I want all that stupid old shit

I am in love with author Stephen Elliot the way that I am in love with Exile In Guyville-era Liz Phair. His writing is honest and makes me either ache or wish I was aching-how fucked up is that? To live in a state of yearning for pain? But that's what both do to me.They also-Elliot as he is and Phair how she was-achieve a state of constant honesty that's also such art it's impossible to fuck or fake. They both share too much, and in doing so can never, ever say enough. Is it obvious? I want to be them.

So when, after a hazy, elongated, wasted/joyous/wasted Saturday night, I awoke Sunday morning (admission: I never really slept) to an email from Elliot's The Rumpus discussing, amongst other things, girls (a usual topic), his book tour (for the fucking stunning Adderall Diaries, also a usual topic) and Liz Phair (!!!), I was floored. I've been thinking about one specific song from Exile In Guyville a bit, and so reading this made a connection in my muddled brain.

From that email:

"That night my host made me a CD of the Liz Phair demo tapes that preceded Exile in Guyville. We talked about what happened to Phair, how rather than confronting her desire she tried to bend and accommodate it and destroyed her art in the process. It's just like writing. I know, because recently I've felt moments of jealousy and greed that are entirely unfamiliar to me. In the Oberlin town bookstore located inside the Ben Franklin I had sat in a chair reading an essay by John Updike about writer's growing old. It was a failed essay, the kind that starts by staring into the truth but finishes by turning away. It was published by AARP Magazine and republished, perhaps as an homage, in the Best American Essay collection. In the good part of the essay, before he sold the reader down the river, Updike spoke about his later work being eclipsed by his earlier work, the vital energy that pours from youth, bleeding across the page. The stuff that can't be mimicked by experience or skill. If he had kept going, if he had finished the short essay with "goddam it all motherfucker crap fuck!!!!!" he'd have really gotten at something. Instead he served it with a blue pill."

-Stephen Elliot

I am at a place in my life right now where that album, that one album, particularly one song, keeps creeping up into my conscious, into my daily life. What do I want, right now?

Liz Phair: Fuck And Run

I want sincerity, and to find something that's close to truth, or I want a one night stand and then to beat the fucking hell away from it all. I either want to swoon or to feel absolutely nothing. I...I...I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas.

Letters. And sodas.

This is the Liz Phair I know, by the way. The one I respect. "Why Can't I?" was a great song in unedited form-the "we haven't fucked yet" line obviously took a cut from the censors in the "we're going to play this in GAP" form-but Exile In Guyville is the Liz that a girl I tape-traded with throughout middle and high school spoon-fed me in bits, probably not knowing that I would wake up one day in college, do uppers and run to Tower Records, suddenly, in an Augustinian "A-ha!" moment, having come to Liz's overpowering lo/high sound (fidelity and maintenance, respectively, on this record and this record alone) on my own terms.

And, like, who the hell...who the hell could ever get honest enough with themselves, in 2009, in the fucking social and new media hell we live in, to ever stop and say "I want a date. Take me out. Not in a Franz Ferdinand way, in a letters and sodas and make me blush and sigh and dominate my thoughts until I can't fucking breathe" way? Who? Who has that sort of...guts? Of fucking depth to be that bare, that open, and say "step to me-and step to me in a classic, classy sort of way, because i can and have had it the other ways and I have, in fact, had it with the other ways."

Old Liz, that's who. And maybe that's why this seems like the right time for this song.

"And whatever happened to a girlfriend
The kind of chick who tries to win you over?
And whatever happened to a girlfriend
The kind of chick who makes love 'cause she's in it?

And you want a girlfriend
You want a girlfriend
You want all that boring old shit like letters and sodas
Letters and sodas"

-Liz Phair, "Fuck and Run"