The Party Scene, A Special Education

It's odd, I'll admit. I was never a big fan of the Smashing Pumpkins when they first came out. More neutral than anything else. However, one night back in 1997 I came home from a late night working in the parking lot and this video was on. I immediately sat down and wrote "Labellypock", my first short story in a long, long time. It wasn't meant to describe what happens in the video, it's just there was a lot of overlap between what I saw, and what I had experienced with my friends in junior high and high school. Set in pre-boom Calgary, with most of the city still mired in recession, "Labellypock" was about a kind of fin-de-siecle party featuring the "naked and the bored". It ended up winning me a small writing contest in university.

Fourteen years later, this video is still as evocative for me. The excerpt from A Special Education that I posted awhile back, which features it's own take on my early nineties party scene, once again leaned on the Smashing Pumpkins to help unlock those memories and experiences.