I’m supposed to remind you of who these two gals are before we get into Part II of the interview. For Part I, I called them little girls who could be dead five different ways before they’re 21 but (I believed) all this self-immolation is just misdirected genius (my opinion)
Photos of Melissa (left) and Pumpkin by Keith Newell
I’m supposed to remind you of who these two gals are before we get into Part II of the interview. For Part I, I called them little girls who could be dead five different ways before they’re 21 but (I believed) all this self-immolation is just misdirected genius (my opinion) and (I proclaimed) I believe in art, and the girls promised they’d put up a short film and song on SBTVC by the time Part II came out, and I believed them.
Then you guys laid into them for being not crazy enough and “yaaaaaaaawn”, and Mel laid into me for I guess (I don’t really understand what she’s saying, maybe I got it wrong) exploiting them for being degenerates while I make all this money and fame. Pumpkin still wanted to do stuff, but Mel has the equipment, and nothing happened. My idealism has been dealt a blow.
When I was young and a mess, like any decent young person, I enjoyed all fights. But there wasn’t much of an internet back then. There wasn’t this anonymous crowd to gang-rape people’s worth so easily and instantly, like a giant phantom foot coming down on a nest of loud baby birds. People had to write letters and pay for the stamp to insult you back then, or else say it to your face. I got in fights and stuff. Well, I’d take a swing, miss, and run away. These girls didn’t get that chance. They just got crushed. What a shame.
PUMPKIN: Did I show you this knife? I got this off a sketchy Moroccan. I love me a sketchy Moroccan. Double edged. Isn’t it cool?
LISA: That’s beautiful. And you know how to twirl it.
PUMPKIN: Kind of. Enough so I don’t end up slipping and stabbing you. That would be bad. You’d disembowel me and make too much of a mess in Mel’s room.
LISA: Do you have any diagnoses besides panic disorder?
PUMPKIN: Um… well, agoraphobia. Fear of the market place. I also have PTSD. I’ve never really gotten a clear diagnosis. I have depression, they don’t know what kind. I never really lived at home since I was 13.
LISA: And you guys want to make music and film.
PUMPKIN: I always want to.
MELISSA: Adam Ant had bipolar disorder, Amy Winehouse. Everyone who makes significant art, even if they’re not straight out of the DSM, they have some kind of fuck-up.
LISA: You were supposed to film yesterday, but you went to Taco Bell instead. What happened?
PUMPKIN: I hadn’t eaten in four days. But I was more interested in laying down tracks anyway. I sang at the wrong octave because I was drinking wine. I should have been drinking coffee. I’m lactose intolerant, so milk coats my throat. Skim milk would do it just enough that I could sing that song at the right octave.
LISA: How do you know about octaves?
PUMPKIN: I’ve been in piano since I was four.
MELISSA: Pumpkin does not like punk.
PUMPKIN: Hate punk.
MELISSA: And I have the encyclopedia of punk.
PUMPKIN: I like country. Cunt tree.
MELISSA: I sang in church choirs and school chorus. And I was always making up crazy songs. These scene kids at school with swooshy hair and tight pants would always make their songs and be like, “Radiohead is the best band that was ever invented.” Thom York scares the fuck out of me, with that one eye. He’s like, “I’m a creep.” I’m like, “Yeah, you are!” The scene kids like record and engineer their stuff, and I offered to pay them fifty bucks to record me and Pumpkin, but I guess they were too busy shopping at Urban Outfitters and growing ironic mustaches.
PUMPKIN: If I go to Allston, they’re there.
MELISSA: Yes. And they love their house parties.
PUMPKIN: I went to one once. I was all about the Ecstasy, man. I was 14. And this guy Steve told me that because vodka was clear, it would rehydrate me. Then the cops came and broke it up.
MELISSA: This German girl Charlotte in Somerville, her roommates had a hipster party and then the cops showed up. This was me trying to be polite: I swallowed my vomit down at least five times. I was in her bed, and I thought, ‘If I stay still enough, they’ll think I’m her girlfriend and won’t kick me out.’ And it worked. Everyone made a big deal of how drunk I was, calling me Rummy. Being drunk is not the worst thing in the world. It’s actually probably one of the best things.
LISA: You guys need to make more movies with your time.
PUMPKIN: I can’t remember my lines.
LISA: Make avante garde films.
PUMPKIN: What does avante garde mean?
LISA: Means don’t need to remember your lines.
PUMPKIN: Someday I want to be a model, but I’m not skinny enough.
LISA: You’re too short to be a regular model, but you could be a–
PUMPKIN: I couldn’t be a full-figured model either, because I got double-A’s.
MELISSA: Fetish model.
LISA: No. The ones with the cherries and the cars…
PUMPKIN: Pin-up?
LISA: I could see you in cherries and cars, happy.
PUMPKIN: I want to get down to 87 pounds. I pretty much live off coffee and the occasional carrot. We go through three pots of coffee a day. Pretty disgusting. And I can’t even clean that area up in a day… the coffee area. I get too dizzy.
LISA: Eat!
PUMPKIN: You’re skinny. Do you eat?
LISA: Like a monkey. You get a disgusting body if you don’t eat… poofy stomach, fur.
MELISSA: I have this friend Cat, she goes by the name Catherine Cheeks because she has a really big ass. It’s not like she’s huge and her ass is huge. It’s just her ass. It’s perfect. Well, she’s half hispanic.
PUMPKIN: Just this half.
MELISSA: But Cat says it’s from butt sex with her boyfriend. You know the cliche you’re gonna break the headboard? Well, they BROKE the headboard. Had to take apart her bed. My tattoo says Little One or Tiny Thing in yiddish. Because I LOVE JEWS. Seriously.
PUMPKIN: Jews can’t get tattoos. My best friend Emma, she’s Jewish, and she got a tattoo: Librex, which means books or whatever. Now she can’t be buried in a Jewish grave. I love Jews. Jews are my favorite.
MELISSA: I love Jews, but this one time I was off my meds and I threw orange peels at my psychiatrist and I called her a psy-kike-atrist.
this is crap.
lol, psy-kike-atrist.
how’d the one from jem and the holograms get a knife?
lisa carver is basically dina lohan tossing her damaged daughters on the rough streets of this site and then tsk-tsking commenters for doing what they always do.
methinks lisa carver likes dangling her little pets in front of the hungry wolves a great deal. “quelle horreur!” she announces with labia a’twitching in delight.
now THAT is more psycho than anything else these two women could come up with on film or otherwise.
dont complain about the trashing in the comments, if you were a real ethnologist doing real research it would be the same except the comments about you exploiting them would be in a journal and 2 pages long and probably have more capital letters
“self immolation” is when you light yourself on fire
i liked these articles though and i hope they get around to making something for the site
a lot of people on these comment board things REALLY like playing Devil’s Advocate and searching deep to find and expose any trace of conspiracy and negativity (real, or imagined)that they can, but everyone is entitled to an opinion.
to say that Lisa is exploiting these two is one opinion. every magazine exploits the people it interviews to get readership and to make money. the only reason people see it as bad in this case is because the subjects are two sick young women in a psych ward who have been through things that a lot of people couldn’t even comprehend. still, they seem fit to consent, and they seem to be enjoying themselves, so i don’t see how this exploitation reflects more poorly on Lisa than someone interviewing Scarlett Johanssen for Cosmo. it’s just s different scene. at least Lisa can relate and seems to genuinely care.
it’s pretty weak and immature to just come on here and trash the girls, the way people were doing in the comments section of the first interview. they’re just trying to get by, like everyone else. if you don’t like the magazine, skip it,trash it, whatever… but don’t anonymously bully teenagers with emotional problems. that’s just so…crude. i don’t see the joy in it.
that being said, i am bummed that you girls (P&M) didn’t produce. i was really curious about it!
Where’s my gad dang movie???? Let’s see some tits.
oh and Pumpkin!! you should check out Nina Hagen if you don’t already know who she is. her old stuff-not the later stuff! your style kind of reminds me of her (compliment) and she’s a punk artist who really sings and did a lot of cool shit with her voice.
To spell it from my mind would be “Sigh-Kike-a-Tryst”. Otherwise, a welcome follow-up and/or continuation from the first article. The wolves are everywhere and feed on anything. However, it seems to me that the Internet based feeders are powerless for the most part. I heard a conversation once at the Gym about one man receiving threats of physical violence and invitations to fight via text messaging. He went over to the textors house and knocked on the door after seeing his car in the driveway. The roommate answered the door and said he wasn’t there. The textee left and as he was pulling around the corner the textor sends him another message saying to come back and fight him. The textee went back to the duplex again and pounded on the door. The roommate came down again and said the textor wasn’t there. The textee grabbed him by the throat and the textor’s roommate gurgled that the textor was upstairs.
The end result? The textor lost some teeth that night.
The moral? I don’t believe there is one. Most people simply do not learn from the mistakes of others or fail to substantially live in the real (non-Internet) world. Either by denial or delusions of grandeur. I believe the motto for the 4Chan group called “Anonymous” is Because none of us is as cruel as all of us” (or something similar). I prefer to live in the real world, but that group lessens with each newly born American.
I love Lisa & Pumpkin & Melissa & the Jews.
OMG this gives me such a boner.
yes, allston loves its house parties.
where would you rather i drink my beer in boston, bitch?
today i met a man with wire rimmed glasses, a greying beard, black shoes, and a purple sweatshirt.
i’m trying to decide if i want to have sex.
(with these two)
(at the same time)
this post offends me, the comments offend me, fuck the chinese!
thanks again, Lisa. Pumpkin & Melissa – screw what the assholes here are saying. You should be working on projects together! Maybe not to post here but just in general. You girls are definitely amazing in your own way, and I don’t think Lisa was being exploitative in choosing you to interview… I am sure she was just as fascinated as everyone who left positive comments was… Anyways, assuming this may be the last we hear from you publicly, good luck in ALL future endeavors… and thanks for sharing a little bit of yourselves here!
I love these, and I don’t say this often, but: fuck the haters.
RE:snowboard with tits
I AGREE, fuck the chinese….no seriously, i may love jews, but i seriously hate gooks with a passion…when i see a group of them together i point and yell “gaggle of gooks”
and im gonna start working on music asap, Melissa doesnt seem to want to anymore, sad but this is what i gather from what lisa has been telling me…
i appreiciate both positive and very negitive feedback so keep em coming.
It seems these young women enjoy attention (we all do!) but when someone finally says, “OK, I’m watching,” they become paralyzed. Fragmented genius, or even little sparks of smart, spring up chaotically but shrink before a direct task. I think they’re neat girls full of unformed energy.
do your thing ladies. don’t listen to a bunch of crusty wankers wallowing in their own arse-sweat in front of their computers. godspeed to you both!
Viva, Lisa! You are not a Lohan. You are unique and smarter than most people. People think they can get off on clever putdowns — they’re so full of shit and their metaphors are belabored and out for shock value — ooh, they know the word “labia”! I hope they get lost in a youtube hole and don’t come out.
suggestion……why not turn this into a series of video interviews.
i mean, sure they are supposed to be “Crazy” or fucked up, or whatever. The crazy only partially exists in the text, like does Pumpkin get hyper-excited about certain ideas or does Mellisa stare you down in the most intense ways? Seriously consider it, and if you decide to film it, do it in AT LEAST 720p and not some bullshit low-fi shit.
these girls are hilarious. I would gladly see a series of their crazy bullshit over 12 neat pics
I would put that knife to Pumpkins throat while I choke fucked her. And she would love it. Yeah.
pumpkin, lactose intolerance means you fart and get the shits when you drink milk or eat cheese. it has nothing to do with the throat. just so you’ll know..
What? What year is this? People are shocked at some mild comment-trolling? You know that this site is run by Vice ex-pats right? And that its primary purpose is to make fun of people?
It’s called Street Carnage. What “carnage” do you think it refers to?
Frankly, I was amazed at how kind these comments were. AMAZED.
I enjoyed both articles. I find these girls both charming and entertaining. Admittedly, some of that entertainment is prurient in nature. Pretty much par for the course for the Vice Family of Badass Entertainment. Not mean, but not nice either. Right?
This is the best part: “I offered to pay them fifty bucks to record me and Pumpkin, but I guess they were too busy shopping at Urban Outfitters and growing ironic mustaches.”
RE: mel (another one)
yes i know that whole lactose intollerance thing, and i usually stay FAR away from dairy….but milk does something to the mucus in your throat, and i know this is a fact….damn i had a link but i cant find it…it would be better explained if i had said link…i cant seem to find anything these days…correct grammar, spelling, what day it is…where i left my fucking space bag and my Mega-T, my name, my pills…i am ….mess
I am not gonna read this – i did read the frist part and meh, crazy girls are great fun tho.
I could listen to these girls for hours. Make them sing songs.
What a surprise, crazy people are just as mediocre and boring as everyone else. Got any other brilliant theories to test out? Save ‘em
“Mel has all the equipment”. Really? I thought I had a shitty laptop that has the “Sound Recorder” program that comes with pretty much every computer that has Windows. Try the start menu, then “accessories”, then “sound recorder”. And please don’t act like this was ever about “music” or “art” or anything like that. That’s mildy insulting.
And you heard the songs we actually managed to record. There was just no mention of them in the article. Okay, you said “their first song.” Sorry. My bad.
Also, since you “really didn’t understand” what I meant, here is the exact message I sent you. We can all figure it out together and track my excitement to disappointment:
“Yeah, I’m handing my nuts over and bitching out. We degenerates are fickle like that. And that’s a direct quote.”
“I already have the link to this. i may have gotten the joke late but at least i got it. hahaha” The LOLs were sarcasm but there’s no specific font for that. Yet.
And I don’t do things like get in fights because as lame as this sounds, I don’t believe that violence solves things, especially the shit women tend to fight about *ahemfemalerelationalagression*. Having been beaten like a redheaded stepchild living with my uncle, why would I inflict that on someone else? So again, my apologies for not being “tough enough.”
Also, I don’t recall saying you were “getting rich and famous” for anything. I said that your life is “settled”. And let me clarify: do you have to monitor your actions and words in fear that you will be put into a hospital against your will? Has anyone ever said they’re going to “go crazy like you” to get some money and/or subsidized housing? Were you cockblocked from going to college last fall because the financial aid you filled out didn’t come through to pay for your courses because you messed up on the FASFA when you filled it out in the hospital with no help from anyone?
And yes, it does get to me when moral defunct cuntsicles say things about wanting to fuck my friend while holding a knife to her neck. But now, I am letting this go. You can’t please everybody and I’m not looking to. What am I supposed to do? Mail everybody who comments (which, you guys are totally badass because you used your names and everything! Who invited the cool kids? HIGH FUCKING FIVE!)a giant stack of papers on my psychosocial history? So, to whomever: you can make light of the fact that I deal with an illness but ultimately, none of them are paying the co-pays on my meds, or doing anything for me in general.
My ego got the best of me (I mean, the guy who founded VICE called me “inspiring?” OMFG!!!) and I was really excited to be interviewed for something. But now it’s just a waste of bandwith to me now. And yes,Lisa, I know it can’t be taken down and this isn’t your site or blahblahwhatevercakes but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel disappointed. In that article and now, in you.
Now I feel like I have to listen to “Heart of City”. Deuces.
PS I sent an email to become a contributor to the site. But before I get a response, I have to know: is that irony?
@ uh: I concur. In more ways than you think.
@ Penny Fine: I’m following your blog now so let’s be interwebs besties.
@ harbinger: I am not dissing Allston house parties. They are the shit. Let’s make plans to drink there sometime. being that I am a “little girl who eats pills instead of food” I’m not enough to by booze.
@ Ed Lister: That is some kinda fantasy and I use “fantasy” not in the sexual sense but almost to connotate “delusion”. She carries that knife for protection. But if you’re into castration, death, and disembowelment…
@ Sir Fagsalot: Someone already made that observation so you just lost cool points (I believe it was “Lynda Barry”…unfortunately, probably not the real one). And funny how people call us “crazy”. The only person described as “crazy” in Part I (and yes, I used a Roman numeral because this is like some twisted, convoluted Lord of the Rings shit) is “Crazy Larry”.
@ Pumpkin: I’m just now realizing that my bedazzled scepter wouldn’t save me from getting shanked. I need to upgrade weapons-wise.
@ Matt Jasper: If you change “make” to “ask”, I might consider it. Imperative verbs are not my friend and they shouldn’t be yours.
@ thich quang duc: I think she was being “metaphorical”, but right on the money. Like Polly in “Girl, Interrupted”. Or protestors.
@ zlur: don’t waste your time. Read a book, instead. I am starting “A Confederacy of Dunces” again after a very long hiatus.
@ Swansoncide: I read Street Carnage regularly (as I told Lisa when she told me this is where the interview would run) for “Ask Barf” by Lesley Arfin so I am familiar with this site. And just in general, how Internet comments go.
@ Ghost of Claude Levi-Strauss: are you the guy who makes the pants? I have several pairs. Thanks.
@JuCIFER: Tits are unlikely. But I will give you the speculum from my next pelvic exam. Promise.
@ Miss Daphne: It’s not like there are no recordings or anything. They’re on my computer…sorry “recording equipment in the studio” because I’m such a bitch and I’m hogging everything. Even with a half-cracked screen I found a way to make my webcam work. I was ready to roll but I was only 50% of the operation. And then I had the idea to throw together some pics and make a cheap Windows Movie Maker movie with our cover of “Lua” playing as the music. It could still be done but as this article states, I am a fickle, cheap bitch and I’m hogging the equipment.
@ Anonymous: Think of a clever name and get back to me.
pumpkin died last summer of a heroin overdose.