Reconciling My Love of Siamese Dream w/ My Hatred for Mr. Corgan

I have to preface the following piece by saying up front, there is no way to properly quantify how much I revile The Smashing Pumpkins and, specifically, the man at the heart of the group. I don't want to be unnecessarily mean to anyone, not even some "rock star" I don't personally know, but if I'm going to discuss them in any kind of positive light, my "hate disclaimer" needs to come first. My feelings are strong enough that I would never want to be mistaken for a fan. Why? Because everything the band has done since Siamese Dream is literal anathema to me. So much so that I stopped paying any kind of attention to them over a decade ago but their continued existence still pisses me right the fuck off!

Over the weekend, K and I drove to Dayton, Ohio to visit her Grandmother. As has become our habit on road trips, we fired up Yacy Salek's Podcast Bandsplain. Scrolling the list of episodes, we eventually chose the two-part Smashing Pumpkins deep-dive. 

I know very little about the Pumpkins post-Meloncollie (sorry billy, not spelling it your way), and what little I gleaned about that magnum stain upon release has long since been recorded over in my memory banks. Because of this, I figured the episode would be equally enlightening, justifying and, of course, hysterical. Salek has already demonstrated her own penchant for taking corgan with a grain of salt on the Soundgarden deep-dive we listened to last month, so I figured, let's hear what someone who likes the music but not necessarily the artist thinks. 

Upon finishing the first installment, K and I drove around Dayton listening to Siamese Dream, and something clicked. I realized that, for all intents and purposes, the corgan who wrote Siamese Dream (and Gish) left this existence in 1994 and was replaced by some kind of doppelgänger cooked up in a corporate lab. This idea felt like a new approach to settle the cognitive dissonance I've had about embracing this record again after all this time.

When Siamese Dream hit record stores in 1993, it immediately became one of my favorite albums of all time. I cannot stress how much this album colored my final year in High School. The music was perfect for a burgeoning stoner and his high school stoner sweetheart; my black-clad girlfriend and I listened to it obsessively, interwoven betwixt all the Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer we thrived on at the time. It's big, fuzzy sonic boom and soft, lilting aquatic passages marked our days and nights and quickly became interwoven in my memories. The song "Disarm," in particular, hit at a time when a friend was arrested and eventually convicted of murdering a younger girl in our group. While "Disarm" has since become emotionally ubiquitous for the general population, its effect will likely always remain strong for me. I have such a strong emotional association between it and the horror and frustration I felt at that time. Hearing it now conjures a balm from thirty years ago. At a time when my life and understanding of the world was crumbling around me, this band seemed to have some kind of parallel. That felt like everything. 

That said, I'm choosing to post the track "Hummer" today because, as Salek points out during her episode, this track is often overlooked. In fact, listening to this masterpiece again with fresh ears, I'd say it might just be the best - or at least my favorite - song on the record. 

Playing this record several times over the weekend - and in fact, even now while I type this - I'm shocked at how much I love it. A lot of my life as a music fan has involved figuring out ways to continue relationships with music made by artists who eventually reveal themselves to be cunts. There is no better example than The Smashing Pumpkins. There is zero chance I'll ever connect with anything after this album (see what I did there?), but I'm taking this one back (However, I have said that before).

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Watch:

Let's lighten the mood. You know, there was a lot of talk about the Netflix Menendez Brothers movie this year. Tabloid true crime isn't my jam, but for my money, there's only one movie about that particular case:

I laughed so hard I cried. This Letterman YouTube channel is one of my favorite finds of the year. I'm not very YouTube savvy, so every time I see a video like this, I try to remind myself that, at this point the streaming giant is essentially our social memory of the last forty or fifty years. Everything is on it. 

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Read:

Over the extended weekend, I had my first chance to really sit down and read in a while, so I was finally able to finish IvyTholen's Mother Dear. The fact that this is the second novel Ivy has published this year makes me think she's something of a superhero, as Mother Dear is just as tightly paced and joyously readable as her other novels. The characters were extremely well designed, but by their nature, anathema to me; however, that didn't keep me from rocketing through this one once I got a few hours to actually focus on it again. 

Next up is Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger:

This is not the edition I'm reading. However, this is one of the illustrations from inside the book, and I LOVE it so much that I couldn't pass up using it to represent this nefarious novella. The Mysterious Stranger begins in Austria during the winter of 1590 and is narrated by one of three boys who begin a casual friendship with an Angel named Satan. Now, never mind that the Angel tells them he is not THE Satan, the boys find themselves swooning for this charming being who hands out money and favors like it's nothing at all. Satan also talks down about the Human Race every chance he gets (can't really blame him, even all these years later). At the heart of the boys' education and the Stranger's criticisms is The Moral Sense, Humanity's inbourne conceit that they can determine what is right and what is wrong (not between what is right and what is wrong). The way Twain writes the characters and scenarios is subtle enough to completely belie the fact that there are some absolutely horrifying ideas here. At one point, the narrator touches on the recent spate of Witch burnings, including an incident where eleven children were burned. It's bafflingly scary and definitely deserves way more recognition as a work of Literate Horror Fiction than it gets.

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Playlist:

Spoon - They Want My Soul

Marilyn Manson - One Assassination Under God, Chapter 1

Ministry - HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES

Bandspain Podcast - The Smashing Pumpkins Part 1

My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

The Smashing Pumpkins - Zero (single; for shit-talking purposes only. I hate this song)

Bandsplain Podcast - The Smashing Pumpkins Part 2

Best Coast - Boyfriend (single)

Radiohead - Kid A

The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead

NIN - Not the Actual Events

NIN - Add Violence

NIN - Bad Witch

NIN - Year Zero

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

Crystal Castles - II

Entropy - Dharmak​ā​ya 

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Page of Wands

• Six of Wands

• Seven of Wands

That's a lot of Wands. So what is this trying to tell me as I come off a long weekend and a small road trip? Wands are all about WILL, so I instantly read this as an instruction to knuckle back down, apply the will and finish the book. I am SO close now; on the final Grammarly edit, but only about 40% of the way through reading it out loud to K. After that, I'll send it to my trusted Beta Reader, wait to hear back and make any changes she suggests that will help the overall book. But I am extremely happy so far, and have considered shopping this around to publishers. We'll see.

War Pimp Renaissance

I finally picked The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen back up earlier this week, and this time, I find I can't put it down. More about that below. For right now, reading the Biafra interview in the book and hearing Al talk about the origin of the band Lard, I felt motivated to dig out 1997's Pure Chewing Satisfaction. This is one of those records I had on cassette back in the day, and because I still have the actual cassette, I always put off listening to it on Apple Music under the guise that I should dig out that tape. Well, that never happens, so I haven't heard Pure Chewing in a loooong time. Guess what? I gave up on the tape and started playing it the other day, only to find out I miss the hell out of this record!

The Last Temptation of Reid has always been the go-to masterpiece in the Lard catalog as far as I was concerned; however, now I find Pure Chewing Satisfaction is every bit as awesome, starting with this, the opening song, which I could listen to over and over again ad nauseam.

 

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Watch:

Watching the first two episodes of Marvel's Wandavision last night was quite the experience. I now very much understand what Elizabeth Olsen meant in the interviews she did during the run-up to this show when she repeatedly said, "I just can't believe they let us actually do this show." 

This is the evolution of Marvel's style. 

I'm speechless. Wandavision isn't the best thing I've ever seen or even my favorite of the Marvel stuff, but being that it breaks their fight-on-catwalk-stop-him-before-he-ends-the-world-and/or-destroys-the-entire-city mold and shows that they will begin to take chances, I'm excited. And as fans, that's all we can ask for. That's how the comics gave us things like Matt Faction's Hawkeye series, or Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers, or any of the mold-breaking stuff Marvel occasionally does to draw in new readers who don't necessarily jive with fight-fight-fight and crossover-crossover-crossover paradigm they seem to still be stuck in.

I'm totally fine having (mostly) given up reading Marvel Comics if I can get stories like this from their MCU.

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Read:

Last year when Mr. Brown sent me his copy of Al Jourgensen's autobiography, I read about a fourth of it and had to walk away. This happens a lot with musician autobiographies. Soul Coughing's Mike Doughty's book really started to affect how I felt about one of my favorite bands of all time, so I stopped reading that, too. I thought that would be the case here, but when I picked Gospels up again recently to give it one more chance, I found I couldn't put the fucking thing down.

Al still comes off like a complete douche, which I guess really shouldn't be a surprise. However, the book is also laugh-out-loud hysterical at times. Really, once I got past the utter nonsense of him bragging about how many chicks he nailed as a teenager and moved into the origins of Ministry, well, the douchery didn't stop, but it became mixed with a lot of great information about a band I've loved for most of my life (thanks also to Brown, who lent me his copy of The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste when we were Juniors in High School).

Anyway, if you can get past those initial chapters, and deal with him being one of those "Been there, done that, did that first, fuck those guys I used to work with" tirades, and the endless drug stories that make him really look like an ass - the River Phoenix one is especially awful - then this is a pretty good read. 

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Playlist:

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid

The Veils - Total Depravity

The Replacements - Tim

Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone

Ministry - Dark Side of the Spoon

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Card:

This morning I thought I'd pull from the Raven Deck. Every time I bring these cards out, I marvel at the work and detail my good friend Missi put into them. The cards literally hum with the energy she put into them, and so they make reading an incredibly unique experience.

Change. From Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null: "The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves."

I have 100% agreed with this statement since I first began reading Carroll in the early 00s. And I find it funny that I pull this card now, as I try to understand how I've suddenly become able to reintegrate The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream back into my life.

Tangent? No. Hear me out.

I loved this record upon its release the summer before my Senior Year in high school began, but I have been mostly unable to feel passionately about it since about two or three years later. Everything about this album and that band that I loved was, in my opinion, flipped on its head beginning with the release of the follow-up, and The Smashing Pumpkins became kind of an antithesis to me. However, for every reason I feel justified in distancing myself from their music and personas, I realize too, I was distancing myself from who I was when this album meant so much to me. Which is fine. That's the mountain of dead selves at work right there, and that's important. And there's a vulnerability to reconnecting with something that was so integral and intertwined with who you were when you were a teenager, and I began to make it a point to execute and deny most previous versions of myself somewhere about the time I graduated college and became a bartender (ha! what a sentence). 

Anyway, I guess the poignant part of all this is that while Siamese Dream was executed and thrown on the pile with that old version of Shawn, along with records by bands like Pantera, Sublime and the like, it's a new one for me that I can dig this one out of that mountain of corpses, dust it off, and reconnect with it in such a strong way.

Will it last? It feels like it will, however, I should probably avoid hearing anything billy corgan says in the media if I want that to last.