Rookie

We’re leaving Paradise in for now ’cause we still need some more stuff for this month, but if you wanna get thinking about next month, the theme is Freedom.

I wonder if I should just start posting in my editor’s letter the same stuff I send all of our staff when it’s time for their monthly pitches. Here’s what I sent everybody for Freedom:
July’s theme is Freedom, especially summer-specific freedom, and all the combined privileges and responsibilities that come with growing up. References include Adrian Tomine, Harmony Korine, Spike Jonze, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Basketball Diaries, Reality Bites, KIDS, Doug Aitken, Mark Borthwick, Galaxie 500 (the song “Strange” especially), Beach House, Juergen Teller (overexposed natural light stuff, not FLASH stuff), Cass Bird, River’s Edge, Todd Hido…but I really don’t want this to be a NINETIES month, it’s just that there are so many good visuals from that time that fit what I’m thinking about, parking lots and sleepovers and stealing shopping carts and barbecues and biking and fast food and gas stations and misty mornings and all-nighters and basketball and getting lost and sneaking out and coming home when it’s light out…I feel like all of those things exist in a vacuum of first tastes of freedom you get as a teenager that’s sort of independent of time or geography.

So far we’ve done a lot about the world you create in an isolated way, in your own backyard with your imagination or out of tangible things or with a best friend, but this month is more about the world you grow into and try to make your own…I love/hate Yo La Tengo’s Summer Sun because most of the music I listen to makes me feel like I’m somewhere else, but YLT just sounds like home…not in a cozy or nostalgic way, just cause it makes me think of everything I see on the way to school and all my friends and feeling both really empty and really emotional? I don’t know how that works into our content but I guess this month is more about a feeling than a movement or subculture or style or decade or anything.