Knock 'Em Dead, Kid

OF COURSE I like heavy metal; I've been angry since I was twelve.

Too Fast For Love

I am starting to believe I only like bands that are older than I am (or would be if they were still kicking).

Tuesday night I went to the Motley Crue/Poison/New York Dolls show in St. Louis and it was undeniably the most epic thing I have ever experienced. NYD rocked while it was still light out. Bret Michaels ran around like he was still 25. As I've mentioned, "Talk Dirty to Me" is one of the most played songs in my iTunes, but the real draw was of course the masters of metal, Motley Crue. And let me just say, the gods were with my friend Brianna and I - we had scored lawn seats for like $16 that magically got upgraded to (only mildly shitty) seats, and then twenty minutes into the NYD set, we moved closer to the stage and closer to center... And stayed there the rest of the night, with no seats in front of us (meaning no tall people to block our view of any epic moment of the next three hours).

Changeover from Poison's set was so epic that they threw up a scrim to hide the action:

And then in the middle of some song playing over the speakers (possibly Guns 'n' Roses, I can't remember), the house lights go out, the stage explodes, the scrim is gone, and Motley Crue is playing "Wild Side," and it's the loudest thing I have ever fucking heard. There's fog. There's fire. There's Vince Niel. In silver pants. Mick Mars is hiding under sunglasses and a top hat and standing in a corner... and there's Nikki Sixx, in a long coat and something with silver sequins.

This wasn't their first song, but the lighting was too epic to handle. That's Nikki down on the left.

The "Glam-A-Gaddeon" Tour is celebrating Motley's 30th anniversary... This band was making music for almost ten years before I was born. (Nikki Sixx was born the same year as my mom...) I honestly didn't become a huge Motley fan until recently, but when I like something, I like it right, and therefore was obsessed by the time I got to the show. And how can you not be when this happens:

It's fire. Fire. Everywhere. (And again I'm pretty sure that's Nikki's silhouette.) Poison had some pyro, but it looked like kid stuff compared to the flames and fireworks that the Crue threw at us.

They had blackouts between most of their songs, but they can even make darkness look epic:

This photo I include purely in honor of the woman standing a few rows behind us who wouldn't stop shouting "Tommy Lee!" and was also drunk enough to not realize that Motley played "Shout at the Devil" pretty early in their set, so she kept shouting "Shout at the Devil!" too.






This picture would have been a lot more epic about ten seconds earlier, but as the night wore on some fucker decided he would occasionally come stand in front of me to take pictures. And he was probably three times my weight, so I just leaned around him.

Nikki being intense:

"Home Sweet Home" was really epic live. And made me like the recording better, and gain a little more respect for ballads:

If Nikki mother-fucking Sixx tells you to sit the fuck down, you do.

The Crue show was directed and choreographed and designed like nobody's business. Media, Tommy Lee's drum kit, flashing signs, a shadow box... So I got inspired to get a little artsy myself and the lighting designer came out in me... I LOVE backlight, it's incredibly theatrical and dramatic, and in this case makes the night look about as amazing as it felt. Fuck yeah.

Things that are EPIC: Everything about Motley Crue:

They played (in no particular order) "Dr. Feelgood." "Shout at the Devil." "Too Fast for Love." "Saints of Los Angeles" "Girls, Girls, Girls,""Wild Side," "Ten Seconds to Love" "Home Sweet Home" "Smokin' in the Boys Room" "Looks that Kill" (one of my faves) and closed with "Kickstart my Heart." They only missed about two songs I wish they had played, and gracefully glossed over their '90s releases that I don't love as much as Dr. Feelgood or Saints of Los Angeles, which, though recorded 20 years apart, are equally kickass.

I rocked so hard I thought my legs were going to fall off on the way to the car and my arms wouldn't be able to get me into it. We got back from the show a little over 24 hours ago (it took over an hour just to get out of the parking lot) and I'm still on a metal high. My hearing is probably going to get back to normal right around next Friday, when I hope to be at the Tour stop in Chicago. Until then...

Rock like there's no tomorrow.

Potter and More

I am unapologetically pretentious when it comes Harry Potter. I am aware of this fact. That is my only disclaimer to the rest of this post.

I went on one of my occasional requesting sprees through the library catalog a few days ago, and as a result today picked up six books and three films. Three of the books have come to resume my study of books about Harry Potter. I haven't read more than the back cover/inside flap/first page of the introduction to any of these books, but I still find them all a little insufferable. As I've said before, most of these books were published in the 2000-2002 era, in the unprecedentedly long lull between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, when JKR was busy getting married and having a baby, in addition to writing her longest installment yet. This obviously means that a lot of Potter analysis is missing (the more significant) half of the story. This is not the biggest issue I have, however; I don't fault people for not knowing information that didn't exist publicly yet. When you're writing about pop culture, your work becomes dated pretty fast.

The problem I face is that before I've read a word of what these people have to say, I feel like I know more than them. They weren't eight years old when Harry got his first letter from Hogwarts, or eleven when we first watched eleven-year-old Harry enter the Hogwarts we had only dreamed about, or seventeen when seventeen-year-old Harry left school and almost everyone he loved to destroy the most evil wizard who ever lived. While anyone born before probably 1993 will be able to remember the development of the series, its explosion into film, midnight releases, and Potter parties, there is only a very small window of my generation that truly grew up with our beloved Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

I feel extremely lucky to be a part of the probably five (maybe seven or eight) year window of kids (now young adults) who got to be young enough to experience magic and wonder but also old enough to realize that this was a big deal, that this was changing our culture and our world and especially (at least in my case) our individual lives. I of course have memories from before I turned eight, but I have a hard time recalling what life in general was like before I started obsessively reading and rereading every word J.K. Rowling put in front of me, desperately waiting for the newest moment in the story. And these experiences, I know, are a rare privilege. But, like I've said, they've also given me a serious superiority complex about anything and everything Potter related. I'm pretty sure I've reached a level of fanaticism that (despite my *I think* articulateness about the whole thing) means I mostly have to hold my tongue in Harry-related conversations. Once I start, talking about Harry Potter becomes an involuntary bodily function.

I was out tonight and someone said J.K. Rowling would probably basically fall off the face of the earth about five minutes after the final film is released in July (less than a month, God help me), and then would resurface again eventually once she started missing being famous. I thought pretty much everything about this statement was wrong, but didn't think it important to start an argument about JKR's dislike of fame or the staying power of Potter and the inevitable notoriety that will probably always glow around JKR, even if she's not always recognized in the street.

Today I found out about Pottermore. As usual, J.K Rowling has something up her sleeve and, because she knows people like me will hang on to anything she gives us, she's dangling an empty website at us. I can practically feel her cheshire cat grin upon creating the site and announcing that something new is coming. We'll find out on Thursday, around 2 am Eastern time, according to the taunting countdown on youtube. Right now we don't even know what we're counting down to, but Potter fans are excited. Very. Excited. Maybe it's the encyclopedia of lore. Perhaps a new RPG. Whatever it is, Pottermore is sure to not disappoint, and I'm counting down the days, hours, and minutes. (Incidentally, I'll be in St. Louis visiting a friend when this news breaks, and we'll just be getting back from a Motley Crue/Poison/New York Dolls concert. It's going to be an extremely intense night all around.)

5 days. 5 hours. 17 minutes. 17 seconds.

Enough

"It is the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation." - Patti Smith 

Commencement

Three years ago, I wrote a post about packing up all my remaining school stuff into a cardboard box. Putting thirteen years of education and accomplishment into one tiny space. And I was freaking out about being able to reduce all my hard work to that. I wondered what it meant that everything which seemed to be important was so small.

I don't know that I could, from the future, tell my past self anything about the size of accomplishments, or qualm fears about the meaninglessness of being left with nothing but a box to show for thirteen years of work and life. But what I can say now is that what we do in life is a lot bigger than what lives on paper as some singular record of what we've done.

There's no way to put what we learn in a box. There's no way to put the value of friendship into a box, or onto a piece of paper with a grade or an award. College has widened my vision so far beyond paper.

I thought about that when I looked at my brother's diploma - or rather his diploma cover. IMSA did the same thing my high school did, which is at the ceremony you get handed the fancy-looking embossed cover for your diploma, but the diploma gets mailed to your house later. After they've made sure you're not going to fuck anything up and they know for sure they're not revoking your right to graduate or whatever. So even in this big, supposedly important ceremony, this great symbol of accomplishment is false. The piece of paper (that you don't even have yet) means very little.

Next year I'll graduate from NYU. I'll get a diploma that says I went to Tisch School of the Arts and, if things continue on their current course, it'll say I graduated with honors. But there's no way to fit onto that piece of paper all the achievements of anyone who graduates from Playwrights, or any other truly unique and rigorous and holistic intensive program. So I don't care much for paper. I have three manila envelopes full of all of my awards from my time in school before college. I never look at them, and to be honest the perfect attendance ones mean more than the ones for straight A's, because that's what was harder. My name on any letter-sized piece of paper (or I guess any size) could mean something if I wanted it to.

In the last couple days I was at my brother's graduation from the Illinois Math and Science Academy as well as the senior banquet the night before. They constantly referred to "the best students in the state," and I would get momentarily disgruntled each time because I felt like I was being written off just because I chose to go to my regular public high school, as if that meant I wasn't smart. But then I reminded myself I go to one of the top universities in the country; I accumulated 28 points of college credit by the time I graduated high school. I may not be able to do half the math my brother can at this point, but I can write circles around most people, and I have a love of history and sometimes even an interest in biology. Not going to IMSA allowed me to continue to work at the local equity theatre where I learned a ton of skills I could never have learned in school. I think I've turned out fine.

I'm extremely proud of my brother. He's done a lot in his years at IMSA, and he even got an A in his English class this semester - which happened to be "Modern Theatre" (and involved seeing As You Like It at Chicago Shakespeare, for some reason, so I'm not sure what we're calling "modern"). I can't wait to see what he ends up doing in life. He's going to love college. My little brother is going to college?! 21 shouldn't feel this old.

Nevermind, Girls

I just realized today that I have probably always thought never mind was one word because of Nirvana. I'm currently listening to their 1991 release, Nevermind, which I have never actually listened to in its entirety. The only Nirvana album I'm actually quite familiar with is Nirvana, a compilation of their greatest hits or best known songs or something, four of which come from Nevermind. I think I listened to it in junior high when I vaguely cared about music (and then in high school I got distracted by theatre or something).

A thunderstorm is currently raging outside my bedroom, rain banging on the windows and sliding down blurry glass. Thunder is rumbling aggressively across the empty fields of Illinois, and I saw a few cracks of lightning earlier. It's a good afternoon for reading, and I just finished a second read of Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a book I last read in the summer of 2009 (which, I think, is when I read everything he'd ever written with the exception of his one novel that I read last summer). This time through, I thought more and more about my affinity for 80s rock music - or, more specifically, metal. This genre is slangily and less-than-lovingly referred to as cock rock. The point, which I can't really argue with, is that all the music, and more importantly, the persona, the aesthetic of metal was about getting girls. Lots and lots of girls. Motley Crue in fact released an album entitled Girls, Girls, Girls. (The title song is still played on classic rock stations - at least the ones that lean more towards Van Halen and less towards Bruce Springsteen.)

Anyone who's met me knows I'm a feminist. I don't even really actively try to be, I just am. In the meeting I had with faculty after my first directing project, one of my teachers said it was definitely a "feminist take" on the play. I didn't do that on purpose, it just happened. So logic would dictate that I wouldn't be so into a genre that is almost exclusively about the masculine power to attract sexy playmates (and doing drugs).

But it's my favorite kind of music.

Klosterman argues that metal wasn't really about the song lyrics but the attitude. And while that may still have been about masculine power and attracting fuck buddies, it was also about being loud and fast and 100% whatever you were. Glam metal was the height of the constructed artistic image, but whatever a band was, if they were successful, it was because they were completely and utterly their aesthetic. And in the 80s, fans tended to hate it when their favorite bands strayed from whatever the expected image was. All this tangent is to say is I like loud, I like fast, and I'm all about being 100% whatever you are. That may seem a little off coming from someone who calls herself an actor/designer/director (not always in that order) but I'm 100% invested in doing anything that fulfills me artistically and allows me to create a gift for the audience, as big and bold as possible. I haven't figured out how to totally succeed yet, but I try as best I can.

I don't know much about music. I haven't taken any classes or studied music theory. All I really know about music I've learned from reading Klosterman's books and talking to my musically-oriented friends. Not much of it ever seems to stick, but I know what I like, even if I can't very articulately explain why. Recently I've done a lot of driving by myself in our 1996 used car which got renovated with a pretty decent sound system before we bought it. All week I've been listening to rock music really loudly. Louder than I ever can in my house or my dorm room or when I have headphones actually in my ears, because I sort of need my hearing. Car listening is awesome though, because you can feel the music while cruising down the highway. I don't think you're supposed to amp up the bass when listening to hard rock, but I do, because I went to a high school that only listened to R&B and rap, and I need bass in my system. Music sounds completely different when it's really loud. And I don't just mean it sounds louder. It sounds fiercer, stronger, meaner, more serious.

For the last several years, I've much preferred listening to music from before I was born to anything from the last decade. The first nine most-played songs on my iTunes are all 80s gems, starting with "Cum on Feel the Noize," "Any Way You Want It," and "Talk Dirty to Me." I'm unsure how "Don't Stop Believing" is only at number six. In any case, my musical tastes create the interesting game any time we're on a road trip of trying to find a good rock station as we drive across the country and in and out of range of major cities. Once you get out of range of Chicago, it's hard to find a good station anywhere in Indiana, eastern Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Georgia, or northern Florida. There's actually a good rock station that broadcasts out of somewhere near my grandma's house in southern Florida. Stations out of Cleveland and Akron, OH are not bad. The entirety of PA is a disaster because of mountains; we have to find a new station every twenty minutes, inevitably as soon as a Bon Jovi song comes on (which is almost always "Living on a Prayer" or "Wanted Dead or Alive"). Around home we've got the Drive, which is alright, but on the lighter side of "classic rock," and the Loop, which is my station of choice now that Jack FM is gone. Jack played almost exclusively songs I know and love, so of course it became an oldies station sometime between January and March. The Loop plays a fair amount of early 70s stuff I don't know, but also a lot of Pink Floyd, Van Halen, and Poison, so I don't complain.

At some point this all might have been leading to some philosophical point, given that Nirvana isn't even a metal band, but I got distracted by the rain for a while and forgot where I was going. In fact I think I might have even intended to talk about my brother's graduation (another post, I suppose), but maybe I just really wanted to talk about rock music. Probably. My love of major league baseball, specifically the White Sox, and my affinity for glam rock are the only things even slightly out of line with the rest of my personality. And I'll grant that the glam part makes sense. I blame Hedwig, but what else is new?