Weeknotes wb 26 August 2024

September has always been the pivot on which the year turns. My birthday is in a couple of days and, as a child, it would be the signal that the return to school would shortly follow (though in those days, the start of school seemed to be about a week after my birthday). And here we are at another turn.

Doing (Done?)

An odd week where I lost track of things towards the end. Our children are back to school from Monday so there’s a mix of last-minute preparations and a sense of anticipating the change of pace from the summer. I’m losing days to nothing (or, at least, that’s how it feels) where the unstructured nature of the summer collapses into entropy. I know that I’m best – or feel more productive – when I plan my days with a greater sense of intention.

Still making and beginning to paint my Black Templar combat patrol. Luckily, Soren has a gadget that lets you spray paint the base coats of multiple miniatures at a time. I still can’t get over how long it takes to clip, construct and glue the figures. Things are taking longer as I’m painting the bases separately and also tiny parts of each miniatures like arms and tabards which just makes everything take longer.

Reading (fiction)

• Still reading Nicholas Nickleby.

Reading (non-fiction)

• Still reading Uniquely Human.
• Started Sinister Forces Book One: The Nine by Peter Levenda.

Reading (comics)

• 2000AD #2397 – All excellent (though I’m sure that there’s a page with the text missing in Brink.)
• X-Men #3 – Terrible cover (for some reason going for humour). There’s a 90s vibe about X-Men that I’m not sure I’m into. Not that much happens.
• The Nice House by the Sea #2 – Post-apocalyptic sequel to TheNice House by the Lake which turned out to be a daring and original take on survivors of an alien invasion.
• William of Newbury #4 – Fantastic. Cross between Mignola, Peterson and Eco.
• X-Force #2 – Unlike the first issue (and the latest X-Men), I enjoyed this. X-Force break into Wakanda.

Reading (online)

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang

Chiang draws attention to the limitations of AI generated “art” and neatly counters the boasts made about LLMs. Chiang draws on the definition of skill and intelligence made by computer scientist François Chollet (“skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills”) and suggests that “art is something that results from making a lot of choices” and that while AI can make (unintelligent) choices, it lacks a communicative nature because

any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it.

And goes on:

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

to conclude:

Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Nathan Ballingrud

I had no idea that Nathan Ballingrud’s new novel, Crypt of the Moon Spider, had been released until I read this interview with him. Ballingrud describes the novel – the first of a trilogy – as “lunar gothic” and describes being in a “retro space fantasy phase”. The most interesting aspect of the intervew is Ballingrud’s insistency of the psychological and fantastical nature of the the new novel:

Once I introduce an explanation for why there is air on the moon, as well as forests and spiders, everything else will want an explanation, too. And I don’t care about the science of it. In fact, the science is not only not the point, it’s antithetical to the point. Gothic fiction is psychological. Pulp fiction is (usually) fantastical. The only logic this story wants or needs is that of the nightmare and the penny dreadful. Any concern for scientific plausibility undercuts the whole enterprise.

Oasis

I read lots of slop this week about the Oasis reunion. Lots of it involved struggling to come to terms with why the reunion has made such cultural noise in the UK and seems to have excited so many people, including youngsters who may not have even been born during the band’s heyday. There were commentators like Simon Price (Stop the celebrations – Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history) who attacks the Gallagher brothers as being socially regressive and argues that

The Gallaghers’ knuckle-dragging ideas on sexuality and politics arguably shouldn’t matter. We’re all familiar with the concept of separating the art from the artist, though everyone’s mileage varies on where to set the line in the sand. But the art needs to at least be good. Oasis, memorably described by the late great Neil Kulkarni as the “English Rock Defence League”, offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.

Simon Reynolds (hyperstOasis) is a little less acerbic but condemns the band for being uninterested in music beyond their narrow, Beatles-infatuated groove:

Not that I’ve read every, or even many, interviews with Oasis but I’ve never seen an indication they are interested in anything at all apart from music – and even then only an extremely narrow furrow of canonical rock-as-it’s-supposed-to-be.

Reynolds does praise Liam and Noel for a handful of songs which capture “the invincibility of youth”:

On some visit to England many years later, when I’d been sent to do a story so I was staying in some fairly central hotel, I was woken by the sound of a drunken bloke hollering the chorus to himself as he staggered along the street below  Yes, I thought: it’s a song purpose-built for those times you are so so wrecked and you feel like no one else in the entire world is having this much fun.  A song for people who say things like “we are such fuckin’ legends” …. as they engage in the standard excesses… the stuff that people do each and every weekend…  that are being replicated all over the country at that very moment.

Matt Colquhoun (The Reurn of Oasis) laments that “Time is and remains a flat circle for British rock’n’roll” and quotes Mark Fisher’s withering observation of the timeless depthlessness of contemporary music from 90s on and

I mean Oasis could have existed in 1980 more or less, but they would have been like fourth on the bill in a small pub. There just wasn’t that level of tolerance for ’60s throwbacks at that time. There was a sense of historical narrative and a sense of time having moved on. But time since the ’90s has got increasingly flattened out, such that exactly that kind of phenomenon can happen.

Stewart Lee (Oasis: a guilty pleasure without fringe benefits) draws on the reunion to explore his thoughts about bands getting back together in general and laughs at “Oasis [being] a guilty pleasure for a pseudo-intellectual like me”:

Oasis, who 30 years ago represented a kind of condensed nostalgia for the previous quarter-century of British rock, are re-forming. The cocaine dealers of Britain are already putting in advance orders so thousands of middle-aged men can stand in stadiums next summer bellowing trivial conversations about fuck all at each other all through the gigs they’ve paid hundreds of pounds to touts to attend. The trail of dead South American drug war casualties will stretch all the way from Heaton Park to Pablo Escobar’s ruined hippo enclosure. All the same, I wish I was going.

Barbara Ellen (Oasis are back. So why all the hatred?) celebrates their return and explores what it is about the band that causes them to be reviled by many commentators. Ellen sees it as a form of snobbish, class hatred:

Only Oasis have provoked such polarised (love/hate) reactions, including retrospective condemnation of their domination of 90s music culture. For some, Oasis were beyond a band, they were tantamount to Big Parka, presiding over a climate of stifled creativity, conservatism, and such socio-political atrophy it facilitated flag-waving nationalism. It’s this sort of charge that makes me think, woah, let’s slow down. There’s nothing wrong with being partisan, even a cultural snob: for music journalists, it’s the actual job, and it’s only right everyone else gets to join in. But this feels different: sharper, nastier, uglier. At moments, it’s felt genuinely shocking: like undiluted class hatred.

For me, I think the interest is much the same as that (on a much smaller scale) of Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre back in the late 90s. It’s the perverse fascination in watching musicians self-destruct. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the bookies have bets on at what point over the next 18 months Liam and Noel feud and Oasis breaks up again.

Viewing (Viewed?)

• Longlegs – First half of this movie is engaging enough: a rookie FBI agent appears to have psychic powers that enable her to track down a serial killer. The second half leans into a weird supernatural involving dolls, large ball-bearings and Satan. Nicholas Cage is awfully good as the bizarre Longlegs.
• The Red King – 6 part British tv mini-series about a rigid detective sergeant who is reassigned to St. Jorys,  a small island community off the Welsh coast who investigates a missing boy. It’s melodramatic and plays on folk-horror tropes (but stays away from anything supernatural). Anjli Mohindra and Mark Lewis Jones are both great in their roles. There is a sub-plot about a DCI homicide investigator who undermines the investigation and appears to be part of the cult on the island – but isn’t resolved and only explained in a throwaway line by a senior police officer at the end about cultist infiltrating organisations on the mainland. Perhaps it’s deliberately unresolved to allow the possibility of a second series.
• Jordskott – I watched the first few episodes of this 2015 Swedish tv series about missing children and something mysterious in the woods.

Listening (music)

• Magazine – mostly their Secondhand Daylight album.
• A Grand Stream by Smote – droning psychedelic. Powerful.
• Ritual by Jon Hopkins – Unexpectdly gentle ambient.

Listening (podcasts)

• The Department of Midnight #2 – Ellis is doing a “a tour of gothic horror subgenres” in this audio drama and this one is both a story of possession and an interrogation. I enjoyed it more than the first episode.
• Word in Your Ear podcast – episode chatted about Oasis and band reunions in general.