vaneigem's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pro-Activism: Having gone back home and working on the documentary on the underground scene in Blvl in the golden ages, seeing old interviews, seeing spots where really meaningful things happened to me, etc, has led me to a bit of reflection. Blvl is a place of community society, the walking society, a small town. A place where there is not much cultural "competition" and therefore anything that explodes is exciting and something to build upon. I conceptualize small towns as timebombs rather than as wastelands, obsessed with the root. Little seeds. It reminded me of my experiences with the development of the "underground" in my town growing up. Kids weren't really given any alternative spaces to hang out at other than our parents' basements so kids started creating shit not to be cool, to network, or to make money (which no one would have even thought of.. youd just assume to lose $$), but cuz there wasn't anything better to do to be honest. And I am really familiar with this phenomenon of alienation in small towns and I'm lucky to have been in a community where we didn't let it suck us in and get us down but took it in our hands and took mad advantage of it. I think we all kind of knew how huge and triumphant it was, I mean belleville wasnt the greatest place in the world but all the more to make something of it i guess. Actually its probably one of the shittiest places on earth but we flipped it upside down. I always felt like I was looking through this lens that no one else saw. I remember sitting on the floor of my first punk show because I didn't know what else to do, totally scared out of my mind. We had this, like, collective unspoken respect to not diss any of the bands and to just support it because they were part of this thing we were making hapepn, a bunch of kids who didntknow what the fuck they were doing. I miss the sense of ownership of the city you live in. Growing up in there taught me a lot about life and I thought a lot about it at the time. There are too many people here, in Toronto. Too many people have too many friends, maybe even myself. Too much stuff to do, too many distractions. Its important just to keep it in mind. I really love living in Toronto and I'd definitely live here permanently like if it turned out that way, but my home is there forever.
Granted, criticism can obviously be very constructive, but at that time and in that place, anything super super negative just wasn't relevant to any of us. You either loved it or hated it and kept quiet about it and let other people enjoy it. Why people have blogs who waste obviously large amounts of their time and energy seriously pouring over the perils of, like, uninfluential stuff like message boards or which underground band sucks... it is sad and destructive. Livejournal iseasier becuase it acknowledges the day to day triviality. I realize its just my own framework of how I work and taht I am just doing the same thing of reproducing their legacy right now as i write, when I should just belike " yeah thats not cool" and leave it at that instead of ever having written these incoherent paragraphs. But anyway, that's why Im doing this doc thing. Its important to know. History to future. Past to influence. Love, 12:33 am - 01.06.06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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