shmurda effekt

it's been 7 years now since 2011 so it is safe to say it is no longer cool to blog about the mandela effect.  however, did you remember the "hot n-word" video being filmed at such an unreasonably hi frame rate? its like it was made to be featured, grayscale & slowed down, in a loving "in memoriam" video. it is nearly unwatchably dizzying to see >60fps handheld. still, the specter of the sirens and "jungle beats!" tag still looms over modern trap... . speaking of which:
can you name another song with the "jungle beats! holla at me" tag that is NOT "hot n****"? of course not. in this sense it's a producer's tag that has achieved the exact opposite: instead of iconography and glory, or even ubiquity, it has become singular to the shmurda song. it is effectively a song tag, indicating not that the following song was produced by "jungle beats" but that the following song is "hot n****" by bobby shmurda.
the tag is a pretty good tag too, especially immediately preceded by the record slow-down right before. the onus is on jungle beats to have established himself as a producer (& tagger) outside of this song. googling "jungle beats holla at me"  will reveal, to absolute shock, that we have collectively misheard the tag, and the producer, jahlil beats, has actually worked his ass off. here is a video of him casually flipping back thru the rolodex of his masterpieces.
"tagging" ones work is real interesting, intentionally branding it at the expense of quality... we are OK with this in rap, we are OK encourage this in fashion, and when we celebrate painters, we usually expect them to stay within line of their established aesthetics. people buy ugly picassos and ugly pollocks.
in architecture, buildings are commissioned as stamps of taste: architects are sought after for their signature style. think chandigarh. think that guy in my hometown folding those hideous futurist disasters together like crumpled metal tissues.
decisions like this have dictated the landscape around me!!
unless you have grown up in close proximity to the undisturbed, natural earth, you likely understand the developed world to be Just the Way it Is. i grew up far enough away from untilled soil that entering a wild nonhuman space was entering an entirely different universe, at complete odds with my known world. so i understood the buildings of chicago to be facets of the world, like these skyscrapes emerged from the earth, these alleys were carved into the stone, these river channels and trees snaked their way through the sidewalks on their own. it didnt occur to me until walking around providence that people actually built all this shit: like, stood on a dirtpile and gathered rocks and built it. made decisions.
that is bonkers.
i love you!

there is something here

check out this muffin that is uniquely hideous. i showed it to a lot of my friends& they were also repulsed. it stood out from all the other muffins on the tray like some grotesque, gleaming gem and i was really taken by it. i think this video is a little heavy-handed in that im puppeteering it in a conniving way, but it is legitimately terrible in its own right.

striking views

not unlike the spinning dancer gif, the forms in this image flip from body to hardened magma depending on how you look at them, and there is something unbearably delicate about them, and its just alarming. on first glance it stirs something that is never stirred again, which is real frustrating, and also encapsulates the experience of early childhood terror that has a great deal to do with the unknown and the fleeting, or the prospect that the terror you felt was confined to that moment.

people are still unsure abt what the deal is w/ night terrors. we know they are more neurological than nightmares. from here:

[night terrors] instigate the fight or flight response - an evolutionary instinct which helps us flee from emergency situations with a rush of adrenaline. The fear is intense, and the sufferer will often scream and shout and be highly motivated to get away. In this half-sleep state, they will not respond well to logical statements ("calm down, it's just a dream") and some people have no memory of the attack whatsoever.

but this is a crucial distinction. night terrors exist on the same plane im referring to, deep in the back of your dome. it picks up only deeply resonant vibrations.

the most haunting vibrations i encountered as a young child may have been this "sneeoosh" sting that would serve as devastating punctuation to (i think) jimmy neutron used to fuck me up so bad, and a quick scan of the comments reveals that i was not alone in this. reading about this commentor's chills

gave me chills, because it validates the terrible energy encoded deep into these tones. it is the feeling of dread when you hear one of those Youtube cats, or when someone says "Something Is Really Wrong Here." a bad vibe verified by another being actualizes it in a really awful way, where you can no longer dismiss it as neurosis and have to legitimately consider it in reality.

here are some other images of lighter fare that have struck me recently:

this shirt, which is almost incomprehensible

 and this image, which carries exactly the energy of my mom so precisely its unbelievable.

(chevy) chasing divine womanhood

it is now fair to say that andrea long chu is one of the most fearless writers of our generation. she is scribbling takes inflammatory to literally everyone, letting no one off the hook. esp. not herself. (though she should cut herself some slack).

this article is revelatory. it is thoroughly-researched and extraordinarily thoughtful. it breathes more nuance into the conversation of transwomanhood than any other single work in the last 20 yrs.
the way she talks about "being a boy" is crazy daring. she is diving headfirst, totally unafraid, into the most uncomfortable discussion in transness: how do we acknowledge our experiences as the first gender assigned to us?
the regressive narrative of "being born a boy in a woman's body" or vice-versa only furthers ideas of gender essentialism, like: "you can be innately man or innately woman," which is the whole thing we're trying to disprove. but every trans woman has spent time as, ontologically, practically, a boy, and every trans man has spent time as a woman. not because it's what they "are," but because it is both how they were treated and what they knew to be true at the time.

in fact, acknowledging that i understand many of the experiences of boyhood is the best jumping off point for how i can emphasize how much of a woman i am. those disorienting experiences of expectation and inadequacy are ultimately really useful for approaching gender going forward. why would i dismiss them and pretend i don't know what it's like to be a boy? our superpower is that we do know what it's like to be "the other one!"
so when she talks about the horror of being a boy, of walking around as a boy, she nails transness. and instead of undermining our womanness, it only proves our capacity to grow and fulfill the best version fo ourselves.

i've been thinking a lot recently about gender (shocking!!) and have smugly settled on some terms i'm eager to show off: diagnostic and prescriptive gender. it feels like these terms bridge the gap and bring clarity to a lot of confusing trans discourse. not to pat myself on the back but i'm paving the way for the new generation with this blog.
diagnostic gender is the process of running "diagnostic tests", like a buzzfeed personality quiz, to determine an output that is either Man or Woman, that concludes you are of the Masculine or of the Feminine, presumably informed by your early childhood experiences, "genetic personality", etc.
prescriptive gender is the process of choosing the gender you identify with— the set of attitudes, ethics, and aesthetics that you admire and want to be. it is the vow of reaching towards Masculinity of Femininity, of "becoming" a man or a woman.

here are some cool ideas in action:
transphobes assume that prescriptive gender—the reach for an identity— is bogus, and that the spiritual quest of ideals cannot be legitimate. But the world was split, destroyed, and rebuilt by people reaching for divine Christianity without ever "embodying Christ" so clearly our aspirations of what we want to be like do tend to define us.  andrea long chu seems to suggest that prescriptive gender is all there is— that Womanhood is only the reach for womanhood. this might

andrea long chu believes the opposite, and that prescriptive gender is all there is— any diagnostic work is inevitably clouded by our prescriptive biases, and the reach for Womanhood is in fact Womanhood. this is optimistic if applied to cis people, that cis men are ontologically men because each day they strive to be men. but it also refuses to admit that were these men to simply decide to be women, there would be some catching up to do in attitude / ethics / aesthetics, and they would have to relearn a lot about how to interact with people.

i think everyone's gender identity is a combination of both diagnostic and prescriptive choices. cis people are people who don't allow themselves the prescriptive gender, because they feel they are ruled and limited wholly by the diagnostic gender + their genitals— or they use the prescriptive gender to augment or supplement their "diagnosis."

anyway, props to ALC for the fantastic article, right? that's what i thought a hefty 4/5 through the article. 80% amazing, that's a B+, so right before the finish line, why does she have to ruin it?

the last paragraph reeks of the kind of transpessimism she imbued a theatrically depressing article in the NYT. that article is guilty of the navel-gazing woe-is-me self-pity that she (justly and satisfyingly) attacked Jill Solloway for. maybe i'm not getting it, but to me it reads as Lena Dunham-gone-trans— it has the defiantly raw, uncompromisingly intimate style of millenial internet lit which weaponizes vulnerability to affront its reader. it posits transness as a losing battle that is waged at the world from birth, a cursed condition that must be reckoned with as long as our society lives under the specter of a binary. and of course there is truth here, and her experience— which is also exquisitely rendered— is good to have out there. but articles like these are necessary only as points of reference: here is trans pain at its most vivid. so when it shows up in the NYT, largely devoid of other trans viewpoints, it twists the 21st century trans woman into a frightening self-destructive spectacle.

how does andrea long chu, electric-joan-of-arc-as-brooklyn-intellectual, fall into the same traps as every 60+ neolib queer? she equates gender dysphoria with body dysphoria, conflates the desire for vagina with the desire for womanhood. she completely neglects to explore engaging with womanhood nonclinically:

to engage with womanhood or to live as a woman means to interpolate the attitudes, aesthetics, and ethics of Femininity— according to your culture / community— into yourself. just as being a Goth means participating in Gothdom, being a woman means participating in Womanness: listening to other women, supporting the work and art and lives of other women, contributing to the universe of Women. andrea long chu seems to miss this fundamentally in her lonely reach for Womanhood.
i'd love to have coffee with her. she is the ta-nehisi coates to my cornel west. and i know what you're thinking: asher, how are you about to pull an andrea long chu and ruin your entire post with a deeply problematic comparison between you, a successful, educated trans writer, and then two of the most important and brilliant living intellectuals in the field of social theory and racial justice?

anyway, andrea long chu's killer jill solloway take-down sent me down a wormhole of articles about journalism and the ethics of the hit piece, and it reminded me of a moment that in retrospect probably defined my understanding of american celebrity:
watching this just unbelievably dismal piece on chevy chase.
everything here is bad vibes. it's literally only negative energy— the ruthless mythologizing by both the interviewer and chevy himself, the easy bait, the eagerness with which chevy takes the bait... bewildered commentors appropriately pointed out its strangely resentful attitude.
and which is more depressing: a.) chevy, so decrepit he is quaking out of fear or newly-developed essential tremor, or b.) chevy, as some theories suggest, so paranoid about misrepresentation that he spills water on his belly to expose potential continuity errors in editing?
the things is though: you almost can't help but sympathize with chevy. we are all familiar with the moment of losing an argument, realizing you are wrong, and confronting the choice to either admit defeat & apologize, or double down on your argument, knowing you are being petty and unreasonable, and dig yourself in further. he has existed perpetually at this point, and has chosen, without falter to double down. it is car crash compelling to see him make this choice time after time when he is consistently given opportunities to redeem himself.
on the other end of the spectrum, take a look at this profile on brandon wardell, which is like the crude opposite of a hit piece— this journalist was hired to be flirted at by brandon wardell and then write an extensive riff off a twitter joke he made about himself in which he was designated a resolute "cutie", a label that ostensibly relieves you of any social or legal consequence.

you think that's grim? just you wait till brandon wardell publicly declares his her strive towards womanhood.

oh fuck

the beat drops at 0:56

it's been wild here at college. 2 times now since arriving, i’ve had the experience being in the bathroom and hearing someone in a neighboring stall have audibly awful diarrhea. just really troubling sounds. i heard a girl just emptying her body. grim, and even worse when we found, to our mutual horror, that we were exiting the stalls simultaneously, washing our hands together, side by side, trying desperately to avoid eye contact. these images of each other, synchronized over the sinks, are so potent with shame and this accidental intimacy that despite our best efforts we’ve been burned into each others consciousnesses. it gets worse though, because i’ve run into this girl since, and it is overwhelmingly clear that this experience has established a power dynamic in which, because of the social leverage of having had a fine digestive system that day, i hold some fundamental authority over her. she is suspended in a nightmarish chamber of physical & emotional vulnerability that is unwillingly in my domain. this reached its peak last night in the met while i was making my way towards a table, and she stumbled and frantically moved out of my way, as if i were about to bully her, or make some public declaration about her colon. she’s scared of me now because she knows i’ve heard her do something awful.
it reminds me of the non-gastrointestinal ways trajectories of relationships are determined by arbitrary circumstance. think about your relationship with either your older sibling's friends or your friend's older siblings. there is a mutual understanding that you are innately less cool. they’ll tell you, "No Shit Sherlock,” which is such a fucked up thing to say, unquestionably the 3 most devastating words to hear from someone who you think is cool (they cut to the core of your greatest fear: that your attempts at meaningful contribution are failed, that your presence is useless). even when someone who you dont think is cool says it.
there are upsettingly gastronomical (tho not gastrointestinal) implications to this. this article outlines the globalization of residents of four rural guatemalan towns and the way they negotiate (& are subsequently manipulated by) mining monopoly men.  these hi-stakes environmental choices can trace back to the initial interactions these two parties have. shifty motherfuckers who dont knwo the lay of the land.

The uncertainty of self-efficacy also leads to questioning the authority,  of mining. This contrasts with the blanket trust extended by lowefficacy individuals. details of meetings between community leaders and mining technicians about wastewater retention exemplified this aspect of mistrust. They promised that the poisonous water would be retained with cement. But we responded that in the rainy season everything fills up with water. Huge rushes of water come down from Cerro Blanco. So how will that water not spill out? We contradicted them because we know this land.

 do you know life exists here in providence and has done been doing this? it's been doing fine without me. if you never moved homes as a child, college is the first time you understand that the tree still does make a noise when it falls, even if you cant hear it. you are for the first time in a place that is not yours, that you cannot hold any claim to, that has no space for you yet.

vidoes with perfect rhythm that even sync up at times.

let john do the silly walk

my god, this man with a huge, beefy fuckin bike— a bike that met every qualification for obnoxious motorcycle except for the motor, it was just a classic pedal bike but steroided out (beast mode alert...). this man, dustin hoffman-eye-wrinkles and all, kept shooting me flirtatious sex looks from across the train car. at night. he was like 60.
this verified my whole new ordeal which is feeling invincible on a train. this is not delusional either people dont want to give me hell: i've "weakened my way through the other side" in that i'm too delicate to be accosted in good conscience. curb-stomping me is like curb-stomping an origami swan. what would otherwise be a cathartic destruction is just so so sad. i got that mush head. no one's gonna fuck with that.

remember the "john silly walk" meme? the caption, "i told john to do a silly walk and he actually did it the absolute madman hahahaha" carries that implacable compelling energy that the most stirring and memorable memes do: capturing some unusually specific and evocative character or way of saying something, but reaching at some somehow universal energy. it taps into some trope maybe we all saw on a kids show, which would explain the generational quality of most memes. there is a bank of zeitgeists that we were fed through Fairly OddParents, Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron... just emotional mechanisms and little operations that we internalized. so a meme that channels— even abstractly— some moment from that show is devastating. i remember in high school the funniest kid in our grade was the kid who was most frequently able to pull references from the collective unconscious, and it was super super funny and warm, because it created this instant kinship and love, triggering a memory that we had but forgotten. it's an amazing thing to do, to access that space. maybe it's nationalistic as well, because it really cements the idea of distinct cultural humors.
anyway, about silly john walk:
this is the kind of heavyduty research that i love to see painstakingly noted in an online forum.
that tirelessly thorough dig is what the internet was built for. thats why we catalog, boys. thats why we catalog boys.

i also recently saw my dad in a chicago production of macbeth. watching my elderly father rapier and prance and joust was just like classic the willy-wonka somersault was surprising , delightful, and somewhat of a betrayal.

most spectacular

if youre even marginally less obsessed w r&b / soul 1968 - 1978 than i am this post is truly disposable.
okay okay thanks. sorry.
is there anything richer and more colorful, more gleefully experimental / endlesly rewarding, more mind-alteringly kaleidoscopic than the psychedelic motown productions of norman whitfield in the early 70s?
maybe.
but those tracks are still fuckig mindblowing. & they are overflowing with pretty confounding decisions: funky bassline + stately harpsichord?? 14-minute sound-collage dirges instead of ballads? who DOES that!?!?!?!
and you can hear him giggling maniacally at the fun stereo engineering could yield: listen to this right-left-panning drum intro:


norman. even at his peak brian wilson was composerly and feels stiff with those anal strings (i'm talking about his meticulous string arrangements, but yes i agree "anal strings" is one of the worst pairings of words)... plus, the only thing better than a genius who falls from a staggering height of brilliance into a dark pit of despair is a genius who, instead of collapsing after the peak of his career, dutifully carries on. and i'm not even saying fuck brian wilson-- or even paul dano!-- but instead saying: norman whitfield was a better man, a better producer, a more interesting character, and brian wilson can go fuck himself.

his closest production contemporary is curtis mayfield, who had a similar penchant for injecting molten gold guitar lines, diverse percussion, and gorgeously unfurling harps, best exemplified here:

BUT clearly it took him the format of a Soundtrack to really let loose and be that indulgent. norman's ok jelqing himself off for a whole half of a record, sprawling out hypnotic bonkers grooves w/ impeccable vocal arrangements and space-funk ..... god it's so good.
i've assembled my 3 favorite productions below:

Little Green Apples (1969) - The Temptations

the opening guitar part is so stunning i famously sampled it a year ago.

Take a Stroll Thru Your Mind (1970) - The Temptations

this song is really transcendental.
it's also probably norman's sparsest, just bongos and a walking bassline, with thos psyched-out doo-wop vocals popping in & out & around the head. proto-ASMR grunts & moans. a masterpiece in restraint... and then when that fuzz guitar shreds in it fucking SCHRIPPS!!!!!!

Smiling Faces Sometimes (1973) - Rare Earth

norm clearly believed this tune to be a fertile plot of land, ripe for experimentation: he continuously  revisited it   over the course of his career, each time using it as a vessel that housed whatever he was interested in at the time. this is his 4th & final (as far as i am aware) & best version.

Wishing on a Star (1977) - Rose Royce

how the lowkey disney ass orchestra swirls behind her? the watery guitar?? the clicky late 70s smooth beat grounded as those waves of sound overwhelm it? or how about when the drums lurch into a sweaty double-time sprint in the final 3rd giving the track just the momentum it needed!?!?!?! and its warmth and nuance remain unmatched.

honorable mentioned to this whole album Sky's The Limit (1971) by the Temptations, because it favors unorthodox orchestral percussion for the majority instead of funk drumming. who would've fuckign thought.

ta-ta!

SMOKE (VAPOR) & MIRRORS

back when the news broke onto buzzfeed my high school collectively uncurled their juul-clenching fists for a brief moment's reflection: does it really make sense that this is "better for you" than weed? or does it fundamentally violate our eternal undisputed millenial qualifier of healthiness: organic-ness?

and look at how "NEWS"-- in a different (serif!) font, no less-- has been conveniently added to the trusty buzzfeed logo to affirm its status. what's next VICE becoming legit and producing important, respectable journalism? i miss the good old days when their all-star team churned out classics like "Inside The Horrible Life of Amsterdam's Wealthiest But Most Irritating PCP-Addicted Child Porn Star" or "We Found The Most Emo Farmer in the Himalayas and Gave Him Peyote" or "5 Guys With Moderate Erectile Dysfunction Reveal The Most Upsetting Porn They've Accidentally Stumbled Across, But High". I'm kind of joking but
also

Joseph G. Allen:
Who invited him?
And doesn't he have any cheese
or grapes on that paper plate?

mostly
not.

anyway, as per usual, the old foagies at the New York Times have finally caught up to this juul & e-cig pandemonium and published a thorough review of this troubling information. already in the 4th paragraph, valiant knight and oddly-insincere-gay-man-at-your-wedding Joseph G. Allen is exposing the scandalous corruption of previous e-cig journalism, citing shady conflicts of interest and asserting himself as the Mueller of e-cig tyranny. maybe this article will at last prompt the men who wear those long coat-tailed blazers and stand outside cafes to finally relinquish their cig pens and vape canisters. maybe.

happy passover, in other news. we're good family friends with my rabbi, and while i'm sure he didn't know i was redwinedrunk after 1 glass, he still exercised great patience in leading my vertigo-plagued body through the Modern-Day Seder. AS IT TURNS OUT we have similar issues w/ passover and its situational irony:

DID YOU KNOW? in the 18th century, American Jews would wax mournful of their ancient days enslaved, until the slaves they kept downstairs took too long to bring up the parsley, which is when we'd yell and demand and then thank God for our newly-instated Whiteness. yes, jews owned slaves! "off-white" has been used to describe the Jewish-American experience (i prefer "egg-shell," or "creme") throughout the 20th-century, but now? (a lot of this is discussed in this book i'd like to read but haven't bought, ironically due its price tag & my jewishness.)
my family accepted our certificate of whiteness with honors, and stamped it with beautiful symbolism when my great-grandfather changed his name from Weisman to White.

have a nice day!!!!! dont forget to drink water!!!!!!! i often feel like the gravity is shifting in parts of my body, or that my center of balance is being drawn upwards as if by a large magnet, when i am not drinking enough water. it is psychosomatic i am sure (i am not chronically dehydrated or anything, just hugely neurotic) but it reminds me of internals sands that indicate what i need!! so it is important to nourish and re-nourish, even if it is only a gesture.

browser dj set 3.04.18

browser djing is the technique invented by me and soon-to-be-former art teacher Bill Simos in which the dj must only use their browser opened to mostly non-streaming sites (no spotify web player / grooveshark / bandcamp, soundcloud is fine for some reason) to engineer a creative, cohesive, and engaging dj set. its blurs the line between musique-concrete, middle-schooler girl talk, & post-internet hyper-referentiality. its really serious.
here's my set, with overlays / fade-ins noted for your feeble attempts at recreating the swift elegance and mastery with which i led the empty art room (+ sporadic appearances of mr simos) through the waves of sound:

1. start things off w/ a chopped-and-screwed version of Teardrop w a lurching beat to provide a stable ground
2. at 0:52 add goat sounds as some scintillating rhythmic interplay
3. at about 1:20 into teardrop some tonal tension and atmosphere w/ police sirens
4. ride it out, let it play, and then SMASH IN this driving filter tune
5. NOTE: keep this pretty racist website open to drop troubling and brash soundbites on the downbeats every so often.
6. as that amps up, bring in the opening guitar twang of Can You Get To That by funkadelic, which i've cordially looped for you:
7. let that play on its own for a little. ride it out. occasionally, threaten to bring in... the second verse of NIN's Perfect Drug, but don't ever fully integrate. just dangle it there.
8. eventually, bring in this video of a news report in a florida bridge collapsing
9. and when the man begins to choke back tears, add both fireworks and Wandering Star. at this point you are set. let all 3 videos play & admire your set.
10. when wandering star ends you'll have 9 hours and 56 minutes left of fireworks, which is the perfect comedown for a set of such intensity.

picture me in my element going rogue, from this very set (NOTE: the edm drop is for advanced browser djs only!!! there is a reason it has been omitted from the above instructions!!!!)

wood hooks and bird bells

here in evanston where the air is damp and rich in the march months, and the smell of mcdonalds curls around warm gentle gusts of spring, we will for a fleeting moment catch a small bird frantically twitching its acorn head before rapidly penetrating a tree like a little drill, with an intensity that i would dare to call erotic if it not for the bestiality witch-hunt that the recent oscar win has spurred.

these birds are gorgeous and so potent with frenetic energy it can also give you a migraine if you're not careful. there is a boy (?) in my art class who wears camouflage baseball caps and glasses with the geriatric strap who reads and draws and talks incessantly about local birds, and he's more suited to writing about this than i am, but these Downy woodpeckers, as they are called, deserve a spotlight.

they are petite fellas who work a mile a minute. i've found that searching any term on eBay is a great way to discover surprising facets of your topic, objects in orbit of whatever you're searching bound by practical usage, aspects of your topic that you wouldn't find on wikipedia or a quick google search. ultimately you get a more intimate and personal understanding of your given topic. for example, i would never fully comprehend just how illegible governmental scripts could be were I to have simply wikipedia'd Ronald Reagan. instead, i found the 1981 inauguration invitation. 

did you know that gargoyle-like decoy owls are used to deter woodpeckers from your trees?

soggy art class all-american bird boy would never get the opportunity to buy this for $18 on ebay just by reading those silly books.

on amazon.com you can also find more psychedelic decoy owls for your conservative, silent-generation-era woodpeckers. 

SPEAKING OF POLITICS!!!!!!!

read bell hooks's criticism on potentially life-altering documentary Paris is Burning.

first of all, i should clarify that in case you've forgotten i'm an 18 yr old white girl in evanston.

so my stance here isn't particularly crucial to feminist discourse. i'm also a huge bell hooks fan.

however: this essay is Plain Silly as Fuck.

we already know she has some grandmotherly tendencies. but i mostly chalk those up to her fundamental opinion that any violence, or depiction of violence, is unproductive. but this dignified standard can reach some dangerously respectability-like requests, like for the oppressed to thoughtfully reject the media of the oppressor— in a nonviolent and measured, but also no-bullshit and constructive way.

but go after Paris is Burning?????? come on!!!!!!

for bell hooks to ask homeless black trans women with no proper education to construct their own "alternative femininity" that exists entirely on their own terms without any tethers to whiteness demonstrates that she's missing the point... these people are recycling and reclaiming the values they have been taught. they are not given any "alternative femininities" to expand upon— yes, it's a nightmare but american pop culture does in fact revolve around icons of whiteness. this group fights for their identity every day. to scorn a disenfranchised group for modeling themselves after this, yearning for this sense of glamour and power (however fallacious and destructive it may be) is silly. they've been robbed of their identity. they can't attend your new school lectures.

whatever ms. hooks. i still love you.

recently i've been faced with the task of pressing the past 4 years of my life into small glimmering diamonds of meaning, which involves condensing my dense formative years into a concise and refined sequence of sweet memories, lifelong lessons, and spotify playlists... the door is shutting behind me! how awful!
to think this period of my life will soon be eternally locked & reopened only by nostalgic trips back home & hazy familiar scents is deeply distressing. and to be able to imagine what i once thought it would mean to be as old as i now am, back in freshman year, feverish visions of a rugged asher chewing on long winding blunts like twizzlers, swigging a 40 and then angrily spitting it out for some reason, a dull gray noon sky painting the alley behind the suburban, oddly well-kept 7/11 in monochrome, my tinny earbuds leaking slow distorted trap like a thin stream of smoke. i am haunted by this future that never arrived, and in its place leaves a pink and flustered whiny asher sneaking down at 1 am for a handful of pretzels that will only make me more nauseous! where did i go wrong???

this haplessness is everywhere: recently the school's been making frustratingly competent decisions like weakening the wi-fi in the bathrooms or adjusting their anti-marijuana posters to finally make sense effectively rendering them ridicule-free which was once the sole source of comfort in the day

not to mention my music taste is accelerating thru middle-agedom? the magnolia soundtrack recently hit me hard on my way to work, which feels like a grim premonition of a potential downfall into the pit of seattle-lesbian identity, which is something i never would've thought i was capable of

but life is full of surprises.
for example: both curious george AND winnie the pooh were addicts??

no stranger to manic behavior he was....

must our anthropomorphized animals be plagued by dependency???? even arthur has some obsessive compulsivee tendencies re: diligence.....

piano tone

zika delka del

the only thing more pisces than the ludicrous quincy jones interviews is tunde adebimpe posting about them on his instagram, and the only thing more pisces than tunde adebimpe posting about them on his instagram is me posting about that on my blogspot.

perfectoplasm (pt iii)

the final chapter in the saga: my buddy violet appearing to emit ectoplasm

1930s bathysphere (for early marine biology) and 18th century illustrations

respectoplasm

compare these (potentially pseudo-) early20th century depictions of ectoplasm...

with this in 2009 depiction:

thoughts:
1. the luminous cgi of after effects cs6 and a questionable budget sure is dazzling and viscerally upsetting in a different more nauseating way, but does not reach the gorgeous photomontages of yesteryore.
2. in writing this i almost referred to Haunting in Connecticut as a "b-movie", because it's a second- or third-tier horror movie without a huge following and little critical praise. but upon investigating this term, i discovered that Haunting in Connecticut falls under zero found categorizations of "b-movie."

This curiously-thorough wikipedia article argues essentially that the b-movie transformed into a certain vein of art house: the 90s indie films that felt particularly informed by exploitation films and cannibalized pop culture, ie most.
And a generous NYT article sheds light on the OnDemand free movies that you scroll past and mentally filter out. This "new B-movie" occupies more-or-less the same space that the b-movies of the 80s once did, with technological variations. he's churning out self-deprecating money-makers that mimic large blockbusters but are self-aware enough to capitalize on the tongue-in-cheek campiness and shlock of OG B-movies.

so what the fuck am i talking about?

i'm talking about another grade of horror films. ubiquity horror movies (U-grade films). you've seen their gothic billboards on the subway or in some empty lot, you maybe hear some kid talking about how they shit their pants, and then they forever are erased from the collective consciousness. films that cost a lot, make a lot, and then are erased and sent into imdb oblivion. films like The Unborn, Blood Creek, Horsemen. films that all feature former (sometimes current!) A-list actors (Gary Oldman, Michael Fassbender, Dennis Quaid), have enormous budgets, and often, enormous worldwide grosses. a lot of these are compiled on this awesome self-defeating list. and it feels distinctly 21st century. these films reliably come from smaller companies like Blumhouse Productions or Gold Circle Films, which were both tellingly formed in the year 2000. and then they're picked up by massive distribution companies, like Lionsgate or Focus or Universal. this is when they become U-grade. what's crucial to remember is that these aren't commercial flops. trusty NYT exposes just how well these films do. often they make more than they cost. from an explanatory article on the bookkeeping behind such oddities:

."..There’s so much more money out there than there used to be five years ago for filmed stories, 100,000, 200,000, which is good news..."

mostly these exist on DVDs now, so you can probably order in bulk on ebay. these artists deserve it.

this is the second time i've posted about this in the past 2 days... what does this mean for my spiritual alignment? or filmmaking aspirations?

the amazing world of ghosts (1978)

cum dumpster

happy new year!
i was thinking about the phrase "cum dumpster" and how unspeakably awful it is... it's like the worst combination of words, even phonetically, and each amplifies the other in feedback loop of disaster... because, ok, "dumpster" has that nearly onomatopoetic garbage-bag impact in the first half, the latter half evokes some horrible 90s videogame character. and then of course "cum" is already balancing precariously on the edge of nightmare-worddom, occasionally relieved of its horror only by the alternate spelling oft found in feminist poetry which is "come", which can be actually really sensual and beautiful if used elegantly. but "cum" as the commoner knows it is no good. "cum dumpster". @dictionary.com, got a new phrase of the day for you
as senior year treads onward ive been finding myself assigning work for myself... it's like reverse senioritis. the blog's back, and now i feel mysteriously obligated to compose informal research papers with all the satisfaction of academia but also the liberation of being able to (knowledgeably) shit all over the place uninhibited about whatever i want. plus my art's been steady lacking so i have to soothe my self-esteem with some other endeavor before i crumble to bits.
also
you guys see the ad for online acting lessons from Dame Helen Mirren filmed in the void?

she sits on an expensive (and expansive) oriental rug on the floor of the abyss and describes her experiences seeing plays as "cataclysmic". wow! words like "cataclysmic"? and that's only the preview? sign me UP!!!!!!!