On Time-Traveler Style

Yesterday’s New York Times men’s fashion supplement is what was on my mind first thing this morning.

I’d let it sit there next to the sports and privileged-people-getting-married sections for a full nine hours after I brought in the Sunday paper. But then, over a late lunch, I decided to get on with it; my twice-yearly men’s supplement ritual: A slow leafing through every page and seeing how many times I can genuinely say “Oh, hell, no!” at whatever is before me. This time, as every time, it’s easier to say how many times I didn’t make this pronouncement: Yesterday, Spring 2017 yielded 12 instances. That is to say, out of perhaps 1,000 pieces of displayed men’s fashion, there were a dozen that, squinting hard, I could maybe—maybe—see me wearing.

And so this morning I was thinking about what this biannual ritual says about me. First and foremost, of course, it demonstrates how much I hate fashion. But that’s a deceptive statement—it suggests that I walk around in ill-fitting clothes that are haphazardly thrown together. Because for most people, fashion equals style. Except that it doesn’t.

Know this about me—my clothes are not fashionable, but they are stylish. Know this too: I was a pioneer of Normcore three decades before Normcore even had a name. In the world of clothing, this is my only claim to fame. And lastly, I’m also a devout believer in style uniforms: find a look that works for you and, well, never change it. Andy Warhol understood the branding benefit and daily efficiency of this strategy and so do I.

For instance, take my writerly workdays: I favor jeans, Oxford cloth shirts with the sleeves rolled up and deck shoes. If it’s winter, I’ll drape a crewneck sweater over my shoulders. On days that I’m feeling wild and crazy. the Oxford cloth will be replaced with a Lacoste-style polo shirt. End of my “fashion” statement. And, yes, it’s been this way since 1975 or so.

There is, however, another unplanned level to my personal style—something which didn’t occur to me until years into wearing my work-day uniform: It is the perfect apparel for time-traveling:

My crewneck sweaters trace their origin back to 1920, when Benjamin Russell Jr invented the crewneck sweatshirt.

My Brook Brothers button-down Oxford cloth shirts (confusing called the Original Polo Shirt—because that’s exactly why they were invented), trace their nearly unchanged lineage back to 1896.

Lascoste-style tennis shirts were created in 1933 by Rene Lacoste.

My Levi original 501 button-fly jeans were introduced in 1927.

And my Sperry Gold Cup Topsider deck shoes have a similarly unchanged ancestry that extends back to 1935.

In all of these cases, the styles have changed only slightly since their years of their introduction. At this juncture, someone else might go on a tangent about a wardrobe built of iconic American classic apparel. But not me.

What I see is the ability to be dropped anywhere in the last 100 years—especially in America—and instantly blend in: to be as invisible in 1920, 1930 and 1940 and as I have been in 1980, 1990 and the 2000s. Even my unchanging haircut is unintentionally smudgy in terms of decades: not too short, not too long, not bohemian, but not Regular Guy. This realization makes me yearn for a time machine because I’m eager to test my theory.

So that’s the story me and unfashionability. No, NYT men’s fashion supplement, I will not be wearing the angry-elephant print man-purse or the just-like-SNL-Stefon striped, baggy shirt or the pink checked cloth A-line overcoat or the silk jump suit with the single, massive flap pocket in front so—I assume—my dick has access to my iPad while I’m walking. Nope, nope, nope and definitely nope.

But what I could be doing, with an assist from Time Lord technology, is effortlessly and without attention striding through the last ten decades in my dull and boring style uniform that’s more effective than the latest military breakthroughs in camouflage design.

I’m very okay with this—in fact, I think it’s kind of cool.

On A Writer’s Workflow

I woke this morning thinking about my workflow. Oh, wipe that pitying expression off your face—yes, you; you in the back. I know what you’re thinking—I’m one life short of a life.

But you would be wrong. I am currently writing a novel and The Workflow is everything. The Workflow giveth and The Workflow taketh away. The Workflow makes me lie down in green pastures and The Workflow leads me beside quiet waters. And Lo, though I stumble through the valley of the shadow of The Endless Novel, I shall not fear because I have The Fucking Workflow.

So yeah, it’s that important, and as a result I find myself regularly thinking about it. Sometimes it has to fixed because of updates to the constituent apps that comprise it. Sometimes it needs to be improved (Paste app, meet Ulysses, my writing app—I know you two are really going to get on!) And sometimes it simply needs to be revisited because my book on an essential level is the workflow in the same way we are what we eat.

The workflow is so critical to what I do that I have three Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ notebooks filled with entries dedicated to it. But let’s pause here because the notebooks are also part of the workflow—the headwaters as it were. Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ is the notebook of the gods—durable and with a light gray dot-graph pattern on its pages, making it perfect for capturing ideas and, if need be, visualizing them. I go through the notebooks at the rate of six a month. I write in them with two Uni Kuru Toga .05 mechanical pencils—the plastic model when out and about and the gunmetal Roulette version when I’m at my desk. The Kuru Togas are self-sharpening with use which, of course, makes them mechanical pencils of the gods. And lastly on-the-fly rethinking is made possible with a white Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser that doesn’t shed and folds into it own protective housing—making it, yes, the eraser of the gods.

I’ve geeked out on the above details to illustrate how much thought goes into a great workflow. The notebook/pencil/eraser combination above is not expensive—far from it. But they’ve been meticulously chosen to work well with each other—so well (and this is the most important thing, this is everything), they completely disappear as tools. When I have an idea, I capture it. The end. The Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’, the Uni Kuru Toga and the Staedtler eraser are utterly transparent to me. The work simply—wait for it—flows through them.

But as is the case with anything in life that is seemingly effortless, a lot of work went into achieving the lack of friction. The approximate $22.00 investment represented by my notebook, pencil and eraser ($26.00 if you throw in some additional leads for the pencil) is paltry. The availability of all three is wide—five minutes on Amazon and you’re all set. But getting there—ferreting out those three models and field-testing each one and then experimenting with combining notebooks with pencils and determining the best eraser for the finalists was a bitch; a genuine pain-in-the-ass.

But it was worth it in the end. Now when I’m capturing an idea, I’m thinking only about the idea and not worrying about the pencil smudging on the notebook paper, the lead breaking or that I can’t cleanly erase something. Transparency. It’s the same reason I’ve always used Apple products—they’re designed to be tools to an end and not an end (and thus stumbling block) in themselves.

And yes, you can kill creativity by overthinking things, but the selective overthinking of the critical channelling of creativity—The Workflow, Praise Be it—only pays dividends down the road.

Here endeth the sermon. If I’m so inclined, I may in the future describe the software side.

On Sinister Spring

In cybernetics, the term valley of the uncanny is used to describe the unease we feel when confronted by current proof-of-concept androids. No matter how meticulously they’re designed, no matter how many separate servo-controlled facial movements they’re capable of, we sense there’s something wrong. Not a doll but also not living: instead, something not-quite-human and, well, disquieting.

That’s the way I feel about late winter, 2017. I live in Greater Washington, DC, and since mid-February something that’s not-quite-spring has been creeping across the winter landscape. And while I’ve taken advantage of the phenomenon by having a beer outside with my sleeves rolled up to better feel the warm breeze, I feel the aforementioned disquiet.

This is not spring, no matter how much it looks like it. To accept its invitation requires me to first cross the valley of the uncanny—which I can’t, no matter how hard I try.

To be clear, we’re not talking here about the simply unseasonable. No, this is full-bore fake spring made a little sinister by the occasional snow shower that dusts the fully blooming ornamental trees in my neighborhood. The massive weeping cherry in my front yard is covered in pink blossoms. The day lilies are already six inches tall, the rose bushes are filling-in with new leaves, the tulip tree next door has flowered, the forsythia in the backyard is golden-yellow and the tulips are well above ground.

Only the dogwoods remain suspicious and resolutely tight-budded—which describes my own reaction to this mutant period. I woke this morning thinking that this must be what it feels like to live in a simulation: the details are all there, but the context is off (a glitch in the Matrix?) and the whole thing feels academic rather than emotional.

Case in point: There are no song birds—like me, they have resisted the temptation to treat this seeming season as the real thing. And, I think, for good reason. Whatever this flowering, grass-growing, shirt-sleeve interlude is, it sure as hell is not spring and, like the Trump Administration, I refuse to normalize it. Sinister Spring deserves its own kind of resistance.

On Third Acts: A Sniffling Consideration

The final scene of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid takes place in a Bolivian stable surrounded by dozens of soldiers ready to shoot Butch and Sundance on sight:

Sundance Kid: “It’s your great ideas that got us into this mess. I never want to hear another one of your great ideas. Ever!”

Butch Cassidy: “Australia. I thought that secretly you wanted to know so I told you.”

Sundance Kid: “That’s your great idea?”

Butch Cassidy: “The latest in a long line. We get out of here alive, we go to Australia. Goodbye, Bolivia. Hello to Australia.”

And then just before they run out of the stable to certain death:

Butch Cassidy: “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t see Lefors out there, did you?”

Sundance Kid: “Lefors? No.”

Butch Cassidy: “Oh, good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

Among other things, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is about the relentless march of time—bicycles replacing horses, bank security improving, law enforcement getting more sophisticated. And it’s also about optimism when surrounded not by Bolivian soldiers, but by time closing in : Australia—hell, yeah!

Then there’s that last moment—the end comes when you’re not expecting it, from an unforeseen direction and despite all of your planning . . .

I woke up this morning thinking about this because I’m in the middle of a new round of king-hell bronchitis—the fourth bout this year. And the bronchitis is an uncomfortable subset of a larger run of less-than-optimum health that’s extended over the past 12 months or so.

This is new territory for me. My health throughout my life has been robust. (I’ve always wanted to say that in context.) And further, I recognize that most of the problems have been bits of me beginning to wear out. I am, after all, officially A Man Of A Certain Age.

But if not Peter Pan, I’ve got a lot of Butch Cassidy in that stable in me as I confront these shifting circumstances: Australia—hell, yeah! The recent string of health glitches have reminded me that, like it or not, it’s finally here—My Third Fucking Act. And the question now becomes what to do with what’s unavoidably become a finite resource—time. What precisely is my bespoke version of Australia? And further, how can I ensure that it’ll fully be Hell, yeah!

This situation is complicated by the other lesson of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid—it’s never Lefors who gets you, it’s the Bolivian Army. As I’m busy constructing My Private Australia, chances are good that a battalion of something dreadful will unexpectedly surround me.

The answer, of course, is the point of William Goldman’s screenplay—it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive. (Which, for the record, was said by Robert Louis Stevenson and not Buddha, thank you very much.)

And, yes, this is not a new problem—merely a problem that’s new to me. I’ll have a mope, cough my way through my work day, kill a couple boxes of Kleenex, have precisely one Laphroaig too many tonight and then, tomorrow, begin to fill a new notebook with ideas about My Third Fucking Act. I think I’m gonna need a big production number there.

On The Cultural Divide: Exactly Whose Bubble?

Okay, so this is on my mind this morning: Real America. The thing that’s evoked when certain people talk about why Clinton lost and why Trump won. The thing certain people slap down on the table whenever Democrats are discussed vis a vis Republicans. The thing that certain people always bring up in discussions of the Rust Belt decline. You know—Real America.

It’s not so much shorthand as an impossibly dense, collapsed star. The term simultaneously refers to politics, elections, economics, religion and cultural values.

Real America—there’s just so damn much to unpack there, but what I woke up thinking about is the Real descriptor. Because the implication is that whatever falls outside of it is, well, unreal. In this, it’s similar to the conceptual Jiu Jitsu of Pro Life: because if you’re not “for” life, then you’re, well . . .

Thus it only seems fair to give Real America a reality check: exactly how connected to, er, the real world are its bundled assumptions?

Is there any sort of credible evidence that steel manufacturing and coal mining will not only return, but somehow return intact in all their respective mid-20th-Century glories?

Is there any credible evidence that the relentless advance of automation and its attendant disintermediation will slow, much less reverse? Automation destroyed manual manufacturing first, but it’s also disintermediated publishing, animation, the Media, the US Postal Service and consumer purchases.

Is there any credible evidence that the elevation of ignorance and anti-expertise is in any way a good thing? When you need to have a brain tumor removed, do you want a business tycoon or a deeply knowledgeable surgeon at the other end of the scalpel? When you remodel a bathroom, do you turn to Fred, the accountant, who has never built anything at all, ever, but who has a real passion for the idea of building—or do you call an experienced contractor with references? Or, say, you find yourself 30,000 feet in the air, cruising at 350 miles an hour—who do you want in the cockpit: a model plane enthusiast or, you know, a pilot? When confronted by complex, potentially life-or-death jobs, who in the real world reaches for the ignorant, non-expert? You don’t and I don’t.

Is there any credible evidence that making the freedom to own a gun so absolute that potential terrorists and the insane have equal access to weapons is working out splendidly? Mass shooting and gun death statistics resoundingly say no.

Is there any credible evidence that who someone else is having sexual relations with is in any way a threat to your own sexuality, relationship or marriage? Would it be rational to say, “Oh my god—the folks in the house three doors down painted their bedroom the worst shade of blue, and now my own interior decoration is completely invalidated.”

Is there any credible evidence that the interconnectedness of the world will somehow be arrested, much less rolled back? You have a smartphone made in China with apps possibly developed in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere. So nationalize the manufacture of your phone and the development of said apps—are they still affordable? The point being we all want relatively inexpensive consumer goods—which is a direct consequence of an interconnected global market. And if people are now bitching about an increase in their ACA premiums, wait until they’re confronted with a now $1500 replacement for their old phone.

Bottom line, or rather, top-line question: just how much actual reality in contained in Real America? Like Pro Life, the name has been chosen in attempt to make the contained assumptions unquestionable. But they can be questioned, and are—every day, every week, every year by just moving through life. The grim and brutal reality is that if your steel mill has been gone for the past 20 years, there is probably no chance of it suddenly materializing again at the same convenient distance of your old commute. It’s a simple, nearly irrefutable fact.

I’d be less annoyed with the Real America moniker if it were more accurate—something along the lines of Aspirational Time-Traveling America, because in end all of the politics, elections, economics, religion and cultural values currently packed into Real America comes down to this: a genuine desire to live in the United States circa 1902.

If this were 1902, almost all the frustrations of Real America instantly go away. But exactly how grounded in reality is a regional desire to live 115 years ago? As someone who lives in Unreal America, I’m simply not sure if I need to make wholesale political accommodations for this point of view—it’s Amish-quaint at best and cult-delusional at worst.

On ‘Moonlight’ As Cinematic Nexus

A few thoughts on the other side of last night’s Academy Awards. Moonlight, my favorite film of the year, remarkably got most of the honor it deserved. Remarkable because over the last 20 years or so, the Academy Awards and I have increasingly parted ways regarding quality cinema.

This morning I pondered exactly what it was about Moonlight that was so deeply satisfying. My answer—and yours most likely will differ—is that the film represents a near-perfect meshing of dialogue with the visual. Put another way, it is a breathtaking example of the writing axiom “Show, don’t tell”—a dictate that, weirdly, is often ignored in mainstream filmmaking.

You can’t just listen to Moonlight to appreciate it, nor can you just settle back and watch it. It seems so simple, doesn’t? Mainstream film as the equal meeting, contrasting and melding of words and images. So why does it happen so infrequently?

Way too often—even now in the early 21st century—what mainstream movies are serving up is either an illustrated radio drama or compositions with with discrete commentary, as if we’ve opted for the audio tour of an art exhibition.

I’m looking at you, Aaron Sorkin—and you, too, Terrence Malick.

Sorkin personifies the exposition-as-dialogue school of film. His characters have no inner life, only a series of nonstop monologues about what’s they’re thinking and what that may mean for you, the other characters and them. And when they’re not talking about themselves, they’re opining on the metaphoric significance of their situations.

Malick quite simply wants to be a painter—and that’s very cool, except that he’s a filmmaker. Take Sorkin, turn him inside out, and you’ve got Malick.

In retrospect, this explains much of my hatred of superhero movies and the films of Woody Allen: For me, both are the worst of cinematic worlds—exposition-as-dialogue surrounded by singleminded and clinically astonishing and / or pretty visuals. Blatancy inside of blatancy, like the motion picture equivalent of Russian dolls.

Moonlight, on the other hand, got the balance exactly right. Evocative, dialogue by characters struggling to in some way articulate what’s going on in their heads met cinematography that wordlessly deepened the narrative even as it helped advance it. And thus Moonlight was robbed when La La Land won the Oscar for best cinematography because the visuals of La La Land were Prettified Blatancy, even in the context of film musicals—and most especially when compared to the roving, observing camerawork in Moonlight.

But on the other hand, Moonlight taking home the best picture Oscar has given me a tiny bit of hope that maybe, fingers crossed, Hollywood’s implacable desire to replicate successes will look beyond the coming-of-age take or even the African-American cinema peg and understand that the perfect meshing of dialogue and visuals is the main source of the film’s greatness.

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On Starting: Tap-Tap-Tap: Can You Hear Me?

Testing, testing, testing . . .

Can you hear me way at the back? How about over there on the side?

Good. Then we can proceed.

So right at the top, let’s talk concept and ponder differences.

This is intended to be a daily journal–a first-thing-in-the-morning affair, banged-out with a cup of coffee before the real work day begins. It’s less diary than a virtual commonplace book written as much for me as any public that may be out there looking over my shoulder.

And because it’s a side venture that I see more as notes than entertainment, the posts will mostly be (by necessity) first drafts–checked for typos (sorta/kinda), but not reworked into Shining Presentable Things that you can take home to the parents with no fear of disapproval–at least in terms of the prose-craft. See PixelSlinger as live-in-studio jazz: full of improvisation, instantly integrated mistakes and unexpected solos.

I’m the proprietor of CultureHack, Turbulent Indigo and a couple of respectively related Twitter accounts. PixelSlinger is Another Thing Entirely because it won’t regularly feature photos or excerpts from a novel-in-progress or political essays or media critiques or humorous essays.

Regularly–that’s the functional word here. Because on occasion, one or more of the above may pop up here–but, and this is important, only in the context of what the free-associative-tide of a particular day washed up. The intention of PixelSlinger is to be a random capture of things on my mind at the moment–stuff that currently hasn’t found a home over at the other two blogs and Twitter accounts.

As such, I expect this to be an unruly place with few neat content silos. I also predict that the lengths of the posts here will vary wildly. I’ll try to write pieces that take no more than 30 minutes to lash-together (because Real Work awaits), but I also envision that if I have something concise to say about an obsession du jour and can capture it in a single paragraph, that’s what I’ll do. Why waste your time or mine?

Given all this, the categories on this site will be based on type rather than topic. If I have topical baskets waiting there in the sidebar, I’ll probably feel obligated to fill them, however irregularly. And that would defeat the purpose of this place. Thus, you’ll find no “Art” or “Film”or “Society” categories here. But almost certainly you’ll come across posts about art and film and society–as they suggest themselves to me; as they inevitably have their turns as obsessions du jour. For the purposes of site search, I foresee creating a consistent keyword system for this site that will add the needed granularity while keeping the categories as broad as possible. Think variation of our old friend the hashtag.

Okay, that’s it. The launch and the premise set-up. We’re good to go. I’ll leave this post pinned to the front page for a few weeks so late-comers will understand what’s going on here.

See you tomorrow morning.