“Why?” the guy said, always the contrarian. “Because they’re pretty,” I retorted, punctuated by the flash of the camera. He didn’t argue with that. Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan looked good up close, with sweet little blond stubble decorating his chin and lip and a brown Fila cap protecting his shaved head. I caught him in the lobby of the Rubin Museum of Art surrounded by admiring fans.
Everyone in the audience had run out that soggy afternoon to watch the Pumpkinhead be analyzed by Jungian psychoanalyst Morgan Stebbins, a smart dude but no badass rocker. He was the enabler who guided Corgan into an extended monologue using one of Carl Jung’s Red Book folios as a springboard. The Red Book, nicknamed the “holy grail of the unconscious,” is Jung’s hand-written, illustrated manuscript that was locked up for 23 years inside a safe deposit box in an underground vault in Switzerland and is now on display in the basement of the Rubin (the former Barneys in Chelsea). Apparently Jung’s heirs didn’t want anyone reading the Swiss psychiatrist’s fantasies about traveling the land of the dead, falling in love with his sister, getting squeezed by a serpent and eating the liver of a child.
Perfect fodder for Corgan, who admits to a “punk rock” relationship with God and who, on 9/9/09, launched www.everythingfromheretothere.com, his blog on mind-body-soul integration. Seated on a stage with Stebbins, Corgan spoke about the travails of being a famous performer in a digital age.
“In the words of Thoreau, I live a life of public—rather than quiet—desperation,” he said, referring to the intense love and hate he inspires. “Why do I engender such intense feelings? Even when I was 5 years old, adults would pull my mother aside and ask her to get me to stop staring at them,” he recalled.
Corgan’s life has been an ongoing quest to find his creative voice. “Who am I?” he asked. When his band split up and he was having relationship issues, he wrote Blinking With Fists, a book of poetry. “I put it out innocently and it sold, and they said, who are you, you’re not a poet, your poetry rhymes. But Oscar Wilde’s poetry rhymes and Yeats’ poetry rhymes, and they’re poets,” Corgan said. He has no time for naysayers: “What do you do if your friends like the old you? You’re attacking me so vigorously you don’t have a life yourself,” he said.
Towering over Stebbins, his slacks, sweater, and scarf matching the earthy décor of the room, Corgan announced proudly, “Most people try to accomplish their dreams. I did it.”
