1:02 p.m.||||2002-10-28
Well, it was bugging me how many I couldn't remember, so I thunk and thunk and here's some of the rest:
REM('86), 10,000 Maniacs, Tracy Chapman, David Bowie (Spider Tour), Bettie Severt (still love this litle band to bits, really - I love when Scandinavians sound more Midwestern than I do), Screaming Trees, Black Grape (descended from Happy Mondays, one of the very best shows I have ever been to), Erics Trip (They came in a big bus, haha, to the only place in my town where cool bands ever play - the same where Nirvana played for the Bleach albumn, um 89 or 90?), (I did not get to see Nirvana), Swervedriver, Lush, MC 900 Foot Jesus, Legendary Pink Dots, The Wailers, Buddy Guy, and You Will Know Us By Our Trail of Dead.
11:51 p.m.||||2002-10-25
You know, I'm sitting here drinking champagne, happy because I found a bunch of cool images, which if I use them, constitute stealing, and if I don't leave me no worse off than I am right now, which is feeling really unfuckingtalented. But at least I know what I want, even if I can't have it right now.
I wish I had something luscious and beautiful to show you. I am thinking often latly of how I once never believed it when people told me I was beautiful, but nonetheless counted on those complimnents in a hidden, burdened, pyschological way, that is the antithsesis to normal healthy female thought. Sigh.
Here they are, as best I can remember: X, HuskerDu, The Sugarcubes, Sinead O'Connor, Mudhoney, Unsane, Flock of Seagulls, Stereolab, The Cure, Mercury Rev, Sonic Youth, Babes In Toyland, Hole, Laughing Hyenas, The Jesus Lizard (my band opened for them!), Union Carbide (made out with the lead singer),Sonic Boom, The Flaming Lips, Soundgarden. My Bloody Valentine. There's more but I am lonely and tired and am losing interest, and was probably too messed up and self-interested at some of the other shows I have seen, by default , cause we opened for others, to even fucking remember, Sorry.
Blah.
10:31 p.m.||||2002-10-25
I am in the process of redoing my templaye - please beware.
This morning as I woke up I was thinking for some reason about all the shows I've seen in my life and I thought, wouldn't it be funny to write them all down?
I will, soon.
11:39 a.m.||||2002-10-23
The morning brings better light.
I am actually a year younger than Kurt Cobain was. Would have been. It's funny, because Nirvana is not representative of my taste - more my age and experience, and where my particular demographic fit into subculture at that peculiar point in time.
Did I ever tell you that my ex knew Kurt, and that he was on the list of people scheduled to try out before Grohl landed the job? My ex also knew Mark Arm and drummed for a couple of years for the Laughing Hyenas when they made the tragic transition from jazz to Southern tragi-rock. Umhmmm. Interesting, I know. Did you also know that Touch and Go was originally started in Maumee, Ohio, in a basement, by his friend; the first time I ever met my ex, he was in the Necroes still, and he saved me from being raped by their roadie at a Maumee kegger. Maumee is the nextdoor suburb to the one where I went to high school.
Memory lane. Tres bizarre.
Anyway - I'm killing time while Punch Drunk Love completes its mission into the bowels of my hard drive.
I wish I had some coffee.
5:39 p.m.||||2002-10-22
This is simply a crushing time of year, crushing.
I'm reading a biography of Kurt Cobain - I cannot tell you why I chose this - but I began remembering that time of my life, when he died. I'm a year older now than he would've been. Anyway, I was painting the evil walls of my new apartment at the time, which was directly across the alley from my ex-boyfriend's house, whom I was leaving. I was painting it in order for it to be ready for me to move in in a timely fashion - it was rented to me by the same evil slumlord who rented the apartment to me and my ex, in both of our previous evil places, and he wasn't moving it along at all, and I needed to go. (Across the alley, but nonetheless.) I was listening to the radio when there came an announcement that an as yet unidentified body had been found in Cobain's place....and I thought, yes, it's him, and of course.
The next month, maybe, I was on a plane headed for France where I would study for a month and revel that every street musician had a Nirvana cover or two up their sleeves..."rape me..." was popular, although those two words were the only ones I could recognize in their funny French dialecticized American.
That was a fucked up summer and the fall that followed even more so. That was the same year I was in love with Lazy...I'm just feeling so freakishly nostalgic and bad right now - hard to explain.
Cobain's death was at time when I was stil feverishly participating in a band called Autopilot, taking for granted that I would always be in a band, that I would always be making music. Lazy's bit in my life at that point also inspired me to learn to play guitar and to do that feverishly for a long time as well, still taking for granted that I would always be associated with music.
And you know, this vision is failing me. Was I so naive to have been in all those bands, and thrown away my college educaiton in favor of it, to come to this impasse, where, although I have a great kid and I love his father, I wonder where it's all gone wrong? I do feel like such a tremendous failure right now - that I wonder why I always quit short of some finish line, while people like Christina Aguilera go on to sing in spite of....
Now, that's a joke, you see, because lately I have been watching too much tv and have beocme invested in some embarassing things. For instance, I enjoy Pink now. And I watched a special on Christina and I thought, oh I know she's marketed to seem like a ho, but she's actually magically talented. And I get it now. She has some stick to-it-ed-ness that precludes even having to have brilliant songs to sing because she's, um, motivated. ANd great artistic ideas get you nowhere if you aren't carniverous in your motivation. Right? So, I root for these people, whether they starve or not, and in so many cases I realize I no longer believe in the starving artist.
I just wish I still were an artist.
I feel like I've suffered enough but can't make the translation anymore. If oyu knew how much I love writing songs, and singing them....bah.
Aren't these supposed to be golden years? Yet, we're broke as always - I fee like a bda ghetto joke; can't explain none of it to my family; lack the old standby outlets; feel so old in a crowd of young; just wish I didn't feel so creased and disappointed, you know, and selfish for thinking in these terms, but still, 34 and fucking counting. I'm afraid there's nothing left momentous to happen in my own life, that will give me relief from this need to create. I wish I were fucking Bonnie Raitte (however that's spelled).
2:10 p.m.||||2002-10-16
How indie are you? test by ridethefader
You're just too cool for school, aren't you? You're pretty narrow minded
and opinionated with regards to music (and probably most other things
as well). But you're allowed to be, because you really are better
than everyone else. You take pride in obscurity.
You probably prefer vinyl too, you elitist bitch.
1:56 p.m.||||2002-10-14
Daves grandpa died Friday, and Josh had a fever that day, pretty much all day, of a hundred and two. It's almost two in the afternoon right now and he is still asleep...so he's fighting something.
It's tricky to know how to feel about a relative dying when it wasn't someone you knew well - it's like grief by proxy. And the weird thing about that is that, except for Dave's mom, who tends toward the histrionic, and his sister, too perfect to emulate, the rest of his family seem to do well with denial, or, stuffing of emotion. So, while there's grief, there's a lot of frozen moments of pre-stuffing, where I begin to wish it were already stuffed.
I'm pretty talented at both denial and stuffing, except that there's a demon inside of me who frequently scratches its way out at the worst moments, inspired by other people's denial, toward a moment of truth. So, I'm ok with being in denial when it comes to me, but sometimes not so much with others.
I'm not making sense, I know, I'm just sad and freaked out and so on and so forth.
I had no idea of the complexity of flower buying.
Grief is grief, you know. Flowers die after they're bought. I was far more touched by the psalm they published in the paper in his honor than I will be taking note for which grandchild bought which flower to throw on the dead man in the OPEN casket. I know it helps some people.
It's really just that Dave's ma puts so much stock in the particulars...who explains this anyway? If it wasn't for her - and the subtle pressure over it - I wouldn't even have known.