noonereallyknowswhatwedo:

Phillip Toledano

zaclittle:

I write down a lot of phrases that I like and generally use them for titles of videos/podcasts.

I’m working on the last monthly vlog for 2018/probably ever and it will be called “If I Forget You, Jerusalem,” which is a phrase I heard in a short film called Hedgecomb. The whole quote is “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my hands forget my skill.” It’s from the Bible or whatever.

Lately, it felt like I was still making those videos and putting them on YouTube just so I wouldn’t forget how. And it started to feel like a self-defeating system, or a recipe for joylessness.

And I realized that my whole online persona/MO is ten years old. Obviously it’s changed a lot since the AFO/RSR days, but clearly not enough. And I realized that I didn’t need to hold on to something just to hold on to it. I can find new ways to practice my skill.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

This news leaves me a bit wretched. I don’t have the best relationship with inspiration. In fact, we rarely meet, but Zac’s videos seems to be an endless source of ingenuity that keep me on this side of creative line. I also have difficulty with watching anything after I’ve seen it. I need a lot of distance to consider coming back, but there have been a few exceptions: season one of Community and Zac’s videos being two. When I first saw season one of Community, I watched it six to eight times in a year. That’s still crazy to me. And not background viewing either, I mean fully entrenched. I don’t even know how often I’ve seen Zac’s videos, because it seems every few weeks, I make the rounds again. Each one has it’s own vibe, but they all have the same fingerprint. They inspired me to step up my own game. I had made monthly videos since 2012, but I fell out of love a year or two in. I would watch Portsmouth Pizza Program, No Church In The Wild and videos like “Some Jokes” and “Radio Edit” frequently, but never watched the vlogs for whatever reason until a few years ago, but when I did, I found my favorite youtuber. The last year or so is when the inspiration started to take hold and I’ve make some of my favorite videos I’ve every done. I’ll follow wherever Zac leads me, but the vlogs will always be some of my favorite videos on the internet.

watch it go, like a firework
it’s too bright to see
right where all the wrongs would lurk
just a little debris

keep walking through walls
you still got some
it’s an expy of withdrawal
you’re gonna become

Gradients of age and turn things around,
mistaken for change, rebellion of sound,
it eats itself, and it eats itself,
sheets of sound, back to the background.

Frank Turner - “I Am Disappeared”

I keep having dreams of pioneers
& pirate ships & Bob Dylan.
Of people wrapped up tight
in the things that will kill them.
Of being trapped in a lift
plunging straight to the bottom.
Of open seas & ways of life we’ve forgotten
I keep having dreams.

Amy worked in a bar in Exeter,
I went back to her house & I slept beside her.
She woke up screaming in the middle of the night,
terrified of her own insides.
Dreams of pirate ships & Patty Hearst.
Breaking through a life over-rehearsed.
She can’t remember which came first:
The house, the home, or the terrible thirst.
She keeps having dreams.

And on the worst days
when it feels like life weighs
ten thousand tons.
She’s got her cowboy boots &
car keys on the bedstand
so she can always run.
She can get up, shower & in half an hour she’ll be gone.

I keep having dreams of things I need to do
& waking up but not following through.
But it feels like I haven’t slept at all
when I wake to a silence & she’s facing the wall.
Posters of Dylan & of Hemingway.
An antique compass for a sailor’s escape.
She says you just can’t live this way
& I close my eyes & I never say.
I’m still having dreams.

And on the worst days
when it feels like life weighs
ten thousand tons.
I sleep with my passport,
one eye on the back door,
so I can always run.
I can get up, shower & in half an hour, I’ll be gone.

And come morning
I am disappeared.
Just an imprint on the bedsheets.
I’m by the roadside with my thumb out.
A car pulls up & Bob’s driving, so I climb in.
We don’t say a word as we pull off into the sunrise
and these rivers of tarmac are like arteries across the country.
We are blood cells alive in the bloodstream.
The beating heart of the country.
We are electric pulses in the pathways of the sleeping soul of the country.

June video

Halted, gasping, sweating,
almost complete darkness.
There’s no man, only me.
What he saw did not seem
out of this sun.
The boy staring.
He’s always throwing over the black birds
with interest.

I got plans cuz they had to be made,
a lot of sand next to castles displayed,
running in place of the placebo,
cutting the brain to see where memories go.

this-day-in-baseball:

January 26, 1960

Jackie Jensen announces his retirement due to a fear of flying, a condition that Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey tried to help his outfielder to overcome by arranging therapy. The 1958 MVP will change his mind, returning to the team in 1961, but will stay retired after the season, having what he considered a sub-par year in which he batted .263 and drove in 66 runs.

Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile To The Surface (2017)

Good art takes you away and sucks you in to its world. Great art takes you by the hand and slits your wrist. The best art ruins your day. The best you can hope for as a creator is to put sticks and leafs over a hole well enough that someone falls in. Experiencing art is arguably harder. The distance between a tee and a hole is so great that if the ball gets in from one swing, it’s an accomplishment. There are variables in and out of your control. This is all part of the game one way or another. You can swing for the fences and get picked up by the wind. You can par every hole. It seems to be about he experience. When that experience can translate from your head or from the ink on the paper to the listener, regardless of how the wind was blowing, or even if that only lands on one person, there has to be weight behind that swing.

Favorite Songs:
“The Alien”
“The Grocery”
“The Wolf”
“The Mistake”