She looks like the real thing

When I was in college decades ago, I went to a strip club for the first time. I was with a guy. I went to prove how much I didn’t care.

Even better than the real thing was playing and a woman wearing thin strips of blue cloth danced on stage.

I’ve been thinking a lot about real things lately. Their simultaneous promise and impossibility. Each part of me, real to the touch; impossible to understand.

You?

Who will watch over us when we’re dead

In the latest episode of talking to myself on Twitter, I ranted about FB’s algorithm banning me from posting kaukauchronicles.org URLs to my group named Kau Kau Chronicles. The group is described as "A place to talk about recipes posted to kaukauchronicles.org.” The algorithm calls my post spam and gives me a choice of two radio buttons: I agree or I disagree. Disagreement is futile. There’s no human, who would likely see the error, to appeal to.

So, I asked this question of Twitter: Can AI be any smarter than its creator?

I received several replies—from bots that were clearly bots, phishing for personal data. So I think I received my answer.

I realized that I was working under a flawed assumption. I thought that for AI to take over, it needed to be smarter than us. And by smarter, I meant, have a capacity for humanity.

I realized that we're already living under the control of inhumane AI. Each time it touches us, we beg it for an empathy that it's incapable of. And in that repeated act, we become less and less human.

Crystal Body, Crystal Eyes

Dennis and I are enjoying these collaborations. I create a collage. He creates text and adds it to the collage. I add pastels, watercolors, and erasure tape. ❤️

Every time I draw or paint, I can’t help but remember doing a charcoal drawing of some bell peppers for a class in college. The professor was so frustrated by what I was doing, she grabbed the charcoal out of my hand, “fixed” my drawing, and said, “See? Why can’t you do that?” The story is layered. I stuck out like a powerless blue-collar sore thumb in that class. Her son was held hostage somewhere in the Middle East.

For me, art was and still is, about revelation, not perfection. If I wanted to look at some perfect bell peppers, I’d just look at some fucking bell peppers.

IN ASHES

Dennis and I collaborated on this one. ❤️

When I first started cutting out images for collages, I feared it. The ultrasharp x-acto knife and the way it slowly dulls itself just by cutting paper. I hated the precision required. You have only one chance to cut out this amazing spoon—don’t fuck it up! After taking a collage workshop, I learned to keep my eye not on where the blade is, but rather, on where I want it to go. Reminds me of being a Denny’s server years ago. To avoid spilling coffee from the six mugs on your tray as you walk them over to a table at the far end of the restaurant, don’t look at the mugs. Collaging has helped me to look, not look, and practice losing precious things. This last one is especially important these days.

Te 5 / Hand Five

I’ve had this book called “Geisha” for several years. I bought it in the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble. It is full of photos and paintings of geishas doing geisha things.

What does it mean for a book on geishas to be in a bargain bin at a chain bookstore in America?

Over the years, I’ve cut up pages in the book to do a lot of erasure poetry and collages. As annoyed as I am about the existence of coffee table books about geishas and the fetish-driven myths they enable, I guess the book has given me a lot.

I work well when given something to resist. Thanks Geishas.

Giving in to maximalism

All my life, I’ve battled what I call maximalism.

The “too much-ism” of everything I choose I do. You feel too much. You think too much. You eat too much. Pull back on the language. Lighten up on the brush.

Settle down, you.

I can’t stop at just a little bit. I need to go to the place just beyond enough, where possibilities have been exhausted. In that place, I often find truth.

I’ve learned to self-censor and it keeps me from doing the thing I love most: creating.

No more, okay?