I’m watching a typical French film, mid-budget, with the same actors you see doing the rounds in these mid-budget French films, littered with the kind of all too earnest sex scenes that border on the ridiculous and are not erotic in the least. Yet, I found myself doing a voice piece out of it, this line, he says to her, into my phone, thinking it could have been yet another album title, running it over, you’re, the one, that keeps, me from feeling…, sa…, rearranging the syntax, troubling the intonation and seeing where that took me, until it took me into seventeen hours of daylight where I am now. I am counting the months until my birthday. How can this be?, my birthday, coming around again? Already? Moondog1, the viking of 6th avenue, and the God of DIY, wandering around NYC and standing on corners selling his broadsheets, blind and homeless, out of step, out of time, most thought him mad, now he’s a genius and so it goes, the tube, rumbling through my bones, checking my stats, and ‘revenue’, hallucinating through lost summers, laughter floating out of the open window and down the street, getting broken into, but it was summer anyway and they were opportunists, B.O., and the general stink of it all, the thing is, we even like it, this non-space, non-time, nobody on your back until you get off, looking down, or across, or anywhere, but at each other, watching someone nod off, or studying someone’s face, expression. I read a quote the other day that said most people die at 25 but live till 70. I cross my legs. They crane their necks into their phones. Why am I the only one looking up? Again? Pressing ‘send’ on disappearing messages, gaming, stock exchange-ing, emailing, reading, streaming, scheduling, DM’ing, Snap-chatting, Instagram-ing, TikTok-ing, content-providing, Wordle-ing, Discord-ing, Telegram-ing, Moodle-ing, doodling, bomb-ing. All those dead eyes sailing down the line, that night I went round and round on the circle line until I sobered up, and the mystery of the night bus. Les Dennis drowning his sorrows in Café Nero in Highgate village. Karl Marx’s grave (before you had to pay). Sting living just down the road, Annie Lennox, George Michael, but I never saw any of them. The sun emoji, 19 degrees and climbing, a soft breeze, blowing, under my lilac cotton dress and all the wild flowers—seeded, the barely there breeze, between my thighs, whispering something. Algorithms, flattening culture, perpetuating seamless consumption, connecting us through parasocial relationships, homogenising, and reshaping us “like everything is Taylor Swift” (Chayka, cited in Yalcinkaya, 2024).2
I’m holding Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld (2024)3 under my arm, exiting the station, the wind in my ear. On the cover is a gingerbread man cutter, empty of filling. Play the game, or risk disappearing; or be indie, and IRL. In an interview with Dazed, Chayka suggests: “Plugging some words into a generator and then being like, I have now completed a cultural circuit. That feels so masturbatory to me” (Yalcinkaya, 2024).
Scotto, R. 2013. Moondog. The viking of 6th avenue. 2nd ed. New York: Process.
Yalcinkaya, G. 2024. ‘Go viral or die.’ Dazed. 20 February. [Online]. [Accessed 15 May 2024]. Available from: http://dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61986/1/go-viral-or-die-how-the-algorithm-took-over-filterworld-kyle-chayka
Chayka, K. 2024. Filterworld. London: Bloomsbury.