AfterWord

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 2)

Chicago has Wicker Park, Brooklyn has Williamsburg, California has Stockton? The people at Pitchfork could have easily called Pavement’s widespread influence on indie culture had they come from Silver Lake or the Mission District of San Francisco. To transform the scene as members of the Stocktonite citizenry (‘a veritable no man’s land’), that was about as unpredictable as Pat Robertson declaring that he had just met up with Anton LeVay and thought he was a pretty neat guy. Hipsterdom’s history is urban to the core. For every Justin Vernon coming out of Eau Claire, are three sets of Fleet Foxes sound-a-likes manifesting in Seattle. Similar to Mr. Vernon, Stephen Malkmus, Spiral Stairs and the rest of the ‘Gold Soundz’ gang came out of territory that no trendspotter could have foreseen. Malkmus eventually settled down in Portland, the hipster Medina to Williamsburg's Mecca, but his humble beginnings as an indie icon are what set out his slacker set of bandmates as a particularly magical occurrence in the alternakid schema of things.

 

You Can't Quarantine the Past (Part 1)

Nostalgia practically demanded that the nineties would be in vogue eventually. The decade seems to be best defined by its undefinability. Mainstream radio was saved from hair metal by Kurt Cobain’s Beatle-esque punk and then plunged right back into the depths with the centralized putridity that is Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam. But if you want nineties in its purest sense, unpasteurized slackerdom, you simply can’t look to anyone other than Steve Malkmus and his fellow Stocktonites as the iconic representatives of this ten year period without an identity. While Kurt's kids smelt like teen spirit and the creeps rocked out to Radiohead, Pavement was playfully riffing on the key of apathy, becoming the poster-boys of slacker-cool indie rock. Their geographical absurdity, musical originality and lyrical frivolity are what paved the nineties and their namesake for indie kids across the globe. These next few days are dedicated to a band for all seasons.

After Chaplin

We, you and I, stand watching. Watching what, precisely? Well, movies, you see?

In film, we have narrative and visual metaphor meeting for tea; the poetics of characterization walking alongside a tailor-made musical score.

Is there plenty of tripe? Certainly. But when a film like Magnolia can psychologically rearrange and emotionally deconstruct me in the same manner as Crime & Punishment once did, I simply cannot help but acknowledge the inherent power of this medium. Moving snapshots of you and me, lost in the lives of those on the screen.

This month, I start my formal study of Western Civilization’s “great books” alongside a major in screenwriting. The book says, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” Art interacting. Glory awaits.

 

After All

"How can you cope with the end of a world and the beginning of another one? How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube, or the sea into a bottle? How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that the fire has become flesh, that life itself came to life and walked in our midst?" - N.T. Wright