fashion fades but she's all that is forever

I may have just graduated high school, but that doesn't mean that I can't pretend like my entire existence is playing out like a Kevin Williamson screenplay. 

with all my heart

Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday. 

featuring a vintage Valentine from '53

I love Courtney Love with all of my heart (so much, in fact, that I wear a locket around my neck with a picture of her stuffed in it at all times). 

Anyone with common sense is aware of my love for The Strokes. 

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen was—and still is—my favorite movie when I was younger. I don't think I ever realized how undoubtedly relatable the film would end up being as I got older. I believe wholeheartedly that Lola Step is a virgo.

These are the first two people I thought about when I started drafting this project. It's kind of creepy to be doing this without them knowing, but they're two people that I'd always admired from afar. My poem for Monyka is probably my favorite out of all of them. 
—

I created a Valentine's playlist that is primarily comprised of 80's synth pop (I wanted to add my favorite sappy songs—Laura by Girls, Unfucktheworld by Angel Olsen, any song off of Crush Songs or Six Feet Beneath the Moon)—but I decided to stick with songs that I felt perfectly embodied my strange love for the holiday), but here are two songs that my brain sonically connects with these collages. 

Sleater-Kinney — No Cities To Love

Sleater-Kinney and The Virgins are two bands that I fall in and out of love with every six months or so. My love for either band is intervaled; when I'm not rediscovering The Virgins's later discography (I am a staunch believer that their first album is truly their magnum opus, but their later album seems to get better every time that I listen to it), I'm redownloading all of the old Sleater-Kinney tracks that I loved in the tenth grade and singing them loudly in my bedroom. 

Joanna Newsom — Only Skin

There is no physical way to formulate my love for this song into words or sentences or phrases or coherent syntax. The "Be a Woman" excerpt (around 4:30-8:00) is one of the most beautiful moments in modern music. 

Angel Olsen — Hi-Five

I think this song encapsulates the absurdity of love/passion/desire/any related abstract noun. The beginning of the song sets up this lonely, luring narrative; our narrator clearly desires another lonely person she has spotted and entices them by pitting their lonesomeness together (something along the lines of "we don't have to be lonely together..."). The ending of the first verse is the breaking point of the song:

Are you lonely too?/Are you lonely too?/Hi-five!/So am I! 

Olsen's voice is alluring (and gently seductive) when she delivers the beginning of the line, which adds to the greater effect—the shrill, abrupt ringing of HI-FIVE! interrupts her mesmerizing tone and forces an element of ridiculousness into the song. Both characters are in a perpetual state of loneliness, but why the hell should they try to get rid/out of it as quickly as possible? Loneliness can be a good thing...a fascinating state of mind. 

strange mercy

''Their music made the blurring lines that separated hell from the hollow a lot less apparent. Their music filled my head with a particular kind of strange mercy; something music hasn't made me feel in a long, lone time. Every song made hell a lot less hot and heaven a lot more soothing. It made my fingertips jittery with pleasure, with every grunt and inflection and key change I felt every bristle and every pore on my body become soothed by familiarity..'' 

         To celebrate me completing the last page of the journal I started on October 12, 2014, here are a few half-embarrassing entries ranging from the beginning of my sophomore year to the end of my junior year. 

the idealism of inexperience (or, how sugar ray changed my life)

      

     Omens, creative stalemates, and a nearly-nonironic usage of Sugar Ray lyrics to assist the flow of ideas.

no time in the world - BLUE and DESPAIR

      I am no longer a human being.

and she melted and i got her all over my shoes

''It was anything but graceful, and I probably howled like a baleful, ill-willed witch, but it was winsome and childlike and reminiscent of a childhood pictured in movies. This degree of solitude is a glowing beacon of temptation, a token, an inducement for the days to come.''

two pages out of my own personal journal, featuring a picture of my mother with quote from one of the worst movies i have ever seen, the cool and the crazy

  

                                 persianthottie.tumblr.com                                                                           Cedric Charlier, Fall 2012

Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Death Proof

Take This Waltz, 2011

Requiem for a Dream, 2000

The Others, 2001

Requiem for a Dream, 2000

Aubrey Plaza, Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings

ROZA by rrrroza, Flickr

an image i took when i walked around the englishtown market, kicking up dirt from my boots to my bones and spending $1 on a bracelet i would never
ended up wearing

and, of course, a song to leave you with

the summer i spent lucid dreaming

As a brooding teenager unhealthily obsessed with the future and the legacy I will uphold within my future generations (as if that didn't sound incredibly pretentious), I believe documentation is incredibly important. Here's a collective photoset of some of my favorite journal entries. (Excluding actually-handwritten entries, which are literally too embarrassing and too pathetic to even reread myself)

(yes, that is a chipped tooth in a bag. yes, i cleaned it before sticking it in the bag)

(postcards i found at an antique store for $2 each; they're written/addressed postcards from 1953 and 1939)

(reminders for when my brain shuts off and demands to watch buzzfeed videos instead of doing homework or actually something productive or creative. well, at least the right side is a reminder)

(another set of gems that i found at an art festival; two photos that i bought from a woman selling some of her personal photos for $2 each. the second photo was so old and bent that it nearly crumbled in my hand)

lastly, and randomly, a song i cannot stop listening to