rock 'n roll high school

2004-07-24 - 5:47 p.m.

listening to the ramones as i do housework. by 'housework' i mean throwing in one, count 'em, one load of towels and then playing with the cats and burning incense. then watching bits of 'bowling for columbine' on cable even though i own the dvd. then updating my journal. har har.

i got this beautiful inspiration of a character sketch while listening to 'judy is a punk' and driving to work yesterday. it was just a flash of a two-minute movie montage introducing a character to the audience, but it was bloody brilliant. it was my fourth (or third, depending on if that one story is about the same woman or two different ones) character sketch i've thought of in just the past couple of weeks or so. that seems to be my bread and butter these days: music and character sketches.

speaking of music and brilliance, the ramones are blindingly brilliant. god, they just fuckin' rock. and what's really funny is that i'm finally into all these bitch-ass bands that this cool punk girl tried to get me into in high school. she kept trying to loan me butthole surfers tapes and she'd make jokes about our history teacher going to a ramones concert or dressing up like the sex pistols and i'd just laugh and pretend like i knew what she was talking about. and, of course, i hadn't a cluuuuue. but i'd known her since middle school. i'd invited her to my sleepovers and swam with her in the shallow end of the swimming pool because she was afraid to go to the deep end, even though i really wanted to swim in the deep end with all of the other girls at the sleepover. she gave me a fashion notebook filled with drawings of girls in different outfits that she'd drawn herself, and she left room at the end for me to add my own. she was shy and nice and sweet and a lot like me.

then in high school she emerged as this punk girl who wore black and dyed her hair to match, who wore saftery pins as jewelry and made up stories about the detachable penis. since she spent a lot of time in the library she'd even send me overdue slips, saying that my copy of 'the detachable penis goes to europe' was overdue. we made up long lists of 'imagine our history teacher doing ...' in typing class. since she was such a fast typer she'd finish her drills early and spend the rest of the period typing up those lists, then she'd promptly hand them over to me. god, those were fucking funny. we both sat at the back table in biology and tried to freak out the new science teacher. she'd make up stories about how he was really a mass murderer and how she'd seen him loading up bodies in the trunk of his car. god, she was so fucking cool, and i didn't even know. i just knew that she was fun and funny and still hung out with me even though, at that point, i was still wearing sweaters with cats on them.

i don't remember if it was sophomore year or the beginning of junior year when she went away. she was put in a psychiatric hospital for depression. i knew that something was happening towards the end. there was a darkness about her that wasn't just punk rock cool. maybe she saw that in me, too. i wonder what it would have been like if i had gone to the psych hospital with her. of course, i didn't get as depressed as she was until the middle of my junior year. but still. how would my life have been different if i had missed the last two years of high school, earned my g.e.d. instead, been treated for depression. would we still be friends? would my life be any different than it is now?

i don't know. but she was bitch-ass. and the ramones are bitch-ass, and the sex pistols, and the butthole surfers.

i probably wouldn't have been into the music back then even if she had managed to get me to borrow her tapes. i had a much different asthetic when i was fourteen. hell, when i was in high school, period. in going back through my music collection, i've been listening to some of the old cds, and some of them are pretty crap. mephisto walz, much as i loved and still love 'mephisto waltz,' is kinda crap. and i own three albums of theirs. it's just so synthesized and processed. kind of laughable, really. and part of me hates to admit that, but even the blue album that i used to listen to on repeat grates on my musical sensibilities. then, of course, there's the opposite. i rarely listened to my 'theatre of pain' cd, but now i can't get enough of christian death (though i prefer rozz williams, r.i.p.).

the same applies to movies. even though it was never as good as the first crow, i remember being rather fond of 'the crow: city of angels' when i saw it in the theatre. then when i caught bits of it on tv today, i almost laughed. iggy pop will always be fuckin' hardcore, that crusty old bastard, but the rest was such an obvious technicolour parady of the first that it became unwatchable. i wasn't buying vincent perez's pain over his dead son, or his anger. i thought it was all too staged and he was laying it on a bit thick. and why is there always an evil asian chick? is that an unwritten rule in goth comic book movies?

i suppose that once you've seen really good movies, and heard truly great music, once you've developed any sort of asthetic about the arts, there's just no going back. even good memories of loving awful crap pale in comparison to something that truly stirs your senses.