Archive for October, 2003

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Free Tommy

Friday, October 31st, 2003

Is there anyone out there that didn’t know that Tommy Chong smoked pot? What is wrong with people? Why is it a surprise that he was selling bongs on the internet? Who the fuck cares anyway? If anyone should be selling bongs – it should fucking be Tommy Chong. What is the problem? Now, Chong, half of the legendary comedy duo, Cheech & Chong, is facing jail time for trafficking drug paraphernalia online. That is fucking stupid.



Cheech & Chong were made famous for films like “Up in Smoke” which were all about smoking pot, getting high, smoking dog shit after the dog ate the pot, being stoned off dog shit, getting more high, making their van run on pot. In fact, their career came to a screeching halt when they started to crossover into other areas. Nobody went to see “The Corsican Brothers” because it didn’t have anything to do with weed. Cheech & Chong were weed personified. If it were not for them, what would we have watched while getting high in the 70s?



If anything, Chong should be receiving a lifetime achievement award of some type for his contribution to our collective consciousness or unconsciousness. You have to admit, “Where’s Dave?” is fucking hilarious no matter how many times you hear it, whether you are stoned or not. Certain things have universal appeal. Babies always draw a smile. When someone greets you with a handshake, more than likely, you will shake their hand in return. And everybody, I mean everybody thinks that sketch where Cheech & Chong were pretending to be dogs and sniffing each other’s butts is funny. If you don’t think it is, you are lying or you are dead. Pot is not what is endangering our nation, nor is the internet sale of bongs, especially by someone who has been advocating the use of marijuana for more than a quarter of a century, working not only as an activist in the decriminalization of the drug but also some double duty as an example for the Just Say No crowd to use as a cautionary tale – “This is your life on drugs. Tommy Chong.”



Chong is a political prisoner. He is a victim of the riotously invasive Patriot Act, which gives too much power to law enforcement officials and this ultra-conservative administration to scare the public into a malleable police state. Those drink cards that so generously offer you a free latte after the purchase of ten or so are not as innocent as they seem, as they work to help the government keep tabs on you, find out what you spend your money on, where you spend it, who you are, what you might be doing. I am not paranoid because I am stoned. I mean it.



I don’t like pot, and I don’t plan on smoking it myself. It makes me want to go to sleep, but then I can’t because my throat is too dry. I am too lethargic after a bowl to get anything done and I lose the plots of films too easily and I am worried that I said something that I was thinking and that is why everyone is looking at me, and then I realize I am on stage.



Smoking weed doesn’t do anything for you, just like any drug that would be taken purely for recreational purposes. If you seek relaxation, then relax. Since when does anyone need to be drugged into taking a load off? Sure nobody needs it, but then again, many people want it. Let them. Who cares? Pot smokers are the most benign, harmless, red-eyed tired drug users. They are not anywhere near as treacherous as crack addicts or alcoholics for that matter. Potheads are too stoned to get it together for a revolution, but they are being attacked now because they are such an easy target. They move slowly, plead guilty, get passive and scared pretty fast. It is up to the rest of us, the unstoned, to make sure that this doesn’t threaten the freedom that we should have as Americans.



Free Tommy Chong.



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So Fucking Typical

Thursday, October 30th, 2003

That is just so fucking typical. Reverend Stephen White, infamous for preaching against homosexuality and sexual promiscuity at Yale and other universities is facing charges of attempting to solicit sex from a teenage boy. White had been well known for his impromptu speeches denouncing minorities, gays, other religious groups that didn’t follow his particular brand of Christianity – and pretty much despised by the liberal communities of every school he visited on his reign of error.



Now, White is being investigated for allegedly giving $20 to a 14-year old boy in Pennsylvania in exchange for oral sex in his van. Reactions from Yale students range from indifference to unrestrained joyful celebration. In a way, it is much better than winning the World Series or any other important sporting event. It is proof once again, that if you give them enough rope, they will hang themselves. Why is it always the ones who protest too much, who project the sanctity of themselves onto those who don’t want to hear it, the people who really need to control the populace, that need to condemn the things they see around them and point fingers, wind up being the worse perps? What is that stupid saying? When you are pointing one finger at someone, there are four pointing right back at you. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Ha ha. Fuck you Stephen White! Child molesters are the worst too. They get killed in jail, they have to register with the communities that they move into – if they survive, they can’t give out candy at Halloween, at least in New York.



This is some Old Testament kind of judgment coming down on people, as in the case of Rush Limbaugh. I keep wondering if Rush is having some type of awakening in rehab, as he probably has at least a week clean now. What if he becomes a total liberal huggy bear, invests a large sum of his earnings as a conservative icon in Ben and Jerry’s, so much they name a flavor after him “Recalcitrant Rush” – Vanilla with hydrocondone chips and an oxycontin swirl running through and through. Then Rush will slip into Greenpeace and become the patron saint of saved water mammals in a XXL tie-dye shirt and a little, tiny, itty, bitty ponytail.



I am trying to contain my own joy at the revelation that White is now forced to face the music, and sing in Sing Sing, but then I wonder what am I all superior about? Biblical lessons abound. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Okay. I am winding up, about to pitch. then I am stopped in my tracks. When does my number come up? Who is going to find out the truth about me? Where is the scandal? I am just kind of jealous that I have no big thing to hide, because that does give a person some depth of character. It makes up for the relative tedium of the minutes that go by, measuring the breaths between birth and death. Not that I am going to solicit sex from children or take gargantuan doses of drugs, but there has to be something. I find children incredibly unsexy, having always preferred the company of those much older than myself. I would much rather play the child. I love drugs, but I hate hangovers, and the hatred of the hangover wins by a landslide every time. Plus, I don’t even know what the new drugs are these days, and I don’t want to appear like I am doing anything for the first time.



I suppose it is that revelation that I am kind of boring that is the greatest secret of my life. I leave social functions early, always, intimating that I am going somewhere better, where there are multiple sexual opportunities as well as other sublime debauchery like hot canapés and soft, flattering light, sleepy eyed and sated, decadently low to the ground sprawled out on Morrocan furniture draped in rich velvets and overly pillowed. A faraway opium den populated by rock stars and the nameless beautiful that surround rock’s elite await me, so I must leave your boring dinner party after the main course is served, no offense – I am just too fabulous for your world. The truth of the matter is that I am going home, to walk my dogs, who whine and glower at me for daring to go out in the first place. I slump down in my uncomfortable, smelly couch, pillowless and covered in inch long blond dog hairs and use a Backnobber on the point where my shoulder blade meets the anterior latissimus dorsi on the right side of my body. Then I will take off my expensive dress and ball it up on the floor where the dogs will poke at it with their wet noses, wash my face, letting my water-resistant mascara make big gray splotches underneath my eyes, then I slather my beautifully tended feet with an AHA cream and go to bed without letting my slippery toes touch the floor, allowing my big dog, Ralph, to lick the moisturizer off my face as I fall asleep. People drain me, even the closest of friends, and I find loneliness to be the best state in the union to live in, and yet to remind myself that I am alive, I like to make an appearance, a grandiose one, then leave them wanting – or at least I hope – more. So there you go. I don’t think that I could go to jail or rehab for that, but there is always the possibility.



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Badministration

Wednesday, October 29th, 2003

Another amazing day in the George W. Bush Badministration, with the newly formed coalition of evangelical groups, who have Karl Rove in their back pocket, basically telling us that we have to ‘do’ something about the spread of AIDS and sex trafficking in the Sudan. At the same time, the Traditional Values Coalition is putting pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on researchers awarded grants for projects on AIDS and sexual activities. The NIH has responded by cold calling the scientists and doctors, not threatening them, but just maybe making them an offer they may not be able to refuse. The researchers were all informed that although their grants may still be valid, their names were going to be available on an electronic list, the very thought of which sends a freakish shiver down my spine. I wouldn’t even think of what might happen if I were ever on an ‘electronic list.’ although if I am doing my job at all, then I am on several. But it does scare me. No, it is serious. Not a sarcastic statement in the least. Do you know what happens to people on electronic lists? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. They swim with the fishes.



What the Traditional Values people are saying is that AIDS education and research is what encourages the spread of the disease. They are doing whatever they can to stop the distribution of condoms and to silence the few voices that we have left in the continuing battle with not only AIDS, but just as deadly, the agenda of the moralistic conservatives.



Why is AIDS so important when dealing with other nations, impoverished ones like in the Sudan or Nigeria, but becomes something altogether different when we face the problem here at home? Is it because colonizing these nations under the guise of health and epidemic management is not at odds with the condescending attitude that we have toward the ‘third world’? Since they are ‘savages’ anyway and cannot stop themselves from fucking everything willy nilly without the ‘advantages’ of Christian values and morals, is it our duty as a nation to give them a slap on the dick, hand them a cross and tell them not to fuck so much? But here at home, we need to be silent and abstinent, and if we do speak of sex, it must be in defense of heterosexual marriage and chastity, and anything that has any mention of fucking, or the assumption that people will actually be fucking so might as well be prepared for the truth about AIDS, will set off a fuckwave worse than any East Coast blackout? “I am going to fuck you so hard that I make the power go out from Syracuse to Miami for three days.” To me, that ideology is savage, and irresponsible, not to mention stupid, fatal, ridiculous, living in another world where there isn’t any reason or logic – just ‘faith based works’.



That was Bush’s response to the AIDS epidemic abroad – that since Jesus H. Christ had been such a help to him in quitting drinking, he understood ‘faith based works’. What is ‘faith based works’? Is that like the faith that he needs to harvest from the religious right that make up forty percent of the voters that stoopidly voted him into office the last time – which doesn’t mean to say that he even won fairly, just that a lot of them voted for him – in order to hope that he has a chance at another term? If it is, then please God, let it not work.



If Bush doesn’t drink anymore, then that is an even scarier thought. He has been stone cold sober driving the nation head on into every type of man’s ruin this entire time. There would be no excuse for his absolute stupidity and lack of judgment. It’s just George, which would be fine if this were a sitcom pilot written on spec by some writer’s assistants, but it isn’t. It is our country, the American people, as well as the global reach that we pretend to use to help the world along. That might be a nice PAX show – an affable, but not so smart drunk finds Jesus in rehab, and gets a new lease on life, as he moves from the counselor’s office to the Oval Office. From detox to Commander in Chief! From the west wing of the hospital to the west wing of the White House!



What I have to admire about the religious right is that they know that forming a coalition is the way to achieve anything in government. They are willing to see past their own biases about the name of God and what God is doing and what God wants us to do and who the ones God likes the most is and get together. You know that they all talk so much shit about each other the second they get home and you know that they all cringe when they are forced to shake hands or call each other on the telephone, but they are still in alliance.



Everyone makes excuses about getting together for lunch, postponing dates with claims of illness or religious holidays until the original plans fade into memory and the votes have all been counted. It makes me know that the liberal thinkers need to also stop thinking so much and take our movements out of specificity, and plunge headlong into union with other political groups that we may be allied with only by the common hatred of ‘them.’ That thread of dissent is enough to hold us together, get us into office. We can sort the differences out from there. And we won’t even insist on getting together for drinks after work.



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P. Diddy

Tuesday, October 28th, 2003

P. Diddy is being accused of using sweatshops in Honduras to produce clothing for his Sean John line. That sucks for so many different reasons. First of all, I must say, I love that Sean Combs. Everybody seems to seek him out for complaint, blaming him for the fall of hip hop to the return of fur. I think that Puff has always been impressive, a shapeshifter to the highest order, talented in unlikely and numerous ways, responsible for the popularity of conspicuous consumption to the point of the grotesque, ringing in an age of opulence for the masses, as we live out our fantasies of private jets flown by big booty hos taking us to a Byzantine baroque menagerie of supermodels and supermoguls, where the money and the champagne never runs out, offering up a moment of release from the tedium of day to day life.



If the allegations that Puff is guilty of violating the worker’s rights are true, then it is also likely that he had no idea, as fashion, like just about everything else, is a rough trade and there has to be some plane of indifference that one must maintain in order to find the sources of wealth and power that don’t come as easily in a world that tends to hoard its riches. This blindness often occurs in the oddest, most ironic situations.



Rap stars are among the highest earning stars in the world and they spend a lot of money and time on displaying that wealth. Diamonds are both their best friend, the exclamation point at the end of the dollar amount, and the silent oppressor, as the gem industry is notoriously unscrupulous with the way they do business. Diamond mines in Africa are the harshest environments of all for workers, with substandard conditions, meager pay and constant violations of both labor and human rights. Does this mean that diamonds should not be worn or valued? I don’t know. I just wonder if anyone thinks their purchases out so clearly, with such an eye on the origins of the product. I certainly don’t. Unless there is an out and out boycott of a said product, a picket line I must deliberately cross, such as the one outside of Von’s near my home, I wouldn’t know, nor would I even pretend to investigate. That is terribly selfish of me, but it is also the truth and I don’t think that it helps anyone to think that we are not selfish creatures. Selfishness is by nature a human and mortal trait. I am the only one in me, so isn’t it realistic and true to say that if I am not thinking about others, it is because of that? Being the only one at home is a good thing because you don’t want to share your body with others, at least not all the time. That would be weird. At the same time, we are supposed to uphold a code of ethics decided upon by who we are in relation to everyone else, which includes who we are not, who we would hope to be, who we are glad not to be, who we fear becoming, who we don’t know.



It would be difficult to be P. Diddy. He has more bank than anyone could ever want, power like a motherfucker, is on the a-list of all a-lists for all time, but it has to be hard to be him. Is this allegation of abusing Honduran workers quicker because he himself is Black? Do we tend to accuse people of color of being oppressors more readily because they should “know better?” How is that fair? Is it worse to be a turncoat than a colonizer? Isn’t that as racist as anything that we might assume about ourselves in relation to those in the dominant culture? Does the self hatred come full circle in the constant drama of the self made? Thinking about race is very time consuming and harrowing, as we don’t want to offend anyone outside our own realm of experience, nor do we want to ignore or invalidate the experience of being ourselves. Must we always oppress others in order to eye the prize for ourselves? I perhaps do not understand money well enough to answer any of these questions, but I believe that I should understand race enough, and the sad thing is that I don’t. In the end, I say that I would probably come out in support of Puff, because I really like that song “Special Delivery,” but is that enough?



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Liza

Monday, October 27th, 2003

David Gest got his ass kicked by Liza Minelli. Damn! That is fucked up yo. That Sally Bowles popped you upside the head so many times!!!!! “WILKOMMEN BIENVENUE WELCOOMMMMMMMEEE!!!!! Smack!!! Smack!!!” Obviously the marriage was a weird one from the start, having a strange publicity stunt feel to it, like Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson’s bizarre tryst in the early ’90s. For all of their nuptial nuzzling, every kiss and tickle was recorded in practically pornographic detail, there was also a lot of unsettling unsexiness built into the couple’s dynamic as a public persona, as most tried and tried not to picture the Gest-Minellis as a consummated union.



Not to say that there is anything unattractive about either of them really, it is just the sum of their parts don’t seem to add up to a heterosexual number. Gest seems gay from the get go, he has a wide receiver feel about him. Liza is Liza, as will be always. She is elemental. Anything she does is a surprise to no one. She has a kind of celebrity that is almost bulletproof. Few are capable of it, and there is no sure formula to get yourself to that point, besides having a rock hard fan base, truly bizarre personal habits/points of view/fits of rage/marriages and re-marriages, with spousal abuse thrown in for good measure/unforeseen and foreseen tragedy, inarticulate but striking roles in gay culture, a legacy of drug use, possibly not only your own but growing like a vine all along your family tree, custody battles of not just your own children but of yourself, incredible, undeniable talent, a tendency to drop in and out of show business for years at a time yet remain a star always.



Eminem is sort of that way, he is untouchable, as is Courtney Love, who is forever compelling and beautiful, yet feared for her unpredictability. But they are incredibly creative and prolific artists, and people love their work as well as use their personae as iconic symbols of the tortured artist. However, Liza is the only one who can really say that she has all these characteristics in spades, and she is second generation of this type of showbiz miracle. She is the kryptonite to scandal, because we would expect nothing less of her. Her family is the cornerstone of diva insanity to which no one can compare.



I consider iconic insanity the very best kind of crazy. It is what my dreams are made of. That kind of fame is real, legitimate, profound, because it is of the individual who is true to their purpose, who uses the life they have been given just as the talent that they fairly or unfairly possess, with artful, imprecise abandon, wild life, not as in preserves and game licensed, but like the Bananarama song, “This is the wild — life. It’s the wild life (WILD LIFE!).” However, these are not the perishable ‘wild child’ archetypes that flit about Hollywood, getting into brawls and insincere lawsuits with other feral youth, unlikely anyone named Colin or Corey. These are the eternal, interminable, untamable, unstoppable – whose publicity firms are working overtime not for damage control but for maximum damage exposure, as they are more exciting not for that which they create, but for what they destroy.



The wildfires raging over California darken the sky and spray ash all over Loz Feliz and remind me of the human drama that is the most exciting show on earth. There are some of us that burn too hotly and threaten to wipe out entire communities with the flame that blazes within our own asbestos hearth, but when we are contained within the eye of the societal lens, we are the brightest of stars.



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All Hail Tha Queen

Thursday, October 23rd, 2003

I remember when I first met Queen Latifah. It was in San Francisco at a huge benefit for AIDS awareness in the early ’90s. She was walking out of the green room and her bodyguard, a large imposing man, gave me a straight arm to get me out of the Queen’s way, and then she saw me, recognized me immediately and embraced me warmly. “Oh I have been wanting to meet you, gurrrl – you are funny! How you doin’? My name is Dana.” I was shaking and couldn’t even muster up the courage to say anything. I just stood there and gaped. She gave me a warm smile and went on stage. She was there with the cast of “Living Single” and showing much love to a worshipful crowd.



My ex-girlfriend, who I still believe is mad at me for breaking up with her, after fifteen or so years, my shit is that tight – for real tho’, was obsessed with the Queen, and made me a mixed tape with the single “U.N.I.T.Y.” and to this day, when I hear the bittersweet hook of that song, a war cry for all girls who want the respect that is due to them, that they had enough of the gender war, the male bonding that left them cold and alone in an already hostile world, I am brought to my knees in reverie. She truly is the Queen, not just in name, for her undeniable grace and power can only come from true royalty that only God can bestow, a Queen from the true Kingdom. There is no one that stands close to her in charisma, talent, beauty – who cares about the breast reduction and the weight loss, which could be construed by some as a self betrayal of her original spirit, the natural largesse of her being. She had some back problems, so get over it. I don’t have to take a feminist stance on judging what one might do with one’s own body, and when it comes to the Queen, nobody and nothing can knock her off her throne.



I got a big chest of drawers myself, and am not really a bra wearer, because I am a member of SAG and AFTRA, if you know what I’m sayin,’ and today in Victoria’s Secret – which I will never go into again by the way, and I only went because I was bored at the airport with a long ass layover. I was talking to my man on my cell, having a half-fight because of missing each other and no one wanting to admit it, and the saleswoman was holding up a support bra and pointing at it wildly, desperately trying to do something about the fact that my breasts were not as jacked up as she thought they should be, so she needed to give me some of that titty sign language like “The only way you gonna keep that man of yours is if you shove that shit up to your chin!!!” all frantic and crazed like she about to shout “UNDERWIRE!!!!!” in a crowded theatre. I did not need it from her and promptly exited the store while still on the phone. Bras don’t make me feel good. They hurt my back, and I could care less about where my breasts are as long they are still on my body. I am not going to go jogging anywhere, nor do I have a set of lingerie that matches because who has the time to wash that shit separately or put anything in a fishnet bag before you do – and I am sorry, I just do not care about gravity. Mind your own chest. For some reason, my lack of support for support, makes people really nervous. I think that there is something about bralessness that is too free, too overtly sexual, too bawdy, too loose – so that it makes people stare and stammer. It isn’t my intention at all to be any of these things, nor do I care if that is what people think that I am doing. Since I am not a dancer with a bony seat and no balcony, the boyish girls who can ‘get away’ with not wearing a bra because they are not guilty of fleshy ‘excess,’ and I am neither ashamed nor am I judgemental about the aforementioned ‘excess,’ considering it less excess and more an extravagance of nature, and something to be celebrated rather than hidden. My lawless braless ways are rather outlaw.



But I am here to talk about the Queen. Her reduction simply does not make her less of an icon in my eyes. The sequence in “Chicago” thrills me and forces me to play and replay it several times a day on my computer, the amber beaded dress fringes out into an ecstatic aura, casting her in a beautiful golden light. Ostrich feathers and jeweled headdresses were made for that shit, and Bessie Smith is reborn better and more badass beautiful than ever. She made that film truly brilliant and my guiltiest cinematic pleasure of the year, as I just cannot get enough of the Queen or that adorable shapeshifter, Renee Zellweger.



My favorite Queen Latifah performance has to be her gritty tour de force as hardcore gangsta bankrobber ladykiller in the exhilarating early ’90s noir “Set It Off.” The Queen goes down in a blaze of glory rivaled only by Al Pacino’s momentous bullet-ridden farewell in “Scarface.” I am not sure why “Set It Off” doesn’t have the same cult following within the hip hop community as the Brian DePalma epic of a Cuban immigrant with balls of steel and a strangely ethical manner of doing business as a high stakes drug dealer. First of all, the people in the movie are all in brown face. The performances are brilliant, but then again, everybody looks really orange. Even if there are a few real Latinos sprinkled in the mix, they fade into the background, chop and get chopped up with chainsaws in the first act, wear fly hats and tight hot angel white pants that look good when they are running and don’t get to have any lines. And the film is about race! I get the heroic thug that Tony Montana is, and have mad love for him, because he is a gangsta, through and through. He believes in himself, and he isn’t held back by his race (even though it is just self tanner but Pacino is a dope actor so he can do anything really), nor does he believe that his class is something that is going to be difficult to overcome. Like the Queen, he is the true King, anointed not by white society, but by his own bravery, intelligence, focus, pride, love, genius and some bizarre familial dysfunction that is both terrifically sad in the rejection of him by his mother and his creepy obsession with his sister. Rappers spend major bank on memorabilia from the film, and there are numerous mentions in legendary rap songs (Biggie says “Don’t get high on your own supply.”).



The true tragedy behind the Jacobean drama of “Scarface” is that no matter how much money Montana makes, no matter how palatial his estate is, Versace to the highest order, no matter how white and distant Michelle Pfeiffer is as a wife – he will never break the glass ceiling into the true elite society that he half-despises yet longs for, because he is not ‘legit.’ His money is dirty, a veiled allusion to his ‘race’ (ok – I won’t go there again, Pacino is the shit), and therefore his royalty is ignored by the playa-hatin’ wack royalty, represented by the blue haired socialites who cower at Montana’s meltdown at the fancy restaurant near the end of the film. The King ends up alone in his ridiculous bathtub, too large for anyone to fill without the water becoming too cold, and self destructs within cinematic seconds through his own drug paranoia, the realization that he has done himself in through a process of internalized denial of his own worth, a ticking time bomb set off by the race and class values of 80s America – that he would be the only one strong enough to bring himself down, and so he does, and even though seems as if he is the victim of numerous hitmen outside his bedroom door, it is really that he cashed himself in, because he couldn’t truly believe in his own credo – “The world is yours.”



My hope for the hip hop Kings and Queens of our age is that they really can believe that the world is theirs, that there is an unstoppable force within them that goes beyond the hype and the male posturing, that the coronation will not be televised, but that doesn’t mean anyone about to abdicate y’all.



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R.I.P. Elliott Smith

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003

What is heaven like Elliott Smith? I have been listening to your records since I got home this morning and I found out that you died. Did you get to meet Him right away? I bet they moved you to the front of the line. Is God nice? Do you feel better? Your songs were like the thoughts that rushed through my head all the time, this bittersweet dark rainy loveliness that wouldn’t leave me, and I never wanted them to leave me, but sometimes it was sad, and sadness is kind of my religion, and I worshipped you because you weren’t afraid to show it. I cannot believe that your soft voice is now silent and there is only these Kill Rock Stars cds left, that swirly Figure 8 album cover, looking like it was lifted from that Silverlake storefront, all your songs, the perfect lyrical accompaniment to my own personal loneliness to remember you by. I wish I had told you how much your music meant to me, to so many many people. There was a bunch of times I could have said it, when I saw you hanging out at the back of Largo and you with your vintage tee and rust cords and All Stars, but I got scared that you wouldn’t like me, and I never said anything. A handful of times I saw you in New York, walking fast in the East Village, but it was like you were surrounded by a light that held you up above the street and you didn’t touch the ground but floated up above just an inch or so that you were there but not there. I could see you but you couldn’t see me.



You were supposed to save pop music. Remember that LA Weekly cover? Your face on the front, looking scared and beautiful, and I am sorry, so so so very sorry that you are gone. What happened? I guess it doesn’t matter now and nothing does really. I just feel sorry and bad that we couldn’t do anything to help. That all the people that loved you really didn’t make much of a difference. That our love wasn’t enough, or didn’t reach you, or put you off, that you were unhappy anyway. But maybe your unhappiness was what we loved about you, so that our love was a constant reminder of how much unhappiness you had. I understand. We were selfish then, and for that I am angry for you. Mad for you. Sad for you. Loving you from here on the earth where things aren’t so great, not at all, but fuck you made things a lot better and now that you are not here we just all have to act like life goes on and there goes another rock star and its better to burn out instead of fade away and whatever the fuck – whatever the fuck. All I can say is that I am crying as I write this, as I listen to your secretly sorry voice on Either/Or and I am wondering if you are hovering in the air above your house, watching the grief stricken fans and old friends walking wounded trying to understand where you went, why you went. If they can reach you now, with their thoughts, their hearts, their love. Can you see them? Does it make anything better? A whole shitload of hipsters are crying right now, hiding behind their ironic 70s sunglasses and vintage western snap front shirts. Legions of girls with scars from cutting themselves and dyed black hair are lighting candles and contemplating joining you today. Thirtysomething dudes with dirty shag haircuts are shaking their heads, looking down at their big jokey belt buckles, thinking about having a beer before the sun goes down, because it isn’t a good day for any of us, because you aren’t here to represent.



One time I was in Portland on tour, an early morning before I was about to leave for home and I walked into a bagel shop. You were there, not in person, but your record was playing. The sleepy, baby cute hippie kid behind the counter was singing along to you, quiet just like you, and he knew every word. There was another raggedy girl cleaning up tables behind me, and she was singing too. Then this other kid came into the shop, and waited in line, and he was singing – as if on cue, a little off key, but almost in harmony. Pretty soon, so was I. But we were all in our own private worlds, our voices barely audible, singing only for ourselves. Were you singing for yourself? I hope so. I hope that you could love your music like it was loved by everyone else.



Goodbye gentle soul. Goodnight. How sorry I am to see you go. But you were maybe too beautiful for this world. So beautiful that it hurt to be in it. I hope that you are not hurting anymore. I hope everything is good wherever you are. I hope that you are happy. Everything reminds me of you.



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