Tag: finance

notes on fake heiresses

‘I work for my success, I earn my accomplishments. […] Maybe you can learn to be smart like me. I doubt it, but you can dream’.

I would really like to exorcise Anna D*lvey from my present obsessions, having blitzed through the hyper-cringe miniseries and comparatively breezy podcast in barely a week, pursued a bunch of Instagrams and finally shut my eyes only to dream of that accent grinding through a void. 

Credit card, credit card, credit card
assspiration/respiration

I used to draw pictures of infinity pools and flick through brochures of luxury hotels for no other reason than my dad works in travel. 

In Anna’s story, to dream is compensatory for the actual accomplishment of success, and your dreams can be extracted by an app called Shadow…….and all that dream data you uploaded gets aggregated as part of general projects of self-optimisation, leading to what? 

I prefer my shadow-realm in dreaming device; what other people dream. You can listen to the stories of other people dreaming by pressing yourself to the groundwork of a landlord nation. So many people have pressed themselves to the skin of these floors and walls. Why the old hard rain or old hard road? It’s nice to stand outside in the rainy asylum of television.

There’s a loud buzzing in my flat like a fly the size of a building is stuck. It’s been going since Thursday.

Today at four o’clock a dark grey cloud. 

Everyone on the internet seems to criticise AD for not using conditioner but I like seeing out of context screenshots flash across google — prison is so exhausting, you wouldn’t know — and everyone asking where is she, what’s that bridge — boys with names like Hunter and Chase

Get off on development

Writing this adds to the AD economy, but I can’t help making notes. For a while now wondering what a dream is and wanting it always to be more than compensation for the struggle we’re put through — dreams are not opiates for mass depression — 
ineluctability. luxury. 

We are suffering a mass shortage of pleasures at least in the narrow world of these isles and especially what I imagine to be england……..who else watches this and thinks, I don’t even like champagne. I wanna be adored comes to mind………I find the soundtrack flashy and intrusive like TOO ON THE NOSE but perhaps being gauche is aesthetic necessity……if you are trying to do a satire on the people whose lives you incorporate fully by lassoing the loop holes of their own system — weakness, lust for novelty, a good story.

Court fashion. What it is to be well-heeled. Attentive to somebody’s daily post. I miss outfit posting thus Polyvore and lookbook but also, ouch. It’s all in posture? Like how you present the myriad proprioceptions of finance itself, plus conceptual finance & platonic finance. Get your eyebrows done. 

Obviously this whole show is about whiteness and how this is performed, tacitly stratified and constructed for actual material consequence, a f f l u e n c e.

What would you do with access to an app called Shadow? What invocation of the shadow realm does this offer? My eyesight is getting worse the singer is a blurred intimation of human blue on the stage. My dreams blur as with eyesight, so become less of narrative detail & character — more of feeling. I wake up with spillages of emotional pigment all over my chest, belly, brain. Sometimes it makes you wet too

which is to say, we read each other. 

Deeply? Every time I blink there are several billion more tweets in the world, you have to know that. Know it all the time like feeling your white blood cells come up. I have a bulimic consciousness I don’t want any more info, the words are burning my throat

for how long has acid been pouring upon them

Los Angeles in fall?

You can tell by the podcast voice. Someone says ‘scammer and scammer – a match made in heaven!’ 

spoiler alert for other fake vocal fry heiresses.

This one is the largest dream database in the world, it’s in her heart. You gave all the dreams by watching it, like & subscribe. Self-identity as Futurist means you floss everyday on the internet. I’ve been studying the little bits. 

Last night a tiny centipede crawled out of the spine of my copy of Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. I want to go to San Francisco. I want the noise to stop. 

AD = After Death. Anno Domini. Anna Delvey. Advertisement. Advantage. Analogue to Digital. 

Bin man outside is singing INXS. 

Dumb socialite lite lite extra cherry diet coke

‘I wanted to learn everything. So I could be anything’.

The Anna D*lvey aporia of February. 

Scam trends of 2022 as response to crypto? 

Tindering loneliness, paying for soap operas of algorithmic advantage, buying virtual real estate including the non-fungible artefact of a HEX number. 

I wonder who I spent a long time being real in. 

How much I paid a month to use all that purple. 

It’s so convenient to log into all the channels at all times, listen to other people talk of their dreams in computerised accents, dream exactly their dreams until you are what kind of god posting anyway, just to reblog them in the 24 hour window of the story

you feel accelerated then smoothed, depressed as in self-love

just to be in their world at the click of a button

I like her best in the lilac pantsuit and classy copper

abyssal sensation that some of this is really true, even the fashion. Slip diamanté talk of I love Dostoevsky accordant to telly

A book she says her father passed onto her, it’s all about struggle, and telling the psychiatrist, Look, that character who said he was going to america, “he shoots himself in the head” — you know what happens

resultant 

cesspools of debt 

“to girls like me”

precognitive data analysis [ crisis ]

augmented saturates of the dream economy 

surplus love 

love

plus size appliances 

Turns out, a scam, you can use right now for free 

taking out money the same as taking the bus to just get somewhere 

none of this is real

no land

forms a bubble

Green Shoots

tree.jpg

For the third day in a row, Brian looked down while brushing his teeth and saw a tiny green shoot sprouting out of the drain. Only last night, at 2am no less, he had pulled the little fucker out and thrown it down the toilet.

“Miriam!” he shouted to his wife, who no doubt was still curled in bed. “The tree’s back!”

“Mhmh?” Cursing at her lack of interest, he spat out toothpaste and watched how the white foam flecked the two bright leaves of the shoot. Remnants of raisins and granola showered like rubble around it. He turned on both taps and washed it away, but the shoot remained.

On his commute to work, he noticed something was on fire at the side of the motorway. The flames were big, apocalyptic, and when he opened the passenger window the black stench of burning rubber filled his car. There wasn’t a scrapyard round here; there were no reasons to be burning rubber. This was the fucking countryside, not some rustbelt wasteland.

At the office, he turned in the financial reports that were due at 10am. He sat through a meeting which featured the usual pantomime antics of his boss, the kind of man whose entire career is based on imitating the flamboyance of a Disney character while necking enough coffee and bourbon to seem manically on form at every performance.

“What we are building up to,” he announced, “is the ultimate synergy.” His arms flailed back in grand gesture, nearly knocking over the pie chart drawing his assistant had etched on the flip chart. “Capital merging with capital, a clean abstraction, the upward surge of profit. Think of this as MarioKart. How many of you have played MarioKart?” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his colleagues round the table.

There was much quivering, as only a handful of people raised their hands.

“Well, the chosen few will know what I mean by the Rainbow Road,” he continued. “We’re on that motherfucking Rainbow Road. One veer off and we plunge into space, the black void, and that’s that. So I can’t afford a single mishap, I don’t care what happens. We need to synthesise, synergise, synchronise. You hear me?”

Every week, the boss delivered a near-identical speech; the only thing that changed was the arbitrary cultural reference he dragged up, presumably from the stacks of CDs and video-games in his son’s bedroom.

At this point, the assistant stood up hastily. She was young for the job, a high achiever, reaching for those virtual stars in a pair of vicious heels.

“What we mean,” she said, trying to clarify, “is it’s important not to underestimate green shoots. Those little signs of growth. Shares in petroleum, in plastic, are rising nicely. Not to mention South American superfood angiosperms, part of a wider move towards elite organic harvests. While the economy flounders around us, clinging to the small things is what will help us reach that upward surge.”

“Thank you, Heidi.” The boss shot her an appreciative leer. “Now what the fuck is an angiosperm?”

On his lunch-break, Brian ate a sad desk sandwich with a fellow number-cruncher. The two of them were the runts of the litter, the ones that never got invited to the cloying, marathon lunches the boss often dragged the office out on. This meant they were never in line for promotion, but bore the advantage of letting them avoid the poisonous oysters and chardonnay which often left their colleagues retching all afternoon.

“You know Liam,” Brian mused, “I found a green shoot in my sink the other day. It’s still there, even though I thought I pulled it out.”

“What?” Liam was dim-witted and this was maybe why he never got called out to lunch.

“Like, an actual green shoot. I think it’s getting taller.”

“Maybe God’s trying to tell you something,” Liam said ominously.

Back home that evening, Brian found that the shoot had gotten much taller indeed. So tall that various branches curled out thirstily, wrapping themselves round the taps. Brian shrugged and didn’t bother brushing his teeth that night. He pressed himself into Miriam’s back but realised she was already asleep. It was what, nine o’clock?

He got up very early and left the flat straight away to get to work. The accounts were flying off his desk that morning.

“Good work Ben,” his boss said, floating past the desk, collecting his documents.

“I’m on the upward surge,” Brian nodded.

On his way out the door that night he gave Heidi a contrived and lustful glance. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, but this could mean anything. He decided to drive out to the spot where yesterday he’d seen the flames. It was a pit in the ground, a charred patch of grass gone black. He fancied there was some resemblance to a pie chart, the way the different shades of burnt matter lay, wedge-like, in the circle. He did some rearranging, moving shrivelled plastic and ash and wood chips around until they met satisfactory dimensions.

When he came home with soot all over his hands and face, Miriam said he looked beautiful. She was a Leo and had a thing for fire. He looked into her eyes for the first time in weeks. Her whole body seemed to pause, to start melting right in front of him. The light from the kitchen window made her skin so pale, except for a flash of orange across her face. He was about to kiss her, to fall into the molten mass of her body, when she reached straight for his belt buckle. This was a first.

Afterwards, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. The tree had taken over the entire bathroom. In just a few hours, the little green stems had become proper woven wooden branches. He had to climb over and around them just to take a piss. What came out of him was yellow, dark. The flames were inside him now, and the leaves of the tree shimmered around his body, bathing him in luxurious gold.

“Honey,” he heard Miriam’s voice at the door, glistening with the shrapnel of Heidi’s lisp. He realised he was still clutching his limp penis. “D’you think the world’s ending?”