Who is Laura Chanel

Hydrangea, Noyo, September 2023

Some children’s books make me feel like I just ate mushrooms.

Pursuant to possible forthcoming leaps in VR, I’m reminded of the sweet idea my dad had a few years back to make deeply immersive multi-hour audiovisual recordings of natural beauty and then bring them to nursing facilities to share with the elderly and infirm.

Sure, some might say replacing times spent in nature with VR sounds dystopian. But some people (many people?) already live at a dystopian remove from nature. Would denying them this incomplete solution really make the world a better place? Injured of the world, don’t hate the bandaid, hate the knife!

(Of course under capitalism the knife vendor and the bandaid salesman are often the same wound-maxing megacorp.)

Stay well, San Francisco.

Here in our corner of Los Angeles, a key local fixture is this art truck always parked on Willoughby, which features an evolving array of flowers, furniture, found objects, newspaper clippings, and more. I especially enjoyed this recent message about the false panacea of social media.

Whereas bad things come in threes, and

Whereas we have been treated to wall-to-wall, unceasing, multi-decade, hotdog-eating-contest-style media attention focused on Donald Trump and Elon Musk,

It is resolved that… Oh god, will there really be one more?

When I feel bad at posting, I remind myself that these other freaks have been going at it 280 characters at a time for literal decades. Their angel-headed tweets are living evidence that the 10,000-hour theory is true.

B. S. High, the doc about the fake Columbus high school that was really just a sketchy football team, is low-key a cult documentary. The “coach” masterminding the thing, keeping the con alive for years, has that same manic creep charisma as Keith Raniere or especially Larry Ray.

Football, a cult?

Watched the documentary Whirlybird expecting to learn more about the history of helicopter news reporting in Los Angeles. And I did learn a lot about that industry and how it intersects with the carceral state and systemic racism. But the documentary is also an unexpectedly harrowing portrait of intimate partner violence, cycles of abuse, and the way societal transphobia causes harm that radiates through families and communities. It’s an intense text to grapple with.

And to think, we picked it mostly because it’s scored by Ty Segal. Not the worst reason. The score is in fact really good!

I spent part of tonight migrating my passwords from LastPass to 1Password and changing the passwords for all my remotely important accounts. What a pain in the neck. LastPass you had ONE JOB!

The saving grace is that 1Password is a clearly superior piece of software.

West Hollywood, September 2023

Easy to forget that, after a fallow period, returning to any activity—blogging, running, writing poems, regular contact with a relative—involves awkward first attempts. Which can be lame, even discouraging. Yet soon enough it’s part of your mundane life again, a thing you do, for better or worse.

All these memory-core podcast nerds be like, “That seems impressive but did you know that in his second season, Dominique Wilkins led the NBA in…” while over here my silky smooth brain can’t remember a single blessed detail from Wheel of Time Season One.

With AI tips like these, we may have finally reached the AI hype cycle phase where expectations are properly tempered:

ChatGPT can suggest loads of (mostly terrible) ideas. Somewhere in there might be a germ of a good idea that you can run with.

That should be your expectation for ChatGPT, Will said

(from the Washington Post)

If you’re looking to replace your doomscroll with a wholesomehole (?) I heartily recommend Jack Cheng’s See You on the Bookshelf, a podcast from 2017 where the author interviewed the people at every step of publishing his middle-grade hit See You In the Cosmos. So sweet—and surprisingly informative!

Bless the promotional committee that decided to brand Ukiah with the slogan, “Far Out. Nearby.”

(They made a nice cooler bag, too!)

In case anyone was wondering what kind of mindset inspires the leader of a group backed by a cabal of tech billionaires to secretively snap up farmland in the Central Valley for “a new city”, this passage from the LA Times has got you:

In a self-help book he co-wrote, Sramek says if given the chance to give his younger self a bit of advice, he would quote Ayn Rand: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

(Love that snooty semicolon!)

This dropdown from a reader survey for Matt Levine’s wonderful Money Stuff newsletter is the written equivalent of that New Yorker cartoon, “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” except it’s from the tippy top of the C Suite.

Some universal questions in this very personal Naomi Klein essay about her morbid fascination with Naomi Wolf, her dark-side doppelgänger:

Even after following Wolf’s antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she – a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies – rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon?

Well, it’s been a good run with the interest+payments suspended on my student loans. I for one savored being free from them. In 2020 I even somehow paid them way down. Then the government announced $10K of forgiveness—seemed things might keep getting better. But no. Tomorrow, boot back on throat!

Delightfully dystopian scene at Home Depot:

• • chaotically parked forklifts in every aisle
• • teenage clerks don’t know the first thing about construction
• • day laborers play cards on overturned cart in parking lot
• • clerk trades $15 off (“damaged”) for real-time filling out of survey (“excellent service”)

Saturday was the closing of the Madam X show at Space Ten in Hawthorne. Thangka-like paintings and intricately-painted sculptures—the long-ignored work of Madam X, visionary painter, mystic, conceptual artist, and LA original. De plus, Madam X herself was interviewed live by co-gallerist Axel Wilhite. And there’s a gorgeous catalog + vibe-y zine!

I’ve never liked the way non-stainless fasteners cause redwood to streak. But these irregular, weeping lines at regular intervals remind me of shou sugi ban, the exterior wood finish where you burn it some. What would normally be a faux pas, lifted into elegance by regularity and intentionality.

A friend recommends an old book. The book is in French. A quick search reveals there are over a dozen translations. Some over 100 years old. Some bowdlerizations. Surely one is accurate and true. But which?

If someone made a Goodreads for comparing translations, now that would be a public service!