Crush June 9, 2024June 10, 2024 Hello! I’m still here. What happened? May is gone? We’re well into June? At any rate, there was too much rain, and some late snow (that trapped people on the Bozeman pass for hours), carpal tunnel surgery on my left wrist, and a lingering respiratory/sleeping sickness that keeps testing negative for Covid but who knows what it is, and next week I’m having carpal tunnel on the other wrist. Read moreLivingSmall is Getting DirtyDid I mention the rain? Many apologies for neglecting the newsletter. You’ve all been so supportive over the past couple of years, and I’d like to echo David Lebovitz, who noted in his latest newsletter that: It’s nice to be able to share things without being subject to the whims of search engines and social media algorithms (and their overlords), which keep changing and getting more vexing. You get the newsletter sent right to your Inbox, so it’s just between you and me. So, as always, thank you for subscribing, and if you’d like to become a paid subscriber, especially as my day job is sunsetting sometime toward the end of summer, at which point I’ll be launched out into “retirement” to try to revive my dormant literary career, well, that would be much appreciated. It’s going to be exciting to finally have time, time to really read and write and think, but as someone who has had steady jobs since I was 14, well, it’s a little scary. And now, let’s talk about the latest thing that’s got me thinking, again, about materiality. Crush When I try to describe this newsletter project, people often ask: what do you mean by materiality? It’s one of those topics I’ve been thinking about for so many decades that I forget that other people perhaps do not walk around all day doing the same. And now, Apple has helpfully given me an easy way to describe materiality. Apple dropped an ad last month called “Crush”, and then hastily killed it when outrage ensued. The ad starts with what looks like a studio — a piano, an old arcade game, lots of paints and oil pastels and a drawing board, a metronome, a trumpet, a TV showing peppy rabbit cartoons, and slowly, inexorably, the giant plate comes down, slowly bending, then breaking, then crushing — crushing — often in excruciating slow motion, all the haptic, analog tools and instruments with which creative people play, and make, and do. Finally, the plate gets to a tiny pyramid of rubber faces, one rolls off the pile, to the edge where it too is slowly mashed, but not before it’s eyeballs pop out. ITS EYEBALLS POP OUT. And then the stupid plate lifts, while a girl’s voice tells us that the new iPad is the — thinnest — one ever. THIN? As though THAT’s the quality that’s most important to creative people? So many of us who responded, immediately, and loudly, and with horror to that ad are creatives whose jobs are absolutely in danger from the whole AI hype cycle of nonsense that the techbros have fallen for. If I wasn’t about to leave my job (or is the job leaving me?), I’d be really freaked out. Apple’s disingenuous response didn’t help, their false sense of surprise that people were horrified. Oh really? People thought this was terrible? Why? We didn’t mean it that way? Of course, the ad wasn’t aimed at creative people. Like so much of the AI hype bubble, the ad was aimed at people who want to think they’re creative, but who are primarily consumers. So much of AI is being hyped as a kind of Find Your Own Adventure — without having to develop any skills through practice, which is boring and hard, you’ll be able to choose from a menu of options, dial up a visual image, or a story, or a movie. You’ll be able to have it your way! The great dream of consumerism, a seemingly-endless supply of options from which you can choose. All of creative life, crushed down into a thin 6 x 9 tablet. With the eyeballs popping out. Art is Practice I had two friends stop by last week, both artists, one I went to college with and one I knew in my early days here in Livingston. It was such a relief because all the talk was about what we’re making, or want to make, or are trying to make. Maybe it’s middle age, maybe it’s the gentrification of Livingston, with the attendant Gentrification of the Mind that comes along as housing and landscaping and buildings and businesses go under the crush plate of homogenization that comes when bourgeois values take over. So to talk to two men I love about things that matter was such a joy. So while Jay and I talked about minimialism and the art he’s making from found pieces of metal, and Robert and I talked about the ephemeral printmaking he did all through the pandemic, with weeds from the garden, soaked in ink, mostly we talked about how hard we worked to find spaces we can afford where our expenses are low so we can, finally, spend our time making. Making with the exact types of analog, haptic, creative tools that that Apple ad crushed into oblivion. This nightmare vision from the tech world, a vision that isn’t about creating anything, it’s simply about consuming felt even more horrific in light of the creative company I’ve been in these past couple of weeks. It’s especially rich in this time of transition at my day job, where I have managers who are bullish on AI in ways that are not going to pan out like they hope. All of us out here, especially those of us in creative professions — who are in the middle of having our jobs replaced by “AI”, an AI that’s not actually intelligent, and that can’t actually create anything, but simply acts like a giant blender of plagiarism — we all got the message loud and clear from that Apple ad. We knew exactly who was being crushed. Not just the things with which we do our work, the things with which we engage on a daily basis to try to express something fundamental about the world, not just the tools of our trades, but our very selves. Our eyeballs popping out. Down to Earth All this sent me back to my beloved Bruno Latour, the great French theorist of modernism and the anthropocene. His little book, Down to Earth, published in the early part of the Trump administration, set out to explain to those of us blindsided by that event what the cultural forces at work were that had brought us to that place. Latour argues that the violence of these culture wars is not irrational. He outlines the ways in which, faced with the looming threat of climate change, the worlds elites have deliberately turned away from the idea that the rising tide can lift all boats, indeed, they’ve rejected the notion altogether that there is one common tide, that there is a common fate. As capitalism has shifted to globalization, Latour points out that “what had to be abandoned, in order to modernize, was the Local.” Even here, in Montana, our Local is being destroyed by gentrification, by people who live here part time, by people for whom this is just one of several homes, by people who have parachuted in to buy up the big ranches, who have aggressively posted their property lines, who no longer allow public access. While I find Latour’s analysis of the brutality of the forces of global capitalism that have brought us to this predicament compelling, it’s his concept of the Terrestrial that gives me a tiny bit of hope. I mean, there has to be some way to live in this broken world. Latour, who hailed from the wine family, understood terroir and his concept of the Terrestrial seems to stem from a winegrower’s relationship with land, one that goes back generations. “There is nothing more innovative, nothing more present,” he notes, “nothing less rustic and rural, nothing more creative, nothing more contemporary than to negotiate landing on some ground.” This was the impulse that drove me here from California, from a townhouse development perched in the hills above the San Francisco Bay, a development that I could see even then was about to be swallowed by more townhouses, on more cul de sacs, spreading across the East Bay hills. I fled. I wanted a place. I wanted some ground on which to land. The Terrestrial, Latour argues, differs from the Local by containing two contradictory impulses: “attaching oneself to the soil on the one hand and, becoming attached to the world on the other.” It’s a way of grounding oneself while not building a barricade, a bunker. He then borrows the term worlding from Donna Haraway, and continues: “the Terrestrial is bound to the earth and to land, but it is also a way of worlding in that it aligns with no borders, transcends all identities.” By gerundizing the noun world, Haraway makes active that which has been considered a passive, inert repository of commodities. For years I’ve had a quote from her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, tacked to the board above my desk: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.” It matters what matter we crush matter with. What Apple — and by extension the tech universe in which that ad got proposed, and storyboarded, and went through meeting after meeting in which details were approved — what they’re still trying to make happen is a world in which nothing happens out here, in the material world, but only happens in there, in their corporatized digital world where “content” is stored “in the cloud.” Where all our actions and interactions are mediated, recorded, and for the moment at least, uploaded into the LLMs that form the raw material from which “AI” plucks, cuts, spins and reconstructs “content.” In which it constructs a simulacrum of creative work, by stealing work done by creative people. The Creative Terrestrial And this, I think, is the reason I keep thinking and writing about materiality. I went to grad school during a particularly unfortunate moment in which beauty, and especially the beauty of the world, was not considered a fit subject for serious literature. It was a moment in which language games, games that foregrounded a specific theory of language that proposed there was no organic relationship between words and what they mean, this was the fit subject for literature. Understandably, I was not a good fit for that moment, and was ill for several years (with a low-grade illness that reminds me very much of the one we’ve both been fighting this past month). My material body rejected the situation I was in. Once I left, I got well again. And I have spent the past 25 years thinking about how to shore up a material home for myself that will provide a Terrestrial space with which I can experiment with and engage with the world. My practices in this space have been writing, but also knitting and sewing and growing things in my backyard. I grow food but I also grow flowers. That I’ve finally found a spot where the Harrison’s yellow roses are happy, that they are finally blooming in my perennial bed, that I’m going to get my moment this late spring of that once-a-season spray of glorious yellow flowers – that is as satisfying to me as finally wrestling this essay, or the current chapter I’m working on, into some sort of order. I think visual artists are better than we writers at thinking this way. Writers tend to only value publication – you see it in the way I’m not even considered a writer here in town anymore, because it’s been so long since I’ve had a book. That I’ve made a living putting words on pages, that I’ve been publishing essays and blogs and newsletters for 20 years – unlike the world of visual art where practice is considered a valuable thing in and of itself — writers still just count pages, and publications, and objects. So one reason I’m so interested in exploring and talking about materiality is that it forms the basis of my practice, one that has been a 20 year project of building a holistic system, a life in which I can express my creativity in just about everything I do. As my painter friend Robert who came to visit this week once said to me years ago, when he quit one of those shitty food service jobs of the sort that we’ve all worked to make ends meet: “You know they just didn’t understand. It’s not like I’m just an artist when I’m painting. I’m an artist in everything I do.” So I think one of the reasons this Apple ad has been haunting me, aside from the fact that I’ve been working in tech for all these years and I’m about to get out, is that it feels very much like the experience of being an artist these last couple of decades. I was just listening to an interview with Max Porter, and he was discussing the uncanny. We’re learning more and more about the human brain all the time, and about the how we only use this tiny proportion of those brains. We’ve been told that magic doesn’t exist that the uncanny doesn’t exist that the imagination is only useful if it’s put in the service of more technological development nonsense. Who needs actual musical instruments? Or oil pastels? Or cans of paint? Or a metronome? Who needs to noodle around and play and make things as a means of accessing those parts of our brains that do not exist to be monetized, globalized, and harnessed to the great productivity optimization hamster wheel on which so many of us live? One of the reasons people reacted so strongly and so immediately and so negatively to that ad is that it’s really enacting this bind we’ve all been in. Where none of the stuff we do is given any credence or value and it’s all being crushed into some stupid little glass tablet by the inexorable forces of capital. Whoever put the little the little eyeball popping faces in the ad was a genius. I like to think that that was someone making a cry for help from within the machine. Sending a signal out to the world that that no this is not progress. This is coming to crush us all. Talking to both of my artist friends this week, remembering how when we came into our twenties, there were places where you could still find a shitty cheap apartments, and because of that, you could find other creative people, and we were all running around doing stuff together. You didn’t need to get a big job because none of us were buried under this crushing burden of student loans. We needed enough to live on, but in the intervening decades, we’ve drowned the generations behind us in debt, the kind of debt that means they’ll never get out from under it, the kind of debt that means they have to find corporate jobs, and stay in them. We’ve done it all to serve this idea that the only thing anyone should be interested in doing is getting rich. And it’s just crushing. It’s crushing us all. And it’s really crushing our children Can we push back? I don’t know. I take heart in the Kids These Days and their love of analog: books, CDs, vinyl, making things on paper, taking photos with film cameras. I’d like to hope that the collapse of the university system could lead us back to better, cheaper, less credentialized ways of learning and knowing (my pet project is encouraging people to take over dead malls and build art colleges, liberal arts colleges. Think of the sculpture you could do in a dead JC Penny). I have no answers. I think we’re living in very dark times, times that are about to get much harder as the climate cracks apart the systems on which we rely. And because I have no answers, I’m just hunkering down here in the backyard of the house I’ve paid off, with my gooseberry bushes and vegetable garden and chickens. With my solar panels so I can afford heat as an old lady. I’m just hunkering down, and trying to make things. I’m trying to make things, and send them out into the world. I hope you too are making things, and sending them out in the world. Let’s send them all to each other.
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