caught a glance in your eyes (and fell through the skies).
on the two gin-soaked masterpieces of 1978 (gena rowlands' performance in 'opening night' and big star's 'third') and art as a substitute for living.
About two weeks before Gena Rowlands died, I sat in one of the few green squares remaining off the main downtown drag of Asbury Park, New Jersey and wept until I became increasingly aware of the young children with parents attempting to picnic around me, so I sloppily wiped my face and left. I went back to my uncle’s house and gorged myself on Chinese food and then laid down on the top bunk of the bunkbed in my cousin’s room, watching the new Charli XCX “Guess” remix video (I was underwhelmed by said remix) and a short documentary about the making of the 1984 film Love Streams (directed by Rowlands’ husband of 34 years and the man who arguably invented modern independent film, John Cassavetes) before going to sleep.
Why I was crying isn’t important. Sometimes, it’s just difficult when you’ve convinced yourself that the people you love are pushing you away and you can’t mourn that suspected loss or shift with them — the people you trust most — because you’re mourning some part of your connection with them (I believe our true poet laureate, FKA Twigs, wrote the line “When you’re gone, I have no one to tell” about this phenomenon). After a maelstrom of texts to one of my oldest and dearest friends, basically begging her to assure me that I’m not crazy in the face of silence from everyone else, she responded “LIFE IS HARD AND A LOT!! U ARE NOT INSANE!!” followed by “INSTEAD U ARE A DIFFERENT THING… VERY LOVED AND TALENTED!!!!” I think it was one of the first times that I really faced that fact: my life has been painful and overwhelming at times this year, and unfortunately, friends who care about me cannot always tell me what I want to hear to deal with that. Vanessa can though. She visited me a few days later and we ate shitty free pizza and jumped between pubs, giggling like idiots as the wind on the boardwalk whipped my hair back into my face. My phone is making it very difficult for me to make those texts my home screen, just so I can have the reminder when she’s not there. It’s an issue with how the phone needs to crop the image, supposedly.
Anyway, Gena died the following week, and I was beside myself over it. Still, I think it marked a moment where suddenly, everything feels less insurmountable than it did before. What I could only see through bleary, hysterical eyes near the ocean before has shifted into slightly clearer focus. I don’t think it was Gena’s death that caused that, but it felt like a grounding device, nevertheless. When time chips away at that which made you you, you slap yourself in the face and sober up a little bit.
There’s a screenshot from the Cassavetes YouTube video too, showing his prominent belly pressed flush against his red polo shirt and panning up to a head of almost fully grey hair, though the footage dates to six years before the man’s passing. He doesn’t so much speak as reel off noble philosophies at an aggressive, breakneck pace. It’s a voice that comes so distinctly through his writing — there’s a moment where he’s sitting with one of his assistants, dictating dialogue he wants to edit on set — speaking like he thinks, like he moves, and meaning it.
“I have a one-track mind,” he says at one point. “All I’m interested is love.” It sounds like something a writer’s room is falling over themselves to write for a family-oriented cable show seemingly everyone in the country will watch but no one will talk about, but you still believe it coming from him. After all, he’s forced us to reckon with his ongoing dissertation on the topic with every film he writes, letting torrential affection and frustration spark and fly from the pen. For his final film, he creates his flimsiest narrative to date — all dissolving into a dream sequence featuring Rowlands’ character coming to terms with the loss of her daughter and her husband through a barren-staged ballet. Cassavetes lifts the girls and dances with them when the camera isn’t rolling. Maybe I just made that up, inventing and reinventing him to hold him closer to me. You’ll have to watch and let me know.
Even with its fantastical, confusing urge to dart between loosely connected situations its characters throw itself into, the best moment of Love Streams is when Cassavetes’ and Rowlands’ characters — estranged siblings — are reunited for the first time in years, and he throws himself into her cab to hug her, looking truly and earnestly elated for the first time halfway through the whole film. Behind the scenes, he spouts his crooked wisdom and orders his crew around, but nothing punctures the heart like the moment where he’s caught staring out of frame, smiling fondly. “Gena, you’re a genius,” he says, like it’s the one thing he knows is true.
I think I’m in a place where I don’t care so much what strangers think of me, but if I truly care about someone, I’m paralyzed by their perception of who I am. I think it stems from those basic fears we all have: that we’re secretly unlovable, that we’ll need to change ourselves to be truly accepted. The past few months marked the first time I really thought I’d be willing to change myself for other people, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin with it or bring myself to ask anyone what I should be changing. Years ago, a friend told me they’d always read my texts in my voice — like you could hear how I spoke just in the way I typed — and I still think it’s one of the kindest things anyone’s ever said about me. Sometimes, when I’m being ignored, I have this childish habit of mimicking people’s manner of speaking or typing back to them, attempting to feign indifference so that they’ll notice the change. Inevitably, I crumble and just start reeling agin, like if I just keep saying things, they’ll find something they’re smitten by in it and decide to rant back to me. If the bond has to be forged by them expressing their hate — if that’s the only way I can garner their trust or praise — then at least I’m associated with the safety they feel in order to express that strong an emotion.
The second Gena Rowlands passed away — having outlived her husband by 35 years — beautiful tributes poured out, with many sharing my personal belief that she was the greatest actor of all time. Not actress, the best actor, point blank. Many tributes called out the few mainstream favorites she’d appeared in (I still think it’s wild that their son directed The Notebook, of all things), but many heaped on deserved praise about the emotionally complex, highly influential movies her husband wrote more or less for her to star in, putting up their own money and their co-stars’ money to make films that completely rewired the concept of American filmmaking. Someone shared a quote from Ben Gazzara where he shared his suspicion that no other director really knew how to harness Gena’s immense talent — she was certainly never seen as leading lady material in Hollywood — and that John was emboldened to write things that cut so close, felt so touchable and hurt so much because he knew only she could do it. It’s love to the point of invention, the selfless urge to share her gift through a vehicle worthy of her talent.
And that’s all true, but it was also put forth that Gena effectively plays him in every film, just in terms of the characters he wrote for her. There’s something to be said for trusting your significant other to act as the living embodiment of your worst impulses or greatest fears about yourself. I’m always trying to steal someone’s face and make them wear mine. Gena acted out violent vulnerability and rabid intensity, making all his fears frighteningly real without making him have to actually push himself over that edge in real life. If I think I have a cartoon face that gives away everything I’m feeling, Gena had that tenfold, creasing and stretching to express the full array of human emotion. What a gift to get to work with those tools to help realize your vision under your own roof.
“I know that she speaks for what she feels that women would like to have said in whatever character she’s playing,” he says in that same documentary. “She’s very concerned about it.” With a smile, he begins acting out a typical conversation while showing Gena a new script, playing her first, on the rampage: “‘God, I don’t wanna play a victim! I don’t wanna be a victim! A victim? That’s passé! I’ve played a victim! I don’t wanna be a victimized person again! This is a victimized person, isn’t it?’” He responds to himself with a loving smile: “No, you’re not a victimized person, you’re a very strong person. Not a victim. You’re anti-victim.” He sharply swings his head around and switches back to being Gena, as if to catch himself: “‘Good! Don’t get it in your mind that I’m a victim.’” His eyes crinkle and he wheezes a chuckle out, amused by his own affectionate ribbing.
I think a lot about Gena’s performance in Opening Night (released Christmas 1977, commercially making it a 1978 movie, for all intents and purposes), which is pretty easily my favorite Cassavetes movie and a top twenty favorite movie of all time, if you ask me most days. I think a lot about the final mindfuck of a scene with Gena and John performing in the play within the movie — playing a character who’s playing another character on stage — and how, frustrated with what Gena’s character perceives as lackluster material from a superstitious playwright increasingly feeling old age gaining in on her, she completely goes off script in the final scene on the play’s opening night on Broadway, improvising the entire closing dialogue with Cassavetes’ Maurice, who plays her current partner in the play-within-the-movie. Though most of Cassavetes scripts were tightly written and adhered to, she and Cassavetes did, in fact, improvise this scene in front of their audience of extras, who played the audience of the play. They always look comfortable acting together, but like they’re shocked by the other’s choice too, clearly digesting and reacting to it naturally. So much of the action hinges on her expressions — incredulous, cruel, silly, exhausted — all while a cigarette hangs from her lip.
The gist of Opening Night, plot wise, is that Gena’s character, lauded actress Myrtle Gordon, is haunted by a younger version of herself, which manifests in the form of a 17-year-old fan who is hit by a car and dies outside of the theater while the show is in previews. While we’re led to believe she’s hallucinating the girl post-mortem, there are soon violent altercations with some ghostly version of the girl that only Myrtle can see and feel, leaving the line between dreams and reality blurred for both us as viewers and the movie’s frightened supporting players. For Cassavetes, the point has never been whether his protagonists are “crazy.” For all he cares, that girl is flesh and blood resurrected and stalking Myrtle, because the emotional effect alone makes it real and worthy of interrogation. He makes us sympathize with his proxy — the largely difficult, alcoholic leading lady created as a surrogate for her largely difficult, alcoholic writer — because he knows Gena’s face alone can carry that drowsy weight.
There’s a scene where Myrtle has a breakdown while they’re rehearsing a scene within the play in which her character is supposed to be slapped, and she lays down on the floor in a fit, mascara smudged all over her eyes, making you feel physically drained just looking at her. Later, she starts improvising in a preview performance and Ben Gazzara’s character — Manny, the show’s long-suffering director — tries to drop the curtain on her, only for her to fly side-stage and demand that he lift it again, completely breaking the fourth wall for the theatergoers and yelling, “UP! UP! UP!” until it lifts again. She breaks into a mischievous Cheshire Cat grin in these moments where she acts up and gets away with it. “Hu-mil-i-a-TING!” she exclaims back out to the crowd, swinging her arms out and holding her next move until the laughter dies down. Of course, the control is what she craves, and when she loses her grip on it, she drinks herself half to death. She shows up to the theater unable to stand and you still side with her. Your heart jumps with a buoyancy unforetold when she sabotages dozens of people and a whole Broadway production just to twist the audience around her finger to her liking. She blows it and you sink into your chair, stomach clenched.
The thing is, I think it tends to diminish art if its gravity or importance is solely based on you knowing the artist’s backstory — wherein the art can arguably not stand on its own without celebrity myth-making. We’ve maybe never experienced a more extreme version of this than we are now in our highly diaristic age of pop songwriting. Really, maybe I’m wrong to assume that Opening Night is semi-autobiographical on Cassavetes’ part at all. I think I’m just fascinated by his ability to create something so complicated and fully realized because I find it painstakingly difficult to create in times of strife. To be honest, this specific newsletter edition is kind of an exercise in shattering my writers’ block currently erected because my brain doesn’t like when I don’t have every beat, every point meticulously laid out ahead of time, frustrated by the imperfect wording I’ve landed on that doesn’t fully and clearly express want to say. When things were genuinely stressful in my life, I completely shut down and couldn’t write for months. I wrote my most recent review for Paste in May and it felt like I was tearing teeth out of my head, grip tight on the pliers as I wracked my brain for adjectives I hadn't used yet. How can I rid myself of the pain I’m experiencing if said pain physically prevents me from expressing it through the medium I need?
I also just tend do the thing where it’s easier to completely shut down than it is to ask for help. Of course, I trust people in my life, but usually, if there’s even one time I feel like I’m bothering or burdening them, I feel physically ill at the thought of returning to them to vent again. I had a friend in college who eventually severed our friendship — an event that took me a full calendar year to get over, like I imagine a bad romantic breakup could be — who told me they didn’t think they’d ever seen me really have a meltdown before, even if I never held anything back from them. I told them that my true spiraling moments require complete isolation (which was true) and I could only seek help once I could incisively articulate what had thrown me off the rails, but I left off the “because I love you and care about you, you don’t deserve that from me” from the end of that. So many things are too much to say. I need the perfect language to perfectly express what I feel, and it makes everything take forever — and the finished product itself hardly scratches perfection. It’s extremely frustrating from a writing perspective.
Yet, I find myself always attracted to other art made mid-breakdown, and the reasons are probably pretty simple to deduce: while I’m not doing the thing I love most, attempting to communicate with the people I love most in a way that will summarize the chaos of that starvation I feel best, I feed myself with things that will communicate something similar as I flail to produce the goods. Recently, I was confronted with the question of what my go-to “comfort” album is, and really, it’s the sound of blood on a mixing desk in a Memphis studio, gin and tonics mixed with glass sticking to the bottom of workmans’ boots. While Gena and John were fleshing out the collaboration prior to Opening Night, 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, former Box Tops singer and then-leader of the floundering pop-rock pioneers Big Star — Alex Chilton — walked into a bar called Yosemite Sam and saw Lesa. And that was that.
Photographer William Eggleston took the picture above the same night that Lesa Aldridge (pictured right) — the daughter of Eggleston’s cousin — first met Alex Chilton, who she’d be in an on-and-off relationship with for most of the next decade. Eggleston’s work tends to possess a painterly quality anyway, but I find it heightened here, carrying the visual quality of a Pre-Raphaelite painting even if you clock the watch on her wrist. A musician and songwriter herself, the then-teenaged Aldridge would later form her own punk band called The Klitz (so, so cool), but first was invited by Chilton to contribute to his working sessions after Big Star had released their second album, Radio City, to little-to-no fanfare due to the major fuck-ups from the people who were supposed to be distributing and marketing it. Short of a bassist or a second songwriter at that point, Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens returned to Ardent Studios to start recording an aimless non-project that would sit on a shelf for a few years after it was made, until finally being released in 1978. “Sister Lovers,” a joke band name chosen because Jody was dating Lesa’s sister Holliday while she and Alex were dating, is listed as the artist on the session tapes, but the final product was marketed as a Big Star album — with zero input from either of the remaining members of that band.
Regardless, Third (the album has also been released under the title Sister Lovers or Third/Sister Lovers, but I’m going to refer to it as Third going forward here) is a sickly album, documenting the sound of a pristine power pop wunderkind falling apart — as his songs start thinning and jumbling themselves until they’re just as sick and sallow as he is. For every run of what should feasibly be called love songs, they come out bitter and frail, frantically swatting at the deterioration around it, wishing to rot alone.
Legendary producer Jim Dickinson entered the sessions dead-set on getting “the music in [Alex’s] head” down on tape, and having previously wrangled the Stones in various states of drug-fueled decay, he seemed to be the man up to handle the job “They couldn’t have mixed it together,” he said of Chilton’s then-tempestuous relationship with Ardent studio owner and mixing engineer John Fry, which had only become more strained by the time the plug was pulled, “Alex would have destroyed the record.” And that was true even before production was halted, as Dickinson remembers him erasing vocals Lesa had contributed because he’d been mad at her on a given day, effectively banishing her from their shared musical portrait of their tempestuous union. I envision him straining to tear the big reel of tape up to take her off, leaving imprints of his nails as they dig over the deep scratch of the cellos. He pleads for her love and casts her out in tandem. For Lesa’s birthday during the sessions, Alex gives her a copy of War and Peace and (as a rare Capricorn astrology savant) a handwritten list of famous fellow Geminis for her to read through. Soon, he’s telling her that things don’t look good “astrologically” for their relationship, letting the stars take the fall for his own fickle whim, when the same stars had served as an offering of his devotion just a while earlier. It was as if Lou Reed’s Berlin — the album the pair were most enamored of at the time of recording — had been relocated to the South and waded through a swamp of downers and booze instead of dirty needles.
Does knowing this backstory “make” Third for listeners who know nothing about it? I don’t think so. I think its beauty and terror transcend its creators’ chaos. Still, said chaos leaves this suspended in mid-air — like the fact that the album never received a proper tracklist determined by the band. The running on streaming now — determined by Jim Dickinson, allegedly what the band also had in mind — is certainly good, but I do find myself partial to the preliminary tracklist that the label PVC put together for the album’s original US release, starting with “Stroke It, Noel” and ending with “Thank You Friends.” So, I’m going to talk about that version.
Above all, this is the order which delivers the emotional and sonic arc the songs deserve. Where “Kizza Me” might be considered a strong option for an opener simply due to its propulsive tempo, “Stroke It Noel” seems to better suited to hone a sound the rest of the album doesn’t trade in: warmth. Something inviting, even. The lyrics set our studio scene perfectly as well, without letting the disorder bleed into the instrumentation just yet: “And they say that we're lazy men / Drinking our white wine / We could go right insane / Cause we can buy the time / Keeping an eye on the sky / Will they come, oh, the bombs?” A band folding in on itself sings its own apocalypse. The following, sole Jody Stephens composition, “For You,” is even more straightforward in its sweetness, with a beautiful string arrangement that lets it float above the implicit darkness of even Chilton’s most tender contributions.
There are two main points where warmth or desolation (and we’ll explore both in earnest here) explode into tumultuous spikes — first with the double-header of “Kizza Me” and “You Can’t Have Me,” both of which I love for Chiton’s incisive delivery, never quite content with letting the new compositions that could’ve been turned into lush, sunshine-pop-indebted Big Star Classics (trademark logo) be that. In the former, he repeats the verse after coming out of a bridge filled with chaotic piano riffing, mimicking the glass broken between sessions in moments of frustration, and after the first line, he lets out a little breathy “Okehhhhy, okehhhhhhy.” That one little ad-lib might’ve marked the first thing I fell in love with Third over, since I was likely listening to the now-primary tracklisting. The latter works in a barrage of vaguely drug-related imagery, with its fluttery, squeaky sax solo and huge drums only further assisting in its spinning out, but a perfect moment of pop instinct comes in the pre-chorus, where Alex presses into the delivery of the line “You just steal things” in a manner that delights me.
I can take the pisstake-turned-accidental-Christmas-carol “Jesus Christ” and the gender-swapped cover of “Femme Fatale” (the one track Alex couldn’t fully erase Lesa from, seeing as she provides the contrasting Lou Reed vocal), sure, but recently, I thought about the truly nonsensical, throwaway romp of “O, Dana” just in passing and wanted to break down in tears. The delivery of “I’m forevermore fighting with Stephen / We do argue beaucoups” alone made me think of five minutes fucked up on a deserted bar floor, between fits where I lick my own wounds, finally unraveling over its echo-filled ambient air holding the spaces between high, hammered piano chords, all driving the honky tonk into a daze and sliding into the decay of the sinking string outro. These are gasps of fresh air before we shroud ourselves again. Now, onto the darkness.
While I was having my weird breakdown in Asbury, someone sent me a text saying how sweet I always am to them, thanking me for offering to help them with something — ostensibly a compliment, but it was the final thing I needed to happen to make me snap. Every time someone’s called me that word in the past, it feels like a gentle nudge down, like they’re saying, it’s a shame you’ll never get it in return. In the moment, it felt like an excuse disguised as shared praise.
I started trying to scratch through my skin all the rest of that week, fearing I wouldn’t be able to handle a more gnarly or painful tactic to trying to make myself stop thinking. I would drink through the day and cry on the ant-infested blue loungers lodged in the mud in my uncle’s backyard. Once I’d let all of that out, I’d just feel drained — like I’d cried all water in my body out onto the pavement downtown, and I’d fight against the wind down the boardwalk, feeling like I could barely hold myself upright as my system lived devoid of anything that could weigh and balance me. I’d get lightheaded in a grimy public restroom and prayed to whatever witchy force I’ve been researching this week that I wouldn’t keel over and pass out. I thought about someone’s reassuring hands on me and it felt violating. I pictured everyone I’d been sweet to dragging me through the gay bar attached to the side of the Convention Hall and finding me light enough to chuck out to sea. “Nightime” is a song about this, to me.
The other day, I listened to this song and said, this is what life sounds like, to myself. It didn't feel particularly sorrowful, just prickly. The song’s two characters swoon and panic in the bustling crowd of a frigid street, lamppost lights forcing them to squint as they’re bound together, but still so afraid of the world they’ve put a barrier up against. They’re skeletal and starving for something they can’t quite place, even as they spew saccharine. I think I thought if I went away for a while, people would starve, and ashamedly, I wanted them to. I thought I was making a point and I was wrong. Everyone sits and stares at me from a corner as I stuff their mouths, hoping it’ll make them inclined to share more than just their hates with me in hushed, confidential tones.
“Blue Moon” and “Take Care” complete its little lullaby trilogy, where for a minute, Alex records his demo of the former and places it under Lesa’s pillow as a mark of fidelity for all time, and the next, without even changing his sonic palette, he’s spitting out halfhearted apologies for turning his back on her: “This sounds a bit like goodbye / In a way it is, I guess / As I leave your side / I've taken the air.” He trips over the title phrase, seeming to jam too many of them into the chorus — all trying to replace the words he can’t force himself to form and then spit out.
The slump that comes in the second half wants it darker, sharper edged, letting surrender (“Big Black Car”), disgust (“Holocaust”) and fear (“Kanga Roo”) steer the ship through its final course. Lethargic drunkenness, hangover, stunned sobriety — in that order, respectively. I don’t think I can stomach talking through all three of them right now, so I’m going to choose one.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into details which aren’t mine to share, but I’ll just say that I worry about my younger brother more than I worry about anything and everything else. The gist is that he got extremely sick as a child and had to go through years of treatment for it, slightly throwing off his physical and mental growth in key years for both of those things, and pretty much every time I see him now, he’s struggling on every level. He has a difficult time socially, a difficult time with keeping a job. He’s one of the funniest people I know when we’re together, but there are plenty of times where he’ll sit looking miserable and not speak, all while assuring me he’s glad to be with me. No matter how dearly I love him, I'm ashamed to say that it’s been difficult dealing with years of that from someone who, under normal circumstances, would’ve been my closest confidante, and I feel so lonely sometimes as I attempt to get him to engage with me — both of us mired in our own self-loathing bullshit we don’t have a cure for. I hug him all the time and he holds me so tightly that I swear my he's going to squeeze bones through skin and I find it hard to inhale again. He’s someone who will never abandon me in the way I know other people I’ve loved to do, but I can’t communicate my problems or emotions in a way he’ll understand. My mom says he feels better when he’s with me, but he usually chooses not to let me in on that in any tangible way. He knows he can tell me anything and doesn’t, and maybe I haven’t been able to admit to myself that I perhaps, unconsciously resent that. Maybe I resent myself for not being able to fix anything — his problems or mine.
One of the things he’ll actually talk to me about is music he loves, and as the older sibling, I’ve usually been the one introducing him to things I’ve loved over the years. Big Star is one of the few things he got into before me, buying a Radio City CD and playing it in my mom’s old car, which predated any bluetooth or aux cord capabilities, and I’d lay in the back and absorb. On my college graduation day when I probably had heat stroke (though this was when I didn’t know that yet), I woozily bounced my knees along to “Daisy Glaze” and turned to him when it ended, shitfaced on sunshine and worse for wear, and said, “That’s, like, a perfect song.” I was semi-delirious, but I think I was probably right.
I told him “Kanga Roo” might be my favorite Big Star track, which was likely met with a shrug, but I think it encapsulates all of the terror we both feel, which both stonewall each other with. It’s a love song that thrives on its inability to articulate its feeling. It’s mopping up your own wounds, risking bleeding out so that you won’t have to try calling for help. It’s seeing divinity in someone else and squandering it in anticipation of feeling its light dawn on you. “It’s falling into itself,” one astute YouTube user claimed under a video of the song. Quite literally, it’s Alex Chilton stumbling into the studio in the middle of the night, recording himself playing the song on a 12-string drunk, and then coming back in the next day and handing the tape to Jim Dickinson, saying, “You want to be a producer? Do something with this.” So he does.
In its stilted description of love at first sight, right down to Alex fucking up the timing of that final stanza — hardly in his right mind, but so intricately choosing words that really aren’t saying anything. But you get what he means, don’t you? “Like Saint Joan doing a cool jerk / Oh, I want you like a kangaroo” is gibberish, but those sustained, straining guitar and Moog passages played over the top of the song is the churn of your stomach, the blinding throb of your migraine, seeing god and stopping short of ecstasy, trying to keep yourself from spilling over. Alex can’t just tell you he loves you. He needs to sneak around half-sedated with someone who might not be you, slurring into a mic and hiccuping in search of oxygen, only to physically scrape you off the tape the next day. But there was a painful glimmer, visceral enough that just the audible squeal bruised you, got you just as high, stoned you to your soul.
Would I have been less upset on that trip down the shore if I had been less myself at the beginning of the year, protected myself from breaking my own heart? I don’t know. It’s a corny and prosaic pastime, to worry about wasting love on someone who didn’t know what to do with it. All I do is leak, writing this same goddamn essay about how tired I am of being let down, being let go, of figuring out what’s wrong with me, and you must all be so fucking sick of it. I’m terrified of writing myself as the victim, though that’s probably exactly what I’m doing. I think it’s just about me struggling to get the wording right, trying to express it in the clearest, most obvious way possible, so someone will finally come to me and say they understand, say they’ll talk back in the same perfect line breaks. I mean, they won’t, but it’s the sliver of a chance that there’ll be recognition that will make the pursuit of clarity worth it. I’ll double over in agony, bile rising. Won’t mind if you watch.
That leaves just the jubilant, probably-sarcastic closer of “Thank You Friends,” complete with its “waaaaah”-ing female backup singers and self-congratulatory guitar solo, all feeding back through the studio glass at the dead-eyed stares of the people whose lives its composer had made miserable throughout recording. At its abrupt close, you hear Alex (?) slur, “…IIIII did something wrong.” Though the understated majesty of “Take Care”’s bittersweet farewell is a fair play for the closer on the now-standard version, there’s something very characteristic about jubilance twisted, shoving all the pain it dragged you through to the back of the party venue, hoping you didn’t notice.
My first point of comparison was the ending of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, another semi-autobiographical work by an auteur depicting a surreal version of his own demise. Still, it’s the end of Opening Night too, where the crowd, unaware of Myrtle Gordon’s improvisatory twist on the play’s ending, breaks into rapturous applause, showering her in kisses and flowers backstage. She cracks the material wide open, acting out every possible ending as she swings from an invisible string holding her up, diving with all show runners unwilling to catch her — and she still winds up with armfuls of bouquets, ready to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until something feels touchable. “Please tell me what this play doesn’t express,” the playwright demands during another catastrophic rehearsal. “Hope?” Gena-as-Myrtle responds, and the room falls silent, as if they hadn’t considered the option.
My brother and I sat in the front of a pub right off the boardwalk so he could order a Coke and I could order a sweet concoction with vodka and honey that I took my time sipping, savoring the sensation as it dripped down my hoarse throat. I had a stomach ache but ordered fries anyway. We were silent until I asked him about Hüsker Dü, asked about all-time favorites, about time stopping. My mind kept wandering off, thinking about definitive days and caring enough to reflect the fullness of your intensity back to the one who loves you unconditionally. “I’m having a good time, you know,” he said, “I’m sorry it doesn’t seem like it.” I squeezed his hand like I’m willing him not to leave me, like I’ll figure out how to fix us soon (because what am I good for if I don’t?). Our bleach blonde waitress couldn’t have been more than 16, but she was allowed to bring me my drinks and I paid our bill and we walked in whispers cutting and crossing through muggy heat on our way back home.
Immaculate stuff. Lucky to have met you at the Kim Gordon show even if just to get these in my inbox every once in a while