I chose art, not to become successful, because you couldn’t make a living from being an artist at that time. It was a profession I chose specifically in order to be a failure.”

~Mike Kelley (2012)

For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death.

~Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

Was going to call this Journalese, which is what I accidentally named a file saved quickly one day but turns out journalese is a real word I’d just forgotten, 

“a hackneyed style of writing supposedly characteristic of that in newspapers and magazines” 

says the Oxford English (with something of an attitude).  

So I fell back on my old favorites the Situationists and their détournement but more like if Guy Debord and Anne Francis were running a souvenir stand on Coney Island in the 60s. Or an MLM scheme in the early 90s. Or had to resort to the classic 70s fallback of making a porno to finance their “personal projects”.

It’s a bonus that French is not a language I speak but it IS the first language I failed to learn. My 7th grade class made Mademoiselle D cry and counted it a victory. America in a nutshell.

Here are the things I’m thinking about on my way to thinking about something else. In other words.