#gotta make a post about the cinematic poetry of these scenes

[shutuperce]

does anyone else think about how terrifying it must have been for mike to watch will ride away from their garage into the dark in season 3 because that’s exactly how he lost him the first time

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

SEVENTEEN AND HIGH, Nikki Darling swaggers down the middle of Garvey Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in the San Gabriel Valley, as cars swerve around her: “‘Three Days’ by Jane’s Addiction is playing on my Walkman and I feel like I’m in a movie, like I’m an assassin.” She stands in the street with a cigarette hanging from her lips, with “someplace to be or maybe nowhere to go.” She taunts the cars as they pass: “Fly around me, motherfuckers! Fly around me like I’m not even here!”

In an opening scene brazen with feminine adolescent rage and emotion, Nikki Darling the author dares readers of her debut novel, Fade Into You, to come in close. By writing in the New Narrative style popularized by Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls) and Michelle Tea (Rose of No Man’s Land), Darling keeps the veil between fiction and nonfiction purposefully thin, and having her protagonist carry her name builds intimacy. In an interview with the popular feminist podcast Call Your Girlfriend, Darling said she named her character Nikki because “being in the interiority of a teenage girl is not something readers are always familiar with.” In Fade Into You, Darling gives us more than an intimate view of a teenage girl; she gives us an intimate view of a young, mixed-race Chicana living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of portrait that is nearly nonexistent in L.A. letters.

Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., an award-winning 1993 memoir that shares the tale of a young man struggling to survive gang life and addiction in the 1980s San Gabriel Valley, is the most notable and celebrated literary depiction of Chicanx teen life in Los Angeles. But not every Chicanx can identify with living “la vida loca.” Darling’s protagonist struggles to find her identity in a city that says to be Mexican can only be one thing, an issue many Mexican-American/Chicanx Angelenos understand. As Nikki thinks,

It would be my luck not just to be half-Mexican, but the wrong kind of Mexican. I am not from East Los. My people are borderlands, the frontera. I am a pale ghost of a bloody past. A daughter of the viceroyalty. A lady of Spain. But I’m not that either. I’m me. I’m SGV. I watch from the schoolyard as the sad boys mark up the EMF, throw down the emero. I live in the cool shadows of libraries.

I grew up in the SGV in the ’90s, and when I was 17 I liked to wear loose-fitting, faded blue jeans with a white T-shirt and blue Chucks. It’s how I felt most beautiful. One afternoon as I was sitting on the front stoop of my grandparents’ Boyle Heights home, my party-crew cousin from La Puente, in stiff Dickies and dark hoodie, looked down his chin at me and asked, “Eh, you like a rocker? You a skater? What are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I read his questions to mean, Why aren’t you more Mexican?

On a different day, a friend from my hometown of San Gabriel came with my family and me to that same Boyle Heights home for Sunday menudo. When my father parked in the driveway and I slid open the door to our Dodge van, she refused to get out. “I’m going to be shot!” she screamed, tears running down her face.

Her shocked reaction meant, I didn’t know you were that kind of Mexican.

By the late ’90s, I had not yet seen in books or TV these disparate expectations of what it meant to look and act Mexican. But I had seen them in two movies: My Family (1995) and Selena (1997). The latter, written and directed by Gregory Nava, put into words how I often felt, a dilemma perfectly articulated by Selena’s father, played by Edward James Olmos, as he rants to his family about the possibility of Selena touring in Mexico:

We gotta prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are. And we gotta prove to the Americans how American we are. We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans both at the same time. It’s exhausting! Man! Nobody knows how tough it is to be a Mexican-American.

But Selena grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, a vastly different setting from Fade Into You’s San Gabriel Valley, California, which in Darling’s hands becomes its own character. Schools, streets, and favorite hangouts of this L.A. suburb east of downtown are namedropped with acute knowledge, and the dialogue between Nikki and her friends — with all its dudes, mans, and bitches — is so accurate to the time and place it sounds more like transcription than fiction.

As I read, I was in awe of how much I had in common with Nikki. I, too, had a gorgeous, gay best friend I was in love with. I, too, studied theater. I, too, got high and went for pancakes at Denny’s before driving up to the mountains because they were close and we could. But as I moved further into the novel, I noticed another layer of the Mexican-American experience that is specific to the suburbs. Nikki narrates,

We are the kids of LA.

They write books about us. They make after-school specials about us. And none of it is the real us. None of it really captures who we are. But we eat it, digest it, and let it redefine us until we no longer know what is real and what is fake.

Nikki inhabits the parts of the SGV where teen movies and TV series such as Pretty in Pink and My So-Called Life are filmed, but these stories never center people like her. When she says, “They write after-school specials about us,” the us is never really us. The best we could hope for was to be the quiet and queer best friend, the Rickie Vasquez to the story’s Angela Chase. Hollywood used our streets but not our faces, and this became a kind of trauma.

I attended a private school in Pasadena not far from Casa Walsh and Dylan’s surfer bungalow (RIP Luke Perry), and my friends and I behaved as if we were characters on Beverly Hills, 90210 even though we were in 91107 and a good 25 miles from the über-rich neighborhood. Like Nikki attending a party at a midcentury home at the edge of South Pasadena, nearly everything we did felt cinematic: “Chelo and I walk into the party and I can tell things are about to get real cinema tonight. It’s a night when this city we live in really shows itself.”

To keep the fantasy alive, many classmates bleached their hair, and when people started driving, a good number opted for convertibles without concern for the make or model. But our proximity to Hollywood teen life affected more than our outward appearance — at least for me, it corrupted my very sense of self. I remember one day bounding into my house after being dropped off by a friend in her white convertible and catching my reflection in the large mirror that hung across from the front door. I didn’t recognize the person I saw. The image of my own brown face shocked me, and for a moment I was invisible.

Latinx people make up nearly 50 percent of the population of Los Angeles, with the majority being Mexican or of Mexican descent. And yet even though most films and TV shows are made here, I can count on two hands the number that center Mexican-American stories. In the afterglow of the 2019 Oscars, Los Angeles Times features writer and taco historian Gustavo Arellano tweeted, “Still waiting for Hollywood to give love to Chicanos.” Sure, over the last six years a Mexican director has won Best Director five times, but these are Mexican nationals, which is a very different experience. What of the immigrant families, children of immigrants, and multigenerational Mexican Americans who live in this town and help make it work?

The literary world maintains a similar sparsity. As a senior in high school in 1998, I read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in my English class. Though it is set in Chicago, I saw a young, Mexican-American character in literature for the first time, and the book thrilled me. In my 20s, I obsessed over Michele Serros’s Chicana Falsa: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (1993), and in my 30s I fell in love with Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, a Girl in Pieces (2014), which follows a 17-year-old, light-skinned Chicana who lives in the Inland Empire and loves poetry and hot Cheetos. Author Helena María Viramontes (Under the Feet of Jesus) also tells stories about young people living in East Los Angeles, but a nuanced view of growing up Chicana in the L.A. suburbs has been missing until now.

We SGV kids live close enough to Hollywood to be infected by its story lines and cultural sprawl, and yet only our streets are worthy of making it onto film. We live close enough to East Los Angeles to know we aren’t the right kind of Mexican, and yet we’re at the same time too Mexican. We are pushed into the margins of pop culture. So while Nikki Darling the character is walking down the middle of Garvey Boulevard dying to be seen, it’s Nikki Darling the author who’s shouting: We’re here! We matter! We live on these streets! And that’s a reflection I recognize.

¤

Women Who Submit co-founder Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s work has appeared on Terrain.org and in KCET Departures. She is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016).

The post Invisible No More: How “Fade Into You” Reflects the L.A. Chicanx Experience appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2JR8b01

[gerardwayisarchive]

MSI’S JIMMY URINE ANNOUNCES SOLO LP FEATURING GERARD WAY AND…ROBOTS?

https://gerardwayisalive.tumblr.com/post/176963498454

https://www.altpress.com/features/jimmy-urine-james-euringer-solo-record/

Jason Pettigrew  August 13, 2018

“I wanted it to sound as if Depeche Mode hired J Dilla and DJ Premier to drop loops while Frank Zappa produced—and then I came in and shit all over it.” So says James Euringeraka Little Jimmy Urine of ADD-addled electro-rockers Mindless Self Indulgence when asked to describe his new solo album under the handle Euringer, featuring cameos from folks such as Gerard Way, System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian, Grimes and Chantal Claret.

(Read more: Jimmy Urine talks MSI, Guardians Of The Galaxy role and new album.)

The album—slated for release Oct. 19 by Metropolis Records—is the beginning of a whole new chapter for the multi-instrumentalist and programmer. After visiting New Zealand a few times in the past, Euringer and his wife, Claret, decided to leave their Los Angeles home and move to the other side of the world.

“I totally think New Zealand is the most awesome place in the world,” he says. “It’s like a combination of San Francisco, New York City and Middle Earth. And I’ve always wanted to live in Middle Earth.”  

“We loved [New Zealand] when Obama was president, but now we love it more since it synced up with the world turning to shit!,” he continues. “Awesome! We’re ahead of the curve!’”

Moving is one big step for a whole new reboot. While his previous album The Secret Cinematic Sounds Of Jimmy Urine was primarily an instrumental dive into various synth-laden idioms inspired by such classic electronic composers as Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre, Euringer is a whole new pint glass of piss altogether.

The album’s audio verité vibe is best described as sneaking through Urine’s diary, with diversions of everything from metaphorical politics to wild-assed cover versions to having his buddies and parents (Ma Euringer counts in Spanish on “That’s How Jimmy Gets Down” while Dad assumes the role of disappointed parent on “Two And A Half Years” and a bitter old record producer on the cover of the Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes”) helping him out on the record.

“This album is kind of a psychedelic, counterculture, avant-garde record with vocals,” he opines. “I’m calling it Euringer because I didn’t want to corrupt any of the other stuff. It’s not Cinematic Sounds. It’s not MSI, which have always been a provocative in-your-face kind of band. [The solo album] allows me to experiment with various BPM speeds, lyrics and tones and try some other avenues.

“It is very personal,” he agrees. “As much as I like being in a crazy shock-rock band, the one thing that gets lost is that people focus on the shock rock and don’t really focus on the fact that I’m a really fucking great programmer, and I’m a deconstructionist and an audio collagist.”

“I sculpt audio and make songs around it,” he continues.“And that’s the first thing that gets lost. [imitates fast-talking industry type.] ‘Awww, Jimmy! You’re crazy and the band’s crazy and they’re great and they do all this provocative amazing stuff,’ and that’s fine—that’s what Mindless are supposed to be. But nobody ever says, ‘I like how you programmed that beat and sampled that stuff backwards.’ [Laughs.] That area is what I went full hog into.”

Urine is thrilled with what his collaborators brought to the proceedings. On “If It Ain’t You Today It’ll Be You Tomorrow,” Urine and Tankian updated Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous anti-Nazi sermon, “First They Came For The Socialists…” “I always thought that quote was really great,” Urine says. “I wanted to write something a little bit political considering the climate, but not a whole record. Serj was in one of the most amazing politically charged bands of the last 20 years. He went through a whole bunch of lyrics and poetry that he had and screamed stuff for an hour. We had coffee, and I went home and edited [the parts] I liked. The point I’m trying to make [on the song] is that we should all stand up for fringe causes because once they’re gone, you’re next.”

Urine teams up with Claret on “Fuck Everything,” describing it as “our ex-pat song. We kind of wrote it while we were packing up our house and leaving, and then we recorded it in Wellington. She’s a really great songwriter: I’ll be sculpting a song for two months, and she’ll write one in a day. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that was so quick! No wonder I married you!’” [Laughs.]

For “The Medicine Does Not Control Me,” Urine was trying to write a song about alcohol that wasn’t about partying or rehab. “I don’t have an addictive personality. I’m not trying to use alcohol to escape; I use it for time travel,” he explains. “I can pull myself a glass of scotch and then go watch a ton of movies that are based in New York. I can find a movie that was shot in the neighborhood I grew up—‘Oh, there’s the place I went to school. There’s the place where I used to play pinball’—immerse myself in it and then fall asleep. I don’t drink to get crazy. I think there’s a middle ground where people use liquor to get creative, but you never hear songs about it. You only hear the ones where people ‘went too far’ or they’re ‘gonna party!’”

He wanted to work with electronic/hip-hop maven Grimes because of her hands-on work ethic. “She’s DIY like a motherfucker. There aren’t a lot of ladies doing synth work, producing, mastering, editing their own videos, everything. Because she’s so talented, I wanted her to write the track and to produce me singing it, like a reverse Britney Spears thing: I’m the ingenue, and Grimes is the mastermind. We didn’t have enough time to do it that way, so I gave her some tracks and ["Medicine”] was the one she chose.”

Urine has been friends with Way back in the days when My Chemical Romance were opening for MSI in NYC. So having the 21st century polymath appear on the fast-paced “Sailor In A Life Boat” was a complete no-brainer.

“First of all,” he begins to laugh, “Gerard could have sang every song on the record! MCR did a B-side from something off Danger Days [�["Zero Percent”]here the programming was drum-and-bassy, very weird and hard at the same time, like MCR being MSI.”

“This time, I figured we’d go the other way and leave it up to Gerard,” he continues.“I sent him the song, and he obviously knocked it out. The lyrics—“you’re a dogface on the frontline,” “a pilot on a ship that’s going down,” convey that you used to be a sailor in the Navy, but now you’re just some dude sitting in the middle of the fucking ocean. His vocal and lyrical style comes across to me like a Frank Miller comic book from 1981, like Sin Cityand stuff.”

As usual, Urine can’t resist taking a swipe at the scene. And here he is with “Random EMO Top Line Generator,” one of the most heartfelt songs he’s ever written. And the joke is on all of us: Much like the net’s random name generators for everything from porn star names to Wu-Tang handles and other monikers, Urine had the net write lyrics.

“I loaded up, like, a thousand random generators that gave me words,” he explains. “I put in a word, then a random generator would give me a sentence. Than I’d put that sentence into a different random generator, and it would give me a phrase. I wrote this song based on what I’d get out of these random generators, and I made it a very emotional and heartfelt song.”

“So the schtick is people will say, ‘Wow, it’s so deep, look how mature Jimmy is,’” he continues.“Motherfuckers, a robot wrote that song. The robot wrote the lyrics, and you’re lovin’ it! A robot wrote a song that’s so emotionally empowering it could have been written in the last 10 years. And random generators are all over the internet, you could write a whole album that way! We’re really living in a William Gibson cyberpunk reality these days.”

With all the cool collabs with women, men and machines happening on Euringer, it might be easy to ignore the elephant in the room. You know, the one with “MSI” painted in 4-foot DayGlo letters and festooned with crudely rendered drawings of penises. Urine swears that everything is good with his homies in Mindless, and the door is always open.

“That’s not the reason I made a solo album or why I moved to New Zealand. We were all on different coasts. These days, the technology exists so you don’t even have to be in the same room to make a record. MSI are a wonderful art project that never stops.”

And you’re not going to see Euringer on tour to support the new album, either. “I’m not going to tour for it because I’m gonna chill here in New Zealand for a while,” he says. “I’ll make some videos, do press and work on some top secret projects—maybe a Mindless record—down here. Incorporating New Zealand in all the stuff I’m doing is really cool and fun. I like touring with Mindless; I don’t need to put a whole new band together.”

Right now though, he’s enjoying his time in Middle Earth and keeping busy. He’s also working alongside Tankian and the animation house ShadowMachine for an English gangster cartoon called Fuktronic. Expect more, but on his terms, as he steadfastly refuses to reveal if the other projects he’s got rolling are for film, video games or elevators.

“Oh man, I wanna do stuff for elevators really bad!” he beams excitedly, in the same perverse glee that has marked every creative avenue he’s cartwheeled and silly-walked on for decades. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve gotten into an elevator that had music playing in it.” He pauses for a moment. “Damn, we gotta bring Muzak back into elevators. I’m gonna change all the Mindless songs into Muzak. The future is elevators.”

You can preorder Euringer here prior to its mid-October release date. Check out “Problematic” from the LP and the record’s artwork below.