tweet #12

was it teddy adorno who wrote that utopia is blocked by possibility? http://goo.gl/9eCmr

— Seth Young (@autresy) March 25, 2011

spectral pincer

For about two years I have been experiencing moments of déjà vu at an unprecedented frequency and intensity: whenever I have been introduced to someone, I have been haunted for days afterward by a sense of recollection, even when I've proven to myself the impossibility of a previous encounter. At first I attributed this burst of memory metastasis to my relocation to a new country. Dasein will not have been at home. But nineteen months later, the hyper-familiarity, the endless glitches in the matrix persist. They persist and now work in coordination with a new symptom: the inability to picture anyone's face. I used to be able to call up and contemplate people's faces in my mind. Now I'm Holly Martins being spirited through Vienna; faces are lit for an instant as the machine in which I'm being conveyed roars past. Perhaps adopting the habit of really staring at people – not rude, evidently, by Berlin standards – has eroded my ability to stare at them when they are no longer in front of me. So far, my hearing is unaffected.

nach Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums

Adapted from an email to JPH, April 11, 2013:

For a month or so I was commuting from Belmont Shore, Long Beach, to Mission Viejo. Inevitably each morning I would be stuck in southbound 405 traffic, and, having consumed the requisite amount of coffee to be able actually to drive a car, I would need to pee. Bad. While painfully coaxing my manual transmission Datsun, nicknamed "Mobu Al Deep," stop and go, stop and go, stop and go down the freeway, each release of the clutch corresponding to a nearly catastrophic bladder squeeze. And then I would finally reach the soulless office park where I was temping for a software company and release a huge stream of urine upon whatever poor, leafless tree had been planted there to offer people the illusion of shade. I say 'illusion' because later, at the end of the day, eager to get the hell out of there, I would have to wait and wait and wait for my steering wheel to cool off before I could touch it long enough to guide that heap of a car back out onto the freeway. But the weather is lovely.

I like pop music.

open triad

February 7, 2013

Blonde Redhead's "Bipolar" Shuffles on. Before the song really gets going I recognize it by its initial drumstick clicks. How are we able to do that? identify a recording merely by an opening percussive tchk or three? I'm certain that I could correctly identify, within a click or two, any song in my large mp3 library that has a drumstick start. What a miracle of memory and perception! when the silence changes, and the click rends it, and within such a small caesura, we anticipate a whole song. When did we all start dying?