Merry Christmas. On account of sick cats at home, not singular, indeed plural, I am at home for Christmas and enjoying extra time to read, play music, and update Asana. The main course this morning is an essay by Jacqueline Fendt, published earlier this year in the Open Journal of Political Science, via New Models. When I finished reading it I loaded the NYT to see what’s happening today and read this. I feel better this Christmas Day with the inkling that people might finally be getting a grip on where we are at exactly, and how we can start to redirect ourselves. I also want one of those posters.
These two articles that I read today suddenly converged at their respective conclusions. The first was a referral from Never Met a Science and the second is from Pace Layers.
When I went to Walmart for candy last month, I could not turn away from the lights that had translucent skeletons dangling from the bulbs, so I had Halloween lights for the first time. And they’re still up because they’re so great.
The tab has been open all day and I’ve watched the opening video sequence probably 20 times by now, and what sounded like a proverb kept coming to mind, about loving even stones. Nothing turned up on Google so I finally went into my office this evening where I knew I had saved the phrase that I have been trying to remember all day. I save my doodles and various odds and ends, and my favorites from the zen calendar. I try to shuffle forward the next piece of paper every day, like the next card in a deck. It was right on top.
Pressed Eject to put the disc on the right in, and the one on the left came out and I was surprised to see how similar they looked to each other. They are 20 years apart, but I couldn’t guess if the Diamond CD’s design is native to 20 years ago. Actually, 20 years ago, the album’s release was a controversy. Reportedly without informing either Diamond or Rubin, Columbia Records put tracking software on the first CD issue that reported back to them when anyone put it into a computer’s CD-ROM drive. There was an uproar and they had to reissue the CDs but at that point, the music, the Diamond/Rubin teaming, was never the news about the record.
… the feeling when you have your storage unit broken into. When you have to do a restart and all your browser tabs are lost. I had a number of things saved up from the month of June which was full of a number of distracting conditions. Back aches, neck aches, the blues. A lot of work. Some travel to visit family. But actually a lot of yoga also, and I rebooted my running practice after a dormancy that has lastted most of this year and back into 2024. I started before ordering some new shoes and was reminded once they got here that if I ever have trouble with running the problem is usually that I need new shoes.
I read two articles in the New York Times Magazine, one that would recommend and one that I would not. The former is an interview with Bill Gates, conducted shortly after it was announced that the Gates Foundation will sunset earlier than originally planned, explaining what all that was about. And the latter was about diminishing academic freedom at American universities, but I think I did learn some things from it about the tenure system that I didn’t know before. I guess what that issue did have going for it was some fantastic photography of musicians in or adjacent to the Americana genre.
I also, through my support of the Prelinger Library, landed on the mailing list of the San Franciso Film Preserve, and watched a newly-restored silent film called Padlocked, which according to them had been thought to be lost. I have never been a silent film junkie, but watching this one afternoon after work, which I think took much less than an hour, I get the attraction.
I was here at my desk this morning cleaning it off and I found underneath some things the book that I have most recently finished reading, Polostan, by Neal Stephenson. The thing about reading N. Stephenson is usually the massive investment involved due to their typical length but in this case he has divvied up a saga to into multiple releases. I picked it up at SFO at Christmastime last year, forgetting, actually, that I had put it on the wishlist I gave my parents (don’t do that). Yes, I liked it, as I usually do with his work. The whole time I was reading it though I was trying to reconcile it and then eventually to disconnect, the title with the Trumpistan moniker that a lot of people I know and/or read gave to the sinking-feeling glimpse of near-future United States in Fall. Which I also really recommend. A few weeks now in hindsight I also realize that the book reminded me of a Russian book I read nearly ten years ago, Happy Moscow.
Something else to mention is that Stephenson has a Substack, and I think it’s free. And he released an article this week which I have not set down with but that I scanned when it first came in – considering AI as one of many intelligences that humans already share the world with, and contemplating a the humans-eyelid mites relationship as a possible model for the AI-humans relationship. I’ll need to read it.
I read a lot of things this week, one of which was this article about the potentially very strong influences that siblings have on each other in their developing years. Nature versus nurture research, but in the past that’s usually focused on the influence that parents have on their children. Thought provoking and worth a read.
Lastly I’m preparing for the spring show the cover band I play in will do later this month. Sultans of Swing is on our setlist and I’ve found in rehearsals that everyone in the group wants to do it this way, but I want to do it this way. Study in contrasts. No, we don’t have a sax player.
By now a practice that I’ve sometimes managed to maintain for long consecutive periods of time, is cover-to-cover ingest of certain things that I read. It’s standard practice to do this with books, right – novels, biographies, history. I do that, I usually don’t put books away without reading the whole thing. But I also do this with Artforum, the magazine. Excepting the dozens of pages of reviews at the end of each issue. But the columns and feature articles I read completely. At least when I’m firing on all cylinders and up on things, and I read so much and subscribe to enough podcasts that this has been increasingly difficult to accomplish. But I still have a certain dedication to it to establishing a long term home or habitation where I make myself consistently available to learning about things that I never would have had I been left to my own devices. It’s similar in spirit to a yoga practice where you kind of surrender to the class and do all the things that are easy for you and applying just as much attention and consistency to the things that are difficult, which your own might skip. So I do this same sort of exercise in other ways in other places but the mechanism with reading about art in Artforum is to simply read entire issues.
The March 2025 issue included a piece that I like a lot featuring a Native American artist called Kite. Many of her works of visual art (she is also a performance and technology artist) are described as scores, as in a score of music. A beautiful example of one of these is on the cover of the magazine. My favorite part of my March Artforum read was this passage of the artist explaining her mandate, which since reading it, I have liked to think about very broadly in terms of the definition of elders and community:
This had been laying on the dining room table for several weeks, owing to the fact that since November I’ve wanted to try to understand what went wrong in the past four years, eight years, sixteen years, whatever the case may end up being made someday. Wanted to, but slow to. When I do work on it, I’m just as interested in hearing from the wilderness Republicans like DB as well as the Democrats, since it’s their failing as much as ours that has to be parsed.
Here, as elsewhere, I read DB at the NY Times also, and in the past I’ve watched him on Fridays on NewsHour, he implicates the American elites as having driven everyone else away from their institutions on the one hand and their progressivism on the other. I tend to read his essays when he’s on this throughline because he means me: I make my living in the knowledge economy, from within an industrial institution, and I have plenty of progressive values.
This piece is long but it’s worth reading. Driving young people to believe that the only way to succeed in life is to get a prestige college degree has been a disaster, because it’s meant that for decades, Americans have hyperoptimized their formative years to conform to a formula to try to enter the topmost ranks of society. Edcuation geared towards getting students to score well on standardized tests is destined to be mostly terrible, and plenty of capable kids can see that for themselves and check out of it, and then they really do have a harder time making a go of it than they would otherwise.
Washington’s current administration and its allies have liked to throw around the word meritocracy. DB is arguing here for meritocracy also, but that there is a terrible need to change he definition of merit so that way more people are interested in striving for it.
Integrated Lights is my blog, which I write from here, where I live, which is Palm Desert, California. I’m writing in a blog because no matter how much I’ve sometimes wanted to, I just don’t like social media, and I also find that I miss Web 1.0. So, writing a blog, rather than socially mediating, seems like the way to go if I’d like to make what’s on my mind and what I’m doing generally accessible to others.
One of my favorite things to do, and this is really a simple pleasure, is walk in my neighborhood during the after-work, before-dinner hours. And at this time of year that’s hard to do. Today is July 3, 2024 and if it’s not rightaway clear why it’s hard to take a walk at the end of the day here, just check the news. Because maybe you’re a little bit avoiding that these days like I am.
Every spring or summer there is a plant in my neighboorhood that emerges in a new form, blooming its bloom for the year, that causes it to resemble a friendly alien. So I am always on the lookout for that plant on my walks, and this year’s emergence is shown above. I found him on an unexpectedly cool evening just couple of weeks ago. Feel free to add googly eyes. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/boston-t-train-googly-eyes.html)
Integrated Lights 