The night was amazing, we danced until we were sick. On the way home I got some of my favorite therapy and stared at city lights while Bright Eyes played on my iPod, until I felt numb of inertia from total tiredness and intoxicated with awe and blithely satisfied.

In 2001 the distinctive indie band Tilly and the Wall was formed, playing their first show at an open mic night in the now out-of-commission joint, Ranch Bowl, in their hometown of Omaha. They started out small, their first record created in Conor Oberst’s garage, self-published and circulated at local Omaha (a city famed for it’s rich indie, folk, blues and jazz scene) venues and shows.

Named after a children’s book, Tilly and the Wall’s maverick and free spirited sound gives a comforting feeling, so it was no surprise when three years after their formation, their first full length CD Wild Like Children, was embraced by indie fans with a good deal of love.

Spun of touching and bittersweet teenaged memories, with lyrics like “Just you and I misbehaving.” Tilly and the Wall don’t need to tell you they want everyone to sing with them.

This album is made up of sweet tracks, heavily reminiscent of indie and folk music styles, like the first and last tracks; “Fell Down The Stairs” and “The Ice Storm, Big Gust And You”, and made up of rhythmic songs with a solid beat, like “Perfect Fit” and “Nights of the Living Dead”, that remind slightly more pop tunes, but the old school acoustic guitar instrumentals and tambourine accompaniment keep the charming indie folk feel.

Tilly and the Wall have another interesting quality that set them apart from all other indie bands and make them true trend leaders. They have no drummer. Instead, to keep a beat, Jamie Pressnall has honed her unique tap dancing style to complete their rhythms. They also keep beats with shakers, bass, and tambourines, making their music distinctive and fun.

A simple and well constructed first album, and the flagship album for Conor Oberst’s record label, Team Love, Tilly and the Wall are breaking new ground with their unique style of music and engaging first record.

Warhol was right. Edie Sedgwick was a remarkable person with a luminous personality and a crazy but elegant style that inspired girls for ages. Edie was also a drug addict, an alcoholic, and anorexic. Despite her colorful character and captivating looks, she struggled with her troubles throughout her life, after coming from a chaotic family of rich Massachusetts lineage and deeply rooted mental problems.

April 20^th, 1943, Edie was born in Santa Barbara, California. Her father was Francis Minturn Sedgwick known to the family and friends as Fuzzy, and her mother was Alice Delano De Forest. Both sides of the family were sources of mental instability. Fuzzy had experienced three mental breakdowns prior to his marriage to Alice, the causes of which were very deeply rooted in his family’s lineage, tracing all the way back to the late seventeen hundreds, and Alice’s father had suffered from manic-depressive psychosis. Alice was advised by her father’s doctor not to have children, which she defied, having eight children. She had Alice known as Saucie, Robert Minturn known as Bobby, Pamela, Francis Minturn known as Minty, Jonathan, Katharine known as Kate, Edith Minturn known as Edie, and Susanna known as Suky. Minty and Bobby each passed away at fairly young ages, both in their late teens or twenties.

An early contributor to Edie’s drug problems was her father Fuzzy. Near the end of his time, one of his brother’s heard him state “You know, my children all believe that their difficulties stem from me. And I agree. I think they do.” 2 When Edie was a little girl she walked in on her father with another woman. She ran to tell her mother, but her father told Alice that Edie was delusional and insane and that she needed medication for her “problems”. Fuzzy ordered tranquilizers from the doctor, giving them to Edie at least one time a day, most days more than once. Later in the 60’s Edie told her friend Ultra Violet, “They gave me so many tranquillizers I lost all my feelings.” 2 It’s believed that these tranquilizers, Edie’s first taste of drugs, were what began her addictions.

Edie attended Cambridge in 1963 as an art student and she had a rare talent for it. While there she met Chuck Wein who became her promoter. They were seen together all the time, described as incredibly close friends. Chuck was another contribution to Edie’s drug problems. Baby Jane Holzer, a brief but surprisingly straightedge friend compared to Edie’s normal crowd, was quoted saying “Edie was with this guy called Chuck Wein, and he had a bad vibe, a very bad vibe. Too many drugs.” 2 Chuck got Edie into copious smoking and drinking. Throughout her life she was dependent on alcohol and cigarettes. She drank constantly and smoked a ridiculous amount of cigarettes and cigars. It became a comfort for her, almost a security blanket, and something she relied on. She felt that if she drank in social situations she could open up easily and talk to people without embarrassment, and if she ever felt awkward or bored, she could simply have a cigarette. Edie’s time at Cambridge was also when she developed her anorexia, which continued into her adult life. This pertained to her large amount of smoking. Smoking calmed her down and made her feel less hungry. Edie could starve herself easily if she smoked every day. The diagnosis was anorexia nervosa, a form of anorexia that was described as a disease where a person would see a warped image of themselves, and would diet, throw up, starve themselves to lose weight. It is said to be connected with OCD. At one point Edie weighed only ninety pounds and her mother sent her to a hospital, which didn’t help much. In New York a friend of Edie’s described how Edie once taught her how to vomit by sticking a silver spoon down her throat after eating.

Edie and Chuck left Cambridge in 1964 to pursue fame for Edie in New York City. She dropped her art, becoming more interested in fame. For the next year or so Edie was a seldom acknowledged star of the New York acting and modeling scene. Then in 1965 Edie Sedgwick met Andy Warhol. They were at a party in a mutual friend’s apartment and it was at this point Edie perked Warhol’s interest. He invited her to the Factory, his creative haven that was the place to be seen in the 60’s, for everyone from drug addicts to debutantes. In March Edie began appearing in small parts of his early films, Vinyl and Horse among them. Edie rapidly worked her way into Warhol’s elite group of friends, becoming his closest, even attending an opening for his work in Paris with him later in ’65. When they returned Andy spoke highly of Edie and began calling her the ‘Queen of the Factory’ and requesting her as the star for his movie Kitchen, then another even greater success called Beauty No. 2, in which Edie’s performance was compared to that of Marilyn Monroe. Edie’s sudden and brilliant underground stardom was of titanic proportions and her fame took off with Warhol beside her. What also took off was her rapid addiction to amphetamine sulphate, more commonly known as its street name: speed. It was one of the most prominent of her drugs, among others she was taking during her Factory years, along with diet pills and depressants. Some people blame Andy Warhol for Edie’s drug use, when in reality, Warhol barely touched drugs himself. “Whatever anyone may have thought, the truth is I never gave Edie a drug, ever. Not even one diet pill. Nothing. She certainly was taking a lot of amphetamine and downs, but she certainly wasn’t getting them from me. She was getting them from that doctor who was shooting up every Society lady in town.” Andy said when asked in later years about Edie’s drug abuse. Edie took the most in style form; they called it “pokes” of speed.

They would simply skin pop or inject the drug into a vein with a needle. Edie particularly liked this drug because of its popularity and the way it made her feel happy, wide awake, and talkative all the time. It also aided her eating disorder which was something else she loved about it; Edie could take one poke of speed and not be hungry for hours.

She took diet pills also to abet her anorexia. Diet pills are similar to amphetamines, and most are legal so Edie didn’t have much trouble getting them. They made her feel not hungry, and sped up the central nervous system and with her already thin build Edie was at more of a risk than most to be permanently damaged by these.

The third of her favorite drugs of the time was depressants, otherwise knows as “downers” or “downs”. Edie liked barbiturates and benzodiazepines especially, and took them with alcohol. These would make her feel sleepy and woozy, as well as disoriented. It was her way to try and stem the pain and sadness she felt when she was alone. Edie possibly could have had a personality disorder from one of her parents, because she could almost never be left alone and more or less seemed afraid of the idea. Edie became dependent on depressants during this and later times in her life when she became lonely.

Edie met Bob Dylan and Bob Neuwirth somewhere within 1965 also, and Bob Neuwirth was one of the most vocal people telling Edie that she should leave Andy to become a ‘real star’. Some time in 1966 Edie fell in love with Bob Dylan, it was unknown to her that Bob Dylan had previously been having two affairs, and had married Sara Lownds in secret a few months before. Warhol allegedly became jealous of the relationship Edie was beginning to entertain with Dylan, thinking maybe it would threaten their friendship. The whispers in her ear from several sources in Dylan’s crowd and other outsiders made Edie believe Andy was making money from his films, and that she should be getting paid more, and asked him several times to increase her payment, until one day in a restaurant with a group of friends, according to Paul Morrissey, “Andy couldn’t resist asking, ‘Did you know Edie that Bob Dylan has gotten married?’ She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn’t been truthful.” 2 Edie went to make a phone call, most likely to Dylan, then returned to the table and announced she was leaving the Factory. She never returned to it or that crowd.

In 1966 Edie was hanging around with Bob Dylan’s crowd, though she was not directly associated with Dylan. During that year he released his Blonde on Blonde album, and Edie was one of the women featured in the album artwork on the inner sleeve. His song Just Like a Woman was rumored to be about Edie, as was Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. During this year Edie was in a relationship with Bob Neuwirth. In her movie Ciao! Manhattan Edie was quoted saying “It was really sad – Bobby [Neuwirth]‘s and my affair. The only true, passionate, and lasting love scene, and I practically ended up in the psychopathic ward. The minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills…” 2 In the time she was dating Neuwirth, Edie started modeling, appearing most notably in Vogue being labeled a “youthquaker” of the era, as well as Life magazine in a fashion spread. She never got any good connections with Vogue due to her identification with the drug scene.

By this time Edie had barreled through her whole inheritance, spending it on fancy dinners, expensive champagne wine and martinis every day, a stunning and costly wardrobe, and drugs. She was frantic for drugs and dependant on them, but without her inheritance she purely couldn‘t pay for them. Desperate for money, Edie stole English antiques and pieces of art from her grandmother’s apartment and sold them for her own drugs. She returned home for the holidays on drugs, and was so out of it that her mother sent her to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. Edie left and returned to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, continuing to take increasing amounts of drugs, and filming Ciao! Manhattan, a kind of biographic, story-of-her-life film about her. Bob Neuwirth left her in early 1967 due to her erratic behavior and insane drug dependency.

Edie was loopy and completely unstable. She was smoking too many cigarettes a day to count, she was taking almost every appetite reducing amphetamine and energy increasing drug under the sun, and with a completely slow metabolism from her lack of nourishment she was consuming large amounts of alcohol on an empty and non functional stomach. Edie was also at the time taking heroin to come down from speed.

She got addicted to heroin for a period of time, a form of morphine, which gave her surges of happiness but also restricted blood from reaching certain areas of her brain and made her speech stutter-y and halted. She was destroying and abusing her brain and body. Her brother Jonathan described the way Edie acted as strange and disconnected. He said “The doctor did a dye test of some sort and it showed the blood wasn’t reaching certain parts of the brain… She couldn’t talk. I’d say, “Edie, goddamn it, get your head together… She’d say, ‘I… I… I… know… know… know… I… I… can but it’s ha… ha… hard…’ ” 2

Edie’s father died in October of 1967. Edie was again committed to the very same psychiatric ward as before, subsequent to Neuwirth leaving her. She was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers until 1970. After filming more of Ciao! Manhattan Edie went to a clinic. By this time she had met her future husband Michael Post, a fellow patient in one of the many facilities she had visited. Of Edie’s time in the health center he said, “She was in the clinic from January 17 to June 4… She had shock treatments – I don’t know how many – maybe twenty or more. Dr Mercer told me that she’d had some shock treatments in the East [as well]. He authorized the new ones because he thought Edie could be close to suicidal.” 2 And that could have been just the case.

Edie married Michael Post on July 24, 1971. She ended her drinking, pill taking, and use of illegal substances until October when she was prescribed pain medication; barbiturates, for a physical illness she was suffering from. Barbiturates were a type of depressant she had previously been obsessed by and her old problems came back once more. Edie lost it all over again, often demanding more pills from her doctor or giving the excuse that she had misplaced them. She would combine them with alcohol frequently.

On the night of November 15, 1971, Edie attended a fashion show, and then a party, where she was verbally attacked by another guest, loudly calling her obscene names and shrieking that Edie was a heroin addict. The guest was asked to leave. Edie then called Michael and he could tell she was drunk, so he went to pick her up. Edie took her medication before bed, went to sleep, and when Michael woke up in the morning Edie was dead next to him. Her death was registered as an accident or suicide due to a barbiturate overdose.

Sources:

Factory Girl (film) 1

www.warholstars.com 2

Sources quotes were not taken from:

http://www.narconon.ca/speed.htm

http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/

http://www.faqs.org/health/Sick-V1/Anorexia-Nervosa.html

http://www.drugabuse.gov/ResearchReports/Prescription/prescription3.html

http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/streetterms/ByAlpha.asp?strTerm=D

http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/tobacco.html

http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/heroin.html

I think what is most compelling about this story is the narrative you are given; it is interesting to hear the story from the perspective of Death. But who is Death? Is he even remotely human? He says he breathes, he says his heart beats, but differently then ours. What is he? Is he even a he? Who is Death? Here is how Death himself puts it.

” ***A REASSURING ANNOUNCEMENT***

Please, be calm, despite that previous threat.

I am all bluster–

I am not violent.

I am not malicious.

I am a result.”

Death, as a narrator, is “all knowing” and unbiased, but also interested in the characters and story and it feels like he is involved in the story; in some ways he is. When speaking in an unbiased tone, Death puts his points bluntly.

Death likes to tell you what will happen, or gives you hints, before the events occur. He even tells you pieces of what happens in the end of the book, about halfway through. It spoils things, but you look at the characters in a different way than before; you know what is going to happen to them, and you know it is tragic, but you can’t help having a partiality to the characters anyways, and feeling even worse when their disastrous fate comes to pass.

“When another piece of broken wall was removed, one of them saw the book thief’s hair.

The man had such a nice laugh. He was delivering a newborn child. “I can’t believe it-she’s alive!”

There was so much joy among the cluttering, calling men, but I could not fully share their enthusiasm.

Earlier, I’d held her papa in one arm and her mama in the other. Each soul was so soft.”

Death’s point of view can sometimes be hard to follow, since his thought process is so different than ours. The way Death sees things, the fascinating issue in the plot is the story; what is happening. To him the ending is just the result of the story. He doesn’t feel the ending is as interesting because he wants to know how the characters get to that point, instead of what happened to them when it was all over. For example he says:

“The night was calm.

Her bed was warm and soft with contentment.

Yes, it was a great night to be Liesel Meminger, and the calm, the warm, and the soft would last for approximately three more months.

But her story lasts for six.”

Death also gives a fresh perspective on how humans act.

He gives a fresh perspective to our whole world. The way he sees the colors and then the humans, the way he sees us as ugly and beautiful, the way he envies us for having the good sense to die when he hasn’t. He is fascinated by humans, so different than him, and so malicious. But sometimes, he glimpses humans being amazing.

“Each story extraordinary in its own right…each one an attempt-an immense leap of an attempt-to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.”

“She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.”

Another interesting point about Death’s perspective is that he mentions how he takes away the souls of the dead humans. He tells of picking up their limp souls, soft and warm, in his hands, and hearing his footsteps in translucent quiet. He tells about hearing his breath; loud to his ears, and how he doesn’t understand why no one notices him, when he feels as noticeable as a blood curdling scream in a quiet room.

Death is everywhere at once, with his “circular heartbeat”. Death says that his heartbeat is different from ours, because while ours constantly stays the same his is “circular” and enables him to be everywhere at once.

He sees everyone that dies, from Nazi soldiers, to tortured Jews, to victims of bombings, to anyone anywhere.

“It was lucky I was there.

Then again, who am I kidding? I’m in most places at least once, and in 1943, I was just about everywhere.”

The way Death sees it all, he has been the most loyal of any participant in World War II to serve Hitler, throughout the Fuhrer’s reign. He is the one holding those souls, cleaning millions of them out of their bodies and taking them somewhere better. Somewhere with no Fuhrer.

“It’s probably fair to say that in all the years of Hitler’s reign, no one person was able to serve the Fuhrer as loyally as me. A human doesn’t have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time.”

Seeing ourselves from the perspective of something, or someone, so different then us is an out of the ordinary experience. We may not think of ourselves as mysterious, nor find the complicated puzzles that Death sees in us. We don’t seem as inexplicable to each other as Death seems to think we are.

So we come to the last sentences uttered by the narrator of The Book Thief. An interesting ending, the same way he gave us an interesting beginning;

“All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you.”

***A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR***

“I am haunted by humans.”

The book Monster by Walter Dean Myers, is about teenager Steve Harmon who has a gift for screen play writing. He lives in Harlem, New York. Steve is on trial for allegedly being the lookout in a serious crime that involved robbery and murder. In the book, he tried to mollify himself by denying (in his mind and to the jury) his part in the murder. To detach himself from the crime, Steve writes in a journal of his trial in the form of a movie script. Throughout the story, though, Steve slips up, and mentions some points that might lead readers to believe he was part of the crime. Readers will come to see that Steve was guilty.

The first reason leading to the belief in Steve Harmon’s guilt is where Steve says that the moment the murder was committed he was “walking down the street, trying to make his mind a blank screen” (Myers 128). This implies that he may have been involved, and was trying not to remember his participation in the crime.

To add to a reader’s suspicion, in a later chapter Steve claims to the jury that he was not even in the store the day of the robbery. (Myers 223). Another incident worth pointing out is on page 115. This is when Steve says he did, in fact, go into the drug store on the day of the murder and was just “looking around” (Myers 115). Also, on a later page, he says he was “buying mints” (Myers 140) in the store.

The third point is on page 266, where Steve admits he is terrified of his sentence. Throughout the book he tries to convince himself he is innocent, and on page 93 he strongly emphasizes that he is a good person, but he can be a good person and still do a bad thing. If he is innocent then why would he be so afraid of his sentence? It’s normal to be nervous over something so life altering, but if he was really innocent he should at least have some hope that the evidence will match up with his story and show his ingenuousness to the jury.

Steve tries to deny he was at the scene of the crime, yet by his own admission says he was in the store that day. He tries to deny that he knew the time of the murder and where he was then, and he continually changes his story. He continually tries to convince himself of his innocence, and seems to have no faith that if he tells the truth he will be found innocent. In conclusion, even though the jury found Steve Harmon innocent the reader should see he is guilty.

Our lives are unlimited nights and weekends.
Let’s burn down these walls and fall head over heels.
Let’s hold hands and kiss in dark streets.
Let’s live in this night and the writing on our hands.
Let’s laugh until we cry ourselves silly and fall to the floor. Let’s dance until everyone is a blur and we can’t feel anything anymore.
Because we are the children and the city is our playground.
The lights are our caffeine, the feelings are our nicotine.
We are living in the moment, not in the photographs.
We might not remember tomorrow but that’s okay.
The feeling will stay.

Nos vies sont des nuits et des week-ends illimités.
Brûlons vers le bas ces murs et tête de chute au-dessus des talons.
Tenons les mains et le baiser dans des rues foncées.
Vivons dans cette nuit et l’écriture sur nos mains.
Rions jusqu’à ce que nous pleurions nous-mêmes idiot et chute au plancher. Dansons jusqu’à ce que chacun soit une tache floue et nous ne pouvons sentir rien plus.
Puisque nous sommes les enfants et la ville est notre cour de jeu.
Les lumières sont notre caféine, les sentiments sont notre nicotine.
Nous vivons dans le moment, pas dans les photographies.
Nous ne pourrions pas nous rappeler demain mais c’est correct.
Le sentiment restera.
Posted in Uncategorized ]]> http://salutsimone.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/unlimited-nights-and-weekends/feed/ 0 salutsimone http://salutsimone.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/marie-antoinette/ http://salutsimone.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/marie-antoinette/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:20:41 +0000 salutsimone http://salutsimone.wordpress.com/?p=11 ]]> Though Marie Antoinette was faithfully bound by matrimony to King Louis XVI she did have an affair with the young and handsome Count Ferson.
When her child was to be baptized, upon being asked what the child’s name would be the Compte de Provence sardonically replied “Oh, we don’t begin with that. The first thing to find out is who the father and the mother are!”
At that time it wasn’t clear if Ferson cared more for his reputation or for Marie’s, but he promptly joined the troops of Lafayette leaving for America as a logical way to bow out of the Paris scene.
“Had I made a conquest I should not forsake it. I go away free, and, unfortunately, without leaving any regret.” were Count Ferson’s words upon being jeered at by a Parisian duchess questioning why he would forsake a conquest such as the queen of France, to fight for Lafayette.

The question remaining; were they in love? Did they just need to use somebody? Did they just need to know someone wanted them for a little while?

I’m Simone, fourteen, who left her heart in New York City. I’m a fashion enthusiast, horror and history lover, appreciator of good coffee, and daydreamer of whimsical things like pianos, deer, and fluorescent lights.

I’m interested in writing (whether I am payed or not) because I want to try and collect experience and work to show for it, in hopes of gaining future opportunities in the industry.

Please enjoy your tour of my writing. x