pedestrian blues

 hi club. i got hit by a pickup truck 3 days ago and it is unlikely for me to post anything this week. i got super lucky and i only injured my ankle and knee, but still I am super tired and i don't have the energy to post anything.

maybe next week! bye for now

lock in o clock

 Hey club... I feel like i haven't been giving you any attention lately. that's because its Lock In O Clock.

i have been so locked in. I have so much to do and i am doing all of it. but today I extra locked in and I have no immediate homework to do right now and I have like an hour to kill and I am in a fancy tea shop so I figured i would get back on the blog.

thus, I am going to talk about myself for a while. and media and art and stuff.

I have been reading Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 by Lizzy Goodman. it is a super thick oral history of the rock age in NYC (think Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, etc.) and I love it. as a biproduct I have been obsessed with electroclash, like Ladytron and Peaches, even though in the book everyone hates electroclash. I also love Karen O all over again. Y Control is probably my song of the year. I am only like a third through the book and I fear it is preventing me from reading other things. I really want to read Dante's Inferno because of Virgil and Hell. 

I also really want to read The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson because I overtranslated Book 9 for Greek class and now I feel on par with her skill (jk). I met her in May and she was so cool. She was covered in tattoos and did an amazing impression of Priam in the Illiad, reading in the dactylic hexameter and everything. I have been generally obsessed with Greek mythology for a long time, but right now I really want to watch mythological movies. I think this is because I binged Kaos (2024) on Netflix and the Eurydice song is a new guilty pleasure of mine. Hopefully soon I will leave Locked In Land and watch some movies. I especially want to see Gladiator (2000), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Elektra, My Love (1974). Classics fans love to be picky about movie adaptations, but what is the fun in following the myth to a tee? Then you know exactly what happens.

last obsession for today is my film camera. my grandparents gave me 2 cameras last year: a Pentax SP500 and a Nikon N2020. both are super old. the pentax is ancient. But i asked my friend to check out the N2020 and fix it for me and he did. I got very excited and bought a roll of film for like $18. and then i go to try it out. and it does not turn on. Apparently my friend forgot to put some essential parts of the camera back into it. so then I try the pentax just for fun. but it also does not turn on. and I can't even open the battery compartment. and then i google the manual and it is so old. i am going to show pictures from it after this. but through the manual I find out it only takes mercury batteries. so I was about to open this compartment and get mercury poisoning probably. hopefully tomorrow my friend will give me the parts to my camera. and I can take some super cool film pics. 

i will never betray my digital camera. even though I accidentally broke it this week and now to take a photo I must use the wiring of my earring to push down on the shutter. but one thing my friend said was that he likes film more because it is much more intentional. I reject that notion. i love digital because of how accessible it is, how i can capture a moment so effortlessly. after all, why would I want to remember the moment for how hard it was to take? when you live through moments, they should not be hard.

one of my favorite pics I've taken is this one:

because it feels so much like that day and that memory. as I type this I am like 2 blocks away from where it was taken, and i think about whenever i walk past it. i wont lie the picture is better in my head and definitely better on my phone but whatever.

not only have i been locked in, but there has also been a lot of drama in my life. i got into a fight over film. i have been invited and then uninvited and then reinvited to a party (i didn't go). there was a bomb threat at my school and we were evacuated for 2 hours?? this was all in the past week.

i have to leave this tea shop. i have sat here for a long time with a $5 lavender lemonade that I was 5 cents short for and the barista had to bail me out. i have to meet with my cousin to get some clothes from her on E Houston. and i have to go to a meeting to plan out an epic Halloween show at 6:30. 

i have other topics to type about including but not limited to:

• my guitar teacher moving to nashville
• videos of 1950s alaska i have found
• whether or not to put this blog on my college apps
• my waste of an adobe subscription

coming soon ;0

senior year start

i am five days into senior year. i am enjoying myself so far. i am not stressed yet.

at school classes are still easy so I have just been taking videos on my camcorder and doodling. I love doing these doodle dumps so here is one now. Except i am trying to format them better this time because Blogger sucks with sort of stuff. I only have something to say about like 5 of them so...

this one is a short comic i made based on the story of Dido and Iarbus i learned in Latin class where Iarbus told Dido he would give her all the land she could cover with a bulls hide, so she cuts it into strips and outlines what would become Carthage. i love comics. I also drew my characters from the other comics that I made over the summer.

here they are except I gave the boy a tan and a different outfit and I forgot the robot's main body design and also what his eyes looked like. it's fine because designs change. I don't think i ever gave the boy an actual name. i think Androkles stuck with me though. Andro for short? and then its like man and robot wowwww right. one day a comic about them will actually be made.

these are the last doodles by the way.. as you can tell I like to label my drawings. I will make more comics in between classes. 

other things going on..... the photoshoot! i learned a lot about taking photos. for one, i know what ISO is but I don't know how to change it on my camera. one of my struggles was shooting in the day and the night. one of my models (friends) woke up at 2pm and the shoot was delayed to 6:30. so half of the pics are a totally different vibe than the other. let me just show the pics.

this is my example. i also experimented with editing but i just can't get them in the same ballpark (pun intended). 

I am really tired so i will write more on the shoot later. i loved it though.

summer collages

school starts in 4 days. today I burnt a CD full of all my repeated songs of the summer. I collaged a cover from New Yorker scraps.

beckford - Cottonwood Firing Squad

Feeling Better - The Teenagers

Kim & Jessie - M83

Red Alert - CSS

Heart Full of Pentagons - Film School

Aoi, Koi, Daidaiiro No Hi - MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS

Pogo - Digitalism

Blonde Blood - Boyscott

Forget It - Blood Orange

What You Like - Wallows

Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl - Broken Social Scene

Twist The Knife - Chromatics

Ain't It Easy - Alex G

360 - Charli xcx, Robyn, Yung Lean

How to Kill a Radio Consultant - Public Enemy

Teenage FBI - Guided By Voices

american dream - LCD Soundsystem

Rock The House - Gorillaz

In Transit - Albert Hammond Jr.

End of the Summer - Joyce Manor

The End has No End - The Strokes

a lot of SOTWs on here! Now when I listen to it i will be reminded of this summer. it feels officially over, now that it's the first of September and I finished my personal statement. I am fine with this. I just saw some friends I haven't seen all summer for a photoshoot (more on that coming soon) and I was reminded of the charm that school can have, or maybe just the charm of my friends. I am ready for uniforms, band practice, the L train, knee high socks, chicken cutlets, greek tests, and college apps. Maybe not the last 2. even though it will be tough, i know I can get through it, and then post-December will be amazing.

every year I get so excited for autumn, and i feel it stirring up again. I deserve to be excited for senior year! i am also excited to implement all the things I learned about myself this summer. i want to make more films, do more photoshoots, write comics, volunteer, etc. how to juggle this with school + college, i don't know yet. but i believe in myself.

before i consider summer actually done, i should probably address the Japan trip. It sort of feels like it didn't even happen. i know it means so much to me and i am so lucky to have gone, but it feels like a fever dream. it was so hot there it could've been. Luckily, I made a scrapbook for every day i was there. it is time I show my favorite spreads. for the record these aren't in the right order and I'm trying something new with formatting :P

I was very committed to this scrapbook. some of the hotels had kitchen scissors, but others only had knives so I would use them as a straight edge to rip my scraps to perfection. everywhere we went my pockets would be full of paper. I thought i would continue this after the trip, but I did not. maybe for senior year?

updates coming soon. photoshoot coming soon. youtube coming soon? stay tuned.