Instructions on how to Assemble and Destroy “Normalcy” using the coming out narrative in a teenage rebellion framework vis a vis riot grrrl.

by Lifeguard of Love

“...an uncontrollable past, the uncontrollability of the past, it’s inability to explain the present” (Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds)

Part 1 – Queer Kid Set Up:

1. At age 15, fall in love with your best friend, who’s been your best friend since you were 10. Tell her. She accepts your love, but rejects it soon after in favor of her other best girl friend.

2. Watch her and your other best friend kiss, touch, and hold hands. Let them spend the night at your house after they’re found out as lovers by their parents and aren’t allowed to spend the night alone together. Much, much later, it will occur to you that kisses don’t make those wet sounds, but finger-fucking does.

3. Come out to your mom and get sent to “counseling”, where you recount your life story with self-important glee to a woman who tells you you can “burn your bra later.”

Part 2 – Procurement of Straight Man:

1. Allow your best friend to procure a 26-year-old man from the internet, whom she met on Professional Women’s Gymnastics and Xena: Warrior Princess message boards, for AIM chatting (this is 1998-1999, after all), in order to deflect your continuing love for her.

        a. He is a virgin, and he says “set” instead of “sit” or “sat,” and “whenever” instead of “when.”

        b. He thinks Nirvana’s best song is “Aneurysm,” which is still true.

2. Some time later, type that you love him, and stand in your bedroom slapping yourself in the face. You know that saying you love him is leading somewhere outside of yourself, but are aware it is a path you have to follow.

3. Write to him in a phonetic language somewhere between baby talk and a southern accent.

4. Encourage him to visit; do not object when he decides to quit school and move to your town instead.

Part 3 – A Teenage Rebellion Primer via Riot Grrrl:

1. On the day of his arrival (a Sunday, in early June), purchase and listen to Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped for the first time. It is a short pop album*, recorded in a punk style that is alternately grinding and melodic, where women express embodiment, self-ownership and self-care, and inner conflicts uncovered during long looks between self and society.

2. Feel a little disappointed that your reaction is not to lay on the floor and kick and sob, like some girls’ testimonies you have read online. You were really hoping to break open in sacreligious ecstasy.

3. Use words like pussy and cunt and fuck lightly, because they have already been reclaimed for you.

4. Listen to Bikini Kill to learn how men and women relate. Nothing has happened to you yet, but you are about to make it happen, when this man arrives.

*This album was a dark place I had never been before; the feminine. This album sounded like going into a vagina; reverse birth; warm and dark. Moving through the dark, everything murky, feeling out to identify the things you come in contact with. This is an album about identifying body parts. Blood, heart, my pussy. My tits, my ass, my legs, heart brain lung gut. Siamese twins connected at the cunt. In my head, I’m on my knees. Sweat on hair/tears on face. Red lips, sharp nails, legs that grow back. I didn’t even know what Pussy Whipped meant, it just sounded cool.

I was 16 and growing up in a safe and loving home. I did not know my body. I had never had a serious illness or injury. I wasn’t athletic and I’d never touched myself for pleasure. I never even thought I was fat or ugly. I had lots of thoughts and feelings, but none of them related to my body.

I had never heard pussy or cunt used to describe a vagina or as an insult to a woman (or man). I didn’t know what “clit” referred to; I thought it meant “slit”, a euphemism for vagina.

I was a prude who had already had a boy suspended in 8^th grade for pretending a vacuum hose was his penis and tapping me with it. So riot grrrl was totally new. It did not resonate with me, but I could tap into the collective girl experience. I moved into it.

Part 4 – Rejection of Straight Man:  

1. Feel no sympathy, in fact feel nothing, when he causes the toilet in your parents’ house to overflow. (this is the first and only time the toilet ever overflows). He claims he only flushed “a tissue.”

2. Come to realize that he wears an “aftershave” that sticks bitter in the root of your nostrils. Notice he always wears dumpy cargo pants and never jeans.

3. Stroke his arm as you watch TV with your family. Later, your parents sternly reprimand:

        “You don’t understand that that kind of touch is exciting for a man.”

        “If you’ll do that in the presence of your parents, how far will you go when we’re not around?”

                a. Feel insulted/humilitiated by the idea that they think you’d have any interest in exciting this man.

4. Kiss him in the driveway, after dark. His tongue is thick and slug-like. At that moment, begin to hate him. Later he will say that he never thought you would want kiss until you were married.

Part 5 – End the Relationship using Teenage Rebellion:

1. Go to Illinois to visit your grandparents, and use the whole calling card he gave you to call your best friend every night.

2. Quit shaving your legs.

3. Break up with him around the time school starts; around the time you get your driver’s license.

        a.  Make fun of his disgusting “aftershave” with your friends when he shows up at the grocery store where you are having off-campus lunch.

4. Stop believing in God after he starts going to church with the Christian girls who are on the periphery of your social group, and tells you that a pastor said “Your relationship will be restored!”

4. Play strip poker with your friends in a half-built house. Tell him about it.

        a. “I thought you were already over your teenage rebellion, or that it had just skipped over you,” he explains. “But you just hadn’t started yet.”

Part 5 – Clean Up:

1. Lose your virginity to a hot butch girl in the fall.

        a. He moves to Texas with his virginity fully intact.

2. Answer the phone when he calls drunk to tell you he went to Pantera’s bar and saw a dancer with her entire labia shut with piercings.

3. Call him some time during your senior year of high school, to tell him you smoke pot every day.

        a. “You’ll only get stupid if you smoke pot every day for a year,” he says.

        b. Smoke pot every day for the next 7 years.

Intro to Pussy Whipped Week

This week we drew "Dead Moon Night Week."

"But what album?" Mr. Jelsing asked.

"I don't know. I couldn't pick just one."

We decided it should be Nervous Sooner Changes or Strange Pray Tell.

"Those were the ones we used to check out at the library all the time. Do we have those both on LP?"

"I think so." (when you're reminded that your record collection is too big to be aware of its inventory)

The Previous Day...

We read an article about Bikini Kill's reissues in The New Yorker.

"Did you know that I got the album Pussy Whipped at the end of my sophomore year in high school, on the same day that _____ moved to Olympia?" I asked. I could feel my eyes getting big and radiant.

"That's wild."

On Solstice I drew the first card from the Triple Goddess Tarot deck. The first card is The Magician, who manifests through will.

"I manifested through will this situation in order to exercise what I was learning in feminism and riot grrrl and then destroy the situation. I made it happen, for that precise purpose."

The Next Day...

"I'm going to write my essay on Bikini Kill anyway, and just save it for when we draw Pussy Whipped, because I'm really inclined to write about that right now, about me manifesting through will that situation with _____. "

"We could just write about Pussy Whipped this week. I'm into being flexible, and it keeps coming up lately."

"We don't only have to draw from one bin...the whole fucking world is our bin!"

Doggystyle

by Lifeguard of Love

1. I don't know much about rap. My favorite rap albums are the most well-known rap albums, Doggystyle and Ready to Die.

2. In 5th grade, my second-best friend (who's now in a bitchin band, Full Moon Radio), listened to Snoop Dogg. "He only killed one person," she said. She was the first person I ever knew who listened to Nirvana (in 3rd grade), and she played in a Nirvana cover band on Halloween, and it was amazing.

3. Doggystyle is really chill.

4. I drunk e-bayed Doggystyle on LP, in 2007 or 2008. It was an excellent choice! It sounds really good on LP. It was the first record we listened to after midnight on New Year's 2010, on Brianna's vintage console record player.

Three on "Doggystyle"

Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle

by Slim Volume

 

I.

CJ was perched on a wooden stool behind the counter of the record store. “This is one of the best albums of all time,” she looked up from her compulsive nail filing. She looked at me while saying this as if she was telling me that the vitamin A in carrots is good for your vision.

CJ had married a local with no first name, an heir to a log cabin dynasty. An A-frame, gun, and a mean dog with a prissy name. I saw her on facebook a year ago standing on the beach, squinting in the sun. A one piece Baywatch red bathing suit. Was she back in Temecula?

II.

There are joints in manufactured homes. They press into your back like a hide-a-bed. We got up off the floor and just like that we were out the door. When you wake up still drunk, tasks seem so well defined. You see with a hard light only what you need to do. You just do. You both get into your ’89 Subaru, jellybeans and antifreeze coldly coagulating on the floor, and direct that puppy down the Duwamish. Everything would be gray anyway.

III.

There’s too much going on around the Dogghouse, too much to look at all at once. I’ve never been interested in graphic novels. So I turned the CD booklet around so Snoop’s face was the cover. “I says I’m 19, she says ‘stop lyin’’”.

 

Built to Spill on That Monogamous Feeling

by Lifeguard of Love

 

I don't think I understand Built to Spill. I don't know if I'd even say I like them.

They are from Idaho, which is the Northwest, and they were putting out records in the 90s, but in the histories, they are never associated with grunge.

I'm not very familiar with their catalogue. I am only familiar with "There's Nothing Wrong with Love"* because I used to drive around getting stoned to it. I guess it is music for stoners. When we saw them play in Bellingham in 2008 or 2009, it was sold out (we got tickets when they were yelling "7 tickets left!"), and I was surprised how many hippies were there. Young girl hippies, younger than us, were singing all the words to all the songs.

I'm tempted to say that Built to Spill (I've always associated their name with a child's sippy cup) are at their best in their love songs, although they tend towards sentimentality and preciousness. If you listen closely, you realize that they probably never even knew the girls in their songs. Like, they thought they loved them, but the girl never really revealed herself to the narrator, and he didn't even notice, just went on loving his idea of her.

This is DUDE music, through and through. Girls listen to it to dream or learn about how men feel about them. I never, ever could have listened to it as a teenage riot grrrl who was also into Jimi Hendrix. I could not have gotten through the whiny man vocals to find the delicious psychedelic center.

But there are moments of PERFECTION here - never through an entire song, but enough compiled to make this album worth listening to several times a year.

1. The lyric "You arrive and I'm on fire" (PERFECT)

2. The storyline intro to "Car" (PERFECT)

3. The very beginning of "The Source" (PERFECT)

And: "Stay with me until I die/There's nothing else I wanna try."

When Kaden asked me to marry him, three months after the first night we shared a bed, which we did without fucking for the first 18 nights, I was not expecting it, but I accepted after only a moment's thought. Yes, I could commit to staying with him forever. Before we got together, I broke up with a girl who was going to move in with me, because I didn't want to "get married". Then I promptly fell in love with my roommate, whom I was already living with. We got married 7 years later, though if our politics were then what they are now, we would not have allowed the state to name our union. His asking and my accepting were the only vows we needed.

There's nothing else I wanna try.

I have sexy fantasies about other kinds of people all the time. I dreamed about drinking gin with a dirty queer punk boy and I knew that if we drank gin together we'd do it, and I felt so awesome. I get off by thinking the words "[first and last name of my favorite homosexual male musician] eating my pussy, [first and last name of my favorite homosexual male musician] eating my pussy." I imagine fucking a fat girl, with a strap-on or "my cock"; depends. I jerk off the air with the hand I don't use to hold my vibrator. I write stories in my head about a young man caring for another young man who is ill, using herbal remedies, in a college dorm. I visualize myself in petticoats and skirts, surprised by a backwoodsman who holds me down. It's all about the sensation of my bare ass on cool moss, and lichen and sticks in my hair. I go to Portland primarily to check out gentlemen's footwear.

These ideas are full and beautiful and secret in my mind, but they are FANTASY. I don’t wish to bring them into my lived life. They’re nothing I wish to actually try, or even role play. In my lived life, I have and want only one beloved, and it is Kaden. We are cut from the same whatever. He's the lover I always wanted and still the one I want.  

Stay with me until I die/There's nothing else I wanna try.

I'm certainly not saying monogamy, or LTRs, or marriage is right for everyone, or even that it will always be right for Kaden and me, but we've had a bitchin' 9.5 years of living together and loving exclusively. Thanks, Built to Spill, for putting that monogamous feeling into words.

*I think "Hazy" from their 1993 album "Ultimate Alternative Wavers" is actually the best song ever recorded.

Bottoms up and this time....

by Slim Volume

You were worried that Built to Spill’s “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love” would be an uninspiring record to talk about at this point of your life but I say we could play, “look at how many Bowie references we can find!”

For example: “My stepfather looks/Just like David Bowie but he hates David Bowie/
I think Bowie's cool...”

This is the generation of the stepfather. “They are the Gen-X Neil Young,” seems to be the cliché. You could certainly claim as much seeing them in Bellingham a few years ago on a damp flannel and thermal night. Who needs smoke machines when a couple dozen lungs billow out the work for you? But the specters of patriarchal authority that had seemed to haunt Neil Young and Crazy Horse have shape-shifted. For Neil and the band, the assemblage of power and authority that early r’n’r attempted to wield or channel intact, but on their own terms, had now crumbled into pieces that they glued back together in a beautiful clatter. 

I think this is part of the revelation of Built to Spill; what’s left over of the Crazy Horse leftovers—the detritus of patriarchal power and the macho mythologies that authorize it are less battled against than repurposed for an Albertson’s stir-fry dinner domesticity. Maybe most importantly, the father is no longer watching them, nor gives a fuck what they do. 

Además,

r.e.: our dear friend in her college stoner era wearing a baby blue BTS “Keep it like a Secret” shirt with the neck cut out—I don’t think I could ever love anyone who hasn’t been a Garth about something.

Week 2

This week on No one can sing the blues like no one:
There's Nothing Wrong with Love by Built to Spill.

Bike Basket Bowie

by Slim Volume

Too early rain
smooth the mud at the crotch of the driveway
Leave no print
Heal my hip
A round corner
carves a ham
and clatters
ceramic oscillating
bowl
Bike chains strung between
starlight lanterns. 

Week 1: David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Part II

by Slim Volume

I could never identify anything inside me that ever pulled me towards David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust. Instead, the idea of them has been an amorphous assemblage, hanging hazy and quiet, distant in my mind. I’m not one of those of my generation who gets sentimental about Labyrinth [editor’s note: the author was more captivated by Shelley Duvall in Fairytale Theatre], but at the same time, I don’t recoil in disgust at the thought of Bowie prancing in nude-colored tights (after all, we are also the Robin Hood: Men In Tights generation). I’ve always desired from performers some sort of knowability, some sort of gesture, an identifying tic. I want to be able to smell the booze in their sweat and feel the bone-soreness of rock ‘n’ roll through and with them. I want urgency of expression, the sharing of vulnerability, the forging of human bonds. I want to feel a connection that isn’t as mediated, scripted, or policed by consumer capitalism and the culture industry.

There was something always untouchable or unfamiliar about Bowie. Unlike ET—another alien from my past—I could never imagine Ziggy or Bowie sharing in the humiliating comedy of coming out of a closet dressed as your little sister (or watching an extra-terrestrial come out of the closet dressed as toddler Drew Barrymore), let alone reach over all those layers of meaning in the human/non-human to touch fingertip-to-fingertip. The persona of Ziggy Stardust, and the persona of Bowie himself continued to be hermetically sealed, distant, and unknowable to me.

Instead, I’ve tended to be drawn to more punk representations of the “alien”. The “Alien Boy,” as the subject of the Wipers song of the same name, is the personification of society’s abjection; a marginal figure, doomed to a life of frustration in a condition of unknowability. It was easy for me to imagine punks, queers, rock ‘n’ rollers, and weirdos who may not share much in common recognizing the beating heart of “Alien Boy,” and forge affective ties as aliens together and with Greg Sage himself. There was something too alienating about Ziggy’s alien-ness however, something too pure—not necessarily normative, but tucked up and away from the messy funk of human existence. Greg Sage and the Wipers refuse this purity, and the alienness of “Alien Boy” is palpable, yet the frustration expressed by Alien Boy seems only to be productive of bloody knuckles punching a brick wall over and over. Can a reconsideration of Bowie, and Ziggy Stardust reveal hidden subversions?   

Ziggy Stardust as a “leper messiah” prophesizing the end of the world and the salvation of humankind by mysterious starmen can be read many ways, but what I find useful here is the story’s “world-upside-down” aspect. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work identified the carnival and carnivalesque literature as a site in which social hierarchies of everyday life are turned on their heads (i.e.  peasants become kings, etc) and an amalgamation of the sacred and profane is enacted in a topsy-turvy world of hybridity, excess, parody, and vulgarity. (Bakhtin 1968) In Bowie’s case, Ziggy is inverting the authoritative power of the state or the church, assuming for himself—the outcast rock ‘n’ roller—the mantle of ideological purity, combining it with the ultimate symbolic profanity of the masses, the leper, with the goal of liberating mankind from its own destruction. However, because carnivalesque performances make visible that “established truth and authority are relative,” (Bakhtin 1968) Ziggy’s disciples are able to see through his pretensions of power. As he assumes the mantle of the new bearer of truth and “all the news”, he transforms into a new authority figure, separated from his disciples (or fans) by the membrane of celebrity, even as he becomes the “poster ‘boy’ for the margin” (Rintoul 2004).

Whatever subversion may be found in Ziggy Stardust seems to exist especially within his disruption of normative gender performance. In many ways, Ziggy’s performances of ambiguous gender and sexuality exemplified society’s desire to confront anxieties and renegotiate norms around shifting constructions of gender and sexuality in the context of his time. Along this line, Richard Grossinger suggests that Ziggy’s alienness coincides with a contemporaneous fixation on aliens and flying saucers as “savior[s] from traditional male-female roles” through their “androgynous, transsexual reflection of the individual who perceives/imagines [them],” a reflection of their unmet needs which “transgress Earth’s genetic and social boundaries in ways that Earthlings cannot,” but desire to. (Grossinger 1974: 56)  However, Suzanne Rintoul points out that, in the similar way Ziggy’s celebrity status alienates him from his fans, his alien-ness is also representative of an ultimate foreignness and difference. (Rintoul 2004: 5)

Rock ‘n’ roll has always pivoted on the aesthetics of the carnivalesque, especially in terms of the grotesque body (individual and collective) as a challenge to dominant hierarchies as “multiple, bulging, over- or under-sized, protuberant and incomplete,” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 9), a part of a teeming mass of an always becoming, hybrid humanity. Of course, power is located in the grotesque body’s dialectical opposite, the classical body: “The grotesque body is emphasized as a mobile, split, multiple self, a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange; and it is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context. The classical body on the other hand keeps its distance,” and “[is] far more than an aesthetic standard or model. It structure[s], from the inside as it were, the characteristically ‘high’ discourses of philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, as well as literature, as they emerged from the Renaissance. In the classical discursive body [is] encoded those regulated systems which [are] closed, homogenous, monumental, centered and symmetrical…Gradually these protocols of the classical body came to mark out the identity of progressive rationalism itself.” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 22)

Perhaps Ziggy’s alien body fails to represent a true digression from gendered norms because it is too invested in a well-bounded classical body. From the vantage point of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, his glam alien aesthetic can be read as a true carnivalesque gesture—outcasts of dominant society performing the rituals of opulence normally reserved for the bourgeoisie. But Ziggy’s performance fails at a true hegemonic reversal. Hermetically sealed from his followers, in an image of a purely androgynous being; pedestal-ized, angular, and closed, Ziggy remains complicit with power and the ideologies that naturalize it. In denial of the grotesque body, he refuses to come down to earth.

The Wipers, in their own way, also remain complicit with power. This can be found within their cynicism, their expressions of futility. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has made important distinctions between cynicism and irony. The cynic and ironist both come from the skeptical position in which they “suspend belief in the moral content of truth,” and embrace the instability of meaning. However, while “the cynic is someone who wants to be on the side of power but does not believe in its righteousness,” the “ironist simply refuses the game, and re-creates the world as an effect of linguistic enunciation.” (Berardi 2012: 20) By resigning themselves to the idea that the law of the powerful is inevitable though it is  “rotten,” “oppressive,” etc., the Wipers’ cynicism forecloses multiple possibilities that the ironist, by creating “a linguistic space where law has no effectiveness,” might open up with regards to human connection beyond established hierarchies of power, “suspend[ing] the meaningfulness of the signifier and freely choos[ing] among multifarious possible interpretations.” (Berardi 2012: 21) The cynical Wipers, like Bowie, are too faithful in narratives of progress, completion, and redemption that have been carried through modernity in both “secular” and “sacred” discourse—narratives that continue to structure and naturalize hierarchies of power. Though they are unhappy with the status quo, they do little to actually threaten it. Instead they merely reaffirm power’s hold, the inevitability of its reach, and its perpetuation throughout time, despite their criticism.

Are there ways to imagine the glam alien beyond the cynicism of the Wipers and beyond Ziggy’s commitment to a narrative of closure and the inaccessible classical body? I became convinced of this at the Olympia Film Festival this year, which had a glam theme and opened with a screening of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. To set the tone for the evening was a glam cover band, Rocknho, who paraded through the likely glam catalogue but with a difference: instead of a goal of faithfulness to a supposed authentic representation of a particular band or specific celebrity figures, this cover band—who claimed to be from a peripheral state of the (former) Soviet Bloc—did not offer any easy references to personas, identities, or places in time. Instead, they seemed to be performing what Elizabeth Freeman has termed temporal drag, or a “counter-genealogical practice of archiving culture’s throwaway objects,” in order to “awaken a dissident future once hoped for in the past.” (Freeman 2011: xxiii) This performance “queers” a progressive narrative that has so often subverted oppositional moments and possibilities (as well as the legibility of their traces in the present).

Rocknho’s aesthetic gleans both from materials offered by the Ziggy Stardust allegory—the performative qualities of gender, the instability of power, and the power of celebrity as well as a punk rallying cry of frustration, which, for the Wipers was provoked by the agonizing force of the policing of norms that intensified in Reagan-era America. Rocknho flaunt the radical iconography of the revolutionary past while rejecting or bastardizing the mythology surrounding the imperialistic and nationalist militarism that followed. The Soviet film projected on a screen behind the band, and the quasi space-age, glammed-out, home-made costumes that riff off Stalinesque Soviet uniforms, recall cosmonaut dreams of human achievement finally unbridled by systems labor exploitation that limit the realization of human potential. At the same time, their bodies spilling out of their lamé hotpants, unruly curls of hair overflowing from under home made Red Army hats, and bending, contorting bodies writhing into the audience, subvert the modernist ideal of corporeal perfection championed by discourses of militarism and citizenship inherent to capitalist liberal-democracies, fascist and communist states alike. Rocknho take these elements and combine them with cast-offs from the scrapheap of modernist utopian symbols and myths at their disposal—an endless pantheon of tools enabling them to construct an ambiguous assemblage to enact a carnival of irony useful in the present.

By providing countless imaginative possibilities of community affiliation and being—a true autonomous consciousness of connection, Rocknho works against late capitalism’s commodification of affective ties, desire, sensuality, and somatic life.  Rocknho’s embodied irony subverts power by flaunting power’s constructiveness, fluidity, and contingency. It thumbs its nose at universal truths and moral prescriptions emanating either from the left or from existent hierarchies and hegemonic ideologies. It blurs the boundaries of both the unified, classical body and the split between the body of the performer and the body of the people. By performing temporal drag, Rocknho takes carnival back from the regulatory, domesticating clutches of the bourgeoisie and redistributes it in an explosion of glittering fractals of emancipatory potentiality.

Compact Disc

This is how we usually listen to it.

Ziggy Stardust LP

Here's our copy of Ziggy Stardust.
We don't usually keep records in the kitchen, but it has the best lighting.

I also highly recommend looking closely at the typography of the words "Ziggy Stardust" next time you see this LP cover. They are really beautiful.

Week 1: David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

This is the first post on No one can sing the blues like no one, which takes its title from an Alice Notley poem. Here, Kaden and Liina will discuss our favorite records in memoir, essay, poetry, and visual representation. We have an old yogurt tub inside a customized tissue box cover where we've put red slips of paper with albums titles written on them. We're going to draw one record each week, and make several posts related to it throughout the week. Since we don't have internet at home or at our rented office, this inaugural post is being posted from Le Voyeur in Olympia, Washington, where we're enjoying some beers on a Sunday night, and they're playing a live version of "Going South" by Dead Moon. It's a day late from it's intended launch, because we didn't feel like finding internet in the rain last night.

*

by Lifeguard of Love

The first time I ever heard David Bowie, it wasn't David Bowie. It was Glass Candy's b-side to their first single, "Brittle Women" b/w "Hang Onto Yourself". It was shortly before my 17th birthday and I'd recently seen them open for Sleater-Kinney at the all ages club that used to be a gay bar called Nikki's. It is now a gay bar called Jake's. Over the previous year I'd become comfortable going into the punk record store. The single was the only thing they had out at the time. It is now worth $75 on eBay, making it likely the material possession I own with the highest value appreciation.

I've listened to that single more in the past few years than I did circa 2000, so I can't share how I felt about it then. I think I was just into Ida's pink feather boa. I bought one for myself soon after.

*

"She wears Adidas shoes and she's one of those girls who's into David Bowie," my BFF and roomie described a classmate she'd be doing her final project with. "She even has David Bowie's name tattooed on her ankle, with some fairies. She's a stoner and she knows about Tracy + the Plastics."

I knew about girls who are into David Bowie. One was in love with me once, but she was a square, and suicidal. I was a fun-loving stoner with a mohawk. We barely spent any time together but she wrote me long letters about how I could be happy without marijuana. The thing was, I was really happy with marijuana.

The first time I met Victoria, I came home from work and she was getting stoned with my roommates. She was wearing Adidas shoes and maybe a baseball style t-shirt with an REO Speedwagon graphic on it. She was nerdy and sweet and loved rock & roll. A later day, we ate mushrooms and went to her dorm. She had a Wendy O Williams photo on her bedroom door and a postcard of Divine with taxidermy eyes glued on. She had a blue tapestry bedspread with elephants and psychedelic flowers in shades of blue. She had a Virgin Megastore bag taped over her smoke detector, like a big red strawberry. She had a trucker hat covered in fake seagull shit. She drew really, really great cartoon-pictures of David Bowie.

*

Once in the summer, around middle school, my parents told me I'd like David Bowie. We were out on the boat, a mossy, corroded flat bottomed boat, like a pontoon boat without pontoons. I grew up on lakefront property, but you had to go down a steep path cut through blackberry bushes to get to the lakefront. The shore had sharp, thick grass growing to chest-height. You could only swim if you took the boat out to the middle of the lake and jumped off; the shore was too scummy.

"Liina, I think you'd like Alice Cooper" my dad said.
"No, you mean David Bowie" my mom argued.

It was afternoon, but they'd probably been drinking.

"Which one wears the eye makeup?"
"Which one is Ziggy Stardust?"

They'd been watching Ziggy Stardust on that cable channel called Encore. It was showing with Gimme Shelter. The only part I watched was Tina Turner singing "I've Been Loving You Too Long." It blew my fucking mind. I remember walking in when Ziggy Stardust was playing. It seemed significant but looked boring. I probably went back to my room to read and write and listen to the radio.

(Recently, my parents claimed to have never seen either movie).

*

Victoria got the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in the mail when she came home from her first day of eighth grade and I guess it made her who she is. (Did the movie Velvet Goldmine come before or after? I recently met Todd Haynes at a screening and I told him about Victoria, and how all the times she'd tried to show me Velvet Goldmine I'd been really stoned and fell asleep).

I had her play Ziggy Stardust for me once in the car late at night when we were going to pick up my BFF roomie from work half an hour away. I noted "Hang Onto Yourself", because I'd heard it. I noted "John, I'm Only Dancing", because I was a childhood Beatles obsessor. I noted which song was my favorite, but I don't remember which one it was now, because it's not my favorite anymore. I think it was "Lady Stardust".

I was really surprised when Kaden got it on LP several years later that "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Sweet Head" aren't on the LP, because they seem integral to the experience of the album to me. As someone who is interested in the idea of an album as a unit, I am also slightly ashamed of that. Kaden gave the LP to Victoria and she was really happy. We got another LP copy, later, but mostly when we listen to it we listen to a burned CD copy our friends Evan and Amber gave to us. We can't decide which of them wrote the title on it. My favorite song on it is "Sweet Head." I don't think I've ever told that to anyone before.