Landscape II (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

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.