One recent evening whilst googling myself, I came across an 801a post from days past simply entitled “Ask Teen Works: I’m a Flirt” written by a jovial, slightly younger Andy Pressman. Sometimes, much like the author of my favorite blog, I wistfully look to the past — the heyday of the 801a blog, perhaps — and wonder what happened. Three (?) blogs later, am I really grown up? No more R. Kelly references? No more overly personal angsty anonymous over-sharing sessions? Just an internet to one day finally print out and graphic design to think about?
It seems like just yesterday (though it was over a year ago) I found a special new home in 801a. We’ve laughed, quizzed, Bjorked, learned, loved. We’ve dealt with economic crises big and small. We’ve bought iPhones (except me!), foolishly antagonized strangers (who have also bought iPhones). We’ve learned about the internet, reported on celebrity comings and goings in Dumbo, raved.
The question that really plagues me is, of course, bigger than our little office. To get back to Lindsay Lohan’s original unexplored topic, is it even possible to feel grown up, an “outsider” perhaps (preferably in a Ponyboy-esque ‘nothing gold can can stay’ type way rather than a special private DJ booth setup at a Samantha Ronson event L. Lo way), and to still feel the same thrill that, say, the ‘Tusk’ documentary once brought? How can we mature without losing all the effusive excitement of youth?
I am putting on the Tusk documentary now. I have some thinking to do.
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This morning as I commuted via G train to fair Dumbo, I perused Sunday’s bargain basement impulse buy, issue #4/5 of a 1982 zine called Re/Search that featured William S. Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle.
A month or two ago for some reason—Health was opening up for Trent Reznor maybe, intriguing?—I decided to listen to Nine Inch Nails, which led me to think of a boy I used to hang out with in high school and some of college, admittedly my only real experience with this music. We’d drive around rural Pennsylvania in his fixed-up Audis and Saabs listening to Throbbing Gristle and KMFDM and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. He was calm-verging-on-boring, with Aryan features so cool and delicate they still inspire some romantic regret, but he loved Industrial music.
An excerpt from this interview with Throbbing Gristle on page 66 from 1981:
GEN: We just have a very simple philosophy, which is that we always think what we want to do next… We look at our record collection, or whatever’s going on, and we decide what we personally would like to have or possess as a record, or a magazine, and then, if nobody else is doing it, then we’ll do it. And with the records that we do, usually we tend to—if we’re not sure—contradict whatever we did last time, and it seems to work quite well.
Most of us are quite good at predicting what people will expect, and then the four of us, between us, can usually confuse that expectation, with a little discussion. We do a lot of talking first.
COSEY: Besides that, there’s no point in repeating yourself either. If you’ve got one thing on record, there’s no point in recording the same kind of thing again!
As I transferred to the A train, I felt overcome by a feeling of nostalgia for a time when I perhaps aspired to this sentiment. I obviously wasn’t making music — it had more to do with certain ideas about communication via media / art / design that we hope to explore more on our Rumors blog in the near future. Maybe happy maturity involves being all grown up and staying an outsider—outside even yourself—for most nights? How can we stop repeating ourselves and make the fantasy objects we actually wish existed? How do we continue attempting to articulate our own idealized worlds?
