Randomly it's sick to just do nostalgia
I saw a kid going to Golden Lady skatepark in mall shoes. Like blacked-out Etnies Faders. I saw another pair of these on a kid at TF West. I don't know where it's coming from. Is it some sort of reverence for the 1990s? Everything is. Is it just spitting in the face of the other kids, who wear chain wallets not because of Matt Hensley but because it's Harajuku. Spaghetti haircut kids who don't follow skateboarding. Who learn a diarrhea'd take on culture from some culdesac hyperpopper.
No one's got OGs anymore.
There are too many rabbit holes that pull you away from art. Scrolling, looking at promotion for hints at experiences. You can go see a movie, though. You can see a band play. You can spend a night at a club. You can give thedoeverythings a few dollars a month. There is real stuff all around you, made by living inspirations and industry plants and trust funders and everything inbetween.
How do you participate? Can you feel a part of something bigger than yourself, just by showing up? Does the scene want you to work it, to futz about, injecting business into pleasure, ringing its value out like a t-shirt on a July day? So it seems.
What's your day job? I feel as if I have been some sort of passionate artist freak for years without knowing. What makes me feel good is working on "my art." So I can get alienated when I watch people reach happiness without that expression. They don't need to bare all through art as a means toward self-knowledge. They go to therapy. They work the program. They work alright jobs. They see their friends. They work on their relationships. They indulge occasionally. They do what must be done, even when it's hard.
In my effort to figure out how normal people's minds work, I have indexed a mental tool that's useful for seeing other points of view.
On Ion, one of the guys, the funny one, typically when engaging with criticism, will interject a "Randomly, it's sick," going on to outline the criticism or other argument or cool qualities of lame figures like Don Lemon or the kids that skate Tompkins.* Now, with my "he's just like me" mindset paired with the perhaps ungodly 'stickiness' of conversational podcasts in my head, I have employed this phrase literally as part of my therapy. I've got anger issues, and I often see something I disagree with online and get mad for like 30 minutes. I don't think this itself is totally fucked up; a century ago you'd have weeks to be mad about something you read, whereas today we only have minutes. Twitter is drugs like Punch was drugs. Anyway, I inject a randomly it's sick into some sort of emotional stew and I can suddenly see the other side with clarity. I can feel tension leave my body. Randomly it's sick to believe what the CIA says, because it must be cool to have faith in them like that. Randomly it's sick to skate with Airpods in. Randomly it's sick to irrationally hate "apolitical" art, especially if it sucks anyway.
Part of this for me has been group therapy; getting taken-to-task about a thought or behavior is rewarding, even though it feels like dogshit in the moment. Randomly it's sick, though. It feels good eventually. It's like working out.
*They hate skaters so much