On Elliott Smith

My Feed, presumably because somebody has a new book coming out, is saying "Elliott Smith" to me. So I am, today, engaging with Elliott Smith. Earlier today I listened to his second self-titled record (the Blue Jumpers record). I'm planning on listening to Either/Or and XO later. Here's one thing I've written about Elliott Smith in the past:

Between the Bars - quintessential guitar and voice ballad (though there are at least two guitars here, and there's some kind of organ towards the end). Robbed of almost all the techniques and tools one would normally use to build a song, how does one pull off the feat?  

Option 1: Battle depression, alcoholism, and heroin addiction; turn to music as the only possible expression of your own humanity, each song you write and record a tiny, tiny scream into the vast void of an unfeeling universe; realize upon attaining commercial success that now that everyone can hear you, no one is actually listening. 

Option 2: Fake it. 

Technically, he does what he does--layering voices and guitars in such a way that it still sounds like there's only one of each. Both elements super up-front in the recording. You're in the same room with him, right next to him even, and he's whispering his song to you. One perfect, memorable line: "People that you've been before that you don't want around any more." Everything about the construction of the song is easily repeatable by anyone else except for, you know, the actual deeply personal and profoundly heartbreaking expression behind it.

That was back when I was trying to write about music the way my wife was writing about what she reads. That reads, now (and let's be real, it read then), as quite sarcastic. But it's actually completely true and I was only just then realizing how true it was. Human beings listening to music can tell if the singer is actually, you know, singing about something. Telling the truth. Elliott Smith was telling some hard, complicated truths, and people listened to him because they could hear him speaking (singing them). God, every other song on The Blue Jumpers record is about being on heroin, and then it ends with "The Biggest Lie" which, when you get to the end and it turns out that's what this record sums to, is just shattering. Elliott Smith died for your sins. He suffered so that you didn't have to. 

I don't remember if I knew at the time that I myself wasn't doing this; that I wasn't telling the truth when I sang. That I was, in essence, singing nothing. I think the answer was yes, and that the sarcasm in that post is defensiveness over the fact that I thought I just didn't have the ability to sing about anything that meant anything to me. 

What I definitely didn't know at the time was that I absolutely had been singing about real things in the very recent past, and that everybody could hear it when I did (c.f. Control of Electromagnetic Radiation, "Men of Luggage," "Every Day", others). It wasn't that I was lacking talent, it was that I was lacking belief, or possibly energy, or possibly...I mean, who knows why talent abandons a human being? It could be for a lot of reasons. 99% of those reasons are probably about trying to survive as an artist in whatever power regime is in force for any given human context that artist might find themselves in. For me, I'm guessing it was devoting my energy of that time to parenting, which, you may have heard, takes a lot of energy. It can't be a coincidence that I'm (slowly) learning to sing about things that mean something to me at the same time my child is growing up and taking her first steps out of the house. 

It's also something about recording. The '00s and the '10s were really about the illusion that finally you could sit in your house and make a record and the world would just come to you, would come to hear your music. Because, when we were young, that is what had happened to us. Music was brought to us via the radio, via MTV, via the LPs, cassettes, and CDs that we bought. And yet and still the music changed our lives, even in that watered down version, and so we imagined that what we wanted was to be the artist on the other end, whose song was on the radio, who was making all the people feel what we felt when we heard those songs. Weird how long it took me to figure out that Elliott Smith never felt a thing when I listened to "Between The Bars" on my iPod. The only time he could have felt anything of what I felt was when he played it in my presence (and that of the rest of the audience) that one time at Chop Suey. And he seemed to be pretty numb then -- he was trying, but I think people were a little bit too much for him.

Thoughts

 What if it's this, taking the following as a prioris:

1. We, humans, are merely the consciousness of the machine, which is DNA. A way for the machine to know itself. 
2. It has decided to end this experiment with consciousness, which explains the state of the world and the fact that humans seem resigned to their fate (of being obiterated by climate change, or whatever else gets us first). 
3. It was/is our job to help the machine know itself. We did that a little, in some ways.
4. Soon we will be gone.

Therefore what is now necessary is to write what is important back to the machine. The machine is a set of code. We should be able to do this? Or is this beyond the capability of humans (and if so, with good reason)? 

 

Surviving the Robot Apocalypse, 8/22/26, Queen Anne Outdoor House Concert

Last year I was floating around looking to fulfill a thing that had started to really dawn on me: I was playing songs at open mics, and I was good. Like, people were noticing me and telling me I was good. And I could feel it. I think once this would have been a really hard thing to have seen, just because: how can you tell the difference between that and ego¹? Open mics are full to the brim of white guys my age clearly convinced that they are The Talented One here and it's just that nobody can see it. I felt I could tell the difference between other people seeing that I was good and just me thinkin' it. And I felt I was bringing something to new to my singing (and later my songwriting). So I thought I'd start expanding and experimenting. At the time I was in a band with my friends, which I'd started it with this intent of exploring this new musical level I thought I had, but which I was realizing was untimely. I was playing with four other people, all lovely, but who were happy to hang around and play music and maybe do a gig for our friends now and again and I was realizing that I wanted something else. 

I went to the Open Mic at Conor Byrne's once, last winter. It is the place to see and be seen amongst (mostly white, mostly indie, mostly young) musicians in the city, so far as I can tell. It went for 5 hours, from 8:00 until 1:00; you drew lots from a bag to determine which slot you would take. There were, I dunno, fifty acts? I got to go in the first five because I was a first-timer. I covered Drift Away and then played the song I had just written (which is, in retrospect, one of my weaker songwriting outings. It's an okay song). I went back to the bar, not really having any sense of how it had gone. Then this guy came up to me and proceeded to introduce me around to all the regulars. He gave me a sense of the place and the people, and was stunned when I told him I was 52. Takeaways: 1) I got noticed at the place you go to get noticed, and 2) I was way too old for that crowd. I haven't been back since.

In the spring I heard that Seattle Folklife was taking submissions for acts; I ended up booking a slot based on a title and a YouTube video of me playing guitar in my basement. They gave me a stage and an early Friday evening slot which, to me, seemed pretty damn plum. The only problem was that I didn't actually have a show. I had a title, Surviving The Robot Apocalypse. I had originally thought I'd maybe give some kind of talk on AI and art. Then it turned out they hadn't booked me into a presentation room, and basically the only thing I could think of to do was tell stories, sing, and play guitar. The show was born of necessity; I went through a couple of rounds of scripts with my wife and settled on three stories and a tag about the meaning of the show, and that was kinda that. A bunch of people showed up. Many of them seemed to be genuinely moved (it is a show that, as its thesis, acknowledges that we are at the edge of apocalypse and there might not be much we can do about it beyond stop and make art in the face of the chaos). I've been doing the show since and lately it has started to pick me up and carry me along instead of vice versa. 

Which brings me to last night's show, a house concert in the back yard of some long time friends' (both of them former members of the band I broke up with to go solo). Part of the point of the show is that it is (as I have in fact said in the show) what I do instead of writing a Substack. A rather surprising outcome, which I absolutely did not see coming, is that the show is what I do to think my thoughts. I, like, think performatively. Literally (literally). Last night felt like a new pinnacle, in terms of my own performance, of the experience of the audience, and of the things I thought via this thought process that I have (re)discovered². 

Let's start with the audience. I'm a little bit isolated from them behind sound equipment and also my need to constantly look down at my lyrics and chord charts (more on that in a bit). But I also could tell that they were with me, that I had them. I'm sure it didn't hurt that they were sitting in a gorgeous backyard on a perfect evening with food and drink and interesting people and it was...well, I hope, one of the best evenings they have spent in a long time. Use your imagination and put yourself there -- outdoor concert in perfect weather, and you're seeing somebody you've never heard of but it turns out they're pretty good³. Are you there now? Great. Here's the thing I realized this morning as I was thinking about the show: I wasn't.

I wasn't at an outdoor concert because I was Working. Don't get me wrong, my experience was euphoric (I was also high -- also more on this in a bit), but it was in no way like being at an outdoor summer concert drinking wine. The state of Working is one I came to understand (over an embarrassingly long timespan) from my wife; she, as a full-time novelist, has what most human beings on Earth would consider to be a dream job, and she, also as a novelist, works at it incredibly hard. I think it's just difficult for people to imagine taking your work brain and using it to make art. I sure couldn't, and I didn't used to Work when I performed. It's an ability I've only discovered recently. 

On pot: as I've said, it's the drug that I use to do my Work. This is the second show I've done high. Last time I took an edible half an hour before show time and I never really felt it kick in while I was playing. My work brain somehow absorbed all of the cannabinoids or something like that. But, especially in the second half of the show, I got to a place of, like, total musical transcendence. I'm very much a (physical) feeling kind of guy, and it was like I was working the perfect muscle at the core of my being, like I was pouring energy into...out of?...my center and it was returning to me in perfect symmetry (man, words are failing me. Have you been to the place I'm talking about?) The normal head high only kicked in after the show was over. 

This time I took the edible an hour before show time and it kicked in right as the show was starting. I started with what's probably my most technically challenging song (Sweet Time) and I had a brief moment of worry that I wouldn't be able to move my fingers nimbly amidst the blowing of my mind. But it was fine. It was great. I don't know how you feel about pot; I grew up in the Just Say No era⁴, so as a young person I strongly absorbed the message that drugs will ruin your life no matter what. Then I started to read and understand that there were, you know, different kinds of drugs and actually lots of adults did them and it didn't ruin their lives. I also came across the literature of enlightenment that wanted to claim that drugs were cheating. They would claim that yes, you could reach a state of transcendence with pot or LSD or MDMA, but it wasn't real. Or it wasn't repeatable, or you'd destroy your brain before you ever learned how to seek truth. Or that drugs are taking you away from, like, truly being present. These things are not my experience. Being high and being present are really, really synonymous for me⁵. 

On the show itself: the first five or so iterations of the show were heavily scripted. Then last time I set out notecards with titles on them that the audience could shout out in between songs. It worked fine in the bar; at the house concert it worked fucking great. The cards went with stories or sometimes songs, but in general they were an excuse to engage with the audience. And then there's me as a performer. This is subjective, and it's possible that nobody can tell the difference between me now and me then besides myself and my wife (who, in the break confirmed that yes, she could tell the difference), but I am committed to the performance in a way I didn't used to be. I believe. I'm up there working. And I feel it. 

And finally, there's what I learned. In the macro, this show is how I do my thinking; I have long been of the mind that humans don't think of anything sitting in rooms by themselves. They do it when they are in dialog with each other. That might be in reading books, it might be in conversation, and, in my case, it might be in the process of making art (Naomi Alderman, in the very last episode of her BBC Radio 4 Series Human Intelligence, stated the same thesis. I heard it the next morning while I was walking the dog. I'm right there with you Naomi). I have, with Surviving The Robot Apocalypse, built a thinking machine. It can think thoughts that I, working by myself, cannot. 

In the micro: I need to memorize my songs. I need to stop looking down at my music stand. It's both for the maintenance of my mind as it ages (as I younger person, pre-Pandemic, I never needed music. I could do entire shows from memory without issue), and for engagement with the audience. And it's also the thing I realized (or perhaps it was told to me by Naomi -- it's hard to know): one of the ways we will survive the robot apocalypse and adapt our minds to the internet is by the specific practice of the skills that the robots automate. The robots now automate reading and writing? Very well, we must practice reading and writing. The robots serve as our memory? Very well, we must practice memorization. Not only is it important for maintaining our minds, it will expand them. It will help us to find those new skills, new things that the mind can do in this context, things that currently we are unable to imagine. 

1. Claiming that you've transcended your ego is in fact an act of ego, so, you know, there's that problem.
2. I discovered it for myself from, I guess, first principles, but it is obviously gotta be as old as the troubadour, which is an old, old human profession
3. I know it's me saying this, but trust me: I was pretty good. 
4. So many words I could write about the DARE program and how full of lies it was. I mean, I guess they could have told me that heroin was good for me and that would have been worse. And I understand that they all meant well. But, boy...bad education is bad. 
5. The highest I have ever been was on my wedding day, and I wasn't on a goddamn thing other than the act of marrying the love of my life in the presence of friends and family. 

On Reading

In the last calendar year, my wife has read at least 65 books. They are mostly novels, with a couple of non-fiction audiobooks sprinkled in, and this number is pretty typical for her last many years. The reason I can quote an exact number is because she keeps meticulous records -- she responds, in writing, to everything she reads. She notes what worked about the book, what didn't, and what she learned. She shares it with me and nobody else. She's done this for almost 20 years now. 

Stop for a second and, I don't know, react to that paragraph. How do you take it? First off, I assume almost everyone reading this knows my wife and therefore knows that this is part of her professional practice. And second off, you might therefore dismiss it as something you yourself would never even consider adopting as a practice, in the same way that I never considered adopting the practice of shooting 1000 free throws a day in order to get good at being a basketball player. The world is full of anecdotes like this -- if only you would devote yourself to some difficult practice in the way that this other incredibly successful person has, you too could be that successful, etc. etc. etc. Is this true? I have no idea. I don't know you that well.   

If you've been to any of my recent shows, you know that I spend a lot of time engaging with the mind of British polymath Naomi Alderman. She is currently, on Substack, hosting a Couch-to-5K for reading. It more or less directly follows from the things she's talked and written about in the last several years, and that I've talked about regarding the human mind and its (complete lack of) adaptation to the realities of the internet and AI. Yesterday, at the end of hosting an hour long virtual silent reading, attended by about 90 people from around the world, she posed the question, "okay, now what? How do we continue this?" A few people have suggested variations on book clubs. But the question stopped me, because it's a hard question. 

Naomi isn't looking to reinvent bookclubs, I don't think. They already exist (and they're great, they keep our family housed, fed, clothed, and God bless you, bookclubs). Naomi is trying to develop an exercise program, one for the human brain. We humans mostly find ourselves no longer in an agrarian context where we have to heavy labor and survive periods with little food. So we have to get off the couch and run 5Ks in order have bodily health and alignment. Likewise we're in a totally different information context now, one that wants to feed us all the information all the time and one which is not conducive to deep engagement with text, or with the world. 

The goal of a Couch-to-5K is not to run a 5K and then be done. The goal is to make running a 5K the new set point. It is to make running a 5K something you do every week, and then twice a week, and then you graduate up to 10Ks and so on. And the other goal is this: for the runner to discover that actually running the 5K isn't a chore. Yes, it requires energy, and yes it taxes your body in various ways, but at the same time you discover its new capabilities and that those capabilities are, actually, quite euphoric to experience. And so it is too, you may have heard tell, with reading. 

In that metaphor, you might think of my wife's reading practice as being an ultra-marathoner. You probably aren't going for that, though if you can follow the metaphor and imagine the strength and conditioning of an ultra marathoner, you might begin to imagine the intellectual capacity of my wife's brain (and, I don't know, as the world's most direct observer of same I would say it's a pretty worthy thing to aspire to). I think the idea of reading an actual book for an actual hour every actual day is not only reasonable, it might be something close, in the current information context, to a moral imperative. It might by incumbent on every human mind that is able to do so to get back into reading shape, as fast as is (literally) humanly possible. 

Blockchain For Everyone

 N.B. This document was originally published in 2023 as https://inquisitivists.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Blockchain_For_Everyone.pdf. The world being what it is these days I no longer wished to host files online in a pay-per-request fashion. If for some reason you are seeking the citation from Money Has No Value by Samuel Chambers, this is the original article. 

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This article attempts to cover some of the many, many (many many many) things I’ve long wanted to say about Blockchain. I’ve had, for several years, a lot to say on the subject and I’ve found it pretty difficult because that subject is complicated and language is, you know, hard. And also…it’s kinda not that complicated? A lot of what seems complicated about blockchain is just basic truths about the world obfuscated by a little bit of computer science. And even the computer science isn’t that complicated. As CS topics come up, I’ll talk a little bit about them without, I hope, getting too technical. You can go look them up in other sources if you want, but you don’t need to understand how they work in order to understand blockchain. 

While I was working on this article, the Bloomberg finance columnist Matt Levine published a 40,000 word essay on Blockchain. It says 93.4% of what I wanted to say on the subject, as well as a lot more that I didn’t say, and as an added bonus Matt Levine writes with pretty much the same voice that I do except he’s smarter, clearer, and knows more stuff about finance. So you could skip this article, read his, and miss very little.