How I Fell in Love with the Clash in 5 Songs: Lose This Skin

BY LAURA JANE FAULDS (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

HI. I need to say some things before you read this. 

1) This story features some EXTREMELY candid writing about eating disorder/body image things, so if that sounds like something that might make you uncomfortable, I highly recommend you stay the hell away from it. 

2) I very deliberately chose the words "make you uncomfortable" over "be triggering for you"- if eating/body issues are something you're dealing with/have dealt with, I DEFINITELY think you should read it, more than anyone. BE TRIGGERED. LIVE YOUR LIFE. 

3) Out of the 5 Clash stories I'm telling, this is the one that talks about the Clash the least. However, it's also the "Clashiest," because it's a story about fighting, and it was the Clash who taught me how important it is to FIGHT.

***

My Favorite Song Right Now: "Evan" by Juliana Hatfield

I wish this weren't a song; I wish it were a book. The opening lyrics could be the first sentence of a story I would read a thousand times:

"Evan, I've never been the same since the day I hit my forehead on the doorframe when I jumped over you and out of the bed to answer the phone in my mother's room."

And then the next lyric goes: "There was blood, but I was all smiles, 'cause I was in love."

So actually, no -- I want it to be a song, and a young adult novel, and a movie, directed by Richard Linklater or some other brainy yet chill romantic. 

If you're like me and born at the right time and of the right temperament to have spent much of your early adolescence fascinated by the mystery of Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield's friendship, then this song'll be a lovely and gut-punching and totally belated gift to you. I heard it for the first time on Sunday morning and I've listened over and over since then -- partly because I'll just never get over certain teenhood obsessions, partly because the Evan-Juliana dynamic is similar to the dynamic between the two main characters in my book (troubled/reckless/childlike boy + hyper-introverted/daydreamy/strong-willed girl), and so I'm studying them. What I've learned from "Evan" is that it's possible to still be a tender fucked-up kid even when you're not a kid at all anymore, and that the preservation of that tender fucked-up-ness is probably not good for much more than writing beautiful songs (/books/movies), and that people who write beautiful songs (/books/movies) are my favorite people in the world.
 
I don't know how you hit your forehead on a doorframe unless you're very tall, but I believe it happened -- we're clumsy when we're in love. But Juliana Hatfield is so graceful too. And in the second half of the song she repeats the line "Evan, I just love you, I guess" eight times, and every time it makes my heart hurt -- literally, physically, truly. 
 
(Btw, the above image comes from this Spin interview from 1993, wherein Evan and Juliana talk about a game they used to play when they lived together, called "Risky Purges," and then Evan tells Juliana she's a Waldorf salad. It's so good.) 


--Liz

Seven Life Lessons Gleaned from Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, pt. 2/side B

BY ELIZABETH BARKER (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

(read pt. 1 here)

SULK LIKE YOU MEAN IT. Last year on Neiler's birthday it rained and I tweeted: "Neil Young made it rain today." Neil Young's birthday is November 12; he's a Scorpio. I like to pay special attention to him in the fall, his birthdaytime, when the air's changing from golden and crispy and apple-orchard-y to gray and rough and raw and mean (or, more precisely, when the weather's changing from "Van Morrison" to "Nirvana"). Neiler weather is somewhere in the middle, not quite autumnal but not really blistery. "The Losing End" is the quintessential Neiler-weather jam and when it rained on Neiler's birthday last year I ate "harvest grain" pancakes and drank like eight buckets of coffee and had a chill writing sesh at IHOP, sulked and skulked and moped around a lot and then drove over to Laurel Canyon and killed some famous people. It was a good day. I'm generally allergic to sulking, but it's nice to bask in Neiler weather, when you're right in the gloomy thick of another Neiler season.

DON'T STEP ON THE MOME RATHS. I can't touch "Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)"; it's too fragile a flower, with that tragical violin and the most poetically assembled cluster of words so nobly confined to parenthesis in the subtitle. If Neil were a flower he'd be a mome rath, from Alice in Wonderland. I love the mome raths, how they're so introverted and benevolent. They look like flowers, Neil Young, and pants.

How I Fell in Love with the Clash in 5 Songs: Rudie Can't Fail

BY LAURA JANE FAULDS (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

One day I'm going to have a daughter, and I'm going to name her Rudie. People will ask me, "Why did you name your daughter Rudie?" and I'll tell them, "Because Rudie can't fail!" and it'll be adorable.
        Ten years will pass, nobody'll ask me that question anymore, and my daughter Rudie will hate me, because I gave her a stupid name.

__

It's springtime, and the whole world feels like it's about to blow its load all over itself. I'm stoned on some of the creepiest weed I've ever smoked in a very long-feeling life spent smoking tons of creepy weed, chewing stonedly on a filter made out of toilet paper roll. It came out in my mouth while I was smoking, but I feel too uncomfortable to ask aloud, "Where would be the best place for me to spit this filter out?" 

        I'm meditating on "the enmeshing of outsider and superiority complexes as they occur in my state of prolonged adolescence"; I don't think these thoughts are productive, and I definitely think they are circular. I'm sniffing a kind of men's cologne off my wrist, trying to bite off a hangnail before remembering I've already got that piece of filter in my mouth. It seems excessive to be chewing on two chewed-off pieces of thing at once, so I spit the piece of filter out into my palm, and wipe it underneath the stranger's couch. I'm pinching the bridge of my nose. 

How I Fell in Love with the Clash in 5 Songs: Cheat

BY LAURA JANE FAULDS (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

By the time I hit the station the sun had set, and I'd listened to a lot of Clash songs, because the songs on The Clash are very short, and it's weird, it's weird the way certain songs have no choice but to mean something to you. You can try as hard as you want to fight it, decide that that's autonomy and go with it, but great art could care less. Great art sees so far past your being at a place in your life where you've decided you don't want to be moved by great art, you've irrationally decided that that somehow pollutes the potential greatness of your own art, and great art thinks you're acting like an insolent child. It has had it up to here with your misread of super-ego as being Id, and is now about to school you. 

Seven Life Lessons Gleaned from Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, pt. 1/side A

BY ELIZABETH BARKER (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

i. THOU SHALT NOT CREATE FALSE IDOLS (OF CINNAMON DONUTS). Apparently "Cinnamon Girl" is about groupies? I think I read that somewhere, probably in the 9,000-page Neil Young biography I bought at the used-book stand at the farmers market one afternoon a few summers ago. That book has its moments, like the part about how Neil Young used to be roommates with Rick James and they did lots of uppers and went around stealing bakery deliveries from people's front steps in the middle of the night, and I also liked how Neil's mom calls him "Neiler." But the book started getting me down after a while, how Neiler's lovely but sometimes dreadful -- and anyway I really don't give a damn about stuff like the use of overdubbing on Neil Young's first solo record; I just don't; I have no idea what the hell "overdubbing" even means.


Anyway, what I really want to tell you about is how I've ruined "Cinnamon Girl" for myself two times in the semi-recent past. 

How I Fell in Love with the Clash in 5 Songs: Janie Jones

BY LAURA JANE FAULDS (ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

“I did not believe that I would ever love the Clash,” I told him, “But it was February- which is bleak, and dull- and I had nothin’ much else doin’, and I wanted to be a good friend to Charlie and Nadine. They love the Clash so much, and they let me stay in their home- home, you know? Not just, like, apartment; it's so different- last time I was in New York, when it snowed on Hallowe’en- it was so weird! It snowed on Hallowe’en. That never happened before. And then it was the mildest winter, but now that it’s not winter I can’t remember the “mildness,” I can’t remember it, I can’t remember winter- but it snowed on Hallowe’en. The news kept calling it Snowtober, but Charlie thought of Octsnowber, which is brilliant, and you just can’t do that. You can’t not listen to the Clash; you can’t do that to people, the people who thought of Octsnowber and let you draw a weirdly good eyeliner Misfits skull on their arm on Hallowe’en- you can’t not listen to the Clash, just to be a dick about it, just to have a jerky perspective on things because every dude I've ever, like, looked at, told me to listen to Sandinista!, like, every single second of my life."