after seeing that it wasn't readily available on any streaming service that I have access to, I downloaded a .FLAC of the GARDEN STATE soundtrack in order to preserve my culture. I started it up and as soon as I reached the first chorus of "Don't Panic", I was hit with the powerful impulse to log onto Mindsay. But we don't have Mindsay anymore -- we have this. So now I'm here.

the sort of relationship I have to music I listened to in high school and college -- it's a little depressing to think that I'll never have that kind of relationship with a new album, but it's really depressing to think that no one will have that kind of relationship, even if they're currently as young and impressionable as I was when I first saw GARDEN STATE and thought it was great because I had only seen like 10-15 good movies at that point.

the key to this kind of relationship is not having other options. high-speed internet and the culture that has developed out of it has totally erased the possiblity for any piece of music (or film or television or culture in general) to be truly "special" in a person's life. if you're not immediately enthralled by a new album, don't worry -- you can abandon it immediatley and jump right to any of the other 50 million songs that are on Spotify right now (that's a real number, I just googled it). completely gone is the investment of spending $15-$20 on a single CD and being determined to get your money out of it. if you didn't like that CD you just bought, well you goddamned well better learn to like it because you're not going to get a new one for at least a month.

was this just cultural stockholm syndrome? would my life/tastes/experiences have been better if I had immediate access to all of the music that's ever been commercially released (or at least the illusion of the same)? on one level, yes: I would have been able to easily explore every genre of music and zero in on the stuff that was most satisfying to me on an aesthetic and political level. but on another level: fuck that! the value of art isn't solely based on the quality of the art itself -- it's also based on how that piece of art fits into the landscape of a person's life. the GARDEN STATE soundtrack doesn't actually matter, what matters is that I used it as a way of decoding my own emotions during a time when the inside of my head was a completely impenetrable and constantly churning hurricane of badness. 

I guess if I was putting a finer point on it, I would say something like: art doesn't matter, people matter -- and art only matters to the degree that it's of use to those people. 

on the other hand, the abundance of choice in the present-day media landscape is probably good for anyone who's looking to define themselves through the media consumption, i.e. teenagers. Adults also do this, but I think that's a mistake. Definining yourself by the movies you watch or the music you listen to is a young person's game, a way of staking claim to your identity through passive consumption when your options for action are extremely limited. As an adult, you can actually affect change in your life and surroundings, so you should try to define yourself that way. But maybe I'm just talking about my own life, maybe most teenagers feel like they do have the ability to define themselves through action... but somehow I doubt it.

but ANYWAY, I used to define myself as being "outside the mainstream" (or whatever) by the fact that I was watching TWIN PEAKS during a time when not many people I knew of were watching it, and I imagine it's easier than ever to do shit like that -- the monoculture is becoming so big and oppressive that all you have to do is not watch WANDAVISION and you're basically william s. burroughs. 

right? does any of this make sense? fuck it, I'm not going to go back and re-read it. also, I'm now realizing that I used to skip half of these songs anyway. Remy Zero? Thievery Corporation? come on, man, this is embarassing even for 2004

A lot of people have picked up new hobbies during quarantine. Some people have tried their hands at amateur woodworking while others have expanded their cooking skills. Sarah has taught herself how to crochet and now our 40% of our apartment is taken up with homemade blankets or cat couches (which are exactly what they sound like).

As for me, my new hobby is getting stoned and thinking about how every American movie released in the 2000's was actually about the Iraq War. 


ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM

The central character of this 2007 sequel to 2004's ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (which is not about the Iraq War, for the record) is Kelly O'Brien, a soldier returning home after a tour of duty overseas. O'Brien is explicitly named as a member of the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, the first unit deployed to Afghanistan in support of the American War on Terrorism and the unit led by Major General David Petraeus during the initial American occupation of Iraq in 2003. It would have been a simple choice for the filmmakers to leave O'Brien's specific assignment vague, but instead the character was assigned to a division that is inextricably linked to America's unjust and inhumane actions in the Middle East. This is a loaded name-drop, is what I'm saying.

The screenplay never make this explicit -- though a few minor tweaks would have easily done so -- but when the Predator descends on O'Brien's hometown and begins laying waste to her friends and family, the senseless and unstoppable carnage clearly echoes O'Brien's experiences in Iraq. It's almost as if O'Brien has carried the violence of war back home with her as a curse. This time, however, she and her neighbors are the one's whose lives are claimed as collateral damage in a battle between forces she has no relation to or clear understanding of.

This is not to say that the actions of the Predator or the Xenomorphs can be easily mapped onto a direct representation of the Iraq War. Indeed, it would be thematically confusing for any alien species to take the place of the U.S. government (even allegorically) when the actual U.S. government plays a major role in the climax of the film. Whether it is displaying incompetence in the form of the National Guard being easily defeated by the Predator or actively plotting to obliterate the entire town with nukes, the message from the filmmakers is clear: the U.S. government is not your friend and you shouldn't believe anything they say. 

And let's not forget the final scene of the film, wherein the armed forces essentially throw up their hands in defeat and outsource the conflict to the private sphere in the form of Ms. Yutani, presumably one-half of the planet-dominating Weyland-Yutani corporation from the ALIEN series proper. If one were so inclined, one could stake the claim that this indictment of the privatization of the American infrastructure (particualrly within the military-industrial complex) is a more compelling and interesting idea to inject into the franchise than anything Ridley Scott did in PROMETHEUS. I'm not inclined to do that, personally, but you definitely could.

FINAL DESTINATION 3

This one is a bit less direct than AVP: REQUIEM and requires a developed "feeling sense" to understand how it relates to the Iraq War -- this, by the way, is why being stoned is a prerequisite for this activity. 

The FINAL DESTINATION series began in 2000 with the first film and continued with FINAL DESTINATION 2 in 2003. Both of those films have interesting things to say about the eras they were produced in, but for our purposes, the important thing is to understand how the tone of the series evolved over the course of its first three entries, resulting in the unique blend of comedy and horror present in 2006's FINAL DESTINATION 3.

The first film is eerie and almost mystical -- death moves with a theatrical precision that is absent from the rest of the series. The whole concept feels more abstracted and alien, and why shouldn't it? This was 2000, still basically the 1990's in America, and our cultural understanding of death had been dulled by a prevailing belief that we stood at the end of history. The idea of an exploding plane and a dramatic, fiery crash being depicted as fodder for fun thrills & chills wouldn't have seemed strange to audiences then. For God's sakes, this thing started out as a rejected X-FILES script, and nothing says "pre-9/11 America" quite like THE X-FILES.

Death is a more practical matter in the second movie. It's still heightened and convulted to the point of amusement -- these movies are supposed to be entertaining, after all -- but it appears on screen as a simple fact of life. Dozens of people are killed in the elaborate interstate pile-up that opens the film, and the moment of death is never lingered upon, only the circumstances leading up to it. Americans were not phased or shocked to watch their fellow citizens die in a public event of massive carnage. The most we asked for is a brief moment before the blackness descended in which to consider and appreciate the dull irony of our silly, short lives.

By the time FINAL DESTINATION 3 hit the screen, the proceedings had taken on air of farce. Not only are the deaths even more elaborate and overtly comical, a new element is introduced in the form of a magic camera that provides coded warnings about who will die next. Unfortunately, the information that the characters have access to is extremely limited and very confusion, so much so that discerning the truth is practically impossible. They are left alone to fend for themselves in a dangerous world in which their friends are all dying around them for reasons that are never entirely clear to anyone involved.

Also, they're all teenagers. That's important. 

While the first movie was largely populated with high school students, this seems to me more a concession to the trends of the era as opposed to a real statement. The horror scene of the late 1990's was packed wall-to-wall with teen characters, almost all of them played by people who were either on DAWSON'S CREEK or looked like they should have been. Also, Devon Sawa slipped in there, somehow. 

FINAL DESTINATION 2 expanded the cast to include several adults, so the move to refocus the third move onto young people feels significant. These, after all, were the people that our government was sending to die in defense of the American empire. We did our best to obscure or ignore this knowledge, but in FINAL DESTINATION 3, the terror of senseless death comes home, disturbing the fragile peace of ignorance. Freud called this "the return of the repressed." I call it the role that fully established Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a successful and bankable film actor. 

FREDDY VS. JASON

I understand that this is the second franchise mash-up on this list, but what can I say? This sort of thing was everywhere in the early 2000's. Also, I just watched this one today, so cut me some slack.

The majority of the FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films were released during the 80's, and while they both represent this anxiety in different ways, both franchises are primarily about the anxiety of nuclear annihilation by the USSR. Many of America's actions during the Cold War (at least the ones that were publicly acknowledged) were justified by the alleged constant threat of attack by our country's Communist enemies. This messaging was so prevalent and so deeply infused into the culture that it became a dark cloud of malevolent possiblity, hovering over us at all times.

This is why, at the peak of US/USSR tensions, teenagers (the true and appropriate audience of any horror movie, freaks and pervets like myself aside) responded so strongly to these films: both Jason Voorhes and Freddy Kreuger are agents of destruction and death, so powerful and inescapable that they feel almost inevitable. Kreuger holds a particularly strong resonance, as his very existence in these films is due to the actions of the main characters' parents. All of that stuff that the previous generation did, supposedly in the interest of protecting you? It turns out that it just made things worse, and now death is coming for us all and nobody can protect you. The Big One can drop at any time, whether you're prepared or not -- Jesus Christ, you're not even safe when you're asleep!

If Jason has less symbolic power, it's because he's actually a surprisingly slippery character to pin down. Each FRIDAY THE 13TH movie presents essentially an entirely new version of the iconic villain, taking into account the previous iterations but never truly beholden to them. Famously, Jason is not even the killer in the first film, but even after he arrives, it's not for another four films(!) that he takes on his most 'iconic' incarnation of an unkillable zombie wearing a hockey mask. Beyond the second film (where he kills as revenge for his mother's murder), he never has a clear motive beyond murdering anybody who happens to be within a five-mile radius of Crystal Lake, and by the end of the main franchise, he's expanded that area to the tune of several thousand miles and hundreds of years.

But still, the central horror of the first film -- that youth will not protect you from consequences, even if you didn't personally commit any crime -- lingers through the rest of the series. Even if the big scary Communists in the Soviet Union were so unknowable and foreign that you couldn't make heads nor tails of their motivation, that would only give their perceived threats even more of an impact. Like Jason, they don't care who you are or what you've done -- you're just in the wrong place, and you're going to die for it.

It took over ten years for FREDDY VS. JASON to make its way to the screen, and when you look at the characters through this prism, it isn't hard to see why. What use did American teens of the 1990's have for these characters? Only when mass death and war were at the forefront of our minds could these two titans of Cold War culture gain any purchase in our minds. 

Again, the characters' lack of knowledge or understanding is foundational to the movie. The adults of Springwood have gone to extreme measures to hide the existence of Freddy Kreuger, doctoring the historical records and imprisoning and drugging anyone who might let the secret slip. Pardon my reach, but it's not hard to connect this conspiracy of silence with the government's attempts to obscure the causes of and reasons for the Iraq War.

In the end, the joyously dumb tone of the movie creates a sense of distance from the supposed horror. Yes, Freddy Kreuger and Jason are literally tearing through the teenage population of Springwood, but it's more like an pay-per-view event wrestling match than anything truly scary. For most Americans, the Iraq War wasn't real. It was empty spectacle, a thing to be discussed and debated over, but there was never a feeling that anything happening over there could actually have an impact on anyone living here. 

This sense of distance is why none of the movies I've listed here (or the dozens of others that I could talk about) are capable of truly grappling with the impact of the Iraq war -- well, that and the fact that they're all genre movies that were intended to entertain and amuse, not to be held up and examined as political texts. But mostly the first thing.

I haven't blogged in any significant way since 2009, unless you count Twitter, which you shouldn't, so I won't. I tried to do some regularly-scheduled music criticism stuff on my website and was moderately successful (at least from a creative and scheduling perspective, hardly anybody read much of that stuff), but that doesn't fall within my personal definition of 'blogging', which I guess would be more accurately termed 'journaling.' I also started a podcast, which in terms of both creative legitimacy and total audience is about equal to my old blog. But I haven't sat down to write (directly) about my personal life in a (tehnically) public forum in well over a decade.

Until now, I guess.

Not that you asked, but I have a pretty simple answer as to why I've stepped away from something that more or less defined my teenage life, which is that I'm now in therapy. Anyone who read my old blog (in which case: sorry!) could tell you that my usual mode of posting was very different from the confessional style that dominates most personal blogs. I didn't really want to share my feelings, I wanted to hint at my feelings in an obtuse way that would, hopefully, inspire curiosity and, I guess, lead people to reach out and establish the intimate personal relationships I so desperately craved.

And it didn't work! Like, at all! This secret fantasy (so secret even I didn't know I had it) that my friends would be able to recognize my pain by decoding a series of unrelated song lyrics and movie quotes never really came to pass.  The most I ever accomplished through my blog was to make people mad, either at me or each other, and I barely even did that. It turns out, if you feel anxious and sad all the time and you feel like something in your brain isn't working right, the best way to deal with that is to find someone qualified and tell them about it directly.

Hence: therapy!

If the term had been more widely known in the mid-2000's, and if I had slightly more self-awareness, I might have recongized my blogging style as a form of branding, only instead of trying to sell shoes or present myself as a person of exceptional worth, it was all one long, inscrutable cry for help. This was, obviously, not very useful to me as a tool for personal healing, but it was also a failure to understand the ultimate goal of writing, which is to reach outside of yourself in an act of empathy and connect with other people in the world, entertaining and enlightening them, sharing of yourself not with the goal of inviting futher interest, but in the hope that someone will recognize something of themselves in you and that they will find that useful, I guess, I guess, I guess.

When I wasn't writing deeply coded explorations of my own pysche, the only other thing I ever devoted much attention to in my blog was the act of blogging itself. I'm doing this now, I realize, but only because it's what I want to talk about, not because I'm doing some sort of cutesey meta bullshit. I can't say for sure what I will use this space for in the future, but I can promise you right now that it will not be solipsistic essays about "what it really means to blog", because I have finally caught up with the rest of the world and realized that a blog is just a place where you share your thoughts and experiences with a grou of people who exist at various points on a spectrum that runs from 'friend' to 'stranger.'

It's simple! And it was always simple. I just made it complicated, for reasons that made sense at the time but now look like barely-disguised coping mechanisms. But I'm trying not to do that anymore. So here we are.