The SLC kid playlist

There's this one astrology blog that is my favorite because the writer (Elsa Panizzon) is an amazing/unique woman with a crazy past and present and she tells great stories about her life. I'm waiting for the book she's going to publish if she ever publishes it. Plus the fact that she gives free, amazingly on point astrology advice and teaches you about astrology doesn't hurt either. I'm not into the stories about her new lover that much because I get the sense that she's hiding talking about her past life and her present. I don't really care to read the astrology advice that much so I'm glad it's diminished in favor of posts about the general astrological situation in the present. She likes to ask questions at the end of some of her posts for her readers to answer and there was this one about what kind of movies we like and how that's reflected astrologically in our chart (the second part I couldn't answer). Most of the people that comment on her blog are women and some I get the sense are flower children that have been through a lot in their lives. Because of this, they tended to respond with movie topics because they already don't give a fuck about classics or movies they "should" watch. I responded:
I notice that a lot of people mention movie topics that they like. (note: maybe they are just not really cultured as their Indigo Child single mother science fictiony pictures of wolves or little children and photographs of sunsets or lily pads seem to point out). I wonder if they've gotten over the whole "what you should like/watch" thing. I really want to see a lot of classic (Golden Age of Hollywood/silent) movies and other types of classics ( i.e. bone up on the Italian/French New Wave, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky..), basically I long to start auditing film history courses again. I want to swallow up/gain a solid footing in all of what I "should" see. And I mean EVERYTHING I should see or the complete history of any movie I research. Even old Bollywood films. Nonetheless, for some reason I procrastinate/balk at watching "serious" movies particularly those of Ingmar Bergman and feel like I have to be forced to. This is partly because when I contemplate seeing them, I feel so bad that I haven't started getting a background in them earlier and have only cracked a dent so I refrain from doing it. That's part of it anyway. I even had to force myself to see Annie Hall. In that case, the movie was sacred to me.

I've made some friends that are discriminating film snobs. It makes me embarrassed because I like some of the indie lite movies that are getting popularized now (basically everything in the indie theater is lite compared to the heavy weights and much of it, like the movies I mention and Y Tu Mama Tambien can be classed as misdirected romantic comedies without the recognizable plot) like Amelie, Cyclo, L'Auberge Espagnole, Chacun Cherche Son Chat (I am kind of addicted to Cedric Klapisch, even if I think that the movie is dumb when I watch it all over again). I also watch a lot of romantic comedies on tv from the very crappy to the decent. I worry that I will like anything dumb that has mass appeal (to women), especially series television like Sex and the City which I consider poorly done/written.

I am really sensitive to color scheme (particularly reds and greens) and cinematography, I like the movie's environment. Sometimes in the case of liking Amelie, Delicatessen..I worry that my sense of color is cheap. The movies I rewatch usually have an environment that opens up to a vision of the world that I like and have a color scheme that I like to immerse myself in. I also love movies with a beautiful sense of history/culture. Particularly ones that portray rock or youth culture and the seedy life. I am completely attracted to darkness/seediness: drugs, drag queens, suicide, sex crimes, crime in general (postsecret simultaneously repels and attracts me).. I loved seeing the drag queen's room in Kinky Boots even though it was a bad movie.


I think I have this dual attitude about pretty much all aspects of culture: literature, critical/philosophical writing, branches of history, and music. On the one hand, I want to assimilate EVERYTHING historical, critically noteworthy, important, the whole academic debate on any topic.. and get upset that I don't and therefore procrastinate on it sometimes. On the other hand, I have all these guilty pleasures that I turn to and so I worry that I, for example, don't actually enjoy reading great literature or philosophy because I procrastinate on it so much. I think that I'd rather pick up Bridget Jones or David Sedaris the Anna Maxted Getting Over It novel I swallowed in the library Starbucks or something and read it in one sitting.

Music is particularly a cultural obsession I have mixed feelings about. Sarah Lawrence students are huge music consumers and I was surprised coming in about how they listen to music everywhere. They listen while they study, take their ipod to the bathroom.. and I hated it. iTunes and mp3s make music tinny and not really something that you could only get a limited amount of and really savor (like records) or listen to live and occasionally as people once did. Plus the musical acquisitive urge is what drives a lot of people to listen. And the fact that they started listening to good music at such a young age intimidated me. In 5th grade I danced around to "A Hard Day's Night" while cleaning, but my parents aren't music consumers so I didn't grow up in a hippie commune where Bob Dylan/Jobim or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or Malicorn were played in the house. I had to discover that later. I was addicted to music history though and watched MTV and VH1 (Behind the Music). My parents come from a Communist country where there wasn't that much of an emphasis on music and my mom particularly doesn't really give a shit about it. Basically, my parents aren't now-affluent hippies like most Sarah Lawrence parents so I don't have a music tradition from since when I was a wee one. A lot of kids in school are the image of the nerdy record collector (Jesse B.) who discovered Joy Division, David Bowie, Kate Bush, the Boredoms in 6th grade and 7th. There are people who are more auditory/musical learners and those who are more visual. This is known. There is also evidence that boys are more auditory.
I think that the whole being in a band phase and doing guitar talk is particularly a boy thing. So is considering music particularly important or a force of life. Hah. Take that in on your ipod headphones. I can't think that music is particularly powerful with the canned sound and format of modern day mp3s. It's pecuniary. I can't describe it. I'd much rather hear it grandiose. I think that people use music when walking around to change their mood, not to listen to it on its own terms. That's right, music is a mood enhancer much like drugs. It conforms to you, not vice versa. I use that "great" form for that purpose in particular. I love to walk and listen to music to feel a certain way, but then I get tired of it and find that just walking and listening to the noise outside is much purer. Letting music be big, restricting your consumption of it makes it more serious than listening to it all the time. I think visual things are much more important than music, the humming noise in your ears. The visual world is large and pure, it sets your mood. I could do without music for a long time. My family has for a long time. My parents don't really listen to cds. I think the attitude that music makes the world go round is such bullshit. It's just stuff.

I love hearing a song in a place/environment without knowing what it is and enjoying it on its own without obsessing about getting it or finding out what it is, yet at the same time it needles me because I want it for myself to listen to over and over again though it takes away the original savor. My acquisitive urge is boundless, though. I am greedy for music, yet I hate the way music is now and people's approach to it at the same time. I might download all the cds of the Velvet Underground even though I don't like them because I want to appreciate them/have heard them/know why they are so great and understand their influence on current music and download just one guilty pleasure song that I really want to hear. I have all this crap that I think I "should" listen to on my computer, but avoid it because I really have trouble listening to new music and have to push myself to do it. Everything I like to listen to over and over I worry is guilty pleasure music. Or simply exotic. Like the dead shit your language professor plays you to teach better (one of my Spanish teachers in high school was obsessed with Mana and Enrique Iglesias, Italian teachers play Jovanotti, a French teacher I heard plays Jordy Lemoine which is this 6 year old that had a dance hit in the 90s). Most of the music I listen to on my computer is in English, French, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic in that order. The genre I listen to the most is rap, in English mostly underground rap like MF DOOM who is my favorite, also I like the new trend of focusing on the hip hop producer in mainstream rap started by Timbaland (aka the only thing that makes Justin Timberlake's new albums good.. I can barely listen to the songs though because of the moronic lyrics). Next I listen to foreign language rap, mostly in French and Spanish. The other genres that I consider a guilty pleasure that are on constant rotation on my computer are Bhangra and rai. Plus I've really liked the crappiest post punk. Even Feist is kind of cheap because she can be counted as coffee shop music. I definitely felt cheap the week when I listened to Gnarls Barkley.
I feel like the stuff I listen to that is "legit" is somehow to prove something to people like other Sarah Lawrence students. I usually have to listen to the whole cd through while playing Freecell on my computer in order to get acclimated to it. If I like it, it starts to be on constant rotation on my computer. This is how I started to like the Modern Lovers and Joy Division. Usually I have to force myself to appreciate music that is sung badly on purpose like the Modern Lovers that stems from the Velvet Underground. That technique pisses me off. Sometimes I gather 6,000 files on my computer and try to burn them all so I won't lose them, sometimes I'm tempted to just erase them all. I didn't used to like/gather music as much as I did when coming to Sarah Lawrence. A lot of the stuff here is really new to me. There was a grindcore scene in my high school where I learned about Minus the Bear, Modest Mouse, The Mars Volta, ETID, At the Drive In, and heard about the Moldy Peaches from some kid back when I didn't know what antifolk was. Sarah Lawrence opened the world of indie and pretentious music collecting to me.
The Sarah Lawrence kids playlist is like a well built hamburger:

Bob Dylan/Bob Marley (more of one or the other, depending)
The Beatles or The Rolling Stones
old time/new jazz
standards (Billie Holiday vs. Ella Fitzgerald)
doo wop, soul (Otis Redding)
early rock (Chuck Berry up to classic rock)
Brazilian Tropicalia
Brian Eno/The Talking Heads
Krautrock maybe (that kind of 80s music)
perhaps folk (Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon)
70s punk and post punk

underground rap
The Velvet Underground

indie new and old
antifolk

Note the absence of 90s music and alternative rock/grunge other than guilty pleasures and Nirvana when these people were actually growing up. The alternative rock era and everything in between. It's like people are pretending that the 1980s other than guilty pleasures like Devo and foundational music like The Talking Heads or The Pixies and the 1990s never happened. It's the 1970s to the indie music of today. I think people are purposely turning a deaf ear to grunge and the terms I learned for music of the late 1990s: post-grunge, nu metal, alternative rock.. It's old enough to be classed as nostalgia (old Nickelodeon is for the history books and gangsta rap of 1995 is classic), but not old enough to talk about and place in the framework of music history. No one really reminisces about the Fastball, Marcy Playground, Chumbawamba, Smash Mouth, Barenaked Ladies, and unfortunately Goo Goo Dolls years. Aka 6th and 7th grade. Or about the shirts that once said Slayer, Slipknot, Superfly, Korn, Insane Clown Posse.
I was so weirded out by the new mod trend starting with the Hives and the Vines back when I only knew about pictures of the Strokes. The Hives, The Vines, The White Stripes, the black and white wearing bands. Plus even Radiohead is not really talked about or advertised on iTunes playlists like it apparently was years ago.

The, Um, Aesthetic of Essays

The thing I like most about the theories I read is the way they form a logical argument I can understand and open up assumptions behind assumptions in order to get at a complex picture that is closer to the truth. They are really aiming at being a world in themselves and bulletproof. Even this is an insight on my part. I feel like a lot of theorists are saying "Oh, you didn't know you do this, but look, I just uncovered this truth about you." I like how a theory makes sense insofar as you can understand it to be true. It doesn't aim to confuse you, but to make things clearer. To synthesize and separate to form the truest pattern. I tend to split hairs because I was taught to question and define my terms at every step. Therefore my writing is clunky. Theories tell me about what's most important on various levels. This is classed as a value judgment, I know. They show me what is most basic and fundamental. They don't want to cherrypick, though. They want to be the most cohesive and all encompassing. They want to say the most, but even in this I'm cherrypicking. They grasp at totality. This is something I'm assuming that I have to legitimate. And explain the concept of totality as opposed to difference. People bitch about imposed dualities but are splitting hairs more. They want to be right. Somehow they express things on various levels much clearer than I do. This is what makes their writing beautiful, the clarity, the amount of insights, the correctness, and the cohesiveness. I get overwhelmed and think splitting hairs to such an extent points to meaninglessness or my own lack of knowledge. I got to a whole new can of worms with mentioning unpleasant and pleasant, pleasure and pain. Academics want to be most right in debate. I always wonder if the complicated questions they explore and don't answer fully plague them in their daily lives. Thinking about these questions drives me to desperation. It's like a tragic play where as Aristotle argues one has to detach from a character at some point because you can't keep up the intensity of empathy and the character dies. I assume that being more emotionally calm the next day and going back to the daily grind means what I'm doing then is most fundamental. How do academics feed their kids? I can't help but be affected emotionally by the intellectual pursuit of knowledge, asking a question and hoping for an answer because meaning is tied up with value. If it's humorous or laughed at (as Mike P. said that Plato thought philosophy a big joke), if the knot is left tangled, isn't meaning or something necessary that I want on multiple levels lost? Can a construction worker live without considering these things or scoff at my emotional discomfort because I do? Even Zen monks are looking for the truth, even postmodernists who say it's manifold. They want to be faithful to the truth in saying that language is inadequate, so they find another truth to get to it. I think people are trying to find the roots of the present situation of all these complicated thoughts and feelings we have and interpret it "spacially" or in the present moment too. So history is useful because it is the study of everything in the past. Lots of things tangle my tongue. And make me flustered. Like the fact that I have to keep mentioning space and time or abstract and concrete if I want to make a general statement. Because people won't let me go or will disprove my argument without my providing context. Because they bitch that the Enlightenment invented basic abstract concepts. That are somehow inadequate. I'll feel better tomorrow. I always do.