january 5th, 2023

every time i try to think about what Pad Chennington actually represents to me i feel like i'd have to
write a whole book for it to not be missing any details. & it still feels like the most core principle of
it is still some undeniable feeling in my chest that, after years, i still don't know how to articulate right

it feels like a phenomenon where conversation about it only crops up around its more egregious cartoonish examples
("do people only like this album because of its backstory?"), when really i think it kind of hangs over everything

i guess it's just that one supreme reality for me is that everything just exists. & the more one accustoms themselves to an
entertainment landscape where some kind of telos behind everything is an absolute unquestioned fundamental given,
the more it kind of deadens connection that supreme reality & distances one from reality a bit overall, in my view

& i'm talking entirely about art here, so one could raise the question, "is a telos not blatantly essential to art?"
but it's not so much about the telos of the art, as much as it's about the art's abduction into a kind of conceptual
plane where telos, as it relates to the viewer, is the fundamental substance that comprises it, & the fundamental
condition on which anything can even be imagined to exist in the first place, & in everything it must be identified

the sphere of entertainment, the realm that is the total body of media subjected to the lens of being entertainment,
of being a service. & i think the more one is accustomed to this sphere the more they place things in it automatically

Pad Chennington says yes, couch yourself in more layers of abstraction & presentation & mere secondhand
perception, & accustom to yourself to a perception of art wherein its expressive & communicative
utility & value is hollowed out & replaced with the perception of how it can serve you.
& insofar as it remains communicative, that too is only in service of serving you

obviously gratification is not fundamentally bad. one can feel the communication embodied in a piece
of art & feel gratified by that connection. that is good. it doesn't mean that it feeds into this sickly
thing i am trying to delineate here. i am convinced that something more subtle is at play

it's what happens when someone can't seem to take in a piece of art without spontaneously weaving some brand
new interpretative lens for it on the spot, through which it can robotically serve some latent desire to
feel inspiration, or fear, or befuddlement, or pride in a musician's "trajectory." & this service
is rendered by way of some controlled, predefined model of "art incites effect"

i'll reiterate: the problem is not that art incites effects! that's its beauty. the problem for
me is "art incites effect." quotation marks. if art inciting effects wasn't beautiful, i don't
think it'd desirable enough to get exploited & muddled up into "art incites effect"

the miracle of inspiration becomes like a service that is successfully rendered at certain times. art can feel
like a service worker, but with the "thrilling risk" that it's simply allowed to not always invariably succeed

even the absence of a telos can be retrofitted into the telos of unraveling or puzzling over an enigma
in some stilted way that follows in the footsteps of some youtube documentarian ("is this an arg?")

Pad Chennington is just the egregiously undisguised abduction of works of art from the
plane of "just existing" to the plane of forced telos. but, like i said, i feel like there is
a tendency for things to exist on that plane anyway, once people are too acclimated

it's invoking discordance & disorder in a piece of art on purpose & being called
schizophrenic by someone who couldn't dissociate it from the telos of your work being
there for them to intellectually conquer by exposing some underlying factor at play

it's K--- F---- streamlining the abduction of its targets' entire selves into a framework wherein not even human
beings inherently just exist, but have their every action filtered through an interpretative lens that reframes
everything to support the telos of gratifying the userbase's desire to feel repulsedly stimulated by eccentricity.
all of this collated & tabulated into a convenient & gratifying list of forum threads, an interface, like
a DoorDash menu, lives flattened into a list like a supply chain flattened into an app

it's like a phenomenological disease that can become a person's fundamental
tone for processing the life happening right there in front of them

january 19th, 2023

my subset of things that i filtered out from the historical agglomeration of global culture
represented by the internet to compensate for my own personal lack of any culture is cooler
than your subset of things that you filtered out from the historical agglomeration of

january 21st, 2023

ideas like "memetic propagation," "remixing," "plunderphonics" are like the demonically understandable recapturings & deadenings
of this really honest sense of freedom that can be evoked by childhood exposure to even these silly things like ytp videos, or
floral shoppe, i mean the way that there is familiarity laced into these things, maybe direct familiarity with the cartoons
in ytps if not necessarily the music sampled in vaporwave, but in any case there are still all these detectable isolated
signs of the mediums' respective established languages & cliches, little fragments of musical language or little cues
that suggest what a moment might have meant in whichever clip or episode is being twisted into nonsense, just enough
to have something to hold onto while these are ground up into this weird montage of pure feeling not bothering to
cater to any need for the usual narrative or visual or sonic continuity, this is how it feels while young & it
doesn't even belong in this retroactively descriptive language because it ties it down too much, but then
idiotic secondhand culture & journalism aims to dash that youthful perspective to bits by forcing it
into these common frameworks of memes & discussion of production processes & ratings &
whether this or that is "commentary" or whatever & just generally everything drab enough
that everyone can understand it so they can have their fake cultural commonality

february 1st, 2023

hes a cool guy!

i don't know, for me there's this weird thing where you can write out the most elaborate explanation in the world for why you
dislike the cultural position & function of a band, album, movie, whatever, & you can really really feel it & really be saying
something honest, but in my view there never comes a point where there ceases to be this ironic sense of liberation in also
just tossing it all out the window & saying your actual, sensory, animal intake of sound right then & there in the moment
trumps everything, that you don't have to abstract things & burden yourself with context & trying to "figure it out"

it's like enjoyment just sidesteps everything, it's always secretly the most "smart, cool, advanced spiritual operation" that was sitting
right there back at the start all along waiting for you to come back to it, it's just that you also hope not to be taken advantage of by it

there's this tension, like say i have some crazy beautiful experience to dark side of the moon by pink floyd without concern for
its status as a "classic" or the homogeneity of its presence or whatever, it's kind of freeing to just self-affirmatively say that
that innocent & unfettered response to just sounds that are happening at a time & place might have more truth & validity
than whatever i might try to make of all the less visceral concerns of homogeneity & obscurity & all that... to say,
"my experience takes precedence!" or else what are we even doing, what is this all in service of?

but, on the other hand, once one thinks about it in the more abstract terms, it can be hard to go back from seeing it through that lens!
the freaky mechanisms of music distribution, music myth, all that stuff reaching down into my life along with everyone else's & trying to
kinda make us all have our unique & true experiences to the same old stuff? there is a kind of paranoid inability to return to the initial
naivete, a sense of being forced to wonder if still possessing it wouldn't be to my loss, since i'd just be entirely subject to
those freaky apparatuses, not even realizing what i might be being deprived of, diversities & possibilities

& then that kinda ties into a broader fear, kind of endemic to having to exist in consumerism & all, which is like, sure, maybe
i care about music, let's say maybe i've even got that locked down to some extent & i'm super tasteful. okay. awesome. but
there might still be all kinds of other sectors of my life where i indeed do not even realize what i'm being deprived of

all in all, though, it's like, come on it's so hard to say i'm not objectively losing in some way if i take myself too
seriously to dance around to something. but it still comes to be the case! i'll up & refuse to dance! what the hell

(if there's any case where the "experience-prioritizing" perspective really finds utility it's when something really beautiful is being made but
people are culturally integrating it in really repugnant ways & you just look past the repugnance to see the beauty without letting people ruin it)