It's been a while.
I cannot help but be influenced by my friends and somehow, these days: I'm eclipsed entirely by them. At least in the form notion now: Zach's got a blog in which he simply takes pictures of the update he wrote on a typewriter, which I think is a delicious piece of intertextuality and "just gotta plug away" nature of the form.
There was a series of posts called Marathon that I did in 2010 about the self titled Marathon record and its relation to my life. I stopped it because well, Rome happened, which meant this blog had to bloom and then wilt. My excuse for not keeping going with it was that I embedded a youtube version of the Marathon songin question being questioned. (Side note: My best interviews are cross-examinations, I've noticed.) Since they're not on YouTube anymore, I had to devote a couple hours or so to figuring out iMovie to put them back on YouTube and that was always priority #139 on a long list of not doing anything and then finding the brain space to play Silent Hill 2.
Because I was looking over the old stuff I did with Zach, I went back to the Marathon posts and saw: No, I totally didn't embed any Marathon songs into the post. So, back to the Marathon. I've been thinking about it more than I expected for a project that's gone to the list in my head labelled inactive.
Because of that: This song, called Where We Hide, is really, really stupid easy. It's about punk being played by privileged straight white kids. It's one of those really obvious points that gets overlooked in retrospect, but when you hear about it for the first time, it's mindblowing. There's a couple harmonies on the song that are placed quite well, the first one that leaps to mind is and we'll make it tasty with sweet melodies having a harmony on the words sweet melodies is one a neat moment of being metatextual with the song, if you know how to look.
The same off-key melody backing vocal hits during details that incriminate and that decision still makes me smile, two years after I noticed it. If you pay attention, the song repays your attention with cool moments like that.
I did something like the same thing for Overkill a college magazine. I named myself Charles Victor Szasz so that if anyone actually used Google, it would pretty quickly reveal I was a massive comic book nerd, and that would narrow the field considerably. But really: I didn't want to use my name for this stuff, because I didn't want to acknowledge the thoughts I had and defend them in public.
Our lives are not really as hopeless or as haunted as we'd like to think. We're just privileged brats. We barely understand it means to be oppressed. We just scrape something real to let out how we feel...
And it was really only with my final piece, an introduction to Overkill #10 that, looking back that I nailed finally my voice, or at least got it better than I did otherwise in previous issues. Not to say I was somehow meaningfully...let's say constrained. I just know now I could write these things better and had I admitted my name, I wouldn't have to apologize for some of this.
Overkill was a project that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. I just wasn't brave enough to say it with my name. The hiding allowed me the sham that I would be seriously inquired for the ideas fired out into the quite flammable collegiate ether like a flare. That these things didn't quite explode spectacularly is one of the things I can't tell if it's relieving or disappointing.
I did, as Aaron sang, pontificate. And in calling myself Charles Victor Szasz, I'm ashamed now that I did it with deniability. It wasn't really so scary. I thought I needed the balcony. Maybe, years later, it's enough to say perhaps I was wrong.
Since Youtube only has a couple Marathon songs easily available to find and it's not this one, take this track, from the singer's new project, Attica! Attica!. It's called "The Children Of Broken Glass." This one line made me love it:
we hid our hearts to shield them from disgrace
and injustice laughed aloud and rubbed it in our face.
Yes. And when I say yes, I mean a wide mouthed, saliva loosening yes!
I cannot help but be influenced by my friends and somehow, these days: I'm eclipsed entirely by them. At least in the form notion now: Zach's got a blog in which he simply takes pictures of the update he wrote on a typewriter, which I think is a delicious piece of intertextuality and "just gotta plug away" nature of the form.
There was a series of posts called Marathon that I did in 2010 about the self titled Marathon record and its relation to my life. I stopped it because well, Rome happened, which meant this blog had to bloom and then wilt. My excuse for not keeping going with it was that I embedded a youtube version of the Marathon song
Because I was looking over the old stuff I did with Zach, I went back to the Marathon posts and saw: No, I totally didn't embed any Marathon songs into the post. So, back to the Marathon. I've been thinking about it more than I expected for a project that's gone to the list in my head labelled inactive.
Because of that: This song, called Where We Hide, is really, really stupid easy. It's about punk being played by privileged straight white kids. It's one of those really obvious points that gets overlooked in retrospect, but when you hear about it for the first time, it's mindblowing. There's a couple harmonies on the song that are placed quite well, the first one that leaps to mind is and we'll make it tasty with sweet melodies having a harmony on the words sweet melodies is one a neat moment of being metatextual with the song, if you know how to look.
The same off-key melody backing vocal hits during details that incriminate and that decision still makes me smile, two years after I noticed it. If you pay attention, the song repays your attention with cool moments like that.
I did something like the same thing for Overkill a college magazine. I named myself Charles Victor Szasz so that if anyone actually used Google, it would pretty quickly reveal I was a massive comic book nerd, and that would narrow the field considerably. But really: I didn't want to use my name for this stuff, because I didn't want to acknowledge the thoughts I had and defend them in public.
Our lives are not really as hopeless or as haunted as we'd like to think. We're just privileged brats. We barely understand it means to be oppressed. We just scrape something real to let out how we feel...
And it was really only with my final piece, an introduction to Overkill #10 that, looking back that I nailed finally my voice, or at least got it better than I did otherwise in previous issues. Not to say I was somehow meaningfully...let's say constrained. I just know now I could write these things better and had I admitted my name, I wouldn't have to apologize for some of this.
Overkill was a project that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. I just wasn't brave enough to say it with my name. The hiding allowed me the sham that I would be seriously inquired for the ideas fired out into the quite flammable collegiate ether like a flare. That these things didn't quite explode spectacularly is one of the things I can't tell if it's relieving or disappointing.
I did, as Aaron sang, pontificate. And in calling myself Charles Victor Szasz, I'm ashamed now that I did it with deniability. It wasn't really so scary. I thought I needed the balcony. Maybe, years later, it's enough to say perhaps I was wrong.
Since Youtube only has a couple Marathon songs easily available to find and it's not this one, take this track, from the singer's new project, Attica! Attica!. It's called "The Children Of Broken Glass." This one line made me love it:
we hid our hearts to shield them from disgrace
and injustice laughed aloud and rubbed it in our face.
Yes. And when I say yes, I mean a wide mouthed, saliva loosening yes!
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