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.

Life Advice

where 'artists' = 'humans' and 'necessity' = 'freedom of will'

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act ‘voluntarily’ and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height – in short, that necessity and ‘freedom of will’ are then one in them.
-Nietzsche

Franzen.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Crazy Never Die

from "Free Association"

"Nietzsche said a person must discover twenty-four truths every day before he can sleep well. First of all, if a person found that many truths, the supply of truth in the world would exceed demand. Secondly, a person who discovers that many truths isn't going to want to go to sleep."

--Xi Chuan

The best 8:40 you'll spend today

way up on way up on way up on

Prized Possession

It's really not even mine. It's Meredith's; she lent it to me two years ago when we shared a wall and the yard that I first read it on. She had read it for a class, said I might like it. I'd never heard of it, didn't consider the great depression among my realm of obsessions. But immediately after opening it, the book became a road map, a compass, a sacred ancient tome by a prophet not of this world, a paper limb.

I could have bought my own copy in the past two years-- whenever I'm in a bookstore I head straight for the A's, hoping there's more by him there, or that James himself will be perusing the beginning of the alphabet too, ready to share more secrets. But usually there's only another copy or two of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A muscular volume, the the humble pale green of the spine greeting me like a friend I skinned knees with. And I always think of buying it, nine or so bucks to own it myself. So I flip it open, scan the pages. And they're bare. No underlines, starred passages or creased corners Meredith made during class (the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by its wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent and most marvelous and most precious...), lines that I've marked, and copied and recopied and since adopting (seizing, really) the loaner.


And the one at the bookstore was never on that yard, when we were still students, children on a blanket in the sun on a weekday afternoon. And it didn't come with me west, to California, then Portland, on to Michigan, then to Thailand, sitting in my carry-on like my only friend in the world.
(what's the use of trying to say what I felt.)






And somehow, between the months and the pages my own story has been seared into this volume. Vital scraps stuck absent-mindedly between pages: the ultimate safe-keeping place, an impeccable record is kept.


I open the front cover-- that face lined with exhaustion and dignity that has become Agee's own in my mind-- to find first a postcard from a friend visiting San Fransisco, addressed to my first house in Portland-- the address now a synonym for both infinite freedom and deadening defeat in equal measure, and nothing in between.


Next, a postcard bearing Frida's photographed portrait, purchased at the SF MOMA on my 23rd birthday, spent with Kelly-- art museum and burritos in the mission-- we owned the world.


A photograph taken my last spring in Burlington, later tried to draw its young leaves and new sun but couldn't come close to their brilliance.


A flier from a local winery in Portland.


And over the face of the first portrait in Walker Evans' series, on a sticky note: a website and number of a student loan agency, to whom I owe money, the rest of my life. I've never called the number.


Halfway through the book-- a flier for a booking/design collective in Burlington. The fall show schedule. Our social calendar in a town with just enough going on. Franzia, board games, b-movies when there wasn't.


Reciepts from a sushi dinner in Seattle-- my first week out West. $11.04-- avacado role and a Sapporo. Another receipt-- $3.50-- another Sapporo. Playing dress-up with other adults. I felt childish and mature at the same time, fearless and terrified. On the brink-- of the world, of what I would be in it. The sun set orange over the water and the warm June breeze sighed through it and I took a breath, found a home, in that.


"Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with fright: do we really exist at all?"





Tree bark I intended to press and write a letter on: the bronze paper skin of the Madrona. Its home Northern California, where Kelly and I spent a summer in the river re-organizing what we'd collected over the years in our minds re: our lives in the world. the futures that laid sprawling before us, boys. Suddenly the bark is a postcard from that time and place, far and away and long ago, now.





And finally, toward the end, between 292 and 293, a January letter from my sister, one of the hundred since we've been apart, since I left where we were for some idea of "more." Two young girls on the front of the card she made: "They remind me of us... although I'm quite thrilled that neither one of us have the boney arm belonging to the girl on the left," she says. "This weather reminds me of last winter, when we were together.... I only hope it can be that way again."
(what's the use of trying to say what I felt.)

And now, it sits on my desk in Thailand, in a school where I am somehow a teacher, not a student. Nine thousand miles from where I first picked up the book, but somehow closer than I've been in a while.

(but I am young: and I am young, and strong, and in good health; and I am young, and pretty to look at; and I am too young to worry; and so am I, for my mother is kind to me; and we run in the bright air like animals, and our bare feet like plants in the wholesome earth: the natural world is around us like a lake and a wide smile and we are growing: one by one we are becoming stronger... and one by one we shall loosen ourselves from this place, and shall be married, and it will be different from what we see, for we will be happy and love each other... it will be very different.)

Rainy Saturdays

= Zizek on youtube.

Joni Sez:

"My first four albums covered the usual youth problems — looking for love in all the wrong places — while the next five are basically about being in your 30s. Things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period, realizing that the human animal isn't changing for the better. In a way, I think I entered straight into my tragedian period, as my work is set against the stupid, destructive way we live on this planet. Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point."

rest of the LA Times article is here.

one of the most intelligent entertainers maybe ever

...is the original antichrist/anarchist.



Interview with John Lydon at the Onion Av Club.

I'll spare you bombastic historical context of Lydon, Malcolm McLaren and whether the Sex Pistols were actually even punks at all since McLaren was a charlatan who just co-opted the whole idea from American proto-punks like the Velvet Underground, et al, and then commodified the entire thing (see Please Kill Me for full background story*) and instead just leave you with some bons mots from Lydon:


"It depends on what you mean by the word “art.” Art as in craftily manufactured? Art as a commodity to be purchased? No."


"Pop music is just as valid as any other intellectual process. It all requires effort."


"I love pop music. It’s not easy to write a good pop song. It may be easier to put out a fake jazz album, as Sting does from time to time."


Pretty impressive that he's still alive in 2010, let alone still making music with PiL and thoughtfully discussing the creative process.



*this weblog fully endorses checking out the book from your local library or at least buying it used if you have to.

How To Be Alive

"...There is no need to be cynical. Nor is there time to be cynical. You and I both know how much stupid crap there is in the world. Do not allow it to make you cynical about your own miraculous being. The crap in the world is about power and control and wealth and status; as such, it is an outgrowth of fear, the ego's silly fear of dissolution and nonexistence; the crap in the world is not the world's essence; it is our fear-filled distortion. Surely moguls and hustlers fill the streets and boardrooms; surely the bullshit machine of need hammers at us day and night to buy more, to keep these fearful moguls in trade; surely there is plenty of crap in the world. But the world is not crap. The world is glorious. The world is an out-and-out miracle. The world is yours. The world is calling to you...."

from Cary Tennis at Salon.com.
Rest of the article is here.

It's not sung tongs.

From Kelly:

"today some older gent came into the coffee shop and was
commenting on how much he liked my DJ skillz, e.g./i.e. van morrison
and neil young, and obv i asked him if he'd seen the last waltz (he
hadn't), and then he proceeded to tell me that one time at this
restaurant in colorado he ran into joni mitchell and talked with her
for two hours about music, the Universe (!), electricity, and how she
felt the tension between settling and continuing to move around all
over the place (!!!). he said what struck him about her was that she
seemed calm and inquisitive and accepting of the world and all its
craziness and was able to articulate it, even though she had no real
answers and seemed like a kid staring wide-eyed at something much
bigger and much more complex that she was. WHOA."

The Point

"The point is not to radicalize a small group but rather to politicize an entire population and then the entire human race. Then it simply becomes a cycle of de-politicization and re-politicization. This will keep the hungry happy, while the scientists can get us farther into space."


-Paul Spike, 1970

...

'Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.'

-Frank Zappa