LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 6 No. 8
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 6 No. 8
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few weeks. Weeks where I felt the accomplishment of cleaning the lawn of leaves, putting my equipment away for the winter and then having even more leaves appear. THIS HAPPENS EVERY YEAR. Weeks of being so busy. Weeks of enjoying some new music and enjoying the annual tradition of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF with my sick for 2+ weeks wife. She is looking forward to not coughing as much as I’m looking forward to a night of sleep not being woken up by coughing and worrying that she is dying.
Website of the year: Internet Artifacts This is amazing and nostalgic (which, is a TOXIC IMPULSE), but even funner because you can “touch” and play with the exhibits.
It’s officially the start of the modern holiday season, the pumpkin spice lattes are still flowing, the holiday music is playing at stores and the email tubes are full of adverts. My favorite holiday tradition is the annual reading of this CLASSIC TINGLER: OPPRESSED IN THE BUTT BY MY INCLUSIVE HOLIDAY COFFEE CUPS. Remember those days when this was THE BIG CONCERN and not the impending authoritarian regime?
Now to distract you with ADORABLE WORKING CATS from 1961: Black cats in line for an audition in Hollywood, 1961
Black Friday sale on Jamaica if you are interested in joining!
ITEM THE FIRST:
ART. CRIME? Two related art and AI intersections this month and one non-art related one.
SUB-ITEM THE FIRST: DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC VAN GOGHS?
I was attending a talk by AWARD WINNING AUTHOR Mindy Mejia when it veered into talk about training AI on copyrighted works and derivatives. I have opinions on that, but that is for another day. The discussion went into the ever popular topic of “what is art?” and is it something generated by a machine “art?” The author had a position that “art” is the is the realm of humanity and something generated by a machine is not. A book written by AI is not art, and I would assume this would pertain to visual arts too…
Instantly, I thought of INSPIRATION OF ALL TIME, Lt. Commander Data, the android character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In later episodes, as he strives to be human, he takes up oil painting. So, the android, who is trained by all life experiences and study of every painting in existence is “creating art.” I bounced this back to Mindy who said “I think the answer depends on how you define consciousness”
Thankfully, WE TACKLED THAT IN SEASON 2. Data is deemed to meet two of three criteria for sentient life, intelligence and self-awareness. The third, consciousness, is too nebulous a concept to define. Thus, I pose the question to you, dear reader, is Data an artist?
When reached for additional comment, she added:
I would amend my earlier statement though, having thought more about it, to say art is the realm of beings with advanced consciousness and self awareness. I don’t want to exclude alien or elephant art from the definition.
Personally, I think we are all trained on everything around us, especially in the arts. I am a huge proponent of remix culture as discussed in previous newsletters. I know in my personal experience in creating music, I studied music to learn how to structure songs, how to build instrumentation, what is important in different genres, etc. It is just that my ability to consume and synthesize is limited by my human brain capacity/processing and time. Everything has been done already, not much is net new. Every chord possible on a guitar has been played. But when you take something like this:
And make this:
You have transformed and created art, just as an AI model is doing when you type in “Elon Musk wearing a literal hat made of asses, riding a oversized beaver bareback defocused background in the style of Frida Kahlo,” IMHO.
SUB-ITEM THE SECOND: WHO IS THE MONSTER, MAN?
I was having an email exchange with a FRIEND OF THE LIFESTYLE discussing Eminem. I was just listening to The Marshal Mathers LP and wasn’t feeling it due to the lyrical content. My tolerance for degrading women and queer people is much less than it was 22 years ago. I’ve never been a fan of his lyrically, but he has an incredible flow and teamed with the production of Dre, it made it tolerable. Not as much any more.
In the email exchange, the Guns n’ Roses song “One in a Million” was brought up. I LOVE GnR, as discussed way back in Vol. 1 No. 10, but this song is something that has always bothered me. Musically, it is a 10/10 for me. Lyrically, even when I was listening to it in 1988, I knew it was gross. As I giant fan, I knew Slash was half-African American and I intrinsically embraced queer people, so I recognized the words in the song and the sentiment as bad, bad, bad. I wanted to love this song, but could not. GnR even removed this song from the re-issue of the album it was on a few years ago.
After hearing of their discomfort as well, I thought—WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. About 20 mins later, I used AI to separate the vocal track and remove one sentence from a verse and another verse completely. Recombined it and presto, a new mix was made:
One in a Million (Removing Axl's Ignorant Shit AI edit)
However, I feel like I have entered the slipperiest of slopes. In theory, I strongly oppose censorship. You hang them Mapplethorpe's & The Holy Virgin Mary. You play that Clockwork Orange movie. You blast The Pill by Loretta Lynn while cruising the hood. You stick that copy of Gender Queer in every fucking library.
That being said, I’m enjoying the shit about being able to listen to “One in a Million” without cringing. Is this any worse than a parent editing a movie to take a sex scene out before they show their kid? A big corporation whitewashing their history? Radio stations refusing to play the Dixie Chicks (err…The Chicks). HAVE I BECOME THE CENSORSHIP MONSTER?
SUB-ITEM THE THIRD: MEET THE NEW ME
The new version of iOS allows you to create a voice based on your own. You just spend about 15 minutes recording 150 phrases and spend overnight processing and you will have an on-device version of your own voice. It is amazing when it works!
It’s a bit buggy, sometimes just simply not working without a reboot and is limited to apps that support it, which does not include Apple’s apps somehow, so you are limited to using this tiny text box in the live speech window. Either way, my dream of fully mediating communication is coming soon. Once this hooks into more apps, I hope to use this at work to have it + ChatGPT attend meetings for me.
Or, have Nick v2 read it to you.
ITEM THE SECOND:
MIRROR, MIRROR: One of my academic crushes and nice person the time I briefly met them in real life, Naomi Klein, has a new book out that is next on my queue Doppelganger - A Trip into the Mirror World. The premise is that Naomi Klein who has been a force on the left for issues near and dear to me is often confused with Naomi Wolf, who was in a similar position on the left but became a conspiracy theorist in the past few years and is now a frequent guest in the Steve Bannon parallel universe.
Sean Illing had her on The Gray Area podcast Naomi Klein on her doppelganger (and yours) and it was a fascinating interview.
Klein first came onto my radar with her book No Logo, which was a seminal text to early 20’s Nick and HOLY SHIT has it come true. It was about 10 years early on the idea of “personal branding” and a lot of the issues she points out with multinational corporations and branding have come true, especially in the era of Amazon. In the podcast she relates some of that work to the new book and there is a fascinating exchange about our own doppelgängers reprinted below and a later one about the performative nature of social media that I found fascinating. If this is interesting to you, check out the hour long interview or check out the book. I’m expecting great things.
Sean Illing: …I think what you're really up to starts to crystallize when you move beyond you and other Naomi, although that dynamic is always, you know, hovering in the background and you start talking about how we're all drifting into Personal mirror worlds, and how we're all kind of losing ourselves and living alongside our own doppelgangers.*
I mean, obviously, you know, you're a relatively famous public person with a relatively famous public doppelganger. But what does it mean to say that virtually everyone participating meaningfully in the online world is creating their own doppelgangers, their own doubles, whether they know it or not?
Naomi Klein: Well, if this idea was first introduced in the late 90s and when I was researching No Logo, it was a very new and radical idea that was being floated in particular by management consultants like Tom Peters.
Also, you know, you'd read about it in places like Fast Company that we should all become a brand called you, right? And the reason why it's worth remembering that this emerges as an idea that we should fashion ourselves as products, as brands, as commodities, um, is, it's significant that it happens at the end of the 90s because this is also, a period of mass layoffs in the corporate world and the idea that if you want to be a successful multinational corporation, you need to really primarily be in the marketing business and not in the stuff business.
You know, you can outsource the manufacturing of your products and pretty much anything, anything that you can outsource, you should. And the main work that you need to engage in is communicating an idea of yourself into the world. So Nike, of course, is the master of this, also Starbucks, also Apple. But then they say, well, all you people who are getting laid off as these companies hollow out and really turn themselves into marketing companies primarily, don't worry about not having jobs and not having pensions and not having the security that a previous generation had.
You can all become brands and that will be the secret to your security and success. And this was a laughable idea to us, to our 1990s brains, I have to say. Like, it was one we could recognize that celebrities could be brands because we were seeing the first branded super brands, like that phrase was something that I think Michael Jordan's agent first used about him.
But the idea that a regular person could be a brand didn't make any sense because of course we didn't have money to market ourselves. And all of this changes with the iPhone and social media, which, you know, happens a few years after No Logo comes out. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying, you know, we are trying to survive in these incredibly insecure times by creating a double of ourselves who is both us and not us, who is more wry, more clever, more beautiful, more glowing, more radical, more, you know, it depends on which niche you're trying to appeal to.
You know, Andrew Tate has a very different kind of brand than a glowing influencer, but the point, the logic of it is the same as the logic that Nike deployed or Starbucks deployed. You need to sort of find what the essential you is, and then you need to perform it and re perform it in order to build brand loyalty and compete against all the other brands out there.
And the trouble is we are now competing against hundreds of millions if not billions of people who are playing the same game. And so it just becomes more and more, well, I think the returns are diminishing. I think it’s poison for solidarity. It's poison for camaraderie because the people who might have been allies, our competitors in this scarcity economy.
But yeah, that's what I mean by creating our, our own doubles. But because so much of it happens digitally on tech platforms that we don't control, there's another layering of digital doubles or digital doppelgängers that we contend with, which is that every time we go online to perform this version of ourselves or just to go shopping or use Google Maps or whatever it is, we leave a data trail and that, those data trails are used by tech companies to create not so much digital doppelgängers of us as digital golems of us, which are, you know, these composites that let the algorithms know what to recommend to us based on things we've done before.
Then on top of that, now we have AI where we could literally, you know, be having the, the odd experience of being confronted with somebody who looks and sounds exactly like us, but is not us and is causing all kinds of mayhem in the world. So yeah, there's a lot of digital doubling going on in the house of mirrors, which is why this topic felt really kind of rich to me and, and why I do, I use my own doppelgänger experience as a kind of white rabbit into this world.
ITEM THE THIRD:
THE DEMORALIZATION IS REAL:
Offered without comment is this recent excerpt from the Atlantic Daily Newsletter from Tom Nichols that encapsulates my fear about the upcoming election.
Trump Plots Against His Enemies
But other American voters—even those who despise Trump—can’t seem to unite long enough to face the authoritarian danger taking shape right in front of them.
The coalition of prodemocracy voters—I am one of them—is shocked at the relative lack of outrage when Trump says hideous things. (The media’s complacency is a big part of this problem, but that’s a subject for another day.) For many of us, it feels as if Trump put up a billboard in Times Square that says “I will end democracy and I will in fact shoot you in the middle of Fifth Avenue if that’s what it takes to stay in power” and no one noticed.
Trump hasn’t taken out billboards, but at his rallies and press events he’s shouting it all as loud as he can, and the people around him are making plans to carry out his wishes. Meanwhile, millions of voters are folding their arms like shirty children and threatening to sit out the election because they don’t like their choices. Some are threatening to withhold support, in particular, for Joe Biden if they don’t get their way about student loans, climate change, or policy toward Israel. They are living in a booming economy that is outperforming any other developed nation since the start of the pandemic on many measures—and they are miserable and angry about it.
Many voters resent hearing all of this. They think they are being bullied into a binary choice between two candidates they do not like, and so they engage in wishcasting: If only someone could beat Trump for the GOP nomination (no one will); if only Biden would step down (he won’t); if only America didn’t rely on the Electoral College (it does); and so on. Trump and Biden are headed for a showdown unless illness or death intervenes. Even if Trump goes to prison, the Republican Party has become so fully corrupted that he could likely still run and get the nomination anyway. And the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere, either.
If American democracy falls in 2024, the chief culpability will rest with Trump, his aides, and the elected Republicans who enabled him (either out of fear or venality or both). But if Trump manages, one last time, to squeeze 271 electoral votes out of a distracted and sullen American electorate, much of the blame will also rest with voters who couldn’t be bothered to put aside their petty beefs and particularistic interests long enough to link arms at the ballot box and defend the American system of government.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
One big-time letter to the editor from a LONG-TERM FRIEND OF THE LIFESTYLE:
Nick.
I have so many thoughts about this newsletter that I would like to communicate.
That cat purr study is great. I had no clue that a cat can ONLY roar OR purr. Wtf. All cats deserve to purr and all cats deserve to roar. Just more quietly.
If a Christian could sell me on a vision of heaven where I get to hang out with Johnny & Emily all day and they can purr and make adorable roars proportional to their size, I would tithe 10% easily. To be fair, Johnny meowed loud enough that it was on the verge of a roar.
I've been reading this graphic novel the past few days, called, "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands." To be completely transparent, I have never read a graphic novel before. But this book, oh man. It is so good. The drawings are all in greyscale. It's sad. Lonely. It really hits home when I think back on the first few months/years of Covid reality. I highly suggest, 10/10, great book.
Welcome to graphic novels! Ducks is very widely praised. I think it is good, not my favorite, but I see the appeal. I love Ed Brubaker’s noir style graphic novels (Reckless series, Criminal series, The Fade Out, etc.) and everyone should read The Nice House on the Lake. This will be a tv series or movie someday. It is so, so good and I blew through it in a day.
Would you please share the 2010s playlist with us? And share the 2000s playlist when it is completed? Here are some of the songs that were on heavy rotation on my iTunes in 2000-2010 and purchased on CD and adored:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Modern Romance"
Delton 3030, "Positive Contact"
Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood"
Mates of State, "Think Long"
Black Box Recorder, "The Art of Driving"
Ladytron, "Seventeen"
Arcade Fire, "Wake Up"
The Hold Steady, "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"
Atmosphere, "Lovelife"
Stars, "The Night Starts Here
Broken Social Scene, "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl"
Metric, "Help, I'm Alive"
Flaming Lips, "Do You Realize?"
Radiohead, "2+2=5" (because it is an epic song)
P.O.S, "POS is Ruining My Life"
M.I.A., "Paper Planes"
Goldfrapp, "Strict Machine"
The Faint, "Agenda Suicide"
Dead Prez, "I'm a African"
Bright Eyes, "An Attempt to Tip the Scales"
Rilo Kiley, "With Arms Outstretched"
Desaparecidos, "Greater Omaha"
White Stripes, "Seven Nation Army" (because, duh)
I can go on, and on. Maybe I'll make a playlist and then we can compare...could this be a group project???
2010's list is linked in the last issue. I’ll share the 2000’s when I’m done in a year or two. 2002 is 3% of my music collection, so it is a beast. Thank you for all the suggestions and new things to listen to!
I’m not going to make this a project. Honestly, I get such little feedback on music because apparently people don’t love music the way WE LOVE MUSIC. And that is ok. I guess.
But guess what, you are the inspiration for the 2024 LIFESTYLE GROUP PROJECT.
The end of my letter to the editor. I'm tired now.
Thank you for your email, it made my day.
THE HOPE SPOT:
Look at all these amazing things that were created this year, even in the midst of democracy crumbling! 200 Best Inventions of 2023 .
Also, my JUMBO PET PEEVE, is seeing best of lists before the year is over. “Cool invention of a machine that reduces plastics from the oceans, but it won’t count for 2023’s best since it is November and we’ll forget about it for the 2024 list. Better luck inventing things earlier next time nerd.”
Not a fan of her music, but fan of this! Pink Plans to Give Away Banned Books at Florida Tour Dates. Guess I'll be playing So What next karaoke night in her honor.
WEATHER CORNER:
It is cold, then it is warm, it will be cold again soon.
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY EARHOLES THIS WEEK:
Pinkpantheress is on fire this year. I first heard her at the start of the year with her collab with Ice Spice on "The Boys a Liar, Pt. 2." This will probably end in the top 10 of the year.
I went through her back catalog and loved it. It’s super modern pop music. Short, hooky, pitched vocals and full of samples from early 2000’s songs. I think her song "Angel" from the Barbie soundtrack is a standout on a great soundtrack and the first single "Mosquito" was solid.
She finally dropped her new album, Heaven Knows, and it is a banger. This is the future of pop, love it or hate it, but give it a few minutes of your time.
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
THIS IS ART.
THAT IS ALL.