h and cc asked me to write this and i immediately said yes before sinking into a completely paralyzing goop, the quicksand of (in)decision/security that comes with a (healthy?) understanding that whatever i have to say is not worth hearing, let alone gleaning anything from. i had hoped that The Perfect Thing would come to me over time, deserving of adorning the soon-to-be storied annals of GUNK. as is always the case, Something came to me - in bits on a tuesday, swarms on a wednesday, and absolute negative space on a thursday. the universe between Something and The Perfect Thing is endless and explosive, righteously devouring the self-inflicted boundary dividing the two, beckoning our arrogance with a fanatic patience, begging for an understanding of more than a one-way road.
there is a poison creeping toward our hearts, a virus rampaging through our lives and our circles that double and triple as amoebas of nausea-inducing competition for the featherweight championship title of “who can most earnestly express themselves as long as it’s within a creative industry-as-machine-approved framework, and who can garner the most impressions while doing so” that infects our nervous system in an attempt to ambulate us toward The Perfect Thing. an infallible and inscrutable holy grail of validation, the sacred, complete canvas that means We I Did It! We I transmuted the generation, sometimes against our my own will or better judgment, of Something into that which synthesizes my ideas, your ideas, and everything we’re lucky enough to share in this life, into a point that we can both look at and nod in agreement with. no notes here! perfectly executed!
if we’re fortunate enough, correct enough in our blind shot into the ether, that agreement happens on a stage, to (x),000 monthly listeners, in a theater, on paper, anywhere in which solidarity re-molds itself into performance. what is lost in the linear journey between Something and The Perfect Thing is the functioning engine that Something is propelled by, the radical act of refining a conviction through ideating in compassionate company. creating a confinement around Something crystallizes it into The Perfect Thing, depriving Something of its oxygen - the instances in which we’re lucky enough to be in a room that exudes a gratitude for being populated by monuments of an insatiable desire to create. there’s a tensile, smoldering thread supporting us all from below in those rooms. a silken spider web that, sure, we are absolutely trapped in. but why would we ever want to leave? are we prey, waiting to be devoured by our own insecurity, preempting a non-existent criticism against our repeated attempts toward The Perfect Thing, or are we guests in the home of Something?
to me GUNK is emblematic of that room, of a desire to traverse these threads for the sole purpose of holding, and being held by, one another. to me it is a beautiful thing because it wears its Somethingness on its sleeve. laying the tracks in front of the train as it barrels through the fog of cultural nausea on a return trip to a radically compassionate Idea Soup has never felt braver, more necessary. this is the first draft of this piece. i hope you can earnestly swap demos - your first draft of an idea, a principle aging into adolescence, an interest, a process of learning, for the sake of a pride in autonomy - with someone in a room you find yourself in with soon. if not, send it to me. it’s likely i won’t reply — i may not even see it and shit like that really stresses me out because i'm a gigantic hypocrite — but the honesty it takes to send it in the first place is what’s worth celebrating anyway. consider this my attempt at the same.
-Dawood Nadurath