I haven’t been up to much these days. Dorking out, mostly. Staying in. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Hot chocolate. My grandmother is still ailing. She has renamed my family’s cat “Percocet.” Last night Darren and I watched the first episode of The Wire, which I couldn’t help but compare to Monk, a USA show we watched last week, also for the first time. The Wire is a “gritty” HBO drama about multi-ethnic, hard-boiled homicide and narcotics detectives in Baltimore, Maryland, where it seems that everyone either smokes crack or owns a loaded gun. The second is a cute show about a lily white obsessive compulsive detective who solves murders by being a charming idiot-savant. I want something in between these two shows. For instance, a jaded Mexican cop has to break up a heroin ring at the high rise Lifesaver Towers in Candy Land. Or a child detective who can’t stop wetting his pants has to kill a couple guys in Queens.
Gag
Lydia Hearst is an artist.
“I sit down and I write what I’m thinking and what I feel—it happens all at once, I never stop writing. Probably when I go home tonight, I’m going to open my computer and just start typing… I always envision myself being a Hemingway type—sitting in a dark corner with my glass of, I guess it would be, my glass of tequila and lime juice– that’s how I do it.”
Recently, she’s been hanging out with a group of young people who call themselves “the 2.0.” They include a giddy gaggle of creative aspirants such as photographer Nadav Benjamin and musician and nude Internet dude Cisco Adler, whom she has dated.
“I would say my closest friends are probably the 2.0,” she said. “It’s not about a clique, it’s just about a group of people coming together and it’s a lifestyle—it’s a bond. … So many young people are wrapped up in the party scene. The great thing about everyone in this group is, we all have real jobs, we get up in the morning. We work and that’s what brought us together…We are hardly ever apart. It’s all artists—everyone in that group is successful in their own right, whether it is music, fashion, art, photography, business. We don’t want to compare ourselves to the Factory, because you can’t have the Factory without Andy Warhol, but essentially it is like a new wave and it’s a new style of living, and we are all just riding the wave, we are all being inspirational to each other and we are helping each other out and we are always there for each other, and we are hardly ever separated for more than a day—each one of us has the same mentality, which is breaking free of the mold that is the stereotype of society and the way that we are expected to be.”
Last month, the 2.0 gang went out and all got tattoos of a skeleton key; Lydia’s is on her inner right forearm. “The symbolism behind the skeleton key is that it opens every door and it’s bonded us together,” she said.
Today I am going writing out in Earlysville with my friend Selvi. Together we form an artistic movement called Future Warehouse. Yesterday we got matching tattoos on the back of our writing hands – the Chinese character that means “We’re better than you, so there.” We have a lot of ground to cover today, not only with our short stories but also with our mission statement and our indie theme song. My mom knows about the Future Warehouse movement, currently based in her pool house, and hopefully this afternoon she will bring us some tea and more money to fund our creative operations.