#212: Arjun Ram Srivatsa
Sep 13, 2022 BY
@arjunEasy Go is a clothing brand based in downtown New York City. Over the past two years they have produced the sickest socks in the game. The socks are thick yet breathable, bright and vibrant. They've done collabs with New Day Motor Club, BALANSA, and most recently they made merch for Pavement. They also make caps, and I recently bit Chris Marker's La Jetee for a commercial for their Digital Camo Ripstop 6 Panel Hat.
Sep 13, 2022
🌤
It can be hot, cold, beautiful, ugly, whatever. Strangers, especially old strangers, will say something, or at least they’ll give you a raised eyebrow of agreement. Long responses are great, like the time an old woman told me about seeing two random people faint on the same corner in the summer of 97, but my favorite response is just a simple, “sure is…” Pure joy.
Sep 13, 2022
👼
Cute formalism is a music genre that originated in the late 90s, predominantly centered around Nobukazu Takemura’s label Childisc. The genre was coined by genius/creepazoid Momus in a sort of problematic japanophilic blog post from 2001, wherein he cites Greenberg, Barthes, Brecht, and others to basically argue that being cute can be an artistic tool for subversive ostranenie. The genre is light, funny, weird, odd, and soft. Boing boing, tee hee, oopsie daisy type beats. Check out suppa micro pamchopp’s Obake, Angela Kohlermann’s Care, Aki Tsuyuko’s Ongakushitsu, Nobukazu Takemura’s Songbook, Manoir Molle’s Manoir, and all of Anne Laplantine’s discography.
Sep 13, 2022
In 2006, a YouTube account called Artssiren uploaded a series of clips for an amateur documentary called “New York City Subculture ‘96.” The doc is set in the East Village and mostly features downtown squatters hanging out on St. Marks stoops talking about tattoos, philosophy, and love. Characters include Kia, a topless punk who confronts a pig, Bernie, a squatter who wants to convince you he doesn’t look like a squatter, and Randy, the most emo boy in America. The film was made by Nia Janeen Brown, who now goes by Chloé Le Roux. She deserves a retrospective.
Sep 13, 2022
➿
Time is my arch nemesis. There’s all this ooga booga shit telling you that time is multidimensional, but in reality there’s a beginning and an end and it’s just one moment after another until you die. I can’t escape it, so I try my best to slow it down. One way is to play with the possibility of infinitude through music. I open Ableton, build a synth with Operator, draw out a chord, add an arpeggiator and set the style to Random Other, and press play. With eternal melodies that have no beginning or ending you can get stuck in the loop and feel the freedom of just middles.
Sep 13, 2022
🎶
If you don’t have a DAW like Ableton you can use Audacity, an open source music software, to slow down time. Audacity comes with an effect called Paulstretch, named after an old program called Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch that was used to make this iconic YouTube video. It allows you to slow down audio files by inordinate amounts, turning silly little love songs into monumental drone landscapes. You can discover hidden melodies buried in the waveform and imagine life outside of time.
Sep 13, 2022
🔒
It’s a weird way to end a recommendations list, but there are things you should just keep to yourself. Also, you should be comfortable with the fact that there are things from which you’re gatekept. Anyway, thanks for reading my recommendations lol.
Sep 13, 2022
I’m fond of feeling lost in abandoned villages that have succumbed to failing industry. If you’re like me, you should bookmark Ghosttowns.com, a guide to America’s lost civilizations. The site itself feels like an abandoned corner of the internet. For example, when you click the map, it automatically downloads a MIDI file called “cowboyj.mid,” an upbeat ragtime banger that will accompany you in your search for desolated destinations. The pages for each town contain detailed descriptions of what remains, including ominous comments like “no current living residents, just ghosts of old miners.” Get on and get lost.
Sep 13, 2022
When I first moved to New York, I made friends with poets by frequenting a little library off the Morgan L called Mellow Pages. Back then poets were obsessed with calling anything a poem: tweets, blogs, videos, facebook event invites. Irony hadn’t died yet and new sincerity was just beginning, which made it all a bit insufferable, but I stuck around for the poems. A lot of those people either moved away, moved on, or got canceled, but one thing that remains from that time is cunny4. For over ten years, Bunny Rogers has been posting her poetry to her Tumblr. Her writing is explicit, private, tender, funny, perverse, and intimate. She is the greatest poet of our generation. It’s poetry, just poetry, no bullshit.
Sep 13, 2022
🐄
In 2017, I flipped over my bike handlebars and flew downhill, falling face first at 30 mph into the pavement. I had my jaw wired shut, and for months all I could eat was food that could pass through a small gap between my teeth. I lost 100 pounds. I mostly drank Ronnybrook’s strawberry drinkable yogurt. Its flavor begins with a smooth sweetness, then lingers on a mouth-puckering tartness. The pulp consists of gelatinous, gooey bits of fruit flesh that you can easily pulverize by tonguing it against the roof of your mouth. The jawbreakers diet is mouthfeel hell, so I was happy to experience some texture. I highly recommend it, even if your jaw isn’t broken.
Sep 13, 2022
😴
My friend Forrest recently called me the world’s premiere gift horse mouth looker. Whenever I’m paid a compliment, I feel the need to explain myself. My debilitating anxiety prevents me from doing normal things, like choosing an ice cream flavor, folding my laundry, or falling in love. All I can do is whine, whimper, wail, mewl, moan, make a fuss. One way I shut myself up is through somatic vocal toning exercises. I close my eyes, fill my lungs with air, and slowly say “Vvvvvvvvoooooooooooommmmmmmooooooooooo.” The vibrations make me dizzy, dislodging me from consciousness as my heartbeat becomes a kick drum under my verbal drone, and for a moment, I feel blissfully stupid, detached from my self, fully present in my body. No thoughts. Head empty.
Sep 13, 2022