PIXIES b/w “pretend it’s the first time”

“Omarion” is the new “binoculars.”
Etymology:
“Our weekend plans are so binoculars, I require a higher resolution to imagine their blinding-hot shine.
Shall I bring a telescope?
Are we up in the planetarium?
So Omarion.”
NOTE: I do not expect this to take off, in mine or any other lexicon.
1. Beardly Omarion has been replaced by babyface Mario as the lusty lusty in the celeb preteen scene.
2. As a word, “Omarion” does not have the same “i mean business” syntax as binoculars.
3. I love Omarion because he is so unaware of his own dorkiness. Not quite the right quality to express something so bananas awesome you have to sit on your hands to keep from tearing your own heart from your chest. Close—but not quite.
I wrote this for The Pixies.
The Pixies were Omarion, binoculars, retarded, it-started, badonkulous, etc. I am overly mistrustful of nasty nostalgia and its aspiration-killing side effects, and I went in with a skeptic’s mind. I attach too many memories of heartache, afterschool herbalism, group fanzine stapling, tortured poetry writing and flashlight toga parties to Black Francis’ deathscream making lover’s rhythms on Kim Deal’s smoking-angel timbre for this to just be REUNION TOUR ’04. This is huge. This is my formative years, graying and under stage lights with a fog machine. SO, accompanying my deep, intense excitement was my cursed, finger-wagging sub-voice, going, “Dude, do not lionize tonight’s performance simply because The Pixies were your teen entry into Art Bell, Spanish surrealist art, the subtlety of good seduction, Mexican Catholic imagery in contemporary popular music, Dick Dale, sex, and David Lynch movies, not to mention the glue that bonded you w/yr boyfriend of the years 1996-’99.
The show must be great on its own.”
We sat in the second-tier balcony, and The Hammerstein Ballroom was a sea of heads. Reiussed back catalogue and Fight Club accounted for some of them, but surely they were mostly old-schoolers. I am obsessed with how kids growing up in small towns heard about punk and indie rock in the pre-Nirvana/pre-internet mainstream, ca. the years 1987-1991, partly because I was one of those kids. The Pixies were one of the first bands of the ’90s weirdo intellectual punk wave that had decent distribution. I wondered how many formerly small-town heads bought Come on Pilgrim cassettes from the Sam Goody, or ordered Doolittle from Columbia House tear-outs in Rolling Stone because they hadn’t yet discovered punk-rock mail order. I got Trompe Le Monde for $6.99 from a returns bin at Musicland in the Frontier Mall, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Ah.. the ’90s… baby-dolls, back then, ‘fore I wrote this blog, I usedta hadda type my life on paper and photocopy it! Moveable Type is the new Kinko’s.
Love,
Grandma
But whatever, anyway. It felt like a renewal of vows; songs I’ve heard like 4000 times glimmered with new context. They were playing them like they believed their songs could exist anew. They loved them and let them live, resurrected for their continued worth and relevance in the world. Little presents in a little basket! Quail eggs!
They opened with their cover of Lynch/Badalamenti’s “Heaven,” Kim singing the verse sweetly, aware of the deep irony of the song and their whole existence. (“In Heaven, everything is fine…”) They barreled through “U-Mass,” “Bone Machine,” the impossibly voracious “Crackity Jones,” their cover of Jesus and Marys “Head On”; there was no sense that they broke up ten years ago or that the music had already ossified in some kind of canon. I was totally scurred this was going to be Mick Jagger cock-strutting but they barely moved, barely looked at one another; they were rigid, and still they seemed to play harder and louder than on the records, even. Doolittle and Surfer Rosa, got em covered. Midway through “Hey,” the tempo melted and slowed a little—Black Francis’ “UH!”S invoked all the sexual pathos I imagined it could. His lyrics are all rhythm and death shrieks; I bounced. During “Vamos,” Joey Santiago performed his well-documented drumstick-assisted/feedback solo, and while Black Francis and Kim and David Lovering sat in the shadows near or on the drumset—kinda chubs and all wearing the same shit as ’92, Kim chain-smoking until her honey vox were coated in rasp—I was like, “I cannot believe these Massholes are the coolest people in America right now, but they are.” Then I had another fucked up moment of Clinton-era wish-listing (nostalgia whatevs, it really was better) and we went home.
They did not play enough from my favorite album, the noisiest/poppiest/UFOiest Trompe Le Monde, nor did they play three of my favorite songs, “I’ve Been Tired,” “River Euphrates,” or “Alec Eiffel.” But they got hits.