BY LIZ
Yesterday I ate brunch at Millie's with Eleanor, who was in town to do some events for her rad book Grow; we both had coffee and hot biscuits with raspberry jam, and I got a big egg scramble thing made with cream cheese and scallions. After brunch I'd planned to have a superlatively chill Sunday of driving around and listening to Rilo Kiley (I'm minorly obsessed with Rilo Kiley right now, after reading Alice Bolin's This Recording essay about how "the music of Rilo Kiley wakens the inner Livejournal user in all of us") and also to "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe" by Kendrick Lamar, which I bought after hearing it Saturday afternoon while buying a pretty gorgeous beige silk dress for $18 at a secondhand shop on Sunset. I was looking forward to playing "Pictures of Success" and "Science vs. Romance" and "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe" like six times each and feeling the sun on my knees through the window through my jeans, and maybe drinking some iced coffee, and maybe going to the ocean and taking pictures of the ocean and listening to more Rilo Kiley, on the beach.
Instead I basically just listened to "Black Skinhead" like six thousand times, painfully loud, through a shitty mp3 ripped from the SNL broadcast. It's my favorite song now:
Before I saw the broadcast I saw a tweet from Thierry Côté, saying "Welcome to your Marilyn Manson years, Kanye" and I was excited by that: I have a weird fascination with Marilyn Manson, partly because I grossly think he's hot, but also because I find him "interesting" as a "cultural figure" or "whatever." With Marilyn Manson, at the height of his fame, I really wanted to give a fuck. I was in college and it was the late '90s and everything was dull and over and I wanted to fall under his spell, I wanted him to be scary and evil and fucked-up and dangerous, I wanted him to poison the minds of the youth and maybe my mind too. But really Marilyn Manson was superboring and never made me feel anything. The big problem, I realize now, is that I never bought that he completely bought it, that Marilyn Manson actually believed in the myth of himself. And that is such a depressing and pitiful failure for a rock star - or maybe for any kind of person at all.














