ATTENTION
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 002 // JUNE 8, 2024
Something like an ending
Children will love the powerful ones who made them rise up from the ground
Children know about the transactions that play out in the mind so that they don’t have to in real life
This can be hard to get over for a child whose ball marks the distance.
There are new walls thrusting shadows into our walkways. This kingdom was not there when I fell asleep. It is like still dreaming, to wake up and discover the war is over and this Rome was built overnight. Okay, the kingdom is inflatable, but I don’t think that changes anything. For the time that these structures stand, children will love the powerful ones who made them rise up from the ground, see them as something altogether different from themselves. Deiokes made himself royal with his seven concentric walls. Parents do it with fewer. The first sign of the inherence of monarchy to human culture. The second is fame.
There’s a kid down the alley who never approached the gates of this kingdom. Children know about the transactions that play out in the mind so that they don’t have to in real life. Like sometimes there’s something you think about doing so you think about the price of doing it and then you decide not to. Running on his own—around, not away—he reaches the top of a hill and sees the city. He, not meaning to, meets the eye of the king standing on his balcony, over sky and sky between them. Now it’s away towards lament… behind the billboard… beyond the real… That’s the feeling that remains, even when you arrive safely back home, of having seen the parents of the kid who didn’t invite you to their park polity where you would have thrown the ball if they hadn’t brought in these commanders of space, these high walls and small people.
His father is out there with him between an island and the rest of the world… out in the yard… dad’s on the phone, not in the normal way. He has it up to his ear. He’s not looking down at it, so he gets to think to himself. Why did I buy this dog for my son if it won’t even fetch? The father subs in for now. Have you ever seen someone multitask like this? Because they see the right thing and they need the necessary?
I can see all of this from a window in my home… the space between a kingdom and a person… between a voice and an ear. It’s always been a problem for us that this space is here, always saying different things are not the same. But when you have two organs pressed together it's like there’s no difference between the one that sounds and the one that hears. This can be hard to get over for a child whose ball marks the distance.
Strictly, the facts:
Recently, the kingdom of The New Yorker published an article by Nathan Heller in which he cites allied king Raja Rajamannar citing some unnamed study which reports that the average human’s attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish. We can be honest with ourselves here: goldfish don’t have many things to pay attention to (I’m thinking of the ones who live in bowls), so this stat might not be much of an insult. I choose to trust the facts from the numbers-sciences here because they paint an amusing picture, a familiar one, too: darting eyes, restless hands… lots of movement… it’s entertaining, this image of people being entertained. A goldfish? Floating upside-down? Boring.
Many people today are reflecting on the fact that the open slots in our calendars are smaller and more numerous, sometimes simultaneous like in the case of the call-and-catch routine. I ask them this: is it really a problem that we don’t have the patience to withstand the pure, unadulterated experience of a single thing for the amount of time that it takes if we can easily pare it down to episodes? Most of the things that require our attention are artificial, so would we be disrupting nature if we manually ripened them for consumption? I really struggle to answer this question for myself. This is where you are supposed to assure me that you and your friends love watching movies beginning to end no pauses no distractions… and, please, do it without trying to be someone… I know you’re tired of dishonesty too, so save yourself the trouble.
I was telling this story to my cousin and my brother about Ted Turner, a royal father whether you like it or not, how he made a video of the U.S. armed forces bands playing the national anthem for CNN’s sign-on, which would happen on June 1st 1980. So they filmed that, and Ted decided that they should probably also make a sign-off video too while they had the cameras rolling and the band there. I imagine that anyone who knew that CNN was going to be a 24-hour channel preferred not to think about what a sign-off meant for it. But they filmed it according to Ted’s vision: the U.S. armed forces bands playing nearer my god to thee. It’s supposed to be the last thing that airs on television before the world ends. That was Ted’s vision. I think it’s not so extreme to doubt that CNN will end a long time before the world does. There’s a bigger point there, but the reason I brought it up is because I couldn’t remember why I told this story to my cousin and my brother by the time I finished telling it to them, so I just said I was planning to make a lost analogy; and then I didn’t know exactly why I started writing about it here when I did. I think you can make the connection, though. After I finish telling the story, before I trail off, I suggest a few possibilities: “Some apocalyptic feeling a person could have about all of this… and then some intuition that apocalypse has meant a lot of different things since 1980 but it probably has always felt the same… a dead goldfish…”
I’m sorry, none of this is all that new, much less news. But I dare you to say it’s not letters. It’s been dark and light outside since I started trying to figure out how to say this and I still haven’t done it. Will you let me try again in the absence of reason? May I say nothing once or twice while you attend? I’ll forgive you for doing the same…
Don’t you love AI art?
Attention was edited by Adrian D’Agnillo and Charlie Zacks.
state of stimulant
Hey everyone, Charlie here. I hope you are all doing well. “This Will Save You” is coming along well. We have tons of submissions to work through. Feel free to keep sending stuff, we will likely close submissions in a few weeks (think mid July). I feel like we are on the precipice of something big. I keep making connections and that’s fun. I started Stimulant so I could publish work I believe in. We have succeeded. What an honor it is to be in the position I am in. Keep sending me your work. I love you all more than I can say.
get hip
Ben Werther’s exhibition “When you can no longer speak, sing me a song.” at no gallery in NYC. We will be working with Ben soon.
Photography etc from fotographe montrealais. Avant-garde…you know the deal.
Check out “Open Secret”, new cinema screenings curated by Dana Dawud on June 22, 2024.
Please support, if you can, families in Gaza by helping to get their voices heard and hopefully experience some amount of security. Here is a link to a spreadsheet from Operation Olive Branch which lists several ways you can support Palestinian families and individuals financially or otherwise.