I Turned 49 Today and I Don't Care. (Or, I Am an Ancient, Cur!)
A very good day, though likely prosaic as fuck for the vast majority of humanity.
May I please bore you?
6:30 AM Chat with Elvira. (It was 2:30 PM in Yaroslavl.) She sent lots of new snaps and mini-vids... Nourishment enough for weeks.
We shared a good laugh emoticon over her Wire mention. A career springboard! Music for Solo Cosmetics, produced by David Cunningham...
(Even by The Wire's habitual, spiritless standard, the God and Country slag was deliriously fatuous.)
(Elja is repped by CAA.)
9:30 AM Location scouting in Quitman, Georgia for "Nigger Branch" documentary with classmate Callie and George Rimes, local NAACP president. (More on this later. In short, our aim is to assemble a narrative from the video testimony of survivors of and witnesses to an apalling spree of lynchings in southern Georgia in the late 1930s.)
12:00 PM Meet at Odum Library with fellow PHI students to plan Wednesday project. (On bell hooks and Paulo Freire.)
2:00 PM Lunch. Chinese waitress strikes up conversation. She asks me where I'm from; raising the stakes ever higher, I ask her where she's from. We speak Mandarin for a minute. I am amazingly rusty, but still manage to mangle six or seven otherwise perfectly banal phrases. She smiles, I leave. She forgets me immediately. (Or, waxes quasi-lyrically in Mandarin blog footnote.)
2:45 PM Catch rays in the back yard. (Today was glorious.) D'bst'p mixtape sends me to quick slumber. Ninety minutes later, still pale, but pinking.
4:20 PM Dicking around.
6:30 PM Sis and her husband arrive. We trade pleasantries. They are executives, toiling in relative private. I am a layabout, reviled/revered by loutish shut-ins in a "public" arena. This is illustrative of the price one's parents pay for genetic diversity.
7:11 PM Off to gym, then some movie, probably. (Sin City. Okay.) Then, the library.
Now, with your patience snuffed, off to oblivion!
Your Pedant,
TS
May I please bore you?
6:30 AM Chat with Elvira. (It was 2:30 PM in Yaroslavl.) She sent lots of new snaps and mini-vids... Nourishment enough for weeks.
We shared a good laugh emoticon over her Wire mention. A career springboard! Music for Solo Cosmetics, produced by David Cunningham...
(Even by The Wire's habitual, spiritless standard, the God and Country slag was deliriously fatuous.)
(Elja is repped by CAA.)
9:30 AM Location scouting in Quitman, Georgia for "Nigger Branch" documentary with classmate Callie and George Rimes, local NAACP president. (More on this later. In short, our aim is to assemble a narrative from the video testimony of survivors of and witnesses to an apalling spree of lynchings in southern Georgia in the late 1930s.)
12:00 PM Meet at Odum Library with fellow PHI students to plan Wednesday project. (On bell hooks and Paulo Freire.)
2:00 PM Lunch. Chinese waitress strikes up conversation. She asks me where I'm from; raising the stakes ever higher, I ask her where she's from. We speak Mandarin for a minute. I am amazingly rusty, but still manage to mangle six or seven otherwise perfectly banal phrases. She smiles, I leave. She forgets me immediately. (Or, waxes quasi-lyrically in Mandarin blog footnote.)
2:45 PM Catch rays in the back yard. (Today was glorious.) D'bst'p mixtape sends me to quick slumber. Ninety minutes later, still pale, but pinking.
4:20 PM Dicking around.
6:30 PM Sis and her husband arrive. We trade pleasantries. They are executives, toiling in relative private. I am a layabout, reviled/revered by loutish shut-ins in a "public" arena. This is illustrative of the price one's parents pay for genetic diversity.
7:11 PM Off to gym, then some movie, probably. (Sin City. Okay.) Then, the library.
Now, with your patience snuffed, off to oblivion!
Your Pedant,
TS
Comments
Love,
Tom
Yrz in the Haze of Aulde Age,
TS
You thoughtless bastar- oops, sorry, wrong form reply!
Really, AS, thanks much for the birthday shout. I was hanging around the shuffleboard deck with all the other near-50s, reminiscing about early 23 Skidoo, trading Cosey Fanni Tutti anecdotes, and checking out the Mick Jones cigarette stub collection of the gal who timeshares my iron lung. Oh, such wonderful days...
Best,
TS
Thanks for your words, as ever.
Tom
Re wounds, brain-splatter: I'm mega-appreciative of our friends, fans, and enthusiasts. Always have been, always will be. I love to have at 'em! But here's something I knew intuitively at 19, I still recognize at 49, and I'm rather positive I'll recall at 509: no artist worth a billionth of a shit creates any work of consequence for an audience. Whether one's muse delivers it full blown, or whether one hacks it out over decades, one's adherents do not enter into the equation. (I'm not speaking here of the usual, benign expressions of appreciation: b-side compilations, "cool" packaging, personal interaction, crashing on fan's futons, eating their lentils, etc., or of "practical" matters, especially those involving the mediation between exhbition/performance and perception.)
I thought this to be rather a given.
Do I want to obliterate every fucking thing on the planet, and make audiences wet their pants 75 years down the line? You bet your old Marshall Tucker t-shirt collection I do! But does Suzy in Altamont, or Generic Noise Dude in Iowa, or Simon fucking Reynolds impel me in any way, shape, or friggin' form?
Gotta be joking.
Lastly, I feel very fortunate. I have had a fantastic 30 years of this blighted, mongrel existence, and I retroactively adore anyone who's ever given me/us the time of day.
Including thee.
Best,
TS
Bore as deeply into the wormwood as you dare, past your Three Doors Down review clips, into the corrupt heart of your James Taylor ticket stubs. The sad fact remains: I have something unintelligible to say, and I want to be understood in the telling. I want my sweet mug on every billboard on Earth. I'll say it again: I want to be heard. Thus, no private auditions, no bedsit iteration.
I make it for me, but I inflict it on them. My intentions, however, are not malign. Ideally, pleasure is also conferred...
Best,
TS