cutting the other edge
The Third Rail
Ich habe mit meinem Herz hämmerte
Sep 30th
“We’re in a road movie to Berlin
Can’t drive out the way we drove in
So sneak out this glass of bourbon
And we’ll go
“We were once so close to heaven
Peter came out and gave us medals
Declaring us the nicest of the damned
Time won’t find the lost
It’ll sweep up our skeleton bones
So take the wheel and I will take the pedals
“We’re in a road movie to Berlin
Can’t drive out the way we drove in
So sneak out this glass of bourbon
And we’ll go…”
-They Might Be Giants, Flood, 1987
Hey, Hipster Bitches!
Aug 7th
Bodycon is back, right?
Well, it’s only fair–if you want to wear this:
You ought to pay your dues, and respect this:
Lycra sausage casings and high-rise jeans have a long and storied heritage that must be paid tribute. Back before you were born, nobody gave a fuck about irony—they were too busy having fun. You’ve heard of fun, right? It was really neat. People got drunk, turned the music up, sang along, and had sex with each other…all without a trace of self-mockery. Bet you wish you could.
Hope’s not lost. Innocent fun could be the latest silly retro trend. You don’t care if people laugh at your dippy plastic sunglasses or uneven beard, do you? So why should you care what they think of your new studied optimism?
Remember, kids: Spandex isn’t a toy, it’s a tool.
Ooh, Malibu!
Apr 12th
Part of my ongoing project to reconstruct as much of my demented youth as possible, includes collecting things I used to own. Well, in my idle search for some back issues of ‘Teen Magazine, I ran across this little piece of early-’90s nostalgia:
Yes, that’s right–Malibu Musk. It, and Love’s Baby Soft, were advertised in literally every issue. And while I never liked Love’s that much, those cheapo cans of Malibu cluttered up my desktop for several years.
It sold at the drugstore, meaning that I could afford it without having to ask my parents. It smelled a little edgy, a little party-girl, without being cheap-smelling or heavy.
I’ll probably get a bottle off Amazon, just for shits ‘n’ giggles. Wonder if I’ll still like it? One assumes that twenty years would improve my taste…but it’s astonishing how many of my childhood decisions I can still get behind.
And how awesome is the Crazy Christian Lady at the end of the video? Happy Easter!
Twenty Years of Diary: Part Three
Jun 18th
I’m a lucky woman.
I was a kid during the eighties, the last great decade to be a kid, and a preteen in a time when my awkwardness was at least partially disguised by the awkwardness of my culture. The luck continued into high school: the years I went, 1992-96, were some of the last years before Columbine, the last years where high schoolers were seen as relatively benign and unimportant.
Sometimes unimportant is good–you can live a lot deeper while off the radar.
Trying to describe what it was like to be a teenager in the early Nineties is pretty difficult. I find myself wanting to talk about it in terms of the limitations not yet in place, the tragedies that had not yet happened, the behavior drugs that most students were not yet dosed with.
In sum: there was still room. Your insides were your own. Adults’ unconcern meant privacy for you. There was even space left over outside you in the world, wiggle room in which to fuck around a bit.
People still looked at each other and saw physical realities. Money meant a lot, but it wasn’t everything. There was no Internet to speak of–what you knew, you learned from books, from experience, or from gossip. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to physically go and find them. If you wanted to talk to a lot of people at once, you formed a band, or wrote a ‘zine.
I wrote one. How could I not? It was 1993, and we were wearing Docs, and coloring out hair with Sharpies, and covering our walls with phrases cut from magazines. It was the dawning of the realization that everyone had a story, that everyone’s story was important. We couldn’t wait to tell ours–we ripped and cut and pasted and xeroxed.
The era looks dorky and sweet in retrospect, viewed with the modern lens of present conformity to various styles that were developed back then. But we weren’t trying and cutely failing to conform to any style–we were trying to throw a wrench into whatever kind of conformity we could think of. It was a sincerely-adopted position of stylistic chaos, aimed at opening up more room to be creative. And it worked. For a while.
I found my voice in that era. I haven’t lost it since. Though the world’s constricted a lot since then–become colder, thinner, more fearful–it’s still the era in which I was stamped and minted, my gold standard. I hold myself still to the values I developed then: creativity, nonconformity, opposition to control. Snark, feminism, distortion. Expecting equality. Taking fun seriously. Writing as often as I can, and telling the goddamned truth.
Twenty Years of Diary: Part Two
Jun 17th
My middle school years almost perfectly overlapped that weird era when the eighties ended and the nineties began, amplifying all the awkwardness of the times with my own dorky puberty.
From 1989 to 1992, I attended three different schools, and was bullied in all of them. I had friends and dates, but much of the preteen world felt closed to me. So I mostly withdrew, and turned to my own life.
A great deal of energy’s generated in those years of life, and most of mine went to imaginary pursuits. All the creativity in me slowly channeled itself into storytelling. During seventh and eighth grades especially, I wrote tons of short stories, centering on a cast of characters that stayed with me for years. I made up planets, drew maps, outlined novels, and used every doll and toy I still had from childhood as a prop in the endless, morphing tale I was telling myself.
The neighborhood in which I lived was a great place for an imaginative kid, with a lake and an island, a skating path, trees to climb, lots of deserted little corners to break into and explore. Within walking distace was a playground, a pool, a grocery store that sold cheap candy, a movie theater, a fancy beach hotel that never noticed quiet kids wandering through, and of course, the ocean itself.
It was a landscape custom-built for acting out inner stories. I lived half in the real world and half in the overlapping world of daydreams.
I kept a normal diary, but only filled two books in four years. It was during this time that my personal writing became more about my inner life than my outer one. The reality of school was stressful and alienating, so my descriptions of even the most eventful days are matter-of-fact and relatively dull. My inner world took precedence.
And even though it is more of a balance now, the “real world” and day-to-day events have never gained ascendancy in the course of twenty years. I write about who I am, not just what I’m doing. And that habit began during my lonely, nerdy days as a poor kid in Palm Beach.