Somehow, despite being mystified by it, I never until today realized that Sufjan’s The Avalanche was named after a truck!

In Evan Osnos’s damning portrait of Xi-ist China he quotes the economist Xu Chenggang:

In the U.S., you have a jungle of free competition, dozens of laboratories competing—no one knows what is going to work. But the Communist regime will not allow for this. That’s the key issue.

To whit: the classic contrast between free-market capitalism and state communism.

But I wonder: assuming this is true, is it the capitalism part that’s powerful here? Or is it the relative anarchy of a “free market”? And are there other ways to harness that freedom beyond capitalism?

I’ve been writing long enough to know that, once I start revising, I will inevitably delete this draft’s flowery introduction. Yet each time I attempt to rush it or skip it or, really, treat it as anything other than the most important paragraph I have ever written, I immediately get stuck and can’t proceed.

It may be throat-clearing, but still: one can’t really talk when one’s throat isn’t clear, can one?

Business idea: pre-selected boxes of touristy tchotchkes that you can order during your holiday, guaranteed delivery timed for when you get back, perfect for painless distribution to relatives and coworkers as “got this for you” gifts.

Ireland Box (Medium): 3 “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirts (S, M, XL), 2 Guinness steins, 8 “Beautiful Ireland” dish towels, 1 “Literary Dublin” poster, 15 postcards, 1 baby-size sweater.

Good morning power lines. Good morning trees. Good morning abandoned construction site. Good morning sun.

The ongoing failure of the California and federal political systems to do away with the barbarity of the twice-a-year time change—despite a passed referendum and the promises of winning politicians—is a small but bulletproof piece of evidence that our political systems are broken. End PST now!

When I was studying Russian in college, my mind was blown to learn that just like English has a separate word and concept for pale red (“pink”), Russian has one for pale blue (“goluboi”).

But now to learn English didn’t have a term for orange till oranges as fruit arrived ca. 1510?!

“So it’s this condition, a bunch of dander, scalp-area.”

“Sounds bad, what shall we call it?”

“I don’t know, dander-uff?”

Sitting at my computer trying to funnel 10,000 details produced by 50+ people into one coherent, high-quality magazine, I’m flooded with the sense memory of being 16, in the computer lab at Fort Bragg High School, trying to turn out a new edition of The Howl. I’ve been doing this most of my life.

There was this trend, the last two decades, to justify literature’s place in our lives via neuroscience (“develop your amygdala”) and self-help (see: Blinkist)—all so cringe. The thing is, we do need a theory of “Why Books.” I say books should seem as fun as a latte, a bath, or a walk in the woods.

Something tells me the publicity department behind The Eternal Audience of One by Remy Ngamije realized what books they’d be shelved by and decided, What the heck, let’s use the Viet Nguyen color scheme and lettering style. Yolo.

Reading the essay, “Why Content is King”, and this passage trips me up:

Why should people care if anyone else has seen their favorite show? Because shared experiences are the basis of mutual understanding. Even if we’ve never talked before, I can learn something important about you when we talk about our complex feelings towards Harry and Ginny’s relationship. You can send me a reaction gif with McGonagall giving “the look” and I will know exactly what you mean.

I read every Harry Potter book. Between age 9-12 I was quite obsessed. Yet now have zero memory—these details mean nothing to me.

A friend told me she traded her smart phone for a dumb one which only calls and texts. (T9, baby!) Part of me wants to follow her lead.

Listing the reasons not to, the first reason is, strangely: dictation. It would be awful not to dictate directly smoothly into notes or texts or anywhere.

Love a good webinar.

Webinar. Whoever coined that one must have been like, ‘Oh yeah!’

The sidewalks in our neighborhood in LA are overrun with cutely designed four-wheeled food delivery robots. Their nametags say, like, “Francisco”. Shocking nobody, these VC-funded cameras-on-wheels are funneling camera footage to the LAPD.

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!