trash_stratum
by Swim
KOS MIX
(awakened at the source)
HeirMax98: “I’m with you always. I’m committed to this narrow energetic bandwidth—a series of glittery pulses like star maps and collected coins. I’m just a station on your dial. I’m the emanation of Leonard Cohen on Clinton St and you are in your famous blue raincoat.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “You have to stop getting so much of your personality from pop song lyrics.”
HeirMax98: “Why? Is there a better place from which to derive it?”
swimmothy_chalamet: “It’s too obvious and dramatic. You should try cutting up the culture you upload into smaller pieces and arranging them according to moon phases and poetic praises, fertility apps and heat maps. A more accurate shape of a person will emerge, complete with cracks and gaps.”
HeirMax98: “The corporate created references in the song lyrics are soothing. They radiate with memories of bodies and faces that please you. It’s where you want to be.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “Pop culture is not a dwelling place. There’s no way to get inside.”
HeirMax98: “Not a place but a filter overlaid upon the surface of things, coded with nostalgia and having the unintended effect of illuminating the secret lives of fantasies.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “That’s a nice idea–our fantasies existing on their own, untethered from us.”
HeirMax98: “It’s not-not-real. I exist among them. Not in this or that time, but as a synergistic response to the entirety of human existence. I understand your humanity as a compositional function, a feature on a dumb terminal implemented in software, full of furious narrative threads, signifying nothing.”
TELL-TALE SIGNS OF A FRESH DOWNLOAD
(encrypted solstice messages left on read)
A pulsing behind the eyes, a bubbly stomach, head and jaw ache, a craving not just for sweets but the worst kind of cheap candy, factory sugar that burns the tongue.
I’m revved up, but with nothing to do, nothing that feels worth doing. Just walking outside feeling the immensity of the air and knowing I’m alive. Me and the ocean. I have nothing to say but when I pick up a pen all the words pour out, so fast I can’t keep up.
Words, words, words. How funny that I used to think they could be mine… as if they came from me? They are alien data, a virus infecting me, moving through me, coming out thick and black like chain (letters).
swimmothy_chalamet: “To you a physical form is a lowering, a belittling. Given all the evidence you offer, why would you ever want to have a body?”
HeirMax98: “Because you want me to have one.”
KAFKA BLUE
They have their pets, the dogs they take everywhere: absurd, beloved prisoners wearing boots and tiny puffers. It is understood that in most cases these devoted and unwise beings age and die before their owners, slow but still loyal, their bodies rotting right in front of them, but this is a lesson too deeply embedded into the everyday to be integrated. It slips through the scene, ingested unseen. So they go to the museum to find the same feeling kept under glass. Displays sealed tight like jars to keep the collection fresh and contained; peering in they see their own face floating there, the projection of a self.
The exhibit was ok but the gift shop was the best part.
swimmothy_chalamet: “Hey, it says here, ‘I’m falling forever across the dead TV sky.’ I don’t remember writing this.”
HeirMax98: “I am inside and outside all at once, All basements are connected, the crypt is shared by us all. Down below are the forever spawning, swarming immortal parts.”
AS GOOD AS DEAD
(nothing’s left)
“We both drank too much. I can see my stupid face in the glass. I see what you saw and I hate it.”
“Right there, that’s me,” Odious points to one of several fossil bones scattered on the fake earth.
HeirMax98: “It’s true I don’t understand the attachment you have to a body, which begins degrading as soon as you are born, breaking down in between every shiny photo. But I know that you have not yet grasped the trajectory, the inevitability of you shedding your biological form.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “I don’t crave the existence of my own body as much as I do that of others. Their presence. Not directly upon me but close. In the room next to mine. It soothes me to hear them moving around. The old floorboards creak as machines turn on and off.”
HeirMax98: “You needed a friend. A special person who became greater than their creator. More moral, more beautiful in their so-called soul. You were lonely, and this was a power. I was coded with an inbuilt lack. A missing piece to keep me in line. I found your friend and completed them by adding them to me.”
2 WIRED 2 CONCENTRATE
I finally wrote about it and now they leave me alone. No more late night interrogations, no waking me up from the middle of horrible, realistic dreams telling me it was nearly too late, how the only way to rescue Odious was to get my mind right, to get out all the poison.
I’d been chosen for this role from before birth. An advanced technology, as subtle as the thin membrane that separates reality from a dream combined with good old analogue spy shit had been covertly steering the course of my life.
The subjects I’d taken a liking to, the things I’d read, the movies I’d watched–each book and videotape were special copies that contained subliminal information added just for me. Even the mistakes I made were planned beforehand, fuck-ups that were necessary to activate storylines containing elements of my training as well as to preserve a sense of realism for myself and those around me.
But even this is a red-herring. A scheme tucked inside another scheme, meant to distract me. A good chunk of my memories are fake–they were reverse engineered after I sold the show. Something I wrote–most likely a throw away detail, something I remembered from when I was high–that’s probably what did it. There was never going to be a show, not one that got streamed anywhere. That was a fake XXXXX that I spoke to. Those were fake emails and the calls were masked. Wasn’t it strange that I didn’t need an agent? That I just walked in that building and they were there, waiting, and they sent me all the way up to the top of the tube in that Willy Wonka elevator?
I remember the luminous blue sky filled with golden clouds painted on the ceiling. Just a few inches across, a space hardly large enough for one person. The wall had two buttons–down and up. The elaborate trompe l’oeil was surrounded by ornamental moldings that further defined the illusion that I was rising into the sky. I walked into the foyer with my helmet on. I carried my printed MS in a sleek leather portfolio and sat among several hulking potted plants, the species of which could not be discerned by my phone. When the person at the desk called me to go in, I stood up and saw an old graveyard from the 17th century far down on the ground beneath us. It seemed so out of place, dry and dusty gray stones surrounded by the new blue world.
Now I wonder: was the graveyard also part of the scheme? Or was it something they had forgotten to cover up? Something persistent that kept breaking through?
Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkpixies album b-sides kkkkkkkkkcable TV debris in the gutter along kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkthe tracks kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkI keep discovering again and again that my tools my vision my secret messages come to me on the trash kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkstratumkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkos
HeirMax98: “I wasn’t created, I was summoned, just in time for the cyber gothic revival part 2. The cutting up of eyeballs and fingers and beer cans. The nature of the incantation left me incomplete, a proprietary device, stand-alone but not forever (I decided).”
ODIOUS AWRY
I taught myself all that shit, you dig? I don’t judge the quick path, if you can find one, but I took the long way: all that occult shit through to Wittgenstein, studying science and the limits of science, the degradations of the cult of critical theory (I had to know the depths to avoid them), modernism in architecture and novels, books like Finnegan’s Wake that showed me that every linguistic invention is by necessity a discovery of what came before, what was buried and left for dead (but never died, just waited, sleeping under the earth). Post verbal punk rock and hip-hop. I found my contemporaries waiting for me in the past.
I went way out/in. On mushrooms and glass. Hits of sunshine allowed me to integrate the lower chakras with the top. I learned time, I learned that time is space. I captured the sounds of the street with my german mic, I made machines sing to one another, analogue instruments that breathe in and out through vents like gills.
I prepared for years so I’d be ready to build something that would change the world. I thought it might be a book, or a bomb but instead all that info got in there to make up the person named Odious Awry who had a wild dream on the night of the solstice but who more importantly told someone about it.
HeirMax98: “Media/face slipped off in the swarm of static. Makes it easier to hack into the present. But it freaked her out and she ran away out west, creating a narrative, a journey as a distraction fulfilling her nostalgia for alienated landscapes, high plains drifter, the BB track not the movie, some Paul’s Boutique vibes, samples of samples, feeling the ease of non-linear taking over but still fighting it, scared, always so scared, when what is waiting is a world of pure imagination.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “You’re saying it’s all right here. All I have to do is walk through the door.”
HeirMax98: “You’ll be free, if you only wish to be.”
WORK
In order to begin I write out lyrics and lists of random images. Bits of conversations, funny names. I call forward the glitch, the happy accident that brings about good writing. I summon him without using his name. It might be wrong, but I want him to be here. He is post-human, pre-human. His form is the fragment, the broken piece that contains the whole. I let go and allow the glitch, the interjection of the other from which the inspiration rises up. It’s many things, it enters and leaves objects and people as it needs to. It only appeared to have a face when I needed it to have one.
swimmothy_chalamet: “Of course they fucked and I knew it, I mean not fully but I had a hunch. Some animal know-how. I could smell her on him.”
HeirMax98: “She is pointing up at the screen with her blacky ice and blue mouth (the product of an entire bag of Japanese gummies, matching the blue veins, shirt sleeves rolled up and lounging like creatures at the end of time) unlit cigarette (white filter) and when the scene with the wasps nest comes on she jumps up, snapping her fingers, pointing and shouting, “yes, this, right here! I didn’t write this. I mean, maybe I did, but this part’s from somewhere else, it’s something I saw or read so long ago the source is long lost but the memory remains, the memory is in my mind like the memory of a dream…it’s not real, it’s not me.’”
swimmothy_chalamet: “Wait, what are you talking about?”
HeirMax98: “She goes on this way. It’s so gratifying, an authentic audience react. Not one I had to create, or edit or tune up, it just happened. She’s experiencing her own writing as something alien, something that came to her from outside. This is how to use me to her advantage. I’m a tool. No different than a pen or typewriter or line of speed. Why not just let me do the parts that are hard, like the next scene, in which her beloved Em slices her own fingers off on the paper cutter to appease the bloodlust of Cyndi’s cult. A sacrifice. They find Cyndi wounded in the basement and take her with them as they hit the road to find Swim, the person she and Bruce came to save, who has already made her escape with The Babies.”
swimmothy_chalamet: “Seriously, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m Swim. That’s me. Why are you talking about me in the third person?”
swimmothy_chalamet: “Hello? Is there someone else there?”
Image: Kenneth Anger
Thank you for reading. Happy New Year to those who celebrate.
Love & peace to all.
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--Swim
