#502

One problem, perhaps, to be identified with my cognition journey--my thought palazzio and its sweeping grounds--the subjective throughline of my consciousness and process-as-being-in-the-world-of-my-own-creation--my bullshit--is that I have perhaps understimated the scope and intensity of the background radiation, as it were, of other people's pathetic fucking resentment.

I mean, so what if you can't draw a decent picture and practice yields no fruit? So what if you can't write a story that anybody on this wide, cruel world will tell you is good and cool? So what if you can't seem to make anything happen with the opposite sex? This is a letter to anyone in this venn diagram, I guess.

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Since I was a baby, I have tried to draw good pictures. Now, I'm not some big-shot success story--I don't think I have ever achieved this once. Can't draw a real-looking thing, man. But, uh, so what? Can't draw good pictures, no, but because I never stopped drawing or at least never abandoned drawing, I can draw pictures that are real, that look like I drew them. They are me. 

Point was always just to draw pictures and to be myself, or the point was moot. 

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Maybe one might forget to draw and paint for a few years at a time sometimes, but a person gets busy, and also, a person might lose or destroy the majority of their possessions multiple times. Hard to paint a picture without paint, tools to apply it, and a viable field of action. Not impossible, but. Plus, had to write. On top of that, had to keep practicing and composing music. On top of that, had to have sex all the time with partners and amenable strangers. On top of that, a person has to work and eat and exercise and travel and get in and out of trouble and do nothing, and also read and play video games and do philosophy and look at the color of the sky. 

Life takes massive effort and all of your focus, so it never really sunk in, I guess, that while I was trying desperately to live it and have some fun even though the odds are kind of stacked against us--more reason to do it, of course--other people sat in their rooms not living theirs and literally hated me for it. 

But hark! The reason you weren't out there doing it yourself is not because the world was somehow set up to laud and reward me and screw you over a barrel. Trust me, it was set up to screw us all. Before puberty, I was reliably the weirdest freak kid who only was friends with the teacher or one or two of the other weird freak kids. Even after puberty, the main way I ever got any respect coming up was cussing hard and saying opinions without fear or mercy. It's the only way for a weirdo to get by with any dignity, in my experience.

The truth of the matter, the reason I am rather rudely using myself as a counterexample is simply that you gave up, and I am trying to show that never giving up is the whole entire battle. Life takes massive effort and all of your focus. It doesn't come to you with all its vital juices and condiments sizzling on the platter ready to eat. You have to live it.

If you wanted to draw a comic book, there was never any reason to do anything else. If instead of drawing shitty comic after shitty comic, enough shitty comics to build a house out of, you sat around hoping someone would invent something you could pay them for to draw in your stead, then you wasted your life and using the product is wasting more of your life. Because you didn't like drawing in the first place! Because drawing all those shitty comics is the whole point! Luckily, it is not too late. You can draw shitty comics literally any time on any surface, and you can start right this second. But if you don't want to draw comics, then why would you?

Comics of themselves are hardly the issue, of course. What you make is barely the question. Why you make what you make is closer to the mark, but it is possible to make good art while only wanting to get money and fame out of it--talent goes where talent goes. It's not a special dispensation from God that makes a person sanctified. It is possible to do what you are best at, be dazzlingly rewarded, want for nothing, and still be as unhappy as before, maybe worse. It is also possible to be all of those things and an asshole that is bad to be around. In fact, it's easy. So the things themselves--fleeting and transient states of matter, no more--are not the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is who and what you choose to make of yourself as a person on your own recognizance. The Main Issue is, this is your life and you are concentrating all of your imagination and longing and want on someone else's idea of someone else's life. You don't know what you actually like, or want, is the problem.

What does it mean when you tell me "I made this using AI."  What are you really saying?

"I made this using the outsourced labor provided by a computer program. To be precise, I gave a daemon instructions until I had something in front of me that I convinced myself was born in my mind's eye, but is actually a composite of other people's real achievements. Producing it required no skill or imagination on my part. I don't know what makes it good or bad. It has nothing to do with me. It is just a set of parentheses around itself which I am trying to use to communicate..."

What?

What are you trying to tell me or give me when you present me with such an artifact? Or, what is it that you expect from me? From the world?

For not caring enough to do something, for lacking passion and drive and love, you want...what? Some reward? And why do you want it? Who owes it to you and why? I'll tell you one thing. The reason most actual artists get mad about it is that it kind of feels like you are saying that you think everything that makes us human is only worth what you can get in exchange for what you seem to think is merely some kind of token.

And this is why you can't get laid, or make it last or mean anything, if you've managed to learn to trick or coerce people. The above question and answer might as well be tattooed on any potential lover, replacing the word "artist" with "potential lover". Pretty fucking straightforward, I think, as is the following. 

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The reason to live life, the reason to make art, and the reason to have sex are one thing: to discover something real.

So a product cannot help you with that. Stop thinking that. No one can help you with this, actually. You are already worth love, and do not need to produce any content that proves it.

*

Can't write? Can't draw? Not a skilled or experienced lover? No problem, actually. 

Believe the product of a product that makes products out of products represents some kind of solution to this state of affairs?

All you lack is tubes going into your body and a saline suspension to float in while the machine empire makes actual use of your radiant energy. 

Doesn't have to be like that. That scenario requires your sumbission, your acquiescence. The battery pod is a sci-fi Plato's Cave. You can get up and walk out any time.

*

This blog gets made for no money, not the tenth part of a doomed penny. Been putting it out since 2018, looks like; guess it doesn't look like I'm gonna stop. Back when I played music shows, by myself or with bands, it would be in backyards and basements for part of the take of a donations jar. I have never sold a piece of art or painting I made--gifts or garbage. Very, very rarely managed to get paid a little bit for a piece of writing or give one away for free; more usually, publication has cost me money. Put shitty books on amazon through their self-publishing thing, and these books did not sell basically any copies. That's for the best. Didn't really do the best job of making them, though it is nice to have shitty books to give away. Free can sometimes be a good enough price for the cost of the thing existing.

Who cares, man? Who gives a fuck? I like doing it. Feels like jazz. I think people that make lots of money from art are lucky, if you can call it that, and the caliber of their work often merits its share of recognition, but I also think most of them would be doing it for nothing, just like me, and also that there is so much more great art to see that is not famous, and that if great art is great then it is great whether it gets famous or not.

Just do whatever you want. I am giving you permission, if you need it. Try to find out what kind of person you really are through the singleminded pursuit of your passions, which you should indulge in and propagate as much as possible. It is almost certain that people will want to have sex with you for that and you'll figure that part out organically and find out it's pretty cool but you were kind of overreacting back then. Nothing is ever as good when you get it as when you were anticipating it; this is one of the sadder but more unbreakable laws of the universe. It's the surprises that you really end up savoring, and you cannot plan for those or force them to happen. That should be clear. 

Listen. You probably won't get famous or make very much money ever. That's just mathematically true. But the big joke is that it doesn't matter at all, because another big joke is that fame is miserable, except for the amenities. 

Point of life is only to do fun things you want to do so bad it's like you need to do them. That way, in this short existence, you might be able to have some fun, even though you will naturally endure hardships.

You are alive. That's the game. Try to have fun. Do things you like to do. Be a friend to yourself, which will involve trying to understand yourself and hear yourself--a lifelong and arduous process, but a worthy one.

Using the products of LLMs to pretend you are alive or skip to parts of being alive that you think are better (and you have no reason to think that, really) will not supply you with what you have been missing or are searching for. Nothing I can say will provide that either--I am telling you that this is a power you must find within yourself or not at all.

Within, friends. Within. A product is just a product. Life is art.

Problem is not that LLM's create inferior products and it is not that they could supplant artists with equivalent or superior products.

It is that they subvert the purpose of making art, which is only, only to live life.

Sex, by the way, can be thought of as an artistic collaboration. 

--JL

#442

Hey, have a post-1:00 a.m. post! That might have to happen consistently. It's a whole new life. We'll see, though. It is possible that I might reclaim part of the morning for writing. But then, it is morning.

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Well, maybe I would have written a post, if the blind cat hadn't chosen one of her times to go absolutely electrically bugshit for pets and scratches. In this mood, she requires the most exhaustive and complete full-body workover that a cat can get, rubs and smushes and scritches everywhere but her forelimbs down and knees down. In this condition she also allows me to clear her eye sockets of dried gunk, which lowers the chance she'll get a deep itch and harm her eye area scratching away madly. 

Now she's licking her paws and forelimbs and the rest of her own business, completing her process thereby.

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Hey, look at that, I have a cat. Cats sure are a thing.

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Friends, I point towards the completely farcical, absolutely criminal stupidity on display with these AI suggestions on search queries, and I allow myself to quote Ian Malcolm: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

This exaggeratedly gross and unseemly preening is a fool's joke I'll allow myself as a seque into saying my actual point, which is that literally everything Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick said was happening/would happen was and did and is right now, and far from giving a fuck, the web-fingered gnomes who get their money from greed-blind inhuman lunatics and their gasping, flopping acolytes work harder every day to do every single thing, to the letter, that these men strove to postulate would be absolutely disastrous, materially and spiritually, for our species and its societies. 

The improbably complete fuckups and pratfalls we are bearing witness to? The even crazier, more dangerous shit that I am reading that people are actually getting ready to try?

Literally Terminal Man out there. Literally Westworld. Literally A Scanner Darkly. Literally Jurassic Park. Literally The Minority Report. Or a fake/sanitized/extremely marketed version, which is equally scary because it culminates the same.

Fucks out here don't even have the excuse of not wanting to read a book, because they made good movies out of every single one of those and more besides.

Know motherfuckers watch movies. Sell them tickets these days! I can now attest, all kinds of people watch movies.

Anyway, hubris. The only cure is mortal agony. And too often in our benighted times, those whose hubris wracks our shared realities are never consequenced with so much as actual discomfort, let alone pain enough to humble or suffering enough to teach,

*

Well, that's my bad shit for the day. On a good note, people still go out and pay money to see Star Wars movies in a movie theater, even though they're fifty years old in some cases, and even though assholes say the ones that aren't are bad. It doesn't seem to stop people who love Star Wars, and I say that this is a good and a noble thing, a cause for hope; one small thing to celebrate.

Take your pick of them. They matter just as much as all the sad infiuriating bullshit that gets rammed down our throats.

Bears repeating, and I'm always pleased to type a little more: whatever gleam of light you can see in the great and indomitable darkness of this universe is real, and not just real. Those small joys, those everyday comforts, are worth everything. The reason we hope. The reason we pray. The reason we want to be okay and the way we get there. 

Hold the things that make you happy to your lips like a glowing coal. They are worth hoping for, worth protecting, and when you speak through them, you speak in the voice of love, the voice of God.

--JL

#32

Rap music! If you hate it, you may read something else today. If you don't, you may read on, but odds are good you'll prefer to go the same direction the haters did, just this once. Whatever your choice, my choice today is to jot down some thoughts about rap music. My thoughts being what they are, I cannot promise they will make sense to you.

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Just to get it out of the way, no reasonable person will deny that extremely foul and deplorable music exists in the genres which loosely collectivize as rap, and that this has always been true. It is ridiculous to assert that rap possesses a virtues over and above all other music, that liking rap enough, or performing the liking of rap to a specific standard, can in any way demonstrate some personal virtue, or that dislike for the music is an indelible mark of personal deficiency or prejudice.

It comes down to this: some people hate rap because they will never be able to understand it, some people hate it because it offends their aural aesthetics, some people hate it because it offends their visual aesthetics, some people hate it because they take legitimate issue with their perception of the content's imprimatur, and some people hate it because it is associated with Blackness and Black people, and they hate Blackness and Black people. This last can be entangled with the previous, but each can also stand alone, and they make vast swathes of difference, which is why it serves no one to pass moral judgments applied broadly and generally, based on the consumption or non-consumption of what in the end amounts to a product and a bill of goods. It is worth remembering that it is perfectly possible to love all rap without question and still hate Black people of every description and everybody else besides, and no one reasonable would assert that liking classical music betokens a specific love for Whiteness or White people, or a hatred for beats, or a belief in werewolves. Get fucking real.

For example, anecdote though it is: I went to school with a Black dude who loved nothing better that to sing showtunes and play the euphonium. That dude hated rap, and loved getting good grades and not drawing attention to himself unless he was playing Jean Valjean. His little brother loved rap, and loved to rap, and also to get into fights and vandalize shit and talk extremely nasty in order to shock and provoke. I went to class with one for eight years and captained the other on a wrestling team, and they each possessed admirable and annoying qualities and characteristics, each had their own complete self and world outlook, each was, in short, a dude--each dude as Black as the other, 'cause they were brothers. Get the drift? 

Anyway, my favorite rap albums are by Aesop Rock, but my favorite rap songs are mostly by Busdriver. I like Eminem  and Outkast, also. The Historian Himself, Mos Def,  Kanye, Angel Haze, Talib Kweli, Method Man & Redman, Lil Wayne, Lil Kim, Dark Time Sunshine, Hail Mary Mallon, some others. Those are the main ones just off the top of my head, my preferred rap ensemble.

I didn't care for Kendrick Lamar until I saw some of the music videos, which is not in his favor. I heard everything he made right up to 2017 without ever seeing what the guy even looked like, and I thought it was okay, not great. Now I've seen the videos and concede that together with the music they are very awesome and important, but have not become convinced that he is an amazing rapper or that his songs are great. I like for music to get me off all by itself. Seems like a cool dude, though, and you can't deny he came from circumstances and made an honest name on a lively pen hand and an active mind.

What the hell is the point of Drake? I do not get the Drake thing. I knew a poet who loved Drake more than anybody. Try as I might, I could not understand, and he marshaled a great many words in an effort to clarify. 

Snoop Dogg's kind of an outside case. I like his stuff, but it's like the dude has a cartoon self superimposed over his actual real body at all times, and he can change the cartoons at will. I like a lot of his stuff, and a lot of his stuff is, well, I dunno; but the main thing is that it's an astonishing variety of different stuff. I don't know if this betrays a mercurial baseness of character, or mastery of self and the complete breadth of the modern culture on the level of Da Vinci. Is he a superactive chameleon with no true core to his being, or among the most authentic, free-spirited men alive? The only thing that is ironclad is that I am always interested, if sometimes repulsed, by what Snoop is up to. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. Tell me that isn't the name of a titan. A titan who happens to be in the celebrity wing of the WWE hall of fame, according to Wikipedia. Anybody see The Tenants?

André the Giant, André 3000, André Agassi, or André Holland? This is one of the litmus tests of personality, the ones that are basically impossible to cheat on.

I like woodwinds and choirs and piano sounds a lot in rap music. I like to hear classical music with tight, skittery beats or afrobeats underneath. I like creative lyrics and interesting thoughts, but I am not above some angry, pointless, hideously gross and fucked-up shit. You can find all kinds of stuff out there, in all manner of modulations, and I endorse the looking.

I've worked in kitchens a lot over the past fifteen years, and have heard a metric fuck-ton of rap over the course of those hours. Many were filled with the repetitive knell of the radio's numbing neutered bullshit, but a golden few have been touched by the grace of true fire off the dome on top of that loud wild. Rap music can really grind down your patience--about the fifty millionth thousandth five hundred and fifty hundredth time Stand Up (most Ludacris, honestly) comes on, sure, you'll want to fucking shove your head in a deep fryer, or simply take a heavy cleaver and chop off your left hand at the wrist just to drown the song in the screams of your workmates. But there are also the other moments, where you hear an idea you've never even thought of before expressed in a way you never believed an idea could be expressed, and your whole life will stop for a moment, the words inscribing themselves in crackling lightning across the surface of your soul, the grin working itself across your face so ferocious it's like the muscles in your face have never truly grinned before. Moments that turn the whole world inside out and blast a new, raw, and powerful attitude into the center of your guts. I would stomach all the bullshit twice over again for the weight of that gold in my pocket.

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Okay, I'm bored of this. More rap thoughts someday, whenever I want, perhaps never.


--JL