went out the last two nights1. j had a show and i met n at the park before it then met c and k and e and f and e2 then we went to m's bday party in ridgewood. it was fun. n pulled up later w/ c2 and e2 and s and j2 also pulled up and i ran into m2 and g, real blasts from the past. m2 said i looked like mc ride twice which bugged me. i think rather than exploding on ppl the best course of action is to hold the energy within and let it explode in my work. also ran into d who shoved a popper under my nose without asking and made horrible conversation trying to flex on retarded film shit. that guy sucks whatever it was still fun hanging with everyone, there was a point when j played music from the barry lyndon soundtrack while basically everyone who wasn't in our group was up on the roof and i filmed parts of it, then edited it into a video today (here). j made espresso and i had some which kept me up until the sunrise. after i walked back w/ n around 330 i went back and read some of the exile of james joyce which i borrowed from c and k
it's a good book so far, i really like the cixous i've read in the past, and reading joyce thru her lens of the exile reminds me of previous work i've made and the first time ulysses, the internal conflicts between relating / inserting myself into the work, but also joyce as a colonized subject, ireland as a colonized nation, etc...
saturday i started my morning/(after)noon reading more of the cixous and transcribing passages into my notebook. then i went to some gallery shows in chelsea. started at greene naftali b/c j2 said the lasker show brought him to tears but it didn't really do that for me, different tastes, different mediums, etc. went to the a show upstairs, she was talking w/ european ppl who were dressed nice and was wearing beat up adidas sneakers - said that the sculpture that was the center of the exhibition was 500 pounds. i liked this one print that was large and pixelated in the show. f had a great point about the weird pressure that comes w/ being that young, thrown a lot of money and expected to make great work. they had her books there as well and i flipped thru show me ur work little temple from the 2021 show and there was a solid section criticizing cixous for saying stupid shit about women and africa. i definitely have a predilection to being a hater, but most shit isn't good but there was stuff happening in the show/writings which was enough for me
swung by some other shows, ran into j and e2 outside gagosian and chatted for a bit while we watched a film called the painter (2021) about oehlen. the oehlen paintings were cool, the mccarthy sculptures were great, i really liked the install w/ the pews and the wrapped works to the side, the wealth of the elites put to good use etc etc blah blah blah. left j and e2 to go see the trisha donnelly show at matthew marks (good, i needed to spend more time w/ the work) and the tuymans show at zwirner (really fucking good). bought a baudelaire book w/ writings from the salons from the zwirner bookstore, to add to the evergrowing list of things to read. then went down to the village to meet e and c and k and f and l for e's bday dinner at this spanish restaurant.
swung by a letterpress shop in the village before, bought e and box of cat matches and a big candle, it was a fun dinner, casablanca was playing on the tv and then this greek sex movie came on and then they put casablanca back on b/c it was too raunchy probably. it was really noisy so i talked w/ l about how it was so noisy that we couldn't hear the other side of the table v well. embarrassed e by singing happy bday towards the end, then we went outside, smoked cigs, went to the park, hung out in these nets, then went to kgb, then bossa, then christopher's palace where the music was so loud that we couldn't talk but really good, really meditative
when we left my ears were ringing and it was like 330 am. i walked back from there which was about a mile and a half down broadway back to my place. it was an interesting walk at night, lots of ppl were out, all of them were black, at one point i walked past a group of teenagers and one yelled 'this nigga look like he got a bomb on him!' at me and all i could do was burst out laughing. the rules of racism are weird but it's good feedback b/c that's the look i'm trying to cultivate for the work i'm trying to make and it all loops back together. maybe he just says out loud what white ppl think but who knows what white ppl think b/c that one bitch said i looked like mc ride and i don't, that man is black. less than 2 weeks ago i walked to the deli at 2am to buy some cigs and this older black guy said 'don't blow the place up' as he walked out and i walked in. i have a libgen tab open rn for "Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait" i'll download the pdf today i'm sure but idk when i'll read it, hopefully soon.
it was a good weekend altogether. you can only rewrite so many parts of it. the coolest shit i probably saw was this latina chick in a red dress twerking all over this guy in christopher's palace. then when we sat down, she came over and asked us what we wanted. it was so loud. the music was good.
they got rid of txti so i have to migrate this to here now. it kinda sucks because this interface isn't as nice to write with, hopefully i'll figure out a better writing machine2 to move forwards from here. it's interesting trying to remember what i did since i last wrote. my instinct was to go to my phone photos, prosthetisized memories, which i could also track back through texts. it hasn't even been that long since i last wrote, and i'm not yet sure how frequent this will be.
last night i went to a q&a at a downtown gallery between notable artists and a notable critic. the chick who runs the gallery did a profile in a magazine of culture recently where she was wearing sheer clothing you could see her tits which were mad perky. i guess she went through a divorce recently and kicked her ex-husband's name off the gallery. things seem to be going swimmingly (word i've been using more often recently for lolz) for her as she launches herself into the ~cultural apparatus~ of the city, the art world, the city and the art world. the conversation was pretty stupid, mainly b/c of the critic but that's part of his deal. i met M and J and E there, and ran into N2 who i kinda know and T who i now kinda know after meeting him at J's show on friday. there were other ppl there too and N pulled up a little bit after the convo started (he didn't miss much)
the most interesting part of the conversation was when one of the artists began talking about the different kinds of paintings that have been prominent at different Times, in this situation focusing on Van Gogh and the still life being situated in a time when the Historical Painting remained of prominence. she talked about how historical paintings aren't really produced today, which got my wheels spinning, if only because i've been fixated on History and Time lately, stephen dedalus saying "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" echoing my head as I continue to read the cixous and walk around with it bouncing around in my brain
i spent over an hour transcribing a section of that book into my notebook today, it's far from the most time effective task, but again prosthetics, memory, blah blah blah, i find it a very helpful thing to do. it was a section on a 1904 essay joyce wrote called "Portrait of the artist" which then turned into Stephen Hero which turned into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. what came to mind after all of this was how the Joyce corpus is basically just Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake for most people. things like Exiles and Chamber Music and the critical writings and stephen hero are only for the headiest of heads, considering the size and density of that original corpus which I haven't even exhausted yet. i wonder when I'll read the wake in its entirety, and where too. the latter feels like the more important question.
after the talk we went to a trendy hip cool bar downtown that serves great cocktails. saw a few other people i knew there like D (it's interesting when someone's last name dominates over their first name in such a way as this) and M (really annoying convo that i could go into here, but it doesn't really feel worth the time rn, i talked to J about it enough at the bar). i got a glizzy, M got a glizzy, N got a glizzy, they really have great glizzys. it was a good time hanging out, i like hanging out, i was close to staying back at home and reading more of the Cixous but i'm glad i left, especially given that my time in the city is limited and i only have about a month and a half left for this stint, and i think i get a lot out of hanging out in a certain way — had a great talk w/ J towards the latter part of the night, about Art and Finding It, how you get to create the type of Artist you are, those types of conversations, but in a fun and mildly retarded way where October writers are not the focus. earlier M joked about how we were enfant terribles and "enemies of art", funny insults that have been bestowed upon us recently. earlier i talked w/ E about her friend R who's also indian and from toronto and about indian friends and the night we met which i faintly remember but i do remember meeting her at a roundtable in a room with a fog machine blasting club music. earlier i talked with M about doing a show in the future called real fine art . E is also doing a show in the future, she joked about calling it "all i had to do was ask"
the future is an interesting thing, it used to be all i had, when the present was unbearable, but now the present has less pain, and i like it because i get to shape the future through the present. i suppose i was always doing this, but it's a more refined process now, one which i feel significantly more in control of. J told me that it's more fun when i'm in town, because i get people together and C and K have said the same thing. I joked about being a socialite, how I should use that "profession" as my response when people ask me if I'm an artist (like T did). I came up with the idea/term "social sculpture" some time in the near-recent past, and then googled it and found out joseph beuys has a whole thing about it. i'm not particularly bothered to find out what he said right now, i'm sure we mean similar things but i also made a joke about how beuys probably hated black people (like bro was in hitler youth) and it's strange thinking about all these things, the anxiety of influence, the canon, the cologne scene, the documentas, all the things that already happened and the choice we have to allow certain thoughts and ideas into our minds, to shape them in certain ways, at the times and places that you choose. philosophy/art theory/art/film/blah blah blah as pharmako-blah blah blah. i like this writing practice, with the blah blah blahs and the whatever tone, like i like my social sculpture and i like being a socialite. one of the other artists at that talk mentioned her education in vilnius, where there's an alternative art history in terms of emphasis compared to the pedagogy models one might find in other countries. i really don't know what they teach on most places, i asked J about what they taught him at his (prominent American) art school, but said that everything about cologne or post-cologne in nyc he found out through the internet.
throughout the night we popped outside of the bar to smoke cigarettes, then at a certain point we called it a night and started walking to the train, but then N got us a lyft and after splitting it 4 ways, we each owed 8.5 dollars, "like the movie lmao". earlier in one of the outside stints we discussed that film and americord and places named after them like a bar/restaurant in midtown. i talked about going to the ritz diner on 62nd and 1st the previous week after running into L and G at a screening of la captive at lincoln center, walking down with them to columbus circle, then all the way across right below the park, how interesting it was to walk through the quiet surrounding the closed storefronts of Zegna and Bergdorf Goodman. when i walked past bergdorf i thought about the joeyy line "i'm in bergdorf goodman dressed like i do fraud". i suggested we go to the ritz sometime, it'd be a great place to hang out, but this was earlier, now we were in the car driving back to brooklyn, there was an accident, smashed cars on the bridge, slowing things down before they sped back up. we dropped off J and E then i got off at N's place. i hugged him goodnight then started to walk back to my place but then had a "FUCK" moment where i realized i left my phone in the car. it was a lucky night tho, i could see the van that drove us a block ahead, stuck behind a garbage truck. i sprinted down the block, glad i wore my asics instead of my loafers, and then waved at the driver who was initially confused with what i wanted then realized, i don't think he remembered me from the ride, it was dark and i sat in the back, and he probably drives so many people in a day and a night and a week and a month and a time. cixous said something about that joyce essay that seems releveant here, about how if the calendar and the clock were abolished, all we would have to tell time are experience and the seasons. the word abolish always makes me think 'a throw of the dice will never abolish chance' and 'NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE". it's curious that cixous forgot about the moon. after a moment the driver realized what i wanted, and got out of the car, opened up the back door for me, and we found my phone. i walked back to my place. it was a night. now it was the early morning. but i was tired, i fell asleep before the sunrise
thinking about a post i made about two years ago, something along the lines of: "writing of the holiest purpose: to transform reality". it popped up into my head again, reading Cixous on the young Stephen of Portrait. at the time, I was thinking about how writing can change the World at large, writing as linear text, writing as the technical image, in relation to traveling images, memetics, how ideas Flow.
now it's the same but different. writing of the holiest purpose meaning writing that changes one's way of apprehending reality. inscribing in such a way that it transforms the self, one's ways of seeing, of Being in the world. a Becoming-Scripture. tonight i transcribed about 7 pages into my notebook, hours passing by in silence save for the street's noises occasionally coming in. the last page was a Darwish poem: "Don't Write History as Poetry"3. I remember reading a Lacan quote about Parmenides, something about how the only reason we give a shit about Parmenides question, what is being/non-being, is because Parmenides was a poet. I wish i could remember more than that
i spent a decent chunk of the evening looking for my vape, while thinking about an interaction from earlier this week at the new yemeni coffeeshop / burger spot / smoothie place that opened up down the way. this Fat (Fat like the short story type Fat) white lady ordered an espresso in the afternoon and was talking to the guys who worked there about how she needed the energy boost because she takes these pills (Xanax) that makes her forget things, how she can be going about her day like she was at that moment but be completely blacked out, and won't remember a thing. she'd misplaced some money while blacked out and was stressing about where it went. but she knew that she'd find it, it had to be somewhere.
Darwish wrote "the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers" and "And history has no time for contemplation, history has no mirror and no bare face. It is unreal reality". is poetry writing or saying? it comes alive as i read it, as the page speaks. Cixous wrote "Language as reality recreates the world from its echo; it questions itself and it appears. It is the same window, but it is also the other room and the other window, opening out on to the infinite spaces of creation". I told myself I wasn't going to quote things too often here. but I didn't see anyone today, I spent time conversing with books instead. I'm tired and am searching for an ending. The final lines of "What Will Remain?" by Darwish:
What will remain of your own speech? – A necessary forgetfulness of the memory of place!
thought about blood5 while walking home today. not so much the liquid, but its relation to metaphor: the bleeding edge, the bleed of the page, how text bleeds, how text made with ink bleed through one page into the next if there's too much of it. but even more so about how life bleeds, how the things created in one container of memory move to change the self, and the inevitability of separate tracks of thought and method working their way to influence different things made in different places.
i was walking home from getting an ice cream sandwich at the deli w/ M, which we were doing after getting mexican food w/ J & E (E didn't get anything, i split tacos al pastor w/ J, M got a quesadilla, i don't think anyone got anything to drink, J also got a bag of chips, can't remember what kind), which we were doing after DJing. the way that we're DJ'ing now has gotten so deconstructed that it's not even about DJ'ing to play songs so much as DJ'ing to resequence and create new sounds. A loop of a bass drum turned into a wave of sound with how short the sequence, loop rolls, phasers, echos, crush, etc. maximizing the number of effects applied to a song. makes me think of Rave and Goetz's writing, and how far we are from the practice of DJing described in that book, in a World where you could only spin vinyls you had in your collection. i took two videos because we didn't record the set (here).
today was a strange day. i got a couple parking tickets back in march so i wanted to stack some supplementary bread to offset the costs and signed up for a medical survey thru craigslist. finally made it uptown for it today where psychiatry people asked me about my drug use and mental health history and had me play puzzle games for 4 hours. i got 60 in cash, a metrocard w/ 2 rides, a slice of pizza, a kind bar, and a few cups of water for doing this. i also had to pee in a cup. it was weird though, reminded me of how much i hate medical institutions, foucault prison shit blah blah blah, but really the voice and disposition of the PA asking me questions about my life. Facetimed T later and he agreed about how much that type of person sucks. i walked around the UES for a while after. though about, but didn't go to, the met because it was already 3 and i didn't want to pay 30 dollars to only go for 2 hours and i had plans to DJ at 6. went into a goodwill and put on a pinstriped armani blazer that was 30 dollars which i didn't get because i didn't want to spend money on clothes. but then in genius fashion, went into a french cafe and sat down and ordered a 24 dollar "salade" and a 7 dollar cappuccino. i scribbled in my notebook while sitting in their outdoor dining area, about watching a taxi that was broken down in the middle of 2nd ave and the driver standing behind it, waving cars past while yelling into his phone that he was between 88th street and 89th street. i thought about how it could've been a frank o'hara poems decades ago and how the world is different now and later i was walking on 86th street towards the train and saw the marquee of a theater below an apartment building and though about frankie cosmos. while still at the table i thought and wrote about the idea of "rendering", like rendering fat while cooking, but also rendering in blender, but also rendering reality.
in The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk wrote: "The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God". He nestled it into the dialogue of a driver. in another world, the driver-turned-traffic-conductor on 2nd avenue was turkish, but he was clearly a Jew. one time i got an uber from my aunt's place in the san jose suburbs to the san jose BART station and the driver was from turkey. i talked to him about istanbul and about new york city. he said he used to live there too and asked me my favorite part. i said brighton beach and he agreed. "beautiful women," he said and i nodded, "only 50 dollars for the night of your life". i didn't expect this turn, but it makes sense that a turkish cabman was fucking slavic whores smuggled into the country. now there's a lot of russians in istanbul, they've left because of the war. my friend tells me it's fucking the rent up. i think of Eumaeus, and how I walked underneath Butt Bridge in Dublin, how the cabman's shelter is long gone, how it's a different bridge now than what used to be there. everything changes. there are so many Worlds
i got back to the city yesterday morning. caught up w/ S via facetime and then hung out w/ Z later. both were nice conversations, where we reflected on recent things. on my end, there was H&A's wedding this weekend. made plans to go back to the noguchi museum this week with Z. need to get something nice for H&A, as a belated wedding gift, but i'm glad it's late, I don't think I would've got the right thing, or been able to write the right letters to them before the wedding. it was a really beautiful thing to witness and even more special to be a part of. everything was always running late and that was fine, encouraged even, Time was moving different. on the flight there, I read Baudelaire's the salon of 1846. he talked about a lot of different shit; i was more interested in the form of the work than how he arrived at the ideas within, but he wrote it when he was 25, trying to outdo diderot (according to the preface). the french do this thing where they just make shit up and it becomes canon — the parts that stuck w/ me the most were about painters "unlearning" (the) past(s), portraiture as either history or fiction, landscapes of fantasy, and how for "men of letters" there is no such thing as sunday.
"men of letters" is such a funny term because we are all men of letters now. men of letters, men of images, men of sounds, men of emojis, men of whatever. I like the idea of Love as the foundation of world. I like that it's built into the foundation of this one.
i was talking w/ Z about how this was "secret" but only in the sense that you had to know about it to read it. i'm more interested in where the sustained practice of maintaining this can take me, especially later this summer, because once you tell enough people a secret it inevitably spreads. in a way that's the point, a controlled mechanism of access when designing/constructing this writing machine6, which in turn designs the shape of the output (though shape is an interesting framing here as well, as geometry, another language, presents its own set of limits). as i read the cixous, i want to read finnegans wake more and more, and i wonder how that as well would push the directions of what comes out. this came up with Z and J today too, talking about movies, and what movies we watch, whether we're watching them at home or in theaters, the idea of curation and programs, things that come back to that Medina lecture about how you reach a point where you construct a program for yourself, shaping yourself in a certain way
in this sense, i've been doubting whether one can truly maintain secrets. the media imbibed by an artist is in turn refracted into their work. they can manipulate the conditions of distribution of this output (to a degree), but there is this totalizing sense of every decision matters in the sense of designing/shaping the self to be a certain way in order to produce or work towards (an idea of) a certain work. yes there are secrets, but the artist gives himself to his public (at times the public he creates), and the delineation between the self and the public-self is often fraught. cixous writes: "For Joyce, writing was always the appropriate field for the expression of anything, however mad it might seem; like Stephen at Sandymount, he used his letters as means to an end in his attempt to surpass reality and its limitations. In writing everything was possible, yet nothing made actual." but i think this is different today. in the sense that virtualized writing is made actual for a moment, like Stephen writing "whoever anywhere will read these written words?" on the sandymount strand, these words will exist until the 'yea like the ocean yea' moment that the waves come in and wash over the sand. but there is something being made somewhat actual, in that the words, when virtualized, can become image, can travel, can become transformed, or imprint themselves onto other locales. that they are monuments in a world, that like all monuments will eventually be dust
last night i watched dil se (hindi for 'from the heart') and there was a scene in which the girl disappears in the middle of the night, leaving behind a message written in the desert sand that read: "Some people are like names written in the sand. Just one gust of wind blows them away." the film ends with the two embracing each other as the suicide bomb in her vest goes off. a big part of hui's writing on chinese art is dissecting jullien's idea that tragedy doesn't exist in chinese thought; it's interesting to read this sort of critique onto the film, given that india existed outside of the hegelian definition of History, though perhaps colonialism imprinted the concept of tragedy into the culture "enough". it was my first time watching the film since i was a kid, thaiya thaiya was one of my favorite songs for a moment, i remember when i was in london last year i heard it playing outside my airbnb window, the first few lines blasting out of a taxi before it faded into distance.
i was at a beer garden with J and Z in astoria. it was after going to the noguchi museum; the sculptures were lit, we saw a baddie with nice tits and a tramp stamp and commented on how certain sculptures reminded us of backs and asses and how sensual and erotic other works were. we smoked cigarettes outside while spitting retarded freestyles (i remember saying something about "marc broke-opeli"). i made a video of things i recorded throughout the day; it's nice to maintain this happening of collecting fragments then re-presenting them. there was a point, while we were eating and drinking that J said something and said something else how i could write about that, and i talked about this for a moment, that's the beginning of this, but we talked about so many other things: christopher williams, the bechers, conceptual photography, gossip, rizz, girls, eyefucking, the bladee show at the hole, different girls, it was all so fluid, now it's a mess in my mind, the linearity of it all dissolved, fragments emerging from one association to the next
Spivak: "History is a storytelling, secondarily also by the arrangement and interpretation of 'facts', and facts are facta, past participle of facio, things that are made - made from conventional standards of truth-establishing, so that you can get a hold of 'what really happened'." I'm still trying to work through 'what really happened'; it was striking when J2 mentioned how wild of an experience it was to read someone else's account of a night you just experienced with them the next day. I think it's funny how the abbreviated letters and numbers will shift throughout the heartbeats. because so many other things happened. history to be written in another time. still a nightmare i'm trying to awake from. i need to go back to the flusser. on the way back Z and i were on the subway platform talking about sebald, his recent trip to italy, heterotopias, and i thought about how all i have at this point are impressions of the rings of saturn and austerlitz from years ago. evergrowing lists of things to read, things to reread, the program continually reconstructing itself, we were on the train, then a deli, then another deli, then we said our goodbyes, i went home, i read, i wrote, i painted, and i tried to search for something that continues to elude me.
“He who writes, writes down himself first of all, for all to read.”7 - Cixous
I've been searching, faraway around the eyes, missing the feeling of being lost in a gazelle of windswept voices amongst all the broken benin bronzes. Mackey said "public" and "private" were disjunctive, now convergent masks for the featureless cave or the evaporative curve of an elapsed interiority, a nonexistent self, maybe that provides enough grounding, in Times Square there were so many different speakers playing Empire State of Mind and one speaker playing Rio Da Yung OG and so many people making images, I walked all the way down from 72nd street, where I sat in a diner drinking coffee eating marbled pound cake after a cigarette after watching Werckmeister Harmonies, another end of the world, staring at the rotting whale thinking that nature was bigger than man, that man was within nature, I was nodding off before, I like when that happens, then the sense of normal time is totally disrupted and the cinema flows into dream time, into everywhen I don't think I believe in an end of The World, but I believe in the ending of Worlds, i remember the ending of Worlds, like I remember forgetting your cosmologies and I remember forgetting that perfect sentence in order to escape its ending and the
it wasn't my party but we threw a party yeah we threw a party bitches came over yeah we threw a party echoes and echoes, i went, i saw people, we talked, we took pictures, we smoked, we pissed, then decided the night was over and rode him in a car talking and talking and talking, at that point with J, E and R were in the car drunksleep but noddingupon, the car was driving the wrong was but R fixed it, I had a nice talk with R on the roof before, about how people dress and their cosmetics, but also about life and past lives and future lives, just before we were at M's, i saw paintings and pig troughs, and me and M and J talked about art and publishing and films and systems and ate garlic bread and pasta and drank kombucha, J and I were talking about important things in the car, but they've faded, what's fresh is Food in SoHo in the 70s, now SoHo is different, everything is different and will never be the same
example: when jim jones jacked the beat to electric feel. now i listen to nr boor rap about mixing fetty with dog and hitting it with tranquil, N emailed me saying i was sensitive to a nihilistic plane of reality, but this is the first time in the opium wars that people made art about making drugs that eat flesh, the outro samples a newsclip about how narcan doesn't work, Flusser wrote in Our Inebriation that "man is not only a being that produces instruments, but also a being that produces instruments in order to escape from the tension produced by his instruments." and then he talks about art, "a medium to propitiate immediate experience"; "Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible... The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it"; "To publish the private is the only type of engagement in the republic that effectively implies the transformation of the republic because it is the only one that informs it."; NR Boor says "we been out here doing all this wrong, I hope this money save us" and i think again everything is different and will never be the same but also everything is the same and will never be different, there are so many worlds always ending, Sauce Walka said "it's Armageddon on my block nigga!" over the pussy money weed beat, Cixous said "Death-in-life is more frightening than life... nothing is lost, because all is lost to begin with" and in Ouvrir, Marker went to Chateaubriand seeing the Battle of Waterloo, knowing he was watching the end of a world, then asking the viewer "what are you watching?" , and as i walked through time square and all the cameras and the noise and the heat i thought "what am i watching?" and on one hand Ulysses was so long ago, but on the other it just happened, time's string lost around the midnight suns
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, Time is a trap from which I am trying to escape, I is a self I'm trying to lose, the first time I spent months walking back and forth on the Sandymount Strand, trying to grasp for something because the ineluctable modalities were meaningless, after asking "whoever anywhere will read these written words?", he thinks "signs on a white field". returning again to language & writing as a means to transform reality, transforming reality as a means to change the world, create a world, end a world, and the idea that writing is a continous project, that one can become Almost Infinite, which is an Infinity separated from Infinity. in my mind I diagnosed the problem as people now trying to rewrite Joyce, but focusing on Stanislaus's diaries and the letters, but who are People, is this projection, what have I assembled here so far, and what will I continue to assemble, already the idea of sculpting these texts into a book is forming, and Cixous gets into the Joyce-Nora relationship as an experimentation space for literature, the fart letters are as much canon as Portrait and Wake, and are probably read more than anything else today, they circulate in far greater volume and frequency, and that speaks to both the work and the problem of work today, as volume and frequency is not a signal of value, but we are so inundated with everything, i inundate this page with words that could go on forever but will only go on for as long as i write it to.
"Joyce also tries to replace the imagery common to Western thought, with its implication of a beginning and an end, a here and a there, a past and a present, a self and an other, by a world without history, a continous world of osmosis. Space is then no longer defined by personal landmarks and one's surroundings are not a line separating the known and visible from a beyond which is different and strange. The outlines of reality become blurred, the horizon clouds over, and people and things can appear to us without being subjected to our minds' usual process of examination and recognition; races, knowledge, cultures, personal histories, childhood memories, desires, all mingle, with no concern for the normal boundaries of mine and thine, hic and ille, tunc and nunc. This is not chaos, but the polycentricity that has replcaed egocentricity or theocentricity."
I suppose what's obvious now is that this isn't the place for that nor can it be, as there's already the linearity inscibed into these numbers, the verticality of the scroll, there would need to be a whole different form, and Form was what first got me lost in Joyce, the imperceptible shifts between reality and hallucination to realize reality-as-hallucination, that there is no stable ground which Flusser fed into later, and I keep trying to understand what it is my task is, of course there is no Task, but there is a Holy Task, a Purpose, a Destiny, a Delusion, I used to think of this compulsion as a Delusion and he did too, and then it became Real, it enveloped me, but remembering the Delusion seems key, in order to reshape it, expand it, so that once it evelopes me again, I can inflate it, make it bigger, bigger, until it evelopes Time, History, -Self, all that I am trying to escape, awake, dissolve, Delusion as a Pharmako, the same words in different places, all these words to escape the near-Death and near-Suicide that has been so Real and Near lately, because of these public and private masks, my mind goes to those African masks, Black Skin, White Masks, Brown Skin, White Masks, how do you say dead sounds, dead words, dead signs, how do you make Dead Times alive again
in another sense, everything I do falls into this sort of diary type practice. not over-thinking, just Thinking
“The only eyes that see are the eyes of water, eyes that are blinded by our tears of compassion for the other.” - Christopher Wise8
the numbers are gone, I was texting T about it, he said heartbeats aren't numbered, they just beat, the heart is a rollie not a stopwatch, of course traces remain, chris marker, magic marker, no mr. clean magic eraser, just permanence, or the idea of pursuing it. something that's always bothered me permanence, even now i wonder when this beard will be gone, when this face will be gone, but also of inscribing permanence onto the body, tattoos, scars, Mali, the Sahel, Egypt on my mind: A SITUATION OF TOTAL PLACELESSNESS ("The face of the future has traces of our past." - Flusser)
everyday by chief keef; it's about how we're always writing, not always with words, if the book doesn't bleed it will be a failure, think of the scars and teardrop tattoos, it's not a textile, the body is writing, thought isn't coming from the body, thought is the body
days happened, nights passed, as did a full moon. i was close to tears watching salaam cinema. again, i thought of how the world was different but the same. there are kisses that could change everything. What am I doing here?
I'm listening to Down 2 (trust) by evilgiane on loop. I'm not sure for how long now. I wonder how many times I've listened to this song now. There was another Cixous quote I found: "Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work, desire, inscribe it on my body, I go where the 'fundamental language' is spoken." the body as text, like the Egyptian myths9.
the description for Chino Amobi's Eroica: "The Epic is situated between history and the myth. It is a tribute to the entire cultural experience of a society to one character who has made a mark on their time, and derives all past, present, and future values of that society from this character thus rendering the epic a source of identity serving to distinguish itself from others. And of all the places in the world there is no place I would rather be." I took a picture of a page, a spread, there was sanskrit and hebrew, text about suicide bombers, about music and dancing and feeling it, and feeling someone with you across distance thru the internet. this song keeps echoing and i think of perfect moments past, of being high, being vacant, being into non-being. all that ketamine feels like forever ago. all that coke feels like forever ago. i might get lost again soon. these last months have been so steady, i'm a week away from three months of sobriety. but i suck down cigarettes and drink coffee like i need it more than ever. i wonder if i can escape it. i wonder what i'm trying to escape, i keep forgetting, because there's so much in remembering
i sent Z and J the video i made of our day in queens, seeing the birds by the water, the photos from the Noguchi museum, little moments of us talking and hanging out at the beer garden, going outside for a smoke. i think of the call i got from my dad, where he told my aunt committed suicide, and it took a few moments before i realized that he fucked up and meant that she attempted suicide. i found out a week later maybe my grandpa had attempted suicide too, months earlier. everything fucked up, struggling with what to do with this, where to put it, history again a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, while life is a prison they're trying to escape. "It is not only the Hindus in London that have lost their homeland: Londoners have also lost theirs... The current migration of peoples has shuffled history and geography" (Flusser, Post-History). the thing is that when things far away happen and you're in a place, they get inscribed into the location where you find out. i walk down mott street and think of the call where i found out S overdosed, the phone call on the M train where I was drunk as a bitch hearing that J committed suicide, even the stilldrunkmorning 2 days later, benderwalking on the train openingphone to pop smoke dying. I went to a movie today, with G and J2 and Z and C, and G was telling me about a friend he has who tweets "RIP Pop Smoke" every 2 days. I say he would've been the one. It's true. the AMC in times square was a labyrinth, we fucked around, drinking Icees from boosted cups, vaping, stumbling, making images, taking wrong turns, out past the dave and busters, out past the applebees, out onto the street, timelost forgottenplace
Z said that day was the best day ever, which was beautiful to hear, it's beautiful having moments like these, it's beautiful having moments, the song still playing as I try to locate myself amidst a flurry of emotions and images and texts. when the sun kisses you as you light a cigarette and sip your coffee. it's simple enough and still so much. i started white mythologies, i finished the christopher wise book on sorcery, totem, and jihad in african philosophy, the spivak articles, but there's still so much more, an avalanche of letters to struggle against, and on the internet i can see the azawad killed 16 algerian soldiers and 8 russian wagner soliders. I texted C about it, I was sending him travel vlogs of this Indian guy who goes through Mali days earlier, before we were talking about how KP Skywalka took a track off The Preacher EP we liked, how it might be gone forever, or at least gone from us forever, i still think about Stunny and Kp0p's Rawr xD and all the other pieces of music that have slipped away, how they exist in memory now. Down 2 (trust) is still on loop. there's so much in the loops, loops within the loops, life within, love within, pain, heartbreak, it's all breaking, escaping
this morning I read Dabashi's essay on A Moment of Innocence. he asks: "Has Iranian cinema crafted a creative corner of reality where the globalized, atomized, brutalized, and ultimately homeless people the world over can call home?" but long before this, he tells the story of Makhmalbaf's life, his political years, the years he spent imprisoned, being tortured: "Makhmalbaf's cinema is scarred, just like his body, and the soul of his nation. Makhmalbaf's realism is virtual, because the full reality it wishes to convey and contest is too traumatic to bear..." there's this sickboyrari song, skullhead, he says "skulls on my belt" but i always hear it as "scars", scars on my–, scars inscribed by the world, scars on my world. life is a part of the program too. i'll leave new york soon, i'll be back at some point, but i need to live and die and cry in other places. nothingfound, everythingremains 2 be sought, everythingyet2come, everything Down 2 (trust)
the cardi b and offset meal was so long ago10. today the sky was filled with smoke and orange haze, everyone jumped to the apocalpyse but it reminded me of delhi. got a coffee, cleaned my room (need to stop twirling beard and pulling hairs out – so many on the floor when i swept up), smoked a cigarette. other things to do, but i keep putting them off, naturally. went to reena, some cool pieces in the show rn, this Kokopelli TV with a stone inside, Juttta Koether paintings, a book i flipped thru of a Claude Balls show in Marseille – there were images of a El Hadji Sy's work, made me think of the protests in Senegal right now, and the images, it'll be dawn there soon, there's probably smoke in their sky too. will I ever step foot in the Sahel. remembering "the reena spauldings in mali", the breakneck haze, cigarette cigarette cigarette, coffee, cremaster. saw J and L there; at first it was kind of grueling, but it came back together after the intermission, through the guggenheim, with richard serra, and with the return to ireland. the guinness exploding, the foam, the broken glass, the cars crashing, the bodies, the bodies, the bodies. after I linked C and M and C2 at a bar. I showed M and C2 my chart, and they said it was interesting, that I work hard or get shit done or something like that. it started because C2 brought up a mole on my cheek and how Chinese fortunes can be read with that, but I have a lot of moles on my face, too many to know where each one is other than there's a few below my eyes, one prominent one on one cheek, and another on my nose, there's also a big one on my neck. maybe more covered up by my beard right now. i'm still too afraid to see a vedic astrologer. i said a lot of bullshit platitudes that i didn't particularly mean, but were more just statements to pass conversation. sardonic worldwordy statements, maybe true by projection. i'll see more people tomorrow, told L i'd go to an opening at the gallery he works at, there's another thing after, and a thing after that too, the usual sequence of events
i need to write the text for the cardi b and offset meal text for the program of films dvd. i'm behind, but the timing feels right now, once i finish white mythologies i think, i'll have what i need to take the text, and make it the text i want to write, returning to the idea of transforming reality through such miniscule gestures as making dvds with films on them, accompanied by small pamphlets of text, that will float and move throughout the world in some way. i was talking about Joyce again with C at the bar, not the first bar, but the second bar, at the first one i got a coke and a glizzy, the second i got a club soda, but I think it's both inevitable and necessary I read finnegans wake this summer. spurred by a number of things, but seeing the documentation images of the keifer show in London the latest impetus. perhaps a trip there too, so many places, but I'm young, they were saying I'm young tonight, and I am but
tonight was full of words and people, i almost didn't leave but then i did. J called me and said he wasn't going to the show but i went after a deep contemplation to stay in. told myself i'd see a film after (made in hong kong) which i didn't, but a good excuse to get me out. saw S and T while walking over there, chatted them up, they said i seemed so excited to go (sarcastic) and i said some bullshit about how excited i was to see the titular gallerist, that we go back, and i say it in such a believable way that it comes back later, that i just say these things, then in the context of saying i'm a murray hill finance bro, speculating that their lives are so interesting in profoundly boring ways
at the show I see L, who's working, and I see E, who i saw on wednesday at reena, and I see J2, who i met back in april with B. chopped it up with J2 about work, our mutual friend. later i'm outside chopping it up with L2 and T2 and J2 asks me about an event that i summarize as having to do with venture capital funded city-states attempting to neo-colonize the mediterranean and a modeling agency that isn't a modeling agency. also saw A and A2 and D (who could be another A). who else, what else, I was low energy at this point, it came up and i blamed it on the smoke in the air, but really i just wasn't in gear yet, i could've been if i was drinking, and this was a night where it would've been fun to drink, fun to do coke, but i didn't, and i think this is where i'll hopefully pick up on self-restraint and discipline after i start drinking again. i decided i'll break in a few days, after it's been 3 months, 3 moons, it feels right in a way, a nice way to send of my time here ending and to link into the next period abroad.
after the opening, i went w/ L and E and S and T and 2 others to get chinese food. we were going to go to a place called "vybes" but took a wrong turn, ended up at this place that was kosher vegetarian chinese food. L and E and the two others decided to leave to uber to a show in bed-stuy so it was just S and T and I, but 3 of T's friends pulled up, F, J3, and this other guy can't remember his name, he was in the opposite corner of our rectangular arrangment of 6. chill time. there was a funny crossover moment between F and S because J and S share a studio and J texted me a painting of me he started working on of me so he came up and a couple years ago F had gone on a hinge date with G, who was living w/ J at the time, but it wasn't really a date, G invited her over but there were like 10 other guys over, and he didn't talk to her at all, but J did. F talked about seeing him around again after and that was more or less the whole story, just hearing it from her side vs. J's side. people talked about other things too, like the internet and buck ellison's recent work. i talked w/ T a decent amount about the internet later, while walking from the restaurant to the hookah bar where the afterparty to the gallery show was at, but the conversation more or less stopped when we got to the bar and it got too loud and crowded to really talk anymore. funny to remember that she called me paul that one time.
got to the bar a bit early, before it was really packed, so we went outside for a smoke. saw K as she was walking up, and E2 who i've seen around and is friendly. i accidentaly walked in on them doing drugs in the bathroom at J's apartment one time a month or two ago, but it was their fault for not locking the door is what N said. went inside, danced a little bit, drank a couple club sodas, chopped it up with A about the internet-film-phenomenon and the failures of it, which later came up again with L2 and T2, which had also came up earlier with T on our walk, and it's hard to put into words how much there is to it all, because that text would and could go on and on and on, and when speaking it out loud, it's so hard to figure out the headsortails point of where to begin to pin the tail on the donkey. it really becomes "chopping it up" when you're in the club. like that's the proper phrase for it. the correct phrase. later i talk with L2 and joyce and what that means to me, the time i read it, and how it helped form me as a person and an artist, as well as the loose travel plans, the Kiefer wake show in London, the interest in Franco-Maghrebian theory, and he talks about DFW and that type of analog for himself. i tell him i'll send him a pdf of derrida the egyptian and we make loose plans for a finnegans wake reading group, which i've already had other loose plans for, like the bloomsday celebration next week. later L3 pulls up and drake is playing, singing along to texts go green, thinking about things i've made, moving my body to the rhythm. chop it up w/ L3 for a little bit, one of the few people who does a perfect job pronouncing my name, really nailing the "TH" sound in the middle. he tells me he's already corrected like 3 people and for someone who i haven't spent much time with, i fuck with him a lot. the general personality, the affect, what he's cultivated for himself. L2 asked me if i thought about writing more fictionalized type stuff, referencing the blade study piece, which he had to photograph for S2, and i didn't bring up this but talked about what i hoped to develop over time, but the amount of living, reading, wandering, and sculpting of the self i felt i needed before i got to a point of where i wanted to be as a writer. that this applied also to filmmaking, music, to art as a whole. normal shit really. but nice to dialogue, get the thoughts out loud, like the details on derrida the egyptian and the freud essay and how i might never go to the sahel
wheredoesitend - train back - before: talking w/ L3 about meeting people being Outside - before: reactivated IG and saw some posts - then: texted E3, texted C, texted J. bought a homeless guy a sandwich after getting off the train. ate some biscuits with peanut butter. drank water. smoked cigarettes. before: lifetimes, lost. i was reciting araby to L2 and parts of proteus, i didn't realize they were inscribed in my memory like that. snotgreen sea. "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." and also the anxiety of influence. that the corpus was unfinished for me, that i had to find a way next, that the way wasn't laid, that i would have to make it
money anger dreams - 3 things that came up tonight. earlier i dropped into a gallery that Z was sitting at and this older lady came in, nicely dressed but nothing crazy. short hair, not lesbian-y, just in a 55 year old type of way. she said hi to M who actually works there, then made her way to the back. i continued talking with Z and M then she came back to the front and left, signing the guidebook before walking out. M mentions that she's one of the gallery's top collectors, and one of the top collectors of contemporary art made by younger artists in general. she shows a picture of a bunker that this lady operates as a museum that's open only once a year or some shit. Z and I speculate where her money comes from – real estate seems the most likely. i talk about some other stuff, like getting coffee with M2 in the morning, and the show at Jenny's, plans for the evening, and so on.
i facetime B in the afternoon, when i'm back at my place, tell him that I chopped it up with Z last night (who i mistakenly thought was a J), and he tells me that he's already heard. we talk shit about shit in general, life shit, work shit, potential money shit, and also about the opening last night, and about an aging generation of artists who still had a dream of being "plucked", in the way barney was, how it lead to cremaster, and so on. i talked about this with Z too, in a sense there's a slight liberation in how bad things are on the economical end of things. get a burger. lay in bed b/c tired asf. try to summon up energy for cozy corner, and then walk to cozy corner. whole gang over there: first time seeing N in a couple weeks, J is there, J2 is there (in the morning i saw him at the coffeeshop, talked about the surf gang show on tuesday, seeing P right before, readjusting after leaving the city and coming back), E is there, C and M pull up, then L and J3 pull up, then Z pulls up, and A pulls up, then K and her friend pull up, the nuggets beat the lakers, and then i get an uberxl to a party in bushwick. J4 and E2 said they'd link us there, C2 and K are there, with N whose place it's at, then we're there, i see M3 for the first time since his party, he talks about seeing the film i made of the barry lyndon episode, enjoying that it got to be made while he was very drunk and absent and exist as a relic of what had occurred.
but back at cozy, that was the first moment of a certain anger. entries ago, i talked about anger and being upset, how the best channel for it was to put it into work, and i suppose that's the action occurring here, where I was talking to L about that older generation and their dying aspirations and lack of monetary success, talking about their co-current interest in NFTs and the speculative markets they tapped into, i don't think i used the word "interesting" to describe it, but i think that's a fair descriptor on the sense that these financial situations have a significant impact on the cultural production that is able to take place, both in its form and in its content, its inflection and tone that is carried forward. my repeated statement on the Joyal show is that it looks like work that was made in a week, but not a particularly important week in the artist's life. I think it was J4 who was talking later about how Joyal's main skill/attribute was his sociality, his ability to be a meaningful personality in a scene that is now witheringagingwhateveryouwanttocallitatthispoint, but L might've been saying this too, but in any case K interrupts by saying she didn't find any of 'this' "interesting", 'this' being the money stuff. it was a bit jarring b/c i hadn't even been talking to her but she was next to us as we talked, but also because I know too much about her on the sense that gossip spreads and her going on to say that it's "gauche" to talk about money or ask what people do for money... it ends up becoming some shit i can't take too seriously knowing that she's "french aristocracy" (J's words at one point), but on a more easier social mapping is a girl from france who went to school in england, talks with a very neutral accent that's assimilated american traits, and then attended columbia as an international student, someone who clearly comes from wealth. which is a fine and normal thing in the arts, and in a sense maybe she's right and i'm wrong, and the first time i linked with S he talked about how new york city's always been a playground for rich kids but that was in the context of the then newest scene-y downtown print publication and not about people who live by irving square park and throw parties at their apartments with nice roof areas to hang out in that in turn create and cultivate a social scene. when i was at that party I was talking with R and she was talking about how she couldn't stand how people dress (clothes from chinatown) while she'd go into their bathroom, look thru the cabinets, and see expensive beauty products. and yea shit is mad annoying and i return back to the question of place/displacement, what is exactly i'm trying to shape for myself, for my life
so it is a "me" thing, i brood on it for a while, until J4 and E2 pull up after being "around the corner" for a long ass time. it was nice tho, because i went down to let them in and L2 was waiting there, who i'd met last in september i think, but it'd been a long time and we chatted about traveling and self-discipline or whatever, the recent things in either of our lives, the things people frequently talk about. we all head from the party to a club, L2 and J4 take pulls from a lukewarm bottle of "supergay" craft vodka, and i film various parts of the walk, scenes of littering and cleaning up, of gas station convenience stores, of waiting in line. on the walk, E2 tells me about a dream she had, where her dream embedded her experience of reading my recent post about the cardi b and offset meal into a play of sorts, and she woke up with fuzzy details but remembering the cardi b and offset meal and the sublation of reading into dreamhaze. it was a fascinating thing to hear, an interesting conceit to work with, of playing with the idea of turning blogpost into (screen)play for the future, re-auto-blahblbahblah or whatever. later we had some fun banter outside on the patio in the back of the club, about how friendship is a sacred bond or something like that, platitudes i put forth but really meant fr this time. i say something else about how life is full of emotions and she brings up that i use a "dot love" url and i'm like yea that's facts or something of that sort. it's funny because everyone else is drunk and i'm the sober one, but my memory blurs it all together too, perhaps not as bad, but it's far from an objective account of how conversations and events happen. not to suggest a camera or audio recording brings "objectivity" and get lost in a whole diatribe about the philosophy of documentary. but it's a funny thing, the little feedback loops of writing and who reads.
also on the walk: J4 tells me he's caught up on the recent ones i've posted, at first a tacit acknowledgement of the emo going thru shit type episode that was very Real, and helpful to write on the sense of working through what to omit and include and how to write about and through certain things and topics. I mention that C called me on the phone after to see what was good, how that was nice. he makes a joke about that, in the sense that he didn't call, and then we get into the weeds a bit more about writing, and how these sorts of things are intrinsic to the writing practice, or at least can be, depending on one's practice. he talks about reading E2's writing, and that he likes where "this" has gone and is headed, and then somehow the conversation moves into the situation of money, probably diverging from my upcoming departure, the reasons for it, how i need to "figure shit out", and i talk about potential money moves, but how unrealized they are, and how far they are from being realized, and all that i have to figure out in the meanwhile, the stress of it, not in the sense of me being "broke" means homelessness or anything actually dire so much as being stranded in india or at my parent's place feeling like a failure for not being able to accomplish something extremely difficult that's more than just a matter of being "good enough" in the sense of the work or writing that's produced, and that being stuck in such a locale would mean a total reworking of how my life operates in order to get to a more stable, sustainable state.
typing through these words makes me even return to the questions of caring about galleries, institutions, positions in Worlds, and so on, vs. just making work in relative isolation and obscurity, showing it in limited capacities, and so on. on a personal level, i really like making my little diary films, making images, playing with sounds, posting them in spaces where people who care about and engage with them can do so, but otherwise not much else. i more or less decided to give up my idea of a kayemes show which i'd floated to L a month and a half or so ago, when i first came back to the city. waterboarding a prominent critic, with other elements playing with documentation images, surveillance, race play, etc. won't be happening sadly, a lot of it because when i brought it up to M2 during coffee she said it risks just becoming a Meme, and at this point that feels like something i need to get away from, because i don't really want the viral traction, attention, and visibility that accompanies memetic resonance, but i'm also sure if i talked to Z about it, he'd talk about how he liked my twitter and i'm back on twitter now, i posted "we really Outside Having Motion" or something like that earlier today, but in any case this sort of giving up on this idea at least liberates me to talk about it to J4 the next time i see him. i like the idea of a triest show in 2024, because it can provide me with the sort of reception for friends and the people who care about my work in the way that i'm interested in
i got angry again on that patio, there was this guy D who came with J from a different opening and when I introduced myself to him he made a joke about how my name sounds like "suck me off" and at that point i wasn't really having it. bullshit short convo after that to get thru the motions, thankfully moved on to talking to other people, but then had to listen to K talk about bohemian larping via greyhound buses and outfits and being called a faggot and philadelphia and later she asked me where i went to college, a question that i hate because of how i did college and how "school" exists as a sort of tattoo to people from certain backgrounds and in the same way that she finds asking about money or work "gauche" i feel like asking about school is the same thing because it's a total revelation of someone's background and social class and that's the further backpedal i have as to why i hate the question is the amount of words and context i have to say to for it to be said out loud in a way that makes sense and i'm fine with. another "me" problem. i should read some bernhard, i remember running into C3 at the park a while back and he was talking about the woodcutters iirc, how bernhard is just narrating being at a party and hating on everyone in different ways, but at the same time i don't really hate on everyone and everything, it's just that a few moments that sour things for me can really ruminate and continue to build inside my head, probably also because i'm not drinking and letting things slip by but bouncing and bouncing and bouncing around in my brain.
but it was a fun night, especially once J4 and E2 pulled up, i think i'm looking forward to drinking with them once i'm drinking again, because it's exactly the type of drinking i want to do, the right company, who bantering with is fun and serious play and work beautiful and sacred and the most fun i had during the night was waiting in line outside the club, taking videos of us hanging, playing with framings, capturing the bullshit inbetween with people climbing over the back fence in the background. there was more but there will always be more, it's impossible for it all to be here. airdrop the documentation of tonight to be assembled and linked into video here: money anger dreams. i'm still happy, left with something to make beauty from. i wonder what it'll be like when i'm dying
when I got coffee with M2 and brought up how "history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake" she brought up her belief in quantum realms, different histories
when i said bye and goodnight to Z at cozy corner he gave me a hug and kissed me on the top of the head. i was wearing a very Z type fit, was talking about it w/ L who was fucking with it and agreed, black boots, black-and-white-striped shorts, a white tee, tattered tan leather coat i got in turkey.
when i was outside talking with L2 these 3 girls walked out, one of whom i'd met at a party back in december and was cuddling up on the couch next to me that night but i didn't do anything because i didn't really have a strong emotional provokation. for a moment after i debated 'should i have done something for the sake of having done something', but tonight resolved those doubts because she was just kind of abrasive and sucked during that interaction where she walked out and it was like 'why did she even say anything'
when i was in line with C and K2 and it was just the 3 of us we were talking about this and how one of those 3 girls was being rude to C and how socially maladapted people who went to private schools often are.
there was a conversation i had with E2 about anger, how it's embarassing to be a person who gets angry and that's one of the reasons why you barely see it. which is true. i have a tendency to keep things cordial and then let them simmer inside. soon i'll leave and all of this will feel like a daydream, a past life
K asked me what i was doing when i was 19 and what she got was that i lived between india and europe then the conversation shifted and she wasn't talking to me anymore. i didn't really say that response, that was her rephrasing of what i tried to explain in the patio din, i spent 5 months in india when i was 18 and then a little over a month when i was 20. when i turned 19, i was in bilbao, i was alone, and i continued to be alone for a very long time. it was painful but formative, that sort of extended silence that continued for years. i don't think the feeling i have is resentment per se (re: college and when people talk about how much they loved going to X expensive private school to study Y thing that doesn't make money); when B and i talked about the icelandic nepo baby in the program who studied art in switzerland and graduated into being olafur eliasson's assistant and showed us pics of him olafur and ai weiwei with dicks drawn in sharpie all over their bodies in lisbon, B mentioned how he suffered from privilege and i think that's the case with most of these people, and it really affects the art that they make. when i was 19, i moved through spain, portugal, belgium, the netherlands, ireland, bulgaria, romania, and turkey. i went back to the U.S. and was detained on suspicions of being a terrorist. i read rimbaud and proust and schopenhauer and carver and joyce and wrote about it in a notebook that was read by homeland security agents. i came back to the U.S. only intending to come back for a little while then lost my mind on a shrooms trip in seattle and ended up medicated and later got magnets put on my brain to try to "fix things". i did a quarter of community college, i worked as a delivery driver and did freelance content writing and other stupid shit with crypto for money. the world was so large, full of seemingly endless possibilities
when M2 told me she was going to Zurich for a graduate painting program, i mentioned joyce's grave and she mentioned canetti's grave. i've never really read canetti, but she named her dog after him, but it seems like she has to leave her behind. when i ran into her in december, i was petting her dog while talking to her friend and she talked to someone else. we didn't talk besides a hi and i thought she hated me. it was a good catch up, as far as those things go, the first time i've really had such a thing really. every other similar situation i've drifted so far from. i've disappeared from a lot of people's lives, most people that i've ever known really
there's a sadness i'm trying to work through, a sort of worldweariness. i hope it lifts when i leave here, i think it will, i've always felt much better when i'm not in america. i'm looking forward to being alone, to dying again
lots of talking tonight. about life and art and other things. went to C and K's with S for dinner. it was great. then A and Z came over. hung out for a while, they drank raki from the liquor store up fresh pond from montenegro, we smoked cigarettes, then went to cozy. saw J and E. played some chess. then K left. then J and E left. then C left. A and Z and S and I stayed for a while, it was helpful, trying to talk through issues and ideas and tendencies and personal histories. eventually went back to Z's place. C2 wasn't home. all the dishes and everything from their kitchen cabinets was on their table. ronnie roach had come by but didn't do a good job as usual. saw a couple roaches by the sink. Z said ronnie roach was telling them that he just uses paper places and it's pointless to fight the roaches, not what you want to hear from your roach guy. it was funny. it was a good night. hung out for a bit longer. ate a mini-croissant that i dipped in nutella. i'd talked about things that i'd written above, but gained new perspectives. it's nice seeing that fluidity, and escape from solipsism. there was so much that i had an ai scribe note record what was said, but it doesn't say who said what. i like it as a block of text that re-presents a segement of the night. non-objectivity, photography, and such and such, a form of recursion with the convos we had.
i want the next thing i write to be a love letter. can every action that i Write be a Love letter.. there's a lot that i'll miss when i'm gone
i don't remember i don't remember, bitch i'm so cold yea i'm so decembrrr
nice day. woke up late, texted Z to see if he wanted to go to the 15 orient show still but last night kinda took it out of him. hung out at the crib, listened to SkeeYee a bunch, it brings this energy out of me in an incredible way. but i struggled to focus. L dropped by to pick up a few more things, talked to her for a bit about marriages and emotions and crying. took the train to manhattan to post that i was Outside and listening to SkeeYee and then got punjabi deli. was a bit early to the film i was going to see at anthology with S so i posted up outside smoking cigs and drinking san pelligrino. at first ran into T, who had was just leaving after watching Ivan the Terrible Pt. 1 without subtitles, then saw N pulled up for the same film as S and I. chatted a bit about what I've been up to, moving around, how Cannes was for him, and then S rolled up and we headed in
the film was solid, i think i'll hopefully go watch it again later this week alone, and let my scribe app run during the entirety of it. the 3d glasses were annoying me, but i really liked some of the sequences and also the writing for the various parts. it was discursive yet not didactic, moving through dreams, life, loss in an oblique way that didn't leave me profoundly emotionally overwhelmed but rather did a subtle thing that i found interesting, as well as the use of text from a man escaped. took a piss w/ S after the film and thought about doing ketamine in that bathroom and then smoked outside w/ N before heading over to grab dollar slice then kgb. shit got kinda retarded there on some internet shit, tired, and currently wondering if there's any value in writing out what happened. i used the scribe again in there and the difference in dialogues between the previous night speaks for itself:
S and I called it around midnight, debriefed about what went down on the train ride back, and about his first 2 days of living here "proper". there's a momentum that's wrapped into doing these when i get home at night, i wonder if it continues. it's a funny thing, to worry about the form of a thing that i shape, yet how the unsteadiness of the "I" in turn creates this sort of unpredictability of the form
also texted Z a bit about jeff wall, i read an interview after not being able to find a piece he sent. spent a bit of time looking for this conceptual art pdf that i have but couldn't find it. read C's rentry. ft'd T to catch up, saw his baby, talked about fidget toys and making things and the bag among other things. he suggested writing about the waterboarding piece, which was an idea that'd been bubbling around. we fell into this wormhole of persian nut company instagram accounts, they have beautiful posting styles, i think tomorrow i'll repost some of it w/ SkeeYee playing on top
reactivated twitter and ig. remarkable how much it's already having an effect on the attention span. also insane to have this sort of text/image distribution network. the amount of stuff, there's so much stuff, i refresh twitter and there's new tweets, i refresh ig and there's new posts new images it really is this inundating flood of stuff but at the same time it also feels less useful. was texting T about my plan which is to more or less post for a little bit, get 'the cardi b offset meal was so long ago' text off, then dip again. i decided the last things i need to read before writing the text are to finish white mythologies, hit the tales of alhambra, and then the donnely materials that N sent me. it's an interesting process, like imbibing substance to shape a freestyle
when i texted N if he had any suggested readings on donnelly, he commented how it was an an interesting thing in respect to my work. i noted that her withholding nature and the aversion to text is somewhat antithetical to how i operate and that i could never be the type of artist she is in terms of that level of elusivity (partially because the internet is already littered with my mostly forgotten detritus which nonetheless could be tracked down vs. her born in 1974 life) but that it makes her all the more compelling. N responded, agreeing with that sentiment, but also saying there's a similarity in the end, that we're both "interested in the final surface". her USC lecture is really incredible because it's as though she can see the future, talking about how the technology to generate TV shows isn't there yet but will be, about talking to dolphins, and her relationship to TV comes up frequently. i supposed TV was like her internet, given the time period. there's a part of the herbert essay from 'tell them i said no' that's a really insightful summary as to the operating mechanism:
"... methodically parsing the actions, objects, and images proffered by the San Francisco-born Donnelly is not really the point. Thinking of them as interacting systemic units and conjectures about shaped reality, the fungible nature of space and time, and the strictures of art reception is more fruitful; as is considering them as disquisitions on how much - how much information, how much presence, how much conceptual connective tissue - an artist needs or ought to provide."
there's a part a bit later in the essay that i found interesting, where Herbert says that Donnely's work insists on being "experienced in real time and real space, so that it can ask what those things even are" as opposed to mediated through the internet, a somewhat implicit suggestion (of Herbert's) that this is not "real". a big part of moving through the donnely archive is the way in which the documentation is done, having to dig for the traces like the vortex notes and the video pieces scattered through vimeo and karagarga, no singular repository to work with her work through the web. the matthew marks website has documentation of the pieces, but the closest you can get to them from there is a shot with 3 of the photographs from a distance, and it's impossible to feel the details of the work, to even get a proper glance really, intentional, but there's already so many other youtube videos of the show. and to think back to the horse at casey kaplan, where the mythology started because of the undocumented moment, it would be impossible to replicate now, because everyone would pull out their phones to film. horses don't stop they keep going. i got horses in my car like a farmer. Paul fell off the horse and found God:
"I like late in the day. I like the day to night transfer. I like the desaturation. It's like a high speed eternity."
"I like smoking opps. I like sipping lean. I like getting high. I like when the car go like 200 hold on let me drive."
i'm returning to the art vs. culture conversation i was having with Z and A, because of how my mind builds a mirror between glockboyz teejaee and donnelly, and how Z feels they have nothing to do with each other. we spent some time in that conversation talking about how painting is not necessarily Art now, again it returns to the surface, and i guess after these last couple days with the immaterial forms of Donnely's work, i can feel how much surface can still exist in the slippage, in interstice. i used to be obsessed with the interstice a few years ago b/c of this book on deleuze and schizoanalysis of cinema that's now faded largely into impression and post-memory. recall, recall, recall like the perpetual AI scribe that lecun envisions will be there for all of us, but how will the machines weigh memory...
the parkett essays N sent me also brought Donnelly into conversation with Barnett Newman – how apocalypse drove him into a belief that art was talismanic, sacred, how they both strove to create totalities, new realities, that were inexpressible as "language" - how i wrestle with Language as I wrestle with History, and remember talking with M about Reality vs. Realities, and the malleability of them as such. and i remember in Lyotard's the inhuman there were essays on Newman that i skipped over
and then it ended how it started. did a couple of bumps of K from M at the bar italia show. like the front and back cover of a book back to io caffe, 3 months exactly to when i first met him, sererendipitous that i ran into him on one end, but also pure coincidence, organized by the chaos of calendar. the show was fine. the show was strange. i was thinking about being on stage on front of people, performing, them yelling songs they want to hear at you, like a monkey, it's no way to be. someone yelled "miracle crush" and nina said "next time" and then the show went on and ended without it, no encore
it was my first time hanging out w/ M one-on-one for an extended bit, my first time hanging out w/ someone one-on-one in a second, we talked about hustles, the past, the future, europe, and so on. on one of my first days back in the city i ran into him, he told me he was going to this gay warehouse party in hoboken because it'd be a good place to sell. asked him about it and he said he cleared 3 grand that night, but that it was deeper than hoboken, his friend picked him up, then when he was done he ubered back to the PATH train in hoboken then commuted and was up until 6 or 7. we talked about getting hit on by gays then having to tell them you're straight, it happened to me at cozy with C a week or so ago, and then we talked about shaved heads and C and how C shaved his head this weekend while he was upstate with M and C2 and today's C2's birthday i see i've seen multiple IG stories even though i don't follow her, and the world grows smaller and i think of all the posts i've missed
i liked when they were performing 'best in show' and they were fucking up and had to restart in a different key which one of the guitarists can sing better, it sounded like a mess before they restarted, but a good kind of mess, it reminded me of moments at pirate studios I've had w/ M2 and J except with guitars and bass and drums and when i looked at the bassist i thought of the gossip M2 had passed along to me and the Worlds that loops into, fights at openings, and the guy next to M and I at the show kept talking to his friend about how cute the bassist was and how he was going to talk to her after the show after the show i bought a shirt kinda passé but whatever and i bought some K from M, i think I'll also ask A about his coke plug, and then the river challenge soon, but i only have 2 weeks left here, it snuck up on me with the week i'll spend in chicago and the northwest, and there's so much to do, that i know i have no option but to go into the mode of Operating, which is a great place to arrive at, where things move and spring from within me, from a real Drive that gets unlocked
M's k is cute, it comes in this little hard clear plastic container, the type used for nail polish i think, but with just some crystals inside, and the cap has this little painting he did on top, he told me he paints all of them 1 of 1 by hand. he told me he'd be in paris in september to move some stuff for one of his homies who works for enfants riches deprimes or as he called it ERD, but i doubt i'll be in paris at that point, i have no idea where i'll be, and that's comforting for me, the significant amount of variance in where Life could be at that point.
I think what's interesting is that I'm not especially trying to escape anything by doing drugs right now, which is why it feels strange to use them, there isn't anything I'm running from. yes the nightmare of History and the prisons of Language, but also I think back to coffee with M3 and how she talked about the different worlds and I think to the Donnelly and the possibility of so much, of worlds, of voids, of "pata-realities", and I think to myself at various stages of childhood that I've only really talked with M3 about, perhaps delusional, but also innately touched, the feeling of being Chosen, of having Visions, dreams of smoke that stay in my mind, things that are nearly impossible to explain in Language but felt
i think k is kind of like this Everything-in-Nothing, that's what the user drives towards. the attempt to reach completion by negation. it makes sense why this and adderall was what i was lost in after thatha died and I was grasping at trying to Do Something, to Change Reality. now it's different, I've settled into this quietude that I enjoy, I'm Here instead of elsewhere
i had best in show on loop but now i paused it and it's so quiet. i've decided i'm going to watch this 90 minute trisha donnelly film in this quiet, it's silent and subtle and i didn't have the mind for it earlier but i feel i do now. i didn't record any of the bar italia show but i'm sure somebody did, they caught the fuck up on film, at first when i got back i watched a performance of best in show from prague a month ago but they did it clean here it was different, someone will put it online, but that isn't the same as being there. now my laptop is going to play a film that Donnelly played on loop in 2012, at documenta 13 in Kassel in a cinema built in the 50s. it won't be the same as being there.
there are so many heres theres and elsewheres. i'm thinking of falling in love and disappearing. they're actions, but they can also be places. maybe some would call them non-places. C3 called bar italia non-music in a chat w/ me and N today. it was to go to the surf gang show but we didn't buy tickets it time it sold out. that's why i'm here and not there.
there are so many heres theres and elsewheres. i'm thinking of falling in love and disappearing again. they're actions, but they can also be places. i'd like them to be places outside of language, outside of history, outside of myself.
rebirth reborn i haven't felt anything like that in such a long time. since atlantique. when i wake up it'll all have felt like a glimmer, like a dream, like it was possibility just beyond the threshhold of becoming tangible. perhaps that's it, it was Possibility Becoming.
i want to get coffee with Z in the morning to talk about it, even though he hasn't seen it yet. I want to screen it on loop in film noir cinema, to experience it again in a different form. this wasn't Kassel but it was really something incredible even here. it was supposed to be silent but in the last 30 seconds this little bell comes in chiming and in those 30 seconds I could hear a train coming by. the synchronicity nearly brought me to tears
everything feels different
i feel alive anew a way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the
rebirth reborn i haven't felt anything like that in such a long time. since atlantique. when i wake up it'll all have felt like a glimmer, like a dream, like it was possibility just beyond the threshhold of becoming tangible. perhaps that's it, it was Possibility Becoming.
i want to get coffee with Z in the morning to talk about it, even though he hasn't seen it yet. I want to screen it on loop in film noir cinema, to experience it again in a different form. this wasn't Kassel but it was really something incredible even here. it was supposed to be silent but in the last 30 seconds this little bell comes in chiming and in those 30 seconds I could hear a train coming by. the synchronicity nearly brought me to tears
everything feels different
i feel alive anew a way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the
in my notes app i typed: i used to be jealous of those ppl who have the type of art practice where they make the same thing every single time until i realized i make the same thig every time but different just like them... anyways we talking bout practice. not a game. not a game. not a game. we're talking bout practice
i'm not sure how true this actually is, the jealously part that is, it came up most recently when Z brought up eliot porter and his photographs of birds when we were at cozy but i thought about it in regards to anne truit and willem de rooij and M's paintings and others before that, to really repeat and hone in on a sort of thing to the point of immense precision. when i woke up this morning i texted Z about the donnelly. i texted J and E to make plans for the river challenge on friday and made a poster. i had a good convo w/ G about music and making and settling down and developing and creating Life in such a way. i got M2 and E to make blogs that I linked at the top with C's blog. I got coffee and smoked a cigarette and sent A a list of things that would be good to read/watch, and I tried to sit with last night. watched some video tutorials on Unity and Blender stuff for 3d scans / game development. when i was with L, he mentioned adam martin's work and his buchholz show which came buck tonight when I was talking to D at the bar he works at, I was talking about the trisha donnelly film last night with S and what it did to me, trying to explain what is to a large extent unexplainable, and he mentioned that he met her at that buchholz show in cologne, that the thing right now seems to be to go study with her. he said that she was how she seems, from her work and the little glimpses of her you can grasp through the internet.
there were many little moments tonight, nothing really big. went to central park where I linked J and M3 and K (who i just met) for this yiddish music thing that J invited us to. it was chill, i'd barely ate before, she gave me a beef jerky stick, then we went to burp castle, talked more, they left, S pulled up, had a brief overlap, then Y pulled up, first time meeting him, was a chill twitter link but i forgot about the part of online links where you loredump which left S just kinda sitting there for a sec which i'm sure he understood but i was like damn i should've planned this better but that's how shit goes. when I first met Y, S and I were outside smoking and I made eye contact with these two dudes walking, one of which complimented my beard and fit and i dapped him up and we started chopping shit up, then Y pulled up and we started talking shit as a whole group and it was funny because he had just asked them for directions a minute before and it was a real 'how do you know each other' situation. the 2 dudes were from DC and knew kp skywalka which was tight, they were moroccan and said if i end up there to hit them up for recs which i might do but i might not. on the train home this group of ppl also complimented my fit, first the boots then the pants, and the socks that matched the pants, and the sweater vest, and the book (i burn paris) which S had given me. J's commented how i dress nice which i guess is true and P's called me a hypebeast which isn't really true cuz i don't wear supreme and palace and shit but the clothes shit just feels kinda regular, there's an element of childhood fulfillment to being 14 and not being able to cop supreme and foamposites and rick and raf in that moment and how it gets re-presented now, but i like drip, whatever that means on the larger sense. and on the "larger sense", i guess clothing is a language that we communicate with and i like to talk my shit with it, the same way i like to talk my shit
i said that what donnelly's work does is to a large extent unexplainable, it's outside the bounds of written language, but it felt like a kiss last night. like a meaningful kiss. it's not an explanation, because how does one explain what a meaningful kiss does, there's just feeling. i brought up quietude and attention spans and time away from Online with Y and S brought up that i'd spent time in meditation retreats. when i tried to explain what a 10 day vipassanna was like to people, my best explanation was a really slow acid trip, because you have so many thoughts and you learn that all you can do is let them pass with nowhere to inscribe them. that's what the donnelly was like too, because i chose not to write, but also because writing would've taken away from the work, from my gaze at the screen because i couldn't gaze at a projection, and you have all these thoughts moving around while you focus on these tiny little changes and things staying the same. you're suspended in this beautiful eternity that ends with bells chiming. you're suspended in this beautiful eternity that ends. you're suspended in this beautiful eternity
the sun is rising and i can't stop it and so many things are happening. i rewatched atlantique and it's different now, because senegal is different now. the sun already rose there and the smoke here is gone but there's smoke there. while i was watching and the dawn crept in i wrote in my notes app:
between between art & culture between the east and the west the night is slipping away the light is slipping in so many things are happening that can't be stopped
there are tabs about el hadji sy i have saved in my onetab. there isn't a word for "art" in wolof. i get to write what's next
Did I go out? Yea I went out i went to a couple of clubs... a fun night tho. went back to the donnelly show and spent some slow time with it... thought about the yonic, wombs, nature and how it's mediated to us, the spacing of the works, but most of all how the prints were encased in glass, something that frustrates me usually, but it's there because of the image-making of supplemental documentation, you almost always get trapped in images of the work, you need weird angles to bypass your reflection, and when you get lost in the black and the white your eyes flick back and forth between the work and your out-of-focus self
before i was texting G and M, about writing, making work and music, and in M's case the piece of advice writing in their blog which really spoke to me in terms of helpful advice in orienting a practice given all the conditions and the most important part, something i've talked w/ Z about a lot, that you have to be doing it for yourself and believe in what you're doing for it to work in any sort of way.
after the donnelly show i walked across manhattan, grabbed a sandwich (honey turkey, lettuce, avocado, pepper jack, onion, and mustard on a roll), and made my way to anthology. there were two egyptian documentaries, a short and a feature, showing, the way the audience interacted with them was exceptional to experience, so much laughter and whispering, in english and arabic, afterwards it was strange though because everyone seemed like they knew someone there and i talked to the woman who programmed the films because one of my friends works with her, but beyond that i smoked a cigarette then saw a text on my phone from N who told me the river would be a function and then my phone died
I went to the river still and N wasn't there but I saw K there and thought about how she sparked the words above as i still navigate the whole art vs. culture vs. money situation and gossip often operates as a pharmakon, she was v much dealing with Life in a very honest way and was kind to me, let me use her phone to text N to figure out what was up, chatted with her and a couple of other people, then N pulled up and we started talking shit, got glizzys got beers, we were in business. ran into A and talked for a while about what we'd been reading, finnegans wake and joyce and traveling and the maghreb, internet shit, private secrets, matthew barney, and so on. I met "I" and M, guys who around and are a bit older, "I" was the rare individual who knew where in Washington and Iowa I was from, M and i chopped it up about a number of different things, internet stuff, music, people we knew, and so on. we talked about names and he said he was at S's studio who made a joke about how i accidentally doxxed myself to him and i talked about that as an impetus for the realization of not being able to be paul all the time. later E and J pulled up and we hung out with more people, migrated to the offices of blockchain music start-up, hung out more, got some dollar slice, drank some beers, had a good night out, the details blurred, things talked about, things forgotten, i drank a ken maynard, a stella, a modelo, a bud light, and another modelo, it was all very nice, it just happened, hopefully i get some motion going on the finnegans wake reading group i talked about with people, i was talking to J about flusser and he was saying it'd be cool to get a reading group going for something.
take care was playing in the uber on the way back. N dropped his dollar slice on the ground while getting in and it was a minor tragedy. i saw and talked to other people too, but they weren't recognized in the immediacy of writing this, if that's the phrase for it. things are in motion for tomorrow. i was texting C about having motion and florida rap. real boston richey tweeted "let me see that pussc", it was like if the weeknd and joyce collabbed on a tweet. in florida the motion comes from the ocean. i listened to SkeeYee while walking home after the uber dropped me at N's house. shit was lit
When Bruno Caboclo was drafted an analyst described him as "two years away from being two years away". He was in the post-Giannis mold of prospects, an extremely raw gifted athlete who played in Brazilian leagues that could be described as amateur at best. For a while, I used this framework to think about myself, someone who came to art quite late compared to the others around me. Like when I was 23 and my work started getting motion, I thought about time in that way frequently. But now, two years into this process, I realzed that to think about that self who is supposedly only two years away and always be eluding me is an unhelpful framework, because artists don't develop like NBA players and the systems that artists operate within are not like the NBA.
But there are some similarities. When I look at the leaked photos of Ja Morant in the strip club, the floor completely covered in money, I think of the curse of privilege. Dame goes on podcasts and says the young guys don't love the game anymore, they just ended up there by virtue of God-given talent and have to find purpose in the hundreds of millions of dollars that will come their way. Ja pulled the blicky out on Live, then he did it again. When he's on the court, he flies like a ballerina. It's like breathing it's nothing it means nothing. All he's doing is Being. But what happens when you have to change your way of Being, when the conditions of the world necessitate change. I thought it was beautiful when Ty Lawson posted that Chinese women got cakes on the low and posted himself in the strip club and got kicked out of China. He got kicked off a team in Venezuela recently. Bro's art is pure dysfunction, he doesn't give a fuck, he stays being Him. Bruno never "made it" in the league. He's 27 now and playing in Germany. All that potential time never amounted to anything in terms of NBA results. I never watched him close enough to figure out "why". Giannis had that dog in him, and that dog never went away.
Getting Bread and Cooking are two different things.
And this shit is never a game, it's always practice. imma still get buckets tho
we played a game today in J and M's backyard tonight, where you say the name of an artist/band, but the opposite of each word, and then everyone tries to guess what it is. there were the easy ones ("desert" / "oasis), ones that strained under the weight of words without pure opposites ("limp bizkit" / "stiff omelette"), and ones that used culture to weigh opposites ("magneto not cringe" / "xaviersobased"). it was a fun thing to do, no winners or losers, just a parlor game to pass the time between beer and cigarettes.
I've been thinking about how I've worked in the past compared to how I work now, revisiting Herbert's Tell Them I Said No, and how one has to "grind to disappear" (L had an IG story about this recently). But that isn't really true. I could just disappear. From 2017-2020 I had an Instagram that I don't use anymore where the posts are now archived with a lot of photos and a lot of video work. It was work without an audience, existing because I wanted to put it somewhere to show. At my parent's house I have boxes of C-prints and black-and-white work that just sits there now. I was flipping through them in March, looking for a picture I took of my dog to frame once he died. The most notable things I found were an image of a public swimming pool that no longer exists, there's just a field in the park, the only traces in image and memory, and nudes of my first girlfriend who also no longer exists in a way because she isn't a girl anymore – for a minute I used the phrase ex-ex-girlfriend. I was talking about this with E and R recently and they made a joke about how that was when I got over her but that was it really, it was pretty funny, I was really drunk at KGB with S and opened my phone and switched to that account and the algorithm knew to put it first and it was like woah life changes and very little is permanent, and then my mind changed too. I think a lot of the photos I took at that time are good, and it's fine that nobody will see them.
When I think of The Name, I think about the Tamil tradition of Cankam poetry. To be a Cankam poet is to be part of the brotherhood of poets, something larger that oneself. In The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan writes: "The classical tradition of Tamil poetry is an impersonal tradition. The use of epithetical names that for these poets no signature was more authentic than their own metaphors". This is after he describes how the poets sign their works with names such as "The Poet of Red Earth and Pouring Rain" and "The Poet of Long White Moonlight". He goes on to say: "By a remarkable consensus, they all spoke this common language of symbols for some five or six generations. Each could make his own poem and by doing so allude to every other poem which had been, was being, or would be written in this symbolic language. Thus poem became relevant to poem, as if they were all written by a single hand. The spurious name Cankam [fraternity, community] for this poetry is justified not by history but by the poetic practice". As I type this I can hear Lil Uzi Vert from outside my window: "It do not matter"
There's an impossibility in attempting this practice on ones own, and this intertextuality does exist in film and music today, from shots referencing shots like the moon and the clouds in Atlantique mirroring the moon and the clouds in Twilight City and Gucci Mane and Chief Keef flows reappearing in different places every year, but it's not the same. It's the same sort of impossibility that exists in regards to how part of what makes the Gommateshwara statue in Shravanabelagola so incredible to me is its lack of an author. Likewise with the temples across Tamil Nadu. They were commissioned by rulers, but no one thinks of the rulers as artists. So it's a strange thing when I go to India and try to talk to ideas with my cousin, like asking about how I could get a carousel like the ones they have on the beach fabricated. I've been thinking of going back for a while again. The uncle who took my to that statue died suddenly a couple of months ago, I told that auntie I'd visit her next time I'm in India. I'm realizing that every person that I've stayed with in Mysuru has died within a year or two of my visit, without being particularly old. In 2017 I stayed with my mom's cousin and when I went again in 2019 she wasn't there anymore.
Z sent me a Jeff Wall text, "Some Comments on the Claims Made For and Against Painting", which focuses on the act of "world-disclosure" through different forms, as it relates to the "autonomous individual". We haven't talked about it yet, but I think I'd benefit from printing it out, and writing on top of it, rather than just highlighting it. I understood Z's sensibilities a bit better after reading it though, it stemmed from the Cozy Corner convo, where Z mentioned how an avant-garde is necessarily reacting against something, which Wall brings up in the piece, and then we got lost on the Surface as where the Art occurs, but that not all Paintings have Surfaces or something of that sort. It's possible none of us said anything like that, but I like that: The Surface is where Art occurs; not all paintings have Surfaces; all Paintings have Surfaces. Something to workshop for later. It'll be interesting going back to Paris and to the Louvre, for the first time in 5 years, in the sense of my recent interest in Historical Painting, but also in how painting used to bore me because of how I viewed the moving image as the most important form when I was younger, given how much information it could convey. Naturally, opinions change, it's a good thing that they do, and now I wonder if I'll make it to Würzburg to see Tiepolo's fresco on this trip. But some tendencies remain, as my mind drifts into the idea of a screening in that room, and how it would function in relation, and the idea of taking as many years as he spent working on that fresco to work on that piece. Markopoulos never saw The Temenos and they're still happening, slowly unfolding, with years in between the screenings that a select few pilgrimmage for. To see a film that no one has ever seen, screened in a very specific place. These ideas interest me more than white walls, as well as pictures to be put on White Pages.
On my walk home, I was explaining my concept for the waterboarding show that won't happen to N. Where it isn't just the sculpture of a fountain that waterboards a manequinn with the face of The Manhattan Art Review printed on it, but that it's accompanied by a 16mm film on loop in the same room, that the projection ideally beams through the water flowing from above, to scatter the light, and that the small room would have 4 surveillance cameras recording. There would be 4 viewings, each 6 hours in length, a week apart, and the documentation becomes the piece I'm more interested in, 24 hours of footage from 4 angles. "Art" as "social science", if one wants to call it that. But the show won't happen. T told me to turn it into a text-based piece (something more formal than this sort of a text) which I've thought about, but it's also a matter of... well what the point is exactly. Tell Them I Said No, echoing and echoing. Herbert describes Hammons as treating "the art world as a high-stakes game of strategy to be played from a highly critical distance". The "Art World" seems stupid though, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I could continue to barrel forward, it's easy enough to do, to knock down dominoes and/or connect train cars. The question I'm coming and returning to: "Why?"
Concept: I'm going to step away to wear Yohji and Kiko while going on a historic run on Jeopardy under my government name. Then I'll disappear again. 10 years after that I'll come back to "Art" under a different name. The world will be so different.
Addendum on names: Lutz Bacher is funny because they really let you know that her name is a pseudonym. The night of S2's opening I ended up in a top-floor apartment of a 7 story walk-up in SoHo, a small bohemian larp crib, and there was this girl there "Emma Pordige" who said that she dated The Dare among other things. Everyone was on coke except me and we were there until the morning. "Emma Pordige" has a strange bit of intruige to me; she follows me and other accounts I've ran on Twitter, where she has basically no followers, and on Instagram it looks like most of her 800-some followers are fake and were purchased. She has a picture where she says rip to her grandmother, #LutzBacher. A follows her though, I'll ask him tomorrow when we link.
my stummy hurt. i drank more than i meant to last night. went to 4 different scene-y bars (burp castle, kgb, the river, clando). talked to people. hung out. the usual shit.
After that 3 month break and how nice it was I question how much alcohol and going out really plays into the kind of practice (and by extension life) I'm trying to build for myself. The River Challenge is ahead of me but after that I'm not yet sure what my course will be. I was texting J about practices yesterday, he hit me about the recent writing and a David Salle talk where Salle says "the best model for art writing would be sports writing, where the writer or speaker has to put you in a moment and express a feeling….." (quoted from J's text), and then brought up Aquariuses (my rising) and Michael Jordan optimizing his body for basketball, Future doing the same for music. Practices that encompass the entirety of life. I brought up a profile of Evan Mobley where he talks about Mike Tyson changing his personality to become the most dominant fighter possible, how he looked towards that as a model for how he could change the trajectory of the kind of hooper he is. Even Giannis has gotten more serious, naturally, from his younger days of being amazed by America and loving smoothies. I'm going to run the Puberty In Painting lecture again and scribe app it, but what I realize more and more is that I don't think I can have a practice that revolves around drinking the way Krebber's did while he was at Staedel. Or rather, it isn't a practice that I'd be happy with, it'd be easy enought for me to do (see my socialite related ramblings somewhere above).
I sent J an article with a list of Swaggy P quotes, who's really been on my mind lately, for being a shooters shoot guy, like Dion Waiters was too. But Swaggy P was different, even the name: “Swaggy P is heaven-sent. I'm like a prophet of swag, so the name was heaven-sent.” - Swaggy P
"He's said a bunch of times that he didn't become swaggy p until the playoffs with the clippers where he walked to the arena with a Versace shirt and played a game in the red foamposites" - sixfiftychris, youtube
The recent focus on the sports/art thing was interesting w/ engaging with Barney's Secondary installation as well. The day before people were talking about it and I had to tell them that Oakland Raider fans really dressed like that, that it wasn't Barney's costuming and that the work is focused on the hypermasculine rituals while in make-up, functionally doing a sort of drag. I went w/ A and ran into a couple of his friends there, where I repeated the same point, pointed out that the drills some of the players were doing were specifically those that secondary players (cornerbacks, safeties) would do - flipping their hips while running in order to mirror the route of a receiver. There really is minimal overlap in the vectors of sports knowledge + art knowledge. I brought up the Farocki Deep Play piece and they commented how it's funny that work shows at Greene Naftali, but it also makes sense, aligns with the Tony Cokes shit. I was facetiming T this evening and we talked more about it, he mentioned that most kids who go to art school / liberal arts schools are going to come from backgrounds where their parents didn't really have sports on. I estimated that from 8-18, I probably spent 5-6 hours every Sunday watching football, then there was also Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, college football, and high school sports, I used to know pretty much every player on the 90 man roster of the Chiefs before cut-down and followed everything year round to an obsessive level, and it's funny to think that the same sort of cuts in the sportswriting economies that funneled me into interests in other kinds of writing economies that then were cut and collapsed in turn funneled me into things existing in the Art Sphere or whatever you want to call it. That Evan Mobley piece was on The Ringer, which exists as a poor man's version of Grantland, and I really only read and don't listen to podcasts and people say the podcasts are good, but podcasts aren't Writing.
After we left the Barney, we went to Sculpture Center, bandied words about, I got the gossip about "Emma Pordige", and though about the mechanisms of secrets. Parted ways with A, then went to Lincoln Center, watched Marco Ferreri's The Seed of Man, which, like Werckmeister Harmonies, extensively featured a dead whale and an end of the world. The print was gorgeous, it had me thinking about the visibility of time, and got my gears turning about the possibility of making cinema still. Like The Temenos, like Cremaster, Cinema as an Event, Cinema in an amphitheater that is built. Things that are outside the scope of my own ability to render into reality, but are still exciting to think about, to work towards. I've had many rejuvenating moments in that theater. The first film I saw in NYC after the covid shutdown was there, Salomé Jashi's Taming The Garden, a documentary at the edges of belief, chronicling the uprooting of trees in Georgia for a man's private garden. There is still possibility.
I need to cook. I need to get buckets. I need to get swole. I need to hit M about training and actually do it before I leave. I'm tryna Get Active. YKTV
I sent T some texts about my basketball links. Like how Satya means "Truth" and Paul Pierce's nickname is "The Truth". The P in Swaggy P stands for Paul. Cosmological shit. I'm Up like my Aquarius.
my stummy hurt. i drank more than i meant to last night. went to 4 different scene-y bars (burp castle, kgb, the river, clando). talked to people. hung out. the usual shit.
After that 3 month break and how nice it was I question how much alcohol and going out really plays into the kind of practice (and by extension life) I'm trying to build for myself. The River Challenge is ahead of me but after that I'm not yet sure what my course will be. I was texting J about practices yesterday, he hit me about the recent writing and a David Salle talk where Salle says "the best model for art writing would be sports writing, where the writer or speaker has to put you in a moment and express a feeling….." (quoted from J's text), and then brought up Aquariuses (my rising) and Michael Jordan optimizing his body for basketball, Future doing the same for music. Practices that encompass the entirety of life. I brought up a profile of Evan Mobley where he talks about Mike Tyson changing his personality to become the most dominant fighter possible, how he looked towards that as a model for how he could change the trajectory of the kind of hooper he is. Even Giannis has gotten more serious, naturally, from his younger days of being amazed by America and loving smoothies. I'm going to run the Puberty In Painting lecture again and scribe app it, but what I realize more and more is that I don't think I can have a practice that revolves around drinking the way Krebber's did while he was at Staedel. Or rather, it isn't a practice that I'd be happy with, it'd be easy enought for me to do (see my socialite related ramblings somewhere above).
I sent J an article with a list of Swaggy P quotes, who's really been on my mind lately, for being a shooters shoot guy, like Dion Waiters was too. But Swaggy P was different, even the name: “Swaggy P is heaven-sent. I'm like a prophet of swag, so the name was heaven-sent.” - Swaggy P
"He's said a bunch of times that he didn't become swaggy p until the playoffs with the clippers where he walked to the arena with a Versace shirt and played a game in the red foamposites" - sixfiftychris, youtube
The recent focus on the sports/art thing was interesting w/ engaging with Barney's Secondary installation as well. The day before people were talking about it and I had to tell them that Oakland Raider fans really dressed like that, that it wasn't Barney's costuming and that the work is focused on the hypermasculine rituals while in make-up, functionally doing a sort of drag. I went w/ A and ran into a couple of his friends there, where I repeated the same point, pointed out that the drills some of the players were doing were specifically those that secondary players (cornerbacks, safeties) would do - flipping their hips while running in order to mirror the route of a receiver. There really is minimal overlap in the vectors of sports knowledge + art knowledge. I brought up the Farocki Deep Play piece and they commented how it's funny that work shows at Greene Naftali, but it also makes sense, aligns with the Tony Cokes shit. I was facetiming T this evening and we talked more about it, he mentioned that most kids who go to art school / liberal arts schools are going to come from backgrounds where their parents didn't really have sports on. I estimated that from 8-18, I probably spent 5-6 hours every Sunday watching football, then there was also Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, college football, and high school sports, I used to know pretty much every player on the 90 man roster of the Chiefs before cut-down and followed everything year round to an obsessive level, and it's funny to think that the same sort of cuts in the sportswriting economies that funneled me into interests in other kinds of writing economies that then were cut and collapsed in turn funneled me into things existing in the Art Sphere or whatever you want to call it. That Evan Mobley piece was on The Ringer, which exists as a poor man's version of Grantland, and I really only read and don't listen to podcasts and people say the podcasts are good, but podcasts aren't Writing.
After we left the Barney, we went to Sculpture Center, bandied words about, I got the gossip about "Emma Pordige", and though about the mechanisms of secrets. Parted ways with A, then went to Lincoln Center, watched Marco Ferreri's The Seed of Man, which, like Werckmeister Harmonies, extensively featured a dead whale and an end of the world. The print was gorgeous, it had me thinking about the visibility of time, and got my gears turning about the possibility of making cinema still. Like The Temenos, like Cremaster, Cinema as an Event, Cinema in an amphitheater that is built. Things that are outside the scope of my own ability to render into reality, but are still exciting to think about, to work towards. I've had many rejuvenating moments in that theater. The first film I saw in NYC after the covid shutdown was there, Salomé Jashi's Taming The Garden, a documentary at the edges of belief, chronicling the uprooting of trees in Georgia for a man's private garden. There is still possibility.
I need to cook. I need to get buckets. I need to get swole. I need to hit M about training and actually do it before I leave. I'm tryna Get Active. YKTV
I sent T some texts about my basketball links. Like how Satya means "Truth" and Paul Pierce's nickname is "The Truth". The P in Swaggy P stands for Paul. Cosmological shit. I'm Up like my Aquarius.
how to be so many things probably can start with the question of how to be fewer things. I woke up late this morning, chugged water, showered, used mouthwash but didn't brush my teeth, threw my shit in a suitcase and took an uber to the airport when i should've woken up earlier and in better condition after a night of work in order to take the J there. slept on the plane for a little bit, took another uber to H and A's place in chicago because I needed to take a phone call for the program while in the car. once I got to their place I'd finished the part of the call I needed to be there, and put myself on mute and put in the corner of their living room so I could talk to them and catch up on how things had been since they got married. it feels the same as when I stayed with them for a while when we were all 22-23 really, except now they're husband and wife, it's nice, beautiful, I'm really happy for the both of them.
H and I leave to get brunch on the way to the MCA. while we're talking and eating I tell him that I broke my sobriety after doing 3 months instead of 6 months. in a sense it makes me feel like a bit of failure, because I'd talked about it to him earlier, a couple weeks before his wedding, and he seemed happy to hear it, that it was doing me well, that in a bigger sense I was doing well. since I've started drinking again, I've lapsed into many different patterns of the past, namely slowly fucking up my finances, shirking responsibilities towards work, and being absent towards those I care about. after a day walking around Chicago, going to the MCA, getting a glizzy and a cake shake, then going to a white sox game, we got back to their place, and i opened my laptop and before starting to work on the shit i'm supposed to have completed tomorrow that'll keep me up most of the night, i looked at M and E's blogs, and M's blog specifically was a mirror that I needed
he detailed an incident from the bar that I felt bad about, but also made me remember a different incident with M2 from more than a year ago, where my similar drunken forgetting of presence while talking to others reduced her to tears. it's weird because my years of isolation kind of disqualify it from being a pattern, but it's a enough of a thing at this point, that hurts people that I care about. and something that makes me feel even worse because the kind of non-existent non-recognition was something I was trapped in for one of the worst periods of my life. I text M and try not to stew in it too much, because I'm sure we'll resolve it. but it reopens / forces the issue of the continous question that dominates the above writing: how to be
today: i took a screenshot of veeze's IG story where he typed out "Being an adult is an everyday grind & struggle it's like fighting but you can't stop it's on you no matter what" (white text, black background, create mode). i took a bunch of screenshots of Isiah Medina's IG stories today, intending to send it to T to talk about later. S and G and C send me a lot of texts that I don't reply to yet. I posted a picture of this candida hofer photo on my IG story and F and L reply to it. I redownloaded tinder because I'm in a different city and don't have to worry about the weird dissonance of someone who knows me from the variety of capacities that people know me seeing it, even though I'm going to match girls only for validation and have no plans of linking any of them in my limited time here that I want to spend with friends, but ofc that means I'm also spending time on swiping, when it could be going to better places. whenever this happens, i normally delete the profile within a week, the last notable thing that happened through that was becoming IG mutuals with a girl in portland towards the end of 2021 and then after more than a year of infrequent story likes, dm's, and my intermittent deactivations, we linked after she liked a pic of the cardi b and offset meal bag i got from the drive thru with plain burgers for my dying dog while i was at my parents and i suggested we should link. it was a good time but i felt guilty after because that was a night i could've spent with my now dead dog. she suggested i link her in Oman this summer where she's doing a program studying medieval arabic, which would be cool, but we haven't seen each other besides that one time, and I almost certainly won't have enough money to do that type of a thing, and i don't know what she's looking for, and what i'm looking for is probably different. I talked about that last part with E at the bar, kind of not really actually, but now that whole night contains a valence that brings me back towards my personal failings
even typing through this, thinking about all the above words, not just the immediate, but the entirety, going above the top of the website and into all the words Before, is this issue of narcissism and ego, another thing that came up with M2. i'm lingering around this and trying to figure out where to proceed. it's early in the morning and i have so much work ahead of me tonight. the best thing is probably to give myself (a short bit of) time and then resituate, rather than recirculating and ruminating
i've been taking screenshots again, but i've been taking photographs too.
thursday morning at 5 something a.m. the morning light hit me thru the giant livingroom window of H & A's apartment. it's crazy living that high up. 24 floors. my phone buzzed with a text from M, the fog was catching the morning light reflecting off the buildings, it was a dreamy haze and i clicked 3 photos before falling asleep again
the list keeps splintering, growing. i'm going to try to suture and simplify things later today.
i took so many pictures the last few days, of art in museums, of different places, of things happening in my phone, and i only posted a few of them. on wednesday i went to the MCA, which was kind of a mess, but there was this one candida hofer photo that was incredible and the gary simmons show generated some interesting thoughts about using the walls of the gallery + the idea of LIDAR-scanning a place in order to digitally imitate a fresco to be printed with a different materiality. not what he does, but it's a point that connects the use of the wall to the idea of site/place, to tiepolo and wurzburg, but also to impermanence and rendering into documentation, which then leads into light, both natural and artificial, and how it changes over the course of a day, an evening, a night.
there was a small etel adnan work that i got lost in for a few minutes, something like an infinity in the simplicity of thick smooth colors placed next to each other, and all the things that can happen within that. later that day, after the white sox game, H, A, and I stopped by IIT to see the Mies van der Rohe hall. it was night and it was a building meant for the days, for the light to flood in through the glass, and the adnan painting felt like a painting to be lived with, for it to hang somewhere in your house and meet your gaze and look within you. paintings to look into, paintings to look within. in any case, the museum is a weird space because work only started being made for it ~recently~, the rest of it just ends up there, stripped out of its context, text attempting to reinscribe it, I wrote about Sokurov and Russian Ark somewhere else, which probes this issue of art and buildings, as does Marker's Statues Also Die, which reemerged at what was formerly known as the Oriental Institute of UChicago at an exhibition called Artifacts Also Die, in a piece that I never finished and never could finish. scraps of a freestyle lost in the booth. maybe the way is to leak a snippet. fragments of the ideas already emerged in the cyz piece last year, other fragments will hopefully be excavated whenever i write the dvd text.
it's so easy to get sidetracked (on the internet). I have 10+ artforum tabs open now that mention Adnan, jstor and libgen open too. Recently I got lost in these videos made by travel youtubers in Syria, where an agency is paying for the travels to leverage their reach as influencers, but now you can pay around 800-1000 dollars to be transported from Beirut to Syria for about a week to visit Damascus and the ruins of Palmyra, which honestly seems like a pretty good deal, ofc there's the risk of death, but the risk of death is always everywhere.
I smoked cigarettes w/ P on Friday, but besides that haven't smoked since Tuesday. and it's starting to wear on me. will probably go to the store and buy some Zyn. Washington is the most beautiful hell.
i fell asleep last night while watching inglorious basterds on my laptop in my bed, i woke up briefly and tubi had autoplayed the beginning of django and i missed the part where brad pitt carves a swastika into hans landa's forehead and says "i think this just might be my masterpiece". tarantino would hate it but tubi really is the ideal way to watch his movies, b movie pastiche into the b movie streaming service. throughout the film, brad pitt talks about killing nazis as an art form, and scalping the corpses as a way to spread word of their notoriety among the nazis. it's an interesting parallel as i continue to graft Art onto everything, because he also calls it a sport, and I've been continuing to think about sports - i read the Zidane's Melancholy piece that G sent me and have some overdue documentaries to watch, spent part of a walk listening to ot7 quanny dame lillard on repeat, shuffle put on lil durk bang bros which sent me down a rabbithole of emotions as i continued to loop it for the rest of the day and still into day, the only song playing as i drive around my past and memories i'd forgotten about emerge – hotboxing in a park one summer night before an old man living across the street yelled that he was going to shoot us if we didn't leave and we had to snap out of the haze as best we could and migrate our cars to anothr spot. the grocery store parking lot where so much nothing happened. the everywhere where so much nothing happened really. i popped a zyn while driving and the nic rush was so intense it felt like my first cigarette and then i got nauseous and had to get an energy drink to get back up.
in the morning, C called me, told me about the gallery party he went to where N performed with others, and running into E and M and others, and how he found out that they'd been reading his blog, and then this morning I read E's blog and she talked about that and about other things that happened. she had told me i should make a paywalled version where I use names but reading hers I can only deduce who a fraction of the people are and I'm sure there's some that I've never met so it really becomes a fun part of the game, especially to consider somebody who stumbles upon this somehow, or only knows a fraction of the people in my life, or how it'll age and the letters interchange because the numbering system is only specific to a certain temporality that continually shifts. C and I talked about a number of things like school and work and the midwest and how different people in the midwest are. when i moved to new york, I didn't really think people were unfriendly because I just viewed it as a curt way of operating and didn't have much other American cities I'd lived to compare it to, but Chicago was crazy, even in the southside people would ask P and I how we're doing as we're walking around, whereas there's only a couple of neighbors where I live rn that will do that with me, and I'm sure part of that is because I'm not white. The uber to the airport was about an hour long and the driver talked the whole time, I know so much about her life and her beliefs, her fear of flying and of being put in an old age home. C told me about visiting Columbus with K and how friendly people are, he went to a party and people will introduce you to other people, how it's less scene-y but there's still a "scene" and it really is quite different than new york.
in the evening I called T and talked to him for a couple of hours while going on an evening stroll. we talked about how I'd FT'd A earlier that day and how things seemed like they were changing in terms of our values & alignments, natural differences that had always been there, but that have been exacerbated in a way, because of the bag and the things A is doing to get the bag, and in turn how that changes what A is doing and who he is to an extent. I'm sure it'll even out over time but right now there's a dissonance in values that is hard to reconcile. A lot of it has to do with a certain type of whiteness and the privilege of ways of being that aren't accessible to me. But other parts are about how I don't prioritize the bag because of how the bag changes you, and T and I also talked about this and potential bags that I could get but am wary of because of how they might change me. T said something like "you gotta get the bag, but you can't let the bag get you". at a kayemes opening, i was talking with R and they said something about how they were "designing a bag" in the literal sense, but I think about it in the abstract, and said that that would be my response when people ask me what I do: "I'm designing a bag". I made a burner twitter account that I need to delete with the bio "Daseining a bag" a couple months ago but haven't really tweeted on it. I need to make a new alt to post more freely on soon. I need to text E, and I need to text others, and I need to start the finnegans wake group gc
I woke up late this morning and i remembered a dream and it's been a while since i've remembered a dream and what's crazier is that E was in my dream, she was telling me about how she and M were making more secret blogs but to post images and that I should get on them too, and it's even crazier because this morning she added images to her blog which isn't exactly what she told me in the dream, but there's still this weird latent connection and it's probably because C talked to me about seeing her and M at that party and talking about blogs, but still. I'll talk to her about it when I see her later this week but I'm sure she'll read about it first. I was only "late" waking up because I had a dentist appointment. It went solid, the gum recession on my front tooth isn't that bad, and I didn't have any cavities or any other problems which is remarkable because I have horrible dental hygeine and rarely floss and only brush at night about half of the time. The issue relates back to the lack of priority I put towards taking care of myself while driving myself towards other things. I was worried about the gum recession for a while because there was a period in march when my dog died and I was really sick and didn't leave my place for 4 days and didn't brush my teeth in that stretch either and then when I did the recession seemed much worse but in any case it's mostly fine now. My dentist asked me if i smoked and I lied to her because she's indian and knows my mom and also because I'm pretty sure telling medical people that you smoke goes back to your health insurance and they'll charge you higher premiums, or at least that's some shit my middle school health teacher told us, and it's incredible to think that American public middle school means you take a class called "Health", but in any case I'm sure she can tell I smoke because she looks at a lot of teeth and gums and can tell what smokers gums and teeth look like. After the dentist, I got starbucks from the drive thru right next to the dentistry – a chocolate cream cold brew and a feta egg white wrap. I thought about Yungster Jack's Pumpkin Spice Latte Type Queen and PNW anthropology while sitting in the drive thru, and about how later I'd write about it and how the menu only featured the sugar-y drinks while the espresso and lattes and cappuccinos were nowhere to be seen, but that the cold brew was fine, regular cold brew w/ a layer of chocolate cream on top. I drove east and sat at the cape horn lookout, as I've done hundreds of times before, to feel small in something bigger than me. the gorge swallows you up. you look down over the edge while the wind blows and feel so precarious, you're so close to plunging down thousands of feet, just falling and falling and falling
"Zidane’s true act on the evening of the final — a sudden gesture like an overflowing of black bile into the lonely night — will only occur later, and then will cause us to forget everything else... only thing visible, that all the spectators around the world could have seen, was the fleeting impulse crossing Zidane’s mind." - Jean-Philippe Toussaint
There is an airplane waiting and it's full, every seat is full, every seat is empty, but it will be full. A wave crashes on Hilton Head and a turtle peeks its head out of its shell. The weather is changing in Curaçao but you have to be ever so attentive to notice. It reminds you of old emails you never responded to, with an old man who made a film. You compose an email to an old man who wrote a book, but you never hit send:
Dear R,
I read your book last summer, it was in a dream I had in Delhi. I took all these pills and collapsed after the sun rose and the dust of the sky became illuminated. You wrote about fields of worlds lying fallow, lying fallow forever, dead letters, the death of letters, artificial fertilizers, American Production. I writhed around the lobby and continued to wander, my days were nights for the following weeks, every hotel worker seeing the delusion in my eyes when I went down to the hotel breakfast, then back upstairs, to enjoy utter exhaustion. Shortly after, I got an email from the factory farm, they offered me a position, and I took it, I got out of India the same way you got out of Algeria, but that's not true at all, I got out in a completely different way. I'd like to go to Algeria now, but I'm still looking for a way in. I don't speak Arabic but my phone can butcher words into meat. "Speaking Glizzy In Oran"
I want to feel my heart leave my body in the desert. And I dreamed about her body in the heat of a different desert. How should I get there? Where should I go? Tell me about being an old man, because I don't know if I'll ever know. Tell me only with eyes.
There is a cavern that emanates light that Emiratis are searching for. They send their migrant laborers to the highest levels of the unfinished glass castles in search of it. Inside is an airplane waiting and every screen it flashes the directions in the subseconds between rainbows. Open the windows and it is empty, every seat is empty, but it will be full. A wave crashes and submerges Kyoto in heartbreak. You try to remember to be attentive. You think of how beautiful pure silence can be, when it dissolves You and all that's left is
A breath of air and a beam of sun slap me in the face. M tells me to do one more. The possibility of vomit exists and I want to put my fingers in my mouth like I've drank too much but he says no because then I'll lose all my strength it's different. A smoothie and a walk and a rest at M's crib and then we're in the booth. Switchy! Switchy! Switchy! (we didn't play certified trapper, that's more the sound of the switches being operated u feel) JoJo! Roscoe Dash! Soulja Boy! Blastah! SGP! WifiGawd! S/o WifiGawd. Bro made Too Much Sauce and he really had Too Much Sauce. When it was all done I made the bass shake the room. Boom. BOOM. BOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. I'm so tired but I'm going to get dinner with J and then idk maybe I'll have energy to do more things or maybe I'll call it a night. Need to conserve strength for The River Challenge tomorrow. I'm reading E's blog and there's an ice cream truck outside playing the ice cream truck song. Single Ladies by Beyonce is a great song. The ice cream truck is still playing music. What a classic song.
I keep refreshing E's blog to see if she's wrote anything but she's probably tired. I keep saying it but it really is crazy blacking out, one moment I was at The River 6 cocktails in, then I woke up in my bed and started to put the pieces together. Plugged my phone in for it to charge. Noticed the vomit on my sheets, then the vomit in my beard, then the vomit on my Junya pants on the floor. It's beautiful when you ruin things because it's a reminder to check your attachment to objects. I like that there's vomit splatterstains on my loafers now and I don't think I'm going to clean them off. I wonder if I finished the challenge, I wonder what even happened, then my phone turns on and I begin investigating.
I send out some texts and look at Instagram. E2 posted a pic of M, E, and me, a crown emoji on top of my head which is pointed towards the ground. M has my towel on top of his head and the picture is blurry and cool. I ask them what happened and they told me that we finished it and sent me more pictures. M is holding me up while I puke in the street. I thought about starting to write something like "There is a hole where my memory should be", or something of that sort. There is a hole, there is a vacancy, there is a gap, et cetera, but it really is crazy the gap in the memory, where I was out doing things in the world and relinquished control of my actions to drunk me.
I facetime M and N, who give me more details on the night, how I puked everywhere. Normally I get really self-conscious about puking and people having to take care of me, so I tend to avoid that situation, but I don't think that happened this night because I was very comfortably with the loved homies and apparently told M I wanted to french kiss him. M wrote an amazing blog post about the night and sent it to us. He also had to hold me up when I was peeing and it's very funny to think of two people inside those saloon doors. Later J and E get up we text about what happened. E can't remember much either. I think it's a fun culmination of this sort of bounce back that can happen with our writings mixing the IRL and the Online in a very self-contained way, these vacancies in memory that challenge how we write and remember things. It was perfect that M started his writing sampling the Greg Jennings broken leg madden video, like how E pulled up in the yankees polo and I had the clyde jersey, and now Dame requested a trade, things are always going to be changing, and they are always going to stay the same:
There is a hole where my memory should be. The other night I watched highlights of when Andre Miller put up 52 points. Post-ups. Midrange jumpers. Drives to the basket. Simple buckets. Pure hooping. Late in the game he steps back and drains a 3 and the crowd loses their mind. This is how I wanted to operate. With patience. High basketball IQ plays. But instead I stepped on the court and went Swaggy P in that bitch
In the afternoon, before we were drinking, E sent a picture of Gatorade or Gatorade-looking liquid into the chat. She says the River Challenge begins now or something like that, and then J says that it feels like The River Challenge started last night. And it really did. It started with dinner with J2, at that vegan kosher chinese place I ended up that other night. That night the guy waiter was really sassy and asked everyone if they wanted beers in a demanding way, and when I said no because I wasn't drinking at the time I also quipped that I wasn't old enough, and some of the people I was with were like "wait really?" which was crazy and then I brought this up again with J2 because this time the lady waitresses were being sassy to us, going as far as to serve me string beans and mushrooms off the plate it came on onto my plate saying that I'm a "growing boy" and that I need to eat and it's crazy to be a man with a beard being called a growing boy by old chinese women. There were a bunch of bugs on the street, but J2 said it was ash and I believed her, but later on the internet people were saying they were gnats. I think about my old friend G and how he became my old friend N2 and his avi and his exploits and how he's in Barbados or Aruba for medical school now and that it's been a while since we've talked and that this is out of place and time for the night, we're back downtown, we walk to No Gallery, where we meet J and E and I see J3 who I haven't seen in a long time, and I get a hug from J4 who tells me she loves what I'm doing and that everything looks great and I assume she's mistaken me for somebody else but I have no idea. Earlier that day E had ran into Tony Hawk and we talk about that and other things like her blog and how she saw Leonardo Dicaprio too, at an opening, with collectors, and money, people paint money, they don't paint money but the paintings are money, and in my head I wish I could've ran into tony hawk because I could've taken a picture and posted in with a caption from the new veeze song 'tony hawk'. There are more people there and I try to go to the bathroom but there is only a door that says private and I don't want to stumble into a mess, there are tons of people on the street and very few in the gallery, I don't really look at the art and later I shit on one of the artists because of my predilection to being a hater but I do think the hate is warranted for old men who make their work about memes that "young people" produce and this was at The River, the shitting on, we ended up there because after no gallery J2 and I went to a party in the east village that M2 was at and it was a crazy time, i think I described the crowd as zoomer tiktok to J and E, but it was also my first time being at a party where I didn't know people in a long time, and i only really met the host and other people in line for the bathroom and that line got long because there were 5 people inside the bathroom doing coke and the host was the birthday girl and talked in a british accent because she was moving to london but not really london the outskirts of london closer to essex because she's going to school in essex for acting and she's going to be an actress, M2 met her working at a restaurant and she's "obsessed" with him in the way that loud party girl types are obsessed with gay guys, it's all fun to watch for a bit, I sip on my modelo tall boy happy that I have a drink and friends there or else I would probably be cranky but then I wouldn't be there and then we decide to leave, J2 and M2 want to go to the dare show because they want to dance but i don't want to go because of lines and spectacles and because i don't want to dance so we separate for a bit and I go to the river where I see J and E and M3 and T and talk to T's sister A, because we just made eye contact outside and then I was like what's up and then when I introduced myself she was like 'oh i know you! J5 was just talking about you' because she's one of the friends he texted me about that's visiting from LA right now and they all went to brighton beach earlier that day and we talk about that and then that turns into me shitting on that artist, then T and J and I are talking about the challenge and we decide to hardpost the indecipherable poster I made and we later get dm's asking what it is and i reply that we're drinking at the river and when I was talking to T he says something about how people think everything I do is an art piece which is interesting but not really how I think of it, more so that everything you do shapes the art that you make, slimesito tweeted about how people think swag is clothes the other day, and i could write an essay about the river challenge and intellectualize it into artspeak and everything but the point is that we stayed out too late because S rolls up with some people that he met that night and J3 is hanging out and gonna crash with J and E so now we're making a night of it because he's in town and not in new jersey and he's a fun time to kick it with and I don't know when I'll see him again and I'm disregarding my prior intention to be well rested for the river challenge, I'm going swaggy p on em, I'm going knicks era jr smith hitting the club the night before the game, like bro was really out there to the point where rihanna dropped an ig comment saying "his ass be hungover from clubbing every night during playoffs", and we stay at the river a bit longer, finish our guinnesses then take the train to J's apartment and I see it for the first time and I fuck with it, great set up, there is a hole in my memory and there is a hole in his bathroom ceiling and his bathroom is just a small room with a toilet and his shower is in his kitchen as it should be and we do shots of tequila or at least I think that we all do but E sips on hers because she's smart and thinking ahead and also because she has a meeting at 8am to turn her computer on for which is smart but it doesn't matter because we go to E's and I drink a bud light and share a bud light and smoke cigarettes on her balcony and this is in greenpoint now and there is so much lost her, of the conversations we had, but this doesn't happen with the river challenge because J recorded audio, but this is still the night before we talk and we talk and it's 3am and i take a lyft back to my place and we all wake up with minor hangovers and i wake up sore from my training session with M
at least i could sleep in, I wake up and get a smoothie and then a tuna salad wrap and then only eat half of it because I think about throwing up mayonnaise later and how that wouldn't be fun and I try to read a bit but my attention span is lacking and the day passes by and then I head to tong sikh kong where I meet J and then M and then E and R for dinner and the food is fantastic and R says something about how it wouldn't be fun to throw up later but that's exactly what I do and I don't remember if it was fun or not but I hope I enjoyed it. Tried the sesame lava french toast for the first time. Got a bunch of other dishes, grapefruit honey wings, XO sauce things, cheesey instant noodle things, ribs, rice, eggplant, dumplings, a smorgasboard, a word you don't get to use often, and I washed it down with an iced coffee and while we leaved a lady ran out after me demanding I show her my venmo transaction which I do and it's okay for me to leave now, and then we wait for M and J to come out with the rest of the food which they wisely packed away into to go boxes, and then we walked down the street to the river and got set up at the corner table that bar italia had previously evicted me from that other time. E was wearing sunglasses, I borrowed R's miu miu sunglasses and then they told us a tale of how she came to own them, a tale for another time, and then we started drinking. We both used our phone a friends at the beginning. J and R had our ricky cliftons and E and I had ken maynards. M4 pulls up and gets a martini. M and J3 who was already at the bar get beers. C pulls up. S pulls up. I think they also got beers. Guinnesses. Later J2 pulls up with some of her friends who I meet and now I don't remember any of them. But I'm a faces guy, not a names guy, and this is out of chronology and we drink more and we're drinking quickly. M4 pulls up with a mysterious prize and starts talking about the pace and E tells me that we should take it slow but I like drinking and it's fun and I drink quickly and it becomes a game of speed because you also have to wait for the bartenders and waitresses to make you drinks and M also ordered celery and dip which was great thinking and we never actually ordered any glizzys because we got drunk and forgot and as we keep drinking the haze only thickens. We take pictures and post them onto our ig stories. We talk about things, people, places, life, and so on. More tales for other times. The sweat hill tasted like licorice. E gave a taste of hers to R because she didn't like it at all but thought R would and R did. Then the office daquiri I remember the banana taste and then the river punch which is solid and then drink number 6, the ultimo, and then my memory goes away... To be continued
The moon will be full tonight and I hope it gives me energy, I feel so tired. I'm listening to "The Moon Is There, I Am Here" because C posted it and showed The Blow to me the other night and I look at the track title and thought 'so true'. Last night we realized that Z's phone screensaver was the moon and mine was the sun. We talked about our horoscopes. The Pattern app sent me a notification this morning: "This a time for endings and beginnings". So true. I'm so tired.
"I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too."
"Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the darkened windows, the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. They are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journey’s end—what heart?—bearing what tidings?"
money longer than a footnote... i couldn't find the write words so it ends up here, and i'm trying to find the words for it all but I don't think I can so much has happened, so little has happened, and tomorrow everything will be different but the same and the day after that everything will be the same but different and I wonder when I'll see Everyone again but it's nice to say I Love You with Goodbye parting is such sweet sorrow
is there a point in delineating the days... F asked me what I'd been reading recently and I wasn't sure what recent meant and it'd been a while since I'd seen him, since the christopher palace night which is so far up, and I'd read a lot since then but I thought recent was the last two weeks during which I've mainly been Reading Life. "my life a text" blah blah blah, i haven't blah blah blah'd in a while, the voice changes, and I've seen the voice change before, when u find new flows, new pockets to get it, and the conditions will change, new flows, new pockets, new deliveries, like xan sosa lean sosa chief sosa... this new gleesh is crazy and he's not yung anymore.
bestie played, like the song, and i haven't started writing footnotes yet, the streetlight stares back at me illuminating the leaves with all the questions of time and backwoods smoke. there is the possibility of and there is the possibility of so much more. before i left M's to grab plates and there was so much light and noise and smoke and there was a child crying in the corner store overwhelmed by the world and the door was ajar and the guy before the counter was yelling as smoke filled up the store and before i took the moscow mule mug from the bar and threw it into the street and the noise was so satisfying and before we were Outside we were Outside talking about being Outside and Being Outside and before it was as simple as the days before speech and before
we threw around that empty bottle of ed hardy sangria for so long. project xyz was so long ago. the river question was so long ago. the cardi b and offset meal was so long ago. the 4th of july was so long ago. S told me that the sample I used for the best in show flip was from the anna kendrick cup song and i'm listening nightcore and he texted back about the gleesh just now saying "hes not yung anymore" and i replied "we on that Same Shit"
people ask if i'm excited and i'm not really, it's just a thing i have to do. R was asking me why i do the things i do and the best answer is that i have to do them. it's a good reason, having to do them. everything a prayer every motion a love letter, foreverwriting in a certain way, Because
money longer than a book of footnotes is what it was then it changed.
There is a Tunisian restaurant on the boulevard. Its walls are covered in tiles and there is a flatscreen playing music videos. Eventually Tunisian Drill comes on, the drums instantly recognizable, but there is no violence, just celebrations, jetskis in the Mediterranean, getting sturdy and popping bottles. A midget walks in and makes his way to the back like he owns the place. Then he comes back out and starts going through the receipts. An ambulance sirens past in the night. It took the sun so much longer to set here.
"The silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech."
"Her silence seemed something supernatural. It was as though a wall of crystal had risen between her and me, and that second, that hour or that eternity was suffocating me."
"At such times as this every man takes refuge in some firmly established habit, in his own particular passion. The drunkard stupefies himself with drink, the writer writes, the sculptor attacks the stone. Each relieves his mind of the burden by recourse to his own stimulant and it is at such times as this that the real artist is capable of producing a masterpiece."
I read the first two chapters of Hedayat's The Blind Owl on the way to the Trisha Donnelly show at Air de Paris, after a mess of a first two days in Paris. Barely slept on the plane and felt sick, got to my hostel and there was this guy in my hostel room as there are in hostel rooms and I remembered how much I didn't want to talk to random people right now and then he asked for my instagram and I gave him my old one and he was nice but I just wasn't in the mood, I felt a certain loathing for "travellers" in the sense that when I did this last when I was 18/19 I barely talked to anyone and when I checked in the guy at the counter gave me a drink ticket for their bar that I never used and told me about all their events, but the last thing that I wanted to was to socialize with my "fellow travellers" because I'm so Different. And I realized I was being an asshole but that this was also fine. I was sick from before I left, I probably got it from hitting Z's vape and drinking his beer the night of the 4th at J's place because I felt kind of shitty in the morning when I woke up at N's place, I could feel my nasal passages blocked up and after getting Hong Kong food and my last golden lava french toast for a while with S and Z my stomach felt even further unsettled as I made my way to the airport, and then the flight, Norse airline food sucked, all airlines should be ran by Middle Eastern oil sovereignties, and after this exhaustion I collapsed in my bed and slept through the evening, then woke up and wandered around got food, then went back to bed, and then felt so shitty I didn't get out of bed the next day, I stayed up until the dawn because of jet lag but then I slept all day and then I woke up in the evening and I forced myself to sleep again, I slept until 1 am and then I woke up hungry with many hours until anywhere would be open for food. I slogged through White Mythologies, but once all the parts about Althusser and Jameson and my tab-distractions at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel ended, I hit the chapter about Cesaire and Said and Fanon, and felt myself able to read again in a way that was energizing. Read a recent Groy's piece about immortality, russian cosmism, the museum, blah blah blah, need to send it to A later, he sent me a bunch of pics of a music video he was filming today and I sent him pics of suburban Paris and a kfc ad that read 'boxmaster' and later I sent a pic of a fried chicken restaurant called "RosaParks" into a GC w/ him, and there was also this asian restaurant called "The Hood". At 7 I left my apartment. Went to a cafe down the block where I got fresh orange juice, coffee, a croissant, and an omelette with baguette slices. Then I started walking. Grabbed a bottle of water and a pain au chocolat from a monoprix. S texted me about his night while I walked, dinner with C and K, who was there, how it went, future plans, it was nice to hear. I replied to N's texts and N2's texts, it was like doing correspondences after a not replying to people while sick, and I'd deactivated my socials while I was sick, more or less as I'd planned, but I got so disgusted with the experience of lying in bed idly swiping from story to story, feeling prisoner to my phone for stimulation rather than accepting the nothingness of sickness. N2 texted me about Ben Lerner which jogged my mind about this Hal Foster piece that discusses 10:04 and I tell him N2 that now isn't the time for me to read Lerner but that I found The Snows of Venice intruiging and while I'm at the Donnelly show I sit down on the floor and skim the piece again and find this quote in it from Latour's "Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam":
"The critic is not one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in need of great care and caution."
I got to the Donnelly show right when it opened and the sun was beaming against the windows coated in a white film, making the part of the show by these windows decently hot. I sat with the works for about an hour. I made sketches of two of the sculptures, took many pictures of all 4, but abstained from 3-d scanning them, accepting my inability to capture the experience and the finer details through images, yet these studies opened open more, as sitting down on the ground made me notice two white cubes set onto the wall in different places, so subtly that I missed them on my initial walkthrough, but once I noticed a hunt for more opened up, which proved fruitless and fruitful. I made a note in my notebook about "studying practice" and about "studying silence", the ears become sensitive to the water in the pipes in the floor above, the wind against the windows, the eyes notice all the dead bugs by the windows, and you think about sitting there all day to study how the light changes even though you can't, you have to go back to check out of your hostel and then ghost the guy who wanted to rent to you off the airbnb app because you lost trust in him and decided to go to bilbao after sitting with the works because you wanted to sit with the ocean, so you go back, but your stuff in a paid locker, then walk to Galerie Chantal Crousel to see the Wade Guyton show, which are nice, more of the same but different, but I wonder if he gets bored of the same, or if he's figured out the same of his life and is content to play with those Epson printers and the algorithms and programs before that stage until he dies. The gallerinas there weren't as bad as this one chick at Air de Paris but all you said to them was bonjour and au revoir after signing 'S. Paul' in the gallery books. The I becomes You and the You becomes I, and now I'm reminded of White Mythologies:
"One way of addressing this difficulty was to redefine the self through the model of the different grammatical positions which it is obliged to take up in language, which disallow the centrality and unity of the ‘I’ assumed by humanism. It is precisely this inscription of alterity within the self that can allow for a new relation to ethics: the self has to come to terms with the fact that it is also a second and a third person."
I booked an airbnb in Bilbao because I don't want to deal with people. I read an LARB article early this morning about Bernhard and the "extremely long paragraph" and thought about C2 and Woodcutters and maybe once I finish the books I brought with me, I part ways with them upon finding Bernhard in whatever city and country that is. When I'm in LA again, I'm going to try to go the bar on the 34th floor of the Bonaventure hotel. It's only 33 stories tall, but they skip 7 and 13 in the floor numbers. I say "going to try to" because I'm bad at sticking to plans. I'll leave Paris without going inside the cinematheque francaise but I'll walk past it on the way to the bus station.
In the Donnelly show, I played a recording of her moma lecture from my phone speaker: "Paul, who turns out to be female, or at least have the voice of one, begins in answer to the announcer's introductory statement, which is, and the ultimate faulted space is perhaps the photograph. I was within the assumption that the object, namely the object of art, when looked at for long enough could be cracked, pixelated in links, and shattered. The ability to travel around something weakers that thing's defenses, stability. The cable's stress and dissection is a fast series of clicks. Ecstatic in its speed, one's mind hops from connection to reference to memory to imagined memory, the future. It is like a crash of currents, originating from all different directions when this object is taken apart."... How to take apart this marble. How to explode it into infinite atoms and then put it back together once every interstice between the fragments has been inspected. There is so much to study in silence. Hedayat knew this, through the wine and the opium, though there are different silences. The light was different at every moment, and I tell myself that by leaving early, by not sitting through the entire day on those linoleum floors, that I removed the possibility of that room's total perfection from haunting me.
I walked around Bilbao feeling sad and displaced thinking about walking around Bilbao when I was 18 feeling sad and displaced and all the time in between then and now. It's such a beautiful place and I think it would be a nice play to die and how I never expected to make it this long but there's no reason to die now. There aren't enough words for right now and there never will be. I'm going to go to the ocean. I suppose this was all to be expected. Whatever thug that shit out don't tell nobody they don't rlly gaf but it's really that nobody can do anything for me and i have to *puts on dean blunt give me a moment*
This morning I got a coffee and a butter bun and it was packaged to go and in New York I would've ate it while walking but nobody does that here. Barely anyone even smokes while walking here. They take their time. So I found a bench, sat down, ate my butter bun and sipped on my coffee and then bought a pack of Ducados and wondered if that was the right choice and then sat on a different bench and smoked one, the sun kissing me. I walked around more, went to a cafe and ate a sandwich that cost 2.20 euros. Then I went to a fruit shop and bought a mango juice from this man from Bangladesh. He tried to speak Hindi but I told him "I don't speak Hindi" in Hindi. We chatted in broken Spanish and broken English and he warned me about pickpockets because my phone hangs loosely in the pockets of the pants I'm wearing.
Yesterday, G, Z's friend from tumblr who he's never met, picked me up in a small blue Hyundai and showed me around Basque country. It was really beautiful and he was the type of person you're endlessly thankful to have met, incredibly kind and generous. We talked about Z and his brother I's music, and he showed me some of the music I draws inspiration from. We went to a bar on the coast, where we drank tea and ate chocolate hearts and while leaving he told me all the bartenders there are known cokeheads. It makes sense why one slapped and squeezed the ass of the other guy. People were watching the Tour de France and were yelling at the tv in excitement. We drove around to this more remote beach, the rock formations were incredible, and we had to use a rope to climb down. Then we drove to a village called Ea, where there were many signs and flags in favor of the Basque movement and its political prisoners. G talked about not feeling Basque enough, assimilation, being a stranger of sorts in his home, things I could very much understand. The landscape reminds me of Washington, albeit a much older one, with history. The Basque initially made their fortune with Iron, G says, and whaling as well. Some of the Basque have Nordic features because of this whaling connection. We drove to another seaside town and ate dinner at somewhat tourist-y cafe. There were other Americans there, much older ones. On the drive back I kept nodding off, it had been a long day, but it was a really beautiful one. I'm excited for when Z and G meet, they'll get along incredibly well.
open secrets... maybe this was too easy to figure out, or maybe it's just the right amount of deterrence (see edit in last paragraph). T texted me that they'd "hacked" M's and then proceeded to build the same out on their site. I like the phrase open secrets, recently S followed me on soundcloud and there's this whole convoluted history with her and me and A and J and I wonder why she followed me but her / was /opensecrets, which i liked. I thought about dm'ing her but I didn't. i miss when soundcloud dm's were desktop only. I talked to L about it once and she told me that she only dm'd J on there, that it was like e-mail
a couple weeks back, J2 and I went to the No Gallery opening and we saw J3 and J4 and E and J3 was talking about my blog which I hadn't yet shared with J2. I have an interesting friendship with J2 where I don't consider us particularly close but I go back further with her (only slightly) than I do M or J3 or anyone else who's really in my nyc life today besides C and S2. I was living with my aunt in the south bay and didn't have friends there and we started dm'ing on twitter and then hung out, and then I don't think I saw her again for almost a year whereas after I met M and J3 I saw them with increasing frequency. But she's nice and is solid people which i value and we hang out from time to time and see each other around and she's friends with M2 who also knows M and J3 and E and new york city becomes small, but in any case once J3 mentioned this blog, I had a slight moment of panic because I wasn't sure if I'd said anything bad about her and I figured she wouldn't look at it until the next day at least so when I got back home I scanned for the entry I was looking for, our time at burp castle, but there was nothing. I'd thought about writing about how I said something about how my apartment had too many pride flags out front for me given that it's in the hood - and there really were a fuck ton, 2 big ones from the windows and like 10+ little ones on the front yard gate, in a neighborhood where I heard one of the neighbors yelling at someone else "Get your money up faggot!!!" repeatedly during a semi-regular type of altercation that happens. there's a documentary 'Flag Wars' about this type of thing - gay gentrification vs. black locals, it follows columbus ohio, but that isn't the point so much as her reaction which was a 30+ minute segue in conversation about how the conservatives are coming back onto gays, abortion rights, etc. that was kind of depressing / not the mood. she's very political for someone I'm around, quite headstrong in her beliefs, and I suppose I'm not especially interested in those conversations and have some relatively conservative beliefs of my own that aren't really worth debating, and view things on a much more transhistorical + post-temporal basis so the crises of our times are just the crises of our times, as there were crises in the times before and crises in the times after and crises in the times in every other planar direction and crises outside of geometric temporalities. I guess with her, I could characterize it as a certain type of neurosis and just a difference in how we weigh things as important. The second time we hung out, we went on a hike and it was raining and the dirt turned to mud and she took a couple hits of my dab pen and got really paranoid about dying and then got really self-conscious that she'd embarassed herself and has brought it up many times after, and it's all really funny to me because I didn't think much of it, but it does come back around in the sense that she's now pretty fixated on the air quality levels given the wildfires, whereas I just accept these poisons as a part of life and don't pay them any mind. In any case, I think it's good to have people around you who aren't exactly like you, but I guess the funny part to all of this is that she isn't particularly "close enough" to where I would've shared the blog with her, but it's now quite a situation that she knows about it given the overlap (and don't worry about this J2, it's kind of comical) in spheres, but she also could've just forgotten about it since i sent her the link
in any case, J2 went from a person I saw every couple months to a person I saw 4 times in my last week and a half in the city, the results of which are pretty funny in terms of life crossover. at the river I told M (repeatedly i guess lol) that they should date, and reading his writing about it is interesting - i recall saying it (close to right before i blacked out) but it was very much on the level that she was clearly into him, and continue to be so - why else would she talk about her trainer so much - and also when M was rocking the tank while grilling on the 4th... shit was so hot i'm surprised the fire alarms didn't go off, i'd never seen bro's body like that and it was like goddamnbruhyoureallyBuildDifferent. in any case, it's an interesting couple pairing because of how different they are, and i've never dated anyone especially different than me, and maybe that's a problem in the sense of why i've never had particularly long/sustainable relationships and i have no idea if i've got a good gauge of compatibility / matchmaking etc... it's just funny b/c i have enough people in enough circles that these sorts of things can happen around me now, which is very new for me
J2 talks to me a decent amount about the guys she's gone on dates with and it's a lot of blah blah blah to me because I don't go on dates very often and don't really try to either and it's a reminder of how foreign other people's 20s are to me in many ways and how i can't really relate, largely because of the kind of aforementioned latently conservative values i have that stop me from moving through life in a similar way. she talked about going on a date with a guy who sucked while we were walking from no gallery to that east village party and that night at burp castle she was going to an indie sleaze type party to try to meet guys, which i dodged going to by having S2 meet me at burp castle, and she mentioned how the bartender was cute, but it was D and i told her he had a gf. at the party at E's i drunkenly slapped on the closed door to R's bedroom that she was kissing S2 behind and had an interaction that would've been a bit more awkward if i wasn't wearing sunglasses and quick to pivot into bullshit banter. she then texted me for his number later that night, but then at M2's spaghetti western she said idk he might be kind of annoying, and then on the 4th when J3 and E and co. all left, it was a strange social situation for me to juggle with her and C and M and S2
R and E also told me that S2 is a little annoying, but i don't want to tell him anything, because he is just being how he is, and it's interesting to think back on how he's changed through the different life periods we've lived through, but that i don't think this needs to be an impetus for a change now (and i don't think he reads this because we keep up enough from texting each other on the day to day and he's busy enough doing his reading and his life). the only other childhood friends around me are L and T, and there's a similar dynamic where people find T annoying too, but friendships that go back that far really are rare and special things. S2 told me that when he was talking to J2 she asked him why he was pronouncing my name like that and he said that's my boy and that's how you say his name and that was a reminder to me that when i go back i need to start correcting people. at E's party, N introduced me to H and said my name for me, and it really has to do with my non-confrontational nature, but things exist orally and if people are saying my name wrong then more people are going to say my name wrong. there was a certain dysphoria in those last few days because i hadn't heard so many people saying my name out loud but so much else was happening in my mind. C and K brought it up too when i was at dinner - it came up because of their friend / my online friend C2 who's indian name i pronounced very properly and then b/c R says my name in the american pronunciation even though she's indian but she also uses a nickname rather than her real name - and it goes on the list of '(trying to) make a change' things to enact when i'm back with people, but when people say it right, like C and K do and Z and sometimes J3 and lately J5 does it feels good. at M2's party, J2 tried to get on N2 who i know thru the internet for more or less only referring to me as 'paul', but it's funny b/c with him and a select group of guys who i've spent time in discord servers with, i'm really fine with 'paul', it's only weird if someone i haven't talked to me online "paul"'s me that it catches me off guard. tangent aside, S2 just isn't very 'new york' and his time in istanbul brought him a level of affability that people don't have here, which really serves him well in some circles and probably doesn't help him in others, but i don't think being 'new york' is a good thing. when C and K and I were smoking outside of E's apartment and I said bye to them they said it was a great party because people introduced themselves to each other and i felt good about that. I feel like S2 will go back to istanbul after his time in the city this summer and do a similar bounceback and forth that I do, the only real thing that i think would make him stay is if he were to meet someone he wants to get serious with, which could happen in the coming months, but it's a matter of luck, timing, circumstance. in any case, i'm sure there are people who find me annoying as well, and it isn't that big of a thing to worry about because he's making friends with enough of my friends and that's the important part
the full circle of this open secret: emails and embarassment. J2 has this friend who i very briefly met at the dg concert last year who was at the spaghetti western who right at the start of the pandemic i sent an email to that was a mix of unhinged, down bad, drunk and off valium, and altogether extremely embarassing,,, it was just before i started being Online and i'd found her twitter which had her email in bio and she seemed cool i shot my shot in a very sad lonely fucked way as i was at that time and then remembered that i did that only when gmail was like 'do you want to follow up' and then i read that shit and was like KMS ASF. i talked to her a bit at the party and it was chill and she was cool and i have no idea if she remembers that or if she's told J2 or other people, which is again pretty funny, and i don't have to deal with embarassment very often, but i figure J2 probably knows and that's why she facilitated me talking to her but i won't see her again for a long time and who knows what the dynamic will be the next time or if it'll ever be spoken of out loud. a final 'in any case': i can't really dm e-girls anymore because you build up this dynamic through online communication that's really hard to integrate when you finally meet IRL. that's part of what happened with M3 and more or less what happened with H2 a few months ago though i kind of ghosted too b/c i was GoingThruShit. i liked that when i met J5 we really had barely spoken to each other, and we've barely spoken since
i decided it was too easy... so i went back and made it less obvious... the first password was open secrets, now it's different... basque.png
clue: mvnsion musick (if you need more help ask me)
I don't really understand how the world works, G said, in between a bite of steak. R had been talking about how the mafia was buying up restaurants in Bilbao, turning them into secret chains, the corporate consolidation of our daily lives. She was an old woman now, about 70, and so much had changed. She grew up in a village without electricity in the Basque country, before leaving to work as an au pair in Paris, Rome, and London. When she returned, she started a bar with a friend. It was a feminist bar that had a strong connection to the movement at the time, where the most beautiful lesbians in all of Iberia would travel to, to organize of course. It went underwater, as did much of Bilbao, when the floods came, but after that R moved into a new world, that of fashion. She started her first boutique and her notoriety around the region grew once again. She occupied places in worlds. And then she grew old.
R worried about the declining birth rate in Europe. They want to replace the youth with machines, she said, and the idea of African immigrants becoming the new youth did not give her any more sleep. She had children of her own - her daughter was to take over the boutique, and she refused to give out hope for the future, for her grandchildren, because she believed the bad people ruining the world would be the first to die, their souls rotten. She spoke in this low hush, you had to lean in ever so close to hear her. They wanted to get rid of bullfighting, they found it cruel, but it was part of the culture, the heritage, so many words had come from it. G's uncle used to be a bullfighting critic, he'd write stories in the weekly paper, and G said it was as though reading another language, the piece so enveloped in its specific jargon. A torero of renown shops at R's boutique now and he's graced the cover of Vanity Fair Spain, but both institutions are propped up shells of what they once were.
The boutique is a wide and long room. Walk through it, past every tube LED beaming brightness below, and you reach the back, which opens up into a massive cavern of Chinese antiques. Porcelain plates, wooden horses, furniture of all kinds, find the staircase and then in the floor below are so many magazines and catalogs that have never been scanned. Purple Magazines from the 90s, with advertisements in them for galleries and publications. Names that are huge now - Luc Tuymans, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Guattari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rainald Goetz - but they hadn't been historicized yet, not when these things were printed, they were still becoming.
"The point is that this is gossip about formalized gossip that provoked a network of extended gossiping across time and space. Irit Rogoff has written that gossip is a form of testimony that is ‘invariably located in the present.’ It externalizes and makes ‘overt its relations to subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure and the communicative circularity of story-telling’... Rogoff notes that gossip ‘is not fictional, but both as oral and written form, it embodies the fictional [and] impels plot’. Gossip, she says, bears ‘a multiple burden.’ Because it is ‘unauthored, untraceable and unfixed in historical time’, it can be read as a phantasmic projection of various desires by its audiences onto cultural narratives which it thus shapes..."
The dinner started, concluded, and continued, as did the viewing of several catalogs of early Yohji Yamamoto, mid-2000s Balenciaga, and Junya Watanabe. It was a goldmine of uncirculated images. But now his eyes burned with sleep as he returned back to the world of screens, longing to continue to turn pages in that cavern of pages until he had committed every photograph, every binding, every typeface into memory. He texted S an update, along with a picture of an advertisement for TZK Vol. 2 No. 7, which turned into a conversation about NFT's, cuckcore, the fellaverse, Amalia Ulman, Adam22, and Elon. It's hard to be interested in any of this, S replied, which was true in some ways, on the outside it appeared to be a schizophrenic tangle of associations, a map of chaosmosis, but in a concurrent convo, T was talking glizzy's, how they were "in" according to some, but how that it had already been written. T asked for permission to leak writing, but it was unneccessary, there was a way in which the words would find their way where they should belong, and if they wouldn't, then they wouldn't... It's a great place to start a rumor, in writing, because it takes the ephemeral and unfixed and gives it form.
See E's blog about Nate Freeman's farts and the behind-the-scenes of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". Or that J was in Zurich as the same time as D (whose name J2 uses to attend guest-listed events) who was there with his girlfriend X who went to college with Y who used to date Z who was in a sextape/art porno with ABC and it begins like Whitten's Greek Alphabet Paintings in Beacon, there was so much other gossip, much of it unsubstantiated, floating in the air, and this was how Herbert had to write about Stanley Brouwn. Because Brouwn fought an impossibility to prove an impossibility, every tiny sliver became so monumental, like Trisha Donnelly's voice, like Trisha Donnelly's face. A voweled artist was pregnant with a married man's child - that was last year and there's been no word of a child but she has a new boyfriend now. Not that it's anyone's business, but it's everyone's Business. There is so much work to be done. Bilbao had become a beautiful place, but it used to be rugged, industrial, disgusting. It needed a dream to become what it is now, a dream that enveloped everybody. And it was decided: they would build like the Basques, they would create a gossip factory.
First came the blogs, tumbling intrigue like dominoes as they spread via text and word of mouth, and then came the passwords, which loosely guarded some of the secrets. But this wasn't enough, new walls to the fortress had to be erected, the data being trafficked was so valuable in the eyes of gallerists, scenesters, and the oh so coveted youth who had yet to discover this underground, yet to be historicized thing, because there wasn't yet a thing to be discovered, but in time, in due time, Palmyra was not built in a day and its rubble still remains. A backend system was put into place, passwords that couldn't be hacked or guessed, but needed to be traded, leveraged, exchanged. They commodified their lives walking around with their pants around their ankles, and the emperor's new clothes were so desirable: there were all the most coveted archive pieces of course, but also what the newest Hararjuku girls had - VeniceW, fresh from the latest NewJeans video, Kiko Kostadinov, Enfantes Riches Deprimes – and it was smuggled in between bricks on a container ship. They moved everything as they pleased with their connections in Rotterdam, Baltimore, Cape Town, Singapore, dodging Customs, Border Patrol, and every other 3 lettered agency, not to mention Interpol. Baselitz said "Don't cover your modesty" and things could only balloon in proportion, like Kobayashi's stomach after swallowing glizzy's by the dozen.
They had plotted an end-point: a proprietary E-Reader, manufactured in Shenzhen but with laborers imported from across the globe. Isabelle Graw was smuggled down the Rhine from Basel, lured by promises of an antediluvian chamber that promised to reverse age. She didn't care about her beauty, but she wanted to escape the suck and fuck that had become Städelschule, every ad placement required more time on her knees as she wondered why she didn't contort the world in such a way that Jörg Immendorff invented "Oda Jaune" for her instead. Now she could change things, instead of writing toilet paper, she could write fortunes. Christopher Williams crawled into the container while it docked in Cologne, having agreed to do the product photography. And it continued, a container on a ship, migrating around the world haphazardly - a drunk skipper later and there they were in Miami. John Kelsey walked aboard, flush with a red noise and stuffed with satchels of... he had forgotten his baseball hat in the confusion and collapse, and it was as though he'd lost all purpose and sought to recompense this with chemical speed. It didn't matter, among the din of whispers in the container, attempting to segregate the circuits of secrets from prying ears, as he tried to talk to Isabelle about the Bernadette Corporation Supreme resale prices, but the bits kept getting stolen, recirculated, so much data bouncing around this storage container moving from ocean to ocean, still yet to reach Shenzhen.
And yet when it did, it did not leave the port. R was crucial in this step. She knew the Chinese were working with "the mafia" to buy up every business that existed, not just in Bilbao, but in Frankfurt, London, San Francisco, everywhere where there was a loophole in legislation, and that means everywhere where "democracy" claims to exist, because with democracy comes lawyers and with lawyers comes loopholes. And so she met with the Triads and in her hushed whisper negotiated her terms. The container got lost in the stacks, and with it so much gossip, which needs air to survive but was instead submersibled. The E-Reader was shipped to basements across the world, waiting to be discovered. Its e-ink had never been seen before, a screen devoid of color, yet able to re-present Jutta Koether and Cy Twombly in a new form of writing, through a new type of codec file. PDF's, EPUB's, DJVU's, none of them worked, this was something different.
The e-readers were distributed around the world. When they were touched, they would mechanically reproduce themselves, and when they fell on unfamiliar eyes they would translate themselves. Every gallerina, whether she/they worked in Hong Kong or Seoul, Hamburg or Shanghai, Harare or Santiago, lost themselves in the endless scroll of gossip, regardless of tongue. And they spread upwards and outwards, to the curators, programmers, and publicists, but also to the DJ's, club kids, drug addicts, and scenesters, you could plug it into a CDJ and make the most beautiful mix, you could rip that battery out and extract the most powerful speedball from its acid, you could smash the screen against your face and the shards would kiss your face, steal a little blood, then return to being one, waiting to grant the bliss of addiction to their next pair of eyes.
The Triads didn't trust R, they knew she was plotting something, her wizened gaze meeting their beady low Chinese eyes. You should be with Chris Tucker, she said. They were so high. 什麼?? mumbled back the Chinamen. Made a bitch. Get on her knees. Look at me. When she suckin. Eyes low. Like I'm Chinese, I should be with Chris Tucker. She whispered with the coldest authority, punctuating every syllable. Then she contined: That nigga don't want smoke, he second-hand puffin. I get a nigga whacked. Just one hand gesture.
In the haze of the Chinese smoke the world was changing. R knew she would die soon, but it didn't matter. She believed in the world, and she believed that death would come righteously. When we dined, she asked me if I was religious, and if my religion permitted drinking. In between bites of steak, I sipped a Rioja, because God willed it as such. In the smoke she finished, and she did not stutter: Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see conc—. Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see concrete.
On the train to Madrid is a specific location of non-location, one that remained in motion save for an extended moment where we were suspended on the tracks. Another train was stuck in Vitoria, blocking the platform. I missed the earlier train, not because I was late to the station, but because I didn't buy a ticket on my phone, and even though the train didn't leave for another 20 minutes, the machine would not sell tickets, and the line to see an attendant was too long, too slow. This happened on the way to San Sebastián as well, with the bus, so instead I took a BlaBlaCar for the first time, I rode in the passenger seat as a 21 year old girl drove and we practiced English and I tried to explain what America and New York were like. She thought people would be friendly there.
In the floor directly above me in this Madrid apartment is someone hammering and drilling, they lack a rhythm to their work, so it does not turn into monotony but a constant source of distraction. Last night I came here, laid on top of the mattress, slept without a sheet in this nausea that comes and goes since I started traveling. I felt it the night before too, when I went out with E and F, I was waiting at a bar, I ate two pintxos and drank a glass of wine, and with more wine the nausea slowly went away. It was the first time I'd been out with them since Christopher's Palace, they met me at a bar that G had recommended and we ate and drank a little there, then we went to a different bar, where we stayed for a while longer, drinking red wine, then white wine, then white wine, then another bar for another red wine. We sat on the steps in front of a church, and in the distance down the street there was a drunk man being dragged down the street by another man. He tried to fight a couple people. Then a police car pulled up. Then another police car. Then another police car. We walked with our glasses to the beach, no one else was there and the night sky still had so much light in it, the Big Dipper was masked by a cloud, but there were so many others, on the seashores of endless worlds children meet and it is so easy to graft the bits and pieces together but there is so much to graft that choice itself can be paralyzing.
We talked about A, how they didn't know his last name, and I talked about things I've written already but that they haven't read, it felt like reciting lines, and this is a feeling that has started to recur since the start of this, recursivity and contingency, an old pdf is downloaded again, and I'm reminded of a part of Hyperdream where Cixous talks about searching for a book she cannot find, she orders another volume, and that reminds her of Benjamin and a pen he lost, and I'm reminded of how Benjamin died in Spain, and Cixous's mother had bought a bed he was traveling with, it was in Oran, but who knows where it is now, who knows if and when I'll make it to Oran to speak broken Arabic in search of past traces in a present that will be unfamiliar, full of shadowed heats, and I talked with F about how much things have changed in the last year, a return to locals, how I went to the Guggenheim and as I looked at Twombly's 9 Discourses on Commodus there was a child with her parents miming "Ta-da!" and her parents applauded and there were so many tourists and I did not feel like a tourist the same way I don't feel like a hipster, I feel like this opacity that floats through spaces, and the woman didn't think I was young enough to be a student, I had to show my ID, and I thought about how I no longer had an interest in making work for the purist and the tourist because I realized that when I was the young boy in Russian Ark staring at Peter and Paul I was not a tourist, but something else, and as I voiced some of this to F I became aware of the walls of language.
"Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something, perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." - Agamben
"Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendents. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears." - Hedayat
The hammering and drilling has ceased for now, there is only the hum of the fan and EDGE OF THE WEST playing from my laptop speakers and I open the window to let the bird songs in. We were on the beach talking about how different it was there, how time was different, how worries were different, and how this made different people. How being an artist or a writer in Europe seemed like something you were born into, or if you pursued it now, you studied at certain schools where you might be chosen to enter certain systems, and it's not as though the same thing doesn't happen in America, T and I noticed a recent Mills MFA graduate in the Bad Painting show who stood apart from the usual list of names, but the idea of New York is one of grind, striving, aspiration, a rat race one opts into, and in opting in, one allows it to shape one's work in a certain way, and one in which fictions can become non-, a more malleable world, moldable, sculptable, but these are only ideas. F called the way I live "a method", then moved away from that framing, but I agreed, it is a "method", I live methodologically, I move in certain ways, and I move deliberately, I threw the wine glasses into the ocean and my phone shattered and I woke up thinking NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE once again
It took Twombly 22 years to paint Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). There are so many things neccessary to work on a thing like that for 22 years, and my method has not yet lead me to a place where I can devote myself to similar tasks. There is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again, and there is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again. There is the matter of writing the same passage, over and over again, and there is the matt of writing the same passage, over and over again. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. There was sand which was glass, there is glass to be made sand, there all the broken mirrors of the past.
Cixous wrote of love letters and I scour my highlights for the passage, getting lost down other passages in the process: "Every day I hope the next day to be called upon by the authorities to create the opera of the creation." --- but then there it is:
"...a true love letter, arriving like all love letters too late, like the love letter transformed into supreme book that the narrator was never to address to Albertine, a letter which had to wait for it to be too late twice over before it could begin to grow and grow until it attained the disproportion of a work of art."
There's still no explanation. There's not always an explanation. And Stendhal never got the joy of speaking on the telephone.
WHERE IS THE LIGHT COMING FROM??? scrawled on the top of my notebook, above the roughest sketch of Tiepolo's The Immaculate Conception. And it's from above, the folds of the blue shawl that wraps the Virgin Mary betray shadows. My gaze flits around the painting as I sit there, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, repeating. The halo of stars above her head. The part of "I'm In It" that goes "star...fucker... star... fucker...". The frame towards the bottom, covered by the branch. The frame within the frame obscured, containing all the Immaculate Conceptions of the past. I sat and I scrawled more thoughts, how the work was hung next to his son, how it was meant for a church, how the Virgin Mary would never meet my gaze.
They don't let you take photos in the Prado. It's good, I've never been a museum that size where nobody is taking pictures, but near Las Meninas I pulled out my phone to take a picture to send to G, and thought about a recent text convo about how the lack of a reproducible image was a major part of early art criticism, the need for ekphrasis, how that need is lost, and the remix as criticism. But I couldn't sit with Las Meninas the way I wanted too, too much echo in the room, I was there too late, I knew I needed to get there first thing in the morning again, for silence to stretch time. I could buy headphones. I could buy codeine too. Moneystretchingtime. I finished the Hedayat and thought of Veeze and Lucki:
"I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden boat and ranged through a radiant, empty world with no obstacle to block my progress. So profound and delicious was the sensation I experienced that the delight it gave me was stronger than death itself."
When I had long hair I would twirl the ends of it and end up pulling strands out in the process. There would be piles of hair after a session of sitting, twirling, thinking. It's the same with my beard now.
I went to do laundry and there was a bar next door. While I waited for my clothes I drank wine and ate potato omelettes. The bartender was from the Dominican Republic. He lived in New York for 14 years, in Manhattan and the Bronx. I told him I lived in Brooklyn and Queens. He's been here for 18 years, but he wants to go back to the DR to die. He said that's where he's from, so that's where he must go. I thought about how I don't plan on dying in America. I thought about how I don't plan
refreshing refreshing refreshing, it's interesting reading everyone's blogs when you're so far away from them but they're also so close, everything always refracts back into the current constellation, so cixous pops back in: "am I perhaps writing a book in order to ask my friend all these questions that I hadn't time to ask on the telephone?"
the track M leaked reminded me of mssingno and a conversation I had with N about how that united in flames mix is canon for "all of us", "all of us" meaning a very particular milieu. *plays mix* *thinks of how he thought to mix the piano from kodak black helluva love with thru the fire and how kodak black must've been in the booth and heard helluva's tag and it caused him to spiral into a series of freestyles built around the word "helluva" and how this must've been in the time when helluva left detroit to work in atlanta, to work on his career but then he went back and we got shittyboyz and babyface ray 42 dugg the streets, there was a moment where i listened to that song hundreds of times over the course of a week* I liked what M wrote about what D said about The Matrix - there was a noir by the Wachowski sisters playing here last night, their first feature, financed by Dino de Laurentiis, a "they don't make them like him anymore" type of guy and they really don't, but I didn't see it, it was playing after 10 and I've been waking up early and going to bed early, quite the opposite from my usual routine, the sun and the heat governs how you operate here and with the amount of daylight I understand why the siesta exists.
T wrote about sandwiches at delis and I've never gotten an egg and cheese with jalapeno, I always got hot sauce, some delis would use harissa and be generous with it, and my mouth would be numb with spice after. he started with Rony's which reminded me of M2 telling me about how Rony always tries to sell her coke, that it's pretty cutty shit, but it's there if you want it with whatever else you're getting. she lives above him, or maybe around the corner and above him, i was at her place once, with Z and A and C2, we played poker and everyone else drank this free tequila she got from frieze week, and the day I left I was at sofia gourmet with Z and A, they brought up how M2 always talks about art in terms of who's selling, how much, which turned into a discussion about the ideas of commercial galleries vs. fine art galleries, anne imhof at dover street market, "CULTURE", and whatever else, I heard the guy at the next table over say something about how we were artists to the girl he was with, when we left I got a limon gelato and it melted into my beard as I ate it, I had to wash the sticky from beard later
E is in Italy now, she told me she was going, but i didn't really believe it was happening until i refresh and see the words and the account and the links continue - Napoli, Dino de Laurentiis, gelato, sofia gourmet. she could be lying, we were texting about how she couldn't put passwords into her blog because she uses google sites instead of neocities, and because she couldn't password protect posts like me, M, and T did, she would fabricate fictions into her writing so no one could tell what was real and what wasn't, and i certainly couldn't once she introduced that strain of doubt, i think that the distanced lurking spectator would take everything to be true and maybe she is still lying about parts of her italy trip. google sites also shows when the page was last updated and i'm sure there's other analytics too and C told me that his blog hit 300 views and i responded that i didn't know how many views mine has and that I liked that. now i'm listening to estranged because J was listening to double virgo while driving E to the airport, she didn't specify which project, but it's the one i have memoryemotions attached to, the one i feel most prosthesized within. C's blog lets me know that it's also hot in new york. it's all good, surfing the network, I like that there's no feed, and I like that E's blog has pictures. it's hot here too, i'm going to go outside and sweat, then look at art, and then sweat again
The bus stops around Madrid are advertising a new sandwich at McDonald's: the Chicken Big Mac. The ads are everywhere but I never see McDonald's around, just Burger King. I finally found one in between the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia, right across from the Atocha Station. It was good, but I've still never had a Big Mac so I don't have much to compare it too. I took one of those top-down pictures of my meal and sent it to E, I'd just texted her a tweet someone made asking "who runs the Jeffrey Deitch instagram account" because the account uses crazy fonts / language, and the girl that runs that account uses it to dm E about her crush on N. M asked me if there was a way i could find the jeffrey deitch reality tv show and it isn't on karagarga or anywhere that i'd check and i told E and she said she'd check with this gallery girl in the hopes that it's in the archives and she has archival access, but that was a while ago and still no word. I took another top down pic after I finished my meal
it was an up and down day at the museums. the down was dealing with the size, there's really just too much to see, you walk past masterpiece after masterpiece after giving it a brief moment of attention, but at the same time there's so much shit in spain that i don't like and i realized how much i don't like picasso and dali and even the miros were kind of boring, cubism is so stupid and masturbatory and like immediately reacting to the crisis of modernity like bro... i'm not even mad about the african mask appropriation (maybe not "mad", but it factors into the evaluation) and maybe Guernica rlly did something to people when it dropped but now it's like just watch an ISIS beheading video, watch drone strike footage, watch hiroshima, watch the holocaust. "hype paintings" are fascinating - in the prado there's las meninas and in the reina sofia there's guernica but las meninas begs for your eyes to move about the work and figure out every little detail and mechanism and operation, guernica is just like... shit is trash bro, imma stop being negative now tho
i was looking at apollinaire calligrams and alcools and thinking about the advertising language of urban spaces, all the text everywhere, crisis in modernity blah blah blah, but it got me thinking while eating chicken big mac about mcdonald's advertising on a metaphysical plane, the cardi b and offset meal was never in spain, the chicken big mac was never in america, and the ads are printed, billboards, videos, digital images, but there's also the interstice of the advertisement where it takes place in the mind regardless of medium, the type of shit deleuze talks about in cinema 2 or whatever. The Cardi B and Offset Meal Was So Long Ago... again. broken record type beat, i tell myself i need to write that text, but now i wonder if it's still even possible for that text to be written, or if its possibility is foreclosed... i'll find out soon enough... or it may be later
I woke up for the third time, dreaming that I had to pee. I woke up, having to pee. And I had to hold it, someone else was in the bathroom. I checked again, then I checked again, and when I checked for the third time, was the bathroom door open. I took a piss. And I realized that when I woke up I was not dreaming that I had to pee, I woke up, having dreamt that I had to pee. Or did I wake up, having dreamt that I was peeing? When was the dreaming, what was the dreaming, the dreaming of the dreaming, I left this room, I came back into this room, and then other people's dreams flowed into this room.
I finished Hyperdream, then read Derrida's Fichus speech, both intricately woven dreamnests, the latter's name coming from a dream that Benjamin had about turning a poem into a scarf, which he then wrote about in a letter to Gretel Adorno. In the speech, Derrida says (and it is transcribed and translated): "If one day I were to write the book I dream..." and then proceeds to outline a book in chapters, "in the style of a TV Guide", and he dreams in books is what I thought, he dreams in books, because I'd been thinking about how in the empty spaces of the day where my mind continues to think and I cannot slow down the slaught of words, but I have nowhere to put them down, they come out and they pass through in a certain way, but I stopped thinking of tweets and posts, and started to think of blogs.
"Vomiting" was one, how I vomit out these words so easily, and how I've always been able to vomit words out onto the internet. And "Vomit" is an interesting word, it is regurgitation, but it brings it from the abstract in-out mechanism to the human body. Already there has been vomit in these words. There is the vomit of translation. And there was all the vomit that I forgot, but was recording, the vomit of pictures and videos, the vomit of memories.
Broke Phone... that shit read 600 hundred thousand... just two years ago i ain't even have all these problems...
A footnote in Fichus lead me to Ulysses Gramaphone: "What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation..."
I talked to S on the phone last night and it took me a moment to find my voice. I've barely spoken in Madrid, life is silence broken by brief ripples of conversation. This will continue for a while and I like it. I tell him this and realize how absurd it sounds. This only happens later, before we talk about New York, how things are there, how people are there. As the conversation continues, I get increasingly tired, I keep repeating what was I saying where were we where was I what was I saying
It's like a computer, D says, and before computers there were still computers: the pen and the post. There is "the motif of postal difference, of remote control and telecommunication"
T texted me that he received the Bape bag. I'd meant to mail it to him months earlier, but I never made my way to the post office. When I was leaving L's place, I realized I needed to get it to him. I gave the bag to Z to give to A who saw T yesterday. The bag was given to me by A2, who bought the gift for me while she was in Tokyo. "Tokyo: does this city lie on the western circle that leads back to Dublin or to Ithaca?" This was in March, the bag started and ended with A before going to T, and L thinks "the coincidence of meeting . . . the whole galaxy of events" while at the centurypast cabman's shelter.
"...what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only thing translatable. What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be the untranslatable."
Another note leads me to Blanchot's The Madness of the Day, but there isn't a translation to download anywhere, only La folie du jour, and I'm reminded of the strange place that is being relatively well-read in the wrong language, of being illiterate in other ones. I went to a kebab place near me yesterday and it was ran by an Indian guy, he spoke to me in Hindi and I replied "I don't speak Hindi" in Hindi and he was confused and I explained to him in Spanish that my family is from Tamil Nadu and I didn't grow up in India so I never learned any Hindi and he still seemed offput by this and I thought of the scene in Louis Malle's Phantom India where he's in Tamil Nadu and the people are protesting against Hindi being taught in their schools. When you're outside of India, everyone gets flattened to Indian, but when you're there the Tamils will speak poorly about the people in Delhi and the dirty Biharis and in Mumbai all the rich people look down on the Dharavi slum dwellers as filthy Madrasis. That was the longest conversation I had yesterday. Blanchot lived in isolation for two decades, but he maintained length correspondences with his contemporaries. I think about how archives of letters will be lost because of how the digital archive overwhelms. D points out how Nietzsche and Joyce anticipated the academies to come to study their work, and he makes fun of the James Joyce Foundation and how American such a thing is. Part of this anticipation is the relation of the computer to the encylopedic project. And what to anticipate of the centuries to come...
"Any public piece of writing, any open text, is also offered like the exhibited surface, in no way private, of an open letter, and therefore of a postcard with its address incorporated in the message and hereafter open to doubt, and with its coded and at the same time stereotyped language, trivialized by the very code and number. Conversely, any postcard is a public document, deprived of all privacy and, moreover, in this way laying itself open to the law."
My phone is broken and I need to take it to get fixed. Sorry if I'm slow to respond to you.
I am trying to fixate on a memory, but I am more and more convinced that nothing has ever happened, that I have been in this room for as long as life. As long as life, as if it were a rope, as if the rope didn't recall memories and create a mental place, space, an image. But I am trying to fixate on a memory, not a place, not a space, and certainly not an image. I am trying to fixate on a memory and not the image of a memory, the image of a memory recalls Croatia, an image-memory-factory of the past, a place that produced overwhelming images of memories.
"But what in fact is my art? What goal does it propose? What does it produce? What does it cause to be born and to exist? What is my aim, and what do 1want to do in exercising it? Is it to write and to assure myselfof being read? Only ambition for so many people! Is that what I want? ... That is what must be examined, carefully and for a long time, until I know." — Joubert (October 22, 1799)
This is the first morning here where the sky is not blue. The light is so different.
"But how can one pass from the sky to the star, from the poem, unlimited fabric of space, to the pure and unique word where it must be assembled? Or from the beautiful, which is indeterminate, to the rigor of the perfection of the beautiful?"
I lapse into quotation in search of a question in search of answer in search of an emptiness in search of If I have said Everything, is it the right Everything and If not, how to change Everything?
"Wisdom is rest in light."
"I like late in the day. I like the day to night transfer. I like the desaturation. It's like a high speed eternity."
"Half-light is charming, for it is a gentle and diminished day. But dawn is less so, for it is not yet day. It is still only a beginning..."
I open up the window to hear the birds for a moment and then leave. There is a symphony of chirps, sledgehammers, and vehicles.
Damascus steel is everywhere on the streets of Toledo. I'd been on the wikipedia page before, I got there from Wootz steel, which originated in Tamil Nadu, but I can't remember why or how I got to that page. They don't know how to make Damascus steel anymore, somewhere in the past it got lost.
At the El Greco musuem I stared at a painting of Paul. He held a sword while he was writing. I bought two post cards of the painting in the gift shop, I paid with a single coin, I thought of Derrida and all the above extending beyond the top of the website, and I kept going up until I was 16 looking at The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene. It was hot outside that day too.
I started Certified Copy last night and finished it this evening. The dialogue about art, how we see it, and such and such was bouncing around in my head as I walked around today, but after the parts about Love and Marriage, I feel inundated and can barely recall what I was thinking. A soccer ball rolled down the street and a boy chased after it, like in the short Kiarostami made in Italy. It'd be nice, to pretend to be married with someone.
There are few things as pleasurable as checking into a hotel room to stay by yourself. You go up to the room and everything is meant for two: two cups for coffee, two sets of toiletries, two towels, even two beds. There is a quiet in the room that is hard to come by elsewhere. The room beckons you to bring another person into it, and remaining alone only accelerates the sense of solitude like nothing else. I used to dream of a life lived in hotel rooms. It'd be like living in the airport.
In the mall in Cordoba, there's a guy wearing a red YMCMB snapback. I thought about Forever and how Drake was shutting shit down in the mall. I thought about last summer, listening to dumpster baby seeing animatronic dinosaurs in the mall in Chennai and then writing that down in my notes app. I thought about Averroes and Averroes's Search and translation:
"In a translation, we have the same work in a double language; in the fiction of Borges, we have two works in the identity of one single language and, in this identity that is not one, the fascinating mirage of the duplicity of possibilities."
"Thus, the world, if it could be exactly translated and copied in a book, would lose aIl beginning and all end and would become that spherical, finite, and limitless volume that all men write and in which they are written: it would no longer be the world; it would be, it will be, the world corrupted into the infinite sum of its possibilities."
"I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum."
Thinking and writing in the heat is so different from working in the cold. I copy my quotes and attach minor commentaries and it all feels so difficult. When I copy a quote, I feel as though I'm painting a miniature of a picture, the words enter and exit me, they become my own copy. Yesterday I climbed up Toledo from the bus station in the sweltering heat, wondering when else are things "sweltering"; today I walked down and it was so much easier, the weight of my bags basically negligent. I took the train back to Madrid then left the Atocha Station once again, I got in a BlaBlaCar and saw windmills on the highway. I copied sections of the Prophetic Speech chapter of The Book to Come, I thought about El Greco, and I thought Campagna.
"Prophecy is not just a future language. It is a dimension of language that engages it in relationships with time that are much more important than the simple discovery of certain events to come."
"... prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset aIl the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic, it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence..."
"It is once again like the desert, and speech also is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert to cry out and that endlessly awakens in us the terror, understanding, and memory of the desert."
"The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never there but always outside. The desert is this outside, where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already outside, and prophetic speech is that speech in which the bare relation with the Outside could be expressed..."
I fell asleep watching a Marco Ferreri last night. It was about a man who diaries obsessively about his erotic fixations. He's not particularly good-looking and has constant money troubles. He studied philosophy. I need to finish it tonight.
How does one afford silence? Does one "afford" swag? Where does swag come from: it is cooked. Where does silence come from — the space between the noise... So does noise afford one Silence? (or: white space studies) it feels as though I'm trying to negotiate weight, and the ease of making images (digital)...
process: watercolors in a notebook of hanji paper, use a black pen to add marks on top of the water. the sensation is quite pleasing, perhaps to the point of overdoing it, but then i withdraw. then i repeat again, the figure at the bottom. then a level of regret, an inability to maintain white space, an urge to fill the page, a larger inability to restrain myself that i'm trying to work with, work around, work through, work past, work future, work present, work within, and so on. took a picture of it on phone when the light was coming in strong through the window, then cropped and manipulated digitally. later the pen that i used had all the ink in the cap, when i opened it, it spilled out onto a new page, but i added faint red + blue watercolor shading, now i regret it, again the inability to restrainstraintrainrainagain, but the end will be digital until if/when it is printed back into the physical, so i'll try to remove and rework it later tomorrow, after photographing once the light is right again
"A fragment obtrudes here and there, just to remind us of the enormity of those procedures of abstraction that also characterize the digital network’s translation of cultural artifacts into code. Transitivity is a form of translation: when it enters into networks, the body of painting is submitted to infinite dislocations, fragmentations, and degradations."
"My ass just in Cordoba running the credit card up on oxtail and churrasco"
In the orientalist fantasy cafe for tourists, I thought about the heat. The heat wave right now is historic, first they were calling it Cerberus, now they're calling it Charon. I haven't been checking the news or going on the internet very much so I didn't know about it until today, I just thought it was hot. The only thing that stuck out was on the drive there were signs saying that there was extreme fire risk right now, and I thought, what do I do if there's a fire, but it's much easier for me since I carry all of my belongings with me and don't have a home or a life here - just get on a bus or a train and get out. I carried all of my belongings from the train station to my hotel in Toledo, I had to climb up stairs of the city carrying my suitcase and backpack and that drenched me in sweat and now I realize the reason the hotel was so cheap was because no one wants to go to Toledo right now, they don't want to deal with the heat. I thought about how it'd have been easier to take the bus while climbing, but I also thought about the centuries past and how people had to come so far to see the El Grecos there if they really wanted to. I was on the fence about whether it would've been worth it, but G texted me to, and that was what I needed.
In the Toledo Cathedral, I broke my silence speaking with a security guard, C, and the fluidity of my Spanish surprised me. He asked me the question that older fat men of a country usually ask young men who are visiting: "Do you like ____ girls" and I said yes, then he asked me if I like men too, and that it was okay if I did, but I told him no, then we kept talking about other things, like why I know Spanish even though I'm Indian, and I tell him I live in New York and there are Dominicans and Puerto Ricans there and that makes sense to him, and he asks me to get a drink with him later, and I give him my number and he says he'll whatsapp me but he never does and I walk around the town in a night that's 90 degrees. It only strikes me a couple days later that he might've been gay.
I text T about magazines and writing and Swiss money and film and how Grace Wales Bonner is curating the MoMA Artist's Choice show, and then I see that she also curated Twilight City in a program of work, except that hers took place at the Serpentine Sackler and mine was in a living room in Bushwick, and that she did the proper European thing of going to the school and then making the work and making the type of work that was deemed exceptional and then making her moves throughout Worlds. I think about the blogpost where M was talking about his music and his label and how what he wants is respect from niche tastemakers (or something of that sort to paraphrase), which brought me into a place of trying to pinpoint what it is that I want. I think about "affording silence", because Yung Weej just dropped a video and I text it to C2, who is gay, and we were talking about how Joeyy is trying to go Yeat mainstream and:
and Weej can afford silence. The rarest of rappers who doesn't need money and doesn't need to commit crime and has been in the room with Fredo Santana. I'm in Andalusia affording myself as much silence as I can, because here my voice is quiet and I realize how much I like speaking softly, and when I walked through the cathedral that was a mosque I thought of all the work realized within it for a holier purpose and I reread Vivekananda while drinking "Baghdad Tea" about the necessity of religion:
"Religious ideas will have to become universal, vast, and infinite; and then alone we shall have the fullest play of religion, for the power of religion has only just begun to manifest in the world."
And I wondered where do I go, what do I want, what purpose does it serve, to me, and to the World, and what is that World exactly... Immediately, I want a place to sit and write, without having to feel the need to see things that I may never have the chance to see again, and I tell myself that this will be Tangier, for 2 weeks, in a few days after I see The Alhambra. What I want still centers around the obsession with the moving image, though now there are so many things in the world that must be manipulated in order to bring the images that I desire to light, a certain amount of painting with reality that exists both inside and outside the frame.
I text C2 about this image and then about the new Lonnie Bands project, about Lonnie Bands being arguably the most underrated rapper alive, all the events of the last few years that happened to him and how he rapped through the death of so many friends, being shot in the head, and how he was the first Detroit rapper to have a show in Paris, and that would've been the first moment he might've felt he didn't have to always be looking over his shoulder but he probably still was, how Babyface Ray can get big off making "get money" music while Lonnie's reign as the King of Detroit was too early, before Bloxk Party hit WorldStar and Detroit Music went global. In this same time period, Icewear Vezzo made the same song over and over again, and created the Icewear Vezzo type beat, and now he still makes the same song with the most minute of differences and sometimes Future and Lil Durk will rap on there with him.
"When T. S. Eliot makes this remark: "It is my experience that towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working" he is weIl aware that it is not only in the middle of his life but at each turn of himself, and at each new work, at each page of the work, that one of these three choices - to speak only of them - would present itself, if a sort of dexterity did not fortunately allow one, each time, to anticipate them." - Blanchot
I look at the map to figure out my way to the bus station and I notice a street named after Le Corbusier (footnote to be added later about Chandigarh, Nazism, Swastikas, and graves) and google the connection - he visited the same Mezquita and bought a post card of the columns inside and he was inspired, to the point at which it's alleged that his chosen name is a linguistic corruption of Cordoba. The drawings and sketches he made of it all really are exceptional:
"this life shit rlly bussin" I thought while eating another Chicken Big Mac meal at the McDonald's at the mall in Granada. This mall had me in awe. The Taco Bell and the Burger King and the Five Guys had 20+ foot ceilings. When I first walked in there were palm trees inside, marking off the corners of a square and in the center was a Dunkin and the food court was so alive, the mall is so alive in Spain, because they love America. E talked about this when we were in San Sebastian, and I noticed it because all across Madrid were advertisements for Netflix's "Bird Box Barcelona" - Bird Box had so much viewer resonance here that the only sequel is a Spanish product and I can't think of a previous iteration of such a phenomenon.
There was a store called "GAME" selling games, not just video games, but board games too. From the window display you could see three different types of Monopoly available for purchase. It's interesting because I don't know any robber-barons of note who are Spanish off the top of my head - the Thyssen family, sure, but only now and because of their investment in the arts, yet there's so much that has happened here and there are rich people here and there was industry here. In any case, it doesn't seem like people work, or at least work like they do in America, and it's interesting to think of how that lack of social floor is part of the reason for America's history of innovation in both culture and technology. There's a Spanish drill rapper who's popped off recently who goes by the name of BB Trickz and she took the Law and Order theme song, had it turned into a drill beat, and then rapped over it like Ice Spice and shot a video of her and her friends dressed like school girls punching the camera, it makes sense why it's big, another step removed from the violence in drill that is inherent to its roots, the violence of the drums. (Brief addendum on the genealogy of the Law and Order beat sample: while most would credit Veeze with being the first to set off this wave, it actually started in Milwaukee on a song called Narcotics that Gwapo Chapo posted onto his soundcloud 6 years ago called BABYFACE RAY FEAT GWAPO CHAPO & CHICKEN P-NARCOTICS which almost certainly inspired Veeze given the Face connection. Then comes the Luh Tyler flip and now the BB Trickz flip.) In any case, there's now a Genius video where Bb Trickz talks about the lyrics to her song, often doing so in perfect English, showing that she comes from a certain social class of Spain. A brief and oversimplified series of events that leads to all of this: Chief Keef makes Chicago Drill pop off, Chicago Drill goes to the UK and mixes with Grime and Garage, which then comes back to Brooklyn via 22Gz and Kush Binflockin at first, sees a meteoric rise with Pop Smoke and Fivio Foreign, and then migrates to the other boroughs, where in Queens it's used as a sampling machine for Shawny Binladen and YTB (part of this production is by Bronx-born but Queens-living producer/now-rapper Cash Cobain and East New York born/raised evilgiane, though giane's sample beat placement rarely crossed over to "Drill Rappers" in the way that Cash Cobain got a B-Lovee placement), and in The Bronx it gets hyper-violent and tied into gang beefs via Kay Flock and DThang before their incarceration paves the way for Ice Spice to take the same style but to change the content to being about smoochies and munches that vaults her into the post-Pop Smoke vacuum of new famous New York rapper/musician that desperately needed to be filled. Anyways, next to the GAME store there was an Ali Express store selling goods straight from China, which reminded me of a video I watched of a hypermarket in Bamako, Mali built by the Chinese and flooded with their products.
While I was eating Chicken Big Mac, J texted me links to two Lil Sinn songs, one of which was a flip of Fun's "We Are Young" that Samson2Slapped (this white boy from the milwaukee suburbs who's collabed w/ AyooLii and can put out some deep cut heaters that I started listening to before the AyooLii collab happened because my soundcloud analytics from reuploading certified trapper songs lead me to him) had uploaded a snippet of with the cover art of black background and snapchat text layered over it, but that snippet upload's gone now and all I have is the thumbnail of when I texted it to C:
I send it to J and tell him I'm in Granada, so close to the Alhambra and think back to how he loaned me his copy of Irving's Tales of the Alhambra towards the end of the really fucked up I/O Caffe night and I couldn't sleep in his bed with him because I was tweaking and he was snoring and I was tweaking about a number of things which culminating in an internal freakout about Irving inscribing upon the Alhambra, but as I move through and inscribe upon Spain in English, I'm trying to rework and reconsider what this practice of inscribing upon a place is/does/how it functions and what the relations of privelege/race to it all are, even though that is a "boring" line of thought, but at the same time A texts me a screenshot of the really racist shitcoin he's pushing on twitter on his "wigga activities" and I think it's just a spiritually ugly pursuit that isn't worth the money and I think again about how T said "you gotta get the bag but you gotta make sure the bag doesn't get you". This line of thought about inscribing on a place was the main link between the "here rn" film at Cozy Corner and Twilight City, though I'm not sure that was obvious to most people, and this inscription with the city, or rather with a World is what seems to be in vogue right now. From a burner twitter account I see a post of someone's fiction in the latest Kaleidoscope which "a long time ago and far away"'s Dimes Square and I think about Dimes Square Belongs To Us and all the Rivette's I need to watch and All The Vermeer's in New York and how Dennis Cooper called Jon Jost the American Godard and I think about how I need to check Jon Jost's blog and then text C about it. I tell J he should find a residency here and I think that it would produce a really compelling body of work. I tell him about how there's bad bitches at the McDonald's eating cheesecake and he tells me about toxic bitches in New York giving him their friend F's number (see above story from the "tonight" entry for backstory - link later) even though he isn't single. When I get to my room I send him a picture of the view.
As I typed out "Dennis Cooper called Jon Jost the American Godard" I was reminded of a sketch of an essay that I never wrote, it remained a constellation of ideas and never took form. The same thing happened last night - a constellation of ideas under the title "Bitch I'm Back Out My Coma" about nations and the art they produce, about Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot, about The Book To Come and the need for addiction to a form, about Richter's Betty, Christian Petzold, and Klee's Angelus Novus, about OT7 Quanny's "Write A Book", "Stupid Bandz", and "Youngest Turnt". I think of essay writing like freestyling - maybe I've already said that somewhere in here - you have to stay in that mode throughout in order to maintain the work and maintain consistency in it. Too long and the threads get mixed up, the tone is in disarray, and it isn't cohesive. The problem I often run into is sketching out too wide a frame for the essay, and then being unable to maintain the freestyle session to get it all written down, or not even getting in the booth because of material circumstances (time, space, place, money). The following sketch is the latter.
It's about the idea of Remakes and Godard, of Remaking Godard, and of the role of "Paul" in Godard. In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema, a subtitled voiceover reads: "They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso". In Godard's adaptation of King Lear, Woody Allen appeared, wearing a Picasso t-shirt. In the summer of 2022, Luh Tyler appeared, wearing a Picasso shirt. The idea of the essay shifted, away from remakes and Godard and Paul and into this obsession: "Why is Woody Allen in King Lear wearing a Picasso shirt" - which is a question all about remakes and Godard and Paul, of course.
Additional stars in this constellation: the Paul's of Godard's films - JPL in Masculin Feminin, Paul in Weekend, Paul Godard in Every Man For Himself — a film which Godard called his "Second First Film" which then splinters off another series of stars. The idea of a "First Film" as a "First Philosophy", and the idea of remaking this "First Film-osophy". The frame rate manipulation in Every Man For Himself as early VCR technology arrived, the need to re-theorize cinema due to the fundamental difference of video images. That Paul is also the name of Godard's father, of his bourgeois background, Freudian blah blah blahs. And the face of Jean-Pierre Leaud, a leap to Irma Vep and "images about images about images", a leap to Pasolini's Porcile and Pasolini's St. Paul screenplay. And the Paul of Contempt, the film an adaptation of an Italian novel, but "Riccardo" becomes "Paul" rather than "Ricard". The idea that Godard is to Cinema as Paul is to the Bible.
Further stars: Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death as a remake of Breathless, as his own remake of a "First Film-osophy", one that brought in Brecht and the theater and the essence of the German Nation. The idea of Fassbinder as a "German Godard", and this is where Cooper comes in, with the idea of Jost as the "American Godard", and inserting the opposition to Woody Allen, who saw himself in Godard, which confused Godard. And then a reading of JLG's 1994 Autoportrait as a nest of Woody Allen jokes, in which Godard flirts with his young hot assistant, squeezes her ass without permission, and then appears playing tennis in WA type drip towards the end, recalling Annie Hall.
Distant stars: Chris Marker's Statues Also Die, incorporated to ask the question of whether the images of film stars will die or if they'll be resurrected. In Spain, new stars emerge. Picasso and the African mask. In the shadow of the Alhambra, I realize that Chris Marker is a Geoffrey Crayon joke. And somewhere in this book on Marker I got lost in last summer "The Suffering Image" was that somewhere, I can't recall where, Marker said that there would be no second century for cinema. I deleted a tweet on a burner account that said "Thinking in centuries; or lies about time"; I've noticed it's a very French way of thinking about time. The tweet was accompanied by a collage of a Chinese painting of a woman over a still from Ouvrir that showed a car crash. "The Suffering Image" focuses on Marker's shows at Peter Blum Gallery, his return to the still image, if one thinks of La Jetee as such, but there's an inverse at play - not celluloid stretched out over time and reprinted onto a real, but video, frozen and manipulated, printed to be placed on a wall.
They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso. While Godard squeezes his assistant's ass he says "Europe is condemned to death". In the footnotes of The Suffering Image, one can read Marker say "life has become a fiction film" and "No, film won’t have a second century. That’s all". Paul appears throughout this text, as it investigates Marker's Messianicity, by way of Agamben's The Kingdom and The Glory, which also brings Pseudo-Dionysius into the fold, and the text is a mess, Anselm Kiefer appears for a paragraph, and as a reminder that I need to make it to London before Finnegans Wake is gone. I wonder where it'll go.
The Kingdom and The Glory factors into The Suffering Image, but not Agamben's The Time That Remains, which Simone White references in METRO BOOMIN WANT SOME MORE NIGGA, a section of an essay called "Dear Angel of Death". She talks about her students' understanding of XXXTentacion and Travis Scott, that they "understand something about the coming situation, this nothing, as Giorgio Agamben works the question of the now through his reading of Paul, that I am not equipped to understand". This reading of Paul contains a quote that was the central star of another constellation that never came to be, titled "RIP JEWELXXET":
"This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement]."
They'll forget all the details, but remember [Paul].
The Alhambra shouldn't be as it is now. It's been restored, from the Peninsular War and an earthquake, and for what end? It's been restored to serve as a Disneyland for Instagram pictures. It exists as another orientalist tourism location, for Europeans who want to see Islamic culture without having to step foot in an Islamic nation with its dirty Arabs. And it's this novelty, that it exists on a hillside in the south of Spain, that is it's draw. I think about Certified Copy again, and doubtlessly if this were to be rebuilt as an amusement park on another hillside in Spain and sold as authentic, people would go, and they'd take pictures.
They put a museum in the Alhambra. The works had to be carried up the hill.
While walking down the hill, I realize that xaviersobased uses the same flow in yh i knoo that A$AP Rocky uses in Ghetto Symphony. In the museum I thought about how biblical scenes that were painted repeatedly were like using the same beat. I thought about 50 Cent's Many Men and Xanman and Lil Dude's Many Men. I thought about how Veeze and Slimesito dropped songs that sampled the same Bone Thugs N Harmony song in the span of a month.
I text J pictures of the Alhambra and tell him about this. He says the pictures I took are good.
Last night I sent C a quote from Jon Jost's blog where he writes letters to his daughter that's been separated from him: "I checked into a cheap hotel near the train station, managed to see some friends, a bit of Roma, and moved along. I was somewhat taken aback how, like Lisbon, Roma – at least in the center and in Trastevere, where we lived – had become overwhelmed with tourists and had changed itself to serve them. Sad. When I left in 2002 I had thought to myself that it was too big to be destroyed, as Venice and Firenze had been, by mass tourism – but I was totally wrong. The Roma we had lived in no longer exists.”
I also sent him Youtube uploads of screen recordings of SlimeGoon9 IG lives from jail. The title of one, "slimegoon9 presses k2 smoker in prison for hanging pooped boxers on his rack", hits me like a madeleine when he replies and I remember smoking k2 in Lisbon with this Australian girl in 2017 and fixate on the memory while drinking my cafe con leche. In the Alhambra, there was a woman wearing a 2pacalypse Now shirt, and I thought about Ab-Soul's verse on Joe Budden's Cut From A Different Cloth, a song I left behind on a hard drive as I migrated computers while trying to assimilate away from rap into PNW whiteness when I was 15 or so ("we got a new 2pacalypse now / when? before the apocalypse / wow how does he come up with this / if ur behind ab then maybe you can stomach this / who can fuck with this / i know you got a dick but use ur head bruh / they sleeping on me like a colony of bed bugs / cut from a different cloth and no one knows my thread count"). I text S about this because he's an Ab-Soul head.
T texts me an IG post that's a series of Paul Pierce clips from his recent appearance on Cam'Ron's talk show. It's so good I have to run the whole episode. He's really The Truth. Yesterday I watched a Lance Stephenson highlight reel and thought about how no one else has any shit even close to that.
Hopoutblick drops a new video. A couple of weeks ago, the video for I Miss Zomb dropped. It's a YBC Dul song that Hopoutblick features on with Merepablo and 9sideree, I'd been listening to the leak repeatedly on soundcloud, well over a hundred times, the beat is incredible. The cover art on the soundcloud upload is now the YBC Dul tape that it's on, but imessage thumbnails preserved the original image, an IG live screenshot:
Presumably it's one of the rapper's IG stories, presumably Zomb is pictured, and 42 Dugg's Free Merey is overlayed. The thing about the comments section for "I Miss Zomb" is that everyone is talking about how crazy it is that HopOutBlick is dropping a video. Accounts saying: He should be in Mexico by now. He's on the run for murder. Check Philly Most Wanted. And I check Philly's Most Wanted and I see him, he's only 18, and he's wanted for a triple homicide that left a 14, 17, and 18 year old dead. In the following week, an interview drops, there are more comments about how he's crazy, and he doesn't speak on any of it in the interview, the mics are so bad and they're so far away from them that you can barely hear what's being said.
And now the latest song, Jump Out Boy with Mere Pablo and Hardy. A sample comes in, looping a voice singing "Mama I'm a Criminal" and I think of "So Many Names", a YBC Dul x Hopoutblick song that samples The Fairly Oddparents theme song as they trade bars referencing people they've killed, the first time I heard him, and about Torcher Party, where he raps about people him and the torchers have killed. In the new song, he raps “Me and my t’s on the run, they tryna book us all”. It's different than Tay-K, because Tay-K had been booked, he did The Race on house arrest. And Tay-K never allegedly killed anybody.
This is all happening in Philly. The same city where a shirtless white fan runs up on Quanny at the Wawa yelling "they told me presidents was smart how the fuck I'm getting stupid bands" at him fanning out before saying he should have another show even though he knows the last one got cancelled cuz someone threatened to shoot it up. The same city where Simone White teaches and presumably wrote about the ceaseless apocalpyse that never comes. The same city where Tovii's deconstructed the form and lost his face in a way that a street rapper never has. I'm reading the war poems, the inscriptions of death in the shadow of the Alhambra, from the shadow of History, thinking about Quanny's Arabic face tat, NR Boor talking about being Muslim in an interview, Tovii's use of arabic script in recent videos, and the idea that the western hemisphere is beyond "the West", a "meta-West", an idea that needs to be fleshed out further.
In the last room of the Louvre Abu Dhabi are 9 Cy Twombly paintings and 4 ancient carved rocks from Saudi Arabia. The Louvre Abu Dhabi's website claims that the paintings, titled Untitled I-IX, 2008, are part of Twombly's Notes from Salalah series, named after and drawing inspiration from city located in an oasis in a southern region of Oman that receives monsoons. Twombly chose to inscribe mythology onto a place that he never went. The thing is that the works were not exhibited in the Gagosian show III Notes from Salalah that inaugurated the gallery's Rome location in 2007. These works came later and were acquired by the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2010 before ever being shown publicly; they would've been unveiled in a 2013 exhibition at the Louvre showcasing the works acquired for this new institution. Every sentence here besides the first is besides the point though.
This is about Trisha Donnelly's Air de Paris show. It's as though she collapsed the Twombly's into those Saudi rocks, and then the Jean Nouvel-designed museum into that. Ancient pre-history meets Twombly's modernism and classicalism meets the violence of post-modern architecture and the slave labor that constructs it. "...what is at stake is something else, an excessive demand, a rigorous and exclusive assertion that is directed in one single direction, with the passion that makes the impossible attempt necessary".
This line of thinking could be expanded in a number of ways: investigations about the materiality, the marble, its history, or about the incisions into the stone, the act of cutting and the need for a sharper stone to do so, a sharper stone which remains absent. Silence requires noise to surround it in order for it to exist, and the noise casts a shadow.
And there were those two white squares, tucked away on the corners of walls, as though they were hiding from you. I suppose the only way to find out if they're works or not is to ask the gallery about their price.
All the things already written existing, waiting to refract light on the writing of the present and the writing to come. It started in the comments section of OT7 Quanny leak "Boston Snitchie" where someone in the comments is pointing out that Quanny's copping his flows from Fleck Billionaire, a Philly rapper from the 2000s that basically no one in Quanny's audience has heard of. Now those comments are missing. I ran a few Fleck Billionaire videos and the similarity in flows is crazy though they sound so different without the beats that define Quanny's sound, the Pyro produced OT7 Quanny type beat. Naturally, I threw an acapella he did over a beat Pyro posted in youtube and it sounded crazy:
In the blablacar to the ferry, I read Dan Fox's latest substack in which he mentions Truman Capote's 'La Côte Basque 1965'. At first I tripped out for a second about the Basque/Gossip coincidenceconnection, and then thought about how much "high society" has transformed since then, become both hypervisible and invisible. One of the above nights that I was at The River with C, I only realized after that the girl he was with was the Rock Revival Heiress. She didn't inherit Rock Revival but her dad bought it and seems to let her do whatever she wants with it - which is the reason that Joeyy and bbygoyard and shed theory members get checks to model their stuff, she's a silent patron of sorts to the soundcloud class. In a sense there's this weird morphing of "high" and "low" in "society" that's prob best summed up by the praxis VC bros booking a bunch of drill rappers for a gatekept event that barely anyone attended. New York City feels so distant now. a prominent Young Artist tweets about how no new ideas are produced there. i don't entirely agree, i don't entirely disagree.
C2 is this older friend that i have (meaning that we go back to 2018) who is an artist but we're not close at all - he's very by the book, we met at a film festival program for students, he did a BFA in film + philosophy (but analytic shit, which says so much), and then did his MFA at oxford, and his entire practice seems to be about being a white guy doing institutional critique in a very "i don't like the art world" way and him doing that is like "bro why are you doing this". he came to the blade study show and i think was shocked by the whole large social thing that happened that night where 30-40 people probably were outside, and the time i saw him before that he made a bad joke about how his girlfriend left her job at the Federal Reserve for a job at Greene Naftali "which is basically the same thing". he premiered a new short this month which is about the non-profit art world and also is about accessibility and when he sent me the screener and mentioned how he was showing it outside of the festival model and asked for my thoughts and I thought about saying something about how work that's so institutional critique-y doesn't really interest / do much for me but didn't because I think it'd be rude and recommend some writers who I thought would be interested in covering his work
This feels relevant because I came up with a concept for a show that has an element of institutional critique to it, and the blade study show did too, and part of that is my fixation on site and how that influences the work, even my substack's name is a critique of VC, I talked about this with Z and A once, tying it back to my cartographic impulse and in a sense inscribing a compass or a legend or politics onto the map. The idea stems from the Twombly wormhole I fell down while looking up the series to write about the Trisha Donnelly show; for years, Twombly was my goat painter, and he still probably is my goat painter, but I realized that to paint and re-inscribe from Greco-Roman antiquity the way he does would mean something entirely different were I to attempt it (and now I'm realizing the extent to which I've got the same hyper-citation that's visible type thing going on in the substack collages). But then there's the Orientalism in his late work, and what's even more interesting to me there is the financialization attached to this Orientalism. The III Notes From Salalah that were works on wood were shown in Rome, he went Marco Polo on em. But then came the additional series of paintings on canvas, which were sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (which doesn't really have much to do with Louvre besides the UAE purchasing its naming rights until 2037) as a kickback for a ceiling mural which Twombly donated to the louvre, which was criticized for being "incomplete" and has since been removed
So the conceit of the show is pretty simple: "complete" the ceiling mural and install it in a gallery space, and accompany it with 3 works on wood - at the moment the approach I'd want to use is taking b/w 35mm photos in Salalah and then printing on top of the wood using liquid light. There's a number of techniques I could use to figure out the end result I want, but that seems like the best one from a combination of cost-approach while still being able to prioritize the abstraction of the image and materiality, and would bring me back into the dark rooom, where I haven't made work in 5+ years now, but after talking more consistently with N, I really have a renewed interest in that sort of temporality and repetition while making work vs. digital work. of course I can also integrate digital aspects into the workflow, and the ceiling mural would already bring the digital valence to the show. Working with wood is also something I've talked about with T, I bounced around the idea of putting out a "poem length book" which would just be an engraving on beech wood, which is where the etymology for book comes from, and i suppose then this would be a show with 3 books. The show would be titled "Kickback" which also encompasses the social element of art, again critique critique critique, and tangentially, the word kickback reminds me of this babyfxce e line: "turned it to a party but it started as a kickback"
so now to reconcile the issue of critique if "work that's institutional critique-y doesn't really interest / do much for me" - i think the bottom line is that the works have to be beautiful, that i have to build upon what Twombly did, while creating my own language and thus altering the history of his works... the part of that is interesting, situationist hijacking kind of, but also not, and of course you have to Get What's Going On, and then the question emerges of do i do another following-the-show text to explain it, or do i put that in the press release and make it obvious, it's interesting to get these thoughts out by typing them here, and of course i need to make the body of work and execute it to the ideal i'm holding in my mind
Part of this also stems from how I view shows as just another text in the artist/author's body of work, and of course as a writer with a critical valence, there'll be critique in presumably all the shows I do. now i'm thinking about the "bas" video and weighing how true I think of this, whether there's critique present in that, which otherwise feels so experiential and inundating as a brief minute of image and sound that's devoid of text-based language. but the genesis for that type of editing style and color grading that i used came from the idea that celluloid and the look of celluloid belonged to a specific time, as did various digital formats such as VHS, miniDV, flip videos, early iphone, and so on, and now we have this homogenized hyper-algorithmic image, and by jarring the image in such a way, i'm trying to represent the current time as such, and the feel of it. there's critique in all of that, the same way there's critique in kashpaint type beats and xaviersobased music, and i think that's the right type of critique, and i suppose that's the sort of obliqueness to the critique i need to strive for with the idea of this show, in a sense the critique that i'm projecting onto the donnelly show. at this point, this all feels sufficiently worked out enough for the time being
Seeing fichus again, this time in Oppenheimer, I was hoping that the subtitles would be in Arabic, but they were in French. I thought about what I would write, but I also thought about how my voice has changed in the silence, about how it's saying more than ever here, and how that'll shape when I return to being around people again. When I walked out of Oppenheimer all of the things I was thinking about writing about - fichus and 9/11 and ww2 and benjamin, power and the larry gagosian new yorker profile, image-making of History - all of it fell away as I grappled with how alive the streets of Tangier were, I was inundated with people and cars and lights and life, that the linkages in my mind faded, and instead I was thinking about being transported back out of the American media reality / spectacle / etc. into a "Real Place", at least realer than new york, the hotel that Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in is still here and it's a kinda shitty hotel, it's only 35 or so a night and I might book it for a night or two once my airbnb runs out
“Man is scattered and discontinuous, and not temporarily, as has occurred at other times in history - but now it is the very essence of the world to be discontinuous. As if one had precisely to build a world - the universe, the most total and unified assertion - on the dislocated, discordant, and fragmented quality of being, or on the defects of man.”
While reading Blanchot on Broch who I've never read before, I thought of the mark of great criticism is when you're reading about things that you haven't encountered and it's doing ekphrasis on the abstract sum of writing - there are no quotations and only a few summaries, but rather just ideas and discussions of them in relation to Broch's output and how it functions.
I went to this cafe with a terrace for dinner that clearly appealed to non-Moroccans, there were a couple of white guys there at the table text to me, one of them tried to speak to me in unconfident Arabic asking if they could move from the table to my left to the table to my right because there was more shade there and I answered in English and then listened to them talk in these drawling Southern accents that felt like Malick voiceovers, also because they were talking about the Bible constantly, and its terrifying verses. I wasn't paying too much attention and was missing some context, but my assumption/inference was that they were both gay and were doing some sort of conversion therapy that included resettling in Morocco for a while. I thought about the scene in Fox and His Friends, where the Germans want to have a threesome with a Moroccan but he isn't allowed up into the room of their fancy hotel. They talked about how long they've been in Tangier, their olds lives back home, it was slow and dull and I almost moved seats so that the drone of Arabic would fill my ears while I tried to read Tahar Ben Jelloun's "The Sacred Night". Earlier, I walked to Gran Cafe de Paris and passed by a gallery ran by the Institut Francais showing some of his paintings which I liked, a couple reminded me of Etel Adnan, but they retained his signature well. Affordable too, a decent amount less than 20k dirhams.
I was thinking about The Minimata Mural (1981) while watching Oppenheimer. I think I'm going to rewatch it before thinking about trying to further any Oppenheimer thoughts. It was interesting, realizing how long it's been since I've seen a film alone (maybe 2 months, there was the string of Light Industry's but I'd also run into people), and that I wouldn't have seen Oppenheimer if I wasn't here and happened to walk past a theater showing it. Barbie had played 2 hours before. I thought about going tomorrow to make a camrip because S and I have talked about doing that and then re-scoring / re-editing the rip, but the subtitles will be French instead of Arabic and he could probably get that same rip anywhere in Canada. I suppose reading Barbie against how I read the Moroccan culture and reality could lead to something, but I already had a version of that during the Oppenheimer sex scenes, seeing white tits and white skin in a country of brown people that is conservative, something many in the audience will never see in person in their lives. I was texting M today and the conversation went from how the guy she's talking to is avoidant to old bladee to me seeing botox lips in clairo's soundcloud likes, then how clairo's from boston and M is from boston and then she said "Where are u from i forget" and the answer depends on who's asking. when I was on the ferry here, the passport guy asked me "what is your origin" and I responded "spain, granada". he shook his head "no, what is your origin" and I said "United States" as my passport was in his hands and he said no again "what is your origin" and then I realized and I said India and he was like "ahhhh" and it didn't have to do with the passport or the immigration, he was just curious because he couldn't place me. last night the guy who was serving me food asked if I was afghani, then pakistani, but not indian.
"I went to Rome in the fifties, which was a whole other world from what it is now. It's not the same city. In a sense, the life is totally different. It had more space, you could see it and you could enjoy it. Now you just plough through just trying to get to where you're trying to go with the least stress. It's wall to wall. If I went to Rome now, I wouldn't spend two days. But when I went I was in paradise."
"What I'm supposed to do when these Racks Blue?? woahhhhhh"
"Just bought a new whip nigga / like I'm a slave master / I pour up two zips nigga / I'm feelin way better"
There's this picture of Twombly and Gagosian in the New Yorker profile and I realized that I'd never seen a picture of him before, and that I'd never sought out a image of him, I was content with the works. But bro looked like he could've been in Django. On the Paul Pierce episode of Cam'ron's new youtube show they talk about how Skip Bayless needs a new cohost and which token it should be - the chyron is extrardinary - and Cam'ron and Ma$e start quoting "How much would you pay for the right nigga!"
I've been feeling this urge of all of this turning in on itself, another fold into its own meta, namely in the idea of going back through all of the words above and adding footnotes. I went through it all yesterday, to refresh myself on what I'd written, what I'd put in this vessel. On one end, I worry it's too soon for that, on the other, the footnotes could then have footnotes, and so on. It'll work itself out in some way. There used to be numbers.
"It is because in these hours of confiding in himself, he is grappling with the fullness of the narrative that has not yet begun, when the still undetermined work, pure of any action and any limit, is only possible, is the “blessed” drunkenness of pure possibility..."
“We can say, then, that if this moment of preliminary work, so wonderful in his memory, is so necessary to Janes, it is because it represents the moment when the work, approached, but not touched, remains the secret center around which he devotes himself, with an almost perverse pleasure, to investigations that he can stretch out even more when they let loose the narrative but do not yet commence it...”
J sent me pictures of a Carroll Dunham essay on Mark Grotjahn and I like the last line: "It's a beautiful thing when artists move in surprising directions that are later deemed to have been inevitable". I haven't seen the works he's talking about, or the images of the works that he's talking about, yet, just as I haven't read Henry James's notebooks - I interface with the ideas of their works, just as I interface with the ideas of Blanchot translated by Charlotte Mandell. Every morning before dawn, the call to prayer comes in through my window and wakes me up. I go back to sleep and this brief awakening plunges me into a state of dreams. There is so much noise here, but there's also piercing silence in it. J asked me what I was going to do here, and there was so much, it ended with "I will live". I like writing in the morning, it's new to me, my mind moves differently and the birds sing along with me.
I walk to a cafe and get breakfast: eggs, cheese, sliced meat, olives, toast, coffee, and orange juice. On the way to a store I stop into a Galerie Tindouf, a cramped space with tons of painted ceramics, many paintings on the walls, and stacks of catalogs, magazines in books. They're not for sale, but the owner tells me I should stop by the Marrakech location if I'm there before August comes, but I won't be. He's a friend of Tahar Ben Jelloun, and helped set up the exhibition at the Institut Francais. He asks me what I do and I tell him I write and I make work and he asks if I paint and I tell him yes but that the work isn't where I want it to be. He tells me that I'm young and that I have time - I thought about when the end of the world was always on my mind, now it's somewhere towards the back, the slow apocalypse. I ask him about how Tangier has changed and he says some of it is for the better, it's cleaner, there's less crime, but it's much bigger now. In my mind I've been thinking about Tangier in relation to Istanbul - both are on straits and occupy positions of border cities between East and West, but Tangier remains less than a tenth of the size of Istanbul. Still, much has happened here. Some of the painters are by a painter named Hamri - he was one of the few Moroccans to be a Beat. The owner lets me take a picture of one of them even though it isn't normally allowed, for research. The stacks of catalogs reminds me of when I first moved to new york, I used to buy so many cheap ones from the used bookstores and then cut them up, collage them onto my walls, make art from images of art, and then when I had to move it was almost all thrown away, the stacks of cut up books went to the trash as well.
I cut 4 pages of hanji paper out of my notebook, and tape them into a whole with masking tape. I start to make a work to be turned into image to be turned into trash, as has been many times before.
S texts me asking if I know a downtown gallery and I know it nominally, describing it as another gallery in the sea of downtown galleries, and ask him why. He met the guy who runs it at KGB last night, describes him as an "absolute cunt", then gives me the skinny on what went down. Mr. Gallerist, nominally B, is drunkenly like “What do you do, you sell art? No you don’t, I know everyone who sells art. What do you actually do? Actually I don’t care” to S, and there was also this group of Jersey kids there, "3 guys, 3 gals", out of place, and two of the girls there were giving B the eyes. S tells me B's full name and I do a google, find his linkedin and a Q&A he did, and after seeing where he's from (Long island), his colleges (out-of-state regional state school undergrad, CUNY grad), and his takes on "the art world", I can imagine the type of guy S was dealing with.
"Oh what’s it like to live in new yorkkkkk” is S's text imitation of one of the Jersey girls. B buys them a drink, then has his arm around one of them, but then allegedly grabs one of their asses. One of the Jersey boys confronts him. S mentions he's 5'6" and I'm imagining an accent while reading S's text: "Bro, you grabbed her ass bro? What are you like 35? Bro she’s 21. Nice try bro". I send S the Gagosian profile and reply "he thinks he’s Larry😹", make fun of the year he graduated college, the Peter Panning, and suggest that S swings by the summer group shitshow to see how hot his gallerinas are. S adds that B is obsessed with Dasha and it's the type of banal New York gossip I've been missing: "She’s really living the dialectical life... Nietzschean... And she’s so beautiful..."
The city is a sea of idiots and S rides The Raft of the Medusa:
“In the world, the world of great cities and great collective masses, it is immaterial whether something has truly taken place… What has taken place remains elusive, and in any case incidental, even null: the only important thing is the possibility of what has happened thus but could have happened otherwise: all that counts is the general significance and the right of the mind to seek this meaning, not in what is (which is nothing in particular), but in the panoply of possibilities.”
Then J and E text me asking who B is. J brings up the latest art magazine diary from Basel which has a whole lot of nothing - there are parties, people put aside their morals while selling art, there are many different artists with work for sale - and was written by S who knows A, the magazine editor, from Colorado. I met S for the first time a couple months ago, after an opening, and after a party at the Ukranian National House. If you search Ukranian National House on Artforum, you can see how many times it's been a setting for a writer's diary entry. Now we're at a bar, I'm with T and L and L2 and A2 and more people join us, S is one of them, he talks about his gallery and I talked about how I liked some of the painters that he'd showed, he asked which ones, and the ones that I mentioned surprised him because they weren't the bigger names. Then the conversation turned to me and he asked what I do and I was oblique because "what I do" still isn't easily said in ~Art World~ terms but I mentioned pseudonyms and writing and film and programming, and he told me that he was starting a screening series at his gallery and that I should come by the gallery later that weekend to talk about programming one. Then he said: "If you're hanging out with this group of people, I'm sure you have good taste".
It passed by quickly but it astounded me - he was saying the implied part out loud and all of a sudden it just felt very gauche. The night continued on into his apartment and people talked and did coke and talked and I confused E2 with Emma Pordige but the funny part was that Emma Pordige was in the room, and then the sun was rising and I took a cab back to Queens. J sent me a Jessica Flint piece about a Richard Prince Gagosian opening in the early 2010s, saying that he likes that approach, as well as Charlie Finch's. Flint presents a series of sharp observations over the course of the night but she doesn't mess the money up or ruin her social standing. That's the interesting thing to think about with Capote - just pulling the glock out and busting shots at everyone he'd gotten close with, turning it on himself, commiting social suicide. Now there's a Jstor PDF waiting to be read about the affair called "How Disgust Works" sitting in my downloads folder and there are 9 Artforum tabs open with various older diaries after I searched for different locations, names, and went through certain writers bodies of diaries. I described S's piece to J as "another H piece where it functionally fills the void of the obligatory document of the present moment to theoretically serve the function of historicization". Too many big words, kind of an ugly sentence.
But "theoretically" is probably the most important part of that statement, because history is many perspectives and whoever is writing for Art Magazine at the time of the Event is hardly the victor in the scheme of narrativization, the pieces just have their little blip of narrativization, enter the vast archives, and minor social capital is exchanged. It's interesting addressing H by letter - we've never met and it'll become obvious enough who she is in the following sentences but months ago she caused a little blip of narrativization that was momentarily baffling for me. H goes out, to S's opening, the dinner party at the Ukranian National House after, then more events the following night, then writes a diary with their takes, one of which is that Zoomers don't want to be broke obscurely cool artists but would rather be rich legibly cool entrepreneurs. A New Yorker staff writer tweets a quote of that part with a link to the article and the thumbnail crops the poster for the show in such a way that it becomes a mirror - a series of links, the last page of the last piece I published on substack, is printed and collaged into the poster. It makes sense, one of the links is for a mix S made, and it wasn't the first time images I've made have triggered other images that entered a much wider circulation. For a day, all the millenials on the new yorker side of twitter talk about that statement, taking it as gospel, while the millenials on the art world side of twitter make fun of how H didn't have a good time at the party she went to the second night out that weekend, and the generational brackets devised by marketers become as real as centuries. At the Ukranian National House D called me the first quirked up zoomer he met (and we met because E3 put us in a groupchat and said we should meet and the first link in the series of links is a piece E3 wrote with L that is very "To Live and Think Like Pigs", which refracted enough on my writing that A told me my piece was very "To Live and Think Like Pigs") and I realized that L wasn't a zoomer, that I was probably the youngest person there, and it's quite funny that H wrote a diary that was like "why aren't the young people here" about the guestlisted party for a Chelsea opening.
I text J and E back from the piano bar El Morocco Club, where there is no piano and the same playlist that's only 30-40 minutes long loops over the course of the night, as I drink alone after eating candied lamb, talking to different couples. E asks me to guess what she's listening to and sends me a screenshot of P's paparazii cover on soundcloud. I tell E that I've been telling people I'm P's ghostwriter, she says I shouldn't want people to think that, and I say that's the joke. Later I'm talking to a British couple and he's starting a winery in the south because climate change is making the UK a great place to grow champagne grapes and she works for the V&A so when I say that I write for galleries and museums she asks which ones. Another couple earlier asked which ones but they were a French-Moroccan couple who lived in Dubai so I told them the Whitney and the New Museum which meant nothing to them, and then I talked about how great Sharjah was, but I didn't ask them if they'd ever been. I tell the British lady Martos Gallery because it's a funny little joke for myself and for E now. Both couples buy me drinks, I bummed the French guy some cigs and I think the wine guy wanted to be nice to a younger guy who was friendly, and then when I close out and tip, the bartender asks if I want a drink on the house and then pours me a limoncello. That was the end of the night, before there were two Manhattans in Tangier, and a Hennessey on the rocks, and while drinking the first Manhattan I wrote the phrase "Manhattan in Tangier" in my notebook because I liked the sound of it.
To get to El Morocco Club you have to walk up a steep hill and now I was walking down. In front of me is a man pushing his son up the hill in a wheelchair. A bottle of water falls from the chair and starts rolling down the hill and it's going too fast for him to be bothered because he has to keep pushing the wheel chair. An older man down the street deflects it with his foot, but it keeps on rolling, it reminds of the beginning of Close-Up but it's much faster and I'm running down the hill and I grab it then I'm running up the hill and give it back to the man, it happens instinctively and there are Shukrans and Mahrabas and Bonne Nuits exchanged and then I'm walking again, thinking about how alcohol inscribes on the body
I had a dream this morning but I've forgotten it and I wake up and see a text from H asking how Tangier is and am reminded of another dream I had recently, that I can't forget. There was some sort of a heist happening, with H, myself, and others who were once familiar and are now blurred faces, and there were guns and gunshots, and I feel like we were stealing art but that could be a graft onto the projection. There was crossfire and H got killed and I had to sit with it for so long in the dreamtime and I was thinking about the texts I couldn't make, the phone calls never to come, the games of 2k, Madden, FIFA never to be played, and it was an agonizing dream. I woke up, disturbed, and texted him, not about the dream, but to see how he's doing. The dream felt evil, I didn't want to tell him I had a dream where he died.
I woke up this morning to a series of nothings. The toilet didn't work properly, then a call from my Airbnb host, D, because the other french guy staying here has been complaining about things - things that I would have complaints about were I in the business of complaining - like the toilet and how the keys to our rooms only work while locking the door from the inside and not the outside and she's in a different city and doesn't want to come back just for this. I ate dried fruits and nuts and walked around the terrace. The French guy wears his shoes in the apartment, into the bathroom, and it bothers me. I read Blanchot's chapter about the diary and this sentence lead to the previous sentences: "Someone does nothing in his life but writes that he does nothing, and there, all of a sudden, something is done".
I read more words and the words become sentences and the sentences become ideas and the ideas become surfaces and I think about what C wrote in his last blog: "Does anyone know how a day turns into a life?" I think about the "Every day is a lifetime" dean blunt interview and how I'm overdue on shaving my head. I read more words and the words become sentences and I rewrite the sentences and they become my ideas and my surfaces: One writes to save the days, but one entrusts one's salvation to writing, which changes the day. Finally, then, one has neither lived nor written, a double failure from which the diary wins its tension and its gravitas. The diary is linked to the strange conviction that one can observe oneself and that one must know oneself. But Socrates did not write.
For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself. For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself. For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.
A, An, The - E tells me I've been writing articles and I don't disagree. S texted me after reading that J and E asked who B was, saying that he was didn't expect me to turn his texts into a post, and I reply that I have so little going as for a social life right now that any Event almost always has to come through the screen. Sure there are the nothing events, I had a schwarma down by the marina and there were stray cats brushing up against my legs, and then I wandered, I took photographs, I walked into a mall thinking about shutting shit down and telling every girl she's the one for me but nothing was happening in there, I took an escalator up to the food court, took a peek, then went back out onto the street, eventually finding a fancy cafe where I got gazpacho, a cappuchino, and a slice of raspberry pie. I transcribed texts that N had sent me about arche writing, Twombly, arabesques, digital work vs. inkjet prints, as an exercise to meditate on them which led me to Sharjah - seeing works by Rafa al-Nasiri and of the Hurufiyya movement - in response to Twombly's arabesque scrawls of Salalah. I leave, I wander into a bookstore, the selection of books and magazines across languages is great, I don't buy anything because of space and I don't want to buy a relatively expensive book I'll have to leave behind somewhere, but there are semiotexte(s) and old bidouns, I see names before they were Names, I find books of relative intriuge, but I'm not sure any of them are exactly the book I'm looking for, so I don't make a purchase. I ask if they have Mohagegh's Omnicide II because they have a book called "Manual for a Future Desert" with an essay of his in it, and I'm close to buying it, but the aforementioned issues weigh me down too much, and they don't have Omnicide II so I leave, I need to take a get back to my place and take a shit.
M wrote about telling E that there's a lot he doesn't write about - shitting is part of this, none of us have written about shitting. And C's the only one who's written about masturbation11. La Cote Basque begins with cowboys talking about how they masturbate in the morning in order to "start their hearts", in order to live, then proceeds into the wealthy patrons of the restaurant masturbating gossip in order to live. These things - I've been calling it "a practice", "practicing", when I talk to T, a name that struggles to stick, but helps me reframe what I'm doing because this isn't exactly a blog (reminder to start working on footnotes) and by eschewing the dates and the numbers, it isn't what Blanchot would call a diary, which "must respect the calendar. That is the pact it signs. The calendar is its demon, inspirer, composer, provocateur, and guardian." There is only this verticality which isn't temporality - but these things, are starting to turn into articles of sorts, I realize it as I reference a pdf comparing Capote to Toulouse-Lautrec, because the events of my day are often within the text and while I can just write and write and write, to reference and to research ruptures this flow of writing, as fruitful as those actions can be, and it becomes less like a freestyle, though I can certainly still punch in and get my flow back. I spent over an hour yesterday listening to different OT7Quanny features and leaks, thinking of how he just mumbles if he fucks up a bar, and then restarts it at the next one. I remember when YN Jay did this in late 2020 and I knew it'd be picked up by other rappers - Sada Baby did it in 2021, but this is the best version I've heard of it yet. In the Dean Blunt "Every Day Is A Lifetime" interview he talked about how rappers have started calling themselves Artists, the capitalism reasons for that, Basquiat and such and such. Big GLTAOW and Shawny Binladen recently dropped this video where they're in the Louvre after it's closed, dancing, making a video in front of the paintings.
As I'm writing this I can hear the French man taking a piss. He has a weak stream. While I was in the bookstore I also flipped through Hatred of Capitalism and a book called "Hotel Theory Reader" which I wanted to buy, but I knew it wouldn't be the book I wanted it to be. I flipped past a Chris Krauss essay where she talked about how she wanted to be famous in the art world in the 90s, leading up to when she wrote "I Love Dick". That was the only part I remember, that my vision and my memory latched onto. In a recent Art Magazine diary from Clout Art Fair, the writer chronicles a moment with two gallerists and a collector in which it's agreed that the reputation of being ambitious is the worst kind. The most interesting part of that paragraph is that the writer is from Montana and her ambition is incredibly well-known and accepted, but she's not an arts reporter, as she lets you know in the first paragraph, and one of the gallerists is her client.
I want to return to shitting and masturbation, but the only things I really feel like baring at this moment are masturbating to a passage from 'Within A Budding Grove' when I was 18 and in India and there was so much erotic tension in Albertine going up to the hotel room that I didn't even get to the part where nothing happened but put the book down and let my imagination take over, and looking at an image of Toulouse-Lautrec's La Blanchisseuse, which is certainly an erotic enough of an image to masturbate to. I read a Slate France article about how Gossip Girl is like Proust, I think about how Homi K. Bha Bha's son directed episodes of the new Gossip Girl, I think about how I characterized Picasso as painting with his dick, I didn't write all of this down, I only used the word 'masturbatory', but I really meant that he was masturbating all over the canvas, and people love to talk about how he wasn't fucking when he was in his most prolific painting periods - which reminds me of a Quanny bar about how pussy feels good, but chasing money feels better. It's a common thread, Quanny recycles bars in a way that I've never heard before: "Imma shoot this bitch until it got [insert basketball player who's jersey number is zero] in it" and "If you put money over bitches OK OK that's the right movement". My favorite is when he talks about his name, when cops ask him for it: "cops ask me my name i tell them idk (ad-lib: I DON'T KNOW MY NAME)" "cops ask me what's my name I told em plead the fifth" "cops ask me what's my name I told em eat a dick", and there's even more variations: "I went out of town and changed my name, we got that smack running (yeah I don't know my name)"
I pause to take a piss as I mull over whether and where to stop. This question of a stopping point is probably the central focus of the white space studies - I think about how M will have a canvas and only do one or two things to it in a day, whereas I busy myself with work every day. I tell myself I'll approach the stop soon, I know what the last points are, after that I'll go back to El Morocco Club and see what turns up out of a night there. That's why they gave me the drink on the house at the end, to bring me back. But in any case, right before I went to take a piss I opened up Krebber's Painting is Forever interview, which I had annotated earlier, thinking about what he calls "accidents": "When something doesn't work, when you just can't get something right, no matter how hard you try. You can't get through a thought or turn a corner. I now call that an accident, if indeed it doesn't work". I did the watercolors of White Space Study No. 3 in the moments before going to bed last night. It took a couple minutes, then I took a photograph in the morning, then I played with it digitally and made things that I didn't like for 45 minutes before a few clicks made the end result, a piece which would take 5-10 minutes total if I were to end it as an inkjet print, less if it only exists digitally, but of course there's all the Life and Life's Minutes around and leading up to those minutes.
The French Guy didn't flush the toilet. I think about spraying my piss all over the bathroom, making a mess of the place, for him to come back to later, because I'm annoyed by his shoes in the bathroom and how he plays the harmonica and how he doesn't flush the fucking toilet. But I don't. I recall a conversation I had with S about how people in New York really want to act a certain way, many act insane, because it's generally permissible to do so, with limits of course, it'll create gossip and fray social relations to a degree to where certain people can't be in the same room as others, but it's just the way things happen. I'd talked about how I could easily act like a psychopath in certain situations, but I don't, I don't really have an interest in "acting" vs. "being". I prepare myself for the bar as I look at the Blanchot chapter I'm leaving behind. I look up a picture of him. French ass motherfucker.
Nauseous, i went to sleep nauseous, i woke up nauseuous, i still am nauseous, last night i ate lamb but there was too much noise, they were doing the thing where a bar plays music at the volume level of a club and there's nowhere to dance and people are yelling just to talk, so i went to the 5 star hotel and figured their bar would be quieter and it was, there was nobody there, so i went past the bar and sat by the pool of the 5 star hotel, on that walk they have all these prints on the walls of people who've stayed at the hotel - leonardo dicaprio, yves saint laurent, kenzo, jean claude van damme, arielle dombasle, francis ford coppola - and then i sat by the pool and there was no one else out there, i thought about amalia ulman and posturing like i was staying there while texting B about Middle Eastern Art Magazine, scenes, funds, and then my mind drifted to whether racist shitcoin is as haram as oil money or arms money, metaphysical money vs. physical money, there's an ice cream store in tivoli, and i feel like vomiting as i vomit words, and after writing about shitting i found myself shitting sickness, shitty sickboy MASK UP "GO DUMB LICK MUSIC", yes there are so many worlds, there is so much to do, and i will do nothing today, i will do nothing today and i will learn from it, i will lie fallow for the future days, i won't do nothing and learn from it because learning means i'm doing something, i will just do nothing, i will simply do nothing, i will do nothing, i will do nothing, i will do nothing
I failed at doing nothing, it was good to fail, and now I'm enacting my failure. I lazily rewatched Irma Vep and there's a part where Maggie Cheung is talking to a journalist and the journalist is criticizing Rene Vidal's films as masturbatory, that they're only for him and not for the public, amd I thought about what I wanted and then I ended up reading PDFs and reading news about Africa, there was a coup yesterday in Niger, and this one's more important than all the other coups for the Western media because the U.S. has military interests in Niger because there's uranium in Niger, and then I read about Senegal, the opposition leader getting jailed, and the young men who are still attempting to make it to the Canary Islands and are still dying, and the thing about Africa is there are so many languages and so many ethnic groups that it makes India look like a homogenized country, I found a tweet or X-post or whatever they're supposed to be called now asking why there aren't women from Togo on Twitter / X and the replies were full of people talking about how expensive data is in Togo, and there's a Quanny line "You ain't got no fucking guap, nigga you a bozo" and the Bozo are a people in Mali, on the Niger river, and there are more than 30 national languages in Benin and when I was in Bilbao, I walked past a group of African men and it sounded like they were speaking Wolof and I wondered how they got there. I read an Art Journal pdf from before I was born, on the global and local in relation to Said's Orientalism and art practices from different parts of the world, where Enwezor asks "And where exactly is home for these people? And where home has become unimaginable except in old, tattered black-and-white photographs, what set of imperatives within the nascent narratives of crossing, settling, dwelling, and transterritorialization do such immigrants conjure up to locate themselves in the new land and to stitch the unruly patterns of home? How do they accommodate the locations of departure and arrival?" and later on the street I saw a fake Gucci backpack that read: "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WHO ALL THIS FUTURE?" and in between those events I ate dinner and sat in the loudest silence and these Berber musicians were making their rounds through the streets it's like the showtime boys on the train but different but the same, I thought about the universality of this homelessness and I thought about what I want, realized what it is I want which is a sense of being at home, of course there's the Novalis "Philosophy is really homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home" thing as I think about why art, why writing, why what I've done as the antidote towards this problem of homelessness, my parents responded to this homelessness by migrating and making a new home, in the process they ran away from so much and in the new home was a home where I could never be home and now I sit in Tangier, tired, exhausted, waiting for the next day of life, to search for home again
When a well runs dry it sounds like thirst // Within every well is an ocean, an enclosed desert
"Only the work matters, the affirmation that is in the work, the poem in its compressed singularity, the painting in its own space. Only the work matters, but finally the work is there only to lead to the quest for the work; the work is the impulse that carries us toward the pure point of inspiration from which it comes and which it seems it can reach only by disappearing."
Approaching silence,,, how to enclose this emptiness?
The machine is changing. It will never remain static, there are a number of lines that changed it, perhaps the ones about searching for a home still weighing in my mind. The French man left, that was what I wanted to start with, the French man left and I finished the Blanchot, the Blanchot finished with Un coup de des, and it was familiar territory, and then it really finished with a discussion of the public:
"There was once a time when the writer, like the artist, had to do with glory. Glorification was his work, glory was the gift he gave and received. Glory, in the ancient sense, is the shining forth of presence (sacred or sovereign). To glorify, Rilke says, does not mean to make known; glory is the manifestation of being that goes forward in its magnificence of being, freed from what hides it, established in the truth of its revealed presence."
"The act of publishing - publication - becomes the essential thing. We can take this in an obvious sense: the writer is known by the public, he is reputable, he seeks to be valued, because he needs what value is, money. But what awakens the public, what generates value? Publicity. Publicity itself becomes an art, it is the art of all arts, it is what is most important, since it determines the power that determines all the rest."
"To publish is not to cause oneself to be read, or to offer anything at all to be read. What is public does not exactly need to be read; it is already known beforehand, with a knowledge that knows everything and wants to know nothing."
"It is against an indefinite and incessant language - without beginning and without end, against it but also with its help - that the author expresses himself. It is against public interest, against inattentive, vague, universal, and omniscient curiosity, that the reader comes to read, emerging with difficulty from this first reading, a reader who before reading has already read: reading against it but still through it. The reader and author participate, one in a neutral understanding, the other in a neutral language, which they want to suspend for an instant so it may give way to an expression that is better understood."
"The extraordinary turmoil that causes the writer to publish before writing, that causes the public to form and transmit what it does not understand, the critic to judge and define what he does not read, and the reader, finally, to have to read what is not yet written - this movement that confuses, by anticipating them each time, all the various moments of the work's formation, also gathers them together in the search for a new unity. Thus the richness and poverty, the pride and humility, the extreme disclosure and the extreme solitude of our literary work, which has at least the merit of desiring neither power, nor glory."
Sometimes I feel I quote too much, other times I feel as though there's no other way forward. There are obvious threads to the words above, that will remain unwoven for the time being. After the Blanchot, I started Irit Rogoff's Terra Inferma, I remember talking about it in a dream this morning. Yesterday the French man left and D came back and she cooked dinner and invited me as Moroccans do and talked badly about the French man for being French and said she didn't mean to be racist but that she wouldn't accept French guests in the future and she struggled to understand why I didn't speak English with an accent and asked what Bollywood actors I liked and I said Shah Rukh Khan because I didn't want to get into it really and she said they have two TV channels for Bollywood movies in Morocco and that they like them a lot here. I've been thinking about Twombly's first interview with David Sylvester and how insistent he was on letting Sylvester and "the public" know about the A in Iliam and how it was intention and how it was for Achilles and how nobody said anything. The A in Iliam is in Philadelphia and I've spent the last two days thinking about Hopoutblick's tape "Don't Believe the Rumors" where he claims that he's being framed for the murders that he's charged with, the narrative of the album is that he's innocent but also that his gang drops bodies - the beats and samples are great: Sweet dreams - beyonce, Juicy, Law and Order, Power, a Bollywood song that I can't place. At one point Blick makes a Brian Dawkins reference which is crazy to me because he would've been like 6 when Dawkins retired. My beard makes me feel older than I am, because I'm starting to feel how others see me. I watched Daughers of the Dust and Guimba the Tyrant, which is floating around with all the above mixed with a Skrilla leak, Skrilla videos, and this article called "Vodou: The Crisis of Possession" that Z posted. Everything only seems to moving on the surface for me, things linking, but without the words underneath. Rogoff starts the first chapter of Terra Infirma with a discussion of the question "Where do I belong?" characterizing it as "one of those misguided questions which nevertheless serve a useful purpose, for while it may naively assume that there might conceivably be some coherent site of absolute belonging, it also floats the constant presence of a politics of location in the making" which I have been sitting with. Mainly the middle part, the naive assumption that there might be some coherent site of absolute belonging. A few days ago I was thinking about New York City as unstable ground, and how foolish it would be to try to build a home there, or rather to build a home on unstable ground. But where is the ground stable
food poisioned again. shit got me fucked up, toilet in the middle of the night, and then i collapsed on my bed. the door to my room always gets blown open by the wind, i stopped bothering to close it but in the morning, early in the morning, after the first call to prayer, i heard people come into the apartment, and someone kept shutting my door whenever the wind would blow it open. exhausted, i didn't really give a fuck. around noon i got up to leave my room and saw that they'd figured out a situation to make the door close - a cloth over the top. i opened the door to a drug den, the windows were all blocked off, 3 men on the couches, 1 girl asleep on another couch, my airbnb host sleeping in her room - i was greeted with the energy of guys who'd been up doing coke all night long. they asked where i was from and when i said india one started singing "chal chaiya chaiya" - this was A. Later A2 would call him a devil and "I" would agree, but they all had nicknames - A was "Pachini", A2 was "Kramer", "I" was "thefuck", and when they asked for one for me, I thought about it then told them "steez" a nickname from early highschool, that later morphed into "swami steez" and "salvia steez". I sat on the couch with them, we talked, music videos played: Drake, French Montana, The Weeknd, Chris Brown, Beyonce, Rihanna, some Algerian drill. Kramer gave me some hash and Pachini gave me his whatsapp and I thought about the option being presented in front of me - to lose myself in a city. Pachini talked the most, he spoke English the best and he did the most coke, they finished their whole bag and a bottle of vodka before leaving for the beach. Kramer called in sick from work. He said it was only the 2nd time in 5 years he had called in sick. Pachini talked about how the ideal life would be to only live at night, partying, doing cocaine, fucking girls - he told me he could show me where to find the cheap girls, that there was a difference between girls who want to be fucked by a guy just for a night and "bitches" - I wasn't too sure what he meant by this. He told me he was 36, divorced, with two children, he seemed like a complicated man and his face must've been so numb. he asked how much cocaine costs in new york, I told him about 1000 dirham for a gram and he was astounded, because "America is so close to Mexico" and then said "so it must be pure right" and I tried to explain no, I tried to explain fentanyl and dirty drugs, I tried to explain the cartels, I tried to explain cheap meth-y blow that will leave you tweaking and sniffing until the bag is gone, I tried to explain but there's only so much you can explain to a coked up Moroccan man when it's 1pm and the light trickling in makes it still look like dawn.
He was telling me to ask him anything and I remember asking him what his favorite place in Tangier was, and he said "my house, home, home is my favorite place". I returned to Rogoff, apparently there was a lot of luggage art being made in the 90s, it was the diaspora poetry of its time or whatever, where she quotes someone named Rosalyn Marangoly George: "the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the experience of 'homelessness' which is compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material". I google George - she studied in Delhi, then Northeastern, then Brown, then she taught, she wrote books and essays, and she died 10 years ago. I look at my suitcase on the groud and I look at the mess of my room - if anything I always thought of the rooms as the metaphor, how there's been so many of them, even just this year. I used to tell people "New York City is a city of rooms" but really it's a world full of rooms, there are different ways to find yourself in them, this morning the one outside my door transformed, and now it's returned, it is a different room
I remembered my dream from last night or this morning. The sun was setting on the sea and the moon was full. Light was refracting off the sea, the sun, the moon, the world was this incalculable prism, it could not be captured by image, by geometry, by text, even by sound.
Finding a good track is much easier on Soundcloud than Ableton. I don't think I'm really making music so much as playing a game of combinations - x stock instruments, y stock plug-ins, z possible arrangements, so on and so on. When you find a good track it's addictive, you want to keep searching, but how to search, does one keep trying to walk the same path despite having forgotten the way, does one try to reach a site equidistant to one that's already been reached. I'm getting closer to what I want, but also further than what I want, it's a good thing, to manage and watch and hear this flow.
On the train to Fez - it's a good place to think, the location of non-location, with much more space than a bus or a train. And I think it's good I left Tangier, there was a sense of stuck-ness there that I could feel creeping in, the type of city that traps a person there who doesn't have much reason to leave, its gravity almost pulled me into its vortex. As I do when I have no place to go, I checked the hotel and airbnb prices of different places to figure out where to go, opting for the cheapest option. It doesn't make much of a difference, as I'll still almost certainly pass through Rabat, Casablanca, and Marrakech, but it's a process that's worked well enough for 7 years now. Last night I told D my age and she was surprised I was younger than her - she was 28, her friend was 32. We talked more, she works as an agent for artists, contacting galleries trying to secure them exhibitions, but it's largely fruitless efforts, and she doesn't feel accepted in the Moroccan Art World because she doesn't come from money. She's studying German in the hopes to study at a university there and then find whatever opportunities are there afterwards. She said if I wanted to come back to Tangier she'd rent the room for me in cash for cheaper. It's an interesting proposition that also reminds me that I have more credit than I do cash.
While looking through the airbnb listings I realized it's time for me to take Work more seriously - not My Work, which doesn't bring me any money really, but Work, the type that puts dollars in your bank account. I was texting P about West Africa, the political instability there, what could possibly happen, and also thought about insurance policies in the process, echoes of Ilana Gaynor's work in the back of my head, and thought about the idea of working in finance, but also how unhireable of a resume I have and how much I don't give a shit about networking for a job even though that's how it works. I tell P about how Ouagadougou has been one of my favorite city names since I was 9, about the film festival there and the Bamako Photo Biennial, and reflect on the idea of a thing vs. the actuality of it, on my ideas of how things could be, should be, and the actualities that I'm facing. S got his fintech job through B and she'd probably be a good person to talk to about how to figure out the following moves - I've been telling myself I'm going to learn to code and get a tech job for the last two years and though I can do a few different things with code now, enough to put together a decent portfolio in a month or so, I have no interest in working in tech. Part of this comes from seeing "Tech/VC Twitter", having been interested in it as a social vector which requires the total commitment of the self in the same way that Art does - "Rahul Ligma" emerged by going viral for pretending to have been a laid-off twitter employee, then built his following in those spheres, and now he has some sort of AI start-up. His IG bio is a Yeat lyric and he tweets about Power and Alexander the Great and I suppose it's not so much this thirst for power that I find really annoying, but the ways in which this sort of dominant techbro archetype goes about it. Part of it comes back into "tech bro art" and feedback loops between life and art and work is a part of life, and I don't really want "Tech" to trickle into what I make, write, and so on. I think understanding tech and coding and so on is important on a Kittler type level, but there's also only so much one can do on their own. I want to go to India where I can afford to hire a private tutor, bloom two sigma max blah blah blah blah blah, you really feel like an idiot when you can only speak English in other countries.
And the desire to go back to India's been pretty strong lately, I imagine I'll be there sometime in September or October at the latest, though I'm not sure for how long, because I'd like to make it back to the U.S. by the end of the year, at least for a short amount of time. But it is the best place for me to learn - distraction-free, minimal expenses, access to things, no unneccessary movements. As much as I do "Work" right now, it's haphazard, unstructured, open to a significant amount of randomness, but I wonder what things would be like if I were to recalibrate how I operate, create structures for the randomness to operate within rather than allowing to take me wherever. There's much to figure out, which is good. There is a transfer approaching and what I really want right now is a long train ride, to sit in this location of non-location for days. I see that there's a Bar Italia show in New York in December and I decide to buy a ticket, though I've bought plenty of tickets for shows I never ended up going to. I text H from the train about his first week of medical school, how much Work it is, how much Work there is to be done - it's a good reminder of how immigrants Work, how the children of immigrants Work, and why that is. I read the Carriere that S2 recommended me and mull over the line "I thought the only thing worth accomplishing in life was to be a great artist — and I hated myself, because in the best of cases I’d be a minor one", thinking about the doctor who read Urdu poetry at H and A's wedding, prefacing it by saying that a translation couldn't do it justice, and the doctor who translated Darwish's poems into English, and words I said in the first "proper" film I made accompanying the image of a bridge my thatha had worked on as a civil engineer - something along the lines of how there was a time when many bridges were being built and there was a time when many films were being made, that those times were passed, that my film would only exist in the margins of cinema, just as the bridge only exists in the margins of bridges, that I was fine with that. Carriere talks about copying passages into his notebook, about the importance of the physical vs. the digital when it comes to maintaining an archive of one's writing, at least of printing what one deems to be important, and I think of the notebooks full of quotes sitting in the storage unit I share with C and K, how I can't read them right now and I've been wishing I could, and now my mind moves to how nice it is to have dinner with your friends, as I wonder when that'll happen next, after meal alone after meal alone.
Earlier I was thinking about ghosts, of how I live like one, and the seeds of desire to change this. I reactivated Instagram and the week since doing so is almost past. I can post what I need to and then disappear again. It's nice, not being online. It's nice to see your friends' posts, but there's so much, there really is so much, and it feels so tethering, to have your identity and whatnot squished onto this metaphysical plane. I wonder how long it'll be. The train approaches the station, and my location of non-location comes to an end.
A phrase like 'a new leaf' is rarely heard in the desert. I like it when your tummy rumbles
like the stupidest of intimacies, a Penelope dancing. Now the tumescent shores of Gibralter shed tears:
You've heard it all before but you love to hear it again that silly old tune
S. Paul's Dinner Poems touches on the banal and fantastic, at once. Walking around Fez's Medina at dinnertime, the poet's flow state resulted in the now infamous book of verses. The space between fiction and the Real is where Paul toggles with language, ultimately churning out lucid ruminations on man and urbanity. Writing of the city's "luminous humidity" and "the paper-littered arches of the express tracks," he illuminates the everyday. Trotting through the alleys of Fez, Paul transforms them into fantastical places and residues from memories of Tangier and elsewhere. What undulates beneath, and occasionally peeks out its head, is the spirit of love here. Per Paul, "everywhere love is breathing draftily." He paints, perhaps, the perfect version of a Morocco kind of love in "Steps" - the poem's final stanza reading: oh god it's wonderful to get out of bed // and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much // So that is what we are left with. Love and Fez. In all of its licentiousness, the city inevitably slouches toward this fate: eros. See the big red heart plastered across T-shirts and coffee mugs, sandwiched between "I" and "Fez" the heart speaks to an essential truth - this is a place motivated by desire.
I wish it was funnier to post a picture of the pool of a 5 star hotel you didn't stay at while sitting on the floor of a room in an old house all night long because you realized there were bed bugs in the bed. It's an amusing situation, easily resolvable - wait until dawn, walk to the taxis, take one away from the medina to the new part of the city with nicer, modern hotels, walk into a hotel, they tell you they're all booked up, walk to another hotel, they tell you to wait for an hour and they'll have a room ready for you, it's 8am at this point, you pull the blackout curtains closed, you sleep for a few hours, take a shower, send your clothes for dry cleaning to get rid of the bed bug risk, walk around Fez, go to McDonald's and eat.
Double filet o fish. They don't have that in America. McFizz Mojito. They don't have that in America. But they never had the Cardi B and Offset Meal here.
I told M that I was waiting for a sign from God and I meant it
On the train to Rabat, I sit across from a man named O. I say Salaam Alaykum, then that I don't speak Arabic, but his English is good. He's from Niger, I ask him about what is not a war but could be a war, right now it's something else and he says "we will see" but doesn't seem too bothered - life will go on. He tells me has a family - a wife and 4 kids - and he's working hard right now because he wants a second wife. He says "that's the reality there. Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it".
This morning I watched a vlog of a gallery opening that happened last night. The show was called War and I read the "press release" and had a real adverse reaction to it because white people and bad writing and general idiocy, but you're not supposed to critique the project space ran by white liberal arts school kids from the lens of Empire or geopolitics or race or anything like that, really you're not supposed to critique it at all. The vlog wasn't good but it's interesting as a means of writing that is so obtrusive compared to text, where you have your night and there's no obtrusive device letting people know what is happening is being prostheticized. I saw T, who clearly didn't want to be on camera, later giving a forced critique of the internet film event, and I saw J in his Napoli hat and Heidegger shirt smoking a cigarette and not saying words. I also saw Yo Chill, but the vlogger didn't know who he was, the camera and the action does nothing to call attention to him because he's not deemed as an "important person" even though he's created one of the most important internet film archives of the last 10 years. I remind myself to text J2 about this later because he's one of the few who gets it (insert Yo Chill footnote). It reminds me of when C appeared next to a well-known art critic in a photo from a diary in an Art Magazine but despite his internet clout, he isn't mentioned by name in the caption because the diarist probably has no idea who he is.
"Paul didn't write to create a body of work, but to keep in contact with the churches he founded."
Last night I was texting T about the Carrere and the blend of writing styles (autobiography, history, essays) that it presents - he says we need a list of books similar in form, and I wonder how many similar books exist. I see that Carrere sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the book according to The Guardian and think about the French reality of being a writer vs. the American reality of being a writer, like the British reality of being a musician vs. the American reality of being a musician. I texted T about my problem of reading to write, of wanting to read so much in order to have it impact what I write next, the problem of this when I constantly put hundreds of pages of words in between myself and the words I need to write, the attempt I need to make, and where this need stems from. Essay comes from "to attempt", it's an etymology that has been broken down many times. T notices that there are more blogs added to the top, we start talking about email correspondence as a form, the Romanticism that accompanies it, Diderot's letters to Sophie Volland, and now I'm reminded of love letters and prayers and the importance of them.
"You can’t say that the Romans invented globalization, because it already existed under Alexander’s empire, but they brought it to a point of perfection that lasted for five centuries. It’s like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, shopping malls, and Apple Stores today: wherever you go, you find the same thing. Of course, there are grouches who deplore this cultural and political imperialism, but all in all most people are happy to live in a pacified world where you can move around freely, where you’re never out of your element, where wars are fought by professional soldiers on the distant borders of the Empire and have no more repercussions on people’s lives than the festivities and celebrations that mark their victories."
"Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it" - how does this adjustment happen, and what should it be? The train is very hot, the air conditioning is broken, and it's 110 degrees outside which doesn't translate directly to inside but I am sweating and waving two cards from Galerie Chantal Crousel - one with a list of names, another with a photograph of a dead elk - to cool myself. There are many people yelling and arguing, I don't know about what. A baby cries, it's all just rendered into a soundscape that I'm not recording. I wonder if my scribe app understands Arabic, but it's too late to pull it out. I wonder if there would've been air conditioning on an earlier train, but I wouldn't have met O on an earlier train. He asks me where I'm from and I say India. He says that's good, there are many Indians in Niamey and they're good people, they work hard, they contribute to the country. He works in agricultural engineering but he also has business ventures. He was in Fez for a religious piligrimmage. It's the second time he's been. Everywhere there is a different reality and you adjust to it. People move about the train and the baby cries even louder - I notice it's wearing a Mickey Mouse onesie.
"When visiting another city he made a habit of going to the synagogue on the day of the Sabbath. He doesn't know anyone, but he's not fazed, because synagogues are the same everywhere. A simple room, almost empty."
There is a hotel room waiting for me in Rabat. It will be cool inside, it will be close to the sea. I will escape the heat and these piercing baby screams.
I turned into a real eater in the Senegalese restaurant. One of the best meals of my life, it's amazing when that happens, when you're just eating and eating and not thinking about anything but how good the food you're eating is.
Then I walked a bit, sat down, drank some tea, and smoked a cigarette. Walked some more and returned to try to put an end to the hundreds of pages for a brief moment.
and I wish there were words but I'll find them later.
There was no beach, only rocky cliffs where men were fishing. The sky was grey, you were only just elsewhere, sipping tea, watching a cockroach crawl over the bread in disgust. You noticed more roaches on the countertop and realized you needed to leave
Dinner Poem:
They called it a margherita pizza but this is not New York City.
An ocean is a considerable distance even with all those networks, and the sauce was different, the crust was different the cheese was different, like how words and images are not a night, are not even a voice
like there are two cold slices not even worth heating up. Where was it? (the basil)
The nights and days have blurred in this hotel room on the avenue Al Atlas. Rabat's streets define a map of the world. You can walk from Togo to Jakarta. The museum of photography is fenced off by Napoli, Rome, and Accra. All of these streets, all of the place-names, and where does that place you? In this absence, where I'm trying to regain a sense of footing, of placement, of direction - and to turn that into Movement, into Motion.
This girl named E subscribed to my substack and from her doing that I was able to see her blog, where she tried (and often failed) to post a diary entry every day. It was like a laundry list most of the time, no details, few reflections, and the entries tended to be very short, but there'd be the occasional post that would reflect something different - her urban studies background, or her careerism, how she'd think about reaching out to people to do certain things, things that are relatively foreign to how I operate. I must've sent her traffic up quite a bit because after clicking through 30 or so, the blog had been set to private.
I met E through L who just announced that she's editing for this alt lit publication that publishes bad writing. I wonder why she's doing it, because I thought she had good sensibilities, and then I click through their recent writings until I find a sort of orientalist racist piece written by this downtown playright guy who was obsessed with me and would accost me and wrap me into conversations I didn't want to be in whenever I'd run into him. It was horrible, not just the orientalism, because as I read the Carrere he makes remarks about the Indians and their relation to the British, and how they are, and I can tolerate it with the quality of the writing, what more am I supposed to expect from an Old French Man, but this guy strikes me as barely literate, it's amazing that a place can publish this and even look themselves in the eye. I text T about this and about these sorts of scenes in general and we struggle to figure out people's rationale and I say that we probably understimate how thirsty for clout everyone is. Last night I sent him an excerpt from this journal article on publishing that was making the rounds on Twitter - I need to get off twitter and instagram again - about how writers have career ambition but not writing ambition. I went to a bookstore yesterday and in the front were the latest Prix Goncourts and Gallimards. It's a different culture than books in the Anglo world and this was also reflected by the English book section they had with the not-sally-rooney type covers. I texted S about this and then the conversation moved on to a masterpiece in Turkish literature with a controversial translation, monolingualism, heroin addicts, the idea of being a translator.
Two writing opportunties came up yesterday. N hit me up about doing a collaborative piece with him and Z that would be part of a show they're doing together in LA in October - I'm looking forward to it and already generating ideas, organic collaboration with friends, as it should be. The other I'm saying no to - R hit me up to do an 'artists in conversation' piece with a 40 year old british post-internet artist who now does crypto stuff and none of the work excites me and when he was younger I didn't give a fuck about art shit and now I look back on what he did that got buzz when I was in middle school and it does nothing for me. It'd be for a new publication they're starting - they described it as being about ~fashion, technology, and desire~ - but it's probably best to say no and I'm generally bad at saying no, but it'll be good to get better at it.
While drinking tea "Leanin" by Chief Keef starts playing in my head - the caffeine is such a rush, it's been days since I've had any and when you're not drinking or smoking or doing anything else you realize how potent a substance it is. My mind goes back to the silk road, cultural transformations, what caffeine provided to the British as it came from Asia, how it was introduced to India by the British, how this shapes the world today. Simple things to think about, while jotting down a list of things to do with deadlines, in order to orient myself for the near future. When I get back to my hotel room I play Leanin, then I play Haha then I play Haha (OG) which doesn't have autotune on Keef's vocals and sounds better. When I was younger I had a friend who was really into Bob Dylan and those collectors sets that have all the different versions of songs and didn't really get it, but through Keef I really do. I remember texting G about Broke Phone and how much of the song is just capturing the feeling of the studio at that moment, with Veeze and Lucki just whispering into the microphone. There's this loop of documentation turning into art, the studio being captured as a wave of information, reformatted, reworked, to convey something into different settings.
I've been thinking about Los Angeles lately, because of texting with N, but because I also went down a rabbit hole that started with early videos on Kreayshawn's Youtube channel, one of which cut Night bus by Burial with footage she'd shot in east oakland and the editing was incredible and then I thought of Archangel and the Ray J sample and was watched the Centerview video and thought of this vince staples interview (insert footnote about the other vince staples interview) where he talks about how Ray J had something to do with everything important, how he's banging blood in Centerview, and the cultural significance of For The Love of Ray J, which I'd never watched before. I texted the Night bus video to M talking about how there was a tweet a couple months ago about how Kreayshawn put 808 slides on Gucci Gucci years before UK Drill was a thing, and how the bigger thing I think about w/ Ray J is his influence on Burial and how that in turn influenced Kreayshawn and Lil B and Based God, which really is the bedrock of the internet.
It makes sense that Los Angeles continues on the West, on the Left. I watch the Centerview video again and then end up on this video of DJ Kay Slay in Compton and Watts and it's a documentation of cultural that is familiar via the distance of the internet, but utterly foreign in lived experience. The video's from 2010 and you're in a park in Southern California with hundreds of Bloods outside, most of which are wearing a Cincinatti Reds hat, while Kay Slay is in the mix wearing a Yankees hat, standing out as a New Yorker though the person behind the camera (Wack 100, now famous from podcasts about gang culture) assures him that he's good. People in the comments clown Kay Slay for looking scared and the video then cuts to them in front of the Nickerson community center with Jay Rock and Top Dawg and this is 2010 before TDE was anything to where it was today and Jay Rock was the biggest star of the label, Kendrick is seen walking in the background for two seconds with a Camcorder, and then you're in a venue with Ray J performing Centerview on stage with a bunch of bloods and he's flashing gang signs and it reminds me of the video of John Wall where he was high as fuck and threw up blood and then had to make an apology. California is so stange because in my mind I'm wondering "Is Carson really still like that now" because there was supposed to be an NFL stadium there but those plans fell through, and also because of gentrification and rising house prices, and also because if you look at the demographics there isn't an absurd poverty rate happening, but if you get on reddit and not a gang reddit but just regular reddit about people who are moving to california and looking for places that are affordable to raise their families, when people ask about Carson they're told that the important thing is the cross-streets because no one can speak for Carson as a whole.
Carson digression aside, I bingewatched the first season of For The Love of Ray J, this idea of what Carson is like underscoring one geography of LA in my mind, while viewing images of this beautiful mansion and these nice clubs and restaurants that he's taking the girls to. The show really impresses me, Ray J is an incredible performer, they build narratives and drama, it's great reality tv, but the cut scenes are also stunning. These little interstitial shots of the moon, the sun, palm trees, the house, and sometimes there's crazy cutting happening in these short little moments. The moon is always full in these shots, it's massive, shot with a telephoto lens, and it creates this total blurring of time where the dating show runs maybe two weeks or less, but it feels so much longer. There were 12 episodes, but really 11, because the finale had this pre-streaming structure where the 11th episode was just a recap of all the prior episodes - I'm assuming they aired it right before the 12th episode so that if people just wanted to tune in for the finale they could be informed on a version of what had happened already - 10 episodes, maybe 300 minutes of Events, condensed down into less than 60 minutes. The 'where are they now' impulse kicked in after - Ray J kept cheating on the girl who won because all she won was being Ray J's girlfriend and he must've told her I'm a star I'm going to cheat on you, and then it didn't work out, and she still works in Vegas now like she did in the show
I think back to the Vince Staples interview and the density of Ray J's life and how we get little pieces of him reflected through the TV show but there really is so much between that and Centerview and everything that happened after the show like Whitney Houston and Bobbi Kristina Brown's deaths and how the life you live shapes you as a person and what type of a person that's made him. In a sense, there's an urge to compare him in parallel to Kanye (and there's also the aspect of his music where people considered what he was doing derivative of Usher and R. Kelly vs. what Kanye's done with music) in the sense of being blessed with certain things in life and the need to have more, to aspire to Godliness. But there's also this fork of reality TV and how it's impacted their lives because I've never watched any Love and Hip-Hop and only caught the occasional Keeping Up With The Kardashians growing up, but "reality tv" has aged in a really interesting way given the internet blah blah blah, there's a reason there's an interest in Jersey Shore that you can see through Phreshboyswag cover art the same way Hi-C found UK Skins inspiring enough to make Skins222.
The idea of Based as the bedrock of the internet as we now know it seems relevant in the case of the internet film event happening and my grievances with it. J texted me from the opening at the east village artist-run-space-turned-cafe opening that garnered one of the most annoying reifications into magazine article that i've read and we went into it a little bit, and it overlaps with conversations I've had recently with T. J's talked about Matta-Clark's Food and the initial response of being pissed of wanting to do a similar remake but being beat to it because of access to money and space and I said that I felt similarly about the internet film event in the sense of money making it happen, but it being a worse version of what I had wanted to make in 2020/21, because of the gaps of knowledge about Lil B and the internet before 2017 in who's making it and how they're making it. I texted T about how E - who lies in the realm that is friendly acquaintance but certainly not friend - has changed significantly since I met her, about aforementioned clout drive that people have, but also how ego's get inflated and you can't tell how much of the ego inflation is an act and how much of it is real. S, the first post-pandemic young e-girl who would say that she was "just like Petra Cortright", tweeted "These Bitches My Sons" a couple days ago, and I thought about running into E at a party where she seemed to seriously be calling herself "the Gen Z Petra Cortright" and it comes into this issue I have where I think it's idiotic to name yourself the generational version of any artist. E's certainly smart and navigates the art world well selling her youth and everyone's read Reena Spaulings
I also texted T about how people still see cultural value in these things and how it is a situation where we were too close to what was going on at the time and know far more than anybody else because they weren't having certain DM's or know certain sources and that's probably the biggest issue I have with the internet film event, where nobody who's historicizing it is familiar with Kinet / Isiah Medina or Stiegler and neganthropology of cinema or can track the soundcloud tracks being used in it - E reposted an IG post that's part of the film event that had grafted Nettspend into it, which as a sense of novelty as he's the first white boy to pop off doing the xaviersobased sound (and on a level bigger than phreshboyswag because he's got the duwap feature), but it's also this trend of fetishizing white youth making black music that goes back to lil shine and before that matt ox and these texts in late 2020 / early 2021 about soundcloud idealism that I found incredibly inventive and generative at that moment for the novelty of it, but now it becomes a situation of what is actually being said here vs. signifiers being strewn all over the place.
But I also have no interest in wading into a public forum with these types of remarks right now. S2, who I met through A in the bay and is now part of an internet music/posting collective that's ostensibly post-crypto collective corporation that was post-"nazi groomer cult", reposted a substack article from some outside who's doing memetic analysis of these scenes for a much larger audience and making mistakes, just as one of the art magazine articles about the internet film event took something said to me one time in DMs and extrapolated it into a sort of axiom for the project. As I type all of this out, I question the purpose of doing so. I suppose I'm trying to get at the issue of how things are being written in the most sudden immediacy after they happen that there is no ability to digest the relevance or impact of what's happening. But again also this drive for clout, notoriety, validation, and how these values are built. When I skim through the IG stories of the substack article, I'm reminded of a conversation at Cozy Corner I had with F and L and E2 and K and S, and also another conversation with Z and A at a different bar on a different occasion, but the gist of both was that knowing so much about memetics, or Crypto-OS start-ups, or capital flows doesn't (necessarily) lead to good art, and of course that raises the issue of what good art is and now I think of an art magazine diary about the self-appointed critic dialogueing with the local-appointed doofus critic at the irish bar where the former says something about how "good art is good because it's good" but also how so much of the 20th century was an attempt to define criteria for good art given duchamp, etc etc blah blah blah
I refresh and see that the right column is more-or-less lined up with the left column and figure that this is a point to return back to a single flow. I do think this typing helps with moving through thoughts, which then in turn will help with the authorship of public texts that I've been putting off writing. I checked my credit card balance today which kicked me into a state of needing to get after it on many ends. In a sense the silence that I've afforded myself is coming to a close, and I think this is a good thing. I need to make plans to get to India, but I don't think I'll get stuck there, I'm confident I can make what needs to happen happen
N texts me about talking and it reminds me of points I never got to about For the Love of Ray J, about inscribing on a place and looking up all the clubs and restaurants he's taking the girls out to, of building a map of Los Angeles in my mind through those images and learning the place-names of closed restaurants and clubs of the past, off Hollywood, off Melrose, in Beverly Hills - it's nice that I haven't even really spent a week in Los Angeles because it lets this fantasy of a place mediated by images exist in my mind. the hallucination of Los Angeles, that's part of what Mulholland Drive was about, and tomorrow I'm going to go to Casablanca, the Casablanca in Morocco, not the Casablanca in the 1940s on movie sets and Van Nuys airport, like how I was on Rue de Togo, but not Togo, not Lomé. before I had tea, I ate at this place called "Saudi House", there was a shrine of MBS and nobody there spoke English or French which was different than all the other places here, but it's because it's ran by Saudi immigrants and it was fine arab food which just means lamb and rice that i paid too much for and they forgot to bring me water and a knife and took so long to get me my change and then the guy who could speak a little bit of english came at the end and asked where I was from and I said India and I said Chennai and he said "ah Cheng-hai, that's the capital right" and I thought he was an idiot for extending me this false courtesy and acting like he knew what he was talking about and I left without mentioning Riyadh or Jeddah, I left without asking questions
Casablanca has these little hallucinations, these little simulacra moments because they built Casablanca on movie sets in Los Angeles, the city of angels AKA the land of lived hallucinations, and then the people of Casablanca decided that they should imitate it. I had a steak sandwich at the Balthazar in Casablanca, thinking about the Balthazar in Manhattan, Durrell's Balthazar, and Au Hasard Balthazar before Balthazar Getty brings me back to Los Angeles via Lost Highway. There's also a Gatsby themed restaurant and a simulacra Rick's Cafe, both of which I only encountered through Google Maps. It isn't a city for tourists really, but tourists come because they know the name, the name is Famous, and then they arrive and the question emerges: what are they here to do?
You never really see Casablanca in Casablanca. You see the inside of a bar where you hear people talk and these conversations create images in the mind that are not on the screen and you build a feel for Casablanca, you Imagine it despite it never being Image. I tried to watch Season 2 of For the Love of Ray J, but I'm not going to make it to the end - the girls aren't as entertaining, the drama can't be manufactured, and the allure of place and cut sequences is winding down. The moon is always full in For the Love of Ray J, in both seasons, but once you're aware of this, it gets old, the temporal abberation gets old, because the absence of proper chronometry is a novelty..? No, that isn't it, because an abberation of what "should be" is not necessarily an absence, how would one create an absence of chronometry on a reality television show that moves chronologically — how would one create an absence?
The last three words of The Kingdom: I don't know. After I read them, Chief Keef played in my head. Done with the book, I read the entirety of that journal article about publishing from 1989 and it feels so "right now", which is why it circulated to me, but it's also because the word "clout" is used 3 times – the crux of the piece hits with the part about career ambition vs. literary ambition, but moreso with a quote from Cyril Connolly - "The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence" - with the following supposition that "the masterpiece, almost by definition, is written outside of this system". I Don't Know (snippet) dropped and it was only ever a snippet, but it dropped on youtube and was reuploaded onto soundcloud, and it had to be delivered like that because the system didn't allow for anything else
Every bar of the hook ends with "I Don't Know". Every bar of the verses is accompanied with these "baaang baaaang baaaang" sung auto-tuned adlibs. "In this critical model, as well as in many others such as the work of Gayatri Spivak for example, it is a complex attempt at self-location which is mobilized to counter the supposedly seamless and naturalized movement of knowledge across worlds of profound cultural difference, of the impossibility of 'knowing' or 'grasping'," says Rogoff, in the context of critiquing James Clifford's writing on travel and theory:
"If theories no longer totalize, they do travel. Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted. Theory travels; so do theorists. In the late twentieth century the producers and audiences of theory can no longer be situated in a more-or-Iess stable map of 'First World' and 'Third World' places"
I spent part of the day looking at apartments I can't afford. Carrere would get into all of his habits and routines in The Kingdom and I'd inevitably reflect on how I lacked that, and how when I've had it for a few months how fruitful those time periods are and I realize that I have trains and rooms to book because in less than 12 hours I have to leave this room.
I think about avoiding repeating myself. I think about the impending location of non-location. I think about emails and postcards, about to-do lists and deadlines, about the time, the night, the morning, and walking to the ocean and listening
There was an article in Wired about Milwaukee, how it's becoming a centerpoint of rap that goes viral and dominates TikTok, which is to say has a dominant presence in the virtual. I sent a screenshot of it to C where they say that "50K Stash" invented the point dance - it annoys me and I think about how rarely journalists get anything right and how this error even emerges from "RealStasher 50K" when a search engine gives you no rap results for "50k Stash". The article went on to mention that Certified Trapper has family origins in Cameroon and C wondered if they have podcasts there and I brought up the Internet in Togo and he found a podcast that was two Cameroonian women but they were speaking in English and that led me to wonder about the linguistics of podcasting, whether it's prevalence is unique to the Anglosphere, or if there are podcasts in China or Japan or Korea, but some sort of marketing information site gave me three free articles and the first article of these three told me that "after English, the top five most popular podcast languages were Spanish (18%), Portuguese (11%), Indonesian (7%) and German (3%)".
Indonesian being in the mix was fascinating, it makes you wonder what's going on over there to make them gravitate towards podcasts, but then you start to wonder what's going on over there. C mentions that they're the 4th largest country in the world by population but there's no real cultural exports besides Rich Chigga, and I rack my brain to think of if I know any Indonesian Artists and Gabber Modus Operandi pops into my mind even though I don't really bump them like that. I find an article where one of the GMO guys is talking about how they've never been to the UK and asking a friend what listening to Burial is like in the rain - "He said, 'it just makes sense,'" with the point being that listening to Gabber Modus Operandi in Bali "just makes sense", and this is true, when I was living in the bay and driving around in a rental, Oakland and Stockton rap just made sense, just like hearing Welcome To The Party when you were Outside in Brooklyn in 2019 just made sense, and I'm sure if you're riding in a Kia Soul on the lowends making that shit shake to Certified Trapper it just makes sense
"Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted."
There's an Ashley Bickerton quote in Terra Infirma, about how he was breakdancing for some kids in the Solomon Islands and then all of a sudden they broke out into better moves than him and this was without internet, without radio, without television - in his mind of course - that they were taking moves from the inner cities across the world and replicating them, reiterating them into something else. "I cannot help thinking that a bad New Jersey haircut can travel faster and with more precision than all of our best intentions". And this is obvious now, they make drill everywhere, but they only make Baile Funk in Brazil and it can be made in other places but does it just make sense - no, and this lack of sense transmutates it in such a way where it is quarantined as imitation, art that isn't innovative, and then it only exists for its local and there are very few who'd seek out Indonesian drill that replicates the 808 slides of UK Drill, but if the gamelan was introduced and different scales in the synths, then there could be something and maybe that is there, maybe I just can't find it. I used to wonder when Cloud Rap would catch on in India, but the country was so memetically fixated on Eminem for such a long time, part of this is the English, the enunciation, and a fixed idea of what rap should be because the only hierarchical, historicized rap was making it there for most of the 2010s - Biggie, Tupac, Eminem type discourse. There was the video of the kids in the village reading the Young Thug "If cops pull up I put that crack in my crack" line that went viral, but neither Young Thug flows nor synthy-production caught on in a meaningful way and despite Bloodz Boi tweeting that "every country has a bladee", I haven't found the Indian Bladee. When I was at a copy center last year, there was this kid behind me who I started talking to and he asked me if I had connections in the music industry because he loved Ariana Grande and Juice WRLD and Justin Bieber and dreamed of being a pop singer and I told him I didn't, but now if I'm ever back there again and I run into him I'll give him The Dare's number and tell him to chase his dreams
"We will never have, and in fact have never had any 'transfer' of pure signified - from one language to another, or within one language - which would be left virgin and intact by the signifying instrument or 'vehicle'."
When I was in India in 2016 I wore these APC selvedge jeans every day because raw denim was a "thing" at that time and I lost those jeans in Romania the next year, but everytime I'd ride a motorbike I wished I'd bought Balmain biker jeans instead, and every time I'd get a haircut the barbers wouldn't know how to do a fade or a taper, but when I returned 2 years later you started to see those things, the knockoff versions at least, and when I went back again, after another 2 years, these things were everywere, one day I was at the beach and I saw a kid in replica Jordan's and bootleg off-white and I saw another kid in a fake Balmain Paris t-shirt and I thought about how even though these aren't "real" they're still hard to find, you have to seek out what you want the imitation of if you're trying to Drip Different, and that this delineation of "authenticity" only exists in the first world and even then N cops shit off Panda Buy like his Gucci Hat and says it'd be stupid to buy a real gucci hat and it's different for things like Kiko Asics that are not generic designer where the fact of wearing them gets wrapped into some sort of irony/sincerity play with how you're speaking with your signifiers, but things travel, there are so many worlds, and this is why Bickerton played with logos and shipping crates and at the time there would've been nothing like it and the compositions are great but we're so oversaturated that while the work is cool it belongs in the late 80s, where we can never go back to, where it just makes sense
"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."
"Geography [is] the eye and the light of history... maps enable us to contemplate at home and right before our eyes things that are furthest away"
I have a tendency where I almost always know my location, the few past situations where I don't stand out in my memory. In Seattle on mushrooms, in a park in the hot sun without water, being led by this girl who had no clue where we were, time warping as we wandered around forevers with our thirst. In Paris, drunk, being led by a friend from bar to bar, I stole a menu from one and it's still in my storage unit, until the sun rose and we were by the Seine. In Los Angeles, in the car with G and S, then with N and Z and "I", going from bar to restaurant to party and so on, and this could happen again in London, or in Berlin, or the many other cities where I haven't spent much time and know people who could lead me around and your sense of a place is informed not by a map, but by a series of rooms and movements between those rooms, very different than how I move alone, where I'm constantly referencing where I need to be, if the taxi or bus or train is going in the right direction. I think about this tendency, this need-to-know, this need-for-location, and as I frame it like that it seems obvious enough the reason for it, a tether on the present for how untethered I feel in all of the other times, and then I think of Drake and In My Feelings, emotion as a location, or rather emotion writing itself as a dominant location, "Why You Gotta Fight With Me At Cheesecake You Know I Love To Go There" is about two emotions - fighting and love - competing for the dominant association of The Cheesecake Factory and that's Child's Play but still, there's also Marvin's Room and how that was a physical place but Drake made it metaphysical, and I think about tweeting screenshots of it in high school, acting fucked up about a bitch who didn't exist because I found it an amusing way to pass the time, but I also think about how I used to tweet so much because I never had a place to put certain words, certain things, like I used to post about music so much but now I just end up texting C or M or G or S2 about it mainly, this is what I was explaining to T on the walk from the chinese restaurant to the hookah bar, that what were once tweets become messages and all I can think of to post now are attempts to approach emptiness
I didn't realize I was late and then they wouldn't let me. It was annoying, it was sad, it was hot and the sun was beating down on me, but then I let go, I realized that it would give me a reason to come back. We'll always have Paris.
They told me I was supposed to have bought a ticket online. It reminded me that I still need to buy the Bar Italia ticket I said I bought. I wrote that I bought it to make myself buy it, because when I tried to buy it my connection on the train was too slow, it didn't go through, and then I put it on the list of the things to do that is infinite and it trickled down the ladder to the point of forgetting until M asked me what day I bought for and I realized that I'd forgotten.
While eating dinner I thought about The Book, how it seemed to hinge on Diderot creating the Encylopedia, that there were books before that but they were books that had Worlds within them, they didn't attempt to contain Everything. On the way there, the taxi driver was from Saudi Arabia and I asked Jeddah? Riyadh? Al-Madinah? and on the way back, the taxi driver asked me "Pakistan?" and then "Delhi? Shimla? Kerala?" after I told him India. There was a girl in the backseat, she said it was India's independence day yesterday.
I got back with a headache from the heat. I'm staying in a Riad in the medina because it was cheap. Supply and demand. While walking through the alleys I saw a sign with an arrow pointing to "Riad Reve d'Orient" and thought about the Orientalist Fantasy Cafe in Cordoba and how the contemporary tourist medina exists as an Orientalist Fantasy City for tourists to walk through while the 4 million residents of Marrakech live in new developments outside that no longer hold the medina as its center, and these new developments remind me of the more modern parts of French cities. I was texting S, wondering if there were still "real" medinas in the world - probably in Libya, maybe in Algeria, but not in Morocco, not in Tunisia. Of course, what does it mean to be "real"? One of my favorite Bladee lines is when he says "I wanna know what is real" on the Hannah Diamond Love Goes On remix. I was texting M2 about what Bladee listeners used to be like and there was that other day when a Joeyy song off Buyer's Remorse that was a Nike Just Do It ripoff autoplayed on soundcloud and then I was listening to Red Light thinking about being high and sad all the time, smoking two bowls then getting in the shower, staring out the little window, losing track of time with college boy on loop feeling numb/beverly hills and the idea of pulling up in a lexus w/ ur besties rolling off the ecstasy ends it just made sense and then the nostalgia for bad times ends
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
"I'm on South Street with all my chains on. Reach for this bitch you gon get rained on."
"Because, no matter how "fictional" the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory."
I decided to go to London a couple days ago. Morocco was hot, the Kiefer Finnegans Wake show was ending soon, I figured it was time, so I bought the ticket and then yesterday I landed. Met up with B, hit a pub, got a pint of guinness, then got Chinese food and had a Zywiec with it, I pronounced it correctly and thought about C and K and ridgewood. When I landed in London my main thought was "Why", like Why am i Here, and when I linked B he was like "so why are you here" and the rationale makes sense once you explain it but it's still like Why
My british twitter friend named M constantly deletes his accounts and disappears for periods of times then comes back, it's a whole thing that involves Rilke's "You Must Change Your Life", and he doesn't live in London he lives somewhere north, but yesterday he tweeted "India *Heart Emoji*" with a list of idealized things and I figured it would be funny to do the same with England, a sort of signal to the British mutuals that I'm around because I'm still a bit reserved, I realize, when it comes to reaching out to people, and I talk about this with Z later, after she dm's me and we get a pint and then another pint, and then go back to hers for saag paneer, and I post her on twitter and she's very pretty and people who follow both of us see it and react because this sphere goes back a few years, I think I first dm'd them both in 2020, but there's this added element of Z's ex, B, seeing it and I've talked to him a bit online and she said he really loves my work and that he's a posh Goldsmith grad who larps as a working class artist when both of his parents are well-off artists themselves and I have tentative plans to link him today. I remember him telling me that he showed my Substack to his boss at Carlos/Ishikawa which is funny because I'm not Issy Wood and nothing will really come of it, there are so many artists, so many systems, so many ways around how these things work, and I think about how I turned down doing the artist conversation with Ed Fornieles and his relation to the gallery, and also how it felt good to do that. I made the gallery rounds yesterday - White Cube for the Kiefer show (amazing, will go back, genuinely inspires ekphrasis because of how images really can't capture the scope of the work, but I'll probably actually buy the monograph when it comes out), Gagosian for the abstract painting survey (fine - the highs are really high cuz there's obv goated artists in the mix), Michael Werner for the Gaston Chaissac survey (good works, interesting approach to collage happening), Lisson for Devon Turnbull show (works didn't do anything for me, there was a room with music playing off tapes that was a whole event but you had to take your shoes off and it was a bunch of young british art people in horrible outfits so I didn't really feel like sticking around). It's crazy people write summaries like this and think of it as a critical practice *crying-laugh cat emoji*
When I was with Z there was inevitably some gossip about other twitter people - we talked about M2 and we talked about M and we talked about N and we talked about N2 and we talked about S and we talked about L and we talked about F, all of which then makes me conscious that once we both go our separate ways, we'll talk about each other, just as I'm doing now. She sent me home with The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt and Mottled Dawn by Manto. We talked about other things too, like versions of being Indian, arts & writing practices, ideas for her thesis, white people & asian fetishism, interracial dating, pronunciation of names, first names, middle names, last names, our parents, our siblings, our pasts, she's brilliant, a lovely conversationalist, and when it got to the hour that the tube is about to stop she walked me to the bus, we made plans for later, then the bus never came so I walked to the tube, I walked 11.4 miles yesterday and another mile between today between midnight and 1, and I slipped down the stairs and cracked my phone screen, but only so slightly in the bottom-right corner on the front, bottom-left on the back, the type of small crack that adds character that I'll wait to fix until much later, and I thought about Drake and the side girl w/ the 5s w/ the screen cracked and I thought about Portland and I thought about Black Portland, and then I got off the tube, I got on a bus, and I rode it a stop too far and did a little bit of extra walking. On my way to meeting Z, I got confused and thought I took the train a stop too far, but by the time I realized I didn't I was going the opposite direction and had to double back once again. I was late and she told me "You know you're not supposed to keep a lady waiting"
depressed but I'll be fine soon, I tell myself, and I tell Z, I'm texting him about Z2 because after my drunken typing last night, I woke up realizing how much of a mess the situation between her and B was, how much of a mess she was, how I was caught in the middle of that. I fell asleep around 3 and woke up around 7 and couldn't fall back to sleep. I laid in bed, texted T, and then laid in bed for a while, trying to sleep then accepting that it wouldn't happen. Read some. Went to a cafe, got an English Breakfast, came back, grabbed my charger, then met B at the London Bridge tube stopped. We walked from there to White Cube, saw the wake show again, then got a couple of glasses of wine after. The whole experience was pretty depressing, he just graduated from goldsmiths, privileged background, oblivious of it, didn't know who Krebber was and it's like idgaf if you're normal and don't know who Krebber is but if you're going to show me pictures of your parents wearing Gucci at Larry Gagosian's mansion then there's a certain level of rigor that I expect and it wasn't there, the whole thing made me sad, I went back to my bnb and texted Z and then we facetimed for a bit, talked about Ray J and other things, it was really nice to hear his voice again, be reminded of missing a friend who you love and really value.
Z left to go hoop and Z2 texted me to meet her at a pub with her friend S and I figured drinking would help me get over the bad interaction with B, but instead it amplified it, she wanted to know if we talked about her, which we barely did, at first he said "how's Z?" because he saw the posts on twitter and I said something about how she was doing fine or decent, but it wasn't that convincing because I'm bad at lying and the previous night we talked about too many things and she talked about how she's an alcoholic and has been drunk every night the past few months, things I wouldn't say are indicative of "doing great" and I didn't get into any of these things with B, but I'm sure he could somewhat tell from my tone and he left it at "haven't heard from her in some time, that's good to hear" and I regretted what I was in the middle of. It reminded me of when this one e-girl I was mutuals with started dm'ing with KirbLaGoop to make her ex who was a big fan of him jealous - I remember this happening on the feed through screenshots in 2020, I remember so much of everything, it'd be easier if I didn't, this is why I like drugs, because they're the best way of creating this forgetting, and I want them but I won't, I remind myself that it won't lead me to where I want to go
I drink with Z2 and S, hoping to forget, but instead it's that type of drinking where I keep drinking and don't even feel drunk, and Z2 and S somewhat increase my sadness, no fault of their own in particular, they're 21 year old Kings College girls talking about King College things and I'm old and wizened and had this gap in my life between 18-22 with occasional frat parties and a lot of isolation, and I'm better for it, it lead me to friends and people that I really love, but it came at a cost, and part of this cost is feeling extremely alienated at times like these. Z2 asks me about B and if we talked about her more and then asks if I'll hang out with him again for her and it becomes clear that she wants to use me to deal w/ her whole mental situation w/ B and the idea of seeing him again pains me deeply and I just keep drinking and she talks about more 21 year old things and S does too, and it goes on, and more alcohol doesn't fix anything for me.
On the train home she can clearly tell I'm not happy and she's also got a lot of shit going on I'm sure and I don't want to say anything that will hurt her because that's not the type of person I am and I think about if I were more a misogynist it would probably get me further with girls and she asks me something like if I hate her but I don't, I think of when Veeze said "I ain't got no hatred in my heart and I'm thankful for it", I really struggle to generate those thoughts, I always turn them back onto how they're "me things", which is what I dismiss this all as to her, then I go on my way. I hope she'll grow from all this, she's young, and I think the best in people, maybe I'm naive for that, but I move with an open heart and I have to
I wish I had pills on me but I don't. which is good, for the better. I text Z, fuck it we ball, life goes on, and it will, I'll move on worldweary with my shattered reassembled open heart
M text me a picture of me when I was in the 7th grade that was in the local newspaper. I'm in front of a map, wearing an aeropostale shirt, because I'd won the school geography bee and was going to the state bee and I placed 3rd in state that year which was a dissapointment. Every year my middle school held an assembly in front of the entire school for the top 10 of the school-wide bee and every year I won and it sucked because you're one of like 4 brown kids in a school of 600 and everyone thinks of you a certain way when really I liked looking at maps a lot and after looking at them I'd memorized what was on them. That's what happens now, the memory, the non-forgetting. I text M "ily bro" and I mean it. God I wish I could forget. and after typing that I realize the funniest part, my paati with dementia that my dad will inherit and I probably will too. eventually I'll forget, if I make it that long. I think about my paati in the new old people home with my thatha after my aunt tried to kill herself, and all the pain over there. next month I'll be there with them, they'll be happy for a moment, and then I'll leave again. everything just seems fucked and I tell myself again, life goes on, fuck it we ball, and I try to let my heart heal again
"She just want to party / Diamonds on me dancing / Codeine double cup"
"It's by the grace of God that we're able to do these things"
"It's by the grace of God that we're able to do these things" is what Pimp C is saying at the start of WEEPIN IN DA TRENCH (Insert footnote about Kray's sampling as it relates to the black archive, and where it happens (Online) vs. where the Isaac Julien and Jafa shows happen (Art "Spaces")). I read more about Carrere and his addiction to writing, rather, to writing about his life, ruined his last marriage. His practice isn't just about honestly, but being willing to divulge - in The Kingdom he talks about his porn habits and then goes on to say that it's easier for him to write about his porn habits than it is to write about his relationship to the Bible. He wrote about emailing the porn he liked to his wife and how she responded. French people are so different when they're just on a page, rendered into English, than when you see them. It really isn't French, it's some in-betweenness and I realize that I've never read Proust, never read Diderot, never read Cixous, I've never even read Un Coup de Des and still NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION
Perhaps what I return to about the honesty of Carrere and what he divulges is how it relates to what I want to divulge. I'm never worried about being honest, perhaps I should be worried about being too honest at times, but we carry things with our names, and they shape us, especially when the name carries the sonic energies of Sanskrit. The first night with Z, who goes by her middle name, she was talking about how her first name means attraction, everyone gets caught in her orbit. When I was texting M about it all, he called her a narcissist, and it's natural I suppose that a life like hers would lead to that. It was my first time feeling attracted to a person I'd met since J, it's hard for a woman to generate a genuine emotional response in me, that was always the struggle with M2. I sent her screenshots of the above to explain what I couldn't on the train, I woke up to apology texts, I sat with them for a moment, and then I realized how much the illusion of attraction had been shattered. It was calming, the soft dawn light creeping in.
France has Prix Goncourts, America has Kodak Black. On the walk home I listened to Skrt and earlier that day I listened to Change My Ways, there's so many lines with so much pain wrapped up inside them, the traumas of Haiti and its generations past echoing through Kodak: "Life done dropped a lot of weight on me", "I need a baby to keep me sedated", "I feel like we still be goin' through slavery". They're oblique but present these openings, containers for others to put their pain and relate, and when I return back to my pain, all the shit of my past generations, I think about divulging like this, regardless of medium, rather than just spilling bits of immediate trauma and pain like I do here. Even after divulging, I'm not interested in probing these points the way Carrere probes his marriage, or relations with a past nanny, partially because of the site of the apparatus of doing so - Publishing, the Literature World, the Art World, the Film World - is always structurally rooted in the West, and I can't overcome this. It's easy to talk about getting beat by your immigrant parents by someone who also got beat by their immigrant parents, but to render it into a short story, a fiction, a film, to attach it into these forms as explicitly as we talked about them is something I struggle with.
I made the mistake of trying to explain the Kickback show concept to B - his inability to understand felt crazy to work through in the moment as I was wondering what this British boy who loves my work so much is actually taking away from it. I started with Trisha Donnelly (and after the Krebber situation I wonder if he even knows who she is) and he was so wrapped up in how I described the sculptures in the Air de Paris as laser-cut when the photo I showed him struck him as probably being done by a CNC, a difference which in my mind has minimal bearing on the work, but to him has so much about ~materiality~ and ~process~ and all the Goldsmith in him and this is how he read the Finnegans Wake show because he hadn't read Joyce and his friend was sitting at the gallery and she talked about how she tried to learn little bits to explain to people as they'd ask her questions but they both struck me as rich idiots because it isn't hard to pick up Joyce, read him cover to cover, and you don't have to do this with Wake, you can do this with Portrait or Dubliners in a day, read an article or two, and then you're in the upper percentile of Joyce knowledge. But then they started to talk about their thoughts on the works, if it was a good show or not, they rated it mid and it felt like a blind person saying a painting was mid because as they rubbed their hand up and down the canvas they didn't like how the paint felt - sure, it's a "valid" critique on the part of the blind person, but they're missing so much, they've never seen color or composition or a history of images that have come before, there's so much beyond their grasp. After so many words, B came away with thinking I wanted to make Twombly derivatives, which felt the farthest thing from how I consider the works-to-be in my mind. It was frustrating, disappointing, I tried to explain a little more and then I gave up.
Why was I explaining myself to a white boy for this long to begin with? This added to the depression and disappointment, remembering how much of being around "Art" is that, people wanting explanations for things, wanting to hear what you had to say as the smart brown person with different perspectives, different canons, different Times, and the morning with T at the tail end our meth-coke bender with J on i/o caffe night came back to me, having to talk about Mati Diop and BAFC and Senegalese cinema to Park Slope's finest child of the theater while tweaking and tweaking about hours before when J making a joke about how I'm white passing and how he looks like could be ethnic and the constant thing about this proximity to whiteness but not being white, and all the mindless white activities I'm implicitly excluded from, and all I can do is just accept it, to work towards the acceptance of the structures that govern that reality, while knowing that there are other realities that I can flit between. I came away all of this so inundated that it spurred my 3 months of sobriety, to reconsider everything. Before T got to the coffeeshop, when I was there by myself, waiting for Z and C to wake up so they could let me to crash on their couch, I asked for paper from the barista and she gave me a blank receipt and I crammed these words onto its surface with the tiniest penmanship, I could feel the speed in my veins, coursing through my pulsing fingers:
tiny scrap of receipt paper — tiny writing. probably not enough to get out all that I'm feeling fucked up about, but maybe the thing to note is coke circling back to this feeling and whether it's necessary. beyond that its beign surrounded by whiteness, or just isolation and now the latter seems so preferable now, but it's the opposite of where I'm going. for a few months at least — but it's also like what else is there? being lost in another place... this feeling of total placelessness. goes back to flusser and groundlessness which I should go back to. so where do I go from here... what do I do... what work do I make. what do I ———— my stomach feels fucked, my head sluggish, empty, vibrating as the coffee and water settle uneasily in my stomach. [Smeared out ink] as a refuge, art as a refuge, at the end its the search for refuge, for religion, for something to carry me through everything, devotion & ritual... the unread books & the unsaid prayers. maybe this is the time to get off everything, for good. to lead myself and love myself better instead of digging these holes. and what does life look like after? after addiction? what is there to be & to become? — myself, and who I should be.. / will be
"I've been in this club too long..." "I be with demons all the time but I thank God everyday." [Scribbling looping lines that move horizontally] what r we supposed to be what are u doing sunday march 12 7:58 a.m. — all these attempts to escape this way of keeping date & time as I'm about to reach 25, something I didn't think for so long — as bad as it is, how far I've come. a sea change - a transformation into something different - that's always it, make it true
Now I feel clearer than ever, having returned to this receipt. That was the night after the program of films, they blurred together in that benderweek, I remember I got to Z2's apartment on Tuesday night and there was immediately a tray of drugs in front of me, and then I ubereats an entire Cardi B and Offset Meal because I was so hungry and that was the first and only time I actually got the meal, the rest of the time it was just the bag with something else in it, usually plain hamburgers for my dying dog who was refusing to eat anything else. There was so much drugs that week because I was trying to forget everything that accompanies death, just as I did in the months after thatha died. I feel so clear coming back to all of this in this way, in this time, understanding my relation to the text to come, to the text that was, and I'm filled with gratitude. It feels time to move forward.
"'Be still and hear me,' she began. I am a courier. I am only a courier. But I come with news of destruction. I come to declare his end. If it need be termed surrender then let it be so, for he has surrendered in word, not will. He has said, "My fall will be great but at least useful." The Emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine. And with this I am electric. I am electric'. This single, emblematic instant tells an entire story; it tells of Napoleon's dream of the imperial Republic, his authority and pride, and his final flight from the disaster at La Belle Alliance."
I saw a tweet in my feed about how Napoleon used to give nicknames to all the women around him, he wouldn't bother to learn their names. Ray J does this too in For the Love of Ray J - there's Cocktail, Mz Berry, Luscious, Unique, Danger, Chardonnay, Feisty, Caliente, Exotica, so on. I was talking about it while facetiming Z yesterday, how he immediately reduces all the women into objects on the show. I talked about the reunion show episode of Season 2 where it's revealed that Ray J hasn't talked to the winner of Season 2 since they finished taping which was 5 months ago but has "talked to" multiple girls who didn't win since. He's also still in touch with Cocktail, who won season 1, and she pulls up and explains to Mz Berry, the winner of season 2, that Ray J isn't a one woman man and the tragedy of this is that a major plotline of season 2 was Mz Berry genuinely falling hard and in love for Ray J, and then 5 months later, she's still sitting in the couch in denial that his performance of the self on reality television was an act. The reunion finale culiminates with Ray J coming on stage, getting extremely upset with Cocktail, and then he storms off, Cocktail follows, the cameras follow, they yell off-stage and Ray J goes Hollywood, telling Cocktail if she needed money she could've asked, she didn't need to do this. One of the youtube comments says that you can tell he's hit recently based on how passionate the argument is. There was never a season 3 of For the Love of Ray J, there's Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood and so much more, there's 31 seasons of all the Love & Hip-Hop's, there's been so much reality tv.
Today I talked with Z and N working towards the text we're trying to formulate together. Part of the conversation hinged around artspeak, how it varies in different locals but there are certain signifiers based on regions, schools, programs, and these don't transfer between them, there's really no precise encylopedia for what contemporary art is because there's Contemporary Art Daily, but that doesn't integrate the 20th century as much, and then there's wikipedia which is so sparse, and there's so many art monographs that have never been scanned. I bring up how the October Journal PDF's are on KG but otherwise you have to browse them thru JSTOR, which is a totally different experience. As we were talking about this Global/Local knowledge, B popped up into my head again because of the Krebber thing. After reading what I wrote, M texted me that he was impressed that B went to Goldsmiths and never heard of Krebber, but what I then remembered was talking about Anne Imhof with B, and he's aware she went to Stadel, but then comes the gap where he didn't know about who was at Stadel and when, really it's just the name of Stadel that's important, despite the people there influencing the shape of the institution. Krebber talks about this in the Kaleidoscope interview, and it comes back up from texting A about his time at Locarno, where he didn't like most of the new stuff besides The Human Surge 3 and ended up spending most of his time watching films in the Mexican retrospective section. He said he's starting a 6 month program with DocLisboa in a couple months and I mention that that's one of the few solid festivals back when I paid attention to that type of a thing more and I do know that IFFR is a mess because C brought that up when I saw him about a year ago, but it's The Name that most people care about. Cannes is about who gets the Palme d'Or and not whose on the jury awarding it (though Carrere wrote about the fanfare and local celebrity that accompanies being chosen as a jury member).
During the call, N asked me about the process for my White Space Studies and I also sent the recent sketches piece I made yesterday as well. I talked about the creation of forms, not with a specific end point in mind, but rather letting the process of creation guide the form coming to be. Which then brings me to how I work with other mediums - text, video, collage, where such a meander isn't as possible, but I suppose there's a similar thing happening in video, I just have done it so much that I have a much stronger control of where I want to take the forms, likewise with text, the flow of letters from left-to-right brings more letters into being and the speed of a keyboard takes me to places far different than that of a pen and paper, just as pastel is not watercolor is not photographing is not digital manipulation. We didn't grill N about his photography practice, but made plans of how we want to approach the series of conversations. I used the AI scribe app for the call and then turned the text file into another image. I zoom into the PNG file and bounce around it, it feels like a map.
Geeked up and it's beautiful, I was outside blasting No Apologies by Chicken P thinking about how he's free now. There isn't a transcript of the lyrics anywhere online. I walked in the door thinking about when Wizz Havinn said "Yea I'm Good Bitch Thank You For Asking" and "Wizz why you ain't dropping? cuz they ain't ready" and now we're waiting for him to drop. I refresh youtube and there's new Mula Mar x MarijuanaXO x OffWhite Wop, whose from Akron and his name reminds of Sada Baby's Off White Whoop and its incredible opening line "you wouldn't make it out my hood nigga, first of all boy you ain't make it out your hood" . I'll listen to that next, then write down the No Apologies lyrics. I remember December litty in LA in the back of the droptop BMW, G was whipping us and dropped it on aux, I was Geeked up, it was beautiful
Just don't lie to me Yeah I Love You Girl Promise that you'll never ever get tired of me Drag you thru the mud know you say you love me but I just gotta see Things will never ever ever be the same that's just how it's gotta be Momma facetimed me, seen me wearing prada smiled and told me that she's proud of me All these niggas hating I can see the faces Yeah I know these niggas doubted me Need a couple million, need to know the feeling Yeah I just gotta see Go hard on these Niggas Ball on these niggas Yeah baby no Apologies
20K tied up in my Ksubi jeans They like ooh he clean Bad lil bitch yea ooh she mean Grew up having heart But lil baby now we living large Same lil nigga, my sack in the woods we was trapping in the park Need to get a different color On my baby these bitches shine in the dark Ready for any weather Yeah the Rolls Royce got the umbrella in the car Fuck the bridge I'll burn it You got to swimming, know all my niggas sharks Talking stripes, I earned it Pop a pussy nigga on the alley on first and clark
On my baby this all facts I ain't never lied nothing in my raps All the shit I did won't take it back Had to stay down yeah I had to stack Why you ain't sign? Cuz I'm in the trap Lost every dime went and got it back Been thru it all running up these racks
Just don't lie to me Yeah I Love You Girl Promise that you'll never ever get tired of me Drag you thru the mud know you say you love me but I just gotta see Things will never ever ever be the same that's just how it's gotta be Momma facetimed me, seen me wearing prada smiled and told me that she's proud of me All these niggas hating I can see the faces Yeah I know these niggas doubted me Need a couple million, need to know the feeling Yeah I just gotta see Go hard on these niggas Ball on these niggas Yeah baby no Apologies
Why would I say sorry I did this shit for us my nigga so we could stay ballin I showed my nigga nothing but love and he put the stain on me Been stabbed in the back by niggas I loved Now I ride all day lonely (by myself yea) Me and my bitch been arguing Say I've been getting too hot and I know she ain't lying Gotta get my shit together Yeah I know I gotta do better I know you hate crime It take time We fucked up a nigga grade letter down the state line Got my glocks I can't let em take mine Won't die in the hood like Trey Five
Six of Red to the head I see high as fuck
Brand new Benz Watch how I spin I used to ride the bus
Just don't lie to me Yeah I Love You Girl Promise that you'll never ever get tired of me Drag you thru the mud know you say you love me but I just gotta see Things will never ever ever be the same that's just how it's gotta be Momma facetimed me, seen me wearing prada smiled and told me that she's proud of me All these niggas hating I can see the faces Yeah I know these niggas doubted me Need a couple million, need to know the feeling Yeah I just gotta see Go hard on these Niggas Ball on these niggas Yeah baby no Apologies
I was thinking about how I never saved different versions of my top Milwaukee rappers list. It exists in my notes app and there's different screenshot versions but probably too much work to track them all down and view all the different versions. For a while Chicken P was number one, even when he was locked, off the strength of BussaBrick Vol. 1 & 2, then Mula got out and started flooding and now he has the spot, there would've been a time when Certified had it too, and Court Loww is 2 for me right now, but it'll all change soon
I suppose it has to start with the details. Which is why working at the risk consultancy firm was important to me. You zoom in past the larger details of the conflict in Africa, instead of reading ECOWAS rumors from thousands of miles away, you send emails to O, who sends you scans of reports that detail Niger's agricultural productivity and imports of specific equipment for the last 10 years. In 2014, there was a nearly equivalent split between Chinese equipment and Russian equipment but in the last two years the percentage of Russian equipment had soared. They'd cut their prices, hoping to curry national favor, as more and more Wagner operatives moved into the country.
One night, my phone buzzed with whatsapp messages from O. Almost overnight, a pocket of Niamey had been transformed, ramshackle walls replaced with glass, mud-bricks turned into iron framing, and a new concrete foundation laid into the ground. Above were a score of new ventures: Russian Tea Room, KGB Bar, Russian Samavor Restaurant and Piano Bar, and an nondescript bathhouse. O had already been inside, the borscht was great, but through the steam, past the sagging white asses and drooping ballsacks, he could see a door that slanted ever so slightly downwards. It must lead into a tunnel, O said.
I shared this with S, head of the firm. He decided it was time for us to move past what O could get us. We needed feet on the ground. I'd been in a stage of intense preparation for the last 18 months. It started with Hausa classes on weeknights in a unit of a public housing project in Brownsville. These went from 9 to 11pm and once they were over, my tutor and I would usually find ourselves in the back of an Uber on the way to Brighton Beach. K would meet us in an apartment lobby by the beach, we'd ride the elevator up to a floor of his choosing, and then he'd let us pick a room at random. But never together, we could never enter the same room together.
Then came the training with an accent coach. Every Saturday and Sunday in Jackson Heights, I'd meet with Dr. P, and we'd work on the stresses of vowels and consonants, tying my tongue in specific ways to make it believable that I was Bengali, that I'd grown up just outside Calcutta, in a reasonably educated household that came from a line of rice paddi farmers. Our alibi was that I'd met O at a conference for agricultural engineers in Omsk, that we'd formed an unlikely friendship after having long conversations about the cultivation of sorghum and millet over glasses of the cheapest vodka our hotel bar had to offer. O told me about his wife, his four children, and the woman he hoped to make his second wife, but he needed to work hard enough to earn the ability to make her that. Our firm came in handy there, forging the payment for a large shipment of millet processing machinery - destoners, aspirators, dehullers, and the maintenance tools for them. O's business was set to carve away a significant portion of the millet production along the Niger River Valley. Along with this boon in his fortunes came an invitation for me and my wife to attend his wedding.
A, my wife, was stunning, an absolute beauty with slim hips and wide eyes who was actually from Calcutta. In the months prior to the wedding, she flew to New York, and what was at first a fake relationship turned into a real bond as she read Tagore and Chatterjee to me in her native tongue, and I picked up the words with a decent pace as we spent our nights glued to the television, at first watching all of the Rays and Ghataks, but then moving to the Bengali serials for television that were produced in the 90s and early 2000s that she'd grown up on. She had brought a large suitcase to New York City filled with bootleg DVD's, purchased from the neighborhood shop she'd grown up next to, and the television-to-tape-to-dvd transfer's fuzzy resolution made the images all the more beautiful. The time flew by, the sounds, the songs, the images passed us by, then we were on a series of flights, from New York to Dubai to Calcutta, then back to Dubai, then to Lagos, and finally we were in Niamey.
We landed in the midst of a dust storm, the small plane veering from side-to-side, shaking violently as it touched its wheels to the tarmac. The wedding was 24 hours away and this was perfect, it was impossible to see more than 30 feet in front of you and everyone kept their sunglasses on at night to protect their eyes. A driver was waiting with a sign for Mr. and Mrs. P and soonafter we arrived at our hotel, just a few blocks away from the Russian District. A concierge lead us up to our suite, and then A opened up her suitcase, pulled out a dvd player, an HDMI cable, and the final bootleg DVD. There were three episodes left on it. The plan was that I'd watch the first, then slip out during the second, but return just in time for the third. She told me she'd catch me up on the middle episode when I was back and I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I'd spoken English, every syllable rolling off my tongue in perfectly accented Bengali.
I was naked, cock swaying about in the steam as I lithely made by way through the bathhouse. No one saw me sneak there in the cover of the dust storm and my presence was fully welcome inside as my privets turned into fully fledged conversations, the most delightful of which was about the primes of Timofey Mozgov and Andrei Kiralenko. This man, homophobic as any other Russian, professed to be a huge fan of Cam'Ron's sports talk show, stumbled through explaining a joke about how people should say "pause" after the T-Wolves name, because the T could stand for trans instead of Timber. I let out a laugh and then he slapped my bony ass, squeezed a cheek, and held it, then asking me how I know so much about America if I'm from Calcutta. And then I weave a story about a client from Harlem with a cousin from Coney Island who had both married Bengali girls whose families had migrated to Queens, and this marriage wouldn't have been okay with the girls' families, but the men pledged to funnel their finances from high school sports gambling rings into agricultural production in the Bengal River Valley, and that's where I entered the picture, a friend of a distant relative of theirs, and these New Yorkers went back and forth, to and from India for a number of years. I tell him that Coney Island's own Lance Stephenson was my favorite hooper because of this and he believes me, all is calm, but time is moving and the final episode of the serial approaches, and I can't leave A to finish the show by herself.
Finally, as planned, there's a large noise outside, a car crash that the firm had set up, and everyone's attention moves that way, despite the limited visibility in the room full of steam. I make my move and open the door, just a crack, and then squeeze inside. There's an old man inside, sitting in a hospital bed, drinking cold borscht and I realize that we'd met before, in the psych ward of the hospital just above 14th street years ago. This was before the days of Russian whorehouse, when I could only speak a smattering of words and references to composers and filmmakers but we could speak with our eyes, and our eyes met again and the recognition was immediate. It happened exactly like it did the first time. He said "cosmonaut" and lifted up his shirt, showing me a torso full of the scars of war. Then his wizened face broke out into the biggest grin and he shouted "BRIGHTON BEACH MAFIA"
Immediately after putting the lists on here, I remembered Elena Gorfinkel's Against Lists piece. I think there's an implicit joke in how often I have to update the lists based on who I'm feeling, their recent output, and so on, and there's so much other stuff I don't know. Right after I made the site for it I listened to a Chicken P x Trap Bando song and Trap Bando isn't even on the list, and on that Trap Bando album there's a Big Homie DreCash feat who I also haven't really listened to. I'm a state of mind where I'm typing, my mind is fast and the words are flowing. As I was writing the story about the Russians in Niamey, I was impatient, I wanted to get to the old man from the psych ward that I left so many other details behind on the way there. It's a short story that could be expanded, you insert tangents, essays, fragments, let it open up like an accordian. Bruno Dumont's talked about his method of writing a novel that becomes a script that becomes a film, and that used to baffle me, but it makes sense now. I'm writing a lot of words but I haven't yet started writing The Text, I'm writing before it, I'm writing around, I'm sculpting my mind in a certain way to get the final preconditions to the place that I desire, and then I'll start and see where the process takes me, of having some inkling of a form in my mind that I want the text to arrive at, but being open to how the conditions and process of creation function and redirect me as I move in that direction. I think that's the most important thing, the letting go.
Writing so many new secrets
And that Blanchot line echoes through my head:
For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.
Hypergraphia has set in, and in such a natural way, it's flowing through me, I'm IG story-ing, I'm tweeting, I'm not texting too much which is part of it, but I'm also Here, and all these channels are mixing together in a way that's extremely energizing and I'm building into something, a nuclear reactor of sorts, energy combustion, where the energy will then get transformed again. Literal thermodynamics, literal literal thermodynamics, and of course there's a slight bit of mania accompanying this, but a only a bit and I'm conscious of it, it came after I got so low, but it came with so much clarity.
I met Z at Victoria Park. She called it Vicky Park, there were signs that called it Vicky Park, and I called it Vicky Park too but I don't really like that name, sounds like Icky Park, and also recalls Vicki Leekx but that refers to Wiki, so there's this sort of confusion of associations. It was a good convo, things settled into the place that I wanted them to, and throughout she kind of sparred with me about things that I would say about things that have happened in my life, or how I view life, or the tendencies of others in comparison to myself, and it was a very helpful practice, for both of us I think. She called me "fickle" which I disagreed with, though we got into my tendencies to code switch, she called it "chameleon-ing", how it relates to my sense of self, but also how it's helpful in certain situations, and also really criticized how I call myself old, which went back to the sort of platitude that I've written about earlier where something is on the border of a joke or serious, and it's not that I'm old so much as there's this hole where parts of my youth should've been and that I've accepted that and have tried to move on as opposed to Peter Panning to try to chase experiences that I'll never have. I think part of this expectation of certain experiences has to with media, the internet, tv, music blah blah blah codifying a set of things that should happen, especially in America where people even dictate it all as "the high school experience", "the college experience", "your 20s" and so on.
The beard is interesting to think about. I talked about how intentionally one has to shape themselves to be a certain type of artist, a certain type of writer, and deciding to let it grow was a part of that, at first as part of the waterboarding concept, but now moreso to remind myself and provoke the world around me into viewing me as a Brown Person. I've let my unibrow grow out along with it, I think that's more just on some idgaf swag type shit, and I feel myself getting back into pretty bitch mode as I type, but the beard also brought the outside world as regarding me as older, and I'm sure that's also partially by disposition and my code switching. I like the look, I think it's the best look I've got with the shaved head / short hair, and I think it delineates the eras of images of myself quite well. Part of this fickle-ness Z described also had to do with how I've made constant self-transformation my center. I pointed out my pinned tweet, but also how necessary it was. Sada Baby saying "You wouldn't make it out my hood" really hits because I feel like I made it out my hood, and I made it out my hood through working on myself and fixing myself, and there's still more parts to how I am that I think that I could improve. It's not so much on some generic ~self-improvement~ type shit, and it has to do with desire and ideals of course, and typing through it opens up this sort of self-questioning again. I think she asked me what I wanted, and I have broad strokes, but the specifics do change and I suppose this is a sort of fickleness, but I also think of how I approach form and making in my work, what I was saying to N and Z2 about the watercolors, and how my approach to the watercolors is informed by how I approach digital collage, how I approach filmmaking, there's some sort of ideal you set out for, and you're not going to arrive exactly there, and you let this journey to the ideal guide what you arrive at.
I wrote a tweet: "just checked the Time and its Mine". It reminded me of this passage about John Milton, how he was always of the time because he was a producer of the times, and I can't recall where it's from, but I remember that phrase resonating with me — "producer of the times". Z was talking about the novel in relation to Empire, and now I'm thinking about Time in relation to Empire, and what does it mean for "someone like me" to have the Time, how "having" Time, is different than "producing" time, producing in relation to production, and then post-fordism blah blah blah blah blah. I talked to W on the phone and he told me to email his friend J who has a PHD in Poly Sci and now works in data science but knows about the Macro Consulting industry and I did, I described my independent research interests as "centered around geopolitics, flows of capital, AI & computation, and histories of Empires". I probably should've also added ~post-structuralism as Franco-Maghrebian theory~ and Africa and its ethnolinguistic divisions, but that would probably scare the hoes. Of course, when it's "someone like me" in relation to Empire, it's a brown guy becoming "paul (from bible)" who was a brown guy who became Historically White, as a way to infiltrate systems of Empire, but I really do have The Time, because I say so, and that's why Lil Dude Luciano calls himself Big SaySo, that's why he ad libs that, because he says so, and then things are.
When I was ft'ing with A last he brought up something Ye said in the last couple years about how language (meaning text) is the most colonizing device of all and I've been thinking of that idea, most likely said in some sort of schizo / bipolar outburst I can't remember the context (I talk about not being able to forget but there's also so much I don't remember, a nice reminder of that, but also a reminder of the selectivity of memory, the writing and rewrting that makes us remember memories of memories of memories) as now I return to this idea of writing as a way to manipulate reality, manipulate the realities of Empire, and what I've talked about with P about how Empire is not exclusive to the West, there were Empires in Tamil Nadu, the Pandyas, Cheras, and Cholas, and they had a relation to Sanskrit, to text, literature, and art, as well. I didn't give Z her Manto back because I hadn't finished it yet but I mentioned that I'd never read any Urdu-in-translation before and she called me white-washed, and that's something we've talked about a decent amount. The dynamic reminds of how things were with M in a way, a sort of verbal sparring, but this time without any pressure or needs of romance. When I asked C to look through my texts on my old laptop to find an email that was in her conversations with her, he mentioned how we had our own sort of language, and the dynamic is similar to that and something that I've been wanting since M and I stopped talking (which for whatever reason on her end only started happening months after we'd broken things off) of having hard questions put towards what I do. Before I meandered, I meant to say that I really understand why Kanye lost his mind — because he changed the world so much, but there were things he couldn't change, and when he hit that wall that's when he really started to lose it. I think of how I've changed the world too, it's a much smaller scope, the ripples that I've made, certain types of images and thoughts that have circulated as a result of me, the question of "what if? what if I'd never gotten Online to post that?", and there's a surge of mania that accompanies these thoughts and Twitter and Instagram and engagement and anlytics feed this, I'm so conscious of this now, because you feel like reopening Twitter to 10+ notifications and IG to a bunch of likes means a thing is happening, and a thing is happening, but what is that thing, what happens after the happening, where does it lead, for what purpose, what good does it do the World? what good does it do me?
And of course, there's this new Kanye vs. Ray J dialectic that's opened up for me in the recent weeks. I was texting T about the internet film event and its similarity in title to Eugene Kotlyarenko's first feature, and how Eugene used to be fucking H before she moved into the internet film event spheres / those spheres metastasized, and the Ray J vs. Kanye "I hit it first" situation. I dm'd H after she tweeted about how that tweet could've been a text to someone she loves. I think the beautiful thing about this is I consider them texts to people I love. There's a level of love necessary to be here and I love you for your eyes that are taking the time to read these whoever anywhere will ever read these written words on Sandymount Strand waiting for the snotgreen sea to take them away and I refreshed instagram and Chicken P's about to drop a song called 'bout it bout it' and is teasing BussaBrick Vol. 3 and I'm geeked, I text links to C and G, and I think about how H and I messaged for the first time in a year and I was vague about this and told her that she wouldn't find it, she said she would look, but I don't think she will, and then when I asked her where the words go when she wasn't posting, she didn't stopped replying, usual for her. Too many people, too many messages, too many things. Right after Chicken P got locked last year he dropped BussaBrick Vol. 2. There's this track "13 Favors" where he says "15 thousand dollar bond, you ever pay for your freedom". I jump to Kodak - Change My Ways, but also Oracle, speaking to the lifers, and that line hit different because he's behind bars, he's living his raps, shaping himself as an artist, a writer, having it all shape him, and crime aside, it's a reminder of the need to live ones work. If you don't live your work, the work gets diminished. This is a Joycean thing, the encompassing aspect of it all, Cixous gets into it in The Exile a decent amount, I was explaining this to B in relation to the Nora fart letters at White Cube, but there's now way around it. I saw a Mavi tweet this morning - "these rap niggas push a certain image for the clout and in real life be nice as hell" - that's along these lines, and thought back to when I shot a video for him, under a different name, back when that was a thing I thought I wanted to do, but then redirected because I questioned my place in the shaping of those images of Blackness. But he was still shaping me, sending me what to collage, looking thru the edit cycles, and it was credited as a co-directed piece, which it was. Hopoutblick is still on the run. He posted a snippet of a video on IG and he said he's going to drop once it hits X number of comments. He's holding two pistols with extended clips in the videos. I was thinking about how if he gets big enough off of this run, it'll become a news thing, and there'll have to be a manhunt or something for him, at least locally. He lives in a totally different reality, he lives in war really. And Empire returns, Chicken P named his label "Really Rich Empire". There are words, there are images, it becomes a text, I read it, and then I write after it. He's a producer of the times too, moreso than I am, or rather the Time he produces reaches more people. No Apologies had 400k+ on Youtube, I've listened to it so many times, he's really spitting scripture
Back at the park with Z I admitted how narcissistic of a thing this is. My ego is at its center. I contain it here, to an extent, but it's also been escaping, via screenshots of this, excerpts of this to the outside with so so few knowing of this inside, the writing machine I've constructed working, rewarding this feedback loop, heading me into further hypergraphia. All these -ia's and manias remind me that the new Mohaghegh is out, I've been waiting for it for almost two years now. A tabula rasa of manias. Somewhere in London, there's a copy of it. Maybe I'll find it. Anyways like Chicken P said "I'm still Bout it Bout It".
I'm Still Bout it Bout it Like C-Murda and P The killas still love me Still would get u murdered for free I still take a hundred on Turn em to three Lil nigga in the kitchen I'm like Curry from deep Lil nigga with them brickys I'm like Shaq at the line I left school to sell dope Ain't get no cap and no gown I still fuck an IG model, pass her around straight drop I still got the fiends flagging me down Boy or girl, yeah I still swerve in both lanes He shot it in his foot cuz he couldn't find more veins The coupe fat, fuck a bike, I need a boat lane Me broke that's like a blind man with no cane The worst thing in the world: a nigga with no motion If you can't use your brain bitch use your throat then If you can't dodge the rain my nigga you gon soak then When it's time to use that jack you gotta press with hands This fetty shit will put you down We ain't just wearing masks Got a couple niggas robbin, they just like baskets I ain't gon lie I just ate baby thanks for asking Let it dry out on a plate or rush and use the napkin If you love her nigga better put her up or you gon lose her All these grams we like two men in the truck how we movin Baby I just want the Cash Money like I'm Juvie On the road riding with a thick bitch from Chattanooga I'm on a marathon, you police ass niggas on the telethon I can make the Benz transform this bitch like Megatron Why you think they call me BussaBrick, I ain't scared to grind I really live the shit I rap nigga every line And you can catch me by the stove nigga everytime you lookin for me I'm the chef, ain't no nigga cookin for me Baby don't keep lookin in my eyes Put that pussy on me Get your favorite shooter sent to God Puttin a rookie on me All these double G's from my head down to my socks All this Gucci mane, bitch I feel like Wop They was waiting on me to come home now I'm the trending topic On my way to stash this 40 thousand in the center console Ain't no way around it i'm knee deep in this shit Quit asking me to sell my lean fool I'm drinking this shit Fiend said this food fire, put my feet in this shit Your girlfriend fucked me better fool I'm keeping this bitch Everybody bout a heads I'm finna get to preachin Thank God for this paper I thought I'd never reach it Selling straight drop, once I hit em with the remix Class in session let me show you how to get some free grits I'm back out on bail again They wanted 75 boy I could've bought a Benz God strike me down if I'm lying Bitch it's Buss One I came a long way from grabbin iron Came straight to the yo But I just had bro nem pressing 5
Linkdin by bladee played in my head as I told this Stanford PhD in Poly Sci who went to Princeton for his undergrad and now works in data science that I'm staying low key. I explained my whole deal to him pretty succinctly, which is good to be getting better at given that I'm going to continue to have to do this. After talking with J, he sent me a spreadsheet with a massive list of private equity, venture capital, and macro consulting firms. I found one called 8miles that was based in London and is exclusively focused on making investments in African businesses. I fantasized about a lifestyle where I trap out investments by the day, and link with soundcloud musicians, writers, and artists by night, with monthly trips to New York. But this fantasy only lasted a moment, there were so many other firms on the spreadsheet, it's going to be so much work to go through them all and send these cold emails where I explain how 3 semesters of studying "media" got me a Bachelor's and the significant gaps in my resume and my "independent research interests" but the easy part is that I already wrote that explanation and I just have to copy and paste it, maybe make the occasional tweak for fit, and he told me that he did this a couple hundred times and got a handful of responses, but he also told me that whenever I felt ready to reactivate my Linkedin to add him and if I saw anyone he was connected with that I wanted to talk to to let him know. He also offered me to connect him to his friend (Harvard undergrad, Stanford PHD) who now works in DeFi and consulting because I talked about my involvement in crypto in vague terms, but it really is incredible how helpful people are given that he's just a guy that this guy that my friend B kind of knows, but people like to be helpful, I like to be helpful, and it's important to remind myself of that.
The firms really are fascinating to me. People get so wrapped up about AI in whatever way it's going to impact them and forget about all the other places it's getting integrated into. There's a firm that "uses political science and AI to measure and predict geopolitical risk" which sounds both insane and exciting. When I was talking to J I grounded myself as an artist and writer who really cares about the feedback loop about how my work (for money) affects my Work (artistic output) and he's well educated so I know I can throw out references like Gaddis and post-structuralism, and he'll get it, and P's also helped put me onto so much academic stuff related to History (the academic discipline and how the modern university approaches it) that I've only slightly glossed over, but still helps convey the seriousness of my "independent research". I worked on The Text today and once The Text is done I want to start working on The Show, but to work on The Show means to work (for money) in order to make The Show a reality, and I like this, it's a good direction to move in, I think it'll retrain and resegment my mind in interesting ways
I also want to work more on The Script. The mania of the past two days has largely faded, which is fine and good, but my main recognition about hypergraphia has stuck - I really have learned how to Write, how to get words out of me through the construction of this machine. I sent a lot of texts today. Many to N, where we're catching up after months of not talking, and also gossiping about other people in our online sphere, a decent bit to Z, who talked about being an author with a lewd photoshoot, an idea which reemerged in the execution of it in a new piece on Kaleidoscope by O, a very career-y young woman writer, and it was initially a print-only piece in this simulacra erotica magazine by a non-modeling agency or something like that that's hip cool downtown and sold in a very limited run for a way too high price in hip and cool and downtown boutiques, and I text T about the piece and we give it a close reading and try not to be haters but end up haters. There's similarities in it to things we both do, the wall of signifiers, references to poetry, the physical geographies T operates in, and it isn't bad writing, it just feels empty, vacant, there's a wall and there's nothing behind it. When talking about the jumps between signifiers and topics in my work, T tells me that "U also be up in ur feelings n shit", "like there’s a soul there working through something" whereas she doesn't say enough, where is she in the piece, where is her soul, to which I reply "What is the soul of someone who's dating D" and we get into how much soul a person can have when they have to alter parts of their lives in order to come up in the social games of whatever world they pick, and it's also so natural a thing, and maybe she'd just prefer to present as a person without interiority. It doesn't really hit the same, to rewrite text conversations after days past of IRL interactions and phone calls, whereas today was just texts and silence, but there's a working through that still feels necessary here. I've been typing and deleting much more as I do this, going back and forth about this transcription of the text elsewhere into text here, what should be included, what shouldn't be
It isn't pouring out of me, there's a sort of hesitation, I stab in and out with keystrokes, I jump back into texts, into twitter dm's, and that's fine, because I think the bigger recognition is that this isn't the immediate text I want to write now
The morning birds are singing and I'm thinking about what I wrote yesterday, I'm thinking about the rewriting of it, about rewriting and the idea of writing "I'm thinking" which sutures a Present into this text, not a gift exactly, but now there is this idea of a text as a gift which is coming from elsewhere and the morning birds are still singing it's beautiful. I woke up and opened my phone and looked at the apps and saw I had messages to respond to and I thought about how I really need to leave, I'm spilling out beyond here, into too many other places, they're fraying what has happened in a way, rechanneling it, and I'm reminded of the internet of years past vs. the internet I want to make for myself, I'm reminded that I want to leave
There's the matter of too much information. Someone followed me on instagram, a private account w/ 30something followers, 60 something following, a dozen or so mutuals, and I wondered who it was. On the same page was a suggestion of similar accounts to follow and the first one was a Bennington girl who follows me and has a public account and then it was easy enough to see that this was her boyfriend. In the past week I've had a version of a conversation about being known with M, Z, and N - I suppose what's nice about this is I have a relative idea of how known what I write here is, it's quite limited, and the feedback mechanism relies on a certain level of friendship. There's this girl on twitter I'm mutuals with called F, I don't know her real name, but that's what her screen name + soundcloud start with, she's also a British Indian girl like Z, and I didn't really want her to follow me at first, I was listening to her soundcloud too much in March, liking her tracks and following her on there, and then she followed me because I use the same @ everywhere, and then I would've been deactivated for a while and now I'm active and Online again and we were interacting with each others posts, which lead to me following her private, and then I saw some posts about her dead dog so I dm'd her about how I listened to a mazzy star cover she uploaded on repeat during the week my dog died, which was part of the reason I didn't want her to follow me. C really gets it in terms of how social media grooms people, he should teach a course on how to get Online, make friends, and then disappear and it's really funny because M thinks of me as very online with these offline friends like C and K and she thinks K is really cool for that and when I was with Z I was talking about how my accounts are tied to forms of capital that I still need for the time being but eventually I'd like to get past that, I can be S. Paul on my website and whatever other works I author, and I can be Satya and Paul in certain physical places, and that'll be that. I type through an implicit narcissism of not looking at my friend's posts while they look at mine, when I was offline someone said something to me about how I was missing all of my friends' "arcs" via IG stories. G brought up how this goes beyond the parasociality of other social media and I replied about how I can't be personal on IG or Twitter because there's thousands of people there who don't know me, but it's not that I'm not personal I suppose so much as I don't give details, it's something I struggle with, I never wanted to post that my thatha died to all of those strangers and I see other people with similar amounts of strangers posting those things when they happen, but I guess it just isn't how I prefer to operate. Parasocial is also a word that has this association of lurking on someone's twitter and you have no idea who they are in my mind, but there's still a parasocial element to being on instagram / twitter with the people you know IRL, there's a certain distance to them, based on whether or not you interact with their posts. But even then, there's something much more intimate about looking through K's Flickr than any instagram feed, maybe it's just a conditioning thing... The thing about all of these words is that they'll soon be resolved by me putting out The Text, deactivating, and then continuing on here
In the last few days, I've thought about this urge to delete and where it comes from. I suppose it's a battle against how unnatural it is to have speech acts suspended in time. Words echo yes, but they dissipate and posts don't. I stumbled into an early memory of erasure the other day - I was in 7th or 8th grade and for whatever reason my mom wanted me clean out my closet with me and was insisting on it and really invading my space and part of growing up was that it was a household where I really wasn't given space, I messaged F about how walking my dog everyday was escape, but in 6th grade in English class I sat next to this kid B, and on notebook paper I'd write these stories, "The Adventures of B", and they had elements of adventure and spy novels to the stories but they were also hyperviolent and grotesque at times, the type of thing that a parent finds and is like 'damn my kid's on some fucked up shit' and I was exceptional at separating and hiding these different selves from different people growing up, until that sort of splitting took its toll. In any case, I couldn't save the stories because that would've called attention to them, it looked like a bunch of other homework piled up in the closet so I let it go into recycling and it was the first time a thing I made became a memory of a thing I made. There'd be the cycle of many accounts in high school that would come and go, ultimately I think the simplest thing is that I was just very resistant to the stability that maintaining the same accounts anchors you to. I remember in high school watching Linklater's Boyhood and there's a scene where the boy was close to my age and some girl is like "yeah he just deleted his facebook" and it means something about the type of temperament he has compared to what's "normal" and I think the thing about being in London is I think about how mobility and brown people exist here and it was something I thought about in high school too, that if I lived over there, it'd be much more easier to be "normal", a mediation of Anwar from Skins, MIA, and whatever else.
The morning birds are still singing, I open the window so that it's louder, and I think about how nice it is to start my day like this. My mind is fresh and the act of writing anchors the way I'll proceed throughout the day. I realize the reason why I've struggled so much with the text is I've created such a lofty ideal of it in my mind that I've been chasing for so long, and the question of how to get there is daunting. But I know I have to work, and let the work guide the work.
After seeing a Guyton painting at Gagosian I decide to run this lecture he did in 2021 that B sent me after I sent him pics of the Chantal Crousel show. Early in the lecture he started talking about his early print drawings and it reminded me of a conversation I'd had with N where he asked me about whether I had an inclination to print the works, to experiment with that, and I said yes but mainly my material conditions (moving around so much, money, etc. but basically those two things and how they relate to one another) get in the way of that. I also brought up how that when artists have their works selling it creates a feedback loop that makes more of them, there's a momentum towards this, why would there be a reason to shift away from that, I feel as though I already wrote about it, but there were other things that Guyton talked about that reminded me of myself - he talked about going to the Strand, collecting books, scanning them, and I did the same but the difference is my frequent moving made me have to leave things behind, and even now I never have every book, every photograph, every thing of mine in a single place, and there's a longing for this in order to kind of orient my thought in a more cohesive way, that brings together my selves of all of these disparate places.
Midway through the lecture I thought about how I hadn't made any physical work in a while, I've gotten wrapped up in writing and Ableton, so I opened up my notebook with the nice Korean paper, took out my pastels, watercolors, and pens, and did some things on the paper, flipped the pages, but I also got caught up with how the light was coming in through the window, the plants on the windowsill, and this empty glass bottle that was also refracting light. I had this scab on my forearm that I picked at last night and got a few drops of blood on the white sheets of this airbnb that I now just rent directly from the guy. I got caught up with photographing the bloodstains with the light, and then once I had made my gestures on the pages of this book, I got to photographing them and started to play with how the light and the shadows from the windowsill appeared on the page. Took it back to the computer to manipulate and Chicken P - Straight to Work popped into my head:
"Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits"
"We hit a nigga with the flame he went potty"
Last night I talked to C and H on the phone, I talked about much of the above and more, and they talked about their lives. It was nice, it's good to miss people and to talk to them on the phone, to be able to talk to them on the phone. I went to bed thinking about Cixous and Hyperdream yet again, when she can't call her dead loved ones on the phone, and I thought about that dream I had where H died, that maybe I'll tell him about when I see him next.
This morning I read D&G's "What is a minor literature" while listening to Philly music and thinking about this IG Story:
Hopoutblick reposted it, it's a transcription of an old song of his, one, like many, that never got a "proper" release and has leaked online after travelling as a file throughout Philly. I listened to the song once but I didn't save the link and now it's gone, at least it is to me. The lyrics won't show up on any search engines, and I could DM the account that posted the lyrics, most likely a teenager somehwere in Philly, but he'd want to charge me for file, that's the way the circulation of these leaks works, there's an entire economy built up around it, one that I'm so distant from.
When I look at the image, I think 'who could've written this', and it's something that I never could've written, even when I transcribe lyrics, I'd never write the emojis like that, and I'd never write my g's as q's to bypass Instagram censorship and I think of the Jackie Wang interview that I read this morning where she talks about how technology has shaped the form of writing, citing the character limit of Twitter, and of course the reason I can write here in this way is because I've set the technology up in such a way to create this ongoing tumult of words. Wang describes poetry as useless, superfluous to capital and difficult to commodify - "how many poets do you know who support themselves on poetry alone"? This is why she loves it. She also talks about technology hijacking her dopamine reward system.
Why does Hopoutblick rap? There's the dopamine, of being 18 and getting those views and followers and DM's, but that came later, that's the feedback loop that emerged to sustain his writing machine. The uselessness of poetry is entrenched in his entire practice, of course there's the possibility of him getting out of the hood through art, but the hood will still exist, and this reality seems unescapable for him. D&G point out that a major characteristic of minor literature is that everything takes on a collective value - in this case Hopoutblick's music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but with the opps he's beefing with their music, their lives intertwining in a sea of young black death. And now he's still on the run, 18 years old, wanted for homicide, and still making music, because the realities of jail are something he's come to terms with long ago.
"How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?"
How many paintings can you look at it a day? Not glancing but looking. I started at Arcadia Missa, there were 3 paintings by Hamishi Farah and a contract framed on the wall and the gallerina talked to me quite a bit, she gave me a tour of the show, explained all the context, and I went along with it, being friendly because I wanted to hear how she'd say it, even though I went into the show having seen images of it for weeks and understanding the context of Farah's work. I thought about the 'White ppl think I'm radical show' he did with Aria and how those burned wife beaters are one of my favorite pieces of hers, and I went into this show knowing that I wanted to take a picture of the Beyonce painting and post it on my Instagram story with HopOutBlick's PTSD overlaid because they're both sampling Beyonce.
“Clouds filled with stars cover your skies / And I hope it rains, you're the perfect lullaby / What kind of dream is this?”
“Bro said I gotta chill off the perks cuz I’m wildin / But he don’t know it’s too much on my mind, I feel like dying”
What's different about PTSD than most drill sample flips is that it isn't just a section of Beyonce's Sweet Dreams that is interpolated, but rather the entire vocal track runs the length of the song, and HopOutBlick writes over, on top of it. It is minor literature, it needs the landscape of Philadelphia, the other rappers, and how that fits into regional rap in America of industrail cities in decline. There aren't really any crazy bars, or incredible wordplay, but what the track is is testimony - he tells you why he can't stop rapping ("I won't stop rapping, you the reason I keep trying"), there's a moment of vulnerability, an admission of being-towards-death, before the infliction of death returns: we hit a nigga with the flame, he went potty. In the gallery, the girl, C, brings up the Dana Schutz Emmett Till painting, which emerged in two conversations I had yesterday. First I was talking about the sort of totalizing whiteness that exists in soundcloud rap as the moment at which innovation dies. What Nettspend is to Xaviersobased type music, what Lil Shine is to pluggnb, what Matt Ox is to tread, and the fetishization of this type of white artistry. T brought up Bill Evans in relation to Duke Ellington, and how he feels that all 21st century American Art is about Black Death, and that's what the Dana Schutz painting is about.
I brought this up with N and Z while we talked and AI transcribed the words without separation of who said what but the conversation last night was largely directed towards me, the recent images I made, my process in making images, and the Cixous quotes I sent into the chat. I said a lot of words and we talked past 4am and as the night wore on I noticed my pace of speech slowing along with my mind, and in this process I think a new version of honestly emerged. Not so much in the sense of telling lies vs. the truth, but a relaxation of how I approach probing questions into my practice, given my comfort with who's asking them, and also being forced to be more instinctual with my responses, which leads into series of rambles that I spread out in so many different directions. And as this tiredness grew, I suppose I was forced to pick between branches for the sake of time and energy, there were things I wanted to write in here after, but after sleep and this day of gazing I'm struggling to come back to precisely what they were. Z started the conversation with a quote about Romanticism and I wished I engaged with it more, but it was the type of thing where you're trying to assign words to impulses. There remains an autobiographical element to the images made, but I suppose it's less immediately discursive, or rather the discourse occurring isn't happening through text-based language (Twombly's Nine ~Discourses~ on Commodus comes to mind as I type this).
"if this new type of book illustration was so apt and definitive an expression of romanticism it was not only because the close association of text and image satisfy the desire to unite different forms of art the vignette by its general appearance presents itself both as a global metaphor for the world and as a fragment dense at its center tenuous on the periphery it seems to disappear into the page this makes it a naive powerful metaphor of the infinite a symbol of the universe at the same time the vignette is fragmentary sometimes even minute in scale incomplete mostly dependent upon the text for its meaning with the regular and ill-defined edges not unlike Schlegel's hedgehog it is the perfect romantic formula" is how the AI transcribed Z reading the quote from "Charles Rosen and Henry Zerner's romanticism and realism" and it's quite a different thing to engage with a quote while hearing it read, as the sound of the words disappears vs. engaging with it in written form. I've thought about how I haven't felt any urge to inscribe text onto these images, I talked about that with them after the series of so many collages with text on them from the last two years and this desire to reach a form of speech through emptiness / absence. I talked a lot, I said so many words, I need to go back through the transcription to locate things I said and figure out what points to continue to probe, to question deeper. There were good bits, about the role Joyce plays for me, about langauge and reality, about the studio process, where the event of art is, how it is recorded, inscribed, transmuted from form to form. N said I'm able to speak fluidly about my practice which is true, I do it often I suppose, I've talked about it with multiple people this week already, and I've talked to other people, not about art, but I'm more conscious of how I appear to others, how I present, following this latest isolation stint. There's a self-posession I've grasped hold of again, it feels good to have, I think it comes and goes but I'm back in Go Mode, I've been Go-ing, on many different levels, and it's a different sort of mental state than when I'm in my own universe and withdrawn.
I went back to the Courtald, mainly to look at this Tiepolo sketch of The Immaculate Conception that hypnotized me when I saw it last year. I sat with it again for about 30 minutes, thinking about seeing the "real" one at El Prado about a month ago, and there was a very strong line of questioning that it provoked about which I preferred, and it was this sketch, much smaller, rougher on the edges, but I liked that it was smaller, I could've lifted it off the walls and carried it out with me, and both works have been displaced from their original sites, or rather The Immaculate Conception has been displaced from its site whereas a sketch has no site, it was a byproduct of the workshop process that later became viewed as art as people desired to own art of various types. Much of the Rubens in the Courtauld are sketches, his sketches were very free, very different than the final works, and some Count collected them, and how they're there to be seen. They keep a sketch of The Conversion of St. Paul next to the actual painting, it's a very interesting thing to see side-by-side, the stage of the process, and the final version. There's the matter of conservation and restoration with all of these works, which I really don't know too much about, and I think about it in the same way I think about translation, there's a mediation of the work from a time and place occurring. Besides these three works, and the two other Tiepolo sketches on the sides of the Immaculate Conception sketch, I spent some time with this Cecily Brown installed above the staircase. Otherwise, I walked past many works, giving them glances - Degas dancers, Cezanne landscapes, Modigliani Nude, there is only so much space to look and to think.
"the weight of the world so heartbreaking but then u just go on" I tweet and then A retweets it and I thought about when i messaged her to check on her after the earthquake and she told me that she was okay but she wasn't okay, so many people she knew were just dead. the weight of the world so heartbreaking but then u just go on. I was thinking about partition and the horrors man can commit, how long they can echo and reverberate, how far they can reach. This morning I had to pause the Chicken P and try to sit w/ Everything in silence. there is so much world, there is so much heartbreak,
I'm getting close, and I'm almost there, I can feel it. The precipice of an absence. The edge of an absence.
Someone tweets a link to my bar italia remix calling it an 'amazing amazing song'. S texts it to me. I think of all the things that needed to happen for it to exist. For S to make that sample. For them to stumble through best in show, for S2 to have gotten that ticket for me off the r/deanblunt subreddit, for whoever bought the ticket to have decided not to go. J shared a playlist with me and Bob Dylan's Simple Twist of Fate was on there and I told her about how much I loved that song when I was 17. I've been thinking about what O told me on the train - "Everywhere there is a Reality and you adjust to it" - and adjusting to the New York or American reality in terms of relationships and love. I've been thinking about how Veeze said "told her take them Skims off / let me be your Ray J", Ray J vs. Kanye, and the idealization of Straub-Huillet. I've been thinking about how Rich Homie Quan said "Heart cold / Ice Box" and I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In. Sometimes there is too much to explain that it escapes words, or rather you have no desire to put it into words, it remains as emotion within. Feelings can be so powerful
"I saw your love searching the waste for a glimpse of my face I tried to call to you but my words were drowned in the silence of the ruins when I saw the first light of dawn I knew I had lost you forever...
and then we'd fall into another silence now we can't even afford that luxury I live in two different worlds in both worlds belonging was never an easy question and because of that friendship has always meant more than a simple reflection of one's personal taste the real tragedy will be if I fail to convince you of this...
I was surrounded by a collection of photographs and there in the photographs were my friends I stood the photographs in a circle a crowd of strange men dimly appeared from nowhere speaking to each other in a foreign language I could barely see them but I could hear their voices when the fog lifted their voices died away...
if you really want to know someone listen to their silences isn't that what you once said I'm beginning to think that in order to understand the city you have to do the same thing...
Don't come back for memories, because memories are not enough. Try as I may, I have a feeling love alone will be too small. When you left, you took your love with you, and you told me you were going to end your days with yourself and your faith. You were tired of silence. A new silence is beginning to rule this city now. Silence may not love you, but I do. So I want you to come back, because I want you to love me. And small as it is, I have a feeling we will need it in our new world."
The thing about London is it makes me miss New York far more than being on my own does. Tonight I'll go to the Galerina opening and I'll meet A2 which I'm sure will be nice, I like her work, she likes mine, we haven't talked much besides soundcloud comments, but that's fine, it leaves more to talk about. She uploaded a mix where she played two of my tracks and it wasn't a mix for soundcloud but a mix she played live at a club called Spanners in Brixton. The first track in the mix is im sorry im hi lets go - the cover art on upload is a photograph i took of C and K and F in washington square park, everything's kind of blurry and you can't really tell what's going on, it reminds me of how special friendship is. I was telling C about missing new york when we talked on the phone this week. I leave London tomorrow, I'll go to Marseille for a week, there will be some people there, same as there were here, and then after that I'll finally make it to India where the deafening silence of history awaits me. Returning to the Cixous this week was helpful, along those lines, dealing w/ the nightmare of History:
"...by definition, a nightmare is an adventure in which one is involved, whose contradictions one is absolutely powerless to resolve. Yet it is in constraint that the imagination is free. The tension between contradictions is the energy of art and the origin of language; helplessness in the face of destiny justifies the artist’s decision to exile himself."
Went out last night and it was good, that simultaneity of a lot and nothing happened, where I looked at art, talked to people, drank beers, moved from one place to another, rode the tube. I left my place in the early evening, grabbed a cheeseburger that I ate on the bus and a Jamaican tonic wine that I drank on the tube, and then got to Hackney a little earlier than I preferred so I walked around for a little bit, smoked a cigarette, there was a beautiful double rainbow, and I tried to digest the locale. Went to a shop and grabbed a Sapporo tall boy, later it came up in conversation, the shape and the size of it, G, who I met while taking the lift up to the gallery, remarked that it was phallic right after I called the curves of it a little feminine. It was while we were looking at one of the works in the show, a piece of wood cut out from a shelf with stickers posted all over it. The stickers were from different hotels decades ago and the artist explained that her uncle collected them, not by traveling because he was a teenager in Communist Poland, but by writing to these hotels and asking for promotional materials, and this is what remains of that. It was fascinating detritus, the design on many of the stickers, like the Hilton Abu Dhabi and another hotel in Kuwait still linger in my mind, and what also comes to mind is Fassbinder capturing those hotels in Fox and His Friends. I guess there's a certain density to it that I like, but also its existence as a found object of sorts, but still a found object that had to be rendered by removal, by an act of cutting, and it was mounted on top of two door handles, one with keys in them. In the other room were 24 plates with paint to delineate hours, one for each time zone, rendering them into clocks without hands. The arrangement was haphazard, scattered across the floor, making it a bit of a landmine situation if you wanted to traverse the room, but they worked well with the tiles on the floor. In the kitchen was the last piece, another clock made of the tops of perfume bottles built onto the wall.
I was talking to A who runs the place and she mentioned something about an amount of selling out and I realized how that notion exists in the UK in comparison to the US, cultural differences blah blah blah, and people kept asking me how I knew about Galerina and sometimes I'd start by talking about Triest and overlap in spheres across cities, but often times people said they didn't know the spaces in other cities, so I switched to talking about my ongoing interest in the lineage and history of artist-run spaces, something that is true, it's how I've learned about ~Contemporary Art~ the most so to speak, you look at documentation, you see what shows galleries have shown, you try to grasp for an understanding through that. G made a joke about how I needed to write a blog about this, a guide to the apartment galleries scattered across the world, a traveller's guide so to speak, and it's funny because he just met me and had no idea about the writing practices I've had.
Later in the kitchen I met A2, who has the same name as A, and G, and their friends O and H, and it was great, we got to chatting and had a lot to chat about. I've really liked A2's work for a couple of years now, I found her stuff on soundcloud at first and then found her website through that and I really liked her sensibilities as they moved between sound and video and drawing and painting, how she moved between these forms in a very seamless way in terms of how the works functioned - oblique and beautiful. On the other end, I didn't realize how much she liked my work, she said that she and G really loved my soundcloud stuff and asked when I was releasing more stuff, and I talked to G about how much I liked some of the tracks he's put up on soundcloud too. It was also interesting because she talked about how there was a level of elusivity to me, something that I felt was gone because I've met so many of the people that were just formerly mediated through the virtual, but I suppose there's so many people I haven't met who engage with the work and I do maintain this reticence / distance in terms of rarely reaching out. When I posted a story of the Beyonce painting A2 liked it and I decided I should hit her up because I figured she'd be at the Galerina show either way, but before that we hadn't ever really talked, just comments, and I suppose that's part of the elusiveness. But I think this elusiveness ends in person because I'm quite forthcoming, too honest, and at the end of it I don't think it matters too much, there's a bit in the Guyton talk where he's asked about his elusivity and he doesn't feel elusive, he just doesn't do much press as some of his peers.
Moments of note from the hours gone by: A2 asks me about The Manhattan Art Review and I tell her about him assaulting J at an opening and she says she likes J's work. I tell her about wanting to waterboard him and she thinks it'd be a funny show. We're talking about college but I'm saying "Uni" and A2 asks me if they say that in the states and I say no I'm just assimilating and code switching. I take a guest shot during a game of pool and have a decent strike on the cue ball but can't knock anything in. There were no numbers on the pool balls, just 2 sets of colors, except for the 8 ball. A girl asked me if I'd read anything recently that fucked me up and I mentioned the Manto but didn't get into it - she mentioned a book about Iraq but didn't get into it. I think about how much talking happened, where do the words go once they dissipate, some into memory yes, but only the smallest amount when there's so many things being said. We talked about gossip and there was gossip, I talked about how I liked gossip and how it functioned, A2 brought it up after I talked about the whole Twombly Donnelly thing and the work I want to make but can't, but also how if I were to show that work I'd want to elide presenting that whole context, she was saying it'd still exist because I'd have talked about it enough and people would then talk about it, it's similar to how I was walked through the Arcadia Missa show with an explanation even if the press release didn't have that many words. I talked with A about the White ppl think I'm radical show and she said it was a Moment when it happened. I've been thinking about this Ot7 Quanny line constantly for the past two days:
"I got paid for a show, then bought some work yea cuz I'm Trapped Out"
I made a video from a moment last night, where A2 was cutting cake on the tracks of the tube stop, layering in footage of a walk through the medina, a television playing a soap in a coffee shop, and the ocean meeting cliffs in Rabat. I kept parts of the audio as well, mixing it with the second "Max B type beat" I made, and I titled the video "VVS Lemonade (coming soon)", the title of the Classic Selena project I want to drop soon, but I also liked how the paranthetical brackets made "coming soon" into a sort of separated message. I went through A2's soundcloud likes yesterday and found this kp0p track that really blew my mind hearing it here. The VVS Lemonade title comes from a song he did with stunny that was deleted off kp0p's soundcloud in 2020 when they beefed out about something. I talked about that bay area scene, I talked about A3 and our friendship, I feel like I did so much talking. It'll even out, I'll be speaking much less over the coming weeks. I texted the kp0p track to C and called him one of the greatest working artists in America. the song's called "i aint never coming back home" - this universal homelessness, brought me back to living on San Pablo ave thinking about San Pablo's Finest, and I wonder where kp0p is now. if he'll ever go back to Richmond. I met this girl from Albany in Romania and she was saying no one could afford to stay there anymore, her parents divorced and her mom lived in Bulgaria, she didn't know what she was doing and would drink vodka everyday to pass the time. i loop 'i aint never coming back home' and pack up for another flight
In the airport I was texting J about writing and art writing but I was texting him from my phone and I was still tired from all the beers so I wasn't able to get all the words out of myself efficiently. I was telling him about how elegant his instagram handle sounds when said out loud in a british accent and then he said that M told him I'd been going in on Twitter which I was it's so easy to post words on the internet when you're drunk, they made it too easy to post and that's why I have to come here, where I could still post drunk but it's a much slower vehicle of dissemination, one that demands a greater degree of intentionality... maybe... I'm trying to decide if I agree with that last part, I'm not sure if "demand" is the right word, perhaps "creates" functions better, the way this writing machine is built in comparison to the other writing machines. He said he feels the same with IG stories and I said yea but I like how inane my IG stories usually are, in comparison text feels so naked and he agreed, then we texted more about writing practices and how they're developed and shaped, the role self-publication vs. self-promotion plays into it, and I thought of the public in publication which was in those Blanchot quotes that are somewhere above here from The Book to Come.
I'm back in France thinking Baudelaire's Salons and Mallarme's La Derniere Mode, of return to old forms, but also ways to make them new. I still like the idea of an e-reader that begins at first principles, to guide a certain type of Reading, and of course it can be translated from that, just as I've only encountered Baudelaire and Mallarme through translation, but that's where it has to begin. In a way that already happens here, where a certain type of reading happens by virtue of how one must come to these words. I feel as though I repeat myself, but that this repetition is good, that the looping of themes and ideas helps me hone in on certain things, specific directions, and other vague things just beyond the curtain of language. It is this sort of active process, where I don't know where this will lead, and that's part of the joy of it, letting the world come into it, to shape me.
In London I went to three shows — already I don't like that, I don't like how it sounds or frames what happens and I went to more than three shows, but there are three shows that I think function in relation to one another as it relates to my time in London in different kinds of arts spaces of different sizes, scopes, and ambitions, and then I come back to this idea of ekphrasis, the idea of communicating things that I saw without images, or rather communicating things that I saw around the deluge of images of them, and still this idea of seeing and looking as my words of choice as opposed to experiencing, or something of that sort. How am I engaging with art - every word around it, even engage, has this specific connotation of associations that I wrestle with, like fighter jets engaging one another in a dogfight, whether in real life or in the Top Gun GameCube game that faintly pops into my memory. There's a gallery with a similar name that J was texting me about - they want him to do a show and he just keeps avoiding it - and I wonder if that's the joke, another war thing happening in New York City.
I come back to where wars are happening and I come back to the deaths of the post colony and now I'm back in Arcadia Missa grafting HopOutBlick onto the Beyonce painting, while also more acutely aware of the optics of painting black people swimming, the stereotypes that accompany it, the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, Drexciya and mythologies and Daughters of the Dust all passing through my head. There's also Barthes - every image is an image of death, he was talking about the photograph and at one point I wrote about how this related to the sound-image, where you can open up a streaming service and listen to dead voices and they were always going to die but you didn't know when. I wonder if Frank Ocean can listen to Blonde or if his brother's voice on the outro is too much for him. My tweet about the weight of the world continues to circulate, people feel it, and I still feel it, but you feel the weight differently at different times, sometimes it's close to crushing you, and at other moments you can lift it above your head, even throw it into the air for a moment of rest before gravity drags it back down on top of you.
There's the matter of the Cavalli painting and the lawsuit, but my mind also drags in the constellation of The Clipse and Mr. Me Too, Pusha T saying "Pyrex stirs turned into Cavalli furs". This sort of intertextual leap from association to association probably stems from how you're trained to look at film, all shots existing in relation to the history of shots, and now I try to work out how French of an idea that is. I used my scribe app to record all the words said in Twilight City and at the end it looped the final sentence over and over and over again and when i was looking at the text file of it, it was an amazing image, I decided to tweet it, F replied that it was beautiful and I sent her a file of the film because I know she's into dean blunt and we'd talked about mekas so I figured she'd like it and then I send too many words, talking about how Mati Diop uses the Hype Williams track iceprincess in Atlantique and that there's this shot of the moon in Atlantique that mirrors this shot of the moon in Twilight City and that's probably the point that grounds my association of the two things together so strongly. I found the legs of Cavalli to be the most interesting part, there's this sort of shadow play going on that makes him look Black if one were to just focus on that section, which is easy to do with how the work is displayed, far too tall for the gallery's ceiling - there's an implicit message here too, a Black painter saying I'm making work of a certain scale and the institutions that could show it aren't doing so right now. Perhaps that's a little presumptuous, he's showing at Maxwell Graham in another week, where the ceilings are very tall. I met the gallerist with B in April, B goes back with him, it was a very funny interaction with one of those very certain types of art people who can act a certain way because they've carved out this sort of accepted reinforcement for those behaviors. Many such cases, many such cases.
In Twilight City, during one of the narrator's letters to her mother, she says "we'd fall into another silence — now we can't ever afford that luxury". It reopened the question of how does one afford anything? Right now I afford life through debt, I've made my peace with it, in time I'll work and I'll erase the debt. There are systems of debt, the one I'm in is not the worst. Yesterday I was googling about Derrida and the gift but there were too many words, it wasn't the time, I closed the tabs. I wrote some words, and then I deleted them. It's so easy to do that. The three different galleries of my time in London - Galerina, Arcadia Missa, White Cube - they can all afford such different things, and perhaps the interesting thing is how similar the Galerina and White Cube shows were on a certain level - working with time, place, and language at incredibly different scales. 24 plates turned into 24 clocks, a room where time is divided on the floor, there is no beginning or end, none of the plates had hands, and again the idea of a landmine of needing to step in a certain way to avoid breaking a plate, to shattering the delineation of time, or rather shattering its representation, all making me cognizant now of how fragile it all is. Meanwhile in White Cube, there were 3 paintings of massive scale in a room with a mass of rubble at it's center. Barbed wire wrapped around the rubble, stones and dust get kicked from time to time if you're not careful, but you're not going to trample into the piece. B was friends with one of the gallery girls there, she told us that it's not actually cement but styrafoam, at least the big pieces are, and then as we keep walking in circles around the piece, acting as the hands for this clock of rubble, you slowly become aware of this deceit, there's parts of the wreckage that would've collapsed under their own weight had they been different materials, but instead styrafoam won't erode at a natural pace - or rather it will but the natural pace of styrafoam's erosion is so much slower than that of a rock. At first I struggled with this piece, trying to make sense of the wreckage because it struck me as the wreckage of World War II, which happened after Finnegans Wake, and of course there's also the wreckage of modernity, which feels more explicit now given the links to chemistry, science, the enlightenment necessary for this styrafoam to come into being.
There's also the matter of density, the amount of texts and images on the board of hotel stickers in Galerina is probably equivalent in proportion to the amount of intertextual references going on at the Wake show. In that dark hallway of detritus, there was one glass case that had this aged dusty representation of a baguette inside, underneath it was a joke of a phrase, something along the lines of "pain the shem man", flipping "Shem the penman" into a French pun about bread, but also maybe about the pain that accompanies the transmission of letters. The whole deal w/ "Shem the penman" and "Shaun the post" can be butchered into Joyce dealing with the transmission of letters, the origins of the postal service, there's reference to von thurn und taxis, but beyond the histories of the past, it also points to the trajectories of the future, the increasing speed of the post, of this transmission of letters that we now grasp through the internet. At the same time, I think of the Ewa Poniatowska's uncle in Poland using the post, how the post is central to this work, and how The Post via instagram stories, via the Galerina website and documentation, via the internet as a whole then circulates images of her work after the show goes up. Posting, posting, posting - it's one of those words where it's become so common you forget to think about the origin, the etymology, but also because it's only used in relation to the public. You text or message someone, you don't post them, to post them is such a public gesture and again Derrida and the post card and that quote from above pop back up. When I was texting J, we were talking about the nudity of text, but we didn't get into its lack of dissipation. There's a range of Posts, some are like styrafoam, some like cement, and others like flowers, sheding their petals as the seasons turn. Now, I realize that a transformation occurred, alchemical, in which I went from texting J to posting J, as the private was rendered public, as he lead me into this. It's 1 am in Marseille. It could be the title of a Drake song.
Puducherry is a city that technically isn't in Tamil Nadu for administrative reasons relating to its colonial history, but it is a Tamil city in the sense that that's the first language of its people. It was known as Pondicherry for a long time because ~people~ couldn't say Puducherry but they changed the name recently, they did the same thing with turning Bangalore and Mysore back to Bengaluru and Mysuru though people end up using both interchangeably. I spent a few months living in a village outside of Puducherry when I was 18. The city itself is interesting, it was a French colonial hub, which naturally has effects that trickle into today. In Marseille I walked past a restaurant called Le Petit Pondicherry. I hadn't ate yet and it as the early afternoon at this point, but I reached the end of the street after having walked past a few more places and then turned around.
Normally I don't bother with Indian places while travelling because they're usually ran by northerners, I don't speak Hindi, and it's a different type of food that I had in restaurants as a child but never at home. But I figured there would be South Indian food and there was, I got a thali of Malayali food and I talked with S who was from Kerala but spoke Tamil, as the two languages are in the same language tree. The food was good, he asked about where I studied, what I do, why I'm here, and he told me about his younger sister who's in Texas, how he hasn't seen her in a while because it's hard to time their holidays while running the restaurant. He gave me a mango lassi and also gave me his card, saying that they can make me idli and dosas and other Tamil food that isn't on the menu for takeaway if I wanted. It was a very touching gesture, I left with my belly full walking down the street thinking about it. I made eye contact with a woman getting out of her car who smiled at me, she asked me something in French and I got the gist of it and then helped her unload a pressure washer from the trunk of her car. Then I kept walking, returning to a silence that'd accompany me for the rest of the day.
While eating the thali I thought about how I've been writing, what my approach has been, what it amounts to. What C wrote and what we talked about on the phone, the question of "how does a day become a lifetime" continues to echo in my head. In writing these days, I usually find a couple moments and then I try to explore them. So much is happening with the smallest nothing, it's easy to say that is life, it's easy to say so many things, and that's part of writing. I texted J a joke about titling a lecture "good art writing is like a knock knock joke" because it'd be easy enough to fit a series of rambles into that framework, but the difficult thing is to build a framework, a philosophy, set of ideas that you truly believe in, but is also malleable enough to grow with you. So much is happening in every smallest nothing, I do believe in that, as I ate Keerai (spinach curry), parappu (dal / lentils), and a carrot curry with rice and a cheese naan and pakodas and onion rings and a samosa. At the end of the meal, S's wife spoke in French to me, it caught me off guard, I replied in Tamil and then she asked her husband "he doesn't speak French" and I had to pop in with the je parle un petit peu, je apprende un peu un peu lentemente and I know a fair amount of words and can look at the text and grasp fractured understandings of what's happening, but to speak and to listen with understanding is a different stories. All things in time, all things take time, and I have to give the time. I do love the word Rêve, I think it's a beautiful sound. My mind trails off elsewhere, a version of Row Row Row Your Boat with that final Rêve echoing above the dreamstreamwaters, the annaliviaplurabella, the photographs of those Tamil men in that version of the wake, what were they doing there, what are you doing here, I found myself later sitting by the sea, the spray of the water meeting the rocks kissing me
The nothingness of it is like the sea, so many points to plunge into, to explore the depths, but there is so much, there is so much of everything, it seems impossible. I tell myself I'll go for a swim while I'm here. The last time I swam was 5 years ago, in the Mediterranean. I like returns, it seems time.
Casablanca came back today, as I was reading Eco's The Cult of the Imperfect, which J sent to me. Casablanca feels like so long ago already, there are words between Casablanca and now, there are images between Casablanca and now, there is life between Casablanca and now, and I think of the first time Casablanca came up here, at that Spanish restaurant in Greenwich Village on E's birthday. Time is nebulous, the feel of it ebbs and flows yes that's all obvious, but I'm thinking about the future of this, given the reality of writing elsewhere, and how that will inevitably shape this in some sort of way. Everything shapes everything, that's why everything matters, it comes back to these feedback loops that you opt into, and how they impact your art, I was explaining that to A today when I was talking about why missing out on tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of crypto money doesn't bother me - because I wouldn't be able to make the art I want with what that does to your mind. Eco writes about "a colossal fortune that places [the count of Monte Cristo] above common mortals" and earlier I was thinking about this while I walked around Marseille listening to Ganger, thinking about Veeze in relation to the common man, how he's elevated above that, but later after talking with A, I thought about it in terms of the crypto-bro. It's not that I don't want money, it'd be nice to have money, but there's a way to do things and I want to do them in "the right way".
J called me right after I finished writing that paragraph. We talked for a long time and it was good. I miss him, I realized how long it had been since I heard his voice and it was so nice to hear. I said whatever else I was going to type out for the sake of thinking through and now I wonder if there's anything left unsaid. Naturally, what I did today: went to the museum of fine arts here (musee de beaux arts 4 the real deal frenchies) where there were paintings and also these incredible plaster and marble sculptures. Pierre Puget, the man could cook. And then there was this room with all of these orientalist paintings of India, Istanbul, North Africa, they really were nice paintings, there were this kids in the room on some sort of educational activity for children type thing and they were running around, one of them ran up to this large painting of Arabs in some village the 1800s and almost touched the painting and then the instructors had to be like 'no no no no no' all french-like and me and this old man were laughing and most of the kids were black and brown and excited to see people who looked like them in the paintings I think. And it is this interesting thing where these cultures didn't preserve themselves through the image. While I was walking to the museum, this black couple approached me and asked me if I knew where the police station was and I said "desole je suis un touriste" and I would've helped them but it didn't seem like an urgent police station thing, moreso that they had an appointment. I keep thinking of Petzold's Transit while I'm here, the two types of migration occuring in that film, the filmed one, and the one embedded in its location. When I was in Tangier I met this couple - a German and an Egyptian - they split their time between Rabat and Marseille and when I said I was surprised by the latter he said "the thing that you won't understand until you go there is that Marseille is not France". And it doesn't feel like France, there are cafes where Moroccans and Algerians sit outside sipping tea and smoking cigarettes, like they do in Morocco, like I imagine they do in Algeria.
I sat in a coffee shop and I organized myself for a while. I drank a cappuccino and got a banana bread. I wrote little notes about the songs that were playing and the associations to media and memory that they gave me (These Days by Nico - Royal Tenenbaums, being 16; Dance of the Dream Man - Twin Peaks, being 19). I thought about how the main thing that bothers me with being in a place where my language is so broken is that it destroys my ability to code-switch, but I still go on with this broken French in restaurants and grocery stores and little interactions and it's mainly fine. I can't really let myself commit to learning French all the way before my Tamil is excellent is the issue and I should just hire online teachers once I have more money. But until then I'll sit with the pleasure of Reve and Livre and all the words I know from being illiterately well-read. After I finished the coffee and the banana bread, I looked at the stains on my napkin, then at the smears of melted chocolate on the plate, and then the foam remaining on the cup. I thought about how the main thing I've been doing with the images I've created thus far has been manipulated images of surfaces that I've made, with a degree of intention, but also being open to how they form themselves. Three surfaces now presented themselves for me. I scribbled some lines into some of the spaces on the napkin, then took my pictures. After talking to J I finished working them into an edit. I don't love them, but the exercise seems fruitful. Another study:
The final notes - how autoportrait is French for self-portrait, Godard's Autoportrait, how auto means self, how automatic refers to a thing that does it by itself - that made me think of 'you can do it all by yourself' and then 'babygirl what's your name let me talk to you let me buy u a drank' and 'SHAWTYYYYYYYYY'. The T in T-Pain stands for Tallahassee Pain. C told me that.
I had a Coney Island dream, we took a bus there, who can say from where, but it wasn't a normal bus, it was a London bus, double-decker and red, with a drop top, and we were all on the top, and I can't remember who we were, before we were in this strange house and I was waiting in like for the bathroom to wash this sticky fluid off of my hands, I talked about television to people who have know been reduced to blurs, and there were many other fragments - conversations about flights, scenes in airports, it all slowly trickles back now, ghosts of dreammemories, that will fade away into the day.
Last night I was texting T about a dream I had as a child. There are some dreams I remember, because I remember remembering them, and I repeated that process so many times, and I remember remembering many things about my childhood throughout it, so many to the point at which I tried Vipassanna when I was 18 I spent those 10 days fighting off memories and associations from the littlest things, or at least I should have, many times I didn't focus on meditating but would let these memories play out, see where they'd take me, how I'd react.
I texted T about my video game dream, because we were texting about Super Mario Sunshine and its game manual. I remember being stuck on this one level with Blooper-Surfing. There was a course and you had to surf past a bunch of obstacles to get a Shine and I couldn't do it, I was stuck, specifically with this wooden planks that rotated in circles. Everytime I'd try to get past them, they'd wipe me off to the side.
In my dream I was Mario, I Blooper-surfed and it was so inundating, being placed into that world, I'll never dream that dream again. I turned around and I did the course backwards and when I got to the rotating plank, I jumped over it. It felt like dunking and I wouldn't know what dunking would feel until years later on a short hoop, and then the next day I pushed a button and I jumped over the plank and I got the Shine. It felt momentous.
In Coney Island I was fighting off a nightmare. As the bus pulled up, people on the streets were joking, wondering why we weren't wearing regular outfits. We had to cross this field of grass and there were hordes of tweakers accosting us. They were wrapped in plastic, plastic bags over the feet, plastic bags covering their face, but you could still see their eyes, this wretched gleam of derangement that was clinging to life. There were so many plastic people, they kept grabbing you, and by the time I made it to the end of the field, I was heartbroken. I went on my phone and saw that others were posting pictures of Coney Island, there were these incredible panoramas, it wasn't the ordinary Coney Island, there were mountains and 7-Elevens and other strange fabrications. Barnabus popped into my head after looking at these images. I didn't dream I saw Saint Barnabus but perhaps I dreamt his ghost. Perhaps his ghost was alive with me as I roamed that strange Coney Island, tortured by its reality.
Saints Paul and Barnabas at Lystra (Sacrifice at Lystra) by Bartholomeus Breenberg, 1637
What is the obstacle in this level I am trying to get past? Or maybe this is the wrong question, that it's obvious analogies of obstacle and level and stage won't help me. I need to press a button and jump. And I can run courses in reverse whenever I want.
This book is falling apart and I carry it with me Along with a broken camera, in the hopes that one day there will be enough time to restore them like those frescoes in Toledo:
I have to come to terms with things She thought from her bed in the mountains waiting for the fog to lift. Sometimes she would wait weeks for this, like it was a lifetime encroaching on her imperceptible horizon.
I have to come to terms with things He thought from his bed in the river collecting the waste that sunk to the bottom, bottles of Welch's Grape Juice, the wet cardboard of Marlboro Red boxes, it was poison, all of it, but he found joy in the contamination.
And these were just scraps, there were innumerable people, reduced to shadows whose fragments could conjure a prism
The days were lonely and filled with light until the days became light, waiting for an ending: the sky fragments
I still don't know exactly what to call this or what it is I'm here for. There's this thing called "Systema" happening and there's also this thing called "Art-o-rama" happening, I'm not exactly sure what the relationship between the two entities is, but maybe I will find out in the upcoming days. Today I sat in my room transcribing Lyotard and making notes for The Text and also did laundry and more self-organization before it was time to go to an opening, in this case for Shanzhai Lyric showing at Giselle's Books which is part of Systema's whole thing. M and A run Shanzhai Lyric, I meet them through A2 after about an hour of standing around looking at art books, looking at t-shirts hanging on clotheslines, and drinking wine. It's a thing where I knew who A2 was before I met him, I wasn't in a rush to introduce myself to him, but he noticed that I was wearing a Kaje shirt and after getting off a few phone calls in the corner of the gallery space, he asked if I was from New York and we got to talking.
He asked what I do, and I went in the direction of the newest writing job I have, and we had mutual connections there like M2, who runs that company, and J who's a musician/artist who works with them now, and then we were talking more, I was trying to explain my background which is very fragmented and a mess and doesn't really make sense to most people with how they live and don't move around constantly and aren't obsessed with trying to do a thing or read things or write things, but it was going fine until D came up and A2 had lived in D's place, where I lived for a couple weeks at one point, and then he asked how I know D and I said "do you know paul (from bible)?" and then it turned into a whole conversation about that kind of stuff, one that I wasn't particularly trying to have, but was neccessary because basically everyone else spoke French, and A2 didn't really get that moment or what was happening, he was too "millenial" (lazy phrase because D and others and other people who were older "got it" to an extent), and he talked to me about meeting people like D on Dump FM, which is only a thing I've heard of and never experienced, like China Chalet and Ghetto Gothik (idk how to spell that off the top of my head). I'm much younger than A2 or M or A, and it's fine, I'm fluid in conversation and know not to make them feel that old, I'm sure my beard helps too, but talking with A2 was also weird because of Indian stuff and how detached his relationship to it all is. He brought up how he never realized I was Indian, which is largely because he's only seen one piece of mine that got traction and doesn't pay attention / follow the project / how it engages with the West, which I explained to him, and when I brought up brown friends and how most of mine aren't in New York he said he didn't have any brown friends and later said "sometimes I hate being Indian" which made me kind of sad and there was this weird awkward silence where I didn't know what to say.
I understand the sentiment, but it's some bullshit to say some shit like that, real self-hating shit (obviously) but I didn't want to coach some 30 something year old man on how he should approach his background and live his life. He was saying this in relation to C/R, the Indian crypto/NFT figure who has a significant degree of self-hatred, enough to erase his identity, whereas my approach to pseudonymity is largely guided by not wanting my sense of self to be completely commodified by the Art World / Art Industrial Complex blah blah blah, and being "Paul" / "S. Paul" / "Satya Paul" lets me engage with these frameworks through the root of the west, I explained to him when he was like 'so what's the deal'. And it was all fine as a whole, I talked with M, his girlfriend about her practice, about being young and trying to figure out how to navigate the art world and get funding to do projects and to live a decent life, and I talked to A, who makes work with M, about relationships. She was getting all of these really long texts because she was exiting a "torrid affair" and I didn't understand at first and then she was like "I was cheating on my partner but we talked about it and then we worked it out" and then I talked about my relationship struggles in terms of length, the different girls I talk to right now, and past relationships to even things out. There was a magazine with M3's writing on a table with many other books in that space. It reminded me of how we'd make fun of A2 for being confused, I even made fun of A2 with my cousins and my aunts right after my thatha died, there was a picture of him circulating online wearing a lungi in a really laughable way of 'confused ABCD' (there's ABCD's and DCBAs - American Born Confused Desi and Desi Confused By America) but he talked about how he got attached to the lungi because it was his thatha's and then he died and that was what he did to move forward with it, which I do understand. I wish I could've told him about the laugh my family had at his expense, how it made us feel better at that moment, but it probably would've made him feel sad. His whole deal felt kind of sad and confused, I wish it was otherwise.
We drank gallery wine and talked about other bullshit like New York and Sex Magazine and times past and other places, and we were hungry so they ordered pizza and these weren't New York slices but they were good "Neopolitan Style" slices, we had a few, and then the night was waning and we said goodbye, I'd see them soon again, at the Club Eat party most likely. The art was the usual Shanzhai Lyric thing, t-shirts strung together to create a poem, there's a nice found object-ness to them, but I don't find it particularly moving work. I like t-shirts, I like bootlegs, I like spelling errors, all of these things are "nice" per se, but there's nothing deeply moving at the root of the work, it feels like the sort of critique type work that I'm wary of, and I talked about the sort of critique type work where I later wanted to elide the critique element with M, she felt like a fine person to talk about art and our relationship to it while glasses of wine deep, but ultimately it's just not a form that can do that much for me. Words on a page can do a thing to me, because I can encounter them in my own space, in solitude, where they can echo and maybe pierce something deep within me and unlock some sort of emotion. That happened with the Bunny Rogers poem this morning. But t-shirts on a clothesline, with some beautiful words and images on them, they just didn't hit or unlock anything in that same way, I wish they could have, but that wasn't the case. It's fine, there's an audience who likes this work, I'm sure M and A get a lot out of it too, at least I hope they do, and art is a finick-y thing as a whole. As I try to grasp for a critical statement I remember that this sort of diary form isn't about judgements but just writing about what happened. There were many other people there, but they were all speaking French, so we formed a sort of group for a few hours, and then we disbanded. Before that I read a book that was composed of two interviews with Moyra Davey and images of her work - she talked about speaking French and reading French and I thought about how nice it'd be to be able to speak French, especially in these settings. I was texting Z about this on the way to the gallery, and in the gallery I was thinking about how I couldn't code-switch into this setting. She also talked about Orchard galley, I took pics of those parts, to send to Z and N later. While I was there, my sister texted me to wish me happy raksha bandhan, I told her thanks and that I'd talk to her later. There were many other parts of the night where I was talking a lot and explaining a lot, I think people like that in a way, it takes the pressure off of them to talk as much, they can be like 'tell me more' and I do, and I suppose I can talk about things they're not used to hearing. M made a joke about how downtown it girl publicist who lives in Marseille part of the year didn't come to the show and I told her that she was eloping at the moment, it was in Page Six, that she probably isn't in Provence right now. I made more jokes about how I'm a prominent gossip columnist and I talked about my blogs in a circular manner but I didn't share any links. It was all fun and games, I walked home and took pictures of the full moon gleaming above.
Shit is interesting, rather it's an interesting word, given that I jumped to it to sum up last night and ongoing events as now I'm digesting what happened last night. When the wine faded away, I was moderately depressed to have socially engaged with A but that's how things go. There was a part of the night where it was the two of us, M, and A2 (the numbers are flipped now whatever) and he broke out into a stereotype of an Indian call center worker and it was like... bro why are u doing this, like who is this for right now... Between that moment and him saying that he doesn't have any brown friends and was fine with playing the role of the token the whole thing made me feel gross. The trips back to India really are formative for me, nobody who's born in America really spends as much time there as I do, and part of that is because it is important to me. And people really do have choices, you can choose to live in New York and try to be a certain way and chase certain things, and I know that people are free to think whatever it is that they think of me, there was a significant level of judgement being thrown at me for a single blog post, and the interesting thing that happened after that was again having to explain myself, this time to a brown man who's very willingly taken on the role of token, and again it's this forthcomingness that I have that I'm not sure everybody deserves. I suppose it's normal to be tired of explaining yourself and what it is you're trying to do. There's another opening tonight, with drinks and a buffet. I'm not too excited and would rather stay in my room writing, but I'm here so I'll go. I posted an excerpt from a Pope.L book I was looking at on my story:
I am on vacation I am on vacation
And then I posted a picture of an LV shirt hanging that said "Love Vacation". And then I posted the blue moon. The joke was that I'm not on vacation, you need a job to be on vacation, a full-time one, not little bits of freelance work that come in while you drift. It's strange to desire a job and a career, but there's a pull, at least there is with my idealization of a job related to researching Empire, which is a job working for Empire. Gabon couped yesterday. Another interaction with A popped into my head, where he did a stereotypical impersonation of Indian parents. Shit still just makes me feel gross.
I think this is the appropriate place to put this: bro i miss my bros😭
(platonically) Fuck texting, I want u here
"Miss me with that gay shit" is a beautiful phrase. There's so much "gay shit" which is just shit that one should miss if they valued what was good for them
In high school there was this guy who started to say "No Don" when "No Homo" became contentious - Don referred to Don Lemon, the gay CNN guy, and it was low key enough that we could say "No Don" and no one would call you out like they would if you said "No Homo". Anyways, miss me with that gay shit
I got to the opening too early again so I walked out. All French people. Went for a walk and then walked back in. This time I ran into L outside. I met him the previous night, he runs one of the spaces that's part of Systema which I then find out is a non-commercial art fair, multiple spaces from both Marseille and other places coming together, so the link betwee J's showing in G's attic space in Paris then fully becomes clear and I'm like "okay I get it now". The opening was at a palace that now houses a music conservatory, there were massive halls with mirrors and pianos and peeling frescoes, it was an incredible place to show work in terms of site & documentation image forming the ghosts that'll linger once the work comes down in a few days. I liked a lot of the stuff I saw on the cursory sort of walk past with wine approach that isn't trying to formulate any sort of deep prying critique because all of this is so new to me, I don't know most of the artists showing work, and again this is a diary and not criticism. I met K, who I know on IG mostly as a downtown party person and moves between DJ, casting person, photographer, filmmaker, nightlife figure, proper multi-hyphenate stuff, and I liked his work in the show, much more than I like the single-screen stuff of his that I've seen on youtube. The install used 6 screens, stacked increasingly like 1, 2, 3 to imitate the milkcrate challenge in a way, but the videos played like this, all the same but looped at different points, rendered it into more of a surface which was just ~fashion imagery~ and requires more thoughtful words than what's in my head right now.
At another point I was talking to L by a table with books for sale and this girl, M, came up speaking English to buy a Sky Hopinka book. We chatted for a bit and she didn't know about the fair, she'd just come to check out the conservatory, and had just moved to Marseille after going to Bard and then working at Bard for a year. She left but we exchanged Instagrams and then she came back later but at that point I had gotten into the rhythm of talking to different people, meeting different people, and then she wanted to go off elsewhere to chat and it was fine, but it felt like saying words, platitudes, bullshit to fill space, and I got stuck with this, I didn't know how to get out of it and rejoin the groups I was talking to earlier because it seemed like she didn't want to do that, they ran out of alcohol at the opening and then she suggested going to another bar and I went with her and I talked more and she asked questions and I'd answer and it was fine but not that enjoyable. It's not that anything that interesting would've happened if I'd stayed at the opening, I just would've had to talk less, and I like that, I'm tired of talking, I'm tired of explaining, I'd like to move from being forthcoming to withholding, at least being selective with it. Protecting my energy or something like that. I woke up feeling drained. Critical Melancholia. There is glitter in a drainpipe...
Make new friends But keep the old One is silver And the other's gold
I texted S about last night and about meeting people, because he's met a lot of people this summer, far more than I have. I think about the nights I met certain friends, or the nights I got close with certain friends. There's this spectrum of experiences when meeting people and the chemistry you have with them. Tonight I'll go out again. But I wonder how late I'll stay out. I want to write more. I've been in this club too long ass mood. Repetition:
“What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation...”
Shit really is the word for what I just waded through. A night of pure excrement. I didn't really do anything before heading to Oct0 for their opening. I had emailed S this week about meeting up, who I'd met last year at S2's opening in London. I knew it was at the end of a long night, he wouldn't really remember it. On my way to the opening I first stopped by an intermarche - grabbed a chicken sandwich and a juice - and then when I neared the gallery I passed a McDonald's and got sucked into its vortex - un petit beouf, a small coke, an oreo mcflurry, I only finished the sandwich. Later M would tell be about how there's a McDonald's here that revolted against corporate during the pandemic. They changed their name to "Apres M", changed the arrangement of the sign outside to signifiy that, and it was a sort of hub for mutual aid.
When I ran into S outside the Oct0 opening it was a little awkward - he was very German gay artworld nonartist, I texted J about it almost immediately, and I struggled to click as I was still far too sober for the interaction at that point. I drank some wine there and met C, an Irish writer and painter who'd been living in the region for a while. We talked about Joyce and Cixous and life and practices. It was the first conversation I've had here that I truly enjoyed and it turned into getting dinner at a Syrian restaurant and more white wine. I saw him briefly in the blur after that and I had a moment of regret of not making my time with C the entirety of the night, but he also encouraged me to do otherwise.
Part of being too forthcoming is me batting around the bush as to why I'm in Marseille at this time, which is partially coincidental and has to do with the independent research I'm doing yes, but also was so that I'd get a chance to meet with S at a time when things were "happening" here - S2 had told me he'd be a good person to link with on the end of turning art into a thing that potentially pays me money, something that after this night I'm not necessarily turned away from, but feel is truly far away, something that I've also accepted when I talk about Baudelaire's writing practice and how his addiction to it constantly drove him into financial troubles. After dinner with C, I ran into M and A and A2 on the street and then ended up going to a different restaurant in Court Julien with them. I got grape leaves and I had a glass of arak. It was fine, they asked what I'd been up to, the dynamic was more clearly established now, A was wearing the lungi and I texted my sister about it again, but it was fine. At the end they said they were looking for drugs for the party, I wasn't really at that time, but I kept it in mind because some of the French people I was with the previous night were talking about 3M or trois-eme, a research chemical that has effects that are somewhere between molly and coke.
I arrive at the Systema party with A and A2 and M and we hang out and talk and smoke cigarettes for a bit. People aren't really dancing at this point, just hanging around the courtyard, and I get more wine in my system. When I was talking to C and telling him about how it's hard for me to deal with people in these settings, his advice was more alcohol. I took it. I saw him briefly in the mix there, he cheers'd my glass, and then I didn't see him again. I did see S though, he was standing up on a ledge, lording over the space, and I started to chat with him again, much more fluidly this time. Before, when I ran into him at the gallery, he said something along the lines of "were there a lot of drugs involved that night", referring to the night I met him, and I made a relatively calculated decision to play the game on both ends. M and A and A2 were looking for drugs, maybe I could find some of this "trois eme" for them, but instead S offered me his coke and told me to take the baggie to the bathroom, cut a line, and then come back. I did as such and then returned and then we got to talking shit.
Cocaine activates people, it makes them talk, it makes them dance, I'm sure there's plenty of passages in Reena Spaulings or Chris Krauss or other art world literature about the function it provides. I returned to a long series of conversations from an old gay German man about his disillusionment with art, with social change, with the world. It was mildly overwhelming but I understood - the crux of the issue was that he thought his curation was "doing something" in these past decades. At Artists Space, at the ICA, around all that, at these parties. When I met him last year he was talking about producing a Hannah Black book and also a Dennis Cooper film and I found the two ends of those spectrums to be quite funny afterwards. It made sense. And now here he was, being quite honest with me, in an extremely harsh way.
The show that his gallery had just put on - he didn't believe in it. Little miniature houses, it's nice yes, but what does it do, he said, before then lamenting that 80% of the board at MOMA is MAGA, a thing to me that's just like "DUH", but he also used the phrase "The Obama Years" to describe his time in New York and then I understood completely that he lived in this sort of fantasy land that got shattered with the election of Trump. The Obama mask on Empire was enough for him to do curational work uplifting minority artists, things of that nature, so that he could feel good about the art industrial complex and his work within it. Now, that fantasy was wholly shattered and that's why he's in Marseille, a small city, running this space that still gets money from different places, and gets its artists some of that money, and has a semiotext(e) bookstore within it, full of books like "Hatred of Capitalism" and "The Coming Insurrection" - and I saw so many other familiar names: Reena, Kathy Acker, Etel Adnan, Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, the list goes on and you get the idea. C was talking to me about how important these books are, that these books are for sale here, because they don't really exist in France the way that they do it the Anglosphere.
C and I talked a lot of shit at the gallery and at dinner - about India, about Ireland, about their relation to the UK, about what France provides and how it is here. He commented on my jacket at first - the Kiko piece that has this lace quality to it and it stands out, that's why I wear it. It's as much part as getting into character as taking the baggie from S and going to the bathroom. That phrase "getting into character" is entrenched into my mind from Pulp Fiction. In that opening scene where Jules and Vincent go to shoot those guys and get the briefcase back, one of them says "let's get into character". I can't remember if it's before or after the conversation about the Royale with Cheese, but when I was at McDonald's I sent E a picture of this display that said "Le Big Mac" and had the Samuel L. Jackson pronunciation running through my head. Getting into character has a decent amount to do with code-switching, you assume certain characters to talk with certain people, modulate those versions to talk to other people, so on so forth, obvious enough, nothing ground-breaking there. At first C thought I was the artist, because I was brown yes, and the artist was Persian, but moreso how I was dressed, the Kiko jacket, the brown loafers, and that was fine, it got us talking. I sent pictures of the show to Z - the works were these little 3-D printed houses, rendered in this gray that sapped away outside associations, and they all had these tiny LED screens that took real advertisements from the streets of Tehran and reintroduced them into this context. My impression of the work was these beautiful little objects, 10 of them in total, were like poems. Sure there is little shift in the world besides those who see them and engage with them in a certain way, but they're meaningful enough for the artist to commit themsleves to making and now, as the signs of Tehran are shown in this context, I'm reminded of Flusser and Groundlessness and Universal Homelessness. It's fine work for me, but at the courtyard of the former palace that is now a music conservatory that hosts this non-commerical art fair that is hosting this party, S is really questioning the purpose of these works, what they are doing in the world, what he is doing by extension, and lamenting that there isn't "change" coming from this kind of work being shown in that kind of space.
When I first met A he talked to me about how his bag got stolen. It had his computer and his passport, a significant amount of his life in it. At the second dinner of last night, he told me about seeing S at the police station as well. Apparently S's car and his apartment had been broken into while he was away (he told me was vacationing in Greece) and maybe there's a small extent to which these recent events, which S didn't tell me about (and had no reason to do so), where echoing through his mind, amplifying his disillusionment, but it's probably much more realizing that his life, his "wikipedia page" as he put it, was doing nothing but serving Empire. I don't think he would characterize it as such, but it's easy to group what he did into neoliberalism, corporations going gay/woke, and so on, it's easy to throw these big words about and to let them do the work of holding the complexities of the world. S talked so much, he talked about S2's work, he talked about it relation to the market and collectors and other artists in New York and London, and he compared the places of different artists in these spheres to that of scenes of German artists in the 20th century. He talked about criticsm in the 80's, when it would actually attack artists and cause questions to arise, and then it really clicked in my mind as to why boomers like Walter Robinson love The Manhattan Art Review. I thought about talking about Staten Island with him. Earlier, he showed me a tiny pamphlet he had stuck in his iphone case that held a story about Staten Island, in both French and in English. But now wasn't the time, I was reacting, he was talking, it was nice, like I said I've been doing too much talking.
I suppose S went on and on, this is what cocaine does, and I'm unsure if there was any new ground being broke besides the same recirculation of lamentations. Recirculation brings up howth and environs and that opening page of Finnegans Wake and when I was talking to C, he was telling me about the necessity of reading the work in a Dublin accent. He told me about where he grew up in Dublin, the history of it, the prostitutes that used to run its streets, and when I called it a cultural backwater, he vehemently disagreed. It was a backwater yes, but there was culture. That was a far more interesting conversation, he fed me gossip about Irish writers, the schemes they cooked up to avoid taxes, problems with writers and their estates and their families after their deaths, and he told me about going to bars in the west of Ireland, tiny places far from tourists, where there is no music, at times it gets so quiet that one can hear the clock ticking. He told me that one of the best things a young writer could do would be to spend time getting drunk in Ireland and listening to the language within the walls of the pub. We exchanged Instagrams and he told me that he'd let me know if he saw of any residencies.
At a certain point, S takes a selfie with me and then sends it to S2. I'm smoking a cigarette in it, my hand partially obscuring my face, which is good. It's an interesting thing to do, on one end, it's a fun "hey we linked up" type of picture, similar to me posting Z2 on Twitter to all of those mutuals, but it's also a validation check, to make sure I'm not lying to climb in some world. We talked about how everything in Art is work, the social end, it never ends, and I brought up SF tech culture and young VC's on Twitter as an analogous situation but I'm not sure he understood what I was saying. We went to the bathroom to do another line and he told me that he'd keep it a secret, which to me meant that he'd talk about it to whoever knew me almost instantly. It didn't upset me, I thought it was funny, the idea of creating this sort of a secret that's so banal, that's constant in the art world. Going to the bathroom together to do drugs. There was a long line for the stalls while the urinals sat empty - because everyone else was doing it. That's how original it was.
At this point I decide my time of chatting with S has more or less come to a natural conclusion. I buy a glass of wine from the bar and I run into M there from last night. She DM'd me before the event, asking what time I was going and whe the different sets were but I didn't reply, too many things going on and she was too removed from them. We had a nice little chat and then she ended up elsewhere in that courtyard and I don't think she really wanted to talk to me because I dubbed her in a way. This was fine. In the morning I was thinking about her background. Separated parents (a French dad who lives and works in Silicon Valley and an American mom, I'm not sure where she is), grew up in Munich, attended an international school where she learned French and English and German, which she only ever spoke outside the home. Then Bard, then apres-Bard, then now, it's the obvious thing of coming from some degree of money to do those things and live in that way and in my mind there's too many gaps to overcome and there just wasn't enough chemistry during the previous night at the bar, maybe some of those assumptions fed into it for me. We were both in Marseille speaking English but our circumstances of being there were so different.
I dance with these French girls who speak English, one of them I met at an opening two nights prior, and we talk, they're going to New York next week and don't really know anyone there and one of them is friends with the gallerist who runs an attic space in Paris where J has shown so I realize the natural link, we exchange IG's and I tell them I can introduce them to him. I text him that too, and that I miss him and he sends me a picture of Z and N at the opening on Hancock Street and missing them and wishing I was there hits me. I bought a flight to India, I'll be there on Tuesday. It'll be good, to sit with everything there, but I want to get back to New York and see my friends sooner than later. I tweet some bullshit about Critical Melancholy and M2 replies. It's such a funny stand-in phrase for the feeling that early Yung Lean, Bladee, Black Kray produces. It's all white artists in that Buchholz show and now I'm thinking Kray's influence on Lean and Bladee and that affect, how there can't be a Critical Melancholy without roots in Blackness and Black Culture, but also how Kray could give a fuck about show happening on 82nd street, he's built his own world and system that lets him make art and his fans stream it, buy it, buy merch, he's done the thing of how to be a working artist in these times. S was talking about what Shayne Oliver does and how it reaches so much more stuff, yes it happens at the Shinkel Pavillion too, but clothes are worn out, nightlife is experienced, these things, in his mind, were greater than a painting in a gallery.
I'm in the bathroom again and one of the French girls offers me some of this exotic "trois eme". It's sharp, cutty on the nose, and I'm glad I only took a bump. I'm not sure that I felt anything in particular but it staves off the comedown off the coke and I'm back outside dancing and socializing as things are winding to a close and we're scheming for the next move. It doesn't end up being with them, but I end up in a back room of the palace with R and R2 and K, who all performed/DJ'd, people are doing lines off an iphone and drinking wine. At this point I'm ready to go home, there is more night to be lived yes, but my phone is dead and it's 45 minute walk back to my place that I don't want to embark on without it, so I'm stuck riding the rest of the night out. We get kicked out of the palace by the security guard and head to the apartment of this couple, M3 and T, who are in the group. It's only 8 or 9 of us. It's the best play for me, I know there'll be a phone charger at this apartment, but the trade off is that I'm stuck there until it's time to leave. It's fine, we drink, we talk, we gossip, there's more cocaine, the sun rises, and then it's time to go. The metro is running at this point and I take it back, feeling like a degenerate with the stimulants in my veins. I get back to my place and my airbnb hosts are starting their day as I walk in. So much nothing happened, especially for those last few hours, that's so much of "the art world", people hanging out and doing drugs and drinking until the sun rises. I understand why it happens but I think about how much nicer it would've been to have a night that extends past the sunrise with my friends. There will be plans to go out again tonight, but I feel spent. I've done enough. There's no more "Art Shit Diary" to be written, I've writhed around in the excrement of disillusionment, aspirations, chemicals, and desire for too long. I've been in the shit, I've been with the shits, and it really just is shit.
I'm looking for an ending of sorts, the night signaled an ending of sorts for me, in terms of certain possibilities that could have been, that I wasn't sure I wanted to begin with, and foreclosure is a sort of opening. The things that eat at S are realities that I've long accepted, getting a grant is no different than getting a check from Amazon in terms of where the money's coming from and whether it's "clean" or "dirty" - there is no clean money, only the illusion of clean money. Trench Town pops into my head: "Dirty money, pick it up throw it on her friend". Being in the shit like this makes you question what it is you're doing - reading, writing, making work, pursuing "Art" in this specific sort of sense, and why you're doing it, what you hope to gain from it. When I got back to my place, there was a part of me that thought "so this is it", realizing the near impossibility of getting money to make work, to be assimiliated into these massive systems that demand so much of you, and that's where being "Paul" would really pay out, as I could externalize these demands and ideally they wouldn't weigh so heavily on myself. But these possibilities seem so far away now.
I don't think this is bad thing. It's quite helpful on the end of prioritizing the end of day jobs and careers and how I structure my life around what it is that I'm passionate about but will probably never make me money. And there's a beauty in accepting that. Jackie Wang was talking about how poems are useless in that LA Times interview, and when I think about those little houses as poems, I also think about how terrible it would be to have to earn money by writing poems, to have to think about that in the process of making poetry, whether through words or walls or screens. I'm searching for an ending and maybe it's that all this shit was necessary. What I want is much clearer now, how the world operates is much clearer now. In a sense that's the main thing I wanted when I decided to approach S - a level of demystification in how things work. And he gave that to me, it wasn't on the surface of what he said, but what was immediately underneath. I realize there isn't much of a point in searching for an ending because there will be more words underneath this soon.
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
I was a fourteen year old boy in a village in Italy when I lost my virginity
I was born in Japan but I grew up in Minneapolis. I never tell people that OMG LOL
I got a clown grant and I used it to buy a house in Philadelphia. Before that I squatted in an office that is now a gallery and showered at Crunch Fitness. The clown grant had no strings attached.
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
I would literally suck dick for fame if I moved to LA. You have to
I want it to become a lifestyle brand. You know, like Billionaire Boys Club or something
You're getting ripped off?! And you're okay with that?
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
It's all fucked up, all dirty money, there is no clean money.
Don't worry, I'll keep it a secret
It stinks in here, but you know some people... some people like the smell
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
Oh my gosh you're so young, you're a baby!
Oh her... I don't like her... She's just so...
Can you get me a show? Like I want to show! I mean I would love to, you know!
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
We were both 13, I think I was just really sexual at a young age, I ate her pussy, she ate mine
This is my first vacation in three years. I never take them.
It's good right? Not too speed-y, hits just about right
Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?
I almost missed my train this morning and I was still so tired, I kept falling asleep sitting up, falling into the aisle, waking up, and then repeating. I wanted to write from the train, the last train for a while, but I couldn't. I got to Paris and couldn't check into my airbnb for a few hours. First I went to restaurant up the street called Africa Grill, it wasn't on Google Maps, and I got a Poisson Braise and it was so good. And then I went down the street to a Salon De The et Shisha. I drank tea and watched Liverpool beat Aston Villa. And then I watched Manchester United and Arsenal play, but I had to leave a little over halfway through, so that I could check into the place. I'm still tired. I need to print things out. I need to do laundry. The little boxes of life to check off. I'll get to Chennai on Tuesday morning India Time and I'll have my paati's 2 bedroom apartment to myself. It'll be my first time staying there alone. It'll be so quiet, I'll have all the time to myself, I'll be able to do whatever I want. I'm going to work.
I texted A about her band's concert which I'm not going to make and about the upcoming group show that she's in that she posted about. She sends me links to her bandmates' soundclouds since they haven't officially put out any music yet. I've already listened to all of G's stuff but O's stuff is new, there's this one track that samples one of The Dare songs where he says "I'm in the club while you're online" but the sample is just "While you're online" looped over and over and over again and it goes crazy. I realize that's where the name of the show series comes from. A sends me pictures of the paintings she's showing and says they're top secret. They're really good and it comes back to the question of why that is and how sensibilities work - "I like this" comes out of instinct, underneath it are things like "I like looking at this" and "I like the way looking at this makes me feel" which could then include a number of "becauses"'s like "the colors", "the composition", "the je ne sais quoi", "the blah blah blah blah". I realize that I've never actually seen A's paintings, only images of them.
I took this live photo of a dog diving into a pond of water in front of the Palais Longchamp in Marseille. It's such a good little moment. I only sent it to M and didn't want to post it because it felt too good to post but if you want to see it hit me up. J and M started cooking on tiktok and it reminded me of when I was on TikTok last year. I'm locked out of the account @freecertifiedtrapper and I thought it was on private but it isn't which is nice, I can watch them now and they've aged nicely, and normally I delete my accounts when I'm done with them. I still have the delete everything impulse, not with this, but with other things. I wonder if that'll change.
I wanted to write about the airport, about the ATM taking my debit card right before my flight, and how delayed things were at the airport. But now I'm at my gate and they want us to get into our boarding groups. I'm mildly exhausted. Things are good.
And now it looks like I do have time, things are slow here. I woke up this morning still needing to do laundry and still needing to print things out. I meant to do them yesterday but I was tired, tired in the sense of going around and doing things, but I stayed in and made a lot of stuff on VirtualDJ and finished mixing most of the Classic Selena project. I took a handful of my underwear to the laundry place and then realized that I didn't have cash or coins and that their system did not take card. I didn't want to carry the underwear in my hands to the ATM so I stuffed them into the butt of the underwear I had on and then walked over to the nearest ATM. I don't think I looked that funny but maybe I did. I tried to take 20 euros out of the ATM and then it cancelled the transaction and didn't give me card back and I was like fuck. I have a stash of emergency cash because that's a thing my dad always harped on while traveling so when I get to India I'll have to convert that and then wait what will probably be 3-4 weeks before a new card arrives there. I can ask my mom to send me money through my uncle but I'd rather not do that. It's annoying, but the timing is probably the best time possible an ATM machine could've swallowed my card. Not exactly I guess because if I had another day or two I could've asked the bank to get it out but whatever. It's time for us to board actually now so I need to go again. The nice thing that happened at the airport was the Tamil lady who ran the shop where I got granola bars and water didn't charge me for the 4 euro water because I spoke to her in Tamil. I had other thoughts, about the mall in the airport, how nice it was, all of the Worlds Worlds Worlds, but those are either for later or never.
And now I'm on the plane, we're on the tarmac. I wanted to write and now I'm writing. When I was on the phone with Z and N we were talking about the need to write, an addition to writing. I deactivated Twitter because I didn't want to India-post. There's nothing that'll come of India-posting in the IRL, maybe I could link with the rich kid in Mumbai who did a summer program at RISD and likes my work, but I don't really want to do that right now. I only Paris-posted to see what would happen, and the result was cool - not a physical link but a virtual link to P, an account that had been following me and liked my story of watching the Arsenal game in the salon de the et shisha. The link is his bio was a series he was working on that fictionalized the life and career of Wilfried Zaha, and it was cool because I'd talked to T and G about different type of sportswriting. I told P about the Toussaint Zidane essay and he replied that he'd rather read Zidane's essay on Toussaint. Zidane made me think of Kobe, it might be the bald heads, but it's more the approach to anger, and I thought about the little brush strokes I've made on here towards Bruno Caboclo and Paul Pierce and Swaggy P, but they've never turned into more than those little gestures. I'm fine with that right now, I like this little collection of small gestures that keeps growing in size. P is friends with A who asked me about a source on one of my collages once and the source was a deep cut - to S's novel El Morado, which he's still never formally released, but there's a PDF of it floating around. He still wants to do something with me for his small press which describes itself as "printing stuff you'd rather read on your phone" or something along those lines. I found A's substack through P's substack and in the one post she has a mention of El Morado. The little ripples of it all are quite nice to see.
I also want deactive IG but I need to wait another week or so, to wrap up ongoing conversations / migrate them elsewhere. Immediately after I deactivated, it felt good. I almost always write on here from my laptop, which has a different speed and feel than the swipe gestures on my phone, which is much more suited for tweets, Twitter doesn't really feel fulfilling, you're not supposed to look back at old tweets so much as just let them out onto the feed where they have their moment. I'll miss dm'ing A2 and mass-liking her tweets the way that she does to mine. It's this weird special relationship through masks, the type of DM's I used to have more often years ago. The last thing I told her was "mid bitches deserve love too" - we were talking about the different parts of Istanbul.
I've definitely written over 200,000 tweets in my lifetime (including RT's) - it's given me a certain grasp of networks and sensibilities, but there's always the question about how those words could have been spent differently. If each tweet was 5 words, that's a million words. Quick maths. In Terminal 1 of CDG there's this oasis of a mall. There's a Louis Vuitton store, there's a Rolex store, there's a Moncler store, you become aware of how there are enough rich people passing through here to make these storefronts worthwhile. I'm on the outside, they're not for me, and I don't go in. I thought about J, I thought about her last night when she liked my tweet ("drinking tea, watching liverpool, in the wrong place as usual"), how I need to text her back, and how long it's been since I've seen her, but I also thought about her because she told me about her parents getting her first class tickets to Dubai. It's interesting to think of where I'll go inside and where I won't. Now I won't be inside another gallery or museum for a while.
again I wanted to write. I landed and it felt more familiar than anywhere else besides New York. There was this sense of calm in all the noise.
Language is perhaps defined as the very power to break the continuity of being or of history.
I keep listening to the hook of SL by Fally Ipupa over and over again. I've started singing along with it.
Depuis okenda chéri, nga c'est comme ça (nga c'est comme ça) Tous les jours, nga c'est comme ça (ngai c'est comme ça) Obengi trop, jaja na yamba (jamais na yamba) Alors kendé na yo, nako bandela (nako bandela) Malgré que tu me manques, mais nako supporter (nako supporter) Motéma pasi mais nako bandela (nako bandela) Chéri, je t'aime mais nako bandela (nako bandela) Steve Loemba, ah mwana mama
again I realized, again I remembered — writing as a means to transform reality
a handwritten note about killing, about the corpse and its relation to the corpus
I went to sleep, my phone buzzed with messages, and I knocked it onto the floor. The cracks in it spread. I noticed this while replying to messages in the morning. It's something I should get fixed now but will put off for the time being. This room feels so comfortable to me, I forgot how long I was here last year. It was a different time, I don't plan on taking tramadol, codi-star, or modafinil this time around. And it's a unique place, there is so little pressure here.
I realized how much I struggle with the institutionalization of the arts / of literature this morning when I got an email from "Creatives Rebuild New York", which *I* signed up for at some point, probably thinking about the idea of trying to get grant money before the actuality of what you have to do to get grant money hit me. Now I think of jobs and the actuality of what you have to do to get a job is hitting me. This is how the world works.
I started another PDF - "Our Place in Al-Andalus" - and have two dozen tabs open yet again. Four of them are LibGen downloads: Michel de Certeau's The History of Writing, John Edward Philips's Writing African History, D. Emily Hicks's Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text, Thomas Moynihan's X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. The odds of me actually reading all four texts is slim-to-none. There is was a world with an academy that interested me that is past. There is was a world that is past. There was is a place that past. That past there was is a world.
I responded to an email from B, who ran a film critics academy in Belgium I attended years back. Someone applied for press accreditation under my name and it was granted. He asked if this was me and if I would be an attendance and I said no, I'm in India for the foreseeable future, and as I type that I think about that phrase - "foreseeable future" - and I google it. There are news stories: Forbes says "Why Job Hopping Is Going To Continue For The Foreseeable Future", Reuters says "Mercedes boss: EV costs will remain higher for foreseeable future", CTV News Vancouver says "BC Ferries suspects vessel hit humpback whale, adjusting operations 'for foreseeable future'", Business Insider says "Russia rejects peace agreement, insisting its war in Ukraine will rage on 'for the foreseeable future'", Mid-day, a Gujurati publication, says "Amanda Bynes to stay at mental health facility for ‘foreseeable future’". I open the article and she has a heart tattooed on her left cheek. Hollywood is a crazy place. The movies do things to you. I think about jobs as I refresh my friends' websites and watch M's latest video. It's incredible, this loop of his kissing to the camera, the coming into focus, the repetition of it with minor changes on the threshhold of perception, and then the black screen at the end. The thing about a black screen is you see your reflection in it. It's like water.
The time is different here. I type slower, as there is no event to extrapolate before it dissipates. Rather there's just this entirety of dissipation surrounding me. Eventually this room will vanish and I'll be elsewhere.
IWANTHERTORIDETHATDICKALLINSLOWMOTIONNNN. It's a line in YNW Melly & J Green's "Florida Water". It happens later in the song but there was a fast version of it mixed by DJ Frisco that chopped that line up, sped it up, inserted it into the beginning of the mix - that version is gone, with DJ Frisco's entire page. He has so many pages, but they took down the main one. And there's other fast versions of "Florida Water" but only one other starts off chopping up that line, and it doesn't hit the same - the effects are different, the speed is different, it doesn't register with my memory like the Frisco version.
I returned to the screenshot of the unreleased hopoutblick song transcribed into an IG story. I read a review of the two new Pasolini translations in TZK, the review was not especially a review and felt fragmented and unfinished, like there was more to be said that couldn't be paid for, so the writing was truncated there. The point I found interesting was that “For Pasolini, there was revolutionary, Mallarméan potential in publishing in Friulian, as he did in both Ragazzi di vita and his second novel, Una vita violenta (1960). To learn, he immersed himself in the slums surrounding Rome (and found his own sort of informants) to listen and transcribe local slang”. In Marseille on the roof I tried to explain DThang and Kay Flock and how this was two years ago to the downtown art world millenials and they couldn't even really understand SUCK MY DICK! There isn't really a way to transcribe SUCKMYDICK into a way that conveys the feeling of a kid from the Bronx yelling it.
Last night I watched a youtube documentary about the drug trade in Marseille. It's a big deal there that 15 people died in a summer. Part of America is this numbness to those types of things. The guns in Marseille are smuggled from Eastern Europe and I wonder how long it'll be before all the excess weaponry from Ukraine starts disrupting life across Europe. I watch a hopoutblick interview and then a music video. It's all so sad and sad fails to capture it all. It's an issue of translation. How can one (re-)voice this heartbreak?
The time difference between Chennai and Western Europe is only 3.5 hours but that's enough that it really shifts how I can text / talk to people. Makes it more of a series of missives to wake up to, that they'll then wake up to, rather than instantaneous conversation. It's good. For the next 7-10 hours, I'll get very few texts and can focus on Work. Yesterday I signal messaged a guy in a bay area group chat I got added to about an AI Conclave being held in Spain in October. I've got enough credentials + background where it could be a solid step into something, but also it's some tech shit and it'll definitely be well-funded. He told me it'd be a minute before he emails me, he's recovering from Burning Man. It's funny to me, but that's the reality he's plugged into.
The reality here is helpful to orient myself following the last week. My thatha's apartment is a small two-story building. An old couple lives in the ground floor and my paati usually lives in the second floor, but she's living with my aunt right now so it's just me here. The apartment is further away from the center of Chennai but the city has grown so much that that doesn't really matter now. My mom would tell me they could ride their bikes on the main road as kids but now that road is a mess, they're building an overground metro line through the center of it, traffic, noise, and dirt is a nightmare. And the surrounding buildings have engulfed this one. The area become desireable as the city grew and in the last 10 years especially people began to buy the neighbors buildings, tear them down, and build newer, nicer, bigger ones. This apartment feels very much like a cave with the way the light trickles in. It's nice though, it's comfortable. On the backside of the building, a house has been torn down and a group of men labor on putting a new foundation in. It's very noisy work, lots of hammering, which serves as a constant reminder of the need for work and how I'm able to afford the life I live.
The only person I've seen the last two days is A. She's an ayya (maid) and it's always a strange thing to talk about on the sense that the relationship my family has with her and her family is a traditional one that's dying. The maid situation basically comes down to there being a billion people here and all of the different caste/social hierarchies and that there's such a labor surplus that you're not going to deal with laundry or cleaning or cooking yourself but will hire somebody to do it. The dust/dirt situation here also means that a place needs to be cleaned almost everyday. Nowadays, most maids work through an agency or an app, and it's like in New York where you can get on an app and hire someone to come to your place and clean, but traditionally a maid would work for a family who would keep her employed full-time. As such, I've known A since I was a kid and any way of describing the relationship I have with her comes off as hyper-privileged to someone from the West - a "my family treats their servants well" type sentiment - but she is close to the family. When my thatha died, she was crying louder than anyone during the funeral ceremonies. My grandparents put her children through school and helped with other needs along the way. Both of my grandparents were extremely frugal, something they had to be at that time, something that I did not inherit but think about when I blow money on clothes or my general lifestyle while they penny-pinched and gave to charity. All of this is just a way of saying that being here makes me hyper-aware of my privilege. I get to stay in this apartment with my needs looked after, while men pour concrete and build metro lines only a couple hundred feet away. I'm not rich enough to make art in a certain way, but I'm rich enough to be here.
There's this guy J who I've met once, but we're mutuals on Twitter and he went to Reed with some of my Reed friends. He also has a daily diary blog, it's on substack but there's no emails, and he's been maintaining it far longer than I have this. I used to read it semi-regularly and caught up on it recently. He's 31, was a fent addict and is now sober, and moves through life pretty honestly and also hangs around downtown stuff because his girlfriend is a downtown person - she's a sculptor, did her MFA at Yale, and showed in Europe recently - even though he's not really a "downtown person". He went on a trip with her family for the Europe show and wrote about it, there was one moment where they were staying at a hotel in the Alps and he wrote that this is an exerience that 99.99% of people will never have, he wouldn't be able to afford it on his own. I could feel him trying to write through things, but it's also a thing where he's so busy with actual daily life of talking to people, going about, working or trying to work, that he doesn't have time for more than a few paragraphs on most days, and he's forced to move through the events rather quickly. It's how I used to write when I started this, before I started using punctuation and capitalization and it became more formalized and the words and sentences got longer and I started to really think about writing, the form, my sentence structure, my use of paragraph breaks, and so on, while the social events of my life also dwindled significantly, to the point at which text conversations became a thing to write about.
Yesterday I texted B for a while - initially I sent him a link to the story I wrote about Marseille and S, I knew he'd get a good kick out of it, and then we got to gossiping, he told me that H and [I] from my program got seed money from Bloomberg for a start-up that they pitched. H was a spoiled rich kid from Iceland who went to art school in Zurich and then graduated into being Olafur Eliasson's personal assistant - it's funny that such a thing as Icelandic art world nepo babies exist. I had to work with him during the "internship" phase of the program which was an experience that kind of drove me insane because while I bullshitted about 20-30 hours of work that month, he sat around and basically did nothing. He didn't have to deal with the realities of the bay area housing market because he had an art world friend who let him stay in an extra bedroom of her Berkeley place for free during the length of the program. There isn't really a cope or a seethe to typing this because I'm already sitting in an extremely privileged room in respect to my surroundings. It was more of a realization of how I should be trying to get money as opposed to hoping some sort of art dominoes topple over in my favor. Going into this, the most important thing I can think of is how to mentally segment any sort of day job vs. my arts practice - the pseudonym helps already, that was part of the thought process when adopting it. It isn't that I have any desire to stop making things so much as I need to rewire my addiction of constantly making into doing things that will help me live better. In many ways, it's better to have money than it is to not have money. - I'm typing this with more money than so many around me, but not enough money to get back to New York. I wish I could type "not enough money to get back home" - at this point it feels closer to that than anywhere else but here. To an extent, the idea of living in a place for a year scares me. But maybe settling in like that would allow me to settle, would reduce the code-switching. When I was with Z she was asking me about what that does to me, the sort of internal conflicts it creates - it's not as bad as it used to be, in a sense it was what made me so depressed growing up. I could ruminate here all day, but instead the best course seems to be to move forward, to be productive, to produce value. I suppose the biggest difference between between J's writing and mine is that he uses his to write about things that happened and his thoughts on them. For me, this has turned into a space to think, the thinking is the event.
I keep wanting to write endings, knowing that this will go on and go on.
Rewatched metempsychosis (2020) after sending it to T. Made me have a lot of thoughts about practice, being, identity, making, etc. Thoughts that I'm still unpacking. Writing is an Event and reading is an Event, insofar as it is also a form of writing - "Our Place in Al-Andalus" makes that clear as I slog through the bits on the Zohar. Yet life is extremely uneventful now, in the sense people usually recognize Events... I think to fully mine the depths of these Events I need a space of silence. I created one already. All this to say that I intend to return here when the typical sorts of Events return. All this to say that I'll be writing footnotes. All this to say things that will become nearly imperceptible to the scroll once I resume this form I made to dissolve the usual delineations of time. All this to say there was so much joy in writing here. All this to say I hope there is joy to come. When I rewatched that film, I thought about my voice at that time, and how much it's changed. It is nice, changing.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about Hong Sang-Soo's Tale of Cinema, how romantic the idea of killing yourself with someone you love is, and how sleeping pills are a bad way to attempt suicide.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about my family and sleeping pills and suicide.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about my fantasy football team, the idea of fantasy, how it relates to sports... that podcast on Walter Benjamin.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about eating chicken today and the mental anguish it cost me. I'd write about the ghosts in this apartment.
I suppose that I have continued writing, that I will continue to write, that the matter at hand is of inscription.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about Hopoutblick getting booked by the US Marshalls and how there was finally a newspaper article about him, how his writing was finally inscribed elsewhere.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about the long conversation I had with N today after Z had to go, the ways in which it was helpful as I pave this road forward.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about the time when bridges were being built and walking past the metro rail construction splitting the center of Arcot Road.
If I were to continue writing I'd write about continuing to write.
I'm geeked off a Zyn listening to Whatcha Say Malibu Cover on loop. It seems like that was the briefest of neccessary intermissions. Worked on more studies. Waiting for daylight to translate the pages into images. I'm comfortable here and with what is it come.
The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses (excerpts)
I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress.
Ill. In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea-style-writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
Reading Walter Benjamin after getting out of the hospital and trying to figure out what to do with this gift called life. Reading Walter Benjamin while missing the bros. Reading Walter Benjamin trying to get your brain to think fast again.
There are different versions of what happened. In the shower I was thinking about the slimesito tweet about how clothes have nothing to do with swag, and how inscription has nothing to do with writing. Was anything ever known or was there only an illusion of inscription?
There's a part where Benjamin writes about writing. I wrote "talks" at first because it's like he's talking to me, but he isn't even close to doing so, it's a translation, but in The Task of the Translator he writes of the impossibility of language itself. But in One Way Street he writes of the writing to come, of picture-writing and the poets who will author it: With the founding of an international moving script, poets will renew their authority in the life of peoples, and find a role awaiting them in comparison to which all the innovative aspirations of rhetoric will reveal themselves as antiquated daydreams.
I watched a clip of JJ Redick's podcast where he talks with Evan Turner and Andre Iguodala about the mentality of "embracing your role" in the NBA. JJ talked about how because of his physical limitations it was necessary for him to have a certain degree of craziness, of swag, in order to "make it".
I've been getting really into AR-Ab. Crazy bars. Free him.
The Classic Selena roll-out has been on my mind. I'm glad M convinced me not to just drop it, but to make a Thing of it, but the question is what... Visuals / videos sure... what platforms / accounts for it? should it be on streaming? I'm still tired and my health is not great. In The Kingdom Carrere wrote about how Paul was a sickly man. I'm not sure I'd describe myself as sickly, or rather I don't want to, but I've never had great health. But I'm also not Paul, circumcision, which Paul cared a lot about, makes that clear. I woke up late because of jet lag today, I ate oatmeal, I walked my sister's dog. There is a reticence to put things here now, because it is about that borderline between the public and the private and I've been writing elsewhere and the current state of affairs is not one I want to write about so much as allude to. I tweeted a photo of the tree canopy in the woods w/ the words "real downbadistan trenches". I made a flip of ot7quanny trapped out that I'm really happy with. This isn't a place where I've produced writing before but now it has to be. That isn't true, but it's been some time since I've inscribed here in a way that I liked. What's clear is I'm in my head about things, and I'm trying to get out of it, to just do. We rewrite memory like we rewrite history, I saw Sans Soleil screenshots on David Rimanelli's IG. I reposted them to my story and then deleted the post 10 minutes later. I posted a photograph from Chandigarh a over a year ago a few hours before that. I think Classic Selena - VVS Lemonade should be a film.
Time had passed, and yet it was not past; that was a truth that I should not have wanted to place in my presence. I often have an immeasurable desire to abbreviate, a desire that is powerless, because to satisfy it would be too easy for me; however lively it might be, it is too weak for the limitless power I have to accomplish it. Oh, how useless it is to desire anything. I didn't imagine that anyone lived in the room, or in any other room in the world, if there were any others, which didn't occur to me either. I think for me, at that moment, the world was fully represented by this room with its bed in the middle of it, the armchair and its little piece of furniture. Really, where could anyone have come from? It would have been madness to expect the walls to disappear. Besides, I was not conscious of the world. Life was now a sort of bet being conceived nearby, a bet with the memory of that touch — had it happened? — with that stupefying feeling — would it persist? — that not only did not fade but asserted itself — it too — in the wild manner of something that could have no end, that would always make claims, make demands, that had already set itself in motion, wandered and wandered like a blind thing, without any goal and yet more and more greedy, incapable of seeking anything but turning faster and faster in a furious vertigo, without any voice, walled up, a desire, a shiver turned to stone. I could not carry her into the center of myself, which belonged to someone else: she lived in the outskirts, at the limit, where difficulties turn into active and real things. This doesn't mean that she was without importance. On the contrary, she whispered at me from that borderland where she was free, she whispered preoccupations that paralyzed time. This paralysis was her victory, this inertia became my struggle. At this instant, she was perfect each of us was relying on the imminence of the ending — imminence that had nothing to do with duration — but leaned on it with such force that the edifice of an instant, founded on nothing, could also appear extremely solid.
At certain moments, I could have found such a face quite reserved, such a contact quite distant, and such perfect kindness strangely divided. But these moments had no place in my existence, which was always reduced to a single moment: a unique moment, marvelously agreeable and important, that made me feel that all of space, from the remotest point to the nearest, was entirely occupied by the living reality of one face, and opened the world for me to the immense measure of that face. Anyone who lives elsewhere has nothing, but nothing was not questioning me. Certainly the truth does not die easily. I never spoke, but "never" could end any instant; "never," a very close limit for someone burning with impatience.A face like that was hardly made to be seen, I was seeing it unlawfully, in a sense, "by chance," even though at such a moment the whole scene just seemed to be taking place only for the sake of this apparation. At such a moment? And when did that moment begin? Nevertheless, it was at just such a moment, with suddenness I was aware of, a suddenness so dazzling that it took all the power away from the phrase "all at once": I found myself seized again, caught up again by the sudden motion, the almost wild leap I spoke of and that took the form of a bolt of lightning. Without my being able to understand exactly when it happened, this sudden movement shook me, I was overcome with horror; I think I saw light, a vision difficult to sustain, instantaneous, connected to that movement, as though the fact that the two of them were torn apart, as though this cruel space... but I can't do it, I can't finish this sentence. I had stood up; I almost fell to the floor. Thank God, I was on the point of dying, these words were not a discovery but, as they crossed my fall, they were revealed under a piercing light, as a sort of oracle choking my strength and goading it into this pitilessly ample vibration: "Death! But in order to die, one had to write — The end! And to do that, one had to write up to the end." It was the the start of a new era, a tragic one in many respects, but since this shock wandered about freely, it seems hard to take it as a reference point for any sort of beginning.
What was in this silence? A question, probably. That idea, "the day is beginning," was burning me, it was already reduced, through my life, to the eternity of so few instants, it was already that other idea, "the day is dying"; haste which was stripped of its composure, like a muddle of actions, and yet was a completely lucid demand, because through its entire extent I saw the immensity of the history that I had to set in motion. I found myself on the same level as this beautiful instant, but could I grasp it? Will anyone have trouble understanding that with its wild strength, the shiver was already dragging me farther along? And what maddened my impatience was that the beautiful instant wanted to be kept, eternalized, it was a cheerful instant that did not know or only suspected that by lingering near me, it was condemning itself to become a beautiful apparation, a return that would be forever beautiful, but separated from itself and from me by the greatest cruelty. Had it happened once? A first time and yet not the first. It had the strangest relations with time,, and this was uplifting too: it did not belong to the past, a face and the promise of that face. In some way it had looked at itself and seized itself in one single instant, after which this terrifying contact had occurred, this mad catastrophe, which could certainly be considered its fall into time, but that fall had also crossed time and carved out an immense emptiness, and this pit appeared to be the jubilant celebration of the future: a future that would never again be new, just as the past refused to have taken place once.
And it is true that even these words, these words too, were an echo of another time now and then I wrote a few words — these words, to be precise — but what "exactly" was happening? I wouldn't be able to say, beyond making this observation: that even though I wasn't thinking about it at all, I had bound myself to this "point" and I was looking at it with such self-abuse that the strength of even a more capable man probably wouldn't have been enough for it and that in any case mine, the strength of the day, of the day that was mine, was no longer equal to the tasks of daily life, even though, I must confess, this life was often reduced to very little.
a day that had not begun and was not yet shining except in the distant beginning of an image whose calm was distress and whose supremacy was origin and end. At night, when I got up, who got up with me? At that instant, there was no day, no night, no possibility, no expectation, no uneasiness, no repose, but nevertheless a man standing wrapped in the silence of this speech: there is no day and yet it is day, so that this woman sitting down there against the wall, her body half inclined, her head bent toward her knees, was no closer to me than I was near her, and the fact that she was there did not mean that she was there, nor I, but the conflagration of this speech: now it is happening, something is happening, the end is beginning. She had bound herself furiously to the infinite; only there could she find a language in which to say, "Even so, I see it!" But the limitless was not enough for her. That was why she was eternally summoning me out of the infinite. And now? Now, the obviousness had been shattered; the broken pillars of time were holding up their own ruins. I think I can no longer lose my time, and for a peculiar reason, really, which is that it has already lost itself, having fallen below the things one can lose, having become unknowable, alien to the category of lost time. Anyone who wants to live has to rely on the illusion of a story, but this reliance is not permitted to me.
How terrible things are, when they come out of themselves, into a resemblance in which they have neither the time to corrupt themselves nor the origin to find themselves nor the origin to find themselves and where, eternally their own likenesses, they do not affirm themselves but rather, beyond the dark flux and reflux of repetition, affirm the absolute power of this resemblance, which is no one's and which has no name and no face. That is why it is terrible to love and we can love only what is most terrible. To bind oneself to a reflection — who would consent to that? But to bind oneself to a reflection — who would consent to that? But to bind oneself to what has no name and no face and to give that endless, wandering resemblance the depth of a mortal instant, to lock oneself up with it and thrust it along with oneself to the place where all resemblance yields and is shattered — that is what passion wants. I have to draw back and draw back again into the heart of the instant where I wander like an image bound to a day that passes immobile through the day and to a time that at a certain point always disengages from itself a vacillating darkness where I had to endure the greatest pain and yet came upon the truest and most joyful moment, as though what I had stumbled against was not the cold truth, but the truth transformed into the violence and the passion of the end. I can recall all that, and to recall it is no doubt only one more step into that same space, where to go farther is already to bind myself to the return. And yet, even though the circle is already drawing me along, and even if I had to write this eternally, I would write it in order to obliterate eternity: Now, the end.
To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.
to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not leave himself behind in order to approach the universal. He does not move toward a surer world, a finer or better justified world where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day. He does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably for all. What speaks in him is the fact that, in one way or another, he is no longer himself; he isn’t anyone any more.
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking—and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it.
an instinct leads me towards a thought: it's easy to imagine eyes. Or rather the question of imagining eyes emerged.
Spin the block: or rotating shapes. Can you spin the block in non-Euclidean space? Is it easy to imagine eyes? Sometimes things die, and then they come back to life. Spin the block like silk — it's bulletproof.
Back From The Dead. Black Orpheus. Imagine the eye's of Calliope. Can you? Whose Gods are these?
Whose myths are these? Whose world is this? An oldhead echo: I'm still making wishes for Disney World tickets.
Persephone's polyphany — mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written, thereby restoring to the present instant its rights, its decisive trenchancy: “A story? No. No stories, never again.”
The words that immediately come to mind are not mine. But I realize the impossibility of ever having words.
Death is an ending. I'm running from it once again. “Once again” as though there isn't multiplicity at play. “Play” like these are instructions for the stage. “Stage” like this is a video game, like we can click and choose our world. “Our world” like what keep it a stack. RIP Princess Diana.
The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the shared concerns of common tasks, of an occupation, through the simplicity of intimate speech, the force of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly historical; but he doesn’t want to waste time either, and since he doesn’t know anymore how to do anything but write, at least he writes in response to his everyday history and in accord with the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid, thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time’s absence.
nothing happened again. listening to lauren duffus fact mix. realized my favorite mix on soundcloud got deleted but i mp3'd a rip of it years ago. went onto a harddrive and found it, listened in the car today. No One's 100% desi bfd mix:
I think it was made by cl9 but I don't know what happened to cl9. I'm afraid to ask ppl who'd know. Before my time. Life is hard. I look at screens and am filled with sadness from all the pain. Heartbroken. I want to listen to it in London. I like London as an alternative past that never happened for me. My mom was telling me about how she took French lessons while I was 3 months old because John Deere wanted my dad to relocate to Orleans but they didn't want me to grow up between French and English, given that it wouldn't have been permanent. I sit in my room and read the space of literature in translation. In two weeks things will be different. In a moment things will be different.
Two beautiful moments from the lauren duffus mix: handel x waka flocka flame x these drums that go dummy +++ that opening guitar riff to justin timberlake what goes around w/ some drums. I need to get lit, I need big drip, I need to fall in love with a lit bitch
There is a point because I delineated it as such. Meaning that there's a realization. Meaning that exists outside of myself. I took it out of a line.
There are all of these words which could be sounds. In this room I'm surrounded by books. Stacks of them on top of my desk and my piano, because I've ran out of shelves. The time went. It was always a matter of time.
It's this matter of unfinished things, all the sketches that remain undrawn. Polly Wood. Glocktober Magazine. The Text. All succumbing to time. It comes back to the types of writing, how text is encumbering, lumbersome — at least for me — it's not as though there isn't malleability, but rather that in order for the form to become malleable in the way I want I need the time to input so many texts into myself. That's how all things work. You input media — images, sounds, texts, Life — and you output media. I can manipulate the image, but not the sound-image, at least not with the same level of precision.
There is a point because I delineated it as such. Meaning that there's a realization. Meaning that exists outside of myself. I took it out of a line.
It's like a score, sometimes, sometimes it's this woven thing — still repetition is at the heart of it. The heart of it.
The heart of it. Is that the center? Or is it, simply, the heart of it?
Casa de Lava, house of lava, I remember watching it, but I didn't remember it, it was anew again. Mariana is so beautiful, she doesn't belong there, but there is no one one waiting for her in Lisbon. The black sand, the black soil, make you all the more aware of her white flesh. I remember loving the film - it's an easy film to love, every shot is perfect, every cut is perfect, the bits of music are perfect, you are transported somewhere utterly Other, and you see beauty in a world of pain, but it is also a world of love, but it is also a world of death, but it is also a world of life.
"We ought to die as children and be born old," says an old man. He plays a fiddle. His sons call music a cruel master. They say they're leaving for Lisbon to labor, to be laborers. At the end they leave. The old man says Mariana's heart is wounded, that it speaks with sadness. They speak Creole on the island. Lovers speak their own language, it's foreign to everyone else. I thought about when I had this. I thought about many other things during the moments of the film that dissipated into past instants forgotten. I remembered watching it, but I didn't remember it. How long had it been?
I write in my own life — sitting in the front row for New York premiere of Vitalina Varela, camera in hand, to tape the Q&A that followed. It was the applause and the standing ovation that bothered me deeply, the mediation of pain that we sat through, that nobody in the crowd could really understand, the same way I can't understand war and the shelling of Gaza, there is this pain that is deeply human, not just the experience of it, but the infliction of it. I thought about institutions and realized the festival wouldn't give me what I want, the people who'd see it wouldn't be the ones I want to see it. And now? It's been years. I can still make. I must make, and then it doesn't matter where it shows, what matters is that it's been made, that it can be seen.
It's all falling apart. It's heartbreaking. Soon the sun will rise and tonight I won't sleep. There is a day tomorrow, it's a day I will have. Although now I think twice before writing about the future, and assuming that I know it.
Writing as a means to transform reality — what is transforming to manipulation? And now, I'm ever aware of how we're always writing, of how that word has opened up in meaning, writing has blossomed here, it has nothing to do with the text.
Writing has blossomed here. This is a site of blossoming. Blossom: the flower of a seed plant; the state of bearing flowers; to bloom.
Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling
A sample. This cascade is confining, yet we work within confines. We grow within confines. We live within confines. This is a site of blossoming. A blossom of heartbeats.
Still, there remains this urge of ending. Leão, Black Orpheus, Back From The Dead. Suleiman, the name of a prophet, not an apostle. There is a post within apostle.
Muted heartbreak. I remember that I left the Casa de Lava notebook at Z's. I'll look through it again soon. Again I assume the future. Or I attempt to write the future. Sometimes it works, sometimes it blossoms. I remember, there is truth in it: I get to write what's next
Enveloped — it's a good place to begin again. I could have started with inundated but there is no paper there, there are no seams, no chemical glue to lick, no factory to produce inundation. It's an emptier image, perhaps there is more tumult in inundation, to be enveloped is a relatively clean process, surgical even, though envelopes can break, paper can stretch thin, and give way. Can pixels? Blanchot (via Lydia Davis) wrote of Mallarme questioning "What is literature?", how this question became literature, I watched Yuk Hui talk about War and Machines and thought about how I needed to reread Recursivity and Contingency and how there is always this infinitely growing list of things to read, to watch, to hear, it is impossible to accumulate it all into the self. This list can be inundating, but it never envelopes.
I was enveloped, I remain enveloped, but the paper is stretching thin — what will come out? Things will be different. I run around in so many different directions at once and I'm trying to simplify the routes. I make all of these Works, they accumulate from within and spill out. I understand when people don't have anything left to spill now, they're exhausted. I was exhausted.
The envelope gets filled, it gets sealed, and then it's shipped. Then someone receives it, they tear it open, sometimes at the seal, sometimes in it's entirety. The envelope can break in such a way that it can never be filled again. But it's easy to make new envelopes. And its this cycle between the postcard, with its public address, its inability to hide, and the envelope, which refuses to bear its words to the public, which has a layer of consent wrapped into the address, that one not break a seal that isn't meant for them.
This doesn't happen all the time. When I worked at the mail center I opened envelopes meant for James Franco and Meryl Streep. They no longer had boxes there, there was no way for the letters to reach their address. But it was always so boring. Louise Bourgeois's son had a mailbox but I never opened his mail. I could see that he was doing projects in Mali and I google him now and there's an obituary, he had a property in Djenne, where there's this incredible mosque I want to see, and I wonder when he last went, because the region has been controlled by Islamic militants for some time. The obituary says he wrote for Artforum in his 20s, and he was of that ilk. Things change so much, today S texted me about how there aren't really websites anymore, I replied with a Colby O'Donis track from the album S2 told me he was listening to, saying that there aren't really pop songs anymore. On my walk I thought about creating a website for Classic Selena.
On my walk I listened to Phreshboyswag - shinin like the sun on repeat. This wasn't today, this was the other day. I thought about how he idealizes an era of the Pacific Northwest I lived through via images and I idealize an era of London he's lived through via images. I sent the track to M - see me in my skinny jeans serving cunt. I play snow angel and think about how phreshboy's voice has changed. Ballin so hard could've played for Barcelona.
The names of things change, by way of their meanings. Time lies in relation to Events, "naturally", "of course".
“The dream of our age is the abolition of time. The timeless (rather than the classless) society is the hope of tomorrow.” What does this mean for The Text?
Images are not windows; they are history’s barrages. The goal of the political demonstration is not to change the world but to be photographed.
Here rn meant that Here would inevitably become Elsewhere.
Here rn, or Ici tout de suite, or Ici dés maintenant, or Ici droit maintenant, an anagram for "ancient intimidator" and "intimidation trance"
Repetition (II) — this has seemingly become an exercise in beating the heart of a dying being, only to realize that's what it always was. Killing to live.
People on the phone will ask what did you do today — it's almost always the same. I'll go for a walk. I'll eat. I'll drink tea. I'll read. Many nights I'll watch movies and videos. I haven't been painting, or manipulating images very much. I think that can wait until Chicago, until I establish a space for that purpose. I still need to buy tickets. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I receieve a notification on Substack that Nick Henderson of the Anchoret Journal has tagged me in a post. He wrote about a piece of art he bought from me last year. It hangs in his living room. I remember googling him around that time and seeing that he was a PhD student at the University of Minnesota and thought 'oh that makes sense'. A couple months ago I messaged H after a tweet she made about how the tweet could've been a text to someone she loves (and I feel as though I already wrote about that earlier) and she told me she asked W for my number because she wants to buy some work. I told her that I was in Morocco and couldn't get it to her, that I would do so at some point. W has a piece I made hanging in his study. A has a couple of my pieces in his crib. T wants the Pussy Money Weed painting that's at A's crib. It's strange to think of these works hanging in places.
Nick describes me as "a Twitter personality and writer" which is both funny and true, and also redundant. Every Twitter personality is a writer but not every writer is a Twitter personality. I was much more concerned with The Post in years past than I am now but I still have love for The Post, as I think of the wake and the von thurn und taxis and F in London, as I think of Derrida and the postcard in relation to enveloped letters, enveloping letters, the postcard of El Greco I bought in Toledo still in my bag. I can hear my dad talking to his sister on the phone. His other sister tried to kill herself again. I think of that day I found out about the time before, how I its memory is silently prostheticized into the video of Z and J, the swan itself is like... and I'll see them both next week.
Nick does ekphrasis on the piece, the images it's composed of, the sources of the quotes. Flusser was also important for him, and the Badiou quote in the work, from his book on Saint Paul, apparently helped lead Nick to convert. There was this e-girl I used to DM in 2020 who was a comp sci student at ASU. Normie party girl who has her secret online life where she follows all the posters and blah blah blah. Xanax girl from the Rafman Dream Journals was her avi. I think I last talked to her in 2021, she sent me a bunch of messages and I didn't respond in time, and then it became too late to respond, but she told me that she'd converted to Orthodox Christianity partially because of me. It's a strange thing, that sort of writing to manipulate reality, that manipulates reality in so many ways I'll never know, in so many ways I never would have expected.
I remember a conversation with M about the Internet and different times on the Internet, when it was a better place. Recently I was thinking about deleting almost all of the substack posts as I work towards authoring a new one, that shifts the direction. But Substack also has gotten so much gayer (miss me w/ that gay shit), in its design, "community building" etc., since 2019 when I started using it, before I became paul. I've been listening to a lot of Rip Eternal lately, thinking about how he changed his name to "Paul", his government name, in the last year, because he wasn't feeling Rip anymore, he felt more like Paul. I remember a conversation with B when I really felt like paul (from bible), I talked about the Lil B's Trapped in Basedworld tape and how I felt Trapped in Paulworld. Last night I watched a GQ documentary short about Magic City, one of the strippers compared stripping to trapping, sometimes the trap is booming, sometimes the trap isn't. At that time the trap was booming. Now everything around the trap has changed and I haven't trapped in a minute. I watched a Hoodvlog of Seattle a few weeks ago and one of the comments said something along the lines of how these are a bunch of lost 30-something year old men, wondering what to do with their way of life in respect to the gentrification and raising rents. The thing is the real trap is in Tacoma now. I think of the project space D and Jasper Spicero and Bunny Rogers had in Tacoma, it was just their work, then it ended, it became documentation. I think of the ice hearts Bunny Rogers made, knowing they would melt.
The quote in the center of the piece that Nick bought is from a Flusser essay for Artforum in the 90s called "Books": "The book gives us a temporal structure in which every moment is unique, and every moment lost is an opportunity lost forever. In reading a book, we experience the dramatic urgency of living. There is something even more...". There is something even more... That quote, from a Libgen PDF that I highlighted, then screenshotted into a PNG, then manipulated in Illustrator and exported as a PDF, the PDF converted into JPEGS, both of which went out via substack, the JPEG later printed onto canvas by Easy Canvas Prints. I remember M2 saying something about the works having a "Made in China" feel to the quality which I liked. It matched the price. Now I want things to be higher quality and I don't think I have people who will buy them for that amount. I have loose plans with T and S to make books with their presses, affordable objects, but I haven't done enough to materialize them into anything. There's a certain paralysis that accompanies such a static object as a book. But I suppose it's only as static as a post, the world around it will continue to change.
"She said I'm famous I ain't Dex!"
"I'd rather be rich and low, niggas broke and famous"
Writing never consists in perfecting the language in use, rendering it purer. Writing begins only when it is the approach to that point where nothing reveals itself, where, at the heart of dissimulation, speaking is still but the shadow of speech, a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and interminable which one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard.
When we look at the music video of La Goony Chonga and Sickboyrari, there is a vantage point where they are no longer subject to the fluctuations of appearance or to the movement of perspective. One sees them absolutely: no longer reduced, but withdrawn from reduction, irreducible, and, in space, masters of space through their power to substitute for space the unmalleable, lifeless profundity of the imaginary. This point, whence we see them irreducible, puts us at the vanishing point ourselves; it is the point at which here coincides with nowhere. To write is to find this point. No one writes who has not enabled language to maintain or provoke contact with this point.
The need to write is linked to the approach toward this point at which nothing can be done with words. Hence the illusion that if one maintained contact with this point even as one came back from it to the world of possibility, “everything” could be done, “everything” could be said. This need must be suppressed and contained. If not, it becomes so vast that there is no more room or space for its realization.
One only begins to write when, momentarily, through a ruse, through a propitious burst of energy, or through life’s distractions, one has succeeded in evading this impulse which remote control of the work must constantly awaken and subdue, protect and avert, master and experience in its unmasterable force. This operation is so difficult and dangerous that every writer and every artist is surprised each time he achieves it without disaster.
And no one who has looked the risk in the face can doubt that many perished silently. It is not that creative resources are lacking—although they are in any event insufficient—but rather that the force of the writing impulse makes the world disappear. Then time loses its power of decision; nothing can really begin.
Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress. The work holds him off, the circle in which he no longer has access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed therein because the work, unfinished, will not let him go.
A work is finished, not when it is completed, but when he who labors at it from within can just as well finish it from without. He is no longer retained inside by the work; rather, he is retained there by a part of himself from which he feels he is free and from which the work has contributed to freeing him. This ideal dénouement is, however, never altogether justified. Many a work moves us because we still see in it the imprint left by the author who has departed from it too hastily, impatient to finish with it, fearful that if he didn’t have done with it, he would never be able to return to the light of day.
The most sincere openly leave to abandon what they have themselves abandoned. Others hide the ruins, and this concealment becomes the only truth of their books.
The central point of the work is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Just as the most courageous men confront risk only through the veil of a subterfuge, many think that to respond to this call is to answer to the call of truth: they have something to say, a world within themselves to set free, a mandate to assume, their unjustifiable life to justify. And it is true that if the artist did not surrender to the original experience which sets him apart—which in this separation separates him from himself—if he did not abandon himself to the boundlessness of error and to the shifting sands of infinitely repeated beginnings, the word beginning would be lost.
Even if one gives “all one’s time” to the work’s demands, “all” still is not enough, for it is not a matter of devoting time to the task, of passing one’s time writing, but of passing into another time where there is no longer any task; it is a matter of approaching that point where time is lost, where one enters into the fascination and the solitude of time’s absence. When one has all one’s time, one no longer has time, and “favorable” exterior circumstances have become the — unfavorable — fact that there are no longer any circumstances.
I realized that this has dragged on for too long. Stopping does not mean writing ends. Stopping does not mean inscription ends. Stopping only means that these public secrets must stop. Must stop - because that's what feels necessary.
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Footnotes:
1: It's a simple starting point — the act of going out implying that there is some initial point of location that is immediately displaced. Of course it becomes a permanent dislocation, there is no return to the same room as it were before having gone out. I went out those nights and it was simple: there were people, places, things, events that became Events, moments that became Memory, or rather whose inscriptions became memories. I went out the last two nights. The previous night I met M at his place and we made two songs. I was late to his place because I had also gone out the night before, the night I got in, I went to Cozy Corner with J and met Z and C and two of her friends, I drank a decent amount for the first time in a while and then I woke up the following morning at 6:30, heart pounding with anxiety. That manner of waking up repeated itself over the coming days. I read and tried to start my day but was tired, I went back to bed around 11, meaning to take a quick nap but slept for too long and was almost an hour late to M's place from when I said I'd be there. I felt bad for being late. We hung out, smoked weed, cooked, got tacos, and then went to J's place to pre-game the Black Kray Nettspend show. We pregamed for too long and missed Nettspend's set but on the way out J saw him and took pics with him and M. On the way in we saw Phreshboyswag but didn't talk to him or ask for pics. We went back to J's for cheese and sausage and crackers, drank beers, and then got in an Uber that dropped M off at his place and J and I at Peg's Cavalier in Ridgewood. It was J2's birthday, he was pretty drunk and I saw and talked to a lot of letters there briefly, and then ended up at Cozy Corner again, before taking another Uber home. That was the first night, the second night started at Chapter where I linked Z and A and L. Then we went to Theta and on the way there there were a lot of people standing and waiting with their phone cameras out. I heard a lady mention Travis Kelce so I figured they were waiting for Taylor Swift. We waited for a couple of minutes and then left. Later I searched her name on Twitter and the pics of her leaving a building and getting into a black SUV had been posted. We walked over to 456 New Shanghai and then L left to go back to Brooklyn. I bought an 'I ♥ New York' shirt and A put fake blood on my neck and my shirt so I could also have a Halloween costume like him and Z (a "final girl" and a Simpson with corpse paint). C2 and K met us at Shanghai, as did C, we ate food, talked, and then got on the train and posted up at Cozy. More letters, some with us, some we ran into. Drank for a while then decided to leave for a party at M2's. It was fun. Drank more. J and I took over and DJ'd for a long time. And then we walked back when it was finally time to leave. During this walk we passed Christopher's Palace and I told the story of the waitress in the red dress twerking all over that other guy before coming over to serve us beers. At this point I got to bed after 5 in the morning, and then woke up again with my chest pounding. I got a smoothie and then came back. I fell asleep and then woke up and then fell asleep again. All of which were the reasons I went out the last two nights, but not tonight. The sketch of these nights remains incredible bare, stripped of any of the finer details, a sequence of movements that become the ground of a vacuity. The most recent question that emerged through these inscriptions is what constitutes an Event. "Going out" becomes the easiest of events to inscribe because it creates this surface of bodies and movements, plied with inebriants that only accelerate the writing process. Countless words, embraces, and moments are exchanged, most of which pass by and fade away — there is a collective body of written but uninscribed memories that remains inaccessible, the idea of which is haunting to some. Sometimes I would tell people about getting sick, why I was there and not somewhere else, the broad strokes of the recent events, and other times I'd say "it's a long story". Story: it comes from history, which comes from Historia, a latin word which was borrowed from the Greek ἱστορία, which meant 'inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge'. Aristotle used it in his History of Animals and there are 'ancestor words' from which it was derived, which have to do with the ideas of 'oaths' and 'witnessing'. Thought then diverges: one thinking of story coming from history and rizz coming from charisma, the other thinking of the weight of the encylopedia, the instantaneity of information. The paths merge: Ruinous pages of Bygone rizzstory. || Return
2: This idea of a "writing machine" was central to this practice, which I reluctantly described as a blog (as referring to it as a 'practice' ended up stilted and resulted in a sort of Capitalization of it that wasn't particularly necessary for day-to-day conversation). Over the last few months, I started having regular phone calls with Z and N, at first to produce some sort of text that could be performed in conjunction with an exhibition they had in Los Angeles in October, but has since morphed into attempting to create some sort of collaborative exhibition, after my sickness and hospitalization foreclosed the possibility of the text for that show. A different writing machine operates during those calls — an AI scribe that records our conversations — and we went through and reread the conversation transcripts this week in order to create short texts composed of excerpts that would be helpful towards explicating some sort of potential show idea to gallerists (a process that's new to me), and there too I have written about writing and writing machines: "...like everyone is always writing at this point of time in the West with like our devices and like you're inscribing metadata, you're writing messages to people, all these types of things. Even if writing isn't formalized into a sense of like putting it into a book and publishing it or like that type of a thing. It's just like this state of constant writing. And I don't want to say that it's like new because kind of every, I suppose it comes to this idea of like every action you do is a form of writing that you're inscribing onto yourself."
When discussing the decisions I've made over the last year, decisions which have left me unemployed and functionally (though in a very middle class sense of the word) homeless as I continue to search for the ideal job that will feedback loop into my life and practice, these ideas of construction and feedback loops are central to how I've operated — on the beach in San Sebastian F referred to it as a 'method' although 'system' is perhaps a better term. Last night, I was on S's website and in the writings section I noticed a new link to a PDF, the introduction and second chapter of a new book written not by him but by an academic, Francis Halsell, that explicates a theory that "both contemporary art and humans at present can be best understood, not as fixed and stable objects with immutable identities, but rather as instances of dispersion across systems of distribution, communication and control." I finished the introduction before leaving the rest for today. I was tired, I watched Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day, which had been added to the freeleech section of Karagarga because of the war (or at least one can only assume as much). It had been four years since I'd seen it last (or rather for the first time), the Albanian boy who is displaced to the streets of Greece because of the war meant by the KG mods to make us consider the children of Gaza. This was why I ended up on S's website, I thought of all the letters being written, the ones he's signed, and wondered if he'd published anything there given that he was born in East Jerusalem. Instead I found this writing on systems theory and art. I highlighted it, and I sent two screenshots of it to P, who replied with a 40 page paper he'd written titled 'The Impeachment of Lionel Cranfield', along with some selected excerpts from it. The first excerpt I sent him had to do with the history of systems predating cybernetics and goes back to the introduction of 'system' in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Langauge, "system" as a genre of writing (the example given is "Kant's appeal to systematicity in his three Critiques and the subsequent system(s) of German Idealism"), and system becoming a means of social organization at the foundation of liberalism — all of which has to do with his research which is on early computational methods in 17th century Britain and how that impacted Empire. His contention, which won't be published in years and will (hopefully) make ripples through academia (just as art's ripples are almost always limited to the art world), is that rather than (the British) Empire pushing out into the world through trade, it got sucked out to places like India. The second excerpt was from a section subtitled Technology, Identity and Self-Understanding, which historically moves through humans thinking of themselves as clay infused with spirit in agrarian societies, which shifted to canals and hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE, then becoming machines in the 16th century, and then the idea of the human as a computer emerging "as the dominant metaphor for cognition and behaviour with the establishment of the so-called von Neumann architecture, which provides the conceptual model of more or less all existing computers".
I highlighted the word 'computer' in that section in a different color in comparison to the rest of the line because I found it interesting in comparison to what it evolved from — a 'machine'. There's an 'all computers are machines, not all machines are computers' argument, and as I type this I begin to get lost in the semantics of what 'computing' means, just as 'writing' can have such a breadth of meanings, although I google 'compute', its definition, its etymology, and it seems much more rigid of a word in comparison. In any case, on my phone calls I described what I called an addiction to writing, not just in the sense of writing words, but in the sense of writing metadata, which I now realize I already quoted above, but in another conversion I remember having with A this spring, I called my condition an addiction to information, albeit a certain kind of information, as I also recall E describing me as "a walking encyclopedia for Contemporary Urban Culture" and my mind already is split between two different digressions to tread down, the first about the word 'recall' and its machinic/computerized (once again, an initially problematic distinction in my mind that has resolved itself as I realize that machines probably can't 'recall', or at least the don't 'recall' the way computers do) connotations, and about the encylopedia, about Diderot, and the weight of it. Halsell's text, an entire academic book published by Routlege which takes it's title from S's Dispersion functions as an addition to an encylopedia, and there's this sense of achievement of a 20th century ideal of having been studied by academics, of being incorporated into the academic tradition — I was talking about this on the porch with P while we smoked cigarettes yesterday, about the forensic academics studying Derrida's Macbook (written about in a blog post by Alexander Galloway which I believe S sent me) where they discovered how he copy-and-pasted while writing, about Joyce looking at Finnegans Wake as a book that would be studied and dissected by generations of academics, but how know, with the impending (and in-progress) collapse of the (American, at the very least) academy, this was a rapidly foreclosing possibility. Once again, the weight of the encyclopedia gets me off track, but what E describes me as is interesting to reflect on now as it limits me to "Contemporary Urban Culture", and that phrase is weighing on me because yesterday, while slowly going through a coding tutorial video and thinking about getting back into calculus and also about how I've always struggled to sit through lessons, I thought about how my personal encylopedia often tends towards bits of information rather than systems imbibed into my mind, most easily evidence by how little coding I've picked up over the years, despite a few half-hearted attempts, and that the way in which all of the reading I do, which moves between literature, poetry, history, and theory for the most part can exist in this sort of loose, amorphous language, one that I explicate most often through a language that isn't text. As I wrote about Derrida and copy-and-paste, I thought about how much he would've loved GPTs, and now I'm thinking of how much there is to read, but that I can't read. 3 Halsell documents in my downloads folder, along with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, along with P's PDF. Soon I'll migrate them to my PDFs folder, which most recently has folders about German Romanticism (and Schlegel and his relation to Hinduism), Farocki, and Blanchot's "The Writing of the Disaster".
I made underlines in my physical copy of "The Writing of the Disaster" which I then typed out onto another page of this website that I've dedicated as a repository for quotes. Towards the end of the book, Blanchot writes about secrets. It isn't the first time — in "The Book to Come" he has this line “For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.” which remains one of my favorite lines I've read this year, naturally, because of the name and nature of this site, as it moves between secret and non-secret. The lines I excerped from "The Writing of the Disaster" are as follows:
“To keep the secret is evidently to tell it as a nonsecret, inasmuch as it is not tellable.”
“It is language that is "cryptic": not only as a totality that is exceeded and untheorizable, but inasmuch as it contains pockets, cavernous places where words become things, where the inside is out and thus inaccessible to any cryptanalysis whatever — for deciphering is required to keep the secret secret. The code no longer suffices. The translation is infinite. And yet we have to find the key word that opens and does not open. At that juncture something gets away safely, something which frees loss and refuses the gift of it. "I" can only save an inner self by placing it in 'me', separate from myself, outside.”
“To keep a secret — to refrain from saying some particular thing — presupposes that one could say it. This is nothing remarkable: it is merely a rather unpleasant kind of restraint. — Even so, it does relate to the question of the secret in general: to the fact (it is no fact) of wondering whether the secret is not linked to there being still something left to say when all is said... The secret escapes; it is never circumsribed; it makes itself boundless What is hidden in it is the necessity of being hidden. — there is nothing secret, anywhere; this is what the secret always says. — All the while not saying it. For, with the words 'there is' and 'nothing,' the enigma continues to rule, preventing installation and repose. — The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so visible that it isn't seen (to disappear, that is, as a secret), or to hint that the secret is only secret where there is no secret, or no appearance of any secret...”
Last night I discovered a "secret entrance" to this website, though perhaps it was only a secret kept from me up until that point, and now it's become a non-secret. After watching Eternity and a Day I thought of Theo Angelopoulos and of Theaphora, T's cat, and I googled "Theaphora", discovering that there was nothing else named that, a sort of combination of "Thea", which I imagine is short for "Theadora" and Greek for "God's Gift", and "anaphora". The first result was the Theaphora Editions homepage, the second was Theaphora's Secrets, which contains links to public secrets, style column, lff, and cool story — in a sense, a non-secret entrance to a series of secrets, although only mine and T's are specifically referred to as secrets. And the words above bring about the idea of whether such a thing as a secret can actually be.
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3: I can't remember how I ended up with that copy of The Butterfly's Burden. Part of me feels like I got it at Mother Foucault's in Portland, another part feels like I got in Berkeley, and yet another part feels as though I ordered it online. In any case I was reading Darwish and I was growing out my beard and part of this was in reaction to what happened that weekend of the screening, the sort of disjunction I felt between the self and the materials presented, further exacerbated by J talking about how I was basically white when a big part of my struggle has been this proximity to whiteness while not having all the privileges of whiteness. My Struggle, by S. Paul — this last week I made a joke with P about how I'm the only white artist who can use a swastika in their work. In any case I was reading Darwish because I felt like the world was closing in on me and I needed to grasp at some sort of understanding of how to live under this sort of control and subjugation, knowing that to compare my struggle to his struggle and the Palestinian struggle was a farce, but still coming back to his work as being a part of this universal homelessness that grounds me. But beyond all these reasons, the reason I was turning through page after poem of poems was because they were beautiful.
Perhaps I was also turning because reading and underlining and transcribing gave me a sense of purpose. This was in Brooklyn, I was subletting L's apartment while she was in Berlin and finishing my philosophy, art, and technology fellowship which only gave me a better sense of how money laundering or philanthropy operated, and that some people were fine abandoning their principles in order to keep the faucet running. Or rather there weren't any principles to begin with. As I read I underlined lines, and then later those lines moved into a notebook that I have with me here in Chicago, but the book remains in Brooklyn, in my storage unit. I downloaded a PDF of it to revisit the poems, to revisit "Don't Write History as Poetry".
To read Darwish now is much more different than reading Darwish then. But it is also the same. There was a slow genocide happening then, now it's faster, happening in such a way that is unacceptable, but it seems as though there are acceptable slow genocides that happen around the world. Genocide isn't the proper word here, because it isn't as systematic as the Holocaust, but it is still systematic, there are systems that are created and maintained in such a way that lives are valued differently and people have to live in different ways, and these are very empty, roundabout ways of trying to convey the pain and suffering of some lives in comparison to others. When I was in Delhi last year and was taking tramadol and then modafinil and then tramadol again I road in a taxi past a woman begging on the street. This wasn't of particular incidence, I road in cars past homeless beggars in Delhi and in Bengaluru and in Chennai and in most cities I passed through. I never rode the bus. That wasn't my place.
An Indian curator resigned from the board at Documenta, or something like that, and he published a letter about it on e-flux. I went to his Wikipedia and ended up opening a succession of Tamil writers' pages documenting their histories and backgrounds, the majority of which actually write in Tamil and not English, which immediately places their work in the context of the working class and the lower castes. Within the last few days, I found a book on Tamil Brahmans published by the UChicago Press. All of these pages sit in a browser extension I have called OneTab. I have been using it for about 6 months on this computer and I have 2420 tabs right now. It'll continue to grow. I had a thought today about how I have lifetimes of work ahead of me. I thought about tweeting something like that, but refrained. I couldn't find the words.
Darwish writes,"the historian doesn't get fever chills when he names his victims" — I think of the amount of dead bodies I've seen on my screen this year, the screams, and the horror that I can just turn off and can't really comprehend. I think about how it brought K to tears when we were talking about it in her kitchen and how she didn't know about the Bengal Famine or about the horrors of Partition, and that this is just the first shock of post-colonial violence that most white people are experiencing. There's a sort of dislocation between their place in Empire and their role in it, whereas I've gotten used to situating myself in the midst of these extremes and I'm doubtful that the system that exists now can be shattered from within. A Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House type situation, but also that the current conditions of Global Empire seem unsustainable, that ~Climate~ will create a sort of reset as Capital sows the seed of its own destruction. Is it Capital or is it Empire? Often what ends up happening is that I realize how much more I need to read, how much more there is to know, in order to inform these sorts of ideas, opinions, and ethics. I struggle with completely villainizing Empire because I've recognized that Empire is not a condition unique to the West. In Tamil Nadu, there were the Pallavas and the Pandyans and the Cholas, they built things that still stand today.
I don't know what to say — that's an easy thing to say. After that screening, I've reworked a text in my mind and in flow charts but never enscribed it, physically or digitally, about the programs of films. At a certain point in time, I was chasing the locations of where the films were made. At another point I thought of Godard's Ici et ailleurs, this idea of presenting a here and an elsewhere — in a sense this was why I threw "here rn" onto the previously untitled work which I was stuck with, a Krebberian accident, but an accident that still felt strong enough to be presentable. There was this desire at that point to create something of a certain scale, of a certain length. When I was at the bar with P and R, R compared television shows to physical monuments of the past, it accumulates cultural and social capital in a much more analogous way than commisioning a statue or some other 'public' art because the digital commons is much more public than any physical space. But of course I ran into the problem soon enough of Here and Elsewhere changing. To read it now was different than reading it before October 7th — they've worked to engrave that date into our head like they have with 9/11, even though the violence had always existed.
When the war "started" I thought about Haiti, I thought about Godard, and I thought about Farocki. The convergence of the latter two lead me to a text by Farocki, titled On Ici et allieurs, that is heavily indebted to Flusser, presenting a discussion of technical images, though he doesn't cite Flusser, just as Godard doesn't cite in his films, just as I didn't cite Farocki when taking quotes from the essay and presenting them in the blog. Like "Images are not windows; they are history’s barrages." and "The goal of the political demonstration is not to change the world but to be photographed". The latter quote seems obscene stripped of context, just as Flusser's thoughts on Auschwitz are stripped when stripped out of context. Even in context, he acknowledges what he has said as unacceptable — this was in Groundless, when I read it I was reminded of Kanye saying that slavery was a choice. That isn't exactly the argument that Flusser was making though. In any case, days before the war "started" I was using Dall-e 3 to re-image viral moments past, like when Kanye went on InfoWars with a fly swatting net and a bottle of Yoohoo, attacking Netanyahu before most people became aware of what a murderous psychopath he is. Like so many other texts, it becomes different with time. I'm attempting to work through this problem, and how it affects The Work — I've shifted away from signifiers. Farocki also quotes a German Jew, Günther Anders, who studied under Heidegger and then fled to America before returning after the war. After the war, he became fixated on the nuclear threat and the self-destruction of mankind. He has this essay about Promethean Shame that sits in my PDFs folder, waiting to be read. His words, as quoted by Farocki, as translated by Ted Fendt, reads: “The dream of our age is the abolition of time. The timeless (rather than the classless) society is the hope of tomorrow.”
I downloaded many more PDFs of Halsell's work — one of which, "Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices: Dialogues with Tony O'Connor on Society, Art, and Friendship", a volume he edited appealed to me much more in the abstract than in the reality of the dry academic texts, though I read the introduction and an essay by David Farrell Krell on translating Hölderlin, though it wasn't an academic essay but a note to Tony, the central figure around whom the texts revolve, as Krell had then sworn to never write an article again. I labored through the article, as my current state of unemployment and lack of "motion" causes me to question what I am doing and why and I lack this sort of fetishization of Hölderlin's work or of Canon Western works that others have. There was a line that Knell translated — into my stillness you came softly wandering that I used as a title for a mix I made, though I set paranthese around "you came softly wandering". It was a mess of a mix, which used the audio from a wedding-themed Yohji Yamamoto fashion show from 1999, one of the most famous according to the Washington Post fashion journalist who seems to be revered by the ~cultural milieu~, phreshboyswag's shinin like the sun, Wizz Havinn's Check Me, and the Rio Da Yung OG and Veeze verses off of Run Down. I tell myself it's fine to meander like this, writing like I paint, wandering to let the form find itself. Knell cites the part of Benjamin's "The Translator's Task" that I like, about how we stand outside of our language, even our native tongue, trying to find the words for what we're trying to say. I like it because it provides a sense of consolation for the placelessness that emerges at the thought of a mother tongue.
Knell wanders through his note to O'Connor and writes a close in order to force himself to close. I quote at length: "But it is time now to close. Translations appear to be acquisitions, at least when they show up as bound volumes on library shelves, but they are there only to encour- age young persons to begin studying languages they do not yet know. All the beauty of a translation has this pedagogy as its goal; all the flaws of a translation are forgiven if the pedagogy succeeds. From time to time there must be a reader who says, in the present instance, “I need to be able to read this in German, I have to start now, there is another world awaiting me.” Not acquisitions, then, but works, or settings-to-work. Works of art, then?
I need to be able to read this, I have to start now, there is another world awaiting me. I need to be able to read. I have to start now. There is another world awaiting me. There is another world waiting for me. I read a translation of Die Titanen and thought about what it would be like in German. I think about the Arabic on the left hand side of The Butterfly's Burden and what it would be like in Arabic. I thought about The Titans and the King Von mural nearby, about wars and O Block and mythologies. I went for a walk. I wandered. || Return
4: So much was elided here. So many different things that could be written about from that stretch of days that took years. Had it happened at a different stretch of time in the maintenance of this practice, it would have been enscribed differently. Now, it doesn't feel like I can add anything — rather it feels like my words partially erase an omission. The erasure of an absence.
What was most memorable was a poem that a doctor wrote for the marriage. He read it in Urdu and didn't offer a translation. I thought of this profession, the doctor-poet, and of Fady Joudah, through whom I've read Darwish: the Arabic on the left, the English on the right. A form where it is only possible to understand half of it, if even. I go on Youtube and listen to him read in Arabic, how he rolls through these sounds and all I can catch is "Habibi". There was an absence, it was erased. Another absence emerged. "... the greatest drawback about writing is that one has to use words." Of course this isn't true.
These words: elide, omit, erase — absence. There is a relation, perhaps one of a mask. Immediately, the image of masking tape is conjured, then a grid, then Agnes Martin, and Rosalind Krauss. The game of Battleship, the construction of toys, when Worlds were smaller, when the World seemed bigger. The weight of the encylopedia. Again and again and again. P recommended me a book on the history of the footnote, which really seems to be a book on the history of historiography, or rather scraping away at how history is constructed. Graph-, the graph— is crucial, yet this is the time when the dissolution of this is only beginning. Perhaps the re-imaging of Getting Fried In The Pool Like Meek Mill and Ye w/ Net and Yahoo is only scratching the surface or re-imaging; just as we now have a new Napoleon film that will briefly enter the conscious before leaving, while Waterloo sits there, waiting to be torrented. My mind flits to an abandoned text involving Russian Ark while I sit here, contemplating the Dominik Graf interview I watched before what was not a film but an episode of the television show Polizeiruf 110 he directed in 2019. The interview was from 2009 — he talked about growing up with television, really going into the minutiae of this experience, comparing it to the cinema, talking about if audience's have gotten stupider... before making the point that if he speaks on this subject again in 10 years, the conversation won't be about television. Television. Telephone. Cellphone. Cellvision. Maybe celevision.
In order to upload the Graf film to my Mega drive and then download it on the computer hooked up to P's TV, I had to delete a folder titled FlusserWeShall, containing three video recordings of him speaking to a camera, images which have become foundational to me since I first viewed them. The collection is titled "We Shall Survive In The Memory Of Others" — immediately the question arises of how memory functions right now (and how Right Now is no longer right now), how it will continue to change. || Return
5: There have been a number of close gunshots the last few nights — bro got murder on his mind, all he think bout is Blood. I've heard it so many times, Apple Music tabulates the amount of times I've listened to Boat Interlude off of Ganger, I could look it up if I wanted to. This time, while walking down 61st, that line stuck out to me, there's the obvious link of murder and blood, but the capitalization of Blood brought me to the idea of Blood as lineage, as a tradition. The previous night I made paintings again — I gravitate towards 4 different watercolors: a red, a dark red, a purple, and a black. M compared one of the series to samurai warfare. I feel like I'm painting my bleeding heart. Its impossible to escape all the blood everywhere, all the lineages and traditions and generations collapsing.
Whenever I hear a gunshot it's a reminder of how Real this violence is. It isn't abstracted through the screen, through the network, and reassembled for me, it's Right There, I can hear it in the air. The problem I run into is how to write about this Violence — I've barely lived it, it has almost always been abstracted to me, and that too familiar word re-emerges: Place. Where does that place me? Zielenski describes the internet as a non-location, comparing it to Heaven and Hell: "To prevent further sacralization of the networks it is useful to develop a profane relationship to them. This can only be done from somewhere located outside of them". I followed him to Agamben's Profanations, where the telling of a Zorastrian myth resonated with me, about this state of always writing, regardless of inscription:
"But it is Iranian angelology that gives the guardian angel its most limpid and astonishing formulation. According to this doctrine, an angel called a daena, who has the form of a very beautiful young girl, presides over the birth of each man. The daena is the celestial archetype in whose likeness each individual has been created, as well as the silent witness who accompanies and observes us at every moment. And yet the angel's face changes over time. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, it is imperceptibly transformed with our every gesture, word, and thought. Thus, at the moment of death, the soul is met by its angel, which has been transfigured by the soul's conduct into either a more beautiful creature or a horrendous demon. It then whispers: "I am your daena, the one who has been formed by your thoughts, your words, and your deeds." In a vertiginous reversal, our life molds and outlines the archetype in whose image we are created."
Before this location of non-location, before this question or placement of Place distracted me, I intended for this thread to go through one of Isiah Medina's IG stories which I sent to Z. I intended, but I let the intent lapse. Or perhaps I knew that this intent would carry through the detour. Medina's story read: "I didn't like the last two features but this short film felt like a rebirth. I was touched when Costa said during the Q&A that black music is the greatest music, since back during Ossos he said he would never have rap in his film, so it's touching that people can change their mind. Gance is a way more interesting model of experimenation than Straub or Ford. The idea that Ford is an "experimental" filmmaker is one of the corniest ever. People have the right to fiction and to music, the way Horse Money briefly comes alive in the music interlude. There's so many European ascetictics, "ethics of documentary" that need to be left behind, so many colonial ideas legislating the differences between fiction and documentary, a question that's not ontological despite their pretentions, these are questions that only come up if someone on screen isn't white, and only then do we have to ask the relation to "documentary" A sad obsession, and when it's left behind cinema breathes, or in this case, sings."
Z had seen that short at NYFF, screened alongside the Godard and a Wang Bing, I was curious on his thoughts, because I'm waiting for those films to finish their festival run and drop onto KG/VK. I referenced a different Medina story where he'd placed Belly alongside Citizen Kane as the best debuts of all time, noting I couldn't think of a film that uses rap better than Belly, that it's so difficult to do so, "like playing with dynamite". This was in response to Z pointing that out Costa's two statements — Black Music being the greatest music + I'll never have rap in my films were not mutually exclusive. I type, I backspace, I type, I find myself splintering.
"Playing with dynamite" is how I positioned rap music in films — as explosive. My mind jumps to Palestine, how I used an image of the aftermath of a bombing as the cover art when I reuploaded a DreThaWiz/Quanny/Tovii track from Youtube to Soundcloud called Today, the other Quanny track (TRAP Or DIE) I used Ici Et Ailleurs. Time, Place, Non-Place. And there's the matter not just of Palestine but of course constant death of (post(?)-)colonies, the calls to Free Congo where the mines share the same indentation into the earth, caused, of course, by dynamite. I thought about this while sampling part of Young Pappy's 2 Cups and mixing it with other samples and the vocals from Bitch Where. There's a conceit in Bitch Where that I link, this sort of linkage, perhaps montage that occurs when Chief Keef goes from saying "I don't go to Church / Man damn I need to pray" to screaming "I'm in a Church and I'M TRYNA GET MY SOUL CLEAR", the delivery reminding me of Pappy's passionate delivery, but also reminding me of the Detroit posse cut Slime Out, where Drego raps "Free my nigga Lonnie Bands" in the first verse, before Lonnie appears in the penultimate verse, rapping "Bitch I'm back home what the fuck you thought". In both lines, a movement to a Place. Medina writes about the colonial ideas legislating the differences between fiction and documentary, a question that's not ontological... I think of Pappy videos, I think of words I've written before about that boundary dissolving, or rather that the delineation is pointless, but it's one that heavily occupies discussion of Costa's films. I remember my shock at the experience of Vitalina Varela, my shock at the applause and the standing ovation, and I can't remember a single word Costa said after. A sad obsession, and when it's left behind cinema breathes, or in this case, sings."
Z brought up rap in Black Cinema vs. White Cinema, how much the reception of rap changes, and how Black/White cinema isn't defined by the race of the filmmaker, but by perspective. Black/White rap has this sort of split too, there's a tweet by Lawrence Burney, a 2010s rap blogger from Baltimore, that echoes in my head: "How do descendants of stolen Africans morally bump yeat? Someone replied culture is a language and that Yeat is fluent even if it isn't his native tongue. I tell Z about how Gucci Mane referred to Spring Breakers as "White Pulp Fiction" on The Breakfast Club, the implication being that Pulp Fiction is a Black Film, at least to Gucci. I send Z the clip — I'd tried to upload it to Youtube but it was copyright striked. "It's a white movie... I'm the only black guy in the whole movie, it's like a white Pulp Fiction... I'm the bad guy... That's what they wanted me to play. I could've been the good guy if they wanted me to." Charlamagne tells Gucci that he always thought Wasted could've been a movie. Gucci replies: "the video was a Movie"
I notice my inconsistencies in tensing, the present creeping in, as I replay the video to transcribe it, but the moment is past. Zielenski creeps in: "Is this really a form of remembering at all or merely a slight stretching of the present moment into the past? Is this not a kind of prospective archaeology or even an advanced form of "de-membering?" Instant archaeology is not concerned with looking back, but looking through what has just transpired while looking forward. Yet to already be the subject of a past event in the instant that something happens is tantamount to abolishing the present. The present becomes merely an extremely short effect for the future; a miniscule, no longer quantifiable amount of time; simply a moment of updating. The extreme shortening of storage times coupled with simultaneous expansion to near-infinite storage capacity have not led to the past being forgotten; rather, the facility of enjoying the present is the victim. There's no time for that anymore. Future and past are joined together directly and effectively". Though I think this space shields me from those impacts, the network effects disappear, there aren't ripples unless I choose for there to be ripples — he points out how Flusser was writing on a typewriter up until his death, in a time where Derrida was copy-and-pasting on his Macbook — "profound contemporaneity can only be produced at the price of untimeliness. To conform at all costs to the needs and expectations of the present creates dependency of thought. Only when there is no compulsion to be up to date is it possible to identify differences in the here and now."
I felt the urge to make an edit — that I reversed it: "in a time where" vs. "at a time when". (Non-)Time, (Non-)Place. I think of grounding in the lack of ground, I think of mathematics, I think of infinities: “they'll try to make linguistic judgments on your non-linguistic fluency, like a lower level infinity that's functionally finite, literally unable to see higher forms of infinity” (Medina, at a different non-time, in a different non-place). Every fragment of words that comes out points me to another reference, another quote, more material that could be spliced in. The phrase "In a vacuum" pops into mind, then black holes, and how they are vacuums sucking things in, the relation of the emptiness to the emptying. I tweeted those Veeze lyrics — bro got murder on his mind, all he think bout is Blood — along with two paintings and immediately felt as though I had emptied them of meaning by placing them onto the feed. I told myself I'd delete them later. I have a lot of deleting to do. And naturally there's the fragment of Darwish I made for myself, that I gravitated towards:
The autumn winds sweep the street and teach me the skill of deleting. Deleting is writing.
6: I had typed words. I tried to find words and the page froze. I hadn't saved and I lost what I had typed. This used to happen to me so often, when I was collaging texts with images, I'd overload illustrator with data and forget to save and then I'd lose everything I had made. But this never bothered me, I was working with a breakneck pace, I would simply move past it, rapidly, trying to recover how things were while still letting the new creation flow through me. Now I've been accumulating material once again. I was writing that before, but I'd arrived there differently. I was writing about machines. What they can do to the self - how they can create joy, give purpose, how exhilarating it is to feel one with a machine. Now things are different.
I'm trying to move differently, or rather I am moving differently. I'm fighting for my soul. I read the words I stuck at the bottom here, to serve as a constant reminder to myself. They remind me of a screenshot I took today, of a James Baldwin quote floating online: "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it...If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write". Writing that changes reality — that's what I want to do by deleting, that's what I want to do with this next film. The texts keep accumulating, they need to come out somewhere:
"Like heaven and hell, the Internet has no location. Body and mind, however, can only be in one place at a time. To prevent further sacralization of the networks it is useful to develop a profane relationship to them. This can only be done from somewhere located outside of them."
"The Internet is one of the non-locations where physical and mental being squanders itself. The subjects, however strong or weak they are conceived to be, should not give up their willingness to squander gratuitously. However, it is time to think about who profits by this squandering."
"Theory and practice of the arts that are realized by media, among other things, should not waste its energy on renovating and restoring the world, but rather on the never-ending experiment, which is never in vain, to create a better world than the one that exists. Because the media-based arts are all time-based arts, which are realized in a space-time continuum, one thing is of prime importance: to give back to those who will look at and enjoy the works some of the time that life has stolen from them."
I realize that footnotes of quotes can only lead to more footnotes. This idea of a slow cascading machine begins to seed, I am trying to will momentum into it. I don't want it to be a machine. I want it to be an avalanche. I want to be an avalanche. From the outside, it appears to be this collapse of whiteness — but inside there is no light. Everything becomes black. A comment of a Glokk40Spaz mix reads: "Black screen now I can see my demons". In the black screen there is reflection. || Return
7: "...As I write them down, I am convinced once more that, however paradoxical it may sound, the greatest drawback about writing is that one has to use words. It is a problem." I don't believe this to be true, but is the greatest drawback about writing that one has to use language? I wrestled with my demons today, demons that will remain in an abstract realm that hasn't been captured by text, but demons that were nonetheless written, demons that were perhaps wrought. Wrought — "archaic past tense and past participle of WORK". It's not a leap to assume that writing has an etymological linkage with work and then another link forms: “...the learned delirium of etymology bears a relation to an historical vertigo. The entire history of a language opens up under the pressure of certain words and is by this genealogy either mystified or demystified. We think and speak dependent upon a past of which we demand an account, or which supports us, not without honor, in its forgottenness. The writer who plays with, or invents etymologies, or, more surreptitiously, appeals to etymology as a guarantee of his thought, is less dubious than exaggeratedly confident about the creative force of the language he speaks. He has in mind the vitality of language, popular inventiveness or the intimacy of a dialect: always he thinks of langauge as a dwelling; always it is a habitable language — language, our shelter. And right away we feel rooted, and so we pull at this root with an uprooting force which the demand of writing wields, just as it tends to tear us from everything natural — for the etymological series reconstitutes the becoming of langauge as a kind of historical nature.”
In The Black Atlantic Gilroy notes that concept of Diaspora comes from the Jews fleeing Egypt, that it is only being applied to the Black African Diaspora, just as it is applied to me. It becomes easy to paint the broad strokes then, of the Jews as the first people to face the Universal Homelessness that comes for us all today, (part of) the reason Western philosophy, following Novalis, has been dominated by Jews in search of a home, finding it in Language. In the foreward to The Infinite Conversation, translator Susan Hanson works through the concept of the Autrui, which is left untranslated to distinguish it from 'the other', as it relates to one of Blanchot's essays 'Being Jewish' — these ideas of exile and exodus take their root in this tradition, to an extent our tradition, and "it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak. Hanson continues: "The event of a setting out, of beginning, is thus tied to the experience of strangeness, and placed at the very origin of speech-a speech that would not work to secure, like the concept, a dwelling place, but rather open a relation to the other and deliver humankind to a nomadic truth."
Exile and exodus gave birth to language, and now langauge is being used to force the Palestinian people into exile and exodus, in the failed mission of recovering what once became a home after a prior exile. Language taking the form of bombs and bullets, given that it cannot be contained within, the violence of language unleashing itself, transmutating into the physical. Fear struck me as I realized this, given the homelessness that has overtaken me, given the homelessness that will overtake the world. How do we, we as a species, contain the violence of language within the self — or is the only natural course, the one in progress, that of barbarism? A fragment of an epigraph hanging over the first chapter of The Black Atlantic: "as for "realities," we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin "realities.""
Writing thus becomes a terrible responsibility. Invisibly, writing is called upon to undo the discourse in which, however unhappy we believe ourselves to be, we who have it at our disposal remain comfortably installed. From this point of view writing is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own. Things are not functioning as they should. I steal a little bit more:
Writing for a newspaper is not so demanding: it is light, it must be light, even superficial. Those who read newspapers have neither the will nor the time to read in depth.
But to write something intended for a book often demands more strength than one seems to possess.
Especially if it means devising one's own writing habits, as in my case. When I consciously decided in my early teens that I wanted to become a writer, I immediately found myself in a void. And there was no one to help me or advise me.
I had to emerge from that void, to try and understand myself, and to forge as it were, my own truth. I made a start, but not at the beginning... And no one knew my secret. I did not tell a soul. I loved through that sorrow alone. One thing, however, did occur to me. It was important to carry on writing without waiting for the right moment, because the right moment never comes. Writing has never been easy for me. I knew from the outset this was my vocation. Having a vocation is not the same as having talent. One can have a vocation and no talent — in other words, feel compelled to write without knowing where to start. || Return
8: Music doesn't dry tears, says the old man in Casa de Lava. And right before that: Music doesn't kill hunger. Music doesn't kill misery.
I found myself writing tweets but being unable to tweet them, realizing that twitter is not a thing anymore, and more so that spiritually it doesn't feel like twitter, even if the surface of the interface largely remains the same. Naturally I deactivated again. I've been accumulating a lot, there is so much, and I'm not sure where to put it. This was the purpose that the collages served, perhaps now I could collage for myself, now that I've learned restraint, and could leave them to be unreleased, or left to be discovered elsewhere on this website. There was so much trying to rush out. And now...
Now I'm coming to grips with my limitations, how there will always be lifetimes to read, how it will always keep expanding, and the need for computation to help me on my way. There are worlds that are yet to be. There are worlds awaiting me. Like language. I've planned an exit. I've checked back into the game. Did you call bank? I called GAME || Return
9: The body as a text returned today — I was talking to A, he wanted to run through a series of ideas with me, he wanted to keep it secret, and yet I find myself on the precipice of breaking that secret. Perhaps I'll get there — I was clicking thru images on A2's website and there was a screenshot of a Criterion website on Julie and Celine Go Boating. It reminded me of a ghost of a film that's been lingering in my mind for weeks now. In the opening scene, or maybe one of the early scenes, a girl who works the front desk at a hotel is approached by a mysterious older woman who asks her questions about the guests and then asks her to work for her as a private investigator. The girl sees someone get killed under the full moon while following someone. As I type this I realize that it was a Rivette film as I suspected — Duelle. The mystery closes on itself, the ghosts of the film and the remembered images in my head become superceded by the trailer I watch. I realize that I would rather watch the film than continue writing. I have lingering thoughts about the direction of these footnotes. I'm writing so many things these days. These days as usual, I'm writing so many things. But I do miss when so many of the words would flow into this Here. || Return
10: It is even longer now, yet it feels closer now. I'm where it happened, further in time, closer in space. Of course it unraveled, it didn't just happened here, it travelled, it lingered, it danced in certain locations and dissolved into images and sounds. I spent so long chasing after it, diagramming it, forgetting it, diagramming it again, assembling, disassembling, reassembling, making, destroying, remaking, and then other things happen, projectiles launch themselves at you and get caught up in your orbit.
The text was supposed to be 'The Cardi B and Offset Meal'. Then it became 'The Cardi B and Offset Meal Was So Long Ago...'. Then it became 'On Texts and Time'. There were many sketches of the stars in the constellation. Glissant's Poetics of Relation, Bedsmaia's The Year of Passages, Farocki's Bedtime Stories, Marie Menken's Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, Diderot, Le Bijou Indescret, Lyotard's Pacific Wall, Ed Weston, Paul Gilroy, Twilight City, Dean Blunt, Homi K. Bha Bha, Gossip Girl, Algeria, Cixous, Derrida, Djebar, inscribing on cities, inscribing on the self, The Inhuman, Yuk Hui, Mahmoud Darwish, Christopher Wise, Blanchot, and so on and so on, the words above track this. At a certain point I began to question whether the text was possible. I'm waiting for a pill to kick in, to slow things down. Life has reverted to screen life. The idea of making this into a book has began to crystallize. A part of me finds that paralyzing. The fixedness of that object. The immutability of it.
I remember why. I remember pushing keys and what it does. The idea is that fixed objects are immutable in the traditional sense, yes, but the world around it, what it's read in relation to, everything that is read in this vacuum of instability, is not fixed, and remains open. The task became clear, a text that seeks not to define a time, but that projects its own temporality into the world outside it.
This text about the making of a text. This text about the making of an unmade text. It is a beautiful thing when things hang unfinished. Perhaps fixedness and mutability are not signifiers of being finished. There's a feeling in my heart, it's escaping words. The Cardi B and Offset Meal is so far away now. Why did it feel so close, for that moment?
Z sent me O's tumblr and it refuses to leave my mind. I scrolled and scrolled for so long, through that sort of open interiority that the internet allowed. I compared it to here, the type of things you can write in a space that's quiet, where you don't feel like things will travel. I wonder if publishing these footnotes, if rendering them into a book, a printed object will kill that? Of course there's the mutability of this, and it already exists at a state near death. I cannot write another secret. I can only write footnotes. And then I'll write stars in my constellation. || Return
11: This is not true, M wrote about masturbating in one of his first entries. To be honest, C's doesn't even count, and now I'm thinking about repression and taboo, and how that played into my automatic typing + memory. || Return
♥ ♥ ♥
Coda:
Perhaps I try to write an ending, a proper ending. I'm in the dark, comfortable, I've shifted my days into nights, and am comfortable having done so. I think of all the lost time, but am comfortable having lost time. I think of all the lost time, and wonder if such a thing is truly possible, losing time. An ending, a proper ending, that's what I'm here to write, knowing that in taking on that task, I will resign myself to the infinite once again, to a space much more lucid, to a space I can get lost in once again.
When I met F, we walked through the streets of London, and he told me about a life I could have in Paris, where I could live at the cinema and barely speak to a soul, moving from theater to theater in silence. I've been dreaming of Paris again from P's living room. I wake up just as it gets dark and then I have the whole night to watch whatever it is I please, to live in these dreams. I've been dreaming of Paris and I've been dreaming of French, I've been dreaming of exile, and trying to connect all the threads, knowing that some will get lost in the twists and draw off elsewhere. I have not left this apartment in 10 days.
A coda, an ending, a musical term. There was a piano in the lobby of the hotel in Fez, it was falling apart and in need of repairs. Every night a man would sit there and play out-of-tune chords that bounced off of the walls that desperately needed to be repainted. Sometimes a secret is a lie. Even if it tugs against my nature.
I notice something in the distance. I sip my tea. I go back to noticing, to letting things flow, acknowledging that they happened, allowing them to cessate. Like sirens, like gunshots, like tender embraces. Like Justin Bieber asking if this is a film and the ensuing answer that is not an answer but a reaction to rid yourself of contemporaneity, to empty yourself of time in order to understand time. To empty yourself in order to understand, or rather to become a vessel once again — one that does not ceaselessly overflow before the Gods
What is the proper time for prayer? The birds start singing again just before dawn. It takes the sun at least an hour to catch up. There is supposed to be a story, there was supposed to be a story, there was supposed to be a coda, there were supposed to be singers. In the theater in Rabat there will soon be operas, just as there will soon be leaks, as the paper-shufflers will try to hide the damage caused by the earthquake that was soon forgotten. As the bombs drop and the mines are policed and we turn mineral into magic. My heart stops constantly until I beat on my chest and get it started once again.
The weaving of a heartwork, it still requires nimble fingers, even if those that man the loom are steadily being lost to time. There she is again, she dances in my mind, I dream of kissing her right above her navel, questioning why the soft draws me in? I dance until my heart stops. And yet
I will wait until the morning, there is a song I'll sing with the birds. A song I'll sing to my memories of Asturias, realizing that the fog wanders with you. That it really is only a few places, those fields of emptiness that were traversed. By train, by bus, by foot. Never by plane. In the sky, there is a fullness, it demands its ending, there is this screech of death that draws you back to Earth. Shivering.
It becomes easy to conjure from memory. A song, a string, a ghost, a gleam of light, a lantern, a cosmos. Yes. It was supposed to start with Poland, with Poland and constellations, or rather the constellations conjured by Poland, the constellations of imagination. I let it trickle by. A coda, an ending, a musical term — all of this encylopedia, all of the etymologia, all of this notation, all of these structures, all of this language. It becomes so easy to conjure language. And still
We await another dawn. It arrives and I stare into the sun. I close my eyes and I stare into the sun. There were plays and interplays and intertextual plays that I couldn't fully grasp. Same as it ever was. Was it? There was a woman who lived by the beach. She said that she had everything delivered. She said that she hadn't seen anyone in six months. I thought about what that must be like. I wondered what time she would wake up. But I did not wonder, I am wondering now. The apellation of the hours, another attempt at inscription.
A musical term. That venice jawn. Like Sheff G said No Suburbans. This is it, the final stab. Oh but there will be another one after. When I woke up it was getting dark and raining and then it got darker. Now I can't sleep because I've made these my days. I've made nights my days. I've been thinking about playing games, about secrets, about Out 1. I made Out 1 my days for a couple nights. The sun rose again and then it had to end. Another list began.
Games and secrets — these things have etymologies, these things have origins, these things have histories. The history of games and the history of secrets and the history of games and secrets — these things need rules, rules, which form the spine of language. As though language were a body or a book. Rules which form the spine of secrets, rules which form the spine of games, as though secrets and games were bodies or books. A string forms — "a book of secrets" — it unlodges a buried memory, one that I hope to soon forget, which only further accelerates the feedback loop of memory, writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting. I miss playing games and I miss having secrets. That could be it — a musical term, an ending, a coda. The title card that fades in reading 'FIN'.
The string that formed continues to unravel. It's been tugged into gravity, it unspools itself. And what comes with it? A book of secrets — must the book be secret too? After Goonew died Lil Dude was on IG live talking about secret societies, and you typed out what he said, pausing, unpausing, trying to render the audio as faithfully as possible as text. The spine of language has been shot — language has been paralyzed, language had become a body. But what of the games? What of the secrets? Playboy Mansions, Playboi Carti, Homo Ludens, Pause. Of course etymology reenters, pause is not la pause is not La Paz, a place in space and time that is not specific — all of the pauses, all the la pauses, all the La Paz's, all of the infinities. The string has not finished unraveling. Is it unraveling, or unspooling?
Love is one of the few true secrets, because so little of it can be spoken. Must a secret be spoken of in order for it to cease to be a secret? If a secret becomes forgotten, if it ceases to be memory, does it remain a secret? An ending, a coda, a musical term. An enjambment — Love, what happened to the heart? I find myself confronting this thing, perhaps the -ing of this ending. There can be an end, like a dead end, a cul de sac, like West End, East End, my ends, your ends, but the thing about these ends, when spatialized — you can turn around, you can circle the cul de sac, and make your way to another street, and find another end. But the temporal end — what happens then? When the timer runs out and reads 00:00. I suppose the timer runs out but the time keeps going. This -ing of this ending, this ending is a process, unraveling, unspooling, this ending, this coda, this musical term.
This matter of the ending, or the impossibility of the ending, because of the infinite nature of space — I think there lies my obsession with the Site. And the Work in relation to the Site, the Text in relation to the Site. The Work and the Text in relation to the ending, the coda, the musical term. I notice how the the crept in, how I dislike the absoluteness it implies, how the echo of absolution creeps in, of all of the centuries of mistranslations past, all of the centuries of mistranslation future, all of the centuries spiralbound, waiting for pages to be ripped out of the notebook, all of the centuries demanding forgiveness for their base. When I speak of I, I don't mean myself, I mean the letter that beckons towards the world with its all-consuming vortex, I mean the ego that is outside of me and has made its home in that sign. This matter of the ending, this matter of the impossibility of the ending, this matter of I, this matter of mine — all of a sudden it has assumed form: it has become matter.
It will remain matter, it lives in its impossibility, it lives and is alive with possibility, alive with possibilities within its impossibility. Proofs are for bottles — glass that, with time, will find their way back into sand. The logic of the heart is a mathematics that exists beyond alphabets and numerals, beyond signs, beyond language. The ending, the coda, the musical term — an ending, a coda, a musical term — a whisper sings outside this window, this window spirals into multiplicities, can a text lead one beyond language? Where does the circle stop?
There is a realization: I don't desire stopping any longer. This isn't to say that this stopping is different than that stopping, or that the desire to embark on one stopping is different from the desire to embark on another stopping, only that I don't want this coda, this ending, this musical term — that I desire the ending but not the ending. I want free fall, but I don't want impact. I want and I desire yet what if I stopped wanting and desiring, what if I embraced this finitude with open arms? Is it possible? This infinite text, another infinite conversation, a coda, an ending, a musical term, that comes after the body of the text, after the footnotes, but before the last things last, ever expanding. And yet this can't stretch out forever, it needs things, oil and minerals, extraction of the earth. I don't desire the stopping of this coda, this ending, this musical term — do I desire the stopping of this extraction?
And blood enters into this ending, and pain enters into this ending, heartbleeding solemnity at the cost of the extraction, no matter how minute the computational power this is, at the blood needed to extract this ending. Have there been bloodless endings? When you inscribe upon the body, taking blade to flesh, blood is sacrificed for the extraction. A secret, an ending, a coda. A musical term. The erasure of a pause.
Will the rupture go unnoticed? In the sea of faces I grasped onto two visages, I exchanged a nod, I shot glimpses in that direction. That direction. The signifiers lead to memories. It is a mechanism I've become too familiar with. I looked down at the words — at that point my eyes could still focus. I read in the sea, I read the waters and the deluge, I held my breath. At the end of the words was a break, it rerouted to the beginning. Was that it — an ending as beginning? A beginning as ending?
|| ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Last Things Last: I feel a duty to humanity. I feel a compulsion that I must carry out. I must dedicate my life to more life. No long talk. But fr tho. ||
Saints Paul and Barnabas at Lystra (Sacrifice at Lystra) by Bartholomeus Breenberg, 1637
