Month: February 2023

The landscapes of Southern Alta & Northern Baja California are nearly indistinguishable from each other. Thanks to plenty of rain this winter, the hills and mountains are lush with greenery. I imagine that summertime things are as sepia dry on the Mexican coast as they are on the Californian. But south of “the border,” I couldn’t help but feel a certain alienness in the air. Not least because my ignorance of Spanish marks me out as a gringo, y un pendejo.

Of course, I wasn’t the only Yankee enjoying their President’s Day in Baja. I’d say about a third of the cars I saw had California plates, and several others repped Arizona and Nevada. Typical Americans. It’s not enough to live the Dream in what before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was Mexico, we have to prance around during one of our many patriotic holidays in the parts we didn’t seize by force. There were so many Patagonia puffies and craft-brewery flatbrims, to say nothing of the skinny blonde chicks in suede floppy hats, you’d’ve thought I was back in Ojai.

At Fauna, one of the upscale restaurants in Valle de Guadalupe specializing in “Baja Med,” a hybrid cuisine blending Mexican, Mediterranean and Asian elements, there are long communal, rather than individual, dining tables. Across from us were sat a couple from Laguna Beach—an enclave deep behind the Orange Curtain. Nixon Country. They were all too impressed to learn we live in Ventura. Ventura is cute, but not impressive. They, well, he, asked way too many questions about it. Her “background is in real estate,” in Tuscon, until she moved to California to support her mom’s third-wave coffee company, which she assured us we could find in Whole Foods. I don’t shop at Whole Foods, but we did happen to stop in on our drive home because we needed coffee for the next day. We did not find her coffee. He, an Australian, “works for the UN.” Started there in 2005, doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and other conflict zones. After a few of the wine pairings, he told stories about texting with a leader of Boko Haram, and meeting a Taliban official at a coffee shop in Thousand Oaks, CA, the very boring LA suburb where I grew up. His LinkedIn profile tells me he’s consulted with the WHO and the Gates Foundation….

The food at Fauna was good. The wine was not.

Last August in several cities along the US-Mexico border, cartels effectively shut down public activities in a show of force that required the Mexican government to call both Army and National Guard reinforcements. Cartel violence has long plagued Mexico’s northern deserts, deserts where outlaws of another kind often die of thirst, fleeing state violence in Chiapas, or in Guatemala, all for a chance to slip into the gilded barbed wire of the United States. It is only if refugees reach a FEMA detention facility that liberals think to cry “fascist!,” never reflecting that obviously, the killing floor of the American nightmare is in the streets of Ciudad Juarez, in Tijuana, in Chiapas, places where drug violence and wanton government repression, overseen by the American intelligence community on behalf of international capital, does all the work of a death camp without any need for trains and ID laws. But drug trafficking is only an additional means for accumulation, a financialization of the gun-for-hire racketeering necessary to protect the real business: petroleum extraction. Mexico is ranked second on the list of countries importing oil to the US: more than Russia, more than Saudi Arabia.

Crossing the border from Mexico into the US is a dispiriting ordeal, and much more arduous than going the other way. Vendors take up one of three highway lanes leading to the US Customs checkpoint, selling snacks, tacky art, cowboy hats, piggie banks in the shape of President AMLO, and even a few puppies doomed to end up among Mexico’s considerable street dog population. Cripples beg for pesos. I watched a man with both hands blown off at midforearm struggle to pull his pants back up after they’d slid to the ground. No one is spared their dignity.

Speaking of banks shaped like AMLO, Mexico is one of the few countries whose currency actually remained strong against the US dollar in 2022. The leftish president is making the most of the economic success by instituting a raft of reforms aimed at bolstering Mexico’s internal markets while paving the way for stronger labor protections. Despite the usual cries from the international business press, AMLO’s anti-neoliberal reforms have not scared off foreign investors in the slightest. In fact, the US, both amidst its Cold War 2.0 Sinophobia and due to just good business sense, has shifted a lot of investments that would have gone to China towards Mexican industries. Why the US would choose months long shipment times across the Pacific over weeks long freights through the southern border I don’t know. But with this infusion of cash from the US comes further dependence on Yankee excellence, a situation with a grim forecast.

One lesson I ought to learn: if I’m going to write, I need to focus, and take better notes. Trying not to idly use the internet helps, but it is foolish to continue believing I can recall details after the fact. Instead of thinking first and filling in later, I should note details first and think later. Naturally I write only what fragments I can dredge out later: if I don’t catch the fragments as they appear, there’s no hope of crafting something larger out of them.

my typewriter’s O key doesn’t sit level with the other keys. it still types fine, so writing on my typewriter doesn’t require I adhere to some Oulipo-style constraint; I wouldn’t even be able to type “Oulipo” at all if that were the case. not that I’m writing this post on my typewriter anyway. some things, like blog posts, I don’t draft as intensively as others, so I can’t be bothered to go through rewriting them onto a hard drive. but doing my writing away from the endless distraction machine of the internet, away from any base-level surveillance, away from the ease of editing afforded by word processors, is something I’m growing to see as necessary if I want to write anything that will outlast the internet.

I opened up my typewriter yesterday to blow out the dust that had accumulated in it with compressed air. mine’s an Olivetti Lettera 22, a model known for being low maintenance: Cormac McCarthy said of his Lettera 32 that the only thing he ever did to keep his in order was blow it out with a service hose. but when I opened mine up, I noticed there was a broken spring loose, and some investigating revealed this to be what causes the O key’s misalignment. so now I need to find a single tiny spring, which is not something easily come by, it turns out, since most hardware like that is sold in bulk. I suppose I could have several dozen spares on hand, but I doubt I’ll ever need that many. maybe I can find one to steal at the hardware store. unfortunately the typewriter repair shop near my place of employment is no longer in business.

keeping my typewriter in good shape will be important as I start building momentum on some longer projects. it’s also important that I start weaning off devices connected to the internet, that is, if it’s important to me that I take a posture counter the dominant culture, and if I want to not waste so much time. there’s a kind of lazy critique popular on the Left that urges people to break away from “productivity culture,” an obvious symptom of the Protestant work ethic underlying capitalism, in favor of “doing nothing” or something, I’m not sure exactly what. as far as I can see, there’s no “doing nothing” on this side of death, so I want my living activity geared towards the things that matter to me. I happen to like being productive. what I don’t like is having my productivity sapped by technology harvesting my data, or having my labor exploited by wage-based employment. that book How to Do Nothing works towards some kind of way of being that isn’t entirely dominated by productivity culture, but I seem to remember that Jenny Oddell doesn’t endorse “just logging off” because it seems like, irresponsible or not possible, my memory of the book is a little hazy. I just know that her plan for “resisting the attention economy” ranked among Barack Obama’s favorite books that year, so I’m skeptical that she really offered anything all that radical.

this past weekend I visited the Hammer Museum for their exhibit commemorating Joan Didion. I have plans to write more extensively about the exhibit and my feelings about the state of curation practices as inspired by a local gallery that recently opened up in Ventura. as such I don’t want to say too much specifically yet, but that essay is really an expansion of some of what I’m feeling here. the pithy way of putting it right now is that, it’s kind of ironic that an exhibit about Joan Didion made me wistful about the lost counterculture of the sixties, given that Didion was not exactly fond of hippies. neither am I for that matter, but it’s undeniable that at least then there was a viable option for refusal that is not so easily seen nowadays, an alternative that really did seem alive with possibility at the time, even if the counterculture ultimately sold out and gave way to the Nixon-into-Reagan era.

I’m not someone who believes that neoliberalism or whatever we’re calling it has totally foreclosed the possibility of an alternative–“capitalist realism” is a problem, but I often critique Mark Fisher for projecting his clinical depression as ontological fact. what that means though is that it’s on me to start thinking about ways of opening alternatives.

any way of living counter to today’s hegemonic monoculture will involve resistance to the culture’s primary motor, surveillance. for starters, this means making good on the threat I’ve long made emptily: getting off social media. I’m not doing that immediately, so if that’s the only way you interact with me you better reach out for some other way to keep in contact or else it’s sayonara suckers. I’m posting this to my Instagram as fair warning. I’m accepting whatever difficulties this makes for me socially and professionally as an artist. I intend on pursuing publication still, but without totally submitting to the demands of the attention economy. this isn’t for the sake of being some contrarian edgelord either; it seems, like art itself, to be a matter of life and death.

I do not mean to be a nostalgic reactionary, or a mere Luddite, scorning social media and clacking on a manual typewriter. but they’re the best first steps I have, and in taking them, I feel a power growing within me.

currently I’m reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. it’s testing my reading comprehension but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun with it.