I meeeeeeeeannnnn...damn.

I was stuck in traffic today and I saw New Jersey license plates. I just about cried. New Jersey is a wasteland, yeah, but really it was seeing someone that was so far from home, too. It was seeing something so familiar in a place that really isn't. I really miss New York. I miss you. (yes, you)

It's going to be easier once the boys get here. They begin their road trip tomorrow morning in the AM- two weeks of driving cross country to make it to mecca, where I already am. (waiting)

When I look back on this time I'm going to remember the music I was listening to mostly. I'm feelin' music like never before, like, it's breaking my heart and waking me up and stopping the gap- I heard Jose Gonzales' "Heartbeats" recently, and oh, hell, it just took my breath away. I had to turn the damn song off to catch my breath! Hearing that song felt like a pain in my chest.

That's the most defining part of my new life. Music. I feel like the people that are coming in and out of my life right now are static. And I feel that way because you spoiled me.

I got so used to being myself, unfiltered and uncensored, that I forgot what it was like outside our little Brooklyn bubble. I can't do that here. I can't say what's on my mind because I get blank looks. I can't say how I feel (or voice the lack) because people are scared of how I live. Meeting tons of new people, building up that rolodex, yeah, but it's like flipping through a deck of cards to figure out how to present myself. I'm good at being charming. I'm not good at being myself. How long did it take with you? Awhile. And we lived together.

So many new people. But I don't know them and they don't know me. I can't wait until the boys are here. I feel like my anchors are road trippin'. My kite strings are coming! I need reminders of who I am. I don't want this place to change me. I'd rather evolve, first. Let the city morph to fit my needs. So far, so good, but I'm feelin' that strain of survival adaptation, that pull of self-preservation. I keep having to remind myself of who I am because I get lost in the shattered parts of who I think people want me to be. Remember who you are.

This is a love letter.

I wrote this song for you: (not really)

villianess

c'mon now

Would someone like to inform me of the exact percentage that my adult life will be spent sifting and sorting through disappointment? I would like to schedule around it. Thank you.

Parents- stop teaching us that if we work for anything, we will get it. Stop teaching us this. Stop coddling us. You baby-boomers, man. You brought us up softened and sorted into neat piles of self-esteem and self-worth so we enter out into the work force thinking we are necessary for something (see HERE. and you know that shit is legit because it's the mathafucking ny times.) and that we might even be overqualified for whatever it is we are approaching. It sucks. We're stunted.

Not that I dislike work. I love work. Working. Having a job to exhaust me. I think its marvelous. Being employed out of college is just splendid.

I dislike the ebb and flow of false hope. This, I find, is supplementary to pretending to be grown up. The parking garage that is $60 a month and a 10 minute walk away. The coffee that I spill in my car. The DIMINUITIVE paychecks. The friend who is angry with me. The boy that didn't call. The Ikea bed that did not come with all its parts. The cockroaches. The mac'n cheese nights. The clothing on the floor.

I'm requesting a time table, plz. I would like very much to know when I can expect the pieces of my life to fit together nicely, like they are supposed to. Like I was taught they would. When everything will fall into place, because I was told that they would. Well, I'm working, world. Hard. Exhaustively.

ATTN KARMA: cut me a deal.

I don't fear that things won't get better, because things always do, eventually. I fear that they might get worse before this happens though.

I'm feelin' like an unencumbered embittered heathen these days. Dazed like an antebellum dream. Sleepin' like a creepy mummy.

I got a tattoo months ago that says "Wake Up." Apparently this permanent reminder is not enough.

spaceman, oh, spaceman, come rescue me

I got somethin' to say. I've got a theory I've been working on that has been pinging around unsaid in my skull for awhile.

You can pitch in if you've got some more fact or fiction to contribute.

I'm religiously untethered. (That's a nice way of calling myself a heathen, y'all.) I tend to see a lot of physical prospect out there, in this whole great big universe, that when I confront it, I back down a little. The world is so big, and we are just the gum on a planet's shoe.

I think not being religious can lead to a certain sense of impending doom. Atheists must live life as a means to an end, right? This is it. This is all we've got. It's hard to keep yer face up and smile into the sun with that kind of attitude, I'll bet. Not having a God up there can make you feel so small and insubstantial.

I used to sit in church when I was a little girl and feel like such an impostor. It all seemed so silly to me. I got baptized and cried, not because I felt the touch of Jesus or I felt connected to God, but because I looked up into the pastor's sweet face and thought "This is a ridiculous show," and I cried for lying.

I believe in art. I seek refuge in music, film, literature, and I think museums are my temples where I go to worship. That's where I experience enlightenment.

There's something else, too. I think science-fiction is the rational mind's answer to religion. I mean, think about it. Futurism and the obsession with the superiority of man-made technology seems like a hopeful prayer for longevity. For something more. For a goddamn eternity.

When I look at sci-fi nerds (like myself) and what we're drawn to, this is what we're praying for. Not a dystopian downfall, necessarily, but the idea that We. Are. Not. Alone. And I don't mean that we believe in little green men and probes and whatnot, that's reserved for the Roswell conspirators. We aren't consciously hoping for E.T. to come be our best franz plz, but just by being drawn to science fiction we are displaying an acceptance of the subject matter which implicates at least some sort of belief in it.

So I've been hoarding science fiction music to aid and abet my obsession. And I'm choosing to write about it now because I think science fiction film and literature is a more obvious choice. I'm more interested in the deviations and where the edges fray, and where sci-fi meets normal. Science Fiction music in my mind is divided into two categories:

1)"Subject" Science Fiction : Music that clearly states science fiction subject matter within the lyrics or title. Includes space, time, stars, aliens, etc.

"Rocket Man" by Elton John
"Spaceman" by Bif Naked
"Robocop" by Kanye West
"Remains of the Sun" by Leitvox
"Sad Robot" or "Space Invaders" by Pornophonique
"Starshine" by Gorillaz
"Conquer" by ABK, Esham, & Violent J
"The Stars Are Projectors" by Modest Mouse
"When They Came For Us" and "We Are Pilots" by Shiny Toy Guns
"Extraterrestrial" by Outkast
"Starstruck" by Santogold
"We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby
"Space Mountain" by Fuck Buttons
"One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21" by The Flaming Lips
"I Want to be a Machine" by Pornophonique
"Slipstream" by the Crystal Method
"Space Oddity" and "Life On Mars?" by David Bowie (DUH)
"Phone Home" by 'Lil Wayne
"From Stardust to Sentience" by High Places
"I'm So Tall" by Chester French
"Paranoid Android" by Radiohead
"Technologic" and "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk

OR

2) "Prospect" Science Fiction: Music that utilizes typically science fiction "noises" like electronic beeps or sonar noises, without necessarily singing about science fiction. Not just electronica music. More like electronic, technological echoes that you would typically hear in a science fiction film score.

"Flashing Lights", "Stronger" and "Coldest Winter" by Kanye West
"Look Back In" by Moby
"Purr" by Tides From Nebula
"Rome" by Yeasayer
"Lullatwerp" by Disastertron
"Chromakey Dreamcoat" or "Satellite Anthem Icarus" by Boards of Canada
"What I Have Left" by Alexis Taylor
"Nights of the Week" by Apes and Androids
"We're Looking for a lot of Love" by Hot Chip
"Coconut" and "When I Grow Up" by Fever Ray
"Flying" by Secret Machines
"DEA" by The American Dollar
"Alice" by Pogo
"Sexy Saturn" by Bix
"Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit
And pretty much everything by this guy.
Or this girl.

It seems that the sci-fi is either implicit or explicit within each category. Some bands, like Daft Punk or Pornophonique pretty much exclusively write songs heralding technology or space. There's even a subdivision of my subject sci-fi just for sci-fi rap. Think Kid Cudi, some Kanye songs, 'Lil Wayne's "Phone Home" or ABK's "Conquer. It seems to me that a lot of sci-fi rap involves a conquering theme, which is congruent to the mainstream aim of most hip hop and also seems to be the mission statement of science fiction. A lot of those songs, no matter what the genre or target demographic, will employ those fuzzy radio voices calling out to you through some staticky nowhere. Hope from beyond.

And all these different songs- this is just what I cound find in my 7500+ Itunes. So that's got to just be a sampling.

Furthermore, I noticed that when I was searching for links to the implicit prospect sci-fi music, a lot of the "fan made" videos depicted space scenes, orbits, galaxies...just images of space they lifted and set to the music, even though the songs never discussed space explicitly. Like Fever Ray's "Coconut" and Alexis Taylor's "What I Have Left." Both show space pictures. Both not about space. People know. They feel the same way.

Isn't this amazing, how this subject seeps into music from so many different genres?

And then I realized.

It's our gospel music.

When we sing out to the stars, we are throwing out our hope for a forever out there, not at the hands of some unnamed, unknown deity, but placing our faith in mankind to rekindle our futures and that there is more out there. Cloning? It's reincarnation.

I guess I am religious. I just think my religion is art. It's what I believe in.

We may not have a God, but we have hope. Hope in ourselves and the intelligence of humanity to perpetuate the species so we can seek out an eventual eternity. We don't sublimate ourselves with a hankering for heaven and dreams of the pearly gates. We evolve.








Here are the related links I could find on science fiction music videos and music. Here and here.

see? homegirl gets it.

ATTN: 18-25 demographic, all races

I gotta bone ta pick with our parents. The baby boomers. Not YOU, Mom and Dad, because you're both ideal grown-ups, but the vast generations of adults who are fucking up all over the place. This is why.


That's a seagull. Or, it was, before the gulf oil spill. Critter's still alive, but he's not going to last long. When they get coated in oil like that, they can't fly. Which means they can't get food. They die. They're immobilized by the oil. So they're all dying.

They dive into the water because they don't know. They just see their dinner swimmin' around, because the fish that are still alive in the gulf coast swim beneath the tar bubbles, and the birds dive down through it, not realizing what they're kamikaze-ing into. They float up paralyzed and blinded.

I'm so infuriated. Like, frustration-tears-furious about this situation because I DID NOT ASK FOR ANY OF THIS. Thinking about and watching the talking heads babble baffling arguments back and forth on the television makes me want to pick up and leave. It was just released that the head of BP is handing off responsibility to this Dudley guy, an American (BP is a british company, I learned that today), so that blame can start getting shuffled around. They spent $3 million on that ad that's been running on tv, but they are slow to reimburse crippled businesses along the gulf who rely on the shore for fishing income. They're also only reporting the minimum gallon amount gushing into our waters to lowball the cost of the $4,300 per gallon they have to pay. It's much worse than we know.

This is not the America I asked for.

Older generations, I'm going to helpfully and politely point out your discrepancies.

You tell us to dream big and shoot for the stars, and that anything is possible if we work hard enough, but you make education so impossibly expensive and unobtainable that only certain classes can afford to "dream big."

You tell us that we're all created equal, but some of us can't marry each other if we want. What's that? Oh, sorry, I can't hear you. It's gotta be this glass ceiling above me.

You tell us to slow down and not grow up so fast, but you put Human Growth Hormone in the food that we eat, so that our bodies develop faster and we physically become adults before we're supposed to.

You tell us to eat right, but you put high fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate in all our food so that we get addicted and obese.

You tell us that our body is a temple and should be treated as such, but you are the ones that set the impossible standard of beauty in advertising and media that taught me to hate my body with such enthusiasm starting when I was a little girl. I can show you the scars.

You are the ones who just want us to be mentally sound so we can be productive members of society, but what that entails is that you first discover symptoms, attribute them to a new disease, and then prescribe us the medication to quell this sickness you fabricated so you can profit from our purchase of the pills.

You are the ones that started the war, and asked us to die for it. You also asked us to kill for you.

Capitalism doesn't work because it is constant warfare within one society. It is marred by free-enterprising battles, the terrain pockmarked with self-indulgent battle scars left behind in the wake of destructive corporate tankers, and since YOUR parents worked their asses off so you could go to college, you have put your education to work by looking out for yourself and proliferating your finite fucking nest egg.

My inheritance from you is a war, its debt, a crumbling economy, dismal job market, and a destroyed coast. Fuck you.

I have lost my faith in you. You have ruined this country. My hope remains with my generation. We are the activists. We are the ones who turned up in droves to vote for Obama- highest young percentage of votes ever. You're welcome. And for those of you who doubt my dear president, here's a list of achievements thus far. I like that list. It includes Bo.

To my peers, if you're out there and sentient, I'm going to ask something of you. Put down the xanax and the adderall. I know we're Generation Medication, and that fake prescription is our birthright, but just stay with me for a second. You don't have to be dependent. You don't need any of our forefather's bullshit. We have the right to take this country back and start repairing the damages. We just have to get angry first. Please. Get mad. Get fucking infuriated and do something. It's what we're really known for. It's what we're best at.

Activism.

it is so hot