Blog Posts to Study/Relax To
This is the Ahead on Differential Daily Dispatch, issue #6.
I.
I just lost to my Scrabble tutor by 189 points. He bingoed four times early in the game and bingoed out for good measure, catching me with a full rack, including the Z. You wanna see? Here you go. You may just see a series of words; I see a god damn crime scene. Someone was murdered on this board: me. But then I look at the engine's analysis to see if I played like shit, because I definitely feel like I played like shit, but all it says is “Well, you missed WEEDIEST, but otherwise, you played quite well. Awesome, even.” Didn’t I blow the endgame by emptying the bag when I played H(I)M, allowing Josh to bingo out? “Nah, you were dead meat already, the play was correct.” It seems I have yet to internalize that I can lose, get dogwalked even, and still have played well.
II.
I’m not so cool that I crossed paths with Cameron Lew, aka Ginger Root, back when he had shorter hair, covering Glen Campbell and Isaac Hayes in his 2004 Honda Element. No, I got on board circa “Loretta,” like a god damn normie. There’s a lot I admire about Lew and his work: his musical omnivorousness, his virtuosity, his ardent dedication to the aesthetics of the VHS era, the handmade feel of his output on record and elsewhere, and his vision of Ginger Root of more than a music project, but a self-sufficient multimedia ecosystem. To than end, he’s recently returned to the land of YouTube covers with Saikoro Music, a musical game show of sorts inspired by Japanese travel shows à la Suiyō Dōdeshō where the song, instrument budget, and shopping location for the episode are determined by the roll of a die. The spirit of Toaster Music lives on.
III.
I don’t know if this snippet will ever find a home, so it can live here:
The Great Steel Gull is perched on the lip of the highest building in the neighbourhood not meant for commerce or worship. Its darting ball bearing eyes chart the dance of debris below. “The wind moves, but never uses,” it laments, pointing its iron beak towards the river. “I could put all this to good use. O pebbles! To aid digestion. O garbage! To make into clapboard for my bungalow. O baseball caps! To broadcast my various fandoms, and thus self-actualize.” A rebar feather gets dislodges and clangs onto the roof of the Abribus. “Everything ends. I am familiar with the ghosts 1994, 2004, 2024, 2054, and forever more. Everything I care about gets carried away by the likes of you, like the smell of every bagel eggs and cheese I’ve ever eaten.”
IV.
I’m not above jamming a little lo-fi hip-hop to relax/study to despite not having had to study in over a decade and being more tightly wound than a mandolin string. Even though a lot of the music in the genre runs together (I’ve actually alluded to this on an old post), I like it on the whole, and you can tell that these bedroom producers have two north stars: Tokyo’s Nujabes and Detroit’s J Dilla. Now there are producers in the genre I like, some of whom I might even write about in the future, but few have come close the achieving the dense technical and emotional collage of Dilla’s Donuts, the fucking Citizen Kane of beat tapes. To even call it a beat tape feels reductive: most beat tapes don’t feature this level of cratedigger taste, production chops, and thematic cohesion. It is the LP that launched a thousand producers, including a bunch working with little more than an old copy of Logic and an MKP Mini clone.