July 27th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Here in my car
More often than not, I look back on my experiences as they are colored by music notes and/or popular narratives. While this framework hides emptiness with whimsy, it also allows me to think of myself as an ‘individual’ while paradoxically subscribing to apocrypha. Subsequently, I’ve been trying really hard to arrive at a more legitimate form of romance. It’s hopeless.
I spent a lot of time in cars this weekend.
When I first learned how to drive, I thought of surrounding drivers as members of the same team. I still do inasmuch as observing intricate choreography at strange intersections, but my initial fantasy of fraternizing motorists was obviously a mechanism in making traveling less intimidating. We’re team members until traffic is bisected by fast and slow lanes.
Michael sent me a punk rock playlist so that I could listen to it on my way up to Santa Cruz. After 1.3 hours, the final track “Pushing the Extreme” by Wipers played and I picked up my iPod to scroll down to the next playlist: a top 40 mix I made for myself. I got pulled over for speeding when I was listening to Lady Gaga. That wasn’t very punk rock, you guys. Making up for this incident, I listened to Au Pairs’ Playing With a Different Sex for the next hour. I went back and forth between being excited about seeing my boyfriend and recalling every incident EVER in which I had gotten in trouble. A bus managed to pass me on the high way.
Michael’s car engine starting smoking when we took it uphill in San Francisco. Anxious bystanders pointed at the dangerous looking vehicle. He had an extended conversation with the tow truck driver about language, Atlantis, the Ming Dynasty, and a ragbag of conspiracy theories. There were a lot of sentences prefaced with the words “they say.” The driver told Michael that he should be a politician and repeated his concern for the next generation. I pretended to sleep. “Are you siblings? He’s a smart guy, isn’t he? Nice meeting you, miss.” Then there was wine tasting in Sonoma County and driving back to Santa Cruz in his dad’s Volvo. And other stuff.
I came back home today on congested roads. Music sounded less magical. I almost rear-ended a jeep with a Texan license plate.
July 11th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Housekeeping
Hey bitches! You may have noticed that I cleaned up my layout quite a bit. It’ll change over the next few days once I figure out what I want the header image to be, but I’m already happy with the way things are turning out right now. I also learned some things about WordPress that make my life a lot easier, like that you can have themes based on other themes so that one serves as a template.
My parents bought our cats a new “cat tree” recently, so Igby’s been all over it. I saw an unsuccessful attempt by him to jump from the bottom to the top yesterday. He almost seemed embarrassed when he fell down because he immediately walked in the other direction, but I know that assigning him with a human emotion is relatively foolish. I take too many pictures of him.
Working at UCLA has been good, especially since I only need to go in once or twice a week. It still requires a lot of work at home though. I finished laying out a lesson plan, but I have another one to complete soon as well as two cover designs. I’m just happy that I have another thing to put on my resume. In addition, I’ve been learning far more things about using InDesign than I did when I worked on EyeCandy. (Primarily because I only dealt with a two-page spread in EyeCandy as opposed to a fifty-page booklet.) I impressed my boss the other day with my ability to quickly convert the National Center for History in the Schools logo into a vector object. Nerdery pays off, sometimes.
I’m seeing my friend Elizabeth tomorrow afternoon and then Troy (exboyfriend) in the evening. It’ll be comforting to feel like less of a recluse. There have been things happening in my life lately that haven’t been very conducive to making me feel like a rational human being, at least in terms of intransigence. I don’t know. I never know.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to M.I.A.’s latest album sporadically over the last two days, but not because I think it sounds good. I’m actually really creeped out by it. I talked to my friend James about it and we agreed that “overstimulation” was a good term to assign to 2010. There’s definitely a lot self-parody in MAYA (yeah I’m not even going to bother with the punctuation) that extends beyond the kitschy album art, in that she’s singing about things a lot of musicians loftily push aside. The tracks are an electronic clusterfuck of memes with lyrics that praise the internet, Twitter, texting, and whatever other mediums we as a society have willingly plugged into. I’m still not sure what to make of “Born Free” (and its ginger genocide music video)–I still can’t listen to it without being constantly aware of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” looped in the background–but I thought this blog post on Lady Gaga brought up a lot of interesting points about the inherent hypocrisy of preaching individuality to the masses. To me, the most striking similarity between Lady Gaga and M.I.A. is that they’re both accused of being “edgy” for the sake of creating buzz for themselves, of putting on some crazy front so that we can talk about them all the time, even if it’s just to say that they’re insane. Lady Gaga, however, has a career that very obviously mimics Madonna’s. Inverted crosses and melodramatic performances will probably soon lose their novelty (again). M.I.A., on the other hand, seems to embody all that weird [seemingly omnipresent] self-referencing shit that I sift through when I’m browsing the internet, and sings about detachment as a result of our twinkling gadgets. Which is precisely what leaves me so horrified.
July 8th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
May 27th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Girl, please come closer (do it, do it)
March 20th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
There’s a buzz in my backside
Hey man, I know that I know shit about music. I know that I like ‘experimental post-rock.’ I know that I stood three feet away from Jamie Stewart last night. I know that I felt his sweat, that I saw his pores, and that the fangirl next to me was creaming her pants at the mere thought of being in my place, despite the fact that the dude closes his eyes the entire time just like my morbidly shy German professor. I know that Xiu Xiu probably played way too fucking loud for a venue of that size, that I’m still deaf from the show, and that this paragraph should end soon before my insides turn into artificially scented ‘feminine hygiene product.’ I GOT CHILLS. THEY’RE ELECTRIFYING.
Stuffing myself in the back of a pickup truck and then getting a ride to campus from a (separate) saintly fellow led to a gathering of chemically altered states at an apartment occupied by new and old friends. I am glad to know them. It was comforting to get the jitters again and to reject my previous belief in utter unfeeling. Curmudgeonliness isn’t hip. Misanthropy is something I will inevitably return to, but I’m hoping these words will make their rounds again, that I’ll look at this memory in its less-than-transient glory (thanks, WordPress), and I’ll have some fondness for previous social successes. Feelings are funny things.
This morning was accompanied by (now familiar) wobbliness and apprehension but I resolved the latter by joining ‘old folks.’ BART, Shanghai in the 30s, food of the Vietnamese *and* Indian varieties, man. I’d like to see El Norte through the eyes of juvenile confreres, but I’m not entirely worried about that right now.
February 18th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Charlene Keys
April 13th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
C-c-c-c-c-cocaine
I spend an unhealthy amount of time making playlists. I won’t even burn them onto CDs or listen to them in their entirety after I’ve finished them, but my playlists are serious business. Perhaps I just get a kick out of absurd themes.
For the last few months, I’ve been compiling tracks for my “songs that make me feel like a recovering drug addict” playlist. Unfortunately, iTunes’ Genius feature does not exactly aid me in this endeavor, so I tend to add to the list once I come across music that would work during casual listening. It got a little complicated when I made the decision to include songs that have lyrics that do not necessarily refer to addiction or drugs.
