The Pipettes and the recreation of everything you've known to be true.

I haven't had many moments recently. Usually, I'm fighting mindlessly against the tide, and yet recently, I feel like I'm stuck in some barren, desolate hell of nothingness, where there are no waves pushing me back towards the shore. I'm having a hard time getting the words on the page, both literally and figuratively. Sometimes, it's because I'm uncertain and I doubt myself, but a lot of the time, it's just that I'm having an extremely hard time getting my head in the game.

Over the past few weeks, a lot of strange things have happened. I think those things have carried over into the other parts of my life and that's what's giving me all this damn trouble, but that almost seems too easy.

As this has all been happening, I've also had a big project in my art class. We're using Photoshop to create a collage of a space, either imagined or conceptual. Of course, since I've been listening to tons of "Concrete Jungle" and "Ghost Town," I decided that I was going to rebuild a skyline, piece by piece. So far, it's been going okay:



but, there's just something about it that's mundane. Of course, the idea is to portray urban life in a very gray manner, but it's more than just that. My collage is just boring. There's very little in it that's visually interesting. Most of what's going on is at the very bottom and I'm having trouble playing with perspective with the components.

I'd been sitting here for an hour, just trying to drop shadow until something happened, when it occurred to me. I should be trying to recreate things in a more unconventional manner. It may come as a surprise to many of you, but I'm not a very unconventional thinker. Over the next few days, I'm going to be looking for photos, items to scan, magazines, books, etc. of things that could possibly play as stand-ins for the buildings in my skyline.

When you're recreating life in this manner, subconsciously, you want to recreate it as closely to reality as possible. I lied a little before when I said that there was no struggle; I've been grappling with changing the way I think, partially because of this class, but also because of everything that's been going on in my life. Things are changing constantly and when it seems like nothing else could possibly change, they keep getting more and more strange. I've had to look at things in a new way, though this isn't to say that it's been a negative experience. I don't know whether it's fear of losing the original image in our minds that prevents us from creative deconstruction or not, but I think it has a lot to do with ownership. I have no problems destroying something I've created and building it back up in a different way, but when it comes to something that I can't call "my own," I shrink back. It has very little to do with creativity.

There are a lot of different things that provoked this outburst: the art project, the Specials, the emptiness. The strangest thing brought this all together. Right as I came up with the idea to reconstruct the skyline with stand-ins for buildings, the song on my iPod changed to a cover of "I Think We're Alone Now" by the Pipettes. If you know me at all, you'll know that I'm sort of obsessed with good covers and tributes. This is a great recreation, even though it's fairly true to the original and it's also a live cut. As I listened to that and realized everything that it was and was not, I realized that these things were all small metaphors for my life now. I've really taken what I had before and deconstructed it, then built it back up into what I wanted it to be. Though I complain all too much about the emptiness or the struggle or whatever, I'm really beginning to realize that I've built something I can really be proud of, something I wouldn't be ashamed to put on the wall for everyone to see.

"I Think We're Alone Now"