Notebook

I’m working on stealing my brains back from the claws of algorithms, clickbait, and social media’s two-minute hates. For years I would reach for my telephone the moment I woke up, groping for it with a junkie sense of need. I’d lie in bed scrolling through godknowswhat because our screens have hijacked the decent impulse to bear witness.

But I’m finally making a change. These days I shower and perform my meditations and feeble prayers. I put some coffee in a thermos and walk to the park, where I take a sip of coffee, chew a piece of nicotine gum, and write with a pen until the page is full. Then I look at the sky, hope for the best, and fire up my phone to let the world into my head. This little routine has made a world of difference, and I’m recording it here because arriving at it was incredibly hard for me. Relapse lurks at the edges each morning.

Do our technologies simply amplify age-old human instincts, or do they create new desires, new behaviors? Was my habit of waking up and scrolling through headlines any different from, say, shuffling to the doorstep in 1952 to fetch the morning paper? There might be a parallel, but today’s media consumption feels far more neurochemical and nerve-wired.

Tonight the president is doing his paranoid schtick in a Phoenix megachurch, and they’re cheering phrases like “Kung Flu” because Christianity in America has become bugshit crazy and cruel. Meanwhile, the term ‘culture war’ continues to circulate through the ether, as if two artistic sensibilities have been drafted into battle. As if the rejection of bare-minimum reason and decency is some kind of culture.

The second phase of reopening began today in New York City. Outdoor dining, barbershops, and real estate. Churches and a bit of retail. The pandemic is spiking in other parts of America, but the data remains encouraging here in the city. Less than one percent of the people tested have the virus. Only ten people died yesterday, compared to nearly 800 per day two months ago. Still, I keep thinking about Taiwan, where only seven lives have been lost to date.

Meanwhile, I continue to wrestle with the best way to teach the history of graphic design. The voices that should and shouldn’t be included in a nine-week intro course. A canon of European men whose Modernist manifestos and grid systems cast such a long shadow. I’ve been reframing, revising, and expanding for years. But maybe the canon should be torched once and for all, which would be a very Modernist thing to do.

While helping my elderly neighbor with an errand this afternoon, she made a comment about her life that seems like a solid piece of wisdom for dealing with any kind of history: “I should look back, but I don’t need to stare.”

At the California Institute of Psychics, only two of every one hundred applicants are selected, so you’re guaranteed a good reading or your money back. A woman on the radio talked about severed feet washing up on the Pacific coastline. “Chopped-off feet are coming in with the tide, and nobody knows why,” she said.

A low voice talked about disemboweled bodies in New Mexico. “Humans don’t have the technology to suck out a person’s intestines through their naval, but I’m telling you that’s exactly what happened.” 600,000 Americans go missing every year, and everyone on this radio station believes they were abducted by aliens. The conversation steered to the Illuminati, as it usually does after midnight, and it’s a worthy fantasy: to think someone’s in charge. During commercial breaks, I sang along to radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep. Wake up energized and get more done.

The KLF – The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By

Chill Out | KLF Communications, 1990 | More

The longest day of the longest year. A day when I feel like I should be deep in a forest, communing with the sun while waiting for revelation or hunting for a reset button, even though I should know by now these things are fictions. But I’m glad we’ve reached the point in the year when we’ll start making more night.

C. and I spent the evening on a Brooklyn stoop with some friends, all of us chattering and burning off some exhaust as we tried to wrap our heads around this year. The fireworks were relentless as we talked. Big-budget fountains filled the sky followed by window-rattling blasts that set off car alarms and emptied your head of thought. They were heavy-duty and close-up, the kind of firepower that’s sold across state lines. Black Cats, M-80s, and Lady Fingers. Neighbors stopped each other in the street to make sure they’re not imagining things. “You couldn’t sleep last night, either?”

Booms have been ricocheting through the night until two or three o’clock in the morning. It’s been like this since the protests began. People are edgy, their dreams infected with anxiety if they can sleep at all. What started as a rumor is cohering into a theory: the firecrackers are coming from the police. A psy-op tactic designed to disorient and destabilize. A way for cops to prove their worth by keeping the possibility of gunshots in the mind. Sinister as hell, and I don’t know if it’s true. But it’s certainly more plausible than the idea that people can’t wait to celebrate America’s birthday this year.

Vatican Shadow – Unknown To The Peacock The Serpent And Scorpion Conspire (Alessandro Cortini Remix)

American Flesh for Violence | Hospital Productions, 2019 | Bandcamp

It’s been a very Vatican Shadow year.

Midnight in Montgomery, Alabama. Six years ago, I parked in front of the First White House of the Confederacy and sat in the dark, staring at that awful house. My telephone said it got four stars on Yelp. The promotional materials said Jefferson Davis “was held by his Africans in genuine affection as well as highest esteem.”

A man pulled next to me in a beat-to-shit Honda with two inches of ash dangling from his lip. He gave me the finger. I got out of the car and walked towards the state capitol. I heard a woman say she went through a period in her life when she didn’t want to brush her hair. I gave a guy a dollar, and he said, “I didn’t know I was full-blooded Cherokee ‘til I was 35, and that fucked me up.” A long Thunderbird pulled up to the curb blasting Curtis Mayfield. Its doors popped open. The driver came around the hood and lifted a trembly old man in sky blue pajamas from the passenger seat and carefully set him in a wheelchair. The guy grinned from ear to ear the entire time, singing if there’s hell below, we’re all gonna go.

Pushing north, I scrolled through streets named after Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton while the radio worried about leftists and alien abductions. Boulevards and cigar shops named after Zelda Fitzgerald, whose great-uncle built the First White House of the Confederacy. Back on Highway 82, I drove past a giant image of a handgun on a billboard: Report the piece and get the prize! Text THUG to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office. Jefferson Davis’s birthday is still a state holiday in Alabama.

Divide and Dissolve – Abomination

Abomination | Dero Arcade, 2018| Bandcamp

Plunging miles beneath standard-issue doom and drone, this is vantablack snarl and groan. From their website: “Divide And Dissolve are Takiaya Reed & Sylvie Nehill, a heavy two-piece band. They utilize drums, guitar, saxophone and live effects to create music designed to decolonise, decentralise, and destroy white supremacy.”

We’ve built such a humiliating world. Facebook banned our president from sharing Nazi imagery after his campaign posted a red triangle used to identify the communists, labor organizers, and other prisoners sent to concentration camps. A few hours later, the New York Times posted a fever-dream headline that said, “Twitter Labels Trump Tweet About ‘Racist Baby’ as Manipulated Media.” I’m logging this here in case I ever feel nostalgic about the good old days in five or ten years.

It’s already been a long summer, and the hurricanes haven’t even started yet. But the pandemic is still going strong and there’s a heatwave in Siberia. Some areas are hitting temperatures of 90 degrees and breaking previous records by as much as twenty-five degrees. An article in the Guardian adds an appropriately 2020 spin: “Unusually high temperatures in region linked to wildfires, oil spill, and moth swarms.”

Meanwhile, I move through my responsibilities and commitments by reminding myself to do these things with kindness or not at all. By the end of the day, this little maxim had blurred into André Breton’s admonition that “beauty will be convulsive or not at all.” More than ever, surrealism might be the best strategy for surviving these days.

Round Three feat. Tikiman – Acting Crazy

Main Street Records, 1996 | Boomkat

I admire C’s life choices lately, her decision to focus on the tactile and textured rather than pushing a cursor around the screen. Her willingness to make messes. She lives among pots of ink, brushes, wax, and specialty papers. And I’m excited about the things she’s learning to do to a canvas.

For a moment I burn with dumb envy, thinking an analogue life is impossible for writing. Then I remember the obvious and power down my screens. I pick up a pen and begin to write the next scene in my book. And I’m reminded that I think better without the screen tugging at my thoughts like a magnet. The pen can wander and roam, liberated to make interesting messes because it already knows it will never look like the finished product.

Last week, footage circulated of a 75-year-old man knocked to the ground by the police in Buffalo, New York. Blood poured from the man’s head. The cops kept walking. Our president suggested it was a set-up designed to make the police look bad, that maybe the blood was fake. The man has a fractured skull and may never walk again.

Yesterday the Supreme Court confirmed that civil rights apply to people who are gay, bisexual, or transgender. It’s insane that such a question even needed to be litigated, yet most American states allowed people to be fired because of who they love. The 6-3 ruling came as a surprise, an unexpected flicker of humanity.

Last weekend another black man was killed by the police after they found him asleep in his car in a fast-food parking lot. The medical examiner’s report said the 27-year-old man died from “gunshot wounds of the back.” There’s something damning about that “of”—the refusal to assign responsibility, as if “gunshot wounds of the back” happen like a rash.

Protest continue. As of today, ninety-eight American cities have used tear gas on their citizens this summer.

I’m writing these things down because I want to remember they happened before they are eclipsed by the next catastrophe, the latest inhuman event. I’ll want to reconcile these moments with the choices I’m making and the actions I’m taking. I want to square my life with these instructions from Thích Nhất Hạnh: “Vow to work for reconciliation by the most silent and unpretentious means possible.”

Lately my nights have been filled with patchy dreams and idiot head chatter. Garbled headlines and pandemic waves. American hallucinations and the Sturm und Drang of digital living. Last night I forgot how to fall asleep, and I faced the solitude of the three o’clock in the morning mind, those thin hours when the soul races like a lunatic puppy, fetching unpleasant memories and scraps of regret for inspection.

More people die during the black and blue hours just before dawn than any other time, disappearing in car crashes, heart attacks, overdoses, and suicides. They call it the hour of the wolf, and I think it’s reassuring there’s a name for this time, that others feel it too. In his 1968 film of the same name, Bergman describes these in-between hours as the time “when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. But the hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”

A piece of gut-punch wisdom from Deadwood comes to mind: “We’re all of us haunted by our own fucking thoughts. So make friends with the ghost—it ain’t goin’ fucking anywhere.”

In 1928, the poet Paul Valéry had a vision of the future: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

I copied this quote into my notebook five years ago, and it still knocks me over whenever I come across it. Today we can let the entire world—and everyone’s opinions about it—into our heads with a swipe or a click. Of course we’re going to feel a little crazy. Perhaps screens have become our reality, and the physical world only exists to serve their needs. This is a loopy sensation rather than a coherent idea, and I clearly need to step up my information hygiene.

But back to Paul Valéry, who might be the patron saint of blogging. Each morning for fifty years, he would record his thoughts, theories, and questions in his notebooks, which became a sprawling collection of meditations on psychology, metaphysics, history, poetry, and the mundane. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind,” he wrote, “I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.

This morning I came across this stray photograph from my mother’s things, and it looks like a scene from a dream. The echoed gesture of hand to forehead, the young girl watching—the accidental heat and motion of a family frozen in time. I think that’s my grandmother in the background, maybe one of my mom’s older sisters returning from a wedding. That might be my mom in the foreground, watching.

The overheated colors and pebbled texture of the photo paper leave me romanticizing the aesthetics of the past. Even life’s incidental moments looked better before screens. A tactile world of cigarettes, record players, and radios like furniture, rather than all of us sitting with scrunched-up faces, tapping at pieces of glass. And one day that will look like the days of the hand-cranked Victrola or the first Model T.