Bogdan Raczyński and Charles Hascoët In A Rave

It's funny to think, and I do mean funny, not "interesting" or as a pseudonym for "I'm actually pissed off but trying to exude maturity", it genuinely brings a smile to my face, to imagine that the sale of Charles Hascoët's piece, Bogdan Raczynski, an oil on canvas painting of my Rave 'Till You Cry album cover, which, before that was a wax sound totem squeezed from the taint of the offspring of capitalism and the oil industry, which, before that was a photo taken by photographer Wim Van Wambeke, which, before that was just a split second in a night from a party I played at in Belgium where I was very famous among a few dozen ravers in a town called Gent for an hour a decade and a half ago.

Who is Charles Hascoët? I don't truly know but I'm annoyed I have to copy and paste that letter ë in his name. C'mon Charles, I don't waste people's time with the fancy ń in my name. Maybe I should, just to be a nuisance.

Anyway, he's some person that contacted me out of the blue not too long ago. But who was your partner or your friend before you met them other than just some rando among a sea of rando's.

SO, anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's funny to imagine that the sale of this single piece could very well have netted more money that I have earned over my entire career; albums, shows, remixes, even the Björk and Playstation things. Oh look, more umlauts, what're they trying to prove? Assholes.

I don't actually know that this is true, nobody shared sales data with me, and besides, I prefer the company of a terminal window in my code cave over the garish dungeon lights of a contemporary gallery.

But, based on the way Charles is dressed in his gallery walkthrough video in what appears to be a proper NYC art gallery which I found out later has a handful of locations around the world with over 600k follows on their IG, unlike the gallery I exhibited at recently, aka the random wall I found near my house upon which I taped a piece of paper... where was I, yeah, based on the above, this looked like a gallery showing where they serve Moët instead of Pabst.

In the video Charles prances around confidently like some kind of art overlord, he's even holding a dog, looking fantastic, talking fantastic, beaming fantastic, riding cloud 10 on the eve of his NYC art exhibition while conversely I sit working on a spreadsheet in one of 5 shirts I own, making money for someone other than myself.

Now, I need you all to stay with me here because this is important.

I am actually 100% pleased by this thought. I promise you.

Of course I'd love to see those same zero's in my bank account so that I can continue to devote my life to sound and text. But I am genuinely happy for the guy.

I put this piece to rest for 6 months. Literally, the cursor sat at the end of the last paragraph, literally, to the day according to the timestamp, because I didn’t really know where I was going with it, plus spreadsheets, neurons diverged, blah blah.

But then out of the blue I get a package nearly 6 months after Charles said he’d send me a thank you thing which I’m sure he felt obliged to do cuz I reached out when I saw his video cuz of course I did he DM’d or tagged me and I said, well, idk wth I said, but he said he’d send me a thing and I chalked it up to politeness teetering between expecting a fat cheque and absolutely nothing but here we are nearly 6 months later later and I’m down one shirt because it had too many holes which was gutting cuz I really liked that shirt but I got two new ones cuz yolo and so the kind package is here featuring all sorts of memorabilia from the showing; T-shirt, photo print, lovely handwritten letter, and even an unrelated hand drawn piece which is actually decent.

And boom the neurons know exactly which memories and words to trigger and string together and at the appropriate intensity and here I am again with my fingers off to the races tap tap tapping like a puppet.

It all hits like a boomerang but I’m going to call it a booërang, a word I just added to the ever-growing lexicon on my site, yes I am that self-important that I looked up and then immediately forgot when to hyphenate words and I also have my own website and I have a page on it with words I made up which felt weird but fun and mostly fine, a sentiment that was tangentially validated literally yesterday by the wonderfully spoken Alok @alokvmenon, but in a completely different context in the form of a comedic dialogue about people finding fault with made up pronouns as though all words weren’t made up.

SO, anyway, Jesus, I can’t get a word in with these damn neurons; yes, this is what it’s like. Super power my ass…

I’m trying to explain what a booërang is.

The backstory is this strange sensation of being one element of something that has become something else. Me performing that night was a thing because I absolutely destroyed the rave, people were apoplectic, out of their minds, probably the drugs but someone said music is a drug so I’ll take credit, and then it became a thing because Wim took a photo which then became another thing because I used it as an album cover 10'ish years later which became another thing when we sold t-shirts of the shirt I wore on the night in the photo which then became a thing as Charles painted it and hung it up in a brick-and-mortar NYC gallery and I'm guessing hoping, more power to him, probably bagged more coin than I’ve earned in my 33 years of what can best be described as the failing trumpet sound, waa waaa…

A booërang.

It's nothing particularly unique. We all live in this way. This is what life is. Culture and art breathes in this way too, the air is shared, impossible to separate, and why would you want to.

I suppose what was special to me was seeing the arc. Witnessing the dramatically different forms a thing had taken and having the privilege of being part of something greater than myself which is an arrogant thing to say because of course everything is greater than ourselves. And then feeling it land back in my arms.

A booërang is when you send something out and it comes back to you, eventually, but it's not quite the same. It took its own journey and met some people and did some things and you can tell it’s still your thing but now it’s also other peoples’ thing too.

I’ll probably get told there’s already a word for that, and yeah you’re right, it’s called a booërang.