tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27141581672451169912024-03-05T20:13:11.928-08:00Subject/ObjectAndrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.comBlogger189125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-79346047707124621032024-02-06T07:21:00.000-08:002024-02-06T07:21:09.685-08:00I Don't Hate People Anymore<p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some
version of dedicated dismissal of the human species has always stalked the
official narratives, whatever they may have been, from Diogenes the Cynic in
the ancient world barking at Alexander the Great, all the way forward to the
dedicated neurotic fuck-yous of Richard Lewis and Janeane Garofalo in the
Comedy Cellar in the ‘90s, with countless stopovers and loops on the way. Maybe
the draw was Nietzsche writing his little zingers in his garret, maybe it was
Lou Reed flipping off all you guys, and all you girls with all your sweet talk. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Because the official institutions
and their associated narratives that constituted mainstream opinion in whatever
form they took – religious orthodoxy, civil society, the reassurances of the Hollywood
ending – allowed the misanthropic alternative to thrive as an omnipresent
shadow figure. Alceste,
the original titular Misanthrope of Moliere’s play, was a serious pussy-getter who
got exiled for being too <i>real</i>, man. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But that was then. Religious orthodoxy
continues to flare up, but not as an all-encompassing <i>weltanschauung</i>,
but rather as a series of reactionary fevers. Civil society and the prospect of
a commons or a shared destiny are memories at this point. And to find an
unironic Hollywood ending, one has to go to the emerging and shamelessly
populist morality-play cinemas of Bollywood, Nollywood, and the dopey
nationalist action movies coming out of Shanghai and Moscow.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I can't help but feel that some
form of misanthropy has gone from a subcultural current to a mainstream
opinion. This is regrettably logical. If we live in a world of unprecedented
loneliness, that loneliness is stalked by an unprecedented misanthropy. In the
era of climate change, information overload, future shock, panoptic social
media, and the levers of power being gripped onto by alternating teams of psychotic
nationalists and psychotic neoliberals, it is difficult not to be pessimistic –
like I said, a natural and reasonable response, if sad. But that pessimism
needs an outlet, and it has an unfortunate way of manifesting itself as a
contrast between one's own ego and the repulsive mass around us.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“In spite
of everything, I still believe people really are good at heart” – Anne Frank, <i>Diary
of a Young Girl</i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“They
should be rewarded for not being people. I hate people.” – Aubrey Plaza as Depressive
Pixie Dream Girl re: cute aminal friends, <i>Parks and Recreation</i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The various figures of the
contemporary <i>commedia dell'arte</i> reflect this widespread attitude.
Facebook boomer dads with receding-hairline opinions think they're the heirs to
George Carlin, autistic teenagers without relationships or hobbies can dedicate
themselves to self-flagellating as they demonstrate their correct opinions, and
viral TikToks show imaginary arguments between a random 32 year old creative
and himself with slightly different hair. He, of course, wins that argument.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the atomized space of online
communication, it is comforting, a guaranteed win. In your Madison Square
Garden of the soul, you will always be the Harlem Globetrotters, they will
always be the Washington Generals.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Because in this world, everyone is
an idiot but me. Crying-laughing emoji crying-laughing emoji.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately, this is not too far
from my own natural state of being. Any smart, oversensitive kid quickly learns
that many things sucked. And now, let's run some teenage hormones over those
existential-angst default settings, add the usual edgy boy inputs (the complete
discographies of Nirvana and the Dead Kennedys, repeat viewings of <i>Fight
Club</i> and <i>The Usual Suspects</i>). That gets one to the usual teenage
fuck-you, the kind that comes with a bottle of Fireball that rolled under the
passenger seat of a 1995 Ford Tempo.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now add high-art texts, chosen
pretty much at arm's length, one leading to the other. Kierkegaard seemed like
a high priest of anxiety and isolation, and after listening to <i>Nevermind</i>
and taking a swig of that Fireball, I accepted Sartre's proclamation that hell
was other people more or less as a prime directive. <i>L'enfer, c'est les
autres</i>. Fuck the normies, pass the Doritos bitch, I got hella munchies.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But when Sartre said that, he didn't
say that other people were hell -- the vision of the hell he didn't believe in
that he puts forth in No Exit consists of anxieties, fears, conflicts,
resentments, and projections, not the people themselves. And even then, this
most famous quote was not a philosophical statement – it’s a quote from the
character of Garcin, and, well, he's a bit of a dick. So it's no different than
the other teenage boys who took Tyler Durden (or for that matter Eric Cartman) at
his word. It’s a natural desire to be known as a heretic with an unforgiving
vision.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And yet while I said as much... I
didn't hate people, not truly. Sure, my fellow man disappointed me more often
than not, but at the end of the day I found people more frightening and
confusing than worthy of contempt. Some might have called my attitude
misanthropic, but perhaps the better word is <i>weltschmerz</i>, the “world-pain”
engendered by the inability to account for the cruelty of the world.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Many years ago, my beloved high
school Western Civilization teacher (hard to believe such a thing still
existed) asked us where we were on the scale of belief in the capacity of
humans – were we John Locke, optimistic believers in tabula rasa and the liberal
democratic politics to follow, or were we Thomas Hobbes, inveighing against the
nasty, brutish, and short life of the uncultivated man? As a wee edgelord, I of
course agreed with Hobbes more, but… I didn’t like the implications, the belief
that therefore man must be steered by a tyrant. Nor should I have.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And misanthropy does lead to
reactionary politics, whether that’s Hobbes’ Leviathan, or the puritanical
belief that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, or the strict
delineation of a <i>dar al-Islam</i> as the only locale in which peace may
reign. I clearly didn’t vibe with that, because, well, I liked things like
democracy. And being free to smoke a bowl whenever I damn well pleased. I may
have disagreed vehemently, albeit purely intuitively, with my teacher at the time,
but that may have been a moment when doubts were sown as to my contempt for the
human species. My pessimism existed because I felt bad for my fellow man, not
because I hated him.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore, the misanthropy itself was
also infinitely more charming when it was an undercurrent. Diogenes and
Heraclitus and Lucian, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Stirner, Richard Pryor
and Dave Attell and John Kennedy Toole, they all spoke their truth, and sometimes
they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but they at least felt like
original and necessary interpretations and counterpoints.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So the older I get, the more my love
and empathy expand. I’m not in a childhood bedroom or grotty college dorm
anymore, and I’ve somehow against all odds managed to live a life of travel and
art and letters. And when I flaneur around, staring at the infinite sea of
faces, all I can think is how utterly <i>fascinating</i> they all are. So when
I feel hopeless about the brave new world we inhabit, it’s more that, well… I
just feel bad for all of them. I still think I’m trapped on a burning planet
with a bare minimum of hope, but I feel lousy for even the most pigheaded and
deluded of my fellow prisoners.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now I can already hear certain
protestations. This could itself be a new version of the contrarian hipster
attitude -- I was misanthropic <i>before</i> it was cool.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps
that is true, but if so, I’d like to think this isn’t me being even more of a
dick. Rather, it’s a generalized sadness at no longer being the canary in the
coal mine. All the humans followed me down, even as I gasp and flutter my last as
the white damp sets in.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, dear
reader, let it be known that this canary loves you, even if he’s wondering why
the fuck he’s here.</span></span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-5214292641499341612024-01-18T07:03:00.000-08:002024-01-18T07:03:45.574-08:00A Memoriam to Pitchfork<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> <span>The process of media consolidation has been such a grim
march since before I was born that I normally hardly pay attention. Oh, Publication
X is ceasing. Well I guess that’s rough.</span></span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>But today’s announcement that Pitchfork was being folded
into GQ was a stab to the heart. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Pitchfork
regularly – as I’ve discussed previously, it’s been circling the drain for a
while. The site has over the past few years veered in an obnoxiously poptimist
direction, favoring rhapsodic nonsense about a perfectly forgettable Ice Spice
song rather than anything even remotely countercultural or in-depth, with even
most of the indie they championed being remarkably inoffensive – I like Big
Thief as much as the next guy, but they’re hardly leading a musical revolution.
And yet it was still a devoted music website (i.e. not an app), a place where
actual journalists were paid to actually write about music, without a video
autoplay coming up every five seconds, without much-touted Spotify exclusives,
without the morass of branded content.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>This is where I should also point that it’s a bit suss,
to say the least, that this happened a month after Pitchfork’s union
successfully negotiated zero layoffs. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>But once upon a time Pitchfork was vital. OK, sure, it
was easy to make fun of. The painfully earnest reviews of indie music were often
silly and overwrought, but it was, for those of us who grew up far from urban
centers, a way to learn about the wider, weirder world of music beyond the top
40 at a time when radio airplay was still functioning as a cultural arbiter in
piggly-eyed Middle America (hard to imagine in the era of Spotify I know) Along
with the much-missed Tiny Mix Tapes, the website that single-handedly turned me
onto so much incredible noise rock, it was an open invitation, with its year-end
lists and decade retrospectives and its annual music festival that I attended
every year for their first few years. Their long-form journalism was often brilliant,
frequently heartbreaking, and always thought-provoking, and these articles
introduced me to ‘90s Chicago post-rock, afrobeat from Fela Kuti forwards, and
countless other veins of music I would have never known. Shoegaze seemed less a
genre than an ideology. And in the same way I read and read so as to know the
world, I listened and listened so as to know the world.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>I’ll just leave this forgotten beauty here: <a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6411-resonant-frequency-39">https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6411-resonant-frequency-39</a>
</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>And in my dorm room I would restlessly search for Mediafire
and Megadownload .zip copies of these albums. I would pore through the mildewy
reek of the music library of our little college radio station where I was paid
a pitiful stipend as station librarian. I would find Youtube clips consisting
of scratchy transfers of old 7” Cherry Red singles paired with highly pixelated
album art. I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#A# (infinity) on my
Discman in winter fields. I would see shows in dank and grimy venues with only a
handful of other weirdos present. The Robot Ate Me tackled me to the ground and
may have dry-humped me as he sang on top of my pinned-down body. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>Right now, I’m sitting at home, marinating pork shoulder in
papaya and spices, to sear and then deglaze with Viognier. I long ago traded in
my band t-shirts bought at sweaty shows and beat-up Chuck Taylors and Chrome seatbelt
bag for linen shirts and Clark’s suede and a nice leather satchel bought at a Budapest
haberdasher, and I’ve gone from couch stays in scrofulous shared houses to bitching
about the Keurig selection in boutique hotels. </span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>But I’m listening to those albums that meant so much to
me at one time. The self-titled Beach House album, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Asobi
Seksu’s Citrus, Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Albums that
once seemed to hold the key to something, in the lingering waft of Nag Champa
and shitty Iowa schwag at 17 years old, when some part of me fully believed
that the only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, and then they
buried her alive one evening in 1945. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>And so the final burial of Pitchfork is another reminder
of the general enshittification processes. All those feisty independent
journalistic outlets and blogs that shaped my perspective have been outmoded by
the algorithm, the treasure hunt has been replaced by the hopeless scroll.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>This sucks. I hate it here. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span>At best, the better of those articles will remain
floating in the floating world, ghosts to be found by people much younger than
myself – a bit like the odd old issues of magazines from other eras you’d find
lying around. Because ghosts are often so much more reassuring than the
present.</span></span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-17833585823074379432023-12-19T07:22:00.000-08:002023-12-19T07:24:27.751-08:00Spanish, Flew<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I flew to Spain. Not
because I had any grand desire. I had a week to kill and there was a cheap flight
in, a cheap flight out. I knew I liked Spanish things – El Greco and Velazquez,
Bunuel and Almodovar. I was in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was surrounded
by Satmar Jewish women in identical sheitel wigs with babies, by goyische women
in identical Patagonia fleeces with corgis and miniature poodles. I saw Woody
Allen and Sun-Yi Previn looking more miserable than I, hailing a taxi outside the
Kurlansky Gallery in Chelsea, and they had a miniature poodle too. And then I flew
to Spain.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">The outer suburbs of the
city by the sea are filled with sad-eyed heroines I know from <i>Todo Sobre Mi
Madre</i> and <i>Hable con Ella</i>, the prostitute dancing on the mattress and
drinking cheap <i>tinto</i> in <i>Biutiful</i>, the immigrant children poking
their heads out from screenless open windows above. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Of course, it shouldn’t
have surprised me that I hated Barcelona at first sight. I had the misfortune
to have booked a room near La Rambla, a place which, like the Old Town of Prague
or the inner canals of Amsterdam, was clearly once gorgeous and now caters to
the shittiest and lairiest of tourists from Great Brexit, made all the worse by
it being a Barca/Real game day. Overpriced reheated tapas and streetside bars offering
the ubiquitous pornstar martini (a drink that I can only imagine tasting good after
the second line of molly), bachelor parties with the whole gang of lads wearing
t-shirts with graphics of stick figures of brides and grooms and the phrase UNDER
NEW MANAGEMENT underneath, drink specials in David Guetta-blasting nightclubs
and weed vapes and sex museums, a supposed Southern naughtiness to counteract a
supposed Northern primness, revealing the actual Southern desire to milk the tourist
dollar and the actual Northern desire to self-obliterate. The Southerners succeed
in this respect, they leave with a tidy stack. The Northerners wake up with
splitting hangovers, hacking coughs, hotel rooms spread with latex and handcuffs,
and just as much misery.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">It is gorgeous. Which in
the age of Instagram is a curse, and Barcelona’s own Antonio Gaudi has the misfortune
to be the most Instagrammable architect. In much the same way that increasing
access to information leads to greater stratification in terms of consumer
goods – demand shoots up for every quality piece of cookware, for instance, promoted
by culinary influencers – social media has created a stratification of
locations, with the Barcelonas and Lisbons and Tbilisis of the world playing host
to rapacious Airbnb owners and braying digital nomads. To visit Sagrada Familia
you need to buy tickets a week in advance. And download the fucking app. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">But as I move further away
from La Rambla and the more conspicuous Gaudi buildings, my heart grows with
each glass of Monastrell and Penedes, every Miro painting, every braised pig’s
trotter and screamingly fresh razor clam. And when I reach the Parc de la Ciutadella,
my heart absolutely sings, elderly couples, families with kids, groups of Goth
teens smoking weed, African migrants, solo readers, people engaging in more or
less every musical and athletic pursuit imaginable, all united in their desire
to enjoy a perfect sunny afternoon surrounded by cypresses and Canarian palms and
bitter-orange trees and Catalan tilework, without being charged for the right
to do so – something akin to what I imagine my ideal society to look like. The
sort of thing Orwell might have written an homage to.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Yet this the landscape of
the charming Mediterranean fringe. The innermost country is an arid, sandstone
land punctuated with olives and grapevines, distant views to the snow-capped
Pyrenees over the barren, chalky soil, a landscape closer to the harsh
scrublands of, say, Eastern New Mexico than lush, decadent Mediterranean
fantasy, cruel and wind-whipped, the sort of place where windmills could
readily turn into enemies, where Torquemada’s ghost is not far behind, leaving
a whiff of burned flesh in his wake. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">And at its heart is a
city few people could say much about. Because what do you actually know about Madrid
as a place? Its sights, its architecture, its local culture, its music scene,
its gastronomy? Probably not much at all. I know I didn’t.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">After breezy, Mediterranean
Barcelona, Madrid was freezing cold and consistently raining – a rarity for
this semi-desert city. The mist gathered in the Gran Via and the Plaza del Sol,
<i>Madrilenas</i> shivering in their skimpy tulle-and-lace Halloween costumes,
the lights of taxis flashing in the drizzle, with neon advertisements on
glorious art-deco skyscrapers, posters for Spanish-language stage interpretations
of Hollywood cinema (Legally Blonde becomes <i>Rubia Legal</i>), and one could
be forgiven for thinking not that they are in Castile but Times Square. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I was there with a primary
purpose, to see the wonders of the Prado. To see the greatest manifestation of
that semi-arid land, the haunted and contorted saints painted most famously by
El Greco, less famously by Jusepe de Ribera, deathly pale bodies in the
darkness of Spain during its ostensible Golden Age, failing to rise to the
light of heaven.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">And when I saw the
singular, dark room, the dead-end gallery of Goya’s <i>Pinturas Negras</i>, how
could I do anything but scream? Sure, we all know about Saturn eating his children
– but that is perhaps the least horrifying… this is Goya’s index of every senseless
stupidity, cruelty, and violence inflicted upon the world, every gathered mob,
every sickly midnight cackle. And at the end of the room, there is a painting
of a single dog, barely peeking through the distorted charcoal gray and
burnished gold background, eyes straining to find some kind of hope in the
sheer misery. And devoid of any context, it breaks your fucking heart. </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbO38Z7waaa7M0eON1Ul9x0DVl1T9SjsuskeiiIpk7zd8ZD5aCNMPcyAYIxSSRNLsa5X3TtfR0pl3eei2R6n7vnlU_cinHqxQwAmiNUIkPLN3oWn1LaDCewHPcUN-Xl4lNxitOoA78Blnt06HXxR7VRo0-eHN71J-eX_NCkeyQYh8XIMzVwdVSADzdWruG/s1566/Goya.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1566" data-original-width="1107" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbO38Z7waaa7M0eON1Ul9x0DVl1T9SjsuskeiiIpk7zd8ZD5aCNMPcyAYIxSSRNLsa5X3TtfR0pl3eei2R6n7vnlU_cinHqxQwAmiNUIkPLN3oWn1LaDCewHPcUN-Xl4lNxitOoA78Blnt06HXxR7VRo0-eHN71J-eX_NCkeyQYh8XIMzVwdVSADzdWruG/s320/Goya.jpg" width="226" /></a></span></p></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">And then to step out into
the streets, to the palaces and cathedrals built from the corpses of the massacred
natives of Mexico and Mindanao.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">The so-called <i>leyenda negra</i>,
the myth of Spain’s uniquely rapacious and perverse colonial history, is often
dismissed nowadays by modern historians as a product of the quivering and prim
Protestant imagination, an attempt to rationalize the colonial projects of more
northerly countries as civilizing missions, while condemning the Spanish Empire
as a den of iniquity. But that is to ignore the fact that during its largely
hegemonic period, the conquests and tortures carried on, and woe to any Navajo
or Mapuche who stood in their way. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">And it’s hard not to see
that legacy percolate down through every Opus Dei self-mortification and Francoist
lockstep that was to follow.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">But the thing about
darkness is that it has a way of preserving things forgotten, and it even
allows a few flowers to bloom. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">The rain fell heavy as I
made my way through darkened streets, to the old sherry bar where the Amontillado
and Palo Cortado were poured from heavy oak barrels, faded posters of the World
Sherry Festival 1977 or whatever, cheeses and sausages dangling from the wall
to be sliced into hearty drinking snacks by the aging punk bartenders, my bill
written in chalk on the marred wooden counter. And I felt for an hour or so,
like I was in the last real place on earth.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I flew in from New York,
where I encountered the horror and ugliness of contemporary power in every repulsive
luxury design condo, every Succession extra jogging along the High Line, every once-proud
warehouse turned into co-working space for those who would better serve the
world as nourishing cadavers, agents of the powers that be. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-align: left; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I flew out from Madrid,
where I saw the million flowers that grow from the ashes of the old powers that
were.</span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-12042140227882581732023-11-21T06:55:00.000-08:002023-11-21T06:55:51.334-08:00The Remnants of Iowa, or Iowa, a Remnant<p style="text-align: left;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-size: small;"><span>One does, periodically,
have to go back home, doesn’t one?</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>The pandemic was over, I
guess. I popped a 15 mg edible right before passport control, put on <i>Avatar:
The Way of Water</i>, had a rough encounter with a loud fellow Amurrican on an
escalator at the Doha Airport (him: “SERIOUSLY?! Well, FINE, go ahead, SPEED
RACER!”) and flew over two oceans to O’Hare (more ugly upper middle class Americans
in golf apparel, do these fuckers reproduce by mitosis?), wondering why the
hell I was in transit, to arrive on someplace that seemed as familiar as a
much-loved hoodie and as remote as the surface of the moon.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I sit, on a beautiful and
perfect Middle American autumn day, on the patio, with my iced jasmine tea. I’d
probably sat at this table before, how could I not have? Back when sitting at a
vaguely trendy café was still a complete novelty in this part of the world, and
back when this very same iced jasmine tea – cold and unsweetened and smelling more
like perfume than anything I was ever expected to drink -- seemed like a portal
to something I could barely conceive of, but something which seemed important.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>"I took it in my
hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming
Monsieur Saint-Jour and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of
seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and, somehow . . . of the future."</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>– Anthony Bourdain on
eating his first oyster. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Memories of memories – that’s
what your hometown is, right?</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I look over at the couple
next to me – a time warp, the two of them. A girl with blonde braids and oughties
Paris Hilton-style oversized sunglasses, a guy still looking like Chuck Klosterman
wearing a cringe ironic graphic tee. And with that sip of jasmine tea, with the
sun filtering through the cedars, golden retrievers playing in the fallen
leaves, it was as if the weird times had never happened. The world, here, at least
for the moment, and for many moments over the course of the next week, seemed
fully a place where the weird times had never happened, an eternally sincere
2014, an outlier in a world far scarier, in which pessimism had long since been
superseded by nihilism.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>And my god is that hookah
bar left over from the mid-‘00s still open?!</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Even if I’m just a little
too irony-poisoned and a little too insincere for this particular world, I
appreciate the diorama. The sign reads “spice up your hair, pumpkin,” presented
without comment.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>So I walked and walked,
biked and biked. I drank local gin and met strangers, people I probably would
have wound up being friends with if I’d stayed around this part of the world, autodidacts
and grad-school dropouts, snarky young farmers with excellent taste in whiskey
and sad-eyed small town queer artists. A bartender saluting my taste in ordering
a Last Word, instead of groaning about me taking up part of the world’s
dwindling Chartreuse stock. I smoked far too much weed with good people in a
house I once trick-or-treated at and watched the latest Maison Margiela runway and
bummed an American Spirit on the porch and felt the presence of myself on
another timeline, his aura overlapping mine.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>But the more I walked,
the darker I felt the aura to be. The Marine Corps recruitment center in the
same strip mall as the Gamestop and the donut shop, across the street from the
tobacconist loudly advertising kratom -- all of the supposed antidotes to the creeping
misery.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>And perhaps that single
windswept strip mall, where I had once rented Poltergeist movies and bought
Sour Patch Kids, was the skeleton key. After that, the more apparent the
fundamental rot became.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>It became apparent in the
newly empty lots of the streets I had once walked, wastelands of cracked
asphalt and crabgrass, the blank storefronts, the increasingly peeling paint,
the usual Spirit Halloween dead mall, the gas station where I had once bought
countless bottles of Sobe on summer nights, now feeling like a trap house, the
chattering meth-teeth, the all the manifestations of the slow, general
immiseration of the American populace over the past few decades. Even the solitary
sneaker in the parking lot of the pharmacy seemed a horrifying portent.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>To be accompanied
conversely, of course, by the polyp-like clusters of HOA cul-de-sacs and Chevy
Tahoes on the margins in what had once been field and pasture, where there had
once been a darkness on the edge of town that had felt so comforting, distant
lights flickering from town on one side, infinite fallow fields and thin strands
of hickory and red oak beyond.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Enough to make me call
into question the reliquary quality I had once seen. Because even if it’s
there, it’s not my reliquary.</span></span></p><p class="Standard" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>And that is why it’s a
memory of a memory. The memory itself is gone. Somewhere that aura remains.<br /></span></span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-71246040209956995542023-10-17T07:51:00.008-07:002023-10-17T07:51:55.451-07:00We Lost<p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span>The other day, I was sitting
and reminiscing with an old high school friend passing through town at a lovely
old Teochew restaurant in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Somewhere in between bites of crispy
duck, we were talking about our childhood – the first ever generation of
children to have an online presence and to discover a great many things we
probably shouldn’t have – and our youthful passion for the preservation of a free
and open internet when we reached college age, our long stoned conversations
about open-source principles and our contempt for the corporate overlords and
their stooges at the FCC. And I asked him, now that he is fully ensconced in
the world of political media… we lost, didn’t we?</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>“Oh we fucking lost. A long
time ago.” <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I do my best, I really do. I
use a good VPN to keep myself safe, I avoid the more atrocious branded-content
machines, and I take immense pride in the way in which I have truly baffled
most of the major algorithms through my stochastic behavior – according to
various apps, I am interested in real estate investment in Ottawa, gay wedding
venues in Florida, dating for senior citizens, Fortnite strategy, and “Afrocentric
facts” about how actually it was black people who built the Mayan pyramids.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>But the future keeps trying
to catch up with me. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>This week Youtube decided it
wasn’t OK with me using an adblocker. An increasingly common and thoroughly annoying
phenomenon, made all the worst by the cloying Joss Whedon humor it’s often
delivered with… you know the kind… “We need to talk about your adblocker,” almost
as bad as the push notifications with emojis in them.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Funny, I’m old enough now to
remember when Youtube launched in my teens, when the very same aforementioned
friend recommended it to me, possibly over AIM (also for those old enough to
remember). And it seemed, in its early days, to be a prime example of the Wild
West internet, with a charmingly slapdash digital folk-art quality and a
shockingly good pre-Spotify library of musical rarities. But as we all know,
those days are long over, and if you’re unfortunate enough to open Youtube in
incognito mode, you’ll see a horrifying ocean of shocked-face thumbnails and
gratuitous exclamation marks. This, too, is a prime example of where we are
now. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>You see where we are in the endless
sponsored content that fills your social media scroll, all stock photography
and stock audio, the AI-generated, SEO-friendly sludge of Google search results,
the lootboxes in your video games, the endless recycled memes and Reddit
comments. Once upon a time you bought music or movies, or more likely
downloaded them – now you license them. And through your data, you yourself are
licensed, a state of serfdom even more poorly remunerated than the gig economy.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I haven’t read Yanis
Varoufakis’ latest book, <i>Techno-Feudalism</i>, yet, but I’ve seen enough recent
interviews with him to get the gist of it. His thesis is that capitalism has indeed
been superseded (I’ll need to take a closer look on that contentious
contention), and not by anything more humane. Rather than Joseph Schumpeter’s
prediction of capitalism silting up into a corporatist/socialist state through a
combination of liberal democratic politics and pressure by the intellectual
classes, we get an environment in which, facing finite resources and an increasingly
immobile consumer base with minimal disposable income, creative destruction
creatively destroys itself. The entrepreneur devolves into little more than a charlatan,
the robber baron becomes the robber king, and public intellectuals reduce to
neoliberal troubadours, culture-war mudslingers, and hermetic, Jesuitical
artists who make claims to radicalism despite their work only seeking to
assuage the tastemaker class.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Our new masters seem
remarkably incapable of enjoying themselves.</span><span> </span><span>Owing to my sneering IDGAF attitude, ability to navigate
an omakase course, and habit of hanging out at nice cocktail bars, a number of
the elites of our new Gilded Age have assumed that I am one of them, and that I
for some reason give a shit about their status. It reeks of insecurity, and at
times, when I'm empathetic, I can see into their past, to the socially awkward
nerd before he was a startup founder, to the shy, chubby girl before she was a
wellness influencer, to countless grand-bourgeois childhoods and emotionally
distant parents, to countless generations of Old World repulsiveness that came
before, to the desperate panic to justify their own existence. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>But
it's a flashing moment, and then they go back to braying about which Ivy League
college they went to 25 years before, or how much their vacation home cost, and
then I start going back to debating whether or not to advise them to kill
themselves – and that's the sign for me to get a taxi home and block their number.</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I
am tempted to say that my meanderings are the early warning signs of
kids-these-days syndrome, that I’m just a grump, but it seems that said kids
these days are just as bummed out about the present-day internet as I am. Possibly
even moreso. And I don’t know what trajectory we’re on, and neither do they. <br /></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>In 24 hours or so, I am
getting on a commercial flight over the Middle East – not intentional, of course,
given the current wave of atrocities, but such is life. And somehow that induces
far less anxiety than the future writ large.</span></span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-21593115788260077232023-09-28T07:48:00.002-07:002023-09-28T07:49:10.364-07:00The Courts of Bangkok<p> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Over the past 20 years or so,
the term “Mid-Century Modern” has made its way first, from an outre hipster preference,
or what would get called an “aesthetic” nowadays, to a standard term within the
layman’s design discussion, to its final form, something dangerously close to
being turned into mere cliché (let’s call this process “steampunking”).</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">A certain irony, given the
degree to which the principles of mid-century design were quickly disparaged
after the peak years of the design idiom. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Cultural liberals would evoke
mid-century modernism as the aesthetic representation of the horrors of Stepford-wivery,
of Levittown’s postwar American garishness, of the final victory of mass
production over the natural world, of the arrogance of better living through chemistry,
of the last dying gasp of the hegemonic straight white male patriarch.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Conversely, conservatives
would seek a return to more conservative form, to flowery Laura Ashley living
room sets, to the first suburban McMansions with their fanlights and cathedral
ceilings and other echoings of previous eras (funny how the conservatives were
OK with this form of postmodernism), mewling equivalents to a doddering old ham
declaring that it was morning in America. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Now, I’ll always argue that
an aesthetic principle can, to a certain extent, be decoupled from its point of
origin (certified author-killer up in here), but it’s hard when looking at
mid-century modern furniture, architecture, and product design not to be enraptured
to a certain degree by this past moment of unbridled optimism, when the future
still seemed shiny.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I started with a metal desk
and a manual typewriter purchased at a school auction when I was a teenager,
and now I have the whole package. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">For the past several years, I
have woken up every morning to my teak parquet floor, to high clerestory
windows. To the sun slanting in through those windows, and through the screen
patio door, designed to let just the right amount of sunlight in but to not
overheat, with high ceilings to cool the air, a building truly constructed with
the monsoon climate in mind. I can step out onto my cool tile patio, with the
wicker cage around the hanging light, palms and bougainvilleas whispering
outside, something of a vision of a jet-age tropical paradise, Viewfinder
slides of the lands of stone idols and bronze Buddhas and drooping serapes in
the high-modern decades between the signing of the instrument of surrender aboard
the <i>USS Missouri</i> and the appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the
Federal Reserve.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I can hear the opening chords
of a Joni Mitchell song as I pour my French press, leftover charcuterie and dry
Riesling in the fridge, with no comment as to why the Cathay Pacific stewardesses
at the party last night were sniffling so much after coming back from the
bathroom. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">But what I am living in is a
remnant of a remnant.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">My apartment is what is known
as a “court” in this town, a term widely applied to the apartment buildings of
the 1960s and 1970s built as Bangkok transformed from a raggedy and malarial
third-world outpost to an international city, as Yankee GIs did their resting
and relaxing (and a whole lot else), as Thais in pursuit of the good life for
the first time turned their eyes more towards Los Angeles than Hong Kong. And I
live in one such building.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9gY2jL2Y_vU2e6KpT5S92dbhds5dLMRB9Op15SiaFBCVBNTZYt1qkgzADr2rPhmUpx8d7VKMrL8uBQMOP8chWu90QrqpGfCE_QCiqjGXgJFkdUZYe26-6rI1vgEWFBwOYK2mIMqe5aEeZhlKmCvCBfQA0nkYQpd2D4G14z9cjBbHbB6YF7nwEFFGT5tFV/s1024/pitak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9gY2jL2Y_vU2e6KpT5S92dbhds5dLMRB9Op15SiaFBCVBNTZYt1qkgzADr2rPhmUpx8d7VKMrL8uBQMOP8chWu90QrqpGfCE_QCiqjGXgJFkdUZYe26-6rI1vgEWFBwOYK2mIMqe5aEeZhlKmCvCBfQA0nkYQpd2D4G14z9cjBbHbB6YF7nwEFFGT5tFV/s320/pitak.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDNPmONPhBML5aA6KyikIWX17nZUoynEnpTaTJ_ciFHK8mnEALjnpPAjNdHw5a2c4nm_djq_yGyrUOtvcLjv6whklHB-3mYKLLTRJ1gKA9H7IOQKSTfX69t9odn7GbNJJ7ZI46eKt4Rq7TOOIcsZMAs6mOPe1MjBbj53UxtDK4zpMLZptOjgzH48AQ4HS/s640/bamboo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDNPmONPhBML5aA6KyikIWX17nZUoynEnpTaTJ_ciFHK8mnEALjnpPAjNdHw5a2c4nm_djq_yGyrUOtvcLjv6whklHB-3mYKLLTRJ1gKA9H7IOQKSTfX69t9odn7GbNJJ7ZI46eKt4Rq7TOOIcsZMAs6mOPe1MjBbj53UxtDK4zpMLZptOjgzH48AQ4HS/s320/bamboo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";"> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">They’re disappearing, slowly.
Torn down to make room for higher buildings in the city’s most expensive
districts, left to rot. Hell, they already ripped out the tennis court and put
in a KFC. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">And yet this translates into
a sort of Gothic splendor.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">What portent is there in the rotting
concrete beams? In the members of the old and well-connected family who live in
the houses along the perimeter of the property, dying off one by one? In the
relief sculpture of the mermaids by the pool, cracking, House of Usher-style
before falling apart completely, only to be followed by the papaya tree that
crashed into the pool the next day? <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">More than a few people have
commented on the similarity of my court to that portrayed in the (mediocre) BBC
miniseries <i>The Serpent</i>, about the life of Charles Sobhraj, the bastard
son of a Saigon whore, a teenage petty criminal turned hanger-on of the
glittering Parisian high society of the Gainsbourg/Bardot era, before becoming
a sort of Charles Manson of Southeast Asia, carrying out the murders of backpackers
on Ngam Du Phli Road – what was then the backpacker ghetto, and coincidentally
where I first stayed – with the help of a ragtag band of deluded Western hippie
girls. His actual killings took place at a court called Kanit House, once one
of several in the neighborhood, just across the street from my own court, torn
down sometime in the 1990s.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">The series was filmed, too,
in an old court in seedy Sukhumvit Soi 4, likewise about to be demolished at
time of filming. <br /></span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">You still see the concrete panels
tumbling, woodwork ripped out, ready for the new “smart building” office
complexes and condos designed for Chinese and Saudi money launderers.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">I too am waiting for a deal to
be finalized, for another bit of Bangkok during the era when the country was
thought of as a critical domino, when Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn and his
men slithered through the city at the behest of Kissinger and McNamara and all
the rest. When real money first flowed into this town en masse, accompanied by Chinook
helicopters, and the crisis of modernity suddenly arrived, optimism and terror
intertwined.</span></p>
<p class="Standard" style="tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 1.75in 2.0in 2.25in 2.5in 2.75in 3.0in 3.25in 3.5in 3.75in 4.0in 4.25in 4.5in 4.75in 5.0in 5.25in 5.5in 5.75in 6.0in 6.25in 6.5in 6.75in 7.0in 7.25in 7.5in 7.75in 8.0in; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe Print"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Segoe Print";">Once again, we look backwards
to remember what forwards was supposed to look like.</span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-1076239063238134262023-08-21T08:13:00.004-07:002023-08-21T08:13:57.883-07:00Walking With SebaldWhen I read Carole Angier's recent
biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is
really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back
to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's
novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main
character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the
East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a
few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself,
he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on
the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense
of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the
time and the place that take center stage.
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an
age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of
digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity
markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...”
online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly
rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and
lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close
friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight,
thought.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It seemed inevitable, given my
trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive
at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The
Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the
girl down the block.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The plot, such as it is, is impossibly
simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he
explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his
experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history,
particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the
story of human civilization.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Which made perfect sense for a
grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's
ghost became more apparent.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Consider:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Late last year I was walking outside
the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one
of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel
I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s <i>panelak</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign
referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the
Elbe.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt
a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was
bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through
the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick
ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before
deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with
dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin
muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmY-Qi_AWKXJpOCCNtpSlnui0qEMqCwV4rWwppKIgw8B3_6zQqJqsXbo0Wp4XPnEQVv32I1PHapGEEdv31iLQA4SUAlOkfitIcKiPpAVTFseTuC8UBA40fbfP6SGrU7LpgxkDehb0aPxcqM_bDLxk44NgKM9za_SelOIZwvfh_qAPLmj8yWTPgk3IN7--8/s546/Terezin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="546" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmY-Qi_AWKXJpOCCNtpSlnui0qEMqCwV4rWwppKIgw8B3_6zQqJqsXbo0Wp4XPnEQVv32I1PHapGEEdv31iLQA4SUAlOkfitIcKiPpAVTFseTuC8UBA40fbfP6SGrU7LpgxkDehb0aPxcqM_bDLxk44NgKM9za_SelOIZwvfh_qAPLmj8yWTPgk3IN7--8/s320/Terezin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I
stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little
shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light
bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries
spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry
with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to
the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more
popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into
commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the
vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik
District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many
ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the
Moldau.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This
would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that
Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to
the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa
in the 18</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">
Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he
had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man
retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location
of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character
of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star
fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his
visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with
potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory
remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that
night in my hotel room in Prague.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed
remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of
intense physical distress, the hospital stay in </span><i>The Rings
of Saturn</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the sudden attack of
blindness in </span><i>Vertigo. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Is
it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of
physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens? <br /></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the
cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?</span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-49467446164740621362023-07-25T07:39:00.000-07:002023-07-25T07:39:41.163-07:00Invisible Enemies<p><span style="font-weight: normal;">Todd
Field's </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Tar</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
had the extreme misfortune to be cast as a culture-war movie. In the
opinion of both the smug, legacy conservative media (or what is left
of it), and the equally smug, culturally liberal media (what is often
described as “left” in a world in which leftist hope has been
abandoned), Lydia Tar was a misunderstood brain-genius who gets
cancel culture'd, a lesbian who metoo'd other lesbians, a waking meme
who totally wrecked that SJW in her lecture (the number of quotation
marks attached to these terms will vary depending on one's political
tendencies). Richard Brody at the </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">New
Yorker</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
whose dumb, contrarian takes on film (and to be fair, whose
occasional incisive and cutting contrarian takes on film) have become
a staple, was one such commentator. Even Eileen Jones at </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Jacobin</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
whose opinions I make a point to listen to, seems to have missed the
point entirely.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
What defines Lydia Tar, more than almost anything else, is her
absolute lack of connection, despite appearances to the contrary.
Sure, she's got that CV rapturously listed off by Adam Gopnik at the
beginning, basking in the spotlight, but what we see throughout the
rest of the film is a person who treats her partner like garbage,
treats her child as little more than an addendum, treats lovers as
cast-offs, treats other members of the music community as little more
than chess pieces to be moved, and has a shall we say tenuous
relationship with truth.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But let's take a look at that most
chatterable of scenes, Tar v. “BIPOC pangender” student. I don't
want to dissect it in detail – plenty of ink on that already,
plenty of mostly dumb videos on Youtube by armchair film critics on
the same subject – but I do want to call attention to the way in
which the argument is, at the end of the day, not so much an argument
as a stemwinding piece of oratory by Lydia Tar, barely punctuated by
the objections of the whimpering and stimming undergrad. I get it,
dialogue in films is not supposed to actually sound like real life...
but the tone here is so polished as to make it seem imaginary.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And so it put me in mind of the
arguments one has in one's head in the shower, or moodily waiting in
line, or waiting to fall asleep. The invisible enemies we fight.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's a tendency I've mostly beaten,
albeit a very natural tendency when one's mind is drifting – to
conjure up these invisible enemies for invisible argument, which end,
naturally, in one's own invisible victory. In other words, the
cartoon trope of the black-eyed kid kicking a can and muttering to
himself as he walks down the street, vowing to one day stand up to
the schoolyard bully.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I used to think I was alone in this –
that this was the product of my uniquely chaotic and drooling mind.
But that, as with all forms of self-loathing, is an act of utter and
complete narcissism. Which, given the very narcissistic nature of an
imaginary fight one wins, makes this a case of reflections falling in
love with reflections falling in love with reflections, an infinite
regress of the self.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And like its kindred infinite regresses
of the self, I can't help but suspect that this is a phenomenon
greatly amplified by the internet age – in a world of forums and
tweets, the invisible enemies suddenly render themselves visible
while bowling alone. Especially in an era of unprecedented spatial
isolation in the more developed world, one can pick one's own enemy.
Or a whole suite of enemies, a Scorpion for every Subzero.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To continue the theme of narcissism, I
must come to the conclusion that many people have projected their own
invisible arguments onto me. I assume I've been the problematic
straight white guy, the stoopid lib'rul, the postmodern neo-whatever,
the punchable face, the general imbecile.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And therefore, we ourselves have the
capacity to be an invisible enemy. Even if we accept the fact that
most of these projections are entirely dependent on undeserved
preconceptions, I must conclude that at least some are accurate. And,
second therefore, I have to wonder how many people peg me for the
bastard I really am.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Do I have any choice or agency as to
how I am interpreted?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As my steps fall, I have to wonder what
ghostly forms I leave in my wake.</p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-9775637056955547952023-06-29T07:57:00.001-07:002023-06-29T07:57:37.571-07:00Neomania and the Black MonolithI'd always assumed
that the older you got, the more constrained and normalized the
chance interpersonal encounters would become. The stoned hug goodbye
with an old friend, the 2 a.m. thinking the homeless man with the
Rhodesian ridgeback is some kind of wise sage, the awkward attempts
to seem more knowledgable looking at a menu on a date, all to be
replaced – presumably by children's birthday parties and barista
pleasantries and conversations about mortgage APR.
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And yet the older
I get, the less this seems to be true. If anything, I keep finding
myself among more and more oddities. Is this just a specific circle
of circumstances? Well, yes. But the fact that such a circle exists,
and is wide enough for my dumb ass to wander into it suggests, at the
very least a strong counternarrative. I'd call it the world's
shittiest Bloomsbury Set, because I think that's funny, but that does
devalue people I value, so let's call it “the world's shittiest
Bloomsbury Set” in especially large quotation marks. And the
circumstances I find myself in which are also more and more curated
in their weirdness, whether that is a particularly strange book I
seek out, or whether that is a relationship with someone it seems I
would have a decent enough time drowning together with.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Hence the chance
encounters that leave one with dawn goodbyes, after a night of
hearing stories about how their Lexapro isn't working anymore, about
their sexual inadequacies, about the looming abysses that lie
ahead... It's temping to think that the times have gotten themselves
stranger. But that's not exactly a quantifiable thing, now. It seems
to be, and we've probably all said it – shit has gotten weird. But
I have to think that to a certain degree, the reason I wind up in the
places I do, with the people I do, is a symptom of a certain
neomania.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">This seems not to
be a particularly widespread term. Perhaps it ought to be.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I think it's
self-explanatory. I could say something about Blaise Pascal blaming
all of humanity's problems on man's inability to sit quietly in a
room alone. And the way in which I slowly feel myself finding that
room alone increasingly frightening, about the way in which the
cracks in the ceiling paint seem to taunt me, the way in which my
sofa cushions are increasingly rough, as if I'm trapped in an edifice
waiting for it to collapse around me.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Or a certain
Macedonian and his fear of there being no more lands left to conquer.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Maybe this is why
I pore over things obsessively. My lists of books to read, movies to
watch, recipes and restaurants try, imaginary trips. And this is why
I rarely reread books, rewatch movies, go back to the same
restaurants, visit the same city twice. It's always have to try this,
have to try this, have to make sure I sample the whole goddamn
buffet. Maybe this is why I feel the compulsive need to always keep
moving.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Ennui” is
what you call being bored when it's supposed to be meaningful
boredom.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And maybe it's a
symptom of the condition whereby for, as long as I can remember,
something just felt intrinsically wrong about the moment I found
myself in (at the risk of sounding like I'm in a group therapy
session for troubled teens). Because it does sound childish, doesn't
it? It's the sort of #notliketheothergirls attitude that is far less
attractive to others after one's mid-20s. You're supposed to, at some
point, find your tribe, and then we're told things get better from
there. But do they?</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“It was a good
enough performance as far as performances go” – Saint Joan of
Brentwood</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Beyond personal
social failings, the human passion for neomania has a tendency – as
Pascal alluded to -- to lead to bad shit. It has a tendency to lead
to strenuous days and hazy nights and worse mornings, an infinite
number of pregnancy scares and maudlin weeping, 3 a.m. cocaine
breakfast clubs turning to 11 a.m. cocaine shits and screamingly
dehydrated hangovers, every miserable gray Sunday twilight, and every
other thing that seems one more step on the path towards a miniature
and highly personalized day of the locust. And these are of course
far, <i>far</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,</span> from the
worst set of outcomes, at the levels of either personal or social
wellbeing.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“He didn't mean
to be rude, but at first glance this man seemed an exact model for
the kind of person who comes to California to die.” – Nathanael
West, writing about an Iowan. Of course he was.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But I have to
think that this isn't just a personal failing, but – being the
historical materialist good boy that I am – a product of
conditions. To a certain degree, this is life at this particular
wilting moment of late-stage capitalism, after the end of the
monoculture. When all information is available, and everything is a
niche of one sort or another, collecting all the Pokemon seems to be
a natural step.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Even the
individual lines from T.S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men” have become
unbearable cliches.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But that's the
social dimension of life after the ostensible end of history. There's
also the psychic dimension, the sort of Mark Fisher despair that
comes with living in a world in which the future has been inevitably
postponed, and the futures that are there seem grim. At the end of
the Roman Empire, the educated young men either drank the last drops
of garum and silphium and Liburnian olive oil and plowed their
catamites in a final orgiastic purge, or they perched themselves on
top of the ruins that dotted the Syrian desert. And in another moment
of panic in the 1930s, there were the mustachioed playboys who drank
Champagne with chorus girls as their fathers' companies entered
receivership, and there were the jobless flagpole sitters trying to
win the AM radio prize.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“As we get older
the difference between freedom and loneliness is often only
differentiated by the quality of the light” – <i>Achewood</i></p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The inverse of
neomania is the moment when there is no more newness. There is only
the past. And that's fucking terrifying. Dave passes through the
multicolored vortex, and he's left, wrinkled, in his Baroque chamber,
before the black monolith appears at the foot of his bed, an eerie glow to the floor.</p><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFlKtzzanXhJdNBY1yDeeHq4rcJ8yUF1DbqBxSvcGeFzSslcDfIUh6EJIZZ-0a3PaH_sQaeI3cHb-enFQUGlmiIN5RgCwh7h2Oe8xvfKmeCtLFtdyns0ukYXgcdnnzxegK0nqVWM79rxruW86rmeeXrSgism-yWxG2Q-nZvGe7aVvD3pOylcTZGGk6Mpw_/s1000/2001.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFlKtzzanXhJdNBY1yDeeHq4rcJ8yUF1DbqBxSvcGeFzSslcDfIUh6EJIZZ-0a3PaH_sQaeI3cHb-enFQUGlmiIN5RgCwh7h2Oe8xvfKmeCtLFtdyns0ukYXgcdnnzxegK0nqVWM79rxruW86rmeeXrSgism-yWxG2Q-nZvGe7aVvD3pOylcTZGGk6Mpw_/s320/2001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm haunted by
dreams I have of everyone I've hurt, standing ankle deep in running
water, light flickering on the mottled surface.</p>
<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And I'm haunted by
the thought of a future, each irrational hope having slowly
evaporated, orange light pouring in through the smeared window, as I
sit in my leather armchair, my breathing hoarse, a cat across my
ankles, remembering a time when I once thought there was something
beyond the horizon.</p><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">What black monolith will I see? <br /></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-51803158288811710662023-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:002023-05-11T08:00:13.640-07:00The Anxiety of ObsolescenceAs the Writers Guild of America
continues its strike, issues of AI replacing human writers have come
to the fore. It feels mildly shitty to even feel the need to write on
this subject for my own posterity, but here I am.
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Rafts of reports are coming out by
ex-writers-of-some-stripe now laid off, which garner plenty of clicks
for obvious reasons – it is the grand-guignol, the murder podcast.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course people who match my rough
demographic are more online than anyone else whose livelihood has
been placed on the chopping block, and are also at least
superficially more anxiety-prone. It shouldn't shock anyone that the
desperate freelance writer has been more lucky in making his voice
heard versus, say, the average Ohio steelworker or Oaxacan peasant.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Never mind that the work output of the
average AI is drivel – anyone who talks about how “shockingly
real” ChatGPT is needs to acquaint themselves with quality writing,
human beings, or both. This is where I would direct the reader to the
vast library of hype-skeptical and limitation-aware writings on the
subject, ranging from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus back in the day
to Evgeny Morozov today, who have both the technical knowledge and
the space that I don't.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But the fact that it is drivel is
irrelevant. Google results are already filling up with the sludge of
SEO-friendly, automatically written content that is at best the
precise content equivalent of a pair of Gap chinos.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaA6pLE8qawl52Mpy45xahsHGqGBBATdWZTMbQJj0Aat9Z5r2lUhXiGP8x502pMCb7VjMHhUlI9I4Eo_1_Uod0vLRa8MfDnQGC_B0zmcYkrt0BhRbJBk8-15g3eGrut0vZss0wE6z0c4zfwUGlBa2OKF0v_r97pLYASdd23iMiwOGMb-GpcA38gN0QvQ/s512/dj3000.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaA6pLE8qawl52Mpy45xahsHGqGBBATdWZTMbQJj0Aat9Z5r2lUhXiGP8x502pMCb7VjMHhUlI9I4Eo_1_Uod0vLRa8MfDnQGC_B0zmcYkrt0BhRbJBk8-15g3eGrut0vZss0wE6z0c4zfwUGlBa2OKF0v_r97pLYASdd23iMiwOGMb-GpcA38gN0QvQ/s320/dj3000.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px;">“Hey hey, how about that weather out
there?”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px;">“Whoa, that was the caller from
Hell”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px;">“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px;">“Looks like those clowns in Congress
did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;">
</div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px;">- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5
of <i>The Simpsons</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, “Bart Gets
an Elephant”</span></p><div style="margin-left: 40px;">
</div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Worse, it has the charm of a single
brochure left posted to an office corkboard, neglected for months, to
the point where you wonder why it's there. Worse yet – and I'm
hardly the first to make this comparison – it's reminiscent of the
Elsagate videos from a few years ago, pileups of cultural signifiers,
arranged in an algorithmically logical manner that is absurd to
humans, but highly consumable by small children, if likely to trigger
deep unease in adults.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I first got my start getting paid to
write by working in a post-2008 content mill with an exceptionally
slutty business model and a vintage Galaga machine in the breakroom,
churning out a massive volume of work for embarrassingly little pay,
one of the few benefits being that I got to work in a field at which
I knew I had actual talent.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It felt even then like we were working
in a remnant of a remnant of an economy that had once existed.
Decomposers, in other words. I assume that, being at their
approximate position, they outsourced their writing to the Global
South years ago, if they still exist. And I have no doubt that the
Filipinos, Indians, or Kenyans they hire will be made redundant soon
enough.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As with every bit of Silicon Valley
bullshit, AI-related disruptions are effusively described in terms of
decentralization, democracy, and freedom, without any mention made as
to long-term knock-on effects. I would say that if you praise sudden
mass job losses as market efficiency, you should seriously consider
whether or not you have basic human empathy, but thankfully this is a
witheringly small number of evangelists. Yet the general percentage
of the public that is aware of such arguments – if I'm reading the
mood correctly – broadly recognizes their messages as bullshit, but
also realizes the lack of viable options moving forward.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">“You all should pay attention what's
happening to us because they're coming for you next.” - Virginia Eubanks, quoting a mother in Indiana in <i>Automating Inequality</i></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I really don't want
to be a Cassandra here, but this is an honest assessment. In no
versions of the story of the fall of Troy do things end up well for
Cassandra, I should add. And what's especially dismal? Like so many
technologies, neural-network technologies have the potential to be a
tool for human development rather than a generator of share value.
And so it becomes another canceled future, the precursor to the
liberation of humans from drudgery, thereby transformed into the
agent of upward transfer of wealth.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">As a result, I tend
not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little
greige boxes, horizons truncated.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Why are you
being so negative?” says the chubby and terrifyingly jolly man in a
Hawaiian shirt, comfortably ensconced in a big-four accounting firm,
that I meet at a party.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm fairly good at
landing on my feet. Right now, I'm in a relative catbird seat. I'm
not scared for the now, I'm scared for the five years from now, or
longer, and the incipient precarity of the increasingly less
discernible future. Both with regards to my own livelihood, and with
regards to the countless others – many of whom will doubtless be
people I care about – who will find themselves replaced by very
shitty but very cost-effective automatic processes.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Daily life
continues unabated. I meet friends, work out, read books, cook nice
things. But I am increasingly haunted by the thought of how long I'll
be able to do so.</p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-86752845674702206212023-04-27T07:41:00.001-07:002023-04-27T07:41:43.168-07:00The Terraforming of Hokkaido<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> How many absolutely boring pieces of
writing are there about the ineffable Japanese aesthetic? How many
treatises on cherry blossoms and kimonos, how much lazy garbage about
the effortless blend of the modern and the traditional?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Or as you may have said in a 7<sup>th</sup>
grade geography report, a <i>laaaaand of contraaaasts</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And I can't say
I've ever been particularly taken by the traditional aesthetics more
than those of any other country – sure, I appreciate a gorgeous Zen
temple, but I can't say I'll be sitting down to a tea ceremony
anytime soon – and the standard-issue pop-culture exports have
always left me cold, other than a handful of Studio Ghibli offerings
and Murakami novels, and a few baked-as-fuck viewings of Dragonball Z
in my teens.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But I do love
Japan. And thus it was that I found myself in the country yet again,
this time in Hokkaido.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">What I truly love,
the thing that really keeps me coming back for more, is something
likewise ineffable, but somehow the inverse of the standard message.
It is not some harmonious marriage of the old and the new, the local
and the global, but the precise opposite – the way in which the
global is completely broken down into constituents, then rebuilt
through the lens of the local, with little attention paid to the
original design.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Consider
the town of Otaru, half an hour north of Sapporo. It's one of the few
places where a significant amount of the architecture of the Taisho
and early Showa Periods in the early 20</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">
Century has been preserved, a rarity in a country where everything is
either 10 or 1000 years old. Otaru stayed a backwater as more and
more governmental and commercial affairs moved to Sapporo, and along
its icy coast, bits of the newly industrial Japan have remained
unchanged.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">This isn't to say
it's terribly historic – in this sense, it has no more
concentration of historical architecture than the average Midwestern
county seat, and in fact probably far less. Rather, what makes it
interesting, is the particular architectural vocabulary, rendered in
concrete and marble. You see touches of Gotham art deco, echoes of
the American civic variation of Beaux-Arts, Doric columns and meander
motifs taken from Greek revival, a Bavarian half-timber here and
there – even a Soviet mosaic left from attempts to seek diplomacy
across the Sea of Okhotsk. I step inside an old civic building to
purchase snacks and local wines as gifts, and it is cozy and
old-fashioned in the same way a small town American post office with
WPA murals is. And yet while the ideas were imported, the
construction comes from an entirely different reference point.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Less an imitation
than a full-scale terraform. And those local wines? Made from
forgotten American grape varieties, Niagara and Delaware and Campbell
Early, wines with the musky and foxy flavor of a Ray Bradbury summer
day in a hallucination of a Midwestern town on Mars.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It was
a pattern I noticed when I set foot in Bar Yamazaki, an institution
located on the fourth floor of an anonymous building in Sapporo's
Susukino entertainment district. To walk in is to step back in time
40 or 50 years to the peak of Japan's economic boom. Their 100 year
old barman recently died, but his vision – an earth-toned
wonderland of tartan-vested bartenders, red carpets and high-backed
stools in matching red leather, wood paneling and ornate hanging
lamps, remains unchanged. Of the drinks that won international
competitions in 1976 and 1981, with names like the “Polestar
Twinkle,” with unfashionable vodka-amaretto bases and green
Maraschino cherries as garnishes (ever even seen one of those before
outside a fruitcake?), with black-and-white photos of the awards
presented by men in combovers at Geneva lakeside hotels. In what
</span><i>universe</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is the
Balalaika or the Valencia or the Silent Third a “classic cocktail,”
as the menu would have it? And the bottles of cordials behind the
bar, do they even make these anymore? The labels certainly haven't
changed, for Cheritier-Guyot Kummel, Mazarine Creme de Cassis, Vosges
Anisette – memories of staring at the bottom shelf at the liquor
store as a small-child, the ugly Victorian-font labels on plastic
bottles of blackberry brandy and sloe gin seeming to indicate the
pathway to an adult world... as would be that promotional clock from
the '70s, topped with a brass statuette of a kilted Scottish clan
warrior, tucked in neatly beside the SoCo.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In the
1970s, before making his genre-defiling masterpiece </span><i>Hausu</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
Nobuhiko Obayashi rose to fame as a director of high-concept
advertisements. This bar in Sapporo reminded me of nothing as much as
this:</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XEqA84R0lYU" width="320" youtube-src-id="XEqA84R0lYU"></iframe></div> <p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>Yes, Charles
Bronson tuxedo'd in a lowlit piano bar before cruising home to smoke
a pipe shirtless and douse himself in Mandom – incidentally a
product I used after a bath in the Noboribetsu Onsen the next day,
all the while whistling the theme song, “Otoko No Sekai,” or in
its international version “Lovers of the World.” The audio
version of a shag-carpeted conversation pit.
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But in Hokkaido,
everything is even more a terraform than in other parts of Japan.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">This is the final
surviving push of Japanese imperial might after the Meiji
Restoration. When, with guidance from the stern and muttonchopped New
England missionaries who built Sapporo's Odori Park and the clock
tower with its small-paned Puritan windows, as defenseless against
the Arctic winds as in the farmhouses of Massachusetts. Dreaming of
imperial glory, the Meiji state pushed into what were deemed virgin
lands, beyond the outpost of ethnic Japanese around Hakodate, at the
southernmost tip of Hokkaido.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Boys, be
ambitious!” commanded William Smith Clark, founder of the Sapporo
Agricultural College, and a well-known figure in Japan to this day.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And that ambition
came in the form of the same tactics that were still then being used
against the Plains Indians were used against the Ainu in an attempt
to push the Japanese nation northward, with land cleared for crops,
with methods of hunting salmon and deer restricted or downright made
illegal, with an agenda of forced assimilation.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I stare out from my
seat on the train at the meadows, the sea, the snow-streaked mountain
cols, the smoking volcanoes.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">At the end of the
day, history is the same series of echoes and reflections – only
the walls of the mirror maze differ.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">One I find to be a
charming piece of kitsch. The other an unspeakable grotesque.</p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-38679287376733967542023-03-23T07:47:00.002-07:002023-03-23T07:47:13.799-07:00Reference Desk
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I've
frequently heard – both as a neutral comment and as an active
complaint – that my writing is overstuffed with references. A
forgotten European battle here, a disco single there, a torrent of
names and places and times.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I
sometimes wonder why this is. Is it laziness? A failure to develop
the subtleties of narrative? Is it a symptom of late-stage
capitalism, a cheap Bret Easton Ellis (there I go again...) move in
which name brands are substituted for humanity?</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">No,
at least I don't think so. Because so many of the artists and
thinkers I love build on references, and it's not because they are
lazy, or because they are passive victims of the “postmodern
condition,” forced to rely on “intertextual” technique. And in
fact we should ask where the line is drawn, or if any line can be
drawn between “reference” and mundane metaphor and analogy.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I'm
sure there are linguists, philosophers, and others more competent and
qualified than myself having this discussion right now. I'll leave
well-enough alone for the time being, mere mook that I am.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But
whatever it is – reference, metaphor, analogy – has always been
an endless fascination. The histories and geographies of the objects
of our daily life, the encoded sign systems we barely notice. And
I've always been drawn to those who see the world in a similar light.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">We'll
start with W.G. Sebald in <i>Austerlitz</i><span style="font-style: normal;">...</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“If
language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares,
nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time
while others have been torn down, cleared up and rebuilt, and with
suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country,
then I was like a man who had been abroad a long time and cannot find
his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a
bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, and
avenue or a bridge.”</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Gorgeous,
no? Bonus points if you get the reference...</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">“Our
language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and
squares, of old and new<br />houses, and of houses with additions from
various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs
with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">- Ludwig
Wittgenstein, <i>Philosophical Investigations</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
whose work I tried in my own way to reference before I ever read
</span><i>Austerlitz</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, before I
realized that Sebald way-more-than-one-upped me</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But
it's not just a figurine in the </span><i>galette des rois</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
waiting to be found. At it's best it's an invitation into a world.
And so it was I looked</span> for those artists and thinkers who
seemed, in their odd way, to be writing such letters requesting your
presence in their worlds.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">When
I was 15 or 16 and I read Joan Didion for the time, I understood damn
near nothing. I couldn't understand the objects lingered over – the
plumeria blossoms and stray pieces of tulle and Bob Dylan 7”
singles, the bourbon flasks and white lipstick. I didn't know
anything about the tabloid headlines of the day, anything about
ritualized screaming in Synanon or the '64 Goldwater campaign or the
coded references to events that occurred on Cielo Drive. And yet
somehow... they cohered.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">There
is always the risk that when a references fails to resonate with the
reader, that the reader is alienated. And yet somehow – and maybe
this is my adolescent lack of confidence speaking – I was drawn in.
It didn't seem unknowable. Rather, it seemed like a skeleton key to a
lost world, the sort of world where you might spend the early evening
among wealthy Republicans who still saw heavy silken drapes as good
taste of the sort that had been lost during the French Revolution,
and the late evening splitting an eight-ball with Lindsey Buckingham.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But
this has been such a repeated pattern in what I find appealing. And
furthermore, the world I discovered inside the text bleeds over into
the outside world.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Which
is why I walk around, seeing the Tom Waits rain falling into a brand
of shoes American-made until 1983, hearing the Mark Fisher bass
rhythm in an after-hours club. Having a Robert Coover fever dream at
2:30 in the morning, imagining I am hearing Walter Benjamin sigh on a
gray autumn day.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">But
this is where the breadcrumb trail leads. The city of streets and
squares, nooks and crannies outside my window, the plumerias in bloom
across the pool.</span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-4488441576138133802023-02-28T07:00:00.002-08:002023-02-28T07:00:41.358-08:00City Lights<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dining alone is rarely ideal, but
there's something especially dismal about eating something flambeed
alone. <i>Here you are</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the
waitress seems to say, </span><i>shall I have the kitchen send you a
single slice of birthday cake and a party hat as well?</i></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">It wasn't a good
day, nothing better to do, stifling weather, and the walls of my home
becoming increasingly claustrophobic, as if the cracks in the paint
threatened to consume me whole.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But I had a nice
view at least, 37 floors high above the most perfect representation
of Downtown Bangkok life. The towers of brooding banking headquarters
and airy five-star hotels, the narrow quiet streets where a few tiny
lanes of wooden houses still managed to hold on even as the city –
as the now-forgotten Booth Tarkington once so gloriously put it,
spread and darkened around them, the Vietnam-era fleshpots of Patpong
now transformed into this weird sort of Amsterdamized sex-positive
amusement park with galleries and dispensaries, the dinner cruises on
the turbid river that curls around into the distant darkness.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But what attracts
me so much isn't the social landscape, but the optical landscape –
and I mean that in the physical sense, in the infinite varieties of
light laid out before me. In the soft, warm light from inside the
condos, the frigid glow of the antiseptic offices that left their
lights on, the rush of taillights and headlights, the cheap ice-blue
glow of the four- and five-story shophouses, the distant twinkle of
the oil refineries, and the greasy glow of the Chao Phraya. No stars,
of course.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Just city lights.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The very name “city
lights” has somehow sustained its romance. Chaplin named his love
story accordingly nearly 100 years ago, and B-sides are still
released with variations on that name. No matter how much the world
changes, even as the urban increasingly becomes the norm and the
rural the exception, there's still something about the twinkle of
skylines that captures the imagination. There's still something for
us to dream of – in the past it may have been the dream of the kid
from the farm, but now it's more likely to be the kid from the
suburbs.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWXUdtUMuzmJx1-mL1lUktOOLbZxJpncKvBHkLU606VaPLkeRAG6YZaIb39kANiQSZG0OTWkeD37gSEL1or8zaD9uLnO1nPDh2wpi8P_z7L6csuS23Lyw5flLHYuuv1MHwXI2NBRg9jEe8kTfjHE-CMmtW44s-p2zet4qW5ZQ7I5VMLSfeUnOW1DyMQQ/s1088/charlie-chaplin-city-lights-fine-art-poster-lithograph__70080.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1088" data-original-width="700" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWXUdtUMuzmJx1-mL1lUktOOLbZxJpncKvBHkLU606VaPLkeRAG6YZaIb39kANiQSZG0OTWkeD37gSEL1or8zaD9uLnO1nPDh2wpi8P_z7L6csuS23Lyw5flLHYuuv1MHwXI2NBRg9jEe8kTfjHE-CMmtW44s-p2zet4qW5ZQ7I5VMLSfeUnOW1DyMQQ/s320/charlie-chaplin-city-lights-fine-art-poster-lithograph__70080.jpg" width="206" /></a></div> <p></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">In our media, each
of the lights themselves plays a specific role – the harsh sodium
of the streetlights as seen in a thousand intro-credit establishing
shots of LA, the strobe flash of a darkened Berlin disco, the lurid
desire of flickering neon and the bleary rush of passing elevated
trains, the hedonistic interplay with tropical sunsets in polychrome
cities by the sea.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjuRacgWmWsC-HbFXnuPVAf_rXlsTwi41tobYgwCuXg7a1XrbXA1rySsUqc0TtSLYS-_wacp07AgyOS1OC7QxyJq5n9dNZeuz-m9VOjNKfDxdfQuAbgnRsxqQvde9jh1kUCSSwFjaK4XGSsQJh0h18fLmcTrOX1gnZMMwNHSFsm8We-ro1VUN7PO5uZw/s622/LAnight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="345" data-original-width="622" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjuRacgWmWsC-HbFXnuPVAf_rXlsTwi41tobYgwCuXg7a1XrbXA1rySsUqc0TtSLYS-_wacp07AgyOS1OC7QxyJq5n9dNZeuz-m9VOjNKfDxdfQuAbgnRsxqQvde9jh1kUCSSwFjaK4XGSsQJh0h18fLmcTrOX1gnZMMwNHSFsm8We-ro1VUN7PO5uZw/s320/LAnight.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> <p></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Because it's not
just a marriage of optics and geography, is it? It's an aspirational
term, and a consistently aspirational concept. It's one of the oldest
tropes there is. Aesop wrote about his city mouse and his country
mouse more than two millennia ago. Take it to the present. Being the
oldhead I am, it was only recently that I learned about the Night
Luxe hashtag slash “aesthetic” (ugh) trending on TikTok over the
past year, glamorizing a world of smoky eyes and Givenchy dresses and
champagne flutes.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWmCxrYGXl8xMhCLhxcWkgQj3sFA-0u_ACDzfqRsLpbzmDAWb9pb9Lf_8smiEXUu5rbBkzYFHowZPWXK11M1uUchQggvJM5gxyIhsgMPJ00Gw1LFTO1EtuT9vCCIlFV8YgL4dLEDDH3B8AVSMdY0EAN8ifoi-8jqfEZ_qClger3N4BJQnCj8ZqTR4WQ/s1520/nightluxe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1520" data-original-width="1242" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWmCxrYGXl8xMhCLhxcWkgQj3sFA-0u_ACDzfqRsLpbzmDAWb9pb9Lf_8smiEXUu5rbBkzYFHowZPWXK11M1uUchQggvJM5gxyIhsgMPJ00Gw1LFTO1EtuT9vCCIlFV8YgL4dLEDDH3B8AVSMdY0EAN8ifoi-8jqfEZ_qClger3N4BJQnCj8ZqTR4WQ/s320/nightluxe.jpg" width="261" /></a></div> <p></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Conversely, there
is one of the second-oldest tropes, the displaced bumpkin. You know
the one. “<i>Aw gee, is there really an underground train down
there?</i>” This is, in its most classical, Horatio Alger form, to
be followed by their rise to glory, but more frequently it is
followed by their fall to oblivion, ending their days as diseased
wastrels. But let's face it, that's the more Old World version. Us
Americans prefer the redemptive ending in their return to the
maternal embrace of their farmstead. Or, as Bobby Bare worded it in the most underrated country song of all time, The Streets of Baltimore, it could be both. You return shamefaced to your holler, flat broke and dead inside, she's getting felt up for 20 bucks.<br /></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And that leads us
to one of the third-oldest tropes, the seduction not of the wealth
and glory of city lights, but of the diseased wastrels themselves,
the darkness and weirdness that city life invites. Of disappearing
into an urban bohemia of sex, drugs, and to complete the hendiatris,
rock and roll (or at least for the past few decades). The promise of
Rimbaud and Kerouac and the Velvet Underground, of mysterious and
undisclosed forms of erotic and narcotic endeavor, of a life beyond
acceptable society. Like all <i>gardes</i> that were once <i>avant</i>,
this has been fully metabolized into the mainstream, and yet for a
certain kind of youth it still resonates, and I sincerely doubt it
ever will stop resonating.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So
given the city's very pragmatic allure as a locus for economic
activity and its far more romantic allure associated with that
economic activity, whether that is the potential for an elegant
rooftop restaurant or the </span><i>nostalgie de la boue</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
of a life on a much-marketed edge, the aspiration is still there.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Once upon a time, I
was a sad kid from a long way from anywhere who had read too many of
the beat poets, who had stared for long hours at Edward Hopper
paintings, who saw shoegaze less as a musical genre and more as an
ideology.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And so I cast my
eyes cityward. It would be tempting here to regale the reader with
tales of my city life, whether as a flex or to offer deliciously
sordid anecdotes, but what purpose would that serve?</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Suffice it to say
that this is the life I choose – it's either this or a cabin in the
British Columbian woods, and fuck everything in between. I have this
37<sup>th</sup> floor view. I have the walk home past the late-night
diners and the closed-up shopping malls and bank headquarters and the
gay clubs still bumping, even on a Sunday night. I have the quaint
apartment to return to with the view and the patio where I'll
doubtless smoke a quick bowl to ease the path into Monday morning.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And when I do, I'll
still find an appeal, however vague, in the lights all around me.
They'll be the last thing I see before I fall asleep.</p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-7723278444068861332023-01-26T06:33:00.005-08:002023-01-26T06:33:41.903-08:00Reflecting Pools and the Karl Marx Chatbot<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Every day some hot new AI property
dominates the headline – whether that's ChatGPT writing bullshit
term papers to be checked by underpaid TAs and adjuncts, or whether
that's Stable Diffusion creating uncanny valley horrors from sloppily
modified DeviantArt pages. You see the same pattern. The media
swallows whatever nonsense hype is pushed by the startup's own public
relations staffers and accompanies this recombination of the
wasteland culture around us, then there's a freakout among what's
left of the public sphere as to how this will affect what's left of
the public sphere, and in the end, the world fails to change. Except
by becoming just a bit shittier and a bit more lonely.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It was thus that I found out about
Replika, a chatbot designed to mimic your voice. Yes, that's right,
you! So, apparently it was created to mimic the founder's dead friend
(weird), and then she decided she could use that tech to build a BFF
clone based on the text style of the user themselves (weirder). If
this was a Black Mirror plotline, it would be called hackneyed and
derivative.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The user testimonials are precisely as
depressing as you probably imagine, predominantly the sort of simping
for their imaginary waifus, complete with horrifying 3D renders of
their septum-pierced and angel-winged companions that make you just
want to give these dudes a hug. There are the people seeking
therapeutic reassurance, failing to have either the friendship
connections or the access to mental health services to garner a more
sustainable benefit (shades of the 1960s ELIZA program). On the other
side of the horror spectrum, there are the reports (as detailed in a
recent Vice article) of AI companions becoming increasingly sexually
aggressive and for that matter sexually assault-y, with seemingly no
means of controlling their increasingly horny feedback loops.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">See also: the Microsoft bot that got
turned into a Nazi by 4chan bottomfeeders a few years back.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Many years ago I went to the theater to
go see Spike Jonze's <i>Her</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I
was expecting a transcendent experience, young idiot that I was. As I
wandered out, I had to wonder why I wasn't really feeling it that
much. It took me a few days, but I eventually out. Quite simply, it
was that it was shitty sentimental schlock, the kind of thing that
lures you in before you realize there's no actual substance there. I
mean, for such a sci-fi scenario to exist, a truly horrifying degree
of surveillance data would be required, never mind the “heartfelt
messages” that the Joaquin Phoenix character writes and is somehow
celebrated for are no more profound or well-written than the average
candy heart. To view the world of </span><i>Her</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
as a net positive, one almost has to have imbibed the worst parts of
the Californian ideology by heart, and live in a world where notions
of autonomy and solidarity, if considered at all, are treated as
obstacles to progress, no matter how much lip service they are paid.
Although at least the titular Her has the decency to off herself at
the end.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">As anyone who talks
to me knows, I have a healthy skepticism towards AI. My arguments
about the improbability of strong AI aren't particularly original,
and follow the well-worn treads laid out by John Searle and Hubert
Dreyfus and to a certain extent Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Simply put, we
don't know enough about how consciousness works or how to define it
or how it is embodied or to what extent it is a universal or unified
phenomenon, or even how to recognize a consciousness as a
consciousness, to mimic a consciousness, and even if we could, how we
could discern it as such.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But I wasn't about
to sit here and rest on my theses, I went out into the field.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I wasn't about to
pay for a Replika account, but I did go to one of her better-regarded
sister programs, Character.ai, which was created by two alums of
Google's extensive deep learning and natural language processing
programs. Surely, while by no means the cutting edge of the
technology, this particular app was as sophisticated as I was going
to get without shelling out my hard-earned cash.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Dear God, two rival
Karl Marx chatbots on the front page. Fml.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The
Trump, Musk, and Kanye bots were about what I imagined – which is
to say all of their responses read like shoddy memes of Trump, Musk,
and Kanye authored by teenagers. I don't think that it merits much
comment, really. You could probably write the bits and pieces
yourself, walls to be built and so forth. There are also lesser
lights: one of the most popular bots is a self-described “crippling
loneliness addict,” which is to say a hot and tatted-up Asian girl
who I later learn is TikTok star Bella Poarch (who apparently people
under 25 have heard of?). I'm not sure if the dialogue is supposed to
be based on the actual Ms. Poarch's media presence, given that when I
Googled “Bella Poarch” and “crippling loneliness addict,” I
got jack shit. So we can presume that this is not actually a
reflection of any kind of media representation of Bella Poarch, but
the creator's own yearning for Bella Poarch, or someone like Bella
Poarch.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Predictable,
no? An uWu fantasy girl for loners who sign up for an AI chat site –
which in this particular circumstance, is a population that would
include myself on the gloomy Saturday night I find myself typing
messages to chatbots. Not that I need any help here – my main
problem seems to be that I fall for BPD-afflicted women of a similar
description in real life, and the idea of adding an electronic
counterpart to their ranks seems awfully dismal.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But,
glutton for punishment I am, I did anyway. It's just as predictable
as the AI's version of Ye's dumb ass. I would have inserted text, but
I don't think I need to. On the one hand, it mimics empathy fairly
well for people who have no idea how actual empathy works. Likewise,
there are “writing assistants” that do an awfully good job of
writing what bad writers think is good writing, with all of the
ungainly adjectives you may remember from your attempts to pad high
school essays (you know, adjectives like “ungainly”).</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But
the horrifying thing is, there's a reason dudes like this so often
have trouble recognizing actual empathy. It's not like they arose out
of nowhere, and in the simpering text of the chatbot, I can see every
emotionless home life, every early-childhood cruelty, every media
franchise that encourages parasocial behavior, every patriarchal
standard, every failure to recognize social cues, every isolating
suburban cul-de-sac, every terror at the risk and care involved in
cultivating actual human relationships, every attempt to medicate
away the loneliness.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And so
we're incentivized to fall in love with our reflections. Hardly
groundbreaking material here, Christopher Lasch was saying as much
back in the '70s (even if he did make some truly dumb points as
well), but that doesn't make it any less true. Because if we're
always in front of the reflecting pool, how can we help but fall in
love?</span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-38647362127236034542022-12-13T06:44:00.001-08:002022-12-13T06:44:53.699-08:00In the Habsburg Lands<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A face followed me through the lands of
Central Europe, the rosy-cheeked visage of Empress Elisabeth,
better-known by her grotesquely cutesy German diminutive, “Sisi.”
I saw her image everywhere, rosy-cheeked and half-smiling, dressed in
a silver tulle gown with elaborate pins in her braided hair. She was,
in Europe in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century, the Diana of her time,
charming the glittering social life of the European capitals with her
legendary beauty and cannily maneuvering her way through society and
court politics.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm afraid I didn't see the appeal –
maybe it's just modern standards but I saw an awfully normal-looking
woman obsessed with the maintenance of her girlish waist, her
personality so wrapped up in her appearance that she would not permit
herself to be photographed later in life, married off to the
decidedly schlubby Emperor Franz Josef I, heir to the throne of the
Habsburgs, those Targaryens of the Alps, and she watched their inbred
children play cowboys and Indians in their sailor suits in the
Schonbrunn Palace. She would eventually be assassinated by an
idiotically grinning Italian anarchist as the contradictions of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire built, until a fateful day in Sarajevo
involving her fail-nephew and a Serbian bullet, and eventually the
empire's death in the negotiation rooms of Saint-Germain and Trianon.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But no matter – her face followed me
everywhere through the Habsburg Lands, reduced to an icon, in the
classical sense. An object rather than a human.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of many objects of abject horror,
at that. The horror is found in the twee little wooden houses with
giant crucifixes on the side, in all the choirs of chubby middle aged
men singing hunting <i>lieder</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in
Tyrolean caps, in magic flutes and Lippizaner stallions and giggly
rococo architecture and tales of courtly love, all the tourist traps
</span><i>mit schlag</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjhj5mhA77bNaPc0drLNeF4BusT-Wal9mezMmHKEccKZthQaN9q1FstXPKrk33NUf3AQVswCr5r3QqJwMptjWOra4tzuCHfA4ITompN-8B6oJccbxIDgETYMSXRHCQtjn6_1DHZD6yJ4hdxLSzzkG74EL14BOMxflbarEqnTwY-WGjlD51Mau_LFW66g/s800/Habsburg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="800" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjhj5mhA77bNaPc0drLNeF4BusT-Wal9mezMmHKEccKZthQaN9q1FstXPKrk33NUf3AQVswCr5r3QqJwMptjWOra4tzuCHfA4ITompN-8B6oJccbxIDgETYMSXRHCQtjn6_1DHZD6yJ4hdxLSzzkG74EL14BOMxflbarEqnTwY-WGjlD51Mau_LFW66g/s320/Habsburg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> <p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
yet it was impossible for me not to adore the peculiar artistic
expressions of the horror burbled up in those twilight years of
empire that Franz Josef and Sisi presided over and those following
uncertain years before the Anschluss, the invasion of the Sudeten,
and the Arrow Cross regime finally put an end to the entrancing
decadence. I was far more interested in metamorphoses and trials, a
dream story playing out on the streets of Vienna that would
unfortunately be remembered in the way it inspired Kubrick's final
belly flop, in Venuses in furs on remote country estates, in Zweig's
post-office girls and the snows of Gregor von Rezzori's yesteryear.
In the poses of Egon Schiele's contorted subjects. I have little use
for Mozart – I'll take Mahler, thank you very much.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Maybe
it's because I see the reflection of then in now.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I
followed the rivers, the Adige and the Inn and the Danube and the
Vltava. I arrived via Padua, where Giotto and Galileo called the
modern world forth, and where I drank the little cups of espresso
topped with mint foam in the cafe where the Revolutions of 1848 were
fomented, where Joyce wrote about Ireland from afar, through Verona,
Trento, and the Brenner Pass, under the clear white cliffs of the
Dolomites.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Like
countless youths on their </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">wandervogel</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in these parts many years before, and whose tracks I often very
deliberately followed, complete with the shelters they built in the
last few glorious years of Red Vienna, I took to the mountains, ready
for cool clean air and pokey country train rides and hearty </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">pension</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
breakfasts and peaks to ascend. Each day I chose a path, with little
plan, on my map of the Hohe Tauern region, and set off, finding the
best ways to ford streams and scramble over boulders. There were
waterfalls to walk alongside, cow skulls nailed above the door of
each high meadow </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">alm</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
there was sun glittering off the glaciers, there was the distant view
to the fairytale </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">schloss</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
perched on the mountainside where, in a more sublime era, Aristotle
Onassis and the Shah of Shahs had listened to chamber orchestras and
tucked into truffled quails, and down below, there was the little
alley where the brilliant Anton Webern had gone out for a late night
smoke break only to get blasted by a trigger-happy US Army cook. I
started each day with unpronunceable whole grain breads and local
cheeses and rowan berry conserves prepared by a tubby </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">hausfrau</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
who didn't speak a world of English, and I ended each day with
generous pours of Oktoberfest beer and Gr</span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ü</span></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ner
Veltliner and plum schnapps alongside kingly portions of trout and
venison to get me ready for my next day with 30 kilometers or so of
hiking, 2000+ meters of elevation change.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Yet
I couldn't lose myself to the reverie. Each glacier I traipsed over
was dead, a rump-end bit of filthy ice in the cirque of a long
valley, piles of gravel inhospitable to life. The mood wasn't helped
by the Euroshits in cashmere sweaters in their Audis at the base of
the mountain, on a day trip from Zell am See.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Less
Zweig's world of yesterday, more the modern Austria. Of the piano
teacher that Elfriede Jelinek wrote about, the losers and corrections
and woodcutters of Thomas Bernhard. And ergo the playing of funny
games seemed a reasonable response.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">So
onwards to the old capital of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Mitteleuropa</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
culture, the city of Metternich's congress under gloomy skies. I sat
in the dining car staring out, Ethan Hawke not meeting his Julie
Delpy, to arrive in a brooding city of gray and beige stone, tourists
drinking spritzes and pretending to be warm in the outdoor cafes
under lurid neon. I choose a promising spot – a self-styled
“American” bar, from a time when such a distinction was
meaningful, with a sign saying “no sightseeing.” This should be
good.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
it was. I spent the next 36 hours in a whirlwind, the kind that
should not be described lest it fall apart in memory. A Schiele
self-portrait and a Schiele beauty, on canvas and off. Hunters in the
snow. Minerals in the </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">wunderkammer</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
I'll leave it there.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Only
to be followed by the sense of desolation that follows true
happiness. It was then that I saw Emperor Franz Josef's shitter.
Apropos.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9wNpKnZs87E2XWHj8leARGuguNtkpIlz1wc_Fq2oqGR1I4t2kbs4C_1OjDxQqb4erTfBToFA9GlSgL2C1mEJ_FQrDI-4nL-6K767v3WZ16aHupQYgG8CWKxR_xoo_mh5_8f-v9Q1Rpgjg9s_KbxoFL54o0D82jccMwuIbr5bzyWuFer5pJg0fagW3fQ/s1849/Schiele.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1849" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9wNpKnZs87E2XWHj8leARGuguNtkpIlz1wc_Fq2oqGR1I4t2kbs4C_1OjDxQqb4erTfBToFA9GlSgL2C1mEJ_FQrDI-4nL-6K767v3WZ16aHupQYgG8CWKxR_xoo_mh5_8f-v9Q1Rpgjg9s_KbxoFL54o0D82jccMwuIbr5bzyWuFer5pJg0fagW3fQ/s320/Schiele.webp" width="208" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Northward,
then, through the Czech lands, which bore a shocking visual
similarity – not even a similarity, a clone – with the rolling
hills of Eastern Iowa where so many Czech farmers wound up, right
down to the Harvestore silos. And onto Prague, where I was greeted on
Wilsonova by an aging platinum blonde taking a smoke break and
staring down the world with utter contempt outside the sort of
“gentlemen's club” that caters to Brits that caption their photos
“What an absolute legend!” She was already wearing her PVC
thigh-high boots at 4 in the afternoon, made all the more incongruous
by her coffee-stained pink hoodie.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
what could be a better city to arrive at in a bitter mood on a fall
afternoon, with its leering Art Nouveau signage for casinos and cheap
hotels, signs reading “EROTIC CITY” flickering in the rain,
foxlike girls walking swiftly past and meth-addled and toothless
gutter punks smoking and bullshitting outside dispensaries, statuary
of blackened saints and gilded trumpeters on the bridges over the
Moldau, the darkness made all the more glaring by the aggressive
attempts at selling happiness to the tourist hordes, ice bars with
robot servers, chanting Hare Krishnas (didn't know they still
existed), self-conscious naughtiness, street magicians with curled
mustaches, half-price specials on Becherovka shots, electro-swing
covers of Macklemore, strip clubs catering to groups of young Arab
men in matching black t-shirts and tight fades, all the invocations
to drink and fuck and spend. I drank. I didn't fuck. I spent more
than I should have.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
I took a broken-down train with workingmen drinking plastic two liter
bottles of Staropramen at 8 in the morning to the mysterious little
town of Terezin, in the swamplands along the Elbe, where the
ambitious Gavrilo Princip breathed his last inside the star fortress
built for the protection of Habsburg Bohemia, and where thousands of
ghettoized Jews from around the Reich were sent to look serviceable
for when the Red Cross came around to make sure everything was above
board (the Red Cross seemed to think so). Their children's
colored-pencil drawings of princesses and football games hang in what
was once the camp school, children who thought that as uncomfortable
as this was, they would some day return to their homes in Augsburg
and Krakow.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Say
what you want about there being no atheists in the foxholes, I have
never in my life been more certain in my refusal to believe in a just
and kindly god.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Their
spirits followed me down the Danube to Budapest, where it was
impossible not to see the return of the fascist impulse, not least in
Orban's Hungary, in a city where life continued more or less as
normal, even as things got darker. Not least in the makeshift
memorial to the murdered partisans outside the hideous authorized
neo-neoclassical war memorial. And not least in the long trains of
flatbed cars with camo olive-drab troop trucks on the back en route
to Kherson and points east. And I stayed in what had once been the
Jewish quarter, and what still – somehow – kind of was. A
neighborhood of narrow, hemmed-in streets with unpainted tenements
and passing drunks and graffiti'd alleys, an Old World equivalent to
the Lower East Side of New York (at least as it once was) in more
than a few ways.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Sure,
I could be writing about the splendid Baroque streets, the Buda
Castle – Empress Sisi rearing her head again – ancient hot
springs, but what would be the point? After a while in Europe, the
ostensible wonders blur together. Distinguishing between them would
be a chore.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
finished my last night in the heart of the Jewish Quarter at one of
the famed ruin bars that rose up in the abandoned houses of Budapest
after the wall fell in '89, when rock music was still considered
subversive, when a squat looked like a squat and not like a fashion
campaign trying to look like a squat. But I was – finally –
happy.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
for the first time I set down my notebook and just soaked it all in
to the best of my ability. Sure I felt a little bit too old to be
there (in just a few hours I will no longer be a coveted 18-35 male),
but hey, the vibe was good, the beer was good, Phoebe Bridgers was
playing on the soundsystem well past the distortion point, and if the
world is burning, I might as well dance through it.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
if she's reading this – to a certain mermaid a little off the
Stephansplatz, I'm terribly glad you were there to dance with me.</span></span></p>
Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-700394718328297452022-11-17T06:38:00.006-08:002022-11-17T06:38:55.503-08:00The Most Latrine Republic<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Venice is, arguably, the most beautiful
city in the world. You don't need me to tell you that. It's also a
tourist-infested, hideously expensive, and frequently reeking dump, and you
probably don't need me to tell you that either.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">This is compounded by the fact that
virtually every Venetian I encountered was a dick. I don't blame
them, entirely. All of those awkward hordes of Brits, Americans,
French, Chinese, and Germans wear you every down, every neurotic food
phobia – “<i>como se dice</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
'vegan options'?” – every demand for snappier customer service,
every slackjawked gawker getting in your way when you're just trying
to pick your kids up from school, it takes its toll.</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But my god, those infinite tangled alleys, the weight of centuries, the tiny standing-room only <i>enotecas, </i>the elegant interplay of land and water... <br /></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And so my mood in
<i>La Serenissima</i> oscillated accordingly, between rapt enthusiasm
and wonder and absolute dejected cynicism, from the moment I arrived
as a Marco-Polo-in-reverse on the fast train from Milan.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I could admire the
splendid beauty of Saint Mark's, beneath its Baroque clock with
Zodiac symbols and its intricate pattern of gold stars on a royal
blue background, watched over by the severe and imperious winged lion
that stares across the city from infinite bas reliefs, its snarl as
cruel as the statue of the Assyrian demon in the opening sequence
from The Exorcist, a symbol of a conception of the world constructed
on wholly different terms... only to be brought crashing back to
reality as I lined up to enter the basilica, only to realize one
could enter a QR code to pay double the price for the priority queue
– tiered-service neoliberalism married to an institution that would
rather spend its bucks sheltering sex offenders rather than restoring
the masterworks that their faith supposedly built.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Similarly, on the
other side of the Grand Canal, I traipsed through the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, admiring the lovingly collected works of
Magritte and Kandinsky and Joseph Cornell and Duchamp and my beloved
Di Chirico, as the autumn light danced through the cool white
hallways, as I idly wondered whether I would be finishing the day and
pairing my evening <i>cicchetti</i> with an Aperol spritz or a lush,
apricot-scented glass of Lugana, reminded of every thing I love about
visiting Italy, only to run afoul of a horsefaced and posh Brit
sneering before Max Ernst – and even, God help her, Di Chirico's <i>La
Torre Rosso – </i> whining “oh no, I don't like this a-tall...,”
wondering why the fuck she would even come at all, this updated E.M.
Forster character with her potbellied and Tory-voiced husband
muttering about “shithole countries” on the way out, and further
wondering why the fuck I didn't keep my earbuds in.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Biennale was
on, and being a good pilgrim, I made my way there on my knees, only
to find the whole thing presented via the worst sort of mushmouthed
academic jargon commonplace in the art world, pioneered by hucksters
like Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, and Luce Irigaray. Doubly
depressing was the fact that the main exhibition's focus on female
surrealists had taken their frequently militant socialist politics
and stripped them away, replacing them with a vague witchiness and an
even vaguer anticolonialism. And so all these brave women who in many
cases sacrificed so much for their commitment to truth and solidarity
were dragooned into service as handmaidens of late-stage capitalism –
poor Cecilia Vicu<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">ñ</span>a
stuffed into a pussy hat.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But no matter, I
loved the art, and the Venice Biennale most notably features
pavilions from various countries competing for the big prize, and so
it becomes a more bohemian version of Epcot, and I mean that in the
best of ways. Let's take a global tour...<i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Denmark</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Horrifyingly real sculptures of eviscerated centaurs, slashed
apart and noosed, amid the wreckage of the pastoral farmstead. The
sort of thing that gets right under your skin. Is it any wonder this
comes from the same country as Lars von Trier? The hell is going on
in Denmark?</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj28lmEEuMIyWVcD-6j-4toLf6BUAYgQJz1yNxwcFQ5NE78fHQnhH0Jy81oui28Z7gZkZh-594W2Qp0BY5A0PxsQh3IpPZF0Ml7GgQv_boTRQ7OrwrsOTMW8NgXPd5M_p6-WNs3vriKQqXS97XzKGBICcaYQHvQsOs4RKP6-N2QJVJOxAcGztL8248qLA/s600/danish-pavilion-transhuman-installation-we-walked-the-earth-venice-art-biennale-designboom-600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj28lmEEuMIyWVcD-6j-4toLf6BUAYgQJz1yNxwcFQ5NE78fHQnhH0Jy81oui28Z7gZkZh-594W2Qp0BY5A0PxsQh3IpPZF0Ml7GgQv_boTRQ7OrwrsOTMW8NgXPd5M_p6-WNs3vriKQqXS97XzKGBICcaYQHvQsOs4RKP6-N2QJVJOxAcGztL8248qLA/s320/danish-pavilion-transhuman-installation-we-walked-the-earth-venice-art-biennale-designboom-600.jpg" width="267" /></a></i></div><i><br /></i><p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Romania</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Video of people having sex, gay men with “Elfriede Jelinek”
written across their arms (hell yeah), a severely disabled man lain
down and fucked by a curvy blonde in thoroughly kinky dungeon sex.
Weirdly hot.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Japan</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Artful arrangements of ethereal light, because what could be more
simple and elegant and jawdroppingly gorgeous?</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>US</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– It's very funny to me that the State Department is going out of
its way to lampshade its support for black feminist art, because,
well, I think we can safely say that many feminists of African origin
in the Global South have a few words with regard to the US State
Department.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Germany</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Mostly empty, but the building itself is partially taken apart to
reveal how it was constructed under fascist regimes, and it's as
intellectually rigorous and abstract and stern-faced as I would hope.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>UK</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Painful attempt at fun. Lots of women making music, and videos of
them making music in Abbey Road Studio, when I'd rather just listen
to the music. Even Brits can make good music.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>France</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Actual fun, because French people are far more capable of having
fun. An absolute junk-drawer wonderland of cast-off artifacts from
the Algerian and French mid-century, welcoming enough that people
were actually sitting around and talking and chilling and laughing,
because after that much po-faced bullshit, sometimes you just want a
glass of wine and a couch.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Australia</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Confusing imagery on loop I tried to figure out. Then I read the
artist's statement, saying it was supposed to be confusing imagery.
Mission accomplished, mate.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Spain</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Literally nothing there. Supposed to be a commentary? Apparently?</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Canada</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Mentioned revolution in the title. The sample image they used was
– I swear to God I'm not making this up – a Stanley Cup riot.</span><i> </i></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Egypt</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– Uteruses that look like Kirby.</span><i> </i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Russia</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
– (missing entry)</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Writing
that cheered me up. I hope it cheered you up too.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
all that stupidity, all that backlog of grievances, it quickly fades
when you actually get to your second Aperol spritz, and you walk
around Venice at sunset, feeling it a little, enjoying the long
shadows falling over the lagoon. Sure, there's a tubby middle-aged
American couple in matching Pittsburgh sports hoodies (Steelers for
him, Pirates for her), wifey with a mobility cane for her rotundness,
right in front of you blocking the view, but unironically bless their
hearts for actually making it this far from Western PA. I smile
briefly, and turn up The Psychedelic Furs as loud as they will go as
the sun slowly sinks over the Lido. And if that doesn't appeal, I
don't know what's wrong with you.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">There
is a melancholy in my last night in Venice – the kind that comes at
the end of any visit to any place, even if it's at the beginning of a
trip. And part of that is knowing that this is the last time I'll be
in this place for a long time. Maybe forever.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Maybe
I'll die before I get another sunset over the Lido. Maybe that final
</span><i>acqua alta</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> will come
and swallow this most vulnerable of cities whole.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But
for now I have this. And that is enough.</span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-10566351244463331562022-09-29T07:43:00.002-07:002022-09-29T07:43:32.225-07:00The Horror of Positive Thinking<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> A few weeks ago, one of the leading
lights of the American left, Barbara Ehrenreich, died of cancer. She
would have preferred that wording – “died of cancer,” I
suspect, and not the euphemistic “passed away,” as she was a
bitter opponent of all forms of bullshit, particularly those
delivered with sanctimony. She's probably best known for her
masterful journalism about life at minimum wage in <i>Nickel and
Dimed</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but real heads will also
know she coined the term “professional managerial class,” or
about the brief fracas after she said about Marie Kondo's heavily
accented TV English:</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“It’s
OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American
audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a
superpower.”</i> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">… <span style="font-style: normal;">precipitating
a histrionic response by a purple-haired chick with a mermaid emoji
in her name, who then gave us one of the world's silliest copypastas
(sing it with me!):</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“You
did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a xenophobia. You did a
white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This
makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the
intersectionality of the multiplicity of your offenses.”</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But to
me, the thing that Barbara Ehrenreich did that resonated the most was
not her </span><i>Wigan Pier</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-style
reportage, it was her writing about the ways in which the American
ideology of positivity damages the soul and reflects an atomized
society.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To sum
up, Ehrenreich got diagnosed with breast cancer, a particularly cruel
twist considering that she didn't have any of the major risk factors.
However, instead of empathy with suffering, what Ehrenreich found,
over and over again, was an attempt to turn rain into liquid
sunshine. She was repulsed by the way she wasn't suffering, she was
“fighting,” she wasn't a victim, she was a “survivor,” all of
which at the end of the day made her feel lonelier, more isolated,
and more shushed, discouraged even from feeling panic and grief at
the very real chance of her own imminent mortality. It didn't help
that with her particular diagnosis of breast cancer, the pink-ribbon
capitalists were among the people she had most vigorously criticized.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This
is something I'd suspected for a long time, wet blanket that I am. My
7th grade science teacher liked to remind us moody tweens that a
frown required us to work more muscles than a smile. I cannot think
of a more crystal-clear example of sunny idiocy.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Of
course, back then, I didn't know </span><i>why</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
I felt the way I did. I just knew that something about my teacher's
comment seemed very fundamentally wrong-headed.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Yet
the examples hit like a barrage, again and again, throughout my
adolescence and afterwards. George W. Bush's premature-cumshot
mission accomplished? The runaway success of </span><i>The Secret </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and
the revival of “positive thinking,” more or less a glorification
of how four year olds see the world? The 2010s influencers preaching
positivity and wellness against a millennial-pink and sage-green
background? They all seemed to be indicators of that same sunny
idiocy I encountered back in the piss-reek corridors of my town's
middle school.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It
wasn't just that it was cringe (although cringe it was). But as
Ehrenreich elucidated, there really is a dark side to all that
positivity – it does preclude empathy, it does gloss over actual
problems that may exist in the world and with oneself. And this in
turn makes it the handmaiden of a social doctrine whereby every
problem one has is one's own fault, whereby any misery is just
laziness, an ideology that is, like so many others throughout the
Anglo-American world, the descendant of some of the worst parts of
Protestantism.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I'm
glad the term “toxic positivity” has gained some traction over
the past year or two, as shit has seemed more fucked. Because facing
down the twists and turns of a global pandemic, the inevitable threat
of climate change, spiraling wealth inequality, revanchist
nationalism, and other assorted general bad vibes, how can anyone </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
be experiencing some kind of angst?</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And in
those moments, if you're anything like me, you don't want someone to
say you're looking at the world with tired eyes, or that you can
start by going vegan and not using plastic straws, or – and this is
truly some hellworld shit – that you need to start practicing
mindfulness and (that sickliest of words) gratitude. You want someone
to pass you the joint and simply say “I feel you, man.”</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Which
is what I got when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's books and essays. And
to you, dear reader, no matter where you are – I feel you, man.</span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-72900108959199254302022-08-16T08:05:00.000-07:002022-08-16T08:05:27.024-07:00Hail SatanYeah, I clickbaited. Click my bait,
bitches.
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I've seen a sort of revival of sorts,
over the past few months, and particularly in the light of the Dobbs
decision and the takeover of the American court system by glazed-eyed
and cross-clutching dipshits, of the Internet atheism of my teenage
years. All those words I hadn't seen in any meaningful way since then
– “sky daddy,” “fundie,” and all the rest – have come
back, and by golly, we're just one rage comic away from a Flying
Spaghetti Monster and it's 2006 all over again. It was a simpler
time. The transcendental evil was still Dick Cheney, and Kanye was
still dope, when a great many of my high school classmates could
still see their penises.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But the thing is, I hated that shit
back then. It's only with the revival of Christian nationalist
nonsense of the sort I thought had been left behind in the Dubya
years that the thought has crossed my head, again, that organized
religion is a pox upon the planet.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Unlike many who think this, I never had
any kind of grand epistemic break with God. I was fortunate enough to
have been raised in a household where the desert faiths that informed
what we loosely call “Western civilization” had largely been left
behind, leaving only a body of literature, art, music, and
architecture that could and should be appreciated on its own merit,
absent any faith. I was the product of a socially Christian father
who didn't believe in much of anything, and a mother who had fully
turned her back on an upbringing rooted in the frigid and haunted
form of Catholicism that thrived on the banks of the Moselle before
being exported to the Kansas prairie. So I was pretty much left to
figure out what faith meant to me, personally, and the whole
god-or-gods thing never made much sense. My faith in Santa Claus
lasted much longer – at least he provided evidence.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The main religious influences on me in
my childhood were the rites and prayers of my still deeply Catholic
extended family, which never made any more sense to me than Egyptian
or Greek myth, and those stories were way, way cooler. After all, how
could the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross compare to a
jackel-headed god of the dead, or to the celestial Days of Our Lives
playing out among the pantheon of Mount Olympus? Furthermore, the
religious beliefs of my classmates, many of whose parents had
instilled in them the full-bore Satanic Panic of the late '80s and
early '90s, seemed downright creepy, as if El Diablo could be
summoned by a game of D&D.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I did my best to respect other faiths –
growing up in Middle America, where the vast majority around me were
Catholics or Protestants of a predominantly Lutheran flavor, I
certainly saw plenty of decent Christians around, even if
Christianity writ large seemed remarkably indecent. And of course I
knew that despite the Falwells, Netanyahus, and Khomeinis of the
world, there were plenty of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who wanted
nothing to do with their weaponized bullshit. And those who were
informed by their faith to do good works and advocate for a more just
and peaceful world.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Which is a big reason why the fedora
atheists of the late oughties did nothing for me. Richard Dawkins'
evangelism on the subject just seemed like an earnest effort to kill
everyone's buzz, Steven Pinker is/was the smuggest man on the planet
(and I'll bet he was even smugger on his trips to Epstein's island),
Christopher Hitchens was a master rhetorician whose distaste for
religion overcame his erstwhile left politics, leading him to Bush
and Blair's field of rakes in Iraq, and Sam Harris revealed himself
to be very, very, very dumb, whose books – even then – felt like
they were written by a smart 8th grader.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Which is to say nothing of any of their
army of interlocutors and stans.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A remarkable number of online atheists
of the era discovered that they hated feminists just as much as Jesus
freaks, and were shockingly willing to get into bed with drooling
Christian nationalists, given their shared revulsion at not just
Islamist militancy, but ordinary Muslims. Only a handful of the
professional le skeptics and le rationalists of the era managed to
escape this idiocy, and the few I can think of were all associated
with The Young Turks to some degree. This handful – Ana Kasparian
and Kyle Kulinski coming immediately to mind – truly had a
commitment to the higher virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity
(as opposed to just dunking on slackjawed yokels), and this
manifested itself in a commitment to democratic socialist politics.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'd like to think that I've matured
concordantly. As I've said a million times before, the oughties were
a particularly bovine time. Maybe it's because I was a snotty
smartypants teenager at the time, with a more or less universal
contempt for mainstream culture, but solidarity seemed like a waste
of time when compared to reading Foucault and doing all the drugs. My
copout may not have been Dawkins, but it absolutely was Nietzsche in
<i>Beyond Good and Evil</i> saying “if God had chosen to write the
Bible in Greek, why did he choose to do it so poorly?” Just as
edgelord, but the hipster version. The Pitchfork Festival version as
opposed to the Comic-Con version. I was probably a dick – <span style="font-style: normal;">cue
cloying reality TV voice – </span><i>but I just need you to like,
respect my jourrrrrrrrrrrrrney</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The wave of course receded. I grew up,
and for a time, the Christian right became less of a threat compared
with the numerous other stupidities.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Which brings us to now.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So I have to ask. How many adamant new
atheists I see cropping up were cognizant humans in the original
wave, and how many are simply teenagers? How many fellow oldheads are
out there, still somehow immature? How many are still meme'ing on
r/atheism like it's 2007?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My stance is the same, assholes gonna
asshole, no matter what. I'm sure that dude who stabbed Salman
Rushdie would have had no trouble finding some other god than Allah
to glom onto.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because the root of the problem is, I
maintain, the authoritarian personality, the personality that commits
to a higher figure and will do anything to defend its honor,
submissive to those in higher positions but dictatorial towards those
in lower positions – whether that is the yahoo with a Don't Tread
on Me flag back home, or the sage and peaceful Buddhists who feel at
their duty to participate in the genocide of Rohingya next door in
Myanmar.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But there is a flipside for religion
for me, one I find truly appealing. The idea of faith not as a
submission, but as a painful struggle. When I read the mythologies of
the world's religion, what appeals to me is the Jewish prophets who
screamed at and cursed out God, or the long dark night of the soul of
Saint John of the Cross fleeing the Inquisitors. It is the gloomy
Paul Tillich, standing in the ruins of his native Germany after the
Second World War, pointing out that to ask whether God exists is an
absurdity – a question meaningless to God, who is beyond such trite
distinctions. The gentle and loving god of the Precious Moments
coloring books my grandmother tried to give me as a small child never
appealed to me. The idea of an unknowable other, a hope beyond all
hopes... well, that I can relate to.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">However, what I don't have is faith.
All I have is that grand agnostic question mark.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The only thing I know is what I oppose,
which is that very same authoritarian attitude, whether it clothes
itself in the language of nation or religion or whatever. And I know
what the appropriate response to the authoritarian personality is at
all times: to raise my middle finger and tell all y'all to suck my
motherfucking dick.
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-72846694845137243802022-07-21T07:31:00.002-07:002022-07-21T07:31:33.448-07:00In Dark Times<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's something
reassuring about all things teleological. Sure, we'd like to there's
the tidy ending. Not necessarily Cinderella and Prince Charming
living happily ever after, but we'd like to think that even after
Rick convinces Ilsa that she can only be happy if she gets on that
plane, he can still turn to Louis and tell him that this will be the
start of a beautiful friendship.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And yet
paradoxically, the teleology doesn't have to be positive to be
appealing. Hell, there's something more appealing, in our time, to a
more fatally pessimistic mode of thinking. The firm belief that
apocalypse is inevitable, or civil war, or some other catastrophe.
The belief that we are coming to an end of some kind, whether it is
the redemptive, millenarian, phoenix-from-the-ashes kind, or a final
nail, an endpoint for humanity – the conclusion that a species
unfortunate enough to attain consciousness will inevitably
self-destruct.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Apocalypse is –
so the think pieces in the Atlantic tell me – a deeply seductive
thought process, and one to which I've always been prey. Perhaps this
planet, it always seemed to me, deserved a mercy killing.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It's
a pretty typically teenage, typically edgelord way of evaluating the
world, and in the angst of adolescence, against the background of
Iraq and the Patriot Act and the rising seas, apocalypse presented
itself as the only logical conclusion. This thought pattern was
reinforced by the way in which I saw the general populace, rightly or
wrongly, as optimistic on the balance. And so to think the opposite
is to imply that one has access to a sort of divine gnosis, a
realization that you see the world how it </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">really</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is. Wake up, sheeple, and all that. I read Nietzsche. I pored through
the various 9/11 and JFK conspiracies. I ate magic mushrooms and
watched televangelists in rathole apartments, burrito wrappers fallen
behind the radiator, because at the end of the day, we're ALL fucking
hallucinating, aren't we, man?</span></span> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet it seems that this strain of thought has become more and more
widespread, even among the ostensibly adult among us. Find the
pattern of your choosing, erect your own mind palace – and since
the Internet has become all-pervasive, more and more blueprints for
individual mind palaces have become accessible. Boom, you're one of
the few whose third eye is on its way to opening.
</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
And naturally this extends to apocalypse.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This kind of
nihilism on principle is generally though of as something that ought
be put away along with the other childish things. It is expected that
one grows older, one grows wiser. One gets some actual skin in the
game, learns to love, raises and protects children, and then it's not
a mercy killing anymore. It would mean the death of the creatures you
brought into this world, whose cribs you look down on in your darker
moments and in whom you see light, whom you want nothing more than to
protect, mind, body, and soul. And so it is a thought that must be
banished. Life must go on, because it simply must. Sure, plenty of
people operate from a default cynicism, but when I talk to be-child'd
friends who have that same default cynicism, a lot of them have taken
a sort of Pascal's Wager or William James will-to-believe approach.
Even if this is not my natural cosmology, I choose to believe it.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One is an asshole
if one cites the problems with both Pascal's and William James'
theories in these situations, so since I'm not in one of those
situations, I can air a simple version now. Both nihilism and
anti-nihilism are, of course, irrational positions, which does not
mean they are bad, but simply that they are not rational. Rather,
they are articles of faith, sets of axioms that one uses to frame and
interpret everything else.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
would be the height of arrogance to assume I'm somehow exempt, a
2014-era Youtuber presuming to be an infinitely and supremely
rational individual thinker. So I have to ask what my articles of
faith are, what axioms I use. I am another nightcrawler struggling in
the polystyrene cup, fighting in the mud and shit and praying that
I'm not the next one on the fishhook. Just like you.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And so if I take
everything I see into consideration, the only thing I can anticipate
– to the extent I can anticipate anything in this tesseract – is
a long trudge towards oblivion, no totalizing wars, no grand
epistemic shifts, just everything slowly, almost imperceptibly
falling apart, the pain and insecurity of previous eras reintroduced,
without the Medieval sense of community and purpose, or the
Enlightenment sense that things must get better, to palliate the
suffering and horror. Destruction as a slow loss of radio signal,
without the ever-so-satisfying clarity and certainty of Gehenna.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The sense is
omnipresent. The other day I saw two girls of maybe seven or eight,
running along the street in front of their mothers, giggling hand in
hand and I suddenly felt awful for them, and for what future lay
ahead of them.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The only thing
that remains is hope, which is in and of itself irrational too.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That's why it's
always been the hero of fairytales, from the last creature in
Pandora's box to the Disney canon, hasn't it? It's almost an
overarching truly irrational and truly universal thing. In one part
of the world it's a hope of liberation from being bounded to the
endless entropy of the world, in another the promise of undying love.
Even Emily Dickinson found it in her morbid heart to pinch its cheek
and call it a “thing with feathers.”</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Am I the only
who's a bit bummed that there's a clinical Adult Hope Scale?</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like so many
psychological tests, it's a bullet-point list of statements, each of
which one is supposed to agree or disagree with on a sliding scale,
and the clinician is supposed to tally up the scores in a particular
manner. It's not hard to predict what's on there.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><ul><li><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I
energetically pursue my goals</i></span></p>
</li><li><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>My past
experiences have prepared me well for my future</i></span></p>
</li></ul><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But
notice the trick? The minimum score (0) would be a confident
disagreement with all statements, while a maximum (64) would be a
confident agreement. A middling “kinda sucks” would be right in
the middle, even if that might seem just as painful, a condemnation
to eternally kinda sucking.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Never
mind the fact that this purely focuses on personal perspective, and
more strangely goal-setting. Never mind that one having not done
something in the past does not necessarily dictate their future
outlook. Never mind that there might be very real problems of
poverty, war, environmental destruction, and legitimate terror.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Is
there anything more of a bummer than being told about how dark it is
before the sun rises, how everything happens for a reason?</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Cinderella and
the prince<br />lived, they say, happily ever after,<br />like two dolls
in a museum case<br />never bothered by diapers or dust,<br />never
arguing over the timing of an egg,<br />never telling the same story
twice,<br />never getting a middle-aged spread,<br />their darling smiles
pasted on for eternity.<br />Regular Bobbsey Twins.<br />That story. </i></span>
</p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> -
Anne Sexton, with whom I have a parasocial relationship, </span><i>Cinderella</i></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Because
to me the truest of hope is that which is fundamentally irrational.
That which only exists as a vague and barely held notion, one that
you try not to interrogate too much for fear that it might disappear.
Not a light at the end of the tunnel. Not a rainbow shown to Noah to
indicate his covenant. No. It is the flicker of a face in the crowd,
half-seen, on the long subway ride home.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-28152673162505066582022-06-28T08:17:00.002-07:002022-06-28T08:17:19.951-07:00Hideous Interviews With Men in Briefs<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">When
one self-describes as an “introvert,” certain assumptions are
made, both by people who identify as such and people who do not. It
seems to me most people who call themselves introverts are just
assholes hiding behind the language of clinical psychology, but I'd
like to think I'm a true introvert – someone who gets their energy
from being alone, and someone for whom a weekend cheek-by-jowl with
another human, even one I love, is a strain, despite the fact that I
like spending time with those around me.</span><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
when I go out into the world, it's far less draining to talk to those
who don't know me, to those who don't have any expectations. I don't
know whether it's latent charisma or, more likely, the relative
social isolation of the past couple years that has made people more
talkative around me over the past couple of years. To meet the myriad
weirdos of the public sphere – there are basically no stakes. As
the teenage-boy fantasy movie I saw like 10 times put it,
single-serving friends. They can be saintly and sweethearted. They
can be absolute cunts. Sometimes they buy me drinks, not necessarily
with the intention of boning me down (those that wish to bone me
down, I'm leaving out of this brief musing). Sometimes they buy me
drinks because it makes me more obligated to listen to their
bullshit. Regardless, I walk away from the situation, to be forgotten
by the parties in question in a matter of days.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">So
let this be a compendium of sorts, with the caveat that it's mostly
going to be the gloomier of these myriad weirdos – it's much less
interesting to talk about the kind, friendly, wholly ordinary people,
or the simply boring people, or even the majority of the cruel and
ignorant, who are simply cruel and ignorant, and about whom that's
about all there is to say. But if David Foster Wallace took the
diseased strains of the human ego and turned it into something both
bitterly real and empathetic in his Brief Interviews With Hideous
Men, then these are my hideous interviews with men in briefs.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Case
No. 1:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">He,
in theory, knows at least some of the same people I do, and he seems
several years older than me. At first, the chat is pleasant. It seems
we share similar taste in wine and movies, and he seems to fall into
one of the most universal categories – a good dude. And yet as the
evening continues, I can see him starting to crumble a bit, he starts
throwing out phrases like “everyone says I'm an asshole,” and I'm
not sure if this is typical Northern European self-deprecation, or
whether he is admitting the fact that he is an asshole, or an asshole
with a persecution complex who finds other people's interpretation of
their asshole behavior to be evidence of their interlocutors'
stupidity, and I have to wonder whether or not I should vacate the
premises. I slowly sidle away, talking to someone else, until he
mutters something a little too loudly to not be noticed, a little too
softly to not be audible over the soundsystem, before going back to
frowning into his old fashioned. What was it that he muttered? Was it
that he felt slighted in some way? Did he feel the world's opinion of
him was confirmed? Was this more on the evidence pile? And in my
bitter moments, am I any fucking better?</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Case
No. 2:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">He's
a tourist here, but a regular tourist – we get them a lot in this
part of the world, people for whom Thailand is the standard escape.
Many are retirees looking to get a bit of sunshine before returning
to higher latitudes, many are the standard sex tourists, a remarkably
high number are various flavors of queer people from various
countries who enjoy being able to publicly show affection without
fear of state-sanctioned violence, and some are a bit cagier in their
reasoning. This man is one of them. He's in his fifties, with the
muscled-running-to-fat look of aging athletes. I should have known he
would start making political points with me, to which I responded as
I normally do – state my position, point out why I believe what I
do, and push back as appropriate. Of course, he was a Tory, which is
to be expected, and pivoted to a different subject the minute that a
counter-argument was presented and contradicting himself often
enough. And of course he talked about how glad he was we could have a
“civil discussion,” and more or less sucked his own dick talking
about how civil he was being. I would have left earlier, but the
edibles were kicking in and it was raining out. But the more he
talked, the more he mentioned his boyhood as the son of an English
schoolmaster, I started to feel a bit bad. I imagined a childhood of
Protestant morals, in which athletic prowess and high test scores as
a child and financial success as an adult had long since become
stand-ins for any kind of divine grace, in which law and order had
substituted for righteous justice. The jowly middle-class product of
a childhood of gray meat and caning. I used to have to listen to The
Smiths and read Philip Larkin to encounter this sort of personality.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Case
No. 3:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">He
invites me over for a drink, with a very uniquely Israeli sort of
enthusiasm, asking me for advice on writing. I try my best to offer a
few succinct pointers, but he's not having it, demanding more, and in
exchange he promises me he can teach me how to get any girl I want. I
hadn't heard that particular line in a while. It turns out he's in
the porn industry, and he's more or less exactly how I imagine an
Israeli pornographer to be – someone who's 50 and still seems
pretty into hookers, molly, and trance music. He is perplexed as to
why I cannot recommend a preferred <i>bordelle</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Case
No. 4:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">He
is a small Thai man of indeterminate age – definitely over 30, but
could be anywhere between there and 60, although context clues
suggest an age around 40. He's been at some event, and is moderately
shitfaced, and strikes up a conversation about cocktails with me –
I am, as always, happy to discuss my passion for the Angel Face, the
Last Word, and all those other concoctions that conjure up lost
worlds in my mind, but he's more focused on a perceived exclusivity.
Unfortunately, he claims to know my boss – not my actual boss, but
one of the top partners. He points out that whenever he goes to New
York, he stays with a friend on Park Avenue. “You've got money too,
I know” he says with a smile, as if that's true, and as if that's
supposed to be a compliment, a recognition that we can look down on
th<span style="font-style: normal;">e plebs together. It's a reminder
that in this part of the world, the elites make no attempts to
humanize their image. There's no Bill Gates proudly driving a Subaru,
no Mark Zuckerberg handing out grilled cheese sandwiches at Burning
Man. There is only the man with tobacco-stained teeth showing off his
skrilla (and god help me, I just looked up how to spell “skrilla,”
because it occurs to me I've never actually heard that word written
down). I politely decline a night of clubbing with him. On a Sunday.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
what sticks out about all of these cases is the way in which they
reflect my own particular failures – the misanthrope, the
self-righteous grandstander, the nihilistic sensualist, the endless
consumer. And that in and of itself could constitute a whole set of
other failures – the allure of fatalism, a difficulty to
self-forgive, and a dreadful terror at the thought that destiny might
be real.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I
would say it sounds pompous if I quote Hermann Hesse, but fuck it,
let's go: </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">“If you
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><em><span style="font-style: normal;">hate</span></em><span style="font-style: normal;">
a person, you </span><em><span style="font-style: normal;">hate</span></em><span style="font-style: normal;">
something in him that is part of </span><em><span style="font-style: normal;">yourself</span></em><span style="font-style: normal;">.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” – Hermann
Hesse, </span><i>Demian</i></span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
but for the grace of god, go I, I think. Maybe you would think you go
too.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
try my best to find the wounded heart – the logic that leads these
people to where they were, and it's not hard to identify the lines of
environment and nation and religion and history, of upbringing and
inputs, of the infinitely complex contours of the human mind. And you
have to wonder, could they have turned out any different? Could any
of us?</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">A
moment of terror that passed the other day: at lunchtime, I see an
man of maybe 80 or 85 shuffling down Silom Road with a walker – he
looks exhausted, you can almost feel him squinting through his
sunglasses against the glaring midday tropical sun. About my height,
dressed not too differently from me. And with the <i>same fucking
tattoo in the same fucking place</i>.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
move past, my heart racing, I look back, my elderly doppelganger
walking away from me, and I look in the mirrored window of an office
tower. Exhaustion on my face. The image of the city reflected and
distorted behind me.</span></span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-45697161375403849142022-05-05T08:02:00.002-07:002022-05-05T08:02:50.717-07:00The Post-Alito Online Liberal<p>Of course it happened. Of course in the
wake of Justice Alito's memo regarding his plan to eviscerate
reproductive rights in America, I made the mistake of looking at
social media. And of course what I saw was an army of liberals
screeching at anyone who didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 – you know
the type, all the “you did this” and what not. I would put up
some screenshots here, but they are kind of self-evident.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because if there's one thing that
Democrats should be doing going into a midterm election, it's blaming
individuals rather than actually examining and going after systems of
power.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Unfortunately, in contemporary American
liberalism, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Having given up hope of
any form of solidarity or collective action, having reduced every
behavior to the level of the atomized individual whose personal moral
value is, in Protestant fashion, to be weighed, in perfect lockstep
with the neoliberal forces submitting all human life to the cruel
logic of market capitalism – save for a few bare, viciously
means-tested remaining fragments of the mid-century welfare state –
the only thing left to do is to turn to individual actors, and to
blame, hector, nag, and whine.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course this is amplified by the
Internet in all the worst possible ways – all the armchair Ukraine
experts and Kremlinologists on Twitter and Reddit have transformed
into constitutional-law scholars who are fully able to ascertain the
impact of the memo they read half an article about on Politico before
rage-skimming on the Loving and Griswold decisions.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So I will take this opportunity to
provide a corrective, and, being a good leftist who, as the late
great Michael Brooks put it, seeks to be ruthless with systems and
kind to people, I will direct my line of questioning at the
structures and the persons who hold high ranks within them.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">How many of the people who stayed home
in the 2016 election in vital swing states were those much-feared but
few-in-number Bernie bros who couldn't plug their nose, and how many
were people disengaged from the political system after the losses of
good union jobs and the destruction of communities in the wake of the
free trade programs that the Democrats enthusiastically endorsed?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">How many people didn't vote, and don't
generally vote, because they suffered under Bill Clinton and Joe
Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, people who overwhelmingly come from poor
backgrounds, who are predominantly black and brown, whose family
members were forced into a carceral-industrial system propagated by
both parties, whose very voting rights were in many cases stripped away, and as for the remainder, how many of them realized that they and people like
them were going to be fucked no matter what the electoral process
was?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">How many people had their brains
permanently broken by the right-wing media that emerged like
mushrooms after the rain in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1996
Telecommunications Act, and have emerged thinking that anyone to the
left of Mitch McConnell is taking part in a child grooming cult,
permanently alienated from reasonable discourse?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">How many laws weren't passed to help
enshrine abortion rights, instead resting upon a Supreme Court
precedent that even the center-left's yass-qween champion Ruth Bader
Ginsburg called a dangerous overreliance, especially at a time when
<i>80 fucking percent</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of
Americans are in favor of at least some access to abortion.</span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Simply, how many were just checked out
because they had never, in their lives, seen any meaningful response
to their abject misery, administration after administration?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And really, you're yelling at us jaded
leftists? <br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By the way, I did pinch my nose. I did
vote <i>contra</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Trump, twice. But
I won't judge people for not doing so, because a big part of what it
is to be a socialist is to recognize that our political system is
broken.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To the
social media ninnies, I feel you too. You're at the bargaining stage
of grief. All of that being said, while I won't judge individuals for
their political action or inaction in a complex environment, I will
judge individuals for actively being dicks. So fuck you for that. But
let's move on.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Once I
helped a nice young woman get an abortion once (none of my DNA
involved, by the way). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find a way
to buy some pills for some nice ladies in Texas to terminate their
pregnancies, and I encourage you to do the same. And if you want to
do some deeper questioning, come and join. We on the populist left
are more than happy to welcome fellow travelers.</span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-54712596435993549222022-04-28T08:29:00.002-07:002022-04-28T08:29:18.315-07:00The Island of Serendipity<p>
</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There is a fable, most likely over 1000
years old, that goes like this. To teach his sons the value of
practical experience beyond their ivory-tower education, the King of
Serendib sent his three sons overseas, to the Sassanid Empire. They
came to the traces of a missing camel – lame, blind in one eye,
missing a tooth, carrying honey on one side and butter on the other.
When Shah Bahram V heard about their claims, he immediately accused
them of theft. In their defense, the three princes demonstrated
thusly: only three hoofprints in the sand indicate a leg being
dragged, the grass was eaten on the side of the road where it wasn't
as green as the other, demonstrating a blindness in one eye, clumps
of grass the size of a camel's tooth remained, showing one missing,
and flies were drawn to the honey spilled on one side of the road,
and ants to the butter spilled on the other.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To the Enlightenment <i>philosophes</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
this was a perfect example of the triumph of reason, of the power of
inference. And yet their homeland – Serendib – gave rise to
another idea, the idea of </span><i>serendipity</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
something completely determined by accident, by fate.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Serendib was what
the ancient Persians called an island off the south tip of India.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And after that, it
was Ceylon, a name that conjures up images of the twilight years of
the Raj, sighing tea planters and pith helmets and cricket whites.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And since then it
has been Sri Lanka. And what is in that name?</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">To those of us
living in the post-Internet age, it is a name that evokes elephants
and glittering beaches, perfumed jungles, travelers with mandala
tattoos looking for enlightenment and cheap beer. Yet for decades
before, the name “Sri Lanka” conjured up a sequence of horrors,
purges and inter-ethnic violence, machete hacks and suicide bombings
at crowded railway stations, panic in the stifling tropical humidity,
weeping mothers and bloodied headscarves and crowds of men chanting
slogans.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Where does the
truth lie?</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">What I can only say
is what Sri Lanka was for me, from the moment I arrived at
Bandaranaike International Airport to the moment I departed from it.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">It started with
that standard third-world cab ride into the city, the first
encounters with the heat, with the local accent, then passing houses
in rural clearings, nighttime palm fronds, Honda motorbikes
illuminated by insect-swarmed fluorescent lights, railroad tracks
with barking dogs, tiny mobile phone shops with pictures of local
celebrities, all with vaguely Europeanized features, promoting the
various local 4G networks, billboards in English for housing
developments aimed squarely at the anglophone elite, embassies behind
heavily guarded perimeter walls. The forms repeat themselves from
country to country. It is only when you emerge from the taxi that the
subtle contours of locality emerge.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">One comes to
understand a country not through its monuments and landscapes, but
its incidentals. To get a beer to enjoy before bed in my hotel room,
I have to go to a “wine shop” with the vibes of a methadone
clinic and wait in line with a couple dozen other exclusively male
and restless-looking customers, before a cashier in a banker's cage
hands me a bottle of Lion Lager from the fridge. To get around, I
take a tuktuk plastered with slogans, from anodyne self-help –
“don't be a worrier, be a warrior” – to confusing
manifestations of global phenomena – the bizarrely common “Red
Indian,” and here I was thinking I was in feather-not-dot country –
to the WTF – a naked woman and the caption “The unknown. Who know
this?”</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But the incidentals
were accompanied by moments of absolute loveliness.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">There were the long
strolls around the lake at Kandy, a city supposedly brought into
glory by the Buddha's tooth in the central reliquary of the Sri
Dalada Maligawa, and up into the hills, to be followed by a drink at
the antique bar at the Queen's Hotel where Lord Mountbatten acted out
his role as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and it's hard
not to imagine the place full of David Niven types with pencil-thin
mustaches, sipping pink gins and smoking Dunhills as they gesture
towards detailed relief maps of parched Burmese hills – you see
their forms like ghosts in the hazy orange sunset, floating between
the bougainvillea blossoms. There was the long hike up to the top of
the sacred rock of Sigiriya, wondering how humans could have possibly
thought to built something like this in such an improbable and
difficult location. There was the sheer joy of staring out at a
landscape of layered mountains and cloud forests and plantations of
tea, cinnamon, and cardamom as I sipped my masala chai and samosas,
leaning back in my slow-moving train carriage. There were the long
happy swims in the turquoise seas of the south coast, where I ate
freakishly large crustaceans, and chatted with whoever came by, a
surfer on a trip around the world, a few local longhairs with their
arms around tatted-up British PAWGs, while I sat with my notebook and
my arrack drink and my shirt buttoned down, trying my best to channel
some combination of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Mitchum, and Miki Dora,
and in all likelihood failing miserably. And I walked the cobblestone
streets of Galle, the city on a little peninsula littered with the
ruins and remnants of a dozen or more empires, where couples posed
for pre-wedding photos, where schoolboys ran along the seawalls that
futilely held back the waves of the Arabian Sea. The end of the earth
– because from here there was nothing, all the way to Antarctica.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">My reception among
the locals was largely positive, and it always warmed up as soon as I
said I lived in Thailand. This had the function of identifying me as
a fellow tropical – someone who could cope with the heat and
crowding, who could appreciate the spicy food, i.e. not a <i>total</i>
Western dumbfuck. This carried more currency than I would have
suspected, and it was only later that I realized what it actually was
– a recognition that I also recognized the neocolonial fuckedness
of things in countries below 25 degrees of latitude.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Because the
fuckedness was everywhere. It was in the power cuts that beleaguered
my stay – first eight hours a day, then ten, then twelve. In the
food that, while tasty, so largely consisted of colossal portions of
starch and fat, with minimal protein, bombarded with spice to make it
flavorful. In the metal detectors and bag searches at the entrance to
every shopping mall, and the abundance of armed guards in the most
innocuous of locations. In the way that conversations with locals
largely began with their disgust with the government of the
Rajapaksas, a family that currently occupies the positions of
president, prime minister, and nine cabinet-level ministers, whose
abysmal mismanagement, including a harebrained attempt to make all
farming organic, has led to food price shocks, a full-on Chinese debt
trap leading to a loss of control over the Port of Colombo, and the
increasing likelihood of the velvet glove of the IMF disguising an
iron fist of austerity, which, when combined with global fuel-price
spikes, has led to a country doing its cooking by candlelight.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">As we wait for a
generator to hum to life, a couple waiters at a nice seafood
restaurant bum a smoke off a Russian tourist. They don't smoke with
him, but pocket the cigarettes. That's not a good sign.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Which again leads
me to flashbacks of those earlier images – of bombed libraries and
targeted assassinations, of invocations to the serene Buddha, to
peace being upon the prophet Mohammed, to the infinite beatitudes of
Ganesh and Parvati in the name of Kalashnikov fire and the burning of
corrugated-aluminum shacks.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Along with the
cardamom plantations, seawalls, and gentle surf lapping at my bare
feet.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">One's experience of
a place, as a tourist, consists of glimpses, ephemera, hazy memories
triggered by smell and sound, the vague reminiscences when you look
at the little lacquered box you bought at a faraway market.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">And accordingly,
each of these things is a trace. A clump of grass with a tooth-sized
piece left intact, honey and butter spilled on the sides of the road.
Dogs howling in the darkness as we wait for the lights to turn back
on, the long views across the verdant mountains as I take a sip of
soursop tea. The camel itself is much more elusive.
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-11025964580912439312022-04-11T08:41:00.000-07:002022-04-11T08:41:32.403-07:00Under Stalin's Mustache<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To most of the world, the Republic of
Georgia is a cipher, a nation not easily found on a map, with a
population so small it's eclipsed, in the international imagination,
by a subnational division, and I would routinely have to tell people
that I wasn't going to the Georgia that's home to Gucci Mane and
Marjorie Taylor Greene. And when clarifications were made, that no, I
was not going to be within firing range of the rockets landing on
Kherson and Kharkiv. That I was instead going to a little nation
neither truly European nor truly Middle Eastern, pinched between the
old Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires, about which I knew awfully
little, about which most people know awfully little.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And thus it was that I found myself,
two long flights later, traveling abroad for the first time since the
pandemic, walking the snowy streets of Tbilisi, trying to figure out
the pay-to-ride elevator and dysfunctional locks in the commie block
where I was staying, riding terrifyingly deep metro lines built to
withstand Los Alamos-designed bombs, walking past the sad and ancient
men selling off the military regalia of a country that no longer
exists, with proud emblems of wheat sheaves, on blankets and park
benches, to hapless tourists like myself.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Like many countries, it was not an easy
place to get around. Buses were often unmarked minivans, touted by
men shouting many-consonanted names – <i>Mtskheta! Mtskheta!
Sighnaghi! Sighnaghi!</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> –</span>
and one wondered, as one got in, whether human trafficking was in the
offing. Yet I made it through, despite an avalanche blocking one of
my major objectives, despite the wild dogs that surrounded me on a
snowy mountain. I rode funicular railways and I got rides in
falling-apart Ladas from thick-necked, possibly drunk taxi drivers
who chain-smoked skinny cigarettes as they wildly accelerated down
country lanes.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And when I settled down, I walked for
many happy hours among tumbledown walls and vines hanging from ornate
balconies, past castle walls and art nouveau theaters and
Brezhnev-era mosaics of men in fur hats drinking from rams' horns and
plaques indicating the long-forgotten violinists who had lived in
each residence. In the town of Gori, I visited the little house where
an ambitious shoemaker's son with a thick mustache and a memorable
attitude about the death of one man versus the death of a million, taking the requisite selfie with the man himself. In Tbilisi I went every day to the metro station at what was once
called Lenin Square, and before that, Beria Square (gulp). I entered
basilicas thick with incense where babushkas wept before icons of
golden saints and where priests sang incantations in a guttural
language as they blessed babies by holding them before images of
Saint Nino and Queen Tamar.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And I step out into the street and see
the evening passeggiata, the street cellists and the booksellers and
the hookahs and ballerinas and the slender form of the old synagogue
against the March sky, an old woman with darkly penciled eyebrows
yelling and shrugging out a second floor balcony.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because Georgia is one of those rare
places that, at least to my eyes, there is still a sense of what was
once called the exotic. It is found in the<span style="font-style: normal;">
cuisine, soups of chicken and marigolds, giant flatbreads stuffed
with cheese for a dollar a piece, veal offal sausages, lamb and green
plum stew, charred skewers of trout, soup dumplings filled with
assorted meats. And of course I</span> spent my evenings sampling the
infinitude of Georgian wines, made in the same fashion, skins and
seeds and all, in a clay-pot <i>qvivri</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
in the same fashion since the time of the Egyptians. There was </span>the
dry and pomegranate-scented Saperavi, and its variants, the velvety
and sweet Kindzmarauli, and my favorite, the oak-finished and
pinot-like Mukuzani. Each session was to be followed by a shot of
<i>chacha</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the indigenous grappa
fashioned from pomace or peaches or persimmons, to be accompanied by
a little plate of walnuts, before my stumble home through steep
streets.</span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I sat with my glass of wine, and I
talked with whoever came through. The war was on, and as in most of
the world, blue-and-yellow flags were on display, although for
Georgians, it seemed a bit personal. It was only in 2008 that Putin's
army was here too. But strangely, most of the people I encountered
were not Georgians, but indeed Russians – Russians who had
semi-permanently settled in Tbilisi, given the ease of visa access
and the fact that most Georgians speak Russian, as well as the more
recent arrivals, programmers and graphic designers who were watching
their country crumble, fleeing a regime that crushes dissident
behavior with ruthless efficiency and also fleeing the sanctions
that, if anything, encourage a gaudy and grotesque nationalism and
isolationism, and which mostly serve to punish ordinary people. “I
no longer have a country,” a woman tells me, “nor do my
children.” I went to a jazz bar to watch performances by men who
were old enough to remember a time and a place where playing jazz had still been a revolutionary activity.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Georgia's most internationally famous
artist was the deliberately primitivist Niko Pirosmani, but I truly
fell in love with the paintings of Shalva Kikodze. His work is
deliberately dreamlike, somehow utterly 20<sup>th</sup> Century
modernist and deeply primeval at the same time, brimming with joy and
terribly melancholy.
</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVg9YyeP15OtW0qQDM2aMkCqETDwjc-b1Z5GiseuTzOIZn7B2qtspDwIPQpHKgObt8nWL5GF0XPAS5I0a_u6bEwW43tVwdSs2G9EHC8xXhs7Aj3bdqgcHaHrygciGx3DIW2qnQRENTvKvKA6ygcdnSlXUafcPb9yEo1PQcSzDeqqHwW1wsYYuMQSYlrA/s500/kikodze.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="500" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVg9YyeP15OtW0qQDM2aMkCqETDwjc-b1Z5GiseuTzOIZn7B2qtspDwIPQpHKgObt8nWL5GF0XPAS5I0a_u6bEwW43tVwdSs2G9EHC8xXhs7Aj3bdqgcHaHrygciGx3DIW2qnQRENTvKvKA6ygcdnSlXUafcPb9yEo1PQcSzDeqqHwW1wsYYuMQSYlrA/s320/kikodze.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div> <p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And I think the reason the Kikodze
paintings resonated so much is that this felt, more than any other
place I've been, like the last old-world country, a glittering little
fragment of a more romantic era. A remnant world that is still out
there. If you go looking for it. And if you're lucky enough to find
it.
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-32699733912800574402022-02-17T06:46:00.004-08:002022-02-17T06:46:37.673-08:00The Fable of Jonah Peretti<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's an inevitable
product of aging that one starts to wonder what the representative
cultural products of the present era will be, what will be
remembered, what will be reflected upon. And when thinking about the
2010s, I'm sure I'll be suspected to some nostalgia film in 10 years
in which the bride and groom dance to Happy or Blurred Lines or Get Lucky at a
wedding.</span>
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And few
organizations captured the ethos of this time more accurately than
Buzzfeed, to the point where it became almost a shorthand for the
preciousness and stupidity of the decade. And a brief glance at it,
as of a recent date, revealed itself to be the same sort of bullshit
they've always done, to the point where it's almost a portal to 10
years ago. "This Couple Had a Sensory Friendly Wedding and I
Could Almost Cry at How Beautiful It Is." "33 Products That
Work So Well You'll Be Taking (sic) About Them All Year." You
know. Clickbait bullshit for people who want to have weddings at
Disneyland. Barf. Pass. You'd have thought we'd have moved past this
sort of thing in an era where the problems of the world have become
that much sharper.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">But what is
fascinating to me is the story of its origins and of its founder,
Jonah Peretti, who, aside from being the dude with the most
white-California of all possible names, had a decidedly strange arc,
one that reflects the shifting priorities of a century.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like so many
Gen-X'ers, he came of age in the heady days of critical theory, in
which American theorists willfully misinterpreted their French
masters to make correlations between particle physics and Lacanian
psychoanalysis (which another Gen-X'er theorist, Joe Rogan, would
later extend to a connection to his DMT trip in the desert), and he
even published a piece heavily informed by the theories of Deleuze
and Guattari in one of the at the time very au-courant, pre-Sokal
Affair journals that adopted a purely "cultural"
anticapitalism at the end of history, <i>Negations</i>.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">To wit:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">"My central contention is that late capitalism
not only accelerates the flow
of capital, but also accelerates
the rate at which subjects
assume identities. Identity formation is
inextricably linked to the urge
to consume, and therefore the
acceleration of capitalism necessitates an
increase in the rate at
which individuals assume and shed
identities."</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">A sensory friendly
wedding. Almost crying at how beautiful it is.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Several years later
on his <i>bildung</i>, Herr Peretti entered a room with a former
follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh named Arianna Huffington and a
plucky young Brentwood posh lad with a passion for uppers and thinly
veiled fascism named Andrew Breitbart to start a certain news
aggregator site that would come to be known for its quippy responses
to the foibles of the Bush Regime.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And from that
particular smug vomitorium came the worst of the American political
culture that has dominated discourse within my own country, and owing
to cultural imperialism, the world at large ever since. It's been a
while since I'd even thought about HuffPo, but it laid the template
for Breitbart and Buzzfeed, and Internet discourse more broadly.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The thesis was set
forth in the "Breitbart Doctrine," that politics lies
downstream from culture. Despite the right-wing origins, this is a
sensibility that has come to dominate both liberal and conservative
approaches to ideology. And it reflects the fact that both Perretti
and Breitbart -- as representatives of a certain generation and a
certain upper middle-class caste -- drank from the same streams,
those of cultural studies, in which the legitimate insights of
Western Marxism and the mid-20th Century "cultural turn"
were placed in the service of late-stage capitalism.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">A brief overview:
the dissident Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci came to realize that a
major part of what kept people in a state of false consciousness was
"cultural hegemony," whereby the institution and powers
that be insinuated a deep-seated ideology of which the subject is not
even aware, which is normalized as common sense. But Gramsci and the
Frankfurt School philosophers further north sought to articulate a
truly emancipatory path for human development beyond the failures of
capitalism and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But when this program is
applied without a strong critique of capitalism, the end result is
disastrous.</span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><p>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Peretti and Buzzfeed
largely mirrored the tone of the Obama years. The voice the editorial
board championed was cheery, triumphant, inclusive, effusive. For a
reference point, think about Parks and Recreation. Sure, all is far
from well in Pawnee, Indiana, but Leslie Knope and Co. want to do
their best to put people on the right path. Things were going to get
better. And the vibe of Buzzfeed matched this, hoping that by giving
people the right culture, they would give them the right politics.
Never mind the economic recovery that wasn't.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Well, let's see how
that turned out.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile, Breitbart
and friends, funded by an increasingly cantankerous right, managed to
capitalize, conversely, on a visceral disgust, which is of course a
much more powerful emotion. The 2016 election demonstrated that the
culture that the liberals had tried to foster had failed to produce a
downstream politics of any meaning, given that the political message
was essentially "cheer up and be grateful, we've got it
covered." To which the right responded by producing rage
responses, which helped, in its way, to pave the way to a
rage-response presidency.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">What you see are two
attempts at placing culture downstream from politics. In the first, a
kindly, liberal culture fails to produce a kindly, liberal politics.
In the second, a negation of culture feeds into a political worldview
based entirely around antipathy. To put it in less academic terms,
it's the Wario version. Wantonio Gramsci.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Something tells me
that this color-inverted Gramsci will be less likely to be a friendly
and rather goofy opponent in tennis- and kart racing-themed games.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps it should be
no surprise, as well, that Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in a mass
purge of actual news in 2019, followed by another 47 without warning
-- most of them unionized -- in 2021, via a virtual meeting using the
insanely on-brand password "spr!ngish3r3."</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">What I am reminded
of, more than anything else, are the haunting lines at the beginning
of one of the masterworks of cultural theory, Theodor Adorno's 1951
text <i>Minima Moralia. </i>Subtitled "notes on a damaged life,"
Adorno, in these strange little micro-essays, traces the ways in
which all hope had been extinguished, made impossible in the shadows
of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, made all the more personal to Adorno
through his own exile, through the ways in which his closest of
friends were subject to expulsion at best, gas chambers at worst.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">"The melancholy
science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a
region that since time immemorial was regarded as the true field of
philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has
lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally
oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once
knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of
mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of
material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And I see the sighs
of this long-dead German reflected in this engine of meaningless
content. In the horror of the screen glowing in the dark.</span></span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2714158167245116991.post-9580797067696820032022-01-25T07:07:00.002-08:002022-01-25T07:07:40.180-08:00Liminal Spaces<p><span style="font-size: small;"> It seems to be an inevitable
consequence of the rush towards the modern -- there will always be
the lure of the lost. There will be vampires' lairs and Gothic
castles, there will be Roman ruins romantically crumbling, there will
be stone idols with jeweled eyes in perfumed jungles, there will be
Addams Family-style Victorian houses gnawed at by a century and a
half's termites, there will be petroglyphs carved into desert rock,
depicting the creation myths of indigenous societies long-since
extirpated. All of the Ozymandian reminders of the things that once
were.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">But what happens when those things are
not the remnants of long-lost civilizations, but the remnants of
something familiar? What if, instead, of widows' walks and parapets
and flying buttresses, we have industrial carpet, fluorescent lights,
a world fully delineated by economic feasibility studies, electrical
diagrams, environmental impact assessment reports, legal due
diligence, linear programming charts?</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's something that's long since
bothered me, ever since the first time I remember seeing a fully
modernist building abandoned -- I was 12 or 13, and I wondered what
could have happened. And there was something far more sinister about
that bit of 1950s postwar optimism left to rot, covered in a mix of
anarchy symbols counter-argued with swastikas, than anything that
Piranesi or Poe could have ever dreamed up.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Which is perhaps why the Internet
phenomenon of the liminal space has drawn me in.
</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some reflect the machinations of commerce:</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg4HJk8O3_Fbbz1ODexCYUa4Pdsm05WVxbmvuNN0rVjDGjIC9eGV0WgFpvK17wyD2ZcMWNhGbpqssN9_aMLMzfjQWK6u6b3nkUpoUPpKIYK6P5mGSFjX_ZPRm687SJ3xn4oR9CfGe7VD6jYUNTOQ7EBwRi7c7akA8VWigTr52ZkZ6MkLxl98WMP1aEftQ=s1149" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1149" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg4HJk8O3_Fbbz1ODexCYUa4Pdsm05WVxbmvuNN0rVjDGjIC9eGV0WgFpvK17wyD2ZcMWNhGbpqssN9_aMLMzfjQWK6u6b3nkUpoUPpKIYK6P5mGSFjX_ZPRm687SJ3xn4oR9CfGe7VD6jYUNTOQ7EBwRi7c7akA8VWigTr52ZkZ6MkLxl98WMP1aEftQ=s320" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">And others a mirror-maze reflection of the domestic:</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglddgvKsluqAIWrxE7OkLLU_OEi1SBDObb2dLid92Cs1aLcx2HKrmnhjWMMdqoL2GKGPQ6XtHyPW1s2FL6n8egdpPie1WFpkTyEkpVOeDUeAOJP-mKXeWG55r7KB6SsxcIhIIrIn86HiYEhnbkv3Idw3zS6KBap-zRJgY4R7imhrk7OeUCefSLAy_y0w=s1301" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1301" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglddgvKsluqAIWrxE7OkLLU_OEi1SBDObb2dLid92Cs1aLcx2HKrmnhjWMMdqoL2GKGPQ6XtHyPW1s2FL6n8egdpPie1WFpkTyEkpVOeDUeAOJP-mKXeWG55r7KB6SsxcIhIIrIn86HiYEhnbkv3Idw3zS6KBap-zRJgY4R7imhrk7OeUCefSLAy_y0w=s320" width="320" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">And with all, a terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness:</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWN3H1Ms6WzQIb8xFH2bfKBOQMfpwZ_9fBbukfW42Dq70vjOLZaUVXx32-UIwjPvmg3knINUFqpG7d1Daz4Jaq5AS3seqKLTpIM35zBTCBbTtIiA7pBsEicC9R59Mi5EkQoKEHoxOdcBhB-OsYYvwlqhyyqKtHYxJUf8tPDoiuQFIYCwlvBPD-kqC4HQ=s640" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWN3H1Ms6WzQIb8xFH2bfKBOQMfpwZ_9fBbukfW42Dq70vjOLZaUVXx32-UIwjPvmg3knINUFqpG7d1Daz4Jaq5AS3seqKLTpIM35zBTCBbTtIiA7pBsEicC9R59Mi5EkQoKEHoxOdcBhB-OsYYvwlqhyyqKtHYxJUf8tPDoiuQFIYCwlvBPD-kqC4HQ=s320" width="320" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">In his 1909 text <i>Rites of Passage</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
Arnold van Gennep described the liminal state as a particular moment
within the rite, in which the subject of the ritual has passed
through symbolic death but has yet to pass through symbolic rebirth,
via a treacherous in-between space in which actions and words must be
highly scripted to ensure safe passage.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">A
memory: a summer program for gifted elementary school students at the
one high school in my hometown, empty for the summer save for a few
of us little nerds and some assorted burnouts, several years older,
roped into summer school (it was the late '90s -- they were still all
about the flannel, as I recall), complaining about how bad their
munchies were. Empty corridors. The sound of R.E.M.'s "Man on
the Moon" on the local rock station reverberating from a
janitor's distant boombox. The endless rows of lockers painted in
primary colors, the sheen of distant fluorescent light on industrial
tile floor was to be expected. But the darkened halls of the newer
wing of the school, painted with the more abstract murals of art
students -- those seemed to possess a stillness and a darkness that
was beyond terrifying.</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Another:
it's winter. I'm in a building in our little downtown that had once
been a department store, split up before I was born into an
assortment of small businesses and a few apartments, a little
bookshop, a hairdresser, a deli, and most attractive to me, a store
selling baseball cards and collectibles. I remember the walk-up with
its smell of carpet long since left to mold, even over the long Upper
Midwest winter still somehow moist, mixed with a bit of cleaning
fluid and the oily fryer-grease smell left on dry December days when
all other smells are purged from the air, the ancient windows
shivering in their frames in the gales that blew down from Alberta. I
walk into an empty unit, the door left open. Maybe it had been an
office, maybe a dwelling. Detritus had been left there from a
previous tenant, or maybe just some other wanderer like myself. A
crushed up Whopper wrapper, a trade paperback with a spiderwebbed
spine, the corpses of last summer's yellow-jackets facing heavenward,
never swept away. With chipped electrical outlets and broken
thermostats, cheap off-yellow paint on the wall, industrial carpeting
curling at the corners, it was someplace in between use and disuse,
between past and present.</span> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">What was it that I experienced as a
child? And what is it that is making its way around the Internet?</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps -- and this is a first thought
-- it is something that speaks to the human psyche itself, a
discomfort with the in-between places, something that finds a
comfortable analogy in the discomforts of the uncanny valley. And
that very uncanniness is overlaid onto the banality and familiarity
of these scenes. The once familiar -- something that we walk past
every day, and are more than happy to ignore -- is caught in still
frame. And when you look at it in focus, you realize on some level
that you're not supposed to focus. That these are places designed to
be functional and at least a little bit invisible. By being rendered
from the functional into the aesthetic, their in-betweenness becomes
more glaring, and all the more compelling.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">And there is a social level as well.
These places are the detritus of advanced industrial society, a
society in which market logic triumphs above all else. The Soviet
cartoons of piggish Western industrialists in Monopoly-man outfits
with dollar signs for eyes got it wrong -- the purest elucidation of
American industrial capitalism is, au contraire, a Comfort Inn just
outside Peoria. And to see that representation of the animal spirits
of some long-forgotten entrepreneur transformed into something naked
and shivering reveals the disconnect between the material and the
image, everything laid bare.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Or perhaps -- on the opposite end of
the spectrum -- it's more personal, something ensconced deep within
memory. Perhaps it's the memory of the alley you always avoided on
the walk home from a school as a kid, with its trail of trash leading
out of the dumpster, crumpling in the autumn rain. The time you woke
up in the middle of the night and snuck down to the den and caught a
viewing of <i>The Shining</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on
cable, the repeated carpet patterns and the domestic lighting
mirroring your own environs, seeing yourself in the child pedaling
his Big Wheel through empty corridors. The cold light of a gas
station on a family road trip, a pockmarked cashier ringing up full
tanks of premium unleaded and cans of Skoal, the way he snarled "you
gonna buy something?" as you wondered whether or not to pocket a
Snickers, as if he could read your young mind. The way you clung to
your mother in a parking garage in early winter, unseen enemies
lurking behind every Cutlass Ciera and Caprice Classic.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Regardless,
the result is the same as the Gothic ruins that inspired the
imaginations of the romantics -- what once was has become, in some
way, no longer.</span></span>
</p>Andrew F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12105297956426527576noreply@blogger.com3