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2003-01-22 - 3:36 a.m.
respect is due
I’m in a weird mood tonight. It’s perverse, but the closest to being alone with my thoughts I really get on a daily basis is spent with my iBook and an endless cirriculum of CD’s that I feel for some reason I really need to listen to on that particular day. But I know that stuff like message boards and writing in my little diary and hearing this song or that song is, while important to me as little rituals of self, not entirely necessary from day to day and I can go a while without them. And really, I always appreciate being busy enough that I actually don’t have time to check the computer. But so after a long, blissful weekend spent with J.G., and then a couple days of pretty serious work shooting Mike’s movie, I feel like I’ve kind of emerged from a bit of a daze, even though it really hasn’t been that long, 4 or 5 days, really. Monday was my Momby’s birthday and I was too spaced and hectic to even put up something nice here, but I did manage a call home in the hour or so between the 2 shoots we had that day. I’ll get to see her this weekend before school starts hopefully, barring more frigging snow getting in the way of that. Love you, mom. One thing that maybe made the past couple weeks strange was the lack of Kelly around to entertain us all, and on Monday she came back from her jaunt in Italy. She has this way of returning from vacations more stressed out and bitter than when she left, but miraculously, she’s in good spirits, which I’m glad for. But then, if she didn’t go on for hours and hours about the things that piss her off, she just wouldn’t be Kelly. It’s good to have her back. Tonight after shooting, I went to pick up Kelly at work and meet everyone at the diner, and Chris (Merriam...I know too many Chris M.’s) was already there at the Vision Center, and that’s when he broke the news to me about the Dismemberment Plan. Chris is one of (many) friends who I’ve helped turn onto the gospel of the Plan over the past few years, and those shows we all went to together at the Black Cat were just wonderful and life-affirming, like all the really great Plan shows have been, and it was really great to share that with some of my favorite people. When Chris first asked me if I’d heard the news, and then told me, at first I was just relieved that it wasn’t anything bad that had actually happened to any members of the band. By comparison, the band itself breaking up isn’t really that bad, but it’s still so unexpected. I started listening to the Dismemberment Plan just before my 18th birthday, and saw them live for the first time the weekend before I graduated from high school, and I feel like they’ve had a pretty huge personal impact on me and a lot of my ideas about music. It sounds silly, but they did. They showed me that you can write kind of somber, philosophical songs about Life in a big-picture sense without being pompous or humorless, and that if you bring the beats, you can rock the party with those contemplative songs. They gave me a blueprint for what I want to do with music. I don’t want to rip off their ideas or try to sound like them, but they showed me how to do it with sincere enthusiasm and love for all of it. Respect. I mean, I know this isn’t the end, and they’re gonna keep doing things, and as long as they keep doing shows in D.C. now and then, I will see them again. I know they will, less than a month ago I still saw the absolute joy they get out of it, the goofy grin on Travis’s face during certain songs. One of my other big musical role models that I was introduced to via the Plan is Rjyan Kidwell, a.k.a. Cex. He’s been important to me personally, as someone else who’s blown my mind as far as what you can get away with in a live show. And he’s someone I really identify with, basically the same age (literally just a few months older), from the same place and into a lot of the same things, and while I’ve been sitting on my ideas and talents for years and slowly slowly trying to do something with them, he’s been out there, doing it, right here in Baltimore. He likes to be hard on himself about what he’s accomplished and what he still wants to do, but really, just having someone like him out there is a huge huge inspiration to me. So tonight after I heard the news about the Plan and was surfing around online after things finally calmed down and I got home, I decided to check up on Rjyan’s site for the first time in a while and saw that, among other things, including a lot of pretty understandable turmoil, he’s ended up leaving Baltimore and moving to Oakland. I’m definitely not going to hate on him for leaving, because it’s his life and he’s got to do what he’s got to do, he doesn’t owe Baltimore anything. But he gave me a lot of hometown pride, and now he’s gone, and he might be back, in fact like the Plan I have faith that this isn’t really the end of anything concrete. But it is something. I was just listening to his record last week, when he says “Charm City is a part of us, we rep it for life”, I really feel it. Ever since years ago when he appeared on the stage of the old Ottobar in a bee suit and made fun of Baltimore bands for being old and boring, I’ve realized that there is something going on in this city, and not only can I be a part of it, but I can take it and do whatever I want with it. There are venues, there are people who care about music and wanna hear local people doing their own things. He’s still out there and I’ll still follow him and see him when I can, but he left Baltimore to me, and now it’s up to me to take it over. Not that he was exactly the toast of the town, or that I think I’ll be, but I have to think of it in those terms. What I really admire about him is that he’s too OCD and driven to do anything but put everything he has into making music and making something happen with his life. I’ve been too complacent with some things. I’ve been letting myself get preoccupied with a relaxed lifestyle and free time, when I could be busting my ass to do something I really really really really believe in. Not that I wanna give up friends or school just to follow some twisted muse. But I need a little more of that in me, to get something accomplished. I dunno. This is a weird entry, but I guess these things happening just brought something up in me, and I felt like getting out somewhere before thinking about all the other millions of things I have to worry about. These are more than just bands to me, and not just because I occasionally got to walk up to them and say hi. That’s what I know I’m going to do with my life, and I’ve wasted too much of it already not doing that. But maybe them being out there let me feel comfortable with someone else doing it. But if they’re going to leave a hole somewhere, maybe that leaves room for me. That doesn’t really make sense, but it’s just my way of pushing myself out there. This is going to be the year that I make some things happen. I have some very specific goals, but I’m not going to be really hardass about it, because I’m going to go wherever the path takes me. I can’t predict it. But these are the beginnings of something. -al
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