Kristin Hersh
Kristin Hersh • Throwing Muses • 50 Foot Wave
A follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rat Girl, this beautifully written memoir takes readers on an emotional journey through the author’s life as she reflects on thirty years of music and motherhood.
Seeing Sideways is out May 2021.
Order from University of Texas Press, Rough Trade (UK Edition) or your favorite retailer.
1. A man once studied some paintings I’d hung on the walls of my sad, little house and cheerfully declared them, “earrings on a pig.” A super commie, he is all about classy vs. classless. Classy being the fail. And then there is the truly beautiful image of a pig wearing earrings. I was still holding my hammer when he said this and had to spit out a nail I held in my teeth to laugh. Laughing for a buncha reasons. And my pig house still wears its earrings very sweetly. Really, I was just given some paintings on tour and I had some nails in the drawer, so there they hang. Sometimes the paintings fall off because the walls are not sound and we play drums in the practice space downstairs, which shakes them. Just in case we were starting to feel classy at all.
2. My engineer, Rizzo, calls me “Princess Grace.” Meaning Princess Graceless, meaning you lack a princess’s grace, and usually phrased: “Princess Grace, wipe the snot off yer face and git yer ass behind that drum kit.” Meaning that I have not developed the social graces/assets/marketing techniques which might convince others that I’m more important than they are. Rizzo and I don’t like princesses? Or high/low, big/small thinkers. But we don’t dislike them, either; missing the point is just boring.
3. A bitter child on playground politics: “Dummies are dumb, ya dummies…doesn’t make you smart.”
The more grasping among us are transparent, in other words.
We prefer pigs to princesses cuz you can’t be a pretend thing, but pigs are cool. Pigs shine in nuance cuz they’re so wicked alive; a glinting tiara or a pair of earrings can’t blur real light. I’ve met people who think they’re princesses and I’ve met some who know we’re all pigs. A princess is pretty, a pig is beautiful. A princess is ephemeral, a pig timeless. A princess is nice, a pig is kind. Princesses are boring, pigs are enchanting. Princesses are “fun,” pigs are fun. Princesses are clean, pigs are dirty. Way better.
We all have facing us a circuitous route to wiping off the snot and gitting our asses behind drum kits, until we learn with our bodies never to bullshit again. And then we hope we play a beast which can’t be blurred. Superficial shine is a waste of time. And time is what you’re doing here. You are an animal. A real song is a dirty thing, rich with animal. A suck song is a shallow puddle, shining with oil slick rainbow. You don’t have to listen to anyone else’s music. Play your own and refuse to lie or be lied to.
Switch one eye to a shadow, wear your dirty, live half a day stuck in that morning’s dream, be a creature: a little quieter, listening to the stream. The noise/un-noisening/how lucky are we stream, seeing past shine or a lack thereof. What you’re looking for is the animal in your shaky house, in the child, in the woman, in the drum kit and in the song.
When I was a kid, fishermen spread their nets to dry in the field across the street. My brother and I learned to ride bikes in this field; on crabgrass, hay, rocks and these fishing nets which caught our tires in outsized, barnacly spider webs and sent us flying. We knew this terrain and not much else, so we flew. And fell, flew and fell. Didn’t bother us, so we didn’t ask questions. The dog looked bothered, had questions, when her collar was caught and she came home dragging heavy old fish parts, but we didn’t know there were ways to fly without tripping on salty knots. Which maybe there aren’t. And it was pretty funny, the dog and her gross, fishy veil. We weren’t sleepwalking, we were dreaming.
Years later, I painstakingly brought a dead lawn back to life, then mowed it in the moonlight with an ancient, rusty push mower. In my nightgown, feet wet with pre-dew, while my son watched from his bedroom window. When I paused to calm our alarmed kitten, he called down, “It’s gonna be okay, Mom.” Which made me think it wasn’t, but it was sweet of him.
In the morning, I studied the grass with my neighbor, a perpetually stoned stoner. “I don’t think this is grass,” he said. And he was right. It turned out to be a sort of crabby, hay mixture that grows best in rocky New England soil and was only missing old fishnets. I stared down. Huh. I’d never seen this guy not completely baked and his brain still worked better than mine. “As long as you like it,” he said. “Don’t let the lawn contingent get you down.”
“Yeah. It’s still kinda pointy, though.”
He knelt, touching a thick, rough blade. “I don’t know how you mowed this stuff. It’s not really lawn as much as, like, terrain.”
I lived in the high desert above Joshua Tree, stumbling over boulders and rattlesnakes; in Portland, OR, where I slid through mud on hyper-green hills in Forest Park and stepped over sidewalk junkies; in heavy New Orleans, pushing through swamp air and tripping over Mardi Gras debris, etc. In other words, I move a lot and there’s always some reason to fall.
Where I live now, in California, there’s a cliff over the ocean. If you look down to where we swim most mornings, you can see circling leopard sharks. On the opposite coast is another cliff overlooking another ocean. If you look down there you can see the ghosts of my friends perched on mussels and barnacles, laughing over cheap beer. The grass in my California yard is AstroTurf; around my east coast friends and their ghosts and the barnacles still grows that hearty, pointy, crabby stuff.
Some of these people tripped and fell and just stayed down, no sharks needed. Dead or alive, they sleepwalk.
And some learned to walk awake, albeit idiosyncratically. They keep walking, on surreal terrain because to them, reality is a question and therefore worth study. My stoner neighbor: “It’s all fuckin’ surreal!” If you can’t stop dreaming, you test your footing, make shit up to keep yourself from repeating others’ mistakes, make new rules and break old ones. The opposite of standing on the shoulders of giants, I guess, because you don’t avoid mistakes, just don’t suffer for them. These mistakes were designed by you, for you: colors you need.
I watched my four sons learn to walk…painstakingly, lots of falling. Years and years of falling. My children are my best friends, my heroes. Salty, knotted souls fly hard and fall harder; so wicked cool to watch glee and desperation blend. Stumbling cut feet, and so much laughing. They dream.
“When you show up at the Craigslist house and every member of the household is female, including, like, their parakeets.”
“Yeah. And they’re sitting in lawn chairs in the yard, eating spaghetti.”
“A little quirky, so you remember them forever. Not remarkably different, not different enough to remark on. Just different enough.”
“Real life.”
“Which this isn’t.”
The dog park was ok. We watched dogs run around and jump on each other under a sign that said “Dog Heaven” while their owners huddled and talked about dogs. They didn’t seem like dog people necessarily, but dogs are a thing right now and some people like to do the things that are things. The conversation petered out while our dog tried a few half-hearted laps around the perimeter.
We let ourselves off the hook easier than the dog park released us. In order to leave, you have to navigate a series of locked gates designed to keep dogs inside Dog Heaven no matter how badly they want to escape. We fiddled with a bolt. “Is the outside world Dog Hell?” Our dog looked anxious to get there.
We also had to navigate some watery conversations designed to make us feel like we were all on the same team. I guess we’re on the same team; I like people and I like dogs. I just don’t think people invented dogs. Not recently, anyway. When they added cars, schools and neighborhoods to the list of Things, we stepped up our efforts to escape. These weren’t bad people, just wild-eyed instead of wide-eyed.
Finally outside the last gate, we left Dog Heaven. Our dog looked intensely relieved. We probably did, too. “Let’s forget about the dog park.”
“I already did.”
Climbing into our truck isn’t easy; you do so over a pile of surfboards and snake tanks. Our truck’s name is Minty, after our old Great Dane. He breathes similarly, and he’s a big doofus who’s always on our side. Pulls us to where we’re going, even if we didn’t originally know where we were headed.
High noon, California sun straight over Minty’s roof. Minty has no air conditioning, really. He tries, sort of whistles coolness and then gives up. It was hot, no apologies. “And when the Craigslist women offer you a plate of spaghetti and a lawn chair? It doesn’t matter that their bike has no chain or their guitar has no strings, cuz they’re super cool. They can’t help it. Every day, they’re building this…invention. Their life is an invention.”
“People trying to be on the same team don’t want to invent anything. That would embarrass them.”
“Well…god bless ’em.”
Our dog panted happily and lay down between us. She doesn’t like running or jumping or playing or anything dog heavenly. She likes spaghetti, though. And parakeets. She’s invented a couple of unremarkable quirks that I’ll remember forever. She’s real life. All my favorite bands are eating spaghetti in lawn chairs, too; nobody watching. The bands I don’t like are huddled together, deep inside forgettable, doing the things that are things so that people can see them doing those things. God bless ’em.
Minty wheezed us back to the Days Inn Encinitas which is what we’re currently calling home. Essentially living in a Denny’s parking lot: American Heaven. We’re leaving soon, though, so we’re taking life pictures. Dana, coming from an AA meeting, holding an unlit joint by the pool: “I used to hate people, now I love them. They work so hard.”
Terence, in maintenance, accepting a piece of pizza: “Why go home? If somebody needs you, that’s your home. That’s where you’re supposed to be.”
Sam, two rooms down from us: “I’m so sleepy, I could lie down right here and sleep. But I wouldn’t laugh if I didn’t have kids.”
Maria, housekeeping: “Look, the rabbits and the birds. Look at them.”
“We are meant to travel lightly through this world.”
– Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
Chromesthesia brings colors into the room with music. Like a lot of musicians, I live in a rushing world of too vivid and too funny, with a broken heart and a pounding pulse to match my drummer’s flailing arms. It’s all we know, intense but invisible; fish can’t see the water they swim in and they probly think everyone is a fish. Everyone has their particular water, is their particular kind of fish. The water we swim in was pouring out of the speakers in an LA control room last night when the guy recording next door walked in, rolling his eyes.
Meet the Transparent Man, he whispered, you will see right through him.
An empty-eyed hunger followed him in, both sycophantic and narcissistic, said he wanted to hear what we were working on, though I could tell he didn’t. A Halloween costume of a wunderkind label rep, a plastic bag with a picture of American teeth and a fat wallet on it. No anachronism dies forever. Look away at the end of your horror movie and it comes rearing up behind you. Aw, crap. Sort of exactly what you’d think, a walking question: what matters? And always coming up with the wrong answer: attention. Not focus but, what’s everyone else looking at?
Who the fuck is “everyone else?”
The musician looked stricken. He once told me that whenever he heard the term “gracious loser” he remembered both his calling and his people. The two most important aspects of a personality held in balance by that one image. I’m feeling some…you know, hate, he hissed. He’s just. Such. An asshole.
He’s not smart enough to be an asshole, I whispered back. He’s just an ass.
I could tell from my friend’s face that this didn’t help. If that guy didn’t like his record, no one would hear it and he might never make another. I shrugged at him. So don’t make records. Your songs’ll matter more.
Willing to sell your soul? How do you sell soul to the soulless? I could feel his fear: Why is this dummy in charge? It’s deeply disappointing to see someone walk shallow talk, though it cements your beliefs. Jesus, you think, try harder. Or stop trying. Or something. Just quit it, wake up.
It shouldn’t be laughable because there’s so much at stake; dummies are capable of horror because, without depth, they don’t know what’s at stake. But…we still laugh. People who’re about attention can’t pay attention. If there is a god, she’s hilarious. Sort of.
Shot me back to a different LA. Years ago: old story, us achingly bored, slumped in vinyl chairs at a major label, waiting for some guy whose name we couldn’t remember – Steve probly, they were all Steve – to show up and say he’d been so goddamn busy, things’d been fucking wild at the show/party/award ceremony/dinner – name drop names – we all attended last night, everybody but you pretty much, what a blast/pain in the ass/but I’ve been there, don’t think I haven’t, wasn’t impressed and this crazy as shit guy – insert drug and alcohol related zaniness – and this hangover, I’m always either wasted or hungover except also? I’m pretty goddamn enlightened, don’t think I’m not – gaze contemplatively at Buddhist water feature for a few seconds – insert reference to meditation retreat/spiritual advisor with bestselling book/meaningful relationship with idiot/close bond with children he doesn’t seem to have met – sorry I’m late, by the way, don’t really value your time, which makes me bigger than you plus, you know, LA traffic – insert reference to expensive car/neighborhood/yoga studio/restaurant – also NY traffic – insert reference to Manhattan and repeat the whole thing.
Like I said, pretty much what you’d think. They seemed to want to be cartoons, to keep up with the other cartoons. Put their cardboard cutout up over someone else’s.
Our LA sunshine smiles always faded a few hours into this, an easy analogy for the musician- corporate relationship. We were mostly there for the free food and the winter sunshine, so thick, ochre and cool. We also thought we could request a different marketing strategy: respect for the listener. Sell the music, not the musician. Didn’t wanna trick people who don’t need this life soundtrack, don’t need to swim in this particular water, into buying records they’d never love. We’d reach our people instead of alienating them with shallow, trust them to come back. We’d make friends. Well, music would.
America is such an experiment. How do we make friends here? Meaningless minutes or infinite feedback loops? People know what companies often don’t: of course you can fool dummies, they’re easily fooled. And for that reason, they bring nothing to the table. They also wander off. Go for the feedback, the loop, the circle over the straight line headed nowhere. Not a new idea, by any means, to reach your audience by refining it, impact over units, making it appear smaller while viewing it through the lenses of time and substance…it’s still considered unworkable, though. Mostly a lack of patience or interest in quality, just wanting to make a splash and then another splash. Oddly, without any water. Kids figure this out in kindergarten. Cool kids, anyway. Connection should matter. It’s how we continue to care. And when you stop caring, you stop caring. Death by dumb.
This particular Steve didn’t show, so we had a meeting without him:
I don’t want to attract attention, it feels awful.
Too much is embarrassing. It just means you’re a jerk or you made some weird mistake. Striving for it dilutes your work.
We’ll starve.
So? Who are we?
Nobody. We want to be loved? Not liked?
Yeah.
Perfect is…what? It really, really matters. To one person.
Ok. I’ll listen to you and you listen to me.
Done.
This was back in time, but we remember it because we just had the same conversation. A kind of shallow we thought was geographically based: the urban hubris of keeping up, a life without nature, seemed to make people stupid. Missing the point every day, then waking up and deciding to miss it again. It’s definitely a choice. You can find them everywhere, people who make cosmic jokes less funny. Yeah, one is the president, but his haters aren’t necessarily free, either. This new Steve, happy to swim through gloss and muck, loved Trump more than any Republican ever could: I found a dummy dumber than me, which makes me smart. Which it doesn’t. No one is free to wash their hands of morality. Like the president, New Steve’d been given some power to wield. Over music, of all things.
Real runs too deep to respond with more than a ripple, but it can be dressed in a way that confuses people. For some reason, documentary plus soap opera equals reality tv: melodrama quashes drama in their hands. Be very careful around these people, see through them. It’s easy, they’re transparent. The musician who’d pointed this out watched creepy, happy water color pour out of the speakers and smiled. It’s ok, he said, opening his arms to the noise, because sometimes people do this.
New Steve left, still hungry, and we wondered about pity as we warned each other against following the Devil down any holes: The emperor’s new clothes are a lousy Halloween costume. Don’t miss your life.
We decided there was nothing to pity because Steve isn’t being Steve this year – possibly this lifetime – no one is truly without depth. There are millions of this guy, across the race and gender spectra and in all political parties; he’s not a person but a failure. He’s us when we fail to fight ourselves, projecting our battles onto the outside. A handy device when you want to both denounce and engage in a behavior. But you fool no one. Because the world is not a corporation. Not a lobster tank, either, though it can feel like one and that makes people nervous enough to devalue special. Special is the reason we’re here. To live our idiosyncratic impressions of the universal. There aren’t really any dummies. Greed is a confusion, an untruth.
Our own splashing party kicked back in when we left the dry counting of corporate to jump into the water; a rushing, chromasthetic spewing. Ludicrous, so painful laughter. Genuine loss, so painful tears, too. We’re not evolved or enlightened, just here. Really here. We’re angry and terrified and there is futility in us and frustration, but a giddiness in cold rain tears and hot sun laughing and the guts we share. You cram all that into a worldview and it sounds like beautiful noise. I imagine that all beautiful noises at once are a black hole of silence, but I’m not there yet.
We sometimes need to replay our conversations to remember how to step back into the light, attract no attention: focus. We don’t give a shit because we care so deeply. This is true of everyone, it’s just sometimes overlooked in the crash of others, because we’re all in it together. Mission is everywhere, but it’s rarely eye-catching. A calling is just so private and it moves too fast to be pinned down. We all have them, don’t look away from yours. Share it if you feel like it, but remember that medicine is only good for those who need it.
This water is pouring out of the speakers and I know how lame it is to call music water, but that’s what it is. It’s also air; some kind of breathing.
One love, no likes.