Crush

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.

Did 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.

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