Casablanca (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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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