#I was also looking thru anime figures on the internet a little while ago and… wanted one very badly

[blueish-bird]

there are JJK figurine blind bags I’ve been occasionally buying for myself — I’d gotten 3 out of 4 without duplicates, but considering that I had a 25% chance to get Megumi/avoid duplicates, I’d made peace with the low likelihood of completing my collection. But, when I went to buy another one today, someone had partially opened a blind bag and I could see Megumi was inside!

in conclusion: thank you whoever opened and didn’t take anything from a blind bag at my local target. my collection is complete and I’m very happy about it

All Four of Them

[circumswoop]

Black Movado: Frank Ocean and the Art of Time

As pseudonyms go, Frank Ocean is pretty straightforward. Right away you know this is emotive, aesthetic music: why get out of his dreams and into his car when you can do both? Take the innate politeness of a born Southerner, add the steel reserve of a bred lowlife and you get songs made from acrylic acids and fine glass powder. Ocean serenades the sea directly in “Swim Good” and “Blue Whale”. Remember the David Foster Wallace line from “Little Expressionless Animals” abt the sea looking like a big blue dog? Swimming with dolphins, incredibly, is the height of basic. But a blue whale? Years ago I read a piece of short fic, by whom I don’t remember, abt a lifeguard who saves a man from drowning and then later sees that man in public, like a restaurant or something, and he, the drowning man, does not recognize his saviour. I wish I cld run into the burning wreckage of whatever hard drive it was on and rescue that story.

More than anything, Frank Ocean’s music feels like falling thru different kinds of air. Figuring out the angles, or angels, of the artist who once asked us to imagine being thrown from a plane is trickier now than in 2011, not just because we’ll never be those kids again. 2011, year of Frank Ocean and the Weeknd, was when the Tumblr aesthetic peaked, with its treatment of visual culture as micrographic surgery, cutting away segments to freeze for a microscope, repeating until there is no more cancer. As palliative pastiche, Tumblr may never be equaled in the history of the internet. Why do you think Grimes, that bony collector of kitschy enthusiasms, still uses it (sort of)? Why do you think Frank Ocean, parachute artist, still uses it(sort of)? Why do you think I still use it (lol, sort of)? If you are a cutter but not of skin, you cut images, or text, and paste them on a blog in lieu of a body. The word “blog” doesn’t mean anything anymore but it still has exactly the trunk space for a body.

A few days after Blonde dropped, I was talking to Yes abt it on Viber, the app we use to keep in touch now that he’s moved back to Greece. Affectionately, he accused me of being too topical bc I’d heard the record and he hadn’t. Then later, he sent me a video of him hearing “Nikes” for the first time, a master shot of him reacting and lowkey crying, a video he meant for his bf in New York but one he wanted me to see, as one of his designated watchers. Once he sent me a visual of him slamming, and this was almost more wrenching. Something about the way that song switches between weary dragging and witchy sweetness recalls one of my favorite lines of literature, from Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk”. (Ondaatje, pastiche royale, is a cutter if there ever was one.) There are stories we tell ourselves and stories we tell our loves. We think we see, just for a minute, the wings of an angel who has temporarily turned into a pickup truck. Or maybe we just hear them.

Frank did some time in church, as attested to on Tumblr: “My grandmother was pentecostal evangelical. She brought much of that fire and brimstone back to her household.”

50 versions of “White Ferrari”

Yes thinks Frank seems pretty gay. I myself do not, while getting that he is. Something about Frank’s testimony seems more like my own, meaning that of a boy who grew up like everyone else and then woke up one day, pretty recently, really exhausted. “Nikes”, for all its gunwales-and-all authenticism, was also a deadly indictment of the ruthless transactionality that passed for straight culture in 2016. Men being power brokers, and women rewarding them, acquires a harsher light when everyone’s in on the joke, when exploitation is the same thing as askance anymore. Yes told me he saw his file from when he was in Bellevue, and honestly they couldn’t figure out his sexuality, except I know for a fact he’s had sex with exclusively men for 3 years now. We discussed it once, and we agreed sort of glibly that girls just aren’t as down, and here’s why: they’re finally as trash about sex as men have been for millennia, but in the opposite direction. Now there’s a winking runway of lights laid out before every m/f interface, and the men are landing and the women are taking off.

I’ve always felt like Frank Ocean did not come out as gay so much as he seceded from the sexual polity. I myself have done this, little by little, over the last 18 months as my years-long relationship, and then another one, wrapped. Seduction and betrayal are an exhausting form of bone remodeling and I can’t deal with that distribution of weight anymore. There’s a reason some dicks are astringent. The curve of the penis is the curve of the earth.

Frank’s Tumblr, last fall: “Consciously though, I don’t want straight—a little bent is good.” Frank on “Siegfried”: I can’t relate to my peers/I’d rather live outside.

Think of another line from “Nikes”--“but if you need dick I got u”--as essentially a somnolent invite, shd sex ever come up. The paradigm of a man too busy for his woman may still be an eye-rolly turn-on, but if that usage slowly morphed into a kind of IOU--not a booty call, but sex on call--then that song accomplishes another mission. If it majors in telling leeches to unstick (these bitches want Nikes/they lookin for a check/tell em it ain’t likely), it minors in motivating the favorably unhorny to speak up for themselves. One of Frank’s most valuable adds has been this exhaustion--if he is in awe of Prince, he’s totally his inverse.

China, Japan, Oceania, France, just around. Casual.

Ocean is, incredibly, both world-spanning and alone. In last year’s NYT feature hosted by Jon Caramanica, he alluded to going on dates in London, keeping the hard drives of his music in a backpack, and skipping Blonde media to tool around anyplace that suited him. These revelations, or postcards, sealed Frank’s fate as patron saint of the voluntarily solitary, which may or may not be the same as the voluntarily committed. In the interview, Frank alludes to the “luxury of choice” which is pretty loaded but the expression of preference is the one thing they shd never take away from you, all the way down to the grout in your cell. Even if you never had it.

In his germinal book The Aesthetics of Disappearance, the writer and artist Paul Virilio famously offered a riffy, razzle-dazzle definition of “picnolepsy” as a kind of allergic reaction to speed--worldspeed or brainspeed, “a montage of temporalities”. This turning of what is essentially epilepsy into just a stunningly inept relationship with reality would seem glib or banal, even though Virilio credits Ambrose Pare’s qualification of epilepsy as “retention of feelings.” Except it also applies to time as a long passage, like a train tunnel, broken up by flashes of light or gleams of steel from above. Obviously this is me getting into Philo101 thru really overqualified means, but picnolepsy is more fun when you make it modular, rather than metabolic. It explains one of the highest functions of pop music: to mark time. Pop is the ceiling fan above you as you lie on your bed. What’s keeping it from falling and slicing you to smithereens?

Frank Ocean Music, with its eroded-coast elisions, nostalgia as a kind of ultraviolence, and polyrhythmic, difficult-to-replicate-at-karoake vocal patterns, is Memory Music. Plenty of artists do this, if not all of them to some extent. Ocean is the rare one who looks sideways, not back to the source of the old memory or forward to the source of a new one. Virilio compares this oscillation to a sort of trackable loss of interest, a loss you can steadily mourn, as simply as looking at old photographs. There’s probably no other songwriter of Ocean’s stature who is so fascinated by the broken image, or the art of the slant, and who breaks that down into pure romance--all while looking so effortlessly out over his life from the slashlike lull of what Virilio called “paradoxical wakefulness.” Which is odd or slightly berserk, since listening to Blond or Endless or even, retrospectively, Channel Orange occasionally elicits symptoms of paradoxical wokeness.

Stare at the monitors and come up with nothing

In the 2016 film Arrival, aliens land in egg-like avatars that also look for all the world like blue whales--especially toward the end of the film, when they levitate with the same impossible elegance. 

The purpose of this film is to talk about time and language, about how they agree and disagree. The aliens, or heptapods, have a written language that uses center embedding and presents visually as witchy-looking spells or smoke. 

As soon as Louise Banks, the Amy Adams character, cracks the language, she cracks time, or at least the heptapods’ expression or experience of it, and is able to, for all intents and purposes and excusing the crudely inadequate phrase, “see the future”. A heptapod sentence can’t really be translated except by effect, because the inkblotty figures they emanate are constructed palindrome-like--the same forward and backward. 

Except it takes several minutes with a legal pad or an app for humans to work out even the flimsiest palindromes, while heptapods intuit or assay the maximum meaning from such recursion with no consideration for time or expelled work, because the time it took to write this sentence would be already inflected in the characters like markers on a motion capture suit. Erase the layer of knowledge or “meaning” and time is able to be visualized, in both directions, and if you can visualize it you can manipulate it. Or erase it.