Category: Uncategorized

Here We Go Again
Welcome to the new site design! I basically gave up!

I was getting tired of trying to massage the back-of-envelope-sketched layout of the previous one into a final form I liked, so I’ve started over with WP’s default freebie theme, Twenty Twenty-Five. I’m trying to make more things in general, so anything that makes getting started back to work, finishing projects, and uploading any easier gets the nod right now. I forgot to reckon with a couple elements that were tied to old templates, like the social media links, but those are less important than the posts, so they’ve fucked off for now until I have the free time to, um, unfuck them.

As with Donald Trump’s first term in office [sidebar: my brother adopted TFG as shorthand in our text conversations some years ago and that stuck as a diminutive; but now that it’s Chief Executive 2: Electric Boogaloo¹, the word “former” is outdated, so hereafter I’ll probably be substituting a ‘C’ for “current], I have quite a few drafts of posts started, but I’ve been sidetracked doomscrolling the post-election deluge of analysis, outrage, regular rage (much of it impotent), and breaking news items. I wasn’t surprised at the events transpiring since the inauguration—in fact, I expected something similar to what’s been taking place, minus the manic stomping through federal agencies Elon Musk has been doing. But the whole thing, and recognizing this pattern beginning again, has set me to soul-searching. Again.

Doomscrolling isn’t fulfilling, but it is easy. Conversely, making stuff for others to doomscroll is a very saturated field. I think when I first started to post things online I was concerned with seeming too scattered, when so many authoritative voices then and now were insisting that one must find one’s niche to gain an audience, and therefore one has to specialize. I don’t find any rectitude or integrity in avoiding politics or current events here. I’d love to be building a space to inform as well as celebrate and analyze (and rant, sometimes), but I also struggle with my lack of reach and what makes sense to spend my time on.

And behold, sticking to just the art and writing about the arts in general has got me where I am today! Sarcasm notwithstanding, it looks to me like most of my readers are bots—and don’t get me wrong, bots, I’m not saying I don’t like the attention, you’re just not persons. And whatever I make, I make for those. Which isn’t a complaint or a lament so much as a way to think about the future of what I post as ‘might as well throw all the various pastas at the wall for now because it can’t diminish what isn’t there.’

I’m somewhat active in local politics, LGBTQ issues, and online/digital rights, but have mostly kept my blogging and social media posts narrowed to the creative stuff. I’ve generally stayed away from confessional writing as being uninteresting. Maybe it is interesting, though? Raw, unfiltered unburdening! Soul vomit, stinky with wretched rumination—maybe that’s exactly the stuff I should be writing! Or maybe not, but I have no idea how to know. It’s not so fun to do a ton of work just because, but I’ve still got that pestery demon that keeps jabbing me in the baby back ribs just often enough and sharply enough to irritate me, and if I make things he stops for a bit.

It’s tricky to imagine you’re writing for an audience when, most of the time, it’s just you shouting into the digital void. It isn’t as vast as the actual capital-vee Void of the expanding physical universe², even if it feels like it is from here on the inside. I do think I should keep trying, though. That void ain’t gonna shout at itself.
1. Like just about every other Gen Xer you know, I can barely stand not to append that subtitle after the phrase “[blahblah] Two” ↩︎
2. Yes, I know space isn’t truly empty, and well pointed out, your technical correctness is of the best kind. ↩︎
February 21, 2025
Super(b) Cinema

Two videos I watched almost back-to-back from @wolfcrow (Sareesh Sudhakaran) about Superman (1978) and The Sound of Music rose above all the angst and sensationalism with which the various social algorithms were jamming my recs and feeds with. They’re part of Sudhakaran’s series of videos discussing the technical reasons why some classic films are still beautiful and compelling, but along with that the artistic achievements of planning, creation, and performances. They delineate a sense of wonder and humanity that I found deeply affecting in the films they analyze from the first time I saw them.

Why superman still looks like a billion bucks
https://youtu.be/kE9h90a12-E

and

Why the sound of music still looks like a billion bucks
https://youtu.be/AEw9OYPeDOM

They’re both terrific, but I love that Sudhakaran points out how amazing Christopher Reeve’s work was, how hard he worked to prepare and how thoughtful his acting choices were.

January 8, 2025
Now Year’s Eve
Kelly Sue DeConnick, writer of comics and dispenser of wisdom and motivational ass-kicking via the—what’s a term for less-than-infamous?—subfamous text group #BGSDlist, sent out a query for how we were planning to spend Liminal Week: the Most Disorienting Time of the Year. Technically, the year begins anew at the solstice, but nobody pays attention to that cosmic pedantry!

After holiday intensity is behind us, but the calendar hasn’t yet ticked over, we’re in limbo, suspended in time: between the cranky, doddering old fart of this year and the fat, wide-eyed and wailing infancy of the next one.

So I sent in the following:

I ritually pretend I’m getting a head start on things by making Boxing Day the beginning of the new year. [This is also a chance to get a jump on fooling myself, always a healthy exercise.]
- I forgive myself any failings or missteps.
- I think about the people dearest to me and the love they’ve given me and that I return.
- I set my resolve, but lower my expectations (for self-kindness), and begin any new process or practice I either want to bring into my life or reestablish.
- I repeat the 3 guiding life principles I thought up at the end of my disastrous 30s:
1. Go Slow
2. Don’t Push
3. Have Fun
This all seems rather sage, now, the wisdom of a person much older and more competent, surely at least as old as I am now. And it baffles me how I came up with such zingy Zen, when nowadays I so often feel like I’m barely able to careen through the days without entirely collapsing in a confused heap of anxious goo.

HNY!
December 31, 2024
Tech Bro Insights

In the name of keeping up with what’s happening in the tech industry—and I’ll admit that “technology” seems rather ridiculously broad as a category to lump it all into a single industry, but here we are—I wanted to note a couple of insightful and forthright works that have helped deepen my understanding. And also firmed up my resolve to keep searching for ways to fight, circumvent, or organize against the continuing concentration of power and wealth at the expense of users.

Questing on down to the News & Activism Dept., the steadfast Gandalf to my hapless Pippin continues to be Cory Doctorow, whose dizzyingly link-packed Plura-listic newsletter-slash-blog is indispensable. He’s become my favorite writer, a Harlan Ellison for our time (and also doesn’t require disclaimers about abusive behavior like HE) who blends activism, social commentary, and deeply human stories together.

https://plura-listic.net/

Paris Marx’s 4-part “Data Vampires” series on the essential Tech Won’t Save Us podcast breaks down the growing incursion of data centers into communities that are often finding vast amounts of their power and water supplies hijacked by server-packed warehouses. And, of course, there’s plenty of cross-referencing with AI hype and the head grifters leading it.

https://techwontsave.us

Ed Zitron is always worth reading, but a recent post thoroughly articulated the central problem of tech journalism: reporters who justify their fawning by saying that without direct access the work can’t exist. But all too often they become unquestioning mouthpieces, transcribing promises and pronouncements wholesale, even as it’s become clear the emperors are naked as jaybirds. It’s long and it’s well worth your time.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

November 18, 2024
Cory Doctorow at Powell’s

I had to race downtown after an exhausting day the minute I got off work to make it to Powell’s Books, and I was late for the start. Cory Doctorow is in the middle of a book tour for his novel The Bezzle, and he had already started a short lecture when I arrived in the Pearl Room on the 3rd floor. After the talk, he took a few audience questions and sat down to sign books. One of them was mine. Does that sound cheesy? I feel like it’s a little grandiose.

But there’s something special about meeting artists, creators, makers I admire. I’ve been lucky to say a brief hello to many of them—Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Bob Odenkirk, Kristin Bell, Neil Finn—when I got over my anxiety and managed to say something. That gets easier with time, the more I do it.

For this moment, it was easier because I’d already met Doctorow once (I’m not counting random social media exchanges), when he came into the Trader Joe’s I was working at because it wasn’t far from USC where he was doing a fellowship.

He took my fresh copy of The Bezzle, asked me who to make it out to, and made short work of it. I had time to tell him that over the last 20 years he’d become my favorite writer. He told me it was very kind of me to say so, and I thanked him for being an inspiration to keep making, creating, and actually FINISH projects, rather than just start them. And then, as I took back the book and was backing away, he said, “well, starting projects is good too!”

This is a magnanimous thing to offer, and still considering it. In a time when I still struggle to fulfill my pre-, mid-, and post-pandemic resolution to Be Kinder to Myself, it’s both humbling and encouraging. Maybe I’ve only finished a few things, but only things with a beginning get to have an ending.

February 28, 2024
Pause, Unpause

It’s taken longer than I intended to get back to posting, but since the pandemic began, and still, time is more fluid for me than it used to be. As always, there are half-finished projects piling up in the wings, not yet ready for the stage.

For now, I’ve added a music section and started it off with my Best-Of annual lists. I usually don’t finish them until after the new year, partly because my listening playlist is massive and partly because I’m perpetually tardy like that.

I started seeing live music again. Since the start of fall I’ve experienced three amazing live acts, all in relatively small venues: Geese, Ariel Posen, and Big Wreck. All were wonderful, but I was practically giddy being able to see Big Wreck for the first time. Ian Thornley is the last founding member, but since he’s both singer and principal songwriter, BW’s evolution has been steady and seamless. He’s part of my overstuffed pantheon of songwriting, singing, AND guitar heroes. It’s become cliché to say “they’re better live!” but in a performance context, it’s true for them.

Smaller venues give one a chance to have a more intimate experience, not to mention it’s usually much cheaper, so most of us can see more shows. I do love a recording with great production and layered sounds, but live performance isn’t just a connection to the performers, it’s a link to our shared cultural past, reaching back thousands of years to when music, dance, art, and storytelling could only be experienced in the moment, face-to-faces.

December 13, 2023
Geese!

I’ve been obsessed with the new Geese album, 3D Country, this past week. It’s like this crazy stew of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kings of Leon, the Doors, and X. But then again, not quite. They are their own thing, which we all should aspire to be. The friend who linked me to their record offered Steely Dan as a part of his musical genetics analysis. And there is some of that, truly. Early Steely Dan, at least, is a big part of the feel, but there’s a bunch of other stuff piled on, layered over, until all these comparisons are really just hints and handwaving because you have to hear it to get it. They have that NYC band confidence, but seemingly no superiority complex. It’s honestly thrilling to listen to music that sounds new, I mean really new.

3D Country

There’s something compelling about the self-indulgent production—at once everything-but-the-kitchen-sink and stripped down presence—juxtaposed with a punk-like carelessness toward arrangement. Geese are tight, and there’s plenty of craft on display. But it’s a bit like Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin: a barely-controlled chaos of notes that feels like someone musically falling down the stairs at first, but somehow comes across as deliberate and skilled. Everything feels both cavalier and purposeful.

Cameron Winter’s vocals are thrilling throughout this consistently good album. He hardly delivers a line the same way twice. He goes from tender to shredded shouting to throaty affectation in a blur of abandon. It seemed to me as I was listening for the first time that an AI visualizer or audio generator would never have come up with anything so strange, singular, wonderful, and essentially human. Talk about your barbaric yawps.

I just read an article about AI in the music industry (apologies for the paywall; Reader version on Firefox worked for me), and it contains the customary hand-wringing alongside the usual open-ended questions: what does this mean for the future of music? Should musicians despair? But, honestly, my reaction is “meh.” It’s not that it doesn’t suck to assume that labels and the few remaining bloated corporate amoebas that have absorbed all the smaller ones will try to use “AI” to crank out more cheesy merchandise. But everything I’ve heard so far is bland or directionless. For lack of a better term, it’s generic. If people are worried that it sounds pretty good, my knee-jerk reaction is that it’s because—as in every era—there’s so much homogenized fluff that’s trying to sound like the other fluff.

But there are always the amazing gems out there. There are always the chocolate-covered strawberries amongst the piles of under-ripe and mushy decaying ones. It’s like generated art. It was amazing at first, but even as it’s become more polished, lots of it is starting to look more or less the same, and rather lifeless. Blandified. AI isn’t making anything NEW and COOL, just pretty versions of some styles that exist. I don’t want to be dismissive, but I followed several AI art subreddits to watch as it evolved, and I’m getting bored irritatingly soon. Maybe I’ll be surprised, but I’m losing confidence. This is the essential problem of AI, and of technology as a whole: it’s all a big maybe. It’s not an inevitable linear increase in ability and quality. New methods and processes can rise quickly but stall, for a long time, or indefinitely. Consider virtual reality, fusion power, and self-driving cars—or the ever-present fantasy of alt.cars.flying-real-soon-now (that’s right, USENET refugees, I see you).

It’s easy to be dazzled by the rapid rise in ability of AI art generators. It’s also very hard to know how capable it will get. One thing that nearly always holds about the future is that it’s impossible to predict with relative accuracy, and the further out one tries to see, the less likely it gets. History is littered with futurists who failed to divine the future. There’s just as much reason to speculate that this tech is following a logarithmic curve that rises quickly but soon levels off, and no one knows if we’ll actually reach the asymptote. At least with what’s been produced so far.

And so we have Geese! This band sounds like the future, that’s how fun and exciting it is to listen to. I feel vindicated again in my firm stance as a kids-are-alrighter. They are simultaneously unpretentious and ambitious. Both new and cool. The band casually spins out uncategorizable, crazy cool mashups of styles. Something humans can do best, and may always.

[Edit 7-23-23: Geese are Cameron Winter, Gus Green, Foster Hudson, Dominic DiGesu, Max Bassin]

July 23, 2023
Hello world! Again!

This is the shiny new warehouse for Marcus Harwell’s work online. Apologies if this is disappointing.

I’m working on getting things up and running, BRB

June 28, 2023