Last Friday/Saturday I spent 18 hours in New York, saw Sonic Youth and Wild Flag at the Williamsburg Waterfront with Laura and Keight and Shirley whom you may remember from Complicated-Women Karaoke back in January. After the show we went to Momofuku Milk Bar and I got that cookie and now I’m so jealous of New York, that you get to have Momofuku Milk Bar and I can’t think of any amazing cookies in Los Angeles. Are there no amazing cookies in Los Angeles?
2. Mary Timony 4-eva
Look how happy she is, basking in our warm and loving presence last Friday. I swiped this beautiful photo from Fucking Nostalgic, which is a website I totally support.
3. Nirvana playing Twister with Smashing Pumpkins
I found this thanks to Tatyana, who writes for Birdsong. Krist Novoselic was hot kind of? Briefs are a good look for him? Kurt doesn’t know how to play Twister?
Our friend Laura with whom I’m going to see Wild Flag on Friday found this clip of Mary Timony on Indie Outing, which apparently was an MTV show in 1997? Mary’s all extra-charming here, wearing pigtails, showing off her adorable lisp, painting yellow stars onto a teapot, giggling about strip clubs. I love what she says about her songs being escapist. I too like to make escapist songs/stories. If I were a person besides myself, I’d like to think I would be her.
My friend Laura sent me a bucket of pre-Dirt of Luck demos by Helium, after me sending me an mp3 of my sweet long-lost “American Jean.” Right now they feel like my favorite Mary Timony-authored songs in the world, and I can’t believe I made it to 2011 without ever coming across them. I’m too lazy to share them all, but here are four of my favorites. I love how almost all of them sound like if you went to a coffeehouse in 1993 and the featured coffeehouse performer was this really chill genius-weirdo who sang some wicked sexy poetry.
I don’t know the titles, so I made them up based on the lyrics within.
“Randy”
Guns and cars and guns and cars and guns and cars and guns and cars…sigh. Randy.
“Your Face Is On Your Body”
This is not coffeehouse-y; it’s all hot and snarly. I so identify with the lyric “I’d love to get to the point that I could call you ‘cutie pie’/You could call me anymore.” And that growling thing she does right after that line? I was gonna say it’s so Jennifer Herrema-y or Courtney Love-y but it’s not: it’s Timony-y.
“Your Head Is Prettier Than A Little Bird”
I’m really into this naming-the-location-of-body-parts thing that’s a lyrical motif throughout these demos: “Your head is on your body,” “Your mouth is in your head,” “Your teeth are in your mouth,” “Your eyes are on your face,” etc. Also I dig her end-of-song humming.
“Your Soul Is A Gun”
The way she sings the word “wallet” at 2:07 is so non-annoyingly adorable; it just kills me. And I’m like, “No, Mary, your soul is a superhero.” It’s so true.
—
I also love the one where Mary sings “Your heart is an orange and your head is the peel,” and the one with the line about “a handful of bones and a hibiscus bouquet.” You can find some of the songs here, btw.
On Saturday morning I roused from slumber to find that my friend Laura had emailed me like 8 million Helium songs, many of which I’d never heard before. It was a really beautiful way to wake up. Before that morning it’d been at least eight years since I last listened to “The American Jean,” aka Helium’s first-ever single: I downloaded it from Napster onto my ex-boyfriend’s computer in like 2000 and it ended up on a mix CD that somehow didn’t make the move to Los Angeles. This song’s 18-years-old and I guess it’s kinda dated but it still sounds fresh to me, in every sense of the word. Listen:
Here’s some vital sartorial advice (plus a few life lessons and random factoids) gained while revisiting “The American Jean”:
-Wear your blue jeans on the inside.
-Mary Timony can put her own pants on.
-Taper your jeans at the bottom – that way, they’re more stylish than when you got them.
-Keep a spare pair up on the dash.
-Wear them all night, wear them all day, wear them out until they fray.
-Your jeans are not cloth, they’re a part of your heart.
Also, when looking up the release date for the “American Jean” seven-inch I arrived at Helium’s Wikipedia, which includes this dumb sentence: “Timony became known for her Lolita-esque image (e.g. short schoolgirl skirts and hairstyle) and naughty lyrics, much like Helium’s then-labelmate Liz Phair.” Uggggggggghhhhhhhhh fuck off, Wikipedia. Don’t you dare use the words “schoolgirl” and “naughty” when speaking of Mary Timony.
There is a certain guilt that often attends the wearing of pigtails, at least among females past the age of eight. “Am I way too old for this shit?” a 33-year-old woman might wonder, braiding her artificially blond hair into asymmetrically adorable pigtails for the fourth time in the same week. “Should I be doing more grown-up hair, or trying out some more adventurous hair concepts, like a windswept chignon or whatevsies?” And though these are valid questions, each should be answered in the negative. If and when pigtail guilt takes hold, one need only remember the existence of Mary Timony, whose oft-pigtailed head has never interfered with her standing as a total guitar god who makes lots of weird and sublime and quietly fierce music that everyone should listen to and love forever.
Timony’s my number-one pigtail idol of all time, apart from my forty-something ex-neighbor who had these super-killer bleached-blond pigtails and the same first name as me (plus a mega-hot vintage car, a really extravagant front-porch flower garden, and the cutest boyfriend + tiny dogs). Mary wears pigtails like girls in storybooks wear pigtails, and isn’t it so cool and beautiful to look like a storybook? Pigtails are charming, and lord knows the world could use a little more charm. Also, lots of dudes think pigtails are cute, and not all of them are creepy perverts. And, above all else, pigtails are lazy and easy and lovely just the same – so you have much more time for reading good books, going for big thinky walks, and puzzling out how to bring slaughtered woodland creatures back from the dead so they can all get together and murder Ted Nugent.
Yesterday at Farmers Market I went to visit my favorite cake. It’s called a Princess Torte and looks like this; it’s a sponge cake with raspberry jam and cream-custard layers and a seafoam-green marzipan “cloak.” It comes from Sweden. Me and these girls come from Boston (sort of, in some ways):
Up top: Mary Timony (taken from bloodtree.tumblr.com). Down below: Tanya Donelly (taken from 90salt.tumblr.com). And to round it out, here’s my favorite song about eating cream-filled jelly rolls and licking jelly-roll crumbs off a floor:
(Mary Timony melting your face, courtesy of Blood Tree)
“Wild Flag? More like Wild Drag,” I said last November after seeing the aforementioned band and hating almost every minute of it. But yesterday my best karaoke girl Laura F. posted this vid of Wild Drag covering “Ask the Angels” and I typed “OKAY FINE” in the comment box and you know what? I meant it. I’ve seen Patti Smith nine times and Carrie Brownstein is no match, but she gets the job done all right. Plus I like her way more now that she’s funny and stuff, and also I just realized she looks sorta like Emily Richmond. Right?
The real show though is Mary Timony, who is so stoked about life and I love her and I hope you love her too. I still stand by my original argument that she is a zillion times too good for Wild Flag, but who I am to get in the way of her good time? A destroyer of Mary Timony’s joy, I will never ever be.
My best karaoke girl Laura Fisher found this yesterday, probably on this beautiful Tumblr that’s full of Mary Timony. It’s such a sweet little movie! I love the way Timony looks up and blinks while lighting her cigarette, and how cutely/shyly she takes her first bite of donut. She has a little bit of a lisp, huh? I never noticed that before. Lisps are my favorite.
I saw Wild Flag last night. They bored and irritated me. They sounded so much like Sleater-Kinney, which is a band I really don’t care for (excepting their last album, which was terrific). Mary Timony seemed like she was having lots of fun, and I’m happy for her, but I’m excited for when she stops playing with Wild Flag and goes back to making her own albums, because they’re so much better than Sleater-Kinney’s albums.
Anyway, one thing I realized last night is that it’s tragic and dumb how there are more people who own Sleater-Kinney albums than there are people who own albums by Mary Timony or Helium. So, here are seven songs by Helium/Mary Timony that you really should buy right now. OK? Just buy them.
It’s just a really hot dance song, from The Golden Dove, which LJ included in our list of the nine best albums of the 2000s. It’s a break-up record about animals, says LJ. “If I could describe The Golden Dove by Mary Timony in one made-up adjective, it would be ‘Elizabeth Barker-esque,’” also says LJ. LJ speaks truths.
ii. MARY TIMONY, “THE VALLEY OF ONE THOUSAND PERFUMES”
Once I did that Facebook thing where you put your iPod on shuffle and skip through the songs and answer a series of Facebook-provided questions with each song title. Facebook asked “What would best describe your personality?”, and my iPod said “The Valley of One Thousand Perfumes” by Mary Timony. “ABSOLUTELY,” I responded to them both. My personality is absolutely a valley of one thousand perfumes.
This is the last track on Helium’s last record; it has cool lyrics about astrology. I made the player button really big so you wouldn’t miss it. I hope that’s not illegal, and Kat doesn’t send me to nogoodforme jail, where I’m forced to listen to Sleater-Kinney albums all day and all of the night.
This is not my favorite song on Ex Hex, Mary Timony’s third solo album. My favorite song on Ex Hex is “9×3,” then either “On the Floor” or “Hard Times Are Hard!” Also: “In the Grass” and “Silence.” Basically, all of them are very great songs and they sound so much like the color blue. This record is the most blue-sounding thing.
From The Dirt of Luck, the first Helium record. My favorite lyrics are the ones that go “Hook me with your hand, my mouth is full of sand, everything I say ends with ‘and.’”
Dude this shit is so totally dated! In a cool way. This one’s also from The Dirt of Luck; I meant to include only one song from each long-playing record album but there are so few Timony/Helium YouTube videos available and I really like this one cuz it’s such solid proof that Mary truly is my number-one style idol.
This one’s from Mary’s most recent record, The Shapes We Make, which also has a superfun song where she disses Ted Nugent by ripping off the theme song from Bad Boys. The Shapes We Make came out in 2007, which means I’ve gone three years without any new non-Wild Flag songs from Timony. AND THAT MAKES ME SAD.
Listening: All my beautiful Swedes: Lykke Li, Miike Snow, Frida Hyvonen. That’s like morning, noon and night right there. Did you see the new video for Lykke Li’s “Get Some”? I feel like she drank some of the punch that Fever Ray had last year. But just a bit. With like a touch of Gaga, but who isn’t touched by Gaga these days? GAGAGAGAGA… Watching:Toy Story 3, Blood and Chocolate (though I have to be careful of watching anything werewolf-y these days, since I’m trying to stay pure for my novel), The Runaways (second time around you kind of realize what a weak script it sort of is, but it’s the Runaways! So I still dig it!) But you know what I’m excited about? I’m gonna start watching the “Daria” DVDS starting next week. Expect full-on droll sarcasm till the end of the year. Reading:Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, because I’m a big nerd and can’t wait to see the movie when it comes out. Also, the Lydia Davis essay in the new Vogue with Angelina on the cover. (It’s slightly weird to read Lydia Davis in a first-person, “personal” tone.) It’s crazy how there’s always one or two articles in Vogue that save it for me, because otherwise if I see another picture of Vanessa Traina, I’m going to fucking claw my eyes out. Wearing: I’m about to head out on another plane for about the fourth or fifth time this month, so my beloved bright orange-y hooded sweatshirt and jeans and Converse. BUT I GOT UPGRADED TO FIRST CLASS, SUCKERS!!!! Wanting: I want to go bowling. And not travel for the next two months. I mean, I love to travel but dealing with the airport is such a drag.
“GET SOME”
+ Liz
Listening: “Can I Get A…” by Jay-Z and the part on the (totally free!) new Girl Talk record that mashes up “Can I Get A…” with “Tenderness” by General Public and then segues into “Twerk” by Juicy J + “Mr. Blue Sky” Electric Light Orchestra. Watching: All of a sudden I’m wicked into Community & in love with Abed. Reading:The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway, “The Women Who Got Away” by John Updike, that New York profile of Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker’s son, this fucking stupid article LJ emailed me yesterday Wearing: my “power outfit” which is the world’s greatest Mary Timony ripoff outfit evs Wanting: I want to remember this really wonderful dream I had the other night, in which I discovered a hidden treasure trove of children’s books written by John Lennon. The books had the coolest titles but all I know now is that one of them was called “[Something] [Something] Shank Shank.”
The “power song” that goes with my “power outfit”:
+ Laura Jane
Listening: Mostly the new Kanye, which is brilliant (of course), and beautiful (in a dark and twisted way, I mean), but mostly just some of the saddest music I’ve ever heard in my life. Raves Laura Jane Faulds of nogoodforme.com, “Sadder than Strawberry Fields Forever!” Watching: Nothing, so I’ll just keep going with listening. I’m really addicted to listening to this one song by Mark Ronson, I mean, “Mark Ronson and the Business Intl” (Int’l?) called “The Bike Song,” which is basically the catchiest shit I’ve ever heard that’s not “Mmmbop” or by the Beatles pre-1966. At first I tried to make it out like, “Oh, this is totally gym music, like, for the gym,” and then I was like “Oh fuck it, it’s for ALWAYS!” I’m assuming that when I’m a famous writer, I’ll probably date Mark Ronson for a bit. Just for a bit, though. Just a bit. Reading: I’m still reading that Beatles book about legal disputes, but I only ever read it on this one particular style of lunch break, when I go to Michel’s Baguette and eat a bagel and a Diet Coke. Never any time else. Wearing: These eerily amazing skinny ankle-zip cargos from Old Navy with a red plaid minidress that all the buttons fell off of and therefore is held together with safety pins, though not in a way that I aesthetically respond to; I’m just scrappy and poor and don’t know how to sew. I also wear sparkly ballet flats and a lot of shit I don’t care about because I work too hard and too much to put any effort into dressing myself right now. Wanting: Just the bare bones of happiness: me, Kanye, four hits of acid, and a room. Not even a fancy Kanye room, either. Maybe just my room. “Come over, Kanye!” I’ll say, and Kanye will comply. Chaos will ensue. Beautiful, dark, twisted chaos.
Here’s that Mark Ronson song I keep going on and on about:
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