The Motherfucking Valentines Day Post: ERIN BECKER ERIN BECKER ERIN BECKER

The Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen In Love?" - Normally, whenever I go about putting one of these elaborate Personal Self-Immolation Pageants & Chili Cookoffs together, I take measures to camouflage the catalyst's name, mostly because I feel bad holding people accountable for offenses they committed inadvertantly back before they'd even taken Driver's Ed. Today, however, is not one of those days; Erin Becker's name is, in fact, Erin Becker, and as far as I'm concerned she spent up any sympathy I might have for her public profile back in the eighth grade. So here goes.

As I may have mentioned once or twice in this space before, girls haven't exactly been all that good to me over the years. I've been stood up on my birthday, ditched at prom, written off as the lame-duck half of a double date in progress - I could keep going, but this is going to be a long enough post already. But when it comes to irrevocably fucking my life up, Erin Becker really does take the cake, for both the sheer volume and the nigh-admirable creativity of horrors perpetrated against yr boy. Here's an abbreviated list:

• Successfully managed to trick me into thinking a girl on whom I had a crush was calling my house to ask me out on a date one Friday night in the eighth grade, then leaving it to my "friend" Jonathan to unearth the truth about who'd actually been on the other end of that line (the quote marks, incidentally, come from the fact that Jonathan decided to inform like three or four other people before hipping me to the truth, thus guaranteeing that an instance of profound humiliation would be a matter of public record. THANKS, BROSEPH). To this day I still have hangups (no pun intended) about using the phone; everyone who's ever tried to give me a call since 1995 can address any frustrations Erin's way.
• Played me like backgammon as part of an elaborate plan to get with the aforementioned Jonathan. Highlights include ditching me by note the day after agreeing to go out on a date with me, recruiting me against my will into a plot to break Jonathan up with his then-girlfriend Anna to give Erin an opening, and, most most memorably, after failing to achieve any sort of happiness with Jonathan during their abortive run at a relationship, hooking up with him on a class trip to London wherein I was trapped as Jonathan's roommate and therefore privy to the kind of unbelievably gross details most typically encountered on the latest installment of Hookers At The Point. I mean, I realize that some sickos in this world would probably pay money to hear eighth-graders attempt phone sex with each other; I suppose I should be thankful to History for teaching me that I'm definitely not one of them.
• Completely ruined the last party I ever threw by pitching a gigantic pouting fit, first on the steps to the upstairs of my house, then on the stone wall across the street from my house. It remains essentially the most archetypally middle-school attention-whorish action in which I've ever seen anyone take part (well, up to the point when I started writing this post out, I guess)

I could go on and on and on, but you probably get the point: Erin did a fuckload of heroically inconsiderate stuff to me. You've also probably noticed that none of these things are really all that bad in the big picture; all kids are pretty heroically inconsiderate by nature, and I do my damnedest not to shy away from the awful shit I pulled on other people during those three godawful years (dear Jameal Jordan: sorry again for tricking you into sitting on an orange). I mean, hell, I've even managed to basically forgive the rest of the guilty parties in the fake-phone-call incident - so why, even thirteen years after the fact (ugh), do I still hold a grudge against Erin?

Because Erin was the first girl who ever served as any sort of object for my then-nascent romantic feelings, that's why. That's not to say she was the first girl I ever (ahem, wink wink) "noticed" (an "honor" reserved for R*ch*l *rl*ngh**s) or even the first recipient of some sort of primal attraction (that would be C*th*r*n* W*ll*s and her big-ass t*tt**s); god, I wish it were that simple. No, Erin was the girl who first got me confronting the idea of a relationshp as something whose cultivation could serve me well, and since I have no reason to believe that she wasn't aware of this, I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn't continue casting her as the Cruella DeVille of my life's story. It only seems fair.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: guys compete for girls' affection against every other guy in her present, but girls compete for guys against every other girl in her past. That's not to say that girls don't fall victim to their own romantic archetypes, of course, but the fact that it's still incumbent upon guys to initiate any sort of advances means that the narratives we construct for ourselves tend to revolve around notions of permission and propriety instead of simple desire-resolution. And yes, dammit, it's completely possible to handle ripping someone's heart out of their ass in a humane and reasonable fashion; Molly, the girl on whom I had a searing crush on through the first part of high school, made it soul-crushingly clear that she had no more interest in any permutation of intimacy with me than Erin did, but she managed to find a way to get the message across without thoroughly convincing me that I was effectively slapping her in the face by finding myself intrigued by the idea. It may have hurt like hell at the time, but at least she didn't condition me to expect abuse as a basic term for a relationship, something I most certainly can't say about Erin.

And I do mean "expect", because at this point in my life, abuse is essentially as fundamental an ingredient for any sort of romantic relationship whose possibility I might entertain as eggs are to omelettes. It's not a coincidence that I spent several in ardent pursuit of high-drama, high-maintainance, self-absorbed harridans, nor is it a coincidence that any advances made by girls from positions of sweetness or agreeability tend to be met with silent stares of panicky disbelief; these are wholly understandable reactions from someone whose first experience with any sort of relationship was solely defined by the absorption of abuse. There's also the not-insignificant fact that one hardly needs to get involved with someone in order to abuse the everliving fuck out of them, a truism which has led me down the path of fixating on some girl who couldn't be less interested in me out of some knee-jerk emotional reaction to some inadvertant moment of insensitivity on her part. Hell, the girl on whom I'm currently fixated probably isn't even aware of how monstrously cruel she's being toward me; my ardor for her hasn't ever burned half as bright. And the worst worst part, of course, is that there's seemingly no way to redress the situation short of ripping up every intergender template I've ever traced out and starting again, a prospect hard enough to do at thirteen and damned near impossible at twenty-five. And you people wonder why I always talk about killing myself.

So fuck you, Erin Becker; in a perfect world I'd have a better response to the staggering snatchiness of your juvenile years than a thousand pages of deathlessly butthurt prose and the most transcendently obvious song ever to attach itself to any of my content. Unfortunately, we live in this one, so I'm forced to defer to Pete Shelley and (hopefully) leave it at that.

Not that I'm bitter or anything. (Click here to buy the expanded and utterly essential reissue of Singles Going Steady from Amazon.com)

Electrelane, "The Greater Times" - Lest you think that it's wall-to-wall wrist-slittery here at Green Peaness HQ, however, rest assured that there's plenty of solace to be found in Electrelane's No Shouts, No Calls, an album which came out of straight-up nowhere to become possibly the record I'm most excited to purchase in the future, no mean feat at the moment. Naturally, the internet's been all up in its shit for a good little while now and I'm just catching up, but oh well; No Shouts, No Calls might as well have been conceived to address specific musical prejudices I've spent decades cultivating, and as a result I have a damned hard time writing it off just because it's not as Fresh-N-New as it might have been a few weeks ago. I do, however, seem to be one of the few people writing up the album-opening track "The Greater Times", which is a little bit bewildering given the fact that it might as well sum up all the album's pleasures in one four-minute burst; it's completely representative of the way the album straddles the lines between wounded and defiant, gentle and driven, despairing and fuming. It's also unaccountably gorgeous, its ragged edges and sparse production only serving to highlight the way lead singer Mia Clark throws herself into her howls of "The walls, the walls" as the song's circuit closes in on itself. I have a hard time believing that I'll have the same enthusiasm for No Shouts, No Calls in six months as I do now, if only because it's February and these things tend to burn themselves out, but I also have a hard time believing "The Greater Times" will be the last time any of its songs shows up in this space. I mean, fuck, here's an album where I even like the instrumentals. Here's an album that's got me rethinking my position on motherfucking Stereolab. Here's an album where - well, here's an album, anyway. (No Shouts, No Calls is currently slated for release in April; in the meantime, check out their MySpace for more songs or click here to purchase The Power Out, their first album, from Amazon.com)

Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, "Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'bout Me)" - I have no idea why I've taken to Frankie Valli so sweepingly as of late; if I were guessing, I'd wager that it had something to do with my interminable search to find something to listen to which effectively serves as the exact opposite of whatever I'm actually listening to, and I suppose archly constructed music passe even at the time of its release could fit that bill pretty nicely. Of course, it's also possible that this music might just be really worthwhile on its own accord; Christ knows that "Opus 17", despite wearing quite possibly the most overblown title not attached to a La Monte Young drone-stravaganza, used to rock my universe whenever it'd show up on the oldies station back in the day, and given my current renaissance for affording the tastemakers of Durham, North Carolina enough retroactive credit for knowing what they're talking about (hey, if nothing else it lead me to pick up a copy of Stevie Wonder's Where I'm Coming From, so I'm way in the black already), Valli's arguable masterpiece might just be the latest beachhead in an ongoing battle. Whatever. None of that matters to me when I listen to the song; all I hear are those unflinching horns, that ruthlessly martial beat, those relentlessly beautiful harmonies presenting some of the saddest, self-pitying-est lyrics I've yet to come across in the most maddeningly compelling way possible. Basically I'm starting to think this is a really, really, really great song; I would invite you to revisit it (believe me, you've heard this song before whether you know it or not) and see for yourself. (Click here to buy The Very Best Of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons from Amazon.com)