a reveille against shame
sound the bugle
LIFE RX 28 OCT 24
the eight of wands, and a paragraph from Miranda July’s All Fours:
It was a video shot at night—I had to cup my hand around the phone and hunch over it to block the glare. He was lit only by his car headlights. It took a little while for me to notice them: the columns. He was dancing in front of the Excelsior. He had gotten up in the middle of the night, slipped out of their bed, driven back to the motel, parked the car just so, and done this dance. There was no part where he touched his heart or enacted heartache in an explicit way—it was just the whole thing. His whole body was desperate and writhing and occasionally climbing an invisible thread, seeming to rise, and then falling as if down a well. He did it in slow motion so I could see each frame, the terror of falling. Some movements he did again and again, like a repetitive thought or a human trapped in the limits of this fucking life. At the end he walked toward the camera, his sneakers crunching on the gravel, broad shoulders heaving breathlessly, and for a moment his whole face filled the screen. He looked wrecked.
the aleatory
Punk is dead. Meat thought is dead. The box office opening is dead. Anyone who isn’t an auteur is dead—and so are the auteurs. Fast-food restaurants with beige atria and phildendrons are dead. Romance. Third places. High school home ec class, I can only imagine. Locality—when was the last time you visited a small or midsize town in America that didn’t have a coffee shop full of Japanese ceramics, a hair salon with sacred geometry on the walls, a squiggle-fonted boutique of Xanax sweatpants? Charm, kindness, public discourse that isn’t just everyone saying the same phrase on the same day. Clickthroughs are dead. SEO doesn’t exist anymore. Products are dead. Investor-friendly zombie concepts are dead, but that’s why they’re so popular. The algorithms are somehow all dead. Instagram just shows you the same ad for colostrum supplements. Your attention span is dead. Don’t lie. You probably clicked away from this email twice already. Everything is dead except for, somehow, the electoral college.
Sometimes I think, gosh. It is just so embarrassing to be a writer. To say, ok, I know nobody asked for an eight-hour mental engagement with some people I invented (jk they’re all me) (jk they’re all you), but I went ahead and sketched it up over the last [inaudible] years and you can read it, and I also put in a few images I’ve been thinking about every day for my entire life. And I did this instead of doing so many other things, especially sensible things that would have helped the world in a measurable way, because it just really seemed like I had to do this. How silly is that? Absolutely godawful embarrassing, when all these things are dying and hollowed out to the point of abolute morbidity.
I thought for the longest time that I could escape the humiliating aspect of all this by being very tough-minded and unyielding and leading with more doubt than anyone about the value of art. But it only made it harder for me to do the one thing that I seem to be driven to do, which is to make a tiny indelible place of of black lines and dots, and make it so real that it’s like a drug when you go there. And to make it as much itself as possible, to separate it from my own personal sense of rhetoric and identity enough that you can be home there as much as I can.
It isn’t insensitive to go on living (breathing, making things) in the midst of death. It’s vain to play dead because you’re afraid to stand for something.
I’m saying this to remind myself as much as to remind you. Every time I see a social media post shaming people for having the gall to keep on getting through the days during xyz crisis, I feel the heat of accusation. Here I am, alive, forgetting to tear myself to pieces, to criticize myself adequately or properly bracket my various sins. I try to make myself smaller, small enough to escape any hypothetical criticism. I can be a bad person, or I can be dead. So I pick up my phone—it’s my tombstone.
But I’m not dead. Not actually! How do I know? Because there are images I want to write down and invented people who are falling in love in a word processing document I made.
Wanting to make art is how you know you’re not dead. And if that’s all it accomplishes, that is good enough.
the assignment
get to work!!!!!!!!!
writing prompt
get to work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
a chune
“Vaxxine” by Visqueen
If you listen to this song in your car, your odds of getting a speeding ticket go way, way up. It chills me that this song missed inclusion in the Empire Records soundtrack, where it belongs spiritually. (Rachel Flotard’s voice even evokes a little bit of the scritchy-scratchy Renee Zellweger rooftop punk singer moment.) I think I only ever heard of Visqueen because Neko Case mentioned them in an interview a million million years ago. Which is funny, because in their active years, I probably carried every possible algorithmic identifier that would me an ideal listener, should Spotify have existed then. (Knew every word to every Belly record? Drew on her Jansport backpack with a wite-out pen?) I know I said above that all these things are dead, but if you listen to this you’ll know better, because you’re still a teenager in all the ways that count.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
All Fours by Miranda July
“Vaxxine” by Visqueen
dear diary, what the fuck is it about people who leave handprints all over windows? What is up with that? My mind turns to this because on Mondays I typically clean our AirBnb, and while much of the time this is an ordinary errand, sometimes the messiness haunts me. Like these guests, who tried to make hot cocoa directly in the electric kettle and then put the electric kettle through the dishwasher!! What IS that? There was a scattering of blue and white jewel-like shards under the wood stove. I swept them up. They didn’t seem sharp enough to be glass. I licked one (like a private detective!!) and it began to go cloudy and dissolve and I got a stomach ache. Miranda July should really consider cleaning Airbnbs because you do get a bizarre form of intimacy with people. But it’s really just the default form of intimacy, where you wonder what the FUCK someone was thinking. XS
a GIFT this was to read xxx thank you