Untitled (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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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."