DAA Mix 2: One Day I Returned to This City, and Then I Knew What That Meant
With a contextual note and some quotations
This post is part of a series where I share mixes I make. Each mix will be accompanied by a comment, a short essay, or perhaps a selection of pertinent quotations. You can listen via the audio embed above; you can also find the tracklist and a link to download the mix at the end of the post. You can listen to the first mix I made for this series here.
I moved to Houston in the fall of 2019. I still live here, but I don’t know for how much longer. The heat falls like rain during the summer—you swim through the pounding rays and the thick humidity. The gentlest of breezes and the harshest of air-conditioned gusts constitute relief; one toys with and kicks around the scraps and debris flung everywhere by downpour. I don’t know if there’s any such thing as reverence here, but there’s always play. The things that are typically loud in America are louder here—this goes for both pride and shame. Nowhere else have I been better able to learn how to listen for silence. Living in Houston means both slowing down and speeding up simultaneously. You do the DJ Screw thing (chop it up, ease the pace, put a bit of swagger into your step, play it back again) and the John Oswald thing (smash it all up, put anything next to everything, cut shit down from 40 to 4 minutes) at the same damn time.
I was born in a city,
but I didn't know what that meant.
I grew up in a city,
and I didn't know what that meant.
One day I left this city,
and I didn't know what that meant.
One day I returned to this city,
and then I knew what that meant.
–Ingeborg Bachman, "City" (c. 1942/56)
Walking through the old section of the city, where some gigantic piece of reconstruction work was going on, walking through a sort of abattoir upended by an earthquake or a tornado, my disgust grew so great that I passed over into the opposite—into a state of ecstasy.
–Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, "Vive la France!" (1945)
Summer is the one season that exists, the other three are calendrical conventions [...] It is the most human time of year. Why do I call it that? Sometimes one feels the most absurd situations, sometimes even the most banal, are felt to be especially human. The summer is absurd. In all its naked structure and impudent poetry, time, for instance, stands before us in summer [...]
–Miklós Szentkuthy, Towards the One and Only Metaphor, Section 29 ["Morn awakening: to be born chaste…"] (1935)
Vesuvious dont talk - Etna - dont - [Thy] one of them - said a syllable - a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever - She could'nt look the world in the face, afterward - I suppose - Bashfull Pompeii! "Tell you of the want" - you know what a leech is, dont you - and [remember that] Daisy's arm is small - and you have felt the horizon hav'nt you - and did the sea - never come so close as to make you dance?
–Emily Dickinson, L233 [second "Master" letter] (1861)
Those people knew too many things. With a simple name they told the story of the clouds, the forests, the fates. They saw with certainty what we barely know. They had neither the time nor the taste for losing themselves in dreams. They saw terrible, incredible things, and weren't even surprised. They knew what it was. If what they said was false, who could blame them? In those days even you couldn't have said "It's morning" or "It looks like rain" without losing your head.
— Yes, they spoke names. So much so that at times I wonder whether the things or those names came first.
— Believe me, they came together. And it happened here, in these wild and lonely places. Is there anything surprising in their coming here? What else could those people have looked for in a place like this, if not an encounter with the gods?
— Who can say why they stopped here? But in every abandoned place, an emptiness, an expectation remains.
–Cesare Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco, "Epilogue" (1947)
1. [...] Again and again I must submerge myself in the water of doubt [...]
3. [...] One can only resort to description here, and say: such is human life.
Compared to the impression that what is so described to us, explanation is too uncertain.
Every explanation is a hypothesis [...]
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough" (c. 1931/51)
I think often of my earlier work and what it has cost me not to have been clear. I acknowledge I have moved chaotically about refusing or rejecting most things, seldom accepting values or acknowledging anything.
because I early recognized the futility of acquisitive understanding and at the same time rejected religious dogmatism. My whole life has been spent (so far) in seeking to place a value upon experience and the objects of experience that would satisfy my sense of inclusiveness without redundancy — completeness, lack of frustration with the liberty of choice ; the things which the pursuit of « art » offers —
–William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, "IX" (1923)
[His] intention is not to destroy somebody else's factum in order to make one of his own, but to show what he thinks is the proper creative relationship to all factums [...]
One must ask oneself where the individual work of art begins and ends, about its relationship to other works of art, about the relationship of any and every other fact to any and every other fact [...]
[He] is primarily interested in the wit of handling information and only tangentially interested in the things that bear the information. Essentially, he has no subject matter at all [...]
–Henry Martin on Ray Johnson, "Mashed Potatoes" (1972)
First and foremost, I do it because I like it, regardless of whether context, discourse, and/or institutionality allow the labor to be legible as art.
Second, I want to be a cool art kid, but I'm not much of a maker.
–Manuel Arturo Abreu, "Rhizome Artist Profile" [Interview with Eleanor Ford] (2016)
Ain't no quarters, ain't no halves,
just some (w)ho(l)es in 'dis house [...]I can lock the whole town
if I break 'dis shit down
But it might be slow,
so I'm sellin' shit (w)ho(l)e
–Gucci Mane, "Swing My Door" (2006)
One Day I Returned to This City, and Then I Knew What That Meant
Tracklist
DJ Screw - “Lil Wayne – Tha Block Is Hot”
NHS Gman - “How to Do It (ft. Eli da Real Steppa)”
Whirling Hall of Knives - “Ripped Out”
Honeywell - “Industry”
Aksak Maboul - “Age Route Brra!”
Hermann Nitsch - “Akustisches Abreaktionsspiel,” A-side
Toto Bissainthe - “Papadanmbalah”
Sunshine Has Blown - “11th May 06 Pt 1”
Culturcide - “Houston Lawman”
Lil Grimm & A. Warren - “Visions/Label Y’all Dirty”
Marsha Fisher - “Grooming IV”
Nick Hoffman - “Strange Lights Filled the Church”
no body - “Oh – did I offend it”
Perihelion Gnosis - “Syzygial Summoning of His Pale-Skinned Majesty (Sacrifice of the Neverborn)”
Old Nick - “Smashing the Chandelier of the Meanest Ghost”
Hanne Darboven - “Opus 25 A, VII. Seite 1 - 4 (1. Juli)”
Bryan Eubanks & Xavier Lopez - “Natural Realms, Realm 1”
Helmut W. Erdmann - “Dodeci Pezzi für Flöte und Live-Elektronik (Entstanden 1985 in Olevano/Rom) – No. 7”
Új Bála feat. Makiko - “Target Group”
die Reihe - “Housed,” B-side
History of Unheard Music - “And a Door Opened”
MC Money & Gangsta Gold - “Ridgecrest Anthem”
Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland - “8210”
Puredigitalsilence - “Death (Live at Ssamzie 2001.3.24)”