Our society’s got problems, and they’re all the same problem: people who already have things are resistant to giving them up.

Got a mortgage? You might be threatened by people planning to knock down the single family homes down the street and put up high-density apartment blocks. Got a small fortune, or a high income? You might be threatened by people trying to raise taxes to fix social problems. Got a car and routes you enjoy driving? You might be threatened by proposals to invest in mass transit over roads. Got white supremacy? You might be threatened by people chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Got a profitable oil company? You might be threatened by climate activists.

Et cetera.

This isn’t to say all change is good change. And especially not when it comes to urban development, which is what I want to talk about here. Obviously, cities like Los Angeles (where I live) have long histories of using development to harm, profiteer upon, and destroy communities with less power.

One of the essays that has most influenced my thinking on this is "Racism is Killing the Planet" by Hop Hopkins. (I first read it when I profiled Hop in the Antioch Alumni Magazine from two years back.) Among many key points, Hop says that “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism.” So many of the disasters of urban development, from the community-bisecting freeways championed by Robert Moses to redlining to the racist “predictive policing” policies championed by fasc-tech companies like Palantir can be explained if you see the people they target as “disposable people” and the communities they live in as “sacrifice zones.”

That said, I’m not so sure that I myself live in a sacrifice zone—and yet my neighborhood seems to be in the middle of a big fight around development. Here’s a political mailer I received a few days ago:

This group, Beverly Fairfax Community Alliance (unclear who’s behind it), is rallying support to oppose the forthcoming redevelopment of the CBS studio lots down on Beverly, about ten blocks from me. According to the other side of the mailer, this expanded facility will “create traffic gridlock on our already congested streets” and “foreseeably push community rents even higher than they are today and lead to the displacement of existing renters.” The second part in particular would be a real harm, especially as many of my neighbors are Jewish emigrés from the former Soviet Union, gay men who have made their lives in West Hollywood, retirees, renters, and most often an intersection of these identities and more. (This is the same coalition that came together to create West Hollywood in the ‘80s, explicitly to pass rent control laws.) I don’t know where many of my neighbors will go if forced out of the apartments where we make our lives.

But I’m also skeptical of the motives of these folks opposing development. The last bullet point, “DENSITY,” seems to give up the game: a chief concern is that the new studio will be designated as a “Regional Center” which will lead to “future intensification of development for our entire community.”

While that sounds scary—it also seems obviously necessary! Beverly-Fairfax and West Hollywood may be relatively high-density in Los Angeles, but for us to house everyone at affordable rents and reasonable home prices, we affirmatively need intensification of development. That should be something we’re pushing for!

So I find myself skeptical of this mailer. I need to do more research. And in a larger sense, I’m finding it harder and harder to make sense of what development we should oppose (beyond obvious things like freeway widening and oil pipelines), and what we need to throw our whole weight behind. More and more, I’m pro-development until convinced otherwise.

We’ve been watching The Rings of Power, the new, half-billion-dollar Lord of the Rings spinoff that Jeff Bezos bought for Amazon Prime, hoping to replicate the success of Game of Thrones. I’m afraid to say, it’s bad. But... good-bad?

The storyline is ridiculous, reliant on the non-existence of a postal system, an absence of news-relaying networks, and some ridiculous failures of operational intelligence. The elves have short hair. The camera always feels like it’s zooming in on people’s faces when they say fancy place-name words like, “Numinor.” The acting is often wooden (not the actors’ faults necessarily; the characters are impossibly broadly written). There are no hobbits, but instead an insufferable proto-hobbit species called Har-Foots, who are always putting shit in their hair. And to top it off, the world-building, the one thing that a fantasy show can’t live without, is atrocious.

Nonetheless, each episode is packed with little pleasures. Some of these are due to the insane budget, which means that the CGI is often excellent. But often it’s due to the ridiculousness of the directorial decisions. For instance, I can’t get enough of this orc:

He’s garbed in ridiculous couture: a white alligator-skin shawl, an eggshell helment, and a battle axe that he’s apparently using to excavate the trench wall. (Why he’s helping the elf-slaves is left unexplained.) But within a moment of appearing on-screen, the sun comes out, and he recoils in pain, the light burning his skin. He holds his shawl up against the sky and does a prissy, shuffling scamper back to the part of the trench covered in awnings.

There’s something alive to this character, some irrepressible messiness and humanity. We never see the specific orc again, but for the four seconds he’s onscreen—what a king! Look at him as he goes by:

Watching the episode, we had to rewind the tape to make sure we’d seen it right. And then we rewound the tape again and again, laughing until we were crying.

At some point I want to write a longer essay about what I call “Fucked Up Taste”—the idea that part of developing an aesthetic sensibility is coming to love things that are un-beautiful and “bad” and even ridiculous. It’s not the newest of ideas, but it’s one that I enjoy contemplating. There’s nothing quite like running into something as wild and precious and lovably ridiculous as this orc, in an otherwise self-serious mess of a show. I love this guy. Give him his own spin-off!

For no good reason beyond proclivity, I can’t help myself but try out new software all the time. I’m on waiting lists for software (Arc Browser; Dall-E). I’m currently on 30-day and 10-day free trials (Qobuz; Tidal; micro.blog). I’ve got a handful of apps that I use daily that two years ago I’d never even heard of (iA Writer; Otter.ai; Fantastical). There’s always that dream, that the next thing you try will become a tool you can’t live without.

It’s sort of like bringing new tools into the kitchen. You’re never going to replace the knife, cutting board, cast iron pan. And sure, most things are either flimsy gadgets or far too specialized. But I started using an electric water kettle here in my kitchen about three months ago, and I feel like it’s been more than a marginal upgrade. I drink more coffee because of it. And I also cook pasta faster, because it’s easier to boil water.

I’m saying all this, because this is my first post to micro.blog, drafted inside iA Writer and posted directly from there (I guess; will find out shortly). And it’s also my first time using micro.blog’s “repost” functionality to automatically add it to Twitter and Tumblr, too. Will anything come of it? Likely not. But if it did, that would be sweet! I always want a new tool, if it’s useful—and especially if it helps me write more, and connect with more people through my writing.

In a similar vein, I’ve been working on a truth-in-advertising makeover on the ubiquitous liberal yard sign. Here’s my take:

I’ve been thinking lately about the reason that the slogan “Defund the Police” became a punching bag and has largely been abandoned by all but committed activists. This despite the fact that police budgets are clearly bloated—and we can get better results with our tax dollars by investing them elsewhere. I suspect the problem with “defund” is that it presents a negative vision. So I’ve been thinking of how to present a positive vision of taking money and duties away from police and creating new institutions that will actually accomplish the goals of enforcing laws and encouraging public safety. Here’s my first effort:

The second album from the acoustic guitarist Yasmin Williams is a revelation. At turns her playing reminds me of early Bill Frisell and, especially, Michael Hedges. I listened to the album probably six times before thinking to look up a video of Williams playing. Her Tiny Desk Concert is incredible: she wears tap shoes, tapes a thumb harp by the guitar’s bridge, and proceeds to play the instrument flat in her lap, like a lap steel, but with intricate fingerings and pickings and a flawless sense of rhythm. She’d be a great show. And her album Urban Driftwood is a new favorite.

The Academy and seemingly my entire family fell head-over-heels for Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic, Dune. And who am I to disagree? But the other night I re-watched the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which recounts the great Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-’60s attempt to adapt the novel to the screen. He never made the movie, but in the attempt he basically invented the next thirty years of science fiction cinema. Along the way, he roped in H.R. Geiger, Moebius, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dalí. He put his 12-year-old son into five-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week martial arts training to prepare him to play the story’s hero-messiah. And he tried to create “an artistic, cinematographical god.” In a way, he did make the movie—but just like how in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna cannot look at Krishna’s divine form with human eyes, we’re only allowed to perceive Jodorowsky’s Dune indirectly. It’s enough.

I’ve been listening to a great new podcast by David Weinberg called “The Superhero Complex” that focuses on the saga of the Rain City Superhero Movement, a well-intended vigilante group that took to the streets of Seattle in the early 2010s dressed up in spandex. Their intention: to fight crime. The story orbits the charismatic and troubled Phoenix Jones, a former MMA champion in a Batman suit with the nipples cut off. Jones proves to be a worthy, at turns heroic and tragic—and always captivating—central figure. The show is chock full of interesting characters, but the best part is David’s lyrical, affectionate, and often laugh-out-loud funny narration. I can’t wait to listen to the rest. (Full disclosure, I’m proud to be friends with David.)

The great art+writing collaboration magazine 7x7.la is currently holding a show of featured collaborations at Beyond Baroque, a literary center in Venice, California. I love this project and am lucky to have had the chance to participate in it—and to have my collaboration with the artist Corinne Chaix featured in this show. I participated in a reading and round-table discussion two weeks ago (the recording is here). If you’re in the LA area, I encourage you to visit the show for its closing reading next Saturday, May 7 at 5pm. My partner—and resident Lightplay book reviewer—Lisa Locascio Nighthawk will be giving one of the readings.

For many years now instead of running the Chrome or Safari web browsers (made by Google and Apple) I’ve been using the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser. (Of course, paired with the indispensable uBlock Origin extension). How many regrets do I have for escaping the corporate browsers? Zero. Now the comic artist and digital rights activist Leah Elliott has released a delightful update of Scott McCloud’s original Google-commissioned Chrome launch zine. Parodying corporate propaganda is where it’s at. Go read “Contra Chrome”—and change your browser!

The writer Kate Folk’s new story collection Out There is full of brilliance, deadpan humor, the occasional horrifying twist, and some unexpectedly moving passages. You should absolutely be reading this book. As a longtime admirer of Kate’s writing, I read many of these stories when they came out—such as the eponymous blockbuster story “Out There,” originally published in the New Yorker. But now that her collection is out, I’ve been rereading them, and I’ve found that taken together the stories have even more power. Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Phillip K. Dick, but with a voice all their own, these tales are joy to read. Go pick up a copy of Out There today.

If you ever attended American high school, you may recall taking a brief class that focused on STDs, abstinence, and the perils of promiscuity! If your experience was anything like mine, that class did precisely nothing to prepare you to navigate your own sexuality, relationships, and health. It doesn’t need to be like this! That’s the starting point of my Seed Field Podcast interview with Dr. Theodore Burns, a therapist and professor at Antioch who has ideas about how we can reform sex education. I especially recommend a listen if you have a young person in your life. I think we had a great conversation.