On turning twenty one

On turning twenty one and being twenty one evermore or at least for the next year:

An honest and genuine appraisal is what is called for, but maybe that’s not what I want. Maybe I’d rather pretend that I’m not precisely as I am, in the interest of a theoretical construct, an ‘image in the mind’ of some being that might or might not exist now or ever have or will.

Shambolic, overstewed, overstuffed, over. Eros and mechanical operation, contraposed against…sure, spiritual, supernatural drives and choices one cannot as such simply say ‘no’ to.

There are special classes of jadedness, and as ever must always be the case, the youthful is the purest, kindest, most beautiful, most correct. I think I am old enough now to be young in the old way. Youth and age interact, they slide back and forth within and along. Opacity is mocking, almost cruel but for its own inscrutability; that inscrutability makes it as divine as any deity can be—the impassive smirk, the withdrawn sneer, the elevate snarl: these are manifestations of an existence outside ‘existence’. I have transcended for so long in my heart and in my mind; this is a concrete good. Transcendence is perhaps the highest good for me in the world I inhabit.

In the slackening of all things, the humanizing duality—not, pointedly not, a wholeness—I perceive more clearly what and where. (‘I’ must fall away from most of my phrases regarding myself because perception deserves self-blindness, oblivion—has earned them)

An aura of detachment, a stepping-back-from-oneself. I know my parameters and characteristics, my bounds and tics and phenomena, but they are present. They define and determine, accompany and inform, limit and direct. I am I, and that means something, I suppose (I decree? I recognize? Recognize.)

Speaking in riddles, lionizing and ‘setting-on-high’ the inexpressible and unconveyable. Being. Yes, as simply as that: being! There are turns one can take, flips pulled, machinations and conceptions and theoretical utiles, but ‘truth’ is simultaneously not the good it ought to be supposed, and the silent duty to be borne.

Commonplaces, terms at the fingertip, means of interpretively framing or marshalling to order so as to contain and incorporate, internalize, process. Like a larger type of word; a symbol, a grammatical tic, a particularity. The shadings of one-ness: solitude, isolation, even iconoclasm in the development I’ve embarked it upon (words’ genealogies are useful or determinant only insofar as they are). Recognition of a necessity, treaty negotiations with stalin. Nations and cultures as organic crystallizations of ‘human drives’ as mingled in particular combination, as much un-intentionally now as necessarily—though the application of necessities to ‘national characters’ is one of the most charming and enthralling (intoxicating) vestiges of the world-enframing certitude of ‘the age of heroes’, as well as the well-meaningly self-blind, self-ignorant ‘pursuers of biological truths’.

This is the state of the state: as masked, as freely universal, as needlessly ordering even as recognizing needlessness. Living at a strange time; a new century is still just a century, change is nonsense and continuity is dominant to absurdity—is causation really this unimaginative? And of course it is. One can stare deeply into oneself forever, and eventually only end up seeing oneself staring back—because that’s all that was ever there! To be is to be as oneself, and that is neither here nor there.

The new gang of four sounds kind of like the new wire

The new gang of four sounds kind of like the new wire, and both remind me some of that newest david byrne/eno thing which leads into ‘wall street two: the new gilded age closes out’. David bowie could come back right now, but it wouldn’t be quite comfortable for anyone I don’t think. There’s nothing wrong with it—every generation has to age, and a unified cooldad front is kind of funny, particularly in this the post-lcd soundsystem world, but it begins to toe a line and raise a hackle on a kill your idols style animal, etc. what do we owe them now, reeeaallyyy, if we really think about it? I mean, again, not bad per se, just need to be appraised in and as their own things in their own rights. And honestly, that seems to have mostly happened: the pfork review bears this out

Their voices aged a little too much. So much of postpunk was the youngman’s mechanical automation and nervous energy. To have actually lived a life, particularly in the face of the apocalypticism and grey world windswept [subjectivity]hellscape sort of undermines what was going on. You cant have learned too much because

I think these post post postpunk bands oughtta aim more for edwyn Collins style sketchy warbliness. Seems p reasonable as an aim to me. Yeah! especailly cause dude literally had a fucking stroke and his new album sounds more vital and immediate and contemporary and straight up young than theirs. Partly its because he never went for coolness, so he never had to shift or age, but just the energy in the band puts him across.

Beets sound like growlers or nodzzz or black lips—conspicuous pseudo pseudoanti ‘hipstar situationzzx’

Reading rainbow kind of like heavenly. Also pfork closing line about comfort and joy in the face of witchhouse and icy dubstep is dece writing because it justified this album to me beyond being instantnostalgic or tired in a post bestcoast world. Welp laid, sars!

[2/6/11; also, i cleaned up some typos and inserted pertinent links when necessary for understanding]

[it's fucking weird to see stuff i wrote for myself because i wanted to record my thoughts published on a blog. not sure how i feel about it. gonna call it a day and come back to it--reappraise the impulse--later. think certainly i would need to reprocess my content more heavily if i were to make a habit of publication: add visual interest and soforth. might be more hassle than it's worth, and i begin to squirm a little when i'm universally appraisable--i mean, that's not to suggest i think anybody would read or pay attention, but all the same, once it's out there it's out there]

George w bush and ape symbology as a fear of losing our cultivation

George w bush and ape symbology as a fear of losing our cultivation? Protofascist authoritarian vs overcultivated immoral slow stodgy inefficient futurism. Competing science fictions, rejection of the next generation’s federation. Then he didn’t do anything because a stupid ape has no need to address the economy of technology imploding, then springing into brutal grim Christian action of pretense to burn away the corruption in the inexplicable and foul east. We will crush out this filth, it has assaulted our core, our soul, our symbols.

The inversion of generation x; they could hardly be relied on as a countercultural force because they were trained into nonexistence and apathy, fading into references and implacable early-internet ‘coolness’. Y as the response to x’s quiet conservatism and growing-upness. More extreme nihilism with cool quietude via the potential and ease for overexpression and showmanship on the internet. Gaudiness writ titanic, aesthetic nothingness. Minimalism and breadth, effortless and unnecessary information, unspoken obviousness in all facts and things, a mere check for the same bullet points. The absurdity being, of course, that it works. This is just the most efficient way to develop our collective subjectivities; end-stage individuality/ism.

[2/14/11]

okay so

i haven't posted anything on here for like nine months, preferring instead to keep all my 'useless and pointless knowledge' to myself in an ever-expanding library of word documents i scrawl into with inexplicable verve when the muse possesses me. seriously, like i could sustain a blog for months with judicious rationing of my extant content alone.

the issue, though, with my writing is that i overauthor, that i cannot separate my Self from my work, that otherwise impersonal concepts become inextricable from the deeply personal thought processes and neuroses that framed and generated them.

what i'm gonna do, though, i guess, is post at random intervals things that i've written that i'm comfortable with making universally available. i think i'll probably make a note of the date of composition, so as to place the work within my human timeline.

don't know if i'm gonna stick with it, but i happened upon a brief piece i wrote a week or two ago that was fairly impersonal and self-contained while still providing 'valuable insights' into 'things', and i figured i may as well 'blog that fucker'.

a note on my style: overdense, difficult to read through, sometimes willfully obtuse or obscure, so caught up in finding the intuitively perfect phrase or word that it often makes sense only to me or remains unfinished, the lightning failing to strike.

i have a longstanding metaphor of creativity as masturbation--which is both insightful and offputting--and that honestly helps frame the way i write. alone, often in the dim, possessed by a need or desire that seems deeper than the mind, that springs from an almost biological truth...
and you start to see why the metaphor is so attractive and ubiquitous to me.


anyway, republished content follows in three, two,