the deep end is not the end

Hello again

Alien Days

Cocteau says: I do not plead I merely produce. The heroine of Aggretsuku says: We work in different departments but our hearts beat as one. A girl whose attraction to me comes in waves, or perversions, that stand out distinctly from the days when she says I’m mean to her and the days when I actually am, releases a text statement that romantic love is useless. But why proscribe or pronounce dead a substance people will mine and abuse anyway, I say. Be careful not to invalidate your own feelings retroactively or otherwise, I say. Then she’s like, we’re forced to live like it’s too Real and to say it’s actually not real or not important is Radical. Leaving my place, she accuses me of wandering deeper into the maze. Well, what of it? Any block of time spent with a cherished person (and I cherish her in a way that is both black with desire and filled with a sort of gambler’s light, always cautious) can reduce your life sentence. Because it’s always too harsh, and no matter how much Drake and BTS decry fake love, maybe fake’s what I like—just to get me thru, just to pick me up, just for the Steadicam instead of the same old handheld. Or maybe changing up Cocteau, into a plea for more production, necessarily accelerates the timeline of regrets. You can always make more.

Cocteau again: A mistake which becomes refined, a vice, is nothing more than one of nature’s luxuries.

At the MGMT show I tripped hard. With booze or coke or even klonopin, there’s usually a moment where I go too far and am certain I’m going to die. With psychedelics, I’m able to observe myself drifting toward an avatar of safety, one who is holding up a card with my name on it like a chauffeur at the airport. In the scrum of the Palladium floor, I caught myself in defensive postures intensified by anxiety (I brought my own). My avatar told me not to do this, to lower my arms or sip beer if I felt unsteady or panicked. Just relax and you’ll be ok, was another instruction it gave and apart from the vaguely consent-oriented topical humor of that, it was true. The hardest part of reading too much into your life and self-observing in constant whip pans is realizing that nobody cares. Nowhere in a 4000-cap event space or a city of 8 million is anyone really watching me all disrespectful wondering what lame thing I’ll do next. It’s probably fine.

She texts: r u patronizing me?

She texts: do u think love is possible after the death of ego?

When I feel anxious or alone, it’s not like I’m in a boxy square, or even an octagon of oblivious strangers milling zombie-like in crosswalks. Sensationally, my anxiety or aloneness is a triangle of assessments wanted and desired, from myself and others. Sort of isosceles, but mostly Bermuda. Whether or not it’s acute, right or obtuse depends on the vertex angle. Or vortex angle.

Also at MGMT, at one point a single upraised ogi crested on all the iPhones and I felt the tidal pull of appropriation. Essentially a party band whose sound can be microdosed, MGMT are also glam entertainers in the Roxy way, operating across two timelines––1973 and 2007. Seeing them live is one of the only remaining ecumenical experiences I can think of in terms of “bands” or “shows”, seamlessly combining analog, digital, and visual into a sort of phosphorus. It’s highly reactive and I assume it’s why people went to see Black Sabbath in 1973, but with the way music and culture have shifted it’s rarely found as a free element anymore.

The first MGMT record (2007) is iconic because of coincidental neoliberal fluxes like Obama and first-gen iPhones, and because their style was so influential in San Francisco when I was there, and because Kids and Electric Feel really were life-bending. Andrew VanWyngarden, the singer, appears in geisha facepaint and isolated items like kimonos and feathers have floated thru fan imagery for years. This is the migratory pull I mentioned: one way to appropriate culture is because you don’t really care about it, and the other way is because you do. MGMT runs on pastiche, and while in the stormy kaleidoscope of all those shrooms and all those people it’s not like I didn’t have bitchy takes, not after reading Hegel all day. But appropriation is just wanting something that doesn’t belong to you, and then treating it like trash or not. It’s like the infamous post-Sontag definition of camp: we’re not making fun of it, we’re making fun out of it. True art recycles, it doesn’t waste.

Surreal and ritualistic, especially in its official video which is like Jean Rollin x The Cure, the track Little Dark Age is not fully abt anxiety and depression––both members claim the bulk of the record is just abt Trump which is boring. But it totally is. Lines like “I grieve in stereo/the stereo sounds strange” and “if I get out of bed/you’ll see me standing all alone/horrified” beworm the brain as much as the electronic bassline or the chorus that mutates slightly into three or four bespoke versions, MGMT-style. Little Dark Age cld also be the love interest who personifies a period of your life, whose epoch can be characterized as growth or catastrophe but either way it’s named. Meanwhile anxiety is its own form of chronostratigraphy, which is weird because having anxiety makes it harder to even tell time. A bit like being on shrooms.

Those days taught me everything I know/how to catch a feeling and when to let it go––MGMT, Alien Days

When I defend romantic love, I worry I sound like Barthes defending the anarchy of Chaplin. Fredric Jameson wrote abt romance as “reconquest of some feeling for a salvational future” but didn’t forget to put “but at what price?” in parentheses. Anyway my little dark age is right: romantic love wasn’t even invented until the 14th century so on the scale of human events it’s just a trend. True love is always late.

Rebels Of The Neon God [Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992]

hi how are you. hi we are fine. 

Richard Hamilton, Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars (1962)

Game & performance.

The opening shot of The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is of a heart splayed, a chest jacked open with ribs akimbo. It is apparently a real heart: photographed in extremis, under surgical duress. With its discernible hemispheres, the heart almost looks more like a brain gobbed in unspeakable fat. If a brain cld be said to beat, it would look like this: the grossest opening shot maybe in movies, or at least that I have ever seen. What comes from confusing the brain and the heart, however lightly? Utter gore, and Colin Farrell being ritually undressed afterward, headlamp and funny surgical glasses on top of other funny surgical glasses and layers of scrubs and gloves reversing off him. If all your life you have been sick with fantasy abt hospitals and their demented sense of enlightenment––the Byzantine corridors the corners of which echo with coughs, in light that can only be described as taurine-colored––you will not so much watch as wander this movie, the latest from a Greek filmmaker whose remade myths are both catchier and kitschier than the originals.

Steeped as easily in opera, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer explores impossibly big moods with a neck-craning soundtrack of Schubert and Ravel. But for a film addicted to classicism, the visual joke of Nicole Kidman being married to another doctor would not be possible if you've never had an affair with Eyes Wide Shut. Alice Harford, having rid herself of the locked-down and oblivious Dr. Bill, landed in the arms of a cardiac surgeon with several shakers full of salt and pepper in his beard. When nicole stares into the mirror of a medicine chest you think she will withdraw a band-aid container that contains weed instead of band-aids. This pot is making her aggressive. No it’s not the pot. It’s you.

Giorgios Lanthimos is notorious for having his actors speak in gray mono, not the stereo of Actorville. This mannerism is Mametian, and takes me back to watching State & Main or Spartan when I was a moviegoing pup, trying to spot how Sarah Jessica Parker or Val Kilmer arrived at such impeccable deadpan. Young audiences schooled on YouTube minimalism may recognize it better now than I did then, albeit as something else. Lanthimos has his own version of Mamet’s command to “just say the lines”, so there are no scenes in TKOASD that cld rightly be called “acted” except for one in which Farrell expertly trashes a kitchen. And yet the threadbare flatness of the performances is still stylized, even glamorized, into fantastic states of catatonia or even anhedonia. The inability to feel pleasure, carried by Farrell, contrasts with the inability to feel anything at all, carried by Kidman: her reliance on psychosomatic diagnoses for her children falling legless to the floor is just her belief that they’ll never stand on their own.

Included in the soundtrack is “Enantiodromia”, a piece by the (also Greek) composer Jani Christou that alternates between narrow and wide frequencies. Carl Jung used the term enantiodromia for “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time”. He updated this from Heraclitus, flipping it into “the most marvelous of all psychological laws”–that which accounts for the subconscious occasionally overruling control freaks. (Jung would describe it as extreme one-sidedness, but he meant control freaks.) The first and really only thing Colin Farrell discusses at length in TKOASD is wristwatches, their waterproof depth and if metal or leather bands are better. For insisting on an ordered life, his unconscious opposite punishes him with a disordered effect, scrambling the health of his family into nightmare fuel. It’s treated as a placed-upon curse by the script, but the odd boy who introduces this malevolence to Farrell’s life probably doesn’t know his Jung from his Young Thug. He simply sells Farrell on the concept of a favor owed, then lures him into a funhouse of unconscious glitch. 

Farrell fears two things: drowning without knowing what time it is (apparently), and killing a patient. He even denies the second one is possible, insisting that surgeons don’t kill patients anesthesiologists do. The boy character, played by the fascinating Irish actor Barry Keoghan, is the son of a patient who died on Farrell’s table which still doesn’t remind Farrell of revenge––only recompense. So when the boy begins to art-direct Farrell’s life, promising catastrophe in three-act structure (paralysis, bleeding from the eyes, death), Farrell’s too committed as a father figure to get out with honor. One thing the Greeks knew: honor as tool for sorting things is always DOA.

As a surgeon, Farrell simply regards the unconscious as a performance space. This extends to erotics, as he and Nicole act out a bizarre and really hot operating room scenario as sexual prelude. General anesthetic? Nicole asks, semi-naked, before going limp. First of all, I’m thrilled by how much this rape fantasy probably horrified woke Twitter. But later, when Nicole ups the ante and gets naked on her own, Farrell isn’t interested. There’s a plague on his family so he’s got a lot going on, but it’s more like he cannot block a sex scene if there’s too much motility. 

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot got famous for expanding the limits of hysteria, and for his pyromanic teaching style that probably tricked Freud, his most famous student, into thinking he was a performer. Charcot’s work moved the chains on nervous abnormalities, using techniques like hypnosis to source seats of trauma. He also liked to get high and paint. His portraits and caricatures were known to liven up meetings. Although his findings on hysteria eroded, he is still reputed as the father of neurology. Several neuropathological disorders carry his name, including Charcot arthropathy––a progressive denaturing of weight-bearing joints. This disconnect between bone and soft tissue usually affects the foot or ankle, and can result in pathologic fractures and paralyses––both of which Charcot interrogated as neurotraumatic. So, the condition that leaves Colin Farrell’s teen daughter and adolescent son suddenly unable to use their legs can be explained as a rare or unprecedented form of Charcot arthropathy, which none of the experts at Farrell’s hospital think of since it’s ordinarily progressive. The effects of a curse are not always immediate, but can be. 

Images of the kids slithering down steps and across floors are so disturbing they cause Farrell to confess that he once jerked off his own dad. His dad was asleep and there was no coercion, but this is still a trauma so unbelievable it must be true. Farrell is so desperate to prove his son is faking paralysis that he relates it as heartfelt. Or his brain and heart have finally traded places. Either way it’s a morale-destroying instance of metapraxis, normality blurred by the deep need to perform. The battle of the pragmatic against the unconscious is rendered hilariously anecdotal, as Lanthimos tips his farcical hand. 

Altogether austere, absolutely clinical scenes in basements and one involving the most nightmarish spaghetti usage since Gummo echo further perversity and nonsense. Jung, writing abt the psychoid archetype, found “no hope that the validity of any statement about unconscious states or processes will ever be verified scientifically”. But filmically? Performatively? The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is either tragedy reëxperienced as camp, or a feature-length realization that the desires for recompense and revenge are never evenly matched. Although in a race of opposites, they’re never far apart. 

perfect, really easy

I hope I can still do this. Write on my phone. Write at all. I still have a messy novel that’s really more of a deconstructed memoir buried in a google doc and I think I have a heart buried somewhere nearby too. The pilot Ben and I are trying to make has been slowed by technical misfortune, substance abuse, and literal distance. I was told from a neutral corner that my dialogue, which is my main consultancy, is too cerebral and will make the show Hard to Sell. If u gave me cash up front, I would be willing to make it dumb. If it’s spec only, I think the smartness of it swings a kind of bellum against my own boredom. It is, indirectly, a show abt a woman who’s turning 30, has two boyfriends, and is constantly thinking up ways to avoid both of them. 

I’m in a rental car with two friends in the middle of New Mexico. Scheduled to go to Marfa two weeks ago, we got into some leftover coke one of us had, mere hours out from our flight, and then nobody woke up on time. Hence the rental. This has got me fucked up, the mind-blowing lack of quality control that went into this. Who books a flight and doesn’t show up? Who does coke and then oversleeps? I now have credit toward a future flight, to a destination I can’t imagine, bc the future rn is the only thing I truly believe to be fake news. Where shd I go next–home for christmas? A beach where the sand looks and feels like broken glass? I want to breathe into a balloon til it turns into another planet where depressing inadequacy is not so elemental. I feel like a farmboy who cannot get all his chores done. This year and the whole headlong rush of this epoch toward certain death by profit cannot be sensationalized enough, and yet sensation is almost all it consists of. An indefinite, generalized body feeling is what we are all turning into as news and politics hammer us with detail. All hammer, no sickle. In the time it took to write the last paragraph, which also involved a lot of staring out the window while eating Taco Bell to be honest with you, we crossed from New Mexico into Texas. Welcome to Texas here’s your white hood. Welcome to Texas the state that killed Kennedy. Actually it was a supreme leftist who killed the centrist Kennedy, but the John Birch fascists get all the credit. Such is our myth of Texas that we empower their racists with more historical thought and influence than they ever exerted over their most famous export which is assassination.

I am in Marfa for the unaccustomed luxury of time spent with friends in an unfamiliar place.

At the start of summer I wrote in an email “even better than love’s confessions are its permissions”. According to the Invisible Committee, much of being a radical is refusal of the world. As abstention makes me feel more miserable not less, I can’t relate. Maybe the reason I can’t go full radical, or am fatally reluctant to, is I like being able to say yes a lot. Anytime I feel desolate or estranged, I get kitted out and go be seen in public even if I don’t talk to anyone. Which I usually don’t. My friend Chloe says she does this too. Love only makes sense to me as a radical act. Much of what passes for functional love in this culture is really just a bunch of hyperextended reactions to institutionalized sadness, but lots of luck finding anything better. I’d like to beat bourgeois coupling unconscious as much as any self-made cynic, but when you compare American marriage to, say, American corrections, both of which are needed systems lost for good in insane blears of greed and paranoia, abolition may not be the answer. It’s like, you can fix it only by starting over which is not the same thing as abolition. Abortion maybe, bc you can always try again if u want. Habitually getting mixed up with ppl already in committed relationships is probably just emotional vampirism. Some call it looting, I call it eating. As a marginal figure slightly on the spectrum with anxiety and repression who can still somehow lie and flirt and manipulate at the executive level all while having no interpersonal or socioeconomic prospects that I don’t want anyway, I am a really good last chance for someone with a probably basic, art-damaged kind of life. Married women always speak of their husband figures in slightly awed tones like they can’t believe how lucky they got, like the man is good in all caps and would instantly unravel at the slightest seam in the stocking. Like if he ever caught them stepping out via some OPSEC mistake they made and not even by his own subatomic awareness level, he’d be demolished simply by never having had anything go wrong for him before. Husband is such a specific kind of person-state, grown and trained, and if I were to ever try to be one i would have to hack the shit out of it–although I’m not convinced they’re any less toxic just bc they’re more high-functioning. Meanwhile the wives or wives-in-waiting pretend not to know they’re already starring in a commercial for how much sweetness and light and GOOD do not fulfil. In short, this is the kind of lawlessness that permits radical love but briefly, before turning again to refusal–the refusal to tamper with status quo, to make any kind of permanent alteration. If it’s secretly very trendy to decry structures the existence of which you not so secretly benefit from, what’s worse is to treat those structures more like fabrics to loiter in or on, or touch longingly. Essentialism doesn’t rend.

If you fall in love with someone you’re not really allowed to, and then that love goes mutual, you’re at least tagging yourself in a picture of paradise. But eventually you’ll be asked to leave. And since paradise is just a picture anyway, your image will feel decayed and exposed. Now it’s 2 days later and I’m back in New Mexico. Despite being a dreamlike Klono-state of pleasant denial, Marfa is still in Texas, the roguest of states. We drove near the Mexican border thru light so splendid the terrain looked recently refreshed. We put our hands in natural running water and looked at millipedes stranded on rocks. A thunderstorm diffused somewhere off to the side. Every picture arrives on your phone instantly airbrushed. The sky dies in pinwheels of color every evening and then reblooms like it never happened, sunsets and sunrises as breakdowns and recoveries scaled to look like natural events. Texas is beautiful but it is not art. Drive-thru banks, courthouse annexes, touchless car washes, parked backhoes, so many f150s.

Halcyon Digest, the Deerhunter record that didn’t define a decade but definitely translated it, was on repeat all summer. So we were playing that as we barreled thru arroyos and past rock formations so intricate they looked cut with string, and I remembered a night earlier in this terrible terrible summer when Ben and Andrea and I were doing coke and playing dominos at like 3am and the song Helicopter was on–that’s the one abt the Russian fashion hopeful murdered by sex traffickers. Its lyrics are too beautiful to edit so I will not reprint them here but I remember as Bradford sang “I have minimal needs/and now they are thru with me” something resetting as I looked at the faces of my friends, like a key of exquisite sadness being turned but I did not know in what lock. I’m certain it wasn’t just a drug reference, and I’m certain I won’t realize exactly what it was for years. 

On the 10 out of town, just before the Prada store, there is a zeppelin, part of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, used by border patrol. Its role is surveillance. Unmanned, it hangs perpetually off the ground, secured by a single cable, from which it can reach altitudes of 15,000 feet, a white bulge of eerie focus, as various homing info scatters and beams. If you ran for your life, this is the thing you would imagine hovering over you, just out of frame. The kind of thing that knows it doesn’t have to hurry to get you. So run. Maybe I can still do it.

april

I decided while reading Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich that I’d been wrong to judge that girl for doing lines so inexpertly. Under a million layers of shallow, I thought I’d determined her age to be what disinterested me, when really it was just disinterest in the whole algorithm of hooking up, the strangeness of boy/girl boy/girl, like an ABBA cover band. It is six a.m. and nobody wants to go to sleep. The girl says, I’ve got weed in my car but will you help me find it? The other boy/girl in the quatrain look at each other like, alone at last. The light in Silver Lake at that hour is indescribable. You know, I know, we are meant to hook up in the car with the weed. But I’d really rather not. Put that cocaine thing in...I have important things to do today, Hitler says in Blitzed. Not much is more morbid than a sexual encounter more expected than desired, no matter everyone’s age.

But honestly my drug use is way down, and so is my tolerance for low-level talks with other flunktionaries whose only common thread is alcohol. Here are some drinks and some underpaid grievances and a tendency to abuse, goes the pitch. Bond seamlessly like titanium with human bone. I’ve gotten so good at running conversations in persistent overlay, they continue even when I press the home button. The millennial trend of staying in is powered by the desire factory, and I’m mostly too old to fully get it. But all the boilerplate, all the socializing with people I don’t really want in my life makes me want to keep all the elevators in view. Show me the way to go home. At one point we were yelling at each other: You’re a genius! No you’re a genius! Real cokehead shit. It’s like hanging out as a threat, when really it’s just hanging by a thread.

Trump popped off some missiles, making Syria even more anyone’s guess. I am not a sincere conspiracy theorist, so my entertainment of the Syrian fringe is merely me dealing with too much information. White helmets remind me of blue helmets, of the 90s and reprobates like Milosevic and Clinton, of Clinton turning on poor people out of transparent self-hate, Milosevic turning to his lawyer at his war-crimes tribunal and asking What mean, Smoke up ass? in response to a witness who became too colloquial. The UN force commander in Rwanda in the 90s enjoyed the impossible name Romeo Dallaire, brought to lush liberal life by Samantha Power in her germinal book A Problem From Hell. In his own book, Dallaire alluded to UN-style peacekeeping as being a pull mechanism, not a push––like braces are a pull mechanism, and Invisalign is a push. In a push mechanism, resources for deployed soldiers are automatically supplied. In a pull mechanism, you have to ask someone. Because the UN is never there, not really, and so the helmets are the light blue of a dawn barely breaking. White helmets are definitely there, in Syria, and they’re definitely helping al-Queda.

In his expose-style book abt the JFK presidency, The Dark Side of Camelot, the journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a Secret Service agent who found the president’s low self-esteem to be personally degrading. While thinking about JFK hating himself is remarkable and validating, it doesn’t make me feel better abt Trump’s particular brand of self-hatred, which is literally a brand––tacky ties, inedible steaks, phoned-in bland as gigantic cover-up. Trump became presidential with the Syrian attack, the liberal media declares, and they’re not wrong. Firing missiles at an adversary like they’re tweets at 7 am is something literally every president has done––Trump is merely the first one to tweet in the first person, literally as himself. It follows that these missiles are the most personal in history, as Trump declares himself presidential to us, and servile to his own ego. A historian who met JFK once ascribed his preoccupation with starting trouble where there wasn’t any––Cuba, Vietnam––to his desire to be a wartime president because that’s where greatness lies. Every president has fallen down this pit, so shd resisting Trump feel saccharine or repetitive in light of this? He is wearing a flight jacket on an aircraft carrier, smiling with none of his teeth. He is living aloof from his detuned wife. He is trying to turn his son-in-law into Bobby Kennedy. History is just wave after wave of panic.

At the Roosevelt, Sara and I kept sneaking off to the bathroom but not to do bumps. We were genuinely drafting an exit strategy, fueled by a few hours of drinking and yes, on again/off-again cocaine intake. In the suite were three actors and a screenwriter. The actors ignored us, and we ignored them. The screenwriter needed both of us, Sara for sex and me for compliments. I kept not remembering the plots of the short visuals he kept showing me on Vimeo, in between keybumps and Bud Lights fished depressingly out of a box. I kept saying how good the short visuals on Vimeo were. I realized again, people will do anything to be liked and I am a person. The Roosevelt is a coven of wolves, not witches, and you know you would cross the street to avoid these people if you saw them in daylight, and vice versa. Daylight that isn’t thru drapes, anyway. But the tow of cheap Hollywood, that scratcher at the gas station mindset, is both decadent and incandescent. It’s bad glitz but it’s glitz. After I left, Sara went down to the restaurant with the screenwriter. She wore sunglasses indoors and ordered pancakes which she cut into little strips and didn’t eat. Still tweaking, I went home and looked at everyone’s IMDB.

untitled #172

today, 3/22/17. Ales Kot tweeted: The internet is not less or more truthful than we people are -- it's our reflection at this present moment, and as such deeply useful”. Like I didn’t have enough irons in the fire, last week I was mad abt Ivanka’s ties to Karlie Kloss, or vice versa. Ivanka Trump is either a parody or a pastiche of a good girl, with degrees in international relations and front-facing camera. Karlie Kloss is a good girl from the great state of Missouri who’s historically been ill-served by her advisors, if her ties to Taylor Swift are any indication. Soft white power is literally a franchise, and Ivanka Trump and Taylor Swift are the female faces, recently inked to long-term deals.

When it comes to my interpersonal relationships I am a control freak, and I don’t like it when people go off script. This includes friends hooking up with each other, because of how unpredictable it makes the group text among other things. I’ve found no other aphorism that fits besides “You don’t have to fuck all your friends: just the ones you want to keep!” This is a tweet I composed, based on the old oral hygiene joke. Dentists are the dads of doctors, definitely, so dentist jokes are their own bland habitat, goofballs in Swiss-coffee-colored pants and apartments. You don’t have to Kloss all your friends. Just the ones you want to keep.

I have econ anxiety I didn’t have before Trump, while making the same amount of money. This is due to the perfect circle of stress that has lowered around my head, causing me to live in a new vise of awareness I didn’t ask for. Finally, the stagnation of my wages is so anterior lately that I constantly check my Chase app. When you’re already constantly checking your phone if only to swipe away notifications nefarious or otherwise, involving money is like asking for an unsafely high body temperature, the kind induced by too many drugs.

If the timeline is a drip into a massive bowl nobody is ever there to empty, wanting to drown oneself ritually looks attractive. When you as a still-youngish (youth-adjacent? youth-ipsilateral?) person are already on a fixed income, it is easy to anticipate automation and the path to universal basic income it cld afford, if that book Four Futures is right. The word “universal” is actually comforting in this instance. Drowning is what loss of life by money feels like. It’s not like I have enough to keep up with absolute body control, anyway. Sometimes I think abt men of a certain class not having much control of their own bodies either, and I’m like ok but better not draft that. 

Maybe what I have is not economic anxiety but alterity, for someone my age. But that scares me, and nobody anticipates their coming forties the same way they did their thirties, as a land of less confusion and mobility. Turning forty is real, and every other age is imaginary. Turning forty for me would happen in a second Trump term, if there were one, and that is too awful to imagine.

Maybe now is the time to become one of those people who rt’s themselves, or who uses an alias at Starbucks, or who says things like “one of those people”.

Space Oddities Doing Barrel Rolls/So Long at the Fair

Space Oddities Doing Barrel Rolls

They call you single so you will feel worth exactly one dollar. We cut our pants off above the ankles so that we may fashion the cuttings into tourniquets. We bleed in headshots and cutaways, in scenes from the guillotine floor. There must always be a wealth of deletion either clockwise or counterclockwise from us, a surplus of editorial, preferably that the crowd controls. Executions have never felt fancier. Mock trials are so first-year; we have graduated to mock executions. We walk around with low-level dread, which feels like walking around with cum in your hair. And you don’t know whose it is.

I endorse the recent rebrand of singles as solos. If you’re not on a mission exactly, you’re definitely making some kind of record.

Since the Great Depression was already taken, historians will call this period the Great Anxiety. People were trying to make the case that they were cocooning, or on another of their expressionistic jags, when clearly they have sociality to your exclusion. I have flattened my substance abuse into a tether no one’s holding the other end of, in which analogy I bump comfortably against the ship in its gravitational pull until slowly one of us gives up.

Until there is a proper map of space, we rely on datasets that are of private interpretation. The theoretical artist and data-planner Laura Kurgan, who works with high-resolution satellite imagery and urban-conflict landscapes, said the following in her Bomb interview: “People often think that layers of a map simply add facts. In reality, each layer is a story about its own dataset.” We discover a new row of planet-like things and all we can talk abt is what if lifelike things are on them, which is roughly like the head of Price Waterhouse Cooper comparing the recent Oscars mistake to Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. Which he did. So much science is pushed like propaganda, it’s no wonder ppl push back. Climate change, for instance, is reduced to either a wardrobe malfunction, or the wrong envelope handed over in a moment of data-seeking behavior. Open it and see a nipple for a scandalizing second, or a trillion miles of posthuman hope extradited by an advertising mentality.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have no brains in their tongues; their taglines are more tethers no one’s holding the other end of. Life in space must exist, we are told, for more loner-shaming reasons no doubt. This kind of faith is always open-sourced, which is strange since it’s so blind. The official at NASA who spoke to the New York Times about the Trappist-orbiting planets plagiarized, or at least pasted, the term “leap forward” in his copy, which I don’t think means what he thinks it means. Hope is regressive, in the taxation sense: it takes the most from those least equipped. Pulled along in wakes of ships, wearing funeral clothes, we think we can leverage science into feeling less like abuse when it is always, always killing us. Is it infantile to claim nothing’s as cold as warmth withheld? I’m afraid hoping for another life-supporting planet, much less real life on it, is for that person who never has enough casual friends, whose influence must constantly be spinning radially outward. Who wants to proceed from the particular to the universal anyway?

But I’m also afraid I may be that person. Here is my most recent text: Anyway, sorry I couldn’t make it. You looked good. Before the surveillance safety net, the crossed references in that text are like an Argento screenshot. Now we spy on our friends day and night so we know who looked good and who didn’t at the function, even if we weren’t there. The kind of bulwarking it takes to send a text like that could be confused for isolationism, or manipulation, but I’ve realized recently that I don’t exactly bestow attention with the hope that attention will be bestowed upon me. I rarely need to be the radius in anyone’s life, but I do need to be one of the equi-angular spokes. Looking at any NASA star plot, you can determine the most desirable data to be in the center, although improvement in one metric often means disimprovement in another. This is why a perfect multivariate balance of friends is so hard to pull off, and why I won’t cop to being an attention whore: I can really only handle three or four personalities at a time and I don’t know how everyone else does it.

So Long at the Fair

At the LA Art Book Fair, aka Instagram Live!, aka the nonholding center: competing clauses of DIY scrolled endlessly in a gallery space that as its day job marries museum culture to Little Tokyo culture, bringing white people together. There were not many solos at the LA Art Book Fair. The art world pretends to be all abt weirdos and loners; they even built that phrase like a dome of inclusion, but the art world is no world. It doesn’t have 7 billion people, just 7 billion microaggressions. There were stated or posted references to nobody owning the beach, which is clearly false: the beautiful people own the beach. I snagged a Cash For Your Warhol sticker from the free media table; “when they go low, we go high!” was the dek so never think memes actually die. They just reoccupy. Taking notes on Instagram, I discovered that when pressed to decide between committing earnestly to LAABF’s excesses and making fun of said excesses, it’s okay to do both.

Nevertheless we stanned over Dodie Bellamy working the Semiotext(e) table: how we got 3 books for the price of 2 or a free poster copped like the setlist from the stage. Don’t semiosext(e) me bro, Ben texted. Patrick got the poster. The three Semiotext(e) titles I got were: Atta by Jarett Kobek (Intervention, Series 9); The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee (Intervention, Series 1); and Communists Like Us by Felix Guattari and Toni Negri (Foreign Agents). These items from my most loved label will live forever in my collection, or at least longer than the fancy zine I nearly dropped $20 on that was just curated McDonald’s-themed photography would have. On the other hand, the new Mac Jr. is beyond reproach.

At the afterparty, Sara texted wya? do you have drugs? find us if yes. The answer was no, but she and Chloe found me anyway before I cld text something bitchy.

Football Night in America 2: Always Concealing a Secret Doubt

Football Night in America

Jamie Lauren Keiles tweeted “as writers, as we look for opportunities to act, what we can do in the meantime is keep clear personal records of what reality is like now”. I’ve had multiple discussions with friends about the disability of push notifications during the neverending news drip, how it makes us crave distance and how that alone, itself, is alienating, that distance cld ever be a destination. Like flying just for the miles. What we cannot afford to be, as writers or as friends, is distal, even when the body is in decay. Decay doesn’t always hurt, as any dentist looks forward to telling you. Is it hard to stay together? Is staying together a viable form of organization? I texted Ben, how will our data plans ever survive any of this. He texted back, I’m afraid if I unplug from the tl I’ll wake up like Neo naked in a tub of fluid. This was right after I discovered the Russians are flexing on Ukraine again. Delimitation is more than a meme, or maybe not.

What is reality like now. It was Super Bowl weekend in America. The movie star quarterback of the Vegas favorites, praised as a superager and hated for his great qualities, was said to “choke up” when a little kid asked him who his hero is. The vegas favorites were the Patriots, whose name is fake, as proven by the WE ARE ALL PATRIOTS tagline on their merch. The debate over what constitutes fake news, to the extent such a debate is even being had in a society that is essentially debateless, keeps glossing over the cusps of it: that fake news has the same exquisite definition as mansplaining. Mansplaining is not telling a woman something she may not already know, it’s telling her something she already, for sure, knows. Fake news is not news you may not believe or may disagree with, it’s news you generate with the intent to mislead. Both mansplaining and fake news have the same rottenness at core: not just raw self-interest, but the overcompensation of people who believe themselves to be ahead when they are utterly behind. Why do you need to harangue a woman into submission? Because if you don’t, who else will. Like, that’s what the supremacist Right, and the misogynists who operate it, have always cudgeled as truth: that whites, and men especially, are permanently Ahead and enforcement is solely up to You. You are ahead, and you must stay that way. Always look over your shoulder, bc someone is definitely gaining on you.

Trump’s identification with the Patriots is irritating, if only bc Brady and Belichick are the great erotic male literary collaboration of our time.They proved this in the Super Bowl by first not playing to their audience (falling embarrassingly behind) and then playing overtly to their haters (by exerting an ethic that never confuses extraordinary force with medium-term precision). Twitter instantly fell apart with exasperated threads comparing the alleged trauma of this Super Bowl outcome with that of the Election, which is the Super Bowl for fat people.

Carly was the only other one for the Patriots in my closed circle. We agreed Tom Brady is handsome in the Adonisian sense, and not in the red-skinned bro-with-squinty-eyes sense like most jocks. He cld model! she gushed. Wokeness will only get you so far when it comes to American sports, and you can’t just show up for the day and rep the minority city. Atlanta is a new American beauty capital but if its athletes are demonstrably less terrible than Boston’s or anywhere else’s, I’d need to have a look at those findings.

As an extremely shallow person, one of the things that bothers me most about the new regime is how wholly, defiantly unhealthy everyone in it is. From the purple of Sean Spicer’s undereyes to the puce of his pursed lips, from Steve Bannon’s terminal unshavenness to the wattle every last one of them has, Rex W. Tillerson (W. for Wattle) as particular offender, cld their bathrooms all have lighting this bad? Do they not have access to leafy vegetables? Or purified drinking water? Yes, in America commenting on someone’s overt lack of health is definitely shallow, just as the right to look and be unhealthy is a certified letter of aggression. These people will play politics with their own bodies, and repulse us by any means necessary. While there may be something nice about current highly-paid NFL players having fat guts, there is also no word to describe how spectacularly out-of-shape former athletes get. And there should be.

What else was going on? Conrad and Angelo and I went to DJ Spinn’s birthday party at Tokyo Beat and watched the footwork dancers corkscrew themselves into bright bonfires of joy. Watching street dancers is strangely purifying, like thrown birdseed on your day. The bone-breakers on the Red Line haven’t been as active lately, and I wonder why. Maybe they formed a union and are now protected from their dazzling impromptu hat-in-hand protests, their sudden cleansing of the filthiness of the trains. The union will ensure that the bone-breakers and all the other street dancers are guaranteed compensation and health insurance for scapulas they might tear too far. Meanwhile, footwork dancing looks like a first-rate Chris Brown dream, can you tell I have zero clue how to technically break down forms of dance? I put them on an Instagram story but didn’t want the flash to distract so you couldn’t really see much. Conrad ordered a drink. Angelo disappeared into the crowd. I kept watching, mesmerized from the waist down.

Ben and I and two girls from Orange County I met in the Lyft Line went to see some guy play funk and disco records in a warehouse at 4 am. Going out when you’re this wobbly and constantly waiting for some kind of drop feels like when the Wi-fi goes out, like how can we occupy ourselves rn?? A sort-of drawn curtains mentality takes over, and you hope nobody sees you having even the most circumstantial kind of fun, but it’s necessary? Drugs and alcohol suck but at least they don’t lie abt it. Then I got home, or at this point the timeline collapses, but I got home and my Wi-fi really had gone out. It was just me and the Criterion Collection, like Lena Dunham in bed sick with mono in some kind of Google witch hunt.

Ignorant is the Western way of life. Richard Burton says that in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, from the outré black and white universe of 1965. Burton acts from a denomination of power that’s no good anymore, but his restless methodism always finds the enemy like some kind of software. Geopolitics and instincts actually going together is one of the great reliefs of the period spy movie, and now they couldn’t be farther apart. Money has always been the only thing anyone cared abt, and yet the only thing anyone cares abt anymore being money still feels like a plot twist.

In one of those talks with friends, where we practically examine each other’s nail beds for signs of Nazi flesh, she named kleptocracy, autocracy, and fascism and told me no ontological database would support all three being true at once. I said Trump, simply as electoral phenomenon, produced the first two as fluid states, knowing the third would take care of itself. Some people just want to rise so high they don’t have to hate anymore—they can get people to do it for them. Ignorance has never been so much the Western way of life as with these old white people who elevate the unread brief to a form of pulp art, who are nevertheless hilariously, decrepitly, skull-clutchingly in charge of reality again—reality as unclear personal record. Trump, unlike Tom Brady, only thinks he’s a superager. Only white supremacy cld ever explain it, and only a parody of rectitude could ever intervene, interfere, and interlope as much as he and his nightmare of whiteness are.

Remember when the Feed was just libs talking abt television? Yeah, I almost miss it. Most of the television I have watched in 2017 is Hannibal, that hot flash of homoerotic giallo that somehow lasted three seasons on an American network. In the same manner of the Trumps looking rich only to the most depraved poor people, the character of Hannibal Lecter, with his spread collars and foodism, looks tasteful only to the most depraved rich people.

At one point on it, Hannibal tells Will that fanatics are always concealing a secret doubt, which I found amusingly “topical” but not enough to actually tweet it. Skip the blind, or bland, poetics of replacing “fanatics” with “all people” and a very clever recipe for coping emerges: whatever the fanatic says, know that in his heart he is always calling it wrong. That’s living under autocracy.

Death Watch (1980)

February 23, 2000

April 11, 2000