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?
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!
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.
West Hollywood, September 2023
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.
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.
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)
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!
Bless the promotional committee that decided to brand Ukiah with the slogan, “Far Out. Nearby.”
(They made a nice cooler bag, too!)
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!)
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.
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?
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!
Delightfully dystopian scene at Home Depot:
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!
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.
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!
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.
Noyo, July 2023.
Renaming Twitter to X is yet another move that I myself would have made when I was eleven.
That year I chose a username for abovetopsecret.com, and the best I could come up with was themaster. But that was already taken, so I tried themastermaster.
Shoot me: that was my handle till mid-college.
I’ve been having lots of good ideas for things to blog about, from little tweet-length things to full essays. For the most part I neglect to write them down, and then I forget the ideas entirely, and that’s that.
Found this in a stack of photos my grandma took. On the back it says, “We saw the fireboat.”
I like how the house my dad built kind of looks like a shogun’s keep.
As I listen to more Hermanos Gutiérrez, I have to say, their debut album has an almost platonically perfect cover:
My brother’s partner put on some music, and I was like, Cool, some “Wicked Games” vibes, love this. And then I was like, What are you doing, fool, ask what it is!
Hermanos Gutiérrez, it turns out. On repeat, on my ears.