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Hunter's Kiss
Rasputina
Cabin Fever
2002

♥: Well, I can't talk about Buffy without talking about Rasputina -- and I can't talk about either without talking about Veronica.

People look at my sister & I and seem surprised, almost confused, at our relationship. Sure, sisters are supposed to love each other, but what V & I have can't quite be called sisterly love. We don't judge. We don't compete. We don't fight. We have what might as well be a secret language (complete with a dozen weird pet names). I tell her everything; she knows everything. Veronica is the other half of my heart: I would take a bullet for her without thinking. Like any lifelong relationship, ours has many facets -- but one of the strongest, one of the most important, is watching TV -- because, for both of us, TV is so much more than entertainment.

Shuffle back a few years. 2004-ish. Both of us are still living in Rigaud; I'm in my second semester of cegep and V is in gr.7. We spend our evenings watching Space, and there's this show Buffy the Vampire Slayer which airs every evening at 6. Our father has told us several times that it is brilliant and metaphorical and we should watch it; I am 17 and rebelling against anything I deem remotely pop cultural (while still rocking out to terrible pop songs; teenagers are exercizes in contradiction). "That show is stupid," I remember saying to him, "We're never going to watch it."

Except: one night, while waiting for another show to start, V & I catch the tail end of the credits. You know, the hand-sketched monster -- "Grr, argh!" hahahahahaha what that's so ridiculous let's maybe tune in a bit earlier tomorrow. And the day after, a bit earlier than that. And so on, until every evening at 6, V & I were excitedly settling in for our daily dose of Buffy.


Now, I love Buffy -- the character interaction, the plots, the jokes, Giles and Anya and Spike -- but what I really love about this show is how much Veronica loves it. I had SG-1 to get me through high school -- V had Buffy. And when I look at her now -- the creative, mature, vibrant woman she's become -- I see a lot of that show in her. Buffy's strength, Willow's kindness, Xander's loyalty, Giles' low tolerance for bullshit, Joss' sense of humour. I love Buffy because it reminds me of how much I love my sister.

There's an episode in season 2 where Drusilla claps her hands and calls for "Music!", and a song called "Transylvanian Concubine" by a band called Rasputina starts playing. I just remember Veronica telling me she needed this song; I needed to download it for her. This song began an obsession that parallels mine with David Bowie: Rasputina is Veronica's band. When we saw them live, together, in New York City in July '10, it was one of the most amazing nights of my life. She and I just inches from Melora Creager's cello, giddy; wandering the streets of Greenwich Village afterwards, blissful.


I couldn't share Rasputina's particular, unique brand of cello rock -- Melora's crooning, whining, and brilliant lyrics -- the overall feeling of beautiful dissonance -- without V's input. So, I narrowed Rasputina's extensive catalogue down to three songs and told her to pick one for this post. I had one in mind, but if this was going to be a song dedicated to my sister, it had to be one she chose.
In testament to how fundamentally we're on the same wavelength, I think, she picked exactly the one I'd wanted to share with you.


So: in honour of Veronica, of Buffy, of strong relationships and strong women and seriously weird, seriously brilliant cello rock ------
a "Hunter's Kiss."