The Anxiety of Obsolescence

As 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

“Hey hey, how about that weather out there?”

“Whoa, that was the caller from Hell”

“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”

“Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”

- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 Automating Inequality

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.

As a result, I tend not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little greige boxes, horizons truncated.

“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.

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.

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.

The Terraforming of Hokkaido

 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?

Or as you may have said in a 7^th grade geography report, a laaaaand of contraaaasts.

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.

But I do love Japan. And thus it was that I found myself in the country yet again, this time in Hokkaido.

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.

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^th 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.

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.

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.

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 universe 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.

In the 1970s, before making his genre-defiling masterpiece Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi rose to fame as a director of high-concept advertisements. This bar in Sapporo reminded me of nothing as much as this:

 

 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.

But in Hokkaido, everything is even more a terraform than in other parts of Japan.

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.

“Boys, be ambitious!” commanded William Smith Clark, founder of the Sapporo Agricultural College, and a well-known figure in Japan to this day.

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.

I stare out from my seat on the train at the meadows, the sea, the snow-streaked mountain cols, the smoking volcanoes.

At the end of the day, history is the same series of echoes and reflections – only the walls of the mirror maze differ.

One I find to be a charming piece of kitsch. The other an unspeakable grotesque.

Reference Desk

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

We'll start with W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz...

 “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.”

Gorgeous, no? Bonus points if you get the reference...

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new
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.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, whose work I tried in my own way to reference before I ever read Austerlitz, before I realized that Sebald way-more-than-one-upped me

But it's not just a figurine in the galette des rois, waiting to be found. At it's best it's an invitation into a world. And so it was I looked for those artists and thinkers who seemed, in their odd way, to be writing such letters requesting your presence in their worlds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

City Lights

Dining alone is rarely ideal, but there's something especially dismal about eating something flambeed alone. Here you are, the waitress seems to say, shall I have the kitchen send you a single slice of birthday cake and a party hat as well?

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.

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.

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.

Just city lights.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Conversely, there is one of the second-oldest tropes, the displaced bumpkin. You know the one. “Aw gee, is there really an underground train down there?” 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.

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 gardes that were once avant, 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.

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 nostalgie de la boue of a life on a much-marketed edge, the aspiration is still there.

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.

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?

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^th 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.

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.

Reflecting Pools and the Karl Marx Chatbot

 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.

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.

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.

See also: the Microsoft bot that got turned into a Nazi by 4chan bottomfeeders a few years back.

Many years ago I went to the theater to go see Spike Jonze's Her. 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 Her 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.

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.

But I wasn't about to sit here and rest on my theses, I went out into the field.

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.

Dear God, two rival Karl Marx chatbots on the front page. Fml.

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.

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.

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”).

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.

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?

In the Habsburg Lands

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^th 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.

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.

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.

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 lieder in Tyrolean caps, in magic flutes and Lippizaner stallions and giggly rococo architecture and tales of courtly love, all the tourist traps mit schlag.

 

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.

Maybe it's because I see the reflection of then in now.

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.

Like countless youths on their wandervogel 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 pension 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 alm, there was sun glittering off the glaciers, there was the distant view to the fairytale schloss 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 hausfrau who didn't speak a world of English, and I ended each day with generous pours of Oktoberfest beer and Grüner 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.

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.

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.

So onwards to the old capital of Mitteleuropa 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.

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 wunderkammer. I'll leave it there.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Most Latrine Republic

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.

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 – “como se dice '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.

But my god, those infinite tangled alleys, the weight of centuries, the tiny standing-room only enotecas, the elegant interplay of land and water...

And so my mood in La Serenissima 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.

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.

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 cicchetti 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 La Torre Rosso – 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.

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 Vicuña stuffed into a pussy hat.

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... 

Denmark – 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? 

 

Romania – 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. 

Japan – Artful arrangements of ethereal light, because what could be more simple and elegant and jawdroppingly gorgeous? 

US – 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. 

Germany – 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. 

UK – 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. 

France – 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. 

Australia – 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. 

Spain – Literally nothing there. Supposed to be a commentary? Apparently? 

Canada – 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. 

Egypt – Uteruses that look like Kirby. 

Russia – (missing entry)

Writing that cheered me up. I hope it cheered you up too.

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.

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.

Maybe I'll die before I get another sunset over the Lido. Maybe that final acqua alta will come and swallow this most vulnerable of cities whole.

But for now I have this. And that is enough.