Jordan Lee (dot) Life

Will Oldham has gifted us another BPB album; this one finds him accompanied by a large ensemble assembled in Kentucky to back up his distinctive americana-esque style. It feels like a continuation of his past couple records which preach love and openness in our time of isolation and fear. I appreciated his interview with Larry Fitzmaurice where he got deeper into the circumstances of making the album including taking care of an aging parent, newfound rootedness, (not) adapting to a changing music industry.

One of my favorite moments is when he sings “the human times have come and gone, we must accept our rule is done” in Life Is Scary Horses. Overall I resonated a lot more with the first half of the record but it is a real treat to have someone like Oldham continuing to chart his own path and still writing lit-up spirit-filled alt country in these dark times.

I liked this short article from tech writer Mike Pepi which offers a critical perspective on organizing societies around software where the intangible and ambiguous seems to give way to the efficient and definiable.

My hope is to find ways for these two ideologies to co-exist. To have trains that run on time AND have well funded community spaces for communal expression. For art to exist in interesting contexts shared and reviewed by real people instead of converted into a huge bundle of machine-readable metadata to be consumed and regurgitated by LLM’s or algorithmic feeds between targeted ads.

Is there a way for cloud-based software to intersect with the deeply human experiences without a sort of corruption from the limitations of binary code, network effect exponential growth, and penetrating surveillance? My gut is this is less of a technological issue and more about defining what is deeply important to our souls and protecting it

_My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever._

~ “Messenger” by Mary Oliver, from Thirst

This Mary Oliver poem was in today’s Prisons, Prose & Protest newsletter. I hope we too can learn the ways of “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished”

Last week I wrote an essay about how it is the process of an ecologically grounded, collaborative, human-scale art practice that makes it meaningful and fundamentally different from content that is prompted via corporate generative AI systems even though they share the same outcome- a piece of digitized art/content oftentimes distributed algorithmically on an online platform.

I felt compelled to write it partially to give myself and other struggling folks a little pep talk but also because it is an existential time, one where we have to stake out our philosophical positions in the midst of the inevitable ruptures in what it means to be human. The more I read and observe, the more I am convinced that it is the embedded logic of non-stop growth at any cost, reducing the complexity of the world into exploitable data points, and turning humans into addicted, spiritually-broken consumers that we must name and offer alternatives to.

One framework I came across in the introduction of James Bridle’s excellent-so-far book, Ways of Being, is to consider an “alien” intelligence that is already here. These aliens are the largest corporations, private equity firms, and financial institutions. In the USA at least, we have given corporations human rights yet they don’t (easily) die and have a psychopathic need for profit margins. They don’t mind lobbying governments to change safety regulations to poison populations, or outbidding people for huge swathes of housing to create a class of permanent renters. They don’t care about supporting brutal dictatorships in other countries for cheaper resource access. They do not flinch if their medicine is so expensive that people die or have pause when they make profit from number of inmates in a private prison. They do not feel like part of an ecological community, they are not moved to help human flourishing or consider their long term effects on the planet. They are singularly, maniacally focused on metrics that lead to two related outcomes: lower costs, higher profit.

We are only useful to these aliens as workers or consumers. And if our work is getting increasingly automated then our main role will be as disempowered consumers. In an interview about her book Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, media theorist Bogna Konior continues the alien metaphor but argues that we may also remain useful as vectors of training data with everything we do in the open web being used to update LLM systems on human behavior. In a separate lecture she wonders if we have gone from using machines to interface with each other to using each other to interface with machines, a feeling I often get when browsing algorithmically sorted media.

This would be a great time for the government to step in and create privacy laws, to demand transparency and guard rails but in the the tech age these aliens have become more powerful than any government. In the case of the USA our current economy is making an all-in bet on LLM’s and the extractive infrastructure needed to run it. Any attempt at opposing this agenda will cause deep economic harm to almost any citizen who has a retirement account which creates a very strange alliance between exploiter and exploited.

Exocapitalism by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo take the alien metaphor the furthest. The authors argue (though I’m not fully convinced) that capitalism itself is a non-human intelligence who found humans to be the most useful tool towards its goals of endless growth, efficient extraction, and abstraction away from our shared ecological reality. They wonder if we are entering a phase where this exocapitalistic drive is trying to untether itself from the limitations of humanity for something that could be even more efficient with less physical shortcomings. Although the book is quite provocative and makes some fascinating points, I believe we have now found ourselves squarely in actual sci-fi territory.

What I am hoping to show is that these companies ARE making artificial intelligence. But they aren’t artificially emulating the human or ecological kind, instead they are further spreading the narrow, corporate intelligence that only knows how to categorize and plunder, to keep virtualizing and rebuilding the world in a biologically-agnostic image. Untangling ourselves from these systems of exploitation (inside and outside ourselves!) is an important way forward as we find ways to resist the “inevitabilities” that these tech oligarchs promise their stockholders while everyone else wonders “why is this happening?” as their way of life is completely destabilized by an unregulated, uncaring, profit hungry, well… alien entity.

I think a diversity of tactics will be helpful from the inspiring protests over data center building, stronger local communities, a rethinking of how humans and technology can co-exist with ecological systems instead of dominating them, making regulation a major bipartisan issue for politics at all levels of government. But most of all this will require deeps wells of imagination, perspective shifting away from human hubris, and collective reckoning over what a meaningful and compassionate life might look like outside of consumption and experimenting with ways to make it happen right now.

Mirah’s earnest songwriting and lushly intimate production have been a big influence on me for a couple decades now. I’ve enjoyed the first couple listens to her new album which is heavy with themes of covid isolation, starting a family, losing a sense of place as a musician. Yet the double meaning of Dedication also comes through, contextualizing the album both as a gift and a show of resolve. I found myself a bit distracted by the production choices on a couple songs that took me out of the moment but mostly I’m very happy to re-enter a musical world from an artist I’ve listened to since high school.

Recommended Track: After The Rain

I recently caught this ridiculous mockumentary style movie about a fictional group called Nirvanna The Band, a best friend duo who spend seventeen years unsuccessfully trying to play a modest sized venue. I expected lots of indie band in-jokes and irreverent time-travel hijinx but not Mission Impossible level stunt work atop a Toronto skyscraper. I love how a realistic and attainable artistic goal could spiral into such an epic plot.

I really enjoyed this insightful and far out conversation on the Hermitix podcast with the media theory scholar Bogna Konior, I’ll definitely be picking up her book. She pulls from sci-fi, theology, the study of non-human intelligence, and the roles of deception to weave together a thought experiment where the most intelligent thing to do as a human may be to stop communicating in open internet spaces (and yes I see the irony of posting this in an open internet space). I was especially compelled by her ideas about monks and prayer and if that type of reverent silence is possible within networked digital spaces.

Last week I wrote about the “creativity portal”, an open antenna-like state where ideas and connections flow easily. Many artists describe it as feeling like the ideas are coming from outside their conscious self, either from a higher power or their own secret depths. It is a deeply fulfilling yet furtive, unpredictable state.

With this on the mind, I saw the Columbian tragicomedy Un Poeta and was shown two very different processes of creativity. The main character, Oscar, is a middle aged poet who hasn’t produced work for a decade so he fills the void through alcohol, delusions, and thinking everyone else is a sell out. The viewer clearly sees the portrait of a spiralling artist disconnected from their creativity and coping in ways that take them even further from what fulfils them.

Oscar eventually meets Yurlady, a 15 year old high school student living in the slums who has immense natural talent as a poet. Although she is outwardly understated and shy, her notebook is filled with poems that are simple yet deep, interfacing with the material difficulties of her life but also finding beauty and transcendence within them.

As a side note, It is interesting how most children are naturally creative and seem to lose that ability as they age. I wonder why that is?

Eventually Oscar takes on Yurlady as a protege and she sees, in full tragicomedy fashion, the dysfunction of how arts funding works, the deeply imbedded sexism and classism of the art world, the macho clashing of egos- none of which has anything to do with the poetry itself. It made me reflect of my own long journey of relearning how to naively enjoy making music after seeing the structures of the music industry up close.

As a movie, I thought it did a great job asking the biting questions but I do wish it was a little less bitter towards poetry itself. I would have loved to hear more of Yurlady’s poems, or seen a little of the positive, transformative impact that making art can have on a person’s psyche. There are little hints of this in the film’s closing chapter but perhaps Un Poeta works best a cautionary tale.

One of my resolutions this year was to “keep the portal open”, a phrase borrowed from my friend and sometimes musical collaborator Matt Bachmann. I think it is a more poetic way of talking about the open, perceptive, creative state where ideas and connections come easily and the world is endlessly fascinating. Like many others who have described this, I feel my ego shrink and instead get to be an antenna picking up the infinite signals of the world and mixing them together within my psychic depths. In my experience, this portal is like a stray cat who must be coaxed, slowly fed and nurtured before it becomes a reliable presence.

Even though writing, teaching, and performing music is a big part of my life, I still regularly lose access to this portal. Usually this loss starts from a combination of work and family stress, travel, some sort of light addiction to junk media, a brutal news cycle, and various misguided fears about my music not being good enough that spiral into avoidance. When I am creatively connected it is one of my favorite feelings in the world yet it can feel like swimming against the current as our society is so wired for easy, shallow hits of pleasure in exchange for perpetually fractured attention.

It can become a vicious cycle. When I’m unable to write inspired music, I am more likely to become depressed and seek distractions which make it even harder to attempt to write again. When I was younger I thought inspiration was random or something to be found in faraway places or extraordinary situations. More recently, I’ve been able to see that it doesn’t need to be boom and bust, in fact it is much better if it isn’t. The Artist’s Way teaches (and I agree!) that the tortured artist myth is toxic and untrue but I do think that many other sensitive and creative people are stuck in this same spiral which brings about a lot of pain.

This year I decided to approach this resolution with good old Buddhist “compassionate curiosity” towards self. Soon questions popped up like what happens if I don’t look at my phone for the first hour of the morning? Should I go straight to the piano? Should I write with a notebook, computer, or both? Should I try to write when I feel totally uninspired? Should I set a timer for 20 minutes? Should I make voice memos while I walk? Should Wednesday be a no screen day? How to make practicing not feel like a chore but also still a habit? Do I buy a special scented candle and light it when I’m being creative to “enchant” the space? Should I take more notes or does that take me out of the moment? What if I meditate before each writing session? What if I only have one cup of coffee a day so I don’t get jittery and anxious? What if I keep a notebook next to my bed to catch middle of the night dreamy thoughts? What types of media fill my mind with imagery and ideas and which ones are more numbing? What does actual rest look and feel like? What do other people have to say about these subjects? Why do I overthink everything!!!???

Yet something interesting has come out of this barrage of noticing and questioning. There hasn’t been definitive answers on “how to be” but the mindfulness of the portal itself has made it feel more consistent than ever. Even on a tiring difficult day where I wasn’t able to get into a creative state I can compassionately notice instead of starting a cycle of depression and avoidance. Last time this happened I resolved to at least look at my lyric or song drafts each day even if it was for five minutes for the sake of my feral portal animal mixed metaphor thing.

Yesterday, I put this to the test and had a small breakthrough. Me and L had scheduled a fun but totally packed Friday where I knew I wouldn’t get any studio time. On the short train ride I checked in on some lyric drafts on my phone and had a huge burst of inspiration that tied a song together and clarified some ideas for my whole album. I started to feel the heaviness of my album-in-progress give way to a lightness where the writing was built into the foundations of my life, not as a burden, deadline, or chore but as a process that expands the very way I see the world.

(Art is untitled by Ruth Asawa)