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.

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!