Twilight of the Public Access Idols

It’s a long-time cliché of art history that kitsch eventually turns into a high art. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Victorian gingerbread was seen as the disgusting affectation of a less enlightened time, and it was only in the past 10 years that Anglo-American brutalist architecture has been reappropriated as the signifier of a more optimistic era rather than just some gray concrete shit. If we’re going to extrapolate further, it’s so easy to mistake age for wisdom, and stupidity for prelapsarian virtue, that I always have to caution myself against it, to put certain automatic skepticism triggers in place, lest I be deceived.

But if you have that crate-digger mentality, a desire to go through the archives and find past ideas and expressions, you’ll always be tempted to find enlightenment therein. It’s something I used to do a lot, in the hope that I could somehow recontextualize and redo what I saw, to make my mind palace into a Joseph Cornell box. Like most people, as I have aged, immediate and quotidian requirements have taken precedence, and yet there will always be an allure in the grainy filmstrip, the library book last checked out in 2003, the potshard. 

And in that context I recently watched 2004’s Public Access Hollywood (available in its entirety here), and it was an opportunity to revisit one such strange world, the legendary LA public access channels, widely regarded as the best in the country, and the strange personalities who inhabit it.

I’m not sure how many people under the age of 30 have even watched public access, but I’m sure many of them know the aesthetic of it – grainy video stock, ill-fitting polyester, primitive digital effects, and general amateurism and incoherence. Famously crappy, famously occasionally very weird programming produced on non-budgets in local cable markets across America, a frequently parodied (see any number of classic SNL sketches from Wayne’s World to Goth Talk) format from a pre-Youtube era where the idea of any audiovisual media beyond the family vacation video being homemade was novel. A clear lineage to the two ferns that Zach Galifianakis sits between (by god, is even that reference long-outdated?). Even by my day, public access was viewed as a strange and quaint thing, something we found through early Youtube clips. The last memory I have of even watching it on an actual tee vee was in my early 20s, in the margarita-and-marijuana haze between viewings of Project Runway with my gay housemates. 

The first viral public access clip I remember was The Spirit of Truth, in which a borderline street preacher randomly cites Bible passages without quoting them from what looks like a telephone book while insulting callers, against a backdrop of Yosemite while Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” plays. Across America, his quotes were dropped in the same way Antwone Dodson’s would be a decade later. He’s not in Public Access Hollywood – a little too ephemeral.

 

So who is in the documentary? The focus is on the mainstays, who, while perhaps, less intense in their insanity, are their own variety of eccentric. There’s David Liebe Hart’s Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program, starring his puppet Chip the Black Boy, with crack-is-wack messaging and songs about helpful aliens. More intentionally weird, there’s Dan Kapelovitz and the team behind Three Geniuses, slashing the media form of television to bits, and commenting on the rebirth and “re-death” of psychedelia, a stage of weirdo anti-humor somewhere in its evolution between Andy Kaufman and Devo on one end and Gen Z Dada on the other. Or the bro version, Zuma Dogg shouting shit on Sunset in his Oakleys and ‘90s condom beanie, a kind of demonic Ashton Kutcher. For more informative content, there’s Dr. Susan Block’s sexual education program, a cavalcade of bizarre proto-sex-positive theater, dressed in vinyl and spanking her guests. Mediating it all, the sort of cultural arbiter was Michael Devine of Hollywood and Devine, whose variety show featuring the lovely freaks and weirdos of Los Angeles feels like a chopped and screwed version of Letterman. And the one who garners the most screen time and most pathos, there is Francine Dancer, chubby and dancing in her lingerie while maintaining that she would never do something so classless as to dance nude, confined to a wheelchair when she’s not dancing. No fixed address, much beloved within her niche community but at best an absurdist artifact outside it.

I think you get the idea. Cranks who interrupt municipal council meetings worldwide, desperate souls, who, above all else, want other people to listen and understand, pranksters and ironists in it for the lulz who could probably cite Baudrillard and Debord off-camera, or at the very least Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren, and the dreamers in rattrap apartments who still believe they can make it in real Hollywood, despite their often-dire circumstances. This studio was their home, and you kind of love it for them. 

But what the makers of Public Access Hollywood didn’t know was that in 2004, they were already at the end of an era.

One thing they acknowledge is that by that point, reality TV had already become an institution. From its inception point in the late ‘90s, it had spread to become the standard for the cable networks, deliciously cheap to produce and packed with mass appeal. Like the public access stars, it provided an ostensibly (adverb doing some heavy lifting there) authentic appeal, and a lurid opportunity to see one’s fellow man at his ugliest and most depraved.

And what they further probably couldn’t have anticipated was that the ecosystem of public access television, one which claimed to bypass the gatekeepers of audiovisual entertainment, was about to expand to the whole damn world with the rise of Youtube (the irony being that that is the very platform where I watched the documentary). 

It logically follows that this is something that the drive towards algorithmic correctness inevitably destroys, not only preventing us the audience from seeing the wilder and weirder side of things and trying to get us to watch preapproved slop, but also incentivizing creators into producing things more algo-friendly (with the occasional oddities like Elsagate videos representing a genuine flaw in the system, fucked up as they are). Sure, previous forms of media were beholden to a hooting and hollering public, but the algorithm seems even worse.

Which might be why, despite the similar hypothetical freedom, few of the public access stars would find a home on this new platform. And beyond that more coldly rational lack of economic incentive, there’s also a deluge of competing content, rather than a particular zone of permitted bizarre. In a world where everyone is a weirdo, and you can turn on or shut off their weird at will, it’s irrelevant. But when you turn on the television and randomly flip to public access, it’s something different entirely. 

“I miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’…

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’ 

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Book You Should Read Even Though People Will Call You a Lit Bro 

But concomitant with the rise of Youtube was the rise of another media machine – Adult Swim. Here, the aesthetics of public access, along with industrial video, low-end public broadcasting, and every other ephemeral form of media from the cable-and-VHS era would be recycled into the lysergic mandalas of Tim and Eric et al. We could view the original vomit of the era on Youtube, and we could view the avant-garde pisstakes on Adult Swim. Indeed, Heidecker, Wareheim, and Co. had the wisdom and foresight to bring some of the LA public access idols to the national stage. I’m guessing a lot of the readership will be more likely to know David Liebe Hart in this capacity. All the food is poison. Keep your meat ice-cold.

But his story seems to be one of the few successes here, and even that success is pretty circumscribed. 

Maybe they would have always been fated to obscurity, but maybe they could have been fortunate enough to breach containment and find their improbable sliver of success. I’m reminded of another LA icon, Angelyne, the bleach-blonde daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors known more for her billboard poses – an early stab at guerrilla marketing – than any of her purported entertainment talent. It would be hard to imagine her transposed to today without a couple seasons on Bravo, or at least a horny Twitch following.

Part of the reason the documentary works in 2025 is that it plays at this historical disconnect, and part of the reason it would have worked upon release 20 years ago is that it plays on the very fundamental feels of the desperate attempts to keep a dream alive. One of the oldest of LA cliches is that of a graveyard of aspirations, a place where the ideology of individual merit runs headlong into bitter reality. And every year, we hear new stories that reinforce the trope, whether lasciviously documented for TMZ, or as the backstories for stalkers and mass shooters. 

I put in some hours, but the fate of most of the performers in Public Access Hollywood is difficult to suss out in casual searches. David Liebe Hart’s latest credit involves Lloyd Kaufman of Troma / Toxic Avenger fame, so he’s continuing to participate in weird media. Dan Kapelovitz still seems to be invested in making fucked up shit, and for that he is to be saluted. The latest project in his IMDB profile is 120 Days of Sodom… Literally, a cut-up of Pasolini’s Salo with a 120 day runtime (feel free to watch it streaming, it’s ongoing), and he seems to be pursuing a side passion for left-wing electoral candidacy (seeing someone else tragically ahead of his time?). Zuma Dogg still seems to be doing pranks in his sunglasses, to a tiny audience. Susan Block simultaneously had a career as a sex therapist and regular on Real Sex on HBO – raise your hand if you remember furtively watching that in the basement, only to be deeply deeply disappointed – and still has the Susan Block Institute, but the website looks like something from 1998, which seems awfully appropriate for a woman seemingly designed for that very 1990s precise balance of lewd, subversive sociosexual commentary. Michael Devine seems to have died from cancer in 2006. And Francine Dancer is still out and about in Hollywood, occasionally popping up on someone’s Instagram, still smiling.

But all of that being said, I ran into quite a few dead ends. Whole swaths seem to be likely dead media, and I doubt I could find much more than the minima I’ve already found, unless I were to chase down moldering basement VHS collections and chase the performers for follow-ups (something I’d totally do if I wasn’t doing this whole thing on top of a full-time job plus freelance writing for actual cash money). Honestly, more than anything else, I just wanted to find signs of life, and maybe it was parasocial, maybe it was morbidly curious, but I wanted confirmation that they were OK. 

Maybe I held hope because in their own way, these were truly the last bohemians, scraping by on the fringes of Hollywood. They said fuck it, did their own thing, on the public commons, with minimal regard as to market incentive. The things that followed inevitably come off as moneymakers, aping authenticity as part of their branding. Reality television, of course, or the monstrous sponsored-content machine that Youtube has become. Even those weirdo Adult Swim shows, as much as I love them, are shaped by the requirements of the advertisers, and Tim and Eric’s legendary, absurdist late ‘00s Absolut ad series were at the end of the day still Absolut ads.

So what we get is real folk art from a lost world. And the documentary, 20 years on, its cri de coeur.

In the Middle Kingdom, Part 2: Dragonfly Eyes

In spring of 2024, I was at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, deep in the heart of the sort of old Tokyo streets that remain sparse and ragged. It’s where I first saw Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes, or at least as much as I could manage in an unplanned visit. I’d later go home and watch the whole thing on Youtube. 

The premise is simple, almost a gimmick. The footage is culled from thousands of hours of CCTV footage from around China to assemble an otherwise fairly anodyne love story. But the plot is only the thin armature that holds it all together. The real joy of seeing it is a voyeuristic look into the lives of what is often regarded as a borderline hermit kingdom, integral to the global circulation of capital, but little-visited and little-known, particularly outside a few major metros – a glimpse of ordinary people at work, at the pharmacy, enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life.

 

And that’s what I thought of on the taxi in from the airport in Shanghai – my god, there’s a whole normal goddamn country here.

Which to many is going to be the biggest shock, given how much ink is dedicated to the mystery of China – whereas once Occidental writers once wrote about the inscrutable celestial mandarins drowning in the river trying to catch the moon, they now write about smart cities and social credit scores, and the messaging is just as vapid as it was 150 years ago. So there’s an anxiety of influence there that stalks me as I write – I want to distinguish that which is genuinely bizarre and unique about contemporary China, without falling into the lazy cliches that stalk virtually all writing about the country in the Anglosphere. Granted, that experience was of Shanghai, and while the valences differed in the gloomy industrial suburbs and sun-faded steppe towns, the principle was the same. The middle-aged man drinks his after-work beer and smokes his cigarette in the doorway to the apartment block, the teenage girls make little finger-hearts and pose for their selfies, the career woman frets over the texts from her side dude, the boys in soccer jerseys and the girls in pigtails go over their math homework and the clerk in the little corner store looks up from the game on his phone and sees he needs to put more Cokes in the fridge.

But part of the reason I’m starting with the bizarre normalcy of the Chinese streets is not just as a counter to the propagandistic messaging one sees across Western media, but because it is actually a difficult place to access. The visa process is an abject nightmare, time-consuming and onerous, and even the exemptions that are in place are arcane, with contradictory information online and poorly translated websites with jankety interfaces. Beyond that, everything is, naturally, mediated through apps, most of which are either impossible or exceptionally difficult for a foreigner to access. For example, WeChat, a standard platform, requires you to be verified by a WeChat user who has been using the app for 12 months, the Weixin pay platform within the app for 6 months, and has not verified any other first-time users within the past month. I didn’t get to use it. And that isn’t to even mention the fact that one is accessing one’s financial data within the People’s Republic is enough to trigger automatic blocks on your bank account, regardless of how many long-distance phone calls you make begging them to take note and being reminded that “[they] care about your security.” 

Which of course reflects a gatekeeping. The Chinese systems and the everyone-else systems are kept at a deliberate distance, like two species evolving on different sides of a broad river.

So what is on the other side? 

Once you crack the system, once you finally get the hang of it – it’s impossible not to be impressed. Procedures are coordinated, efficient, and inexpensive. You’re effortlessly jumping into prim little electric taxis that smell (nostalgically) of cigarettes and BO, driven by gruff uncles that hack up morning half-pack out the window between historic sites and antique restaurants. Despite what you may hear about gutter oil and plastic rice – jenkem for CNN viewers – I’m happy to report that the spiced lamb skewers were flavorful and the cherries tart and sweet.

The high-speed train system should be enough to blackpill any Westerner – I come from a country that can’t build a pissant metro without having to deal with armies of red-faced suburban homeowners and byzantine public-private partnerships, and it will take decades to build. The system in China, conversely, is consistently clean, efficient, and inexpensive to use, expensive to build, but designed with long-term benefits in mind, and to alleviate the many economic externalities caused by poor infrastructure – the paymasters within the state accept the loss leader, because they view this as an investment, which is a tough thing to imagine when you come from a society run by profiteers who don’t care about much of anything beyond their Q2 returns. And you have to think that maybe, unironically, these are Brautigan’s machines of loving grace. 

It felt a bit like I was walking in the shoes of those early 20th Century European intellectuals, looking at America with awe and horror. I am a representative of the falling world, here in the rising world, and it’s impossible to feel anything other than the sublime, fascination and unfamiliarity and admiration and fear in equal measure.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is often thought of as an anti-communist classic, and to be fair, Zamyatin was no fan of the USSR, despite his past as a Bolshevik revolutionary. But one thing the standard reading forgets is just how enraptured and expressionist Zamyatin’s descriptions are of what we would consider a dystopia. 

“Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral was being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying at its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight. And then to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom.”

The dragonfly’s eyes flicker in the distance. 

Objections here are pretty obvious. You’ve heard most of them, with varying levels of reliability – lack of free expression (which is often reframed as a point of pride, an antidote to “disorder”) to social credit (an almost completely ginned up story designed to stoke terror in the heart of the well-meaning Atlantic reader). And to be fair, living in a mass surveillance state fucking sucks, particularly one that well-oiled.

And it comes at you at inopportune moments – when you see the QR code on the apartment door, when you’re stopped and have your notebook rifled through, presumably in search of flyers about Jesus or something of that nature. When you realize that there is a contingency upon which the new China is being built. My delight in flânerie through the streets of Shanghai could be easily contrasted with the merciless checkpoints of Beijing. 

But if you’re reading this you probably know the extent to which you’re already under the microscope, at least to some extent, from both the private and public sectors. Patriot Act, built-in forensics in devices, biometrics, you know all of this already, and it’s best not to think about it, especially given the degree to which we seem to have all collectively given up hope in any kind of an alternative. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive, beautiful in their goals, seem almost as quaint as the Free Tibet concerts and Trotskyist reading groups of another era – quixotic missions for idealists who still, bless them, truly believe another world is possible.

Some asshole dork is probably ready to play the “nice whataboutism” Yu-Gi-Oh card, to which I say, fuck off, I’ll steal your Yu-Gi-Oh cards and trade them for an eighth of mids. I’m making a direct comparison here – the nature of the surveillance might differ, one might choose direct censorship over incentivized and nudged corralling of the human soul (and the direct censorship is to be fair probably worse), but the similarities should be, to any enthusiast for freedom, uncomfortable. 

And at least the Chinese provide treats. Try paying for a hotel or booking public transit stateside. And for a double contrast, compare the China of now with the China of generations past, even after Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. The Chinese must be the last people on earth who see life getting better and better, rather than a slow miserable death, if for no other reason than that they started from nothing.

I drift back to the West Lake in Hangzhou, where I started, to the old folks with their boiled peanuts and medlars. Had they been urban youths sent down to the country? Or had they been militant Red Guards? Or had they been the countless those in between? 

As for me, as much as I enjoy the peanuts and the medlars, I am still a product of a very different place or time – for the jolly, double-chinned crowd, this is the culmination of a long and hard life, a transcendent epoch of rest. As for me?

I still love cities at night – even if I am slowly aging out of the nightlife demographic – but as someone who was always a bit on the periphery, the being peripheral is no skin off my back. I swan through the streets of the French Concession in Shanghai, surrounded by people much prettier and more stylish than I, and they pay me no heed, as I pay them no heed. I’m happy to walk on this lovely spring night, a soft rain falling. 

I stop in at the posh wine bar, and I am left alone on the rooftop – the better-connected, the ones who know exactly which bottle to select to impress their clients or their attendant crowd of fawning girls draped in Alexander McQueen, they’re inside. I am here with the malfunctioning lights, but I don’t care, their cellar selection reflects the taste of the new China, and I have in front of me a glass of Charmes-Chambertin, and I am left to enjoy it in peace, each subtle aroma sending me to a place and time from my past – here, the smell of the incense in my dorm room, and there, the hippie grocery store in my hometown, and over there, the spice cabinet from my old rattrap apartment back in Seattle, living with two middle-aged gay addicts in an illegal sublet for 600 a month, and I was one of the last to experience that. I come from falling America, and I’m here in rising Asia. And I don’t even care about the rainfall all around me.

Only to walk through the slick streets, a little music playing from the intervening years, until I find myself under a parasol.

In the Middle Kingdom, Part 1: Wuwei

What lazier way is there to title a book than the “Tao of…” (other, of course than “Zen of…,” with apologies to Mr. Pirsig, he did do it first and best). It’s an easy way to flog a book on some particular or quotidian thing, just bard it with a bit of Eastern mysticism, and an often shockingly superficial understanding of Asian religion, but it’s OK, because most of your reading public will be familiar with these concepts in name only. So off you go, and the “Tao of Fly Fishing” it is. 

(Note to self: check if that’s a real thing lol omg of course it totally is, and maybe the author is a true sage, but let’s just say my suspicions are not assuaged)

So, without going to Wikipedia, what could most of us say about Taoism? 

To be fair to my fellow damaged occidentals, it’s a devilishly difficult system to put your finger on, especially given its longstanding historical associations with esoteric and mystical beliefs despite the lack of mystical language in the Tao Te Ching, especially given the ways in which it has, like all Asian faiths, lent itself to syncretism, and the sheer openness of interpretation of the texts themselves, even by the woo-woo standards of religious literature. It is written in these dense, hermetic little aphorisms, which along with the allegories of the Zhuangzi as well as countless astrological guides, herbals, and alchemical manuals, form the corpus of Taoist holy text.

If I have to compare the whole thing to anything, it would be Robert Burton’s maddening, lengthy The Anatomy of Melancholy, an equally hermetic 1000-page Baroque treatise on the nature of the melancholic, rooted in the theory of the four humors, largely consisting of peculiar cures and musings on ancient Greek thinkers and legends. 

In that openness, I naturally found an appeal. Rather than religion, the Tao seemed more like a poetic, gestalt approach to the world. Even the first line of the Tao Te Ching is a fuck-you. The way which can be walked is not the eternal way. Sorry, next. Instead, we can only hope to listen closely to the music of the spheres, and try not to be idiots or assholes. Let that move me rather than being bogged down trying to make a rational decision in the infinite choices that flaunt themselves like streetwalkers in the grim stage of history in which I find myself. I can only try to move through as gracefully as possible, hoping to take effortless action, or what they call wuwei.

Knowing that there was no “knowledge” there, per se, no ultimate faith, I decided to take a cue from William James, and embrace the will to believe. I didn’t even know what I was believing in, but that was beside the point. I made a conscious decision, and chose to see where it leads me. 

So the wuwei led me to China.

Everyone has a take. The nation of the future. The number one enemy of human freedom. The inscrutable empire. The spearhead of communism. The spearhead of capitalism. The world’s oldest and noblest human civilization. A country irrevocably destroyed. A pillar of strength. A Potemkin village, a whole Temu-ass nation. 

Eh to all of that.

I’d rather smile at the aunties sitting next to me by the West Lake in Hangzhou. They laugh and gossip and enjoy their bags of medlars and their bayberries and their boiled peanuts, and their husbands smoke Chunghwa cigarettes, once a privilege of the Politburo, through stained teeth. They all loudly cackle and hack up phlegm and sip their tea. 

Robert Burton used to watch the boatmen of Oxford screech and swear and spit between writing the Anatomy.

They were men and women of an age where they may well have been sent down to the country. So let there be a blessing upon the sunny terrace and their medlars and cigarettes. They say that there are ten scenes of West Lake, depending on the seasons – the spring dawn on the Su Causeway, the lingering dawn, the autumn moon. This spring afternoon felt more than enough. 

Karl would have loved it. So would Rosa. But that Jiang Qing was a real ass, wasn’t she? Those were quite a few dead sparrows.

Nonetheless, the water still flows under the climbing vines on the old stone bridges of Zhouzhuang. Nonetheless, the stoic warriors still stand in silent formation, holding watch for their emperor beneath the mercury-fouled silt. 

And I can sit in a Shanghainese restaurant dating to the late Qing Dynasty, where the eels are slightly charcoal-grilled before being braised in spices and rock sugar, the chafing dish adding a second layer of char. The pork knuckle is cold and stodgy and dense under aspic, and a sip of hot Pu Erh tea turns it into an incomparably rich soup. A private joke among the last generation of mandarins. Men who would set their teacups on lilypads as they dreamed about butterflies.

“This is a way of showing the small in the large: in an unused corner plant some bamboo, which will quickly grow tall, then plant some luxuriant plum trees in front to screen it. 

This is a way to show the large in the small: the wall of a small garden should be winding and covered with green vines, and large stones decorated with inscriptions can be sent into it. Then one will be able to open a window and, while looking at a stone wall, feel as if one were gazing out across endless precipices.

Here is a way to show the real amidst an illusion: arrange the garden so that when a guest feels he has seen everything he can suddenly take a turn in the path and have a broad new vista open up before him, or open a simple door in a pavilion only to find it leads to an entirely new garden.” – Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life 

I take a taxi through the hutongs midway through demolition in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a little Ethel Cain playing on my headset, to the base of the Back Hill in the Garden of Harmonious Pleasures, on the north edge of the Summer Palace. It’s a steep climb, straight up amid old brick pavilions. These were once full of splendors, but when the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion came, loutish British soldiers marauding through, sacking and stealing, smashing screens, pocketing jewels, grabbing curios which would go on to decorate the bourgeois living rooms of West London.

Because a trip to China is a trip through the horrors of human history. Here, the plaque says, is where caves in the Northwestern loess collapsed en masse in the great earthquake of 1556, burying thousands in their dugout homes. Here, the next plaque says, is where the Song Dynasty intellectuals committed suicide rather than submit to the Yuan. And over here is where the emperor’s mistress was tossed into a well alive. The stone lid they put on it that day is still there. 

In Nanjing, where the crayfish are beautifully sweet, the self-titled rulers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom slaughtered the Manchu men first, and the Manchu women second, and then 30 million of their own Han Chinese were killed in the fracas, and 70 years later, the debonair and handsome Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, uncle of the Taisho Emperor sanctioned the industrialized mass murder of 200,000 civilian residents of the same city – and given his royal status, he was granted immunity. He died in 1981, a pious Catholic and wealthy golf course developer, living on my beloved Izu Peninsula coast west of Tokyo.

On the Back Hill, I am exhausted, the midday sun shining bright, amid the scars of old wars. 

But then I reach the pine-crested top, and the trees part and reveal Xanadu.

 

The mandarins are long gone, and us commoners get to traipse the plaisance along the Kunming Lake below. The girls get to do their hair into elaborate updos and dress up like empresses and concubines and water-sleeved fairies and interwar Shanghai femmes fatales. Along with the occasional anime schoolgirl. 

Not that it’s all lovely – a pox upon the gaggle of fat old ladies in jewel tones who nearly pushed me into the ponds in the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou while they took a group photo, hideous knockoff sunglasses perched on their porcine faces. Chinese tourists have a reputation for being monstrous abroad, but it turns out that even domestically, all it takes is a selfie stick to turn a kindly aunt into hellspawn. And as I traveled, I had more than a few deeply unpleasant encounters.

Lacking the time to climb the sacred mountain of Huashan, I made my way to the Huaqing Pool, where the love of Emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Guifei was not to be, as told in the saga The Song of Everlasting Regret. Where, as the only Westerner, I was surrounded by more gawking locals who didn’t even have the courtesy ask if they could take a picture with me. More jewel tones. More knockoff sunglasses. 

The structures are largely hideous contemporary recreations, complete with plastic lotuses in the pond and mist machines.

 

“Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox,

Like on the way up to the terrace in the spring.

I alone am inert, giving no sign,

Like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.

I am wearied, as if I lacked a home to go to.”

- Ch. 20, Tao Te Ching

 

“All my joys besides are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.”

- Robert Burton in his overture to the Anatomy

 

But then I saw the path lead up the mountain of Lishan. Surely, this must be the way. 

And I climb to the top, to the little Taoist temple where the monks and nuns smiled and greeted me, merrily attempting to speak to me in Chinese, clucking through missing teeth. I simply smiled back and shrugged. They offered melon and steamed buns. And looking at the statues of the deities, I learned who my Taoist protector god was.

General Zhang Geng was an official of the decadent late Ming Dynasty who defended his family against unjust persecution, who defended the common folk against tyranny and oppression, who devoted his life to what he believed to be the honorable and honest way of doing things. This went as well as it normally does – of course the emperor offed him. And now, so they say, he keeps watch over all those born when the year of the tiger occurs in conjunction with the elemental sign of fire. 

I bought a cinnabar amulet there. I keep it in my messenger bag still.

And as I stared out at the turmeric-colored river, down towards the spot where the Qin Emperor’s mysterious necropolis supposedly lays undisturbed, I knew that I should be there, amid the lilacs and the cedars. 

In the distance lurked concrete towers.

As to those, I’ll see you in part 2.

The Summer Vibes Never Die

 On Sunday, 15 June 2025, I do what we all do. I wake up and check in on the world.

Then I see this beauty, shot at a Beirut rooftop club:

 

“Missiles in the sky, but the summer vibes never die.” Sun emoji.

Click the link for the funky beats and Baker Street-level sax solo: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK5Z41RMRkz/ 

Netanyahu, of course, is hiding out in Greece right now. The Israeli Air Force One is apparently called “Wing of Zion.” Maybe he wanted summer vibes too.

The water is for the coffee is taking too long to boil. 

Meanwhile, back in my country, one Minnesota Democratic lawmaker has been killed, another injured. The presumed killer was the head of a security company called “Praetorian Guard,” but was apparently debased to living with a roommate, an old buddy. His CV said he’d worked for “the world’s largest convenience store chain” as a flex, meaning he had managed a 7-Eleven. Said roommate seemed to be a Papa John’s employee, and now the image everyone is going to remember of that poor bastard is him crying and reading text messages to the news cameras as he sweats through the Papa John’s polo stretched over his gut.

The suspect was experiencing “mental health challenges” per the local sheriff’s office. “Challenges.” 

I got baked last night and made post-midnight eggs au gratin with hella hot sauce. Probably a bad idea.

There’s probably still shit going on in Los Angeles, but Trump had a birthday rally in DC so all eyes were there, with troops failing to march in time to generic rawk and roll music that sounds suspiciously AI-generated. Sponsored by Coinbase, Palantir, UFC (natch), and Scott’s Miracle Gro. 

Miracle Gro.

Who’s been sending me messages? Seoul, Paris, Kyoto, and New York all send their regards, or at least their memes. I send back a picture of the pool outside (there are summer vibes, we must remember, even if it’s the bleak and rainy monsoon season here) and I have to ask myself whether to use the sunglasses emoji, or to playfully allude to the fact that I want to use the sunglasses emoji. 

The signs at the other rallies read “No Kings!” and I genuinely can’t figure out what this means. General dissensus, I suppose. I don’t see much in the way of concrete policy goals, mostly just one big frowny-face emoji.

Meanwhile, marines are detaining US citizens in Los Angeles after storming elementary schools, cops firing, point blank and with intent, at an Australian journalist reporting on the scene, Latino cops roughing up Latino protesters, LAPD and LASD shooting rubber bullets at each other, and Brian Wilson is dead.

 

But I repeat, “summer vibes never die.” Brian Wilson, at least you were given the dignity of being called profoundly mentally ill, not challenged. 

I really shouldn’t have had those late-night eggs.

The coffee is almost ready, though. 

What they tell you, five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Zero things you can vibe on, summer or otherwise.

I don’t know that that necessarily works. 

But I hadn’t even noticed my foot was bleeding.

I Miss Duolingo

Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse, daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly says “he’ll be fine.”

Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch. 

(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)

Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or “dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it, decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go. 

And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too decided to dust off my French.

It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option (as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization was vague. 

Which says something about how optimistic the technological environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider. And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.

It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like “tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get better. 

And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.

Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns to shit.

As for when and how the decline started, different users have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one another, but were forced to simply play the game.

And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this. Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.

But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.

Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible, and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.

“One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well.”

 The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.

But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress. 

As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old man or a fatass unicorn again.

But this is what happens when you take a good product, and let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the professional con men. 

At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see what products his name was being slapped onto.

Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.

The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.