JFC. It’s hard to tell who’s a bigger twat, Karoline Leavitt or Steven Cheung.
The Mean Girl Division of the White House communications office is some next-level shit. Good thing Vinnie Barbarino isn’t in the press corps. Dude wouldn’t last two rounds with these bitches.
The body may be at rest, but the mind wanders as it will.
Two songs have been getting heavy play on my cranial jukebox: “Katmandu,” by Bob Seger, and “Bodhisattva,” from Steely Dan.
The first, from 1975, ostensibly about salvation via relocation, is actually what Seger described as “an exasperated song” written near the end of a decade-long stretch “where I was going nowhere fast. … I still had some of that defeatist mentality and you can hear it in there.”
The second is a 1973 critique of cookie-cutter spiritualism and its related divestiture of worldly goods that co-writer Donald Fagen once summarized as: “Lure of East. Hubris of hippies. Quick fix.”
Thomas McGuane was scouting that territory even earlier, in his 1971 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano,” in which the peripatetic Nick Payne’s father tells his wayward son: “I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. … My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure.”
That these musical and literary ingredients are suddenly bubbling to the top of my consciousness, such as it is, may be a consequence of having just finished McGuane’s latest story collection, “A Wooded Shore,” in which a selection of the damned find themselves adrift in various fashions and locations, Dante’s Sea of Excrement being among the hot spots. “I’m a realist, you see,” says that particular voyager.
“Sure rings a bell these days,” as McGuane told The New York Times. On the mark as usual, Tommy me boyo.
Or perhaps it’s that I’m rocking a streak of vivid dreams about bicycling in outlandish circumstances, perhaps as a reaction to getting myself locked into a small selection of predictable 20-milers, your basic hamster-wheel loops, for no good reason that I can think of beyond sloth and convenience. An assist from Rand McNally is not required for this sort of tour de meh. Trying to break the chain I recently took two rarely ridden bikes on short outings, one of them involving a few miles of singletrack I hadn’t ridden since January. I dabbed frequently and shamelessly.
I suppose it could just be that fall is upon us, and with it our local elections and the fabled “fall back,” slated for Sunday, Nov. 2. Oh, good, an extra hour of nightmares.
When swimming the Sea of Excrement, I recommend the backstroke.
I’m a late adopter. Hardware, software, pants in autumn.
Herself cracked this morning and pulled on the long johns — plus long sleeves, socks, and a vest — but not me. No, sir.
The uniform of the day until further notice remains Columbia shorts from the previous millennium, a mildly pilled Paddygucci T-shirt, and some battered old Tevas. Shucks, I even went outdoors in that kit to water the shrubs.
Not for long, mind you. But still. It keeps the blood flowing briskly and the neighbors at a comfortable distance.
“Don’t get too close, now. You might catch whatever it is he has.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla, meanwhile, welcomes the advent of cooler weather. That means the Return of the Bedcave, a passive-solar getaway that’s like a day at the beach without the sand in your undercarriage. It’s the cat’s meow, if you will.
A spot of seasonal weather has rumbled into town, and thus the cycling is contraindicated for the moment. The gods are bowling up there and though I have three bikes with fenders, I’m not exactly eager to deploy them.
My last few outings have been on the coolish side, but dry. Arm and knee warmers have become part of the uniform of the day. Haven’t gone to tights, tuque, and full-finger gloves yet, but I can see that gloomy country from here.
It’s fair, as Thomas McGuane has taught us. (He has a new book out, in case you’re interested.) The fall to date has been spectacular, and as we know, anybody who chooses to live in a desert shouldn’t bitch about getting free water from the sky.
Unless you’re homeless and using an arroyo to hide your proud-ofs from the Chamber of Commerce street-sweepers. That’s a free ticket for a fast trip to the Rio, and it’s hard to hang ten on a shopping cart. Not exactly a day at the beach, as the fella says.
Speaking of street people, letting that orange mold run wild in the East Wing of the White House is like hiring a Central Avenue hooker to give a makeover tutorial to your teenage daughter. Or maybe it’s more like letting a roach design its own motel.
This we have money for. Head Start and food assistance, not so much. Any of you kids out there who want a bite to eat and someone to watch over you should probably sign on with the War Department, start sinking boats in a bigger bathtub.
Jesus H. Christ. Did the Heritage Foundation rewrite all the civics books when I wasn’t paying attention? Have the three branches of government become the Surprise Party Department, the Practical Joke Department, and the Fairy Godmother Department?*
If so, I wish the last would put down her knitting and do something nice for a change.
* A tip of the old war bonnet goes out to Major John Hay Beith, a.k.a. Ian Hay, via Robert A. Heinlein’s “Glory Road.”
I shouldn’t do any deep reading on a single cup of joe at stupid-thirty on a Tuesday.
Then again, maybe I should do it more often. I might be inspired to compose a new Zen text: “Empty Stomach, Empty Mind.”
If artificial intelligence hasn’t already beaten me to it.
Thus we arrive via the usual scenic route at the first item that got my attention this morning: “A Tool That Crushes Creativity,” by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who fears that generative A.I. slop, once a toxic byproduct of our latest technological Great Leap Forward, has become the shit sandwich du jour.
The second, also from The Atlantic, was “What the Founders Would Say Now,” Fintan O’Toole’s speculation about how the deep thinkers who got our national party started might be surprised that the Republic — as stove-up, surly, and senile as we perceive it to be today — survives at all.
That first one may have been more depressing than the second. The Republic has been in a state of collapse ever since I first took note of it. Maybe even longer. America’s very own Leaning Tower, possibly of pizza, almost certainly from Domino’s. We knew it was wrong, but we ate it anyway.
But creativity — an appeal to hearts and minds with words, sounds, and images — freed me to sing for my supper, the tab paid by all the poor suckers who actually had to work for a living. And now Warzel says that, like made-in-China Marxists, my tools have risen up against me.
Writes Warzel:
The people selling these tools are doing so with a powerful narrative: Generative AI supposedly supercharges all that it touches, democratizing creativity, eliminating friction, increasing productivity, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. … [But] the loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. … It is how we make meaning and move through the world.
I have not consciously employed any form of A.I. as I move through the world, making meaning. If I sniff its spoor in an online search, I tiptoe gingerly around it, trying not to get any on my shoes. WordPress offers a “Generate with A.I.” option when inserting images in a post, but I mostly generate my own images.
Or do I?
I’ve been a scribbler for as long as I can remember, and probably longer. Created my images in crayon on Big Chief tablets; in pencil, pen and ink on Bristol board, augmented with Zip-A-Tone; using Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s Preview; whatever was handy and could enhance my limited skillset.
“Enhance,” you say? Yup. The legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant tipped me to the Zip-A-Tone crosshatching shortcut when I interviewed him in the late Seventies for the Gazette. And I discovered the value of Photoshop a couple decades later when the bicycle magazines I worked for decided they wanted my cartoons in digital form, and in color, too.
I was no artist, as you probably already know. I tried using colored pencils and pens after first penciling an initial sketch and then inking it in. But when I fucked up — as I did, frequently — I had to start over from scratch, penciling and then inking and finally risking everything yet again on the whim of a Prismacolor Premier or Sharpie in my pig-ig’n’ant fingers. Digitizing the original black-and-white ’toons and coloring them in Photoshop let me magically undo what I had done and keep on keepin’ on.
It was so much easier. Frictionless, you might say.
I’ve been writing nearly as long, since George Gladney at the Colorado Springs Sun suggested I start keeping a journal back in 1974. Started with a Bic pen and a Vernon Royal composition book, then shifted to manual typewriter when I became a sure’nough reporter like Gladney, and finally went digital when the newspapers did.
If spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and autocorrection had been available I might have used them, but back then we had angry editors for that sort of thing, and it was either learn or leave. I had bills to pay, so I learned. When I became an angry editor myself word-processing software had made everyone a writer, or so they thought. The software processed their words and I processed what the software shat out.
And yet some people wondered why I was angry.
Well, soon I had company.
I was a terrible photographer and filmmaker when cameras still used film. I had something of an eye — woefully uneducated, in need of vision correction, yet basically operational — but there were so many aspects of the craft to learn if I really wanted to make the magic happen.
Happily for me — and unhappily for pro shooters — digital cameras came along, followed by phone cameras. And before you could say “Ansel Adams” three times fast even I could make an image for a blog post on the cookie-cutter, dot-com version of WordPress (shout-out to the folks at Automattic), with a little help (OK, sometimes a lot) from software (Photoshop early on, and now Apple’s Preview).
I never thought I was a photographer, but plenty of other people thought they were, including one middle-management type who emailed a lame phone-camera snap of a sprint and expected us to use that as “art” for an online race report.
Video got a whole lot easier about the same time, for the same reasons, and I actually made a little money off that, using GoPros and iMovie to assemble bike-review shorts for Adventure Cyclist. Occasionally, and strictly for laughs, I called myself Quentin Ferrentino (h/t to the Grimy Handshake). Meanwhile, podcasting let me walk a few squeaky klicks in the Firesign Theatre’s inflatable clown shoes, with an assist from Zoom, GarageBand, Auphonic, and Libsyn.
So am I a photographer? A moviemaker? A spoken-word artist? Is the driver a car?
The only legit titles I can claim are writer and cartoonist, I think. I can write or draw with a Bic pen on a blank sheet of paper and then staple that shit to a telephone pole if I want to. Less effort than Ben Franklin put into his Pennsylvania Gazette. Nothing between me and you but a little time and sweat equity.
A.I. won’t help me make it, and Google probably won’t help you find it.
But at least we’d know we made the effort while we wait to see whether these new tools become trusted advisers instead of questionable servants — or worse, malevolent masters. That teetering Republic ain’t gonna prop itself up.
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