killing time, no. 1
Welcome to the first installment of my new blog series, killing time. This is where I write on my phone about anything I find interesting while I wait for a new laptop and start doing honest writing again. Here goes:
One of those ”this is how you spend your day?” internet mysteries got solved today. It’s called celebritynumbersix. The subreddit has 30,000 members. Essentially, some years ago a guy found a shower curtain with a bunch of celebrity face outlines on it. All were recognizable save one, a vaguely ‘90s, vaguely Adriana Lima, vaguely fashion model’s silhouette. People have been looking for years.
The face was definitively IDed today and it was a presumably retired Spanish model with no internet footprint. I didn’t follow this thing too closely because it’s literally an investigation of actual garbage that charitably could have come from a 99 cent store.
But as always, it’s the social and community dynamics that pull me in. They may as well have been trying to figure out if a french fry in a dumpster was from Applebee’s or Fatburger. And there were fights anyway. Outsize egos anyway. Conspiracy theories anyway. Humans are a miracle.
But there was one element of the shower curtain debacle that was new: people trying to solve it with AI, accusing the positive ID of being AI, and generally worshiping at the altar of this garbage tech fad that should mostly be used for medical imaging. You can tell the photo ID isn’t AI because it‘s clearly from a magazine. Because it’s a photo of a person and that’s all it could be. But I saw multiple lunatics accusing a white blur in her eye (human studio lighting) and a flyaway hair (human head) of being AI errors.
That word, error, is key, because it presupposes that AI is way more advanced than it is. That it got all but two things “right.” It gives AI a staggering, almost spiritual amount of credit, when in reality, all AI photos look like wax bullshit from ten miles away, worth considerably less than the electricity required to generate them. Anyway, congrats to the internet, now go do something with your lives and play in a landfill.
Watched a couple movies last night. First was The Holdovers. I love Alexander Payne; Citizen Ruth and Nebraska both stone-cold classics. Wanted to like this real bad because Paul Giamatti is great and him that’s a teenager is a hell of a find. But the script was just an unbelievable stack of clichés. Baffling that it could get all the way to a Best Picture nomination. Even when I was taking screenwriting classes in college and reading for other kids my age, the only only only nice thing I could say about it is it’s makable. You know where the cameras go, where the locations are, where to throw in a Cat Stevens song for no reason, you’re done in a month. Maybe that’s the secret.
Other one I watched was a documentary (An Honest Liar) about James Randi, one of the best magicians, skeptics and talk show guests ever. Amazing personality, lots of good clips and opportunities to reflect on how strange it is that Uri Geller was a cultural phenomenon. You bend spoons? That’s it? Go bend a semitruck. Unlean the tower of Pisa. I can break a spoon just fine.
But the peculiar thing, and this is a great lesson in documentary editing, is that two thirds of the way through, they make the documentary about his undocumented gay partner who’s gay and they’re gay guys. It destroys the whole movie, and it’s not the topic, it’s the abruptness, like flipping a U-turn at 60 miles an hour in a school zone. Like it’s daybreak and you have a paper due at noon and have to just start writing random words and pray for a passing grade. I thought this was about stage magic and the ridiculous underworld of faith healers. Show more Carson clips! Where are they!
It’s just a complete failure at maintaining a thematic throughline. All the stuff about his personal life could have been integrated in a satisfying, humanistic way, and the arc would be rewarding and the documentary a tearjerker. The material’s all there, but they never found the edit. The greatest story in the world is nothing if you don’t understand that editing is storytelling too.
Also listening to a lot of Tom Petty on Sirius. I’m doing a real piece about him later but for now: I just rediscovered Crawlin’ Back to You. Best song on Wildflowers. Speaks to the outrageous power of ooh-ooh-oohs in songwriting. But most importantly, it’s really funny how many cred alt-country, folk-rock, NPR type songs want to be exactly Crawlin’ Back to You, and it’s impressive that absolutely none of them are. It sounds like it should be easy. Maybe that’s why it’s not.