Everyone I'm in Love with in the Big Star Movie

BY LIZ

I saw the Big Star documentary at a press screening last May and I loved it, because it's about Big Star. It also kind of bugged me, for reasons that are unfair, like how so tragically little footage of Big Star exists in the world. After a while I got antsy watching a bunch of dudes talk about how great Big Star is (even though those dudes include Lenny Kaye, who's basically my favorite person). But now the movie's streaming on Netflix and I rewatched it last Sunday and it was less antsy-making: probably because I knew what to expect, but also because I watched it in bed in my PJs when it was nice and hot and sunny out. Bed is the best place for watching a Big Star movie; Big Star is very closely associated with sleeping and dreaming and being lazy and feeling perfect about it, at least in my book.

The movie's called Nothing Can Hurt Me, by the way, which is so smart. It's a lyric from "Big Black Car," which is maybe my third favorite Big Star song, I think? If you could get songs tattooed on your body - not song lyrics but like actual songs, with their complete actual sound and aura - then I'd get "Big Black Car" tattooed on myself. But you can't, so I got Alex Chilton's name tattooed on me instead. So here is a list about Alex, and everyone/everything else I love in the Big Star movie:

i. ALL OF BIG STAR, ALL TOGETHER

For some reason the other day I read the first paragraph of the New York magazine review of Wolf of Wall Street, which says how in the movie Martin Scorsese "continues his worship of masculine energy: energy for its own sake, energy as a means of actualizing the self, energy because there’s nothing worse in Scorsese’s cosmos than passivity, which inevitably translates as impotence." I like Martin Scorsese's movies just fine, but mostly that sentence interests me because I'm into the idea of Big Star as an alternative to Scorsese-y energy: energy that's masculine and feminine, tough and dreamy, neither active nor passive, just...receptive. That's the sort of energy I worship.

Plus I just really love this picture because they're brothers. Weird brothers, I guess: I can't imagine too many brothers spend a lot of time sitting around bedrooms together. They're probably like the Darjeeling Limited brothers, bitchy and impossible and hotheaded and wonderful. Wes Anderson is a nice alternative to Martin Scorsese.

ii. BIG STAR MINUS CHRIS BELL, I GUESS

It's sad that Chris Bell left when he did but we have to accept it, I guess. And they look pretty all right as a trio, especially here, with Alex being a big diva and Jody having amazing bangs as per yoozsh:

And what's happening on Alex's shirt here? Are those spaceships? They look like spaceships, but also like hamburgers. I don't know how you pull off wearing a shirt printed with cartoon things that look like spaceships and hamburgers and still be completely tough and elegant, but there you go: Alex Chilton. 

iii. JODY STEPHENS

I Got Alex Chilton's Name Written On My Body Forever

BY ELIZABETH ALLISON BARKER

On Friday I got Alex Chilton's name tattooed about an inch above my left ankle. I love Alex Chilton because it seems like he generally did whatever the hell he felt like doing, and a lot of it was beautiful. That's the fast and easy explanation for why I got his name written on my body forever, but here are eight more reasons, about the cosmos and gross sex and sex poetry and summertime and bad vibes and plum trees and huge, undying, life-saving love:

viii. Astrology. I have a recurring daydream in which I meet Alex Chilton (in Heaven, I suppose) and he asks me my birthday and I get to tell him what my birthday is. The answer is we have the same birthday, December 28; we are both Capricorns born in the Week of the Ruler. One of my favorite things about Alex is he was obsessed with astrology and made a point of asking everyone his/her birthday, and thought it was very important that he and Chris Bell were both Capricorns, which of course it was.
        Jen does illustrations for Madame Clairevoyant from The Rumpus, and on April 15 my horoscope told me that week was a "good moment for wandering, at your own speed, for going where you want to go, for looking up at the sky, for seeing your own weird thoughts form in the clouds." My gut response to that was to get all high and mighty, like, "Eww, what do you think I usually do? Do you think I'm one of those super-Capricorn-y Capricorns or something?" But now I'm into it. Maybe a lot of Capricorns aren't accustomed to wandering around and watching their own weird thoughts form in the clouds - but Alex Chilton is, and I am too, and we are just the same: a couple of weird cloudy dreamers together forever.

vii. Because his dream world has the same exact temperature as my dream world. It took me a while to get into the third Big Star record, which I understand is a typical experience. I'd known and loved "Kangaroo" and "Stroke It Noel" since a boy put them on a love mixtape for me when I was 19, and I immediately fell for "Kizza Me" and "Holocaust" when I bought the record earlier this year, but the rest of the songs took their sweet time sinking into my brain. In retrospect, I'm completely charmed by and admiring of their lack of hurriedness in getting to me. 

        I fell in love with the third record late one night in February, when I spent hours and hours sitting at a table on the sidewalk near the Sunset Strip, drinking pink wine and hanging out with a bunch of strange people, some of whom were very lovely. On the way home I drove down Beverly and the sky was so foggy and black, all the light was ghosts; it was the most perfect way you could ever hear "Big Black Car":

 

Now whenever I listen to "Big Black Car" I think of that car ride and I think of the end of the first chapter in my book, which I'm rewriting to give it optimal "Big Black Car" vibes. The scene's in a car when the sky's foggy and black and all the light is ghosts, except the air's more "Massachusetts in deep summer" instead of "Los Angeles in winter": it's heavy and hot and muggy, it kills you a little but it's okay. When Alex sings it ain't gonna lassssst with that hiss at the end, it's so severe and it always jars me, but never in a way that disrupts that cool murky daze the song's put me in. Alex Chilton really knows what he's doing when it comes to "subtly twisted manipulation of vibes." I want to be more like him.

vi. Because he is my favorite girl poet. There's an Alex Chilton song called "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It (Version 2)"; it's probably the Alex Chilton solo jam I'd most rather die than live without. It's seven-minutes-long and it's basically Alex singing/playing the same shit over and over but somehow making it weirder and weirder as the song goes on. At first listen the real showstopper lyric is "Call me a slut in front of your family," but my favorite line is the one that goes "Bite my veins, cigarettes and big eyes" - or at least that's what I think he's singing. Some people think he's singing "You like my bangs, cigarettes, and big eyes," but I think those people are dumb. Obviously he's singing it exactly the way I want him to.
        I love "Bite my veins, cigarettes, and big eyes" mostly because it sounds like something I would have read in a zine written by some superweird and glamorous girl a very long time ago, like 1999. I would have read that sentence and spent the next few days or weeks of my life being obsessed with that girl and trying to write like her, walking around Boston feeling so electrified by this new world in which you can command someone to bite your veins, cigarettes, and big eyes - and maybe he'll even actually do it. That's what I value most about girl poets like Alex Chilton, how all this wild and insane and beautiful shit you never even thought of before suddenly seems so hugely possible.

v. Because he is the most beautiful sicko. The first Alex Chilton solo song I ever heard was the original version of "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It," which goes like this:



and I loved it right away but it also embarrassed me. "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It (Version 2)" is even more embarrassing; there at least three moments in the song that will never not mortify me, especially the part where he actually says the word loincloth. (I mean, I can't even tell you how much I had to psyche myself up just to type the word "loincloth" in that last sentence, such is the depth of my "loincloth" embarrassment. "Loincloth," Alex, really? Loincloth???????????)
       So every once in a while, like maybe once a decade or so, I get way into some musician-dude who's exorbitantly weird. My first one was when I was 17, and so much of the appeal was knowing it sounded way too crazy to most people. But I think maybe it might also be a sex thing. Patti Smith's point about not listening "to music by people I don't wanna fuck" is a little too limiting for me, but I could definitely I amend it to something like "I don't listen to exorbitantly weird music by people who aren't sexy, scrawny, slightly deranged dudes whose hair's always in their eyes, these perpetually bugged-out eyes that would probably be really terrifying to stare straight into, and maybe you'd just die if you looked at them too long." That's not the sort of thing I look for in a guy in real life, but it's good to sometimes fall for musician-dudes like that, to turn them into my imaginary weirdo-boyfriends that I'm endlessly grossed out by.
        So I can forgive Alex Chilton for saying "loincloth" because my creepy attraction to him balances out the horror of that. And by the time the song hits the five-minute mark and he laughs like the most adorable psychopath, I'm just incurably in love with him forever, it's so disgusting and wonderful.