Notes from a Spring Chicken, with Hints of Positivity

The Apple Store is a kind of torture chamber in which I can smell the primroses of technology—enchantment and bewitchment, followed by misrepresentation, ineptness, and duplicity where we, the end users, are placed in a kind of purgatorial limbo by the late Steve Jobs or one of his replicants. And don’t forget the Genius Bar!

It’s a real racket, all right, but what are we to do?

I am trying to figure it out—the ‘deal’ made between tech (the latest model, Ai for instance) and the consumer: the promise of technology v. the reality of our ever-expanding capitalist universe…

…long discussion yesterday with Lucas R, a very good painter who’s also writing a book. He says he wants my help, so I try, quoting Pound: ‘The natural object is always the adequate symbol.’ Lucas ponders, thanks me; we conclude our conversation. I suppose I could have been more helpful, but I kept thinking as we talked of his paintings, and how he must include some of them in his book, that his paintings are so beautiful and need to be in the book he’s writing about the trip he took to Ukraine. But I re-think: a painter can’t possibly show what actually happened in the Ukraine, that’s not what I ask of a painting, and so the whole notion of what is a good painting and what isn’t dissolves.

Execution by nitrogen of a prisoner in Alabama; it’s news with a banjo on its knee, but the Supreme Court won’t touch it! Other old news: Trump loses lawsuit to a woman he abused and slandered. Suddenly perhaps, NOW WE LOVE OUR JUDGES!

My new friends down the street have invited me to dinner. It’s a very nice invitation, and I show up at their door promptly at 7 pm but their doorbell is hopeless. Finally, I’m buzzed in from above. We sit down and enjoy a meal together. Hot topics: is a cloud a puddle or is a puddle a cloud? Is zero the calmest number? Why is The Right turning the country inside out so that Everybody is against Everybody? Are trees for or against us?

I walk home from dinner. The hostess has wrapped up a plate of real San Francisco fog, a treat for me; I’ll put it in the fridge, then turn in.

Last thought: Man Ray, artist and photographer, much preferred not having his windows washed, wanting the pane of glass he’d take a photo through to show the dust, the grime, as it actually appeared, and not gussied up.