Classic Selena - VVS Lemonade

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

I was a fourteen year old boy in a village in Italy when I lost my virginity

I was born in Japan but I grew up in Minneapolis. I never tell people that OMG LOL

I got a clown grant and I used it to buy a house in Philadelphia. Before that I squatted in an office that is now a gallery and showered at Crunch Fitness. The clown grant had no strings attached.

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

I would literally suck dick for fame if I moved to LA. You have to

I want it to become a lifestyle brand. You know, like Billionaire Boys Club or something

You're getting ripped off?! And you're okay with that?

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

It's all fucked up, all dirty money, there is no clean money.

Don't worry, I'll keep it a secret

It stinks in here, but you know some people... some people like the smell

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

Oh my gosh you're so young, you're a baby!

Oh her... I don't like her... She's just so...

Can you get me a show? Like I want to show! I mean I would love to, you know!

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

We were both 13, I think I was just really sexual at a young age, I ate her pussy, she ate mine

This is my first vacation in three years. I never take them.

It's good right? Not too speed-y, hits just about right

Do you think the face of Barbara Gladstone is a happy face?

On the train to Rabat, I sit across from a man named O. I say Salaam Alaykum, then that I don't speak Arabic, but his English is good. He's from Niger, I ask him about what is not a war but could be a war, right now it's something else and he says "we will see" but doesn't seem too bothered - life will go on. He tells me has a family - a wife and 4 kids - and he's working hard right now because he wants a second wife. He says "that's the reality there. Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it".

"Paul didn't write to create a body of work, but to keep in contact with the churches he founded."

Last night I was texting T about the Carrere and the blend of writing styles (autobiography, history, essays) that it presents - he says we need a list of books similar in form, and I wonder how many similar books exist. I see that Carrere sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the book according to The Guardian and think about the French reality of being a writer vs. the American reality of being a writer, like the British reality of being a musician vs. the American reality of being a musician. I texted T about my problem of reading to write, of wanting to read so much in order to have it impact what I write next, the problem of this when I constantly put hundreds of pages of words in between myself and the words I need to write, the attempt I need to make, and where this need stems from. Essay comes from "to attempt", it's an etymology that has been broken down many times. T notices that there are more blogs added to the top, we start talking about email correspondence as a form, the Romanticism that accompanies it, Diderot's letters to Sophie Volland, and now I'm reminded of love letters and prayers and the importance of them.

"You can’t say that the Romans invented globalization, because it already existed under Alexander’s empire, but they brought it to a point of perfection that lasted for five centuries. It’s like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, shopping malls, and Apple Stores today: wherever you go, you find the same thing. Of course, there are grouches who deplore this cultural and political imperialism, but all in all most people are happy to live in a pacified world where you can move around freely, where you’re never out of your element, where wars are fought by professional soldiers on the distant borders of the Empire and have no more repercussions on people’s lives than the festivities and celebrations that mark their victories."

"Everywhere there is a different reality, and you adjust to it" - how does this adjustment happen, and what should it be? The train is very hot, the air conditioning is broken, and it's 110 degrees outside which doesn't translate directly to inside but I am sweating and waving two cards from Galerie Chantal Crousel - one with a list of names, another with a photograph of a dead elk - to cool myself. There are many people yelling and arguing, I don't know about what. A baby cries, it's all just rendered into a soundscape that I'm not recording. I wonder if my scribe app understands Arabic, but it's too late to pull it out. I wonder if there would've been air conditioning on an earlier train, but I wouldn't have met O on an earlier train. He asks me where I'm from and I say India. He says that's good, there are many Indians in Niamey and they're good people, they work hard, they contribute to the country. He works in agricultural engineering but he also has business ventures. He was in Fez for a religious piligrimmage. It's the second time he's been. Everywhere there is a different reality and you adjust to it. People move about the train and the baby cries even louder - I notice it's wearing a Mickey Mouse onesie.

"When visiting another city he made a habit of going to the synagogue on the day of the Sabbath. He doesn't know anyone, but he's not fazed, because synagogues are the same everywhere. A simple room, almost empty."

There is a hotel room waiting for me in Rabat. It will be cool inside, it will be close to the sea. I will escape the heat and these piercing baby screams.

The Alhambra shouldn't be as it is now. It's been restored, from the Peninsular War and an earthquake, and for what end? It's been restored to serve as a Disneyland for Instagram pictures. It exists as another orientalist tourism location, for Europeans who want to see Islamic culture without having to step foot in an Islamic nation with its dirty Arabs. And it's this novelty, that it exists on a hillside in the south of Spain, that is it's draw. I think about Certified Copy again, and doubtlessly if this were to be rebuilt as an amusement park on another hillside in Spain and sold as authentic, people would go, and they'd take pictures.

They put a museum in the Alhambra. The works had to be carried up the hill.

While walking down the hill, I realize that xaviersobased uses the same flow in yh i knoo that A$AP Rocky uses in Ghetto Symphony. In the museum I thought about how biblical scenes that were painted repeatedly were like using the same beat. I thought about 50 Cent's Many Men and Xanman and Lil Dude's Many Men. I thought about how Veeze and Slimesito dropped songs that sampled the same Bone Thugs N Harmony song in the span of a month.

I text J pictures of the Alhambra and tell him about this. He says the pictures I took are good.

Last night I sent C a quote from Jon Jost's blog where he writes letters to his daughter that's been separated from him: "I checked into a cheap hotel near the train station, managed to see some friends, a bit of Roma, and moved along. I was somewhat taken aback how, like Lisbon, Roma – at least in the center and in Trastevere, where we lived – had become overwhelmed with tourists and had changed itself to serve them. Sad. When I left in 2002 I had thought to myself that it was too big to be destroyed, as Venice and Firenze had been, by mass tourism – but I was totally wrong. The Roma we had lived in no longer exists.”

I also sent him Youtube uploads of screen recordings of SlimeGoon9 IG lives from jail. The title of one, "slimegoon9 presses k2 smoker in prison for hanging pooped boxers on his rack", hits me like a madeleine when he replies and I remember smoking k2 in Lisbon with this Australian girl in 2017 and fixate on the memory while drinking my cafe con leche. In the Alhambra, there was a woman wearing a 2pacalypse Now shirt, and I thought about Ab-Soul's verse on Joe Budden's Cut From A Different Cloth, a song I left behind on a hard drive over a decade ago ("we got a new 2pacalypse now / when? before the apocalypse / wow how does he come up with this / if ur behind ab then maybe you can stomach this / who can fuck with this / i know you got a dick but use ur head bruh / they sleeping on me like a colony of bed bugs / cut from a different cloth and no one knows my thread count"). I text S about this because he's an Ab-Soul head.

T texts me an IG post that's a series of Paul Pierce clips from his recent appearance on Cam'Ron's talk show. It's so good I have to run the whole episode. He's really The Truth. Yesterday I watched a Lance Stephenson highlight reel and thought about how no one else has any shit even close to that.

Hopoutblick drops a new video. A couple of weeks ago, the video for I Miss Zomb dropped. It's a YBC Dul song that Hopoutblick features on with Merepablo and 9sideree, I'd been listening to the leak repeatedly on soundcloud, well over a hundred times, the beat is incredible. The cover art on the soundcloud upload is now the YBC Dul tape that it's on, but imessage thumbnails preserved the original image, an IG live screenshot:

Presumably it's one of the rapper's IG stories, presumably Zomb is pictured, and 42 Dugg's Free Merey is overlayed. The thing about the comments section for "I Miss Zomb" is that everyone is talking about how crazy it is that HopOutBlick is dropping a video. Accounts saying: He should be in Mexico by now. He's on the run for murder. Check Philly Most Wanted. And I check Philly's Most Wanted and I see him, he's only 18, and he's wanted for a triple homicide that left a 14, 17, and 18 year old dead. In the following week, an interview drops, there are more comments about how he's crazy, and he doesn't speak on any of it in the interview, the mics are so bad and they're so far away from them that you can barely hear what's being said.

And now the latest song, Jump Out Boy with Mere Pablo and Hardy. A sample comes in, looping a voice singing "Mama I'm a Criminal" and I think of "So Many Names", a YBC Dul x Hopoutblick song that samples The Fairly Oddparents theme song as they trade bars referencing people they've killed, the first time I heard him, and about Torcher Party, where he raps about people him and the torchers have killed. In the new song, he raps “Me and my t’s on the run, they tryna book us all”. It's different than Tay-K, because Tay-K had been booked, he did The Race on house arrest. And Tay-K never allegedly killed anybody.

This is all happening in Philly. The same city where a shirtless white fan runs up on Quanny at the Wawa yelling "they told me presidents was smart how the fuck I'm getting stupid bands" at him fanning out before saying he should have another show even though he knows the last one got cancelled cuz someone threatened to shoot it up. The same city where Simone White teaches and presumably wrote about the ceaseless apocalpyse that never comes. The same city where Tovii's deconstructed the form and lost his face in a way that a street rapper never has. I'm reading the war poems, the inscriptions of death in the shadow of the Alhambra, from the shadow of History, thinking about Quanny's Arabic face tat, NR Boor talking about being Muslim in an interview, Tovii's use of arabic script in recent videos, and the idea that the western hemisphere is beyond "the West", a "meta-West", an idea that needs to be fleshed out further.

I fell asleep last night while watching Inglorious Basterds on my laptop in my bed, I woke up briefly and Tubi had autoplayed the beginning of Django and I missed the part where Brad Pitt carves a Swastika into Hans Landa's forehead and says "I think this just might be my masterpiece". Tarantino would hate it but Tubi really is the ideal way to watch his movies, B movie pastiche into the B movie streaming service. Throughout the film, Brad Pitt talks about killing Nazis as an art form, and scalping the corpses as a way to spread word of their notoriety among the Nazis — he calls it a Sport, and I've been continuing to think about Sports - I read the Zidane's Melancholy piece that G sent me and have some overdue documentaries to watch, spent part of a walk listening to OT7 Quanny - Dame Lillard on repeat, shuffle put on Lil Durk Bang Bros which sent me down a rabbithole of emotions as I continued to loop it for the rest of the day and still into day, the only song playing as I drive around and past my past, forgotten memories emerge – hotboxes, summers, threats of gunshots but never gunshots, driving high so you wonder how after the grocery store parking lot where so much nothing happened. the everywhere where so much nothing happened really. I popped a zyn while driving and it felt like my first cigarette I got nauseous and had to get an energy drink to get back up.

In the morning, C called me, told me about the gallery party he went to where N performed with others, and running into E and M and others, and how he found out that they'd been reading his blog, and then this morning I read E's blog and she talked about that and about other things that happened. she had told me i should make a paywalled version where I use names but reading hers I can only deduce who a fraction of the people are and I'm sure there's some that I've never met so it really becomes a fun part of the game, especially to consider somebody who only knows a fraction of the people in my life, or how it'll age and the letters interchange because the numbering system is only specific to a certain temporality that continually shifts.

In the evening I called T and talked to him for a couple of hours while going on an evening stroll. we talked about how I'd FT'd A earlier that day and how things seemed like they were changing in terms of our values & alignments, natural differences that had always been there, but that have been exacerbated in a way, because of the bag and the things A is doing to get the bag, and in turn how that changes what A is doing and who he is to an extent. I'm sure it'll even out over time but right now there's a dissonance in values that is hard to reconcile. T said something like "you gotta get the bag, but you can't let the bag get you". At an opening, I was talking with R and they said something about how they were "designing a bag" in the literal sense, but I think about it in the abstract, and said that that would be my response when people ask me what I do: "I'm designing a bag". I made a burner twitter account that I need to delete with the bio "Daseining a bag" a couple months ago.

I woke up late this morning and I remembered a dream and it's been a while since I've remembered a dream. I got starbucks from the drive thru right next to the dentist – a chocolate cream cold brew and a feta egg white wrap. I thought about Yungster Jack's Pumpkin Spice Latte Type Queen and PNW anthropology while sitting in the drive thru, and about how later I'd write about it and how the menu only featured the sugar-y drinks while the espresso and lattes and cappuccinos were nowhere to be seen, but that the cold brew was fine, regular cold brew w/ a layer of chocolate cream on top. I drove east and sat at the cape horn lookout, as I've done hundreds of times before, to feel small in something bigger than me. The gorge swallows you up. You look down over the edge while the wind blows and feel so precarious, you're so close to plunging down thousands of feet, just falling and falling and falling

Enveloped — it's a good place to begin again. I could have started with inundated but there is no paper there, there are no seams, no chemical glue to lick, no factory to produce inundation. It's an emptier image, perhaps there is more tumult in inundation, to be enveloped is a relatively clean process, surgical even, though envelopes can break, paper can stretch thin, and give way. Can pixels? Blanchot (via Lydia Davis) wrote of Mallarme questioning "What is literature?", how this question became literature, I watched Yuk Hui talk about War and Machines and thought about how I needed to reread Recursivity and Contingency and how there is always this infinitely growing list of things to read, to watch, to hear, it is impossible to accumulate it all into the self. This list can be inundating, but it never envelopes.

I was enveloped, I remain enveloped, but the paper is stretching thin — what will come out? Things will be different. I run around in so many different directions at once and I'm trying to simplify the routes. I make all of these Works, they accumulate from within and spill out. I understand when people don't have anything left to spill now, they're exhausted. I was exhausted.

The envelope gets filled, it gets sealed, and then it's shipped. Then someone receives it, they tear it open, sometimes at the seal, sometimes in it's entirety. The envelope can break in such a way that it can never be filled again. But it's easy to make new envelopes. And its this cycle between the postcard, with its public address, its inability to hide, and the envelope, which refuses to bear its words to the public, which has a layer of consent wrapped into the address, that one not break a seal that isn't meant for them.

This doesn't happen all the time. When I worked at the mail center I opened envelopes meant for James Franco and Meryl Streep. They no longer had boxes there, there was no way for the letters to reach their address. But it was always so boring. Louise Bourgeois's son had a mailbox but I never opened his mail. I could see that he was doing projects in Mali and I google him now and there's an obituary, he had a property in Djenne, where there's this incredible mosque I want to see, and I wonder when he last went, because the region has been controlled by Islamic militants for some time. The obituary says he wrote for Artforum in his 20s, and he was of that ilk. Things change so much, today S texted me about how there aren't really websites anymore, I replied with a Colby O'Donis track from the album S2 told me he was listening to, saying that there aren't really pop songs anymore.

On my walk I listened to Phreshboyswag - shinin like the sun on repeat. This wasn't today, this was the other day. I thought about how he idealizes an era of the Pacific Northwest I lived through via images and I idealize an era of London he's lived through via images. I sent the track to M - see me in my skinny jeans serving cunt. I play snow angel and think about how phreshboy's voice has changed. Ballin so hard could've played for Barcelona.

I failed at doing nothing, it was good to fail, and now I'm enacting my failure. I lazily rewatched Irma Vep and there's a part where Maggie Cheung is talking to a journalist and the journalist is criticizing Rene Vidal's films as masturbatory, that they're only for him and not for the public, amd I thought about what I wanted and then I ended up reading PDFs and news about Africa, there was a coup yesterday in Niger, and this one's more important than all the other coups for the Western media because the U.S. has military interests in Niger because there's uranium in Niger, and then I read about Senegal, the opposition leader getting jailed, and the young men who are still attempting to make it to the Canary Islands and are still dying, and the thing about Africa is there are so many languages and so many ethnic groups that it makes India look like a homogenized country, I found a tweet asking why there aren't women from Togo on Twitter and the replies were full of people talking about how expensive data is in Togo, and there's a Quanny line "You ain't got no fucking guap, nigga you a bozo" and the Bozo are a people in Mali, on the Niger river, and there are more than 30 national languages in Benin and when I was in Bilbao, I walked past a group of African men and it sounded like they were speaking Wolof and I wondered how they got there. I read an Art Journal pdf from before I was born, on the global and local in relation to Said's Orientalism and art practices from different parts of the world, where Enwezor asks "And where exactly is home for these people? And where home has become unimaginable except in old, tattered black-and-white photographs, what set of imperatives within the nascent narratives of crossing, settling, dwelling, and transterritorialization do such immigrants conjure up to locate themselves in the new land and to stitch the unruly patterns of home? How do they accommodate the locations of departure and arrival?" and later on the street I saw a fake Gucci backpack that read: "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WHO ALL THIS FUTURE?" and in between those events I ate dinner and sat in the loudest silence and these Berber musicians were making their rounds through the streets it's like the showtime boys on the train but different but the same, I thought about the universality of this homelessness and I thought about what I want, realized what it is I want which is a sense of being at home, of course there's the Novalis "Philosophy is really homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home" thing as I think about why art, why writing, why what I've done as the antidote towards this problem of homelessness, my parents responded to this homelessness by migrating and making a new home, in the process they ran away from so much and in the new home was a home where I could never be home and now I sit in Tangier, tired, exhausted, waiting for the next day of life, to search for home again

I don't really understand how the world works, G said, in between a bite of steak. R had been talking about how the mafia was buying up restaurants in Bilbao, turning them into secret chains, the corporate consolidation of our daily lives. She was an old woman now, about 70, and so much had changed. She grew up in a village without electricity in the Basque country, before leaving to work as an au pair in Paris, Rome, and London. When she returned, she started a bar with a friend. It was a feminist bar that had a strong connection to the movement at the time, where the most beautiful lesbians in all of Iberia would travel to, to organize of course. It went underwater, as did much of Bilbao, when the floods came, but after that R moved into a new world, that of fashion. She started her first boutique and her notoriety around the region grew once again. She occupied places in worlds. And then she grew old.

R worried about the declining birth rate in Europe. They want to replace the youth with machines, she said, and the idea of African immigrants becoming the new youth did not give her any more sleep. She had children of her own - her daughter was to take over the boutique, and she refused to give out hope for the future, for her grandchildren, because she believed the bad people ruining the world would be the first to die, their souls rotten. She spoke in this low hush, you had to lean in ever so close to hear her. They wanted to get rid of bullfighting, they found it cruel, but it was part of the culture, the heritage, so many words had come from it. G's uncle used to be a bullfighting critic, he'd write stories in the weekly paper, and G said it was as though reading another language, the piece so enveloped in its specific jargon. A torero of renown shops at R's boutique now and he's graced the cover of Vanity Fair Spain, but both institutions are propped up shells of what they once were.

The boutique is a wide and long room. Walk through it, past every tube LED beaming brightness below, and you reach the back, which opens up into a massive cavern of Chinese antiques. Porcelain plates, wooden horses, furniture of all kinds, find the staircase and then in the floor below are so many magazines and catalogs that have never been scanned. Purple Magazines from the 90s, with advertisements in them for galleries and publications. Names that are huge now - Luc Tuymans, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Guattari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rainald Goetz - but they hadn't been historicized yet, not when these things were printed, they were still becoming.

"The point is that this is gossip about formalized gossip that provoked a network of extended gossiping across time and space. Irit Rogoff has written that gossip is a form of testimony that is ‘invariably located in the present.’ It externalizes and makes ‘overt its relations to subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure and the communicative circularity of story-telling’... Rogoff notes that gossip ‘is not fictional, but both as oral and written form, it embodies the fictional [and] impels plot’. Gossip, she says, bears ‘a multiple burden.’ Because it is ‘unauthored, untraceable and unfixed in historical time’, it can be read as a phantasmic projection of various desires by its audiences onto cultural narratives which it thus shapes..."

The dinner started, concluded, and continued, as did the viewing of several catalogs of early Yohji Yamamoto, mid-2000s Balenciaga, and Junya Watanabe. It was a goldmine of uncirculated images. But now his eyes burned with sleep as he returned back to the world of screens, longing to continue to turn pages in that cavern of pages until he had committed every photograph, every binding, every typeface into memory. He texted S an update, along with a picture of an advertisement for TZK Vol. 2 No. 7, which turned into a conversation about NFT's, cuckcore, the fellaverse, Amalia Ulman, Adam22, and Elon. It's hard to be interested in any of this, S replied, which was true in some ways, on the outside it appeared to be a schizophrenic tangle of associations, a map of chaosmosis, but in a concurrent convo, T was talking glizzy's, how they were "in" according to some, but how that it had already been written. T asked for permission to leak writing, but it was unneccessary, there was a way in which the words would find their way where they should belong, and if they wouldn't, then they wouldn't... It's a great place to start a rumor, in writing, because it takes the ephemeral and unfixed and gives it form.

See E's blog about Nate Freeman's farts and the behind-the-scenes of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". Or that J was in Zurich as the same time as D (whose name J2 uses to attend guest-listed events) who was there with his girlfriend X who went to college with Y who used to date Z who was in a sextape/art porno with ABC and it begins like Whitten's Greek Alphabet Paintings in Beacon, there was so much other gossip, much of it unsubstantiated, floating in the air, and this was how Herbert had to write about Stanley Brouwn. Because Brouwn fought an impossibility to prove an impossibility, every tiny sliver became so monumental, like Trisha Donnelly's voice, like Trisha Donnelly's face. A voweled artist was pregnant with a married man's child - that was last year and there's been no word of a child but she has a new boyfriend now. Not that it's anyone's business, but it's everyone's Business. There is so much work to be done. Bilbao had become a beautiful place, but it used to be rugged, industrial, disgusting. It needed a dream to become what it is now, a dream that enveloped everybody. And it was decided: they would build like the Basques, they would create a gossip factory.

First came the blogs, tumbling intrigue like dominoes as they spread via text and word of mouth, and then came the passwords, which loosely guarded some of the secrets. But this wasn't enough, new walls to the fortress had to be erected, the data being trafficked was so valuable in the eyes of gallerists, scenesters, and the oh so coveted youth who had yet to discover this underground, yet to be historicized thing, because there wasn't yet a thing to be discovered, but in time, in due time, Palmyra was not built in a day and its rubble still remains. A backend system was put into place, passwords that couldn't be hacked or guessed, but needed to be traded, leveraged, exchanged. They commodified their lives walking around with their pants around their ankles, and the emperor's new clothes were so desirable: there were all the most coveted archive pieces of course, but also what the newest Hararjuku girls had - VeniceW, fresh from the latest NewJeans video, Kiko Kostadinov, Enfantes Riches Deprimes – and it was smuggled in between bricks on a container ship. They moved everything as they pleased with their connections in Rotterdam, Baltimore, Cape Town, Singapore, dodging Customs, Border Patrol, and every other 3 lettered agency, not to mention Interpol. Baselitz said "Don't cover your modesty" and things could only balloon in proportion, like Kobayashi's stomach after swallowing glizzy's by the dozen.

They had plotted an end-point: a proprietary E-Reader, manufactured in Shenzhen but with laborers imported from across the globe. Isabelle Graw was smuggled down the Rhine from Basel, lured by promises of an antediluvian chamber that promised to reverse age. She didn't care about her beauty, but she wanted to escape the suck and fuck that had become Städelschule, every ad placement required more time on her knees as she wondered why she didn't contort the world in such a way that Jörg Immendorff invented "Oda Jaune" for her instead. Now she could change things, instead of writing toilet paper, she could write fortunes. Christopher Williams crawled into the container while it docked in Cologne, having agreed to do the product photography. And it continued, a container on a ship, migrating around the world haphazardly - a drunk skipper later and there they were in Miami. John Kelsey walked aboard, flush with a red noise and stuffed with satchels of... he had forgotten his baseball hat in the confusion and collapse, and it was as though he'd lost all purpose and sought to recompense this with chemical speed. It didn't matter, among the din of whispers in the container, attempting to segregate the circuits of secrets from prying ears, as he tried to talk to Isabelle about the Bernadette Corporation Supreme resale prices, but the bits kept getting stolen, recirculated, so much data bouncing around this storage container moving from ocean to ocean, still yet to reach Shenzhen.

And yet when it did, it did not leave the port. R was crucial in this step. She knew the Chinese were working with "the mafia" to buy up every business that existed, not just in Bilbao, but in Frankfurt, London, San Francisco, everywhere where there was a loophole in legislation, and that means everywhere where "democracy" claims to exist, because with democracy comes lawyers and with lawyers comes loopholes. And so she met with the Triads and in her hushed whisper negotiated her terms. The container got lost in the stacks, and with it so much gossip, which needs air to survive but was instead submersibled. The E-Reader was shipped to basements across the world, waiting to be discovered. Its e-ink had never been seen before, a screen devoid of color, yet able to re-present Jutta Koether and Cy Twombly in a new form of writing, through a new type of codec file. PDF's, EPUB's, DJVU's, none of them worked, this was something different.

The e-readers were distributed around the world. When they were touched, they would mechanically reproduce themselves, and when they fell on unfamiliar eyes they would translate themselves. Every gallerina, whether she/they worked in Hong Kong or Seoul, Hamburg or Shanghai, Harare or Santiago, lost themselves in the endless scroll of gossip, regardless of tongue. And they spread upwards and outwards, to the curators, programmers, and publicists, but also to the DJ's, club kids, drug addicts, and scenesters, you could plug it into a CDJ and make the most beautiful mix, you could rip that battery out and extract the most powerful speedball from its acid, you could smash the screen against your face and the shards would kiss your face, steal a little blood, then return to being one, waiting to grant the bliss of addiction to their next pair of eyes.

The Triads didn't trust R, they knew she was plotting something, her wizened gaze meeting their beady low Chinese eyes. You should be with Chris Tucker, she said. They were so high. 什麼?? mumbled back the Chinamen. Made a bitch. Get on her knees. Look at me. When she suckin. Eyes low. Like I'm Chinese, I should be with Chris Tucker. She whispered with the coldest authority, punctuating every syllable. Then she contined: That nigga don't want smoke, he second-hand puffin. I get a nigga whacked. Just one hand gesture.

In the haze of the Chinese smoke the world was changing. R knew she would die soon, but it didn't matter. She believed in the world, and she believed that death would come righteously. When we dined, she asked me if I was religious, and if my religion permitted drinking. In between bites of steak, I sipped a Rioja, because God willed it as such. In the smoke she finished, and she did not stutter: Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see conc—. Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see concrete.

“The only eyes that see are the eyes of water, eyes that are blinded by our tears of compassion for the other.” - Christopher Wise

the numbers are gone, I was texting T about it, he said heartbeats aren't numbered, they just beat, the heart is a rollie not a stopwatch, of course traces remain, chris marker, magic marker, no mr. clean magic eraser, just permanence, or the idea of pursuing it. something that's always bothered me permanence, even now i wonder when this beard will be gone, when this face will be gone, but also of inscribing permanence onto the body, tattoos, scars, Mali, the Sahel, Egypt on my mind: A SITUATION OF TOTAL PLACELESSNESS ("The face of the future has traces of our past." - Flusser)

everyday by chief keef; it's about how we're always writing, not always with words, if the book doesn't bleed it will be a failure, think of the scars and teardrop tattoos, it's not a textile, the body is writing, thought isn't coming from the body, thought is the body

days happened, nights passed, as did a full moon. i was close to tears watching salaam cinema. again, i thought of how the world was different but the same. there are kisses that could change everything. What am I doing here?

heartbeats

Shit really is the word for what I just waded through. A night of pure excrement. I didn't really do anything before heading to the opening. I had emailed S this week about meeting up, who I'd met last year at S2's opening and it was at the end of a long night, I knew he wouldn't really remember it. On my way to the opening I first stopped by an intermarche - grabbed a chicken sandwich and a juice - and then when I neared the gallery I passed a McDonald's and got sucked into its vortex - un petit beouf, a small coke, an oreo mcflurry, I only finished the sandwich. Later M would tell be about how there's a McDonald's here that revolted against corporate during the pandemic. They changed their name to "Apres M", changed the arrangement of the sign outside to signifiy that, and it was a sort of hub for mutual aid.

When I ran into S outside the opening it was awkward - he was very German gay artworld nonartist, I texted J about it almost immediately, and I struggled to click as I was still far too sober for the interaction at that point. I drank some wine there and met C, an Irish writer and painter who'd been living in the region for a while. We talked about Joyce and Cixous and life and practices. It was the first conversation I've had here that I truly enjoyed and it turned into getting dinner at a Syrian restaurant and more white wine. I saw him briefly in the blur after that and I had a moment of regret of not making my time with C the entirety of the night, but he encouraged me to do otherwise.

Part of being too forthcoming is me batting around the bush as to why I'm in Marseille, which is partially coincidental and has to do with the ~independent research~ I'm doing sure, but also was so that I'd be here at a time when things were "happening" here - capital of various sorts to be mined, accumulated, everyone knows it, and after this night I'm not necessarily turned away from it, but it feels truly far away, something that I've accepted as I talk about Baudelaire's writing practice and how his addiction to it constantly drove him into financial troubles. After dinner with C, I ran into M and A and A2 on the street and then ended up going to a different restaurant in Court Julien with them. I got grape leaves and I had a glass of arak. It was fine, they asked what I'd been up to, the dynamic was more clearly established now, A was wearing the lungi and I texted my sister about it again, but it was fine. At the end they said they were looking for drugs for the party, I wasn't really at that time, but I kept it in mind because some of the French people I was with the previous night were talking about 3M or trois-eme, a research chemical that has effects that are somewhere between molly and coke.

I arrive at the party with A and A2 and M and we hang out and talk and smoke cigarettes for a bit. People aren't really dancing at this point, just hanging around the courtyard, and I get more wine in my system. When I was talking to C and telling him about how it's hard for me to deal with people in these settings, his advice was more alcohol. I took it. I saw him briefly in the mix there, he cheers'd my glass, and then I didn't see him again. I did see S though, he was standing up on a ledge, lording over the space, and I started to chat with him again, much more fluidly this time. Before, when I ran into him at the gallery, he said something along the lines of "were there a lot of drugs involved that night", referring to the night I met him, and I made a relatively calculated decision to play the game on both ends. M and A and A2 were looking for drugs, maybe I could find some of this "trois eme" for them, but instead S offered me his coke and told me to take the baggie to the bathroom, cut a line, and then come back. I did as such and then returned and then we got to talking shit.

Cocaine activates people, it makes them talk, it makes them dance, I'm sure there's plenty of passages in Reena Spaulings or Chris Krauss or other art world literature about the function it provides. I returned to a long series of conversations from an old gay German man about his disillusionment with art, with social change, with the world. It was mildly overwhelming but I understood - the crux of the issue was that he thought his curation was "doing something" in these past decades. At X gallery, at Y museum, around all that, at these parties. When I met him last year he was talking about producing a H's book and also D's film and I found the two ends of those spectrums to be quite funny afterwards. It made sense. And now here he was, being quite honest with me, in an extremely harsh way.

The show that his gallery had just put on - he didn't believe in it. Little miniature houses, it's nice yes, but what does it do, he said, before then lamenting that 80% of the board at MOMA is MAGA, a thing to me that's just like "DUH", but he also used the phrase "The Obama Years" to describe his time in New York and then I understood completely that he lived in this sort of fantasy land that got shattered with the election of Trump. The Obama mask on Empire was enough for him to do curational work uplifting minority artists, things of that nature, so that he could feel good about the art industrial complex and his work within it. Now, that fantasy was wholly shattered and that's why he's in Marseille, a small city, running this space that still gets money from different places, and gets its artists some of that money, and has a semiotext(e) bookstore within it, full of books like "Hatred of Capitalism" and "The Coming Insurrection" - and I saw so many other familiar names: Reena, Kathy Acker, Etel Adnan, Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, the list goes on and you get the idea. C was talking to me about how important these books are, that these books are for sale here, because they don't really exist in France the way that they do it the Anglosphere.

C and I talked a lot of shit at the gallery and at dinner - about India, about Ireland, about their relation to the UK, about what France provides and how it is here. He commented on my jacket at first - the Kiko piece that has this lace quality to it and it stands out, that's why I wear it. It's as much part as getting into character as taking the baggie from S and going to the bathroom. That phrase "getting into character" is entrenched into my mind from Pulp Fiction. In that opening scene where Jules and Vincent go to shoot those guys and get the briefcase back, one of them says "let's get into character". I can't remember if it's before or after the conversation about the Royale with Cheese, but when I was at McDonald's I sent E a picture of this display that said "Le Big Mac" and had the Samuel L. Jackson pronunciation running through my head. Getting into character has a decent amount to do with code-switching, you assume certain characters to talk with certain people, modulate those versions to talk to other people, so on so forth, obvious enough, nothing ground-breaking there. At first C thought I was the artist, because I was brown yes, and the artist was Persian, but moreso how I was dressed, the Kiko jacket, the brown loafers, and that was fine, it got us talking. I sent pictures of the show to Z - the works were these little 3-D printed houses, rendered in this gray that sapped away outside associations, and they all had these tiny LED screens that took real advertisements from the streets of Tehran and reintroduced them into this context. My impression of the work was these beautiful little objects, 10 of them in total, were like poems. Sure there is little shift in the world besides those who see them and engage with them in a certain way, but they're meaningful enough for the artist to commit themsleves to making and now, as the signs of Tehran are shown in this context, I'm reminded of Flusser and Groundlessness and Universal Homelessness. It's fine work for me, but at the courtyard of the former palace that is now a music conservatory that hosts this non-commerical art fair that is hosting this party, S is really questioning the purpose of these works, what they are doing in the world, what he is doing by extension, and lamenting that there isn't "change" coming from this kind of work being shown in that kind of space.

When I first met A he talked to me about how his bag got stolen. It had his computer and his passport, a significant amount of his life in it. At the second dinner of last night, he told me about seeing S at the police station as well. Apparently S's car and his apartment had been broken into while he was away (he told me was vacationing in Greece) and maybe there's a small extent to which these recent events, which S didn't tell me about (and had no reason to do so), where echoing through his mind, amplifying his disillusionment, but it's probably much more realizing that his life, his "wikipedia page" as he put it, was doing nothing but serving Empire. I don't think he would characterize it as such, but it's easy to group what he did into neoliberalism, corporations going gay/woke, and so on, it's easy to throw these big words about and to let them do the work of holding the complexities of the world. S talked so much, he talked about S2's work, he talked about it relation to the market and collectors and other artists in New York and London, and he compared the places of different artists in these spheres to that of scenes of German artists in the 20th century. He talked about criticsm in the 80's, when it would actually attack artists and cause questions to arise, and then it really clicked in my mind as to why boomers like Walter Robinson love The Manhattan Art Review. I thought about talking about these ~infrastructures~ with him. Earlier, he showed me a tiny pamphlet he had stuck in his iphone case that held a story about Staten Island, in both French and in English. But now wasn't the time, I was reacting, he was talking, it was nice, like I said I'd been doing too much talking.

I suppose S went on and on, this is what cocaine does, and I'm unsure if there was any new ground being broke besides the same recirculation of lamentations. Recirculation brings up howth and environs and that opening page of Finnegans Wake and when I was talking to C, he was telling me about the necessity of reading the work in a Dublin accent. He told me about where he grew up in Dublin, the history of it, the prostitutes that used to run its streets, and when I called it a cultural backwater, he vehemently disagreed. It was a backwater yes, but there was culture. That was a far more interesting conversation, he fed me gossip about Irish writers, the schemes they cooked up to avoid taxes, problems with writers and their estates and their families after their deaths, and he told me about going to bars in the west of Ireland, tiny places far from tourists, where there is no music, at times it gets so quiet that one can hear the clock ticking. He told me that one of the best things a young writer could do would be to spend time getting drunk in Ireland and listening to the language within the walls of the pub. We exchanged Instagrams and he told me that he'd let me know if he saw of any residencies.

At a certain point, S takes a selfie with me and then sends it to S2. I'm smoking a cigarette in it, my hand partially obscuring my face, which is good. It's an interesting thing to do, on one end, it's a fun "hey we linked up" type of picture, similar to me posting Z2 on Twitter to all of those mutuals, but it's also a validation check, to make sure I'm not lying to climb in some world. We talked about how everything in Art is work, the social end, it never ends, and I brought up SF tech culture and young VC's on Twitter as an analogous situation but I'm not sure he understood what I was saying. We went to the bathroom to do another line and he told me that he'd keep it a secret, which to me meant the complete opposite. It didn't upset me, I thought it was funny, the idea of creating this sort of a secret that's so banal, that's constant in this world. Going to the bathroom together to do drugs. There was a long line for the stalls while the urinals sat empty - because everyone else was doing it. That's how original it was.

At this point I decide my time of chatting with S has more or less come to a natural conclusion. I text J that I miss him and he sends me a picture of Z and N at the opening on Hancock Street and missing them and wishing I was there hits me. I bought a flight to India, I'll be there on Tuesday. It'll be good, to sit with everything there, but I want to get back to New York and see my friends sooner than later. I tweet some bullshit about Critical Melancholy and M2 replies. It's such a funny stand-in phrase for the feeling that early Yung Lean, Bladee, Black Kray produces. It's all white artists in that Buchholz show and now I'm thinking Kray's influence on Lean and Bladee and that affect, how there can't be a Critical Melancholy without roots in Blackness and Black Culture, but also how Kray could give a fuck about show happening on 82nd street, he's built his own world and system that lets him make art and his fans stream it, buy it, buy merch, he's done the thing of how to be a working artist in these times. S was talking about what Shayne Oliver does and how it reaches so much more stuff, yes it happens at the Shinkel Pavillion too, but clothes are worn out, nightlife is experienced, these things, in his mind, were greater than a painting in a gallery.

I'm in the bathroom again and some of this exotic "trois eme" finds its way to me. It's sharp, cutty on the nose, and I'm glad I only took a bump. I'm not sure that I felt anything in particular but it staves off the comedown off the coke and I'm back outside dancing and socializing as things are winding to a close and we're scheming for the next move. It doesn't end up being with them, but I end up in a back room of the palace with R and R2 and K, who all performed/DJ'd, people are doing lines off an iphone and drinking wine. At this point I'm ready to go home, there is more night to be lived yes, but my phone is dead and it's 45 minute walk back to my place that I don't want to embark on without it, so I'm stuck riding the rest of the night out. We get kicked out of the palace by the security guard and head to the apartment of this couple, M3 and T, who are in the group. It's only 8 or 9 of us. It's the best play for me, I know there'll be a phone charger at this apartment, but the trade off is that I'm stuck there until it's time to leave. It's fine, we drink, we talk, we gossip, there's more cocaine, the sun rises, and then it's time to go. The metro is running at this point and I take it back, feeling like a degenerate with the stimulants in my veins. I get back to my place and my airbnb hosts are starting their day as I walk in. So much nothing happened, especially for those last few hours, that's so much of "the art world", people hanging out and doing drugs and drinking until the sun rises. I understand why it happens but I think about how much nicer it would've been to have a night that extends past the sunrise with my friends. There will be plans to go out again tonight, but I feel spent. I've done enough. There's no more "Art Shit Diary" to be written, I've writhed around in the excrement of disillusionment, aspirations, chemicals, and desire for too long. I've been in the shit, I've been with the shits, and it really just is shit.

I'm looking for an ending of sorts, the night signaled an ending of sorts for me, in terms of certain possibilities that could have been, that I wasn't sure I wanted to begin with, and foreclosure is a sort of opening. Trench Town pops into my head: "Dirty money, pick it up throw it on her friend". Jackie Wang was talking about how poems are useless in that LA Times interview, and when I think about those little houses as poems, I also think about how terrible it would be to have to earn money by writing poems, to have to think about that in the process of making poetry, whether through words or walls or screens. I'm searching for an ending and maybe it's that all this Shit was necessary. What I want is much clearer now, how the world operates is much clearer now. In a sense that's the main thing I wanted when I decided to approach S - a level of demystification in how things work. And he gave that to me, it wasn't on the surface of what he said, but what was immediately underneath. I realize there isn't much of a point in searching for an ending because there will be more words underneath this soon.

As I typed out "Dennis Cooper called Jon Jost the American Godard" I was reminded of a sketch of an essay that I never wrote, it remained a constellation of ideas and never took form. The same thing happened last night - a constellation of ideas under the title "Bitch I'm Back Out My Coma" about nations and the art they produce, about Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot, about The Book To Come and the need for addiction to a form, about Richter's Betty, Christian Petzold, and Klee's Angelus Novus, about OT7 Quanny's "Write A Book", "Stupid Bandz", and "Youngest Turnt". I think of essay writing like freestyling - maybe I've already said that somewhere in here - you have to stay in that mode throughout in order to maintain the work and maintain consistency in it. Too long and the threads get mixed up, the tone is in disarray, and it isn't cohesive. The problem I often run into is sketching out too wide a frame for the essay, and then being unable to maintain the freestyle session to get it all written down, or not even getting in the booth because of material circumstances (time, space, place, money). The following sketch is the latter.

It's about the idea of Remakes and Godard, of Remaking Godard, and of the role of "Paul" in Godard. In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema, a subtitled voiceover reads: "They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso". In Godard's adaptation of King Lear, Woody Allen appeared, wearing a Picasso t-shirt. In the summer of 2022, Luh Tyler appeared, wearing a Picasso shirt. The idea of the essay shifted, away from remakes and Godard and Paul and into this obsession: "Why is Woody Allen in King Lear wearing a Picasso shirt" - which is a question all about remakes and Godard and Paul, of course.

Additional stars in this constellation: the Paul's of Godard's films - JPL in Masculin Feminin, Paul in Weekend, Paul Godard in Every Man For Himself — a film which Godard called his "Second First Film" which then splinters off another series of stars. The idea of a "First Film" as a "First Philosophy", and the idea of remaking this "First Film-osophy". The frame rate manipulation in Every Man For Himself as early VCR technology arrived, the need to re-theorize cinema due to the fundamental difference of video images. That Paul is also the name of Godard's father, of his bourgeois background, Freudian blah blah blahs. And the face of Jean-Pierre Leaud, a leap to Irma Vep and "images about images about images", a leap to Pasolini's Porcile and Pasolini's St. Paul screenplay. And the Paul of Contempt, the film an adaptation of an Italian novel, but "Riccardo" becomes "Paul" rather than "Ricard". The idea that Godard is to Cinema as Paul is to the Bible.

Further stars: Fassbinder's Love is Colder Than Death as a remake of Breathless, as his own remake of a "First Film-osophy", one that brought in Brecht and the theater and the essence of the German Nation. The idea of Fassbinder as a "German Godard", and this is where Cooper comes in, with the idea of Jost as the "American Godard", and inserting the opposition to Woody Allen, who saw himself in Godard, which confused Godard. And then a reading of JLG's 1994 Autoportrait as a nest of Woody Allen jokes, in which Godard flirts with his young hot assistant, squeezes her ass without permission, and then appears playing tennis in WA type drip towards the end, recalling Annie Hall.

Distant stars: Chris Marker's Statues Also Die, incorporated to ask the question of whether the images of film stars will die or if they'll be resurrected. In Spain, new stars emerge. Picasso and the African mask. In the shadow of the Alhambra, I realize that Chris Marker is a Geoffrey Crayon joke. And somewhere in this book on Marker I got lost in last summer "The Suffering Image" was that somewhere, I can't recall where, Marker said that there would be no second century for cinema. I deleted a tweet on a burner account that said "Thinking in centuries; or lies about time"; I've noticed it's a very French way of thinking about time. The tweet was accompanied by a collage of a Chinese painting of a woman over a still from Ouvrir that showed a car crash. "The Suffering Image" focuses on Marker's shows at Peter Blum Gallery, his return to the still image, if one thinks of La Jetee as such, but there's an inverse at play - not celluloid stretched out over time and reprinted onto a real, but video, frozen and manipulated, printed to be placed on a wall.

They'll forget all the details, but remember Picasso. While Godard squeezes his assistant's ass he says "Europe is condemned to death". In the footnotes of The Suffering Image, one can read Marker say "life has become a fiction film" and "No, film won’t have a second century. That’s all". Paul appears throughout this text, as it investigates Marker's Messianicity, by way of Agamben's The Kingdom and The Glory, which also brings Pseudo-Dionysius into the fold, and the text is a mess, Anselm Kiefer appears for a paragraph, and as a reminder that I need to make it to London before Finnegans Wake is gone. I wonder where it'll go.

The Kingdom and The Glory factors into The Suffering Image, but not Agamben's The Time That Remains, which Simone White references in METRO BOOMIN WANT SOME MORE NIGGA, a section of an essay called "Dear Angel of Death". She talks about her students' understanding of XXXTentacion and Travis Scott, that they "understand something about the coming situation, this nothing, as Giorgio Agamben works the question of the now through his reading of Paul, that I am not equipped to understand". This reading of Paul contains a quote that was the central star of another constellation that never came to be, titled "RIP JEWELXXET":

"This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement]."

They'll forget all the details, but remember [Paul].

Thought about blood while walking home today. Not so much the liquid, but its relation to metaphor: the bleeding edge, the bleed of the page, how text bleeds, how text made with ink bleed through one page into the next if there's too much of it. but even more so about how life bleeds, how the things created in one container of memory move to change the self, and the inevitability of separate tracks of thought and method working their way to influence different things made in different places.

i was walking home from getting an ice cream sandwich at the deli w/ M, which we were doing after getting mexican food w/ J & E (E didn't get anything, i split tacos al pastor w/ J, M got a quesadilla, i don't think anyone got anything to drink, J also got a bag of chips, can't remember what kind), which we were doing after DJing. the way that we're DJ'ing now has gotten so deconstructed that it's not even about DJ'ing to play songs so much as DJ'ing to resequence and create new sounds. A loop of a bass drum turned into a wave of sound with how short the sequence, loop rolls, phasers, echos, crush, etc. maximizing the number of effects applied to a song. makes me think of Rave and Goetz's writing, and how far we are from the practice of DJing described in that book, in a World where you could only spin vinyls you had in your collection. i took two videos because we didn't record the set.

today was a strange day. i got a couple parking tickets back in march so i wanted to stack some supplementary bread to offset the costs and signed up for a medical survey thru craigslist. finally made it uptown for it where psychiatry people asked me about my drug use and mental health history and had me play puzzle games for 4 hours. i got 60 in cash, a metrocard w/ 2 rides, a slice of pizza, a kind bar, and a few cups of water for doing this. i also had to pee in a cup. it was weird though, reminded me of how much i hate medical institutions, foucault prison shit blah blah blah, but really the voice and disposition of the PA asking me questions about my life. Facetimed T later and he agreed about how much that type of person sucks. I walked around the UES for a while after. Went into a goodwill and put on a pinstriped armani blazer that was 30 dollars which I didn't get because I didn't want to spend money on clothes but then in genius fashion, went into a french cafe and sat down and ordered a 24 dollar "salade" and a 7 dollar cappuccino. I scribbled in my notebook while sitting in their outdoor dining area, about watching a taxi that was broken down in the middle of 2nd ave and the driver standing behind it, waving cars past while yelling into his phone that he was between 88th street and 89th street, wishing I could smoke a cigarette. I thought about how it could've been a frank o'hara poems decades ago and how the world is different now and later I was walking on 86th street towards the train and saw the marquee of a theater below an apartment building and though about frankie cosmos. While still at the table I thought and wrote about the idea of "rendering", like rendering fat while cooking, but also rendering in blender, but also rendering reality.

In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk wrote: "The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God". He nestled it into the dialogue of a driver. In another world, the driver-turned-traffic-conductor on 2nd avenue was turkish, but he was clearly a Jew. One time I got an uber from my aunt's place in the san jose suburbs to the BART station and the driver was from turkey. I talked to him about Istanbul and about New York City. He said he used to live there too and asked me my favorite part. I said brighton beach and he agreed. "Beautiful women," he said and I nodded, "only 50 dollars for the night of your life". I didn't expect this turn, but it made sense that a turkish cabman was fucking Slavic whores smuggled into the country. Now there's a lot of russians in Istanbul, they've left because of the war. My friend tells me it's fucking the rent up. I think of Eumaeus, and how I walked underneath Butt Bridge in Dublin, how the cabman's shelter is long gone, how it's a different bridge now than what used to be there. everything changes. there are so many Worlds

I got back to the city yesterday morning. caught up w/ S via facetime and then hung out w/ Z later. both were nice conversations, where we reflected on recent things. on my end, there was H&A's wedding this weekend. Made plans to go back to the noguchi museum this week with Z. Need to get something nice for H&A, as a belated wedding gift, but I'm glad it's late, I don't think I would've got the right thing, or been able to write the right letters to them before the wedding. It was a really beautiful thing to witness and even more special to be a part of. Everything was always running late and that was fine, encouraged even, Time was moving different. On the flight there, I read Baudelaire's Salon of 1846. he talked about a lot of different shit; I was more interested in the form of the work than how he arrived at the ideas within, but he wrote it when he was 25, trying to outdo Diderot. The French do this thing where they just make shit up and it becomes canon — the parts that stuck w/ me the most were about painters "unlearning" (the) past(s), portraiture as either history or fiction, landscapes of fantasy, and how for "men of letters" there is no such thing as Sunday.

"Men of letters" is such a funny term because we are all men of letters now. Men of letters, men of images, men of sounds, men of emojis, men of media.

Reflections on Bruno Caboclo:

When Bruno Caboclo was drafted an analyst described him as "two years away from being two years away". He was in the post-Giannis mold of prospects, an extremely raw gifted athlete who played in Brazilian leagues that could be described as amateur at best. For a while, I used this framework to think about myself, someone who came to art quite late compared to the others around me. Like when my work started getting the slightest bit of motion, I thought about time in that way frequently. But now, two years into this process, I realzed that to think about that self who is supposedly only two years away and always be eluding me is an unhelpful framework, because artists don't develop like NBA players and the systems that artists operate within are not like the NBA.

But there are some similarities. When I look at the leaked photos of Ja Morant in the strip club, the floor completely covered in money, I think of the curse of privilege. Dame goes on podcasts and says the young guys don't love the game anymore, they just ended up there by virtue of God-given talent and have to find purpose in the hundreds of millions of dollars that will come their way. Ja pulled the blicky out on Live, then he did it again. When he's on the court, he flies like a ballerina. It's like breathing it's nothing it means nothing. All he's doing is Being. But what happens when you have to change your way of Being, when the conditions of the world necessitate change. I thought it was beautiful when Ty Lawson posted that Chinese women got cakes on the low and posted himself in the strip club and got kicked out of China. He got kicked off a team in Venezuela recently. Bro's art is pure dysfunction, he doesn't give a fuck, he stays being Him. Bruno never "made it" in the league. He's 27 now and playing in Germany. All that potential time never amounted to anything in terms of NBA results. I never watched him close enough to figure out "why". Giannis had that dog in him, and that dog never went away.

Getting Bread and Cooking are two different things.

And this shit is never a game, it's always practice. imma still get buckets tho

“He who writes, writes down himself first of all, for all to read.” - Cixous

I've been searching, faraway around the eyes, missing the feeling of being lost in a gazelle of windswept voices amongst all the broken benin bronzes. Mackey said "public" and "private" were disjunctive, now convergent masks for the featureless cave or the evaporative curve of an elapsed interiority, a nonexistent self, maybe that provides enough grounding, in Times Square there were so many different speakers playing Empire State of Mind and one speaker playing Rio Da Yung OG and so many people making images, I walked all the way down from 72nd street, where I sat in a diner drinking coffee eating marbled pound cake after a cigarette after watching Werckmeister Harmonies, another end of the world, staring at the rotting whale thinking that nature was bigger than man, that man was within nature, I was nodding off before, I like when that happens, then the sense of normal time is totally disrupted and the cinema flows into dream time, into everywhen I don't think I believe in an end of The World, but I believe in the ending of Worlds, i remember the ending of Worlds, like I remember forgetting your cosmologies and I remember forgetting that perfect sentence in order to escape its ending and the

it wasn't my party but we threw a party yeah we threw a party bitches came over yeah we threw a party echoes and echoes, i went, i saw people, we talked, we took pictures, we smoked, we pissed, then decided the night was over and rode him in a car talking and talking and talking, at that point with J, E and R were in the car drunksleep but noddingupon, the car was driving the wrong was but R fixed it, I had a nice talk with R on the roof before, about how people dress and their cosmetics, but also about life and past lives and future lives, just before we were at M's, i saw paintings and pig troughs, and me and M and J talked about art and publishing and films and systems and ate garlic bread and pasta and drank kombucha, J and I were talking about important things in the car, but they've faded, what's fresh is Food in SoHo in the 70s, now SoHo is different, everything is different and will never be the same

example: when jim jones jacked the beat to electric feel. now i listen to nr boor rap about mixing fetty with dog and hitting it with tranquil, N emailed me saying i was sensitive to a nihilistic plane of reality, but this is the first time in the opium wars that people made art about making drugs that eat flesh, the outro samples a newsclip about how narcan doesn't work, Flusser wrote in Our Inebriation that "man is not only a being that produces instruments, but also a being that produces instruments in order to escape from the tension produced by his instruments." and then he talks about art, "a medium to propitiate immediate experience"; "Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible... The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it"; "To publish the private is the only type of engagement in the republic that effectively implies the transformation of the republic because it is the only one that informs it."; NR Boor says "we been out here doing all this wrong, I hope this money save us" and i think again everything is different and will never be the same but also everything is the same and will never be different, there are so many worlds always ending, Sauce Walka said "it's Armageddon on my block nigga!" over the pussy money weed beat, Cixous said "Death-in-life is more frightening than life... nothing is lost, because all is lost to begin with" and in Ouvrir, Marker went to Chateaubriand seeing the Battle of Waterloo, knowing he was watching the end of a world, then asking the viewer "what are you watching?" , and as i walked through time square and all the cameras and the noise and the heat i thought "what am i watching?" and on one hand Ulysses was so long ago, but on the other it just happened, time's string lost around the midnight suns

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, Time is a trap from which I am trying to escape, I is a self I'm trying to lose, the first time I spent months walking back and forth on the Sandymount Strand, trying to grasp for something because the ineluctable modalities were meaningless, after asking "whoever anywhere will read these written words?", he thinks "signs on a white field". returning again to language & writing as a means to transform reality, transforming reality as a means to change the world, create a world, end a world, and the idea that writing is a continous project, that one can become Almost Infinite, which is an Infinity separated from Infinity. in my mind I diagnosed the problem as people now trying to rewrite Joyce, but focusing on Stanislaus's diaries and the letters, but who are People, is this projection, what have I assembled here so far, and what will I continue to assemble, already the idea of sculpting these texts into a book is forming, and Cixous gets into the Joyce-Nora relationship as an experimentation space for literature, the fart letters are as much canon as Portrait and Wake, and are probably read more than anything else today, they circulate in far greater volume and frequency, and that speaks to both the work and the problem of work today, as volume and frequency is not a signal of value, but we are so inundated with everything, i inundate this page with words that could go on forever but will only go on for as long as i write it to.

"Joyce also tries to replace the imagery common to Western thought, with its implication of a beginning and an end, a here and a there, a past and a present, a self and an other, by a world without history, a continous world of osmosis. Space is then no longer defined by personal landmarks and one's surroundings are not a line separating the known and visible from a beyond which is different and strange. The outlines of reality become blurred, the horizon clouds over, and people and things can appear to us without being subjected to our minds' usual process of examination and recognition; races, knowledge, cultures, personal histories, childhood memories, desires, all mingle, with no concern for the normal boundaries of mine and thine, hic and ille, tunc and nunc. This is not chaos, but the polycentricity that has replcaed egocentricity or theocentricity."

I suppose what's obvious now is that this isn't the place for that nor can it be, as there's already the linearity inscibed into these numbers, the verticality of the scroll, there would need to be a whole different form, and Form was what first got me lost in Joyce, the imperceptible shifts between reality and hallucination to realize reality-as-hallucination, that there is no stable ground which Flusser fed into later, and I keep trying to understand what it is my task is, of course there is no Task, but there is a Holy Task, a Purpose, a Destiny, a Delusion, I used to think of this compulsion as a Delusion and he did too, and then it became Real, it enveloped me, but remembering the Delusion seems key, in order to reshape it, expand it, so that once it evelopes me again, I can inflate it, make it bigger, bigger, until it evelopes Time, History, -Self, all that I am trying to escape, awake, dissolve, Delusion as a Pharmako, the same words in different places, all these words to escape the near-Death and near-Suicide that has been so Real and Near lately, because of these public and private masks, my mind goes to those African masks, Black Skin, White Masks, Brown Skin, White Masks, how do you say dead sounds, dead words, dead signs, how do you make Dead Times alive again

in another sense, everything I do falls into this sort of diary type practice. not over-thinking, just Thinking

Casablanca has these little hallucinations, these little simulacra moments because they built Casablanca on movie sets in Los Angeles, the city of angels AKA the land of lived hallucinations, and then the people of Casablanca decided that they should imitate it. I had a steak sandwich at the Balthazar in Casablanca, thinking about the Balthazar in Manhattan, Durrell's Balthazar, and Au Hasard Balthazar before Balthazar Getty brings me back to Los Angeles via Lost Highway. There's also a Gatsby themed restaurant and a simulacra Rick's Cafe, both of which I only encountered through Google Maps. It isn't a city for tourists really, but tourists come because they know the name, the name is Famous, and then they arrive and the question emerges: what are they here to do?

You never really see Casablanca in Casablanca. You see the inside of a bar where you hear people talk and these conversations create images in the mind that are not on the screen and you build a feel for Casablanca, you Imagine it despite it never being Image. I tried to watch Season 2 of For the Love of Ray J, but I'm not going to make it to the end - the girls aren't as entertaining, the drama can't be manufactured, and the allure of place and cut sequences is winding down. The moon is always full in For the Love of Ray J, in both seasons, but once you're aware of this, it gets old, the temporal abberation gets old, because the absence of proper chronometry is a novelty..? No, that isn't it, because an abberation of what "should be" is not necessarily an absence, how would one create an absence of chronometry on a reality television show that moves chronologically — how would one create an absence?

The last three words of The Kingdom: I don't know. After I read them, Chief Keef played in my head. Done with the book, I read the entirety of that journal article about publishing from 1989 and it feels so "right now", which is why it circulated to me, but it's also because the word "clout" is used 3 times – the crux of the piece hits with the part about career ambition vs. literary ambition, but moreso with a quote from Cyril Connolly - "The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence" - with the following supposition that "the masterpiece, almost by definition, is written outside of this system". I Don't Know (snippet) dropped and it was only ever a snippet, but it dropped on youtube and was reuploaded onto soundcloud, and it had to be delivered like that because the system didn't allow for anything else

Every bar of the hook ends with "I Don't Know". Every bar of the verses is accompanied with these "baaang baaaang baaaang" sung auto-tuned adlibs. "In this critical model, as well as in many others such as the work of Gayatri Spivak for example, it is a complex attempt at self-location which is mobilized to counter the supposedly seamless and naturalized movement of knowledge across worlds of profound cultural difference, of the impossibility of 'knowing' or 'grasping'," says Rogoff, in the context of critiquing James Clifford's writing on travel and theory:

"If theories no longer totalize, they do travel. Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted. Theory travels; so do theorists. In the late twentieth century the producers and audiences of theory can no longer be situated in a more-or-Iess stable map of 'First World' and 'Third World' places"

I spent part of the day looking at apartments I can't afford. Carrere would get into all of his habits and routines in The Kingdom and I'd inevitably reflect on how I lacked that, and how when I've had it for a few months how fruitful those time periods are and I realize that I have trains and rooms to book because in less than 12 hours I have to leave this room.

I think about avoiding repeating myself. I think about the impending location of non-location. I think about emails and postcards, about to-do lists and deadlines, about the time, the night, the morning, and walking to the ocean and listening

Casa de Lava, house of lava, I remember watching it, but I didn't remember it, it was anew again. Mariana is so beautiful, she doesn't belong there, but there is no one one waiting for her in Lisbon. The black sand, the black soil, make you all the more aware of her white flesh. I remember loving the film - it's an easy film to love, every shot is perfect, every cut is perfect, the bits of music are perfect, you are transported somewhere utterly Other, and you see beauty in a world of pain, but it is also a world of love, but it is also a world of death, but it is also a world of life.

"We ought to die as children and be born old," says an old man. He plays a fiddle. His sons call music a cruel master. They say they're leaving for Lisbon to labor, to be laborers. At the end they leave. The old man says Mariana's heart is wounded, that it speaks with sadness. They speak Creole on the island. Lovers speak their own language, it's foreign to everyone else. I thought about when I had this. I thought about many other things during the moments of the film that dissipated into past instants forgotten. I remembered watching it, but I didn't remember it. How long had it been?

I write in my own life — sitting in the front row for New York premiere of Vitalina Varela, camera in hand, to tape the Q&A that followed. It was the applause and the standing ovation that bothered me deeply, the mediation of pain that we sat through, that nobody in the crowd could really understand, the same way I can't understand war and the shelling of Gaza, there is this pain that is deeply human, not just the experience of it, but the infliction of it. I thought about institutions and realized the festival wouldn't give me what I want, the people who'd see it wouldn't be the ones I want to see it. And now? It's been years. I can still make. I must make, and then it doesn't matter where it shows, what matters is that it's been made, that it can be seen.

It's all falling apart. It's heartbreaking. Soon the sun will rise and tonight I won't sleep. There is a day tomorrow, it's a day I will have. Although now I think twice before writing about the future, and assuming that I know it.

Writing as a means to transform reality — what is transforming to manipulation? And now, I'm ever aware of how we're always writing, of how that word has opened up in meaning, writing has blossomed here, it has nothing to do with the text.

Writing has blossomed here. This is a site of blossoming. Blossom: the flower of a seed plant; the state of bearing flowers; to bloom.

Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling

A sample. This cascade is confining, yet we work within confines. We grow within confines. We live within confines. This is a site of blossoming. A blossom of heartbeats.

Still, there remains this urge of ending. Leão, Black Orpheus, Back From The Dead. Suleiman, the name of a prophet, not an apostle. There is a post within apostle.

Muted heartbreak. I remember that I left the Casa de Lava notebook at Z's. I'll look through it again soon. Again I assume the future. Or I attempt to write the future. Sometimes it works, sometimes it blossoms. I remember, there is truth in it: I get to write what's next

"Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits"

"We hit a nigga with the flame he went potty"

Last night I talked to C and H on the phone, I talked about much of the above and more, and they talked about their lives. It was nice, it's good to miss people and to talk to them on the phone, to be able to talk to them on the phone. I went to bed thinking about Cixous and Hyperdream yet again, when she can't call her dead loved ones on the phone, and I thought about that dream I had where H died, that maybe I'll tell him about when I see him next.

This morning I read D&G's "What is a minor literature" while listening to Philly music and thinking about this IG Story:

Hopoutblick reposted it, it's a transcription of an old song of his, one, like many, that never got a "proper" release and has leaked online after travelling as a file throughout Philly. I listened to the song once but I didn't save the link and now it's gone, at least it is to me. The lyrics won't show up on any search engines, and I could DM the account that posted the lyrics, most likely a teenager somehwere in Philly, but he'd want to charge me for file, that's the way the circulation of these leaks works, there's an entire economy built up around it, one that I'm so distant from.

When I look at the image, I think 'who could've written this', and it's something that I never could've written, even when I transcribe lyrics, I'd never write the emojis like that, and I'd never write my g's as q's to bypass Instagram censorship and I think of the Jackie Wang interview that I read this morning where she talks about how technology has shaped the form of writing, citing the character limit of Twitter, and of course the reason I can write here in this way is because I've set the technology up in such a way to create this ongoing tumult of words. Wang describes poetry as useless, superfluous to capital and difficult to commodify - "how many poets do you know who support themselves on poetry alone"? This is why she loves it. She also talks about technology hijacking her dopamine reward system.

Why does Hopoutblick rap? There's the dopamine, of being 18 and getting those views and followers and DM's, but that came later, that's the feedback loop that emerged to sustain his writing machine. The uselessness of poetry is entrenched in his entire practice, of course there's the possibility of him getting out of the hood through art, but the hood will still exist, and this reality seems unescapable for him. D&G point out that a major characteristic of minor literature is that everything takes on a collective value - in this case Hopoutblick's music doesn't exist in a vacuum, but with the opps he's beefing with their music, their lives intertwining in a sea of young black death. And now he's still on the run, 18 years old, wanted for homicide, and still making music, because the realities of jail are something he's come to terms with long ago.

"How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?"

Went out last night and it was good, that simultaneity of a lot and nothing happened, where I looked at art, talked to people, drank beers, moved from one place to another, rode the tube. I left my place in the early evening, grabbed a cheeseburger that I ate on the bus and a Jamaican tonic wine that I drank on the tube, and got to Hackney a little earlier than I'd preferred so I walked around for a little bit, smoked a cigarette, there was a beautiful double rainbow, and I tried to digest the locale. Went to a shop and grabbed a Sapporo tall boy, later it came up in conversation, the shape and the size of it, G, who I met while taking the lift up, remarked that it was phallic right after I called the curves of it a little feminine. It was while we were looking at one of the works in the show, a piece of wood cut out from a shelf with stickers posted all over it. The stickers were from different hotels decades ago and the artist explained that her uncle collected them, not by traveling because he was a teenager in Communist Poland, but by writing to these hotels and asking for promotional materials, and this is what remains of that. It was fascinating detritus, the design on many of the stickers, like the Hilton Abu Dhabi and another hotel in Kuwait still linger in my mind, and what also comes to mind is Fassbinder capturing those Moroccan hotels in Fox and His Friends. I guess there's a certain density to it that I like, but also its existence as a found object of sorts, but still a found object that had to be rendered by removal, by an act of cutting, and it was mounted on top of two door handles, one with keys in them. In the other room were 24 plates with paint to delineate hours, one for each time zone, rendering them into clocks without hands. The arrangement was haphazard, scattered across the floor, making it a bit of a landmine situation if you wanted to traverse the room, but they worked well with the tiles on the floor. In the kitchen was the last piece, another clock made of the tops of perfume bottles built onto the wall.

I was talking to A who runs the place and she mentioned something about an amount of selling out and I realized how that notion exists in the UK in comparison to the US, cultural differences blah blah blah, and people kept asking me how I knew about the gallery and sometimes I'd start by talking about another gallery and overlap in spheres across cities, but often times people said they didn't know the spaces in other cities, so I switched to talking about my ongoing interest in the lineage and history of artist-run spaces, something that is true, it's how I've learned about ~Contemporary Art~ the most so to speak, you look at documentation, you see what shows galleries have shown, you try to grasp for an understanding through that. G made a joke about how I needed to write a blog about this, a guide to the apartment galleries scattered across the world, a traveller's guide so to speak, and it's funny because he'd just met me.

Later in the kitchen I met A2, who has the same name as A, and G, and their friends O and H, and it was great, we got to chatting and had a lot to chat about. I've really liked A2's work for a couple of years now, I found her stuff on soundcloud at first and then found her website through that and I really liked her sensibilities as they moved between sound and video and drawing and painting, how she moved between these forms in a very seamless way in terms of how the works functioned - oblique and beautiful. On the other end, I didn't realize how much she liked my work, she said that she and G really loved my soundcloud stuff and asked when I was releasing more stuff, and I talked to G about some of the tracks he's put up on soundcloud too. Moments of note from the hours gone by: A2 asks me about TMAR and I tell her about him assaulting J at an opening and she says she likes J's work. I tell her about the waterboarding idea and she thinks it'd be a funny show. We're talking about college but I'm saying "Uni" and A2 asks me if they say that in the states and I say no I'm just assimilating and code switching. I take a guest shot during a game of pool and have a decent strike on the cue ball but can't knock anything in. There were no numbers on the pool balls, just 2 sets of colors, except for the 8 ball. A girl asked me if I'd read anything recently that fucked me up and I mentioned the Manto but didn't get into it - she mentioned a book about Iraq but didn't get into it. I think about how much talking happened, where do the words go once they dissipate, some into memory yes, but only the smallest amount when there's so many things being said. We talked about gossip and there was gossip, I talked about how I liked gossip and how it functioned, A2 brought it up after I talked about the whole Twombly Donnelly thing and the work I want to make but can't, but also how if I were to show that work I'd want to elide presenting that whole context, she was saying it'd still exist because I'd have talked about it enough and people would then talk about it, it's similar to how I was walked through the Arcadia Missa show with an explanation even if the press release didn't have that many words. I talked with A about the White ppl think I'm radical show and she said it was a Moment when it happened. I've been thinking about this Ot7 Quanny line constantly for the past two days:

"I got paid for a show, then bought some work yea cuz I'm Trapped Out"

I made a video from a moment last night, where A2 was cutting cake on the tracks of the tube stop, layering in footage of a walk through the medina, a television playing a soap in a coffee shop, and the ocean meeting cliffs in Rabat. I kept parts of the audio as well, mixing it with the second "Max B type beat" I made, and I titled the video "VVS Lemonade (coming soon)", the title of the project I want to drop soon, but I also liked how the paranthetical brackets made "coming soon" into a sort of separated message. I went through A2's soundcloud likes yesterday and found this kp0p track that really blew my mind hearing it here. The VVS Lemonade title comes from a song he did with stunny that was deleted off kp0p's soundcloud in 2020 when they beefed out about something. I talked about that bay area scene, I talked about A3 and our friendship, I feel like I did so much talking. It'll even out, I'll be speaking much less over the coming weeks. I texted the kp0p track to C and called him one of the greatest working artists in America. the song's called "i aint never coming back home" - this universal homelessness, brought me back to living on San Pablo ave thinking about San Pablo's Finest, and I wonder where kp0p is now. if he'll ever go back to Richmond. I met this girl from Albany in Romania and she was saying no one could afford to stay there anymore, her parents divorced and her mom lived in Bulgaria, she didn't know what she was doing and would drink vodka everyday to pass the time. i loop 'i aint never coming back home' and pack up for another flight

When I think of The Name, I think about the Tamil tradition of Cankam poetry. To be a Cankam poet is to be part of the brotherhood of poets, something larger that oneself. In The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan writes: "The classical tradition of Tamil poetry is an impersonal tradition. The use of epithetical names that for these poets no signature was more authentic than their own metaphors". This is after he describes how the poets sign their works with names such as "The Poet of Red Earth and Pouring Rain" and "The Poet of Long White Moonlight". He goes on to say: "By a remarkable consensus, they all spoke this common language of symbols for some five or six generations. Each could make his own poem and by doing so allude to every other poem which had been, was being, or would be written in this symbolic language. Thus poem became relevant to poem, as if they were all written by a single hand. The spurious name Cankam [fraternity, community] for this poetry is justified not by history but by the poetic practice". As I type this I can hear Lil Uzi Vert from outside my window: "It do not matter"

On the train to Madrid is a specific location of non-location, one that remained in motion save for an extended moment where we were suspended on the tracks. Another train was stuck in Vitoria, blocking the platform. I missed the earlier train, not because I was late to the station, but because I didn't buy a ticket on my phone, and even though the train didn't leave for another 20 minutes, the machine would not sell tickets, and the line to see an attendant was too long, too slow. This happened on the way to San Sebastián as well, with the bus, so instead I took a BlaBlaCar for the first time, I rode in the passenger seat as a 21 year old girl drove and we practiced English and I tried to explain what America and New York were like. She thought people would be friendly there.

In the floor directly above me in this Madrid apartment is someone hammering and drilling, they lack a rhythm to their work, so it does not turn into monotony but a constant source of distraction. Last night I came here, laid on top of the mattress, slept without a sheet in this nausea that comes and goes since I started traveling. I felt it the night before too, when I went out with E and F, I was waiting at a bar, I ate two pintxos and drank a glass of wine, and with more wine the nausea slowly went away. It was the first time I'd been out with them since Christopher's Palace, they met me at a bar that G had recommended and we ate and drank a little there, then we went to a different bar, where we stayed for a while longer, drinking red wine, then white wine, then white wine, then another bar for another red wine. We sat on the steps in front of a church, and in the distance down the street there was a drunk man being dragged down the street by another man. He tried to fight a couple people. Then a police car pulled up. Then another police car. Then another police car. We walked with our glasses to the beach, no one else was there and the night sky still had so much light in it, the Big Dipper was masked by a cloud, but there were so many others, on the seashores of endless worlds children meet and it is so easy to graft the bits and pieces together but there is so much to graft that choice itself can be paralyzing.

We talked about A, how they didn't know his last name, and I talked about things I've written already but that they haven't read, it felt like reciting lines, and this is a feeling that has started to recur since the start of this, recursivity and contingency, an old pdf is downloaded again, and I'm reminded of a part of Hyperdream where Cixous talks about searching for a book she cannot find, she orders another volume, and that reminds her of Benjamin and a pen he lost, and I'm reminded of how Benjamin died in Spain, and Cixous's mother had bought a bed he was traveling with, it was in Oran, but who knows where it is now, who knows if and when I'll make it to Oran to speak broken Arabic in search of past traces in a present that will be unfamiliar, full of shadowed heats, and I talked with F about how much things have changed in the last year, a return to locals, how I went to the Guggenheim and as I looked at Twombly's 9 Discourses on Commodus there was a child with her parents miming "Ta-da!" and her parents applauded and there were so many tourists and I did not feel like a tourist the same way I don't feel like a hipster, I feel like this opacity that floats through spaces, and the woman didn't think I was young enough to be a student, I had to show my ID, and I thought about how I no longer had an interest in making work for the purist and the tourist because I realized that when I was the young boy in Russian Ark staring at Peter and Paul I was not a tourist, but something else, and as I voiced some of this to F I became aware of the walls of language.

"Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something, perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." - Agamben

"Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendents. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears." - Hedayat

The hammering and drilling has ceased for now, there is only the hum of the fan and EDGE OF THE WEST playing from my laptop speakers and I open the window to let the bird songs in. We were on the beach talking about how different it was there, how time was different, how worries were different, and how this made different people. How being an artist or a writer in Europe seemed like something you were born into, or if you pursued it now, you studied at certain schools where you might be chosen to enter certain systems, and it's not as though the same thing doesn't happen in America, T and I noticed a recent Mills MFA graduate in the Bad Painting show who stood apart from the usual list of names, but the idea of New York is one of grind, striving, aspiration, a rat race one opts into, and in opting in, one allows it to shape one's work in a certain way, and one in which fictions can become non-, a more malleable world, moldable, sculptable, but these are only ideas. F called the way I live "a method", then moved away from that framing, but I agreed, it is a "method", I live methodologically, I move in certain ways, and I move deliberately, I threw the wine glasses into the ocean and my phone shattered and I woke up thinking NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE once again

It took Twombly 22 years to paint Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). There are so many things neccessary to work on a thing like that for 22 years, and my method has not yet lead me to a place where I can devote myself to similar tasks. There is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again, and there is the matter of painting the same painting, over and over again. There is the matter of writing the same passage, over and over again, and there is the matt of writing the same passage, over and over again. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. Down there on the beach re-beginnings where everything is washed clean each day nothing veils the scene of memory, no curtain, no television, no artifacts, no human fabrications, there is no time, only youth, virgin life and the canny woodcutting of nature. There was sand which was glass, there is glass to be made sand, there all the broken mirrors of the past.

Cixous wrote of love letters and I scour my highlights for the passage, getting lost down other passages in the process: "Every day I hope the next day to be called upon by the authorities to create the opera of the creation." --- but then there it is:

"...a true love letter, arriving like all love letters too late, like the love letter transformed into supreme book that the narrator was never to address to Albertine, a letter which had to wait for it to be too late twice over before it could begin to grow and grow until it attained the disproportion of a work of art."

There's still no explanation. There's not always an explanation. And Stendhal never got the joy of speaking on the telephone.

Broke Phone... that shit read 600 hundred thousand... just two years ago i ain't even have all these problems...

A footnote in Fichus lead me to Ulysses Gramaphone: "What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation..."

I talked to S on the phone last night and it took me a moment to find my voice. I've barely spoken in Madrid, life is silence broken by brief ripples of conversation. This will continue for a while and I like it. I tell him this and realize how absurd it sounds. This only happens later, before we talk about New York, how things are there, how people are there. As the conversation continues, I get increasingly tired, I keep repeating what was I saying where were we where was I what was I saying

It's like a computer, D says, and before computers there were still computers: the pen and the post. There is "the motif of postal difference, of remote control and telecommunication"

T texted me that he received the Bape bag. I'd meant to mail it to him months earlier, but I never made my way to the post office. When I was leaving L's place, I realized I needed to get it to him. I gave the bag to Z to give to A who saw T yesterday. The bag was given to me by A2, who bought the gift for me while she was in Tokyo. "Tokyo: does this city lie on the western circle that leads back to Dublin or to Ithaca?" This was in March, the bag started and ended with A before going to T, and L thinks "the coincidence of meeting . . . the whole galaxy of events" while at the centurypast cabman's shelter.

"...what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only thing translatable. What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be the untranslatable."

Another note leads me to Blanchot's The Madness of the Day, but there isn't a translation to download anywhere, only La folie du jour, and I'm reminded of the strange place that is being relatively well-read in the wrong language, of being illiterate in other ones. I went to a kebab place near me yesterday and it was ran by an Indian guy, he spoke to me in Hindi and I replied "I don't speak Hindi" in Hindi and he was confused and I explained to him in Spanish that my family is from Tamil Nadu and I didn't grow up in India so I never learned any Hindi and he still seemed offput by this and I thought of the scene in Louis Malle's Phantom India where he's in Tamil Nadu and the people are protesting against Hindi being taught in their schools. When you're outside of India, everyone gets flattened to Indian, but when you're there the Tamils will speak poorly about the people in Delhi and the dirty Biharis and in Mumbai all the rich people look down on the Dharavi slum dwellers as filthy Madrasis. That was the longest conversation I had yesterday. Blanchot lived in isolation for two decades, but he maintained length correspondences with his contemporaries. I think about how archives of letters will be lost because of how the digital archive overwhelms. D points out how Nietzsche and Joyce anticipated the academies to come to study their work, and he makes fun of the James Joyce Foundation and how American such a thing is. Part of this anticipation is the relation of the computer to the encylopedic project. And what to anticipate of the centuries to come...

"Any public piece of writing, any open text, is also offered like the exhibited surface, in no way private, of an open letter, and therefore of a postcard with its address incorporated in the message and hereafter open to doubt, and with its coded and at the same time stereotyped language, trivialized by the very code and number. Conversely, any postcard is a public document, deprived of all privacy and, moreover, in this way laying itself open to the law."

How many paintings can you look at it a day? Not glancing but looking. I started at Arcadia Missa, there were 3 paintings by Hamishi Farah and a contract framed on the wall and the gallerina talked to me quite a bit, she gave me a tour of the show, explained all the context, and I went along with it, being friendly because I wanted to hear how she'd say it, even though I went into the show having seen images of it for weeks and understanding the context of Farah's work. I thought about the 'White ppl think I'm radical show' he did with Aria and how those burned wife beaters are one of my favorite pieces of hers, and I went into this show knowing that I wanted to take a picture of the Beyonce painting and post it on my Instagram story with HopOutBlick's PTSD overlaid because they're both sampling Beyonce.

“Clouds filled with stars cover your skies / And I hope it rains, you're the perfect lullaby / What kind of dream is this?”

“Bro said I gotta chill off the perks cuz I’m wildin / But he don’t know it’s too much on my mind, I feel like dying”

What's different about PTSD than most drill sample flips is that it isn't just a section of Beyonce's Sweet Dreams that is interpolated, but rather the entire vocal track runs the length of the song, and HopOutBlick writes over, on top of it. It is minor literature, it needs the landscape of Philadelphia, the other rappers, and how that fits into regional rap in America of industrail cities in decline. There aren't really any crazy bars, or incredible wordplay, but what the track is is testimony - he tells you why he can't stop rapping ("I won't stop rapping, you the reason I keep trying"), there's a moment of vulnerability, an admission of being-towards-death, before the infliction of death returns: we hit a nigga with the flame, he went potty. In the gallery, the girl, C, brings up the Dana Schutz Emmett Till painting, which emerged in two conversations I had yesterday. First I was talking about the sort of totalizing whiteness that exists in soundcloud rap as the moment at which innovation dies. What Nettspend is to Xaviersobased type music, what Lil Shine is to pluggnb, what Matt Ox is to tread, and the fetishization of this type of white artistry. T brought up Bill Evans in relation to Duke Ellington, and how he feels that all 21st century American Art is about Black Death, and that's what the Dana Schutz painting is about.

I brought this up with N and Z while we talked and AI transcribed the words without separation of who said what but the conversation last night was largely directed towards me, the recent images I made, my process in making images, and the Cixous quotes I sent into the chat. I said a lot of words and we talked past 4am and as the night wore on I noticed my pace of speech slowing along with my mind, and in this process I think a new version of honestly emerged. Not so much in the sense of telling lies vs. the truth, but a relaxation of how I approach probing questions into my practice, given my comfort with who's asking them, and also being forced to be more instinctual with my responses, which leads into series of rambles that I spread out in so many different directions. And as this tiredness grew, I suppose I was forced to pick between branches for the sake of time and energy, there were things I wanted to write in here after, but after sleep and this day of gazing I'm struggling to come back to precisely what they were. Z started the conversation with a quote about Romanticism and I wished I engaged with it more, but it was the type of thing where you're trying to assign words to impulses. There remains an autobiographical element to the images made, but I suppose it's less immediately discursive, or rather the discourse occurring isn't happening through text-based language (Twombly's Nine ~Discourses~ on Commodus comes to mind as I type this).

"if this new type of book illustration was so apt and definitive an expression of romanticism it was not only because the close association of text and image satisfy the desire to unite different forms of art the vignette by its general appearance presents itself both as a global metaphor for the world and as a fragment dense at its center tenuous on the periphery it seems to disappear into the page this makes it a naive powerful metaphor of the infinite a symbol of the universe at the same time the vignette is fragmentary sometimes even minute in scale incomplete mostly dependent upon the text for its meaning with the regular and ill-defined edges not unlike Schlegel's hedgehog it is the perfect romantic formula" is how the AI transcribed Z reading the quote from "Charles Rosen and Henry Zerner's romanticism and realism" and it's quite a different thing to engage with a quote while hearing it read, as the sound of the words disappears vs. engaging with it in written form. I've thought about how I haven't felt any urge to inscribe text onto these images, I talked about that with them after the series of so many collages with text on them from the last two years and this desire to reach a form of speech through emptiness / absence. I talked a lot, I said so many words, I need to go back through the transcription to locate things I said and figure out what points to continue to probe, to question deeper. There were good bits, about the role Joyce plays for me, about langauge and reality, about the studio process, where the event of art is, how it is recorded, inscribed, transmuted from form to form. N said I'm able to speak fluidly about my practice which is true, I do it often I suppose, I've talked about it with multiple people this week already, and I've talked to other people, not about art, but I'm more conscious of how I appear to others, how I present, following this latest isolation stint. There's a self-posession I've grasped hold of again, it feels good to have, I think it comes and goes but I'm back in Go Mode, I've been Go-ing, on many different levels, and it's a different sort of mental state than when I'm in my own universe and withdrawn.

I went back to the Courtald, mainly to look at this Tiepolo sketch of The Immaculate Conception that hypnotized me when I saw it last year. I sat with it again for about 30 minutes, thinking about seeing the "real" one at El Prado about a month ago, and there was a very strong line of questioning that it provoked about which I preferred, and it was this sketch, much smaller, rougher on the edges, but I liked that it was smaller, I could've lifted it off the walls and carried it out with me, and both works have been displaced from their original sites, or rather The Immaculate Conception has been displaced from its site whereas a sketch has no site, it was a byproduct of the workshop process that later became viewed as art as people desired to own art of various types. Much of the Rubens in the Courtauld are sketches, his sketches were very free, very different than the final works, and some Count collected them, and how they're there to be seen. They keep a sketch of The Conversion of St. Paul next to the actual painting, it's a very interesting thing to see side-by-side, the stage of the process, and the final version. There's the matter of conservation and restoration with all of these works, which I really don't know too much about, and I think about it in the same way I think about translation, there's a mediation of the work from a time and place occurring. Besides these three works, and the two other Tiepolo sketches on the sides of the Immaculate Conception sketch, I spent some time with this Cecily Brown installed above the staircase. Otherwise, I walked past many works, giving them glances - Degas dancers, Cezanne landscapes, Modigliani Nude, there is only so much space to look and to think.

Damascus steel is everywhere on the streets of Toledo. I'd been on the wikipedia page before, I got there from Wootz steel, which originated in Tamil Nadu, but I can't remember why or how I got to that page. They don't know how to make Damascus steel anymore, somewhere in the past it got lost.

At the El Greco musuem I stared at a painting of Paul. He held a sword while he was writing. I bought two post cards of the painting in the gift shop, I paid with a single coin, I thought of Derrida and all the above extending beyond the top of the website, and I kept going up until I was 16 looking at The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene. It was hot outside that day too.

I started Certified Copy last night and finished it this evening. The dialogue about art, how we see it, and such and such was bouncing around in my head as I walked around today, but after the parts about Love and Marriage, I feel inundated and can barely recall what I was thinking. A soccer ball rolled down the street and a boy chased after it, like in the short Kiarostami made in Italy. It'd be nice, to pretend to be married with someone.

There are few things as pleasurable as checking into a hotel room to stay by yourself. You go up to the room and everything is meant for two: two cups for coffee, two sets of toiletries, two towels, even two beds. There is a quiet in the room that is hard to come by elsewhere. The room beckons you to bring another person into it, and remaining alone only accelerates the sense of solitude like nothing else. I used to dream of a life lived in hotel rooms. It'd be like living in the airport.

In the mall in Cordoba, there's a guy wearing a red YMCMB snapback. I thought about Forever and how Drake was shutting shit down in the mall. I thought about last summer, listening to dumpster baby seeing animatronic dinosaurs in the mall in Chennai and then writing that down in my notes app. I thought about Averroes and Averroes's Search and translation:

"In a translation, we have the same work in a double language; in the fiction of Borges, we have two works in the identity of one single language and, in this identity that is not one, the fascinating mirage of the duplicity of possibilities."

"Thus, the world, if it could be exactly translated and copied in a book, would lose aIl beginning and all end and would become that spherical, finite, and limitless volume that all men write and in which they are written: it would no longer be the world; it would be, it will be, the world corrupted into the infinite sum of its possibilities."

"I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum."

Thinking and writing in the heat is so different from working in the cold. I copy my quotes and attach minor commentaries and it all feels so difficult. When I copy a quote, I feel as though I'm painting a miniature of a picture, the words enter and exit me, they become my own copy. Yesterday I climbed up Toledo from the bus station in the sweltering heat, wondering when else are things "sweltering"; today I walked down and it was so much easier, the weight of my bags basically negligent. I took the train back to Madrid then left the Atocha Station once again, I got in a BlaBlaCar and saw windmills on the highway. I copied sections of the Prophetic Speech chapter of The Book to Come, I thought about El Greco, and I thought Campagna.

"Prophecy is not just a future language. It is a dimension of language that engages it in relationships with time that are much more important than the simple discovery of certain events to come."

"... prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset aIl the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic, it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence..."

"It is once again like the desert, and speech also is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert to cry out and that endlessly awakens in us the terror, understanding, and memory of the desert."

"The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never there but always outside. The desert is this outside, where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already outside, and prophetic speech is that speech in which the bare relation with the Outside could be expressed..."

WHERE IS THE LIGHT COMING FROM??? scrawled on the top of my notebook, above the roughest sketch of Tiepolo's The Immaculate Conception. And it's from above, the folds of the blue shawl that wraps the Virgin Mary betray shadows. My gaze flits around the painting as I sit there, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, looking, thinking about looking, thinking, repeating. The halo of stars above her head. The part of "I'm In It" that goes "star...fucker... star... fucker...". The frame towards the bottom, covered by the branch. The frame within the frame obscured, containing all the Immaculate Conceptions of the past. I sat and I scrawled more thoughts, how the work was hung next to his son, how it was meant for a church, how the Virgin Mary would never meet my gaze.

They don't let you take photos in the Prado. It's good, I've never been a museum that size where nobody is taking pictures, but near Las Meninas I pulled out my phone to take a picture to send to G, and thought about a recent text convo about how the lack of a reproducible image was a major part of early art criticism, the need for ekphrasis, how that need is lost, and the remix as criticism. But I couldn't sit with Las Meninas the way I wanted too, too much echo in the room, I was there too late, I knew I needed to get there first thing in the morning again, for silence to stretch time. I could buy headphones. I could buy codeine too. Moneystretchingtime. I finished the Hedayat and thought of Veeze and Lucki:

"I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden boat and ranged through a radiant, empty world with no obstacle to block my progress. So profound and delicious was the sensation I experienced that the delight it gave me was stronger than death itself."

When I had long hair I would twirl the ends of it and end up pulling strands out in the process. There would be piles of hair after a session of sitting, twirling, thinking. It's the same with my beard now.

I went to do laundry and there was a bar next door. While I waited for my clothes I drank wine and ate potato omelettes. The bartender was from the Dominican Republic. He lived in New York for 14 years, in Manhattan and the Bronx. I told him I lived in Brooklyn and Queens. He's been here for 18 years, but he wants to go back to the DR to die. He said that's where he's from, so that's where he must go. I thought about how I don't plan on dying in America. I thought about how I don't plan

There was an article in Wired about Milwaukee, how it's becoming a centerpoint of rap that goes viral and dominates TikTok, which is to say has a dominant presence in the virtual. I sent a screenshot of it to C where they say that "50K Stash" invented the point dance - it annoys me and I think about how rarely journalists get anything right and how this error even emerges from "RealStasher 50K" when a search engine gives you no rap results for "50k Stash". The article went on to mention that Certified Trapper has family origins in Cameroon and C wondered if they have podcasts there and I brought up the Internet in Togo and he found a podcast that was two Cameroonian women but they were speaking in English and that led me to wonder about the linguistics of podcasting, whether it's prevalence is unique to the Anglosphere, or if there are podcasts in China or Japan or Korea, but some sort of marketing information site gave me three free articles and the first article of these three told me that "after English, the top five most popular podcast languages were Spanish (18%), Portuguese (11%), Indonesian (7%) and German (3%)".

Indonesian being in the mix was fascinating, it makes you wonder what's going on over there to make them gravitate towards podcasts, but then you start to wonder what's going on over there. C mentions that they're the 4th largest country in the world by population but there's no real cultural exports besides Rich Chigga, and I rack my brain to think of if I know any Indonesian Artists and Gabber Modus Operandi pops into my mind even though I don't really bump them like that. I find an article where one of the GMO guys is talking about how they've never been to the UK and asking a friend what listening to Burial is like in the rain - "He said, 'it just makes sense,'" with the point being that listening to Gabber Modus Operandi in Bali "just makes sense", and this is true, when I was living in the bay and driving around in a rental, Oakland and Stockton rap just made sense, just like hearing Welcome To The Party when you were Outside in Brooklyn in 2019 just made sense, and I'm sure if you're riding in a Kia Soul on the lowends making that shit shake to Certified Trapper it just makes sense

"Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted."

There's an Ashley Bickerton quote in Terra Infirma, about how he was breakdancing for some kids in the Solomon Islands and then all of a sudden they broke out into better moves than him and this was without internet, without radio, without television - in his mind of course - that they were taking moves from the inner cities across the world and replicating them, reiterating them into something else. "I cannot help thinking that a bad New Jersey haircut can travel faster and with more precision than all of our best intentions". And this is obvious now, they make drill everywhere, but they only make Baile Funk in Brazil and it can be made in other places but does it just make sense - no, and this lack of sense transmutates it in such a way where it is quarantined as imitation, art that isn't innovative, and then it only exists for its local and there are very few who'd seek out Indonesian drill that replicates the 808 slides of UK Drill, but if the gamelan was introduced and different scales in the synths, then there could be something and maybe that is there, maybe I just can't find it. I used to wonder when Cloud Rap would catch on in India, but the country was so memetically fixated on Eminem for such a long time, part of this is the English, the enunciation, and a fixed idea of what rap should be because the only hierarchical, historicized rap was making it there for most of the 2010s - Biggie, Tupac, Eminem type discourse. There was the video of the kids in the village reading the Young Thug "If cops pull up I put that crack in my crack" line that went viral, but neither Young Thug flows nor synthy-production caught on in a meaningful way and despite Bloodz Boi tweeting that "every country has a bladee", I haven't found the Indian Bladee. When I was at a copy center last year, there was this kid behind me who I started talking to and he asked me if I had connections in the music industry because he loved Ariana Grande and Juice WRLD and Justin Bieber and dreamed of being a pop singer and I told him I didn't, but now if I'm ever back there again and I run into him I'll give him The Dare's number and tell him to chase his dreams

"We will never have, and in fact have never had any 'transfer' of pure signified - from one language to another, or within one language - which would be left virgin and intact by the signifying instrument or 'vehicle'."

When I was in India in 2016 I wore these APC selvedge jeans every day because raw denim was a "thing" at that time and I lost those jeans in Romania the next year, but everytime I'd ride a motorbike I wished I'd bought Balmain biker jeans instead, and every time I'd get a haircut the barbers wouldn't know how to do a fade or a taper, but when I returned 2 years later you started to see those things, the knockoff versions at least, and when I went back again, after another 2 years, these things were everywere, one day I was at the beach and I saw a kid in replica Jordan's and bootleg off-white and I saw another kid in a fake Balmain Paris t-shirt and I thought about how even though these aren't "real" they're still hard to find, you have to seek out what you want the imitation of if you're trying to Drip Different, and that this delineation of "authenticity" only exists in the first world and even then N cops shit off Panda Buy like his Gucci Hat and says it'd be stupid to buy a real gucci hat and it's different for things like Kiko Asics that are not generic designer where the fact of wearing them gets wrapped into some sort of irony/sincerity play with how you're speaking with your signifiers, but things travel, there are so many worlds, and this is why Bickerton played with logos and shipping crates and at the time there would've been nothing like it and the compositions are great but we're so oversaturated that while the work is cool it belongs in the late 80s, where we can never go back to, where it just makes sense

"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."

"Geography [is] the eye and the light of history... maps enable us to contemplate at home and right before our eyes things that are furthest away"

I have a tendency where I almost always know my location, the few past situations where I don't stand out in my memory. In Seattle on mushrooms, in a park in the hot sun without water, being led by this girl who had no clue where we were, time warping as we wandered around forevers with our thirst. In Paris, drunk, being led by a friend from bar to bar, I stole a menu from one and it's still in my storage unit, until the sun rose and we were by the Seine. In Los Angeles, in the car with G and S, then with N and Z and "I", going from bar to restaurant to party and so on, and this could happen again in London, or in Berlin, or the many other cities where I haven't spent much time and know people who could lead me around and your sense of a place is informed not by a map, but by a series of rooms and movements between those rooms, very different than how I move alone, where I'm constantly referencing where I need to be, if the taxi or bus or train is going in the right direction. I think about this tendency, this need-to-know, this need-for-location, and as I frame it like that it seems obvious enough the reason for it, a tether on the present for how untethered I feel in all of the other times, and then I think of Drake and In My Feelings, emotion as a location, or rather emotion writing itself as a dominant location, "Why You Gotta Fight With Me At Cheesecake You Know I Love To Go There" is about two emotions - fighting and love - competing for the dominant association of The Cheesecake Factory and that's Child's Play but still, there's also Marvin's Room and how that was a physical place but Drake made it metaphysical, and I think about tweeting screenshots of it in high school, acting fucked up about a bitch who didn't exist because I found it an amusing way to pass the time, but I also think about how I used to tweet so much because I never had a place to put certain words, certain things, like I used to post about music so much but now I just end up texting C or M or G or S2 about it mainly, this is what I was explaining to T on the walk from the chinese restaurant to the hookah bar, that what were once tweets become messages and all I can think of to post now are attempts to approach emptiness

I didn't realize I was late and then they wouldn't let me. It was annoying, it was sad, it was hot and the sun was beating down on me, but then I let go, I realized that it would give me a reason to come back. We'll always have Paris.

While eating dinner I thought about The Book, how it seemed to hinge on Diderot creating the Encylopedia, that there were books before that but they were books that had Worlds within them, they didn't attempt to contain Everything. On the way there, the taxi driver was from Saudi Arabia and I asked Jeddah? Riyadh? Al-Madinah? and on the way back, the taxi driver asked me "Pakistan?" and then "Delhi? Shimla? Kerala?" after I told him India. There was a girl in the backseat, she said it was India's independence day yesterday.

I got back with a headache from the heat. I'm staying in a Riad in the medina because it was cheap. Supply and demand. While walking through the alleys I saw a sign with an arrow pointing to "Riad Reve d'Orient" and thought about the Orientalist Fantasy Cafe in Cordoba and how the contemporary tourist medina exists as an Orientalist Fantasy City for tourists to walk through while the 4 million residents of Marrakech live in new developments outside that no longer hold the medina as its center, and these new developments remind me of the more modern parts of French cities. I was texting S, wondering if there were still "real" medinas in the world - probably in Libya, maybe in Algeria, but not in Morocco, not in Tunisia. Of course, what does it mean to be "real"? One of my favorite Bladee lines is when he says "I wanna know what is real" on the Hannah Diamond Love Goes On remix. I was texting M2 about what Bladee listeners used to be like and there was that other day when a Joeyy song off Buyer's Remorse that was a Nike Just Do It ripoff autoplayed on soundcloud and then I was listening to Red Light thinking about being high and sad all the time, smoking two bowls then getting in the shower, staring out the little window, losing track of time with college boy on loop feeling numb/beverly hills and the idea of pulling up in a lexus w/ ur besties rolling off the ecstasy ends it just made sense and then the nostalgia for bad times ends

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

"I'm on South Street with all my chains on. Reach for this bitch you gon get rained on."

"Because, no matter how "fictional" the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory."

The machine is changing. It will never remain static, there are a number of lines that changed it, perhaps the ones about searching for a home still weighing in my mind. The French man left, that was what I wanted to start with, the French man left and I finished the Blanchot, the Blanchot finished with Un coup de des, and it was familiar territory, and then it really finished with a discussion of the public:

"There was once a time when the writer, like the artist, had to do with glory. Glorification was his work, glory was the gift he gave and received. Glory, in the ancient sense, is the shining forth of presence (sacred or sovereign). To glorify, Rilke says, does not mean to make known; glory is the manifestation of being that goes forward in its magnificence of being, freed from what hides it, established in the truth of its revealed presence."

"The act of publishing - publication - becomes the essential thing. We can take this in an obvious sense: the writer is known by the public, he is reputable, he seeks to be valued, because he needs what value is, money. But what awakens the public, what generates value? Publicity. Publicity itself becomes an art, it is the art of all arts, it is what is most important, since it determines the power that determines all the rest."

"To publish is not to cause oneself to be read, or to offer anything at all to be read. What is public does not exactly need to be read; it is already known beforehand, with a knowledge that knows everything and wants to know nothing."

"It is against an indefinite and incessant language - without beginning and without end, against it but also with its help - that the author expresses himself. It is against public interest, against inattentive, vague, universal, and omniscient curiosity, that the reader comes to read, emerging with difficulty from this first reading, a reader who before reading has already read: reading against it but still through it. The reader and author participate, one in a neutral understanding, the other in a neutral language, which they want to suspend for an instant so it may give way to an expression that is better understood."

"The extraordinary turmoil that causes the writer to publish before writing, that causes the public to form and transmit what it does not understand, the critic to judge and define what he does not read, and the reader, finally, to have to read what is not yet written - this movement that confuses, by anticipating them each time, all the various moments of the work's formation, also gathers them together in the search for a new unity. Thus the richness and poverty, the pride and humility, the extreme disclosure and the extreme solitude of our literary work, which has at least the merit of desiring neither power, nor glory."

Sometimes I feel I quote too much, other times I feel as though there's no other way forward. There are obvious threads to the words above, that will remain unwoven for the time being. After the Blanchot, I started Irit Rogoff's Terra Inferma, I remember talking about it in a dream this morning. Yesterday the French man left and D came back and she cooked dinner and invited me as Moroccans do and talked badly about the French man for being French and said she didn't mean to be racist but that she wouldn't accept French guests in the future and she struggled to understand why I didn't speak English with an accent and asked what Bollywood actors I liked and I said Shah Rukh Khan because I didn't want to get into it really and she said they have two TV channels for Bollywood movies in Morocco and that they like them a lot here. I've been thinking about Twombly's first interview with David Sylvester and how insistent he was on letting Sylvester and "the public" know about the A in Iliam and how it was intention and how it was for Achilles and how nobody said anything. The A in Iliam is in Philadelphia and I've spent the last two days thinking about Hopoutblick's tape "Don't Believe the Rumors" where he claims that he's being framed for the murders that he's charged with, the narrative of the album is that he's innocent but also that his gang drops bodies - the beats and samples are great: Sweet dreams - beyonce, Juicy, Law and Order, Power, a Bollywood song that I can't place. At one point Blick makes a Brian Dawkins reference which is crazy to me because he would've been like 6 when Dawkins retired. My beard makes me feel older than I am, because I'm starting to feel how others see me. I watched Daughers of the Dust and Guimba the Tyrant, which is floating around with all the above mixed with a Skrilla leak, Skrilla videos, and this article called "Vodou: The Crisis of Possession" that Z posted. Everything only seems to moving on the surface for me, things linking, but without the words underneath. Rogoff starts the first chapter of Terra Infirma with a discussion of the question "Where do I belong?" characterizing it as "one of those misguided questions which nevertheless serve a useful purpose, for while it may naively assume that there might conceivably be some coherent site of absolute belonging, it also floats the constant presence of a politics of location in the making" which I have been sitting with. Mainly the middle part, the naive assumption that there might be some coherent site of absolute belonging. A few days ago I was thinking about New York City as unstable ground, and how foolish it would be to try to build a home there, or rather to build a home on unstable ground. But where is the ground stable

Casablanca came back today, as I was reading Eco's The Cult of the Imperfect, which J sent to me. Casablanca feels like so long ago already, there are words between Casablanca and now, there are images between Casablanca and now, there is life between Casablanca and now, and I think of the first time Casablanca came up here, at that Spanish restaurant in Greenwich Village on E's birthday. Time is nebulous, the feel of it ebbs and flows yes that's all obvious, but I'm thinking about the future of this, given the reality of writing elsewhere, and how that will inevitably shape this in some sort of way. Everything shapes everything, that's why everything matters, it comes back to these feedback loops that you opt into, and how they impact your art, I was explaining that to A today when I was talking about why missing out on tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of crypto money doesn't bother me - because I wouldn't be able to make the art I want with what that does to your mind. Eco writes about "a colossal fortune that places [the count of Monte Cristo] above common mortals" and earlier I was thinking about this while I walked around Marseille listening to Ganger, thinking about Veeze in relation to the common man, how he's elevated above that, but later after talking with A, I thought about it in terms of the crypto-bro. It's not that I don't want money, it'd be nice to have money, but there's a way to do things and I want to do them in "the right way".

J called me right after I finished writing that paragraph. We talked for a long time and it was good. I miss him, I realized how long it had been since I heard his voice and it was so nice to hear. I said whatever else I was going to type out for the sake of thinking through and now I wonder if there's anything left unsaid. Naturally, what I did today: went to the museum of fine arts here (musee de beaux arts 4 the real deal frenchies) where there were paintings and also these incredible plaster and marble sculptures. Pierre Puget, the man could cook. And then there was this room with all of these orientalist paintings of India, Istanbul, North Africa, they really were nice paintings, there were this kids in the room on some sort of educational activity for children type thing and they were running around, one of them ran up to this large painting of Arabs in some village the 1800s and almost touched the painting and then the instructors had to be like 'no no no no no' all french-like and me and this old man were laughing and most of the kids were black and brown and excited to see people who looked like them in the paintings I think. And it is this interesting thing where these cultures didn't preserve themselves through the image. While I was walking to the museum, this black couple approached me and asked me if I knew where the police station was and I said "desole je suis un touriste" and I would've helped them but it didn't seem like an urgent police station thing, moreso that they had an appointment. I keep thinking of Petzold's Transit while I'm here, the two types of migration occuring in that film, the filmed one, and the one embedded in its location. When I was in Tangier I met this couple - a German and an Egyptian - they split their time between Rabat and Marseille and when I said I was surprised by the latter he said "the thing that you won't understand until you go there is that Marseille is not France". And it doesn't feel like France, there are cafes where Moroccans and Algerians sit outside sipping tea and smoking cigarettes, like they do in Morocco, like I imagine they do in Algeria.

I sat in a coffee shop and I organized myself for a while. I drank a cappuccino and got a banana bread. I wrote little notes about the songs that were playing and the associations to media and memory that they gave me (These Days by Nico - Royal Tenenbaums, being 16; Dance of the Dream Man - Twin Peaks, being 19). I thought about how the main thing that bothers me with being in a place where my language is so broken is that it destroys my ability to code-switch, but I still go on with this broken French in restaurants and grocery stores and little interactions and it's mainly fine. I can't really let myself commit to learning French all the way before my Tamil is excellent is the issue and I should just hire online teachers once I have more money. But until then I'll sit with the pleasure of Reve and Livre and all the words I know from being illiterately well-read. After I finished the coffee and the banana bread, I looked at the stains on my napkin, then at the smears of melted chocolate on the plate, and then the foam remaining on the cup. I thought about how the main thing I've been doing with the images I've created thus far has been manipulated images of surfaces that I've made, with a degree of intention, but also being open to how they form themselves. Three surfaces now presented themselves for me. I scribbled some lines into some of the spaces on the napkin, then took my pictures. After talking to J I finished working them into an edit. I don't love them, but the exercise seems fruitful.

The final notes - how autoportrait is French for self-portrait, Godard's Autoportrait, how auto means self, how automatic refers to a thing that does it by itself - that made me think of 'you can do it all by yourself' and then 'babygirl what's your name let me talk to you let me buy u a drank' and 'SHAWTYYYYYYYYY'. The T in T-Pain stands for Tallahassee Pain. C told me that.

The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the shared concerns of common tasks, of an occupation, through the simplicity of intimate speech, the force of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly historical; but he doesn’t want to waste time either, and since he doesn’t know anymore how to do anything but write, at least he writes in response to his everyday history and in accord with the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid, thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time’s absence.

1 AM in Marseille:

In the airport I was texting J about writing and art writing but I was texting him from my phone and I was still tired from all the beers so I wasn't able to get all the words out of myself efficiently. I was telling him about how elegant his instagram handle sounds when said out loud in a british accent and then he said that M told him I'd been going in on Twitter which I was it's so easy to post words on the internet when you're drunk, they made it too easy to post and that's why I have to come here, where I could still post drunk but it's a much slower vehicle of dissemination, one that demands a greater degree of intentionality... maybe... I'm trying to decide if I agree with that last part, I'm not sure if "demand" is the right word, perhaps "creates" functions better, the way this writing machine is built in comparison to the other writing machines. He said he feels the same with IG stories and I said yea but I like how inane my IG stories usually are, in comparison text feels so naked and he agreed, then we texted more about writing practices and how they're developed and shaped, the role self-publication vs. self-promotion plays into it, and I thought of the public in publication which was in those Blanchot quotes that are somewhere above here from The Book to Come.

I'm back in France thinking Baudelaire's Salons and Mallarme's La Derniere Mode, of return to old forms, but also ways to make them new. I still like the idea of an e-reader that begins at first principles, to guide a certain type of Reading, and of course it can be translated from that, just as I've only encountered Baudelaire and Mallarme through translation, but that's where it has to begin. In a way that already happens here, where a certain type of reading happens by virtue of how one must come to these words. I feel as though I repeat myself, but that this repetition is good, that the looping of themes and ideas helps me hone in on certain things, specific directions, and other vague things just beyond the curtain of language. It is this sort of active process, where I don't know where this will lead, and that's part of the joy of it, letting the world come into it, to shape me.

In London I went to three shows — already I don't like that, I don't like how it sounds or frames what happens and I went to more than three shows, but there are three shows that I think function in relation to one another as it relates to my time in London in different kinds of arts spaces of different sizes, scopes, and ambitions, and then I come back to this idea of ekphrasis, the idea of communicating things that I saw without images, or rather communicating things that I saw around the deluge of images of them, and still this idea of seeing and looking as my words of choice as opposed to experiencing, or something of that sort. How am I engaging with art - every word around it, even engage, has this specific connotation of associations that I wrestle with, like fighter jets engaging one another in a dogfight, whether in real life or in the Top Gun GameCube game that faintly pops into my memory. There's a gallery with a similar name that J was texting me about - they want him to do a show and he just keeps avoiding it - and I wonder if that's the joke, another war thing happening in New York City.

I come back to where wars are happening and I come back to the deaths of the post colony and now I'm back in Arcadia Missa grafting HopOutBlick onto the Beyonce painting, while also more acutely aware of the optics of painting black people swimming, the stereotypes that accompany it, the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, Drexciya and mythologies and Daughters of the Dust all passing through my head. There's also Barthes - every image is an image of death, he was talking about the photograph and at one point I wrote about how this related to the sound-image, where you can open up a streaming service and listen to dead voices and they were always going to die but you didn't know when. I wonder if Frank Ocean can listen to Blonde or if his brother's voice on the outro is too much for him. My tweet about the weight of the world continues to circulate, people feel it, and I still feel it, but you feel the weight differently at different times, sometimes it's close to crushing you, and at other moments you can lift it above your head, even throw it into the air for a moment of rest before gravity drags it back down on top of you.

There's the matter of the Cavalli painting and the lawsuit, but my mind also drags in the constellation of The Clipse and Mr. Me Too, Pusha T saying "Pyrex stirs turned into Cavalli furs". This sort of intertextual leap from association to association probably stems from how you're trained to look at film, all shots existing in relation to the history of shots, and now I try to work out how French of an idea that is. I used my scribe app to record all the words said in Twilight City and at the end it looped the final sentence over and over and over again and when i was looking at the text file of it, it was an amazing image, I decided to tweet it, F replied that it was beautiful and I sent her a file of the film because I know she's into dean blunt and we'd talked about mekas so I figured she'd like it and then I send too many words, talking about how Mati Diop uses the Hype Williams track iceprincess in Atlantique and that there's this shot of the moon in Atlantique that mirrors this shot of the moon in Twilight City and that's probably the point that grounds my association of the two things together so strongly. I found the legs of Cavalli to be the most interesting part, there's this sort of shadow play going on that makes him look Black if one were to just focus on that section, which is easy to do with how the work is displayed, far too tall for the gallery's ceiling - there's an implicit message here too, a Black painter saying I'm making work of a certain scale and the institutions that could show it aren't doing so right now. Perhaps that's a little presumptuous, he's showing at Maxwell Graham in another week, where the ceilings are very tall. I met the gallerist with B in April, B goes back with him, it was a very funny interaction with one of those very certain types of art people who can act a certain way because they've carved out this sort of accepted reinforcement for those behaviors. Many such cases, many such cases.

In Twilight City, during one of the narrator's letters to her mother, she says "we'd fall into another silence — now we can't ever afford that luxury". It reopened the question of how does one afford anything? Right now I afford life through debt, I've made my peace with it, in time I'll work and I'll erase the debt. There are systems of debt, the one I'm in is not the worst. Yesterday I was googling about Derrida and the gift but there were too many words, it wasn't the time, I closed the tabs. I wrote some words, and then I deleted them. It's so easy to do that. The three different galleries of my time in London - Galerina, Arcadia Missa, White Cube - they can all afford such different things, and perhaps the interesting thing is how similar the Galerina and White Cube shows were on a certain level - working with time, place, and language at incredibly different scales. 24 plates turned into 24 clocks, a room where time is divided on the floor, there is no beginning or end, none of the plates had hands, and again the idea of a landmine of needing to step in a certain way to avoid breaking a plate, to shattering the delineation of time, or rather shattering its representation, all making me cognizant now of how fragile it all is. Meanwhile in White Cube, there were 3 paintings of massive scale in a room with a mass of rubble at it's center. Barbed wire wrapped around the rubble, stones and dust get kicked from time to time if you're not careful, but you're not going to trample into the piece. B was friends with one of the gallery girls there, she told us that it's not actually cement but styrafoam, at least the big pieces are, and then as we keep walking in circles around the piece, acting as the hands for this clock of rubble, you slowly become aware of this deceit, there's parts of the wreckage that would've collapsed under their own weight had they been different materials, but instead styrafoam won't erode at a natural pace - or rather it will but the natural pace of styrafoam's erosion is so much slower than that of a rock. At first I struggled with this piece, trying to make sense of the wreckage because it struck me as the wreckage of World War II, which happened after Finnegans Wake, and of course there's also the wreckage of modernity, which feels more explicit now given the links to chemistry, science, the enlightenment necessary for this styrafoam to come into being.

There's also the matter of density, the amount of texts and images on the board of hotel stickers in Galerina is probably equivalent in proportion to the amount of intertextual references going on at the Wake show. In that dark hallway of detritus, there was one glass case that had this aged dusty representation of a baguette inside, underneath it was a joke of a phrase, something along the lines of "pain the shem man", flipping "Shem the penman" into a French pun about bread, but also maybe about the pain that accompanies the transmission of letters. The whole deal w/ "Shem the penman" and "Shaun the post" can be butchered into Joyce dealing with the transmission of letters, the origins of the postal service, there's reference to von thurn und taxis, but beyond the histories of the past, it also points to the trajectories of the future, the increasing speed of the post, of this transmission of letters that we now grasp through the internet. At the same time, I think of the Ewa Poniatowska's uncle in Poland using the post, how the post is central to this work, and how The Post via instagram stories, via the Galerina website and documentation, via the internet as a whole then circulates images of her work after the show goes up. Posting, posting, posting - it's one of those words where it's become so common you forget to think about the origin, the etymology, but also because it's only used in relation to the public. You text or message someone, you don't post them, to post them is such a public gesture and again Derrida and the post card and that quote from above pop back up. When I was texting J, we were talking about the nudity of text, but we didn't get into its lack of dissipation. There's a range of Posts, some are like styrafoam, some like cement, and others like flowers, sheding their petals as the seasons turn. Now, I realize that a transformation occurred, alchemical, in which I went from texting J to posting J, as the private was rendered public, as he lead me into this. It's 1 am in Marseille. It could be the title of a Drake song.