Mike, what you have written is IMHO a great think piece about our AI doom and corporate greed destroying every last vestige of great humor. It will definitely happen if we continue to churn out a population of low intelligence, illiterate, tik-tok addicted fools, and also let big corporate publishers keep focusing on greed instead of content.
It'll be sad day when the 10 year olds of today will in the future take a peak at a Sam Gross cartoon and fail to get the joke. Of course, their sense of humor will have been twisted by the corporate AI overlords so that they'll be laughing at all the carnage and destruction of the planet around them.
Wow, I think I just went way too dark in that observation. Suddenly I understand why Hunter S. Thompson instead of finishing his last book he reached for his 45.
On a happier note, countries where the internet and the world move a lot slower, like say, Costa Rica, have far lower levels of the same neurosis that's creating our American cultural and creative necrosis. If you need it, I know of a cottage near the beautiful beach in Bahia Sámara that would be a great new headquarters for the American Bystander.
But who will bother reading AI comedy? Who bothers to read Sports Illustrated anymore? People will find a way to discover what moves them. Commercial radio has sucked for years, driven by algorithms, but people still find music they love. (The musicians who make a living at the music? Don't muddy up my premise.)
Maybe you need some good live performances to raise your spirits about audiences. Here in Chicago, I perform in and more often attend storytelling events with people much younger than me. The writers are smart, canny and yearning for the same things they always have: authentic life. The audiences howl for the same thing. As John Cale once said, "Let us celebrate our presence together in chaos."
I see A.I. as a tool. Great for sifting through terabytes of data, looking for patterns, not so great for replacing human creativity. Will it eventually be able to do it? Probably. Will I like it? Hell no!
I believe I know the person who said that A.I. will be able to replace the cartoonists in the New Yorker. They recently asked me to submit a detailed process of how I come up with my captions for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest so that they could feed it into an A.I. system. I was a bit reluctant to do so, but then I decided it was going to happen one way or another and I might as well feed it my sense of humor. Either I'm going to short circuit the logic engine or send civilization to hell in a hand basket. (Queue up Charlton Heston on a beach yelling, "Damn you, damn you all to hell!")
I subscribe to but 2 or 3 substacks precisely due to the contemporary issues of information overload and superfluousness. Including yours, for one, because you're one of the few people amidst the zeitgeist I've encountered who not only speaks wholly truthfully on the state of humor writing and comedy and its various forms, as well as history more broadly, but also, it seems in part intuitively, in part as a student of history, actually is on the pulse of things, discerns and prognosticates correctly and incisively for most part. Alas, something of a disembodied voice in the Static Wilderness
P.S. While I'm still alive and kickin' (and even if I weren't kickin'), you could always hit me with any Fellini (and art cinema) reference :)
Jason, this is very kind of you and rather dangerous for me to hear, because I purposely don't say my more outrageous historical opinions. (Don't worry, I'm not a closet Nazi, or anything else--I just don't need to gore anybody's sacred cows.)
Glad to hear I'll always have somebody to enjoy the Fellini references! When I get a yacht, it's going to be named "Asa Nisi Masa."
Well, I do mean it. Not one for the flattering arts... Did qualify with 'for the most part.' Not even the most powerful AI, Douglas Adams' Deep Thought (or Earth), can predict the future perfectly :)
If I were to have a yacht named after some element from 8 1/2, would probably go with one of the odd yet somehow perfectly fitting sounds Marcello makes, such as 'Sgulp!' Or maybe with Old Snaporaz. (Incidentally, at this point probably have seen 8 1/2 eight-and-a-half times. One of the small number of films I own on DVD. Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Jodorowsky also make the cut. Gotta love the auteurs with the 'ee' ending.)
One of the things I like most about Fellini is how he used to do cartoons for a humor magazine. Doesn't Sandra Milo also say, "Sgulp!"? She's the unsung performance of that movie.
I've always wanted to like Bergman, but there's a chilliness in him that I don't like--a kind of anti-Fellini.
I love Truffaut and dislike Godard; love Kurosawa; like Ray; like Tarkovsky; but Fellini really hits me where I live. To an embarrassing degree; to such a degree that I see my own flaws in his characters.
Agree that Bergman certainly has a faint Swedish chilliness and outward detachment ('still waters run deep') in the majority of his films, which may feel kindred only to one reared in a similar culture or of such temperament. Personally don't identify with it wholly either. But the emotions that surface or are implied are very true and poignant, ala Dostoevsky or Tolstoi. And his small number of comedies, and certain 'late works,' have variably lighter and heartwarming tones. Also, his 'mis-en-scene' and general artistry is typically incredible. He's also one of the most prolific filmmakers and maybe artists, like, ever. Did he sleep? Was he an android? Did he dream of Electric Chess Pieces? I've come to appreciate him more and more.
Also love some of Antonioni's more detached and difficult films. He takes modern Alienation all the way. Gotta love it when an artist goes as far as possible. But also don't identify entirely with the attitude.
Try to appreciate and come to understand the full gamut, the sampler of aesthetic attitudes, as it were, even if I do feel more at home with the Belgian Cask Ale than Portland Double IPA, let's say.
. . .
Yes, I believe Carla (Sandra Milo - actually tend to remember characters' rather than actors' names better) Sandra is the one who initially makes that noise a few times (from what I vaguely recall, if I'm not mistaken, based on semi-onomatopoeic sounds in Daffy Duck comics), and later Marcello parrots her
. . .
Actually wrote a few papers on Fellini in college for an Italian film class I took on a lark, taught by this intense bonafide Italian aesthete expat professor, which, I guess as this thread evinces, turned out to be life-changing.
Also vaguely remember reading at that time about how Fellini, after segueing into his more nonlinear, symbolic, and abstract phase beginning with La Dolce Vita, would only have a loose script, or practically no script, sprinkled with some caricaturish sketches, for some of his films. Sometimes he'd come up with actors' actual lines the day of a scene, changing them mid-scene, or just have them mouth something unintelligible in some emotional vein. And ultimately would painstakingly craft dubbed dialogue in post-production.
Not having a script would drive some actors less comfortable with spontaneity and improvisation a little crazy. Ostensibly--a few would beg him for their lines for weeks. And, as Marcello in 8 1/2, he'd sort of get a kick out of puckishly evading and teasing those he didn't particularly care for or who were too annoying about it, eventually, as a tongue-in-cheek prank, giving them hastily scribbled cartoons as substitutes (a few whose content, err, was basically harmless, but wouldn't be looked on too kindly today).
. . .
A few last comments (as this conversation could go on for hours, and a substack isn't exactly the best medium for it)...
If you haven't seen Satyricon (on a big screen), would highly recommend it. I'd rank it among my favorites by Fellini. Not so much for the emotional content and storyline, but the art and set design, cinematography, and other elements. Essentially each still frame is a great photograph and artwork. The level of attention to corporeal detail and mastery is astounding, akin to the great Renaissance painters' masterpieces, and (sadly) -- due to decline and rise of costs in materials, loss of certain structural techniques and rigor, the primacy of digital, general decline of vision and meticulousness -- likely no film will ever come close to equalling it ever again.
Saw Satyricon in the cinema for the first time a few years ago, at the wonderful arthouse Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal. Accidentally went to the screening with French subtitles. But was with a French speaking friend, and didn't want to bail, so buckled in for the 2.5 hours...
Surprisingly, didn't even 'need' to understand the dialogue. The film was so rich, so masterful in virtually every respect, one could concentrate on the other elements, and it ended up being an almost transcendent experience. Such an effect would be unthinkable with most narrative films.
Another movie I can think of with practically this much attention to the aesthetics, tho in a somewhat different way, is Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Tho otherwise my least favorite of his films.
As for directors I personally identify with most, that seem closest to my own heart, probably Tarkovsky and Fellini -- a mix of the tragic and comic, as it were.
All-time favorite directors... a big topic... but if you're curious, here's an old (but mostly still accurate) list of my 'favorite' movies
I prefer pro basketball to college; Paul is not my favorite Beatle; and I’m not a big fan of the Beatles, either. Nonetheless, were an AI created to pander to my prejudices, I would not look forward to it one hundredth as much as I do to a new Gerber.
I’m starting to get a kind of physical revulsion when I see AI art. It’s not even a kind of moral reaction, I think the aesthetic ugliness of it just kind of makes me want to puke. I want to watch the new Beatles music video, but every time I do, I get motion sickness when it reaches that shot of all four of them standing next to each other.
On a more positive note, I definitely agree about Ram. For a long, I really thought All Things Must Pass was the best Beatles solo album, but that was before I seriously explored McCartney’s solo work. There is so much great stuff there
Oh I love ATMP too, but I think Spector’s production makes it sound very dated. The very stripped down quality that critics hated about RAM in 1971 is why I think it has worn so well.
I will be interested to see people’s reaction to this shop I’ve art directed; I think it’s actually somewhat Felliniesque and made me want to explore a big comedic project using AI, but the politics around it may make me simply keep all that to myself.
George may have agreed with you. I rewatched the Scorsese doc on him a few years ago, and was surprised when they said that George was really disappointed with the sound of "Wah-Wah." The musicians all thought it sounded incredible when they were playing it, but he really disliked what Spector did with the track. I also think George's last album, Brainwashed, is a real little gem
I love "Ram" and the fact that it's the only studio album credited to both Paul and Linda McCartney. I also want to second the appreciation for Robert Klein. I still remember so much of his material. His fake ad for "Every Record Ever Recorded" predated Spotify by four decades.
Michael, thank you for generously creating such a funny, insightful and informative post, complete with Insider Gossip, from the dregs of your depression. I find the prospect of a world such as that which you're predicting (and which I've been trying to avoid coming to terms with, in hopes we'll never get there) horribly dystopian. I don't even want to know about it, it mightily pisses me off that apparently this is what we're gonna be doing now (or by next Christmas) - but at least you made me laugh.
Also, I certainly hope that my as-of-yet still-in-development "Bob's Burgers" substack isn't one of the ones you unsubscribed to, just because it's sat dormant for over a year - I swear, it's coming!
Re: college basketball, we were in a bad place to catch this particular bug back in our undergrad days, as the Yale men's team was pretty terrible for years and years (not too bad now, though!). My advice, besides maybe trying to catch a UCLA and/or USC game (men's or women's) in person: wait until March Madness, and allow yourself to be talked into filling out a bracket, then watch the games and enjoy the feeling of all your picks going down the drain in the first few days. Repeat this process over the course of a couple of Marches, and you'll either be drawn right in, or hopelessly repulsed by the bad hair and oleaginous personalities of the coaches (which somehow reminds me, that former Villanova coach will feature prominently in every other commercial, so your friend will be pleased).
Thank you, Mark! I actually spent a lot of time at the college basketball games of Lincoln University, an HBCU in Jefferson City Mo. College basketball is wonderful in person, every year I think "I should go see a game at Pauley Pavilion."
Like hockey, like many (most?) sports, the in-person experience far exceeds what one would get just watching on TV. But the activation energy to get to a game (plus all the costs, parking hoo-hah, etc.): such a turn-off. Thus we accept the weak-tea version, which is your main theme in today's post, I note.
Oh for sure. Klein has never gotten his due, IMHO--he's the equal of Pryor and Carlin. My mistake came from writing the original sentence about Pryor, but then not fixing it as the sentence changed.
RAM is indeed fab and it's because Paul McCartney is the only Beatle who writes as well or better then he's heartbroken as he does when he's happy. But it's only the best solo Beatles album if you don't count Electric Arguments, and I do count it, of course, because it's imminently countable and it also happens to be essentially the spiritual successor to the White Album. Or maybe Pepper. Either way, it's stunning. Check it out sometime. (Why Paul puts his best solo work out under a pseudonym that almost no one knows about is one of the great Beatle mysteries...)
Being a sports ball fan means having a meaningful relationship with the players, imho. Browse the player biographies and find those connections.
The community of creative folks is expanding due to AI tools. Our skills at discerning creative quality will be challenged for a while because of all the turd polishing.
As far as I'm concerned "generative" AI is a *destructive* force. Turning that switch on with zero debate beforehand was like if in the '40s a private company had secretly invented the A-bomb, and then set it off in Chicago just to see what would happen.
Note, I've essentially made my living for the past several years writing about technology, and I know that in some contexts, machine learning can be a positive -- I'm thinking of programs that can sift through tons of images of cells in minutes to find signs of a tumor -- stuff like that. In that case, no jobs even exist to be eliminated, because it would take a human a hundred lifetimes to perform that task.
But those examples are pretty limited -- and are only coming from the kinds of scientists/engineers who were actually looking to solve existing problems in the first place. The Silicon Valley D-Bag Complex, on the other hand, prefers to create new problems. They call it "disruption," like that's a good thing in and of itself.
Mike and everyone else, if you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech," by Brian Merchant.
Merchant tells the real story of the Luddite movement. I don't know about yous, but I previously had only the vaguest notion of who the historical Luddites were. (It almost sounds like a religious sect or something.) I can't really do it justice in a couple of sentences, but they were weavers in early-1800s England who were perfectly capable of using machines (hand-operated looms) to do skilled labor, and they weren't "anti-technology." They rebelled against new kinds of automated looms, what they called "machinery hurtful to the commonality," including the whole incipient factory system that meant lower wages, more drudgery, less freedom.
That kind of machinery *only* benefited a handful of entrepreneurs, and it destroyed communities. So the Luddites and their supporters (and Merchant, the book's author, in rescuing their reputation) ask (and I'm paraphrasing): Why the f--- would we as a society accept that? In the last portion of the book, he ties it very clearly to Uber, Instacart, and all these other exploitative gig platforms, and now ChatGPT and the like.
Anyway, it was infuriating to read, but also inspiring. I think we can all do our part to hold the line for humanity against -- not "the machines" as an abstract concept, but against the a---holes who try to foist the especially harmful machinery upon us.
On another note, Mike, I tend to get glum myself about the state of culture for "the kids today." At 47, I'm pretty out of touch at this point, and I've had this impression that "kids don't even listen to rock and roll anymore." So I was *elated* to learn that basement shows are still happening in Boston. (Link below.) It doesn't seem like that long ago that I was going to and playing basement (and VFW and dive bar) shows, and I thought today's teens and 20-somethings were too TikTok-addicted to even make this kind of thing happen. Nope!
Restacked (I was coincidentally revisiting Paul's catalog because that was a discussion about Ram... it's very inspirational for artists when one reads all the scrutiny his solo and Wings career got. It was pretty harsh and if you are an author or cartoonist, it can put a lot in perspective about trusting your own work.
Mike, what you have written is IMHO a great think piece about our AI doom and corporate greed destroying every last vestige of great humor. It will definitely happen if we continue to churn out a population of low intelligence, illiterate, tik-tok addicted fools, and also let big corporate publishers keep focusing on greed instead of content.
It'll be sad day when the 10 year olds of today will in the future take a peak at a Sam Gross cartoon and fail to get the joke. Of course, their sense of humor will have been twisted by the corporate AI overlords so that they'll be laughing at all the carnage and destruction of the planet around them.
Wow, I think I just went way too dark in that observation. Suddenly I understand why Hunter S. Thompson instead of finishing his last book he reached for his 45.
On a happier note, countries where the internet and the world move a lot slower, like say, Costa Rica, have far lower levels of the same neurosis that's creating our American cultural and creative necrosis. If you need it, I know of a cottage near the beautiful beach in Bahia Sámara that would be a great new headquarters for the American Bystander.
Send papers will sign and move immediately
I didn't even get a chance to ease into the morning before I read this. Thank you, but now I'm going to take a nap in my oven.
Well,, @Trubbaman, people will still DO stuff, it's just that it will take some effort to find.
The good news is, they will create a genuine underground for the first time since what, 1975?
But who will bother reading AI comedy? Who bothers to read Sports Illustrated anymore? People will find a way to discover what moves them. Commercial radio has sucked for years, driven by algorithms, but people still find music they love. (The musicians who make a living at the music? Don't muddy up my premise.)
Maybe you need some good live performances to raise your spirits about audiences. Here in Chicago, I perform in and more often attend storytelling events with people much younger than me. The writers are smart, canny and yearning for the same things they always have: authentic life. The audiences howl for the same thing. As John Cale once said, "Let us celebrate our presence together in chaos."
I see A.I. as a tool. Great for sifting through terabytes of data, looking for patterns, not so great for replacing human creativity. Will it eventually be able to do it? Probably. Will I like it? Hell no!
I believe I know the person who said that A.I. will be able to replace the cartoonists in the New Yorker. They recently asked me to submit a detailed process of how I come up with my captions for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest so that they could feed it into an A.I. system. I was a bit reluctant to do so, but then I decided it was going to happen one way or another and I might as well feed it my sense of humor. Either I'm going to short circuit the logic engine or send civilization to hell in a hand basket. (Queue up Charlton Heston on a beach yelling, "Damn you, damn you all to hell!")
I subscribe to but 2 or 3 substacks precisely due to the contemporary issues of information overload and superfluousness. Including yours, for one, because you're one of the few people amidst the zeitgeist I've encountered who not only speaks wholly truthfully on the state of humor writing and comedy and its various forms, as well as history more broadly, but also, it seems in part intuitively, in part as a student of history, actually is on the pulse of things, discerns and prognosticates correctly and incisively for most part. Alas, something of a disembodied voice in the Static Wilderness
P.S. While I'm still alive and kickin' (and even if I weren't kickin'), you could always hit me with any Fellini (and art cinema) reference :)
Jason, this is very kind of you and rather dangerous for me to hear, because I purposely don't say my more outrageous historical opinions. (Don't worry, I'm not a closet Nazi, or anything else--I just don't need to gore anybody's sacred cows.)
Glad to hear I'll always have somebody to enjoy the Fellini references! When I get a yacht, it's going to be named "Asa Nisi Masa."
Well, I do mean it. Not one for the flattering arts... Did qualify with 'for the most part.' Not even the most powerful AI, Douglas Adams' Deep Thought (or Earth), can predict the future perfectly :)
If I were to have a yacht named after some element from 8 1/2, would probably go with one of the odd yet somehow perfectly fitting sounds Marcello makes, such as 'Sgulp!' Or maybe with Old Snaporaz. (Incidentally, at this point probably have seen 8 1/2 eight-and-a-half times. One of the small number of films I own on DVD. Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Jodorowsky also make the cut. Gotta love the auteurs with the 'ee' ending.)
One of the things I like most about Fellini is how he used to do cartoons for a humor magazine. Doesn't Sandra Milo also say, "Sgulp!"? She's the unsung performance of that movie.
I've always wanted to like Bergman, but there's a chilliness in him that I don't like--a kind of anti-Fellini.
I love Truffaut and dislike Godard; love Kurosawa; like Ray; like Tarkovsky; but Fellini really hits me where I live. To an embarrassing degree; to such a degree that I see my own flaws in his characters.
Agree that Bergman certainly has a faint Swedish chilliness and outward detachment ('still waters run deep') in the majority of his films, which may feel kindred only to one reared in a similar culture or of such temperament. Personally don't identify with it wholly either. But the emotions that surface or are implied are very true and poignant, ala Dostoevsky or Tolstoi. And his small number of comedies, and certain 'late works,' have variably lighter and heartwarming tones. Also, his 'mis-en-scene' and general artistry is typically incredible. He's also one of the most prolific filmmakers and maybe artists, like, ever. Did he sleep? Was he an android? Did he dream of Electric Chess Pieces? I've come to appreciate him more and more.
Also love some of Antonioni's more detached and difficult films. He takes modern Alienation all the way. Gotta love it when an artist goes as far as possible. But also don't identify entirely with the attitude.
Try to appreciate and come to understand the full gamut, the sampler of aesthetic attitudes, as it were, even if I do feel more at home with the Belgian Cask Ale than Portland Double IPA, let's say.
. . .
Yes, I believe Carla (Sandra Milo - actually tend to remember characters' rather than actors' names better) Sandra is the one who initially makes that noise a few times (from what I vaguely recall, if I'm not mistaken, based on semi-onomatopoeic sounds in Daffy Duck comics), and later Marcello parrots her
. . .
Actually wrote a few papers on Fellini in college for an Italian film class I took on a lark, taught by this intense bonafide Italian aesthete expat professor, which, I guess as this thread evinces, turned out to be life-changing.
Also vaguely remember reading at that time about how Fellini, after segueing into his more nonlinear, symbolic, and abstract phase beginning with La Dolce Vita, would only have a loose script, or practically no script, sprinkled with some caricaturish sketches, for some of his films. Sometimes he'd come up with actors' actual lines the day of a scene, changing them mid-scene, or just have them mouth something unintelligible in some emotional vein. And ultimately would painstakingly craft dubbed dialogue in post-production.
Not having a script would drive some actors less comfortable with spontaneity and improvisation a little crazy. Ostensibly--a few would beg him for their lines for weeks. And, as Marcello in 8 1/2, he'd sort of get a kick out of puckishly evading and teasing those he didn't particularly care for or who were too annoying about it, eventually, as a tongue-in-cheek prank, giving them hastily scribbled cartoons as substitutes (a few whose content, err, was basically harmless, but wouldn't be looked on too kindly today).
. . .
A few last comments (as this conversation could go on for hours, and a substack isn't exactly the best medium for it)...
If you haven't seen Satyricon (on a big screen), would highly recommend it. I'd rank it among my favorites by Fellini. Not so much for the emotional content and storyline, but the art and set design, cinematography, and other elements. Essentially each still frame is a great photograph and artwork. The level of attention to corporeal detail and mastery is astounding, akin to the great Renaissance painters' masterpieces, and (sadly) -- due to decline and rise of costs in materials, loss of certain structural techniques and rigor, the primacy of digital, general decline of vision and meticulousness -- likely no film will ever come close to equalling it ever again.
Saw Satyricon in the cinema for the first time a few years ago, at the wonderful arthouse Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal. Accidentally went to the screening with French subtitles. But was with a French speaking friend, and didn't want to bail, so buckled in for the 2.5 hours...
Surprisingly, didn't even 'need' to understand the dialogue. The film was so rich, so masterful in virtually every respect, one could concentrate on the other elements, and it ended up being an almost transcendent experience. Such an effect would be unthinkable with most narrative films.
Another movie I can think of with practically this much attention to the aesthetics, tho in a somewhat different way, is Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Tho otherwise my least favorite of his films.
As for directors I personally identify with most, that seem closest to my own heart, probably Tarkovsky and Fellini -- a mix of the tragic and comic, as it were.
All-time favorite directors... a big topic... but if you're curious, here's an old (but mostly still accurate) list of my 'favorite' movies
https://forwhatitsworth.be/favorite-films/8207/
Hmm, missing Bresson... feel like Bresson needs to be on there somewhere
Ok, be well!
I prefer pro basketball to college; Paul is not my favorite Beatle; and I’m not a big fan of the Beatles, either. Nonetheless, were an AI created to pander to my prejudices, I would not look forward to it one hundredth as much as I do to a new Gerber.
Sending love through the gloom to you and yours.
You are a very sweet man, and Paul is not my favorite Beatle, either. :-) Back at you.
I’m starting to get a kind of physical revulsion when I see AI art. It’s not even a kind of moral reaction, I think the aesthetic ugliness of it just kind of makes me want to puke. I want to watch the new Beatles music video, but every time I do, I get motion sickness when it reaches that shot of all four of them standing next to each other.
On a more positive note, I definitely agree about Ram. For a long, I really thought All Things Must Pass was the best Beatles solo album, but that was before I seriously explored McCartney’s solo work. There is so much great stuff there
Oh I love ATMP too, but I think Spector’s production makes it sound very dated. The very stripped down quality that critics hated about RAM in 1971 is why I think it has worn so well.
I will be interested to see people’s reaction to this shop I’ve art directed; I think it’s actually somewhat Felliniesque and made me want to explore a big comedic project using AI, but the politics around it may make me simply keep all that to myself.
George may have agreed with you. I rewatched the Scorsese doc on him a few years ago, and was surprised when they said that George was really disappointed with the sound of "Wah-Wah." The musicians all thought it sounded incredible when they were playing it, but he really disliked what Spector did with the track. I also think George's last album, Brainwashed, is a real little gem
I love "Ram" and the fact that it's the only studio album credited to both Paul and Linda McCartney. I also want to second the appreciation for Robert Klein. I still remember so much of his material. His fake ad for "Every Record Ever Recorded" predated Spotify by four decades.
Michael, thank you for generously creating such a funny, insightful and informative post, complete with Insider Gossip, from the dregs of your depression. I find the prospect of a world such as that which you're predicting (and which I've been trying to avoid coming to terms with, in hopes we'll never get there) horribly dystopian. I don't even want to know about it, it mightily pisses me off that apparently this is what we're gonna be doing now (or by next Christmas) - but at least you made me laugh.
Also, I certainly hope that my as-of-yet still-in-development "Bob's Burgers" substack isn't one of the ones you unsubscribed to, just because it's sat dormant for over a year - I swear, it's coming!
Re: college basketball, we were in a bad place to catch this particular bug back in our undergrad days, as the Yale men's team was pretty terrible for years and years (not too bad now, though!). My advice, besides maybe trying to catch a UCLA and/or USC game (men's or women's) in person: wait until March Madness, and allow yourself to be talked into filling out a bracket, then watch the games and enjoy the feeling of all your picks going down the drain in the first few days. Repeat this process over the course of a couple of Marches, and you'll either be drawn right in, or hopelessly repulsed by the bad hair and oleaginous personalities of the coaches (which somehow reminds me, that former Villanova coach will feature prominently in every other commercial, so your friend will be pleased).
Thank you, Mark! I actually spent a lot of time at the college basketball games of Lincoln University, an HBCU in Jefferson City Mo. College basketball is wonderful in person, every year I think "I should go see a game at Pauley Pavilion."
Like hockey, like many (most?) sports, the in-person experience far exceeds what one would get just watching on TV. But the activation energy to get to a game (plus all the costs, parking hoo-hah, etc.): such a turn-off. Thus we accept the weak-tea version, which is your main theme in today's post, I note.
Um… I’m old enough to know you meant Robert Klein, not Richard.
Otherwise, perfect!
HOW EMBARRASSING -- fixing
No shame - I was a big fan of Klein’s standup. Looks like you were too.
Oh for sure. Klein has never gotten his due, IMHO--he's the equal of Pryor and Carlin. My mistake came from writing the original sentence about Pryor, but then not fixing it as the sentence changed.
Now if only there were an Icantstopmyleg.com.
I do stuff like that in hopes someone will take it up and run with it
RAM is indeed fab and it's because Paul McCartney is the only Beatle who writes as well or better then he's heartbroken as he does when he's happy. But it's only the best solo Beatles album if you don't count Electric Arguments, and I do count it, of course, because it's imminently countable and it also happens to be essentially the spiritual successor to the White Album. Or maybe Pepper. Either way, it's stunning. Check it out sometime. (Why Paul puts his best solo work out under a pseudonym that almost no one knows about is one of the great Beatle mysteries...)
https://open.spotify.com/album/1MbT7Ct4YAw4MRypVTCvLq?si=qCVENzsbQUCeS_t4vGNHrw
Being a sports ball fan means having a meaningful relationship with the players, imho. Browse the player biographies and find those connections.
The community of creative folks is expanding due to AI tools. Our skills at discerning creative quality will be challenged for a while because of all the turd polishing.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
As far as I'm concerned "generative" AI is a *destructive* force. Turning that switch on with zero debate beforehand was like if in the '40s a private company had secretly invented the A-bomb, and then set it off in Chicago just to see what would happen.
Note, I've essentially made my living for the past several years writing about technology, and I know that in some contexts, machine learning can be a positive -- I'm thinking of programs that can sift through tons of images of cells in minutes to find signs of a tumor -- stuff like that. In that case, no jobs even exist to be eliminated, because it would take a human a hundred lifetimes to perform that task.
But those examples are pretty limited -- and are only coming from the kinds of scientists/engineers who were actually looking to solve existing problems in the first place. The Silicon Valley D-Bag Complex, on the other hand, prefers to create new problems. They call it "disruption," like that's a good thing in and of itself.
Mike and everyone else, if you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech," by Brian Merchant.
Merchant tells the real story of the Luddite movement. I don't know about yous, but I previously had only the vaguest notion of who the historical Luddites were. (It almost sounds like a religious sect or something.) I can't really do it justice in a couple of sentences, but they were weavers in early-1800s England who were perfectly capable of using machines (hand-operated looms) to do skilled labor, and they weren't "anti-technology." They rebelled against new kinds of automated looms, what they called "machinery hurtful to the commonality," including the whole incipient factory system that meant lower wages, more drudgery, less freedom.
That kind of machinery *only* benefited a handful of entrepreneurs, and it destroyed communities. So the Luddites and their supporters (and Merchant, the book's author, in rescuing their reputation) ask (and I'm paraphrasing): Why the f--- would we as a society accept that? In the last portion of the book, he ties it very clearly to Uber, Instacart, and all these other exploitative gig platforms, and now ChatGPT and the like.
Anyway, it was infuriating to read, but also inspiring. I think we can all do our part to hold the line for humanity against -- not "the machines" as an abstract concept, but against the a---holes who try to foist the especially harmful machinery upon us.
On another note, Mike, I tend to get glum myself about the state of culture for "the kids today." At 47, I'm pretty out of touch at this point, and I've had this impression that "kids don't even listen to rock and roll anymore." So I was *elated* to learn that basement shows are still happening in Boston. (Link below.) It doesn't seem like that long ago that I was going to and playing basement (and VFW and dive bar) shows, and I thought today's teens and 20-somethings were too TikTok-addicted to even make this kind of thing happen. Nope!
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/11/14/arts/underground-concert-scene-boston/
Restacked (I was coincidentally revisiting Paul's catalog because that was a discussion about Ram... it's very inspirational for artists when one reads all the scrutiny his solo and Wings career got. It was pretty harsh and if you are an author or cartoonist, it can put a lot in perspective about trusting your own work.
Twice in a row! Six hours! That's an ass of iron, my friend.
It was wonderful, as ever, and that cinematography just sings on the big screen.