Dear Internet Surfer-- This "Eddie Vedder" piece is by far the most popular page on this site. But remember: it's hardly representative of all the vast and wonderful selection found on "Dear Winona": & Other Stories from St. Louis! This is a story about what happens when a young person is subject to the influence of a shameless youth culture machine that doesn't care about what kind of impact it may have on the impressionable, only the bottom dollar. This goes out to that "lost generation" who fell too hard for their blond-haired, blue-eyed, MTV messiah who was going to lead them to "Nirvana" like the mop-haired pied-piper of Hamlin slinging a guitar, but led many to their destruction. Don't put any stock in the prevailing "fashion of the day" and the party is "where you are"!
-- The Management
********************
The Searing Eyes of Vedder
"One morning, after anxious dreams, he had woken up to find that he had literally turned into a [screeching] insect"
-- Franz Kafka, "Metamorphosis" (1916)
In early summer '94 I traveled with my mother and younger brother on a cross-country road trip to Niagara falls in upstate New York. Inside, it was a nightmare of ripping turmoil. . . . . wondering who I was and what I was supposed to be on the cusp of 13 in this lost time of seeping doubt and Clinton-era rottenness as the world yawned open like an abyss.
Looking back on this episode years later,
it was all just a matter of time until I figured out
that there was no party raging somewhere in the night where all the hip, intelligent, beautiful people gathered above the dweebs like cream in a butter churn-- the stick pummeling up and down
on the
lonely, all-too-white, half-Jewish losers.
I would ponder upon my predicament on the balconies outside of hotel rooms, leaning on the cast-iron railing with my young arms folded in front of me, assuming a motionless posture of subdued panic,
dreading the moment in which I would have to move
and risk being seen in a world that seemed to cast a jaundiced eye over
everything like cheap cynicism and curdled ill-will.
Off in the back seat of my own little world as Mom drove the brown Honda Accord, I analyzed the radical dichotomy between Metallica and the new Generation-X grunge rock of late, seeking higher knowledge from my glaze-eyed, flat-affected media masters, born stale and old before their time like slithering aficionados, emotional-splotches of human beings who knew only indulgence and judgment, sizing you up and "writing you off" like the Simon Cowell's of the world. . . . . years before "The American Idol" phenomenon made types like them so common in the rude desert of our media sphere.
Yes, as the sniveling, servile writers at Rolling Stone reminded us over and over again-- those snooty record collectors clasping the last
of the "good recordings" to their chests like meticulous
"i-dotting, t-crossing" hipsters-- 1991 was the culmination
of all history when Nirvana released Nevermind and reinvented the entire music industry
as we knew it. What satisfaction,
this langouring voice of the AIDS-infested cartoon cow making fun of all that was macho and corn-fed
as "an alternative you didn't quite buy" but were afraid not to.
As the logo of MTV and the static
of my cable-ready television as my witness (-- about as ready as it
would ever be, which is to say it was out of the "picture-tube"),
the sense of inadequacy was cringing as a kid "outside of the mainstream" who
desperately wanted "in" to this club that apparently
welcomed "all outcasts".
But Sumner Redstone-- the foul, elderly executive of Viacom who owned Nickelodeon too-- whom had the appearance of a painted marionette, he looked so evil-- didn't care. He was riding high on a greedy CEO's salary while youth culture was becoming more and more self-destructive and non-sustainable, the futility of the center that could not hold as things kept getting wilder and more out-of-hand.
Case in point, Kurt Cobain who blew his face off,
perhaps as the ultimate statement of the times. Back in April fans were burning flannel shirts in downtown Seattle,
shouting out lyrics, and taunting the police trying to keep them out of the public fountains.
No doubt, we were all grotesque human wreckage-- I was just beginning to figure this out by now-- but some seemed in better possession of themselves, and that unto itself was a kind of answer. Growing up came with no set of instructions, ones that weren't cheesy anyway, and all one had to go by was what was in the media.
Case in point, a fictional 17 year-old named Analee. Fat, pale, with long black hair, a maroon dress, fishnet stockings, and glazed obsidian eyes as she vegetates in the living room, centered in the crass plains of exurban Texas for a final smoke before she goes off to work in the pizza parlor, if not the festival fields of Lollapalooza.
Why, if you saw her family photo album you would see Analee as a toddler with her mother (-- since divorced and remarried) and father who works for the Madison sewage treatment plant. In later pictures you would see her pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named after Glenn Danzig of the cruddy punk band "The Misfits".
She hangs out with her friends, embodying the carefree, contemptuous, and banal aspects of being "cool". You would have Duncan, a big kid who definitely didn't play football, who spoke with a lisp like "Butthead" on the cartoon. He could
beat
the shit out of you if he cared to, owing to his bullying size if you didn't conform to his indie notions of "tolerance".
Then you had Laura, a girl with long brown/blond hair and cream-colored Gap pants, who though smaller than you
would look upon this 7th grader with disgust if you confessed your feelings for her
elfin beauty. My hands would have been folded before my lap like dead, awkward claws. . . . . waiting
for my perfect moment, and she would have only assumed they were smeared in semen like "Beavis" in the cartoon.
(What right did I have to say anything, or to have an opinion, or even TO EXIST in front of this hard-edged lot?)
Rounding out the group was the ghost of
Pizzaro de la Christo, the spoiled heir of the sweetsy, slushy Susan
Flower-Smile Hallmark empire. Treacle, sap, and sentimental slush
had produced a rotten little boy who died of a heroin overdose
at the burnt-out age of 15. With his medium-cut grunge rocker's haircut-- blond bangs hanging in his eyes-- a designer ball cap,
and an air of unallayable petulance, he merely laid his head upon his folded arms on the library table when he and I were assigned research partners in math class at our liberal arts alternative school.
one night, how many tons of water fell?".
"Huh?"
he asked when I queried him of his opinion from whence to begin.
To earn his approval and respect, I even dusted off the almanac from the book shelf
and did all the work, decorously briefing him on precisely what I planned to do.
Yet he didn't seem to care.
I heaved mightily to imitate
his burnt-out slouch, wringing my soul
WHOLE-HEARTEDLY for the listless, strung-out residue, speaking in vague monosyllables like a bored stoner though the only grass I knew grew in
roller-blader-friendly Forest Park and sprouted from Easter baskets at my right-wing Uncle Ben's upscale log cabin out in conservative
Western Illinois as he glad-handed like an entrepreneurial rancher
who
told
a
shivering lad
that
he could
be
anything
in
America.
Looking back, maybe it was better that I wasn't "cool" enough to hang out with Pizzaro (-- or was his name Dillon?!) because one time he flashed a pellet gun at a party and shot out some windows. What aroused him to such a spasm of violent agitation, I will never know.
How much pity was I supposed to feel for him? In this life would I ever feel an illusion
of fixity, of importance, like how the editors, reporters, and photographers of the tabloids
must have felt? Parasitic to be sure,
but with their solemn,
buzzing British accents lending gravity to the proceedings, it had to be good. . . . . right? Their sound-bytes breathily warned how their celebrity quarry battle chemical dependence, an ersatz
"intimate concern", as if outpourings of public "sympathy" will be enough to turn them around (--
it won't!). Like supermarket spirituality by the candy rack in the "check-out" lane,
this existence seemed very fleeting.
Even the famous
and ridiculously earnest figured that out. . . . . like when Eddie Vedder, the singer of Pearl Jam, melodramatically threw a chair across the room with a crash as he mused heavily on the suicide of Kurt Cobain for the writers of Rolling Stone,
as if the very presence of a reporter somehow gave him validation to act how he
does.
Even in the months leading up to the final culmination, the escape from rehab over the six-foot brick wall, it was made abundantly clear that Kurt was a goner. Compared to Kurt's cooked heroin sludge injected like the slow, postmodern death-fuck. . . . . the swallowing of stars by celestial black holes as the high sucked back up your arm. . . . . Eddie was like one's cupped hands lifting up spring water in the wilderness of Washington state. Long-haired, rugged, a flannel shirt and bumping a hackey-sack on your knee in furrowed "Green Party" earnestness.
But sometimes it could become a little much, even for me, and I only wished that I could
ever feel the license to act so definitively. What
"terrible vehemence", suspended between "fatigue and violence", such a
"physical declaration", speaking in a "hushed, faltering whisper",
if not an "extremely ill"
one as he sits on the floor of his devastated hotel room.
If someone tried to dash his romanticism
and point out some rather unpleasing facts, Vedder would have leapt to his feet and stalked out of the hotel room with the complete hatred of
"the other", total melodramatic entitlement. Like Kurt Cobain's animus toward his own
weak, bewildered father, who really didn't do anything to warrant such theatrics, standing around like the barreling, bustling, confused fundamentalist Christians who just "didn't get it"
like croaking toads.
The culture war was in full swing, and partisans of each faction condemned each other
with ever more accusatory language and fervency. One wonders what
"Dillon" would have thought of "Ely" from Colorado, a man in his fifties' with a trucker's cap, a ruddy face, and a white mustache with the ends turned upward like a fuming, teeth-bearing steer. There the man sits in a "Steak n' Shake", ruminating
over his bowl of chili
and, on further suspicious reflection, the "Chinaman" overseas who threatens his livlihood.
. . . . whatever the breathy pause from the
New York Times "smart-set"
which then went on to utter about how such thoughts "were so racist and
unacceptable in our global village" though it wasn't their life in the
crosshairs.
And what would "Ely" think about fictitious Analee's illustrative 11 year-old sister, Lira? A feisty, beautiful little pistol who's more dysfunctional than all, swallowing the entire contents of her mother's jar of sleeping pills, hacking at her wrists
when things get really stressful. The personnel at the emergency room know her on her first-name basis. . . . . in therapy she draws pictures of a suited '70s-era "Smiley Face" blowing out it's brains with a pistol.
"Kill Smiley. KILL HIM!"
Her room is filled with mutilated stuffed animals, the walls plastered from floor to ceiling with Johnny Depp pictures. Even though Winona and Johnny have broken up for quite some time, Lira regularly sends the actress
ominous hate mail almost on a weekly basis. Asked who her role model is, she replies "Courtney Love" before going bonkers in a flurry of hair-pulling and screaming.
Analee, hanging out with her friends in the "den of slack", stubs her cigarette in the ash tray and shouts up the stairs, "be quiet up there or I'll have to bring out the strait-jacket!".
"No
you won't! I'm going to kill myself! Good-bye!".
Before the waning afternoon is over, Duncan will be enlisted to bust open the locked bathroom door with his beefy shoulder, as Laura calls 911 with a mundane, disquieted
"oh my god".
Pizzaro de la Chirsto's ghost stands in the hallway outside the gliding emergency of things,
barely reacting.
God forbid, the whole sorry crew may have to miss "Max-X"! You know, the syndicated program of extreme video footage that comes in over the airwaves, the nothing-space of the stratosphere, right into your television set.
The inertia of our humdrum 1990's existence
isn't usually overrun with dare-devils, rioters, desperate criminals, helicopter rescues, natural disasters, and car chases. But the throbbing logo, an angry red salutation, swelling in size,
with the crunch of a riffing guitar, makes vicarious snippets of nihilistic, montaged voyeurism possible. Clench your fists with excitement from your comfortable mattress on the hotel bed, thrills to the
"max". Adrenal glands, eyes pinched wide
open, neural chemicals and secretions seeping
A more thoughtful person than Analee and her friends
would find themselves appalled at the concept, appalled that
he yet can't turn away, and even more appalled
at the glib, irritating narrator who keeps up the buoyant tone in his voice in utter unrelated detachment to all manner of chaos, tomfoolery,
and senseless destruction.
Demonstrators in the freezing streets of Russia attempt to light an effigy on fire with kerosene at an effort of democratic protest, only instead
lighting themselves instead. Swaddled in heavy coats, they walk forward, arms outstretched, engulfed in flames.
Barely even with scholock-mock "empathy" that would "gratify", the off-screen narrator jokes about
"needing some brewskies and hot-dogs on the double".
A bloodied faith-seeker in Mexico, a blanket over his head, skinny as a coyote, outstretches his arms
for transcendence as the Pope waves to the brown-skinned throng from his armored motorcade.
Natural forces at play-- huge, muscular-- outside of human control, unharnessed for any practical application, gone in an instant-- not unlike a spark from a battery. Action, then stillness-- the unchanging conservation of matter and energy as the animating force leaves the ordered system.
Bone-crunching lionesses pouncing on a wildebeest, a swarm of them waving their tails, then at last driven off by the vengeful herd with pointed horns and cloven hooves, the skinny, bulging-eyed camera-man in a Hawaiian shirt catching it all on a camcorder, staggering around on hooped legs as buzzards fly overhead.
And there was lust . . . . . . .
I may have felt like a toad struggling in a fish bowl of molasses
for all my wretchedness, but there it was. . . . . The waitress in a green shirt, white golf cap, and jean-shorts that showed off her tasty, tanned thighs cut the check, laid it down on the table in front of us
with a
tennis player's flutter, and I knew that my prepubescent younger brother and graying mother
could never understand it.
Soon the fall would come, flannel shirts and blue jeans kissing sweaty virgin skin, long-hair and gold-plated glasses pushed up the edge of my oily nose, wiping my face with a clean white towel held under the brass faucet to prevent acne. Like a hippie returning to the land, unrolling a blanket for Woodstock.
A skittery wimp holding up a peace sign, back when there was something
certain to believe in.
But there was still
aggression in me, love for Metallica, the mythical, the battle-cry of freedom against
I only wished that Elektra records
would pay me to travel around the country in a black Metallica t-shirt,
an insider and informal spokesman exposing the unwary to the phenomenon, like a radio D.J. with a mustache and sunglasses making his voice sound deep and deceptively confident as he felt the license
to act hoggishly flirtatious with the
brain-dead waitress in sit-down establishments such as these.
Naturally, the record company picked up the tab. But of course, the record company
didn't need me because by now Metallica had achieved mainstream acceptance with sold-out stadium tours and mega-platinum sales.
All the money had been made!
Besides, Mom insisted that I was really "too smart" for the likes of Metallica, but I felt that it was an elitist statement. In any case,
we were all cockroaches in a dead, profane, and wasted age.
Wasn't that the secular conceit made by the postmodernists,
having disdain and scorn for petty bourgeois values? Andy Warhol and his platinum wig, with that telltale conceit and abandon-- telltale signs of true genius,
if not the Afro-Hatitan funkiness of Basquiat.
A Parisian beret, a black turtleneck, dropping change in the outstretched derby
of "Koko", the unhappy French clown.
"For life is brief and meaningless",
closing one's purple eyelids in weary opium-addicted disdain, using it as an excuse to scratch out pornographic novels in longhand at the cafè run by the Marxist owner, Papa Joffree.
"
The Resis-TANCE", walking arm-and-arm with a young female revolutionary in a violet, velvet beret and black dress along the Seine to paint watercolors. Pierre Salinger declares his eternal love, and tries to get Elaine to vow a suicide pact, like something out of a European art film(e).Wide-eyed, she shakes her head
"no. . . . .""Then I will die!", hair wind-whipped and dramatic. Then he jumps in the river. A bad idea, because the Paris sewer system drains there. Elaine calls for help, and some vagrants help fish him out with a pole. He will experience the fetid comfort of being sad, because Elaine leaves him then and there for an opportunity to see Johnny.
You know,
Johnny Depp-- the Indian-faced
American
alternative youth idol who has a passion for French art film(e)s. Why, he even performs at "The Little Green Balloon", Papa Joffree's coffee house, playing slide guitar for his back-up band of avant-garde musicians
with his lizard-like, insectoid eyes that stare on utterly without irony. He lives by the credo of "conspicuous minimalism", defined by a cynic as "the non-ownership of goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority". Or at least that's the impression he lends-- standing there in an undershirt, jacket half-off, exposing his fleshless arm-pit with his outstretched, crucified Jesus Christ pose, a slender little mustache
that makes him look like Zorro.
Johnny doesn't talk about the time when the academic Foucault school of postmodernism was intellectually lazy enough to publish the nonsense-laden
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
just to see how decadent and pretentious the
"liberatory postmodern sciences"
had become. The editor handed in his resignation and slunk off chagrined. Koko the clown merely slouched down his chin and assumed what he calls
"the broken puppet figure".
After all, he claims that
"my art is only for humanity. I sing only for humanity!".
"McDeath, McMurder, McShit!"
from "The Animal Liberation Front", scrawled in the bathroom of McDonald's with a can of spray-paint. In blood red, of course-- the color of implacable accusation. Another time they dumped a 600 pound bovine carcass in the middle of a fast-food drive-thru lane before the breakfast crowd got there.
At a Paris zoo, a man in a pink elephant costume pulled up in a dump truck and
spilled out five tons of horse manure at the visitors' gates
to protest the
confinement of animals. Dead serious in "his statement", protesting furiously,
the police had to drag him out of the cab and yank off his mask so he could be
identified, the news cameras rolling all the while as he shouted dramatic
left-wing slogans to the world.
All and all it was the disassociations of a sham existence, but it all seemed frighteningly real to me. Anxiety has always been a problem of excess meaning, and I knew that life didn't forgive weakness. It always seemed easier-- and safer-- to go along with the raging cultural mores of the day. At last, on the drive back to St. Louis, I felt like a drummer boy with a bandage around his head. . . . . limping home from the war.
********************
Epilogue. . . . .
(What I think of all that bullshit now)
-- I have learned in the intervening years that 90% of what I've been taught from school and t.v. is "bunk", that most of the sights, sounds, and images we're surrounded by is propaganda set up either to satisfy someone's self-concepted ego or "the profit motive", whether capitalist or self-centered socialist. Sartre once wrote that "hell is other people" when you watch them claw around in their own world of grotesque illusion, all searching for "heaven" but not getting very far. Some take perverse delight in denying that there is a heaven and that is their short-changed ecstasy.
But wherever you find it, don't rely on the world of media and entertainment which is just a couple of sets, a camera crew, and actors who pretend like they believe in what they're saying!
Be better than them. . . . . by creating your own media!
***************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at