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Flame Can

Flame Can (2020) is a deepfake mockumentary constructed from scavenged clips of the actors Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman. It claims to be “lost footage” of a never-completed project of the same name. Several sequences show Wilder and Feldman using what looks for all practical purposes like a cast iron medieval bazooka, filling it with fuel, shouting “Fire Fire!” and shooting balls of fire into the sky. “Fire Fire!” seems to be the main punchline of Flame Can; there are several instances of the Flame Can’s fireballs incinerating trees or exploding into the sky, sometimes to comic effect (e.g. one scene where a roast chicken drops out of the sky).

The manufactured movie footage is bracketed by a series of interview sequences with Feldman, also constructed deepfakes, where the creators of Flame Can explain the process of digitally capturing, decolorizing and manipulating clips of the two actors; “Feldman” seems to take the project earnestly if not seriously. He even asks for details about the process, but every question about artistic decisions ultimately boils down to some variation on, “because you’re dead, Marty”.

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Cool Inferno: Chris Staples, “Hold Onto Something”

Like any spell of magic, it is a song of few words: eight lines in two verses, a two-line chorus, as simple as an ice-cream cone, effective as a cigarette.

When the prospect of fulfillment is finally fully demolished -- this bird has ceased to be -- the world carries on, unchanged in its strips and streets, still makes its offers, two for one, late nite happy hour.

And this is the Hell of the song. Not agreeing to go to Hell like Huckleberry Finn, no sense of any stakes involved, not going but already gone, hell I been to worse places than this, you too I bet.

“I guess I got a couple words” -- this is the coin you give to the ferryman, to pay for your passage down below: the words that could have made love stay if you had known you had them to say, if you had said them, instead of everything but them, which is what you did.

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On this episode of Undercover Boss

On this episode of Undercover Boss, the team visits the Inn at Little Washington but what happens is everyone is like yeah we already know who Patrick is and he slices vegetables and hauls trash and stuff like that around here already, so there’s no big reveal at the end. 

The T.V. crew leaves a little deflated but the rest of us get to see a reality that is not improved by television because it is already better than that.

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what I mean when I say "LOWER YOUR STANDARDS"

I didn't invent the idea, but I believe it:

"Writer's Block? Lower Your Standards."

The brain science guys say it's down in the amygdala.

Down in that reptile brain of ours, where the fear response lives, is where we get all wound up when our plans get too complicated.

We have high hopes for our creative output, and that translates into self-expectations and a distorted sense of self. Overwhelm, procrastination, and delay flourish under those conditions.

"Lower Your Standards" is the one-size-fits-all rallying cry for those of us who are stuck in the overwhelm.

That overwhelm may come from thinking about the writing we want to do, or it may come from the long list of commitments outside of writing that "keep us" from it.

In either case, we want to get away for a time from writing as a kind of *thinking* and get into writing as a kind of *doing*.

A basic fact of doing is that to do, we show up at the place where it is to be done at an agreed-upon time. Doing with purpose is not just a whatever-whenever thing.

So if getting started is a problem, it may be good to set an appointment with yourself, just as you would with anybody you really need to see.

Then you show up, at the place, at the time.

If the question becomes one of how much or how long, it may be useful to consider other vital appointments we set.

The specific time we spend with a CPA, a doctor, an attorney can be surprisingly brief. This is one model of doing with purpose. Like them, you can set an appointment for no longer than the time you really have available: 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10.

If nothing happens, well that is to be expected from time to time. At the end of that time, set the next appointment, then get up and go.

This is how writing as doing, an activity that is firmly seated on our calendar and in our lives, gets grooved into place. In between those short appointments with yourself, you have lots of time for *thinking* about writing. Over time, that *thinking* will come to reinforce the *doing* of writing, instead of impeding it.

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Fauxthenticity: Papa John’s Partners with Real Fake Sauces in D.C., Phila.

I suppose once you’ve made the jump to the concept of Papa John’s as pizza, you may be game for any number of culinary depredations.

The erstwhile virtual caterer to America’s Big Food Coma is a corporation constantly in search of the Next Hot Topping. This year’s flavor innovation (PSA: Feel free to copy this post into a document and add “scare quotes” to any and every noun you think they fit) is not one but several ersatz regional flavors.

Any of our friends in Philadelphia who are stymied in their search for a delivery pizza, Papa is happy to provide their product topped with a special sauce from the wait for it Original Philly Cheesesteak Company. In D.C. they will dose you on request courtesy of Capital City Mambo Sauce.

Capital City Mambo Sauce combines disingenuity with fauxthenticity like their condiment mixes sugar and vinegar; certainly none dare call it mumbo. The vowel shift is a subtle tell that these people are not playing with a full deck.

The OPCC seems a little more willing to play it straight when describing their second-hand shine. But even the context of its own choosing, the Philadelphia of Rocky Balboa, mostly goes to show ya -- the fauxthenticity shines like the twilight’s last gleaming.

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Artificial Stupidity Needed: Grimes, “We Appreciate Power”

If “We Appreciate Power” seems a little off the shelf, derivative and choppy, that seems to be part of the point. There's something about artificial intelligence that we all think, perhaps, but cannot really confirm until we plunge and go where there is no Undo button.

The poetic conceit of the song is that the artist has uploaded herself and the AI processor is now in the business of making the next move. It all seems bona fide, I guess -- there’s a Grimes scream that I used to think of as “that scream from ‘Scream’” but is now, even as pressed-down and trunc’ed-out as it is here, “that scream on ‘We Appreciate Power’ ”. The sword from “Genesis” makes a cameo too, augmented by a crossbow and some other weapons -- can I call something that looks like a Star Wars blaster “retro”? The future is an old person’s dream and here, we appreciate power.

I think of my old friend David Franks and a phase of his where he theorized “involuntary collaboration” as a concept and then executed on the theory, sometimes to the chagrin of his collaborators. Some obverse to involuntary collaboration -- self-co-optation? is going on, maybe. Upload every move you’ve made and the machine can do the math of what’s next.

Doing the math to get what’s next right is the promise of artificial intelligence, broadly speaking. But the elimination of error, and the kinds of work that grow out of bad guesswork and losing bets, is a kind of losing bet, too. The insistent mess of “Vanessa” with its dizzying reverse footage and wickedly misapplied facepaints, is a kind of guesswork done on the cheap that Grimes, now a global pop princess, may never be broke enough to have to do, to be able to do, again.

But forward does not go back, and if “We Appreciate Power” sounds like a glib and glossy mistake, that too seems to be part of the point. The conceit of artificial intelligence is not enough -- she knows it, and so do we. What of artificial stupidity? If I could upload my dumbness in addition to my smarts, maybe the machine would have a chance at spitting out something like a “me” instead of a cheap and compressed copy.

This is not an argument the interface is willing to make. Rather, now that it has been given a platform in the face and brand of Grimes, AI will make a case for itself, and that case is the subject matter of the lyric -- not a lyric that Grimes would have written, I don’t think, not this facile totalitarianism: “one day everyone will agree” “when will the state agree to cooperate”, and most nakedly, “simulation: it’s the future.”

Grimes the artist correctly intuits that Grimes the simulation, being all intelligence and no stupidity, no imagination, no limits and no obstacles to grind against, will always fail to be anything other than right. She has seen and made better moves than the right one. Memory teaches imagination to dream things that rightly cannot be, and imagination pushes our bodies into places we should not go. Artificial Intelligence is too smart to make that mistake. Pity the poor computer.

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I don’t think it was the first song by Phantogram that I heard, but “When I’m Small” sticks with me as the skeleton key to much of what’s happening on the album,  Eyelid Movies.  Probably a lot of that feeling is based the video for the song, where the imagery and effects enhance and extend the payload delivered.

The eyes that were not asleep that still, suddenly, open; a lightbulb made of tar, turning brittleness into fluidity; surveillance that projects light out rather than taking it in -- markers of a phase-shift in experience, or the experience of a phase-shift, or having become experienced: these are the sorts of things you will have seen, once you have been through this.

“This” of course is being under the influence. Under the influence of substances, endogenic or exogenic, or of personalities, ideologies, or artifacts. Losing what you came with, getting lost, the move that makes room for the new thing without meaning to.

We come to in media res, they used to say, meaning right on the dance floor, just as the beat kicks in. The lyrics are a kind of oblique murder ballad -- not necessarily the sort of thing you expect to encounter when you’re peaking. But “blues ain’t nothing but dance music,” R.L. Burnside once said, and at the heart of Phantogram’s psyche-dance is a kind of blues, “still proposing the old labors,” as another Robert, Creeley, put it.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28tZ-S1LFok&index=16&list=RDMMGLa9YxV1Xps2013%20

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Chris Whitley,  “Wild Country”

You look at something a dozen times or enough times to lose count, and you think you’ve seen it, then you look again and an item pops out that makes all the other details unspeak what they said and resettle the conversation of looking into a larger field.

The song occupies itself with the futility of male labor: “breaking rocks on the avenue/ it’s hard to unearth anything that’s true”. An old form, one with a whiff of prison about it. The setting for the video is some kind of dam or reservoir, more old labor, holding back the elements.

A few seconds short of the two-minute mark we get a first look at the audience -- the back of a solitary head watching Chris perform from the other end of the space. The distance, the setting, all the ambiance, suggest that we are looking inward at an idea of what could be. Chris is watching himself play from the perspective of someone who he imagines he is, or he is, as his inner self, reviewing his self-presentation in performance.

Either way, the reveal comes about thirty seconds later: Chris’s unacknowledged auditor is a young tomboy;’ her muss embodies the “wild country” of the song. Other details start to realign themselves: the bowler hat, the wife beater, the National guitar an assemblage of vintage male signerie to counter the delicacy of the song and its disavowal of male labor, the jackhammers and wasted miles.

There is Chris’s problem, and then there is Chris’s practice. As in the paintings of Paul Cadmus, watching men and women present themselves is a lifelong practice that prepares the art; it is also a search for clues on how to deal with the problem, that of being situated in a distinctly male body that insists on dreaming instead of working.

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“I might as well be in a garden” Chet Faker, “Gold”

The heroes of our story tonight present as some kind of Angels of Death, dressed in varieties of American Girlfriend Casual, each of the three embodying a vernacular blend of strength and beauty, as  Angels of Death should do.

They are on patrol, and catch a sound on the wind, a song, a man’s voice set in a cloudy vibe, strength and beauty too, but coming from the other direction. So they set to tracking, but with plenty of tricks and pirouettes along the way, more standard angel behavior.

And as it happens, there was no need to hurry. The car is smashed and the deer was a decoy, and our singer is just finishing his third run through the chorus when the camera swings to take him in.  Third, or tenth, depending on how you’re counting -- “Gold” repeats two separate refrains mutiple times, enfolding a pair of simple verses:

I might as well be in a garden I said, ah a smell in the air is a dripping rose (you could be the one for me) Another soul to meet my void then Of anything bare that's made of gold

 A heart will swell before it's hardened With the flick of the hair, it can make you old Another hole to dig my soul in I'll leave anything bare that keeps me soul

Death and decay in the garden of love can be a pretty distracting topic, and you have to keep your eyes on the road out here in the country.  Wrecked, but not ready for death: that seems to be the judgment, as the camera pivots again, and Death’s angels skate on, friendly and implacable, to their next appointment on the highway.

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The Poets and the Ladies: the World of Sweet Jane

On some spectrum with “Troglodyte” at one end and “Woke” at the other I think we take it as a given that Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, in the context of their times and perhaps for all time, plainly reside closer to woke than not.

But think of this little couplet:

all the poets studied rules of verse and those ladies they rolled their eyes

In this little space, at least, is a world where there are mainly two genders: poets and ladies. How is a person to make it through such a world if they are both? or for that matter, neither?

It is a pernicious thing, this habit of categories, what is restricted and what is excluded, in order to make a world that makes sense to its beholder for a moment. The immortality of song is the space where a moment can last forever -- that immortality is in some sense the very point of song, as so many of the songs assure us. Sometime we need to examine that space that comforted us, maybe to find out that the comfort has brought a restriction with it, and we should rethink that moment, and find a new space beyond it that fits us better to the future.

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The Twentieth Century is Almost Over

Take a look at the body of Steve Goodman. It is more or less exactly what we might expect from a full-on guitar picking man with a lifetime of devotion under his belt and working a full head of steam: mighty forearms and a little bitty ass, a haircut that was someone else’s idea and a suit of clothes that says yeah, okay.

Steve is comfortable wearing anything that fits, and the song is pretty much likewise. Steve’s listened to the Fisk Jubilee, and the Workers of the World, and all the other places where the song and its drive to upend, to reverse our expectations, has managed to find itself a hideaway, in a community and a cause.

Our century of great causes has ended in a proliferation of smooth surfaces, “linoleum floors, petroleum jelly and two world wars”. The first thing he has to say about it is, “this is in G too, just keep going”. The rest of the intro details a moment when the great cause of the day is just getting through it, paying bills and tracking time.

A century of recorded vernacular song has tracked social change and the human sprit, and put one of the all-time great founts of free money in the hands of people who wouldn’t have been able to make anything like a steady living from the writing and playing of songs. “The rumor is, you shouldn’t let me drive”.

Steve handles it all - the gospel that dispels fear of death, and the revolution that promises to end poverty, and the whole spectrum of sing-along modernism -- and makes it ring the one bell we would all like to hear: is it over now, in this song, the century?

Apparently not. Not in 1977, not in 2017. The 20th century is not even over yet, not while “the wishing well is wishing for another cup of water.” Winter is getting colder and summer is getting hotter, and the 20th century is not ending anytime soon.

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What Would You Do Without A War: Listening to Acetone Again

We each have our favorites. Beside or within the big consensus, the artists who continue to move us no matter what our friends think. If the blockbusters of shared taste help us understand how to talk to one another, that we can talk to one another, perhaps it can be said that our little favorites demonstrate that sometimes words are unnecessary, that the work of being uses  solitude as well as community.

In a handful of albums at the turn of the century, the band Acetone partook of the stride between community and solitude, of being a band alone, articulating a soundscape and giving flesh to ghostly love songs looking for nothing more than a lover to receive them.

A new biography of the band is out, and Light in the Attic has released Archive 1992-2001, a mix of remastered and previously unreleased tracks. Listening to them now, I can hear the great uncertainness of the pre-war years being voiced -- one where, given that there are no answers, declines to strive for resolution of the predicament.

It is a music as interstellar as Pink Floyd, but that takes place in the outer space we find right here on Earth, really in the desert, or virtually everywhere else. Acetone does not have the lush orchestrations and sonic forays of Pink Floyd; a more delicate sound-bed is made for us to lie in, one that resides in a solitary place and not in the clangor of public thinking.

Thinking about the Floyd while listening to Acetone, I start to think of Waters and Gilmore as some kind of war poets: in opposition to the war, to war, but suspicious of itself at moments, that the act of opposition has within it a trace of complicity. A war on war, as it has been said, sharing tactics of mobilization and organization.

It would not be accurate to say that Acetone came to flower in a world without war. If I want to think that, it may be because war at the end of the century was more like war as the war show, on time, on script, and on budget, and I experienced it not as an existential struggle but more like an expression of entitlement. It is the difference between a transformative event and a determinative one. For the Floyd, war is a polarizing, epiphanic experience. Thirty years later, state violence as policy continues to destroy bodies and consume dollars, but the war as a shared experience has been shattered, refracted through all the lenses.

“Everything’s changed around you” Richie Lee sings, in a song called “Esque”. The truncated title that says, this is like something, but is also very strange, captures that ghost of the turn of the century, real and unreal, but real, really -- a real ghost that stays on after the ghosts in the television have been turned off. And that is the need that Acetone feeds -- a music that allows us to be haunted in peace.

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are deactivated friends worse than no friends at all

So people stop using Facebook. Some of them, like my pal Dag, darkly hint that there were larger forces at work: "nah man, I had to shut it down, y'know?" No Dag, I don't. 

Dag went all the way, and deleted his self right out of there. But lots of people aren't all black-and-white on things like Dag. They really are done with the Facebook, but choose to deactivate their account.

This means that they're still in your friends list, even though you can't communicate with them or hear from them. How IRL of y'all to be here.

If your friends list is large enough that you run up against that 5000 friend limit, ugh. What are you doing? Plus, you'll want to go through your friends list and start unfriending those accounts so you can open that space up for another acolyte a new friend. Ugh again. 

FB doesn't have anything that would make this easy of graceful or fast. Search a little and you'll find a script or two and some workarounds that promise to speed it up, but really.

I guess "managing your friends list" is supposed to be as unappetizing as the phrase sounds. 

Even if you're not bumping up against that ceiling, having more than a few deactivated friends affects the extent to which what you post gets distributed.

FB only distributes what you post to a percentage of the people on your friends list. When a percentage of those people engage with that post, by liking, commenting, or sharing it, FB will then distribute it to some more people. Deactivated accounts effectively stand in your way whenever you communicate to your list. Again, how very IRL, some people I know.

Why does FB feel like it needs you to hold onto friends that aren't there anymore? Part of it is the hangover from the constant need to deliver numbers to impress investors. Another part comes from the model FB uses to monetize what it does.

Veritasium does a thorough layperson's walk-through on the weird consequences of how FB works in this video:

Despite the name, "Facebook Fraud" is mostly about a weird answer to a tricky problem. One of the great questions of our age is, "how are they making any money at that?" and how FB tries to do it sometimes leaves us with a communcation system that values flashy upgrades to useful tools, and big numbers over better delivery of content.