EARNESTNESS

for anyone still unconvinced of the perils of post-irony, think about it this way: even if belle delphine were to come out as satirical, the bath water paypal transactions would still exist. she would be able to buy even more plush dolls for what is presumably her parents home, and the eboys who were so purposeless already that they ordered small jars of water would still be $30 in the hole. will belle use accelerationist-like tactics to finally illuminate to the masses that we have gone too far?

this short-lived tv show, which is really an entirely baffling Flava Flav vanity project, casually suggested that the apocalypse will be indulgent and fun in a really horrible way.


I was 6 in 2006, but it's still hard for me to imagine that flava flav was, even back then, a particularly luminescent star. even at their peak, he never seemed to be Public Enemy's burning star core. while his "greatest hype man in the music business" claims are still undisputed, the show never ceases to feel like an owed favor by some shady executive. i personally suggest becoming a little drunk and watching S1E01 in its 40-minute entiretym as it's probably the most entertaining show ever made, but here are some starter moments:

[3:34]
Flava Flav: "Sometimes, Flava Flav gets lonely."
Flava Flav attempts a full-court shot and misses. The ball bounces off the garage roof, cue shattering glass sound effect.

[9:06]
In a troublingly Orwellian move, Flava Flav renames woman living in the c̶o̶m̶p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ mansion. Allegedly it is to assign nicknames that he can remember.

[10:54]
"Pumkin" grabs Flava Flav's ass as they hug.
Flava Flav: "How does it feel grabbing that broomstick back there?"
Pumkin (nervously): "Good."
Flava Flav (proudly): "I got no butt. There's nothing but a broomstick. I'm telling you, you might get a splinter in your finger."

Both Flavor of the Month and Belle Delphine are cynical, enjoyable, and pretty confusing. becoming immersed in the worlds they offer is disorienting in the same way listening to a beach boys album can be, where the fundamental attitude of what is valuable and what is necessary feels so radically out of touch, and so relentless in its pursuit, that you either are constantly aware of its cluelessness or forced to abandon your own bearings. their 1970 album Sunflower certainly gets attention for inventing chillwave  but not enough for nesting some pretty stunning songs. Are the lyrics unbearably bad & uninspired as is usual for the Beach Boys? Yes! Does someone do an almost-unlistenable "soul brother" voice on "Gotta Know the Woman"? YES!! Would these all be better as instrumentals? Of course!!!!!

However, the arrangements and production is absolutely off the chain.  Maybe the loveliest moment in any Beach Boys song ever— yes, this is a wild claim— is the candid and haunting piano reverie that closes out "Tears in the Morning." So much Brian-crisis-era Beach Boys in marked by an odd playfulness that is eerily devoid of humor, like they heard the delightful Beatles outtakes and tried to engineer their own. this is especially upsetting because we've heard them have real genuine fun, and it rules. so "Cool Water," which features such inconceivable lyrics like,
"In an ocean or in a glass / Cool water tastes like such a gas," 
has extremely pleasant harmonies and a nice foley rhythm track of droplets, in addition to tasteful prepared piano. But what the fuck? Tastes like "such a gas"? What other fringe 60s vernacular like "such a gas" didn't make it to Mad Men?
overall it is an essential listen,  if only to remind you that: too much earnestness can be a bad thing, or at least one that plunges you into uncanny valley. the sincerity of Sunflower is frequently too much to handle. if only belle delphine were to show up and drop some bars.

PS
here's a short bonus review of Billy Joel's fabulous Nylon Curtain album from '82 which I listened to 4 consecutive times at work the other day:

1. someone ought to liberate "Allentown" from Billy, who maniacally births songs into captivity with his uncanny airtight productions and hammy vocal takes. allentown is kind of a gorgeous song.
2. "Goodnight Saigon," of course, is more late 70s/early 80s misguided valorizing of Vietnam.
3. "Laura" is another entry into Beatlesdom, with  "Don't Pass Me Buy" drums and Abbey Road guitar, but is unnvervingly spiteful in a way that most Billy Joel songs are.
4. "Scandanavian Skies" is fucking cool, and what modern orchestrations!!

the sounds of adulthood, the hummusless grind

in his brain-rewiring performance, Anthony Pateras must've had all his equipment plugged into the same powerstrip as the lamp that rested on the table, because i couldn't take my eyes off the little flickers that fell in sync with some of the deeper bass frequencies grinding out of his synth rack. the most expansive sounds he could churn would suck some barely-noticeable light from the center of the room, and during an immersive piece that at times felt both weightless and impossibly heavy, both intimate and distant, it reminded me of the finite power allotted to this room, the finite waves of the sound, the finite number of people in the room.
in a move that was at best foolish and at worst legitimately destructive to my ears on a longterm scale, i sat in front of a speaker, and was really taken with how anthony's ability to snake frequencies
directly into the pit of my ear, like they had nested and curled against my eardrum. hearing the tiny oscillations in each tone rub up against each other... he had engineered a real physical proximity to sound.
anthony is a startlingly friendly man (he approached me for some mystifying reason!) with an ambiguously australian-esque accent and who is easy to picture eating a pastrami sandwich at a deli (this is NOT some lazy code for jewishness; it more indicates a humility, i.e. a willingness to publicly undergo the overstuffed-sandwich-collapse insides-out-the-back catastrophe that no deligoer is exempt from, to be a world-class electroacoustic musician who appears at a deli suggests a warmth and self-deprecating dignity. plus i don’t think pateras is jewish as a.) his name is genealogically untraceable and b.) i am not optimistic about the jewry of australia.)

i met him last night after the show, which was at Lampo. lampo occupies a curious and potentially infuriating space between elite, hibrow gallery space (women with large stones for a necklace or segmented gold watches) and young diy noise venue (men with psych rock t-shirts and troublingly soft mustaches). you are equally likely to find people invested in chic design firms as you are people with stick and poke tattoos; for this it is not unlike RISD, and similarly it poses eternal questions about the merits of institutionalized art spaces. the event, which took place in the #1 wealthiest neighborhood of chicago in an opulent historical building, was (literally) gatekept, and occupied primarily by people who wouldn't necessarily feel out of place within its gates. what does it mean for "fringe music" to be reserved for people well-accustomed to it? it pulls any urgency from the music, which by nature is physical, immediate, urgent, powerful, and potentially empowering and rests it down to enter a "tasteful palette." who knows. this is in no way a diss of anthony pateras, who is making great work for a great audience... like anyone attending a recognizably-named university, i am just reconciling how endeavors like this fit into the real world. how many of us there were... "adults"?

while i was briefly hit with a wave of lucid self-consciousness while grabbing multiple glasses of wine, i also maintained a confident air of adulthood when i found myself engaging in "map talk" with some other chicagoans. i went to the show with my new friend Eliza, who says things like "indeed" and has a brain that is probably 1000 times bigger than mine. having just graduated, they are now inescapably an adult but seem to have figured it out for the most part. we stopped at HALAL GUYS but HALAL GUYS was out of both hummus and pita, which is a betrayal that is so devastating beyond words that the blog post stops here.

how am i supposed to learn to drive

if i'm just a little rascal?

kombucha, youtube

ok so as the golden dusks rise up like steam from the thawing streets of providence and becomes iridescent in the ripe rich air, who is going to do the math to figure out how many kevita ginger kombuchas i can buy with the remaining points i have on my student id? certainly not me, and my breath is catching every time the card is swiped, i run the risk of absolutely public humiliation in front of everyone, and not because it is shameful to not have money (it's not), but because it is shameful (deeply) to choose the drink that most signifies oblivious wealth and then be publicly hit with the sobering realization that you may not drinketh from the goblet of disposable income as you so thought. it's like an attempted flex that results in you spraining every muscle in your body.

i've also been wasting large chunks of my life watching the worst content in the world at the worst hours of the morning (the early ones!)— late night talk show clips, which now seems to be the bulk of youtube's stock. when did youtube become a post-apocalyptic corporate hellscape? i remember when it once represented some gleefully anarcho garden of eden in which puppy eating flower would fall in line with family guy poop. as a middle schooler i would scour the depths, riding the high of the millennial complex of "accessing content you shouldn't be"— feeling perpetually too-young in a deviously satisfying way. naughty naughty. i always assumed i was the youngest in the comments section. in retrospect it is clear that everyone felt that way, and people like Shane Dawson and RWJ were appealing exclusively to this demographic: younger kids who assumed it was for older kids.

now, what few human beings do seem to be straggling on the barren cliffs of the site are disturbingly conservative. did 4chan imperialize when i wasn't looking? and when did the figure of the rogue youtuber get replaced with TV networks? the absence of real content in lieu of Entertainment Content reminds me of mark fisher quoting marc augé:

In the final assignment [of series finale, titular characters] Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos – Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV – are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining café. This ‘halfway place’ is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Augé will call in a 1995 book of the same title, ‘non-places’ – the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism.

(Fisher, Mark. “Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.” Zero Books, 2013)

obviously an essential difference here is that youtube was never a physical space. but that's also super interesting, because the interface of networks like facebook and youtube are built to feel architectural— it's why if you spend a long time browsing, you'll start to conceptualize it as a space to "return to" or "re-enter." i'll hand this one over to the black mirror writers now though.

in response, i've started a youtube playlist of bona fide DIY indie videos with low view counts that i've been really passionate about. i've put some of these clips on this blog before. please enjoy.

p.s. about a month ago i got upsettingly high and, subsequently, pretty nauseous, so in a panic i bought some kevita ginger kombucha. upon taking a first sip a small, phlegmlike object started darting around my mouth. my first thought was: there's a fucking tadpole in here. i spit it out, wretching, only to find it was literally the scoby. i drank the ONE bottle that the scoby got into. if you dont know what a scoby is, it's the "sourdough starter" of kombucha, but also, more accurately, the placenta.

the center knife / symmetrical forks

FANTADROMS (LAUGHTER)

it is latvian. he turns into a pencil ?

LOOK AT THE TOP OF HIS HEAD

what has allowed for sunlight to spill into this cold dark earth?
although operatively mean-spirited and objectively kind of cruel, LOOK AT THIS DUDE brings me more joy than any other video. its is shrouded in mystery in that every youtube video claims to be the original, but i have yet to figure out who made it, or even what platform it originated on. the only certainty it brings is that is so delightful.
 "look at this dude" is about more than petty associative humor. it is about the anticipation of funniness itself. that narrators voice spillith forth with sheer joy and hes quivering and sputtering around the images, sometimes prefacing them with a sound effect or naming them before we see them, warning "wait till you see the—". hes stifling laughs before the punchline hits, and thats what makes it so warm and inviting: presumably he's seen all the images before, and knows that theyre fucking dynamite, and is just leading us through the sequence and still being earnestly overjoyed and continually shocked at how powerful it is. its amazing. it's like he's sitting on a couch next to us. his screams are cathartic and infectious. it is just perfect. BOOP is brilliant.

conversely, here are shadows the sun does not reach. as another xiu xiu album inevitably lumbers forth, presenting itself in its self-loathing hideous glisten, we must revisit the reasons why xiu xiu is absolutely awful— artistically, politically, ethically, etc.
jamie stewart has built his entire career off of the fetishization & exoticization of asian women so shamelessly that we've bought his excuse that it's either satire or commentary on that imperialism, even though he has never once acknowledged the fact that his american band is using the imagery, symbols, language, themes, aesthetics, etc— of late 20th century east asian "underground culture". it's fucking embarrassing. his obsession with the dark fantasy of asianness that he has created cannot be divorced from his rotating cast of asian women as band members that he uses as ornaments or gimmicks to frame him (and his white manliness) in press photos. it fucking sucks. also can't be divorced from his using a vietnamese prostitute as a cover or creating a music video of his bandmate inducing vomiting.
STOP USING ATROCITIES TO FUEL YOUR WEIRD EDGELORD BROODING WHITE GAY GOTH MAN FUCKING GARBAGE!!!!!
YOU ARE EVERY FUCKING SELF-IMPORTANT BROOKLYN ASSHOLE WITH A RICHARD SPENCER HAIRCUT THAT YOU USE YOUR QUEERNESS TO EXCUSE.
these are such laughably, unfathomably awful lyrics. they don't even have the privilege of being cringey art school poetry. its like an 11 yr old NIN fan's attempt at grossing out their parents. it is not controversial, it is not evocative, it is not challenging, it is literally just terrible.
and the Nintendo shit is crazy gimmicky. using outdated technology and attempting to divorce a very recognizable and culturally weighted sound from its original context rules— if you do it tastefully and successfully and inventive ways. This Is Not That.
fuck that guy.
nearly simultaneous with this new xiu xiu— which reaffirmed & provided useful fodder for my burning rage—was a new panda bear album, which similarly reaffirmed what i understand to be the new panda bear era of paternal care and artistic decline.
that is NOT to say that this issue is coolness. it's not that he's a lame dad. in fact, the most refreshing aspect of animal collecrtive has always been their staunch anti-coolness. while their peers exorcised their cool kid-complexes by leaning into them  or ironically detaching (but inevitably engaging)  with trendiness, animal collective were of the few to completely disengage. they didn’t lean on intellectualism or straightforward emotional earnestness. they literally just jammed. they have never been shy about their detestably uncool inspirations (grateful dead). their post-merriweather directions have confirmed this: they seem peacefully unconcerned with what is hip, content to carry on as dads tinkering with toys. almost defiantly unbothered by their critical reception.
understanding this reframe their white-hot 5-yr run from 2004 - 2009 not as them especially in tune with what was cool, but almost as a coincidental aligning of brooklynite appetites and their particular explorations with technology. so what does that mean going forward?

divine

the most gorgeous youtube video

We Care Legal Services, PLLC, Bucks County

from the depth of the gnarly facebook mines comes an unparalleled gem. i am unsure of how i can best promote the richness of this page. it is worth an excursion of your own because i can't find the sheer number of screenshots worthy of immortalizing, but given that they don't remove their posts, it's an essential move.

here are my favorite exchanges:

if that final litany of marital crimes seems familiar, you may have seen it repurposed on a number of other posts.

have a great night. enjoy.