A Lesson In Contradiction

I've come to recognize a sick monthly ritual of mine. Every 3 to 4 weeks, I find myself obsessed with one song. Just one song—new or old, by one artist—dead or alive. Okay, I know there are people out there that have ritualistic behaviors much more sick than this but to most, the number of times I listen to this particular song and the time I spend replaying the song in my mind when I'm not listening to it is without a doubt, pretty sick.




This month it's The Smith's "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out". Pretty "cliché" right? Yeah, yeah, your momma.

Leave it to Morrissey and Johnny Marr to write a song that is both morbid and optimistic, a song that makes contradicting feelings of doom and despair vs. joy and contentment, not contradicting feelings at all and more like the very same thing.
Maybe the crazy interrelatedness of all human emotion wasn't what those Smith dudes were going for at all. Maybe Morrissey and Marr wrote the song to mean strictly one happy feeling or the other sad feeling.. or neither and the song is really about puppies and kitties.
But that’s what this song means to me—and alas! what makes music and a person’s obsession with music so wonderful and hmm.. maybe not so sick after all.

Times They Are A Changin'- Or Recycled

I was fascinated with this lil emo bitch from the first day I saw her show "My Life As Liz" premiere on MTV. I still have no clue if this is a legitimate reality show (if there is such a thing), a mock reality show that reenacts her real-life drama orrr if I even know the difference between the two. All I really know is this Liz Lee character is a full-blown bad ass and I kind of want to be her. ESPECIALLY after watching the episode where Liz showcases her Cat Power- esque pipes and Karen O- reminiscent stage presence while singing her rendition of the oldie but goodie indie fav “the funeral” by a little band named Band of Horses.

And I’m pretty sure and I share my Liz Lee obsession with every teenage buzznet.com emo princess in America (along with that Band Of Horses album) but for the first time my unoriginality feels entirely awesome. Hooray for MTV for starting to stray away from those conventional looking, uninspired, sheltered rich kid morons of Laguna Beach (you know, the show where Heidi Montage made her debut/i.e. before she completely lost her shit).

Maybe MTV thought it was time to give teenagers some “reality” that actually mattered-- the type of stuff that could inform and persuade healthy ideals and encouraging standards in the young minds of their viewers. Or maybe a couple people at MTV felt a tiny bit of pity for Crazy Face Heidi after repetitively youtubing her dateline interview and decided that from now on they would only give the limelight to people with brains. Or mayyyybe they knew that being an Alt/Emo/Indie/Hipster/Whatever You Want to Call It Kid is now mainstream enough that making a show that chronicles the life of one would guarantee decent ratings.
Which to 90’s kid knowledge could very well be the case here, recalling we haven’t seen a show like this since My So Called Life in 1994 when grunge was at the forefront.

So here it is again then-- a generation that celebrates being a nonconformist, articulate, artistic, individualistic, alternative badass.
And I truly could not be more excited about it.

My Mother the Hipster.

My mom's greater caliber of cool than the average Suzie Homemaker Soccer Mom has always been a topic of discussion amongst friends and I. But it hasn’t been until recently that friends go on to say that my Mom’s cool factor undoubtedly goes on to outweigh my own. I’ve been perfectly okay with this and have humbly agreed because well, if my mom’s cool doesn’t that automatically make me pretty cool by default? You know, genetics. No? Okay, well whatever the case, I’ve always taken her cool as a compliment to my own, hoping to someday be ½ the amazing powerhouse of a woman she is.

And it’s not just because of this super cool photo I found of her as a super cool 70’s chick with a super cool camera, it’s other stuff too. I see her cool as deriving from both the tangible and intangible assets that go along with meeting her, getting to know her and then basically falling in love with her. The tangible encompass a wide range of hard facts and physical attributes such as: her longstanding eminence in the Phoenix art scene, her undying obsession with Eddie Vedder, her laissez-faire attitude and worldly wisdom, her adored husband and my step father-- a cool looking, Vintage Moto Guzzi driving, leather jacket wearing, intellectually elite Professor of Art, their matching black framed glasses and their even closer matching vision regarding art and love-- and these are just a few.

But the cold hard facts of cool are nothing compared to what cool really is, an indescribable energy that can never be learned or imitated. The people who try to emulate cool are never really fooling anyone. You either gots it or you don’t, and she’s gots it.

Why is this important? Yeah I know I’m getting there. Because it hasn’t been until very recently, when my mom’s cool took a certain shape, the shape of a blog, that I found myself a bit uneasy about her prevailing coolness. Why? Because of my own procrastination to do the same—start an effing blog. It’s been the task that has haunted my To Do list ever since I decided I kinda sorta maybe wanted to be a writer and now that I have a bachelors degree in English and way too much effing time on my hands, there is no excuse other than my own crippling juvenile insecurity to why my 50something year old mother has a blog (itisanditisn't.blogspot.com) and her 20something, pop culture- obsessed, “aspiring writer” daughter does not. So here I am, finally staring my first blog because my mom has yet again done what she does best—Inspire my cool.