cody frank

I saw Bright Eyes in concert last night. Conor Oberst seems to be doing okay.

last weekend, walking through Berkeley, at the corner of Solano Avenue and Modoc Street, in front of a Wells Fargo, Jordan alerted us to a wad of $120 on the ground. the cash had been folded as though to be placed in someone’s pocket, but, due to circumstances beyond our knowledge, the money wound up not securely stashed on the withdrawer’s body, landing instead in the middle of the sidewalk. the only person we could see who it might reasonably have belonged to didn’t respond when Chris shouted after him as he skated away down Modoc and around the corner onto Marin.

so we were presented with a moral dilemma. a smaller quantity might have been viewed as mere good fortune; who hasn’t picked a loose bill off the ground, feeling the Fates smile kindly upon them? but six twenty dollar bills is a weightier entry into one’s karmic ledger. is it mere good fortune, or a test of one’s integrity? if it is such a test, what is the proper way to exercise that integrity?

Vicky would have left the money on the ground and let someone else wade into the murky waters of moral chance. an understandable reaction. certainly it’s preferable to not assume more ethical quandaries than one already bears in the regular course of life. there are enough decisions to make in the minute by minute task of being a present and empathetic person, more than enough. trouble with this is that there’s no guarantee the next person to stumble on the cash would use the money any more honorably than you might, and you leave open the possibility they would use it far less honorably than you would. besides, I had already picked the wad up, and putting the money back down on the ground entails more responsibility than just pretending to not see it. I had already allowed a god to enter the fray.

a few days prior I was made aware of one of the few genuinely organic internet happenings in recent memory (in my recent memory, at least, I don’t try to keep up any more): the Donald Boat Unemployment Fund Saga. it’s something that defies easy summary, but since I don’t want you to leave this post to spend a very long time scrolling through the substack summary: donald boat aka laserboat999, a power twitter user, through sheer force of will (and just a dash of well-aimed bullying), managed to get a bunch of people, mostly techbros, to buy him a bunch of stuff. initially he set out to, it seems, build a gaming computer, but the requests ranged from podcasting equipment (from the Red Scare girls), to music gear, vinyl records, and, of interest to me, a great deal of literature. he also assembled a team of interns to run the numbers on his requests (breaking slightly less than even on “ignored/refused” vs “fulfilled”) and to ultimately build the PC for him. all while driving back and forth across the bridges of the Bay Area, sipping Steel Reserve, PBR, and Celsius.

someone asked the twitter AI chatbot account to explain the phenomenon. @grok put it this way:

The “Donald Boat” phenomenon centers on laserboat999, a 21-year-old X user famed for surreal, deadpan posts blending humor, philosophy, and high-agency antics. He crowdsources ambitious projects (like his recent satellite/rocket expert hunt) via wishlists and ads, turning online clout into real-world resources. It’s why fans call him a “Kwisatz Haderach” of Twitter—enigmatic and unstoppable

the descriptor “high-agency” has been stuck in my head ever since reading this. it’s apparently a linkedin business term, something you’d call yourself in a job interview. I’m not a writer, I’m a “creative, people-oriented, high agency project manager with strong written and verbal skills.” this, obviously, sucks. the way language is used in the selfhelp/grindset circles depresses the shit out of me. but not knowing this provenance, I did think that characterizing donald boat as demonstrating a high degree of personal agency was a pretty apt description. and regardless of how many people might list it on their linkedin profiles, I don’t think of many people nowadays as being particularly agentive. myself included—in fact, I think a lot of my gripes with myself and my general malaise comes down to a subconscious recognition of how little I resist the ukases of habit and laziness. to make an impact on the world, the dream of all artists with some measure of self-regard, requires that one be “high agency”: like donald boat, or Conor Oberst.

Angie suggested we each give one of the 20s to a homeless person, probably the best solution to the dilemma of finding a wad of cash on the ground. I’m glad that’s what we did, and I’m glad I picked up the money, not out of some self-righteous satisfaction I got from later giving $20 to a homeless man in Oakland who definitely needed it more than I did, but because it was an opportunity to exercise agency.

now, truth be told, if I was alone, I’d still have picked up the money, but I don’t know if I’d have been altruistic with it.

some kind of clarity has dawned in my intellectual life, but like the light of the sun I can’t glimpse it directly. last post I wrote about Bertrand Russell, because I was inexplicably compelled to pick up the one book of his I have, Unpopular Opinions, and flip to an essay at random. as is often the case, the Book Angels arranged that the exact thing I needed to read in that moment is what I landed on. the call Russell makes in that essay, about the value of grappling with ideas, in solitude, without concern for what’s contemporary or modern, hit me squarely.

finding that the next essay I tried in Unpopular Opinions did not excite me at all, I put it down. on a whim similar to that which made me pick up Russell, I picked up Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. philosophy ought to be energizing, driving the reader to consider, practically, the aspects of their life they need to examine for the sake of making change. I’ve been in a bit of a rut about what reading means in my life; like almost everything, it’s become a habit that mostly serves to maintain a certain stasis, which is diametrically opposite what I crave from reading. the reason I love literature is because it, once upon a time, taught me what living could be, if I take seriously the questions posed through the ages by our artists, poets, and thinkers. by really grappling with the dilemma Hamlet faces, or considering what Ahab’s quest might reveal about my own approach to life, I might realize how little I’m actually “living,” and thereafter seek a new degree of radical engagement. this is an especially urgent question here in the contemporary world, where the arrangement of society effectively zombifies its participants, banking, as global consumer capitalism does, on a populace totally alienated from not only their labor but the reality of their individual experiences. the Spectacle not only doesn’t want you to know thyself, but it actively works to deny you that possibility. as such, the artifacts left by people who have tried harder than anyone else to know themselves—books, namely—must be protected and handled deliberately, for it is easy, under the sway of contemporary hegemonic ideology, to appear to be engaging with these questions while totally missing the volatile power of literature.

I won’t bother to recapitulate the meditation on faith, absurdity, responsibility, sacrifice, and morality that Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de silentio, lays out in his analysis of Genesis 22:1-18, the Binding of Isaac. part of this analysis includes the impossibility of Abraham, the knight of faith, making himself comprehensible, in his embrace of the absurd, to anyone who might condemn him as a would-be murderer. I’ll briefly note that it became clear to me, in reading Fear and Trembling, that it is important for me to dwell on the question of faith and absurdity, seeing as I’ve lost some conviction that my creative pursuits, and the version of myself my creative pursuits reveal, are valuable, despite, or thanks to, the sacrifices they entail.

in a strange synchronicity, the day after I started reading Fear and Trembling, I met a young woman similarly seeking encouragement to pursue her creative impulses. her name? Faith.

the demiurge is not always one for subtlety.

I’m not on Instagram any more. that means there’s nowhere to put the pictures I’m starting to take again but here.

Bertrand Russell wrote that in the modern world, it’s become difficult to pursue the highest ideals of the intellectual life and that we moderns live in the “most parochial” era since Homer. by this he means that there is a tendency in contemporary thought to disdain the hard won wisdom of previous eras in favor of viewing everything through recently conceived frames. “We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and cannot believe that the quaint clothes and cumbrous phrases of former times can have invested people and thoughts that are still worthy of our attention.” most people making a name for themselves as public intellectuals—that scabrous and embattled profession—do so by applying preapproved dogmas that often only serve to signal their allegiance to some faction while reducing the need to think clearly.

Russell places one cause for this tendency with the need for the money and the fame that support a career in thinking. this appeals both to the psychological desire for validation and also the need to make one’s living. another cause is the rapidity with which the world changes, which creates an anxiety about keeping pace with the times while fearing the inevitability of being surpassed and the risk of appearing “untimely,” as Nietzsche would put it.

these are only epiphenomenal symptoms, according to Russell. ultimately, in the modern world, there is a desperate lack of compelling context. “Every serious worker, whether artist, philosopher, or astronomer, believed that in following his own convictions he was serving God’s purpose.” as the world became more and more secular, principles like Truth, Beauty and Goodness floated the spirits of atheistic “workers,” but their earnest faith in these principles had the paradoxical effect of privileging subjective conviction, which is prone to manipulation by the above mentioned desire for acceptance among one’s peers, over an objective reality. thus, Truth gave way to rhetorical force, Beauty deemed a social construct, and Goodness reduced to mere cultural behavioral norms. deprived of divine justification, a would be visionary/revolutionary was left with a weakened psychic defense against the pressures of dogmatism and social conformity. “For these reasons a greater energy of personal conviction is required to lead a man to stand out against the current of his time than would have been necessary in any previous period since the Renaissance.”

I don’t really care whether this diagnosis is right or not. Russell is kind of obnoxious, even if I sympathize with his opposition to dogmatism in favor of clarity of thought. he spends too much harping on Marxism, as would be expected from a British aristocrat. but what struck me about this brief essay, “On Being Modern-Minded,” were the last two sentences (emphasis mine):

A certain degree of isolation both in space and time is essential to generate the independence required for the most important work; there must be something which is felt to be of more importance than the admiration of the contemporary crowd. We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude.

imagine what Russell, who wrote this essay nearly 90 years ago, would say about the chattering classes on Twitter and Substack, hordes clamoring for attention by either parroting shibboleths or rage-baiting.

I have almost entirely removed myself from the social media ecosystem. this was for the exact reason Russell suggests: I recognized a need to develop my attention, and my personal conviction, away from the weaponized consensus manufactured by social media platforms. these platforms also just take up too much of my time, filling my experience with a kind of white noise that dulls my ability to perceive the subtleties of life, a perception that’s indispensable to anyone hoping to represent their impressions of the World via artistic and intellectual practices like literature, film or music.

but now I’m wondering if there’s not still value in trying to express oneself via these most immediately available means. whether a desire to get back online is a sign of strengthened personal resolve, or if it’s the addict’s faux-naive belief that they can use responsibly now.

in any case, I’m back to writing online, and I intend to do so consistently again.

I came across a recently created Instagram account for a local “social club.” I’ve lived in Ventura nearly 10 years, and I have succeeded in making fewer than that number of friends in that time, many of whom I would not still consider friends. this “social club” purports to be a solution to a frequent complaint about Ventura, about how hard it is to meet people and make friends. it’s an interesting phenomenon of contemporary American society, once thought to be the land of friendship and democracy, that so many people complain about the lack of meaningful friendships in their lives, yet can’t seem to connect with the other lonely people at the table next to them. Ventura seems especially insular, for reasons I’m not interested in exploring right now.

lately I’ve been trying to figure out what my life is. well, “lately” is a funny, inexact way to put that, but nonetheless, as I approach the middle of my 30s, I feel a pressure to really decide what it is I do, who it is I am, how it will be that I spend my time. I once thought of myself as a pretty great friend: reliable, empathetic, interested and easy to spend time with. I had many friends in college, nearly all of whom I’ve lost touch with, for reasons I’m not interested in explaining right now. through my 20s I was intensely isolated despite maintaining an apparently normal life. things changed, I restructured my life and rediscovered a kind of openness and gregariousness that had been abused out of me. I found myself at the end of my 20s without the kind of social circle people usually spend that time of their lives establishing. for a year or so I “got my groove back,” found some people to get drunk with, participated in drama, felt pretty good about where I was at. then COVID, some weirder drama that lost me some of those people I found, and now I’m here, in a much healthier relationship than I was in in my 20s, but similarly without much social life I could call my own.

sharing lives with people through sustained contact over time, the intertwining of experience and the creation of shared history, this all seems such a powerful source of meaning, one I envy people for, as I envy people with close knit, supportive families. with this in mind, I suspended my usual cynicism and paranoia about such things, and peaked into this “social club” to see if maybe there still is some chance for me to be a friend, here.

immediately upon entering the group’s discord server, after the mortifying ordeal of introducing myself, I was stricken with an intense allergic reaction to the normie millennialness of the group. the tone of the conversations is a noxious mixture of theatre kid enthusiasm, gamer nerdiness, intentional mispellings a la jomny sun, and a general ambience of preening niceness. everyone, of course, overuses the laugh-cry emoji, types “WAIT” in all caps, and repeats “im dead” ad mortem. i’m not crine, you’re crine. the final nail in the coffin of my hopes that maybe I could make even one friend here came as a picture of a tattoo depicting Pikachu dressed in Sith Lord robes. my alienation glows like the light off a UFO.

back at the end of 2024, I had planned to write a kind of call to arms for myself for how to reestablish a perspective and direction as an American artist amidst the apparent stagnation of our culture by neoliberalism and political dysfunction. among the things I thought it important to prioritize was the creation of communities between apparently divergent groups that nonetheless share basic principles. at the time, being jaded from the first Trump presidency, I anticipated the basic problem of being an engaged American artist only becoming intensified. however, the extremity of Trump’s fascistic pretensions and the attendant derangement of the sociopolitical discourse (not to mention the psychosis of the Market) have left me feeling like an exile in the Desert, without a clear view of the City against which I usually define myself.

yesterday my coworker showed me that clip of Brian Eno, one I’m constantly thinking about:

my coworker meant for us to laugh at Eno’s droll call for artists to avoid getting a job. this clip is never far from mind for me, both because I know I spend too much of my time at my job and not enough of it working on what I really care about, but also because I lament that I do not have a community of people engaged in passionate creative activity; there is no “scenius” here in Ventura that I have been able to find. one could say its for lack of trying, and it’s true, I don’t go to open mics or join local writing groups or even strike up conversations at the punk shows around town. but I’m coming to suspect that my reticence to even try is not only a product of my cowardice (though it is that too). it may just be that the time and place I find myself in are not conducive to that kind of creative life, or that kind of political life, or that kind of social life. when even the punks pay for Disney+, to say nothing of the average adult, what hope is there of finding comrades-in-refusal?

“I have arrived at the end of my path, there where the unthinkable presents itself like an abyss. Faced by this nothingness, I can no longer move forward. All I can do is retreat, while contemplating the road I have already traveled. With every step I take backward, I form a reality before me.”

“The Hermit” – The Way of the Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky

lately I haven’t been very good at directing my attention. throughout the day I snap into the realization that I’ve frittered away the better part of several hours doing nothing worthwhile. this even though I’m almost entirely removed from the social media ecosystem, down to less than 15 minutes a day on Instagram. it pains me to admit that a lot of what I waste my time on is browsing resale sites like Depop or eBay for vintage flannels and secondhand items from prestige Japanese workwear brands, things I don’t really even intend to buy. otherwise, I read about menswear: Die Workwear’s blog, Heddels, r/malefashionadvice. I have degenerated into a screen-shopping consumer, mostly because I have so much dead time to fill while sitting at a desk equipped with a computer for my day job, where I find it very difficult, inexplicably, to do any creative work, even though I have ample freedom to get away with whatever I want.

during the Biden administration I made a pretty conscious effort to stop caring about current events. the ongoing genocide in Gaza notwithstanding, I didn’t feel like much of what passed for political news really mattered all that much. seeing how rapacious the second Trump administration has proven to be in just a few short months, I feel pretty vindicated for not really caring what the Democrats were up to, since all their “principled opposition” to the threat of fascism wound up being exactly what I suspected it was way back when I was 16 years old: mere theatre. kayfabe. the old bill hicks joke about the two puppets being controlled by the same guy:

which isn’t to say what’s happening now isn’t an emergency. this time around there’s definitely a stronger sense of purpose and direction that was lacking from the more chaotic start to the first Trump admin. but what to actually care about, how to best direct my attention, I’m still not sure about. and for whatever reason, the past month or two the only thing that’s kept my attention is the fucking menswear niche of the internet. I want so bad to be Committed and Engaged again, and I refuse to accept that complacency is an inevitable effect of aging.

part of the problem is that throughout the better part of my life, tech executives, advertising firms, and entertainment companies have perfected the ability to harvest people’s attention. even if I’m not spending hours watching TikTok videos, the damage to the psychic landscape both personal and collective is catastrophic. it has never been easier in the history of humanity to find ways of distracting one’s self, literally: to draw apart the self via the myriad funnels of desire and attention opened up by electronic communication technologies. if the medium is the message, and the medium is a schizophrenic slot machine built on behaviorist manipulation, then it’s no wonder I can’t keep my attention trained on anything other than the embodiments of unleashed supranational commerce: Kapital Boro jackets, Japanese imitations of the long-defunct American textile industry, and relics of past eras afloat upon the monetized nostalgia of online auction sites.

I’m loath to admit how I’ve been spending my time, but like they say in AA, the first step is admitting there’s a problem. the problem, however, isn’t an addiction to idle window-shopping: it’s in the way that my attention has been crippled by these technopolitical forces. and this is the real emergency of the present, because it must be overcome before any work can be done for imagining alternatives amidst the rapidly deteriorating world order.

each of our consciousnesses is not merely a receptacle for the givens of so-called objective reality. a common sense conception of cognition posits the mind as a kind of screen, with the world’s light being focused onto it through the lens of the eye. this is exactly backwards: consciousness is the light projected out onto the world: we are all directors, cinematographers, and editors of our personal realities, realities which coalesce into what passes for capital R Reality. this means that collective reality is far more malleable than we tend to believe, and this failure of belief is by design: those tasked with managing our attentions have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because they benefit from it. woe to them if everyday people learned to embrace the power of our birth right. there are innumerable cosmos unrealized because we have had the boundless eternities of our souls dammed up by the technicians of the Spectacle.

I’ve been teasing this manifesto of sorts for a long time now, but for my own sake, I really ought to get my principles in order, lest I further devolve into a basic-as-fuck suburban 30-something, drinking natural wine in his selvedge denim jeans while the world sinks into hell. in the meantime, here’s some reading suggestions:

• The Poet – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Kybalion
• The writings of Chuang Tzu
• The Gospel of Thomas
• Lemurian Time War – Ccru
• Psychic Self Defense – Dion Fortune
• The Psychonaut Field Manual – BlueFluke
• Revolutionary Letters – Diane di Prima

i dreamt that i was in an unfamiliar city, trying to get to a park about a mile and a half away. i was in someone else’s house, and there was a kid who was waiting for me to take him with me to the park. i repeatedly looked at the gps map to ensure i knew how to get there: the route changed a few times, but the general direction i understood. besides, the city was laid out as a grid, so it would be impossible to get seriously lost. despite this, i couldn’t muster the courage to head out; i kept reading a book that described what to expect on this short journey, hoping to know as thoroughly as possible how to achieve my goal without making any efforts myself. the kid grew increasingly impatient with me; i continued reading this book, checking the map, feeling confident that i knew where to go, only to lose nerve as i started towards the door, returning to my reference materials. by the time i awoke i still hadn’t left the house.

sometimes dreams require close examination with a trained psychoanalyst to tease out their significance. other dreams don’t let their details stick around long enough for their import to come fully into the waking mind. this dream i understood almost immediately upon waking.

something i’m trying to come to terms with is how significant horror is to me and my taste. i never thought of myself as a big fan of horror films. most horror films i find stupid, irritating, not even particularly scary, and besides, i don’t particularly enjoy the experience of being scared the way some people seem to. but as i’ve gotten older i’ve recognized that many of my favorite narrative works do exist somewhere on the horror spectrum: david lynch isn’t a surrealist so much as he’s an unalloyed horror storyteller who recognizes that there’s nothing so horrifying as the unknown; i will sometimes say that the texas chainsaw massacre is my favorite movie of all time; the works of hp lovecraft, shirley jackson, and edgar allan poe have become increasingly important to me (which is atypical for these idols of adolescent fascination).

horror humor and beauty are the three faces of the goddess Art; creating things that give glimpse to all three visages is the highest of aesthetic pursuits, in my humble opinion.

a couple things have happened in the last few weeks that it would be prudent for me to think publicly about, if that’s what this blog is for (haven’t posted in a month but whatever). both are about the only things the internet has talked about until two days ago, when I’m given to understand a new old president assumed the office.

first: a huge swath of Los Angeles burned. what that means for your weekend depends a lot on where you are. I’m close enough for it to make me consider what it is I plan to do when a similar catastrophe comes for me; in fact, a similar catastrophe on a smaller scale already came for me, seven years ago, and it’s with some sheepishness that I own up to how little having to flee in the middle of the night from a rapidly advancing wildfire has changed my habits since. maybe it’s the benefit of being close enough to feel the significance without being overwhelmed by it; maybe it’s because this fire already feels to be of, if not world-historical, then at least California-historical, significance. but the Palisades and Eaton fires feel like a wake up call for the crisis-craving insurgent in me.

there’s an essay I was working on that I kind of lost interest in, because I let the idea get stale, or the idea was already stale, or I hadn’t figured out how to actually advance the idea without retreading thought that’s already been examined, affirmed and criticized endlessly. the ideas in question I drew from Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his speech “The American Scholar.” I’m interested in seeing how the cultural situation he was responding to is echoed by the wasteland of 2025’s American society, but I didn’t have a crucial piece necessary for extending and complicating his prescription to would-be artists and intellectuals. what’s become obvious to me is that the distinction between then and now is that it’s not merely a crisis of culture we must grapple with, but a culture of crisis. as we hurtle into the future created by petrocapitalists, technocrats and their spookier brethren, there will be no more valuable skill than disaster preparedness, and not in the narrow sense monopolized by libertarian doomsday psychos, but in an all-encompassing, positive, and communally-oriented manner. more on what that means in the actual essay. all of which is to say, nothing like a world-historical disaster to make you consider how you want to face the future, ie the proper engagement with the present.

the other thing that happened that would be strange for me to not comment on is that David Lynch died. if you’ve followed my blog at all you know Lynch’s work is extremely important to me. there’s no question that his death is a great loss for cinema, and for American art generally. you can have qualms with the worldview that Lynch’s work presents (more on that later) but you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t “have the goods” as a filmmaker. the indie theatre near me played Mulholland Dr for free on Saturday; I wasn’t going to go since I had just seen it about two months ago, but my girlfriend’s parents were going, so I opted to join them. the way that Lynch can compress so much significance into a scene, even a single shot; the way his films operate as giant resonance chambers of aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, emotional, spiritual meaning, is truly astounding. a small but important example: Laura Harring’s character tells Betty her name is Rita after seeing a poster of the film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. Hayworth was married Orson Welles; Rita’s doppelganger Camilla becomes engaged to director Adam Kesher. Rita Hayworth was not her real name; the Mexican actress was born Margarita Carmen Cansino; Laura, also Mexican, is credited in Mulholland Dr as the much more Spanish sounding Laura Elena Harring. so the character—who marries a director and is played by a white-passing Mexican actress—assumes a false name drawn from…the stage name of a white-passing Mexican actress who married a director. that all seems very clever unless you keep in mind that Rita Hayworth confided in Welles that her father had repeatedly raped her as a child.

my current favorite reading of Mulholland Dr is not the fairly common and frankly simplistic one that reads the first 2/3 of the movie as a dream-fantasy conjured by the character Naomi Watts plays in the last 1/3 of the movie to deal with her failures and heartbreak (and perhaps crime). I’ve come to see the movie as a very complex dream-fantasy-repressive apparatus emerging out of the psyche of a woman struggling to come to terms with the abuse she suffered as a child, likely from a family member, and how that abuse has dictated the direction her life went since—the abusive relationships she’s fallen into, the compromises she’s ashamed of, the poverty she exists in either literal or spiritual. my own interpretation has her as a very successful actress who hates what she’s done to become sucessful, possibly having allowed Harvey Weinstein types to take advantage of her in exchange for stardom. or she’s not an actress at all, but a prostitute forced into desperate circumstances after being totally shut out from the industry. or, somewhere in-between (and the most consistent, probably), she’s a waitress (like a lot of wannabe actors) who moonlights as a call-girl for Los Angeles bigwigs to make ends meet in between being cast in bit parts in shitty movies. I’m not really in the layout-all-the-clues-for-how-to-read-a-David-Lynch-movie business, but I recommend, after watching the movie and understanding the most common interpretation of it, that you read this page and then click around the other parts of the website to see just how rich in potential significance a David Lynch movie is.

this reading is supported if we take the movie as being in dialogue with Twin Peaks (initially, Mulholland Dr sprung from the idea of giving Audrey from TP a spinoff series), a show about a teen girl who’s been subjected to sexual abuse by her father (spoiler I guess? we’ve know who killed Laura Palmer for thirty years.) the original series, the film, and the 2017 reboot operate on a similar logic, of being a Freudian repressive apparatus wherein Laura is working out a terrible truth she can’t admit to herself. Inland Empire I’ve only seen once but it also works as a hall of mirrors in which “A Woman In Trouble” struggles to face some terrible truth. point is, clearly this is a fascination of Lynch’s. when I feel most generous, I want to argue that Lynch works very hard to extend true empathy and understanding to women who have been abused by men, often men very close to them. his work is about misogyny. but it would be dishonest, maybe even dangerous, to give him carte blanche on this front without ever pausing to ask: why is he so fascinated by the sexual abuse of young women?

I don’t mean to argue that Lynch’s work is some kind of alibi, a coded confession of terrible deeds. if you want to have a little fun of that variety, check out pd187’s legendary letterboxd review of Lost Highway. but whether or not we should trust a man to be telling these stories is worth pondering. it’s not impossible for a man to tell empathetic and responsible stories about women experiencing abuse at the hands of men; in fact, with enough care, a man willing to be honest about how cultural misogyny has informed his own attitudes towards women would be in a good position to do just that. this is, I think, the generous way of reading Lynch’s work about women in trouble. not being a woman, and not being a woman who’s been abused or the victim of incest, it appears to me that Laura Palmer is a very careful and nuanced presentation of how such trauma shapes a woman’s life. despite her status as a kind of Jesus figure, who dies for the sins of Twin Peaks, she is not idealized by Lynch, only by the town who needs her to be the image of perfect innocence. she is equally cruel and generous, despairing and vivacious; in a word, she is human, all too human.

but on the other hand, the mystical, supernatural, metaphysical world that Twin Peaks conjures also calls into question who exactly Lynch assigns guilt to. many people have argued that by making BOB the manifestation of a cosmic evil, Leland is in some ways absolved of the mundane evil he enacts. and by placing this story of mundane horror, in which regular people do monstrous things, in a world that seems shaped by cosmic, Manichean forces, making the town of Twin Peaks a battleground between Good and Evil, between Fear and Love, Lynch seems to suggest that the violence perpetrated by men on women is the natural order of things. a terrible order that’s to be resisted and rejected, but natural, and therefor possibly inescapable. and if that’s what’s being suggested, it makes Lynch’s depiction of women a little, as the kids say, “sus”.

one could argue that the metaphysical, esoteric streak in Lynch’s work is a metaphor, a representation of how men see the world and how that worldview results in acts of brutality, sexual and otherwise. that’s fine. but the aura conjured by Lynch’s work is so powerful, so hypnotizing, that I can’t help but think, to quote Deleuze & Guattari, “it’s not a metaphor.” all films are a kind of illusion, a magic trick; all stories are dreams dreamt for us by a conjuror. but no films seem so much like genuine acts of magic, full of potentially sinister symbolism and dark energy, as David Lynch’s. I will continue to cherish and study his work, because there’s no doubt in my mind that he was literally a magician: his films have altered the way people see the world at a fundamental level, and have perhaps even changed the substrate of reality itself. whether or not he represents the Black Lodge or the White Lodge, however, will remain a mystery.

been feeling particularly caged in by the Black Iron Prison lately (the world is a vampire, history is a nightmare, etc. etc….) in no small part due to the terms of agreement I didn’t read before signing up for this particular lifestyle I have: not particularly luxurious, but comfortable, a job not particularly soul crushing, but soul sapping. each day becomes more like the next as I swaddle myself in restraints that cushion me from the untamed majority of reality.

I’ve resolved to give up. giving up is easy, that much I’ve proven to myself every time I don’t sit down to write, every time I say there’s always tomorrow. but it’s best if I apply this talent for giving up to different ends. if I don’t get the librarian job here that I’ve applied for, then I’m giving up on the idea of having a librarian career. certainly giving up on the idea that this is a system worth working for. the trajectory of my life the past decade suggests that my priority has been to have a career in libraries. a noble cause, if I may say so. but emotionally, psychically, the depression and dissatisfaction I’ve felt suggests that my priorities lie elsewhere, and it’s long past time that I take that seriously.

I’m not interested in rehashing this problem. just dusting out the cage so I can get some real thinking done while incarcerated.

because the guards aren’t my coworkers here at the library; my boss isn’t the warden. the System extends far beyond the little grievances I have with wage labor. everything is working against the possibility of living life freely; and the only possibility of living life freely is to be a creator of realities that compete with, rail against, and try to subvert the structures holding us back. ie to be an artist. and here, in the US of A, artists who don’t serve as mouthpieces for the Empire place themselves near the very bottom of the pyramid, among women the poor nonwhites and queers. but it is in this willingness to cast themselves out of the Empire’s good graces that artists gain the power of true perception, and the potential for self-mastery.

there’s one passage in Great Expectations by Kathy Acker I think often about, where she lays out the problem of being an artist in the United States. if she thought the problem was bad in 1982, no telling the depths of despair she’d feel seeing the state of the arts today. the broader point she makes is that in a country where money is the Logos dictating the conditions of existence, and this society selects very few of its artists as being worthy of attention (ie care and support), then to persist in being an artist requires either financial support from family or sexual partners, critical compromise with commercial forces, or else a pathological and self-destructive commitment to the work. that aside, a minor point she mentions is that, because so few artists are selected as worthy of attention, the vast majority of us never get the recognition, distribution, or feedback necessary to progress artistically past the personal preoccupation stage of an artist’s development. the inclusion of “feedback” in this list really hits the mark for me. the past 6 months to a year has been a steady decrease in my concern for not only sharing work, but for making work at all, because I tried for a few years to keep at the avenue most available to me for sharing work, and never got anything that felt like actionable feedback. if creating art is a cybernetic process with the world, and there’s no response to incorporate back into the original force that brought the work into being, then by the law of entropy the will to create, unless exceptionally strong and self-sufficient, will dissipate.

this was supposed to be a kind of working out of ideas I’m going to package differently on my newsletter soon (remember I have a newsletter? link in bio). not sure I did that exactly but whatever–I’m learning to be okay with making a mess I don’t know what to do with. I think I’ve come up with a System (my old boss was all about creating Systems, and something I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to have a goal, or even a plan, but you need to have a System for attaining that goal, for implementing that plan). I’m going to start writing newsletters again, and hopefully get them out more consistently, because why else have a newsletter if I’m not sharing something consistently.

despite a feeling of having my creative energies exhausted, I remain dissatisfied with a life not shaped by a commitment to art. so I’m fueling my tank up with vitriol, resentment and a hunger to prove myself.

this morning before work I watched a video that I’d seen logged or listed by a few insane randos I follow on Letterboxd. it’s a video produced by something called “Sound Photosynthesis,” editing together stock/historical footage with a couple recordings of Terence McKenna explaining his “Timewave Zero” theory. according to him, using a software model based on the I Ching (how exactly I don’t know; I’d have to read the book he wrote about it I guess), we can map temporal cycles as a fractal oscillation between various periods of “complexification” and “simplification.” his model, conveniently, predicts that the limit of this oscillation is reached at the birth of the universe and in the year 2012—remember the 2012 phenomenon? how lots of people in the weirdosphere/psychedelia/conspiratainment circles latched on to the fact that the Mayan calendar “ends” in the year 2012?

leaving aside the possibility that in some way the “world” might have “ended” in 2012, the year I graduated college, McKenna posits that time is a kind of spiral fractal approaching a “transcendent object at the end of history.” spiral because as we approach this telos, the chronic tightening compounds the complexity of being, and fractal because patterns repeat at various scales, leading to resonances of similarity across time. McKenna uses the example of Ulysses to demonstrate: how Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin on a random day are somehow cosmic echoes of the wanderings of Odysseus around the Mediterranean over the course of a decade plus.

this is the closest theoretical explanation of some intensely overwhelming experiences (yes, brought on by drugs) where I felt—not conceptualized, not imagined, not speculated—but felt that “I” (the bundle of perceptions and sensations comprising the flimsy construct of my consciousness) am the very tip of all of Time, and within me is the totality of all that had to happen—traumas personal, generational, historical, biological, geological, and cosmic—for this present moment to be as it is now.

periodically, an impulse will have me ruminating on emo music, the genre most suited to adolescent angst. I was lucky enough to be an angsty adolescent when emo gained mainstream popularity back in the mid-aughts. they’ve since made a whole industry out of capitalizing on people my age pining for the days when it was socially appropriate to feel your heartbreak at the volume of a sold-out stadium concert, but you won’t find me ever attending “emo nite” or buying tickets to When We Were Young, the corporate festival where ancient (ie 20 years past their prime) post-hardcore, pop punk and emo bands are wheeled out to perform for crowds of tattooed millennials whose knees will hurt for days after pogoing to “What’s My Age Again?”

nonetheless, the opening chords of “A Decade Under the Influence,” or the album art on Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate, or the 16-minute coda of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity—these stir up in me a feeling, of being young and in love, of being ignorant of all that I know now, of having possibilities not yet foreclosed upon, of being wide-eyed and eager to embrace life in all its messiness and pain and euphoria. friday night lights are lit over the football stadium, holes are forming at the elbows of a favorite zip up hoodie, and someone told someone else that another person is making out with someone they shouldn’t be behind the auditorium.

if I’m being honest with myself, this is the feeling I’m always trying to recapture. it seems that that former eagerness has been beaten back cowering into a corner. even just reminiscing on the discovery this music online, back when the internet felt like a place of boundless exploration, fills me with nostalgic yearning. how can I face the future squarely, with eager anticipation, as I once did in the past?

I’m not old, and there’s plenty of life, painful messy euphoric life, yet to be embraced. but I’m not quite young either, and not getting any younger, as the old ones say.

more to the point: what’s my age again?

currently reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. on a bit of a noir kick, having watched Laura, Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, and No Country for Old Men all in the last month. noirs reveal to me just how shaky my grasp of plot is. I’m great at being carried along by a movie or a book, immensely enjoying it as it unfolds, but then retaining almost none of the details of the story. The Big Heat is about…a police officer gets killed…and there’s a bigwig politician…Glenn Ford’s wife is murdered by a car bomb…uhhh….Laura, obviously, Laura dies, but then she’s not dead, because…her effete journalist patron…kills the wrong girl……Double Indemnity, insurance fraud, of course, like the title suggests, Barbara Stanwyck tricks Fred MacMurray into killing her husband, but then…MacMurray’s boss doesn’t want the insurance company to pay out…so….and, and, No Country for Old Men, I’ve seen it innumerable times, could practically recite the opening monologue…but…Anton Chigurh works for…uh…and Woody Harrelson, he’s hired by…someone…who also is working with the Mexicans…to track down the money Josh Brolin finds…..

it’s worse for things I read, and Red Harvest is especially convoluted. all the characters are lying to each other, the “mystery” that incites the action is apparently resolved a third of the way in, and I’m now at the part where there’s a boxing match that’s fixed, but…one of the boxers is actually a different guy…from…Philadelphia? anyway, sorry if I’m spoiling any of these classics for you. the point is, well, the points are: 1) I think it might be beneficial to read/watch something almost immediately after finishing it for the first time; I’m thinking I’ll flip back to page one of Red Harvest as soon as I reach the end. 2) maybe “plot” isn’t exactly my thing; maybe I ought to care less about ensuring something coherently flows from beginning-middle-end, inciting incident-rising action-climax-denoument, at least not in terms of “events,” but work more through vignettes that ebb and flow, building towards moment(s) of clarity, like a Fellini film (I’ve watched three Fellini films, Nights of Cabiria, Amarcord, La dolce vita—none of which have much in terms of traditional “plot”—in the last week). and 3) I should pay closer attention to the things I read and watch—I’m notoriously bad about “reading” something while thinking of something entirely different for a page or two, somehow dissociating from an activity that is itself a little dissociative. that’s a bad habit; I envy people who can bring to mind specific scenes and sequences from books they’ve read once; I can’t even do that with books I’ve read multiple times.