SLACK'D

Back in 2003, I was living at home, wearing purple eyeliner to my boring service industry job and spending most of my time collaging. I had a fresh driver's license and the thrill of rolling around in my mom's car at night listening to the Raveonettes and using her Hollywood Video rental card to check out Marlon Brando movies was unparalleled. The guy at the counter was a plump ginger with a long ponytail under his Hollywood Video-issued baseball hat who I suspected had a crush on me since I was the only teen coming in without my kid and buying the king size pack of jujufruits. I ignored his halting glances since I didn't really start talking to boys until I was about 20, even ones I had no interest in.
One day, I checked out Slacker, because the case looked weird and I had just recently discovered that I was cooler than anyone I knew, having been educated at a prep school in which my peers' interests ranged from the fall j. crew catalog to the spring j. crew catalog. I got home, popped in the VHS (earnestly) and got to work stenciling "London Calling" lyrics onto t-shirts I'd just picked up at the Gap on sale for $9.99.
Slacker was weird, I couldn't really make sense of the characters and the lack of plot line got lost in my intense stenciling session-- I later moved onto Bowie lyrics.
Eight (!!!!11) years later, my life is eerily (depressingly?) similar to that of my eighteen year old self. The only element that's different today from the scene described above is that I use my mom's Netflix account. And I know how to talk to boys now, but that's a different story entirely. Tonight as I was sitting around making record cover journals, feeling inexplicably attracted to Ted Nugent, I decided to scroll through the Netflix collection, and Slacker caught my eye once again.
The film that I watched tonight, of course, is the same as the VHS I rented a thousand beers ago, but oh how my perception of it has changed. What once seemed like dreamy esoterica has since become the soundtrack to my own life; the characters, once just that, are now people I have met over and over, comprising my own anchor to post-collegiate reality. While I was completely engrossed in the film and finding myself in conversation with these people, a thought entered into my head: Is this movie making fun of us? Is Richard Linklater looking at 20-somethings who sit around drinking beer, talking about their lives and the world, politics and their relationships, with their friends and roommates and strangers, and deeming it all a waste of time? The film is called Slacker. Is the film's thesis that we're aimless, rootless, wasting our time and our potential to fulfill that great American myth of "making something of ourselves"?

As anyone with a hundred thousand dollar degree in Why The World Sucks and a barista job to prove it knows, "Our Generation" is the topic of a thousand porch/bar/breakfast PBR 30-packs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "slacker" as "a person regarded as one of a large group or generation of young people (especially in the early to mid 1990s) characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition". They may have to alter the era included in their definition. Is it not "Our Generation," the children of those hardworking model Americans, the baby boomers, that has been called out on a hilariously frequent number of occasions by the New York Times for being lazy, ego-driven, sext-crazed narcissists? Slackers, in the truest sense of the word? Intra-generational hand wringing abounds at the NYT as their op-ed columnists tell us to stay out of restaurants and save our money. In preparation for footing the bill for "Their Generation's" gross mistakes, of course.

Every conversation over porch beers at noon on a Tuesday illicits the same conclusion: we're not unmotivated, the ones pushing papers and paying their bills are. We're the ones who are looking for something more, the ones who refuse to settle for what we've been given. We're taking the path of least resistance, fighting with ourselves and everyone else for answers instead of with the TV over Dancing With the Stars.


And it turns out Linklater agrees: “Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.”



Slack on, "our generation."


also posted at l337blog.

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for those of you following along from home, new things concerning matters of the heart have been posted here.

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New stuff here!!!

Hot New Tunes!!!!!!1 (tm) Vol 1

miss u the rapture! photo from christiannation.com

Hey Friends,
You've come to rely on Remix Mountain for cutting-edge, up-to the minute music reporting, so I thought I'd let you know about some cool new bands. I'm just gonna shuffle up some tracks and tastemake away.



The Rapture:
I hate to have to ask this, but what ever happened to these guys? I remember back in 2003, the British press was all over them (At the time, I was in the UK on a prestigious Sub Pop internship to study the effect of American buzz bands in the British market/psyche). Think they rolled right off the tail end of the first "The" bands, like The Strokes, and then they didn't do anything else? Sounds like Brooklyn and maybe that doesn't translate elsewhere, besides the UK. They also came up before the internet became peoples' main source for air, food and music news/videos/album leaks, so they probably missed some important hype and couldn't really establish a strong blog presence, and now they're "old." Wonder what they're doing now? Probably interning at Moma. Whatever, "House of Jealous Lovers" still sounds awesome and will make you long for the days when New York seemed "cool" rather than where all your friends from high school moved after college to get crappy jobs, have their parents pay their rent, and do coke in the bathroom of tacky,overpriced bars with tacky, overpaid dudes and broads.
Verdict: Sorry, bros.

Plants And Animals/Parc Avenue
This came out about 16 months ago and should be called "Riding the Canadian indie-world domination wave." Their With/Avec EP is better. Just Sayin. But seriously, Plants and Animals are very good.
Verdict: Canada is awesome!

Patsy Cline:
I think she is some post-ironic singer songwriter trying to appeal to our appreciation of authenticity. It works.


Ruby Suns:
Yes. Seriously. Just check them out. They're American but moved to New Zealand. I don't want to say anything else and ruin it. You will not regret this.

Passion Pit:
New Genre Alert: Mediocore.
Just listened to this "band" for the first time and couldn't help but get really angry. First of all, they're from Boston, which is one rung lower than Philadelphia on the list of East Coast Cities That Aren't New York. I know 19 year olds who think that they "get it" because they "shop at American Apparel" and aren't actually that self-aware but they have just completed their first year of college/done drugs/know to how appeal to the opposite sex have elected this group of bearded young white men as the flavor du season, but they sound like a pretty blatantly watered-down American version of Justice, that you can dance to and also experience valid emotion to while hanging with your friends and maybe making out with your crush before breaking up over txt msg. I like that about this kind of music, but I get sad when I think about what they'll be doing in five years. Probably in worse shape than The Rapture.
There are about 20 other bands who are doing this exact thing, have also appeared in Nylon Magazine for 14-year-old aspiring vapid "fashion photographers"/drug trade supporters, and they're all pouring Amstel Light for their high school classmates in their hometown's "most legit" bar now.
Verdict: Catchy as hell (before it gets grating), disposable as fuck.

John Fahey:
Perfect antidote to Passion Pit. Sigh. (Sorry to use those two in the same sentence.) But solo guitar is awesome. Highly recommended.



stay tuned for Part Deux for more opinions you should have.

Clinic.

The porch was crowded. We sat in the dark with forms to fill out and idle evening conversation. I waited to be called inside for a treatment for my ear, a minor, chronic condition that took nothing more than water and a few minutes to remedy. While trying to ignore the loud amazon in a large America! t-shirt talking into her cell phone and making others around her inexplicably embarrassed, I treaded in David Foster Wallace's Oblivion:

...a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy ... had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright and young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful-- what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?-- and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it....

It was a full moon, chilly but pleasant for a mid-November evening. The sky was clear for the first time in weeks. I'd filled out the paperwork at the free clinic, watching as the others did the same. I imagined they probably had much greater ailments than mine, knowing that one day I would have insurance and the ability to receive health care at a facility with indoor waiting rooms. The patients here were women and black men, the nurses white women, and the two doctors white men. An African-American woman sat across the porch next to her husband, who was receiving the flu shot. "I'm just happy ya'll are here," she told the nurse. "Hopefully one day we'll all have healthcare," she replied. "Maybe Obama will make it happen," I offered, and the woman smiled at me; our president is now a magic word. "He's got the weight of the world on his shoulders," said the nurse.

In the hallway, Mary Ann, RN, took my blood pressure. "Beautiful. That's only possible when you're ...23," she said, glancing at my chart. These women, with their short hair and glasses, tapered jeans, comfortable shoes and genuine kindness, are unmistakably motherly; its tempting to crumple before them, as they would calm, and assure, and fix. My own sense of personal-and-professionally-related despair, and the deadly, deadening notion that ruins us all was slowly ruining me. That is, the notion that we are not unique, that we were wrong to ever think so and that the world wants us to consume plastic and perishable items, not to create anything beautiful or universal but to buy something large, lots of large things, and spend the rest of our lives working to pay them off.

Maybe some notion of that sort is what consumed and killed Wallace a few months ago.

After treatment, I hopped on my bike, rode home, brewed some tea and then impromtuly got drunk at a Chinese karaoke bar and sang Boston and the Eagles and the Spice Girls before going to bed alone, because no one is perfect. The moon was still full, and somehow seemed old like our own roughened skin, because now we crawled into bed with people who were never as much as we wanted when we had yet to discover more truths about the world; we were resigned to it all and barely repentant, taking what we could get and writing it off as experience, as being young and fearless, when in reality we were just being very old and very scared.

May 2008

Summer Scene by Bazille, 1869

In May 1968, students boycotted classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. They aimed to protest the divisive, hierarchical social systems that capitalism has formed into its own incarnation of humanity. Behind slogans such as "Never Work," "The More You Consume The Less You Live," and "Run, Comrade, the Old World is Behind You," there were soon one thousand protesters, then ten thousand, and ten million, and by the end of the month, forty percent of the nation was on strike. The students had grown to include a formidable group of professors, communists, and prominent intellectuals. The group intended to bring their revolution to other European countries, stating
"Just as we have made Paris dance, the international proletariat will again take up its assault on the capitals of all nations, on the citadels of alienation.... A deeply-rooted movement is leading almost every sector of the population to seek a real change in life. It is now a revolutionary movement which lacks only the consciousness of what it has already done in order to triumph."
Forty years later, the revolution of 1968 is left out of history books, remaining a cult phenomenon among historians and anarchists. Today, most college students choose to graduate with the means to furnish their urban apartments with expensive electronics. Under a certain sky, the urgency of fear and boredom of consumption are replaced by a determination to escape the existence capitalism has etched into the modern world for each of us.

When the sun heated up the cold air, and we wrote letters to people we'd been changed by, and painted. We ourselves were Late May. The end of spring. We had the world; we had to pay for what we had learned. We were naked and fearless, we wanted the love of one another, in this moment, forever. We gave almost everything we had to each other (I would have stayed with any of them here, I left all of them for somewhere very far away). We were like we will probably never be again: we were racing in the night, almost identical, hiding nothing from the world but seeking refuge in our parallels.
The sun-- you really should have seen this sun-- it crept across the yard all afternoon until only this huge lopsided tree was illuminated-- an electric lime green across this blue sky that can only be described as silken or satiny; so rich is this blue that it almost seems unnatural. The sun falls across the sky as paint drips down wood. So when the sun left the yard for this big tree you were left cold with only memories of what had happened in the sun, and these two colors together which were so brilliant, so otherworldly, supernatural, cosmic, hyperreal, that there's no point in trying to explain them except to say that when you see these two colors together, and especially if you're watching them while in the company of very beautiful, very young people with folded limbs, intentionally dressed, with long hair and red cheeks, long low laughs and good ideas who are creating things and saying kind things to one another so that they can continue, you will believe that there is a world that is very large, endless actually, and very important, and very real, outside of your own mind and this at once becomes a whole new reason for Never Working.

Jakov's Suite

That the world is not one, that the world is not whole, that perhaps I must decide to get away from all this, that if I want to make something of myself, then at the same time I must leave all that is mine behind me, all I can do and all that I know; leave these people sitting on the doorsteps outside the house where I live, drinking coffee and talking about all that they know, say goodbye to them forever. And if that is what I must do to develop myself, as they say, then what is the point of it all?
-Per Petterson

This is leaving, being in an airport, left, there is no place or time in here but it is supposed to be California, but is a nation, a day, a life away from Home. Leaving is being alone at Yankee Pier, a classy restaurant for an airport, drinking pinot grigio next to a balding, round-faced, fair-skinned man who recommends the clam chowder. I am immediately overcome with sadness for him and us and the airport, but in the middle of the wine, we talk at length about college (his daughter just graduated, an English major at the University of Portland), and Burlington (it's nice), and wind power (a good idea, a growing industry), and Israel in the summer of 1969 (he went, returned right before Woodstock). He is inquisitive and congenial and interested, mistakes me for an adult, thanks me for the conversation. I mourn his absence when he leaves to catch his plane home, unsurprisingly as I always become attached to former strangers who reveal humanity and kindness and daughters who are English majors.

I agree with the waiter when he suggests another glass of wine, then wonder if this moment of presumed celebration-- I am a human, an adult; at least enough to have ripped myself from the womb of comfort to selfishly fulfill my fantasy; for the time being, able to pay seven dollars a glass for Oregon wine served by a dapper waiter who says please when he places the glass squarely on the square napkin on the square table for one-- is actually one of sad submission to this airport lifestyle that confuses me, tempts me, and I want to--do-- loathe in its impermanence, this symbol of our willingness to be uprooted, this embodiment of our fossil-fueled self-indulgence that will soon bring this country and the world down with it.

People at other tables engage in minuscule talk with strangers seated far away at adjacent tables. All of these people have homes and people that love them, but I imagine them perpetually awaiting their planes, always exchanging niceties with new strangers, running from the people and places they don't know if they love, listening to the taupest of ten-year-old radio hits in airport restaurants, and alone in their thoughts away from empty banter and cell phone companionship, pause to wonder who sings these songs but cannot remember.




I think I might split in two.
-Per Petterson

Holden.

I'll tell you what really sucks. The mall. All those soulless bastards walking around buying hoodies from American Eagle for like 50 bucks. I was there a while ago with my older sister, Annie, who used to be cool but now just shops a lot because after she graduated from college she got a real job. She always wanted to be an artist, but instead she got a job in an art gallery as the receptionist and worked her way up, and now she gets really rich people to buy expensive paintings that look like crap. They don't even care what it looks like. If it's expensive, they buy it and hang it in their bathroom or something. So of course we didn't go into American Eagle, we went into Bloomingdales where she dropped about $400 on a few shirts. I wanted to puke. 

We went out for drinks afterward and I got really drunk. I hadn't eaten all day and I'm only seventeen but I drank a lot and started slurring all over the place. I never get carded around here, especially when I'm with someone older. Some guy came over to chat and waited about thirty seconds to start staring down my shirt. That's the thing about guys. They don't care if you have nothing to say, but they stare down your shirt. I said "the only reason you're standing here is to look at my tits." I always want to say that but usually don't. He looked pretty surprised and then politely excused himself. I felt kind of bad until Annie slapped my leg and asked why I would say something like that. I told her "because it's true." And it is. If I didn't have big tits, guys would never talk to me because I don't want to listen to them talk about themselves. Annie doesn't get it because she has a flat chest and an agreeable nature. She'll sit there nodding her head for hours listening to some guy talk about his car or his job. That's probably why she does so well selling art to rich idiots. 

I just read something about Suze Rotolo, who was Bob Dylan's girlfriend back in the 60s. She just came out with a book about the Village at the time, so of course the Times ran a big article with lots of pictures of Suze and Bob from about 45 years ago looking young and cute. Old people love that stuff. Anyway, Suze said people need to get over the 60s because every time has things happening in them, and people who think differently and make interesting things out of it all. I read that here, in this place, this morning. I wish I would've read that before I landed in here, even though my parents probably still would've shipped me off. 

After we left the bar that day after shopping, I kind of start of wigging out. I saw all these sad people coming out of the mall with their bags and bags of clothes, and how they could feel completed for a few minutes because of it all. And how all those clothes would end up in a big pile on the dollar table at the Salvation Army. And then I thought of how most guys only stare at your boobs and talk about themselves, and what's even worse is that the ones who don't are too shy to talk at all. I started to cry and Annie was getting on my case about things and then I screamed a little and got hysterical. I probably looked like one of those crazy bastards you feel sorry for all the time. Anyway, Annie didn't help, and called my parents for chrissakes. That day wasn't really the first time that happened to me. So they stuck me in here. You could tell they felt bad about it, but not really because they've convinced themselves its the best thing for me. And them, probably. I'm not going back to school next term. I don't know what I'll do. I'd like to get as far away from here as possible. I'd like to go somewhere that doesn't even have roads for cars. I'd like to go sit in the middle of the woods for a while and never see anyone again. 

All the girls in my dorm will probably talk about it and soon everyone in the whole school will know that I left. That's what happened when one kid left in the middle of the year, and everyone said he had schizophrenia. I don't even know if it's true but everyone thought it was so it doesn't even matter. No one really leaves in the middle of the year. Unless they get kicked out. Then old Davidson gets up and tells everyone why some poor got the boot. Usually its because they were getting drunk in the dorms or something. One time they sent a German exchange student home for copying about two sentences of some book in a paper. The place is pretty ruthless. That's why all the inmates start to go crazy. This place is actually a lot nicer. At least I don't have anyone breathing down my neck telling me to get off the phone and do my homework. 

I told my roommate, Julie, she could have all my blazers and to give the rest of my stuff to whoever wants it. Some of my stuff is pretty nice, I guess. But before we left for winter break, she wrote me this poem. It was really nice. It was about winter and people, and was full of metaphors. It really blew me away because she's pretty quiet and just works on her homework a lot. The night before break all the  girls in the dorm got together and ate cookies and stuff.  Julie didn't come because she was working on some paper or something, and so everyone started talking about her. It was pretty crappy. I should've said something, but I didn't want them to start talking about me. Anyway, I didn't think Julie thought about things like quiet snow and bare trees and people. Actually the poem made me cry a little the second time I read it. She wasn't around, and I didn't tell her. I never want to wear a blazer or stockings or eat cookies with people who talk about other people ever again. 

I've been thinking a lot about what Suze said. I hope its true, about every time being OK. Because right now is pretty stupid. The whole world could end in about 30 seconds. Someone could push a button in some cave or skyscraper and it would all be over. I guess not everyone knows that. If they did, there would be a lot more people in this place. Everyone would start crying when they saw people with shopping bags if they knew the world could end in a second. And the people who didn't would need to talk about their feelings to someone who writes them down.