Sick
I’ve been bravely suffering from a nasty head cold for more than a week. It occurred to me last night I should probably invest in a humidifier. The next thought that sprang to mind was a memory of Cory Arcangel’s Real Taste, an ultrasonic humidifier he filled with Diet Sprite for a show at Lisson Gallery in 2011.
It did not dazzle me the first time I encountered it. In fact I rolled my eyes, thought it was a dumb stunt. But you know what? It’s still lodged in my brain almost 15 years later. I think about it whenever I walk into a Muji and see those scent diffusers spewing polite little plumes of mist. I think it’s a great work of art, actually. A subversive totem of perfect, disgusting artificiality.
I’ve been consuming a tiny cup of cough syrup before I go to bed each night, which has been making me nostalgic for the codeine-soaked Southern rap of the pre-crash 2000s. Dextromethorphan has largely supplanted codeine in over-the-counter medicines, but in high enough doses it can still make you robotrip, as any Rick Ross aficionado knows.
This music and its related aesthetics permeated my high school and college years to a degree that is difficult to really explain today. I hazily recall an unsupervised graduation party in 2005, filled with a whole host of preppy white teenagers. Most of us were holding silver chalices we’d just been awarded for academic achievement, which we’d gleefully dubbed “pimp cups,” and which we were using to chug purple drank. My own pimp cup did not survive the night. It’s probably still under a bush somewhere in Kentucky.
The soundtrack to that party was Three 6 Mafia’s “Sippin’ on Some Syrup,” which is real classic of the genre. That song has so thoroughly imprinted on me that to this day I can’t eat shrimp without mouthing the lyrics “we eat so many shrimp, I got iodine poisoning.”
