I have a few more philosophical and political and personal pieces in the works for this blog, but that’s not stuff I do. This is stuff I do.
What I would do if I had a lot of money
What I would do if I had a lot of money is, I would finance a production of a gender-swapped but not outfit-swapped The Lord of the Rings starring Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Viola Davis, Yvette Nicole Brown, Brenda Song, and more, with a whole new soundtrack written by Oneohtrix Point Never for three Volca Keys, three Volca FMs, two Volca Drums, and a vocalist (Hannibal Buress, who would also be MC). I would attend this production in a Diane Von Furstenberg and Sailor Moon Cons, and “plain jane” as they say, so as to not be gaudy. I would invite all of my friends, naturally, as well as Hideo Kojima and any transgender women he would like to have as plus-n. Admission to the public would be free but there would be a Berghain-style bouncer who is 3 feet tall. I would hold this event at an Amazon warehouse - no deliveries, sorry! The stage would be constructed out of tightly-packed boxes of inventory. “Fragile”, “This side up”, “🍷” - such things would be like Greek to me. And in this hypothetical I would not nearly be fluent in Greek. I would cheer gleefully as Legolas and Gimli overcome their deeply-entrenched racism while stumbling over a box of fine china that crumples under their feet, or as Gandalf and the Balrog (played by Eminem) fall into a pit below the stage, padded by a delivery package containing a feather pillow that some lazy fuck placed an overnight order for. And when the dust has settled, and we have learned who really is the Lord of the Rings, Roland TR-808s would be handed out to the audience so that we could applaud using claps more beautiful than hands could make. And tears would fill my eyes, and presumably everyone’s, when Dafoe leads the cast in a deep bow, humbled before his audience of the rabble and me (I would stand apart considering I would have a lot of money).
Song lyrics
i was going to post some catchy lyrics here from my notes, but you guys can just wait a little bit right?
Potry
one time i
took a shit
and weighed myself
and the scale said
64.4 kg
and i
i
i had to take a shit again like 5 minutes later and i did
and then i weighed myself
again
and the scale said
64.8 kg
A
what
I was into AI before it was cool
I think it’s a good time to defend my “hipster” tendency, now that the zeitgeist is near-universally reviled and the word “hipster” itself is outdated to the point of being historical. I’m so happy to have been a fan of MIKE for years now, since way before a clip of some corny white guys at his show went viral on Twitter. I proudly tell people about my taste in arcane and inscrutable electronic music with double-digit buy counts on Bandcamp - or quad-digit play counts on Spotify. I smugly look down on the Hegelian egirls, because even though I own a copy of Matthew Healy’s favourite book Simulacra and Simulation, it sits on my shelf (in the “partially read” section) alongside works by Mao Zedong, Alfred McCoy, Daniil Kharms. And don’t even get me started on the books I have finished! Who else’s shelf has Dambudzo Marechera, Anne Carson, AND Sheldon Axler? Yeah. That’s right. I know math even though I’m literate/I’m literate even though I know math. I don’t even need to talk about the tapes next to all this shit.
But what else is there… 😱 Is that… Frank Herbert? Is that Walter M. Miller? What’s that? I wasn’t just into Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders before they teamed up with the LSO to record their critically acclaimed album Promises, I was also into machine learning???
I’ve been interested in things before they were cool, and I have a tendency to steer myself toward other things that might be cool one day. I’ve also been interested in things before they were lame, cringe, revealed to me by vulgar Adorno-ists on Twitter to be reactionary, evil. While it is genuine interest that leads me - I do really enjoy Dune - I do also find myself seeking out the new for its own sake.
And it is embarrassing to gloat about being in early. “I was into xyz before it was cool” - ok, so I was into something lame? And now I’m just into a cool thing, just like everyone else? And what about my youthful tech optimism? Of course I’d be very careful to navigate a conversation about that, lest anyone get the notion that I believe in the revolutionary potential of the blockchain, or that I pray to Roko’s coveted Basilisk.
I don’t want to turn the screen on and get a glimpse of myself only to see a vulgar imitation of a 20-something alt they. A person generated, or at least aggregated, by the algorithm. A /r/starterpack. A /mu/ topster. A basic bitch. I fear so much that if I stop truly finding my own idiosyncracy, if I let the internet memes catch up to me, I’ll be an internet meme myself. Or maybe I already have.
There can be no truly alternative movement when you can find sLums, Pivot Gang, McKinley Dixon on the same Spotify playlist as J. Cole and Chance the Rapper. There is no idiosyncratic obscure schizo when Gene Wolfe and Ted Kaczynski have works that land among 4chan’s top 100 books. If I have such a unique and full-hearted love for the homeless, the Afghans, the trannies, then why is Vollmann always sold out at the used book stores? (Apparently the clerk sold Rising Up and Rising Down for $500!) Mubi is a subscription service just like Netflix and I don’t know a single other person who owns tapes but FIIO made the CP13. Why the fuck do I have a Walkman.
Being quirky is over. There is no individuality to be found in any form of consumption, that cannot quickly or immediately be re-absorbed into some sort of ridiculous micro-archetype, where Spotify can’t locate the five other white boys in the world who have 99% of the same thoughts as me. There is no combination of sources that I can take in that will offer me a reasonable guarantee that I’ve thought critically, curated my own information, and resulted in a bespoke and independent view - not because it’s probabilistically impossible, but rather because I will never find those sources unless someone else has or someone else will. The Algorithm will nudge me and goad me and sometimes shove me along a path that seems like it’s leading away but ends up curving back.
The Cowardice
These posts are on my pseudonymous Substack because I do not want my opinions on Palestine and the University of Waterloo’s policy toward it to be published under my own name. After some thought, I have nothing to fear.