Sleepless Night Blog, Vol. 2: Facebook and Instagram are back. No shocks. Here's another nostalgia dump.

Does anybody find it funny that Facebook and Instagram were down the day after a pretty damning series of information came out about how they're TOTALLY aware of how much hate they foster and promote?

Me too.

Fuck Zuckerbot. Break Facebook up. YEAH, I CAN SAY THAT HERE. YOU CAN'T GET TO ME HERE IF NOBODY CARES ABOUT BLOGGER ANYMORE YOU ROBOT BASTARD!

Anyways, being downtown again more frequently has been really nice. Especially with the fall weather officially kicked in. I really missed that morning ritual of just, waking up super early and getting to be around such a busy environment as it's all just starting to wake up. There's kind of a zen vibe to it. It's nice. I just didn't appreciate as much as I should have initially. I mean, I did but... not like I do now. There's something kind of calming knowing somewhere so busy can be so quiet and empty sometimes too.

To kind of build on that, being downtown again I'm reminded of the numerous treks in different parts of the city at ungodly hours. It was always pretty surreal. Definitely not something I do nowadays, especially with just how... much more sensible I am now. Two memories mainly stick out. I'm gonna try painting the picture as best I can. The first one was being downtown at an hour my parents would be mad at me for. This was after a show out in the suburbs that May and I saw the summer we were rehearsing the first Vanity Contest show. Thankfully I wasn't alone, but it was just crazy. The wind howled between buildings, I'm not kidding. So surreal, it was like a siren that you couldn't place where it was coming from. I had photos somewhere from that night, but I can't seem to find 'em.

Another time was during the winter. THIS I have pictures from. I woke up at 4 in the morning (barely) because on the forecast I saw that all early in the morning, there was supposed to be a dense layer of fog absolutely blanketing the majority of the city. This was one of the last days of my winter break from that year of high school. So I figured a morning out on the beach at 5:00 AM was a wonderful idea.

Well, I'm glad I had the experience but I'd be ok only having done that once. I was freezing my ass off on Montrose Beach carrying WAY too many cameras. There wasn't any other weather other than the fog, thankfully or I might've gotten some pretty severe frostbite. The photos were partially inspired by Ghosts I-IV (coming back to this record for the millionth time, I TOLD YOU it was an influence!), albeit with an icier feel and focused primarily on winter. There was a record I did that tried to accompany those photos but it's pretty lo-fi. I'll come back to some select tracks eventually. There are lots of ideas from those sessions that were cool, but didn't translate well just based on inexperience.

This was next level though, this was something else. The isolation, the graininess of the photos. There's so much honesty to them. There's no big picture artistry, no concepts, no crazy layers. It's just raw experimenting, it really was trying to hone my craft. I've always really cherished what came out of that part of my life artistically. I dunno. Maybe it's not much, but there's something about winter that's always inspired what I do to some degree. It's a whole vibe. Yeah, I get sick of it at some point but it's cool. On a VC-related note eagle-eyed fans of our track, I Do Not Want This, will notice the original photo from the cover art came from these photos. As did part of the inspiration for that track.

I've tried really hard to capture that feeling again. I've tried a lot to capture that point and feeling again with music like that and I have yet to do so to the same degree. There was no faking the inexperience. Sure, I could go lo-fi again, but there's no recreating it. I KNOW it wouldn't be the same, so there's no point in trying to give it a polished coat, or even the same coat. I can only look back.

I miss it.

TRACKS YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO RIGHT NOW:

1 Ghosts I - NIN (but do yourself a favor and listen to that whole album)

Motion Picture Soundtrack - Radiohead

Girl Loves Me - David Bowie

The Escape Engine - Burning Airlines

Perdonare - Alessandro Cortini