twang (vol 1)
I am in the store, meticulously glancing at my reflection in the freezer cabinet doors. The light is yellow but it makes me look sort of tanned, which I suppose is nice. I’m simultaneously looking at my image on the surface and the Thai cubes behind the glass, trying to decide which one of us is truly behind the glass. The store floor is covered with hexagon-shaped tiles; hexagon is the bestagon, said a Youtube video a year ago, and told me that hexagon is a shape that nature often gravitates towards, as it’s the only shape that can seamlessly fill an area when put side-to-side. Fascinating, I state to myself, and the Big Blue Bear in front of me hands me a note:
What is behind consumption and material pursuit is the need for a mother’s love; our first heartbreak is realizing that we can’t live our entire lives with our mother, that eventually our paths will split, that they can’t give us everything; the two-fold feelings of abandonment it casts upon you - you’re angry at your mother for her having to grow old, having to go to work, having to be powerless in the face of time; you’re angry at yourself for the same powerlessness and the rejection that you project. What the endless pursuit is, really, is an eternal race towards infinite acceptance, infinite unconditional love, infinite companionship; infinite mother’s love. It’s the grand need, the great, painful temporariness we carry in our chest that consumerism built its city on - a need so unreachable that its earthly objects of desire can never be more than mere metonymies.
I. I, TOO, KNOW THE ROUTES OF THE FRUIT FLIES IN MY HOME
EVERYTHING IS NAMED FROM THE CONTEXT OF ITS COINING MOMENT; IF THE PHENOMENON ROAMS FREE AND UNCOINED AT TIME T, ITS COINING MOMENT T+1 INSTANTLY GIVES ITS EXPRESSIONS A LAYER OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND REFERENCE VALUE, AND FREEZES IT IN TIME; THE ATTRIBUTES THAT ARE NOTICEABLE AND INTERESTING TO T+1 WILL CHARACTERIZE IT FOREVER; WE CAN PREDICT THE PAST BUT WHAT WE ARE CHRONICALLY MISSING IS THE UNKNOWN NATURE OF T, THE PRESENT
1. Say a phenomenon, an era, is currently taking place. Before we identify it and give it a name, we can’t see it - we might feel an unknown umami in the things we experience, gravitate towards it and through that give it grounds to grow without it being monitored.
2. Let’s call these highly contextual and contingent cultural phenomena time beings - at core, they are synthesized derivatives of what culture has accrued at a given moment, combined with our nature as humans, and maybe capitalistic and democratic systems reacting intuitively to emergent cultural cocktails. These eras or trends are intuitively developing and forming answers to certain collective hungers, freely roaming camouflaged zeitgeists, ways for us to collectively cope, express and regulate.
3. These time beings - post-punk, bloghouse, normcore, nihilistic meta-satire and the likes - have the time they exist, sprout, form and create impact, and as soon as the time being is coined, the retrospective starts, and its expressions acquire an element of intention, irony or reference. Like animals, time beings behave differently in captivity, and can no longer intuitively roam and acquire form in a petri dish.
4. Let’s say the time of this intuitive, authentic existence for a time being is at time t. Once coined, the time being is now eternally cast in resin, and it will go down in cultural history through the lens of the moment t+1, the ethos of the time of coining. The prevalent norms and structures dictate how a particular era or trend will be perceived and documented at a given time. T+1 will write down the specific characteristics that it itself found noticeable, interesting and dominant, reduce it down to these main characteristics, and eventually the nuances will be dusted off. History is not just winners’ history, but it’s also essentially a story dictated by a series of coining moments - the tyranny of t+1.
5. The center is always empty; things acquire their final significance when put into context. If you zoom into a tiny incident in history, it will likely have no meaning or significance in a vacuum - it just merely is. It’s the composition of the string of beads that assigns the time being its narrative, role and repartee. That’s why often in order to see close, you have to go far; to later moments in time.
6. So, often when we’re looking at a distinctive cultural era, a time being, we’re looking at a dead star, seeing things when there’s already a past tense. T can not see itself; the present seems calculated, logical, objective, middle-of-the-scale - that’s why we participate and lean towards time beings that take place, because they seem natural, rational, air-like.
7. We’re great at forecasting the past, but the emergence of t always catches us by surprise. To maintain a sense of control, we rationalize trajectories in hindsight, pretend we could have ended up at the correct forecast, had we taken this and this into account.
8. So, in our perception of reality, we are chronically tardy. There’s a latency, more specifically (t+1)-t that we’re blind to, or more specifically, unable to intellectually observe its true nature. I guess you could even say that the space between t and t+1 - let’s call it the garden of latency - is the window where the most genuine manifestations of human nature exist, a child-like state of authenticity and play, and the areas in time surrounding it are not experiencing it, but merely referring to it.
9. The emergent and uncontrollable nature of the garden is the eternal dark matter: our words and registers are not enough to describe its qualities, but we can sense its presence. It’s analogous to how we as humans are just mere observers of our own nature; just consciousnesses that are trying to decode their syntaxes, intra-head moderators of our brain chemistries and neurons.
SPRING BREAKERS IS A TAKE ON THE ONION-LIKE SIMULACRA OF THE WORLD WE LIVE IN; UPHELD BY OUR BELOGING-LONGING DNAS WE PERFORM LAYERED CHOREOGRAPHIES OF CHOREOGRAPHIES OF CHOREOGRAPHIES; MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE HAVE SIMULTANEOUSLY 1) ACCRUED AN INFINITE VALUE AND 2) COMPLETELY BEEN LOST DUE TO THE BREAKING DOWN OF CONTEXTS
Yeah!! Girlfriends! We don’t care, we’re drunk and wild and hot and were the coolest bitches on this beach!
1. The first layer of the hyperreal meta-satire is the film’s casting: 2012’s hottest teen stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson scream a conventional beer-y party film where people e.g., wake up on the lawn post-party with a Crazy drawing on their face. People who were familiar with Korine’s production obviously understood the ethos but for me and my recently teen-aged peers (or other oblivious crowds), the film was a shaking experience with its video-game like violence and other tropes of trashy, extrapolated sleaze and general darkness.
2. We start off with the girls, Brit, Candy, Cotty and Faith, stranded at their lifeless campus, broke and desperately longing to travel to Florida for spring break. To make do, they violently rob a nearby fast-food joint. Cotty waits in the car while Brit and Candy storm in wearing ski masks, raging with hammers and squirt guns. Their evident enjoyment of the situation feels unexpected, uncanny - the moment they step in, sealing the deed, they seem to shift into these alter-egos that can no longer be benched. The gun-representing pointed fingers at the campus hallways earlier acquire a new significance; is the symbolism of violence not distinguishable from actual violence, or does the world just simply seem unreal?
3. The robbery scene hence feels like a reference to the lord-of-the-flies -type statement that civility is an illusion: when needed (and offered a possibility to), people will fall right through the weak veil of social conventions and turn into savages that take what they want. (Later in the film, to articulate the pipeline, the girls go on a murderous, for-fun robbing spree with their new friend Alien.) This is sort of the extrapolated myth connecting hyper-capitalism and the balance-of-fear-nuclear-weapon-realists: people are essentially selfish and mean, and by material incentives and threat of violence, they stick to their civilized ways.
(The mainstream field of sociology was particularly keen on proving this right in the 60s and 70s with biased, sensational experiments like the Milgram obedience experiment and Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment that have later been proven unscientific due to their premises. Also, this idea of kindness only being the result of social contracts and joint profit incentives is definitely a close relative of the invisible hand. The scene consequently feels like a mockery of the naïve, stick figure image of human nature that hyper-capitalism implicitly depicts (humans are greedy and mean and cooperate only when given a profit incentive); of course they use excessive force!)
4. When we get to Florida and the party starts, the girls are having the time of their lives but every moment is clouded by this odd presence of a void, a deadly dark pit that will at least stare back should you not fall into it. The mantras they repeat, such as we have found ourselves here and I’m so happy serve as tangible grips that keep them above the Grand Emptiness - backtracking the neon-hued, idealized moodboards of happiness and life will eventually just get you back to the base, your body: you just exist and observe, and have thoughts and wishes and emotions, react and initiate.
5. The characters seem to be playing to be playing their roles; they are satirical, generalized emojis of what and who they represent, serving an endless litany of tropes in an attempt to reach some kind of an ego death of a character profile; a rapper-dealer, a party-hungry college girl, timid and conventional religious people. An infinite amount of hollow aesthetical references is not a sculpture of itself, but rather the whole world of which it has carved itself out of, an emergent negative space.
This is the fuckin’ American dream. This is my fuckin’ dream, y’all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got... I got SHORTS! Every fuckin’ color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin VAM-pires. I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y’all! I got Escape! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein Be. Smell nice? I SMELL NICE! That ain’t a fuckin’ bed; that’s a fuckin’ art piece. My fuckin’ spaceship! U.S.S. Enterprise on this shit!
6. When we’re rotting at campus in the beginning, Cotty is seen watching some kind of UFC-or-whatever, and after a while of the spring break wobbling, Brit and Candy are watching a cartoon in a neon-colored motel. It’s the inside-out and outside-in of hyperreal spaces; the infinite one-foot-out-the-door of the middle class ennui.
7. We see the girls at various parties performing choreographies of enjoyment, partying, living. Repeated mantras like I’m so happy and clearly performing to an unidentified external eye depict the girls as helplessly institutionalized to the imagery of western, consumerist, Hollywood fun; the deep eye contacts between Brit and Candy (when they’re forcing Alien to fellate a loaded gun or pouring beer in each others’ faces) seem to illustrate the mutual, unarticulated understanding of the scene in question. There’s this feeling of the girls just sleepwalking through frat parties, detached.
8. On the other hand, escapism, idealization and a bird’s-eye view to one’s own life is also a valid source of enjoyment and fun, and should not be categorically pathologized: phenomenologically they are real experiences, and can at least serve as a grounds of play and exploration, like dreams do. It can also bring agency, as expression through a character or a skin can provide distance and alienation from the ego, and consequently freedom. (And even a venue through which to process external imagery that have made a home into your subconscious; like in sex.)
9. The carnivalized party scenes of Spring Breakers and the routines around it supposedly reflect the naïve hedonism of the American adolescent, illustrate the implicit form of the collective dream, the thing that’s behind the smokescreen. Still, it feels like double satire, as it somehow doesn’t seem to be criticizing the sleaze itself but rather mocking the dramatic critique of it; the as-old-as-time cliché of the spoiled youth who still, more often than not, end up better than their parents.
10. The girls make calls home, telling about their calm and substance-free vacation; lying to their parents as they did to their parents, as people lie to their bosses and colleagues and friends, and everyone else, really. The choreographies of white lies is a powerful, global, self-organizing entity and norm, and we’re also tragically unoriginal in our lies. The neon-colored bikinis of Spring Breakers lie, too; they serve as the silk glove on top of the hard, cold iron fist of commercial ideals and driving forces; they’re the hot pink cover of the Russian doll, under which is an angry plywood grandma or maybe a rotten fruit.
11. The particular Russian doll of Spring Breakers is as follows: we start off with commercial teen movie tropes; below it is satire of these tropes; below that is how the characters perform these micro-pseudo-plots to the imagined audience of the whole world; below that is the all-encapsulating metaphor that within consumerist capitalism, even the craziest Fun always has its victims, near or far. Eventually, we arrive at the existential feedback loop of how delusional people create delusional worlds, and delusional worlds create delusional people, and this circulation flows through a body of stages.
12. So, behind the stage there is another stage, and another stage, and another stage. Is there a mother of all stages; a network-theoretical, big-bang meta-stage that indirectly feeds all materials into other performances? Historically and chronologically we could certainly find disruptive turning points, but as to the real-time energetic circulation, where does material come from?
13. Rhetorics, registers and conventions can form death mills that feed on their own tails, where the syntax and semantics of a system start to live their own, self-justifying life. A lifestyle characterized by material pursuit could be seen as flesh of this, assuming that the material pursuit is not coded to ever experience satisfaction; it would, by definition, mean the death of the pursuit. Natural selection also happens to ideas and values: they have to have self-sustaining qualities to survive. Sociological ponzi schemes that eat their own toenails eventually start to crackle due to the lack of fundaments, forcing us to pour the excess into yet another microsystem.
IV. THOUGHTS ON AMBIENTNESS AND WEIRD RUBBER TOYS WITH TENTACLES
Brian Eno defined ambient music as something that accommodates many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; that it is as ignorable as it is interesting. As opposed to other genres, if ambientness is characterized as a dismissable, non-truculent atmosphere, what would be its opposite? (To crystallize the definition, we can expand this ambientness into other art forms as well, and picture what this characterization would look like in other mediums, eg. textile art.)
The opposite would probably be something utterly stimulus-drenched, shouting, attention-seeking, aggressively surprising; absurd, loud and space-taking. Let’s call this wide, theoretical genre-aesthetic hyper-manic-deconstructed-glitchcore. (Function-based sour candy like Juicy Drop Gummy Dip ‘N Stix would, for example, belong in this latter category, like the avant-garde absurdist-futurist rubber toys with wiggling tentacles and maybe lights inside of them.)
Ambientness or its opposite also has culturally relative characteristics in terms of shock value or worn-outness: for example, Paul Frank could be considered extremely ambient to people who lived through its absolute saturation, as it’s now a mere symbol of 2000s-white-noise-cultural-heritage.
If we extrapolate the two opposites as far as they go, they turn into each other: a stimulus is a stimulus only relatively, as opposed to something that is a non-stimulus - if there is an infinite amount of stimuli, they form an even surface; nothing stands out anymore, and the whole turns into a shapeless mass with no sharp edges; something non-truculent, something dismissable; something ambient.
CHANGE OF SCENERY:
I was in central Finland at a gas station at 11:40 PM, holding a weird-feeling pink, slimy toy that had wiggling, slim tentacles and a soft, squishy center. It looked like a sea plant, like a bloated, odd algae. I remembered seeing a meme of some funky-looking sea plants alongside a text that said “WTF is going on in the sea. Fundamentally unserious place”, and I immediately thought the same about the gas station I was in. I squeezed the odd Big Slime and felt the sticky friction on my fingers. It, whatever it was, was lost in translation, an adolescent non-verbal alien or ameba trying to break curfew and use illegal substances in order to carve out its final form, a rigid chainmail suit through which to find its place and maybe get an apartment or a library card.
Lost in translation (2003):
When you go to another country and there is another country
I thought about kids and how weird their taste is in general (assuming that their taste is less socialized and more intuitive, more pure compared to adults). I suppose it arises from this curiosity that knows no limits, a deep, subconscious desire to see new and weird stuff. It’s the novelty that drives it, and the exhilarating thing about it is that it expands the world - this, too, is possible, and this, and THIS. It’s actually a possessive force, I guess, that keeps you constantly hungry for more. When I was, say, 6 years old, I had all sorts of slimes, mini-quicksands, mold kits - weird stuff. Allegedly, when my dad came home from a work trip and returned with a half-my-size yellow teletubbie with a screen in its stomach that had lights and music, I started screaming and ran across our living room, possessed, for multiple minutes. For the 2-year-old me it must’ve felt nothing short of a vulgar breach of the laws of physics, a charismatic leader levitating in front of me.
I constantly get numb to things that previously provoked a reaction, but I also find out about new weird stuff - I wonder which development is faster; does my potential window of weirdness expand or shrink? Does the window also decrease in height as I constantly accrue more reference data; everything I see is more and more recognizable and less extraordinary?
Still (and also), experiencing novelty is somehow anti-processing; it clogs the channels of thinking and chewing, swallowing and spitting out; novelty shoves you into a small state of not-knowing where all you have is your current experience. Analysis can take place post-experience. Could we say that macro-novelty en masse is mostly behind us and as adults we’re more post-experience analysts, analogy-finding synthesis-makers and most of our experieces now are just incrementally new?
Sometimes the box is empty inside, but that’s not a reason not to shake it.
-Serge Gainsbourg
EPILOGUE!!!!!!!
The state of not knowing is the root of knowing; attributing everything to variables we already know leaves no room for discovery or invention. Infinite explicity, infinite explaining freezes us in time; we fill ourselves with our past and leave no room for the future. We can’t see truly radical ways of existing through the lenses of currently recognized characteristics and qualities.
Do you ever cry?
I do, sometimes; I do when i’m sad or lonely
That’s so sad; that makes me want to cry
Ellen Järnefelt (2024)Brian Eno defined ambient music as something that accommodates many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; that it is as ignorable as it is interesting. As opposed to other genres, if ambientness is characterized as a dismissable, non-truculent atmosphere, what would be its opposite? (To crystallize the definition, we can expand this ambientness into other art forms as well, and picture what this characterization would look like in other mediums, eg. textile art.)
The opposite would probably be something utterly stimulus-drenched, shouting, attention-seeking, aggressively surprising; absurd, loud and space-taking. Let’s call this wide, theoretical genre-aesthetic hyper-manic-deconstructed-glitchcore. (Function-based sour candy like Juicy Drop Gummy Dip ‘N Stix would, for example, belong in this latter category, like the avant-garde absurdist-futurist rubber toys with wiggling tentacles and maybe lights inside of them.)
Ambientness or its opposite also has culturally relative characteristics in terms of shock value or worn-outness: for example, Paul Frank could be considered extremely ambient to people who lived through its absolute saturation, as it’s now a mere symbol of 2000s-white-noise-cultural-heritage.
If we extrapolate the two opposites as far as they go, they turn into each other: a stimulus is a stimulus only relatively, as opposed to something that is a non-stimulus - if there is an infinite amount of stimuli, they form an even surface; nothing stands out anymore, and the whole turns into a shapeless mass with no sharp edges; something non-truculent, something dismissable; something ambient.
CHANGE OF SCENERY:
I was in central Finland at a gas station at 11:40 PM, holding a weird-feeling pink, slimy toy that had wiggling, slim tentacles and a soft, squishy center. It looked like a sea plant, like a bloated, odd algae. I remembered seeing a meme of some funky-looking sea plants alongside a text that said “WTF is going on in the sea. Fundamentally unserious place”, and I immediately thought the same about the gas station I was in. I squeezed the odd Big Slime and felt the sticky friction on my fingers. It, whatever it was, was lost in translation, an adolescent non-verbal alien or ameba trying to break curfew and use illegal substances in order to carve out its final form, a rigid chainmail suit through which to find its place and maybe get an apartment or a library card.
Lost in translation (2003):
When you go to another country and there is another country
I thought about kids and how weird their taste is in general (assuming that their taste is less socialized and more intuitive, more pure compared to adults). I suppose it arises from this curiosity that knows no limits, a deep, subconscious desire to see new and weird stuff. It’s the novelty that drives it, and the exhilarating thing about it is that it expands the world - this, too, is possible, and this, and THIS. It’s actually a possessive force, I guess, that keeps you constantly hungry for more. When I was, say, 6 years old, I had all sorts of slimes, mini-quicksands, mold kits - weird stuff. Allegedly, when my dad came home from a work trip and returned with a half-my-size yellow teletubbie with a screen in its stomach that had lights and music, I started screaming and ran across our living room, possessed, for multiple minutes. For the 2-year-old me it must’ve felt nothing short of a vulgar breach of the laws of physics, a charismatic leader levitating in front of me.
I constantly get numb to things that previously provoked a reaction, but I also find out about new weird stuff - I wonder which development is faster; does my potential window of weirdness expand or shrink? Does the window also decrease in height as I constantly accrue more reference data; everything I see is more and more recognizable and less extraordinary?
Still (and also), experiencing novelty is somehow anti-processing; it clogs the channels of thinking and chewing, swallowing and spitting out; novelty shoves you into a small state of not-knowing where all you have is your current experience. Analysis can take place post-experience. Could we say that macro-novelty en masse is mostly behind us and as adults we’re more post-experience analysts, analogy-finding synthesis-makers and most of our experieces now are just incrementally new?
Sometimes the box is empty inside, but that’s not a reason not to shake it.
-Serge Gainsbourg
The state of not knowing is the root of knowing; attributing everything to variables we already know leaves no room for discovery or invention. Infinite explicity, infinite explaining freezes us in time; we fill ourselves with our past and leave no room for the future. We can’t see truly radical ways of existing through the lenses of currently recognized characteristics and qualities.
Do you ever cry?
I do, sometimes; I do when i’m sad or lonely
That’s so sad; that makes me want to cry