ARCHIVE

quick memory of a stupid answer (9/29/24)

From a very young age, you learn to contend with the 'icebreaker.' It is a functional and streamlined means for introducing a litany of people -- say, a class -- to one another. It is almost never fun, at once both demanding far too much vulnerability on display to total strangers, while as well expecting you to perform to them. Gradually, as school years grind by, you begin to compile a list of possible prompts and acceptable answers, filing down the edges as the performance aspect overtakes the initial vulnerability aspect of it. Acting is still uncomfortably betraying of the self, but it is in a different, more manageable way. In my own case, it was by the freshman year of high school that I had arrived at a carefully pruned answer to the favorite: "If you had a superpower, what would it be?" With put-on nonchalant, I had decided. "I would choose to let other people read my mind."

It was perfect to me, I was enamored with its subversion and my own portrayed sensitivity. I let on a fakery that first day of school, of a young boy craving only openness, sacrificing even the omnipotence of the equal-but-opposite power to read others' minds, all for the opportunity to be an open book. In hindsight, though, despite my counterfeit it let on exactly what sort of kid I was. And on top of that violation, I was lying, too. Of course I wanted to read other people's minds, I wanted more than anything to know what people were thinking and saying about me behind my back where they all must be. Of course, it must've been obvious to anyone listening. I'm a poor actor.

Icebreakers still continue into my adult life, though frequently in an informal and semi-ironic fashion. Recently I was posed again the superhero question, and the same old answer came clattering out by way of autonomous reaction more than anything else. It felt like a foreign object. I did not have the same personality to comfortably tell such a lie anymore, and what's more, I found myself genuinely wishing that I wanted it to be true. To wish to turn myself open like the ideology I've been scratching at lately demands of me. As I was rightly poked fun at for my answer, I quietly lost myself in the paradox my fourteen year-old self had trapped me now in, lying about wanting total honesty while wanting it to be true. It must've been some divine punishment for it all. I now so desperately want to genuinely be the person I had once only wanted other people to see me as, and there is a palpable difference. You can live a lie in public and sleep just fine, but if you begin to do so in private then you cannot live with even the person making your bed.

Perhaps it doesn't matter though. We will never have superpowers beyond that low-stakes thought experiment. It is at most just an expression of your own personal worldview, which is a luxury that, in capital-R Reality, we cannot Really afford. There is only one world, one view, and everything we see is reflected and refracted through our own looking-glass, then approximated from there. So I can only want to want It, and even then I will never know if I really do want It, because any threat of It coming to pass is hollow. All I'm doing is banging words together without any program of action. Personal beliefs chafe against the social reality, and a culture of narrativization and individualism is applied to us, socially -- how ironic. Even deeper, maybe, the individual conscious self is positioned versus the collectivist unconscious. Little burning contradictions within and without each of us. I tell a story about how I want to be honest while lying, I tell a story about how I want to not tell stories.

It is uncertain how to rectify this. Caught up in modern anxieties like Am I Living A Life That Someone Else Has Already Lived Or Is Still Living Right Now, modern anxieties like They All Think I'm A College Student Despite My Insecurities About Not Being That. Telling things through words themselves confine it to the boundaries of narrative. Sometimes I say nothing at all and look into her eyes, and convince myself that is the honesty of honesties. But even I grow uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact, even with her. Telling things at all is a story, seeing things at all is a story about the outside, being things at all is a story we tell to ourselves. As in an icebreaker, as following a rubric, it is not fun it is unresolvable conflict. We cannot knowingly say things which are completely true, the crucible of what we say and what we are is from where the truth may be unwittingly pulled.

autumn why? (9/22/24)

In the first part of the documentary Get Back, which altogether is unintentionally a mutedly tragic look at the dying days of the Beatles, a section is dedicated to an early version of what will become the song "Carry That Weight." At first, it is a song about a man running afoul his wife by drinking, and then waking up hungover -- the subject of which prompting a remark, either from George or Paul, describing it as "finding out there is a weight on your head, and then realizing it is your head," to paraphrase. Common troubles, as the band would put it. And we know how they end. The song about a spatting couple would eventually be reworked into a song about the spatting band, which would then ultimately break up forever like lovers tend to. And to me? It was my own drunk, my own breakup, and my own head, the weight, which I was carrying as I stumbled back to the room I was bunking in, when decided to create this website. It was very late August. I had no mission statement, I just wanted to write something again.

Of course, a raw drive to create, to say and to see, is only going to take me so far without anything to cohere it. I tend to begin these projects with little concept in mind, allowing that to form only as it goes, and so more often than not letting the thing burn apart when said concept fails to manifest. So while this is not some certain artistic project, I do want this to have a goal beyond words just for the sake of them. I start college soon, and I am sure my writing makes painfully clear that I have no higher education and have not so much as read a book in an academic setting since twenty twenty two, let alone done anything else in such a setting. In fact, I know it must be obvious, so much so that a friend of mine lightly joked at me, saying my letterboxd reviews were painfully that of a college freshman. Unsure if that was an insult or a compliment given my unschooled station, I asked, to which she only shook her head and said that I "will make a great English major." I would be lying now if I said that my two-year long "gap year" wasn't now a source of insecurity for me, particularly living among the degreed denizens of America's Athens. I feel so far behind. Until the semester begins, I think this will suffice to re-establish any amount of confidence in my own writing, or if nothing else give me an avenue to practice where I can receive genuine criticism, a bona-fide public eye.

Because why write, why create anything at all if you plan to show only no-one? At that point it is only journaling, which there is a definite place for, Lord knows I have shelves of my own journals (and have faithfully since I was eleven) -- but that's just it. I already have journals. I don't need to add to that now. If one is supposed to have any amount of trust and confidence in themself, then they will allow some piece of their inner core to become folded outward, intentionally or unintentionally, and present bare in their art. Publish something. In earnest, in honesty. We all betray at least something of ourselves when we make anything, it is an unavoidable byproduct of the process. With that in mind, the worst thing you could betray is that you yourself are insincere. So I needed to say anything, and above all I needed it to be true.

I oscillate frequently between either of two venues, really. When I have not decided to myself, as I wrote priorly, that art is some universal cosm, that we all have a unique voice layered underneath somewhere if only we allow it to be heard -- I am convinced that all I could ever want to say has been said already, and then it follows that the most logical answer to this is for me to kill myself. Which must itself betray how much this all intrinsically means to me. I know the latter of these two lines of thought is an improper impulse, defeatism of defeatisms, but I can't help it. Because I think at some level I know it is not true, only that I sometimes want it to be. It's my own idea, because it would make the whole ordeal simpler. But simplicity is not the point. I knew the type of person I was, I knew it was coming for me when I was sixteen, and still coming here today at twenty. For however much I can try and convince myself that I have walked all avenues in life, that teeming futurist inside of me so determined that at my young age I am already obsolete, I know it isn't true. Van Gogh's older brother was an art dealer, and as a young man he must've been steeped in culture. But he himself did not pick up a brush until twenty-seven. This looms over me. It's only over because you want it to be. I'm doomed.

Having been so denied it throughoutt my life, I am now loathe to not have my own voice. I told my girlfriend that she has a nice view of the city, but she only grimaced and said it wasn't much. Just a few buildings to the treeline. Though the concrete outside still stunned me, such a welcome human break from the operative color green of my apartment. Its outside tree canopies and its mint-green painted walls. "Well, sure, but the city ends at the treeline, as all cities do," I told her. She smiled. "Yeah, you would say something like that."

a review of apple music (9/20/24)

I was sixteen, and I was fucked. Drunk out of my mind and blacking out. It had become typical. I was sixteen, and I was probably the biggest Car Seat Headrest fan you would ever meet. So it was that I was engaging with both at the same time, drinking myself into a stupor as the Twin Fantasy demos played from my cell phone speakers, anything to stop from confronting the realities of my life at the time. It was a two-pronged strategy, really, the shows I had seen on TV prescribed drinking as the traditional remedy for ailing people, and the lingering doom in my heart advised I listen to music. At an indeterminate hour I woke up, still half-drunk, the album still looping from my phone, now lost somewhere in my childhood bedroom. Disoriented and without light, all I could do was let my thoughts grasp around at things while the final thirty seconds of Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog played me into complete ether. In that moment, the soul won. I remember it. I knew I was gay.

Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog would be reworked into the third track on the album Monomania, incorporating parts of an earlier song "Fuck Merge Records", then altered further still into a re-recording on the album Teens of Style. My revelation that night would be reworked too, associating it with an older crisis of the self from when my cousin came out as trans, all the frequent times I drank and insisted to people that I "wanted to be a girl," and I would eventually come to the final conclusion that I was a woman in the following year. The songs still remained, though. Even now when all the prior strife is just a memory, I can return to the songs. It meant a lot to me, being as intensely self-obsessed as I am, that I could return to their associated memories demanding constant appraisal, forever. It was why I signed up for Last.fm. It was why, afterwards, I bought a Spotify subscription.

But things change. Four years go by, and Spotify decides to raise their prices just a bit too high. I become just a bit too concerned with nonsense like "codecs" and "mixing." I finally make the reasonable push, the one all my friends had been urging me to make, and moved on to Apple Music. I was expecting much the same, just better audio quality (and I use wireless earbuds mostly, anyway) and namely a price that was one dollar cheaper. While it agonizingly does not have the Hang Onto Your Ego recording of I Know There's An Answer, much of my music library remained untouched. The Last.fm integration, or lack of proper, left something to be desired, though remembering to press the "scan" button every day or so in the app was little hassle. Though, I did very quickly realize something -- Spotify had changed how I interacted with music, and for the worse.

In an era of on-demand streaming and constant information, we are a bit spoiled. And to little good end, too. Nations (in both the Westphalian and Leninist senses) are leveled for the American's maw, gaping as it is, and it is done all in the service of a new plastic box to watch Netflix Original Content on. Blood-money cell phones to watch Saturday Night Live on. Of course, I'm not the first to take issue so impotently with this. But I did not realize my complicity in an on-demand economy had reached so deeply as my perusal of art. I was still there, though, answering to the Spotify algorithm's auto-generated "mixes" which dictated much of the music I discovered. Taking songs as they came, piecemeal. Removed from context.

When I primarily took my music from YouTube and my parents' old CD collection, I understood it, the nature of the album. Why artists choose to make cohesive, identifiable albums as opposed to only singles and unbound compilations of songs. It wasn't a concept that was ever explained to me, I simply knew it on instinct. Much like one knows to read a book, when given an album, it is generally best to listen to it all the way through. I gradually lost that unspecified knowledge, though, with the constant stream of music I would become bombarded by on Spotify. Without the guidance of the medium, I fell through. Sure, the songs given to me were adequately related to one another, could adequately approximate what I might want to hear when in any certain mood. Yet times would come when I would hear two songs back to back, ones which were meant to be heard in that manner either as part of a medley or just a pairing, and I would get a quick glimpse at what I was missing as I listened to music in this way.

Apple Music is different. In a phenomenon which makes a lot of sense given the company's history with iTunes, it is arguably far more centered around the album than the individual song, far more skeuomorphic to the actual experience of owning an album. From its inclusion of standard and deluxe editions, various mixes and re-recordings, to its very design layout. When you open the app, you are dropped into a "home" page, which, unavoidably in our age, contains a few mixes of different tracks. Then, avert your eyes down, and you are met with your own recently played albums, then a slew of further album recommendations. Beneath that still there are also approximations of radio stations, though my slavish devotion to my Last.fm statistics constrains me to not using them. Instead, I listen to music solely in my library, which isn't an intended feature of the app but rather out of my own peculiarity. When I find new albums, either from the homepage or from my friends recommendations, I add them to my library. At first, when I was transitioning my heavy rotation over from Spotify to Apple Music, I only added individual songs -- though I quickly realized that this was taking up a lot of screen real estate. I can only fit about six album covers at a time on my phone screen, and it was becoming very unhelpful to have only one or two songs behind each of them. So, my hand was forced.

David Lynch has famously, correctly expressed his chagrin with people viewing films on cell phone screens, and I think a similar principle applies here. Singles do exist, and with reason, of course. It is perfectly fine to listen to a track isolated, and it has been a thing long before technology caught up with individualist social rot. But to never listen to a full album is cheating yourself. How could I experience the sweeping medley of the B-side of Abbey Road, without ever knowing it had a B-side? How could Twin Fantasy have resonated with a sixteen year old me so much as it did had I only experienced parts of it in Spotify mixes? I would've been missing out on an artistic work which calls back to itself, which builds into a whole. You can, in fact, take excerpts from a book. But to never read the whole thing is to read nothing at all. To rob yourself of the whole. An album, all art in fact, demands you sit down and receive something as it is given to you, not as you take it. It becomes rarer and rarer, though.

If you have a premium subscription, Spotify does not force you to listen to its mixes. You can, if you know well enough, decide to listen to complete albums. But nothing of the app's gimmick-laden homepage or its library interface encourage that, on the contrary, they discourage it, burying them behind user-curated playlists and auto-generated mixtapes and even podcasts and audiobooks. I am glad I finally had the clarity to make the switch, but I am nervous inertia has already swung too hard the other way. I am nervous that some day, the album, with all its emotional and artistic weight, might die.

on a song i recently heard (9/16/24)

I was drunk with friends the other night, the social aspect making it dissimilar enough to drinking alone that it was something I could abide, when one raised her voice and decided we should do karaoke. As is typical, we cycled through the same old half-joking suggestions of the most mood-killing artists to possibly pick from, Silver Jews, Car Seat Headrest, and finally arriving at Lex Walton. "Hyperconfessional and Overwhelmingly Sincere," from the album I WANT YOU TO KILL ME. Despite everything that should compel me to, I have to admit that I've never personally listened to the album in full, and this might've been my second time ever hearing this particular song. This was far from the ideal setting. The karaoke never came, though, as thank God the lyrics were not on Spotify. Instead of drunk singing, I heard from someone in the apartment: "this is why I poke fun at this album, this is embarrassing." I'm unsure if it was derision, though, because on its face it is such a neutral statement. You can poke fun at something you love, and something can be embarrassing without it being an appraisal of quality. I remember thinking that then. Of the so few other things I remember from that night, the song itself sat with me, and in the hungover morning to follow my girlfriend read the lyrics to me in full. When I am hungover, my own thoughts flow so much more freely, the usual background static no longer present to cling to. In my clarity, it all felt pretty clear. I really loved the song.

Embarrassing, though. Isn't that the point? The song somehow manages to tell what I imagine are all personal vignettes without the self-aggrandizing "look at what crazy things happened in my interesting life" importance that characterizes so many other things which might be termed as "masturbatory," but it also doesn't fall so self-effacing as the Woody Allen-styled faux self-deprecation (we all know the excerpt about him from the one Orson Welles interview, I'm sure). It's an impressive balance to strike. But I'd be remised to stop there, that's almost all technical. It would be like admiring a painting strictly for the brushwork. Be more specific -- why, instead, are the brush strokes like that? I discovered only a few months ago how incredibly fake almost everything is, and ever since it's been driving me mad, I've been appraising it from every possible angle, from my ex and our hyperreal trans 4 trans polyamory to the way plastic bleeds into my water and then into my brain. How you can have two completely different conversations at once with one person across two messaging apps, how you can put wildly disparate books on your shelves to show to people and know you'll never read. And I've been trying to find any sense of something real. "Overwhelmingly sincere."

When I set out on this website, it was on a whim. I just one day remembered I had a command of very rudimentary HTML and CSS, and stackoverflow to fill in whatever other gaps. My lack of any cohesive statement becomes clear with every entry. When I write here, I increasingly strain against not only what I want to do and say, as anybody would, but also justifying this. Why say anything at all here when I have my near-decade worth of journals to continue to fill? Why write something which could instead be tucked away into a notes app or thrown half-composed into a tweet? If I am to have an audience, why waste their time with something specific only to me, but as well why waste their time with something numbingly universal? It is an impossible juxtaposition to compose, but a personal essay worth seeing does need to somehow be both specific and universal at once. Masturbation should have something in it for the viewer, voyeurism is no fun when nothing can be meaningfully seen. Finding this balance as well is something that the song manages quite neatly. This website is not the end of what creative output I wish to have, I am only twenty, and all the other things I have to remind myself of so often. But I do want to hammer something worthwhile out of it while I am here. And for that, I have been provided a reference point of sorts.

It's not all about me, though, I just don't find myself well-studied enough to seriously rate music. I only want to say I really value this song. I ought to write while more sober.