Tag: Aesthetics

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog” according to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

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Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1686 and Immature Collegen Fibers

One of the most unsettling aspects of having a deep tissue infection surgically removed is watching the hole fill itself back in from the bottom up. It doesn’t look like normal tissue as it regrows.

When deep tissue wounds heal from the bottom up, the new dermal tissue appears white because it consists of immature collagen fibers and lacks proper vascularization during the initial stages of repair. Via Perplexity

I happen to take a collagen supplement which is looks like tiny little white balls in a capsule. Collagen is a hot aesthetic supplement for making your hair and nails grow but it benefits your fascia as well. It’s a popular supplement with biotin for overall health of one’s tissues.

I am aware of a number trends in the space to generate and promote the growth of collagen as I happen to follow the arc of Korean plastic surgery as it led to many successful cosmetic products. Collegen became popular in America through aesthetic practices and social media.

And yet with working in cosmetics and taking it as a supplement I hadn’t ever experienced a chunk of tissue growing back personally. It’s all been, well, literally cosmetics. And now it’s growing back and it’s really anything but attractive.

I am also concurrently bringing a hyperbaric chamber to Montana so we can do hyperbaric oxygen therapy protocols for ourselves and for the community. I am interested in their benefits for chronic issues but they have also proven themselves in the treatments of skincare wounds in diabetic and burn patients.

Ironic that I should have immature collagen fibers lacking vascularization at this moment and will soon have access to state of the art treatment for it but I have to heal this one the old fashioned way.

It’s my hope that we are going to improve our treatments for chronic issues in the future but in the here and now my acute issue is being handled the old fashioned way with lots of care and research and rest.

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Travel

Day 1685 and National Lampoon’s European Vacation Albania

We just wrapped up a week long “coastal convalescence” tour otherwise known as Alex and Julie’s European Vacation tour. Typically we take time off during shoulder season which is the off peak months for a destination.

Not being bound by school vacations or particular holiday schedules, shoulder season works better for many reasons from fewer guests to lower prices.

Mostly it’s because I struggle with high season summer heat and we live in one of the most in-demand areas for vacationing in America. Why go to Greece when I can go to Yellowstone? Why go to St Moritz when I can go to Big Sky?

And yet somehow between the Istanbul surgery incident and a general “why not” attitude we decided to be like the masses, head to Europe and enjoy the Ionian and Adriatic coastlines in high season. No we didn’t go to Sicily or Italy or France. We went to the Balkans.

Ksamil at sunset where you can see Greece.
High above the Mediterranean

If you pay attention you may have noticed a fondness for Albania which sounds odd but isn’t as unusual as you might imagine. Many older military families served in the Balkan campaigns and recognized the beauty of Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Serbia and Kosovo.

The Ionian Sea is quite clear

Our Congressional representative Ryan Zinke served there as well many other Montanans. Heck, a guy I went to college with studied Balkan languages with the goal of being deployed there for peacekeeping operations with NATO in order to avoid being deployed to “the sandbox” during the war on terror years.

Albania in particular likes its American allies. They like us so much there are streets named after Madeleine Albright, a Clinton and both Bushes. There is even a town that made Trump an honorary mayor.

I wonder if this closeness to America has contributed to the country’s troubles in managing an ascension to the European Union despite being country you could easily mistake for Italy in climate, culture, scenery and history. It’s closer to Italy by boat than Helsinki is to Tallinn.

High above Vlore which is so close to Italy you can almost see it and can cross over by ferry

And yet they are treated as if they aren’t Europeans at all by dint of being on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Which you’d think Germans would appreciate.

Alas Albanians prefer the good ol’ USA to Brussels and this is a problem. That Europe let in less European countries than Albania into both the EU and Schengen feels unfair.

And it sucks for them as their passports are some of the worst in the world despite producing superstars from Dua Lipa to Mira Murati. Don’t give me guff about corruption or timelines either. If Romania and Hungary are part of the bloc then surely they can hurry up and let a NATO ally in during this time of crisis for the continent.

In my opinion, Albania is in every way superior to Italy from the kindness of its people to the beauty of its countryside and the quality of its food. Even the Italian luxury houses have exported most of their leather goods and clothing manufacturing to the country but that’s meant to be secret.

So if you want to experience the mysteries of antiquity from Thucydides to the birth of Rome to its empire years don’t look simply to Greece or Italy but to the Balkans. Delphic temples, Melian cities, even a Roman emperor are from this region.

If you enjoy Positano style sea vistas and clear blue Ionian waters go to Albania. And then please tell Brussels to let them into the European Union.

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Community Travel

Day 1684 and a Very Balkan Top Gear Episode

Let me set the scene for you. Alex and I are in a classic old Mercedes black sedan I’d describe as “oligarch or drug dealer chic” trying to navigate a steep 700m downhill drive in a tiny Balkan village when the GPS sends the driver (a friend of ours) down a set of stairs. 

Confusing signage and incorrect GPS data

We are stuck. The signage pointed confusingly to not enter the other round, the high noon sun meant little to no shadows cast by the small steps, and the GPS insisted this was the way down. Mistakes were made but we learned later we weren’t the only ones who made them.

The village springs into action. Our driver stopped the moment it was clear the directions were wrong and he’d gone down a step. We got out and within moments we have locals trying to bounce this heavy monster into a low rider to get unstuck. This does not work but looks cool and feels very cool.

We are now entering peak male “helping” in which a variety of men, young and old, are watching, commenting and a few are in fact helping contribute to solutions.

Within no more than ten minutes, a couple village guys have shown up with a truck and we are looking at tow options and reverse pressure solutions.

We end up hooked up to the truck as a counter weight with a rope and a block.  This is promising. We have half dozen, if not a full dozen dudes helping and watching. A few women watching become women clapping. It worked! We are rolled back.

Young and old come came together to participate in the age old ritual we Twitter types call #DudesRock and got the beautiful old Mercedes safely out. The road is fine too.

How did we get saved? Well a woman who owned a restaurant in the village saw us and sent for some friends. She apologized profusely saying she couldn’t stay as she was opening shop but said don’t worry she will send help.

And she did!  And so swiftly. They came ready with a block, a rope, and a truck in no time at all. Alex being a man of action got as dirty as anyone wrangling the solution.

It was like being in a lost episode of Top Gear where a gangster car is stuck in an old village and the wise elders descend with a few able bodies to save Jeremy Clarkson. Some just watch & comment. The car is miraculously running even better at the end. Everyone vows to do more coastal drives along the Adriatic and Ionian seas.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1683 and Caftan versus Cutouts

I am doing a bit of coastal convalescence. Americans would be loathe to call a vacation anything but a euphemism. What are we French?

That said, sunlight is the best disinfectant and I’m sick of taking antibiotics after my exciting Istanbul surgery adventures after a physician was a bit cavalier about my request for preventative care given details in my case file.

So why not get a little bit of time off with the loved ones and see some sights. A spot that particularly captured my imagination has two distinct demographics with widely divergent tastes.

A resort a thousand feet above the Ionian Sea

There are a number of beautifully styled women in their prime forties and fifties with gracefully maintained skin, silk caftans and sunhats. They seem to have children and husbands and are otherwise living their best life.

And then we have the younger crowd who I’ll call the cut-outs. In an ideal world, this would be Norma Kamali technical fabrics showing off her pioneering swimwear. That would be very sexy.

But it’s mostly different ways of showing off suggestive swathes of bare skin in clingy clothing. Lots of neon colors and odd cutout areas that get close to the action (side boob is popular) but still count as being covered. It is also mostly skintight but occasionally some volume is added to let some other salacious details pop.

These appear to be gaggles of girlfriends mostly. They don’t have men with them that I’ve seen, though I’ve seen a few couples where a young man has a woman dressed like this on his arm. And they are all made up in full beat makeup that would make a drag queen think “not very demure.”

When you make odd choices for travel and off the beaten path you sometimes see a hospitality culture that is both expensive enough to attract the tasteful but with enough flash that it plays on social media so the Instahoes aspire for picture. And believe me this spot is extremely Instagram friendly.

I am neither caftan Parker Posie mom nor young beautiful aspirational influencer (or OnlyFans star depending on who you ask) so I am staying out of the culture clash between richer hipster travelers and “it’s expensive so let’s show off” personas.

I am in a more wrap dress and kimono style woman when pools and beaches are involved. I am happy to enjoy the salt room and infrared sauna before a massage without styling my every single fit for the occasion. That said I did feel as if I nailed the vibe. All cotton and silk with one floral kimono for the pool. Even I need to live a little.

I got captured taking a selfie during golden hour before dinner
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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1682 and Hipster European Vacation Activated

If there is one complaint Americans have about Europe (and no this isn’t about air conditioning) it is their insistence on playing the worst kind of nightclub music absolutely everywhere.

You are getting your morning espresso and it’s trashy club music. You go eat at a normal neighborhood spot for a quiet dinner and you can feel the beat drop as they place your first course. Domenico Modugno isn’t on any Italian menus these days.

If you are by a hotel pool you better be ready to enjoy some Kylie Minogue nostalgia-core. Which I actually enjoy but I’ve been honest about maintaining my own nostalgia for Hotel Costes delivered by noise canceling headphones. It’s trashy but so is blasting up-temp remixes when I stare at the sea.

The more tourism because contentious in Europe, the worse the problem seems to get. It’s the belief of most proprietors that more local guests and tourists alike prefer this kind of cacophony. When you ask them about turning things down or towing on a playlist better suited to cuisine it can be hit or miss.

Especially if you are the sort to seek out the foodie destinations of a town. Nothing is quite the let down of eating a Michelin quality meal with a backing track of bad house music.

I am sure some tourists have furthered these stereotypes (I’m looking at you Britain). But assure you, Americans do not prefer this especially if your tourism is made up of the first wave of cultural hipster.

Once you go high margin (again apologies to the Europoor tourist) you do bave a very different customer base and they hate this shit We can tolerate your aversion to ice but not an aura assault.

If you have cultural touchstones in your own musical history, we’d much prefer that over dinner.

Authenticity is all anyone will have left in any smoothed over algorithmically perfected middle ground. And guess what it’s not Swedish House Mafia and no one wants Miami or Ibiza to be everywhere. Tallinn and Tirana have their own vibe.

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Travel

Day 1681 and Going On Vacation Mode

In discussing with our cadre of friends taking time off this week we all realize it had been many varying years where we had multiple days in a row, in the same place, with nothing planned.

We’ve got that time off ahead of us so we’ve been discussing the ways we trick our bodies into accepting emotional decompression and physical relaxation.

For me it’s a playlist and a certain kind of pulpy paperwork. For others it’s a Mexican beer in the sand, another a meandering walk though a hotel property looking at all the options for lounging.

Bouncing from one hotel to another can be a lot of fun then you are driving. A new novelty is over every range and the switch road back slowly brings you to something magical.

Sightseeing and activities have their own merit. I am always asking to see ruins and museums. Some folks are foodies. Others like nightlife.

But we’ve got a few days of staying in the same place ahead of us and any desire to seek novelty is entire up to us. I’d post some pictures from the travel but I prefer to do that afterwards. Just as a precaution even as I share so much.

As we transit desert scrub looming above us in mountain terrain, we are riding high over sea level as we gain and lose altitude. From that vantage we see coastal towns and mountain set backs. From sea to sky on one set of switchbacks.

The car sickness makes an enjoyable roller coaster of views and the focus on the ride helps you avoid the annoyance of slow traffic. A little sick and a little scared and a little excited. A layered set of feelings for going on vacation mode.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1680 and Tricking Your Parasympathetic Systemic Into Offline Relaxation Mode

I was introduced to music curators by what you might call third spaces in the aughts. If you were very good, you might program television show but the work of designing audio atmosphere was often about hospitality.

Boutique hotels, luxury gyms, and luxury boutiques looking to set a mood would hire these talent for playlists that fit into their brand book.

We’ve come to appreciate just how much a full sensory experience encompasses every detail. Decor, lighting or even a house fragrance can all be ruined by overloading your guests with discordant noises.

Unless it’s a nightclub or cocktail lounge, the blending of audio spaces and creating the right vibe to open up your guests to the experience is about settling sympathetic nervous system into the openness that comes with the “rest and digest” chill of the parasympathetic response.

I was part of a team that made playlists for Milk Studio’s New York Fashion Week, looked over the shoulders of the creative director who hired a well known curator for their playlists.

Fashion runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York City would also hire these DJs sometimes being the top of the diffusion spear but they were often collaborating with hotels where the fashionistas stay.m

I saw how the Standard Hotels made choices for their properties and was inspired by their work to get even deeper into the best boutiques and their choices. The beloved Parisian fashion staple Stéphane Pompougnac who became the wildly successful Hotel Costss house DJ.

Hotel Costes 6:
Combining casual glamor, “retro-canaille” and smooth house, this compilation evokes the luxurious, eclectic and elegant atmosphere of Hotel Costes.

Stéphane Pompougnac (born 1968) is a French houseDJ and record producer best known for curating and mixing the Hôtel Costes compilation series

It’s become such a part of my own relaxation and time off routine, I can hear a few bars from Hotel Costes 6 (a particular favorite of mine) and immediately feel calmer. Amazing what a ritual we can make of music. Sure it is silly but you can’t beat decades of somatic learning.

Maybe I’m not always going “a la peche” but my body doesn’t know that. From there, all I need to do is open up an Ian M Banks paperback and I can slip into a short trip of my own. Amazing mow malleable our minds can be to repetition.

Brand collaborations are everywhere you look
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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.