The ghosts in the American Ghostshave been dead for centuries. One of them for over a thousand years. They rattle around a house in the Hudson Valley: Revolutionary War soldiers, bootleggers, a Viking, a 1920s lounge singer. Most of their time goes to trying not to go mad from the sameness of it.
Survival is over for them. That game is finished. The only game left is what you do with consciousness when there’s nothing pressing requiring it.
Which is, if you sit with it for a minute, mostly the game we’re all playing too.
Every living creature is doing two things: surviving, and then dealing with the fact of its own existence once survival is handled. A well-fed cat does not simply stop. It hunts anyway. Sits in windows. Tracks birds it has no intention of catching with something that looks remarkably like philosophical attention. Not need. Engagement with existence itself.
We do the same, except we invented a third level that runs parallel to the second and keeps mistaking itself for it. Thriving. The endless pursuit of more status, more achievement, more everything. A game with its own rules and its own specific forms of suffering, marketed to us as the point of the whole enterprise.
Epicurus grew vegetables and had long conversations with friends. He wasn’t after intensity. What he wanted he called ataraxia, a settled freedom from the anxiety of wanting too much. Not an absence of pleasure, but a quality of peace that doesn’t depend on accumulation. He understood that the main enemy of happiness is the scoreboard you’re keeping. The one that tells you you’re behind.
The frame I keep coming back to: life is a game, and the ghosts have the clearest view of it. No survival pressure. No thriving to perform. Just the bare question of what you do with the fact that you exist.
At that level of reduction, certain things clarify. Fear becomes information. Risk becomes interesting. Failure stops being evidence of personal inadequacy and starts being data about what the territory actually contains. The scoreboard dissolves once you’re not competing for anything in particular.
The game ends. That’s different from having a winner. And actually holding that knowledge, rather than keeping it at a safe distance, seems to change how you play. More willingness to make the interesting move. Less attachment to games you didn’t design.
Some of the ghosts in that house, the ones who’ve been there longest, have figured out how to make it interesting. Centuries in and still finding things to argue about, still surprising themselves occasionally.
I’m not sure what to make of that exactly. But I keep turning it over.
I can’t say that I’m a Lorde fan—not that there’s anything wrong with her music; it’s just not my usual thing. But I came across her blog, which she runs on Tumblr (I think people need to keep an eye on Tumblr; it’s poised for a comeback as a blogging platform). She was very open about the pressure to make a buck on concert tours, especially when all she and other musicians really want to do is play for the fans.
I don’t know how much you’ve been following the live music industry conversation, but lemme hit you with a five minute explainer, cause I think it’s interesting, and good to know about if you’re going to concerts at the moment. Basically, for artists, promoters and crews, things are at an almost unprecedented level of difficulty. It’s a storm of factors. Let’s start with three years’ worth of shows happening in one. Add global economic downturn, and then add the totally understandable wariness for concertgoers around health risks. On the logistical side there’s things like immense crew shortages (here’s an article from last week about this in New Zealand), extremely overbooked trucks and tour buses and venues, inflated flight and accommodation costs, ongoing general COVID costs, and truly. mindboggling. freight costs. To freight a stage set across the world can cost up to three times the pre-pandemic price right now. I don’t know shit about money, but I know enough to understand that no industry has a profit margin that high. Ticket prices would have to increase to start accommodating even a little of this, but absolutely no one wants to charge their harried and extremely-compassionate-and-flexible audience any more fucking money. Nearly every tour has been besieged with cancellations and postponements and promises and letdowns, and audiences have shown such understanding and such faith, that between that and the post-COVID wariness about getting out there at all, scaring people away by charging the true cost ain’t an option. All we want to do is play for you.
I know you’re probably sick to death of hearing about the fate of Twitter. I am too, but because it’s a platform I love, I can’t resist reading every article about its demise that comes through my feed. It’s like rubbernecking on the highway. When you see an accident off to the side, you feel compelled to look, which in turn causes you to slow down, which, through the ripple effect, turns into a mile-long traffic jam.
Stop rubbernecking!
Sorry, I can’t help myself.
This article in The Verge feels like the scene where the villain hits the self-destruct button, lets out an evil laugh, and then heads to the roof to escape in his helicopter. When your CISO, Chief Privacy Officer and Chief Compliance Officer ALL resign at the same time, you know the ship is going down!
Sources say:
Over the last two weeks. Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he’s incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter. He chose to enter into that agreement! All of us are being put through this as a result of the choices he made.
Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them.
I don’t often mark TV shows down in my calendar, but for The English, I did. The Guardian called it a rare, sensational masterpiece, with Lucy Mangan giving it 5-stars! How could I not watch it?! As a kid, I was a huge Western fan. I picked up my love of cowboys from my dad. He was a huge fan of Louis L’ Amor. He had all the books, like The Sacketts, among others. And whenever a western was on TV, we were there to watch it. Some of my favorites:
I was curious to know if The English would live up to my expectations of a Western. The basic story line follows a revenge narrative.
The English takes place in the mythical mid-American landscape in the year 1890. It is about Cornelia Locke, an Englishwoman who comes to the new and wild West to get revenge on the man she thinks killed her son. When she meets Eli Whipp, a former cavalry scout who was born into the Pawnee Nation, they work together and find out that they have a common past that they must defeat at all costs if they want to live.
I am 3 episodes in and I am not disappointed. Chaske and Blunt are awesome together. The dialogue is superb. The action is graphic and dark. And the cinematography is stunning. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story plays out. It’s on BBC iPlayer in the UK. I think it might be on Prime in the US.
I gotta another wild hair
Well, it’s on. I’m embarking on a 30 day blogging challenge with my Twitter friends, @SMWGeek and @MrFresh who, like me, are OG bloggers from back in the day when blogging was cool and everybody had a Blogger or a Livejournal account, and we blogged everyday about everything and nothing. We shared our thoughts, our hobbies, our frustrations, our passions. Our blogs were an extension of ourselves. They were personal blogs back then. You were doing it for the love. Then blogs got popular and somebody figured out how to make money from them. That was the beginning of the end of personal blogging. The snake oil salespeople could smell the blood of the innocent. They promised to show us how we could make money blogging in our underwear. The marketeers could see the gold rush coming, and they moved in with their banner ads and Macromedia Flash videos. The personal blog was dead. Blogs became like the suburbs of the 1950s uniformed and bland, with every blog looking the same. No more Geocities. Myspace tried to keep the gig alive, but Zuckerberg had other plans. Now it’s all about the niche blog and content marketing, if you’re blogging at all and not doomscrolling or suffering anxiety from all the FOMO induced posts on Instagram.
So every now and then I get a wild hair on my butt and decide it’s time to do another 30 day blogging challenge to get myself back in the habit of OG blogging with the hope that maybe it might rekindle the fire of personal blogging.
If you’ve made it this far, then go ahead and make a nostalgic old man feel good by leaving a comment below. I will be cross-posting the 30 day challenge posts to Twitter and Mastodon, but if you want to be guaranteed to get my posts, then go ahead and subscribe to the blog or add it to your RSS feed reader.
This blog has been running since February 2004. Long may it continue.
I’ve seen the film countless times, but Ruth has never seen it (although I’m sure she’s heard it because I own the DVD and have watched it from time to time over the years).
My dad was a massive Spaghetti Western fan, so growing up, I watched a ton of “cowboy” movies. Clint Eastwood was my favorite. I liked all of his Westerns apart from Unforgiven, which saw Eastwood return to the genre that made him the quintessential tall, dark, silent stranger type. I had high hopes for Unforgiven. I mean, how could it lose. It had Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Gene Hackman in it. It failed for me because Eastwood didn’t use his gun until the end of the movie! He took the retired old Western gunslinger too much to heart.
This is what I wanted to see the whole movie, but sadly had to sit through 2 hours to get this (don’t watch if you haven’t seen the movie and want to judge for yourself):
I spent most of the day outside in my back garden working on my suntan. The sun was glorious yesterday. I think we hit a high of 21C. I launched the Radio Warwickshire #30DaySongChallenge in our Social Radio Club on FaceBook. Day 1 was to choose a song that needs to be played loud. I chose:
I’m also running the challenge on our Instagram and Twitter accounts. But like most things I post, Facebook is the place I get the most engagement. Go figure.
I’m still working my way through The Unspoken Name which is the first heroic fantasy book I’ve read in a long while. It’s good for reading when you’re working on your tan. I haven’t completely warmed to the story yet, but it’s early days.
With lockdown, all the days blend together. But I’m glad it’s a Bank Holiday weekend. I can spend time on the frivolous.
I finally watched El Camino last night, and seeing how Breaking Bad was one of my all time favourite TV series, I had high hopes for the movie. You can probably guess from my intro that it fell short of what I was expecting. Instead of a movie, we got an extended last episode to the series, one that we could arguably have done without.
I don’t want to get too much into the spoiler game, but basically, we catch up with the story at the end of the last episode of Season 5 with Jesse Pinkman speeding off into night in psycho Todd’s El Camino. The 2 hours that follow drift along at a slow pace as Jesse encounters some of his old crew, both in real time and flashbacks. He does have a problem to solve before he can ride off into the sunset like the High Plains Drifter. I guess the movie brings closure to the show, if you need such things, but I think we would have been better off leaving Jesse’s endgame to our individual imaginations.
Switching gears…
Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus came yesterday. I was a little reluctant to pay £25 quid for a book sight unseen (there was no preview available on Amazon). I had to go on the strength of the reviews alone. I’m glad I went for it though because so far it has not disappointed me. And in fact, I cranked out my first tiny poem using one of the techniques from the book. Real quick, Jeff Noon is a really big language dude (he’s famous for writing in the cyberpunk genre with hits like Vurt, Pollen, and Automated Alice). He’s also into his music. He wanted to do what DJ’s do with music to literature, i.e. taking source texts and running it through a series of noise gates and filters to produce something totally different from the original text.
satan got the whole team reading dark material like your heart.
I did that over lunch. I’m looking forward to using the different filters and gates on some longer source texts.
So blogging turned 25 this week:
Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads.
I’m amazed that Dave Winer has managed to blog every single day since 1994! That’s lot of blogging. I like the writer’s suggestion that blogging is still important despite the infilitration of social media:
He’s also a reminder of the importance of blogging, a phenomenon that has been overshadowed as social media exploded and sucked much of the oxygen out of our information environment. When Winer started, blogging was an elite activity: you had to know how to set up a website and publish to it. But when Blogger and LiveJournal launched in 1999 followed by WordPress and TypePad in 2003, the barrier to entry became vanishingly low; in effect, if you could type and had an internet connection you could become a blogger. And so for a time blogging became the predominant form of user-generated content on the web.
And finally, I agree:
The blogosphere continues to be one of our greatest information resources. So why not log off social media, get yourself an RSS reader and wise up?
And here’s my RSS Feed so you can add me to your RSS reader.
Musical Interlude
I’ve been digging Cake this week. Particularly this version of I Will Survive:
