Signed my contract yesterday to start photographing and writing articles to an amazing up and coming blog, Salty Eggs. Starting next week I’ll be photographing a monthly ladies night~ at a great local tiki bar, and all the other emails and messages I have been getting (?!) on top of working a full 40+ hours at work covering my coworker who is out on leave at least until June.
I am exhausted and am going to continue to be, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hustle, hustle hard.
That’s the thing about a musician dying. Or an actor. Or any cultural icon, really. For me, at least, their passing brings back every memory I’ve ever had with their music playing in the background, or who I was with at the movies seeing them, or exactly where I was and what I was doing when hearing they passed.
Writing this with tears in my eyes, already having had three complete bouts of sobbing, almost feels funny. I mean, it’s the Beastie Boys. I’d also be lying if I said this was the first time I’ve cried listening to them.
I could not have been any older than 8 or so, digging through my moms tapes. I realized my Tuff Stuff tape recorder could do more than just record me screaming at the top of my lungs, it could play tapes. I had collected a pile. Joshua Tree, Rumors, Use Your Illusion. Paul’s Boutique was my first choice out of her stacks. Followed by Licensed To Ill. Mind you, none of these were tapes I was “allowed” to listen to. My mom was out of the house, and I was small and sneaky.
Shake Your Rump was the first song I listened to. I then frantically fast forwarded and rewound the tape to find the song I had heard my mom listen to constantly. I was looking for Hey Ladies, and when I heard it it was over. I wanted nothing more than to dance to that song forever. When I got over my dance session I threw the tape aside and put Licensed To Ill in. These were songs my parents would play around me, and I had known the chorus to No Sleep Til Brooklyn for years. But I was listening to it on MY tape player. This was my music now, and I could choose how many times to replay She’s Crafty and Fight For Your Right. ( I was able to sing that chorus at somewhere around 4 years old, it was one of my moms party tricks) I could listen to any of these tapes at any time and dance or sing my own words to them and all was right in my world.
Well, my mom confiscated her tapes and I was back to belting my slurred words into my plastic microphone by days end. But the memory of that day will easily replay in my head forever.
By the time Hello Nasty was released I was already a huge Beastie Boys fan. 12 year old Paige played Body Movin’ and Intergalactic until I could re-site them backwards. Honestly, how are you going to put the two most powerful songs on an album back to back like that? My mom didn’t like Hello Nasty, and considered it too “mainstream” but that never stopped my incessant playing of it in my bedroom, doing my poor robot impersonation most likely.
By The time To The 5 Boroughs was released my mom had passed away, and it’s release really set off a trigger for that in me. I wasn’t going to be able to argue about this album like we did Hello Nasty, she couldn’t sit there and vibe on tracks with me. Mostly, I knew 3 The Hard Way would be a song she would have loved. I went to New York the year this album was released, and I remember playing An Open Letter To NYC on the plane’s landing into JFK.
See? This is the impact music can have on someones life. That it has had on mine. Adam Yauch, MCA, this one is for you. Thank you for founding the Beastie Boys. Thank you for putting out some of the greatest rhymes and having visions for not only how far music can reach, but how far humanity can as well. Rest in power, sir. Keep an eye out for my moms, she would love the chance to meet you.
Ooh, Get me away from here I’m dying
Play me a song to set me free
Nobody writes them like they used to
So it may as well be me
Here on my own now after hours
Here on my own now on a bus
Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us
With our winning smiles, and us
With our catchy tunes and words
Now we’re photogenic
You know, we don’t stand a chance
Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story
About a boy who’s just like me
Thought there was love in everything and everyone
You’re so naive!
They always reach a sorry ending
They always get it in the end
Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then
With a winning smile, the poor boy
With naivety succeeds
At the final moment, I cried
I always cry at endings
Oh, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all
From where I’m sitting, rain
Falling against the lonely tenement
Has set my mind to wander
Into the windows of my lovers
They never know unless I write
“This is no declaration, I just thought I’d let you know goodbye”
Said the hero in the story
“It is mightier than swords
I could kill you sure
But I could only make you cry with these words”
—
This song made it’s way on to more than a handful of mixes I would make for friends, past and present, hopeful lovers, failed high school crushes. I felt the strongest about it in maybe my Junior year. I had only began listening to Belle And Sebastian after scanning the Dear Catastrophe Waitress CD into the listen now machine at Barnes and Noble, and I fell in love. I had been given my fair share of mixes with “We Rule The School”, “I Could Be Dreaming”, a brave fella even put “Dirty Dream Number Two” on one of them.
Once I bought If You’re Feeling Sinister and gave it a full listen I remember feeling empty, and only interested in Track 1. I hated, and to this day still do, albums that peaked on the first song. No lead up to a masterpiece, just there and done. “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” snuck up on me like a thief in the night. Wheter I was doing my almost daily beach drive or laying in my bed on my laptop for hours I don’t remember, but replaying it for almost a hour I do. If you have known me for any amount of time you know I am infamous for this. I will listen to a song I am infatuated with for up to a hour straight. I have this song on repeat now as I write this.
It was less than a week before it made it onto a mix. I will do my best to say the CD was for Kelly, seeing as any song that made us feel a bit of emotion had to be shared immediately. About ten years later, and the same applies. After that it was just an avalanche of playlists with this gem hidden away. A plead to a friend, a confession of being overemotional, a way of sneaking out of a possible romance. It fit in with all the subjects my later teen years plagued me with. I do hope teenagers are still finding out about this song, or this band in general. I would love nothing more than to curl up and rest for a day inside of a Belle and Sebastian song.
(Source: chrisferentinos)
Sorry Victims: Gov. Rick Scott Vetoes Rape Crisis Funding
For his part, Scott stands by his vetoes, saying that if he vetoed them, it was because they “weren’t a good use of taxpayers’ money and did not serve a statewide need.”
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Not that I have ever supported or stood behind this man or much of my State’s government at all, but this is one hits a little too close to home. Fuck you, Rick Scott.
But you get nauseous now as he speaks to you. Such proper language for acts so cruel.
But you’re my favorite, you know it’s true.
You look like your mother, in that thin disguise.
Your parting mouth, your shutting eyes.
And the way that you hate me, and the length of your hair
It’s the reason I make you, it’s the bond that we share
You see we’re all trying to endure, you could easily go and make your own life somewhere
Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you?
Couldn’t you, couldn’t you,
couldn’t you, couldn’t you,
couldn’t you?
Cleaning artifacts. Pasts I didn’t bury far enough away.
Yay for new vaginal horizons! Also, for ladies who dont know, now you know!
Let me add, in my own personal post, regarding this post , that I wish being born from a Native American father meant I had some cool stretchy costume or ability to shoot webs from my hands. And not just anger, confusion, and no knowledge of WHERE I come from past my father because he was stolen off of his reservation and sold to an “orphanage” with a new fake birth certificate and all. The older I get, and the more I want to be able to pass on my heritage and family line to any future mates or children or friends, the more passion grows in my heart. Watch out.
I love you + want the best for you
Thanks to a little bit of help from the Google machine, I brought myself back to the first time I ever saw Bright Eyes preform. It was in this theater in the middle of Little Havana. September 29, 2002. I was 15, Lifted.. had just come out and I knew every word to every song already. I had no idea what this concert would do to me. 10 years later and after seeing him preform another 5 or 6 times, it is still the most influential show I have ever been to. After the show Conor was hanging out in the back parking lot, meeting people, signing stuff, drinking. I was anxiously waiting with my friend for him to stumble close enough to introduce ourselves when he drunkingly ran into a shrub, fell forward, and into me and the person next to me. For years after this I would tell this story as the time Conor Oberst threw himself into my arms.
My Tumblr is really turning into a “music that has saved my sanity/life growing up..” but I am revisiting a lot of it, and it’s helping me yet again.
This was one of the most influential one line messages I’ve ever received in my life. Kimya’s music has been another huge influence to me and has helped me through a lot of hard times. There’s more to it then this one message, but it says the jist of it all.
I have close to 300 Elliott Smith songs on my computer. A ton of bootleg concerts, demos, all of it. I also have ten live versions of Angeles. On days, weeks, months like the one I am having I will loop all of the versions for close to a hour and feel a little more safe, comfortable. Elliott Smith has played a huge part in keeping me here since I first listened to him as a distraught teenager. He is still playing a part in these battles, always will. Be forever, with my poison arms around you.
(Source: whymustache)
Come tomorrow it’s going to become a lot easier for me to take a deep breath in this city again.
Oh, my talking bird, though you know so few words
They’re on infinite repeat, like your brain can’t keep up with your beak.
And you’re kept in an open cage, so you’re free to leave or stay.
Sometimes you get confused, like there’s a hint I am trying to give you.
The longer you think, the less you know what to do.
It’s hard to see your way out when you live in a house, in a house.
Cause you don’t realize that the windows were open the whole time.
Oh, my talking bird, though your feathers are tattered and furled,
I’ll love you all your days, till the breath leaves your delicate frame.
It’s all here for you as long as your choose to stay.
It’s all here for you as long as you don’t fly away.
