Dream

April 29th

Had a dream about death as an emaciated black dog, leading a line of trudging people and creatures across a quiet rural landscape. They were all walking to the afterlife in some vague, hard to articulate sense. Maybe each would disappear one by one while no one was looking or something, it didn't bother explaining itself to me. They resembled the danse macabre in The Seventh Seal a bit, probably inspired by reading about black dog folklore in the days beforehand. I like the phrase "death as black dog," I might do something with it.

Summer poem

This first day of summer

Looking out the window, I see the sky sprawling

Cascading pure blue and empty

With a million leaves arcing upward against it

Soaked in light and saturated in life

And I know I will die on a day like this

Just like the day two years ago

When the sky yawned blue and clear and full

And I layed in bed wanting nothing

And begging for God to take his weary angel home

And just like the day two years from now

When it will be closer than it ever was in the past

And in that moment I will have longer to live than I ever will again

Feeling that giddy precipice approaching

Feeling it like stormclouds in the distance

Knowing that this weary angel will not be asked permission before he is blown away

Just like everything else, when that great blue reaches down and soaks this all

As clear and full and empty as it now is sprawling above me out the window

With a million green leaves pressed up against it

And I know I will die on a day like this

Pure pale blue

Unfinished essay scrap

[...] the real tangible texture of a vhs tape [conveys] the aesthetic of the decay of the medium, the conceptualisation of a rotting corpse embedded in the very way the corpse is struggling to communicate (@_C6507 (vivian raine))

The further back you go in time, the lower-quality the recordings tend to be. I can't help but think of it as a kind of underwater abyss, and it often gives me the same cold, sick feeling in my gut as being over deep water does. If I were on a boat above the Marianas Trench, it would likely evoke the same feeling as blurry, degraded photos from the earlier half of the 1800s, woodcuts by poorly documented artists, anonymous medieval marginalia, the outlines of lost information. As you go down, everything gets more and more fragmentary and waterlogged, until all you have is blurry scraps with the signal all but lost in noise, before all thats left is that noise itself, and all you can meaningfully say is that something was here once. Memories left unretrieved for years and sitting perched over oblivion, and the vague traces of memories that have long since made that plunge into irretrievability but that leave faint imprints where they used to be. (The same phenomena remains in modern contexts, possibly in an even more immediate and visceral sense; in blurry webcam stills and abandoned online presences, "presence" used in the same ghostly sense as "spectre" or "phantom”; digital cenotaphs that still seem to be haunted by something left behind.)

Digital recordings are haunted by compression - sift through older, forgotten YouTube videos and you'll soon find one that's rendered almost abstract and incomprehensible by a garbling haze of 144p artifacting, message (if there was one) lost in the failure of the medium itself. The anonymous nature of online accounts further facilitates this disconnected element: almost always there is no name, no context, and no information attached, and all you're left with in the vast majority of cases is simply an orphaned memory, recorded and made accessible without a past or a future, presuming anything at all content-wise is decipherable beyond the blur and MP4 artifacts. They're caught between memory and forgetting, partway decomposed into data loss. There's a sense of the unheimlich about these abandoned media fragments, both online and analog, a sense of the departed still speaking, of faint noises and words from behind the veil of forgetting whose meaning you can't quite make out out but can't fully ignore either. Maybe you can decipher a word here or there but it never seems to come into focus, you can just watch the blurry shadows on the other side of the fogged glass and wonder, or try to pretend they aren't there when you know they are.

Unfinished essay scrap

 [...] “youthful innocence and hyper alienation delivered with sincerity, without cynicism” [...]

Pop music is conventionally oriented to serve the flesh and to power the unstated but omnipresent libidinous motor of the cultures that surround it. The overwhelming majority of songs that have scored radio play since the 1970s are implicity or explicitly about fucking, and moreso than their lyrics content, they serve the same physiological function, carrying a sense of forward motion that ultimately align with biological goals. The overwhelming majority of post-internet art is strikingly and even disturbingly different in the context of its abandonment of emotional imperatives that previously so thoroughly saturated the mediascape that we scarcely had words to describe them.

In many of these works, the libidinous motor of pop music is short-circuited and redirected in a markedly different direction; the energy that served an explicitly sexual or or non-sexual will-to-power — will to status and superiority, will to control, will to violence — function, is harnessed and reoriented towards a completely separate imperative. The emotional charge is shifted from pleasure to transcendence (the absence of the need for pleasure itself,) the fulfillment of one's need for pleasure to the complete abandonment of that need. There are, at present, dozens of online music scenes that retain the structure and stylings of dance music while specifically trying to make music designed to make you cry. The pursuit of God (not necessarily religious) has found its way to forms of art previously consigned to dancefloor utility because individuals in search of proximity to God have realized that the energy of those art forms — hip hop and electronic club music specifically — have great potential to move in directions towards that proximity. Given that decades of cultural selection have specifically bred forms of music — the aforementioned modern hip hop and club music — designed to carry as much energy as possible, it makes complete sense that artists looking to create powerful forms of transcendent art would  appropriate this energy and use it for their own purposes.

Bubblegum bass, despite retaining (and even sometimes emphasisting, to the point of parody) the sexual innuendos of top-40s pop, has a strange sense of sexlessness. QT can sing about feeling “your hands on my body” without the song having any more erotic energy than a Staples ad (corporate imagery being a deliberate influence in the stylings of prime-era PC Music’s work.) It invokes a feeling reminiscent of youthful innocence — recall singing along to, in retrospect, questionable pop song lyrics as a preteen, not particularly knowing or caring what they meant. The structural energy of pop or club song movement is stripped of its sexual context and set in motion to power the sense of warmth and first-crush innocence these songs convey. (“Where Jason Derulo sings about his erotic, exotic adventures, Hannah Diamond sings about puppy-dog love.”)

This is because the conceptual world of bubblegum bass, and post-internet music generally, lacks flesh inherently.  The semantic signifiers to worldly indulgence remain, but self-consciously point to a very conspicuous nothing; an absence of flesh. In the realm of post-internet art, flesh is substituted by plastic, metal, screens, or simulacra in a kind of casual, unstated transhumanism. It is only logical that post-flesh, post-pleasure media would arise during the formation of a generation whose primary existential medium is no longer their flesh, but the silicon and screens through which they interact with the world that really matters to them (or at least to those of them who take an interest in post-internet art.) Once one has abandoned their flesh, it is easy to see why the pursuit of transcendent states could follow.

[...] could be projected just as accurately among large swaths of the current electronic underground, whose music serves entirely “post-pleasure” functions. However, the emotional affect of current electronic music exists in an odd relationship to depression; the depression of non-pleasure remains, juxtaposed simultaneously and seamlessly with transcendence (the removal of need for pleasure itself.) It is the aural communication of complete bliss in complete loss. These songs exist in a state of bifaceted unipolarity (one image communicating two messages at once,) in which a sense of heartbroken desolation and blissful warmth exist without any sense of contradiction. It calls to mind a non-physical, desexualized experience of love; of first crushes without the demands and impositions later socially forced onto such connections, uncauterized, unnumbed, and unlabelled. The difference between these states (love and longing, bliss and loss, flying and falling) only exist when seen from a perspective in which the concept of the pleasure principle still holds any real coherency; without it (that is, in the transcendent state,) they are seen as one and the same (see also the plethora of religious traditions in which physical suffering and spiritual bliss coexist.)

1. “Danny L Harle's music has this weird property where you can see it as either depressing or upbeat and it's like one of those optical illusions that's two pictures at once.” (@tsero.0)

2. “There's a tangible darkness to "Without You". [...] It's not a feeling a pop song is supposed to give off.” (@Helwy, February 20 2020)

Personal interest list

In no order

Soyuzmultfilm and Soviet animation (Nu Pogodi, Leopold the Cat, etc.), post-Soviet culture and Eastern Europe generally, khrushchevka, British folklore, mythology, and urban legends (black dogs, stone tape theory, Hexham wolf, etc.), Britain and British culture generally, Ireland and Irish culture generally, historical and contemporary (geo)politics and ideology ([removed]), religion (Buddhism and Christianity mostly, also Quakerism; the lives of the saints, both canonized and uncanonized; religious iconography and ethics; Saint Francis (and the Wolf of Gubbio,) Pierre de Luxembourg, Saint Christopher; doctrine of universal reconciliation,) ethics and post-biological values (non-anthropocentrism, antisexualism, antinatalism, negative utilitarianism, veganism and animal rights, Mitchell Heisman's concept of post-biological values,) AI development (If Anyone Builds It [...], AGI and ASI, x-risk and p(doom) discussion and writing, political and cultural implications, attempting to keep up with things in real-time as it all happens, Lesswrong, potential timelines and developments, AI 2027 and associated projects and websites, Claude Mythos talking about Mark Fisher for some reason nobody seems to know,) hauntology (in music; in writing; in mainstream culture; references in past culture (Sapphire and Steel and basically anything else Mark Fisher talks about,)) angelicism01 (Jonty’s works themselves and the surrounding culture, Dimes Square itself to a limited degree, potentiality of near-term extinction, “going extinct online,” film01,) funny animals (vintage fursuits, non-furry anthropomorphism, Reynard and Isengrim, Robin Hood (1973), Watership Down, mascots and characters, old illustrations, furry music, certain corners of modern furry subcultures, sparkledogs,) OTC drug subcultures (DXM mostly, as well as research chemicals, grey market substances, etc.) digital archiving, Soulseek, piracy, animals and animal symbolism (cats, wolves, foxes, coyotes, deer, rabbits and hares, hawks, ravens and corvids, sparrows, etc.), digital presences, online urban legends, various authors (Mario Montano, Kenji Miyazawa, Jonty Tiplady,) music (obsessively) (bubblegum bass, ambient, drone, HNW/ANW/DNW, (early/unique) hyperpop/cloud rap/digicore/rave rap/"scenecore," twee / jangle / dream / indie / noise pop, shoegaze, noisegaze, emo rap, neofolk, hauntology, sound collage, emo, midwest emo, post-punk, coldwave, nightcore, vaporwave, post-nightcore, deep internet, field recordings, noise, tape music, bedroom pop, slacker rock, signalwave, turntable music, plunderphonics, lowercase, reductionism, chamber folk, power electronics, death industrial, martial industrial, toypop, "new way of Danish fuck you," etherial wave, breakcore, onkyo, spoken word, slowcore, seapunk, witch house, C86, indie folk, late 2000s/early 2010s post-internet phenomena generally, glitch, dark ambient, ambient pop, indietronica, indie rock, gorenoise,) caffeine, cultural minutae, archiving and documentation, friendship, flowers (and photos of flowers,) vintage stuffed animals (and some modern ones,) post-modern & ergodic literature, post-internet art and net art, antiquarianism, conceptual / performance / transgressive / dada art, universal constructed languages (Esperanto, Toki Pona, Toki Ike,) heraldic animals, visual art (Louis Wain, Komako Sakai, Mark Rothko, Eva and Franco Mattes, JODI, Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Roze Stiebra, David Lynch, Ladislas Starevich, etc.), Monotone Blue, the idea of living in a slowly ending world, puppetry, junkie subcultures, northern cities in Europe, the Titanic, cynocephali, medieval folklore, unicorns, cultural studies, weird online niches, individuals with idiosyncratic value systems, affection, pacifism

Review of Rabbits (2002)

[...] the rabbits remain in their unchanging world, strikingly disconnected from the rest of the film. The jagged stream of continuity that Inland Empire operates through seems to go from fragmented to entirely irrelevant, broken time to no time at all. Instead of existing at the boundaries of clashing realities and narrative levels, their segments of the film feel abandoned and almost clinical, existing outside of the flow of time, broken or not; instead of the rapid and hysterical narrative of the rest of the film, fraught with constantly-shifting external drama and poorly defined internal anxieties, a cold resignation weighs like a weighted blanket over the rabbit’s rain-soaked world [...] the flow of linear time is severed, and everything takes on the feeling of a gradually cooling physical system asymptotically approaching absolute zero more so than any kind of human drama, however abstracted or alienated. [...] The rabbit’s world feels like a dream, going on without the dreamer. If the rest of the film is subject to nightmare logic, the Rabbits are what are left of a nightmare when the dreamer wakes up and the rest of the oneiric world goes on without them, stripped of momentum or motivation and left to quietly end like unmaintained hardware. "I do not think it will be much longer now."

Among the monotone dissociation of the rest of the film, much is understandably made of the brief intrusions of activity, specially the ritualistic interludes and the ringing telephone (the single cutscene in the films entire duration,) but I find it hard to interpret these as more than brief bursts of inconsequential energy in a slowly failing system that leave almost as soon as they arrive. The trains of logic and actual activity left by the long-departed dreamer in this world still surface from time to time, but they are mere scraps of imagery and movement that trail off into nothing as soon as their residual momentum runs out, and the ceaselessly repeated non-action of the film settles back into place. The moment that I'm inclined to make the most out of, and consider the films emotional cornerstone, occurs around 18 minutes in; Suzie wordlessly sits down between Jack and Jane on the couch, and the three lean their heads together. In a film so devoid of recognizably human feelings besides a vague disconnect too tired to be called anxiety, a moment of almost tenderness is striking. Calling it sweet might be making too much of it, but the idea that an almost-comfort can be found in this exhausted, collapsed world without drive or trajectory is haunting in its own way.

It also suggests that the rabbits, rather than being empty automatons parroting their dislocated phrases and meandering blindly through their non-narrative, have some kind of interiority; they are inhabitants of their closed world rather than props in it, actual characters in an empty room where it is always raining who can find some kind of solace in each others presence. We can no longer take comfort in the possibility that these are just things that are happening without anything inside looking out from behind their eyes, however blank they may seem. To make something of the actual costumes themselves, it calls to mind rabbits in a burrow, sleeping through a harsh winter that they may or may not live to see the end of. It opens the unsettling possibility of living like this; affectless without being emotionless, exhausted without being non-present, the feeling of living in a world that is slowly ending, or might have ended a long time ago, simply stoking the ashes for lack of anything else to do.

Unfinished essay excerpt

[...] that the current phenomenon of aesthetic-oriented soundcloud rap is a kind of un/intentional attempt at articulating hyperspecific cultural states as a way of orienting oneself in an increasingly schizophrenic and disorienting (pop) cultural landscape. The early years of the self-aware post-internet music scene (post-sunsetcorp/Ryder Ripps basically) is by nature very cognizant of its post-post-ironic / neo-sincere state, placement within the internet itself, and its aspirations to a kind of modern art status; and this “post-internet” scene can be entirely bisected into two separate waves - late 00s until 2020, and 2020 onward. The former was primarily the product of more underground or idiosyncratic producers / artists, as the attitudes and aesthetics inherent to the post-internet “movement” was not yet mainstream, whereas post-COVID it, its aesthetics, and its ethos has completely infiltrated culture (albeit in a highly bastardized state,) as it is essentially the only way to successfully orient oneself within culture as it presently exists, given that mainstream culture is a rotting corpse and anything that under normal conditions would come to replace it is now dead on arrival. The increasing number of artists deliberately invoking even the recency of 2010s imagery (ex. #twilight, Snow Strippers, Citadell, “indie sleaze”, fakemink, uncounted Soundcloud collectives and microscenes) specifically is symptomatic of an unstated yearning for literally anything other than the present state of affairs. It is a traumatic regression into any state in the past in which something resembling a coherent future could be projected forward, as opposed to the futureless, self-mutilating culture that has existed since March 2020 in which nothing but further content-ex-content can be derived.