Jasperland
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  • Stay well, San Francisco.

    → 6:58 PM, Sep 16
  • Here in our corner of Los Angeles, a key local fixture is this art truck always parked on Willoughby, which features an evolving array of flowers, furniture, found objects, newspaper clippings, and more. I especially enjoyed this recent message about the false panacea of social media.

    IMG 0131 IMG 0132
    → 2:47 PM, Sep 14
  • Whereas bad things come in threes, and

    Whereas we have been treated to wall-to-wall, unceasing, multi-decade, hotdog-eating-contest-style media attention focused on Donald Trump and Elon Musk,

    It is resolved that… Oh god, will there really be one more?

    → 2:39 PM, Sep 14
  • When I feel bad at posting, I remind myself that these other freaks have been going at it 280 characters at a time for literal decades. Their angel-headed tweets are living evidence that the 10,000-hour theory is true.

    → 11:55 PM, Sep 12
  • B. S. High, the doc about the fake Columbus high school that was really just a sketchy football team, is low-key a cult documentary. The “coach” masterminding the thing, keeping the con alive for years, has that same manic creep charisma as Keith Raniere or especially Larry Ray.

    Football, a cult?

    → 11:08 PM, Sep 12
  • Watched the documentary Whirlybird expecting to learn more about the history of helicopter news reporting in Los Angeles. And I did learn a lot about that industry and how it intersects with the carceral state and systemic racism. But the documentary is also an unexpectedly harrowing portrait of intimate partner violence, cycles of abuse, and the way societal transphobia causes harm that radiates through families and communities. It’s an intense text to grapple with.

    And to think, we picked it mostly because it’s scored by Ty Segal. Not the worst reason. The score is in fact really good!

    → 12:20 AM, Sep 11
  • I spent part of tonight migrating my passwords from LastPass to 1Password and changing the passwords for all my remotely important accounts. What a pain in the neck. LastPass you had ONE JOB!

    The saving grace is that 1Password is a clearly superior piece of software.

    → 11:00 PM, Sep 10
  • West Hollywood, September 2023

    → 10:54 PM, Sep 10
  • Easy to forget that, after a fallow period, returning to any activity—blogging, running, writing poems, regular contact with a relative—involves awkward first attempts. Which can be lame, even discouraging. Yet soon enough it’s part of your mundane life again, a thing you do, for better or worse.

    → 4:17 PM, Sep 6
  • All these memory-core podcast nerds be like, “That seems impressive but did you know that in his second season, Dominique Wilkins led the NBA in…” while over here my silky smooth brain can’t remember a single blessed detail from Wheel of Time Season One.

    → 10:21 PM, Sep 5
  • With AI tips like these, we may have finally reached the AI hype cycle phase where expectations are properly tempered:

    ChatGPT can suggest loads of (mostly terrible) ideas. Somewhere in there might be a germ of a good idea that you can run with.

    That should be your expectation for ChatGPT, Will said

    (from the Washington Post)

    → 9:48 AM, Sep 5
  • If you’re looking to replace your doomscroll with a wholesomehole (?) I heartily recommend Jack Cheng’s See You on the Bookshelf, a podcast from 2017 where the author interviewed the people at every step of publishing his middle-grade hit See You In the Cosmos. So sweet—and surprisingly informative!

    → 8:05 PM, Sep 4
  • Bless the promotional committee that decided to brand Ukiah with the slogan, “Far Out. Nearby.”

    (They made a nice cooler bag, too!)

    → 1:51 PM, Sep 4
  • In case anyone was wondering what kind of mindset inspires the leader of a group backed by a cabal of tech billionaires to secretively snap up farmland in the Central Valley for “a new city”, this passage from the LA Times has got you:

    In a self-help book he co-wrote, Sramek says if given the chance to give his younger self a bit of advice, he would quote Ayn Rand: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

    (Love that snooty semicolon!)

    → 7:01 PM, Aug 31
  • This dropdown from a reader survey for Matt Levine’s wonderful Money Stuff newsletter is the written equivalent of that New Yorker cartoon, “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” except it’s from the tippy top of the C Suite.

    A dropbown asking, What is your job title?  with the options of, Owner/Partner, Chairman President, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Financial Officer/Controller, Chief HR Officer, Chief Information/Chief Technology Officer, Chief Investment Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Other Chief Officer, Executive Vice President/Senior Vice President/Vice President, Director/Managing Director/Department Head, General Manager, Senior Manager/Manager
Supervisor, Entry level, Other

    → 3:22 PM, Aug 31
  • Some universal questions in this very personal Naomi Klein essay about her morbid fascination with Naomi Wolf, her dark-side doppelgänger:

    Even after following Wolf’s antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she – a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies – rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon?

    → 12:28 PM, Aug 31
  • Well, it’s been a good run with the interest+payments suspended on my student loans. I for one savored being free from them. In 2020 I even somehow paid them way down. Then the government announced $10K of forgiveness—seemed things might keep getting better. But no. Tomorrow, boot back on throat!

    → 12:30 AM, Aug 31
  • Another Entry in the Iconic-Weirdo-Documentary Canon

    There’s this throwaway scene in I Love You Now Die—the documentary about the trial of Michelle Carter, the teen who supposedly hectored her boyfriend into killing himself—where the filmmakers stand in a parking lot near the crime scene and interview random passerby about what happened. Nothing much comes of their gambit until a woman rolls down her window and gives a brief monologue in a thick Massachusetts accent.

    “Why does evil exist?” she asks dramatically, before answering her own question. “I don’t know.”

    There’s something iconic and unfiltered about her, and about this thing she says. The quote immediately became a catchphrase in our household, always recited with the same melodramatic, singsong intonation of the original.

    The chance to see something like this, something true and raw, is for me one of the chief pleasures of watching documentaries. If you share this pleasure, then I highly recommend Telemarketers, a three-parter about predatory spam calls, 2000’s call center culture, poverty, fraternal orders of police, capitalism, and an extremely iconic man named Patrick J. Pespas. It is truly stuffed with the strangeness and playful genius of people you never otherwise see on TV. (Except sometimes in reality stuff like Catfish.) And it centers on an unlikely bromance between two life-affirming weirdos.

    Plus, it answers a question I’ve had for years: what the hell is up with those deep-voiced robots who call you and pretend to be cops and ask for money?

    → 10:45 PM, Aug 30
  • Delightfully dystopian scene at Home Depot:

    • • chaotically parked forklifts in every aisle
    • • teenage clerks don’t know the first thing about construction
    • • day laborers play cards on overturned cart in parking lot
    • • clerk trades $15 off (“damaged”) for real-time filling out of survey (“excellent service”)
    → 12:09 AM, Aug 30
  • Saturday was the closing of the Madam X show at Space Ten in Hawthorne. Thangka-like paintings and intricately-painted sculptures—the long-ignored work of Madam X, visionary painter, mystic, conceptual artist, and LA original. De plus, Madam X herself was interviewed live by co-gallerist Axel Wilhite. And there’s a gorgeous catalog + vibe-y zine!

    A photo of the wall text, Madam X Circumnavigating the Sphere of Time, with her hair beside it A photo of Axel Wilhite interviewing Madam X in the gallery in front of a crowd A photo of two visitors peering to read the wall text of a painting A series of painted spheres, with the one in the foreground painted solid black A photo of a sculpture of a seated figure, filigreed with intricate and colorful designs Three figures talking during sunset, photo
    → 11:43 PM, Aug 29
  • Costco: Soviet-Style Utopia?

    Just finished the Acquired episode about Costco, and hearing a detailed breakdown of the business model has convinced me: I’m going to get a membership. (They cap their markup at 14%! For everything!)

    As I was listening I slowly realized something strange: Costco basically runs a controlled economy. They only stock one or two items in each category, in part because that’s the only way that the larger business model can work, but also because they assume customers don’t want endless choices as long as the limited choice they do have is high quality and very cheap.

    This is basically how Lenin drew it up! State communism and a command economy! The state determines what the best things are, ensures their availability, and the populace happily accepts them, spared of the need to make a decision.

    Another thing I learned is that the demographics of Costco members skew wealthy. Rich people want that sweet luxury communism most of all.

    → 11:29 PM, Aug 29
  • I’ve never liked the way non-stainless fasteners cause redwood to streak. But these irregular, weeping lines at regular intervals remind me of shou sugi ban, the exterior wood finish where you burn it some. What would normally be a faux pas, lifted into elegance by regularity and intentionality.

    → 9:46 PM, Aug 26
  • A friend recommends an old book. The book is in French. A quick search reveals there are over a dozen translations. Some over 100 years old. Some bowdlerizations. Surely one is accurate and true. But which?

    If someone made a Goodreads for comparing translations, now that would be a public service!

    → 1:48 PM, Aug 26
  • Two months away, and within 24hrs of returning home I start rearranging furniture like a psycho: changing where paintings hang, scrubbing dust bunnies under the bed, scaring the cat, building teetering book stacks. It’s important to re-impose your will, lest the domicile get uppity in its solitude.

    → 9:38 PM, Aug 23
  • Noyo, July 2023.

    Kale being washed in a big basin.
    → 4:58 PM, Aug 19
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