Archives for May 2009

“My heart goes out to where that song comes from. It’s very much about thinking you were loved for who you were, and realizing you weren’t and realizing maybe you don’t love yourself.” (uncredited, Here. In My Head)

Isn’t it interesting how the choirgirl hotel is suddenly about the men who have checked out?

He has always been sweeter than her, sugar to her wine. “If you could see me now.” Now that she’s been forged and drowned, like the sharpest sword.

The beauty of this song is the ambiguity. Girls have to know when a kiss in the rain is only romance because of the weather.

Just because you’re wet doesn’t mean you felt the spark.

And then you’re thinking, “Oh, god, could it be the weather?”

What if it’s not?

How will I know?

“When I use this term, the Dark Prince, this is my definition of a male essence that is able to shed light in darkness. … A lot of people around me at that time were turned on by cheap come-ons, drawn to thinking that the Dark Prince was somebody who would handcuff you and give you the orgasm of your life. Well, he doesn’t need to handcuff you. It’s boring. Go handcuff yourself.” (Piece by Piece)

“A lot of people think darkness is making somebody emotionally defecate on themselves. That’s baby demon stuff. … These baby demons can be wonderful in some ways. Wonderful in some ways, highly conscious in some ways, but until they’ve done their work on their shadow, they are more concerned with the power of seduction and the control over another Being than anything else.” (Lucifer, per Tori, Piece by Piece)

Finally, she emerges from her shell.

After visiting her personal nadir and coming back up for air everyone else’s aura is evident. Suddenly all the minor demons are plain as day, and she’s watching in mute horror as they eek out a living as ineffectual parasites.

Flukemen. Huge reptiles gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet a blood-soaked sponge.

Is it true that devils end up like you? Something safe for the picture frame? No longer devils, but simple symbiotes? Well guess what, fucker – the real prince of darkness isn’t defined – defamed – by his vampirism. Lucifer is more than a leech.

But you need the blood so bad you will do anything to get it. Change your life, your look, your heart rate and the way you breathe. That is the depth of your fear and loathing. She’s got your shaving your legs. Shimmy once and do it again.

“Bring your sister,” she chides, “if you can’t handle it.”

As if there is any question. Clearly you cannot handle it.

Tori is on the other side of the swirl now – more herself than ever before. Berdache, masculine and feminine. Kachina, corporeal and ethereal.

“Everybody knows that I’m her man,” she reminds you, “and I have a message for you: you don’t need one of these to let me inside of you. Getting fucked is not about physical penetration – it’s about emotional penetration. Either way, I can impale you.

“And for all of your animus, you just doesn’t have that power. So, how’s your jesus christ been hanging?”

Flaccid? It’s not the side effects of the cocaine.

“I feel like I’m in a dream, I’m in some crazy dream, boy. I feel like I’ve made a movie with my baby, with my baby. We were, we were riding through the mountains. Then we found some rocks, and then you told me, ‘look closer baby. You’re a diamond. You’re a diamond, just like this rock could be.’

“You’re a diamond to me.” (11/18/07, Melbourne, Fl.)

Surrender. Then start your engines. Have we all got the bends? Am I really sinking this low?

We’re past her deal with the devil now. She knows just what she gave up to get here. And she knows that this is madness.

When she couldn’t sustain the spark she retreated to the opposite element: she tried to hold the entire sea inside herself. If the sea is in her and she is in the sea there’s no pressure – it’s easy to be an underwater thing. She will grow her own fins and dance the Sufis alone.

Underneath the waves she has discovered her first mistake: you cannot live alone within a single element. She tried to embody Pele, but no woman can be aflame all the time. And now she wants to live in the deep, just liquid diamonds of light trickling in from the faraway surface to remind her of solid ground.

But she cannot be that mermaid she once imagined. Can he bring me his jeans, with her name still on them? She sees now what she was really asking: “Bobby, bring me those chains.”

That watery bass, half sink and half swim. Coming up for air, slowly, after sublimating every single hope.

“I would close my eyes when he would appear. And I would follow him. And he would say things like, ‘come here…’ And I would go.” (VH1 Storytellers)

We are at the nadir.

Take your ease, and your happiness, and your country, and your god. Leave me alone to wail into the emptiness.

This is a lament for every child lost. Skeeter with her heart on a tree. That bat-winged boy, harbinger of death in every town, but Tori believes he is going to save her if she just follows him.

She will follow him to bottom of herself. Into Mordor. He is Lucifer, so sane, building a world out of flame. You don’t need the light on to guide you through the southern lands.

Is it really as easy as saying yes? If she burns it all down can she learn their ease? Or, is she still stuck with the beauty of her pain, screaming in the cathedral.

Sweet Jean. Not every redhead is a phoenix.