. Silly that it took us a lockdown to appreciate it and take notice of it, right? So many things we took for granted..

Anyway, one Sunday morning I was cleaning up my place and from the open window I heard some notes. I took a break from my chore and walked closer just like a sailor hearing a siren song from the sea. Apparently a neighbour put their stereo close to their window and raised the volume so that the music could break the heavy silence of the street. I recognised a song that now I associate with that spring, it's called Il Cielo È Sempre Più Blu and it's Rino Gaetano's most famous hit.

The melody is quite cheerful and careless even though, if you pay attention to the lyrics, you will realise that the meaning is deeper than one could think at first.

In short, it says that life will go on no matter how many bad things there are in this world: awful people, social and economic disparities, poor - or rotten - government institutions, simply bad luck... no matter how the world brings us down, life will go on. "The sky will always get brighter".

And during the spring so cruel to all of us, the sky was definitely blue and bright.

[thom-yorke-hoard]

Thom and Michael’s relationship throughout the years

We already know Thom loved REM as a child. He noted in an interview that Michael Stipe was one of the biggest reasons he decided music was his passion. He’s made it very clear that he adored and looked up to Michael very much.

In 1995, Radiohead finally got the chance to open for REM, which Thom described was like meeting God himself.

Here is an excerpt from Thom’s diary after the event:

"First Gig with R.E.M. Mr Stipe says hello ‘Hi, I’m Michael, I'm really glad you could do this. I’m a very big fan.’ Wonder how many times I will run this through my brain after today. I've never believed in hero worship but I have to admit to myself that I’m fighting for breath. I've had moments in the last two years when time has completely curved and space became a hitchcock camera trick. At these moments, barriers seem to break in my head and I will never see anything in the same way again. And for days and days all I want to do is run around jumping into peoples earshot waving my hands up and down like bjork and pulling faces. This is one of those moments."

This is too cute. He fanboyed so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Eventually, they became friends.

Michael saw how difficult dealing with the insanity brought on by the success of Creep was for Thom, and decided to share some coping mechanisms with him. He told Thom that whenever he felt helpless or overwhelmed to close his eyes and repeat “I am not here. This is not happening.” Thom then wrote what he considered to be the best song he’d ever written at the time- How To Dissapear Completely. Something funny; Michael later wrote a song called Disappear which was heavily inspired by HTDC... which is very meta.

They’ve been close for literal decades, and it all started with baby Thom looking up to and being inspired by his favorite musical artist.

Here they are getting all old together 🥺💖

[readingsrantsrambles]

Taylor Swift and the Sad Dads

by Spencer Kornhaber

theatlantic.com

The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.

In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world.

Read: The National further complicates its sadness

So some listeners have been surprised to see the two emerge, in recent years, as close collaborators. After the pandemic interrupted Swift’s promotional plans for her 2019 album, Lover, she reached out to the multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner to help produce two new albums, Folklore and Evermore, the latter of which featured all five members of The National—whom she called her “favorite band”—in some capacity. The albums easily could have amounted to a credibility-chasing costume change: pop star goes coffee shop. Instead, they refreshed Swift’s style by pairing sophisticated, moody arrangements with a new lyrical approach. Rather than once again mine her own life for lyrics, she imagined fictional scenarios: a teenage love triangle, a murder conspiracy among friends, a romance between two con artists. Swift was availing herself of the freedoms, even imperatives, that men in rock and roll had long enjoyed—projecting moral ambiguity rather than wholesomeness and virtue.

Now it appears that Swift may have pushed the men of The National in new directions too. On the band’s latest album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, out in April, Swift’s influence feels pervasive. It’s not just her voice, which she lends to the lilting track “The Alcott”; she seems to have taught them something about the mode of candid self-expression that she has mastered. In so doing, The National and Taylor Swift have become one of the unlikeliest and most productive synergies in contemporary music—the cross-pollination of a gloomy indie-rock fraternity and proudly sentimental, stadium-charming pop.

Murky, male-driven art rock tends to encourage the confession of flaws without hope for absolution. Think of Leonard Cohen in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a self-lacerating mash note to the man who cuckolded him. Or take the mealymouthed misery of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe on “Losing My Religion”: “Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough.” Like his predecessors, Berninger tends to use oblique, figurative language to evoke his own shame and humiliation. “I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses,” he sang on “Secret Meeting” (2005), possibly alluding to the tears he’d shed over a lover and the ways he’d tried to hide them.

But in First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the songwriting is tighter and often brighter, and Berninger’s meanings are remarkably direct. On the hopeful-sounding “New Order T-Shirt,” Berninger collages images with his trademark flair, and then, atypically, explains himself in a chorus that Swift herself might have written: “I keep what I can of you / Split-second glimpses and snapshots and sounds.” Over the danceable beat of “Tropic Morning News,” Berninger even tells a tale about learning to share his inner life: “There’s nothing stopping me now / From saying all the painful parts out loud.”

The changes in style reflect a change in substance. Many old National songs are character studies of a morose, hapless man getting nurtured—or dumped—by a competent woman. The trope of wife or girlfriend as mothering savior looms perpetually, even as Berninger’s humor, grounded in the mundane realities of adult relationships, usually undercuts it. “Carin at the Liquor Store”—a 2017 track whose title refers to Berninger’s wife and lyrical co-writer, Carin Besser—sees him mocking his own abjection: “I was a worm, I was a creature … I was walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheever.”Taylor Swift seems to have taught The National something about the mode of candid self-expression that she has mastered.

But if The National’s signature narrator used to be a lonely mope, here he’s no longer wallowing quite so helplessly. On the new album, Berninger sings about being useful to his romantic partners. In the gentle, kind closing track, “Send for Me,” he offers: “Send for me whenever wherever / Send for me I’ll come and get you.” Even the breakup songs are a bit rebalanced. The thundering “Eucalyptus,” for example, depicts a couple dividing their belongings. Listening to it is like watching a bout of arm wrestling that’s closely matched and oddly poignant. And on the plaintive ballad “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,” he’s the one consoling someone whose interior world is—as has been the case for so many of The National’s past narrators—an “awful place.” The new lucidity of the lyrics thus has a constructive purpose. As Swift’s songs have always shown, reaching out to connect with others requires openhearted, straightforward communication—from her outright plea “Baby, just say yes” on the 2008 classic “Love Story” to her simple admission “I’m the problem, it’s me” on 2022’s “Anti-Hero.”

Berninger does seem a little bashful about now acting as a healer. On “Alien,” he wryly suggests, “I can be your nurse or something.” Nursing, as that “or something” acknowledges, is a role that our culture hasn’t exactly shown men how to play. Those who try, in music, tend to overshoot into messianic territory (see Coldplay’s “Fix You” or U2’s past few albums). In dialing back the misery and adding Swiftian uplift, the new album sometimes flirts with this kind of sappiness. One can almost imagine “Send for Me” as the first dance at a wedding or “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend” in a touching insurance ad.

Read: The real Taylor Swift would never

But the band guards against cheap inspirationalism by relying on the idiosyncrasies that have defined it all along. Its old motifs—romantic death and rebirth, sad saps saved by realists, drums that burst like flak cannons—now serve a new aim by acting as a reminder that empathy doesn’t come easily. Rescuing people can mean coaxing them to share how they really feel—and that process requires psychological struggle. On “Alien,” Berninger urges someone to “drop down out of the clouds you’re in.” A hint of conflict lurks in the line, acknowledging just how bracing such conversations can be. Real breakthroughs, these artists have shown in their work together, come from blunt and open exchange. As Swift and Berninger sing on “The Alcott”: “I tell you my problems / You tell me the truth … You tell me your problems / And I tell you the truth.”

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “How Taylor Swift Infiltrated Dude Rock.”

[projectalbum]

All the best. 200. “Accelerate,” 201. “Collapse Into Now,” 202. “Unplugged 1991/2001: The Complete Sessions” by R.E.M.

After exhaustive touring, a greatest hits disc, and a dud album, the lovable lads from Athens, R.E.M., wisely took some time to figure things out before regrouping.

The four-year absence didn’t register with me, as I was collecting the back catalogue during that break. As far as I was concerned, new material was everywhere I looked, filling up my burgeoning record collection as I finished high school and started making my way through college. By the time Accelerate (#200) burst onto the scene in March 2008, I was a junior in film school, about to attend my first documentary festival. I put aside an extra $15 from my work study job to pick up the CD the day of release— the first time I’d been able to perform that record store* ritual for my favorite band. *(Though I didn’t have access to any record stores at the time, so it was likely procured from the closest Wal-Mart.) 

Fast, lean, gritty, produced by a guy who goes by “Jacknife,” this set of songs could not be more of a deliberate course-correction from the overly fussy, mid-tempo Around The Sun. Peter Buck’s skills on the axe, often mixed way down on the previous album, here announce Accelerate's punk-ish purpose in the intro to “Living Well is the Best Revenge,” leading off with a dexterous riff before the drums come trampling in. Stipe spits furiously, with the best use of his full-throated tenor since New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and the rare bar to inspire a Fuck Yeah fist-pump: "Don't set your talking points on me / History will set me free / The future's ours and you don't even rate a footnote.” Recorded and released in the tail-end of the Bush years, there are unmistakable references, drawn in anger and in weariness, to the emotional tolls of that reign.

“If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will,” Stipe muses at the top of “Houston,” a hair over 2 minutes but suffused with poignancy. It’s an acoustically-driven Western-tinged ballad that hearkens back to “Swan Swan H” or “Monty Got A Raw Deal,” but here the drums are splashy and blown-out, the organ serves a bleating counterpoint to the vocal, and bowed electric guitar bleeds through into the verses, serious as storm clouds. The intriguing production choices are what mark it as the Accelerate twist on familiar R.E.M. tropes. The chorus: “Houston is filled with promise / Laredo's a beautiful place / Galveston sings like that song that I love / Its meaning has not been erased” is stirring, as if to absolve the Lone Star state for spawning the political dynasty that led to 2 disastrous presidencies. "Belief has not filled me / And so I am put to the test” are the last words before distortion drowns out the melody like a fatal wave. The song has never left my head.

“Until The Day Is Done” is a more familiar flavor of the band’s earnest political identity— it even ended up scoring a CNN-produced piece on environmental issues. The lyrics approach the first two verses of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” in reflecting a distressing capitalist landscape, and to read them is to find that the “business-first flat earthers” have only doubled-down in the decade since the song was released. But the lack of idiosyncrasies leaves us with a folky protest song, and it has a tendency to become oatmeal to the ear, nestled amongst the bolder sonic moments.

By which I mean the muscular guitar sounds and fast n’ furious arrangements on tracks like “Man-Sized Wreath,” “Accelerate,” “Horse To Water”— the revitalized band blowing up the electronic, art school solemnity of the preceding Bill Berry-less records. I remember I once put on Accelerate during a day of recording drive-by b-roll footage with some new coworkers, who enthused, “We were a little worried when you said you were gonna play R.E.M…. but this is really good!” I just glided past the implied criticism and took the positive note.

In early 2011, songs for their follow-up began to be released on YouTube and rolled out by the pop culture press. I’ll admit I was underwhelmed by what I heard. Accelerate’s novelty, its flouting of the band’s cliches, had me expecting another quantum leap in a wild direction. Collapse Into Now (#201) was feeling more like a greatest hits mashup.

“Discoverer” at times sounds like an interpolation of “Man-Sized Wreath” (compare the chorus of the former to the verses of the latter.) That exultant wordless harmonizing on “It Happened Today” is straight from “Belong” on Out of Time (plus special guest Eddie Vedder.) “Blue,” the closing track, takes equal parts New Adventures’ “E-Bow The Letter” (dark grinding minor key, Beat poetry, plus Patti Smith-voiced chorus) and Out of Time's “Country Feedback” (the chords sound similar, and the aching Peter Buck solo is back). I’d never before been able to identify the sonic inspirations so easily. However, for all my creeping dissatisfaction, as a true fanboy I knew the record would grow on me. The prophecy was indeed fulfilled.

The song that most represented the sound of a modern-day R.E.M. was “Mine Smell Like Honey.” It was unmistakably them, with the inscrutable lyrics, Michael in gravel-throated rock mode, a Mike Mills vocal harmony line designed to carry its own trajectory while lifting up the chorus, Buck with an indelible riff that doesn’t show off for its own sake— but it would fit right on modern rock radio in 2011, if that still existed. I had another one of my Best Buy PA system epiphanies, clicking this track into place, proving sometimes you need some huge speakers with good bass to truly experience certain songs. In a similar mode, “That Someone Is You” rockets by in under 2 minutes; a live-in-the-room ode to the feeling of meeting that exciting new person who'll lift you out of the mud. 

The mid-tempo balladry is back as well, diversifying the sound from the previous release. In “Oh My Heart,” a direct sequel to “Houston,” Stipe croons a New Orleans spiritual with "a new take on faith," while Buck's mandolin comes out of retirement for another sweet, sad melody, and Mills fills in the mournful choir. As with the song’s predecessor, it’s a high-point in the track listing that moves me whenever I hear it.

Before I had warmed to Collapse Into Now, I comforted myself with the idea that New LP equaled New Tour. I could finally catch my favorite band live! They told the press they had no plans to tour behind the record. Odd, but they were an institution, so they could take a pause. I’d recently witnessed Paul McCartney tearing through his hits in person, and he’d already blown past age 64. Then in September 2011, R.E.M. announced they had decided to “call it a day as a band”— a phrase designed to wave away the idea of Beatles-esque acrimony. I was, you can probably imagine, more than a little heartbroken. The previous tour had come within 2-and-a-half hours of my town back in ’08. At that point in my life, that seemed like a hassle: why not wait, see if they made it a little closer next time? Now, I wish I had put in the extra effort.

With this announcement, the sense of Collapse as R.E.M.’s tribute album to themselves came into focus. Stipe is even waving goodbye, for god’s sake, on the first album cover photo to clearly feature the faces of the whole band since 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It's just like me to overstay my welcome, bless” he sings with sheepish glee on “All The Best.” Shrouded by the spirit-radio-filtered effect of his “Blue” recitation comes his clearest statement of purpose: "I want Whitman proud. Patti Lee proud. My brothers proud. My sisters proud. I want me. I want it all,” and then Patti Lee (Smith), one of his earliest lead singer inspirations, draws the narrative to a close… before the ringing jangle of opener “Discoverer” reprises and concludes. The book’s been closed shut… but the story of the band’s music continues.

There was the inevitable plundering of the vaults. An over-arching Best Of record, finally combining songs from the I.R.S. and WB catalogues (didn’t buy it), with 3 brand new recordings (they’re ok). Two digital-only “Complete Rarities” collections, encompassing hours of b-sides and soundtrack cuts (lotta great stuff, but this week WB removed all of theirs from Spotify, so I’m pretty perturbed).

In 2014, 3 years into my mourning period, they announced Unplugged 1991/2001 (#202), a 2-CD set of their appearances on the MTV show where bands play intimate, stripped-down acoustic sets… you know, in front of multiple TV cameras capturing every angle. Now this got me excited, maybe more than I had been for their swan song record— Bob Dylan Unplugged, Paul McCartney Unplugged, and The Unplugged Collection Vol. 1 had all got a lot of play in my home through the years. Other than my favorite version of “Half A World Away” closing out the Vol. 1 compilation, and a burned, hand-labeled CD-R I had once glimpsed on a coffee table during a realtor’s house tour, recordings of R.E.M.’s appearance on the show didn’t seem to exist until now. I pre-ordered that bad boy.

The set is a snapshot of two very different eras for the band: Disc 1 features them on the cusp of superstardom fueled by Out Of Time’s success, with the classic lineup of Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe and support from Peter Holsapple. Disc 2 finds them down to a three-piece, supporting Reveal, a record that never got its due, with their frequent contributors Scott McCaughey and Joey Waronker filling out the sound. “Losing My Religion” is on both discs, of course, from the bright new hit that pumps up the crowd to a warmly-recieved old friend.

The treat in hearing these shows is also two-fold. There’s the way that familiar tunes get adapted to the setting: “It’s The End of the World...” is transformed into a Friday night Americana hoe-down, while “The One I Love” is slowed down to a gritty lament with a slightly varied vocal melody. After the 2nd chorus and an instrumental bridge in “Country Feedback,” Stipe folds lines from Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone” into the tune, a goosebump-inspiring moment.

Then there’s the added benefit of songs that I’d once slept on revealing their power in the live arrangements. The 2001 show closes with several tracks from Reveal, and free of all electronic touches, the choruses of “Disappear” and “Beat A Drum,” well, revealed themselves to me, becoming new earworms and spawning a personal reevaluation of the album. “Find The River” had once been a pleasant-enough closer on Automatic For The People, but a step down from the iconic “Nightswimming” that precedes it. Now it’s a new favorite, and I’m prone to singing it loud with embarrassing over-earnestness.

With the band truly well and dissolved (and no cynical cash-grab “reunion tours” planned, those damn jerks and their integrity), the repackaging of older material is the only avenue left for unheard R.E.M. music. The studio albums are greeting their landmark anniversaries with special editions: Automatic’s 25th was recently celebrated with various configurations of physical release, including one with a disc of demos and a 5.1 surround sound Blu-ray that I WILL possess one day, damnit! Just this week, their social media team announced a sprawling set of BBC sessions and interviews, hopefully to be made available on streaming services in addition to the fancy 9-disc set (I know, sacrilege in my blog about physical media, but space is at a premium and I haven’t even COVERED the live DVDs and music video collections I already have of these guys).

There’s even a podcast exclusively about the band! The exceedingly silly interplay between Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott was enough to get me to listen to several eps of their previous U2-centric show (a band that I’m fairly positive towards), so "R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME?,” in which they go album-by-album through the discography, was appointment listening from the jump. I couldn’t help but sprinkle inside jokes from the podcast into my first entry. Fuckin’ stoked!

It’s hard to articulate how much R.E.M.’s music has meant to me. There’s undeniable power in finding art when you’re young and unsteady. To ally yourself with a favorite band, especially one that clearly creates from a place of conscience and empathy, is to find a solid stone floor that supports you when you’re at your most weighted down. It’s easy for me to hold onto nearly 2 dozen discs because there’s so much variety. They could uplift, interrogate the status quo, offer humor or succor or an outlet for the uncertainty we struggle with. Michael Stipe sang about identity, queerness, nature, hypocrisy, anger, tenderness, artists, politicians, outsiders, expressive freedom, and quiet contemplation. These lyrics came from what he saw and felt but they were conjured by the instrumentals constructed by Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and for years Bill Berry. Jangle-rock or country-western or chamber pop or folk or glam or electronica— they busted through genres with grace and power; immutability was not an option. They couldn’t finish a record until Michael had the words; Michael had their blueprint on tape to fill his ears until the images flowed.

“Here’s a little agit for the never believer / Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah / Here’s a little ghost for the offering,” Stipe sang in his 11th hour, one-take performance of “Man On The Moon.” Now I offer a 20-song Document of the R.E.M. songs that mean the most to me at this moment. It nearly killed me to whittle it down, and your favorite probably isn’t on it. The song I just quoted isn’t even on it! But that’s the power of R.E.M., where the subjective experience rules all.

[theghostpinesmusic]

Some Notes On Ride

As some regular readers might remember, at one point this whole recording project was known as Triptych. As I've said and written before elsewhere, the idea was to record three albums, forming the sonic version of a medieval triptych: three "panels," one story. The story would be the cycle of the seasons, literally but also metaphorically. There would be a folksy, acoustic album with a sort of spring/summer feel, a jammy, electric album with a sort of summer/fall feel, and then a darker, "winter" album to close things out. The cycle, of course, would move through birth, growth, death, and then rebirth: in nature, in individuals, in relationships, in the trajectory of human society. You know, relatively unambitious stuff. This sort of ended up happening, but got a little muddled along the way as I wrote more songs than I'd planned and struggled with the idea of leaving songs I liked unrecorded for the sake of some loose concept-album plan. In the end, I ditched Triptych and recorded everything I wanted to record instead, ending up with four albums instead of three. Wilderness Amen stuck around as the first album of the cycle, as I wrote a bit about in the notes for that album already. But, early on, Ride was part of the triptych's middle album, a double-LP called Maps. The first half of Maps was going to be electric, with generally big-picture, abstract lyrics, while the second half was going to be more acoustic, more reflective, and more autobiographical. Both halves of the album would feature songs that were more structurally complex and had more layers (overdubs, harmonies, etc.) than my recordings had previously had. If you've listened to both, you can probably guess that the double album got split into two albums and ended up being Ride and Maps, respectively. The writing and recording of these albums coincided with my recent fall into obsession with the Grateful Dead's songbook, and that influence, as well as the influences of bands I'd already listened to for years like Phish, Trey Anastasio Band, and Chris Robinson Brotherhood show most obviously in this album, I think. "Ride" starts the album with an opening riff and later overlapping guitars, "The Melody," one of my oldest songs, has a new, muted jam section that is one of my favorite things I've ever recorded, "Sometimes" has a pop sensibility to it right up until it takes a very Phish-y left turn at the outro, "Bright Girl" has an acoustic-vs-electric guitar duel near the end, and "Electric Dream" and "Invocation" both build up energy to a crescendo via guitar jams. I'm not as good at composing these kinds of guitar parts as I'd like to be, yet, but this whole project, and Ride in particular, helped me take the first few steps down that road. "I Love You (Or The Mountains)" and "Ways To Fly" stick out to me as slightly weird fits for this album, but they fit here better than elsewhere and I didn't want to leave them behind. "I Love You" was a song I wrote shortly after "Running," on an afternoon when I had a hankering to write a song that had some of the lowest and highest notes I could sing in it. I ended up with something that reminds me in a weird way of Michael Stipe's vocals, and then figuring out how to record the bridge of the song with a sort of Beatlesesque vibe finally brought the whole thing together for me. "Ways" is a much older song that has just never made it on an album, partially because depending on the day, the lyrics either hit hard for me or feel a bit trite or sophomoric. So, after singing this song a certain way for ten years or so, I rewrote about half of the lyrics during the Triptych sessions to be something I felt less ambivalent about, and it was the exact change the song needed. How you hear it now is, I think, how it was always supposed to sound. I just finally stumbled on the right words. So, the most fun part of writing the notes for Wilderness Amen was the random trivia section. So let's do that again! The subtitle of "Ride (Charley)" is another tribute to my dog, Charley, who passed away during these sessions. He was

actually laying on the floor in the studio on the day I recorded the demo of this song, when I was still trying to decide the name of the song's protagonist. He was such a good and quiet dog that I was able to record the whole demo with him in the room. Ride, Charley, ride. Once, while performing "The Melody" live, I mis-sung the line as "I woke from a dream to the sound of the melody / In a house full of dust, with a mouthful of cats" and it took me at least a minute to stop laughing hysterically and start the song over. I still worry every time I play it that I'll sing it backwards again. "Sometimes" was the result of my attempt to write a catchy, "disposable" pop song. It's as hard as they say! It was intentionally based on the outro chords to Phish's "Harry Hood," because of course it is. "Bright Girl" is a little hamfisted, maybe, but I wanted to write a song that was about wanting to fall in love outside of the usual hyper-gendered, codependent, typically toxic model of "love" that movies and music present us with. It's hard to think outside of those ideas when you've lived with them in your face your whole life, but I'll do a better job next time. "Ways To Fly" is a song about trying to find a way out of depression without taking advantage of others emotionally, and without hating yourself for being depressed. It's hard to do; fortunately, writing a song about it is super-easy. If you don't recognize the title of "Oread," you should read some of H.D.'s poetry. It's really good. And this pointed-pine-themed instrumental made a great segue into "Jeff Tweedy's 49th Electric Dream," which is a reference to Wilco's song "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard" and also to the fact that this song is basically the same chord progression as Wilco's "Handshake Drugs." Like "Bright Girl," this song seemed a little...unsubtle to me at first. Then, during COVID, my grandpa died and I had to watch his funeral over Facebook because I couldn't travel. It's as bad as the song makes it sound. How do we live lives with meaning when reality has become virtual? "Emerald Downs" is the name of the apartment complex I lived in for most of my 20s. I explained "Invocation" to a friend in an email this morning like this: "The original idea of "Mother Roads" as a sort of highway deity or demigod came about through a half-serious/half-joking conversation ["Neal" and I] had years and years ago while trying to drive from the Pacific coast to Ohio without paying to sleep anywhere (partially for the fun of it, but partially because at the time we had a combined $200 or so beyond gas money to our names). I think we were somewhere in Montana at the time, and I vaguely remember a campfire, and maybe a lake (?), but ["Neal"] had built this weird little pagan effigy and burnt it in the fire as a "sacrifice" to "Mother Roads" to guarantee our safety. It felt a little hokey, years later, to insert that character/spirit into a song in the form of a prayer, but once I sung it a few times, it felt right, so I left it that way."

[aprilrichardson]

I Know It’s Over

There are people to whom music doesn't matter. I often envy these people. My mom is one of them -- she's not really concerned with music, poetry, movies, or anything in popular culture. She considers herself a whole, satisfied person without these things in her life, free from any aesthetic crutches. I am not one of those people. I needed music. I need music. From a very early age, I needed music to tell me I was okay. I needed it to tell me I was normal, I needed it to tell me I was weird, I needed it to confirm that I'd be fine either way. I needed it in a dramatic way. I needed it in a mundane way, playing all the time in the background like wallpaper with a pattern you've stopped noticing. I needed to identify with it, I needed it to make me feel complicated emotions I'd never felt before; it could comfort me or repulse me, soothe me or force me to look outward, echo my own sentiments or expand my mind to fit new ones. Music (and the bands/people who made it) served as my mentor, my older sibling, my voice of reason and, at times, bad influence. When you're an only child from a fractured family, you spend a lot of time in your room. Your hobbies can become your closest friends. Music became my savior and my most time-consuming, all-encompassing, money-draining pursuit. My savings account would be at least triple its current amount had I not been so obsessed with seeing bands and collecting their records. Perhaps I would have created more things of my own if I'd not spent so much time fawning over the creations of others. My personality would have been entirely different if, early on in my youth, I had not blatantly lifted the clothes and mannerisms and styles of those I looked up to or had not read the books and watched the movies they had championed. For better or worse, art -- this specific form of art, music -- has been and continues to be a transformative force in my life. At the very center of this were two bands, R.E.M. and The Smiths, and specifically two people: Michael Stipe and Morrissey. My first two real heroes, with now only the former still on the pedestal I built when I was around 11 or 12. I moved to a new neighborhood and school district when I was in second grade, and became fast friends with a boy my age who lived one street over. Nathan and I shared a lot of the same interests, and as we started middle school, a deep obsession with those two aforementioned bands and frontmen (and, also, Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan). Nathan was gay before either one of us knew what that meant, and was often mocked for this -- I was made fun of, too, but for reasons far less difficult for me than coming to terms with my sexuality as an adolescent. But, for our own reasons, we were outcasts, seeking comfort in our chosen art. This was conservative Georgia in the late '80s/early '90s, a time well before the Internet, before easily accessible media, when role models were fought for tooth and nail, with plans having to be made on how to save enough allowance for cassette tapes, older friends or siblings bribed to purchase things with "parental advisory" labels we'd smuggle into our rooms later. I can barely put into words what hearing (and seeing!) Morrissey for the first time did to us -- did FOR us! For Nathan, in such an environment, Morrissey became a blueprint for queerness, the very first peek into the very POSSIBILITY of life as a grown man who wasn't either an alpha male jock, like all the ones at our school, or stern businessman with a briefcase, like all of our (step)dads. He was the first person to, with his mannerisms and his very existence, communicate to Nathan that it was perfectly fine (and cool even!) to, in the words of the bullies, "act like a girl." And the magical thing is, he somehow simultaneously did the exact opposite for me! As a masculine tomboy, I saw in him a person so easily blurring the lines of both! He made me feel better about the qualities I had so often been told "weren't ladylike." We talked about him constantly. We dressed like him. It goes without saying that his music was playing in the background nearly every time we hung out. I remember my mom allowing me to stay up late to watch Johnny Carson the night Morrissey was on -- I was 12, and I absolutely remember my mom getting angry, watching alongside me as Morrissey fans screamed over Bill Cosby (gulp) as he tried to talk. The next year, Morrissey was on Saturday Night Live, and my mom let me go over to Nathan's house to watch it (our parents became very close friends as well). He taped it on their VCR as we watched, and we immediately played it back. We watched it probably every day for months. We didn't have the money to buy all of his back catalog, so an older kid in my youth group at church let me borrow his Smiths CDs, and I dubbed copies on my tape deck for us. I sat and hand-wrote the lyrics down on notebook paper, carefully transcribing from the liner notes as the tape recorded. It's difficult for me to be eloquent here, and I always find it hard to convey these feelings to people who are, well, normal, who can hear a song and go, "That's nice!" and not have to immediately know its backstory, who wrote it, why they wrote it, what inspires them, what books they read, etc. Who don't feel their insides twist into knots when a turn of phrase meets a melody and the combination makes them feel understood in a way they never have, sets them at ease in a way that even the kind words of the closest relative couldn't do. That is absolutely how I felt the first time I heard The Smiths. When you're 12, at least when I was 12, the last people you feel like you can talk to about your feelings are your parents; and for Nathan, doubly so, as I don't think he could even articulate his until Morrissey's lyrics shed some light on what he'd been going through. So, for us, this guy was so far from "just a singer" -- he was a beacon, a mentor, he told us it was okay to be effeminate and okay to be masculine and okay that you didn't get invited to the parties because staying in your room reading books was more glamorous anyway. The world wasn't made for people like us and that should be worn as a badge of honor, not shame. Such a message was REVELATORY for a girl whose every male role model had let her down or left entirely and a boy who didn't want to play football or shoot guns. The obsession continued and deepened, and in high school, became full on reliance. Who better to help me navigate the emotional minefield that is the teen years than Morrissey? I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't do drugs, I didn't "party," I didn't even so much as hold a boy's hand until I was a couple weeks shy of 16 years old -- all of the things that kids considered fun and did on a regular basis were so foreign to me, until I got home to my bedroom and was soothed by the voice of a guy who also did not participate in any of the above. I didn't really know anyone in real life who seemed to understand my plight more than the man whose voice was blasting out of my speakers. To me, Morrissey was always absolutely the voice of the underdogs. The weirdos. The outcasts. The disenfranchised. Anyone who felt left out, let down, misunderstood, too sensitive, too sad. He was there to comfort us, understanding and empathetic to our needs while giving the finger to the system and the people therein who were keeping us down, shoving us into lockers, ripping the glasses off our faces and stomping on them in front of their domineering friends. When someone writes songs as seemingly personal as Morrissey's, you tend to think you know them. And in my case, having read so many books about him (and now some BY him), I felt that way, to a degree. I like to think of myself as a rational person (perhaps after reading this far, you disagree), but I definitely felt a bit like I "knew" him in the sense that I'd picked up on words he'd frequently used ("vulgar" and "vile" were personal favorites), had working knowledge of the causes that were important to him, and certainly knew his favorite bands and movies and authors. I'd even been lucky enough to meet him quite a few times, especially after moving to Los Angeles, where I'd see him at restaurants and shows, and he was always cordial (if not downright sweet) to me every time we spoke. Of course I'd heard stories about him "being a dick," but that never bothered me, truly, only because I think that's kind of relative, and perhaps a lack of manners or catching someone on a bad day is a bummer, and the "temperamental artist" archetype exists for a reason. Sure, it's ideal that someone you admire is nice to you should you ever interact, but a surly encounter would not cause me to write someone off completely. So, because of this, well, perhaps delusion, I was able to explain away certain statements, such as calling Chinese people a "subspecies" while addressing animal rights, because I knew of his history of exaggeration when trying to get his point across about that subject in particular, the one perhaps dearest to his heart. (And I won't pretend that white privilege didn't play a part; it's undoubtedly and shamefully easier to conveniently ignore something when you aren't the target.) This person's main place in my life thus far was almost as a therapist, so the possibility of him having anything other than the best of intentions seemed so unlikely. But the words became harder to parse, excuses harder to make. Playing the contrarian for the sake of it isn't helpful (or even entertaining) in times like these. You aren't at the Algonquin Round Table. You're courting Stormfronters. It's not funny or charming. I don't expect every artist I look up to (or even every friend or acquaintance in my life) to share my exact same views, but when your band wears T-shirts supporting the Black Panthers yet you voice your support for the likes of Nigel Farage, how does the cognitive dissonance not paralyze you? You change lyrics to songs to slam Trump, yet you basically share his views on immigration? You imply that a gay teenager -- arguably the demographic most deeply affected by your art -- is at fault for the predatory behavior of an adult? You've told anyone who will listen that you were raised on feminist literature, yet you claim the female victims of Harvey Weinstein -- a man who hired fuckin' BLACK OPS to spy on his accusers to make sure they never came forward, so calculated were his plans -- were just "disappointed" that their RAPES didn't result in career advancement?! WHO ARE YOU. Who is this person saying this? The very person who gave me the strength to stand against the establishment has become the establishment! The person whose voice soothed with empathy and compassion for outsiders like me has become someone I would have crossed the street to avoid. The bullied has become the bully. He has, for years now, exhibited the very closemindedness I thought he was trying to free us from. Is it just an inevitability that the spoils of success will change a person? If you isolate yourself and invite no one into your circle who will ever question you, is this the result? Contempt for the very people who supported you for so long? A quality I used to admire in Morrissey was his obstinance, but I've found as I've aged myself, standing by opinions for the sake of it, refusing to allow yourself to grow and change as more information becomes available, to never soften your heart and swallow your pride and apologize when you've realized you might have been wrong about something -- that's not admirable, that's cowardice. I appreciate it more when people admit they don't know enough about a subject to comment on it instead of making a statement just for attention. My heart is broken. The man I looked to as an oasis of sensitivity in a desert of toxicity seems, well, just plain mean and vengeful now. I refuse to be cynical, and I refuse to be someone who says, "That's what you get for having heroes." Perhaps the lesson here is just knowing when to let go. And that it was indeed the songs that saved my life, not the man.

Fifteen-year-old me in my bedroom.

[3thurs]

Third Thursday events and exhibitions for October 15

The next Third Thursday — the monthly evening of art in Athens, Georgia — is scheduled for Thursday, October 15, 2020, from 6 to 9 p.m. All exhibitions are free and open to the public. Several of the venues are closed or in between exhibitions. It is recommended that you contact a venue in advance to confirm its current status, especially in light of the potential for changing circumstances during COVID-19.

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia

“Sarah Cameron Sunde: 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea” — A series of site-specific participatory performances and video works by the interdisciplinary artist Sarah Cameron Sunde, addressing climate change and slow time.

“Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Horvitz Collection” — This exhibition presents Japanese pottery and porcelain created by three generations of master ceramic artists. Made with both ancient and modern materials and methods, their works are exceptionally diverse and share exceptional craftsmanship and sophisticated design.

“Carl Holty: Romantic Modernist” — This exhibition of paintings and drawings reflects Holty’s personal pursuit of modern art theory, much of which focused on color as one of his essential building blocks.

“Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath in the Art of Rolland Golden” — As the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, this exhibition presents works Rolland Golden created in its aftermath. These paintings and drawings, some of the last work Golden made, document the devastation of the storm and focus on the traumatic experiences of New Orleanians.

“Drama and Devotion in Baroque Rome” — Paintings on loan from the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University that show the influence of Caravaggio, including works by Rubens, Orazio Gentileschi and Simon Vouet.

“In Dialogue: Cecilia Beaux’s ‘Twilight Confidences’” — A look in detail at Cecilia Beaux’s “Twilight Confidences,” an important recent addition to the museum’s collection and the artist’s first major exercise in plein-air painting.

The museum’s days of operation have changed to Thursday through Sunday, and a free timed ticketing system is now in place to limit the number of people in the building, along with new policies for safety during COVID-19. Info at https://georgiamuseum.org/visit/.

tiny ATH gallery

“It’s Easier This Way” by Eli Saragoussi — A colorful reflection on the intensity of the past many months. The artist hopes that this collection of work provides a welcome escape for a moment or two. The featured felt piece was a product of the Shelter Projects.

Safety precautions in place for tiny ATH gallery:

Please, please, please WEAR YOUR MASK (we will have gloves and sanitizer and extra masks readily available as well).

4 people will be allowed in at a time or a larger family group that has been sheltering together.

ENTER through front porch door, EXIT through back of gallery (one-way traffic).

Please consider parking on Pulaski St. or Cleveland Ave. to alleviate parking issues, and allow for extra space for the entry line.

Please follow signage instructions and maintain safe 6-feet-plus distancing while waiting to enter the gallery.

Feel free to mingle (6 feet safely away from one another) on the back patio area.

If you feel unwell or have been in contact with anyone who has been sick, please stay home.

Ciné

“The New Americans” — by Blair LeBlanc 

Hotel Indigo, Athens

“Athens Facades” — Photography by Mike Landers. The artist took these building portraits at dark downtown and in Five Points between 2000 and 2002. His first building portrait shows what had been The Gap on Clayton Street, which left a beautifully symmetrical illuminated façade and an empty interior. Landers finds this an exercise of looking in and looking out.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art

Socially distanced opening reception, 7 – 9 p.m.

“The Unseen Forest: Three Photographers” — Featuring the Work of Jaclyn Kolev Brown, Nydia Blas and Aaron Hardin, curated by Alex Christopher Williams. 

Lyndon House Arts Center

3Thurs Gallery Talk, 6 p.m. — Don Chambers, Alex McClay and Katherine McCullough. Join curator Beth Sale for a discussion with artists from the “Boundless” exhibition. Please visit https://www.accgov.com/lyndonhouse to reserve your free ticket for the talk. 20 tickets available, face coverings required and social distancing enforced.  

On view: 

“Imagination Squared: Pathways to Resilience” — A community project directed by Christina Foard featuring over 1,000 small works

“The Art of Jeremy Ayers” — Photography, painting and drawing by this inspirational artist as well as “Jeremy Dance,” a film by Michael Stipe

“Boundless” — Site installations by Paula Reynaldi, Don Chambers, Derek Faust, Katherine McCullough and Alex McClay

“Waterfall Plot” — Poetry and photography by Andrew Zawacki

Paintings by Kendall Rogers in the Lounge Gallery

We require face coverings and social distancing and follow all CDC guidelines. As we navigate through these unusual times, we recommend visiting our website, social media or calling the Arts Center for further information regarding procedures for visiting the galleries. Please note gallery hours and numbers of visitors at one time are subject to change and will follow CDC guidelines. For more information, please call 706.613.3623. Please visit us at accgov.com/lyndonhouse or on Facebook and Instagram.

Creature Comforts Brewing Co.’s CCBC Gallery

Get Artistic Artist-in-Residence Abigail West’s installation made from hard-to-recycle industrial materials from Creature Comforts’ brewing facilities will remain on view through the end of October. See it outside under Creature Comforts’ courtyard pavilion until 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, or until 6 p.m. on Sunday. More information at GetCuirious.com.

Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries, University of Georgia

Closed for Third Thursday.

The Classic Center

Opening: “Inside/Outside,” 6 – 7:30 p.m. — Register for free tickets to reserve limited timeslots at https://classiccenter.formstack.com/forms/3rd_thursday_sign_up.

“Inside/Outside” — An exploration of domestic spaces as well as an opportunity to step outside and enjoy the garden. The three artists featured in Gallery I (Christina Foard, Leah McKellop and Cameron Bliss) are intimately examining their surroundings and the people, pets and furniture they share these spaces with. Downstairs in Gallery II five artists invite us into their gardens: Beth Richardson, Richard Houston, Melanie Graham Epting, Nancy Everett and Richard Botters.

—

Third Thursday was established in 2012 to encourage attendance at Athens’ established art venues through coordination and co-promotion by the organizing entities. Rack cards promoting Third Thursday and visual art in Athens are available upon request. This schedule and venue locations and regular hours can be found at 3thurs.org.

Contact: Michael Lachowski, Georgia Museum of Art, mlachow@uga.edu.

[dustedmagazine]

Lonnie Holley — Oh Me Oh My (Jagjaguwar)

Lonnie Holley has led a life that posed considerable challenges. An orphan who spent time as the adopted child of a burlesque dancer and much of the rest of his childhood in Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, an institution even more hellish than what one might imagine, early on Holley endured a great deal of abuse. Challenges were not to end there, and without the artistic pursuits to which he has been devoted, a conduit for purging the demons of his life, one wonders what might have happened to Holley. Fortunately, he has carved a poly-artist career as a highly regarded visual artist, poet, and vocalist.

Holley has frequently been categorized as a bluesman, and his emotive, raspy pipes are well suited to the blues. On his latest Jagjaguwar recording, Oh Me Oh My, he presents his voice in an expansive set of contexts that transcend traditional blues stylings. The list of artists who make guest appearances speaks to the respect with which Holley is regarded. Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker lend their talents to Oh Me Oh My, affording its arrangements and production a mutability that supports, never dilutes, Holley’s aesthetic. For instance, the title track features Stipe singing layered backing vocals, making a refrain over which Holley sings verses about his history and joins with Stipe in the chorus. The effect is haunting. Bon Iver joins Holley on “Kindness Will Follow Your Tears,” creating a swath of group singing and synth keyboards that buoy the lead vocals. Holley frequently bends pitches, modulating sustained notes to wring every last piece of emotion out of them. 

Moor Mother guests on two tracks: “I Am a Part of the Wonder” and “Earth Will Be There,” adorning the first with rasped rapping, trumpet, pitched percussion, and mid-tempo beats. The second begins with thrumming bass, bodily in its impact, and Holley’s spoken word. The synthesizers expand their range against metallic percussion. Holley’s voice gradually moves from speech to song. Partway through, the beat drops, a horn section is added, and the vocalist sings a refrain that, by itself, could be a hook, but here is part of a kaleidoscope of sounds. There is a sizable section of Moor Mother’s spoken word with Holley vocalizing in the background. He then takes center stage, once again singing the refrain, which is followed by the full ensemble, now with backing vocalists, creating a rousing coda. It is a fulsome, polystylistic brew. 

Holley without guest stars is no less compelling. Particularly moving is “Mount Meigs,” where he recounts the abuse of his troubled childhood. Accompanied by searing electric guitar and a thunderous rhythm section, the song uses the blues to express inconsolable suffering. There are few who rival Holley in the ability to so viscerally share the depredations of the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s. The recording closes with a surprising twist. “Future Children '' features a Holley through a vocoder, minimalist synth arpeggios, and solo soprano saxophone. Taking a page from Philip Glass may not be as futuristic as the artist supposes, but the spaciness of it suggests that Holley may be looking to the future as well as channeling the past. For him, and for us, that is good news. 

Christian Carey

[dearyallfrommatt]

Alt-weeklies are dead. Blogs are dead. Bootlickers and the civility police won.

 The above story from The New Republic written by Alex Pareene was brought to my Twitter world by Radley Balko, superlative journalist and maybe the only self-described libertarian I’d let thrive after the Purge. In short, it discusses the recent emasculation of Deadspin and how it’s indicative of the death of the “rude press”. That is, the elimination of smaller, shall we say less respectful outlets like Splinter and Gawker, publications that would stick their fingers into they eyes of the rich and the very much richer.

 And it’s not just those web-based publications’ deaths that article warns of. It’s the slow extinction of the alt-weekly or alt-monthly, all to be replaced by boutique publications that won’t be so gauche as to upset their betters. In other words, they’ll be “civil” because “civility” might be the most important thing we’re missing in this cold, cruel world.

 The first writing gig I got out of college was at an alt-monthly and the only “regular job” I’ve ever had was with an alt-weekly, so I might be a bit biased on this matter. Twenty-some-odd years ago in Gainesville, FL, a pair of cats named Colin Whitworth and Mike Podalsky started MOON Magazine, maybe the altest alternative magazine that wasn’t a ‘zine that I’ve ever seen. I mostly wrote about music and Gainesville being what it was, there wasn’t much sticking-in-the-eye that needed doing.

 Though I do remember them pissing of a real estate guy so badly he started his own “alt-monthly” in competition. It lasted one issue as I recall. Every afternoon at 4:20, we'd have a “staff meeting” and the magazine run pieces from severely left-wing sources going after the destruction of the Everglades or the dangers of the Cassini probe. It was that kind of magazine.

 After I left Gainesville for Athens, I took up with Flagpole Magazine, a music/news/arts weekly in Michael Stipe’s hometown. Athens is a different town and publisher Pete McCommons was a different breed. An old school newspaper man contrasted to Mike and Colin’s “young upstarts”, Flagpole was a gentler poke that nevertheless contrasted well with the bought-and-owned-by-the-chamber-of-commerce local daily, The Athens Banner-Herald. He still gave a lot of room to his staff to go nuts, notably my direct editor Ballard Lesemann.

 When I left college in 1997, I had already worked in actual, for real newspapers for almost a decade. Furthermore, I’d grown my hair long and discovered Hunter Thompson, so I was by no means inclined to go back to covering school board meetings for some small town weekly. MOON went the way of the dodo sometime in 2001, and though I left in 2002, Flagpole’s still kicking.

 I rarely made anything close to a living at writing, but I’m thankful of my time with the alts and grateful to Colin, Mike, Pete and Ballard for letting me share the ride with them and have a little fun. So, again, grain of salt. One thing working on alternatives taught me was that “complete objectivity” was not only impossible but unnecessary so long as your cards are on the table, so I ain’t going to put no shuck on you.

 Now, I won’t summarize or really explore what the above-linked New Republic piece goes into. I highly recommend it be read and considered with much gravity. Even if you don’t agree with its conclusions - or even the need for the existence of “rude journalism” - do study on what it suggests. Do we really want a world where the extremely rich, either as individuals or as a group, can shut down publications that don’t show proper fealty and people who’re willing to tell the Boss Man to take this job and shove it?

 The responses to Radley’s retweet and others I’ve seen elsewhere are telling indeed, though. While there are plenty of sympathetic voices, not a few folks are saying “well, good, fuck ‘em”. There is a negative view of journalists, but if anyone suggests that it’s caused by recent events in the business are lying or stupid or ignorant or all three. For as long as there have been rich dudes willing to start wars for more wealth, there have been plenty of poor bastards willing to die for them. Nowadays, we have folks willing to pay Major League Baseball for what they used to get for free, and not even blink an eye.

 A lot of it’s political. Right-wing media doesn’t have the same problems in getting funding because, well, most rich people are quite fine with the nuts and bolts of conservative thought. The economic side, anyway, which spells less taxes or regulation; the social side, they have enough pull to not have to worry about anyone griping unless they piss off someone higher up the ladder.

 Which is extremely amusing, since these are the same folks who stay constantly stricken with the vapors about how much money Hillary Clinton (or Elizabeth Warren or Barrack Obama or Bernie Sanders or fill-in-the-blank-here) bring home. The “common people”, they’re saying, don’t need hoity-toity nerds who can string sentences together and count without taking off their shoes telling us that they’re favorite rich guy needs a kick in the nuts for being the type of bastard that needs kicking in the nuts on a regular basis. The hooting baboons that support digital frat houses like Barstool are happy to stick it to those PC creeps, man, rebelling in that way that hurts the actual elite not one tiny bit.

 They also hate the corporate media and social media sites, which they will tell you endlessly in the comments sections of corporate medias’ pages on social media while FOX and CNN have a special on it every other week. They hate “political correctness” trying to tell them that the “natural order” isn’t just boozy white dudes watching the Pats and gorging on chicken wings, making  cracks about the opposing quarterback being homosexual or making “hey-it’s-just-a-joke” jokes about Serena Williams or some WNBA playing being a “man, baby”.

 There is most definitely a place for big mainstream news sources like CNN or The New York Times or TIME Magazine. A professor of my in journalism school used to repeat the quote, paraphrased from memory, that “journalism is the first rough draft of history”. Despite what the right wing has been screaming for years, whoever the president is, the big papers are rarely out for his blood. Once you become president, you are a “Washington insider” and all the corporate media really cares about is making money. 

 Whatever he says about the “Washington Swamp” and “fake news”, Donald Trump’s been part of that world, as is every Washington politician or media figure. FOX News is the mainstream media and the Washington Examiner has plenty of backing to keep that so. Who funds The Federalist? That publication has its place but that question must be asked. To do otherwise is to tell the powerful that you’re just fine with them running things, thank you very much.

 But there needs to be a place for a small, scrappy paper speaking for the weird and shat-upon, flicking the earlobe of the rich and powerful and running ads for weekly drag shows. The dirtbag center - that’s what I’m calling the tedious middle-class bourgeoisie spawn that all voted for Trump because they hated Hillary but don’t want to admit it and were shocked as the rest of us, deal with it - wants to be kept fat and saucy while their kids joke about “learning to code” and they all grind themselves down in a miserable existence. Sticking it to the media and the elite, man, all up in the “intellectual dark web,” man, just like Peter Thiel or Bari Weiss, man.

 This is one of those things that shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, because these people are that guy who started a one-run magazine to get back at Colin and Mike for saying hurtful things about them being crooked. In America, at least, there has always, always been a group of people who will kick down for the benefit of their upper-class betters and do it with a smile on their faces. It’s why dumbass country boys went to die for slavery and why thick-necked hardhats smashed picket lines and assassinated union leaders.

 Like the story notes, we all thought that blogs would be the new hotness, but that lasted just long enough for Google to deciding that “do no evil” was bad for the bottom line. People, especially wingnuts, boo-hoo about Facebook or Twitter without acknowledging or even recognizing that Mark Zuckerberg is a greedy little shit and Jack Dorsey is quite comfortable with cosplaying Nazis. Thanks to Ajit Pai’s bought-and-sold ass, Net Neutrality - about the only thing that keeps the internet from being anything other than a glorified Want Ads - is going to be that much harder to make reality.

A lot of this goes back to the “civility” thing, or lack thereof, NYT columnists bemoan whenever they get caught out being a dipstick. We’re too mean to each other, they say, we don’t know how to respect each other, they say. Rich people know how to run things better than the hoi polloi, so do sit down and be quiet like nice children. Or else. 

 Because here’s the thing, friends and neighbors: the rich, I mean really rich class in this country do not give a solid gold shit about you apart from how much more money they can squeeze out. Suck up to Elon Musk all you want and bemoan Bill Gates having to pay so much in taxes that he’s still a billionaire afterwards all you want. They are not going to let you on the space ship with them once they’re done fouling the waters and scouring the land.

 You can cheer the death of Deadspin all you want, hoot at the firings of journalist who say bad things about Trump or the cops or Tom Brady, and general be gleeful that the media all should “learn to code” to your heart’s content. Because it won’t end there. Conglomerations are already scooping up weekly and small town dailies, shuttering the superfluous and give everyone the same story in the same tone while kissing the proper butts.

 In the end, we need an antagonistic press. We need someone willing to piss off the deep pockets and old families and moneyed interests. We need someone that’ll give a voice to left-handed, bisexual, transvestite furries who love swing dancing. Or even just a little time, a slice of acknowledgement that the world isn’t just boozy obnoxious white dudes on barstools or bitter wine moms sniping on Facebook. You can cheer the downfall of such, but all you’re doing is putting the noose around your own throat and saving the Powers That Be a little time.

 You may not want to rock the boat, friends and neighbors, but have no illusions. When the rubber hits the road, the Wealthy Elite will throw you over. Don’t make it easier for them.