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Music
Ziggy Stardust put the whammy on my kid or, everything I needed to know about parenting I learned from David Bowie.
The Baby Goth and I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario today. There’s a giant 20-foot version of the picture above plastered on the outside. (Because they have the Bowie exhibition, which you should go to if you’re in Toronto. It’s fun, if not transcendent. What I learned when I went: Bowie has a 26-inch waist. The costumes! They are so small!)
BG did a cartoon stop in front of Bowie, like someone put the brakes on him. After a moment of silent, slack-jawed staring, he turned to me and said, “What IS that?” We had a little convo about Bowie (yes, I know, it’s too Portlandia, isn’t it?). The takeaway for BG was: Bowie has two different coloured eyes. Bowie sings some good songs. Bowie has red and blue lightning on his face, and BG is a little concerned about whether it’s going to come off. We can’t see his nails, but maybe Bowie has silver toenails like Lily and BG do.
Then we went in, and our first stop was their family activity centre, where you can play and make art and read books. BG demands some paper and markers and then he writes his name. Then he writes, “Papa.”
So apparently this junior kindergarten thing is working.
I did not know he could write. I played it cool. I don’t know what I’m doing in this whole parenting thing, but I did once read an article that stuck with me that said, “praise the effort, not the outcome.” Because, you know, otherwise, you end up with entitled kids for whom life in the real world as a non-famous person is a crushing disappointment. So I told him he was doing a really good job holding the marker and concentrating so he could write.
But inside, yes, I was freaking out a little. I was going to take a picture and post it on Facebook, but then I calmed down and realized that everyone learns to write, and it’s not inherently an interesting phenomenon unless it’s happening to your kid.
Then BG asked if we could make a sign that said, “Welcome Lily.” Because a week ago, we made a sign lettered thusly in honour of Her Awesomeness’s arrival—she came bearing silver nail polish—but I did the lettering on that one. One week later, BG asked me to tell him each letter, and he wrote it.
Um, hello? Paging the Nobel committee. (Praise the effort, not the outcome!)
BG tired of his genius, so off we went, to see some miniature ships and some paintings of icebergs.
Then we went home and BG wrote signs welcoming various people to our house.
Later that night, after the standard epic bedtime struggle, I thought about the whole thing. It was difficult not to conclude that Bowie did in fact put the whammy on my kid, that as they stood there and stared at each other, Bowie somehow MADE HIM LITERATE.
But of course for that we must thank junior kindergarten teacher Mr. Brink, who works in the trenches every day with nary a museum exhibition mounted in his honour. Incidentally, BG pointed out later, during an impromptu Bowie video marathon, that Mr. Brink looks like Tin Machine era Bowie. They both play guitars (true) and they both have the same hair (sort of true).
I told BG that when he was baby, Mr. Mock and I liked to watch him sleep. In those colic-ridden months when BG would cry for six consecutive hours every night, we would sometimes find ourselves with a rare moment where he was asleep and we were not. We would drag our exhausted selves, feeling like husks of people rather than actual people, to his side and stare. Somehow, we got into this habit of singing Starman to him.
There’s a starman waiting in the sky.
He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.
There’s a starman waiting in the sky.
He’s told us not to blow it cause he knows it’s all worthwhile
BG now demands Starman at odd intervals, including bed time. I had to do a rendition when I kissed him goodbye this morning.
Mind blown. Trying not to blow it. That about sums up this whole parenting thing, doesn’t it?
Our hotel had electric wall sconce candelabra over the bed
The latest from Lily…
Last week (did I bore U with this already?) my sister dragged me 2 Philadelphia, where we saw a hardcore show in an unairconditioned basement where the temperature reached 123 degrees. My sister wrung her shirt out on the sidewalk, and I had an awesome time! Plus I met some hawtt boy with grey eyes (!!!) from a farm, and our hotel had electric wall sconce candelabra over the bed. Otherwise nothing is new cause I’m lame, natch.
Oooh! New slang! My sister got it from an article she was editing! “Monet”, as in someone who is attractive far away, but not so much close up. Usage: “That guy I thought was checking me out at the roller rink turned out 2 B a total monet….among other things.”
I’m so tan that my hands look dirty
The lastest from Lily, whose pallor is apparently threatened.
Dude, I’m so tan that my hands look dirty. U know what I mean? Why? See attached picture. Priestess were playing Coney Island at 1:30 in the afternoon. In the SUN! I literally RAN down the beach 2 shove my way 2 the front row. Whereupon I found that 5’5″ chunky, not-cute-no-matter-how-U-spin-it Mikey Heppner has NATURALLY RED-BLOND ROOTS under his dyed black hair. He was drenched with sweat. He was bright red from the heat. He will never give me the time of day. I heart him! Even though he made me tan!
Does God exist?
Yesterday, from Lily…
Subject: The latest proof of divine existence.
1) Find attached a photo of Gerard sans gear and dye: he’s still hawtt and it’s obvious he must have been human at some point. MayB there’s still hope 4 gearless, dyeless goth me when he eventually returns 2 his natural state!
2) My skin medicine is working. Keep yr fingers crossed.
3) The bus came when I got 2 the stop! W-O-W!
4) Most valid proof: THEY R POURING WET CEMENT IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. I’m waiting 2 hours till its dark, and then I’m going down there with a screwdriver and going apeshit.
Then, today, from Lily:
Subject: Proof there is no God.
1) That fucking cement was fucking Kwikdry and it fucking fucked me.
2) I spent THREE HOURS struggling up 2 City College 4 one lousy record -40 minutes waiting 4 the bus. Bus breaks down. Wait 4 second bus with a preteen who asks if I sleep in a coffin. Second bus comes. Arrive train station. Uptown train shut. Take downtown train. Take express uptown back up past local stops. Take local train BACK dowtonwn 2 hit missed stop. Tromp up world’s steepest hill in SUNLIGHT WITH NO SUNSCREEN – and when I got there…..the building had been bulldozed. It was literally a pile of rubble with the bulldozer still sitting on it.
3) I just threw out all that perfectly good generic Nyquil 2 prove I’m not addicted 2 it 3 days ago. Now I have a cold.
4) Gerard Way’s still not dating me.
Darkly,
Lily
You know you’re old when…
I went to the mall yesterday and as I was standing in line to pay for my black and white diagonal striped skirt that looked exactly like something I would have worn to a school dance in 1985, David Bowie’s Space Oddity came on the Muzak. Then when I got to the front a teenager named Britney whose name tag said she had “served two years” asked me if the gray streak in my hair was natural. It was, I said. “Awesome,” she said.
I am not making one word of this up.
I saw Axl Rose at Misshapes
The latest celebrity sighting from Lily…
I saw Axl Rose at Misshapes. And I just wanna say that I saw him 19 years ago on Guns N’ Roses’ first ever U.S. tour, and he was just….OMG….and then there he is in a half-empty trendoid club on a rainy Saturday, just like some dork like me. I don’t like it. He deserves BETTER!
Audience participation is the bane of my existence
Audience participation is the bane of my existence. I work hard, Mr. Rock Star Man. How do you know that I wouldn’t rather just sit back and listen quietly? Maybe I don’t want to dance. Maybe I’m too spastic to clap in rhythm and if you try to make me maybe I’ll become all self-conscious and distracted and weird. What are you, my mother? Do you think you can just boss me around? Issue commands for me to “start acting like I’m having fun” and I’ll just leap to my feet and start screaming? How do you know whether I’m having fun? And why do you keep saying you can’t hear me? Is it maybe all the hearing loss you’ve incurred over the years? Listen, I paid an ungodly amount of my hard-earned money to sit in a little plastic seat in this huge stadium and I didn’t do it so that you could spend all evening talking about how I’m not living up to your expectations. I’ll get up and dance if I feel like it, but right now I’m not feeling very effusive, so can we just get on with the show?
Don’t you hate it when there’s not enough bloodshed on Valentine’s Day?
Lily spent Valentine’s Day at the Met, naturally. But she isn’t a happy camper:
I just came back from the opera! I went with Todd and Travis 2 Aida at the Met, and it was 4 fucking hours long. And only 2 people died at the end, out of a cast of hundreds. what kind of payoff is that?!? Tosca’s only 2 hours max, and EVERYBODY dies! The champagne at all 3 intermissions helped, but now I’m regretting it.
Don’t you hate it when there’s not enough bloodshed on Valentine’s Day?
I saw the worst band ever 2night
The latest from Lily, Chicklets:
I saw the worst band ever 2night. It was twin boys from St. Louis, and the only good part was that they kissed. They were the first Myspace band I have ever seen, which I guess means that U set up a Myspace account 4 your band, post the hottest picture ever of yourself, make a ton of “friends”, and then have a ready-made audience that adores U and already knows your songs wherever U tour. It was pathetic. I can’t wait 2 go see Priestess, who open with the line “we’re from Canada, and we’re here 2 fuck U”, and then proceed 2 blow your head off with metal. No wonder U moved there!
I secretly think that the universe might be extra revealing to a girl around her birthday
Leaving work this afternoon, on the eve of my 32nd birthday, I thought I should start looking for signs. You know, like omens. I do this every year on my birthday because even though I know it’s stupid, I secretly think that the universe might be extra revealing to a girl around her birthday. At least it can’t hurt to keep your eyes peeled, is all I’m saying.
The city was carpeted by low-hanging fog. Fog in January! The snow has all melted so it kind of looks like spring, the yucky early weeks of spring where the snow melts to unveil garbage and waterlogged leaves and all sorts of ugliness. Except at least in the springtime, it’s actually, you know, spring.
As I headed toward the subway station, I could hear someone playing a saxophone. The musician was quite talented but I could not see him/her, given the fog and the crowds of commuters. It was one of those slow mournful kind of saxophone songs. It seemed familiar but I couldn’t place it. Anyway, it matched the fog.
“This is not a good sign,” I said to myself. “It will be difficult to spin this in a way that accords at all with my image of what the universe should be saying to me on the eve of my 32nd birthday.”
As I opened the door to the station I was debating whether it was best to accept that the year ahead was bound to be foggy and mournful, symbolized by a lone saxophonist in a crowd of people who just want to get home, or to abandon entirely my whole system of looking for signs, deciding instead that the year ahead will be rational, sensible, and totally ungoverned by the unseen.
But lo! I realized with a jolt that I did recognize the song. It was Blondie’s The Tide is High! It’s just that it was practically unrecognizable, you know, due to the mournfulness and such. “I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that,” Debbie Harry informs us calmly. “Oh no!” This is one of the earliest pop songs I remember because I used to dance around to it at my neighbour’s house, where we listened to it on 8-Track. It is still a favorite and is already programmed into the iPod for Saturday’s big bash.
So clearly, not only is this meant to be my theme song for the new year, it was being played in such a cryptic and nearly-unrecognizable format because it was meant as a sign that only I would recognize. Duh.
The tide is high, but I’m holding on.
Lily lives a life of the mind
Lily is my hero. You already knew that, but here’s another reason why. Last weekend Lily flew from New York to Seattle to see her celebrity crush, Gerard Way, and his band, My Chemical Romance, play a show. Gerard reportedly lives in Queens and Lily has even run into his brother and bandmate at a club, but did that stop her from flying from the shared city they call home across the continent on a whim? Well, duh, not!
The best/worst part is that before she headed to the airport, she went to the bank to withdraw some cash, only to learn that nine thousand dollars, her “nest egg,” as she puts it, had been drained from her account by an identity theft ring based in Cleveland who somehow used her old Minnesota driver’s license number to secure two cashier’s checks from the same teller at the same branch on the same day. (Don’t they screen these people? Don’t they have some kind of minimum I.Q. cutoff?)
They left her $36. Undaunted, she filed a police report, which was required to trigger an investigation by the bank, and got on the plane. A girl has to have priorities.
The thing I love about Lily is that she lives a life of the mind. They say that about a lot of people, and in most cases that means that they don’t do anything but read and write. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! said the blogger who hasn’t been outside in 24 hours.) But there are entire worlds inside Lily’s head, fantastical worlds, and unlike many of the rest of us who also sport, shall we say, active imaginations, every once in a while Lily makes these worlds manifest by doing something like getting on a plane with $36 in her pocket to see a New-York based band play in Seattle. Just because she really, really loves the lead singer.
Life is short, Chicklets, life is short. That’s why we love Lily, because she’s braver than the rest of us. She’s who we want to be when we grow up.
Aren’t we unnaturally blessed, sitting in this hotboxed church?
Chicklets, I was in a church last night — for a rock concert! Well, not really rock, more like earnest clever-but-slightly-granola folk music. I never did get why the show was at a church because last time I saw the artist in question it was at a normal nightclub. But whatever, it was fun! We sat in pews and people (other people!) smoked pot. The juxtaposition was thrilling.
Before the show started, I noticed a big marble plaque on the wall that was a memorial to 19-year-old George Courtland Noxon, who “accidentally drowned while on duty at the internment camp, Kapuskasing, Ontario, MDCCCCXV.”
I didn’t know if this was an Anglican or a Catholic church, though I suspected Anglican because — call me crazy — they seem more amenable to renting their churches out for rock shows than, you know, the Catholics, who are currently too busy ejecting gays from the seminary and telling women in Africa not to use condoms to book their spaces out to outsiders.
I turned to Mr. Mock, and said, “what does MDCCCCXV equal?”
“1915,” he said, squinting at the plaque.
“But who was being interned in Canada in 1915?” I said. Mr. Mock did not know, which is itself kind of remarkable, because he usually knows these sorts of things.
“I love that it’s called the internment camp,” I said, “like there’s only ever been one in the world.” The proverbial march of history is interesting, because of course the people who made that plaque could not imagine a future in which we’d need to narrow down exactly which internment camp you were talking about. And how sad that there are so many possibilities.
It turns out that there was indeed a camp in this northern Ontario railroad town, where Ukrainians and Turks and Austrians were interned. Some of them are buried in a cemetery there, while this boy who guarded them was shipped home and memorialized in his church. It is interesting how similiar the words “interred” and “interned” are, no?
Meanwhile, nearly a hundred years have passed and we’ve all forgotten. Sitting in the same church, the crowd is mostly aging hippies and Serious Young Women. There is one (a Serious Young Woman) in front of me wearing a sweatshirt that says, “One Act Play Festival, 2001” on the back. She doesn’t seem the actor type, so I imagine that she wrote and/or directed a one act play in her junior year of high school – which would make her 20 now.
I imagine that the play might have been about an historical injustice that we’ve all long since forgotten, because this is a category that Serious Young Women are inevitably attracted to (I can say this, having been a Serious Young Woman myself). Like maybe the internment camp in Kapuskasing, Ontario, during World War I. Perhaps sections of the play were even told from the point of view of one of the guards, an innocent young boy from Toronto, who had nothing against Ukrainians –- hadn’t even met any, probably –- but was just doing his duty. When he accidentally drowned (in a well? who knows?) it’s easy for the audience to see how the pointlessness of his accidental death is mirrored by the pointlessness and cruelty of the whole exercise.
Kapuskasing, Ontario, it turns out, is also the hometown of James Cameron, director of movies like Titanic and The Terminator. He was born in 1954, almost 40 years after George Noxon died. I am not trying to make a point here, just an observation. Or maybe the point is just that life goes on, the narrative keeps rolling.
And aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we unnaturally blessed, sitting in this hotboxed church, glorious stained glass windows soaring up into the winter night? Aging hippies, earnest girls (and lots of boyfriends taking one for the team): we’ve all forgotten that anyone was interned in Ontario in World War I (when was that again?) because we’re safe and dry and our ethnic backgrounds have been muddled up enough that no one knows or cares who among us is Ukranian. No one is paying attention to the plaques on the wall. Because it’s the early 21st century and we have the luxury of forgetting. We’re just here to hear some good music.
Axl Rose used to be cool before he went insane
Axl Rose used to be cool, before he went insane,” said Lulu while eating cake and grooving to Sweet Child ‘o Mine at the boss’s house. It was the annual staff party. It was very late. Fancy martinis had been consumed.
“I wish everything I ate tasted like this,” she went on. “Except meat. I like the occasional steak.”
Also, their singer is Clinton’s speechwriter
Why is Lily always mixing boating with weird rock shows? Can we attribute it all to the glam life of a New Yorker or is there something about her that attracts andrognyous musicians and boats/rafts?
“I spent the night on a 3-hour rock cruise 2night! It was a boat that U go down the East River and out around the Statue of Liberty on, while they ply U with alcohol, and a band plays upstairs. The band was the Upper Crust, which was 4 guys in Mozart-style breeches and frock coats, white wigs, and powdered white faces, doing songs like “In2 the Breeches” and “Matron”, ACDC-rock-style. Also their singer is Clinton’s former speechwriter. The “seas” got rough, and people were sliding all over the place, it was 2 die! I really wished U were there, it would have been a complete riot.”
I have to get a grip on my fashion sense before 70s glam rock comes back in
The latest from Lily:
I’m in love with the singer from Franz Ferdinand beyond all control. It’s causing me to wear striped shirts and ties and to deeply desire, for some reason, a red Polo. I have to get a grip on my fashion sense before 70s glam rock comes back in and I get caught with my platforms down, so to speak.
Stalking around in his purple stilettos…
Did you know that Prince is following me, in a kind of reverse celebrity stalking? Let me lay out the evidence. I grew up and came of age in the gorgeous city of Minneapolis. Prince grew up and came of age in the gorgeous city of Minneapolis. I moved to Toronto some years ago. Prince moved to Toronto shortly thereafter.
Now back when I was a little chickadee and Prince was playing shows at the now-made-famous-by-the-film-Purple Rain concert venue First Avenue, I certainly thought that Prince was going to change the world, or at least cause a tiny little revolution in gender roles. “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man,” he said, stalking around in his purple stilettos, “I’m something that you’ll never understand.” He had girls in his band without having girls in his band be a gimmick. This was before he became a Jehovah’s Witness and began to believe that the women should stay home and raise the kids.
Oh, but weren’t we lucky without knowing so? Prince lived among us in a big purple house and he showed up in the local gossip columns saying weird but lovable things, doing weird but lovable things, wearing weird but lovable things. And we tolerated him, rolling our eyes with secret affection. Yes, we said, he wears buttless pants and changes his name from time to time to an unpronounceable symbol, both things that We Do Not Do Around Here, but he is One Of Us. And the teenagers among us began 2 write like him, 4 we felt that the use of numerals in place of letters was somehow symbolic of our inner brilliance, our inner sensitivity 2 all that the capitalists and racists among us were blind 2. (Lily still writes this way. We continue to disagree on whether the replacement of the pronoun “I” with the word “eye” is part of the “pure” form of Prince Speak or merely a late-on-the-scene bastardization. Clearly eye M in the right here and Lily’s misguided interpretation is merely reflective of her advanced age. She clings to her youth. But eye digress.)
But, really, wasn’t he a genius? I am prone to exaggeration, but it seemed so. What Prince gave us was the perfect pop song, an art form that I fear is lost in the current dark age of millionaire teenagers whose wits are not nearly so taut as their bellies. A song by Prince, a song, like, say, When Doves Cry, could be one the one hand a perfect, singable song, about a crystallized moment in time (“dream if you will a courtyard,”) and no more. But, it could also be a sad song about ruined love (“why do we scream at each other?”). But, wait, there’s more, there are Freudian parental issues (“maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied”)! But, wait!, wait!, the whole thing is, with a little unexpected flourish, wrapped up in a much bigger and yet not unpalatable doves/peace/war metaphor. But you can still dance to it and of course can choose to ignore one or more of the levels of genius embedded within, should they offend your definition of popular music or challenge your grasp of the metaphorical.
And doesn’t this all lead us, then, to the ultimate Prince song, to Purple Rain? Aahh. Think of it, think of the words themselves: purple, rain. Put together they are such nonsense, and yet they belong together, don’t they? And think of the opening line, a plaintive, “I never meant to cause you any problems.” Oooh, you’d keep reading a novel that opened that way, wouldn’t you? Like all the best Prince songs, it’s about two things. First, there’s doomed love. So sad! “I never wanted to be your weekend lover!” But it’s also somehow inexplicably about racism and prejudice. “You can’t seem to open your minds, so close them, and let me guide you to the purple rain!” But the best part is that even though the song is so totally tragic on all levels, it feels, with all those whining guitar interludes (If you’re doing your homework, I really must insist that you listen to the long version as it appears on the Purple Rain album, not some randomly-truncated-for-radio version such as you might hear on the Lost Eighties Lunch) like a totally slow-dance-able-at-the-prom ballad. I must have heard it for a good ten years before I registered its utter inappropriateness as a straight-up love song. Oh, but isn’t this unlikely juxtaposition the best thing about it? Because isn’t this what love is actually like in the world?
And now we come to my 13-year-old fantasy. Well, there are many, but this one looms large. I am at either a roller rink or a school dance. I am wearing a horizontal-striped boat necked long sleeved t-shirt like Madonna in the Papa Don’t Preach video (I am, however, not a teenage mother-to-be), black velvet miniskirt, black tights, black flats. In my fantasy, I am not hiding in the bathroom when the slow song begins (so as to avoid literally leaning against the wall: “even doves have pride”) because in this universe there is no reason to hide. I am shocked, and yet not shocked, when my teenage dreamboat crush, who is not the captain of the football team, but also not the captain of the chess team, begins to walk toward me. Perhaps, to accord with the opening of the song (“I never meant to cause you any problems”) he is my debating partner. Or perhaps we have run against each other for student council and clashed on the issue of whether installing a pop machine in the student lounge is a step forward in the self-determination category or a harbinger of a lifetime of obesity for our fellow students. Whatever, we clearly must set aside our differences and face up to our undeniable attraction to each other. We must dance to this song. And so we do. But wait! We must introduce a tinge of sadness. Perhaps it is the end of junior high and we are bound for different high schools. Or perhaps I in my brilliance have been invited to transfer to a special gifted school in Paris. Either way we are not sure if the song portends romance or doom. We dance. It is bittersweet.
And, um, that’s all. It never really got much farther than that. I mean, come on, even your wildest imaginings have to have their limits. I don’t think we lived happily ever after. I don’t even know if we ever saw each other again, after I transferred to Paris. I sent him a few postcards, maybe, but he was sensitive to the fact that I’d become too, well, continental for him and so we drifted apart into the Purple Rain.
Enough pink drinks and she was able to forget…
Lily spent last Tuesday night on Liberty Island at a private party to launch some new brand of vodka. Not being told by the publicist friend who invited her that the event was part of Fashion Week, she came dressed in her usual Lacoste-meets-Goth clubwear. They were ferried over and plied with pink vodka drinks distributed by supermodels in babushkas. Enough pink drinks and she was able to forget that she was wearing a polo shirt and platform boots and Mikal Baryshnikov was wearing Armani.
After watching fireworks while lounging on Persian carpets and plush throw pillows scattered about on the lawn, the evening ended with a concert by none other than Duran Duran. Playing on a floaty raft thing forty feet out in the water, they were, Lily reports, “phoning it in.” She did not care, though, because of course she will someday marry Simon Le Bon. One doesn’t want one’s husband to be too enthusiastic when whoring himself out at corporate gigs, does one?
He took off his jacket and she was overcome with a desire to yell “take it all off” but thought about how she was surrounded by nine-foot supermodels doing shots of vodka and just clapped politely.
“Then we got back on the ferry with Mikal and the supermodels and I went back home,” says Mrs. Le Bon.