"You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later."
- Mitch Hedberg
March 15. Remember Matt Savinar? He was a top-tier doomer with a popular website called Life After The Oil Crash, and then all at once he quit and became an astrologer. At the time I was baffled, but in hindsight, Savinar is my new hero. He probably figured out that he had been accidentally lying to people, and rather than spend years trying to salvage a position that was still exciting without being incorrect, he just cut the knot, and turned his talents to another form of lying that is benign and endlessly creative.
I've been continuing to enjoy writing this blog, and I was comfortable with my practice of asking important questions and aiming for concise, original answers. But it felt more and more like I was wrestling with the ghost of my past self. I thought about Neil Young, who sometimes argues with his fans about what he's playing, and I thought, if Neil Young started playing black metal, the people who want him to play "Old Man" wouldn't even come to his shows.
I'll always be a writer, but I'm probably finished writing seriously about politics and social philosophy. It's taken me a long time to see that there is no middle ground between anchoring a cultish echo chamber and serving up a bland soup of facts (unless it's comedy). And I think my bigger mistake was years earlier, when I caught the habit of writing about what's wrong with the world. That road just leads deeper into a swamp where in the end there are no monsters to fight except other lost travelers.
March 13. I've been meaning to make a lot of changes to this site. Today I finally have enough of a vision to feel motivated. The new favicon is the exact opposite color of the old one.
March 13. Doubling down on last week: Leigh Ann and I watch a lot of TV shows, but with Orphan Black, Dark Matter, and Game of Thrones not starting again until summer, we're running out of things that we both want to watch. I've about given up on Mad Men, a show of the highest quality except that I don't care about anything that happens. But just lately I've been rewatching two shows that I absolutely love, even when everything else feels boring.
One is Mushi-Shi, a Japanese animated series that ran for one season in 2005-2006, about the dreamy and wistful adventures of a wandering master of the spirit world.
The other is a mind-boggling masterpiece, the most mythic, most iconic, and funnest achievement in the history of storytelling. Of course, it's Gilligan's Island. In ten thousand years, when Breaking Bad is long forgotten, even if Gilligan's Island is also forgotten, it will be reinvented. It seems to be a children's show only because of its fathomless purity. The jokes are obvious like an approaching train, their impact undiminished no matter how long you see them coming.
The Skipper is the best straight man ever because he's the most joyful, unable to hide that he's having a great time even when he's angry. Gilligan is the best trickster ever because he wears the mask of the fool so well that neither Gilligan himself, nor the other characters, nor half the audience understand that staying on the island is his motive.
The show's very absurdity is a blinding sun of metaphor. How can an island remain unknown and attract so many visitors? Because the Island is the liminal space between consensus reality and the world of myth -- and this weirdness extends into our own world: the show's creators got the name Gilligan through bibliomancy, picking it from a phone book; in the pilot episode, as the ship leaves port, the flags are at half mast because Kennedy had just been shot.
In the best episodes, the characters enter the world of dreams and return to their homeworld not as exiles but as gods, acting out its most primal stories and characters: cavemen and vampires and pirates and cowboys and secret agents. This is probably the best music video ever, synchronizing Gilligan's Island dream scenes with the 1967 garage psych revelation "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night" by The Electric Prunes.
By the way, everyone knows that Mary Ann is hotter than Ginger, but rewatching, I was surprised to learn that Mary Ann is hotter than basically anyone, and even Mrs Howell is hotter than Ginger. Her character was conceived as a "hard-nosed, sharp-tongued temptress" (quoting wikipedia) but Tina Louise couldn't pull it off, and instead played her like a cardboard Marilyn Monroe. That's the one aspect of the story that needs redemption.
March 10. For today's installment of raving about what makes me happy, of course it's music. The other night I stripped down the clunky top playlist on my favorite songs page, cutting 12 of the 19 songs and adding three new ones.
The new opener is Come On Down, a magical 1970 psych folk song by Rex Holman, an actor who made only one album. The second new song is a primal 1920's Greek recording of Misirlu, later made famous by Dick Dale's surf cover.
And the third is by my favorite 90's band, who I've been getting back into: The Muffs! You could easily dismiss them as generic pop-punk, but the Muffs are like the Led Zeppelin of pop-punk, that's how much better they are. Of their six albums, their self-titled debut is the most varied and inspired, their second, Blonder and Blonder, is the most powerful, and their third, Happy Birthday To Me, has the most depth without any dropoff in songwriting.
Anyway, their most epic and beautiful song, Eye to Eye, beat all competitors for the spot right before my favorite song, and placing it there was the wedge that cracked the old list apart.
It also occurs to me that my three favorite bands, Big Blood, Hawkwind (at least in the peak years), and Beat Happening, were all indifferent to making money. This is related to the observation by the Picbreeder guy, that when image selection was crowdsourced, the results were totally lame. On a tangent, I think this is why TV has become so good and movies have become so bad, because movies have the life polished out of them by preview audiences.
March 8. Today I want to rave about Picbreeder, a website where you can make art by selecting images as a computer alters them with an algorithm based on biological evolution. Here's a 40 minute video by one of the guys who made it, mostly about how the best images come from headlong improvisation instead of planning, and from individual judgments rather than consensus.
But I don't think he sees half of it. For me, Picbreeder is the most valuable technology of the 21st century. So far I've put 50-100 hours into it, way less time than someone might spend on video games, and I feel like I've already learned more about creativity than in decades of writing, and made images that I could never make alone even if I mastered painting software.
Suddenly I understand that creativity has two components that are completely separate. One is the magical well that ideas come from. And the other, almost as magical, is how you decide what ideas to trash and what ideas to run with. What I mean by "magical" is that my conscious mind has no creativity at all. It's like the manager for an art department where the "artists" are hard to explain with current theories of mind.
In this condensed video of the 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso, you can watch Picasso's creative process as he starts with a sketch and puts it through changes until sometimes there's no trace of the original idea. Of course he does everything: the ideas, the rendering, and the selection. But Picbreeder allows someone with no skill in ideas or rendering to still practice creative selection, ten times faster than Picasso, plus a back button.
Another way to say it: the stuff that bubbles up from the Picbreeder computer is not that different from the stuff that bubbles up from your own mysterious subconscious, and might almost replace it. If I can use only selection to make an impressionistic landscape like Mordor, or a near-realistic portrait like Sunbathing or Spacewalking... could someone with no ideas still use selection creativity to produce good fiction, or choreography, or architecture, out of nothing but AI-rendered noise?
If you want to try Picbreeder, here's my strategy guide: 1) Go immediately to advanced with color. 2) At first, breed for color and structure together. At some point you'll either really like the colors and want to keep them while you breed structure, or you'll nail the structure and want to color it differently. In a long project you might go back and forth. 3) Usually it's best to select only one image. A good reason to select two is if you can't decide between them. 4) Combining two images into one with elements of both is really hard, but it gets easier the more similar they are, and the more patience you have. It took me at least a hundred evolutions to give my spacewalker a chest icon in blue space with a sun. 5) When in doubt, go for gut aesthetics over rational thinking. Pretend you're looking at a bunch of album covers and deciding which one to reach for even if you can't explain why. 6) If you're in a rut, either use the back button to find your last exciting image and go a different direction, or go forward with big changes. 7) Marijuana.
March 6. If you missed my Saturday post, this week I'm raving about what makes me happy. Today it's my biggest science fiction influence, and if you think it's Philip K Dick, guess again. Of course Dick is the best. In some of his early novels, like The Game Players of Titan or Dr Futurity, it's like you're watching figure skating, and nobody's ever done a triple axel, and then this guy comes out and pulls a quintuple axel. A Chinese philospher wondered if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, and after two thousand years suddenly Dick turned that shit into a fractal. (And he barely made any money, and someone probably thought he was wasting his life.)
But Dick's protagonists are mopey and angsty. In the face of uncertain reality, they're treading water in a dark ocean. Then along comes an author whose reality-tripping characters are surfers: Roger Zelazny.
I'm thinking of two Zelazny works, and neither is his serious and brilliant early novel Lord of Light. That one pleased the critics, and he was probably thinking, with that out of the way, now I'm just going to write experimental shit and have fun.
The first Chronicles of Amber are the funnest books I know. There are classics I've never opened, but I've read those five books three times. The story hits the ground running, with a first person narrator who wakes up with amnesia and super powers, but the star of the books is Zelazny's colorful, dreamy mechanism for shifting through parallel worlds by using attention to make the world change around you.
What I don't like about Amber is that the characters are too often motivated by vengeance, competition and fear. Zelazny's secret masterpiece is a little book about time-traveling highways, with an emotional tone so playful that even deadly adversaries usually turn out to be old friends. Roadmarks is luminous on multiple levels, and poetic, and totally trashy.
March 4. I've been thinking about that Beatles song, "Hey, you've got to hide your love away." (Referencing Chris Farley...) Is that true? Do we really have to hide expressions of love, and why?
I can see more than one reason. First is that our love is often at odds with the world. You know that quote, "Everything I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening." The word fattening makes it funny. If you stopped with illegal and immoral you would have a dark message -- and yet not completely untrue. It also reminds me of a line from one of my favorite 90's hits, Here's Where The Story Ends: "The only thing I ever really wanted to say, was wrong, was wrong, was wrong."
Even if you love something appropriate, the people around you don't love it and will just be annoyed (or envious) if you chatter about it all the time. Yesterday there was a thread on the subreddit (now deleted) from a reader who tried to leverage my personal blogging into unsolicited advice. I answered that I think readers want to hear about my struggles that they share in this difficult time, and they don't want me to rave about what makes me happy.
But maybe I'm wrong. So next week (unless it's bumped by a new subject) I plan to just rave about stuff that makes me happy. And I'll find out (quoting the same song) if people weary of me showing my good side.
March 2. One of the things I'm doing differently now is that instead of saving up links where I have little or no comment, and posting them here in occasional bunches, I'm just posting them to the subreddit.
Today I want to write about motivation. We've all read thousands of motivational sayings, yet most of us still struggle with motivation, so words aren't as powerful as we hope. But I've been getting a lot of mileage lately out of a few attitudes that can be put into words.
One is a Zen saying, "The obstacle is the path", and there's a popular self-help book called The Obstacle is the Way. I don't even want to look at it. It's all in those five words, and I think it would weaken the words to have someone else do the work of digging meaning out of them.
Another is a line I've seen attributed to different sports coaches: "If you want something you don't have, change what you're doing." Again, that is drum-tight language that shouldn't need any exposition.
Here's one I came up with myself, and it does need explaining because it's so peculiar and specific, but I think it applies to more than this context: "Pen on paper is the dictator." When I'm writing, there are at least two voices. One is what I was planning to write, or what I aspire to write. The other is the actual words that I enjoy writing so much that more words follow. And there is no way to know what those words are until the pen is touching the paper (or until the fingers hit the keyboard).
"Dictator" is a strong word, but I think it's that important, when there is a conflict between what I planned to write and what comes out in the process, to squash the plans under the jackboots of the process. Creativity is not at all like following a blueprint, but like being the first explorer of a new land, or like tuning into alien radio. My favorite songwriter's peak album is described like this: "These songs forged themselves. They exploded out of us."
February 28. Continuing on woo-woo philosophy (thanks Yasmin), Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? And a subreddit thread on the same article.
Here's how I would make the argument: Really unlikely things have been happening lately, but they're not unlikely in arbitrary ways -- they're unlikely in ways that tell good stories. I mean, not only was the wrong card read on the biggest award of the night, but if you put any two other best picture nominees in the spots for apparent winner and actual winner, the story wouldn't be as good.
This is outside the range of science, because science requires repeated experiments, and fate happens but once. When real-world fate unfolds like fiction, we wonder if there is an unseen storyteller.
I don't think we're in a literal computer simulation. That's like cavemen thinking their gods made them out of clay because clay is the most advanced simulation technology they possess. Computers are just our best metaphor for reality creation tools beyond our imagination. I see it like this:
Philosophical idealism holds that mind is the fundamental reality, and matter is like a dream. Actual dreams can go anywhere fast because you're alone. When we're dreaming together, change is slowed by the need to form consensus, and reality appears so sticky that matter seems to exist independently of mind.
Not only that, our conscious minds are not the sole reality creators, and might even be more like an audience. I think the power gets stronger as you go deeper, first to your individual subconscious mind, and then to something like a collective unconscious, which might be like a great hidden city hosting agents and motives from outside humanity.
What do they want? Here's where people fall into black-and-white thinking, with perfectly evil master conspirators or a wise and benevolent God. I think the "gods" are somewhere between distracted scientists and playful children. My most reasonable guess, for the motive behind these spectacles of sudden reversal, is that we're being prepped for a time when ordinary life will be more surprising. And my funnest guess is that the dream is breaking up.
February 26, late. Tonight's Academy Award fiasco, in which the shoo-in feel-good white people movie was announced as best picture, and it turned out they read the wrong card and the serious black people movie was best picture... that's the weirdest thing that's happened in America since 9/11, even weirder than the Red Sox breaking their curse during a full lunar eclipse.
I'm not even going to try to explain it rationally. It's best understood on a subverbal intuitive level. And I don't think it was any kind of conspiracy, at least not by humans. It was the Trickster breaking through the screen and then vanishing into irreconcilable happenstance. (This is how I write when I'm high.)
Because Warren Beatty was at the center of it, appearing to be making a joke when he was genuinely puzzled by the anomalous card, I'm going to go watch his obscure 1965 surrealist movie, Mickey One, for more clues. [Update: what a terrible movie! Its theme, the artist's fear of fame, gives me nothing, but I learned that Warren Beatty was the dweeb James Dean, and that in the 60's it was a lot easier to pass off shit as art by making it weird.]
By the way, over the weekend I made a decision to change the tone of this blog. I've decided to go at least a few months without writing anything about politics or social philosophy. This is not a joke. That leaves technology, entertainment, drugs, psychology, music, personal stuff, and like tonight, vague hints about esoteric sub-politics.
February 24. Bunch o' links, starting with some rare good news: The Netherlands Keeps Closing Prisons Because It Doesn't Have Enough Prisoners.
Review of a new biography, Rasputin: full of ecstasy and fire. It turns out he wasn't that bad. His worst vice (like our president) was groping women. He was genuinely spiritual, he frequently tried to do good, and people hated him because he blurred lines between the classes, and drew attention to the corruption of the elite. Also, this reddit thread has a great colorized photo of Rasputin, and lyrical references to the song.
It's Reddit the rest of the way. This long comment attempts to define fascism, mostly based on the thinking of historian Robert Paxton, who defines it like this:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
In a thread asking what changes Millennials will oppose in their old age, Stanzin7 makes a set of predictions for how the world might change in the next 50 years. There will certainly be big things that nobody expected, but I haven't seen a more concise or reasonable list of stuff that we should see coming.
Finally, something important, a shockingly perceptive comment about why the Hobbit movies sucked and why they can't be fixed by editing. After the smashing success of Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson felt the need to make another Hollywood Bullshit Blockbuster, and he couldn't do that by actually adapting the book, in which a physically weak protagonist solves problems with stealth and wit. So he deeply rewrote the whole story to turn Thorin Oakenshield into Aragorn 2. My favorite part of the comment is about how Lord of the Rings was almost ruined in the same way:
I think that Peter shot the Aragorn half of TTT+ROTK in a very Aragorn-centric way just as a desperate backup in case this weird story of "two homoerotic leprechauns being led through a swamp by a CGI skeleton-man on a quest to throw away magic jewelry" didn't test well with audiences and he had to fall back on telling a more intelligible Disney-fantasy story of "a prince and his cool comic-relief sidekicks returning to the prince's kingdom, fighting awesome battles against a demon king and winning a princess's hand."
By the way, I love Peter Jackson's early stuff, especially his filthy-muppet masterpiece, Meet The Feebles.
February 20. From the subreddit (thanks iron dwarf), 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump. It's a well-written journey through the history and psychology of a new subculture of young outsider males, and their gradual entry into politics. A paragraph on Pepe the frog:
The grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog is an ideology, one which steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it. That is to say, it is what all the millions of forum-goers of 4chan met to commune about. It is, in other words, a value system, one reveling in deplorableness and being pridefully dispossessed. It is a culture of hopelessness, of knowing "the system is rigged". But instead of fight the response is flight, knowing you're trapped in your circumstances is cause to celebrate. For these young men, voting Trump is not a solution, but a new spiteful prank.
I think some of the arguments near the end are convoluted and implausible, but at least the author is asking an important question and seriously trying to answer it: Out of all the ways 4channers could have become political, why did they choose the cultural right?
Why not the economic left? In a world with all-time highs in weath inequality, when you're living in your parents' basement, why not try to use the government to take money from billionaires who don't need it, and give it to you and your friends so you can get your own apartments and better computers?
My answer hinges on a distinction between two kinds of hikikomori, a Japanese term for people who withdraw from society into worlds of imagination. I'm an aspiring hikikomori -- I want to withdraw even more, but society keeps pulling me back, making annoying demands on my attention. Right wing 4channers are involuntary hikikomori.
This is my version of the "banality of evil": the most harmful political movements are driven by the kind of person, in a movie, who would be the buddy character. But in a tragic failure of the social order, no one will take them as a buddy, until they reach a critical mass and some charismatic leader assembles an army of buddies to do his will.
My adversary is the economic right, because they withhold the money (or the dirt cheap housing and food) that I need to be free of the demands of a nightmare economy. But right wing 4channers want love. That's why they've chosen the cultural left as their adversary, because they sense that the cultural left is where the love is, and they feel (as I do about money) that the love is being offered on terms that are warped and unreasonable.