Long Tail snippet

Lets all preschool clap for the internet: Chris Anderson report(ed, 16 years ago) that more than half of Amazon’s sales come from outside its top 150,000 titles. Who are these people writing books that sell one or two copies? Are they even really authors? Which I don’t mean as in, a real author must sell a lot of books; but for real, are they actually not books, but cocktail napkin scribbles that somehow have been published? Golf clap the long tail, but the YouTube videos you see about publishing books still tell me that it is prostratingly difficult. 

Also from Anderson: “As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.” One or two streams per month is great for Rhapsody and the listener, but it doesn’t feed a working artist. 

If all these long tail books aren’t creating living wage authors, is it because Amazon is fucking them, or is it because they aren’t really books, in the sense of anything that anyone actually reads?

Let’s hope the long tail isn’t composed of 3 AM auto-plays and dusty paperbacks that ship for $1.99; but things that people actually want more than they want what’s trending on Twitter.

Learning the long tail

It’s been about two years of a state of somewhat attentive yearning for evidence of the idea I unfolded in my last writing. That I’ve hunted for in Spotify and body art. The idea that, by by accessing an unlimited catalogue of digital goods, with its recommendation engines and various accelerating accoutrements, users might discover greater variety in said category of goods. That in discovering this variety, they may come across goods that respond to aspects of their personalities that are not strictly unique, but that make them different from most people around them. That in experiencing this recognition, or expression, of what sets them apart from the daily mass of others, they may experience more excitement, fulfillment, transcendance, or something else that feels good inside, than when consuming something served to everyone by traditional distributors of only the most enormous sources of supply, like Wal-Mart or Hot 97. That this more intimate and personal experience of consumption might draw more of their time, attention, and associated dollars away towards the creators of these niche products. That this growth in dollars towards creators of niche products might provide livings for a greater number of creative people. And finally, that these creative people might be important to the “Future of Work”: that frustrating branding for all the people who think about whether and how quickly computers will automate jobs. Every warm and cold study of job loss potential agrees that workers in the future will need to use their creativity. Maybe this is how?

But only in the last week did I sheepishly discover that this is an established idea in, I don’t know what the name of the field would be, but the field of serious people who think about what consumers want and why and how the internet changes that. And that it has a name, and that at least fifteen years of surrounding literature. That name is “The Long Tail.” 

I don’t want to patronize my very small audience of people that are much smarter and more graphically inclined than I am, but just in case anyone is on my level: the long tail refers to the graph of total consumption of a category of thing – say, music – on the y-axis, and the raw number of distinct things available in that category on the x-axis, in order of popularity. For a lot of things, some of the distinct things – in this case, specific songs – are way more popular than all the rest, so the line starts high on the y-axis, and slopes downward as is moves along the x. Because the number of unpopular songs is much larger than the number of popular songs, the “tail” of seldom-sung songs extends for longer along the x as the “head” of hits does up the y. Fans / proponents of the long tail theory ( I guess count me in) believe (hope?) that the tail will “fatten” as the internet expands variety and our capacity for finding it. 

Since I was already feeling sheepish that I’d been walking around for two years feeling like I had some precious insight when a best-selling book was written about this exact thing, it was extra exposing of overconfidence that the very article that formalized this hypothesis in my brain then concluded without qualification that it was wrong. 

Enter this article, where in a 2008 essay, an HBS prof wrote that the long tail is a myth, using data so high quality that discovering today’s version of it two weeks ago would have made me feel like the Emperor of Knowledge. I felt checkmated by their authority, still felt foolish at being fifteen years late to the debate, and as it was at the end of a Friday, my brain had no resilient attention with which to read critically. And she clearly showed that consumer taste in music and fashion, two things whose consistent daily interplay with consumers’ sense of personal meaning and emotion made me count on them to be cesspools of long tail activity, were heavily concentrated. 

But even late-Friday brain could take refuge in the fact that her data was pre-iPhone. And when I returned on Saturday to think about what her data actually said, I didn’t think her conclusion was exactly wrong; but the long tail lived anew. One source at a time:

Starting with Rhapsody: a music subscription service with unlimited listens and no marginal cost to discovery, making it a solid landscape for comparison to today’s dominant streamers, minus recommendation engines, playlists, and other great machines of niche discovery. Within a library of one million songs, the top 1 percent most popular accounted for 32 percent of total listens, and the top 10 percent accounted for 78 percent. 

The bottom 90 percent of tracks getting only 22 percent of listens? That long tail is rat-thin, you might say. But then, as the author notes, in a tonally out-of-place twist of argument: that top 1 percent of the one million song sample, is about the limit of what you might expect to be carried at Wal-Mart (I’ll have to trust her; haven’t darkened one’s door since I last got run off by a security guard for registering voters without permission). That means, in theory, that 68 percent of listens on Rhapsody in some year of the 2000s went to tracks nobody had access to in the 90s unless they lived near a cute record store. Let’s say in the 1990s, a full 50 percent of all music listens nationwide went to the bottom 99 percent of tracks: if all today’s streaming companies did was increase that share to Rhapsody’s 68 percent, it would represent an enormous shift in attention towards smaller artists. 

An Australian DVD mail subscription service called Quickflix (lawsuit, anyone?): Same vibes. In a library of 15k movies, the most popular 10 percent got 48 percent of views. If, as the author says, 150 movies is greater than the annual output of major studios, then 52 percent of consumption went to films beyond what Hollywood can make in a decade. Those films were probably available at Blockbuster, but it’s more than a kiddie pool of eyeballs for people who didn’t feel like taking a meeting with Harvey Weinstein. 

Nielsen SoundScan data on “home video” sales between 2000 and 2005: Wth are home video sales? Is that people buying VHS’s? Did anybody do that? This data doesn’t say anything about how the internet changes behavior, since buying a VHS is among the more un-internet things I can imagine doing. But it could reflect extra-web changes in consumption patterns, which I’m still interested in. The verdict: the total number of films selling a handful of copies popped up like a cork. At the same time, the market got MORE concentrated. How could this happen? A massive increase in overall sales, powered by a large increase in niche purchases and an even lager spike in buying blockbusters. The long tail got way longer; but the head got WAY taller. 

Nielsen SoundScan data on “recorded music” sales between 2005 and 2007: Interesting time window, because it covers a period in which digital music sales rose from one-third to two-thirds of total recorded music revenue: the rise of iTunes and the fall of Tower Records. The impact on the consumption graph of having a large, instantly searchable library, if only with 10 second samples and wimpy discovery algorithms. To wit: a longer and flatter tail, yet more concentration among the most popular titles than before; which must mean a taller head driving overall consumption to new heights. (Right? But she only mentions the first half of that semicolon-divided phrase; an explosion in overall music consumption doesn’t track with my memory of the time and seems like a pretty big wave for the writer to skip; this is making me concerned I’ve fallen down a logical crevasse). 

Assuming I didn’t. I don’t know how to feel. The last two examples kind of spook me. The most fulsome fantasy of the long tail is one where the practice of popularity breaks and created goods are as flat and wide as Kyrie Irving’s earth. Not one where more dribbles of strange sauce leak out the back of a huge machine that sings fewer and fewer songs to more and more people. 

But: the long tail theory, as presented for slaughter in this refutatory paper, says that “online channels” will fatten the tail. And even in this old data, in 2008, when “online channels” meant your laptop, when real “online channels” didn’t exist, when the multiplying possibilities of networks were merely spun sugar in the minds of early adopters, the long tail still grew. So there’s that.

Early Fashion

It was March 2018, Cambridge Analytica SZN; when even [REDACTED] was texting me to say how how upset at Facebook he was. And there was some big phone call, the public kind with lots of important people on it, perhaps an earnings call timed immediately after the New York Times headlines appeared. And there was Cheryl Sandberg, the smiling book cover of Lean In social progress, talking meekly, like the sweet, gentle romantic partner who you have nevertheless discovered has been cheating on you. Meekly, but also resolutely, if those things can be combined, in her justification of Facebook’s existence. Not that Facebook was under threat of ceasing to exist, far from it; but still, suddenly and all at once, all the heads at society’s table turned to Mark Zuckerberg’s fun project and inquired, “wait, we definitely should have asked this earlier, but why exactly are you here?”

One of her answers: to place on pedestals little grandmas in cluttered extra rooms in fully paid for houses knitting sweaters; or two best buds in a messy pad in Anaheim with a random talent for designing bedside lamps; and every other tiny business that depends on Facebook’s scale and targeting to find customers for their products. Specifically, “niche” products, the kind that maybe a lot of people like when a lot is, the number of rows in an Excel document that is too large for your four year old laptop to manage without crashing; but not when a lot is, something that you could depend on your Uber driver to converse with you about. Products that maybe only one person in 100,000 would bother to pull off the shelf at Wal-Mart, but for which Facebook can use its personality profiles to find customers anywhere in the world. Apparently, says Sandberg, a lot of businesses have launched since Facebook’s founding that would never have made sense when you had to sell a lot of something in each small geographic area.

I remember this answer, because Ben Thompson mentioned it once on his podcast, which I listened to at the time so I could feel important when talking to myself. And Ben Thompson held this answer up, like a zag on his zig of agreement with the body politic that Facebook fucked up big, because he felt these businesses are not only good for the grandmas and bedside lamp bros; they are important, for the main economic story. That when, “automation happens,” as I’m pretty sure he put it, and the mutually reinforcing triumvirate of TV advertising, mainstream (think Gillette) consumer products, and cable companies comes crashing down, these little companies will be what replaces them. In other words, the sellers of niche products on Instagram will pull weight comparable to Comcast and Procter and Gamble. In yet other words, become the entire economy. 

I want to believe it. Of course I want to believe it. Of course I want to believe in a long-tail (foreshadowing!) hypothesis for home goods, apparel, and anything else that can be infused with the power to make a consumer feel singularly seen and expressed, like a 3D-printed car (more foreshadowing!) Of course I want my coasters and bedside lamp and salt pig to be pajama chic, and therefore enjoyed by me, and a few thousand other like souls. Of course I want Instagram targeting to be so good that every time a person scrolls, they see a product that makes them say “I MUST have that,” because it resonates with them in a way the few others share. 

Because if that happens, there would have to be a lot more people finding steady work coming up with unique ideas and making stuff than the number of people who design furniture at Restoration Hardware and clothes at Uniqlo today. And maybe those people could never be millionaires, but be able to pay rent in a nice place, save a little, and stay in a hotel for a few nights a year. Maybe there could be a big enough market for niche creators to replace the shrinking market for bookkeepers and receptionists, or cab drivers if you swing that way. I think they would be happier than when they were bookkeepers and cab drivers. 

So I started with music, and then I slide into clothing and apparel. Where, early creeping makes it seem like all the sad little Nigels who dream of making dresses one day should be getting excited. There are lots of “reports” and “analyses” from McKinsey and random economics analysts and our friends the opaque but important and credible-seeming market research firm IBISWORLD saying how demand for personalized styles is surging, because, I guess, people my age want to feel an “authentic” connection with what they buy. How there are now over 20,000 direct-to-consumer brands – a self-explanatory term that typically connotes clothing companies transacting over Shopify and marketing on Instagram – most of which you’ve probably never heard of, about half of which sell over 200 distinct products, and the top 500 of which have raised over $3 billion in VC cash. 

But nowhere along this rainbow road of intellectual reinforcement do I see any revenue figures; nothing ot tell me how much money is brought in by Nike and Gap vs, I dunno, whatever cool thing I last saw on IG before I deleted it. And what those numbers were five and ten years ago. I also haven’t found any evidence of diversification of styles, which would imply a greater absolute number of design creatives, even working within large companies. And I’m suspicious every time VC financing is used to hype an industry; in my last job, VC figures were how we tried to make things like graphene manufacturing seem like local growth industries to state legislators in places like Wyoming. 

So have I been ensorcelled by a false dream of an internet that promotes social equity? There are certainly more listens going to small musicians, and the body ink explosion could reveal and undercurrent of yearning to buy stuff that’s different from what everyone else is buying. But are people really more likely to resupply their wardrobes on Instagram instead of running to Target? Are they really going to start to see clothing more as a way of expressing what’s unique about themselves, and less as a way of signalling that they are similar to the people they want to be similar to? 

I don’t know yet. The work continues.

Nebula

In case this needs explaining: I am an admirer, nay, believer, nay, zealot, in / of / about the creatively lived day. Where you wake up and have the calm to settle on thoughts and ideas I'll be so bold as to call “inspiration.” And spend your undistracted energy following up on them, turning them into a defined thing of some kind. I feel like this process opens up a temporary vacation from the brain’s constant background chorus of ”why am I doing this?” And “can I have a drink?” I want it for myself, I want it for everyone. 

But when the guys from Lessons from the Screenplay (literary lessons from big movies) and Wendover Productions (explanations of how airlines plan routes, the logistics of taking the US census, and other taken-for-granted background achievements of industrialized prosperity) and CinemaWins (soothing breakdowns of good bad movies) lead videos with an invitation to sign up for Nebula, a new creator-built video subscription service, I feel a kind of nervous refusal, similar to how you probably feel when you ignore a homeless person asking for change. 

By the logic of what must have been Nebula’s investor pitch deck, this doesn’t make sense. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of people who feel a soothing blend of excitement and relief when I see new content from these creators at the top of my feed. I know that these creators need to convert the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of other people like me into money that keeps up with how much things cost in America. I know that YouTube, once a novelty platform for hobbyists to pick up some extra change, has metastasized into a defensive, squinty, tightfisted behemoth that is hard to pry a steady living from. A non-neutral utility, trying to get as rich as possible providing a service the creators absolutely depend on, rigged with nets and booby traps of content regulation. A new network, owned by creators, supported by nominal subscription fees of $3 / month, instead of advertising, sounds like exactly what I want to exist for the sake of the creatively-lived days I want more people to have. 

But man, I just love YouTube. The familiar home page, with its array of deep and shallow pockets of curiosity and intrigue and laughter and earnest wishing-well. Try something new, just to help creators and get a sliver of extra content? That part of the mind, which grips me when I’m just looking for a little satisfaction, doesn’t see any extra satisfaction in Nebula, and doesn’t even look up to sniff when offered to try it. What I believe and advocate for is not what chooses to consume. Nebula is begging – not openly, but I know how much YouTube stresses creators out – for me to make a simple, entirely tentative mental step of facing up to a different experience. I’m sorry; I’m just riding this dopamine dog, and there’s nothing I can do. 

Tattoos

I remember like 28 years ago, somehow ending up in the front hall during some toddler wandering, and looking up at the (what I now know to be young) man painting the front door, and seeing that he had a big tattoo on his tank top-exposed bicep. It was orange, maybe a little red; it might have been flames, I can’t be sure, but I definitely remember the color orange. And while I don’t remember my first time seeing or hearing about tattoos, that must not have been the first time, because when I saw it, I knew what it was, and remembered that some older person had told me before that only reckless or dangerous people got them. Therefore, I wondered why this man was at our house painting our door. 

But as a much older person, I’ve seen hundreds of images on friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and thought they looked so good, not just in that the shapes, colors, and patterns were visually pleasing, but in that sharp way you see a painting or sculpture that has grabbed a little inside part of you that maybe you knew was there and maybe you didn’t. An anxious teacher with a sperm whale in the style of a totem ornament on her leg; a friend of a friend with the Le Petit Prince holding birds on a string on her upper back; a random stranger in an Old Dirty Bastard t-shirt with three or four insects at various levels of enormity ever crawling up and down her calves and thighs. And as I’ve appreciated these pieces of memory, literature, and pure imagination in chemistry with experience, and I’ve come to see it as really fucking beautiful that people of every dimension of shyness and aggression and rebellion and solitude feel carefully around their lived experience, down to the most pointless yet head-buzzingly meaningful detail, for sign to put on their body that is unique either on its face or in how it came to be for that particular person. That people I know are undergoing such a deeply creative experience.

And it is many people – and many more as time passes. In 2003, 15 percent of American adults had at least one tattoo; in 2012 it was 21 percent, and in 2019 it was 30 percent, including half of people born between 1981 and 1996. This has of course coincided with an increase in number of operating tattoo parlors from 500 in 1960 to 10,000 in 1995 to somewhere between 21,000 and 47,000 today, with continued growth projected by those apparently smart and well-respected but impossibly glib and opaque market research firms like IBIS World. My rough draft math says there would need to be 10,000 tattoo artists each inking 4 people per day to meet the growth from 2013-2018 alone. 

It’s not just that this is at least one little piece in the potential but as yet unproven flowering of income-earning opportunities for creative people that I yearn for. It’s that now almost 63 million American adults and counting have given over a lot of money and a literal piece of their self to, as research into people’s motivation for getting tattoos suggests, mark their personalities and experiences. Even if you subtract all the dumb, impulsive tattoos, it’s still a large and fast-growing number. Perhaps that tattoos have swollen from an antisocial fringe to a mark of honor and health in one or two generations is evidence that creativity’s raw ingredients are as universal as I hope. 

My thought is: if the growth of tattoos equates to growth in desire for people to recognize their personal story and meaning: might they be looking for such recognition elsewhere? Like the TV they watch, or the music they listen to, through consuming content that most people haven’t heard of, but resonates powerfully with their sense of self? Could this growing desire for unique recognition extend beyond traditionally “creative” domains, and could digital networks be helping this along?

Bourne

We fetishize Europe for its old-feeling. The wine you’re drinking really was made by a proud old man who was taught to do so by his father on land that’s been used for this purpose far back into memory. There are ornate buildings and covered fish markets with negotiable prices. Warm baguettes and cute corners overhung by cafes, where you can feel like you’re stepping into a Van Gogh painting, and not really be wrong, are unavoidable. But Europe also has futuristic charms: the bullet trains, that you can take from one country to a completely different one; the minimalist furniture in airport lounges; the techno that’s so forward-looking they’ll be listening to it in bars on a colonized asteroid; soccer stadiums lit neon red. When I visit, I look warmly at opposite directions of history at the same time, reveling in differently temperatured attachments. 

This is why The Bourne Identity is the most European feeling movie. The first well-lit shots are of fishermen, whose actual living is earned like men have been earning livings since forever, by going out on boats and pulling fish out of the sea. They have long, wet hair, gray whiskers, and heavy, well-worn rain gear. They are slouched around a table in the galley of a boat pitching in a dark storm, exclaiming as they slap cards down in anger or triumph next to an crowded ashtray. Soon after, the film takes you into a picturesque Italian port through the morning mist, docks, buoys, and moored fishing boats all rich and drab, all lined by a strip of narrow pastel houses, the sound of a large bell echoing out from town. Then you see a little three wheel fish-hauling motor vehicle drive along the wet industrial promenade, that Bourne disappears onto as it crosses his path. All of which foment vibes that haven’t changed much since, say, Italy and Germany were first unified, and that well-off people around the world like to pay a lot to be immersed in. 

But these old, quaint scenes are intersected by signs of modernity’s tactical efficiency and cool. The location tags typed across the screen to digitish noises. The suit on Bourne’s limp body when he’s pulled out of the water: some kind of synthetic sponge material you might find in a kind of computer product I can’t place right now, affixed with a range of equipment of undeterminable utility, bespeaking specialized tactical savvy. CIA HQ in Langley: a buzz-cut, tie-wearing achiever pushing open a glass door to an office paved all around with pale wood, computer monitors accessing the world’s CCTV footage. 

The fishermen are kind to Bourne. The captain pulls bullets out of his back, and gives him clothes, food, friendship, a wad of starter cash. On my first watch, this didn’t seem weird; why shouldn’t they be friends? But now that we’ve edged out of the postwar sun into the fog of whatever era we’re now in, it played differently. It’s not that I don’t think fishermen today would pull in a man from overboard and shelter him without hesitation; but I also impulsively wonder, would they be as kind in the same situation today as they are in the film? Relatedly: are they supporters of the Northern League? Would they vote to expel Sicily? How would they feel about accepting a boatload of refugees from Syria? 

Bourne is an alien creature, with alien skin, from a trim, clean, fabricated alien world. That world makes a business, in the film’s era, through the CIA, and today, through massive data collection and computational capabilities, of looking down bemusedly into the fishermen’s old reality like it’s inside a snow globe. And when this movie came out, had this alien not come crashing down out of nowhere into their space, the fishermen might not have really known that this world existed, let alone that they’re being watched by it. But today, they probably know all, and resent. The easy coexistence between past and future that draws me to Europe, that keeps me going back to the Bourne films over and over, is resolving to friction. 

I saw The Bourne Identity for the first time in October of 2004, sitting on the end of a bed in a drab hotel in Mongolia, where I was on a school trip, about four months after moving to Shanghai, its own symbiotic hive of brilliance and depth. I started to love the world for offering me both history and science fiction. I hope this doesn’t all turn to wistfulness in the years ahead. 

Please don't make me title this blog post about how streaming changes music consumption and its implications for the platform economy

As I have gingerly stepped up to this question, a question that I have yet to define well enough to actually write here (introductory blog post hopefully coming soon); as I have picked around its edges like a decade-untouched attic I’ve resolved to organize; I’ve thought a lot about music. 

I have two reasons. First, to write and produce original music, which a musician friend recently told me was like a “boring pushup wet dream,” is one of the most recognizably creative activities – and for those who can make enough money, one of the most recognizably creative occupations. 

Second, in landing and casting their shadow upon Earth massive new digital networks, like the spacecraft in Independence Day, companies using the internet have perhaps increased how many people can earn money making music, and what kind of music they produce. 

Any song on a web music store can be downloaded by anyone, anywhere (at least in the country, theoretically the world). If you play French trombone fart jazz, in the 90s sitting alone in your room for hours trying to make your true self seen by nobody in particular (who does that?) was probably the extent of your ability to build an audience. But starting twenty years ago, you could build a global global following, tiny relative to everyone on earth, but absolutely enormous; fame was no longer a prerequisite for listenership outside your mom and most indulgent friends. 

And you’d further expect streaming platforms to have accelerated the matching of weirdo musicians with weirdo fans across the world, because it costs you nothing to click on a playlist whose thumbnail is of, say, a guy in leather and chains, because it might not normally be your thing, but hey, maybe you’re feeling extra lonely tonight. As Ben Thompson has written, “the internet enables niche in a massively powerful way.” 

So: if the adoption of digital tools and networks in society were going to free up time for humans to work with their creativity, as all the optimistic consulting firm reports on the future of work like to propose, an increase in the number of people earning livings making music, in the form of more artists with small, dedicated global followings accessed on web services that have totally transformed music consumption, would be an intuitive place to see an early part of this process. 

After a medium amount of Googling, and a large amount of stuttering heaves at assembling original data (which yet may or may not pay off), I found a study that could validate this story. A Stanford professor had been given access to an unnamed app that makes song and artist recommendations based on a user’s listening behavior across all music apps and services. It was a view from a perch of melodic omniscience: perfect detail on the listening habits of 2,000 people over a two year period, at the beginning of which most acquired music mostly through downloads, but by the end of which most had become frequent users of streaming services. A direct view of the immense mass of American music consumption as it traveled through the filter of Spotification. 

My good news: as I thought, after the adoption of streaming, smaller artists got more listenership, both absolutely and relative to the most popular performers. Total music consumption among streamers six months after making the switch from download-only increased 49 percent, confirming that streaming puts a ton more track listens up for grabs. With total number of unique artists consumed 32 percent higher after the adoption of streaming, consumption of top-100 artists declining by 7 percent relative to total listenership, and consumption of top-500 artists declining by 2.4 percent, it’s clear that a sizable number of those additional listens were going to non-superstars. 

Some of these acts may be established indie bands who already make good cash; others might be hobbyists – I mean that in the most dismissive way possible – who have gone from playing for their friends to getting accidental listens on obscure Spotify playlists, earning them $1.50  per week. But if you assume that the new listens going to previously undiscovered artists are evenly distributed across types of said artists, then some of them are going to be bands and producers who get to stop waiting tables devote every morning and night to the creative process because the streaming platforms delivered them listeners and income (fewer than there should be, because Spoitfy allocates subscription fees to artists in a way that totally screws small creators, but we’ll get to that another time).

Bad news: it’s not that many people. A a reallocation of 2.4 percent listens from the top-500 to the rest hardly bespeaks a massive shift in listening dollars from Drake to your friend who is an insanely talented producer but for whom the process of getting discovered and paid is so daunting that he may as well just code. Maybe the continuing use of discovery algorithms as well as other mythical but I swear to God real trends driving fragmentation and specialization in taste will redistribute more of the top shelf cash to lone creators. Maybe this will turn recording artist from a job you need to be famous to sustain to a job you that can support a mainstream consumer lifestyle for a lot of people. I can dream. But if that’s happening at all, it’s happening very slowly. 

Still. Spotify’s revenue in Q4 of 2019 was €1.855 billion, with a gross profit of €474 million. I remember accounting 101 from college; this leaves a COGS of €1.381 billion; I’m pretty sure most of a streaming platform’s COGS is the cost of its rights to music. In Spotify’s case, this is made up mostly of payments to artists, the total pot of which is allocated directly in proportion to total listenership. If, as indicated by the Stanford study, 2.4 percent of listenership we redistributed from top-500 artists to everyone else, that’s an extra $37 million (4/2/2020 exchange rates) going to recording artists that, let’s estimate generously, 10 percent or fewer Americans have ever heard of. On an annualized basis, that’s 1,850 more artists taking $80k per year from Spotify alone, or almost 15,000 taking home $10k. 

Music isn’t the new automotive sector, and Spotify’s mission of “giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art” may be a fantasy, but it’s not nothing. And maybe if I look around at other industries and jobs that technology is disrupting, I’ll be able to stich together the beginnings of the platform-enabled creative and empathetic job opportunities that – if coronavirus-inspired automation has its way – we’ll need pretty soon.

Data?

I can’t talk baseball, read about politics, or consume coronavirus news without being reminded of the supremacy of data. I can’t crack open a book on US economic history, ask my partner about her job, or imagine my future career without acknowledging that to measure things and analyze them with computers is modern society’s most prestigious ritual. I can’t even find a new shrink. 

Last week I sat down in a new psychiatrist’s office. Surrounded by soothing music and abstract art with innocuously warm colors and rounded shapes, seated across from a bespectacled face full of kind, studied interest, my instincts from regular psychotherapy kicked in. I breathed deeply; I noted feelings in my body; I paid attention to the sensations of thoughts; I let the “interpreter” part of my cerebral cortex monologue non-linearly about my day, my job, and my amygdalae. I figured, this is the best way for a professional to understand my mind. 

Back my direction came a blank stare, a polite nod, a question as to my suicidal-ness. I was unsurprised: in my experience, psychiatrists are computers. They exist to observe measurable behaviors that may hint at what is happening in my brain – how much am I sleeping, am I thinking about hurting myself or others, am I interested in things that normally interest me, etc – and match them with the average outputs of clinical drug trials. They are not interested in the immeasurable parts of mind, the unique workings of thought, feeling, and experience that might actually explain how I feel, and how to feel differently. I was disappointed; I wanted her to do better. 

I’ve always wanted Nate Silver to do better, too. Back in 2011, 2012, and 2013, Nate Silver was becoming canon among political spectators. He would gather all available measurable information about an election and aggregate it into a very clean, simple scoreboard. This was the era in which devices in everyone’s pocket started throwing off rich streams of data, that Geoffrey Hinton’s team was reviving a long-dormant algorithmic technique called neural networks, and that Steph Curry started shooting almost eight threes per game: in other words, as a society we were slipping into a kind of giddiness about the power of measurement and analysis, like it was showing us the real truth of the universe, with which we could aspire to perfection. And so Nate Silver’s scoreboard was ascribed with awe-inspiring wisdom. But I was a hater. 

I hated partly because, as a college senior, I was desperate to be seen as intelligent, no idea what anyone would ever pay me to do for work, and had a long history of turning blank when confronted with any math, whether it was precalc or basic stats questions or even longhand multiplication, as friends who happily watched me labor with pen and pad on my senior apartment porch in preparation for an undeserved case interview may recall. 

But I hated also because, as a political obsessive, popular devotion to Nate’s scoreboard offended my personal devotion to my lovely Where’s Waldo swamp map of randomness that was politics and campaigns: full of haywire gauges of jealousy and enthusiasm and apathy, torn up by news thunderbolts and economic earthquakes. In which each candidate’s smile, laugh, and tone of confidence or violence or reflection will or will not gently interweave with voters’ desperate need to be participating in a compelling story. Unique features of individuals and unprecedented events can’t be transformed into numbers, and can’t be recombined by a computer into a scoreboard. They can only be observed by a patient and curious human brain, and interpreted by its unknowable and emergent blend of conscious and subconscious experience and intuition. Belief in Nate crossed against my belief in the beauty and power of examining the unmeasurable. 

Likewise: while psychiatry is not useless (if you need help, please seek it!), so far its “let the computers figure it out” approach lacks the dimensions-adding, reality unspooling power of a patient psychologist who wants to figure out how your mind is different from all the others. The power to reach inside, twist the deeper muscle and sinews, unearth from many feet down forgotten seams of feeling, turn things over on their sides, and make stars align. 

I just read about the history of readymade clothes and department stores and interchangeable parts: all major aspects of the de-blurring of the late 19th-century America into the familiar world of consumption we were born into. And all of it relied on the new use of data and statistics. Today’s tools are just continuing what could be modernity’s defining process. 

But as we continue to revel in having solved baseball and dating; and as the moneyed knowledge class continues to use the word “intelligence” to describe statistical calculation machines, and remains collectively dogged about what can be figured out with data, and how much money can be made: All the more, I wonder, what other parts of earth can be improved, what more can be accomplished, by exploring the immeasurable, by sitting quietly in our own and each other’s teeming inner worlds. 

Empire

You couldn’t choose more equivalent weather for this low and unexpected coronavirus mood than for it to be gray and pouring across Southern California. I am worried and sad, and my writing reflects that I am worried and sad about being worried and sad

My hand starts to hurt from moving my hand across the page. I’m spilling out vague and unconnected images and metaphors that relate to how I’m feeling only for an instant and in my own mind (“Caves in New Mexico. Shadows and yellow brown dust, an expanse.”) And my mind meanders to the idea that if I got a bionic thumb and wrist, I could write forever without pain. Like the fake fingers Luke Skywalker pricks in the medical frigate at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

That final scene with Luke and Leia has always felt like a cheap way to make audiences not just feel sad at the end of a sad movie. Our heroes are on the run, dismembered or baked inside a metal encasement, yet we close with shared smiles, promises of better times, and a swollen orchestral flourish. Eight year old me was suspicious of these sensory stimuli, and defensive of my sadness, which I felt reflected the reality of the whole situation.

But now, as I set here, listening to Max Graham’s moon beats, looking out at a thick mist covering the mountains behind Goleta, allowing all the news and fear to blow through my head: I think of this scene, and its two friends (or siblings, lol), probably thankful to both be alive and with each other, thankful for the Star Wars galaxy’s prosthetic science, thankful to be doing something to improve their situation, thankful for a stunning view of the entire galaxy, core and swirls and all. A view that might be as stunning and reanimating as when you meditate, and you see your whole mind, the thing you’re normally inside of, like the object it is. And it makes me feel respect for that scene, as more than a crowd pleasing salve for the feelings of anxious tweens who always need the good guys to win. 

The good guys don’t always win. The good guys might be losing right now. And maybe I’m just having a good morning, but beauty can have meaning anyway. 

Broadcasters vs. Podcasters

On a hungover Sunday, if I’m accompanying my coffee with a podcast, the talkers will be American; but if a flip on a game, I hope they will be British. 

British football broadcasters use animated yet distinctly non-flamboyant metaphors: an unfortunate player who shoots wide after beating the last defender has “flubbed his lines,” a center back who fails to mark a goal-scoring opponent on the far post on a corner kick has “lost the plot.” 

They also use words and phrases that capture the essence of happenings on the pitch, whether a cutting through ball, a head-knocking collision, or a rude exchange between players, in an effortless and profound way that I want to believe is characteristic of people living where English has been spoken for more than a thousand years. I’ll explain what I mean: consider the Shakespeare line “once more into the breach.” Today “breach” means something like, to penetrate an erstwhile highly resilient barrier or container. But when Hal uses it as a noun, you’re not confused. The word evokes feelings of pressure and confrontation and crisis, conveying a description of the space of battle he is about to jump into more succinctly but profoundly than a long description of the scene using technically descriptive words. British football commentators use little phrases that Americans would never use, but resonate with an original, subconscious level of language understanding. 

With deft metaphor and turns of phrase, they can pack more feeling into fewer words and at lower volume. They accent and texturize the game’s inborn drama, like a tart salad next to a rich bearnaise. 

At best, American commentators have voices and catchphrases that are not obnoxious, but at worst, they constantly refer back to the spiritual underpinning of American sports: an informal belief system wherein toughness, and love of your mother, and fanatical, happiness-defying self-belief and work habits that somehow leave space for respect for colleagues. The heaven in this belief system is the sublime and transcendent apex of modern achievement, which is to be a champion above all others. I’m sure there were prophets of this faith before Vince Lombardi, but he was one of its preeminent evangelists. From fieldside broadcast pulpits at American stadiums, this message is preached, thumped on like a Bible or a psalter, by men who, and I’m being petty, probably don’t have many other ways of measuring self-worth. 

And yet: on podcasts, British circumspection, (a word whose meaning I sort of know but can’t define beyond the fact that it makes me think of a gray-haired professor wearing spectacles, who rarely smiles and stands really straight and is a nice guy, but who nobody really knows), no longer carried up by the winds of the game, sounds polite, constrained, withheld. And without the elite athletic drama and roaring crowds, Americans’ louder voices and attitudes are entertaining. To be unconcerned of sounding wrong, or discomfiting, provides drama. When there’s nothing to watch, and just people talking in my ear, I’d rather have the unjustified self-confidence that fuels big adjectives and risky, yet thoughtful, takes.

Lava

I love watching videos of flowing lava. Back when the big island was blowing up, I sometimes procrastinated by watching successive news clips of crusty molten flows crossing roads and consuming garages. It makes me feel warm inside: not because lava is literally hot and orange, but because it connects me to the big, loud, scary forces that shaped the universe.

Lava is not really of our world. It’s a part of the violent storming and clashing of elements and particles in space that made the world we normally see. An output of processes taking place at temperatures so extreme that they defy our perception. Before there were trees and flowers and swimmable lakes, let alone modern comforts, there was stars exploding, dust compacting, planets colliding -- and lava.

We humans are suited to live only in this strange little moment of peace and quiet on a sphere of rock with air to breathe and water to drink. The normal state of the observable universe, in which our existence is an interlude, is way too cold and empty or way too hot and crowded. But sometimes that rock we live on cracks open and we are reminded what our moment is really at the mercy of. Seeing lava is similar to if a tiny star passed through our atmosphere, fusing nuclei and everything that stars do, but is small enough that you could look at it without being irradiated or incinerated. To be in our arbitrary world, of streets and awkwardness and deadlines and everything else, and see concretely a flash of the vast forces that made us and will someday unmake us, fills me with a kind of awe that is both mysterious and calm. 

Art makes me feel the same way. An acting performance that is ambiguous, angry, sad, and wild, or a painting of things that are twisted, deeply impressed, scarred, textured with light and darkness, make flesh the history, relationships, culture, emotion, and identity, expressed in ungovernably large groups across untraceably long chains of generations. These are forces that are not literally the power behind the stars, but just as vast, inspiring, terrible, and visible but beyond reach. The right kind of artistic experience does not create these feelings, but perhaps independent of the creator’s intent, reveals charged glimpses of them. 

Literature classes want me to draw out a logical interpretation of what crawled across the floor that Nakata had to kill. A museum placard or audio guide wants to tell me who the dead mother in the painting is, and therefore what the painting represents. All very interesting, but turns the work into some kind of high-brow newspaper. I’d rather let Murakami’s intense but possibly pointless climax and Schiele’s broken limbs and molted skin speak for themselves. 

One of my favorites scenes in Mad Men is when a bunch of low-level employees sneak into the lead partner’s office after hours to get a look at his new painting. It’s a Rothko, and they’re confused about what it means. “Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything,” says Ken Cosgrove, the literary account executive. “Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it. When you look at it, you do feel something.” When I look at it, I feel the same as when I’m watching lava: like I’m among quarks, bathing in primordial soup, sensing whatever is going to happen once all of this ends for all of us.

Fog

Every image in the city, every successive field of view, is part of the total collage. There are things that were put there intentionally, like advertisements, or speeches, or mission statements; the ones they want you to see. Then there are the things that just are, that nobody decided to show you. 

Things they want you to see: an image behind the train track of a woman of color, happy and in command, in a police uniform. Or in a station, a series of posters of transgender couples and individuals, celebrating self-realization and inclusivity. Or a company mission statement preaching some happy version of openness and connection. Or finally, political speeches at a fundraising breakfast before a big parade in June. All effusively representing the crown jewels of this city: pride that this place is more accepting of variety, more celebrating of diversity, more kind, and also more just, than any other place. But pride can become bitter, even if what you’re proud of is inclusion and tolerance. Especially when the inclusion and tolerance have deflated, and the pride is what’s left. 

One realization they maybe don’t want you to see enough to have: that there is deeper racial segregation than I’ve seen anywhere else, not as much of neighborhoods, but of restaurants, stores, bars, nightclubs, parks, or any other space of leisure. 

And another: that the companies preaching openness and connection, seek these things only as the occasional side effect of a hard, cold campaign to bring more people onto a platform, measure more data, break apart the economy and stitch it back together. That people within them must be demanded to justify their existence for fear of not having made enough money appear. That these same people will unironically discuss salaries over $100,000, as though it’s not relevant, not even true, that that is a lot of money, so long as we take truth to be informed by what is real for most human beings living around us. Money, money, money, made not religious, but fundamental. 

It’s the richest place the world has ever seen, and it doesn’t care, charmed as it is by its own ways of eating, talking, renting, driving, living, whether it’s shared, whether society learns anything from it. Doesn’t care that it is becoming its own separate algae bubble, because so long as it puts up enough “coming soon” posters for the hot new IP franchise “Inclusion and Equality,” it does not see that anything beyond the bubble exists.

I have a crush on Florence Pugh

I was maybe gonna write, “I think I have a crush on Florence Pugh” like I could edge away from this, but it’s a fact that at this moment, on this train where I am writing, I have a big fat fucking crush on Florence Pugh. It may not always be the case, but right now, it’s the truest thing brewing down there in that feeling belly. 

I had maybe heard her name before on The Big Picture podcast or something, but I didn’t know who she was. Then, innocently enough, I threw on LIttle Women the other night with Sarah. The stars in that movie erupt at you like–I’m hesitating and using an over-the-top simile but I think this is right – like fireworks. Boom, there's Meryl Sreep. Boom, there’s Saorsie Ronan. Boom! Laura Dern! (and Emma Watson? Lol). Then, the grand finale – and this for me was like one of those explosions in a different movie, where the explosive device makes some small little noise that fakes your brain out about what’s to come, so that you're extra shocked when the loud noise and fire and smoke and shrapnel and shock wave come – Timothée Chalamet! My God. 

But wait. In the middle of this symphonic display, who is that self-possessed, round faced, cutting gaze-possessing, spontaneous gurgles of fun-having beautiful woman I’ve never seen or heard of before in my life? Why, when this movie features like six of the buzziest and/or most legendary actors alive, am I waiting for their scenes to be over so that she can return to the screen? 

Because of things like that flashback scene in the March family living room, where she’s prancing around and saying how one day she’s going “to be the best painter in the world.” And when she gets to the word, “world,” she pauses her prancing, her eyes drift up, and her hands on her sideways-outstretched arms cock back towards her face. It took me right back to that feeling, when you’re in your young teens and it feels like you could really be the best in the world at whatever you choose to do so long as it’s not professional athletics. It’s not a feeling that’s super commonly conveyed in movies, at least not ones that I’ve seen. And I feel warmth in remember it, but also a little bit of sadness to know that whatever she does or doesn’t achieve, that feeling is going to end for her. Which in one way is what the whole movie is about. That was my favorite scene. 

Then she’s glaring down at Chalamet, boring holes in his fragile, drunk body, and scolding him in her smooth-but-rough velvety voice: “I waited an hour for you.” Here I see someone whose life is incredibly complicated, whose internal world is a buzzing hive of contradictory desires and fears and obligations but who can somehow twist and mold all of that into this very impressive and kind of sad resolution. 

And then she can just turn around and be goofy and joyful, like that incredulous, “fuck yeah for me” look she gives when Meryl Streep promises her her fancy old ring. Or as a part of the girls’ little club thing where they play act as jolly pompous old man theater goers. Every previous production of Little Women has portrayed Amy as a treacherous blond snake in comparison to her quirky and interesting sisters, but inhabited by Florence Pugh, she can be prim and savage in a lacy ballroom gown or laugh like Santa Claus with a pipe and a top hat. 

Saorsie and everyone else are exciting, but the feelings Florence Pugh delivers as Amy are so thick and layered that I feel like I could chew and swallow them. An actor who can serve up such straight-from-the-oven apple pies of humanity scene after scene, working with an erstwhile shallow character, is an actor well worth crushing on. 

So we’re watching the movie, and I’m just delighted by all of these things that are happening, and every ten minutes or go I ask aloud, “who IS this woman?” And finally, like halfway through, Sarah says, “isn’t she the girl from Midsommar?” And then it all comes rushing back to me. How well she played in that terrifying movie. Her recent Oscar nomination. Now I understood all the buzz I’d heard on podcasts. Florence Pugh is now a big deal, and I finally caught up. 

Good news for me. I’m getting Pugh season tickets.

Murakami

There’s something so cold, unreachable, withheld and complex, about really solemn, adjective-driven writing, like the sentence I just wrote. But it’s everywhere. I peruse novels in bookstores and am told about, or actually–not told, but shown: these are good writers, after all–something like this: Here is a protagonist. Here is what he is wearing. The gray sky is hanging low over the houses and steeples as he walks through the city, which is barely visible by the soft glow of yellow kerosene lamp posts; church bells toll as though heralding the sad conclusion of whatever personal trial or pre-occupation this protagonist is undergoing. 

In other words, novels or essays that are trying to slather, with the first sentence on through paragraph after paragraph, depth, seriousness, and profundity; they think it’s their job to create an operatic scene, emotional vibrato echoing about the visually opulent landscape.

But then there is a kind of scene-setting where the recitation of details is so matter of fact that the writer doesn’t intend to convey heavy emotional terrain. Where the reader doesn’t ned to strap on packloads of symbolism. Where the waitress’ hairstyle, the sound of the espresso machine, the foam in the cappuccino, the placement of the hands of the woman sitting across from the protagonist, her reason for liking chocolate cake instead of flan, are all just there. The reason behind the details of the scene are as banal as the reasons behind the details any scene you actually find yourself in, allowing the reader to experience what comes next – dialogue, action, feeling – as though they are real, not like they are wax figures behind glass in an old museum. These scenes can be contemporary, but they don’t have to be. 

When Murakami does this, the details maybe even convey bemusement – on the part of him, the writer, or maybe even his characters – that there might be any other way to set up a world, that there are readers who might find this style boring, or spin up machinery in their brains in an alchemic mission to extract meaning or messages from it. 

The first one makes me feel like I’m walking up to a house with 19th century haunted-style features, where I’ll have to bow in the entranceway, and dine at a long table full of strange guests where everybody’s honor is at stake. I am guilty of this: see my last post about India, colors busy and bright, spices deep and rich, etc. The second one invites me to experience the writer’s feeling in my own t-shirt and shoes, in my room, on my street, in my city. I can be on a highway or in a car or cafe and feel the story happen.

India

Sometimes I felt like I want to be truly submerged in Mumbai. It’s wafty with spices deep and rich, the colors busy and bright and everywhere, the music foreign yet soulful. A wealth of humanity I yearned to physically interweave with as much as possible. 

But the people have a way of physically placing themselves in the world I can’t pretend to imitate. One: on a busy streetside, in the gully of bicycles and ginger-footed strollers avoiding puddles, a barefoot man, perched on the seat of a parked motorbike, resting on his own shin. His leg is bent so far that is sole is facing upwards, his torso relaxed, his face unphased, a little spaced. All the effort of a gentle breeze. 

This is a folding of the body that would normally – for me or other white men at least – signal the summoning of immense, stiff discipline. As though to use the body for support, and and to avoid barriers between the body and the world, is the sign of some kind of superhuman nobility and physical practice. Like just sitting there in the world taking up a little space can’t just be as natural and unencumbered, unpolluted by effort and planning, as a leaf, brown and crispy, drifting down from a familiar east coast tree on a boring November afternoon and alighting on a wide, open, concrete square delineating where people feel comfortable walking. But for me, it can’t.

Within my yearning to be one with the kind of unfolding metastitization of rich and personal expression that I felt Mumbai acting out, the irony – a fancy abstract word evoking interruptive record scratches – is this: there are stalagmites and tites or other long-formed, hard features that are if not a controlling interest are still probably the largest voting block in the board of directors of how I feel. Which determine what I have the courage to do in a day. When I was They kept me relieved -- very relieved -- to be in a tower, behind a gate, on the seventh floor. And kept me feeling bold and energetic and fully spent just from having gone out beyond those gates and through and around the inspiring noises and people in the busy river of motorized tricycles they call rickshaws, get lunch, and return. And generally confined my experience to the most carefully manicured peaks of experience, the air conditioning and bused tables, and shuttling between them. I know that I probably cannot go get a train, and get off somewhere else in India, and walk out and find somewhere to sleep without feeling scared, overwhelmed, or some kind of unease with the world. To know that, to submerge in what inspires me, for all kinds of totally understandable but sheepish reasons, is not what I really “want,” whatever want means.  

So I hung in the pool on the tower roof, head just above the water’s reflection of the brownish, molted, expressionist urban landscape below, listening to the lyrical, lilting, mystical wailing floating up to me from the minarets. 

And now my comfort demands that I make a point, like it demands clean sheets and my own bed in a private resting spaces. But maybe just this once, I can say no. These words can just take up a little space and nothing else, like a comfortable barefoot man.

Hong Kong 2

In the first moment, I’m in a glass and steel tower lobby on Hong Kong Island, a space I’d say was cavernous if it wasn’t so lit that morning by the midsummer sun. Sitting at one of a little crop of white metal tables and chairs next to a kiosk that together comprise a cafe. Besuited professionals are milling about. A busy, gleaming, global corporate setting. 

What I remember that moment for is a vertical banner hanging down from the ceiling behind the escalators to the mezzanine. It’s enormous, maybe fifty feet long, though my memory could be exaggerating. It portrays a trim, clean-cut, gray-haired white guy on it, with a big smile, the picture of oblivious satisfaction: it’s an ad for a credit card or life insurance or something else moneyed. And in that moment, for some reason, I think of this fact I had recently learned about Hong Kong, which is that any person of any nationality who spends seven continuous years living and working in the territory qualifies to become a Hong Kong permanent resident, with all attendant social privileges and benefits. 

On the light side (sorry, just saw Star Wars) of this fact is beautiful, admirable: as I wrote glowingly last time, it makes Hong Kong a city unanchored from inheritance, where commerce and culture are defined by whoever decides to show up. A place in that moment more free than anywhere from the biases and inclinations and tendencies of thought based on the actions of angry people in the 19th century or before. 

But then there is the dark side (sorry again), where I see that content white man in the banner, and then I see myself, excited at being given permission to take this exotic place of old and new, with oceans and mountains framing its skyscrapers, and make it my own. As if my place in America was not enough; I need another piece of the world, and I can have this one. 

And then, after the first moment, the next moment: my attention returns to the people I’m sitting with at the cafe, who I got drunk with the night before, who have lived in Hong Kong their whole lives. And I mention that I’m returning to mainland China later that day. My two friends wrinkle their noses, and shake their heads. Mainlanders and loud, rude, and dirty, they say. And I’m too aglow with admiration of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitanism, too able to relate to my friends’ frustration at having serenity disrupted by a tour guide wearing neon speaking into a megaphone five fee away, to be offended. 

Nine years and change after these moments, we watch the protests. It’s easy to see a mass of citizens demanding better treatment from their government; this is good liberals understand. But we might also be watching a visceral, or otherwise body-bound rejection of people Hong Kong ren see as loud and dirty. A nationwide wrinkling of the nose and shaking of the head, triggered as automatic and beyond control as Mr. Park’s reaction to Mr. Kim’s smell at the end of Parasite, right before [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]. 

And for the part of us good liberals, maybe we’re supporting the protesters not so much because we demand equal treatment and human rights for all people, but because we prefer Hong Kong as an open, exotic, commercial city where we can come and go as we please.

Again: I support Hong Kong, and I hope you do too. But it’s an exercise in clear and honest engagement with the world to reflect on the tribal rage and preference beneath the thin skin of our principled stand. 

Hong Kong 1

There’s a vein of belief flowing strong in the head of any modern American liberal, fed by good liberal education in which the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, and I Have a Dream speech are major plot events in a world story unfolding towards perfection. A belief formed in our little liberal minds that all history is defined by the total score of freedom against unfreedom, where it’s simple to tell who the good guys and bad guys are. 

Example: you’ve seen the students in windbreakers and maybe Uniqlo, colorful and loose, standing in some gray plaza with skyscrapers rising through the background. There’s tear gas blowing around and rows of black helmets and shiny plexiglass shields. This is our generic image of Hong Kong today, the New York Times and its extended family putting points on the freedom/unfreedom scoreboard.

But there’s a richness, a sort of dusty, golden, grand old library sort of vibe to the truth about China that isn’t so clear and clean. To perceive it you have to sit there with it, looking deeply into it, in the best case navigate through it with one of these tiny cameras people swallow so that 6th graders in science class can take a first person tour of a digestive tract. I got some of that living in China in a constant reading of books or watching my parents read books or watching movies or talking over dinner about Chinese history.

And when I did that, I saw British ships captained by really really red-faced men that you imagine have the most arch-pompous of high-pitched nasal accents looking for reasons to open cannon fire on a proud people without good guns, so that they could continue pumping them full of literally life-sapping drugs. And over time other white men seeing little features and pieces of China and saying, “heyy, that looks tasty,” and coming up with pretexts to ignore that last oblivious white guy who promised he was finished, and pull out a pirate pistol and say, “what, you’re not sporting?” while going for the ass grab. A century of perpetual harassment. 

Then later, I saw a shattered map, run over by skinny strongmen on rural roads, fields, and ditches. I saw Japanese soldiers and mass rape and the removal of entrails, and wide rivers of peasants fleeing, some of whom are so starving that they smother their newborns. And later, different peasants, now in bland communal kitchens that have no food; and still later, I saw teenagers in red torturing monks, smashing Buddhas, and marching their pediatricians down the street in dunce caps.

And finally, I saw busy streets where nothing is really happening except people living their lives, buying stuff at the drugstore, hanging out at Starbucks, worrying about their kid getting into college. Enjoying – really, enjoying–all the colorful fruits of modern living that Americans are now sour on. And I realized that freedom scoreboard I’d been using to measure China and myself, leaves out pain, progress, imperialism, history, pride.

The Times family’s China story is often some version of, “more people in China can drive cars and eat in restaurants and go shopping, but look at all the people they are putting in prison” as if those things need to be intrinsically related, like the latter comments on the former. And it’s rich of us to engage with the world by marking a scoreboard that measures all of history and current events in terms of conformity to ideas that we think we invented, that are the spine of our story about ourselves. 

I’d be in Shanghai, reading this story, tapping the vein in every liberal Americans’ head that now fuels their outrage over what’s happening in Hong Kong. And I would feel, defensive? Not of humorless and sensitive autocrats, but against the freedom scoreboard we use not to measure the truth of the world, but to feel good about ourselves. We should probably stop. 

When people say “it’s complicated” when they talk about Morey’s tweet and the Hong Kong protests with all kinds of care and hesitation in their voices, they are trying to stop. But they do it like China is special, as if it’s some kind of fucking news, as if a lot of the other images of batons and tear gas we’ve used to mark our scoreboards don’t have just as much of a detailed landscape of pain and pride surrounding them. The only reason we’re admitting to complexity now is that China is too powerful for us to give ourselves our usual shower of outrage without costing ourselves a lot of money. Lebron says Morey was was “misinformed;” and that might mean that he didn’t know about the Opium Wars, and in that sense he probably was misinformed. But in that same sense we are all mostly misinformed all the time, because we don’t look to any history  but the best version of our own when we go for another hit of indignation. 

And yet. 

There’s another vein of belief, filled by deep consideration of the genocide of indigenous Americans, or the colonization of Hawaii. A vein flowing in the heads of those who just had their first drink of the world’s complexity, and suddenly nothing matters. Suddenly everyone’s the same. Where Steve Kerr talks about AR-15s in the US in response to questions about China. Yeah, AR-15s are a problem. So is rounding up millions of people into camps for no reason.  

And if you’ve traded the outrage shower for the equivalence bath, you should know: Hong Kong is a bright, special star. You can use escalators to get across town. It has the coolest skyline and lit up cyberpunk vibe. Someone told me once that anyone in the world can become a citizen of Hong Kong if they live there for seven years. By accident of its colonial past, it is like one independent system on the edge of the galaxy, an island of non-partisan commerce. A place existing outside the national anthems, drums and guns and weird military uniforms, history and the Olympics, or any other part of the grand charade of vanity that is nationalism and geopolitics. 

And there is just something so enragingly demeaning about being told you can’t speak your mind, to be intimidated into shutting up. The PRC does that on an industrial scale, and it sucks. I feel for the people who have to live under it. It certainly wouldn’t work out well for me. 

It would be a human tragedy for Hong Kong to be subsumed into China’s film reel of patriotic development – its own blooming sense of manifest destiny, its drive to become the center of known existence that it was for 2,000 years. To lose Hong Kong’s sense of separateness from so much that is tiresome and wrong with this world. 

So Morey is right. Stand with Hong Kong. Stand with the protesters. But savor complexity, and fear any way of thinking about the world that results in you being better and others worse. You can both stand up for your values, while understanding they grow from a single perspective.

Dreaming

My music must (almost) always be four-on-the-floor. That means a kick drum, the kind on a drum set you play with a pedal that makes a low sound that is 80% thump and 20% thwack, that hits again, and again, and again without changing, four per bar, for the entire song. Most people need rhythms to be rich and funky, syncopated, alternating, uneven. And I like that kind of beat too; it’s ponderous,  or mischievous, inarguably more seductive than a four-on-the-floor beat. But my favorite rhythm is so straightforward, unedited, and unironic, so plain and basic, so stripped down to the most basic and raw element of rhythm that it makes most people uncomfortable, it hits their dance nerve too directly for comfort. Or like seeing more of someone than they wanted to see. Your beat is naked, put some clothes on it.

In my early teens, “techno,” as four-on-the-floor music is known by the skeptical, suspicious, and uninitiated, was foreign, frizzy, and “for f**s,” as I heard said more than once. No sooner had I begun turning the volume up loud on my boom box did I hear Eminem, as good a moral authority as there ever was for white boys from 1999-2002, declare that “nobody listens to techno.” Or there was that scene in Bad Boys 2, the coolest movie of 2003. Early in the film, you’re in a nightclub, blue and purple lights are flashing, the drums are hitting. It’s full of undesirably European-looking people, very doofusy white men and women that look like they might be Scandinavian underwear models waving their arms around and putting pills in each other’s mouths. In the back room, a sleazy Russian gangster taps his foot and counts bills. Four- on-the-floor-beats were to be avoided by serious young men. 

Anyway, when I was young and scared, I wasn’t ready for music that made me feel open or honest. Fourteen-year-old me needed a heavy dose of anything that would make me feel strong and protected, that would put weight into my walks in and out of school through the happily chatting pockets of other boys and girls. Something so armored with bravado that if I listened to it loud enough, I could strut without thinking about who was, or probably wasn’t, looking at me. So I blasted the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album so loud that people could hear tinny gunshots from my cheap walkman headphones. I avoided social interactions at school dances by walking around rapping along to lyrics, hoping to score passive admiration for knowing the words. (I even supported the invasion of Iraq for machismo reasons).  

One scene lifted and another settled when my family moved to Shanghai. The cool kids weren’t guys in long sleave Under Armor with big hair curling up from underneath their baseball hats, stealing liquor from their parents to bring to parties in Bethesda. They were Europeans who went clubbing. The buildings were tall and lit. Long ships steamed downriver carrying things from China to wherever I wanted to imagine in the world. I could take taxis everywhere. I learned a new language, poking through one of the many veils of mind that segregate humans from each other. And techno, or house, or trance, as I passively started to absorb that breeds of four-on-the-floor music were called, were in the literal air, in bars and clubs I would go to with my idiot friends, out of speakers outside designer stores on the avenue near my house, at the mini parties on beaches in the Philippines. All as I was first experiencing intoxication – chemically, and spiritually. At last, there was freedom. I resisted for a while, but at some point I let go of my attachment to my fourteen-year-old disdain for “techno” and asked my cool Belgian friend to send me the names of tracks I could check out. 

Some weekday that April. In bed, on top of a thin, gray, spread-out duvet. Late afternoon light. Maybe I had been playing sports that day; I was tired, but pressed, unrelaxed, exhausted from unrelaxation. Then I noticed a new email from my Belgian friend listing tracks to download. “Like you would hear at Bonbon,” he wrote, referring to the club steps away from my house with an all-you-can-drink fee of around $15 on Friday nights. I opened up Acquisition P2P and downloaded all I could find approximately matching track titles for. The first one to complete was Dreaming, by “DJ Tiesto,” as he was known at the time. 

Tiesto played a show in Shanghai a year hence, which I skipped because I was herky-jerkying around a Rolling Stones concert with my parents. I heard about it the next day from Tom in Chinese class, and felt a flash of imaginative wonder I now recognize as such, but at the time experienced as just another pressing discomfort to be ignored. But a year later, I recognize Tiesto’s name. So I put on the track. 

There’s a flutter of drums, flipping and flimming, maybe a symbol or a congo, I don’t really know. After eight bars, an elevated dripping noise. And after another eight, my brain was loose, jogging in place at the starting gun.

There’s a part of you, way below consciousness, the part that knows how to dance. Right when that part expected it, came the kick drum. And with it came a sound I can only describe as a delicate shooting star, fizzing in from another system before dissipating calmly in my atmosphere, from which the flicking ornamental drums grew right before my ears. And we were off. 

These plucky, repetitive chord noises I can only describe as “synths,” layered on one another, building every minute or so, until the kick drum vanished, and all the other sounds pulsed. The parade of sound was held up, the crowd of onlookers wondering what’s happening, holding its breath. The imaginary ghost of the beat, momentum continuing forward in the form of a gentle repetition of three descending notes, not unlike a gentle alarm. And the lone dancer emerges into open space from the front of the parade column, and a voice sings:

No words. No talk. We’ll go dreamin’

No pain. No hurt. We’ll go dreamin’

No words. No talk. We’ll go dreamin’

No pain. No hurt. We’ll go dreamin’

These words were the last of successive layers of sand reaching further and further down into my body, until it felt like this voice was being sung in my chest. I lay back on pillows, eyes closed, arms out, palms upward, feeling golden rainbow roads coursing through my arms and out my fingertips.

I felt a living memory’s satchel of loneliness, desperation, yearning, and striving, come out meekly and stand there, for once not hiding but watching time go by as the song’s elements jumped off from the breakdown into a soaring, magic carpet ride over blurred streaks of light and landscape. I thought of my girlfriend, and wanted to hold her hand. 

When it was over, I was a little empty, but so filled. Nothing like that had ever happened before. 50 Cent made me imagine that I was known to be feared, which gave me the courage to walk through the cold courtyard and into school every day. Tiesto made me feel like I could be loved.

Succession's twisted harmony

There are moments when Succession shimmers, visibly and physically. Like at the end of season two, when the high violin vibrates in tune with ripples reflecting off the shiny white hull of that yacht. And at a glance one might feel these shimmers as portraits of wealth and power designed to do whatever such landscapes of exponential extravagance do for viewers of other shows, from Million Dollar Listing to Big Little Lies. 

But the veteran Succession spectator will experience these moments as expressions of the gaping trauma, the echoing caverns of humanity, that define its characters; or at least I do. Two full seasons have plotted a direct relationship between sumptuousness and emotional desperation; the more exquisite the presentation, the more piercing the cries for help. 

So for me these moments make flesh the awesome emotional no-man’s land the characters inhabit, scooped out pits and torn barbed wire and shrapnel strewn about. They raise the shade on the heads of Shiv and Kendall and everyone else, inside which you can see the desolation throbbing behind their eyes, the fear gulping in their throats, as vividly as if they were wounded, their bodies marked with impressions, torn or scraped, red and glistening, the sting of recency ringing out. 

This blaring human suffering is set back in a diorama of...despicableness? I don’t know; despicableness is too simple and dismissive a word with which to weigh the heaviness of these people’s unseeing of the world as they step out of Escalades and choppers. Their obliviousness to the stalling of the earth’s life-sustaining architectures, the spreading of mental nausea, and every other system failure as they pluck immaculately stemless glasses of green garnished fizz out of the hands of physical, yet invisible, human beings, and lie about a cushioned deck on the Aegean in their fine clothes and hats. These children also cannot even see, let alone feel in their guts, the rapidly dimming ambience of our unfolding history, the dark turn in the plot line of the narrative tapestry of all of our lives in which they are large, defining, non-ornamental figures. 

I’m an out of tune voice among my generation of urban dwellers when it comes to the idea of the injustice of the world. Yet I feel anger at the depth, complexity, and massive intricacy of the conspiracy of denial within and among the Roy children as to the forces humans have unleashed upon the world and ourselves, that have escaped our grasp and now spin beyond our casual control. 

But alongside of all the deep-stewing disgust that gurgles up from inside as I watch, the the vicious slicings, intentional torture, and indifference to pain these people sit around luxuriating in pulls out of me a kind of yelping compassion. This is Succession’s twisted harmony.

After Liverpool

Sitting around after Liverpool beat City 3-1. Waiting for the emotional payoff of this fraternal twin of a baseball playoffs elimination game to splash across my face. A booming switch plays in my head here, a head touch there, an open beam into the left side of the net, blood red shirts running around powder blue; it’s new, it’s different, it’s wrong?

Last season’s City, you always knew they were better than me, even if they flailed or overheated or slept in against Crystal Palace. Against Liverpool, City was a cliff, made of hard rock, but also a giant octopus/hydra hybrid: cut off one fearsome De Bruyne tentacle and it grows right back as Leroy Sane. By grace alone Liverpool didn’t lose to them twice. I would watch the highlights of the Reds (I hate this nickname, it reminds me that Lebron is also a fan, which makes me feel cheap, but I need a pronoun) winning back to back against City in the Champions League Quarterfinals in 2018, and it seemed so implausible that it must have taken place in a different universe with different gravity, different physical laws. 

And now my guys are – what manner of undefeated are they? 10-0-1? 11-0-1? Does it even matter? And they have deliberately and confidently sent down the overwhelming, immeasurable, utterly sure reason why this unbeaten streak couldn’t last, why it was just lucky. And I don’t want to read the articles, I don’t want the 12 different easy ways I’ll hear talking heads on Youtube say that it’s Liverpool’s title to lose. I just want to see Mo Salah smiling, Jurgen Klopp’s perfect teeth. And those torrents of blood red in the stands at Anfield, rippling and crashing like a sea of the right kind of humanity. The right kind of deep, pain-lit interconnection and raw feeling. The maximum example of the power of stories, and of humans shouting together, put out there for us to be wrapped up in, to help us feel justified as ourselves. Bless us, bless Liverpool.