Month: April 2022

partial list of artistic influences

Thomas Pynchon, Emily Dickinson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Samuel Beckett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Diane Williams, Francisco Goya, Cady Noland, Mike Kelley, Henry Miller, Henry James, Henri Matisse, Robert Henri, Philip Guston, Mariah Carey, Harmony Korine, Sylvia Plath, Gustave Flaubert, John Cassavetes, JPEGMAFIA, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Lydia Davis, Baruch Spinoza, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, the Relentless Picnic, Stan Brakhage, Amalia Ulman, Bunny Rogers, Molly Brodak, Paul Thomas Anderson, Zhuang Zhou, St Francis of Assisi, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Plato, Kanye West, Remy LaCroix, Nick Mullen, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Pettibon, Édouard Manet, David Lynch, Lenny Bruce, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Charles Bowden, Britney Spears, Maya Deren, Bunny Yeager, Ezra Pound, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Oscar Wilde, DJ Shadow, David Wojnarovicz, MF DOOM, William S. Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud,  Sonic Youth, Tim Heidecker, Gary Larson, Herman Melville, Dane Rudhyar, Federico García Lorca, Nina Hartley, Laboria Cuboniks, Mark Fisher, Lord Byron, William Blake, Prince, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Leonara Carrington, Max Martin, Marcel Duchamp, the Marquis de Sade, John Coltrane, Kathy Acker, Djuna Barnes, the Wu-Tang Clan, Buzz Osbourne, Alfred Hitchcock, Mel Blanc, Wikipedia, Dopesmoker, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hugh Holland, Aristotle, Richard Feynman, Voltaire, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Jimi Hendrix, Aeschylus, Ovid, Doris Wishman, Eric Stanton, John Willie, Bertolt Brecht, Dōgen, Br’er Rabbit, Karl Marx, Art Bell, Albert Einstein, Robert Graves, 808 Mafia, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Jacques Vallée, Vince Staples, DJ Screw, Sylvia Sleigh, Robert Altman, Frantz Fanon, Georges Méliès, Dante Alighieri, J Dilla, Anaïs Nin, Erich Fromm, Comte de Lautréamont, Ishmael Reed, Alexander del Mar, David Ray Griffin, Russ Meyer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gil Elvgren, the Gospel of Thomas, Carly Rae Jepsen, Niccolò Machiavelli

YOUNG THUG ENACTS a Charlie Parker theory of trap. Virtuosity, drugginess, genius, vulnerability, an impish childishness almost as a compensation for the overabundance of talent, the superfluidity of imagination. A Cocteau from East Atlanta, he teases the beat, skipping off it like a yo-yo, yodeling, crooning, blurting, squawking, purring, working his game on you, finessing, playing ad libs like Curtis Mayfield worked strings, or scatting and growling low like Louis Armstrong if he were sweating it out in a freestyle battle with James Brown, bouncing back and forth between personalities. His polymorphously perverse sexuality is so insistently graphic and deadpan that it has virtually zero erotic charge, au courant pimp talk channeled through a kind of private board game of his own imagination, a Candyland fantasia slimed in promethazine. By contrast, his persona oozes sex. In leather jackets, ultratight jeans and Janet Jackson piercing arrangements, he’s a Mick Jagger–ish rake on the make who is also shy and easily wounded, suddenly open for a hug. A favorite and telling picture posted to Instagram account thuggerthugger1 (5.2 million followers) captures him with his arm around Sir Elton John, posing like a polite politician in photo-op mode (Obama-alt) next to Sir Elton, who is dressed in a gold-trim Adidas tracksuit and a black thugger cap.

“Notes on Trap,” Jesse McCarthy

in a humorless mood

sometimes it is impossible for me to extend the kind of generosity of spirit that usually makes me excessively empathetic and understanding–it’s like that well is just dry, and so I grow paranoid or indignant that whomever I’m interacting with only wants to stake further claim on a dangerously depleted resource of mine. I can be irritable, bitchy, nitpicky, belligerent, huffy. it is not attractive.

I need to give myself permission to express these feelings without concern for offending people or for not being understood. not like, go out of my way to be mean spirited, but I’m allowed to create an artistic space for those feelings to be sublimated into so that I don’t feel subjected to them without agency. this can produce interesting and worthwhile material, but only so long as I accept the consequences.

basically I’m trying to get to the Sontag place of going to the keyboard as I would go to a machine gun.

before I die I must listen to these 1001 albums: week ending april 13, 2022

Nevermind, Nivana

imagine if I had never heard this album.

highlights: “In Bloom,” “Something in the Way,” “Lithium,” “Territorial Pissings”

rating: 👶🏻

Lazer Guided Melodies, Spiritualized

for when you want to listen to Spiritualized but don’t want to feel like you’re attending high mass.

highlights: “If I Were with Her Now,” “Smiles,” “Take Your Time”

rating: 🌫 ✨ 😢

Forever Changes, Love

hippies were a mistake.

highlights: the lyrics on this album are so corny I quit listening. the music is fine though.

rating: 🙄

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly

okay hippies weren’t totally a mistake.

highlights: the title track, duh

rating: 🎸 😮‍💨 🌀

Mask, Bauhaus

this album is way better than In the Flat Field, so much better than I’m confused why I’ve only heard In the Flat Field. gothic-ass post punk with a generous side of dub? sign me the fuck up dude.

highlights: “In Fear of Fear,” “Of Lillies and Remains,” “Satori”

rating: 💀 🏝

Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits

is this a protest album? I don’t get it. I might have enjoyed this more if not for that verse on “Money for Nothing.” you know the one.

highlights: the production.

rating: 🥱

schemin and scamming amidst pestilence and famine

i’m plannin on standin behind a personal canon, and in fact it’s that act that maps a world beyond appearance, your adherence to dogma it’s not comin along ya wanted a name but you keep it too tame to ever deserve to be heard in this noise and glut, girl you know I’m a slut so show me that ass and grab the cash in the safe, now I’m blastin away all day with an AK, Viet Cong hit the bong movin on, song to song, all night long I be workin & lurkin & twerkin til my shit got you perkin up even if you’re sippin from a dirty cup.