@scanpaths / scanpaths.com
erratadrool
4.2.26
TV on in the living room, Polymarket insignia on the bald eagle livecam. Rachitic rosary round the nest.
Next, a run in the damp, out on the street, cracked blacktop gummed up with quick-cement. Past a row of houses, that dusty look of old plastic clapboard siding. Past curbs, through those tiny rhotic patches of lawn between driveways and the street.
Past house with gas station serape draped in the window, makeshift curtains. Writing now, I’m embarrassed to compare textiles and computation, but in the moment, I’m struck their incredible resemblance to old-skool CRT-VJ glitch art, stripes and seams of color.
Live visuals have always struck me as a little embarrassing (even the most virtuoso bands or DJs will be stuck with some stupid timecode loop); this used to be because they were so materially grounded and unmediated (the earthiness of tie-dye hippie-stuff, loft camcorder feedback loops, tricks to be dumbstruck by - even the first DIY show I went to, at American Burger on Lighthouse Ave, had someone smearing food coloring between laminated sheet on an overhead projector); now, because every Ambient Church show has some prefab projection-mapped simulacrum of this. (You can see why Dan Lopatin had to start working with Nate Boyce - otherwise Tiny Mix Tapes would still be calling his music ‘lysergic’.) But every VJ software assumes you would like a tool to do exactly this; still mostly concerned with ‘virtual analogue’ - what I would give for a visual software modeled on ROMplers (say Zbigniew Rybcynzk), rather than 3osc, knit-together Zumeiz-snapback colors.
Still running, past the Little Caesars and round the graveyard corner, which inspires another shiver of 2010s (acid flashback). But then that’s the midwest. Reminded of ten million years of iPhone flash photos of puddles and traffic cones and graffiti and Mac DeMarco on iCloud. Today, however, I’m in a nike windbreaker, puke-green, technical fabrics. More like the other yuppies I run past back in Chicago, on the lakefront by the stupid fucking Nike wheatpastes of fashionable taxpayers beaded with sweat. Today, the uncool people online are in athleisure, run clubs, biting their metals and framing their bibs, but even the cool people are talking about ACG or pinning the same Nike MaxSight contact lenses to their Are.nas. smug satisfaction with my disinterest in sport.
Past dinged-up Corolla, bumper held in place with bungee-cord tensegrity work, like a Contortions “Buy” bikini, like "The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse": A bigger blanket, the better to hide chickens under.
The same subject, continued - “a gray wasp’s nest of chewed-up paper glued with spit" -
A plinko machine in the image of Fisches Nachtgesang. Maybe on Rainbet, which is 'Provably Fair.' Token caught in the same famous smiling sleeping eyes of klee's forgetful angel
need to increase the frequency of writings so i can narrow their scope
Remembering when I was trying to describe some loanword for murderous rampage - could only come up ‘berzerk’ but I meant ‘amok.’
Something to maybe write on A Study on the Rug Patterns and Morton Feldman’s Approach and The Figure in the Carpet, itself a ‘crippled symmetry’.
Hazlitt, on writing, in an essay on the pleasures of painting: “The ideas we cherish most, exist best in a kind of shadowy abstraction, “Pure in the last recesses of the mind;” and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view. They are old familiar acquaintance, and any change in them, arising from the adventitious ornaments of style or dress, is little to their advantage. After I have once written on a subject, it goes out of my mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and them I forget.”
Reminded of wonderful hilarious 2008 review of Murakami's running book: "I have not made a comparative study, but I suspect that the most tedious four-word combo in any language is “As I said earlier.” Murakami wastes no time demonstrating his mastery of all the variants of this heart-sinking turn of phrase. It first pops up on Page 12 - difficult to see how it could have come any earlier - and its cousin “As I mentioned before” appears five pages later. On Page 25 he tells us that the “kind of” jazz club he used to run was “pretty rare” and served “pretty decent food” and that he was “pretty naïve.” Moving on, we learn that he was “pretty surprised” when his first novel was “fairly well received,” that his Cambridge apartment was “pretty noisy,” that his new running shoes have been “pretty well” broken in, that he is “pretty easygoing” and had “a pretty good feeling for the pace” he would need to maintain in the New York marathon [...] Now, I don’t know how representative this book is of Murakami’s novelistic style, but I wonder: Is this low-maintenance, attention-deficit prose part of Murakami’s attraction, especially among the young? Do people enjoy reading him for the same reason they persist in listening to music as blandly familiar as Clapton’s? If Martin Amis is engaged in a “war against cliché” - a phrase in danger of becoming a cliché itself - then Murakami, on the evidence of this book, is a serial appeaser. How much does his thigh hurt? “Like crazy.” How do we know the weather is nice? Because - as he tells us (twice) - there’s “not a cloud in the sky.”
Wikipedia suggests that Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s name is “onomatopoeia of how Indonesians traditionally beat kentungan slit drums to commence sahur, the pre-dawn meal that Muslims eat before fasting during Ramadan. The word tung also means ‘rumbling’ in Sundanese, spoken in Indonesia.” sort of moving.
Time bleaches the bones of reason.
3.24.26
"From time immemorial it has been the tiresome habit of man ever to have any scratches and pockmarks left by the recently weathered centuries and burn marks and aftermaths of former barbarities removed twice - firstly by means of time, and then secondly by means of edicts, district regulations, imperial ordinances, parliamentary decrees, pragmaticas sanctiones, and episcopal statutes - in such a way that our confounded scurvy, rusty, moldy, and abject follies and customs resemble the royal corpses, which are also buried twice, the first time in secret when they smell, and the second time publicly in an empty double-walled show coffin, followed by doleful funeral flags, black mares and mourning cloaks."
interior scene, pomegranate molasses with mujaddara for a sort of dinner. a moment before sleep where i feel as sort of perverse gratitude towards the algorithms which at least contour online experience into shared currents - or a recognition, at least, of the strangeness of the replacement of one set of bowling-alley bumpers with another. grand houses were as grand people to him, just as the Indian pagoda means at once temple and god. falling asleep on the anthill and waking up in frantic motion, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry.
wondering if anyone has revisited modernist theories of the crowd (paltin) in a moment obsessed wiht the 'wisdom' of crowds
more jean paul:
"German art critics have a deplorable way of dismembering humor and also (to my surprise, as the enjoyment of beauty can only increase with one's ignorance of her anatomy) an even more deplorable way of enjoying it, although as judges in darkness they resemble the Areopagites, who were forbidden either to laugh at a joke or to compose one."
"Kant does indeed enjoy the rare fortune of commanding a stage well edged and bordered by heads that reflect his noises more clearly, as with the ancients who concealed empty pots in their theaters that assisted the actors' voices with resonance. An author who has ideas of his own often adulterates someone else's."
reminded of january days where the dustings of snow on car hoods thin and melt with the dissipation of heat from the idling engine. reminded of nothing so much as the imprint a Sony flatscreen made on the blanket it sat on. and now, the kettle on the stove has not gone off because it is empty: can not sing and can not produce steam.
FICO's 'fair isaac' a backhronistic sort of biblical gravitas. backdrop to our lifestyles. frameperfect but regionlocked.
2.11.26
my hobby recently is smoking a joint and going for a run while listening to music
usually sort of high-concept yuppie music from the 90s, a sort of security blanket from yesteryear, hits different when you are actually an office drone
anyways yesterday i listened to portishead and broadcast. i think the sort of received idea about portishead is that they're creating new music ("trip hop?") out of old parts, and that broadcast is making old music ("it sounds just like BBC stereophonic!") out of new parts, but i think the trajectories are actually the other way around
the real sexy sinister thrill of listening to portishead is the emptiness of the arrangements (premasticated cliche would be 'negative space,' but i don't think that's quite right at all - nothing 'sculptural' about it).
i always understood these moments (the absolute 0.0db noise floor of 'only you' or the ducking on 'biscuit') as the hard cuts of a chopped sample - but actually realized last night that it also evokes dub. what most boring 90s music (and todays music) takes away from dub is, like, slapback delay. conversely, there's no spring-tank reverb in portishead ... but there are these moments where the song itself is just sucked out of the room
2.1.26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuYjhRY2wjo
gnashing of teeth and all that. blurry january spent proofreading (NGO report on sectarian violence/ethnic cleansing; memoir manuscript about someone who went somewhere else in the 90s); nursing plantar fasciitis.
went to a former industrial repurposed community space to see a series of short films from twnetysomethings another country. one was about pantomime-gesture energy mimicry in public parks. one was about making rent-a-cops go on a walk around the park with you. and the last one, which was brilliant, was about Li Yuyin / parisian tofu production / anarchist practices concerning GMOs / Changsha - CNT-FAI
zinc sacrificial anodes - copper biomining
spoke with one artist who makes 3:1 scale numismatics and another concerned with gun case furnishings
i didn't realize this but giant salamanders make sad kittenish little mewls
happy with so much but saddened by how neglectful i am toward who i oguht to be
1.4.26
I think I was listening to Radiohead again because I was visiting home. Obviously disfavored by today's in-the-know audiences—but from this side of the 21st century, and from this side of my teens, it's comfort food. When I got back to Chicago I smoked a joint and went for a really long run and listened to them on shuffle. ran to a point of exhaustion that was kind of reassuring: fatigue as the most obvious and correspondence between physical life and mental life. and if we all valorize physical fatigue (just look at our health culture), why not take heart in my own mental exhaustion?
Anyways
- The Bends aged poorly and is basically unlistenably dated because it's their last project that isn't taking influence from hip hop.
- on OK Computer, the worst thing about their sensibility is that they still feel like they have the need OR license to 'rock out.' the best thing is that they are still cynical. anyways the chord progression in the intro of airbag is still neat, like they're giant steps to me. the filterbank blips on the drum break are great. and i love the moment when the greenwood solo is about to come in and then break down. stylish fake-out, like a frayed hem on a tightly structured album
- compare the "choir" on exit music to the kind of terrifying vocal samples (or formant synthesis?) on the first half of ‘everything in it’s right place’ - narratively, I think it’s babel; like some babbling rubik’s cube hans belmer doll; the glitches on the vocal takes in the outro feel like a more violent defacing since they're in higher fidelity?
- The best moment in Idioteque is how the dance music build at the start leads into a little squiggly blip incidental, like some cyberspace pop-up commercial. nice bathetic moment. of course this is the album with "blips."
- There's a weird, clearly automated/regimented tambourine-ish crash that comes in before the verses (0:41), clearly a drum machine, which is a nice maybe morbid callback to the use of tambourine on OK comptuer
The sentimental movie / dream sequence harp /zither outro on Motion Picture Soundtrack feels so much more sardonic for being so recorded so lovingly and tastefully.
- It's nice to blog about them in a p2pish capacity bc their early experimental blog-sites were a pretty lasting influence on me.
When I smoke and write, I usually write in TextEdit (perfect app) but sometimes get somehow too scared to save a file? I’m afraid I’ll crash it or close it out in the process without saving … but Command + s feels securing, each save, in its pleasurably instinctual motor simplicity like a carabiner point for a rock climber up a face (the page) - bolted in and can only fall so far
i think i have plantar fasciitis now.
1.1.26
I think it's been a problem that i go to making music when i'm trying to relax, and think it would do me some good (in relaxation and in working) to come to it when i'm ready to work.
8.25.25
spinoza says that 'to make use of what comes in our way, and to enjoy it as much as possible (not to the point of satiety, for that would not be enjoyment) is the part of a wise man. I say it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour. For the human body is composed of very numerous parts, of diverse nature, which continually stand in need of fresh and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of performing all the actions, which follow from the necessity of its own nature; and, consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of understanding many things simultaneously. This way of life, then, agrees best with our principles, and also with general practice; therefore, if there be any question of another plan, the plan we have mentioned is the best, and in every way to be commended.'
i'm fearful that i fail to follow this
on an unrelated note, pleased to find my 12.5.24 echoed in steve rendall's introduction to jean-marie schaeffer's "Art of the Modern Age"
"it is often advanced as a criticism of the analytical philosophy of art that it has allowed no room for what Marcel Duchamp described as 'aesthetic delectation.' Whatever happened to beauty? is heard today with increasing frequency, and it is perhaps of some value to be able to say that the great German philosophers of art did not themselves deal with that kind of question either — that it was their view indeed that art is of greater consequence than allowing aesthetic gratification."
8.18.25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIplWMqGG2c
8.17.25
it's good for me to write I need to do it, I hope it's good for you too
spending a lot of time stressed by how stupid I am and stupided by how stressed I am. but fuck it we ball.
lots of good stuff lots I'm grateful for too of course. visited an old friend in Indianapolis. being a nurse seems nice. went home. DJed a porch party and got caught in the rain. got a call out of the blue from a childhood friend. kept on keeping on. still trying to make up my mind on Spinoza. I would also like to make spiders fight though. was reading about Patrice pastor. the latest instance of Carmelite intrigue. I'll write on another occasion about my visit to the walker house.
Letter to the Financial Times from Bruno Noble, London SW19, UK: "In your review of the Jean-François Millet exhibition at the National Gallery (August 9), you omit the most interesting fact about L’Angelus. Salvador Dalí, viewing the painting for the first time, saw immediately, from the postures of the man and the woman, that the couple aren’t praying but grieving. He had the Louvre X-ray the painting and, sure enough, the basket of potatoes had been painted over a child’s coffin."
Letter to the Financial Times From Patrick M Dransfield, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: "I was reminded of the late art historian John Richardson’s anecdote about the time he and Pablo Picasso sat down to sort out authentic and fake Picasso drawings. As Picasso put a particular drawing on the “fake” pile, Sir John reminded him that he had witnessed Picasso drawing that one himself, to which the artist replied: “I, too, can fake a Picasso!”
7.30.25
""If I stacked up all the hours I wasted, I could climb straight to heaven."in some sort of way but working on it.
I read that synthetic diamonds were first used not for jewelry but for drill bits. THAT is something that will make sense later.
polar (ha!) opposite is what I read about a military satellite company that got its start tracking arctic ice floes for shipping routes ...
read about Chappe telegrams. read about naxalites. read about seaweed farming.. reread 'like a velvet globe cast in iron.' someone once said I looked like clay ... I sure felt like him when I read it for the first time!
I got too high the other night and watched 'smiley face.' really liked it and think you all would too.
miss you all a ton. I need to write here more.
1.29.25
carnuba wax, *oilcloth histories*, ciguatera poisoning, ram temple fascimile in NYC parade, sony ericsson + ISIS, Monster Wolf1.TWENTYTHREE.25
really interested in the trax network re: mail art
proximate to some interesting things but feeling mute and stupid as ever. working on songs again.
now listening
12.13.24
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver. 1.28
12.5.24 a strong but poorly articulated instinct *against* the focus on 'the experience' in art criticism – any possibilities reduced to gratification for the viewer
12.4.24 want to read more about: portugal + empire in the 20th century. PiS pegasus spyware probe, peter ivers, cinderella stamps, UNITA / FLEC, scarf, EUR in Rome, fred c koch constructing nazi refinery, RAND viet cong motivation studies, the engine (Gulliver's Travels )... was also reading about terpenes on wikipedia. didn't know it was another kekulé coinage (or derived from turpentine). if you keep reading you can learn about how termites of the nasutitermitinae subfamily shoot terpenes at their enemies .. the 'fontanellar gun.' exited about cragale, studio 12, m squared ... listening schaflose nächte, height/dismay, RNA organism, nexda, stephen mallinder. walking around the city and hearing strange sounds from unseen creatures in strollers. no one got their 15 minutes of fame but we all got to be the bromley contingent. untitled (gold knot) - sherrie levine
historically mail art bored me, but it seems worth understanding better bc it's one of the only precedents for a viable art
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