#7
Hi there, it’s been a moment since our last newsletter. I’ve been busy with grappling with unemployment and have been a bit of a social recluse. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram and am now exclusively using Twitter, my preferred choice for investing in a social media platform conducive to autocracy.
I have been busy however.
More or less an ambient album. The title is a reference to the beautiful ‘Deep in the Woods’ by The Birthday Party which holds a special place in my heart. It is an exploration of various tones specific to the Fender Jaguar. I believe ‘Threnody’ to be what I would consider a ‘post-totalist’ approach to the guitar, in the vein of the late Glenn Branca.
The desire realm is pulled from Buddhist ‘mythology’. It is an hour-long ambient/experimental album of feedback as dirge. I recorded this in January and decided to remaster and release this on streaming. It was made in the spirit of my immediate love deciding to abandon me for someone else. The album cover is a ‘tombstone’ unicode character, popularized by the late great Paul Halmos, who happened to teach at my school and live in my hometown.
I have been called the worst and best guitarist in Los Angeles. Perfect Cool is quite precisely, perfectly cool. I recorded this in lieu of the fact that I have to sell my instruments for rent money, so it’s a bit of a swan song. Both songs are expressions of my approach to the guitar, which I consider to be an instrument for idiots.
Chopin is the obvious reference here. I had the idea to make chopped and screwed Chopin but there are numerous predecessors with better execution on YouTube and the like. This is a long and repetitive piece best intended for brooding and sulking in a bathtub in the pitch darkness.
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
I despise otaku and consider them to be human detritus. However, I consider their human condition to be a marvelous example of the postmodern state of being. This book is more/less a philosophical critique, somewhat lacking rigor but otherwise endeavoring to dignify the subject-matter with enough consideration that is largely left unsquandered by others who could consider this trite.
Reaction to Reactions - The New Inquiry
It is insufficient in this day and age to be merely a bystander with what one could loosely understand to be the ‘dialectic’ these days. The ‘dialectic’ and the recursive metanarratives of metamaterialism (consider what each reaction or digital gesture may signify with its quantity and quality), must be observed as industrialized bullshit factories.
Facebook in the Age of the Facebook
A good companion piece to the prior.
Japan’s Cynical Romantics, Pre-cursors to the Alt Right
It is no secret that the throes of fascism and neoliberal nationalism have gripped Japan’s culture for quite some time now. One may conjecture this in parallel to the economic depression of the 80s. It is important to distinguish 4chan and its variants as having originated from 2chan, being quintessentially Japanese for its time.
Rhextortion: Misinterpretation by Proxy
This is a nice insight into how judgment is doled out within the current ‘dialectic’. The narrative, the meta-narrative, the post-metanarrative, the post-post-metanarrative - this infinite game of semantics and semiotics and fancy-book-words game of what people are trying to say, what people are trying to mean, what people are understood to being said, and what people are understood to be meaning - all feels deeply Wittgensteinian in a cruel and unmannered fashion. Consider the Turing Test, in which a language game is fashioned as to condition one against testing the ‘humanity’ of a subject. The more interesting Turing Test is in which language itself may dehumanize others.
A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
Taste is everything. Bad taste leads to crime. Wherever the law is, crime can be found.
I am/was/will be an Internet edgelord. I do not have any qualms about the informational cesspool with which I was wrought in. I am thankful for the amount of bullshit I have ingested and the bullshit I endure, for I am stronger because of it.
This is a new art project I’ve been working on. It is basically conditioned output of the GPT-2 1.5B model, paired with rendition by a text-to-speech model and an AttnGAN for the cover image. It is essentially ‘intellectual’ and ‘poetic’ shitposting. Of course, the name is the reference to ‘Notes from the Underground’.
I say two things about machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence: data laundering and labor externalization. So much ‘science’ here is absolute bullshit and unfortunately our laity are not equipped to critique it adequately for the bullshit it is.
Good lord, dating is bleak these days. We are all going to die alone.
CCPA and GPDR Comparison Chart
It is without much inquiry or rigor to state that GDPR has had an impact on privacy/security and the economy of Europe. I am eagerly awaiting to see what sort of havoc CCPA shall wreak upon California.