I picked up this great Bettye Swann compilation from other music a few weeks ago. I was reading the liner notes today and the compiler talks about trying to track Swann down and how she dodged his questions and walked away from her music career because of "really rough times." The whole narrative seems to remove agency in the creative process from Swann and place it in the hands of this dude trying to track her down, trying to unearth her work, trying to restore her music/name to never-realized former glories a la British orientalism (Jones et al.) (sorry, still rereading Said.) All of which, aside from being politically problematic around issues of representation and the racialized logics of creative labor and intellectual property, also begs the question - is she actually being paid for any of this? If this person can't even really locate her, how is she getting a check?

I think part of my ambivalence about finding a new place comes from the fact that the move i really want to make right now is to another city and possibly another profession, but i'm not doing any of those at the moment, and instead i just kinda sit around and try to write and passivley wait for the future to happen against the prescient advice two of the best organizers i have ever met gave me almost a year and a half ago.

I should follow by clarifying that my desire ot leave new york stems not from the sort of "been there done that" cum "New York is mean and overbearing and i make millions writing bad songs about how alienated i feel" B.S. for which i have pilloried certain sectors of the Indie Rock establishment. I appreciate and am thankful that New York is bigger than, more than, North Square and North Six, Theory and Anthropologie and etc. I just want to be somewhere else.

Meanwhile the increasing numbers of young white folks moving into sunset park seem to be hailing from increasingly elevated income brackets and wearing increasingly hip clothing, and i'm totally complicit in this, and i',m frustrated that my only contribution to this neighborhood in the years i've lived here seems to have been as a pioneer for successive waves of gentrification.

Anyway, speaking of hipsters, i am excited about the new New Pornographers CD. Ah NAFIJWA, you hypocrite. I wonder if anonymity has run its course. I'll be 26 on tuesday and I feel like I am wasting too much time not particularly productively moving towards a profession i don't know that i want to enter. At the very least I wonder if I shouldn't have waited several more years to start grad school, and as counterproductive as this sort of speculation is it's also pretty addictive.

So I turn to "Becoming Part 2," specifically the scene in which Angel/us is about to kill Buffy, and taunts her by telling her that she has "no weapons, no friends, no hope," and then asks her, mockingly, what is left as he thrusts his sword at her neck (phallic much?) She says "me." stops the blade with her hands and breaks it in two. Of course, then he gets his sould back and hse has to kill him anyway to stop the world from being sucked into hell, so maybe that's not the best place to look for inspiration. Or maybe the point is that shit is hard, and you have to do things that are extremely difficult and gut wrenching, and you have to do them and move forward anyway and then you have to deal with the consequences. Alright, the ADD's kicked in, I'm babbling about Buffy, and somewhere between the first and fourth paragraphs this got way too emo, so i'll have mercy on you, dear reader, (apostrophe!) and end it here.