Sat 21 Oct 2006 7:42 PM
Define or Identify
Posted by blaark under Art , Cross-culture , Family , Fatalism , Friends , Hesitating , Identity , Productivity , Society , The Future , WorkIn response to not having a computer I tried to write something in a notebook with the intention of working on whatever ideas landed on the page at a computer later… Instead I had a quickly written rant with no opportunity to tease out ideas or thoughts and the night I thought I might spend a little company time looking around the internet to help flesh things out a bit my manager walked in the room snooping which, obviously, ruined the thought… So instead we have yet another overly emotional, from the hip rant about nothing in particular but transcribed from a notebook and written as quickly as possible on a lunch break in a coffee shop after the girl working there showed me her fucked up wrist she injured in the Odwalla cooler the night before:
Ain’t nothing to do– the traditional rallying cry for bored teenagers, reaction against the frustrations and powerlessness of youth… A million nights of drinking and drugs, thousands of bands, hundreds of fanzines all sprang forth from one shared sensation… We stayed up til’ dawn watching horror movies or playing the same songs over and over again in the motorcycle shop… The Dead Boys beat up hippies and knocked old men down…
In recent weeks I’ve attempted to corrale countless friends into a variety of the traditional activities which were once born from boredom and frustration, but phoned inqueries– what’re y’doing?– no longer find the answer of ‘nothing’… Now people have to wake up early for work, or stay home studying for school or are just too tired to contemplate anything beyond microwaving a meal and watching television… Guess we’ve gotten older and things to do have been found…
Must be a natural progression, through the phases documented by films and books… Hormones run rampant for a couple of years and everyone’s nuts, acting out and picking through their obsessions… Then it’s time to mature, time to go to college and so the band breaks up, the zine doesn’t seem important anymore and another form of acting out and picking through obsessions ensues… By the time we’ve been suitably groomed for entering the work-force the bands and zines have been whittled down to almost nothing, property of the immature and disconnected… Sure, you can set aside a little time on the weekend to pursue your former ambitions or passions or whatever’s less embarassing a term, maybe take a class one night and if you’re up for it you can catch a movie Friday night: but these are now hobbies, not what you do… These things no longer define or identify you…
The flexibility is gone, we have our obligations and we have our schedules… If you’re lucky you enjoy your job– there’s a sense of accomplishment and a sense of worth resulting from every eight hour day… Most people find their way to places that aren’t so bad– the work isn’t terribly demanding, the co-workers are nice enough and the money’s pretty good… You get up and you spend an hour getting ready, an hour going to work, an hour for lunch, and hour to go home, an hour dealing with dinner, an hour trying to relax and an hour trying to fall asleep…
Maybe one day you’ll have a family and a 30-year mortgage… A trip to Europe, a family vacation to Disneyland, a big screen TV and a car… Your sense of what’s going on will become informed by product placement and labor day sales at Macy’s or whatever Junior’s demanding for pulling a straight B average… Maybe one day while cleaning out the attic you’ll come across an old shoebox with that tape your old band recorded, a copy of that zine you used to do, a reel of Super 8– God how embarassing… Maybe you’ll remember people you haven’t seen or even thought about for years and smile, or feel a little sad, or feel a little angry, or feel a little proud or even a little stupid… But you carefully put the lid back on the box and dig around further looking for the fucking Christmas lights…
Well, there’s always your mid-life crisis to look forward to…
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:42 am
Had a shitty day Brendan?
Super 8s are on the way back - ask Keith.
Instead of filming grainy footage of camping holidays in the great woodlands of North America or catching the first wobbly steps of a child in dungarees and a mop-top-hairdo, we intend to film real things - and all these things will fall under the mantra of “21st century”.
‘It will be a contemporary piece for an urban audience…’ the film school twat declared.
Are all things “21st century” homogonous or easily defined? No. We will rely on the vagarities and apathies of the dispicable urbanites to promote our experiment.
What does our 21st century film look like? Its better than Fox and its better than Searchlight. The orchestral intro has bigger trumpets and thumpier drums assaulting the ear with an HD-THX-DD-surround-ground-triple-X-aneurysm-inducing coma.
We will film friends opening the door at 3pm. We will stick the camera right in their face - how real. We will have just woken them up from a blurry sleep haunted by the idiots they met at the party the night before. (A work colleague organised the party … it was always gonna be a disappointment.) We will capture the sleep in their eye; the slippers on their feet and their waning morning rubber-on pressing their nightwear.
We will go to the streets and film the things that happen to fall into the two hours of daylight remaining after an hour spent waking up and hour spent getting ready. We will document buses and parks and dogs. We will get a close up of that mangled tennis ball sodden with saliva that the overweight labrador drops on our flipping and flopping thonged toes.
When it gets dark we intend to make a fake snuff movie, but realise the costume shops are closed. We resort to making a real snuff movie with a spider in the leading role.
Later, we go to another work-colleagues party, but we’ll leave the camera at home. We know the party will suck - it was billed as a BBQ. Conversations about tofu and Hilary Clinton ensue. I will punch that bloke in the face if he talks about real estate again.
The answer to it all? A magical trip out of the city to North American woodlands to capture grainy footage of friends larking about next to a river.
If we get really inventive, we can make a bigfoot tape and spend our adult lives defending its authenticity….
October 22nd, 2006 at 6:56 pm
From what I can remember, the good ol’ days of yore were pretty miserable. For every manic, all-night adventure with brilliant friends who also didn’t have shit to do, there were countless misfires and depressing false starts; from jobs to relationships to projects to anything that required the most minimal amount of money. It’s easy to look back on those times and crave all that ‘freedom’ once again, but eventually you have to put the plan into action and try to move your piece across the board to whatever goal you have in mind.
The trick is venturing into the world of soul-sapping financial stability and then navigating your way back to passion-town. Some people are able to do it simultaneously, most never even try. Is it more noble to be the 40-year-old still working on a fanzine that only teenagers read? Obssessing for twenty years over a daydream you had for a few months? Not allowing yourself or the things around you to change because you’ve reached the golden era and that’s all there is?
Where do your efforts lie? Where would you rather be? Let’s try to get there…
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:03 am
Sounds like you need to break out. Maybe it doesn’t happen often anymore, but it still does, it’s usually better thought out than before - not to mention this time we can remember the results in the morning…
Want to go sticker SUVs and jump on people’s shrubs? I’ll be back for the holiday acomin’…
October 30th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
On the whole, I’m pretty sympathetic to this post, but the tags are like a countdown to a kind of epileptic fit.
“….Hesitating , The Future , Art , Productivity , Fatalism , Cross-culture , Identity , Society , Family , Work , Friends…”
Post!
Seizure!
Think of the easily overstimulated, dude.