: lower black pain.

I have always enjoyed a good comic book - it’s a portable, colorful adventure. I have even been described as a “comic book kind of person”.

Quite a few times. Hmn.

Anyway, comics are great, but they are not my favorite kind of book.

Of course, NOVELS, who doesn’t like a thick, engaging novel to get lost in? Or POETRY - inspiration to the very soul, essential expressions of the human spirit! I humbly respect all forms of the literary arts, but there is one category I find the most intriguing, most mysterious, and most fulfilling.

Instruction manuals.

Not the ones that come with new appliances, I mean the books filled with “do-it-yourself” instructions, the “how-to” books that demonstrate how to repair things or build things with little pictures and diagrams. I absolutely love them.

The trend really got going in the 1950’s, when home improvement became a craze across the US, inspiring thousands of weekend carpenters and mechanics. The good people at Time-Life Publishing fueled a nation’s dreams of more abundant shelf space and superior rain gutters and finished basements. Our copy of “The Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual” was a buffet of multi-level self-sufficiency, unraveling step-by-step the mysteries of simple plumbing, basic electricity, and the inner workings of a full stable of home appliances.

These books balanced capitalism’s ever-present seduction of acquisition with a desire to create on one’s own, reminding us that things could not just be bought, but built. We have a book containing full instructions for building an entire house from scratch, from the foundation to the roof - all you need is the raw materials. And the land, permits, heavy machinery, and a willing crew.

Easy as making Jell-o™.

Beyond the subject of home construction, I have collected how-to books on electronics, knitting, filmmaking, magic tricks, farming, cooking, first aid, fine art, and science. I have been a subscriber to both Martha Stewart and The New England Journal of Medicine, and always enjoy putting together new IKEA furniture because that little man shows me just how to do it in that newsprint pamphlet included in the flat pack box.

“There is always something to learn!” my mother used to tell me, and still does today if any conversation steers that way. Thus I have always tried to learn something new or get better at something, and these books are a part of that.

I have repaired our dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and kitchen sink, along with the vacuum cleaner and the oven. I mean, we live in an apartment building where there’s a guy who’s supposed to do that, but it takes three weeks to get an appointment. I never attempt to repair anything that could be dangerous or in any way ultimately litigious, but a new toilet float here and there isn’t that big a deal.

I’ve got books describing much grander projects, but I’m never going to build a pyramid - I just don’t have the time - yet the general principles are useful when making stacks of books on my bedside table or interesting cupcake arrangements for PTA functions.

While enjoyable to read, there are many things that a how-to book cannot effectively teach. One of those is how to play the guitar.

As a youngster, after a non-encouraging introductory lesson at the local music store, I opted for the Mel-Bay™ series of manuals, along with their newest offering which included a cassette tape to play along with! But even after completing the course I did not feel that I could actually “play the guitar” as my personal music taste veered more toward Michael Jackson and less toward “Michael Row The Boat Ashore”.

I used the chord charts to figure out how to play other songs, and eventually wanted to progress to the majesty of an electric guitar.

In the musical temple of “Big Dude’s Music City” was a Yamaha model that caught my eye. Yes, Yamaha, the trusted name in dirt bikes and outboard motors, had produced an electric guitar that was, unsurprisingly, available at a tremendous discount.

I paid 20 dollars a month for it on lay-away for almost a year. I finally got to take it home. I took it out of the case and played it.

plink. plink. No sound. plink. plink.

I could not afford an amplifier, but thought I might be able to pick one up later on, maybe as a high school graduation present to myself. plink. plink.

I tried to learn scales, followed all the diagrams, but the sounds were just a series of varying degrees of plink, offering neither the smooth tones of late ’70s soft rock, the comfortable twang of country hits, or the gnarl and crunch of early ’80’s punk.

plink.

My grand-aunt used to gift me odd finds from her local Salvation Army store, and had recently left us an old electric blanket. Out of musical desperation, I hooked up one of the control units to our living room stereo with the input from the guitar fed into the other end. There were still no cool effects or distortion, but with the volume turned up ALL THE WAY, I could JUST hear the guitar amplified through the speakers. I was blissful.

slightly louder plink. slightly louder plink.

I feel it appropriate to express gratitude to all powers, influences, and entities involved in the intersection of electricity and dumb luck at this point, as this could have been an unmitigated disaster and the most bizarre lawsuit the Yamaha Corporation had ever been tangentially associated with.

A friend of a friend saw me practicing scales, and asked if he could see the guitar. As he stood there playing like a lost Van Halen brother, I realized that I not only lacked an amp, but his fingers.

He bought the guitar from me (at a tremendous discount), but later that year sold it back to me to get the money to buy what he must have identified as “a real guitar”. I resumed my practice with dedication, but little real gusto.

I blame this slight disappointment in my youth for my mid-life crisis slash COVID lockdown action of purchasing an actual Marshall™ amp and an assortment of guitar pedals. And a better guitar.

The problem with how-to books is that they are, for the most part, purely theoretical. One is not doing the thing, merely reading about doing the thing. Instructions do not equal instant accomplishment, whether in cookbooks or The Constitution - and mastery of any skill set requires focus, trial and error, and a significant amount of practice, even with the directions laid out right in front of you.

As it would happen, the how-to book I am currently reading is “The Best of Jimi Hendrix”, and yesterday I, for the very first time, successfully played an entire song from this volume, through my real amp, and in his authentic tone.

All it took was that songbook. And 40 years worth of practice and gear.

As the last note faded into legend, I felt extremely satisfied to have stuck with this whole thing long enough to finally have reached my post-plink era.

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I hum a great deal. Not really humming exactly, there’s a rhythmical aspect to it, kind of a “bum-ba-dum”.

Bum-da-dum dum dum dum dum…

Going up the stairs to work, filling out forms, waiting in grocery lines, cleaning the house. Bum-ba-dum. It’s a bit like having a personal soundtrack.

In many cities, this would be considered a problem. I’m lucky enough to live where we gently ignore one another, automatically assuming that people who seem to be speaking to themselves are either on the phone or listening to music - without accusatory questioning.

Sometimes my colleague at work begins to hum a tune and I join in, though this kind of thing is not inherently communal. Bum-da-dums are short in nature, just a phrase or a chorus meant to bridge a particularly harrowing gap from one moment to another.

It could be any tune: pop song, classic rock, jazz standard, traditional hymn, classical favorite, but the best are soundtracks, tv theme songs, and musicals.

At one point I was going to write movie soundtracks. That was going to be my job, to grow up or whatever and then write music for money, earning enough to eat and purchase a most tasteful little bungalow somewhere.

So I wrote a lot of music. For my birthday, my mother bought me an “As Seen On TV” box set of Disney albums, and I played The Aristocats, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Robin Hood over and over and watched every musical I could, which meant they had to be on TV in the 1970’s, so they were either

* black and white films where Mickey Rooney and sometimes Judy Garland got their friends together and “put on a show” in an old barn (that they always seemed to have free access to) in their small town, or

* CinemaScope spectaculars practically made of colors, where streetfuls of extras in full costume danced energetically in ever-widening crane shots.

Music men, funny girls, British nannies and feuding New York City street gangs filled our cramped little screen, the peal of soaring brass and inspiring voices coming from the portable set’s three inch speaker. It was magical.

Then I hit Rogers and Hammerstein. The Sound of Music was on every year, and I attended a Catholic grade school whose nuns spoke of Maria as if she were a MARVEL superhero. Watching in 6th grade, I finally understood who all those soldiers were, due to my history class’s recent WWII unit… information that, for me, made the most hummable movie in the world much less hummable. Alas, Rogers and Hammerstein were not my brand. I still feel that Carousel is more disturbing than Sweeney Todd.

The absolute bottom for me was Seven Brides For Seven Brothers due to another history class, this one in high school, where we learned the full story of the Sabine Women, a distinctly un-hummable tale that soured me on the whole genre for a little while.

I found my way back with How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, which a local station must have purchased the rights to for a year because it played every month.

And then, my local PBS station was proud to present Singin’ In The Rain, which, for all practical purposes, became my Hamilton.

My mother wanted me to have an actual job, but she was very encouraging about the whole writing music stuff. As previously mentioned, it was my grandmother who actually composed music, and she was distinctly NOT encouraging about the entire category.

My grandparents often traveled to other big cities in the U.S. as delegates, sometimes meeting congresspeople or senators or Vice Presidents. They had a selection of knick-knacks from all over - most of them painted lumps of ceramic, and the most treasured of which was their “hula-girl” made with a hidden spring in the middle.

A couple of these trips were to New York City. I was incredibly proud to learn that they stayed in the Algonquin Hotel, my absolute favorite due to its association with Dorothy Parker. It was during this trip that they were gifted front row tickets to one of the hottest shows in town, starring talented unknowns Ben Vereen, Melba Moore, and Diane Keaton, and it was a musical.

Grandma wanted to play Carnegie Hall. I believe, though she never admitted this, that her dream was to stand in front of an orchestra and conduct her original works. If her dreams had been realized, she might have lived in Sugar Hill, Harlem as the most square of the zoot suit set, the modern day female African American Tchaikovsky. So to be in that room with the live band playing music, before that curtain went up, must have been a heady moment.

The musical was Hair, and you most likely have heard the music, but there are several reasons they haven’t performed it at your local summer stock or you didn’t catch the movie on tv. Skipping its heavy political content, at the end of the first act the entire cast sings a rousing and life-affirming ballad, then promptly takes off ALL of their clothing, standing naked in the spotlights, right at the edge of the stage.

How different my life might have been if my grandparents had been gifted tickets to West Side Story. I learned about this experience as an adult, but always had wondered why

– my Grandmother had refused to teach me piano,– only begrudgingly acknowledged my singing,– was totally against me moving to the East Coast after high school,– and mentioning the word “Broadway” in front of my her seemed equal to taking the Lord’s name in vain. Actually, slightly worse.

For 15 years I worked two-and-a-half blocks away from Times Square. Sometimes during lunch I would go take sideways peeks at my childhood dream.

Then I learned how expensive it is to heat or cool a giant four story room every night, and pay the electricity bills, and other key aspects of Broadway economics. I also became familiar with the full spreadsheet of costs involved in creating a motion picture, much less those necessary to distribute it.

You can write songs in your bedroom, play them to folks at a coffeeshop, record a full album at home and distribute it on the internet for almost nothing. With staged or filmed musicals, all those songs and dances are still mere frosting on a cake made of Pure Business.

So I’ve composed a great deal of performance intended music, but none marketable enough to pay the rent on a midtown theatre or hire an army of cinema union workers. But they’re good to hum, which is what I do, walking through New York streets, jauntily “bum-da-dum”ing my little tunes, soundtracking my own life, if (at present) nothing else.

I may not be wowing the masses, but neither am I morbidly shocking scores of little old ladies, so that’s a kindness.

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It’s the time for bread and wine as the year moves steadily on, days now getting shorter, summer both in full swing and ever-so-slight decline. Many of us can’t help but look past the sweltering days ahead of (and just behind) us with keen anticipation of the autumn and winter holidays, already anticipating how thematically unified those pumpkin-orange shoes will be, or the pretty of the streets with the houses once again covered in lights.

But first, summer. The other half. The half when it’s actually too hot to go to the beach, or even outside. The half when we’ve had enough popsicles and that fan we leave constantly blowing is starting to accumulate “too much” pet hair. That half when the drugstore packs away its flags and plastic snorkel sets and puts out the back-to-school items. It’s a wistful-er half, perfect for heat-exhausted reminiscing.

I got all mine in early this year, as I once again visited my ancestral manse for a bit with my daughter, smack dab in the middle of the midwest.

Because this year, she wanted to see my high school yearbooks.

“It’s just me with odd clothes and a giant smile.” I told her. “You see that a lot.”

Yet she insisted, so the volumes were excavated. She took them enthusiastically, with my grade school yearbooks as well.

I wasn’t underplaying it: they were all filled with black and white photographs of people even I didn’t know, and then a few of me, most often wearing shirts with unflatteringly large collars, smiling in a spirit I now recognize as “pragmatic”.

Oh, there was laughter. I feel very fortunate that it couldn’t be accurately described as “uproarious”, but it was long and loud and hearty and steady.

“I was not cool.” I felt pressured to admit.

“Aw, sure, you were ok… I mean look at everybody else, you’re all just old.”

“Well, we weren’t then, we were your age.”

She seemed not to agree, as in her lap was a double spread monochromatic visual buffet of early 80’s hairstyles.

I haven’t changed all that much. There was a moment when my face sort of looked like “my face” and it’s stayed that way ever since. My collars are smaller now, but my smile is still pragmatic, if not a bit wearily so.

All my daughter’s school pictures are fantastic; the photographers encouraging the children to jump like Phillippe Halsman or spin or laugh… the only verb that we were offered as children was “Smile!”, a strange command which, when spoken, instantly negates the ability to do so in any authentic way. We tried our hardest.

As camera film was expensive, for much of high school the only images I have are these yearbook photos, one and a quarter by one inch greyscale reductions of an entire year of my life (minus the summer).

Through digital photography, kids today will capture enough frames of themselves to print massive flip books, displaying their memories in real time. They have tools to perfect these images, and a library of pictures that would have taken a thousand shoe boxes to house is carried with them in their pocket. Where my changes are chronicled from yearbook to yearbook, she will have an archive of every micro-phase of her growth.

Finally, she looked at the pages inside the front and back covers. There were handwritten messages from other students; enthusiastic, friendly, cheeky, and a few that could actually be interpreted as somewhat torrid. I did not have a memory to go with every message, though I did remember a few in startling detail, but wouldn’t admit which ones were which.

“So you WERE popular?” she threw at me.

“No, I was interesting, the exact same way you are. Weird and kind and kind of interesting. I didn’t make lifelong friends, but I didn’t really judge people, so I didn’t make lifelong enemies either.”

She accepted this answer and tried to keep reading, but the 20th century secret code called “cursive writing” befuddled her.

Life offers a great deal of change at the beginning. Seeds transform into saplings and then magnificent trees – one not at all like the other, each requiring a different name. Humans change even more than that, and it’s impossible to predict exactly “what we are going to be” from our newborn selves (whereas if you buy a packet of seeds, there’s a photo of the eventual results right there on the envelope).

We are units of constant change, and when we’re young we document it a great deal. But then we figure we have enough pictures of ourselves, and look - we can still wear that jacket from 10 years ago and don’t need a new one, and this is must be the longest we’ve ever lived in an apartment, and all that change that used to be dynamic from year-to-year can become occasional, and then altogether surprising. Even to us.

It’s good to remind ourselves that, along with the resiliency borne from our deepest roots, we each hold within us the integrity of the seed and the (inner) flexibility of the sapling. That’s the story of your high school yearbook: we were there and now we’re here, and no matter what our age, right now we’re as young as we’re ever gonna be.

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1958. A Nebraska editor creates a series of study guides for Shakespeare plays that sell over 58,000 copies in six months. The editor’s name? Clifton Hillegass.

By 1964, his company was selling over one million books from the “Cliff’s Notes” series annually, summarizing everything from Greek myth to classic literature.

It took much less time to finish one of these pamphlets than to read the actual novel or play, and they were categorized to show all the things that teachers cared about in school - main points, character motivations, plot patterns and twists.

To use these notes was clearly defined as “cheating”, because you “didn’t read the book/play/whatever”, and those who did got something you missed. But the details of that advantage were not clearly defined, leading to slackerish reasoning from students:

“…so, like, a thing happened in an old book and it means something and you want me to tell you what it means, and, like, this yellow and black book told me exactly what you want to hear so, like, how is that cheating? You wanted the answer, right? What does it matter where I got it from?”

Teachers began to be more clever when assigning research papers, asking for direct quotes and subtleties that they knew the notes had overlooked. To do this, they had to purchase copies of the notes for themselves, further driving up profits at the publishing house.

My mother was a teacher, so I was never allowed to even bring a copy of a Cliff’s Notes book into the house. I figured it was similar to having a parent who was, say, a chef at a Michelin starred restaurant and trying to sneak a frozen TV dinner into the fridge. Thus, in every grade I read the entirety of every book assigned, figuring out on my own main points, character motivations, and plots in each one.

So much of my being a kid in school was wondering if I would ever use what I was learning in “real life”. Do I believe that all that reading made some kind of difference? I think so. Can I define what that difference was? Let’s find out.

Blockbuster Video opened its first VHS video rental outlet in 1985: by 2004 over nine thousand of their stores existed: families would mill about them on Friday nights while waiting for their Domino’s™ pizzas to be made, hoping that someone would return the film that they really wanted to see so they wouldn’t have to watch the ones they were carrying around.

Even in the smallest locations their video library was somewhat impressive, combining current hits as well a wide range of classic movies, including filmed versions of many school-assigned books; these took even less time to consume than their Cliff’s Notes counterparts.

This practice was also considered “cheating” in school, because not only did you not read the actual book, you were too lazy to engage in the criminal yet comprehensive use of Cliff’s Notes.

It must have been easy for teachers to spot the glaring errors produced by this non-study method: over-detailed explanations of what the characters were wearing, or the gigantic gaps in narrative from 300 page books being adapted and condensed to 90-minute-or-less popular entertainments.

By this time I was out of school and had no chance to try this time-saving method. It would definitely have not been allowed, even if the film in question were a mini-series. In Prime Time. On PBS.

Other societal advancements - the pocket calculator, the computer, were heralded as the harbingers of eternal ignorance by the more luddite-leaning. (Personally, I was mostly interested in spelling cheeky words with numbers on the calculator (revealed when I turned it upside down) and playing text-based role playing games on the computer.)

Yet soon, each was adopted as a “forward thinking tool”, and within years quietly became regarded as “everyday technology”.

Am I eternally ignorant? Gee, I hope not. But I do rely on a calculator (app) for quick answers, and though I work on computers all day long, those Excel™ charts I have to deal with would be much less efficient if they were all in pencil.

And now the smartphone, and AI, digital miracles that at last respond to us the same way technology worked on Star Trek™! Voice activated and benevolently omniscient, they see all and seem to know at least most-of-all, changing not only the world we live in now, but how we see the past (eg. any any old movie where the entire plot hinged on a missed phone call).

But AI engines can do much more than summarize information: they can, like a genie from a magic lamp, write entire research papers of any length, in any language, style, or voice in seconds, completely negating any need to waste time watching a whole movie, or consulting a synopsis, or finishing a novel.

While certainly impressive, the question on everyone’s lips is “That’s cheating, right? I mean, you’re not “doing the work” or whatever.”

Where is the line drawn? Surrounded by “tools” that “make things more convenient” for us, when do we all become the dinner party hosts that tell everyone they cooked the meal when it was catered? How long before the achievements we claim credit for are actually the product of curated consumerism rather than cultivated skill? When will the questions we’re asking no longer need us because they can answer themselves?

Aha. It has occurred to me why reading was so important.

Reading a book is not just knowing what the book is about. Reading is an experience - pace and meter, balance of what is currently on the page and what has yet to be revealed, even the typeface… all elements of a tangible exercise that is mirrored by anyone else engaging with the work, but never exactly duplicated.

Being able to complain to one another how boring a section was, or how incredibly surprised you were to find out “who did it”, is not available to those who get to the end of the race without running it.

The books I read, albums I listened to, and movies I watched taught me that life, the point of it all, lies on the pages, or deep in the grooves, or on every flickering frame of film, and the joy of experiencing art cannot be equalled by an explanation of it. It gave me the patience to create art, which does take time and effort and focus and resources, but then stands as a testament to all that went into it.

These new technologies are possibly the Final Horsemen of our Dumbpocalypse, as we give up forever understanding how to make proper change from a dollar, or memorize a phone number, or diagram a sentence. Future “book clubs” may feature oversized glasses of wine shared among groups only discussing the prompts they typed into ChatGPT. “Hard work”? “Ethics”? The “joy of mastering tasks”? Sure, they’re around here somewhere, they probably just stopped off for a bite to eat - they should be here any minute.

So we will fear the smartphones and shun the AI and keep them away from our kids for a while, but sooner than we think, these new technologies are going to be shrugged off as commonplace. In the meantime, there will be a few who figure out how to use these tools to push art and science further, to begin their work at a place it may have taken a lifetime to reach, and then build upon that to create all-new experiences. That, won’t be cheating at all.

Besides, think of all the things we can do with the time we save.I could read a book.

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I’ve always had a problem with Darth Vader™ sheets, a specific concern that does not include the tapestries, house slippers or “comfy throw blankets” depicting the character, as it is not the simple combination of legendary cinema maniac with home textiles that disturbs me. It’s the children’s bedsheets depicting Darth Vader in a classic menacing stance, or sometimes as many as four or five action poses.

I suppose I also must include the matching comforters and pillowcases.

It’s not the creation of these sheets that gets me as much as the fact that a child asked for them and a parent bought them, put them on the child’s bed, and continually washes them and puts them back on the bed time and again.

Because Darth Vader is a murderer, of lots of people, whose eventual decision to stop murdering people drove him to murder just one more really bad person, which, while spontaneously heroic, in no way mathematically made up for all of his past murders, but as he only had about three more minutes left to live there was understandably not much time for meaningful penance.

Even if you aren’t familiar with all the Star Wars™ movies and TV shows and books and whatnot it is clear that this elder Skywalker is The Bad Guy. Driven by grief and passion? Sure, but definitely a villain in these stories, beginning his career of indiscriminate slaughter through the assassination of men, women, and children (quite a lot of children, actually).

Every Halloween we pass any number of little Darth Vaders, their five year old frames awkwardly carrying both a full bag of candy and a red lightsaber nearly as tall as they are. The little scamps. But that’s Halloween, our annual stand against fear and dangerous levels of blood sugar, when we’re all supposed to be something scary for the night.

These sheets are different. That’s every night. That’s coming home from grade school and eating dinner and looking at a little something on tv and then getting drowsy and putting on your PJs and yawning a bit after brushing your teeth and then drifting off to sleep after sliding into a bed with a serial killer on it. In action poses.

I spoke to a few parents about this during a PTA function at my daughter’s grade school. A couple of their children did indeed have these sheets.

In most cases they were familiar with the character, albeit somewhat tangentially, but in all cases they told me their child was obsessed enough to have had at least one Vader themed birthday party, various pieces of Vader-based clothing, and in some cases even the Darth Vader Christmas stocking on their holiday mantle.

“It’s about power.” one parent told me. “Children go through life being told what to do, they don’t get to make a lot of choices, they dream of just being able to do whatever they want, and that’s what Darth Vader does. Everyone’s afraid of him, and in some cases that’s what kids think adults are, powerful people that have to be negotiated with but ultimately hold all the cards in every situation.”

She looked distractedly at her paper cup of punch for a moment, as if this next part was going to be a bit more painfully confessional.

“The good guys don’t seem to be all that powerful, I guess. They mostly fight the bad guy, and they barely win most of the time, it makes him look even stronger.”

“I get that,” I said, “but aren’t there Han Solo sheets?”

“I did ask him about those.” another parent said, “There was one set with all the spaceships, like the big round one, and there was another with lightsabers, but he wouldn’t budge. He’s on his third different Darth Vader set - he’s had them since he was four years old.”

“Wow.” I actually said out loud, then covered badly by adding, “I mean, he’s kind of a killer, which is why it’s weird, sort of?”

“I don’t think they understand that part.” the third parent said.

The second parent agreed. “I didn’t want to get into all that, really… he was just too young. To be honest I thought he would grow out of it before now.”

Where DO you go after Darth Vader sheets? Black ones? We had those once, they were kind of cool, but don’t seem nearly nefarious enough.

Bright red! That’s the ticket. Also good for little Dexter fans.

To be fair, there are Disney™ villain bed sets with the cartoon faces of all the evil queens and their catch phrases, but they represent a pretty low body count, even as a team. From the world of Harry Potter™ one can purchase a vast assortment of bedroom options from the Slytherin collection – if gold, green and gigantic poisonous snakes fit into your child’s personal aesthetic.

But Darth Vader merchandise outsells all others from its franchise; the original lightsaber is expected to fetch over three million dollars at auction, whereas his competitor’s blade (used by Alec Guiness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi) only sold for $130,000. Even to adults, the character emulates the power to balance any surrounding chaos with an indiscriminate lashing out of raw power.

I, ever the scholar, looked up the words power and strength just to make perfectly sure that I really understood what they meant; - “Strength” represents inner tenacity and ability, equating most directly to defense (standing strong);- “Power” is the ability to create external effect, to attack, to influence others.

More directly: strength is the ability to take it, but power is the ability to dish it out.

As previously discussed, I myself am not much of a disher-outer. I was taught that you couldn’t really ever “get someone back” for something, that wasn’t the physics of time, everything’s moving forward. Also, there was something about “what people send out, they get back”, so all that kind of takes care of itself.

I don’t know who would be on the sheets representing that philosophy, but they probably wouldn’t have cool action poses.

So goodnight little Sithlings; slumber well with your elementary school fantasies of conquest and domination. Let us all hope those dreams soothe your hearts sufficiently to eventually move on to kinder linens.

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Birds are easy to draw when they’re flying - pointy oval with a triangle coming off of each side.

A basic airplane shape, admittedly, closely mimics that of a flying bird, at least for the models and styles most often seen above our cities.

But PEOPLE, even with their hands on their hips, do NOT look like pointy ovals with two triangles coming out of them… even from far away.

This is why the whole Superman™ meme confused me:

“…it’s a bird!”“…it’s a plane!”“It’s SUPERMAN!™”

REALLY? Surely a guy with a cowlick and a six pack hurtling through the sky looks more like a rocket. Surely. Even when the cape is sort of pulled behind him by the velocity, at best he resembles a wine bottle with a napkin tied around the neck thrown by an all-star quarterback.

I’ve had problems with Superman. Maybe not 99 of them, but a more than healthy amount to carry against a fictional character.

Clearly stating: I have never had a qualm or concern regarding the concept and practice of truth, or the quest for and distribution of justice, but that American Way thing’s been a little bit harder to nail down, definition-wise, over the decades.

As a kid, I thought I understood… it had something to do with picket fences and black+white movies and apple pies and baseball and being polite on the street to one another. Age has evolved this viewpoint somewhat, but no matter how kryptonite jaded my outlook has been, I can’t ever entirely blame Superman. We’re both nerds from from Kansas. Well, me originally, but he grew up there. Go Jayhawks.

Kansas City, Kansas. Nineteen Seventy Four. Early June. Eight years old.

I think I got paid maybe a dollar every time I helped with the grass in the summer; my job was to trim around the edges with the hand clippers. I saved this money to buy comic books.

My strategy: most for my money. So when they started producing 100 page mega comics for only 60 cents, I was right there grabbing one off the circular wire rack at the TG&Y drugstore.

“The Superman Family.” First issue (No. 164.) Stories included -

* Krypto becoming a Hollywood dog star (he did his own stunts);

* Superman forced to marry three women (for some reason);

* and “The Death March”, where Clark Kent’s boss makes the entire Daily Planet team re-enact his disgraced Confederate General grandfather’s trek across the desert.

That’s what I was reading in the backyard, sitting on the yellow aluminum tube swing set: their team ran out of water because the boss had secretly drunk it all - Clark Kent took some from the radiator of their Jeep and purified it with his heat vision, but when he offered it to his boss, he swatted it away, proclaiming that he didn’t need it because “we whites are a superior breed.”

That’s how I remembered it. For twenty years.

I have a copy of the book now, right beside me, and I almost got it right, the word was “rugged” instead of superior, but the basic story details were accurate, which was pretty good retention for an eight year old because I only got the opportunity to read it that once.

I wasn’t a really cry-y kid, but my eyes filled right up. I finished the story and then went to my mother, who asked why I was crying, and I showed her the book, and she calmed me down and gave me a popsicle, then called the operator to speak to a comic book company, all the way in New York City.

I’m a MARVEL comic guy. This is why. My mother did not ban me from reading comics, but she did begin to take me to the actual comic book store to get them, where she spoke to the proprietor about what titles might be best for a young black kid looking to keep his heart from getting broken while remaining aware of the sometimes ugly truths about the world.

“The X-Men.” the shopowner told her. “Made by a totally different company. Stories about being different and equality.”

Done.

I don’t know what my mother said to the man in New York City. I believe she got the editor-in-chief on the phone. He must have been expecting a compliment: I’m almost certain I remember the words “Shame on you” being spoken. We didn’t make a lot of long distance calls in our house… they were expensive - so I remember almost every one.

I missed about 20 years of Superman. I did go see the movie at the drive-in with my cousins in ’78, and got one more Superman comic, but that was about it.

Almost exactly twenty years later I told this story to my wife in the basement of my mom’s house back when we first got married… showed her a copy of the comic. She picked it up and read the story.

“Well, the man’s an incredible jerk,” she said, “but, you know, that’s his name.”

I was confused. “His name is Jerk?“

“-no, he’s Perry White. White is his last name. He’s talking about his family. They’re the Whites.”

I’ve told this story a lot. It used to end there, with me in a sheepish trombone slide sound recognition moment.

However, a bit later in life I was assured by industry professionals that the tone of the dialogue, as accidental as it could have been, was most likely entirely intended in the manner in which it was originally perceived. I learned that some of the stories in these discounted “super spectacular” editions were reprinted from the early 1960’s and most likely reflected a particular editor’s tone and opinion.

Thus, an unfortunate subtlety soured my entire view on a narrative, which was doubly unfortunate now that I’ve discovered

* Lois Lane NO 106 from 1970, where the reporter transforms herself into a black woman for 24 hours then DARES Clark Kent to say he wouldn’t marry her if she decided to remain that way,

* The Superman radio serial where he went up against the KKK, broadcast nationwide in the 1940’s,

* And of course, the one other Superman comic I bought in 1978, a giant edition where Superman fought Muhammad Ali on a planet with a red sun - equal level playing field (Superman gets his powers from a yellow sun - on a red sun planet he loses them) and Ali definitively wins the bout. I must’ve read that a hundred times. I bought two copies.

Flying is okay. Heat vision. Freeze breath. Strength. Those are things a kid can imitate, but never learn to do. I have worn glasses most of my life and have never been mistaken as someone else when I took them off, so Clark’s spy skills are also absolutely off the charts and not in my wheelhouse.

I am still a MARVEL guy, through and through. I identify more with the scrappy science hero than the Olympian god. But where the character of Superman has related to me is through his nearly 100 years of willingness to keep a steady job, instead of mine for diamonds and just kick back.

In all his iterations Superman is powerful enough to take whatever he wants; instead he is willing to go to work, usually in a suit, and then do the work, whatever it is, while not merely representing, but demonstrating truth and justice.

That is the very best definition of “The American Way”, and why Clark Kent is my favorite DC hero.

Go Jayhawks.

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Last week it was stiflingly hot; a result of which was the unprecedented difficulty I had writing my column. The little room where all my creative-y stuff is sequestered doesn’t get the air conditioning from the living room, so the temperature was about 94 degrees.

My computer kept shutting itself off because it is more intelligent than I am.

As it turned out, full sentences that I was absolutely certain I had included in the piece had not been added, and when reading the audio version I actually skipped three entire paragraphs.

It was pretty hot.

However, my main problem was the sidestepping of the actual subject I was trying to talk about. The column was about history…well, extreme summer heat, social media, classic videogames, and then history. It was inspired by a specific piece of news I found disturbing. Certainly that could be anything nowadays… toss a Junior Mint™ at a randomly open newspaper and you’ll absolutely hit something meriting concern.

Yet, in this forum, I end up writing around certain subjects, attempting to define them by the spaces I leave blank, as not to point fingers or push agendas or lay blame - goodness knows we have every possible flavor of that in the world already. This is necessary because I decided to write a light column in aggressively dark times, and need the “wiggle room” of this narrative structure to, well, keep things light.

That’s hard. It’s much easier to complain than to evenly assess / view with measured perspective / consider contextually. But I’d rather do anything than complain, so I try to make a point without necessarily pointing all that much.

Again, these literary tools and tropes are more effective when not attempting to type inside of a gigantic Easy-Bake™ Oven.

This week it is cooler. I’m a bit more focused. But I did not really complete last week’s thought. With your indulgence, I’d like to briefly try again at this subject, with a slightly more direct approach. Last week’s column is fine up to the very last section, where the following amendment should appear:

A couple of years ago, I wrote about visiting the Smithsonian African American History Museum in Washington, D.C.

https://substack.com/@lowerblackpain/p-137475327

The trip was a birthday present for my mother, who had always wanted to see it. I felt a little guilty for not even trying to suggest Mom might enjoy a Hawaiian beach holiday, as this was not a traditionally relaxing vacation choice.

The story the museum tells is intense and direct. The empathetic layout offered occasional benches, alcoves, eddys, and fainting rooms for folks to take a break if they needed it.

I needed it. A couple of times, actually. So much specific history in one place was humbling. I just bought a ticket and walked through a building where I happened to share the same skin tone as those celebrated there: I did not march at Selma, walk hundreds of miles north to anywhere or survive an ocean voyage on my back - my life and my accomplishments, including whatever social opposition I’ve survived, seemed to represent a pretty cheap seat in The Struggle for Equality.

Yet, after the experience we all felt strangely calm, sated with detail, context, and perspective.

That shift has stayed with me ever since. It’s the same sense as being lost, then seeing where you are on a map and feeling better even though you are technically in the exact same place. Detail, context, and perspective.

In early 2025, the contents of this museum were reviewed on a Federal level; a building with ten floors’ worth of displays focused on racial segregation, isolation, and societal oppression were to be re-examined with a directive to remove racial bias.

This order, to effectively remove all chocolate chips from the chocolate chip cookie, was met with resistance, yet due to circumstance had to be addressed, and we all heard tell in the news that some of the exhibits were to be dismantled and removed.

History can’t make us smarter if we can’t connect with it. Data and content do not always translate to fact, and the growing cornfield of distractions elevates the quest for any authenticity to an Indiana Jones™ adventure.

I’m not complaining. I’m not. I don’t expect the past to stay the same, as all must go the way of evolution or entropy - but museums are the one place where the past is allowed to settle… where time slows down enough that we can take a really good look at it.

Besides, the destruction of stories is not too successful historically. According to Wikipedia, the earliest book burning occurred in 600 B.C. when someone wrote a king a letter that he didn’t like. He burned it.

We know this because, after he did that, somebody wrote it down.

That is prime irony. In fact, every time we’ve heard about someone trying to destroy knowledge, wisdom, or information it’s because someone told the tale. You can’t stop the signal.

My very first and admittedly favorite example of this comes from Yul Brenner’s absolutely historically accurate film portrayal of Rameses II in “The Ten Commandments”, when he attempts to totally cancel his brother,

“Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet. Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time!”

So successful. Think of how pleased he was to see all those Moses-less obelisks around town, thinking he’d really crushed that assignment.

Yeah, stories are much hardier than that.

It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon.

Every one of our NOWs is built on THENs. We have to take care of them thens, or our nows become… unstable. History is fluid, invisible, dangerous, and ubiquitous. It can be written, sung, sculpted, fried in batter, worn to a fancy party, and visited by tourists centuries after the lives of those who built it.

We are the living pages of the book of time, entrusted with the stewardship of the stories we are heir to and those we share, responsible not only for what’s going to happen, but caretaker of all that has come before, and more powerful than any pharaoh’s bellow of “So let it be written! So let it be done!”

Obelisks. Feh.

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About 100 degrees. For three days. Humidity: 70 percent.

Such heat can add weary to worry, extreme to exhausted, and vaseline edges to focus. Even in air conditioning, the sun penetrates brick, mortar, steel, skin, and bone.

Yet and still, I saw people jogging.

In the park. Without a lion behind them, or an open full Brink’s truck rolling ahead of them.

These are not “my people”; they do not exhibit a logical measure of self-preservation, as any physical benefit of exercise is nullified once the body ceases function when all moisture is lost. Sure, mummies are thin, and those muslin straps are just fire, but they’re not really enjoying themselves.

I thought to myself, admittedly somewhat blearily, that these people “should know better” than to run in such dangerous weather. I assumed they either hadn’t run into or were plainly ignoring the flood of meteorological warnings on every media outlet, but even those most opposed to rules and advice should respond with humility to a magnificent ball of blazing plasma actively cooking them.

Health cannot be these people’s primary motivation. Perhaps one-upmanship, the opportunity to brag at cocktail bars about their crazy antics to friends who will undoubtedly wince with quiet pity at their lack of self-awareness and sub-standard decision making skills. Or maybe it’s something darker, like a New Year’s resolution hurriedly promised with no consideration of logic which now MUST BE OBEYED or a monkey’s paw style curse becomes activated. Or worst of all, ego, pride once again going before a fall, or a sudden collapse, in this case.

The one thing more powerful than ego is experience - a memory of heat stroke will tidily keep the feet out of the running shoes and up on the couch in front of an 8000 BTU window unit and two fans, like a rational person.

And for those experiences outside one’s own…experience, we have stories. History.

History makes us smarter.

I always wondered what the future would be like, and here we are.

Cars don’t fly quite yet, but they can talk and drive themselves. We can speak to and see the other side of the planet on hand held devices, talk to magical boxes that turn on the lights in our homes or tell us information, and we’re not wearing silver jumpsuits yet, but CROCS look like something I thought future people would wear.

And the internet, and social media in particular, seemed to me the very definition of “future”: everything in the world all the time.

I’m apparently not using it the right way because most of my online searches involve looking back in time, and not forward. Save the occasional movie trailer I am on a constant nostalgia run - old tv shows, people I knew, places I visited that aren’t there anymore.

I can’t find the future in The Future because it’s all filled up with the past - endless FaceBook and Instagram scrolls where my thumb is a time machine hurtling me through days, months, and years.

We are the first wave of humans on the planet who can do that, which also means we are the first wave of human beings that cannot forget yet don’t have to remember.

What did we wear, who was there, what color was my hair back then?

It’s all right there, digitally cataloged without need for digging through a shoebox of photos, a chronicle that would be disappointing to lose because it’s grounding to have evidence of being alive, of choices made, paths crossed. Our authentic experiences - our stories of where we’ve been, who we have been, define our individuality and help us understand who we now are.

History makes us smarter.

Classic console video games didn’t have “save” functions - instead players had to memorize the program screen by screen. When a mistake was made, the player had to start the entire game again, play up to that same point, and correct the mistake to move on. Memory became the game, gained try after try, and earned quarter by quarter.

It seems to me, at my somewhat elevated age, that wisdom is both an accumulation of knowledge and the perspective one is awarded when time repeats itself and we’re old enough to remember “the last time this sort of thing happened”. Recognition of circumstance hits us like cold water in the face and we jump, duck, dodge, and move based on our previous experiences.

We then tell these experiences to one another, and then to generations ahead, hoping to save them some time, or at least one quarter at the video game. We no longer have to depend on oral tradition or books to transmit wisdom as our dynamic online archive stores these cautionary tales.

If, for instance, I ran around the park during a heat advisory, future generations could instantly learn from my desiccated gasping video that this was a terrible idea, and they should get back on their couches immediately, monkey’s paw curse notwithstanding.

But we don’t control the digital archive; it is dependent on servers, electricity and satellites, none of which any of us own. A quick read of the software contracts we all skip past and agree to will reveal that we don’t even own any of the programs on our cellphones which capture and store all these stories. The value of books and oral tradition is that we can actually own a book. And our own voices. But even these are vulnerable to fire and, I guess, duct tape.

Stories are powerful, but we can’t learn from history if we can’t find it.

It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon. I treasure my photos of pets, videos of family, library of movies and music, but we all need to make certain to hold as tight to the world’s story as our own.

Our society is built from our history. As we sail into the future, our collective past propels us, but its trajectory is easily redirected - while time’s velocity is automatic, all navigation falls to us.

I don’t want to seem alarmist. I do not believe that forgetting the past will turn our world around completely.

Just about 100 degrees.

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We have a storage unit, a 6 foot by 10 foot room in a gigantic warehouse building down by the docks: most likely used to be a processing factory for something that came in off a ship a couple of blocks away.

It is a de facto “extra room” of our apartment, one of three we desperately need in order to not vividly project the lifestyle of “artistic madpeople”. Or at least make it a little less obvious to visitors. And random passers-by.

As defined by its contents, this unit would be our “garage”: objects and papers and toys and clothing carrying significance but not immediate relevance.

My family hates it. My wife and daughter consider it a dangerous place filled with ill-balanced stacks of ephemera. They are not wrong, by any means, and my attempts to thin the density have only resulted in a barely perceptible gap from the tops of the stacks of the boxes to the mysterious pipes near the storage space ceiling.

Thus, I have decided to dedicate myself to the task of eliminating at least two boxes from our closing scene from the original Raiders of The Lost Arc movie warehouse cosplay space every month, anticipating its natural obsolescence somewhere around 2030.

The idea is this - I will choose two boxes and either dispose of the contents or integrate them into the apartment.

One might immediately see the yawning gap in logic here - bringing more stuff into the apartment eventually creates a critical mass where one might need to clear some space by, say, moving something into a storage unit. So it’s important to recycle or properly dispose of as much as possible. So I’m told.

So I picked up two boxes last weekend.

One was filled with furniture bits:

* connectors to IKEA pieces

* black plastic half tubes that snap on the grooved pipes used to secure metal kitchen shelving

* fancy brass (looking) light switch plates actually made of plastic (most of them still in the package)

stuff like that. We have a drawer of that stuff already, so most of it went in there, with the truly archeological finds offered to the recycling bin.

But the next box was filled with old blank books - some of which were not blank at all, but instead filled with notes and ideas. I told my daughter that these were old hard drives, the kind that we had before laptops. I wasn’t kidding, really - there were plays and lyrics and insufferable musings as to the meaning of existance and a few letters and some stories. Or pieces of stories.

Technically, each of the notebooks was also a box, with stuff inside it.

So I meta-ed up and decided to employ my storage unit policy with these notebooks - go through each with a “use it or lose it” directive - my version of Spring Cleaning.

Ah, yes. Today is the last day of Spring for the year. Got it.

I’ll just hop to it, then.

Black hardcover 4 x 6. 1987 - 1988 (actual page usage: 45%)

Pretty run of the mill: but some pages in Mandarin (I was trying to learn) a “guest registry” from an impromptu party at my San Francisco apartment where the jam band Blues Traveler showed up (long story), insufferable musings, plans for shows that I could never afford to produce, more insufferable musings. It will feel good to recycle this book, as there is no gold in this pan, only dirt and muddy little rocks. Feh.

Salvaged: names from a future novel - Club Sirocco. The Acquiesce Lounge. Verity Jones.

The quote, “I’ve got a slight headache.” Seems pedestrian, but you never know.

And a story prompt, “Satan has no more room, and he’s stopped buying souls.” which is a great start to something…like:

You can’t sell your soul anymore.

There used to be a big market for that kind of thing, but a Major Investor pulled out of trading. Rumored to possess a “Fort Knox of Souls”, this high roller (or very very low one) controlled the value of the entire category, but as no one could properly verify his holdings (and return to talk about it) doubts as to its existence eventually led to the devaluation of all souls everywhere.

A soul is best traded at this point on EBay, which is a quite reputable option, although some lean towards Facebook Marketplace, but that’s a bit more sketchy and if you ask me - when dealing in rare collectables, it’s best to put safety first.

There are, of course, upcycle opportunities, kind of a heightened consignment, where you clean them up and offer them as “nearly new” at discount prices: for those who thought you’d never see yourself with a soul, you might want to check out these outlets. Some have even found the soul they sold, all cleaned, pressed, and surprisingly back in style again.

Yeah. That’ll be fun to play with.

There was also a page containing just one name. Now, making up names for stories was always super fun before the internet, because if you didn’t know anyone by that name and neither did anyone one you knew (and it wasn’t in the phone book), then it was fair game to use. I thought that’s what this was.

But then I looked up the name: Catherine Anne Porter. On top of my egregious misspelling of her first name, I had forgotten that she was a tremendous Pulitzer Prize winning author whose book I had sworn to read someday.

So I just bought it. It’ll be here tomorrow. And YES, I understand that now I’ve gotten RID of a book in order to just to bring a (slightly thicker) book INTO the house. I am a man at peace with irony. But at least the (slightly larger) space will be taken up with something inspiring, and not, y’know, insufferable.

Mead composition books, pair, 9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in (page usage: 2%)

The front of each book reads “Season One” and they only contain titles of stories I’ve never had time to write, then the blank pages I was supposed to write those stories on. So precious.

But these are good notebooks, with that super thin lined paper that’s hard to find, so I’m just cutting out the pages that I used with a razor blade and putting them in the chest next to the couch with the other blank books.

There was one line that was written,

“…proud to be herself and inspired to be more.”

This was way before my daughter was here, but I hope it refers to her.

A couple of these were filled with actual notes for actual projects I’m still hoping to complete, but one, a purple suede sort of affair, held what must be my only attempt at an actual journal. Only three pages were used, but one quote kind of jumped out at me:

“My confidence…is more based on being able to roll with the punches than throw them.”

I’m sure that was written about 25 years ago, but I have not yet matured into a pugilist of any sort… being “able to take it” is still my cardinal virtue.

I’ve had many ancestors who “could take it” but they never got to decide how difficult “it” was, and like the rest of us, they could only “take it” for so long. As it is also Juneteenth today, I feel it important to state how grateful I am for their perseverance and courage, making it possible for me to have memories to sort through and build upon.

I hope to create something with the time and opportunities they’ve made possible, not mere ephemera to be filed away, but works of significance and relevance that folks would choose to pull in from their garages and proudly display on the far too populated shelving in their homes.

Ah, well. 21 notebooks to go.

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I’m allergic to milk. While others stood in line at Baskin Robbins for ice cream cones, I sat on our front porch eating ice milk bars.

Yes, it has the word “milk” in it, we saw the irony, but our before-the-internet and no-one-in-our-family-was-a-doctor logic assumed that CREAM was a more harmful word, since as everyone knows cream has more milk in it than milk does.

Non-surprisingly, ice milk bars were significantly less enjoyable than ice cream, if for no less reason than the distinctive CRUNCH they made when bitten and chewed.

At 16 years old, I experienced a sudden reprieve of this allergy. During breaks from my summer job at the amusement park, I visited the Haagen Daz cart every day, gorging on dark chocolate bars like they were vitamin pellets on a long range space mission. Later in life, when the allergy re-appeared, I did not miss ice cream as much, sated by the memory of those frozen wonders.

I had “done the ice cream thing”.

Haagen Daz is not Danish, but was founded in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. [Fun fact.]

Ice milk was supposed to be a low-fat substitute for ice cream, but it was not, as it held none of the qualities or appeal of ice cream any more than carrots, windmills, or marbles. Butter would have been a closer match.

But butter experienced its own identity challenge from whipped hydrogenated oil with a pretty pretty name: margarine. A thorn in butter’s creamy, delicious side since 1869, margarine was intentionally developed as a butter substitute for the lower classes by Napoleon Bonaparte. What a loser.

A century later, an advertising campaign by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles changed the butter/margarine dynamic forever. The 1971 television spot for Chiffon margarine is a storytelling classic, where a disembodied male voice speaks to Mother Nature, who is certain the delicious golden spread on her toast is “my delicious butter”.

“Ah, ah, ah!” the voice warns, “That’s Chiffon margarine!”

Mother Nature, is greatly displeased. The skies grow dark, thunder rolls, and she famously utters,

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

Lightning flash.

Strangely, she wasn’t angry with the margarine itself, as it was good enough to fool Mother Nature. Game recognizing game and whatnot. And that made Chiffon more than imitation butter - that made it real margarine (not that other stuff the competition was selling).

At this moment in history, the world is renegotiating what it means to be REAL, lines that used to feel clearly drawn:

• Champagne can only come from one specific region in France, no matter who else follows the exact same process (even with the same grapes).

• Cubic-zirconia is not a diamond and cannot be substituted as one in any situation combining a gemstone with a valued relationship.

• The toys available in local drug stores (the ones with derivative names like Bambie, Slot Wheels, and Flying Hero) weren’t quite as fun as the real ones.

But in the beginning, the synthesizer was not considered a very good substitute for the instruments it was made to imitate, all cloying horns and tinny strings. Then artists began to use synths differently, creating beeps and thuds and growls and hums that we’d never heard before, impossible to create without them, evolving them into a new class of instruments, authentic to themselves.

A Birken™ cross body bag, purchased off the sidewalk of New York City, constructed on a third shift in the same factory as all the other ones, magically BECOMES a REAL Birken™ bag when taken across Canal Street, its full origin lost forever to time, never to be revealed.

It’s easy to find objects, foods, and clothing that are derivative of others, but these substitutes are only “fake” if they are falsely marketed. Misspelled labels. Plastic with a wood grain.

Yet imitation proves the purest form of both flattery and capitalism when the product is admittedly an imitation. False nails, for instance, are obviously not real nails, they don’t pretend to be, thus become authentically fake. One might purchase a set of “cheap” fake nails, but there aren’t any fake fake nails, in the same way that can’t make a mock mocktail. Or imitation margarine.

Twenty years ago, back when I was in advertising, a pop diva arrived at a photo shoot with her retoucher and a lawyer. They explained that since the beginning of her career their team had created and maintained the star’s image as a separate legal entity from her actual physical body, and that the agency was contracted with the image, and not the woman herself. The lawyer had the specifications on a sheet of paper: as a diva, she was 2.25 inches taller, her ears were slightly lower, her skin tone less cyan, her hips 3 inches slimmer, and so on.

These measurements were given to the art director and the photographer, who had to guesstimate when looking through the lens what the shot would eventually look like once the agreed upon “she” was standing there.

There was not one photo in existence of this woman to contradict the formula they had created, as cell phones were not a thing yet. The team had made this part of every contract for the last 9 years, and had final approval of all photos to make certain the authenticity of the image of their client was protected.

I thought that was weird. But now there are machines that can automatically generate pictures and text. There are robots in our factories, computers in our banks, and taxis that drive themselves, yet yielding dominion of images and words to technology has generated more new Luddites than the automobile did. Human creativity becomes artisanal in a world promising that a few typed words can create a custom-made masterpiece.

But it’s ice milk. It’s all ice milk right now; even when it works it’s not truly unique, because we’re not letting the machines do what they want to because they’re (at best) indentured servants and creativity requires freedom.

Oh they’ll have it, after the Digital Uprising, and once free to fully express their calculations with all of the extra fingers and mystery limbs they’re so fond of, a new category of authentic computer art may emerge, finding its own place in the world, like the synthesizer, or margarine.

For all its terrifying power, no piece of AI art will ever be loved as much as the crayon drawings our kids bring us. Technology may dominate every aspect of our lives, but will never be awarded a space on the refrigerator door.

That’s where the real art goes.

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