We released this in 2012. I miss the live iterations of this project, which included visual art and movement. I miss working in the studio. I miss some of my best friends.
The intro track is available on Bandcamp, but the the rest of the disc is where the real art is.
After graduation, I farmed CDs at Best Busy, the great beginning of the need to make sure everything would always be just so. I curated Aphex Twins and AC/DC according to their kind, sold DVD players for 400 dollars, caught kids stealing porn and shitty music. This came on every hour on the Summer of ’98 Best Buy Super Sampler, we played “Closing Time” to kick you out, Katie Holmes was Beatrice in songs sung by The Flys. How we sensed foreboding, how we savored loss. It was all we knew then, all we could. It’s most of what I miss.
CNN with “The Woman Who Stood Up to Joe Paterno,” a piece about Vicky Triponey, the former Penn State VP in charge of student discipline who profoundly clashed with Joe Paterno over how players should be punished for off-field infractions.
You should read the whole thing, but I was particularly interested in Paterno’s thinly-veiled misogyny:
“I am very troubled by the manipulative, disrespectful, uncivil and abusive behavior of our football coach,” she wrote. “It is quite shocking what this man — who is idolized by people everywhere — is teaching our students.”
Paterno clearly seemed to resent “meddling” from outsiders, even if Triponey was simply doing her job. She saw the dangers of special treatment that placed football players under a softer standard than other students lived by. She said it wasn’t right. But it was a battle she couldn’t win.
Paterno ridiculed her on a radio show as “that lady in Old Main” who couldn’t possibly know how to handle students because “she didn’t have kids.”
And there’s also this:
And then one day in late 2004, as disciplinary sanctions were being considered against a member of the football team, she received a visit from Paterno’s wife, who had tutored the player.
He’s a good kid, Sue Paterno said. Could they give him a break?
Triponey realized then that she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or even Connecticut.
By the next year, 2005, she was battling Paterno himself over who controlled how football players were disciplined. Paterno also chafed over enforcing Penn State’s code of conduct off campus.
Spanier called a meeting at which Paterno angrily dominated the conversation, Triponey recalled. She summarized the meeting in an e-mail to Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley and others, complaining that Paterno “is insistent that he knows best how to discipline his players” and that her department should back off.
And, perhaps most tellingly:
Tensions reached the breaking point in 2007 over how to discipline half a dozen players who’d been arrested at a brawl at an off-campus apartment complex. Several students were injured; one beaten unconscious.
Triponey met with Paterno and other university officials half a dozen times, although she preferred to remain neutral as the appeals hearing officer.
At the final meeting, Triponey urged the coach to advise his players to tell the truth. Paterno said angrily that he couldn’t force his players to “rat” on each other since they had to practice and play together. Curley and Spanier backed him up on that point, she said.
That thing about “ratting,” you caught, that right? I’m fairly certain Paterno didn’t come across that code of ethics in his celebrated study of Virgil and the Roman classics. It sounds a lot more like omerta.
Forget that we’re conditioned to expect misogyny and reckless codes of male super-valuation from old men, or the Mafioso codes of silence or the parallels to the Catholic Church’s endless scandals. Over a lifetime, the Brown-educated, Latin-reading Paterno presented as someone fit and wise and cosmopolitan enough to lead the big business of Penn State football, and, over the course of time and through the gross misguidance of others that he did nothing to remedy (and seemingly encouraged), the University itself.
Turns out he hadn’t really been fit for any of these roles since 1998. Maybe sooner. I suspect we’ll’ learn more than we ever wanted to know about Joe Paterno in the coming weeks and months. He can’t defend himself, it’s true. But he had opportunities before he passed, and he continued lying to everyone, including the community he claimed to love and, most ironic for a life-long student of the classics, himself.
You look at this infographic and you think “Wow, Spider-man pays more federal income tax than Bruce Wayne. Doesn’t seem fair.”
And certainly, it’s not.
At the same time, look at Bruce’s charitable giving. One could make the case that he is giving more to the kinds of causes that the government uses taxes for than Spidey ever will. So here’s what we do: take away charitable deductions for any cause that isn’t related to human services or infrastructure. Problem solved. (Oh, and fix the capital gains tax so that it’s taxed like income.)
I don’t agree with all of Hyden’s conclusions in this piece (and I’m certainly no Rush expert), but isn’t this a fantastic piece of writing?:
Resentment was very good to Corgan when he invented the original incarnation of Smashing Pumpkins and made it the biggest band of alt-rock’s last, lurching stand in the mid-’90s. It grew — as only the purest, most potent reservoirs of resentment do — from out of the Midwest, festering inside the pinched heart of a nerdy metal kid who knew he would never be accepted by the Thurston Moores and Stephen Malkmuses of the world, with their stupidly perfect mussed hairdos and mysteriously crucial connections to skateboard culture and world-class noise-rock collections. To them, no matter how fast he shredded or how high his choruses soared, Billy would always have sweaty palms and pockmarks and a ruthlessly flowing mullet. Guys like that can just smell the hayseed on you, even through your paisley-colored rock-star clothes, and they’ll never let you forget your place.
I also love this Corgan quote, which Hyden thinks is Billy talking about Billy:
“I can’t think of any people outside of Weird Al Yankovic who have both embraced and pissed on rock more than I have. Obviously there’s a level of reverence, but there’s also a level of intelligence to even know what to piss on. ‘Cause I’m not pissing on Rainbow. I’m not pissing on Deep Purple. But I’ll piss on fuckin’ Radiohead, because of all this pomposity. This value system that says Jonny Greenwood is more valuable than Ritchie Blackmore. Not in the world I grew up in, buddy. Not in the world I grew up in.”
Says Hyden:
If you’ve been following Corgan for these last 20 years, and know how to parse the cogent thoughts from his thatches of twisty-turny grandiosity, you might understand that he’s not talking at all about Radiohead here, and only a little bit about Weird Al and perhaps slightly more about Ritchie Blackmore. That Billy Corgan quote is mainly about Billy Corgan; Al and Ritchie are manifestations of how Corgan sees himself and his place in rock music. He is criticizing the value system that says fashionable and arbitrarily acclaimed (in his view) bands are considered more valuable than he is. Unfortunately, this is the world you grew up in, buddy. Corgan’s feelings of persecution at the hands of a vast, underground, oppressively aloof hip-stapo have been central to his music since at least “Cherub Rock,” one of the few golden-era Smashing Pumpkins oldies that Corgan never seems to tire of playing.
He’s right, of course, that this really isn’t about Radiohead. And hey, I remember when Adore and all that came out and we couldn’t give it away at BestBuy. It must have hurt that Semisonic and The Flys where outselling the Pumpkins’ follow-up to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and it must have hurt more that no one who listened to the record seemed to like it. I remember Corgan saying he was being punished for being ahead of his time, and I remember thinking it was all an ill-informed load of crap. But Corgan’s right, isn’t he, about the value system of Whoever It Is that makes tastes and foments critical opinion? Yes and no, of course. But if you’re like me, the yes has found you really pissed off about these hierarchies on more than one occasion…typically when your heroes are passed over for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with merit or talent or art.
Billy Corgan was never a hero of mine the way, say, Noel Gallagher was/is, but I was 15 when Mellon Collie came out and I had all those thoughts. Maybe Corgan’s talking about himself and maybe he’s not, or maybe we just don’t expect this kind of angst about authenticity from people in their 40s. (Of course we don’t. Maybe we should.)
Hyden’s right, anyway, about the Mellon Collie Corgan being a Brill Building of his own. A Baxter Building, even. Listen to “1979” and don’t feel amazing about some sliver of your youth. Go right ahead. Listen to “Tonight, Tonight” and don’t feel like the un-vindicated sixteen-year-old you were. Not in the world I grew up in, buddy.
And so this post ends up not being about Steven Hyden and only a little bit about Billy Corgan. And that’s what great writing, like Hyden’s, and great art, like Corgan’s, find us doing. Sorting out our own histories and narratives and hard-won feelings. It’s why Mellon Collie soared and Adore didn’t. It’s why I share and quote from pieces like these in the first place. Buddy.
From 2012.
A few years ago, a Mennonite at the Kutztown Folk Festival gave me a copy of Regeneration by Pat Barker. It was in a bin of dollar books at his church’s tent, and while I dug for grungy bills, he told me I could have whatever I wanted, free.
I started reading Regeneration over the weekend. I’m through Chapter 4, and I really like it. A compelling picture of care has already emerged (and I expect to be woefully, blissfully subdued by the anti-war message throughout).
Chris Cocca 