If Everybody Had an Ocean

 

With the Euros in Germany last month, and now the Olympics in Paris, this summer has meant a lot of sports on TV.  So much screen time does not benefit one’s mental or physical health — especially near the end of a long soccer tournament, I start to feel all strung-out and irritable — but it’s hard to resist the Olympics.  And this year the organizers made the inspired decision to make Paris itself the star of the show, eschewing the typical stadium extravaganza for an opening ceremony along the riverbanks, putting beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, plotting the road events to pass the Musee d’Orsay, etc. Their only notable misstep has been to insist on forcing the triathletes into the disgusting Seine, rather than using one of the many non-toxic and highly telegenic bodies of water (e.g., Lac d’Annecy) across the hexagon.

Watching this much TV has also given me the chance to catch up on my advertising.  I’m digging Salesforce’s spots with Matthew McConaughey as a Wild West sheriff heaving “information bandits” through swinging saloon doors.  The fact that the bandits all wear some version of the Silicon Valley tech bro “puffer vest” always makes me chuckle, and might make you forget that Salesforce is run by Silicon Valley tech bros.  There’s also the usual spate of pharma ads, which are mostly unremarkable, save the prelude to the Opzelura (ruxolitinib) spot from Incyte, where various family members run frantically into the living room after the mother exclaims from the couch, “QUICK! THERE’S A PHARMACEUTICAL COMMERCIAL COMING ON!”  Ironic self-mockery may or may not move more units, but it at least signals to the viewer that we’re all in on the joke.

More rote and uninspiring has been the lineup of overtly Olympics-themed ads, every single one of which is an execution of the same concept: i.e., a representative child sees the Olympics on TV and is inspired to put in years of hard work, to see every setback as an opportunity to grow stronger, to be grateful for all the sacrifice and support from their parents and coaches, all in the service of following their dream of becoming a member of Team USA who will one day be on TV and inspire the next generation of young athletes, and so on. Of course, the likelihood of any of these “children” actually making it to the podium is roughly equivalent to their winning the Powerball, but we Americans do love worshipping a certain mythology around work ethic and achievement.

Peacock has made the most of streaming video’s capabilities through their “Olympics hub,” which lets the viewer watch multiple live events at the same time, with the option to zoom into a specific event if things get interesting.  It also lets you search by individual sport, so you can spend all day watching judo if you want (I do not, as I don’t understand the rules and it always appears as if at least one competitor’s uniform is getting pulled off).

Early in the games, I clicked on the “surfing” icon, mainly out of curiosity because I knew it was taking place in Tahiti and I wanted to see what it looked like. Even though I grew up <5 miles from the ocean and spent most of my summers at the beach, I was never a surfer.  My formative years were generally spent rule-following, and the surfing scene seemed to me as a more menacing, criminal-adjacent realm, of cars and fins and skipping school and precocious body hair and danger. 

It’s hard to overstate how unlike surfing is to other televised Olympic competitions.  The coverage opens on a bobbing, half-in-sea-level shot of Teahupo’o.  The competitors – one in blue, one in red – dive into the water and paddle out to the break line, where they sit on their boards looking out to sea, hoping a rideable wave will come their way.  Minutes pass.  Only the steady white noise of the surf, softly amplified every now and then by the roll of a breaking wave – sits above the silence. More minutes pass.

The TV commentators are also of a different species.  Joe Turpel, raised in Hawaii with an easy Pacific burr, effortlessly covers play-by-play.  Color commentary, such as it is, is handled by Mike Parsons, a famous big wave surfer with a more bookish timbre in his voice, but the same half-baked lack of urgency.  Together they escort the viewer into a totally awesome semantic universe, of gnarly tubes and tagging the lip and staying behind the curtain and getting gobbled up by the foam ball. A universe in which “goofy” is a term of art. “Get too close to that reef, and it can really stop your energy,” says Turpel, describing the literally death-defying nature of this event with characteristic insouciance.  Some more minutes pass.  

I would like to watch an Olympics in which all the events are covered by Joe Turpel and Mike Parsons.

There are moments of action, when the right wave comes and the surfer with priority spins the nose of their board around and paddles along with the rising wall.  What these humans do on surfboards is miraculous, and you’ve probably seen that great photo of Gabriel Medina, with his finger raised and his board hovering above the surf, looking like some kind of Brazilian god/warrior.  But, as breathtaking as they are, these moments are somehow not over-dramatized. A surfer gets rewarded for constructing a ride in which the turns are seamlessly connected together.  In the same way, it seems like riding the wave, and paddling back out, and (especially) sitting there bobbing and waiting, are all part of one, larger, connected practice that seems awfully spiritual.  There is a reason why the surfers’ meditation routines come up in the commentary so often.

Each heat lasts 30-35 minutes (minutes can sometimes be added on if there were no rideable waves for a long stretch).  As the clock winds down, which in other sports would be a crescendo of frantic activity, we find the surfers, still, sitting there, maybe taking a few searching paddles up the reef, but for the most part still bobbing and waiting.  The winning wave may come, but very often it doesn’t, and there’s nothing they can do about it, and they don’t seem terribly concerned about this.  They, like us, are subject to forces much, much more powerful than our own desires and dreams.  No matter how many hours of work have been put in, the right wave at the right time simply might not come and the horn will sound it will be time to paddle back to shore.

Zen and the Art of Airline Marketing

A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school.  When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll.  I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity.  Kids today.

Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure.  Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.  

While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other. 

It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones.  You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination.  But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad. 

What does this say about Delta’s customer experience?  I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology.  Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."

Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable.  Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen.  A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.

In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on.  When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc.  With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist. 

Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.

As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos.  If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.

People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally.  Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents.  And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness.  All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.

 

The Content Generation

Why you should embrace generative AI, and why you should resist it.

The boardroom soap opera of the past week seemed an appropriate punctuation to a year in which generative artificial intelligence went from esoteric CompSci topic to something we all needed to be concerned about.  Like a handful of pebbles thrown into a pond, the launch of ChatGPT, barely a year ago, created ripples which continue to expand and overlap. “Knowledge workers,” who for years looked on complacently as digital automation put checkout clerks and assembly line workers and travel agents out of a job, suddenly confronted a future in which they too could be replaced by machines. CFOs salivated over OPEX savings that would come from swapping out messy, inefficient humans with computers. Luddites and other contrarians split semantic hairs, chortling over ChatGPT’s mistakes, and arguing that these models were no closer to “general intelligence” than your smartphone’s auto-fill function. Money poured in. The rest of us kept ourselves entertained asking ChatGPT to write poems and break up with our boyfriends.

I come neither to bury GenAI nor to praise it.  Like any technology, GenAI is neither inherently evil nor inherently good. Scoffing at it or ignoring it won't make it go away. Deifying it, despite OpenAI’s lofty mission statement, will not bring about the betterment of humanity.

Granted, there is a lot to worry about.  I won’t even touch the hypothesis that a paperclip-maximizing AI will wind up annihilating humanity. The doomers may be right in the end, but humans seem to be perfectly capable of coming up with ways to annihilate themselves without the aid of a large language model. I do worry about the stuff that GenAI models make up as they respond to a prompt. The term “hallucinations” -- evoking dreams and psychedelia -- is deceptively benign; “lies” is more appropriate. In 2024, citizens of many countries including the US will elect their next leaders amidst a swamp of artificial words and images indistinguishable from real ones, and I think we’re in for some seriously ugly scenes. 

And yet, retreating to our pencil-and-paper sanctuaries and refusing to engage isn't a good answer. Your job will (or already does) involve interacting with AI at some level. GenAI models will make your life easier, especially by automating certain repetitive tasks. Working alongside a GenAI, if you do so skillfully, will liberate you from a whole lot of drudgery – think writing meeting minutes, summarizing long documents, cleaning out emails, etc. Rather than doing your job for you, GenAI can actually enhance the work that you’re doing. To paraphrase medical futurist Bertalan Meskó: professionals will not be replaced by GenAI, but professionals who know how to use GenAI will replace those who don’t.

Amid all the chatter, I think it’s beneficial to consider a question that I don’t hear very often when generative AI is discussed: What do humans lose when they stop writing? What happens to them when they no longer devote time and energy to the practice of composition, when they delegate that activity to a machine? 

Content generation is among the lowest-hanging fruit for companies looking to improve their P&Ls using GenAI. Without a doubt, ChatGPT can churn out, adapt, and optimize mountains of text a lot more efficiently than you or I can. The marginal cost of producing another unit of content approaches zero. And a funny thing starts to happen. Words, and the ideas they signify, become reduced to units of economic output: manufactured, ingested, excreted. The relationship between the source of the content and its consumer becomes purely transactional. More than that: the “reader” becomes nothing more than a vessel through which content passes as supply and demand curves seek equilibrium. 

I get a similar feeling sometimes when I think about money. My salary, direct-deposited into my bank account while I sleep, effortlessly sluices through me on its way to my creditors, thanks to the “auto pay” function I’ve set up. I have forfeited my agency, like we’ve forfeited many things, for the sake of convenience. We get out of bed each morning to keep feeding the machine.  

Yet I still see glimmers of hope. A few months ago, I was asked to write a one-page memo summarizing a strategy presentation my team and I had put together. This could have been accomplished in a few seconds by uploading our 50-or-so slides into a GenAI model. However, the presentation was confidential, so a public model like ChatGPT wasn’t an option, and we hadn’t yet stood up an in-house model. So I spent two or three hours drafting the memo myself. And in the act of writing it – putting one sentence after another, searching for the right words and flow, crafting a few paragraphs to convey a set of ideas – something interesting happened. I became able to articulate our strategy more clearly. I found that I actually understood the story we were trying to tell much more deeply than I had beforehand.

If you've ever kept a journal, perhaps this sounds familiar. Our appreciation for experiences, situations, people, ourselves, you name it, becomes much stronger, fuller, realer, when we try to write about them. Writing helps us make sense of our world, which seems even more important at a time when the world is full of a lot of stuff that seems senseless. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Writing prose, as opposed to just consuming it, also forces us to reflect at least fleetingly on the human being who’s eventually going to read it. We consider our words, not only for their accuracy, but for the impression we wish them to leave on another person. Writing is a solitary and often lonely activity, but, perhaps paradoxically, it fosters empathy. Will this speak to my audience?  What is their state of mind when they sit down to read it?  How will it “land?” All part of a delicate but critical maneuver which requires that the writer place herself inside the head of her reader.

When humans stop writing, I would argue, they become less human. Or at least they become lesser humans. They get mentally and spiritually flabby. They become Matrix-like vessels for forces that do not have their best interests in mind. They think about other people less. They succumb to powers of this world that rebel against God.

So, yeah: understand what GenAI is and what it isn’t. Get comfortable with ChatGPT. Learn to work with GenAI tools, just like you’ve learned to use a word processor.  But at the same time make sure you don’t surrender the opportunity to create prose of your own. Take the time and make the effort to work with language, to put words together, to create meaning. At the very least, it’s good for your health. At best, as George Saunders puts it, “purifying one’s prose style is a form of spiritual dedication; working with language is a beautiful and noble way to spend one’s life.”

Wastin' Away Again

The start of Labor Day weekend brought news of the passing of Jimmy Buffett (no relation to Warren).  He was only 76, the same age as both of my parents. If you’ve come anywhere near classic rock radio and/or Times Square recently, you’re familiar with Buffett's work, especially “Margaritaville,” the catchy, calypso-infused 1977 single which he parlayed from modest chart success into a multibillion-dollar empire of themed restaurants, resorts, cruises, and senior living ("55 and Better") communities. The song and the enterprises it spawned all celebrate a singular statement of purpose: the sea, the sun, and (especially) frozen tequila-based cocktails will deliver succor and redemption in the face of life’s hardships, be they severe foot injury, regrettable drunken body-art-related decisions, or existential angst represented by misplaced dispensers of sodium chloride.

Like no other artist of his generation, Buffett’s trajectory and philosophy were the ideal representation of Boomerism: youthful hedonism co-opted by the comforts of American-style capitalism.  All of the tourists covered in oil were not just objects of artistic reflection from a porch swing: they were a market to be catered to. Which Buffett and co. did, cultivating a lifestyle of tasty waves and cool buzzes which particularly appealed to those in their autumn years.  As a few cocktails at the end of a long day make everything feel all right now, so would the Margaritaville lifestyle deliver a breezy coda to one’s retirement. No bad days, as the bumper sticker says.

What keeps the narrator of “Margaritaville” just on the right side of sympathetic is his sheepish acceptance of responsibility. Some may blame their exes for their misfortune, but by the third chorus, he's ready to concede that it’s his own damn fault.  By all accounts, Buffett himself was a decent guy: he spent generously on conservation and hurricane relief. He bailed on the Florida Keys after they became too commercialized, perhaps understanding that the hazy good times would not roll on forever; that sooner or later Americans, especially those close to the shoreline, would have to contend with the bummer consequences of limitless consumption. I wonder if he appreciated the irony of building a business empire based on a scene that will most likely be underwater by the end of the century.  Or maybe he understood it perfectly, and concluded that strumming his six-string all the way to the bank was as good a response as any.

Things Will Be Fine

I spent late 2022/early 2023 performing my annual ritual of trying to cram as much new music into my head as possible, ostensibly in an effort to compile year-end best-of lists, which some of my old musician friends and I have done off and on for the past thirty or so years.  Increasingly, this exercise is probably less about grooving to the latest Taylor Swift release, and more about straining against the inevitable pull of mortality, an observation which is pretty tedious and best left unexplored.  

With that out of the way, I present to you my list of top ten albums of 2022, which features mostly kind-of-obscure artists, along with references to other mostly kind-of-obscure artists. Enjoy!

 

10. Melody’s Echo Chamber, Unfold — French neo-psychedelia, with a breathy lead singer (Melody) who evokes Dominique Durand from Ivy and who will probably be a movie star or doing Louis Vuitton ads before the year is out. Hangs out with the dudes from Tame Impala, and it sure as hell sounds like it. The album clocks in at 21 minutes, which to my aging, impatient self feels like the ideal running time.

9. Yard Act, The Overload — Funny, sharp, very British (an actual British person shared this observation, so it’s not just me making a sloppy generalization), similar in both content and deliverance to Mike Skinner. These guys also remind me a lot of Art Brut, and I suspect their career trajectory will be similarly brief and forgettable, but good fun while it lasts.

8. Elvis Costello & the Impostors, The Boy Named If —  The most Brutal Youth-sounding album since, well since Brutal Youth. If a new artist dropped something like this, we’d all be doing backflips. But because it’s EC, we don’t make so much fuss. The curse of greatness, I suppose.

 

7. The Paranoid Style, For Executive Meeting — Elizabeth Nelson writes extraordinarily erudite and insightful pieces in places like Pitchfork and The New York Times on subjects as diverse as Warren Zevon concert films and the rivalry between Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. As someone who once fantasized about challenging Hootie and the Blowfish to a match play competition in which they would be able to scramble four balls against my one, let’s just say I fit quite snugly in her demographic.

 

6. Carly Cosgrove, See You in Chemistry — The guitar tone on this was so similar to Home Like Noplace Is There that I had to check the Internets to see if it was the same dude from The Hotelier.  It’s not, and for a moment I imagined a good-natured effects pedal exchange program among emo bands, which, ridiculous as it is, still gave me a warm feeling.  Anyhoo, emo is normally not my thing, but there’s an awful lot to like here. Wicked guitar playing. Scream-y vocals not overdone. Musical themes introduced and re-introduced in just the right places. Girl bass player. Strong ending. 

 

5. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field — Irresistible Kiwis with talent and energy to burn. They haven’t really made a misstep on their last two efforts, so I hope they can keep this up. 

 

4. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights — “Bad Habit” is one of the most unlikely tracks ever to grace the single-digit end of the pop charts. Two chords, dorky synth, totally undanceable, lyrics about regret; yet there it was, firmly lodged at the very top of the Billboard charts and in our brains.  The rest of the album also resists attempts at classification. Apple Music tells me this is “R&B/Soul,” and I suppose one could see a little Frank Ocean or Andre3000 in his vibe (sexually and otherwise), but then a track like “Mercury” drops, and he’s doing Tropicalia in waltz time. I should stop trying to place him into a genre and just leave him be.

3. Richard Dawson, The Ruby Cord — Newcastle’s chief troubadour completes his trilogy (with 2017’s Peasant and 2019’s 2020) covering a span of roughly 2000 years — the first set in the 5^th century in the kingdom of Bryneich, the second in present-day UK, and now this one several hundred years into the future. Guess what: things have not turned out so well. Crow-pecked corpses litter the landscape, cities are deserted, videos looping in a museum are all that remain of the life that you and I know.  Yet through the characters which Dawson so fully inhabits, he shows us that, no matter the epoch, it’s always the same stuff with us humans: love and death and cruelty and tenderness and survival. And, as intellectually juicy as the concept is, it’s Dawson’s drop-dead gorgeous melodies, and choruses that repeat until they start to resemble the movement of the oceans, that make this such pure joy. RIYL: Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors.   

 

2. Black Country, New Road, Ants from Up There — Since last year’s offering, these kids have turned down the spazz a bit, but they’ve dialed up the melodrama in the best way possible.  Isaac Wood croons/moans about leaving home and missing home and coming back home (depending on the situation, “home” may be a person, whom Wood often addresses in second person), over a well-oiled but loose-limbed ensemble. This might have topped my ballot if they had ended the album following the barn-burning “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” but instead they chose to plow ahead with not one but two not-so-great tracks clocking in at over 9:00 each. Maybe they were trying to emulate Illusory Walls from last year, which is easier said than done.  

 

1. Metronomy, Small World — All these albums exist for us at a particular point in time, and one of the reasons — maybe the reason — we do this every year is to give these albums and the year in which they arrived some enduring meaning beyond the ephemeral experience of living through them, and it. We realize, a little more each year, these attempts at assessing and ordering and ranking are kind of futile, but here we are. The track list for Small World — “Life and Death,” “Things Will Be Fine,” “It’s Good To Be Back” — reads like a string of headlines for the kind-of-but-not-really-post-Covid world of 2022. Sad and complicated and hopeful but still sad. Each day’s a little mystery.

 

P.S. In the 2+ months since I compiled this list, The Ruby Cord is the only thing I've listened to on anything approaching heavy rotation.  Make of that what you will.

P.P.S. Most of entry #7 refers to golf.

P.P.P.S. (*=recommended):

070 Shake, You Can’t Kill Me – Auto-croon.  Resembles early The Weeknd more closely than The Weeknd does these days.  

2nd grade, Easy Listening – Aspiring to be the GBV of jangle pop. Snotty lead singer and noise guitar in the background doesn’t match Bob Pollard’s swagger. Back to triple-A. 

*Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer – Belgian dance act with a Roisin Murphy vibe. Best and funniest closing song. 

Animal Collective, Time Skiffs – I cannot believe that any of the people who gave this album gushing reviews actually enjoyed themselves while listening to it.

*Beyonce, Renaissance – Ranges from breathless, mindless disco anthems to deep cuts where she discusses the color of her vagina and the stretch marks on her breasts. These are not the kind of moves one sees every mega-star making. 

Dayglow, People in Motion – Owl City-esque. Should be doing ads for Skittles or toothpaste, or maybe Skittles-flavored toothpaste. 

*Frontperson, Parade – Man/woman share lead vox over a bed of synths that sounds like a second-grade recorder orchestra playing Loveless.  Intriguing.

Alex G, God Save the Animals — No relation to Kenny, I assume. Alternates vocal effects and styles from Sufjan Stephens’s gentle coo to early Kanye sped up samples. I find it hard to relate to, but the drum tone is amazing.

*Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: I read something recently about how the purpose of art is to make us uncomfortable, and this does that. Taylour Paige and Tanna Leone make the best female guest appearances since Nicki Minaj. 

Father John Misty, Chloë and The Next 20th Century – Singer-songwriter stuff over full orchestra, brushed drums, etc. Lyrics have a tinge of darkness that makes this more interesting than it sounds. I might like this more when I’m like 65. 

Office Culture, Big Time Things – From the band name, I was expecting something literate, hyperactive, wry, maybe Vampire Weekend-y; instead it sounded like the verse to “Baby Come Back.”

Open Mike Eagle, Component System With The Auto Reverse – Name-checks an entire roster of backup NBA centers.  Deserves a re-listen.

Beth Orton, Weather Alive – I believe I’m in a demographic that’s supposed to like this, but I do not like this. The music is moody and tasteful enough; singer sounds like she has been bouncing around NA meetings for a while now. 

Pinegrove, 11:11 – An awful lot of first-person singular going on here.  Like on every single song. Was this the guy who was accused of sexual assault or something?  Heavy solipsism doesn’t help his case (e.g., “I climb inside my iridescent mind (?!)), no matter how nice the guitar tones are. 

*Aaron Raitiere, Single Wide Dreamer – High-octane country music and deft observations of the human condition in America. Blue-staters will hear the pedal steel and deny that this applies to them, and they would be mistaken. 

Saba, Few Good Things – Chicago rapper with a fondness for triplets and a desire for familial stability. Channels Kendrick and Drake on a couple of tracks, but who can blame him. 

Sloan, Steady – Straight-faced MOR rock, nothing really not to like. Kinda reminds me of David Schreiber, RIP. 

*Spoon, Lucifer On The Sofa – We always knew they could bring winning guitar and drum sounds, but Britt Daniel pulls off an impressive shift from aesthete to swaggering Texas (and seemingly born-again) rocker. Great bass playing.  

Bartees Strange, See Through You – Guitar playing that sounds like a tape loop which is kind of cool.  Sags in too many places, but like he says it’s been a hard year.

*Harry Styles, Harry’s House – what is it about Harry Styles that makes him such a likeable character in a way that, say, Charlie Puth is not? Musical inventiveness and leanness helps. Not a song on Harry’s World is too long; he knows when to trim a measure from a pre-chorus, etc. 

Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen – Experimental R&B. Wants to have her titties out, apparently

Taylor Swift, Midnights – Who am I to give advice to Taylor Swift, but here it is: more Emily Haines, less Emily in Paris. 

Wet Leg, Wet Leg – All the rage, but I just can’t get past the ASMR vocals. Music producers: please please please stop with that.

Billy Woods, Aethiopes – closer to spoken word or slam poetry than hip hop. Bonus points for finding a rhyme for “poultice” and for name-checking DFW.

*Nilüfer Yanya, Painless – Annie Lennox fanatics and their heirs will lap this up. Great drumming.

Years and Years, Night Call – Music for the horny.  Bright and clean like a penny whistle.

*Other albums I liked but I didn’t listen to enough to say anything useful about: Belle & Sebastian, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Kiwi Jr, Big Thief

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

A gray rain fell without ceasing on the 41st Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.  People huddled in hotel doorways and waited on Ubers. The bellman offered me a plastic sleeve for my umbrella as I shook it out. “Water and marble don’t go well together,” he said. In San Francisco, we didn’t get the heavy flooding and evacuations seen in SoCal, but our phones lit up with alerts of a dangerous and life-threatening situation.

Security was heavy at the Westin St. Francis. I hadn’t picked up my badge yet, so a blazered guy with an earpiece pointed me to the side entrance, where I navigated another three security people before making it to the roped-off “presenting company check-in” section. My QR code wouldn’t scan, but the friendly young woman in a white silk top said she trusted me. She handed over my badge and lanyard and a bone-white canvas tote bag with a blue embroidered JP Morgan logo. The bag was of a heft and quality that assumed there was a decent chance that its recipient would own a matching sailboat.  

The corridors and stairways of the Westin teemed with characters who in one way or another were looking to make their fortunes in pharmaceuticals.  Tall, bearded banker bros; C-suite executives in dark suits and European eyeglasses; female buy-side analysts with blonde hair yanked straight back who looked like they spent their pre-dawn hours astride a Peloton; South Asian PhD/MBAs. The Colonial Room was SRO, so I leaned against the back wall and listened to our CEO talk about how we are transforming the practice of medicine and how our operating margin was on track to reach 32% by 2025.

I spent most of my week down the hill at the Omni, shuttling between conference rooms. The company I work for is Large Cap (nestled between between Mega Cap and Medium Cap), and as such my days were stacked with one-hour blocks of presentations from different small-to-medium biotechs looking to “partner” with us. Between two and ten people would show up for each meeting, their eagerness for partnering generally in direct proportion to the number of people there.  

In general, each of these folks was either a Science Person or a Money Person. The Science People wore clothing suggesting a teenager being dragged to a wedding. Many had one minor but unignorable physical characteristic: a wandering eye, excessive ear hair, dermatitis. The Money People clustered at both ends of the fashion spectrum, either wearing suits, or going for venture capitalist casual chic: fleece vest or quarter-zip sweater over a checked button-down shirt and high-end running shoes. On’s were in abundance. Despite being Money People, they were not necessarily slick: I observed one BD woman inspect her split ends assiduously through our entire meeting.

As they spoke to us of novel therapeutic targets and cytokines and mouse models, I would regret that I had selected English as my undergraduate major. 

“Never drive a fancy car,” a former boss once said to me, “Because we don’t want to give the impression that we are profiting off of the ill health of the American public.” I suppose it’s tempting to look at all this cynically and to disapprove of the baser desires behind it. The industry has done plenty of unsavory stuff over the years. My favorite communist podcasters would go a step further and call out the unsustainability of the entire system: look no further, they might argue, than the contrast between the bright lights, fancy presentations, and carbon footprint over at the Westin St. Francis, and the rising flood waters outside.    

I can’t argue with any of that. I also know that I’m not in a position to work for free, and I suspect you aren’t either. And despite my attempts at clever commentary above, the people I spent time last week with were not caricatures; they were intelligent people trying to do decent work. Meanwhile, people are still getting sick and dying from nasty diseases.  If, God forbid, one of our kids were to come down with one of these diseases, we would pray for someone to show up with some medicine. We can all dream of a day when our elected representatives prioritize medical research over DDG 51 Burke-class Aegis Destroyers. But in the meantime, the powerful and greedy pharmaceutical industry is our best hope. Wish them luck.    

Welcome to Acedia

Over the past few months, I’ve run into several people who have told me that they read and appreciate the stuff I write here.  This always leaves me surprised and humbled.  It also makes me feel guilty for how little I’ve written the past year or so.  I have a trunk full of excuses for why that might be: too much work, too many early morning meetings, too much going on with the new house, etc. 

I also think that living in the US again changed the way I perceive things, moreso than I thought it would.  I recently read an interview with Wes Anderson, who talked about living outside one’s home country: “I think there’s something about when you’re living in places where you don’t really speak the language…There’s something that isolates you…You’re sort of an observer…Every day that you’re abroad, you’re discovering something new.  It’s sometimes challenging to do basic things.  I remember when we were doing The Life Aquatic [in Italy] I had to go buy lightbulbs.  I was able to communicate what I needed to communicate in order to find a buy the right lightbulbs.  In America that would not be a particularly rewarding experience.”

In any case, perhaps most importantly, this website is supposed to have something to do with spirituality, and, for whatever reason, I’ve been feeling pretty spiritually languid lately.  I still say a small prayer of thanks most mornings, but I’ve been going to church like once every two or three months.  The “spiritual” books on the shelf next to my desk at home sit there untouched.  Nothing seems really novel or energizing, God-wise. 

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I read Dante’s Inferno over my summer holiday, an appropriate choice for a heat wave, or a rapidly overheating planet, or a society plunging ever deeper into a spiritual abyss.  I had read at least part of it years ago for a college class, but I didn’t remember much.  I suppose the Divine Comedy wouldn’t be labeled a “fun vacation read,” but there’s a reason why people make such a big deal about Dante.  Granted, he plays to the LCD a bit with some of the gory punishments he inflicts on the eternally damned.  His hierarchy of sins can also seem puzzling (do alchemists and counterfeiters really belong on a lower rung of hell than murderers?).  But structurally, thematically, symbolically, it’s hard to find any work of art so rich and rewarding.

Dante drops us right into the action in Canto I, where the narrator finds himself in midlife/spiritual crisis.  Volumes could (and probably have been) written about the opening line alone: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”  His gently sloping but straightforward path is suddenly blocked by three beasts -- a she-wolf (understood to symbolize the sins of incontinence), a lion (violence and bestiality), and a leopard (fraud).  His path to salvation must pass through the recognition of sin (Inferno), the renunciation of sin (Purgatory), before finding the rapturous presence of God (Paradise).  He can’t make this journey by himself: first Virgil (human reason) and then Beatrice (divine love) must guide him.   

This preceding paragraph was liberally plagiarized from the fine “How to Read Dante” by John Ciardi, who translated the version I borrowed from the Cambridge Public Library.  Discussing the key themes introduced in these first Cantos, Ciardi talks about sin, specifically the deadly sin of acedia.  This is better known to us as “sloth,” and we typically associate it with being lazy, sitting around staring at your phone, that sort of thing.  But to Dante, Ciardi argues, acedia was the central spiritual failure: “the failure to be sufficiently active in the pursuit of the recognized Good…to acknowledge Good, but without fervor…The Divine Comedy is the zealous journey from man’s recognized spiritual torpor (neglect of God) to the active pursuit of his soul’s good (love of God).” Emphasis mine.

* * * * *

I’ve been sick for the past week.  Not Covid, one feels obliged to say these days.  It was one of those old-fashioned upper respiratory things which starts out with a nasty sore throat, then spends a couple of days in your sinuses, then spends a couple more days in your chest.  Nothing serious, and almost quaint in its course, recalling a time when a tickle in your throat did not come with the psychological and logistical baggage of a global pandemic.  Still, I was pretty tired for a few days. 

This morning was Thanksgiving and I woke up early and fed the cats.  Then, rather than doing what I usually do (eat breakfast while staring at my phone), I meditated and stretched and did a little Pilates and tried to write something about Dante and I started to feel better again.