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lilianarhudgens

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i was sad and singin will ease your troubled soul

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My Lil westcoast cuzzin sangin them mosters away.

lilianarhudgens

spirits, tahoma

"Summer Sux" by The Hotels We'll always be BFF4Life. I'm worried about other stuff.

#best friends #girlcrazy #atlanta #september #tomahawk chop #this is why we chop #chipper #iphone 420 #summer sux #2012

Happy Birthday to me!

Buses. Cars. Lights.

The streets smell bad in the summer. The tunnels have rats. The drunken men want money. The taxis drive considerably faster than they ought to. Nobody wants to talk. The bars are overpriced. The police seldom help. Everyone is an artist. Everyone else is in a band. Trees aren’t as hard to come by as everybody thinks. The other kind of trees are easier to come by than everybody thinks. You think you have a moment for gay right, but you don’t. The lights go out, but not until the sun comes up. The paths you walk are slippery in the winter. The Internet/cable provider is a monopoly. Rooftops make people happy. Rooftops make people nervous. Flood Watch in effect until _____. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. The garbage service industry is remarkable; those people are heroes. It takes forty minutes to get anywhere. When it rains it’s cheaper to buy an umbrella on the street than in a store. When it pours cancel all plans. There is an equal chance of winning the lottery as getting hit by a Manhattan bound L train. Half of people have respect for the appropriate amount of personal space. One river is better than the other. Six packs are called mixed packs. Hipsters are out. Timing is literally everything. The sports teams are bullshit and even they know it. “Borough” might be a dumb word but it’s better than “county”. Never answer the question, “Do you have the time?” Standing on the train is more fun than sitting. The news is important/relevant. Something in the water makes the bread taste fantastic. Assemblymen. The heat wave. Walk up six flights of stairs. Construction. Fewer Transfers/More Walking. You’ll have to wait on line. Dial 3-1-1. Empire Pizza. Famous Ray’s and Not Famous Ray’s. Soda; in a can, with a straw. Universal small napkins. Northeast on a compass just means North. Aspiring models hang out year round. Real models hang out in the summer. Welcome home back to the city, dog.

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An old recording of July Pt 2 we made in Liliana's bedroom a bunch of years ago.

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Dis new demo

Special B (2012) by The Hotels.

There Are Lights In The Clouds

It finally happened. I didn't think it ever would, but it did. And when it happened I was standing in front of about 1200 other people and maybe behind 100. Jeff Mangum finally came to my hometown and I saw him play all of his finest songs about a mile and half from where I was born. When I was fifteen I was tripping on mushrooms chilling with some friends listening to Everything Is EP with my then-best friend and driving around in circles on a warm summer night in Atlanta, feeling like the spirit of an entire city was rushing through me. I felt like I was flying around the universe, falling really, at a billion-million miles per hour and I was free from all worries or bothersome factors that tend to slow down progress or maybe bring it to a halt all together. It was funny because I was on drugs, which is pretty much what I'm talking about in terms of slowing down or halting progress, but this night and these drugs were different. After listening to the title track of Everything Is, we put on On Avery Island and kept driving in circles. By this point in my life I was very familiar with the masterpiece In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and I was no slouch with NMH's B-sides and live recordings, but for some reason I had never become that familiar with On Avery Island. I had heard it before, sure. My favorite song was always track 10. “Naomi.” I still get chills just thinking about it. Naomi. What is she? Where is she? She's an asshole but she's the kind of asshole you can’t hate. The first thing I noticed about Avery Island was how much more deadpanned Mangum’s voice was than on the follow up record. I guess it makes sense that he would become more confident as time moved forward and his writing style would mature a bit. Not that Song Against Sex isn't a mature song. I'd be lucky to ever touch that level of maturity, certainty in my life, let alone in the Hotels music. But Naomi. This girl. Driving around, on mushrooms, listening to the slightest amount of distortion on his nylon string guitar and the whininess of this guys' voice who I have no idea what he looks like. It's blasting through the speakers as we drive past Candler Park for the fifth time in twenty minutes. I've never been more certain of any individual moment in my life than I was that moment and it was the first time of a very select amount of times I'd consider myself to have been feeling what most people deem as a "moment of spirituality." What I mean is I had a solid moment where I was confident that this (ya know, thissss world) wasn't all there was to it. This life, I mean. This street we were driving down and the things we were seeing, like trees and grass and other cars...that wasn't all there was to it. Back then I probably looked up at the sky and thought "I'll go to a heaveny type place and become enlightened and everything will be beautiful forever."

I've spent the better part of my adult life as an atheist and I find that most of my peers identify in similar ways. Some are too afraid (and I mean literally terrified of being wrong) and never pull the trigger, so they identify as "agnostic," which is almost exclusively a cop out if you ask me (but clearly you didn't). I had a friend who died when I was sixteen and a friend who died when I was seventeen. I've had friends die more recently than that but these two were the closest to home. When the first friend died, I thought she was watching over me from outer space. I didn't do shit she wouldn't like and when I did I apologized to the ground I was talking to thinking she could hear me. In reality, I was talking to the ground. Even then I realized it was kind of stupid and probably not "a thing," as my good friend would say, but hey, I was bereaved and vulnerable. When the second friend died I wasn't ready for it. Not that you ever are, but these tragic deaths were too close together and I was already in a bad place, so for me personally, I wasn't ready. But obviously she didn't care and I learned the sad way that the world doesn't revolve around me. This is when any concept of fate or destiny slipped out of my grasp and into a pile of mud and I spit on it for the rest of my life, kicking it and mocking it. There is no fucking way this was a plan. And never again would I look back and think that anything had happened for any reason other than it just fucking happened. We can have the conversation about free will and human nature and shit later, but for now, on a very basic level, nothing happens for a reason and everything happens because it just fucking happened. Word? My friend who lost his mom a short while ago has inspired me so much with his conviction and his unwavering understanding of what he believes this world to be. His mom isn't chilling, waiting for him a cloud. She's a bunch of dust somewhere and she's not suffering from illness anymore. I would never want to hurt a persons feelings if they believed differently from me and I honestly don't mind when people believe what they need to believe. When my mother passes away nobody will be able to tell me anything. I'm not prepared for that and I never will be. And I might become the most religious person in the whole town after my mother passes. But probably not.

Then last night happened. That familiar feeling of the pulse of a city flowing from within, the extreme sadness I was feeling that was caused from being so happy I couldn't process it as anything else besides sadness, the way Mangum looked as he hit the high notes that most male vocalists can only hear in their heads, it fucking happened. I don't know what got me. It wasn't Naomi, although, that was some beautiful shit. He even introduced it. Mangum, on stage, surrounded by three guitars plus the one he was holding in his hands and a piece of sheet music that presumably had his set list or something on it, whispered into the microphone, "This next one's called Naomi." Joe, Catherine and Micah turned and looked at me because they knew it was my favorite and Abbey grabbed my hand. We held hands for the entire song and I would have held her hand for the next forty-five minutes if I didn't feel compelled to clap and scream every chance I got. Mangum even said to the crowd at one point, "If you sing the words at home there is no reason not to sing them here," so my friends and I sang along with the other 1300 people all of the words to most of the songs. There were a few that needed to be just him but effectively what happened was he led a big, successful, happy sing along. When Mangum walked off stage after “Oh Comely” it was obvious that it would be only a few moments until he would come back and play a few more selections from his archive. He played "Song Against Sex" as his first encore and everybody started jumping where the fuzz bass and drums usually kick in. But this night, all of the songs for the most part, was just Mangum and his guitars. Once he finished the first song he said with some authority actually, "I want to hear you guys sing this one with me." He started the beautiful chord progression that has been used in so many before him and so many after him, in a fitting 3/4 time signature, on the brightest sounding guitar he had in the bunch. He started, "What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all 'round the sun." I've known every word to this song since I was fifteen—well before that night in that car driving around in circles (which happened way more than once, by the by). It was never my favorite but it was the title track on the most perfect album that ever happened. Maybe that's what got me. "Oh how I remember you, how I would push my fingers through your mouth to make those muscles move." What an absoute creep, right? What a beautiful man and a beautiful song. So it finally happened. I finally found myself dosed correctly on notgivingafuck. It was at a Jeff Mangum concert and it was the most spiritual experience I've had since I was a teenager trying to experience all the beauty of life all at once. Nothing could have ruined it (although I had plenty of friends who tried to ruin it by calling me a pussy afterwords and making fun of it/me). Nothing can take it away from me. I'll never forget last night and I'll never forget the people I was with. I'll never forget the way it made me feel. It made Joe feel the same way. I'm sure Abbey and Micah and Catherine and all the friends that were with us standing in different places all across the room felt it too. We'll talk about it sometime and we'll feel similarly and then it'll never come up again. And then for the rest of forever it will be personal experiences that are internalized and will be there when we need them to be...some of us more than other, I’m sure. The lame guy that I probably have very little in common with standing next to me jumping around, raising his beer can and shit and singing, “I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRISSSSSSSTTTTT. JESUS CHRIST I LOVE YOUUUU YES I DOOOOO.” I’m sure that song means something different to him than it does to me, but that’s okay. That’s what I mean by notgivingafuck. I wish I could have given that guy with the beer a hug and told him he had a nice voice in that moment in time. Once this dumb, happy smile rubs off my face in a couple of days and the cynicism sets back in I’m sure I’d be more likely to make fun of this guy for being a Christian do-gooder than trying to realize we have shit in common, but last night it didn’t matter. Not one bit. And it made me really happy. I didn’t even care if some teenage kids saw the tears in my eyes and thought I was one of those emotional losers/a teenage girl that would cry when Justin Timberlake would shake their hand on TRL. I didn’t give a fuck. It was so internal but also so much more than that. Whatever a spiritual moment means for you, this is what mine meant for me.

And I'm still trying to figure out exactly, "how strange it is to be anything at all." When he sang/yelled that, that's got to be when it happened. I'm almost positive.

We played a show in Athens once.

So last Christmas, right in that in between time where you’re finished with whatever it is you were doing—be it school, work or something different—and the holiday season, I recorded a Christmas album and emailed it to most everybody in my address book. It was called “Christmas Pills/Merry Christmas Dog.” It was called Christmas Pills because I thought that was a funny name and because drug addicts celebrate holidays too, and that’s kind of sad to think about (and what kind of Hotels Christmas would it be if it weren’t super sad?). It was called Merry Christmas Dog by accident because I wrote it really big on the cover. I recorded the album in my apartment in south Williamsburg BK during a rainstorm that was kind of an ice storm and kind of annoying. It took about three days in total. Not because there was too much work, but because I recorded like 4 other songs that would have gone on this short little Christmas-spirit-filled album if they had sounded cool. I like the way the strings on my poorly intonated acoustic guitar holds it together just long enough to make it from “Jolly Old St. Nicholas” to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” without sounding like it sounded in real life, sitting next to it, playing it. The strings hadn’t been changed in a year and the guitar had been sitting next to a radiator that was either turned off or scolding hot. Not to mention it had been driven from Atlanta to New York in the trunk of a car in the middle of the previous winter, which, really none of that is what you want. I was really happy when this album was finished. I had good grades that semester, I hadn’t seen a mouse in our apartment in like a month and I was excited to come back to Atlanta for the holidays. So in the spirit of that, Merry Christmas Dogs.

Stop dreaming about the past. Start focusing on the future. Get a job and maintain it for longer than a few weeks or months. Make it count. Meet a girl or a boy and ask them to move in with you. You don't live in the nicest place but whatever, they don't mind because they love you. Maybe get married but maybe not because getting married is kind of silly. Also if it's somebody of the same sex you most likely still won't be able to to get married to them if you're from where I'm from. But whatever, have a kid or adopt a puppy. Share furniture and enjoy the weekends more than you ever have before. Spend a few weekends a year with your friends from when you were younger but always be thinking to yourself that it's only for a weekend and you'll get back to reality soon enough. Those guys always stressed you out, even when you were extremely close with them. You'll always be wishing for something a little better and maybe one day you'll get there. Maybe not though. But honestly, who gives a fuck?

Occupy Everything

October is for Idiots

I have a lot of friends who aren’t sports fans. I have a lot that are sports fans. I’d say most people range somewhere in the middle of casual-to-serious in terms of really caring about sports. I watched the NBA finals with my friend James in Brooklyn last spring, which was funny because he’s the creative type and only occasionally would he bring up the Knicks or how much he loved the Chicago bulls of 1993-1994. I went to a few Knicks games when I lived in New York (certainly more Knicks games than Hawks games, basketball is dumb anyway). I went to one Mets game and zero Yankees games (something about that hallowed ground at Yankee Stadium that makes me suspicious and sketched. Babe Ruth for christ’s sake…he played there!). Every Sunday I’d wake up at about 11:30, possibly still a little lightheaded from the night before, and stumble my way to this bar in Cobble Hill called Cody’s with my friend Joe and we’d watch the Falcons play. Last year, 2010, they kicked major ass. First in the NFC, home field advantage throughout the playoffs, poised to make a serious run at the championship. Until, of course, we lost the first game in a blowout. I don’t think I can count high enough to explain how many points it felt like the Packers ran off on us (them) in the first half of that game. And then it was out of reach and our (their) dreams put on hold for another season. I try not to talk about sports too much on this blog because, well, it is about the music and it is about that creativity and it is about expression. So, I myself do find it a tad humorous that for the second week in a row all I have to write about is sports. Troy Davis died, but I'm not emotionally prepared enough to write an essay about that. I wrote a new song, I’ll show it to you sometime, but I had my heart smashed into 3000 pieces last night and I’m fucking pissed off and sad and angry and in denial. I’ve given more of a shit about the Atlanta Braves than most people give shits about anything since I was five years old. It’s the single longest running thing in my life that has remained constant from when I was a little kid until now. I’m twenty-two. I’ve actively cared about Chipper Jones all of those years too. He’s played 3rd and hit 3rd since I can remember. He’s a lifetime .300+ average guy with 400+ home runs and 1500+ RBI. He was MVP in 1999 and an all-star seven times. He won a World Series on the 1995 team and went to the World Series two other times in losing efforts. All told, this man, a man I compare to a father figure in my deeply fatigued and skewed cognition, will go to the Hall-of-Fame sometime between the 2017-2020 years. He’ll be placed amongst the greatest ballplayer of any and every generation. Players of all shapes and sizes, backgrounds and ethnicities, racists and homophobes, drunk guys and career wife beaters, home run hitters and ground ball pitchers. I’ll go see him when he gets inducted. I’ll pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room and a ticket to the ceremony. I’ll buy a jersey and, depending on where I am in my life and what new characters have come on the scene, maybe I’ll buy my love child a Chipper Jones jersey too. I’ll stand in line for 2 hours trying to get his autograph and I’ll probably get it. I met Chipper Jones once at Turner Field when I was 14 or 15 and he gave me a high five as he walked back to the dugout. I was with my friend Adam and we were super excited just to fucking see this guy with our own two eyes. He was a fucking hero. He still is. He’s the greatest 3rd baseman in Atlanta Braves history and in the discussion for greatest 3rd baseman of all time. Congratu-fucking-lations. Last night the Braves fucking completed the second to worst collapse in the history of September in baseball. On September 6th 2011, my 22nd birthday, the Atlanta Braves had a fucking EIGHT AND A HALF game lead on the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals. During the next three weeks that lead shrank to ZERO eventually with the Braves losing it to St. Louis on the last day of the year (last night). Overshadowed by Boston’s equally epic collapse that officially marks the worst meltdown (statistically, at least) of all time, the Braves might not take the heat they deserve. Instead, they’ll be placed on the back burner, not like when you’re in high school and you get caught skipping and at the same time some kid gets caught smoking weed in the bathroom and suddenly they don’t really care that you went to Woody’s across the street for lunch. Not like that. We’re the hood kid that gets caught cheating on an exam because we didn’t understand the material and the teacher that was supposed to be teaching him was under qualified to start off with so we sell weed because it’s easy money and we have a big brother who knows a gang (or maybe he is in a gang) that can teach us the ropes. We’re forgotten and left alone. We’re the kid nobody gives a shit about because we lived up to expectations. We were going to surprise people but then we couldn’t. So while the adults and the white kids keep turning pages and moving further along, we’ll be stuck on the same page, sad and frustrated. And we’ll go about fixing the problems the wrong way, make some mistakes, and five years later we’re sitting with all this potential somewhere in the middle of the pack, not being bad enough to take shit about and not being good enough to notice—somewhere in the middle. Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens deserve the team Most Valuable Player awards. Clearly, we couldn’t win a fucking ballgame without them. They got hurt at various points during the year, JJ being the league leader in ERA for several months out of the season. Hanson could have been an All-Star but maybe a bad start or two shafted him. When they went down, we had no chance. Our rookie sensations, our “untouchable” prospects came through as best as could be expected but it wasn’t enough. Rookie 1st baseman Freddie Freeman is going to win rookie of the year. Craig Kimbrel is going to finish second or third. Brian McCann will likely get some votes for MVP, although not as many as he would have gotten in July or August. Derek Lowe would get the Raspy award if baseball had such an honor. He was terrible in every sense of the word and hopefully he’s going to be wearing a different uniform for a team we have to play a lot next year. I’d love to see Brian McCann and Freeman send his sinker-that-doesn’t-really-sink to the fucking moon. Chipper Jones won’t get anything besides a year older and a quarter-step slower. He’ll get a couple million dollars to play next season and then he’ll be done. He’ll have made a fucking fortune in his career, something like 150-million dollars over 19 seasons, and he’ll have made me excited about every one of those seasons. Even years when we were bad I still thought we had a chance. The Braves are like family and it’s always harder to admit the truth about your family than it is about other people. I listen to the media talk about Bobby Cox as one of the least mentally equipped managers in the postseason but I don’t want to believe that shit. He’s a Braves legend. But he choked all but one year out of 14-straight seasons of playoff baseball. Fredi Gonzalez is the Braves manager now, as Cox retired at the end of 2010 season, and now, for the first time, I’ll get to see what it’s like to have a manger that could literally lose his job at any second. Cox was unfire-able. Gonzalez is the definition of fire-able. I’m tired of being a team that—no, nevermind. I’m just tired. I’m so fucking exhausted every year from the ups and downs, but this one hurts more than most. What if Uggla goes in shoulder first and takes Ruiz out—maybe the ball pops loose and we score that 4th run. What if Michael Bourn was called safe at 3rd on an unnecessary and unsuccessful double steal? (It was a terrible call, by the way. He was safe. Dan Uggla hit a two-run homer right after that. Just saying—that’s the 4th run we were looking for.) What if Craig Kimbrel doesn’t blow that save in Los Angeles back in May? What if he doesn’t blow the save to Florida a week and a half ago? What if Brian McCann took another two weeks to heal his oblique strain? What if he never hurt it in the first place? Hanson never gets hurt? Jurrjens never gets hurt? What if Jason Heyward hit at all this season? As a matter of fact, let’s not let Heyward off the hook so quickly as that. What the fuck happened? Heyward, doing his best Jeff Francoeur imitation, hit a fucking lousy .227 with 14 HR and 42 RBI. What the fuck? From a guy that was runner up in rookie of the year last year and actually received some 3rd place votes for league MVP? It’s hard to admit it about your family, but Heyward would have won rookie of the year if he had finished strong. His numbers from April of 2010 to June of 2010 were fantastic. His numbers the rest of the way were shit. You can look them up yourself or you can take my word. He hasn’t hit major league pitching successfully for about 15 months. That sounds like more than a sophomore slump and more than a lack of adjustments. He’s got to get it going. I know I’m different than my friends. They all tell me that. I watch at least 140 games every year, go to at least 10 (when I live here in Atlanta) and read about 162 games every year. I’m at least 15 people’s “Braves guy,” maybe at least 10 people’s sports guy and I’m happy to have those titles. When I watch a game at the bar or at a friends place or all by my damn self-alone at home, I keep the computer away. The iPhones, iPods and other distracting things stay away from me. I keep focus easily when watching baseball unlike most people I know. The advanced stats and sabermetrics are interesting but there is something about watching a ballgame with your own eyes that tells you all you need to know for that moment in time. Baseball is like the one thing in my life that I put all of my energy into. When football season is here, nobody wants to talk about the Braves, unless it’s this year and they want to talk about this epic collapse and the chip that Atlanta sports teams have on their shoulders. Chipper Jones will have a quote in the paper talking about the loss and how he’s sad and how he’s coming back next year. Jeez, he’s pretty much my number one reason for binge drinking. Chipper Jones taught me how to chase bourbon with PBR after he lost the batting title to Matt Holliday in 2007. Him and all the girls I’ve been in love with or thought I was in love with. Chipper Jones is like the girl that keeps getting away and I keep not getting it. She hits me in the face and shit but I still love her. And I’d never hit her. And I’d never think about leaving, because—actually this analogy is a little weird. I’ll just end with saying that: It’s weirder to not be a Braves fan and from Atlanta than it is to be one. Maybe it’s weird to be obsessed and have your day(s) ruined, but more people will know about last night than not. And they’ll actually feel sad. Even the girl who pretends to not like sports and talks shit about the Braves will feel sad because her best friend and her dad are both fucking heart broken today. Everybody has an A-hat somewhere in his or her wardrobe. Everybody knows what the tomahawk chop is. Everybody 30+ will know Sid Bream’s slide and everybody 15+ will know Jason Heyward’s opening day home run as the defining moment of the Braves that they can pinpoint and say “That was special.” Me? I’ll always remember the 1997 National League Championship Series against the Marlins when Chipper Jones rolled over a slider and grounded out to the second baseman to end the game. I was 7 years old and I told myself to never forgive Chipper Jones for ending the game like that. And to be honest, I don’t know if I ever actually have.

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