10 scraps from my notebook

What I'm thinking about right now

Hey y’all,

On Tuesday I usually take an idea or two from my pocket notebook and expand them into a long letter. But today I have all these half-baked ideas in my notebooks I want to riff on, so instead of one long letter, here are 10 little letters!

1. In Blade Runner, the LAPD administers a Voight-Kampff test to determine whether or not someone is a replicant. It occurred to me recently that we are living in a world now where every new email — heck, almost every interaction online — is a Voight-Kampff test. Is this a human I’m talking to or a bot? Is this real or is this AI slop? It’s exhausting being a Blade Runner! I doubt most people can handle it. Many will try to fight it, many will disengage as much as possible, and many of us, I fear, will become Cypher with the steak in The Matrix: Willing to be blissfully ignorant of what’s real and what isn’t, giving ourselves over to the machine, and letting the slop float us merrily down the stream...

2. What if you replaced your dread with curiosity? is a question I keep asking myself when I get too worried about the future. George Carlin said, “When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat. And some of us have notebooks.” I’ve been thinking a lot about Mass Observation and diaries and how, if I must live through this time, I might as well take notes. How I get myself out of bed down here in the belly of the beast most days: I say, Well, let’s see what kind of crazy shit happens today. It won’t work for everyone, but it’s what’s working for me.

3. The book Art of Over the Garden Wall begins with this quote from art director Nick Cross: “I don’t know how this show got made.” I think that phrase — How did this even get made? — lets you know that you’re experiencing something that deviates from the average. AI is, of course, about averaging large amounts of data, and to quote Harvey Pekar, “Average is dumb.” I’m out here looking for what isn’t average.

If you look into it, the process is often what makes a piece of art exceptionally good… or exceptionally bad.

As for the exceptionally good: Over The Garden Wall, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Lilo & Stitch, off the top of my head, are all pieces of media that probably shouldn’t exist, but their existence can be explained by the story of how they were made.

Same for the exceptionally bad: When you watch The Room, you think, “How did this crap even get made?” and then you can go off and read The Disaster Artist.

Which leads me to another theory of mine: You can learn a lot from really great art and really bad art, but it’s hard to learn much from the truly mediocre.

“Average is dumb.”

4. I discovered that creator Patrick McHale actually started the Over The Garden Wall project when he was a student in Southern California and was missing the seasons so badly that he flew to Concord in New England. That trip sort of planted the seed for the project. This story made perfect sense to me: a piece of art that was bringing me something I desperately pine for in my life was made by someone who did that same kind of pining.

5. Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away. It happens to coincide with watching your kids and your parents age — you observe in your kids where you’ve been, and you observe in your parents where you’re headed. (If you’re lucky enough, that is, to age.) Weird time.