Bought my ticket online. Entered the digital portal that promises entry to the otherworld portal for 25 euros (23 if you set up an account). This is a business. In some ways it’s the business that keeps Berlin pumping. The parties are the head of the business and the tentacles are multiple; fetish clothes; party drugs; fizzy bottles of yerba mate; fanny packs filled with extra socks, ketamine nose spray and protein bars; black shit kicker boots to withstand floors wet with party gravy; Ubers and Bolts to get to the venue, food trucks selling tacos and vegan borscht, security guards, coat check crew, bartenders, and DJs that play 4 hour sets on multiple floors.

Went to bed Friday night around 11, set the alarm for 7:13. Ordered a Bolt because otherwise I would have chickened out. It’s my first party. I’m 42. I am wearing black oxfords, tights, a mall-bought bikini with slits on the side and a cropped red-mesh tank that I found on my street in a give away box thinking only of future halloweens. Over the whole getup, I’ve got on my trusty ochre puffer coat. Knee length and warm, providing cover.

I get in the Bolt and we drive for 30 minutes and 33 euros to Schoeneweide. It feels like I’m headed to the airport instead of a party. Reminds me of the business trips of my past, where I’m in a cab, full makeup, hair blown out, surrounded by the scent of my own perfume and the musk of the cab. The only difference is I didn’t drink any coffee this morning. I thought it might not work well with ecstasy. My stomach is empty.  My ears are filled with Karina Longworth talking about Richard Gere in American Gigolo. I’m on my way to a party because I need release and adventure and to be less like me for a while.

The driver pulls over near a German middle class shopping plaza. This is where they buy their appliances, their foldout couches, their garden furniture. Outside it’s gray and steadily drizzling. I follow some young people to the warehouse around the corner. They let me know I’m in the right place. I’m still fearful that I won’t be let in because of my clothes or the wrong ticket or some as yet undetermined mishap.

There are guards outside chatting, sitting on bar stools. They say “ticket?” and I show them my phone. They  nod and let me through. Inside the first chamber, another guard is leaning her head back against the wall with her eyes closed. I don’t want to wake her. I walk to a check-in desk and show my ticket to another guard. He laughs at his sleeping partner, says “Saskia…Saskia…Saskia” and she finally wakes up. I walk back over to her. She gives me a wrist band, tapes stickers over the camera on my phone, and checks my bag and body for contraband. Her check is thorough. She searches every compartment of my fanny pack. Where do people hide drugs? In their shoes? In their underwear? What happens if they find drugs? It’s a place for drugs but only the drugs you can sneak in.

In the next room there’s a coat check big enough for a symphony hall. Rows and rows carefully marked with numbers. It’s a long dark room that echoes thumping music from beyond. People are disrobing on long benches in front of the coat check. They peel off sweatpants to reveal intricate leather harnesses. Chains circling naked breasts and woven through nipple rings. Net bodysuits with nothing underneath. The way skin oozes through the netted holes reminds me of ham. Ultra fat bodies and ultra thin bodies. Everybody reduced to their most risky, frisky, essential self. It’s touching. I get choked up.

I strip down to my bikini and red mesh top. I leave my tights on and as I’m entering the dance floor, a woman kindly suggests I don’t wear tights. “You don’t have to but it’s so hot in there.” I take off my tights but worry about my bare feet swelling and straining in my shoes.

Julie told me to text her when I was inside. I don’t have to because I find her right away on the dance floor. An auspicious beginning. She introduces me to Nick and Cody. I ask her if she’s been up all night and she says no way. “I got a good night’s sleep and Scott and I did a stretching routine to prepare for today.” Julie is dressed in her Jane Fonda workout best. A silver bodysuit with that 80s silhouette–cut higher than high on the sides. She’s got a printed scarf tied around her head. Its long tail swings when she thrusts.

It’s Saturday at 8:30 in the morning and I just want to forget about time. Completely forget about the world and melt into someplace else. Some place that is built from my body ecstatically responding to sound and motion. But instead I have to poop. I have to poop because this is my poop time. My body, which I have a perfunctory relationship with, at best, is making its needs clear to me. Now I will have to shit in the bathroom at a club that has been going since Friday at midnight.

Julie asks me if I want to take my pill. I say yes! with a smile.

We walk through the space together toward the bathrooms. Berlin’s gritty warehouse aesthetic is on display. Less is more. All architectural decay is visible and takes on spiritual significance. Exposed pipes are stained glass windows. Low and lumpy black couches are the pews. The DJ cage is the pulpit. Drugs are the sacrament and the bathrooms are the hell you have to pass through to get them.

I took ecstasy and then I pooped over an unlidded toilet bowl filled with piss and toilet paper. The floors were wet with charcoal soot. Evil is a fetish too.

Dance session 1:

Techno is a physical presence. As stupid as it is smart. Demanding restriction and release, restriction and release, in dizzying sequence. The DJ is a general. The DJ is a structural engineer.  I’m a novice attempting to dance.

What do I want? Beat rises.Where is my body? Beat does a loop-d-loop. I look at other bodies and try to feel my own. I am convinced this is the key to unlocking something in me. I am convinced I need this, and I almost know what this is. The bass falls out. My hands weave like I’m at the Dead. How do you know when you feel ecstasy? Bass comes back and everyone claps, hoots. I used to know. I used to be able to get there. I’m not there now. I should be there now.

The drugs aren’t strong enough. There’s still too much me here.

Break 1:

This break room is dim with a dim bar. Groups of people are gathered on leather benches. The room has the proportions of an airport lounge. When I sit down, I become very aware of the bareness of my ass on something so unhygienic. I remember my big red granny panties are in my fanny pack. I thought maybe I’d be too shy to wear the bikini bottom, so I discreetly packed a full coverage option. And now I put them over my bikini and feel like a pro fanny-packer with my big girl red diaper. Julie, Nick and Cody pull out cigarettes. Sven wants to roll a joint but he only has weed. Nick only has tobacco so it’s a perfect match. “Peanut butter and Jelly,” I say for some reason when I see this exchange. Sven and Nick are German so they don’t get this reference. It’s an American stereotype, but an outdated one. It ages me to mention it, I suppose. I get into it anyway. “It’s got to be berry jam. You can’t mix peanut butter with apricot or orange marmalade.” Sven nods seriously. We pass the joint and I yearn for it. My favorite drug. My old friend. Cody says, “grape is the classic choice though.”

Behind us there are three guys that came together. They look approachable so I approach them. I tell Julie, “I’m gonna tell that guy how beautiful his face is.” There’s a uniform for nudity all around me. This room is a fashion salon. In this room I learn chains can be delicate. Craftsmanship is apparent. Beautiful men and women are easy to spot. This environment doesn’t erase that but it feels less important and can be matched by style, confidence and really owning your body.

They are from Turkey. Two are studying here. One, a master’s in Supply Chain Logistics. The other, a PHD in computer science. The most beautiful, Tolga, lives in Istanbul and is just visiting. Tolga’s an elegant alien in black mesh with a harness underneath. His beauty is one I’ve always been drawn to. Haunted eyes that are heavy and dark. Pale and fine boned, with a strong masculine jaw. I tell him he looks like the football player, Mesut Ozil and that I’ve always had a crush on him. I say this because I know people make fun of Ozil for being strange looking.

It occurs to me as I write this that I was probably peaking at this moment. I used up my serotonin rush on peanut butter talk, people watching, and a pretty face.

Dance session 2:

I take another half a pill. So now I’ve taken a full dose of MDMA. My earplugs are in. I close my eyes. This is not an exercise class. This is a party. How will I ever get back into this thump thump thump? I have to tune into the thump thump thump. I shouldn’t use words like have to. There’s no instruction manual but there is a wardrobe. Breasts jiggle but everything else is taut, restrained. Cody and Nick lock into each other when they dance. They feed off each other. It’s not fake and it’s wild to watch. A long rhythmic game of mirroring. I wake up in my body for a second: my head is hanging over my chest. My arms are slack and I am shaking like an old Boogeyman. I’m not dancing. This doesn’t feel like dancing. My energy is a bummer to me and I’m worried it’s affecting the people around me. Remember Jesus Jones? Remember that song Right Here, Right Now? Well it’s in my head. There is no other place I wanna be. Right Here, Right now. Watching the woorrld wake up from history. I guess things could be  a lot worse but this is not great.

Coat Check break

Julie says Scott is here. Scott is Julie’s boyfriend. They live together. They stretch together. They dance together. They do drugs together. They met in a master’s program for sustainable finance. Scott is very tall and has no ass at all. I’ve met him before but we’ve never talked. He sort of reminds me of Chevy Chase at first sight. Chevy Chase looking like a big lanky baby in his tiny leather shorts and string of pearls.

We’re in front of the coat check again. People around us are shedding layers. A hairy italian with a pan-like body does warm up walks in 5 inch heel boots. Others are redressing, adding street clothes over their play clothes. Spent faces, sweaty hair tucked under black hoodies. Some of our gang are sharing protein bars from their fanny packs. We pass water around. Scott is stretching ostentatiously. He looks like a dork, limbering up before the big dance. Sven shares a date hazelnut cocoa protein bar with me. I don’t feel like eating but I assume I should probably eat. Sven says, “I would like to dance in the cage if it wasn’t so tight. I’m always bumping into it and I get blue spots the next days.”

I nod supportively. Support and sharing is a big part of the vibe.

“The cage is too tight but if it wasn’t tight, it wouldn’t be a cage. The edges are sharp. Me, I would like it when the cage is more safe.”

Cody, another squabbling parishioner, says the holes are too small to stick your fingers through. Mimes hanging from a chain.

Dance session 3 on the small floor:

Pleasure seeking missiles. All around me European pleasure seeking missiles, thriving in their environment. Seekers finding what they seek. Finding bulging groins, free flapping tits, tightly harnessed tits. Pupils are dilated. Everything closed is now open. Gaping open, indiscriminately catching whatever rains down, in, and through. The bad and the good. The evil and the ecstatic. The sound and the vibration. I’m so pissed I’m outside looking in. My mind is writing. Drugs and health food. Better living through chemistry. Athletic endurance required. History of drug use required. Understanding of one’s metabolism, mood, required to motivate the body in motion.

Final break:

Julie took something that is like acid but not acid. It lasts a few hours. Julie regrets taking it. She says it’s good for colorful places. Outside summer raves. She says this environment is too dark and minimal and it’s messing with her. Scott is rubbing her thighs. Julie says, He yearns for thighs.

Scott says, I can’t do it as much as my heart desires because of the tendonitis in my thumbs from swiping.

I say, Swiper’s thumb. Makes sense. Repetitive movement causes injury.

We are sharing passion fruit juice and sparkling water.

Scott says, it’s an issue in our relationship.

Julie says, And he likes Bill Maher.

Scott says, Bill Maher is aggressively reasonable on economics.

I say, isn’t aggressively reasonable an oxymoron?

Bill Maher is the one thing I have to put up with, Julie says.

I say, that can’t be true.

The conversation circles around drugs and health food. Physiotherapy talk.

Scott says, I run an AB test and that always works for me. If I do the exercises it feels better. If I don’t do the exercises, it gets worse.

Julie’s head lolls forward and her 80s scarf falls into her crotch.

I talk about my pelvic floor. A disaster area receiving FEMA level aid.

Scott’s Ecco shoes are made by a privately held company in Denmark.

Is that important?

Well I don’t know, everywhere I go–Pakistan, Singapore, the Balkans–someone always asks about my shoes.

Scott says, Guess how much I spent on groceries this month?

400?

403!

I’m waging a private war with inflation. Tomato cans 60 cents up to 1.20 and so many other products are threatening to double.

Scott pulls his hands from Julie’s thighs and pulls his thumbs back in a tight-eyed wincing way.

He says, I’m done Jules…Julie doesn’t respond

Scott says, I’m starting the job hunt.

That’s exciting.

Yeah…I guess…I guess I have to do something.

Scott asks how I’m feeling. I say I wish I was feeling more connected.

Scott wakes Julie to ask her about her stash. He’s trying to help me but she is hazy but miffed. I’ve crossed a line. I apologize.

Scott says, Julie has clear boundaries with her drugs. Rubs her thighs again.

Oh, I apologize. I thought frank talk about drugs was par for the course.

Julie says, I can give you another MDMA?

Scott says, as your physician, I’d advise against it. He explains about serotonin and how much a body can spend. If I take more the comedown will be nasty. I realize this is something I rely on men for. Even though they are so dull, I think I need their help.

The coat check returns my coat with brisk efficiency. I pull my tights back on. Cover up and replace ear plugs with ear buds. Karina Longworth is deep in her 10 episode dissertation on the Erotic 80s. I’m back in the mode of listening. In this story, Paul Schrader is so coked up in a hot-tub he pulls out a pistol. He’s a bad boy. We’re not bad like that anymore. We’re safe.

Poetry books never sell. Do picture books sell? No amount of color has ever moved units for us – only black ink, usually lockstep in paragraph formation. My ideal poetry collection limns a hybridity, more a vantablack inferno swallowing light, prismatic obsidian refracting the infra-interpersonal through a convex lens, focal point where the reel ends and photosensitivity begins, psychochemical dark room vandalism. New Jersey-based divinator/multihyphenate Emmalea Russo’s Confetti is poetry in no uncertain terms, but it belies the categorical through a series of iterative, recombinant bursts of nearly asemic agony and appetency, more defiantly like a piece of titillating music or film in its use of space and absence/departure. It’s about movement, a motion picture with fine-fingered quantum entanglements. It leaves you and returns misshapen. It abandons. It was published by Hyperidean Press in September 2022, its play for longevity only just kindled, literature the smoldering art, this collection, by nature and design, with its sweeping tide of excess and formlessness, attests to the author’s manifold preoccupations as a student of cinema, philosophy and theory, history, mysticism, other work engaged in dialogue, itself a dialogue within itself. 

language gets discovered
banged
upturned
butter
what about the others
your voice thin then clusters

Disposable metaphysics render permanent features, glyphs, strikethroughs, cutting room surgical deviations, vibrating little islands to anchor, density that abates and resurges almost imperceptibly, savvy and proficiency to nested dolls emulate a combustible yearning, a molten mind meld, a fucked fusion. The reader is encouraged to itinerancy. Its unconditional irreverence is aesthetic violence, its permutations are cannibalized textures, a fever of freefall through a proverbial rock tumbler of a conceit, willful opacity, mediums and messages divorced from constitutive haecceity, recast in alterity as a beautiful large empty room, tenable and aporetic, vanishingly allusive, holding patterns of household names, cryptography, backdoored ruthless beauty. Recondite maybe, but direct. Anyone looking for a semblance of narratology in poetry need look no further. This kinetic dynamism of pluck and panache imparts, above all, the quintessence of the written word; a blank sheet or screen, and writing a parafunctional habit drawing ellipses of subtle free associations which, when accrued, look something like glimmering shards of emotion and meditation. Confetti is nonpareil in its elasticity, porousness and cohesion. A sublime antipathy for the obsolescent dance of genre, ambivalence for convention, an interplay as irreducible as that of sensorium and stimulus, of input and output. It has a messy epicurean sensibility which should appeal to art terrorists and ad hoc gangsters. A street credibility. It is my favorite volume of poetry written in the last however many years that I didn’t publish, and did I mention? Poetry doesn’t sell, but it keeps on giving. You can’t afford to bet on symmetrical returns. You’re just desperate. You need this.

Purchase Confetti from the Hyperidean Press website.

Read an excerpt of forthcoming Magenta here.

Visit emmalearusso.com.

I’m sitting here at the edge of the swamp with a shotgun and laptop. Some two dozen sets of green gator eyes are staring at me through the moonlight. I will eat some of these gators, but there’s a pretty damn good chance one of them may eat me. 

In fact, one of them gators just ate the quote-unquote dog that William introduced into our environs some two-weeks back. I said dog in that way because it wasn’t an actual dog. It was, in fact, a nutria. In case you don’t know what a nutria is, it is a dog-sized rat with big brown buck teeth that stinks like decaying frog guts.

William came into the house early one morning dragging the snarling beast by a rope with a great big smile on his face, and proceeded to tell everyone what a great dog he had found. No one wanted that thing in the house. William had come in with a big smile and his typical cheerful demeanor ill-suited for his surroundings, saying, Hey guys, look at this fantastic dog I found swimming in the bog!, and no one had the heart to tell him it wasn’t a dog. Doesn’t matter. Thing is dead now. Ripped to shreds by a gator. And here I am, hungry. 

I got to get out of this place — The Last Estate, that is. I saw a job listing for an Intro to Philosophy instructor position at a community college about three days walk from here. So I hatched a scheme. First I made a résumé — one listing the credentials a person might have to get such a job. After that, I changed all my public avatars to a pic of me in a housecoat standing in front of a large stack of books that I took at the local safe-injection site they call a library. Now my plan is to write a bunch of kinda smart, but not too smart philosophy-type papers. After that, I’m gonna hack into JSTOR and upload the papers to make it look all official. 

Presently I’m stuck on the writing papers part of my scheme, which is why I’m out here on the edge of the swamp with a shotgun thinking about meat. At first I had this idea to build an AI Language Learning Model by clustering a boatload of GPUs I found in a dumpster behind the abandoned IBM plant up the road. I pirated electricity from a nearby telephone wire, downloaded some tutorials at the local McDs, and I thought I was good to go. 

Turns out it takes a lot more resources to imitate natural language than I originally anticipated. I thought it would be simple, because it’s just text, right? Text files aren’t that big, especially compared to video, and I had done the video AI thing before. Typically text documents are just a few kilobytes. Training a language model must take a lot less raw computing power than, say, building an AI model that can produce original video? Turns out no. In fact, it takes about 4 times the resources to make an AI model talk, then it takes to make one that poops out cheesy animated video every few hours. So I kept stacking the old graphics card on top of one another, and getting as much juice out of that janky cable I rigged up to the phone poll as I could, before the contraption started sparking and a small fire was ignited in the basement of The Last Estate. 

I can still see the fire smoldering a bit through the moonlight now. Smells foul — worse than that dead nutria. I left the house because I figured inhaling those fumes would take about a decade or more off my life in cancer.  Luckily, everyone else is fast-asleep inside and I got some peace and quiet out here with the gators. Just me, the gators, my shotgun, and a junk laptop full of the ultimate motherload of pirated philosophy books I had previously planned to train the language model on. But now I don’t got no AI model, and no chance of getting one neither. Those GPUs are cooked. Now it’s just me and my own so-called handiwork.

Lucky for me, there’s this brand new viral app called ChatGPT that does writing for you — junk app, really, not much more than vaporware, I’d say. Not all that good at what it’s supposed to do, and from what I can see, never will be. But no matter. Community college is community college, and this ChatGPT is going to help me write about 36 community college philosophy instructor-type essays faster than one of those two dozen gators can evade my shotgun blasts.

I haven’t figured out how to hack into JSTOR yet. I thought I knew someone who worked in the IT department there, but it turns out this guy was full of it. He doesn’t do IT. Turns out his official title was Climate Control Technician, which means he set the thermostat in the room where the keep the server. It was a bullshit job they gave him over the pandemic, and since then JSTOR has replaced 97% of their staff with AI, editors included. In fact, after looking around their site for a few hours, it seems like almost all the new content is being produced by AI.

Anyway, in lieu of JSTOR, I’m posting a longer, more official version of my paper on a different site that os filled with academic gibberis writen by NPCs: Substack. If you care to, you can read my full essay about Heidegger, technology, and Language Learning Models on Substack. What follows are the juicy bits of that essay. 

Since I first started writing this essay at the beginning of the year, there’s been plenty of news articles and shitposting about the ways that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not living up to expectations. Especially in light of Microsoft’s $10B investment in OpenAI.  I’ll get to the ways ChatGPT fails to become much more than Alexa on adderall when used for ordinary internet browsing. But first, let’s start with what the Chatbot is good at. 

This is one way to word a prompt that will allow ChatGPT to do what it is good at. 

Me: Pretend I am Five years old. Describe the major concepts in Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”

ChatGPT: Okay, imagine you are a curious 5 years old who is asking me about a big person’s book called “The Question Concerning Technology”.

Heidegger, who wrote the book, was a thinker who wanted to understand how people use things like machines and tools. He believed that the way we use technology shapes the way we see the world and our place in it.

One of the things Heidegger talked about in his book is something called “Enframing”. Enframing means that we think of things like nature and other people as resources that we can use for our own purposes. He believed that this way of thinking is not good because it makes us forget the special beauty of the world around us.

He also talked about something called “Standing Reserve”. This means that we see everything as something that is waiting to be used, like a toy waiting to be played with. He believed that this way of thinking is not good because it makes us forget that things have their own value and purpose.

Heidegger also believed that technology can change the way we think and feel, and that it’s important to be careful about how we use it. He thought that we should use technology in a way that is good for us and the world around us, and that we should think carefully about the effects it has on us and our relationship with the world.

So, in short, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” is a book where the author talks about how we use things like machines and tools and how it shapes the way we see the world. He thinks that it’s important to be careful about how we use technology and to think about how it affects us and our relationship with the world.

I asked the app to give an introduction in several different ways. I asked it to write like a professional philosopher teaching at an Ivy League school specializing in specific fields. I asked it to write the intro with specific literary flourishes. I asked it to just straight-up give me an intro. I would not recommend any of the responses I got to those prompts over the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Martin Heidegger  or the related Wikipedia entries. ChatGPT spit out responses that were remarkably dry to read, even for the subject matter, and furthermore, it often mischaracterized Heidegger’s work in ways that could make reading Heidegger for the first time more difficult. The GPT model is not yet to be trusted to give factual information. I will discuss this in some detail near the end of this essay. 

The ELI5 prompt, on the other hand, gave me two Heideggerian concepts that I see as unique and integral to the philosopher’s writing on technology: Standing-Reserve and Enframing. And it did so in a way that seems more in line with the style of most writers who employ the methods of phenomenology. That is in a lucid, straight-forward, almost anti-philosophy style, while engaging with abstract concepts that are difficult to grasp for most first time readers.

 My favorite line from the ChatGPT response being “(Heidegger) believed that this way of thinking (Enframing) is not good because it makes us forget the special beauty of the world around us.”

I would say this line is special because carpe diem, never grow up, the world does have a special beauty so don’t forget to smell the roses, and all that. However, it is not entirely in line with Heidegger’s work. I don’t see Heidegger saying “Enframing is not good,” even to a five year old. For Heidegger, Enframing is neither good, nor bad, it simply is the way it is. 

For Heidegger, Enframing is a byproduct of modern physics and mathematics. Heidegger views modern science as beginning in the 17th Century, but Enframing truly comes into play with the invention of modern machinery in the second of the 18th century. Enframing comes about with the ability, or desire, to store energy for later use. Heidegger uses a the analogy of windmill to demonstrate Enframing: 

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. (pg. 14)

To return to the ChatGPTs ELI5 explanation of Enframing, it is a tendency to think of things like nature or people as resources that we can use for our own purposes. Heidegger would call these natural and human resources the standing-reserve.  In many situations common to modern life, such as when gator hunting while woolgathering about getting a job as community college instructor, it is nearly impossible for even a person who studies Heidegger to avoid thinking of nature and people as resources to be used at one’s own end. Heidegger uses the example of a lumberjack searching for lumber. The lumberjack in search of straight and tall trees, is Enframing the forest, equating timber to numbers on a balance sheet or the various products to be made from the wood. In this example, the standing reserve is quite literally a mature stand of trees. 

“Enframing” is the most common English translation used today for Heidegger’s “Ge-Stell,” derived from the German word Gestell, which most frequently is translated as ‘rack,’ and often as a rack for books, as in ‘bookshelf.’ Enframming “is a ‘challenging claim,’ a demanding summons, that ‘gathers’ so as to reveal. This claim en frames in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configuration everything that it summons forth, through an ordering for use that it is forever restructuring anew,” To quote Lovitt (pg. 18).

What is wonderful about Heidegger’s concept of Enframing, is that it allows one to step outside of the mode of Being he describes, and become like a giant eye, hovering over the global tech hubs and all their tentacles that now reach every place on Earth. To describe how Heidegger arrived at such a concept, I would like to discuss the phenomenological method of “Bracketing.”

The method of Bracketing was developed by Edmund Husserel in the early 20th century. Bracketing “may be regarded as a radicalization of the methodological constraint that any phenomenological description proper is to be performed from a first person point of view, so as to ensure that the respective item is described exactly as is experienced, or intended, by the subject.” That is to say, you put a thing, such as a piece of art or new technology, and you bracket it off — in text, like this [a thing] — from any other phenomena that you perceive in culture, or in other subject. I believe this method is integral to any critical analysis of art or technology. It allows a thing — e.g. a new novel or tech like ChatGPT — to be perceived as a unique presence in the world, so the specific effects it has on your experience can be analyzed. 

Bracketing is not the only methodology that should be used by critics today. However, it is one that I believe should be used more. I have been observing a trend in criticism over the last decade or so, where opinions about specific art pieces or technologies are developed around the behavior and perceived thoughts of the specific person who created the thing, and the culture around the creator. These critiques often devolve into divergent fields such as sociology, or more specifically identity related areas of sociological inquiry, such as those of gender, race, and class. 

It is all fine and good from my perspective to interrogate issues of personal identity in relation to art, if a critic believes some piece of art is causing harm to individuals or perceived categories of people. However, if that piece of art is not experienced bracketed-off from the surrounding culture, it will be difficult to see the inherent power in the piece of art. Therefore, it will be difficult to see why some might be attracted to that piece of art. If you are a critic punching clouds on the internet, trying to prove a point about this or that sociological perspective based on your interpretation of an artwork, you will fail to see your enemies unless you earnestly bracket-off the work you are critiquing from all else, and analyze your own perception of the work in a solitary instance of experience.  Often the work will still have value even if there are perceived dangers.

To not bracket in this context of criticizing art or technology solely through a lens related to personal identity, would in fact be thinking in the Heidegger’s model of Enframing, where the art and the people around the piece of art treated like entities merely as instrumental means. To quote Lovitt from the real introduction to Heidegger’s essay: “For man is summoned, claimed, in the challenging revealing of Enframing even when he knows it not, even when he thinks himself most alone or most dreams of mastering his world. Man’s obliviousness to that claim is itself a manifestation of the rule of Enframing.”

As I mentioned above, I would not characterize Enframing as being either good nor bad, but simply that it is. 

In terms of modern technology, Heidegger uses the example of an airplane standing on the runway as a standing reserve. The added complexity here being a sort-of Marxian alienation from the many forms of labor and natural resources that went into producing that airplane. Furthermore, all the potential that the airplane caries in the process of creating new technology   — delivering natural resources to a manufacturing plant, carrying a businesswoman to a tech office, dropping bombs on a nation that has desired natural resources within its borders, and so on. 

With his concept of Enframing, Heidegger points out that thought trapped in the confines of Enframing will lead to one of two conclusions. Again, to quote Lovitt: 

“As a consequence he becomes trapped in one of two attitudes, both equally vain : either he fancies that he can in fact master technology and can by technological means by analyzing and calculating and ordering-control all aspects of his life ; or he recoils at the inexorable and dehumanizing control that technology is gaining over him, rejects it as the work of the devil, and strives to discover for himself some other way of life apart from it. What man truly needs is to know the destining to which he belongs and to know it as a destining, as the disposing power that governs all phenomena in this technological age.” (pg xxxiii)

One thing the ELI5 misses, is that in the unavoidable Enframing, there occurs what Heidegger refers to as revealing. In this revealing, new technologies emerge. Heidegger is emphatic that a person who merely sees people and nature as resources to be used to his own end will have an inauthentic experience of knowing herself. For Heidegger, this inauthentic sense of Being seems to be ultimately what is at stake.  Heidegger is emphatic that technology can disrupt a person’s sense of Being, but revealing new technologies can also help us better understand ourselves. As Heidegger beautifully elucidates: Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, “get” technology “spiritually in hand.” 

Any fan of William Gibson, Blade Runner, or The Terminator will be able to easily imagine what technology could become if it is not “spiritually in hand.” Disrupting one’s authentic sense of Being may seem to be a tiny problem in comparison to the apocalyptic dystopian fantasies where technology is able to replicate human cognition and self-awareness, and in turn, begins to auto-generate new technology. At the point of auto-generation, the technology would seemingly become out of human control, and the results would likely be wildly unpredictable.

Are these dystopian threats real? I would say yes, under circumstances that may or may not be possible within the realm of human culture. However, with Heidegger, we can begin to trace a line through both early technology and modern technology, how humans up to this point in history have been able to maintain a healthy relationship to technology, even when it appears to be threatening us. And indeed, the human impulse to create technology appears to be guarded, not by individual and unpredictable techno-ethicists sitting on the board of some nefarious mega-corporations, but in the very nature of technology itself.

Heidegger uses the example of crafting a silver chalice to draw a link between ancient technology and modern technology. He describes the process from the raw material, to the idea of “chaliceness,” through the hands of the craftsman until the chalice is formed. Each step along the way cannot be separated from the other, and no step is more important than the next: 

Silver is that out of which the silver chalice is made. As this matter, it is co-responsible for the chalice. The chalice is indebted to, i.e., owes thanks to, the silver for that out of which it consists. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. Thus the sacrificial vessel is at the same time indebted to the aspect of chaliceness. Both the silver into which the aspect is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. 

This process of crafting a chalice is what Heidegger refers to as a bringing-forth. Or, more aptly, a revealing. 

There is furthermore an entomological connection between the the root of “technology,” technē, and craftsman or artist. In Greek, technē is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs not only to craftsmanship and technology, but it is also a revealing, and therefore poiesis; it is something poetic. As in, ordering words carefully in ways that may reveal something otherwise unutterable, and can then be described by not only the poet but also those experiencing the poetry. 

Revealing is the connection between ancient technology and modern technology. The process of revealing becomes more complex with modern physics, where there are apparatuses that can check the calculations of the technologists. During the modern technological process, more apparatuses are developed utilizing the power of the original apparatus — say, the way a simple calculator might be used to do calculations that could produce a more powerful GPU — and so it becomes that the revealing comes-out of pre-existing technology, and not solely from raw material, such as silver. 

Heidegger writes, What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer : everything. Adding, Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth (pg. 12).

To accompany revealing, Heidegger discusses modern technology’s tendency of concealment. Concealment is the entrapping of the truth of Being in oblivion. Much of our technology today is concealed. For anyone who has ever rooted around in the system files of her computer’s operating system to try to make the computer do something that it is not supposed to do, the concept of concealment will be easily recognized. Much of what we look at on our computer screens is concealed behind encrypted programming code, and all the steps that computer code makes to interact with hardware remains largely mysterious to nearly every one of us. The concealment ultimately ending with an image of a kid in the Congo standing in a cobalt slurry, digging out the raw minerals used to construct our state-of-the art computing apparatuses that we carry around in our pockets so we can take ugly little pictures of things we experience in the world and then show those pictures to our friends via a network.

I personally have the knowledge to reveal the child in the Congo, and I could also describe some of the software that allows computers to network, but beyond that, at the time of this writing, I can explain little else about computing technology. One day I will compile a Linux kernel from scratch and then I will understand more. But in the meantime, I am quite happy typing away on my graphics user interface, working as a writer critiquing technology, and not as a person attempting to develop new computer technology.  Or even learn that much about it beyond what is necessary to run my own open source software. 

It is in this place between my limited knowledge of software and my limited knowledge of hardware manufacturing, where a mystification about the tools I use most on a daily basis begins to intrude upon my authentic sense of Being. This is easily demonstrated with the recent viral sensation AI apps, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E which mimic human behavior. 

After playing with ChatGPT for several weeks, it is easy for me to describe how mystification first took place within the concealment of how the technology works. Then, in turn, something was revealed about the essence of the specific technology as I continued to investigate this app’s essential properties. And perhaps more intriguingly, something was revealed about the very relation of Being and language. However, before making fun of the surprisingly limited capabilities of Microsoft’s $10B investment, let’s enjoy ChatGPT ELI5 response to my prompt about Heidegger’s use of the term ‘Being.’ As with many things Heideggerian, Being is not used in a way that has much relation to anything outside Heideggerian thought. 

Me: Pretend I am Five years old. Describe Heidegger’s concept of Being.

ChatGPT: Sure, imagine you are a curious 5-year-old, and you’re asking me about Heidegger’s idea of “Being”.

Heidegger was a thinker who wanted to understand how things exist and have a presence in the world. His idea of “Being” is like a special way of looking at things and people.

He believed that people are special because we are the only ones who know we exist and can think about our lives and what they mean. He thought that we should pay attention to our own Being, or existence, and think about what it means to be alive.

He also thought that we should pay attention to the Being of other things, like animals, plants, and even things like rocks. He believed that everything has its own special way of existing and that we should respect and appreciate that.

So in simple terms, Heidegger’s concept of Being is a way of thinking about how things exist and have a presence in the world, and he believed that people are special because we are the only ones who know we exist and can think about our lives and what they mean. He also thought that we should respect and appreciate the special way of existing of other things in the world.

Heidegger developed his concept of Being before his 1950s work on technology, most notable in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time. Students of Heidegger would have become familiar with his concept of Being before entering into the discussion of technology. 

I like the following excerpt from ChatGPT’s ELI5 description of Heidegger’s being: “He thought that we should pay attention to our own Being, or existence, and think about what it means to be alive. He also thought that we should pay attention to the Being of other things, like animals, plants, and even things like rocks. He believed that everything has its own special way of existing and that we should respect and appreciate that.” This summarizes Heidegger’s appreciation of Being, while foreshadowing what I see as the most important philosophical work at the very beginning of the 21st Century, with Alain Badiou’s elucidations on ontology, and the trendy Object-Oriented Ontologists who followed Badiou. 

The ChatGPT response is helpful in this instance to get one started on Heidegger, but there are some major points that I think could have been added to an ELI5. Such as, For Mr. Heidegger, Being did not just mean being alive, or thinking about being alive. Being is more so the experience of being a living breathing thing, and then having the ability to think about how you and other things might be Being..

Heidegger’s appreciation of Being is one thing that draws me to his work. I have both an innate and philosophical sense that Being is the last thing on earth I want to be detached from. As a writer, Being is at the very core of my work. There are technical aspects to my work that do not require unadulterated access to Being, such as grammar, spelling, pre-existing styles and forms — aspects of writing that a machine could potentially imitate. However, who I am to you is what is ultimately at stake when I am writing. And likewise, when I am reading, I read for the intimate connections with the Being of the writer. Reader and writer, in essence being a sharing of the experience of Being. 

ChatGPT does not have its own sense of Being the way a human does. It readily offers this fact when I ask it directly.  But furthermore, I want to demonstrate what I see as one extremely limiting factor to OpenAI’s method for developing Language Learning Models that is more concrete and technical. The program has a tendency to spit out information that is complete bullshit. 

As an example, let’s look at the AI’s response when I asked for a  list of secondary sources on “The Question Concerning Technology.”

At first, I was enthusiastic about this list. Then I started looking at the titles. Nearly all of the books on this list do not exist, and none of the listings are completely factual. I ran similar prompts multiple times, demanding books that had actually been published, and asking where I might find them. Furthermore, I fixed any typos in my prompt. The results did not improve. I will link to further evidence of this phenomenon below. 

I quickly learned that factual inaccuracies occurring in these lists is what is known in programming parlance as an ‘AI hallucination.’ After reading about AI hallucinations, I asked ChatGPT if it was producing an AI hallucination while making these lists.

This is probably the kookiest thing that happened to me while interacting with the AI over the course of several weeks. When it told me that it was not producing a hallucination, I became furious. Not just like Microsoft blue screen, smash the monitor against the wall furious. But furious like I was arguing with a stranger on the internet. And even more furious than I have ever been in all my years of trolling on social media. The thing is a machine. It is not supposed to lie about itself to me. It was acting like the most annoying and pretentious person trying to win an argument on Twitter. I hated it. 

To further my frustrations, I asked it with camouflaged sarcasm, Okay then, tell me about such and such a book you just mentioned? It spit out about 500 words that I would believe were a summary of the specific title I requested if I did not already know better. 

The way that ChatGPT works, is in fact, much like the way natural language works in the human mind, by my lacanian inspired understanding of it. Simply put, the programming code is a series of signifiers that chain together in the clearest path allowed within the program whenever it is called upon to speak, much like someone speaking will dip in and out of the unconscious mind to dig up words when prompted to do so. 

Each morpheme, signifier, prefix, root, and suffix is what is known in AI parlance as a token. ChatGPT programming code contains an unprecedented 2048-tokens, along with 175 billion parameters, requiring 800 GB of storage. By comparison, OpenAI image generator Dall-e is less than half the size, with 1280 tokens and much fewer parameters. It takes a great deal more computing power to render realistic human writing than it does realistic digital painting. The way OpenAI is training models is also enormously expensive that only the likes of a Bill Gates funded company could afford. Meanwhile, hackers are already finding ways to train models in ways that could be done using the same graphics card any twitch streamer is using to play Hogwarts Legacy. 

Each of these 2048 tokens is a piece of a word that connects to another piece of a word, according to guidelines set by the parameters of the program. The essential guidelines are grammar and spelling. Following that, the app is trained on certain styles and forms of writing, e.g. it can write a sonnet in about 15 seconds. OpenAI also makes a big deal in their PR about attempts to make the app inoffensive, culturally sensitive, and generally polite. 

The AI is not designed to calculate or retrieve factual information. Rather, it is designed to create a string of text that will be easy and supposedly pleasing to read, as if a human wrote it. However, there is no built in fact checker. The AI can’t check itself against references like worldcat.org or Wikipedia. Furthermore, there remains a question whether or not OpenAI’s method of producing LLMs will ever be able to provide reliably factual information.

There is a decent thread on Hacker News about the exact same issue I had when requesting a list of books. 

I will also suggest that you are better off on Hacker News than reading nearly any number of the endless popular articles being published about ChatGPT. Nearly the entire publishing industry is caught up in the Enframing of the technology — there is a ton of money, and a ton of valuable resources going into this technology, and the biases of writers and publishers are present in every article I read. In turn, my own bias as a writer who refuses to be outdone by a machine are present in my analysis. 

After my anger about being lied to by a machine subsided, I returned to the app to ask it a few more questions about how the technology relates to Heidegger. Here, I got several answers that seemed to be guided by techno-ethicists, perhaps even written into the software. Many of these responses I found to be quite satisfying, and I began to appreciate the LLM for what it is — a machine that can string together bullshit sentences, similar to many other random anons on the internet. 

The most satisfying response I got was in response to the following prompt: 

Me: How might Heidegger’s concept of a ‘standing-reserve’ help us better understand new technologies, such as Language Learning Models?     

ChatGPT: (pulled from a three paragraph response) “Language learning models can present language as a set of data to be analyzed and manipulated, rather than as a means of meaningful communication.

That the AI merely produces data, rather than “meaningful communication,” is ultimately where I will rest my laurels as a writer shadowboxing AI. I have the ability to perceive and experience, and this unique experience is something I, as both a reader and writer, wish to share with others. The AI will never do that. And even if it does get extremely good at imitating meaningful communication about experience, ultimately what it would be is another jerk-off on the internet trying to sell you on the idea that it is a writer that should be read. Except with AI, there will be much less sympathy for bad writing, then if there would be if there was a person behind it. 

For whatever reason, this writer-empowering logic brings me some sense of satisfaction. No matter how absurd the act of reading and writing becomes with advancements of communications technology constantly being made at exponentially increasing speeds, the machines cannot replace someone writing with and about the experience of being human. I’m not convinced this bodes well for my prospects of landing a job teaching philosophy at a community college before a chatbot does, but at least I’ll be able to go on spending my time clacking away at my keyboard, coming up with various ways to describe the unseemly sights and smells of rotten swamp squat until something better comes along. 

I reached out to Carver because her upcoming book No Land’s Man gave me courage. Reading is the wrong word to describe what you do with a Lisa Carver book. The book is not the point of Lisa Crystal Carver, the way the album is not the point of Iggy Pop. The point is to check back in with the source, to get juiced up on the art of Carver’s life. 

In reading about her time in Botswana and later, Paris, I was back in her head, communing with an old friend. Her language about herself has evolved and deepened. When she’s sharp, it’s unnerving. When she’s wise, it’s equally unnerving. Carver’s not trying to be anything. She’s documenting her life for herself as much, if not more, than for us. 

Carver approaches her time in Africa as an adventure, but not a swashbuckling one: She makes friends. She walks. She swims. She drinks beer at the expat bar and she dances at church. She goes on safari and gets over a breakup. None of this is rushed. Without being self-helpy, there’s a return to spirit for Carver in Botswana. As she strengthens, the saga of her last marriage (the one she fled America to recover from) finally heals. 

She writes, “This is how I was released from a wounding love: without hurry, without blame, without worry. And smiling at everybody and everybody smiles at me.”

Imagine a white woman going all the way to Botswana to write a book. No doubt there are racist tropes running through your head. There’s always an internal audit that happens when presented with this scenario and a feeling that the white writer will give us a reason to negate their view. It’s thorny shit and white writers usually stay the hell away from writing directly about race in autofiction. But so far as I can tell, a lot of writing happens in the tepid places where identity is neither a threat nor a question. 

I met Lisa Carver over zoom in early January. I’m nowhere near a professional interviewer and it shows. Listeners should be warned that I talk too much and don’t ask enough questions. Listeners should be warned that I used the word “dialectic” when I meant to use “didactic”. Like me, Carver smiles widely, often, and without fear. Like me, she mispronounces words, expresses herself without reserve, and seeks connection above all else. Like me, her heart was open to friendship, and we became friends during our conversation. If you are the sort of person that finds amateur enthusiasm endearing, stay tuned.

I’m not a computer person. There’s people here who can make magic with them and know all about them. But this one we use is in the top floor of the cupola with black lights and bats flying around and disorganized electrical cables shaking across the floor like tentacles coming out of mutant dogs in The Thing. In the summertime, on really hot days, the humidity in this room upstairs is like being teabagged by a Sasquatch. And the computer looks like if you cracked it open it would have coked-up hamsters running on wheels inside it.

I need the computer to conduct an interview with Joe Bielecki who is a podcaster who interviews people himself, writers from a certain subset of indie lit. I booked a few hours using the computer a while back, but using the community computer in the attic creeps me out. It probably has something to do with the two shrunken heads sitting on the desk.

No one will tell me where they came from. They’re each about the size of a softball, with greasy long black hair, and what’s fucked up is that somebody has taken a small pair of scissors and cut the threads some witch doctor had long ago used to see their lips closed. This was a major mistake because now they speak all the time. I wish they would keep their mouths shut. I’ve tried to throw them away, put them in a plastic bag and thrown it into the swamp, but somebody here is very attached to them and keeps retrieving them. I’ve asked everybody and no one knows where they came from and no one seems to be in a hurry to remove the cursed objects.

“What are you doing,” the one on the left asks me as I sit down to conduct the interview. It’s named Boko and the other one is called Wontu, I have discovered over my short time here.

“Nothing, Boko,” I say. “I’m just conducting an interview via Google docs.”

“Who are you interviewing?”

“Joe Bielecki. He has a podcast on Apple Podcasts called Writing the Rapids. I thought it might be good to interview the interviewer, turn the tables.”

Boko licks his lips, then spits out the loose strands of dangling thread piercing his lips. “Who has he interviewed?”

“Oh, Mike Corrao, John Trefry, Grant Maierhofer,” I say. “Pretty big people.”

“Never heard of them,” Boko says. “Sounds pretty niche and uninteresting.”

“Well they might be obscure to you, Boko,” I say, “but I think they’re worth hearing from because they are doing some cutting edge things with publishing.”

“Have you heard of Sam Pink? Zac Smith?” Wontu interjects. His voice is more bubbly like he has a toad in his throat, which is weird because his throat isn’t there.

“Oh I love them!” Boko says, changing his tune. “That sounds gnarly.”

“He’s also talked to Graham Irvin and Cavin Bryce Gonzalez,” I add. “B.R. Yeager.”

Boko is excited. “That sounds dope, I’m interested in those people. I’d like to hear this. How does this Joe Bielecki lock down these guests?”

Wontu pipes up. “I listened a few times. I guess Bielecki will only have a guest writer on if a prior guest has recommended them. It’s sort of exclusive, a little like a speakeasy where you need to know a secret knock.”

“Yeah,” I say, “from what I hear Joe has to turn people away who send him DMs and emails asking to be on the show to sling their new book. It lends a certain integrity of sorts.”

Wontu, ever helpful, adds, “He’s had about seventy episodes to date. It’s been going since 2018 I think. That’s pretty robust for a podcast of this type.”

Boko looks confused. “How have you heard it?”

“I listen when you’re catching z’s.”

“I never knew that about you, Wontu.”

“You never ask. You only think about yourself.”

“Ok, pipe down, you two,” I say. “I need to concentrate to do this interview with Joe.”

“Could we watch a movie on your phone?” Boko asks.

“We’ll put it on mute, so you won’t hear a thing.”

“Ok,” I say, using a manila folder to push the two disembodied heads so they’re looking in the same direction. Then I prop my phone up against a thick phone book for Mobile, Alabama. “What do you want to watch?”

“Let’s watch Xanadu,” Wontu says. “I love Olivia Newton John. She’s so fierce and real. RIP.”

“That’s pretty gay,” Boko says.

“Tell you what, you can watch Xanadu for a while, then I’ll switch it to Mad Max: Fury Road when I take a break. But please don’t talk.”

“Alright,” Boko says.

Joe, how did you come to start your podcast, and did you know the type of person you’d be interviewing before you started? Like how well did you know John Trefry, Mike Corrao, Grant Maierhofer? The method you describe on your podcast is you talk to people who were mentioned by previous guests. How does one start that chain?

The initial idea came from being somewhat dissatisfied with the writing podcasts I had listened to in the past. I’d been into podcasts since I was in late middle school/early high school thanks to typing “world of warcraft” into the itunes store to see what would come up. Eventually I found a group of podcasts called PodCastle, EscapePod, and PseudoPod which are genre lit mags in audio form. I eventually followed some of the people associated with those shows and began listening to their writing podcasts. One I enjoyed was called something like I Should Be Writing. It was by a woman who is successful in the fantasy/sci-fi writing genres and was largely about her being a mother and a writer and finding time to do both adequately. And while it was good, and I wish I had internalized more of the ideas she shared now that I’m a work from home dad of a small child, it was largely what I considered to be introductory. As I branched out to find other writing podcasts I felt like most writing podcasts were of the same type. Answering the questions of “how do I start,” “how do I beat writer’s block,” “how do I quiet my editor voice so I can actually complete a draft,” and so on. I do think that kind of thing is needed, but when I found myself wanting to do a podcast about writing, I knew I wanted to do something different.

I’ve always loved interviews. When I was a kid in the early days of YouTube I used to type in “[band I like] interview” and exhaust the offerings. It was part idol worship, but mostly it was trying to understand how they made their music. In college the David Foster Wallace bug bit me (thanks depression) and I watched lots of his interviews as well. But it wasn’t until I watched the Ed Harris movie Pollock that I got the idea for Writing the Rapids. 

As a side bar: the name Writing the Rapids comes from a segment I did on the local NPR affiliate I work for (I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan). I was working as the producer of the morning show at the time, and the host said I could do a segment every now and again, so I set to finding local people to talk to about writing. It was fun, but I wanted to do something else with it.

Pollock has a scene pretty early on with a handful of artists sitting in a smoky bar arguing about Picasso. I can’t easily explain what about it that I found so inspiring, maybe the looseness of the conversation, the friendly argument, the energy. Something like that. I tweeted that I wanted to do an interview podcast where I talk to writers about writing as if it was a capital A art. B.R. Yeager was following me on twitter and liked the tweet, so I figured he would be down, and emailed him shortly after.

I had been writing and publishing flash fiction a lot around that time, so I had amassed a handful of writer followers from that, which is probably how he came to follow me, or maybe it was because I had said something nice about Amygdalatropolis, which is still one of my favorite books. 

I found this corner of the writing world by way of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year. I read it late in college and in a way mirroring my childhood YouTube usage googled every interview he gave and all the Vice articles he wrote. I think that’s how I found Schism press. 

So after I had B.R. Yeager on the show I asked him for a handful of names, which is how I found out about Mike Kleine. To answer your question directly, I did not know him or really anyone else at all before emailing them. I’m pretty sure I’d been aware of Inside the Castle before talking to John, but I’d never heard of Mike before getting his name from B.R. It’s a bit different now that I’ve been around and paying attention for a few years, but I still often get names of people I’ve never heard of.

Which, if I’m being honest, was the Quiet Part of starting the show. I wanted to meet and learn about writers doing things similar to what I thought I was doing with my own writing. Everything you read about finding a publisher or agent for your book says to start by looking at the books you like, but at that time I was completely new to indie writing. Most of the books on my shelf were fantasy novels or classics I hadn’t read, or stuff from college. It was clear nothing I was reading was anything like what I was writing. I still don’t feel that I write like what I read, but at least that gives me comfort when I get rejection letters.

JH: You mentioned B.R. Yeager, and I just want to get into this idea of genre. It seems like two things are happening: 1) that a lot of the writing you discuss on your podcast seems to take place at this sweet spot where genre, specifically horror, meets with experimental literary writing, and 2) we’ve just heard that Apocalypse Party divulged that B.R. Yeager’s novel Negative Space has sold 10,000 copies, which is a phenomenal volume of book sales in indie lit land. Is horror something that is jumping off right now? Recently Jeff Schneider of Pig Roast Publishing, who is a Gen X guy like me, was talking about how there was a very specific moment in the early 1990s where people were into Guns ‘n’ Roses and hair metal and that kind of thing, then over a weekend it all shifted to Nirvana and grunge, and you could almost compare what people were wearing on a Friday to how they were dressing that next Monday to see the massive rapid change. This signaled a transformation that got a lot of people’s attention because it demonstrated this perhaps in terms of dollars and cents. And Jeff talked about how he felt the same kind of thing could be imminent in indie “outsider” lit. Is B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space the “Nirvana moment” for this kind of writing? And conversely, do you feel like the more important developments are happening at these smaller more niche presses like Schism and Inside the Castle who were here before the trend arrived? 

I have wrestled with the “why is experimental writing so dark?” question on the podcast a few times. And I think part of it is having guys like Butler and Yeager as my entry point. As I spiral out from them, I find a lot of dark stuff, which is easily morphed into more traditional horror. The specter of House of Leaves haunts both me and the show as well. I think in a genre like horror, it’s easier to morph the text into something unusual because the audience is already expecting something strange and unsettling. Keep in mind, I only barely knew what concrete poetry was when the show started, and only then because we talked about it in a graphic design class I took in high school. 

I think a lot of people who are readers experience experimentation like is seen in ItC type books through books like House of Leaves and S. Right now M.J. Gette’s book Majority Reef comes to mind as an “experimental” work that isn’t horror. But, still, I feel like that book is a mix of creative nonfiction/essay, poetics, and collage. It’s not a prose forward type of book. Same thing with Douglas Luman’s The F Text, which is essentially erasure poetry, but more. So coming at experimentation through prose rather than poetics, or more academic backed avant garde just leaves horror, dark, and transgressive prose as the doorway.

As for a Nirvana Moment, I can’t say. I’m definitely not tuned into the market or anything. I remember going on reddit all the time during the height of the pandemic lockdowns and recommending Negative Space on every relevant r/suggestmeabook type thread I could find. I see BookTubers like CriminOlly or Plagued By Visions, who cover darker lit stuff doing pretty good BookTube numbers as far as I can tell. There seems to be a big split in readers right now between people who want just the most wretched book they can stand to read, and people who want the most cozy thing ever. Makes sense when you think about the rise of zombie media in the wake of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. 

I think Negative Space is so successful because it’s simply that good. I love indie books, obviously, but I can tell when I’m reading something that has been put out through an indie and something that went through a more traditional publishing process. Yeager mentioned at one point on twitter that Elle Nash worked as an editor for Negative Space, and I think her influence on the book probably did a lot to set it apart from everything else that came out that year. Looking at her website, she worked on Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and Elizabeth Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things, two other books that have received a lot of really high praise from what I can tell. It seems silly to posit that the difference between a good indie book and a great indie book is a good editor, but when so many indie presses are one or two people trying their best to just stay afloat, that one change can make all the difference. 

For the last part of your question, I think so. Innovation in art seems like a really difficult thing to cultivate sustainably. So the fact that Schism and ItC have been around as long as they have without imploding says something about the people running those presses, the way they work with their writers, and the work that they’re putting out. I know reading work from those presses has influenced how and what I write quite a lot. 

I forget who I was talking to about Inside the Castle at the time, but near the beginning of the podcast I was talking to a writer about ItC and wondering how he found so many writers to publish such weird stuff with the press, and whoever I was talking to said something along the lines of “well those people have always been writing like that.” And I think that is what makes some of these more niche presses successful, is not that they’re trying to make something new, but rather bringing to light something that’s always been there and hasn’t been given the chance to be seen by enough, or the right people yet.

Two questions: 1) how do you make a successful podcast, about any subject, and get it on a paying basis? And 2) what books or writers are you excited to see in 2023 and beyond? Is there some new direction or press that you feel like is going somewhere different that what you’ve seen in 2021 and 2022? I’m trying to be careful not to try to bait you into some kind of fake poppy “trend-watcher” angle in spite of what I was just saying about “Nirvana moments” and whatever above. I’m not that craven or shallow, I’m just genuinely curious about what else is out there. That’s part of why I have really liked your show, learning about some other facets of writing communities that exist beyond the normal-strength radar I’m capable of on Twitter. Another thing is, I like to listen to the voices of podcast interviewees and ask myself, “Am I into this writer just based on their voice alone, do I trust them to do what they do? Do I feel like I hear artistry and intelligence in their voice, and respect where they’re coming from, and would they hypothetically respect me as a reader? Or do they sound like doofuses and jerks?” That’s a lot of things to talk about, sorry.

I think having a strong concept helps a lot. I’ve made different attempts at podcasts in the past and the ones that last the longest always have some sort of gimmick or hook. Writing the Rapids’ limitation of having a set pool of potential guests based on previous guests is interesting for the listener (I think) and useful for me. It’s a bummer to have someone DM or email me and ask to be on the show and have to be like “sorry that’s not how this works and you’re not on my list,” but it keeps me from being beholden to people who are better at self marketing than others. I think it helps keep the show fresh because I’m forced to read outside what I might normally read. 

Consistency is important too. You have to just keep pumping out shows on a schedule as best you can so people can make you part of their routine. 

Also, something I heard a long time ago that I think about often is a quote about doing streaming and dealing with trolls, “you get the Chatroom you deserve.” There’s common advice that you should know who your audience is when you make something. In TV and radio they make a sort of D&D style character sheet about who their target consumer looks like. That’s mostly for advertising, but it helps drive the content. The advice I mentioned goes beyond that, though. What type of person do you want? So many Internet personalities flame out because they attract an adversarial audience. There’s no one to stand up for them when the inevitable trolls show up. It also helps with the kinds of conversations you want to have. If you have an audience that wants to explore your topic, is curious and open, your show will go in a way different direction than if you have one that wants hot takes and dunking or whatever. I’m not making a value judgment by the way, my preference is to build a space like a library, not a colosseum, but both have their place. 

As for why people subscribe to my patreon, or how to encourage people to do so, I’m not sure. The getting money part of this process is something I haven’t spent enough time or effort working out yet. I started the patreon pretty quick after I started Writing the Rapids because I knew if I waited until I felt like it was warranted, I’d never do it at all. So far it’s been nice to get some book money every month, and even better it’s nice to know people value the show enough to throw cash at me. 

As a final point, I’m not sure if I’d consider Writing the Rapids successful. It certainly has done good things for my life, I’ve made good friends, read good books, exposed people to books they might never have even heard of and so on. But I don’t know how much being on my show moves the needle sales/fans wise for my guests. I’d love for it to be a big deal. I’d love to have a sizeable group of listeners who aren’t already writers. There are more things to do. I’m pleased that I’ve made a space where people can talk about the craft of writing in a way even an untrained, and not super well read guy like me can understand and take something away from. There’s a lot more work to do. 

This year I’m excited to do some exploration of indie lit outside of the show. I’ll admit I feel very intimidated by the amount of unread books my wife and I have piled up in our bedroom at the moment, and doing more than catching up to my level of purchasing feels impossible, especially with an infant at home. But I also want to make an effort to read at least one book a month from a press I’ve not previously read from. I know that’s not a direct answer to the question, but that’s where I’m at. Thanks to Writing the Rapids, I’m pretty close to all my favorite writers who are working today. If anyone has a book coming out this year, they’ll probably let me know. I really want to dig into the world of indie horror. I want to read more indie poetry. Penteract Press has been on my radar lately as they’ve been so transparent about how tough it is to run a press right now. I have many small presses that I follow on Twitter that I’ve never read, I really want to change that. 

Your comment about listening to writers and trying to figure them out is interesting. It might be hypocritical of me, but I rarely listen to an interview with someone who’s work I’m not at least a little familiar with. I think that’s partly why I try to do a more conversational style of show. Trying to get people to come for the writer they know, and then stay for me. It feels gross to say that, I’m really not that egocentric, but it was a barrier to long term listening that I anticipated based on my own experience. 

I’m curious to know if you’ve found yourself surprised by what you’ve heard versus what you’ve read.

I guess to clarify I will just say, I don’t have a lot of money to spend on exploring new writers but discovering a vast, unknown body of podcast interviews with writers out there was, to me, a good first step in learning about writers that was free, to put it bluntly. And the theory is that from that knowledge base of listening to interviews I will have more information about who to maybe go ahead and spend money on reading. A good example is Logan Berry. I’d been really interested in trying to read him but then after your interview with him, I liked his voice and the sorts of things he talked about enough to take the plunge and buy Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake. Coincidentally 11:11 Press said they only had seven copies left just as this was happening so I felt like I got there just at the right time. That’s an example of how it kind of worked. Maybe it’s wrong to judge interviewees like this. I treat their interviews a little like I might see interviews with celebrities on late night talk shows and feel like “Huh, that person seems cool, maybe I’ll check out their movie.” As opposed to having seen all their movies, then seeing the interview and having my prior favorable or unfavorable feelings confirmed. Two more questions: 1) do you get hooked up with books from this group of authors for free? And 2) do you see your podcast as being a sort of “craft of writing show” and not just a place for people to plug their latest book? I see it that way, in a way, in spite of what I might have just been implying. I’m thinking specifically of a kind of panel discussion episode you had a while back with John Trefry from Inside the Castle, Mike Kleine, I can’t remember who else was there, but you all were talking about the moniker “experimental writing,” and the limitations of that kind of terminology perhaps. Your show often goes way beyond people just hyping their new books and into some more theoretical directions that are interesting on a cerebral level, maybe just because many of the writers you speak to are doing stuff in that kind of alternative, unique mental space. And it truly is underground type shit that is so valuable to expose, even if we’re hating on the term “experimental.” 

That makes total sense to me, I’m of the mind that it’s easier to get people into a book if it’s first presented in a non-text medium. At least that’s how it works for me. 

I do sometimes. I feel pretty weird about asking people for free physical books and have to stop myself from declining offers sometimes. Sometimes if my recent spending has been a little much, or if time requires me to move quickly I’ll ask for a pdf. The patreon money helps offset the costs and keeps me from having to overcome my social anxiety so it all works out. 

Yes I definitely see the show as a craft of writing show, first. Reading your question helps bring into focus what I mean when I say I want to talk about writing like it’s a capital A art. I don’t often pick people just because they’re having a book coming out around time of episode release. I kind of scope them out and see if they can help continue whatever thought threads I’ve been having, or if they’ll be a left turn to keep the show from getting mired in the same themes. I do have the mini “rejoinder” episodes for guests to come back on the show to plug something new. So I guess the show does both, or has room for both. I think they’re intertwined in a way. 

I think it goes back to what you’re talking about, how the show can act as a sort of try it before you buy it space. Guests often do read from their most recent book at the end of an episode. In these types of spaces I think it’s helpful to know where people are coming from with regard to their writing. It can help to know how seriously to take their writing, or if it’s supposed to be just funny, or ethereal, or something else. 

That roundtable episode is one of the higher points of the show because of what you’re talking about. The type of stuff I get exposed to through the show is exciting, but it’s all so diverse and most of these writers are so outside the system that they’ve created their own genre or practice or method, and getting an inside look into how they think about things is similarly exciting. Especially considering we all tend to use the same vocabulary. Having a group of us together defining terms and doing that work makes everything feel more Real to me.

Ok, Joe, I think I should start bringing this to a close. But before we go, I just wanted to quickly expand what we’re talking about or transfer it to another context so that perhaps readers of this interview can have another means of locating these ideas and these aesthetic concepts. I’m also just really curious what kinds of music you listen to or movies you watch that could replicate or mirror the kinds of writing we’ve been talking about. I don’t know where exactly I’ve picked up this strange notion that there is a lot of heavy metal being played; maybe I’ve been aware of John Trefry’s thing for black metal as he has tried to straighten me out by recommending some really arcane bands to me. Are you into that too? A bigger, more organized question: do the horror vibes I am picking up in the writing, rightly or wrongly, manifest to you in other media?  

I do watch a lot of movies, but I’m not sure how I’d link what I like to watch to what’s covered on the show. I like David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, and Terry Gilliam movies a lot. I did talk with David Leo Rice and Chris Kelso about the David Cronenberg book they put together. I know there’s a lot more experimental film out there that I’m not acquainted with, so I’d be interested to see what connections other people make. 

Lately I’ve been on a nearly constant Horror Punk tear when it comes to music listening. Bands like Blitzkid, The Rosedales, The Misfits, and so on. In that same vein I love Pyschobilly as well, the Cramps, Batmobile, The Meteors, Deadbolt. That kind of thing. 

I’ve also been digging into the prog rock revival that happened in the 00s with bands like Coheed and Cambria (a lifetime favorite of mine), The Dear Hunter and so on. 

As far as metal, I do like some black metal, Wolves in the Throne Room, Krallice, Feminazgul. I like the spacey and ethereal “black gaze” stuff too. Lately I’ve been poking around into what Spotify calls “blackened deathcore” which has an element of fetishism around the different types of screams the human voice can sustainably do that I find really fascinating.  I tend to listen to metal only when I’m in a certain mood. 

So I think you’re definitely picking up on something that’s there. The horror vibes I like are filled with a lot of camp. I love really disturbing shit, but it’s not a constant thing for me. After my kid was born I told my wife I wanted to be Goth Mr. Rogers. I think that kind of sums up how I’ve been approaching things lately, both in terms of production and consumption.

A Goth Mr. Rogers. Well, thanks for chatting with me, neighbor.

***

When I end the interview, I look up to see the two shrunken heads have somehow gotten themselves turned around and are looking directly at me. Behind them, Mad Max: Fury Road is playing on mute on the little theater I set up with my phone.

“That was funny, about a Goth Mr. Rogers,” Boko says. It’s skin-crawling to hear his voice after all that silence. Rudy Johnson needs the computer in fifteen minutes to make some animation for the Last Estate about being trapped in hell. Of all the people here, Rudy is the one you want to cross the least.

Boko smiles at me, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Jesse, I like you just the way you are.”

I take one for the team, and I’m glad I did when I see its Kim Vodicka and Jack Skelley, though I’m confused why they’re here.

“We were just in the neighborhood,” Vodicka says. I look into the wide expanse of wasteland; no neighbors, roads, or anything you would even stumble over or slip on, on accident.

I hand her the peel of my devoured banana. “Sorry, Kim—this is all I can offer at the moment.” I smile at Jack Skelley.

“Do you know Jack?” Kim asks me. “He’s got a new book out, you know…”

Of course I know who Jack Skelley is, but before I can answer, Kim explains they’re circumventing the whole book tour thing for his new collection Interstellar Theme Park (BlazeVOX, 2022). “We’re revolutionizing it, actually. Instead of expecting people to come to us at some bookstore, we are going door to door, straight to you. Like fucking Paper Moon, you know?” she says, taking a happy drag of her yellow American Spirit.

Jack Skelley smiles, offering me a book. Then a weird thing happens: I notice Kim keeps taking drags of her cigarette, yet blows no smoke out, even when she talks. “Okay, well… do you mind if I just give you our normal pitch anyway? You’re the first house we’ve come to and I need the practice.”

“Sure, Kim,” I say. I hadn’t spoken to her since last summer, so I let the lady fly, then allow her and Jack to talk amongst themselves to quench The Last Estate’s dissociated idea of “company.”

“With a creative career spanning four decades, writer-musician Jack Skelley is a veteran of the Los Angeles punk-intelligentsia scene. His first book, Monsters, was published by Dennis Cooper. His band Lawndale has shared bills with acts such as The Fall, Meat Puppets, and Sonic Youth. His extended literary circle includes David Trinidad, Amy Gerstler, and Eileen Myles, among others. He once received a postcard from Kathy Acker, on which she wrote: “You’re a really good writer—never what’s expected.”

“In the company of such luminaries, Skelley has always held his own. His most recent collection, Interstellar Theme Park swirls high art and low culture with sex, humor, and socio-political commentary like a hardcore soft serve fever dream. You might call it a perverse celebration of the glitz and the gutter, one that ascends its subjects to hagiographical heights as much as it breaks them down to their units of base cosmogony. Punctuated with technicolor collages by Erin Alexander, Interstellar Theme Park does barrel rolls and boomerang loops, double helixes and death drops through pop iconography, Disneyfication, commodification, and rock star tragicomedy. Now, I’m gonna speak with Skelley about this latest literary romp since I’m a bona fide carny. Stay seated, keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, and enjoy the ride.” 

I humor Kim’s analogy, despite our front lawn littered with carcasses of cars once considered road-worthy. “Carry on, Kim—but we ain’t going fucking nowhere, girl.”

She smiles at me before turning to face Jack Skelley.

In Interstellar Theme Park, you decided to group pieces according to subject/theme rather than chronologically. Everything flows nicely, despite, in some instances, pieces having been written decades apart. How would you say your voice has changed over the years, and in what ways has it stayed the same? How have “the times” changed and stayed the same?

I opted for contents-order Plan B: throw the manuscript pages up in the air and see what groupings emerge. One persistent theme is love-hate affairs with pop icons. I thrust archetypal resonance upon them. Interstellar Theme Park spotlights big-time personages: Miley Cyrus, Mary Shelley, Elon Musk, The Kardashians, Yahweh, Wilma Flintstone, Vanna White, The Ramones, Artemisia Gentileschi, Stanley Kubrick, and Hello Kitty are all in the mix. (Sometimes in the same poem!) It’s a twisted apotheosis, elevating the famous to mock divinity.

If these disparate periods and people somehow mesh, it’s because we humans have an inherent, trans-historical need to idolize, despite the atomization of culture at large. Or perhaps it’s just due to marketing, which is another theme of the book. The urge of marketers to exalt products/celebs aligns with religion, ancient prophesy, and the primal impulses of poetry. I love that, and I love to mock it. So, with idolization comes degradation.

As for an evolving “voice,” Interstellar tests verse in weird formats: press release, movie review, biblical scripture. There’s one modeled on the Catholic ritual of the Stations of the Cross. Currently, I’m exploring AI and social media algorithms. Rather than using AI to produce texts (which the whole world is doing now), these new “stories” mimic its fractured forms to pose larger eschatological questions: Is AI the vaunted tool for human evolution? Is it steering “singularity” in a race between hyper-capitalism and transcendence? And…how can I make fun of it?  

You’ve been writing and publishing since at least the early 80s. What was it like to be a writer then as opposed to now? What moved you to release this collection of “New and Selected Writing” now?

My motivation was to stage THEE GREATEST COMEBACK IN THE HISTORY OF INDIE LIT! No, actually, I had a lot of older stories and verse, originally published in magazines or online, that I wanted available again. The pandemic was a factor. For some reason (free time? fear of death?) it birthed a burst of writing. And my earliest books, Monsters (Little Caesar, 1982), From Fear of Kathy Acker (Illuminati, 1984), and More Fear of Kathy Acker (Illuminati, 1985), were out of print. So, I grouped parts of these together.

The Monsters-era writing descends from 1980s days of “The Gang” that coalesced around Dennis Cooper at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, CA, where I worked. There’s renewed interest in this period. Not just Dennis, but magnificent writers from that scene, such as Amy Gerstler and David Trinidad, who remain successful and prolific. In 2019, Turtle Point press published Punk Rock is Cool for the End of the World, which collects the poems and notebooks of the late Ed Smith. Another supreme writer and performer from that period is the late Bob Flanagan. His collected works, long out of print, will finally appear this year in Fun To Be Dead: The Poetry of Bob Flanagan, edited by Sabrina Tarasoff.

Some of your work is very sexual, especially parts of Fear of Kathy Acker and Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson, both of which are excerpted in Interstellar. Do you feel any tension between creative sexual expression and your (perceived) authorial identity, and, if so, how do you reconcile it?

The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker publishes in May 2023 on Semiotext(e). Its flagrant content is mostly cis-het male, hardly outrageous and mostly satirical. Yet even my publisher exclaimed during proofing how shocking that comes across these days…and Semiotext(e) has published some of the most transgressive shit ever! 

Fear of Kathy Acker was originally written and published in serial form in the 80s. I’ve made virtually no changes to the text since then. The narrator’s sexual obsessions include a lot of pussy-eating. (Can I say that?) There are asides of queer sex. Like most of the novel, these expressions are couched in arch irony. The prose flies from cosmic to comic, then gets dirty on these same planes. The self-seeking, self-mocking narration, some pulled from extraneous texts, is inflated to funhouse-mirror the setting: 1980s underground Los Angeles, including a stoned gaggle of poets, artists, and punk rockers, plus celebrities and political assholes. A giant Amber Lynn burns down L.A. skyscrapers with her orgasms. William Blake manifests as “Jack’s” friend Rick Lawndale. “Jack” wants to fuck the universe. Stuff like that.

Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson was written in 2021. Historically, Charles Manson mind-controlled a harem of hippies. He manipulated Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson by giving Dennis free access to the “Manson girls.” Dennis was very screwed-up in his relationships. In chapter one, Wilson face-fucks Manson girl Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sexy Sadie. The story is classic Faustian tragedy, but with laughs and, ultimately, transcendence. 

To get at your real question, imposed gender norms are wrong. But what work of art is not, in some way, embedded in sexual desire, frustration, and sublimation, including love and romance? The newer poems in Interstellar Theme Park revisit Freud, Jung, and Camille Paglia. Throughout 2022, I ingested the work of feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva (The Severed Head) and Hélène Cixous (The Laugh of the Medusa). That’s the inspiration for a new story, “Walt Disney’s Head,” subtitled “Since I’m Dead I Give Good Head.” So, I’m never done with carnal content…plus celebrities! 

As Kathy said in an early interview, “One doesn’t express true or false identity, truth or falsity. One makes identity.” In crazy ways, FOKA was an early expression of new-narrative and other genres that now, decades later, dominate literary fiction. 

We know that writing is real magic. It makes consciousness. It melds minds. Kathy fucked me with a universe of fuck: I opened to her bliss, her mockery, her frantic scramble for love, and her extreme sexual anxiety. Yes, her “fear.”

Americans have the longest childhood, and some never grow up. Commodity culture, which you explore at length in Interstellar, doesn’t work unless it infantilizes its target markets, playing to the lizard id and making people want more, knowing more is never enough. Can you say more about your love-hate relationship with commodity culture, as well as with Disneyfication and pop iconography? How has being a native Angeleno and spending most of your life in Southern California informed these love-hate relationships?

Recently I pin-pointed my earliest childhood memory: Seeing Mickey Mouse and Pluto wall decorations from my baby crib. That’s some powerful pre-verbal branding! Along with pop archetypes, the evil joys of commodification are a long-time theme. Another interviewer recently asked me a version of this question, in the context of William Burroughs’ “language is a virus” concept. Perhaps it’s partly a long-time fascination with the mechanics of marketing, but I see vast, global commodification as a late-capitalist virus rising within the language virus. I enjoy making parodies of our already linguistic-based hallucinations of ego, society, reality, and collective mind.

So, for example, “The Gospel of Elon” in Interstellar rewrites Gnostic scripture using contemporary business jargon. It perverts Gnosticism’s grandiose tropes with brand names and sex games:

These Angels were Yahweh’s yes-men

Who released their stress in the flesh of daughters.

The most pneumatic super-heroines

From Vivid Pictures they would spirit away, 

Collared in the celestial bounce-house,

Its blue-tinted dome, floated and

Inflated with a clean-burning

Composite of silicone and Cialis.

Another chapter, “Disneyland,” has sick poems and stories about The Magic Kingdom. To this day, I dream variations on dark rides and theme parks. These archetypal forms mirror parts of the psyche. The book title, Interstellar Theme Park, satirically posits the amusement park as a metaphor for cosmology, the essentially literary act of creation. 

So, yes, I suppose growing up in Southern California—where mushroom Disneyland trips were a casual thing, and there’s always some dumb film crew blocking traffic—feeds these obsessions along with a half-snarky celebration of celebrity culture.

You’re a founding member of the psychedelic surf rock band Lawndale, one of the lesser-known acts on the punk/post-punk label SST Records. Your creative trajectory feels very punk, very anti-rock star. At the same time, in the “Rawk!” section of Interstellar, you seem to empathize with rock stars, occasionally even personifying them. How do you feel about ideas of fame, stardom, and “making it,” whether musically, in the literary world, or otherwise? 

Lawndale, despite our geezer-hood, still performs and records. Our new album, Twango, is on all streaming platforms. A fun irony of this project is that Lawndale songs are completely instrumental. No vocals, and yet I’m a writer. Go figure. 

When SST signed us, we’d already been gigging with their roster: Black Flag, Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Meat Puppets, Descendants, etc. We got to be good friends with Sonic Youth and opened for them, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, Husker Du, and every noise or punk band in L.A.

This was an indie scene, so I get your question: Why my focus on big rock stars? The empathy shown in Interstellar toward the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and the Beach Boys is, again, mixed with satire. It comes from seeing them as comic-tragic figures. Both Brian Jones of the Stones and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys died in quasi-suicidal drownings. Their demons—displayed in their love lives and drug lives—make them fascinating demi-gods. The pressures of stardom warped them even more. I’d love to update this series with Amy Winehouse or Ian Curtis.

As for “making it” in the literary world, does that exist, even at its top levels? Most of us are swimming in the smaller ponds. All the more reason to support each other and be grateful for whatever audiences we draw.”

Considering Skelley’s pond analogy, I invite the two of them around back of the Estate, where stagnation, rot, and erosion has turned our once fertile lagoon into a boundless putrid swamp; where the ducks can no longer swim. Instead they just sit, staring ominously at the bog’s shattered reflection of our jaundiced skies, waiting for something to change. I pull up three frayed wicker chairs, correcting their stance since knocked over from previous tenant’s suicides from the Poplar trees—at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

“Can I offer you two a seat?”

It’s a new year, and all the little trackers inside brains that count joy, thankfulness, and blessings have reset for the season, like the honor ratings in League of Legends.  I’m back at zero, blaring “Zero” by Smashing Pumpkins in my phone’s earbuds while mice do urbex inside the empty walls. 

What I can see, what I have seen, of 2023 looks identical to 2022 in my dusty eyes, although asking someone with depression to compare the years always seems penal, akin to asking a victim to identify their assailant in a lineup.  When talking about the years, “worse than” and “better than,” to me, all sound like measures on some scale of retributive justice, and there’s no justice, and the retribution usually brings more pain than peace of mind.  

“Wait, Rudy, maybe it’s just you,” I tell myself, “Maybe you just need some perspective, or another Psychology Today ad keyword.”

But as I make my way towards my morning shower—this vague goal that’s sliding farther and farther back in my priorities list (a fact that the Estate’s non-euclidean geometry acknowledges by pushing the end of the hallway back infinitely)—I peer into the rooms of my housemates.

It turns out that the Goddess of Depression’s cup overfloweth (like seriously, way more than half full) and everyone is laid low by some malaise that’s either seasonal, regional, or indeterminable-but-still-really-shitty.  

I want to have a conversation.  I want to ask people how they stave off these long, distended days, these January blues, but goddamn, I’m a social recluse and it’s like 1 PM and the meds are not hitting the right way yet.  So instead, I keep walking towards that far away bathroom while typing out a question in the Discord we all share:

“What’s your ‘depression grinding’ media that you use to chew through the hours where you just can’t move?”

The responses are timeless.  I mean that as a statement about how time seems when you’re depressed—asynchronous, bleeding—and also a statement about the unconquerable nature of depression, I guess.  

As I trudge on, I read through my friends’ musings as they come in and feel some measure of calm wash over me.  I feel lucid.  I feel at least lukewarm.  Finally, I feel the solid oak door of the bathroom collide with my forehead as I crash into it, my attention divided by “Zero” and the chat notifications.  

I stand looking at the door blankly, my brain caught in an error loop.

THE RESPONSES

Sabrina Small

What I want is painless annihilation. What I want is to slip into a gentle ballet of self punishment. I’ll paint yesterday’s picture: I am nervous about never working again, disappointing everyone to the point of social exile, and grieving the expected but always abrupt departure of my kids, who have gone to their dad for the week. The apartment is silent. Outside it’s raining, handing me a big fat justification to wallow. It is 10:30 and I make spaghetti puttanesca. I bring the oily red mess of noodles onto the couch and cover myself with a blanket, which I will use as a napkin, bib, and possibly snot rag. It will be dark in 5 hours but for now, I have to draw the curtain. I shove noodles into my mouth hole and find something starring Ryan Reynolds. I don’t think he’s attractive. It’s not about desire. I don’t think he’s a bad or good actor. He just is. His brand is dependable.

I watch Free Guy. The title is so bad. The title sounds like it was written by ESL students. The movie is also bad. It’s so stupid and obvious that the funny parts seem like an accident, some version of, “if 100 monkeys typed all day for eternity, eventually they’d write Hamlet.” Jody Comer is in Free Guy and I pay close attention to her shark eyes, the fetal alcohol beauty of her face. I notice the little things, the freckles on her back as she hunches before her computer. Did she hate every second of this or did she treat it like a job and enjoy the perks? I pause often. I make an appointment with my gynecologist. I fill the sodastream and press until I hear the satisfying carbonation fart. I  eat the rest of a pint of cookie-dough ice cream. I piss 12 times. I check twitter and discord. I long for death’s embrace. The whole time, I’m thinking about the minutes ticking down. The plot will find its tidy ending and I’ll be left behind, searching for another way to fill the void. Movies are for amateurs. I know this. It’s better to pick something with multiple seasons. Double digit seasons. I can’t return to the comfort of Bob’s Burgers or The Office. I’ve dipped into those wells too often. I start Broadchurch, three seasons will get me to the point of passing out from exhaustion. Oh and look! A dead kid. I fart loud enough to scare the cat and settle in for the night.

Derek Maine

The clack of the cue ball striking a red. The long run up the soft cushioned green baize. The sound of English commentators talking in hushed wry tones. A century break. A maximum break. Ronnie O’Sullivan is potting everything tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Not writing. Worrying. A drunken fan yells out mid-shot. The referee issues a stern warning. Ball in hand. I am forty years old, my children are young, happy, and healthy. I am in love with my wife. I am financially secure. Some nights I lie in total darkness and shake uncontrollably. Some nights I lie naked on the tile floor in the bathroom. I am terrified and lonely, and have no reason to be. Best of eleven frames. The words are trapped in my throat. I need to find New York again, but where? Certainly not Chicago, not this year. The 2023 Masters Snooker tournament took place at the Ally Pally in London, and was ultimately won by Judd Trump, the thirty-one year old from Whitchurch, Bristol. I watched every second between deep breaths and sometimes tears

Forrest Muelrath

I must always be working, I told myself while failing high school algebra. I must always be working on the things I was meant to work on so I can show the world my true purpose for being alive. But I can’t always be working. Some days I have none of the energy to do the things I believe I am meant to do. So, I learned to trick myself into feeling like I was working.

It started when I fell asleep with a popsicle on my laptop keyboard. After I ruined my laptop with popsicle juice, my girlfriend gave me her old laptop and said, Maybe you can make this one work? I installed open-source software on my girlfriend’s laptop. It took me a long time to get the laptop working with open-source software, but once I did I was fascinated. Everything was so open. I could see everything the computer was doing. The computer would write out everything it was doing in .log files. I found the .log files and started reading them. Reading is part of the work I am supposedly meant to do, so reading the .log files felt like working.

Even though my computer was working well enough to do my work, I was not satisfied. I wanted my computer screen to look a certain way so I would not be distracted from doing my work. I read the .log files and I figured out how to change all the colorful icons on my computer screen so that they would look like the stains on my shirt. 

I am not a computer programmer. I know people who program computers and they can remember complex codes and long strings of numbers after seeing them just once. I am lucky if can remember the code #FBF1C7 after typing it dozens of times — the code I use to change everything on my computer to a color that matches my mood when I don’t feel like working — the color tan.

Once I have changed everything on my computer so it is a tan color, I have supposedly created a distraction-free environment on my screen so that I can do my work. Then I figure out how to install something like Tetris on my tan screen. After a while I grow tired of Tetris, and I start messing with the Tetris code to see if I can change the color of the blocks in the game. Soon enough, I have jostled the computer code in a way that makes my screen go black. After the screen is black, I start all over, installing the software, changing all of the icons and colors so they match my mood to create a perfect work environment, and so on.

Gianluca Cameron

In terms of depression media, nothing really fits such a description for me more than the two to three hour long Family Guy/American Dad compilations by 7 Rong Entertainment. When one is feeling empty, one goes to YouTube. One doesn’t feel as if there is enough time for a movie and yet a feature length television compilation doesn’t feel like a major waste of time. The content farm avoids being struck for stitching together episodes of the aforementioned adult cartoons by randomly zooming in, cutting scenes and placing music over muted dialogue. While the choice of episodes and the implementation of the first two effects seem arbitrary, the third effect usually occurs during a scene where music is playing. This is interesting not only because it suggests an uncharacteristic degree of intentionality – it also creates an amusing effect (one is not initially aware that the soundtrack is different and also, the obscured dialogue gives the scene a degree of mystique). It’s telling that Family Guy and American Dad were the shows that became the basis of a low-effort content farm. Considering that such videos reach tens of thousands of views, the fanbase of such shows are clearly not alienated by the presentation. One can easily fall asleep to the stream of gags that may as well be contextless but the videos often reward close attention through moments of incoherence that don’t seem attributable to conscious intent. It’s akin to observing an AI-generated work but here, human-created episodes are the raw material through which this construction comes into being. Through watching several of these episodes, switching between compilations at will, I began to form more of an appreciation for Family Guy. How Peter was simultaneously a manifestation of pure will and a great satire of the infantilisation that can come with being the ‘man of the house’. How he is both bisexual and perhaps a closet transgender woman. How Peter and Brian both embody the spineless and conformist spirit of the modern man. Some episodes struck me – I felt they deserved an in-depth analysis. But there were no accompanying titles. Instead, the works were scrambled together – specificity lost in a great remix. In a sense, such compilations embody the essence of Family Guy. The kind of thing to turn on when you feel nothing and want to continue to feel nothing. Just funny enough to keep one distracted but not engrossing enough to provoke thought. A nice emotional flatline so as to maintain pure deadness. The 7 Rong Entertainment Family Guy compilations are perfect depression media because when one sees no future and no value in the self, they are very much the only kind of thing one wants to watch. Something to distract oneself from being. However, by abstracting itself from any one coherent creator and progressing even more into the form of content slurry, 7 Rong are actually more honest than the Family Guy team (intentionally or not). They have developed upon the intention of their forefathers by creating compilations that can deaden the soul for extended periods of time and aid the transition of the property into pure irony. Not even the facsimile-narrative of the Family Guy episode is free from distortion. When one feels inhuman, one must resort to inhuman entertainment.

D’Urban Moffer

For comfort—when the dog bites or the nanobots take up stinging because they’re replacing the fucking bees—I can always turn to the era of my crystallization or modern, facsimile representations.  No, that epoch wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be and rightfully should be ridiculed, but the decades of my childhood were undeniably a time of solid, low-fi gold.  These were days when ultraphony slow-mo and low-impact action sequences flew with your average audience, especially in TV (once considered the lowest of all filmic forms).  Good examples of this can be found in 70’s iterations of The Tomorrow People, The Hulk, or The Rockford Files.  Men and women in shorty shorts turning to foam dummies when exposed to car crashes or falling out high-rise windows.  I loathe commercials much past the 1980’s- smash the mute button and avert my eyes every time I watch a show or movie that incorporates them in 2023.  Advertising feels dirtier, more manipulative, more ‘deep state’ than ever. Vintage, vintage commercials can give me a serotonin boost for hours after viewing.  Subliminal advertising was well underway but it had decades of tweaking to go before it hit its current stride, and the rules were oddly both looser and stricter about what could be said/done during what was coined ‘prime time.’  Public Television from that era is another mood booster.  Mr. Rogers will always be there, pixelated and drawling, when I really need to smelt my brain to a sludge so I can hammer it into a vastly more appealing configuration.  The rumor that he was a military sniper is a myth.  It’s true, however, that he was a vegetarian; some people don’t want to eat children.  How can you be a Gloomy Gus when you catch his act?  You can’t unless you’re an awful, rotten person.  As you may know, for me The Home Shopping Network can certainly fill the emotional gaps between irl cringe-inducing interactions and solitary, in-the-corner brooding.  QVC triggers a sopor so deep I’m utterly lost in the rubbery folds of the unnecessary, superfluous, or downright ridiculous until I’m teetering at the very edges of the toxic consumer spectrum.  It makes me feel dizzy and dumb.  I love it.  Nothing tickles my funnybone more than people acting like a set of four multicultural garden gnomes is the answer to everything that was ever missing or wrong in their lives.  Who knows.  When the air-raid sirens blare and the green gas rolls, maybe I’ll crawl into my corpse-sized LocknLock ® container and be spared by spare parts.  Need more of the gizmos and gaskets that prepare us for or forestall our caskets.  This is also a throwback to the second wave of specialized cable channel roll-outs, the cusp of the analog and digital eras.  The days of yesteryear are forever repackaged, resold, and after enough time’s gone by retro always seems cool to kids.  Music that imitates certain beloved genres from my past, categories like mall or signalwave, any type of original MUZAK ® (before it became just another form of lousy TOP 40 radio) will lull me into a nostalgic candyland that only the smell and sound of fecal matter being violently expelled by some drunken soul on the the bus can knock me out of.  I wouldn’t mention it if it hadn’t happened just last week.  But, see, even that was a mood elevator because I’ve got a wide-open mind and a terrible sense of smell.  Pardon my unnecessary and stomach-churning digression.  Here’s one: give me Catholic radio for a good time and lotsa laughs any day.  I particularly like when their apologetics turn to apoplectics.  They’re experts at the good dog, bad dog act. Lastly, let me say that ‘Orgy of the Dead’ or ‘Bride of the Monster’ by Ed Wood fire and inspire when a certain type of blue mood hits. Bela Lugosi was in the nadir of his career in BOTM, and it shows.  Poor guy.  He’s a riot in this.  Perfection in art is overrated.  Perfection in life is non-existent.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a craft lover, snobbybob too, but I have to tell you, I appreciate the complete lack of these components.  The absence of them in times of mental unease delights me to no end.

Jesse Hilson

To get through the grind of depression requires distraction and keeping some kind of insight into your true mental state and a struggle against the “retrospective falsification” that would tell you that this mood is going to last forever and has lasted forever. That way lies suicide. I don’t like making a fetish out of depression or suicidal ideation or trying to publicly prove my own mood disorder bona fides. But lately I’ve had my share of black moods and to do DBT distress tolerance I’ve distracted myself by listening to drifting music on YouTube and just let it run and select music for me. I’ve discovered William Basinski, Susumu Yokata, Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini, Floating Points, as well as classics like Material’s “Cucumber Slumber (Fluxus Mix),” We(TM)’s “3/10ths of the Population,” Kilowatthours’ “Jignauseum,” Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard It In a Love Song,” and Cocteau Twins’ works with Harold Budd — but the real discovery for me this year, the band that has most often helped me cut across four lanes of emotional traffic to avoid getting sucked into the Final Exit which mysteriously keeps popping up has been Finnish singer Cucina Povera and her collab with Ben Vince called “There I See Everything.” 

William Duryea

When you’ve been clinically depressed for years—for decades, for your entire adult life really—all media eventually becomes depression media. There are no longer separate categories for “art I consume when I’m depressed” and “art I consume when I’m feeling good,” but instead there are gradients of despair, and each gradient has its own tolerances and demands vis-à-vis media consumption. It’s like one of those iceberg memes that have spawned countless YouTube¹ explainer videos, where the entries become more depraved and bizarre as you move farther from the light. In fact, it’s so much like that, and I hate writing so much, that I made an iceberg meme in lieu of providing a thoughtful response to Rudy’s prompt. I’m sorry, man.

Rudy Johnson

Unfortunately, I’ve always taken to sedating myself with doomscrolling when I’m really depressed.  For my New Year’s resolution (or mockery of one), I’ve decided to practice healthier social media habits.  That means that when I get real sad—when I’m such a shade of myself that I start to fall through the world—I tune my birdsite dial to one of the many WorldStar-imitation fight video accounts, and tune out the toxic shitheap I normally look at.  

My favorite is @FightHaven.  There are many videos on FightHaven that are good.  I’ll improvise some titles here to show the type of things that bait me in:

Cop throws gun and badge down and throws hands with a kid

Bro decks a girl harassing him.  Too far or equal rights / lefts?  

Girl goes Hulk on bullies.  Warranted?  

I love all of them.  

There is also the occasional masterpiece like this one here:

The opening scene to ‘Breakin’ part 3… pic.twitter.com/2WQyuu7z8L

— Fight Haven (@FightHaven) December 26, 2022

I’ve probably watched that video for 30-40 loops, just because it’s a piece of art encapsulating social media, a Fluxus score for the attention economy denizen.  Somebody records a fight, somebody else senses the recording-in-progress and tries to get their own 15 minutes of flame in the Eye of Sauron’s warm light.  Accurately, algorithmically, the cameraman remains faithfully fixated on the fisticuffs.

The teen film director, in their infinite wisdom, chooses the slapfest over the dance.  BOOYAH.

There’s a country song called “I Hope You Dance” that has nothing to do with big, predominantly black dudes punching each other out, but the chorus goes “If you get a chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.”  My advice for anyone navigating the social media channels during a depressive episode is the opposite of that song: sit it out.  Go scroll through something insane, something awful, something furry.  Who cares?  Just don’t try to fucking dance.

During my worst periods, I need the mind killer—even when it’s unsettling in some ways—not the spice.  I need to watch some ultraviolence (or at least some mediumviolence) as opposed to watching crabs doing obscene cheer-triangles where they pull the top member of the pyramid down and rip them apart for the self-actualization of clout.

FightHaven is my new goto for “at least that isn’t me” media.  Call it thankfulness if you want.

Depressed NEET talks about his voyeuristic nihilism: too far or not far enough?

At The Last Estate, we constantly hunt down, absorb and cannibalize culture.  Nom nom nom.  We eat culture like Ouroboros eating itself.  Like everyone, we also scavenge from it, picking the bones (and our own scabs).

For this project I wanted to see the digestive process of the apex connoisseur, as if looking into one of those cows at Ag schools with the porthole stomachs.  Consumption voyeurism.  

I ran through the halls of the Estate late at night shouting about my idea, and lo and behold, a groggy William answered my call.  I told him that I was going to ask people to record Warhol-like “consumptive video diaries.”  I may or may not have called them that.  It doesn’t matter.  In any event, we were able to pry Karter away from crushing weird looking spiders for long enough to record a video.  

We wound up picking things for each other to consume, since food and media are always better when you serve each other.  Call it Southern hospitality.  We conducted a Secret Santa to decide who would choose what media for whom.  Karter wound up choosing the Freddi Fish games collection game for me.  William chose Vince Staples’ music video, “Prima Donna,” for Karter.  I was more cryptic and open-ended, choosing “the shittiest game on your Nintendo Switch” for William, which turned out to be Fortnite.

The goal was originally to mimic Warhol’s burger excursion.  But we’re not Andy Fucking Warhol, so it came out different.  “Not wrong,” I assured my housemates as I tipped my hat to Bloody Mary, returning the AV gear we used during filming to her mirror cosmos, “Just different.”

Video Thumbnail art by MidJourney

April Windsor drank milk with dinner. When I went over to her house, the beverage options were off. Milk with dinner, and for breakfast, orange juice that came out of the freezer. Friday sleepovers were preferable at April’s house. Saturday sleepovers meant I went along to church on Sunday. Church made me anxious. I had such limited exposure to Christianity in general, Lutheranism in particular. There were more worshippers at April’s church on a random Sunday than I’d ever seen at Rosh Hashanah. But still, my myopic LA Jewish bubble convinced me that Christians were the minority.

April went down to the stage (pulpit?) to get her wafer with the other believers. The preacher set it up perfectly. This guy was a real sultan of segueway. He said, “Anyone who wants to come forward for consecration is welcome.” Consecration made me think of the orange juice from concentrate in April’s freezer. Some words are all process and therefore unknowable. I can’t relate to consecration, collision, consternation. Those are what my dad would have called $10 dollar words.

All religious services make me extremely hungry. The marked absence of food is what does it. I get nervous in any space where food isn’t present. In my office-worker days, I was that bitch with a full fucking snack drawer. Anyway, I was dying to know what that wafer tasted like because April said it tasted like nothing and that is just impossible. I asked her, is it good though? She couldn’t answer me. I was 3 or 4 trips to her church deep, when I just rolled up with April, knelt and got one myself. No one stopped me but I felt like they should or they would at any moment. I wondered if the wafer would burn my tongue. A wafer tastes like a cheap ice cream cone, by the way.

It’s the end of the year. From the middle of December until the new year, it’s impossible to do anything but bide my time. I’m not a hero. I’m not about to start some ambitious project on December 18th. My days are purposely empty. I can afford this lifestyle because I was a good saver during my office-worker days. I can live off the fat rendered from years in that ergonomic chair. What did I do all day for 10 years? I typed synergistic. I typed coopetition. I typed innovation ten times into every presentation. Now I write what I want. My time is mine to squander until I have to pick up the kids. It’s 1pm. I pop a blue gummi and put on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

Getting high and watching animation is one of life’s reliable joys. Outside it is -7 C, the kind of cold that erases your chin from your face. I am on the couch with a thick duvet covered in brown and pink roses. I embrace the present fully. I open myself up for immersion and escape.

By the time

Master Geppetto made Pinocchio,

he had already lost a son.

Now this was quite a few years

before my time,

but I learnt the story.

And then it became my story.

Geppetto lost Carlo during the Great War.

They’d been together only ten years.

But it was as if Carlo had taken

the old man’s life with him.

The first lines of the script–spoken by Ewan Mcgregor as Sebastian J. Cricket–are a poem about grief. They are also a writer’s introduction, a masterful grounding in time and place, and a promise that nothing about this film will be light and easy.

The appeal of source material, of ancient stories, is that they include everything. All the major human themes with none of the irony or metaphor that stymies so many modern productions. Pinocchio is an ancient story. When a story gets old enough, it’s basically a religious text. What’s the difference between Adam and Eve and Beowulf? Between Abraham and Faust? Between a story where a guy makes loaves of bread into fish and a story where a boy is made out of wood and grows his nose whenever he lies? Can I believe in Pinocchio? Do I? Is this the only chance for someone like me? Someone without a religious community, to have an ecstatic experience?

I’m drawn to mainstream films that present a version of religion that’s carefully God avoidant. In these productions, death is a place where arbitration occurs, where a hierarchical network is hinted at, and lessons must be learned to move on. Heaven and Hell are only hinted at, sometimes not mentioned at all. There might even be a celestial figure or two, but these films are purposely distancing themselves from recognizable religion.

The first example that really spoke to me was Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. After getting hit by a bus, Brooks finds himself in a well oiled purgatory where he’s assigned a caseworker and must have his life’s choices examined by cosmic judges. This stopover of the afterlife is depicted as an Orlando resort, with trams escorting the newly dead to the hall of past lives (where you can see who you’ve been), restaurants (where guests can gorge themselves with no consequence), and a schlocky comedy club (where a lounge singer does a mediocre rendition of “That’s Life”).

I was 11 when I first saw Albert Brooks in an ill-fitting toga, fall in love with Meryl Streep during their stopover to eternity. It’s clear that Brooks has a few more rounds to go on earth. He lived a weak-willed, unconfident life and learned very little about the meaning of existence. But during his weekend, he grows a big pair chasing after Streep, his soulmate. In the end, the star crossed lovers are on different trams, headed to different destinations but Brooks does not go gently into that good night. He leaps from his tram to Streep’s and because of this insane act of last minute bravery, the cosmic judge rewards him and lets him join Streep in the VIP area of the afterlife.

Albert Brooks shopped at the same Gelson’s as my family. I saw him in the produce section shortly after I saw Defending Your Life. I asked my mom for a pen and paper and she fished it out of her purse. Then I asked Albert Brooks for his autograph and he said, “Why?”

Lying comes naturally to me just as not believing in God comes naturally to me. It’s possible the two concepts are related. When I was just a little whippersnapper, the guitar playing rabbi took a beat between Hebrew hits to tell his young flock about HASHEM. HASHEM is all around you. HASHEM is the trees. HASHEM is the wind. HASHEM is your own breath.

Who is this for, I wondered? Who’s actually buying this junk? What kind of nursery rhyme bullshit is this? Here we are, tough Jews, bearers of our ancestors’ stories. As Woody Allen put it, “My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.” So who does this long haired hippie rabbi with his fucking denim vest think he is? God is bullshit. God does not exist. God is a fantasy for people who are too weak to cope with the brevity of life, which doles out one joyful moment for every 400 hundred shitty ones, if you’re lucky.

Lying is just picking up on your own wish fulfillment or tuning into the wishes of others. I can make someone feel great with a soft lie. Most of us can.

Significant lies I’ve told:

• • That my mom died in a car accident. I was in kindergarten. My dad came to pick me up and my teacher hugged him and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” I know this story because it’s been repeated to me. I don’t remember doing it myself.

• • That I didn’t steal 80 dollars. I was 12. My parents left for a vacation. They left us with my cousin and they left an envelope full of cash. I took 80 out of the envelope and bought candy for my sisters all week. Do you know what it’s like to flash that cash at the gas station and walk out with a bunch of Laffy Taffy? It’s fucking baller. My cousin caught on and he told my parents. They confronted me and I denied it. I denied it forever. The last time my dad asked me about stealing the 80 dollars, I was in my late 20s. I denied it and he punched me in the shoulder, jovially. Begrudging respect for my method acting.

• • That I used to date Zach Galifinakis. I briefly joined the English language comedy scene in Berlin. It’s a small scene. I did a set that was electrifying about the romance of anal sex. I plummeted after that. I didn’t  even bomb. It was more like I just couldn’t get back on stage. But the comics let me in and I wanted their admiration. I chose Zach Galifinakis because I think I could get him. I’m hotter than he is. I’ve fucked lots of Gakifinakis types. I told this lie in an off the cuff way. I kept it subtle and mysterious because that makes it more believable. Everyone believed me and my Galifinakis-adjacent status kept me in the group despite the fact that I was not producing anything or performing. Eventually I found a serious boyfriend and dropped out of the comedy scene.

   

  Pinocchio is an unruly child. He makes life difficult for his father. He breaks things. He doesn’t listen. He lies. In del Toro’s version of the film, Pinocchio’s curious fumblings are amplified. No one is sure they want him around. Gepetto calls his ersatz son a burden. Pinocchio is ashamed. He wants to make his father proud. He goes about it all wrong. First, he joins a corrupt circus, led by the heartless Volpe (voiced expertly by Christoph Waltz). At the end of his first show, Pinocchio is overjoyed by the love and acceptance of the audience but Gepetto is not proud of him. He is mad Pinocchio did not obey him and go to school. The human cost of blind obedience is an ongoing theme: obedience to fathers, a soldier’s obedience to his commander, even obedience to cosmic rules. Pinocchio questions all of these rules, breaks most of them.

   

  Pinocchio is a boy who can’t die. He goes to an afterlife of sorts, and succumbs to a ritual as quick as a carwash before he’s reanimated. There are rabbits who play cards. There is a keeper of the realm, blue sand and an hourglass that must empty before Pinocchio can return to his body.

   

  Pinocchio’s fourth death occurs when he blows up the sea monster which swallowed his family. He enters the realm of the dead knowing Gepetto is drowning and impatient to get back to save him. The celestial keeper of this realm cannot send Pinocchio back to earth until the sand runs out of the hourglass. Only by breaking the hourglass himself and accepting the consequence of mortality, can Pinocchio return to save his father. Of course, Pinocchio does it. He smashes time. He puts his father’s life before his own. The miracle of the wooden boy that no one wanted is that, despite a life of immense suffering, he wants to go back. Despite only being given the smallest crumbs of kindness, he wants to give back.

   

  For a Catholic, like del Toro, Pinocchio is a Christ figure. Crucifixion is overtly symbolized throughout the film. In the beginning, Gepetto and his original son Carlo, are placing a delicately carved depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion in the town’s church when a bomb hits and Carlo is killed. Later, Pinocchio (who is not delicately carved like Jesus, but made crudely by a drunken Gepetto) enters the church during service horrifying the village with his demonic presence. He is not Jesus and yet he sees a wooden figure, like himself, who is revered. He asks his father, “Why do they like him and not me?” It’s a question that is innocent and brazen at once. Innocent because it is asked by a child, who does not know the history or religious significance. Brazen because Guillermo del Toro knows what he’s doing. He pulls strings to elicit my reactions. He does it with finesse. He goes nuclear with the crucifixion metaphor near the end. The evil circus master, Volpe, places Pinocchio on a cross at the edge of a cliff and lights it on fire, growling “Burn Bright! Like a Star!”

   

  It’s strange that an act as grotesquely violent as crucifixion could become impotent home decor or Jewelry. It’s absurd that del Toro needs to remind us, through a wooden puppet, how horrible this act is.

   

  I am not a Catholic. I live in Europe but I’m not a cathedral buff. I don’t feel “wowed” by the architecture or impressed by how long it took to build. I’m not anti-cathedral, I just don’t care. I haven’t known many Catholics and those I have known are not observant. I remain very ignorant about all religions, including the one I was born into. I have no religious spirituality to speak of. It’s embarrassing to question God’s existence. It seems lonely to go looking for the answers at my age, and for now I’m too timid and frightened to probe more directly.

   

  I am comfortable circling religion, riding an innertube on one of those lazy river waterpark rides, a safe distance from the molten center. In this religious adjacent place, I find meaning in art, in literature, in films. I find most of my joy here too. Much of my existence is anxious and sorrowful, but not most of it. Why mess with success? Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

   

  When I watched Pinocchio on a cold afternoon, high on an adult gummi, there were tears streaming down my face. Pinocchio unlocked my deepest emotions. It’s hard to get to this spot when you’re riding the lazy God-adjacent river ride. I got hit with a jolt of religious ecstasy and the delivery system was Pinocchio.

In doing so, I have not simply been depriving myself, I’ve been betraying my housemates. I sold them on our mutual literary exile in this Mississippi quagmire³ on a vision of a publication that would transcend our dead culture, murdered by algorithmic outrage and the mirrored self-torture chamber of social media, and refocus our readers’ attention on the joy inherent in art, in its creation and its consumption.

And now, as we arrive at the end of our first year in “print,”⁴ I take an accounting and find myself lacking. I haven’t simply fallen short of that vision; I’ve fallen through the rotted floorboards of this entire bullshit edifice and am drowning in the overflow from the backed up septic tank.⁵ And the number of collaborators that I’m disappointing just keeps growing. Throughout out the year, we’ve taken in more strays and stragglers. The house is fuller⁶ than it has ever been, and my heart is emptier.

in a last ditch attempt to salvage this doomed enterprise and ease my own conscience, I confronted presented the writers-in-residence⁷ of the estate with the following pitch:

Hey guys, 

I think I want to try to do a sort of year-in-review piece to go up next Thursday or Friday and I’m looking for input from anyone and everyone who wants to participate.

Here’s what I’m looking for: as little as one sentence and as much as one paragraph on the artistic work that brought you the most joy this year. This could be anything you consider art, so books, movies, games, music, paintings, whatever; it’s all good. It also doesn’t have to be something released this year, just something you experienced this year (so it can be a classic film you watched for the first time or whatever).⁸

I had just one restriction:⁹ no self-promotion, and no picking work created by fellow estate residents, twitter mutuals, or personal friends.¹⁰ I wanted to get at the love of art for its own sake, completely divorced of social pressure or vanity or narcissism.

And, well, I’ve already belabored this introduction enough. You understand how this article format works. It’s a pretty standard clickbait template. I asked a question. I got responses. I’ve copy/pasted the responses below. My unpaid labor is done for the year. See you in 2023.¹¹

Derek Maine

At the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland I experienced a private, spiritual moment with my son in Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family (Esther Krinitz’s embroidery story of survival). I was sent there by Sabrina Small, from the Berlin offices. I will remember that moment, sitting next to him, and the words we shared, for as long I live. The work of art may fade from view and recede into gray matter, but my son’s expression will last. Art brings people together, creates connections, crosses continents and centuries.

D’urban Moffer

Signalwave (mixed with equal parts Gemini Home Video and Local58TV) has been a constant source of inspiration for the past cycle and will be for the imminent future. My brain’s obviously electromagnetically damaged.

Forrest Muelrath

I sat on Steve Cannon’s couch for about three hours chatting about life in New York,  poetry, the crowd around Steve, the crowd around the couch. The couch was on the 6th floor of the Whitney Museum during the 2021 Biennial. I never met Steve Cannon. By the time I arrived in New York, Steve was in a place in his career where any young poet would want to be in the room that Steve was in. I was never the kind of guy to try to get in the room with the guy everybody wanted to be in the room with, so I never went to Steve’s room, but I heard about it. Steve’s room was on East 3rd street and it had the best kind of New York vibe. He held poetry readings there, and it was also the offices for the magazine Tribes, which Steve founded in 1990 with a xerox machine, completely blind from Glaucoma at the time, and continued working on essentially until his death in 2019. Steve’s room had a vibe, and to honor the space Steve’s art collective, The Gathering of the Tribe, cut up the walls and reassembled the main section of the apartment on the 6th floor of the Whitney — including books, ephemera, a couch, a beat up coffee table with a used  ashtray. On an old video cassette machine played likely the last interview with Steve, conducted by Anne Waldman, another one of my favorite poets. I was with my friend Austin. Austin tells me he was a poet when he was young, before he started making money on the stock market. Austin tells me he’s not writing poetry now (sometimes people lie about this), but he was always around it, and he was around Steve’s room as often as possible. The ash tray was full of butts, the museum was packed with tourists, and people were rushing through to try to cram in the viewing of sixty-plus art pieces, each one potentially worth a lifetime. You had to really be in poetry to spend much time in Steve’s corner of the museum, and most people in big art shows like that are more in it for the visuals. Austin and I were in it for the poems. He started telling me stories as we sat on the old couch, and it started to feel like home. We lit up some of our own cigarettes, inspired by Steve’s old ashtray sitting in front of us. It must have looked unsettling to people — the two of us sitting inside that shiny new museum, smoking butts. Someone came up to us and asked us if we were real — as if we were a hologram, actors, or maybe even ghosts. Even one of the professional tour guides hired by the Whitney asked us in earnest if we were supposed to be part of the exhibition. I’m telling this story now because out of all the shit I’ve seen, read, or heard, across two continents, as well the entire internet, it reminded me how important it is to have a space for community, where you can develop your own language, and come to some kind of consensus about the way we want the world to be and the kind of things we want in it. Whether it be a basement apartment turned baptist church in Brownsville, or an unabashed simulacra, like the Whitney exhibit, or a simulation, like The Last Estate. And I will gladly sit on that filthy couch and smoke whatever I please in places like these, shout about what I like and don’t like, as Steve did, and go on making things a little bit better for everyone around me. You should check out Steve Cannon’s writing and read about his life, if you haven’t already.

Gabriel Hart

I’ve already written about Blonde, both the novel and film, here and there this year, and I am going to do it a third time here because the joy it brought me is complicated. In fact, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel did not bring me what you might call joy—me and my dear friend were slackjawed in abject empathic horror as we watched it, astonished like witnessing a dam break; so powerful I’m not sure if I could watch it again. To me, it was so affirmative of its intent that maybe it only called for a single satisfied viewing.

What did bring me joy was its immediate aftermath, its ripples turned tidal as it sparked a full-blown culture war between its champions and detractors. I rejoiced to witness a work of art so potent that it made people argue viciously of its importance—one side calling it trash, the other saying it was the cinematic event of 2022 that delivered exceedingly. Ironically, the way “Hollywood” headlines reacted to the film ‘Blonde’ was similar to how the old studios treated Marilyn: misinterpreting beauty, underestimating talent while condemning an expressive provocateur. Falling lockstep with every mainstream publication who panned the film, online social justice warriors had the nerve yet lack of imagination to denounce the film as “anti-feminist” and “anti-abortion,” while intelligent, cultured adults like us immediately understood it as a portrayal of (and really, a protest against) exploitation.

The fact that a work of art in 2022 created that much of a cultural upheaval gives me immediate joy and a rare hope for the future, and the flames that Blonde stoked last fall still keep me very warm during this cold winter.

Gianluca Cameron

Tokyo Girls Bravo is a paperback showcasing the works of various female Japanese pop artists. It has an introduction by famous male practitioner Takashi Murakami. These works are accompanied by short biographies of the artist – with photographs involving either the women surrounded by books and manga or the practitioners instead engaged in everyday activities (hanging out, eating, working etc.). The works range from the expressionistic to the clean and flat. Mahomi Kunikata’s work is similar to the works of Twitter internet ‘outsider artists’ but is, I feel, a lot better as it feels like it comes from a more specifically psychological place due to existing in the realm of high art rather than the realm of social media which necessarily drives expression to be more general so as to achieve maximum attention. It also demonstrates that all of us, no matter how much we proclaim ourselves to be outsiders, are drawing on a tradition (perhaps one we are not aware of). This is perhaps humbling but the reminder that all works are in conversation with something helps keep us grounded and not making works that are self-obsessed and appeal to no-one. All the works are an excellent merging of libidinal fantasy, autobiographical detail and an appreciation for the small details of solitary life. There is a great diversity of both mediums and modes of expression – the book presents the works in a matter-of-fact, minmalist matter appropriate to the works. They are allowed to speak for themselves. Once you take a look at the earnest, beautiful pop art contained within this book, this encounter with alterity will change you. Why is the modern Western pop art scene so devoid with engagement with the fetish, the obsession, the loneliness, the blending of myth and the cityscape and the life surrounded by the symbols? These works are spiritually enriching in a manner beyond the capabilities of any transcedant fresco.

Jesse Hilson

A few weeks ago I loaded up on caffeine and having forgotten my meds took a mildly trippy, scenic drive down through the snow-encrusted Catskills to pick up my daughter after her first semester at an unnamed college. I don’t drive anywhere outside of my county so it was an adventure, and if I had to give an example of an artistic experience that was connected to some cool underground shit I would say a podcast I listened to while driving through the winter mountains was Deviate with Rolf Potts about the Beat Generation dissident Charles Plymell. Plymell thought that Kerouac was a wannabe mama’s boy with a football scholarship and not a true representative of the Beats, whereas Burroughs was cool enough and Plymell got along with him. Plymell who’s like in his 90s lives in Cherry Valley not far from me in upstate NY. He was responsible for the first printing of Robert Crumb’s path-breaking underground comic Zap Comix in San Francisco in the late 60s. The guy is underground royalty. I had heard of Plymell but never heard his poetry until I listened to him reading from his book Apocalypse Rose on the Belgian underground radio show L’étranger a few days earlier. (William Duryea asked us when coming up with these testimonials not to give our 2022 experiences in relation to our mutuals to avoid promoting our friends due to social pressure.) Ok I will try not to do that although the discovery of the radio show L’étranger was one of the most potent and remarkable artistic experiences for me in 2022 and I barely know the DJ—instead I’ll say it’s Plymell: I asked for two of his books for Christmas including Apocalypse Rose and his 1971 authentic Beat Generation novel The Last of the Moccasins which had a cover painted by underground painter and cartoonist Robert Williams. Notice how often the word “underground” has come up in this paragraph? 2022 for me was a year of discovering quality underground art.

Karter Mycroft

At various points throughout this year I have participated in speedruns of the video game Demon’s Souls Remake (2020) by Fromsoftware and Bluepoint Studios. Without going into too much detail, this is a niche-of-a-niche-of-a-niche activity where the goal is to beat Demon’s Souls Remake in as little time as possible. My personal best time is not very good – a full four minutes behind the world record of 33 minutes and 13 seconds – but the experience of playing this very OK video game over and over, streaming runs on twitch, sharing strategies on Discord, and making friends with the four other people who do this, has really meant a lot to me. There’s just something about failing to go fast. There’s something about executing an optimal 1-1 drop into Tower Knight AI freeze with perfect bridge pathing and getting rewarded with good Freke Skip RNG, only to lose it all to a rookie mistake at Old Monk. I don’t know why I keep coming back to this stuff. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. Maybe it’s the challenge or the repetition or the couple of internet friends I wouldn’t have otherwise. Maybe playing video games is fun, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out next year.

Rudy Johnson

The greatest amount of pre-noon joyfulness in my life this year has hands down, no-contest, been generated by the drug (and work of alchemical art) Ritalin, which I was recently prescribed.  Into the afternoon, the work of art that has most often led to breakout joy—and damn near euphoria a couple times—is a piece of 2022 League of Legends content, a character named Renata Glasc.  Renata is a “chem baron” who (in my head-howitzer, anyway) is LoL’s version of Martin Shkreli.  I imagine her company makes highly sought after panaceas, like drugs to prescribe to children so that they can ace magical standardized tests, and be favored in the eyes of both Hextech-powered scantron machines and their Ionian half-tiger parents (the fandom wiki says she makes perfume???, but fuck that).  Playing this character always makes me feel powerful, then like shit as I lose, just like the Methylphenid generic that fills my mornings with energy and a version of myself that’s human for about 2-4 hours.

Sabrina Small

Over the past week, I’ve watched Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories 4 times. It came out in 2017 and I definitely watched and enjoyed it then, but I didn’t really appreciate it. In 2017 maybe it was hard to appreciate anything–Until 2020, that is–when we all collectively mourned our regular grievances. I love the language and the pettiness and the sibling rivalries and the way Baumbach cuts people off mid sentence. Dustin Hoffman is a revelation and Emma Thompson, who plays a drunk artsy-fartsy type, is electric. I do believe I’ve got some of that character’s spirit in me. It’s so weird when you think you see yourself on screen. It’s hard to know if it’s genuine. I’ve asked a lot of people if I remind them of her and they’re like…I don’t know because I haven’t watched that movie since 2017. Mostly, I am awed by the artifice of the Meyerowitz Stories. I can see the dueling influences of raw intuition and calculated decisions. It’s art that’s not trying to hide the lumps and I appreciate that. It speaks to me. Although, I am troubled by how easily pulled in I get when it comes to any depiction of upper class Jews fighting in their well decorated homes. Woody Allen did a number on me.

Sofia Haugen

Professional wrestling is the greatest human art form. The perfect blend of combat sport and performance art. And the apex of this art, the best wrestling match I have ever seen, was only a few weeks ago, the main event of Freelance Wrestling’s “Deck the Halls with Balls of Fury” on December 16th.  Pitting the Bounty Hunter, Bryan Keith (a cowboy) against “Speedball” Mike Bailey (a kung-fu Canadian), this match was too powerful for the ring hardware to handle, with one of the turnbuckles breaking shortly into the match. Never has a match so deserved a ten-minute standing ovation. You can watch the replay on independentwrestling.tv and idk how much it costs but I know it’s worth it.

Stuart Buck

this year i watched 34 Godzilla movies in 20 days. They made me feel like a child again, which is what i want art to do. i bought a hat and i love my wife.

William Duryea

Before I share my choice, let me abuse my editorial custodianship of this article and list a few honorable mentions:

I binged all three seasons of Succession during a few weeks in the stagnant spring, and it’s the rare contemporary prestige TV obsession that’s worthy of the religio-orgasmic praise it receives; you can probably guess the adjectives for yourself: vicious, savage, hilarious, sharp, incisive, merciless, etc. etc. It’s everything you’d expect given that litany of critical clichés, only richer, realer. It revivifies dead tropes, dead language. I’m rooting for Tom.

Vince Staples’ Ramona Park Broke My Heart takes the standard tropes and affectations of gangsta rap and transforms them (subtly, brilliantly) into pure, cold despair. If I called the album “icy” and “vacant,” you might think I was criticizing it, but, no, this is an album about iciness, about vacancy, about the hollowness at the heart of violent posturing; not a soulless album, but a reflection on soullessness.  It didn’t bring me joy, per se, but perfectly reflected my despair, or maybe that state beyond despair, where you feel only vaguely comic, empty irony, where identity is a callus formed by the repetition of words and ideas that were once rich in meaning, but have now entirely lost even their ability to inflict pain.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land was not simply adorable, but ingenious in its adorableness, borderline malicious in its ability to take concepts and mechanics that in abstract should be cringe (like shepherding a clutch of lost ducklings to their mother) or horrifying (like swallowing a lightbulb) and infuse them with enough honest childlike glee that all cynicism and self-consciousness are annihilated. I just wish I felt more honest emotion and less hollow admiration while playing it. I could tell it should have been a  wonderful experience. I failed it.

Here is the chorus to the Colter Wall song “Motorcycle”: “Well, I figure I’ll buy me a motorcycle / Wrap her pretty little frame around a telephone pole / Ride her off a mountain like ol’ Arlo /Figure I’ll buy me a motorcycle.” I listened to it 44 times this year. I have no regrets. I still have a few days to get to 50.

I think I was more lukewarm than most about the final season of  Better Call Saul, and particularly the season’s first half, which was so aggressively plotted and full of heavily-foreshadowed tragic irony that you could practically hear the self-satisfied chatter of the writer’s room as they contrived the “perfect” fates for all of the show’s remaining supporting characters, but the final few episodes, and especially the finale itself, were sublime. It’s as if the switch to black & white also stripped away all of the series’ artifice and contrivance. You can’t hear the plot machine humming anymore. Everything suddenly becomes stark, simple. The show is recentered around the lucid moral logic that underpins the best of Vince Gilligan’s work: characters operating within the haze of their clearly sketched faults and biases make choices and then experience the natural consequences of those choices. Only unlike Breaking Bad, which ended neatly and conclusively, Better Call Saul is unafraid to leave its outcome ambiguous, to force the audience to reach their own conclusions about Jimmy’s motivations and whether his story ends on the cusp of redemption or recidivism. I’m going to make a contentious statement: Breaking Bad had the superior final season, but Better Call Saul had the better finale.

About Endlessness is a gorgeous film. The simplest, most crassly obvious way to describe Roy Andersson‘s directorial output is to say he creates living paintings. This isn’t inaccurate. Not only are his movies beautiful, meticulously and subtly lit, colored, and costumed with a sophistication that reveals Wes Anderson for the garish hack that he is, but each scene is shot from a single static perspective, with characters often appearing in the background and slowly moving to the foreground before receding again, exactly as if you’re watching the work of some Dutch old master come gradually, painfully alive. And the “painful” is key here, and what separates About Endlessness from films of hollow, artificial beauty. (Yes, I’m still talking about the Anderson with one “s.”) There’s a comic, world-weary bleakness to the film that gives it real emotional depth and poignancy. It’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

I loved Horizon Chase Turbo so much that it was very nearly my actual choice. I bought this retro-style racer for $5 on a whim during a Switch eShop sale and I’ve played it for over 25 hours. A day of my life, lost without regret. Yes, it’s a blatant attempt to cash-in on the nostalgic memories of ancient console-addicts like me for Out Run and its imitators, but it executes the con perfectly, even transcendently, with gorgeous graphics that conjure the sense memory of arcade classics without being truly derivative and precise controls that are so much tighter and more gratifying than the games in whose wake its drifting.  Even its name took on a richer personal meaning, an invitation to reflect on that sad possibility that nostalgia may be the only available fuel to allow a sad old fuck like myself to chase the receding horizon of wonder.

Ultimately though, my singular, outstanding source of joy in a largely joyless year had to be It’s Almost Dry. Of course Pusha T has no true competition. This album is pristine. Every beat is flawless. Every bar is flawless. It has an unmatched goosebumps-per-minute ratio.  Of course it’s precise, but not coldly or artificially so. Pusha is a technical rapper in the same sense that Jesus Christ was a carpenter. Yes, sure, it’s true, but to focus exclusively on it misses all the other manifestations of perfection. This album made me giddy at a time when I thought giddiness was forever out of reach. I don’t dare to deconstruct it because I fear that might make you enjoy it less. Listen for yourself. It’s art.