I wanna be your Thurston Moore

BDR points out that today is Thurston's birthday, someone who's been one of my guitar heroes for a good while now even if I can't call myself the world's biggest fan as much as some.

I got some Sonic Youth albums from the library in the formative years but it was the lesser works in their career, the Silver Sessions of straight feedback and Experimental Jet Set which didn't stick at the time. One of my classmates junior year wore his sister's Sonic Youth shirt and his Rollins Band hoodie almost daily, and told me that Teen Age Riot changed his life. Most of my crew's inside jokes involved obscure references to Nirvana and Black Flag, geeky teens that we were. The first time I heard that song on the radio, at 2am on a hot summer night, it was revelatory for me too, though the band was one that we more talked about than actually listened to, because there is a difference. I wanted to play guitar that weird, and had a brief all female band that tried to be like Sonic Youth but we weren't so good and like most things, it fell apart.

My freshman year as an art major with oil paint in my chopped-up hair at a small conservative school in the heartland was made bearable by the art majors several years my senior who liked weird Brazilian movies and similar tuneage. One of our professors was a Fluxus alumnus who traded art in the mail with Yoko Ono and it was the most wonderful artistic community I've ever been around, and I would have maybe stayed if all the people I really liked weren't 26 to my 19 and on their way to graduating or getting the hell out. There was probably a reason why the campus tours never came to the art building, where we oddball Jesusheads with our grungy clothes and piercings congregated to talk theology and books and listen to Ani Difranco and Bjork and Sonic Youth. The year Murray Street came out, we gathered in a classroom late at night after painting and blissed out to Rain on Tin.

There was someone I had a small and of course unrequited crush on during those days and we drove up with one of his other friends to Cleveland one night listening to Washing Machine. I still remember him singing along to the guitars at the end. I was too shy to say much to him then, and I probably still would be now.

I transferred to Kent the following year due to economics, profound loneliness, and coming near to a nervous breakdown from the prior year. I made friends with a girl who loved loud tuneage as much as me and we lived together two years, went to shows, and watched old VHS tapes of MuchMusic and Daria and wish that we were as cool as Kim Gordon. I had MySpace for a couple weeks with a picture of her up instead of me, and got lots of "friend requests" from dudes who didn't know better and realized this whole social networking thing with strangers is kind of stupid.

She had copies of Goo and Dirty. I have to admit that I prefer their more accessible material to the more arty-farty stuff. It's not that I don't like things that are a little more complex, but sometimes I felt like it was just too arty, and I wanted a verse-chorus-verse and some fabulously squalling guitars and jams. I still don't don't own any of their albums, and compiled my favorite tracks onto a cassette tape that I listened to when I shelved library books at work.

Some friends of mine who lived out of town came in for a festival our old alt-rock station had. We met up and I had the closest thing to a romantic moment I've ever had with anyone sitting drenched on a lawn and listening to Schizophrenia.  Incidentally, the guy ended up having a breakdown a year or so later and this song kind of haunts me now.

I realized then I'm not a super-fan when I didn't hear the songs that I wanted to hear, which were these.

. I never could do Kim's voice, finding her songs generally uninteresting, but I loved Thurston's guitar work, in part because I couldn't figure out how he did it, and how he managed to sound so epic without being technical. Celebrity followers have their own couples, but for a lot of us, there was Thurston and Kim, making music and having a kid and being arty and old and still cool. My dad refers to the band as "Sonic Old" which may not be entirely inaccurate. It was kind of surprising that they split, because I dropped out of the loop on those things for awhile, but I'm past the point of assuming that things last forever most of the time as it is.

Wizards, Weed, and Outer Space

Over the Elixir of St. Drogo this morning, we pondered the aesthetics of one of our mutually shared favorite genres, known for its general worship of Sabbath and Zeppelin, downtuned guitars, and vaguely arabesque instrumental passages and a generally kitschy lyrical amalgam well-known to teenage boys who read Tolkien and comics and played card games that involved mages and sages, and in this case, the girls who loved them. As I've gotten older, I've realized how devoid of estrogenic conversation I was when I was younger, because I still don't always know what to talk about in the world of women, and inevitably fall back into geekery of board games and MST3K, debating the merits of guitar solos and quoting Spinal Tap.

It may in part be the cultural heritage of being Parmastani in the last part of the 20th century and growing up on a certain strain of lovable loser pop culture, of acid-drenched classic rock, cherrypicking our favorite bands, deriding the boomers who still prefer the polemics of St. Robert of Dylan. That's completely different of course, because War Pigs has always resonated way more for me as a timeless commentary on the world than any Lennonista giving peace a chance or imagining a world that will never exist.

As a long-haired geeky teenage girl, I got out piles of CDs from the library, delving into genres without regards to cachet of coolness, and along with the spiky noisetastic indieish rock that actually had loud guitars and some teeth as opposed to what The Kids are into these days, found the sonics of stoner-rockdom much to my liking though the only thing close to a mind-altering substance I'd ever imbibed was an ill-advised Surge drinking contest at someone's birthday party because I'm really not too thrilling in real life. I transferred in junior year and spent a year anonymous, listening to a discman and doing my homework at the far end of the cafeteria, holed up in my room painting on the weekends of taking long walks with the dog before finding a niche later on. I like people, but I find I still enjoy the solitude.

Blame it on the Soundgarden, perhaps, and the college radio I listened to while getting my braces done and cutting class with my dad to drive around and listen to the likes of Pentagram as a gateway drug to the drop C, because the acolytes and contemporaries of the rest of the Seattle bands were found wanting. It didn't necessarily have to be earthshatteringly new-sounding, it just had to sound good, have that right amount of heavy low end and trippy lightness of being.

While the Fu Manchus and the Nebulas were a little too testosterony for me, as I'm into neither babes nor bikes, the more mellowed out sounds of Kyuss and Dead Meadow, the soulfulness and murk of Corrosion of Conformity, the sublime sludginess of the Melvins. There is a certain dorktastic aesthetic that doesn't lend itself well to hipsterdom. The touchstones don't involve New York artists, or the usual canonicals. D&D, Lord of the Rings, suburban drugs, wizards, outer space, the kind of things that get emblazoned on tie-dye t-shirts seen on middle-aged women. Kitsch, I guess, but awesome.

Up until the time I was gainfully employed here, this wasn't the kind of thing that most of my friends were into, as in high school, the most underground it got was usually Pantera, and the metal kids I knew in college were into sounds more technical and the indie kids preferred the Locust or whoever if they weren't listening to something more folky or twee. It's never going to be the thing that The Kids are into, if the ones in my world are any indication, and it's not as much a chick thing I guess most of the time, and I've never been one for leafy substances so I feel like that makes me even more of an outlier. At least 50 Foot Wave, Worm Ouroboros and Subrosa still like the low end and don't make me feel quite so alone.

shoptalk

I took some time off to catch up on my sleep but the apartment was cold and the weather was warm so after a brief old lady nap, I took a walk and went through what felt like an extremely pointless exercise in voting, when my request for a nonpartisan ballot was discouraged and I had to pick between Republican and Democrat and wanted to vote against enough people on each (despite dwelling in a red state, it's a blue town).

I don't vote for people when I don't know who they are, and repub on the local more as a protest of the party machine that endorses mean and incompetent people. The lady who did my provisional ballot spent more time talking about her makeup and I just kind of sat there and thought about other countries where it's even more weird. I feel agnostic about the whole process.

So I walked home, relishing the orange and pink of the sunset and drove out to the burbs where one of my friends is apprenticing at a guitar repair shop and while I didn't plan to stay, I ended up hanging out there for way longer than planned, conversating over beer, learning about the intricacies of sundry musical instruments, of the electronics of wiring, the resonance of wood, the tension of wires and strings.It's something I'd never dream of trying to do because I'd be afraid of screwing it up, but watching and observing, taking it all in.

I have crazy respect for people who know how to do things not just sit at a computer like I do. People who can fix cars, who understand what wires go where, who build buildings and bridges that don't fall down, who know how to take apart things and put them back together, who take scraps and make art or useful things or can make things look beautiful. I can do a little of this, but there's a lot I never learned or don't have the musculature or the aptitude for. 

I feel like these kinds of things are undervalued in an increasingly technocratic society that still slots people in pecking order and perception by occupation alone, when there are these entire bodies of knowledge that I couldn't even begin to understand that come so naturally to others. The amount of bread on a corner store shelf, the intuitive knowledge of trucking routes better than any GPS, knowing what's wrong with a car just by what noise it makes and when. I sometimes here people who consider themselves enlightened disparaging those who work with their hands or get them dirty and I just don't understand the derision, because if we disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice we were gone.

consumer goods

To the chagrin of sundry family members, I've been doing most of my economic transactions on craigslist, including my current apartment, my car, my camera (from a hobbyist banker), art supplies (a Korean couple in a rocky marriage), and now a beautiful red Gibson SG guitar with crescent moon inlays on the fretboard from an Oberlin music student who doesn't play it anymore, needed the cash, and wanted it to go to a good home. I insist that I do a cursory google-style background check and if anything carries a whiff of weird, I back off, but in this case I knew what I was in for.


She plugs in the guitar in her dorm room and as I play it we end up talking about this and that to the point where the whole transactional nature and the exchange of cash feels like an afterthought. Sometimes these feel awkward, like the art supplies bought from a Korean couple that wasn't speaking to each other, and other times, it's pure business like the CD player from an Afghanistan vet who returned to find his audio equipment obsolete, but in this case, it's one of those times when it doesn't feel awkward at all. I really hope she goes far with her music, because even though I haven't been following much of the folky stuff The Kids are into these days, this song of theirs hits me somehow, and I wish them all the best.