r.i.p. richard serra
Richard Serra died this week. Coverage: Artsy, Artnet, NYT (Kimmelman), NYT (Smith).
Here’s Kimmelman on experiencing Serra’s “elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel.”
I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings.
Google Photos is getting pretty good – here’s a screenshot of the first bit of search results from all the Serras I’ve snapped over the years…
The experience of disappearing into his mazes turned Serra’s sculptures into something remarkably human, almost in spite of their materials, their scale. This short piece from SFMOMA about the installation of his piece Sequence is a great reminder of how Serra’s sculptures bumped up against notions of time, decay, civic infrastructure, personal boundaries and visual perception.
Three things of sporting note: death, machinery, words.
Iditarod musher Dallas Seavey kills moose to protect his dogs during race.
According to Iditarod Rule 34, if an edible big game animal — like a moose, caribou or buffalo — is killed in defense of life or property, the musher is required to gut the animal and report it to race officials at the next checkpoint. Mushers who follow must help gut the animal when possible and no teams may pass until the animal is gutted and the musher gutting the animal has proceeded.
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain. Linked everywhere, because it was unceremoniously unpublished from Road & Track’s website, but obviously worth reading. (Version linked here is my highlighted read on Readwise.)
When we got into the garage, Lewis’s car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.
The Tournament of Books Play-in Match. The Auburn Conference v. The Bee Sting v. The Librarianist.
As is well known, the Tournament of Books is an elaborate prank played on those who think they are capable of making aesthetic judgements.
Didn’t have this on my 2024 bingo card: Taylor Swift Beau Travis Kelce Will Help Finance a Basquiat Documentary.
WITI: The Saddle Stitch Edition. I loved the Hermès episode of Acquired; Why is this Interesting digs into the saddle stitch. “The craft and process is antithetical to mass-produced goods and is a good representation of what actual luxury is: based on effort, rare, and made to last.”
Via The Browser, this 13 year old, 3200 word piece on the Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball Extra Fine.
We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl. We think we can detect gender and personality, childhood traumas, future ambitions deep-seated hang-ups, sophistication and intelligence from the way a person’s hand puts ink to paper.
Greg.org on Richard Prince’s photographs of Milton Berle’s file cabinets of jokes:
When I first saw these images, I figured that their elongated, portrait-style dimensions reflected a decade of Prince using an iPhone as a studio. But they also simultaneously read as landscapes, with joke mesas extending to a cropped out horizon, a western desert begging for a cowboy. Then I saw the file cabinets, and realized these images also map to their subject, and the experience of living with these physical objects made over decades from words, ideas and language.
While I think the headline of the piece is overblown, John Herrman gets to the heart of the challenges Google and OpenAI are facing with LLM personification:
With Gemini, incredibly, Google assigned itself a literal voice, spoken by a leader-employee-assistant-naïf character pulled in so many different directions that it doesn’t act like a human at all and whose core competency is generating infinite grievances in users who were already skeptical of the company, if not outright hostile to it.
Herrman doesn’t use the word “personification” in his piece, but I just keep coming back to that word when I think about the personalities of LLMs. (A reminder from Wikipedia: “Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person.”)
Herrman, without explicitly naming it, gets to an interesting “jobs to be done” framing of what users are hiring Chat GPT or Gemini to do, vs how the narrower “job” that users are hiring specialized AI applications or even Custom GPTs for makes the personification problem easier.
Specialized AI represents real products and an aggregate situation in which questions about AI bias, training data, and ideology at least feel less salient to customers and users. The “characters” performed by scoped, purpose-built AI are performing joblike roles with employeelike personae. They don’t need to have an opinion on Hitler or Elon Musk because the customers aren’t looking for one, and the bosses won’t let it have one, and that makes perfect sense to everyone in the contexts in which they’re being deployed. They’re expected to be careful about what they say and to avoid subjects that aren’t germane to the task for which they’ve been “hired.” In contrast, general-purpose public chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are practically begging to be asked about Hitler. After all, they’re open text boxes on the internet.
Colin Ainsworth, in the Paris Review, visits Chip and Joanna Gaines’ new hotel in Waco, which has been outfitted with the thousands and thousands of books they bought from Larry McMurtry.
In the library, I get as close to the shelves as I can and tilt my head to read the spines. There’s a copy of Moby-Dick just over the railing of the stairs. I look down over the library to see if taking it off the shelf is kosher. I don’t see anyone with a book, but I also don’t see any security or anyone telling me I’m about to do something wrong. I grab it and flip through it, still conscious that someone might be watching, and when I really realize that no one is paying attention, it occurs to me that I could walk out of this hotel with this book right now: Larry McMurtry’s personal copy of Moby-Dick, or at least, one from his bookstore, could be mine. I text a couple of friends this idea before I put the book back on the shelf.
Brian Morrissey on Bill Ackman, Ackman’s three hour conversation with Lex Fridman, and incentives in journalism and the media business:
The real issue Ackman underlines is a cultural insularity within the profession that has to be acknowledged. It’s too easy to blame external forces for the declines in trust and simple prestige of the news industry. There’s groupthink that tends to coalesce around a singular point of view. This got exacerbated during Trump and a generational shift toward a form of activism that’s been embedded in journalism for a while but has become heightened in recent years. Speaking truth to power became “calling out” various transgressions. The moralizing over dumb tweets did the profession no favors.
Worth reading in full.
pong wars, electoral college edition
I really love watching the random math of Pong Wars play out, but it felt like it needed some actual stakes. So I updated it for 2024.
Sari Azout on Artifact shutting down, reacting to the argument that “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.”
”The market opportunity isn’t big enough” – for reading? For knowledge?
That’s such a cop out. … Right around the time of their launch, I listened to an interview with the founders framing their new venture along the lines of “AI has captured our imagination and personalized news feels like a good place to start”.
From the outside, the narrative felt very tech for the sake of tech.
Rosencrans Baldwin encounters a Starbucks barista who has never served just a plain espresso:
“So, you drink it just like that,” he said, musing. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen that before.”
“Maybe it’s old school,” I said.
“That’s sick, bro,” he said. “That’s so sick. I might have to try that.”
Virginia Heffernan on Presidents’ Day:
As with Shakespeare, who wasn’t revered as the English GOAT until some 150 years after his death, Washington wasn’t figured the full American GOAT right away. In 1869, his face was engraved on the dollar bill. In 1879, his birthday became a national holiday. In 1884, the Washington Monument was completed.
All of that followed the Civil War. In celebrating Washington, therefore, we’re recalling not just the founding of the nation, but the refounding. We’re revisiting the national myth-making that was meant to tie the Union back together after it was torn apart.
Ted Gioia on the state of the culture in one brilliant graphic:
Related: from 2022, Adam Mastroianni, Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly:
As options multiply, choosing gets harder. … More opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance. When the only way to watch a movie is to go pick one of the seven playing at your local AMC, you might take a chance on something new. But when you’ve got a million movies to pick from, picking a safe, familiar option seems more sensible than gambling on an original.
Specialist insurer Hiscox has reported a trend of selfie-taking visitors damaging valuable paintings, objects, and installations by walking into them backward. … Hiscox’s head of art and private clients, Robert Read, dubbed the phenomenon “a pandemic of selfies,” as the consequences are happening at prominent art institutions across the globe.
Emphasis mine, because “a pandemic of selfies” is the perfect collective noun.
Emanuel Derman in WITI on watercolor technique, but not really…
The surface you paint on determines what you can achieve.
torturing poets
Of course The New York Times sought out actual poets who would comment on the title of the upcoming Taylor Swift album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” Some loved it! Some were worried about the whole “tortured” typecasting thing! And one even likened Taylor to Wordsworth!
But this 35 word sentence towards the end of the piece floored me.
Some hoped that Ms. Swift’s next era would increase interest in American poetry, a precarious market for academics in real-life poetry departments — usually subsumed by English departments, which themselves face existential threats — across the country.
There’s a lot going on here. It kicks off with the classic indefinite subject (“Some”), and then pins a massive subordinate clause on “hoped” and then twists and turns through…the politics of academia?
My brain hurt trying to deconstruct it all, so I did what any diehard Swift fan / long lost English major would do: I went to Chat GPT and asked it to diagram this sentence.
Alas, GPT-4 was sort of cantankerous, and while it did a lovely job explaining different parts of grammar, it wasn’t terribly helpful in actually drawing anything.
While I can’t draw this visually here, imagine the main clause as the top line of your diagram, with each additional element branching off below it according to its function in the sentence. Each level of the diagram would represent a different layer of complexity within the sentence, from the main clause at the top to the most detailed modifiers and descriptive elements at the bottom.
OK! Yes! That’s what I was imagining!
For actual diagramming, drawing software or a pen and paper would be best to accurately represent these relationships visually.
Oh…OK, sure.
Thank goodness for the marketplace of ideas, because it turns out that Bard is an excellent sentence diagrammer. It spat out an ASCII representation of the sentence diagram in Reed-Kellogg format (full text here, image pasted below), as well as a very detailed description of what’s going on in this sentence.
- Main Clause: The main clause of the sentence is “Some hoped,” which establishes the basic subject-verb relationship. “Some” acts as the indefinite subject, and “hoped” is the past tense verb.
- Subordinate Clause: The clause “that Ms. Swift’s next era would increase interest in American poetry” modifies the verb “hoped.” It functions as an adverbial clause, providing more context about the object of hope.
- Subject: “Ms. Swift’s next era” acts as the subject of the subordinate clause. The possessive construction “Ms. Swift’s” indicates ownership of the “era.”
- Verb: “Would increase” is the modal verb combined with the base verb “increase,” expressing a conditional possibility.
- Object: “Interest in American poetry” is the direct object of the verb “increase.” The prepositional phrase “in American poetry” clarifies what is being increased.
- Appositive Phrase: The phrase “a precarious market for academics in real-life poetry departments” serves as an appositive to “American poetry,” providing additional information and clarification about its nature.
- Adjective: “Precarious” modifies “market,” describing its uncertain and unstable nature.
- Prepositional Phrase: “For academics in real-life poetry departments” clarifies who is affected by the precariousness of the market.
- Preposition: “For” indicates the beneficiaries or recipients of the precarious market.
- Noun Phrase: “Academics in real-life poetry departments” specifies the group facing the precarious market conditions.
- Noun: “Academics” refers to the people working in the field.
- Prepositional Phrase: “In real-life poetry departments” restricts the type of academics to those specifically associated with poetry departments, excluding theoretical or purely literary-focused academics.
- Participial Phrase: The phrase “usually subsumed by English departments” modifies “poetry departments,” providing further context about their status.
- Participle: “Subsumed” is the past participle of the verb “subsume,” indicating an action that has already happened.
- Prepositional Phrase: “By English departments” clarifies who is doing the subsuming.
- Relative Clause: The clause “which themselves face existential threats” modifies “English departments,” adding another layer of information.
- Subject: “English departments” acts as the subject of the relative clause.
- Verb: “Face” is the present tense verb indicating an ongoing situation.
- Object: “Existential threats” is the direct object of the verb “face.”
- Reflexive Pronoun: “Themselves” emphasizes that the English departments are facing the threats directly.
- Adverbial Phrase: The phrase “across the country” modifies the verb “increase,” specifying the geographical scope of the potential rise in interest.
I hope this more detailed explanation clarifies the sentence’s structure and the relationships between its parts!
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, tortured poets. April 19. Can’t wait.
Being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.
M.G. Siegler, Unchoking the Web:
It is absolutely not enjoyable to visit many websites of today. Especially content-focused websites which have become an absolute cesspool of obnoxious ads which at best distract from and often outright block the content. And that’s if you can get the pages to load, which is a chore in and of itself because of all the scripts these pages are running to be able to glean more insight so as to get more information to serve up said shitty ads. It’s a fucking nightmare.
Arc Search is currently my default mobile browser for three reasons:
- It opens right to the search experience.
- The “let’s make a web page for you” is a clever solution to a real problem that M.G. so correctly outlines.
- The whole experience is just delightful.
bobby koons
Somehow I missed Andy Baio’s post from May of last year, The Unhinged Miniature World of Bobby Fingers. As usual I’m late to this party.
If you haven’t seen them before, Bobby Fingers makes elaborate 1:9 scale dioramas depicting embarrassing moments in the lives of famous men, showing off his talents in model-making with a range of techniques from Bronze Age wax casting to modern 3D laser scanning.
But I discovered Mr. Fingers’ work today, thanks to Kevin Kelly’s tip in Recomendo, who calls them “Dada YouTube.”
His long videos are masterpieces of meticulous art craftsmanship, elaborate prank puzzles, indie music, deadpan comedy, all disguised as one of the best maker tutorials I’ve ever seen. It is very hard to describe their obsessive weirdness and elegant absurdity.
Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama is the best place to start, but Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama deserves a spot in the contemporary canon alongside Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
books finished, jan 2024
I’ve been reading a lot; here’s a ranked list of books I finished in January, with one pertient highlight pulled from each. Thank God for Readwise or I probably wouldn’t remember a thing.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William Eggington
The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that. This connecting of disparate slices of space-time is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowing anything at all, but it is not itself a thing in space and time, a thing that survives our existence on Earth.
Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by Neil Theise
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment. This very body and mind, this very heart and soul is the transcendent reality. It was never somewhere else, something we had to reach for or travel to; it was just this body in just this moment.
The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner
Stop, I interrupted, just stop for a second, John, and listen. Listen to the wind in the birches, a stream of alephs, the room tone of the forest, sirens in the distance, folk music, unnecessary but sufficient. I personally need cities at night, clear glass pavement, impurities, writing paper, all forming together an immense patchwork curtain. I’m listening now, John, Jack, Josh, Josiah, James. Tell me what you need.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture, by Jenny Odell
The world is ending – but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, “a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.” Hallucinate a scenario, hallucinate yourself in it. Then tell me what you see.
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, by Heather Cox Richardson
The fundamental story of America is the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy come true. We are always in the process of creating “a more perfect union.”
Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, by Paul Bloom
Why would language make us better at thinking about other minds? The obvious theory is that engaging in linguistic communication conveys more and more information about the minds of other people. But a more radical theory is that it’s the structure of language that does the trick.70 The syntax of language allows for a superior understanding of how the world is seen by others.
The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, by Kyle Chayka
How do you find a way to live the life that you are born with and stake out a space for yourself in the tumultuous present?
Jacobin: We’re Still Living in Don DeLillo’s White Noise:
To consume is ultimately a passive experience: receiving something from outside the self. And our consumption is not limited to the products we decide to purchase. Without our choosing, we absorb what Jack calls “waves and radiation” — the chatter of television, the messages of advertising, the chemicals in the air and water. The control that we feel at the mall and the supermarket conceals our greater powerlessness against the white noise of consumer society. “The flow is constant,” says one of Jack’s colleagues. “Words, pictures, numbers, graphics, statistics, specks, particles, motes.”
Greil Marcus: A Brief History of Chez Panisse in Four Parts:
It would be a little French restaurant where people would meet, find inspiration, renew old friendships, establish new ones, talk, and discover. There would be work for people to do, and while it might barely pay the rent, it would be more fulfilling than any work they had done before. People would leave their tables with a feeling of surprise at how good something could taste. The way a peach or even a green salad could taste so fully of itself, as if it were both a thing and the idea of it, would suggest that other parts of life, outside the restaurant, could achieve the same rightness.
Inspired by the conversation between Gruber and Kottke on The Talk Show, I kicked off a weekend project: a simple script that would cycle through my blog archives, extract every URL I’ve ever linked to, and then load them to see if those pages are still up. My hypothesis: more than 50% of the URLs linked to more than 10 years ago are gone, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics.
It’d been a while since I’d written any Ruby, so I fired up Chat GPT and asked it this prompt as a starting point:
can you help me write a ruby script that will loop through a folder of markdown documents in order to build a CSV with columns for date (pulled from YAML frontmatter), date (also pulled from YAML front matter) and URL, where each row in the table is every anchor HREF tag in the body of the document
And, of course, the response wasn’t perfect out of the box, but it was pretty damn good – and it included a description of how the script works! As I’ve been tweaking it, debugging regex bullshit, adding functionality (follow redirects, anyone?) my robot overlord has been with me all along the way, a patient teacher with perfect context of our whole conversation. And it will be there tomorrow when I pick this weekend project back up.
I know this isn’t exactly the freshest of news or the hottest of takes, but this is just a reminder that AI tech is making computers fun again. And when tech feels fun, tech has a high likelihood of getting weird. This shit’s gonna get really, really weird.
Pitchfork gives the new 100 gecs record (10,000 gecs) an 8.2:
On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate.
I saw them last summer at Outside Lands, and though I’m not a millennial, they absolutely broke my brain in the best way possible.
On the other end of the spectrum, and something that feels a bit more age approprite, A24 announced that they’re releasing a newly restored 4K version of Jonathan Demme’s 1984 masterpiece, Stop Making Sense. It’s wild to rewind and read through a contemporaneous review of the film; here’s part of Pauline Kael’s take:
Byrne has a withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He gives the group its modernism — the undertone of repressed hysteria, which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike “big suit” — his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys’ large suit of felt that hangs off a wall — it’s a perfect psychological fit. He’s a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.
Can’t wait to see this in theaters. Again.
Nicola Twilley, in the 2023 Tournament of Books, on her “HBO-induced Emily St. John Mandel bias.”
If the painfully earnest members of the Traveling Symphony are only the kind of people who survive a pandemic, I would prefer not to. This makes no sense, because I actually enjoyed Station Eleven in book form, and the TV series doesn’t even follow the source material, but these kinds of prejudices don’t, necessarily.
And then…
I say all of this because I firmly believe that novels and their characters are extremely particular in who they speak to, and even when. Yes, good fiction can and should be able to strengthen and expand its readers’ empathy muscles, but the kind of magical experience that comes from really relishing the company of the characters and the world they live in—that’s an individual thing. In other words, I’m not even trying to be objective as a ToB judge, because I don’t think that’s how reading fiction works.
Emphasis mine. And note, she picked Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility over R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.
Jennifer Egan, on the Collective Conscious device in The Candy House.
I gleaned this device and its various properties more from first-draft material that I started writing in those early years, from 2010 to 2013. So, for example, in “Lulu the Spy,” the chapter that you published as “Black Box,” Lulu is spying for the U.S. government and transmitting a record of her mission via a device implanted in her brain. So there’s already this possibility of mental content being shared technologically. Little by little, I began to get a sense that in the twenty-thirties, which I was writing into, there’s the possibility of thought sharing. And that was how I began to have a sense of what this machine was. And the device I eventually came up with allowed me to do a lot of things. It allowed me to write both from the perspective of looking back at the past and from the perspective of the future. It allowed time travel within the book. It allowed me to do certain narrative things that I knew I wanted to do. One of those, for example, was to write a story in which people can find other people whom they’ve glimpsed only once, whose names they don’t know.
Here’s the original “Black Box” story; I blogged about it back in 2012.