I'm really happy for you 2010, and ima let you finish, but 2011 is gonna be one of the best years of all time...
I was considering trying to pull some year-end wrap up deal here. Talk about the ups and downs of the last twelve months, favorite albums, movies, wins and losses, books I read. And I may do that still, but not today. It's really too much to think about. Too much has happened this year and I wasn't taking notes or keeping track. Suffice to say the year has been, like most years, filled with some incredible life-changing things and some very difficult lows.
I saw a lot of the people I love this year. I'd say, ironically, being so far away from so many of them, that I saw more this year than any other year in recent memory and for that I am so grateful. I read a lot of books (I credit Jenn for being a good reading influence/great person to be in a room together with, each person doing their own thing). There were even a lot of movies I was genuinely blown away by. Many projects started and underway, very few finished. Lots of electronic set-backs and some steps forward, not the least of which is this place: http://kanyegate.tumblr.com/. Not sure that I usually go for this kind of broad, meme-based internet humor, but I have to say, something about this whole thing makes me laugh really hard every time. I am sort of thankful to be living in the time and place when a classic of ubiquitous comedy is born. I mean, I wish I could have been there when someone came up with the whole "Andre the Giant has a posse..." thing. If you aren't familiar with what I'm referring to there, do yourself a favor and Google Image search the words "has a posse". You can find a wiki page about the original as well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_the_giant_has_a_posse, just for a little more background.
OK, back to the point I was trying to make. The problem here is that once you start making these broad statements about a long period of time it quickly becomes silly and contrived and pretty meaningless. It's like I'm writing a bad horoscope or something. I would be inclined to offer some specific examples in all those broad categories but I just don't think I can recall enough from across the whole year to do it justice.
So I am going to stick to the original purpose of this post. To say hello, goodbye. Hello, hello. I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello. To remind myself that the last post deserves a lot of pictures and attention before it gets too far away to matter and, most of all, to invite everyone to take place in another one of those little KINGS field trips that I am so often inviting you on.
It is, as I type, New Years Eve day, and it's looking sunny and beautiful here. I think it's even unseasonably warm today. So I am going to go for a walk and think about Allston and other places and all those people that mean so much to me but are really so very far away.
Since it is going to be the last night of the year tonight I would like to invite everyone to listen to the appertaining mix:
--080(The Last Night Of The Year)
As usual in these instances, the mix appended to the event or day is not always (or even ever) very appropriate to the setting. Ok the Christmas mix ended up being mostly thought out and intentionally themed (though to be fair it didn't even begin life as a xmas mix at all). But most of the time a mix has just become inadvertently a part of a particular day by chance, by virtue of the Phil song it was named after. I mean, the Thanksgiving mix, --107(Thanksgiving [Live At The Y, 2004]), is not exactly the mix I would have intentionally put together to set the scene for that day. It just happens to be the collection of songs that ended up under that heading. The mixes tend to be that way, not exactly ever what you want or expect them to be. They end up being just a weird collection of things that maybe makes sense as a unit, and maybe doesn't at all. Oh see, I am making a totally perfect but unintentional allegory for the year, or a year itself. Awesome. I mean, marking off any arbitrary unit of time or space is sort of meaningless, trying to summarize and make it means something is sort of silly. It just is what it is, a place for a large number of things, to collect and happen. They don't really go together, per se, we just need to try to make them, to understand them. We say ok these things happened in this little square, now lets add them up and make a story out of them, these songs appear on this mix, lets say it's because they go together for some grander reason. But none of that is necessary or even natural. That's a human brain trying to process disparate things. Which is great, I love it, I mean, I've practically made a religion out of it with KINGS and mixing and everything else. Ok, I'm losing myself in the broadness here. I am at the stage where I'm talking about all of life being this process of compartmentalizing and organizing and story-arranging. I need to stop. You're all getting my point I'm sure. (I am reminded here of something I heard someone say about the definition of "what a genius is", something about being able to see the connections between seemingly unconnected things, and having sparked that quote in my head I did a little fihing and found this little article, http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/06/09/how-geniuses-think/, it's good for a larf). Am I making sense here?
My point is this: the last night of the year mix is what it is because it ended up being named after that Microphones song, not because it was my stab at making the ultimate "New Years Eve Mix". In fact, glancing over it, I am not sure what I was stabbing at. Well a couple things come to mind I guess. One thing I'd like to put a finer point on though is that "Life in a Glass House" is a pretty phenomenal stand-in for "Auld Lang Syne" any day.
Anyway, I've rambled long enough without saying anything here (and done a lot more page linking than I usually tend to, sorry). I am off to walk and listen, I suggest you all do the same, or maybe get together with some loved ones and hang out and drink or eat, maybe listen to some music, maybe throw on this mix (I know, I know, almost no one has access to these but me, please people lets make a resolution, everyone treat themselves to a little iPod, doesn't have to be a huge one, a smaller one will do, I think, and send it to me and I'll equip it with a complete set of KINGS mixes, a working, up-to-date library of all of them. Make it happen!) Let's all take a minute, here at the customs exchange, and tell the people we love that we love them. I know it is silly to mark some significant meaning to this moment. It's just another day really. No reason that it should be some emotional turning point or milestone. No reason that it should be different than any other day. Huge changes are not going to happen and alter your life and your way of thinking and who you are just because it's a new year. Changing isn't suddenly going to become easier just because it's a new year. But it is also nice to be reminded that you can start over, you can turn over a new leaf, things do go on, you can make positive change, you can improve yourself and the world and the worlds of the people you care about. You can make a difference, in some way, every day. And you do. Even if you don't realize it, you do, all the time, to the people that love you. It is good to be reminded of these things,
even if we only think that way
on the last night of the year.
Lets all try to be more amazing to each other next year.
it is the last night of the year,
this is the seance.
xx
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