Myths are public dreams; Dreams are private myths- Joseph Campbell

Oh, goodness gracious. How much fun is this performance project of Joe Lies?! A nice swan song for Chicago, a city where my favorite talented, driven and awesome friends are those who are in functioning bands that build, dissipate and transform with associations, logic and common interest. From the moment I entered Chicago, music, music culture and those relationships that are built of familiarity and support have defined my experience here. Chicago, as it contorts and cries to redefine itself, has a constant.The bands that exist here. Bands require intense relationships. Chicago is a city built on intensity and looking forward to the next step. As I spent nine years traversing the non-profit world of interdisciplinary art and education, relief came with my musician friends who were doing the same thing. And our hours matched, and some gorgeous friendships were made. These friendships were beautiful and consistent enough to make Joe Lies an easy band/ performance project/ silly playground to pursue.

To tie Joe Lies into the body of my work as a performance artist is easy. It is as simple as association, much like the Femme Fatale project. There are clear parallels between the two. The femme fatale project put an archetype from a clear genre of horror into a human atmosphere, showcasing ritual, isolation, humor and scrutiny. Joe Lies takes that a step further- still playing with the archetype of a powerful and influential woman- this time taken from a silly 80's film(Say Anything)- and offering the next step. We are a band. We play out. We need to build an audience. It is a play on the pop culture and influence with which I am familiar, clearly, and an association with which I could easily find my musician friends to jump and say, "Yes! Let's play! That's fucking funny." And we can play, make obscure references, have much fun, and build. What a treat to simply to build and explore because we find a common joke and association amusing. Sometimes, there is nothing more simple nor pure than just that. So, with the grace of this, the play has been wonderful and fun.

This is the point of both the Femme Fatale project and Joe Lies. They are both exaggerated character studies of an archetype put in a painfully pedestrian frame. While the Femme Fatale Project focused on isolation, Joe Lies teases and offers isolation as an impetus to build association and community. Lyrics are literally pulled from journals of real circumstance and played with in presentation. We play as a band. and we play with a real relationship of a band, hopefully, joyfully, and based on our comfort, practice and kinship. We are a relationship. As every band is. As every association is. As every tortured journal entry that we discover and explore promises to be. We have a goal, set by an archetype, to fulfill. Brilliance and ridiculousness will ensue. And that is what it is. Hilarious, uncertain, honest, and done when it is done. The relationship remains. And we have 63 songs. All about pain. All about you.

As read at CHIRP Radio(Chicago's Independent Radio Project- www. chirpradio.org) inaugural "The First Time Series" on April 28th, 2010. Originally, this had been posted after the event. However, the format was skewed...So, here it is again. Tying virginity to music... One in a Million is One More Than Me, by Karen Louis and great humility

From Wikipedia:

A virgin (or maiden) originally meant a woman who has never had sexual intercourse. Virginity is the state of being a virgin. It is derived from the Latin virgo, which means "sexually inexperienced woman", but also of older women, and even goddesses.[citation needed]

…another association of virginity—the notability of its loss. More properly, the association is with the significance of the addition of a new status, rather than a loss. Hence this association is typically found in references to the first instance of a potentially extended series of like events.

I’m a virgo. Virginity is my schtick. I like definitions. I can’t think about virginity, and the loss thereof, without associating when I recognized that it would be lost, at some point. And that I would, barring any unintentional traumatic theft, choose the loss of said virginity. I wanted it to be such a cool distraction. I wanted the idea to be musical, a journey of slides, steps and images made interesting by unexpected refrains that repeat and hook. And this was the late 80’s/early ‘90’s so you had this information: be safe, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to suck, protect yourself, oh, and by the way…you might die. Or get pregnant. And teenage pregnancy, by the way, is the equivalent of killing your youth. And the world, by the way, might collide, your heart, by the way, might break, and you may, by the way, fall in love and get married. So design your life now, before you know what it is, or how it can be taken from you or given to you! Because, no matter what, it’s all your fault, so question your desires. Virginity is supposed to be a big fucking deal. Boo. No fun. What a bother that would happen some day, at some point. So, I chose music over sex. It was an innocent choice, and much more fun. And music is always awash with love and clashing and things more interesting to me at a young age than an awkward experience that promises nothing more than a new status. An uncomfortable story to share in front of a room full of strangers. And a microphone.. If the loss of virginity was going to be such a chore, I wanted to decorate it. I wanted to be a muse, of sorts, so I searched music.

This is when I found Michael Penn. These are his muses(Law and order Dong dong)

A woman of common majesty. A waitress. A motorist. A nurse. An angel lost in a pedestrian eternity. A Dorothy Lamour who beats her reputation and circumstance by smiling quizzically, raising a brow. accepting the world and walking away, believing in her own disbelief. Beauty lives on the outskirts of action, watching and documenting in each peel of an orange, each heave of a metaphor, and therefore becomes the action. She is constantly out of reach and under skin. She can neither be caught, nor escaped. Her power is her placement in life and the luck that she is gracing the presence of a sensitive marksman in her public bower.


In the hey-day of the early ‘90’s we were inundated with the pull of fascination in explicit lyric warning labels, an age of legality to buy cigarettes and alcohol, and other vices that are less addictive than the tortured poet claiming the desire of pining over the purity of lost causes and undetermined hope wrapped in a world-wise woman rolling her eyes and waiting for her shift to end, her car to arrive, her ship to sail, only to turn and find you standing in hopeful anticipation, humming a catchy refrain and holding her bag that she had left three cities behind. Fuck you, Michael Penn. Fuck me. I was smitten. He was one in a million. Everyone was a muse. That’s what I wanted to be and to find.

I studied.

I had lots of boyfriends in high school, although I never recognized them as such. The boys I dated were muses themselves, of their own making, The sweet, kind, caring , enigmatic and Morrissey obsessed best friends who eventually came out of the closet with their very supportive best girl beside them(points to self), cheering them on and moving forward. If we ever really dated, or just experienced the world for a moment didn’t matter. I was the “last beautiful girlfriend.” We had awesome relationships, just not the kind that ended in sex.

Then there was the DJ playboy from Akron, who thought he looked like Morrissey, but was closer to Vanilla Ice, and would play songs for me at Thunders on Alternative night, talk on the phone for hours, and dedicate sets to me on the radio, but our physical intimacy would end at kissing , picnics, stories and my trusty friend Kim who would test the waters of his loyalty by telling him that I was a virgin, and she was not, then reveal that she pierces her body for each boy she has fucked while tucking her hair behind both of her ears that were decorated to capacity.

I brought Kim along to all of the punk shows in Cleveland, as well. She liked to fuck. I liked to fall in clandestined love with random strangers. We had a symbiotic relationship, I suppose. I was the one. She was the million. Or she was the one, I was the million.

I went to college a virgin, without Kim and her piercings. I fell in love my very first day, as I was prone to do, with an angst ridden boy in horn-rimmed glasses who didn’t seem to notice anything more than the disturbance settled around his brow and the Fugazi he blasted from his stereo. As I bounded up the stairs in a blonde glee, I knew we’d destroy each other in the end. I’d make him play with happiness as he brought misery to my blue-eyed plate. That was how college love was supposed to work, right? Knew it in an instant, as his doting and tall friend carefully moved his guitars. I was smitten, bounding and infatuated in the way we would one day meet and discover how our polar opposite muse-ridden teenage identities would clash. I was nearly 18.

I met his tall friend first. He was awkward and smarter than everyone. A comic book artist, a musician, an actor, an enigma wrapped up in Tim Finn hair and a nickname taken from Dune. I assumed he was gay when he asked me out, after watching me swing my sweater in boredom during a blocking rehearsal for a play we were in together. He made a terrible excuse of it. He told me that his friend(angst boy) had backed out of seeing a show, and that he found me amusing. So, I bit. Protected. Happy to be in the atmosphere of this world I admired. One step closer to the angst boy, and two steps closer to finding friends.

We went on our convenient date. We went back to his room, where friends who would become mine, sat around as he played guitar and smoked and he broke out into Michael Penn. My grin and comfort pricked as I admired his sculpture of cigarette butts in his industrial sized ashtray, and the comics he had drawn lining the molding of his 5’ x 10’ single dorm room. I was in love with everything. All of the clichés fit. Friends left, and he put his guitar away, put Michael in the Cd player and kissed me, and I began to laugh as Michael Penn sang, “She said she always pegged me as gay.” I told him that I had done the same, and he was encouraged. I took Kim’s role to tell him I was a virgin. And then we had sex. And it was appropriately awkward. A surprise, but not a mistake. Afterwards, he told me he loved me, and I politely dismissed it. The Michael Penn muse doesn’t fall for false, though sweet, proclamations of love. I had a walk of shame to enjoy with a wistful gait. Drama would ensue later, when I dated his angst ridden friend, and we appropriately destroyed each other, as fortold, but by that time, I had mused myself into a new status; Leonard Cohen back-up singer, something that can’t be done as a virgin.