jan 2 2020 - canonizing a year? nah
jan 2 2020 - canonizing a year? nah
withholding some of my wittiest content !
dear reader,
i come to you from a previous decade, one you might have been in since people started frantically anticipating its arrival with the countdown’s and best of 2019’s and best of the decade lists whose integrity i questioned. how many spots were earnestly chosen? how many spots were paid for by sponsors? but ofc, most Mainstream Content has already been filtered by the Patrons - i saw that movie because everyone was talking about it, but only because the media was hyping it, but mainly because the marketing dollars got behind that film and dumped CATS (lol), which still got reverse hype notoriety, if not as many of the dollars that things/people get for being BAD (see; NYT columnists, US politicians, etc.). i was also here before this panic about the gregorian calendar moving and have already left and will be back soon ~
i’ve also been thinking about my last slushee and how those pieces of content crossed my consciousness with the right kind of relevance. here’s another succession mash up that’s very ‘on the nose’ - delusions of homoerotic american grandeur. but what fantasies and rhythms (i see you 2012 LDR) and erasures are these expressions of self-knowing white nostalgia predicated on?
i could find out perhaps, following another curiosity towards a precise unraveling of imagery, symbolism, and forms i’m not expert in. but for this object, i don’t feel deeply compeled.
this question was at the crux of the last slushee’s back half. sure, i was nervous by a few deadlines but the imposter syndrome is old. do i know enough to write enough? does ’knowing’ mean ‘knowing the white canon’ and even if it doesn’t, one could spend a lifetime reading old things and not write anything now, not that writing now is the benchmark of a life lived.
i’ve read and watched and listened to a good # of things over the last year — i started an attempt at compiling a deliberately incomplete list of some memorable and less-talked-about books, songs, TV, movies, etc. that i chose or that the algorithm chose for me that i didn’t turn down or skip. a small act of canonizing, if you will. it was cute and funny and so incomplete. i thought about this recent piece about how people don't read anything and how writers now write in a style that anticipates that and i felt nauseous at the idea of spending even more time somehow culling together what would always be an ‘imperfect’ list and, as i’ve whined before
there’s so much content !!
so in the vein of doing less, i pasted the very fun, witty, cleverly self-referential (i need to compliment myself on my labor well-spent!) multimedia list into a place that maybe (gasp!) doesn’t (eek!) need to be shared publicly on the internet b/c i do not currently possess the fortitude to contend with all the ways context spirals out gets squished in even the clearest of concise internet writings.
and you know how i tend to write ;)
in a time where it feels like most of the internet-content is meta-content about meta-content and meta-data, writing about writing, writing about reading, reading about the internet while necessarily online (don’t talk to me about clouds in this way), critiquing how our criticism has devolved, long-form pieces about short-form twitter fights, and some of this is good and important and my body is tired
today’s first quarter moon shifted from pisces to aries, so this is the best i can do:
if you wanna reply with a piece of content/culture you’re still thinking about, i’ll respond with one of mine
if i had an intention for arbitrary turns of the calendar page, one for now might be to be so intentional about spending time with gud things b/c it’d be so easy to spend all the time laughing at bad twitter memes and while that’s nice sometimes, there’s this queue of new music and articles and books that i hope to take in as well so i can gush and guffaw about it in person next time we might meet
to dialectics in context and good cheer ;)
bn