Vaportactics

Vaporcontexts

Surrounding any literature worth being made classic is a body of criticism, lesser than the perception of its antecedent in terms of importance to understanding yet often nonetheless crucial when loss meets it, when few can explain literally whatever's within, commentary and appendix aligning thereby with some set of ulterior motives not necessarily the same - as with Nietzsche's corruption into the favor of the oft-cited forces of fascism he, the man whose last letters aimed for the death of all antisemitic persons, abhorred - as the author's. Were it possible to convey thoughts with pristine, unabstracted directness for which we long yet never see through, our utopian society would be uninspired and bereft of Dickenses as much as consistent-flowing and eusocial, always adjusting to oncoming manque-to-be-filled, but per a 2024 study regarding a pair of Midwestern universities, Dickens himself lives no longer even in the pertinent mind of a large-language-unmodeled English student, and lack permeates our every belabored move as we're stretched past what our necks can handle, broken and unemployable. Thus our ancillary works crowd the sidelines, only written by aging scholars uninterested in the new precedent now in the process of setting, perhaps for good reason, perhaps in fear of its implications. Text exists for photographers to ogle as a poet goes unpublished when all poetry is ultimately Kaur's, and nothing is able to restrain the Vuongesque impulse to integrate - in opposition to differentiating - lived experiences into contexts wherein the curtains are "just fucking blue." I stand for none of this, clinging to Knechtges' Wen xuan volumes to observe the notes presented alongside each page of rhapsodies, where a thousand years of history unfold breve and where I can find another world worse and better than my own with relative ease, for such supplementary, even capillary, pleasures cannot be lost despite their decreasing degree of "importance" in an AI-psychotic landscape. Nevertheless, I cannot help but notice an old pleasure of mine likewise reach the wayside, one having half-jokingly promised an answer to the condition at hand through recontextualization of sources, that being none other than vaporwave, the culmination of supposedly globohomo-jingoistic capital coalescing, set dressing for the still-advertisement-printing end of the world, and "irony" which, soon after the onset of vaporwave as a concept, seemingly staged a hostile takeover of the Internet as a whole. Now, despite the temptation to answer with a veneer of "new" "sincerity," I fear I mustn't; rather, I will operate on irony's stage, for this is all that is understood, this is all that most deny seeing, and this is all I care for at the end of the day when it comes to vaporwave, which (at least in its "classical" stage, so to speak) is ultimately a commentaristic discipline dependent not necessarily on recognition of source material, but on waves of being, of disparate, yet recombinatory thoughts had at different times, of editing techniques and digital audio workstations, of a people's history of anything and everything amenable to the chopping-and-screwing process.

Nuance is the void, so I will not necessarily bring nuance to the proverbial table given that I intend to discuss music revolving around intense or even intensive editorial restraint at its best and elaborately conceited, retconned-to-be-high-concept theft of Solar Fields records at its worst, yet I will remain staring into it, remembering a time wherein nuance was relevant and an artist like NYKDLN could reform the acoustics of commercials through speaker staging to create something of a parallel reality, something apparently explained in-depth in direct messages to O.M. Sheffner, now lost to time, yet the most prolific producer in the genre today works, again, with artificial intelligence as his primary means of work, to be methodically added to RateYourMusic at every turn and flood the database with empty signs. Likely much to these scam artists' delight (and to the dismay of NYKDLN/Scott Michael, who took down his masterwork blessings on tape after apparent poor reception from vaporwave "fans"), I see dialog after dialog on what is theft, what is not theft, and when theft is ethical within vaporwave, yet I see very little pertaining to theft within the New Age and its consequences, a central theme of much vaporwave, nor serious analysis of the implications of vapororientalism when drunken David Russo ramblings so regularly take the discursive cake, so clearly I am not dealing with anything more than a false vacuum in the present, yet even with this said, I turn to Robin Burnett, who once labeled vaporwave as a revolutionary tactic in an interview just as disappeared as Sheffner's discussions with S. Michael, though I doubt they stand by this any longer when the next MiniDisc-based HyperLive is always right around the corner and the reissue market for records by the likes of John Zobele uses just as much plastic as drifted through the empty oceans of Luke Laurila's work as Telepath. Raw sincerity is nothing either: taking vaporwave "seriously" only feeds it into the artspace critiqued by Brad Troemel in his infographics and results in its proliferation outside its native realm of the digital (for remember that Chuck Person's Eccojams, after all, was edited in Goldwave during office-job work hours), eventually pushing it into waste-product dimensions, yet feeling pure disgust at the best vaporwave entirely feeds into the Era of Bad Feelings-mindset, where everyone recognizes their surveillance yet cannot articulate why they dislike it or how they would ameliorate their conditions. The scammers parodied by spamwave are now wholly unrecognizable when they have moved into the uncanny valley of indistinguishability from the promoters of San Francisco-speak technobabble-as-sensical-investment, and nothing can be called for even in the most articulate of essays when marketing email fodder tells artists the same three ways to get big and the same top ten things to avoid without any assistance, necessarily, from ChatGPT. Some will cite Capitalist Realism to defend this claim, but I cite what they're calling the "Akashic Records," the Library of Babel. There is no in-between when there is already one thing in the superposition, however many transgender artists who can make the claim to having popularized vaporwave, and a myriad different personalized experiences to choose from. Prophecy is not, necessarily, revolutionary: vaporwave has, in this regard, failed.

The genre having died as I will describe, many too young to represent vaporwave as it is or was discount that its origin vector of Tumblr was, many years ago, a real place where people would go to categorically curate vibes with minimal algorithmic influence, and the machinations of humans and bots alike would create operatic interplay between pure images resulting in Homestuck fandom as much as Elysia Crampton's severo, seapunk in order with pastel goths, the opulent alongside the breakers of the sacred-profane dichotomy, the vulgar, unread theorists letting their ideas spread through surf clubs and other such dynamic, human motion. Permeating all this is agency, action ostensibly taken against the quietish backdrop of Obamapolitik even in a country where gay marriage had not yet been legalized, existing in a time far less than perfect and appearing unaware that this post-recession information economy would within a decade become the basis of "recession pop" revival fervor, and thus such agency was limited, perhaps even selectively counterrevolutionary, insofar as its scope so quickly turned to discourse that the simulative strategy of vaporwave soon fell forgotten upon the manufactured death of each and every critique put into place in arms with the microgenre itself, thus leaving us in the same hole for over twelve years to this date. My aim in writing differs decisively, for my aim is a new perspective combining the past and the present on my own terms to haunt all that has been before, to envision a world where vaporwave survives an oncoming apocalypse alongside its antecedents and we paleographers of sound reconstruct its principles from the work itself, the words of its makers, and anything else accompanying, synthesized into something greater than the sum of its parts amounting to nothing.

Vaporbases

At the very moment Ezra Pound's Cathay met the world's eye in April of 1915, it was not without a myriad continuities ranging from implicitly understood to entirely obfuscated, imagining China-through-Japan by means of brushtalking Tang-dynastic work - unique to an inaccessible pre-An Lushan reality - without a true translation to boast, yet resting within orientalism as it had long been from the earliest Confucian adaptations, and we now see such a work as perhaps just as hyperspecific in its meterless lines as the brush gestures of (mostly) Li Bai's now (mostly) lost to time, although it did not take reaching for the moon from a boat on the lake to drown Pound in an ocean of fascism. Ideological extremities aside, what has long distinguished Cathay is what I might call a weaponization, a singular repurposing of a vaster concept towards an equally sharpened end to attack concepts, able to be likened to the Kojiki, wherein created is an imagined continuity forming the rifled barrel a bullet of precedent travels down to maintain a disparate nation as broadly continuous, albeit not with a current of national, imperial, or other identity necessarily proceeding therefrom given that clearing the murk of history can support any idea, even evolution as today understood. However, it is apparent that the weaponizations I've mentioned and many others recorded, such as the mythos of the Roman kings and Early Republic, tend to come from anisotropic sparseness of records as opposed to gory excess: regularization and simplification - sometimes to excess - emerged from these great ideas despite their conceptual hyperspecificities in collective mental space, and comprehension quite enjoys a singularity, a grand unified theory bursting at the seams with more and more investment-meriting information. Yet when all things are weaponized in production and consumption as reinventing the breaking wheel with friendlier and friendlier commercial constructs for immediate broadcast, we are lead to wonder whence anything originates at all and whither we're going, and no specificity can be drawn anymore, especially from a foreign language along the lines of Japanese, for great spans of time only understood by the Dutch and the Portuguese beyond its own land, yet now pockmarking every "techwear" outfit we can define for miles. Vaporwave is, accordingly, a pisstake on weaponization, purposefully ineffective in that it carries additive elements, rearranging subtractively-acquired pieces of material into distinct structures unimaginable to city-pop writers of bygone postwar economic decades, the editing process discarding semantics while leaving them present, extracted from TV adverts with the purpose of lampooning a world within our own. The restrictive patterns of recurring amusement broadcast at intervals are quietly lifted, yet scars remain in the liberated result, scars often more apparent, as if from the world itself, eventually approaching (as in Burnett's Liberated from the World, in fact) Dadaistic nonsense, asking whether vaporwave itself is, in the same way as capital, a cancer.

To say that the undifferentiated surface of the algorithm is wounded in perpetuum by the human spirit yet always scraped only as opposed to penetrated would represent total incomprehension of the algorithm's subconscious-in-the-conscious nature observed so astutely when one commercial fragment ends into its own beginning, and Silicon Valley paranoia pertaining to algorithmic recommendations is itself a component of the cancer which has, as they once said, been killing thought for what seems like many subgenerations of our own now, driving an economy of what is called "effortlessness" and "seamlessness" to the forefront of a would-be flawless world's imagined streetside marketplace. In truth, effort is what is done to seem effortless, while seams conceal even the more despicable kinds of ideological weaponry perpetually at play in the artist's process, but within imagined consensus realities, these concepts are cultural glue which has gradually come to ensure that something is posted for the satisfaction of social-media johns on a daily basis without fail, lest one be forgotten, and we hand to the artist the perpetual flood of liquid capitalism into the American landscape for the curatorial instinct to be piqued amidst the equally literal as figurative rising of water into homes, workplaces, and other such domains. Within this pervading perfection-expectation, save the single-event upset brought on by cosmic rays, we could reasonably reckon computers as a paragon, in many ways, of perfection, their digital precision abstracting away some - but not all - human error, their calculations only theoretically limited by available space, but such perfection is impossible to reconcile with both the series of caveats necessarily provided to expound on the bounds within which computation works and the illusory, hyperbolic degree to which we have come to find objectivity and function through even the most flawed software which breaks down at whichever points it meets with the analog and the real many have obsessed over trying to write of untenable acceleration, meeting proposed slowdowns with immediate-as-reactionary pushback, construing producing vaporwave as a means to address worldly concerns effortlessly while ignorant that vaporwave does not do anything in and of itself and indeed "celebrates itself" with elaborate in-jokes (most iconically Greco-Roman statues in the image of Floral Shoppe) and fauxstalgia. No matter how tempting it may be to dismiss vaporwave as a lightened gateway into acceleration or a trap for the blindly nostalgic and uncritical, it mustn't be stated in such simplistic terms, lest we collapse it into a singularity of concepts without adjacents and render it unto the wrong bounded set of antecedents, and with the streaming-service desires of seamlessness and effortlessness in view, it seems more pertinent to consider vaporwave, next to the noise movement before and during it, as a jocular early protest against the oncoming occultation of visible seams expressed through blatant digitality applied to sonic results of studio traditions established in the tumultuous, AIDS-scarred, and Reagan-blasphemized 1980s inter alia, visions destroyed and rebuilt to feed a human-driven exchange system before it would disappear altogether like worn-down memories of yesteryear. The algorithm breeds vibes-based thought, summons the end of nuance, and feeds the thread leading to a supposedly ironed-out reality, integrated into a single picture, but when we turn to wonder what is to be done with a single picture, our own eyes remain, and to the earliest vaporadvocates, the best way to go about addressing this many-eyed interpretation of the fixed, recorded image was simply to make it as catchy as possible.

We must turn to the postwar economic miracle and to the world and its extensions more generally, seeing they are stuffed with excesses unrecognized except for things they could prop up, thereby noticing that, among meanings found in the 1980s and thereabouts, that although such thoughts hold a myriad derivable truths even in their falsehood most immediately evident, the ultimate meaninglessness common to the human experience haunts a great many emptiness-forgetters and their ilk more than anything else, and we reflect our waking falsehoods through not-so-careful exegesis tied to cultural symbols established over perhaps incomprehensibly immense spans of time which, as I have insinuated, lead us to forget by difficulty of understanding. It may be easier to see in pasts with reflective reverberations and trails most immediately apparent resounding through the present day closest to ourselves, but where sits the rest of the world, the mysterious image of all, having gone differently, coalescing into something different, remains too elusive and obfuscated without either an orientalist's doctorate or the proliferation of inexpensive, easily accessible online communication, along the lines of which we have traveled for so long into the streets of Japan, where, they say, masking is respectful, anything is available out of a vending machine, a culture of shame predominates, Catholics are persecuted relentlessly by the shogunate, the emperor is not readily understood when he announces his state's surrender, anime and J-drama are available at more ideal prices but sans English subtitles, and other such amenities we so urgently desire stand present, at attention, and above all else, available in currencies other than JPY. It's easy to watch this image fading when combined haphazardly with ghastly hikki-images and reliquaries of recent war as much as conscious, externalizing knowledge of omnipresent orientalizing tendencies pushing exceptionalism at the price of nuance and in the service of the vibe - which is both a space of elucidative possibility and the void thereof, thereby becoming conceivable as an always-emerging, never-truly-suppressed primordial chaos of je ne sais quoi - but reconciling nuanced and unnuanced knowledge, often the past with - or inside - the present, into a singular entity which may reveal the flaws built into the freshman's-dreamy ideas at first instilled. Thus, what is suppressed and misconstrued remains after a spectral subtraction between the ideologies, a pair of fraternal twins, and the total artist may weaponize it like any other multifaceted piece of history, a process vaporwave seemingly incorporates into itself by literally cutting up prior vibe-knowledge with interruptions, self-repetitions, and so on, but why, then, do so many cite vaporwave as an "ironic celebration" of capitalism and its unfetteredly ongoing cultural ouroboros, and why must the prominence of this assessment rise above so many other, hazier peaks in the eyes of contemporary music journalists?

Although not entirely confident in the unequivocal, I answer this question with the simple claim that vaporwave is, furthermore, a critique of the critique, demonstrating ineffectual dissenting efforts' futility with grace and poise insofar as its appropriations are both surface-level and readily available, the perfect formula for reproducibility without any special knowledge or practical technique, allowing vaporwave's vision of a perfect Japan to exist for its later proponents in the absence of context and personal synthesis - thus, also living anaerobically in spaces compressed down to their barest essentials of otherwise suffocating images without context. David Russo, ever-notorious among vaporpurveyors as HKE and the owner of (eternally disgraced) Dream Catalogue, wrote vaguely of "the synthetic haze of Kowloon" in a Bandcamp description for an album named for the year after the Hong Kong SAR itself at last concludes (in some sense), evoking anxiety for the end of a way of life which never truly existed given the relative brevity of Kowloon as an entity and the more readily-evoked Mainland Chinese association with the bullet train, the same anxiety James Ferraro's repetition of "2014" on the ever-topical lyric sheet to Capitoline Wolf ultimately conveys for a "champagne apocalypse" concluding the broadly unattainable or even inconceivable luxuries afforded to the highest ranks, but Russo does so without any despair or urgency, without emptiness in his eyes despite what he (given the remainder of his online presence) must see as a chapter's closing for some vision of Western Democracy so cherished, and no critique is made even though, formally, the music of Dream Catalogue is just as likely to descend into readymadeness as something without protest, without any verbally intended disruption, only observing as many critiques do even without meaning to. Vaporwave, another vehicle for fictions, does not accomplish the soul-stare of Ferraro's greatest works precisely because it is so able to explore the mind of the unconscious Lumpenproletariat, a background world of advertisements and perpetual stimulation, what Oneohtrix Point Never called "the internet as a self-atomizing machine" on the title track of Returnal. Seeing that reality is the target of this weightless irreverence for truth among artists in the niche I document, I can conjecture that, in making vaporwave, we take what seems insincere and reshape it in just the same way, taking up an avant-garde stance to posture and putting tension at our forefront, demonstrating the great excess which accompanies all digital-artistic surplus-replications resting on hard drive discs, solid-state drives, and perhaps even archival tape worldwide, well before we might look back and see the newness we've imagined for these works is, like many things, in perfect continuity with the rest of human time, tradition, and knowledge, inescapable as any other category of ephemera yet holding an equal quantity of eternity to everything else we have or will have soon lost.

Vaporprosodies

As orature, literature's indisputable predecessor in union with song and voices alone, coalesced from speech and song into a body of epic narrative from true happenings often thought embellished aside from innately known knowns unlikely to shift over centuries of recitation after recitation, the more contemporary notion of found poetry and its results diffuse with similar patterns of phenomenological discovery, though found poetry tends to do so along more estranged and contextual lines whereby stripped are many dozens of real locations of featural exemplars to create a new entity of evolving Verstehen traversing the future and the present (the former on the latter's terms), which only becomes more and more void of its sources when the front matter fades away from the print and digital traditions in the process of materialization every second we live, so with the grand inevitability of fragments replacing the whole in tandem with loss and fostering new work's origins in imitation and gap-filling (so often with some kind of God) alike, the ever-changing Heraclitean Somnium Scipionis by which thinkers, writers, and artisans may model bits of the cosmos is, by default, the most crucial part of a De re publica wherein it can be imagined that every allegorical answer once existed in more than just abstract, and despite everything, vaporwave must be crucial as found poetry to today's experiential journey of oscillations between machine poison and selflessly-provided epistemological sustenance, for it embodies both at once yet has done nothing, has served as nothing but itself, and may never materialize as the meaningful movement we saw anticipated like some kind of Second Coming amidst the apocalyptic scenery of surf clubs which, functioning as bazaars, would be the last real "marketplaces of ideas," and invasive, soon-to-be-omnipresent venture-capital buyouts laying perpetual threats down to these circles' continuations, so the abstract medium of music would be undivorceable from decontextualization and nonspecificity would thrive in perpetuum to choke out nuance and make superior returns on investments ignorant of repurposed-stock-music assemblages and smears of digital waste themselves being detritus from the moment of name-your-price publication for the world to soon devour, unconscious.

Vaporworlds

The ultimate result of vaporwave is an indistinct blur of symbols incomprehensible without the present or very recent past nearby to guide perception in the right direction, yet at a lower level supporting all other pertinent thought, this absurdity of gradual decontextualization is what makes vaporwave a significant and in due time insignificant subset of our artistic worlds today, an impossibility documented and a possibility extinguished for the anguished quasi-pleasure of the masochistic listener who does not recognize how briefly recorded music has existed in the scope of the human record yet wishes to revisit unlived times and realities which have passed by and become pieces of themselves, effectively transporting anyone passing by to a New Nowhere, equally impossible as the artwork doing the deed of creating false vacuums, filling them with signs, yet at last collapsing them when the time has come to cease their illusory tricks, conning us out of our precious time and transcending YouTube livestreams of muzak through this contradictory vision of things, resolvable only experientially, only through vibes and other such nonspecific digital-Gaussian obscurities, together becoming bokeh, something pleasurable and replicated only through the right combinations, something from which we may derive contrarian cynicism regarding the mainstream while fitting perfectly therewithin, the end of the world no longer a concern, a new world failing to rise from its grave in the meantime, all while we wait, perfectly placated.

a review of "bully" by kanye west

(originally published on rateyourmusic. fuck you to whoever took this down)
i can be the cleanest millionaire, i'm from the mud still

from the very moment its "official" release appeared, i knew that my listening to donda in full was a genuine impossibility, the same as the reversal of gravity, a medium so saturated with infamies it could not in any way be genuine, but one must understand kanye once lived, was once vivacious as they came, once required vigorous defenses to friends and family who refused to understand his merits as they were in those days, that he would come back around, and that his life was a samsaric cycle in miniature of sorts, a constant series of rebirths. years passed, and this possibility became more and more restricted, all the way until donda ceased to embrace its great, daring emptiness one could hear in the early listening events, refusing to acknowledge nothing would be filled in. i could never find joy in the hackneyed christian morality imposed onto donda, lines like "kanye and jay still brothers, they both billionaires" nagging at me the whole time i tried to listen, no rebirth having been made so long as ye's self-denial would proceed, the cycle of west in suspended animation, a hope fading and fading with each subsequent twist and turn. now, ye the nazi, ye the demagogue, ye the one with whom they fear to associate for damn good reason, is not a billionare, this line dated to only a series of specific moments in his life which can no longer be recreated under any circumstances. thus, through self-interpolation and AI-aided self-debasements, ye acknowledges an extraordinary inverisimiltude within himself on bully, the incompleteness finally a salient factor in his work, the larger-than-life nature he cultivated no longer able to suffice as an environment in his dental-gas mind, and in acknowledging the hellishness of being kanye without any self-mythologization, without any self, ye finally, in many ways, is able to be somebody. one could even call him purified at last, airing out his last grievances, being ran down the lobby, no longer hearing screams of a vast, forsaken love. no family surround kanye, dying fameless and soon broke, except stock-market plummeters and oval-office ghouls, which must mean it's over after, on "close to you," he - or some machined approximation thereof - goes quiet in barely-comprehensible moments of apparent brain-fried earnest, trying to reason or perhaps negotiate. everything is silent, as is everyone, because the artist has left the room, leaving only semblances and footprints to be collected for distant-future reliquaries ignoring prior deeds, just as ye himself knows no precedent, no joy, no spirit.

in 2018, kanye west attempted to make an album titled love everyone. therewithin, a song titled "dj khaled son," to leak in full several years after the album's existence became public knowledge, plays out quietly, unmixed and unmastered, detailing what i might describe as a rich man's false filial piety, a son as a gun, family ties as weapons. it, in the manner of a child, reduces family to a method of self-defense, forming likewise justification for some kind of artistic regime, yet half the lyrics can barely be made out, to be labeled unintelligible on lyric sites across the internet, essenceless. even though, with plentiful incoming societal upheaval which surely will rob us of much contemporary work in its haphazardly wobbling place, most art made today will not receive half the appraisal bully will, we must remember that this is art's logical extreme, the formation and asasembly of its own absence, looking into a mirror and seeing no reflection. remember this when someday you, historian, write your prosopographies.

To render dub-sar-tur auteur

Introduction

A Sumer-reiterating poetic nonprofessional, versed in verse unrestrained by enterprise-ready training and poring over atypical inspiratory sources with the idea that something will provide a compositionally relevant deontic sense and a capacity within itself to be referenced, soon notices the Bronze Age poetics' worldliness despite having hitherto, for all intents and purposes, sought transcendentality within the compositions, such a material attachment's presence somehow contradicting a deep-seated root acting out a supposed spiritual connection in some supposed way characteristic of earlier human society alone, lost to time, princely office upon princely office having been brought out from the house, the repetitions describing predominantly measurements within the sections expressing a belief grounded in being on this god-departed earth opposite celestial onlooks carefully inclined in design to become unquestionable to apprehend suicidal maniac-philosophers through a system of asebeia, and this violent dissonance strikes a tritonal chord against a sacred modal harp tuned to the Mixolydian of Lesbian Sappho partly lost to time, a void in consonance's supposedly purposeful place (in one's head) suggesting to the inner eye untrained a lack of prosodic knowledge within the language itself, a grammar of literature insufficient to interface with the poorly-known structures of Emegir itself dwelling inside the long-died-out minds of a people having undergone mystery attrition to storange in loanword reliquaries in later tongues of the Near East, and such a conception may persist for an indefinite duration, even becoming regularly cited for the purposes of chiding those having seen more in the oppressive copying of morphosyntactic structures line-to-line and left-justified, but all is wrong already, for the only path approaching objective towards infinity is cherishing the long-lost intentions at the whims of which these documents came into existence, as sudden, immediate, and sporadic as the emergence of writing itself inside a society. Had the assumption of writing as a wholly subconscious progress connected intrinsically to the generatively-hypothesized instinct of the spoken tongue persisted in its entirety with X-bar subconstituents forming entire contrary countries resolving diplomatically through the transformation/Xn all potential conflict in arbitrary mechanisms with features which exist for reasons yet also on account of nothing in particular at all, there would be no author to self-reference, no necessity for criticism or any literary designations for the conscious patterns exercised from the orature era into "proper" oratory in turn bleeding out into transcriptions politically intended to form identities, only recorded on account of the ability of a new concept of Greekness to unite disparate city-states prone to civil war against an invasive Achaemenid enemy exemplified in its own ends by the Cyrus cylinder and pictured through Herodotian judgments despite the state's eventual consumption in Heraclitean fire so often disputed by post-Socratics, which is, of course, an intention twisted, an archaic story repeatedly rewritten through retellings received by recitation regeneratively and memorized through formulae which had to be conceptualized in at least one mind far prior to their realization in the manuscript tradition we cannot study on account of its disappearance, intents only available in reference with millennia having passed us by, yet lacking any regard for the march of time having made tomes fragmentary, we deduce elements and construct a sparse zuihitsu on each antiquarian author's behalf provided at least one quotation and biography back up such a figure, a conception from which we may derive our textual criticisms, our watchful gazes centered on the long-ago, the bygone, and that which perhaps continues to influence the present in ways we may or may not discern quick, but are nonetheless made apparent to the scholar who notices a symbolic gesture in Ovid's placements of chiasmus, often ultimately standing on the shoulders of antiquity's giants in the process, an unbroken tradition of intent layering into itself more and more intent even in interpolations, figures forming in the process. The erudite one having written over a whole lifetime under necessitatedly assumed authorial choice having been professionalized and thus methodically turned into a source of meager income reads in among prior legends' oeuvres details no matter their supposed insignificance and discovers a personal meaning to be communicated at least in part, be it the last thing they do or the first they do they believe matters, noting singular choices of one word as opposed to alternatives buried like hatchets in the perpetually reborn lexicon, a mental dictionary in a confused state between samsaric rebirth and mere eternal return, always changing in the same direction even if appearing the other per typological unidirectionality established in principle by linguists, this mental commentary defined by, despite the inherent shortcoming of the studied author's psychology's prenegotiated absence-inaccessibility, meticulous associations which may themselves be interpreted with the zeal by which Alexander Vovin died adapting the Man'yoshu into its most effective English representation to date, mayhaps taking into account Ezra Pound's abstractions in "his" Cathay whereby a new work emerged loosely knotted to the signals and signs differentiating brushstrokes initially calligraphic - but soon in woodblock - from one another, the annotations made to the Aeneid by Servius Grammaticus centuries after Vergil's death and ultimately preserving lifetimes' worth in commentaries for which it is impossible to determine an equivalent weight in gold, silver, bronze, or heroics, the mere concept of scholia, or any other lengthy tradition or pristine example having sporadically emerged just the same, yet even as I construe such a lofty association between the established past and the inglorious present, I must emphasize that even among the ones who refuse writing, those who abandon all fashion of reading to slice page in half with burning fasces, and those who believe creative professions carry an inherent degree of distrust about themselves in the same way actors were denied burial rites were they not to rescind their lives' works, interpretations always exist, and thus intentional detail must always exist to nurture hermeneutics and criticism, whatever they may be called, based in some regard or another on other interpretations in the process of composing.

The intentions having long lurked in my arteries and thus circulated throughout the landscape of my veins forming plaques which have bound me to record in documentation for the sake of my health and creating a lack of infamy's intense inflammation each and every thought I deem sufficiently impactful on the surrounding experiential reality to which I am bound even if failing necessarily to impact others' phenomenologies outright, I intend resolutely to intend as if tending to do so has since initial inception been replaced unceremoniously with the substitute of purposeful unknowing which permeates the wills that carry us most often to greener pastures and deeper waters of a greater residence time than should be licit in a world of rivers unstepped in twice, and thus seldom do great thinkers anymore exit their cramped dwellings, be they New York City apartments suffering from a rent ceiling blown off in a tornado or secluded in Wyomingite perma-sorrow living lives of prayer and penance for the quite conscious quotidian choice of resounding Americanness' worldly persistence, all wasting away in a tragedy of images, unpaid even in exposure or mere sub-scene suzerainty for their ostensibly Sisyphean efforts touring the world from the comfort of a room, which comes as an anecdotal recognition I mention on account of the lack of proper accounts thereof uncontaminated by other anecdotes and paucally numbering their distinctive details, influenced yet governed by purpose in their poverty of expressive description for strange predicaments predicated on loneliness and indeed belief in unintentionality, a total social determinism fatalist in determining a destiny in absolutes reduced to their most concentrated possible solutions - even though there is shame in none of it and none of them on their part are as deserving of superiority as Kesh, the frailty an imaginative product with domain and range, both supposed to be reckonable with ease - and such accounts inspire a greater floridness in this sub-pectore I submit to metaphorical competition as for the singing of arms and the man, a lengthy incipit in Kafkaesque Germanic "run-on" sentences, and thus I find it is due time for my exposure to increase in this common dark setting from a unique angle of the lens, and thus the dark appears more navigable following its development, an illusion of the eye.

Intentionality

Given that to intend with care is perceivable more readily than anything to be found within the inattentive hand with its verbal brushstrokes disorderly not paleographically, but on a much higher level interfacing with elusively underlying syntax of the phrase and sentence, ever-debated and ill-defined semantics, functional and appropriately fit-to-situation tailorable pragmatics, and rhetorically observable discourse, some may easily define unintentionality as a function of a pauper writer unversed in purpur or pretending to the Tyrian colors with disorderly, unrefined prose thought of as a usurper of a throne better spent on an author of the various canons, yet even though this instant razor of Occam's precedes sliced bread by centuries, both are but logical conveniences designed to deter indirect illogic from being applied amidst lies and claims that simplicity rules all - claims which perhaps always best fit a feed-aggregating link site where all metaphorical "graphic design pornography" exchanges among its myriad forums seem to value simple comic wit above abstracted technical skill, at least in my wearily isolated, quite unimpressed lumina - despite contradicting factors which allow the conscious application of illogic some space in the mind, anyone's mind at all, for indeed the surrealists consciously valued illogic and disconnection, even extensively philosophizing around its sensical periphery as justification for their work, but unintentionality predominantly functions as a rhetorical weapon against effective integrations of illogic into a body of work which argues points, conveys information, effects sensation, and so on. The illegible carries with it varying hues of intention the glyph-insertions bereft of discernible definition carefully or carelessly half-encode, but visible disorder nonetheless provides scholia and marginalia as corollaries and caveats to the more readily establishable search for objective truth among philosophers of yesteryear quickly abandoned by some means in this state of postmodernity proper, as with all or at least most things entirely impermanent or perceivable as such, and everything commentates, quotes, and decides what is worthwhile to record given that there always accompanies information deemed extraneous, the visual snow clouding the outlook of an author famed for abstract thought bleeding into their descriptive paucity and contributing to the mission to impress a fewness in detail instated on account of confidence in the true appearance of nothing subjective being known, Aristotle asserting a reality to influence generations of Christ-loving monastics philosophizing when or when not drunk on their own produce. Surmise that even automatic writing requires consciousness prior to its inception, the intention of reporting a contact to worlds beyond this mere semblance more authentically communicating as an oracular judgment kept only in Herodotus' near-complete earliest universal history, the ruiners of Troy, those who would call themselves Greeks, desperate to draw common truths in their quest to defeat would-be conquerors from a foreign land, an illusion of unity in war, an identity affirmed by destiners and soothsayers and soon enough a Roman Emperor's appointed haruspices, ready to beckon in the Odoaceric end already and the reinstatement of a king among those who clung so dearly to imperial power for many centuries revised to integrate interruptions into a story which never happened. Whatever benefit seamlessness may bring to those who justify tyranny transiently according to their unpredictable or even aleatoric whims, to presume its presence helps us in instances of texts intruded upon by interpolations made for the smoothing-out of inconvenient ill-fated gaps many centuries after the fact and, as one would expect, so readily identified centuries later still by trained classicists stylistically critiquing a text and piecing together its former structure to the best of their abilities, training agility in skipping between pieces of a disappeared world so clearly to create an apocalypse in the original sense of relevation for the true extent of uninhibited ancient knowledge and creativity, yet despite the exclusion of certain passages of Virgil from his corpus, interpolations remain transcluded bracketed inside classroom editions not unlike those I have used in my own studies both secondary and collegiate, commentated fully with perhaps motives in mind for later generations of scholars to consider why such a passage inhabits the domain of a set of words so carefully arranged on the manuscript page, ultimately without concern for exact truth, instead fully engrossed in learning the earliest picture of the work we may clearly see from codices recovered by Renaissance humanists whose names, too, will be lost to time given enough floating-into-space done by this heliocentrically oriented earth on which we live, though such pessimism is the bane of knowing the now and what came before, the means we use to counteract futures which may destroy us just as much as our creations, and thus intention is inescapable, constant, and widely acknowledged, at least among those who will to understand.

All literature, returning over time to noise so profoundly acidic in scientific measurement it dissolves semantic fields in its spilled reach from the vile vial of vitriolic fragmentation uncautiously released by a scribe whose chemically-derived black ink eats manuscriptural vellum antiphon-encapsulated on a per-word, per-page basis given enough time anyway, turning museum glass to shards unsafe to step in lest studying their refractions and nearby materials' elusive optic birefringence ultimately destroy them once and for all, yet such works are guessable and force observers into living with the knowledge that the knowledge within will be archaeological fodder and myth for forthcoming generations provided they arrive at the rate we're all going today, and intention even if no longer discernible will be imagined fancifully within the critical world on the basis of having been preserved only in titles tiled into palimpsests imperceptible until fully unrolled like Herculanean charred scrolls by means of technology modern and cautiously set aside by the papyrologists who wanted their hands not in the numbers of the Library of Alexandria's figurative burners disrespectful as ever of earnest learners from earlier in the collective process of human thinking, a mental grammar melted down as a colossal monument despite having been spoken only by a few speakers, as in manuscript traditions having perhaps disappeared in knowing or chance thereof forever with the forgetting of things from Linear A's inscription in the Aegean onward - even Michael Ventris died, surely for worse, knowing or more likely believing he would not be able to match his own codebreaking feat - and this is enough to presume that human beings with knowledge of a literary corpus, and any knowledge whatsoever at that, will presume meanings within it and the existence of another human being who wrought such poetic designs knowing that the wind carves no alphabets or logograms and the phenomenon of weathered rocks mistaken for Paleolithic industries has either dissipated from its former ingloriousness or become cliche in nature, and pareidolia occurring on the reader's part may as well have genuinely taken place on the part of the author as an addendum to any existing theoretical frameworks, done in many names for many personal purposes which remain enigmatic to onlookers.

In Closing

Crucial is faith in methodology, at present a waning presence ceasing with cycles, even if cycles also waxing given time aplenty, to illuminate the scribal hands who bind their intentions to meaning so carefully or carelessly to now often computationally assembled words contracted to binary representations themselves ever-unstable, their only constant the chance to be devoured by the disordered march of entropy, and ideas of "unintended" words only serve to torment the passive author not knowing how to realize an active construction as agent rather than patient or to distinguish the two, integrating them into a better system where all actions, even those deemed useless or odd, are deeply intentional, never excluded from processes ongoing in every moment of verbal thought classed not into categories of utility, but rather of intrigue, fielding complaints with illogic as opposed to a perfectly sound system's resonant mystique creeping slow towards a single compass point whereas omnidirectional efforts, no matter how stylistically bizarre, allow for a wider interpretative range and capture intentions just as well as cherished formal brevity as the stylistics of this document have sought to demonstrate by example, all or nothing despite the darkness of the uncapturability of not-everything's looming over the total of the literate or even just language-wielding population, therefore creating a world of valuing bathroom graffiti with its multi-composed woeful seeking-out on the same level as Joyce or his ilk, conceived to work reality itself as potently as possible, albeit unconcerned with what is possible, for anything might be if deontics are temporarily abandoned from time to time and the world just is for once, a fact which requires no verification, an axiom that writing will lead somewhere or another regardless of the finer points defining it, a sign which should bring us hope.

On LaTeX, or My System of Sanity Maintenance as a Graphic Designer

An essay by Janis Vivian Media Lago

    Seldom do we stray anymore from the path of immediacy in graphic design: a plurality of changes run primarily through the mouse to be inflicted, inscribed, onto a digital surface limited in resolution only by available memory, layered for convenience, obstinate that everything be done as unprogrammatically as possible, the belief being that the designer, as a digital artist, is more "artist" than are "digital" and therefore should only have to endure the gritty internals of composition in place of interaction with the underlying machine framework, but this motive and its intentions merit interrogation.  The keyboard temporally predates the mouse by decades even within computing, and upon its introduction, a full what-you-see-is-what-you-get system was still yet to manifest given the difficulties overcome by software engineers maximizing potential within computational limits of the day, often strict and arbitrary even within workstations optimized for the precise purpose of graphics.  Therefore, early digital design often takes a limited form not unlike Knuth's famed TeX typesetting system, an ingenious conglomerate of all that was possible to execute in raster (or close) page design at the time, nothing immediate, everything entirely ascertained through carefully-timed printouts to ensure a lack of personal error not detected by the program itself with its abundance of backslashes, braces, and currency symbols.  TeX, of course, originally ran on a terminal, the technology most readily accessible to the academic wishing to make a preprint containing mathematical formulae but unwilling to settle for the displeasure of including hand-drawn ones within a given journal, and it included a related technology, METAFONT, used for the rendering of raster glyphs optimized and individualized for each possible printer resolution at which a document could ultimately be produced, but it was distinct from later desktop publishing software insofar as it only necessarily required a text editor into which it could be written, entirely free software to compile it, and a way to view and verify the formatting of the result.  It was not PageMaker, QuarkXPress, or Microsoft Word, instead stemming ultimately from the culture of Incompatible Timesharing System and WAITS, also the origin of Emacs, my preferred environment for editing TeX and its relatives.  It may be inevitable to wonder whether any of this may be of relevance to anyone in the design world when the clickable menu-based environment presents an immediate realm of possibility and prevents the designer from indulging in the framework by which the image is generated, but nonetheless, I seek to present a case for a technology primarily restricted to academic publishing as an artform unto itself.

    I will primarily refer to LaTeX herein because it presents an interesting contradiction: a typesetting language layered carefully onto its preceding TeX with the express intention of separating content from presentation, as is often the norm in web design, seems far from apt for solely artistic pursuits given that it intentionally prioritizes the content itself above its exact look or position on the page, yet it presents complete facilities for page design through a wide variety of extensions for graphics, text positioning, page sizing, et cetera, so it has become my language of choice from my very first introduction through deciphering org-mode export backends (indeed, this turned out to be much more of a rabbit hole than I initially anticipated, hence the existence of this piece).  I, however, was initially oblivious to this contradiction and, not understanding the ethos surrounding LaTeX, challenged myself immediately to put it to use for highly context-dependent visual art bound to virtual pages and exported direct-to-PDF (as I still do today), a restricted shorthand for a concatenative language at a far lower level of page design, yielding interesting results in due time, especially as I began to work with PGF/TikZ, which is, of course, not a drawing language, but a way to describe graphics briefly and eloquently.  Through such processes, I found I could compose and align without any trouble from auto-alignment clicked with a mouse, specify features of text without crawling relevant menu after relevant menu until hallucinations of irrelevance of it all and laziness began to overtake my vision, precisely coordinate coordinates with elaborate iterations or transformations, and generally discover alternative solutions whenever one aspect of the code worked in any way other than perfectly, a viable strategy for genuine graphic design resulting in the process.  The layers of abstraction separating me from low-level PostScript framed then and still frame design in LaTeX as a compositional exercise not dissimilar to ordinary writing, with text directly integrated and all components designed for immediate legibility, a statement unspeakable of a program as complex as, say, Adobe Illustrator.

    Illustrator, with which I had a brief flirtation about three years ago now, frustrates me to no end because, while expressly intended for vector design, it is just as ancient a technology as LaTeX or PostScript executed in the absence of interfacing with the intensely mathematical nature of vector graphics; all things Illustrator, rather, are expressly bound to measurements which must, for the most part, be measured manually with keyboard-and-mouse mechanics and alignment intended for us to click, inscribe, draft as if still bound to the pen, paper, ruler, compass, and so on.  This is not to say I wish to ascribe or pin dishonor onto pen-and-paper design approaches because there is one important detail in this approach which transfer over to digital graphic design and indeed does despite a lack of transparency in the forms of programs, the aspect of geometric construction.  To draw from the honorable field of vexillology, designers of flags wishing to codify their creations into law undergo scrutiny, executing a complex process of description applicable to domains of shape and color alike such that the flag is reproducible in manufacturing from merely a written account of its proportions and other visual features, essentially known in idea, but made relative to cataloging systems such as Pantone when necessary.  Consider, then: project files for a page or vector design are likewise a description from which a design may be reproduced, but to the erudite analog designer of pre-computational yesteryear such instructions - or declarations, depending on one's outlook - are inconceivably exact down to units as small as a single 1114112th of an inch, as found in the TeX system about which I write, but making the compromise between human and computer standards of legibility proves itself inevitable and complex alike whenever it appears - it always does - and, for we are already embroiled in a situation pseudo-distanced from its mathematical underpinnings, we find the format tends toward the machine's whims, just as it did in days of restricted memory and computational power, indecipherable and far from transparent.  The former directness of design in its physicality was now lost within encoding, architecture, and a litany of other uniquely digital factors, but was what-you-see-is-what-you-get a one-size-fits-all solution for accessing the data therein, or was everything to be considered write-only, conjugation tables which the program must simply memorize for their irregularities, often concealed in cryptography or compression far more complex than we can penetrate with pen-and-paper or M-x decipher RET.  Alas, our formats, our webs of interconnected formatting information, are caught up in a web of our own illiteracy, their behaviors undocumented to the general public.

    Now, consider also another domain, one indulged in out of necessity and-or under the pretense of serious graphic design far too often by those who have by and large never used any sort of desktop publishing or typesetting program otherwise.  Microsoft Word, saving near-inevitably in a proprietary format (not even considering the difficulties with the proprietarity, to which many arguments regarding or against Word have been made in a continuous stream since its inception) predominantly binary, with dependencies on behaviors of particular versions of Word, which create a dependency on Word itself for backwards compatibility, and the interface presented by Word upon startup by an unsuspecting user seeking to write a paper or design a flyer is, to say the least, obtuse to its own detriment, discombobulated and complicated by a network of, again, buried graphical menus - click, click, click, click - perpetually mouse-governed in a loop of formatting, a Proustian death sentence for a modern Sisyphus.  My experience with Word and its numerous imitators - all with their own sets of difficulties quite often rooted in the licensing I have promised not to discuss in-depth here due to my relative lack of expertise, limiting myself to the discursively coverable within a gamut of reason - was never even dotted, much less crossed, with pleasantries when formatting papers throughout secondary school with strict limitations of format, pervasive to the extent that the gestural sequence resulting in Times New Roman, twelve-point-font, double-spaced, and one-inch margins became conceptually automatic, but the gesturality required me to turn away from my keyboard, never divorced the information itself from my instructors' expected formatting looks or desired textual lengths demarcated with surveys in units dictated by formatting standards (themselves seemingly equal in their arcane complexities to the difficulties of redefining the metric kilogram without any dependency on the International Prototype whatsoever, although far less rigorous), always took too much and required the use of a system of troubled templates not necessarily fitting.  "No title page is required," some might have said.  "Page numbers do not need to match the APA," others uttered.  The documents themselves never ended up pleasing the eye particularly, their alignments uncleanly and their hackneyed structures irregular and warped to fit an assortment of needs often too broad for Word itself, all in pre-installed fonts seemingly popping into being with every wish I had to edit the format of my page numbering, my footnotes, my bibliography, and thus the idea that the document should consist of one font all the way through as a colloid of glyphs made so even it may as well be one surface received little in the way of respect.  Therefore, I would neither design nor typeset in Word: as a program, it seems a flimsy replacement for LaTeX when one discovers the latter.

    One commonality between Microsoft Word's ideal domain of the many-paged, sprawling paper and Adobe Illustrator's preferred productive space of the vector graphic is that both areas of work, despite the significance in the divergence of prioritizing either linguistic or abstracted-visual information, ultimately convey a message in some regard, read in by the viewer-examiner in manners distinct from the comprehension of explicit speech, immediacy not resulting from the nature of the interaction itself but rather purposefully composed features of the visual information, be it in a bolded word or the centering of an element, in the angularity of a tilted vector or the typographic offsetting of a text block away from its companions through a distinguishing indentation.  While this is common knowledge to its users and I will make no serious attempt to evangelize, LaTeX covers both domains while ensuring that formatting is adaptable, that no renumbering of a referenced example will be affected by the addition of another before it, offsetting the enumeration and vanishing the need to look for all examples thereof within a paper and alter their numeric values, which, from the perspective of a linguist whose example (re)numbering is presently automatic and who has to keep her examples numbered consistently without any duplicates, is utterly glorious, for labels and refs in tandem render the document presentable and adherent to a format without much effort on my own part, a fine-tuned weighing scale - Lady Justice's balance, if you will - proving the masses of intentionality and automatic convenience entirely even in their prioritization by both myself and the program, a plethora of convenient resources available, a plurality of editors presenting themselves to each potential user, a series of opportunities, even preferentially chosen engines with reproducible results individualized to each, all of which remain well-loved even if not necessarily actively updated, a series of factors which result in a robust community and documentation system sprawling across gigabytes of code packaged conveniently for inclusion, occasionally clashing but still harmonious in its approach.  Furthermore, I can take joy in the benefits of LaTeX for artwork, discovering that page resizing using, say, the "geometry" package is a breeze in the winds of time saved and can maintain the overall formatting of my creations, and although this joy isn't what led me to explore LaTeX graphic design in the very beginning, considering I was simply attracted by the challenge of using a new creative format, it has kept me around, the admixture of format independence and precise, algorithmically manipulated measurements (not to mention that PGF/TikZ can clipping-mask layers at multiple levels somehow!) has captivated me, fully maintained my sense of awe with plentiful scintillations every single time I accomplish something new in my world of design, because referencing current page nodes, beginning and ending scope environments, and having a text in particular to reference when I have finished composing a piece is frankly incredible, in particular when I begin to consider that the same system handles both my (always properly aligned) interlinear glosses for my undergraduate linguistics work and my abstracted artistic endeavors, a counterexample to both Word's tragically now-widespread horror-story idiosyncrasies - lamentably generalizable to Docs, Writer, any competitor one can think of which has attempted to imitate the shrouded what-you-see-is-what-you-get model - and the difficulties I have experienced attempting to edit Bezier curves by hand in Illustrator or Fontlab/Fontforge, the distinctions between the latter two having blurred away in my mind, and it all constitutes a simultaneous success story and stable, harmonious existence which I have chosen to maintain through the software I use in my day-to-day life.

    Even for the millennia prior to TeX and soon enough LaTeX, history has demanded to progress without cessation, with no stagnation, and with constant documentation of even the most minimal now that there is a means by which we chronologize our being as it runs its course and the inevitability of time threatens to destroy at its own pleasure all which precedes, which furthermore motivates our decisions we make with technology, for the present kind of technological forward motion - technovelocity - encourages faster and faster production with new means constantly morphing between one another or into mutant forms unrecognizable in their design and thus in time ignoring existing systems for innovation's sake, new architectures from the ground-up creating competing standards with the intent of unifying all existing ones under a new, arbitrary definition to be practiced alongside everything which existed prior, thus executing a cycle which I do not at all suggest we strive to prevent, as its occurrence is so frequent as to resemble a nature, though its intensity is more than just certainly a productivity-oriented society's borne fruit which would be uncomplicated and less torn were we to make compromises and overwork ourselves less as we attempt to make wrought the various processes of composition, but even so, we must try not to ignore a fundamental message that the old and often ostensibly illiterate may be the wiser ones risen above the rest with distinction after all.  That is, the arcane system may be better-documented, more explicitly open to the public for examination and modification, more capable or flexible in its architecture or architectural sensibilities, and ultimately more sensical when the careful user compares it to unreadable systems despite complaints of idiosyncratic behaviors and learning curves themselves nullified by a careful, thorough examination of the concept in and of itself in relation to its implementation, even if the explorer is no programmer by any conventional reckoning (I'm certainly not), meaning visual immediacy may perhaps distract from our desire to compose and theorize alongside seeing results with every digital brushstroke where the need to do so may not truly exist in a moment or for the sake of something or another, and we can thus save our thinking and resources for the discrete and raster and, with a sigh of relief that they are in safe, well-composed LaTeX hands having in at least some capacity had their content separated from its presentation, allow our vectors to run free.

Cunein-Formatics and the Impermanent Groove

     Fluke. This word alone, as used most prominently by noted idiosyncratist and improvisationist Scotch BX, encapsulates an eternal truth of both traditional and non-traditional electronic music: nothing is exactly replicable unless you have digital copies, and even the things that ARE digital will be replicated in different ways in their translation to audible sound by DAC units, etchings onto the readable surface of vinyl records, duplication onto cassette tape via an ever-degrading deck which hasn't actually been 'hi-fi' for a few decades now, and so on. In short, electronic music production is distinctly Heraclitean, and it often survives in just as many fragments as the Pre-Socratics, but the media is lost in the span of only a decade rather than, say, a few centuries to a millennium. After all, SoundCloud, someday to become a Library of Alexandria itself even if 'saved' by ArchiveTeam, houses lossy encodings of so many of these flukes, artifacts of real-time performances and indeterminate sequences, assembled in an oxymoronic blend of painstaking effort and haphazard chaos, and they too will disappear with the rot of hard drives and the decommissioning of servers. We make all our efforts to archive, but SP-FORUMS will shut down eventually, will it not? So much color will fade from this world that day, but the new will bleed in; it always does. I, personally, know that I bled in when I first purchased an SP-404A nearly two years ago, and even though it once brought me great sadness knowing that impermanence is a modus operandi on this scene to which I have grown so damn attached, but I have found beauty in the same concept, for it's baked into the very nature of the music itself, the performance of a Jalen beat or a Brrd tape or one of those assembles /f made as WARM THIGHS or Susan Balmar. Many of these are indeed far displaced from their origins, available only on Soulseek or MediaFire, but the records these artists would cratedig come scratched and damaged and dusty likewise end up voided of their original context in the process of sampling, chopping, resampling, arranging, and recording. We write flukes. We write with impermanence. We never step in the same goddamn river twice. We allow time to eat away at us and resist knowing resistance is futile, but this isn't a tragedy, it's a natural history. Welcome to the world of the sample, where the SP and MPC reign supreme, where any equipment capable of flukes (especially in '12-bit grit') commands unnatural resale prices, where magic is real and happens every day in silence. Join us as we sit around and debate whether MPC swing exists or do comparisons between the 303/404 Vinyl Sims. We have a lot to cover.
    For many years (I wanted to say 'fourteen years ago' but this goes back slightly further), it was possible to find gear for relatively inexpensive prices in local classifieds, online marketplaces, and even yard sales run by beatmakers of yesteryear or their surviving relatives. The Roland SP-404SX and Akai MPC1000 were still in production, but secondhand units, lovingly used and occasionally smelling of smoke (samplers and weed seem to have a lot of synergy - Reverb listings for MPC2000s and 3000s often still specify a 'smoke-free' studio as a smelling point), could be found sustainably and easily because almost no one outside the scope of these scenes thoughy anything about them was anything worth keeping. Computer sampling technology had presented a significant challenge to the E-Mu model, the ROMpler, and even a giant like Akai, which had already spun off its Professional brand in 2000, with an acquisition by inMusic in 2005 (the same year Roland released the original SP-404) that eventually brought us the unreappraisable MPC Renaissance (shame!), among other things. The relative accessibility of sampling instruments in an era where they were (supposeldly) well on the way to uselessness spawned a scene based on esoteric exchange. Forums centered around technique cropped up online, and regulars would dominate pleasantly off-the-wall discussions about the machines, the flukes into which users found themselves falling after acquiring these devices and messing with them. The boards were conceptual exchanges; in a 2007 thread on SP-FORUMS, one user, Cheenergies, attributes their abilities with the 404 to their experience with the cultural conversation surrounding it, their existence in the machine's then-present-day (and somewhat ongoing) zeitgeist. Everything about this was distinctly in-the-moment, organic, and collaborative in an era of far slower internet speeds and peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge and files alike. It would only be natural for ephemerality to play in so heavily, so rapidly.
    It's an exaggeration to say that nothing lasts forever. The concept of divinity, after all, has permeated the entire human experience, apparently since our prehistory, and some of the earliest literary texts preserved are of an explicitly religious nature, calling out to regionally-specific gods above (or below!) with either requests for guidance and assistance or thanks for the good in the world, the fertility of Mesopotamia before its aridification (an extension of how we felt when the sea levels were at their lowest during the Last Glacial Maximum), so I'll put my bets on it. What I intend to illustrate is that divinity/transcendence is as eternal as impermanence, which is itself paradoxically eternal as the opposite of eternity. We face rotting SoundCloud links and embarrassment at the perceived poor quality or corniness of beats at all times; more than that, we face the consequences. Thanks to the partial preservation enabled by Internet Archive, we can even examine this process essentially as-it-happened, so why don't we? We turn our sights to Jalen Tuna. Jalen Tuna, theater kid extraordinaire, perhaps found himself in the predicament of having lived a life too played-out for his own good and began erasing all but enticing traces of his online presence, his Nina-inspired flukes falling back on themselves and incomprehensible to those who hadn't been lurking SP-FORUMS for years already, screaming FUK NINA for months. Jalen effectively conveyed the (apparent) emotional intensity of his feelings for Nina through his sampler: on '4 nina,' you can hear him frantically shifting a tortured voice through every effect readily accessible on the 404's MFX unit, rushing the listener through his flurry of feelings; he still misses her, he still loves her, and he still has things to say, even if she won't end up listening. Keep in mind, now, that all of this has been deleted from the public's view, surviving on archival SoundClouds, MediaFire, Soulseek, and any other distribution service for rare music you can possibly think of. But '2 nina,' cleverly transcluded onto his 2016 (?) work 'For Parker Nina and My Range Rover,' is a lament of the transience of his love for Nina, and he tries his best to make the momentarity forever, singing about Nina more and more with each new mixtape or single, refusing to forget her even when he has covered up all trails that could lead someone to Nina, trails that could explain his story for certain. His sense of deletionism and potentially even humiliation over the mythos surrounding Nina obliterates his message and, in the end, illustrates the ever-changing nature of things he seeks to counteract through his work.
    Much early writing, however, also comes in the form of administrative documents used in burgeoning city-states for the tracking of things which no one (exaggeration) had had to count before. Cuneiform was a tool of trade and commerce in its earliest days, a tool used by officials who didn't want to get fucked over in the process of exchange in a reassurance that some permanence would remain for at least some stretch of time certifying that a singular event occurred and the state was not what it was before. Likewise, hip-hop sampling, in keeping continuity with the prior musical traditions of funk and jazz and soul and R&B it draws from, records the process of abstracting that existing material, the investments made in the (generally respectful, but occasionally sacrilegious) thematic distortion of included samples. The sampler is the utensil with which the thematic mental transactions of everyday art-conscious life are both recorded and turned into clay tablets for - in turn - further bookkeeping on the present mechanics of reality by vocalists. Rap is quite often as powerful as it is because lyricism expresses the current condition, how the world is right now, and even calls us to action based on what we now know. In this sense, hip-hop is of the world and permeates the world, allowing the full expression of all that is, especially so for those who would have no outlet otherwise. Like many genres, however, its inscription was prohibitively expensive and far from taken seriously by anyone willing to pay the necessary recording prices, which created a delay between its inception and proliferation through wax and cassettes. Within this delay we find a distinct dense of loss, for we cannot entirely reconstruct a record that does not exist in any capacity except secondhand accounts and circumstantial evidence. Having forced the artists into a state of protohistory, major record label executives only wanted in when they discovered there was profit in the equation, that the semi-permanence of having recordings in broad circulation would drive more capital, though in the end, the same semi-permanence has allowed hip-hop to prosper, driving the cultural conversation. This in mind, what can we say about online sampler culture, its tendency towards needless deletionism and its frequent exclusion of vocalists and 'text' from the story?
    By purposefully leaning into the same impermanence that was once forced upon hip-hop (and jazz many decades before it, when no one was willing to record it), modern sampler culture both succeeds beautifully and fails spectacularly. Through the omission of sociocultural context and through the decay created when a thoroughly embarrassed beatmaker memory-holes their work from the entire Internet, SP-404ists void their material of worldly context and create discrete realities in which the logic of sampling doesn't work as one would expect from the majority of producers and there is no fame outside the paracosm of the scene. Chushi's "Symantecs" (gone from the public Internet but nevertheless still available today on filesharing networks) includes "hendrix&tyler," centered around an essentially verbatim sample of a Tyler, the Creator track, a Surrealist interpretation of text already extant, where lyrical content is overlayed into an instrumental setting within which words and speech - frequently sampled by Chushi as if instruments - primarily function to create atmospheres, as one would expect from your typical CULP beattape (see: Marineland, also not available directly from the artist in full) chock-full of movie soundbytes intended not to advance a plot or convey a message, but to accentuate the hyperdetail (or, in Chushi's case, just as often hypodetail) of each piece, to see how the timings of speech align with the gaps left in the beat expressly for those timings to take place. Even so, the speech content often remains intelligible in SP-404ist work, leading listeners away from being 'readers' and into being 'curators' of feeling. Always creating transient identities, they shy away from the interpretable discography and its corresponding hermeneutics, becoming imperceptible except on the terms they have created, ready to build or destroy worlds at a moment's notice using the once-cheap, now-coveted equipment they bought on a whim while they browsed garage sales, inspired to integrate into the forum life. However, these powerful artistic phenomena do not absolve sampler culture of its faults, the other side of the same coin. Listeners/readers/curators may not exist in moments past, these listeners having found their cuneiform records of sample-transactions irreversibly altered by link rot and the aforementioned pervasive deletionist tendencies, which make research difficult unless you know exactly what you're doing, makes the all-but-loss of labels like SLF Tapes distinctly tragic, for heritage is lost, a landfill containing thousands of precious minerals is compacted to crush them into dust under the weight off guilty accumulated dirt. I can't help but feel hurt myself by this from time to time, seeing the work eat itself by becoming disposable, but it is what it is, truly. Jalen's work is gone, Chushi's work survives partially, CULP's trimmed down too many of his albums, and Antoje is somehow still going strong, among others. There may be despair here, but rest assured that you, too, can buy a hard drive and start backing up everything you see, such that nothing escapes your gaze, at least not for the time being.
    At the end of the day, these devices wear out, for everything involved in the production and recording process is temporary, even when digital permanence is supposedly the norm. Too often do we ignore the eventual tendency of hard drive disks to rot over time, and flash storage tends to last at most a decade before becoming entirely unreadable - those 1TB SD cards aren't the infallible archival media you may think they are. Ultimately, our tablets - both modern-era glass and etched Sumerian oddities - are fractured, and we only find out how long any of it lasts when it's too late to recover any of our masters, any of the MP3s we ripped off the aforementioned SoundCloud. With our tendency to project the present onto both the uncertain past and the dubious future, we inevitably face this problem, assuming that today will always persist, that the moment is the most authentic thing in our lives right now, yet the qualities of being in-the-moment and of being present are artificial constructions we've built up in our attempts to better deal with the philosophical difficulties presented by change. Likewise, the beatmakers we study intently from a distance often sell off their equipment to unknowable fates at the hands of new musicians, wake up one morning and find that half the buttons on their aging machine with its yellowing plastic case have become unresponsive in ways that can only be remedied by careful soldering. The characteristics of performance also do not survive beyond what can be expressed in a recording; we can only guess whether a beatmaker calls us to action or simply wants us to groove and, if they were inclined to convey a clear message, what exactly that message means for the course our lives will take after the immediate moment. Embrace the work for however long it may last, and when it has disappeared, find beauty in your own impermanence and likewise the perpetual search for the detextualized, ambitious new. Above all else, fluke.

REFERENCES
https://sp-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=240 - "The first time you picked up your SP-404" thread on SP-FORUMS (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfkWvFE0wt0 - Tha Piña da Nina and the Santamaria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txRQ6zyqJYo - Jalen - Goodbye (which contains both '2 nina' and '4 nina')
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUSySuoiLAA - CULP - MARINELAND (unabridged cut)
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/cuneiformwriting.php - Information on Cuneiform

Fragmentation and Creation

    The famed Humanist scholar Petrarch was known to have written many letters to his long-dead inspirations, the wandering spirits of those virtuous pagans whose work he deemed preservable in some capacity. He would temporally displace himself for moments in time to compose these documents, unstuck from his Christianized origins in medieval Italy and forgetting the worries of his time - the women who may or may not have been alive for him to obsess over in his Canzoniere - in exchange for eternal longing for something that is not any longer. The existence of these letters does nothing for Petrarch but cause him more sorrow; he worries he has offended Cicero in subsequent documents, putting on a pantomime of one-sided exchange. This, then, emphasizes distance in a society which could not bear to be close to the dead or worship ancestors, instead thinking souls would rise as skeletons at Judgment Day and putting as much space - the entire sky - between themselves and Heaven as possible. Paradise is a boring place in medievality and thereafter anyway, where flawlessness characterizes all, where everyone has monocultural virtue and is only allowed in if their behavior was divinely right. I, of course, am no expert on this matter, and this vision of Heaven is an opinion of mine, but Petrarch's lament of death, distance, and unattainability became a genre unto itself in subsequent centuries of literary development, did it not? Thus, Heaven must be torture, and God must be a nightmare for the man who writes to those who never knew the name of Christ. Responsible for rediscovering a manuscript of Cicero which would have otherwise likely deteriorated, Petrarch bears the burden of knowing the dead more intimately than many in his time, and this is what makes him fail to recognize that Cicero lives on through him. He ruins himself and widens spacetime through his successes, failures, and mere acknowledgments that the past existed and he now has to deal with it. The unattainable gives him purpose, but he doesn't pick up the scraps - he leaves them on the ground and takes photographs. The shards matter this much despite the errors in transmission; the true Cicero, after all, was lost the moment his first original manuscript was hand-copied and disseminated. Where is rhetorically vicious, truly stalwart Cicero? He is in shreds.
    The idea of 'lost media' has gained far more credence in the mainstream of online culture than any articulation of what Petrarch unknowingly experienced, the 'altered media' of Ciceronian texts. From there, a duality emerges between 'lost' and 'found,' searches for unknown songs intensify to the point that they become far more difficult to find as they are reposted over and over, edited and remixed, chopped and screwed. The 'lost' is that which we are forbidden access by the passage of time, ideally only for the time being. As time goes on, we naturally lose more and more in the same way we approach death, and we're about to see so much lost in subsequent decades as many misconceptualize digital media as lasting forever, when in reality its fragility matches or exceeds the papyri of early Biblical manuscripts, its Nag Hammadi-esque preservation in a temperature-controlled environment without human interference basically impossible. There is no application of the documentary hypothesis and/or source criticism to 'found' media, no attempts to identify an author outside the immediate canonical creator. We do not treat Everyone Knows That the same way as Deuteronomy, yet both have reached legendary status (albeit in different degrees). No blanks have been filled in; if the 'found' copy is missing a scrap, it's fine, but if a brief lacuna or interpolation exists in every manuscript of Vergil, scholars will wonder about its purpose for many decades, essentially indefinitely unless, somehow, something is found. We forget in this day of reposting, hypotheticals, and YouTube-video-essay-summary-as-analysis that these internal logics exist and are important to survey. In creating these understandings, we creatively construe; we find places for the placeless, and there is value there.
    Fragmentation is something I have intended to write about at a greater length for some time now, as I have discussed it many times in relation to textual transmission and Julia Holter's "Aviary," among other things, but I think the best place to begin is with Sappho. Of Sappho we have pieces we have had to assemble from wine bottles, refuse in Egypt's dead of nowhere, commentaries, hearsay, and everything else, all without the word of God to tell us anything of her existence. Of subsequent queer women we mostly have rumors; in fact, queer women were once created by rumors in the process of transcribing history, lesbianism bestowed upon unfavorable figures, nonetheless adding to legendarity in the twentieth century and onward, funnily enough. Of the women who were said to be in Boston marriages we know their strong emotions for one another, but redactions have omitted the precise places we would rather have filled in. Finally, of the women of the lesbian canon, we have so much that some argue against their queerness after they've left their deathbeds and gone up, down, or horizontally to wherever they may end up, precisely because they believe God is in the gaps. Like how Cicero survives in fragments, these women face difficulties being incorporated into latter-day Cities of Women (after de Pizan), for we suppose that they are erased by these superimpositions. Their survival in fragments, however, truly speaks to an eternal idea of love, as eternal and unwavering as the haunt of death looming over us all (but especially Petrarch). We find these fragments and, in filling in the gaps and reconstructing, we create something distant yet new, something unique to the context in which we restructure. The infinity of our world and these recursions creates many different Sapphos, many ideas of the woman from whom all femme queerness radiates into the future, refracted through our visions of form and our experiences of function. Sappho is gone, but we can become closer to her in subjective ways by making things from her text, refusing to solely speculate on her responses to our present-day or whatever came after; she would never be applicable to our time, and she would never truly understand anything which extended beyond her lifetime but the underlying idea of love threading her back to us. Our fragmentations outline disparate ideas into one structure, archaisms made fresh in their translation into modern tongues or even their direct inclusion with a multi-paragraph footnote explaining the gamut of possibility surrounding such obscure lexical items. This universe, inherently productive, and this mode of communication we indulge in, language, are inherently productive and can find creation even in the wake of destruction, life originating from things that die, all emerging from a spontaneous happening in a void we cannot even imagine until we are already gone. I say that our recursively fragmented world, while neither flawless nor the best of all possible, is the most fulfilling we will ever know, and the artifacts of perception and ideation impact our lives in positive ways, even when ends approach everything but the unknowable, overarching divinity.


REFERENCES
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47859/47859-h/47859-h.htm - Petrarch's letters to the ancient dead
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html - Nag Hammadi library's complete contents
https://juliaholter.bandcamp.com/album/aviary - Julia Holter's "Aviary"

Against Emo, For Dada

AGAINST EMO, FOR DADA

AN ESSAY BY JANIS VIVIAN MEDIA LAGO WITH OCTAVIA SHEFFNER 

    LAGO SAYS: We live in an era of uneasy clairvoyance, an era of discomfort, for we cannot capture every space and are instead captured, held captive, by spaces we imagine. Has this not always been the case? Indeed, music inherently moves through space by its very nature as sound, its limitless complexities and variations captured in the recording medium in an attempt to *preserve* space. Thousands of audio plugins are available online which serve only to emulate the reverberations of physical spaces, varying in their degree of authenticity yet always falling short of preserving the feeling. The 'church' or chamber is equally common in contemplative 'ambient' and tortured 'witch house,' a signifier separated from its origin and devoured by the language of production in the days since Lexicon units first began to quietly invade music studios. The spaces through which we move often do not exist, the songs we produce as musicians irreplicable in concert, for we capture, kidnap, our flukes, yet the idea may be replicated infinitely so long as a recording exists. Our composited flukes, put in the same place and oriented within the same context, are easy to construe as 'worlds.' These recordings will see many spaces, be heard in many realms of experience, yet they do not originate from any particular space. They are nanometer processes, translations of the imagination. So, what are we as musicians if we create spaces and construe worlds with the idea of reproducing the feelings of our worlds in the minds of others, even if those feelings prove inaccurate and often over-fanciful? We are _worldbuilders._ All of us, worldbuilders, inevitably, at all times, even when we believe we are not. Even field recordists are building worlds, just worlds very similar to their own. So, whence originates the idea that worldbuilding is optional, that it is at all possible to escape it, especially when such an idea itself is a product of the human imagination?

    SHEFFNER SAYS: I believe in a thing called love. Specifically, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" by post-ironic or honest to god British hair metal revival, silver sparkling spandex-clad butt rock band The Darkness, clamped ballsack high notes and flowerchild hairdos included. A song whose music video is set in a spaceship and a squeaked call of "GUITAR!" (sounding more like CATCHYA!) in which starts up the guitar solo as the camera pans across a hallway to the guitarist in a green light, and escalates into lasers shooting out of guitars in defeat of a giant space octopus that has landed onto The Darkness' craft and whose tentancles reach inside as the band fend it off with the sheer power of rock. I believe that this Katamari cornball is actually a better expression of the feeling of falling in love than a fragmented queer narrative told by 5 author stand-ins over an acoustic guitar, despite the latter sparing no details and baring everything. I'm not a hardline proponent of concision, I believe indulgence is the space of life. But 'I wanna kiss you every minute, every hour, every day.' kicks an astronomical, space octopus-slaying amount of ass. This work is not intended as an indictment of work that is your last breakup with the names changed, but it is in fact intended as an indictment of the work that in fact parades the fact that it is the minutiae of your last breakup with the names changed. Why do we need 'messy' queer art if 'messy' exclusively constitutes the reliving of one's traumas? Furthermore, do we particularly need honesty of the stranger talking your ear off on public transport while you nod along caliber? Can an elevated honesty exist in burying your head in mediated sand and allowing the healing process to take place guided by filmic cues, the tradition of snowfall indicatory of love, ceiling-mounted machines that drip the water comprising the rain of grief, defeat, loneliness and every other possible negative emotion? Can we become more of ourselves by removing ourselves and instead interrogating genre and convention, what is nostalgically available and what is in some way has been sold to us as universal? _Hell yeah, bro. Bless up. Fingerguns._

    LAGO SAYS: This, inevitably, brings us back to the underlying concept of worldbuilding. We as listeners are conscious of the worldbuilding process because it is primarily _a priori,_ using existing signifiers and coalescing them into a new combination. In fact, I often define the much broader concept of creativity itself as 'the resynthesis of preexisting influences with unique experiences,' perhaps tacking on 'as a conceptual exploration relating to reality' as an optional qualifier, but such an addition would completely disregard a very crucial fact about worldbuilding: not everyone wants to worldbuild. In fact, there exist artists who find themselves so repelled by worldbuilding as to create featureless works, on the surfaces of which they extend little more than vaguely evocative metadata - often metadata in irrational, inexplicable flux not unlike what we see on The Weather Channel, as if to align it with nature - and remark on inconceivable concepts, such as inhumanity. May I, if a bit aimlessly, suggest that inhumanity is only human, since it requires the construction of an intelligent human mind to relativistically map out everything typical of humanity before exploring latent space? Maybe, but let me illustrate a point here, one that anyone familiar with Gabi Losoncy's seminal 2017 release _HH_ will be able to reckon with. Those who have heard _HH_ can still confidently know nothing about it: in other words, those familiar are supposed to ask, what even is _HH_ anyway? Forced Exposure describes _HH_ as "psychologically dense nothingness" at its marketplace, a group of fanciful words which, fittingly enough, say little to nothing about the release itself. Air conditioner recordings, _man._ Absolute fuckall with very few exceptions, all found in the bookendings. On 'Faceshopping,' SOPHIE's lead singer begs the listener, "Reduce me to nothingness." When watching the music video, one will indeed see these words dissolve on the screen into digital darkness: #000000. Such a sentiment of queer transcendence is hard to convey with such eloquent brevity, but is this really where Losoncy's handcuffed figure ends up, or is she simply stoking the flames of pareidolia with tidbits? Is anything about _HH_ truly insignificant, or are we all just children on the inside, wishing to see something more? I say we are all _enfants terribles_: we pick our poisons, and if this is your poison, so be it. You can imagine the music all you want, but there will never be music there without the conscious force of _worldbuilding._ What Losoncy succeeds in is creating an empty world. What you salivate over is indiscernible metadata; perhaps it is better to admit this than to chase the dragon until you have written four thousand words on an incorrect interpretation of John Cage's seminal _4'33._ When confronted with nothingness, we construct our own somethings. Sappho's poems survive fragmented, her Aeolic dialect reframed in the context of modern queerness. Why must partial understandings be left _unconsciously_ empty?
    There is, however, the issue of fullness, being stuffed to the brim with what is now unceremoniously called 'content.' In all its glory, 'content' can nonetheless be reduced to the role of a space-filling fuzzy concept, one which leads either to meaning or to uninterpretation, the perception of depth where there is none, not unlike what we imagine glancing into our screens' inherent degrees of 2.5D, yet more exaggerated: imagine simulating _two_ dimensions instead of just one. Overstuffed lyrical designs thus risk misinterpretation not only by those who have a thesaurus on hand, but by those who have one too many at their fingertips. The latter group get into messy relationships with language, prodding at their pareidolia with a deathwish, poking it as one would a grizzly bear with a stick - perhaps not quite as intensely, but still dangerously. _Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are,_ considered The Brave Little Abacus' magnum opus, illustrates such a concept effectively. I could digress for a while about a personal dislike of this album, sure, with its tender and afraid clean guitar sounds and detestably clean mixing, especially in comparison to _Demo?_, but what I wish to discuss here requires only that you have a lyric sheet for this record on hand. I will put aside what's personal and focus on the text. "I see it too." relates itself first and foremost to nature, what could be called 'lush' language, and Adam Demirjan's narrator quickly builds a world, an abstract world, where trees dominate and 'home' is imminently leavable by any means necessary. Such intensely personal lyrics, however, provide us very little in the end: what we can establish about Demirjan is that he is a teenager with a headstrong sense of independence and vocabularic pride. The evocativity is there, but the words tell us too much and too little: the personal diffuses beyond Demirjan and inspires readers/listeners to project everything from severely repressed trauma to George Bernard Shaw quotes onto his record. Sonically, nothing differentiates it from a bargain-bin indie rock record, except maybe the Alesis Micron, and the cult history of _Masked Dancers_ is more readily connectable to the Internet and its self-fulfilling prophecies than to anything about it being 'personal.' One cannot add a few generic personal names (ex. Abby on "Born Again..."), verbose expressions, and obtuse allegories and expect a 'personal' record. This genericized abstraction may be fuel for long-term fame, but, despite being full to the brim with human language, its world falls apart quickly as it becomes impossible to forget that _Masked Dancers_ was just basement recordings of a few Midwestern young adults who happened to enjoy _Akira_ more than your average joe. Jane Remover, on her modern and now-trimmed-down cult classic "Teen Week," references specific dates and times throughout the songs included and now expresses shame for even the most generic forms of specificity, as the album primarily covers the (unfortunately) common queer feeling of alienation from friends and family. Having since put most of the record in the bin, leaving cuts like "let down" to the wolves, and having moved on to a discontinuous direction, it is arguably more special and peculiar than ever for her to be cryptic. Average, somehow, can become crucial.
    By introducing tiny, tiny pieces of _Akira_ into the medium/framework/idiom/whatever which we happen to call Midwest Emo nowadays (as if the term had any meaning to a few boys from the geographically challenged state of New Hampshire who wanted to form a silly little band as many boys do in young adulthood), Adam Demirjan does something many attempt, yet few truly succeed at: he directly incorporates the material he is working off of, sculpts it into a form still recognizable as its point of origin, something that barely requires tracking down by sleuths who devote hours upon hours to sites like WhoSampled searching for commercials haphazardly picked out by Daniel Lopatin for use - incorporation into - Replica. The brief song in question, rightly polarizing, is constructed out of foreign bodies - the aforementioned groans - looped over Alesis Microns and undistorted guitars, apparently evoking ruined childhoods and homes so toxic you have to wear hazmat suits to hide your face. What we find here is many 21st-century artists, specifically this era's storytellers and worldbuilders, show a preference for introducing obvious formal references in the structures of their work to the exact things they explore in their artworks, restricting themselves thence to the literal, referential structures and considering them "new." Now, TBLA is far from an extreme e\0xample, I must say; for a more hyperbolic expression of what I refer to, I will have to discuss the now-infamous mascot horror genre.
    While much of the music and art I have mentioned hitherto tends to focus on adolescent or early-adult feelings, often fears, mascot horror games make an attempt to connect with childhood terror, using elements readily experienced by most in their early lives (even if not inherently horrifying to the vast majority of children past or present). Early titles were often runaway successes among vloggers now unceremoniously relegated to the flimsy title of 'content creator,' for, in using the forms, qualities, and feelings of childhood as a structural basis, they captured the imaginations of adolescents and adults online, spawning a litany of retrospective analyses and at least a bit of awe. Ostensibly novel, this fictional form soon sprawled into expansive lore, taking on a life of its own while still constrained to the exact elements of childhood. The beauty of _Five Nights at Freddy's,_ however, was not to last forever: soon enough, the appeal had become Flanderized, the demographic shifted towards children - experiencers of childhood - without any point of reference, in some ways replacing ever-declining strongholds of Charles Entertainment Cheese and all the world's _Purble Places_ and public-access television shows. This brand of indistinguishability is never a good sign. Thus, I will state an alternative preference of my own, for art construed using the abstract elements inherent to the artform rather than depending entirely on the formal references I have described here. This thought is far from original, and so I will claim no credit and instead riddle you this: for millennia, we cherished poets for their ability to construe pictures in constrained metrical forms, forms themselves often established for many centuries before any given poet had entered the picture. In the Latin language, there are certain adverbs and even verbal forms which a poet may not use whatsoever in dactylic hexameter without breaking from their rote system of verse. Those who could understand and appreciate the poets praised them for their imagery, as evocative and vivid as many great authors of the modern era who have conjured up with newer literary rules and often wholly reconceptualized rhythms, and the subtleties of their choice of language and even manipulations of syntax and word order to accommodate ideas they expressed. Working within these forms, we have a long continuity of masterpieces leading into our _Waste Lands_ and _Cantos,_ a long history leading back to the pre-print oral tradition. Being able to create a poem in the literal shape of, say, an apple is a new development, but *conveying* the shape of an apple is eternal, fundamental, even transcendental. With this knowledge, we should seek to exhaust as many of the infinite possibilities of the world as we can rather than returning to traditions no longer living with a conservative, neoclassicist bent - no need to RETVRN in *this* economy as the TikTok grifter-influencers command us to do. Instead, it is the task of the artist, the storyteller, the storytelling artist, to understand the worlds she builds.
    To explain this idea of understanding-worldbuilding, I feel I must once again turn to the aforementioned classical tradition of poetry and go from there, for it is one of many of my varied inspirations underlying this essay and contains a wealth of manipulations of form and balanced situations within the established reality of both reading and speaking, within which this poetry existed in its day. The notes I have seen on readers of this Latin poetry (and even of prose) over the years often contain bits and pieces explaining how the poet purposefully altered the word order, which Latin syntax allows and perhaps even encourages, to associate conceptual groups more closely, to emphasize concepts, or even to suggest additional actions or details pertaining thereto, which the audience may figure out from context and further imagine despite the absence of a direct description. Using the understandings taught to them from a young age by authors who had invested their entire adult lives into rhetorical and grammatical arts, Greco-Roman storytellers synthesized their influences and experiences to work medium-internally to build worlds of their own character and emphases, carefully designed and _understood._ The wealth of ideas which stem solely from syntactic choices conjures not something that outright "isn't there," but rather uses little content to create suggestions while the content is actually present - _aliquid adest._ No metadata is necessarily required, although metadata is important: we can look at an individual line with contains chiasmus and identify chiasmus on account of its simple ABBA structure (not to unintentionally reference the European band of the same name), and we can take out-of-context excerpts, as students of classics do due to obvious constraints on what lines of Latin can be covered in the span of a single college semester, and still find extensive meaning. We cannot say the same, however, for something like James Ferraro's earliest solo work, _Cruisin' The Nightbiker Strip 1977,_ a piece so abstracted and imperceptible in every possible regard by way of its extraordinarily low karaoke-machine fidelity, that it depends entirely upon metadata and the narrative of Ferraro's life to capture the imaginations of its listeners and generate hype. In this case, not one segment can be taken from _Nightbiker_ and analyzed on its own, for when we attempt to analyze, we fall back on the metadata rather than the content found in the art itself, and we must ask the rhetorical question: is a transcendence found reading a Wikipedia article or database entry about the thing any different from a transcendence found experiencing the item described by the encyclopedia? Of course, indeed they differ, but are they equally valid? Also yes, but not in the way one might think. Where many make the mistake is in citing the subject of the article as the source of their transcendent experiences rather than the article, which is as painful to admit as having lied about reading a book in full. The Russian language, after all, is quite clever to have a pair of verbs which distinguish between having read a book _at all_ and having read a book in its _entirety,_ something English, the dominant language of both amateur and professional artistic and literary criticism online, ought to take notes on in this day and age. If only the summary is to survive intact in the artistic transmission of a work, then why not attribute the worldbuilding to the summary written by the insider? We are afraid to do so because it means actively admitting that the medium is referentially constructed, that we are inherently inauthentic despite having defined inauthenticity ourselves. Is there anything wrong with that?

REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKjZuykKY1I - I Believe In A Thing Called Love
https://www.forcedexposure.com/Artists/LOSONCY.GABI.html - HH by Gabi Losoncy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9-P1SOeHU - Music video for Faceshopping by SOPHIE (rest easy)
https://genius.com/albums/The-brave-little-abacus/Masked-dancers-concern-in-so-many-things-you-forget-where-you-are - Lyrics to Demirjan's effort
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeXQ3A1wVQQ - Example of Replica sample sleuthing
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land - The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
https://hexameter.co/how-to-scan - Practical guide to dactylic hexameter, for proper appreciation of the art of classical poetry
https://latin.packhum.org/loc/690/3/0#0 - Text of Vergil's Aeneid (in Latin), full of examples of the syntactic manipulations discussed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K3t34Sazzc - Cruisin' The Nightbiker Strip 1977 by James Ferraro