digital-priest.com: A Platinum Complication

december 5, 2001

question. this is serious. i have this really bad feeling lately.. not of impending doom or anything. i feel as if tension is building in every one of my relationships lately (sans a few, you know who you are)...and it makes me wonder, am i really that unreasonable that things can't be discussed with me? am i so intimidating that people don't want to confront me with problems they may be having with me? i'm feeling very self-consious right now. i feel like i have to walk on egg shells with just about everyone around me. i don't want to say something that can be taken the wrong way. this happens all the time, and i don't know what it is. if there is a problem, i would expect someone to come and tell me about it. maybe i'm making all this up, and no tension exists at all...but it happens all the time. i get this feeling, and no one confronts me about anything, and then it keeps going on without being discussed until it blows up and is too late. it happened 2 years ago, and instead of confronting me about problems they took it out on danielle. and even after they took it out on danielle, they STILL didn't mention it to me. and while this isn't the same situation, it feels the same way.
i need to get out of here. i need to get out of here SO badly.
*sits here and waits for carolyn to read this, and demand an explanation for this entry*
current mood: irritated, tense, etc.
listening to: "new york" - u2
stolen by the thought police from sara @ 2:01 PM

A PLATINUM COMPLICATION

She'd never heard of me. Which is good, actually. She'd never read Quantum & Woody or Black Panther, though I think, she'd be able to relate to both of those comics. On the other hand, I've never heard of Orgy, one of her favorite bands, which I, a 40 year-old black Baptist Minister, will now go out and buy so I can understand what she's trying to tell me. She's not afraid of me, intimidated by me, and, for some reason, she's not bothered by me. Which makes her all the more fascinating. Her name is Sara, and she's an artist. I'm not certain she knows she's an artist, but she is. I'm not exactly certain, even, what her art form is, but a visit to her site should give you a better idea. She certainly has a designer's eye and a webmaster's code chops (withering my laughable FrontPage paint-by-numbers routine into dust). It would be a horror for this very young woman to end up doing CD booklet designs for Virgin records while her real genius stalks across cyberspace unnoticed.

But, wait, what is art? I remember an interview with Sting, talking about the Blue Turtles album, where he braced against a reporter's assertion that he was doing Jazz. "This is not Jazz," Sting said, "this has nothing to do with Jazz." And he was right. Most people think Spyro Gyra and (flings himself into traffic) Kenny G do Jazz. They don't. They do fusion. They fuse elements of different art styles together. But Sam Goody only has but so much shelf space, so they routinely commit the heinous crime of racking Blue Turtles next to Mood Indigo.

december 8, 2001

so utterly exhausted.
so starving
so much work to do
stolen by the thought police from sara @ 11:37 AM

Sara is an artist. She paints with words. Art conveys ideas, emotion and concepts in a visceral and intellectual way. Art connects the producer and consumer, linking them in a common experience. Sara is webmaster of plantinumcomplication.com, a site that exists, apparently, as a hobby (much as this one does). She is a 20-ish college senior from upstate New York who likes some band called Orgy and (shudder) U2. Sara's studying something she calls "neuropsych" and is currently being hammered by her GRE's. She is, frequently, terribly happy and terribly miserable and she parties with her friends and hides from psychotic stalkers and worries about her future and her place in the world. About right for someone her age. The site is taken from two of her favorite songs, Platinum from Orgy's album Candyass, and Complication, an instrumental track of off Fragile, a release by the band Nine Inch Nails.

A huge music fan, Sara is trained in piano (with attempts at violin) and tells me she'd love to front a rock band. She says she doesn't sing, but she does sing, but she doesn't sing. I dunno, ask her yourself, she's really friendly and types very fast. Her roommate is someone named Danielle, whom I exchange messages with through Sara. Danielle has her own site on platinumcomplication, Ramblings of An Overstressed Biology Major, where she cheekily rants about "stupid boys" and meeting actors from soap operas. Actually, to my surprise, Sara has a virtual cabal of pals and gals, each with their own websites and "blog" (see below). You could lose a month combing through the comm traffic, but I've yet to stumble across any that made me take notice the way Sara's often purposefully insipid rambling did. Sara has also posted galleries of her photography, and her own archive of rants (doesn't everybody love a good rant?).

American Heritage Dictionary:
art: human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty; especially the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.

The (apparently) frequently-changing design schemes of platinumcomplication likely reflect the place Sara is at emotionally. She works the code better than many professional designers (she is not a web designer), creating an environment that speaks to her as a person. She's created her own confessional where her words resonate, and we can find comfort in her distress. Clarity in her confusion.

december 5, 2001

just a comment. my mom has every reason to worry about me becoming an alcoholic. given my family history, and my mental instability, pretty good chance of it.
i haven't felt this bad in a long, long time. i got too used to feeling.....um...good.
and thanks to carolyn and adrienne for your concern.
current mood: see above
listening to: "happiness in slavery" - nine inch nails
stolen by the thought police from sara @ 5:41 PM

This sounds really trite, and I can hardly get Sara herself to understand what I'm seeing, but there's real, disarming genius to her work. This very young woman is terribly creative, the Anti Alicia Keys, a wholly unmanufactured woman. The lower case sentence structure and squint-till-your-head-pops font design may lend the impression she's pretentious. Nah. She's just into that Goth crap the kids like so much these days. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, I find great beauty in this person and in her online window into her world. She's a brilliant writer, and I hope, for Pete's sake, she's archiving her daily ramblings somewhere for a book deal

This poor girl is a Cancer, born nineteen years and two days after me, but apparently suffering through the many trials Cancers (and Field Mice) suffer through. Plagued by the untamable highs and lows we creatures of duality— the hard shell protecting the soft underbelly— suffer with. I know Sara because I've passed that way before and, nineteen years later, I have not won a victory over these issues but rather attained a polite cease fire. A tenuous détente with the chemicals in my brain that keep me from enjoying most anything in life.

Here's this girl who is looking for love and trying to have fun and not quite getting it that neither really exist in the quantity or quality that were advertised when we were six. But she keeps trying. She's different. Special. She's a Field Mouse (we know our own), a wholly different species of individual who has no true place in the mainstream of society. She may burn another decade or longer trying to fit in and being rejected and hurt until she manages to extend her web space into her actual life, creating her own cathedral and bulwark where she can find comfort and peace.

december 5, 2001

so i just remembered something my mom said to me this summer. well when i started hanging out with joe, of course the next logical question was "are you going out with him?"...and i said no. cuz we're not dating. so then one day we were driving somewhere and i was talking about him, or something about the next EC show we were going to or whatever...she's like, you aren't going out with him? and i'm like NO! and shes like oh... do you think you ever could date him?. and i'm like WTF... you haven't even MET the kid and you want to pawn me off on him?!?!...she never likes the guys i like...she liked Scott, and well that turned out lovely ..and she thought Tim was hot, but me and tim never had a relationship....so now she hasn't even met joe, and she wants me to date him...trying to get rid of me or something mother?...that just kinda irritated me all of a sudden.
current mood: my eyes are tired
listening to: "in a little while" - u2
stolen by the thought police from sara @ 11:06 AM

The difference between Sara's site and mine: I'm over here creating all of this art and color and coldly calculating what I will tell you and in what way I'll tell it, while Sara just posts, literally, whatever she's feeling at the moment. She uses something called a "blog," which she had to painstakingly explain to me is a weblog, all the rage with the kids these days. Anyone can sign up to create their own blog at blogger.com, and instantly post pretty much whatever you want to directly to your website, which Sara does to great effect.

Now, this is either the most cynically calculating manipulative bitch I've ever met, or, more likely, this is horrifyingly real. A personal bulletin board on How Sara's Feeling At This Very Moment. We're on the ladder outside her bedroom window, watching this person make the painful transition from child to woman, and she is brazen enough or desperate enough to not mind that we're there, fogging up her window.

I've chosen to believe this is more bravery than manipulation. Actually, I've chosen to receive it as art. Cumulatively, as a piece of work, the content and design rise to that standard, evoking emotional and intellectual response and connecting producer with consumer.

And, this is something I could never do. Never in this life could I actually tell you who I am. What I do. What I'm feeling, from hour to hour. For one thing, I'm too much in the public eye. For another, I'm a black man in his 40's and it's too humiliating to admit the shocking degree of paranoia and obsessive compulsive behavior that's taken root in my life.

I found Sara while researching my rant on Michael Jackson. An unapologetic Jackson fan (who struggled through a long summer at MacDonald's to save money to go to a London Jackson concert), she's posted an online Jackson fan page. Her obsessions have moved onto Bono, of all people, from the band U2, which she is now trying to lure me into revisiting (I can't even name a U2 song beyond Where The Streets Have No Name).

Wandering around the rest of her site, I kind of liked, kind of hated, her approach to coding her site. Her current theme, modeled after the film Metropolis, employs a severe, The Weakest Link sort of unforgiving Snowman In Siberia minimalism that is, paradoxically, cheekily over decorated with cutesy arrows and over/underlining that I find appealing in its repulsive gaudiness (and employed here to my horror and delight). Interesting and idiosyncratic choices that definitely create a mood and an environment for her art. yes, art.

december 4, 2001

i feel loved.
really, someone at yahoo must have gotten off their asses lately and added my site to the search engine or something. because like i said last week, i keep getting all this email. after a month with no submissions for anticrowdsurfers i got 8 over the weekend. i got a few other emails from people regarding my site. i've never felt so popular in the words of macphisto "you've made me very famous..and i thank you.".... ok so not quite famous, but WHATEVER! haha. i really appreciate the people who i don't know in real life who visit my site. while i consider my site to be mainly for my own entertainment...whether it's to keep me occupied by just maintaining it, or as a glimpse of my own life i can look back on....for people to read it and find it interesting, that really means alot to me.
meanwhile, psi chi created an email list...which is fine. except something is wrong with it, and the only emails i get, are like 10 a day from people saying "please post me to the list"...it's getting irritated. here i am, i come back from being out and see the little red flag on my mail waving, i get excited that maybe i have something good, and what is it? "please post me to the list"....spectacular.
there's something else i want to talk about, but not now. i have to decide what i think first and what i want to do with it. it's not bad...i was propositioned. NOT FOR SEX! haha...ok forget it, i should just delete this whole sentence lol.
current mood: should start doing some work maybe
listening to: "pushit" - tool
stolen by the thought police from sara @ 2:54 PM

Finding her online journals, though, made me want to burn my own site. With precious little in the way of color, without tons of blinking this and cross-fading that, she's created this unique space for herself. A highly effective, potent bit of business, where this young woman (trying desperately to not call her "kid") communicates better with a handful of words in the questionable grammar of stream-of-consciousness than I do in all of my windy, bloated rants here. I'm serious, I just wanted to trash everything and start again. Rip off her design and code and do the Weakest Link severity here. But I'm way too immature for that, and far too conventionally unable to step out of my own head enough to transform myself into her deal. But I can appreciate her deal for what it is: art. Interesting. Annoying. Scary. Funny. "Something Picasso," per Billy Zane in Titanic, contemptuous of the "finger paintings" of an unknown artist.

Sara's an unknown artist. She likely doesn't even realize she is an artist, but she is. Visit her while the gallery's still open.