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the saddest blog that ever was
6.14.2005:
found two mason jars and an entire filing cabinet filled with books from someone named meghan. meghan seemed like an interesting girl, friend material, though the things she threw away were the ones best for keeping, so perhaps not. a pamphlet of the RNC protest routes from last summer, an NYC free events calender that someone else's friend drew the cover for, bikes on punks jumbled and mashed inside a nate powell anthology. score. walkie talkie was a hard read somehow but tiny giants is great. another: penguin classics of classical literary criticism; plato's ion, aristotle's poetics, horace's art of poetry. also: homer's odeyssey, the new translation by robert fitzgerald from the upscale imprint farrar straus giroux. nice book, beautiful unplaceable font with the full greek terms in the index. who is this girl?
she thought vaguely and blandly if her cousin effie was having sex now, the kind of sex she was having. she must be, effie was only four years younger than she was, so twenty-three...alongside that thought swimming in a parallel river slowly drifting downstream the notion of trying to explain thinking about your cousin effie's sex life to white people. she swam with it. the notion of asian-ness and female-ness and sex-things and its explication, in english, already a denomenational concession difficult to fully conceive in. its tricky triangular demarcation enmeshed together and centered fully at...oh such a cliche. she abandoned it. it wasnt true and she couldnt say it. images passed in and in again, never fully going out. courbet's l'origine du monde, especially how Lacan reveled in owning it and even still, displayed it behind velvet drapes, the ceremony itself already another unveiling. then ghada amer's stichings, marina abramovich's burlap peoples both of which she liked, culled from a miscellaneous pile of taschen and phaidon glossies that megan left behind. she mildly considered writing about ghada amer's sewing and maybe tara donovan's coils and fuzzes, looking forward to the expansion in time and space that would allow her to do so. then onto the paul d miller book, aka dj spooky, whose album she once owned but sold, the one before the one with the red and green spaceships or whatever, the one before the video game one, when she thought she was really into ninja tune records stuff (though she still listend to dj shadow at least once a month, which is saying alot). in it dj spooky tells two continuous stories of first a queensryche/iron maiden concert in nyc @ msq and second how he was in tokyo doing a set with dj krush and anticon for the victims of another war. it's worth partially retyping: "america seems to have in abundance, and that other countries are struggling to catch up with - a trend i'd like to call 'demographic nostalgia.' each part of the crowd [at iron maiden/queensryche] reflected their appreciation of the bands they had come to see. they left the garden and moved from the finely tuned precision of rows and seat numbers into clumps and clusters of people held together only by fashion and previous social and geographic allegience like so many particles of gas drawn together by electro-chemical valences and atomic mass. i was in tokyo and doing a show with an old japanese friend of mine, dj krush, and some new folks on the block, anticon, young white kids from Middle America. they were doing a collaboration with krush, a piece called 'song for john walker' - the suburban kid who joined the taliban. needless to say, the backstage vibe was all about dialogue and we were all just kicking it. krush's wife walked in and handed him a samuri sword before his set, and everyone in the room was...umm...kind of silent. in a moment like that , the strangeness (strange-mess) of global culture, hip-hop, and of operating as a dj on a global level crystallized before my eyes. we all sat there and paused for a second. it really felt like a still from a video art installation. krush doesnt speak english, and we have communicated mostly with beats over the years. the show was a benefit for afghani war orphans at tokyo's liquid room in the shinjuku district, and well...you just had to feel the oddity of being in a room with some white americans talking about a lawyer's kid who read malcom x and defected to a terrorist organization and a japanese kid who prayed with his family and was into shinto buddhism chants before he went on stage to do turntable tricks. a scene like that doesn't fit into any normal categorization of hip-hop that normal america wants, and it never will. that's the joy of seeing how this stuff is unfolding in a real way across the globe." ect ect (see pgs 104-5).
she skims over everything, just slurrying the cream off to get to the milk inside, slightly sour. all she can remember about anticon is that some members of anticon are from berkeley, that one of them might have worked at the library, a short little boy with curly hair. she leaps over all the other critical assessments of paul d miller's stories to the one that elides local tribal difference in the face of tyranny of global acculturation. who the hell cares if you listen to dj krush or dj spooky in the crewtonz house of god or in mbabane swaziland where female life expectancy is pegged at 34.07 years of age in 2005. its' all crappy gravy to them. these smallish margins of error are erased completely to some dude who wants to write books proclaiming djs as the engines of postmodernity or whatnot. things he says upsets her so easily at moments indescribable inscrutible in its mysterious machinations it is and becomes completely ridiculous. this is what its all about. the fact that she thinks anticon is from berkeley and thus are not merely white kids from "M"iddle "A"merica which dj spooky presumes to scorn with cultural supremacy and the fact that he cannot recognize this subtle difference between the progressive white hip-hop of the east bay and the not-so-progressive white hip-hop of the not-east bay merely serves to strip him of credibility in her youthful eyes. she is almost glad she sold back the cd. but not really, her mind shrugs, whatever. she was merely illustrating the point to herself that tribal differences (tribal in the sociological term, in the eileen term) are sometimes so quickly effaced as to render them superfluous from day to day operation. so why bother keeping them? why cant two bands from two different houses playing the singular equivalent of journey to someone like her neighbor across the street attending nyu who hath not the connoisseurship of years of iron maiden and motorhead just play? the scene was a snob and she was disgruntled at having been caught up in it. but it was because secretly, she was maybe a snob. all kids are secretly snobs who want to be kids forever, who retain the right and forgo the responsibility to fuck you at any moment. the ones in the noise scene, the ones in the old lady scene, the post-garage revival new hippie-boho scene like adam's, the white girls liberation movement scene, the electro-clashing for democracy scene, the photographers who vie to be in vice magazine aka todd s aka suckapants dot com vs. anterlerdgirl fashion anarchist scene...so she returned with childish glee to the delillo sen had loaned her and was only moderately grossed out by the the machinery of her own self-created generated perpetuated insensitivity. and then she remembered that episode of family guy when peter decides to narrate his own life. the wife punches him in the face and hours later he wakes up in the dark. i hope this happens to her as well.
Blog // 8:20 PM
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