Lately I’ve been in to uncovering digital/online art communities and browsing through all their stuff. Art is a total mystery to me. I sometimes sit down and try and draw things, or color things, and they inevitably disappoint. Which is amusing, because my dearest friend from high school and spiritual little brother is an artist for a living, and when we get together he will occasionally respond to something I’ve said with, “Yes! That is art!” and I am all “What? Where? Did I blink and miss it? I don’t understand!”

Anyway, this is a longwinded way of pointing out that these old school book covers for modern movies completely kick ass.

I had this moment last week where a song I hadn’t heard in ages came on the radio at a restaurant and I was instantly flooded with vivid memories. It was “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone”, and it played over and over and over at the little tourist shop where I worked one summer. Sitting there last week I could actually smell the clothing steamer, and my fingers were alive with the memory of folding a million shirts on my cardboard folding board.

Anyway, it gave me the idea of a writing exercise: think of an evocative song from my past, and write about the memories. I did my first one on the plane to Vegas. It’s a little clumsy and maudlin, but I’m out of practice and didn’t want to edit too much and air travel terrifies me. (Half writing exercise, half therapy!) With that in mind…

Joey, Concrete Blonde (1991)

It was Fall, I think. Cold enough to have to keep the heat running in the car, but not far enough in the year for jackets.

We sat in the car, Mom in the driver’s seat and me beside her. We were parked at the big recreation center outside of town, almost exactly halfway between our home and that of my boyfriend at the time. It had long since shut down for the day, and we were the only car in the lot.

She must have been driving me home. She had done it before, and it was always one of those awkward things. “So.. what were you two up to tonight?” “Oh, you know.. stuff. Watched T.V. Just.. stuff.” A pause would stretch into silence for the rest of the drive.

But not that night. That night she pulled over, kept the car running, and tried to explain all those things that Moms want their daughters to know and sixteen year old daughters are too smug to learn. She talked, I listened. The Concrete Blonde cassette played through twice, making that ‘clunk’ noise of the automatic side switcher every twenty minutes or so. Each time I heard that thunk I would inwardly roll my eyes and wonder when the lecture would end. Eventually I think she felt she had said enough, and with a sigh she headed the car back towards home.

I learned very little. How do you teach your daughter to never have her heart broken, to never be reckless, to always be loyal to herself? You don’t, of course. But I imagine sometimes one would get the urge to try, sitting in the middle of nowhere as slow ballads blend together in the background.

I came across the Lifestreaming phenomenon while I was looking for a way to keep track of the books I read in 2009. Basically it’s the idea of keeping a central, automatically updated list of everything you do socially online. It’s sort of the hyper-extention of what we used to do in ye olde dayes of blogginges, keeping manual lists of things we read and movies we watched.

Obviously when I discovered the idea on Friday I thought it was stupid. What sort of narcissist would collect streams of data about themselves and gather it in one location? Who cares what I’m reading, or what I posted on my blogs, or what I said on other people’s — ooh, it can do that? What about.. ohh. And does it work with an RSS stream? I see. How.. interesting. /twitch.

(Have we spoken about my little voice yet? My little voice tells me to do many things, but mostly it likes obsessing over weird nerd projects. Stay up for 48 hours getting glue in my hair creating tiny sprockets for a paper clock? Okay! Eschew living beings while I obtain some achievement on my pixelated elf? Awesome! See the sunrise because I have to figure out how some new web geek phenomenon works? Yes please. I am probably the happiest when it’s 2am and I’m waist deep in some useless project with no end in sight.)

So here we are, about 10 hours of effort later and of course I have one of the blasted things. It combines the internet traces of books I read, movies I watch, games I play, and music I like, along with my blog posts, bookmarks, comments on other blogs, tweets, and GTalk status. Why? God, I don’t know. I still think it’s narcissistic and has no purpose. I just also think it’s shiny and organized, and I feel so structured that it makes my toes curl. Damn you, trendy new web phenom. (Then of course I had to redesign the site to go with the new feature, and properly tag and catalog all my old posts.)

I also got almost all my archives from 2000-2006 back online, so that’s an actual contribution of content to the series of tubes. I’m hoping it all evens out in the end.

Pride and Prejudice And Zombies. “… a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.”

The concept of this book fills me with such joy, y’all, I cannot even describe it.