'26 MULTIMEDIA CHANNEL 7

Everyone, say thank you to Carmen for the idea, and check out her June Consumption Pack because she's so creative.

 

CHANNEL 03. Introduction

It’s the middle of summer, and somehow, nothing has changed. I spend so much time wanting my past that the future is always seen as unattainable. Something for future me to deal with. It was okay to think that way when you’re a child; you have family, friends, and your whole life ahead of you. When family is no longer reliable, and friends are scarce, it’s hard to see what’s ahead, and instead, it’s about the past. When being young and stupid was normal, expected even. I never stopped being a child. I blame everyone but myself for why that is. Convinced it’s because of my own traumas, self-hatred, or something unexplainable. Unfortunately, it’s something far more unornamented. 

I never had to grow up. I could live my whole life completely sheltered because I allowed myself to be. I took “no” as an answer for things that I knew could help me. I never had to work for my money; I never had to witness pain or suffering. Though my guardians were insane at times, they were relatively present in my life. Anything I would ask for, one way or another I would get it. I never learned to control myself, and that’s the problem. Controlling my emotions, my income, my life, my wants, my needs. My life feels as if it’s in a constant loop of not being in control, as if it’s too heavy to continuously hold. 

I starved myself for a full week because I didn’t have money. Of course, there was food in the house, and I could have fully just eaten that, but the need for control was so unbearably strong that I would rather not eat than eat food that I didn’t buy myself. 

I can’t control my emotions, so instead I cry uncontrollably, take as much melatonin so I can fall asleep, and continue to repeat the cycle. I would overwork myself because feeling something is better than feeling nothing. 

July was uncontrollable, exhausting, and hypersensitive. As was every July after I turned 15. Somehow the media I've consumed reflected exactly that. This includes my top album(s), movies watched, books read, and poetry.

CHANNEL 12. MUSIC

Channel ORANGE (2012)

Frank Ocean

What’s funny about how this was my top album from last month was I listened to this album for the first time last July. A friend told me I reminded him of it and that I should listen to it. Of course, I spent weeks convincing myself that I would listen to it a different time, only to never listen to it.

I still remember the first day I heard it. I was lying in bed, and I was so bored that I just wanted to get lost in my own thoughts. Egyptian summers are so hot and dry that I had my air conditioner on fan, and I was still in my pajamas. And I was so entranced as soon as “Start” was playing. It was as if I was being transported in some sort of strange way. I’m so moved right now; I’m listening to the album all over again while I’m writing this. 

The first part of the album is exactly what it felt like to be upper-middle-class in white America. The recklessness, the privilege, and addiction. Money gives freedom, and when a child is exposed to that level of freedom, it turns into something more. Not understanding the level of privilege it takes to see money being used in ways that only have to make sense to you. There’s an ongoing gag that rich kids randomly become addicted to random substances even though they have had everything handed to them at a young age, and I think that is exactly the problem. 

You cannot comprehend the amount of freedom you have, and the feeling of it gets so unbearably strong that you become the privilege of it. I could remember so clearly how it felt to be guarded with wealth. Not having to worry about what anything meant because it was beneath me. Drugs, partying, and drinking can never harm me because I’m so high that anything I lose from it can get scooped up and spoonfed to me. It’s the feeling of being depressed when there is no reason to complain, to feel worthless when your worth can be calculated in vacations and houses. 

The middle of the album feels like the transition of it all. It feels like the past. How I witnessed addictions at a young age and how it felt to not have anything and still feel at home. Home felt real at this time; it felt above the clouds. Experiences that lower-class black Americans could relate to. It’s isolating seeing my people find similarities within each other, and somehow I felt far away. Otherworldly to the community I call mine. 

Towards the end, it’s the transitions of a level of understanding. Honestly, this album has always reminded me of Egypt, not only because I heard it when I was there, or because there’s a song called Pyramids, but because of personal experiences and enlightenment. I lack the words to describe exactly how it makes me feel, or why I feel so strongly towards it, but everytime I hear the back end of the album, I feel so overwhelmingly flooded with memories from that time. 

It’s rejection, sarsagy wannabes, eternal damnation, rebellion, sex, religious guilt, addiction, and tagamo3 kids. Everyone makes fun of the tagamo3 accent, but I know y’all were posted up at CFC so…

Too many words to explain what the album means to me, too much for me to say in a way that it deserves. It feels like one of those albums that you listen to at the perfect moment in time, and it feels like it belongs to you. 

This album truly never leaves my rotation.

Disintegration (1989)

The Cure

I’ve been listening to The Cure since I was 15, so I’m always listening to at least one of their albums, since Robert Smith can do all things, and one of them is to make one of the most depressing music known to man. Even finding photos for the spread was hard because to me this album truly feels like pain and suffering and the hollow emptiness of being. I’m hurt. 

This album is so hungry, and listening to it all the way through leaves me so ravenous every single time. Going through heartbreak, losing my sense of self, and experiencing the numbness before hysteria is exactly what this album feels like to me. 

The mood is so distinctly cold that I could listen to it during summer and still feel a chill. I got the same feeling when I watched The Hunger from 1983; it’s cold in the way that you feel it piercing under the skin. It’s infectious. Poisonous. Hurtful. 

I think it’s so perfect how both of these albums happened to be my top albums of the month because while Channel ORANGE felt like a narration of my life, Disintegration feels like the soliloquy. 

I won’t talk about “The Same Deep Water As You” because that’s my best friend’s favorite song off the album and she describes it so much better than I do, but  “Prayers For Rain” moves me in ways that all the words in the world couldn’t begin to scratch the surface of it. It’s the quiet, starving feeling of hope, remembrance, and accountability. The wishing for rejuvenation, creation, and beginnings that only rain can give to something so hopeless. This album, from beginning to end, is the most beautiful thing to ever exist. Robert Smith and Frank Ocean were pregnant with me when they created these albums. Devastating album 10/10.

I won't say much about this album strictly because, truly, the album will find you when you need it most. 

CHANNEL 47. Movies

I have watched a total of eight movies this month, but I’m only going to talk about the ones that I enjoyed the most! Atonement (2007), Fish Tank (2009), Lost and Delirious (2001), Better Than Chocolate (1999), Touki Bouki (1973). I do suggest giving these movies a watch too; none of these were terrible movies, I just have favorites!

Possession (1981)

Andrzej Zulaeski

★★★★☆

“Do you believe in God? It’s in me.” I was so deeply uncomfortable watching this film.  It was bloody, abusive, and cold, but also erotic, blasphemous, and dull. I wrote in my review that this is what lesbianism feels like, and honestly, it kind of does. 

Disease is God, and God creates disease, exploits it, and somehow it lives, “and that’s why through disease, we can reach God.” Disease is the brain, the body, and the soul; it multiplies and leaves you thirsty. That is what this film feels like to me. Rotting and all-consuming. 

God is creation itself. The ties between damnation and euphoria. It’s judgement and enlightenment. She asks if he believes in God because she is the creator of her own understanding. Her creation was horrific, torn, gore, and inhuman, but all her own. She wasn’t asking if God exists but rather if you would believe that she herself was the God of her own desires. If she could dictate her own understanding of love and beauty and what she was willing to do to keep that power. 

This film stuck out to me in a way I never expected it to. The reviews described it as a psychological horror, but it feels so disturbingly erotic in a way that was so disgusting that I couldn’t stop watching it. 

“You know, for me, God is still under the porch, where the dog died. And on the branch of the eucalyptus tree, where I lie for hours, and watch how the clouds change the color of the grass below.”

Videodrome (1983)

David Cronenberg

★★★★★

Possession to Videodrome truly sent me into a spiral of despair, rejection of the flesh, masturbation, desperation, and repulsion. To say this movie was pornographic would be one of the many things it is. 

I wrote in my review of this movie that it feels like “Some Great Rewards,” and I still stand by that statement. Maybe I’m a loser, and I’m always on Pinterest. Still, it’s like that one picture that’s like “What a meaningful exploration of the complexity of intimacy in an industrialized society” and above it it says, “You should suck on the strap” that is what Videodrome feels like to me. Instead I would say, “What a meaningful critique of the delicacy of existing within a overstaurated digital space where pornography is a spectrum of disease.”

My question is what makes something sexual? The voyeur? The action? Could it be something completely different? Voyeurism itself is sexual; The action could be sexual in nature, though who created the nature surrounding it? At what point does pain become pleasure and pleasure become no longer pleasurable? These are the questions that arose as I continued through this film. 

The disease itself is pornography. Voyeurism is the organism that mutates and consumes the mind as it desensitizes and adapts until it reaches the level of depravity. Sex, whether the obsession or the rejection, develops into depravity. The more you consume it, the more you need it; the more you try to reject it, the more you think about it; the more it grows and exists in the cleavage of the imagination. 

It’s a Video Arena.

CHANNEL 36. POETRY

I don’t tend to talk much about my love for poetry, or how much it impacts my life, follows me wherever I go, but I’ve developed a deep appreciation for it over the years. This month I read only three poems: The Flea by John Donne–though I read it every month– Sonnet by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, and The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats, which was the poem of the month!

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats

Poems that stick with you are the words that you were meant to hear, and I thought of this poem all month. Finding it felt like a song I heard as a child, and now I could listen with new ears. 

I went to my cousin’s baseball game, and there are a lot of trees and greenery where I am, but right in the middle there was a factory, pumping out black smoke that stained the trees nearby. The factory was glossy from the rain, the air was thick, yet refreshing, like drinking out of the hose, and the water was uneven, so it felt like drinking heavy rocks. This is what this poem feels like.  Even if I had a photo of the scene, you could not see what my eyes saw at that moment. 

It felt so industrial. 

It’s nature. Change, development, and adaptation. It’s creation and the creation creating. What’s more nature than industry? It’s the combination of hearing the streams of water while standing on the pavement, still being able to hear the drum of life underneath it all. 

Linnets are both a symbol of freedom and isolation. Being lost within its own freedom. While the day could be full of glimmer and glow, the evening has its own limitations, its own industry. For freedom lugs isolation. No one could understand your own freedom; it’s the creation you made yourself. It’s childish spirit with adult responsibilities. 

I will search for primitive freedom within the industrialized society we witnessed. The joys that come with life that has been locked beneath the pavement. We all can still hear it. You feel it when it rains, and you’re in the car. When it’s hot outside, and the fan’s hum fills most of the space. When you roll down the hill next to a dead-end train track. It’s the subtle mix of nature’s norms and machines existing within it. 

I’m sorry this took so long, but it’s done! Hopefully I can engage in more media because I’m down a job, but for now, this is all I got :[

Long post, so thank you for reading!