Another Year

Things are winding down. I’m somewhere between having a completed first draft and a rough outline of my race and urban planning paper. I’m trying to think up a title that’s clever but not at first. Only in retrospect.

One of the best parts of procrastinating is that I finally get around to the web-slacking that I know I should’ve attended to for some time. Joined Reddit and Vimeo. Also discovered totally badass video series Target Women. This summer will be time spent with Donna Haraway and Robert Bolaño, also, in the garden, and with my baby:

my baby

Sometimes the library’s the only place to be, and sometimes my room is the only place to be. Huh.

A few things

I saw a girl at the gym yesterday. On the front side of her shirt:

God is dead.
– Nietzsche

And on the back:

Nietzsche is dead.
– God

I didn’t know what to think. Of course I did anyway, but I’d wish I’d asked her what it meant to her.

On another note, I like some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the study rooms in Raushenbush. I found this particularly affecting:

I forget that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character and that therefore what one does in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops.
–Oscar Wilde

Today begins the long haul.

TITLE

Writing a blog entry (I can’t find it in me to do the work that needs to be done). I’m writing a texture piece in the spirit of Ligeti’s Atmospheres but I’m allowing for harmonies to crop up and since the transitions between different sections are meant to be subtle and messy it’s got a little bit of a Reich-like sound. I’m using big chords though, entire scales really, so it’s still essentially a texture piece. It should be cool. You will come and hear it and that’ll be good.

I got fucking sunburned yesterday, but then I took a cold showerfollowedbybath like three times and it made me well. I drank a beer and it put me right to sleep but not before I put on Aloe. Now I have a tan. It was ninety yesterday. It’s going to be ninety today. I can say, without a doubt, that I find this to be the most perfect weather in existence, fuck all y’all west coast people with yr insistence on “dry heat.” It’s not that pretty. I like being wet. So do you (I know it). It’s awesome, and the sky looks dense and filled with things, there are many more beautiful clouds and the soft haze that floats above the city and the fields during the golden hour makes me feel like I’m in a movie about the future or an alternate dimension and Tim Burton’s doing the set design. Anyway I had to lay around with little clothing. It made for a happiness I cannot explain even though I felt like a vain douchebag.

I’m gonna write. When it’s finished, sometime tonight, I will post the sheet music and you, web denizens, will be able to see what things look like.

@#&*^$#!

Fuck Sarah Lawrence’s housing lottery. I need to have a room to myself, I need to be naked, frequently. I also need a goddamned kitchen. Why the fuck couldn’t they have given us Kober?

Bicycles, Whiteness, Cigarettes

Look. At this. I see things like this, and I realize that massive sums of money are of little consolation. The best things in life are usually affordable. Maybe that’s a terribly ignorant (arrogant?) statement and revealing of my white, middle-class privilege.

I’ve been thinking about race of late. (That’s always true.) But it seems to me that whiteness is whatever everything else isn’t. When I look at a site like Stuff White People Like, I get a little upset at their attempts to ascribe middle-class triviality and self-absorption to white culture. I’m not sure why.

My intuition tells me that I have good reason, that this facade of critical, self-deprecation is little more than a cover for self-indulgent fawning. There’s an acknowledgment and a tacit acceptance of the notion that America’s class structure favors whites. It’s not obvious, but I doubt that the site appeals to any people of color unless they are forced to deal with what they perceive as the social conventions of the bourgeoisie, and that they see themselves as something else.

I think what bothers me the most is that the site functions as a corrective measure against the only good thing that whiteness has to offer, that is, it’s malleability. As far as I can tell, the more people appropriate middle-class values and achieve material wealth, the less ‘whiteness’ will be conflated with bourgeois culture. For any person of color who happens to like old school hip hop, they will suddenly feel the inadequacy of inauthenticity that so often demarcates white culture, even though the beat or a message in the music might truly speak to them, they’ll be pressured out of listening to that music because it essentially amounts to them being ‘white.’ In this way I think SWPL functions to maintain the color lines of other races as well. Also If someone reads about how only white people love coffee, they will have to think to themselves that these white people actually are ridiculously self-absorbed, to the extent that they think their excessive consumption of caffeine is in any way unique and therefore something funny. Things that aren’t true aren’t generally funny. You’d have to have your head stuck up your ass not to realize how popular the drink is just about everywhere on the planet.

Of course the site’s entire premise, be it tongue in check or not, is that there is something essential and categorical about race, so maybe I shouldn’t be particularly surprised by any of this. Still, I can’t stand it. I think it totally undermines the notion that there is such thing as class (which I believe) and that it imputes, in an ideal environment or system, some sort of meaning about a person (which I also believe). Somebody has to get exploited… right?

On another note, I can’t fucking stand living with people who smoke cigarettes. There’re two closed doors between me and them and this shit is still driving me crazy.

Not that I don’t have one now and then…

Cucurrucucu Paloma via Caetano Veloso

I cannot stop playing this song. A cover is in order.

Defining Post-Modernism

Ever since around middle-school when precociousness set in and a few John Cage texts fell into my lap, I’ve always struggled with my working definition of post-modernism. Back then I didn’t want to betray my lack of comprehension with straight-forward questions: what is it? Though when I did explicitly ask the answer sailed over my head. The best clue until recently came from my sexology/cultural studies teacher L. Lewis who told me that “the existentialists passed the ball to the post-modernists.” Phenomenology and existentialism hold a lot of currency in my intellectual Rolodex of ideas and I can see how their efforts to reduce and locate this event in space-time ultimately crash into the wall of Sisyphean ‘to-be-or-not-to-be’ angst. Thus post-modernism.

But I think I’ve broaden my understanding to include a more satisfying and illuminating range of ideas. I’m reading this text called Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture and it’s made me realize that post-modernism is about a new level of process-orientation-awareness. The pre-modern era, in the mythology of Kant and the Enlightened, is little child, lacking self-awareness. Modernism is realizing agency and taking an active role in the processes and patterns that human beings come to see as describing their behavior; in a way, self-awareness. Post-modernism, then, is becoming aware of and affecting the patterns and processes describing our way of becoming aware of and affecting the patterns and processes describing our behavior. I see a parallel in mathematics and physics in the idea of rates. The mind in the pre-modern era is about inertia, matter; in the modern era the focus shifts to constant speeds, velocity; and in the post-modern era it is about acceleration, or speed at which speed changes, the rates of rates of change.

It’s easy to see why so much of the literature comes off as convoluted and abstruse. It’s weird, highly referential way of seeing things, but it is a higher level of reality inasmuch as it’s a valid and logical representation of things, grounded ultimately in common-sense facts about the world. When I read this kind of high-minded literature I get sucked up into the myriad junctures of ideas at levels of abstraction at which I’m not used to thinking about things. All this language is a network of patterns extending human knowledge outwards, all of it constructed from base kernels of logic that seem innocent and unprovocative enough and yet you can blow them out to seemingly meaningless, irrelevant levels of discourse and the whole thing, the patterns of language, still maintain structural integrity.

It’s inspiring and somehow way more empowering than I had assumed to think of things on this level. The undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in this culture runs deep. I don’t know when I become affected by it. Thinking about my backyard in terms of process makes obvious what my top gardening priorities should be. This approach makes even more sense in music. I guess I wasn’t heavily influenced by the dogma of theory until recently, but I realize what a flawed paradigm it is in that it limits the motivic range of music to something unduly formal. Music takes on new meanings all the time! It’s deeply involved in and influenced by its environment! I should embrace the flexibility of meaning in music given context by looking to anticipate any and all environments into music. My next artistic priority: music with sophisticated mobility.

Chico Marx

Pretty unparalleled.

Damn

Having considerable trouble making all this technology work. I’ve decided in the meantime to stick with the free and relative ease of use provided by WordPress.com. That said, I’ve gotten a better idea, through misguided efforts in the past half-year, of the structure and scope of my page. For now, this works.

I been thinking about the hipster class. They got a lot of nerve. Very nervous.

Coming Soon…

We’re working on a ‘real’ website, to be released by the end of the Fall. Stay tuned for more updates.