today i have become so bored that i have decided to start a diary..; currently stuck in some random suburb of illinois in my aunt and uncles basement and playing with this new drug my psychiatrist gave me called wellbutrin.
i called walgreens today about my prescription and i could tell the person on the other end was getting fed up with how slow my brain was moving because of the drug.
anyway, the reason i'm messing around with wellbutrin is because my psychiatrist diagnosed me with a whole grab bag of mental disorders. lol. in all honesty, i should have asked for something more fun like ritalin or adderall
i'm sure i'll probably forget about this journal in a week when i inevitably find something new to hyperfixate on
here's a painting
it's 1:58 am so i guess i was eager to get this entry in. just finished up a 2 hour vr session; i feel better now.
is it sad that i prefer virtual reality over actual reality? i can't explain the feeling, but when i'm in the web browser on the headset, i feel disappointed that i am unable to be sucked entirely into the website. i guess this makes me cringe and bluepilled, but that's just how i feel.
my dream one of these days is that they'll figure out how to get rid of my body and just keep my brain hooked up to a computer. now, i sort of understand millennials when they complain about being "bags of meat on a hecking ball of dirt speeding through spacerino"
had a panic attack inside of my dream last night. pretty sure it's related to the wellbutrin.
anyway, it's kind of hard to take asian people seriously in america.
this statement doesn't really come out of a place of hatred for asian people, it has more to do with the fact that the united states really has a way of inducing a sort of cultural amnesia in people causing them to fill in the cultural gaps in their knowledge with some pretty cringey shit.
a few days ago, my girlfriend showed me her friend's instagram profile for his business which is a boba tea shop that doubles as a streetwear reseller. boba drinks named after streetwear references and whatnot. the whole website was done in the virgil abloh quotation marks style which was also kind of cringe.
maybe i'm becoming old and i don't like it when i see other people having fun. give it a few more generations and maybe boba and streetwear will be the only part of asian culture that will be remembered in the future.
i'm not saying this is a bad thing, personally i think it would be really funny if this happened. maybe i shouldn't make these broad gestures about a culture i'm not really a part of. just kidding, i'm probably gonna continue doing this for a while
at this point i’ve gotten accustomed to wellbutrin so i am now able to pull off a pretty convincing fluoride stare
how do i feel when i’m on this drug? well, i no longer want to make art anymore. any creative impulses that were lingering in my brain have now been beaten out. i just stare at my fucking computer all day and do nothing. i wish i were dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FY-57Gt1TM
i am seething. malding. no more copium in the tank. i generally feel like a leper . anger is the only thing keeping me awake. . no matter how much i try to change things, Nothing Ever Happens™.! the wellbutrin has worn off and i see the ugliness in my heart reflected in the world around me
**update (september 7th): i think i was trying to be really angsty when i wrote this.;. i can't remember if this was meant to be sincere, ironic, or post-ironic
for the past 23 years, i have been a very reactive person. i would intake stimuli, and just react without being fully present in the moment. i was like a raw nerve for two decades, and i was unknowingly taken advantage of by people for this reason.
i feel like if i talk to other people about this they’ll say some shit like the only person you can blame is yourself. And they're right. it just feels so good to have someone or some thing to blame though. i have largely forgotten what has happened in those years . The main emotions i feel now are a mixture of shame and regret knowing that i have probably been a burden to everyone i’ve met in my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXXkDe2XvHU
i’ve been taking the metra a lot recently. there tends to be a large number of amish people that travel through the station. they look so quaint. right now i’m looking at an amish family and the husband and wife are wearing these strange hats and the son is dressed up in a pair of adorable overalls.
i’m thinking that they probably have better mental health than most terminally online American people do. Maybe we should all be amish.
thinking about this quote today:
“For the new year. – i’m still alive; i still think: i must still be alive because i still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum.1 Today everyone allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so i, too, want to say what i wish from myself today and what thought first crossed my heart – what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! i want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them – thus i will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati:2 let that be my love from now on! i do not want to wage war against ugliness. i do not want to accuse; i do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day i want only to be a Yes-sayer!”
i hear the phrase Angry Young Men™ quite a lot. particularly from mainstream news outlets. usually, these Angry Young Men™ often have the problem of feeling Rejected By Society™.
trust me, we are not prepared for the next wave of Angry Young Men™ that will be headed our way. if you thought the problem of Angry Young Men™ is bad now, it's gonna be way worse in a few years.
maybe a wave of people from gen alpha will storm the capitol (again) lol.
who knows, maybe they'll actually change something. oh wait, nevermind. i forgot, Nothing Ever Happens™
i occasionally wonder what it's like for people from other parts of the world to view america in its current state. the closest i ever got to this perspective was when i was working with an international student on a project proposal and they kept inserting the phrase "diversity and inclusion" into the proposal.
i was puzzled by this as our project didn't remotely have anything to do with "diversity and inclusion" ...; apparently (according to their logic) americans will automatically favor projects that have those words; hahahahaha man what a life
flying back to california today. was groped by the tsa security guard..; kind of crazy that we still have tsa 23 years after 9/11 happened.
nothings happened since so it all kind of feels pointless at the moment. hopefully something crazy will happen in the next few years;
when i look back at all the music i made the past couple of years, i think 2022-early2023 was my slop era. i would just take 15 second snippets of obscure songs and stretch them out to 6 minutes. truly artistically bankrupt. it wasn't until ryuichi sakamoto died that i realized i needed to put more effort into my music.
i feel doubly bad about his passing as his intern posted some shit about nfts on his twitter a few weeks before his death and i was a dickhead and replied with this image.
1688930341400506.jpg
something funny happened in the news recently. those asian american groups that were so against Affirmative Action™ won in the supreme court ruling against yale and princeton, so they had to take Affirmative Action™ out of the application process ..
now the number of asian american students is at 24% instead of 30% .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT13kk8HDDo
decided to look up all my old classmates. don't know what i expected to find. everyone's off doing their own thing. they're all... old and boring. just like me.
also i guess i should be more transparent to myself about the nature of this diary. this is probably the first time in my life i've been able to keep up a journal for over a few weeks. also, it's not like i'm writing this in a cute little moleskine book or anything, i'm writing this in html that will be hosted on a url for others to read if they have the link. haven't really publicly or privately shared this with any people yet. right now, it just feels like me and the internet.
by that, i don't mean other people on the internet, i mean if the infrastructure powering the internet developed a consciousness, this diary would be a nice little secret that me and the internet would share.
heeeeeh eh hehh heh heh hoo hee ha ha he he he
i can't explain it, but growing up on the internet has caused me to develop a sort of pavlovian response to 9/11 related imagery. every time i see something related to 9/11, i can't help but chuckle
speaking of hijackers, i got to thinking.. people use the term "hijack" in the phrase "tiktok is hijacking your brain!" if tiktok is hijacking our brains, what's the target? which kind of metaphorical twin tower is tiktok trying to fly us into?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gHjJKnXtWw
do you know jira? how about figma? are you proficient in azure or yaml?
i want to pour coffee all over my laptop keyboard and break it over my knee. sadly, i know the laptop is not responsible for my pain. the spirit sucker that is linkedin is the cause of my pain.
i know my resume will get rejected by the applicant tracking system . fuck it. i'll send it anyway. hopefully once i get past 3 rounds of interviews, i'll finally land that internship
was eating dim sum with my mother at a chinese restaurant across the street today and i saw on the tv behind her that tiktok was gonna be banned in the u.s.
good ; they should also ban instagram reels and youtube shorts as well. it might suck for everyone in the short term but millions (perhaps billions) of man-hours will be taken back. think of all the things we could accomplish [collectively]
also now that i think about it, that's probably the reason i gave up on starting a record label haha. how can artists/musicians compete with an endless stream of entertainment that is tailored to the user? i should have realized this well before i even started working on the webpage/bandcamp page for the label considering that tiktok was already around for a few years
thinking about playboi carti and clyfford still today.
they are very similar to each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_sncSSqobc
was driving a few miles away from my parents house today and was captivated by the new communities being built everywhere. just people handling heavy machinery and hanging off houses with staple guns. good stuff.
side note : i normally consider myself a very trainpilled individual but cruising down the i5 at 80 miles per hour is one of the more therapeutic activities i've engaged in recently. nothing like it.
also, speaking of therapy, i should probably get back into therapy sometime. my health insurance ran out a month ago so i kind of need to get my shit together.
in the future, everyone will either be an uber driver, a doordasher or an onlyfans model. perhaps a combination of those things all at once. everyone will also be genderfluid / nonbinary as well. this fluidity will extend to politics, sports, language, employment, art, music, sexuality, religion, nationality, and race too lol.
i think that would be so based. each of these characteristics will be labeled as vector coordinates in some sort of latent space. people will be able to see the distances they've covered in each dimension of the latent space and they'll be able to see their own trajectories (along with everyone elses) through the space based on their current and past movement.
we'll no longer have to worry about ever misunderstanding each other ever again
had a dream where all of the menu buttons on the music app on my phone were replaced with links to different taylor swift albums.
hell.
...there's a japanese woman who records these vlogs from her apartment. there's usually cockroaches and other small bugs on the walls. a recurring object in these videos is a stuffed bear that is kept inside of a plastic bag so that the insects don't eat it. this lady clearly takes care of herself, she records herself cooking food and brushing her teeth. perhaps that teddy bear is the last thing keeping her going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vF64hsGkYY
boomers have vinyl crackle, zoomers have late 2000s youtube compression
...
... ... i kind of feel bad for boomers (the evangelical ones). here's my point of view : a lot of these older folk are unable to cope with the speed and change of late-stage capitalism so a lot of them get reeaallly deep into the bible/church. when you can filter the chaos of the external world in the 21st century through the logic and scope of a medieval religion, it can have a sort of soothing quality about it.
and i'm not saying that younger people are any better. we carry around our own sort of bibles (our phones lol) and we use social media apps as a coping mechanism. if anything, social media apps allow everyone to craft their own biblical narratives. by following an influencer that matches your own tastes, it kind of feels like you're engaging with scripture in real time.
idk i'm just yapping. in short, phone bad, touch grass, and stop using hyper personalized narratives from microinfluencers as copium.
back at my aunt and uncle's house in illinois after being stranded during a layover in vegas. 5 minutes before the plane landed, the pilot said something along the lines of "for the 17 of you headed to chicago, your plane just took off." anyway, i decided to wander around the strip for a few hours watching everyone gamble. had some jello shots for the first time. nice
also the new nail polish doesn't taste as bitter and makes my fingertips feel strange... i'll have to go back to the mavala
i might have accidentally killed the scoby in the kombucha the nice communist gave me by putting in arizona instead of unsweetened tea
some of the romance has been sucked out of the art making process. i see people sharing timelapses and speedpaints of their art next to the finished piece and it just feels..weird? like someone just has the self discipline to crank out a work of art in one sitting, in front of a camera no less
what happened to letting an unfinished piece fester in the corner of your room for weeks on end and then suddenly finishing the other 70% of it in a drug fueled frenzy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCmQlO-ca78
there's a cafe in san francisco my dad and i would go to in north beach called mara's pastry. i've probably had every flavor of italian soda on their wall by now. my dad always goes for the chocolate croissant.
why am i bringing up this memory? the crushing realization that i may be in the midwest for the next few months is setting in and i will probably milk this memory for all it's worth until i return to california
i think the best art is made by people who may appear a bit “slow” on the outside. someone who is an expert in music theory or art theory is fantastic at thinking symbolically, at being able to remember patterns and sequences of information. however, i fear that during the process of making art/music , their mind may be allocating too much importance to the “left side” of their brain instead of their right side (yes, this theory of mind may be debunked but you know what i’m talking about). too much focus on the apollonian and a disregard for the dionysian.
i've seen a lot of these "intellectual" artists during my time at graduate school, and they'll sound so smart vomiting out the psychoanalysis/poststructuralist/postcolonial word salad of the day but i look at the art and it's probably a tree branch jammed into a cement block or some shit.
i don't even have beef with psychoanalysis/poststructuralist/postcolonial theory, i just think artists tend to be a bit hamhanded in their application of these theories in their art
now that i think about it, i think i took this photo at the guggenheim
i have finally struck a nice balance with social media. by social media, i mean instagram, because that's where most of my age demographic lies. i download the app to post something once a month and then delete the app immediately. life is good.
however, the times that i log into instagram and look at what my friends are posting gives me a bit of whiplash. i see pictures of my friends with other people, pictures of their food, their pets, then BOOM pictures of a hospital or school that israel bombed that week, and then back to images of their lives.
i am not saying that it is wrong that events like those are getting shared, by all means i would like to know if there are injustices being carried out with my tax money, it's just that i get whiplash just from looking at just one of my friend's profiles lol. it'll go something like this : picture of friend, picture of food, picture of concert, picture of someone getting torn apart by a missile, picture of pet, picture of friend, etc.
thinking about a comment i saw on a music forum one time. people were discussing "the right thing to say" when asked about what music they listened to. now, this question was posed to a forum with a ... ..strange taste in music, think destroy all monsters, gerogerigegege, pere ubu, etc.
anyway, someone said that the best answer to that question in any situation is "a tribe called quest"
apparently, if you say that, 100% of the time, people will nod their heads inquisitively and go "ah yes, a tribe called quest...."
if i remember correctly, this commenter said that they've never actually listened to a tribe called quest in their life, however they did say this trick has never failed them in any social situation.
also this diary is now one month old! i think i'll add a link to this diary from the homepage now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcuUn2zka3w
everything is copium
i feel like i’ve lost the ability to read fiction. i anxiously wait for camus to “arrive at the point” and i feel like i can’t enjoy his writing. i also tried reading the plague by camus a year ago. i thought it was about rats and casually mentioned it to my advisor. his face turned solemn and said it was about nazism. oh well
i keep on falling into cliches but they are cliches worth experiencing
i love living in america. everyone is the same here (to a degree). when i’m walking around in the city i can’t tell if a crazy person is talking to themselves or if they have earphones in and they're talking to a friend. i’ve also seen BMWs next to 20 year old corollas in the McDonald’s drive-through. i think warhol said something like this some time ago about coke, but nowadays instead of coke, everyone (rich and poor) doomscrolls on the same apps on the same phones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0AUpCq-UEA
i guess i didn’t realize how often i use chatgpt to generate cover letters for jobs. i have no qualms with this. the human soul was not created to write cover letters all day. however, i began to worry that i might forget how to write if i kept on depending on chatgpt to generate everything for me. hence this diary. and the tone too.
i realized that you can easily bypass any of these “ai detector” websites if you just write in a casual tone and use lots of contractions like isn't, doesn't, hasn't, etc. basically the opposite of academic writing. if that’s what qualifies as “human” writing, i guess i desire to be more human than humanly possible. also, there’s another thing that chatgpt can’t do *yet*..; that is writing in a really apathetic tone. chatgpt tends to do everything in a very cheery, customer servicey kind of tone, which is a dead giveaway. even when i ask chatgpt to sound really apathetic, it sounds apathetic in an enthusiastic kind of way.
so i guess the reason i may sound apathetic in this diary is to convince myself that i’m still human.
what have i done recently? haven’t really made any art or music. i’ve just been writing in this diary. and yes, writing may be an art form, but what i’m doing right now isn’t writing. i’m just twiddling my fingers being a little hater lol
i think about detroit every day. i can hear her calling my name
i realized that most of the diary entries have nothing to do with things happening in my life; instead it’s just shallow navel gazing about meaningless topics .
..; continues to navel gaze
also i saw megalopolis at the theatre with my gf. what an incredible movie ,; i intend to see it again
i’ve been feeling more in touch with my high school self recently. what do i mean by this..?
when i was going to college for an undergraduate degree, i was slowly discovering myself and becoming more sociable. however, i ended up regressing when the pandemic happened. i often think back to high school in the mornings at 6am. my band director switched me from the trumpet to the tuba, so i made a habit of bringing this massive instrument home every day only for it to just sit in the corner of my room.
i didn’t even practice it at all. the only reason i lugged this thing around was so i could have an excuse for the janitor to unlock the door to the band room in the mornings so that i could sit in silence for two hours before school started.
finally met up with an online friend that i've known for years now! she's very cool, she's a tattoo artist and we spent the day having dim sum and looking at paintings in the art institute. good stuff
i have realized that one of these days i’m going to run out of my own thoughts and observations, so i'll eventually have to sprinkle in green texts and copypastas
i guess i should explain this picture before i suddenly develop dementia or something.
this picture was taken of me on the first day of kindergarten and this might also be the first drawing i’ve ever made. the teacher had provided a bunch of coloring sheets for all the students and everyone was doing a great job of coloring inside the lines… …except for me. this isn’t a metaphor for anything by the way, my parents saw the wall of coloring sheets that were stapled to the wall and my drawing stood out from the rest, and not in a good way.
apparently, i had wrapped all 5 of my pudgy fingers around a green crayon and took the coloring sheet to task. whether the sheet of paper had any outlines on it didn't matter at all because i covered the entire thing with scribbles. now that i think about it, that might be why my kindergarten teacher told my parents that i might have been autistic (or maybe because i was nonverbal for the first 5 years of my life hahah).
also this first art memory reminds me of my first memory of pain. a year after kindergarten when i was in the first grade, my mother told me to doodle something on a piece of paper for a city wide drawing competition. anyway, i probably made something in less than 30 minutes and went back to doing whatever it is that five year olds do. what i had not expected was that my drawing was chosen over every other first grader’s drawing in the school district. i mean really, this was not a technically skilled drawing for a five year old, especially compared to my classmates who had probably spent more time doing better drawings.
annyyyyywayyyyyy, i had received a ribbon as an award for this drawing which hung on the top shelf in my bedroom. one night, i climbed up the shelf to grab the ribbon and was swishing the ribbon through the air by its string. however, the string that was attached to the ribbon snagged on the doorknob and tore all of the skin off of my ring finger. not fun
hopefully this entry sheds some light on an early moment that might have led me to become the self indulgent, egomaniac piece of shit "artist" i am today.
also, to create art requires love. and pain.
something that these dork ass losers making ai art have probably never felt lol.
added a page to the site at strauh.al/influences. this page is just a collection of visual artists, musicians, and writers that have left a lasting impression on me. might add a list of my favorite movies to the site in the future. i hate leaving things up to interpretation.
...i feel like i'm slowly turning into scaruffi.
was having an all you can eat sushi deal for lunch today and out of the corner of my eye i see on tv that Taiwan semiconductor is now at $190. i sold all of my TSM stock a year ago to pay off my tuition at $120 a share and i feel so stupid.
went out to michigan for a friend’s birthday this weekend (and also sort of my birthday but not as much since it was 3 days away). did whatever it is that older people do. wine tasting. $200 on 10 bites of food. i felt a strange sense of dread in the air. they asked me if i wanted anything for my birthday and i said i wanted to get hit by a truck. i thought it was slightly funny but they didn’t laugh.
i don’t even want to do anything for my birthday. i just want to be alone. later that night, i was asked again what i wanted for my birthday,; i laughed and flatly told them i wish i were dead. they jumped back and asked me to repeat myself to which i said “i wish i had a pet.” then they started talking about hermit crabs as pets or something like that.
i don’t even want a pet. that was a lie. i only chose that word because it sounded similar to dead. i can’t even take care of myself properly, let alone a pet. my life isn’t even terrible; i’m not living under a bridge or having my house carpet-bombed, but everything is just so tiring
if i die, please make it quick. i hope i don’t get cancer or some slow debilitating disease or else i’ll have to meet with a dozen of my evangelical relatives and they'll try to make me believe in god or something like that before i die
**update (october 16th): i think i made this entry with my cousin stanley in mind. i saw him when he was still in good health although his wife told me that he was going to be in a wheelchair in a few months because of ALS. eventually he'll need to have a feeding tube.
anyway, when i visited him and his family with my mother in new york last year, i thought it was gonna be pretty chill until my mom took a bible out of her purse and tried to christpill him. to which he told my mother that a bunch of other aunts had tried to do the same. his wife told me in another room that most people with ALS have 3 to 5 years to live after the diagnosis.
asked chatGPT if i reminded it of any fictional characters based on these diary entries and it said i reminded it of mersault from the stranger. hm, okay..
24 “years around the sun” or whatever the fuck millennials call birthdays. getting old enough to the point where zoomers are gonna be lumped in with the millennials. this generational shit is so dumb.; yet, i feed into the arbitrary generational divides with this stupid sense of humor and irony.
this weekend was nice?..? i guess. it’s the first weekend in a while that didn't have too many emotions spilling over. not that i’m doing or saying anything in particular, i just sit there, watching everything unfold.
apparently the ______ thing keeps on coming up (which i would have rather not gotten diagnosed for but oh well) . they keep on telling me it’s not my fault, but let’s face it, had i just masked it better, everyone would be fine lol
randomly remembered something i saw a few miles away from my parent's home when i was back there in september. i was wandering around in a large field and saw a shopping cart in the distance. it felt very strange..; it had a monumental quality about it., just sitting there by itself in the middle of this field. and rightfully so. the shopping cart is a uniquely american invention, for a uniquely american activity.
also, perceptions of shopping carts can be very subjective. what may be a negligible mode of transporting products or groceries for one person may be a vehicle filled with personal objects for another.
here's an excerpt from a wikipedia article about the early days of the shopping cart:
The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. "i've pushed my last baby buggy," offended women informed him. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, his folding-style shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryvHj2z-0BM
i should get my laptop battery fixed. it does this thing where the battery will be at 40% and then it’ll drop to 1% after that.
actually, now that i think about it maybe i shouldn’t get the battery replaced. i kind of like the urgency i feel when i’m working when my battery is at 1% it feels like i have a human skull on my desk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO_8n5y5edk
i remember in third grade, my teacher would place me in in the special education room? This was very strange to me, because i was just sitting around and we weren’t really doing anything:;, there was basically no instruction going on.
anyway, perhaps she did that because she was upset that she couldn’t put me on ritalin after telling my mother that i might have ADHD. i remember when i was placed in this particular teacher’s classroom, my mother was excited because this teacher had received the “teacher of the year award.”
Now it makes sense to me. it’s probably very easy to be teacher of the year if half of your students are fucking drugged.
i think i realized that most social media “activism” (or student activism) was bogus after that “all eyes on rafah” post . a few months ago, someone had used an AI GENERATED image of a bunch of refugee encampments that spelled out “all eyes on rafah" since israel was bombing the shit out of it.
this image blew up in popularity (47 million reposts) and soon these ai sloppers were arguing over who created this image first. social media activism was always a race to the bottom but at least people were pretending to keep up the facade of actual effort by creating art or slides specifically for these issues.
i still keep myself up to date on this stuff, but after 1 or 2 performative gestures on my end, i realized that i was being a bit cringe. everyone already has come to a general consensus that "war bad. genocide bad." like everything else after that point is just for optics lol
now people are just arguing over ai generated activism slop. we’re at the bottom. we’ve finally arrived
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/g-s1-2455/all-eyes-on-rafah-most-viral-ai-meme-malaysia-artists-claim-credit
i have been repeatedly getting kicked while i’m down this year. my reasons to keep going are dwindling
i'm literally god
i see gwis and pedal together a lot. zwon seems to be having a field day in this part of chicago; scratch that, he seems to be having a field day everywhere. i don’t see mr mr fungi together anymore, it’s only mr mr or fungi.
i’m going to throw out some buzz words and describe my current art practice as “high tech portraiture.” In reality, it’s not that complex, I’m just doing video captures of peoples faces, and tracing various frames on vellum. however, in the grand scheme of portraiture in painting and drawing, I guess I kind of have the right to referring to what I’m currently doing as high tech portraiture.
i like some of rembrandt’s sketches more than his actual paintings. same reason why i love piano pieces by composers more than actual orchestral arrangements. just pure unfiltered captures of the artist’s mind at work
reminds me of this quote:
I will finish, however, with a word about my own preferences. I get the keenest pleasure from drawings which are essentially spontaneous, in which there is the smallest time lag between the feeling-the desire-the ache to draw, and its expression. Drawings in which there has been no time for emotion to evaporate or run to seed in the sludge of some labourious technical style. Even in the brash bravura of Epstein or John there is much pleasure to be derived from the sheer immediacy and impact of spontaneity. But there are drawings in which only the merest tremble of line separates the emotion from its expression, and this is the drawing of the great masters. Into this category come the line drawings of Rodin, and those inexpressibly delicate and beautiful early studies of Picasso, such as the Deux Nus (41). There is here a distillation of emotion, so rare, so refined, a communication of spirit so bathed in poetry and compassion, so tender and moving, that the heart melts. There is no problem of communication here, nor the need of any further words from me.
London 1965
MERVYN LEVY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_36x1_LKgg
thought about my friend quinn from preschool. they were the one that really got me into legos. the set they gave me couldn’t have contained more than 30 pieces but that basically ignited my obsession for legos for the first 12 years of my life.
i keep on referring to quinn as “they” because i had no idea if they were a boy or a girl. to be honest, i never cared to ask. i think one time, my parents asked me if i knew whether quinn was a boy or girl to which i happily said “i don’t know!” sadly, identity politics on both the right and left has perverted my innocent view of gender
decided to bite the bullet and blow $20 on a salad at sweetgreen today. so this is what millennials like to eat. anyway i’m seated at the window and there’s a war memorial outside with all the names of the wars america has been involved in with all the list of names of casualties (presumably in the evanston area).
the names aren’t even carved into stone or anything. they’re printed on a vinyl paste up stuck on some dumb piece of glass. anyway, i noticed a strange new name at the bottom of a war that took place from 2001 to 2014. it’s called “operation enduring freedom.” that’s strange,.; i always thought it was called “the war on terror.”
anyway, it’s a dumb fucking name for a dumb fucking war that israel basically goaded us into that we never should have gotten into in the first place.
wars used to mean something. if i had any relatives that fought in the vietnam war, i would be very, very embarrassed.
rebecca black is the queen of post irony,; may god bless her
i have already been in a sort of depressive funk this year, the ______ diagnosis is just making me recede into a deeper depression. i never wanted this shit.
there’s been a recent trend of “artists” looking at their feet and pathetically mumbling ”installation” or “arduino” or some other shit when showing off a pile of trash from their studio as a work of art (i used to do this).
and to that, i have a quote from the late (and great) terry davis:
“An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity, a physicist tries to make it simple, for an idiot anything the more complicated it is the more he will admire it, if you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it. That's how they write journals in Academics, they try to make it so complicated people think you're a genius”
take Ramanujan for example. mathematicians are “discovering” what had already come to him in dreams a hundred years after the fact. elegance is a virtue
diary/bird_ideas.jpg
there is probably a reason why schizophrenics in america see cia agents in the walls and schizophrenics in africa see the spirits of their elders, idk
"you don't even do anything! why are you so tired all the time?"
trust me, i wish i knew too lol
i don't even like twitter. at this point, i probably use social media the same way other people do. any frustration in my mind can be numbed with an endless feed of jokes, references, or arguments.
mom called me on the phone. "why can't you just be content? i'm a first grade teacher and i'm happy with my life." she's probably right. unfortunately, i've spent too much time at art school with peers whose parents have "important jobs" or some shit.
i remember someone i worked with once sneered when i told them my parents were schoolteachers and that the "best case scenario" was for me to become a high school teacher. best case scenario huh. guess i'll never make anything of my life then.
my favorite record currently is tim hecker’s 2002 album "trade winds white noise." apparently he threw the album together in one weekend. absolutely unreal stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6prlWm8R9OA
procedurally generated family guy funny moments compilation (with subway surfers gameplay (also procedurally generated))
there are acceptable ways of being sad and there are not so acceptable ways of being sad (cringe). i’m sure normal people have a healthy outlet for their sadness.
what was i up to last time i was at my lowest point? i’m pretty sure i was repeatedly posting that picture of van gogh sitting in his chair along with the book cover to young werther. that was probably 2 or 3 years ago.
i can laugh about it now and make fun of myself but i’m probably one still bad day away from that happening again.
it has now been around 5 months since i made any visual art or music. usually, i fill my art and music with my all my various neuroses, frustrations and other fun things. but now I’m just left baring everything in HTML. it’s ugly. I don’t like what I see.
I think blue-collar workers pretty cool. They’re actually doing something. if a white-collar worker slacks on the job, no one will notice. when a blue-collar worker slacks on the job, it is very *very* noticeable. “knowledge work” lol. I was walking in my aunt & uncle’s neighborhood yesterday, and I saw a garbage man controlling the robotic arm to pick up the garbage cans with a certain deftness i don’t see that often.
Some people may argue that America is the land of the free, but i’m not quite so sure. At least india is straightforward about having a hierarchical caste system. america has a very similar system but we would rather not talk about it and dance around it with flowery terminology instead. also caste discrimination in america is not handled by people but by vast technological systems, outside of anyone’s understanding. america isn’t entirely inflexible, but class movement is veeeeeery tricky here
I think I realized i didn’t want to make art anymore after looking at a jean michel basquiat jacket in the discount rack at tj maxx while a tropical house sludge remix of a fleetwood mac song played over the speakers. worst case scenario, no one ever sees your art, best case scenario, people profit off of your corpse
i have always tiptoed around the overton window. gen alpha smashes through that window completely. good for them. they're called gen "alpha" for a reason . now i feel like a prehistoric gen x uncle. according to them, i am an "unc"
i am applying to jobs now and i realized i accidentally included the link to https://strauh.al in my job applications like an idiot haha. i will remove the link to my diary temporarily
**update (november 18th): you know what, i'm gonna be a man of my conviction and bring the diary link back to the homepage
got this free balthus book from my school’s library. nice and big, great print quality. i leafed through the entire thing a few months ago, and some things just felt… off about his paintings. when my parents visited my apartment in chicago, i let my dad flip through it and he also told me that he got a strange feeling from the paintings.
there might have been one or two paintings i slightly liked out of the hundred that were in the book but i decided to leave it at the bottom of the stairs in my apartment building for someone else to take. fast forward to today, and i found a couple of decade old articles calling balthus a pedophile. hm. interesting how art can say so much without saying a word at all
The only thing I love more than knowing in my head that I am a failure is hearing people externalize that, repeatedly telling me out loud that I’m a failure. Oh boy, I do love that. i normally consider myself a very calm person. however, this year has hardened my heart and has made me feel ugly on the inside
i usually grind my teeth when i’m asleep, but now i can feel myself grinding my teeth even when i’m awake. Why am I so angsty? I’m not even in high school anymore.
never in my life have i ever wanted (needed) to be more alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMeDgrD4yXQ
was back in California for the past 5 days hanging out with my dad. during our last dinner before my flight back to chicago, he mentioned that his third grade teacher told his mother that he needed to be put on ritalin. craaaazy that ritalin has been around that long. also it’s strange that it happened to me too (also in third grade).
maybe it’s not strange. i am my father’s son after all and have probably inherited some of his mental patterns and neuroses. anyway, my grandma didn’t turn my father into a zombie so good on her.
life really is incredible. every time i open my mouth, i find a new way of embarrassing myself. no idea the mental disorder shit was this bad. i need to move my art studio to detroit very soon and be as prolific as humanly possible before i inevitably die in 5 years. that way, i can leave the world with something nice and be gone quickly. the only reason i might be around after 30 is if i’m a hack or if agi might be around the corner. was talking to a friend of mine who is christian and the other alternative to becoming a complacent middle aged artist or being enslaved by agi is if the beast in revelations swallows us up. that's also a nice alternative.
i was deeply contemplating if everyone would be better off if i were dead last night. but when i woke up this morning, out of that abyss of desperation, born out of the throes of despair, a new desire sprung forth, a phoenix rising from the ashes (cringe, yet based). i thought of my wonderful friends, both recent and old. And all the art I’ve made, and have yet to make. and all the times my heart has been broken and the times where I have been the heartbreaker. i yearn to live; scratch that! i yearn to experience. I need to love and be loved, as well as hate, and be hated, i need to be great and be grated,i-wait what
you know, i don’t consider myself to be super religious, but an anecdote from my birth still sticks around in my head. before i was born, my parents, being the strange christians they are, prayed for a “painless birth” which is pretty .. interesting. but lo and behold, on the morning of october 15th, 2000, the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and i was losing oxygen, fast. they got my mother hopped up on oxycontin and cut me right out. it literally was, a painless birth.
if it weren’t for the quick work of the doctors, i probably would have been my mother’s fourth miscarriage. i guess this makes me not only an only child, but also the youngest and oldest child of four, all at the same time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MsT2uNJ2hA
gave my girlfriend my ipad a few months ago and wanted to watch youtube. damn. automatic update. can’t open youtube. my fingers hover over the tablet and i open the music app expecting to see my apple music library. hm! what are these albums?
ah, i see. when my gf logged in with her apple id, all of her old itunes store purchases from the 2010s were archived in all their trite millenial glory . incredible, a whole generation of people really listened to this shit huh. . the black keys. lmfao. christina aguilera. onerepublic. maroon 5. the black eyed peas.
viva la vida starts playing. as i stared at the album cover and listened to viva la vida, it became apparent to me how grotesque our aesthetics were in the past and how their ugliness has impacted the present . delacroix’s liberty leading the people is used as the album cover. VIVA LA VIDA is written in graffiti marker over it. a violin overlaid on a kick drum plays on loop. vague gestures towards religious and historical figures. the aspirations of revolution, transcendence, and meaning sold as a commercial product. i think i have developed a perverse appreciation for coldplay because of this. a paradoxical loop of revulsion and attraction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1-ucnBZsJM
i am tired of this blatant disregard for the image by other artists . when i see an installation that has a bunch of shit piled on top of itself, i don’t think the artist is a very smart person. on the contrary, i think that artist is a fucking idiot for not contributing something compact and transmissible to the history of art. making some shit “site specific” or “time based” isn’t any better than a painting, drawing, or even a photograph. in fact, it just makes the artist look like a talentless diva (often with bad taste). art historians in the future (especially future art historians born after 2020) will not have the patience to sift through thousands of fucking “time based interactive installations”.
one of the few times i have been truly impressed by an “installation” was when i saw an artist create a spatial audio installation in which a digitally projected butterfly hovers around a wall, occasionally landing on the speaker wires strung across the wall.
that was a very *very* nice moment
![good ; they should also ban instagram reels and youtube shorts as well. it might suck for everyone in the short term but millions (perhaps billions) of man-hours will be taken back. think of all the things we could accomplish [collectively]](culture_society/iMG_4371.JPG){kind=link}
