Teenage

I rescued a couple discarded Blink-182* cds at the beginning of the month from Value Village..Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show and have been listening to them nonstop. I was totally convinced that portable CD Walkmans were the way to go..until I was jamming out while walking home and the disk started to skip more than me!! (check out that figurative language yallzz). Don't fret, that's when my faith in the iPod was rekindled..my new Blink albums are now safely stored on iTunes.

The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show is a live album that incorporates pretty good live recordings with hilariously vulgar, crude, obscene teenage boy humor. Blink's in between song banter is so great...I was mildly offended when I first listened to it but then was throughly desensitized after the first couple songs that their profanities became terms of endearment. This cd filled me to the brim with gratitude for being a teenager; unapologetic sense of self and saying whatever you want.

Freaks n Geeks, Dazed and Confused, The Strokes, Paranoid Park...makes me wanna be forevaa young!

*I'm so not ashamed of early 2000 culture! This goes to show what you can find @ thrift stores that others don't want but you're over the moon about.

All the small things

You know that one song that however many times you hear it, you still like it? I resurrected Blink-182's "All The Small Things" at the beginning of this summer when I was reminiscing on late 90s/early2000s alt rock. It screams teenage summer to me: doing whatever I feel like, wearing whatever is comfortable, just having fun, whatever fun is to you. So many people take their music SO SERIOUSLY but what fun is there in that? People can be so condescending about contrasting music in iTunes* but they don't even know how much fun it can be! The best mixes have the most diversity in them- some old stuff, some popular stuff, indie, classic.There's this one scene in Paranoid Park where Alex is driving in his car and he's listening to rap and everyone thinks "tyypical" and then it cuts and he's listening to classical, and in the next cut he's jammin' out to punk rock. It's  so perfect.

*"You can't have Sigur Ros and Fall Out Boy in the same iPod! You must not be a true Sigur Ros fan! You just don't have the right!"

[whenever I hear this song it will bring back this summer]

I also wanted to bring to everyone's attention the online stylings of I Love Fake magazine. Their tag-line on the site caught me immediately: "Celebrating the Spirit of Youth" and while looking at the rest of the site, I decided that I had found some creative soul mates. Seeing this editorial made me have such a 'connecting the dots' moment- these guys are such love children of Blink-182. The guy on the bottom right is what Tom and Mark's faces would look like smooshed together- seriously, watch the video. This editorial is just so Blink-esque- not only the ridiculous clothes that could have easily replaced the ones seen in the original video, but the slack-jawed, winking, lip-biting poses that set my heart aflutter.  

[images via I Love Fake magazine]