The Pumpkin Cycle, Part One, the Last Sixth: "All you are is brand new."

CONCEPT

More auto writing stuff.

Over the next year, Big Things continued happening with regularity.

The most conspicuous Big Thing was getting my drivers licence. Now I could access Flint Youth Theatre and any of my Flint friends in under a half-hour, whenever I got to use the car. I could reach my Detroit friends and the Ren Fest in just over a half-hour. Once I'd acclimated myself to this new privilege, supervision was sparce. New vistas of exploration, in most senses of those words, opened up.

Just a little lower was the intensity of my theater involvement. Through 10th grade I played a bit part in FYT's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, directed an avant-garde Christmas play called MS.X-MAS for Elysian Theatre, followed by the role of Charlie in U of M Flint's Marvin's Room, back to FYT for the Flame of Peace, stayed on over the summer to act in several short pieces and the more substantial role of the Newboy in their second staging of Trace Titanic. The last featured a small cast of profession actors, and in August, we toured to Minnesota. But I'm getting past the pale a bit here, because...

The third Big Thing was a little deal with big implications. I'd always been nervous, if not paralyzed, auditioning for plays and this often affected the results. I resolved to enter each audition not with the goal of obtaining a role, but of obtaining a phone number. This had the intended effect of increasing the number of parts I was assigned, and the unintended but even more desirable effect of procuring cute girls' numbers. Aided by an artsy porkpie, my success by this method at the audition for Sleepy Hollow was matched on both ends as I got one of six or seven male parts to the twenty or so boys who auditioned and easily hooked up with a girl, Katie, even though I secretly thought her best friend, Nikki, was cuter. (I should note that this was an essential moment to build some self-confidence, as my odds would shortly be pulled back into orbit by my unfortunate cultivation of the Connormullet.)

So I'd continued to develop independence in several big areas of life, and these discoveries coincided with the discovery of more Smashing Pumpkins music. After all, the band had been one since 1988... I had six years to catch up on.

* * * * *

A memorable beginning was when I hosted the second gig on the Throw Rocks at Us, We're Dorks tour. Ironically, this event was overblown in every orchestrated way and relevant in every substantial way. The "tour" played both corners of town... they'd played on the South Side (of the river) and now they played on the North Side (of the river). They had a gross take of about $35. [I'm making an joke here; Flushing covers a few square miles.]
On the other hand, when I consider that we were a bunch of tenth and eleventh graders with complicit parents, we got quite a bit done.
The concert was held in my barn, the "Barnitorium," with an array of light effects perpetrated by my theater group, Elysian Theatre, with the help of my brother and Paul. Three bands played: Drive By Elvis, Laugh Backwards, and Minefield Hopskotch. Easily thirty kids, possibly more, were in attendance.
Since these kids had been listening to Alternative for months and years, I heard more and more about the music I should be catching up on: Jane's Addiction and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and R.E.M. Other moments followed... when the concert had wound down around eleven at night, we stood out in my backyard, talking for an hour about the Music, and I desperately tried to hold on to every word.

* * * * *

More trips to the planetarium followed. The planetarium was one of two loci for the younger alternateen set. The other was the Local 432, a cheap venue for area bands, but both the setting and clientele at the time were a little too edgy for some of us suburbanites (I was briefly a 432 groupie, and still go there from time to time. From my perspective today, my fears and concerns were misplaced and amusing). The perception of chaperones and the planetarium's setting in the cultural center made it a more "legitimate" destination, and I think that's part of why I got to go so often.

Most of you have probably been to laser shows, but I doubt you've been to shows like that '94 Laserpalooza. Longway is Michigan's largest planetarium in size and technology, comparable to Adler (that's right, in Flint, dammit), and at the time laser shows were on the cutting edge. For some reason or other, nobody felt compelled to keep the volume at a sane level, so even the rustle and chatter of several hundred teenagers couldn't prepare us for the walls of darkness and sound that filled our heads with a cottony texture and rang for hours after. The show itself was a guaranteed success... not only were eight or nine bands featured in the hour-long spectacle, but at the time, these bands were at the height of their mainstream success. Nirvana had ranked with In Utero before self-destruction, the Pumpkins were out with Siamese Dream, NIN with Downward Spiral, and then there was Jane's Addiction, Soundgarden, Porno for Pyros, Cypress Hill, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, Pearl Jam. I don't think a single group on that list was a lame duck that year. Even though the planetarium's capacity was 175, the crowd must have topped out at about 300 because when the show started there were kids sitting on the floor, in the aisles and the doorways, and others were turned away. Kids came from Kearsley and Clio, Mount Morris, Grand Blanc and Goodrich, Davison and Flushing, Swartz Creek, Montrose, Otisville, Burton, Lapeer, Owosso, and the list goes on. Every Flint suburb was well respresented, and I'm sure some from Detroit as well.

* * * * *

So I accumulated Smashing Pumpkins music as follows:

My CD player broke in October, forcing me to resort to cassettes again. My family bought me the CD of Lull, the EP preceding Siamese Dream, and then I bought Gish on my own (the same trip fruited Days of Future Past by the Moody Blues), and then in January I bought the newly released Pisces Iscariot, which quickly became a new favorite. At the time, my listening implement was a small tape recorder of my grandma's, but she let us use it freely and it was always at our house. I'd place the CD player against the window and lie down with my head near the single, mono speaker, and listen to Soothe over and over again. My favorite songs of that CD became Obscured, Starla, and the cover of Stevie Nicks' Landslide.

* * * * *

I'm leaving out plenty of eventful stuff. It was an eventful year. A girl Jenny, had a huge crush on me, and I was dismissive if not rude about it. In retrospect, I should've been more reasonable, because I'm sure it would've been a fun time. One crazy week I became my family's chauffeur when my brother had his appendix removed very late in the game, and just as I was preparing to go to prom with my friend Becky. Becky was a student at Flint Central, so the event was held in the University Club topping Genesee Towers... I looked far out to the north, past the plant where my dad worked, and out past the city where the houses receded into walls of trees.

Throughout all of this I was focusing mercilessly on my art. While I continued to audition and act in plays (not having much technical experience), my attention was more and more captivated by the lure of directing and writing. When summer started, releasing me from the daily social drama of school and I began rehearsing my first central role at FYT, I focused on art continually and daily. I began to write poetry seriously for the first time. In two days I wrote a play, September, that went on to win a New York playwriting contest (the upshot was that I was flown to NYC for a week to hear my play read). I started developing another play, Agamemnon's Numbers which quickly imploded except for some bits, which in six months had become the beginnings of Urbàntasm. I was listening to the Pumpkins obsessively... they were often the only thing I listened to, and I'd memorized the lyrics to all the songs on their three albums.

* * * * *

On the surface, Siamese Dream (which was the center of my Smashing Pumpkins universe at the time) is all about relationships and emotion. Corgan's messiah complex had diminished or concealed itself and wouldn't reveal itself in such flagrant color until the final act of Machina in 2000. Still, the sentiment is nested deep in there:

Rocket:
"Consume my love, devour my hate, it only powers my escape.
The moon is out, the stars invite. I think I'll leave tonight."

Sweet Sweet:
"Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet little agony,
I don't know just where you've been.
But I'll take, take, take all that you have for me in sin."

Geek U.S.A.:
"In a dream we are connected,
Siamese twins at the wrist,
and then I knew we'd been forsaken,
expelled from paradise."

If there's one thing that I have seen to be true for all work by the Smashing Pumpkins, and Billy Corgan in particular, it's the expectation that highly individual and subjective impressions can be joined to a universal experience, with bolts and sledghammers if need be, that the moment of this interaction is an almost sexual ecstasy, and that art can achieve all things, including messiahhood and the redemption of the world.

Now whether these beliefs were qualities in my writing and theater beforehand and I found hints in the raw emotion of Hummer, Disarm, Silverfuck, Spaceboy, and Geek U.S.A., or whether my perspective was insufficiently defined at the point of discovery and the Pumpkins lent me assumptions I've applied ever since is anybody's guess. I really don't know what came first, the chicken or the egg. I do know that the art I created prior to my discovery of Smashing Pumpkins was well-crafted for my age, but existed without hunger or need. It was academic art, created as an intellectual novelty to pass the time. I'm not saying this in a self-depracating. By staying involved in the arts, something was bound to draw my attention and expand my vision. In reality, this "something" was the Smashing Pumpkins.

* * * * *

10th grade had set up the parameters for what would unfold in 11th grade. All of the pieces were in place, they just had to move along their pseudoprogrammed paths.

In October, over two years since the release of Siamese Dream, the Pumpkins third full album was released: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This album, I pulled apart with my mind and feelings (here is what I found). I hosted the year end party for the Renaissance Festival, received my first kiss, and actually hooked up with a number of girls. I raced frantically between my Detroit friends, Flint, and Flushing, between writing and acting. I got and lost my first job. I explored Flint just a little bit too far. I began to read about the colleges I'd apply to. In the spring, FYT put on their most groundbreaking project, The 7th Dream, I had my first serious relationship (of two to date), and my first devastating heartbreak (of innumerable to date). I started Urbantasm, the project which has preoccupied me for the last decade, and isn't going away any time soon.

Sometime during that year, 11th grade, which will probably always be one of the most vivid, startling, and important years in my life, I discovered Tori Amos and R.E.M. and added them to my list of "most favorite bands." But however I might ache in the wrenching detail of Tori's emoting or tap along to Michael's truly happy and curious engagement of his life and his world, neither of them has filled the space carved early on by the Smashing Pumpkins.

Writing this has been indulgent, and more than a little... fun. In fact, I'd be lying if I didn't say that writing this has been delicious.

As I move into the new Billy's, the fallen Billy's, the forgotten Billy's more recent projects, I hope at least I've expressed, here and for myself, why I'd bother trying to get a letter to a celebrity.

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