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Listening to this well-done episode of the Conspirituality podcast about RFK Jr. and how he's managed to unify New-Age-flavored apocalypticism with nostalgia for an idealized America, I suddenly realized where that kind of thing is so familiar to me from: The X-Files! Specifically the less good parts of the show, usually written by Chris Carter, where:

1. we find out once again that we're utterly screwed because the conspiracy of aliens and federal dudes (and the UN) has been controlling everything for our whole lives, and all kinds of medicine and technology that we take for granted are part of this scheme, and every kind of authority is totally corrupt, and everyone who finds out about any of this will almost immediately get killed;

2. but then Agent Mulder finds some evidence, and at the end of the episode he testifies in a hearing where he goes on and on trying to sound like Kevin Costner in JFK, and unfortunately he can't really show any proof just yet, and they're all against him anyway, but they'll never get around to actually shutting him up or killing him, and ultimately if he can just get The Truth and get the truth Out There, then... I guess the system will work and the villains will be fired or arrested or something, and then it'll be like the good old days before the villains took over, some time in the 1950s or 60s.

I mean, ultimately Mulder is a simple guy who just wants people to be honest and also enjoys finding out about weird monsters, and he has to believe that America basically works because otherwise there's no point in him working for the FBI and testifying in hearings. But the story also requires this massive level of world-crushing evil that can't be reconciled with that at all. Similarly, RFK Jr. will go on about how the vaccine brainwashing conspiracy has almost totally destroyed freedom and poisoned us all... and then he'll say that all we really need to do is elect a guy who's "not afraid to ask questions" etc., and then it'll be like the good old days when America didn't have terrible problems (or at least not the kind of problems that RFK Jr. cares about), some time in the 1950s or 1960s. Is Chris Carter writing his campaign?!

There's a specific Kennedy connection too, because in the X-Files episode where we get the life story of the main villain in the conspiracy, the biggest revelation isn't that he did all this alien coverup stuff—it's that he shot JFK. And it's the most simple-minded version of the assassination legend from a liberal angle, where Kennedy had to be killed not because of the aliens or the Mafia, but because he was supposedly thinking about de-escalating the Vietnam War and the Cold War. (The same villain also shoots Martin Luther King, after explaining that the conspiracy's problem with him isn't actually about civil rights, it's about the Vietnam War. Because what really mattered in US history, in this version of "where did we go wrong", was Vietnam and JFK.)

Of course, since that episode is written by Glen Morgan and not Chris Carter, it's actually enjoyable and more funny than preachy. But it still fits with the show's idealization of the past, which also fits with RFK Jr.'s worshipful treatment of his uncle and his dad as the two guys who would've saved America, if only.

Not sure anybody is reading this, but just FYI, the reason there hasn't been much here for a while except Letterboxd movie review links isn't because I stopped writing anything else. It's because most of what I've written in the last year is theater/performance art material for the San Francisco Neo-Futurists.

The SF Neos are a relatively recent (10 years) offshoot of the original Chicago company that's now 35 years old, by way of the New York sister group. Pretty much everyone in Chicago knows what that is, but I haven't spent much time in Chicago and so I only found out about it when I had the great good luck to meet Dave Awl and Diana Slickman in 2005. I could see immediately that this was something I needed in my life, so it was pretty exciting when the SF group started in 2013, and I became a loyal fan to a possibly annoying degree, and unsuccessfully auditioned for them early on. More recently I did some work for them as a theater tech, and then last year I finally got my nerve up to audition again and got in. It's been pretty great, not just in general because I'd been itching to perform more after many years of not pursuing theater, but also because I specifically love this group and their work.

But, being theater, it's mostly ephemeral work. I might post some of my own short pieces online at some point, and maybe one day we'll do a big book like the ones Dave and Diana did, but right now I'm content to have a couple of them in the little anthology chapbook/zine that we publish every year. The 2022 chapbook (which also includes a bunch of little drawings I did) is available at the merch table at our shows; people in Chicago may also find one at Quimby's.

There are various comics projects that I keep working on very slowly, and this year I printed a few small zine/minicomic things, like this and this and this.

White Christmas (1954, **½), Babylon (2022, ****), "Battleground" (Nightmares & Dreamscapes) (2006, ****), The Stepfather (1987, ***½), Spring (2014, ***), Resolution (2012, ****), M3GAN (2023, ***½), The Black Phone (2021, ***), A View to a Kill (1985, ***), West Side Story (1961, ****), PlayTime (1967, *****), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, **½), A Mighty Wind (2003, ****)

Color Out of Space (2019, ***), Hellraiser (1987, ***½), Hellraiser (2022, ***½), The Night Manager (2016, ***½), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022, ***½), Breathless (1960, ****½)

This piece about the apocalyptic consequences of AI art is just one of about 1000 pieces on that theme that I've read lately, which are all 1. basically the same and 2. an understandable feeling. And I'm terrible at predicting the future, so I can't say they're wrong. But I do think it's worth mentioning that "will professional illustrators have even more trouble finding work than they already do" is not the same question as "will the whole field of visual art produced by human beings die, because AI art is just as good and everyone will be happy with nothing but that."

Computer text-to-speech technology is now very good, and as a result, there's much less paid work for human beings to record train announcements, telemarketing scams, etc. It's also not very hard to know that what you're hearing is a computer voice; even though there's also technology that can fake a more expressive result (with a very similar approach to AI visual art, that is, imitating existing human samples), if the only goal is "make this text audible" most companies have no reason to bother with that. So, there is and will continue to be a lot of audio material that sounds pretty good and is also obviously a low-effort computer product— not unlike how it's pretty obvious when articles are using stock photos.

A counter-argument would be that the quality of AI visual art is just so much higher than those other things, and indistinguishable from human art— I mean, look at it! But I think that's strongly colored by the novelty effect. We're not used to seeing this stuff; once we're seeing it all the time, I think it's likely that we'll have a pretty good instinct for "yeah, that's another nice piece of AI art." And since the whole idea of this technology requires a large reference database of existing images from the Internet, this could go one of several ways depending on how that database is updated over time:

1. It gets updated very little, because people feel like the AI is already working great as is. So, AI art keeps on riffing on human-generated art that existed online in 2022, and after we've seen a million such riffs, it becomes an easily identifiable kind of thing. It won't be repetitive in the sense of always having the same ideas, since there is a chaotic element to the process, but its ideas about what things can look like won't really change.

2. It gets updated using newer material, but only human-generated newer material. But, if humans will in fact be making a lot less art because AIs are getting most of the work, this is pretty much the same as 1.

3. It gets updated using all of the material online, a lot of which is now AI art. That has the most potential to evolve into something we might call genuinely creative, but feeding on itself could also make it much more obvious that AI art is its own thing with its own weird ideas. People who are into that will be into it, and people who are into other kinds of things done by humans will be into those. And that's not necessarily either/or: that is, "guiding an AI to produce particular kinds of things it would be unlikely to do otherwise" will be an artistic skill humans can have.

I guess that's all a long-winded way of saying that I'm sure this technology will be a major cultural presence from now on, and it'll be another in a long line of developments that make it harder to make money as an artist, and unfortunately money is a major factor in what people do, but none of that has anything to do with killing the whole concept of people engaging in a kind of thing people have done for its own sake for as long as there have been people.

I fell behind on writing these, and I totally lost steam for writing about books (I did read some books), and I'll probably start to cut back on the quantity of movie pieces too because I'm busy writing for the San Francisco Neo-Futurists now. But here's a bunch of them from earlier.

The Batman (2022, ***½), Fortress (1992, ***½), The Artist (2011, ***½), Purple Rain (1984, ***), The Northman (2022, ****), Below the Surface (1920, ***), King of the Circus (1924, ****), Apart from You (1933, ***½), Salomé (1922, ****½), The Night House (2020, ***½), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925, ***), X (2022, ***½), Bringing Out the Dead (1999, ****), Catch Me If You Can (2002, ****), Dirty Dancing (1987, ***½)

The Invisibles volume 3 #8-5 (1999)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Sean Phillips/Jay Stephens

After the previous four issues kicked off with a sense of things potentially moving into some new configuration, this next stretch circles around in a holding pattern that doesn't give much of a hint as to where things are going. But it does at least give us some contemplative time with Edith, an interesting character who'd been sidelined a long time; I'd been missing her, and her cynical-but-gentle point of view is one that Morrison seems to understand the series really needs as a counterbalance to the manic ideological certainty of other characters. We've also been getting a somewhat mellower King Mob, but a mellower King Mob just comes across as one of Morrison's letter-column travelogue pieces and I've already read lots of those, whereas Edith taking one look at de Sade's grandiose "I'm creating a new sexual utopia that will solve all psychological and medical problems" schtick and basically going "whatever, bless his heart" is (for me at least) pretty satisfying.
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Before Sunrise (1995, ****), Spencer (2021, ****), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021, ***½), The Power of the Dog (2021, *****), Eternals (2021, ***½), The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, ***), Belle de Jour (1967, ****)

Movies: ParaNorman (2012, ***), Vamps (2012, **½), Doctor Sleep (2019, ****), Soul (2020, ***½), Cabaret (1972, ****½)

Books/comics: Bezkamp—Sattin/Hickman (2019), The Outsider—King (2018, ***), Psychological Warfare—Linebarger (1948, ****), Exhalation—Chiang (2019, ****)

Insomnia Collection, vol. 5, by various authors
full contents (19h 46m)
with: "The Privy Purse Expences of King Henry the Eighth, from November MDXXIX, to December MDXXXII", by Nicholas Harris Nicolas (1827) - text / audio (1h 3m)

LibriVox periodically puts out these "Insomnia Collection" anthologies, where volunteers are asked to submit any public-domain text of their choosing as long as it's (1) read in a soothing tone and (2) boring. As the title implies, they're meant to help you fall asleep. For my section, I randomly found a lengthy analysis of Henry VIII's account books by a British antiquarian of the Georgian era, and read the first hour or so of it. I can't tell you much about the other pieces in Insomnia Collection vol. 5, because I couldn't get through them, because they are boring, so I guess everyone did their jobs.
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