Djed

I've been getting a lot of shit for my music recently and its getting to me. mostly because one of the big things I was looking forward to with being home for the summer was not having to hide my music, being able to play it loud and talk about it with out compromise. aloud to be passionate about what I'm passionate about. and yet I feel persicuted on all sides, from my family from my friends, I've been acused of pretention and of mocking other peoples tastes - things I've worked hard to avoid, I've been laughed at, eyes rolled at me, I've been not taken seriously. I feel isolated again, maybe even more so than at pratt, because at least there I knew better enough than to play anything for anyone. Here I thought people would be cooler with the stuff I like and it set me up for getting shut down much more often.

the worst part is I've been acused of not genuanly liking the music I listen to. it happened once back in new york and then again today, by someone I respect. "I mean, be honest, you don't actually like that stuff". that hurts the most, and on a base level.

and the problem is, I didn't even think my tastes are that far out, at least not much farther than at any other time to explain this suden jump in persecution. I mean, last summer I was in a blissful shock and awe over Sunn 0))), and noone seemed to get on my case. This summer I listen to dance music and loads of The National and some alternitive hip hop.

so let me level. I LIKE THIS STUFF. saying otherwise would be dishonest. its not work for me, its what I love, and if I have to hide it in order to contiue listening to it I will. I'm sorry if it sounds crappy to you but I really truly wish you would shrug it off and think "I probably just don't get it" and to each his own and all that like I've been doing with you and your music. This is killing me.

never die

Alice Practice

Toy Story came out when I was four. they released, of couse, toys to mimic the ones found in the movie about toys and insead of making woody as he is in the film, cheep cloth, big plasic head, pull string, five phrases, cutting edge technology cira nineteen sixty three and charging three or five bucks a peice they put out these even cheeper made rags of toys and the same for buzz lightyear and I thought, well, these are a frail reproduction of a frail reproduction of a cowboy. an imprint of an imprint. and it was the same all around me. instead of real restarants we had things mimicing some perverded fantasy of the fifties. instead of real adventure we had jeans pre faded and pre ripped. instead of musical instuments we gave our kids fake press-button guitars. instead of real fights we had fake apologies forced upon us. maybe it was just the nineties, it was the age of artifice. maybe it was the boomers not wanting anything to fade, wanting to fake it forever instead of letting anything go. maybe not. and imprint of an imprint of an imprint.

and thats the problem really everything is trying to be something else that it isn't. borrowed. instead of posters trying to look the best they try to look like something trying to look the best fifteen years ago. Instead of groups trying to get the best sound they can they try to get the sound of groups from '94 trying to get the best sound they can and not doing that well. Los Campesinos said, in that thing they do where they say something not deep at all and completely ovious that for some reason no one has the courage to say out right because of how imature it sounds, they said "they've apropriated everything we've ever loved, dressed it up in quotations and fluff".

And so it ocurs to me that nerds these days are no longer doing what they do because they're smart and rejected by the mainstreem, they're doing it because thats what they preceve nerds as doing, and they think of themselves as a nerd. Which is to say, most nerds these days aren't smart at all they just think those things are cool. most artists don't get art at all they just think its cool too. most people who listen to weird music don't get anything at all.

in high fidelity (fuck me for thinking to refreance this. fuck this.) theres a line about him feeling like the guy who shaves his head into a mohawk one day and swears that he's always been a punk. and I think - thats every punk. What do you think they were born that way? They just up and shaved their head out of the blue before you met them. Everyones a poser, those you think are the real things are just better at posing consistantly, keeping they're story straight, ridding themselves of any human incosistancy in they're chosen characer.

you see I used to use that little bit whenever someone acused another of being a poser or a fake - to defend the attacted by saying we are all posers equily so you can't be a dick to this guy in particular. but now I see it another way - we are all posers. we are all a decreped pile of phonys - too self councious and self ironic to even use the word phony based on its connotations. the world is made up of echoes of echoes. jocks pretending they're losers pretending they're the oppresed poor pretending they're glamorous millionares pretending they're rebelioius angry punks pretending they're well read anarchists. imprints of imprints of imprints.

I'm bitter tonight. some drunk adults are making noise outside my window. sometimes I need to say things extreemly childish, sometimes I need to be honest to myself and say it anyway.

scares will heal soon

Hajnal

so it seems to me that in many situations there are three main points of view, and these seem to be affecting a lot of things in my life so I'mma gonna dissect them.

the first one, for the sake of this, I call the General Self-Antagonizing perspective (or the depressive's perspective), which states that whenever something goes wrong it is my fault and I as a whole am bad because of it (or that I am a whole am bad, as demonstrated by this failure).

the second perspective I call the General Others-Antagonizing perspective (or the cynic's perspective), which states that whenever something goes wrong it is completely the fault of the other people involved in the situation, with little or no fault my own.

the third point of view I call the Specific Antagonizing perspective, which states when something goes wrong it's my fault and I should change it.

now to put these in better conxtext, lets say you realize that the friends you are hanging out with don't match you at all and are generally making you feel terrible:

The Self-Antagonizing person would think there must be something wrong with me that I don't fit in with these people, I must be not normal, and I should change myself to be more accepted.

The Others-Antagonizing person would think people in general (or people my age, or people in this country, etc. etc.) are horrible and don't understand me and I wish the world was better.

and the Specific Antagonizing person would think how the fuck did I get here these people are terrible I need to find a new group.

so this has become a problem in my life you see. to many people I know think they're a horrible un-lovable person on the slightest criticism, and to many people I know are angry at the world for cheating them, for not allowing them to win every time. fuck this shit. you are an amazing person, and there is a lot of goddamn room for improvement.

these are love songs and grief songs

Iron Galaxy

so theres this thing called 30 days of music and I'm sure you've herd about it and though I don't know where it started I think I first herd about it through Kieron Gillen (just like everything else, the guy's half my mentor we've never met) and then trough the blogs of a couple of my freinds and my god I follow too many blogs at this point and I miss the time when it was just me jackie adrian parker and then travis. anyway. as my friends post I think about what my responce would be, I would post it myself but it would be one more thing for me to silently obsses over and it would end up being another incedibly self absorbed and self indulgent thing to add to my long list of self absorbed and self indulgent things that I already do including - hey! - this blog. day 15 I think was a song that describes you and I thought when it turned up, shit, no way. ran through a hundred songs in my head, I guess I don't listen to to many songs that describe people in the first place, or not many that describes guys. and I thought maybe the only living boy in new york to be compleatly romantic and self indulgent the matt sheehy cover in particular maybe (here) but no that sucks. and I couldn't think of anything else we are beautiful we are doomed, no rain, loser, abel, these kinds of things. and today I was thinking about the boxer, another simon and garfunkle song, because my mom mentined it while we were tlaking about the national and their album boxer. and I thought, the boxer.

the boxer was this song that followed me in a weird way when I was a kid, in that I had a strong affinity for it, a strong affinity but I didn't know what it was. and occationaly someone would hum it or it would come up on the radio and I would jump out and catch them and get them to tell me what the song was because for some reason this song remided me of when I was little (littler, I guess). and I would try to hold that in my mind, hold "the boxer by simon and garfunkle" but for some reason it never worked. between the ages of five and - probably - twelve i was curiously inable to remember the title of this song. between the ages of five and twelve I somewhat unknowingly chased this song. and, very unknowingly, in more than one way. you see, this song described me. or described what I thought I was, but probably was not. the quiet lost boy from new york who tryed to be stoic but had the scars from every thing he'd lost and was leaving now himself. thats who I wanted to be or thought I was. It takes a five year old of a weird demeanor to think that he's lost something significant and sad in that kind of way, I was weird.

and though I feel my personality pulled in a million differant directions these days thats still what I think of as the old stuart, the stuart I was at five. small, quite, honest, kind, fair, and stoic and intelligent. sad and lonely and trying to be strong. with a scar across his left eye. wishing he could go back to new york.

I am not the boxer anymore, nor do I want to be, at least not compleatly. now I'm trying to be a dosen other songs now I hope I am to angry to be sad in that way, to miss the past when I was 3. now I don't listen to the boxer.

new york is evil at its core

Ashes of American Flags

No more symbolism. i'm starting to realize that its just a tool to eschew the truth, or for people to accuse other people of eschewing the truth. no more symbolism, no more allegories. Its weak, its cowardly. If you have something to say, say it.

speaking of tomorrow - when will it ever come

Ape in Cage with Wire Cutters

hes a poet and hes I know in college but I can't shake the feeling, not knowing him in person, that hes sixteen because he seems to have a sixteen mindset or at least the just-finding-out-about-dada mindset I had when I was sixteen but really thats just me condesending him, i'm an asshole, and his poems are pretty alright although to be honest I didn't read much of them and the ones I did I skimed and he today writes that modern poets are shit and he talks about poetry readings where the only thing he gets from the reader is that they want people to like them that they're skreeming 'like me' through there poems pretending that thats not the case trying to be cool by delibratly trying to be differnt, the softer kind of hipsters basicly, basicly hes talking about thouse girls that live down the hall from me and lets be honest pretty much every girl at pratt and every girl back home and every girl who talks to me that I try not to talk to and then he talks about how he likes to go to the older generations poetry readings becasue they have more to offer him, and he's got that whole thing wrong of couse becasue the older generation poetry back in the day was just people trying to convince the audience that they're so cool based on snaping and stand up bass and black and that the only reason the older ones are better now is because these are the only people who stuck with it but whatever, you can't convice kids that kids are good, its too cool to hate your peirs and convince yourself that you belong with the older

THE POINT IS

in the middle of his rant he said that hes not trying to imply that his own poetry is so good or worth reading over other modern poets, hes just trying to point this all out and I think

IF THERE IS GOING TO BE A GREAT MODERN POET THE FIRST STEP WOULD BE DECLARING THAT, YES, MY OWN POEMS ARE BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSES.

ba ba ba gonna die young

Pursuit of Happiness

When a character I care about in a book dies, at least when I care enough that this fact upsets me, I am always angry at the author. I think, this book could have been its own transient, it could have been glorious, and now I have to go through the next hundred pages of heart wrench and watch the charecters recover, and try to recover with them. They're not real. I am. But it hurts me anyway. I wish she had survived, and its weird to think that someone could have had her survive. It is I guess good to think that I can still feel this much based off a book, esspecialy givin my deep seeded half-apothy for everyone I know and at one point cared about at Pratt. but it is only half-apathy, and in that there is another problem.

I am reading Looking For Alaska by John Green right now. If you don't want the book spoiled for you do not keep reading. I read one hundred and fourty three pages of it over the course of yesterday, I hope to read the rest today. I am reading this because that shirt that I countiue to covit and continue to be bitter about, that shirt hanging on diana's wall I found out is quoted - though used in a compleatly different context - from it. I remember her talking about it all the famous last words. so I found out, and I'm an ideot, and I checked it out right away from the library. I am mad at John Green though I understand why he killed Alaska. I understand that Alaska had to die because Alaska had to die. Because otherwise the book would be a charming tom sawyer or ryan mcginley type fantasy, and because of her death it is now a n intence powerful book that, because it seems to be aimed at fourteen year-olds, I know would have changed my life at fourteen. though, fuck it, that is prentention isn't it? saying, yeah this would have changed my life but I'm above that now. so fuck it. It'll change my life. I'll let it. I'm not above this. not ever. And I think IF ALASKA HAD TO DIE THAN EVERYONE I KNOW AT PRATT IS GOING TO DIE. and I think that her death and the neccesity was a condemnation on the life we live here. Its telling us that we are doomed. and I can imagine justice or mary or esspecialy paige or mike and so on, they are all going to die. theres no other way to read this. and I think of of belle and sebastion.

Take me away from here I'm dieing, he said. He said sing me a song to set me free. nobody writes them like they used to so it might as well be me. there on his own now after hours, on his own now on a bus. look at it one way you could either be sucsessful or be us. with our winning smiles and us. with our catchy tunes oh us. we're so photogenic you know WE DON'T STAND A CHANCE.

tell me what you know about dreamin