The state of things vs. the state of souls
What about the people behind the postcard?
Alicia and I are at Cinema Plus, working again. It's slow again, because it's Thursday again and we're drinking White Zinfandel (on the house) again. Everything as usual. The wine is so terrible and cheap that we feel like we do the place a service by drinking it since no one else will.
Alicia scrunched up her face after a giant gulp: I'd rather drink the dishwater than more of this. You know, I tried to dare the Nacho Guy and his wife (regulars) to drink it and they wouldn't even consider it.
Well, it is free. The fact that we're showing Spring Breakers is annoying and sort of meta, which is probably why it's annoying. If you want to have "Spring Break in Florida" then walk outside, that's where we are. It's like when people go to the beach and take a ninety degree turn straight into a hotel's swimming pool.
Chill out, the theater isn't that beachy. It's just a coincidence. The movie is pretty popular right now.
Yeah I guess. Ever hear the term I need a vacation from this vacation? That's how I feel. I feel like I'm supposed to be living in a vacation but I just want a break from it. What even is a vacation at this point? People who vacation here would rather watch a movie about a vacation here than have their own.
I think you're over-thinking it.
She turned back to her wine as if that was less offensive than my company.
Closing always meant hearing the loose threads of belligerent bar band funk music lazily floating on the salt in the air, disconnected by the darkness, tangled in the drunkeness. I curse Jimmy Buffet, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the whole reggae genre individually each night for what they have done to my hometown. The image of old people dancing with their shoes off and generally trying to get their swerve on with one another has been a trauma for more people than just me, I'm sure.
I turn all these things over in my head on my walk home.
I wonder about how many souvenirs the tourists bought here that they didn't need, what it's like to unpack a suitcase full of plastic "good times" that someone made just for you to buy. Reducing a place to its attractions, building an economy off of impulse buys, booking bands that sound like worse versions of already shitty bands, bands that don't even pretend to be anything else, validating an existence by how many pictures you have of it in different lights and at different angles.
A lot goes into that fetish. A lot of lives, tons of alcohol, and too many beach-related puns.
Alicia scrunched up her face after a giant gulp: I'd rather drink the dishwater than more of this. You know, I tried to dare the Nacho Guy and his wife (regulars) to drink it and they wouldn't even consider it.
Well, it is free. The fact that we're showing Spring Breakers is annoying and sort of meta, which is probably why it's annoying. If you want to have "Spring Break in Florida" then walk outside, that's where we are. It's like when people go to the beach and take a ninety degree turn straight into a hotel's swimming pool.
Chill out, the theater isn't that beachy. It's just a coincidence. The movie is pretty popular right now.
Yeah I guess. Ever hear the term I need a vacation from this vacation? That's how I feel. I feel like I'm supposed to be living in a vacation but I just want a break from it. What even is a vacation at this point? People who vacation here would rather watch a movie about a vacation here than have their own.
I think you're over-thinking it.
She turned back to her wine as if that was less offensive than my company.
Closing always meant hearing the loose threads of belligerent bar band funk music lazily floating on the salt in the air, disconnected by the darkness, tangled in the drunkeness. I curse Jimmy Buffet, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the whole reggae genre individually each night for what they have done to my hometown. The image of old people dancing with their shoes off and generally trying to get their swerve on with one another has been a trauma for more people than just me, I'm sure.
I turn all these things over in my head on my walk home.
I wonder about how many souvenirs the tourists bought here that they didn't need, what it's like to unpack a suitcase full of plastic "good times" that someone made just for you to buy. Reducing a place to its attractions, building an economy off of impulse buys, booking bands that sound like worse versions of already shitty bands, bands that don't even pretend to be anything else, validating an existence by how many pictures you have of it in different lights and at different angles.
A lot goes into that fetish. A lot of lives, tons of alcohol, and too many beach-related puns.
My reaction to the blog assignment is definitely a positive one. I've had to do blog assignments before for different classes and they were worse because there was no new material to work with. In this assignment, there is new material every few weeks because you are constantly put in conversation with other people's ideas and narratives. I think incorporating other works made my blog more interesting and actually motivated me to develop it more. I could have ended it with a single day or a well written thought but because I had to keep referring to other blogs, I was forced to take my blog in other directions. I thought most people were doing really interesting things with their blogs so it wasn't an unhappy experience working with them. I would've liked to choose which blogs I could work with but I also see the merit in not allowing the student to choose (we would probably choose things that were too similar to our own stuff). It was a little uncomfortable and difficult at times but I understood why it had to be (it challenged me to be more creative and open-minded while it displayed intertextuality first-hand). Obviously the blog relates to intertextuality, the most readily apparent reason being that we constantly put our blogs in dialogue with other blogs so pieces of our blog would be in theirs and vice versa. The whole network of blogs, however, cleverly avoided being self-contained (even though it was self-referential) by us quoting our critical texts and writing them in the style of the avant-garde novels we've been reading. It relates to text in that each blog is a story, one that you could potentially watch grow and interact with in real time, one that is multi-media enhanced and broadcast online but it is still a text. It is not so traditionally, as it would be with text as literature, but it is in the modern sense of the word. Text is happening in places it was never found before, in mediums people never even knew would exist. I think the blog is a tribute to that. Naturally, there are tons of different reactions to this development in text. We've had a few critical texts to read about it but I liked Walter Benjamin's the most. He writes about a lot of things I think we have to look forward to in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He asks people to question reproduced art that is made to be easily reproduces, art that may lack an aura because of its lack of authenticity, and that is what this blog mostly is. Like a movie, which doesn't make a profit unless nine million people see it, the internet doesn't make a profit unless it reaches its almost infinite audience in at least some small way. Html is like the film of art: you simply angle it a certain way (that being your "personal touch") and your creation basically stops there. Anyone can push a button under the same circumstances and create the same thing. The fact that web pages are at the mercy of screen shots, or page source copy, and that both those actions are quite simple to perform makes it pretty clear that this is a reproducible medium we're working within. Does that devalue the art of the text? I don't know. It's easier to write things on the internet (a fact that has absolutely betrayed all of us at one time or another) but the medium also offers a lot more people opportunities to make art and to make art in such a way that once wasn't possible. I think the aura of a real journal is much more powerful than the aura of an internet one but that's just my opinion I guess.
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