The Fine Art of Not Knowing What You Want
You know what I miss? Browsing.
Way back before all this started, I was a fond browser; I likely irritated all manner of store owners because of it, but there’s a very particular joy in heading into a bookstore, a record store, a comic store, wherever, with no plan or agenda — not even, really, any real intent to actually buy something — and just wandering around to see what’s available, almost willing yourself to be surprised. I’ve found countless favorite things that way, stories or songs that nowadays feel integral to my personal history even though I found them by accident.
It started when I was in art school, I think, decades ago. I’d arrive at the weekend with only vague plans, and amongst those would be grocery shopping. For the majority of my time in Aberdeen, both studying and later teaching, I’d live some distance away from the town center with all the stores, so even just heading to pick up milk, bread and almost inevitably frozen breaded chicken breast — I was a creature of habit — would be an undertaking; I quickly resolved that, if I was going to spend an hour or so getting there, then I’d make the most of being in the center of town as I could.
In practice, that meant spending a lot of time browsing in the bookstores and the record shops. I’d spend hours in there every weekend, checking racks for new releases or looking for old favorites. I spent so much time in these places — and, to a lesser extent, the comic stores in town, but they almost aggressively pushed browsers away, preferring those who knew what they wanted and knew where to find it — that I can remember the layout of each store even now, a quarter century after I’d last visited, and likely after the stores have gone out of business.
Here in Portland now, I still like to browse Powell’s, occasionally check in on Jackpot Records or somewhere similar. The curiosity, the joy of discovery, is still very much there. Except, of course, right now, it’s not — and I feel that, more and more with each day. I miss that space, that freedom to find unexpected things; I’ve started literally dreaming about it. Some day soon, I hope, I’ll have a chance to feel it again.
May 11, 2020
May 8, 2020
I Don’t Care About Spots On My Apples
Things go wrong; that’s just a reality. I’m not talking about the result of machinations to fuck people over, or screw up others’ plans and hard work, but instead the times when… well, things just go wrong. When it’s no-one’s fault, per se, but just what happens sometimes and you deal with whatever’s happened and move on. It’s a simple, if frustrating, fact of life.
This site disappeared for a bit, a few weeks ago. Not a long time — an hour or so, maybe? But it vanished, entirely; something went wrong somewhere on the internet, and any attempt to reach it was met with messages explaining why that was impossible, that the server wasn’t available, that you couldn’t get here. R.E.M.’s “Can’t Get There From Here” played somewhere to underscore the possibility, just in case the blunt, dry message onscreen wasn’t enough.
The why of it all wasn’t the issue, really; my web host was having trouble for whatever reason. Maybe it was being attacked by raccoons, perhaps they had a power outage, or someone tripped over a cable and unplugged something. It wasn’t anything I had any control over, so a lot of me has this feeling of, what actually happened wasn’t really that important.
What felt more important, though, was the sense of immediate loss I felt every time I refreshed the page and couldn’t get to the site. At first, I thought it was just the back end that had failed, as I was trying (and failing) to write something, but then I realized everything was… gone. It was an odd, disorienting, feeling — I’ve often said that I’m not entirely sure why I post here, but at least I now know that, if everything here was to suddenly disappear, I’d feel a deep and impressively sharp loss, as if I’d literally lost a part of myself.
That’s melodramatic, I know — especially as the site returned soon enough, as if nothing had happened — but the experience made me realize how important this small, relatively private, place to wonder and ponder and write just to write had become to me, and how much I get some undefinable, yet very real, joy and value from it. Somewhere, the ghost of Joni Mitchell is exasperatedly going, “What did I say about not knowing what you got ‘til it’s gone?” but, well, there’s a reason people liked that song so much, and it wasn’t just her laugh at the end.
Website, thank you for your service. Don’t go away again, please.
May 7, 2020
What’s The Matter With Your
Technology is wonderful, until it isn’t.
I’ve never been an especially technical-minded person, despite my occasional fervent wishes to the contrary; I even took a two-year course at my high school called “technological studies” in the hopes that it would turn the little eager teenage me into a hacker or whatever the 1980s equivalent was, but it basically turned out to be wood shop with added compressed air, somehow.
Perhaps that’s what prevented me from delving deeper into that world at any single point in the three decades that followed. It’s not that I dislike technology — I’m typing this on an iPad, after all, and my work revolves around me being online all the time, so I’m hardly a Luddite — but I’m also not an early adopter anymore; I’ve tried that, only to be exhausted by the inevitable discoveries of bugs and glitches and plain simple ideas that shouldn’t have been brought into the world just yet.
I remember, bizarrely, having a cellphone in the early ‘90s, and just how large and unwieldy it was; I remember it being like a black brick with an antenna you could unscrew, all held in a flimsy black leather and plastic case. More than that, I remember how I felt with it, as if I was ahead of the curve, some kind of smart future me in some way. I wasn’t; I used it to call my family every Sunday instead of wandering to find a payphone to huddle in when it was cold and rainy.
These days, I’m firmly behind the curve. Proudly so, almost, except that I know there’s nothing to be proud of. My phone these days is so old that my carrier couldn’t quite believe there was still one in use, and truth be told, it barely is any more. That’s more than alright with me, though — I’ve firmly entered the “Does it do what I need it to? It does? Great, I don’t care about the other bells and whistles” period of my life, and it’s a very comfortable one.
All of which is a preamble to this: I listen to podcasts on my iPad when I shower. And, yesterday, when I got out the shower and pressed my thumb against the sensor to open the iPad up to switch the podcast off, I got a message saying my thumbprint wasn’t recognized. It said the same again, again, again. Maybe it was the steam in the room, maybe residual dampness of my thumb, but it wouldn’t work.
For others, this would be a moment to consider a neat trick to make it work, or whatever. For me now, it was a sign that technology is only useful until it stops working properly. I keyed in the passcode, resentfully, and grumbled internally about how useless the thumb sensor, and therefore the entire device, actually is.
May 6, 2020
May 5, 2020
One Day You’re In, And The Next
I’ve made no secret of my love of good reality TV show contests — I’ve eagerly binged recent seasons of Project Runway, Top Chef and The Great British Bake Off (Yes, I know it’s officially Baking Show here in the US, but no-one really calls it that, do they?), and even became temporarily addicted to the UK version of Love Island in a bout of madness — so I feel pretty confident in reporting that Amazon’s recent venture into the genre, Making The Cut, is… not a good reality TV show. That said, it might the most Amazon reality TV show imaginable.
There are a number of reasons why Making The Cut doesn’t work. On the most basic level, there’s the simple fact that it doesn’t actually spend enough time or energy humanizing the contestants, who instead get to spout some generic, faux inspiring lines about their struggle each episode that don’t really connect with what they’re actually working on — which, in a sad way, makes sense, given how little attention is actually paid to what the contestants are actually doing in each round.
Each episode, the contestants have to design and kinda make two outfits — a Runway Look and another that can be sold on Amazon, because it’s a show where shifting product is the immovable focus. But, aside from vague comments about inspiration and footage of designers frowning in the workshop, the actual process of getting to the final outfits is missing, which feels like a real mistake. It’s one made intentionally, though; the show’s format centers around the designers handing unfinished clothes off to unseen “seamstresses” at the end of each day, and picking up the results the next morning. That’s why I said “kinda make,” above — it’s actually the work of nameless, faceless workers, because Amazon is entirely utterly lacking in self awareness about concerns over its labor practices.
The true focus of the series is capitalism — there’s repeated discussions around the words “global brand,” and contestants aren’t graded on their aesthetics or individual skills, but how they promote their brand and how sellable their work is. The soundtrack of the show is generic, but lyrically focused on wealth and success, and the much-ballyhooed globe-trotting aspect — they’re in Paris! They’re in Tokyo! They’re in New York! — meaningless in any sense beyond offering tourist backdrops and lip-service to finding a global market.
The more you watch the show, the more obvious it is how gross it is; how disinterested it is in anything beyond promotion of a new Amazon product line and Amazon in general, no matter what. (While Heidi Klum had little credibility before this, I do feel the show humiliates Tim Gunn as he gets pulled into this promotional mess.) I watched the whole thing, utterly fascinated by the spectacle eating itself and how ultimately boring it turned out to be. Which, I guess, makes me the problem, doesn’t it?